Matters of Opinion

If there’s one thing I learned during my almost six years of writing for Kirkus Reviews, it was that when it came to choosing the “best crime fiction” produced in any given twelvemonth, my opinions often diverged from the publication’s consensus of opinion. This year is no exception. Earlier today, Kirkus released its Best Mysteries and Thrillers of 2017 rundown, touting the following works:

• Magpie Murders, by Anthony Horowitz (Harper)
• The Smack, by Richard Lange (Mulholland)
• Say Nothing, by Brad Parks (Dutton)
• Exposed, by Lisa Scottoline (St. Martin’s Press)
• The Fifth Element, by Jørgen Brekke (Minotaur)
• Keep Her Safe, by Sophie Hannah (Morrow)
• The Late Show, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
• A Cast of Vultures, by Judith Flanders (Minotaur)
• Murder in Saint-Germain, by Cara Black (Soho Crime)
• Defectors, by Joseph Kanon (Astria)
• House of Spies, by Daniel Silva (Harper)
• Bluebird, Bluebird, by Attica Locke (Mulholland)
• Fierce Kingdom, by Gin Phillips (Viking)
• Lies She Told, by Cate Holahan (Crooked Lane)

Although I’m still narrowing down my top-five and top-10 crime-fiction choices for the year, I can tell you right now that of the 14 novels Kirkus mentions here, only two have scored spots among my preliminary picks. That has to do in part with the fact that I have not read as many books as all of Kirkus’ reviewers combined; but it’s also true that every individual book critic has his or her own distinctive tastes. It’s just as likely that my selections for 2017 will stand in contrast with those of other Rap Sheet contributors. You will find out for sure come early December, when we all post our “best books of the year” nominations on this page.

Good-bye, “Kirkus” … Hello, Rennie Airth

Fellow authors Laura Wilson and Rennie Airth attend CrimeFest 2010 in Bristol, England. (Photo © Ali Karim)

“All good things must come to an end,” said 14th-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, and that turns out to be true of my nearly six-year career as the crime-fiction blogger for Kirkus Reviews. Today’s column—found here—is the last of more than 170 posts I’ve put together for Kirkus since I began my stint with that publication in March 2011. This separation wasn’t my idea. In late November, my editor called to tell me there were changes in the works for the Kirkus Web site, and one of the columns being cycled out was mine. I couldn’t help but be disappointed, as I’ve mostly enjoyed my association with Kirkus over the years, and I was already in the midst of planning author interviews and special-events coverage for the next three months. Some of what won’t now appear in Kirkus can be rolled into The Rap Sheet, and maybe I can convince editors of other print periodicals and Webzines to accept my humble contributions as well. We shall see.

In any case, I wanted my Kirkus experience to end on a high note. So I arranged to interview Rennie Airth, the now 81-year-old South Africa-born author of the John Madden historical mystery series. The fifth and latest novel in that line, The Death of Kings (Viking), has its official U.S. release this week, so I was grateful that Airth—who currently lives in Italy, and whose work I’ve admired ever since the publication of his first Madden yarn, the post-World War I-set River of Darkness (1999)—took the time to answer a lengthy collection of questions I e-mailed his way. Inevitably, though, I wanted to know more about his background (including his time as a foreign correspondent) and his fiction-writing efforts than could find a home in Kirkus. As a result, I wound up splitting the results of our exchange in two. Part I—which you should definitely read first, since it lays out the general plot of The Death of Kings and explains that book’s relationship to its predecessors—can be enjoyed in my final Kirkus column. Part II is embedded below.

J. Kingston Pierce: Who were your parents, and what did they do? What sort of people were they? Do you have siblings?

Rennie Airth: My father, Eric Airth, was born and grew up in England. He was a mining engineer who came to South Africa in pursuit of his profession and met and married my mother, Emily Dwyer, whose father was Irish. Harry Dwyer was his name and he had emigrated to South Africa, where he met and married my grandmother, who came of English stock. I have a sister.

JKP: Where in South Africa were you born, and what was life in South Africa like back in those days?

RA: I was born in Johannesburg, but we moved quite a lot as my father was transferred regularly from one mine to another. With the election of the Nationalist Government soon after [World War II], the policy of apartheid was introduced and I grew up in a racially divided country which remained that way until I left for London at the age of 20, and did not change until the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990.

JKP: Did you come from a family that valued books?

RA: No, none of my family apart from me were great readers. I started at an early age and the book that first caught my fancy was [Rudyard] Kipling’s Jungle Book. I read it again recently and found it had lost none of its magic.

JKP: Did you grow up wanting to be a writer?

RA: I did think about being a writer from quite an early age and never really considered any other career possibilities, other than journalism.

JKP: In the mid-1950s, you moved to England to work for the Reuters news agency. What sorts of duties/beats did you have with Reuters? And for how many years did you work with that media company?

RA: I worked for Reuters for about a dozen years, starting in London on the desk as a rewrite man and then later as a correspondent abroad. I was based in Europe initially, and was stationed in Geneva first and later in Brussels. But I also worked in various other European capitals during that time, most memorably Rome, where I was one of the Reuters team covering the [Summer] Olympic Games that took place there in 1960. Later postings included Washington during the Kennedy Administration, Havana, and Saigon.

JKP: When did you decide you wanted to pen fiction for a living?

RA: It was when I was working in Vietnam. At that point I felt I had to decide what to do next. On the one hand I could stay with Reuters, on the other I could move to a different branch of journalism and look for a job on a newspaper. But the urge to try my hand at fiction was growing and in the end I opted for that, and like others before me settled down on a Greek island—it seemed to me the sort of thing aspirant writers did—and wrote my first novel. It never found a publisher—quite rightly—but I think you learn more from a book that fails than one that succeeds, and I certainly drew some useful lessons from the experience. It wasn’t a thriller; it was a novel that showed all too clearly the author’s attachment to the works of Graham Greene, a writer I admired then (and still do). But one of the lessons it taught me was that you have to break with your literary heroes and find your own voice. At all events I left Crete—the island I’d chosen—and moved to Rome, where I wrote a book called Snatch, which couldn’t have been more different from my first attempt.

JKP: Yes, in fact you saw two of your novels published before the Madden series: Snatch in 1969 and Once a Spy in 1981. For people who have not read those books—including me—could you say a little about their stories and what your intentions were in writing them?

RA: Snatch was a story set in Rome about a gang of hapless kidnappers who carry out their scheme by switching babies. It was later made into a not-very-successful movie [1976’s The Big Operator] starring Yves Montand. Written in a style that seemed to fit the time, it’s outdated now and I’ve made no attempt to get it republished. My second book was entitled Once a Spy and featured a hero who had given up being an agent but been drawn back into the game to try to figure out why a number of his old colleagues were being murdered. What I was aiming to do was write publishable books. It was as simple as that.

JKP: My recollection is that you’d intended to write only a trilogy of books about 20th-century sleuth John Madden. What convinced (or enabled) you to keep going with that series?

RA: Yes, I did initially mean to write only a trilogy, but I found I had more to say about the Maddens and the people around them. They had come to fascinate me and I wanted to know how they would continue with their lives. It’s curious how one’s characters take on a life of their own, but they do.

JKP: Madden’s life and career have certainly changed over the years. He retired from his detective inspector’s post with Scotland Yard to become a gentleman farmer in Surrey; he remarried, and with his second wife, Helen, bore two children. But how have your impressions of Madden the man altered as this series has grown? Is he the same person now that you knew he could be when you composed River of Darkness? Or has he surprised you in some ways?

RA: Yes, he certainly changes from the man he was in River of Darkness. I pictured him then as silent, for the most part, and a man who seldom smiled. Thanks to Helen he changed, if slowly, and by the time I wrote The Dead of Winter [2009] he had become much more open and accessible. I might put a word in here for both [former Chief Inspector] Angus Sinclair and [Detective Inspector] Billy Styles, old colleagues from his days as a detective at Scotland Yard, whose friendship has always been important to Madden. Sinclair in particular has played a crucial role in several of the books. Being an articulate man—as opposed to the often laconic Madden—he is frequently called upon to explain things to the reader and push the story along.

