Starr of the Show

Continuing what we consider to be an impressive run of guest bloggers, we welcome New York crime-fictionist Jason Starr to The Rap Sheet today. In case you don’t know (and how could you not?), he’s the Barry and Anthony award-winning author of nine novels, including Cold Caller (1997), Nothing Personal (1998), Lights Out (2006), and a trio of Hard Case Crime paperbacks he penned with notable Irish writer Ken Bruen: Bust (2006), Slide (2007), and The Max (2008). Starr’s latest thriller, The Follower, is now available in a new mass-market paperback edition at bookstores everywhere.

Commenting on The Follower, acclaimed wordsmith Joseph Finder wrote that it “puts Starr up there with some of the greats of psychological suspense--Patricia Highsmith, Ira Levin, Ruth Rendell, Peter Abrahams.” Publishers Weekly had this to say:

Murder stalks a love triangle in New York City in Starr’s low-key thriller, his most crowd-pleasing novel to date. Katie Porter believes her encounter at the health club with Peter Wells is total chance. What she doesn’t know is that Peter once dated her sister back in her hometown and has elaborate plans to marry her, after waiting a couple of weeks for the perfect romantic moment to pop the question. And she doesn’t have a clue that her current boyfriend, Andy Barnett, is ready to dump her. A twenty-three-year-old single guy in Manhattan, Andy is a male animal on the prowl, checking out all the action: The clothes were loose, but it looked like she had a nice body--thin anyway, which was all that really mattered. Starr (Lights Out) is a master at capturing the minute-by-minute lives of vacuous yuppies, and he absolutely shines with these characters. When Peter decides he needs to eliminate the competition, this Looking for Ms. Goodbar suddenly becomes a very funny, dark social satire.

And January Magazine contributing editor Anthony Rainone wrote in his own review of the book:

Every principal character in this novel endures some form of transformation, with some ending up more scarred or irreparably damaged than others. The Follower provides a denouement that is a satisfactory conclusion to the tale, yet that also causes ripples likely to emanate for years to come. As always, Starr leaves the reader feeling thoroughly entertained, but at the same time creeped-out.

Starr lets us know that people who visit his Web site and sign up for his newsletter become eligible to win a $50 Amazon gift certificate, as well as other exciting prizes. Newsletter subscribers will also be in the running to win free advance copies of Starr’s next thriller from St. Martin’s Press, Panic Attack, which goes on sale next August.

We’re delighted to have Jason Starr writing on this page today. And we hope you will be, too. Please feel free to comment on his posts as the day rolls along. Starr has promised to keep track of any such comments, and respond as he finds time.

Burke’s Law and Order

Later today, we will welcome to The Rap Sheet the eighth and latest in our series of occasional guest bloggers, Irish writer Declan Burke.

Most readers of this page probably already know Burke from his own excellent Weblog, Crime Always Pays, which for almost a year and a half now has been chattering about and championing Irish crime fiction in all of its colorful manifestations. In addition, Burke is the author of Eight-ball Boogie, a more-or-less private eye novel from 2003, and The Big O, a humorous crime caper that was released in Ireland last year and numbered among January Magazine’s favorite crime novels of 2007. The Big O is finally being made available in the States as of next Monday, September 22. Of that second book, Kirkus Reviews opined: “Imagine Donald Westlake and his alter ego Richard Stark moving to Ireland and collaborating on a screwball noir, and you have some idea of Burke’s accomplishment.” A fine clip, indeed.

Readers looking for more Burke should know that he spent part of this last summer posting original installments on the Web of a novel called A Gonzo Noir, which he says he “wrote about five years ago” and a few months ago “started messing around with” again. “Why am I posting it on a blog?” he asked rhetorically on his blog in May. “Well, because I can. And because I’m interested to see what kind of reaction this kind of post might generate, as well as the more specific kind of feedback that may or may not come via the comment box or e-mail. Any and all bouquets, brickbats, thoughts, and impressions welcome.” Mostly he received plaudits for the story’s text--and cautions around the idea of publishing anything free of charge on the Internet.

