In Reference to Crime Fiction

 

I came across some interesting recent and upcoming nonfiction books, a mix of niche reference to specific cultures and subgenres that look intriguing. Many are priced high enough that it's obvious they're destined to be library and textbook denizens (note the professor/authors and university presses) as opposed to off-the-shelf books, but if you're a fan of these particular subjects or need insights into Italian or Russian mysteries, you can seek these out.

  Pimping Fictions by Justin D. Gifford, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. "Lush sex and stark violence colored Black and served up raw by a great Negro writer," promised the cover of Run Man Run, Chester Himes' pioneering novel in the black crime fiction tradition. In Pimping Fictions, Justin Gifford provides a hard-boiled investigation of hundreds of pulpy paperbacks written by Himes, Donald Goines, and Iceberg Slim (aka Robert Beck), among many others. Gifford draws from an impressive array of archival materials to provide a first-of-its-kind literary and cultural history of this distinctive genre.

Russian Pulp:  The Detektiv and the Russian Way of Crime by Anthony Olcott, Associate Professor of Russian at Colgate University and author of the Edgar-nominated Murder at the Red October. Using the detektiv and its counterpart—the many mysteries and thrillers set in Russia but written by Westerners—as evidence, Russian Pulp demonstrates that Russians and Westerners view the basic issues of crime, guilt, justice, law, and redemption in such fundamentally different ways as to make each people incomprehensible to the other.

 

The Importance of Place in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction: A Bloody Journey by Barbara Pezzotti, who teaches Italian language and culture in New Zealand. By taking as its point of departure the privileged relationship between the crime novel and its setting, this book is the most wide-ranging examination of the way in which Italian detective fiction in the last 20 years has become a means to articulate the changes in the social landscape of the country.

Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961 by Curtis Evans, an independent scholar and book dealer. In 1972, in an attempt to elevate the stature of the "crime novel," influential crime writer and critic Julian Symons cast numerous Golden Age detective fiction writers into literary perdition as "Humdrums," condemning their focus on puzzle plots over stylish writing and explorations of character, setting and theme. By championing the intrinsic merit of these mystery writers, this book shows that reintegrating the "Humdrums" into mystery genre studies provides a fuller understanding of the Golden Age of detective fiction and its aftermath.

 

 

 

In Reference to Crime Fiction

 

I came across some interesting recent and upcoming nonfiction books, a mix of niche reference to specific cultures and subgenres that look intriguing. Many are priced high enough that it's obvious they're destined to be library and textbook denizens (note the professor/authors and university presses) as opposed to off-the-shelf books, but if you're a fan of these particular subjects or need insights into Italian or Russian mysteries, you can seek these out.

  Pimping Fictions by Justin D. Gifford, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. "Lush sex and stark violence colored Black and served up raw by a great Negro writer," promised the cover of Run Man Run, Chester Himes' pioneering novel in the black crime fiction tradition. In Pimping Fictions, Justin Gifford provides a hard-boiled investigation of hundreds of pulpy paperbacks written by Himes, Donald Goines, and Iceberg Slim (aka Robert Beck), among many others. Gifford draws from an impressive array of archival materials to provide a first-of-its-kind literary and cultural history of this distinctive genre.

Russian Pulp:  The Detektiv and the Russian Way of Crime by Anthony Olcott, Associate Professor of Russian at Colgate University and author of the Edgar-nominated Murder at the Red October. Using the detektiv and its counterpart—the many mysteries and thrillers set in Russia but written by Westerners—as evidence, Russian Pulp demonstrates that Russians and Westerners view the basic issues of crime, guilt, justice, law, and redemption in such fundamentally different ways as to make each people incomprehensible to the other.

 

The Importance of Place in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction: A Bloody Journey by Barbara Pezzotti, who teaches Italian language and culture in New Zealand. By taking as its point of departure the privileged relationship between the crime novel and its setting, this book is the most wide-ranging examination of the way in which Italian detective fiction in the last 20 years has become a means to articulate the changes in the social landscape of the country.

Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961 by Curtis Evans, an independent scholar and book dealer. In 1972, in an attempt to elevate the stature of the "crime novel," influential crime writer and critic Julian Symons cast numerous Golden Age detective fiction writers into literary perdition as "Humdrums," condemning their focus on puzzle plots over stylish writing and explorations of character, setting and theme. By championing the intrinsic merit of these mystery writers, this book shows that reintegrating the "Humdrums" into mystery genre studies provides a fuller understanding of the Golden Age of detective fiction and its aftermath.

 

 

An Overview or Two (or Three)

 

Last week, I noted some recent and upcoming nonfiction books about niche subjects in crime fiction. This week, I thought I'd point out some new crime fiction overviews that look interesting for both casual readers and those of you who are more into the academic side of things. 

Crime Fiction From Poe to the Present: A Historical and Critical Introduction to Crime Fiction from Edgar Allan Poe's First Detective Story to the Present Day by Martin Priestman, Professor of English at Roehampton University London. This book gives a historical and critical introduction to the genre of crime fiction, from Edgar Allan Poe's first detective story The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841 to the present day. It concentrates chiefly on three branches of crime fiction: the classic detective whodunit, the thriller in which the protagonist is opposed either to a powerful conspiracy or to society at large, and the hardboiled private-eye story, or detective thriller, which mixes aspects of the other two.

The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, edited by Catherine Ross Nickerson. From the execution sermons of the Colonial era to television programs like The Wire and The Sopranos, crime writing has played an important role in American culture. Its ability to register fear, desire and anxiety has made it a popular genre with a wide audience. These new essays, written for students as well as readers of crime fiction, demonstrate the very best in contemporary scholarship and challenge long-established notions of the development of the detective novel. 

The Crime Fiction Handbook (Blackwell Literature Handbooks) by Peter Messent, Emeritus Professor of Modern American Literature at the University of Nottingham. The Crime Fiction Handbook presents a comprehensive introduction to the origins, development, and cultural significance of the crime fiction genre, focusing mainly on its American, British, and Scandinavian forms. The book’s first main section presents an overview of the subject, addressing the politics of crime fiction and exploring some of its main variants  – classical and hard-boiled detective fiction, the private eye and the police novel, fictions of transgression. 

Bibliomysteries

 I received an interesting e-mail from Nina Lassam at Open Road Media, which is a publishing partner with Mysterious Press for eBooks. Together, they're releasing new bibliomystery eBooks from best selling mystery authors Anne Perry, Ken Bruen, C.J. Box, and Jeffery Deaver on November 12th. What is a Bibliomystery, you may ask? It's a book featuring books, manuscripts, libraries or publishing houses as a major theme that can appear in all the various subgenres: hard-boiled private-eye stories (such as Raymond Chandler's classic The Big Sleep), cozy mysteries (including those of Charlotte MacLeod's librarian sleuth) and the mainstream detective novel (such as Booked to Die by John Dunning).