JKP: In River of Darkness, you described Madden as a former soldier who was left very much alone after the deaths (from influenza) of both his first wife and their baby daughter. He’d returned to Scotland Yard “a different man,” someone “more like a monk than a policeman.” While we have learned much about his present family situation, his previous family remains largely a mystery. For instance, did you ever supply the names of Madden’s first wife and daughter? I searched through River of Darkness, but couldn’t come up with them.

RA: No, it’s true I never gave them names and the reason is that I wanted to underline how changed Madden was by the war he was trapped in. Nowadays we all know about post-traumatic syndrome, but it hadn’t been recognized then, and what the men who served in the trenches suffered through—repeated shelling and near-suicidal attacks across no-man’s-land—may well have been worse than anything experienced by soldiers today. Madden was one man before the war and another after it, and without Helen’s love and understanding of his condition he might never have recovered properly. He hasn’t forgotten his first marriage, but it must seem to him like something that happened in another world. But he hasn’t ceased to mourn his lost baby daughter, nor has he blocked out the memory of her tragic death from influenza, which he was a witness to.

JKP: One of the things I found interesting about The Death of Kings, your new Madden tale, is how large a role you awarded to Madden’s “stunner” of a daughter, Lucy, while his wife, physician Helen, is at best a secondary presence. What intrigues you about Lucy, and are you setting her up to have a larger impact on the series going forward?

RA: Yes, Helen is rather trapped in her role as the village doctor, while I would characterize her lovely daughter as definitely a loose cannon. I enjoyed showing Madden having to cope with his adored but unpredictable offspring. I don’t know that I’m setting Lucy up for a larger impact. You won’t find her solving crimes. But I like her presence in the story and can only hope my readers share that feeling.

JKP: Do you also have something more in mind for her elder brother, Rob, the naval officer now “serving on a cruiser in the Indian Ocean”?

RA: I’ve thought about bringing Rob in, and decided against it. There are quite a lot of characters in the series now if you include the police, and I don’t want to overload the books. I might give him the sort of walk-on part he gets in The Death of Kings, but not much more, I think. Except you never know …

JKP: So there are more Madden novels still to come?

RA: Yes, I am working on a new Madden novel now, but I haven’t settled on a title yet and I’d rather not go into the plot. I never discuss a book while I’m writing it. I feel you lose something by talking about it. The last thing I want at this stage is a reaction to whatever ideas are going round in my head. It doesn’t matter whether the response is favorable or not. Neither really helps.

JKP: Are there things about fiction writing or your own abilities in this field that you’ve learned over the decades, but that you dearly wish you had known from the outset?

RA: I certainly hope so. It would be awful to think one never learned anything from experience. But I can’t necessarily put my finger on what I’ve learned except to try to keep things simple and avoid anything that smacks of fine writing. As others have found, it’s often the passages you’ve taken particular pains over that call for a blue pencil. And yes, generally speaking I wish I’d known what I know now about writing when I started.

READ MORE: “Once Upon a Time in Havana,” by Rennie Airth (Mystery Fanfare); “Down to Airth,” by J. Kingston Pierce (Killer Covers).

Readying Literary Escapes for 2017

With the new year starting in less than two weeks, I’ve devoted my new Kirkus Reviews column to a selection of crime-fiction releases due out in the United States during 2017’s three opening months. In addition to my mentions of some two dozen other fresh finds, I am offering short previews of seven novels I think deserve special attention, including tales by Derek B. Miller, Charles Cumming, and Julia Dahl. You can find the full piece here.

A Fuller Read on 2016

In my new Kirkus Reviews column, I look back at my last year’s reading within the category of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction through a lens somewhat broader than I used while putting together my “favorite crime novels of 2016” list. For instance, this piece celebrates “Series Debuts That Left Me Hungry for More,” “Most Welcome Detective Comebacks,” and “Second Books That Justified My Original Faith in Their Authors.” You’ll find this week’s Kirkus column here.

A Cut Above

’Tis the season for “best crime fiction of the year” lists, and I am chiming in today with my own roster of favorites for the Kirkus Reviews Web site. You’ll find that piece here.

There’s some overlap between my 10 U.S.-published choices and those of other critics. But what’s always most interesting about these sorts of inventories is where they diverge. Today’s crime, mystery, and thriller genre is a broad and diverse one, and each reader brings to it his or her idiosyncratic tastes. There can never be universal agreement on which works published in any given year are the “best.” After long consideration, I have come up with a list of my favorites. Other readers are welcome to offer their own contrary picks.

Second Time Around

Because of a recent home-remodeling project, memorable older crime and mystery novels have been much on my mind lately. So, taking a break from the deluge of political news, I’ve devoted my Kirkus Reviews column this week to a few dusty but still delightful works, all published within the last four decades, that deserve re-reading.

Please feel free to chime in with your own suggestions!

READ MORE: “Hail to the Chief! Presidential Crime Fiction/Presidents’ Day Mysteries,” by Janet Rudolph (Mystery Fanfare).

May Increases the Hebrides Murder Stats

As was probably the case for a great number of Rap Sheet readers, my introduction to Peter May’s crime fiction came with the U.S. release, in 2012, of The Blackhouse, the initial installment in what would eventually become his Lewis Trilogy, set on Scotland’s rugged Outer Hebrides archipelago. I’ve since followed his novels quite closely, choosing The Blackhouse (in 2012) and its first sequel, The Lewis Man (in 2014), as favorite novels of their respective release years in the States, and lauding his standalone Runaway earlier in 2016.

Now comes Coffin Road (Quercus), another Hebrides-backdropped suspense yarn, its story building around a 30-something man who washes up on an Isle of Lewis beach—with no idea of who he is or where he belongs. In short order, this protagonist discovers he’s been bedding his neighbor’s wife, has an interest in a mysterious colony of bees, and might well be a murderer. You can read more about Coffin Road in my latest Kirkus Reviews column, which is dominated by an interview I conducted recently with Scottish author May.

What often happens when I engage novelists in e-mail Q&As is that I draw more information from them than I can possibly fit into my regular Kirkus column. That was again the case with Peter May. So below, I am embedding the sections of our exchange that I had to leave out. It’s probably best to read the longer Kirkus piece first, then dash back here to learn about what else we discussed.

J. Kingston Pierce: This is a complicated story. Did you have trouble making all of the pieces fit properly?

Peter May: In a word, yes! It was probably one of the most complex and difficult storylines I have ever attempted. My process is that after researching and developing characters and an idea, I write a detailed story synopsis. That’s when I work out all the labyrinthine details. Halfway through my synopsis of Coffin Road I ran into a dead end. I knew where I wanted it to go, but had no idea how to get it there. I went through 24 hours of hell thinking that I was going to have to abandon the whole thing. Until suddenly, something clicked in my mind and, thankfully, the path to the denouement became clear.

JKP: You’ve spent much time in the Outer Hebrides over the years. Yet I understand that during your work on Coffin Road, you rented a cottage on the beach at Luskentyre, which is where the opening action in this novel takes place. How long did you stay on Harris, and what new things did you learn about the place while you were there?

PM: I have been to Harris many times over the years. I returned specifically to research the book in March 2015. I took the cottage (which became the model for the one in the book) for a week, during which time the worst imaginable weather assaulted us on every front—snow, sleet, hail, gale-force winds, and subzero temperatures. But because the constant wind moves the weather fronts through so quickly, sunshine is never far away, so to be down on the beach like that with a panoramic view from the cottage, was like being witness to God’s own light show. It was spectacular, and I learned that the Hebridean winter can be just as extraordinary as the summer.

JKP: Like your Lewis Trilogy, Coffin Road takes place in the Outer Hebrides. It doesn’t feature Fin Macleod, but the plot does bring back Detective Sergeant George Gunn (last seen in The Chessmen), who’s ventured out to Eilean Mòr to investigate a murder. Can we expect to see more of Gunn in your future novels, or was this a one-off?

PM: I needed a local cop for my story in Coffin Road, and since I already had a custom-made one from the Lewis Trilogy I thought, why create another? Whether or not he makes any further appearances remains to be seen.

