Cool Canadian Crime: Jack Batten

Today I welcome Canadian Crime Writer Jack Batten. Thanks to mystery author David Cole for arranging this. In 2009 David Cole interviewed 13  Canadian Crime Writers for Mystery Fanfare. Scroll down to see links to those author interviews.

Jack Batten is an author, journalist, reviewer, and radio personality. He has written over thirty books on subjects that include biography, crime fiction, law and court cases, and sports. Jack Batten’s first career was as a lawyer. After four years, he turned to writing. He has been a staff writer at Maclean’s Magazine and the Star Weekly. Batten has written for many magazines, including Chatelaine, Rolling Stone, and Toronto Life. He has written radio plays for the CBC and a jazz column for The Globe and Mail. Nowadays, Jack Batten writes books and reviews crime novels for The Sunday Star. The Man Who Ran Faster Than Everyone is Jack’s most recent book, for which he was nominated for the Norma Fleck Award for nonfiction, the biggest prize in Canadian Children’s literature.

Jack Batten:

For years, I've read crime novels. For almost as many years, I’ve made my living writing magazine articles and nonfiction books. Now and then, back in the late 1980s, I thought idly about putting the two together, the reading and the writing. I would write mystery novels. But I didn’t seriously crank up with this ambition until Eric Wright and Howard Engel began publishing crime novels. I’ve known those two guys for years, and I thought to myself, somewhat arrogantly, if they could write successful crime novels, why couldn’t I?

Of course it turned out to be much harder than I dreamed. But to make it easier, I borrowed freely from my own background when I wrote about my made-up characters. Isn’t that what every novelist does? For my central character, whom I named Crang, I chose as his day job the profession of criminal lawyer. Why criminal lawyer? Because I knew at both first hand and second hand how criminal lawyers go about their business.

I practiced a little criminal law during my four not entirely happy years as a lawyer in Toronto. That was one source for my knowledge about criminal law. Even better, after I left law to become a writer, I wrote a series of nonfiction books about lawyers of all sorts, including the criminal variety. I interviewed dozens of criminal lawyers. These people love to talk about the wild things they get into with their clients. I saved up the stories, and gave many of them to Crang, my own fictional criminal lawyer.

Something else I gave to Crang, to shape him as a character, were my own likes and dislikes. Crang drinks the same beverage as I do (Polish potato vodka) and listens to the same music (jazz covering the period from Lester Young’s emergence in 1935 to Bill Evans’s death in 1980). For almost twenty-five years, I reviewed movies on the CBC’s Toronto morning program, Metro Morning. I didn’t give my movie knowledge to Crang. I gave it to his girlfriend, Annie. She holds down a freelance job in the books as—can you guess?--the movie reviewer for Metro Morning.

That’s another indentifying characteristic in the Crang books: the place is specifically Toronto. I name the names; the names of radio programs, restaurants, neighbourhoods, sports arenas, buildings and just about everything else are the real thing. I didn’t make up any of this stuff (except the plots) because I wanted Toronto to appear in the books as it really is. Novelists often say of the areas where their books are set that the place is intended to be something like a distinct character in the books. That’s how I thought of Toronto in the Crang books.

For plots, I arrived at a kind of pattern that runs through all the books. First comes a more or less minor crime, which I define as not up to the level of murder. In Crang Plays the Ace, the first of the four books in the series, the crime involves a private disposal company that is playing fast and loose with pricing. In the second book, Straight No Chaser, someone swipes a jazz musician’s beloved tenor saxophone. In both instances, Crang is hired to get to the bottom of the trouble. Up to that point in each book, Crang is acting more or less in his capacity as a criminal lawyer. Then someone gets murdered. That’s when Crang begins to perform more like a private eye.

In real life, he would back away from events and allow the cops to solve the murder. But in the books, Crang insists on sticking around until he gets to the bottom of all the crimes he’s encountered, including the killing. His motivation is largely a matter of conscience; he feels it’s part of his job to see the case to its completion. But the other factor that comes into play is Crang’s own bumbling; he’s not always on top of events, and often finds himself roped into dicey circumstances without intending to end up as deep in trouble as he gets. He needs to solve the murder in order to avoid potential grief from either the bad guys or the cops or, worst of all, from both.