According to a brief biographical sketch at Books ’n’ Bytes, Burke was “born in Sligo [Ireland] in 1969. During the 1980s he worked as a labourer, barman, and factory hand.” Since graduating in English Literature and Media from the University of Ulster at Coleraine in 1994 he has worked as a freelance writer, reviewer, and editor, and is currently contributing to the Sunday [Irish] Times, the Evening Herald, the Sunday Business Post, and The Last Word on Today FM. Nowadays, Burke resides in Wicklow with his wife, Aileen, and their new, much-written-about little girl, Lily.

If fatherhood and promotional touring don’t keep him busy enough (he’s even scheduled to appear next month at Bouchercon in Baltimore), Burke has also been developing a non-fiction book of late that he described in a recent e-mail note as “a narrative of Irish crime writing.”

Basically, the notion is this--given the recent explosion in Irish crime fiction, I wondered if there might be any interest in putting together a book offering perspectives on the whys and wherefores of contemporary Irish crime writing. It would consist of a series of essays written by the Irish crime writers themselves, with each author taking a chapter according to his or her specialty and/or interest. Aimed at a general reading audience, it would decidedly not be an academic tome, but an entertaining and informative read.

The writers who have to date confirmed they will be taking part are: John Connolly, Colin Bateman, Declan Hughes, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Gene Kerrigan, Gerard Donovan, Brian McGilloway, Neville Thompson, Adrian McKinty, Gerard Brennan, and yours truly, with the latter trio taking on the job of compiling/editing.

Last week the project went forward to be assessed for funding by the Irish Arts Council, and an Irish publisher has already expressed a strong interest in publishing it.

Since he’s been thinking a lot in recent days about the evolution of Irish crime fiction, Declan Burke has decided to spend his weeklong guest spot here at The Rap Sheet commenting on the post-1990 burgeoning of crime and mystery stories in his native land, the uses of humor in Irish crime fiction, the ambiguous separation between literary and genre fiction, and other related subjects. We hope that you will enjoy his contributions, and will share with him your comments on his posts and his novels.

READ MORE: ““Ya Wanna Do It Here or Down the Station, Punk?” #2,012: Declan Burke” (The Rap Sheet); “An Interview--Declan Burke,” by Gerard Brennan (Crime Scene NI).

Lennon on the Loose

Today, The Rap Sheet offers up a new guest blogger. He’s Patrick Lennon, British author of the Corn Dolls (2006) and Steel Witches (2008), both of which star a determined but troubled Cambridge sleuth named Tom Fletcher, described rather simply in the latter work as the “holder of a police bravery medal. Thirty-three years of age. Height, six foot two. Brown hair, cut straight across the forehead. Always stubble on his chin.” Regardless of his hirsute inelegance, Fletcher may have a fine future ahead of him. In remarking on Steel Witches, the London Times’ Peter Miller wrote, “this ... richly imaginative follow-up to Lennon’s debut novel ... could just possibly turn Tom Fletcher into another Morse.”

If only Lennon can be so lucky.

Born in 1964, the author grew up in Cambridge, England, but has lived at various times in Thailand, Italy, France, and Mexico. Prior to embarking on the potentially less lucrative enterprise of composing fiction, Lennon is said to have labored in the employ of multinational corporations “in international roles” (which might explain why his passport is so well worn). He still runs his own business, separate from writing, which he characterizes as “a language services agency in the London area which provides training, translation, and interpreting in European languages.”

Lennon’s Corn Dolls was a tough little nut of a tale that involved a body found in a shredding machine, long-ago shipments of Soviet tractors, and secrets from the past visiting harm upon the present. And it was all set against the backdrop of England’s distinctive Fenland (familiar territory to those of us who’ve also enjoyed the work of Jim Kelly, author of The Water Clock and The Skeleton Man). “If you like books set out in the back of beyond with more than an echo of The Wicker Man, you’ll snap up Corn Dolls in an instant,” Sharon Wheeler wrote at Reviewing the Evidence. Corn Dolls features on the longlist of nominees for the 2008 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award.

