Latest news with #crimefiction
New York Times
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Cozy Mystery Novels: A Starter Pack
First, a confession: For years, I thought little of 'cozy' mysteries. Crime fiction was supposed to reflect reality and society in all of its darkness and discomfort. Murders committed offstage, almost tastefully? Puns in the titles? An emphasis on lightheartedness, small stakes and gentle humor? These weren't serious books for a serious person like me. Read that last sentence with the appropriate eye roll, because that's how I wrote it. Entering middle age made me realize that marinating in perpetual darkness wasn't doing me any good. I feel better when I temper that darkness with witty stories that highlighted community and care. If you're never dipped into the joyful glory of a cozy mystery, here's where to start. I want a charming mystery with sparkling prose Thus Was Adonis Murdered Caudwell's four books featuring a group of young London lawyers and their mentor, the Oxford professor Hilary Tamar, may be the platonic ideal of a good mystery series: intelligent and elegantly mannered, filled with sparkling prose, pithy dialogue and characters making terrible choices. Start at the beginning with 'Thus Was Adonis Murdered,' ostensibly about a murder in Venice, and prepare to be utterly charmed. If you've read it and loved it, try … Emma Lathen's John Putnam Thatcher series or Jane Haddam's Gregor Demarkian books. I'd like some modern-day Miss Marples Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
4 days ago
- The Guardian
The stranger in a strange place is an enduring narrative in Australian fiction. But what if the crime scene is a whole continent?
Non-Indigenous Australians of my generation might have fleetingly pondered the curious names that flashed past the car windows on long ago family road trips – Massacre Bay, Skull Hole, Butchers Creek. Too few, however, might contemplate today how it feels to be dispossessed in a continent replete with topography, public buildings and institutions named in honour of your people's murderers – names celebrating the very acts of massacring Indigenous people without commemorating those murdered. Just on that, at least 10 places in Queensland alone are named Skeleton Creek. Discuss. Much contemporary Australian crime fiction is set in farms, small towns, the hostile bush and the red dusty expanses of various deserts; rural landscapes from which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people would probably have been violently dispossessed and massacred after European invasion. These crime novels are captivating, understandably popular and skilfully written. Most, with notable exceptions, focus on crimes committed within fictional contemporary settler communities. The names of some Australian places and the violence they connote seem perfect for the crime genre. Stranger than fiction indeed. But perhaps they are too real. In late winter 2023 I was well advanced on the draft of a novel I'd been steadily progressing since my last was published a year earlier. The characters were circling one another – conversing, doing to each other and being done to. Ghostly lines of plot were finding definition to steadily form a blueprint. I could envisage the final pages. Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads This coincided with Australia's purported national conversation about the looming October 2023 Indigenous voice to parliament referendum. The mainstream political atmospherics were ugly and the so-called robust debate gave licence to resentful torrents of racism that manifested in absurd propositions that Indigenous people would somehow be unfairly advantaged by a yes result. Added to that was a burgeoning (and, as the referendum result would have it, emphatic) national repudiation of long-overdue imperatives of historical truth telling of how Australia has violently oppressed the world's oldest continuous civilisation. The debate and the referendum result reflected Australia's past as much as its present. This urgently changed my plans. I dropped what I was writing. New thoughts impelled me. What if I wrote a place that encapsulated this racism, historical denial and hatred? How would that history reverberate today? What is the town called? How did it get its name? These questions quickly gave shape to a place inspired by my travels throughout Australia and from my non-fiction writing and journalism. There were so many places where terrible acts of violence against Indigenous people were committed both in colonial and post-federation times. A number of these violent acts involved troopers, police and 'hunting' parties chasing or 'herding' Aboriginal people over cliffs to their deaths as infamously happened at Appin under the orders of Governor Macquarie in 1816. The fictional Leap could be in any Australian state or territory. It is ubiquitous for its violent connotation – the history of terror and colonial massacre seared into the landscape. Its imagined surrounds embody murderous frontier conflict, where the Indigenous custodians survived and endured but remain dispossessed, discriminated against and marginalised. Where a racially motivated cop can still shoot dead with impunity an Indigenous person in response to a wildly disproportionate physical threat. Where Aboriginal people