Fiction's Global Crime Wave

Detective novels from Japan, Nigeria, Germany and Korea are pouring into the U.S. as publishers hunt for the next 'Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.' In pursuit of the new international man of mystery.

By ALEXANDRA ALTER

From Wall Street Journal

iStockphoto

A Nigerian detective unravels a web of corruption, suspecting an inside job when a bomb goes off at the mansion of a rich political candidate. A Japanese physics professor gets sucked into a murder investigation targeting a single mother in Tokyo, and tangles with his old university rival. A Turkish-German investigator in Frankfurt takes on a gang of neo-fascist Croatians involved in human trafficking.

It seems a certain Swedish hacker heroine with a dragon tattoo has paved the way for a surge of international crime fiction.

Spurred by the popularity of Swedish writer Stieg Larsson's trilogy, which has sold more than 40 million copies world-wide, U.S. publishers are combing the globe for the next big foreign crime novel. While major publishing houses have long avoided works in translation, many are now courting international literary agents, commissioning sample translations, tracking best-seller lists overseas and pouncing on writers who win literary prizes in Europe and Asia. The result is a new wave of detective fiction that's broadening and redefining the classic genre.

In the coming months, Minotaur Books, a mystery-and-thriller imprint of St. Martin's, will publish new crime and suspense fiction from Iceland, Japan, Nigeria, South Africa and, naturally, Sweden. A few years ago, most of the imprint's international authors were British.

"A lot of publishers are looking at this because they don't want to miss the next Stieg Larsson," says Kelley Ragland, Minotaur's editorial director.

Some have pegged Japan as the next crime-writing hotspot. Literary agent Amanda Urban of International Creative Management, who represents Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison, took on Japanese suspense and crime writer Shuichi Yoshida, a best-selling author in Japan, because she saw his novels as literary works with commercial potential. "Crime really crosses over," says Ms. Urban.

Doron Gild for The Wall Street Journal

More

• James Patterson Launches an International Franchise

Mystery novels translate well across cultures, because they usually prize plot over literary acrobatics. The global influence of American and British crime writing has also led to the widespread adoption of familiar tropes and plot conventions: the gloomy, loner detective, clipped dialogue, the standard plot structure that opens with a body and follows the investigation. Best-selling Turkish crime writer Mehmet Murat Somer, who writes a series about a cross-dressing Istanbul detective with an Audrey Hepburn alter ego, says he's been heavily influenced by Agatha Christie and Patricia Highsmith. Penguin published a U.S. edition of his book "The Kiss Murder" in 2008, and has another translation, "The Wig Murders," under contract for 2011.

Many cultures have crime writing traditions that stretch back centuries. Early examples of Chinese crime writing date to the 18th century; Japanese writers were telling crime stories as early as the 1600s. By the 1920s and 1930s, commonly referred to as the Golden Age of detective fiction, British and American crime writers came to define the genre.

More recently, crime writers around the globe have developed their own brands of crime fiction, often blending classic suspense story telling techniques with regional themes and literary styles. In Italy, where there's been an explosion of crime fiction lately, Albanian, Serbian and Asian immigrants have started to replace mafia dons as the favorite fictional crime lords. South African crime fiction tends to be noir-tinged and ultraviolent, with nods to the lingering effects of apartheid. Most Swedish crime writing turns on political and social issues (the original Swedish title of Mr. Larsson's "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" was "Men Who Hate Women"). Latin American crime novels often center on drug trafficking and police corruption; "narco-novels" about drug lords are booming in Mexico.

Some American crime writers are now taking cues from abroad. Best-selling author Michael Connelly says that he's started bringing politics and economic issues into his novels after reading a lot of South African and European crime fiction. He's now working on a novel that touches on the mortgage crisis: an angry homeowner murders the banker who forecloses on her home. "Writers and readers in other countries tend to look at crime novels as social novels," he says.

Much of the crime fiction being imported blurs the line between genre and literary fiction. In Europe, where crime novels take top literary prizes, suspense writing is regarded as a serious literary endeavor rather than a form of mass entertainment. In Japan, top mystery writers Shuichi Yoshida and Keigo Higashino have won multiple literary awards.

Minotaur is betting big on Mr. Higashino with a first print run of 75,000 copies for his novel "The Devotion of Suspect X," which comes out in the U.S. next February.

Keith Kahla, executive editor of St. Martin's Press, described the author as the Japanese equivalent of James Patterson or Stephen King. "He's huge, and he's utterly unknown here," says Mr. Kahla, who had never heard of Mr. Higashino before he was approached by the author's agent. Just one of Mr. Higashino's books, "Naoko," had been previously translated into English and released by a small American literary press in 2004.

Crime Wave

"The Devotion of Suspect X" is part of Mr. Higashino's popular "Galileo" series about a university physics professor with an uncanny ability to crack tough murder cases. The five books in the series have sold more than 3.2 million copies in Japan; more than a dozen of Mr. Higashino's books have been adapted into films and TV dramas in Japan. "Suspect X" starts with a murder in a Tokyo apartment complex. A single mother strangles her ex-husband, and her neighbor, a math teacher, helps cover up the crime. A cat-and-mouse game unfolds as the math genius tries to elude the detectives and his old university rival, the physics professor.

