Hello and Goodbye
Just a heads up that this blog is now closed. Long overdue, I know. I’ve exported the blog posts and comments into a new reading blog I’ve set up. So if you want to update your blog readers, I’m at http://fanarchist.wordpress.com
As short-lived as this blog was, I’m still very passionate about the topics that lead me to open it in the first place. I’m hoping that a fresh start would make me start writing again. See you on the other side!
-Kristel
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Blog Recommendation
The Rap Sheet is an awesome blog-cum-magazine about crime fiction. I found their interview of Giancarlo De Cataldo particularly eye-opening
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… you have to set yourself on fire.*
This was so not the post I wanted to start off with. XD
–
So the annual discussion about cultural appropriation and “When Is It Okay to Pillage Other People’s Cultures for Literature and Profit?” has erupted. It’s times like this that makes me both angry and sad. It also makes me despair at my lack of proper words to adequately convey the agitation and despair it ignites inside myself, but that’s the beauty of quoting people. So here goes:
Do not tell me, or the people like me who have grown up hearing Arabic around them, or singing in Swahili, or dreaming in Bengali—but reading only (or even mostly) in English (or French, or Dutch)—that this colonial rape of our language has not infected our ability to narrate, has not crippled our imagination…. Do not tell me that this cultural fracture does not affect the odds required to produce enough healthy imaginations that can chrysalis into writers. When we call ourselves Oreos or Coconuts or Bananas (Black/Brown/Yellow on the outside, White on the inside)—understand the ruptures and bafflement that accompanies our consumption of your media while we resent and critique it.
— Deepa D.
Powerful words. And it has some resonance when we try and look at crime and mystery stories with the colonialist experience as our lens:
More than heroes and heroines, however, the empire produces villains. Nearly half of the first 25 Sherlock Holmes stories feature colonial villains of one sort or another. Some come back from the colonies with their ill-gotten gains to settle into respectability, and others follow them to England to wreak a terrible revenge for the way they had been treated earlier on… The other stock ex-colonial villain in the Holmes stories is the cruel older man who has obviously had his morality buds excised through his years abroad dealing with colonials…
Crime fiction, especially its infancy, was inexorably tied to Empire and the easy (for the dominant culture) distinction of race. It isn’t a coincidence that the rise of this genre came at the heyday of Pax Brittanica and those who we consider as the writers of the Golden Age (Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Michael Innes) are British. New Zealander Ngaio Marsh, while a writer born away from London, nonetheless wrote like she was part of the club, with Scotland Yard Inspector Roderick Alleyn as his protagonist. So did a number of writers who were “colonials” but mostly wrote with the point of view of the colonizers.
The reason behind this: the central theme inherent in detective fiction (justice and order triumph against crime) goes hand in hand with the rationale for colonization (civilization and order triumph against savagery). It may seem a bit of a stretch to put crime fiction into this kind of framework but I’m not the first one to have pointed this out, nor will I be the last.
This is the legacy I have to live with, as a mystery fan who has read Peter Wimsey stories and cringed a little at the mention of the “usurious Jew” and “inscrutable Oriental” in Dorothy L. Sayers’ pages. More often than not, crime fiction takes the things we fear in the privacy of our own minds and makes them into reality magnified. And readers are not even provided with the buffer of the “improbable,” as with the case of Science Fiction and Fantasy. The menace in the narrative aren’t the Uruk-hai or the invading aliens. Because the foreigner is perpetually the Other, their very existence sow the seeds of fear and distrust.
Racism, prejudice and xenophobia latent within the genre aren’t going away anywhere soon. The “Yellow Peril” is a stereotype alive and well in television shows, movies, and books. Instead of the the Fu Manchu-type villains of old, however, we get Asian triads, yakuza, and Big Scary Financially Empowered China. For the Philippines, we are only ever mentioned as the connoiseurs of snuff movies as in Nicholas Cage’s movie 8 mm or as part of the Islamic militant hotbed that is South East Asia. As long as the dominant culture is still the one writing about us, we will always be one of the usual suspects.
(“But 24 helped combat racism!!!! It’s postively post-racial. Look, they placed a black man in the White House before anyone has even heard of Obama. Never mind how the plot arcs in most of the seasons feed off the inherent paranoia the Western world feels about Arabs and Muslims. Emancipation!!!!
This comment comes from a person was watched all but the last season of 24. Even things I love has faults, and I accept that.)
/digression
Which bears the question, why did I write about this aspect of crime fiction (which is admittedly unflattering) instead of celebrating the good things first before going into the critique? I’m honestly not sure. Perhaps it’s me thinking that we should get the fucked up stuff out of the way so we could get on and focus on the good things. And that as Deepa D. had asked in another post: This will probably be painful because it reveals feet of clay in dearly beloved books and authors. Is the cost worth the result for you?
My answer is yes, always.
*reference to a Stars song.