die in police lock-ups after needless arrest. Where violent deaths of other Indigenous men and women have always been swept under the carpet by cops, journalists, politicians, the broader community … too many historians and writers. Where the very name of the town is a celebration of mass colonial murder. Fanciful? Read the news. It's a place where direct descendants of Black people's killers and the descendants of those they massacred walk the same streets. Where the Indigenous people will talk of that violence as recent because, given hundreds of generations of civilisation, it is only yesterday and today's oppression is part of its continuum. It's where the settler families mostly choose not to dwell on it at all. Sign up to Five Great Reads Each week our editors select five of the most interesting, entertaining and thoughtful reads published by Guardian Australia and our international colleagues. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Saturday morning after newsletter promotion Welcome to The Leap! The stranger in a hostile, strange, remote place is an enduring narrative in Australian fiction whose modern exemplar is, to my mind, Kenneth Cook's brilliant, unsettling 1961 novel Wake in Fright. This book was formative to the teenage reader – and the adult writer – in me and The Leap is partly intended as paean to it. My stranger is Ben, an Englishman who is vaguely conversant with his empire's colonial crimes (more so than many Australians he meets). The story begins, like many crime novels, with a dead white person. But Ben's quest is not to solve this killing. Instead he finds himself peeling back the layers of the victim's home town, its racially divided community and reverberating history. There is no misanthropic cop or prodigal son or daughter returned home to unearth clues about a mystery killing. For there is no single crime to solve in The Leap. No killer to track down. Just a vast colonial and contemporary crime scene involving countless offences against race, gender and social function. The scene – the whole district, the town and its stranger-than-fiction name – is the crime. Everyone knows who the offenders are – now and back when. There is no deeply buried big secret here, just deliberately forgotten truths. And that seems like an apt description of a far bigger place. Perhaps an entire continent. The Leap by Paul Daley is out now through Simon and Schuster.
Times
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
James Ellroy: ‘I have been obsessed with crime since my mother's murder'
James Ellroy is prowling a tiny hat shop in a side street in Seville, Spain. His angular 6ft 3in frame, loud bark and garish Hawaiian shirt draw attention. Everyone watches as he reaches for a khaki green cashmere fedora and tries it on. 'Does it look big?' he drawls, squinting at himself in a mirror. 'Shake your head and see if it moves,' I suggest. He waggles his head: the hat fits but he is still not sure. 'It does not vibrate my vindaloo,' he bellows. 'Let's broom on outta here.' Ellroy, 77, has been vibrating the vindaloo of millions of crime fiction readers for decades, and he is part of his own myth-generating machine. 'I am the greatest popular novelist that America has ever produced,' he declares. 'The author of 24 books, masterpieces all, which precede all my future masterpieces.' He repeats variations of this self-praise multiple times during the week I spend with him in Spain, where he has come to speak at a literary festival. When I ask how he feels about the author Joyce Carol Oates describing him as the American Dostoyevsky, he snorts derisively: 'Dostoyevsky is the Russian Ellroy.' His densely plotted novels, which include 1995's American Tabloid and 2023's The Enchanters, focus on the criminal underbelly of postwar America, especially Los Angeles, and have sold millions of copies. Several, including The Black Dahlia (1987) and most notably LA Confidential (1990), have been adapted into movies. His writing style is a sort of staccato cop rap from a bygone era, sometimes echoed in his own speech. And he has a truly shocking origin story for a crime writer: when he was ten years old his mother was murdered, her body found in shrubs beside a California high school with one of her stockings tied around her neck. 'I have been obsessed with crime since the hot Sunday afternoon of June 22, 1958, when a policeman named Ward Hallinen squatted down to my little kid level and said, 'Son, your mother has been killed,' ' he says. • James Ellroy calls LA Confidential film 'a 'turkey of the highest form' Ellroy's own life inspires much of his work, which often blurs fact and fiction. At times it seems as though he has walked out of one of his novels. And it's no wonder he wants a convincing hat to wear: the Hat Squad in his books, as any self-respecting Ellroy fan will tell you, comprises four inseparable fedora-wearing robbery detectives who are based on real LAPD officers, known for their tough veneer and compassionate hearts. Which sums up Ellroy too. Despite the braggadocio, he is not insufferable — he veers between extreme self-confidence and a touching unworldliness. 'The world bewilders me,' he says in a moment of self-doubt when we are trying to find our seats on a busy high-speed train to Madrid. He cannot stand crowded places. 