Limited Edition of Boston Noir from Akashic

Akashic Books has a real cottage industry going, churning out city themed noir. As part of their promotion for the upcoming Boston Noir, they have produced a limited number of hardcover editions signed by the book's editor, some guy you've probably never heard of before named Dennis Lehane. It goes for a cool hundred bucks, and you can preorder it here. The site says it'll ship by the end of September.

Killing Castro and True Crime

Hard Case has announced it's first title of 2009-Killing Castro by Lawrence Block. Yet another of Block's early pseudonymous efforts, they're billing it as his rarest book, written under a name he only used once.

And over in Brooklyn, Akashic has returned its city themed noir anthology series to Brooklyn for a third outing with a true crime twist.

Review of Tango for a Torturer

Daniel Chavarria’s latest novel, Tango for a Torturer, (Akashic, 2007) is more fairy-tale for aging communists than mystery. The novel tells the story of Aldo Bianchi, a successful Argentine businessman, and former victim of the military police in that country, who finds his old nemesis, Orlando Ortega Oritz, the notorious CIA trained torturer who made his life a living hell. With the help of a prostitute named Bini, who has a relationship with both men Aldo sets in motion an elaborate plan to destroy his enemy.

The story itself is straightforward, but Chavarria approaches it elliptically, and the constant diversions, detours and asides may try the patience of readers who are used to the more straightforward style of English language fiction. Chavarria’s story jumps around in time, and point-of-view, something that is apparently common in Spanish language fiction. Still, the novel is never too confusing, and if one is patient all will be revealed.

The main weakness of Tango for a Torturer is Chavarria’s naïve worldview. Communism was very 20^th Century, and Chavarria, a Uruguayan living in Cuba, is in the awkward position of having outlived his own ideology. The book rightly condemns state sponsored violence, and Aldo’s revenge is certainly just, but the irony of writing a novel condemning such a thing while living in Cuba seems entirely lost on the author. It’s not like Castro has a history of caring deeply about the human rights of his opponents, or homosexuals or Jehovah’s witnesses. In the book, Aldo frames Triple-O for a hit-and-run. Triple-O is sent to a Cuban prison, which sounds more like a social club than a place of punishment. It’s a place, not fraught with violence and fear, but full of culture. One of Triple-O’s fellow inmates is memorizing the Iliad in five different languages. Everyone seems to think this is a laudable goal, and wants to hear him recite ancient poetry. In sunny Cuba, under Castro’s benevolent rule, even jail is a center of culture.

Bini, the prostitute, is a communist daydream as well. It is made very clear that she whores, not because of economic deprivation, but because she enjoys it. She’s a noble savage, poor, but committed to justice. When Aldo asks for her help in framing Triple-O, she does it for nothing, even though it means she must spend time behind bars. If this has the distinct ring of bullshit, that’s because it’s bullshit. Let’s not forget, however, that Castro has been known to jail people for publishing works abroad without official consent. Of course, if jail is so great in Cuba, one wonders what Mr. Chavarria has to worry about.

I've been slacking lately, so here's some stuff

I've been a bit slack with the content of late, so I sat down to try and find things of note this afternoon.
First, we've got a profile of Akashic Books' Johnny Temple that ran in the IHT some time ago. I missed it the first time around. He also managed to land himself in a Glenlivet ad.

Over at Bleak House Ben LeRoy interviews Mike Segretto of Contemporary Press. (For a publisher with books like these, they sure have an innocuous sounding name.)

The Rap Sheet has the scoop on Crippen & Landru's definitive collection of Lew Archer short stories.

Allan Guthrie is on television.

Review of The Session

The Session by Aaron Petrovich (Akashic, 2007) is not a traditional crime story. It's not a traditional story of any sort. Billed as "a novella in dialogue," it could have just as easily been described as a play without stage directions.
The story centers around detectives Smith and Smith, who may or may not be the same person, and may or may not be inmates in an insane asylum. The Smiths are tasked with finding out who killed The Mathematician, who was murdered while giving a lecture on Essencism, a new apocalyptic cult he proposed to found.
Plot is of secondary importance, in the story, however. It is really a word game. Petrovich has clearly studied his Beckett and Stoppard. Much like Estragon and Vladimir or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Smith and Smith pass their time more consumed with banter and word games than with accomplishing anything.
At his best, Petrovich 's dialogue is like an existential Abbot & Costello routine. There is a particularly funny passage involving a play on the words "patients" and "patience," that reads like a vaudeville skit.
At his worst, Petrovich seems to be willfully pretentious, being vague merely for the sake of vagueness. Unlike Beckett's, Waiting for Godot, however, the mystery at the heart of The Session does have a solution. Petrovich is merciful in that respect.

