“K” is for Joseph Kanon

It is time for the letter “K” at the Alphabet in Crime Fiction at Kerrie Smith’s blog, Mysteries in Paradise. I have chosen the American author Joseph Kanon.

Born in 1946 he studied at Harvard and got a Master’s Degree in English Literature at Trinity College in Cambridge in England.

He then went into the publishing industry where he was an editor and then in management. He was President of E.P. Dutton and an Executive Vice-President of Houghton Mifflin.

Tired of commuting between New York City and Boston and wanting to do something different he took up writing fiction and published his first book, Los Alamos, when he was 49 in 1995. When that book won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel he was onto a writing career that will see his newest book, Istanbul Passage, published earlier this year.

His website advises that he is a winner of the “The Anne Frank Human Writers Award for his writings on the aftermath of the Holocaust”.

From an interview at Simon & Schuster he revealed something of his personality when he said:

Q. Who are your favorite authors?

A. Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Marcel Proust, Evelyn Waugh,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

In an interview with Jesse Kornbluth for Random House Kanon discussed how he wrote Los Alamos:

Kornbluth: What was your writing day like?

Kanon: Five days a week, I went to the public reading room at the New York Public Library. There's enough going on so you don't feel isolated. And when you need a book, the staff is helpful.

Kornbluth: Did you have an outline?

Kanon: Because it's a thriller, you know where it's going to come out. I wrote a thriller because I like to read them. And it forces you to pay attention to the story.

While in New York City I visited the public reading room of the main branch of the New York Public Library and loved the room. Though on vacation I needed to some work one night and went there. It was a wonderful place at which to do my work. My only regret was how early it closed in the evening.

Going back to Kanon, I have read his second book, The Good German. I enjoyed the book a great deal.

Most mysteries do not tackle “big questions”. The Good German was a book on the “big questions” that happened to have a murder mystery involved. Who was a good German during WW II is a challenging question? Reading The Good German will make a reader reflect that there is not a simple answer.