Literary crime fiction melds Cold War, American film noir
Advanced praise compares ‘SHAMUS DUST’ to Chandler’s ‘The
Big Sleep’
SHAMUS DUST (Troubador, October 28, 2019) features Newman,
an American private investigator living and working as an expat in London – in
the pulsing financial heart of the City to be exact, a single square mile,
confined, claustrophobic, and hard on the outsider. Additionally, readers are
met with a bold, diverse cast of women, including the temporary Forensic
Medical Examiner. Kathryn Swinford is well-qualified, capable, and clear-eyed,
a woman who knows her own mind. But even in the liberating aftermath of World
War II, she’s a high-flying anomaly, treading warily in the men’s club of City
money-making.
Two candles flaring at a Christmas crib. A nurse who steps
inside a church to light them. A gunshot emptied in a man’s head in the
creaking stillness before dawn, that the nurse says she didn’t hear. It’s 1947
in the snowbound, war-scarred City of London, where Pandora’s Box just got
opened in the ruins; City Police has a vice killing on its hands, and a spooked
councilor hires a shamus to help spare his blushes. Like the Buddha says,
everything is connected. So it all can be explained. But that’s a little
cryptic when you happen to be the shamus, and you’re standing over a corpse.
This is great – it’s elegant and spare but still cloaks
itself in a terrific atmosphere. I liked the backstreet whores and the tipster
barbers; the gold-leaf dining rooms and the tenement bedrooms. For me, it rang
of Chandler – a grey-skied, British Big Sleep
– Atlantic Books
JANET ROGER: Janet is a writer and an avid fan of film noirs,
those movies first crafted in Hollywood that span a golden decade from the mid-1940s.
She calls film noir the “ground-breaking cinema of its time, peopled with an
unforgettable cast of the era’s seen-it-all survivors, slick grifters,
racketeers, the opulent and the corrupt.” She’s fascinated by the period, the
generation that came through it, and the hardboiled detective fiction it
inspired. SHAMUS DUST is her homage. Outside of writing, and life on a small
island off the coast of Africa, she seeks out English-language bookstores
wherever she goes. The audiobook for SHAMUS DUST proudly features the vocal
talents of John Reilly (CBS Radio, The Disney Channel), whose reading captures
the noir mood and rhythms beautifully. To learn more about SHAMUS DUST and
Janet Roger, visit https://www.shamusdust.com/.
An Interview with
JANET ROGER
For readers who are unfamiliar with SHAMUS DUST, how would
you describe this book?
London’s square mile of high finance – the City – at
Christmastime 1947. An apparent vice killing spooks a City councilor into
hiring Newman, an American private eye, who follows up two twisting trails. One
takes him to the rackets, to a police murder investigation, and the City’s own
grandees. The second takes him into the ruins left by wartime bombing, to make
sense of what he’s finding out about his own client. Newman’s problem is that
more killings cut off all avenues even as he joins up the dots, until he has
choices to make: what to let go and who to let burn, in a square mile where the
money always holds the aces.
SHAMUS DUST features Newman, an American PI, living and
working in the City of London. What is important to know about his placement
and displacement as an expat?
At the time of the story, Newman has been an American
in London for nigh-on twenty years, having arrived there in the Depression
era for the chance of a job in the City. He lands work as an insurance
investigator, then spends his war attached to a British Army unit
(tracking down military supply fraud, but that’s another story). War over, he's
back in the City, going it alone as a gumshoe, one of very many
Americans still around in postwar London, both in and out of uniform. In photos
from those years you’ll see GIs everywhere on furlough, strolling Soho and
Trafalgar Square, and while a civilian like Newman stands out less in a crowd,
it’s not and never will be his town. There’s his accent obviously, his problem
with tea-drinking and the everlasting island weather. But in the end, it’s the
different manners and mores that keep any of us a little off-balance in a
country that’s not our own. And for all Newman has known London half his
lifetime, he’s no exception. He moves in a world that still feels slightly out
of kilter, recognizable but always elusive. I think that vague sense of unease
could be a key to the man.
Hard Winter. Cold War. Cool Murder. It’s the novel’s
subtitle, and the mention of the Cold War gives the novel a contemporary feel,
doesn’t it? What significance does the setting have for you?
