Duane Swierczynski iskee lujaa

Vastikään ilmestynyt Keikkakuski aloittaa Arktisen Banaanin uuden pokkarisarjan, joka tuo suomalaisten lukijoiden ulottuville parasta uutta kovaksikeitettyä dekkaria Yhdysvalloista ja Englannista.

Keikkakuski on Duane Swierczynskin toinen romaani. Ensimmäinen oli outo paranoidista scifiä ja kovaksikeitettyä dekkaria sekoittava Secret Dead Men, joka ilmestyi PointBlank-kustantamolta vuonna 2005. Keikkakuski eli The Wheelman otti kuitenkin dekkarimaailman ällikällä ilmestyessään keskisuuren St. Martin’s -kustantamon kovakantisena kirjana vielä samana vuonna. Yhdistelmä rajua väkivaltaa ja sysimustaa huumoria puri erityisesti ylipitkiin ja löysiin trillereihin kyllästyneisiin lukijoihin ja tuntui tuovan kovaksikeitetyn lajityypin suoraan 2000-luvulle.

Kysyimme muutamia kysymyksiä kiireiseltä kirjailijalta.

Miten Keikkakuski syntyi?

Kirjoitin sitä huvikseni lukukausien välillä, kun opetin journalismia. En ollut vielä julkaissut mitään, mutta olin jo kirjoittanut Secret Dead Menin, joka oli jäänyt tietokoneen kovalevylle. Halusin kokeilla, onnistuisiko tiukan ja ilkeän rikoskirjan kirjoittaminen, enkä ajatellut, että se johtaisi mihinkään. Halusin yksinkertaisesti vain viihdyttää itseäni.

Keikkakuski on kunnianosoitus Richard Starkin (eli Donald Westlaken) Parker-kirjoille ja ylipäätään koko keikkalajityypille. Miksi keikkakuvaukset kiinnostavat sinua?

En oikeastaan ole keikkalajityypin suuri fani. Täydellisesti ajoitetun keikan suunnittelu ja toteutus ei innosta minua yhtä paljon kuin pieleen menneen keikan jälkiselvittelyt. Sen takia Keikkakuskikin alkaa muutamia sekunteja sen jälkeen, kun keikka on käytännössä jo hoidettu.

Oletko samaa mieltä, että kovaksikeitetty noir-dekkari elää nyt uutta nousukautta? Mistä se johtuu?

Minulla ei ole käsitystäkään. Sanoisin, että täällä USA:ssa pannaan jotain veteen, mutta vastaavia kirjoja on ilmestynyt viime aikoina paljon myös Englannissa ja Suomessakin, joten... Oikeasti olen sitä mieltä, että aina on lukijoita, jotka kaipaavat tällaisia synkkiä tarinoita. Ainoa asia, mikä muuttuu, on se, että kirjoille laitetaan erilaisia nimilappuja muutaman vuoden välein.

Onko sinulla joitain suosikkeja uusien kirjailijoiden joukossa?

Olin muutama kuukausi sitten aivan täpinöissäni Josh Bazellin kirjasta Beat the Reaper. Hän onnistui yhdistämään kaksi todella erilaista lajityyppiä, gangsterieepoksen ja lääkärijännärin, ja tuloksena oli jotain todella outoa, brutaalia ja väkivaltaisen hauskaa. En vieläkään ymmärrä, miten hän sen teki.

Keikkakuski on todella vauhdikas ja väkivaltainen kirja, mutta väkivalta tuntuu todelliselta, koska se sattuu. Miten määrittelisit eron sellaisen väkivallan välillä, joka on olemassa draaman takia, ja sellaisen, joka on pantu mukaan vain sen itsensä vuoksi?

Aina kun kirjoitan väkivaltaisen kohtauksen yritän saada aikaan jonkinlaisen tunteen lukijassa. Joskus haluan saadan heidät itkemään. Joskus hätkähtämään. Joskus nauramaan ja sitten tuntemaan itsensä syylliseksi.

Seuraavaksi sinulta ilmestyy suomeksi The Blonde (keväällä 2010 nimellä Vaaleaverikkö). Millainen kirja se on?

