DC Does Crime

During the Bouchercon mystery conference, held in Baltimore earlier this year, DC Comics announced its new Vertigo Crime graphic novel imprint. The list will include graphic novels by Ian Rankin (his first foray into comics), Gary Phillips, Brian Azzarello, and my own first graphic novel, The Chill (with amazing art work by Mick Bertilorenzi, shown on the left).

The Chill is a thriller centered around the investigation of a series of murders in New York City with a mysterious Druid connection. There’s a lot of action, suspense, graphic violence, and sex--you know, all the good stuff. I don’t want to give too much away, but parts of the story are set in the past and the distant past in Ireland, and there are also some supernatural elements to the tale. While readers familiar with my writing will recognize my style in The Chill, I think I do a lot in this book that I haven’t done before. The best way I can describe the process is that when you write a graphic novel you have to use a different part of your brain. You aren’t just using words; you have to tell your story with images as well. It’s like screenwriting, except you are also the co-director and co-cinematographer.

One objective of Vertigo Crime is to attract crime-fiction enthusiasts to cross over and read graphic novels. I think that some of the best crime-writing being done right now can be found in comics. Writers such as Brian Azzarello, Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka, and Brian Wood have been doing amazing work for years. Recently, a wave of fast-rising mystery authors, including Gregg Hurwitz, Victor Gischler, Duane Swierczynski, and Charlie Huston, have started writing comics too. Big influences for me were graphic novels like John Wagner and Vince Locke’s A History of Violence and Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner’s The Road to Perdition.

So I have another question for all you mystery and crime readers out there. Do you currently read graphic novels? If not, what has turned you off to them in the past, and what would persuade you to start reading them in the future?

Hard at Work Half a Planet Away

I’ve had several of my books optioned for film, and I have written several screenplays. But this week my first movie is being shot in Australia. It’s a short film based on my short story “The Bully” (which is available exclusively on Amazon.com for just 49 cents). I think it’s definitely the best short story I’ve written.

The producer of The Bully is Smoking Gun Productions; the same outfit is developing my first novel, Cold Caller, for the screen. The Bully was written and is being directed by a very talented filmmaker, Shane McNeil, and it has received full production funding from the South Australian Film Corporation (the SAFC is a also financing Cold Caller, but in that case I’m writing the screenplay). I’ve been getting updates all week from the set of The Bully (the cast looks perfect), and so far I’m told the shoot has been going very well. It’s an emotional story, and I hear there are lots of tears on the set.

As a former fledgling playwright, I remember how exciting it was to hear my words come out of actors’ mouths. It definitely makes me wish I was in Adelaide, Australia, this week.

Do Book Trailers Actually Sell Books?

During the past couple of years, I’ve been on the fence about book trailers. I’m all for any new form of promotion and I’m always brainstorming about new ideas, but as with any marketing expenditure it comes down to cost and effectiveness. In other words, if you have a strict marketing budget, is a book trailer the best way to reach potential readers?

When I asked some author friends about book trailers the usual answer was: “Well, they can’t hurt.” But I’m not sure this is true. If a book trailer is poorly made, I think it can have a negative effect, since your trailer might give someone his or her first impression of your book. If that first impression brings up adjectives such as shoddy, amateurish, or dull, then I think you were better off having no trailer at all. The last thing you want your trailer to do is turn someone off who might otherwise have bought your book.

While it’s hard to quantify what sorts of publicity actually work, I think a well-made trailer is a great way to create buzz, especially if it can attract a new audience that you wouldn’t ordinarily draw.

There are a lot of wonderful trailers out there. One of my favorites promotes Alexandra Sokoloff’s The Price.



I like that this trailer is simple, stylish, to the point and, most importantly, it makes you want to read the novel (and everyone should read it, by the way--it’s one of my favorite books of the past few years). The trailer’s fairly brief too, which in my opinion is a big plus. People online usually have short attention spans, so a trailer needs to grip them from the get-go. I know that when I click on a random Web video the first thing I do is look to see how long it is. If it’s longer than a few minutes I immediately become impatient. Unless Martin Scorcese directed it, I don’t think a lot of people are going to stick around to see a four- or five-minute book trailer.

To promote the new-mass market paperback edition of The Follower, I decided I wanted a trailer of around two minutes that would pique readers’ interest about the themes of the book and reinforce the title and cover art. Initially, I “cheaped out” and tried making one on my own. I’m reasonably good with Movie Maker--I can make a mean birthday party video--and I thought, How hard could it be? Well, I discovered that while it’s not difficult to make a book trailer that sucks, it’s very hard to make a good one.