Following on that debut, Steel Witches finds former Detective Inspector Tom Fletcher having left the police and now working as a private detective in Cambridge. He’s endeavoring to rack up some well-paying corporate assignments, but is instead drawn into the murder of an American armaments company executive--a case that also involves an alleged female escort who may be a bit too smart for her own good, a killer on a mission, hauntingly strange women painted on the noses of World War II bombers, and more than a few questions surrounding Fletcher’s parents. Oh, and I mustn’t fail to mention the subplot involving old English witch trials.

“The story is set in the winter,” explains Amanda C.M. Gilles at Euro Crime, “and the weather is awful most of the time. At the start of the book it is bitterly cold and there are ice crystals everywhere. Then, as the tension increases, so does the amount of precipitation and the thrilling climax of the story is set amidst a terrifyingly violent storm. This ‘Hardy-esque’ link between atmospheric conditions and the progression of the story brilliantly enhances the tension in the book as it races towards its end.”

In an online interview, Lennon says that Corn Dolls and Steel Witches are the first two installments of a four-book series, “taking Fletcher through 10 years in his life. In the next book, number three, he seems to have found the peaceful home he’s always wanted. The problem is, there’s an army barracks just up the road, and they start taking an interest in him. The wrong kind of interest.”

Naturally. This is crime fiction, after all.

A fan of Elmore Leonard, Dennis Lehane, Walter Mosley, and J.G. Ballard, Patrick Lennon today begins a weeklong stint here at The Rap Sheet. Over the next few days, he will be writing about his own work and influences, as well as the genre as a whole. Please join us in welcoming him to this page.

Phillips Signs On

Tomorrow we will have the distinct pleasure of welcoming to The Rap Sheet our latest guest blogger, and one of the nicest guys we know, Los Angeles crime novelist and editor Gary Phillips.

Our appreciation for Phillips goes all the way back to his first published novel, the racial-strife-tinged Violent Spring (1994), which introduced his series private eye, doughnut-loving Ivan Monk. And we have followed his career since, through the Monk books (ending, so far, with the collection Monkology [2004]); his literary dalliance with showgirl-turned-mob courier Martha Chainey in High Hand (2000) and Shooter’s Point (2001); his standalone novels, among them The Jook (1999) and Bangers (2003); his short-story contributions to anthologies such as Los Angeles Noir (2007), Shades of Black (2004), Murder on Route 66 (1999), Kolchak: The Night Stalker Casebook (2007), and The Darker Mask (due out in August of this year); and of course his labors on graphic novels such as 2003’s Shot Callerz and 2004’s Angeltown. Phillips also edited the ... well, addictive anthology The Cocaine Chronicles (2005) and--just in time to capitalize on the mounting hoopla over this year’s U.S. presidential contest--put together the forthcoming Politics Noir: Dark Tales from the Corridors of Power, which features tales from Ken Bruen, John Shannon, Twist Phelan, Robert Greer, Pete Hautman, and others. Oh, and he writes for monthly Mystery Scene magazine.

Most recently, for the Web site of The Nation magazine, he’s inaugurated a politics-oriented crime serial called Citizen Kang, which should run through the end of the 2008 election cycle. Episode 5 of Citizen Kang debuted earlier this week, with new installments due every Monday. (Keep up with them here.)

Phillips has promised to stick around these parts for two or three days, commenting on the challenges of writing a serial novel, the real-life machinations of political campaigning, and whether series characters such as Monk and Chainey continue to live in their creator’s imagination, even if they aren’t currently appearing in print. We hope he will also bring us up to date on future plans for Ivan Monk; we distinctly remember him mentioning the possibility of another Monk novel, City of Fortune.

Please join us in welcoming Gary Phillips to this page. And we hope you will enjoy his participation here. Feel free to add comments to his coming posts, and maybe he’ll have time enough to answer some reader questions along the way.

Break Out the Good China. Royalty’s Coming

This Friday--that’s tomorrow, for all of you who are still trying to recover a sense of time after the recent holiday rush--we’ll have the pleasure of welcoming to The Rap Sheet Laurie R. King, author of the new historical thriller Touchstone. She’ll be guest-blogging here the whole day long.

According to her online biography, “King was born in Northern California, the third generation in her family native to the San Francisco area. She spent her childhood reading her way through libraries like a termite through balsa, and her middle years raising children, traveling the world, and studying theology, earning a B.A. degree in comparative religion and an M.A. in Old Testament Theology. She now lives a genteel life of crime, back again in Northern California.”

