Gormania

Signing Off

2006-04-07T16:19:00.000-07:00

This will be my last post until at least fall. And maybe my last post ever. Simply put, I have to get ready for my stay at Mayo in June and that, along with finishing my novel, will have to be my primary concerns. Thanks for all your support. My health doesn't seem to have changed but my oncologist says I should pay it more attention than I do. Thanks again, Ed

Pro-File: Charles Ardai

2006-04-05T16:55:00.000-07:00

Charles Ardai has distinguished himself as writer, editor and with the extremely hot Hard Case Line, editor. Here's a particularly fine interview. Thanks, Charles. Ed

1. Tell us about your current novel.
After publishing LITTLE GIRL LOST (under my "Richard Aleas" nom-de-pulp), I went on a spate of short story writing, and the results are just showing up in bookstores now. There's "The Good Samaritan" in Lawrence Block's MANHATTAN NOIR, "Fathers and Sons" in Duane Swierczynski's DAMN NEAR DEAD, "The Home Front" in Harlan Coben's DEATH DO US PART, and "The Quant" in Peter Spiegelman's WALL STREET NOIR, plus some others in books I'm not supposed to talk about yet. I started my career writing short stories for ELLERY QUEEN and ALFRED HITCHCOCK and if I go too long without writing a short story, I don't feel good, sort of like if I go too long without exercising.

2. Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?
The long-delayed sequel to LITTLE GIRL LOST, which will be called SONGS OF INNOCENCE. I've had it plotted out for the better part of a year, but finding the time to sit down and write it has been hard while putting out a book a month for Hard Case Crime. John Blake is back, though he's no longer formally working as detective; he's gone back to school and tried to put the unpleasantness of LITTLE GIRL LOST behind him. And that works for a while, until another woman in his life turns up dead, an apparent suicide, and investigating what happened to her takes him to a very dark place.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?
Creating something out of nothing -- you take the stuff of your dreams and fantasies and nightmares and speculations and put it on paper and suddenly something exists in the world that didn't exist before and wouldn't exist without you and that, if it's any good, has the potential to influence or entertain or baffle or mesmerize thousands of other people. It's the opposite of working as a cog in a corporate wheel, where you know that if it weren't you in your job the company you work for could find a hundred other people to do exactly the same work more or less as well. As a writer, you create something intensely personal -- it may be good or bad or in-between, but by god it's yours, and no one else could've done it quite the same. It's like a little stab back at the void, a little way of leaving something behind that says "I was here."

4. Thegreatest DIS-pleasure?
You work really hard, you sweat and agonize, and maybe, if you're very lucky, you produce a sentence you know is good -- you just know it, it sounds just right to your inner ear, and you're filled with elation. And then you have to do it again. And you can't.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?
Stop aspiring to be big business. You're not Wall Street and never will be, and shouldn't want to be. If you want to make a lot of money, there are many easier ways to do so and not too many harder ones. Given that that's the case, no one should become a publisher, and no publisher should exist, primarily for the money. The reason to publish books is because you love books. Period. Because your heart races when you read a well-told story, because you appreciate that telling stories and reading them is one the fullest expressions of what makes us human. Publish books you can't stop reading. Publish books that break your heart. Publish books you think might offend someone but, damn it, you love. Stop looking at Bookscan. Stop buying crap you think will sell and turning down fine work by authors whose last book didn't.

Is this naive, quixotic advice? Yes. Does publishing, regrettably, have to be run as business if it is to survive? Yes. I understand that. But I don't have to like it. And if you imagine a spectrum, on one end of which sits Warren Buffett and on the other end of which sits Don Quixote, I think publishing would be better off in every respect if it shifted even just a little bit in the direction of the of the old man of La Mancha and away from the Oracle of Omaha.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

Because of Hard Case Crime, I'm in a very fortunate position: If there's a forgotten mystery writer I'd like to see in print again, I have the opportunity to bring him or her back. In the last year we've revived Day Keene and Wade Miller and David Dodge; over the coming year we'll be bringing back Richard S. Prather and John Lange and Gil Brewer. But there are still a few authors I'd love to bring back and can't, simply because I've been unable -- despite a ton of old-fashioned detective work -- to locate their heirs or estates. At the top of the list is Steve Fisher, author of I WAKE UP SCREAMING. Next is Ed Lacy, born "Leonard Zinberg." If any of your readers know how to find these authors' estates, I'd be very grateful to hear from them!

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

It's funny: I'd written LITTLE GIRL LOST specifically for Hard Case Crime, but the day I finished it I was on the phone with John Helfers, who works on the mystery imprint for Five Star, and John said something like, "We're looking for some more books, do you know anyone who has a good crime novel we could look at?" And I said, "Actually, I just finished one about an hour ago." As it happened, they only needed hardcover, trade paperback, and large-print rights, while Hard Case Crime only needed mass-market paperback rights, so the two dovetailed perfectly. I sent him a copy and he bought it; they brought out a hardcover edition in January and we brought out the paperback in October. Of course, I think the hardcover edition sold something like 500 copies, as opposed to the paperback, which sold orders of magnitude more; the result being that the hardcover first edition could one day be a rare collector's item, worth oodles on eBay. (I should be so lucky.)

Changing Agents

2006-04-04T13:55:00.000-07:00

Is my agent doing well by me or not? Is it time to do the unthinkable and look into changing agents? So many writers seem to change agents to no avail. On the other hand quite a few have done well by changing agents. How do you sort through all this, anyway?

A prominent, even distinguished crime fiction writer recently went through the difficult pursuit of finding not just an agent but the agent he felt was right for him. Friends are always eager to recommend their own agents. Or to suggest the names of agents who happen to be "hot" at the moment. They can be well-meaning but not helpful in their recommendations.

I asked the crime fiction writer I know to discuss his recent experience in finding himself a different agent.

-------

What finally made you change agents?

My agent felt she could not sell my idea for a new legal thriller. She also was developing a substantial practice in the "chick lit'" area of writing.

What was the most difficult part of making the change?

As an attorney myself, it wasn't really difficult, as I understood the future division of money that might come in for the projects she had sold for me in the past. I do miss the staff people at her agency, as they had been unfailingly kind and professional, just as my agent had been.

Had you changed agents earlier in your career?

Once before, when my first agent fell ill from cancer and no longer believed he could represent me effectively.

Is it possible to leave an agent on good terms?

I think it is. We're all supposed to be professionals, and this is just business. Also, about 10 years ago, Richard Curtis, the terrific NYC agent, wrote an article (actually, I believe it was an excerpt from one of his own books) for the Author's Guild Bulletin on "divorcing" your agent. That article remains the best explanation of the process I've ever read.

Did you consider several agents before deciding on the new one?

Not really. I was about to make inquiries of agents I knew when I did a writers conference at which an agent I'd met 8 years before was also teaching. We discussed my situation, and he agreed to represent me.

What made you decide on the new one?

I'd always found him to be a warm and caring man, and he's had great success representing authors in the thriller field.

Do you feel your expectations and her plan for you are realistic?

His plan, actually, and yes. He's made me rethink how I structure the emotion in a novel.

What advice would you give other writers if they feel the need to change agents?

Go to a good library, and find either the Curtis book I referred to earlier or the Authors Guild Bulletin in which the excerpt appeared. Seriously, it's all you should need unless there is bad blood involved

=

Pro-File: Ed Gorman

2006-04-03T18:27:00.000-07:00

Ed here: Six people, including Terrill Lankford today, said that I should answer my own questions so here goes:

Tell us about your current novel?

My latest books are all in the Sam McCain series, three of them coming out within a month of each other in England, France and Italy. My last mystery was two years ago, Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool, which I thought would be the last of the McCains. But then I got this idea…

2. Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?

…for a McCain that brings him into the Sixties. When I first started the series, Kent Carroll my editor and I talked about taking him from his early twenties to early forties. We’re both big fans of John Updike’s Rabbit books. We wouldn’t do every calendar year of course. The McCain I’m starting now jumps three years. And the next will jump two years more after that. Jon Breen once said that I was “the poet of the mid-life crisis.” The thing with McCain is that he’s been in mid-life crisis since he was seven. Much like me.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

The writing and working with the right editor on the right book, as has happened to me a number of times. I’ve been lucky. But I’m not a social person so promotion and especially self-promotion embarrass me and make me uncomfortable. I have an ego of course, and of course I’d like to have more success than I’ve had to date, but I’d rather get it by a contestant on “American Idol” saying “I don’t read the Bible much any more but I sure do like them books by Fred Gorman.” Barry Gifford was once going to give me a plug when he was on the “Today” show but the weather guy ran long and Barry was lucky he got to plug his own book.

4. The greatest DIS-pleasure?

How much publishing has changed in the past quarter century. It’s unrecognizable for most people of my tenure. Everybody’s running scared now and, I have to say, with good reason. So much damned competition for the same dollar, though I still have a hard time equating reading books with nazi video games and dumb-ass blow em up real good movies.

This is hardly my original thought but publishing is much more like the movie industry today. Publishing was always a business of art and commerce. Now it’s just commerce, though given that fact I still say that this is the true Golden Age of the mystery. There are so many good writers today you can’t keep up.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Since I live about four miles from cows and horses, I’m not sure I’m in a good position to give a vast international business any advice at all. I have a rather limited view of the world from my window. I feel sorry for editors today, I can say that for sure. The steely expectations for success can make for a pretty unpleasant working environment. Especially when the operative corporative word is disposable. I’m reading a great new book by Louis Uchitelle about how downsizing and layoffs have now become a regular part of the American employment system. His portrait of sleazy “Chainsaw Al Dunlap” is especially sickening. Chainsaw made many, many millions of dollars downsizing businesses. He also destroyed many, many thousands of lives in the process. Uchitelle’s point is that all the laying off is at best a temporary solution and almost never achieves its intended long-term goals. But CEOS don’t give a damn about long term. They just want those bonuses and perks. Thank God there are two or three publishers who refuse to go along with it and who are honorable and loyal people, one of them being Tom Doherty at Tor/Forge who’s long been known as somebody who really cares about his people and the books he publishes.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

Thanks to Hard Case and Stark House, a lot of my old faves are being brought back. Dolores Hitchens and Margaret Millar are certainly two I’d like to see in print again. Stark House will be doing a pair of Millars later this year. Hitchens’ two private eye novels are knock-outs, especially Sleep With Slander.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

I’d never been able to finish a novel until I met Max Allan Collins. I wouldn’t have been able to finish my first novel Rough Cut without his encouragement and advice. I mean that literally. We sent it to his agent, who is now my agent, but who passed on it because: “The most psychotic character in the novel is the narrator.” I then sent it to another agent who held it for several months. Whenever I’d contact him he’d say, “You write an awful lot like Dick Francis and I really don’t like Dick Francis.” I took it back and sent it to St. Martin’ where an assistant editor, now the enormously successful agent Brian DeFiore, picked it out of slush, liked it and embarked on a three-month battle to get it approved by committee. He called with the good word. Caorl and I stayed high for a week.

The Crimes of Jordan Wise

2006-04-02T14:23:00.000-07:00

(Pre-Review Pub date July 2006

The Crimes of Jordan Wise
by Bill Pronzini
Walker & Company $24

Actuary Jordan Wise tells a joke on himself a third of the way through the novel: (paraphrase) an actuary is somebody who doesn't have the personality to be an accountant.

If you watch many true crime shows, you see a lot of Jordan Wises. People who fall into crime through circumstance rather than those who go looking for it.

Jordan becomes a criminal only after meeting Annalise, a troubled and very attractive young woman who needs two things badly--sex and money. But in order to get the sex on a regular basis, Jordan must first provide the money. He embezzles a half million dollars and flees with Annalise to the Virgin Islands. In this first part of the novel, there's nice James M. Cainian detail about how Jordan comes alive for the first time in his life. Some of this is due, whether he admits it or not, to the danger of committing a serious crime. But most of it is due to Annalise and his profound sexual awakening.

The central section of the book reminds me of one of Maugham's great South Seas tales--lust, betrayl, shame played out against vast natural beauty and a native society that, thanks to an old sea man named Bone, that Jordan comes to see value in--even if Annalise, her head filled with dreams of Paris and glamor, does not. Old Maugham got one thing right for sure--as Pronzini demonstrates here--a good share of humanity, wherever you find them, are both treacherous and more than slightly insane.

There are amazing sections of writing about sea craft and sailing that remind me not of old Travis McGee but of the profoundly more troubled and desperate men of Charles Williams who find purity and peace only in the great and epic truths of the sea. That they may be as crazed and treacherous as everybdy else does not seem to bother them unduly.

There are also amazing sections (almost diaristic sections) where Jordan tells of us his fears and desires, his failings and his dreams. In places he deals vididly, painfully with his secret terror of not being enough of a man in any sense to hold Annalise.

The publisher calls this a novel and so it is. Pronzini brings great original width and breadth to the telling of this dark adventure that is both physical and spiritual. He has never written a better novel, the prose here literary in the best sense, lucid and compelling, fit for both action and introspection.

You can't read a page of this without seeing it in movie terms. The psychologically violent love story played out against a variety of contemporary settings gives the narrative great scope. And in Jordan Wise and Annalise he has created two timeless people. This story could have been set in ancient Egypt or Harlem in 1903 or an LA roller skating disco in 1981. As Falkner said neither the human heart nor the human dilemma ever changes.

Ed Gorman's intro to Lawrence Block's Cinderella Sims

2006-04-01T18:31:00.000-08:00

Reader Peter Logan has asked me to blog "the article you did on Lawrence Block." By that I guess you mean the piece I wrote introducing his novel Cinderella Sims. Peter also mentiond that he's tried to get into my old blog. The blogmaster assured me that it would never be taken down when I made the switch. Of the hundred some pieces I wrote, there wre a few I wanted to save for myself. But the blog vanished. Sorry.

The introduction to Cinderlla Sims
by Ed Gorman

Lawrence Block (1938-) writes the best sentences in the business, that business being crime fiction. No tortured self-conscious arty stuff, either. Just pure, graceful, skilled writing of a very high order.

No matter what he writes - the dark Scudder private-eye novels; the spunky Bernie Rhodenbarrs about the kind of thief even a mom could love; or his latest creation, John Keller the hitman, an existential figure full of quirks and kindnesses rare in his profession-no matter what he's telling us, he always makes it sweet to read. He's just so damned nimble and graceful and acute with his language.

By now, his story is pretty well known. Wrote a lot of erotica in the late fifties and early sixties, all the while writing his early crime paperback originals and stories for magazines of every kind. Started becoming a name in crime fiction in the seventies, really broke out in the nineties and is now posed, one would think, for superstardom.

Block has always reminded me of a very intelligent fighter. He knows what he's good at and sticks to his own fight, un-moved by popular fads and critical fancies. He writes about women as well as any male writer I've every read (though since I'm a guy, I may just be saying that he perceives women the same way I do) and he deals with subjects as Oprah-ready as alcoholism and failed fatherhood realistically, yet without resorting to weepiness.

One senses in him sometimes a frustrated mainstream writer. He's always pushing against the restrictions of form and yet never failing to give the reader what he came for in the first place. No easy trick, believe me.

For some reason, I've always hated the word "wordsmith" (probably because it's popular among pretentious young advertising copywriters who don't want to admit that they're writing hymns to beer and dish soap), but that's what Block is. A singer of songs, a teller of tales, a bedazzler.

I read three of his erotic novels and I'll tell you something. They're better written (and we're talking 1958-1961) than half the contemporary novels I read today. He was pushing against form even back then, creating real people and real problems, and doing so in a simple powerful voice that stays with you a hell of a long time.

I wrote the above as a way of setting up a Larry Block novelette I was reprinting in an anthology of pulp stories. I don't see any reason to change a word. Not because they're such graceful or pithy words but because they convey my feelings about Lawrence Block the writer.

I always say that I'm glad to see writers make it up from the trenches and into the sunshine of national prominence. Few writers spent so long in the trenches. Larry sold his first story in 1958. He first hit big in the middle 1990s. That's a long time to breathe the dusty, sometimes dank air of literary obscurity.
Larry began his career, as most of us know by now, selling short stories to the crime magazines of the time and to the sort of paperbacks that local religious groups were always trying to drive from the newsstands.

We called these, as I recall, the motley crew of outcasts I hung with in my early college years, right-handers. Suggesting that this type of book inspired one to a certain kind of action few other books did. Except maybe for Peyton Place and its imitators. The underlined passages.

I read a lot of Midwood and Beacon and Nightstand novels in those days. I quickly came to realize that some of the writers were much better than others. Max Collier, for example, wrote some of the most perverse books I've ever read. As I remember them, he frequently paired up his bitter hunchbacked heroes with heiresses. Clyde Allison was usually thin on plot but great with patter. Orrie Hitt sometimes got too perverse for my tastes but usually supplied a kind of second-rate James T. Farrell-like blue collar take on the standard "sexy" plots.
And when I say "sexy" I mean "sexy" in the way of the movie comedies of the 1950s and early 1960s. Short on actual details but long on suggestion. And metaphor. Orgasms were frequently portrayed as "searing volcanoes"or some such.
A few of the right-handers were written reasonably well. No great masterpieces slipped through, you understand, but some of the books were actually...kinda sorta actual novels rather than just the usual monthly tease.
Which brings us to some guy named Andrew Shaw.

This was one of Larry Block's pen-name circa 1959-1961. Other writers would share the name later on (someday somebody will do an article on how contracts to one writer secretly get handed off by that writer to another writer, a particular form of "ghosting" that goes on at the lower levels of publishing even today) but the early Shaws, at least those I've read, read like Larry Block.

Not the Larry Block of today. The Shaw prose isn't especially polished; the Shaw stories don't always escape cliche; and the Shaw attitude is not unlike the hardboiled crime fiction magazines of the day- i.e., too tough for its own good.
And yet.

Yet you can can see in glimpses - and sometimes sustained for long stretches - the Larry Block of today. The idiosyncratic take on modern morality; the dour irony that hides fear and loneliness; and the seeds-just planted-of the style that would become the best of his generation.

Cinderella Sims was originally called $20 Lust. The editor obviously spent a long time coming up with that one.

I'm not sure what else Larry was writing at that time. I suspect he was upgrading for an assault oh Gold Medal and better-paying markets. I say this because Cinderella Sims seems to fall between his sexy books and his early Gold Medal books. Not quite worthy of that little gold medallion but damned close.
One thing Larry Block always had was the ability to move a story forward while giving you detailed character sketches. He has a fast eye for the unusual, the quirks in us, and he makes us come alive with these details. That skill is already apparent in the novel you're holding.

So is his skill in giving you journalistic snapshots of urban American. Re-reading Cinderella Sims today is like traveling back in time to that pre-hippie sixties when crew cuts were still the style on college campuses and free love was something only the ridiculous Hugh Hefner experienced.

I'm not going to tell you that this is a great book because it isn't. But it's a damned interesting look at the artist-in-making. I think you'll agree with me that, from the very beginning of his career, Larry Block was a vital and powerful storyteller.

Pro-File: Steve Hockensmith

2006-03-31T15:03:00.000-08:00

Steve Hockensmith

Though the town elders of Louisville, Ky., have yet to acknowledge it with so much as a single commemorative plaque, Steve Hockensmith was born in the Derby City on August 17, 1968. The first two decades of his life passed uneventfully, the only notable highlight being a short stint as an intern at People magazine, an experience that allowed Hockensmith to realize his lifelong dream -- crank calling Crispin Glover.

Despite (or perhaps because of) such lapses in his professionalism, Hockensmith eventually found work as an entertainment journalist: He's covered pop culture and the film industry for The Hollywood Reporter, The Chicago Tribune, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Newsday, Total Movie and other publications. He spent a year as editor of The X-Files Official Magazine (thus explaining his morbid fear of David Duchovny) and more than three years as editor of Cinescape, a nationally distributed bimonthly magazine devoted to movies in which things explode (i.e., science fiction or action films or anything produced by Jerry Bruckheimer).

In 1999, traumatized by multiple viewings of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Hockensmith set out to write something that would under no circumstances require the use of the phrase "Jar Jar Binks." He settled on mysteries, soon becoming a regular contributor to both Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. His first published mystery story, "Erie's Last Day," won the Short Mystery Fiction Society's Derringer Award and appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2001. More recently, Hockensmith's story "Tricks" (a sequel to "Erie's Last Day") was nominated for a Shamus award, while his story "The Big Road" (yet another "Erie" follow-up) was nominated for a Barry.

Hockensmith is also the creator of mystery-solving cowboys Big Red and Old Red Amlingmeyer. The Amlingmeyer brothers first appeared in Ellery Queen in the story "Dear Mr. Holmes," which was voted the fifth most-popular story of 2003 by the magazine's readers. The Sherlock Holmes-worshipping drovers returned to Ellery Queen's pages in the February 2005 and February 2006 issues. In addition, Hockensmith has completed one novel about their adventures (Holmes on the Range, to be published in 2006 by St. Martin's Minotaur) and is currently finishing a second.

Hockensmith gets to combine his love of mysteries and his journalism background thanks to "Reel Crime," a column about mystery TV shows and movies that appears in each issue of Alfred Hitchcock. Hockensmith promises that this time there will be no crank phone calls.

Though he considers himself a Midwesterner at heart, Hockensmith currently lives in California's Bay Area. He says he's adjusted to life on the West Coast, but confesses that he still misses thunderstorms, snow and Long John Silver's Seafood Shoppes. He shares his home with the perfect wife, the perfect daughter and a slightly imperfect cat.

Pro-File Steve Hockensmith

1. Tell us about your current novel.

My "current" also happens to be my first -- a tip of
the Stetson to Arthur Conan Doyle called HOLMES ON THE
RANGE. It's about an 1890s cowboy who sets out to
solve a mystery using the methods of his hero,
Sherlock Holmes. He's at a slight disadvantage,
however: He can't read or write. So he drafts his
younger brother to be his Watson.

The book plays with the Holmes mythos, but it's not a
pastiche. There's a lot of humor in it, but it's not a
comedy. It's set in the West, but it's not really a
Western. It seems to be pretty unique!

2. Can you give us a sense of what you're working on
now?

Nothing but these questions, thank god. I just
finished the sequel to HOLMES this week, so I'm taking
a short (as in three or four week) break from novels
to work on articles and short stories and promotional
stuff. The book I just wrapped up, ON THE WRONG TRACK,
took me a year to write, so I need a little vacation.
It takes place on a train traveling over the Sierra
Nevada mountains -- if I were a screenwriter, I'd
describe it as MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS meets
BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID. But I'm not a
screenwriter, so I'll just say it's another mystery
starring my cowboy heroes, Big Red and Old Red, and
I'm both really happy with it and really, really happy
to be done with it!

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

What I'm doing at this very moment: sitting in a quiet
room all by myself thinking and putting words
together. Paradise. I'm not a hermit or a misanthrope
or anything, yet I truly love locking myself away in
solitary confinement for half the day. I spend the
rest of the day taking care of my 2-year-old daughter,
which is wonderful in its own way but certainly a far
cry from "quiet" and "solitary"!

4. The greatest DIS-pleasure?

It's all still so new to me, I feel like I can hardly
judge yet. I quit my day job in early 2005, and the
last year has been simply wonderful. The thing that'll
probably start to weigh on me as my career progresses
-- or doesn't -- is being at the mercy of forces
beyond my control. If Barnes & Noble isn't stocking my
books or reviewers aren't writing about them or people
just plain aren't buying them, there's only so much I
can do about it. Which isn't being a passive defeatist
about it all: I know it's my job to get out there and
promote promote promote. Yet I can't escape the
feeling that there's an arbitrariness to it all.
Worthy books (and writers) fail, and sometimes it's
hard to see why. I hope that doesn't eat at me too
much in the years ahead.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing
world, what is it?

Here's my Joe Konrath answer: Buy HOLMES ON THE RANGE
and tell all your friends and family to do the same!

Here's my *me* answer: I have no advice to give. I'm
so new to this whole thing, it'd be like a batboy
giving advice to Hank Aaron. The thing that scares me
most about the publishing world is the blockbuster
mentality and the death of the mid-list, so I guess I
wouldn't advise so much as beg: "Please, guys! Give us
a decent shot here, huh?"

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers
you'd like to see in print again?

A reviewer compared HOLMES ON THE RANGE to the Lobo
Blacke books by William Deandrea, so I tried to track
them down. (I'd never heard of them before.) It was
actually pretty tough. I finally found one on Amazon
or eBay or Half.com, I don't remember which, and I
ordered it. It's called FATAL ELIXIR, I'm half-way
through it now, and it's pretty darned good. In some
ways, Deandrea was doing with Nero Wolfe what I'm
doing with (or *to*, depending on your outlook)
Sherlock Holmes, so I can understand the comparisons.
It depresses me that it was so hard to dig up one of
Deandrea's books, though. There but for the grace of
god and all that.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't most of the
Nero Wolfe books out of print? That's just plain nuts.
I know used copies are easy to find, but it seems like
someone ought to be repackaging those suckers and
putting them out again. Rex Stout's stuff was funny,
fast and engaging -- very modern in its tone. I think
it would still appeal to today's mystery fans. I know
it still appeals to me.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most
writers never forget that moment.

I'd better not have forgotten -- it was only a year
and a half ago! I was fairly confident *something* was
going to happen, because I have a lot of faith in my
agent. There's a moment toward the end of "Monty
Python and the Holy Grail" when the strings swell and
trumpets blast and King Arthur wearily declares, "Our
quest is at an end." That's how it felt when my agent
officially signed me on as a client. It had been such
a long, hard slog, but finally there I was. Of course,
in "Holy Grail," someone immediately dumps a bucket of
dung over Arthur's head. Fortunately, things worked
out better for me. My agent sent the book out to about
a dozen editors at once, and two weeks later we had
competing bids. When I heard what they were and who
they were from, I literally clicked my heels -- I'm
not too horribly decrepit just yet, so I can still
manage to jump up and actually do it when occasion
warrants. After some frantic back and forth phone
calls, we zeroed in on one of the publishers and
banged out a final deal within a couple of hours. Then
I called my wife. Then I called my mom and dad. Then I
had to go to my day job...but I knew I’d be quitting
in a few months, so for once I didn’t mind!

Pro-File: Marcia Muller

2006-03-30T14:00:00.000-08:00

A native of the Detroit area, Marcia Muller grew up in a house full of books and self-published three copies of her first novel at age twelve, a tale about her dog complete with primitive illustrations. The "reviews" were generally positive.

Her literary aspirations were put on hold, however, in her third year at the University of Michigan, when her creative writing instructor told her she would never be a writer because she had nothing to say. Instead she turned to journalism, earning a master's degree, but various editors for whom she freelanced noticed her unfortunate tendency to embellish the facts in order to make them more interesting.

In the early 1970s, having moved to California, Muller found herself unemployable and began experimenting with mystery novels, because they were what she liked to read. After three manuscripts and five years of rejection, EDWIN OF THE IRON SHOES, the first novel featuring San Francisco private investigator Sharon McCone, was published by David McKay Company, who then cancelled their mystery list. Four more years passed before St. Martin's Press accepted the second McCone novel, ASK THE CARDS A QUESTION.

In the ensuing twenty years, Muller has authored 32 novels, three of them in collaboration with husband Bill Pronzini; four short-story collections; and numerous nonfiction articles. Together she and Pronzini have edited a dozen anthologies and a nonfiction book on the mystery genre. The Mulzinis, as friends call them, live in Sonoma County, California, in yet another house full of books.

Marcia Muller:

1. Tell us about your current novel.

It¹s titled VANISHING POINT and is coming out in July. Another Sharon
McCone. In it she is hired by the daughter of a woman who vanished
twenty-two years ago to look into the disappearance and provide her family
with closure. In the middle of McCone¹s investigation, the client also
vanishes, and she finds herself working two cases.

2. Can you tell us what you¹re working on now?

It¹s another McCone, THE EVER-RUNNING MAN. Someone has a vendetta against
RKI, the security firm in which McCone¹s husband, Hy Ripinsky, is a partner.
Several of their offices have been bombed, and they hire McCone to
investigate. But before she can even get started, RKI¹s San Francisco
headquarters are blown up and she narrowly misses dying in the blast. She¹s
now in Chicago, investigating yet another explosion, and after that...who
knows? Not I!

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

The writing itself. And hearing from readers who understand and appreciate
my work.

4. The greatest DIS-pleasure?

Being involved in a high-stress industry that no one--even those who run
it--can really figure out.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Nurture your authors. Don¹t kick them out because they¹re not instant
bestsellers. I¹ve been fortunate to have this experience with
Mysterious/Warner, and I wish more writers--especially the new ones coming
into the field today--could have it.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you¹d like to see in
print again?

Thomas B. Dewey, who wrote wonderful private eye novels, comes to mind. And
there are a whole lot of writers, not necessarily forgotten, whose early
work I¹d like to see rereleased.

7. Tell us about your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

I¹d submitted a manuscript to Michele Slung at David McKay Company because
I¹d heard she was looking for my kind of material. She rejected it, but
said she liked the character and if I did another, she¹d like to see it. I
was finishing EDWIN OF THE IRON SHOES at the time and shipped it off. She
wrote, said she wanted to buy it, but was going on vacation for a month. I
waited, getting more and more panicky as two months went by. Then one
evening the phone rang. Michele, confirming the sale.

Orange County Housewives

2006-03-29T16:02:00.000-08:00

* Throw enough crap against the wall and some of it's bound to stick

Until last week, I was a reality show virgin. I don't believe that I have ever watched as much as two minutes of any of those shows. First of all, I resent all the writers, actors, directors, crews etc. that they put out of business. And second of all most of them strike me as inane. From the commercials I get the sense that the "relationships" on shows such as Survivor as all contrived and loosely scripted. And as for shows about eating bugs or hang gliding on the back of an alligator...

But came the end of a long day and night of work and I thought I'd watch some tv. Cable had been promoting The Real Housewives of Orange County relentlessly. Simply because a couple of the women were good looking, I thought I'd take a look. I had no hopes that the show would be interesting.

I have to say that the first two episodes have been fascinating. The camera follows five housewives in a wealthy gated community about their day. There are two things you notice instantly. All of them have had muy breast implants. And all of them are two-and-three car families with Mercedes Benz' being the staple car and at least one Hummer thrown in. One of the housewives tells us early on that you are judged by what you own and what you wear. She says this with no apology. She not only approves it, she is enthusiastic about it. She says that this is her dream. She also says that boob jobs are mandatory if you want to keep your husband interested.

We begin to meet the regular players. There are a couple of good looking women, indeed, but unfortunately, like just about everybody else in this gated community, they are so greedy, superficial and arrogant, they are hard to like. I can feel sorry for them--there's a lot of fear behind those gates--but liking them...

There is the former major league baseball player who bullies and humiliates his oldest son for never being good enough (the kid gets picked in a major league draft but he's a low number so the father isn't impressed). The son in turn berates his little brother who assures us that he doesn't mind the teasing--then admits that when the teasing gets too bad he has episdoes of stuttering, which he starts to do while the camera rolling.

Then there is the attractive woman who was dumped by her long-time husband and forced to live (the way she tells it) in a house so small (she is the only one who lives outside the gated community--she feels literally banished from heaven) that it can't possibly hold her two kids plus herself. It appears to be a nice, average size middle-class house that 100 million people in the U.S. would love to live in. This is a refrain with her, how she has been forced to live like somebody "common" (this is what she implies).

Her story takes a nasty twist. I couldn't keep count of who divorced whom but through a tangle of divorces the one real victim was her fifteen year old son. He constantly gets into fights in school, even though he's small for his age. He smokes pot constantly. And fights fights fights. She has to take a job at an insurance office operated by one of the other Housewives (a mostly unpleasant woman who in over-protecting her daughter becomes a nag). The problem is the woman who's been tossed out of paradise has so many errands to run that she doesn't spend much time in the office. She doesn't seem to sense that she's going to get fired. I believe, in soap opera fashion since we were left with a cliffhanger, that that will come next week.

That isn't the nasty part. At work one day, she get a call from school. Her son was found with drugs on him. Because he's been in juvenile court many times, the judge has put him in juvenile jail. She goes to see him. This is one of the few times she's able to forget about herself. As any parent would, she's devastated when she walks into the jail and sees her son. "But at least he'll be safe." I'm not sure how to take that. Is she relieved that he is no longer her responsibility for awhile? Or does she simply mean that he can't get in any trouble behind bars?

I'm not judging her morally. We spend a lot of time with her but don't find any hint of a center. I guess that's the part I don't care for. This sense of banishment from life in a palace. She obviously loves her kids but seems to be walking around in a revery about better days. And when her son is interviewed on camera, there are a couple of crushing minutes. You see the toll the divorce has taken on him. He was raised in a world of privilege. He no longer has that to protect him. You're almost afraid to see how he ends up. His grief and fear and confusion are palpable. His worried little sister writing him a letter in crayon pays off one of the acts. The juvenile folks won't let him have the letter.

The true beauty in the series is a sixteen year old girl whose face and figure are stunning. She is also a very capable smart-ass and cynic. And as greedy everybody else in the series. She whines when her mother tells her that she can't have a brand new Mercedes convertible for high school graduation (or this is how I understood it--she had to take a hand me down Mercedes as her first car and now wants a brand new one). She gets the new one of course and is happy again. For a few minutes.

A couple of the men are worse than all the housewives put together. The ballplayer is a strutting blustering macho fool and the Driver is (to his woman) a drill instructor. The Driver (as in hard-driver) lives in a manse with his two kids. He's divorced. He's now going out with an attractive and much younger young woman. Her I like. She's upfront, sweet in her way, and looks like she'd be a lot of fun. He wants to get married; she isn't so sure.
v
She prefers to work, he wants her home 24/7 cleaning the house etc. Oer and over she tells us how bored she is. She also tells us how she'd still like to go out with her girl friends and have a good time, which happens in the second episode and sets the Driver off. Even though she has started to make friends with the other wives, I doubt that this relationship will last. He's too anal and she's too spontaneous. He just keeps buying her lots and lots of expensive gifts.Trying to bribe herinto becoming Betty Crocker. She seems to like them but after awhile there is a hint of monotony in her. She's still bored. Next episode promises to be a tough one for these two folks.

I realize in writing this that have become, for the first time, in my life, addicted to a soap opera. I'm sure that some of the dramatics are hyped; maybe even vaguely scripted. But if so these folks are damned good actors. Unlike soaps, I can enjoy this because A) there are no people in the hospital dying of an unkown disease B) There aren't really any villains here, just mostly unhappy and shallow people driven to compete and losing themselves in the process and C) It has the feel and sound of reality. This is how a lot of us live today.

You may not like it but it obviously fascinates me. The trouble is, unlike a soap opera, some of these people are going to get hurt and badly. As, if you remember, the now-ancient Loud family shows (a documentary about a similar California family in the late sixties) showed all too well.

Take that Guding Light.

Pro-Files: David Niall Wilson

2006-03-28T15:03:00.000-08:00

DAVID NIALL WILSON is an author, poet, past president of the Horror Writer's Association , ordained minister, guitarist and dreamer writing from the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina . He is the author of over a dozen Novels , over a hundred and twenty Short Stories , and winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Professional Achievement in poetry. David has been spilling words out of his head and onto paper since the mid 1980s when he quit saying he was a writer and started writing. He lives and loves with author and Bram Stoker Award winning editor Patricia Lee Macomber in the historic William R. White House in Hertford, NC. His novel The Mote In Andrea's Eye , will be available this spring, and his Amazon Short “ Ennui ” was selected as one of Amazon's top stories for 2005. His short story The Call of Farther Shores will appear in the anthology “ Horror: Best of 2005 .” He is a columnist at www.chizine.com and contributor on the 1st of each month to the ongoing writer's site Storytellers Unplugged. More information on David, his career, his life and his works can be found at his Website: www.macabreink.com , or in his blog at http://deep-bluze.livejournal.com

“Tugging heartstrings with the expertise of a master puppeteer, Wilson, a former naval technician, adds plenty of authentic touches but never overwhelms the reader with details. The clean prose, romance and fantasy elements, heart-pounding scenes of man against nature, and topical currency (thankfully not overplayed) will appeal to a wide variety of readers . . ."

Publisher’s Weekly on The Mote In Andrea’s Eye

1 Tell us about your current novel.

My current novel, I suppose, is “The Mote in Andrea’s Eye,” due out in June from Gale/Five Star. This novel is a departure for me, and very personal. It involves a young girl who suffers the tragic loss of her father in the aftermath of a hurricane. She grows to be a strong, willful young woman with a mission: she wants to fight and stop hurricanes.

