IN A MELLOTONE — No.28 Winter 2008

A John Harvey/Charlie Resnick Newsletter

Past editions (from issue 15 onwards) can be found in the Mellotone archive

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So, what’s been happening? And before I forget – the Christmas lights, I noticed the other evening, are already up in Oxford Street – the compliments of the coming season. In a slightly despairing effort to get this newsletter out before the post bags are choked with cards and presents, I’ve pushed everything else aside on this slightly dank November afternoon and settled down at the office computer with instructions not to be disturbed until it’s finished. Not even for a fresh cup of coffee or one of the first mince pies of the winter.

“Cold In Hand”, the first Resnick novel in ten years, was published by Harcourt in the States last month to some excellent reviews, and, also in the US, Bloody Brits Press performed the seemingly impossible task of reissuing all of the earlier Resnick books in paperback within a twelve month. Just today I received advance copies of the UK paperback of “Cold In Hand”, which Arrow are bringing out in the larger B format in January 2009. Also this year, “Nick’s Blues”, my first novel in a very long while for young adult readers was published by the Nottingham-based Five Leaves Press. Since I’m a bit of an unknown in this particular area of the market, the book has had a few troubles getting off the ground, so let me give it a bit of a shove with this extract from a review by Adèle Geras on the Armadillo.com web site.

“It [‘Nick’s Blues’] does a lot of different things very well. First, it's a mystery. For his sixteenth birthday, Nick gets a box full of stuff left by his dad, who killed himself when Nick was only seven. The boy lives with his mother on a tough estate, so part of the novel brings life in such a place vividly before our eyes. The third strand is Nick's own story, in which he has to deal with bullies, violence in various forms and also work out who he is and what he's going to become. He does this by trying to understand his father's suicide.

Charlene, who used to sing with Nick's dad's band, gives him a guitar and the hope of playing it. Melanie, the overweight young woman who's one of his neighbours, has a tragedy of her own to deal with, and various schoolfriends, teachers, and shopkeepers also play a part in the drama. It's a very short book but packs a both an exciting plot and a great deal of emotion into its pages. There is, you should know, a single use of a four-letter word which is shocking, but then it's meant to be exactly that. This is one to try on boys who think they don't like reading.”

Not just boys, I think, but girls too - and, I have to say, all the adults I know who’ve read it have liked it also.

The next book – which, to the chagrin of my editor, I’m still working on – is called “Far Cry”, and is set principally in Cambridgeshire and Cornwall, with a few side-trips to London and Paris, and features married police detective Will Grayson and his colleague Helen Walker from “Gone to Ground”. Not to mention, as they used to say in the movies, a cast of thousands.

One reason the book lingers as yet unfinished is that I allowed myself to be sidetracked in the summer by my involvement as presenter in a BBC Scotland documentary about the Swedish writer Henning Mankel. Entitled “Who is Kurt Wallander?”, this is due to be shown to coincide with the films of Mankel’s books which are being made by the BBC with Kenneth Branagh as Mankel’s detective hero, Wallander.

Despite doing quite a bit of arts radio, this was the first time I’d worked on anything like this for television and I have to say that while I did enjoy conducting the interviews with Mankel and others, and relished the opportunity to visit different parts of Sweden – the area around Ystad in the south of the country, where the books are set, is particularly lovely – there was, for my liking, too much time spent hanging around while the crew worked their magic – and far too many shots of me poncing around in a travel-worn suit.

Transmission is set for Saturday, 6th December at 9.30pm on BBC4, repeated the following evening, the 7th, at 10.30pm on the same channel.

The big event of the year for me has undoubtedly been the Bouchercon Mystery Convention, held this year in Baltimore, Maryland, and organised to the pitch of perfection by Ruth Jordan and Judy Bobalik with a host of volunteers. As International Guest of Honour I was duly feted and my work celebrated in a way that I found rather wonderful if slightly unnerving. What, writing a bunch of books aside, had I done to deserve all this? But then,I suppose that was the point.

For me, the highlight was most probably an hour long interview in which I was put through my paces by the redoubtable Otto Penzler; there were also enjoyable panel discussions [not often you’ll hear me say that] on poetry and music and, at the end of the final day, a session which involved, as I recall, much badinage barely kept in check by Miss Baltimore herself, Laura Lippman, and fuelled – well, it was the last session – by numerous bottles of wine.

The whole affair was made even more enjoyable by sharing the spotlight with other honoured guests, most of whom I’m fortunate enough to count as friends: Barbara Peters and Robert Rosenwald, Thalia Proctor, the aforementioned Ms Lippman and, being honoured for his distinguished contributions to the genre, the apparently invincible Lawrence Block. And, of course, there was my good pal Mark Billingham turning in a sterling performance as Toastmaster.

