"...in crime, after all, the backdrop is always one of the lead characters."

Tobias Jones on the pleasures (and the limitations) of crime fiction set in exotic locales:

The appeal of such books is that, as well as a good yarn, they offer the traveller the longed-for "feel" of a country. They serve up digestible slices of culture and history at the same time as giving you the pleasure of an old-fashioned page-turner. The marriage works well because in crime, after all, the backdrop is always one of the lead characters. Ross Macdonald told his readers far more about the underbelly of California than he ever did about Lew Archer. We read Scandinavian crime fiction largely because we're fascinated by countries simultaneously so similar yet different to ours. And people turn to Alexander McCall Smith or Ian Rankin in part for the same reason others sit on an open-top bus: they want to see the sights and sounds of Botswana or Edinburgh. Add to that the fact that we live in an era of cheap air travel and quick continental breaks, and it's hardly surprising that there's a demand for crime set in exotic locations.

For the rest of the article click here.

Muriel Spark as Metafictionist

I just discovered that Brock Clarke's excellent article on Muriel Spark in this month's issue of The Believer is available online, and so hastened here to direct you to it.

I'm a huge admirer of Muriel Spark's work in general and of her first novel, The Comforters, in particular. And I've long thought that Spark's innovation as a metafictionist has been unjustly overlooked. Imagine my pleasure then to stumble upon Clarke's article and find him lauding that very aspect of Spark's work with a particular focus on The Comforters as well as the novel which followed it, Memento Mori.

Click here to read Clarke's article. I hope that it will pique your interest in The Comforters if you haven't already read it.

(Note: The image above is a portrait of Muriel Spark painted by Alexander (Sandy) Moffat in 1984 which is owned by the National Gallery of Scotland. For more information on it, click here.)

Oliver Twist and Slumdog Millionaire

In Doug Saunders' column in the Saturday Globe and Mail, he traces the parallels between Oliver Twist and Slumdog Millionaire:

Bethnal Green, meet the Dharavi slum; Oliver Twist, meet Slumdog Millionaire.

What has made this genre so enduringly successful is not the melodramatic account of a young person's rise from squalor and poverty to something more elevated. That story had been doing great box office for centuries – including such hits as Cinderella, Moses, Moll Flanders and Jesus Christ.

What Dickens introduced was a new character – the slum itself. The East London shantytowns of Clerkenwell and Bethnal Green loom so large in Oliver Twist that they serve as the novel's main antagonist, throwing all manner of spectres and challenges at the hapless Oliver. At the end, while Oliver is fixed and catalogued, the slum remains a blank-faced mystery.

Danny Boyle's Mumbai, which at the story's outset has not yet been robbed of its name Bombay, is similarly compelling, similarly menacing, similarly inscrutable. It appears as a vast and gorgeous figure, responsible for most of the film's plot twists.

For the rest, click here.

The Hardest Part of Writing

I can totally relate to this bit of the interview with Alan Bradley (whose The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie I look forward to reading) that appeared in the Saturday Globe and Mail:

"The hardest part of writing," he confides, "is sitting down. Once I'm there, I'm good – I write about 1,000 words a day."

For the rest, click here.

More Powerful in the Reading than in the Hearing

For a most interesting analysis by Stanley Fish (law and literature scholar extraordinaire) of the text of Barack Obama's inaugeral address, click here.

"It is a complex pleasure and a difficult pleasure..."

Virginia Woolf on the duties and pleasures of reading:

[W]hen the moralists ask us what good we do by running our eyes over these many printed pages, we can reply that we are doing our part as readers to help masterpieces into the world. We are fulfilling our share of the creative task - we are stimulating, encouraging, rejecting, making our approval and disapproval felt; and are thus acting as a check and a spur upon the writer. That is one reason for reading books - we are helping to bring good books into the world and to make bad books impossible. But it is not the true reason. The true reason remains the inscrutable one - we get pleasure from reading. It is a complex pleasure and a difficult pleasure; it varies from age to age and from book to book. But that pleasure is enough. Indeed that pleasure is so great that one cannot doubt that without it the world would be a far different and a far inferior place from what it is. Reading has changed the world and continues to change it.

Commemorating Virago Modern Classics

There’s a marvellous essay by Rachel Cooke commemorating the 30th anniversary of Virago Modern Classics in this weekend's Observer. I know that many of you experience the same excitement I do upon catching sight of one of those green spines on the shelves of a used bookstore, and that you will read Cooke's article with the same sense of kinship that I did. You'll find it here.

A Novelistic Take on the Spitzer Scandal

I hadn’t given the Spitzer scandal a great deal of thought until I read this opinion piece by novelist Richard Russo in The Washington Post. Not only did it prompt me to think more deeply about Spitzer, but also about the construction of novels. (Thanks to Sarah for the link.)

In Praise of Harriet the Spy

Click here to listen to a radio tribute to the central character of one my childhood favourite books, Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. I think that I'm overdue for a reread of this one.

Karl Marx's Das Kapital

I was pleased to see a book from my own pantheon of greats lauded in this week’s instalment of the Globe and Mail’s “50 Greatest Books” series, and to see it described in terms that very much reflect my own experience of it. Here’s Francis Wheen on Karl Marx’s Das Kapital:

Though many who haven't read it assume that his unfinished masterpiece is an economic treatise, Marx himself regarded it as a work of art, breaking through the narrow conventions of political economy with a radical literary collage that juxtaposes voices and quotations from literature and mythology, from factory inspectors' reports and fairy tales. Das Kapital probably has as many allusions to Shakespeare as to Adam Smith. It mixes satire, melodrama, Gothic horror and reportage to do justice to the irresistible, yet mysterious, force that governs our material motives and interests.

To read Wheen’s case for Das Kapital in full, click here.

Profile of Fred Vargas

There's a profile of my new favourite crime novelist Fred Vargas in this weekend's Guardian. Click here to read it. I promise a post soon on why I'm so taken with her Commissaire Adamsberg novels.