Guest Author James R. Benn

We’ve guested Jim once before,  back in October of last year, when he contributed a post about Armed Services Editions during the Second World War.  If you missed that one, be sure to read it here: http://bit.ly/HNZI67

Jim, of course, is the author of the acclaimed Billy Boyle series, historical mysteries set against the background of the Second World War. The next book Death's Door is slated for September of this year. The most most-recently published was, A MORTAL TERROR, launched last September. My review is among the many you'll find here: http://amzn.to/H6433b

On Desperate Ground, with an entirely different cast of characters is just out -- and high-up on my TBR list. It's available in both print and eBook form, and can be found here: http://amzn.to/Hd1JYl

Leighton - Monday

How I became a writer.

Finally.

                It was my 50^th birthday, back in the year 1999. My wife and I were on a trip to Germany, visiting Berlin and the Harz Mountains. History and hiking. On my birthday, September 5^th, we walked up a hillside to a restaurant offering spectacular mountain views. As we dined on the deck, Debbie asked me about my life goals on this landmark half-century mark (she’s a psychotherapist, it comes with the territory).

                “Well, I always wanted to write a book,” I said. I’d been a reporter during college and still harbored a desire to see if I could write a novel.

                “Why don’t you do something about it?” she quite reasonably asked. It was then I realized I’d wanted to write for the past three decades and had done nothing about it. If I waited another thirty years, things might not work out. Another liter of German beer came around, and plans didn’t get very specific. But I’d made a commitment of sorts, and all I needed was an idea. It didn’t take long.

                In Berlin we took several sponsored walking tours. One was Jewish Life in Berlin, focusing on the past and present history of Jewish life in the city. The tour guide took us to the New Synagogue, built in the nineteenth century as the main Berlin synagogue.

Constructed in the Moorish style, it was architecturally and historically important; the Berlin government had granted specific permission for the synagogue to be built facing the street, an important distinction for the Jewish community. Their house of worship did not have to be hidden away. The document also stated that the synagogue had the right to exist forever on Oranienburger Strasse.

                Fast forward to November 9, 1938; Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass).  Synagogues and Jewish business all across Germany are being vandalized and burned.

A crowd of Brownshirts descends on the Neue Synagogue and begins to set torches to it. In the face of that state-sanctioned terror, a single Berlin policeman, Lieutenant Otto Bellgardt, draws his pistol and orders the crowd to disperse, citing the protected status of the building, adamant about his intent to uphold the law. One man against a mob. He won. The Nazis left, and the Berlin fire brigade arrived in time to put out the fire that had been started. A single person. It would have been so easy for Otto Bellgardt to stand aside, to give up in the face of impossible odds.

                His behavior addressed a question that had always troubled me; what can one person do in the face of unspeakable evil? Otto Bellgardt found his answer, and kept his honor, not to mention the New Synagogue, intact. Later in the war, the New Synagogue (now rebuilt) was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid. Otto Bellgardt, pictured below, disappeared in combat on the Eastern Front, another casualty of war.

                Our tour then took us around the corner to Saint Hedwig’s, a Catholic Hospital where Marianne Hapig was the chief social worker. As Jews from Berlin were rounded up for shipment to concentration camps in the east, many were temporarily housed in a building near the hospital. Marianne Hapig and a doctor from St. Hedwig’s began providing medical assistance for these Jews as they were awaiting deportation, living in cramped and unsanitary conditions. She came up with the idea of diagnosing some with contagious illnesses, and offering the services of St. Hedwig’s. The Gestapo, wanting to avoid an outbreak of disease, quickly agreed. A handful of lives were saved as the Jews were declared dead and hidden in the city. But Marianne Hapig’s crusade had just begun.

                At the time there were thousands of Jews in hiding in Berlin. Word spread through the underground of anti-Nazi sympathizers that medical aid was available at Saint Hedwig’s. Illness, malnutrition and injuries from constant Allied bombings took its toll on the health of these hidden Jews. As we stood on the steps of the main entrance to the hospital, pictured above, I wondered what it must have been like to emerge from hiding, sick, without identity papers, needing to trust rumors of medical care. While it took courage and daring for Marianne Hapig to do what she did, and it must have taken a brave determination for hidden Jews to take that step in blind faith.

                During the war, identity papers were more precious than gold. Without them, any spot check on the street would mean deportation if not instant execution. At some point, Marianne realized she had a steady source of valid Aryan identity papers; those of the victims of the bombings who died at the hospital. Instead of turning them in, she began to save them and then was able to provide papers to hidden Jews who fit the physical descriptions of the dead.

