series (the latest installment of which is P.I. on a Hot Tin Roof, reissued in paperback earlier this month).Writing in Critical Mass, “the blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors,” Smith explains that, as a result of that hurricane, she’s at least temporarily given up writing mysteries in favor of “a mainstream novel about me and my crazy-acting neighbors in my benighted, messed-up post-K neighborhood ... I’m still working on it,” she writes, “but every time I mention it to my agent, she changes the subject. So I’ve taken to calling it my therapy novel. Clearly, she doesn’t think it has a chance in the marketplace, but I can’t help it, I have to write it.”
In addition, however, Smith has edited New Orleans Noir, one of Akashic Books’ terrific collections of city-based short stories, this one due out in March 2007.
By the way, Smith’s remarks are part of a series Critical Mass is currently hosting. The blog has invited Crescent City writers to talk about how they have weathered the year since Katrina caused devastation all up and down the U.S. Gulf Coast, exposed rank incompetence in both the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the White House, and brought Americans together in the cause of saving one of the nation’s most wonderful cities. Publisher Josh Clark was the first to sound off, novelist-poet Andrei Codrescu has some things of his own to say on the matter, and we’re promised more voices yet from the still-recovering hurricane zone.
* * *
While we’re talking about the Katrina disaster, I should mention that the special New Orleans-themed edition of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine that I wrote about in early June is finally available from the EQMM Web site. Copies go for $3.99 apiece and can be ordered here. Income from advertising sales for this November issue is supposed to be donated to “organizations with rebuilding or relief efforts ongoing in the areas affected by Katrina.” Good reading for a good cause. What’s not to like about that deal?
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