For some reason, I never got around to reading Craig McDonald's second novel, Toros & Torsos. In a way it was a fortuitous oversight, because it meant that I got to spend the last 10 days completely absorbed in the world of Hector Lassiter, reading that and McDonald's third, Print the Legend, back to back. 600-plus pages later, my only regret is that there aren't 600 more... yet.

Anyone who has followed this blog for any length of time has probably already read a Q&A with McDonald. He's the Monday Interview record holder (sorry, Craig, there is no cash prize), having assented to answer four batches of questions. Each time, I learn something new: McDonald knows a hell of a lot more about books and literature than I do.

Print the Legend is the third of seven books to follow Lassiter, a pulp and crime fiction writer who is chums with Ernest Hemingway. In Toros & Torsos, the two get wrapped up in a series of murders that are tied to the surrealist art movement. In Print the Legend, which picks up where T&T ends, it is five years after Hemingway killed himself, and Lassiter is in Idaho looking into some questions about Papa's remaining unpublished work. This is a crime story, however, so there is plenty of intrigue and action along the way.

The genius of these books is that McDonald has created a perfectly believable world in which Lassiter interacts with real people, reacting to actual events (and occasionally bringing them about), and does so in such a way that he doesn't affect what truly took place. He does so with impeccably researched details that add to the verisimilitude without intruding on the story. It's intriguing to read about Hemingway (and I learned more about the man here than in any textbook), but the story would be just as compelling if it were about a fictional character.

There are four more Lassiter books to come, though they follow no chronological order (the nice segue from T&T to PTL was thanks to a new editor at a new publisher), so we'll continue to learn bits and pieces about Lassiter's life as we read.

The only downside is knowing that McDonald has plenty of other work that must wait years to see publication.

To read about McDonald's first author interview collection, Art in the Blood, click here.
To read about McDonald's first novel, Head Games, click here.
To read about McDonald's second author interview collection, Rogue Males, click here.

You've obviously fully absorbed Hemingway's work and done considerable research on the man. But writing in his voice is still quite a challenge. How did that work, and did you get it right the first time?

It’s really up to the reader as to whether I pulled off writing a lost chapter of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, or in drafting Hemingway’s alleged suicide note. In terms of the actual writing of the “lost chapter,” I reread Hemingway’s Feast, then wrote the chapter in a single sitting without very much revision. The suicide note was also written in a single pass.

I think if I’d really gone over and over those pieces, they might have come out as over-thought…over-cooked. Hem’s voice in his letters, which I used to write Hem’s dialogue in my novels, is pretty far away from Hem’s formal fiction prose, so I shot for that tone in the suicide note. Feast had a narrative voice all its own…longer, more interior…not so laconic and stripped down as the prose style most think of when they think of Hemingway’s writing. So I think trying to capture that voice from the memoir, you’re less apt to veer into something that might come across as a contender for the annual Bad Hemingway writing contest.

You have several books in the Lassiter series ready to go. Are you continuing to tweak them? Do you plan to bring all of them out before anything else, and if so, are you building a backlog of work that will eventually see publication when this series is done?

Every once in a while, I’ll make a trip through one of the unpublished books, or lay in a sentence or two. Some of that is driven by new stuff introduced in the editing process…some from just having the books around for so long that I have the luxury of continuing to bind them tightly together. As to when they get published, and in what order, much of that is in the hands of acquiring editors. The editor who brought me over to Macmillan left there just before Print the Legend launched. Together we edited what I expect to be the next novel, Roll the Credits, just before he went on to Little Brown. So at the moment, I’m not certain what might happen next. It’s truly out of my hands.

You've said that the order of the books was changed when you moved to St. Martin's. That makes the most recent two -- Toros & Torsos and Print the Legend work well chronologically. Why was that not the plan before, and how does this reshuffling affect the overall story arc in your eyes?

My original notion was to ease readers into Print the Legend, whose tone is very different from any of the other novels and a world apart from that of Head Games, particularly. No question, Print seems to come right off the end of Toros & Torsos.

But my original plan was to follow Toros with what might be my favorite in the series, a Hector novel set in Paris in one week in 1924 and tied to a nihilistic religious cult and the whole mystique of the Lost Generation. It was my notion, early in the series, to see Hector and Hemingway together in Paris as unknowns before going into the twilight scenes of Print the Legend. Now, what we’re most likely going to end up with, largely, is a sequence of novels with a twenty-something Hector.

There seems to be some playful self-deprecation here in your treatment of the literary scholar Richard early on, with his pursuit of all things Hemingway somewhat mirroring what a reader imagines you have done, to some extent, in your own pursuit of the man. Was this a knowing admission?

Again, that’s probably a call for others to make. I didn’t really see myself as pursuing Hemingway in the way Richard Paulson, Hemingway scholar, does. Richard’s wife, Hannah, indicates Richard tends to go at the surface aura of the man…the houses, the places and bars…the kind of iconic clutter around Hemingway, without really grasping the essence of the writer or of the writings. I’m much more interested in Hemingway as writer and flawed literary innovator. His swaggering, larger-than-life mystique doesn’t entice me. For Richard, on the other hand, well, that’s all he sees.

How is it different writing a character who actually lived vs. one like Lassiter who is entirely fictional?

In a funny, or even unsettling way, Hector ceased to be a fictional character for me some time ago. I put together such a detailed biography and chronology for the character at my first editor’s insistence, that I came to approach him as a living or historical figure and feel an obligation to be as true to Hector’s biography as I am in writing Hemingway, or Dos Passos, or Orson Welles.

Your Lassiter series is historical in nature. Do you foresee yourself ever writing something thoroughly modern in terms of setting?

I’ve got several manuscripts that would fit that description. Some are out there now, being shopped. One or two haven’t really been pushed in that way. You do tend to get typed and I think for the moment, I’m the “historical thriller” guy. For a time, after the interview book Rogue Males was released, I was kind of threatened with being perceived as a nonfiction writer, which is not the way I want to be typed… another reason why I’m very resistant to the possibility of anymore interview books. They tend to muddy the marketing waters, in a dangerous way, and sad to say, in this current milieu, writers have to really be cognizant and protective of “brand.”

Hector bristles at the tag "mystery writer," preferring that his books be labeled "crime fiction." Do you share similar thoughts? What do you make of the ongoing debate over the merits of genre and the general classification of books?

I’m getting that question a lot for some reason… perhaps because Print the Legend takes on that subject full bore. To the first part of your question, I view myself as “a storyteller,” without any qualifiers. My first two novels were sub-headed, “A Novel.” The first cover mock-up of Print the Legend said “A Mystery” and I pitched a fit. We settled on “A Crime Novel,” for Print’s cover.

For my part, I think the tag “mystery” embodies certain expectations on the part of readers… expectations my books do not and never will fulfill. It’s a matter of honest advertising, in that sense. In terms of Hector’s own resistance to the term, when he was writing, “mystery” was a kind of repugnant or dismissive term if you look at most of the writing being done in genre. Hector also went to Paris in the 1920s to be a literary writer in the vein of a Hemingway. But Hector got typed early as a crime writer more in the Chandler/Hammett vein than Christie and company. We see in Print he eventually took radical steps to shrug off that label. The next novel, Roll the Credits, will make more explicit how far Hector went to reinvent himself in the late-1960s.

As to the bigger and perennial literary vs. genre debate, I’ll only observe that you see a lot of literary writers big-footing into the genre pond these days, but no genre writers running the other way. Maybe that’s because “literary fiction” has come to be a term associated with novels unpopulated by compelling characters and devoid of enticing stories… these too-often arid, shrug inducing tomes that are just death to anyone who cares about story.

Labels: crime fiction, Monday Interview

After reading Steve Hamilton's first novel, A Cold Day in Paradise, it didn't take me long to zip through the rest of his seven Alex McKnight novels. The last time I was this captivated by an author and his main protagonist, Michael Connelly was hooking me with his Harry Bosch books.

There are a few similarities there: A police background, a loner who pushes people away and a keen mind that is adept at solving crimes. There are similarities in the writers, too, in that both write extremely well about characters yet don't let that get in the way of deftly plotted stories. Theirs are the kinds of books that reveal the whole "style over substance" argument as it relates to crime fiction a sham.