In the dealers’ room I was able to hang out a little with more old friends – Marion Misters from Sleuth of Baker Street in Toronto, Helen Simpson and her daughter from Big Sleep Books in St. Louis, Tom & Enid Schantz of Rue Morgue Press in Colorado and, not least, the seemingly retired and currently freelancing Steve Stilwell, who was happy to reinstate an earlier Bouchercon tradition of keeping a bottle of decent Scotch under the table for the occasional passing sip. Or nip.

Sad to say, I didn’t get to see as much of the city of Baltimore as I would have liked, though I did manage an enjoyable and instructive hour or so going round the Walters Art Museum with the New York artist and writer, Jonathan Santloffer, and got to share a beer or two one evening with George Pelecanos, Mark Billingham and Laura Lippman in one of Laura’s favourite neighbourhood bars. Not “The Wire”, but close enough for comfort.

All in all, I had an undeservedly wonderful time and could barely scrape the smile off my face during the entire four days. Judy Bobalik, forewarned of my curmudgeonly reputation, and pressed into service as my minder should trouble ensue, had been steeling herself in pleasant anticipation of battle, and was rather deflated to find said battle unjoined. Judy, I promise to be a cantankerous so-and-so on some future occasion. Marked with sadness at the Bouchercon Convention was the death, a short time before, of the author James Crumley. In addition to being an avid reader of his work, I’d been fortunate enough to get to know Jim and his wife, Martha Elizabeth, a little and had always enjoyed their company a great deal.

I wrote an essay about Jim’s work, “The Last Good Place: James Crumley, the West and the Detective Novel,” for a book edited by Peter Messent called “Criminal Proceedings: the Contemporary American Crime Novel”, which was published by Pluto Press in 1997. I leant heavily on that essay for the short appreciation of Jim in “Red Herrings”, the magazine of the Crime Writers’ Association, and, since that journal is for members only, I’d like to reproduce some of what I wrote here.

I first met Jim Crumley in London, the mid-90s it would have been, edgily prowling the book tables in the Camden Town branch of Waterstone’s, before he gave a fierce and often hilarious reading from “The Mexican Tree Duck”, and then again, a few days later, with his wife, the poet and artist Martha Elizabeth, at Shots in the Dark, the much lamented [by me, anyway] Nottingham Mystery & Thriller Festival.

Crumley was engaging, expansive, happy to talk, and a long, late breakfast somehow encompassed lunch before shading into high tea. The following year, at the Seattle Bouchercon, we sat in a hotel room on the 23rd floor, overlooking the Puget Sound, and, with the assistance of some Absolut vodka and room service hors d’oeuvres, recorded the interview Jim was later to say, in a postcard from his home in Montana, he had enjoyed on the page.

“A snowy spring here. But some sun. So we survive.”

Sadly, but not surprisingly, given the ill-health that had plagued him in recent years, he survives no more. But his work, the best of it, will.

I read “The Last Good Kiss” first in ‘78 or ‘79, not long after it was first published, and right off it hit me in the same way as listening to Philly Joe Jones did when I was faking it as a drummer. Made me want to consign my typewriter to the bin along with my drum sticks. There I’d been, in my pathetic way – get hold of one of the old Scott Mitchell paperbacks, if you don’t believe me - attempting to relocate and somehow update the Chandler private eye novel, and Crumley had just done that and several things more besides. I’ve reread “The Last Good Kiss” numerous times since and I think it remains not just Crumley’s best book, but one of the best books of its kind ever written.

In “The Final Country”, James Crumley wrote something that comes close perhaps, in spirit, to being his own epitaph. “It's done. This may not be my final country. I can still taste the beer in the back of my throat, bitter with the blood of the innocent, and somewhere in my old heart I can still remember the taste of love. Perhaps this is just a resting place. A warm place to drink cold beer. But wherever my final country is, my ashes will go back to Montana when I die.”

As I said in “Red Herrings,” rest easy, Jim. We’ll raise a glass and read the books. My attempt to raise money for Medecin Sans Frontiers and simultaneously rid my shelves of unwanted editions of my books was successful to the tune £300, so, with Christmas in view and books making such good presents, I’m repeating the offer as before. List enclosed or following.

And finally, for anyone in London on Friday 28th November, I’m reading, alongside two sets by the excellent singer-songwriter Liz Simcock, at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden, 22 Betterton St., 8.00pm . Details: 020 7420 9880 - hyldaquay@btinternet.com - www.lizsimcock.com

John Harvey, London, November 2008