The Blonde on minun femme fatale -romaanini, sellainen jossa kaveri tapaa vääränlaisen naisen baarissa ja hänen elämänsä menee päin helvettiä. Tässä tapauksessa sankari Jack kohtaa naisen, joka sanoo, että jos hänet jätetään kymmeneksikin sekunniksi yksin, hän kuolee. Kenetköhän nainen pakottaa pitämään itselleen seuraa koko yön..?

Olet myös kirjoittanut Cable-, Iron Fist- ja Punisher-sarjakuvia Marvelille. Onko romaaneissasi vaikutteita sarjakuvista?

Ilman muuta. Minua kiehtoo ennen kaikkea laittaa henkilöt äärirajoilleen ja katsoa, miten he reagoivat niissä tilanteissa. Supersankarit kuten Cable ja Iron Fist eivät ole siinä mielessä erilaisia. Joskus minusta tuntuu, että olen kehitellyt juonet kirjoihini kaavalla: kiduta henkilöitäsi niin kauan että he melkein kuolevat.

Muutamia eriskummaisia faktoja Duane Swiercynskistä:

- kirjailijan sukunimi tarkoittaa kuusipuun lähellä asuvaa
- Duane ja hänen veljensä Gregg saivat nimensä Allman Brothers -bändiltä
- Duanen äidin sukunimi lyheni, kun hän meni naimisiin – hänen tyttönimensä oli Wojciechowski
- Duanen esikoispojan nimi Parker on kunnianosoitus Richard Starkin romaaneille
- Puolassa Swierczynskin nimi lausutaan ”Smith”

Q&A with Duane Swierczynski

In order to promote the recent translation of Duane Swierczynski's Keikkakuski/The Wheelman, I sent him a few questions about The Wheelman and his other work. Here are his answers; I'll post the Finnish translation later. (It's already been published in the Facebook group for the Arktinen Banaani's paperback series. Join now, if you haven't done that already!)

Q: The Wheelman wasn't your first novel. Could you tell us how your writing career led into The Wheelman?

The Wheelman was something I wrote for fun during breaks between semesters when I was teaching journalism. I'd a previous novel, but it had been languishing, unsold, on my hard drive for a few years, and I was just itching to tell a lean-and-mean crime story, with no expectation of publication. I just wanted to entertain myself.

Q: The Wheelman is an homage to the caper books of Richard Stark and Lionel White. Why are you fascinated in the caper genre?

I'm actually not a huge fan of capers -- the intellectual exercise of a perfectly-timed heist doesn't excite me as much as the aftermath of a heist gone wrong. Which is why THE WHEELMAN picks up a few seconds after the big heist has already happened.

Q: Do you see that there's a boom of hardboiled of noir writing nowadays? Where does it come from?

I have no idea. I'd say something in the water here in the USA, but there have been outbreaks in the UK and Finland as well, so... Honestly, I think readers have always had a thirst for these kinds of stories. The only things that change is what we label them every few years.

Q: Who are your favourite new writers in the genre?

A few months ago I was blown away by Josh Bazell's BEAT THE REAPER. Somehow he managed to combine two really different subgenres -- the gangland saga and the medical thriller -- into something weird, brutal and savagely funny. I still don't know how he did it.

Q: There's lots of action and violence in The Wheelman, but it always hurts. How would you draw the line between violence for vilence's sake and violence for drama's sake?

Whenever I write a violent scene I'm trying to reach out of the page and provoke a response from the reader. Sometimes I want them to cry. Sometimes, flinch. And sometimes, laugh, then feel guilty about laughing.

Q: We will have your novel The Blonde in Finnish translation in the Spring 2010. How would you describe the book?

THE BLONDE is my femme fatale novel -- you know, the kind of story where you meet the wrong kind of woman in a bar and your life promptly goes to hell? In this case, our hero Jack meets a woman who says that if she's left alone, even for 10 seconds, she'll die. And guess who's going to be forced to keep her company all night long?

Q: You've also been writing Cable and Iron Fist stories for Marvel. Are there same elements in your comics writing as in The Wheelman and your other novels?

Definitely -- I'm always fascinated by pushing characters to their limits, and watching how they respond. Superheroes like Cable and Iron Fist are no different. Sometimes I think that my version of plotting is nothing more than, "Torture main characters until they almost die."

The first Finnish rewiew of Keikkakuski

The first review of Swierczynski's Keikkakuski in Finnish on Jussi Katajala's blog. Very positive.

