Author, Author

 

As part of a Bouchercon and Baltimore Book Festival preview of sorts, The Baltimore Sun profiled Walter Mosely, who ended the exploits of Los Angeles-based PI Easy Rawlins in the novel Blond Faith last year. "I think I've done enough," he said. "My writing career is not about Easy Rawlins. It's about Walter Mosley." Although he's not abandoning crime fiction, he's branching out a bit more, including one project involving a series of five science-fiction novellas.

Otto Penzler profiled Stuart Kaminsky, back with his 15h Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov novel, People Who Walk in Darkness. Penzler writes that Kaminsky has maintained a consistently high level of professional crime fiction throughout a career that has spanned more than three decades, but feels there is little introspection or internal conflict on the part of Mr. Kaminsky's characters, a key element (in Penzler's opinion) that prevents them from being in the first rank of literary creations. Apparently, this is just fine with the author; Kaminsky made it clear in an autobiographical essay once that his goal is to be "a storyteller who transports his reader into the tale." He added, "if there is Meaning in my tales ... then let it be absorbed rather than academized."

An LA Times article on British mystery writer Michael Dibdin (who unfortunately died last year, a few days after his 60th birthday) points out that, although Dibdin's novels featuring Italian police detective Aurelio Zen have been dismissed by detractors as "tourist noir," Zen experiences Italy in almost the opposite way that Anglo vacationers encounter bella Italia. Dibdin had numerous fans, including writers Ruth Rendell and Ian Rankin, and also reviewer Tom Nolan who said "He tried to make every book different...There's one modeled on a Mozart opera. That's the kind of thing really inventive people do when they write a series. His books were in no way ordinary."

Elmore Leonard is the subject of a Times Online profile who called him no less than the "Dickens of Detroit" and America's greatest living crime novelist. In an interview that also included son Peter (with his own recently-published crime fiction novel Quiver), Leonard Sr. says "If you've got characters that you like, and you can make them talk, then it's in their hands. They'll say something that surprises you."

According to an article by Entertainment Weekly, Dennis Lehane is done with mysteries, or at least whodunits. "I'd say it's highly unlikely that I'll ever write another one," He said, even though he's the author of five Patrick Kenzie detective mysteries (including Gone Baby Gone, made into a movie by Ben Affleck). "I was never comfortable with them anyway. I'd be writing these friggin' whodunits and I could care less. I wanna tell everybody on page 2, he killed so-and-so, he done it! If you look at my books in that regard -- and I'll be 100 percent honest about my flaws -- you can see how I was whipping out the kitchen sink just to obscure s---, like the identity of the serial killer or whatever, and that's why the books got so labyrinthian in the last 100 pages."