Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind

Oline Cogdill has her say on Julie Compton's new thriller RESCUING OLIVIA.

In the LA Times, Paul Tremblay tells a harrowing story of how his child's nanny defrauded him and other families she worked for - using almost quaint methodology.

Belinda Bauer talks about fantastic debut novel BLACKLANDS with Rege Behe of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

And Carla Buckley discusses *her* debut, THE THINGS THAT KEEP US HERE, with the Columbus Dispatch.

David Peace is all over the place, and I couldn't be happier about the turn of events. Not only is RED RIDING, the three-part movie based on his Yorkshire Quartet, playing roadshow-style at the IFC until February 11th, but his new novel OCCUPIED CITY, now out in the US is getting excellent reviews from the LAT's Richard Rayner (though the Austin-American Statesman's Patrick Beach kind of doesn't get it; style is the point, sir.)

Simon Beckett is one of the world's bestselling crime novelists, but his home country of Britain lags a great deal behind the curve.

T.C. Boyle tells the Olympian why authors must perform when on tour, what he's working on next, and how John Updike did a huge favor which Boyle only found out about after the elder man's death.

Lorraine Adams talks with the WSJ about her new, terrorism-inflected novel THE ROOM AND THE CHAIR and her life in Harlem with fellow novelist Richard Price.

Not only is Tereska Torres still alive, but she's just published a heavily revised edition of WOMEN'S BARRACKS in France.

A "new" Gormenghast novel, which was completed by Mervyn Peake's wife Maeve Gilmore, will finally be published in the UK by Vintage Classics.

Waterstone's children's catalog recommended Stuart MacBride's new novel SAWBONES as being suitable for kids. Um, clearly they didn't read the book and previous series entries in question...?

And finally, just because, Eddie the Eagle.

My newest column at the LA Times looks at a slew of newcomers, including Belinda Bauer, Randy Susan Meyers, Carla Buckley and James Thompson, whose first crime novels come at the dawn of a new decade (or the end of the old one, depending on how you do the math.) Here's a choice excerpt:

In the midst of the new decade's tumult, book publishing's lifeblood -- first-time writers -- still requires feeding. We're hungry for fresh voices unsullied by Bookscan stats, backlist expectations and narrative investment because, when new, the potential is limitless, and we can delay disappointment until the next book (which is why the so-called "sophomore slump" is only partially true; it's less the product of a bad outing than the author falling victim to heightened forecasts by readers and critics alike).

The boom-bust cycle applies just as much to the mystery world as it does to more literary-minded spheres. New voices often herald new series, but even when the books mean to stand alone, the entry threshold is steeper than ever. It's not enough to be good that first time out; one must be near close to outstanding -- or at least carry a distinctive voice -- to stand a chance for the future.

This is why I'm heartened by 2010's new class so far. By year's end, no doubt the submission list for the Edgar Award's Best First Novel will be the typical mix of many good-to-mediocre novels, even more tepid or flat-out-terrible outings, and a smattering of very good-to-great, but already, there are a few contenders strutting confidently out of the gate....

Read on for the rest.

After twenty-four years in business, my hometown mystery bookshop, Prime Crime, is shutting its doors. Its last day of business, according to the store's website, is March 14. "A sincere thank you to our many customers and supporters over the years," said owner Linda Wiken in a statement. "It's been a true pleasure to talk mysteries with you and to help you keep on top of the latest from our wonderful Canadian authors, as well as from around the world."

The Ottawa Citizen followed up with a longer story, revealing that the store has been on the block for a year, with no takers. Mary Jane Maffini, who bought the store with Wiken in 1995 (but left several years later to focus on her own writing career) emphasized the store serving as a meeting place for crime writers and readers. "There are other bookstores in town that also do a very good job on mysteries, but this is a special place for us, a special place in our hearts," she said. "It's been the heart of the mystery-writing community for a long time."

