All day long, Spinetingler Magazine has been rolling out its lists of finalists for the 2012 Spinetingler Awards. Beginning tomorrow, readers will be invited to make their preferences known in 12 categories.
Below are the nominees. Asterisks denote works that, as far as I can tell, are currently available in the United States only as e-books.
Best Novel — New Voice (authors with 1-3 books published):
• Beautiful, Naked and Dead, by Josh Stallings (Heist Publishing)
• Mule, by Tony D’Souza (Mariner)
• The Dead Women of Juárez, by Sam Hawken (Serpent’s Tail)*
• The Devil All the Time, by Donald Ray Pollock (Doubleday)
• Dove Season, by Johnny Shaw (AmazonEncore)
• The Drop, by Howard Linskey (No Exit Press)
• Dust Devils, by Roger Smith (Tin Town)*
• Good Neighbors, by Ryan David Jahn (Penguin)
• Raise a Holler, by Jason Stuart (Double Action Press)
• Wire to Wire, by Scott Sparling (Double Action Press)
Best Novel — Rising Star (authors with 4-8 books published):
• All the Young Warriors, by Anthony Neil Smith (Blasted Heath)*
• Already Gone, by John Rector (Thomas & Mercer)
• Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, by Sara Gran (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Cold Shot to the Heart, by Wallace Stroby (Minotaur)
• El Gavilan, by Craig McDonald (Tyrus)
• The End of Everything, by Megan Abbott (Little, Brown)
Best Novel — Legend (from authors with 9+ books published):
• A Drop of the Hard Stuff, by Lawrence Block (Mulholland)
• The Bitch, by Les Edgerton (Bare Knuckles Press)*
• Falling Glass, by Adrian McKinty (Serpent’s Tail)
• Hard Cold Whisper, by Michael Hemmingson (Black Mask)
• Seven Spanish Angels, by Stephen Graham Jones (Dzanc)*
• The Wrong Thing, by Barry Graham (PM Press)
Best Short-Story Collection:
• Crime, by Ferdinand von Schirach (Knopf)
• Crimes in Southern Indiana, by Frank Bill (FSG Originals)
• From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet, by Patrick Michael Finn (Black Lawrence Press)
• Gone Bad, by Julie Morrigan (Morrigan Publishing)
• Nowhere to Go, by Iain Rowan (Infinity Plus)
• The Outlaw Album, by Daniel Woodrell (Little, Brown)
• Volt, by Alan Heathcock (Graywolf Press)
Best Anthology:
• Beat to a Pulp: Hard-boiled, edited by David Cranmer and Scott D. Parker (Beat to a Pulp)*
• L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories (Mulholland)*
• Off the Record, edited by Luca Veste (Lulu.com)
• Pulp Ink, edited by Chris Rhatigan and Nigel Bird (Needle Publishing)*
• Warmed & Bound, edited by Pela Via (Velvet Press)
• West Coast Crime Wave, edited by Brian Thornton (Bstsllr.com)*
Best Crime Comic or Graphic Novel:
• 99 Days, by Matteo Casali and Kristian Donaldson (Vertigo Crime)
• Blue Estate (Vol. 1), by Viktor Kalvachev, Andrew Osborne, et al. (Image Comics)
• Cowboys, by Gary Phillips and Brian Hurt (Vertigo Crime)
• Liar’s Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano (Top Shelf)
• Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot, by Jean-Patrick Manchette and Jacques Tardi (Fantagraphics)
• Loose Ends, by Jason Latour, Rico Renzi, and Chris Brunner (12-Gauge Comics)
• Noche Roja, by Simon Oliver (Vertigo Crime)
• Rat Catcher, by Andy Diggle (Vertigo Crime)
• Criminal: Last of the Innocent, by Ed Brubaker and
Sean Phillips (Marvel)
• Scalped: You Gotta Sin to Get Saved, by Jason Aaron (Vertigo)
Best Short Story on the Web:
• “Abriani’s Six,” by Atul Sabharwal (from Tehelka)
• “The Cloud Factory,” by Court Merrigan (from PANK Magazine)
• “Disney Noir,” by Peter Farris (from Shotgun Honey)
• “Either Way It Ends with a Shovel,” by David James Keaton
(from Crime Factory)
• “Hoodwinked” by Nigel Bird (from All Due Respect)
• “The Other Man” by Hilary Davidson (from Beat to a Pulp)
• “Road Kill” by William Dylan Powell (from Flash Fiction Offensive)
• “Silas’ Good Run” by Matthew C. Funk (from Beat to a Pulp)
• “Silent Game” by Stephen Graham Jones (from Plots with Guns)
• “Vorovsky Mir” by M James Blood (from Plots with Guns)
Best ’Zine:
• Beat to a Pulp
• Crime Factory
• Needle
• Noir Nation
• Pulp Modern
• Shotgun Honey
Best Crime Fiction Publisher:
• Blasted Heath
• Mulholland Books
• New Pulp Press
• Serpent’s Tail
David Thompson Community Leader Award:
• My Friends Call Me Kate (Sabrina Ogden)
• My Little Corner (Sandra Seamans)
• Musings of an All Purpose Monkey (Elizabeth White)
• Pattinase (Patti Abbott)
• Psycho-Noir (Heath Lowrance)
• The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Adrian McKinty)
• Dead End Follies (Benoit Lelievre)
There are two additional Spinetingler Award categories, but because their contenders can’t be described in a few simple words, I’ll refer you to the Spinetingler site to see the lists: The Fireball Award for Best Opening Line and Best Cover.
Polls open here tomorrow, Saturday, at 6 a.m. EDT. Voting will continue through the end of April, with winners to be announced hourly on Tuesday, May 1.
Friday, March 30, 2012
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Snatch and Grabber
Earlier today, the crux of my recent conversation with Vancouver, Canada, resident Owen Laukkanen appeared on the Kirkus Reviews Web site. As many readers already know, Laukkanen was a Web site reporter, who covered international high-stakes poker tournaments, before re-launching himself as a novelist. His debut work, The Professionals, is being released this week by Putnam.
Here’s the publisher’s brief on that book’s plot:
This is a book that actually deserves its designation as a “thriller.”
Click here to read my Kirkus interview with Laukkanen.
J. Kingston Pierce: Did you find it difficult to relate to the motives of your quartet of kidnappers? Could you imagine yourself in their shoes?
Owen Laukkanen: I’m not sure I could ever imagine myself turning to crime to pay the bills, but I did give Pender and his gang a motive to which I could relate. I think there are a lot of young people out there who get out of college and realize the jobs they’d always imagined would be waiting for them aren’t there. They’re taught that a university degree is going to mean financial security, and when they get out into the real world there’s a lot of desperation and disillusionment.
What pushes Pender and his gang isn’t unique among members of their generation; their reaction is just a little beyond the norm.
JKP: Having read The Professionals, my guess is you came up with your four abductors before you filled out the rest of your cast. Is that the way it worked?
OL: Pretty much. The book developed ... pretty organically; I created characters on the fly, as the situation warranted. In Pender’s case, that was chapter two, when it came time to give a face to the kidnappers. Certainly, I wrote the first draft with Pender and his gang as my protagonists.
JKP: And then how did you choose your two principal crime-solvers, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Kirk Stevens and law school grad-turned-FBI agent Carla Windermere? What made them ideal adversaries for the Pender gang?
OL: Stevens and Windermere, when it comes down to it, are more the result of jurisdictional circumstance than any concrete planning on my part. I knew, obviously, that the law would have to play a role in the story, and as the novel unfolded it became clear that Minnesota was where the crime-solvers would first be introduced.
I gave Stevens the case first, but I knew that as his investigation proceeded, he’d pretty soon reach a point where he’d lose jurisdiction. That meant introducing Windermere, and as soon as she hit the page it became clear that my two cops had the makings of a pretty memorable partnership.
JKP: At one point in The Professionals, Stevens says, “I want to look at Arthur Pender just once and try to figure him out.” Imagine you could explain Pender to Stevens: What would you tell him that would satisfy his curiosity?
OL: I think I would tell Stevens something very much like my last answer: Pender is, at his heart, a terrified young man who’s in over his head and whose fear and desperation are driving him to make some awful decisions. That’s Pender: a kid who was probably too smart for his own good, and who probably believed himself invincible for just a little too long.
JKP: Going forward, will you continue to focus more on your criminal characters? Or do you have a plan in mind to increase the depth and dimensionality off Stevens and Windermere?
OL: Ideally, I’d like to strike a balance. I had a great time expanding on both Stevens and Windermere in the second novel, particularly Windermere. In The Professionals we see her mainly through Stevens’ eyes and she remains quite enigmatic. In the second novel, we see more from her side.
That said, I do want to continue to write about interesting, three-dimensional and, if possible, sympathetic villains. I don’t want to populate my novels with boilerplate malevolent thugs; I’m interested in real, conflicted people with compelling motivations.
The challenge, I guess, is to create interesting villains while still giving Stevens and Windermere enough space to develop. I think the second book gives both Stevens and Windermere plenty of time in the spotlight.
JKP: You’ve mentioned elsewhere that your mother is a former forensic pathologist with the Vancouver, Canada, police department. What sorts of specific knowledge was she able to provide you as you put this first crime novel together?
OL: I’m not sure that I can point to any specific piece of knowledge she was able to impart, but I can say that for a crime writer, having a forensic pathologist in the family is certainly an invaluable asset. There’s something fantastically morbid about being able to discuss body decomposition over dinner and call it research.
JKP: What sorts of books or movies inspired The Professionals?
OL: I read David Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets as I was writing The Professionals. It’s an incredible look into the workings of the Baltimore PD’s homicide division over the course of a year, and was pretty much invaluable as a glimpse into the machinations and psychopathology of a violent-crimes unit.
Movie-wise, my major influence was (and maybe always will be) Heat, by Michael Mann. Pender shares a lot of his obsession with professionalism with Robert De Niro’s Neil McCauley, and I wanted the reader to feel that same kind of empathy that the audience feels watching Heat, even while both De Niro and Pender do some morally indefensible things.
JKP: Was The Professionals really your first novel, or like so many other writers, do you have a carefully secreted previous work stuck away in a drawer, never to see the light of publication? And if you have an unpublished first novel, what was it about?
OL: Oh, I have more dusty manuscripts in my drawer than I’d care to admit. I decided I wanted to be a writer at age 18, and from then on, I wrote. A lot. There are three or four first novels in my past, and I still harbor fantasies of going back and tinkering with them and making them publishable. I refuse to give up.
My first crime novel, though, I wrote about a month before I started The Professionals. It was a very hard-boiled detective novel set in the poker scene in Las Vegas, and though it hasn’t been published yet, it did attract the attention of my agent, so in some sense, it’s been a success.
JKP: Finally, I have to ask: How do you pronounce “Laukkanen”? And where in the world does that family name have its roots?
OL: It’s a Finnish last name. My grandparents immigrated to Canada in the early 1950s, just before they gave birth to my dad. Unfortunately, I barely speak four words of the language.
The name is pronounced Lao (as in cow)-ka-nin.
READ MORE: “Owen Laukkanen’s Got a Hit on His Hands,” by Sarah Weinman (Macleans).
Here’s the publisher’s brief on that book’s plot:Four friends, recent college graduates, caught in a terrible job market, joke about turning to kidnapping to survive. And then, suddenly, it's no joke. For two years, the strategy they devise--quick, efficient, low-risk--works like a charm. Until they kidnap the wrong man.I went into The Professionals cold, with very low expectations, and was pleasantly surprised by the novel’s assured writing style, narrative drive, and substantive characters. Especially worth watching are the original four members of Laukkanen’s kidnapping “gang”--leader Arthur Pender and his girlfriend, Marie McAllister, together with Matt Sawyer and Ben “Mouse” Stirzaker. Later in the story, when Pender & Co. are in full flight mode, a fifth and no less intriguing player joins them: comely college student Tiffany Prentice, the daughter of a “big-shot investment banker.”
Now two groups they’ve very much wanted to avoid are after them--the law, in the form of veteran state investigator Kirk Stevens and hotshot young FBI agent Carla Windermere, and an organized-crime outfit looking for payback. As they all crisscross the country in deadly pursuit and a series of increasingly explosive confrontations, each of them is ultimately forced to recognize the truth: The true professionals, cop or criminal, are those who are willing to sacrifice everything.