If Hamilton's new novel is any indication, he and Connelly are soon to share another trait: successful novelists who are able to weave together a career alternating between series books and top-notch stand-alones. Connelly has proven adept at the practice, and Hamilton, with The Lock Artist, proves he is more than up to the task.

Instead of McKnight, a former pro baseball player and cop who now lives in a cabin in the remote Upper Peninsula of Michigan, we get Michael, someone once know as "the miracle boy" who now is a talented lock picker and safecracker. He is unlucky enough to show off his skills in the wrong company, and now he is forced into a life of crime. Further complicating things is that that "miracle" event left him unable to speak, so the best way he can communicate is through his detailed, skillful drawings. (If you want more than that, look around the web. Hamilton plays with time here, so to give away much more is to give away too much).

With this book, Hamilton has stepped up his game. Though the McKnight books are awfully good, The Lock Artist is the best thing he has done, a cleverly plotted, sophisticated story full of rich, well-drawn characters that leap off of the page. It should be a career-defining book, sating the appetites of patient fans pining for the next McKnight book, and drawing in many more who have been oblivious to this top-flight talent.

TIRBD: From a reader's perspective, The Lock Artist is a book that clearly takes your writing to another level and is quite different in almost every aspect from the McKnight books. Does it feel that way from your perspective, and what signifies the differences for you?

SH: It does feel a lot different, yes. It’s a younger character, and the overall feeling in the book ties in a lot more closely to things I’ve felt in my own life. Not so much the lockpicking and safecracking, obviously, but the feeling of alienation and loneliness. With Michael, that feeling is a lot more dramatic, but otherwise the whole story could be like a strange dream version of my own teenage years.

You mention that writing Michael allowed you to write about alienation and loneliness. But Alex McKnight certainly deals with both of those things, too. How was this different?

I suppose you could do some psychoanalysis on me and find out why that's such a recurrent theme – but in this new book those feelings hit a lot closer to home for me. Alex has his own brand of solitude, of course, but he was a good 10 years older than me when I first started writing about him (funny how I seem to be catching up to him now), and he'd already been through a career as a cop, a divorce, and a lot of other things that I can only imagine. In Michael's case, he's 17 and his life hasn't even started yet. So, that's something I could definitely relate to, looking back at that same point in my own life.

The book is quite specific in its detail about how to pick locks and crack safes, and has the feel of being more than a recitation of research. Did you try your hand at these things to get a feel for them and better your descriptions of the act?

I was fortunate enough to work with a lock expert – somebody who knows a lot about lockpicking and even more so about opening those $5 combination locks you see on every gym locker. (Very easy to open, it turns out.) I also found a gentleman who happens to be one of the best safecrackers in the world. He was incredibly kind and generous in helping me to understand what it feels like to open a huge, 800-pound safe. (He’s not a criminal, by the way! He’s a legal safecracker and that’s the only thing he does, every single day.)

Is technology getting to the point where a book like this might one day be historical fiction because everything will be electronic and skills like these will be dated?

Apparently (and don’t quote me on this), the electronic safes are fairly easy to crack if you have a special computer that can transmit the different codes at a high speed. There’s something about a good old-fashioned metal combination dial that people just naturally trust. I don’t think that’ll change for quite a while.

I would imagine that the character of Mike evolved for you as layers were added: young kid who suffered a tragedy and can now pick locks and can't speak and is a great artist... did you worry at any point that you'd gone perhaps one step too far in giving Mike things to deal with, or did all of these seem vital from the start in terms of telling the story you wanted to tell?

It all started with the fascination with locks, and how that tied back to this thing that had happened to him. The muteness literally didn’t occur to me until I got to his first line of dialogue. Then it was just like, No, he’s not going to talk! That’s going to be the thing he has to deal with, every moment of every day. The talent with art followed after that, because without speaking he needs some way to impress a girl, right? Otherwise, it’s hopeless.

You set up an interesting premise that is fairly unique in crime and mystery fiction: the protagonist who is forced to use his skills in criminal pursuits. How does it change the dynamics of a crime story when there isn't the clear cut choice between doing right or wrong?

Mike does know it’s wrong, of course, but he does it anyway, because it’s essentially the best choice he has. Although the first time was clearly a mistake, letting himself get roped into this seemingly innocent thing, because he succumbs to the basic idea of finally being popular at school. Eventually, he’s on the edge of becoming a full-fledged criminal, but at that point it’s just about impossible to turn back. He does it for what he sees as a perfectly justifiable reason – to protect the one person he’s ever loved.

You mention on your web site that you're back at work on another McKnight book. Does that process feel different now that you've been away for two books? Do you bring anything to it this time out that you learned from writing those other books that you might not have otherwise?

That was the idea. Take some time away from the series, recharge my batteries, become a better writer. (And never, ever get to the point where you’re just mailing it in!) I didn’t plan on doing two books outside the series – this new one just sort of got in my head and wouldn’t leave – but I’m glad it all turned out that way. Now that I’m back to work on the next Alex McKnight book, it all feels new again.

Given the success of The Lock Artist, do you foresee a new schedule that finds you alternating between series and non-series books like Michael Connelly, Laura Lippman and many others now do?

Absolutely yes. I’ll keep doing new and different things, and I’ll keep going back. (As long as people are reading the books, anyway.)

What is the status of the various film projects associated with your McKnight books?

I’ve been working (and reworking and reworking) on the “Cold Day” screenplay with Nick Childs – the director I worked with on “The Shovel.” He hopes to get that off the ground this year. Actually, this new book might get adapted first! There’s been some real interest, and talks are ongoing, as they say. Just think about it – some young actor gets to be in every scene, without ever having a line of dialogue! Talk about a breakout role, eh?

Labels: books, crime fiction, Monday Interview

I started reading Ed Gorman because I felt I should; I keep reading him because his books are always entertaining and captivating, and I love his voice.

As an arts & entertainment writer for five years with the daily newspaper in Gorman's hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, I somehow never read Gorman's work. I'm a mystery and crime fiction fan, but there was another guy on staff who was a Gorman fan who snapped up his books to review. Practicing the same snobbish conceit that I find so distasteful in others, I decided that someone from Cedar Rapids probably wasn't worth following, and dismissed the glowing reviews as little more than fealty to a local author.

I left that job for another a few years ago. Later, I helped to set up a (still pending) event in support of the Iowa City library featuring Gorman and fellow Iowa mystery writer Max Allan Collins of Muscatine. I'm slated to moderate a discussion between the two at some point, and figured that I had better familiarize myself with Gorman's work (I've already read a lot of Collins). That was 18 months ago. In the time since, I've read a dozen or so of Gorman's books, including a smattering of the Sam McCain novels and at least one each of his other series. A couple of his excellent stand-alones, including Cage of Night and The Midnight Room also made the list. I can't include Sleeping Dogs in that list of excellent stand-alones, because Gorman just announced that a follow-up to that political thriller, Stranglehold, is due in November.

The discovery of this new favorite author is bittersweet: While I now have dozens of books I know I'll like that I can pick up whenever I need a good mystery to read, I kick myself for ignoring what was under my nose for so long. If asked to describe what I like about Gorman's work, I might be hard-pressed. The closest I can come is that his books are always real. Even with the most fantastic of the stories he spins, I can imagine them unfolding in exactly the way he describes. These are no-nonsense tales with just the right mix of grit, intrigue and humor.

And he keeps getting better. While I found the first McCain book a bit precious thanks to its 1950s sock hop-era setting, the character was compelling enough to hook me. In the latest McCain novel, Ticket to Ride, we're now in the 1960s, and race relations (and their violent underpinnings at the time) drive much of the plot. McCain is a deeper, richer character thanks to the story that Gorman has developed over the books that bridge the gap, and Gorman's voice, always a key draw for me, is deeper and richer as well.

You can learn a little about Gorman and a lot about authors of mystery and western fiction on Gorman's blog. He's not only a chief purveyor of both genres, but something of an amateur historian as well. He does all of this while battling multiple myeloma, a cancer that, while treatable, is not curable. He is candid about that on the blog, occasionally taking a break to deal with treatments.