Now, I must be frank: it's people like me who contributed to the end of Prime Crime, by which I mean, I hardly ever shopped there when I was living in Ottawa. I remember making a rare trip in the late 90s and asking after a book that wasn't in stock and I knew was available at the chain store near my parents' house. I was told it wouldn't be available for another two months because it had only just been ordered. Which struck me as weird, and voila, the Pinecrest branch of Chapters got my business.

But I also know things have changed somewhat in the intervening years, as Ottawa's crime fiction community grew more established (in large part thanks to the critical and commercial success, at least locally, of Barbara Fradkin, Mary Jane Maffini, Alex Brett, and others.) And even though the commercial redevelopment of nearby Lansdowne Park drags on and will change the Glebe, losing Prime Crime does strike another needless blow to local business and neighborhood community.

So between this and the end of Indiana's The Mystery Company, all that can be said is: don't be like me. Shop at your local mystery indie. Because when they disappear, there is no replacing them.

At the Barnes & Noble Review, I consider John Burdett's latest Sonchai Jitpleetcheep novel, THE GODFATHER OF KATHMANDU, which is only partially set in Bangkok but still very much in keeping with the hallucinatory quality of the previous books. Burdett's novels are distinctive, but problematic; I want to pick fights with each of the books and with Sonchai's worldview, but damned if I don't keep coming back for more (which means, of course I'll be reading the next one.) Here's how the piece opens:

We tend to think of crime fiction as reading designed for entertainment -- not education. It delivers an almost pure kind of readerly pleasure -- the mystery solved, justice delivered, roughly or otherwise. But consider, for a moment, how often crime stories concerns themselves with unveiling a society -- or slice of society -- that has received little or the wrong kind of attention. With his Bangkok novels, John Burdett strives for both. As a British expatriate living in Bangkok for more than two decades, it's a given Burdett writes from an outsider's perspective, but he takes this several steps further with the novel's common protagonist, police detective Sonchai Jitpleetcheep, moving well beyond entertainment towards the more  Socratic (and idiosyncratic) goals of fiction -- they make you think again about what you might have thought you knew.

The proof is in the opening lines of The Godfather of Kathmandu: "Ours is an age of enforced psychosis. I'll forgive yours, farang, if you'll forgive mine -- but let's talk about it later." Right away Burdett establishes Sonchai's didactic attitude towards the reader, equal parts contempt and curiosity. There's confrontation in Sonchai's reminder here (just as in his three previous appearances, Bangkok 8, Bangkok Tattoo  and Bangkok Haunts) that the reader is a farang, a foreigner, and thus the other, someone to be admonished or cajoled, addressed directly or skilfully evaded...

Read on for the rest.

Margaret Cannon's latest crime column features new titles by Steve Hamiton, John Burdett, Stephen Hunter, James Hall, Jonathan Kellerman and Cora Harrison. The column, as has been widely reported by now, exclusively available online as of the beginning of the year, and while I get the outrage, as someone whose work, with some exceptions, now more or less appears only through online conduits (regardless of whether big corporations or well-funded startups are involved) I'm having a hard time getting worked up about the switch. Sure, the most reader email I've received were for pieces that ran in the Wall Street Journal and The Believer, but it just feels like another round in an argument that feels tired, dated and in a stalemate, because its roots are in a dying industry that will never recapture its former glory and heyday. Print isn't better or worse than online; it's different, and there's an adjustment period, but a Facebook group isn't going to put Cannon's column back in the Saturday Globe.

There's any number of commentary and analysis on Amazon pulling all Macmillan titles for direct sale (my own should show up tomorrow sometime) but Andrew Wheeler gets at the root of much of the issues at hand.

Randy Michael Signor has his very positive say on T. Jefferson Parker's new thriller IRON RIVER in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Rege Behe compares and contrasts two very different L.A. visions by Robert Crais and Charlie Huston.

Leonard Cassuto has many thoughtful things to express about Robert B. Parker, the hardboiled professor, in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Joan Brady tells the Independent on Sunday's Danuta Kean why she's made the permanent switch to thrillers, and still retains a sense of righteous anger.

Sara Paretsky, thespian.