The first part of this novel, the girl’s story, was drawn in great part from my own family’s experiences during Hurricane Isabel. My daughter Stephanie wrote a journal during that period of time, and I also drew on stories and images from her past to create the character of the young Andrea Jamieson.

Once Andrea grew up, I was in research land, studying Operation Storm Fury, the governments attempt to control or stop hurricanes in the 1960s, which largely fell by the wayside at the outbreak of the Vietnam War. I also discovered a man named Win Wenger, who had created a pump he believed would help in the fight against world starvation by circulating the silt and cooler water at the bottom of the ocean with burst of air. He also thought it might stop a hurricane, if applied properly.

The final element came from the love of my life, Patricia Lee Macomber, who asked the casual question – why has a hurricane never disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle?

With those elements, a touch of romance, and a dash of US Navy experience, a novel was born. I wrote it during the National Novel Writing Month (NANOWRIMO) challenge in 2004 and sold it two months later, making it 90 days from initial clack of keyboard to sale. It’s a very clean read, not built on violence, strong language, or bloodshed, but still packed with action – I wrote it so my daughter could read along, and inadvertently created my first young-adult friendly thriller.

2. Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?

I wish I could make sense of that myself, at times. I have a new novel, “Vintage Soul,” making the rounds in NYC, and I’m currently writing a novel that is being serialized on Amazon.com as part of their Amazon Shorts program. This novel, The Orffyreus Wheel, is a sort of historical / modern thriller about an invention that a man named Johann Bessler – in theory – created in the 1700s. The device was a perpetual motion wheel, and though it was witnessed in operation and tested many times, the secret was never revealed as Bessler died an untimely and tragic death. In “The Orffyreus Wheel,” of which two parts are now available on Amazon, I parallel the story of Bessler’s life and tragedy with the modern day story of one of his descendants. It’s a novel of free energy, and what would happen in our world if it ever threatened to exist. This is a thriller out of the gates, and I’m enjoying it immensely, though it’s challenging to work in both the past, and the present, as well as chopping the novel into ten or so parts that have cliff-hanger enough to bring readers back for the next installment.

I also have a short story collection due out early in 2007 that I’m currently working on with Sarob Press. This will be titled “Defining Moments,” after a story that was first published at www.gothic.net – and I’m very excited about it.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?
Though I’m sure I have creditors who would disagree, I’d have to say that moment when someone reads a thing you’ve written – and gets it. The warmth inside of knowing that you took something from an idea, to words, recorded it and saw it through the long, arduous trail to publication, and it wasn’t in vain. That Publisher’s Weekly review excerpt above was such a moment. The feeling of accomplishment is hard to describe.

4. The greatest DIS-pleasure?

It’s always the waiting that gets to me. I love the process of creation. I even like revision, now that I’ve matured enough to realize how badly my raw work actually needs it. What I hate is the time between releasing a story or novel into the mail, or e-mail – and the time someone comes back and says yes, or no. Even worse is the longer wait for an actual reader to get their hands on the work, read it, and react. The more things you finish and get into the system at once, the worse this becomes. It’s terrifying, really. You can do a thing well all your life and still wonder, the next time, if you got it right.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

If I could offer advice to the publishing world as a whole? That’s such a broad question.

I guess what I’d like to see in publishing is more of an overall understanding of and love for books throughout the entire process. Authors and editors too often strain against walls of numbers, marketing strategies, and financial “bottom lines” that impede books from reaching readers, or present them in an improper manner. If each step of the way could be staffed with readers – people who genuinely cared about the book itself, and not the product it represents, I think we’d see somewhat of a shift in strategy, quality, and eventually in profit. Good books, treated well, seem a good bet for any investor, and something to be proud of once they are on the shelf. Once a wheel gets spinning (thank you Orffyreus) it’s hard to divert it or make it stop, particularly if it takes a strong effort to get it spinning in another direction – so the status quo holds a lot of sway in this business, as in any other.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

Probably there are, but to be honest, every time I think a writer is out of print I find that someone like Wildside Press, or Nightshade Books has brought them back. I have a gorgeous set of books by Manly Wade Wellman from Nightshade, and I have Hugh Cave’s Justin Case Mysteries in a fine signed HC…so I’m not sure that I could name anyone currently that is not available, and that I wish was. I wish authors like Wellman were more widely known outside genre circles, but that’s an entirely different question.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

I’m guessing that the sale of my first novel is a bit unique, even in the circles of writers who live undeniably unique lives. I was in the US Navy when I attended the first World Horror Convention. I had just had my story, “A Candle In The Sun,” printed in STARSHORE Magazine, and picked up for Karl Wagner’s Year’s Best Horror XIX. I met a man named Robert Eighteen-Bisang, a collector and lover of vampire fiction, and sold him a copy of Starshore. Before that convention was over, we had talked many times, and he kept insisting that this story needed to be a novel. I agreed, but didn’t feel quite “up” to it yet.

To make a very long story short, I wrote the novel on a cruise to Europe in 21 Days. I revised it in five days – feverish writing sessions late into the night – floating in the middle of the ocean with a much dog-eared and annotated New Testament at my side, and Concrete Blonde on the CD Player. I called Robert from Crete, and I sent him the manuscript. I called him back a two weeks later, standing on the same beach in Crete, and heard the words. “I have to publish this,” for the first time.

A lot happened, and Robert never did publish that novel – Terminal Frights Press did, but I’ll never forget the moment.

DNW

Pro-File: Mary Higgins Clark

2006-03-27T16:12:00.000-08:00

Ed here: Mary Higgins Clark is not only a brilliant suspense novelist and an international bestseller but also one of the nicest, most decent people I've ever worked with. I believe she was in Mystery Scene eight times over the eighteen years when I was editing it. And she always made it a pleasure. I've taught mystery fiction six times and I always lead off with Where Are The Children? It is one of the true classics of the mystery field and students are always astounded when they see how carefully and cunningly the book was structured and written. They suddenly understnd just how difficult it is to wrte a novel of that stature.

Pro-File: Marty Higgins Clark

QUESTIONS/ANSWERS FOR ED GORMAN

1. My current novel, Two Little Girls in Blue, is a story of identical twins, Kathy
and Kelly, who are kidnapped on their third birthday. After paying the ransom
Kelly is returned – Kathy is believed to be dead. At the Mass of the Angels,
Kelly tugs on her mother’s hand and says, “Kathy wants to come home now.
She is scared of the lady.” Only the mother believes that the twins are
communicating and begins a frantic search for her missing child. I’m happy
to say that Publishers Weekly says, “Clark at her best in this chilling tale of
kidnapping, murder, and telepathy.”

2. The title of the next book I am working on is, I Heard That Song Before. It’s
about a young landscape architect who marries the widowed owner of the
estate where her father has worked as a gardener. But a childhood memory
of being in that house puts her in the crosshairs of the killer.

3. There is a wonderful old saying, ”If you want to be happy for a year, win the
lottery. To be happy for a lifetime, love what you do.” I love writing. I would
write even if no one ever read what I did, but to also have been successful,
is obviously very gratifying.

4. My Irish Catholic guilt is that the volume of mail I receive is so heavy and no
sooner do I sigh with relief because I caught up with it, that an avalanche
more arrives and the guilt starts all over as I don’t get to it.

5. My advice is to tell a good story. Isaac Singer said, “I do not care how
eloquent your phrases, how polished your prose, unless you are a storyteller,
you are not a writer.”

6. I think there are many great mystery writers who in their day were enormously
popular but are not readily available in bookstores. I am sure that sometime
in the future, I will be among them.

7. My first novel, Where Are the Children, was bought by Simon & Schuster.
I thought I had died and gone to heaven. They paid $3,000 and it could have
been $3,000,000. I wrote in my journal, “I have sold to Simon & Schuster.”
I leaned on my pen so hard, I tore the page.

Pro-File: Bob Randisi

2006-03-26T14:53:00.000-08:00

Bob Randisi is one of the movers and shakers of the mystery field. Not only is he an accomplished novelist, he founded the Private Eye Writers of America and co-founded Mystery Scene magazine. It's a real pleasure to have him here.

I
1 Tell us about your current novel.

I'm excited about two books one coming in Oct., and the other Feb 2007. In Oct EVERYBODY KILLS SOMEBODY SOME TIME will be published by St. Martins. It features the Rat Pack--Sinatra, Dino, Sammy & Co.--in Vegas in 1960 during the filming of Ocean's 11. The main character is a pit boss at the Sands who is asked by Frank to help out when Dean is threatened. I'll be doing at least one more Rat Pack book after this, called LUCK BE A LADY, DON'T DIE.

The book coming out in Feb. 2007 is one I'm actually just finishing. THE PICASSO FLOP combines crime with the current Texas Hold'Em poker craze. It takes place in Vegas, at the Bellagio casino, and is et at a World Poker Tour (WPT) event. My co-author is Vince Van Patten, who is a commentator on the WPT for all its events. We've worked closely together on this book, and will be doing at least one other, both published by Warner/Mysterious Press. We share cover credit, and Warner will be promoting the hell out of it--supposedly--largely using Vince and his celebrity.

2. Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?

Oops. See above. I'm also working on a new western series called THE GAMBLERS, so right now I'm writing about poker and gambling in the 1880's, the 1960's and the present.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

Making a living at it. I also still get a big kick out ofd receiving the carton containing my author's copies of each book. It's like Christmas to me.

4. Thegreatest DIS-pleasure?

Working with numbers crunchers instead of book people. Also, the dirth of real editors in the business--I mean that all a\round editor who bought the book, championed it, worked on it, was there every step of the way. The people I work with now are good at whatt hey do, but those kinds of editors don't exist, anymore.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Give the books, and the authors, more of a chance to built. Too many publishers are dropping writers after one or two books. They want INSTANT success stories. Those are few and far between. I do believe that a publisher can MAKE a best seller by getting behind it, but you have to be that lucky one they decide to get behind.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

Thomas B. Dewey, Ralph Dennis and I'd like to see somebody reprint Henry and Frank Kane.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

I used to tend bar at MWA cocktail parties when I first joined because I was painfully shy. It was there I met my first editor, Michael Seidman. We talked quite a bit, became friends, and he wanted to buy a four book P.I. series from me, but as happens in publishing his company froze his ability to buy, so we had to wait. eventually, he bought the first book, THE DISAPPEARANCE OF PENNY, but we were never able to continue the series. We both went on to other things. I do have him to thank, though, for my Gunsmith series, which is now 16 years old.

Richard Matheson - Part Two - The Interview

2006-03-25T14:36:00.000-08:00

Reprinted with permission from Filmfax -- interviewer Ed Gorman

FAX: What do you consider the highlights of your career thus far?

MATHESON: I guess the highlights of my career would, of course, have to be the projects that worked out best. A few examples: Novels like I Am Legend, The Shrinking Man, The Beardless Warriors, Bid Time Return (soon to be called, understandably, Somewhere in Time), Hell House, What Dreams May Come, Hunted Past Reason, Abu and the Seven Marvels, a few others. As I have said a number of times in the past, I think Somewhere in Time is the best-written novel I’ve done. I was reading some pages from it in the past week, and (immodestly noted) I thought that the writing was really lovely. Yes, that’s the adjective I came up with—really charming prose, but enough of my immodesty.

As I have also said in the past, I think What Dreams May Come is the most important (read effective) book I’ve written. It has caused a number of readers to lose their fear of death—the finest tribute any writer could receive.
Highlights of my script work: four or five of the 14 Twilight Zones; Somewhere in Time; The Morning After, Duel, and The Dreamer of Oz on television.

Hoped-for highlights with only moderate gratification: my two metaphysical books The Path and A Primer of Reality. To these two I would add Hunted Past Reason because I wrote it to state my metaphysical basic assumption, the quote up front in the novel is “To die is nothing. To live is everything.” I wanted the novel to be called To Live but, to my consternation—and for the first time in my entire book-writing career—Tor put their own title on it; a quote from “King Lear,” which was pointless to print, because it has absolutely nothing to do with the story and the point I was trying to make.

I suppose there were other highlights, but these will suffice.

Low points? Scripts re-written by producers, one novel re-written because the two women editors decided that I couldn’t write good English! Actually, most of my novels—and movies; and television scripts—were printed and/or produced word-for-word. Low points occurred in that, despite the religious adherence to my words, a number of the television shows and movies were poorly done. I won’t name them.

FAX: What do you like and dislike about the current state of movies? Television? Publishing?

MATHESON: I think the current state of movies and television is pathetic. I just read a long article this morning in the Los Angeles Times citing the creative blunders of many of the major studios in which marketing considerations blinded them to the sad fact that almost none of the films had any interest to the public. Instead of making films that were creatively exciting, they functioned as marketing ploys—“Oh, that worked before, let’s do it again. And again. And—ad boring. And if a film was creatively exciting, the “new” audiences didn’t really warm to them and they barely made their costs or actually lost money. As a member of the Academy and the Writers Guild, my vote went to Seabiscuit, a wonderful film, which had made a limited amount of money, not blockbuster caliber; with marketing costs on top of production costs, it might lose money. A pity. Which is why good films with limited box office receipts really need the Academy Award to bolster earnings.

In brief: Films today? Pathetic!

I can’t pass judgment, but I will say that I think publishers have the same “blockbuster” mentality as movie producers. King, Koontz, Crichton, Grisham, etc.—not to mention J.K. Rowling, who has created a publishing world all her own. When a writer has more money than Queen Elizabeth—Yow!

FAX: Looking back on your career, is there anything major you’d do differently?

MATHESON: Yes. I’d complete novels I didn’t finish. My self-assurance as a writer has been lamentable. Come Fygures, Come Shadowes was intended to include every aspect—good (and bad)—of spiritualism, plus an approach to modern parapsychology; shame on me for not finishing it as well as The Link, which was intended to include the entire history of mediumship, as well as a total study of modern parapsychology. Shame on me twice.

FAX: Do you have any particular favorites among your writing in various media?

MATHESON: As indicated, Somewhere In Time is my favorite novel. The Beardless Warriors is good, too.

Movies and television: I think I’ve mentioned some. I might add A Comedy of Terrors (very funny, I think).
Short stories: Too many to pick favorites. I like “The Test,” “Duel,” and “The Distributor.” This last one I probably wouldn’t write today. I hate it when something I’ve had published “inspires” some nut to imitate what I’ve written, or some teacher gets fired for having her students read one of my stories or novels.

FAX: Though you’ve always used supernatural themes in some of your work, there is a deepening spirituality in your fiction as the decades pass. Was this because of your growing personal feeling about the nature of the human soul and what lies beyond what we call life?

MATHESON: I have read countless books on parapsychology, metaphysics, etc., through the years. My special favorite is Thinking and Destiny by Harold W. Percival. It inspired my book The Path which consists mostly of quotes from Thinking and Destiny.

Anyway, I have studied these books and evolved my personal philosophy which, when all the details are considered, consists of that little quote in Hunted Past Reason—“To die is nothing. To live is everything”—with all that implies.

FAX: Were you religious as a youth?

MATHESON: Not particularly. I was raised as a Christian Scientist, which I accepted. A good religion. On the wall of the pulpits in Christian Science churches is the phrase “God is Love;” not a bad statement.

FAX: Did your experience in World War Two affect your religious views?

MATHESON: I used my Christian Science belief system when I was in infantry combat. It reassured me. At the same time, my blood pressure went sky high—so you pays your metaphysical money and you takes your choice. Later, I left the Christian Science religion and chose to evolve my own belief system, which does not adhere to what has been described as “Churchianity.” However, I still think Christian Science is an acceptable religion.

FAX: What project are you working on currently?

MATHESON: A one-man play; I won’t give you the title. I also have a suspense-comedy due to be produced in London if and when we can come up with a leading man. I would like to concentrate of theater for the next decade—whether that works out or not rests in the laps of the theater gods.

FAX: Your work grows in stature with each decade, and seems assured of enduring. Do you have any thoughts on that kind of immortality?

MATHESON: I hope people are reading my work in the future. I hope I have done more than frightened a couple of generations. I hope I’ve inspired a few people one way or another.

Actually, the highlight of my life—which, of course, had an enormous influence on my writing career—was meeting Ruth Woodson on the beach in Santa Monica in 1951, falling in love with her, marrying her, and creating with her a family of four children; two sons, two daughters. My love for them, and growth because of them, made my writing life what it was. It’s a process I advocate for any would-be writer.

Richard Matheson

2006-03-24T14:28:00.000-08:00

Several of you have written me in the last month to ask where you could get copies of my interview with Richard Matheson, the one that appeared in Filmfax two years ago. Well, I'm updating it for inclusion in the Richard Matheson Companion which Matthew Bradley is doing.

For those of you unfamiliar with Richard's work, he's usually associated with horror, though in fact he's done nearly as much suspense as he's done horror. He wrote Spielberg's Duel, Kolchak the Night Stalker, all the important Poe films and numerous other suspense features. The only film Alfred Hitchcock asked to direct on his excellent one hour show was Richard's Ride The Nightmare, the novel being a true masterpiece of ever-ascending suspense, even though the TV movie doesn't quite make you break out in cold sweats the way the book does. With appearances in Queen and Year's Best among many other mystery anthologies, the suspense genre can certainly lay claim to him, too. Though as you'll see in the second half that runs tomorrow night, Richard considers himself a "writer" period. He writes whatever appeals to him at the moment.

So this is the slightly edited version of my Matheson piece. The interview itself appears tomorrow night. This is both the set-up and an overview of some of Richard's novels. Tor recently issued a beautiful trade pb that includes three of the suspense novels referenced here, Fury on Sunday, Someone Is Bleeding and Ride The Nightmare. (Thanks to Jim at Filmfax for letting me reprint the piece.)

---------

Just about every time I’ve ever written about Richard Matheson over the past thirty 30, I’ve started out the same way.
The night of my eighth grade dance. My very first real dance. I’m duded to the max. Black suit and pink shirt and black tie. Like the one I’d seen Gene Vincent wear at the local dance club a couple of months earlier.

On this cold February night I am on a mission. I am going to win at least one dance with the girl I’ve loved with embarrassing fidelity since fifth grade. She must be aware of my painful condition—God knows I’ve humiliated myself enough because of it—but she’s far too busy fending off high school boys. Her beauty is quite apparent to them, too.

Well, friends and neighbors, this night, she does not go so well. The usual criminals I hang out with are nowhere around. They see this dance as strictly candy-ass. I am left, the only kid there with a true duck’s ass, to talk to boys in crew cuts and butch wax and gray suits. As I recall, they were friendly enough but wary of me because of the tough crowd I ran with. What the hell was I doing here? they wondered. And soon enough, I wondered, too.

Long story short: she danced with five or six different boys, and then a sophomore heartbreaker (just ask him) sort of commandeered her. She danced with nobody else but him. My chance was past.

I left for home early in the winter night. It was cold but at least the shadows were comforting. I felt a whole lot less foolish in the darkness.

Three blocks from my house was a pharmacy that didn’t close until 10:00. I stopped in there to have a Pepsi and a smoke. As always, I looked over the metal swivel paperback rack. This was 1955. I’d probably heard the name Richard Matheson in a few of the science fiction magazines I’d just begun reading, but I’d never seen a book of his before.

I took I Am Legend home, and two pages in forgot my broken heart entirely. I had never read a book that transported me so totally into its reality. Not only was it a harrowing suspense story, it had an emotional power and resonance that would remain with me the rest of my life. (Unfortunately, the heartbreak did return and all too soon.)

That night, Richard Matheson became one of my three favorite writers. He’s remained so for more than 50 years now.
Back in 1955, I divided my reading between mysteries and science fiction. I generally felt closest to the mysteries, especially the Gold Medal novels by John D. MacDonald, Charles Williams, Peter Rabe, Lionel White, and several others for a simple reason: The world they tended to set their stories in was my world, a working-class neighborhood with more taverns than churches, a Greyhound bus station, serious games of craps and poker played in drafty basements, a fair number of teenage boys and girls alike shipped off to reform school or even prison, and cops who were always dragging your friends off to jail, especially if you happened to be black, as about a fourth of the neighborhood was in those days.

The next two Matheson novels I read were Fury on Sunday and Someone is Bleeding. They were every bit as brutal and real as any of my favorite Gold Medal writers, and with an added attraction: In Matheson novels, romance, often painful romance, drove the story as much as the violence did. To this day I prefer my novels to have man-woman stories in them. Not Romance. But romance.

A year later or so, Bantam did the first mass market edition of his collection Third from the Sun. Friends of mine who hated to read ate up every single page of it. If the subject had been The Works of Richard Matheson, these kids would have gone on to graduate school instead of flunking out of high school.

Matheson was one of the first writers I consciously copied. Those short, jabbing sentences. Those clearly defined settings. The dialog that could create a human being in just a few lines. And plots that just never let you go. I believe I read “Dying Room Only” three times the day I found it in a pulp in a second-hand store. Yes, he could write humor and adventure and even outré settings on far-off worlds. But mostly what he could do—whatever the setting or storyline or tone—was make it impossible to put down whatever story of his you were reading. The people were just too damned real, and their dilemma just too damned urgent.

He was also capable of constantly surprising his readers by shifting the types of stories and novels that attract him. Though he was known as a horror writer, he was equally skilled with suspense, Westerns, and pieces that are unclassifiable. Which he continues to do today in a variety of story types and the hell with career consistency.

His serious interest in the supernatural was first expressed in Hell House. His serious interest in spiritual matters was first expressed in What Dreams May Come. Now, you could argue that these novels evolved naturally from some of his previous work. Well, yes and no. Yes, he had written stories about hauntings and the supernatural before, but never with the singular and serious purpose of Hell House. And yes, his work had touched on matters of time travel and the quantum universe before, but never at the length or with the aching beauty of What Dreams May Come.

Same with the Western novels. Except for a few early stories, Matheson had never seriously attempted to work with that most venerable of forms. But when he did so, with Journal of the Gun Years, he wrote what has to be one of the most unique and powerful Westerns of the past quarter-century. With a single novel, he was up there with the big guys, Elmer Kelton and Ernest Haycox and Elmore Leonard.

There is no way to cover my favorite Matheson books in any depth in this piece, but I would like to pass along a few thoughts on a writer I’ve just never quit reading. Virtually all of his work has improved with age. The late mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner—whose smart-ass novels as by A.A. Fair I think you’ll enjoy as much as I do—wrote some of his fiction in such a way that it was “timeless.” At least this was what he thought he was achieving by almost never making contemporary references in his later Perry Mason novels. No song titles, no movie titles, no fashion styles were cited. But Gardner was too tricky by half with this ploy. What he achieved was not “timelessness” but an odd sterility of setting. The later Masons happen in a world that has no reality. It’s like a shooting a movie with the actors standing in front of a blank wall. I recommended his A.A. Fairs because they have a lot of atmosphere, especially those set during World War Two.

I mention this because while Matheson’s descriptions of time and place are usually spare, they still manage to evoke the decade in which they were written. The first couple of pages of A Stir of Echoes, as just one example, carefully and evocatively establish that our protagonists and his neighbors are working-class folks, something the under-appreciated film adaptation had the courage to match.

So now to some—but not all—of my favorite Matheson novels. But not the classics such as I Am Legend and The Shrinking Man. I’d rather talk about a few of the novels and stories that don’t seem to get much mention. The Shrinking Man is invariably and deservedly praised for its action set-pieces, especially the extended scene with Scott Carey battling the Black Widow spider. But I’ll tell you, for me the most difficult scene to write may well have been when Carey, now 49 inches tall, attempts to make love to his wife. Because what you have here, friends and neighbors, is a dirty joke. Think about the kind of bar patter this situation would inspire in any other hands. Seinfeld’s George and his “shrinkage” problem (yes, ladies, they really do shrink when you’ve been in cold water) was nothing compared to what Carey experiences. But Matheson makes this one of the most tender, emotionally compelling scenes in the book. It could have been lurid and freakish, and yet it defines Carey’s love for his wife Lou in a way no other scene in the book quite matches.

Earthbound is usually dismissed as minor Matheson, and I’ve never quite been able to figure out why. The bestseller, Stuart Woods did a book called Under the Lake which used many of the same tropes and tricks. He didn’t copy the Matheson book—he may not even have read it—but he did show us how not to write a novel about being possessed by gorgeous erotic supernatural women (though, to be fair, there are some nice long stretches of writing in it). Matheson takes what is essentially the material of a dirty joke—humping lady spooks—and turns it into a serious and moving look at a marriage that is beginning to fail, and a man who has begun to question some of his key values. The use of barren seashore winter images to contrast with the heat of the ghost is remarkable, as is the sorrow of the wife who can’t understand—or quite face—what her husband is going through. It’s one hell of a good, solid, eerie read. This is one of the few supernatural stories I’ve ever found believable, by the way.

Ride the Nightmare—This novel virtually vanished for two or three decades. There was an Alfred Hitchcock Presents version of it that a lot of people like, but which failed, for me, to capture the singular grinding terror of the novel. Familiar material turned into a masterpiece, if you want a slug line for this novel. Respectable married man with a Past finds his life turned into horror when a couple of thugs from his yesterdays turn up and try to blackmail him into helping them out with a new job. There is a particular '50s feeling to this material that enriches the way Matheson handles the marriage in this one. It dates well because it speaks of and to its era. I’ll tell you true—whether you’re an established pro or a beginner, if you want to take a graduate school course in writing suspense novels, memorize this book.

Shadows On The Sun—Here’s one for you, a horror-Western, the only good horror-Western I’ve ever read/seen/heard of, in fact. This was originally a screenplay but it adapted just fine, thank you, to prose. Would’ve made a really nice TV movie back when the networks were pushing that long lost breed of cat (I don’t count all those current Sunday and Monday night weepies as TV movies—they’re just long form soap opera installments). This would also make an especially fine graphic novel should anybody be interested. Here, atmosphere and plot trump character, though Matheson gives us some really nice glimpses into some really not nice people. His mixture of Indian supernatural lore with the spur-jingling realism of traditional Western tropes works very very well.

The Beardless Warriors is another one of those Matheson novels that disappeared for decades after a successful first appearance. This is likely one of his three or four most accomplished novels for two reasons—it is, for me anyway, his most ambitious in terms of the writing problems he sets for himself. The first difficulty is to shape a fast-paced drama coherently about a group of young draftees. A group, mind you; do a group but make them each individual enough that you remember them as separate people. This is no simple drama. He must describe a war, Pvt. Everett Hackermeyer's place in that war, and the young man's reaction to the numerous small dramas all around him. I love this book, and I generally hate war novels. But Matheson plays the entire symphony here—action, tragedy, poignance, humor, the lore of epic battle, and a stunning portrait of a young man's feelings about the requirements of war. No John Wayne crapola here. This is much more in the mode of Samuel Fuller's "The Steel Helmet," reporting the tedium and terror and ambivalence of young soldiers in battle. I can't over-estimate the grace or power of this novel. (This is one of the many recent reissues in handsome trade paperbacks from Tor/Forge.)

What Dreams may Come—My wife Carol read this shortly after she was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. (Not to worry; she’s symptom-free now.) The book changed her life, as she always tells people when urging them to read it. She found in it elegance and beauty, the kind of spirituality she'd never been able to find in churches, a sense of spiritual well-being unfettered by dogma or doctrine. While my reaction was less dramatic, I was struck by how similar my own vague religious feelings are to Matheson's. This is the ultimate love story, of a husband who seeks, and ultimately saves, his wife even though he has died and exists on another plane of reality. I'm not drawn to novels of spirituality, but this one works as both a spellbinding fantasy and a serious speculation about life after death.

Bid Time Return. In gentler times, there was a fine fantasy writer by the name of Robert Nathan. His most famous book was Portrait of Jenny, which is one of the finest romances I've ever read. Then came Jack Finney who, after scaring the hell out of us with The Bodysnatchers, spent the second part of his considerable career re-imagining his beloved town of Galesburg, Illinois in two excellent historical novels. I'd say that Matheson, in Bid Time, demonstrates that he is their equal in matters of time travel mixed with romance. What an enormous accomplishment this novel is—a quicksilver story of a man and woman of different centuries who not only fall in love, but transcend the problems of time. It's hard to imagine any kind of reader not liking this book. The word "fetching" was created to describe it.

The Kolchak Scripts—Gauntlet Publications is in the midst of a major Matheson publishing and re-publishing program. That excellent journalist and reporter Mark Dawidziak has put all three Kolchak scripts (the third being a collaboration between Matheson and William F. Nolan) plus extensive (and excellent) essays on the entire Kolchak saga into a huge volume that is certainly the definitive book on the subject. If Psycho forever changed suspense movies and novels, the first Kolchak movie forever changed horror movies and novels. Yes, there had been gritty newsroom horror films before; and yes, there had been wry, even comic horror flicks before. But using Jeff Rice’s clever novel as a basis, Matheson brought his own shrewd take to this new form. Instead of using humor as farce or slapstick, he used humor to make the realistic elements all the more darker and more believable. I just watched it again, and it’s as fresh, sassy, and spooky as it was three decades ago. It’s a gloriously lurid and nasty piece of work, glitz played off just the right amount of gore, a true classic.

Chris Carter has always said that The X-Files was directly inspired by The Night Stalker, and when you think about it, it sure was. What is odd is that X-Files was imitative in many ways, but there were few Night Stalker homages (as we call them in the land of litigation). Maybe this is because the Matheson-McGavin duo brought a unique insolence to the respective parts they played. In places, Night Stalker teetered right on the brink of parody, both in the writing and in McGavin's acting. But it never crossed the line, remaining mostly dark and surprisingly realistic because Matheson gave the whole journalistic angle the world-weariness (if not cynicism) one finds in most real newsrooms.

Gauntlet also published Matheson’s award-winning and beloved children’s book Abu and The Seven Marvels, a bracing adventure that your kids and grandkids love (mine sure do). You’ve got your princess, you’ve got your hero, you’ve got your wizard, and you’ve got your quest. You might think you know what Matheson does with these familiar elements, but you’d be wrong. Matheson never gives us same old, same old. Never.

Camp Pleasant—Cemetery Dance Publications is another small press that has produced several beautifully made and important books by Matheson. Camp is a superior short novel about a summer camp that is turned into a concentration camp of sorts by the man who runs it. The writing here is outstanding Matheson, outright poetic in places, mixing humor and terror as the bully intimidates virtually everybody in the camp. This is a real page-turner with plenty of suspense, but most of all there is Matheson’s compassion for the weak who must suffer at the hands of the ruthless. A fine, quiet addition to the Matheson library.

Doug Humble - Ed Gorman

2006-03-23T16:03:00.000-08:00

From Doug Humble:

Normally when I'm by myself I don't laugh out loud. (This is something
in itself
that could be looked at on a really rainy day. Suffice to say it must
have something
to do with humor as group activity - ie. demonstrative reaction like
group laughing [ those guys making
laugh tracks know something] )
So, I find myself cracking up reading Viehl's Earnestly on your blog.
Really a great piece.
Reminds me of my doctors office visit (Kaiser, L.A.) and when the
doctor finds out I'm an
artist wants me to cast some concrete lions like those in front of the
NYC library for his house
in Brentwood. I'm trying to get him to focus on my prostate and he's
conjuring up a vision
of his house as San Simeon south.

Ed here: Doug and I go back to the days when one of our more seriously disturbed friends was calling in bomb threats so we could get out of school to drink beer and play pool. Rhodes Scholars we were not. But Doug became a well-known sculptor and artist so things turned out all right for both of us. Even our bomb-threat friend turned out all right, at least sort of...he's a lawyer.

I agree, Doug, I thought Lynn's piece was funny and all too true. In twenty five years of publishing fiction, I've probably been approached thirty or forty times by strangers who want me to read their manuscripts. Lynn handled the situation much better than I usually do. I used to be polite, now I just simply say Can't do it, busy. If they push past that point, I say, Cancer and that stops them. Busy they can deal with. Cancer and busy is another matter.

Mystery Scene was probably five years old when I got a letter from a subscriber that started out with praise for the magazine and then an explanation that his favorite mysteries were those with golf in them. Then I got to the third paragraph. He asked if I would send him a list of all novels that had golf in them.

There's a story by Arthur C. Clarke called The Nine Billion Names of God. The premise is that the human race exists to identify all the names by which God is known throughout the universe. And when all the names are identified, earth has no reason to exist any more and thus vanishes.

The Nine Billion Names of golf...

I'll generally read a short story if somebody asks me to. I spoke to a writer's group several years ago and afterward a young man came up and asked if he could pay me to read his short story. I took the story, no charge, sat down and read it on the spot, and asked why he didn't send this to a magzine. It was a knckout story in every way. He said that he was afraid it just wasn't any good. I told Marty Greenberg about it next day and shipped it up to Green Bay. He read it, agreed it was a great story. A few weeks later no less a writer than Roger Zelazny personally called the young writer to tell him that he was not only buying the story for an anthology but that it was one of the two or three best in a book filled with heavy duty names.

About a year later, Carol and I took Larry and his wife out for dinner. We were all friends by that time and went out fairly often. They thought it was just another dinner. But it wasn't. I'd been talking to the editor we submitted Larry's first novel to and she told me that I could tell him that they were buying it. It was a great kick telling him that and seeing how happy it made both of them.

As some of you have probably guessed by now, the guy I'm writing about is Larry Segriff, the number two man at Tekno Books (he and his family moved to Green Bay) and his lovely, gracious, wonderful wife Marlice.

Every once in a while, these stoies have happy endings--I helped sell a novel for an old college classmate of mine--but unfortunately not often enough.

I've had two exceptionally sad experiences with reading a beginner's material. Carol and I were at Red Lobster (remember, this is Cedar Rapids, Iowa so Red Lobster is life in the fast lane) when a middle-aged guy in wheelchair kept looking at me as if he knew me. On the way to the john, I had to pass his table so he stopped me and said he was a reader of mine and it was great to meet me. Very nice guy. He'd lost his legs in Nam. Then he told me that he'd written a novel about Nam and would I read it. I of course said yes.

It had moments but it needed so much work I literally couldn't figure out where to begin. I shipped it off to a college friend of mine who'd done two tours in Nam and had published three Random House novels based on his experiences there. He came to the same conclusion I had.

I had lunch at Red Lobster with the writer and his wife. I was as gentle as possible, told him that with work it might be publishable, etc. But it was heartbreak for all three of us and I still think about it all these years later and feel that I betrayed him somehow.

The other experience involved one of the sweetest women I've ever known. I mean it. If there are secular saints, she's at or near the top of the list. She is in her seventies now and has written stories since she was in high school. She showed me three boxes of stories. Because I liked her--I kept hugging her as we talked because she was just so damned nice and modest and , yes, sweet--so I took three of her stories home and read them and wanted to kill myself. There was no way I could tell her how stupendously bad her writing was.

The day I broke it to her I brought a pizza along and over it we talked about writing and I made a lot of suggestions--she had a particular problem with run-on sentences--so I'd also walked in with a paperback of early Hemingway and read parts of the stories out loud to illustrate points I wanted to make.

But man I felt that I'd betrayed her. She just sat there, all those dutiful years of writing writing writing, and I could see she was fighting tears once she figured out that what I was really saying was that her material just wasn't any good.

I think about her every day. I sure wish I could've given her good news instead of bad. She still buys all my books and gets me to sign them. I wish it was on her books and she was signing it to me.

Guest blogger: Lynn Viehl

2006-03-22T14:40:00.000-08:00

Since turning pro in 2000, Lynn Viehl has published thirty-two novels in five genres, most recently "If Angels Burn" and "Private Demon," the first two books in her USA Today best selling Darkyn vampire novel series. She also writes romantic suspense as Gena Hale and Jessica Hall, inspirational fiction as Rebecca Kelly, and science fiction as S.L. Viehl.

This piece is reprinted from Lynn's must-read writer's blog Paperback Writer http://pbackwriter.blogspot.com/ She provides the nitty gritty about the life of the full-time professional writer

EARNESTLY by Lynn Viehl

I am having a conversation with an earnest young writer. I have no choice; I'm trapped in a doctor's waiting room; all the chairs are taken and he's in a leg cast sitting next to me. I'm pretty sure the receptionist, who has been reading my vampire novels and demands a new one everytime I have an appointment, has let it slip to Earnest that I am a real author (as opposed to a fake one? One who is only a figment? Ghost writer? I never get that label.)

After heaping me with praise for being the real deal, although he tempers the gush by admitting that he's never actually heard of me or any of my books, Earnest confides: "I have a fantasy novel that's ready for publication."

The standard published author response is to smile and congratulate him. Something vague, along the lines of "That's terrific." My watch tells me the doc is probably going to keep me waiting for another 30 minutes, so I might as well be nice. "That's great," I say, and think of Jesus weeping before I go on. "What's it about?"

