And We're Back Again

 

Yesterday I posted some recent crime fiction tidbits from European newspapers, so today it's back in the USA (and Canada) with news on this side of the Pond:

From the Toronto North Shore News comes an article on John Connolly (ironic, since he's Irish -- maybe I should have included him with yesterday's posting). The author talks about his latest novel The Reapers. "I really wanted to write about the way men relate to each other," he says. "There's a law in physics that says the thing is changed in the observation; you can't plot the position of something and say its speed, because you have to stop it to take its position. And I think men are a bit like that: when you put them in the company of women, their behaviour changes slightly."

The Post Star of Glen Falls, NY, gave its recommendations for summer mystery reading: Bangkok 8 by John Burdett, Neon Rain by James Lee Burke, Hitler's Peace by Philip Kerr, and Sun Storm by Asa Larson.

The Tampa Bay News Tribune wrote that the Gerber Baby has a new book. As hard as it may be to see now, octagenarian Ann Turner Cook was once the model for the chubby-cheeked commercial icon. She just published her fourth mystery novel, Micanopy in Shadow.

Last December, a new anthology edited by Otto Penzler was released, featuring mystery stories written by members of the legendary literary circle 1920s, the the Algonquin Round Table. The Classic Mysteries Podcast talked about via an online blog link here.

Publishers Weekly printed a web-exclusive interview with Lawrence Block about his latest novel starring Keller, the laconic, stamp-collecting hitman, titled Hit and Run.

The Boston Globe Online reviews British mystery author Morag Joss's latest, The Night Following. (OK, so this is a European subject, too, but there *is* a lot of global cross-polination in crime fiction these days—a very good thing, in my opinion).

And Sarah Weinman, in the Los Angeles Times, reviewed Finding Nouf, the fiction work by San Francisco novelist Zoe Ferraris which developed from a stay in Saudi Arabia for several years after the first Gulf War.

News From Across the Pond

 

The Irish Independent takes a look at rising crime fiction writers from Ireland (although I would add that some of these authors aren't just "rising," they've already arrived and checked into their 5-star hotels), including Declan Hughes, Tana French, John Connolly, Arlene Hunt, and Andrew Nugent. Arlene Hunt thinks part of the appeal of Irish crime writing is its realism. "People can relate to the characters," Hunt says. "It's not just about escapism; they like to hear the spoken word and the different accents and not just read about glamorous characters gambling in casinos in the south of France." Connolly sees a bright future ahead for Irish crime fiction, saying that, while a lot of modern crime fiction adheres to conventional formats and constructs, this isn't the case with Irish crime writing, where "interesting things are happening. The great hunt in British publishing is to find the Irish Ian Rankin."

The Guardian profiled Lee Child as a British author who "beat the Americans at their own game" (pointing out that a planned Hollywood film adaptation could turn his hard-boiled creation of Jack Reacher into the next Bond or Bourne). As to why Child chose to write an American character who lives in the U.S., he said "America suited the book I wanted to write much more than Britain. British crime stories tend to be very internal, psychological, claustrophobic, very limited in terms of geography. If you think about Ian Rankin, it's a small area of Edinburgh. I wanted to do something that was more wide-ranging in terms of geography, empty spaces, distant horizons."

The UK's Independent talked with author Karin Slaughter, a female crime writer who "doesn't flinch from extreme violence." As the article states, it's the victim's perspective that matters to Slaughter, who vividly remembers the trauma caused by the notorious Atlanta child murders, in which 29 African-American boys were raped and murdered, in her own neighbourhood, when she was nine. "I was living in this middle-class suburb really insulated from the world then suddenly my life changed and we had to check in with our parents and couldn't go down certain roads and there were all these new limitations," she recalls. "It really affected me."

The Manchester Evening News had an article on Eric Allis, who began writing a crime fiction novel with co-author Bruce Kennedy Jones, an investigative journalist, while Allis was in prison serving time for bank theft. A career criminal, Allis turned his life around by educating himself while incarcerated and becoming a journalist himself. The Allis/Joned novel, The Last Straight Face was subsequently published, and the duo are working on a sequel.