'I am only comfortable around a few people.' However, when I interview Ellroy in front of an audience at the Hay Festival Forum in Seville he is more than comfortable, bounding on to the stage and roaring like a lion. Literally. The audience is aghast. 'Good evening, peepers, prowlers, pederasts, pedants, panty sniffers, punks and pimps,' he snarls in full performance mode. 'I'm James Ellroy, the death dog with the hog log, the foul owl with the death growl and the slick trick with the donkey dick…' On stage it is all swagger and stonewalling. 'I have no view on Donald Trump,' he declares when I ask for his take on the American president. He adds primly: 'I rigorously abstain from moral judgment on the current times.' Yet away from the crowd, one on one, he is much more candid. 'If you want to stray to Trump, I realised very early on that he was, at the very least, a career criminal, mobbed up and very probably a serial sexual harasser. So that should exclude him from the presidency. My cop friends like Trump because Americans have a tough-guy complex. They don't realise how weak and craven he is,' he says. Lee Earle Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948, the only child of 'a great-looking, cheap couple'. His mother, Jean Hilliker, was a nurse and his father, Armand Ellroy, an accountant and, as Ellroy describes him, 'a Hollywood bottom-feeder'. He had no idea how to parent. 'He once said to me, 'Hey kid, I f***ed Rita Hayworth.' I said, 'F*** you, Dad, you did not f*** Rita Hayworth.' Ten years after his death a man who was writing her biography looked me up — my father was her business manager. Did they ever have sexual congress? I'd like to believe they did but my father was a notorious bullshit artist.' Ellroy's parents split up when he was five, and he later moved with his mother to El Monte, just outside LA, spending weekends with his father. Both parents were promiscuous. 'I realised there was a secret adult world out there and that sex is at the heart of it. I saw my mother in bed with men. And later on I came home and found my dad in bed with my sixth-grade teacher. I heard the grunting and groaning as I walked up the steps. What was funny was the dog was trying to take a nap on the bed while all those legs were kicking around.' With the encouragement of his father he grew to hate his mother. When he told her he would prefer to live with his dad, she slapped him. 'I fell and whacked my head on a glass coffee table. She didn't hit me again. She was nothing but solicitous [But] from that point on it was over. It was him and me against her. She was the bad guy.' His mother was murdered on the night of Saturday, June 21, 1958, while Ellroy was staying with his father. Sixty-seven years on, the murder remains unsolved. Only Ellroy could make it even more shocking by saying he was grateful to the killer. 'What I recall most prevalently is forcing myself to cry on the bus going back to LA,' he says. 'I cranked the tears out. I remember waking up the next morning, looking out at a bright blue sky and thinking I had a whole new life. This is not a retrospective,' he insists. 'I'm not concocting this.' In fact his feelings towards his mother are more complex. 'I admired her tremendously. She was capable and competent in a way my father was not.' In his 1996 memoir My Dark Places he admits to having had sexual thoughts about her both before and after her death. Many years later he spent 15 months and a lot of money trying to solve her murder with Bill Stoner, a retired homicide detective. Stoner later said he thought Ellroy was 'falling in love with his mother'. Not quite, Ellroy says today, but 'I am of her'. Living with his permissive father was not all he had hoped it might be. The apartment was filthy and meals were erratic. It was a 'horrible, horrible childhood', he says, but he cautions against pity. 'I'm not some crack baby butt-f***ed in his crib by his Uncle Charlie.' A voracious reader, he gravitated towards crime books after his mother's murder. He was expelled from school for fighting and truancy as a teenager, then stayed at home to care for his father, who had suffered a stroke. Eventually he could stand it no more and in 1965 he briefly joined the army to escape — something for which he has never quite forgiven himself. 'I used to dream about the abandonment of my father when he was dying,' he says. He returned from the army just before his father's death later that year. 'His final words to me were, 'Try to pick up every waitress who serves you.' ' Ellroy — who adopted the name James because he hated the 'tongue-tripping l's and e's' of Lee Earle Ellroy — hit a precarious decade. Often homeless, he would sleep in parks, could not hold down a job and sank into alcoholism. He was arrested multiple times: 'I used to shoplift. I used to break into houses and sniff women's undergarments, I stole a few cars — Mickey Mouse misdemeanours. I probably got arrested forty times but [on] aggregate I served no more than four or five months of county jail time.' His determination to write lifted him out of this spiral. In 1977 he took a job as a golf caddie at the Bel-Air Country Club outside LA and started his first novel, Brown's Requiem, about a caddy who hires a detective to spy on his sister. Murder and mayhem ensue, interwoven with a love story. 'All my books are love stories set against violent backdrops,' he says. 