Obscure Chandler no more obscure

I posted earlier about a short novelization of Double Indemnity that was published in Finnish in 1945. I asked if anyone knew where the thing came from - is it a translation of an American tie-in or was it perhaps Swedish in origin?

No one came to help, so I started digging around. I took a look at Fennica, the Finnish National Library's database and made a note of what films had been novelized in the same series. There were surprisingly many, 37 in total, and some of the films were European in origin. Many were American, like Robin Hood, Road to Cairo (another wonderful Billy Wilder outing) and The Saratoga Trunk, to mention only a few.

Then I made quite a many Abebooks searches for many of the films the names of which I'd found in the library database. I knew there are lots of European bookselelrs in Abebooks, and before long I noticed there has been something called Illustrierte Film-Bühne (translated approximately as Illustrated Film-Scenes or some such). And then simply Googling with that I noticed a German-located database had listed all of the books published in the series. I then cross-searched with the books that had been published in the Finnish series, and they all matched each other.

So, the series (which was called Paletin filmiromaanit, by the way, and it was published by Lehtiyhtymä, one of the foremost Finnish published specialized in cheap entertainment) that had the Double Indemnity novelization was first published in Germany and the writers of the texts were probably German, too, so to count the novelization of Double Indemnity as a work of Raymond Chandler is a bit of a stretch.

I haven't been able to find who was the German publisher of these booklets, but they lasted surprisingly long, to the late fifties. Depicted is the cover of John Ford's Gideon of Scotland Yard and Jack Hawkins as the titular hero.

Edit: my friend, Sauli Pesonen, found this quote from the German Wikipedia. It says that the series was published by the Paul Franke publishers in 1946 and that the series lasted till 1969! This seems, though, that there have been quite a many series that have been called Illustrierte Film-Bühne, since the books I found (again, check the link above) were published already in the thirties and early fourties.

And here's the quote: "Die Illustrierte Film-Bühne (IFB) wurde 1946 in München von dem Verleger Paul Franke gegründet. Die Programmhefte wurden häufig in Blau, Grün, Braun oder Rot gedruckt. Mit der Nr. 8069 wurde 1969 die letzte Ausgabe produziert."

Edit 2: Thanks to Tapani Bagge for the explanation of the word "Bühne".

Obscure Chandler

Almost forgot that it's the 50th anniversary of Raymond Chandler's death. The Rap Sheet gives you a plethora of links (and here's the rundown of Marlowes on film on the very same blog). By the way, my choice for the best Marlowe novel is Farewell My Lovely.

Pulpetti, being busy as usual, gives only a mystery to all the bibliographers round the world: what is the origin of this booklet, published in Finland in the 1940's? It's a short novelization of Double Indemnity, the film scripted by Chandler and Billy Wilder from James M. Cain's novel. Was it published first in English and if it was, when and in what country, in the US or the UK? Or was it perhaps published in Sweden first? No author credits are given in the book. I don't think it's Finnish in origin, even though no translator is mentioned.

I talk about the book more here.

More Poika Vesanto

Instead of trying to write a Forgotten Friday entry, I'll post instead some more western book covers by the Finnish artist extraordinaire, Poika Vesanto.

I believe all the books depicted herein, with the exception of the Buxom Bill, are Swedish in origin.

Poika Vesanto's western covers

Poika Vesanto (1908-1950) was one of the best Finnish cover illustrators and comic artists of the bygone days. He's always been known and admired by the cognoscenti, but his name has been hidden from wider audiences. My friends, Timo Kokkila and Ville Hänninen, compiled an exhibition of Poika Vesanto's works (it's at display at the Rupriikki media museum in Tampere) and Ville has been writing a short book on Vesanto.

Here are some of Vesanto's western covers from the 1930's and 1940's. Most of them are for juveniles, but the C.K. Shaw book is for adult audiences (no no, it's not porn). C.K. Shaw was one of the forgotten pulp authors of her day - this may be the only instance where she's got a book publication. The book contains also a short story by Walt Coburn, one of the best known pulp western writers. Gil Dennic was a Finnish author called Olavi Linnus (yeah, I know, Buxom is a pretty weird choice for a name), and Arvily was really Arvid Lydecken, one of the first practitioners of the western genre in Finland. Bertil Cleve, I believe, was a Swedish writer, but correct me if I'm wrong.