Some have reported that Ticket to Ride is the last McCain novel, but despite all that Gorman is dealing with, he assures us below that more will follow. That's good. While it will be years before I catch up with all of his output, it's nice to know that list will continue to grow.

TIRBD: From all indications, Ticket to Ride is the last Sam McCain novel. If true, did you set out to tell a story with this particular arc of books, or are there other reasons behind drawing things to a close?

EG: Originally, my first editor on the series wanted me to take McCain into the Seventies. I had some doubts about that, but one night at dinner with Max and Barb Collins Max came up with an idea for a final McCain. I liked it and told my current editor about it. Then the editor and I started kicking around ideas for a few more books to do before the final one. So there’ll be a few more.

You have written very candidly about your cancer and its treatment on your blog. Beyond the obvious affect on your energy and ability to spend time on it, how has it effected your writing?

The first time I was diagnosed with cancer I took it on as an experience.The prognosis was very good and I wasn't unduly afraid. People thought I was in denial, in fact. But the second time when the prognosis was a cancer that was treatable but incurable, that made me more insular and introspective than I've ever been. I'm not sure how this has effected my writing. I think the characters in my darker stories have always been fatalistic. I suppose they're more than way now.

Most of your books are set here in Eastern Iowa. Has that ever felt constraining? Do you ever feel as if your work is judged differently because of that setting?

Well, even though the McCains constitute my longest series, they’re a small part of my resume. I don’t find them constraining because I know that after I finish one I’ll do a very different kind of book. For instance in July a very dark thriller called The Midnight Room came out. Completely different from the McCains. As for the Iowa stigma, oh yeah it’s still operational. I once spoke to a very hoity-toity critic who said that he’d looked at a McCain but he just couldn’t imagine reading a book set in Iowa. It’s stupid snobbery but just part of the flyover country joke. And yes I'm sure there are readers who share his bias. Who the hell would want to read about Iowa?

Through your blog, your work with magazines and your general efforts to support the work of other writers, it seems safe to say you're among a handful of the most-beloved crime fiction writers out there. What is it about the genre that appeals to you so that makes you give so much toward nurturing and sustaining it?

Well, I don’t know how beloved I am but I have tried to help new writers because so many writers — especially Max Collins — helped me when I shifted from short stories to novels. I know a number of established writers who lend a hand when they feel there’s something they can actually do. But the New York publishing scene is in such disarray that even most established writers are scrambling so helping new writers gets more and more problematic.

In your conversations with other writers, do you mull over problems in stories, spitball ideas or collaborate informally on projects?

Not very often. If I do it’s usually with Max or our friend Bob Randisi or the agent all three of us share.

I know you have an incredible grasp on the history of crime fiction and Westerns. What are a few books that you wish you had written and why?

Wow. That would be a long, long list if I put any thought to it. Off the top of my head I'd say Axe by Donald Westlake, The Chill by Ross Macdonald, How Like An Angel by Margaret Millar (Ross' wife), A Key To The Suite by John D. MacDonald, just about any of Simenon's psychological suspense novels. As for westerns, True Grit by Charles Portis, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, Valdez is Coming by Elmore Leonard, A Partnership with Death by Clifton Adams and the short stories of H.R. De Rosso.

You came out of the advertising world when you began writing. At what point did you see yourself more as a novelist than an ad man? Did that experience give you anything that gave you a leg up as you transitioned to that new role?

I’ve been asked this many times. I worked for five agencies by the time I was done and I was a terrible employee at each. A champion slacker. I divided my time by trying to figure out how I could get out of anything that resembled work and working out plots for the downscale men’s magazines I was secretly selling to. I just sort of passed through without leaving anything behind or taking anything along.

Labels: books, crime fiction, Monday Interview

Another great new venue for crime fiction writers has debuted in the UK, and the results are well worth figuring out how to convert pounds to dollars so you can import them to your mailbox.

Crime Express, a new series from Five Leaves Publishing, offers a series of short crime stories each published as a short pocket book. They retail for 4.99 pounds (about $8), and are short enough to devour in one sitting. Consider them something between a short story and a novella, something perfect to keep with you for those times when you have half an hour to kill.

If you can hold off that long, that is. The first I've read, Allan Guthrie's Killing Mum, is a ripping good read in the vein of his longer works. Hitman Carlos Morales gets an unusual job: killing his mother. But who ordered the hit? And how could he possibly pull the trigger? With 15,000 words to tell the tale, Guthrie doesn't make the reader wait long to find out the answers, yet that amount of space allows for more development and description than your typical short story.

Other authors in the series include Ray Banks (Gun), John Harvey (Trouble in Mind) and Lawrence Block (Speaking of Lust).The Block book was shortlisted for the Crime Writers Association short story Dagger this year. There are 10 Crime Express titles to date.

Five Leaves Director Ross Bradshaw answered a few questions about this exciting new series.

TIRBD: What was the genesis of the series and how does the work to date compare with that initial idea?

RB: For years I had the notion of publishing long short stories/short novellas, call them what you will. It stemmed from a couple of books I read, not crime, one being Swimmer in the Secret Sea by William Kotzwinkle, the other being Rain by Kirsty Gunn. I was impressed with what you could do with fiction that length. By chance I'm bringing out the Kotzwinkle in a new edition in the autumn, but that is by the by. Then I thought "series," and then I felt that crime fiction would fit the series notion best of all. I know a fair amount of crime fiction writers and the first three I asked (John Harvey, Stephen Booth and Rod Duncan) were excited to try to write to the length I had in mind, 15,000/16,000 words, 20,000 max. It is quite a challenge writing to that length. And I thought they would work better as a stand alone imprint. Maybe get people following the series, collecting the set.

How are the authors chosen and what guidance are they given?

After those three David Belbin, a local writer best known for his young adult material but someone with a big interest in adult crime fiction, and the short story, came in as series editor. He'd already done the desk editing on the first three and years ago he'd edited an anthology of Nottingham crime short stories for us, City of Crime (boy did that title go down well with the then leader of our local Council). Dave's been steadily building the list, and through everyday networking he gets the writers. I know he is concerned that the books work to their own length and are not a full length novel trying desperately to break out. That has implications for plot and character, and the number of characters of course.

I know the Lawrence Block story is a reprint from an anthology he edited. Do you foresee other opportunities to single out and highlight work that might otherwise have been overlooked?

Dave's a big fan of Block and that story had been buried in a small press anthology series in the US that disappeared after two books, which was barely seen on this side of the pond. We were pleased to get such a big name on the list but after that the series has been, and will remain, all new work commissioned by us. Unfortunately we don't have the time to read unsolicited material.

Is there an endpoint for the series, or will you keep things going as long as authors contribute and readers pick them up?

We've published eight so far. Some have sold very well, some less so. Unfortunately the major chains in the UK are not keen on the A6 size. When Murder One closed in London that meant that there is not a single crime shop in Britain (unlike the USA where there are many great independent mystery bookshops) which means we are very much in the hands of the big chain buyers. They are not keen on the format so we are looking at relaunching the series next spring. Same length, still Crime Express, but perhaps not the smaller format. Pity. A lot of readers did like that shape but the chains, the chains... We've commissioned a few ahead already.

How does it fit in with Five Leaves' overall mission?

Five Leaves has done a few full length crime fiction books, but I thought the short ones would be better as a stand alone imprint. Al Guthrie and the previous book by Ray Banks are darker than the books we normally publish, but that is no bad thing. I don't think we'll go dark completely on the crime front but it seems to me that some of the most exciting crime fiction around is on the dark side. As to our overall mission... if I ever draw up a mission statement feel free to shoot me. Five Leaves publishes the books that excite us... social history, Jewish culture, young adult, a bit of poetry, a bit of this, a bit of that. And crime fiction.

Labels: Allan Guthrie, Crime Express, crime fiction, Lawrence Block, Ray Banks

As a crime fiction fan who feels as if he is just now scratching the surface of the genre's history thanks to folks like Charles Ardai at Hard Case Crime and authors Craig McDonald, Bill Crider and Ed Gorman, I know I have a lot of catching up to do. The folks at Stark House Press, or rather, publisher Greg Shepard, are helping and/or adding to that task by unearthing some lost classics. Stark House's latest find is a trio of books by Harry Whittington, rightly called "the King of the Paperbacks" (Note right off the bat that this is not the same Whittington who was shot in the face by Dick Cheney).