'If there are two great themes in my books it's history as a state of yearning and bad men in love with strong women.' His most recent book, The Enchanters, published in 2023, features a real-life Hollywood private eye, Freddy Otash, spying on Marilyn Monroe to get dirt on the Kennedys. Describing Monroe as 'talentless and usurious', Ellroy conjures a murky world of corrupt politicians and craven stars and looks on with his readers, enthralled and titillated, as they tear each other apart. 'Absolute factual reality means nothing to me,' he stresses. 'What I do is I slander the dead.' • The Enchanters by James Ellroy review — he's a one-off The police in his novels are often as corrupt as the criminals. 'I love the cops. It started when a policeman put a nickel in a vending machine and handed me a candy bar the afternoon [after] my mother was killed. He gave me a little pat on the head and I have given my heart to cops ever since. I don't care what kind of outré illegal shit they pull, I take gleeful joy in describing police misconduct. Rogue cops are my guys.' Would he ever have contemplated becoming a cop himself? 'Naaah,' he growls. What about a criminal? Has he ever fantasised about murdering someone? He narrows his eyes and for a moment I wonder if I have overstepped the mark. But his face softens into a smile: 'No, I never have.' Ellroy has been married and divorced twice — first to Mary Doherty, a phone company executive, from 1988 to 1991. These days he lives in Denver with his second ex-wife, the Canadian author Helen Knode, whom he met in 1990 when his marriage to Doherty was crumbling. 'She's the single most brilliant human being I've ever met,' he says of Knode. They married in October 1991, but their relationship became tumultuous: Ellroy was tackling addiction and mental health problems. They now live in the same building but in different apartments. 'I have a key to hers, she has a key to mine. It's not monogamy that's the problem, it's cohabitation. We can fight a fight. She gets shrill real quick. Helen would believe she is remarkably more open-minded than me. I would say I'm remarkably more open-minded than her… Tell her I said that. She will bray like a horse.' A few days later I speak to Knode on the phone. She splutters indignantly when I tell her what Ellroy said. How does she put up with him? 'It's breathtakingly exhausting to be him and to be around him,' she says affectionately. 'There are several James Ellroys and they all cohabit sometimes.' He has never had children, saying in the past he feared he would be a 'bad father'. 'I have absolutely no feeling for families,' he tells me. He and Knode experimented with an open marriage but by 2005 they had agreed to split. 'It was the best day of my life when I realised I could divorce him,' Knode says with a laugh. Ellroy then had a series of relationships with, as Knode puts it, 'parasitical women' — but they remained close. During his last relationship, more than a decade ago, his girlfriend complained about the amount of time he spent talking to Knode on the phone. 'She said, 'Her or me?' I said, 'Her.' We've been together ever since,' Ellroy says. They usually spend the late afternoon together at Knode's apartment, have 'dinch' (lunch/dinner) and watch a documentary or an old movie. 'I've had to put my foot down,' she says. 'I told him we're not watching any movies with guns.' 'Then we say goodnight,' Ellroy says, 'and I go back to my apartment. I have insomnia, so I'm padding around.' Ellroy's flat is austere with grey walls, overlooking a railway track. 'It's reassuring. Trains going by at two and three o'clock in the morning.' The bookshelves are filled with copies of his own books. He rarely goes out. 'Helen has friends, I don't. I actually have panic attacks if Helen stays out too late.' He spends most of the day at home, writing and listening to classical music, especially Beethoven. 'I write by hand, I've never logged on to a computer. I believe the internet, computers, cell phones, apps, electronic devices are the most pernicious version of Satan on earth. Get a gun and shoot your computer through its evil digital heart. In its guise of convenience it has destroyed civility and turned younger people into uncivil, brusque, rude, low-attention-span, shithead kids and we have to rescue future generations from this evil.' He will never write a novel set in the present — or even in the last half century: 'In 1972 Watergate eats up the political scenery. There's no place to go after that.' He knows his political history but very little about the world today. He admired Margaret Thatcher as 'the saviour of Britain' (he even named a dog after her), but when I ask what he thinks of Keir Starmer, he replies, 'Who?' Ellroy has almost finished writing his next novel, set in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis but spanning back to include the bombing of Guernica. He has never seen Picasso's Guernica painting of 1937, so we arrange to meet one afternoon at the Reina Sofia art museum in Madrid. He stands silently in front of the huge monochrome oil painting for a full ten minutes, scanning every detail, before making the sign of the cross. 'It's horrifying,' he says quietly. In the next room, though, he is back in ebullient mode. Catching sight of Salvador Dalí's 1929 painting The Great Masturbator, he chuckles. 