Happy Wappu!

Been posting new parts of my Joe Novak private eye story to my new blog. Sorry, in Finnish only. Here.

As it is the national Vappu day's eve here in Finland, it's only appropriate to say: Hauskaa vappua!

Gabriel Hunt in Finland?

In the mail today: the long-awaited first entry in the Gabriel Hunt saga, Hunt at the Well of Eternity, as told to James Reasoner. The book'll have to wait until I finish with James Clavell's Japan trilogy (appr. 4000 pages), for which I'm truly, truly sorry. I'm sure James could kick Clavell's ass a hundred times.

Here's something interesting: James wrote a little inscription in the book. Now I'll have to make sure he keeps his word and Gabriel Hunt will have one of his adventures here in Finland.

Shogun rip-offs?

I'm reading James Clavell's Shogun for the historical novelists reference book I've been working on. It's been over 20 years ago since I first read it and it seems I don't remember anything of it. The book seems better than I really expected, but it's also too long. I'm hoping all the time they'd start with fights and battles and all that. It occurred to me that there must've been some Shogun rip-offs that would be shorter than 1,000+ pages. Any suggestions? Do Robert Shea's books count?

Started another blog

Here's my new blog. It will consist of a Joe Novak story I've written ten years ago. It's a continuation to a shorter story that was published in my fanzine, Isku, last year. I'll post the longer story in short installments, a sort of a serial, and will edit the story as I go. I won't promise great or even good literature, it's some sort of a parody.

And yes, it's in Finnish. One of these days I'll try to translate a shorter Novak story in English.

Unknown pulp heroes, perhaps?

Here's a list I want everyone to look at very hard. They are names of some characters appearing in the Finnish pulp, Seikkailujen Maailma. I believe they are all from translated, American-origin stories. But the stories appeared with no author's names, so I'm at loss here. Can anyone help with these? The stories are hardboiled crime from the 1930's up to the fifties. I know this can be solved, since I already solved one such name: Mike Blair who also appeared in Seikkailujen Maailma without the author's name, but I know now that he was Hank Searls's hero.

Carrhart
Art Casey
Hap Collins [yeah, the same name Lansdale has!]
Matt Devon
Jones
Streak McShea
Pat Muldoon
Joe Portugal
Bulldog Ryan
Stevenson (detective for an airline)
Bill Thorne
Bart Trevor
Jeff Dixon
Sidney Gordon

Zombies keep on coming

I've already got 12 stories to use in the book, two came today. But it's occurred to me that I should choose only those that take place in Finland, hence I could drop two stories out and leave ten intact. Then I could name the book Tuhansien zombien maa / The Land of the Thousand Zombies.

(Umm... in case this is not clear to everyone: Finland has traditionally been called "the land of the thousand lakes".)

Parker graphic novel

The guy's no Lee Marvin, but still these previews of forth-coming Parker graphic novel look very neat.

John Twelve Hawks is Robert Mark Kamen?

Breath-taking analysis on why mysterious mystery writer John Twelve Hawks is really screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen. (Hat tip to Sarah Weinman's tweet!)

My dream with Duane Swierczynski

I had a strangest dream last night: it was about a graphic novel, written by Duane Swierczynski, that had this really weird structure with metafictional story in which the hero of the actual story imagined The Lord of the Rings as a black-and-white crime graphic novel that looked really neat. And it was set in the present time, with Glocks and all. (Meanwhile I was being tried to assassinate in the "real" life, but more on that later.) I can't draw shit, but I can imagine the best-looking cartoon ever?

Zombie Reprise, pt. 2

In one week I've managed to gather a collection of eight or nine zombie stories, four or five in reprints and the rest original. I have one coming and one I haven't as yet read. I haven't proposed this idea to the publisher (I'm thinking it should be Turbator), but I'm ready to do it cheap and also do the layouts for the book. I even got a cover art. Check it out - it's by Mika Myyry, who's done great illos for my fanzines. (The headline must be changed, though.)

All this in one week! Thanks to e-mail, Facebook and discussion groups! How were these books done before digital communication?

There's just one minor problem. You know, I have this story called "Jumalten tuho" (= "Gotterdämmerung" or "Twilight of the Gods", if you will). It was published in the Finnish fanzine Tähtivaeltaja in 1988 (and it was for long my only published piece of fiction) and it has lots of zombies. And it takes place in Wild West. It has a giant mole called El Topo. It has UFO's and aliens. It has two FBI agents called Frank Gruber and Jonathan Latimer. It has a weird divinity called El Cucaracha. So, what's not to like? It's just so shittily written I'm not sure if I can use it. I just dug it up from an old 3.5 diskette and took a look at it. Oh my God... Do you think it would serve as a joke if I was open about in the foreword? So that everyone knew I'm perfectly aware it's a piece of shit? There's this, you know: it's one of the first pieces of Finnish literature that has zombies in it. So it's practically an important document.