Crang’s name comes from my childhood. When I was a kid growing up in the Forest Hill neighbourhood in Toronto, the most mysterious person on the block lived in a big house hidden behind a circular driveway and a large stand of very tall trees. All I knew about this elusive figure was his last name—Crang. I gave the name to my guy, leaving it at just plain Crang because I thought it was distinctive all by itself (in the same mode as the late Robert. B. Parker’s Spenser).

Years after I wrote the Crang books, I met a man who was a friend of the original Mr. Crang in the Forest Hill mansion. He told me that the real Crang’s first name was James, that he made a lot of money as a stockbroker, and that among the books in his library were the four novels in the Crang series. The man who told me all this added that Mr. Crang was a fan of the series. He loved seeing his name attached to a criminal lawyer who acted more like a private eye. He hoped I would write more Crang books.

**
Cool Canadian Crime Interviews by David Cole on Mystery Fanfare: 
The group of 13 authors were chosen by David to represent a variety of mystery genres, styles, and historical periods. Some of the authors have won or been shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis award for best mystery novel.
 
Louise Penny
Barbara Fradkin
Mary Jane Maffini
Thomas Rendell Curran
Gail Bowen
Garry Ryan
Anthony Bidulka
R.J. Harlick
Linwood Barclay
Anne Emery
Rick Mofina
Lou Allin
Vicky Delany

Interview with the Interviewer David Cole

Anna Massey: R.I.P.

Sad to report that British actress, Anna Massey, one of my favorite British actors, died yesterday at age 73. She starred most recently as the blind woman in the Poirot production "The Clocks." She was also in Hitchcock's Frenzy.

She was born in 1937 into a performing family. Her father was Raymond Massey, and her mother was Adrianne Allen. Her brother, Daniel Massey, also became an actor, and her godfather was director John Ford.

Massey made her West End stage debut at 17 in “The Reluctant Debutante” and her film debut in Ford’s 1958 police procedural “Gideon’s Day.”She had roles in films including Michael Powell’s chiller “Peeping Tom” (1960), Otto Preminger’s “Bunny Lake is Missing” (1965) and the 2002 adaptation of “The Importance of Being Earnest.”

She worked most frequently in television period dramas. She appeared in TV adaptations of Anthony Trollope’s “The Pallisers,” Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” Charles Dickens’ ”Oliver Twist” and many others.

Massey won Britain’s top acting award for her role in the 1986 TV adaptation of Anita Brookner’s novel “Hotel du Lac.”
 
The actress revealed in a memoir that she had struggled with depression and stage fright, and suffered a nervous breakdown in the 1960s.

She once said that as an actor, “I’m not instinctive. It takes enormous discipline and bravery to get me there.”

Her first marriage, to actor Jeremy Brett, ended in divorce. Survivors include her second husband, Uri Andres; and a son from her first marriage.

Above from the Washington Post. Read the Telegraph (UK) obituary, HERE.

Revolver Ring

I'm a big fan of rings, and even if I don't wear them all, I certainly collect them. Here's one I'm missing, but I'll be making up for that shortly. This Revolver Ring is a must for Crime Fiction Fans:

This is an exact scale replica of a 44 Cal revolver chamber made into a ring. It was carved, cast, and finished in NYC. It is an exclusive design and offered by Blue Bayer Design NYC on Etsy  shop Billbyblue22.

Hat Tip: Toxel.com

A is for Airth: Rennie Airth

Mystery Readers Journal's latest issue focuses on London Mysteries II: Crime fiction set in London. This issue is available as a PDF and in hard copy. For more information and the table of contents, go HERE. This article appeared in the London Mysteries II issue of MRJ. Perfect for the Author Alphabet Meme here on Mystery Fanfare.   

A is for Airth: Rennie Airth

Rennie Airth's work has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has been nominated for the Edgar Award in the US, the Historical Dagger award in Britain and won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France. Born and educated in South Africa, he spent his early years working in journalism, first for the Johannesburg Star and later for Reuters as a foreign correspondent. His postings included Washington, Havana and Saigon. Turning from journalism to fiction, he wrote Snatch and Once A Spy before starting work on the John Madden trilogy, an idea that came to him after he found a scrapbook devoted to an uncle of his who was killed in World War I. 

RENNIE AIRTH:

Although the books I've written in the Madden series are sometimes described as historical, I prefer to think of them as heralds of the modern age. Historical for me means men in funny hats and people travelling in horse-drawn carriages. Once women's skirts rose above ankle length the old world crumbled.