"Well," says Earnest, before he launches into a description that tells me nine thousand things about his hero's backstory and absolutely nothing about the novel. It sounds like Lord of the Rings with only one guy being manly instead of twelve of them. While I listen, I amuse myself by inventing titles for this book of Earnest's heart: The Sauron and the Fury. Death of a Hobbit. Alas, Poor Gandalf.

From Earnest's lengthy description, his book is about as ready for publication as I am prepared to take the gold in Women's Olympic Skating. Just before I lapse into an irreversible coma, Earnest adds the final blow. "It's like Terry Brooks' Shanara novels, but not exactly." He gives me a hopeful look. "Do you know Terry?"

I am briefly tempted to claim Terry is one of my ex-husbands, just to enjoy myself in a small but evil way, but that kind of joke has a way of biting you on the ass in a small town. "No, I'm sorry, I don't."

"But you've read his books." Earnest is fan-anxious now.

I shake my head and invoke the Rule of Silence: Never explain to a fan why you don't read his idol's novels. Never. There Can Be No Adequate Excuse.

"I'm surprised." And he is. "You being a published author." Doubt, too, implying that maybe I'm not, you know, real. "You've read Lord of the Rings, though."

Bingo. Honest response: Not even if you drugged me. Polite lie: Many years ago. I make mine reasonably honest. "Nope."

Earnest is earnestly speechless for about two seconds. "What is it you write again?" Horror has given him temporary amnesia.

I could give him a run down of the backlist, but he's had enough jolts for one day. "Romance novels," I say, and observe the superior gleam appear in his eyes. He's about to explain to me that I write trash, in a polite, condescending way, and with the mood I'm in, I might break his other leg.

Before Earnest can patronize me, I say, "Excuse me" and wander up to the receptionist's window. To her, I say, "I will give you an ARC of Dark Need if you take me in right now."

I am on the exam table two minutes later. The doc's new tech comes in, puts up my x-rays on the light board and eyes me. "Ms. Kelly?" When I nod, he smiles. "Alyssa says you're a real author. I've been working on a novel myself."

I am sitting on a metal table in a large paper napkin that passes as a patient gown, so I can't make a break for it. "That's terrific," I say. "Have you met the other author out in the waiting room? Guy with the broken leg. Writes just like Terry Brooks." I think of a way I can make a break for it and get off the table. "Excuse me, I have to use the restroom."

I wash my hands nine times before I go back to the exam room, and it works. When I leave a half hour later, tech and Earnest are talking in the hallway. Both of them ignore me. It's okay. Not like I'm a real author.

New Books: Out of Order by Charles Benoit

2006-03-21T16:23:00.000-08:00

Out of Order
Charles Benoit
Poisoned Pen Press
Release Date: March 1, 2006

I’m one of those folks who actually believes the things he reads. Junk mail
offers, threats on bumper stickers, emails from former Ugandan government
officials who apparently need my help to access millions in offshore banks –
if it’s typed up, I tend to assume it is true. This explains why I own stock
in a wombat farm (The Other Gray Meat™) and how I ended up spending three
years in the Army. As a copywriter for an ad agency, I find myself actually
believing the things I write, sometimes Calling Now! before I even finish
writing the ad. Given this affliction – and knowing that I am not alone – I
have promised myself that I will only put things in my mysteries if they are
true.

I’m not talking about the actual mystery – I still have to come up with that
on my own. But all that neat little stuff that peppers my books – the
location of coffee shops in Cairo, the details of hotels in Casablanca, the
layout of the sleeping berths on Indian trains – is really true. In Relative
Danger, all that stuff about Raffles Hotel in Singapore, the Fridays
restaurant on the Nile and the rugby players in Bahrain is accurate. And in
Out of Order, my new mystery set in India, when I tell you that the Pink
City Express pulls out of Delhi at 0600, you can go ahead and book a seat.
It’s not easy getting all these details right. Once I start a book, I have
to travel to every place I plan on writing about, staying at the hotels I
want my protagonist to stay at, seeing the sites I want him to see, eating
the foods he’ll dine on later. And it would be one thing if I set my books
in New York City or LA or Toronto. But no, I am driven to write the kind of
around-the-world adventure mysteries I love to read, books like Jon Clearly,
Wilton Barnhart and Paul Theroux wrote, books that take readers places they
never thought they’d see, and show them a time they’ll never forget. And
while I seldom ‘rough it’ – camping is a concept I accept only in theory – I
often surprise myself at the places I end up.

I wouldn’t have this problem if I were a better writer. “It’s a work of
fiction,” my wife likes to point out. “Go head and make it up.” But the
truth is I can’t. For me, every element of a book has to ring true – from
characters you’d swear you know to a story line that, while a bit
outrageous, is just outrageous enough to be believable. And if I were to try
telling you about getting hammered in a martini bar in Bangalore or
hobnobbing at a Bollywood premiere in Mumbai or what it’s like to chase a
felonious monkey across a rooftop in Jaipur without having experienced it
myself, well, you’d just know I was making it all up.
I’ll continue to travel, setting my books in the kind of places they feature
on the Discovery Channel, collecting exotic stamps in my passport and exotic
parasites in my bloodstream, all the while building an impressive – and I
certainly hope tax-deductible – credit card bill. So pick up a copy of Out
of Order and come along for the ride.

Pro-File: Kevin J. Anderson

2006-03-20T15:22:00.000-08:00

Professional Bio

Since 1993, 32 of Kevin J. Anderson's novels have appeared on national bestseller lists; he has over 16 million books in print worldwide. His works have been translated into German, Dutch, Japanese, Spanish, French, Romanian, Greek, Russian, Portuguese, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, Hungarian, Chinese, Indonesian, Hebrew, Korean, Slovenian, Estonian, Turkish, Croatian, and Polish.

Anderson recently signed the largest science fiction contract in publishing history, to write a prequel trilogy to Frank Herbert's classic SF novel DUNE, coauthored with Herbert's son Brian. Bantam Books paid over seven figures per book in this trilogy. For a book signing during the promotional tour for his comedy/adventure novel AI! PEDRITO!, Anderson broke the Guinness World Record for "Largest Single-Author Signing," passing the previous records set by Gen. Colin Powell and Howard Stern.

His STAR WARS JEDI ACADEMY trilogy became the three top-selling science fiction novels of 1994. He has also completed numerous other projects for Lucasfilm, including the 14-volumes in the New York Times bestselling YOUNG JEDI KNIGHTS series (cowritten with his wife Rebecca Moesta). His three original STAR WARS anthologies are the bestselling SF anthologies of all time.

Anderson is the author of three hardcover novels based on the X-FILES; all three became international bestsellers, the first of which reached #1 on the London Sunday Times. GROUND ZERO was voted "Best Science Fiction Novel of 1995" by the readers of SFX magazine. RUINS hit the New York Times bestseller list, the first X-FILES novel ever to do so, and was voted "Best Science Fiction Novel of 1996. "

Anderson's thriller IGNITION, written with DOUG BEASON, has sold to Universal Studios as a possible motion picture. ANDERSON and BEASON'S novels have been nominated for the Nebula Award and the American Physics Society's "Forum" award. Their other novels include VIRTUAL DESTRUCTION, FALLOUT, and ILL WIND, which has been optioned by ABC TV for a television movie or miniseries.

Anderson's solo work has garnered wide critical acclaim: CLIMBING OLYMPUS (voted the best paperback SF novel of 1995 by Locus magazine), RESURRECTION, INC. (nominated for the Bram Stoker Award), and his novel BLINDFOLD (1996 preliminary Nebula nominee). Anderson has written numerous bestselling comics, including STAR WARS and PREDATOR titles for Dark Horse, and X-FILES for Topps.

Anderson's research has taken him to the top of Mount Whitney and the bottom of the Grand Canyon, inside the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD complex, into the Andes Mountains and the Amazone River, inside a Minuteman III missile silo and its underground control bunker, onto the deck of the aircraft carrier Nimitz, inside NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral, onto the floor of the Pacific Stock Exchange, inside a plutonium plant at Los Alamos, and behind the scenes at FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, and out on an Atlas-E rocket launchpad. He also, occasionally, stays home and writes.

Pro-File: Kevin J. Anderson

>>Tell us about your current novel. >>Can you give us a sense of what you're
working on now?

I like to keep several projects on the burner at the same time, at different
stages. I just delivered the tenth and final draft of HUNTERS OF DUNE,
written with Brian Herbert, 600 pages long. This is based on Frank
Herbert's final outline, which he left in a safe deposit box before he died
of pancreatic cancer. It's very exciting to be working on this, the grand
finale of Frank's Dune Chronicles.

I am also editing the manuscript of SLAN HUNTER, which I've just completed,
based upon the last unfinished manuscript by AE Van Vogt. His widow asked
me to finish it, and I consider it a great honor. I loved SLAN when I was
in college, and this is just the right kind of big science adventure.

And, for my own stuff, I have just started the big work on nailing down the
outline, 125 chapters, of the sixth volume in my massive "Saga of Seven
Suns," a big epic with a huge cast of characters.

>>3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

Making up stuff and getting paid for it! My stepson jokes that I "lie for a
living." I have learned how to write (dictate) while I hike, so I can do
the two things I love most. I can live vicariously the adventures of many
different characters in many different exotic locales and situations.

>>4. The greatest DIS-pleasure?
Doing a lot of travel and promotion. Oh, I'm good at it and I enjoy doing
book signings and meeting fans, but it becomes more than a full-time job. I
spend as much time promoting as I do writing, which is my real love. And I
can't remember the last time I took a trip that was at my own discretion!

>>5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Think outside the box. Each novel is different, with a different audience.
Too often publisher's marketing doesn't go beyond Generic Plan A, whether
the novel is a thriller, a fantasy, a poker puzzle caper. They don't THINK
about where they might catch a specific readership. For instance, the poker
puzzle caper might be advertized in a poker magazine. Do they think about
that? No! Early in my career I published a fantasy trilogy based entirely
on role-playing games. At the time the publisher had a Generic Plan A of
advertizing their #1 title in various genre magazines, including the
Dungeons & Dragons magazine, and the #2 title got no ads at all. Now, my
novel was *about* Dungeons and Dragons...but instead of thinking this might
be the best choice for an ad in a D&D magazine, they ran their standard ad
for the #1 title (a time-travel SF novel about Sherlock Holmes, I believe).

>>6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print
again?

I have always loved Martin Cruz Smith. GORKY PARK is one of the best novels
I've ever read. He wrote several mysteries before he hit it big with
NIGHTWING and GORKY PARK ("Gypsy in Amber" is one of them...I tracked it
down in a used book store). The others are out of print and I would love to
see them. That's all that come to mind.

>>7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that
moment.

I was working full time as a technical writer for a research lab, and I had
gone away for a business conference. I came back to the office and found a
message on my answering machine (one of those clunky beasts with a
full-sized cassette tape that automatically hummed and rewound after you
played the message.) On the answering machine tape was a call from my agent
saying, "Kevin, I just sold your first novel!" He rambled about the terms,
but I didn't hear many of them I was so excited. I ran down the hall to
yell to my coworkers. "I sold my book! I sold my book!" In the meantime,
another worker called my office with a completely mundane message -- I had
an order to pick up at the photo lab -- and recorded over my agent's
message! I sure wish I could have kept that tape.

Catching up

2006-03-19T14:49:00.000-08:00

Catching Up

With all the interviews I've been running lately, I've accumulated a few notes and reviews I'd like to include here. Many more reviews to come and soon.

# Dear Ed,

With a sudden start, I realized I forgot to list an out of print writer whose work I admire. It’s the late William L. DeAndrea, and if it’s not too late, I’d love to have you add that to the interview. And if it is too late, maybe you can mention him on your site.

Best, Linda Barnes

# The latest Hardcase Crime is Richard Powell's Say It With Bullets and it's a lot of easygoing, witty fun. The copyright here is 1953. I remember the Powell name from my high school days but I don't recall ever reading a book of his. If all of his novels are this larky, I wish I'd caught up with them a long time ago. This involves a bus trip and a guy trying to figure out which of his war buddies shot him and left him behind, presumably dead. Lots of bodies, some very deftly portrayed sexual tension with a tour guide, and excellent dialogue. He can be tough and funny at the same time. In places he walks right up to parody and then wisely backs away. No small accomplishment.

# Otto Preminger's The Fallen Angel is out this week on DVD, starring the melancholy and always believable Dana Andrews and the gorgeous and elusive Linda Darnell. She always played women with secrets and this film is no exception. I actually prefer this to Preminger's Laura, mostly because I can't stand most of the characters in that film except of course for Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney. The Fallen Angel is less rommantic, a true streetwise noir, with Andrews as a bitter grifter and Darnell a sleazy lady looking for a good ride out of the bad burg she lives in. In places this has the feel of a Billy Wilder noir, The Big Carnival maybe, with that almost giddy sense of hurtling toward oblivion. As always Charles Bickford shines, here as a cop not afraid of violating every civil right a suspect has.

# Beginning with the August issue, I'll be writing a monthly column that spotlights various mystery-oriented blogs. If yours isn't mentioned in the first column, know that I have limited space and will get to yours sooner than later.

Guest blogger: Tom Piccirilli

2006-03-18T16:59:00.001-08:00

We're always open to guest bloggers or to those of you who'd like to write up to 750 words about your latest book if it hasn't been self-published.

From Tom Piccirilli

WELCOME TO HELL by Tom Piccirilli

A friend of mine just finished her first novel. It was five years in the making and, like every first novel, it was a hell of an arduous task. Like all of us she’s got a busy life full of family and debt and kids and a career and moving apartments and plenty of other ups and downs and around-the-bends. Over the course of the last half decade she’s had a lot of ground to cover.
Point being, she still managed to swing finishing that son of a bitch first novel.
So she treated herself to a bottle of Dom and called to say thanks for some advice I gave her a while back, a few helpful words she printed out and taped to her desk. It wasn’t the kind of advice that changes the course of your narrative voice or alters your precepts about the writing process. Or anything else even remotely discerning or insightful.
It was just one of those basic suggestions that everyone needs to remember no matter where he is in his writing career. If you’re just starting out or if you’ve been in this adventure for twenty years, it’s pretty much the primary rule of the game.
KEEP YOUR ASS IN THE CHAIR AND WRITE.
Nothing like the voice of God from a burning bush, right?
Since she phoned I’ve had two other folks drop me emails asking a bunch of questions about the publishing biz, all of which I answered faithfully. Both of these acquaintances are newer writers.
One told me that she had five stories written but was a little worried about sending them out. I told her that insecurity and indecision is normal, we all have our reservations but eventually get over it and start submitting. I led her to a website of market listings and told her the names of some of the best editors, magazines, anthologies I’d worked with. Did she think she had anything that might fit these guidelines? What were the word counts of her tales?
She then mentioned that the five stories she had written were still in her head and hadn’t been put on paper yet.
Oh, Mama Piccirilli and the sweet Baby Jesu, protect yer little boy.
Which leads me to revise my original suggestion to now state KEEP YOUR ASS IN THE CHAIR AND WRITE...WITH WORDS, YOU KNOW, THAT YOU TYPE OUT ON THE KEYBOARD...OR WRITE OUT WITH A PENCIL ON PAPER...BUT NOT JUST THOUGHTS DEEP INSIDE YOUR SKULL, OKAY?
The empty page is a lonely landscape for all of us, but especially for beginners. There’s a natural fear of writing the first word because it might not be the right word. That the idea is wrong, that the first sentence will be weak, the characters dull, the plot hackneyed. And you know what?...you’re probably right.
But so what?
We put down a sentence and we pick it up and put it down again. We need to start somewhere. It doesn’t matter where–you might replicate someone else’s voice or style. You might use cliched concepts without understanding how unoriginal they are. You might write the same story twelve times over before you see that you’re not breaking any new ground.
And yeah, not dropping it down on paper is the safe way to go. Nobody will ever see your errors that way.
Not even you. And without seeing those problems you won’t ever be able to resolve and overcome them.
It’s natural for a writer to feel the terror and the exhiliration of everything leading up to the process of the writing itself, but don’t let it stop you. You can find a thousand reasons for not starting a story, and if any of those reasons means more to you than the very fact that you HAVE to get it written, then don’t bother. You don’t need that kind of pressure on you. Go to the beach. Watch Seinfeld repeats. Cook a pizza. If you can get by without having to do the work, then you should. Life is already hard enough.
Otherwise you need to plant your ass in the chair and write. Now, baby, right now.

Tom Piccirilli is the author of fourteen novels including NOVEMBER MOURNS, A CHOIR OF ILL CHILDREN, HEADSTONE CITY, and THE NIGHT CLASS. He's a hardcore fan of noir fiction and film, Asian cinema, and grade z-horror flicks. Learn more about him and his work at his official website: www.tompiccirilli.com. You can often find him with his ass in the chair writing. He adds this codicil to his column–if you don’t want your ass to be as fat as his own, he urges you to go out on occasion and do laps around the block.

Pro-File: Duane Swierczynski

2006-03-17T15:16:00.000-08:00

Pro-File: Duane Swierczynski

Duane Swierczynski is the author of Secret Dead Men (Point Blank Press) and The Wheelman (St. Martin’s Minotaur)—the latter of which was praised by the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer and Mystery Scene, and was optioned for film by director Simon Hynd. Duane’s short stories have appeared in The Adventure of the Missing Detective, Dublin Noir, and the forthcoming Best New Noir.

By day, Duane’s the editor in chief of the Philadelphia City Paper, that town’s top alternative newsweekly, and has worked as an editor at Men’s Health, Details and Philadelphia. He lives in Philly with his wife, son and daughter. “Swierczynski” is Polish for “Smith.”

1. What is your most recent book?

My third novel, The Blonde, is due out this November. It’s the first novel I’ve written with someone looking over my shoulder—that is to say, expecting to publish the damn thing when it was finished. Which was weird. The first two novels were more or less experiments. With Secret Dead Men, it was “can I write a novel-length piece of fiction?” With The Wheelman, it was, “can I write a novel-length piece of fiction without any soul-swapping or other goofy sci-fi ideas in it?”

I’ve been told by friends who’ve read The Blonde that it’s a nice blend of the oddball concepts of Secret Dead Men and the fast-paced action of The Wheelman. We’ll see. I’m in that extremely sensitive place where the book is turned in, it’s not due out for eight months, and I’m worried that I completely screwed it up, and thus sabotaged my fledgling career.

This is normal, right?

(Um… right?)

2. What are you working on now?

Funny you ask. I submitted a short synopsis for my next St. Martin’s book, which my editor really likes (as do I). It’s called Violent Type.

But I’ve been cheating on it with another idea that hit me three weeks ago. I’m a big fan of non-supernatural horror novels—stuff guys like Richard Laymon, Jack Ketchum, Dean Koontz and a certain writer named Ed Gorman have done so brilliantly. So I’m trying to fuse that horror sensibility with the pace and spare language of an action thriller, set in a place where horror stories are almost never set.

Again, it’s all about experimentation. That’s what makes this profession so much fun.

God, I hope my editor isn’t reading this.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

Entertaining people. For me, that’s what writing has always been about. When I was in high school, I’d write two-page horror stories in class, then pass them around to my friends. The expression on their faces was worth the risk of getting caught. And that’s still my prime motivation.

4. What is the greatest displeasure?

The toll it can take on your personal life—especially when you’re really, really in that story zone, and you kind of check out from real life for a while. When I finished the last sentence of the first draft of The Blonde, I let out a sigh of relief. So did my wife. If my home had a guy doing voice-overs, he’d be saying something like, “Rejoice, citizens. Our long national nightmare is over…”

It’s not easy balancing family and writing. If someone put a gun to my head and asked me to choose one over the other, I couldn’t decide. Living without either is unthinkable. Hence… the tension.

5. Any advice for the publishing world?

Scratch-and-sniff novels. I’ve been saying this for years.

Otherwise… I haven’t been in the game long enough to have my spirit snapped in half over someone’s knee. (I’m sure it’ll happen sooner or later.) So let me just say that I hope publishers continue to take risks, and allow writers time to grow, and try to
not have editorial decisions dictated by the bottom line instead of literary merit.

6. Any writers you’d like to see back in print?

The complete David Goodis. The complete Dan J. Marlowe. The complete Wade Miller. The complete non-McGee John D. MacDonald, published in trade paperback form with three novels in each volume. (Hey, a boy can dream, can’t he?)

Cornell Woolrich’s Hotel Room is a underrated masterpiece that’s been out of print since it first appeared in hardcover in the 1950s. That would be cool to see again.

I’d also kill to have more Jean-Patrick Manchette novels translated into English, as well as that French Goodis bio by Philippe Garnier.

Oh—I’m also desperate for someone to publish a trade edition of Richard Laymon’s A Writer’s Tale. The book’s pretty impossible to find, and I’m dying to read it. To even just hold it for a seconds.

7. Do you remember selling your first novel?

Like it was yesterday.

(That’s because it was more or less was yesterday. April 2004, to be exact.)

Secret Dead Men was written in 1998, revised in 1999, and sent out to five publishers in 2000. One close call at Pocket Books, but no dice. It sat on my hard drive the next four years. I played with a couple of paper clips, stared at the wall, and listened to The Smiths.

In late 2003, I struck up an e-mail correspondence with the incredibly talented Al Guthrie. A few months later, he foolishly let it drop that he was the new acquiring editor at Point Blank Press, so I sent him Secret Dead Men for the hell of it. He completely stunned me by accepting it. This is not false modesty. To me, SDM was deader than Barry Goldwater.

But Al’s faith in the book made all of the difference. Without that, I wouldn’t have finished the draft of The Wheelman, which I’d been playing around with for a year or so. And it wouldn’t have sold. And I wouldn’t be lucky enough to be here, answering these questions.

Sometimes, that’s all it takes. One person.

So if this all goes south, I say we blame Al Guthrie.

Pro-File: Michael Bracken

2006-03-16T16:19:00.000-08:00

Michael Bracken is the author of 11 books--including ALL WHITE GIRLS, BAD GIRLS, DEADLY CAMPAIGN, TEQUILA SUNRISE, and YESTERDAY IN BLOOD AND BONE--and nearly 800 short stories that have appeared in literary, small press, and commercial publications worldwide. He is the editor of FEDORA, FEDORA II, FEDORA III, HARDBROILED, SMALL CRIMES, and three additional crime fiction anthologies currently in press.

He serves as vice president of the Private Eye Writers of America, recently completed three terms as vice president of the Mystery Writers of America's Southwest Chapter, and is also an active member of the Horror Writers Association and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Bracken's "Dreams Unborn" was named one of the best mystery short stories of the year by the editors of THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES 2005, "All My Yesterdays" received a Derringer Award, "Cuts Like a Knife" was short-listed for the Derringer Award, and "Of Dreams Unborn" appeared on the preliminary ballot for the Nebula Award. Stories from Bracken's anthologies have been short-listed for the Anthony, Derringer, Edgar, and Shamus awards.

In addition to writing and editing fiction, Bracken is editor of SENIOR NEWS, a monthly newspaper distributed throughout Texas, and managing editor of TEXAS GARDENER, a bi-monthly consumer magazine. His non-fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including ATLANTA PARENT, MOTHERING, MYSTERY SCENE, and THE WRITER. He has edited corporate and organization newsletters, and has received many regional awards for advertising copywriting. He regularly speaks about writing, editing, and publishing to audiences across the U.S.

A full-time freelance writer/editor, Bracken lives with his family in Waco, Texas.

1. Tell us about your current book.

YESTERDAY IN BLOOD AND BONE (2005) is a collection of 20 mystery short stories, 18 of which first appeared in various commercial, literary, and small press publications. Two stories--including the title story--are original to this volume.

Of particular interest are "City Desk," my first published mystery, and "Yesterday in Blood and Bone," both of which feature St. Louis newspaper reporter Dan Fox. "City Desk" originally appeared in the January 1983 GENTLEMAN'S COMPANION and I have revisited the protagonist three times since then.

In "Yesterday in Blood and Bone," one of my longest stories at 18,800 words, Fox witnesses the murder of veteran newspaper reporter Benjamin "Bucky" Weaver and learns of the death of Alderman William Kelvin. Fox finds himself searching deep into the past to discover how the two men were connected and why someone would want them dead. In the process, Fox learns a lesson about prejudice, 1950's justice, and how the power of the press is sometimes embodied in the things that aren't said.

2. Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?

Unlike many writers, I am not a novelist. I am a short story writer who occasionally writes a novel. At any given moment, I have a few dozen short stories in progress. Earlier this week I completed a story about a woman whose son disappears on a mission trip to Central America. I'm trying to finish a horror story about a haunted wardrobe and I keep tinkering with two stories featuring Waco-based P.I. Morris Ronald Boyette and three stories featuring St. Louis-based P.I. Nathaniel Rose.

I also hope to edit additional crime fiction anthologies, so I continue to create and submit proposals.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

I daydream for dollars. I make up stuff and people pay me for it. How cool is that?

4. The greatest DIS-pleasure?

The greatest displeasure is the absolute unpredictability of income. If I didn't have a spouse with a steady paycheck and medical insurance, writing for a living would be quite difficult.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Writing might be an art, or it might be a craft, but publishing is a business. Learn the business.

Too many would-be writers and would-be publishers fail to comprehend that basic fact and they get themselves into trouble. They sign contracts they don't understand or they make promises they can't keep.

Technology has evolved so that it is now possible for every boy and his dog to start a publishing company on a shoestring and many would-be writers are so desperate for the immediate gratification of "publication" that they let their unrealistic expectations blind them to the realities of publishing. The publishers fail; the writers get burned.

So: Learn the business.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

Walter R. Brooks. His 26-book series about Freddy the Pig--who just might be the greatest detective alive--introduced me to mysteries when I was a child. Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys couldn't hold my attention the way Freddy did. (A quick check on-line reveals that some of the Freddy the Pig books have been reprinted within the past few years. I think they all should be.)

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

I sold my first novel to a non-traditional publisher, and not entirely by intent.

DEADLY CAMPAIGN, a novel about St. Louis newspaper reporter Dan Fox, kicked around publishing houses for years. Many years. I tinkered with it. I revised it. Still, it went out and it came back.

In June of 1992 I submitted the unsolicited manuscript--the entire thing--to audiobook publisher Books In Motion. I knew nothing about the company and can't even swear at this late date that I knew they weren't a traditional ink-on-paper publisher. I just saw the company listed in a market report and took a chance.

On January 27, 1994, Gary Challender phoned from Books in Motion and told me they wanted to release my novel.

I could barely stand upright long enough to finish the phone call. Then I collapsed on the floor with joy.

A month later I received, signed, and returned the contract, and Books in Motion released DEADLY CAMPAIGN in May of 1994. (Six more years passed before the novel finally appeared in print. Go figure.)

Pro-File: Gary Brandner

2006-03-15T14:58:00.000-08:00

Gary Brandner, born in the Midwest and much traveled during his formative years, has 30-odd published novels, more than 100 short stories, and a handful of screenplays on his resume. After surviving the University of Washington, he did his part with the National Guard to protect the homeland from Godless Koreans. Seeking his fortune, he followed such diverse career paths as bartender, surveyor, loan company investigator, advertising copywriter, masked avenger, and technical writer before turning to fiction. Having amassed a following of several people, he has settled into a relatively respectable life with wife and cats in California's San Fernando Valley.

Pro-File Gary Brandner

1 Tell us about your current novel.
My current in-work novel is a hardboiled detective yarn set in 1940. It is a labor of love, since I know damn well it will never be published...there are maybe 12 million hardboiled dick stories out there looking for a publisher, and the only thing different about mine is that I wrote it.

2. Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?
After 30-some years of writing without a vacation, I am taking all of them now before it's too late.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?
Getting to hang out with other writers, and meet some who were my idols.

4. The greatest DIS-pleasure?
Dealing with editors whose concern was not my story, but their bottom line. Even more, movie people who consider the writer an annoying necessity.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?
What could I tell them? They make a lot more money than I do. Maybe reissue my books.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?
Frank Gruber, Richard Sale. Darn near anybody who wrote for the old pulps. I have great admiration for these guys who churned out some pretty good stuff for a penny a word, or less.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.
The first one that really counted was The Howling. My agent read my outline and told me it would never sell. A month later Fawcett bought it. It was made into a pretty good horror flick, spawned a couple of sequels, gave me a recognizable credit, and provides a virtual annuity. No wonder I love wolves.

Pro-File: Linda Barnes

2006-03-14T15:00:00.000-08:00

Linda Barnes, author of fifteen mystery novels, has won the Anthony Award, the American Mystery Award, and been nominated for the Edgar and the Shamus. She lives in Boston, roots for the Red Sox, and is proud to be the new president of Private Eye Writers of America.

Pro-File: Linda Barnes

1 Tell us about your current novel.

On May 2, 2006, St. Martin’s Minotaur will publish “Heart of the World,” the 11th Carlotta Carlyle novel, a book I’ve been writing in my head for the past ten years or more. Ever since I introduced Carlotta’s little sister, Paolina, in “A Trouble of Fools,” I’ve intended to explore her Colombian background. The problem: the research; Colombia, in spite of the regular visits I make there to visit my own family, has always terrified me. But I conquered my fears. “Heart” is the first Carlyle to move out of Boston -- to Miami, Bogota, and the wilds of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

2. Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?

The 12th Carlotta. Back in Boston, but irrevocably changed.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

With every book, you begin again -- all sins forgiven, every page a blank.

4. Thegreatest DIS-pleasure?

For me, the only thing worse than writing is not writing.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Get over this business of “branding” authors.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

Joseph Hansen. Jonathan Valin.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

Selling my first play was infinitely more dramatic. At a performance, a complete stranger came up to me, handed me his card, and said, “Can I publish that?”

When I finished writing my first novel, I assumed the same thing would happen. Long wait. . .

Pro-File: Tess Gerritsen

2006-03-13T14:11:00.000-08:00

Tess Gerritsen took an unusual route to a writing career. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University, Tess went on to medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, and was awarded her M.D. in 1979. After completing her internal medicine residency, Tess worked as a physician in Honolulu, Hawaii.

While on maternity leave, she began to write fiction. On a whim, she submitted a literary short story to HONOLULU MAGAZINE's statewide fiction contest -- and won first place!

In 1987, Tess's first novel was published. CALL AFTER MIDNIGHT, a romantic thriller, was soon followed by eight more romantic suspense novels. She also wrote a screenplay, "Adrift," which aired as a 1993 CBS Movie of the Week starring Kate Jackson.

It was a chance dinner conversation that inspired Tess to write her first medical thriller. The man sitting beside her at the restaurant was an ex-cop who ran a security service protecting American businessmen in Russia. On his last trip abroad, Moscow cops had told him that Russian orphans were vanishing from the streets. They believed the children were being kidnaped by the Russian mafia and shipped abroad as organ donors.

The story so horrified Tess, she immediately called her brother-in-law, a reporter for NEWSWEEK, suggesting he investigate. NEWSWEEK was unable to track down any proof. Weeks later, Tess was still unable to forget those missing Russian orphans. They became the inspiration for the plot of her first medical thriller, HARVEST. HARVEST was released in hardcover in 1996, and marked Tess's debut on the NEW YORK TIMES bestseller list. Film rights were sold to Paramount/Dreamworks, and the book was translated into twenty foreign languages.

Since then, Tess has written the medical thrillers LIFE SUPPORT (1997), BLOODSTREAM (1998), GRAVITY (1999), THE SURGEON (2001), THE APPRENTICE (2002), THE SINNER (2003), BODY DOUBLE (2004) and VANISH (2005.) Critics around the world have praised her novels as "Pulse-pounding fun" (PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER), "Weirdly terrific stuff with a steel grip" (KIRKUS REVIEWS), "Scary and brilliant" (TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL), "Like Michael Crichton in medical mode" (LONDON GUARDIAN), "Polished, riveting prose" (CHICAGO TRIBUNE), and "Delightfully scary" (PEOPLE MAGAZINE). USA TODAY says Tess is "tops in her genre" and the SAN JOSE MERCURY has declared her "The reigning champion of the medical thriller."

Now retired from medicine, Tess writes full time. She and her family live in Maine. In her free time she enjoys gardening and playing the fiddle.

Pro-File: Tess Gerritsen

1 What is your most recent book?

My most recent release is VANISH, which was just nominated for an Edgar Award. When a "corpse" suddenly stirs to life in the morgue, she's rushed to the hospital. And there the nameless woman does something entirely unexpected. She kills a security guard and takes hostages -- one of them a very pregnant Detective Jane Rizzoli. Who is this mysterious woman and why does the federal government suddenly show up on the scene, determined that she not survive the night?

2. What are you working on now?

The book I'm finishing up right now -- the one that's due next week (!)-- is called THE MEPHISTO CLUB. It's the sixth Jane Rizzoli book. When a murderer leaves mysterious ancient symbols at a crime scene, Boston police must turn for assistance to The Mephisto Foundation, a secret society obsessed with tracking down evil -- and proving that Satan Himself actually exists.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

The greatest pleasure of a writing career? There are too many to count. Getting paid for daydreaming and going to work in bedroom slippers are pretty high up there as reasons, though!

4. What is the greatest DIS-pleasure?

The greatest dis-pleasure? Having your work out there in full view, for attack, by the whole world. I'm the kind of person who absolutely hates the idea that someone out there doesn't like me. Conflict (in real life anyway) gives me ulcers. So it's very hard to be a public person -- because the result is that someone, somewhere, is going to decide they don't like me. Or my books.

5. Any advice for the publishing world?

My piece of advice for the publishing world? Stop it with the ghost-written celebrity books, already. Please.

6. Any writers you'd like to see back in print?

I don't know if she's really in the "forgotten" category, really -- but I really do miss the Fremont Jones series by Dianne Day. And I'd love to see Helen MacInnes back in print!

7. Do you remember selling your first novel?

The very first novel I sold was actually a romantic suspense novel, which sold to Harlequin Intrigue back in 1987. But it was sort of an Alice-in-wonderland moment when I found out about the sale, because my agent at the time (whom I've since fired) didn't even bother to call and tell me he'd sold my book. Instead, he WROTE ME A LETTER with the news, a letter that didn't get to me for a week. I heard it instead from some poor editorial assistant at Harlequin, who called to find out some details for the cover design. I didn't know why she was calling me. I didn't know my book had sold. When I finally figured out what was going on, I hung up the phone and just sort of wandered around in a daze.

Pro-File: Jeff Abbott

2006-03-12T16:34:00.000-08:00

Jeff Abbott is the national-bestselling, award-winning author of eight mystery and suspense novels. Jeff's novels have been called "exciting, shrewd, and beautifully crafted" (Chicago Tribune), "fresh, original... intricately woven" (Publishers' Weekly), "nail-bitingly suspenseful and totally original" (Irish Independent) and "excellent" (South Florida Sun-Sentinel).

Jeff is a three-time nominee for the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allan Poe Award and a two-time nominee for the Anthony Award, given at Bouchercon (aka the World Mystery Conference.) All of Jeff's Whit Mosley suspense novels have been honored with nominations for major writing awards: A Kiss Gone Bad was short-listed for the Anthony Award; Black Jack Point was nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, and Barry Awards; and Cut and Run was nominated for the Edgar Award. Jeff's first novel, Do Unto Others, won both the Agatha Award and the Macavity Award for Best First Novel. His other books include The Only Good Yankee, Promises of Home, and Distant Blood.

Jeff's short stories have been anthologized in collections such as Best American Mystery Stories and The World's Finest Crime and Mystery Stories.

Jeff was born in Dallas and grew up in Austin and Dallas. He graduated from Rice University with a degree in History and English, and worked as a creative director at an advertising agency before turning his attention to writing. He lives in Austin with his wife and two sons.

Pro-File: Jeff Abbott

1 Tell us about your current novel.

FEAR revolves around three very different people: a federal witness hiding from the mob, an ex-TV celebrity, and a young soldier, who all survived horrifying experiences. Their lives and their minds have been scarred by severe post-traumatic stress disorder. Their psychiatrist--who involves them in a new research project to eliminate traumatic memories-- is murdered, and the three of them, despite the challenges of their mental illness, must run for their lives while trying to find the miracle cure that could give them hope for a normal life. FEAR will be out in August from Dutton, along with the paperback release of my last book, PANIC.

2. Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?

I'm just getting my ideas together for the next book; but I'll have three short stories out in the fall that I recently wrote: "A Few Small Repairs" in RELATIONSHIPS CAN BE MURDER, edited by Harlan Coben; "Tender Mercies" in DAMN NEAR DEAD, edited by Duane Swierczynski; and ""Seize Your Future" in THESE GUNS FOR HIRE, edited by Joe Konrath.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

I still can't believe I get paid to make stuff up. And I love getting to work at home and have more time with my kids.