Whittington wrote around 200 books in his life (1915-1989), and while they're hard to track down, they are worth it. Stark House makes it easy to dive in, gathering three in one new book: To Find Cora, Like Mink Like Murder and Body & Passion. Before diving into those, a little history, thanks to David Laurence Wilson, the man who found these books and, in the case of at least one, significantly edited it to return it to Whittington's original form.

In an illuminating essay that reads a bit like bracing crime fiction itself, "Harry and his Bastard Children," Wilson details his quest to identify and locate 39 books Whittington alluded to but never revealed. Midway through his career, Whittington signed a deal wherein he would write one 60,000-word novel each month for $1,000. He did this for 38 or 39 months (reports seem to vary). He wasn't proud of these, and they certainly wore on him: "The novel a month with the other work I was trying to do, plus the tensions and the debts, exhausted me. Emotionally. Mentally. Physically. I cried at weather reports," he wrote in the essay, "I Remember It Well," which was printed in 1980s Black Lizard reprints of his books.

Wilson recounts his efforts to locate these books, and I won't spoil it by sharing details, but suffice to say much of his effort was rewarded. One of the books he uncovered is the second one in this volume, Like Mink Like Murder. Rejected by U.S. publishers, it was issued in a different form in France in 1957 as Ta's Des Visions! loosely translated as, "you're seeing things." It made it to English audiences in yet another form as Passion Hangover in 1965 (under the pen name J. X. Williams). Wilson edited it for this edition, trying to capture Whittington's original intent: "Distracting add-ons were removed. it was a feat of subtraction, bringing Like Mink Like Murder into the main current of Harry's storytelling. Everybody was always 'gazing' and 'srugging' in the (1965) novel. You will find less of that here." Wilson cut it from 55,000 words to 36,000, and the result is a taut thriller that does everything a Whittington book should do, placing an average guy who has made some dumb choices directly in the path of trouble, and then watching him try to extricate himself.

The other books, while not as rare, certainly were difficult to obtain before now and are real finds. To Find Cora is a 1963 book original published under the misleading title, Cora is a Nympho! (They loved their exclamation points back then), while Body & Passion was published in 1952 under the pen name Whit Harrison (one of several, including Harry White,Hallam Whitney and Henri Whittier used by Whittington).

All three are great reads if you're a fan of 1950s and '60s pulp. When you're done with those, Stark House has an earlier book that collects two more Whittington's: A Night for Screaming and Any Woman He Wanted. Others are available if you dig. I picked up Web of Murder online, and grabbed Ticket to Hell on a recent visit to Once Upon a Crime in Minneapolis. Yes, that means I've only read five out of nearly 200, but it also means that any time I want a quick dose of vintage crime fiction, there will be plenty from which to choose.

Labels: crime fiction, Harry Whittington

You see a list of Marcus Sakey's published works -- four novels and stories in five prominent short story collections -- and you figure the guy has been at this a while. Then you look at the publication date on the first novel, The Blade Itself, do the math, and then maybe figure the guy is a hack, cranking out the four books and those stories in just two years.

Wrong on both counts. Sakey really has been in the game just more than two years, but he's no hack. Each of his novels is a page-turner with real social and moral issues at their center -- the kind of work that has made George Pelecanos a household name.

He returns this month with The Amateurs. While I still think his debut is his best work to date, I'd rank this second-best and would allow little debate. The amateurs in the title are four friends in their early 30s who gather every Thursday for drinks. Alex tends bar there, wishing he could make more so he could keep up child-support payments. Jenn is a travel agent longing to go to some of the places she sends others. Ian is a trader whose last big deal is a fading memory. Mitch is a doorman who longs for Jenn.

One night, playing a game of "what if?" Alex mentions that his boss, the shady Johnny Love, is doing a big cash deal soon and they could rob him and solve all of their problems. The discussion, lighthearted at first, becomes much more serious as each thinks of what they could do with the money. They pull off the robbery, but things go very wrong, sending the four friends into a downward spiral that, in Sakey's hands, makes for a very gripping tale.

Along the way, Sakey educates the reader about things I can reveal without giving away the plot -- such as game theory -- and others that I cannot. The result is a tightly plotted crime story that hits home because it's protagonists are the kind of people who could be reading a book like Sakey's, looking to escape their dreary day-to-day. Most of us are content to lose ourselves in the worlds created by fiction writers. Here's what happens to four friends for which that isn't enough.

TIRBD: To a certain extent, the protagonists of your first two books had things dropped in their laps, while the two most recent books find your characters bringing things on directly through their choices and actions. Does this shift require a different approach in terms of plotting and characterization? Is it more difficult to make these people sympathetic in the eyes of your readers?

MS: I like to write about people who have made mistakes, whether you're talking about mistakes of the past--the first two books--or whether you're seeing them make the tragic mistakes of their life, as in Good People and The Amateurs. But yes, I do think it's harder to evoke sympathy for characters when they are doing things that are morally questionable or even flat-out despicable.

But that's part of the joy of fiction, in my humble. I like following characters that I believe in as people, that aren't just white-hat/black-hat.

Without giving anything away, it seems as if some significant research was required for this one. Did you set out with the need to learn about specific things, or did things unfold in a less linear fashion that ultimately led you to stage events in the way you did?

All of the books have involved a fair bit of research, but each one has been quite different, and you're right, this one did require some specialized delving. I did set out to learn specific things; I need to have an idea of where I'm going. At the same time, I want to leave myself open to surprising possibility. Without giving away too much, the climax of the novel actually came directly out of something I learned in the research process.

One thing that I've always been struck by is how willing people are to help. From cops to soldiers to university professors to medical examiners, people are delighted to tell you about what they do, and to answer detailed, often stupid questions about their fields. And thank god, 'cause I've got no shortage of stupid questions.

Game theory plays a role in how events transpire in the book. What led you to use this as a device? Are you surprised, given the way the Prisoner's Dilemma so clearly plays a part in crime in general, that it is not used more overtly in crime fiction?

Funny thing, the original title of the novel was actually Game Theory.

I was a poli sci major at U of M, and one of the most fascinating classes I ever took was on game theory and persuasion. The professor was ridiculously brilliant, an ass-kicker, and his ideas about how game logic applied to decisions that literally shape the world just blew my mind.

Prisoner's Dilemma is an elegant little game. It works like this: two men are arrested for a crime, and the cops only have enough evidence to hit the for a minor term, so they split them up and question them. If both keep quiet, they'll get six months, and then they're free. If both talk, the cops nail 'em for five years. But the worst case of all is the "sucker's payout"--one of them talks, the other doesn't. The one who talks walks free; the other gets ten years.

So the question is, what do you do? Because the stakes are so high, the best solutions aren't those that rely on "soft" concepts like trust and friendship, but rather on hard, iterative logic. And that's an interesting idea, especially if you imagine taking it off the blackboard and into your life.

You continue to set your books in the Chicago area. That obviously makes it easier for you to sprinkle in geographic details, but does it present challenges as well because you must ground your settings in real life somewhat rather than simply create something from whole cloth to satisfy the story?

Actually, I find that it opens up opportunities. As I go through life, I'm always looking for interesting places to set a scene, bars that have just the right tone for a fight, sunlit streets for bad men to walk down. I love it. And when I need to, I can, and do, create things that don't exist. Sometimes that's the best solution.

Oddly, the book I'm working on now is set mostly in Los Angeles. That is challenging for me, mostly because I don't know it as intimately as I'd like.

You shifted two books ago from Minotaur to Dutton. Has that changed anything for you, or is it simply a matter of dealing with different people once you turn in your book?

One of the big reasons I shifted was to stay with my editor, a guy named Ben Sevier. He's remarkable, and was the one who first signed me, so the move was actually about keeping things the same.

Your first three books all have been optioned for films. What is the status of these projects, and does the knowledge that No. 4 and beyond are likely headed for a similar fate affect you at all (consciously during the writing or perhaps something subconscious that you detect after the fact) as you write?

