• With the presentation of this year’s Edgar Awards coming tomorrow night, CrimeReads invited more than 20 nominees to a roundtable discussion of the state of mystery and crime fiction. UPDATE: Part II of this skull session can now be enjoyed here.
• In his blog, ‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?,’ Martin Edwards reflects back on his two-year stint as the head of Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association. “As it turns out,” he writes, “I’m the only person who has served as CWA Chair and Detection Club President at the same time, and I also became the longest-serving Chair of the CWA since our founder, John Creasey, back in the 1950s. So it’s definitely time to step aside and get some more writing done. But I’m going to continue to be involved with the CWA, not least as anthologist and archivist. And I’m very glad to belong to such a thriving and forward-looking organisation.” Author Linda Stratmann has taken over as CWA chair.
• We’re very sorry to hear that Detroit-area writer Patricia “Patti” Abbott has finally lost her husband of 52 years, Dr. Philip Abbott, to colon cancer. She wrote this brief note last evening in her blog: “Died today at 4:00. He
reached for my hand, I gave it to him, he died.” Our heartfelt best wishes go out to Patti and her family (including author Megan Abbott) at this difficult time. UPDATE: Patti has more thoughts to offer about Phil and their family here and here.
• Finally, the pseudonymous Nathan Blackwell, author of The Sound of Her Voice (Orion), is Crime Watch blogger Craig Sisterson’s 210th interviewee in his “9mm” series. Read the Q&A here.
Showing posts with label Patricia Abbott. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Patricia Abbott. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 24, 2019
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
Fair Play Can Be Fatal
This week marks the welcome return of Monkey Justice and Other Stories, a collection of short fiction by Michigan author Patricia Abbott. Originally released in 2011 by Snubnose Press, 
an e-book imprint launched by the now late, lamented Spinetingler Magazine, Monkey Justice has been reissued in both paperback and Kindle formats by Down & Out Books, with a new cover design by J.T. Lindroos.
I’m a big fan of Patti Abbott, who has contributed a couple of essays to The Rap Sheet over time (see here and here), and who I interviewed when her first novel, Concrete Angel, saw printed back in 2015. I also coordinated with her for many years on the Friday “forgotten books” series. Yet for some reason, I never read Monkey Justice when it first appeared, so it’s nice to have a second chance at poring over the contents.
As far as I can tell, all 23 of the original stories are contained in this new edition. It’s a very mixed set, the pieces focusing on people who live under great stresses, and showcasing how they make decisions that will change their lives—not always for the better. For instance, the opening yarn, “Like a Hawk Rising,” gives us a burglar who has been laid up with a badly broken leg, and in his boredom has taken to peeping on the kid in the suburban house next door—a boy with a serially abusive father and a peculiar menagerie of caged animals. In “The Instrument of Their Desire,” the year is 1931, and a brother has engineered a scheme to save the family home—one that necessitates him pimping out his sister. “My Hero” finds Superman intervening in a marital dispute, with unexpected consequences. In “The Tortoise and the Tortoise,” which Abbott explains was inspired by an episode involving her own father, a man in a nursing home isn’t happy that the arrival of a priest in the room next door has caused his status in the place to slip. And Abbott wrote in her blog years ago about how this book’s title story, “Monkey Justice,” came into being:
an e-book imprint launched by the now late, lamented Spinetingler Magazine, Monkey Justice has been reissued in both paperback and Kindle formats by Down & Out Books, with a new cover design by J.T. Lindroos.I’m a big fan of Patti Abbott, who has contributed a couple of essays to The Rap Sheet over time (see here and here), and who I interviewed when her first novel, Concrete Angel, saw printed back in 2015. I also coordinated with her for many years on the Friday “forgotten books” series. Yet for some reason, I never read Monkey Justice when it first appeared, so it’s nice to have a second chance at poring over the contents.
As far as I can tell, all 23 of the original stories are contained in this new edition. It’s a very mixed set, the pieces focusing on people who live under great stresses, and showcasing how they make decisions that will change their lives—not always for the better. For instance, the opening yarn, “Like a Hawk Rising,” gives us a burglar who has been laid up with a badly broken leg, and in his boredom has taken to peeping on the kid in the suburban house next door—a boy with a serially abusive father and a peculiar menagerie of caged animals. In “The Instrument of Their Desire,” the year is 1931, and a brother has engineered a scheme to save the family home—one that necessitates him pimping out his sister. “My Hero” finds Superman intervening in a marital dispute, with unexpected consequences. In “The Tortoise and the Tortoise,” which Abbott explains was inspired by an episode involving her own father, a man in a nursing home isn’t happy that the arrival of a priest in the room next door has caused his status in the place to slip. And Abbott wrote in her blog years ago about how this book’s title story, “Monkey Justice,” came into being:
Its genesis is easy to remember. I overheard the entire story on a bus ride into work [in Detroit]. No kidding. Well, not the part about the protagonist working with monkeys, but the rest of it.Abbott (the mother of fellow writer Megan Abbott) has penned more than 125 short stories, and in 2008 won the Derringer Award for one of them, “My Hero,” which features in Monkey Justice. Concrete Angel was nominated for an Anthony and Macavity award, and her subsequent novel, Shot in Detroit (2016), was in the running for both an Edgar Award and an Anthony Award. All of this should make clear that Abbott has had the opportunity to polish her storytelling style. The stories here aren’t always easily classified as crime fiction, and some of the choices their players make in pursuit of justice may cause you to shake your head with undue force. But they’re just as likely to launch you on the hunt for more of this author’s work.
Who could resist using a story about a man's wife and mistress giving birth to his daughters on the same day? The guy on the bus becomes Gene, the beta male, in my story. I even watched him de-bus at the [Michigan] Science Center.
He will never know that his story became my story and the title of this collection.
It was almost too easy to write it until I thought to insert the part about monkey behavior. ... Spending a week or two looking over recent capuchin monkey experiments was a treat. And those four anthropology courses finally paid off.
Monday, March 05, 2018
The Story Behind the Story: “I Bring Sorrow & Other Stories of Transgression,”
by Patricia Abbott
(Editor’s note: Patricia “Patti” Abbott has been a friend of The Rap Sheet for many years, dating back at least to 2008, when she launched the Web-wide “forgotten books” series, in which Rap Sheet contributors have often since taken part. A
rather prolific short-story writer, with more 125 such brief yarns to her credit, Abbott—who, by the way, happens to be the mother of novelist Megan Abbott—has won the Derringer Award, published two e-novels [Monkey Justice and Home Invasion], and in more recent years seen a couple of her novels reach print: Concrete Angel [2015] and Shot in Detroit [2016]. This week brings the release, 
from Polis Books, of Abbott’s I Bring Sorrow & Other Stories of Transgression, a collection of her short fiction that Publishers Weekly calls “sparkling” and “brilliant.” In the essay below, this Michigan writer recalls how one of the stories featured in that book was created.)
I will need to make a slight detour here in order to explain how “Burned the Fire” came to be. In 2006, I began blogging on a site I named Pattinase. I was interested in interacting with other readers and writers. Slowly, a network of like-minded readers and writers formed. At its height, before Facebook took a big bite out of blog readership, I got several hundred visitors a day. That number has decreased over time, but I still interact almost daily with other bloggers as well as writers and readers on Facebook.
Eleven and a half years later, I can state that there are many rewarding aspects to blogging. A large number of the people I count as friends today, I got to know through my blog. Also, a lot of the opportunities that came my way originated through people I met online. But there is a downside to blogging, too. The difficulty is in not posting boring, fatuous, self-promotional, argumentative, or repetitive remarks. Striking the right note takes time. I have removed many posts because they felt unwise in the cruel light of day.
Back up now to 2010, a time when blogs were still enjoying their halcyon era. Periodically I’d challenge other writers to create a flash-fiction story from a prompt. (Other blogs also hosted such challenges). An early challenge was to write a story taking place at a Wal-Mart store. The results were successful enough to attract an agent (through the auspices of Steve Weddle) and then a small e-book publisher (Untreed Reads), and the collection is still available under the title Discount Noir. I am proud to be associated with that anthology. Many of those fledgling writers of 2010 have gone on to produce novels that have won awards. Novices became seasoned writers over the years.
“Burned the Fire,” the subject of this essay, however, emanated from an interchange overheard on a street in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A young woman walking ahead of me said to her male companion, “I really don’t mind the scars.” That was all I heard of their conversation, but the phrase stuck with me and I eventually offered it as a prompt for an 800-word flash-fiction challenge. More than 30 people responded. Some of the stories they wrote were published on my blog; others appeared on the writers’ blogs, and I linked to them from Pattinase. Those stories were amazingly diverse, although largely dark … as was mine.
As the blogger who issued that challenge, developing a story of my own to fit the prompt was important, and in this case—where it was a very specific sentence—difficult. What did I know about scars? A fistfight on a street corner did not interest me. But typically, scars come from a physical confrontation: a fight, a fall, an accident of some sort. I wanted to subvert this idea. Or have the reason for the scars come as a surprise. Or if the scars were not to be a surprise, I wanted their origin to be unusual. In the best flash-fiction stories, the ending is inevitable but also a bit of a shock.
As I thought about this, I remembered the story of Siegfried & Roy, two famous German animal tamers. Certainly men who performed with large cats had to have significant scars. Wounds had to be part of their business. Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn performed with white lions and tigers from 1967 until 2003. They were wildly popular until a white tiger bit Roy on the neck and dragged him around the performance stage. On the way to the hospital, Roy’s only concern was that they might put Montecore—the cat who’d attacked him—down. It was this sentiment that I wanted to capture in my story: the relationship between a successful animal handler and his cats.
Did women ever tame big cats? Yes. The most famous such entertainer was Mabel Stark (1889-1968), who performed with tigers for 57 years. After reading about her life, I decided she’d become the Pearl in my story. Despite many incidents of being mauled by her tigers, Stark loved her work and continued appearing in the ring until she was in her 70s. Her most serious mauling required 378 stitches and she was not expected to survive the attack. Yet she was back to work within weeks. Like Roy, she never blamed the tigers for these mishaps, but admitted there was no such thing as a tame tiger.
(Above) This poster above promotes “Miss Mabel Stark and Her Ferocious Giant Jungle Tigers,” one of the best-loved attractions of the Al G. Barnes Circus. As the Los Angeles Times has reported, “In 1912, Mabel Stark bought a ticket to the circus while vacationing in Los Angeles. She loved it so much that she chucked her nursing career. So apparent was her rapport with furry creatures—and with [circus owner] Barnes—that he offered her a job on the spot as a lion tamer.” (To learn more about this poster, click here.)
Stark worked as a stunt double for Mae West in the 1933 motion picture I’m No Angel. According to her 1938 biography, Hold That Tiger, she would have preferred to die at the hands of a tiger than by any other means, but she outlived the possibility of that.
Of course, in an 800-word story, you are limited to presenting only a scene or two, and I chose to describe the frightful mauling and how Pearl dealt with it. The inevitable ending is surprising because the reader does not realize, initially, that Pearl is talking about an animal and not a man. Everything she says about the tiger could hold true for a man as well.
