Translation Tuesday #2: The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin.

The Winter Queen is the first book I’ve read by Boris Akunin, an acclaimed writer of mysteries in Russia, but based on this sample I’ll be reading more.

It’s a well-plotted book which cleverly subverts expectations throughout. For instance, it’s a murder mystery which begins not with a murder but with a very public suicide — and not a possible suicide that turns out to be murder, but an actual one. Another example is the book’s hero, Fandoran, a twenty-year-old bookish sort, the antithesis of the square-jawed hero of classic detective novels.

But what I most responded to was the writing. I don’t know where Boris Akunin ends and his translator Andrew Bromfield begins, but the prose is fantastic. There isn’t the clumsy, grasping lack of confidence that plagues so many translations; the book feels as though it was written in English, and by a hell of  stylist. Imagine for a moment that Michael Chabon wrote a mystery set in Czarist Russia (it takes place in Moscow in 1876) and you’ll have some sense of how the book reads, minus Chabon’s sometimes too-clever similes (they really draw attention to themselves, don’t they?).

If you want a well-written mystery that plays with expectations, this is a book you should seriously consider picking up.

Paperback covers.

My UK editor just sent me a couple new covers, one for my novel Low Life, which is finally being released in paperback, and one for The Dispatcher, also being released in paperback. Both will probably hit shelves next summer around the time my fourth novel, The Last Tomorrow,* is released. Anyway, here they are.

*The working title was Down City, but we decided to change it to The Last Tomorrow, which better captures the tone of the thing. I’ve also cut about 12,000 words since I turned in my “first” draft in September, bringing it down to a cool 118,000. This was not done at the request of anyone; I just wanted the book as tight as possible.

The truth about Amazon publishing.

If you’re at all interested in the publishing business, as opposed to simply being interested in fiction (either reading or writing it), you should read Laura Hazard Owen’s two-part piece on Amazon.com.

Excerpt:

Amazon, which made its fortune selling other publishers’ books, is now pushing hard into the business of signing up and publishing its own authors, in both digital and print. Since 2009, it has launched six new imprints (see chart) and hired publishing industry veteran Larry Kirshbaum, the former CEO of Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) Book Group (now Hachette) to head up a seventh. All of this has led to a spate of breathless headlines, especially following a recent New York Times piece about Amazon’s publishing program. “Wake up and smell the disruption,” Mathew Ingram wrote at GigaOm. “Amazon is coming for the book publishing industry. And not just the e-book world, either,” wrote Noah Davis in a Business Insider post under the headline “Amazon Invades The Publishing World, And Publishers Are ‘Terrified’.” And Glyn Moody at Techdirt called Amazon’s efforts “a fully-integrated global publishing strategy.”

Yet beyond these bullish prognostications, there’s been little effort to gauge the success of Amazon’s nascent publishing efforts.

Part one is here.

Part two is here.

Q. R. Markham followup.

I posted last month about Quentin Rowan, who, writing as Q. R. Markham, plagiarized several other authors. Here’s a followup on the story from Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon.com.

In a new piece (ostensibly by Rowan himself) on the sobriety-centric site The Fix, Rowan blames it all on a manifestation of “addiction.” After admitting the high cost of his transgressions — “I lost my job in the Brooklyn bookstore where I was a part-owner, my beautiful girlfriend left me (and the apartment we were going to share), and my future in the only field I know anything about, books, came to ignominious end” — Rowan traces the roots of his behavior back to the 1990s, when, he says, he was newly sober and “came upon a paragraph I liked from a short story by B.S. Johnson.” Before he fully realized the implications of his actions, he’d “transferred my obsession from drinking and drugs to plagiarism.”

And so on.

Black Friday.

Instead of going out and getting trampled today, you should get comfortable with a David Goodis novel. Your time will certainly be better spent, and your money won’t be spent at all.

Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving.

Life will be bland, but we’ll be okay.

I watched a little film called Bellflower last night and it absolutely kicked my ass. It’s a wild, somewhat-Lynchian flick that begins as an awkward-meet relationship story about twenty-somethings and takes a wild left turn into nightmare country. It’s not perfect, not by a long shot, but it’s real and raw and emotionally true, which is more than can be said for most films. And, anyway, perfect is overrated — it’s possible, after all, to polish something till it’s cold and lifeless. Bellflower is full of life.

If you have a chance to check it out, do so.

Here’s the trailer:

And here’s the song from the trailer, which is where the title of this post came from:

That whole Markham thing.

You’re probably aware that Assassin of Secrets by Q.R. Markham (the pen name of Quentin Rowan), which came out on November 3 in the US, has been pulled amidst charges of plagiarism, and that those charges seem firmly grounded in fact. Here, for example, is Edward Champion’s look at just how extensive the plagiarism actually is.

I don’t want to hash through the whole story again — it’s been well-documented elsewhere — but I would like to comment on one small part of it. As I’ve been following the story around the internet, I’ve noticed several comments which, by way of justification, compare what Markham did to sampling or remixing music.This is, I think, a false comparison for at least three reasons.