4. Thegreatest DIS-pleasure?

This will sound odd, but I kind of hate it right after a book is done. I'm relieved and happy but out of sorts. I feel like my muse has gone on WIFE SWAP and not bothered to come home. RIght now I've finished a book and am just starting to think about the next one, so it's that odd creative lull. Fortunately it never lasts long. I usually get my ideas in the shower so I tend to be very clean during these times.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

We should all work together to find ways to expand the reading audience. Millions of people who don't normally read novels bought THE DA VINCI CODE--so how do we keep them reading?

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

I am so happy that Eric Ambler's wonderful thrillers have been reissued recently in nice trade editions. And I'm very glad Ross Thomas is being reissued again. When I speak to book clubs or writers' groups, they are two authors I always recommend. I just discovered Adam Hall's terrific Quiller novels and am enjoying them.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

I had a cunning plan. I approached two editors at the end of a conference to ask if I could send them the first three chapters of DO UNTO OTHERS, and because they were Southerners I thought they would be too polite to say no. I had spoken with them both previously and had not been pushy (that's so key) and both editors kindly said sure, send me your book. So I did, and six weeks later they both called within two days of each other to offer multi-book deals. I didn't even have an agent yet. It was surreal but obviously a big thrill.
=

Pro-File: Katherine Ramsland

2006-03-11T16:48:00.000-08:00

Katherine Ramsland

Katherine Ramsland, Ph.D. has published twenty-five books. She holds graduate degrees in forensic psychology, clinical psychology, and philosophy. Currently she teaches forensic psychology at DeSales University in Pennsylvania. After publishing two books in psychology, Engaging the Immediate and The Art of Learning, she wrote Prism of the Night: A Biography of Anne Rice. At that time, she had a cover story in Psychology Today on our culture's fascination with vampires. Then she wrote guidebooks to Anne Rice's fictional worlds: The Vampire Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, The Witches' Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice's Lives of the Mayfair Witches, The Roquelaure Reader: A Companion to Anne Rice's Erotica, and The Anne Rice Reader. Her next book was Dean Koontz: A Writer's Biography, and then she ventured into journalism with a two-year investigation of the vampire subculture, to write Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vampires in America Today. Following that was Ghost, Cemetery Stories, and The Science of Vampires. She has also written for The New York Times Book Review, The Writer, The Newark Star Ledger, Publishers Weekly, and The Trenton Times.

Her background in forensic studies positioned her to assist former FBI profiler John Douglas on his book, The Cases that Haunt Us, and to co-write a book with former FBI profiler, Gregg McCrary, The Unknown Darkness. She has also written The Forensic Science of CSI, The Criminal Mind: A Writer's Guide to Forensic Psychology, The Science of Cold Case Files, and Inside the Minds of Mass Murderers and she pens editorials on breaking forensic cases for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Recently, she co-wrote A Voice for the Dead with James E. Starrs on his exhumation projects, and became part of the team. She also contributes regularly to Court TV's Crime Library and has written nearly three hundred articles about serial killers, forensic psychology, and forensic science. Her latest book is The Human Predator: A Historical Chronicle of Serial Murder and Forensic Investigation.

www.katherineramsland.com

Pro-File: Katherine Ramsland

1 Tell us about your current novel.

Currently, I'm writing a history of forensic science, possibly to be titled "Beating the Devil's Game," to follow-up with my 25th book, "The Human Predator: A Historical Chronicle of Serial Murder and Forensic Investigation." Both involve story-telling, putting criminal history into a narrative frame.

Also, I'm following up "The Forensic Science of C.S.I." with a second volume, which goes beyond the basics into new territory. It's called "The C.S.I. Effect," which refers to the current complaint that C.S.I. has negatively impacted the legal process in our country. While it's true that people who watch tend to think that this is the way that real CSI's work (and it's not), there is as yet no evidence that it's affecting jury trials in a negative way. In fact, jury members are listening now when the scientists testify and even recognizing and understanding things they say. That's not been the case in the past. So while C.S.I. is certainly not accurate (and it does annoy a lot of people in this field), it has had a positive effect on such things as increased interest in forensic science education and better funding for investigative agencies.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

Writing. Actually, having the opportunity to learn new things, go new places, and meet new people, just because I'm a writer. I use writing to learn and process the world.

4. The greatest DIS-pleasure?

Having something go into print that I subsequently learn is inaccurate, due to some source not reporting the facts as they occurred, and not being able to do much about it except cringe and hope for an opportunity to correct it in the future. The other annoying thing about this career is the pressure to market myself. I like to talk to people, but I don't like having to put the marketing machine into gear.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Stop underestimating your reading audience. They want challenging things, not a rehash of the same old formulas. They can handle the challenge and they ought to be allowed to have more to chew on.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

I have written both novels and nonfiction, and despite having succeeded with nonfiction, I still aspire to write more fiction. My first novel was a vampire tale based on my actual experiences in the vampire subculture. Selling that and writing a story of my own creation was euphoric. I made less money, but I didn't care. The experience of living with characters who were alive to me and ready to be guided was fabulous. Especially in bed.

Po-File: Stephen Marlowe

2006-03-10T15:21:00.000-08:00

TWO THRILLERS
by Stephen Marlowe

The cover, though busy with type, is riveting: You see a road going to nowhere under a lowering sky, and you want to know what is at the end of it, but you somehow know you’ll never quite find out. Is this the story of my life, or just of the fifty-odd novels I’ve written so far in a career spanning—good Lord!—more than half a century?
The cover says:
VIOLENCE IS MY BUSINESS
TURN LEFT FOR MURDER
Two Thrillers by Stephen Marlowe
and the double volume is a February 2006 publication of Stark House Press under the rubric Stark House Mystery Classics ($19.95). In the front matter you’re regaled with an ISBN number (1-933586-02-8) and other publishing impedimenta—and finally the key dates, 1958 and 1955.
Those are the years in which the two books were first published—a lifetime ago. I was in my twenties, and now in my seventies I’m delighted with this chance to look back at who I was then and why I wrote those two suspense novels, and not two other books, when I was young and eager and thought that I could write anything and dreamed that I would.
Now glued to my computer is a note to myself. I see it every time I sit at this desk. It says: “No one ever said it was easy, but: Write one page at a time, one scene at a time. And you will enjoy the writing more by making sure the scenes are scenes you like to write.”
This is the truest thing I know about writing fiction. Did I know it then, half a century ago? Did it matter when, being young, I believed I could do anything?
I grew up on the streets of Brooklyn during the Depression and the Second World War, and two things can be said about that place in those years. The streets were mostly mean streets, and Brooklyn was a place you might love in some perverse way—for the excitement, maybe—but still want to escape from. One of my writing idols, Irwin Shaw, made that escape about a decade before I did, and so did countless others. The world is, it sometimes seems, peopled with Brooklyn expats.
VIOLENCE IS MY BUSINESS is an early novel among the twenty I wrote about a footloose international private eye named Chet Drum. But of course it is more than that. A novel is more than what it seems to be, more than what even its author thinks it is, or it is nothing.
I lived through the McCarthy era—coincidentally brought vividly to life this year in the movie GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK. Those were also the years of the Korean War, and I saw the virulent Senator McCarthy self-destruct by attacking the Army, in which I was then serving. Chet Drum as a private eye couldn’t fight this demagogue as Edward R. Murrow did in life and does in the film. Drum worked on a different level, in a more physically dangerous world, and his antagonist had to be of a different sort. So the villain of the piece was another private detective, as tough as Drum and far better connected in the Washington corridors of power, a henchman for lobbyists and McCarthyite politicians.
VIOLENCE IS MY BUSINESS has much to do with the patriotism of dissent and, while chiefly a story of noir suspense, it still has something to say about the abuses of power in a democracy.
TURN LEFT FOR MURDER stays much closer to home for the me-in-my-twenties who wrote it. The background is mean-street Brooklyn all the way. The seedy poolroom where the story opens is a poolroom I knew only too well, and the novel’s characters are based on its habitués. Brooklyn, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, supplied the contract killers employed by the national syndicate and collectively known as Murder Inc. How I managed to keep my nose clean in that milieu I’ll never know. The less lucky protoagonist of TURN LEFT was someone I knew intimately. He was who I almost was.
So, one background, one writer, two totally different noir novels. Chet Drum in his twenty cases—and particularly in VIOLENCE IS MY BUSINESS—is the me, the fictionally glamorized me, who escaped those mean streets, went to Washington as a private eye, and ultimately traveled the world, to pit himself against more deadly, yet more subtle, demons. Norm Fisher is the ordinary-guy me who managed to survive those mean streets on their own terms.
And the real me? I wandered away from that background, as Drum did, spent decades traveling the world, and returned Stateside. Writing one page at a time is still the only way I know, and it is glorious when the page comes easily. When it doesn’t, it is trouble, but not more trouble than it’s worth.
There are a couple more novels I want to write. And this opportunity Stark House Press gave me to look back at my early work strongly suggests that they will be as noir as I can make them. Noir is where I come from.

Pro-File: Peter Abrahams

2006-03-09T15:07:00.000-08:00

Peter Abrahams is the author of seventeen novels, including End of Story, Oblivion, and Lights Out, which was nominated for an Edgar best novel award. He also writes the best-selling Echo Falls series for younger readers. He lives on Cape Cod.

Pro-File: Peter Abrahams

1. Current novel: There are two, actually, End of Story, which comes out
March 28 (Morrow),
and Behind the Curtain, volume two in my Echo Falls YA series, coming April
25 (Laura Geringer/Harper).

End of Story is about Ivy, a young would-be writer who gets a job teaching
inmates in a maximum-security
prison in upstate New York. There she encounters a prisoner of uncommon
literary talent, she thinks.
How can that be reconciled with his horrible crime (to which he pleaded
guilty, by the way)? She begins
looking into the original crime. Somewhat dark in tone, but I had a lot of
fun with this book, especially
writing the inmates's writing.

In Behind the Curtain, Ingrid, the thirteen-year old heroine, gets
kidnapped. She escapes,
thinking the kidnapping is related to her suspicions about the existence of
a steroid
ring operating in Echo Falls. She's right about the existence of the ring,
but wrong about
the kidnapping motive, a costly mistake.

2. What I'm working on: More than half finished my next adult novel, but
I'm under
orders to be cagey re subject matter on this one.

3. The greatest pleasure, for me, is the act of writing itself -
specifically, entering imaginative
space every day. Second is hearing from readers who've been entertained,
or sometimes even
moved.

4. Displeasure: Nothing that rises to that level.

5. Advice for the publishing world: Don't be scared. Huge numbers of
people will always love books.

6. Can't think of any off the top of my head. Ross Macdonald should be
better known, but he's in print.

7. First book (The Fury of Rachel Monette, 1980): I'd been out for my
run. My wife told me my
agent had called, pretty excited. I phoned him. He told me there'd been
an auction and the
winner had bid ... But I'd forgotten the English language and couldn't
understand a word. Auction?
What the hell was he talking about? He had to repeat it three times.

Pro-File: Margaret Maron

2006-03-08T15:00:00.000-08:00

Margaret Maron:

Margaret's books have been nominated for every major award in the American mystery field for which they are eligible.

In 1993, Bootlegger's Daughter won the Edgar Allan Poe Award and the Anthony Award for Best Mystery Novel of 1992, the Agatha Award for Best Traditional Novel, and the Macavity for Best Novel -- the first time one novel has ever won all four awards.

Margaret was the Guest of Honor at Malice Domestic XIII, held May 4-6, 2001 in Arlington, VA. She won an unprecendented fourth Agatha Award (below) for Storm Track. The flamingo? Don't ask!

Pro-File Margaret Maron

1. Current Novel: Winter's Child. Out in August 2006. 12th in the Judge Deborah Knott series. Opens a month after the wedding in Rituals of the Season. The eponymous child is Deborah Knott's stepson.

2. Working on now? Various short stories ("El Tramegra" is due out in EQMM in the Sept/Oct issue) and the next DK novel.

3. Greatest pleasure? Working at one's own speed, in one's own house. The friends who enrich my life but whom I'd never otherwise have met.

4. Greatest displeasure? Not getting to see those friends as often as I'd like and readers who write to correct the grammar in my first-person narrative or in dialog.

5. Advice for publishers? Or for writers? For publishers, nothing that would be feasible for their bottom lines. For writers, keep your bottom in the chair, i.e., finish the work.

6. Forgotten writers? No, all my favorites are in print.

7. "Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment. " First moment? Oh, sweetie! Try first year. A botched-up mess that would take too long to detail. Suffice to say initial exaltation to black despair to near indifference by the time the book was actually in my hands.

-------------------

NEW BOOKS PIECE by Jane Tesh

My first published book, A Case of Imagination, was published by Poisoned Pen Press, February 28, 2006.

In the small town of Celosia, North Carolina, no one takes former beauty queen Madeline Maclin seriously as a private investigator. Her best friend, Jerry Fairweather, has inherited a house the locals say is haunted, but Jerry thinks the house is perfect for his shady psychic schemes. Madeline not only has to deal with her growing feelings for Jerry, but she's also called upon to help investigate the murder of an unpopular contestant at the Miss Celosia Pageant.

For me, the writing process begins with finding the right name for a character. Once a character is named, he or she starts talking and I write down what they say. Dialogue comes easily for me. I have to work at creating a believable plot. I chose the beauty pageant world for Madeline because, living in the South, you can't avoid pageants. I have many friends who have participated in pageants, judged pageants, or produced them, and I drew on their experiences for the book. I've also done a lot of community theater. Between community theater and pageants, there is a wealth of eccentric characters and more drama than you can imagine.

As for being published, perhaps the biggest adjustment for me has been the leap from private writing world to the Internet and beyond. I've been living with and writing about these characters for at least 30 years and to have them finally alive to everyone is a heady experience.

Jane Bat

Jane Tesh

A Case of Imagination

Poisoned Pen Press, 2006

http://www.janetesh.com

Pro-File: Lynn Viehl

2006-03-07T16:28:00.000-08:00

Pro-File: M.J. Rose

2006-03-06T15:12:00.000-08:00

//////Ed here: If you have a mystery or crime novel that has appeared in the past thirty days or will appear in the next thirty days, this blog will begin publishing New Books pieces in which writers talk about their books in 800 words or less. Why you wrote it, what it's about, interesting insights into the writing process, etc. We need name of publisher, price, on sale date. If you have a New Books piece e-mail it to ejgorman99@aol.com No e-books or self-published books please. Regular trade houses and small press houses only. Thanks.////////

Pro-File: M.J. Rose

M.J. Rose, is the author of half a dozen novels, Lip Service, In Fidelity, Flesh Tones, Sheet Music The Halo Effect and The Delilah Complex. She also is a contributor to Poets and Writers, Oprah Magazine, The Writer Magazine, Pages Magazine. Her short fiction has appeared in Pages Magazine, The Vestal Review and several anthologies including Best American Erotica and The Auntie's Book.

Rose is also the co-author with Angela Adair Hoy of How to Publish and Promote Online, and with Doug Clegg of Buzz Your Book.

Getting published has been an adventure for Rose who self-published Lip Service late in 1998 after several traditional publishers turned it down. Editors had loved it, but didn't know how to position it or market it since it didn't fit into any one genre.

Frustrated, but curious and convinced that there was a readership for her work, she set up a web site where readers could download her book for $9.95 and began to seriously market the novel on the Internet.

After selling over 2500 copies (in both electronic and trade paper format) Lip Service became the first e-book and the first self-published novel chosen by the LiteraryGuild/Doubleday Book Club as well as being the first e-book to go on to be published by a mainstream New York publishing house.

Rose has since been called the "poster girl" of e-publishing by Time magazine and has been profiled in Forbes, The New York Times, Business 2.0, Working Woman, Newsweek and New York Magazine.

Lip Service has been published in seven countries. In Fidelity is in its fourth printing and was chosen by Cosmopolitan Magazine as the July 2001 Book of the Month.

Rose has appeared on The Today Show, Fox News, The Jim Lehrer NewsHour, and features on her have appeared in dozens of magazines and newspapers in the U.S. and abroad, including USAToday, Stern, L'Official, Poets and Writers and Publishers Weekly.

Rose graduated from Syracuse University and spent the '80s in advertising. She was the Creative Director of Rosenfeld Sirowitz and Lawson and she has a commercial in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

She lives in Connecticut with Doug Scofield, a composer, and their very spoiled dog, Winka.

M.J. Rose:

1 Tell us about your current novel.

The Delilah Complex is the second novel in my psychological suspense series about NYC sex therapist Dr. Morgan Snow.

In this book she works with a group of women who belong to a secret sex club and are grieving the death of one of the men who was also a member. And then a second man is killed…

The book explores sexuality’s power and looks at some unconventional and often taboo issues – while at the same time – delivers – I hope – a page turning, thrilling read.

2. Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?

The third, THE VENUS FIX, will be out in July and is even more controversial that THE DELILAH COMPLEX. It has to do with teenage boys who are addicted to internet pornography. So now I’m starting the fourth in the series and trying to shake things up a little.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

The hours that I get to spend lost in creating stories, seeing them unfold and come to life.

And hearing from readers who are moved or transported or entertained.

Is anything better than finding out you did your job well?

4. Thegreatest DIS-pleasure?

What happens once a book is finished. Publishing isn’t broken but its navigation system is. At the same time that we see declining readership, more books than ever being published each year. The industry is being irresponsible in how much they buy versus how little they support. We desperately need new marketing initiatives so that we can expose more readers to more books and get more people excited a greater number of titles.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Only become a writer because you love the process of writing. Don’t get in it for the money or the glory. For the greater percentage of authors, that never comes.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

With all the out of print venues on line to buy used books, there’s nothing that is out of print that I haven’t been able to find fairly easily.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

By 1998, despite having a great agent and two almost sales, my novel was rejected because it crossed several genres. Suspense, erotic, too literary to be commercial, too commercial to be literary and psychological.

A marketing nightmare the publishers told my agent. (At the time the term “psychological suspense” wasn’t being used, it would have solved everything.)

Frustrated and against all advice, I self-published LIP SERVICE and marketed it online in an effort to test my theories about how a cross genre book could and might be positioned and promoted.

Cut to six months later.

My significant other was in kidney failure, on dialysis, awaiting a transplant. Life had gotten very complicated and the only thing that distracted me was going online and marketing the book. From home, from dial up connections when he was in the hospital, it didn’t matter. I didn’t even care about the book or getting published anymore but I was needed something to think about beside life and death.

LIP SERVICE it turned out, had generated some buzz. Up till then no one had really exploited the web to get attention for a book, reach readers, offer free downloads and excerpts. And Erika Tsang an editor at the Doubleday Book Club and Literary Guild came across the novel online.

She read it and emailed me and made an offer. The clubs wanted to buy the book and make it a featured alternate selection. The first time they’d found a book online or bought a self published novel. Not to mention one that had started its life as an electronic download for sale for $9.95 from a website.

Twenty-four hours later, my agent sent out the books to six NYC editors. Three weeks later, she held an auction.

I was at the hospital with my significant other -- on one of his many stays -- when my agent called to present me with the offers.

It was very bittersweet. I remember sitting by his bed, knowing that this was an incredible moment, that I needed to focus on it, that it was what I had waited for, for so very long. But in the face of the illness we were dealing with, the book sale just couldn’t compete.

What really matters is that he got his transplant 10 months later and it’s still a bestseller. And, oh yeah, I’m still getting published. I don’t write happy endings, but I sure appreciate them when they happen in life.

Pro-File: Donald E. Westlake

2006-03-05T15:10:00.000-08:00

Donald E. Westlake

DONALD E. WESTLAKE has written numerous novels over the past thirty-five years under his own name and pseudonyms, including Richard Stark. Many of his books have been made into movies, including The Hunter, which became the brilliant film noir Point Blank, and the 1999 smash hit Payback. He penned the Hollywood scripts for The Stepfather and The Grifters, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay. The winner of three Edgar awards and a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, Donald E. Westlake was presented with The Eye, the Private Eye Writers of America's Lifetime Achievement Award, at the Shamus Awards. He lives with his wife, Abby Adams, in rural New York State.

Ed here: As I've said before, I believe that Don Westlake is flat out the best crime ficton writer of our time--the most skilled, the most daring and the most accomplished. I think he's wrtten a number of masterpieces but of them all I'd have to say that The Ax is probably his best for sheer brilliance of craft and relevance to our time. Here are a few review quotes to remind you of just how fine that book is:

Charles Taylor has this to say about Westlake's The AX:

"The murderous characters that unnerve us the most are the ones we can feel close to, the ones who make us feel protective of them, make us realize what human traits we share with them. No one has ever captured those qualities better than Anthony Perkins playing Norman Bates in Psycho. And though he's a very different character, the middle-aged businessman in Donald E. Westlake's devastating novel The Ax who, after he's laid off, resorts to killing the competitors for the job he desperately needs, makes us feel the horror of seeing murder as necessity (talk about a thriller that really represents our contemporary dark side; nothing Harris has written can touch The Ax.)

"If there were a different set of values at work in our glum society, Westlake would have won National Book Awards and Pulitzers...[and] there would be statues of him in every municipal park."
-Washington Post Book World

"No one can turn a phrase like Westlake."
-Detroit News and Free Press

"Westlake is one of the best crime writers in the business...inventive, suspenseful, muscular, angry, horrific."
-Los Angeles Times
The Ax

Pro-File: Donald E. Westlake

Tell us about your current novel.

1. I'm breaking my own rule again. For 25 years or more, my rule has been
to limit myself to 1 Dortmunder in every 3 Westlake novels, in an effort to
keep the series from growing flat or thin or anything else bad -- which
I've seen with people sometimes who go to the well too often. So, when I
finished THE ROAD TO RUIN I was supposed to write 2 non-Dortmunders, but for
a couple of months the only story I could think of was another damn
Dortmunder, so I finally gave up and wrote it, and that was WATCH YOUR BACK!
So now I'm supposed to do 2 from column B again, and hit me with a brick if
I'm not hanging out with John, three times in a row. It's 284 pages so far
and does not yet have a title, not even YOU AGAIN?

Can you give us a sense of what you're working on?

2. Right now I'm working on page 285, with very little success so far,
except I think one of them -- or maybe both of them -- will go out that
window onto the roof next door. Which will give me an even bigger problem
on page 286.

What is the greatest pleasure in your writing career?

3. At the party after the New York premiere of THE GRIFTERS, I went over to
say congratulations to Stephen Frears, but before I could speak he grabbed
my elbow and leaned in close and said, "Wull, we got away with it." That's
the greatest pleasure, not in writing, which is its own greatest pleasure,
but in the writing career. Year after year, we get away with it.

What is the greatest DIS-pleasure?

4. The greatest displeasure in my writing career used to be my occasional
indentured servitude in Hollywood, but now it is the ramshackle mess that
has become of New York publishing. Doesn't anybody here know how to play
this game?

Do you have any advice for the publishing business?
5. Pay attention.

Are there two or three writers you'd like to see in print again?
6. There are specific books from uneven writers, but I don't want to do a
list, so I'll make one stand for them all. I believe Joel Townsley Rogers'
THE RED RIGHT HAND should be reissued every 5 years forever.

Tell us about writing your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.
7. Well, I wrote a mystery I called THE CUTIE, a title which died along the
way, which would have been better if it had died for a better title, instead
of for THE MERCENARIES. I was represented by Scott Meredith then, which was
very much like being a cow on a dairy farm, and Henry Morrison was his
assistant. He wanted to send my cutie to a paperback house, but I said I
wanted it in hardcover. He told me there were only 2 hardcover houses at
that time worth thinking about, Simon & Schuster and Random House, neither
of which would want it. I insisted, and he said, okay, we'd waste the time
and then sell it paperback.
So it went to Clayton Rawson at S&S, who was personally insulted that
anyone would send him such trash (s'truth). Then it went to Lee Wright at
Random, who called Henry and said it was a near miss, she was sending it
back but wished I lived in New York so she could talk with me. "He lives in
New York! He lives in New York!" It was arranged I'd meet with her and
pick up the manuscript. Henry said to me, "LISTEN to her!" So I spent two
hours listening to her and she made me see the bad pulp habits that had led
me astray, and it was agreed I'd rewrite and she'd look at it again. I did,
she did, and she bought it. She was the best editor I ever had, very smart
and very funny, and she knew her business. She once told me she was such a
sucker for story that she had to read a manuscript 3 times before she could
get objective about it and be of use. Look for an editor like that, eh?
The suits were always oafish, of course; they made her also be the cookbook
editor, though she'd never cooked anything in her life. She once said, "I
walk into the kitchen and my thumb starts to bleed, and I haven't even
picked up the can opener yet."

Pro-File: Doug Clegg

2006-03-04T17:44:00.000-08:00

From Doug Clegg:

Born in the South, Lived All Over

If you really want to know about me, read my novels.

I was born in Virginia, and have lived in various places, but currently live along the coastline of New England with my partner, and we have a small menagerie of rescued animals (a dog, a cat, and a rabbit).

I wrote my first novel in my 20s -- it is called Goat Dance. Since that time I've seen more than 20 of my novels published in the genres of psychological suspense, horror, and fantasy, the most recent being The Priest of Blood: Book One of The Vampyricon, published by Penguin's science fiction and fantasy division, Ace.

My fiction has variously won a Bram Stoker Award, an International Horror Guild Award, and a Shocker Award; The Priest of Blood hit the New York Times bestseller list; my novel Bad Karma was made into a bad film; recently, my novel The Hour Before Dark was optioned for the movies; and none of that really means much at all when I sit down to write a new novel -- it's always a blank page. It's always the same road that spread out before me when I wrote my first novel.

Pro-File: Doug Clegg

1 Tell us about your current novel.

Three have come out recently -- The Priest of Blood, Mordred, Bastard Son, and The Attraction. The Priest of Blood is a medieval dark fantasy novel -- with vampyres, while Mordred is a twist on the Arthurian tale where Mordred is gay and has a very different version of events to tell. The Attraction is a short novel with a mummy who might be an ancient Aztec priest or not, and a bunch of college kids out on spring break. It's basically Mummys Gone Wild with a lot of terror.

2. Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?

I'm finishing up Lady of Serpents, the second Vampyricon novel after The Priest of Blood. It picks up where the first novel left off, when Aleric, Falconer, the messiah of vampyres, has been captured and imprisoned by the woman he once loved. It moves between France and Mexico -- in the 13th century. Then, I'll be getting back to a supernatural thriller I've worked on for awhile.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

Living inside the imagination and getting paid for it. The second greatest pleasure is hearing from readers who also went inside my imagination.

4. Thegreatest DIS-pleasure?

Watching a beloved novel not get support from a publisher. That has got to be the worst experience a novelist can face.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Support the sales reps and editors so that everyone feels invested in the success of the books.

6. Are there two or three forgotten writers you'd like to see in print again?

There are too many for me to even pinpoint a few.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

I lived three thousand miles away from Manhattan, but happened to be in the city through a fairly unusual circumstance. I visited an editor who had rejected the book but had liked it -- I wanted to thank her in person because she'd been so helpful despite the rejection. While in her office, the editor at Simon & Schuster called to try and track me down because she had called a number in California but had gotten a Chinese restaurant instead of me -- and she knew the editor who I was visiting would have my number.

I stood there, eavesdropping. The editor looked up at me and said, "Call her. She doesn't know you're in Manhttan. She wants to buy your book." I got the offer that afternoon and walked down Sixth Avenue, weeping as I went because I had waited since I was eight to consider myself a writer of fiction. I was twenty-eight at the time. It was my first novel, and it was bought by a house to which I had dreamed of selling a novel since I was a kid.

People on Sixth Avenue stopped me to ask what was the matter -- New Yorkers really are the best -- and when I told them, they all congratulated me. And one woman gave me her card, told me she was an actress, and if they ever made a movie, to give her a call.

Pro-File: Nancy Holder

2006-03-03T16:23:00.000-08:00

Ed here: If you have a mystery or crime novel that has appeared in the past thirty days or will appear in the next thirty days, this blog will begin publishing New Books pieces in which writers talk about their books in 800 words or less. Why you wrote it, what it's about, interesting insights into the writing process, etc. We need name of publisher, price, on sale date. If you have a New Books piece e-mail it to ejgorman99@aol.com No e-books or self-published books please. Regular trade houses and small press houses only. Thanks.////////

Pro-File: Nancy Holder

Nancy Holder was born in Los Altos, California, and her family settled for a time in Walnut Creek. Her father, who taught at Stanford, joined the navy and the family traveled throughout California and lived in Japan for three years. A famous schoolmate is Mark Hamill of Star Wars fame. When she was sixteen, she dropped out of high school to become a ballet dancer in Cologne, Germany, and later relocated to Frankfurt Am Main.

Eventually she returned to California and graduated summa cum laude from the University of California at San Diego with a degree in Communications. Soon after, she began to write; her first sale was a young adult romance novel titled Teach Me to Love.

She lives in San Diego, California, with her daughter Belle; their cat David and kitten Snow; and their anole, Cammy. She has no spare time.

Nancy's work has appeared on the USA TODAY, LA Times, amazon.com, Waldenbooks, LOCUS, and other bestseller lists. A four-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association, she has also received accolades from the American Library Association, the American Reading Association, the New York Public Library, and The Romantic Times.

She has sold approximately six dozen book-length projects, many of them set in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Smallville universes. Wicked, her recent series for Simon and Schuster, was co-authored with her former Maui Writers Retreat student, Debbie Viguie. She has also sold approximately two hundred short stories, essays, and articles, mostly recently to Hot Blood XI and BTVS: Tales of the Slayer 3.

Nancy also worked as the editor for a computer game company; she provides editorial consulting services and ghostwriting for private clients. She also teaches creative writing.

1. I am currently working on two novels. One is a pseudonymous novel
for "tween" girls. These are girls who are not just little kids
anymore, but not yet teenagers. Let's call them the trainer-bra crowd.
My nine-year-old daughter is a self-identified tween. (My friend Karen
asked her about her trainer bra. She said, "What is it that you are
training?") If you watch THAT'S SO RAVEN/ /and you know who Aly and AJ
are, you are either a tween or have very well developed tweendar.

1.5 and 2.0 I am also working on a trilogy of books that are being sold
via Silhouette Bombshell, which is actually an imprint of Harlequin.
Bombshell is seeking to attract readers who like Buffy, /Alias, /Lara
Croft--ballsy women shooting bad guys, solving mysteries, saving
handsome guys and their own teenage daughters. I just read one about a
fire jumper that was very cool. There's usually a love interest-guy but
if there's no guy like that, these women still have sex lives. My first
is called DAUGHTER OF THE FLAMES and the umbrella title for the trilogy
is THE GIFTED.

The weird thing about my DAUGHTER books is that they have become
intricate mystery novels. No plan on my part, but every time I would
have a character do or say something, I would trace back the motivation
and then try to figure out what the motivation was for THAT. How come X
wanted to do that, and how would they set up that ambush, for God's
sake? People (and vampires) are getting killed and my heroine is
finding out that All Is Not As It Seems. I think this shows growth on
my part. The first time I wrote a mystery, it was a short story and I
had no idea how to salt in the clues, and point the reader toward the
inevitable conclusion, etc. It all came down to a book of matches. Now
I'm just a regular Inspector Gadget.

I am also working on a short story with my tweenette, about a mouse who
saves mousedom from the Katzies during WWI. Yes, it's a bit scrambled.
This is our second collaborative work. "The Further Adventures of
Lightning Merriemouse-Jones" went to FURRY FANTASTIC, and we each got
our own contracts and our own half of the money. Life is good.

So in essence, I'm writing fantasy, dark fantasy, and chicklet lit. All
of this is thrilling to me. I love the act of writing. I love being
asked to write all these different projects. I'm good to go, gimme the
keyboard, let me talk to myself while I work (because I do, even in
restaurants.) And I have established that if I push the driver's seat
back, I can balance my laptop on the steering wheel, which is a useful
thing to know if you arrive at a bookstore early for a signing while on
deadline.

3. The greatest pleasure of a writing career is being able to get paid
while learning on the job. I learn something new every day. I am so
sloppy and lazy and I use adverbs. I'm extremely, terribly, totally
ashamed of my dependence on adverbs. I love email. I love getting
missives from other writers, seeing how funny they are, how witty and
creative. Another woman writer and I just discovered that we have been
quoting Piet Hein poetry to various other writers. I'm on a list with
one of my idols, Ursula K. LeGuin. I teach her in class (via UCSD
Extension) and then I go home and email her. Fantastic! What a life!
I have a writer friend who helps me with all my gun questions and
another friend who helps me swear in French Canadian. How cool is that?

When I was writing Buffy books (I've written more Buffy tie-in projects
than any other author) I visited the set a number of times and I never
got over my starstruckidity. Interviewing Joss. Getting a steak from
the catering truck. I had two Christmas dinners/lunches with those
guys. I was walking along through a park with one of the set dressers
and he bent down and picked up a pine cone. He said, "Oh, my God. This
is a perfect pine cone." I wanted to marry him. I was a
Communications major in college and all the miniutae of tv and film
production is like porn to me. I can't get enough. I love
interviewing crew. Listening to a DP wax on about his choices of gels
and baby-baby's. Oooh. That's the cool stuff writers get to do.

4. Dis-pleasure: Lawrence Kasdan has been quoted as saying, "Being a
writer is like having homework for the rest of your life." This is
true. I envy people with jobs they leave. I have a friend who is a
therapist. She makes tons of money sitting in a chair. When the last
client leaves, she gets up and shuts the door and drives home. She is
always lecturing me about being a workaholic and observes that I need to
restructure my life. Additionally, I have such a finely honed
imagination that I can easily see myself burning out, auguring in, and
starving to death. These scenarios usually send me to monster.com
looking for jobs for which I am unqualified. I had a substitute
teaching credential for a few years but I never used it, ever, so I let
it go. I had hives for days. Another writer friend of mine has parents
who are teachers. They wanted him to at least get a teaching
credential, for God's sake. He said, "Ma, if I have something to fall
back on, I'll fall back on it." I get horrible cases of the heebie
jeebies and I sit around like Bob in that Bill Murray movie, saying
things like, "I am an island of serenity. My external circumstances
have nothing to do with my inner peace and tranquility." And then I
realize that it has been four days since I cleaned out the cat box and I
haven't called the cable company to find out why I can no longer DVR LOST.

5. A piece of advice FOR the publishing world? Hire me all the time
and pay me a lot more money. Now. And: do your best every day, and
even if things go south, you can know that you did your best, every
day. This sounds inane but it is truly excellent advice.

6. Two or three forgotten mystery writers. I forget. But I did google
"Forgotten Mystery Writers" and discovered THEY DIED IN VAIN:
OVERLOOKED, UNDERAPPRECIATED, AND FORGOTTEN MYSTERY NOVELS, edited by
Jim Huang. This sounds like something I need to buy at my local
independent bookstore.

7. My first sale. My agent called with the good news and I didn't
believe him. He had to convince me. He said, "What's wrong?" I said,
"I'm waiting for the shoe to drop." He said, "There is no shoe. You
sold it! It's your first sale." I kept saying, "Uh huh. Okay." I'm
sure it was very unfulfilling for him. But I wrote Stephen King and
told him, because I had promised myself that when I sold a book, I would
buy King's DANSE MACABRE in hardback. So I did, and I went to the
bookstore, and I came home and read it all weekend swigging hot cheap
champagne out of a bottle. He wrote me back and congratulated me. We
had faces then.

Pro-File Jon L. Breen

2006-03-02T16:16:00.000-08:00

Pro-File: Jon L. Breen

Jon L. Breen

(from //hometown.aol.com/mg4273/)

Jon L. Breen began his literary life as a satirist and pastiche artist, mainly writing short spoofs of Golden Age detective writers. His best stories of this period are loving recreations of S.S. Van Dine and Ellery Queen. Breen is remarkably good at conveying the "feel" of these authors - although it is a parody, "The Lithuanian Eraser Mystery" recaptures all of the excitement of reading the Ellery Queen stories themselves. Similarly, some of his Van Dine pastiches are very good detective stories in their own right.

Breen is also knowledgeable about classic Hollywood films, and his "The Auteur Theory" (1978) is an affectionate-but-devastating satire of the auteurist film studies that were popular in the 1960's and 1970's. (I am still an unregenerate auteurist, and find auteurism infinitely preferable to the current rage for Marxist and psychoanalytic film studies.)