After posting “Burned the Fire” (originally “Burnt the Fire”) as part of my flash-fiction challenge, I dressed it up a bit and published it on the Shotgun Honey Web site. I included it in I Bring Sorrow because it harks back to the time when flash-fiction challenges were a big part of blogging. Nowadays, when there are whole flash-fiction Web sites, such blog challenges make less sense.
I am not sure why I chose this story to talk about in The Rap Sheet. There were 24 others from I Bring Sorrow that I could have selected, some of them longer, some probably better. But Pearl and her beloved tigers stuck with me and became the story behind the story.
READ MORE: “Patti Abbott—The BOLO Books Interview,” by
Kristopher Zgorski (BOLO Books).
from Polis Books, of Abbott’s I Bring Sorrow & Other Stories of Transgression, a collection of her short fiction that Publishers Weekly calls “sparkling” and “brilliant.” In the essay below, this Michigan writer recalls how one of the stories featured in that book was created.)I will need to make a slight detour here in order to explain how “Burned the Fire” came to be. In 2006, I began blogging on a site I named Pattinase. I was interested in interacting with other readers and writers. Slowly, a network of like-minded readers and writers formed. At its height, before Facebook took a big bite out of blog readership, I got several hundred visitors a day. That number has decreased over time, but I still interact almost daily with other bloggers as well as writers and readers on Facebook.
Eleven and a half years later, I can state that there are many rewarding aspects to blogging. A large number of the people I count as friends today, I got to know through my blog. Also, a lot of the opportunities that came my way originated through people I met online. But there is a downside to blogging, too. The difficulty is in not posting boring, fatuous, self-promotional, argumentative, or repetitive remarks. Striking the right note takes time. I have removed many posts because they felt unwise in the cruel light of day.
Back up now to 2010, a time when blogs were still enjoying their halcyon era. Periodically I’d challenge other writers to create a flash-fiction story from a prompt. (Other blogs also hosted such challenges). An early challenge was to write a story taking place at a Wal-Mart store. The results were successful enough to attract an agent (through the auspices of Steve Weddle) and then a small e-book publisher (Untreed Reads), and the collection is still available under the title Discount Noir. I am proud to be associated with that anthology. Many of those fledgling writers of 2010 have gone on to produce novels that have won awards. Novices became seasoned writers over the years.
“Burned the Fire,” the subject of this essay, however, emanated from an interchange overheard on a street in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A young woman walking ahead of me said to her male companion, “I really don’t mind the scars.” That was all I heard of their conversation, but the phrase stuck with me and I eventually offered it as a prompt for an 800-word flash-fiction challenge. More than 30 people responded. Some of the stories they wrote were published on my blog; others appeared on the writers’ blogs, and I linked to them from Pattinase. Those stories were amazingly diverse, although largely dark … as was mine.
As the blogger who issued that challenge, developing a story of my own to fit the prompt was important, and in this case—where it was a very specific sentence—difficult. What did I know about scars? A fistfight on a street corner did not interest me. But typically, scars come from a physical confrontation: a fight, a fall, an accident of some sort. I wanted to subvert this idea. Or have the reason for the scars come as a surprise. Or if the scars were not to be a surprise, I wanted their origin to be unusual. In the best flash-fiction stories, the ending is inevitable but also a bit of a shock.
As I thought about this, I remembered the story of Siegfried & Roy, two famous German animal tamers. Certainly men who performed with large cats had to have significant scars. Wounds had to be part of their business. Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn performed with white lions and tigers from 1967 until 2003. They were wildly popular until a white tiger bit Roy on the neck and dragged him around the performance stage. On the way to the hospital, Roy’s only concern was that they might put Montecore—the cat who’d attacked him—down. It was this sentiment that I wanted to capture in my story: the relationship between a successful animal handler and his cats.
Did women ever tame big cats? Yes. The most famous such entertainer was Mabel Stark (1889-1968), who performed with tigers for 57 years. After reading about her life, I decided she’d become the Pearl in my story. Despite many incidents of being mauled by her tigers, Stark loved her work and continued appearing in the ring until she was in her 70s. Her most serious mauling required 378 stitches and she was not expected to survive the attack. Yet she was back to work within weeks. Like Roy, she never blamed the tigers for these mishaps, but admitted there was no such thing as a tame tiger.
(Above) This poster above promotes “Miss Mabel Stark and Her Ferocious Giant Jungle Tigers,” one of the best-loved attractions of the Al G. Barnes Circus. As the Los Angeles Times has reported, “In 1912, Mabel Stark bought a ticket to the circus while vacationing in Los Angeles. She loved it so much that she chucked her nursing career. So apparent was her rapport with furry creatures—and with [circus owner] Barnes—that he offered her a job on the spot as a lion tamer.” (To learn more about this poster, click here.)
Stark worked as a stunt double for Mae West in the 1933 motion picture I’m No Angel. According to her 1938 biography, Hold That Tiger, she would have preferred to die at the hands of a tiger than by any other means, but she outlived the possibility of that.
Of course, in an 800-word story, you are limited to presenting only a scene or two, and I chose to describe the frightful mauling and how Pearl dealt with it. The inevitable ending is surprising because the reader does not realize, initially, that Pearl is talking about an animal and not a man. Everything she says about the tiger could hold true for a man as well.
After posting “Burned the Fire” (originally “Burnt the Fire”) as part of my flash-fiction challenge, I dressed it up a bit and published it on the Shotgun Honey Web site. I included it in I Bring Sorrow because it harks back to the time when flash-fiction challenges were a big part of blogging. Nowadays, when there are whole flash-fiction Web sites, such blog challenges make less sense.
I am not sure why I chose this story to talk about in The Rap Sheet. There were 24 others from I Bring Sorrow that I could have selected, some of them longer, some probably better. But Pearl and her beloved tigers stuck with me and became the story behind the story.
READ MORE: “Patti Abbott—The BOLO Books Interview,” by
Kristopher Zgorski (BOLO Books).
Tuesday, June 07, 2016
Bringing the Dead to Life
(Editor’s note: Just a year after the release of her debut novel, Concrete Angel, Michigan author Patricia “Patti” Abbott is back with a brand-new second yarn, Shot in Detroit [Polis]. I included a short write-up about that work in my latest Kirkus Reviews column, 
but I also asked Patti to pen a short
original piece for The Rap Sheet about the work she did concocting back-stories for each of a dozen dead African-American men—all under 40 years old—who become photo subjects in Shot in Detroit. Her fine submission is below.)
In Shot in Detroit, Violet Hart, trying to succeed as a serious artist, comes up with the idea of photographing the young men her boyfriend, a mortician, buries with alarming regularity. Initially, she's caught up in the artistic aspect of this project. But gradually the horror of what she sees, the possibility that she is exploiting the situation in Detroit, Michigan, takes hold. Black Lives Matter, or the foreshadowing impetus and circumstances around that movement, begins to have an impact on her work. Is she exposing her own insensitive ambition in her pictures, or is she exposing what's happening in the city where she lives? Has she crossed a line?
I suffered those same qualms about the book’s subject matter as I wrote her story, and as it became a several-years-long project. Violet and I, in essence, followed the same path. Yes, it seemed like an interesting idea and one that was once used by a New York photographer with access to a mortician’s Harlem practice. That New Yorker’s gallery show and the subsequent book was a great success a decade ago. By changing the setting to Detroit, by making Violet’s relationship with the mortician more personal, by making her photos focus solely on young black men, by having Violet involved in some of their lives, I upped the ante for accusations of exploitation.
An early reader made a suggestion: Why not include a short chapter about each of the dead men on whom Violet turns her camera lens? Inoculate myself from seeming callous by giving those subjects more airtime in the minutes before their death. Initially this seemed like a good idea. In Shot in Detroit, the 12 men meet their ends due to various causes: smoke inhalation, HIV, West Nile virus, a skirmish at a mall, an altercation at a bar, an aneurysm, and several are victims of robberies. Why not write short pieces that bring each man to life? I began to work on that. And it was very useful. I felt I understood, in a small way, the situation leading up to each man’s demise. But when I began to insert these pieces into the book, they diluted Violet’s story. They broke into any suspense I’d been able to generate from the narrative of how Violet becomes increasingly involved with the police, with gangs, with some dangerous situations. I read a few of these pieces to members of my writing group, and although they liked the stories, they agreed that they were more an intrusion than an enhancement to Violet’s yarn.
I eventually settled on using only a death notice at the front of each chapter in which I dealt with one of those dozen men. In a few cases, there is more than the notice, but only when I thought it served Violet’s story. However, I still wanted to get those back-stories out there. So I began posting them in my blog, Pattinase, for anyone wanting to know more about each individual. (You should be able to keep track of the posts by clicking here.) Some of these deaths closely resemble ones that took place in Detroit between 2006 and 2008. Others I completely invented. Sadly, it was not due to a scarcity of actual deaths (you can Google “shot in Detroit” any day of the week to find some tragic tale similar to those found in my new novel), but strictly to avoid repetition of the same distressing stories. Men die in Detroit because of guns most often. Guns in the home, guns in the car, guns in the schools, guns stuffed deep into pockets. I could have easily had Violet Hart photograph 12 men who perished because of the ease with which Americans can now acquire such deadly weapons. And perhaps that would have been the most honest approach. Over and over and over again.
READ MORE: “My Five (Actually Six) Favorite Novels Set in Detroit (or Near Detroit),” by Patti Abbott (Crimespree Magazine).
but I also asked Patti to pen a short
original piece for The Rap Sheet about the work she did concocting back-stories for each of a dozen dead African-American men—all under 40 years old—who become photo subjects in Shot in Detroit. Her fine submission is below.)In Shot in Detroit, Violet Hart, trying to succeed as a serious artist, comes up with the idea of photographing the young men her boyfriend, a mortician, buries with alarming regularity. Initially, she's caught up in the artistic aspect of this project. But gradually the horror of what she sees, the possibility that she is exploiting the situation in Detroit, Michigan, takes hold. Black Lives Matter, or the foreshadowing impetus and circumstances around that movement, begins to have an impact on her work. Is she exposing her own insensitive ambition in her pictures, or is she exposing what's happening in the city where she lives? Has she crossed a line?
I suffered those same qualms about the book’s subject matter as I wrote her story, and as it became a several-years-long project. Violet and I, in essence, followed the same path. Yes, it seemed like an interesting idea and one that was once used by a New York photographer with access to a mortician’s Harlem practice. That New Yorker’s gallery show and the subsequent book was a great success a decade ago. By changing the setting to Detroit, by making Violet’s relationship with the mortician more personal, by making her photos focus solely on young black men, by having Violet involved in some of their lives, I upped the ante for accusations of exploitation.