The Financial Times plays the Q&A game with Richard Powers now that GENEROSITY is available in the UK.

Finally, goddamn, Rip Torn.

Now I can confess: when I first heard the news that J.D. Salinger died, I was instant-messaging with my editor at DailyFinance and said something to the effect of "not to sound crass, but his family is going to end up a whole lot richer as a result." Obviously, the big question, as the AP's Hillel Italie succinctly put it, is "what's in the safe?" - which is why I had put in my own two cents about what will surely be the title of an upcoming thriller, The Salinger Vault (oh wait, looks like someone wrote that already.) But my so-called crassness stemmed from the piece being edited, and now live - a look at the wacky loophole that repeals the federal estate tax, for the time being, for the duration of 2010. 

The piece, which for contractual reasons I cannot quote from here, stems from my longtime fascination with legacy and what happens after death - especially for authors. It's why I've read disappointingly little of Raymond Carver but can quote chapter and verse about the battles Tess Gallagher waged to get the "real" versions of her husband's stories out in the world lest they settle for Gordon Lish's semi-authorial stamp on "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" and the like. It's why Andrew Wylie interests me less as an agent of living authors than of dead ones, why literary biographies soon after a subject's death both appeals to and repels me (cf. Louis Begley on John Updike, D.T. Max on David Foster Wallace) and why most of my author interviews of late somehow stray into the notion of what they plan on doing with their voluminous literary archives.

You're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, and you're not supposed to ask what happens to the unpublished manuscripts and creative endeavors when the body's hardly cold. But look at how so many estates end up in legal hell, with heirs wrangling over the right to publish or not publish what the recently deceased writer wanted or did not want. Even a perfectly ordered estate takes a great deal of time to sift through, but it seems that the more time spent in advance thinking about what to do, the less there will be headaches.

Unless, of course, you're related to J.D. Salinger. Because there's just no way I can envision a simple solution, even if he had taken the step to put most of his earnings into a self-named trust back in 2008. Not when CATCHER IN THE RYE still brings in a boatload of backlist bounty for Little, Brown, acting as the publisher's secret ingredient for continued success. Kafka wanted his manuscripts burned, and look how that turned out. Nabokov didn't want THE ORIGINAL OF LAURA published, and look how that turned out. But wouldn't it be strange if it turned out the decision to let loose those hypothetical magical revolutionary* manuscripts depended on whether the estate tax repeal - and thus, the beefing up of family coffers - actually stuck for the remainder of the year?

*obligatory Apple iPad joke. It's been that kind of week.

Marilyn Stasio looks at recent crime fiction by Ian Rankin, Belinda Bauer, James Thompson and Ian Sansom.

Hallie Ephron analyzes new mystery releases by Lori Armstrong, Leighton Gage and Michael Thomas Ford.

Tom Nolan also reviews Lori Armstrong's new one, NO MERCY, in the Wall Street Journal.

Randy Michael Signor wants yet more Joe Pike novels after loving THE FIRST RULE by Robert Crais.The author gets the Q&A treatment from Carole Barrowman at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

Still more Robert B. Parker tributes: in the Globe & Mail from crime columnist Margaret Cannon and Ian Brown, as well as from Kate Mattes, the longtime propreitor of Kate's Mystery Books, Dennis Lehane, and David Montgomery in the Chicago Sun-Times.

And still more Nordic Noir considerations, one by Boris Johnson in the Telegraph and another by the Independent's Boyd Tonkin.

Let's not lose track of other award nominations that came out over the past week: the Dilys, Lefty, Bruce Alexander and Panik prizes, the winners which will be announced at Left Coast Crime in March.

In the Guardian, Laura Wilson has her say on new crime novels by Frank Tallis, Henry Sutton, Martin Edwards and Mark Sanderson.

Marcel Berlins examines new crime books by Catriona MacPherson, Tony Black and Eugenio Fuentes in the Times of London.

Carlo Wolff likes Lou Berney's "highly entertaining caper novel" GUTSHOT STRAIGHT.