This is a book that actually deserves its designation as a “thriller.”
Click here to read my Kirkus interview with Laukkanen.
* * *
Of course, there were parts of that exchange I had to leave out, in order to conform with Kirkus’ worth-length restrictions. Rather than waste all of the excess, I shall post it here. A word of advice, though: Unless you have already made it through The Professionals, it’s probably best to read the Kirkus section of this interview first, then follow it up with the material below.J. Kingston Pierce: Did you find it difficult to relate to the motives of your quartet of kidnappers? Could you imagine yourself in their shoes?
Owen Laukkanen: I’m not sure I could ever imagine myself turning to crime to pay the bills, but I did give Pender and his gang a motive to which I could relate. I think there are a lot of young people out there who get out of college and realize the jobs they’d always imagined would be waiting for them aren’t there. They’re taught that a university degree is going to mean financial security, and when they get out into the real world there’s a lot of desperation and disillusionment.
What pushes Pender and his gang isn’t unique among members of their generation; their reaction is just a little beyond the norm.JKP: Having read The Professionals, my guess is you came up with your four abductors before you filled out the rest of your cast. Is that the way it worked?
OL: Pretty much. The book developed ... pretty organically; I created characters on the fly, as the situation warranted. In Pender’s case, that was chapter two, when it came time to give a face to the kidnappers. Certainly, I wrote the first draft with Pender and his gang as my protagonists.
JKP: And then how did you choose your two principal crime-solvers, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Kirk Stevens and law school grad-turned-FBI agent Carla Windermere? What made them ideal adversaries for the Pender gang?
OL: Stevens and Windermere, when it comes down to it, are more the result of jurisdictional circumstance than any concrete planning on my part. I knew, obviously, that the law would have to play a role in the story, and as the novel unfolded it became clear that Minnesota was where the crime-solvers would first be introduced.
I gave Stevens the case first, but I knew that as his investigation proceeded, he’d pretty soon reach a point where he’d lose jurisdiction. That meant introducing Windermere, and as soon as she hit the page it became clear that my two cops had the makings of a pretty memorable partnership.
JKP: At one point in The Professionals, Stevens says, “I want to look at Arthur Pender just once and try to figure him out.” Imagine you could explain Pender to Stevens: What would you tell him that would satisfy his curiosity?
OL: I think I would tell Stevens something very much like my last answer: Pender is, at his heart, a terrified young man who’s in over his head and whose fear and desperation are driving him to make some awful decisions. That’s Pender: a kid who was probably too smart for his own good, and who probably believed himself invincible for just a little too long.
JKP: Going forward, will you continue to focus more on your criminal characters? Or do you have a plan in mind to increase the depth and dimensionality off Stevens and Windermere?
OL: Ideally, I’d like to strike a balance. I had a great time expanding on both Stevens and Windermere in the second novel, particularly Windermere. In The Professionals we see her mainly through Stevens’ eyes and she remains quite enigmatic. In the second novel, we see more from her side.
That said, I do want to continue to write about interesting, three-dimensional and, if possible, sympathetic villains. I don’t want to populate my novels with boilerplate malevolent thugs; I’m interested in real, conflicted people with compelling motivations.
The challenge, I guess, is to create interesting villains while still giving Stevens and Windermere enough space to develop. I think the second book gives both Stevens and Windermere plenty of time in the spotlight.
JKP: You’ve mentioned elsewhere that your mother is a former forensic pathologist with the Vancouver, Canada, police department. What sorts of specific knowledge was she able to provide you as you put this first crime novel together?
OL: I’m not sure that I can point to any specific piece of knowledge she was able to impart, but I can say that for a crime writer, having a forensic pathologist in the family is certainly an invaluable asset. There’s something fantastically morbid about being able to discuss body decomposition over dinner and call it research.
JKP: What sorts of books or movies inspired The Professionals?
OL: I read David Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets as I was writing The Professionals. It’s an incredible look into the workings of the Baltimore PD’s homicide division over the course of a year, and was pretty much invaluable as a glimpse into the machinations and psychopathology of a violent-crimes unit.
Movie-wise, my major influence was (and maybe always will be) Heat, by Michael Mann. Pender shares a lot of his obsession with professionalism with Robert De Niro’s Neil McCauley, and I wanted the reader to feel that same kind of empathy that the audience feels watching Heat, even while both De Niro and Pender do some morally indefensible things.
JKP: Was The Professionals really your first novel, or like so many other writers, do you have a carefully secreted previous work stuck away in a drawer, never to see the light of publication? And if you have an unpublished first novel, what was it about?
OL: Oh, I have more dusty manuscripts in my drawer than I’d care to admit. I decided I wanted to be a writer at age 18, and from then on, I wrote. A lot. There are three or four first novels in my past, and I still harbor fantasies of going back and tinkering with them and making them publishable. I refuse to give up.
My first crime novel, though, I wrote about a month before I started The Professionals. It was a very hard-boiled detective novel set in the poker scene in Las Vegas, and though it hasn’t been published yet, it did attract the attention of my agent, so in some sense, it’s been a success.
JKP: Finally, I have to ask: How do you pronounce “Laukkanen”? And where in the world does that family name have its roots?
OL: It’s a Finnish last name. My grandparents immigrated to Canada in the early 1950s, just before they gave birth to my dad. Unfortunately, I barely speak four words of the language.
The name is pronounced Lao (as in cow)-ka-nin.
READ MORE: “Owen Laukkanen’s Got a Hit on His Hands,” by Sarah Weinman (Macleans).
Gunplay and Stage Plays
This year’s Left Coast Crime convention is only just beginning today in Sacramento, California. It’s scheduled to run through this coming Sunday, April 1. I’m already sorry not to be participating.
Already, though, some people are looking forward to similar conventions later during the year. Oline Cogdill, for instance, has dropped a mention onto the Mystery Scene Web site about the fourth International Mystery Writers’ Festival, set to take place in Owensboro, Kentucky, from June 14 to 17. “Unlike the vast number of mystery fiction conferences this is indeed a festival,” she writes. “The International Mystery Writers’ Festival takes a unique approach by including authors and TV writers and producers as well as playwrights.” Learn more about the IMWF here.
Already, though, some people are looking forward to similar conventions later during the year. Oline Cogdill, for instance, has dropped a mention onto the Mystery Scene Web site about the fourth International Mystery Writers’ Festival, set to take place in Owensboro, Kentucky, from June 14 to 17. “Unlike the vast number of mystery fiction conferences this is indeed a festival,” she writes. “The International Mystery Writers’ Festival takes a unique approach by including authors and TV writers and producers as well as playwrights.” Learn more about the IMWF here.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Let There Be Lightness
The Canadian crime-fiction convention Bloody Words has announced its nominees for a new annual commendation, the Light Mystery Award. According to a press release, this prize “celebrates traditional, feel-good mysteries ... The award--aka the Bony Blithe--is for a ‘book that makes us smile,’ which includes everything from laugh-out-loud, to gentle humour, to good old-fashioned stories with little violence or gore.” And the nominees are ...
• Dire Threads, by Janet Bolin (Berkley Prime Crime)
• A Red Herring without Mustard, by Alan Bradley (Doubleday Canada)
• Cheat the Hangman, by Gloria Ferris (Imajin Books)
• The Busy Woman’s Guide to Murder, by Mary Jane Maffini
(Berkley Prime Crime)
• Champagne for Buzzards, by Phyllis Smallman (McArthur & Company)
This year’s Bony Blithe will be handed out during the Bloody Words XII Banquet at the Hilton Hotel in Toronto, Ontario, on June 2. More information about that convention is available here.
• Dire Threads, by Janet Bolin (Berkley Prime Crime)
• A Red Herring without Mustard, by Alan Bradley (Doubleday Canada)
• Cheat the Hangman, by Gloria Ferris (Imajin Books)
• The Busy Woman’s Guide to Murder, by Mary Jane Maffini
(Berkley Prime Crime)
• Champagne for Buzzards, by Phyllis Smallman (McArthur & Company)
This year’s Bony Blithe will be handed out during the Bloody Words XII Banquet at the Hilton Hotel in Toronto, Ontario, on June 2. More information about that convention is available here.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Please Pass the Fingernails
Intro from the October 6, 1972, episode of Ghost Story, “Bad Connection,” starring Karen Black and Michael Tolan.
This is the sort of news that fills me with hope of other under-appreciated small-screen programs someday being made available in stores: The blog TV Shows on DVD reports that the 1972-1973 NBC series Ghost Story will be released in a six-disc set this coming May. It also supplies some background on that show:
Horror movie maestro William Castle (The Tingler) followed his role model Alfred Hitchcock into TV with this anthology series of suspense and shudders, though he ceded the hosting chores to Sebastian Cabot (TV’s Family Affair) as “Winston Essex” for the first part of the series. A mid-season name change (to Circle of Fear) and a no-host format were intended to boost ratings, but this quirky, chilling and fascinating series only lasted one season. All 23 hour-long episodes are included, with outstanding guest stars like Jason Robards, Helen Hayes, Melvyn Douglas, Gena Rowlands, Jodie Foster, Angie Dickinson, Geraldine Page, Patricia Neal, Martin Sheen, Stella Stevens, Karen Black, Rip Torn, Carolyn Jones, Mariette Hartley, William Windom and many, many more. This is a must-have for lovers of thrillers and classic television alike! Newly remastered.Many years have passed since I last gave a moment’s thought to Ghost Story, but I remember watching that spooky weekly drama during the period when Cabot played host. (It was broadcast on Friday nights at 9 p.m., just before the Robert Forster period private-eye series, Banyon.) Ghost Story debuted on September 15, 1972, with an episode titled “The Dead We Leave Behind,” starring Jason Robards “as a man haunted by television ... a man whose life is strangely--and tragically--proscribed by scenes on a TV set he can’t control,” according to that week’s write-up in TV Guide.
TV Shows on DVD explains that Ghost Story (a.k.a. Circle of Fear)--The Complete Series “will be available as part of Sony’s manufacture on demand (MOD) program. Which means it won’t be in stores; you’ll be able to purchase it online from places like Amazon.com’s CreateSpace service, or the WBshop’s Warner Archive program.” There’s no word yet on what this long-overdue set will cost.
With the release of Ghost Story now finally scheduled, can DVD collections of other dramas I’ve enjoyed in the past--including Harry O, City of Angels, Assignment: Vienna, Spenser: For Hire, and the aforementioned Banyon--be far behind? Let’s hope not.
Below left: TV Guide’s description of Ghost Story from the September 9, 1972, Fall Preview edition (click on that image for a blow-up). Below right: The planned cover of Ghost Story (a.k.a. Circle of Fear)--The Complete Series.
“One of the 20th Century’s Top Spy Thrillers”
In his blog, The Deighton Dossier, Rob Mallows has posted an interview with author Len Deighton. The principal part of their discussion is about The Ipcress File, Deighton’s influential first spy novel, which was published half a century ago this year.
You’ve Gotta Love ’Em
Earlier today, the Romance Writers of America announced the finalists for its 2012 RITA Awards (named in honor of that organization’s first president, Rita Clay Estrada). Nominees are listed in a dozen categories, but only two of those include crime-fiction works.
Contemporary Series: Suspense/Adventure:
• Cooper Vengeance, by Paula Graves (Harlequin Intrigue)
• The Doctor’s Deadly Affair, by Stephanie Doyle (Harlequin
Romantic Suspense)
• The Man from Gossamer Ridge, by Paula Graves (Harlequin Intrigue)
• Nothing But the Truth, by Kara Lennox (Harlequin Superromance)
• Soldier’s Last Stand, by Cindy Dees (Harlequin Romantic Suspense)
• Stranded with Her Ex, by Jill Sorenson (Harlequin
Romantic Suspense)
• Taken to the Edge, by Kara Lennox (Harlequin Superromance)
Romantic Suspense:
• Hidden Away, by Maya Banks (Berkley Sensation)
• Hot Zone, by Catherine Mann (Sourcebooks Casablanca)
• Hush, by Cherry Adair (Pocket Star)
• New York to Dallas, by J.D. Robb (Putnam)
• Secrets of Bella Terra, by Christina Dodd (New American Library)
• True Colors, by Joyce Lamb (Berkley Sensation)
• True Shot, by Joyce Lamb (Berkley Sensation)
• Where All the Dead Lie, by J.T. Ellison (Harlequin Mira)
The names of the winning books and authors will be declared on July 28 during the RWA conference in Anaheim, California.