An early reader made a suggestion: Why not include a short chapter about each of the dead men on whom Violet turns her camera lens? Inoculate myself from seeming callous by giving those subjects more airtime in the minutes before their death. Initially this seemed like a good idea. In Shot in Detroit, the 12 men meet their ends due to various causes: smoke inhalation, HIV, West Nile virus, a skirmish at a mall, an altercation at a bar, an aneurysm, and several are victims of robberies. Why not write short pieces that bring each man to life? I began to work on that. And it was very useful. I felt I understood, in a small way, the situation leading up to each man’s demise. But when I began to insert these pieces into the book, they diluted Violet’s story. They broke into any suspense I’d been able to generate from the narrative of how Violet becomes increasingly involved with the police, with gangs, with some dangerous situations. I read a few of these pieces to members of my writing group, and although they liked the stories, they agreed that they were more an intrusion than an enhancement to Violet’s yarn.
I eventually settled on using only a death notice at the front of each chapter in which I dealt with one of those dozen men. In a few cases, there is more than the notice, but only when I thought it served Violet’s story. However, I still wanted to get those back-stories out there. So I began posting them in my blog, Pattinase, for anyone wanting to know more about each individual. (You should be able to keep track of the posts by clicking here.) Some of these deaths closely resemble ones that took place in Detroit between 2006 and 2008. Others I completely invented. Sadly, it was not due to a scarcity of actual deaths (you can Google “shot in Detroit” any day of the week to find some tragic tale similar to those found in my new novel), but strictly to avoid repetition of the same distressing stories. Men die in Detroit because of guns most often. Guns in the home, guns in the car, guns in the schools, guns stuffed deep into pockets. I could have easily had Violet Hart photograph 12 men who perished because of the ease with which Americans can now acquire such deadly weapons. And perhaps that would have been the most honest approach. Over and over and over again.
READ MORE: “My Five (Actually Six) Favorite Novels Set in Detroit (or Near Detroit),” by Patti Abbott (Crimespree Magazine).
Tuesday, June 09, 2015
Mommie Direst
Newly minted novelist Patricia “Patti” Abbott has a nice short essay posted this morning in Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine, which explains in part: “I wasn’t raised to have high aspirations. I was raised to find a steady job with good benefits, to raise a family, to be a good citizen. I think that is why it took me so many years--nearly 50--to 
have any confidence that I could be what I secretly always wanted to be--a writer. I would still not identify myself as one--except to you.”
Her modesty is endearing, but quite unnecessary. Over the last decade and a half, Abbott has published more than 150 short stories and won awards for her efforts. She’s become a familiar blogging voice, spearheading the Web-wide “Friday forgotten books” series of posts from her own site, Pattinase. And now this 67-year-old resident of Huntington Woods, Michigan, the mother of novelist Megan Abbott (The Fever), is debuting her own first novel, a domestic suspense yarn titled Concrete Angel (Polis). The fact that it wasn’t until her two children left home that Patti Abbott finally went back to finish her college degree and launched her career as a crime-fictionist takes nothing away from the fact that she accomplished her goal: she has a novel in print, and it’s a damn good work to boot. That’s a confidence raiser, if ever there was one.
In my Kirkus Reviews column today, I remark briefly on the plot of Concrete Angel, which is set in the area around Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (where Abbott herself grew up), noting that it “introduces readers to Evelyn ‘Eve’ Moran, a narcissistic, melodramatic and hyper-acquisitive woman who, as this story opens, shoots her latest boyfriend to death after trying to filch cash from his wallet, and then persuades her 12-year-old daughter, Christine, to say she pulled the trigger, instead, that she was protecting her mother from attack.
Abbott does an exceptional job of building Eve Moran’s twisted character and showing how her behavior corrupts the lives of everyone around her, especially that of her less-attractive only daughter. She also makes fine work of re-creating 1960s and ’70s Philadelphia, as well as the public attitudes of that period toward psychiatric illness and treatment. The author takes what might, in the hands of some less-talented writer, have become an unrelentingly grim and distressing story, and turns it into a textured, ever-magnetic mix of humor and heartbreak. One that makes me more than a little curious to read her next novel.
I spent some time recently interviewing Patti Abbott via e-mail. Parts of our exchange make up today’s Kirkus Reviews column, but there was plenty left over, including Abbott’s recollections of her sometimes troubled Philadelphia childhood, her transition from poet to fiction writer, her story about first being published, her memories of the struggle it took to get even one novel into print, and her satisfaction in having introduced many blog readers to vintage mystery and thriller fiction they might never have discovered on their own. All of that material is embedded below for your enjoyment.
J. Kingston Pierce: You were born Patricia Arlene Nase?
Patricia Abbott: On the birth certificate Nase was spelled as “Nasi,” but it had to be corrected when I married. I am not sure why no one fixed it before then. The error may have come because the name Nase is pretty unusual. It was changed at least six times over the years that my brother traced it back. I think the original spelling might have been “Nehs.” The family came from the German section of Alsace-Lorraine. The town of Sellersville, Pennsylvania, is filled with Nases but it is hard to find them anywhere else. More than you wanted to know I am sure.
Author Patti Abbott, photographed by Ewa Golebiowska.
JKP: You grew up in Philadelphia during the 1950s and ’60s. Where in that city did you live? What was Philly like in those days, and how significantly has it changed?
PA: I lived in a section to the north known as West Oak Lane then, but now it seems to have been folded in with Mount Airy. It was a middle to lower middle-class neighborhood. My block was made up of mostly large Catholic families. Mine was Lutheran. These were tiny houses, but some had four or five children crammed in.
But across the alley in the back of my house, everyone was Jewish. I was the girl who lit the Shabbat lamps and ovens. My school was 90 percent Jewish. (All of the Catholic kids went to parochial school.) As a child, I rarely left my neighborhood except when we went shopping downtown. I had very little sense of living in a large city. I was quite free to roam my neighborhood, though. My life centered around the church to a large degree. I think of my childhood as more similar to someone who lived in a small town than someone who lived in a city. We took very little advantage of the art museum or any cultural institutions. Most of that was due to my father’s long work hours and small paycheck. And my parents were not adventurous.
My old block, 7600 Gilbert Street, has a Facebook page and it is all African American today. It looks very similar. There wasn’t a tree on that block when I lived there and there still don't seem to be many. Downtown Philly seems vibrant to me today when compared to Detroit, but less so than in the ’60s. It shares many of the same issues as Detroit (my current home): too much poverty, poor schools, deteriorating housing. But since I get [to Philadelphia] only as a tourist now, I probably don’t know enough about issues to comment.
JKP: What were your parents like? Were they big readers, or did you acquire your interest in reading from others?
PA: My father was the third youngest of 19 children and became an office manager for car dealers. My mother, a secretary, was an only child. His father was a cigar maker. Hers, an architect. To my knowledge, my father never read a book after high school. He read the sports page and that was about it. He worked 12 hours a day, six days a week, so there was little time for reading, although I doubt he would have read anyway. My mother read more but not a lot. If she read, it was Ellery Queen mysteries or light romance. My maternal grandparents were bigger readers, but still mostly [of] those condensed books they collected in the ’50s. My grandmother read a lot of movie-star biographies.
But I couldn’t wait to learn how to read so I could go the bookmobile that cruised my neighborhood and take out the five books allowed. And when they built a library, I went every Friday after school, returning the books for five more the next week. The children’s librarian, Mrs. Robinson, the only African-American woman I knew, would hold books aside she thought I would like. And I read the most prosaic books on the shelves. I never once tried science fiction or fantasy. It had to be about girls, and girls as much like me as possible. My favorite series was the Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace. And the “Shoes” books by Noel Streatfeild (Ballet Shoes, Circus Shoes, etc.)
and All-of-a-Kind Family [1951], by Sydney Taylor. So I acquired my interest from others. I just can’t tell you what others.
JKP: Where did you go to school, and were you a “serious student”?
PA: I went to Samuel Pennypacker Elementary School, Leeds Jr. High School, Germantown High School for a year, and then Philadelphia Montgomery Christian High School, which my parents could ill afford. But I was beginning to get into trouble. I was hanging out on corners, smoking, running around with some bad types. I had a boyfriend who stole cars for a while. Another who dropped out of school. So [my parents] scraped together their money and sent me to a school [Philadelphia Montgomery] that straightened me out pretty quickly. I went from a C student (I had been an A student in elementary school) to the National Honor Society in one year. Academically it was great, but it was a fundamentalist Christian school, and although my parents went to church, it was a traditional church, not this. In my junior year I campaigned for Barry Goldwater with friends from school and Lyndon Johnson with my friends from the ’hood. Still, I was old enough not to be completely swayed by the school’s politics.
But then I made a mistake and went to a Christian college [Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts]. That lasted one semester and I did not go back to college for 20 years, despite marrying a man with a Ph.D. in the meantime. I studied history and anthropology went I returned in the late ’80s [this time to Wayne State University in Detroit]. On my return, I was very serious indeed. I was tired of explaining why, although my husband was a professor, I was uneducated. I graduated with a 4.0, not because I was particularly smart but because I was particularly driven. I loved college in my 40s.
JKP: How did you meet your husband to be, Philip Abbott, and when did you marry? Am I correct that you have two children together?
PA: I met Phil the summer after I graduated from high school. His father had a store in a town where I had a summer job (New Hope, Pennsylvania). We married the next year (1967). I was 19 and he 22, and just starting grad school. My son, Josh, was born in 1970 and is a prosecutor in Macomb County [Michigan]. And Megan was born the next year and writes novels.
JKP: Is it true that your mother remarked to you, just as you and your new husband were leaving after your wedding reception, “I give it six months”? That seems a bit cynical, doesn’t it?
PA: Wow! How did that get out? She actually murmured it to my grandmother, but I overheard. This comment referred to my fickleness as a teenager. And also to my age. And also to our brief courtship. But [my mother] was wrong and admitted it many times over the years. She became Phil’s biggest fan.
JKP: Am I correct that your husband is a professor of political thought, American political culture, and presidential studies at Wayne State? How long has he been there?
PA: Phil has been at Wayne State University since 1970. He came there at age 25 and stayed. With the Vietnam War going strong and his draft number being low (5), he had to attend school full-time and was done just as he turned 26 and could no longer be drafted. Amazing how much that war determined what our life would be.
JKP: Did you move to Detroit after marriage, or were you already there for some reason?
PA: We moved to Detroit three years after we got married. WSU was Phil’s first job offer. Well, not really his first, but the first one that seemed feasible. He had lived in D.C. for four years and wasn’t anxious to teach in a small town, and the other offers were in small towns.
JKP: When your children were young, did you work away from home?
PA: No, I was a stay-at-home mom mostly until high school. We were active in Little League, Girl Scouts, were room parents, on the PTO [Parent Teacher Organization] boards. I made quilts and read books. Lots of books. My mother had been a working mother and I thought that was one of the reasons I got into trouble. Well, at least partially. Part of the truth was, I didn’t know what to do with myself without a degree. So I finally started taking classes and that seemed like enough,
until college for the kids began to loom in front of us and more money seemed like a good idea. Then I got a job at WSU, where I wrote catalogue copy, newsletters, flyers, and course descriptions, and worked on placing our Ph.D. [recipients].
