Blowing My Horn

Once a year, here on Murder is Everywhere, each of us gets to blow their horn.

It’s when we launch a new book.

Some lucky few, like Tim, get to do even more horn-blowing, because they’re productive as hell.

Me? No. Just one book a year.

And guess what?

This year, 2012, no new book.

Not in North America anyway.

A Vine in the Blood was launched in December of 2011.

But Perfect Hatred won’t be hitting the bookstores until February of 2013.

There are good reasons for this, which I won’t bore you with.

But, in compensation, and because they are nice people (and savvy marketers) the good folks at Soho are throwing me a very meaty bone. (Arf!)

On the fourth of September, they re-published my first-in-series, Blood of the Wicked – in a special, low-priced, trade paperback edition.

And it's currently making its presence felt in bookstores all over North America.
And quite a few in the UK as well.

Here’s what it looks like:

Most of you, kind regular visitors to Murder is Everywhere, have read the book already, right?

Good. You can stop reading now. Please catch up with me next week when I’ll have something to write about that will interest you.

Now, for those few of you who are left, here’s the pitch:

In a recent review, commenting on all of my currently published books, the Wall Street Journal opined that they have “all the step-by-step excitement of a world-class procedural series”.

The New York Times called Blood of the Wicked “top-notch” and “entirely absorbing”.

Library Journal gave it a star.

The Boston Globe found it “compelling”.

The Toronto Globe and Mail referred to it as “masterful”.         

And Booklist, in another starred review, called my Chief Inspector Silva “South America’s Kurt Wallander”.

If you live in North America, your local, independent mystery bookstore will surely have it.
If you aren't lucky enough to have one of those fine establishments near you, you can get it at Barnes and Noble.

To find where, near you, go here: http://tinyurl.com/97m6m4j

Then, under the orange button that says ADD TO BAG, click on the link that says PICK UP IN STORE.
It will prompt you to enter your zip code.
And locate the nearest shop that stocks it.

End of pitch.
Thanks for your time.

Leighton - Monday

On the Backbeat

I'm old enough to have been listening to the radio when Little Richard smashed through the pap with his finger-in-the-socket-to-God brand of ecstasy-on-demand (what revolution ever had a more exhilarating overture than ""A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-boom!"?)  and Chuck Berry drove the nail the rest of the way home with "Maybellene," "Roll Over Beethoven," and "School Days."

I experienced an instinctive and extremely uncomfortable genetic cringe when Pat Boone put Fats Domino, Little Richard, and LaVern Baker through his blender to produce something that reminded me even then of my mother's ham sandwich if someone had removed the ham and painstakingly scraped away the mustard, leaving two nice slices of white bread held together with mayo.  But I also had the taste to sigh with relief when I first heard Jerry Lee Lewis, a pillar of holy fire high atop Mount Whitey.

So, we could do it, even if less dependably.  But then other forms of music converged into rock--country, blues, doo-wop, Mexican, even jitterbug--and rock by white artists became a little less imitative of black music.  But by then I'd stopped caring, because rock changed my world.

It was as though rock was a whole new room in my house--whatever house I was in--a room my parents couldn't enter, and which had none of their blue upholstered furniture, gilt mirrors, and grandfather clocks in it.  In fact, whatever furniture it did have in it, rearranged itself every night because the moment we fell asleep it started dancing.  Every morning I opened the door to new damage, new recklessness, new chaos.  It was everything a kid could want.

Those whom rock threatened (and they were many) said it would lead the young people of America off a cliff.  They were right, about me, at least.  I happily followed it off every cliff in sight.  I stopped taking school seriously because of rock and roll.  I left the suburban womb of the San Fernando Valley to live with various remarkable women in smaller and smaller places in then-dicey areas like Echo Park and Silverlake because of rock and roll.  For a couple of years I never went to bed before ten AM and never got up before three in the afternoon.  I inhabited a parallel Los Angeles where the lights were always on and amphetamines and marijuana were the intoxicants of choice, and I chose them every chance I got.

Rock and roll led me astray.

And I had a great time.  The drugs got a bit more varied and Byzantine until I tardily quit them.  I wound up writing songs, I wound up (after a long and somewhat sober hiatus as a businessperson) writing books.  There, I've said it.  If it weren't for rock and roll I would never have written a book.  I'd be a retired English professor living someplace where my feet stayed warm all winter.