                As the war worsened for the Germans, the Wehrmacht finally took over Saint Hedwig’s as a military hospital, and ordered that all civilian patients be removed. It was the end of Marianne’s source of identity papers, but also the occasion of her greatest inspiration. She demanded that if the military ordered her patients to be released before they were healthy, they should provide transportation to the country for recuperation, and that each patient must be assigned a nurse’s aide as a companion. The Wehrmacht obliged, and before long a convoy left Berlin for safer ground, with hundreds of patients and their helpers – young Jewish girls, now armed with official identity papers.

                Marianne Hapig provided the inspiration for what would become my first novel. Fictionalized as Elsa Klein of Saint Ludwig’s, her story became a keystone of that book. Marianne survived the war, and there are several plaques and remembrances of her in Berlin today.

                I didn’t expect further inspiration for my foray into writing, but it came yet again in the Harz Mountains. We had left the wonderful, history-thick city of Berlin behind to hike in central Germany, an area that had seen some of the last days of fighting in World War II. One day, at the end of a long hike, we descended a path down a hill and came upon a small German military cemetery. It was secluded, and a fair distance from the main road. We detoured in, and were struck by the dates on the tombstones; late April and early May 1945, the last week of the war. The ages on the markers were young and old, sixteen and sixty, little in between; sad, useless sacrifices.

                In one corner of the cemetery there were other tombstones, all marked Unknown Russian. And unlike all the other grave sites, each of these plots held a pot of fresh geraniums. Who were these Russians? And why were they there? Military cemeteries are for the dead of specific nations, and enemies are never co-mingled. I recalled a news item from the year before, about a soldier in the Gettysburg National Cemetery having been identified more than 140 years after that Civil War battle as a Confederate. His remains were respectfully disinterred and returned to his home state.

                So who were the unknown Russians, and why did they lie with German dead in this small, out-of-the way graveyard of young boys and old men? And most mysteriously, why were there fresh flowers on the Russian graves?

                And who put them there?

                I came up with my own answers to those questions when I returned home and started writing On Desperate Ground. I had no reason to wait another thirty years; ideas and intent combined to show me I could conceive of and bring a novel to conclusion. Completion bred confidence, and the process gave birth to the Billy Boyle WWII mystery series. But this first novel is close to my heart, as is the memory of those real people who dared to act in the face of evil.

Impossible Colors

We use the word "light" to describe the relatively tiny part in the center of the electromagnetic spectrum that can be detected by the human eye.  The spectrum itself stretches off for quite a long way in both directions, left and right, beyond the weensy little bit we can see and sort into colors.  

The Chinese have a saying that trying to understand life within the span of a single lifetime is like watching a horse race through a crack in a fence.  This is almost literally true of the tiny slice of the spectrum we're able to see as light.  When we think of the spectrum, we probably envision something broad and horizontal, like this:

But in fact, placed into the entire spectrum, that spacious gradient of color up there actually looks like this:

We can only see that little notch in the center,  All the colors we celebrate in art and poetry and love letters are crammed into that minuscule segment of the spectrum.

But just because our eyes can't see them, it doesn't mean there aren't colors, millions of other colors, trailing off into space, colors like plore and yensh and lorrow, emitted by the parts of the spectrum we can't see.  It's silly to try to give them names because -- here, at last, is the point -- we can't even imagine them.  We literally cannot visualize colors we've never seen.  They're unimaginable colors.

My guess is that most of us with ordinary vision don't go through life wishing there were more colors.  At some fundamental level, we believe that we were essentially born with a full box of crayons.  If we're missing anything, it's a shade of some color -- purple, for example -- that's a blend of two colors we can see. We might not have a red enough purple in our crayon box, but we can imagine it.

And yet we're practically drowning in colors we can't imagine.  If I can't imagine something as fundamental, as primary, as colors, it makes me wonder what else I can't imagine.  The reality, for example, of other people's world view.  Unconsidered variations of love.  The permanent availability and power of forgiveness.  Beauty in art I've glanced at or listened to once, and rejected.  Better ways to be true to myself and others.

Easter, the holiday of resurrection, is in part a festival of color, which is a residue of its pre-Christian identity as a celebration of the rebirth of spring, when the monochromatic world of winter turns brilliant again.  Rebirth is a valuable concept, even a useful one.  I personally think rebirth should be something we try to practice daily.