I've been very fortunate. The Blade Itself was optioned by Ben Affleck's production company; there is an approved draft of the script, and talent attached that I'm not supposed to talk about yet. At the City's Edge was recently snagged by the producer of "The Departed," and the director of a wicked claustrophobic film called "Felon." And Good People went to Tobey Maguire, with Kelly Masterson ("Before the Devil Knows You're Dead") adapting.

Obviously, I hope that The Amateurs and future novels will have a similar fate. But it doesn't really effect the way I write. I think I've always written somewhat cinematically, probably as a result of having watched a lot of movies, and also of having worked in advertising. I tend to picture the scenes I'm writing, and to include only the details that bring those scenes to life.

Since we first talked two years ago, authors seem to have been given even more responsibility to get word about their own work. You're on Twitter and Facebook and still blog as part of the Outfit. Do get as much as you give to these efforts?

Well, I enjoy interacting with book people, so it's not really work.

But if your question is whether I believe those things lead to more sales, the answer is a qualified yes. It will never replace actually working your ass off to write a great novel. But it certainly helps to have a dedicated fan base.

Beyond that, there are some other benefits as well. Social networks are a great place to get feedback, to bounce ideas off a large group. Both Facebook and Twitter offer an opportunity to post questions and ask advice. I've requested research help and gotten immediate, helpful results; I've posted about contests and tailored them according to the responses. It makes the communication more two-way, which is wonderful.

Labels: crime fiction, Marcus Sakey, Monday Interview

The cat is out of the bag. Or perhaps it's more fitting to say the hound of the Baskervilles. Hard Case Crime head Charles Ardai had been trying to keep secret the identity of the imprint's second December book, but Amazon.com's aggressive advance ordering policies have unveiled the title before its time, so Ardai has fessed up: It's Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear.

It's an ingenious move, the country's best crime fiction imprint bringing out what has been called the first hard-boiled detective story. The book was Doyle's fourth and final to feature Sherlock Holmes. Doyle penned 56 short stories featuring the detective, but only four novels. This one according to Wikipedia, is a standalone of sorts, making it both a good introduction for a generation of crime fiction fans who have relegated Holmes to the dusty shelves of history, and a perfect entry for a series that invites impulse buys. It follows The House of the Baskervilles, Doyle's most famous work, coming 13 years after that book.

Ardai and Co. aren't playing up the Holmes connection. As you can see, the cover is as lurid as any other HCC title, and the author is listed as "A.C. Doyle."

"It's the very hard-boiled story of a man murdered by a blast from a sawed-off shotgun to the face at point-blank range; of a criminal on the run from Chicago who comes to a dirty Pennsylvania coal-mining town and winds up locking horns with the corrupt Masonic lodge that runs the town; of a Pinkerton detective who sets out to clean up the town; and of the doom that pursues a man across an ocean and leaves him at the mercy of the world's most ruthless criminal mastermind," Ardai writes. "It's a story narrated by a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, whose partner in investigating the twisted plot is a drug addicted private investigator with a brain like a steel trap."

I'm in. Reading the sample chapter HCC provides, it's clear that Doyle's 1915 text will take some getting used to, but once you catch the rhythm of his prose, it's easy to sink right in. To sample more, you can check out online repositories like this one that offer the text in full. Me, I'll wait for the bound copy, thanks.

Labels: crime fiction, Hard Case Crime

After two titles in December -- one of which thus far is a surprise -- the folks at Hard Case Crime are making us wait until April for the next one. But that April book is a doozy, the last book from Donald E. Westlake.

Memory is a manuscript that Westlake's friend and peer (and fellow HCC author), Lawrence Block, brought to the attention of HCC's head Charles Ardai. After Westlake's death last New Year's Eve, it seemed as if HCC's Cutie, would be his last book (it was also his first, though long out of print) . According to Ardai, Westlake wrote Memory in the early 1960s "but set it aside when his literary agent advised him that it was too literary and encouraged him to concentrate on more commercial sorts of crime fiction."

Sounds like it will be worth the wait. It will be Westlake's fifth book with HCC (including Lemons Never Lie under his Richard Stark pseudonym), and the first to be previously unpublished. Speaking of the wait, don't all of us loyal HCC readers have a book or two still on the shelf to pick up to help pass the time? I know I do. That makes the news about the imprint's slowing publishing schedule easier to stomach. After four years of publishing a book each month (after half a year of publishing two a month at the start), HCC is shifting to an every-other-month schedule.

Ardai writes that the move is "largely to give us a bit more time to work on and drum up attention for each novel, and to give readers more time to digest them all." I've been hopping around in my series reading the past few months, having somehow moved from Jason Starr's predictably solid reprint Fake I.D. to the forthcoming Losers Live Longer from Russell Atwood. The latter is a complicated but gripping tale that unfolds over the course of just a few days in New York's East Village. At times I felt like I should have been keeping notes, but Atwood pulls it all together and makes everything work.

Ardai won't lack for things to do with the slowing publication schedule. His Gabriel Hunt adventure novels seem scheduled to fill the gaps, meaning he'll still have the same number of books to edit as always. The Hunt novels tell of adventurer Gabriel Hunt, and while they're all published under that name, various thriller and crime fiction writers hold the pens. To show how busy Ardai is, he wrote the second Hunt novel, Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear, out now. It's a rip snorting read, full of action and twists and turns as Hunt heads all over the globe.

Labels: crime fiction, Hard Case Crime

Any time I think about Craig McDonald, two things come to mind. First, if you think you know a lot about crime fiction, at best you're in second place. McDonald is a like a walking encyclopedia of the genre. Second, knowing all of that information doesn't guarantee that one's own efforts at writing crime fiction would succeed, but McDonald's two novels prove it certainly doesn't hurt.

I first came to McDonald's work through the book Art in the Blood. The book gathers 20 long interviews McDonald conducted with crime fiction writers like Ken Bruen, George Pelecanos, Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin and Dennis Lehane. It was a fantastic book that revealed new information about these oft-interviewed subjects. McDonald was able to get them to open up because his preparation was so thorough. He reads everything a subject has written -- usually more than once -- and prepares fastidiously to take the conversation in new directions.

His crime fiction debut, Head Games, followed. It was a treat, a historical fiction that never let the research get in the way of the ripping yarn McDonald unfolded. It was the beginning of a series featuring pulp fiction writer Hector Lassiter. Another interview book was to follow, but the success of that Edgar-nominated novel forced the non-fiction title to the backburner so the Lassiter follow-up, Toros & Torsos, could be issued.

That brings us to the present, when that second interview collection, Rogue Males is now on shelves. It again gathers interviews with crime fiction writers (and two musician-authors: Tom Russell and Kinky Friedman), offering rich profiles of Bruen, James Sallis, Daniel Woodrell, Lee Child and more. The most interesting section is one featuring extended narratives with Sallis and Bruen drawn from a long weekend spent with each (and later, together) in Arizona. McDonald veers from the Q&A format used for the rest of the book here, and the result allows him to inject more of himself into the proceedings.

It's another illuminating collection that whets the appetite for more. Though McDonald says he has plenty of content for future volumes, however, he says it's unlikely. The Lassiter series is his main focus these days. Here's hoping he finds the time (and a willing publisher) to balance the two. These collections are indispensable for crime fiction fans.

What follows is McDonald's third Monday Interview (the others are here and here). He's the first to hit that mark, and I can't think of a more fitting subject to do so.

TIRBD: You're back for round two in terms of interview books. Did you learn anything from the first that you applied to the second?

CM: The interview tactics stayed the same. For me, the crucial difference between Art in the Blood and Rogue Males is my role in the two books. As Ken Bruen sharply seized on in his foreword to Art, my private goal in that book was to disappear, so to speak — to not become a distracting presence. In Rogue Males, I was trying for what Hemingway termed remate. In Rogue Males, I aimed to portray myself and my journey toward fiction writing through something like “ricochet.”

You're also now a twice-published novelist. Did the process of publishing and being interviewed yourself affect your own interview process or the way you put this book together?

Head Games and Rogue Males were sold as a package deal back in ’06, I think. With the exception of the Elmore Leonard interview, Rogue Males was wrapped before I even finished Head Games. But the awards attention for my first novel made it necessary to put out my second novel ahead of Rogue Males.