As of right now, rock and roll is the most enduring popular music trend of all time.  Big bands, jazz, standard pop--they all flared up, flickered, and faded within a decade or two.  Rock has been on top for more than sixty years.

And I still live it, I still listen for hours each day, I still write to it.  Steve Jobs designed the iPod specifically for me, and mine now contains almost 8,000 songs, 80 gigabytes of music, divided pretty much exclusively into two categories: classical and rock.  (About 80% rock.)  My writing playlists sample almost every one of the rock decades, although I'm not really crazy about the 80s, and every year or so I just reverse-alphabetize the whole thing and listen to the cuts as they come.  (That's a great way to program writing music because I never have any idea what's coming next.)

So, old fart that I am, I still rock.  It still keeps me going. I still pick over new music almost daily and love about as much of it as I ever did, which is to say about fifteen percent of it.  My novels take shape to it, my memories are tied to it, my internal movies use it as a sound track.  If I were Catholic, I would petition the Church to make Little Richard my patron saint.

A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-boom, indeed.  It's been 57 years since that call to bliss first shredded crappy car speakers all over America, and it's still a direct short cut to Dionysus.  Hail, hail, rock and roll.

How Paradise Deals With Garbage.

By Mark Cross

I just finished driving along the Northern California coast—from up above Bodega Bay (where Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds was filmed) to Carmel-By-The Sea (where Clint Eastwood of RNC fame was mayor).   I must say, those Californians have their &^%$ together.  Or, more accurately, that they have it carefully collected, stored, and out of sight. 

I was amazed at how little litter there was to be found along that stunning coastline.  In Greece (as well as many other Mediterranean destinations I find enchanting), garbage literally decorates far too much of the landscape.  Whether or not the situation in Greece rises to the level of a national disgrace I am not qualified to say, but garbage is certainly the hottest subject of citizen ire on Mykonos.

One story stands out in my mind.  A couple years back, on a stunning, virtually empty southern Mykonos beach directly across the sea from the neighboring island of Naxos, a woman who’d been sunbathing nude walked to the edge of the water carrying a plastic garbage bag.   She proceeded to empty the contents into the sea followed by dropping the bag.  An American couple nearby yelled, “Hey, what are you doing?” 

The woman screamed back, “Don’t you foreigners tell us how to live on our island!  The currents will carry it all to Naxos.”

What can one do with some one like that?  Okay, this is real life not a murder mystery, so what else can one do with such a person?  To set the record straight, I know the woman and, though Greek, she is not Mykonian and lives on the island only during tourist season.  Nor is she is like most Greeks, who would not bath nude or so brazenly pollute their waters.  But she does exemplify a ready willingness on the part of many to litter.

Garbage collection and disposal on Mykonos is a mega-problem, one of seeming concern to virtually every resident of the island except those government officials charged with actually doing something about it.  Officials claim the problem stems from a five-fold and more increase in population during tourist season, but California too has a massive tourist population to contend with…and its crisis fiscal situation is often compared to Greece’s. 

Omiros Evangelinos

Many say the root of Mykonos’ problem is public indifference toward an “I can do as I wish” attitude that has left much of the wildest parts of the island accessorized in wind-blown blue plastic shopping bags and cast aside water bottles.  But there are those who speak out and others willing to do more than just speak.  One is Omiros Evangelinos, co-owner of perhaps the chicest and best-known nightspot on Mykonos, Astra. 

Omiros organized a group to clean up one of the island’s windiest beaches and filmed the process.  Then he submitted his work to an international film festival. Here’s a link to the video, titled MYKONOS BLUES.  It’s subtitled in English, except for a forty-five second piece beginning at the 7:00 minute mark where some American writer is interviewed and the subtitles are in Greek.

Mykonos Blues opening shot.

The video was shot during the last campaign for mayor of Mykonos and so appropriate concern for the environment was expressed by electioneering government officials who showed up at the cleanup site for some camera face time.  A particularly interesting example of the political byplay on Mykonos today is the four minute or so give and take with the mayor (starting at the 8:00 minute mark).

To Omiros’ credit the filming did not stop at the cleanup site.  He took his camera to find out what happened to the garbage collected by the volunteers that was “picked up by the city” for disposal.  To me, this was the film’s most poignant, tragic example of a local government mindset that haunts the island as an insidious threat to paradise. 

