J. Robert Janes, Jerome Charyn & A Messerschmitt Knife
Monday, March 24, 2014
A Northside Knife
Boys, who are the devil
Will look for it with stealth
And try with a fingertip
To see if its edge is nicked.
How many times it entered
The flesh of a Christian
And now it's put away alone,
Waiting for a hand.
Jorge Luís Borges
Translated by Christopher Mulrooney
Will look for it with stealth
And try with a fingertip
To see if its edge is nicked.
How many times it entered
The flesh of a Christian
And now it's put away alone,
Waiting for a hand.
Jorge Luís Borges
Translated by Christopher Mulrooney
Un cuchillo en el norte - Jorge Luís Borges
Lo
buscarán con sigilo
Y
probarán en la yema
Si no se
ha mellado el filo.
Cuántas
veces hará entrado
En la
carne de un cristiano
Y ahora
está arrumbado y solo,
A la
espera de una mano,
From my early childhood I observed my parents read. My mother, in particular was snob when it came to reading she would have never read my father's Leslie Charteris. She taught me about the good writers she liked. From her I learned to read Daphne du Maurier, Eric Ambler, Lawrence Durrell, Dickens, Graham Greene and in the early 60s, Ian Fleming's James Bond.
It went the other way a couple of times that I can remember. I recommended an author which in the end she liked very much. She read as many of the Riverworld series by Philip José Farmer as I could get for her. In the mid-50s I had given her (at the time I was a member of the Doubleday Book Club) Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart which introduced her to gothic romance novels. I read it too, and I kind of liked it.
From my mother then I
learned to be careful in my choice of reading matter. And so, I stuck to the
well-known but sometimes the slightly offbeat. Offbeat in the sense that by the late 80s
few of my peers knew who Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett was. It was while
looking for new Chandler
and P.D. James books that I found two authors I would never have ever
discovered otherwise.
At Duthies I was
looking for Chandler
and found Jerome Charyn. Under James I found the odd-named (it seemed at the time!)
J.Robert Janes.
My life has not been
straightforward and predictable or boring since, thanks to these two novelistic
loose cannon.
I can safely say that
I have a friendship with both. In the early 90s went to New York City to interview and photograph
Charyn who taught me the wonders of vanilla ice cream with fresh raspberries
and aged balsamic vinegar. I was too polite to challenge him to a game of
ping-pong.
Of Janes, who lives in
Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario our friendship has been via email
and Skype.
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| "bumper" Sidney Holden Illustration Bascove |
I have just read Janes’s 14th St-Cyr & Kohler novel Tapestry. These are set in German-occupied Paris. In a time of all kinds of unspeakable war crimes, Chief Inspector Jean Louis St-Cyr of the Sureté and Detektiv Aufsichsbeamter Herman Kohler formerly a detective in Munich but now with the Gestapo solve normal crime as partners. Since St-Cyr is part of the defeated and Kohler is one of the Occupiers, Jane likes to use this word lots, the latter drives the Citroën traction avant and only gives his partner his ancient Lebel revolver when it is absolutely necessary.
In his introduction to
all his books Janes puts it this way:
Tapestry is a work of
fiction. Though I have used actual places and times, I have treated these as I
see fit, changing some as appropriate. Occasionally the name of a real person
is used for historical authenticity, but all are deceased and I have made of
them what the story demands. I do not condone what happened during these times.
Indeed, I abhor it. But during the Occupation of France everyday crimes of
murder and arson continued to be committed, and I merely ask, by whom and how
were they solved?
Of these 14 novels I
must advise that you attempt to read them in order:
Mayhem (1992)
Carousel (1992)
Kaleidoscope (1993)
Salamander (1994)
Mannequin (1994)
Dollmaker (1995)
Stonekiller (1995)
Sandman (1996)
Gypsy (1997)
Madrigal (1999)
Beekeeper (2001)
Flykiller (2002)
Bellringer (2012)
Tapestry (2013)
Carnival (2014)
What is astounding
about them (I have yet to read Carnival) is that the first, Mayhem
begins in December, 1942, the Occupation (the only time Janes does not tell us the
exact date and day of the week) and Tapestry begins Paris, Thursday 11 February 1943 at 11.47
p.m.
I assume that Mayhem
may have been sometime mid December of 1942. This means that 14 crimes are
solved in a span of about 10 weeks. I checked with Janes (you never know) and
he replied:
Well, I did what I
thought I should at the time, and yes, all of those first 15 titles take place
one after another in what is really quite a short period of time.
I do not know of any
other novelist who has put his protagonists in such a hurried situation.
Another Janes standard is that in the last few pages of each novel the
detectives are assigned to a next case and somehow the title of the novel is
revealed.
How can two detectives
work so quickly? In the British TV series Wallander (I have seen two) Kenneth
Branagh (I am convinced of this since it cannot all be makeup) looks eternally
spent, with bloodshot eyes, and in one he is almost involved in a crash when
he falls asleep while driving. I am sure they tell Branagh not to sleep for a
few days for effect.
Janes’s Kohler is
smarter than Wallander. He pops Benzedrine which in the 40s Germans called
Messerschmitt Benzedrine. It seems Luftwaffe flyers in the Russian campaign
had little relief and had to fly day and night.
Janes’s beautiful
novels (they are and they are full of details on what it was like to live, day
to day under the yoke of the brutal Germans) are not easy to read. The plots
are complex and the writing reminds me of a blend of Faulkner and Saramago.