And the Inverness Courier featured Scottish crime writer Grace Monroe, who dedicated a debut book to the Law Society of Scotland "without which this book would not have been possible" (a tongue-in-cheek reference to a falling out with the Society which led to a career change). Grace Monroe is actually the work of two authors, Maria Thomson and journalist Linda Watson-Brown who have just published their second thriller. As to the falling out, it was a very public case in which accusations that they were abusing the legal aid system led to the Maria Thomson and her husband losing their home and law business and travelling to the other side of the world to Hawaii to get away from their problems in Scotland. The Thomsons were cleared of any wrong-doing, but not before Scotland's most expensive defamation action and Maria staging her own hunger strike in a bid to clear her name.

More Media Mystery

 

Crime novelist and screenwriter Lynda La Plante (best known for the award-winning TV series, Prime Suspect starring Helen Mirren), was awarded a United Kingdom CBE Medal as part of the Queen's Birthday Honors List.

The War on Crime radio show featured as guests crime writer Diane Fanning, discussing the case of a mother who murdered her children in Plano TX and now wants to be released from a mental hospital; Kelly Siegler, a Texas prosecutor and Women in Crime Ink Contributor who talked about that same case, and Gil Alba, a law enforcement expert and P.I. who dicussed the tragic Oklahoma child slayings.

The Lifetime Movie Network's recent broadcast of The Capture of the Green River Killer, LMN’s March 2008 TV adaptation of Dave Reichert’s book, was apparently a huge success. The two-part movie smashed through past ratings records, attracting more than 2 million viewers to a network whose normal primetime audience is less than 500,000.

NPR aired a piece on how murder-mystery audiobooks help keep truck drivers awake, as part of its summer series called "Roadside Reviews," in which truckers will offer their recommendations of the best and worst books for listening.

NPR also reported on the new move afoot to try to change the decades-old publishing model of returning unsold books, as spearheaded by a new imprint at Harper Collins.

And "Masterpiece Theater" on PBS is broadcasting a summer lineup of British crime thrillers, starting with  the first of three “Inspector Lewis” films, followed by episodes of "Foyle's War," "The Inspector Lynley Series," and "Sally Lockhart."

The Book Sales Roller Coaster

 

According to the Association of American Publishers, book sales in March declined 11% to $462.1 million (the bad news), although sales for the year to date rose 1.3% to $1.71 billion (the good news). It probably has to do with the increased gas and food costs, although there's no way of knowing at this point. The AAP also indicated which types of books were selling best:

Stronger categories:

• E-books rose 58.9% (with sales of $4.4 million).
• Children's/YA paperbacks were up 9.1% ($51.3 million).
• Adult paperbacks sales rose 6.2% ($138.5 million).
• El-Hi basal and supplemental K-12 gained 3.9% ($153.3 million).
• Children's/YA hardcovers increased 2.4% ($48.1 million).

Weaker categories:

• Audiobooks fell 44% ($11 million).
• Adult hardcovers were down 25.9% ($103.1 million).
• Religious books decreased 25.5% ($47.6 million).
• University press paperbacks dropped 14% ($3.7 million).
• Adult mass market declined 10.9% ($67.4 million).
• University press hardcovers fell 5.7% ($5.9 million).
• Professional and Scholarly books were down 4.6% ($46.8 million)

So what's a bookseller to do? During the BEA panel "Evolution of In-Store Events: From in-Store to Online," Book Passage's Karen West said they were having to revamp their web site presence (e.g. elements like author appearances, book clubs and other events). Fellow panelists and booksellers Dave Weich and Charles Stillwagon talked about some of the steps they're taking to harness the power of the Internet to sell books, including blogs (such as one that has authors contribute leading up to their store appearances), as well as outreach on general sites such as MySpace.com and YouTube.com and book/author-focused ones like RedRoom.com and GoodReads.com. As to whether that translates into more sales, it remains to be seen. Need more ideas? Powell's Bookstore even offers a film series. As Karen West added, "Bookstores are about community, and the current social climate is making more events possible," West added. After experiencing a "lack of intimacy in the 1980s and '90s, people are now looking to connect," she said. "Offer them a reason to come."