As Omiros points out (beginning at the 12:35 minute mark), what was supposed to end up in Mykonos’ new sanitary landfill, never made it there.  Instead, the bags were dropped by the side of the road at the old illegal burn site, left to break open and be re-distributed across the island by the winds.  Or burned, and God knows what distributed then.

Maybe the woman at the beach was not as out of line with local mores as she seemed?  After all, there is the old adage, “A fish smells from his head.”   Never more so than in the case of garbage.

Jeff—Saturday

Truth. Then Justice.

When I wrote this post last year about the forthcoming panel report into the Hillsborough Disaster of 1989, I have to admit that while I was hopeful that the misconception that the fans were any way at fault might be erased, I wasn't hopeful of much else. Liverpool fans, and many others, have long known there was a sustained cover-up and a cynical attempt to shift the blame away from the failings of the police and on to the fans. The idea that such a conspiracy might be revealed and proven, given the slipperiness of those involved and the refusal of successive Governments to adequately investigate the matter, seemed too much to hope for.

But then, this Wednesday, the Hillsborough Independent Panel report was released, after years of painstaking investigation. It's conclusions were devastating. Not only did the report prove conclusively that there had been an orchestrated cover-up by South Yorkshire Police, in collusion with a Tory MP of the time and Rupert Murdoch's newspaper The Sun, which involved smearing the dead and those that tried to save them. The report also revealed the extent of that conspiracy. A total of 164 statements provided by policeman who were on duty that day were amended, a staggering 116 of which altered or doctored to remove any criticism of how the event was policed. It found the fans were in no way responsible for the disaster, and their safety had been compromised at every level. Even more wounding for the parents and families of those who died, the report estimated that of the 96 killed in the crush, 41 people might have been saved had the response of the emergency service been adequate.

Given the contents of the report, The Prime Minister had no option but to give a a full apology to the families and all the fans who were there that day and had their reputations besmirched (rival fans have often taunted Liverpool fans, as a consequence of Hillsborough, of being 'whingers', referring to it as the 'self-pity city' and chanting they they 'killed their own fans - surely that must now stop?). He outlined the 'double injustice' for the families of the dead: how the state failed to protect them, and the long wait to find out exactly what happened that day; then the way the dead were denigrated, as those responsible sought to protect their reputations by casting slurs on people who were no longer able to answer. Now at last someone has spoken on their behalf, and the families can get the closure they deserve.

People have said such a thing wouldn't happen now. Don't believe a word of it. This lot - police, press, coalition government - would cover their backs just as quickly if they were given chance and thought they could get away with it. This report, coming on the back of the much-needed Leveson inquiry, is welcome because it shows that eventually those in a position of power, or those who are given the responsibility of holding those in in power to account, will eventually be found out if they abuse that power, and use it against the very citizens they are supposed to protect and serve.

Because that's what happened here. That's what lies at the root of the Hillsborough scandal, the phone hacking scandal, and many others - a disdain for ordinary people. In the 1980s Mrs Thatcher's reprehensible government actively turned the police and elements of the press against the people of this country, or at least those elements that were not compliant with its right-wing ideology.  A line can be drawn from reaction to the riots in Brixton and Toxteth at the beginning of the 1980s, through the middle of the decade, including the Miner's Strike, in which Mrs Thatcher described a group of men carrying out their basic human right to withdraw their labour as the 'enemy within', and used the police to bully and intimidate them (see the 'Battle of Orgreave' where picketing miners were set upon by...South Yorkshire Police). All the way to the Hillsborough Disaster of 1989, where it was deemed acceptable to shift the blame on to a group of fans rather than the real culprits, the cops, because they were working-class football fans, who were all hooligans, and they were from Liverpool, a city full of lefties.

Now that the families have the truth, one can only hope that those responsible - the senior policemen of South Yorkshire Police in particular, but also the former Tory MP Sir Irvine Patnick (that ludicrous knighthood needs to go for a start) - are punished for perverting the course of justice. Then the course of justice can be seen through for the sake of those families who have struggled for more than two decades to get to the bottom of what happened that fateful Spring day. They always knew their loved ones had died as a result of incompetence, and that those in power had sought to avoid any responsibility by all manner of means. Now it is time to end the matter once and for all and prosecute those responsible for this most shameful episode.

cheers

Dan - Friday

Smaller than Life

There seems to be some confusion about the meaning of “larger than life”.  The free dictionary suggests: "Very impressive or imposing: 'This is a person of surpassing integrity; a man of the utmost sincerity; somewhat larger than life' (Joyce Carol Oates)", while English Forums give Winston Churchill as an example, noting his diminutive size.  On the other hand the McGraw-Hill dictionary of American phrases and verbs offers: "[someone] having an aura of greatness, perhaps not supported by the real person".  And that’s pretty much the opposite.  Let’s go with the majority and the Winston Churchill model, and use "smaller than life" for the McGraw Hill situation.