The flat, unadorned prose and police-procedural elements of "The Devotion of Suspect X" will likely appeal to fans of American crime fiction, but much about the novel remains particular to Japan, down to the detectives' exceedingly polite interrogation techniques and the murder weapon (the victim is strangled with an electrical cord attached to a kotatsu, a low, heated table common in Japanese households).

"It has a very clean, very primal, and hence very universal setup," Mr. Kahla says of the book's crossover potential.

Pantheon Books has also been snapping up Japanese crime fiction: Pantheon will release Mr. Yoshida's 2007 novel "Villain," a murder-and-manhunt tale set on the coast, this August. In Japan, Mr. Yoshida, 41, has published 10 books—four have been made into films and television dramas—and won several major literary awards for his novels, which often feature rootless, lonely characters in their 20s. He has been published elsewhere in Asia and in France but never translated into English before. "Villain" opens with the arrest of a young construction worker for the murder of an insurance saleswoman. The investigation turns up other suspects, and the moody narrative unfolds from multiple characters' perspectives. Pantheon also bought Mr. Yoshida's 2002 novel "Parade," featuring five young Tokyo roommates whose neighborhood is hit by a string of gruesome murders targeting women, which is scheduled for publication in 2012.

The flood of imported crime fiction is striking given American publishers' longstanding resistance to works in translation. Newly translated books still make up just 3% of titles released in the U.S., according to Bowker, a company that tracks the publishing industry, and translated fiction and poetry make up less than 1%. In many European countries, translated books account for 25% to 40% of titles.

Foreign Affairs

A recent string of surprise best sellers has eroded the notion that Americans prefer home-grown authors. A 2008 translation of the French literary novel "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" from Europa Editions, an independent press dedicated to European fiction in translation, sold more than 500,000 copies here; Stieg Larsson's trilogy has sold more than six million copies in the U.S.

As focus shifts toward international hits, American editors who used to rely on international book fairs and pitches from literary agents have gotten more proactive. Some are asking translators to suss out rising literary talents and provide plot synopses for books that are creeping up best-seller lists overseas. Ms. Urban, who represents Japanese author and international literary star Haruki Murakami, learned about Mr. Yoshida's crime novels from Philip Gabriel, Mr. Murakami's American translator.

Carol Janeway, a senior editor and director of international rights at Knopf, tracks rising European literary stars by keeping an eye on Germany, which tends to lead the way in translating literature from other countries. Ms. Janeway, who also translates German novels, discovered Swedish novelists such as Hakan Nesser and Arne Dahl by reading German editions. This February, Pantheon will publish the first novel in Mr. Dahl's popular crime series, which has sold more than two million copies in Europe.

Excerpts

• 'Villain'
• 'Hypothermia'
• 'Treachery in the Yard'
• 'The Past is a Foreign Country'
• 'Kismet'

Some small presses have also found that international crime can be profitable. Revenue at Bitter Lemon Press, an international publisher that focuses on translated crime fiction, has grown roughly 12% a year since the imprint was created five years ago, says co-founder François von Hurter, who declined to provide overall sales figures. The press's top-selling authors include Italian crime writer Gianrico Carofiglio and Leonardo Padura from Cuba.

In October, New York-based independent press Melville House will launch an imprint devoted to international crime fiction, featuring mostly works in translation. Fall titles include "Cut Throat Dog," a psychological thriller about an ex-Mossad agent by Israeli novelist Joshua Sobol, and "Kismet," a 2007 novel by German writer Jakob Arjouni, which centers on an ethnically Turkish private investigator.

Translated fiction is still a hard sell, and many U.S. publishers remain wary. Foreign rights rarely exceed four or five figures, but translating a book can add tens of thousands to production costs. Marketing a book by an unknown author poses challenges, particularly if the writer doesn't speak English.

Publishers seem increasingly willing to gamble, however, especially on Nordic noir. The Stockholm-based Salomonsson Agency, which represents 36 Scandinavian writers, has sold nearly 40 books to U.S. publishers in the last three years, says co-founder Niclas Salomonsson. Twenty-one went to Alfred A. Knopf, which publishes Mr. Larsson and recently signed Jo Nesbø, who was formerly with HarperCollins. This spring, Simon & Schuster's Atria Books paid more than $500,000 for rights to four novels by Swedish crime queen Liza Marklund, whose books have sold 12 million copies world-wide.

Publishers and agents going after the next big thing say the U.S. market for Nordic noir may have reached a saturation point, and are looking farther afield. Kent Wolf of Global Literary Management, an agency that focuses on international fiction, says he's focusing on suspense novels from Asia. Mr. Wolf represents five writers from Asia, including South Korean novelist Young-ha Kim, whose spy thriller "Your Republic Is Calling You," will be published this September by Mariner Books. The novel, a "24"-like thriller, unfolds in a single day and features a North Korean spy who is activated after spending 21 years undercover in South Korea.

The explosion of crime fiction overseas could come at a price for U.S. publishers. Danny Baror, president of Baror International, which sells foreign rights for more than 100 American authors, says his sales have dropped by 25% in Germany and 15% in France and Italy in recent years because publishers there are focused on local writers. His worst market is Scandinavia, where sales have dropped by 90% since 2000: local stars like Mr. Dahl and Ms. Marklund now dominate there.