The upcoming titles include

• The Scroll by Anne Perry: An ancient book draws a bookseller into a chilling mystery.
• Pronghorns of the Third Reich by C.J. Box: A hidden library holds a mystery that stretches back to Nazi Germany.
• Book of Virtue by Ken Bruen: A son¹s only inheritance is a leather-bound book, which causes his life to spin out of control.
• An Acceptable Sacrifice by Jeffery Deaver: A cartel leader's weakness is antique books ­ which federal agents use to attack where it matters most.

Look for more bibliomystery eBook titles in the coming months.

Bibliomysteries

I received an interesting e-mail from Nina Lassam at Open Road Media, which is a publishing partner with Mysterious Press for eBooks. Together, they're releasing new bibliomystery eBooks from best selling mystery authors Anne Perry, Ken Bruen, C.J. Box, and Jeffery Deaver on November 12th. What is a Bibliomystery, you may ask? It's a book featuring books, manuscripts, libraries or publishing houses as a major theme that can appear in all the various subgenres: hard-boiled private-eye stories (such as Raymond Chandler's classic The Big Sleep), cozy mysteries (including those of Charlotte MacLeod's librarian sleuth) and the mainstream detective novel (such as Booked to Die by John Dunning).

The upcoming titles include

• The Scroll by Anne Perry: An ancient book draws a bookseller into a chilling mystery.
• Pronghorns of the Third Reich by C.J. Box: A hidden library holds a mystery that stretches back to Nazi Germany.
• Book of Virtue by Ken Bruen: A son¹s only inheritance is a leather-bound book, which causes his life to spin out of control.
• An Acceptable Sacrifice by Jeffery Deaver: A cartel leader's weakness is antique books ­ which federal agents use to attack where it matters most.

Look for more bibliomystery eBook titles in the coming months.

Author R&R with D.J. McIntosh

 

D.J. (Dorothy) McIntosh is the former co-editor of the Crime Writers of Canada's newsletter, Fingerprints, and is a Toronto-based writer of novels and short mystery fiction. Her short story "The Hounds of Winter" was nominated for the 2008 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story.

Her first novel, The Witch of Babylon, was short-listed for the Crime Writers Association Debut Dagger Award, and won a Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award for best unpublished (at the time) novel. The trade paperback version, published in Canada last year, was named "One of Six Enduring Historical Thrillers" by CNN (along with works by Umberto Eco, Wilbur Smith, Kate Mosse, Agatha Christie, and Dan Brown), and honored as one of Amazon.ca’s Best Books of 2011. The hardcover version debuts in the U.S. this week.

The book is set in modern-day New York City and Iraq and follows street-smart Turkish-American art dealer John Madison, who is caught up in the aftermath of the looting of the Baghdad Museum. A race to beat the bad guys to an mysterious ancient Assyrian treasure leads Madison on an international treasure-hunting adventure of lost relics, ancient sorcery, alchemy and the Mesopotamian cult of Ishtar. Author Louise Penny said of the novel, "I think The Witch of Babylon is going to blow everyone’s socks off, and Dorothy McIntosh will establish herself in the pantheon of Canadian writers."

D.J. is on a blog tour this week and stopped by to take some Author R&R (Reference and Research) with In Reference to Murder:

 

If there were ten rules for writing, one of them almost certainly would be “write what you know.” We authors hear that over and over again. I chose another path because I felt passionate about my subjects. My lack of knowledge didn’t stop me but it did necessitate years of research.

One way to look at a novel is as an extended lie; it is fiction after all! A writer’s job is to convince readers that what is fabricated is real and the more skillfully achieved, the more enjoyable the read. My approach was to pack as many facts and recognizable place names or other elements into the book as possible without diluting the story. That’s why I’d never choose a fictional city for a setting. The liberal use of ‘facts’ though, whether historical or contemporary, means that research has to be comprehensive.

The Witch of Babylon is set in two locations, New York City and Iraq. The challenge with New York was to find unique venues as the city has been written about so well and so often. Not being a New York native compounded the issue. It took three separate visits to find these venues, a welcome task I must say as I love the city so much.

I started by wandering, to the Village, Harlem, Hell’s Kitchen (now called the much less colorful Clinton) and the Lower East side. New York is a bountiful feast for authors because almost everywhere, something – a building, a park, an elevated rail line, a store window – catches our attention. I found a fantastic gothic high rise with terraces and gargoyles sprouting at the roof line, an abandoned steel arch bridge spanning the Harlem River and the Dominican Church of Saint Vincent Ferrer, not as well known as the cathedrals but exquisitely beautiful with remarkable stained glass windows, candle lit chapels and saintly relics. My love of music took me to Kenny’s Castaways, a historic New York music club that nurtured stars like Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith in the early days. These are just a few of the many gems I discovered.

Iraq presented the opposite problem. The Witch is set in 2003 at the advent of the war so it was impossible to visit there. To paint a convincing picture of Baghdad and Mosul in the north, I relied on hundreds of newspaper articles, photos, blogs written by Iraqi civilians, journalists and soldiers and books (notably Thieves of Baghdad by Matthew Bogdanos and William Patrick) detailing the looting and recovery of antiquities from the Iraq Museum. I watched many hours of television war coverage and you-tube videos. One of these taken in real time by a soldier that showed a high wall of sand as it swept toward a military encampment, left an indelible impression. There was a wealth of material to choose from and I’m so grateful to the bloggers, reporters and photojournalists who risked their lives to bring us the story of the war.

The third major research area concerned history. Mesopotamian achievements easily equal those of the Egyptians but surprisingly, little has been recently written about them for the lay reader. My main source was a book: The Might That Was Assyria by H.W. Saggs supplemented by lots of internet searches. Speaking with university professors helped enormously as well. Research turned up many fascinating facts. I had no idea for example, that a Babylonian scholar first posited that the earth revolves around the sun or that, in the Parthian era a rudimentary battery was developed more than a millennium before the modern version, or that the alchemy had its beginnings in perfume making. Learning about the three great Mesopotamian cultures, Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian, was so fascinating it became a pastime I really looked forward to. All three novels – Book 2 and 3 to come – focus on some aspect of Mesopotamian history. So by not following “write what you know” whole new worlds opened up to me.