Contemporary Series: Suspense/Adventure:
• Cooper Vengeance, by Paula Graves (Harlequin Intrigue)
• The Doctor’s Deadly Affair, by Stephanie Doyle (Harlequin
Romantic Suspense)
• The Man from Gossamer Ridge, by Paula Graves (Harlequin Intrigue)
• Nothing But the Truth, by Kara Lennox (Harlequin Superromance)
• Soldier’s Last Stand, by Cindy Dees (Harlequin Romantic Suspense)
• Stranded with Her Ex, by Jill Sorenson (Harlequin
Romantic Suspense)
• Taken to the Edge, by Kara Lennox (Harlequin Superromance)
Romantic Suspense:
• Hidden Away, by Maya Banks (Berkley Sensation)
• Hot Zone, by Catherine Mann (Sourcebooks Casablanca)
• Hush, by Cherry Adair (Pocket Star)
• New York to Dallas, by J.D. Robb (Putnam)
• Secrets of Bella Terra, by Christina Dodd (New American Library)
• True Colors, by Joyce Lamb (Berkley Sensation)
• True Shot, by Joyce Lamb (Berkley Sensation)
• Where All the Dead Lie, by J.T. Ellison (Harlequin Mira)
The names of the winning books and authors will be declared on July 28 during the RWA conference in Anaheim, California.
What Crime Novels Teach Us About Ourselves
William Landay, the Massachusetts attorney turned author, whose much-talked-about new novel--Defending Jacob--I critiqued recently on the Kirkus Reviews site, offers a bit of background on his book in the Shotsmag Confidential blog. He writes, in part:
Bad men do what good men dream.You’ll find the entirety of Landay’s piece here.
In Defending Jacob I wanted to explore that idea. I wanted to narrow the gap between my audience and the fantasy world where they imagined crime takes place--between the good men who dream and the bad men who do. No more baddies in the inner city, as in my first book, Mission Flats. No more infamous villains like the Boston Strangler, as in my second. I wanted this criminal to be real, to be ordinary, just like us. And if I could not define precisely what “ordinary” and “us” might mean, because readers come in all shapes and sizes, I could at least define a world that looks like my own. Andy Barber, the narrator and protagonist of Defending Jacob, attended Yale, became a prosecutor in Middlesex County near Boston, and lives in Newton, Massachusetts--all qualities I share. Andy is not me, of course. The story-writing process is not that simple. And thankfully my two little boys are not Jacob Barber, the teenage boy accused of murder in my story. But my family and I are not so very different from the Barbers, and neither, I’d bet, are you.
Monday, March 26, 2012
Pierce’s Picks: “Astride a Pink Horse”
A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.
Astride a Pink Horse, by Robert Greer (North Atlantic):
Taking a break from his crime-and-cowboys series featuring C.J. Floyd (First of State, 2010), Greer delivers this modern thriller firmly linked to the wars of the 20th century. Bernadette
Cameron is a U.S. fighter pilot turned military investigator, who must determine how a decorated African-American Air Force veteran wound up hanging by its ankles--dead--in one of southern Wyoming’s decommissioned nuclear missile silos. It’s supposed to be a straightforward breach-of-security case. However, Bernadette wants to know more, which means stepping outside her jurisdiction as she and Elgin “Cozy” Coseia, a former college basketball star who now works as a Web news reporter, pursue this homicide’s elusive leads. Some of those leads suggest that the crime was hate-related, while others spark suspicions of a conspiracy perhaps involving a right-wing cattle rancher, a Japanese internment camp survivor, and a military contractor with a longstanding grudge against the murder victim.
Astride a Pink Horse, by Robert Greer (North Atlantic):
Taking a break from his crime-and-cowboys series featuring C.J. Floyd (First of State, 2010), Greer delivers this modern thriller firmly linked to the wars of the 20th century. Bernadette
Cameron is a U.S. fighter pilot turned military investigator, who must determine how a decorated African-American Air Force veteran wound up hanging by its ankles--dead--in one of southern Wyoming’s decommissioned nuclear missile silos. It’s supposed to be a straightforward breach-of-security case. However, Bernadette wants to know more, which means stepping outside her jurisdiction as she and Elgin “Cozy” Coseia, a former college basketball star who now works as a Web news reporter, pursue this homicide’s elusive leads. Some of those leads suggest that the crime was hate-related, while others spark suspicions of a conspiracy perhaps involving a right-wing cattle rancher, a Japanese internment camp survivor, and a military contractor with a longstanding grudge against the murder victim.
News from All Over
• This year’s Left Coast Crime convention will take place in Sacramento, California, from March 29 to April 1. If you haven’t already registered, you can do so right here.
• I received a news release this morning, saying that Mysterious Press will issue Dennis Lynds’ first six Dan Fortune detective novels, written under the pseudonym Michael Collins, as e-books beginning tomorrow. However, I don’t see any more information about that release on the Mysterious Press Web site. Lynds’ introduction of the one-armed Fortune, of course, came in Act of Fear (1967). UPDATE: The Lynds/Collins link is now live here.
• Downton Abbey fans, rejoice! There were concerns heard earlier this year that Downton creator Julian Fellowes’ new miniseries about the sinking of the Titanic might not be aired in the United States until after the 100th anniversary of that disaster, which took place on April 15, 1912. (The series has already begun broadcasting in Great Britain, in four one-hour episodes.) But The Huffington Post now reports that ABC-TV will set sail to Fellowes’ Titanic next month. It will debut on Saturday, April 14, at 8 p.m. EST with a three-hour installment, followed the very next night, Sunday, April 15, by a concluding episode that begins at 9 p.m. EST.
• BBC-TV has commissioned four new episodes of George Gently.
• Round 3 of blogger Jen Forbus’ “Heroes and Villains” bracketed tournament has now commenced, with 16 candidates remaining in each category. I was especially sad to see both John Rebus and Sherlock Holmes defeated in the last round, and am hoping that Lisbeth Salander and Dave Robicheaux can survive this latest match-up. To participate in Forbus’ tourney, click here.
• This week’s new short story in Beat to a Pulp is “Eyes Open,” by award-winning Detroit writer Patti Abbott.
• Jeffery Deaver’s one and only James Bond novel, Carte Blanche, has apparently won Japan’s Bouken-shouetsu adventure fiction award for the Best Foreign Novel of 2011.
• And congratulations to Steven Millhauser, who has picked up the 2001 Story Prize for his collection, We Others: New and Selected Stories. I’ve been enjoying Millhauser’s work ever since I discovered a story by him in Esquire during the 1980s.
• I received a news release this morning, saying that Mysterious Press will issue Dennis Lynds’ first six Dan Fortune detective novels, written under the pseudonym Michael Collins, as e-books beginning tomorrow. However, I don’t see any more information about that release on the Mysterious Press Web site. Lynds’ introduction of the one-armed Fortune, of course, came in Act of Fear (1967). UPDATE: The Lynds/Collins link is now live here.
• Downton Abbey fans, rejoice! There were concerns heard earlier this year that Downton creator Julian Fellowes’ new miniseries about the sinking of the Titanic might not be aired in the United States until after the 100th anniversary of that disaster, which took place on April 15, 1912. (The series has already begun broadcasting in Great Britain, in four one-hour episodes.) But The Huffington Post now reports that ABC-TV will set sail to Fellowes’ Titanic next month. It will debut on Saturday, April 14, at 8 p.m. EST with a three-hour installment, followed the very next night, Sunday, April 15, by a concluding episode that begins at 9 p.m. EST.
• BBC-TV has commissioned four new episodes of George Gently.
• Round 3 of blogger Jen Forbus’ “Heroes and Villains” bracketed tournament has now commenced, with 16 candidates remaining in each category. I was especially sad to see both John Rebus and Sherlock Holmes defeated in the last round, and am hoping that Lisbeth Salander and Dave Robicheaux can survive this latest match-up. To participate in Forbus’ tourney, click here.
• This week’s new short story in Beat to a Pulp is “Eyes Open,” by award-winning Detroit writer Patti Abbott.
• Jeffery Deaver’s one and only James Bond novel, Carte Blanche, has apparently won Japan’s Bouken-shouetsu adventure fiction award for the Best Foreign Novel of 2011.
• And congratulations to Steven Millhauser, who has picked up the 2001 Story Prize for his collection, We Others: New and Selected Stories. I’ve been enjoying Millhauser’s work ever since I discovered a story by him in Esquire during the 1980s.
A Day at the Zoo
Don’t forget about Patti Abbott’s latest flash-fiction challenge. She’s suggesting that writers create a new tale--not necessarily rooted in either crime or mystery--“set in a zoo. The zoo can be incidental to the plot, but that’s the setting.” Stories ought not exceed 1,200 words in length, and should be posted in the writer’s blog next Monday, April 2.
Anybody who wants to take part in this challenge, but doesn’t have a blog of his or her own, should drop an e-note to Abbott here.
Anybody who wants to take part in this challenge, but doesn’t have a blog of his or her own, should drop an e-note to Abbott here.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Forshaw’s Climate Control
Barry Forshaw (left) with Swedish author Johan Theorin.
I have always admired UK critic Barry Forshaw’s insights into the crime-fiction genre, as well as his encyclopedic knowledge of cinema. A few years back, I was fortunate to be one of the contributors to a book he was editing for Greenwood Publishing, British Crime Writing: An Encyclopedia, and more recently I provided him with some background for a biography he was writing, Stieg Larsson: The Man Who Left Too Soon. In addition to his being one of London’s leading literary critics, he somehow finds time to edit the magazine Crime Time.
Over the last couple of years, though, Forshaw has become closely linked with the explosive growth of the Scandinavian and Nordic crime-fiction subgenre--an association sure to be cemented by the release earlier this year of his book Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan).
Prior to the start of publisher Orion’s recent authors’ party in London, Forshaw and I got together at a local hostelry. Over a couple of glasses of port, we discussed his newest book, what he considers “signal work” from the Nordic region, what he’s busy with now, and of course one of my favorite subjects, Stieg Larsson.
Ali Karim: Tell us how you came to write Death in a Cold Climate.
Barry Forshaw: I was keen to write about the amazing explosion of interest in Scandinavian crime fiction (both on the page and on the screen) and the fact that the British and Americans are becoming aware of the fact that the Scandinavian countries have their own very individual identities--this is reflected in the novels of the best writers. When I was writing Death in a Cold Climate, Norwegian Anne Holt said to me: “If you are visiting a new country it should be a crime novel from that country you read before you leave on your trip--you will learn more than any travel guide can tell you.” I try very hard to capture the individual identities of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland--and if I’ve managed to make even the Scandinavians look at their neighboring countries afresh, I regard that as a little added value for the book.
AK: Death in a Cold Climate is a fascinating overview of the Nordic countries’ new-found fame when it comes to crime fiction. I was particularly delighted to see you explore the pre-Henning Mankell, pre-Stieg Larsson era of Scandinavian/Nordic mystery writing. How important were the roots of this subgenre?
BF: The roots--or the inspiration for the whole genre--could, frankly, be summed up in the names of two writers (although vintage writers such as Maria Lang should not be overlooked): the massively influential Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. [Their] Martin Beck novels [were] name-checked again and again by so many Nordic crime writers I spoke to as a key influence. Interestingly enough, statistically speaking, a certain British writer turned up frequently as another influence--not Agatha Christie, but Ruth Rendell, for her dark psychological standalone novels (rather than her [Chief Inspector Reginald] Wexford police procedurals); she is, of course, half-Swedish, but clearly that unforgiving, ruthless mindset is something that Scandinavian crime writers respond to.
AK: So there could not have been a Lisbeth Salander or a Mikael Blomkvist without there first having been a Martin Beck.
