The Hustle

Rap Sheet editor J. Kingston Pierce wanted me to mention what’s in store for my series private eye, Ivan Monk (Monkology, 2004). I can tell you for sure that this weekend I plan to plot out a Monk short story for Phoenix Noir, a forthcoming collection in a series of city-set Noir anthologies that those fine folks at Akashic Books have been publishing. In fact I’ve been in two others from Akashic: Dublin Noir (“The Man for The Job”), edited by the crazy, lovely bastard, Ken Bruen; and Los Angeles Noir (“Roger Crumbler Considered His Shave”), edited by the lovely and talented Denise Hamilton.

Phoenix Noir is being edited by my home skillet Patrick Millikin, and I surely don’t intend to let him or me down, so I will be sweating hard on churning out this bad rascal. Beyond that, I do intend to get back to finishing Mr. Monk’s next novel, City of Fortune. Though first, as I mentioned previously, I do have to retool my online mystery novella, The Underbelly, for book publication. But believe me, I’ve been living with this cat too long to let him die a literary rest. Sure, everybody will remember the friggin’ TV show that, er, came along and used my character’s name, but the cognoscenti know my boy was on the scene first. As to Martha Chainey (remember her from High Hand and Shooter’s Point?), well, she too calls to me in that husky voice of hers in the wee hours in between my bouts of the night sweats; and while she’s dormant now, this too shall change.

Last night--don’t I just have a whirlwind existence of premieres and soirées?--I was at a book signing for fellow author April Smith’s new Judas Horse. This the third of her FBI Special Agent Ana Grey mysteries. Naturally, I want you to go out and buy the book, but also note that the gig was at Dutton’s Brentwood Books, an institution here in Los Angeles. You hear it from writers all the time, I know, but I can tell you for damn sure that it’s independent bookstores like Dutton’s and Eso Won (props to James and Tom) that hand-sell the merch that has kept my so-called sorry ass career afloat. You want to show your love on Valentine’s Day--or Singles Awareness Day, as I just heard it called on KPFK, the Pacifica station here? Go out and buy a book from an independent bookstore, y’all.

Also on hand at the Judas Horse event--and here I get to do a bit of name-dropping--were Dick Lochte (Croaked!), Gerry Petievich (author of The Sentinel and To Live and Die in L.A., whose 1982 novel, Money Men, was turned into a sweet little crime film called Boiling Point, with Wesley Snipes, Dennis Hopper, and Lolita Davidovich--if you haven’t seen it, let me recommend it), and the irascible Robert Crais of Elvis Cole/Joe Pike fame (who wants you to know that, despite what Amazon.com has up on its site, that his next book--due out in July--is not titled Untitled Crais: An Elvis Cole Novel). Indeed, if memory serves, Crais and Ms. Smith met when both were writers on the 1980s CBS cop show, Cagney & Lacey.

I’m out for now, but as the foregoing demonstrates, the writing hustle continues ...