Anthology Potpourri

 

The advent of eBooks has brought many changes to publishing, both good and bad, but one of the positive developments is a new wave of terrific short crime fiction anthologies. In case you missed them, here are a few of the latest publications released in September and October (noting that some are eBooks, some print, some both):

 

Beat to a Pulp: Superhero has gathered some of the best hardboiled and noir crime stories with a superhero twist. Billy Mitchell, the six-year-old "Red Avenger" in Kevin Burton Smith's tale, has an innocence and a special something that draws us to want to don a mask and tie a towel around our necks. Steve Weddle dissects the reality of a world in which super-powered "others" walk in the midst of normal people who tend to quote only parts of the Bible. And James Reasoner's story is set in a time not usually associated with superheroes -- the American Revolution -- yet Patrick Mainwaring finds the classic essence of a superhero. Other top contributors include Jake Hinkson, Garnett Elliott, Liam Jose, Sandra Seamans, Jerry Bloomfield, Thomas Pluck, Keith Rawson, Court Merrigan, Benoit Lelievre, and Chad Eagleton

The recent inaugural Bloody Scotland conference sponsored a short-story competition. The 19 winners chosen from 230 entries are collected into an anthology titled Worth the Wait, sponsored by Glengoyne Whisky. You can download a free copy via the conference site. As the sponsor foreword notes, "Scottish crime fiction and malt whisky are both international success stories and two of this nation’s greatest exports. Why? Because here in Scotland we understand that quality cannot be rushed. Crafting a great crime story takes time, care, attention and commitment. It doesn’t happen overnight – but when it does come together, it’s magical."

Crime Factory is launching an all Australian crime fiction anthology, Hard Labour. It includes brand new fiction from Peter Corris, Leigh Redhead, Helen FitzGerald, Angela Savage, David Whish-Wilson, along with Garry Disher's first ever Wyatt story (unpublished in over a decade), JJ DeCeglie, Andrez Bergen, Deborah Sheldon and many more, including CFP’s own widely-published editorial staff. Along with a brand new story by Melbourne-based Irish veteran Adrian McKinty, the story collection is topped off with a foreword by Sisters in Crime National Co-Convenor, Lindy Cameron.

 

Fifteen Tales of Murder, Mayhem and Malice from the Land of Minnesota Nice, are "perfect for a quiet evening cozied up in front of the fireplace or to share around a flickering campfire. Some of them will scare you. Some may make you cringe. A few might bring a smile to your lips. All of them, we guarantee, will put to rest forever the myth of Minnesota Nice." Contributing authors include William Kent Krueger, Jess Lourey, Rich Thompson, Lois Greiman, Mary Logue, Pat Dennis, David Housewright, Elizabeth Gunn, Judith Borger, Joel Arnold, Lori L. Lake, Michael Allen Mallory, Marilyn Victor, Carl Brookins, and Ellen Hart.

 

Noir at the Bar 2 is "Back for another round of booze, blood and bad taste...and continues its assault on the literate world." Contributors include: Jedidiah Ayres, Frank Bill, Jane Bradley, Sonia L. Coney, Hilary Davidson, Les Edgerton, Nate Flexer, Matthew C. Funk, Jesus Angel Garcia, Glenn Gray, Kevin Lynn Helmick, Gordon Highland, John Hornor Jacobs, David James Keaton, Tim Lane, Erik Lundy, Jason Makansi, Matthew McBride, Jon McGoran, Cortright McMeel, Aaron Michael Morales, Scott Phillips, Robert J. Randisi & Christine Matthews, John Rector, Caleb J. Ross, Duane Swierczynski, Mark W. Tiedemann, Fred Venturini, Benjamin Whitmer and Nic Young.

 

Off The Record 2, At The Movies, is an anthology with 47 Short Stories with Classic Film Titles, with proceeds benefitting two child literacy charities. Edited by Paul D Brazill and Luca Veste, authors contributing stories include Will Carver, Steve Mosby, Helen FitzGerald, Adrian McKinty, Matt Hilton, Stav Sherez, Claire McGowan, Sean Cregan, David Jackson, Mel Sherratt, Nick Quantrill, Maxim Jakubowski, and many more.

Psychos: Serial Killers, Depraved Madmen, and the Criminally Insane, edited by John Skipp, is a crime anthology featuring stories by master storytellers including Neil Gaiman, Lawrence Block, and Ray Bradbury. As Skipp writes in the Foreword, the anthology includes "A staggering thirty-eight-course banquet of literary mania and mayhem, served up by some of the most amazingly astute, deeply disturbing, immensely entertaining chronicles of crazy ever to grace the printed page."

 

The relatively new Shotgun Honey ezine of crime and noir fiction brought together 29 authors from around the world to produce their first anthology, Shotgun Honey Presents: Both Barrels. Featuring stories from: Patti Abbot, Peter Farris, Trey R. Barker, Hector Acosta, Cameron Ashley, Ray Banks, Frank Bill, Nigel Bird, Jen Conley, Paul D. Brazill, Thomas Pluck, Garnett Elliott, Matthew C. Funk, Chris F. Holm, Glenn Gray, Naomi Johnson, Nik Korpon, Kieran Shea, Julia Madeleine, Joe Myers, Andrew Nette, Mike Oliveri, Dan O'Shea, Tom Pits, Keith Rawson, Holley West, Frank Wheeler Jr., Jim Wilsky and Steve Weddle.

True Brit Grit was actually published in April of this year, but proceeds of this anthology go to support the charities Children 1st and the Francesca Bimpson Foundation. Edited by  Luca Veste and Paul D. Brazill, the volume contains forty five gritty stories from the likes of Ray Banks, Allan Guthrie, Charlie Williams, Julie Morrigan, Howard Lynskey, Sheila Quigley, Nick Quantrill and Matt Hilton.

Books to Die For is an anthology of essays billed as "the most ambitious anthology of its kind yet attempted, the world's leading mystery writers have come together to champion the greatest mystery novels ever written." In a series of personal essays that often reveal as much about the authors and their own work as they do about the books that they love, 119 authors from 20 countries have created a guide that will be indispensable for generations of readers and writers. From Agatha Christie to Lee Child, from Edgar Allan Poe to P. D. James, from Sherlock Holmes to Hannibal Lecter and Philip Marlowe to Lord Peter Wimsey, Books to Die For brings together the cream of the mystery world for a feast of reading pleasure, a treasure trove for those new to the genre and for those who believe that there is nothing new l

Anthology Potpourri

 

The advent of eBooks has brought many changes to publishing, both good and bad, but one of the positive developments is a new wave of terrific short crime fiction anthologies. In case you missed them, here are a few of the latest publications released in September and October (noting that some are eBooks, some print, some both):

 

Beat to a Pulp: Superhero has gathered some of the best hardboiled and noir crime stories with a superhero twist. Billy Mitchell, the six-year-old "Red Avenger" in Kevin Burton Smith's tale, has an innocence and a special something that draws us to want to don a mask and tie a towel around our necks. Steve Weddle dissects the reality of a world in which super-powered "others" walk in the midst of normal people who tend to quote only parts of the Bible. And James Reasoner's story is set in a time not usually associated with superheroes -- the American Revolution -- yet Patrick Mainwaring finds the classic essence of a superhero. Other top contributors include Jake Hinkson, Garnett Elliott, Liam Jose, Sandra Seamans, Jerry Bloomfield, Thomas Pluck, Keith Rawson, Court Merrigan, Benoit Lelievre, and Chad Eagleton

The recent inaugural Bloody Scotland conference sponsored a short-story competition. The 19 winners chosen from 230 entries are collected into an anthology titled Worth the Wait, sponsored by Glengoyne Whisky. You can download a free copy via the conference site. As the sponsor foreword notes, "Scottish crime fiction and malt whisky are both international success stories and two of this nation’s greatest exports. Why? Because here in Scotland we understand that quality cannot be rushed. Crafting a great crime story takes time, care, attention and commitment. It doesn’t happen overnight – but when it does come together, it’s magical."