Frankly, Rogue Males was actually an outgrowth of the fact that I’d recklessly signed away all my foreign rights to Art in the Blood in my pre-agented days. Suddenly, my agent was getting inquiries about Art for foreign publication, but we couldn’t take advantage of those opportunities. So I put together Rogue Males, drawing largely upon a huge reservoir of interviews with writers who struck me as being of a “type.” At this point, I could easily do a third — perhaps even a fourth — interview collection if there was an opportunity to do so, but my gut instinct is these will be the only two I’ll have out there. I have a version on my hard-drive of a female version of Rogue Males, but so far, nobody’s knocking down my door to acquire that book.

You went back to talk with some authors already covered in the first book. Did you try any new methods to get them to reveal more? Did the passage of time affect the way you viewed them as artists? Did anyone contradict themselves?

There were no contradictions that I can recall. I think in the first interview I conducted with James Ellroy I reached a kind of connection with him that carried us through the subsequent two interviews contained in Rogue Males. I’ve interviewed Lee Child several times and he’s very candid. The author I think I’ve interviewed the most is Michael Connelly. At this point, I could probably do a smallish book just collecting those interviews. I think Michael has spoken on the record with me at least five times, maybe six. A lot of the material from those discussions is still not out there.

So far as changing attitudes go, with the Rogue Males repeats, the authors are there because I think well of them and respect their work. I can’t think of any particular author I’d duck based on past experience. That said, there are several authors I’ve passed on interviewing, mostly based on their reputation for showing themselves. Life’s too short. And in most cases, their work doesn’t speak to me, anyway. And before you ask, sorry, but they’ll remain nameless, and deservedly.

Your backgrounding is so thorough that I wonder if you have time to read anything other than these authors. You mention reading some of their books several times, and seem to read every word they've ever written before doing these interviews. How is it possible to fit it all in?

Back in the interviewing days, I could do a ton more reading than I can now. The bulk of my reading now is tied to my own work. I’m mostly writing historical fiction, so that requires a certain investment of reading time directed toward what I write. For various reasons, this year marks the first time in several years I’m reading deeply and widely again in genre. Candidly, I’m finding it a pretty headshaking experience. It would be great to find a new writer who would grab me as Woodrell, Sallis, Bruen, Ellroy or Megan Abbott did, but so far...

I particularly enjoyed the narrative presentation of the Bruen/Sallis section. What led you to take that tack after using the Q&A format up to that point? And while you clearly appreciate the work of the other authors in the book, I know you have a special fondness for these two. What was it like on a personal level to spend time with them?

I think my own reaction to those two comes through pretty strongly and accurately in Rogue Males. Arizona marked the first time I’d actually met Ken, face-to-face. He was frank and funny and although he was exhausted by his book tour at that point when we met up in the desert, he was wonderful and wry. James Sallis I’d been reading and re-reading for some time. James is truly a delight to spend time with and he’s an excellent interview subject and a natural and powerful teacher. I’d learned a lot from him, on the page and in person.

I originally set the Ken and Jim interviews in Q&A format, then decided that format didn’t serve the material well. So I recast it in prose form. I was deep into writing Head Games at the same time, and the voices and terrain and even some of the subtext of those two pieces of writing blended and infiltrated one another. If I ever should find myself interviewing another author, I think I’ll probably go the narrative route.

Where do things stand with the announced graphic novel of Head Games? Any film interest in the books thus far?

Head Games, the graphic novel, is still in the pipeline. It’s with First Second, and now that I’ve moved the Hector Lassiter series to Minotaur Books, Hector is now pretty much contained in the Flat Iron Building in all his various English-language forms.

So far as film interest in Head Games, I’m adapting it to script format now. There was intense and pretty heady Hollywood interest in the novel when the publishing deal was first announced. But as is so often the case with this stuff, it never quite came together. There’s nearly always someone nibbling, but getting a bite…

From the way things sound on your web site, the third book in the series already is in the can and the fourth is under way if not already written. Do you have the entire series mapped out?

Actually, the entire series is finished. By the time Head Games was announced as an Edgar Award finalist, I was writing the last pages of what I then considered the seventh and last novel in the series.

Of course the “finished” books undergo an editing process, but I’ve had the extremely rare opportunity to live with the series for some time and to tweak and polish and tie together the various installments into what I hope functions as a fully-integrated series on a level other crime series can never aspire to attain. Essentially, it’s one big book. I also added an eighth entry that I completed a few weeks ago. That pretty much closes out that enterprise. Now it’s a matter of reader support justifying the publication of the remaining four novels.

If I recall correctly, you also have a few other unpublished novels sitting around. Is it time to bust out a pseudonym?

Funny you should say... I’ve had some inquiries. Unlike some other recent crime novelists who’ve gone down that road, if I did it, I wouldn’t hide in plain sight. In other words, if I should ever do it, I’ll go out there under a cloak of anonymity as the fellas like Cornell Woolrich and others did in the old days. It wouldn’t be a winking, “Craig McDonald writing as” kind of gambit.

But for the moment, my focus is squarely on novel number three, Print the Legend, that Minotaur will publish early next year. I literally just finished going over page proofs and we have the cover, which is very striking. In a few days, we begin edits for number four, Gnashville, Mon Amour, which will likely appear next fall.

Labels: crime fiction, Monday Interview

Hearing that the author of a 600-page National Book Award-winning novel about the Vietnam War is going to write a short, pulpy crime novel might make your head turn. Hearing that Denis Johnson is going to do so is no surprise. Fans know, of course, that these two authors are one and the same, and it is testament to Johnson's breadth that he can tackle each and make it feel like the perfectly organic manifestation of his talents.

Writing about people on the wrong side of the law -- and the wrong side of everything else, for that matter -- isn't new for Johnson, so on the surface his new novel, Nobody Move, doesn't feel like a stretch. But Johnson goes all the way here, adhering to the tenets of crime fiction. He has a classic noir protagonist in Jimmy Luntz, a barbershop chorus member and inveterate gambler who runs afoul of his creditors. The oh so cleverly named enforcer/collection agent, Ernest Gambol, seems at first to be from central casting, and the femme fatale is beautiful, troubled and easy.

But this is still a Denis Johnson book, so while he is reverent when it comes to the genre, he uses it as a starting point for a typically twisted tale. It begins with Jimmy coming out of a barbershop chorus competition to find Gambol waiting for him. Luntz owes money, Gambol wants to collect, Luntz doesn't have it and Gambol prepares to extract a pound of flesh as collateral. But things go awry, and much of the rest of the book involves the cat and mouse game between Luntz and Gambol that results.

The book is slim, just 196 pages, and is split into four bite-size sections. That format derives from the story's former life as a serialization in Playboy magazine (for a look at Jeffrey Smith's great illustrations for each of the four installments, click here). Johnson seems a perfect fit for such a presentation, though one wonders at the reaction to his lurid, visceral prose from the folks who, um, happen to gaze at the articles.

It's certainly not Johnson's best work, nor will it have any established crime fiction writers quaking in the boots. But Johnson's unhinged prose style works well with the genre, even enlivening it at times as he pushes at and plays with the bounds of traditional crime fiction.

The flaws come, as they do with many undercooked crime fiction novels, in the form of unrealized characters and plot threads. Luntz meets up with Anita Desilvera, a woman who has embezzled $2.3 million and is a fugitive of sorts herself. Problem is, the circumstances of her crime are sketchy at best, and it's never clear what happened or what might, meaning her motivations are confused and lack much tension. Luntz's situation is a bit more fully formed, but it, too, lacks definition. Johnson was rightly more interested in characterization and action than in plot, but he leaves things so bare boned as to cause more stuttering consternation than full-throttle celebration.

Still, it's an entertaining ride. Any time spent with Johnson's writing is time well spent, and something this bracing and breezy is all the more so. I'd love to see Johnson crank out a few more like this than wait five years for another serious tome.

Labels: crime fiction

I didn't know what psycho noir was until a couple of years ago when I read a review of a book I'd already finished and realized I had been a fan of the genre all along. Essentially, you take a guy facing extreme circumstances and let him loose to do whatever it takes to succeed. But, of course, he rarely does. Instead, he leaves a trail of mutilated bodies in his wake and ends up little better than his victims by the time the tale is told. There is a lot of over-the-top violence and plenty of humor for those who get the fantastic, exaggerated nature of what transpires.

