Daniel Woodrell, Dashiell Hammett and Me For some years – a period that, for me, encompassed the first ten Resnick novels – Lonely Hearts to Last Rites – Daniel Woodrell and I shared the same publisher in the States, the redoubtable Marian Wood at Henry Holt & Company. Address: 115 West 18th St., New York 10011 – I remember it well. Whereas Marian would have worked closely with Dan from the first draft manuscript on, with Resnick she would have bought US and Canadian rights to books that already existed in published form. For many
Read More Looking at Lester There are several, often conflicted, ways of looking at Lester Young, the American tenor player who was born, one of six children, in Woodville, Mississippi, in 1909, and who died, a crumpled, sick man, in March 1959. One comes from the poet, William Matthews, in an interview with Dave Johnson, originally published in the High Plains Literary Review in 1995. Young was the Donald Barthelme of saxophone storytellers. The work is elliptical, funny, smart, blithe surfaced, and endlessly sad. Another, quite opposite, comes from another tenor saxophonist,
Read More John Harvey: Charlie Resnick Übersetzung: Susanna Mende In Erinnerung an zwei Profis, Laurence James und Dulan Barber, ohne die es Charlie Resnick womöglich nie gegeben hätte – und für Marian Wood, die Charlie und mir als meine US-Herausgeberin bei Henry Holt über zehn Jahre die Treue gehalten hat. Danke, Marian. Dass ich überhaupt Schriftsteller geworden bin – und somit Charlie Resnick zum Leben erweckt wurde – ist vor allem einer Reihe glücklicher Fügungen zu verdanken. Ich habe nie irgendwelche Ambitionen gehegt, Schriftsteller zu werden, jedenfalls kein Romanschriftsteller, und bis mein
Read More Posted On Juni 15, 2017By John HarveyIn Crimemag
Listening to Jazz „The jazz circles in England are peppered by evenings where sax, drums and horns punctuate poetry read by author John Harvey, best known for his crime novels“, writes Sascha Feinstein, Ph.D., professor of English and creative writing at Lycoming College (Williamsport, Pennsylvania) in the introduction of his interview he conducted with me for “Brilliant Corners”, a biannual journal with a unique blend of literature about jazz. To accompany the interview, Sascha Feinstein chose extracts from four of my books as examples of the way I write about jazz … and the ways in which
Read More My favourite relative recent crime novels Hmm, a friend remarked after perusing my recent listing of the 50 books I’d most enjoyed reading since the turn of the century, not a lot of crime fiction here – for a crime writer, especially. To which I might have replied, that in itself might be reason enough. And besides, if you stretch the definition a little there are five. No, wait, six. But here, to set things right, or achieve some sort of balance, at least, is the list of my favourite relative recent crime novels,
Read More Howard Hodgkin 1932 – 2017 I first became really aware of Hodgkin’s work towards the end of 1995, the beginning of 1996, when I was able make several visits to a major retrospective of his paintings, first at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and then at the Hayward Gallery in London. It was difficult – nigh on impossible – not to be dazzled, delighted, impressed – the richness of colour, the seductive brilliance, all those glorious swirls of paint – echoes of other favourite painters, Bonnard, Vuillard. It was only when visiting
Read More John Harvey on starting a new novel with Frank Elder “Now it is necessary to get to the grindstone again.” Ernest Hemingway, 1938 “So there is this pressure now, on every sentence, not just to say what it has to say, but to justify its claim upon our time.” Renata Adler: Pitch Dark Two quotations which were very much in mind at the end a week in which I began writing a new book for the first time since I set out on the road to Darkness, Darkness back in 2013. Not another Charlie
Read More iPod Shuffle, January 2017 by John Harvey. So, these tracks are the ones that bounced up into the headphones, accompanying me on my Heathside stroll … Girl From the North Country : Bob Dylan & Johnny Cash Time After Time : Miles Davis Kathy’s Song : Paul Simon Line Up: Lennie Tristano Standing at the Crossroads : Johnny Shines Carolina Shout: James P. Johnson Four Bothers : Anita O’Day My Creole Belle : Mississippi John Hurt When Will I See You Again : Billy Bragg Winter Lady : Leonard
Read More „You can do powerful things with a few sticks and bones“ John Harvey on Peter Temple’s „The Broken Shore“ Es ist die wohl ambitioniertest Anthologie der Kriminalliteratur. Nicht von ungefähr trägt sie den Titel “Books to Die For”, erschien 2012 mit dem Untertitel “The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels“. Die irischen crime-Autoren John Connolly und Declan Burke (zuletzt bei uns “The Big O” bei Nautilus) haben hier ein Riesenprojekt gestemmt: 119 der besten crime-Autorinnen und -Autoren aus 20 Ländern schreiben über die Kriminalromane, die sie