(Yeah, right...)

Zombies Reprise

But I want to mention that after my short post on zombies I started compiling a collection of Finnish zombie stories. Five found so far, at least two new ones coming up!

The Facebook book foreword

I just posted the foreword to my Facebook collection here. It's in Finnish. (But read it anyway: it may sound Elfish to you!)

Sorry for non-existent posts here in Pulpetti. Am trying to get back in schedule.

Zombies? Zombies, yeah!

J.D. Rhoades is writing about the recent zombie revival at the Murderati blog and it really sounds like I gotta get me one of those Jonathan Maberry books. One of his zombie novels starts with this line that I just love (the politics of it notwithstanding):

"When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week there's either something wrong with your skills or something wrong with your world. And there's nothing wrong with my skills."

Allan Guthrien Viimeinen suudelma ei ole kivaa kamaa

Allan Guthrien Viimeinen suudelma (Kiss Her Goodbye, 2005; suom. Mika Tiirinen) on toinen kirja Arktisen Banaanin uutta kovaksikeitettyä dekkaria esittelevässä pokkarisarjassa. Se on ankara kertomus Joe Hopesta, jonka työnantaja on koronkiskuri ja työväline baseball-maila.

Guthrie on skottilaisen dekkarin, ns. tartan noirin, mestari, jota on verrattu sekä Irvine Welshiin että Denise Minaan. Hänen muita romaanejaan ovat mm. rankka mustasukkaisuus- ja ristiinnaulitsemisdraama Hard Man ja silvotun ruumiin eri osien löytymisestä kertova Savage Night. Guthrien uusin romaani on tänä vuonna ilmestynyt Slammer.

Tuottelias Guthrie ehti vastata muutamaan kysymykseemme.

K: Viimeinen suudelma ei kerro sympaattisesta päähenkilöstä. Itse asiassa yksikään kirjoista ei kerro sympaattisesta päähenkilöstä. Miksi pidät sosiopaateista ja väkivaltaisesta käytöksestä, vaikka itse olet selvästi niin mukava mies?

V: No kiitosta vain - luulisin. Kirjoitan sellaisista ihmisistä, jotka kiinnostavat minua, ja minua kiehtovat epänormaalit persoonallisuudet. En voi kuvitella mitään niin epäkiinnostavaa kuin jostakusta mukavasta kirjoittaminen. Viimeisen suudelman Joe Hope on totisesti kaikkea muuta kuin mukava. Hän on koronkiskurin kovistelija ja hakkaa ihmisiä työkseen. Kun päätin kirjoittaa hänestä, se oli osittain reaktiota muutamaankin kirjaan, jotka olin lukenut - niissä gangsterit olivat loppujen lopuksi hyviä tyyppejä. Halusin kirjoittaa jostakusta, joka ei ollut vähäisimmässäkään määrin hyvis, koska se tuntui minusta realistisemmalta. Toivoin kuitenkin, että pystyisin luomaan henkilön, jota kohtaan lukija tuntisi empatiaa. Minun mielestäni se on mahdollista, koska huolimatta siitä että Joe Hope ei ole mukava tyyppi hänen tunteensa ovat vereslihaisia ja hän paljastaa lukijalle paljon omia heikkouksiaan.

K: Kirjoissasi on myös paljon mustaa huumoria. Miten onnistut löytämään niin paljon hauskuutta kaikissa kuvaamissasi hakkaamisissa ja tappamisissa?

V: Minusta olisi todella vaikea lukea jotain, mikä on pelkästään synkkää ja mustaa ja huumoritonta ja minusta olisi vielä vaikeampi kirjoittaa sellaista. Joskus yritän, mutta tuloksena on aina se, että henkilö joutuu johonkin absurdiin tilanteeseen ja siitä seuraa aina pelkkää mustaa komediaa. Minusta absurdi ja noir-kirjallisuus ovat lähellä toisiaan, melkein sama asia käytännössä. Absurdin tunne on tunne elämän merkityksettömyydestä. Noir kertoo siitä, että olemme kaikki tuomittuja. Kun ne yhdistää, tuloksena voi olla aika synkkää hupaa.