(Right) Megan, Patti, and Philip Abbott.
JKP: Your daughter, of course, is novelist Megan Abbott. Her success as a fiction writer seemed to coincide with your rise as an author of short stories. So was it you who influenced her to try penning fiction, or was it the other way around?
PA: When I started writing stories, Megan was working on her Ph.D. and had expressed no desire (to us) to write fiction. Although as a child she wrote and illustrated her own stories constantly. And I mean constantly. When I remember her as a kid, it is sitting in front of a movie like Red Dust or Little Caesar, a sketch pad in hand. I don’t think either of us was influenced by the other. In many ways, my husband is more of an influence on her in terms of her intellectual interests. They can talk about Freud, the Cold War, Hannah Arendt, and Kim Philby forever. That’s why I fully expected her to be a college professor, but it wasn’t quite the right fit.
JKP: Had you been trying to write fiction for a long time before you were actually published? What was your first story to see print, and when/where did that piece appear?
PA: My first story was published in 1998 in a little journal called The Bonfire Review. It was a story about two friends who find some salacious photographs among the remains of a deceased friend. Both of them swear they won’t show anyone the photos, but of course they do. It was a humorous story--or at least it was to me.
The journal was elegant, hand-bound with a hard cover, and the editors held a reading and I went to Ann Arbor [Michigan] and read a part of the story in a neat little pub there. So I sort of thought I would be doing a lot of that, but of course, that live reading was the exception. I was able to get most stories published by aiming fairly low. I never tried to get into The New Yorker. But more and more over time, traditional literary journals were saying, “this is crime fiction.” So I began to make the switch.
JKP: It seems you’ve been making rather hesitant steps toward becoming a novelist for several years now. You published an e-book of unconnected short stories, Monkey Justice (2011). Then you released Home Invasion (2013), with stories taking place over a 40-year span, mostly about members of the same family and folks whose lives intersected with theirs. Finally we get Concrete Angel. Did this progression reflect your working up the courage to write longer pieces of fiction?
PA: I tried writing a novel before I did these collections. I almost had an agent. But no one liked the central character very much. No one was willing to take her on. So I tempered an unlikable character with a likable one in Concrete Angel. I guess unlikable characters will always interest me more than nice ones. If I wrote detective fiction I might create a likable protagonist, but it doesn’t seem to work for me in suspense. If that is what this is.
JKP: You have said before that your influences as a short-story writer include Andre Dubus, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Eudora Welty, Jean Thompson, William Trevor, John Cheever, Amy Hempl, John Updike, and Lorrie Moore. Who, then, are your influences as a novelist?
PA: Anne Tyler, Richard Bausch, Russell Banks, Margaret Millar, Patricia Highsmith, John Irving, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Daphne DuMaurier, Shirley Jackson, Carson McCullers, Stewart O’Nan, Joe R. Lansdale, Nicholas Freeling, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Ruth Rendell, Ross Macdonald. I could go on for days.
JKP: When author Richard Godwin interviewed you in 2011, you said you had two unpublished novels. “The first one,” you said, “was based on a short story called ‘Raising the Dead.’ It is the story of a photographer who hasn’t achieved the success she’d hoped for and how she goes about achieving that elusive goal. It takes place in Detroit and deals with the current situation here--the poverty, the animosity between black and white, the failure of a once-great city.” The second novel you mentioned--“about a Philadelphia woman who steals, grifts, hoards, and eventually kills”--was obviously Concrete Angel. How is it that Concrete Angel made it into print, while the other book, which you’ve titled Shot in Detroit, has not?
PA: Well, the other one, after some revision, will come out next summer. [Its protagonist] was the unlikable woman who I hope I have honed a bit. Taken off some of the rough edges but not too many. Made her story a fuller one than that agent finally rejected.
Martina McBride sings her 2002 hit, “Concrete Angel.”
JKP: So where does the title Concrete Angel come from? Are you suggesting that Christine, Eve Moran’s daughter, provides a rock for her mother, or did you have something more complicated in mind?
PA: Originally the title was Eve’s Daughter. But the first press that took it, Exhibit A (before they folded), thought that was too bland. So I chose Concrete Angel, which is the title of a song by Martina McBride about an abused child. Also one of my favorite novels is The Stone Angel, by Margaret Laurence (Canadian). So nothing complicated at all.
JKP: Was part of the reason that Concrete Angel was slow to be picked up by a publisher because it’s not strictly a crime novel, but also not obviously a literary novel?
PA: No publisher saw it before Exhibit A Books. I didn’t send it to that many agents--maybe 15. So without an agent I didn’t see how I would interest a publisher. I had lost confidence after coming close and missing with Shot in Detroit. If [author] Sandra Scoppettone hadn’t read it and said you have to try harder with this, it would probably exist only on my hard drive. So I started trying harder.
When I heard that writer Bryon Quertermous had become an acquisitions editor for Exhibit A (then part of Angry Robot), I e-mailed him and asked him if he’d like to take a look. He liked [the book] and made an offer to publish. When Exhibit A closed its doors, Bryon suggested I try Polis (where his book Murder Boy had found a home).
I do think Concrete Angel falls between the two genres somewhat. And the other one does, too. But I see them both as crime novels, because it is the driving engine to me. Eve [Moran] steals and kills to get what she wants. [Shot in Detroit’s] Violet Hart throws herself into some treacherous water to get the photos she needs for an exhibit. When people want something badly, they either get their 4.0 or commit a crime.
JKP: Concrete Angel might fit most comfortably into the amorphous sub-genre of “domestic suspense.” Did you intend your work to be domestic suspense?
PA: That is how I see it. I am not sure if the term existed before Sarah Weinman’s collection, or if it did, it was not well known as a sub-genre. But if you look at the stories written by Margaret Millar, Charlotte Armstrong, and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, I think that term describes their work well. The Blank Wall [1947] by Holding is a perfect example.
JKP: I know you’re a fan of at least one author whose work also often fits under that label, Margaret Millar (The Iron Gates). But are you a big fan of domestic suspense fiction? Or will you become one now?
PA: I wonder if Mignon Eberhart would count. And what about Celia Fremlin? Is there any man who writes it? I would say Linwood Barclay’s novels are a sort of domestic suspense. Maybe Harlan Coben, too. Also, outside the genre, Russell Banks’ novels, especially Continental Drift and Affliction, are very much about families in crisis. Same with Richard Bausch.
JKP: What do you still need to learn in order to really be “a novelist”?
PA: I think my biggest failing is my reliance on flying by the seat of my pants too much, which I was able to get away with in a story. With a novel, you can get into trouble, write yourself into too many corners, without more of an outline. I would hope to have one next time.
JKP: In the course of Concrete Angel, Eve becomes more and more obviously a hoarder, someone whose happiness and self-definition/self-worth are defined at least in part by the accumulation of stuff, no matter how valueless. Did you do a great deal of research about the psychology of hoarding, or do you know people with such inclinations?
PA: Both. I knew a hoarder who could not even throw away a used Band-Aid. This hoarder had an office next to mine and after a while was forced to meet with people outside of his office. I heard rustling in there off and on, and finally called the custodial staff and they carted everything out one weekend (with a family member standing by). In every other way, this person seemed normal. Of course, within a year the office was the same again.
But I also read several books on mental illness [in the] mid-20th century. Especially Women and Madness, by Phyllis Chesler. The way women were treated in the middle of the 20th century was shocking to say the least. I also did some research online and via some of the reality shows that expose these ill people for entertainment.
JKP: Some of the most interesting and comical elements of your new book revolve around Eve’s psychiatric treatments. Every new analyst or therapist she is sent to seems to have a different idea of how to treat (or mistreat) her. Can I assume your opinions of 20th-century psychiatry are mixed, at best, and probably negative?
PA: Again I would recommend Women and Madness, which documents the evolution in treatment. As various drugs came on the market, it became more about finding the right drug than finding what the problem was. And now the average psychiatrist is just there to write prescriptions.
I must also confess to knowing a woman during that period (mid-’70s) who was incarcerated--the only word for it--in Norristown State Mental Hospital in Pennsylvania. What led to her commitment was having an affair with a fellow teacher. For some reason, he was thought to be OK. I saw him not long ago--now in his 80, his wife on his arm.
JKP: This yarn takes place in Philadelphia in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. Did you find returning to the city as you once knew it enjoyable? Were you able to work some of your fonder recollections into the novel?
PA: A lot of the book is set in Bucks and Montgomery counties. In the mid-60s, I spent a lot of time there. Doylestown seemed so provincial to me then. So too, Hatboro. I loved writing about Eve going downtown to shop. I remember downtown Philly so fondly. I was crushed in the ’70s and ’80s, when one after another, those elegant stores all closed. I also enjoyed re-creating life in a Philadelphia townhouse--the fact that to get to the back of the house, you had to go all the way around the block. How you lived elbow-to-elbow most of the time. How little went unnoticed in 750 square feet.
JKP: Concrete Angel depends more on understatement and character building than it does on cinematic action. Yet you begin your story with an action sequence: Eve’s murder of a boyfriend who has discovered her taking money from his wallet. Was that simply to draw readers in immediately, or was it the quickest way to define the dysfunctional association between Eve and her daughter, Christine?
Just yesterday I read a review from [The New York Times’] Janet Maslin in which she said no self-respecting writer would start a novel with a murder now. Nobody told me that. I started there because I wanted to establish right from the start that this woman was someone who would do anything to protect herself. And very little to protect her child. I toyed with the idea of another murder--perhaps Mickey [DiSantis, Eve’s second husband]--but she really only had one murder in her. She was a lot of bad things but not really a murderer.
JKP: As much as I enjoyed Concrete Angel, I was a bit distressed to see your new novel filled with so many typos and missing or incorrect bits of punctuation. We’ve all been conditioned to accept some such errors these days, even in books from major publishers. But was there something about Polis Books’ publishing process that prevented these errors from being caught?
PA: Polis went over it several times and I went over it repeatedly, so I am sorry we have missed so much. I will have to pass this observation along. After a time, a writer just doesn’t see the mistakes, I am afraid. Especially one with old eyes.
JKP: One of the things that many readers know about you is that you’re active in the blogging world. When and why did you first test the waters there?
PA: I started my blog [Pattinase] in 2006. I really liked the idea of communicating with other readers and writers. The Rap Sheet was one of the first blogs I had read as a wannabe crime-fiction writer, and I saw it had many links. My hope was to be linked there. And then CrimeSpot came along and made blogging so much more rewarding.
JKP: Have those rewards changed for you over time? And do you see yourself continuing to blog, even as a successful novelist?
PA: I blog less than I used to. Because so much of my blog is based on my coming up with new topics, I am running out of steam. And Facebook has taken a lot of that steam out of blogs. You can communicate with people very easily there. And in great numbers.
