SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: I'm delighted to introduce Detectives Beyond Borders' Peter Rozovsky, writing about "Crime During Wartime," a panel he moderated at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany.
Enjoy!
PETER ROZOVSKY: I changed the name of a Bouchercon panel because of Susan
Elia MacNeal. The panel, at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, spotlighted crime
fiction set during World War II and its aftermath conflicts, and I had called
it “World War II and Sons.”
“What about daughters?” Susan asked, and I explained that
the “sons” in this case were not people, but rather the Cold War and the Korean
War, personified as male. Susan accepted
my explanation with good grace. But she had got me thinking about the books our
panel would discuss, and I realized these were at least as much about people as
they were about fighting.
When I welcomed the audience, I told them the panel
was now called “World War II and Its Offspring” because the stories that Susan
told, and those of her fellow panelist/authors James R. Benn, J. Robert Janes,
John Lawton, and Martin Limón, were more about persons than about
personification, and those persons were, of course, women as well as men.
Sure, Benn’s Billy Boyle is an aide to Gen.
Eisenhower, but he’s also a brash kid from South Boston thrust into a world far
bigger than anything he had encountered before, and the passages where he
realizes this are some of the most affecting in Benn's books. (MacNeal's Maggie
Hope, though brilliant, college-educated, and heiress to an English home, is,
like Billy, something of a fish out of water, and a more interesting character
for it.)
I told the audience in my (brief) introduction that war was
like a magnifying glass, multiplying the real or imagined significance of any
action, including “ordinary’ murder, arson, and embezzlement. But it’s really
more like a raindrop or a tear. It will magnify a scene, but the lightest touch
to the surface on which it rests will set the lens vibrating and hopelessly
distort the view.
Among the members of that wartime crime panel, that sense of unease, of the distortions and diffractions war works on the way people see the
world and are themselves seen, is strongest in J. Robert Janes and Martin
Limón. Janes pairs a German Gestapo and a French Sûreté inspector investigating
crimes in occupied France during World War II. Limón’s novels and stories have
two American G.I.s in South Korea looking into crimes that involve the U.S.
military—two outsiders, that is, poised uneasily between two divided cultures. 
Amid a military hierarchy often more interested in protecting its own brass
than in justice, amid a Korean culture sometimes mysterious to Limón's American
investigator-protagonists, and always in the face of the looming military
menace of North Korea, it is no wonder that the most "ordinary" crime
acquires deep and menacing dimensions. And, though a disclaimer that prefaces
Janes' Kohler and Sr. Cyr novels claims Janes merely inquires after the way
"ordinary" crimes were solved in occupied France, his moral universe
is the darkest of any noir I have ever read. Here, too, there are no
"ordinary" crimes.
And how about this brilliant dissection of England's
national character (and characters) in John Lawton's Second Violin? Read the passage, then reflect that Lawton
sets the scene in an English internment camp for aliens from enemy countries,
notwithstanding that some had escaped the terror of what seemed about to happen
in those very countries:
"`And I'm Rod Troy ... of Hampstead.'
"`It helps," said Drax, `and it will not detain us
long, if we state for the record our city of origin. ... Arthur Kornfeld, of
Vienna, keeps records for us. We all feel it helps to know where we all come
from. To have something written down by us rather than by the British. Helps us
not to ... not to lose touch. A matter of identity. No small matter you will
agree.'
"Rod did agree. It was a matter of identity that had
brought him here in the first place.
"`In that case,' he said, perfectly willing to play the
game, "`I'm Rodyon Troy, also of Vienna. Indeed, I think you'll find more
than a few of us are.'
"Drax stuck out both hands to shake one of Rod's,
beaming at him as though he'd found a long-lost son. Behind him Rod heard Jacks
plonk his gladstone bag on the table and say, `Billy Jacks, Stepney Green.'
"Kornfeld said, `It won't hurt, you know. And we're all
in the same boat.'
"Billy shot a surly glance in Rod's direction, looked
back at Kornfeld.
"`OK, OK, whatever `Ampstead says. Abel Jakobson,
Danzig. Now, where's me bleedin' tea?'"
(Lawton's principal characters are English, but his novel
Bluffing Mr. Churchill offers an entertaining version of the American innocent
abroad, a young embassy staffer plunged into London in 1941, puzzled by Cockney
rhyming slang and staggered by the sight of solitary houses left standing after
German air raids. Are stories about
civilians in wartime particularly fascinating to we North Americans, the
majority of whom have been mercifully free of such experiences in real life?)
The wars need not be long past. Some of my favorite crime
fiction in recent years has come out of Northern Ireland, from authors
grappling with the effects and after-effects of a kind of war – the sectarian
Troubles – on daily lives. See Anthony
Quinn's Disappeared, for example, or Stuart Neville's Ghosts of Belfast. I'll leave it to one such author to sum up
the appeal of crime fiction set during wartime, of the terror, the
exhilaration, and the sheer wonderment that something like ordinary life
sometimes goes on amid hellish circumstances.
"I wanted to set a book in this claustrophobic
atmosphere," writes Adrian McKinty in an afterword to his novel The Cold
Cold Ground, "attempting to recapture the sense that civilization was
breaking down to its basest levels. I also wanted to remember the craic, the
music, the bombastic politicians, the apocalyptic street preachers, the
sinister gunmen and a lost generation of kids for whom all of this was
normal."SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Reds and lovely readers, do you read historical fiction? Who are some of your favorite authors? Do you believe, as Peter does (and I do), that "war [is] like a magnifying glass, multiplying the real or imagined significance of any action, including “ordinary’ murder, arson, and embezzlement"?
Peter Rozovsky writes the Detectives Beyond Borders blog.
His reviews and essays have appeared in Following the Detectives: Real
Locations in Crime Fiction; The Cultural Detective; Nordic Noir: The Pocket
Essential Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, Film & TV; Words Without
Borders; the Philadelphia Inquirer; and elsewhere. Read Detectives Beyond
Borders at http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