First, when someone samples a sound, they’re layering it in with other sounds. That is, they’ll play one track over another track over yet another track simultaneously to create an all new soundscape — that new soundscape is, in my opinion, of great importance. It’s what changes the act from copying to creation.

What Markham did was to merely play a single track at a time, sometimes for long periods. There’s an entire six-page section in Assassin of Secrets pulled from another novel. This isn’t sampling; it’s making a mixtape and calling it an album.

Second, remixing and sampling are — generally — done right out in the open, if not necessarily done legally. Part of what’s enjoyable about listening to Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, for instance, is that you can hear the sources; it makes the listener a party to the construction of the new material.

Third, because sampling is done out in the open, it hurts no one. Markham, on the other hand, sold his novel as an original work, and accepted payment for it. Thousands of dollars collected with a lie. He also solicited blurbs from other writers, some of whom provided them. Duane Swierczynski, for instance, blurbed the book, and talks of his embarrassment here. Jeremy Duns also blurbed the book, and talks about it here, as well as saying it’ll be a while before he blurbs another first novel, an understandable response. It’s pretty rotten to take someone’s generosity — and taking the time to read a first-time novelist’s book and endorse it is a generous act — and make him feel like an asshole for it.

Intentions matter. And from the evidence available, it looks like Markham stole others’ work in order to pass it off as his own and collect money for it, and in order to do so he lied to, and took advantage of, any number of people.

Post hoc justifications are just that.

Location as character.

A couple weeks ago, after well over a decade in Los Angeles, I picked up stakes and moved to a small Cape Cod in Louisville, Kentucky. One of the reasons I made the move was because I wanted a new place to write about. Los Angeles has been done and done again. Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Charles Bukowski, John Fante, Michael Connelly, and James Ellroy have all used the city — and that’s an off-the-top-of-my-head list, incomplete if ever a list was. Besides them, dozens of other writers have taken a whack at it.

Including me. My most recently completed novel — a five-hundred-page crime story — also takes place in Los Angeles, and though my LA isn’t James Ellroy’s, which isn’t Raymond Chandler’s, I couldn’t help but feel that I was borrowing someone else’s character while writing about it — and I didn’t like the feeling at all. I wanted to get to know another place, one that hasn’t been used to the point of being threadbare.

My first book, Acts of Violence (aka Good Neighbors), takes place in Queens, New York, but Queens isn’t a character in the novel — I didn’t know it well enough to make it a character. The real backdrop is any-big-city-at-all in the mid-1960s, and I worked hard to bring the period to life rather than the place. As someone once said, the past is a foreign country.

My second book, Low Life, takes place in Los Angeles, but it’s a one-character story, and that character is Simon Johnson.

My third book, The Dispatcher, which will be released in the US on December 27, takes place in a fictional town called Bulls Mouth, Texas. Now Bulls Mouth is absolutely a character in the novel, and it’s based, in part, on a town I spent a few of my formative years in, but basically it’s as fictional as any of the people in the book. I drew a map of the town on butcher’s paper, built houses with pen and ink, created a history. It felt real to me while I was writing the novel. But there’s something about writing a fictional town that’s rather like shooting on a sound stage instead of on location. You have to work harder to make it real. Reality, after all, has actually been lived in — you don’t have to put fingerprints on the wall next to the bedroom door because they’re already there. If you care at all about the craft, you try your damnedest to know every detail, and, as any reader of science fiction knows, a good writer can do a very good job of building a fictional world.

But even if the writer’s done a brilliant job, there will be missing details you don’t even know are missing. For instance: I have no idea what color the fire hydrants are in Bulls Mouth, Texas. Unimportant, I suppose, but I know that in Los Angeles they’re yellow and in Louisville they’re orange. What do the traffic signals look like? I’m not sure. In Los Angeles they’re mounted on metal poles, which are themselves covered in pigeon shit; in Louisville they hang on wires, and are impossible to see through the windshield of a PT Cruiser — a car I rented while here in the summer — unless you sort of slouch down and tilt your head up.

These specific details aren’t essential, of course. In the case of Bulls Mouth, I used other details — details I knew, because I’d thought about them — to make the town come to life, and this can be quite rewarding in and of itself. Certainly it can be as rewarding as bringing a human character to life. Because, as with human characters, it’s the accumulation of details that will eventually result in a fictional city, somehow magically it seems to me, drawing breath.

When setting a story in a real place, you’re dealing with something that’s already breathing.This has both benefits and drawbacks. Instead of creating something and bringing it to life, the job is instead to capture it on the page without killing it.

As I said above, my fourth book, which I just finished a few months ago, takes place in Los Angeles. By the time I finished the novel, I’d decided I never wanted to write about the place again. It was a character I was done with. So I moved.

The more attention you pay to people in the real world, and the more types of people you expose yourself to, the better you will be at creating human characters. I think the same is true of places.

Whether creating a city or capturing one, it’s important that the world of your story feel three-dimensional. Details are essential. Cumulatively, as I said above, they bring a place to life, they make it breathe (or keep it breathing, if you’re working with a real place), and if readers feel they understand the world of the story, if they feel it’s a world they could step into, it will make everything that happens in that world all the more believable.