King’s first novel, the Edgar Award-winning A Grave Talent (1993), introduced crime-fiction readers to Kate Martinelli, the lesbian San Francisco homicide inspector who has since headlined four more books, the latest of those being 2006’s The Art of Detection. King may be better known, however, for her series featuring Mary Russell, the resourceful younger woman and scholar who, in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (1994), met an aging Sherlock Holmes in Sussex in the early 20th century, learned his methods, and eventually married him--at least in King’s fiction.

On top of those popular series installments, the 55-year-old King has penned a handful of standalone novels, including A Darker Place (1999) and Keeping Watch (2003). Of her latest, Touchstone (which came out just before the new year began, but carries a 2008 publication date), critic Dick Adler wrote in January Magazine:

Everything Laurie R. King writes is first-class, from her modern, totally feminist and often surprisingly touching Kate Martinelli mysteries to her Mary Russell thrillers, which manage to carry on with (and improve upon) Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of Sherlock Holmes and give the Great Detective a new life. King’s new novel, Touchstone, is one of the best books of any kind published in 2007--a terrific combination and culmination of her work so far.

During her time at The Rap Sheet tomorrow, King will begin by offering her thoughts on the unexpected effects a writer can have on readers, and take off from there. You’re welcome to join in the fun, as the author says she will respond to at least some questions addressed to her in the Comments sections of her posts.

Stay tuned.

(Author photograph by Seth Affoumado.)

Coggins Takes to the Field

This week we have the pleasure of welcoming San Francisco novelist Mark Coggins, the creator of private eye August Riordan, as The Rap Sheet’s latest guest blogger. He follows in the footsteps of James Ellroy, Megan Abbott, and R.N. “Roger” Morris. That’s rather daunting company, but we have faith that Coggins won’t disappoint.

According to his online bio, Coggins was born in New Mexico in 1957, earned a couple of degrees from California’s Stanford University, went on to work for “a number of Silicon Valley computer and venture capital firms,” and introduced Riordan in a short story (“There’s No Such Thing as Private Eyes”) published in the short-lived, 1980s paperback series The New Black Mask. The first book-length appearance of Coggins’ detective and jazz bass player was in The Immortal Game (1999). Riordan has since taken the lead in Vulture Capital (2002) and last year’s enjoyable Candy from Strangers. He’s also the protagonist in Runoff, which is being released this month by Bleak House Books. Describing the plot of Runoff, Coggins writes at his Web site:

“How much does it cost to fix an election?”

August Riordan--private investigator, jazz bass player, smart ass with a foolish heart--is going to find out. He’s been hired by Leonora Lee, the all-powerful “Dragon Lady” of San Francisco’s Chinatown, to investigate the results of the city’s recent mayoral election. It seems the Dragon Lady’s candidate failed to even carry the Chinese precincts, and she’s convinced that someone must have rigged the outcome by hacking the city’s newly installed touch-screen voting machines.

A runoff between the two remaining candidates is days away, but it takes Riordan mere hours to find the Director of Elections dead in his office. A visit to the offices of Columbia Voting Systems--the suppliers of the city’s touch-screen machines--results in another corpse. A wide range of political interests share a stake in the election, so Riordan’s got plenty of suspects.

But when the Dragon Lady’s beautiful daughter is attacked after giving Riordan a goodnight kiss, it starts to get personal. Soon, Riordan is in a race not only against the runoff deadline, but against powerful political movers and shakers, Chinatown gang members, and crazed anarchists, with only his techno-savvy, cross-dressing friend Chris to help.

With the United States heading into what’s likely to be a course-altering presidential race, and with questions having been raised all over the country about the accuracy of electronic voting machines and their potential in voting fraud schemes, Runoff seems particularly timely. Publishers Weekly says of this new novel: “Firmly entrenched in the classic private eye mold of Hammett and Chandler, Coggins exposes the dark underbelly of American politics, but doesn’t stoop to political correctness or mindless carnage.”