Breen has since branched out into detective fiction of his own. So far, his best novel-length work is Touch of the Past (1988). This book is not just a backgrounder, but is a triple backgrounder. It gives fascinating backstage looks at three of Breen's enthusiasms: the real life small town of Idyllwild, California, Golden Age mystery fiction, and the movies. The storytelling and the characters really click. So do the background portraits, on subjects in which Breen is an expert. Breen has a gentle literary personality, and is especially good at picking up on likable characters.

The detective heroine of Touch of the Past, Rachel Hennings, has also appeared in three short stories, of which the best is the longest and most complexly plotted, "Starstruck" (1987). "Starstruck" is a fine example of a type of story Breen has written throughout his career, the mystery with a detailed Hollywood background. These brightly colored stories are rich in show biz lore. Other good works in this mode are the early Van Dine pastiche, "The Austin Murder Case" (1967), and Breen's recent series of tales about Hollywood detective Sebastian Grady, such as "Credit the Cat" (1994) and "The Cat and the Kinetophone" (1999).

Some of Breen's stories tend to be closely constructed around his characters. Breen's non-pastiche works usually have either a show business, literary or sports background, and every character in the tale will have some specialized professional skill relating to that background. His characters also have a professional status, such as up and coming newcomer, old-timer on the downgrade, person trying to branch out to some new specialty, etc. This allows Breen to work a portrait of an entire sport or entertainment into his tale. In addition, each character has their own personality and feelings. The progression of Breen's plot is often a mosaic made up of many different facets, actions or abilities of his individual characters. The stories are full of interesting detail. Breen also has an affinity for parties. This gives him a chance to gather his characters together, and let each express a vivid personality. Costume parties show up in a number of Breen tales; each character gets to come both as himself, and in some new, often symbolic persona.

Breen has sometimes branched out into combinations of fantasy and mystery. His recent "No Gaol For The Budgie" (1993) is a James Powell like mystery fantasy set among birds. It is a little gem. It shows both imagination, and something to say about society.

Breen's delightful pastiche "Frank Merriswell's Greatest Case" (1968) also anticipates Touch of the Past in that it is set in the 1930's, and contains a great deal of historical material about sports and broadcasting. Like "Old-Timers' Game" (1973), this story is about basketball.

1. Tell us about your current novel.

My next novel, Eye of God, will be published by Perseverance Press this September. It is both a private eye novel and a clued puzzle, and I think it is one of the best things I've done. It was not easy to get into print, since its basic situation makes it potentially controversial: one partner in a successful private detective agency (the brains of the team as it happens) has a born-again religious experience and declares an intent to leave the firm; his partner thinks taking the case of a faith healer and televangelist seeking a traitor in his midst will bring him to his senses. In describing the book, I always emphasize that it is neither a religious novel nor an anti-religious novel but one that involves non-caricatured religious people and religious issues.

2. Can you give a sense of what you're working on now?

I have a number of novel and short-story projects at various stages of completion, but I'm always reluctant to talk about work in progress. Not that I'm superstitious, but work discussed too soon tends not to get finished for some reason.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

Writing hasn't gotten any easier, but I've come to realize that the act of writing itself is the greatest pleasure. Also, I'm one of those lucky (I guess) writers who take pleasure in rereading their published stuff. I have to emphasize that a writer's pleasure or lack thereof in his own work says nothing about his worth as a writer. Some of those I most admire are on record as saying they can't read their own writing without cringing, and equally, some lousy writers surely find every word golden.

4. What is the greatest DISpleasure?

Having always had a day job (or, in retirement years, another source of income), I've probably escaped most of the aggravations that come with writing for a living. Of course dealing with careless, clueless, or actively harmful editors and agents might befall any pro, but I've been lucky there, too.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Look for quality and the bottom line will take care of itself. (I'm sure they'll listen to me.)

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

There are many more than three, but for starters, how about three major American women of the '40s and '50s?: Charlotte Armstrong, Helen McCloy, and Margaret Millar. McCloy and Millar have at least had their short stories collected recently (by Crippen & Landru), but Armstrong, who was a terrific writer of pure suspense, hasn't been heard from in years.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

My first novel, Listen for the Click (in Great Britain, Vicar's Roses) was published in 1983, but it had its genesis about ten years before. The first version was submitted several places but universally rejected. In the early '80s, Harlequin introduced a paperback mystery line called Raven House. It didn't last, perhaps victim of a strange method of marketing, but it published some good people (e.g. Richard A. Moore, Maxine O'Callaghan, and the comebacking William Campbell Gault) and its advent was what spurred me to do a rewrite of Click and try again. Raven showed some interest but (I'm thankful now) turned it down, and it found a home at Walker and Company with that fine and much-missed editor, the late Sara Ann Freed. The problem with the first version was that, while some of the minor characters came to life on the page, the two leads were terrible, hero Jerry Brogan a passive blank and his girlfriend Donna an abrasive bitch. For neither the first nor the last time, my wife Rita told me how to fix it: rewrite the two characters picturing people I knew in the roles. I did so in a way the two models would never recognize themselves. Jerry's model, a fellow writer who is now deceased, I assume never knew how he was used. The model for Donna I did tell, and when she finally read the book, she assured me she was absolutely nothing like Donna.

Thank you

Pro-File: Carolyn G. Hart

2006-03-01T14:00:00.000-08:00

Pro-File: Carolyn G. Hart

Five feet five inches tall, light brown hair streaked with silver, green eyes, fairly athletic, reticent about her weight but decidedly not thin. (Henrie O looked thoughtful. Was that why she was thin?)

Some books are written by Carolyn G. Hart, some by Carolyn Hart. Why the missing G? When Hart changed publishers, the new publisher decided the art work would be easier without the G. G stands for Gimpel, Hart's maiden name.

Hart was born in Oklahoma City where the sun almost always shines and the wind almost always blows. Her first fiction about Oklahoma is a non-series short story, "Spooked," which appears in Murder on Route 66. "Spooked" tells the story of Gretchen, a 12-year-old girl in a northeastern Oklahoma town during World War II.

Hart met her husband to be, Phil, on a student trip to Europe during her junior year in college. They had a great journey. They are still having a great journey.

Hart's first cat was Baby Face, a gray tabby. Her current felines are charming (and huge) Cat-A-Thomas and imperious but beautiful Sophie (who bites).

Women she admires: Amelia Earhart, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edith Hamilton, and Georgie Anne Geyer.

Favorite vacation spot: Hilton Head, South Carolina.

Favorite baseball player: Sammy Sosa.

"A Cubs fan," Annie observed darkly. "That's revealing."

"Oh hey, maybe next year," Henrie O challenged.

Max shook his head. "I thought Harry would have some influence in high places, but..."

Annie rattled the sheet with the dossier. "All of this is okay, but surely there's something more interesting about her. Something exciting!"

Max ran his hand through his thick blond hair. "I couldn't find anything else and I looked at everything on the web."

Henrie O sipped the strong coffee. "You know, maybe the truth is, she puts all the interesting stuff in the books about us!"

Pro-File:Carolyn G. Hart

1 Tell us about your current novel.

DEAD DAYS OF SUMMER, the 17th in the Death on Demand series, will be an April 1 Morrow title. Annie Darling plans a big birthday bash for her husband Max. She's having great fun planning the party. One hot August afternoon, Max calls her at the bookstore, tells her hurriedly he's taken on a new assignment and may be late getting home.

He never comes. The phone never rings. Annie knows something dreadful has happened. She calls the police and friends. Everyone searches. His abandoned car is found the next day with a very dead young woman nearby and the murder weaspon in the trunk. The media arrive like vultures and Max is portrayed as an unfaithful husband willing to kill to rid himself of a clinging mistress. Annie never loses faith even though evidence mounts against Max. Annie goes undercover in a last desperate hope to trap a murderer who may have committed the perfect crime.

2. Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?

I've turned in the 8th novel in the Henrie O series, SET SAIL FOR MURDER. It will be out in 2007. Retired newspaperwoman Henrietta O'Dwyer Collins finds murder on a Baltic cruise.

I've also turned in the first novel in a new series. ONE GOOD TURN . . ., a ghost story, relates the adventures of Bailey Ruth Raeburn, late of Adelaide, Ok., who returns to earth to aid a young woman in danger of being accused of murder. I had great fun writing about Bailey Ruth, who always means well but leaves behind her a trail of havoc and some startled citizens.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

The last stanza of Rudyard Kipling's When Earth's Last Picture Is Painted captures the joy for me:

And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame;

And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame.

But each for the joy of working, and each, in his separate star,

Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They Are!

4. The greatest DIS-pleasure?

Knowing that the world of publishing discards wonderful books and wonderful authors as coldly and impersonally as a rampaging tiger destroys his prey.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Seek what is good and true and honorable and beautiful.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

Selwyn Jepson, Kathleen Moore Knight, Erle Stanley Gardner (surely not forgotten but not, to my knowledge, not currently published), Mary Collins.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

A lifetime ago. I saw an ad in The Writer about a contest for a mystery for girls 8 to 12. I loved Nancy Drew and I decided to try. The Secret of the Cellars won the contest. It was published in 1964. ONE GOOD TURN . . ., the first title in a new series, will be out (I think) in 2007. It will be will be my 40th book.

Pro-File:Michael Connelly

2006-02-28T14:49:00.000-08:00

About The Author

   Michael Connelly decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing — a curriculum in which one of his teachers was novelist Harry Crews.
   After graduating in 1980, Connelly worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, primarily specializing in the crime beat. In Fort Lauderdale he wrote about police and crime during the height of the murder and violence wave that rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars. In 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the survivors which was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper levels of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and bringing him to the city of which his literary hero, Chandler, had written.
   After three years on the crime beat in L.A., Connelly began writing his first novel to feature LAPD Detective Hieronymus Bosch. The novel, The Black Echo, based in part on a true crime that had occurred in Los Angeles , was published in 1992 and won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by the Mystery Writers of America. Connelly followed up with three more Bosch books, The Black Ice, The Concrete Blonde, and The Last Coyote, before publishing The Poet in 1996—a thriller with a newspaper reporter as a protagonist. In 1997, he went back to Bosch with Trunk Music, and in 1998 another non-series thriller, Blood Work, was published. It was inspired in part by a friend's receiving a heart transplant and the attendant "survivor's guilt" the friend experienced, knowing that someone died in order that he have the chance to live. Connelly had been interested and fascinated by those same feelings as expressed by the survivors of the plane crash he wrote about years before. The movie adaptation of Blood Work was released in 2002, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood.
   Connelly's next book, Angels Flight, was released in 1999 and was another entry in the Harry Bosch series. The non-series novel Void Moon was released in 2000 and introduced a new character, Cassie Black, a high -stakes Las Vegas thief. His 2001 release, A Darkness More Than Night, united Harry Bosch with Terry McCaleb from Blood Work, and was named one of the Best Books Of The Year by the Los Angeles Times.
   In 2002, Connelly released two novels. The first, the Harry Bosch book City Of Bones, was named a Notable Book Of The Year by the New York Times. The second release was a stand-alone thriller, Chasing The Dime, which was named one of the Best Books Of The Year by the Los Angeles Times.
   Lost Light was published in 2003 and named one of the Best Books of 2003 by the Los Angeles Times. It is another in the Harry Bosch series but the first written in first person. To celebrate its release, Michael produced the limited edition jazz CD, Dark Sacred Night, The Music Of Harry Bosch. This CD is a compilation of the jazz music mentioned in the Bosch novels and was given away to his readers on Michael's 2003 book tour.
   Connelly's 2004 novel, The Narrows, is the sequel to The Poet. It was named one of the Best Books of 2004 by the Los Angeles Times. To accompany this Harry Bosch novel, Little, Brown and Company Publishers released a limited edition DVD, Blue Neon Night, Michael Connelly's Los Angeles. In this film, Michael Connelly provides an insider's tour of the places that give his stories and characters their spark and texture.
   His 11th Harry Bosch novel, The Closers, was published in May 2005, and debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. The Lincoln Lawyer, Connelly's first-ever legal thriller and his 16th novel, was published in October 2005 and also debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.
   Michael will release two books in 2006. Crime Beat , a non-fiction collection of crime stories from his days as a journalist, will be released in May. The Harry Bosch novel, Echo Park, will be released in the fall and will be Michael's 17th novel..
     Connelly's books have been translated in 31 languages and have won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, Dilys, Nero, Barry, Audie, Ridley, Maltese Falcon (Japan), .38 Caliber (France), Grand Prix (France), and Premio Bancarella (Italy) awards.
   Michael was the President of the Mystery Writers of America organization in 2003 and 2004. In addition to his literary work, Michael was one of the creators, writers, and consulting producers of Level 9, a TV show about a task force fighting cyber crime, that ran on UPN in the Fall of 2000.
   Michael lives with his family in Florida.

Pro-File: Michael Connelly

1 Tell us about your current novel.

It's called Echo Park and it is a Harry Bosch novel. Harry is assigned to the LAPD's open-unsolved unit and as such is assigned to take the confession of an imprisoned killer who wants to clear up old murders. One of those old ones was a case Harry worked about 13 years earlier and which has haunted him. Harry finds out during the confession that he could have caught this guy back then but made a simple mistake that allowed him to elude justice and kill other people. Harry has to deal with that guilt as well as solve a mystery that develops during the confession.

2. Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?

I'm in the final editing stages of Echo Park and trying to think about what I want to write for a novella that will be serialized in the New York Times Magazine this summer. I have never tackled a 35,000 word story. Most of my novels run 100,000 words, so its the form as well as the story that are taking some thought.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

The freedom in the work as well as the freedom in life. I can work wherever I want to work. I write about LA but don't have to live there. I work at home and get to see my kid everyday when she comes home from school. Little things like that add up to great pleasure. As far as inside the work, the greatest pleasure is probably in knowing that it all comes from you. You start with a blank screen--nothing--and what you end up with is all yours.

4. The greatest DIS-pleasure?

When that blank screen isn't cooperating and what ends up on there you have to acknowledge is all yours. In other words, when its not going well it is not going well.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Give writers more time to have the audience find them. I was lucky. I started only 15 years ago but I don't remember any pressure to have big sales and profit attached to my books. It seems like those expectations come down harder and sooner on writers today because of the publishing industry's increasingly bottom-line mentality.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

I've been acting as sort of an advisor to the estate of Mercedes Lambert/Douglas Ann Munson. She wrote some really nice stuff about LA and I know there is at least one unpublished novel. I'd like to see her on the shelves again. They are by no means forgotten but I'd also like to see writers like Vicki Hendricks, Terrill Lee Lankford and Kent Harrington get the publishing attention I think their work merits. But I guess you could see answer 5 about that.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

I have a strong recollection as well. My father was dying of cancer and my five brothers and sisters and their families came from all over the country to all be with him one weekend. We knew it would be the last time we would all be together with him as a full family before the funeral. One night we were all about to get together for dinner when my agent called and said he had sold my first book. I brought my dad some ice cream before dinner because chemo was burning out his throat. That was when I told him the news. He then announced it to everyone at dinner. it was a very proud moment for him and for me. He had really been important in supporting my desire to be a writer--certainly a long shot profession for someone to choose at 19. He died before the book was published but he had kept a mock up of the cover propped up on his bureau where he could see it.

Pro-File : Carole Nelson Douglas

2006-02-27T15:22:00.000-08:00

Pro-File: Carole Nelson Douglas

A LITERARY CHAMELEON!

Carole Nelson Douglas
"Her fine Sherlockian novels and her Midnight Louie books have made her a genuine mystery star. Pick one up and see why." --Ed Gorman, Mystery Scene

The author of 37 novels--mainstream, mystery, fantasy, science fiction and romance/women's fiction, Carole Nelson Douglas was an award-winning journalist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press until moving to Texas in 1984 to write fiction full time. In fact, she "found" Midnight Louie in the classified ads in 1973 and wrote a feature article on the real-life alley cat long before she began writing novels or Louie returned as a feline supersleuth with his own newsletter, Midnight Louie's Scratching Post-Intelligencer.

Carole the child loved the Sherlock Holmes stories, but the adult found something missing: strong women. That literary lack drives her multi-genre odyssey: "I began Amberleigh, my first published novel, in college because I was fed up with the wimpy heroines of then-popular Gothics," she says. "Since then, I've merrily reformed the fiction genres, reinventing women as realistic protagonists. Of course, creating true women means creating true men as partners and co-protagonists. I like writing popular and genre fiction because it's so influential; it forms attitudes that shape society." Many Douglas novels have received awards and appeared on various bestseller lists; her mystery short fiction appears in numerous anthologies, including The Year's 25 Best Crime and Mystery Stories, '93, '94, '95, '96 and '98.

Carole and her husband Sam Douglas reside in Texas with seven felines: two senior alley boys, Panache and Longfellow; four Persians, two adopted as adults--Summer and Smoke, Victoria (Summer and Victoria are shaded silvers like Louie's fictional ladylove, the Divine Yvette)and Victoria's shaded-golden daughter, Secret. The latest additions number two. Their first all-black cat, Midnight Louie, Jr., was acquired by virtue of a squeaky meow from an animal shelter concrete floor during Carole's first Midnight Louie Adopt-a-Cat tour of Texas. Carole found Xanadu, a species-confused chow-mix dog, dumped as a four-month-old puppy at a four-way stop sign near an elementary school. Carole picked her up because she was afraid the dog would be run over. Months later Sam saw Xandau's "twin" dead by the curb across from the school, so if you think a stray is in danger, you're probably right.

1. Tell us about your current novel.
Coming out June 27, priced at $19.95, is the Midnight Louie mystery hardcover, Cat in a Quicksilver Caper. Since the series is written like a
three-year ensemble television series and has alphabetical titles, Cat in a Quicksilver Caper is the 18th in the series, an exercise in literal and emotional and criminal "suspense," and the series' second "season" ender. All four human characters--two pro and two amateur crime solvers who are also two men and two women--find their careers and lives and futures up for grabs, even as a priceless Russian scepter is heisted and members of an aerial magic show above the art exhibition fall to their deaths at a big Las Vegas hotel-casino. Elements of international terrorism season the murder/theft plotline.

I'm about to start the 19th Midnight Louie mystery and "third season"
opener. Cat in a Red-Hot Rage will find the main characters trying to
to wrench some order out of their personal and professional chaos, and is
set at a gathering of "seasoned" (aka middle-aged before Gail Sheehy came along) women who wear purple with red hats and have fun . . . until murder
hits them hard.

Of course, Runyonesque black alley cat PI Midnight Louie is always at work behind the scenes, saving lives and putting the puzzle pieces together for his unsuspecting human acquaintances.

> 2. Can you give a sense of what you're working on now?
>
I'm finishing a novel that returns to my roots in publishing: fantasy and
science fiction. This is a female-first-person dark fantasy where crime and paranormal elements reach a lethal and sometimes sexy boil. Paranormal Noir. While the Midnight Louie series satirizes Las Vegas and contemporary society, this novel reveals a hellish Las Vegas of a slightly future "now." The protagonists are an orphaned Midwestern TV investigative reporter who was named after the street she was found on, Delilah Street (yes, shades of Della), who is developing bizarre psychic powers, and a Latino ex-FBI guy who is supernaturally good at finding dead bodies. The novel has celebrity zombies and werewolf mob bosses, and takes an extreme, scary, and sassy look at what greed and modern media hath wrought.
> 3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?
>
Making things up, then discovering the meaning your subconscious put into what you've made up. I named a minor character in my mainstream SF thriller-love story, Counterprobe, "Turner." Bland last name, I admonished myself as I wrote it. I'll put in a name with more flavor when the book is done. When the book was done, Turner was no longer such a minor character; in fact, he and his actions were what the climax "turned" upon, the literal Turning point. Also a great pleasure is hearing from satisfied, insightful readers.

> 4. What is the greatest DISpleasure?
>
Having your work and career totally dependent on the kindness (and integrity) of others. With the readers, that's a plus, with a giant corporate entertainment mills, that's suicide.

> 5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is
> it?
>
Forget selling to the middlemen; they're busy becoming you. It's a producer- to-consumer world. You sat along the dance hall wall too long while the new kids in town--internet startups and superstores--turned all the genteel "rules" of old-school publishing upside down. They waltzed away with the initiative and the momentum. Also, forget the acid-free paper; make books that disintegrate after two or three readings. The nouveau chic of buying used books is going to eat all of our breakfasts, lunches, and dinners.

> 6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see
> in print again?
>
My favorite is Josephine Tey and I have an essay on her Miss Pym Disposes in Jim Huang's Mystery Muses, coming out from his Plum Creek Press very shortly. I have absolutely no interest in Wall Street, but "Emma Lathen's" John Putnam Thatcher financial world mysteries were always engaging years ago before I began writing novels. Mildred B. Davis wrote The Room Upstairs and Three Minutes to Midnight, great late forties domestic suspense. Speaking of which, Vera Caspary's classic Laura was reprinted last year, but her other forties romantic suspense noir novels deserve revival. Also Georgette Heyer's
charming mysteries.

> 7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget
> that moment.
>
Have I got a story for you! I'd been sending out the world's first post- feminist mainstream Gothic and getting it rejected by rubber stamp
(Gothics had died without telling me) when my newspaper assigned me to interview the brilliant director, playwright, and raconteur Garson Kanin
again after five years. Turned out he still had my previous interview in the
St. Paul Pioneer Press in his press kit, between articles from the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. And he was still raving about my previous
article.

When I timidly asked him if he had any suggestions for selling my novel, I was
hoping for an agent's name. Instead, he told me to drop it off at his hotel
that evening and he'd take it back to his publisher, Doubleday. I did, all
840 pages. The editor said they'd have bought the book two years before, but it was especially well done and she thought I could still sell it. She recommended other editors at other houses.

The first house I tried bought what was retitled Amberleigh and another novel. Both books were promptly orphaned and sent to the paperback original arm of the publisher. I never even knew who bought them. In those days, though, even orphaned paperback originals had print runs of over 100,000 and made money beyond their modest advances.

Cheers,
Carole
www.carolenelsondouglas.com

Midnight Louie mysteries:
SOMETHING FISHY, a ML illustrated
short story book from the author
COYOTE PEYOTE limited edition coming soon!
Jun '06 CAT in a HOT PINK PURSUIT pb
Jun '06: CAT in a QUICKSILVER CAPER hc

Irene Adler Suspense:
Jan '05: GOOD NIGHT, MR. HOLMES Adler I reissue pb
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Sept '05: SPIDER DANCE pb Adler VIII
Dec '06: A SOUL OF STEEL pb reissue Adler III

Pro-File: Kris Rusch -Gorman

2006-02-26T14:47:00.000-08:00

Kristine Kathryn Rusch is an award-winning mystery, romance, science fiction, and fantasy writer. She has written many novels under various names, including Kristine Grayson for romance, and Kris Nelscott for mystery. Her novels have made the bestseller lists--even in London--and have been published in 14 countries and 13 different languages.

Her awards range from the Ellery Queen Readers Choice Award to the John W. Campbell Award. She is the only person in the history of the science fiction field to have won a Hugo award for editing and a Hugo award for fiction. Her short work has been reprinted in six Year's Best collections.

Pro-File: Kris Rusch

1 Tell us about your current novel.

I write mysteries as Kris Nelscott. The latest is called Days of Rage. It's noir set in Chicago in 1969, right around the trial of (then) the Chicago Eight (later to become the Chicago Seven).

2. Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?

Currently I'm working on my next sf mystery written as Rusch. It's called Paloma, and it's a murder mystery set on the moon. It'll be out in October.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

The freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want. (And the freedom to lie for a living. )

4. Thegreatest DIS-pleasure?

The low pay, the slow pay, and fighting the same publishing battles over and over again as the editors change.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Be flexible.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in
print again?

(Sorry Ed, none come to mind. Now if you were talking sf....)

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that
moment.

I was at my day job--I was a secretary to a forensic psychologist (great prep for the budding mystery writer)--and I got a call from my agent. I couldn't scream and carry on, especially in a psychology office, so I sat there and quietly glowed. Then my boyfriend (who became my husband) sent me a dozen roses that afternoon. My first dozen roses ever--and for such a great occasion. It was wonderful.
--------------------------------

Ed here:

I was going to write about the deaths this week of Robert Colby and Don Knotts and Darren McGavin. Then just before I sat down to post this I noticed a "sad news" headline on the science fiction line. Now I'll have to include the death of Octavia Butler, one of the shining science fiction stars of my generation.

The older I get, the more I appreciate the people who entertain and enlighten me, who help me to persevere. All of the people mentioned did just that. So long, friends, and thank you.

Pro-File: Richard S. Wheeler

2006-02-25T16:01:00.000-08:00

Richard S. Wheeler is writing his sixty-first novel. He began writing western fiction late in life, at age 50. He has won five Spur Awards from Western Writers of America, and the Owen Wister Award for lifetime contributions to western literature.

Pro-File: Richard S. Wheeler

1 Tell us about your current novel.

The Fire Arrow, out in a few weeks, is one of my Skye's West novels, which have been my bread and butter for two decades. Skye and his Indian wife Victoria deal with corrupt Indian traders who debauch villages with booze so they can clean up the pelts and buffalo robes for almost nothing.

2. Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?

I'm writing another Skye's West. Skye and his two wives, Mary of the Shoshones and Victoria of the Crows, are guiding a wagon company of consumptives out to the southwestern desert, where they hope to heal. (TB was the scourge of the 19th century.) They discover they are the "Plague company" on the California trail, and subject to all sorts of troubles. I'm amazed at the way this story is blooming.

However, my primary work in recent years has been biographical novels. Genre westerns are extinct, give or take a few bimbo eruptions and Elvis sightings. So I have turned to writing fiction about real people, and it is a field I have to myself. I've done six: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Francis Meagher, Major Marcus Reno, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and (forthcoming) William F. Cody. I have a contract for a seventh, about the Fremonts.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

I'm an uneven writer, but now and then I write something that delights me. It might be a character's soul laid bare, or simply a lyrical sentence. These are humble pleasures but they sustain me and help me feel I am worthy of my calling.

4. The greatest DIS-pleasure?

Sometimes I discover that people misconstrue what I intended to say because my prose was murky or I somehow failed to achieve the clarity and lucidity that are my constant goals. When I see reviewers or readers misinterpret what I intended to say but didn't, I know I failed. It's a bad feeling. The book is in print and I can't go back and do it better.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Two pieces: The public buys authors, not titles. Yet all too often authors are treated with a yawn on the jackets or in the book's press releases and publicity. That hurts sales. Any time a publisher fails to present an author in the most intriguing and attractive manner, that author is losing sales, and the publisher is too.

In my western field it is commonplace to slap deceptive or even mendacious covers on novels. The titles and art and cover copy are all intended to deceive. When some guy forks out cash for a western and discovers that the story has utterly no relation to what's on the cover, he feels cheated, and is likely never to trust jackets again. One by one, after being snookered a few times, they quit buying.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

Westerns, yes. W. R. Burnett wrote some distinguished westerns that were published by Knopf. And Gordon Shirreffs wrote great stories of the Southwest, which in fact drew me into the western field.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

It was really my third. I had done a couple of Double D westerns and returned to book editing. Then, in 1982, at a Western Writers of America convention in Santa Fe, I met Walker and Company editor Sara Ann Freed, and she bought Winter Grass, my third novel. When that happened it was like walking through a golden gate into a joyous new world, and soon I was writing these stories fulltime. Sara Ann became a distinguished editor at Mysterious Press before her tragic early death.

Pro-File: Susan Oleksiw

2006-02-24T16:25:00.000-08:00

Susan Oleksiw is the author of the Mellingham Mystery series featuring Chief of Police Joe Silva.

The first in the series, Murder in Mellingham, appeared in 1993. Double Take followed in 1994, and Family Album in 1995. Friends and Enemies was published in 2001.

Susan's first publication in the mystery field was A Reader's Guide to the Classic British Mystery (G.K. Hall, 1988; Mysterious Press, 1989), the first in a series of six readers' guides for which she is editor. She has been reviewing crime fiction for over twelve years with The Drood Review of Mystery and other magazines

Before turning to crime fiction, Susan received a Ph.D. in Sanskrit from the University of Pennsylvania, and lived and traveled extensively in India as part of her studies. She was the editor for a collection of scholarly articles on communications in Asia in the early 1980s; she has published several scholarly articles on Indian literature and art as well. Her short stories and essays about India appear in other literary journals.

Pro-File: Susan Oleksiw

1 Tell us about your current novel.

A Murderous Innocence by Susan Oleksiw (Five Star, April 2006) covers Chief of Police Joe Silva investigating two drug-related deaths in Mellingham. He's not willing to chalk both of them up to an accident, and after a third death he knows he's right. The drug threat is personal for Joe because it's threatening to wreck his new family. Joe and Gwen face this one together, and it pushes their relationship to another level.

2. Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?

I've written almost a dozen short stories featuring Hindu-American photographer and amateur sleuth Anita Ray; some have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and some in the Level Best Books annual anthology. Anita is loads of fun--very irreverent in the world of traditional India. I enjoy her enormously, so I'm writing a novel about her and her penchant for finding corpses.

The other thing I'm working on is a YA novel, which my agent has now. I've written a short story introducing the character, and there are a few special details that I won't spell out. I don't want to spoil the surprises. This was a departure for me, but I loved it. It was loads of fun being a teenager again.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career? I

have so many ideas--I enjoy discovering them and then working them out in a plot, watching the characters develop. I'm very nosey about people, but that can get me into trouble, so I channel it into writing. I can't imagine living with an idea and not being able to do something with it. Dorothy Sayers talked about the tactile pleasure in working out a plot with clues, etc., and she's right. That's a pleasure different from the writing process, but equally wonderful. Ideas--making them work, watching them grow, writing about them.

4. The greatest DIS-pleasure?

Struggling with an idea that won't work, even though I know there's something good there. I've gotten over my dislike of promoting and selling my work (maybe I have more confidence now), but I get so depressed when an Idea doesn't work. It's like watching someone drown.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Three times more books are published today then when I started out, in the 1960s, writing very bad literary fiction--but three times more books doesn't mean three times more variety. We have lots of books in each genre, but not much depth. Publishers need to remember that readers are different and like different things. The classics that today are the bread and butter and sometimes caviar of publishers were the short-run, no-review books of earlier generations. Take a chance. Publishing something with a small market. Publish with depth and variety in mind.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

I haven't checked but I haven't recently come across anything by P.M. Hubbard. He has no series character, but he does more with setting as a character and "weapon" than many, many others. Some of his scenes are still vivid 30 years after reading them. I've always thought Gwen Moffat was highly underrated by readers in the 1970s--her character was a feminist of supreme and quiet self-confidence long before anyone else.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

You're right. You never forget. It was a Sunday evening and Suzanne Kirk called, and of course my first thought was if I didn't get this settled right away she'd go on to someone else and my great opportunity would be gone! My agent was on vacation in the Bahamas, meeting her new mother-in-law. So, of course, I called her right away, and she and Suzanne talked. Then, later, Liz called and said, "Are you sitting down?" I was after that. I felt so foolish interrupting her vacation but also so surprised and excited I was shaking.

=

Pro-File: Tom Piccirilli

2006-02-23T15:00:00.000-08:00

Tom Piccirilli is the author of thirteen novels including HEADSTONE CITY, NOVEMBER MOURNS, and the mysteries THE DEAD PAST, SORROW'S CROWN and SHARDS. He's a fan of noir fiction and film, enjoys Asian horror cinema, and is always on the lookout for grade-z cult flicks that tend to boil the brain matter of normal middle class citizens. If anybody out there knows John "Ronnie Z-Man Barzell" LaZar from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, drop Tom a line at PicSelf1@aol.com. He wants a signed photo. Check out Tom's website at: www.tompiccirilli.com

1 Tell us about your current novel.

My latest novel HEADSTONE CITY is a crime novel with some dark fantasy tossed in. It's about an ex-con and his former childhood friend whose now a mob boss. As teenagers the two stole a car and went through a windshield together, leaving each with strange psychic powers and the ability to see ghosts. The mob boss blames his former buddy for the death of his sister, so you know a showdown is coming that'll include mob muscle, supernatural powers, and a shotgun-wielding granny. PW recently gave it a starred review and in part said, "Alternately funny, sad and thrilling, Piccirilli's stellar supernatural crime novel plays haunting riffs on old mob standards."

2. Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?

My latest is called NIGHTJACK, another fusion of crime-fantasy that deals with four escaped mental patients, each with multiple personality disorder. My protagonist can actually see the other personalities, some of which are monsters, animals, characters from history, personages from Greek myths, and possibly even Jack the Ripper. The four are on the run from a tycoon who believes that one of them–or one of their alternate identities–raped his daughter. It's a pretty dark tale, but with some very offbeat, black humor.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

The satisfaction of having readers say that you reached them on some level. That they enjoyed the work, that they were touched by it, that it had some kind of impact.

4. The greatest DIS-pleasure?

Invasive editors, backstabbing publishers, and this bullshit we call royalty statements which are handled with some kind of arcane mathematics that even Stephen Hawking can't figure out.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Clean up your act, treat your authors like the valued commodity they are, and quit putting downpayments on your penthouse apartments with their sweat and tears. Share the wealth and show some respect.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

Thankfully, Hardcase has brought back some of my favorites, but there's so many more we need to get back on the bookstore shelves. If I could only choose a handful I'd say Gil Brewer, Fredric Brown, and Bruno Fischer.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

I broke every rule in the submission process and sent in a fifty page partial of an unfinished novel with no synopsis, right over the transom. I don't know how the stars and planets lined up just right for Pocket Books to accept the book based on that, but they did. And thank Christ that they did. I'd just graduated college with an English degree and had no job and absolutely no prospects.

Pro-File: Laura Lippman

2006-02-22T15:15:00.000-08:00

Laura Lippman is one of the most successful and distinctive voices in contemporary crime fiction. If you doubt that, consider that she has won the the Agatha, Anthony, Edgar, Nero Wolfe and Shamus awards. A remarkable acknowledgment of her formdiable skills.

Pro-File: Laura Lippman

Tell us about your latest novel.

1) The ninth Tess Monaghan novel, NO GOOD DEEDS, will be published in
late June. Baltimore Noir, an anthology I edited, shows up in early
April.

Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?

2) I'm working on my third stand-alone, although stand-alone is a bit
of a misnomer as there are some overlapping characters in these books,
an accidental trilogy set in suburban Baltimore. This one is sort of
Anastacia meets Scheherazade. A woman shows up, claiming to be a girl who disappeared thirty
years ago, but there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical.

What is the greatest plasure of your writing career?

3) I like writing, the actual act of it, the tactile pleasure of
fingers on keys, the giddiness of just making stuff up and watching it
show up on the screen. I like it better when it's going well, but even
a bad day writing is pretty good. I was a newspaper reporter for a long
time and the nature of that business is that bosses often interrupt
you, redirect you, spike the thing that you love and assign you to do
something else. No one ever sneaks up behind me anymore and asks: "What
are you working on?" (A question that, in the newsroom, was almost
always followed by: "Well, I need you to do this instead.")

I'm writing this from Phoenix, where I flew out to attend the Brandeis
Book Luncheon, one of the largest in the country. We were late leaving
the gate and the head winds were strong, so it took mor than six hours
to get here. I tried to work on the plane, but it wasn't going very
well. I arrived with only a little time to shower and change, then go
to the welcome reception. And you know what? If that's a tough day,
it's a pretty blessed life.

What is your greatest DIS-pleasure?

4) Well, it's not a meritocracy. And once you admit how much luck is
involved, you have to concede that your own luck could run out at any
moment, which is terrifying.

If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is
it?

5) You know what? I've had the good fortune to work with people (at
HarperCollins and Morrow) who are really, really smart. They clearly
know more about publishing than I do, so I wouldn't presume to give
them any advice. I couldn't begin to do what they do. It does strike me
as curious when publishers knock themselves out, bidding on some former
politico's memoir to the point where it can never earn out. But maybe
there's some intangible benefit to such deals.

Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see
in print again?

6) I know Sandra Scoppetone mentioned Liza Cody, but I'd like to
reiterate that. I was crazy about her Eva Wylie books. I think Kathleen
Taylor had an original sensibility and I miss her characters.

Tell us about selling your first novel.

7) I remember it was October 1995. The manuscript had gone out to 10
publishers, and the morning started with a phone call: Berkley had just
offered a three-book contract. My agent then checked in with the other
editors and two more bid. One of them, Carrie Feron of Avon, wanted to
talk to me, however, see if I had a firm idea for my second book. By
the end of the day, I ended up going with Carrie, who's still my
editor.