And maybe make it worth the extra $5 in gas it will take them to get there...

Mystery Melange

Author Robert Walker, the author of 40 books (paperback thrillers like Shadows in the White City, Fatal Instinct and Cold Edge), talked with the Charleston Gazette about growing up in Chicago. The son of a WWII vet and a hard-drinking trucker driver, Walker was "one of those guys yelling into a bar, asking if my father was in there." When he became interested in a writing career in the 1980s, he sent a letter to 10 best-selling author and asked them how they did what they did and how could he get books on the best-seller list? "Dick Francis called me from an airport," he laughed. "I didn't learn anything from him, but it was great to talk to him." Horror novelist Dean R. Koontz sent him a six-page letter, gave him advice on what to read for pointers and told him to move back toward reality-based horror fiction (no surprise), although it taught him to pay attention to trends. Still, as he points out, "I love writing, but I wouldn't wish this kind of life on anybody," he said. "The hardest part isn't the writing. The hardest part is keeping a steady income."

The Times Online featured an article on Elizabeth George. She began writing at the age of 7; the family were “quite poor” and not well educated, but her mother gave her an old Remington typewriter. She got herself to university and into the teaching profession, producing three crime novels before she was accepted for publication. Despite her subsequent success, she admits to having been in therapy, mostly due to personal relationship issues. “Happiness is an inside job - it takes a long time to learn that. I was pretty frightened to strike out on my own, but it shouldn't be such a big deal.” She was single for four years before meeting her current partner, a retired firefighter. “Between husbands I discovered that I quite enjoyed my own company.”

The Times Online also offered up a look at Ian Rankin's next novel, the first non-Rebus outing since that protagonist was killed off.  Rankin told the Times that he hopes to be able to use the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August as a launchpad for an Edinburgh-set comedy thriller, which is to be formally published the following month.

James Fallows wrote in a recent Atlantic article about the Hard Case crime fiction series which he says "is justly celebrated."

The Times Union has a Q&A with Julia Spencer-Fleming. In response as to why she, as a lawyer, didn't want to write legal thrillers, she said, "When I started writing, I was trained as a lawyer. My husband at the time was a lawyer. Almost all of our friends were lawyers, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend my fictional hours with more lawyers. It bored me. And when I started my first book, back in 1998 or 1999, there were already a number of really good legal mysteries and legal thrillers. I didn't feel that there was anything new that I could bring to the field."

The Dallas Morning News profiled Elaine Viets who fought back from a massive stroke in 2007. Although she had a career as a career as a print and broadcast journalist, Viets does research for her minimum-wage Dead-End-Job Series, such as worked in a dress shop (until the owner was indicted and it closed), clerking for a year at a bookstore in Hollywood, Fla., to pay the mortgage after her husband fell ill, and working the phones as a telemarketer selling septic-tank cleaner. "I was really awful," she says. An insomniac, she writes between 3 and 6 a.m. on a computer, then sleeps until 11 a.m. and revises her work that afternoon. "I must be part vampire," she says.

In a recent interview, British crime writer Mo Hayder talked about going from a runaway (she wanted to be a punker) to being a bestselling author. Hayder is liberal in view of her past drug use and says it's not drugs that kill people, it's the lifestyle that gets attached to it. "I imagine a lot of the time it's that they're (drug takers) not looking after themselves and they're living on the edge of life and they're marginalised anyway."

And finally, the Ventura County Star writes about Janet Evanovich and her visit to Mysteries to Die For bookstore in Thousand Oaks. "It's one of my favorite places," said Evanovich, who visited the store often to sign books before she became a best-selling author. "As I became more popular, little independent bookstores couldn't accommodate crowds, so I make these sort of clandestine stops. It's more fun. At big signings, I don't get a chance to talk to people."