Such comparisons with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler must warm Coggins’ heart, for he’s made clear in his blog that he’s fond of, and indebted to both authors. August Riordan has an office in downtown San Francisco’s Flood Building, for instance, because that’s where Hammett worked when he was with the Pinkerton Detective Agency. And Coggins wrote a year ago about making a pilgrimage to Chandler’s old home and ill-kept gravestone in the San Diego area. On his Web site, the author offers a tour of Hammett’s onetime apartment on Post Street, in San Francisco--the same place where P.I. Sam Spade evidently lived in The Maltese Falcon. And this last August, Coggins published a fascinating analysis of Chandler’s revisions to his Edgar-winning 1953 novel, The Long Goodbye.

We’re hoping Mark Coggins will address his interest in both of those crime-fiction heavyweights--and maybe others--during his time here at The Rap Sheet, and that he’ll share with us as well his ruminations about the current place of private eyes in fiction, the difficult balancing act of incorporating politics into mysteries, and his interest in technology-based tales of law breaking. We know already that he’s going to write about the now largely forgotten periodical that bought his first short story, The New Black Mask.

Fortunately, he’ll have plenty of time to explore these subjects. While our guest bloggers in the past have posted for only one day or one week, Coggins will be with us for the whole month. His initial piece will appear on this page later this week.

Welcome aboard, Mark.

(Author photograph by Linda Zhou, Coggins’ wife.)

R.N. Morris Makes His Mark

Today The Rap Sheet is delighted to welcome its third “guest blogger,” following James Ellroy and Megan Abbott. He’s British author Roger Morris, or “R.N. Morris,” as his byline appears on A Gentle Axe, his new novel, set in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1866 and starring none other than detective Porfiry Petrovich from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic novel Crime and Punishment).

Morris was born in Manchester, England, in 1960 and now resides in North London with his wife and two young children. He peddled his first short story to a magazine for teenage girls while he was still a student at Cambridge University, where he read Classics. He went on to make his living as a freelance copywriter, composing text for British Airways, Penguin Books, The Guardian, and even Lexus automobiles. Yet he continued to pen fiction as well, although it was only occasionally published. His story The Devil’s Drum was turned into a one-act opera, which was performed at the Purcell Room in London’s South Bank neighborhood. Another of his tales, Revenants, saw print in the form of a comic book. His novel Taking Comfort, a semi-thriller about a corporate cog, observer, and collector of mementoes from the disasters he witnesses, was published in 2006 (by Macmillan New Writing) under the byline “Roger Morris.”

As we’ve explained before on this page, A Gentle Axe (retitled The Gentle Axe in Britain) sends investigating magistrate Porfiry Petrovich out to untangle the apparent murder-suicide of a burly groundskeeper and a dwarf translator, who’ve been found in a St. Petersburg park by a light-fingered former prostitute. It doesn’t take long for the Columbo-ish sleuth to link these horrors to a dreary whorehouse, a pornography ring, and a starving lawyer-wannabe--and incite resistance from his superiors. Morris’ delving into the squalid corners of tsarist Russia, as much as his quirky players, makes this novel a thoroughly absorbing read.

Roger Morris’ first post will appear here presently. We hope he’ll follow that over the next few days with remarks about the expanding world of historical fiction, his encounters with some of the other crime writers who live near him in London, his future novel-writing projects, and his impressions of the master from whom he has so artfully “stolen” his protagonist, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.

Feel free, as we go along, to weigh in on the topics Morris brings up or to ask him questions in the Comments section of each new post.

(Author photograph by Simon Nicholls.)

Megan Abbott’s on the Case

Three months ago, we welcomed our first “guest blogger” to The Rap Sheet, James Ellroy. Tomorrow, our talented crew of contributors will be joined by Megan Abbott, the New York City author of The Song Is You, released this month by Simon & Schuster. It’s the second novel from Abbott, following Die a Little (2005), which earned Edgar, Anthony, and Barry award nominations last year.