Allan Guthrie is a modern king of psycho noir. His books Savage Night and Hard Man, particularly, elevated the genre with their tight, visceral prose, deft plotting and twisted but intact sense of morality. So, when Guthrie recommended the debut of novelist Nate Flexer, The Disassembled Man, I was primed and ready to read.

Let me start by saying that Flexer is no Guthrie. Not yet. But he's good, and the things that are at the heart of a good psycho noir -- great characters, lurid action and a propellant plot -- are all here in abundance. His writing will get tighter with time, and he'll hopefully find an editor who knows the right homonym at the right time. But those are nitpicky points to make. Sure, that's the difference between an upstart publisher like New Pulp Press and something like Harcourt, the imprint that puts out Guthrie's work. The story is there, and it's a doozy.

The story opens as Frankie Avicious, a slaughterhouse worker, is beaten by the pimp of a whore he's fallen for. He realizes that to successfully woo this woman, he needs money. It just so happens that he's married to the daughter of the rich slaughterhouse owner -- though the owner doesn't even acknowledge such when he visits the plant -- and he decides to take what is rightfully his. In a traditional novel, the rest would be angst-filled intrafamily squabbling and recriminations. In a psycho noir, you know that blood will be spilled in pursuit of normally unreachable goals. Here, Frankie takes up arms against his kin, mowing down anyone else who gets in his way. The characters in this tale are particularly colorful (and that's saying something for this genre). Yes, there are the standard hookers, police officers, seedy bar dwellers and toughs, but there's also someone who may or may not be the devil, a malformed creature of woe and a disturbingly amorous parent in the mix.

According to Bill Crider, Flexer is actually Jon Bassoff, publisher of New Pulp Press. He's to be applauded for not only getting his book out to the world, but doing so for other like-minded authors as well. It's quite an undertaking to start a publishing imprint these days, and any one willing to take the financial risk to meet the needs of a niche market like this deserves support. I hope to read the rest of what New Pulp Press has to offer very soon.

Check out the first two chapters of The Disassembled Man at Guthrie's Noir Originals site.

Labels: crime fiction

I really felt like I was keeping up in 2008. Alas, when it came to crime and mystery fiction, that really wasn't the case. The 2008 Edgar Awards were announced Thursday night at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City, and I'm sorry to say I've read none of the winners. The good news, of course, is that I now have a lot of award-winning books to add to my ever-expanding "to-be-read" list.

It's not as if I simply didn't read the winner in a given category. I've read few of the nominees . It seems as if this year's nominees were not of the marquee variety this year, which is a good thing for a genre looking to broaden its horizons. You can only give so many awards to the Connellys of the world before people start to see things through a very narrow scope.

This year's winners are:

Best Novel: Blue Heaven, C.J. Box (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
Best First Novel by an American author: The Foreigner, Francie Lin (Picador)
Best Paperback Original: China Lake, Meg Gardiner (New American Library – Obsidian Mysteries)
Best Critical/Biographical: Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustrated Companion to His Tell-Tale Stories, Harry Lee Poe (Sterling Publishing – Metro Books)
Best Fact Crime: American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century, Howard Blum (Crown Publishers)
Best Short Story: "Skinhead Central" - The Blue Religion, T. Jefferson Parker (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown and Company)
Best Young Adult: Paper Towns, John Green (Penguin Young Readers Group – Dutton Children’s Books)
Best Juvenile: The Postcard, Tony Abbott (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
Best Play: "The Ballad of Emmett Till," Ifa Bayeza (Goodman Theatre, Chicago)
Best Television Episode Teleplay: “Prayer of the Bone” – "Wire in the Blood," Teleplay by Patrick Harbinson (BBC America)
Best Motion Picture Screenplay: "In Bruges," Screenplay by Martin McDonagh (Focus Features)
Robert L. Fish Memorial Award:
"Buckner's Error" - Queens Noir by Joseph Guglielmelli (Akashic Books)
The Simon & Schuster - Mary Higgins Clark Award: The Killer’s Wife, Bill Floyd (St. Martin’s Minotaur)

Labels: crime fiction

Having just finished Lawrence Block's great new memoir, Step by Step, (much more about this later), I'm finally able to crack the spine of Harlan Coben's new thriller, Long Lost. Now comes word that there is more Coben to come, this time on the silver screen.

Much as American Jimi Hendrix had to make it big in Europe before U.S. audiences finally embraced him, Coben will finally make it to U.S. movie theaters thanks to the success of a European adaptation of one of his novels. Miramax and Focus Features announced this week that they have secured English language remake rights to "Ne Le Dis A Personne (Tell No One)," the award-winning adaptation of Coben's wildly successful first stand-alone novel.

According to Variety.com, "no director or cast have been attached although a start date of spring 2010 has been tentatively set for principal photography."

The French version did very well in the U.S. as measured by the foreign film yardstick, grossing $6 million. Variety reports that the film grossed $22 million in France and $2.3 million in the U.K.

The original version of the film hit DVD here in March. See the trailer here.

Labels: books, crime fiction, movies

I didn't even know that George Pelecanos had a new novel coming out, so I was pleasantly surprised to get a notice in my inbox today from Hatchette Books that Pelecanos would be the subject of an online interview today. Never mind the fact that the notice came 17 minutes into a live 30 minute interview. Luckily, it already has been archived, and I'm listening right now.



The book, The Way Home, is out May 12. According to Pelecanos' web site, the book deals with father and son pair Thomas and Christopher Flynn. Chris works for his father's remodeling business. "Thomas is just getting comfortable with the idea that his son is grown, working, and on the right path at last. Then one day Chris doesn't show up for work-and his father knows deep in his bones that danger has found him. Although he wishes it weren't so, he also knows that no parent can protect a child from all the world's evils."

"I don't want to misrepresent it as some sort of relationship novel. It's still a crime novel, I'm staying in the vein I've always stayed in," he says in the interview. "The crime novel has the supreme conflict of life and death which is the stuff of drama. But also, I can take the crime novel and talk about a lot of these social issues that I want to, which includes, here, the incarceration of kids, which is something I feel really strongly about."

I enjoyed, but didn't love Pelecanos' last, The Turnaround. But that's only because it came after his masterpiece, The Night Gardener. Having read most of his work over the past decade, I'll say I'm tremendously excited about the new book, which sounds like a return to form.

Labels: crime fiction

Charles Ardai was wrong. Thank God.

When he and his partners launched the modern-day pulp fiction imprint Hard Case Crime in September 2004 with two books -- Lawrence Block's Grifter's Game and Max Phillips' Fade to Blonde -- he expected to put out a half dozen books or so. Instead, E. Howard Hunt's House Dick, which came out this month, was the 54th, and there are another eight in the pipeline that take the imprint through the end of this year.

The list is impressive. The imprint has issued lost classics from the likes of Block, Robert Bloch and Donald Westlake, and the work of hard-hitting newer names to the genre like Allan Guthrie, Christa Faust and Jason Starr. Ardai himself has penned three of the books, two as Richard Aleas (Little Girl Lost and Songs of Innocence), and one under his own name, Fifty-to-One. The latter is a fantastic bit of meta-fiction, telling the story of a guy named Charles who publishes a line of pulpy crime fiction books. Each chapter title takes its name from one of the 50 books in the series up to that point, with the action somehow incorporating that title. It is clever, funny and very well written.

In March, Hard Case Crime issued what will likely be the last book from Westlake, The Cutie. Oddly enough, it was also his first. The book was originally published nearly 50 years ago as The Mercenaries. It shows that Westlake had it from the very beginning, and is further evidence that Hard Case Crime is doing a real public service for fans of this kind of fiction by unearthing things we wouldn't otherwise have the chance to read.

As if that wasn't enough, Ardai is set to introduce a new series, the Adventures of Gabriel Hunt. The books will follow the titular hero through a number of fanciful adventures. "Backed by the resources of the $100 million Hunt Foundation and armed with his trusty Colt revolver, Gabriel Hunt has always been ready for anything—but is he prepared for the adventures that lie in wait for him?" The first, Hunt at the Well of Eternity, was a ripping read penned by James Reasoner that takes Hunt into the wilds of South America. Future titles will come quarterly, written by Ardai, Faust, Nicholas Kaufmann, David J. Schow and Raymond Benson.