Edit: Only just now I took a look at the Fictionmags Index and noticed that C.K. Shaw was a woman. I took the bibliography of her short stories and posted it to Pulpetti's Bibliographic Section. Follow the link.

Edit No. 2: Timo Kokkila reminded me that the exhibition is at the Rupriikki museum, not Vapriikki. Sorry 'bout that! He also informed me that the Poika Vesanto booklet is 40 pages and in full colour.

Strawberry Fields: Finnish short film

Here's a short film made by Finnish students, starring a 8-year old daughter of a friend of mine. The film has a nice twist which turns the genre expectations upside down, but I can't even reveal the genre. It's short, so you can easily sit through it, and it has captions in English. (The aspect ratio is wrong in this clip, but I hear there's a DVD with the right one.)

Finnish writer Taavi Tuokkola

I posted a working bibliography for a Finnish writer called Taavi Tuokkola in Pulpetti's bibliographic section here. He wrote some pieces for the Finnish pulp, Seikkailujen Maailma, and then thirty years later he penned three adventure novels for a religious publisher. Life of a writer can be weird. (This is part of my on-going research on Finnish pulp fiction, but stemmed from the book I'm compiling from Finnish war stories.)

Great rock song and video by Magyar Posse

I was just listening to the whole album, Random Avenger, by Finland's Magyar Posse, when I realized that some years back I posted a link to their video on one of the songs, called "Whirlpool of Terror and Tension". It's so good I'll post it again - or actually embed it from YouTube. If you like Ennio Morricone's soundtracks or have affinity for Krautrock bands of the seventies, check this out.

Allan Guthrie's book out

The second book in the Arktinen Banaani paperback series I edit is now out: Allan Guthrie's Viimeinen suudelma (orig. Kiss Her Goodbye). Here's the menacing cover by Ossi Hiekkala. The book is available (almost) everywhere books are sold.

We are hoping to bring Allan to Finland to the next Helsinki Book Fair.

James Hadley Chase: collected mini-reviews

Over at James Reasoner's blog, there's been some discussion on the British crime writer James Hadley Chase. I've reviewed several of his novels here and I thought I could gather them in one posting, edited, of course.

James Hadley Chase's Shock Treatment from 1959. It was more sane than some other Chases I've read, but still nothing memorable - just another James M. Cain imitation with a surprisingly flat ending.

The Dead Stay Dumb by James Hadley Chase. It's an early Chase, from 1939, and while it's pretty wild, it's also somewhat moronic. There's no real plot, no real characters - all the killings and counterfeits just happen almost out of nowhere. Maybe it's surrealism. (I know that the French are enthusiastic for Chase.)

The Flesh of the Orchid, James Hadley Chase's sequel to his debut, No Orchids for Miss Blandish, is absurd and implausible, but you never know if it's because Chase was a poor writer or because he wanted it to be so. There's a ridiculous thing about having a law according to which if you escape from the mental institute and manage to not get caught in fourteen days, you get to go free. What the fuck? If you manage to forget all this, I guess the book could be enjoyable. There are some genuinely chilling moments and Chase has a knack for outrageous violence, but in the end it's a rather empty book. The French director Patrice Chereau made a film from this in the early eighties (or late seventies?). It emphasized the dream-like quality that I think is involuntary in the book and is a much better work of art.

James Hadley Chase: Eve (1945; no American publication that I know of) - basis for a famous film by Joseph Losey (1962), but of little interest as a thriller, Chase doesn't really know how to make American settings plausible, this has characters Clive, Carol, Rex etc., which doesn't ring true; a Cainish story, but not enough plot.

What's Better Than Money? (1960) is one of the best Chases I've read, even though there were many implausibilities and some of the scenes were just plain stupid, but in this Chase was able to build suspension. The ending was flat, though.

In Knock, Knock, Who's There (1973) Chase has switched to Mafia stories that were a fad in the early seventies due to the Godfather movies. It's a story about Johnny Bianda, the bagman for a small-time mafioso. Bianda decides to get off the boat and robs the money he's gathered on his daily racket round. The book focuses on him trying to stay one step ahead of the Mafia guys. It's a bit weak in the middle, but all in all one of the better Chases. The ending is very cynical and not so flat as in the some other Chase novels I've read so far.