The Song Is You spins off from a real-life--and still-unsolved--disappearance, that of Jean Spangler, an attractive dancer, model, and sometime actress who vanished in Los Angeles, California. On October 7, 1949, she left her 5-year-old daughter with her sister-in-law and headed off, she said, to talk with her ex-husband about child-support payments and then appear in a nighttime movie-lot shoot. “Wish me luck,” she told her sister-in-law. She was never seen again. However, Spangler’s purse did turn up two days later, discarded near the entrance to L.A.’s expansive Griffith Park, with its strap broken and a cryptic note inside. What followed was “one of the biggest manhunts in LAPD history,” according to an article in Palm Springs Life magazine. Rumors of a new romance, a botched abortion, and Spangler’s association with known criminals all seemed promising, but led police down blind alleys and to no good leads in the case. Three weeks into the investigation, cops said they’d reached a dead end. “The only thing we’ve been able to find out,” one detective confessed, “is that this girl really got around.” In the months that followed, law-enforcement personal got around some themselves, chasing supposed sightings of Spangler all over the American Southwest and Mexico, yet none of them amounted to much. Almost 60 years later, the Jean Spangler case remains open.

It also remains fertile ground for fictionalizing, especially because Spangler’s disappearance came a mere two years after the more notorious slaying, in L.A., of another wannabe starlet, Elizabeth Short, aka “the Black Dahlia.” (Abbott remarked on that timing in a Rap Sheet post from last September. Click here to read her comments.) In The Song Is You, the author introduces us into the company of Gil “Hop” Hopkins, a young and rakish movie-mag reporter turned film studio publicity man, whose guilt at concealing evidence of what happened to Spangler on the last night she was seen alive drives him, first, to ensure that the information remains secret, and then, to figure out for himself whatever became of the dark-haired, fetching Jean. Abbott posits her own complicated solution to this mystery, but not before leading readers through a funhouse of flaky Hollywood comers, sexual predators, and grimy L.A. nightspots that never made it into any tourism brochures.

Atmospheric, filled with period slang, and harrowing in its conclusions, The Song Is You confirms Abbott’s skill at penning noirish potboilers with literary aspirations. And it’s likely not only to send readers back to buy Die a Little, but also to look forward to Abbott’s third novel, Queenpin, “a feminine twist on a classic story of underworld seduction,” due out from Simon & Schuster in June.

I’m most pleased to welcome Megan Abbott to The Rap Sheet this week. I hope that during her time in our midst, she’ll share some of her thoughts on noir fiction, white men as hard-boiled fictional protagonists (the subject of her first, non-fiction book, The Street Was Mine [2002]), the Spangler investigation, the state of modern crime fiction, and much more.

Wish her luck.

The “Demon Dog” Has His Day

If all goes as planned tomorrow, The Rap Sheet will welcome its first-ever “guest blogger,” noted American crime novelist James Ellroy. As you might expect, I’m quite pumped at this turn of events. But I also feel more than a bit intimidated; after all, once you’ve had Ellroy guest-blogging for you, what do you do for an encore?

I believe my first experience with Ellroy’s storytelling came in the mid-1980s, when I snatched up a paperback copy of his debut novel, Brown’s Requiem (1981). It told the tale of an alcoholic ex-Los Angeles cop turned repo man, whose job tailing the sister of a fat caddy introduced him into a convoluted plot involving hit men, incest, murder, corruption, arson, and the darker side of golf. It wasn’t long after that that I plunked down cash enough for a hardcover edition of The Black Dahlia (1987), Ellroy’s “breakout book,” in which the compelling story of two 1940s L.A. cops--rivals for the heart of a striking but damaged young woman--is interwoven with the real-life slaying of Elizabeth Short, a 22-year-old actress-wannabe whose mutilated corpse was found in a vacant lot in January 1947. (The case was never officially solved.) Brimming with duplicity, lust, obsession, and rich, street-slangy dialogue, Dahlia was unlike anything I had read before, and led me to consume the subsequent three installments in Ellroy’s “L.A. Quartet”: The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz. I haven’t been quite as devoted an Ellroy reader since then, though I did enjoy The Cold Six Thousand (2001) as well as the columns he used to pen for GQ magazine.

It is with great pleasure that I welcome James Ellroy into The Rap Sheet. I hope he finds his stay here enjoyable and educational, and I hope readers of this blog will find his thoughts insightful.

(Photograph by Marion Ettlinger)