So this post is about someone much smaller than life, whose racist philosophies and impassioned speeches did much damage in South Africa, and could have sparked chaos if things had gone differently.  He was murdered on his farm in 2010, setting off a wave of protest amid justified concern about white farmers being murdered by gangs with little police action.  But the facts turned out to be different, and when recently his murderers were sentenced, the last untainted vestiges of his aura disappeared. 

ET with the AWB banner.
Any similarity to a swastika is purely coincidental, of course.

Eugène Terre'Blanche was born in 1941.  Curiously, his name means White Land in French, and he was a staunch supporter of that philosophy all his life.  He was scathing of what he called the left wing policies of the National Party (the ruling party of the Apartheid era) and, after a brief flirtation with formal party politics, he founded the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement) or AWB.  I imagine that it is difficult for people outside South Africa to visualize something to the right of the government of that day, but it was there all right.

When FW De Klerk negotiated with Nelson Mandela, Terre'Blanche called it a complete surrender to Communism and threatened a full scale rebellion.  A public meeting addressed by De Klerk in Terre'Blanche’s home town turned into a riot and a number of people were killed.  Terre'Blanche in larger than life guise claimed that only his personal intervention between incensed Afrikaaners and the police had saved the day, and that De Klerk had deliberately provoked the riot for political gain.  There is no evidence of anything of the sort.

Later Terre'Blanche led his loyal followers to “save” Bophuthatswana from being taken over by the rampant African National Congress of Nelson Mandela.  (Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of that country; very few people outside South Africa had, it was recognized by no other country, and it no longer exists.)  Once more this led to a riot in which people were killed - mainly AWB members shot by the local police - and any initial enthusiasm that the Bophuthatswana authorities had for being “rescued” by the AWB quickly disappeared.

 In fact, Terre'Blanche was something of a buffoon.  Leading his men into battle as in the old Afrikaaner commandoes, he fell off his horse.  His personal life was celebrated by paparazzi.  His views and behaviours were often so odd that he was dismissively referred to as ET (as in 'call home').  But he was dangerous when faced with opposition weaker than himself.  He was convicted in 2001 for assault and attempted murder when he beat up a black gas station attendant and a security guard.  He was sentenced to six years while his followers howled about how he’d been framed.  He claimed to have found God during his time in prison, modified his most extreme views, and was released after three years.  After that he retired to relative obscurity on his farm. There, in April 2010, he was set upon and beaten and hacked to death.  There was a huge outcry that this was part of an orchestrated scenario to drive white farmers off their land a la Zimbabwe.

In fact, two of his own farm workers were arrested and convicted.  The claim was that a wage dispute led to the fight.  However, at their trial, the two black men claimed abominable treatment including sexual attacks by Terre'Blanche, and at sentencing one of the men put forward being HIV positive as a result of these rapes as an extenuating circumstance.  Of course, no one will ever be able to determine if this was true or not, and it cut little weight with the judge.

So here was a man much smaller than life.  Quoted in the press, followed like a celebrity, a leader feared by the right and the left, yet in the end nothing more than a schoolyard bully.  Why even bother to write about him?  Because it seems to me that many smaller than lifers are abroad these days and projecting tall shadows.  Take a look around.

Michael - Thursday

Bloody Odd

In case I forget – if you are in Scotland this weekend, make sure to drop by Bloody Scotland in Sterling. It has all the makings of a good time and considering how many great crime writers have popped out of Scotland it is remarkable that this is the first international crime festival held in the country. The star studded line-up features Ian Rankin, Val McDermid and Peter James to name some. (and me)

Back to business:

 

 

The occasional person is aptly named. None more so than Odd Nerdrum.