Crime Factory is launching an all Australian crime fiction anthology, Hard Labour. It includes brand new fiction from Peter Corris, Leigh Redhead, Helen FitzGerald, Angela Savage, David Whish-Wilson, along with Garry Disher's first ever Wyatt story (unpublished in over a decade), JJ DeCeglie, Andrez Bergen, Deborah Sheldon and many more, including CFP’s own widely-published editorial staff. Along with a brand new story by Melbourne-based Irish veteran Adrian McKinty, the story collection is topped off with a foreword by Sisters in Crime National Co-Convenor, Lindy Cameron.

 

Fifteen Tales of Murder, Mayhem and Malice from the Land of Minnesota Nice, are "perfect for a quiet evening cozied up in front of the fireplace or to share around a flickering campfire. Some of them will scare you. Some may make you cringe. A few might bring a smile to your lips. All of them, we guarantee, will put to rest forever the myth of Minnesota Nice." Contributing authors include William Kent Krueger, Jess Lourey, Rich Thompson, Lois Greiman, Mary Logue, Pat Dennis, David Housewright, Elizabeth Gunn, Judith Borger, Joel Arnold, Lori L. Lake, Michael Allen Mallory, Marilyn Victor, Carl Brookins, and Ellen Hart.

 

Noir at the Bar 2 is "Back for another round of booze, blood and bad taste...and continues its assault on the literate world." Contributors include: Jedidiah Ayres, Frank Bill, Jane Bradley, Sonia L. Coney, Hilary Davidson, Les Edgerton, Nate Flexer, Matthew C. Funk, Jesus Angel Garcia, Glenn Gray, Kevin Lynn Helmick, Gordon Highland, John Hornor Jacobs, David James Keaton, Tim Lane, Erik Lundy, Jason Makansi, Matthew McBride, Jon McGoran, Cortright McMeel, Aaron Michael Morales, Scott Phillips, Robert J. Randisi & Christine Matthews, John Rector, Caleb J. Ross, Duane Swierczynski, Mark W. Tiedemann, Fred Venturini, Benjamin Whitmer and Nic Young.

 

Off The Record 2, At The Movies, is an anthology with 47 Short Stories with Classic Film Titles, with proceeds benefitting two child literacy charities. Edited by Paul D Brazill and Luca Veste, authors contributing stories include Will Carver, Steve Mosby, Helen FitzGerald, Adrian McKinty, Matt Hilton, Stav Sherez, Claire McGowan, Sean Cregan, David Jackson, Mel Sherratt, Nick Quantrill, Maxim Jakubowski, and many more.

Psychos: Serial Killers, Depraved Madmen, and the Criminally Insane, edited by John Skipp, is a crime anthology featuring stories by master storytellers including Neil Gaiman, Lawrence Block, and Ray Bradbury. As Skipp writes in the Foreword, the anthology includes "A staggering thirty-eight-course banquet of literary mania and mayhem, served up by some of the most amazingly astute, deeply disturbing, immensely entertaining chronicles of crazy ever to grace the printed page."

 

The relatively new Shotgun Honey ezine of crime and noir fiction brought together 29 authors from around the world to produce their first anthology, Shotgun Honey Presents: Both Barrels. Featuring stories from: Patti Abbot, Peter Farris, Trey R. Barker, Hector Acosta, Cameron Ashley, Ray Banks, Frank Bill, Nigel Bird, Jen Conley, Paul D. Brazill, Thomas Pluck, Garnett Elliott, Matthew C. Funk, Chris F. Holm, Glenn Gray, Naomi Johnson, Nik Korpon, Kieran Shea, Julia Madeleine, Joe Myers, Andrew Nette, Mike Oliveri, Dan O'Shea, Tom Pits, Keith Rawson, Holley West, Frank Wheeler Jr., Jim Wilsky and Steve Weddle.

True Brit Grit was actually published in April of this year, but proceeds of this anthology go to support the charities Children 1st and the Francesca Bimpson Foundation. Edited by  Luca Veste and Paul D. Brazill, the volume contains forty five gritty stories from the likes of Ray Banks, Allan Guthrie, Charlie Williams, Julie Morrigan, Howard Lynskey, Sheila Quigley, Nick Quantrill and Matt Hilton.

Books to Die For is an anthology of essays billed as "the most ambitious anthology of its kind yet attempted, the world's leading mystery writers have come together to champion the greatest mystery novels ever written." In a series of personal essays that often reveal as much about the authors and their own work as they do about the books that they love, 119 authors from 20 countries have created a guide that will be indispensable for generations of readers and writers. From Agatha Christie to Lee Child, from Edgar Allan Poe to P. D. James, from Sherlock Holmes to Hannibal Lecter and Philip Marlowe to Lord Peter Wimsey, Books to Die For brings together the cream of the mystery world for a feast of reading pleasure, a treasure trove for those new to the genre and for those who believe that there is nothing new left to discover.

CSI Portsmouth

 

Tickets are now on sale for the third annual CSI Portsmouth festival taking place on Saturday, November 3, at John Pounds Centre, Portsmouth, England. Special guests include international crime authors Stephen Booth, Ann Cleeves, Matt Hilton and Pauline Rowson; Crime Scene Manager Co-ordinator Carolyn Lovell from Hampshire Police; DC Terry Fitzjohn Crime Scene Fire Investigations Officer, Hampshire Police; Andy Earl Hampshire Fire and Rescue Arson Task Force; Adrian Fretter, Hampshire Police Hi Tech Crime Unit; Professor Bran Nicol, University of Surrey, an expert on stalking culture including Internet Stalking; and Dr. Mark Button, Director of the Centre for Counter Fraud Studies at University of Portsmouth.

Highlights of the one-day affair are two panel debates on crime fiction versus crime fact and a meet and mingle with top selling crime authors and police and forensic crime experts. Participants will also have a chance to learn about what really happens at a crime scene, how a fire investigation is worked, hear about cyber crime and internet stalking, see how the fingerprint bureau works, have your fingerprints taken, and much more.

 

Fall for the Book

 

The 14th annual Fall for the Book Festival at George Mason University starts tomorrow and lasts through Sunday, September 30th. As part of this year's event, the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of Mystery Writers of America is sponsoring the Mason Award presentation to Neil Gaiman, creator and writer of the DC Comics series Sandman and author of the bestselling novels American Gods, The Graveyard Book, and Coraline. In addition, Michael Chabon, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policeman's Union, will receive this year’s Fairfax Prize honoring outstanding literary achievement.