'Wanker!' he says loudly. There is something restless about Ellroy, both physically — loping around, fidgeting — and in spirit. 'I want to get lost,' he says repeatedly. 'I gotta get outside of myself. I wrestle with it all the time.' What does he mean? 'I'm always thinking. I can't sleep for shit. I just want to go to a place where nobody knows me and have one double Manhattan, or eat a marijuana cookie, and just see what happens.' But he won't let himself. He has been teetotal for years and during his sleepless nights he worries about everything, death above all. 'Horror of death is the tremor that lies beneath everything. And 77 will get you there.' He has thought carefully about how he would like to be buried. 'I want to have my briefcase and my three stuffed alligators.' He's not joking — but they are fluffy toys rather than taxidermy. 'Sometimes I'll put the gators under the covers with me, they're a family. Al is the alligator, of course. Wife is named Clara and they have a daughter named Gertie. They're going in the hole with me.' Not that he is winding down. 'I'm not checking out of here any time soon.' Indeed he often says that he will live until he's 101. 'I've got a lot of books left in me. I'm going to have a strong third act. Not to labour a point, but I am a genius.' Hay Festival Segovia runs Sep 11-14 and Hay Forum Seville Feb 11-14, 2026;
Telegraph
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Forget Agatha Christie, this is the real Queen of Crime
Agatha Christie has long been synonymous with the Golden Age of crime writing, that inter-war period when people sought comfort from easily solvable problems, prompting a boom in detective fiction. Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh completed the best-known quartet. But contemporary readers would have crowned someone else as the true Queen of crime: the Scottish writer Josephine Tey, whose novels stood out for their meticulous observations, dry, standoffish wit and her unique voice. Tey (a nom de plume) published a series of six meticulously crafted detective novels between 1929 and 1952: the first, The Man in the Queue, which introduced her shrewd but understated hero, Inspector Grant of Scotland Yard, was an instant critical hit. Now, a new theatrical version of The Daughter of Time, one of her later novels, is set to open at the Charing Cross Theatre – and to revive interest in the 20th century's real Queen of Crime. The groundbreaking novel sees Grant tackle one of the biggest puzzles to plague British history: who really killed the Princes in the Tower? Decades before the historian Philippa Langley would lead the charge to prove that Richard III did not orchestrate the 1483 murder of the two young British heirs, Tey's protagonist was on the – very – cold case. Laid up in a hospital bed, Grant needs something to relieve his boredom when a friend shows him a portrait of the 15th-century king. After staring at it for ages, he concludes: 'I can't remember any murderer, either in my own experience, or in case-histories, who resembled him.' And so he sets out to prove the Plantagenet king's innocence, in what was Tey's fifth novel featuring Grant. But Tey didn't only write great mysteries – her own life was one, too. She never gave interviews, describing herself to a friend as a 'lone wolf' and keeping her private life firmly under wraps. Born in Inverness in 1896, the eldest of three sisters, her real name was Elizabeth 'Beth' MacKintosh. Her father, Colin, was a greengrocer, whose own parents were illiterate Gaelic-speaking crofters. Tey wasn't even her only pen name: her first novels were published as Gordon Daviot, which was also the name attached to most of her plays; she also used F Craigie Howe for a 1946 comedy at Glasgow's Citizens' Theatre. From the age of 27, she lived a double life. She moved back to Inverness after her mother died, writing and looking after her father until his death in 1950, but would travel down on the sleeper train twice a year for a fortnight in London. There, she would become an entirely different character, swapping her dutiful Scottish life with its tweed skirts and cardigans for a glamorous London one. There was even a costume change: from Kings Cross she would go straight to Debenhams on Oxford Street, where she stored her London wardrobe, complete with furs. She stayed at the Cowdray, once the largest women's club in the world, on Cavendish Square, spending her days lunching with friends or at the races, and her evenings at the theatre. She even made it into Tatler: there is a 1934 photo of Tey on holiday with friends in Portmeirion, the Welsh coastal town. Tey never married although there were rumours of a lover who was lost during the First World War. Many of her thespian friends, who included the actress Dame Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies and her partner, Marda Vanne, were gay, prompting speculation about Tey's own sexuality. Vanne even confessed to having strong feelings for Tey, although these were not reciprocated. Author Val McDermid thinks Tey is the most interesting of the great female writers of the so-called Golden Age of crime writing – and deserves to be much better known. 'She is still an unknown quantity to lots of people,' McDermid tells me. 