Hard-boiled History

Bouchercon-goers in New Orleans last month, who asked me to name my favorite recent read will undoubtedly recall me extolling the multiple virtues of By Gaslight (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a Victorian-era suspense novel penned by Victoria, British Columbia, author Steven Price. It isn’t often that I find cause to go on and on about a 730-page yarn, but this one I consider extraordinarily well-written and ambitiously conceived. I endeavor to defend those opinions in my brand-new Kirkus Reviews column, which calls Price’s book “absorbing, persistently surprising,” and “poetically composed.” You can (and should) read the whole piece here.

There’s no question in my mind that By Gaslight will find a prominent spot in my Best Books of 2016 tally.

READ MORE: “By Gaslight,” by Miriam E. Burstein
(The Little Professor).

Just in Time for Holiday Buying

Following up on my most recent Kirkus Reviews column, in which I highlighted a variety of new crime, mystery, and thriller novels due out in September and October, this week’s column focuses on titles coming our way during the last two months of 2016. Those include a greatly expanded version of Max Allan Collins’ The Road to Perdition, the final entry in David Morrell’s trilogy of whodunits starring British essayist and notorious drug addict Thomas De Quincey, and Erle Stanley Gardner’s “lost” second entry in his underappreciated series starring Los Angeles private eyes Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. You’ll find my comments on these works, and more, by clicking here.

READ MORE: “What’s New in Canadian Crime Fiction,” by Bill Selnes (Mysteries and More from Saskatchewan).

What You’ll Be Reading in the Future

It’s almost September, my friends. High time to start looking toward fall and winter crime-fiction debuts—which is exactly what I’m doing in my Kirkus Reviews column this week. Because I had a rather wide variety of new novels I wanted to mention (including works by Carl Hiaasen, Amy Stewart, Thomas Mullen, and Tana French), I divided my survey of forthcoming releases in two. First, I highlight 10 new novels reaching stores in September and October. Next time, I’ll write in Kirkus about fresh fiction on tap for November and December.

Again, my latest piece can be found here.

The Scandi Man Can

I’ve been curious to learn more about the work of Norwegian detective novelist Gunnar Staalesen ever since reading this piece in Crime Fiction Lover, in which noted UK critic Barry Forshaw identified his “top 10 Nordic classics”—one of which is Staalesen’s The Consorts of Death (released in an English-language translation in 2009). Only recently, I was sent a copy of Where Roses Never Die (Orenda), the 19th installment in Staalesen’s series featuring Varg Veum, a committed, compassionate private eye on the order of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer. You can read my critique of that novel today on the Kirkus Reviews Web site.

McFetridge Sows Crime Among His Roots

If I’m correct, the first time I met Toronto, Ontario-based crime-fictionist John McFetridge was during the 2008 Bouchercon in Baltimore, when we gathered together with way too many other people in an auditorium to see editor-bookseller Otto Penzler interview writer Dennis Lehane on stage. As it happens, I had packed along for that trip a copy of McFetridge’s third novel, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, but hadn’t read much of it by the time I met its author, so I hoped he wouldn’t ask my opinion of the work. (Which he did not.)

I didn’t return to his fiction until 2014, when the first of his Eddie Dougherty mysteries, Black Rock, saw print. With its unusual setting of 1970s Montreal, Quebec, and its stripped-down, dialogue-heavy style, the novel struck me as something rather special. I wrote in a spring books wrap-up for Kirkus Reviews that McFetridge was “still looking for a ‘breakout book,’” and added hopefully: “With its well-etched family drama and dynamic historical background Black Rock might finally be the one.”

Whether a breakout work or not, Black Rock got me interested in McFetridge’s storytelling in a way that his handful of previous novels had not. I was quick to snap up his second Dougherty yarn, A Little More Free, when it came out in 2015, and asked his publisher to send me a copy of this year’s third series installment, One or the Other, long in advance of its August 9 release date. My hope was to conduct an e-mail interview with McFetridge, which I managed to complete just recently.

The results of our exchange are posted today in two parts. The first segment, focused around One or the Other, fills my new Kirkus column. Part II can be found below. It covers McFetridge’s educational and reading history, his interest in filmmaking, his early Toronto-backdropped novels, parallels between his own life and the Dougherty yarns, and why he chose Montreal—the city of his birth almost 57 years ago (his next birthday is in November)—as his setting for fiction.

J. Kingston Pierce: I’ve read that you attended high schools in Quebec, New Brunswick, and Ontario. What made you such a peripatetic teenager? Was it the result, perhaps, of one of your parents having to move around for work?

John McFetridge: Both my parents worked for the phone company. My father was an installer and my mother was a clerk, so we didn’t move for work. But when I was a teenager in the early 1970s my father had a couple of heart attacks and open-heart surgery. (I used some of those experiences in A Little More Free.) In those days that meant some long hospital stays, and I was the youngest of three kids and the only one still at home (and maybe not the best-behaved kid in the world), so I was sent to live with various relatives while all that worked itself out.

JKP: Are your parents still around?

JM: My father passed away in 1985 but my mom is living in New Brunswick. She had a pretty severe stroke a few years ago.


Author John McFetridge (photo by Jimmy McFetridge)

JKP: Have you been a big reader your whole life? And were you always interested in crime fiction, or is that a more recent interest?

JM: I was not a big reader in high school. I did read a little, but I wasn’t a good student. I was about 10 years old when my older brother [Bobby] joined the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police], so I was interested in the cop’s life, so to speak. And when I was in high school I did read Joseph Wambaugh’s The Onion Field and The New Centurions and a book called Walking the Beat, by Gene Radano, which stuck with me so I looked it up a little while ago. One of my favorite books that I read in high school was The Super Summer of Jamie McBride [by Christopher S. Wren and Jack Shepherd]. It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I started to read a lot more.

JKP: How is it that you started out at Quebec’s Concordia University wanting to study economics, but wound up—nine years later—with an English Literature degree? What changed in between? And one can’t help but ask, did it really take you nine years to get through college? Was that because you were working at the same time?

JM: Yes, I was working at the same time. Concordia University in Montreal started out, in the 1920s, as Sir George Williams College, a night school attached to the YMCA. It became Concordia in 1974, but for quite a while it still had a lot of evening classes that made it easy to do a part-time degree. After high school I had gone out west and worked, and then returned to Montreal, and I figured I needed to get some kind of career. I had met a couple of movie producers who were raising money through stock brokers (some of this will be in the next Dougherty book), so I thought I could become a broker and I enrolled in economics. I was wrong.

JKP: Early on, you wanted to be a filmmaker. How and why did you make the transition into penning novels?

JM: As I said, I wasn’t a big reader in high school, and when I was working blue-collar jobs everyone I knew saw movies but not many read novels. So, I thought to get to the audience that was like me, I needed to do it with movies. And I was intimidated by the idea of writing a novel. But when I started taking creative-writing classes and trying to write short stories, I started to realize that [novel writing] was the best way to be able to say everything you want to say. There’s really nothing like a novel to tell a story. And to understand other people. I realized a while ago, for instance, that the best insight I had into my mother and her life was through the stories of Alice Munro; they really gave us a way to talk to each other.

JKP: You went to college back in Montreal, but you now live in Toronto. When did you move to the Ontario capital? Was it before or after attending the Canadian Film Centre there in the early 2000s?

JM: It was before. When my wife and I were married in 1990, she was living in Hamilton, just outside Toronto, and I was in Montreal and we had to decide where to live. I was ready for a change of scenery, I think.

JKP: The first book you saw published was Below the Line, a 2002 short-story collection about filmmaking in Toronto, which you co-authored with Scott Albert. But did you try writing other books before that? Are there as-yet-unpublished John McFetridge novels gathering dust in a drawer somewhere?

JM: Yes, there are a few in the drawer. I haven’t looked at them in a long time, but the Eddie Dougherty series is getting into the 1980s and I wrote a private-eye novel in Montreal in the mid-80s, so I may get it out of the drawer and see if there’s anything I can scavenge.

JKP: Save for that first book, your subsequent ones have been novels published in Canada by small, Toronto-based ECW Press. Did you try selling your work to larger houses? How did you wind up with ECW, and can I assume that’s been a good relationship?