Is the appeal of this subgenre linked to its social commentary and introspective nature?BF: Absolutely! The social commentary aspect in the genre is crucial--even if we are not offered a totally accurate picture of the Nordic counties. Let’s face it, most readers are canny enough to realize that the picture of a society given to them by crime fiction has to be more dramatic, more corrupt, more sinister than the real thing. We might know that Iceland, for instance, has approximately two murders a year, rather than the host of killings committed in the novels--just as foreign readers know that Oxford has a far lower body count than in the Morse novels of Colin Dexter. Having said that, the best novelists can still give us some sharp insights into various key aspects of their societies.
AK: And I noted while reading your book that perhaps there could not have been Beck, Kurt Wallander, or Inspector Erlendur without, say, Lew Archer, Philip Marlowe, or Mike Hammer?
BF: The excellent Norwegian detective novelist Gunnar Staalesen and I often talk about how many crime-fiction aficionados are Ross Macdonald disciples. But then, what crime writer worth his or her salt doesn’t read Macdonald? (And his partner, Margaret Millar, definitely deserves a revival.) ...
AK: Is crime fiction of the Nordic regions, then, more in tune with the American tradition than the British Golden Age?
BF: Of all the writers I spoke to--and that was a great many of them--most were familiar with (and admiring of) both the British and American traditions.
AK: While you delve into the history of Scandinavian/Nordic crime fiction, you also talk about many of the contemporary and up-and-coming wordsmiths. How did they feel about being discussed alongside the so-called masters?
BF: Everybody was happy to talk frankly about their work--from the major names to the up-and-comers. Thankfully, it’s a very democratic field. In the entire genre of Nordic crime fiction I found a welcome readiness (almost without exception) among novelists to discuss their own writing, and to answer the many questions I had about their individual countries and societies. I suspect they were intrigued by the fact that a Brit was trying to tie everything together!
AK: Tell us what you’ve made of the Nordic writers you’ve met over the years. Are they as dour as their characters can sometimes be?
BF: Ah, the stereotypes! We’re all comfortable with them--but when I’ve spoken to Håkan Nesser about such things, he shoots them down quickly, notably the dourness and the British/American idea that the Scandinavian countries are sexual wonderlands, sans inhibitions. My own view? It was important for me to nail such notions. To that end, I contacted again every author I could with whom I had previously spoken, along with many whom I had not been in touch with before and discussed the stereotypes.
Yes, it’s true that some writers correspond to the dour Scandinavian image (two of the very best do, in fact)--but most don’t. The reverse, in fact!AK: Considering your diverse workload, did you work on Death in a Cold Climate in short bursts, or was it a concentrated effort?
BF: Both, in fact. As editor of Crime Time, I sometimes spend time chasing copy, but I had few such problems here with the authors, publishers, and translators I interviewed. My own motivation? I sometimes shout at myself--after squandering time on work-evading tactics: “Come on, Barry--for God’s sake, get to work!”
AK: Do you think that the influx of these chilly tales has altered the general direction of today’s crime fiction? We now see publishers scouting around for the “next Sweden,” in terms of the genre. And one paperback edition of Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X carries the blurb, “the Japanese Stieg Larsson.”
BF: Aren’t these attempts to catch the slipstream of literary success inevitable? With such a wealth of Nordic writing talent currently producing best-selling crime fiction, the continuing rude health of the field seems guaranteed--though publishers will always be looking for the next trend. You mentioned the excellent The Devotion of Suspect X--showing that the Scandinavians had better watch their backs!
AK: I found your book to be less a critical study of individual works from the region than it is a sort of guidebook. Would that be a reasonable comment?
BF: That was, in fact, the aim--I wanted to produce a guidebook. You may have read and enjoyed Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, or Karin Fossum and are hungry for more, so I can hopefully guide you to your next choice.
AK: You interviewed many writers; I counted over 70 novelists mentioned. How did you stop the book from becoming unwieldy? Are you a particularly judicious editor?
BF: It was tough, I can tell you! As the deadline loomed, more and more new writers seemed to demand attention and inclusion--on a daily basis. Frankly, it could have been even longer … but I like the shape it now has. There are omissions, but I tried to be as comprehensive as I could within the word count--at least including those writers currently translated into English.
AK: There’s a section in this book about film and television, which--considering your own professional film criticism--is most welcome. So, can you tell us about some of your favorite adaptations?
BF: Fair enough. Well, [I must mention] the first Swedish Larsson film adaptation, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, for all its faults (and the David Fincher remake is pretty creditable). The first season of The Killing, of course--nothing needs to be said, does it? We all worship at the altar of Sarah Lund. And the compelling Borgen--which does have political thriller elements (there’s a prominently displayed poster in the flat of one of the protagonists for All the President’s Men). The film of Jar City (possibly to be remade). And the adaptations of Gunnar Staalesen's Varg Veum novels, not shown [in Britain] yet, but available on subtitled DVDs. I’m looking forward to the Swedish/Danish The Bridge, though I found Those Who Kill efficient, but by-the-numbers and over-familiar.
AK: Speaking of Jar City, I have found Arnaldur Indriđason, in person, to be very different from his melancholic Detective Inspector Erlendur. From where does the too-familiar Nordic/Scandinavian depressive stereotype spring?
BF: [Henrik] Ibsen and [August] Strindberg, of course, the dour twin gods of Scandinavian theater. Strindberg influenced the great Ingmar Bergman … and Henning Mankell married the latter’s daughter. There’s a line of succession.
AK: For readers who want to get a flavor of Scandinavian/Nordic crime fiction, but don’t have a lot of extra time, which five or so works would you recommend their reading?
BF: I’d go for:
• Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, aka Smilla’s Sense of Snow (1992), by Peter Høeg: The atmospheric literary crime novel that almost single-handedly inaugurated--without trying to--the current Scandinavian invasion. Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow mesmerizes with its evocative use of Copenhagen locales and weather, so significant for the troubled, intuitive heroine. Most of all, it’s the poetic quality of the novel that haunts the reader.
• The Laughing Policeman (1968), by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö: Two writers--a crime-writing team--might be said to have started it all. The critical stock of Sjöwall/Wahlöö could not be higher:
they are celebrated as the very best exponents of the police procedural. Martin Beck is the ultimate Scandinavian copper, and if you prefer to ignore the subtle Marxist perspective of the books, it is easy to do so.• The Redbreast (2000), by Jo Nesbø: Is he really “The Next Stieg Larsson,” as it proclaims on the [book] jackets? He’s certainly the breakthrough Nordic crime writer post-Larsson, and more quirky and individual than most of his Scandinavian colleagues--not least thanks to Nesbø’s wonderfully dyspeptic detective, Harry Hole (pronounced “Hurler”). The Redbreast bristles with a scarifying vision of Nordic fascism.
• Firewall (1998), by Henning Mankell: Mankell’s Kurt Wallander is one of the great creations of modern crime fiction: overweight, diabetes-ridden, and with all the problems of modern society leaving scars on his soul. Firewall is one of the writer’s unvarnished portraits of modern life, in which society and all its institutions (not least the family) are put under the microscope.
• Woman with Birthmark (1996), by Håkan Nesser: Where does Håkan Nesser set his novels? It’s not important; his crime fiction, located in an unnamed Scandinavian country, is so commandingly written it makes most contemporary crime fare seem rather thin gruel. Nesser’s copper, Van Veeteren, has been lauded by Colin Dexter as “destined for a place among the great European detectives.”
•Jar City (2000), by Arnaldur Indriđason: The talented Indriđason is making a mark with his Reykjavik-set thrillers. His debut, Jar City (successfully filmed), is Indriđason’s calling card. When the body of an old man is found in his apartment, DI Erlendur discovers that the murdered man has been accused of rape in the past.
AK: Now that Death in a Cold Climate is out, what’s next of your plate?
BF: Three books! I’m a glutton for punishment. Next up are British Crime Film (for Palgrave Macmillan) and a study of Thomas Harris and the film of The Silence of the Lambs. Then I have to write a book about British gothic cinema--which will be another labor of love. Hopefully, British Crime Film and British Gothic Cinema will remind people I’m not just a Scandi Man …
READ MORE: “Death in a Cold Climate: Review,” by Martin Edwards (‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’).
Without a Clue
Author and sometime Rap Sheet contributor Gary Phillips passed along a link to The Huffington Post’s recent list of what it says are “Television’s Most Memorable Detectives of All Time.” In his note, Phillips adds: “Cool that Mannix and [Darren] McGavin’s Mike Hammer are there, as are other choices--though no Peter Gunn, no (Jack Lord) Steve McGarrett? But the bloodless television version of Shaft is [included]?” I share his bafflement.
You Don’t Know Shat!
Today is actor William Shatner’s 81st birthday. It reminds me that I participated two years ago in a fun, weeklong Shatner blogathon, organized by Stacia Jones of She Blogged by Night. Most features of that blogathon can be found here. My own humble contribution, about the 1975-1976 ABC-TV series Barbary Coast, can be found here.
The film-oriented blog, The Lightning Bug’s Lair, has organized its own tribute around Shatner’s latest birthday. Click here.
My father’s 88th birthday would also have been today. Unfortunately, he passed away back in 2004, leaving me, finally, parentless.
The film-oriented blog, The Lightning Bug’s Lair, has organized its own tribute around Shatner’s latest birthday. Click here.
My father’s 88th birthday would also have been today. Unfortunately, he passed away back in 2004, leaving me, finally, parentless.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
First Reads of Spring
My Kirkus Reviews column this week is devoted to new crime and thriller fiction scheduled for release this spring. And since spring allegedly begins today ... well, what could be more appropriate?
Among my seven principal picks: Philip Kerr’s Prague Fatale, Jassy Mackenzie’s The Fallen, and Wallace Stroby’s Kings of Midnight. The full rundown is here.
Among my seven principal picks: Philip Kerr’s Prague Fatale, Jassy Mackenzie’s The Fallen, and Wallace Stroby’s Kings of Midnight. The full rundown is here.
On the Lammys
The Lambda Literary Foundation has announced the finalists for its 24th annual Lambda Literary Awards, honoring lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) books published in 2011. There are 119 contenders for these “Lammys,” in two dozen categories. However, we’re most concerned here with nominees of just two types.
Lesbian Mystery:
• Dying to Live, by Kim Baldwin and Xenia Alexiou (Bold Strokes)
• Hostage Moon, by A.J. Quinn (Bold Strokes)
• Rainey Nights, by R.E. Bradshaw (R.E. Bradshaw Books)
• Retirement Plan, by Martha Miller (Bold Strokes)
• Trick of the Dark, by Val McDermid (Bywater)
Gay Mystery:
• The Affair of the Porcelain Dog, by Jess Faraday (Bold Strokes)
• Blue’s Bayou, by David Lennon (Blue Spike)
• Boystown: Three Nick Nowak Mysteries, by Marshall Thornton (Torquere Press)
• Malabarista, by Garry Ryan (NeWest Press)
• Red White Black and Blue, by Richard Stevenson (MLR Press)
“Winners,” explains a Lamba press release, “will be announced at a Monday evening, June 4th ceremony in New York at the CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Avenue) with an after-party at Slate (54 West 21st Street). ... Tickets for the Lambda Literary Awards ceremony and after-party go on sale today. For more information click here.”
(Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)
Lesbian Mystery:
• Dying to Live, by Kim Baldwin and Xenia Alexiou (Bold Strokes)
• Hostage Moon, by A.J. Quinn (Bold Strokes)
• Rainey Nights, by R.E. Bradshaw (R.E. Bradshaw Books)
• Retirement Plan, by Martha Miller (Bold Strokes)
• Trick of the Dark, by Val McDermid (Bywater)
Gay Mystery:
• The Affair of the Porcelain Dog, by Jess Faraday (Bold Strokes)
• Blue’s Bayou, by David Lennon (Blue Spike)
• Boystown: Three Nick Nowak Mysteries, by Marshall Thornton (Torquere Press)
• Malabarista, by Garry Ryan (NeWest Press)
• Red White Black and Blue, by Richard Stevenson (MLR Press)
“Winners,” explains a Lamba press release, “will be announced at a Monday evening, June 4th ceremony in New York at the CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Avenue) with an after-party at Slate (54 West 21st Street). ... Tickets for the Lambda Literary Awards ceremony and after-party go on sale today. For more information click here.”
(Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)
Monday, March 19, 2012
Pierce’s Picks: “The Namesake”
A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.
The Namesake, by Conor Fitzgerald (Bloomsbury):
While some other Irish crime writers set their fiction on the Emerald Isle, Conor Fitzgerald (the pen name of Conor Deane, son of poet Seamus Deane) has so far preferred Italy as a storytelling locale.
His first novel, The Dogs of Rome (2010), introduced police chief commissioner Alec Blume, a lonerish and endearingly flawed American expatriate who’s lived for almost two dozen years in Rome. It sequel, The Fatal Touch, ranked among January Magazine’s favorite books of 2011. Now comes The Namesake, which commences with the killing of magistrate Matteo Arconti’s namesake, an insurance man from Milan. This act was a particularly callous message of resistance to the magistrate’s investigation of the Calabrian mafia. Commissario Blume, already busy with a homicide connected to an arrogant mafia boss who’s been pulling strings from the safety of Germany, hands the new case over to his live-in partner, Caterina Mattiola, whilst he embarks on a journey designed to draw his own elusive quarry out into the open.
The Namesake, by Conor Fitzgerald (Bloomsbury):
While some other Irish crime writers set their fiction on the Emerald Isle, Conor Fitzgerald (the pen name of Conor Deane, son of poet Seamus Deane) has so far preferred Italy as a storytelling locale.
His first novel, The Dogs of Rome (2010), introduced police chief commissioner Alec Blume, a lonerish and endearingly flawed American expatriate who’s lived for almost two dozen years in Rome. It sequel, The Fatal Touch, ranked among January Magazine’s favorite books of 2011. Now comes The Namesake, which commences with the killing of magistrate Matteo Arconti’s namesake, an insurance man from Milan. This act was a particularly callous message of resistance to the magistrate’s investigation of the Calabrian mafia. Commissario Blume, already busy with a homicide connected to an arrogant mafia boss who’s been pulling strings from the safety of Germany, hands the new case over to his live-in partner, Caterina Mattiola, whilst he embarks on a journey designed to draw his own elusive quarry out into the open.
Care for a Bite?
I don’t think I have ever seen a full episode of the supernatural-flavored, 1966-1971 ABC-TV soap opera Dark Shadows. However, the trailer for Tim Burton’s more comedic big-screen interpretation of that series concept (starring Johnny Depp and scheduled for release this coming May 11) looks, well, kind of fun. Watch it here.
Winnowing the Field
Please excuse the obvious dearth of posts over this last weekend, but I had a couple of friends from out of town fly in to surprise me on my birthday, and I am trying to keep them entertained. The Rap Sheet should resume its usual schedule by next week.
One thing to keep you busy in the interim is Round 2 of blogger Jen Forbus’ “Heroes and Villains” bracketed tournament. The number of nominees has now been halved, down to 16, with the loss of such characters as Jack Taylor and Nero Wolfe, Arnold Zeck and Irvin Irving. Click here to make your preferences known in the new match-ups.
One thing to keep you busy in the interim is Round 2 of blogger Jen Forbus’ “Heroes and Villains” bracketed tournament. The number of nominees has now been halved, down to 16, with the loss of such characters as Jack Taylor and Nero Wolfe, Arnold Zeck and Irvin Irving. Click here to make your preferences known in the new match-ups.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
The Story Behind the Story:
“The Girl Next Door,” by Brad Parks
(Editor’s note: This latest entry in The Rap Sheet’s “Story Behind the Story” series marks a repeat appearance by Nero and Shamus award-winning author Brad Parks. 
In February 2011, he wrote about Eyes of the Innocent, his second novel featuring New Jersey investigative reporter Carter Ross. Below, he explains the background of its sequel, The Girl Next Door, which has just been released by St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books.)
I will long remember the day that inspired my latest novel, The Girl Next Door.
It was July 30, 2008, and all the employees of the newspaper where I was working at that time, the Newark, New Jersey, Star-Ledger, had been summoned to the first floor for a special meeting with the publisher.
We all knew this was likely grim news--it wasn’t exactly a secret that our paper, like every large daily across America, had been hit with a tsunami of bad financial circumstances. But even under those soggy circumstances, the message our publisher delivered that morning was shocking: our newspaper, then the 11th largest in the country, was on life support, and it would be shut down by the end of the year unless several conditions were met.
Among them were that three of our unions, including the Teamsters, needed to renegotiate their contracts; and that 150 newsroom employees had to take voluntary buyouts.
I remember this day clearly not only because it was the start of this book, but also because it was the end of my career in newspapers. I gave my notice later that morning. Under the terms of the buyout I eventually worked out, I would continue working until Thanksgiving. Then I was gone.
I was 34 years old. Newspapering was all I had ever done.
And it was more than just my job. It was really my identity, this thing--my vocation, my avocation, my passion--that had come to define who I was and how I thought about the world.
My first newspaper gig had come when I was 14 years old and I conned my hometown weekly into letting me cover the local girls’ basketball team. I kept writing sports all through high school.
Then I went to Dartmouth College and did the same. I’d file stories on the same college football game for three newspapers (they all had different deadlines). When I got frustrated by how the student paper covered sports, I started my own, running it out of my dorm room. I was the publisher, editor-in-chief, ad salesman, writer, designer, layout artist, paste-up guy, even paperboy--after getting it printed on Monday mornings, I would dash back to school and spread copies all around campus before running off to class.
My summers? I spent them writing for newspapers. I won internships with The Boston Globe and The Washington Post.
My first real job? That was when I got hired by the Post full-time. Two years later I jumped to The Star-Ledger. I basically grew up in the newsroom, this wonderful place full of irascible, irreverent, fascinating, passionate people, most of whom were unapologetically ink-stained. And I soon became ink-stained, too. I loved working for newspapers. The thought of leaving the industry terrified me.
But it was clearly time. The Star-Ledger wasn’t the only newspaper on life support. They pretty much all were. Even if I tried jumping to a different paper--not that any of them were hiring at the salary I was making--I’d just be hopping from the last flight of the Hindenburg to the first voyage of the Titanic. I knew I had to leave, or I would just be the guy still hanging around 10 years later when they finally turned off the lights. As much as I loved newspapers, I didn’t want to be that guy.
Besides, I wasn’t exactly making the leap without a back-up plan.
I had long thought that writing mysteries would make a great semi-retirement career, something I’d do in my late 50s and 60s, when the kids were finally out of college, when the mortgage was paid off, and when the grind of working for a daily newspaper finally became too much for me. So I had started dabbling with writing fiction in my mid-20s.
I completed my first manuscript when I was 30 (no, you’ll never see it). By that point, I was in the groove of writing during evenings and weekends. So I started another novel.
My career had taken me over to the news side at The Star-Ledger by that point and I was really diving into the urban world of Newark, writing about all the issues and events that shaped the city. I was covering crime. I was understanding poverty in ways I never had before. I was becoming immersed in Newark’s attempts to reinvent itself and in all the barriers that kept getting in the way.
So it seemed natural to write about an investigative reporter who was doing the same thing. (Besides, being as I had a very demanding job, I didn’t have time to do extensive research. “Write what you know” was sort of a necessity for me.) I named my protagonist Carter Ross, because it was the whitest, WASPiest-sounding name I could think of. And I sent him plunging into Newark’s neighborhoods and let him bumble his way through them, just like I was doing.
The first Carter Ross manuscript--which you now know as Faces of the Gone--sold to St. Martin’s Press on July 8, 2008. And 22 days later, there I was, listening to the Star-Ledger’s
publisher utter his dire message about our future, realizing full well where it was going to lead me.
(Left) The front page of today’s Newark Star-Ledger.
Under the contract I had just signed with St. Martin’s, the second Carter Ross book--you now know it as Eyes of the Innocent--was due in January. So I had to jam it out pretty quickly, while I was still working full-time.
By the time I started work on book number three, The Girl Next Door, a lot in my life had changed. My family and I had moved to Virginia, where my wife had gotten a job. I was no longer making daily trips into the newsroom. I no longer identified myself as a journalist when I met people. I was now a full-time novelist.
But my brain was still stuck on July 30, 2008, that day when everything started to become so different. And I think maybe I was still trying to process all that had changed--to the point where maybe I couldn’t have written anything else but a book in which one of the central characters was a newspaper in trouble.
So I started with the idea of a contentious negotiation between that newspaper and one of its labor unions. (I invented the union in question, calling it the IFIW--International Federation of Information Workers--because I was afraid that if I used the Teamsters and they didn’t like what I wrote, there could be repercussions. Jimmy Hoffa has been dead a long, long time, but if living in New Jersey for 10 years taught me nothing else, it’s that you still don’t want to mess with the Teamsters).
Then I asked myself: who might get caught in the middle of such a negotiation? Someone who was involved but, basically, an innocent? Someone whose death might catch Carter Ross’ interest?
I came up with the idea of a paper deliverer, figuring Carter would likely have a soft spot for someone like that; and, because you can’t support yourself delivering newspapers alone, I made her a waitress, too. She was hard-working, conscientious, devoted to her family and her church. She was pretty, but not too pretty.
She was basically the girl next door.
The story takes on a life of its own at that point. And, no, Carter doesn’t end up taking a buyout at the end. He’s still got a long career ahead of him, writing all the stories I never quite got around to doing myself. I could never let him leave the newsroom we’ve created together.
I’d miss it too much.
READ MORE: “Dumb Answers to Stupid Questions: Brad Parks Edition,” by Gar Anthony Haywood (Murderati).
In February 2011, he wrote about Eyes of the Innocent, his second novel featuring New Jersey investigative reporter Carter Ross. Below, he explains the background of its sequel, The Girl Next Door, which has just been released by St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books.)I will long remember the day that inspired my latest novel, The Girl Next Door.
It was July 30, 2008, and all the employees of the newspaper where I was working at that time, the Newark, New Jersey, Star-Ledger, had been summoned to the first floor for a special meeting with the publisher.
We all knew this was likely grim news--it wasn’t exactly a secret that our paper, like every large daily across America, had been hit with a tsunami of bad financial circumstances. But even under those soggy circumstances, the message our publisher delivered that morning was shocking: our newspaper, then the 11th largest in the country, was on life support, and it would be shut down by the end of the year unless several conditions were met.
Among them were that three of our unions, including the Teamsters, needed to renegotiate their contracts; and that 150 newsroom employees had to take voluntary buyouts.
I remember this day clearly not only because it was the start of this book, but also because it was the end of my career in newspapers. I gave my notice later that morning. Under the terms of the buyout I eventually worked out, I would continue working until Thanksgiving. Then I was gone.
I was 34 years old. Newspapering was all I had ever done.
And it was more than just my job. It was really my identity, this thing--my vocation, my avocation, my passion--that had come to define who I was and how I thought about the world.
My first newspaper gig had come when I was 14 years old and I conned my hometown weekly into letting me cover the local girls’ basketball team. I kept writing sports all through high school.
Then I went to Dartmouth College and did the same. I’d file stories on the same college football game for three newspapers (they all had different deadlines). When I got frustrated by how the student paper covered sports, I started my own, running it out of my dorm room. I was the publisher, editor-in-chief, ad salesman, writer, designer, layout artist, paste-up guy, even paperboy--after getting it printed on Monday mornings, I would dash back to school and spread copies all around campus before running off to class.
My summers? I spent them writing for newspapers. I won internships with The Boston Globe and The Washington Post.
My first real job? That was when I got hired by the Post full-time. Two years later I jumped to The Star-Ledger. I basically grew up in the newsroom, this wonderful place full of irascible, irreverent, fascinating, passionate people, most of whom were unapologetically ink-stained. And I soon became ink-stained, too. I loved working for newspapers. The thought of leaving the industry terrified me.
But it was clearly time. The Star-Ledger wasn’t the only newspaper on life support. They pretty much all were. Even if I tried jumping to a different paper--not that any of them were hiring at the salary I was making--I’d just be hopping from the last flight of the Hindenburg to the first voyage of the Titanic. I knew I had to leave, or I would just be the guy still hanging around 10 years later when they finally turned off the lights. As much as I loved newspapers, I didn’t want to be that guy.
