Finding Phillips: Another Kindle Adventure

I’ve always thought that Scott Phillips was one of the shining lights of the mystery-fiction world. I loved his first novel, The Ice Harvest (2000), as well as The Walkaway (2002) and Cottonwood (2004), and I was especially fond of the way all three books were joined together by recurring characters. More recently, I realized that I hadn’t heard any news about Phillips for an extraordinarily long while.

It was clearly another case for my trusty Kindle. Not only did that device--now sporting a handsome brown leather jacket--tell me that Phillips has a new hardcover novel, The Adjustment, due out from Phoenix Books in September, but that he was also featured in the new online magazine Crimefactory, which bills itself as “a bi-monthly noir/hard-boiled crime-fiction publication.” Phillips had composed an article about another of my favorite writers, the late Charles Willeford, for that mag’s debut issue.

For just $1, Kindle instantly sent me a copy of the Crimefactory issue containing Phillips’ terrific article. In it he talks about Willeford’s Hoke Mosely series (which began with Miami Blues in 1984), and then about how Willeford has influenced his writing. “I actually started asking myself, ‘What would Willeford do?’ whenever I came to a moral crossroad ...,” explains Phillips.

There’s lots more of this delightful stuff in the essay, and other goodies to be foud elsewhere in that issue of Crimefactory: an unpublished novel excerpt from Ken Bruen, and stories by Derringer Award winner Dave White, star of the short form Patti Abbott, and up-and-comers Frank Bill, Steve Weddle, Hilary Davidson, and Keiran Shea.

For a mere buck, Crimefactory has been my best bargain buy on Kindle--aside from War and Peace, of course, which was free ...