TIRBD: Writing Fifty-to-One gave you the opportunity to go back and look at Hard Case Crime's back catalog. Any thoughts about what you've been able to put out, particularly when weighed against your initial expectations?

CA: Well, our initial expectations were that we might only do a half dozen books and then stop; since we're now closing in rapidly on our 60th title, clearly our expectations were too modest. Now, bigger is not always better (I'd rather eat a half-pound tomato than one of those 50-pound monstrosities you see trotted out to promote one weed killer or another), but in this case I'm proud of having delivered not just a handful of good reading experiences but a steady stream over the course of what's now (rather to my astonishment) half a decade. It's not as though there was no hardboiled crime fiction for people to read and enjoy before we came along, but I know that as a reader I felt starved for a good, old-fashioned Gold Medal-style series that reliably delivered something new I'd enjoy reading every month or two. That's what I'm proudest of having brought back.

In terms of the individual books, I'm glad to see cases where we reprinted one book by a largely forgotten author and then other publishers picked up the reins and brought out other work from his catalogue. This happened with Richard Powell, for instance, and Gil Brewer and Wade Miller, and even to some extent Richard Stark -- the reissuing of the Parker books might not have happened, or not the way it did, if it hadn't been for our bringing some of Donald Westlake's other early work back into print.

How did you plan out Fifty-to-One? Was the plot entirely dictated by the chapter titles, which were taken from the 50 books published up to that point?

Yes, the titles really were the key. We had a book called Blackmailer, so I knew there needed to be a blackmailer in the book -- and since that was our 32nd title out of 50, the blackmailer had to show up (or be revealed as such, or something) roughly at the two-thirds mark in the story. We had a book called Home is the Sailor, so boats had to figure into the story somehow. Chapter 30 would be called The Vengeful Virgin, so I'd damn well better have established that some character was a virgin before that, and I'd also have to give her something to be vengeful about. And so on. I tried not to plan too much too early, just to preserve the fun of improvisation -- I like working without a net and thought the feeling of seat-of-the-pants invention would add to the comic tone of the book. But I did try to keep all the titles in mind as I went and did always have a sense of where the story would ultimately end.

You wrote this under your own name rather than your pseudonym, Richard Aleas. Any reason for that? Is there a different approach or mindset between the two?

Richard Aleas wrote two very bleak, very sad, basically tragic stories. It didn't seem right, somehow, for him to turn around and author a frothy comedy, any more than it would have for Richard Stark to write Somebody Owes Me Money or The Hot Rock. Also, Fifty-to-One was about a guy named Charles who edits a line of books called Hard Case Crime, so it seemed appropriate -- in keeping with the hall-of-mirrors spirit of the enterprise -- for the book also to be written by a guy named Charles who edits a line of books called Hard Case Crime.

You have found success bringing out older work from legendary authors. Are others now beating down your door hoping for a chance to do the same? Anyone in particular you're still working to land?

The sad thing about legendary authors who published older work is that most of them are no longer alive to beat down doors, mine or anyone else's. This is one of the problems, actually, and one of the reasons I feel it's so important that there be some publishers out there who are working to keep their names alive. Fifty years ago, everyone knew Richard Prather's name; today, only hardcore aficionados do. Will it be the same in a few decades for giants like McBain and Spillane and Westlake? I hope not. But it's not enough to hope. You have to do something to keep their work in front of people's eyes.

That said, there are certainly living authors who have contacted us, including some fairly well known ones, and we receive such inquiries with great enthusiasm. It's hard to know in advance which ones will bear fruit and which will not -- the more legendary an author is, the more demands there are on his her or her time -- but hopefully we'll have some fun surprises to serve up for readers each year.

What about newer authors -- how many submissions do you receive in a year and how many of those receive serious consideration? Do you commission work from authors or seek out specific writers to contribute to the imprint?

The volume of submissions varies -- some days we get none, but some days we get a dozen. On average it's about two or three submissions per day, which adds up to more than 1,000 per year. Since we only publish four or five original novels each year (at most), we have to say no to well over 99% of the books we see, including some very good ones. But the positive side of all this rejection is that it gives us the opportunity to be exceptionally selective, not just in terms of quality, but in terms of maintaining a consistent tone and flavor for the series. There have been cases where a book has been excellent but just didn't feel like a Hard Case Crime book; if we had to buy two or three every month, we'd have had to buy it, but since we only buy maybe one every other or every third month, we could hold out for a book that was just as good but a better fit.

We do sometimes approach authors to see whether they might be interested in submitting something to us, but with very, very rare exceptions we don't actually commission books, just because if you do that, you're pretty much stuck publishing the result even if you're not crazy about it. Better to just put out an open call and then take the best of the best, rather than asking a specific author to write a specific book for you.

January brought the last book from Donald Westlake, which coincidentally enough was also his first. What was it like to work with him, and what have we lost with his passing?

Don was a pleasure in every way. Really. He was gracious and funny and responsive and game to let us bring his most obscure books back into print, and willing to re-edit the books when something didn't make as much sense to a modern reader as it would have to a reader 40 or 50 years ago. He took genuine pleasure in how our books looked -- he loved the art, and it was so much fun to make him happy. I miss exchanging e-mail with him, and I miss having new Westlake books to read. At his recent memorial service in New York, Peter Straub read the last thing Don ever wrote, two chapters of a new Dortmunder novel, and it was wonderful. A last bit of Don's voice, making us laugh one more time.

What those of us who knew him lost is a friend. What all of us who treasure crime fiction lost is a great, great writer.

In May, you'll introduce a new line of books with the Gabriel Hunt adventure series. How did that come about and what is in store for readers who pick up these new titles?

I'm a passionate fan of crime fiction, obviously, but it's not the only genre I love; another is adventure fiction. I grew up reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and Dumas and H. Rider Haggard and Sax Rohmer (my father's copies) and Edgar Wallace (my mother's), and watching old Buster Crabbe serials whenever they were shown on PBS. Then when I was eleven and a half, my love of the genre was galvanized -- as it was for so many of my generation -- when "Raiders of the Lost Ark" hit theaters. I had no idea what it was when my parents dragged me to see it; I figured it was something about Noah's Ark, maybe in the vein of the cheesy occult TV series of the time, "In Search Of..." But, oh boy. I left that movie theater trembling. Literally: trembling. It took an hour just for my pulse to return to its normal pace. And ever since that day I've been telling myself that one day I'd try my hand at telling an adventure story that would make someone else feel the way I felt when I walked out of that theater. Gabriel Hunt is my chance to do that.

On the flip side, I have to admit I was disappointed in the last Indiana Jones film -- with 19 years to work on the script, it felt like they should have been able to come up with something better. In some sense, each Gabriel Hunt book is my attempt to give readers the experience that the fourth Indiana Jones film should have been, but wasn't. Pure, exhilarating popcorn entertainment, with thrills and chills and spills, men trading blows on the back of a speeding truck, explorers delving into dangerous tunnels lit by flickering torches, beautiful women imperiled and imperiling...all the stuff that makes your heart beat faster and your palms sweat. I want to excite a physical response from readers. I want them genuinely to be short of breath when they put the books down. That's what the Gabriel Hunt series is all about, and I'm having a blast working on it.

With several different writers tackling the same character, does each subsequent author need to be aware of what came before, or are they simply given a character sketch and other details and set loose?

Actually, I wrote a fairly detailed bible for the series before we started, and all the writers worked from that when coming up with their stories. (Much the way you would if you were writing a new TV series.) The writers pitched their stories to me, and I worked with them to tweak them. Then we all sat down to write our own manuscripts in isolation, though some of the writers would occasionally toss a question my way: Does Gabriel know how to fly a plane? Does he smoke? What does he like to drink? And so on. Eventually, the manuscripts started flowing in, and then I went to work editing them, and that editing process smooths out any rough edges and inconsistencies, either of plot or voice. In the end, even though each book is written by a different "ghost," we want Gabriel's voice and personality to come through the same in every book...and that's my job. Not a bad job, either.

Labels: books, crime fiction, Monday Interview