Odd Nerdrum is a contemporary Norwegian painter that has made a name for himself world over for paintings that are in most part made using the techniques of the old masters such as Rembrandt. His work is thus baroque in style, although the subject of his work varies from that of the 1600s. If you have been to one of his exhibitions you will recognize his paintings from then on.

 

Taste in art varies so greatly from culture to culture, period to period and person to person, that it is useless to categorize Nerdrum’s work as good or bad. I have taken the liberty of choosing some examples of his paintings to accompany this post so the reader is able to judge for him/herself. Personally I find his work very impressive. The motives seem to represent another world, a planet somewhere far away – where I would under no circumstance want to live. Science fiction painting.

I once took my daughter ice skating during the period he lived here and had a very difficult time focusing on the slippery surface below me as Odd Nerdrum and his wife were such a contrast to the other skaters. To this day I am not even sure if they were skating at all as the robes they wore were so long you could not see their feet. It was a bit like watching “Name of the Rose – on Ice”.

The other day I heard him mentioned on the news. There were actually two separate new from Norway on that same program and both involved sentencing in the court. The second news regarded a gypsy gang that had been charged and found guilty of human trafficking of children/ child slavery and for a number of rapes, all in Norway. Six gypsies were before the court and the highest sentence passed was 2 years. The news about Odd Nerdrum, now 68, regarded tax evasion for which he had been sentenced to jail for 2 years and 10 months. The money involved was not chump change, apparently he kept 900.000 USD in a box and did not report it on his return. He however insists that the money was in safekeeping to repay buyers of his works from a period where he used a paint mixture that turned out not to last well. And he says that he is an artist, not a numbers person. I am not a lawyer but I find it highly likely that a better defense in a tax evasion case has been put forth at some point.  

 

The prosecutor of the case said when the sentence was handed down that: "As a preventative measure, tax evasion must be strictly punished." But apparently not child trafficking and rape.

When comparing the two crimes it is obvious to me that justice was not eked out very equally here. The judge seems to have given Odd Nerdrum a super-sized order while the gypsies got a kid’s meal. You see, even if it is the belief of the courts or spelled out in the law of the land that tax evasion is more serious than serial raping and selling of children, one must not forget one thing. There is not a chance in hell that the gyspies paid taxes on the funds acquired for selling those children.  

Yrsa - Wednesday  

Curiosities from Paris

This sign is the window of the doll hospital near the Canal Saint Martin in Paris.

'Here we replace the bad heads'. Now if it only were that easy with humans. I would be the first volunteer

 But the doll hospital is a bit scary. On the inside the sick and injured dolls are strewn about. I took Stuart Neville there and he wanted to leave in a hurry. Vowing he wouldn't show his little daughter the photos he took.

 Supposedly Absinthe was outlawed after the 1900's but it's served à la traditionelle at Cafe Fée Vert - the green fairy cafe. Modgliani called Absinthe his fée vert and danced on the table at La Rotonde and kicked a newspaper from Lenin's hand. Of course the one below doesn't contain wormwood or rot your brain, it's the tame stuff made in Spain these days.

 If you're travelling down to the south of France and hunger strikes you at Gare de Lyon pop up to Le Train Bleu this amazing resto/bistro which deserves a visit even if for Jus d'Orange. In the 90's Luc Besson film La Femme Nikita - Nikita is taken here for dinner - her graduation dinner from intelligence school - but her dessert involves doing a 'hit' on a diner and escaping to earn her diploma.


In the 10th arrondissment there's a shop - on the site of an old forge - only a bit of the oven left but the shop still specializes in metal work and wrought iron decoration - balcony railings, those intricate iron net like enclosures for trees on Paris streets. Now the heavy work is done at their factory in the countryside. But if you're inclined to put a royal insignia from Versailles in metal on one of your walls or in front of your fireplace you can purchase this or others forged from the REAL molds at the Versailles iron monger before the Revolutionaries looted the iron forge.

Up the street from this store is an electronic fix-it shop the size of a large closet. The man who works here will re-wire your lamp, repair your old radio, hair dryer or toaster. For decoration he's got his supplies and posters all over the ceiling.

At the bouqiniste stalls on the quai you can find old copies of Paris MATCH. Here's one from 1939 and below 1940.

But you won't find these two - our own award nominated duo Stan and Michael - unless you come to Cleveland and join us  - most of us except Leighton and Dan, sigh - at our panel at Bouchercon moderated by the most excellent Monsieur Rozovsky.

Cara - Tuesday