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Christopher
G. Moore Blog
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Blog
Archive April 2011
| Who is Watching Your Back? |
In Search of
Demons
In the Vincent Calvino series the
private eye has a number of people watching his back: a Royal Thai police
colonel, his secretary and a friend or two. The idea of watching each other’s
back isn’t confined to crime fiction. It is the staple of most novels
everywhere. And there is a reason for the pervasiveness of protecting each
other, providing security and support to others. We can tell a great deal about
a man or woman by knowing something about the people who watch their
back.
We can also tell a lot about a
novelist in the way he or she writes about human collaboration. Other species
collaborate but no species other than ours has refined collaboration and scaled
it beyond a handful of others. It is likely that the reason there are nearly 7
billions of us is a testament to our skill at collaboration on an epic
scale.
Read more: http://www.internationalcrimeauthors.com/
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Posted: 4/28/2011 10:42:23 PM |
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I grew up in a world where it was
expected that judges and juries would be neutral. That neutrality was an
essential mechanism to resolve conflicts. Countries were also neutral. Places
like Sweden and Switzerland had a long history of not taking sides, by staying
on the sidelines, as other European countries took off their gloves and brawled
in the streets.
I don’t recognize neutrality in the
modern world. I’ve been searching everywhere for the retreating remnants of that
defeated army called neutrality. People are not just expected but required to
take sides. “Either you’re with us or against us,” said that great American
philosopher George W. Bush. If there was ever a phrase that marked the end of an
era, it came the date that phrase was uttered.
Read more: http://www.internationalcrimeauthors.com/
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Posted: 4/21/2011 10:10:48 PM |
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| THE DEATH OF HEROES and the End of the Sacred |
What drives the current interest in
noir fiction is that the stories validate our worst fear. There are no longer
any heroes who will ride to the rescue, put things right between those in
conflict. What has happened to the heroes who rose above the crowd to serve the
large community interest? Or did those people always live deep in mythology and
not the real world?
I write a crime series about a
private eye, Vincent Calvino, who works inside a system of vanished heroes. Many
of the Calvino readers like the realism of the novels and critics have commented
on their authentic insight into Thai culture.
Read more: http://www.internationalcrimeauthors.com/
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Posted: 4/14/2011 9:26:47 PM |
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Crime authors are accustomed to
killing off characters in their novels. In this fictional world, a man’s life
might not be worth more than a dime on longshoreman’s payday. We have no problem
dispatching the evil, malignant, cruel, and selfish megalomaniac. In fact our
readers often like those scenes when the bad guys expiry date is reached. If we
reflect on this ‘liking’ for a moment, one has to admit there is a shared bond
between author and reader over the necessity of killing the bad and protecting
the good. We are natural born killers.
There are three intersecting worlds
of killers and victims. There is the individual killer. He or she might be a hit
man, a crazed ideological or religion-inspired zealot, an emotional hothead, a
cold-blooded gang leader looking to keep his control and authority. We search
out, arrest and punish these people. Then there are the corporate killers.
Profit motive leads to killing to meet the next quarter’s results or the share
price falls. Jay Gould, a famous American 19th century oligarch said, “I can
hire one half the working-class to kill the other half.” That profit at any cost
attitude hasn’t changed much in many parts of the world. And last, the killing
machine of last resort, the one we agree has the right to kill in our
name: the Nation-State.
Read more: http://www.internationalcrimeauthors.com/
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Posted: 4/7/2011 10:51:19 PM |
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