JM: It’s been a very good relationship. I’ve had three different editors at ECW and each one has been excellent and has helped me in different ways. I did have a couple of contracts with American publishers, but the timing was bad. My first two novels, Dirty Sweet and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, were bought by Harcourt, but it merged with Houghton Miflin just as they were being published, and my novels got lost in the shuffle (they did print a paperback of Dirty Sweet and a hardcover of Everybody Knows with, I think, terrific covers, but I don’t think they ever made it to stores). Then my next two books, Swap and Tumblin’ Dice, were picked up by St. Martin’s, but my editor left just before publication and those books disappeared, too. There is an American version of Swap called Let It Ride [2010] that I see sometimes, but it’s pretty rare.

And I’m very comfortable with ECW. I’m an old guy and I think of indie presses like indie record labels or indie movies. I’m glad I had the experience with Harcourt and St. Martin’s, but I’m very happy to be with ECW.

JKP: Have you given up on selling your books to the big U.S. publishers?

JM: I don’t really know a lot about the business end of things, so if a deal came along I’d certainly look at it, but it isn’t something I’m pursuing.

JKP: You wrote four novels in your so-called Toronto Series. For readers who haven’t yet discovered those books, could you please summarize what you intended to achieve with them?

JM: Toronto is a steadily growing, ever-changing place, and I was really just trying to get to know it myself. Within Canada, Toronto is the city everyone loves to hate because it’s the biggest, and the joke is it thinks of itself as the center of the universe. But within Toronto, of course, not many people really feel a part of the center. A little more than half the population of Toronto was born somewhere else, some in another part of Canada like me, but most in another country.

And I felt then that one of the best ways to see characters in many different and diverse neighborhoods was to follow cops and criminals around. I still feel that way. Criminals, especially in organized crime and drug dealers, often move between richer and poorer neighborhoods and cops go anywhere they’re called.

JKP: Yet, just four books into the Toronto Series, you gave it up. Were you personally ready for a change, or was this something suggested by an agent or publisher?

JM: I was ready for a change. After I wrote Black Rock, Jack David [the co-founder, with Robert Lecker, of] ECW asked if I could write another Eddie Dougherty novel, which was not something I was thinking about doing, but I’m very glad he asked. Then he asked if I would be able to link the series, and I thought I would. There are some characters in the Toronto Series who, like me, moved from Montreal to Toronto, and now I’m very excited about seeing some of those people earlier in their lives [in the Dougherty novels].

JKP: So Black Rock finally moved your attention back to Montreal. You’d been born across the St. Lawrence River, in what was at that time a separate city, Greenfield Park (since merged with Longueuil). Was it useful to have put some distance between you and the Montreal area by the time you started penning the Dougherty mysteries?

JM: Yes, I think it was. And also a little distance [from] my younger self. There’s not much that’s autobiographical in the Toronto Series (except I was arrested, along with everyone else on my shift, as a night-shift cleaner in a department store), but Eddie’s parents live in the house I grew up in and Eddie’s younger brother, Tommy, is exactly my age and going to the high school I went to.

JKP: What is it about Dougherty that made him seek a life in law enforcement?

JM: He didn’t start out looking at it as a life in law enforcement. It started out as not being at another desk in another classroom or at a desk in an office. Like a lot of cops of his age, Dougherty played sports and gave the referee a hard time, but understood that without the refs there wouldn’t be much of a game, and that’s how he saw the cops. As he gets more experience on the job, though, he starts to really appreciate that most of the interaction he has with people is when they are in a time of crisis—maybe minor, like a fender-bender, and maybe major, [as] when a loved one has been killed—and he starts to realize that he has a chance to make a positive difference in these moments.

JKP: You integrate a great deal of history into the Eddie Dougherty books. Has it helped that you lived through the 1970s, so you remember at least the highlights of that era? And when it gets down to re-creating Montreal street scenes, or now-defunct businesses, are you drawing on memory to some degree?

JM: Yes, I’m drawing on a lot of memories. Which is fun now, to reminisce like that, it helps to balance some of the unpleasant things that I research for the books, like the murders of young women or the [1972] nightclub fire.

JKP: Is your historical research mostly a matter of reading old newspapers and other publications?

JM: I do read a lot of old newspapers. And magazines. I try to interview people as much as I can, too. I wish my father was still alive, he spent his whole life in Montreal and a lot of it driving around in a phone company van with ladders on the top going to every neighborhood in the city. Driving with him was an adventure with a running commentary.

JKP: Even after you seemed to become comfortable as a novelist, you went back in 2010 to compose an episode of the Canadian TV crime drama The Bridge. Do you still harbor aspirations as a screenwriter?

JM: Yes, I interviewed for another TV show gig a couple of weeks ago. I still like TV and the big audience reach it has. Plus, writers’ rooms are usually catered and the food is really good.

JKP: Finally, what sort of books do you read these days? Do you read a lot of crime fiction, and if so, who are the writers you prefer?

JM: I just finished Stephen King’s Bill Hodges crime-fiction trilogy and enjoyed it a lot. I do like to read crime fiction and I wouldn’t want to give it up. I really liked Sam Wiebe’s Invisible Dead, a terrific private-eye novel set in Vancouver [British Columbia]. Also I’m reading the Women Crime Writers collection that Sarah Weinman edited and discovering some great writers I hadn’t read.

Also, I read a lot of non-fiction for research, but also for pleasure. Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, by Jefferson Cowie, is a very good book about the ’70s, and now I’ve started reading about the ’80s. Some of it I’m looking forward to, but some of it I never wanted to think about again.

Lion-Hearted Leo Rides Again

While other Seattle-based fictional private eyes have come and gone, G.M. Ford’s Leo Waterman is still on the case—and doing pretty well at it. My new Kirkus Reviews column—posted earlier this morning—looks at Ford’s new novel, Salvation Lake. You will find the piece here.

Deming Did It

Although I’ve had a couple of Richard Deming’s 1960s Sergeant Matt Rudd novels on my shelves for some time now, it was only while flying back recently from a Midwest vacation that I cracked one of them open. And I enjoyed it so much, I went on to read the second, and am currently looking for an old copy of the third book in that trilogy.

If you’ve never dived into Deming’s too-short Rudd series (Vice-Cop, Anything But Saintly, Death of a Pusher), I hope my new Kirkus Reviews column will encourage you to do so. As I write:

At his best, Richard Deming was a smooth, solid mystery-maker, who offered up enough dynamic twists to keep readers awake into the wee hours. Yes, like other U.S. crime writers of his era, he made sure his stories blended violence with sometimes unnecessary, titillating sex; and though he was less guilty of this than, say, Frank Kane, Deming had the habit of repeating—almost word for word—chunks of basic information about his main players (particularly, in the case of Rudd, on the subject of the man’s brown eyes, which seemed devastating to women). But those things can be forgiven in tales that, while short, deliver multi-dimensional characters and ample
droll dialogue.

You’ll find the whole of my new column here.

Another Whack at Lizzie

There’s every chance you haven’t noticed this yet, but my latest Kirkus Reviews column—this one focused around an interview with Walter Satterthwait about his second delightful Lizzie Borden whodunit, New York Nocturne—was posted this morning. You’ll find it here.

As frequently happens, the interview material I had available exceeded what I could use in Kirkus (though not by much this time). So, as a bonus for Rap Sheet readers, I am embedding my last three questions to Florida author Satterthwait below.

J. Kingston Pierce: Over the last 20 years, you’ve had to give up two different series—one starring Santa Fe, New Mexico, private eye Joshua Croft, the other featuring Pinkerton agents Philip Beaumont and Jane Tanner. Did poor sales figures doom both of those series, or were there other issues involved?

Walter Satterthwait: The Joshua Croft novels ended just about exactly where I wanted them to end—in a kind of uncertainty. As for the Pinkertons, I may see both of them again. When we saw them last, they were on their way to Greece. There was a lot of stuff going on in Athens in the early 1920s, and, so far as I know, no one’s ever written a thriller that used any of it.

JKP: Are you currently laboring over a different work of fiction? If so, can you tell me something about its storyline?