We've all experienced rebirth.  We fall in love, and our world changes, although, of course, we're what's really changed: we're reborn.  We find the thing we love to do: rebirth.  We see Van Gogh's "Starry Night" -- really see it -- for the first time: rebirth.  We read a line of poetry; for example (for me), Rilke's "I believe I would know/which one of those stars still burns/like a white city/at the end of its long beam/in the heavens."  Rebirth. We do something we didn't know we could do: rebirth.  We're re-centered, re-energized, refocused.  Reborn.

When we live literally surrounded by realities we can't imagine, it seems to me disastrous not to try to be open to them, to be content to wake up every day in the prison of our limited sensibilities without trying to find a way toward new feelings, ideas, commitments, even realities: impossible colors.  When I look at the eggs in that Easter basket up there, it reminds me that I need to be open to rebirth, even tiny rebirths, on a daily basis. 

I know none of this is new, but Easter, which I don't celebrate in the conventional sense, brings it to mind.  I have the blessing of being a writer, meaning I get to trot characters around and see what's wrong with their lives, and that has made me doubly aware in my own life of the almost constant need for re-evaluation, for re-commitment, for constant redefinition of the word "possible" or even "unimaginable."  For rebirth, in other words.  So my Easter message to you, as I sit here in a blaze of invisible unimaginable colors, is a line from Bob Dylan: He not busy being born is busy dying.

Happy Easter or Passover or whatever holiday it is for you.

Tim -- Sundays 

Back Home Again

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.

That’s my way of letting you know I’m back on Mykonos, safe and sound as of late Thursday.  It’s early Friday morning and I’m sitting on my front porch taking in the view.  And what a view it is. I’m on a rise behind the seven windmills symbolic of my island, looking across the old port toward the much larger neighboring island of Tinos, a half dozen miles away.

It’s been a hectic week, starting off with chores on a farm in western New Jersey (that’s my forest fire fighter buddy’s new truck in front of the barn) and a few days in New York City to tidy things up a bit before flying off from JFK—no doubt passing Stan headed in the opposite direction somewhere midway across the Atlantic.  But I made it, and the photo at the top of this article is the start of my first Aegean sunset of 2012.  Glad I could share it with you. 

Park Avenue

JFK Delta Lounge

My trans-Atlantic view

I know it’s time to start writing the new book.  But for this morning, at least, I prefer reminiscing about the last one, and what got me to write it.  After all, it all started here, on this porch.

Have you ever wondered how many times a day your eyes see something that your mind never gives a second thought?  Birds, for instance, or the color of the floor in your apartment building’s halls.  That’s sort of the way I’d always looked at Tinos.  It was just a high-ridged, mountainous island backdrop for whatever what was happening on Mykonos. 

Tinos' Church of Panagia Evangelistria

I knew of Tinos’ Church of the Annunciation (Panagia Evangelistria) and of the more than one million pilgrims who flocked there each year seeking to invoke the healing powers of its Miraculous Icon of the Virgin Mary (the Megalochari).  It’s perhaps the most revered religious shrine in Greece and is known as the “Lourdes of Greece.”  I also knew that every August 15^th Tinos was overrun with gypsies coming to pay their respects to the Virgin during the annual religious festival celebrating her assumption into heaven. 

Many times I’d stood on the deck of a ferry stopped in Tinos’ port and watched pilgrims head off to begin a half-mile crawl up the steep hill from the harbor to the Church.  But I never had much interest in visiting there.  It seemed too close to bother, much like the Statue of Liberty is to New Yorkers.

Path crawled by pilgrims

About two years ago I was having morning coffee on my front porch with an American friend.  Her late husband had been a jeweler on Mykonos.  We were talking about a new book I was working on and she said, “You should write one about Tinos.”

When I asked why, she said, “It has all that hidden treasure.”

She sure knew how to get my attention.  That’s when I learned that her husband had been one of the few jewelers entrusted to restore and maintain hidden caches of gold, silver, and precious gems given as gifts to the Church of the Annunciation by grateful pilgrims.  Not long after that I learned that all this wealth was not controlled by the Greek Church, but by a two-hundred-year-old private foundation so rich and powerful that some referred to it as “The Vatican of Greece.”

A miraculous icon, vast hidden treasures, a mysterious foundation, and gypsies.  How could I not be inspired?  Still, it took until last spring before I got around to seriously exploring Tinos.  Now it’s one of my favorite places in Greece.

