Juri Nummelin (jurnum@utu.fi)
Mon, 30 Aug 1999 18:03:35 +0300 (EET DST)
On Fri, 27 Aug 1999, William Denton wrote:
> How popular are these writers in Finland? How well
have they been
> translated?
It depends. Chandler, Hammett and Ross Macdonald are all
respected and liked here, but I'm not sure how many readers
they have. The HB stuff is here more a intellectuals' hobby
than the average readers'. And I think it was the leftists in
the sixties and seventies who first began to pay attention to
the American hardboiled writers.
The big publishing houses here do mostly bestsellers and
blockbusters, but some smaller publishers like Book Studio
(boring name, isn't it?) print Leonard, Lawrence Block,
Highsmith, Margaret Millar (she has some great books, whether
or not they are hardboiled) and Joe R. Lansdale. Some other
publishers print James Ellroy ("American Tabloid" is coming
this fall), Walter Mosley, Marcia Muller and Jim Thompson. We
don't usually get the older books translated, but the movie
focused publisher Love made Geoffrey Homes's "Build My
Gallows High", Goodis's "Dark Passage", Cain's "Double
Indemnity", Woolrich's "The Phantom Lady" and "The Bride
Always Wore Black" (did I get it right?) and Dorothy Hughes's
book about which Nicholas Ray made a movie ("Knock On Any
Door"?). But alas the publisher seems to be defunct.
Gil Brewer and the other paperback writers were popular in
the sixties and the seventies, but not anymore because the
supposed readers (working class men) don't read any more, so
new paperbacks don't get published in Finland. But nobody
paid any attention to those writers when they were published,
so everybody seems to have forgotten about them. My main
function doing my bibliography is to get people to read them
once all over. (And maybe to collect them so that I could get
money from my duplicates...)
> Are there any Finnish hardboiled writers?
Well, not actually. Some writers tried to copy the American
writers in the fourties and fifties, but the results are
preposterous. The Finnish crime literature is focused more on
police activity, like in police procedural novel, or
psychological and sociological doings of the crime. One
writer, Reijo Mä«© (pronounced like 'macky'), has a PI called
Reijo Vares and he is your regular hardboiled PI: drinks,
makes love, hates everyone, gets beaten and mugged. But I
haven't read the books. Everyone says they are good, but I
haven't had time while reading my gilbrewers and
daykeenes.
> If it's hard to
> get American books in Finland, it's even harder to
get Finnish books in
> Canada.
Sometimes you find a Signet or even a Fawcett Gold Medal in
the Finnish second hand book stores. Once I found at least
ten John Macdonald first editions at one mark each (something
like 25 cents). I simply don't know where the guy who sold
them had got them.
Vow, what a letter! Hopefully you beared with
it.
Juri jurnum@utu.fi
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