"We used to sell our entire catalogue in Sweden," Mr. Baror says. "These days, they only buy Robert Ludlum."

Write to Alexandra Alter at alexandra.alter@wsj.com

Bret Easton Ellis Interview

Bret Easton Ellis

from goodreads.com

June, 2010

The nihilistic, drugged-out characters of Less Than Zero pushed teen angst to a whole new level of depravity. Published before Bret Easton Ellis was even out of college, the book (and later its loosely adapted film) was an instant success. He has since continued to populate his bleak literary landscape with dissatisfied and often violent characters in The Rules of Attraction and American Psycho, and has playfully examined his own morals in a mock-autobiographical horror novel, Lunar Park. Now, 25 years after Less Than Zero, Ellis returns to Los Angeles to pick up the story in Imperial Bedrooms, where he imagines what his malcontent teens would be like in middle age. He chatted with Goodreads about why there's a piece of himself in every one of his characters.

Goodreads: Given the '80s zeitgeist-touching status of Less Than Zero, Imperial Bedrooms is heavily anticipated by both fans of your work and detractors of sequels. Are you feeling more pressure than usual with this book release?

Bret Easton Ellis: Feeling pressure suggests that the person I'm writing the book for is an audience. I'm actually obsessed with the material, and I'm writing the book for myself. I emotionally become involved in an idea. It took me three years to write the shortest book of my career because I was interested in the story. Now it's going out into the world. It is what it is, and what will happen, will happen. I do think, however, that some readers will definitely feel betrayed because Less Than Zero, as an artifact, is beloved in a way. People have a lot of strong associations with it. It is one of the first novels they read, or it is one of the first novels they read as a teenager. I think a lot of people are expecting Less Than Zero 2: The Party Continues. And that's just not what I felt it would be. I hate to think of Imperial Bedrooms as a sequel. I wasn't thinking "sequel" as I wrote it. I was really just thinking about Clay and where he'd be if he came back to L.A.

GR: What inspired you to return to Clay, Blair, Julian, and Rip 25 years later?

BEE: When I was rereading all of my books while outlining Lunar Park, I reread Less Than Zero for the first time in what must have been 17 or 18 years. I became obsessed with this idea: "Where is Clay now?" I had to find out where he was—emotionally. And that's shaded a little bit by where you are in your life, too. If you're super-happy, then maybe Imperial Bedrooms would have been a different book. I don't know, but obviously it was a bit of a dark period, and I think that's reflected in Imperial Bedrooms.

GR: Heralded by some as "the voice of a generation" and compared to The Catcher in the Rye, Less Than Zero brought you success before you even graduated college. That level of praise could warp or at least paralyze a young writer, but you went on to write six more books. How do you reflect on that experience now as an adult?

BEE: I'd always been writing. Ever since I was a kid I was writing. I think part of what saved me those first couple of years when the book came out is that I was still in college. I had classes to go to, I had papers to do, I wasn't being feted in clubs in Manhattan, and I wasn't doing the whole media tour. So I escaped. The only sense I would get would be when a reporter would come up to Bennington to interview me in my dorm room, or I would read something in a magazine.

Also, I was already well into The Rules of Attraction when Less Than Zero was published. That book was outlined and was being written. I didn't feel paralyzed because I wanted to write The Rules of Attraction. I was excited by it, and I was going to finish it, but I wasn't awaiting a reception for it. I don't look at writing a novel as something like that. A novel is something I can't help but write because I'm feeling something at that moment. It is hard for me to find an idea for a novel that I want to spend three years with, that I think will be fun, that I think will be a good novel. And that's why I have so few books in my list of published works.

GR: Clay returns to L.A., the place that so disillusioned him as a teenager, in Imperial Bedrooms. How has middle age changed Clay?

BEE: It seems that he's become a little unhappier. More entitled. He's become successful. He's a bit of a raging narcissist because he thinks everything revolves around him. He wants what he wants. His appetites are much greater than they were in the first book. And all of this has to do with him moving into middle age. Perhaps the seeds of this persona were sown when he was a younger man. When I was thinking about him, this character took shape. Not for pragmatic reasons, but emotionally this felt right to me.

GR: How do you tap into Clay's narcissistic voice?

BEE: When I'm outlining the book, I take a lot of notes on what the narrator is going to sound like. This happens with every novel I've written so far because there's been a narrator. They dictate where the story goes and how the book will be written stylistically. I made notes about Clay: "OK, he's in his early 40s, he's a successful screenwriter, he's coming back to L.A. I want the novel to be about that central Hollywood narrative, which is basically exploitation." And then I realized that if he's a screenwriter, it's probably going to be like a movie. It will be written in very sparse language, and it will read like a movie, and because he's a narcissist he'll be the star of this movie. And then everything started falling into place. Once I figure these things out, Clay starts telling [the story]. I'm a technician, of course, but emotionally he starts telling it. I followed his cues. That's the truth for every book I've written. It's the way I work.

GR: Would you say you're drawn toward unreliable narrators?