From earlier in the week, Patrick Anderson puzzles over Robert Crais's decision to go in a more superheroic direction with THE FIRST RULE, but let's face it: we want Joe Pike to be a little vulnerable, but not too vulnerable, because his ass-kicking abilities is catharsis all the way.

Also in the Washington Post, Richard Lipez raves about T. Jefferson's third Charlie Hood novel, IRON RIVER.

Charlie Huston talks about SLEEPLESS further to the Dallas Morning News, while Ed Champion offers a well-considered take on the book and Huston's whole career at the B&N Review.

Robin Burcell chats with the SF Chronicle about her career in law enforcement and her forensic artist crime novels, most recently THE BONE CHAMBER.

About to embark on another teaching turn at Writers in Paradise, Laura Lippman talks with the St. Petersburg Times about why she'll only write about Baltimore (despite now spending more time in New Orleans) and offers a glimpse of the new novel, I'D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE.

Add another artistic endeavor to Walter Mosley's arsenal: his first play, "The Fall of Heaven", premieres this coming Thursday at Cincinnati's Playhouse in the Park.

Both MJ Rose and Tess Gerritsen's books are coming to a small screen near you. FOX will air PAST LIFE on Tuesdays at 9 PM starting February 9, and TNT picked up RIZZOLI AND ISLES to air starting this fall.

The London Review of Books is very, very, very much in the red, but I guess it doesn't really matter to the owners.

R.I.P. Paul Quarrington, who lost his battle with cancer at the age of 56.

Yes, a surefire way to Kindle bestsellerdom is to give books away for free.

And finally, even swans get divorced.

At the age of 77, "just sitting at his desk" at his home in Cambridge, Mass., according to an email sent out by a representative of his U.K. publisher Quercus, Robert B. Parker is dead. The news of Parker's death on Monday was confirmed by Parker's U.S publisher, Putnam; on Twitter, a representative wrote: "R.I.P beloved author Robert B. Parker. You were indeed a Grand Master, your legacy lives on, and you will be missed by us all."

In a statement released late Monday, Parker's longtime editor at Putnam, Christine Pepe, said: “What mattered most to Bob were his family and his writing, and those were the only things that he needed to be happy. He will be deeply missed by all us at Putnam, and by his fans everywhere.”The thriller writer Joseph Finder also confirmed the news directly with Parker's family, said to be "in shock."And the Bookseller quotes Parker's UK editor, Nick Johnston: "He was a great talent who will be mourned by all his many fans."

I'm really not sure how to process this. Not at all. I suppose it's exactly the way the author best known for his Spenser private detective novels, who by the latter portion of his career was up to publishing three novels a year, working at a five to ten page-a-day clip, should die - doing exactly what he was doing, day in, day out.

He is survived by his wife, Joan, and his sons, David, a choreographer, and Daniel, an actor. Several more novels will be published in 2010, including SPLIT IMAGE, the newest Jesse Stone novel (out February 23) and BLUE-EYED DEVIL, an Appaloosa novel (out on May 4). In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Community Servings, 18 Marbury Terrace, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130. As well, Parker's literary agent, Helen Brann, told the Associated Press that a private ceremony will take place this week to remember the author, and a public memorial, a "celebration of his life and work," is planned for mid-February in Boston.

Many more tributes will likely roll in over the next day or two, and I'll be updating this post during that period of time with links to pieces past and present, including:

• Bullets & Beer - the in-depth RBP site
• Robert B. Parker's blog, last updated in May
• The Thrilling Detective on all of RBP's P.I. novels
• Don Swaim interviews RBP in 1984 and 1986
• 2009 WSJ interview
• Mystery Ink's RBP Tribute, in honor of his Gumshoe Award for Lifetime Achievement
• The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik cooks one of Spenser's recipes
• Bill Crider on "a writer I've followed faithfully since the appearance of his very first book."
• Laura Ann Gilman, who used to work at Putnam, which was Parker's longtime American publisher
• Janet Rudolph
• Gerald So, who was one of Parker's most astute fans and critics
• Bob Freeman
• Joe Hill: "Tremendously sad to hear about Robert Parker dying. When I was a jr. in H.S., I went through about 10 of those Spenser novels in 6 months. I had lunch with him & his wife Joan once and he was just as unflappable and funny and perceptive as you'd want him to be...I have an impression (I don't really know & could be wrong) that he lived the life he wanted to live. I'm down about it, tho."
• Chris Well
• Ann Kingman, a sales rep for Random House: "He was the 1st author I collected in 1st editions. And his books helped me turn many non-readers into readers."
• David Lubar
• HubArts.com
• David Cramner
• Jen Forbus
• Grapeshot/Odette
• Krimiblog.de
• Matt Marcotte
• Ron Earl Phillips
• The 411 from 406
  
• Dave White: "the Spenser novels weren't about thrilling reads to me. They became a visit with an old, tough, and funny friend."
• Lee Goldberg
• James Reasoner
• Obit from the WSJ's Speakeasy blog
• WBZ-TV's report
• An appreciation from Jim Fusilli, crime writer and WSJ rock critic
• Associated Press obit, which includes a quote from Parker's agent, Helen Brann: "They had had breakfast together Monday and he was perfectly fine," Brant said. "She went out to do her running and when she came back about an hour later, he was dead. We were in a complete state of shock and still cannot quite believe it."
• Washington Post obit by Patricia Sullivan
  
• St. Petersburg Times obit by Colette Bancroft
• Boston Globe obit by Bryan Marquard
• Preliminary NYT obit by Bruce Weber (a full one still to come)
• Rick Koster at The Day
• Bob Sassone at TV Squad
• The Christian Science Monitor's Marjorie Kehe
• Mat Schaffer at the Boston Herald
• E.J. Dionne
• Bill Barol
• Bish's Beat
• Tainted Archive
• Martin Edwards
• Marc Levy at Cambridge Day
• Bryon Quertermous, who named his son after Parker's iconic P.I. Spenser: "the only reason I ever think about going back and writing a PI novel is because of the amazing experiences I had reading those early Spenser novels and the desperate need to recreate it in my own work."
• Tina Jordan at Entertainment Weekly 
• Reuters obit
• Tim Redmond in the SF Bay Guardian
• Clea Simon's appreciation for the Boston Globe's book blog: "If Philip Marlowe is LA, then Spenser is Boston. Tough, tender, with no first name necessary, Spenser loved food, books, and the Red Sox as well as justice, and made no apologies for these passions." Simon also picks five Parker novels that qualify as "must-reads."
• At The Rap Sheet, Kevin Burton Smith comes out swinging: "I know a lot of you didn’t like him, or dismissed him. Including, distressingly, a small but vocal slew of his contemporaries, who--just coincidentally, of course--never achieved his commercial success...But his influence on the private-eye genre (and the mystery genre as a whole) over the last four decades is undeniable." And J. Kingston Pierce recalls his 1980 interview with Parker for the Willamette Week and sums the author up thusly: "his prose was often so smooth, you might find yourself reading 30 pages of it without being cognizant of time passing. You could tell in reading his work that there were few things he enjoyed more in life than putting words on a blank page."

UPDATE: My own tribute to Robert B. Parker is now online at the Los Angeles Times' website (and will run in tomorrow's paper.) Here's how it opens:

Robert B. Parker, who died Monday in his Cambridge, Mass., home at age 77, spent his final moments doing exactly what he'd done for almost four decades: sitting at his desk, working on his next novel. He didn't concern himself with looking back. Instead, he wrote, and in the process irrevocably altered American detective fiction, forging a link between classic depictions and more contemporary approaches to the form.

Parker produced more than five dozen books in a variety of styles, including westerns, historical fiction, a marriage memoir and a nonfiction account of horse racing. But the bulk of his writing revolves around Spenser, the one-named, Korean War vet detective first introduced in "The Godwulf Manuscript" (1973).