Most who come to Tinos are only aware of the Church and its surrounding harbor town.  But for those who venture out onto the island, there are serious surprises in store.  Fifty villages as quiet and undisturbed as a dreamer’s quaint fantasy of Greece; brilliant vistas at every turn; a meandering two-hundred-mile network of cobblestone trails and old farm paths running from hillside to hillside and dipping into valleys in between; and a history of fabled marble quarries and artisans linked to some of Greece’s greatest artistic achievements.

And unlike other Aegean islands, Tinos successfully resisted Ottoman rule for most of Greece’s occupation, making it a Christian oasis amid Turkish domination and the Cycladic island chain’s economic center and most populated island, earning it the nickname “Little Paris.”

What a setting for a story. 

And it will be out this June.

For those interested in a peak at the tale, here’s Publishers Weekly’s starred review of Target: Tinos.  Dare I need say it began my week on as glorious a note as that resolving first sunset!

Set on the Aegean pilgrimage island of Tinos, Siger’s superb fourth procedural featuring Chief Insp. Andreas Kaldis (after 2011’s Prey on Patmos) cleverly integrates the ancient with the modern. When Andreas looks into the mysterious immolation of two gypsies on Tinos, apparently a hate crime against immigrants, he faces formidable pressures from his fiery fiancée, Lila, whom he’s to marry in six days on nearby Mykonos—and from his wily boss, Spiros Renatis, who abruptly orders him to close the investigation. While the Greek government can’t afford bad publicity during the country’s current financial crisis, Andreas, aided by his feisty chief assistant, Yianni Kouros, and his friend Tassos Stamatos, chief homicide investigator for the Cyclades, pursues this eerie case, which soon involves ruthless Albanian mobsters, the history of Greek independence from Turkey, and a Tinos-based esoteric cult. A likable, compassionate lead; appealing Greek atmosphere; and a well-crafted plot help make this a winner. (June)—Publishers Weekly (starred review) 3/30/2012

Jeff—Saturday

Not again

Last week I had an epiphany. When I was flabbergasted by the endless high rises in Beijing, it was merely a sign that it had been too long since I visited New York. Something that I have now amended. It is an incredible city.

While I was there the Freedom tower, being constructed in the World Trade Center, reached 100 stories, having only 4 to go. When these have been added it will be the tallest building in America, at 541 meters height. This is seven times higher than the tallest building in Iceland, a mere 77,6 meters high 20 story office building in the greater Reykjavík area. The second tallest building here is Hallgrímskirkja, see photo, at 74,5 meters.

My American publisher, Minotaur of St. Martins Press, has offices in a wonderful building in NYC that might not be the highest, but is certainly one of the coolest. It is the Flatiron building in the Flatiron district which, as I told my husband is named after the trade of ironworking that was formerly the main industry of the area. Except it isn’t. This was absolutely wrong. The district is named after the building and the building is named after a clothes iron because of its distinctive wedge shape.

I was lucky enough to be invited to visit on of the corner or point offices. The space was to die for and the view breathtaking. It was pointed out to me that on one side, the windows overlooked an area of somewhat lower buildings and thus a whole lot of roofs. On most stood a wooden water tank on steel legs, much like the inhabitants of the buildings were some form of very low-tech aliens with spaceships poised, ready to evacuate. In such a modern city these offer the eye a strange condolence.

To build a high rise like those in New York, one obviously needs a whole lot of investment capital but even when this is secure, on its own money is not enough. Without solid bedrock to build on, the number of stories you will safely build is limited. Manhattan is a good example of this. The underlying ground conditions are such that at the south end of the island where the financial district is located, the depth down to solid rock is not much and the same applies to Midtown. Hence a lot of skyscrapers in the two areas, separated by a part with much lower buildings where the bedrock dips deeper into the ground. This can clearly be seen in the first photo on the top of the page, showing these particular sections of Manhattan. Follow the skyline of the skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan, past much lower buildings and up to Midtown where the buildings rise upwards again.

In Iceland we have lots of bedrock. But alas no capital. One or the other does not suffice. And then we have geological activity which does not help either. So 20 stories tops suit us fine. But it is nice to see what else is on offer in this big diverse world.

And if New Yorkers want to come see something they don’t have and probably don’t want anyway – we are experiencing a strange phenomenon that might indicate yet another eruption. This one is not so hard to pronounce although for Iceland it might be hard to swallow.

Askja is a volcano located in the east highlands of Iceland, north of glacier Vatnajökull. From settlement until 1875m a period of 1001 years, it was dormant, gathering its strength. The eruption in 1875 was tremendous and caused a large part of the population in the east of Iceland to immigrate to Canada. Following the eruption the land around the volcano collapsed and it is now a lake, the deepest one in Iceland. Another eruption occurred there in 1961. Take a look at the picture below. Notice the water. In this particular instance seeing the water is a bad thing. It should be frozen over and covered with snow, at bare minimum a whole lot of sheet ice. The lake is being heated up and certainly not from above. The same as preceded the eruption in 1961.