Besides, I wasn’t exactly making the leap without a back-up plan.
I had long thought that writing mysteries would make a great semi-retirement career, something I’d do in my late 50s and 60s, when the kids were finally out of college, when the mortgage was paid off, and when the grind of working for a daily newspaper finally became too much for me. So I had started dabbling with writing fiction in my mid-20s.
I completed my first manuscript when I was 30 (no, you’ll never see it). By that point, I was in the groove of writing during evenings and weekends. So I started another novel.
My career had taken me over to the news side at The Star-Ledger by that point and I was really diving into the urban world of Newark, writing about all the issues and events that shaped the city. I was covering crime. I was understanding poverty in ways I never had before. I was becoming immersed in Newark’s attempts to reinvent itself and in all the barriers that kept getting in the way.
So it seemed natural to write about an investigative reporter who was doing the same thing. (Besides, being as I had a very demanding job, I didn’t have time to do extensive research. “Write what you know” was sort of a necessity for me.) I named my protagonist Carter Ross, because it was the whitest, WASPiest-sounding name I could think of. And I sent him plunging into Newark’s neighborhoods and let him bumble his way through them, just like I was doing.
The first Carter Ross manuscript--which you now know as Faces of the Gone--sold to St. Martin’s Press on July 8, 2008. And 22 days later, there I was, listening to the Star-Ledger’s
publisher utter his dire message about our future, realizing full well where it was going to lead me.(Left) The front page of today’s Newark Star-Ledger.
Under the contract I had just signed with St. Martin’s, the second Carter Ross book--you now know it as Eyes of the Innocent--was due in January. So I had to jam it out pretty quickly, while I was still working full-time.
By the time I started work on book number three, The Girl Next Door, a lot in my life had changed. My family and I had moved to Virginia, where my wife had gotten a job. I was no longer making daily trips into the newsroom. I no longer identified myself as a journalist when I met people. I was now a full-time novelist.
But my brain was still stuck on July 30, 2008, that day when everything started to become so different. And I think maybe I was still trying to process all that had changed--to the point where maybe I couldn’t have written anything else but a book in which one of the central characters was a newspaper in trouble.
So I started with the idea of a contentious negotiation between that newspaper and one of its labor unions. (I invented the union in question, calling it the IFIW--International Federation of Information Workers--because I was afraid that if I used the Teamsters and they didn’t like what I wrote, there could be repercussions. Jimmy Hoffa has been dead a long, long time, but if living in New Jersey for 10 years taught me nothing else, it’s that you still don’t want to mess with the Teamsters).
Then I asked myself: who might get caught in the middle of such a negotiation? Someone who was involved but, basically, an innocent? Someone whose death might catch Carter Ross’ interest?
I came up with the idea of a paper deliverer, figuring Carter would likely have a soft spot for someone like that; and, because you can’t support yourself delivering newspapers alone, I made her a waitress, too. She was hard-working, conscientious, devoted to her family and her church. She was pretty, but not too pretty.
She was basically the girl next door.
The story takes on a life of its own at that point. And, no, Carter doesn’t end up taking a buyout at the end. He’s still got a long career ahead of him, writing all the stories I never quite got around to doing myself. I could never let him leave the newsroom we’ve created together.
I’d miss it too much.
* * *
For more from Brad Parks, sign up for his newsletter here, like him on Facebook here, or follow @Brad_Parks on Twitter.READ MORE: “Dumb Answers to Stupid Questions: Brad Parks Edition,” by Gar Anthony Haywood (Murderati).
Thursday Briefing
• The second season of Sherlock, BBC One’s spirited version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures, won’t debut on PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! series in the States until May 6. But Omnimystery News already has a preview video of what we can expect from the three new episodes to be offered.
• Needle Magazine’s first new issue of 2012 is now available. Included in its contents are works by Matthew C. Funk, Jen Conley, Loren Eaton, B.V. Lawson, Robert Swartwood, and Chris La Tray.
• I find it heartbreaking to read that Encyclopaedia Britannica has decided to cease print publication after 244 years, and become an online resource instead. Growing up, my brother and I had the World Book encyclopedia at home, but our grandparents had a set of the Britannica available at their house. We were never lacking in access to knowledge. It was a constant inspiration, to see all of those books lined up, ready to teach us about life and the world. I’d frequently just pull down a volume at random and read through it, seeing what I might learn in the process. It’s not the same, looking for information--usually not fact-checked and often filled with mere opinions--on the Web. Tomorrow’s children are certain to miss something valuable with the disappearance of the printed Britannica.
• For Criminal Element, Rachel Hyland has composed a pleasant tribute to Enid Blyton’s various mystery-fiction series for children. “I always liked the Adventurous Four, didn’t mind the Secret Seven, had a mild crush on Fatty from the Five Find-Outers and wished fervently to be either circus folk like Barney or in hiding like the Secret kids,” she writes. “But above all of these--most of which deserve to be discussed at greater length in these pages, and doubtless will be at some future date--I was eternally, hopelessly devoted to Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timothy the Dog; aka, The Famous Five.” You can enjoy the entirety of Hyland’s piece here.
• And being a mustache-wearer myself, I found this post on the subject in Yvette Banek’s blog altogether entertaining.
• Needle Magazine’s first new issue of 2012 is now available. Included in its contents are works by Matthew C. Funk, Jen Conley, Loren Eaton, B.V. Lawson, Robert Swartwood, and Chris La Tray.
• I find it heartbreaking to read that Encyclopaedia Britannica has decided to cease print publication after 244 years, and become an online resource instead. Growing up, my brother and I had the World Book encyclopedia at home, but our grandparents had a set of the Britannica available at their house. We were never lacking in access to knowledge. It was a constant inspiration, to see all of those books lined up, ready to teach us about life and the world. I’d frequently just pull down a volume at random and read through it, seeing what I might learn in the process. It’s not the same, looking for information--usually not fact-checked and often filled with mere opinions--on the Web. Tomorrow’s children are certain to miss something valuable with the disappearance of the printed Britannica.
• For Criminal Element, Rachel Hyland has composed a pleasant tribute to Enid Blyton’s various mystery-fiction series for children. “I always liked the Adventurous Four, didn’t mind the Secret Seven, had a mild crush on Fatty from the Five Find-Outers and wished fervently to be either circus folk like Barney or in hiding like the Secret kids,” she writes. “But above all of these--most of which deserve to be discussed at greater length in these pages, and doubtless will be at some future date--I was eternally, hopelessly devoted to Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timothy the Dog; aka, The Famous Five.” You can enjoy the entirety of Hyland’s piece here.
• And being a mustache-wearer myself, I found this post on the subject in Yvette Banek’s blog altogether entertaining.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Faye Calls in the Cops
On behalf of Kirkus Reviews, I had the good fortune not long ago to interview Lyndsay Faye, author of the propulsive new historical mystery, The Gods of Gotham (Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam).
If you haven’t yet heard about it, this novel is set in New York City in 1845 and traces the escapades of Timothy Wilde, a young bartender who--following a devastating downtown fire that causes his disfigurement--signs on with the city’s embryonic police force, a company of “copper stars” (as those early patrolmen were known) who are still trying to figure out the best means to curb Manhattan’s escalating crime rate. After literally running into a 10-year-old girl covered with blood, Wilde sets out--with his elder brother’s help (and sometimes his hindrance)--to determine where she’s come from, what horrors she’s witnessed, and whether her story about a field of corpses secreted in a woodland north of 23rd Street can possibly be true.
In addition to discussing that book’s plot, I talked with Faye (the pen name used by New York resident Lyndsay Farber Lehner) about her first novel, a Sherlock Holmes tale called Dust and Shadow (2009), as well as anti-Irish violence of the 1840s, Wilde’s complicated personal relationships, and her use in Gotham of “flash talk,” or the arcane lexicon spoken by thieves and other street toughs.
You’ll find my Kirkus interview here.
J. Kingston Pierce: You were trained as a stage actress. How do you think that training has helped you as an author?
Lyndsay Faye: I’ve found that stage training helps immensely, particularly with the sort of books I want to write. Actors are taught to closely observe other people, they’re taught how to mimic them, and in addition I’ve done productions using everything from a Northern Irish accent to rapid-fire Nashville to tony Brit.
I don’t always get dialect right, but it infuriates me when I get it wrong, and I think that’s good for the overall product. Language and personalized vocabularies are enormously important to me, so I’m lucky to have been taught how to capture them.
JKP: It’s often noted that you are “a true New Yorker,” in the sense that you were born elsewhere. So where were you born? And did you move to Manhattan simply to advance your acting career?
LF: I was born in San Jose, California, grew up in southwest Washington state, and then moved back to the Bay Area. One day my husband and I (he’s a painter) looked at each other and realized that we had extremely tolerable routines, with wonderful friends and idyllic weather, and microbrews and fried artichokes on the coast every weekend, and that we could spend the rest of our lives that way, or we could challenge ourselves. We’re both quite affected by the pace of where we live, and we thought, How much more could we accomplish if we moved to New York? We wanted to dare ourselves to do better.
JKP: Have you pretty much put your acting career on hold now, in favor of composing more books?
LF: I’m often asked this question, and always say I’d prefer to be good at one thing than bad at two things. Acting careers require total dedication--writing, for me, is the same. If there were two of me, I’d still be singing Sondheim and touring Shakespeare. It breaks my heart a little that there aren’t. But I’m still in the union [Actor’s Equity]. I can’t bear to think of giving that up, since I worked so hard for it.
JKP: What sort of things did you learn by writing Dust and Shadow that you applied when putting this second novel together?
LF: I learned that I am capable of completing an entire novel, a lesson that sounds obvious but isn’t to be underestimated. Research--into the history, the language, the culture--is essential but also a real joy. If you’re wondering whether that sentence is necessary, cut it at once.
Do the most terrible things to your protagonists you can think of, then do worse things.
JKP: I hadn’t realized, until after I finished reading The Gods of Gotham, that the downtown fire you describe actually happened. How did it affect New York at the time, and did it convince the city to change its fire-prevention or -suppression tactics?
LF: The fire of 1845 caused around $6 million in property damage, according to the Herald, and destroyed 300 buildings. A huge swath of downtown was decimated. But I’ve seen nothing to indicate that the blaze changed the system of volunteer firefighting. The fire was a series of unfortunate coincidences--a whale-oil storehouse being so near to a brandy and gunpowder supplier, for example. The firemen did their best, but they were working against an extraordinary combination of poor circumstances.
JKP: Manhattan was a vastly different place in 1845, still very undeveloped, still rampant with wild pigs and thick with forests if you went far enough north. Living there now, is it hard to imagine the city as it was during James K. Polk’s presidency? And I seem to remember reading somewhere that you are a big fan of the mammoth non-fiction book Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace. How helpful was that work, and others, in transporting you back through time?
LF: I didn’t find imagining Manhattan with woodlands intact and chickens roaming the streets difficult per se--it was exhilarating. Countless diaries and newspaper accounts from the period have survived, so locating original sources about what life was like in mid-century was shockingly easy. In addition, New York had just decided that it was the center of the American universe, and that lurid travelogues should be widely published about it. Gaslight-and-shadow-themed accounts of the “real” city, the poverty-blighted and vice-infested underbelly, were very popular; I studied those voraciously.
I read Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 from page one right up until it hit the 1850s; it was hugely helpful, and I’m in Wallace and Burrow’s debt. Five Points, by Tyler Anbinder, was also a fantastic source of information, as was City of Eros, by Timothy Gilfoyle.
JKP: Could you imagine yourself living in New York in 1845? How would your life have been different?
LF: If I lived in 1845, I’d suffer from an extreme paucity of career options. Actresses were not necessarily the cream of society, though they were often celebrated, and while a few women were successful published authors, they were much more restricted as to style and content. I’d like to think that I’d have been one of the adventuresses, but possibly that’s wishful thinking and I would be running a boardinghouse or married to a businessman who’d no further expectations of me. One of the aspects of my research that shocked me was how very close to the edge women lived, economically speaking--one disaster could easily ruin your life.