Individual author events include sessions with crime fiction authors John Gilstrap, Will Lavender, and Laura Lippman. A Mid-Atlantic Chapter of Mystery Writers of America panel moderated by Alan Orloff will include authors Tracy Kiely, Thomas Kaufman, Sandra Parshall, and Joanna Campbell Slan. A trio of first-time novelists will take the stage to discuss their debut political thrillers, including defense anthropologist Alexandra Hamlet, U.S. Naval Academy grad Kathleen Toomey Jabs, and Mark Harril Saunders.

Another highlight of the festival for fans of crime fiction will be the panel "On Literary and Genre Fiction" on Sunday from 1:30 to 3:00 p.m.  The National Book Critics Circle hosts a discussion of literary fiction and genre fiction, asking the questions, What's the difference? What's the divide? Where's the overlap? Weighing in on these topics are novelist Julianna Baggott, whose latest novel, Pure, ventures into the realm of post-apocalyptic horror; Louis Bayard, whose literary mysteries include The School of Night; Alma Katsu, author of The Taker and The Reckoning; and journalist and critic Laura Miller, author of The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia.

The 'Zine Scene

 The newly-resurrected magazine Thuglit is back and badder than ever after being on hiatus for a few years. The first issue of the new zine features stories by Johnny Shaw, Mike Wilkerson, Jason Duke, Jordan Harper, Matthew Funk, Terrence McCauley, Hilary Davidson, Court Merrigan, and editor Todd Robinson. It's switched over from a free website 'zine to a Kindle 'zine, but at 99 cents, it's a bargain.

Upstart Noir Magazine is raising funds on Kickstarter. The publication plans to be "The first-of-its kind tablet magazine for the mystery, thriller and true crime genres in all mediums." Some of the best-known names in the genre are already on board, including Megan Abbott, who will serve as the magazine's Editor at Large. The Board of Advisers and contributors include Ace Atkins, Cara Black, Ed Brubaker, John Buntin, Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Joel Engel, Lyndsay Faye, Sara Gran, Denise Hamilton, John Harvey, Stephen Hunter, Leslie Klinger, Denise Mina, T. Jefferson Parker, Otto Penzler, Ian Rankin, April Smith and Joseph Wambaugh. 

The third issue of Blood and Tacos is out. This online and Kindle-zine is edited by Johnny Shaw, who touts this issue that "includes a schwack of fist-pumping fiction from the legendary Stephen Mertz, along with Garnett Elliott, Todd Robinson, Chris La Tray and Rob Kroese. Like you couldn't have read that on the cover. We're also featuring a great article this month on the Cannon studio and four exemplary films from same and reviewing Doomsday Warrior (specifically book 9). Finally, have a look at our new feature, Cooking Like a Tough Guy."

Crime Factory #11 is live, with Road To Perdition writer Max Allan Collins; comics-superstar Jimmy Palmiotti; a discussion of boxing pulp novels by Paul Bishop, Mel Odom and Eric Beetner; fiction by Jonathan Woods, Michael A. Gonzales, Matthew C. Funk, Michael Bracken, Robin Jarossi, John Kenyon and Nigel Bird; and much more.

The winter issue of Plots with Guns has short fiction by Eric J. Bandel, Taylor Brown, Terry Butler, Andy Henion, Erik Lundy, Dan Ray, Craig Renfroe, Rick Ripatrazone, and Tim L. Williams.

Spinetinger's latest reviews include The Prophet by Michael Koryta and the TV show Breaking Bad, and there's also Spinetingler's view on the recent revelations about fake Amazon reviews (a/k/a "sock puppets") in an essay titled "Internet Integrity and The Ethics of Review."

The editors of Near2TheKnuckle created it to provide an outlet for darker, grittier fiction. Now, they're looking for submissions for their first Kindle anthology of stories between 1,000 and 3,000 words. You can still submit stories for the regular website zine, too, which at present are nonpaying, publicaton only. The editors hope to raise funds from the anthology to pump up the website zine and also offer a print anthology in the near future.

If you've got a hard-boiled or noir short story of 4,000 words or less looking for a home, Beat to a Pulp has opened its submissions again through October 15.

The "Six Questions For" blog featured Eddie Vega, Editor-in-Chief of Noir Nation, an eBook journal of high quality crime fiction, essays, and author interviews, illustrated with living art: tattoos. Vega talks about what he looks for in submissions and what he's learned about writing based on his experience as an editor.

July Conference Extravaganza

 

July may well be the peak month for crime fiction conferences geared to authors and fans around the globe. Here's a listing, with the note that it's not too late to register for most:

July 3
Crime in the Court
London, England
Close to 40 authors will attend, including Mark Billingham, Christopher Fowler, Sophie Hannah, David Hewson, Peter James, Erin Kelly, S.J. Watson.

July 11-14
Thrillerfest
New York, NY
Spotlight guests will include 2012 ThrillerMaster Jack Higgins; 2011 ThrillerMaster R.L. Stine; 2012 Silver Bullet Award Winner Richard North Patterson; 2011 Silver Bullet Winner Karin Slaughter; and 2012 Spotlight Guests Lee Child, John Sandford, Catherine Coulter and Ann Rule.

July 12-15
Public Safety Writers' Conference
Las Vegas, NV
Special Guests John M. Mills, Herman Groman

July 13
Poisoned Pen Conference
Scottsdale, AZ
Special Guests: Howard L. Anderson, Mark de Castrique, Linda Fairstein, Timothy Hallinan, Alex Kava, Joseph Kanon, Jesse Kellerman, Martin Limon, Francine Mathews and Dana Stabenow.

July 19-22
Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference
Corte Madera, CA
Editors, agents, publishers and panels of detectives, forensic experts and other crime-fighting professionals. The keynote speaker for 2012 in Don Winslow. Author guests on the faculty include Don Winslow, Cara Black, Tony Broadbent, Robert Dugoni, William C. Gordon, Taquin Hall, Jesse Kellerman, Arthur Kerns, John Lescroart, D.P. Lyle, Tim Maleeny, Cornelia Read, Gillian Roberts, Kirk Russell, Sheldon Siegel, Karin Slaughter.

July 19-22
Theakston's Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival
Harrogate, UK
Programming Chair, Mark Billingham; Special Guests include Harlan Coben, John Connolly, Jo Nesbo, Kate Mosse, Peter Robinson, Peter James and Ian Rankin.

Pulp Ink Part Deux

 Hard-working Chris Rhatigan, editor of the ezine All Due Respect and author of the story collection Watch You Drown, teamed up with the equally hard-working writer Nigel Bird (who just released his novel In Loco Parentis) to create and edit the anthology Pulp Ink. The stories were all inspired by the movie Pulp Fiction and written by 24 of the best short crime fiction authors working today. It proved so successful, Rhatigan and Bird decided to follow it up with a sequel.