It seems as this century has not taken much of a fancy to Iceland. I was hoping it would only turn out to be the first decade but that does not seem to be the case. One can only hope that it is not the millennium that carries the grudge.

Although impressed by New York, Beijing and numerous other cities I would hate to have to move.    

Yrsa - Wednesday

Musings on off the beaten track Paris

Bibliotheque Mazarine
21 quai de Conti, 6th
“Because it’s incredible, lined with books, old leather bound volumes, old winding narrow library stairs reaching to a walkway that rings the ceiling with murals, hidden spaces behind the bookshelves, the quiet and rustling of pages. It’s also open to the public, unlike some French libraries, and a day use card very easy to obtain. I often go for research on my books and stay for hours.”

Rue Meslay
Metro Temple or Republique, 10th
“Drop into any of the crammed designer markdown shoe shops lining this street at the edge of the Marais below Republique. What more needs to be said - go there ladies. In Murder at the Lanterne Rouge, Aimée casts a longing eye at the stairs, ‘the stairway to heaven’ as her friend Martine refers to it, from rue Notre Dame de Nazareth leading to rue Meslay.”

Musée des Moulage de l'Hôpital Saint-Louis
1 avenue Claude-Vellefaux 10th
Open by appointment, tel 01 42 49 99 15
“Founded in 1867 in the seventeenth century Hôpital Saint Louis originally built for plague victims, this dermatological museum houses the wax castings of skin diseases. It’s creepy, weird and out of the last century. To understand and illustrate for his medical students, a doctor commissioned a fruit seller in the Passage Jouffrey who sculpted wax fruits to show his wares, to sculpt human appendages. In my book Murder in the Bastille, Aimée’s partner René visits a doctor in the museum.”

Maison des Métallos
94 Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, 11th
http://www.maisondesmetallos.org/
“Built in the 19th century for workers ‘ouvriers’ who filled the quartier and now a thriving hub of dance, theatre and literary discussion and conferences. This center radiates the spirit of the old worker’s roots and today’s modern community.”

Du Pain et des Idées
34 rue Yves Toudic, 10th
“A boulangerie close to Canal Saint Martin - the baker at last check in still used a wood burning over for his baking...and old artisanal style.”

Parc Montsouris
RER Cité Universitaire, 14th
“A English garden style near the reservoir with a lake, odd sculptures and where local Parisians go on Sundays with their families...just very local and Parisian.
The meridian line of Paris pierces it and its great green space. Walk up to Impasse Nansouty at the very tip near the tram on Boulevard Jourdan. You’ll think you’re in the French countryside...a street of houses built for soldiers wounded war victims and their families after the Great War. Henry Miller and Anais Nin, Braque, Lawrence Durrell all lived nearby.”

Didiers Crêpes
3bis rue Carpeaux, 18th
“Run by Didier from Brittany, the lace curtains, light blue storefront, a pet rabbit for years, grows a lot of his produce in his plot outside Paris...ambiance and locals.”

Cara - Tuesday

PS -At almost every book event on this tour someone asks 'Do you outline your books? How do you take an idea into a story? '
And I've yet to explain it well because, it's kind of a mystery to me. Forces take over and it's hard to explain and if I did understand the process I don't know that I'd want to explain. Everyone writes books in their own way.
All I know is I don't outline, wish I could and that it would save me tons of time. Call me a Seat of the Pantser...for me it's like finding a place in Paris then throwing it against the wall - like how some people cook pasta - and see if it sticks for a hundred pages. If so, then there's a story, there's a place to explore and reasons why my detective would get involved. The story, the characters work their way out from there. Any one an outliner or seat of the pantser?

Inhotim

This gentleman,

Bernardo Paz, is a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, Brazilian man-of-means.

And Inhotim is his creation.

It’s a botanical garden…

…and contemporary art museum, rolled into one…

...located about an hour’s drive from Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s third largest city.

The name, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, is difficult for non-Brazilians to pronounce or remember. But perhaps this will help: Inho, in the local dialect, is short for Senhor. And Tim, of course, is a name. The Tim in question was an agriculturist who previously owned the land upon which Mr. Paz ultimately built his complex. Mr. Tim’s farm (fazenda de Inhotim) they called it back then. Later, in its abbreviated form, the area simply became known as Inhotim.