I Hold the Four Aces (1979) is strictly mediocre. It has a nice scam plot, but Chase is not very good at describing a female lead and there's a stupid butler character involved. The climax is also not violent enough.

This must be one of the best James Hadley Chase novels - at least of those I've read. In The Sucker Punch (1954) he spins the story of the man caught in the web of fake love, greed and seven million dollars quite well. There's just that it never feels like it takes place in the US. If someone gave it to me without covers or any other identifications and took out the half dozen references, mainly to California, from the text, I'd say it takes place in England. This makes the novel seem pretty empty, without any real content. I haven't really checked, but I believe the book was first published as by Raymond Marshall, one of Chase's pseudonyms.

Film book out

I started doing this book, what, four years ago? Or was it only three? I got a smallish grant for a non-fiction book aimed at young readers and I was going to write a book that would tell everything on films - the narration, how they are made, all that. I got bored pretty quickly, and everything went on hiatus for at least a year. Then I decided the book would be only about the history of cinema. Even after that it was quite a long time before the book saw daylight (there was even some fighting between two publishers, which was absurd and took quite a while). The book's not anymore targeted at young readers, but if you're a cinephile with a long background, you don't have to read this.

Today I got my hands on my author copies. It's a hardcover book - haven't done many of those. And it looks pretty neat, too. I would at least browse through this in a bookstore.

Available everywhere books are sold.

Forgotten Short Story Friday: Tom Blackburn and George Michener

As Patti Abbott suggested, this Friday's Forgotten prose entries should be about short stories. I thought immediately about two western short stories that stuck to my mind when I was researching the Finnish pulp and other fictionmags some years back writing my books Six Guns and Five Guns (the latter is exclusively about short stories in magazines). The other story is by Tom Blackburn, the other one is by George Michener.

Tom Blackburn is better known of the two. He lived from 1926 to 1997 and wrote pulp stories from the thirties on. Later he did lots of novels, both in paperback and hardback. He was never a bestseller, but he's a firm part of the fifties' western renaissance that was heavily featured in paperback originals.

The one short story I've read from Blackburn is called "Then There Were None". It appeared in Dime Western, July 1950 (and the Finnish translation came in Seikkailujen Maailma 7/1956). It's a gripping noir story, with full of violence and unexpected twists, all in a very short form, handled convincingly. The story starts with the boss of the criminal gang waking up and killing one of his mates and trying to convince the others that the dead man attempted to shoot him. Involved is a stupid young boy who idolizes these gangsters. As noir as a western can be.

Now, George Michener we know nothing about. He wrote primarily westerns for the short story market, starting from the mid-thirties and magazines like West and Ace-High Magazine, and giving up in the early fifties. His one story was called in the Finnish translation "The Scarface's Revenge" (Seikkailujen Maailma 10/1951), which doesn't match those found in the Fictionmags Index. It's a great story nevertheless: Scarface, mentally and fysically disturbed criminal, returns to his old haunts and gathers up his old gang, but they have a new boss. He decides to kidnap the sheriff's kid - and it turns out the sheriff is Scarface's half-brother. Very violent and disturbing - a noir western in the mold of Blackburn's story above.

PS. Just thought to Google and found this. I didn't know that Blackburn wrote lyrics for Disney films!

Finnish war short stories

I'll start a series of posts on Finnish war-themed short stories found in various sources, mainly old fictionmags, on one of my other blogs. The first post is here. In Finnish.

Jack Webb's only western novel

I was writing obits for the Ruudinsavu/Gunsmoke magazine of the Finnish Western Society and decided to include Jack Webb. Why? Didn't he write mystery novels with that priest Shanley in them? Yes, but he also wrote one western novel, under the pseudonym of Tex Grady. High Mesa came out as a hardback in 1952 from Dutton and then in 1953 as a paperback from Popular Library.

Here are the both covers and also the introduction (probably the back cover copy) from an Abebooks seller:

Disguised as an itinerant cowhand, U.S. Army Captain Jeff Macon is working at the Lazy A. Detailed by his Colonel to discover the source of unrest which is causing border warfare in the vicinity of the Lazy A and the Hacienda Moreno, Jeff has his work cut out for him. Playing a lone hand against the perpetrators of such treachery as Jeff unearths is a dangerous game. Jeff is smart, and he is no coward, invaluable qualities in view of his being called on to out-think and out-fight as villainous a gang of cutthroats as ever roamed the border.