About midway through the morning, I wandered to the coffeehouse across
the street in a cheerful daze and ran into one of my colleagues who had
published a nonfiction book, with great success -- winning an Edgar,
seeing a television show based on his book become a moderate hit. It
just seemed natural to tell him what was happening. He totally got it,
insisted on buying me a cup of coffee and congratulated me. Many years
later, our personal lives had altered dramatically and we became a
couple. He still totally gets what I do. And, on occasion, he'll still
buy me a cup of coffee.

Pro-File Mat Coward

2006-02-21T15:16:00.000-08:00

Pro-File Mat Coward

Mat Coward leads a double life as a crime writer. In the UK, he is well known as a specialist in the short story; his extremely diverse work has been published in many anthologies and magazines and has earned Dagger and Edgar nominations. In the USA, in contrast, he is now well-established as author of a series of novels featuring police detectives Don Packham and Frank Mitchell; enterprising US publishers have also brought out a book-length collection of his tales of mystery and imagination and a novella is in the works

1. Tell us about your current novel.
"Open and Closed" is the fourth (or fourth-and-a-half, if you count a novella) in a series about London cops, DI Don Packham and DC Frank Mitchell. It’s set in a public library, threatened with closure, which is being occupied by its readers as a protest - until one of them is found dead. I used to work in public libraries, from my late teens to my mid-twenties, and have always thought they’re a great setting for fiction. You’ve got everything you need in a library: a diverse and dynamic population, sex, loathing, and hiding places.

2. Can you give a sense of what you're working on now?
With great delight, I am not writing at all: I have a four month contract as a researcher on a TV panel game.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?
Not having to go to work, because you’re already there. That lack of rush in the mornings is worth a lot.

4. What is the greatest DISpleasure?
Writing.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?
I’ve never understood why publishers spend all their money on books that they already know are going to be best-sellers.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?
There’s one: in the last days of apartheid in South Africa, a few crime novels by Wessel Ebersohn were published in Britain. They were terrific. I’m always asking people "Whatever happened to Ebersohn?" but no-one seems to know. I’ve even prayed to Lord Google for guidance, but to no avail.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.
I just remember being astonished.

Pro-File: Jason Starr

2006-02-20T19:31:00.000-08:00

Pro-File: Jason Starr

Jason Starr is the author of eight crime novels which are published in ten languages. In 2004, he received the Barry Award for his novel Tough Luck, and in 2005 he won the Anthony Award for Twisted City. He has two novels due in 2006: Lights Out (St. Martin’s Press) and Bust (co-written with Ken Bruen, for Hard Case Crime). He is also co-editing a horse racing anthology called Bloodlines with Maggie Estep for Vintage Books. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Starr now lives in Manhattan.

1. Tell us about your current novel.

My new novel is LIGHTS OUT, a crime-thriller set in Brooklyn, and it's coming in March from Orion in the U.K., and in September from St. Martin's Press in the U.S. I think it's the biggest, most complex one I've done yet and I have terrific editors at both houses who are very excited about it. I also co-wrote a book with Ken Bruen called BUST for Hard Case Crime. Ken and I had a blast doing it. We think we created a whole new voice for us and we're planning to do another. BUST is due out on May.

2. Can you give a sense of what you're working on now?

A thriller set in Manhattan, and then I'll probably do a sequel to this one. My books have all been standalones so far.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

The moments when I'm writing and get "writer's high." No drug can match it.

4. What is the greatest DISpleasure?

Angst. But that's where it all comes from, right?

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?
Publish authors, not books.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

Gil Brewer and Charles Williams. Hard Case just did a Williams book and it rocked big time. More, please.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

My manuscript of COLD CALLER was rescued from several slush piles and made its way to No Exit Press in the U.K. Ion Mills, the publisher of No Exit, is a class act. I was lucky as hell to start out there.

Pro-File: Paul Guyot

2006-02-19T13:38:00.000-08:00

Pro-File:

Bio:
Paul Guyot is an award winning television writer, though his awards
have all been plaques as opposed to statuettes. He has written for
such shows as Snoops, LEVEL 9 (created by Michael Connelly), Judging
Amy, and that mother of all crime shows: Felicity. Over the past
three years he has written and produced pilots for 20th Century Fox,
Showtime, TNT, and Warner Brothers. Not one has made it to series.
Currently he has deals with Sony Pictures, and Dean Devlin's Electric
Entertainment, to write and produce more unairable pilots.

On the prose front, Paul's first short story "The Closers" was
published last year in Carroll & Graf's GREATEST HITS anthology,
edited by Robert Randisi. Paul is contributing stories to another two
anthologies for 2006, as well as co-editing (with David J.
Montgomery) THE TICKING CLOCK - an anthology of time. His novel
remains untouched, sitting on his computer in a file labeled "The
Damned"

He used to have a blog.

Pro-File: Paul Guyot

1.What is your current novel?

Being a TV scribe, my current novel is nothing. I did a pilot last year for TNT that I just found out is not going to make it to series. Which isn't a bad thing because I had been extensively rewritten - something novelists never have to worry about.

2.Your current project?

Currently, I'm working on a new pilot as part of a deal I signed with Sony Pictures. It's a character-driven (as opposed to plot-driven) cop show, centering on an organized crime task force. I'm also finishing up a short story for a Carroll & Graf anthology, and David J. Montgomery and I are still peddling our "Time" anthology idea around town. Ed,
This just in - you can add this to my #2 answer re: current project: I'm also writing a feature film for Stephen J. Cannell,
which all takes place in one location. The story, not the writing of it.

3.Greatest pleasure as a writer?

I often hear writers say their greatest joy is connecting with readers (or viewers in my vocation). But being the egomaniac I am, I write for myself. Always have. Well, except at the beginning of my career - when I wrote to make the kids in my 5th grade class laugh. My greatest pleasure is simply doing it. I hate hearing writers talk about how horrible the job is, how painful, how they wish they could do something else. If they really wanted to, they would. We write because we absolutely love doing it. We can go inside our imaginations and not just play, but create, invent. And sometimes we even have the chance of saying something that might be important to others, or touch them, or move them. Getting paid to play like this makes us the luckiest people on the planet.

4. Greatest displeasure as a writer?

For me personally, it is the fact the my job - television writing - is governed by people who are not creative, not artists in any sense. They are bankers, basically, and it often causes the writer to be forced to, not only do much more work than is necessary, but compromise themselves creatively. It can be very frustrating.

5. Advice to the publishing world?

I would tell them to let go of the thinking that only the High Concept-Blockbuster mentality will sell books. It doesn't work for Hollywood, why does the publishing world think it would work for them? I hope publishers would be smart enough to see that - Hollywood's own invention does not work. Yes, there are always exceptions to everything, but generally and overall, the blockbuster mentality has cost Hollywood more money than it's made them. And publishers who complain about the costs need to realize that the answer isn't publishing fewer books, or spending less money, or whatever. It's about publishing better writers. Better writing. Do that and everything else will take care of itself.

6. Which writers would you like to see in print again?

As Max said, W.R. Burnett was a master. And though most of his books are still in print, we need more Gar Anthony Haywood. Despite the awards and accolades this guy has, he is still one of the most under-appreciated and underrated crime writers over the last twenty-five years.

7. Do you remember selling your first novel?

I remember getting my very first paying writing gig. I had to go into the writers' offices of SNOOPS - a David E. Kelley show about female private eyes. I pitched episode ideas to the writing staff - the entire staff, staring at me, unemotional - and then I left. After a two-hour meeting, everyone stood up and said good-bye. I asked when they might make a decision. the executive producer looked at me and said, "You got the job. This was your first story meeting." As much as I fought them off, tears welled up in my eyes. It had been such a long, dark journey for me - becoming a writer. One of the writers laughed and said, "Look! He's crying!"

I learned there's no crying in television.

=

Pro-File: Brendan DuBois

2006-02-18T14:35:00.000-08:00

Pro-File: Brendan DuBois

Award winning mystery/suspense author Brendan DuBois is a former newspaper reporter and a lifelong resident of New Hampshire, where he lives with his wife Mona, their neurotic cat, Oreo, and one happy English Springer Spaniel named Tucker.

He is currently at work on his twelfth novel, AMERIKAN EAGLE, and a variety of new short stories, as well as other writing projects.

His most recently published novel, BURIED DREAMS, was released in July 2004 by St. Martin's Press in the United States. This fifth Lewis Cole mystery novel examines the puzzling death of an amateur archaeologist who believes that Vikings had settled along the New Hampshire coastline more than a thousand years ago.

The next Lewis Cole mystery, PRIMARY STORM, has been accepted for publication by St. Martin's Press. This sixth book in the Lewis Cole series has Lewis involved in investigating an assassination attempt of a presidential candidate during the New Hampshire presidential primary.

St. Martin's Press has also accepted his newest thriller to be published in the United States, called TWILIGHT, a first-person account of a Canadian member of a UN inspection team investigating war crimes. Publication dates for these two novels have not yet been set.

However, Time Warner UK -- in the spring of 2006 -- will publish Brendan's most expansive thriller yet, FINAL WINTER, which depicts a supposed terrorist plot to destroy the United States that involves betrayal, heartbreak, and breath-taking courage.

Prior to TWILIGHT and FINAL WINTER, his most recent thriller, BETRAYED, was published in 2003 by St. Martin's Press in the United States and by Time Warner Books UK in Great Britain. This suspense thriller took a new look -- and provided a stunning new revelation -- to the enduring mystery of the fate of nearly 2,000 servicemen missing in action during the Vietnam War.

BETRAYED followed his thriller SIX DAYS, which was published in 2001 by the British publisher, Little, Brown (now Time Warner UK). It depicts a plot to overthrow the government of the United States and was called "A well-paced, exciting 'what-if thriller' " by the newspaper, Irish Independent.

His most widely-published suspense-thriller, RESURRECTION DAY, has received world-wide acclaim. First published in 1999, it takes place in October 1972, ten years after the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted into a full-scale atomic war, destroying the Soviet Union and decimating the United States. Called "one of the most inventive novels of alternative history since Robert Harris' FATHERLAND", RESURRECTION DAY is a chilling tale of what might have been. RESURRECTION DAY was called "brilliant" in a starred review from Publisher's Weekly, which also said it was "what-if thriller fiction at its finest."

RESURRECTION DAY has also been published in Great Britain, Germany, Holland, Italy and Japan, and will also be published in Estonia and Poland. At the 58th World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago on September 2nd, 2000, RESURRECTION DAY received the Sidewise Award for Best Alternative History Novel of 1999.

DuBois' first novel, DEAD SAND, a murder mystery set in his home state, was published in 1994 by Otto Penzler Books, a division of Macmillan Books. The sequel to DEAD SAND, called BLACK TIDE, was published in 1995. Both are now available in paperback from Pocket Books. The third Lewis Cole novel, SHATTERED SHELL, was published by St. Martin's Press in 1999. The fourth Lewis Cole novel, KILLER WAVES, was published in June 2002, also by St. Martin's Press.

All these novels -- plus the latest, PRIMARY STORM -- feature Lewis Cole, a magazine writer and former Department of Defense research analyst, who investigates things mysterious in and around the New Hampshire seacoast.

DuBois has had more than 80 short stories published in such magazines as Playboy, Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, as well as in numerous original short fiction anthologies. In 1995, one of his short stories -- "The Necessary Brother" -- won the Shamus Award for Best Short Story of the Year from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the PWA also awarded him the Shamus in 2001 for his short story, "The Road's End." He has also been nominated three times -- most recently in 1997 -- for an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for his short fiction. One of his short stories in 1997 was also nominated for the Anthony Award for Best Mystery Short Story of the Year.

In 2005, he received the Al Blanchard Crime Fiction Award for Best Short Crime Fiction Story at the fourth annual New England Crime Bake, a mystery convention organized by the New England Chapter of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime. This short story, "The Road's End," appeared in the Windchill crime anthology, published by Level Best Books.

His short stories have also been extensively anthologized, including the 1988, 1990, 1992 and 1995 editions of "The Year's Best Mystery & Suspense Stories," published by Walker Books, as well as the 1995 and 1997 editions of "Year's 25 Best Mystery Short Stories" and the 1997, 1999, 2001 and the 2003 editions of "Best American Mystery Stories," published by Houghton Mifflin. In addition, his short fiction has also been reprinted in the 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004 editions of "The World's Finest Mystery and Crime Stories," published by Forge.

An anthology of his short fiction, "The Dark Snow and other Mysteries", was published in 2001 by Crippen & Landru press of Virginia. This was followed by a second anthology, "Tales from the Dark Woods," published by Five Star.

In June 2000, DuBois was honored when one of his short stories, "The Dark Snow," was published in the anthology, "Best American Mystery Stories of the Century," from Houghton Mifflin, edited by Otto Penzler and Tony Hillerman. Other authors in that anthology included Raymond Chandler, O. Henry, Flannery O'Connor and John Steinbeck.

His stories have also appeared in two short story anthologies published in Germany as well as in South Africa and Japan.

Brendan DuBois:

1. Tell us about your current novel.

Actually, and I’m not writing this to impress anyone, for heaven’s sake, I have three novels in the pipeline, coming out in the next year or so. First up is FINAL WINTER, a thriller about a terrorist attack on the United States occurring as a result of a secret intelligence organization that has a traitor in its midst. As of this writing, this novel will be published this April by my British publisher, Time-Warner UK. Again, as of this writing, we’ve not been able to secure an American publisher, though I’m sure something will pull through.

Coming this fall from St. Martin’s Press will be the sixth novel in my Lewis Cole series, PRIMARY STORM, in which my intrepid semi-hero, Lewis Cole -- magazine columnist and ex-Department of Defense research analyst -- gets caught up in an attempted political assassination during the quadrennial circus trooping through my home state that’s called the New Hampshire presidential primary.

Third up is TWILIGHT, another thriller -- though I think a quiet thriller, if there’s such a term, is more appropriate -- which will also be published by St. Martin’s Press. This novel follows a UN war crimes inspection team as it travels through a rural area, looking for mass graves... the rural area being a county in upstate New York

2. Can you give a sense of what you're working on now?

Currently working on another alternative history thriller, tentatively called AMERIKAN EAGLE. The most successful book I’ve done in my career was RESURRECTION DAY, which depicted a world in which the United States and the Soviet Union fought a nuclear war over the Cuban Missile Crisis. That was a tough book to write but very satisfying, so I thought it would be time to pay that particular genre another visit. In AMERIKAN EAGLE, it’s 1943, and there is no FDR presidency. The president of the United States is former Louisiana Senator Huey Long, who has little interest or concern about foreign affairs. Germany has conquered Europe (including Great Britain) and is bogged down in fighting the Soviet Union, Imperial Japan is turning the Pacific into their own domain, and at home, labor camps are filling up with dissidents and opponents as the Great Depression continues to grind along.

Oh, and as a short story author who finds himself amazed that he’s approaching the three-digit number of sold and published short stories, there’s always a couple of those in the hopper as well.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

The greatest pleasure is that wonderful combination of being paid to do what you love, and what you love to do is create places and people and events from that gray matter between your ears, and to have these creations be read and enjoyed by others.

4. What is the greatest DISpleasure?

The greatest displeasure is when everything is dark, formless lead. When the fingers are clumsy upon the keyboard, the dialogue is trite, the characters the form and shape of fog, the plotting to simple a five-year-old can figure out, when that little hidden voice inside of you whispers that you’ve lost your mojo. Everything else -- bad reviews, poor sales, indifferent editors -- pales compared to those days when it just doesn’t work... which, of course, makes the days it *does* work so much brighter and better.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Advice for the publishing world? As one who’s been published now for nearly twenty years, I still don’t have a good handle on how the publishing world operates. However, and this is a pipe dream akin to those who long for the restoration of the Romanov dynasty, it would be nice if publishing stepped back to a time when authors were supported over a number of books, when a career was nurtured and developed, as opposed to the current “sink or swim” process.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

Well, three come to mind. First up is Tony Kenrick, who wrote a series of wonderful novels in the 1970s and 1980s, including A TOUGH ONE TO LOSE, STEALING LILLIAN and THE 81st SITE. He had this wonderful capability of writing humorous caper novels similar to Donald Westlake, and then crisp thrillers that really had you turning the pages as you went along. Apparently hasn’t published anything for more than twenty years, which is a pity.

Then there’s Edwin Corley, who wrote a number of thrillers, three which stand out in my mind: THE JESUS FACTOR, a thriller looking into whether or not the world’s nuclear arsenal actually works, and if the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were a gigantic hoax; SIEGE, a novel inspired by the 1960s turmoil and involving a an African-American military plot to hold Manhattan hostage; and AIR FORCE ONE -- not the movie with Harrison Ford -- but a novel with similar (and earlier) theme of the hijacking of Air Force One.

And Alistair MacLean, whose thrillers my brothers and I devoured during the 1960s and 1970s: THE GUNS OF NAVARONE, SATAN BUG, WHERE EAGLES DARE, HMS ULYSSES.... Great stuff that I’m sure is out of print nowadays.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

That’s right. We don’t.

September 1991. Prior to this date, I had written two suspense novels that made the usual and customary rounds of publishing houses with some sweet and polite rejections, but rejections, nonetheless. I also had written about a hundred and fifty pages of a third thriller that just died away on me.

So. Four years worth of writing novels, and nothing to show for it. In August 1990, I had an idea for a series detective, set in the home state of New Hampshire. It took about a year to write, and my agent, Jed Mattes, loved it. But he warned me that the market was still poor for new detective series.

September 1991. Working at my job at a state utility in corporate communications. I’m in the cafeteria, hear my office phone ring, and head upstairs. Our department admin aide looks at me and tells me its my agent. I go to my office, pick up the phone, and with cheer and joy in his voice, Jed tells me of a two-book offer from Pocket Books, for both hardcover and softcover, and I can hardly believe what I’m hearing.

I jot down the details of the deal and then take the rest of the day off. Go to the beach and watch the Atlantic Ocean work its wave magic, and sit there, in a sweet fog, knowing that a twenty year dream has been reached, that nothing will ever be the same again, and how wonderful it all was.

Of course... that was the high point, ha ha ha. After some bizarre twists and turns, it took nearly three years for the book to see print, and by then, it was under the Otto Penzler/Macmillan imprint but still... you never, ever forget that first wonderful moment, when you realize You’ve Done It.

Pro-File: John Lutz

2006-02-17T14:05:00.000-08:00

Ed here: John Lutz

John is one of my favorie writers. He is also one of the most readable, cunning and stylish writers I've ever read. He has written and mastered nearly ever sub-genre of crime fiction, from the Alo Nudger private eye novels about a rather hapless guy who is a spirtual cousin of Buster Keaton to the bedazzling big city Lawrence Sanders-like novels he's been writing the past five years or so. His novel/movie SFW Seeks Same is exactly what I want in suspense: a familiar situation turned upside down one creeping and creepy step at a time. I have never read a bad novel or story by John. Never.

What is your current novel?

1) Current novel is FEAR THE NIGHT, a Pinnacle paperback original published in November of 2005. It is part of my “Night” series and features a legendary former NYPD homicide detective who is lured from retirement to pursue a sniper in Manhattan.

Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?

2) I am working now on CHILL OF NIGHT, to be published in November, 2006. It is in the same vein as FEAR, and the earlier Night books. I’ve found that the sometimes maligned serial killer genre is a mine that contains a myriad of unexplored tunnels and plenty of rich literary ore. I’ve become a serial serial killer novelist.

What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

3) Writing.

What is the greatest DIS-pleasure

4) I’m not sure. I haven’t encountered anything that isn’t at least bearable. This is not like a real job.

If you have one piece of advice for the publishing industry, what is it?

5) Don’t fight technology; embrace it.

Are there two or three writers you'd like to seein print again?

6) Eric Ambler, Geoffrey Household, and the masterful short story writer Stanley Ellin.

Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

7) I began by publishing a string of short stories, and selling my first story was not transcended by my first novel sale.
The sensation was like finally clearing a hurdle after trying over and over and over. You never really come down.

Pro-File: James Reasoner

2006-02-16T12:37:00.000-08:00

Pro-File: James Reasoner

Ed Here: Bill Pronzini and I always say that we probably would have been happiest back in the Fifties when the paperback original field was new and thriving. I supsect that James Reasoner would have been happiest back in the Twenties and Thirties when the pulps dominated newstands. This doesn't mean that his books read like old pulp. On the contrary, his cult novel Texas Wind remains one of the finest private eye novels I've ever read and brings a distinctly modern viewpoint to the dusty truths of Texas. And that modern viepoint and style can be found in almost all his books. I think what he shares with the pulp boys and girls is their spirit and the simple love of telling good stories. You find this spirit and love in virtually everything he writes--and he writes virtually everything--westerns, mysteries, war stories, tie-ins, mainstream...and I'm sure I'm leaving out a couple of categories here. The pro's pro, James Reasoner.

1. Tell us about your current novel.

CALL TO ARMS, the first book in a new Civil War series entitled THE PALMETTO TRILOGY, was published in the fall, and the second book will be out in the spring, with the third and final book scheduled for next fall. These are in collaboration with my wife Livia, who is using the pseudonym Livia Hallam on them.

2. Can you give a sense of what you're working on now?

I just finished a house-name Western and plan to write a fantasy short story next, before moving right on to a historical novel which will also be under a house-name.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

Seeing a new book of mine and knowing that people will be reading it and I hope enjoying it.

4. What is the greatest DISpleasure?

Waiting. You send the books in and then wait for all the other steps in the process to unfold.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Stop cancelling books -- and entire lines -- that make money, provide livings for their authors, and entertain their readers, simply because they don't make *enough* money.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

I don't know if they're forgotten, but how about Ed Lacy, George Harmon Coxe, and Henry Kane (the early novels, not the later stuff).

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

I had a post office box at the time, and one day there was a large manila envelope stuffed in it. Inside were several copies of a contract from Manor Books for my novel TEXAS WIND. No letter, just the contracts. But I didn't need a letter because I knew from the contracts they were actually going to buy and publish my book. I rushed home to tell Livia instead of going on to the real-world job I was holding down. The euphoria was tempered a bit when I actually *read* the contract and saw how little they were planning to pay me. We looked at each other and said, "That can't be right. That's all they pay for an entire *book*?"
Little did we know. They actually paid us even less.

But in the long run it was okay, because Manor published the book, and although I had sold short stories before, after that day I was an honest-to-gosh novelist.

Pro-File: Sandra Scoppettone

2006-02-15T14:05:00.000-08:00

Pro-File: Sandra Sandra Scoppettone

From Sandra:

Gender: female

Astrological Sign: Gemini

Occupation: Author

Location: Southold : New York : United States

About Me

I'm a full time writer and have published nineteen novels, 5 for young adults and the rest are crime for adults. I've also published 2 books with Louise Fitzhugh ... the best known is Suzuki Beane. I used to live in New York City but since 1998 I've lived on the North Fork of Long Island.

Interests

The Yankees computers reading

Favorite Movies

The Grifters The Godfather

Favorite Music 40s music

40's music

Pro-File: Sandra Scoppettone

1 Tell us about your current novel.

In June, Too Darn Hot will be published. It's the sequel to This Dame for Hire which was the first in a series featuring Faye Quick. She's a P.I. in 1943. Her boss has gone to war and she takes over the agency.

2. Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?

I can hardly give myself a sense of what I'm working on now. By that I mean I'm writing a crime novel in a way I never have before. As I wasn't writing a 3rd Faye quick novel and I didn't want to sit around and I didn't have an idea I devised this process. I found a list of 50 film noir titles on the Internet. I copied them and pasted them into a word document. Then I printed it out and cut each title into a strip of it's own, threw them into a box and then picked one out without looking. The first one was Asphalt Jungle. So I sat down and started writing with the title in mind, not the film. I let it dictate to me. And before I knew it I had a character, setting and action. No story though.

As the days and titles went on I got more characters who told me their stories and eveything began to happen. I won't say fall into place, because I'm not sure that's happened yet. I still don't know what's going to happen or how it's going to happen, but I have almost 70 pages of people I'm interested in and a glimmer of where I want to go. I think it's the kind of crime novel I always wanted to write and didn't think I could. Maybe I'll find out I can't.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

Being on my own schedule, not having to answer to anyone on a daily basis, and doing what I love to do. Telling stories. I like the hours, too. I'm not a writer who writes all day, never have been. I write about 3 or 4 hours 5 days a week.

4. Thegreatest DIS-pleasure?

Never knowing when I'm going to have to reinvent myself again. Not having money I can count on.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Stop paying huge sums of money to 5 or 10 writers. Spread it out. Don't overpay the smaller writer either because you'll probably be disappointed and the writer will be left in the lurch.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

Liza Cody, Marc Behm and ....I know I'll think of another the moment I send this off.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

It was a YA novel. I'd written about 4 adult novels before this and they'd all been rejected. My agent submitted my YA to Harper & Row (that's who they were then) and I got the call in 24 hours. I was making dinner. I threw it in the garbage and we went out. I thought it was always going to be like that.

Pro-File: Jack O'Connell

2006-02-14T13:30:00.000-08:00

From Bluejack:

Jack O'Connell is known for dark, mysterious crime novels. "Imagine Kafka writing The Maltese Falcon," says James Ellroy.

O'Connell appears to be something of a genre bender. Although his novels have been firmly classified as mystery, and are thus not listed in ISFDB, critics name influences from Bruce Sterling to Philip K. Dick to J.G. Ballard. O'Connell himself seems to look to crime novelists first -- Thompson, Goodis, and Willeford -- but says "I'm not shy about stealing anything that rings my bell. I've yet to meet a form that didn't look ripe for pilfering." Now that's a crime novelist!

One interviewer notes with trepidation that O'Connell is known to be "moody, reclusive, suspicious, litigious, and mercurial."

One thing is clear: Jack O'Connell is a massively talented, enormously creative writer. His work is a true pleasure to read, even when it is incomprehensible.

Jack O'Connell:

Tell us about your current novel.

As my last book came out in – Jaysus! – 1999, it’d be a stretch to use the adjective “current” in reference to it. So we must be talking about the work in progress. Which brings us to question 2.

Can you give a sense of what you're working on now?

I think, hope, I’m about two or three weeks away from finishing the book that has tried to kill me innumerable times over these last five years. It is my problem child, a story with severe ADHD that refuses to be corralled in one genre no matter how many times I offer it a carrot or beat it with a stick. Well, hell, Ed, how long have you been listening to me whine about this monster. As to subject matter, as I wrote Jim Sallis an embarrassingly long time ago, it’s about: pharmacists, coma, bikers, stem cells, comic books, salamanders, and circus freaks. True story: a photographer pal of mine – who loves to contrast my career with that of Robert Parker – said to me three years ago, “You know what your books need? A nymphomaniac nurse.” I shook my head and left his studio. Then woke up at 3 that morning and thought, “Maybe he’s right.” So she’s in there, too.

What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

Still can’t think of writing in terms of career… But when you hit that moment – and it seems to grow rarer with age – when you’ve been at the desk for hours, for weeks, for months, spinning the story, and suddenly the world falls away and you slip into the fiction, into its world, you slide into that timeless and – forgive me – effortless zone where it’s all firing and you feel for a moment that you’re a transcriber.

Also: I have to say it’s been a kick to meet a few of my writing idols. And, beyond this, to have found all of them, truly, to be kind, gracious, accessible, generous, human, funny, and often wise.

What is the greatest DISpleasure?

When you review the pages you made while in that zone I just mentioned and you find them unreadable dreck.

If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

These days, I’m not being facetious when I advise larger type. You have to aim small when dealing with multinational congloms and I think larger type is a realistic agenda. (I could play the old riff about hiring accountants and marketing folks to account and market, rather than, say, acquire. But that’s just not going to happen.)

Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

Well, you know, I’ve been lighting candles and killing chickens for Gil Brewer for some time now. And I’d love to see somebody republish Ev Skehan’s A Bullet for Georgie. (Hard Case, you guys listening?) And though he’s far from forgotten – and the book isn’t a mystery from what I hear –what about Marc Behm’s infamous female vampire novel?

Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

A fine memory that seems less real with each receding year. I’d had the classic Bad Day – full of lost keys, bounced checks, angry phone calls, parking place fist fights, midnight oil expended on the job site. I think there were locust and boils in there somewhere, too. It was days before 25 December, and, at 7 p.m., as I finally left the day-gig with my co-worker wife, she reminded me that we still needed to buy one last Christmas gift. This seemed a perfect end to the day and we headed for the mall, stopping at home to let out the mutt. As I opened my back door, I noticed, in the darkness of the kitchen, the flashing red light on the wall phone. Hit the playback and heard a message to call a New York #. When my agent answered, I told him who it was and said that I hoped I wasn’t calling too late. He said: “Not at all,” took the perfect dramatic pause, then barked, “Congratulations, you’ve sold a novel.” Of course, we did not make it to the mall that night. We made it to a favorite restaurant and, over a bottle of wine, spent the evening casting all the characters in the book for the movie that, inevitably, would be adapted from the book.

Pro-File: Martin Edwards

2006-02-13T14:05:00.000-08:00

Pro-File: Martin Edwards

In introductory remarks to an interview in the UK's Macavity's newsletter, Martin Edwards answered as follows:

Q You write books on employment law, regular articles for journals, crime fiction novels, short stories, book reviews, edit anthologies of short stories and have a full time job as a partner in a solicitors firm as well as being head of the practice labour law department. How do you find time to eat and sleep?

A I'm very lucky in that I have two enjoyable jobs and it's very rewarding to move between them. For instance, if I have a bad day in the office, I can go home and kill someone (well, in print…).

Ed here: Martin Edwards is one of the finest stylists and most perceptive crime writers of his generation. Part of his problem in the marketplace is that he is writing in an era when same-old same-old and bombast rule the cash register. His gifts are of the more classical variey--there are points in his novels when I think I'm reading Graham Greene--and that recognition has begun to attract the attention of book buyers as it has so long attracted the attention of reviewers.

The Magnificent Seven (Questions) -- Title thanks to Terrill Lankford

1 Tell us about your current novel.

The Cipher Garden is my second Lake District Mystery. DCI Hannah Scarlett, head of Cumbria's Cold Case Squad, is prompted by an anonymous message to reopen inquiries into the death of landscape gardener Warren Howe. Meanwhile, historian Daniel Kind, whose father was Hannah's mentor, becomes obsessed by the mysterious design of the garden at his Lakeland cottage: what secrets does it hold?

2 Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?

The current work in progress is another Lake District book, provisionally entitled The Arsenic Labyrinth. The return to Coniston of a drifter with a talent for deception coincides with renewed interest in the disappearance of a young woman ten years before.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

The joy of friendship with people - writers, readers, publishers, agents - with a common passion for the written word.

4. What is the greatest DIS-pleasure?

Being urged to do what is 'commercial' - typically, writing to some sort of formula - rather than what seems to be right for you as a writer - for example, doing something fresh and different. If you do what is right, I still believe - however naively - that it will pay dividends in the long run.

5. If you have any advice for the publishing industry, what is it?

Have faith in good writers who show commitment and a passion for their craft and be prepared to support them while they develop a following.

6 Name two or three mystery writers you'd like to see in print again.

Henry Wade, Rupert Penny and Richard Hull.

7.Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

I won a prize in a writer's competition for a short crime story which was published in a national magazine - my first ever published fiction. A few weeks later my first novel, All the Lonely People, was accepted by a publisher and a few weeks after that my first child, Jonathan, was born. Teh novel was later shortlisted for the Dagger for best first crime novel - though Walter Moseley won it. Definitely an unforgettable period! Though selling Take My Breath Away, my first non-series book and a very ambitious story that proved very challenging to write, felt like an equally exciting achievement. It didn't attract as much attention as my series books, but I'm still very proud of it.

Pro-File: Graham Masterton

2006-02-12T14:55:00.000-08:00

*Graham Masterton has published more than 35 horror novels and has won numerous awards, including an Edgar. Altogether he has written more than a hundred novels in a range of genres.

Born in Edinburgh in 1946, Graham became executive editor of Penthouse and Penthouse Forum magazines at the age of 24, at which time he began writing a best-selling series of sex how-to books.

His grandfather was Thomas Thorne Baker, the eminent scientist who invented DayGlo and was the first man to transmit news photographs by wireless.

Graham now lives with his wife Wiescka in a Gothic Victorian mansion high above the River Lee in Cork, Ireland.--horrorwriters.uk.com

Ed here: among Graham's many fine novels, Trauma stands out as one of one of the most original and stunning crime novels I've ever read. While there is a horror aspect to the story, it doesn't play much of a part in this thriller about a working class woman who cleans up murder scenes after the various law enforcement people are done with it. It is one of the most honest noels I've ever read about the isolation of a woman from her family and friends and about the effects a job can have on a worker. It is also, flat out, one of the best written novels of any kind I've ever read. (Cemetery Dance published the novel as Bonnie Winter, NAL as Trauma.)

Graham Masterton:

1. Tell us about your current novel.

My most recent mass-market horror novel was MANITOU BLOOD from Leisure Books. I brought back the original characters from my 1975 novel THE MANITOU and had another go at devastating New York. Ancient Native American wonder-worker Misquamacus returns to life and employs long-incarcerated vampires to help him in his battle against the white man. Fake seer Harry Erskine attempts to thwart him, with the help of a sultry Romanian lady.

My most recent hardback was TOUCHY & FEELY (Severn House) based on the Beltway snipers. Two wildly different but equally disaffected characters accidentally meet in snowbound winter Connecticut and begin a random shooting spree. They are pursued by ageing fortune-teller Sissy Sawyer.

NIGHT WARS, a fourth saga in my novels involving Night Warriors -- ordinary folks who become heroic warriors in their dreams and battle against the forces of evil -- will be published this summer by Leisure. In this one, two epic nasties called the Winterwent and the High Horse are trying to steal the dreams of newborn infants in order to discover the secrets of the universe (and dismantle it).

DESCENDANT will be published by Severn House this summer, too. An American vampire hunter is sent to London in the 1950s to track down the last of the vampires who was used by the Nazis during the war to exterminate the French and Belgian resistance. He discovers some deeply uncomfortable secrets about his own family history...

2. Can you give a sense of what you're working on now?

EDGEWISE, the story of a woman who uses a Native American demon to find her kidnaped children...with terrifying consequences

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

No commuting.

4. What is the greatest DISpleasure?

Irregular income and no friends.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Stop mimicking Hollywood by relying on tried-and-tested formulae. Take some risks.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

No.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

I was writing very successful sex "how-to" books in the mid-1970s (remember that I was executive editor of Penthouse at that time). But the bottom fell out of the sex book market quite abruptly and Andy Ettinger at Pinnacle decided he didn't want to honor my latest contract. So I sent him THE MANITOU as a substitute. He called me when I was sunning myself in the garden and said he'd take it, so long as I changed the ending. Which I naturally did. Wouldn't you?
Thank you

Pro-File: Andrew Coburn

2006-02-11T14:54:00.000-08:00

Pro-File: Andrew Coburn

Andrew Coburn is one of the three or four best crime fiction writers alive today. Most people who’ve read any of his novels—from the bestselling The Babysitter to his current novel On The Loose—will agree. While he has always been more widely read in Europe than in the United States, it’s hoped that with the reissue of some of his key novels here, he’ll win the popularity he has so long deserved..

1. Current novel. It's about a boy, born with a bent brain, that murders two women. Who do we blame?. Do we sue God? And which God? The Christian one or one of the others?

2. Current project. Collection of short stories. Finishing one called "Egg Yolk," about a man born with a hole in his height and cuts his wife down to size. Another is about a Roman Catholic priest and a woman assistant district attorney who meet on a nude beach.

3. Greatest pleasure of a writing career. Being more or less my own boss, moving more or less to my own tune, and being more or less at my own beck and call.

4. Greatest displeasure. Realizing how much time I didn't spend with my four daughters.

5. Advice to the publishing world. Publishing world is a money world. Would a conglomerate listen to my advice?

6. Forgotten mystery (crime) writers I like to see back in print. George V. Higgins. He created dialog much imitated and never equalled. I'm sure there are others, but they immediately come to mind.

7. Selling my first novel. For two years I tried unsuccessfully to sell it on my own; then I lucked out when a editor at one of the publishing houses steered me to an agent, who sold it (The Trespassers) within a month. To Houghton-Mifflin. My wife and I did a dance.

-----

Pro-File: Marijane Meaker aka Vin Packer

2006-02-10T13:27:00.000-08:00

Pro-File: Marijane Meaker aka Vin Packer aka M.E. Kerr. I’ve always rated Vin Packer (Marijane Meaker) as one of the three or four best of the paperback original writers. She came as close to turning pulp into mainstream as anybody ever did—and in this instance I mean this as a high compliment. She was frequently compared to John O’Hara and while the influence was obviously there, she had baroque wit in her Big City novels and a dark Faulknerian strain in her Deep South novels that nobody else came close to matching. One of her lost gems is a Gold Medal novel called The Girl on The Best-Seller List, which is her take on the sad (and at the time notorious) Peyton Place writer Grace Metalious. And none of this even touches on her best-selling award-winning Young Adult career as M.E. Kerr. tMarijane Meaker is one of the great ones.

