Detectives Beyond Borders' Peter Rozovsky and "Crime During Wartime"

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: I'm delighted to introduce Detectives Beyond Borders' Peter Rozovsky, writing about "Crime During Wartime," a panel he moderated at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany.

Enjoy!

PETER ROZOVSKY: I changed the name of a Bouchercon panel because of Susan Elia MacNeal. The panel, at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, spotlighted crime fiction set during World War II and its aftermath conflicts, and I had called it “World War II and Sons.”

“What about daughters?” Susan asked, and I explained that the “sons” in this case were not people, but rather the Cold War and the Korean War, personified as male.  Susan accepted my explanation with good grace. But she had got me thinking about the books our panel would discuss, and I realized these were at least as much about people as they were about fighting. 

When I welcomed the audience, I told them the panel was now called “World War II and Its Offspring” because the stories that Susan told, and those of her fellow panelist/authors James R. Benn, J. Robert Janes, John Lawton, and Martin Limón, were more about persons than about personification, and those persons were, of course, women as well as men.  

Sure, Benn’s Billy Boyle is an aide to Gen. Eisenhower, but he’s also a brash kid from South Boston thrust into a world far bigger than anything he had encountered before, and the passages where he realizes this are some of the most affecting in Benn's books. (MacNeal's Maggie Hope, though brilliant, college-educated, and heiress to an English home, is, like Billy, something of a fish out of water, and a more interesting character for it.)

I told the audience in my (brief) introduction that war was like a magnifying glass, multiplying the real or imagined significance of any action, including “ordinary’ murder, arson, and embezzlement. But it’s really more like a raindrop or a tear. It will magnify a scene, but the lightest touch to the surface on which it rests will set the lens vibrating and hopelessly distort the view.

Among the members of that wartime crime panel, that sense of unease, of the distortions and diffractions war works on the way people see the world and are themselves seen, is strongest in J. Robert Janes and Martin Limón. Janes pairs a German Gestapo and a French Sûreté inspector investigating crimes in occupied France during World War II. Limón’s novels and stories have two American G.I.s in South Korea looking into crimes that involve the U.S. military—two outsiders, that is, poised uneasily between two divided cultures. 

Amid a military hierarchy often more interested in protecting its own brass than in justice, amid a Korean culture sometimes mysterious to Limón's American investigator-protagonists, and always in the face of the looming military menace of North Korea, it is no wonder that the most "ordinary" crime acquires deep and menacing dimensions. And, though a disclaimer that prefaces Janes' Kohler and Sr. Cyr novels claims Janes merely inquires after the way "ordinary" crimes were solved in occupied France, his moral universe is the darkest of any noir I have ever read. Here, too, there are no "ordinary" crimes.

And how about this brilliant dissection of England's national character (and characters) in John Lawton's Second Violin?  Read the passage, then reflect that Lawton sets the scene in an English internment camp for aliens from enemy countries, notwithstanding that some had escaped the terror of what seemed about to happen in those very countries:

"`And I'm Rod Troy ... of Hampstead.'

"`It helps," said Drax, `and it will not detain us long, if we state for the record our city of origin. ... Arthur Kornfeld, of Vienna, keeps records for us. We all feel it helps to know where we all come from. To have something written down by us rather than by the British. Helps us not to ... not to lose touch. A matter of identity. No small matter you will agree.'

"Rod did agree. It was a matter of identity that had brought him here in the first place.

"`In that case,' he said, perfectly willing to play the game, "`I'm Rodyon Troy, also of Vienna. Indeed, I think you'll find more than a few of us are.'

"Drax stuck out both hands to shake one of Rod's, beaming at him as though he'd found a long-lost son. Behind him Rod heard Jacks plonk his gladstone bag on the table and say, `Billy Jacks, Stepney Green.'

"Kornfeld said, `It won't hurt, you know. And we're all in the same boat.'

"Billy shot a surly glance in Rod's direction, looked back at Kornfeld.

"`OK, OK, whatever `Ampstead says. Abel Jakobson, Danzig. Now, where's me bleedin' tea?'"

(Lawton's principal characters are English, but his novel Bluffing Mr. Churchill offers an entertaining version of the American innocent abroad, a young embassy staffer plunged into London in 1941, puzzled by Cockney rhyming slang and staggered by the sight of solitary houses left standing after German air raids.  Are stories about civilians in wartime particularly fascinating to we North Americans, the majority of whom have been mercifully free of such experiences in real life?)

The wars need not be long past. Some of my favorite crime fiction in recent years has come out of Northern Ireland, from authors grappling with the effects and after-effects of a kind of war – the sectarian Troubles – on daily lives.   See Anthony Quinn's Disappeared, for example, or Stuart Neville's Ghosts of Belfast.  I'll leave it to one such author to sum up the appeal of crime fiction set during wartime, of the terror, the exhilaration, and the sheer wonderment that something like ordinary life sometimes goes on amid hellish circumstances.

"I wanted to set a book in this claustrophobic atmosphere," writes Adrian McKinty in an afterword to his novel The Cold Cold Ground, "attempting to recapture the sense that civilization was breaking down to its basest levels. I also wanted to remember the craic, the music, the bombastic politicians, the apocalyptic street preachers, the sinister gunmen and a lost generation of kids for whom all of this was normal."


SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Reds and lovely readers, do you read historical fiction? Who are some of your favorite authors? Do you believe, as Peter does (and I do), that "war [is] like a magnifying glass, multiplying the real or imagined significance of any action, including “ordinary’ murder, arson, and embezzlement"?

Peter Rozovsky writes the Detectives Beyond Borders blog. His reviews and essays have appeared in Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction; The Cultural Detective; Nordic Noir: The Pocket Essential Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, Film & TV; Words Without Borders; the Philadelphia Inquirer; and elsewhere. Read Detectives Beyond Borders at http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/