WS: It’s another story about New York at night. That’s about as much as I can say. It’s never a great idea, I think, to talk too much about the stuff that’s not finished. To some extent, talking about it can drain away the energy you might need to finish it.

JKP: Finally, if you could have written any novel that doesn’t already carry your byline, what would it be?

WS: Pale Fire, the [Vladimir] Nabokov novel that purports to be the editor’s notes to a poem of 999 lines. Like Lolita, it’s a very nearly perfect book, but the monster at the heart of Pale Fire isn’t quite as monstrous as the monster in Lolita.

Dark Reads Under Sunny Skies

And we’re back! After a week’s impromptu vacation—necessitated by other work demands—I have returned with a new Kirkus Reviews column. My subject this time is summer crime novels, 20 of them to be exact. Among the books I suggest your checking out over the next three warm months are tales by Walter Mosley, both Megan Abbott and Patricia Abbott, Michael Harvey, James Sallis, Peter Lovesey, and Laura McHugh. Click here to learn more about these picks.

READ MORE: “What Kirkus Didn’t Tell You: Three More New Crime Novels You Can Read This Summer,” by Peter Rozovsky
(Detectives Beyond Borders).

Slay Rides

Spurred on by the recent release of a trailer for Time After Time, a forthcoming ABC-TV crime drama that imagines Jack the Ripper fleeing Victorian London for 21st-century New York City, I wrote this week’s Kirkus Reviews column about two new Ripper-related novels, Alex Grecian’s Lost and Gone Forever and Oscar de Muriel’s The Strings of Murder. Click here to find the full piece.

READ MORE: “Signs That You Should Probably Reconsider Writing that Jack the Ripper Novel,” by Miriam Elizabeth Burstein (The Little Professor).

Hamilton Grabs His “Second” Chance

If you haven’t noticed already, my latest Mysteries and Thrillers column—posted earlier this morning on the Kirkus Reviews Web site—features an interview with Steve Hamilton, author of both the long-running Alex McKnight detective series (Die a Stranger, Let It Burn) and the soon-forthcoming thriller, The Second Life of Nick Mason (Putnam). I’ve followed Hamilton’s work ever since his early days with the McKnight novels, back when I commissioned Anthony Rainone to interview him for January Magazine. We have since met at a few Bouchercons, including last year’s event in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I’ve found him to be generous with his time and remarkably humble for somebody who’s enjoyed his level of authorial success. So it was a real treat to fire off my own questions to this now 55-year-old resident of Cottekill, New York.

As if often the case, however, I didn’t have enough room in that Kirkus piece to fit our full exchange. So I am embedding the remainder below. Here, Hamilton talks about his former day-job, his appreciation for cars, his approach to character development in the Mason series, and a great deal more.

J. Kingston Pierce: At what point did you finally give up your day-job as a technical writer with IBM and become a full-time author? How many years did you work for IBM?

Steve Hamilton: I worked for IBM for 32 years, writing in the evenings when I got home from work, after spending time with my family. It was honestly exhausting, but being a writer is what I always wanted to do. It felt like I was leading a double life, especially as I started having some success (winning two Edgars, putting two books on the New York Times bestseller list, writing two New York Times Notable Books of the Year). When the people I was working with were going on vacation with their families, I was going on book tours. So I can’t tell you how happy I am to finally be in a position where I can concentrate on writing full-time. I know I’m very lucky, and I’ll never take it for granted.

JKP: In The Second Life of Nick Mason, your protagonist has the opportunity to wheel around Chicago in a couple of classic cars, first a 1968 Mustang, then a 1967 Camaro. You write rather lovingly of both experiences. Are you a vintage-car enthusiast?

SH: I grew up in Detroit, so cars are in my blood. Even now, you go back there on a Saturday night in the summer, and you’ll see all of the old classic cars doing the “Telegraph Cruise.” The Ford Motor Company, in particular, has been a big part of my extended family. My father worked briefly for Lee Iacocca back in the1960s, when I was just a little kid, and his job was to distribute this new car called the Mustang to all of the local dealerships. As you can imagine, he got to be a pretty popular guy.

JKP: One of the few complaints I’ve heard about Second Life is that not all of the main players are given great dimension. Is that because you looked at this book as the opening chapter in a longer saga, one that will give you time over its full run to flesh out your continuing characters, including the enigmatic pet shop owner, Lauren, and Mason’s daughter, Adriana? How much do you think series characters need to be developed in the early books to keep readers interested?

SH: I wanted this book to be lean and fast, but at the same time I think all of the essential information about these characters is there. You’re right, it is the first book in a series—I’m on number 11 with Alex McKnight, so I’ve learned a lot about how a series should develop. In Nick Mason’s case, I’ve been much more thoughtful upfront about where the series is going. I actually have the first seven books all plotted out in great detail, so I can tell you that readers will learn a lot more about these characters as the series progresses. Every character will have his or her own time, with much more depth and history. And some of the transformations will be pretty dramatic. Allies will become enemies, and enemies will become allies.

JKP: By the way, does Lauren have a last name yet? I don’t remember seeing it mentioned anywhere in your new novel.

SH: She does, but it’s top secret. (Seriously, I’m sure it’ll come out in the next book.)

JKP: Does it have any influence on your writing this new series, knowing that Lionsgate hopes to use your books as the basis for a film franchise? Do you deliberately introduce elements into your stories that might play out well cinematically?

SH: That deal came about months after the first book was completed, but even with the second book, it’s not something I ever consciously think about. Of course, there’s always a certain amount of visualization that goes on in a writer’s head when he’s writing a scene. Many of the same elements that make a scene work on paper, when the “film” is essentially playing in the reader’s head, will naturally translate to a real-life film adaptation. But you can never let yourself get too hung up on that. Your job as a writer is to tell the story, in the best way you can. That’s it.

JKP: I notice that you have two children, Nicholas and Antonia, both of whose names you use in Second Life—Nick being the first name of your protagonist, and Antonia’s being the name of the Rush Street restaurant in Chicago where Nick is ostensibly employed. Why was this book the one in which you chose to honor both of your offspring so?

SH: Nick was a name that came to me early on—it just had the right feel to it, for a character like this. Nick Mason. It just fits him. I’ve always loved that name, even before I had a son and named him Nicholas. For Antonia, I think it was just a matter of giving her a little equal time.

JKP: After all your years of writing fiction, after all your accomplishments in the field, what’s one thing you know now that you wish you’d understood from the very start?

SH: Honestly, I wish I’d known that a publisher is not doing you a big favor by publishing your book. It should be an equal relationship, and promises should be kept on both sides. If it’s not working for you, you should be free to leave. A pretty simple idea, I know, but I wish someone had told me that a long time ago.

JKP: And with these two series going, will you ever find time again to write standalones such as Night Work (2007) and The Lock Artist?

SH: I’m sure I’ll do that again. Although I’m actually more excited about the chance to go back to Michael (from The Lock Artist) again. As long as he has this unforgivable talent for opening safes, and as long as other people know about it, there will always be new trouble for him to get into.

READ MORE: “Writer Steve Hamilton’s Second Chance,” by Richard Turner (The Wall Street Journal).

Execute Plan B!

I will let you in on a little secret about my latest Kirkus Reviews column, which was posted earlier this morning.

I’d originally planned to devote that piece’s full length to critiquing a single new novel. However, I wound up not really enjoying the book I had chosen. This happens every now and then when you’re penning a regular books column; you have absolutely no guarantee, when launching into a novel, that it will be satisfying enough or even sufficiently interesting to write about—yet you’re still scheduled to write something. In this case, I decided that the work in question was worth commenting on ... but I couldn’t address it alone. I needed to package it along with my thoughts on a couple of other recent releases I’d found more rewarding.

So click right here to read about three fresh additions to the crime/mystery/thriller genre: Murder Never Knocks, by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins; The Other Widow, by Susan Crawford; and The Sign of Fear, by Robert Ryan. I bet you’ll be able to guess which one of that trio I had initially thought to appraise on its own.