More News and Links than you can shake a stick at

Things have been piling up this week, so let's jump right in...

New Reading Material
International Thriller Writers new Web zine is out, including this article by Tim Maleeny author of Stealing the Dragon.


A new Thug Lit is available.

And here's a piece from the Virginian-Pilot on Hard Case Crime. (Hat tip to Tim Lockhart on the Rara-Avis mailing list)

New Publishers

New UK imprint Ocean House Press is releasing two books by David Callinan. They seem a little far-fetched for my taste, but I wish them luck with their new venture.

Akashic books has launched a new imprint, Hotel St. George Press. It's not going to be crime focused, but The Session, their initial offering, promises detectives, missing organs and a new religion. The protagonists are described as Keatonesque. Presumably they mean Buster, not Alex P. or Michael.

New News

Allan Guthrie has announced titles and publication dates for some new novels:

Kill Clock (a novella) Sept. 2007, UK. (There is no U.S. release date yet. Hopefully, someone will pick it up)

Savage Night Oct. 2007, UK; June 2008, US

Slammer April 2008, UK, June 2009, US

Also, Ray Banks' Donkey Punch, which is getting a May release in the UK will be getting a Fall 2008 release in the States.

Review of The Weeping Buddha

A koan, in the Zen Buddhist tradition, is a question that cannot be answered rationally, and must be approached with intuition. The most famous one, at least in the English speaking world, is "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" A Koan is a lot like a crime. Often, when looked at by an impartial observer, a crime, especially a violent one, will seem senseless. Crimes, however, are seldom senseless to the person who commits them. In fact, they usually make perfect sense. If a person is to understand why a crime is committed Zen like intuition is often required.A Zen monk makes this point explicitly late in Heather Dune Macadam's The Weeping Buddha (Akashic: 2002), when he says that "Murder is a Koan."
The Weeping Buddha is full of both murder and koans as it follows the story of Long Island detectives Devon Halsey and Lochwood Brennan as they try to unravel the mystery of the murder of Devon's best friend and her husband, and discover how it is connected to a young man who walked out of a New Year's Eve party in Manhattan in 1984, never to bee seen again.
Devon, and her best friend, Beka, were both at the party from which Todd Daniels vanished, and both of them have remained haunted by it for years. When Beka and her husband turn up dead on New Year's Eve eighteen years later, it forces Devon to confront her past and reevaluate all her relationships with the people she thought were he friends, once it becomes apparent that they are all suspects in a string of crimes stretching back almost two decades.
Macadam maintains the suspense by gradually revealing the extent and complexity of the crimes in a manner that should keep the reader guessing as to exactly what has been happening until quite late in the book, and Devon and Lochwood are a couple of sympathetic protagonists who manage to be more than cardboard cop cutouts.
The only weak point in this book is Macadam's penchant for similes. When Beka's body is found she is described as "an origami bird with its wings clipped," "a deer on the highway," and a "geisha doll." That's three separate images in four sentences.It's a bit overwhelming. Elsewhere the word almost creeps into her similes, like when she writes, "Autopsies were almost like the Ritual of the Sky Burial in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition." The Sky burial, according to Macadam, involves feeding a dead person's corpse to sacred vultures and then grinding up the bones. It's a good image, and the comparsion of cops standing over a cadaver and vultures is a good one. That what makes the almost maddening. It gives the impression the writer is being tentative about making the full commitment to the comparison.
In the end, though, the faults of The Weeping Buddha are minor ones that do not detract from the story or obscure the points that the author makes about the mutable nature of relationships and the pitfalls we all risk falling into as we stumble toward enlightenment.

Preview of Coming Attractions

I'm reading The Weeping Buddha by Heather Dune Macadam, and hope to find time to write something about it this week. It was published in 2002, but I see no reason to confine myself to new books.