What is your current novel?

1.I have just finished Scott Free, a new Vin Packer about a transgendered detective who was Scott(male) and is becoming Scotti (female). It is now being offered to publishing houses by McIntosh & Otis of NYC, my agent.

2.Your current project?

I also just finished a young adult novel( under my pseudonym M.E. Kerr) about an undocumented Latino boy and a girl he meets when he works for her contractor father. I am now beginning a lesbian comedy of the 50's, an adult novel as Marijane Meaker. I am delighted to say Stark House is reprinting many Vin Packer novels, bringing them out with such care.

3.Greatest pleasure as a writer?
The freedom to be what I always wanted to be (for some 50 years now) and the pleasure of finding a new idea in everything from something a neighbor tells you, something in another author's book that triggers your imagination, something you see, remember, hear about, read about or imagine. Writing can also be a career from which you never have to retire.

4. Greatest displeasure as a writer?
The greatest displeasure is sometimes watching the disappearance of the caring editor, the midlist novel, the small independent publisher, and the avid young reader who existed before computers.

5. Advice to the publishing world?

Help beginning writers, nurture them as writers like Anne Tyler, William Kennedy, Elmore Leonard, Stephen King etc. were encouraged with advances, advice, and patience while they developed their skills.

6. Which writers would you like to see in print again?
Peter Rabe, Charles Williams and there was a paperback writer, Jerry Weil*, who wrote regular novels and suspense.

7. Do you remember selling your first novel?

Dick Carroll, then editor of Gold Medal books was taking me to lunch. I was 22. In the cab, just as we went under the ramp near Grand Central Station, he said, "We're going to buy your book," and the taxi came out of the darkness to sunny Park Avenue. I'll never forget it. The book, by the way, was at that point one chapter and an outline. He advanced me $2000. It was 1952. Imagine what an unbelievable windfall.

*Ed here: Coincidence. A week ago I was at Half Price Books and found in their Nostalgia section three Jerry Weil novels for a buck each. I remembered how much I’d liked his stuff—he was kind of soft-core hardboiled Francoise Sagan, in other words, you never knew what the hell he was going to write next but he was an interesting guy—read one of them Escapade and liked it a lot. One of the many good writers lost to time.

Pro-File: Max Allan Collins

2006-02-09T13:58:00.000-08:00

Pro-File: Max Allan Collins

MAX ALLAN COLLINS -- BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

MAX ALLAN COLLINS has earned an unprecedented seven Private Eye Writers of America "Shamus" nominations for his "Nathan Heller" historical thrillers, winning twice (True Detective, 1983, and Stolen Away, 1991). The new Heller novel, Flying Blind (to be published by Dutton in August '98), explores the most famous mystery of the twentieth century, the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. His previous Heller novel, Damned in Paradise (1996), the story of Clarence Darrow's last case, will be reprinted by Signet in July 1998.

Termed "mystery's Renaissance Man" (by Ed Hoch in The Best Mystery and Suspense Stories of 1993), Collins has created three celebrated contemporary suspense series --Nolan, Quarry and Mallory (thief, hitman and mystery writer respectively). He has also written four widely praised historical thrillers about real-life "Untouchable" Eliot Ness; and is an accomplished writer of short fiction: "Louise," his contribution to the popular anthology Deadly Allies, was a Mystery Writers of America "Edgar" nominee for best short story of 1992.

He scripted the internationally syndicated comic strip DICK TRACY from 1977 to 1993, and wrote three TRACY novels; a number of collections of his TRACY comic strip work have been published. He is co-creator (with artist Terry Beatty) of the pioneering female P.I. comic-book feature MS. TREE, and has written both the BATMAN comic book and newspaper strip. The Collins/Beatty mini-series JOHNNY DYNAMITE (published by Dark Horse) has been optioned for film by Adam Kline Productions. MIKE DANGER, a science-fiction comic book project with bestselling mystery writer Mickey Spillane for Big Entertainment, ran for several years, ending in 1997; it is currently under option to Pressman Films. An epic graphic novel about Capone-era crime, Road to Perdition, is forthcoming from Paradox Press/DC Comics.

Collins is the one of publishing industry's leading authors of movie tie-in novels, including the international bestsellers In the Line of Fire (Jove, 1993), Maverick (Signet, 1994), Waterworld (Boulevard, 1995), Daylight (Boulevard, 1996), Air Force One (Ballantine, 1997), and Saving Private Ryan (Signet, 1998). He has written two original NYPD BLUE novels for Stephen Boccho and Signet Books, Blue Beginning (1995) and Blue Blood (1997).

His screenplay THE EXPERT was shot in Nashville in 1994 -- starring Jeff Speakman and James Brolin -- and was an HBO world premiere film, airing in April 1995. Upcoming movie projects include his screenplay SPREE (from his novel of the same name), under option to filmmaker William Lustig (RELENTLESS, MANIAC COP) and IN HEART AND SOUL, a 1960s midwestern drama to be written and directed by Collins.

Working as an independent filmmaker in his native Iowa, he wrote, directed and executive-produced "Mommy," a suspense film starring Patty McCormack, which aired on Lifetime cable in 1996; he performed the same duties for a sequel, "Mommy's Day," released in 1997. The recipient of two Iowa Motion Picture Awards for screenwriting, he wrote "The Expert," a 1995 HBO World Premiere film starring James Brolin. He was also Creative Consultant on the Disney production, "Dick Tracy" (1990), for which he wrote the bestselling novel.

One of the creators of the controversial and enormously successful "True Crime" trading cards published by Eclipse in 1992, Collins has authored (or co-authored) a number of bestselling card series, reflecting his interests in popular culture and true crime, including PAINTED LADIES, POCKET PIN-UPS, DIGEST DOLLS and CHICAGO MOB WARS (the latter with longtime associate, George Hagenauer). He has also co-authored ONE LONELY KNIGHT, an Edgar-nominated critical study on Spillane (with James Traylor) and THE BEST OF CRIME AND DETECTIVE TV, a review of TV detectives (with John Javna); and a collection of his movie review columns from MYSTERY SCENE magazine is forthcoming from Borgo Press.

A longtime rock musician, he has in recent years recorded and performed with two bands -- Seduction of the Innocent in California, Crusin' in his native Muscatine, Iowa, where Collins lives with his wife, writer Barbara Collins, and their son, Nathan.

Collins and his wife Barbara have collaborated on a number of short stories and their first novel is in the works.

1. Tell us about your current novel.

ROAD TO PARADISE, which came out from William Morrow in December 2005,
completes the trilogy begun by the graphic novel ROAD TO PERDITION. Like
the second book, ROAD TO PURGATORY (currently out in mass market paperback),
PARADISE is a prose novel. A few reviewers and listings refer to this as
the "Perdition" series, but it isn't really a series in the usual sense --
more a family saga in the context of several kinds of families. The
protagonist, Michael O'Sullivan Jr., is an adolescent in PERDITION, in his
early twenties in PURGATORY and in his fifties in PARADISE. The attempt is
to bring this story full circle, with Michael finally finding his redemption
(or the path to it) in the third novel -- in which he and his teenager
daughter retrace the violent journey of Michael and his father in PERDITION.

My recent tie-in novels are the latest CSI, KILLING GAME (Pocket) and THE
PINK PANTHER (HarperCollins). The latter is a very funny novel. No
kidding.

>
>2. Can you give a sense of what you're working on now?

I've just completed the first draft of a television movie screenplay based
on my long-running female P.I. comic book, MS. TREE. And I'm working on a
paperback-original novel called A KILLING IN COMIC BOOKS for Prime Crime, a
medium-boiled Rex Stout-ish mystery dealing with the comic book industry
right after the Second World War; and researching my next big historical for
Morrow, which is about Wyatt Earp. Also, we have just premiered my new
indie movie, ELIOT NESS: AN UNTOUCHABLE LIFE, based on my Edgar-nominated
play.
>
>3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

Hands down, the great pleasure is being able to pursue a passion and get
paid for it. I consider myself a storyteller and, accordingly, work in
many mediums. I love readiing novels and get to write them for money; I
love movies and occasionally get to make them; I love comics and get to
script them. My hobbies have turned into my job, and what could be a
greater pleasure than that?

>
>4. What is the greatest DISpleasure?

I disilike the editiorial phase, even though I like working with editors.
That sounds contradictory, but when I finish a novel, I finish it -- and a
real attitude adjustment is required from me to do revisions (especially
when I don't think they're necessary) and deal with copy-edited manuscripts
and galley proofs. But I am too anal retentive to blow these things off, so
I handle all of this in a responsible, professional way. My pet peeve for
decades remains the same: over-eager copy editors, particularly those with
either a tin ear or a desire to write their own novels.

On the other hand, the actual editors -- as opposed to copy editors -- have
helped me improve my work. Sarah Durand at Morrow gave me great notes on
PURGATORY, for instance, and definitely improved the book. The biggest
problems, of course, occur in licensing work -- there is never any
predicting on what the Hollywood side will demand of a novelization or a
tie-in novel. My worst experience was novelizing the screenplay of ROAD TO
PERDITION (which of course was based on my own work) -- I delivered 100,000
words, fleshing the story out into a genuine novel not unlike my
sequels...and was forced to cut it in half, leaving out anything that wasn't
in the filmscript.
>
>5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

This applies to a specific aspect of my own career -- publishers who are
interested in pursuing that seductive buzz word GRAPHIC NOVEL (okay, buzz
words) should find existing properties that can be effectively repackaged,
as opposed to trying to fund new ones, at least right now. The comic book
market is such a niche one that great things published there, over the past
twenty years -- like my own MS. TREE -- would be brand-new for a mainstream
market.

I have had at least half a dozen calls, post-PERDITION, from publishers
wanting to do graphic novels with me...until the numbers got crunched and
the budget required to hire an artist to illustrate, say, 300 pages made the
projects unrealistic.

>
>6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in
>print again?

W.R. Burnett is the great forgotten master -- the true peer of Hammett,
Chandler, Spillane and Thompson. And his impact on the popular culture is
at least as great as any of them. He lived too long and wrote too much,
however -- a problem that resonates with me.

He's not exactly forgotten, but I place Horace McCoy high on the list, as
well -- KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE is better than any Jim Thompson, and I say
that as one of the couple of people (Ed Gorman's one of the others) who put
Thompson back on the map.

And Ennis Willie -- who wrote a couple dozen wonderfully fun, pulpy
Spillane-school tough guy novels that were published in the mid-'60s as
softcore porn -- deserves at least a one-volume retrospective. Lynn
Meyers, who co-edited my Spillane anthology BYLINE: MICKEY SPILLANE, is
putting one together with Steve Mertz and myself, and will soon seek a
publisher. Willie was sort of the Betty Page of paperback pulp -- a cult
favorite about whom nothing was known, and who utterly disappeared after a
short, prolific period. But he has turned up alive and well, a successful
printer. We should print him.
>
>7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that
>moment.

I attended the esteemed Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, where my
mentor Richard Yates guided me through my early mystery novels. BAIT MONEY,
NO CURE FOR DEATH and THE BROKER were all written there. Yates helped me
land Knox Burger as an agent, and -- during my grad school days -- Burger
showed BAIT MONEY around for almost two years. Originally BAIT MONEY had a
bleak ending -- the hero, Nolan, died. The typescript got coffee spilled on
it (at Pyramid Books, I believe, dating me and the book) and Burger asked me
to re-type it, and "Change that goddamn downer ending." Nolan lived in the
new typescript, and it promptly sold -- on Christmas Eve, 1972, weeks before
I graduated. When I told Don Westlake at the time, he said, "Sometimes God
decides to be O. Henry, and there's nothing we can do about it."

Max Allan Collins

Pro-File: P.J. Parrrish

2006-02-08T13:41:00.000-08:00

I've been pushing P.J. Parrrish novels for three years now, ever since I read one and then quickly went through the others. These are fine mysteries with real gravitas. Pro-File::

Who is PJ?

P J. Parrish is actually two sisters –- Kristy Montee and Kelly Montee -– who decided to pool their life-long loves of writing by teaming up in 1995 to create the character of Louis Kincaid. Their collaboration is unique in that the sisters live in separate states (Kelly in Mississippi, Kristy in Florida) -– which means hefty phone bills and a reliance on America OnLine. The sisters were born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, each going their separate ways in college.

Kristy graduated from Eastern Michigan University with a teaching degree but went on to journalism, first as a police reporter and features editor for the Southfield and Birmingham Eccentric newspapers chain in suburban Detroit. After moving to South Florida in 1973, she served as reporter, editor and finally assistant managing editor for the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. Drawing on a childhood love of ballet, she also served as the Sun-Sentinel’s dance critic for 18 years before leaving journalism in 1985 to write fulltime. She now lives in Fort Lauderdale with her husband, Daniel, who is a deputy managing editor with the Sentinel, and their seven cats. When not writing, Kristy keeps her hands busy trying to tame her jungle garden and her right brain busy by learning to play the piano.

After college at Northern Michigan University in the state’s remote upper peninsula, Kelly moved to Arizona and later settled in Laughlin, Nevada. She has worked in the gaming industry for the last 15 years -– doing everything from tending bar to dealing blackjack. Several years ago, she moved to Philadelphia, Miss., where she became a manager in the human relations department of a Native-American casino. Recently, she relocated to the north of the state, just outside of Memphis. She has two daughters, a son, and three grandchildren. Louis Kincaid was born of Kelly’s experiences in Mississippi and of her love of northern Michigan -— where she plans to retire someday.

The interview:

1. Tell us about your current novel.

An Unquiet Grave (released February 2006) is the seventh in our Louis Kincaid series about our biracial cop-cum-PI and it is a hybrid thriller-procedural. And while it retains our usual hardboiled style, it has a backstory that comes as close to a love story as we dare tread. It's a deeply personal book for us because it was inspired by a place we knew growing up: an old Victorian insane asylum, the kind of place that fuels campfire stories and kid's nightmares. Louis receives a call from his foster father Phillip asking for his help. Phillip has been tending the grave of a youthful love, Claudia, who died decades ago at the mental institution where she was a patient. But as the asylum is being torn down and its cemetery relocated, it is discovered that Claudia's coffin is filled with rocks. Louis's search for her remains crosses the path of a journalist pursuing rumors that a long-dead serial killer, once housed at the asylum, is alive and killing again. Louis's investigation leads him deep into the secrets of two families, the crumbling asylum and his own fears about mental illness.

2. Can you give a sense of what you're working on now?

We have just signed a three-book deal with Pocket Books and are very excited because they have asked us to not only continue our Louis Kincaid franchise but to also write a new series
featuring a female protagonist. We are spinning off a character from our 2005 Kincaid book
"A Killing Rain," a Miami homicide detective named Joe Frye, whom Louis became romantically involved with. Her series will find her leaving Miami to become a police chief in a small Michigan town. The plan is to perhaps alternate books and then have Louis and Joe work a case together.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

That's easy. Some authors claim they write only for the pure pleasure of writing, that finding commercial success is not important. But commercial success in our genre means you've connected with a large audience. Connecting is the pleasure of knowing that something you created from the ether of your imagination and the sweat of your faith has resonated with someone else. It's the best high on earth.

4. What is the greatest DISpleasure?

The vagaries and cruelties of the business that mean so many great storytellers don't get the patience from their publishers they need to build an audience. Publishers are too quick to pull the plug today. As a consequence, most writers work in constant terror or become contortionists trying to fit themselves into the mold of whatever is "hot."

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Quit overprinting bad books. It hurts all of us.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

Hmmm...gotta get back to you on that one. I am not as well read as I should be.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

We rewrote it ten times at our agent's request before she would send it out. Everyone in New York turned it down. Except one editor, John Scognamilio at Kensington Books. But that is all you need -- one person who takes a chance on you. Even though it had the typical freshman mistakes, he saw something in our work and gave us our start. What we didn't realize then, though, was that it just gets harder and harder. To paraphrase from "Alice in Wonderland": In this country, it takes all the running you can do just to stay in place.

Pro-File: Bill Crider

2006-02-07T15:10:00.000-08:00

I'm always interested in the lives and working methods of other writers so toward that end I'm beginning a series called Pro-Files in which various professional writers answer the same seven questiions.

Pro-Files launches tonight with one of the most skilled and neglected writers working today. Bill Crider's books and stories have been giving me true pleasure for well over two decades now.

Bill Crider

1. Tell us about your current novel.

A Mammoth Murder will be out in April. Sheriff Dan Rhodes tangles with Bigfoot, feral hogs, a long-dead mammoth, and a very much alive murderer.

2. Can you give a sense of what you're working on now?

I'm doing a house name novel and trying to come up with plots for three short stories. After I finish all that, I have one more Sheriff Rhodes novel to write on my current contract. Since I no longer have an agent, I'm not sure what happens after that.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

Writing a book or story that somebody reads and enjoys.

4. What is the greatest DISpleasure?

The business side, especially promotion.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Forget the blockbuster mentality and promote good writing.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

Hard Case Crime and Stark House are doing great work, but we could always use more Harry Whittington, Day Keene, and Gil Brewer. What about Bill Gault and Thomas B. Dewey?

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

It's a long story, but of course I'll never forget when my friend Jack Davis called me to say that our Nick Carter novel, THE COYOTE CONNECTION, had been bought by Ace Books. We even had a party to celebrate when the book was published. And our names weren't even on the cover.

Thanks, Bill.

More Radio...

2006-02-06T14:24:00.000-08:00

From Stephen Marlowe:

Hi Ed
    I was weaned way back in the late 1930s on Jack Armstrong, fifteen minutes five days a week. It started out being a sort of highschool adventure series, but soon went exotic when the eponymous hero would join his friends Billy and Betty, who were brother and sister, on adventurous missions to exotic places in far corners of the world with their globe-trotting Uncle Jim. To an impressionable would-be writer and pre-teenager the program was irresistable, You could save boxtops of the sponsoring breakfast cereal too and with them and a dime claim what seemed like exotic gifts for which, you searched the postbox every day as soon as you sent away for them. I read a few years ago that not a single radio script of Jack Armstrong remains anywhere, not one. Along with the program itself, they just vanished--as if neither the radio serial itseslf nor the writers who wrote the scripts ever existed. Sic transit gloria mundi...

    I was also hooked on a thrice-weekly half-hour-a-go serial called I Love a Mystery, but that's another story.

     And it is worth mentioning that one of the best--if not the very best--short story writtren by Irwin Shaw was MAIN CURRENTS OF AMERICAN THOUGHT, whose protagonist was a young writer during the Depression who gave up his youth to support his parents and sister by grinding out radio serials.A very powerful story.

    Steve
-----------------------------

From Elizabeth Foxwell

I regularly broadcast old-time mystery radio shows as part of my weekly radio show "It's a Mystery" (Mondays at 11A ET, http://www.fcac.org/webr). These are usually tied to an author's birthday; today's, for example, is part 2 of "Strangers on a Train" with Ray Milland and Ruth Roman (in honor of Patricia Highsmith's recent birthday). And speaking of Bob & Ray, last week I played a snippet of "The Adventures of Sherlock Sage," which was their fairly insane version of Sherlock Holmes. I've also played Stan Freberg's famous send-up of "Dragnet" ("St. George and the Dragonet") and a bit called "Sam Shovel, Private Eye."

Coming up in March..."Sorry, Wrong Number," in honor of Lucille Fletcher's birthday.

---------------------
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Radio

2006-02-05T14:43:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Norm Partridge, I'm again going to lose myself in the wonderful world of old-time radio. Norm was nice enough to tell me about this site that sells CP3 CDs inexpensively, not, you understand, that I had any idea what CP3 was of course. So Carol picked me up the approriate player and as soon as the CDs arrive, I'll do what I did when I was drying out years ago, spend a lot of time listening to the shows of my very early years,

I bought a lot of Bob and Ray, the Great Gildersleeve, a variety of detective shows and a mighy heavy load of Jack Benny. Just before he died, Charles Beaumont wrote a fine vivid piece about the radio shows of his own boyhood. He insisted that because radio used the listener's imagination instead of his eyes, it was a richer experience. I agree. Jack Benny's vault, his ancient car, the mote protecting his money...as much as I love the TV show (Benny's expressions are a lot of the fun) there was no way it could create the outre parts of his imaginary house. I always likened his house to the Carl Barks artwork of Scrooge McDuck's manse. No way a set designer could even come close to this.

The arrow-swift through line of radio narrative is another reason I like radio. The other day I listened to three episdoes of the Shadows done by Orson Welles. You'd think the speed of the storytelling would work against the brooding mood but it only enhances it. There's no time to doubt any of the spectacular if unlikely drama filling your mind.

Now if I can just figure out how to use that new CP3 player Carol got me...

Dis-associations

2006-02-04T20:30:00.000-08:00

Bill Crider made some good points on his blog the other night--i.e., mystery readers seem to love historical settings unless that historical setting is the old west. I've never understood that either.

This afternoon an old friend of mine who started full time writing about the same time I did called to compare notes on the market today. She's had two or three successes above and beyond merely making a good living. But she wondered how it is that graphic porno in the female fantasy romance field has become such a hot item. I tried to get through one of them myself once but found the writing god awful and the humor on about an eighth grade level.

Makes me wonder why porno in books for men isn't more popular. The Internet?

I've mentioned this before but there's a bookstore around here where the guy who owns it berates his customers for buying certain books, much like the great Jack Black character in High Fidelity who reuses to sell certain CDs because they offend him. Only the bookstore guy's pomposity isn't funny like Black's.

I've seen a lot of arguments lately among writers about used bookstores. Are we putting ourselves out of business by doing business with them? The fact is, I do most of my book buying on line these days, about 30% of which is used books. Any opinions?

I'm told book clubs are in decline. Is there any segment of publsihing that ISN'T in decline?

-----------------------

I usually avoid politics here but this one I can't let pass by--the latest attempt by the bush people to drag us back into the Dark Ages. This is from the best political blog on the internet, Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshal:

This stuff really is amazing. It's not just evolution that's beyond the pale anymore. Bush administration campaign flacks are making NASA employees put the word 'theory' in front of references to 'big bang' in NASA publications. Lucky we can still talk about dinosaurs.

It sounds broad brush but facts, empiricism really have become an issue of the day.

-- Josh Marshal

The James Frey mess

2006-02-03T16:24:00.000-08:00

Stephen King has an excellent piece in the new Entertainment Weekly on the Oprah-James Frey dust-up. He speaks as a recocvering alcoholic and druggie. As do I.

As you know, I read the rehab section of the book a few months ago and knew immediately the whole book was probably bullshit. Ridiculous macho posing. I pretty much kicked alone but I wouldn't recommend it. I did it that way because I can handle being around a lot of people and rehab was nothing but people. I went to two AA meetings where they told me if I didn't go through their program then I wasn't realkly sober. Which I resented. My girl friend of six years had moved out and I was hanging on by my fingernails ad I wasn't up for some asshole trlling me that my seven years of total sobreity didn't count.

But I'm all for seven step programs. I've personally driven at least half a dozen people to AA meetings and taken them into rehab programs. It's tough work, what these folks do who work with addicts. I have a college friend who's been working as a drug counselor since we got out of college thirty-some years ago. Shes neither burned out nor cynical. The Catholic church is always looking for saints apparently. I'd nominate Laura.

The worst thing about the Frey story is that despite him admitting to so many lies--his book is still selling.

Stuff

2006-02-02T15:07:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Jerry Healy we lead tonight with a truly witty remark by one of my favorite congresspeople, Charlie Rangel:

Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., who is African-American, was asked on
public
TV what he thought about the president.

"Well," he said, "I really think that he shatters the myth of
white
supremacy once and for all."
----------------------------------

Vince Keenan wrote to ask what my impression of Japanese horror films is thus far. Mixed, I'd say. Some of the films everybody's excited about seem to me overpraised. But when they are character-driven, as the best of them are, they strike me as generally superior to what we produce in the U.S. The original Ring worthy of Polanski, I think, while the two gangster films I saw don't come close to the richness and spectacle of the early John Woo, if I may include an Oriental who isn't Japanese. These are crude impressions, Vince, based on just a handful of films. I wish I had access to more. A final note--their trash is every bit as boring as our trash.

----------------------------------

A lot of blogs are treating Christopher Fowler as if he's brand new. He's actually got a number of novels and movies behind him. He used to be categorized as a horror writer, though that never struck me as fair to him or fair to horror. He's one of those writers who's largely unclassifiable, though his excellent Bantam novels fit comfortably into the mystery slot.

---------------------------------

I mentioned the dearth of Fredric Brown reprints. I'm now in contact with the agent who handles the estate. He's looking into the rumor that there will be no more Brown novels from the Stewart Masters group. There are at least eight Brown novels I'd like to get back into print.

Edgar Awards; A Truly Gross Story

2006-02-01T15:07:00.000-08:00

Here's a letter I sent to Sarah Weinman's blog this afternoon after I read several sites talking about how difficult it is to lose when you've been nominated for awards:

I've been nominated (as I recall) twice for Edgars and for several other awards such as the Anthony, Bram Stoker (horror), Shamus, Spur (western) and the International Fiction award. I list all these because I want to say that while I've never won an Edgar, I did win in all the other awards (once as part of a collaboration). I've also, having been nominated more than once, LOST in all those other award competitions. I've also served on various judging committeees and know that so many vagaries are involved in the selection process, H.P. Lovecraft's Dark Gods might as well be running things. As a judge I always felt the same way--that there were two or three pieces/books that should've been first place. And as a loser, I never felt any bitterness. Even when I'd gotten my hopes up, there was just that bee-sting moment of disappointment. Then I got on with my life. I know I'm in the minority here but all groups--writers, actors, directors, plumbers--make way too much of awards.

Ed Gorman

Over the years, I've quit three different writers' groups because they didn't seem to be about anything except awards. I enjoy wining awards, who doesn't? But I would never ask anybody to vote for me and Lord God A'Mighty did I get sick of people asking ME to vote for THEM. I quit one group because a famous--and I mean FAMOUS--writer called and said he'd appreciate my vote. This was like hearing a ward heeler putting the bite on you to vote for his guy. A famous and reasonably moneyed writer asking a nowhere idiot like me to vote for him? I was embarrassed for both of us. I immediately quit the group. (And no, I'll never divulge who that writer is.)

Let me re-iterate what I said long ago. Mystery folks are the smartest, nicest, wisest group of writers I've ever met. Other writers' group have many members about whom I could say the same thing. But as a GROUP, mystery writers are sensible, sensitive (and I don't mean touchy-feely) and bright--bright enough to know that while awards are fun to win, they're not worth worrying about. You win or you lose. Life goes on.

Thank God.

-X-TREME GROSS OUT AHEAD--YOU'VE BEEN WARNED-----------------------

I've been watching Japanese horror movies lately--the subtle ones, not the slice and dice--so I thought I'd start familiarizing myself with various directors, actors, writers. etc. I spendt an hour on various informative sites that Wikipedia linked to.

At the end of many of the profiles they listed trivia. Here's piece of trivia that would give Larry Flynt pause:

Trivia

• Shinya Tsukamoto who plays the muscle bound mastermind in Ichi the Killer (2001) supplied the semen in the opening scene, where the title is revealed. Miike gave a bucket to Tsukamoto to fill but was unable to provide enough material for the shot. He passed the bucket to three other crew members to add the remaining amount.

Stuff

2006-01-31T14:07:00.000-08:00

As Bill Crider indicated on his own fine blog the other night, there's a very snazzy new edition of the novel Detour, on which the classic cult film was made. I read it straight through and was impressed by the fact that Martin M. Goldsmith, author of book and screenplay, was able to do what Horace McCoy did in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?--give you a much more open ended novel than just a narrow pulp tale. Goldsmith gives us a true road tale, a true look at the post-Depression as it effected the west coast, a true ballbusting romance, and his own idiosyncratic take on the promise of the Hollywood of his time. You'll find some interesting differences between book and script. This is a winner.
Detour is published by O'Bryan House rdoody@ix.netcom.com According to publisher Richard Doody, it's his plan to publish a number of "great books from the (Depression) era." Order from him or Amazon, Borders, Barnes and Noble and Target.

--------------
Re the Orson Welles entry the other night:
In the 1970s Orson Welles was the spokesman for Gallo wines. He did a great job. The problem was getting that great job on film and on audio tape.

One of his recording sessions became the most listened-to private tape of the year. You know how geniuses are supposedly unable to work in any kind of "team" way? Well, he starts calling the advert guys various names because they made a few suggestions about his reding of a line. Then he tells them that the copy stinks. He refuses to read it. He wants to rewrite it himself. On and on freaking on in one of the most juvenile and nasty personal attacks I've ever heard in a studio.

From most excellent writer Norman Partridge:

Hey Ed:

I never heard this story, but it must have been the inspiration for a funny bit on the old SCTV show. One of their holiday episodes had a skit with John Candy appearing as Orson Welles on a Liberace Christmas special. It was hilarious, with Candy screwing up his lines and berating the camera crew as he sits before the laden Xmas table. Finally, Candy stalks off, but not before ripping a leg off the roast turkey!

Boy, do I remember those Gallo commericals--they were always in heavy rotation out here in California. Too bad they didn't let Welles do one as Hank Quinlan; I can (easily) picture him wandering those TOUCH OF EVIL streets with a bottle of Gallo screwtop in his hands....

Norm

-------------

Michael Stern wrote to remind me that writing novels that don't quite fit neatly into any one genre was the path followed by "the writer you always sight as being a major influence on you--Fredric Brown." Excellent point, Michael. Brown sure did take a lot of liberties with each genre he worked in. And speaking of whch, weren't there two publishing programs that were going to put all of Brown's major work back into print? Anybody know what happened to those?

--------------

People have been betting on the net all day (no money--just guessing) as to how long it will be till bushie cites 9/11 tonight. My bet is 47 seconds. My friend Sarah thinks his first words will be, "9/11 was meant to stop America from expressing itself in speeches like this...blah blah blah." I think she may be on to something.

What is it?

2006-01-30T16:12:00.000-08:00

A woman I went to college with sent me an interesting review of my Dark Fantastic collection that appeared in some kind of French magazine. Beth has lived in Paris for years and e mails me reviews from time to time.

For the most part the review is more than favorable. The problem the reviewer has with my material is that while it is billed here as horror it's not exactly that nor is it exactly crime fiction.

A long time ago I joked that I was a nobody in three genres and that holds true today as well. After a dozen or so mystery novels, I'm pretty much unknown in the field except for those who remember me vaguely from Mystery Scene. My books are rarely stocked in mystery stores. Same for horror. I'd say the same for western stores except there aren't any.

Tempting as self pity is, my obscurity is my own fault. Every book I write, with the exception of the Sam McCains, fails to fit tidily into the genre it's billed as. I don't do this on purpose. It just sort of comes out that way. And this is true of my short stories even more than my novels.

I'm not alone in this. Jack Ketchum, Bentley Little, Tom Piccirrilli, Rich Chizmar, Billie Sue Mosiman and several other writers inhabit this no man's land somewhere between crime fiction and fantasy/horror. This my favorite kind of reading. I like crime fiction tinted with the supernatural. Or crime fiction so strange--Jack Ketchum's great novels and stories, for instance--that in places it seems otherworldly.

The thrust of the review Wendy sent me is that the reviewer really likes my work. He just wishes he knew what to call it. I wish I knew what to call it, too.

A Touch of Death by Charles Wiliams

2006-01-29T14:04:00.000-08:00

I once read an unfavorable review of a Charles Williams novel that said the protagonist was unbeleivably naive. How could he not know know that the people he was getting involved with were criminals? Which, to most Williams fans, has to sound unbeleivably naive on the part of the reviewer.

In his exceptionally fine piece on the work of Charles Williams, poet, journalist and editor (the Library of America) Geoffrey O'Brien notes that of all the paperback original writers, Williams' protagonists are the ones most predisposed to criminality themselves. If they are naive, it's only in the women they choose to hook up with. And they are rarely naive even about the ladies.

Madelone Butler, in Williams' A Touch of Death (Hardcase, $6.99), is the kind of woman most men would run from. It's too easy to say that Madelone is a deceitful, duplicitous shrew, which she is of course. But that's putting too much on her. She presents Lee Scarborough with the chance of stealing $120,000 in stolen cash or just walking away. Which he could easily do. But--and this is the point many reviewers miss about many of Williams' men--his boys are a lot like his girls, the one difference being that they generally don't betray their partners.

Williams has always been my favorite of the Gold Medal writers. As John D. MacDonald said of him, "Nobody can make violence seem more real." The reason for this is that Williams' men are violent themselves. Not predatory. But certainly tough men, usually from workingclass backgrounds, who use violence when it becomes necessary. Another point too seldom made about his work. He was the master of the slow-build suspense novel; he clearly enjoyed twisting every aspect of the treachery and surprise that fill his books.

This isn't always true of Williams' work. The sea novels for which he's most famous (the excellent film Dead Calm was based on a Williams novel) are usually told by men who, if not heroic, are not crooked. But I've always preferred the deep South, small-town novels usually set after the big war when our wandering boy meets our wandering girl and together they decide to make a little money.

Line by line I think that Williams is by far the best of all the early Gold Medal folks with the exception of Vin Packer and Malcolm Braly. There's real beauty in his descriptions of nature and a true feel for the hypocrisy of small towns. And there is that great frantic sense of being unfulfilled--of looking for something, a woman, a gig, a place, anything that might offer him peace--that always eludes. Williams is the great melancholic, especially his men whose two dominate emotions seem to be remorse and a paranoid sense of betrayl.

Hell, yes, they know what they're getting into, his people, and they get into it gladly. As Sartre once said, go figure.

Genius; the Edgar nominees

2006-01-28T17:02:00.000-08:00

Last night I finished Always Magic in The Air, the book about the famous Brill Building that produced so many of the important--even seminal--song writing teams of 1950s and 1960s rock and ryhthm and blues.

Don Kirshner, a key player in Brill Building successes, became the producer and overseer of the Monkees when Brill Building teams began working in LA as well as NYC. The Monkees, based on the material here, were a group of vainglorious no-talent morons who never did appreciate the name and money that other people earned for them. Kirshner was able to keep in them in check only so long. Screen Gems, who owned the Monkees, decided to send in one of their own to be Kirshner's co-producer. Kirshner couldn't deal with a co-producer. He was a lone gun who generally did things his way. He claims he quit; Screen Gems says he was fired.

The other day I watched a biography of Orson Welles. The point made about Welles was pretty much the same point made about Kirshner. Lone gun. Worked best when he had total control. And, in Welles' case, that he was a genius. A true genius.
It was the confluence with the Kirshner material that made me think about genius. (Kirshner went on to work in various systems not of his own making and has done right proud by himself.)

I don't think you can argue the last point when you're talking about Citizen Kane and probably the Magnificent Amerbersons and (close call) maybe even his own cut of Touch of Evil. Genius. From what I could gather the rest of his career was an attempt on his part to reach the level of Kane again.

A sidebar here. When I worked out of Chicago producing radio commercials and soundtracks for TV spots, it was common for recording studios at that time to put together gag reels for holiday parties. Catching stars in awkward moments usually provided the most fun. There was an abudance of such reels in NYC and LA because of the heavy concentration of well-known actors who did voice overs.

The late Herschell Bernardi wrote, acted in (along with others) and produced the best reel I've ever heard. He created a pretty standard recording session play in which the ad agency dude Milltown Jag directed the actor. (Milltown was the most prominent tranquilizer of the late 50s and early 60s; and Jag of course was for Jaguar, the kind of car Milltown drove.) Bernardi spoofed ad agency folks about as well as I've ever heard them skewered--Milltown was stupid, vain and insecure.. His first instruction to the actor was "Bloopers soap is real good. All we want is a simple throwaway reading. Bloopers soap is real good. Nothing dramatic." So the actor, who knows what he's doing, gives Milltown exactly what he asked for..

One hour later, take #73 or thereabouts, Milltown keeps saying 'You're not hitting the word `good' hard enough. The client tried t copywwrite that word last year." Bernardi: "Milltown, I don't think you can copyright words." The tape is about an hour long and believe it or not it manages to sustain itself as everbody in the studio (I believe it's Christmas Eve) just wants to get out of there--and they've 73 great takes to choose from. Everybody but Milltown just wants to get home.