Slayings Among the Stacks

The entrance to New York City’s 42nd Street research library, also known as the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

During my first journey to New York City, not too long after I’d graduated from college, all I wanted to do was visit buildings. My father was an architect, who—though we lived way out in the hinterlands of Portland, Oregon—had for years been showing me magazine articles and books about Manhattan’s thrusting skyline, and how modern designers went about inserting slender glass-and-steel edifices amongst its older, broad-shouldered stone structures. So I was well prepared for a self-guided tour of the burg. I don’t remember in what order I saw them, but my wide-eyed walk through Manhattan (with too-infrequent stops at sidewalk eateries and bookshops) carried me to the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, Grand Central Terminal, the Woolworth Building, Daniel Burnham’s Flatiron Building, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, and, on the edge of Central Park, the luxurious Plaza Hotel.

Somewhere early in that hike, I also made sure to stop by the New York Public Library main branch at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.

A magnificent Beaux-Arts structure, built on the site of the old Croton Reservoir, designed by the local firm of John Merven Carrère and Thomas Hastings, and opened in 1911, that institution has become a beloved landmark, as well as a familiar location for movie shooting. (I think the first time I became aware of its cinematic potential was in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, during which an astronaut, played by James Franciscus, stumbles—at some time “in the distant future”—upon the ruined, buried, and sadly forgotten research library.) I recall standing in front of that marble mammoth on a warm summer day and just watching people as they climbed its broad entry staircase, on adjacent sides of which recline giant stone lions, nicknamed “Patience” and “Fortitude” by New York’s Depression-era mayor, Fiorello La Guardia. Having absorbed all I could from that vantage point, and with a smile threatening to plant itself permanently on my face, I finally mounted the stairs myself, touched each lion for good luck, and then roamed the building’s impressive interior for at least an hour. Ever since then, whenever my travels take me to Manhattan, I make sure to pay a call on that beautiful place of learning.

So it was probably inevitable that I should enjoy Con Lehane’s brand-new mystery novel, Murder at the 42nd Street Library (Minotaur), much of which takes place in and around that very landmark. But I’ve also read and enjoyed his previous three mysteries, all starring bartender-turned-amateur sleuth Brian McNulty: Beware the Solitary Drinker (2002), What Goes Around Comes Around (2005), and Death at the Old Hotel (2007). I knew, going in, that Lehane loves complicated plots, quirky characters with troubled back-stories, spirited dialogue, and a good deal of incidental humor in his storytelling. Murder at the 42nd Street Library offers all of those, plus a bookstacks-to-bowels view of what it’s like to work in a modern bibliotheca.

(Left) Author Con Lehane

After finishing Murder at the 42nd Street Library, I was hoping to interview him about this debut work in his new series and how it shows his evolution as a fiction writer. Fortunately, he accepted my invitation. The first—and shorter—part of our exchange was posted earlier today on the Kirkus Reviews Web site. Part II is embedded below.

For those of you who aren’t already familiar with Con (formerly Cornelius) Lehane, let me just note that he was reared in Connecticut and has been, at various points in his life, a bartender, union organizer, labor journalist, college professor. He attended Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and later earned an Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction writing from New York’s Columbia University. Currently a resident of Kensington, Maryland, near Washington, D.C., he shares his hard-won knowledge of fiction writing and mystery writing with students at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

In addition to the topics he covered in Part I of my interview with him, I asked Lehane about his life-changing experiences with the labor and civil-rights movements, his move into journalism, his years as the adviser to a student newspaper, his debt to novelists Nelson Algren and Ross Macdonald, the ups and downs of his mystery-writing career, and how he hopes to develop his new series, built around librarian Raymond Ambler. Read on to learn about those subjects and more.

J. Kingston Pierce: “Cornelius” isn’t the most common of first names. Is there a story behind that? Did your parents name you after the 19th-century Irish Socialist leader?

Con Lehane: I’m named after my paternal grandfather. My sister is named after our maternal grandmother. My middle name, William, is my maternal grandfather’s first name. My sister’s middle name is our paternal grandmother’s name. This is an Irish way of naming children. I don’t know what happens after the first two kids. Our family didn’t get that far. Actually, my son Paddy is named after my father. My son Jimmy is named after his mother’s father. Finally, Cornelius is not such an uncommon Irish name. In the west of Cork and the East of Kerry, the name Cornelius Lehane is not uncommon.

JKP: After you published your first novel, Beware the Solitary Drinker, much was made of your having a bartending background. But how extensive is that background, really? For how many years did you work among the tippling crowd, and where?

CL: I could probably name all the bars I worked in, but it would take some effort. There were 24 of them. It might really be 23 bars, because I was fired in a strike at Hartford Jai-Lai many years ago before I ever got to step behind the bar. My first bartending job was when I was still in college in Milwaukee and I was 21. My last bartending job was during the summer after my oldest son was born. That was almost 30 years ago.

JKP: You grew up around Fairfield County, Connecticut, and your father was a gardener on private estates, if I understand your history correctly. Your father often took you out to help him in the gardens, and you developed an affinity with other workers. Can we trace your interest in labor issues to those childhood experiences?

CL: Yes, though not directly. Certainly, my identification with folks who make their living by the sweat of their brow was because those are the folks I grew up among. My identification with the labor movement as the voice of those folks (even those who don’t believe that unions are the best representatives of working people, of whom my father was one) came later, more or less through my involvement in the civil-rights movement and later the anti-Vietnam War movement.

JKP: What was the extent of your involvement in labor organizing? What was it about such work you found so appealing? And for how many years did you work in labor-organizing positions?

CL: My first union activity was picketing supermarkets in support of the United Farm Workers’ efforts to organize migrant farm workers. It was the UFW’s first national effort, the [1965-1970] Delano Grape Boycott, a kind of amalgam of civil rights and labor issues, and a great lesson in unifying workers. The strike began when Filipino-American grape workers walked off the job. It wasn’t a strike of Mexican and other Latin American workers until the National Farm Workers Association, led by Cesar Chavez—a mostly Latino union—joined the strike later. The boycott went on for five years. I wasn’t much involved except picketing grocery stores with Boycott Grapes signs.

My first job in the labor movement was with what was then called the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. At the time, the Amalgamated represented clothing workers who made men’s clothes and the International Ladies Garment Workers represented workers who made women’s clothes. Since then, because of dwindling membership, those two unions merged, that merger followed by other mergers and splits, so the old Amalgamated later became part of the second union I worked for, what was then called the Hotel and Restaurant Workers and Bartenders International Union. The Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union was sort of my home union, because I was a bartender and a member, as well as a staff person. After I was let go (fired) from the staff, I kept on organizing as a member of a bartenders local in Massachusetts. More union jobs followed, including organizing doctors and, later, circus workers. Later still, after I thought I’d finished with organizing and begun teaching, I was elected president of my community college union local.

Unless you’ve been involved in a union organizing campaign, you wouldn’t know the courage and nobility of the folks who put their economic well-being—their jobs—on the line to stand up against forces with a lot more power than they have. There was a documentary film of one of the farm workers strikes some time back. I don’t remember the title. In one scene, the camera panned a picket line of workers standing alongside a road, maybe blocking trucks carrying struck goods, maybe buses carrying strikebreakers. I don’t remember. What I do remember is the expression on the face of one of the men standing wearing a picket sign. It was an expression of abject terror, the expression on the face of someone who thinks he might die in the next few minutes. The man was terrified, but he was there, standing up, as scared as he was. That’s why I did it. That’s what I got out of it: standing up against exploitation with folks like him. I could go on for a couple of days about my time in the labor movement; it’s been decades now, and I’ve never thought I was wrong about it.

JKP: Were you employed as a labor journalist at the same time as you were organizing, or did that period of your career come before or after?

CL: I worked as a labor journalist for the National Education Association. This was my last job in the labor movement, from which I retired. My background was as a college teacher, so I wrote and edited NEA’s higher-education publications. But I also did work on organizing campaigns on college campuses while at NEA.

JKP: So where does being a college professor fit into your résumé? Was that a later-career move? Were you teaching English, journalism, or something else? And where were you teaching?