AFI's Best Mystery Movies

The American Film Institute just announced a new set of lists: the top 10 films in 10 classic genres (science fiction, romantic comedy, western, etc.), chosen by a jury of 1,500 film artists, critics and historians. AFI President and CEO Bob Gazzale said: "This year's celebration of the art form is ten times the fun for movie lovers. And another chapter in our mandate to drive audiences to discover and rediscover the classics of American film."

And the winners of the Top 10 Gangster and Top 10 Mystery Films are...

GANGSTER:

1. The Godfather (1972)
2. Goodfellas (1990)
3. The Godfather: Part II (1974)
4. White Heat (1949)
5. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
6. Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (1932)
7. Pulp Fiction (1994)
8. The Public Enemy (1931)
9. Little Caesar (1930)
10. Scarface (1983)

MYSTERY:

1. Vertigo (1958)
2. Chinatown (1974)
3. Rear Window (1954)
4. Laura (1944)
5. The Third Man (1949)
6. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
7. North by Northwest (1959)
8. Blue Velvet (1986)
9. Dial M for Murder (1954)
10. The Usual Suspects (1995)

When it Rains...

 

The floods in Iowa and other parts of the midwest aren't just affecting homes and crops, as horrible as that is. The University of Iowa has been under seige as well, including its library. Librarians had been moving books from the basement all week, but only copies of manuscripts and theses. But when they heard the news last Thursday that the river was going to rise higher than expected, they put out a call for help.

"All of the sudden, 'whoosh' all these people showed up," said Nancy Baker, university librarian. "Many things can be replaced but not some of these books." Many are out of print, books dating back to the 1800s or older that have been stored in the basement for decades. As the hour approached quitting time at 5 p.m., when all operations were ordered to halt and volunteers evacuate the building, hands just kept moving, with one stack was emptied every 20 minutes. Psychiatry professor Jim Beeghor said his shift started with Western philosophy, Kant and Spinoza, and he handed off to theater professor Kim Marra, who was glad to see a rescue of old plays from the 18th century, up the stairs, through the hands of joking students — 95 people to the top.The best guess is more than 100,000 books are moving upward as they raced the clock, realizing some would be left behind.

The Library Journal reported on other libraries affected, including the State Library of Iowa, the National Czech & Slovak Museum and Library, and the the Cedar Falls & Waterloo Public Libraries.

Also falling victim, as the Graphic Arts Online site indicates, are several printing companies in the area.

I don't have any information on funds to help replenish any lost books just yet, but the Red Cross announced today that they disaster relief fund had been depleted and they are welcoming contributions.

British Bounty

 

A couple of items from the isn't that amazing (and trying not to be jealous) department of news from the world of publishing:

British thriller-writer Ken Follett beat his own record of 1,600 books signed in one session with a new record of 2,050 works signed in just over three hours at Madrid's book fair. Follett is one of Spain's most popular authors, and his latest novel Un mundo sin fin (World Without End) has sold 1.5 million copies in Spain alone.

And the Irish Independent wrote about the very generous advance that newcomer Matt Hilton was reported to have received for a new five book series of crime novels from Hodder & Stoughton on the strength of his crime novel, Dead Man's Dust. The figure is apparently around 800,000 pounds (close to $1.6 million). I'm not as thrilled with his agent's assertions, however, that "It's been a long time since the British market has come across a British writer who writes very commercially like this. They don't come along every day. If you can make it work, the revenue stream is very high for a publisher." The agent, Luigi Bonomi, went on to say, "The problem is that it's all or nothing. The mid list is dead, and therefore publishers have to take huge risks. But the potential revenue is huge or nothing. That's the gamble."

It's Murder, He Wrote

 

Somehow the idea of the hard-boiled, babe-chasing, long-drinking protagonist who goes home each evening to his kids hasn't really taken off in the world of crime fiction. There are a few single fathers, such as Alex Cross in James Patterson's novels, and you have an author like Jeffrey Cohen who created protagonist Aaron Tucker, a part-time stay-at-home-dad to a son with Asperger's Syndrome (a form of autism, a condition that afflicts Cohen's own son). But the list of such crime fiction Dads isn't very long.

