New books out: Duane Swierczynski, Ken Bruen, JP Koskinen

I just won't stop putting out new titles! I received my translator's copies of Duane Swierczynski's The Blonde last Friday, alongside with Ken Bruen's London Boulevard and the Finnish writer, JP Koskinen's Eilispäivän sankarit (The Heroes of Yesterday), which I both had a hand in.

Here's Ossi Hiekkala's great cover for Swierczynski's book. The book is Vaaleaverikkö in Finnish, which is a literal translation. We would've gone for Blondi, but we didn't want the book to get mixed up with Joyce Carol Oates's Marilyn book. The cover wasn't an easy one. We wanted to avoid the easy Sin City banality of this cover, but doing a dramatic cover without any weapons or some such proved very difficult. I think Ossi did a fine job.

As for the Bruen, I only picked the book, located the agent and started the negotiations (and found the translator for it). Koskinen's book I commissioned, but I never edited it (someone else did. It's about an old criminal who's been inside for the last 30 years, and when he's finally getting out, he doesn't understand shit about the new world. It's a very touching book, with some heavy-duty violence and black humor.

This is a nice job, but the titles have been selling too poorly, so it looks like I won't be doing it anymore. There's still Jason Starr's Fake ID coming out, hopefully next year. (Hopefully especially, since it's my translation.)

More on the titles here, alongside with some other books.

The Finnish translation of Don Tracy's Criss-Cross

I reviewed Don Tracy's Criss-Cross recently and mentioned not having been able to check if the Finnish translation from the fifties is an abridged one. I had finally an opportunity to check and I can tell you it's not abridged. The translation is somewhat toned down and, for example, all the ethnic slurs, like "wop" and "dago", have been taken out and replaced with "guy" and similar neutral epithets. Some of Tracy's short, clipped sentences have been connected to make longer sentences.

But all in all, it seems an above average translation, which is unusual for the Finnish paperback publishers of the fifties. More often than not, they used to cut huge chunks of the original books, sometimes censoring, but also to make the books shorter and cheaper to print.

The Finnish translation came from Nide that operated from Hämeenlinna, and the publishing year is 1957. The Finnish title means "She-Wolf", which is not bad, but I'm not sure if it really depicts Tracy's novel. If someone knows from what book the cover illo is, please let me know. (It could be from the reprint of Criss-Cross, called The Cheat.)