CL: I hold a Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction writing, my credential for college teaching. This was something of a planned move, and strangely, it’s all connected. I was always back and forth between my union work and bartending, making my living as a bartender so I could get time to write when I wasn’t working for unions. It was much harder to find time to write when doing union work. When I “got done” with my job with the Amalgamated, I went to work at the University of Massachusetts [UMass] in Amherst as a janitor, so I could take courses in the MFA program with Harvey Swados, who’d recently joined the faculty. He was probably the last of the “proletarian” writers. One of his books, On the Line [1957], was based on his time working in an auto plant. He was really encouraging to me, despite the fact I was very much an amateurish writer. He died [in 1972] just after I was accepted into the MFA program. I was sort of lost without him and floundered around a bit, finally dropping out of the program, bartending and then going to work for the bartender’s union.

I finally got an MFA a few years later, not from UMass but from Columbia, having moved from Massachusetts to New York to work for a union. My plan was to trade in my union work and bartending, which I’d done one or the other of for more than a decade, for teaching at a college, which would provide me more time to write. My first teaching jobs were as an adjunct composition teacher in the CUNY [City University of New York] system. Not so coincidentally, one of my positions there was in the City College Workers Education Center. After a couple of years of that, I was hired by Rockland Community College as a full-time tenure-track assistant professor, to teach English and act as adviser to the college newspaper. God knows why they hired me. But it was great. I worked there for almost 10 years, leaving as an associate professor to move to Washington, D.C., to work in labor education with SEIU [the Service Employees International Union] and later to become an editor at NEA.

JKP: Being someone who first saw the possibilities of his own writing career while working for a college paper, I’m interested in your mention of having been the adviser to the staff of such a publication. What were your best and worst experiences in the adviser’s role?

CL: I was the adviser to Outlook, the student newspaper at Rockland Community College in Suffern, New York … The student editorial crew I inherited when I arrived at Rockland were conservative, Young Americans for Freedom types. They didn’t trust me at first because I was always up front about my own political views. I got along with them—and all of the subsequent editors—because I told them right from the start that the paper was theirs. They made the decisions. I was the adviser. I couldn’t and wouldn’t make decisions for them. They didn’t believe me. But I convinced them, the college administration, and the faculty that the final decision on anything editorial would always belong to the student editors.

As you might imagine, this ruffled a lot of feathers. I persuaded the administration to adopt this hands-off policy by pointing out that if I made decisions, the college would be liable for what the students wrote. If it was clear that the decisions were always made by the students, the college wouldn’t be liable. I would argue with the students. They knew what I thought about whatever issue they were dealing with. They also knew they didn’t have to agree with me. I wouldn’t have the final word. They got things wrong. They embarrassed faculty members and the administration more than once. They took editorial positions that made me cringe. In all of that, they grew a lot.

One year, I had this group of guys, disciples of Howard Stern. Every day, I went into the newspaper office; Howard Stern was blaring out of the radio. I couldn’t stand him—still can’t. For the entire year, no women entered the newspaper office, or if a young woman might happen in, she’d leave quickly and never come back. The editors moaned and groaned that there were no women. This was before there was as much consciousness about hostile work environments. I knew. I told them to turn off Howard Stern, stop with all the women-as-objects jokes. They weren’t bad guys. They were boorish and afraid of women, so they scared them off in turn.

After that, for a number of years, women were editors and the place was more welcoming. Yet, it never became welcoming to black students. The editors would have welcomed black students. [But] hey didn’t know how to create a setting, a newsroom, where black kids felt welcome and comfortable. I didn’t either. I had one black kid as an editor, Michael Grant. He was from Jamaica and went back to Jamaica where he’s a writer now.

JKP: At what point in your life did you determine that composing novels was the perfect job for you?

CL: My becoming a novel writer, a story writer, derives from my reading, by luck and happenstance, The Man with the Golden Arm [1949], by Nelson Algren, near the end of my time in college. When I read the first few pages of that book, I knew for the first time that I could become a writer, a novelist. I won’t describe the story (it’s not the movie) or my epiphany (I’d never read a novel that was so much about things I knew: the setting, the characters, and the sensibility, which was sympathy for the kind of folks a lot of people don’t feel much sympathy for), because it would take too long. Basically, I had this epiphany that I could become a writer—that I should become a writer—at the same time in my life that I discovered this political battle against injustice that manifested itself in the civil-rights movement, the anti-war movement, a bunch of anti-poverty community organizing that was going on at the time, and the labor movement. So, for me, the two—what then we called “the movement” and my writing—were intertwined, inseparable.

JKP: Did you try writing and selling other novels before you found a publisher for Beware the Solitary Drinker?

CL: When I was at the UMass MFA program, I began a novel that took place against the backdrop of the radical political movement of the ’60s and early ’70s that I’d been part of. I worked on that off and on for a number of years. It took a long time to write and a longer time to go through many revisions. It was my thesis for my MFA at Columbia, and I tried to get it published for a few years after that, publishing stories here and there in the meanwhile. In one attempt to get it published, I attended a conference on the first novel in Woodstock, New York, not far from where I lived at the time. One of the speakers, Ruth Cavin (with whom, years later, I closed down a couple of Bouchercon bars) said, among other things, that it was easier to get a first mystery novel published than a more traditional sort of novel. I’d begun reading mystery novels a few years before that and had the same sort of epiphany reading Hammett and Raymond Chandler and, later, Ross Macdonald that I had upon reading Nelson Algren, a kind of affinity for the settings, the characters, the voice, and especially with Macdonald, the sensibility (incidentally, Ross Macdonald was an admirer of Nelson Algren). In one of Macdonald’s books, Lew Archer says something like, “As the wise man from Chicago once said, ‘Never play cards with a man named Doc, never eat at a place called Mom’s, and never, ever sleep with anyone who has more troubles than you do’”—a famous quote from Algren. That’s when I began Beware the Solitary Drinker, thinking it would be easier to get a mystery published.

JKP: When you created New York City bartender Brian McNulty, did you imagine that he’d be able to carry a series of novels, rather than just one? Or had you planned Solitary Drinker as a one-off, with completely different novels to follow?

CL: At first, coming out of the conference I mentioned above, thinking about what Ruth Cavin said about it being easier to get a first mystery published, I thought I’d write one mystery novel to get myself published as a novelist and then go on to being whatever kind of novelist I thought I was. Once I got into writing Beware the Solitary Drinker, though, I found I was entirely comfortable with the form. I think I sort of needed the conventions of the mystery novel to provide a structure for my writing. That first novel I mentioned was over 800 pages long in the first draft. After a couple of rewrites, I got it down to 400-something. As you can guess, it was bit unwieldy. The mystery novel provided a structure and provided the basics of a ready-made plot: someone killed someone and your protagonist needs to find out who did it and why. Well, by the time I finished [Beware the Solitary Drinker], what Ruth Cavin said was no longer true. In fact, she (or one of her assistants) rejected the book. It took years to find a publisher for that one. I finally found a publisher in France, Francois Guerif at Rivages/Noir, so I sold my first book [translated as Prends garde au buveur solitaire] in France before I found a publisher here in the U.S.

JKP: After writing and publishing three McNulty yarns, the last one being Death at the Old Hotel, you pretty much disappeared from bookstore shelves, though you maintained a presence at conventions such as Bouchercon. Nine years went by before you introduced your fourth novel, Murder at the 42nd Street Library. What was behind that hiatus? Was it your choice, or your publisher’s?

CL: First of all, I was writing the entire time. It was a hiatus from being published, and it was definitely not by choice. My publisher, Thomas Dunne Books/St Martin’s Minotaur, didn’t want to continue the McNulty series because the sales weren’t good enough. This was around the time of one of those turning point in publishing when the publishers gave up on the idea of slowly building an author through three or four books until sales became respectable. Really good writers—Reed Farrel Coleman, Scott Phillips, Eddie Muller, Jim Fusilli, many others—were dropped by publishers after really good books didn’t sell well enough. Death at the Old Hotel came out in June 2007. I don’t remember when I found out they weren’t going to do another book in the series. By the time I found out, I was a good way into a fourth McNulty book. My editor, Marcia Markland at Thomas Dunne, hadn’t given up on me, even though she couldn’t sell the house on another McNulty. She said I should write a different book: “Something no one ever thought of before that could star Matt Damon.” I fiddled around with a number of ideas I might pitch to her and talked things over with my agent, Alice Martell. Alice told me she doubted she could sell the McNulty series to another New York publisher because of the sales numbers. So if I wanted to finish the book I was working on, we’d have to try a small press and hope something worked out there. Otherwise, I should write a different book—and she wasn’t especially hopeful about selling that either. Her advice was that if I wanted to sell a book, I should become famous. Agent and editor were both being facetious (Marcia is still my editor and Alice Martell is still my agent). But they provided a pretty good description of what publishers were looking for.