BEE: I am. Clay leaves a lot out, but I don't know if it's that he leaves so much out as that there are a lot of things he's doesn't want to know. Also, if something doesn't revolve around him. Scene after scene in Imperial Bedrooms, people tell him, "This isn't about you," and he thinks it is all the time. That leads to him not answering certain questions that could save people. He only cares about himself. Once you understand that you have a narrator like this, then a lot of things are automatically answered for me. It's not hard to tap into it. It's harder to tap into when I'm outlining the character and I'm asking questions of myself. "Would he describe it that way? Would he use this kind of language? Would he notice that detail? Would he do this with her? Would he ask that question? No, he would not ask that question. OK, cut that." Once you have the template down for who Clay is, then the writing starts flowing.

GR: In an early review, Goodreads member Kristin says of Imperial Bedrooms: "Again, a disturbing, painful look at the lengths some people will go to get what they want and once again, indicative of the times." Do you agree? If so, how do you think Imperial Bedrooms is indicative of today's culture, just as Less Than Zero encapsulated the excesses of the 1980s?

BEE: If you have a novel that takes place today, you're going to do it anyway. It's not something I'm overly conscious of. I was not overly conscious of writing a novel about the '80s in Less Than Zero. It happened to take place during the '80s, and then because of that everyone now writes about it as an indictment of the 1980s. Well, guys, that wasn't my plan. There were other things on my mind I wanted to do with that book—stylistically, and there were autobiographical elements, etc., etc.

But look, we're in a self-obsessed world now. Everyone has their own Web site. Everyone is pushing themselves out there, displaying themselves. We live in a pretty exhibitionistic culture. People are able to get things that they want faster and faster. I'm not judging this at all. I'm not painting it pink or black. It's just how it is. I do tend to think this can build the ego up; it can build your narcissism up. But I think any book that I would be working on now would probably tap into that. Not specifically just Imperial Bedrooms. It is part of the wallpaper that surrounds us now.

GR: Despite the characters in common, Imperial Bedrooms is a big departure in style from Less Than Zero. You are known for playing with genre in some of your books. What prompted you to pick noir?

BEE: I had been reading a lot of Raymond Chandler. I wanted to merge this idea of where Clay was with my take on a Raymond Chandler novel. And that's just something that I have been interested in for the last 15 or 20 years. I make attempts at genre books, whether it was a Robert Ludlum book with Glamorama or whether it was a Stephen King book with Lunar Park. Raymond Chandler is something I wanted to fool around with. He's the best and most universal [among crime writers]. His books are more like poems than they are crime novels. The mysteries are sometimes solved, but they're sometimes not. The mystery is beside the point. I thought a lot about The Road, the Cormac McCarthy book. I thought of Philip Marlowe [one of Chandler's well-known detective characters] wandering through this morally blasted landscape, where people are doing the most outrageous things, and he's just trying to keep it together. Sometimes he really acts like a detective, and other times he's more interested in the girl, or in what's right, rather than figuring out "Mrs. Cocker did it in the library." There's something more metaphysical, more universal and grander about Chandler's vision. Even though the trappings are of a crime novel, the experience of it is very different than your average crime book. Almost existentialist. The journey is what matters, not where you end up.

GR: Goodreads member Adam Scovell asks, "What character in any of your books best represents you or your worldview?"

BEE: That's a dangerous question. I have something in common with all of my narrators, to one degree or another. I've said this before: What is the point in writing a memoir? I can look at my published novels, and each one can tell you exactly where I was at that point in my life, what I was fantasizing about, what I was thinking about, how I was doing emotionally. At different parts of my life, yes, I was feeling like the kids in The Rules of Attraction. I was feeling like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, or Victor Ward in Glamorama, and then certainly the Bret Ellis character in Lunar Park. If someone held a gun up to my head and I had to say which character best describes my worldview, it would probably be Bret Ellis.

But certainly while I was working on American Psycho, I identified with Patrick Bateman. Not in terms of myself as a murderous clotheshorse, but his loneliness and alienation were certainly [what] I was feeling at that time. I was living a bit of yuppie nightmare when I was in my mid-twenties in Manhattan. That's certainly affected the book. Also, the conformist attitude that was so big in the moment. Which actually still is big: You've got to wear the right suit, you've got to have the right apartment, you've got to have the right body in order to get the right girl. The numbing lists of things you were supposed to have as an American to make you happy, which ultimately, of course, don't. Those aren't the things that make you happy. Which can lead someone to fantasize the most outrageous things in order to feel something. In a way, Patrick Bateman may commit those crimes in order to feel something, or he may have fantasized them in order to feel something. The same way that I think I wrote American Psycho in order to feel something during those years when I was extremely adrift, not feeling connected with the culture and kind of repulsed by what was going on in America at the time. So the answer really is all of them.

GR: Goodreads member Natalie says, "I've had my feminist credentials called into question for defending American Psycho as vehemently as I have. I maintain, among other things, that hypermasculine culture is being satirized. Is this something with which you'd agree?"