JKP: Seven years ago, in the spring of 2008, you made the suggestion that bloggers interested in crime fiction begin writing periodically about “books we love but might have forgotten over the years.” That idea has since grown into a regular, Web-wide series of “Friday forgotten books” (FFB) posts. Are you surprised that the series is still going strong?
PA: I expected it to last a few months--especially with The Rap Sheet doing a similar series. But when [author-blogger] Bill Crider did a second review the second week and then a third and fourth, I began to think there was a pent-up desire for such a thing. A lot of the reviewers had participated in a newsletter where books were reviewed. That newsletter was coming to an end and I think FFB took its place. I am very surprised that Bill Crider, for instance, has written a book review every Friday for seven years. And there are others not far behind him. I can’t let them down, and passing it on seems too sad.
JKP: Do you have at least anecdotal evidence that these forgotten books posts have encouraged readers to expand their knowledge of vintage crime, mystery, and thriller fiction? How often do you try to track down an old book because of something that’s been written in this series?
PA: I have tracked down quite a few over the years. When I came into this crime-fiction blogging world I didn’t know about a lot of the writers that these reviewers read. I read a lot of best-seller-type crime fiction, but not people like Elisabeth Sanxay Holding or Don Carpenter or Derek Raymond. There was this whole other world of crime fiction that I never heard about. These were the writers on spinner racks in 1960s drugstores. The truly forgotten writers.
And the other participants often mention that they found a book someone else recommended in some obscure place or other. I think it means a lot to a small group of people and, hopefully, some writers that deserve to be remembered are. Just putting a name on the Internet may have some value. I hope so.
JKP: Finally, let me ask which current authors you most enjoy reading. And do you restrict yourself primarily to crime and mystery fiction?
PA: I read crime and mainstream fiction about equally. I really hate favoring one current crime-fiction writer over another, but in the mainstream arena I like Stewart O’Nan, Ann Patchett, Richard Yates, Barbara Kingsolver. I am reading [Ted Lewis’] Get Carter right now and recently enjoyed The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown. Set in Seattle, Jeff. Have you read it?
JKP: Not yet, Patti. But my stepmother-in-law gave me a copy for my birthday, and it’s not far down now from the top of my to-be-read pile. Maybe it’s time to move it up higher yet.
READ MORE: “Patti Abbott and Rob Hart: A Conversation” (Shotgun Honey); “Pro-File with Patti Abbott” (Ed Gorman’s Blog); “Patti Abbot: Concrete Angel and More--the Blog Tour Continues,” by Todd Mason (Sweet Freedom).
have any confidence that I could be what I secretly always wanted to be--a writer. I would still not identify myself as one--except to you.”Her modesty is endearing, but quite unnecessary. Over the last decade and a half, Abbott has published more than 150 short stories and won awards for her efforts. She’s become a familiar blogging voice, spearheading the Web-wide “Friday forgotten books” series of posts from her own site, Pattinase. And now this 67-year-old resident of Huntington Woods, Michigan, the mother of novelist Megan Abbott (The Fever), is debuting her own first novel, a domestic suspense yarn titled Concrete Angel (Polis). The fact that it wasn’t until her two children left home that Patti Abbott finally went back to finish her college degree and launched her career as a crime-fictionist takes nothing away from the fact that she accomplished her goal: she has a novel in print, and it’s a damn good work to boot. That’s a confidence raiser, if ever there was one.
In my Kirkus Reviews column today, I remark briefly on the plot of Concrete Angel, which is set in the area around Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (where Abbott herself grew up), noting that it “introduces readers to Evelyn ‘Eve’ Moran, a narcissistic, melodramatic and hyper-acquisitive woman who, as this story opens, shoots her latest boyfriend to death after trying to filch cash from his wallet, and then persuades her 12-year-old daughter, Christine, to say she pulled the trigger, instead, that she was protecting her mother from attack.
Did I mention Eve is also highly self-protective? In any case, Christine goes along with this seat-of-pants scheme because … well, she doesn’t want to lose her single remaining parent, and after years of listening to Eve lie her way out of one tight spot or another, the girl has become more than a bit adept at spinning prevarications of her own. She’s also practiced at excusing, if not denying, her mother’s casual kleptomania, which propels Eve from one Philadelphia-area store to the next, snatching merchandise merely for the sake of having it, not because she needs it or can’t afford it. This remorseless larceny eventually leads to run-ins with the law, lands Eve in a pricy sanitarium, destroys her marriage to Christine’s father and results in her renting a profusion of storage units for her “junk.”Through all of these turns, young Christine hangs in there as her mother’s confidante and co-conspirator, even though she’s also served up occasionally as Eve Moran’s scapegoat. However, the responsibilities and deceptions eventually become too much to bear, leading Christine, as she matures, to think “killing her [mother] might be the easiest thing,” just to put an end to the nightmare that Eve has created for both of them.
Abbott does an exceptional job of building Eve Moran’s twisted character and showing how her behavior corrupts the lives of everyone around her, especially that of her less-attractive only daughter. She also makes fine work of re-creating 1960s and ’70s Philadelphia, as well as the public attitudes of that period toward psychiatric illness and treatment. The author takes what might, in the hands of some less-talented writer, have become an unrelentingly grim and distressing story, and turns it into a textured, ever-magnetic mix of humor and heartbreak. One that makes me more than a little curious to read her next novel.
I spent some time recently interviewing Patti Abbott via e-mail. Parts of our exchange make up today’s Kirkus Reviews column, but there was plenty left over, including Abbott’s recollections of her sometimes troubled Philadelphia childhood, her transition from poet to fiction writer, her story about first being published, her memories of the struggle it took to get even one novel into print, and her satisfaction in having introduced many blog readers to vintage mystery and thriller fiction they might never have discovered on their own. All of that material is embedded below for your enjoyment.
J. Kingston Pierce: You were born Patricia Arlene Nase?
Patricia Abbott: On the birth certificate Nase was spelled as “Nasi,” but it had to be corrected when I married. I am not sure why no one fixed it before then. The error may have come because the name Nase is pretty unusual. It was changed at least six times over the years that my brother traced it back. I think the original spelling might have been “Nehs.” The family came from the German section of Alsace-Lorraine. The town of Sellersville, Pennsylvania, is filled with Nases but it is hard to find them anywhere else. More than you wanted to know I am sure.
Author Patti Abbott, photographed by Ewa Golebiowska.
JKP: You grew up in Philadelphia during the 1950s and ’60s. Where in that city did you live? What was Philly like in those days, and how significantly has it changed?
PA: I lived in a section to the north known as West Oak Lane then, but now it seems to have been folded in with Mount Airy. It was a middle to lower middle-class neighborhood. My block was made up of mostly large Catholic families. Mine was Lutheran. These were tiny houses, but some had four or five children crammed in.
But across the alley in the back of my house, everyone was Jewish. I was the girl who lit the Shabbat lamps and ovens. My school was 90 percent Jewish. (All of the Catholic kids went to parochial school.) As a child, I rarely left my neighborhood except when we went shopping downtown. I had very little sense of living in a large city. I was quite free to roam my neighborhood, though. My life centered around the church to a large degree. I think of my childhood as more similar to someone who lived in a small town than someone who lived in a city. We took very little advantage of the art museum or any cultural institutions. Most of that was due to my father’s long work hours and small paycheck. And my parents were not adventurous.
My old block, 7600 Gilbert Street, has a Facebook page and it is all African American today. It looks very similar. There wasn’t a tree on that block when I lived there and there still don't seem to be many. Downtown Philly seems vibrant to me today when compared to Detroit, but less so than in the ’60s. It shares many of the same issues as Detroit (my current home): too much poverty, poor schools, deteriorating housing. But since I get [to Philadelphia] only as a tourist now, I probably don’t know enough about issues to comment.
JKP: What were your parents like? Were they big readers, or did you acquire your interest in reading from others?
PA: My father was the third youngest of 19 children and became an office manager for car dealers. My mother, a secretary, was an only child. His father was a cigar maker. Hers, an architect. To my knowledge, my father never read a book after high school. He read the sports page and that was about it. He worked 12 hours a day, six days a week, so there was little time for reading, although I doubt he would have read anyway. My mother read more but not a lot. If she read, it was Ellery Queen mysteries or light romance. My maternal grandparents were bigger readers, but still mostly [of] those condensed books they collected in the ’50s. My grandmother read a lot of movie-star biographies.
But I couldn’t wait to learn how to read so I could go the bookmobile that cruised my neighborhood and take out the five books allowed. And when they built a library, I went every Friday after school, returning the books for five more the next week. The children’s librarian, Mrs. Robinson, the only African-American woman I knew, would hold books aside she thought I would like. And I read the most prosaic books on the shelves. I never once tried science fiction or fantasy. It had to be about girls, and girls as much like me as possible. My favorite series was the Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace. And the “Shoes” books by Noel Streatfeild (Ballet Shoes, Circus Shoes, etc.)
and All-of-a-Kind Family [1951], by Sydney Taylor. So I acquired my interest from others. I just can’t tell you what others.JKP: Where did you go to school, and were you a “serious student”?
PA: I went to Samuel Pennypacker Elementary School, Leeds Jr. High School, Germantown High School for a year, and then Philadelphia Montgomery Christian High School, which my parents could ill afford. But I was beginning to get into trouble. I was hanging out on corners, smoking, running around with some bad types. I had a boyfriend who stole cars for a while. Another who dropped out of school. So [my parents] scraped together their money and sent me to a school [Philadelphia Montgomery] that straightened me out pretty quickly. I went from a C student (I had been an A student in elementary school) to the National Honor Society in one year. Academically it was great, but it was a fundamentalist Christian school, and although my parents went to church, it was a traditional church, not this. In my junior year I campaigned for Barry Goldwater with friends from school and Lyndon Johnson with my friends from the ’hood. Still, I was old enough not to be completely swayed by the school’s politics.
But then I made a mistake and went to a Christian college [Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts]. That lasted one semester and I did not go back to college for 20 years, despite marrying a man with a Ph.D. in the meantime. I studied history and anthropology went I returned in the late ’80s [this time to Wayne State University in Detroit]. On my return, I was very serious indeed. I was tired of explaining why, although my husband was a professor, I was uneducated. I graduated with a 4.0, not because I was particularly smart but because I was particularly driven. I loved college in my 40s.
JKP: How did you meet your husband to be, Philip Abbott, and when did you marry? Am I correct that you have two children together?
PA: I met Phil the summer after I graduated from high school. His father had a store in a town where I had a summer job (New Hope, Pennsylvania). We married the next year (1967). I was 19 and he 22, and just starting grad school. My son, Josh, was born in 1970 and is a prosecutor in Macomb County [Michigan]. And Megan was born the next year and writes novels.
JKP: Is it true that your mother remarked to you, just as you and your new husband were leaving after your wedding reception, “I give it six months”? That seems a bit cynical, doesn’t it?
PA: Wow! How did that get out? She actually murmured it to my grandmother, but I overheard. This comment referred to my fickleness as a teenager. And also to my age. And also to our brief courtship. But [my mother] was wrong and admitted it many times over the years. She became Phil’s biggest fan.