Pulp Ink 2, freshly-baked by Snubnose Press, features a mixture of crime and horror, a la "beautiful killers, visions of the apocalypse, blood-thirsty rats, and one severed arm on a quest for revenge. No half-assed reboots here, just some of the finest writing in crime and horror today." I'm proud to be included with the likes of Patti Abbott, Heath Lowrance, Kevin Brown, Mike Miner, Eric Beetner, Matthew C. Funk, Richard Godwin, Cindy Rosmus, Christopher Black, Andrez Bergen, James Everington, W. D. County, Julia Madeleine, Kieran Shea, Joe Clifford, Katherine Tomlinson, R. Thomas Brown and Court Merrigan.

Proceeds go to support the charity PLACE2BE, a school-based counselling service for kids. As Nigel Bird says in his intro: "A full year of weekly counselling sessions are offered within a therapeutic environment. As relationships are built, so is confidence and self-esteem. Families and teaching staff are included in the support so that progress can be continued outside of the therapy room."

Pulp Ink is available in print form from Amazon and various digital formats via Smashwords, Amazon and B&N Nook Books. Go grab a copy and settle down with some fun horro-crime. But you might want to lea

Author R&R with Joy Castro

 

Joy Castro's short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction has appeared in several anthologies and journals, and she was named one of 2009's Best New Latino Authors by LatinoStories.com. Her Truth Book: A Memoir was named a Book Sense Notable Book by the American Booksellers Association and excerpted in The New York Times Magazine. Joy's new debut novel, Hell or High Water, from Thomas Dunne Books, is celebrating its book launch today with the start of a blog tour.

Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, Hell or High Water features young, ambitious Cuban American reporter Nola Céspedes as she tracks registered sex offenders who went off the grid during the Hurricane Katrina evacuation. Nola tries to balance her investigation with taking care of her aging mother, mentoring a teenager, and meeting a mysterious stranger named Bento. But Nola is gradually drawn into an underworld of violent predators that she struggles to keep separate from her middle-class professional life. Raised in poverty by a single mother in New Orleans' notorious Desire Projects, Nola has her own secrets to hide.

Joy stopped by In Reference to Murder for a little "Author R&R (Reference and Research)" to offer up some of the research she undertook in writing this book:

 

Novelists sometimes feel comfortable drawing upon only their experience and imagination to write their books, but for my debut thriller Hell or High Water, in which a young tourist is abducted from the French Quarter in post-Katrina New Orleans, research was essential.

Although I’d been traveling regularly to New Orleans for many years before I set a mystery there, I found that I still needed to learn a great deal. Because my husband grew up on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain and later lived, worked, and graduated from college in New Orleans—and because we always stayed with his family when we visited—I’d had the good fortune of seeing a version of New Orleans that went well beyond the French Quarter’s particular charms. But I still had a lot to learn.

Though the novel is set in 2008, I wanted to integrate into the story some of the city’s rich, complicated history, including its colonial rulers, France and Spain, and some of the colorful characters from its past. Library research helped me with this aspect, as did visiting the historic Cabildo, part of the Louisiana State Museum complex in New Orleans. I’m particularly grateful to Ned Sublette’s excellent book The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square, which is thorough and beautifully written. I was able to include relevant, illuminating details about the French settlement of the city, early convent girls, the Baroness de Pontalba, and more.

Hell or High Water is set almost three years after Katrina, during the long aftermath of disaster, and Katrina still looms large in the memories of the characters. I was not in New Orleans during the hurricane; my in-laws came and stayed with us, and we obsessively watched, read, and listened to news reports about the storm. For heartbreaking accounts of the human impact, I read and reread Chris Rose’s Times-Picayune columns, which are collected in his wrenching book 1 Dead in Attic and which I highly recommend. Visiting New Orleans afterward, I interviewed a friend who’d returned to the city immediately after the evacuation, and details from his eyewitness account of that strange time—hot, silent, lawless—are integrated into the novel.

Other books helped me put the hurricane into a larger environmental and political context.  Bento, a key character in Hell or High Water, is a coastal geomorphologist at the University of New Orleans, and my efforts to make his character believable, knowledgeable, and realistic were helped by books such as Douglas Brinkley’s The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast and Mike Tidwell’s The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America’s Coastal Cities. Bento’s urgency around restoring Louisiana’s coastal wetlands is based on the real concerns of scientists.

The main plot of Hell or High Water, though, concerns protagonist Nola Céspedes, a reporter at the Times-Picayune who is assigned a story about the hundreds of registered sex offenders who went off the grid during the hurricane evacuation and had not, by 2008, been relocated. At the same time, a female college student has been abducted from the French Quarter. Nola’s pursuit of both cases leads her into increasingly dangerous corners of the struggling city.

To give Nola’s interviews with sex criminals and psychiatric professionals the ring of accuracy, I did library research—with the help of some wonderful reference librarians—about sexual predators: the psychology of sex criminals, criminal sentencing, rehabilitation methods, and rates of recidivism.  Library research also helped me describe the long-term effects of sexual assault, as well as the therapeutic methods used to help the victims. All of the information and statistics in the novel about these issues are based on recent published scholarship.

To be able to describe accurately Nola’s workplace in the Times-Picayune offices, my husband and I took a tour of the building—with a bunch of grade-school kids! That was fun. They asked all kinds of crazy questions as they were being herded through, and we just kind of tagged along. Seeing the actual presses on which the physical newspapers are manufactured was incredible. They’re gigantic. Getting a sense of the spatial relationships in the building helped me to visualize and describe Nola’s time at work more accurately. For help with the professional life of Nola’s friend Calinda, who works at the DA’s, I interviewed my sister-in-law, a Louisiana attorney and fantastic storyteller.

My own background is not Catholic, but Catholicism is tremendously important in New Orleans, and Nola, her mother, and her friends Soline and Fabi are Catholic. I did religious research about Catholicism, and since Nola’s mother immigrated from Cuba, the research included learning the various versions of the origin story of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, Cuba’s Virgin Mary, which I’d known about vaguely due to my own Cuban background but had never studied in any sort of thoroughgoing way. I also visited the two Catholic churches in New Orleans that are important settings in the novel, the St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square and Our Lady of the Rosary Church on Esplanade Avenue. In writing, though, I still made errors, and my Catholic friends were kind enough to point them out when they read the manuscript. 

Because Nola and her mother are Cuban American, I also researched Santería, the syncretic Caribbean religion that mixes elements of Catholicism with Yoruba religion. If you’re familiar with Santería, you’ll notice that some of the key characters in the book are marked by colors and traits characteristic of Santería’s orishas, or deities. The bath that Nola takes on pages 315-317—for courage, strength, and protection—comes from a Santería recipe.