The idea of embarking on the Madden series came some years ago from an idle thought: how would the police have dealt with the problem posed by serial killers before they were recognized as such—before the very concept of forensic psychology had been developed? By chance, at around the same time I happened to be going through some old family albums and came across a scrapbook kept by my paternal grand-parents in memory of their elder son who was killed in the First World War. Paging through it I discovered something I hadn't known before: that the telegram they had received advising them of his death had arrived the same week as another from the War Office informing them that their second son, my father, who like his brother was an officer in the British army, was missing. Luckily he proved to have been captured, but I was struck by how appalling these twin blows must have been to them at the time and from that point on I began to read more about that terrible conflict and the scars it left on society. These two trains of thought came to-gether and eventually led to the first of the Madden books, River of Darkness, in which the psychological damage inflicted on both protagonists, hunter and hunted, by their experiences in the trenches plays a major part in the story.

I'd resolved from the start, too, that I wouldn't get trapped in a long series following the usual pattern of one case after another. Rather, I wanted to place Madden and those around him—his wife and family, and his colleagues at Scotland Yard—in the context of their time; to see them grow older and their lives develop quite apart from the mystery elements in each story. Hence the clear historical links which all three books have. The first, as I said, takes place in the shadow of the Great War, the second, The Blood-Dimmed Tide, against the rise of fascism in Germany and the looming threat of another war, while the third and most recent, The Dead of Winter, has the bombed-out ruins of London in the closing months of the Second World War as a backdrop.

Mystery writers are sometimes asked which they think is more important—plot or character; I would unhesitatingly plump for the latter. Of course it's necessary to have a good story; apart from anything else it prompts the reader to keep turning the pages. But there aren't that many plots when you think about it, only variations of them, while human nature is infinite in its variety. I set out from the start to give my characters lives larger than the stories they happened to be caught up in and to watch them as they developed over a period of time that now spans more than two decades.

That said, getting the atmosphere right, avoiding anachronism, is always crucial in books set in the past. The physical side is easy enough. It's not difficult to bone up on what people ate, how they dressed, what cars they drove etc. But what's more important is determining how people behaved to one another. At the time when my books are set, particularly the earlier ones, they were generally politer than now, more gentle. Set against that, however, was the hierarchical nature of society, a product of the notorious British class system. Certainly there was too much forelock-touching for our taste, too much deferring by the so-called lower classes. But all this was a necessary part of the books' atmosphere. Mostly it boiled down to how people spoke to one another and in that I was helped by my memories of my father, who grew to manhood in that period. Whenever I wrote a piece of dialogue I was uncertain about, I'd ask myself how it would have sounded to his ears. Or, better still, would he have put it that way?

To return to the question I started with—how the police might have hunted a serial killer then—I resolved early on to introduce a form of 'profiling' into my plots, while recognizing that this would have been resisted by diehard elements in the police force at the time, and for that reason I created the character of a Viennese psychoanalyst, Dr. Franz Weiss, who appears in the first two books. A pupil of Freud's, he is able to offer invaluable advice to the detectives investigating the series of murders, and being Jewish he also becomes a symbolic figure in the second of the two stories as the Nazi party comes to power in Germany. It was through the character of Weiss that I was able to explore the roots of Amos Pike's murderous impulses in psychological terms recognizable to a reader of today, though perhaps not to one of the time in which the book was set. He became to my mind like the dark figure in Yeats's poem, slouching not towards Bethlehem certainly, but perhaps into our modern consciousness.

Although this piece is included in a 'London Mysteries' issue, in fact the capital plays only a small part in the Madden books. True, there are periodic glimpses of Scotland Yard and readers of the series must be well used to the view of the Thames and the tree-lined Embankment it offers. And the third book does feature a London damaged by war and bone-weary of the long struggle. It's a city I never knew, of course, and barely recognizable in the present-day metropolis. But the image we all carry of London in those days, with the bombs falling and the searchlights piercing the night sky, is so familiar that even as I was describing them I half felt I'd been there.

However, most of the action in the books takes place in a still unspoiled countryside, and this is deliberate. The image of terror stalking the fields and quiet country lanes of England seemed a potent one, given that the books' overarching theme is the change brought about by the First World War: not simply to society but to the very way we think about ourselves. Still suffering from the after-effects of his experience, Madden is one of the few to understand the dire message of the carnage inflicted in the trenches. That now we truly know ourselves and the world will never be the same.