JKP: Am I correct that your husband is a professor of political thought, American political culture, and presidential studies at Wayne State? How long has he been there?
PA: Phil has been at Wayne State University since 1970. He came there at age 25 and stayed. With the Vietnam War going strong and his draft number being low (5), he had to attend school full-time and was done just as he turned 26 and could no longer be drafted. Amazing how much that war determined what our life would be.
JKP: Did you move to Detroit after marriage, or were you already there for some reason?
PA: We moved to Detroit three years after we got married. WSU was Phil’s first job offer. Well, not really his first, but the first one that seemed feasible. He had lived in D.C. for four years and wasn’t anxious to teach in a small town, and the other offers were in small towns.
JKP: When your children were young, did you work away from home?
PA: No, I was a stay-at-home mom mostly until high school. We were active in Little League, Girl Scouts, were room parents, on the PTO [Parent Teacher Organization] boards. I made quilts and read books. Lots of books. My mother had been a working mother and I thought that was one of the reasons I got into trouble. Well, at least partially. Part of the truth was, I didn’t know what to do with myself without a degree. So I finally started taking classes and that seemed like enough,
until college for the kids began to loom in front of us and more money seemed like a good idea. Then I got a job at WSU, where I wrote catalogue copy, newsletters, flyers, and course descriptions, and worked on placing our Ph.D. [recipients].(Right) Megan, Patti, and Philip Abbott.
JKP: Your daughter, of course, is novelist Megan Abbott. Her success as a fiction writer seemed to coincide with your rise as an author of short stories. So was it you who influenced her to try penning fiction, or was it the other way around?
PA: When I started writing stories, Megan was working on her Ph.D. and had expressed no desire (to us) to write fiction. Although as a child she wrote and illustrated her own stories constantly. And I mean constantly. When I remember her as a kid, it is sitting in front of a movie like Red Dust or Little Caesar, a sketch pad in hand. I don’t think either of us was influenced by the other. In many ways, my husband is more of an influence on her in terms of her intellectual interests. They can talk about Freud, the Cold War, Hannah Arendt, and Kim Philby forever. That’s why I fully expected her to be a college professor, but it wasn’t quite the right fit.
JKP: Had you been trying to write fiction for a long time before you were actually published? What was your first story to see print, and when/where did that piece appear?
PA: My first story was published in 1998 in a little journal called The Bonfire Review. It was a story about two friends who find some salacious photographs among the remains of a deceased friend. Both of them swear they won’t show anyone the photos, but of course they do. It was a humorous story--or at least it was to me.
The journal was elegant, hand-bound with a hard cover, and the editors held a reading and I went to Ann Arbor [Michigan] and read a part of the story in a neat little pub there. So I sort of thought I would be doing a lot of that, but of course, that live reading was the exception. I was able to get most stories published by aiming fairly low. I never tried to get into The New Yorker. But more and more over time, traditional literary journals were saying, “this is crime fiction.” So I began to make the switch.
JKP: It seems you’ve been making rather hesitant steps toward becoming a novelist for several years now. You published an e-book of unconnected short stories, Monkey Justice (2011). Then you released Home Invasion (2013), with stories taking place over a 40-year span, mostly about members of the same family and folks whose lives intersected with theirs. Finally we get Concrete Angel. Did this progression reflect your working up the courage to write longer pieces of fiction?
PA: I tried writing a novel before I did these collections. I almost had an agent. But no one liked the central character very much. No one was willing to take her on. So I tempered an unlikable character with a likable one in Concrete Angel. I guess unlikable characters will always interest me more than nice ones. If I wrote detective fiction I might create a likable protagonist, but it doesn’t seem to work for me in suspense. If that is what this is.
JKP: You have said before that your influences as a short-story writer include Andre Dubus, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Eudora Welty, Jean Thompson, William Trevor, John Cheever, Amy Hempl, John Updike, and Lorrie Moore. Who, then, are your influences as a novelist?
PA: Anne Tyler, Richard Bausch, Russell Banks, Margaret Millar, Patricia Highsmith, John Irving, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Daphne DuMaurier, Shirley Jackson, Carson McCullers, Stewart O’Nan, Joe R. Lansdale, Nicholas Freeling, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Ruth Rendell, Ross Macdonald. I could go on for days.
JKP: When author Richard Godwin interviewed you in 2011, you said you had two unpublished novels. “The first one,” you said, “was based on a short story called ‘Raising the Dead.’ It is the story of a photographer who hasn’t achieved the success she’d hoped for and how she goes about achieving that elusive goal. It takes place in Detroit and deals with the current situation here--the poverty, the animosity between black and white, the failure of a once-great city.” The second novel you mentioned--“about a Philadelphia woman who steals, grifts, hoards, and eventually kills”--was obviously Concrete Angel. How is it that Concrete Angel made it into print, while the other book, which you’ve titled Shot in Detroit, has not?
PA: Well, the other one, after some revision, will come out next summer. [Its protagonist] was the unlikable woman who I hope I have honed a bit. Taken off some of the rough edges but not too many. Made her story a fuller one than that agent finally rejected.
Martina McBride sings her 2002 hit, “Concrete Angel.”
JKP: So where does the title Concrete Angel come from? Are you suggesting that Christine, Eve Moran’s daughter, provides a rock for her mother, or did you have something more complicated in mind?
PA: Originally the title was Eve’s Daughter. But the first press that took it, Exhibit A (before they folded), thought that was too bland. So I chose Concrete Angel, which is the title of a song by Martina McBride about an abused child. Also one of my favorite novels is The Stone Angel, by Margaret Laurence (Canadian). So nothing complicated at all.
JKP: Was part of the reason that Concrete Angel was slow to be picked up by a publisher because it’s not strictly a crime novel, but also not obviously a literary novel?
PA: No publisher saw it before Exhibit A Books. I didn’t send it to that many agents--maybe 15. So without an agent I didn’t see how I would interest a publisher. I had lost confidence after coming close and missing with Shot in Detroit. If [author] Sandra Scoppettone hadn’t read it and said you have to try harder with this, it would probably exist only on my hard drive. So I started trying harder.
When I heard that writer Bryon Quertermous had become an acquisitions editor for Exhibit A (then part of Angry Robot), I e-mailed him and asked him if he’d like to take a look. He liked [the book] and made an offer to publish. When Exhibit A closed its doors, Bryon suggested I try Polis (where his book Murder Boy had found a home).
I do think Concrete Angel falls between the two genres somewhat. And the other one does, too. But I see them both as crime novels, because it is the driving engine to me. Eve [Moran] steals and kills to get what she wants. [Shot in Detroit’s] Violet Hart throws herself into some treacherous water to get the photos she needs for an exhibit. When people want something badly, they either get their 4.0 or commit a crime.
JKP: Concrete Angel might fit most comfortably into the amorphous sub-genre of “domestic suspense.” Did you intend your work to be domestic suspense?
PA: That is how I see it. I am not sure if the term existed before Sarah Weinman’s collection, or if it did, it was not well known as a sub-genre. But if you look at the stories written by Margaret Millar, Charlotte Armstrong, and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, I think that term describes their work well. The Blank Wall [1947] by Holding is a perfect example.
JKP: I know you’re a fan of at least one author whose work also often fits under that label, Margaret Millar (The Iron Gates). But are you a big fan of domestic suspense fiction? Or will you become one now?
PA: I wonder if Mignon Eberhart would count. And what about Celia Fremlin? Is there any man who writes it? I would say Linwood Barclay’s novels are a sort of domestic suspense. Maybe Harlan Coben, too. Also, outside the genre, Russell Banks’ novels, especially Continental Drift and Affliction, are very much about families in crisis. Same with Richard Bausch.
JKP: What do you still need to learn in order to really be “a novelist”?
PA: I think my biggest failing is my reliance on flying by the seat of my pants too much, which I was able to get away with in a story. With a novel, you can get into trouble, write yourself into too many corners, without more of an outline. I would hope to have one next time.
JKP: In the course of Concrete Angel, Eve becomes more and more obviously a hoarder, someone whose happiness and self-definition/self-worth are defined at least in part by the accumulation of stuff, no matter how valueless. Did you do a great deal of research about the psychology of hoarding, or do you know people with such inclinations?
PA: Both. I knew a hoarder who could not even throw away a used Band-Aid. This hoarder had an office next to mine and after a while was forced to meet with people outside of his office. I heard rustling in there off and on, and finally called the custodial staff and they carted everything out one weekend (with a family member standing by). In every other way, this person seemed normal. Of course, within a year the office was the same again.
But I also read several books on mental illness [in the] mid-20th century. Especially Women and Madness, by Phyllis Chesler. The way women were treated in the middle of the 20th century was shocking to say the least. I also did some research online and via some of the reality shows that expose these ill people for entertainment.
JKP: Some of the most interesting and comical elements of your new book revolve around Eve’s psychiatric treatments. Every new analyst or therapist she is sent to seems to have a different idea of how to treat (or mistreat) her. Can I assume your opinions of 20th-century psychiatry are mixed, at best, and probably negative?PA: Again I would recommend Women and Madness, which documents the evolution in treatment. As various drugs came on the market, it became more about finding the right drug than finding what the problem was. And now the average psychiatrist is just there to write prescriptions.
I must also confess to knowing a woman during that period (mid-’70s) who was incarcerated--the only word for it--in Norristown State Mental Hospital in Pennsylvania. What led to her commitment was having an affair with a fellow teacher. For some reason, he was thought to be OK. I saw him not long ago--now in his 80, his wife on his arm.
JKP: This yarn takes place in Philadelphia in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. Did you find returning to the city as you once knew it enjoyable? Were you able to work some of your fonder recollections into the novel?
PA: A lot of the book is set in Bucks and Montgomery counties. In the mid-60s, I spent a lot of time there. Doylestown seemed so provincial to me then. So too, Hatboro. I loved writing about Eve going downtown to shop. I remember downtown Philly so fondly. I was crushed in the ’70s and ’80s, when one after another, those elegant stores all closed. I also enjoyed re-creating life in a Philadelphia townhouse--the fact that to get to the back of the house, you had to go all the way around the block. How you lived elbow-to-elbow most of the time. How little went unnoticed in 750 square feet.
JKP: Concrete Angel depends more on understatement and character building than it does on cinematic action. Yet you begin your story with an action sequence: Eve’s murder of a boyfriend who has discovered her taking money from his wallet. Was that simply to draw readers in immediately, or was it the quickest way to define the dysfunctional association between Eve and her daughter, Christine?
JKP: As much as I enjoyed Concrete Angel, I was a bit distressed to see your new novel filled with so many typos and missing or incorrect bits of punctuation. We’ve all been conditioned to accept some such errors these days, even in books from major publishers. But was there something about Polis Books’ publishing process that prevented these errors from being caught?
PA: Polis went over it several times and I went over it repeatedly, so I am sorry we have missed so much. I will have to pass this observation along. After a time, a writer just doesn’t see the mistakes, I am afraid. Especially one with old eyes.
