Keeping it Fresh, Part IV: Dana King edition
I write occasionally about how crime writers keep established sub-genres such as P.I. or spy stories fresh (here, here, here)
Dana King's Wild Bill makes a running theme of one such example: FBI organized-crime agents' complaints that their resources are being depleted by another, more headline-grabbing priority:
“Rumor had it he had his eye on moving to an upcoming counterterrorism task force that could be a career maker, organized crime too Twentieth Century for him.”That's some canny updating by King, a forceful case that gangster stories are still relevant, and another of the pleasures of this impressive book. Now I'll ask you once again: How do your favorite crime writers keep well-established sub-genres fresh, relevant, and contemporary?
*“`Frank Ferraro might be the most dangerous criminal in the country. The only reason he’s not on the Most Wanted list is because he shaves and doesn’t wear a rag on his head.'”
*“`About half our resources will be assigned to counterterrorism.'”
*“`Careers are easier to make in counterterrorism than in OC.'”
© Peter Rozovsky 2012
Labels: Dana King
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 6:34 AM
8 Comments:
Well, off the top of my head, the whole detective genre was revitalized back in the 80s by the advent of the female PI, particularly Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky.
James Church putting an Inspector into the sealed world of North Korea was a terrific idea.
Adrian McKinty's using the police procedural as a way to talk about wartorn Northern Ireland was another.
It's hard for me to appreciate what that first group of writers did because they were established big names by the time I came along.
I haven't read Church, I'm afraid -- no excuse. Nothing could be odder than trying to solve crimes in North Korea. Only reason I'd not have thought of "Cold Cold Ground" and its follow-up as rejuvenating the police procedural is that I don't think of them as police procedurals, I think of them as stories about Northern Ireland.
That's okay--we're supposed to be coming up with things you haven't thought of yet, right?
Yep, that's why you folks are here. Grafton, Muller, Paretsky et al. have probably created the biggest change in the P.I. novel in the last twenty-five years. I wonder what the popular and critical reaction was to their early books. Pretty good, I imagine; they kept writing, after all. But I wonder what sorts of things were said.
Here's one reaction.
Very nice. Thanks.
Dana King is doing it right now. The Mob is dead? Maybe in real life, as a genre, it will always have fans. When the writing is as good as King's, the genre is assured a long distance run.
Having mobsters reminiscing about the old days and fretting that things are not what they used to be would have been easy. Having FBI organized-crime agents as the worriers was wonderfully effective and novel, I thought.
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