I was in the very early stages of drafting when I first heard about the French Canadian legend of the loup garou—half-man, half-wolf—during a director’s talk by filmmaker Jay Craven. I immediately intuited some relationship between that legendary curse and the plot of Hell or High Water. Excited, I researched the loup garou online and found that the legend had, indeed, traveled with the Acadians down to French Louisiana, where it morphed into the Cajun legend of the rougarou. As soon as I learned that, I had one of the key structuring metaphors of the novel. 

All of this research was emotionally moving and intellectually fascinating. I learned so much. 

But the really fun part was the on-the-ground research. Every location where Nola goes in the book—from bookstores to nightclubs, from restaurants to the zoo, from the Ninth Ward to the Garden District, from a plantation to Grand Isle—I went myself. The food Nola eats, I ate. I saw the bands she sees. And so on. I wanted to get the sensory details exactly right: the tastes, the scents, the humidity, the temperature of the water in the Gulf in April. (Oh, the sacrifice!) For the sake of literary accuracy, I threw myself on the grenades of K-Paul’s, Liuzza’s, Ignatius, and other fantastic New Orleans restaurants. That part of the research was genuinely delicious.

Once I’d learned so much in so many different realms, the challenge was weaving all the material together smoothly in support of the plot, so that the driving engines of the book would still be suspense and excitement.  I hope Hell or High Water achieves that.

Author R&R with Ben Winters

 

Ben H. Winters joins In Reference to Murder today for a little Author R&R (Reference and Research). Ben is the author of five novels, including the New York Times bestseller Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and the Edgar-nominated YA novel The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman. His other books include the sci-fi Tolstoy parody Android Karenina, the Finkleman sequel The Mystery of the Missing Everything, and the supernatural thriller Bedbugs, optioned for film by Warner Brothers.

Ben's latest novel is titled The Last Policeman, the first in a trilogy. It offers a mystery set on the brink of an apocalypse and asks the question, "What's the point in solving murders if we're all going to die?" Detective Hank Palace has asked this question ever since asteroid 2011GV1 hovered into view. People all over the world are walking off the job—but not Palace. He's investigating a death by hanging in a city that sees a dozen suicides every week—except this one feels suspicious, and Palace is the only cop who cares.

But how do you research the apocalypse? Ben offers his take on that:

Quirk Books in Philadelphia is the publisher of my new novel, a murder mystery called The Last Policeman, and they’ve published several of my earlier novels as well. But my relationship with the company started when they hired me to do a series of books extending the franchise of their flagship title, The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Guide. The premise of that very successful book, and its modestly successful sequels by myself and others, was to imagine rare and horrifying situations—like being attacked by a bear or falling from a plane or drowning in quicksand—and offer step-by-step advice, in the dry, practical tone usually used when someone has to reboot their computer or correct a dropped stitch. 

Over a few years I wrote everything from The Worst-Case Guide: New York City (How to Survive Falling on the Subway Tracks) to Worst-Case Guide: Meetings (How to Survive Your Boss’s Unfunny Jokes, etc.). And perhaps the most important thing I learned from working on these books (besides the fact that, in a pinch, you can take off your pants and turn them into a floatation device) is the value of interview-based research. 

Because at this late point in human civilization, there is so much information available on the internet, immediately and without charge, that the temptation when writing nonfiction is to just grab a bunch of it and stick it in where needed. (Just ask your local high-school student or PhD candidate who’s been bounced for plagiarizing from Wikipedia). But to the conscientious nonfiction writer the value of a one-on-one conversation is immeasurable. Of course you can find a paragraph on the Web somewhere about how to drive a car up a flight of stairs—but tracking down a stunt driver, engaging him in a long conversation, and recording a series of anecdotes about real adventures in the art of stair-driving, will give the finished product a salt and a snap one can never get online. 

The point is, having graduated from tongue-in-cheek reference-book writing to fiction, I find myself addicted to this process. For The Last Policeman, a murder mystery set on the brink of apocalypse, I had dozens of one-on-one conversations. I visited a preeminent asteroid-tracking astronomer in his office and basically forced him to give me an intro-level course. I called an acquaintance who is a forensic pathologist and had her walk me through a typical autopsy for the kind of crime my hero investigates. Then I called her back about a thousand times with follow-up questions, significantly revamping the details of my murder to make it track more with reality. I sat in the office of an assistant district attorney in Concord, NH, absorbing not only the details of homicide law, but also the look and feel of the office itself. 

And because my novel unfolds in a world of economic collapse, I called economists and economist reporters to chew the fact about the ways my scenario might play out. And the secret is that most people love to talk about what they do and what they know. Imagine that you’re an expert in the concept of insurable interest, a fine point of the insurance business that people at dinner parties aren’t necessarily so intrigued by. Then imagine that a guy calls and says he’s writing a novel, and would you please tell him everything you know? Wouldn’t you be delighted? My expert sure was.  

Which is why, after I finish this blog, I’m goings to start calling experts in immigration patterns, because in the sequel to The Last Policeman—well, I don’t want to spoil it. But somewhere out there are very smart people who know things that I need to know—about how and when desperate people move from one place to another—and now I have to find them and call them. 

--Ben Winters, July 9, 2012

You can read a Q&A about Ben, his writing and this new novel on the Quirk Books website, and also check out a book trailer for The Last Policeman.

Everything Old is New Again

 The explosive growth of digital books has spurred a lot of interesting trends, both in digital and print. One such trend is that many books previously out of print or with limited print runs are being made available again. Open Road Media is at the forefront of this particular trend, such as their new rerelease of Larry Beinhart’s No One Rides for Free, which won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. The timely work takes brash, opinionated private eye Tony Cassella into the world of corporate corruption and Wall Street crime. Two of Beinhart's books, Wag the Dog and Salvation Boulevard were made into films, and he received the prestigious Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award.

The Mysterious Press recently partnered with Open Road Media to release classic crime, mystery and suspense titles in digital reading formats. They've just reissued four of hard-boiled author Joseph Koenig's books in digital form: the Edgar-nominated Floater; Little Odessa; Smugglers Notch and the groundbreaking Brides of Blood, a police procedural set in Islamic Iran.

It's also nice to see publishers taking advantage of new global online book channels to reissue works as paperbacks. Soho Crime just announced it's publishing Stuart Neville's Irish noir Belfast Trilogy  (The Ghosts of Belfast, Collusion, and Stolen Souls), which have won or been nominated for just about every major crime fiction prize. Each book will include new bonus material such as interviews, alternate scenes, never-before-published short stories, and previews of Neville's new series. Plus, the author is undertaking a rare U.S. tour in October, with a stop at Bouchercon. 