JKP: One of the things that many readers know about you is that you’re active in the blogging world. When and why did you first test the waters there?
PA: I started my blog [Pattinase] in 2006. I really liked the idea of communicating with other readers and writers. The Rap Sheet was one of the first blogs I had read as a wannabe crime-fiction writer, and I saw it had many links. My hope was to be linked there. And then CrimeSpot came along and made blogging so much more rewarding.
JKP: Have those rewards changed for you over time? And do you see yourself continuing to blog, even as a successful novelist?
PA: I blog less than I used to. Because so much of my blog is based on my coming up with new topics, I am running out of steam. And Facebook has taken a lot of that steam out of blogs. You can communicate with people very easily there. And in great numbers.
JKP: Seven years ago, in the spring of 2008, you made the suggestion that bloggers interested in crime fiction begin writing periodically about “books we love but might have forgotten over the years.” That idea has since grown into a regular, Web-wide series of “Friday forgotten books” (FFB) posts. Are you surprised that the series is still going strong?
PA: I expected it to last a few months--especially with The Rap Sheet doing a similar series. But when [author-blogger] Bill Crider did a second review the second week and then a third and fourth, I began to think there was a pent-up desire for such a thing. A lot of the reviewers had participated in a newsletter where books were reviewed. That newsletter was coming to an end and I think FFB took its place. I am very surprised that Bill Crider, for instance, has written a book review every Friday for seven years. And there are others not far behind him. I can’t let them down, and passing it on seems too sad.
JKP: Do you have at least anecdotal evidence that these forgotten books posts have encouraged readers to expand their knowledge of vintage crime, mystery, and thriller fiction? How often do you try to track down an old book because of something that’s been written in this series?
PA: I have tracked down quite a few over the years. When I came into this crime-fiction blogging world I didn’t know about a lot of the writers that these reviewers read. I read a lot of best-seller-type crime fiction, but not people like Elisabeth Sanxay Holding or Don Carpenter or Derek Raymond. There was this whole other world of crime fiction that I never heard about. These were the writers on spinner racks in 1960s drugstores. The truly forgotten writers.
And the other participants often mention that they found a book someone else recommended in some obscure place or other. I think it means a lot to a small group of people and, hopefully, some writers that deserve to be remembered are. Just putting a name on the Internet may have some value. I hope so.
JKP: Finally, let me ask which current authors you most enjoy reading. And do you restrict yourself primarily to crime and mystery fiction?
PA: I read crime and mainstream fiction about equally. I really hate favoring one current crime-fiction writer over another, but in the mainstream arena I like Stewart O’Nan, Ann Patchett, Richard Yates, Barbara Kingsolver. I am reading [Ted Lewis’] Get Carter
JKP: Not yet, Patti. But my stepmother-in-law gave me a copy for my birthday, and it’s not far down now from the top of my to-be-read pile. Maybe it’s time to move it up higher yet.
READ MORE: “Patti Abbott and Rob Hart: A Conversation” (Shotgun Honey); “Pro-File with Patti Abbott” (Ed Gorman’s Blog); “Patti Abbot: Concrete Angel and More--the Blog Tour Continues,” by Todd Mason (Sweet Freedom).
Thursday, July 08, 2010
Clearing the First 100 Hurdle
Sometime tomorrow morning, The Rap Sheet will publish its 100th entry in the “Books You Have to Read” series. That popular succession of posts began way back in May 2008 and was inspired by Derringer Award-winning short-story writer Patricia “Patti” Abbott (pictured below with her husband, Dr. Philip Abbott). The mother of novelist (and Rap Sheet contributor) Megan Abbott, Patti had rather offhandedly suggested a month before then that it might be fun--and even enlightening--for book bloggers to recommend, each Friday, “books we love but might have forgotten over the years. ... I’m worried great 
books of the recent past are sliding out of print and out of our consciousness. Not the first-tier classics we all can name, but the books that come next.” Little did Patti know that so many people would pick up on her suggestion, and launch what has become a familiar weekly blog feature about “forgotten books.” Our “Books You Have to Read” series has been part of that estimable venture.
Over the last two years, we’ve endorsed older volumes by such diverse wordsmiths as William Campbell Gault and Eric Ambler, Barbara Seranella and Mickey Spillane, Newton Thornburg and Karen Kijewski, Cornell Woolrich and Stanley Ellin, Donald Goines and Reginald Hill and Josephine Tey. We hope our 100 posts have provided people who are on the lookout for novels to fill in the missing parts of their crime-fiction education with invaluable guidance in making their next reading choices. Personally, it’s because of this series that I was finally provoked to delve into the output of Neil Albert, Norbert Davis, and Jonathan Latimer.
If all of this makes it sound as if The Rap Sheet is winding down its “Books You Have to Read” series ... well, that’s right, but it’s also wrong. After having recruited so many contributors over the last couple of years, I do find myself a bit weary of the task. However, I very much enjoy the results of the effort and so don’t intend to end the series here. The change will be, that from here on out I won’t try to maintain a weekly schedule of “forgotten books” posts, but will add them to the editorial mix on a less regular basis. There are a few writers who still owe me submissions to this series, and there are a number of books I would like to read (or re-read) myself for possible mention. If there are any published authors out there who haven’t yet submitted recommendations to The Rap Sheet’s series, but would like to, I’d be very happy to hear from you. The same goes for people who’ve contributed before and want to do so again. Just drop me an e-mail note here.
By the way, tomorrow we have a special guest making our 100th “forgotten book” pick--none other than Patti Abbott herself!
In the meantime, if you haven’t been keeping up with The Rap Sheet’s “Books You Have to Read” series, here’s the rundown of the works we’ve plugged so far. Following each book title and author name, I’ve identified (in parentheses) the person who commented on the work:
• The Iron Gates, by Margaret Millar (Patti Abbott)
• Tony and Susan, by Austin Wright (Maxim Jakubowski)
• The Song Dog, by James McClure (Stanley Trollip)
• Caleb Williams, by William Godwin (Andrew Taylor)
• Drink to Yesterday, by Manning Coles (Irene Fleming)
• Thumbprint, by Friedrich Glauser (Patrick Lennon)
• The Black Path of Fear, by Cornell Woolrich (Thomas Kaufman)
• Blanche on the Lam, by Barbara Neely (Naomi Hirahara)
• The Zimmerman Telegram, by Barbara Tuchman (J. Sydney Jones)
• Murder Fantastical, by Patricia Moyes (Jim Napier)
• Death of a Peer, by Ngaio Marsh (Les Blatt)
• Shoot, by Douglas Fairbairn (Mike Dennis)
• Train, by Pete Dexter (David Thayer)
• The Great Zapruder Film Hoax, by James H. Fetzer
(Michael Atkinson)
• The Adventures of Max Latin, by Norbert Davis (Ed Lin)
• Swag, by Elmore Leonard (Mike Dennis)
• Build My Gallows High, by Geoffrey Homes (Thomas Kaufman)
• Light of Day, by Eric Ambler (Leighton Gage)
• Alley Kat Blues, by Karen Kijewski (Karen E. Olson)
• The Most Dangerous Game, by Gavin Lyall (Calum MacLeod)
• The Saint-Fiacre Affair, by Georges Simenon (Matt Beynon Rees)
• The Body on the Bench, by Dorothy B. Hughes (Jeri Westerson)
• The Drowner, by John D. MacDonald (Ace Atkins)
• Dead Man Upright, by Derek Raymond (Ray Banks)
• I Was Dora Suarez, by Derek Raymond (Cathi Unsworth)
• How the Dead Live, by Derek Raymond (Russel D. McLean)
• The Devil’s Home on Leave, by Derek Raymond (John Harvey)
• He Died with His Eyes Open, by Derek Raymond (Tony Black)
• The Staked Goat, by Jeremiah Healy (Libby Fischer Hellmann)
• Nightmare Alley, by William Linday Gresham (Kelli Stanley)
• The First Deadly Sin, by Lawrence Sanders (L.J. Sellers)
• The Dolly Dolly Spy, by Adam Diment (Tom Cain)
• Freak, by Michael Collins (Russell Atwood)
• Who Killed Palomino Molero? by Mario Vargas Llosa (Marshall Browne)
• The Cracked Earth, by John Shannon (Dick Adler)
• The Last One Left, by John D. MacDonald (Bill Cameron)
• Room to Swing, by Ed Lacy (Art Taylor)
• Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe, by Nan and Ivan Lyons (Jeffrey Cohen)
• Solomon’s Vineyard, by Jonathan Latimer (Mike Ripley)
• Modesty Blaise, by Peter O’Donnell (Vicki Delany)
• Modus Operandi, by Robin W. Winks (Stephen Miller)
• The Eighth Circle, by Stanley Ellin (J. Kingston Pierce)
• The Woman Chaser, by Charles Willeford (Kathryn Miller Haines)
• The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V. Higgins (William Landay)
• GBH, by Ted Lewis (Ray Banks)
• The Criminal, by Jim Thompson (Nate Flexer)
• Trent’s Last Case, by E.C. Bentley (Stefanie Pintoff)
• The Depths of the Forest, by Eugenio Fuentes (Ann Cleeves)
• Putting the Boot In, by Dan Kavanagh (Michael Walters)
• Switch, by William Bayer (Col Bury)
• Sympathy for the Devil, by Kent Anderson (John Shannon)
• The Quiet Strangers, by John Buxton Hilton (Stephen Booth)
• Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman, by E.W. Hornung (Chris Ewan)
• No Orchids for Miss Blandish, by James Hadley Chase
(James R. Benn)
• War Against the Mafia, by Don Pendleton (Matt Hilton)
• Daddy Cool, by Donald Goines (Gary Phillips)
• Edith’s Diary, by Patricia Highsmith (Jason Starr)
• Night of the Panther, by E.C. Ayres (J. Kingston Pierce)
• Death of a Unicorn, by Peter Dickinson (Keith Raffel)
• The Andromeda Strain, by Michael Crichton (Anthony Rainone)
• The Bigger They Come, by A.A. Fair (J. Kingston Pierce)
• Death of a Citizen, by Donald Hamilton (Rob Kantner)
• The Double Take, by Roy Huggins (J. Kingston Pierce)
• The Overseer, by Jonathan Rabb (Simon Wood)
• A Coffin for Dimitrios, by Eric Ambler (Ali Karim)
• The Scarf, by Robert Bloch (John Peyton Cooke)
• The Ebony Tower, by John Fowles (Michael G. Jacob)
• The Grifters, by Jim Thompson (Chris Knopf)
• A Clubbable Woman, by Reginald Hill (Simon Wood)
• The Bloody Bokhara, by William Campbell Gault (David Fulmer)
• Journey into Fear, by Eric Ambler (Charles Cumming)
• Despair, by Vladimir Nabokov (Robert Eversz)
• Marathon Man, by William Goldman (Linwood Barclay)
• Mayhem, by J. Robert Janes (Cara Black)
• The Caves of Steel, by Isaac Asimov (Jane Finnis)
• The 12:30 from Croydon, by Freeman Wills Crofts
(Dolores Gordon-Smith)
• The Golden Crucible, by Jean Stubbs (Amy Myers)
• Rilke on Black, by Ken Bruen (Tony Black)
• The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey (Judith Cutler)
• Nine Times Nine, by Anthony Boucher (Jeffrey Marks)
• The Three Coffins, by John Dickson Carr (Edward Marston)
• Some Must Watch, by Ethel Lina White (Mary Reed)
• The Golden Gate Murders, by Peter King (Anthony Flacco)
• The Big Bow Mystery, by Israel Zangwill (Will Thomas)
• Coffin’s Got the Dead Guy on the Inside, by Keith Snyder
(Timothy Hallinan)
• The Twisted Thing, by Mickey Spillane (Max Allan Collins)
• The Falling Man, by Mark Sadler (Robert J. Randisi)
• Don’t Cry for Me, by William Campbell Gault (Ed Gorman)
• No Human Involved, by Barbara Seranella (Louise Ure)
• Watcher in the Shadows, by Geoffrey Household (Mike Ripley)
• Cutter and Bone, by Newton Thornburg (Kirk Russell)
• Funeral in Berlin, by Len Deighton (Tony Broadbent)
• God’s Pocket, by Pete Dexter (David Corbett)
• Chinaman’s Chance, by Ross Thomas (Tim Maleeny)
• I Am the Cheese, by Robert Cormier (Steve Hockensmith)
• The Honest Dealer, by Frank Gruber (Dick Lochte)
• When the Sacred Gin Mill Closes, by Lawrence Block (Dick Adler)
• The January Corpse, by Neil Albert (Kevin Burton Smith)
• The Lunatic Fringe, by William L. DeAndrea (J. Kingston Pierce)
• Memoirs of an Invisible Man, by H.F. Saint (Ali Karim)
books of the recent past are sliding out of print and out of our consciousness. Not the first-tier classics we all can name, but the books that come next.” Little did Patti know that so many people would pick up on her suggestion, and launch what has become a familiar weekly blog feature about “forgotten books.” Our “Books You Have to Read” series has been part of that estimable venture.Over the last two years, we’ve endorsed older volumes by such diverse wordsmiths as William Campbell Gault and Eric Ambler, Barbara Seranella and Mickey Spillane, Newton Thornburg and Karen Kijewski, Cornell Woolrich and Stanley Ellin, Donald Goines and Reginald Hill and Josephine Tey. We hope our 100 posts have provided people who are on the lookout for novels to fill in the missing parts of their crime-fiction education with invaluable guidance in making their next reading choices. Personally, it’s because of this series that I was finally provoked to delve into the output of Neil Albert, Norbert Davis, and Jonathan Latimer.