BEE: Totally. Of course. I satirize male behavior in everything. Victor Ward is a total girl in Glamorama. All his metrosexual obsessions and his vanity are totally silly. Certainly, the Bret Easton Ellis of Lunar Park is no hero. His wife is a lot saner than he is. If anything, all of my books have added up to a very critical portrait of what it means to be male and American in our society. I'm not really thinking of hating women or being a misogynist. Though, if I was, so what? Would that lessen the appeal of the book? I guess for a certain type of reader, that would. Do I not like certain poets or writers from the '30s because they were anti-Semitic? How does that come into play when you're evaluating art? If you look at the artist or the musician or the painter or the playwright, God only knows how many things you might find about them that you might personally disagree with. So what? You're not evaluating the artist. You're evaluating what they've created. Also, you bring a lot of stuff to the table when you read a novel. Novels mean different things to different people. Half the people who read Less Than Zero took it to be a very seductive, glamorous look at L.A. I've met people in L.A., young people, who say, "Oh man, you wrote Less Than Zero? Yeah, that book made me want to move to L.A." Basically, Natalie is right. The book is that, definitely to a degree. But even if it was written by a misogynist, what does that mean? Does that change the meaning of the book? I don't know. I'm not sure it matters.

GR: Goodreads member Bradley asks, "If you had to assign a musical genre to your writing style, what would it be and why? Do you listen to music while you draft or edit?"

BEE: I don't listen to music anymore [when writing]. I never really did. I think I like to say that I was listening to a lot of music when I was writing Less Than Zero, but you know what, in order to really write, you need quiet. You need to be able to concentrate, and you don't need Tom Petty blasting while you're trying to figure out if a sentence works or not. There is a lot of music in the books. I know that my publisher wanted me to put on iTunes a playlist from every novel, which are available now. I was very surprised when I was going through the books how much music does play a part in them.

As for what kind of music, that's for [the reader] to figure out. For some people, I'm probably hardcore rock or punk. For other people who don't like me, I'm probably elevator music. I'm probably adult contemporary! I love adult contemporary. Rob Thomas? Bring it on!

GR: Describe a typical day spent writing. Do you have any unusual writing habits?

BEE: I have no unusual writing habits, except I like to write in a clean environment. I like to make my bed. I like to make sure the kitchen is clean. I like everything organized. I don't like any clutter. I don't like to have a lot of obligations hanging over my head. I don't like to be worried about things. This comes from the old quote from Flaubert: "In order to write like a revolutionary, you need to live like a bourgeois." Which basically means in order to fully concentrate on the novel you're working on, you need to have all your debts settled more or less. To create under stress, it'll get the job done faster, but it doesn't mean it'll get it done better. I try to keep office hours. I work best during the day.

I write better when I'm happy. I know that sounds strange. Not happy, but where I don't have major drama going on. In fact, I've seen it before in my career, where there was major drama going on I wasn't working so well. Part of the reason Glamorama took so long to finish is that there was a lot of drama going on while I was writing that book. That stopped me from completing that book in the amount of time that I wanted to. I would even say the same holds true for Imperial Bedrooms. While I was working on Imperial Bedrooms they were making the movie version of The Informers, which I'd written and I was producing, and it turned out to be a very difficult, stressful movie to make for a number of reasons. I think that did slow down the writing of Imperial Bedrooms a little. So I need things to be fairly calm in order to move ahead.

GR: What authors, books, or ideas have influenced you?

BEE: Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion, Gustave Flaubert. You really don't need a lot, actually. You only need one or two when you're young to really do the job. But it changes as you get older. Certainly when I was in my twenties, I started reading a lot of Don DeLillo, and he affected the way I was writing. Later on, Philip Roth. Stephen King, because I wanted to write Lunar Park. And now, Raymond Chandler. That's pretty representative.

GR: Do you have any favorite books?

BEE: Lolita, Sentimental Education by Flaubert, The Great Gatsby, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Middlemarch. A lot of Philip Roth, a lot of Don DeLillo. Play It As It Lays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and The White Album by Joan Didion.

GR: What are you reading now?

BEE: I'm reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, which I had picked up when it first came out and I just didn't get it. It wasn't speaking to me. But over the years enough people have told me that it's worth a second shot, and they were right. I liked Lorrie Moore's book, A Gate at the Stairs, a lot. And I liked Jhumpa Lahiri's last collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth, very much. And I'm a huge fan of Roberto Bolaño. It took me a year to read, but I really loved 2666.

GR: What's next?

BEE: I'm actually working on various scripts and a TV idea. I have not really planned a novel yet. I have a couple of very vague ideas, but nothing has come together. I've been thinking a lot about Sean Bateman, who is Patrick Bateman's younger brother and the main character in The Rules of Attraction. But he's not haunting me in the way that Clay did. The answer is, I don't know. I really don't have anything that I'm working on now in terms of a novel.

GR: Finally, the movie question: Is it true that you'd like to see the original Less Than Zero cast return for a movie adaptation of Imperial Bedrooms?

BEE: Of course, I'd like the cast back, but there's been no movement on that as a movie. That's really in the very early stages, if it will happen at all. I think it would be a wonderful idea. I just don't know how it would happen. They don't make movies like Imperial Bedrooms for wide release anymore. They used to. If made today, Less Than Zero would be an art house movie, not a big 20th Century Fox film. The times are very different now, and I don't know if Imperial Bedrooms really fits into the movie culture today. But who knows? Stranger things have happened.

1984: Orwell vs. Bowie

After David Bowie released his Pin Ups album in 1973, he began working on material for a theatrical production based on George Orwell’s 1984. The author’s estate denied him the rights to produce the project, but not before Bowie had written a few tracks that ended up on side two of 1974’s Diamond Dogs. If “Big Brother” is any indication of what could have been, it’s a shame he never got around to finishing the musical.