Hard Case Crime also comes to mind, with a who's who list among its print reissues, including Harlan Ellison's first novel, Web of the City, and recently discovered unpublished gems from James M. Cain (The Cocktail Waitress) and Donald Westlake (The Comedy is Finished). As an interesting tie-in to the note about Joseph Koenig above, Hard Case Crime will release his newest novel, False Negative, a rollicking mystery about a journalist who, like Koenig once did, writes for true-crime magazines.

There are certainly plenty more where these come from, and if you know of noteworthy upcoming reissues, feel free to post them in the comments or drop me an e-mail.

Everything Old is New Again

 The explosive growth of digital books has spurred a lot of interesting trends, both in digital and print. One such trend is that many books previously out of print or with limited print runs are being made available again. Open Road Media is at the forefront of this particular trend, such as their new rerelease of Larry Beinhart’s No One Rides for Free, which won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. The timely work takes brash, opinionated private eye Tony Cassella into the world of corporate corruption and Wall Street crime. Two of Beinhart's books, Wag the Dog and Salvation Boulevard were made into films, and he received the prestigious Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award.

The Mysterious Press recently partnered with Open Road Media to release classic crime, mystery and suspense titles in digital reading formats. They've just reissued four of hard-boiled author Joseph Koenig's books in digital form: the Edgar-nominated Floater; Little Odessa; Smugglers Notch and the groundbreaking Brides of Blood, a police procedural set in Islamic Iran.

It's also nice to see publishers taking advantage of new global online book channels to reissue works as paperbacks. Soho Crime just announced it's publishing Stuart Neville's Irish noir Belfast Trilogy  (The Ghosts of Belfast, Collusion, and Stolen Souls), which have won or been nominated for just about every major crime fiction prize. Each book will include new bonus material such as interviews, alternate scenes, never-before-published short stories, and previews of Neville's new series. Plus, the author is undertaking a rare U.S. tour in October, with a stop at Bouchercon. 

Hard Case Crime also comes to mind, with a who's who list among its print reissues, including Harlan Ellison's first novel, Web of the City, and recently discovered unpublished gems from James M. Cain (The Cocktail Waitress) and Donald Westlake (The Comedy is Finished). As an interesting tie-in to the note about Joseph Koenig above, Hard Case Crime will release his newest novel, False Negative, a rollicking mystery about a journalist who, like Koenig once did, writes for true-crime magazines.

There are certainly plenty more where these come from, and if you know of noteworthy upcoming reissues, feel free to post them in the comments or drop me an e-mail.

Author R&R with Jake Needham

 

Hong Kong Magazine called Jake Needham "probably the best known American writer almost nobody in America has ever heard of." They might well be right. The four Asian crime novels he has published up until now (The Ambassador's Wife, Killing Plato, Laundry Man and The Big Mango) have sold nearly 150,000 copies in Asia, Europe and the UK, but not a single copy has ever appeared on any bookstore shelf in the US or Canada. His fifth novel, A World of Trouble, was published this week, but it won't be sold in the U.S. either.

Fortunately for readers who enjoy international crime novels, Jake's publisher has recently released all of his novels worldwide for Kindle, Nook, and iBooks. And, for the first time, Americans are beginning to discover Jake Needham, too. You can learn more about Jake and read excerpts from his books at his website.

Jake stopped by In Reference to Murder to take part in the ongoing feature "Author R&R" (Reference and Research), offering up these fascinating insights:

 

I write international crime novels set in contemporary Asia. They're filled with a collection of colorful rogues who range from the merely raffish to the downright scary: criminals on the lam, politicians on the take, intelligence agents on the grift, and hustlers on the scam.

Yeah, I know. You probably didn't realize there were any crime novels set in contemporary Asia, did you? You've read American crime novels, British crime novels, Italian crime novels, Scandinavian crime novels, and Russian crime novels, but…uh, Asian crime novels? I have to tell you, the few of us out there publishing Asian crime novels these days pretty much think of ourselves as the Rodney Dangerfield's of popular fiction.

Authenticity is important to me and I work hard at maintaining it in my books. Of all the reviews I've had over the years, both in the press and from individual readers, I am proudest of those that talk about the feel of my books and how real they make contemporary Asia seem for readers. "Needham certainly knows where some bodies are buried," Asia Inc Magazine said about my books. Darn right. I helped bury some of them.

I've lived in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bangkok for nearly twenty-five years now so my research these days consists primarily of a lot of pretty energetic hanging out. Let me give you an example.

I've been thinking a lot about doing a novel set in Macau so a few weeks ago I flew to Hong Kong, took a hydrofoil across the Pearl River estuary, and checked into the Grand Lisboa on the edge of the old city in Macau. I've been going to Macau for nearly thirty years, but the place has changed so much – and continues to change every year with such terrifying speed – that I wanted to walk the streets again and renew my feel for it.

Now I know quite a few people in Macau, and they know a lot more people in Macau. Generally, I find people like to talk to novelists, particularly if we come recommended as reliable by people they trust. We're not journalists. We're not trying to dig some dirt and turn it into a front-page story that might make our career even if it ends somebody else's. What we care about is how things might be, not how they really are. After all, we write fiction. We make this stuff up, don't we?

So here are some of things I did in Macau…

A retired MI6 intelligence officer who is now involved with casino security operations bought me dinner at the Wynn Macau and told me stories about the Triads involvement in the gambling industry there. As we were finishing our steaks, a major figure in one of Macau's largest triads dropped by the table and had coffee with us.

I drank San Miguel with a retired CIA officer in a little bar down in the old waterfront district, although in this case I have my doubts about the 'retired' part. He told me quite a lot about the life of Kim Jong-Nam, the eldest son of Kim Jong-Il now living quietly in Macau. Early the next morning, we climbed a narrow dirt path along the bluffs in Coloane and looked down into the house where Kim Jong-Nam lives.

I walked the narrow streets of the old city from the Chinese border to the outer harbor with an Australian who is an old Asia hand if there ever was one. He knows more about what is going on under the surface in Macau than I have a hope in hell of ever using in any book.

I ate Portuguese food in a tiny restaurant near the ferry terminal with a Chinese lawyer who represents a lot of people I have absolutely no intention of mentioning. He told me the real story of the North Korean bank that had for a decade been laundering counterfeit American currency into the international banking system through Macau.

And one night I sat all by myself in a half-empty bar at the top of the Old Lisboa casino, shooing away Russian hookers and remembering when I had shaken hands with King Sihanouk of Cambodia in that very room some thirty-five years before, back in a time when the Khmer Rouge had taken over Cambodia and Sihanouk was running for his life.

That's what I mean by 'hanging out' and calling it research. Hey, do I have the best job in the world, or what?

My new novel, A World of Trouble, is about Thailand on the brink of a civil war, its wealthy former prime minister now living in splendid exile in Dubai, and his American lawyer caught between two worlds. It's now available worldwide for Kindle and Nook, and through Smashwords. It will soon be available for iBooks, too.

Please visit my web site and read my Letters from Asia for more about my books and my life along the fault lines of modern Asia.