If all of this makes it sound as if The Rap Sheet is winding down its “Books You Have to Read” series ... well, that’s right, but it’s also wrong. After having recruited so many contributors over the last couple of years, I do find myself a bit weary of the task. However, I very much enjoy the results of the effort and so don’t intend to end the series here. The change will be, that from here on out I won’t try to maintain a weekly schedule of “forgotten books” posts, but will add them to the editorial mix on a less regular basis. There are a few writers who still owe me submissions to this series, and there are a number of books I would like to read (or re-read) myself for possible mention. If there are any published authors out there who haven’t yet submitted recommendations to The Rap Sheet’s series, but would like to, I’d be very happy to hear from you. The same goes for people who’ve contributed before and want to do so again. Just drop me an e-mail note here.
By the way, tomorrow we have a special guest making our 100th “forgotten book” pick--none other than Patti Abbott herself!
In the meantime, if you haven’t been keeping up with The Rap Sheet’s “Books You Have to Read” series, here’s the rundown of the works we’ve plugged so far. Following each book title and author name, I’ve identified (in parentheses) the person who commented on the work:
• The Iron Gates, by Margaret Millar (Patti Abbott)
• Tony and Susan, by Austin Wright (Maxim Jakubowski)
• The Song Dog, by James McClure (Stanley Trollip)
• Caleb Williams, by William Godwin (Andrew Taylor)
• Drink to Yesterday, by Manning Coles (Irene Fleming)
• Thumbprint, by Friedrich Glauser (Patrick Lennon)
• The Black Path of Fear, by Cornell Woolrich (Thomas Kaufman)
• Blanche on the Lam, by Barbara Neely (Naomi Hirahara)
• The Zimmerman Telegram, by Barbara Tuchman (J. Sydney Jones)
• Murder Fantastical, by Patricia Moyes (Jim Napier)
• Death of a Peer, by Ngaio Marsh (Les Blatt)
• Shoot, by Douglas Fairbairn (Mike Dennis)
• Train, by Pete Dexter (David Thayer)
• The Great Zapruder Film Hoax, by James H. Fetzer
(Michael Atkinson)
• The Adventures of Max Latin, by Norbert Davis (Ed Lin)
• Swag, by Elmore Leonard (Mike Dennis)
• Build My Gallows High, by Geoffrey Homes (Thomas Kaufman)
• Light of Day, by Eric Ambler (Leighton Gage)
• Alley Kat Blues, by Karen Kijewski (Karen E. Olson)
• The Most Dangerous Game, by Gavin Lyall (Calum MacLeod)
• The Saint-Fiacre Affair, by Georges Simenon (Matt Beynon Rees)
• The Body on the Bench, by Dorothy B. Hughes (Jeri Westerson)
• The Drowner, by John D. MacDonald (Ace Atkins)
• Dead Man Upright, by Derek Raymond (Ray Banks)
• I Was Dora Suarez, by Derek Raymond (Cathi Unsworth)
• How the Dead Live, by Derek Raymond (Russel D. McLean)
• The Devil’s Home on Leave, by Derek Raymond (John Harvey)
• He Died with His Eyes Open, by Derek Raymond (Tony Black)
• The Staked Goat, by Jeremiah Healy (Libby Fischer Hellmann)
• Nightmare Alley, by William Linday Gresham (Kelli Stanley)
• The First Deadly Sin, by Lawrence Sanders (L.J. Sellers)
• The Dolly Dolly Spy, by Adam Diment (Tom Cain)
• Freak, by Michael Collins (Russell Atwood)
• Who Killed Palomino Molero? by Mario Vargas Llosa (Marshall Browne)
• The Cracked Earth, by John Shannon (Dick Adler)
• The Last One Left, by John D. MacDonald (Bill Cameron)
• Room to Swing, by Ed Lacy (Art Taylor)
• Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe, by Nan and Ivan Lyons (Jeffrey Cohen)
• Solomon’s Vineyard, by Jonathan Latimer (Mike Ripley)
• Modesty Blaise, by Peter O’Donnell (Vicki Delany)
• Modus Operandi, by Robin W. Winks (Stephen Miller)
• The Eighth Circle, by Stanley Ellin (J. Kingston Pierce)
• The Woman Chaser, by Charles Willeford (Kathryn Miller Haines)
• The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V. Higgins (William Landay)
• GBH, by Ted Lewis (Ray Banks)
• The Criminal, by Jim Thompson (Nate Flexer)
• Trent’s Last Case, by E.C. Bentley (Stefanie Pintoff)
• The Depths of the Forest, by Eugenio Fuentes (Ann Cleeves)
• Putting the Boot In, by Dan Kavanagh (Michael Walters)
• Switch, by William Bayer (Col Bury)
• Sympathy for the Devil, by Kent Anderson (John Shannon)
• The Quiet Strangers, by John Buxton Hilton (Stephen Booth)
• Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman, by E.W. Hornung (Chris Ewan)
• No Orchids for Miss Blandish, by James Hadley Chase
(James R. Benn)
• War Against the Mafia, by Don Pendleton (Matt Hilton)
• Daddy Cool, by Donald Goines (Gary Phillips)
• Edith’s Diary, by Patricia Highsmith (Jason Starr)
• Night of the Panther, by E.C. Ayres (J. Kingston Pierce)
• Death of a Unicorn, by Peter Dickinson (Keith Raffel)
• The Andromeda Strain, by Michael Crichton (Anthony Rainone)
• The Bigger They Come, by A.A. Fair (J. Kingston Pierce)
• Death of a Citizen, by Donald Hamilton (Rob Kantner)
• The Double Take, by Roy Huggins (J. Kingston Pierce)
• The Overseer, by Jonathan Rabb (Simon Wood)
• A Coffin for Dimitrios, by Eric Ambler (Ali Karim)
• The Scarf, by Robert Bloch (John Peyton Cooke)
• The Ebony Tower, by John Fowles (Michael G. Jacob)
• The Grifters, by Jim Thompson (Chris Knopf)
• A Clubbable Woman, by Reginald Hill (Simon Wood)
• The Bloody Bokhara, by William Campbell Gault (David Fulmer)
• Journey into Fear, by Eric Ambler (Charles Cumming)
• Despair, by Vladimir Nabokov (Robert Eversz)
• Marathon Man, by William Goldman (Linwood Barclay)
• Mayhem, by J. Robert Janes (Cara Black)
• The Caves of Steel, by Isaac Asimov (Jane Finnis)
• The 12:30 from Croydon, by Freeman Wills Crofts
(Dolores Gordon-Smith)
• The Golden Crucible, by Jean Stubbs (Amy Myers)
• Rilke on Black, by Ken Bruen (Tony Black)
• The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey (Judith Cutler)
• Nine Times Nine, by Anthony Boucher (Jeffrey Marks)
• The Three Coffins, by John Dickson Carr (Edward Marston)
• Some Must Watch, by Ethel Lina White (Mary Reed)
• The Golden Gate Murders, by Peter King (Anthony Flacco)
• The Big Bow Mystery, by Israel Zangwill (Will Thomas)
• Coffin’s Got the Dead Guy on the Inside, by Keith Snyder
(Timothy Hallinan)
• The Twisted Thing, by Mickey Spillane (Max Allan Collins)
• The Falling Man, by Mark Sadler (Robert J. Randisi)
• Don’t Cry for Me, by William Campbell Gault (Ed Gorman)
• No Human Involved, by Barbara Seranella (Louise Ure)
• Watcher in the Shadows, by Geoffrey Household (Mike Ripley)
• Cutter and Bone, by Newton Thornburg (Kirk Russell)
• Funeral in Berlin, by Len Deighton (Tony Broadbent)
• God’s Pocket, by Pete Dexter (David Corbett)
• Chinaman’s Chance, by Ross Thomas (Tim Maleeny)
• I Am the Cheese, by Robert Cormier (Steve Hockensmith)
• The Honest Dealer, by Frank Gruber (Dick Lochte)
• When the Sacred Gin Mill Closes, by Lawrence Block (Dick Adler)
• The January Corpse, by Neil Albert (Kevin Burton Smith)
• The Lunatic Fringe, by William L. DeAndrea (J. Kingston Pierce)
• Memoirs of an Invisible Man, by H.F. Saint (Ali Karim)
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