The song conveys Winston Smith’s love for The Party, which occurs in the final pages of the novel and only after great amounts of torture and brainwashing. For most of the book, Smith found solace in a reality based on his own senses and memory, even if it was in disagreement with what The Party said. Though the entire world might be told to believe that 2 + 2 = 5, he thought he could remain sane by knowing that 2 + 2 = 4. Convincing him that, by definition, a ‘minority of one’ was an example of insanity was part of his ‘healing’ process.

Bowie does a great job of representing this in “Big Brother” by contradictions in lyrical and musical structure. The first verse’s lyrics border on nonsensical. The glass asylum may refer to one of the ministry buildings, but capers, steel, pulsars, and whirlpools seem unrelated to the novel. However, the message is clear: the narrator wants nothing more than to be told what to think. This is then driven home by a chorus that is easy to imagine being sung by a worshiping mob.

Don’t talk of dust and roses
Or should we powder our noses?
Don’t live for last year’s capers
Give me steel, give me steel, give me pulsars unreal

We’ll build a glass asylum
With just a hint of mayhem
He’ll build a better whirlpool
We’ll be living from sin,
then we can really begin

Please savior, savior, show us
Hear me, I’m graphically yours

Someone to claim us, someone to follow
Someone to shame us, some brave Apollo
Someone to fool us, someone like you
We want you Big Brother, Big Brother

The second verse stands out in the song for its carnival-like atmosphere, a jarring change from the musical expectations previously established. It is here that Bowie sticks in the line, “I’d take an overdose if I knew what’s going down,” a sentiment that echoes Smith’s willingness, before his brainwashing was complete, to commit suicide for The Brotherhood (an alleged underground organization acting against The Party). Bowie mimics the anxiety of conversion by pairing Smith’s original beliefs with the most unusual musical passage of the song. By releasing the tension by jumping back into the chorus, we are left feeling relieved to find ourselves once again singing in praise of Big Brother.

David Bowie on 1987's Glass Spider Tour

Bowie also uses a device in this performance to warn us that we aren’t too far off from a similar fate. During the ending instrumental section we hear snippets of advertisements. Low in the mix, they sound like the constant, subdued voices you might expect to hear through a telescreen. Only these not-so-subliminal messages aren’t fictional propaganda, but phrases we hear every day on television and radio like “operators are standing by,” “we’ll pass the savings on to you,” and “available on compact disc.” Orwell refers to the age of the capitalists as a thing of the past but, in 1987, capitalism was thriving, helped, at least in part, by advertising campaigns that relied on ubiquity.

Obviously, it’s hard to cram a whole novel’s worth of material into a four-minute song and there are many themes presented in Orwell’s 1984 that are not referred to in “Big Brother.” However, by using a few musical and lyrical tricks, Bowie is able to touch on some that run through the entire book.

from wolfgangsvault.com

The Stranger: Camus vs. The Cure

Last week I mentioned the idea of starting a rock and roll book club to discuss songs based on literature. The inspiration came after finishing The Stranger on the subway one morning; my mind was subsequently a bit distracted and so I tried to transition into a day of work by listening to The Cure’s “Killing an Arab.”

The gimmick worked, but not how I expected it would. Instead of a gradated transition back into normalcy, the song snapped me out of my absurdist reverie all at once. The track’s mood was so incongruent with the mood the book left me in, I couldn’t tell the two were related at all.

Robert Smith likes to read the book while performing.

Personally, I react to both literature and music in a similar manner, as more of a visceral, emotional response than an intellectual reaction. I hardly ever digest lyrics on a first listen and, even for songs I know by heart, I rely on the music to tell me how the singer’s feeling. So when Aretha Franklin sings “Eleanor Rigby” I forget to feel somber, and when Har Mar Superstar does a funky remix of “Alone Again (Naturally)” I feel like I’m having the time of my life amid a throng of dancers.

My primary response to The Stranger was aloofness, but not as a result of having different values than society. It was more a detachment from my thoughts. The cadence of the short, Hemingway-esque sentences made me realize how loopy, inefficient and paralyzing thinking usually is. If this were a Buddhist text, there would have been some encouragement to laugh at the silliness of thought, but Camus provides no such pat on the back. The sun and the heat get to Meursault on that beach and he, in turn, left me feeling stuck in the doldrums, waiting for a breeze to come along and dislodge me.

Do NOT listen to what the sun tells you do.

On the other hand, The Cure’s song got me pumped up. As soon as that bass riff reaches the bottom of its descent and the rest of the band comes in, I felt like running. It makes sense within the context of a rock concert, but it doesn’t fit well with the book. There are three figures in the song: the bass riff that opens and closes the track, the 8-beat drone with some movement along with the crash cymbals on the 7 and the 8, and the few occasional measures where the chord and drum beat change. It’s actually a good formula for mimicking Meursault’s repetitive narrative style. The lyrics, which are choppy and, for the most part, stick to objective observations, also match well with the book’s tone. But I never got an adrenaline rush reading the book, not even when Meursault pulls the trigger or attacks the champlain in his prison cell…and adrenaline is one thing The Cure lay on pretty thick.