Read More Pulp Fiction John Harvey über seine Anfänge als Pulp-Writer. Für CrimeMag hatte der Autor der hochgeschätzten Charlie-Resnick-Romane schon einmal über seine Vergangenheit als Verfasser von hardboiled Western Auskunft gegeben. Siehe: „Erst Western, später Kriminalromane“ (hier). Nun stellt sich heraus, dass das alles noch viel „schlimmer“ war. Nämlich echte Pulp Fiction von A-Z. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about pulp fiction lately; not the Tarantino movie, but the kind of racy if flimsy paperback stuff I began by writing and, long before that, enjoyed the frisson of reading. I suppose
Read More Posted On Juni 1, 2016By John HarveyIn Litmag
A World Away. Jim Harrison 1937–2016 John Harvey ist einer der „Masters of British Crime Fiction“ und ein von Lesern und Kritikern gleichermaßen geschätzter Kriminalautor. Der Tod von Jim Harrison war ihm Anlass für diesen Nachruf. Back in 1992, I was pleased to be invited by Geoff Sadler to contribute a couple of entries to the encyclopaedia of Twentieth-Century Western Writers he was compiling and editing for St. James Press. One of these was Thomas McGuane, the other, his friend Jim Harrison. Here are the first five paragraphs of my
Read More Rocking Hemingway’s Boat von John Harvey. Ever since I started writing with any degree of seriousness, or even a little before, I’ve been fascinated by interviews with writers about their work – hence the pile of „Paris Review“ single issues and anthologies ever-growing on the shelf. In a few cases, not many, this has spilled over into an interest in their wider lives – biographies, collections of letters, diaries – F. Scott Fitzgerald, D. H. Lawrence, Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf. But, although Hemingway was one of those writers I began
Read More Back on the Old iPod Shuffle, Jan. 2016 Er geht meist mit einem Knopf im Ohr spazieren. Wer die Charlie-Resnick-Romane kennt, weiß, dass John Harvey ein überaus kundiger Jazz- und Musikliebhaber ist. Weiß, dass diese Art von Musik zu seinem Alltag gehört. „Bluer Than This“ lautete der Titel seines zweiten Gedichtbandes (1998, Smith/ Doorstop Books). Seine Romane charakterisierte die New York Review of Books einmal so: „He sings the blues for people too bruised to carry the song for themselves.“ Uns CrimeMag-Lesern stellt er hier seine Playlist vom Januar zur
Read More 2015 Als Appetitanreger auf den großen CulturMag-Jahresrückblick, der Mitte Dezember erscheint, blickt unser Kolumnist John Harvey auf seine Lektüren, Kinoerlebnisse und seine Lieblingsmusik des Jahres 2015 zurück. BOOKS According to my notes, I’ve read close to 60 books this year, fiction and non-fiction, and there are two that stand out from the rest: both non-fiction and, by sheer happenstance, the first and last books on that list. Both books are about America, American lives, and are distinguished by a quality of writing and sense of purpose that make them difficult
Read More Henning Mankel, 1948 – 2015 by John Harvey I had the good fortune to meet Henning Mankel on several occasions some half-a-dozen or more years ago, when I was in Sweden with a crew from BBC Scotland, fronting a documentary on Mankel’s work as a crime novelist for BBC4. The programme title (it was to be shown in tandem with the adaptations then being filmed with Kenneth Branagh) was Who is Kurt Wallander?, though, of course, it should have been, more properly, Who is Henning Mankel? We met first in Stockholm, at a conference that Mankel had largely
Read More Ein musikalischer Spaziergang (AM) Wer die Charlie-Resnick-Romane kennt, weiß, dass John Harvey ein überaus kundiger Jazzliebhaber ist. Weiß, dass diese Art von Musik zu seinem Alltag gehört. „Bluer Than This“ lautete der Titel seines zweiten Gedichtbandes (1998, Smith/ Doorstop Books). Seine Romane charakterisierte die New York Review of Books einmal so: „He sings the blues for people too bruised to carry the song for themselves.“ Uns CrimeMag-Lesern stellt er dieses Mal – und das zudem kommentiert – seine ganz alltägliche Playlist zur Verfügung, die er derzeit bei seinen vormittäglichen Spaziergängen
Read More Lyrical, humane, amused and precise A Lee Harwood Obituary by John Harvey. I’m still in shock after hearing of Lee Harwood’s death. A friend for a good number of years, Lee was a singular and fine poet, one whose work synthesised the early influences of American writers of the New York School, John Ashbery in particular, and the European surrealism of Tristan Tzara, into something that somehow embraced the breadth of the world while maintaining, it seemed to me, something quintessentially British, English even, at its heart. I first came across
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