K: Kirjasi ovat myös melko lyhyitä (Viimeisessä suudelmassa on 255 sivua). Mikä sinua kiehtoo lyhyessä muodossa aikana jolloin rikos- tai jännitysromaanin vakiopituus on 400-500 sivun paikkeilla?

V: Kirjojeni pituus on yleensä jotain 60 000 ja 75 000 sanan väliltä. Kirjat varmasti tuntuvat lyhyemmiltä kuin ne oikeasti ovat, koska kirjoitan tiiviisti ja yritän pitää juonen niin nopeassa liikkeessä kuin mahdollista. Yleensä jännäreissä sankarille jää paljon aikaa parantua kaikista hakkaamisista, mutta minä en juuri anna sankarireppanoilleni paljonkaan rauhallisia hetkiä. Minusta olisi vaikea kirjoittaa 500-sivuista kirjaa. Olen tehnyt sitä joidenkin varhaisten versioiden kohdalla, mutta niissä on paljon roskaa ja ylimääräistä täytettä ja tarpeettomia kohtauksia, joten kirjat tulevat aina paljon ohuemmiksi jahka rupean käymään tekstiä läpi.

K: Suomeksi saattaa ilmestyä myöhemmin muitakin kirjojasi. Mitä voit kertoa meille uusimmasta romaanistasi, hyviä arvosteluja saaneesta Slammerista?

V: Slammer on tosiaan saanut pari hyvää arviota, mikä on todella mukavaa. Se on vankilakirja kokemattomasta vanginvartijasta, jonka elämä on nopeasti muuttumassa suunnattomaksi sotkuksi. Slammer kertoo vartijan yrityksistä päästä irti tuosta sotkusta ja niistä seurauksista, jotka hänen toimintansa aiheuttaa. Olisi upeaa nähdä kirja myös suomeksi. Arktisen Banaanin kirjoissa on todella upeat kannet ja olisi hieno nähdä, mitä kuvittaja Slammerista keksii.

Q&A with Allan Guthrie

Here's another short interview with an author whose work I've had pleasure getting to print inside the paperback covers of Arktinen Banaani's new crime series. Allan Guthrie is the writer of Viimeinen suudelma (Kiss Her Goodbye, Hard Case Crime 2005; translated in Finnish by Mika Tiirinen), a hard-hitting tale of Joe Hope, bad guy whose main tool is a baseball bat and whose daughter commits a suicide and whose ex-wife gets killed. (I'll be posting the interview also in Finnish, as soon as I get it translated.)

Q: Kiss Her Goodbye doesn't tell about a sympathetic character. None of your novels features a sympathetic character. Why do you like sociopaths and violent behaviour, while you're yourself such a nice man?

A: Why, thank you. I think! I write about the kind of people who interest me, and I'm fascinated by abnormal personalities. I can't think of anything more boring than writing about somebody 'nice'. Joe Hope in Kiss Her Goodbye is certainly not nice. He's an enforcer for a loan shark, and beats people up for a living. When I decided to write about him, it was in part as a reaction against a few novels I'd read around that time where the gangster was a good guy at heart. I wanted to write about someone who wasn't even remotely a good guy, because I felt that was far more realistic. I hoped I'd be able to create the kind of empathy that would enable the reader to feel something for the character nonetheless. I think it's possible, because despite the fact that Joe Hope's not a nice guy, his emotions are fairly raw, and he exposes a lot of weaknesses to the reader.

Q: There's also lots of black humour in your books. How can you find humour in all those beatings and killings?

A: I'd find it hard to read something that was consistently dark and bleak and humourless, and I find it just as hard to write. Sometimes I try, but what usually happens is that a character will get into an absurd situation and there's a bit of comedy as a result. But that's fine with me. I think absurdity and noir are very closely connected. Almost the same thing. Absurdity is about the ultimate meaninglessness of life. Noir is about the fact that we're all doomed. Put them together and you can have some dark fun.

Q: Your books are also very short. What attracts you in the short form now when the crime novels and thriller are almost always 500 pages?

A: My books range from 62,000 to 75,000 words. I think they probably feel shorter than they are. That's possibly because I tend to write quite sparsely and aim to keep the plot moving as quickly as possible. Most thrillers have significant downtime for the character to recover from the ordeal he's facing, but I don't give the poor guy much peace at all. I'd struggle to fill 500 pages, I think. I've done that with early drafts, but there's so much rubbish and padding and unnecessary scenes in those that they soon slim down a more athletic size once I start revising.

Q: We may have more of your books in Finnish in the near future. What can you tell us about your latest novel, Slammer, that has been getting lots of good publicity?