JKP: Do you read other novels set in old New York? Can you recommend some titles to readers interested in such works?
LF: I’ve been a Caleb Carr fan for quite some time, and Stephanie Pintoff and Jed Rubenfeld also write great crime novels about old New York. Doubtless there are countless others, but my reading taste is quite omnivorous.
JKP: The Gods of Gotham has much to do with the creation of the New York City Police Department. What circumstances finally led to that force’s founding, and what had the city done previously to keep down or solve its many crimes?
LF: The ruling political parties had been arguing about the formation of a police force for years, because the system in place simply did not work. A city of 400,000 people requires more than a night watch and a semi-professional group of constables. When crime reached the point that the watchmen (who were laborers expected to stay alert through the night for an extra pittance) were more of a joke than a law-keeping force, a Democratic majority in the Common Council finally managed to form an official police department. No single incident caused the NYPD to be founded, but the city was by that time in dire need of better law enforcement.
JKP: In your novel, you describe widespread distrust of the NYPD at its inception. Why, if the force was designed to quash crime, were even respectable city dwellers suspicious of its value? At what point in the past did the NYPD finally find favor with the general populace?
LF: Well, the NYPD’s detractors were entirely correct, after all--they feared that the police force would be inextricably tied to politics, and supposed that having no officers would be better than having corrupt ones. I don’t mean to suggest that good men didn’t populate the copper star force from day one, but appointments were always made based on cronyism and political affiliation. It’s important to recall that the police were in Tammany pockets for decades, which was one of the things its opponents had been so concerned about--and they were right. The other people loudly declaiming against a “standing army” when the star police formed were the criminals. If you were making a tidy profit by illicit means, it was a good idea to couch your anti-police arguments in the terminology of freedom and patriotism.
As to when the NYPD found favor with the general populace, that still depends on who you’re talking to. One hundred percent of my personal interactions with the NYPD have been positive--they’re brave, intelligent, resourceful people who deeply care about the community. But if you ask someone who lived in the Bronx in the 1970s, or even an Occupy Wall Street protestor, you might get a different answer.
JKP: If I’m not mistaken, only one real-life personage figures large in this new novel: George Washington Matsell. Who was he, and how did The Gods of Gotham benefit from your including him in its plot line?
LF: Justice Matsell was the first chief of police, and he was a remarkably modern figure--he studied gang violence, family planning, tenement life, very unsavory topics at the time. The dictionary he wrote in order to teach his copper stars criminal argot is a remarkable cultural record, and one that enormously influenced the writing of Gotham. I don’t care to solve the problem of anachronism in historical fiction by using safe, bland words--thanks to Matsell, I didn’t have to.
The only other historical figure in the novel is young Bill Poole, to whom Timothy takes considerable objection. He would grow up to be better known as Bill the Butcher.
JKP: Your books so far have been notable for their rich atmospherics. How do you get the balance right between larding on period details and moving the story forward at a captivating clip?
LF: It’s important as an author of historical fiction to include only--and I mean only in a ruthless, hardline sense--those period details that your narrator actually cares about. Too often you come across fictional scenes in which protagonists are hurtling across bridges in hot pursuit and then pausing to tell you the history of the architecture.
This is another aspect of storytelling in which actor training in incredibly helpful--if it isn’t in character for my narrator to notice something, I don’t note it. Atmospherics are all well and good, but they have to mean something. There is nothing more irritating than reading a factoid the author included simply so that you’d be aware he or she conducted extensive research. If you can confine the details to those your protagonists care about, issues of pacing won’t plague you nearly as much. Timothy is a close observer who takes considerable ironic pleasure from noting what’s screwed up about his city, like many New Yorkers, so with him I’m able to incorporate a wealth of detail because he’s quite civic-minded.
JKP: Finally, I understand that you’re a serious fan of microbrew beers. You and your husband, Gabriel Lehner, even write a blog--Beer Meets Food--about cuisine and drink combinations. How did this interest come about, and how big a part does it play in your life? Do you have any favorite beers that you think the rest of us should sample?
LF: Yes, by all means, let’s talk about beer! You can’t grow up in the Pacific Northwest and not develop a serious crush on that beverage--my husband’s family even brew their own. It’s the geekiest beer culture outside of Belgium.
Everything from Lagunitas Brewing Company is delicious, but one of my favorites is their New Dogtown Pale; it’s based on a recipe they did for a Frank Zappa-themed series of 22-ouncers that was called Kill Ugly Radio, and they ended up turning it into their standard 12-ounce pale ale. Fantastic. If you’ve never had Pliny the Elder, which is an imperial IPA from Russian River Brewing Company, I’m deeply sorry. And if you’re into stouts, you desperately need The Abyss, an imperial from Deschutes Brewery. It’s out of this world.
If you haven’t yet heard about it, this novel is set in New York City in 1845 and traces the escapades of Timothy Wilde, a young bartender who--following a devastating downtown fire that causes his disfigurement--signs on with the city’s embryonic police force, a company of “copper stars” (as those early patrolmen were known) who are still trying to figure out the best means to curb Manhattan’s escalating crime rate. After literally running into a 10-year-old girl covered with blood, Wilde sets out--with his elder brother’s help (and sometimes his hindrance)--to determine where she’s come from, what horrors she’s witnessed, and whether her story about a field of corpses secreted in a woodland north of 23rd Street can possibly be true.In addition to discussing that book’s plot, I talked with Faye (the pen name used by New York resident Lyndsay Farber Lehner) about her first novel, a Sherlock Holmes tale called Dust and Shadow (2009), as well as anti-Irish violence of the 1840s, Wilde’s complicated personal relationships, and her use in Gotham of “flash talk,” or the arcane lexicon spoken by thieves and other street toughs.
You’ll find my Kirkus interview here.
* * *
Not being somebody who finds it easy to stop asking questions of authors, I came away from my interview with Faye having many more words available than I could squeeze into the Kirkus piece. Therefore, I am posting the remainder of our conversation below.J. Kingston Pierce: You were trained as a stage actress. How do you think that training has helped you as an author?
Lyndsay Faye: I’ve found that stage training helps immensely, particularly with the sort of books I want to write. Actors are taught to closely observe other people, they’re taught how to mimic them, and in addition I’ve done productions using everything from a Northern Irish accent to rapid-fire Nashville to tony Brit.
I don’t always get dialect right, but it infuriates me when I get it wrong, and I think that’s good for the overall product. Language and personalized vocabularies are enormously important to me, so I’m lucky to have been taught how to capture them.
JKP: It’s often noted that you are “a true New Yorker,” in the sense that you were born elsewhere. So where were you born? And did you move to Manhattan simply to advance your acting career?
LF: I was born in San Jose, California, grew up in southwest Washington state, and then moved back to the Bay Area. One day my husband and I (he’s a painter) looked at each other and realized that we had extremely tolerable routines, with wonderful friends and idyllic weather, and microbrews and fried artichokes on the coast every weekend, and that we could spend the rest of our lives that way, or we could challenge ourselves. We’re both quite affected by the pace of where we live, and we thought, How much more could we accomplish if we moved to New York? We wanted to dare ourselves to do better.
JKP: Have you pretty much put your acting career on hold now, in favor of composing more books?
LF: I’m often asked this question, and always say I’d prefer to be good at one thing than bad at two things. Acting careers require total dedication--writing, for me, is the same. If there were two of me, I’d still be singing Sondheim and touring Shakespeare. It breaks my heart a little that there aren’t. But I’m still in the union [Actor’s Equity]. I can’t bear to think of giving that up, since I worked so hard for it.
JKP: What sort of things did you learn by writing Dust and Shadow that you applied when putting this second novel together?
LF: I learned that I am capable of completing an entire novel, a lesson that sounds obvious but isn’t to be underestimated. Research--into the history, the language, the culture--is essential but also a real joy. If you’re wondering whether that sentence is necessary, cut it at once.
Do the most terrible things to your protagonists you can think of, then do worse things.JKP: I hadn’t realized, until after I finished reading The Gods of Gotham, that the downtown fire you describe actually happened. How did it affect New York at the time, and did it convince the city to change its fire-prevention or -suppression tactics?
LF: The fire of 1845 caused around $6 million in property damage, according to the Herald, and destroyed 300 buildings. A huge swath of downtown was decimated. But I’ve seen nothing to indicate that the blaze changed the system of volunteer firefighting. The fire was a series of unfortunate coincidences--a whale-oil storehouse being so near to a brandy and gunpowder supplier, for example. The firemen did their best, but they were working against an extraordinary combination of poor circumstances.
JKP: Manhattan was a vastly different place in 1845, still very undeveloped, still rampant with wild pigs and thick with forests if you went far enough north. Living there now, is it hard to imagine the city as it was during James K. Polk’s presidency? And I seem to remember reading somewhere that you are a big fan of the mammoth non-fiction book Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace. How helpful was that work, and others, in transporting you back through time?
LF: I didn’t find imagining Manhattan with woodlands intact and chickens roaming the streets difficult per se--it was exhilarating. Countless diaries and newspaper accounts from the period have survived, so locating original sources about what life was like in mid-century was shockingly easy. In addition, New York had just decided that it was the center of the American universe, and that lurid travelogues should be widely published about it. Gaslight-and-shadow-themed accounts of the “real” city, the poverty-blighted and vice-infested underbelly, were very popular; I studied those voraciously.
I read Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 from page one right up until it hit the 1850s; it was hugely helpful, and I’m in Wallace and Burrow’s debt. Five Points, by Tyler Anbinder, was also a fantastic source of information, as was City of Eros, by Timothy Gilfoyle.
JKP: Could you imagine yourself living in New York in 1845? How would your life have been different?
LF: If I lived in 1845, I’d suffer from an extreme paucity of career options. Actresses were not necessarily the cream of society, though they were often celebrated, and while a few women were successful published authors, they were much more restricted as to style and content. I’d like to think that I’d have been one of the adventuresses, but possibly that’s wishful thinking and I would be running a boardinghouse or married to a businessman who’d no further expectations of me. One of the aspects of my research that shocked me was how very close to the edge women lived, economically speaking--one disaster could easily ruin your life.
JKP: Do you read other novels set in old New York? Can you recommend some titles to readers interested in such works?
LF: I’ve been a Caleb Carr fan for quite some time, and Stephanie Pintoff and Jed Rubenfeld also write great crime novels about old New York. Doubtless there are countless others, but my reading taste is quite omnivorous.
JKP: The Gods of Gotham has much to do with the creation of the New York City Police Department. What circumstances finally led to that force’s founding, and what had the city done previously to keep down or solve its many crimes?
LF: The ruling political parties had been arguing about the formation of a police force for years, because the system in place simply did not work. A city of 400,000 people requires more than a night watch and a semi-professional group of constables. When crime reached the point that the watchmen (who were laborers expected to stay alert through the night for an extra pittance) were more of a joke than a law-keeping force, a Democratic majority in the Common Council finally managed to form an official police department. No single incident caused the NYPD to be founded, but the city was by that time in dire need of better law enforcement.
JKP: In your novel, you describe widespread distrust of the NYPD at its inception. Why, if the force was designed to quash crime, were even respectable city dwellers suspicious of its value? At what point in the past did the NYPD finally find favor with the general populace?
LF: Well, the NYPD’s detractors were entirely correct, after all--they feared that the police force would be inextricably tied to politics, and supposed that having no officers would be better than having corrupt ones. I don’t mean to suggest that good men didn’t populate the copper star force from day one, but appointments were always made based on cronyism and political affiliation. It’s important to recall that the police were in Tammany pockets for decades, which was one of the things its opponents had been so concerned about--and they were right. The other people loudly declaiming against a “standing army” when the star police formed were the criminals. If you were making a tidy profit by illicit means, it was a good idea to couch your anti-police arguments in the terminology of freedom and patriotism.
As to when the NYPD found favor with the general populace, that still depends on who you’re talking to. One hundred percent of my personal interactions with the NYPD have been positive--they’re brave, intelligent, resourceful people who deeply care about the community. But if you ask someone who lived in the Bronx in the 1970s, or even an Occupy Wall Street protestor, you might get a different answer.