You’re absolutely right, Cold War is in the air again.
What’s more, the viciousness and brutalities of the original are revisited to
marvelous effect in John Le Carré’s latest (A Heritage of Spies). I still have
to remind myself that it’s almost three-quarters of a century since the chill
first descended, so at one level, the way that the Cold War played out in
ordinary lives will be new to a generation that – thankfully – didn’t have to
experience it. Now it’s true that many of the characters winding through Shamus
Dust (or through Le Carré for that matter) could hardly be called ordinary. Shamus
Dust, after all, tells of a private investigation that cuts through official
corruption, vice rackets, police protection and murder. Nonetheless it’s a story
set against the regular pulse of a London recovering from war, in a period when
dark and twisted is the new normal, and many of the conflicts and tensions
we’re inured to now were already up and running. That said, let’s be absolutely
clear: Shamus Dust is no superpower spy intrigue or licence-to-kill actioner.
Its Cold War is simply the day-to-day backdrop for a hardboiled private-eye,
who’s working a case that springs from events of his time. In fact, I think the
story’s current relevance has just as much to do with its tale of well-heeled
and influential people, willing and ready to cross any line that gets in their
way. When things go awry, they spin a spider web of bald lies, cover-up and
rat-run lawyering that turns ever more desperate and transgressive. Sounds
familiar? Think of any one of the convictions recently brought in by Special
Counsel Mueller. What could be more contemporary?
SHAMUS DUST revolves around the City, London’s financial
heart, rather than in parts of the capital that readers are more likely to be
familiar with. Why did you choose to set the story there?
Good question, and it’s true that the City does get
overshadowed by the metropolis around it, both in books and in film, crime
fiction included. Perhaps it’s because the City is geographically so small – a
single square mile that corresponds roughly to the area inside London’s ancient
Roman walls. Shamus Dust is mostly set in that square mile (Newman walks it
constantly from end to end), and the intention is simply to let it be itself –
confined, claustrophobic, secretive and resistant to the outsider. The City is
and always has been run by its own corporation. Its politics and its policing
follow different rules. And while Mayfair or Soho each has its take on
more-or-less picturesque sleaze, the City is unquestionably where the money is.
That alone made it an obvious location for Shamus Dust. A place, as Newman
discovers, where a single high-risk fraud can propel a train of Christmas
homicides.
What books have you been reading lately?
I live on a small island off the north Africa coast, so my
first outing in any new city is to an English-language bookshop. I love the
serendipity, and it can turn up some real gems. Recently it was Olivia
Manning’s Balkan Trilogy. I came across it in a bookshop in Bucharest, which is
where her story begins. Her heroine is newly arrived there when war is declared
in 1939. Six books later – there’s a Levant Trilogy as well – her characters
have taken you with them on a journey through Athens, Cairo and on into
Palestine, always one step ahead of the war in southern Europe and north
Africa. It’s special on many counts, particularly on the manners, mannerisms
and casual prejudices of the times. And she’s an acute observer, trained as an
artist, terrific on places, smells, sounds and color. A wonderful storyteller
too (if you’re planning six volumes you’d better be). But there’s also another,
more technical, reason. Olivia Manning lived through the period and the events.
You can trust her on the vocabulary and idiom of those English expats marooned
by war. The voices and gestures are of their time, and that’s most instructive
when your own story is set in London in the same decade.
What are you writing next?
It’s a sequel to Shamus Dust called The Gumshoe’s Freestyle,
set six months later in the City (of course), in the summer of ’48. Those
immediate postwar years made interesting times. Freestyle ties up some loose
ends, returns to some characters from the first story and develops with them.
Actually, there’s a connection planted toward the close of Shamus Dust, though
you do seriously have to know your Chandler to spot it. I liked the idea of
some oblique, passing link between two cases that Newman and Marlowe will never
know they once shared an interest in. As for the second story itself, Freestyle
stands on its own and takes our American in London on an entirely new
investigation. Which makes it interesting to decide which characters you might
want to go back to, how fleeting or important they need to be, and of course,
how to introduce them to a reader who doesn’t already know them from the
earlier story. Those can be tough decisions, especially when you’re getting
excited by so many new and unexpected faces.
