Nonetheless, it was good to get away from the constant demands of blogging and editing, if only for a short time. My mini-vacation really began last Friday night, when I sat down for dinner with
New York City writer Anthony Rainone (seen on the left in this photograph, with yours truly). Although he’s been a contributing editor of January Magazine for a number of years now, and writes less than regularly for The Rap Sheet as well, I’d never before had the chance to meet face-to-face with Anthony (whose last name, I now know, is pronounced rain-OWN, rather than RAIN-won, as I’d formerly assumed). But he and his delightful girlfriend, Kimberly, stopped over for several days in Seattle on their way home from Anchorage, Alaska, and this year’s Bouchercon, and the two of us took that opportunity to finally get together. Over beers and fragrant plates of food at Mama’s Mexican Kitchen, a noticeably unostentatious joint in downtown Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood, Anthony and I talked about this year’s crime-fiction offerings, some of the writers (good and not so good) who have produced them, and more general topics, such as the relative merits of America’s Midwest versus its two coasts, and our hopes for political change in the rapidly approaching post-Bush era. I was confident that I’d enjoy Anthony’s company, and I most certainly did.After Friday’s dinner, I can now say that I’ve met all of the people I work with at January Magazine and The Rap Sheet, save for two: Cincinnati’s James R. Winter and Roger “R.N.” Morris, who resides in Britain. I’ll get to them eventually.
The Web-publishing colleague I have known longest is Linda L. Richards, who co-founded January Magazine 10 years ago with her partner, designer-artist David Middleton, and soon after that was kind enough to welcome me into her stable of critics. (I’m pretty sure my first review for January was of the non-mystery novel Comanche Moon, by Larry McMurtry.) On the morning after dining out with Anthony, my wife and I drove north from Seattle to visit Linda and David at their home on an island off the coast of Vancouver, British Columbia. They’d invited us to spend the weekend and sit down with them, as well as Linda’s actor son and other of their friends, for a pre-Canadian Thanksgiving dinner, on Sunday night. We had stayed at their house previously, so knew what this journey entailed: waking up at the ungodly hour of 3 a.m. in order to catch an 8:30 boat from the Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal, right across the U.S.-Canada border. Fortunately, all went as planned, though my body forced me to take a short siesta after driving all that way at such an early hour.
Normally, I find it difficult to separate myself from my computer for three minutes. But hanging out on island for three days without access to the Web allowed me no choice but to disengage. Even the fact that it rained like the dickens one morning (an especially noisy event, as there weren’t the usual in-city traffic sounds to compete with the downpour) failed to dampen my spirits. It simply gave me more quiet time in which to read (I’d packed along Irish writer Declan Burke’s The Big O) and to yap about crime fiction. Linda, being a contributor to this genre herself (her first Kitty Pangborn novel, Death Was the Other Woman, is due out from St. Martin’s Minotaur in January 2008), is a fount of astute observations about fictional whodunits and tougher-edged works. For his part, David frequently reads in this same field and has much to say about book-cover design, which as you probably know is a favorite topic of mine. Hanging out with them for the weekend was like reconnecting with fellow tribe members, people with a similar background, who actually like to engage in esoteric conversations about character creation, scene setting, the uses of dialogue in establishing a tale’s tone, and related subjects. As a freelance writer and editor, I frequently feel rather isolated. And although I usually resist attending conferences or spending too much time on social networking sites such as Crimespace, every once in a while I have to bask in the presence of likeminded folk. Linda and David, along with Anthony Rainone, are just such individuals.