Philip Larkin summed it up best in a marvellous poem titled 'MCMXIV.' He pictured a crowd of men, moustached, good humoured, waiting patiently in long lines, happy to be setting out on what seems like a holiday. He doesn't say why they are there, but we're told what they are leaving behind—the familiar shops and pubs, children at play, flowering fields; and marriages that will last 'a little bit longer'—and we soon sense without being told that that this is 1914 and they are enlisting in the army. He ends the poem with a single, devastating line:

Never such innocence again.

***
Following this Mystery Author Meme? Be sure and check out B is for Block: Lawrence Block

Flea Market Mysteries

Today is Flea Market Day, and I'm off to the Alameda Flea Market aka Alameda Point Antiques and Collectibles Faire. I'm a great flea market goer. Having been to Flea Markets all over the world, the Alameda Flea market remains one of my favorites. Can't be beat for a spectacular view of San Francisco, either. It's located on the old Alameda Navy Base and literally runs right into the Bay. I love going on the first Sunday of every month to this great show. Here's a photo of me from a recent  show--very fitting for Independence Day. And, in case you want to know, I didn't buy that Statue of Liberty, although she would have looked great in my garden!

I used to frequent the Marin Flea Market which really dates me since housing replaced that space in Sausalito many years ago. I always go to Portobello Road when in London. Not sure I'd call Portobello Road a flea market, but I've been there early on a Saturday morning when the stalls are setting up. I adore the Paris Flea Market, and I have many finds from there. I love flea markets, estate sales, boot sales, garage sales and collectible shows (although they sometimes tend more to the antique), not that that's a bad thing. .. I also won't turn my nose up at a dumpster. Lots of treasures.

So it should come as no surprise that I enjoy reading mysteries with a flea market, boot sale, picker or garage sale theme. Here's a short list. I welcome additions. And, flea markets are great places to find mysteries!

The Flea Market by Randal Adam
Antiques Flee Market by Barbara Allan
Savannah Blues, Hissy Fit by Mary Kay Andrews
Mobbed by Carol Higgins Clark
The Unraveling of Violeta Bell by C.R. Corwin
Death of a Garage Sale Newbie by Sharon Dunn
The Flea Market Mystery by Virginia Besaw Evansen
Tight as a Tick by Toni L.P. Kelner
Killer Stuff, Dead Guy's Stuff, The Wrong Stuff, Buried Stuff by Sharon Fiffer 
The Emma Chizzit Mysteries (several titles starting with Emma Chizzit and...) by Mary Bowen Hall
Something to Kill For by Susan Holtzer
Double Dealer by Barbara Taylor McCafferty & Beverly Taylor Herald
Resolution by Denise Mina
Leave a Message for Willie by Marcia Muller
Murder of a Smart Cookie by Denise Swanson
Garage Sale Stalker by Suzi Weinert

Jonathan Gash's Lovejoy is an antiques dealer, but he employs a wonderful picker, so I might include his books on this list. He and his sidekick do a lot of foraging at sales and in stalls looking for valuable antiques.

Anthony Oliver has another favorite antique themed series. My favorite is The Pew Group.

There is definitely a difference between Flea Markets and Antique Shops, but often the same characters inhabit both worlds. If I put together another list of Antique Mysteries, I'll certainly include books by Jane Cleland, Lea Wait, Tamar Myers, and many others will be on that list.

Mystery Readers Journal has had several issues focusing on Art & Antiques Mysteries. Have a look at the Tables of Contents: HERE and HERE.

Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Shortlist

The Shortlist of nominees for the 2011 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, created to celebrate the best in crime writing. The award is open to British and Irish authors whose novels were published in paperback between January 1,  2010 and May 31, 2011.

Finalists:

From the Dead, by Mark Billingham (Little, Brown)
Blood Harvest, by S. J. Bolton (Bantam Press)
61 Hours, by Lee Child (Bantam Press)
Dark Blood, by Stuart MacBride (HarperCollins)
The Holy Thief, by William Ryan (Mantle)
The Anatomy of Ghosts, by Andrew Taylor (Michael Joseph)

That news release goes on to tell that “The winner of the prize will be announced by radio broadcaster and festival regular Mark Lawson on the opening night of the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate on Thursday 21st July. The winner will receive a £3,000 cash prize, as well as a handmade, engraved beer barrel provided by Theakstons Old Peculier.

“On the same night, a special presentation will be made to the winner of the second Theakstons Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award, which this year is presented to P.D. James.”

Hat Tip: The Rap Sheet