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(Edible) Filler Post
I’m trying (and failing) to write a coherent post about racism and prejudice in crime fiction, an offshoot of this discussion. So while I gather my wits you get this, a webcomic by that kick ass artist over at Kawaii Not:
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Tags: hardboiled, kawaii not, web comic
For today’s MB column, I went with my old love, writing about crime fiction. It seems quite appropriate to talk about it again. This is more of a primer since the Read or Die column is geared towards students in the high school and college level. More in-depth discussions will be the raison d’etre of So Fedorable, after all. :)
The Crime Fiction Case File
One of my New Year’s resolution (aside from “read more books”, the mantra of Read or Die) had been to write more. I was not satisfied with my writing output for 2008, not only in terms of fiction but also non-fiction. Aside from my contributions to the RoD column, I wanted to discuss literary issues more deeply than a one-page column could contain. So one of the first major things I have planned for myself is the creation of a crime fiction blog that will contain my offbeat rants and raves on everything that has to do with crime and mystery.
But why crime fiction? It was only a matter of time I guess, for me to have come up with this venture. For one, I have always been fascinated with crime and mystery TV shows. I was already watching cop shows like NYPD Blue, The Profiler and Law and Order with my mom at ten years old. And though my interest with the genre started with television, it wasn’t too long before I gravitated to crime novels. I have hazy memories of reading Nancy Drew and Bobbsey Twins in my school library. I went on to read the early John Grisham books and, of course, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.
What interested me with the genre had always been the element of the unknown. From years of being an avid fan, however, I have come to find nuances to the stories that have kept me interested even after the first thrill of the plot twists have subsided. Sympathetic protagonists who always fight for justice in the face of crime and corruption, a grim portrayal of the reality that exists in the (mostly American, but that is changing) streets. Those are the kind of topics I want to write about, a way to articulate my own jumbled thoughts and provide insight to an audience at the same time.
One other great thing about writing about crime fiction is that there’s simply a lot of types out there. Reams of scholarly books have been written about mysteries and they barely even scratch the surface. It is also part of the fun for me, as I can assume the role of the eternal student, learning more about the genre I enjoy. And hopefully I can write a crime story of my own in the future.
As I’ve said, there are many subcategories under the crime fiction umbrella. I’d like to briefly discuss some of these here and include recommendations that I hope would whet the appetite of every other mystery buff out there.
Cozy
This type of a mystery often occurs in a quaint and quiet town. The miserly owner of a mansion dies–often by poisoning, which is often in his tea. This is the standard picture of most people about the cozy, tales that mostly focus on the inventiveness of the murder plot, as well the intellectual prowess the “the detective” variably employs to unravel the murder mystery. The bulk of Agatha Christie’s qualifies in this category. Her fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple has been elevated to classics figures, ferreting out murderers in the novels, Murder on the Orient Express, The Murder at the Vicarage and Death on the Nile. Other masters of the cozy appeared in what had been dubbed “The Golden Age of Detective Fiction.” My personal favorites have been Dorothy Sayers in Murder Must Advertise and G.K. Chesterton’s “Father Brown” stories. For an example on television, think of Angela Lansbury’s Murder She Wrote.
Hardboiled
Hardboiled fiction came as a reaction the first type of mysteries that existed. While the novels of Christie et al. stimulated readers with their clever puzzles, the plots didn’t feel immediate and “real” enough for some writers who felt that crime in real life was often messy and unsettling. The venerable master of this, at least in my opinion, is and always will be Dashiell Hammett. Fans of old Hollywood movies may have heard one of his books. The Maltese Falcon, with Humphrey Bogart playing the jaded private investigator Sam Spade in the movie adaptation, created the iconic image of what we know as detective fiction today. My personal favorite of his is The Red Harvest, where Hammett combines sharp prose with cynical humor. Raymond Chandler, the other big name of the genre created Philip Marlowe, and depicted the seductive yet seedy underbelly of post-Depression Los Angeles in novels such as The Big Sleep. Contemporary writer James Ellroy continues the tradition of the hardboiled with his critically acclaimed novels, L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia.
Spy Novel
Move over, James Bond. The rise of the Soviet Union after World War II also gave birth to this exciting offshoot of the crime genre. The spy novel taps into the paranoid adventurer in all of us, as they spin conspiracies and political machinations done my intelligence operatives. Power and greed in this global scale can have catastrophic consequences. And although Ian Fleming has become the writer most people think about when discussing espionage fiction but John le Carre (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) and Eric Ambler (A Coffin for Dimitrios) and Robert Ludlum (of the Bourne Series fame) are other names to look out for. A more contemporary writer, check Ian Rankin’s Witch Hunt (writing as Jack Harvey) and Alan Furst’s Night Soldiers.
There are countless other subgenres that I haven’t discussed here. Legal thrillers, police procedurals, psychological thrillers—their prevalence in pop culture can be seen in popular TV shows like CSI or Criminal Minds. Suffice to say, I have a lot of material to work with, and I wouldn’t have any trouble in blogging about it. As far as good reading experiences go, nothing tops a spectacular crime novel for me. And for this die-hard (no pun intended) crime fiction fan, murder most foul becomes a mystery most sublime.
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By the pricking of my thumbs…
WATCH THIS SPACE.
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So Fedorable - A Crime Fiction Blog 