Likewise the roll call of Father's Day-themed crime fiction/mystery novels and stories is fairly scant, but there are a few to be found running the gamut from noir to cozy:

The Father's Day Murder, A Holiday Cozy by Lee Harris, is the 11th in a series of holiday-themed murder mysteries by the author featuring ex-nun (and amateur detective) Christine Bennett. In this outing, one of the students in Christine's poetry class calls her for help when the girl's grandfather is accused of murder.

Father's Music by Dermot Bolger. Gerard Brennan's blog Crime Scene NI (Northern Ireland) recently profiled this book which Brennan says "may slip under most crime aficionado's radar's as Dermot Bolger is better known as a literary novelist. However, this offering is crime fiction through and through."

Dear Old Dead by Jane Haddam features Gregor Demarkian, an Armenian-American detective, in this tenth holiday mystery which has a Father's Day theme of sorts and centers on a gang war raging around a Harlem medical clinic.

Father's Day Murder by Leslie Meier has protagonist Lucy Stone investigating the murder of a nearly bankrupt newspaper dynasty patriarch right before Father's Day, with suspicion falling on the man's children.

The Blue Religion is a 2008 MWA Anthology edited by Michael Connolly which also features a story by Michael Connelly titled "Father's Day," in which Harry Bosch faces one of his most emotionally trying cases, investigating the death of a young boy.

If readers know of others, please feel free to add them in! And don't forget Dear Ole Dad today. (Hint: from my experience, men like chocolate, too. The hubster's addicted to Godiva's Petite Mousse Biscuits.)

 

Looks like CrimeFest is going to be an annual event henceforth. Originally designed to be biannual, recent success like the June 5-8 event this year made the organizers reconsider that schedule and so the festival will return next year, from May 14-17. Thriller writer Meg Gardiner will be the 2009 Toastmistress, and one of the featured guest authors will be Simon Brett.

Guy Ritchie has signed on to a new Sherlock Holmes movie, although early plans make it sound like something purists might not approve. The Hollywood Reporter says "The concept sees the character be more adventuresome and less stuffy than previous screen incarnations and mines on more obscure character traits."

Clues Magazine, the only U.S. academic journal on crime fiction, is moving to a new publisher, McFarland & Co. of Jefferson, North Carolina, after the former owner sold it. As Managing Editor Elizabeth Foxwell explains, Clues "is a good match for McFarland, which has a strong popular culture line, including mystery reference works."

Not too long ago, the Times Online had a piece about collecting crime fiction, in which author Nigel Williams stated that detective fiction is probably the most avidly collected section of the modern second-hand first- edition market. Williams advises against collecting as an investment per se, since demand can vary depending upon various factors. Dick Francis's 60s books are valuable, but after the mid-70s he had print runs of 10-50,000, so those books have little value. Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White in its original binding would be around $13,000 US. Later reprints are less expensive: a good-quality early reprint of The Hound of the Baskervilles would only sell for $116 US. Williams goes on to add that modern writers are collectible too, as a first edition of the first Ian Rankin novel is a four-figure book.

Atlanta's Sunday Paper had a recent Q&A with John Connolly. In it, Connolly admits "There is a difficulty in being a genre novelist; as you achieve an amount of success, there’s pressure to repeat that success, to do pretty much the same thing. Having done Nocturne, it’s never going to sell in the kind of quantities that the Parker novels will sell in. You’re not going to make that much money that year. I recognize this dependence I have on a certain readership, and sometimes that comes into conflict with the desire to take chances."

So Shines a Good Deed

Who says that crime fiction and film offerings are just for entertainment? As if entertainment alone wasn't enough, of course. There have been a few examples in the news lately which prove crime fiction isn't just a pretty face (or mug, as the case may be) and can actually inspire some charitable and/or educational endeavors, as witness the following:

• Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbo announced he will donate all the proceeds from his new book Headhunters to the battle against illiteracy among children, with funds going to countries with a high rate of illiteracy (maybe he should start with the U.S., where Hispanic teens and African-American teens have illiteracy rates of 25% and 20% respectively).