So I hired Michael Gaylin at Aurora Video to put together a trailer for The Follower. I think Michael did a terrific job of capturing the suspense and milieu of the book, and you can see here:



I’m wondering: What are some of your favorite book trailers? (Please tell where to watch them on the Web.) Has any book trailer ever made you want to go out and buy a book? And has a book trailer ever persuaded you to not read a book that you would have ordinarily have picked up? Comments welcome below.

Much Ado About Pub Dates

Hey, and thanks so much to J. Kingston Pierce for letting me blog on The Rap Sheet today. I’m truly honored to be here.

Today happens to be the publication date of the mass-market paperback of my 2007 thriller, The Follower. I’m particularly excited, as this is my first mass-market-size book in the United States--my other paperbacks are available in trade editions. But as far as the pub date itself is concerned ... well, it’s pretty much like any other day, really.

Like New Year’s Eve and prom nights, pub dates have built-in expectations, and they rarely live up to the hype. The perception is that on pub dates, authors have big parties, and hang out with Bryant Gumbel, and are surrounded by mobs of adoring fans. But the fact is, most of the time, nothing much happens on the actual pub date. There are no red carpets or book parties catered by Nobu. Maybe when a new hardcover is released, an author will have a book party or store event on the pub date; but usually due to scheduling considerations these events don’t take place on the actual date of publication. Interviews with members of the press might be conducted on a pub date, but they probably won’t. In fact, books are generally released into stores a week or even two weeks before the official pub date, so the date of publication doesn’t even mark the first appearance of a book. By the time the pub date comes around, a book is already old hat (and some chains may have even have returned the copies they ordered).

But today I vow, Screw it: I’m going to live up to the expectations of my pub date. OK, so I won’t have a huge book party and that bottle of champagne from my agent won’t arrive, but I’ll drop by a few bookstores and “visit my books” (and turn them cover-out, of course). And then tonight I’ll go out to dinner at a nice restaurant and have a few glasses of wine. As authors, we should celebrate the publications of all of our books. Just because pub dates are usually anti-climactic, doesn’t mean we can’t go out and have a good time.

Bullet Points: Back from the Past Edition

In case you haven’t noticed, my participation on this page has been a bit lighter than normal over these last two months. Thank goodness for The Rap Sheet’s other contributors, especially Ali Karim, Linda L. Richards, and June’s guest blogger, Patrick Lennon (Steel Witches), who all took up the slack. Meanwhile, I was off finishing work on a photographic history of San Francisco, which should be out sometime before Christmas (I think). Thanks to that project, I’ve been pretty much living in the past since January, and especially since I began my final push toward the finish line in late May. I barely had time enough to lift my nose from the computer screen, much less read as prodigiously as I would like, or keep up with current affairs. (Had the media not repeated its coverage of escalating gas prices, as well as John “100 Years War” McCain’s floundering campaign and bewildering inconsistencies, I might have been in the dark about all of that until now.) Fortunately, I have moved into the proofing stage on this book and haven’t yet begun composing its companion volume about Seattle. So I have time in between to catch up with friends, housework, and blogging.

A few crime-related things worth noting recently:

• The new Mystery Scene magazine just dropped through my mail slot. It offers plenty of distractions, including Kevin Burton Smith’s interview with 70-year-old writer Lawrence Block (Hit and Run); Jon L. Breen’s retrospective on the work of novelist (not politician) Thomas B. Dewey, who came up with one of the all-time best titles for a private eye novel, The Girl with the Sweet Plump Knees (1963); a catching-up piece on John R. Maxim (Bannerman’s Ghosts); and Ron Miller’s review of two UK series making their way back to America’s PBS-TV this month: Inspector Lewis and Foyle’s War. Oh, and elsewhere in the issue, novelist James O. Born interviews his “inspiration,” cop-turned-author Joseph Wambaugh. Great bathroom reading, to be sure.

• ThugLit is back, this time with added ... er, punch. Offerings from the June-July edition include short stories by Keith Gilman (“Pay to Pray”), L.V. Rautenbaumgrabner (“The Baby-Smooth Skin of the Bank Manager and His Mistress”), Kim Cushman (“Simeon”), and Andy Turner (“Food in Search of a Country Song”). The issue’s full contents can be found here.

• The latest issue of Genre Flash, focusing on new crime novels and true-crime books being released in Australia, has just been released. (Hat tip to Crime Down Under.)

• Guest blogger and second-novelist Michelle Gagnon (Bone Yard) writes in the BookBitchBlog about the unexpected value of e-book readers. “I quickly became hooked,” she explains. “I didn’t expect to--I’m one of those people who wax eloquent over the feel of a book in my hands, the whisper of pages turning, blah blah blah ... But with a few months of intensive travel facing me as I braced for my next book tour, I decided to download some books. I was only going to use it for travel, I was still in control. I swear, I could stop any time I wanted. After taking it on a vacation to Mexico, I was hooked. I read a book a day, and never had to deliberate over the weight in my suitcase, or whether or not I should shed paperbacks en route like some strange molting creature. What I discovered is that this format suited my reading habits perfectly.” Read her whole post here.