(And no, he's not the same Jack Webb who was in Dragnet.)

The Best of Isku out

The collection of short stories published originally in Finland's only crime fiction fanzine, Isku, is out. We had a launch party earlier today - okay, it was actually for the sea story book by Veikko Hannuniemi I mentioned earlier, and I got to talk about Isku only briefly.

The book sure feels and looks nice: it's classic paperback size and has only 99 pages. How's that for vintage cheap paperback feel? The cover by Jukka Murtosaari is a delight - you can spot some vintage Finnish pulp and other magazines in the racks, including the real Isku magazine, with the same masthead used in the book and (in black&white) in my fanzine.

The book consists of ten short stories, of which only one, Tarja Sipiläinen's chilling "The Collector", is over 3,000 words. Others are somewhere between 1,000 and 2,500. The best-known writer in the bunch is my friend, Tapani Bagge, with a nice short-short about a loser down on his luck, but aficionados (at least real ones) can recognize names like Petri Hirvonen, Helena Numminen, Petri Salin and Timo Surkka. Others include Teemu Paarlahti, Heikki-Antero Laurila and Sami Myllymäki.

I'm also there, with the first Joe Novak story published in Isku. I read the story earlier today and wasn't entirely satisfied with it (and I found a glaring error in there!), but I guess that's how it always turns out.

Mind you, there's also this, which is the actual first Joe Novak story. I wrote it in the late eighties, while still in school, and published it in a small pamphlet (eight pages, I think, covers included) with the same title (Joe Novak pinteessä in Finnish). It came out retrospectively in 1997. The other stories in the pamphlet had other private eye heroes for which I had developed cool names, like Sam Odessa. In one of the stories Sam Odessa meets the Finnish rocker Mike Monroe who's gone to Amsterdam... [This is a bit of inside joke amongst the Finnish people.]

[Edit: at Todd Mason's proposition I removed the word "pulpish" and replaced it with "cheap paperback". The small number of pages in the book makes one think of a sleazy sex paperback of the sixties. I also added the publishing year of the Joe Novak pamphlet. Now, that's a collector's item. I think the print run was 20 or 25. I seem to remember that I did a reprint two or three years back, but I'm not so sure about that.]

And hey, anyone wants the book, I sell it! Feel free to comment or e-mail me!

A mysterious three-line poem

I made myself a note on Word about some matters that had crossed my mind. It looked like a short poem. Can anyone recognize just what I was trying to remember? (The members on the PulpMags e-mail list are not allowed to answer.)

love
sensations
they shoot horses

Two new books out next Tuesday

Here's the cover by Jukka Murtosaari to a book I've compiled and written the foreword. The book is a collection of Finnish writer Veikko Hannuniemi's sea-faring short stories, starting from 1939 and ending up in the early seventies. Hannuniemi's stories are full of humour and action, but they are not usual adventure stories. As a sea-farer himself, there's also lots of authentic feel to the stories. The book's title translates as "The Great Hunger" which is title of one of the first stories Hannuniemi wrote. The launch party is next Tuesday at the Raisio municipal library - Hannuniemi lived in Raisio from the 1950's on. He died in 1990.

The book is also an entry in my on-going research into the annals of fiction magazine publishing in Finland: all the stories in the book were first published in various magazines, ranging from Kuluttajain Lehti to Seura and Koti-Posti. Suuri jano is also the newest installation in Turbator's series called m.

I've posted my foreword here. It's in Finnish - understandably.

The next Tuesday will also see another book of mine - the collection of my crime fanzine, Isku's best pieces. The book has stories by Tapani Bagge, Helena Numminen, Petri Salin, Petri Hirvonen, Timo Surkka and other writers - including me. (One of my Joe Novak private eye stories.) I don't have the book's cover at hand as yet, but here's the tentative cover I posted a while back.

Friday's Not Very Forgotten Book: Alex Haley's Roots

I finished Alex Haley's Roots last night and I must say that it's not a very good novel. It's not forgotten, either, so I don't know why I'm writing this, but there are some things I was wondering about reading the book, so here goes.

