The final psychological thriller featuring Javier Falcon, the tortured detective from ‘The Hidden Assassins’ and ‘The Blind Man of Seville.’ A sweltering Seville is recovering from the shock of a terrorist attack and Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón is struggling to fulfill his promise to its citizens: that he would find the real perpetrators of the outrage. The death of a gangster in a spectacular car crash offers vital evidence implicating the Russian mafia in his investigation, but pitches Falcón into the heart of a turf war over prostitution and drugs. Now the target of vicious hoods, Falcón finds those closest to him are also coming under intolerable pressure: his best friend, who’s spying for the Spanish government, reveals that he is being blackmailed by Islamist extremists, and Falcón’s own lover suffers a mother’s worst nightmare. In the face of such fanaticism and brutality, their options seem limited and Falcón realizes that only the most ruthless retaliation will work. But there is a terrible price to pay!This book is due out in early March.
• Author and Rap Sheet contributor Mark Coggins alerts me to a nice long profile in today’s San Francisco Chronicle of Joe Gores, the private eye turned novelist who’s gaining fresh renown at age 77 for his new novel, Spade & Archer, a prequel to Dashiell Hammett’s famous 1929 novel, The Maltese Falcon. Read the piece here.
• More bad bookstore news: Cheesecake and Crime in Henderson, Nevada, will close at the end of this month.
• I hate it when U.S. publishers change the names of British books, because they think Americans can’t understand obscure references. Case in point: Laura Wilson’s wonderful Stratton’s War, released in the UK last year, is finally set to reach U.S. readers in July--as The Innocent Spy. I can imagine the conversation that went on between editors at Minotaur Books, the gist being that because this is the first novel in a series, nobody knows yet who the Stratton of the title is; therefore, since Americans aren’t patient enough to figure things out for themselves--we want everything spoonfed to us, right?--the name just had to be changed. I, for one, am tired of being underestimated by American publishers. Perhaps if they treated their readers as intelligent people, we’d become more intelligent people.
• Speaking of affronts to America’s intelligence, did you know that the soft drink Mountain Dew is no longer Mountain Dew?
• Beginning today, Encore TV has scheduled a 48-hour celebration of James Bond movies. Check out the schedule here.
• Mystery*File’s Steve Lewis has just discovered the 2001-2002 A&E cable-TV series A Nero Wolfe Mystery on DVD, and pronounces it “the finest TV series ever based on the works of an American mystery writer.” Lee Goldberg recalls writing for Nero Wolfe here.
• Just what the world needs: Robert Ludlum video games.
• J.D. Rhoades tries to figure out how the pulp authors of yore were able to write so ridiculously fast.
• And just for Mickey Spillane fans, Pulp Serenade’s Cullen Gallagher has scanned and posted the entirety of a July 1952 article from True: The Men’s Magazine. “Written shortly after the release of Kiss Me Deadly,” Gallagher explains, “the article examines the ‘Mike Hammer’ phenomenon that was sweeping the country and racking up millions in sales--10,395,716 at the time of the article. Also discussed are [Spillane’s] childhood in Elizabeth, NJ, and the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY; his beginnings as a comic-book writer; and his gun collection and many other ‘manly’ habits (after all, this is True: The Man’s Magazine we are talking about).” Click here to read more.
4 comments:
And that’s before one factor’s in that the title ‘Stratton’s War’ gives you some idea of the content/character of the book and (given that it’s about Stratton) the title ’The Innocent Spy’ is somewhat misleading.
To say nothing of that fact that it’s (at least in my view) aesthetically inferior.
Very much looking forward to the follow up (Hell, any Laura Wilson novel is an event in my house) due this summer.
G.
That drives me up a tree when they do that. They changed Stuart MacBride's BROKEN SKIN to BLOOD SHOT, which is a generic title used more often than Bush used "the terrorists win" since Sara Paretsky used it in the 1990's. It was different when Sara used it.
Now it stands for, "The marketing team is timid and unimaginative and pees its collective pants whenever it sees the British title."
Too bad its a tough economy. Authors should demand the original English title be used by all subsequent publishers or they have to shell out an extra $50K for the privilege of changing it.
Will never happen, but it should.
What, and waste a perfectly good opportunity to confuse the book with the Accidental Spy and the Amateur Spy?
Hey, thanks for the heads-up on Mountain Dew. My Good Thief character just broke into a hotel room in Vegas and found 6 bottles of Mountain Dew with their caps missing - a key plot point, would you believe - and now I discover I'm already out of date...
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