I ran into Marcia at either Malice Domestic or Bouchercon in 2008. She had an idea: I should write a mystery set at the 42nd Street Library. So I did. No contract, no promise of publication, just an idea. I was still working at NEA then; writing time was limited, so it took a while. At any rate, I wrote the book and sent it to her in early 2011. Basically, it was an unsolicited manuscript. Marcia isn’t the world’s speediest editor at getting things read. So, for this reason and that, she held onto the book for a while. At some point, she asked me to send her a proposal for a second book in the series. I did. What happened was she rejected the book I sent her and gave me a contract for the proposed book, as yet unwritten, which became Murder at the 42nd Street Library. I began [work on that] in the fall of 2011, spent the winter of 2012 in the Frederick Lewis Allen Memorial Room at the 42nd Street Library writing it, and turned it in, if I remember correctly, in 2014. It took this long to get it to publication. In the meanwhile, I’ve written a second Raymond Ambler book, also under contract.

JKP: About your librarian … Is it true, that his name was meant to honor both Raymond Chandler and Eric Ambler?

CL: I don’t think I ever said that to anyone. But a couple of people, including reviewers, made the connection. I came up with the name for the first book, before he was curator of the crime-fiction collection, so the name might have begot the collection and his new identity. So the answer is yes. I almost changed it a couple of times, but it stuck.

JKP: I always find it interesting to read your novels, because you’re an absolute demon for complicated plot twists and hidden motives. Which authors have been most influential in leading you to construct your mysteries as you do?

CL: My editor said when I was beginning the second Ambler book, “Try to make it simple. You have enough going on in that last book for two or three mysteries.” I don’t try to obfuscate. I don’t try to make it difficult for the reader. But I don’t like to explain. I try to write so I don’t have to explain, and this might require the reader to do some work. I don’t watch TV shows very often. When I do watch them sometimes, a lot of times, what’s going to happen next in a show is obvious to me—the body lying in the tub isn’t really dead, despite the axe sticking out of his head; he’s going to bounce back up in a minute, and so he does. That’s not the same thing as the suspense Hitchcock talks about where the viewer knows there’s a bomb under the table and the card players don’t. The first is just something predictable happening. I’ve been accused of being predictable myself. But I don’t like it. I try not to be predictable.

I mentioned Hammett and Chandler. I’m very much influenced by them. That’s why I began writing mysteries. But I don’t think I write like them, except maybe a little bit in tone with McNulty, the mean streets sort of thing. Ross Macdonald is who I think I’m most like—not that I’d put myself in the same league. Megan Abbott, who read Murder at the 42nd Street Library early on, made that connection of secrets in the past working themselves out in the present.

I think there were two strains of crime writing coming out of Hammett and Chandler. Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) went one way; John D MacDonald went another way. A lot of writers who came after were much influenced by John D. (a writer I appreciate much more now than I did when I was beginning to write mysteries), some writing today who might not realize his influence on them. For a lot of reasons, I connected with Ross Macdonald and not John D. The next major influence, after those two was Robert B. Parker—a huge influence on many of today’s crime-fiction writers. I didn’t connect with him either, though I think, because he opened up so many new kinds of possibilities for crime fiction, he influenced me without my reading him much.

I also connected with a number of European writers. The aforementioned Eric Ambler, Georges Simenon, Nicholas Freeling, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and others. But Ross Macdonald was my new Nelson Algren. He’s the writer I read over and over again. I spent a couple of days a couple of different times reading his notebooks in the library at the University of California-Irvine, where his papers are collected. I went there the first time after reading Tom Nolan’s wonderful biography. At the moment, I’m reading Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald.

JKP: Can I assume that an important secondary character in your new book, distinguished crime-fictionist Nelson Yates, takes at least part of his name from Nelson Algren?

CL: [And] Richard Yates was one of my fiction-writing teachers at Columbia and a major influence on me also. Why do people keep thinking I combine writers’ names for character names in my book? Actually, for a while, the character’s last name was Macdonald.

JKP: You mention as background that Ambler has “practiced tai chi for 20 years.” Why make that an element of your protagonist’s character?

CL: I had a boss years ago, a young man from Taiwan, whose adoptive parents opened a restaurant for him to run in Middletown, Connecticut. I was the bar manager. He’d been trained from childhood in tai chi. Tai chi, which most Americans think of as a set of exercises, is a martial art. One night, a drunken cook who knew some karate tried to take him on in the parking lot of the restaurant. It supposedly started as a joke—but those kinds of things with drunks are never jokes. The cook threw punches, kicked, charged like a bull. Andrew, my boss, sunk and turned and listened. He threw no punches, no kicks, but the drunk cook couldn’t touch him. Basically, the cook beat himself up. It was a bit like the fight in Murder at the 42nd Street Library.

I do tai chi exercises. I know the form. But I’m not proficient at it as a martial art, nor do I know the underlying philosophy, Taoism, that well. I keep at it, take a course now and again. But I’m not dedicated enough to become proficient. It’s sort of the peaceful martial art—softness, yielding, to overcome strength, or more properly to allow strength to overcome itself. Don’t quote me. The unpublished book had a lot more tai chi in it because I was taking a class at the time I was writing it.

JKP: I was surprised to read, on the back of the advance reader’s copy of Murder at the 42nd Street Library, that this was the first installment in a series that “features crime à la library at some of America’s most famous institutions of higher learning.” Does that mean you’re planning to take Ambler on the road, have him investigate murders and other nefarious acts at libraries around the United States? Or do you plan to stick with New York City libraries?

CL: I was surprised to read that myself. The second book is set at the 42nd Street Library. That library is a fascinating enough place to handle any number of murder mysteries, which is what I was inclined to do. I’m not averse to setting crimes at other libraries. There are a lot of great libraries, with interesting collections, histories, and architecture. I haven’t started a third book yet. I don’t know if the publisher will continue the Ambler series. I have a lot of ideas for the series, so I’d like to keep going. I’ll begin a new book soon without knowing if the series will continue, so at the moment, I don’t know what the book will be.

JKP: Do you have writing ambitions beyond what you’ve already achieved? Would you like to pen works other than crime fiction?

CL: So far I’ve been able to tell all the stories I want to tell, address all the reasons I write fiction in the mystery novels I’ve written. If I came up with a story I needed to tell and couldn’t tell it within the conventions of the mystery novel, I might write another kind of book. I think that book would be a tragedy—some might call it noir—along the lines of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie or An American Tragedy or Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm. Ross Macdonald tried to write what he called “an autobiographical novel about my depressing childhood in Canada.” He couldn’t do it. Instead, he found Lew Archer to be kind of a filter than enabled him to write about the things that were closest and most important to him. The detective novel has served that purpose for me also.

JKP: Finally, are there things about the writing of fiction or your own abilities as an author in this field that you’ve learned over the years, but wish you had known from the outset?

CL: I’ve been writing fiction a long time and I’ve been teaching fiction writing and mystery writing for a few years now. I read any number of books on fiction writing—dozens, if not scores—both when I was learning to write and later as I was learning to teach fiction writing. I’ve come to believe that you learn best about writing fiction—mysteries—by reading the books of fiction themselves, more than from reading books about how to write fiction. I’m not saying don’t study the craft. Some of the books on craft are helpful but only in the context of reading the works of fiction themselves. Starting over, I would have paid more attention to how the writers I identified with did what they did by reading and re-reading and thinking about the books I felt a kinship with.

READ MORE: “Con Lehane & Lola” (Coffee with a Canine).