For me, a slower and more electronic interpretation of this tune would bring it closer to what I get from Camus. That said, I’m grateful The Cure were there that morning to snap me out of existential indifference.

What do you think?

“Killing an Arab” lyrics:

Standing on the beach
With a gun in my hand
Staring at the sea
Staring at the sand
Staring down the barrel
At the Arab on the ground
I can see his open mouth
But I hear no sound

Chorus:
I’m alive
I’m dead
I’m the stranger
Killing an Arab

I can turn
And walk away
Or I can fire the gun
Staring at the sky
Staring at the sun
Whichever I choose
It amounts to the same
Absolutely nothing

Chorus

I feel the steel butt jump
Smooth in my hand
Staring at the sea
Staring at the sand
Staring at myself
Reflected in the eyes
Of the dead man on the beach
The dead man on the beach

Chorus

from Wolfgangsvault.com

Edgar Watson Howe

E. W. Howe

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Edgar Watson Howe (May 3, 1853 - October 3, 1937), sometimes referred to as E. W. Howe, was an American novelist and newspaper and magazine editor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was perhaps best known for his magazine, E.W. Howe's Monthly. Howe was well traveled and known for his sharp wit in his editorials.

Howe is known to have begun his journalistic career as far back as March 22, 1873, when as a 19-year-old he came to Golden, Colorado from Platte City, Nebraska and partnered with William F. Dorsey to acquire the Golden Eagle newspaper. Renaming it the Golden Globe, it was the second main newspaper of Golden and served a Republican readership and political bent. Howe, who took over complete ownership by the end of the year, quickly gained a sharp-witted editorial reputation in the community that would preview his national fame. Within a couple of years Howe sold the Globe to his brother A.J. Howe and partner William Grover Smith, and moved to Falls City, Nebraska in 1875, where he established a new Globe newspaper, affectionately called the "Little Globe". In 1875 he merged this with the Nemaha Valley Journal and it became the Globe-Journal. In 1877 Howe established and edited the Atchison, Kansas, newspaper Globe, which he continued for twenty-five years, retiring in 1911. Having been raised Methodist, he described himself as identifying with Methodism but is essentially a cultural Christian, according to his writing. Howe's most famous novel is Story of a Country Town. A 1919 edition of his Ventures in Common Sense featured a foreword by celebrated American writer (and cynic) H.L. Mencken.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

EDGAR W. HOWE

from History of Kansas Newspapers (1916)

FROM "Who 's Who in America": Edgar Watson Howe; born, Treaty, Ind., May 3, 1852; common-school education; been in printing office since ten years old; publisher Golden (Colo.) Globe at 19; started Atchison (Kan.) Globe, 1876; turned business over to sons, 1912; since in retirement, and editor E. W. Howe's Monthly. Author: "The Story of a Country Town," "The Mystery of the Locks," "The Moonlight Boy," "A Man Story," "Daily Notes of a Trip Around the World," "The Trip to the West Indies," "Travel Letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa," "Country Town Sayings," "Pagan Psalms," "The Hundred Stories of a Country Town." Address: Atchison, Kan.

William Allen White: E. W. Howe is the most remarkable man Kansas or the Middle West has produced. Moreover, he has written the greatest novel ever written in or about Kansas or the Middle West. His "Story of a Country Town" is one of the ten best novels written in America.

American Magazine, August, 1915: E. W. Howe, famous for his wisdom and ability to write, is one of America's real possessions.

Dr. Frank Crane, in New York Globe: E. W. Howe is a national-institution. On earth, in the heavens above, or in the waters beneath the earth, there is nothing like his Monthly; it is a broad stream of horse sense; he is giving to the world the most perfect example of self-expression with which I am familiar.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: There is merit enough in E. W. Howe's Monthly to give it a national reading. Labouchere's Truth was never better.

W. D. Howells: E. W. Howe's "Story of a Country Town" is a very remarkable piece of realism, and constitutes a part of the only literary movement of our time that seems to have vitality in it.

Edward Bok: E. W. Howe's "Daily Notes of a Trip Around the World" is a lesson in travel writing that is worth while. I can not imagine a person who should not read this book.

S. S. McClure: I have read E. W. Howe's travel letters with tremendous interest. I do not know that I have ever read any book of travel equally well done.

New York Sun: E, W. Howe's travel book has the humor of Mark Twain.

Taking a Walk Through J. D. Salinger’s New York

Taking a Walk Through J. D. Salinger’s New York

By JAMES BARRON

Edward Keating/The New York Times Many places Holden Caulfield visited survive, at least in name, among them the Seton Hotel on East 40th Street.

Holden’s New York

• Interactive Map »

A reading tour of Holden Caulfield’s experiences “The Catcher in the Rye.”

Hey, listen. You know those ducks in that lagoon right near Central Park South? That little lake? By any chance, do you happen to know where they go, the ducks, when it gets all frozen over?

There it is: the Holden Caulfield question. Sara Cedar Miller gets it all the time.

“Everybody’s read that book,” said Ms. Miller, the historian for the Central Park Conservancy. It went without saying that the book in question — the book with the question, on Page 60 — was “The Catcher in the Rye.”

And the answer, according to Ms. Miller, is that the ducks never go anywhere.