The point of me retelling the story is that I've been in many many tense recording sessions. Everybody who works in the biz has been in them. The wrong actor was cast. The studio guys just can't give you the effects you want. The product song produced by some LA hotshot that sounded so good at first hearing sounds like hell now. Or you realize that you've written copy that not even Olivier could bring to life. And you're spending hundreds of dollars an hour (maybe thousands today).

So most pros--studio guys, actors, agency people--try to remain civil, focused and just get the job done. The job has probably been bid out and the client ain't gonna pay you five cents more if you run over. And then the agency is gonna be on your ass.

So. Come prepared. Spend 20 minutes or so off the clock with the studio effects guy listening to everything he's got for you. Be civil. Run through the copy with the actor three or four times before the clock starts ticking. And get ready for ten takes max.

In the 1970s Orson Welles was the spokesman for Gallo wines. He did a great job. The problem was getting that great job on film and on audio tape.

One of his recording sessions became the most listened-to private tape of the year. You know how geniuses are supposedly unable to work in any kind of "team" way? Well, he starts calling the advert guys various names because they made a few suggestions about his reding of a line. Then he tells them that the copy stinks. He refuses to read it. He wants to rewrite it himself. On and on freaking on in one of the most juvenile and nasty personal attacks I've ever heard in a studio.

I'm not here to defend ad people. I hated 98% of them I had to work with. My feeling is you go into advertising when you can't do anything else, the exception being the art department. That's the only place you find real talent. While I'm sure that some novelists didn't mind their tenure in advertsing, most of them I've talked to hated it and the people as much as I did.

However, Welles was broke. The ad agency agency was paying him tremendous bucks. He owed them a professional performance.

The tv biography I saw of Welles implies that geniuses just simply can't work with lessers. They implied that Weeles could never work in the movie studio system because only hacks survived.

That's the point that made me bristle about Welles. How many men and women working wth studios have turned out excellent pictures--importtant, true, powerful pictures? Hundreds if you include wroldwide. Hundreds. Few if ny even approach Citizen Kane. But I feel pretty sure that Welles' failure with the studios was largely his own doing. I'm sure there were scenes in the front office where Welles went after studio heads the same way he went after the Gallo advert Nobody in the bio ever mentioned that he was self-destructive but how else would you characterize that kind of behavior? I'm not defending the dopes who run Hwood but who's going to put up with that kind of abuse just so you can say you worked with Orson Welles?

The Edgar nominees

Dear MWA Member:

Image Mystery Writers of America is proud to announce its Nominees for the 2006 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction, television and film published or produced in 2005. The Edgar Awards will be presented to the winners at our 60th Gala Banquet, April 27, 2006 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, New York City.

BEST NOVEL

The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
Red Leaves by Thomas H. Cook (Harcourt)
Vanish by Tess Gerritsen (Ballantine Books)
Drama City by George Pelecanos (Little, Brown)
Citizen Vince by Jess Walter (Regan Books)

BEST FIRST NOVEL BY AN AMERICAN AUTHOR

Die A Little by Megan Abbott (Simon & Schuster)
Immoral by Brian Freeman (St. Martin's Minotaur)
Run the Risk by Scott Frost (G.P. Putnam's Sons)
Hide Your Eyes by Alison Gaylin (Signet)
Officer Down by Theresa Schwegel (St. Martin's Minotaur)

BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL

Homicide My Own by Anne Argula (Pleasure Boat Studio)
The James Deans by Reed Farrel Coleman (Penguin - Plume)
Girl in the Glass by Jeffrey Ford (Dark Alley)
Kiss Her Goodbye by Allan Guthrie (Hard Case Crime)
Six Bad Things by Charlie Huston (Ballantine Books)

BEST FACT CRIME

Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece by Edward Dolnick (HarperCollins)
The Elements of Murder: The History of Poison by John Emsley (Oxford University Press)
Written in Blood by Diane Fanning (St. Martin's True Crime)
True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa by Michael Finkel (HarperCollins)
Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans by Jed Horne (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

BEST CRITICAL/BIOGRAPHICAL

Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel: How to Knock 'em Dead with Style by Hallie Ephron (Writer's Digest Books)
Behind the Mystery: Top Mystery Writers Interviewed by Stuart Kaminsky, photos by Laurie Roberts (Hot House Press)
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Novels edited by Leslie S. Klinger (W.W. Norton)
Discovering the Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade: The Evolution of Dashiell Hammett's Masterpiece, Including John Huston's Movie with Humphrey Bogart edited by Richard Layman (Vince Emery Productions)
Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her by Melanie Rehak (Harcourt)

BEST SHORT STORY

"Born Bad" – Dangerous Women by Jeffery Deaver (Mysterious Press)
"The Catch' – Greatest Hits by James W. Hall (Carroll & Graf)
"Her Lord and Master" – Dangerous Women by Andrew Klavan (Mysterious Press)
"Misdirection" – Greatest Hits by Barbara Seranella (Carroll & Graf)
"Welcome to Monroe" – A Kudzu Christmas by David Wallace (River City Publishing)

BEST JUVENILE

Shakespeare's Secret by Elise Broach (Henry Holt Books for Young Readers)
Wright & Wong: The Case of the Nana-Napper by Laura J. Burns and Melinda Metz (Penguin Young Readers – Sleuth/Razorbill)
The Missing Manatee by Cynthia DeFelice (Farrar, Straus & Giroux Books for Young Readers)
Flush by Carl Hiassen (Knopf Books for Young Readers)
The Boys of San Joaquin by D. James Smith (Simon & Schuster Children’s Books)

BEST YOUNG ADULT

Down the Rabbit Hole by Peter Abrahams (HarperCollins – Laura Geringer Books)
Last Shot by John Feinstein (Knopf Books for Young Readers)
Quid Pro Quo by Vicki Grant (Orca Book Publishers)
Young Bond, Book One: Silverfin by Charlie Higson (Hyperion/Miramax Books)
Spy Goddess, Book One: Live & Let Shop by Michael Spradlin (HarperCollins Children’s Books)

BEST PLAY
River's End by Cheryl Coons (Book and Lyrics), Chuck Larkin (Music) (Marin Theatre Company)
Safe House by Paul Leeper (Tennessee Stage Company)
Matter of Intent by Gary Earl Ross (Theater Loft)
Mating Dance of the Werewolf by Mark Stein (Rubicon Theatre)

BEST TELEVISION EPISODE TELEPLAY

CSI – "A Bullet Runs Through It, Parts 1 and 2", Teleplay by Richard Catalani & Carol Mendelsohn
CSI – "Grave Danger", Teleplay by Anthony Zuiker, Carol Mendelsohn, Naren Shankar. Story by Quentin Tarantino
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit – "911", Teleplay by Patrick Harbinson
Sea of Souls – "Amulet", Teleplay by Ed Whitmore
Wire in the Blood – "Redemption", Teleplay by Guy Burt

BEST MOTION PICTURE SCREENPLAY

Crash - Story by Paul Haggis; Screenplay by Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco (Lions Gate Films)
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Mystery *File; Lawrence Tierney

2006-01-27T16:24:00.000-08:00

Sandra Scoppettone pointed out that the correct link to Mystery*File should be http://www.mysteryfile.com/ Sorry I got it wrong.

From Turner Classic Movies (the best channel on the dial) website:

Lawrence Tierney is THE HOODLUM by Glenn Erickson

Tough-guy actor Lawrence Tierney is enjoying a renewed popularity thanks to last summer's Film Noir 2 releases from Warner DVD. A good actor who spoiled a promising career with arrests for boozing and brawling, Tierney was a genuine bruiser and all-around dangerous character.

The Wade Williams Collection presents a rather beat-up copy of The Hoodlum, an inferior crime melodrama distributed by United Artists in its first year of reorganization. More a continuation of the Eagle-Lion label than the Chaplin-Fairbanks-Griffith tradition, UA in 1951 was a home for all manner of independent films. Some were artistic, and a lot weren't.

Synopsis: Against the strenuous objections of the prison authorities small-time hood Vincent Lubeck (Lawrence Tierney) is paroled after serving half of a ten-year armed robbery sentence. Bitter and maladjusted, he rejects the kindness of his mother (Lisa Golm) and grudgingly pumps gas for his brother Johnny (Edward Tierney). Vincent is soon seducing his brother's girlfriend Rosa (Allene Roberts) while planning a major armored car holdup. As part of his scheme he also romances Eileen (Marjorie Riordan). She works at the bank across the street, and knows of some large cash shipments coming up.

The Hoodlum begins intriguingly with a sweating Vincent Lubeck being taken for a ride in the dead of night to the city dump. It then flashes back to retrace a gangster plotline already twenty years out of date. Ma Lubeck has two boys, one an honest garage owner and the other a vicious criminal. Ma's special pleading wins Vincent an early release from jail but the hardened thug has no intention of going straight.

Sam Neuman and Nat Tanchuck's simplistic screenplay leans heavy on the proposition that all prison inmates should remain locked up for the protection of society. Selfish and violent, Vincent boasts that he's learned a lot in prison and is ready to go for a big score. He flies off the handle when anybody tries to give him advice. He's just an angry guy, as seen in an unintentionally silly scene where he loses his cool over some innocent guff from a dissatisfied customer. "What's in it for me?" is his basic motto.

Director Max Nosseck had helmed Tierney's breakthrough picture Dillinger but returned to poverty row productions after only a few bigger studio assignments. His clumsy direction keeps The Hoodlum at a comic-book level. We have to believe that Lawrence Tierney directed himself - his hammy theatrics at the tearful ending will give some of his ardent fans second thoughts. The other actors are left to their own devices. "Helpless old lady" specialist Lisa Golm (So Ends Our Night, A Place in the Sun) overacts ridiculously as the suffering mother. Billed as a new "discovery," Edward Tierney has almost nothing to do. He was the third Tierney brother to try his luck as an actor. The second was Scott Brady, who ended up with the most satisfying career.

Although cameraman Clark Ramsey's lighting is consistently good, the movie looks cheap. Audiences in 1951 must have laughed derisively at the scratchy 1930s-vintage stock shots of police vehicles and gangster action. The big robbery set piece is ineptly staged - it looks as if a dozen people are shot dead but we lose track amid the confusing coverage.

(spoilers) A potentially interesting romantic angle is woefully undeveloped. Vincent uses bank employee Eileen in his robbery scheme but she has already used her charms to tap her boss for expensive luxuries and is too slick to be taken in by his games. We never find out the full extent of Eileen's conniving. Given slightly more time is a subplot in which Vincent seduces his brother's sensitive girlfriend Rose, who becomes pregnant and suicidal. From the standpoint of the Production Code, it's odd that the makers of The Hoodlum would billboard out-of-wedlock pregnancy and suicide as key plot points, after being so careful to maintain a conservative take on law and order. One can almost see where Southern parishes would have made their censor cuts.

Image and Corinth's DVD of The Hoodlum is from the Wade Williams Collection; he provides some awkward package copy. The splicy print is regularly interrupted with breaks that lop off a word or two and occasionally create glaring jump cuts that bounce actors around the frame. We're told (through the IMDB) that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences restored the film in 1999 but the copy on this disc is mediocre. There are no extras.

For more information about The Hoodlum, visit Image Entertainment.

by Glenn Erickson

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Mystery File; Judi Rohrig on John D. MacDonald

2006-01-26T14:56:00.000-08:00

Hi Ed

Thanks for the plug (but is there any way you can change Crime*File to Mystery*File?)

Anyway the link is correct, and the number of hits since yesterday is about double the usual daily average. It had to be you.

Best

Steve Lewis

Last night I promoted Steve Lewis great blog by the wrong name: It's Mystery*File www.mystery*file.com
---------------------------
There's been a lot of talk about John D. MacDonald on the blogs lately. Here's Judi Rohrig's take from her much-admired e magazine Hellnotes.

Here 'tis!

Love Judi

---

THE NUMBER ONE QUESTION FOR WRITERS

Introduce yourself as a writer, and then brace yourself for the obvious first question. Where do you get your ideas?

Not why on earth would you be idiot enough to waste all those hours one-on-one with a keyboard/pen and paper when you could be playing basketball, knitting, watching TV, listening to ambulance runs on the radio, petting the cat, or (insert -ing action-word here followed by noun)?

The better question would be where "don't" ideas come from?

One of my favorite writers is John D. MacDonald. Dean Koontz turned me on to him. (In fact, I blame Koontz for all the hours I've spent with the pens drippings from John D., Ed Gorman, Joe Lansdale, Norman Partridge, and James M. Cain.) Koontz -- in his biography -- claimed MacDonald's writing had a profound effect on his own storytelling.

MacDonald obviously plucked his ideas from life. His is the eye focused well on the 50s and 60s, moving from post WWII male-domination mind-set to the burgeoning sexual revolution. Sometimes he did this through his continuing character Travis McGee.

"Most readers loved MacDonald's work because he told a rip-roaring yarn," Carl Hiassen says in his Introduction to a reprint of MacDonald's DEEP BLUE GOOD-BYE. "Every McGee saga guarantees such splendidly mordant commentary. The customary targets are greedhead developers, crooked politicians, chamber-of-commerce flacks, and the cold-hearted scammers who flock like buzzards to the Sunshine State. For John D. MacDonald, these were not just useful fictional villains; they were villains of real life."

Inspiration? Where is it not?

Yet even the master had his walls. It was said John D. would begin typing somebody else's story word for word until his own story took form in his mind. Whatever stokes the creative fires.

Every writer would well to study MacDonald's way with words. The Late Richard Laymon thought so. In fact, he shared his own joy at reading John D.'s stories several years ago in Baltimore with some young writers gathered in Brian Keene's living room during KeeneCon 2000, the precursor to the HorrorFind Weekends.

Laymon wasn't alone in his feelings for MacDonald. Most every good writer I know readily names a favorite MacDonald title. Joe Lansdale claimed SOFT TOUCH as his favorite; Ed Gorman named DEAD LOW TIDE. Koontz offers out SLAM THE BIG DOOR; CRY HARD, CRY FAST; LAST ONE LEFT, and THE END OF THE NIGHT. Add to that list Dallas Mayr (Jack Ketchum), Jay Clarke (Michael Slade), the late Ian Fleming, and scads of others. And don't forget to include Stephen King on that list.

King has said that MacDonald was "the great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller."

What can be learned from John D. MacDonald is.. well, most everything: style, plot, character, description, suspense, location, politics, tenderness, and capturing much like a photographer, a period of time. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. said: "To diggers a thousand years from now... the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen."

MacDonald zeroed in on Florida at a time when the place was being mined for its riches: its lush paradise of clear water, sandy beaches, and plenty of warmth year round. And yet for every manatee slipping through sparkling waters, John D. held up Lysol-pungent backwater motels, stiletto-heeled Trixies, and furtive-eyed, underhanded operators. The seamy side, the lost side of paradise exposed on those sandy beaches.

Even his hero, Travis McGee, was eventually unleashed, revealing his full unbridled torrent of personal and most savage revenge in THE GREEN RIPPER. The novel won both awards for such a well-told story and scorn for its violence. Many fans claimed Trav would never had acted like that. I trust the author knew precisely what he was doing.

But this is about ideas, and John D. was all about that. Seeds of birth for THE EXCUTIONER, which eventually was renamed CAPE FEAR, came from another writer's taunt that John D. couldn't write a bestseller or a story that would become a film. He dashed those notions in one work.

But really, why do people want to know where your ideas come from? Writing is creating, and "creation" remains mysterious. Or… they think they want to write. Fame and fortune and all that.

John D. MacDonald did a truly wonderful job of handling that hot potato as he offered in his Introduction to Stephen King's NIGHT SHIFT:

"I am often given the big smiling handshake at parties (which I avoid attending whenever possible) by someone who then, with an air of gleeful conspiracy, will say, 'You know, I've always wanted to write.' I used to try to be polite. These days I reply with the same jubilant excitement: 'You know, I've always wanted to be a brain surgeon.'"

You may try that answer on for size, though please remember that most people aren't being snarky. They actually might envy you for entering where they fear to tread.

Seek and find stories by John D. MacDonald. You won't regret it. In fact, you just might be inspired. Reading does that.

+++

This and That

2006-01-25T14:03:00.000-08:00

There was such a response to my entry on Harry Whittington's A Night for Screaming that Greg Shepard of Stark House and I decided to try and get it back in print. We've reached an agreement in principle with the Whittington estate and hope to bring it out yet this year paired wth another Whittington novel, Any Woman He Wanted, an obscure book but a good one. I'll keep you posted.

CrimeSpot is a new and excellent website that gives you a daily sample of what's on other crime sites and blogs. Then it gives you a direct ink to the site just quoted. This is one of the best ideas I've seen since serious blogging began. http://www.crimespot.net/

Crime*File is another site you should check out frequently. Excellent pieces on all matters mysterious. I like the fact that every sub-genre of mystery fiction is covered. I know that all readers quickly get classified cozy or hard-boiled. While I'm not much for cutesy poo books of any kind, there are many cozies and traditionals that not only have something to say but that are also very well written. Likewise, traditional cozy readers are missing some excellent novels if they pass by the darker side of the mystery genre. Right now on the site, there's the long (and some would argue deservedly) forgotten Edward S. Aarons and his Sam Durrell series. I read them in the Fifties but gave them up when Matt Helm came along. The Aarons books that I really enjoyed were all the one-shots he did in the late Forties and early Fifties. His novels set along the Atlantic coast were espcially strong on local color and atmosphere. The esteemed Alan Hubin and Jeff Falco do a wind-up piece on Aarons that is interesting and informative. Here's Crime*File http://www.mysteryfile.com/

Michael Dirda on Robert E. Howard--James Reasoner responds

2006-01-24T13:29:00.000-08:00

Hacking his way from one crisis to another -- the quintessential fighting man.

By Michael Dirda
Sunday, January 22, 2006; BW15 The Washington Post

THE COMING OF CONAN THE CIMMERIAN

By Robert E. Howard

Illustrated by Mark Schultz

Del Rey/Ballantine. 457 pp. $29.95

THE BLOODY CROWN OF CONAN

By Robert E. Howard

Illustrated by Gary Gianni

Del Rey/Ballantine. 366 pp. Paperback, $15.95

THE CONQUERING SWORD OF CONAN

By Robert E. Howard

Illustrated by Gregory Manchess

Del Rey/Ballantine. 393 pp. Paperback, $15.95

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robert E. Howard (1906-1936), the creator of a blue-eyed Cimmerian fighting man, who wandered the ancient Hyborian age as a thief, pirate and mercenary, before finally seizing the royal throne of Aquilonia. In the course of many adventures, this axe and sword-wielding battle-machine was to encounter Stygian demons, a lonely being from another planet, vampiric witches and saturnine sorcerers who possess the elixir of life, a seraglio's worth of scantily clad slave girls, more than one haughty but secretly hot-blooded princess, and, not least, many, many, indeed hordes, of bloodthirsty, blood-crazed Picts, Kushites, Shemites, Vendhyans and Hyrkanians. Even more remarkably, this indomitable warrior earned the love of both Belit, the notorious corsair Queen of the Black Coast, and the deadly Valeria of the Red Brotherhood. Such a hero could obviously be no one but Conan, King Conan, Conan the Barbarian.

To most of us these days, Robert E. Howard's Cimmerian is rather a joke. During the 1970s, the Depression-era hero evolved into a comic-book icon and was later literally embodied by the young Arnold Schwarzenegger in a pair of exceptionally good sword-and-sorcery films. Soon thereafter appeared both the bookish Conan the Librarian and Terry Pratchett's mangled and bitter old bandit Cohen the Barbarian. Many an older reader must still recollect the Frank Frazetta paperback covers, top-action portraits of a massive half-naked fullback with a broadsword, either in full berserker fury or standing triumphantly upon a mound of dead enemies, his mighty thigh caressed by an adoring Playmate of the Month. Or two. Of course, none but the brave deserve the fair.

Are the tales of Conan then what a female friend would call "boys books"? Testosterone-driven daydreams for 15-year-olds? Pulp schlock with titillating suggestions of sadomasochism, rape and sapphism? (Many of the stories were originally illustrated for Weird Tales by the legendary Margaret Brundage, who specialized in kinky cover art.) The answer to all these questions is, obviously, yes.

Yet without making grandiose claims for them, Howard's Conan chronicles are also a bit more than that. They are, as Patrice Louinet demonstrates in his forewords and afterwords to these three volumes, studies in the clash of Barbarism and Civilization. In Howard's grim and all too realistic view, the barbarians are always at the gate, and once a culture allows itself to grow soft, decadent or simply neglectful, it will be swept away by the primitive and ruthless. As a character insists in "Beyond the Black River," the most deeply felt and complex Conan story, "Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. . . . Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph."

To Howard, however, this isn't wholly a bad thing.
to read the rest of the article read here http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/19/AR2006011902754.html

Michael Dirda is a book critic for Book World. His e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com, and his online discussion of books takes place each Wednesday at 2 p.m. on washingtonpost.com.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Reviewing a review is perhaps an uncommon thing to do, but Ed asked me for a few comments on Michael Dirda’s review of the three Del Rey editions of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, taken from either Howard’s original typescripts or the appearances in the pulp WEIRD TALES for the stories for which typescripts are not available.

Considering some of the press that Howard and his work have gotten over the years, Dirda’s column is fairly even-handed. There’s no dwelling on Howard’s personal life, no amateur psychoanalyzing, no grinding of axes. I give Dirda credit for concentrating on the stories themselves, as is only proper, since in the end they’re really all we have left of Bob Howard. (Well, other than the poetry, the letters, the articles and fragments and . . . )

Yet like many critics, Dirda can’t help but damn with faint praise. Are the Conan stories “pulp schlock”, he asks, and then he answers, “ . . . obviously, yes.” He refers to the character as a joke because of the movies, the comic books, the multitude of pastiche novels . . . none of which make the original Conan stories anything more or less than exactly what they were when Howard wrote them. Now that the original texts are available again, this is an especially important point. Readers can go back to the stories as Howard wrote them, as if none of what came after ever took place. The best way to experience the Conan stories is to read them in the pages of WEIRD TALES, I suppose (and facsimile reprints of them will be available in the future – without, unfortunately, the smell of decaying pulp paper, unless the book manufacturers have come up with something I don’t know about). The next best is to read them in these Del Rey editions, or in the ten-volume set from Wildside Press that reprints all of Howard’s stories from WEIRD TALES, not just the Conan yarns.

I would take issue, too, with Dirda’s assertion that Conan’s only solution to any problem is to hack his way through it. Yes, there’s plenty of swordplay and action in the stories. But Howard also emphasized Conan’s cunning, as well. There’s a great deal of political intrigue in many of the stories, and no one is better at pitting one faction against another and manipulating his enemies into destroying one another than Conan. The reason Conan is so dangerous is that he isn’t just a mindless, hack-and-slash barbarian. He can out-think his foes as well as handle a broadsword.

And of course, bringing up the so-called racism in the stories is old news in critical circles. Howard was no more racist than anyone else living in a small town in the Thirties. It’s probably safe to say that he was no more racist than most people who lived in big towns then, too. In fact, reading his letters leads one to believe that he was probably less racist than many people of his era.

I agree with Dirda’s comments about the appeal of Conan’s indomitable spirit. And he’s certainly right about the story “Beyond the Black River” actually being a Western. Take away the slight fantasy trappings and it’s one of the best stories I’ve ever read about Texas frontier in the 1840s, when the first settlers were beginning to make their way into a vast land ruled by the Comanches. It’s been said that no matter what the setting of a Howard story, he was actually writing about Texas, and there’s some truth to that.

So I would hope that Dirda’s readers would come away from his column with a desire to actually read the stories and judge for themselves whether they’re “pulp schlock”. I think they’re more than that. A lot more.

From Stephen Marlowe

2006-01-23T18:05:00.000-08:00

THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT
Early in February, Stark House will be publishing a double volume containing two of my early novels, VIOLENCE IS MY BUSINESS and TURN LEFT FOR MURDER, one from the Chet Drum series, the other a stand-alone gangster novel. Several weeks ago, just before the book went to press, the publisher e-mailed me wanting to know if I'd like to include a short story in the volume because it was running a bit short. I declined with thanks, saying that each novel was the length it decreed itself to be, and short–-hopefully–-meant terse and even, with luck, riveting.
At about the same time, you ran a thoughtful piece about how you preferred short novels to long. In fact, you said that you rarely read long novels. And I began to do some thinking about the short and the long of novel writing.
I've written both. The Drums and most of my stand-alone noirs are short, rarely more than, say, 75,000 words, often a deal shorter. But I've written what the French call pavées--paving stones--that is, really long novels. For example, my antihistorical take on Columbus, THE MEMOIRS OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, runs a quarter of a million words, and so does THE DEATH AND LIFE OF MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, my fantastical biography of the creator of Don Quijote.
Their subject matter decreed their length, just as the subject matter of the two novels in the Stark House double volume decreed theirs. A novel is as long or as short as it has to be, and I'll always let the writer–-or the book itself–-make the decision. The novel's subject and substance determines its length, and the wise novelist not just necessarily but willingly goes along with it. It is much like the novelist's need to make the reader suspend his disbelief.
Here are a couple of pairings of novels to show what I mean.
THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE by Stephen Crane and GONE WITH THE WIND by Margaret Mitchell.
MOBY DICK by Herman Melville and and THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA by Ernest Hemingway.
Is Stephen Crane's novel, for its brevity, the better Civil War novel, or is Margaret Mitchell's, for its length? The first deals with a single battle from a single viewpoint, the second with what happens to an entire culture when engulfed by war. Which is the superior work of fiction ? I'll make no value judgment here, but I'd go to the wall saying neither the shortness of the first nor the huge length of the second would affect my judgment if I did.
Melville's long novel is about men and the sea, and about so much more than that–-the almost metaphysical confrontation between good and evil without the author ever saying which is which, the tragedy of revenge served not cold but hot, even the moral significance of the whiteness of the whale. Is Captain Ahab evil? The whale? Both? Or is it the dance of death between them that is evil? It is for us to decide.
Hemingway's short novel is about one man and the sea, but it is also about one of Hemingway's "double dichos"–-man can be defeated but not destroyed or man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Each of these exemplary sea novels reaches down to a more profound depth, a truth, that its words alone can't touch, and each is successful in its own way, and in its own length.
Is the short better, or the long?
The only answer I can give is that length has nothing to do with quality except to verify it by being the right length for the particular novel.
And the long and the short of it is that I'm happy to go with the writer every time–-provided the writer knows what he's doing.

Murder By Decree

2006-01-22T14:19:00.000-08:00

Ed,

You've made three hundred and some blog entries and have never yet mentioned Sherlock Holmes or Conan Doyle. Don't you like the Holmes stories?

Ben Adamson

I'm pretty sure that I've mentioned both somewhere in the past, probably in connection with the DVD appearance of Bob Clark's Murder by Decree, which I consider not just the best Holmes picture I've seen but also one of the best suspense films of any kind I've seen.

As much as I love the Doyle stories, what Clark brought to them was socio-political context. He used Jack The Ripper to examine how the various aspects of Victorian London reacted to the killer. He didn't turn it into a screed, either. The film moves arrow fast and arrow true, making its points dramatically rather than shoehorning them in as audio pamphlets. And has there ever been a better Watson than James Mason?

Have you ever seen photos of White Chapel? Remember Jack London said that it was worse than Calcultta; in fact, London had been in White Chapel for somthing like five days when he had a breakdown and was put in a hospital. Look at the scenes in the film, the madhouse, repellent and heartbreaing at the same time; the faces of the prostitutes who looked to be carrying every disease young girls could; scurrying about of the underclass, like rats darting from one hole to another. . All this was contrasted with the lives of the upper classes. Clark didn't trowel the contrast on. He again let it speak for itself. The dandified men of the leisure class contrasted witht the ragged disaesed men who sold their ten year old daughters into prostitution as way of getting food and shelter for their family. (Upper class men worried that their wives would be unfaithful had surgeons make sure their wives could never enjoy sex gain with anybody.)

Many of the critics disliked the movie. I remember Richard Shickel saying that it demonstrated "the pornography of violence." I thought it was just being true to what we know of Victorian London. If anything, Clark held back. Read about White Chapel and how the lowest of classes sold their children to the highest of classes; and how killing prostitutes became a form of sport.

None of this made me think less of the Doyle stories, which I revere. But Doyle's London was in many respects his own creation where Murder by Decree is what Clark is both great storytelling and at look at how life back then really functioned.

Night for Screaming cont'd

2006-01-21T13:53:00.000-08:00

Eight of you wrote me today asking where you could get a copy of a Night For Screaming. I gave away my duplicate copy last year. Here's what I found on abebooks.

A Night For Screaming
Whittington, Harry
Bookseller: James H. Tinsman - Bookseller
(Topton, PA, U.S.A.) Price: US$ 37.50
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US$ 3.50
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Book Description: Ace Books, New York, 1960. Mass Market Paperback. Book Condition: Good. First Edition. D-472. Crease across front cover but it does not mar picture. Bookseller Inventory # 13238

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2.
A Night for Screaming
Whittington, Harry, Illustrated by Pictorial Cover
Bookseller: Wild Hills Books
(Town 'n Country, FL, U.S.A.) Price: US$ 40.00
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Book Description: New York: Ace D-472, 1960, New York, 1960. Paperback. Book Condition: Good+. Pictorial Cover (illustrator). First Edition. Good+. First Edition. 192 pages. A scarce Paperback Original (PBO). Tanned pages, spine lean, light reading crease and some general wear, but overall an attractive copy. Scans or Pics available. Bookseller Inventory # 001128

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3.
Night For Screaming
Whittington, Harry
Bookseller: Green Lion Books
(St. Paul, MN, U.S.A.) Price: US$ 50.00
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Book Description: Ace D-472, 1960., 1960. Mass Market Paperback. Book Condition: Very Good Minus. Paperback Original/First Edition. Great cover of a woman being run down by a car. Sitcker pull on front and some rubbing, still fairly attractive. Bookseller Inventory # 002546

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4.
A Night For Screaming
Whittington, Harry
Bookseller: GRAHAM HOLROYD, BOOKS
(Webster, NY, U.S.A.) Price: US$ 71.00
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Book Description: Ace D Series. New York: A.A. Wynn/Ace Book, Inc. , 1960 ed. D-472 , vg, rear 1 inch square corner missing, some spine roll PBO. paperback, Bookseller Inventory # 198704

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5.
A Night for Screaming
Whittington, Harry
Bookseller: Memories Lost and Found
(Avondale Estates, GA, U.S.A.) Price: US$ 80.00
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Book Description: Ace Books, New York, 1960. Original Wraps. Book Condition: VG+. No Jacket. First Edition. 16mo - over 5¾" - 6¾" tall. Reading crease at spine, otherwise light edgewear, store stamp inside front cover. Bookseller Inventory # 002382

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6.
A Night for Screaming
Whittington, Harry
Bookseller: The Book Bin
(Salem, OR, U.S.A.) Price: US$ 80.00
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US$ 4.00
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Book Description: Ace D-472, New York, 1960. Paperback. Book Condition: Good+. 16mo - over 5¾" - 6¾" tall. 192pp. cover has creases and light wear. scuffs and light soiling along back hinge. paper starting to yellow. otherwise clean and unmarked. binding tight. an attractive copy. Bookseller Inventory # 028872

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7.
A Night For Screaming
Whittington, Harry
Bookseller: GRAHAM HOLROYD, BOOKS
(Webster, NY, U.S.A.) Price: US$ 87.00
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Book Description: Ace D Series. New York: A.A. Wynn/Ace Book, Inc. 1960 ed. D-472 vg, some spine slant, reading crease PBO. paperback, Bookseller Inventory # 198703

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8.
A Night for Screaming
Whittington, Harry
Bookseller: Lofthouse Books
(Ashtabula, OH, U.S.A.) Price: US$ 100.00
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Book Description: Ace Books, 1960. Soft Cover. Book Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. Author's most scarce title. Creasing to sides of spine, shelf wear, rubbings. Bookseller Inventory # 15235

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9.
Night For Screaming
Whittington, Harry
Bookseller: Green Lion Books
(St. Paul, MN, U.S.A.) Price: US$ 100.00
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Book Description: Ace D-472, 1960., 1960. Mass Market Paperback. Book Condition: Very Good To Fine. Paperback Original/First Edition. Great cover of a woman being run down by a car. Nice clean and bright copy with a slight cover pullback. Bookseller Inventory # 002545

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Ed here: $37.50 to $100. Pricey. Greg Shepard (Stark House) and I are going to see if we can reprint some of Harry's best books. Well just have to see how it goes.

Meanwhile here's Bill Crider's take on Night, taken from his blog and published last summer.

A Night for Screaming -- Harry Whittington

The other day Lee Goldberg asked me which of Harry Whittington's novels was my favorite. That's an impossible question for me to answer, since I like so many of them. Certainly A Night for Screaming is right up there, so I decided to re-read it. It's the story of Mitch Walker, ex-cop, on the run from a murder he didn't commit, who winds up in Kansas, working on a huge farm that's run like the prison camp in Cool Hand Luke. The complications include Walker's relentless pursuer, the beautiful but nutjob wife of the farm's owner, the owner himself, the brutal overseers, and more.

One thing Whittington can do about as well as anybody ever could is begin the book with a tense situation and then dial up the tension on every succeeding page. He can put his protagonist into a situation that seems as bad as it can get, and then he can make it worse. And after that, he can make it worse still. In this book he takes a seemingly simple situation and complicates it more with every chapter, throwing in a few reversals and surprises along the way. If you ever run across a copy of A Night for Screaming, don't pass it up. You'll be sorry if you do. It's a dandy story, and it has a great cover, besides.

posted by Bill @ 12:49 PM

Harry Whittington's A Night for Screaming

2006-01-20T15:06:00.000-08:00

Richard Moore's article about Ralph Dennis will appear here soon. He wanted to update certain portions.

A Night for Screaming

In virtually every interview that Harry Whittington gave, he talked about the time in his career when he really discovered how to plot. Writers being writers, they love epiphanies because of the high dramatic content.

Last snowy night I read Harry's A Night for Screaming and I tell ya true, he indeed learned how to plot. Night is the one about the drifter wanted for murder and on the lam who finds himself hiding out in a work camp that is one half volunteer workers and one half prisoners from the county jail. There is the fetching wife of the man who owns and runs the camp, to be sure. And there is the enigmatic friendly boss who seeems to befriend our fugitive. Day Keene wrote this book four times and four different ways, most successfuly in Sleep With The Devil, in which the work camp is an Amish-like farm.

The book is pure Harry. The damned thing is almost on fire, it reads so fast. My only disappointment is that the waitress in the first chapter never reappears. Interesting quick sketch of her.

There are three midle chapters that sort of drag for me. Nothing wrong with them but nothing remarkable with them either. Then we come to the third act. You want twists and turns? You want to be knocked out of your seat not three but four times in about the last forty pages? You want to change your politics and take up with a chick with Hooters and run away to the sunny beaches of Indiana and hold yur breath for six days? Well, this slender little novel with one of the truly classic cover paintings will make you do all those crazy things and more. I promise.

This is an example of taking a familiar set-up and turning it into a novel you've never read before. I'm in the process of outlining it now. I want to see how he did it.

Ralph Dennis

2006-01-19T14:59:00.000-08:00

Tommorrow night I'm going to run a piece by the writer Richard A. Moore on the subject of the most beloved obscure private eye writer who ever lived, that being Ralph Dennis who published eleven novels in his Hardman series in the early 1970s.

The books are short enough that I was able to read two of them last night preparing for this entry. The story goes, and the story is wrong, that maybe just maybe Robert B. Parker read one these got his idea for a white p.i. with a black superdude buddy. That is the one similarity the two series share and it's not much of a similarity at all. To me, on a lesser level, the mixed race buddies go back to at least The Lone Ranger.

Where Parker is resolutely BWM and upscale, Dennis is resolutely blue collar (or below). Both men prefer the worlds of their invention to the worlds most of us would call reality. Both the are very good at giving the patina of reality to their respective worlds but their wise enough not to give us naturalism in their books. Chandler was very real either.

Dennis coulda been a contender. His was a narrower fix on the p.i. field than Parker's but if he'd lived longer that might have changed. Parker is a great mass entertainer. A true and enduring star. I'm not sure that Dennis, or most of us, have that quaity in us. That's not to lessen Dennis' achievements, which are considerable. It's just that he never takes us anywhere different. He pretty much lives on the mean streets with down and outers. Parker takes on life in pro sports, life on a college faculty, life on tracking a serial killer. He's like great and classic boxer. He knows enough to keep moving.

Richard Moore is a fine writer in his own right and brings all his gifts to this intriguing piece on the sad life of another fine writer, Ralph Dennis.