Mr. Paz’s museum contains more than 500 works...

…from more than a hundred artists…

…representing more than 30 nationalities.

The works are of all kinds, sculptures, paintings, drawings, photography, film and video.

Some are displayed in pavilions.

Others in the open air...

...with a number of them being site-specific – works constructed in locations chosen by the artist.

The botanical garden, in which they make their home, is a brilliant tour-de-force of landscape architecture.

Burle Marx collaborated on an early plan that has since been developed by a number of talented successors.

It contains more than 3,500 species of plants, including the world’s largest collection of palms…

…and more than 350 species of orchids.

Inhotim is, I admit, a bit off the beaten track.

But it’s rapidly becoming a “must-see” destination for globetrotters with a passion for contemporary art.

Leighton - Monday

Whocarez?

An entire approach to writing was, for quite a long while, labeled with a compound word that was ungrammatical, condescending, and ultimately, damaging.

The "whodunnit" was a product of what is often called the "golden age" of mysteries, the period that can be said (although probably not very accurately) to have begun in both England and America in 1920-21 with the publication of Agatha Christie's first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.  The book set a whole slew of parameters for much of what was to follow: country houses, a closed world which only a small number of people could enter or leave, an aristocratic victim and suspects, a classless detective, exotic murder weapons, and a welter of motives, suspicious actions, creaking stairs, and the rich, ripe smell of red herrings.

Raymond Chandler would later characterize this fictional environment as one in which the suspects "sit around sipping Singapore slings and sneering at each other while the flat-feet crawl to and fro under the Persian rugs with their derby hats on."

The problem with the classical mystery was that it really was a whodunnit, and little more.  The whodunnit had at its steely little heart not love and longing, but floor plans and timetables, tos and fros, the ticking of the clock.  When all was said and done, Lady Furtheringham and the Earl of Fogwart and the racy young Mr. Peffington-Smythe exist only to help the detective penetrate the truth of, as Chandler says, "bits of charred paper and who trampled the jolly old flowering arbutus under the library window."  As characters, the people in most of these books are cogs and wheels, and the mystery itself is a machine.  Human motive and individual behavior are oil and gears.  The whole thing is a bit like one of the elaborate cuckoo clocks in which a surprising panorama of simulacra parade by, doing the same things over and over.  The books are puzzles, no more and no less.

And they sold in the billions, and, yes, that's billions with a "B."  Christie's sales alone account for approximately four billion books.  So when we look back and get the impression that the golden age had the stage to itself for a long time, it's easy not to see, beneath the avalanche of secretive butlers, shady vicars, and curare darts, that Dashiell Hammett published Red Harvest in 1929, only eight years after the English publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and followed it up only a year later with The Maltese Falcon.

Red Harvest was a game changer, the modern world arriving on a bolt of lightning.  Hammett, as Chandler says, "gave murder back to the kind of people who commit it."  In doing this, Hammett paved the way for Chandler himself, and with him, for a whole new kind of writing.  It looked directly at dark impulse and dark sex, at people with no money and no power, at neighborhoods that most literature of the time drove through quickly, with the windows rolled up.  This world was--unlike Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with a fifth-century Greek curling-iron--real, at least in the hands of good writers.

Some people could tell the difference. There was Chandler, of course, and in 1945 the lion of the day's literary critics, Edmund Wilson, wrote a famous New Yorker piece, "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" eviscerating one of Christie's most famous books and, by extension, the entire genre.

Today we live in a new golden age in which the heirs of Hammett and Chandler can explore virtually any aspect of human life, and set it anywhere in the world.  Some of the best writing of our age is being done by writers working in what's usually called "crime fiction," in which, broadly speaking, a crisis caused by crime brings character to the fore, revealing unexpected strengths, weaknesses, and moral codes and exploring the mysteries of life, death, and the often rocky interval between.  It has become one of the world's great literary forms.

Unfortunately, "crime fiction" is looked down upon as a sort of literary ghetto by the loftier critics, writers, and editors engaged in what they think of as "literary fiction."  These labels, of course, are mostly shelving devices aimed at helping bookstores and libraries decide where to put things, but there's an implied hierarchy, too.

And I blame the term "whodunnit" in large part for that hierarchy.  The idea that there's something mechanical, formulaic, and two-dimensional about crime fiction persists -- especially among those who can't be bothered to read it.  And you know what?  Too bad for them.  Think what they're missing.

Let's not tell them about it.

Tim -- Sundays