I was thinking about Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code for a couple of times when I was going through Roots. Why? Because they share something: both have spawned several imitations in different media and Haley's book may have given a boost to the subgenre of historical novels which describes a history of one family through centuries (I don't know when James Michener started doing these, but Roots is still an early example).

Both books are also very bad considering how much they have been discussed and talked about. You know, writing courses and teachers of creative writing always: Show, don't tell. That's the way to come up with good literature, otherwise you'll be just a bore. Then how come do these books which tell, don't show, have been so popular and so influential? Haley's book could've been at least 200 pages leaner if he had taken some creative writing courses and taken a hint: show, don't tell. He's always telling what his characters are thinking and why and how and when that happened and what was going on in the big world. It was boring in the beginning and irritating in the end. And I'm sure the book's depiction of the slave system could've been more shocking if Haley hadn't been so careful to point out what his characters are feeling at any given moment.

The Da Vinci Code is fast-moving and it has a plot full of intrigues and mysteries. I can understand its popularity. Roots, however, doesn't have a plot - the whole book is just a series of scenes, put together with no tension between them. Especially the first 150 pages are very boring - the description of everyday African life seems meaningless (at least now, it must've been a culture shock in the 1960's America). There are some scenes which have more tension and suspense in them - for example the scenes in the slave ship are quite good, as are the scenes which show Kunta Kinte trying to escape his slavedom.

I'm not sure how much Roots is being read today. Its popularity may be due to the TV series the last episode of which has been one of the most popular TV shows ever in the US history. But the book has been highly influential and its impact on the American culture cannot be ignored. Still, it's not a very good novel.

One thing on Haley interests me though. He says in the end of his novel (he's also a character in the book, in case you don't know, as he is a descendant of Kunta Kinte) that he published some sea-faring stories in some magazines, presumably in the fifties. He doesn't name any publications, story titles or possible pseudonyms. The Fictionmags Index has only one article by Haley, in Saturday Evening Post. Does anyone know what magazines Haley is talking about?

(Written on Thursday, since I'll be away for some days.)

My contribution to Patti Abbott's series.

A Chap O'Keefe story I almost published

The webzine Beat to a Pulp features "The Unreal Jesse James" by Chap O'Keefe (Keith Chapman [I don't think he's the same Chapman who created Bob the Builder]). It's an interesting story and I almost published it in Finnish translation some years back. I was editing an all-story issue of Ruudinsavu/Gunsmoke, the magazine of the Finnish Western Society. Keith sent me this story, which had been left unpublished for some years, even though he had submitted it to several magazines, including, I think, Fantasy & Science Fiction. (I hope I'll be corrected if I'm wrong about this!) So, the Finnish translation would've been its first publication world-wide.

I'm sorry to say, though, that I ran out of time and space, so I dropped Keith's story out. I'm happy to see it has found a venue and thrilled readers!

It's finally official

Here's the final cover of the Finnish translation of Duane Swierczynski's The Wheelman, called Keikkakuski, published by Arktinen Banaani. The book is now out and on sale everywhere where books are sold, also at the newstands. The cover illustration is by Ossi Hiekkala - it's very cool, isn't it? Both modern and retro at the same time and what's most important, it's full of action, as is the novel. Check out the bumper.

The Finnish title, "Keikkakuski", is taken from the Walter Hill flick The Driver, or actually its Finnish title, since we thought the association is a good one. I asked Duane about this and he said he hadn't seen the film. But I'm sure that when he'll see it, he'll know we were right about the title.

This also marks my first book-length translation in print. Up to this book, I've done only short stories for my fanzines. Not in print are two novels by Jason Starr (I'll see to them getting published) and 50 first pages of Russell Banks's fabulous Rule of the Bone (which I hope to finish some day).

I urge everyone who's reading this to join the Facebook group for the Arktinen Banaani's crime paperbacks. The group is in Finnish, but you can join for the purpose of support, too.

I'll be having a short Q&A with Duane here and on the FB group shortly (just as soon as he answers my questions!), so stay tuned.

The next novel in the paperback series, Allan Guthrie's Kiss Her Goodbye, under the Finnish title Viimeinen suudelma (The Last Kiss), is just going to printers and will be out in some weeks.