JKP: If I’m not mistaken, only one real-life personage figures large in this new novel: George Washington Matsell. Who was he, and how did The Gods of Gotham benefit from your including him in its plot line?LF: Justice Matsell was the first chief of police, and he was a remarkably modern figure--he studied gang violence, family planning, tenement life, very unsavory topics at the time. The dictionary he wrote in order to teach his copper stars criminal argot is a remarkable cultural record, and one that enormously influenced the writing of Gotham. I don’t care to solve the problem of anachronism in historical fiction by using safe, bland words--thanks to Matsell, I didn’t have to.
The only other historical figure in the novel is young Bill Poole, to whom Timothy takes considerable objection. He would grow up to be better known as Bill the Butcher.
JKP: Your books so far have been notable for their rich atmospherics. How do you get the balance right between larding on period details and moving the story forward at a captivating clip?
LF: It’s important as an author of historical fiction to include only--and I mean only in a ruthless, hardline sense--those period details that your narrator actually cares about. Too often you come across fictional scenes in which protagonists are hurtling across bridges in hot pursuit and then pausing to tell you the history of the architecture.
This is another aspect of storytelling in which actor training in incredibly helpful--if it isn’t in character for my narrator to notice something, I don’t note it. Atmospherics are all well and good, but they have to mean something. There is nothing more irritating than reading a factoid the author included simply so that you’d be aware he or she conducted extensive research. If you can confine the details to those your protagonists care about, issues of pacing won’t plague you nearly as much. Timothy is a close observer who takes considerable ironic pleasure from noting what’s screwed up about his city, like many New Yorkers, so with him I’m able to incorporate a wealth of detail because he’s quite civic-minded.
JKP: Finally, I understand that you’re a serious fan of microbrew beers. You and your husband, Gabriel Lehner, even write a blog--Beer Meets Food--about cuisine and drink combinations. How did this interest come about, and how big a part does it play in your life? Do you have any favorite beers that you think the rest of us should sample?
LF: Yes, by all means, let’s talk about beer! You can’t grow up in the Pacific Northwest and not develop a serious crush on that beverage--my husband’s family even brew their own. It’s the geekiest beer culture outside of Belgium.
Everything from Lagunitas Brewing Company is delicious, but one of my favorites is their New Dogtown Pale; it’s based on a recipe they did for a Frank Zappa-themed series of 22-ouncers that was called Kill Ugly Radio, and they ended up turning it into their standard 12-ounce pale ale. Fantastic. If you’ve never had Pliny the Elder, which is an imperial IPA from Russian River Brewing Company, I’m deeply sorry. And if you’re into stouts, you desperately need The Abyss, an imperial from Deschutes Brewery. It’s out of this world.
Cameron Captures an Owl
Portland, Oregon, author Bill Cameron has won the 2012 Spotted Owl Award for his novel County Line (Tyrus Books). The Spotted Owl is given out annually by the Portland-based fan organization Friends of Mystery to what its members believe was the foremost Pacific Northwest crime novel published during the previous year.
Also nominated for this year’s prize were Heather Sharfeddin (Damaged Goods), Urban Waite (The Terror of Living), Chelsea Cain (The Night Season), Robert Dugoni (Murder One), Dana Stabenow (Though Not Dead), Aaron Elkins (The Worst Thing), Mike Lawson (House Divided), Kate Wilhelm (Heaven Is High), and Gary McKinney (Darkness Bids the Dead Goodbye).
Cameron should certainly be happy today. But there’s good news as well for his fellow Portlander, Johnny Shaw. The Friends of Mystery will give Shaw a special Stan Johnson Outstanding Debut Mystery Award for his 2011 novel, Dove Season. (Stan Johnson [1920-2011] was one of the founding members of the Friends organization.)
Congratulations to both authors.
Also nominated for this year’s prize were Heather Sharfeddin (Damaged Goods), Urban Waite (The Terror of Living), Chelsea Cain (The Night Season), Robert Dugoni (Murder One), Dana Stabenow (Though Not Dead), Aaron Elkins (The Worst Thing), Mike Lawson (House Divided), Kate Wilhelm (Heaven Is High), and Gary McKinney (Darkness Bids the Dead Goodbye).
Cameron should certainly be happy today. But there’s good news as well for his fellow Portlander, Johnny Shaw. The Friends of Mystery will give Shaw a special Stan Johnson Outstanding Debut Mystery Award for his 2011 novel, Dove Season. (Stan Johnson [1920-2011] was one of the founding members of the Friends organization.)
Congratulations to both authors.
Selleck and the Spooks
Double O Section brings the rather surprising news that Henstooth Video, “an obscure company that specializes in obscure movies,” will finally release a DVD edition of the 1984 adventure-espionage movie Lassiter, which starred Tom Selleck as a gentleman jewel thief. As Wikipedia notes, the film was “made to cash in on Selleck’s popularity as the character Thomas Magnum in the show Magnum, P.I. but failed to ignite the box-office on its release.”
Double O’s Tanner offers a bit of the film’s story line:
I’d just moved to Detroit, Michigan, in 1984 to take a magazine job that turned out to be an extremely bad idea. I was, for all intends and purposes, living at a hotel in downtown’s Renaissance Center. That commercial complex included pretty much everything one could want: restaurants, clothing stores, sundry shops, and even a movie theater. With nothing else to do one weekend, I took the elevator down to sample the big-screen fare. Lassiter had recently opened, so I bought a ticket. How bad could it be, I figured.
Well, I enjoyed the picture so much, I decided to stay in my theater seat for a second showing. I wasn’t a huge Magnum fan, but Lassiter’s plot was playful and involved enough to hold my attention, and I loved the period setting. I also fell in love with Jane Seymour, who was only 33 years old when Lassiter was filmed. She had the role of a hard-working but mischievous dancer, fond of Selleck’s Nick Lassiter despite his unpredictable ways.
You can watch a trailer for the movie here.
I don’t think I’ve seen Lassiter once since departing Detroit. Could I be overdue for another viewing? The DVD release is set for April 24.
Double O’s Tanner offers a bit of the film’s story line:
In Lassiter, Selleck plays the suave titular cat burglar, operating in 1930s London. When British and American Intelligence get wind of a major diamond shipment moving through the German embassy, the spooks force Lassiter to pull another job--for them, It Takes a Thief-style. As he plots the heist, he finds himself between two beautiful women: his sweet, long-suffering girlfriend, played by former Bond Girl Jane Seymour, and sexy femme fatale Lauren Hutton. Persuaders! composer Ken Thorne provides the jazz-heavy, period-appropriate soundtrack. ... It’s a really fun movie, and for my money Selleck’s best theatrical effort.Although audiences didn’t line up around the block to watch Lassiter, I went to the see it. Twice in one day, in fact.
I’d just moved to Detroit, Michigan, in 1984 to take a magazine job that turned out to be an extremely bad idea. I was, for all intends and purposes, living at a hotel in downtown’s Renaissance Center. That commercial complex included pretty much everything one could want: restaurants, clothing stores, sundry shops, and even a movie theater. With nothing else to do one weekend, I took the elevator down to sample the big-screen fare. Lassiter had recently opened, so I bought a ticket. How bad could it be, I figured.
Well, I enjoyed the picture so much, I decided to stay in my theater seat for a second showing. I wasn’t a huge Magnum fan, but Lassiter’s plot was playful and involved enough to hold my attention, and I loved the period setting. I also fell in love with Jane Seymour, who was only 33 years old when Lassiter was filmed. She had the role of a hard-working but mischievous dancer, fond of Selleck’s Nick Lassiter despite his unpredictable ways.
You can watch a trailer for the movie here.
I don’t think I’ve seen Lassiter once since departing Detroit. Could I be overdue for another viewing? The DVD release is set for April 24.
Prizes in Your Future
Now that it has finished its contest to choose the best crime-fiction e-book of 2011 (Ray Banks triumphed over Patti Abbott in the concluding round), Spinetingler Magazine has turned its attention back to its larger selection of annual commendations.
Non-fiction editor Brian Lindenmuth reported earlier today that nominees for the 2012 Spinetingler Awards will be announced on Friday, March 30. Readers will then be invited to vote for their favorite contenders in each category throughout April, with the winners of that polling to be declared on Tuesday, May 1.
Meanwhile, it looks as if the page on which you can register additional candidates for nine Spinetingler Awards remains open.
Non-fiction editor Brian Lindenmuth reported earlier today that nominees for the 2012 Spinetingler Awards will be announced on Friday, March 30. Readers will then be invited to vote for their favorite contenders in each category throughout April, with the winners of that polling to be declared on Tuesday, May 1.
Meanwhile, it looks as if the page on which you can register additional candidates for nine Spinetingler Awards remains open.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Pierce’s Picks: “An American Spy”
A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.
An American Spy, by Olen Steinhauer (Minotaur):
Steinhauer’s third Milo Weaver novel (after The Tourist and The Nearest Exit) finds the reluctant espionage operative recovering from nearly mortal wounds and the eradication of the clandestine company for which he worked--the CIA’s fictional, and top secret, Department of Tourism.
Weaver wants nothing more than to return to civilian life and reconnect with his wife and daughter. But then his boss, Tourism director Alan Drummond, disappears and the surmise is made that he’s gone in search of revenge against Xin Zhu, the Chinese spymaster behind the department’s destruction. Milo is recruited to find Drummond and stop him from perpetrating any international disasters. The trick is, Xin Zhu also has a plan for Milo: to turn his loyalties. Caught between adversaries, and meanwhile negotiating the dangers of dealing with a secretive UN agency run by his father, Milo puts not just his own life, but the lives of his family, at risk. Steinhauer’s plot is slow at times; yet his story is brilliantly twisted and filled with captivating personalities, and it makes clear that the spy-fiction genre doesn’t lack for intrigue, even two decades after the Cold War ended.
• Death at the Jesus Hospital, by David Dickinson (Soho Constable)
• The Girl Next Door, by Brad Parks (Minotaur)
• The Gods of Gotham, by Lyndsay Faye (Amy Einhorn/Putnam)
• Helsinki White, by James Thompson (Putnam)
• Phantom, by Jo Nesbø (Harvill Secker)
• Rizzo’s Daughter, by Lou Manfredo (Minotaur)
• Sail of Stone, by Åke Edwardson (Simon & Schuster)
• The Voice of the Spirits, by Xavier-Marie Bonnot (MacLehose Press)
An American Spy, by Olen Steinhauer (Minotaur):
Steinhauer’s third Milo Weaver novel (after The Tourist and The Nearest Exit) finds the reluctant espionage operative recovering from nearly mortal wounds and the eradication of the clandestine company for which he worked--the CIA’s fictional, and top secret, Department of Tourism.
Weaver wants nothing more than to return to civilian life and reconnect with his wife and daughter. But then his boss, Tourism director Alan Drummond, disappears and the surmise is made that he’s gone in search of revenge against Xin Zhu, the Chinese spymaster behind the department’s destruction. Milo is recruited to find Drummond and stop him from perpetrating any international disasters. The trick is, Xin Zhu also has a plan for Milo: to turn his loyalties. Caught between adversaries, and meanwhile negotiating the dangers of dealing with a secretive UN agency run by his father, Milo puts not just his own life, but the lives of his family, at risk. Steinhauer’s plot is slow at times; yet his story is brilliantly twisted and filled with captivating personalities, and it makes clear that the spy-fiction genre doesn’t lack for intrigue, even two decades after the Cold War ended.* * *
This is going to be a busy week as far as book releases go. In addition to An American Spy, the following crime/thriller works will debut:• Death at the Jesus Hospital, by David Dickinson (Soho Constable)
• The Girl Next Door, by Brad Parks (Minotaur)
• The Gods of Gotham, by Lyndsay Faye (Amy Einhorn/Putnam)
• Helsinki White, by James Thompson (Putnam)
• Phantom, by Jo Nesbø (Harvill Secker)
• Rizzo’s Daughter, by Lou Manfredo (Minotaur)
• Sail of Stone, by Åke Edwardson (Simon & Schuster)
• The Voice of the Spirits, by Xavier-Marie Bonnot (MacLehose Press)
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