to return soon enough to writing my novel. Meanwhile, I must divide my time more than normal between writing for pay and blogging. Among the interesting developments during my time off the Web:• The ever-readable Salon has posted its list of 2007 Book Award winners, and amazingly, at least two of its five fiction choices can easily be defined as crime fiction. The most obvious example is Michael Chabon’s alternative Alaska history novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, about which Salon senior writer-critic Laura Miller remarks:
The novel offers lots of genre fun--snappy dialogue, action and suspense--yet it’s all seamlessly married to a searching consideration of Jewish identity. What would it mean to be a Jew in a world where the Holocaust never happened and the state of Israel didn’t exist? Are human beings the products of history, or does our essence transcend it? These are weighty questions for a book that’s so entertaining, but Chabon’s themes never overload his frame. Like the very best dancers and magicians, he makes it look easy.But Miller also applauds Indian author Vikram Chandra’s tome-like Sacred Games, in which “Mumbai’s most notorious gangster dies in a strange, cube-shaped bunker after a shootout with the police; the rest of the book tells us why.” It’s a ripping yarn, to be sure, but with plenty of literary merit: “The villain is not a criminal, really, but fanaticism in all its forms, and the battle is literally between life and death, between those who understand that this world is necessarily chaotic, flawed and painful and those whose craving for order, calm and purity make them so very, very dangerous.”
In addition to these novels, Salon gives the big thumbs-up to Judith Freeman’s The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, a more-than-biography that’s already won many endorsements from crime writers. “Most evocative,” writes Miller, “are the excursions Freeman makes to houses and apartments the Chandlers rented throughout [Los Angeles] (the couple moved a lot), extended wanderings through a city that seems both lost and timeless. Her version of L.A. is as moodily unforgettable as Chandler’s, a fitting tribute to the ‘new kind of American loneliness’ born there and the man who made it his muse.”
Go here to find all of Salon’s book award winners for the year.
• Walter Mosley may or may not have ended detective Easy Rawlins’ career in his most recent novel, Blonde Faith, but his interest in the genre is apparently far from exhausted. As Publishers Weekly explains, the author “has signed with Riverhead to write three new books, with two launching a new mystery series. ... Mosley’s new series is set to feature Leonid McGill, an African-American private eye from New York who was introduced in the author’s 2006 short story, ‘Karma.’ The first title in the McGill series is set to be published in 2009 ... Mosley has also contracted to do a literary novel for Riverhead, although no pub date has been disclosed.” (Hat tip to Sarah Weinman.)
• An A-Team movie? Can I start puking now, or must I wait for the film to actually be released? The A-Team was a real come-down for George Peppard after doing Banacek.
• Author-editor Sandra Ruttan updates us on the status of votes in this year’s inaugural Spinetingler Awards competition. In the Crime Zine Report blog, she writes that “Already, 298 e-mails have arrived. It’s anyone’s guess how many actual votes that is, as I haven’t counted, but at a guess I’d say at least 800 votes, and already we’ve exceeded the number of e-mails received in the first round.” As it stands now, “7 of the 8 categories are still too close to call,” Ruttan notes, “and in reality, with 20 days left, anything can happen ...” If you haven’t voted yet, you can do so in an e-note to sandra.ruttan@spinetinglermag.com. The deadline is December 30.
• I almost missed Fred Blosser’s response to author Ed Gorman’s recent post in which the former lamented “how quickly John D. MacDonald started to fade after his death.” As he traces why the creator of Florida salvage consultant-cum-sleuth Travis McGee should have disappeared so thoroughly, Blosser opines:
[MacDonald] didn’t write in the pared-down, dialogue-driven style now employed by James Patterson, John Sandford, and John Grisham, whose names are as ubiquitous on bookshelves today as JDM’s once was. At random, I recently picked up one of MacDonald’s Gold Medals, Deadly Welcome [1959]. At 160 pages, it should be as much of a fast read as they come. Nevertheless, MacDonald devotes as much space to describing his sleepy, stagnant Florida backwater setting as he does to finding out whodunit. For a reader who comes to the novel from Patterson, there may be too much sensory description, not enough straight-ahead action.Funny. Until I read this post, and Gorman’s earlier one, I hadn’t even realized how long it has been since one of the McGee novels passed under my nose. (I was never much interested in MacDonald’s non-series books, for some reason.) But now I want to go back and re-read, say, The Green Ripper (1979) or Cinnamon Skin (1982) or maybe his last colorful McGee novel, The Lonely Silver Rain (1985), all of which are staring me in the face across my desk. I don’t remember any of them as being slow; but I may have been less demanding in my choice of fiction back then. I shall see.
UPDATE: More from Gorman on MacDonald here.
• The Rap Sheet gets a nice mention, as do books by “dangerous women” authors Megan Abbott, Zoë Sharp, Denise Mina, and others in Clayton Moore’s latest “Mystery Strumpet” column. Read it here.
• If you didn’t see it before, check out Steve Almond’s fine assessment in The Boston Globe of how pulp crime fiction has shaped the way we see the world.
• And please don’t forget to vote for your favorite crime novel cover of 2007 in The Rap Sheet’s recently announced competition. Last time I checked, the fronts of Abbott’s The Song Is You, Michael Harvey’s The Chicago Way, and Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union were running neck and neck. Vote here by Friday at midnight.
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