• Kerrie Smith, proprietress of the Mysteries in Paradise blog, is the latest host of that traveling extravaganza known as the Carnival of the Criminal Minds. She takes an unconventional approach, noting some of her favorite genre reads (from the last three years!), the longlist of nominees for the 2008 Ned Kelly Awards, and a rather short list of Australian crime-fiction-related blogs. The Carnival’s next stop: Damien Gray’s Crime Down Under at the start of August. (So, when did this progressive blog feature go from being a fortnightly offering to a monthly one?)

• Shamus Award nominee Daniel Judson (The Darkest Place, The Water’s Edge) is guest blogging this week at St. Martin’s Minotaur’s Moments in Crime site. You’ll find his contributions here.

• Timed to the release of his new thriller, Deadline, Simon Kernick is July’s Author of the Month in CrimeSquad. Over the course of a short interview, he talks about chairing the 2008 Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, the boost he received from British TV co-hosts Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan (who chose his last novel, Relentless, as one of their summer reads for 2007), and his “favorite plot twist of all time,” from Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (“To come up with a twist like that in 1926, when that kind of literary sleight of hand was still in its infancy, was sheer genius.”)

• Although Roger Ackroyd doesn’t appear on Brian Skupin’s list of “five of the best mind-blowers ever written,” he does feature another Agatha Christie tale. “What’s a mind-blower?” Skupin muses in his introduction. “You might think it’s a surprise ending, but not necessarily. With your typical surprise ending, if you know in advance it’s going to be a surprise, then you can usually figure out what the surprise is going to be. Although some of the 5 short stories below do have surprises, knowing that won’t help you. And a couple of them don’t exactly have a surprise ending so much as an upsetting of all your expectations, leaving you flailing your arms with nothing to hold on to at the end.” You’ll find his five selections here.

• If ever there was a book jacket that screamed “summer reading pleasures,” it’s the one on the right. Too bad, then, that Linda Gerber’s Death by Bikini is a young adult novel.

• Actor Jeff Goldblum, who I so enjoyed in the too-short-lived NBC-TV series Raines, has reportedly been signed to replace Chris Noth on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Adding to the eccentric appeal of Vincent D’Onofrio, Goldblum should make L&O: CI even more watchable, beginning in the fall.

• In other TV news: The Season 5 DVD set of Mission: Impossible--the year that both Sam Elliott and the lovely Lesley Ann Warren appeared on the show--is set to be released on October 7. A week later, stores should have in hand the initial season of Don Johnson’s series Nash Bridges. Meanwhile, Sharon Gless--former Cagney & Lacey star, and returning to small screens in next week’s season premiere of the USA Network’s spy spoof, Burn Notice--is interviewed by TV Squad.

• Since I’ve been writing about old San Francisco, it should come as no surprise that I was drawn to Anthony Flacco’s second novel, The Hidden Man, which happens to be set in that same city in 1915. Again featuring Randall Blackburn and his two adopted children (all introduced in 2007’s The Last Nightingale), the story this time is backdropped by San Francisco’s grandiose Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Flacco talks more about his tale in an interview with Poe’s Deadly Daughters. I found his explanation of why he’d given one of his characters Alzheimer’s disease to be of special interest. The full exchange can be found here.

• A (very) brief history of The Shadow, popularized by Walter Gibson in the 1930s and ’40s. (Hat tip to Bill Crider.)

• Author Jason Starr reports that his 2000 novel, Fake I.D.--previously published only in the UK--will be made available next year in Hard Case Crime paperback form.

• Finally, Salon movie critic Andrew O’Hehir admits he was “engrossed” by the French thriller Ne le dis à personne, adapted from Harlan Coben’s Tell No One (2001), and finally being released across the United States this month. Read his review here. And you can watch a brief trailer by clicking here.

Bruen and Starr Go “Bust”

Anthony Rainone’s review of Bust, the new crime-fiction collaboration between acclaimed Irish novelist Ken Bruen and New York writer Jason Starr, was posted this morning in January Magazine. You’ll find it here. “I have to state immediately,” Rainone remarks in his excellent critique, “that this book is laughable--literally. Bust is a black-comedy caper of the darkest and raunchiest order, and the comedic team of Bruen and Starr is one to be reckoned with, along with the historic likes of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, or perhaps Cheech Marin and Thomas Chong. These two authors will have readers laughing at the vilest of moments, making those readers concerned for their own sanity, if not the authors’. Don’t dismiss Bust as not having bona fide mystery aspirations, however; there are several vicious murders in these pages, as well as a heaping helping of blackmail intrigue, a love interest and a pair of plodding detectives who would feel right at home in the meatiest of crime-fiction offerings.”