• In Davie, Florida, Michael Sheetz, an instructor with American InterContinental University's Criminal Justice Department in Weston, and Dr. Grace Telesco produced a 75-minute murder mystery film to show the stress of working in law enforcement, with proceeds benefitting the Broward Sheriff's Office Foundation: Fallen Heroes Fund, which aids seriously injured police officers and their families. 

• In Naples, Florida, sixth grade language arts students at Corkscrew Middle School, inspired by the YA mystery novel Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett, created a museum based on the works of Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer.

• And in Connecticut, the Southbury Public Library is using mysteries to draw in kids into its summer reading program. In addition to creating a live murder mystery, the library will offer three months of mystery movies for teens. Anything to get kids to read more books is always a positive thing (see the illiteracy tidbit above).

 

Marilyn Stasio's latest crime fiction column travels to Italy for two novels, reviewing Magdalen Nabb's posthumous Vita Nuova set in Florence and Grace Brophy's A Deadly Paradise set in Assisi. Other titles reviewed include Thomas Perry’s new thriller, Fidelity and Boris Akunin's historical Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk.

The New York Times also has a profile of Lee Child who says “The idea of writing against a huge landscape, a vast continent where anything could happen, greatly appealed to me, and I also discovered that the emptier I made Reacher, the more of a mirror he became. The reader has a chance to partly create the character himself.”

The San Francisco Chronicle has reviews of new works: Slip of the Knife by Denise Mina, The Price of Blood by Declan Hughes and Hard Case Crime's reissue of Shepard Rifkin's The Murderer Vine.

Otto Penzler reviews (unfavorably) Alix Lambert's anthology of interviews titled Crime.

The Seattle Times takes a look at new crime fiction titles This Night's Foul Work by Fred Vargas translted by translation by Sian Reynolds, Mike Lawson's thriller House Rules, Lawrence Block's latest John Keller installment Hit and Run, Ruth Rendell's latest Inspector Wexford book Not in the Flesh, Alan Furst's The Spies of Warsaw, Steve Martini's Shadow of Power, and Philip Margolin's Executive Privilege.

The Economist features an article on new crime fiction inspired by and set in China.

Marketwire waxes rhapsodically about author Jon Land who they point out was recently hailed as "the greatest thriller writer alive today" by Bookviews.

Mystery Melange

 iF Magazine gives an exclusive preview about a new TNT "light hearted thriller series" titled Leverage and starring Timothy Hutton "as an alcoholic ex-insurance investigator who decides to right wrongs, using a group of semi-reformed criminals."

USA Today reviews a new TV series titled The Inside starring Peter Coyote as Virgil "Web" Webster, head of an FBI unit that investigates serial crimes, including a young empathic profiler named Rebecca Locke (Rachel Nichols).

Netflix features a Movie Tip of the Day and for June 2nd they profiled the 1973 film The Long Goodbye by Robert Altman based on Chandler's novel, starring Elliott Gould in the "performance of his career" as private eye Philip Marlowe.

On author Christopher Moore's blog, he writes a thoughtful article about getting "Inside Crime Fiction Characters, and Inside Their Culture and Society." As an example of how to go about setting a novel in a different culture from your own, he holds up Philip Carl Salzman’s book Culture and Conflict in the Middle East as "a brilliant case study of how culture defines and shapes the concept of 'friends' and 'enemies'", adding that "those two categories are at the heart of much crime fiction."

Blogger and teacher Mark Wallace writes about "Little Known Greats in Contemporary Detective Fiction."  He's not terribly positive, however, concluding that there "aren't many," and that he has a hard time "finding a contemporary book of detective fiction that has enough qualities of serious literature to be worth teaching." He invites comments, however, so feel free to chime in and prove him wrong.

And, Roger Silverwood, author of crime fiction for 37 years, gives his thoughts on his writing process in the blog Authors Online Workshop.