Fortunately, nothing too newsworthy--no deaths of prominent crime novelists or presentations of significant genre awards--appears to have taken place during my short time out in the hinterlands. However, there are a number of smaller developments worth mentioning as we begin this new week:
• Philip Kerr, who surprised readers last year by producing The One from the Other, a fourth entry in his Bernie Gunther “trilogy,” has apparently decided to continue that series even further. Euro Crime reports that a fifth Gunther outing, A Quiet Flame, is due out in Britain from Quercus in the spring of 2008. The description of that title at Amazon UK reads, in part:
Bernie Gunther, Berlin’s hardest-boiled private eye, returns in this his latest outing. Moving the plot from pre-war Germany to the dangers of Argentina in 1950 and the post-war world of Hitler’s most notorious war-criminals, Kerr yet again delivers a powerful, compelling thriller. Posing as an escaping Nazi war-criminal, Bernie Gunther arrives in Buenos Aires and, having revealed his real identity to the local chief of police, discovers that his reputation as a detective goes before him. A young girl has been murdered in peculiarly gruesome circumstances that strongly resemble Bernie’s final case as a homicide detective with the Berlin police during the dog days of the Weimar Republic. A case he had failed to solve. Circumstances lead the chief of police in Buenos Aires to suppose that the murderer may be one of several thousand ex-Nazis who have fetched up in Argentina since 1945. And, therefore, who better than Bernie Gunther to help him track that murderer down? Reluctantly Bernie agrees to help the police and discovers much more than he, or even they bargained for.That same item in Euro Crime brings news that Michael Walters has what looks to be a third installment of his Inspector Nergui series, The Outcast, due out next June.
• Picking up on a piece in Publishers Weekly, Sarah Weinman reports that Archer Mayor, whose 18th book featuring New England policeman Joe Gunther, Chat, is due in bookstores this month, has decided to take the extraordinary step of reissuing his critically acclaimed backlist on his own dime. “To me it makes perfect sense,” PW quotes Mayor as saying. “The whole thing about getting mad and getting even, I’m doing something in between. I’m trying to be part of the solution.” PW adds that Mayor is “optimistic even though he had to mortgage his home and find investors” to realize his self-publishing dream. A gutsy guy, no question about that.
• As if it weren’t hard enough just trying to keep up with all the new books being published, Beyond the Groovy Age of Horror’s Curt Purcell now has me hankering after an increasing abundance of out-of-print paperbacks that I’ve somehow managed to avoid reading after all these decades. The latest two works of interest: Wolf Cop (1961), by Richard Jessup; and Morals Squad (1959), by Samuel A. Krasney. I’ll never catch up, at this rate.
• Irishman Sean Moncrieff, whose “unconventional crime novel,” The History of Things, has won some nice “big-ups” in certain quarters, reveals at Crime Always Pays his fondness for Richard Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake), his status as a “complete snob” when it comes to reading, and what he thinks are the best and worst things about being a writer (“you get to live inside your own head for long periods of time”). You’ll find everything here.
• Robert J. Randisi has certainly received a lot of interview attention lately. First, he submitted to questioning by the western-fiction-oriented site Saddlebums. Now, Dutch blogger Jochem van der Steen has him under the hot lights at Sons of Spade. In the course of answering Van der Steen’s questions about his favorite private-eye writers, his anthology work (including his latest collection, Hollywood and Crime), and the potential for psycho sidekicks, Randisi supplies a modicum of news: He hopes to pen another book featuring hot-dog-loving New York P.I. Nick Delvecchio, whose last novel-length appearance was in The Dead of Brooklyn (1992). Read more here.
• As editor “Steve-O” observes in Noir of the Week, “The story behind the creation of the 1952 newspaper-noir Scandal Sheet ... is almost as interesting as the film itself.” Apparently, film director Howard Hawks at one time wanted to make that movie himself (based on Samuel Fuller’s 1944 novel, The Dark Page), with Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson as its stars. But things didn’t quite work out that way. Read all about it here.
• The Los Angeles Times’ Thomas Curwen sets Walter Mosley’s new, 10th Easy Rawlins novel, Blonde Faith, in the context of the series as a whole. His conclusions are overwhelmingly favorable.
• Jason Starr wrote in Sunday’s edition of The New York Times about his discovery that Normandie Court, the 34-story brick complex on Manhattan’s Upper East Side where he and his wife have taken up residence--and which provides one of the settings in his latest novel, The Follower--hasn’t fully outgrown its rep as a party haven. His observations are available here.
• Another crime novelist writing about other things: Rochelle Krich (Now You See Me) recalls her recent visit to Poland, where her Jewish parents met with pain and hardship during World War II.
• If Sherlock Holmes had owned a computer, what would it have looked like? Scott Monty has all the vitals at his Baker Street Blog.
• And did you know that there’s a Crimespace equivalent designed specifically for Holmes enthusiasts? It’s called, appropriately, the Sherlock Holmes Social Network.
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