‘Time?’
‘At about five thirty
in the afternoon.’
‘Ah, bon. At last
we’re getting somewhere. Now tell me, did they come here often?’
That ‘Ah bon. At last
we’re getting somewhere is not uttered but thought. Often a suspect when
questioned will think, ‘Will he believe me if I only tell him part of the
truth? He was tall and fat.’
Often I have to
re-read to make sure I understand whose saying what. It was Mario Vargas Llosa
years ago who told me during in interview when I visited him in Lima, “I write like that
because I want my reader to be part of the creative process.”
Once you have read one
St-Cyr/Kohler you will warm up to their warm friendship and to their
particularities. Kohler faints at the sight of blood while St-Cyr has a habit
of talking and questioning the dead bodies, “How did you come to be here like
this?”I do know that Janes himself often talks to St-Cyr and Kohler in his backyard garden shed.
For me the common thread in Charyn and Janes’s novels is the lasting
friendship of their protagonists. This theme has cured me from ever wanting to
read another American serial killer novel.
Robert Louis Stevenson who read Dumas’s the Vicomte de Bragallone at
least five times, of his second reading, wrote:
“I would sit down with the Vicomte for a
long, silent, solitary lamp-light evening by the fire. And yet I know not why I
call it silent, when it was enlivened with such clatter of horse-shoes, and
such a rattle of musketry, and such a stir of talk; or why I call these
evenings silent in which I gained so many friends. I would rise from my book
and pull the blind aside, and see the snow and the glittering hollies checker a
Scotch garden, and the winter moonlight brighten the white hills. Thence I
would turn again to the crowded and sunny field of life in which is was so easy
to forget myself, my cares and my surroundings: a place as busy as a city,
bright as a theatre, thronged with memorable faces, and sounding with
delightful speech. I carried the thread of that epic into my slumbers, I woke
with it unbroken, I rejoiced to lunge into the book again at breakfast, it was
with a pang that I must lay it down and turn to my own labours; for no part of
the world has ever seemed to me so charming as these pages, and not even my
friends are quite as real, perhaps quite so dear, as d’Artagnan.”
Janes does insert humour in his novels but
in strange ways. Consider Kohler, in Tapestry, forcing a Parisian socialite to
witness in a morgue the body of a woman, whose death she may have been
responsible. It seems that the woman has previously been dining at that most
famous establishment (during the Occupation only frequented by people with lots
of money, German officers and collaborators) the Tour d’Argent. This is what
happens:
She coughed, she cried, she threw up the
pommes d’amour flambées à l’Amaretto,
the salade féndives de Belgique canard à la presse, caviar russe malossol et
bisque de homand à l’armagnac et huitres à la Florentine, the Romenée-Conti
also, or Nuits-Saint Georges and the champagne, mustn’t forget that, thought
Kohler.
This is especially
funny for me. Both my father and I were famous for only throwing up what had
made us sick. Janes has the woman throw up last to first which would be the
usual!
Without wanting to reveal too much more,
Tapestry is special for me because of this:
‘A knife – but what kind of knife, damn it?
That was no cutthroat.’
The right breast had been cleanly and
deeply sliced open by one slash that extended down through the nipple. The
shoulder had been opened and then the forearm as she had managed to pull free
and had tried to fend him off only to have that arm grabbed again by the other
assailant, the one who had come up behind her. The knife had been pulled away
after she’d been cut open. Blood shot from its blade, lots of blood that had
only at last, dribbled from it.
Had the bastard known how to butcher? Had
he been a butcher?
And later there is this:
The knife that would be used was still
lying on the table before her and…‘An’ old friend,’[he] had said he had brought
from Argentina.
A gaucho’s knife with a long and shallow groove on either side and almost the
whole length of the blade to hold and drain away the blood –her blood – once the
throat had been slashed. He would simply pick it up, grab her by the hair, yank
her head back and cut her throat as he’d done to others, she was certain of
this. A knife whose blade was twenty centimeters long at least, two in width at
the top and razor sharp, with a flattened, S-shaped guard, the handle
beautifully embossed with what looked to be hammered, coppery-silver designs of
crisscrossed triangles, curves, ridges and countless patterns…Whenever possible
they [gauchos] would use no other weapon that the facón each carried at the
waist in its sheath, behind the back.’
Perhaps the knife weighed two hundred
grams. Certainly it must be light for such a length. ‘The gavilán,’ he had said
of it in Argentinian Spanish. ‘The balance has to be absolutely perfect. This
one’s short by a good ten centimeters because I wanted it that way.’
Some years ago J. Robert Janes asked me to
scan my facón, to measure it, to weigh it and to balance it at my finger, the balance
point is right below the guard on the handle.
The facón was given to me as a gift by my
Argentine sailor companions when we finished our service in 1966. How was I to
know then that the gift would be a vicious murder weapon some day?
This week I went to pick up some frozen pizza dough at Calabria Meat Market on Victoria Drive. Calabria Bakery moved to Port Moody so they deal with the Irish owners of the meat market. I spoke to the owner, Mr. Moynihan who is burly ex-rugby player and trained butcher. He explained that the purpose of the indentations of my knife (which really is a small bayonet) is to make it easy to remove it after plunging it or cutting meat. He told me that he had two old German butcher knives. He said they are called Messerschmitt knives.