'People who haven't read her are missing out on some really good storytelling and on reading someone with a really incisive way of writing about character. She gets under the skin of her characters and writes about them vividly and also with humour, which was something that a lot of Golden Age writers didn't have.' Tey died of liver cancer aged 55 on 13 February 1952, leaving The Singing Sands to be published posthumously. The Times records the death of Gordon Daviot two days before the state funeral of George VI, whose life, death and majesty had filled the newspapers that week. She left most of her estate of £24,000 to the English National Trust – to spite her native Scotland, says McDermid. 'When she was starting out, the literary establishment in Scotland was very male and she was not made welcome. She felt that exclusion quite keenly. She wanted to leave her estate to further the beauty of the landscape she loved. And she was pissed off with Scotland.' Tey's life has remained as mysterious as her fiction. The author Nicola Upson abandoned an attempt to write a biography because she couldn't find out enough about her life. Instead, Upson started writing a series of detective novels featuring a protagonist called Josephine Tey, who has a female partner. 'From the letters I've read, her most important relationships were with women,' Upson has said, by way of justification. Even John Gielgud, a close friend, didn't really know Tey. In an introduction to her 1953 collection of her plays he wrote, 'We were friends until her death last year – 1952 – and yet I cannot claim ever to have known her very intimately… She never spoke to me of her youth and her ambitions. It was hard to draw her out. It was difficult to tell what she really felt, since she did not readily give her confidence, even to her few intimate friends.' The Daughter of Time runs at Charing Cross Theatre from July 18 to September 13. The five best Josephine Tey novels – ranked 5. The Man in the Queue (1929) Tey introduces Inspector Grant in what is probably her most straightforward example of the whodunnit genre. This stands out among her crime writing contemporaries for the quality of its prose. Buy the book 4. To Love and Be Wise (1950) Tey sends Grant to a remote English village to investigate the disappearance of a Hollywood photographer, setting up a cleverly constructed narrative that explores questions of sexuality and gender identity in ways that were unique at the time. Buy the book 3. The Daughter of Time (1951) Widely perceived as her masterpiece, this is a must-read for any budding historians. Tey uses an ingenious device – getting her detective, Grant, to investigate a case from centuries ago – but the result is somewhat over-expository. Buy the book 2. Brat Farrar (1949) One for horse lovers, this is based, in part, on the real-life Tichborne case, which saw an imposter pose as a missing heir. In Tey's version, a young man is persuaded into impersonating a missing twin in an upper-class family in order to inherit the estate. Combines humour, melodrama and a cracking narrative. Buy the book 1. The Singing Sands (1952) Published posthumously, this is Tey at her crisp, wry best. Inspector Grant is suffering from burnout, so she sends him to the Scottish Highlands for some rest and recuperation, but after a dead body is discovered on the sleeper train, he winds up working. Tey has fun mocking Scottish nationalists. Buy the book
Japan Times
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Times
Queer-coded yakuza story wins prestigious U.K. crime writing award
Akira Otani's "The Night of Baba Yaga,' translated into English by Sam Bett, received the prestigious Crime Writers' Association Dagger Award for crime fiction in translation in London on July 3. It's the first time a Japanese writer has won the translation award since it was established in 2006. The genre-bending novel takes place in Japan's 1970s yakuza underworld and centers on two women, Yoriko Shindo, a ruthless martial arts fighter, and 'the princess' Shoko, daughter of a mob boss, for whom Yoriko serves as a bodyguard. "In form and style and content, 'The Night of Baba Yaga' is unlike any book I've translated, but it's also eerily familiar, like a myth you overheard before you learned to talk,' Bett tells The Japan Times. Contributor Kris Kosaka writes in her review, '(The novel) radiates with both cinematic grandeur and a subtle, constant railing against normalization of any kind, the latter of which can be seen in another aspect of queerness that permeates the novel: its framing of what it means to be the 'other' in society.' 'The Night of Baba Yaga' was a commercial success in Japan and was shortlisted for the Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 2021. It's Otani's first novel to be translated into English, by Soho Press in the U.S. and Faber and Faber in the U.K. Translating the novel was not a safe, obvious venture from the start. "'The Night of Baba Yaga' has no obvious comparison title among what's been published from Japan,' Bett says. 'It's more like a 1970s exploitation film than any book that comes to mind. It's built differently, somehow both borrowing from action cinema and playing entirely by its own rules. 'After today, those of us working in publishing should all feel more encouraged to take risks on the books that we believe in.'