A: Yes, Slammer's had one or two nice reviews, which is most pleasing. It's a prison novel about an inexperienced prison officer whose life is rapidly turning into an almighty mess. It's about his attempts to extricate himself from that mess and the consequences of the choices he makes to do so. It'd be great to see it published in Finland. Arktinen Banaani's book covers are superb, and I'd love to see what the artist comes up with. Here's hoping...

Comment moderation

Those sexy Japanese spams found their way here as well, so I'm putting up comment moderation.

Forgotten Short Story Friday Reprise

I did this already back in March, and I think a link will have to suffice now: it's about two western short stories by Tom Blackburn and George Michener. (I want still to add that it's not about James Michener. George Michener is totally unknown, while Blackburn may be only forgotten.)

Happy Easter to each and everyone!

Okay, my Facebook book

I didn't get seriously sick, as you might've surmised, but I've kept busy. I'm very much behind my schedule in the historical novelist reference book, but I managed to self-publish a small volume of my Facebook status updates.

What? you ask. What's the point? I hasten to add that my use of Facebook is strictly something else than promoting my latest book - which is something American and British authors like to do, to the point their so-called friends don't really know what they are about. (I once noticed an author mentioning his signing or some such event and one of his friends asked: "Hey, great! What kind of books do you write?")

My use of Facebook status updates is more akin to conceptual poetry, even though I'm known to have written also about something topical, comments on Finnish politics, media, literature etc. I've done lots of updates picking up random texts from other sources (I've taken a piece of writing from one reader of this blog, but I won't tell who it is) and using absurdly ephemeral texts the contexts of which no one knows but me. Put together, they are, I think, an interesting mix. (I'd like to compare it to a small book a Finnish poet Karri Kokko did recently: he listed all the people he met during a year and places he met them.)

And years later it will be valuable to see what has been in air, so to speak. I've been thinking I should do a similar volume each year, as long as I will be using Facebook, but actually the process is a bit difficult: the statuses (stati?) don't easily transfer into written text. And I've already lost many while sitting on them.

So, The Book of Updates: 11 Months in Facebook is available. At the moment it's pretty difficult to obtain to foreign countries, but I think it can be solved, just use the comment box or e-mail (or Facebook!). For the Finnish readers, it's 3 euros plus postage. The book is bilingual - some of the comments are in Finnish and some of them are in English. I'd say the percentage is fifty-fifty. (I've been thinking about doing a wholly English version of the book and put it up on Lulu.com or some such, but I don't know whether I'll have the time for that.)

I'll be posting the foreword to one of my other blogs later, but not now (it will be in Finnish). The latest version is only on the other computer we have and I don't have access to it at the moment.

Tiina Torppa's book on female crime writers

My publisher, BTJ, put out a new book by Tiina Torppa. It consists of 25 interviews with female crime writers, ranging from P.D. James to Kate Mosse. Here's the cover - it's taken from a Peter Cheyney cover done by Finnish master of pulp illustration, Poika Vesanto. (Whose western covers I posted here a while back.) The cover is originally from around 1946. The title means "Murder by Woman's Hands" or something along those lines.

The wimpy Matt Helm

Way back when I posted a note about a spy thriller paperback by John S. Glasby (under the alias Manning Robertson) and was wondering about the cover of the book.

Someone called "unk" just posted a comment on the post and mentioned that the Finnish cover of the Glasby book belongs originally to a Swedish Matt Helm translation. (Which means the image is even more unappropriate!) "Unk" also pointed a Donald Hamilton website with lots of information on Hamilton's appearances in print, both in magazines and books, and of course the cover gallery, with lots of foreign covers, including some Finnish ones, with Bertil Hegland's illustrations. Check them out, if you haven't done already. It seems there could be a small volume of previously uncollected Donald Hamilton short stories.

Sick sick sick

And now I'm getting down with flu. First it was Kauto, then Elina, then Ottilia came to visit us from abroad and then she got sick - no wonder I'm now sick.

So, probably no entries (not even on the Facebook book) for some days now.

Busy busy busy

Sorry, no Forgotten Friday entry today, or yesterday, or any other entry. Just this in: Päivitysten kirja: 11 kuukautta Facebookissa / The Book of Updates: 11 Months in Facebook came out from the printers yesterday. Will talk about this later, but I'm pretty sure it's the world's first collection of Facebook status updates. (As I sent this to the printers, I was reading that someone will be paid a five-figure sum for a Twitter book.. and here I go, printing this out in a run of 50, while I could be making some serious money.)

The book is half-Finnish, half-English, am considering of putting up a 100 % English version for sale on Lulu or some such.