“I have no idea what J. D. Salinger was thinking,” said Ms. Miller, who remembered reading “The Catcher in the Rye” as a high school student in Sharon, Mass. “I’ve worked for the park for 26 years, and I’ve always seen ducks.” She saw them in the subfreezing cold on Thursday morning: “I photographed them sitting on the ice.”

Those ducks are perhaps the most memorable New York image in a slim little book that is full of them.

Before he went into seclusion in New Hampshire, Mr. Salinger, who died on Wednesday at 91, had a deep relationship with the city, having moved from Harlem to the Upper West Side to Park Avenue as a youngster and later to East 57th Street. As our colleague Clyde Haberman noted last year, the city itself was a character in “Catcher.”

So “Catcher” could almost serve as a guide to the city of a certain time, a city that has been lost forever, but still somehow exists: dark, enigmatic, grown up.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a cross section of New York, but it’s a cross section of what a kid like that who grew up in New York would be interested in doing,” said Peter G. Beidler, the author of “A Reader’s Companion to J. D. Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’” (Coffeetown Press, 2008) and a retired professor at Lehigh University. “A 40-year-old man walking around New York would see different things. But he describes the things a 16-year-old would notice.”

Salinger started with Pennsylvania Station — 58 pages after promising not to tell “where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like,” Holden Caulfield alights there and heads for a phone booth. A 16-year-old taking the train to New York nowadays would arrive in a different, less inspired place: Holden was in McKim, Mead & White’s extraordinary station, the one whose destruction in the 1960s kindled the historic preservation movement.

“One entered the city like a god,” the architecture historian Vincent Scully said. The dingy, workaday one that replaced it is no match: “One scuttles in now like a rat.”

And what modern 16-year-old would need a phone booth? Even his parents have cellphones.

Mr. Beidler made a map to go with his book that traces Holden’s perambulations around Manhattan, even to nonexistent places like the Edmont Hotel, where Holden has an awkward encounter with Sunny the hooker. Mr. Beidler places the Edmont in the West 50s, between Fifth Avenue and what is now officially known as the Avenue of the Avenues d’oh! Americas. In Holden’s day, it was just Sixth Avenue.

“Because it is in this hotel that Holden sees ‘perverts’ and later encounters a pimp and a prostitute,” Mr. Beidler wrote, “it is likely that Salinger did not want to use the name of a real hotel.” But he gave a clue: He said it was “41 gorgeous blocks” from Ernie’s nightclub in Greenwich Village. Ernie’s, too, was a made-up place.

“You kind of triangulate a little bit,” Mr. Beidler said. “He goes so many blocks away, goes here, goes there. I was always able to figure out more or less where he was.”

Holden mentions the McBurney School, a private school that Salinger had attended. After Salinger came students like the actor Henry Winkler, the television journalist Ted Koppel and the financier Bruce Wasserstein. But McBurney closed in the 1980s.

“The good thing about New York is, as much as it changes, there are so many things that never change,” said Will Hochman, a professor at Southern Connecticut State University and an author of the forthcoming “A Critical Companion to J.D. Salinger.” “I had a student who read ‘Catcher in the Rye’ and told me she felt like she lived in Grand Central Terminal. I could relate that to Holden’s feelings of being lost.”

And there is a timelessness to the problems of navigating the confusing place that New York can be, with its strange streets and its stranger rhythms and rituals. “At one point Holden is worried he’s going to fall because he’s stepping off a curb,” Mr. Hochman said. “I think Salinger intended that to convey the smallness. You’re aware of how many great people are there, how many great things are there. At Ernie’s, where he’s recognized by one of his brother’s old girlfriend, he gets some status because he’s recognized but he feels belittled. In some ways New York overwhelms him.”

At another point, Holden waits near the clock at the Biltmore for his date. The Biltmore was turned into an office building more than 15 years ago, the couches where he sat, girl-watching, gone. “Girls with their legs crossed, girls with their legs not crossed, girls with terrific legs, girls with lousy legs, girls that looked like swell girls …” Salinger wrote. “It was nice sightseeing.”

“Grand Central Terminal stands, though coin-operated lockers that Holden uses were removed long ago for security reasons,” Clyde Haberman wrote last year. “Radio City Music Hall goes on, in its fashion. For sure, so do the book’s two museums that abut Central Park — ‘the one where the pictures are’ and ‘the one where the Indians are.’ ”

As for the pond where the ducks are, long after “The Catcher In the Rye” had become the kind of forced reading in school that ruined it for so many teen-agers, there was one person who could have told Salinger that the ducks never really left.

That person was was Adrian Benepe, a longtime Parks Department official who is now the commissioner. Salinger, Mr. Benepe said, “was our immediate next-door neighbor in Cornish, N.H., where I spent part of my childhood.”

“I would have told him that the ducks don’t go anywhere in winter—they mainly stay right here and head for the Reservoir, where recently counted them.”

And the Hotel Seton, where Holden goes for a drink?

“We get high school kids coming in and asking and they want to know if it’s the Seton Hotel,” said Leslee Heskiaoff, the owner of the hotel by that name on East 40th Street. “It isn’t. We have no bar.”

Regrets

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Poem by Alex Chalkidis

Comic by Kafka's Koffee