That novel, which Parker wrote two years after publishing his Boston University doctoral thesis on the violent heroes of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, is a clear pastiche of those authors' works. Parker's biggest debt, though, was to Chandler, whose detective, Philip Marlowe, inspired Spenser's poet-inflected surname, his noble quest for justice and his desire to save women from miscreants...

UPDATE 2: Tom Nolan's tribute in the Wall Street Journal, simply put, knocks it out of the park, and closes with a bang: "The Spenser chronicles were created to be read in the moment. Time alone knows whether they'll survive their creator. But one sign of how important a writer was to us is how death, in an instant, can turn a name-brand author from taken for granted to one of a kind. Right away, we miss Robert B. Parker."

BEST FIRST NOVEL BY AN AMERICAN AUTHOR
The Girl She Used to Be by David Cristofano (Grand Central Publishing)
Starvation Lake by Bryan Gruley (Simon & Schuster - Touchstone)
The Weight of Silence by Heather Gudenkauf (MIRA Books)
A Bad Day for Sorry by Sophie Littlefield (Minotaur Books – Thomas Dunne Books)
Black Water Rising by Attica Locke (HarperCollins)
In the Shadow of Gotham by Stefanie Pintoff (Minotaur Books)

BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott (Simon & Schuster)
Havana Lunar by Robert Arellano (Akashic Books)
The Lord God Bird by Russell Hill (Pleasure Boat Studio – Caravel Books)
Body Blows by Marc Strange (Dundurn Press – Castle Street Mysteries)
The Herring-Seller’s Apprentice by L.C. Tyler (Felony & Mayhem Press)

BEST FACT CRIME
Columbine by Dave Cullen (Hachette Book Group - Twelve)
Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde by Jeff Guinn (Simon & Schuster)
The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston’s Racial Divide by Dick Lehr (HarperCollins)
Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo (The Penguin Press)
Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa by R.A. Scotti (Random House - Alfred A. Knopf)

BEST CRITICAL/BIOGRAPHICAL
Talking About Detective Fiction by P.D. James (Random House - Alfred A. Knopf)
The Lineup: The World’s Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest
Detectives edited by Otto Penzler (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown and Company)
Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King by Lisa Rogak (Thomas Dunne Books)
The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar (St. Martin’s Press)
The Stephen King Illustrated Companion by Bev Vincent (Fall River Press)

BEST SHORT STORY
"Last Fair Deal Gone Down" – Crossroad Blues by Ace Atkins (Busted Flush Press)
"Femme Sole" – Boston Noir by Dana Cameron (Akashic Books)
"Digby, Attorney at Law" – Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine by Jim Fusilli (Dell Magazines)
"Animal Rescue" – Boston Noir by Dennis Lehane (Akashic Books
"Amapola" – Phoenix Noir by Luis Alberto Urrea (Akashic Books)

BEST JUVENILE
The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity by Mac Barnett (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)
The Red Blazer Girls: The Ring of Rocamadour by Michael D. Beil (Random House Children’s Books – Alfred A. Knopf)
Closed for the Season by Mary Downing Hahn (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s Books)
Creepy Crawly Crime by Aaron Reynolds (Henry Holt Books for Young Readers)
The Case of the Cryptic Crinoline by Nancy Springer (Penguin Young Readers Group – Philomel Books)

BEST YOUNG ADULT
Reality Check by Peter Abrahams (HarperCollins Children’s Books – HarperTeen)
If the Witness Lied by Caroline B. Cooney (Random House Children’s Books – Delacorte Press)
The Morgue and Me by John C. Ford (Penguin Young Readers Group – Viking Children’s Books)
Petronella Saves Nearly Everyone by Dene Low (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s Books)
Shadowed Summer by Saundra Mitchell (Random House Children’s Books – Delacorte Press)

BEST TELEVISION EPISODE TELEPLAY
“Place of Execution,” Teleplay by Patrick Harbinson (PBS/WGBH Boston)
“Strike Three” – The Closer, Teleplay by Steven Kane (Warner Bros TV for TNT)
“Look What He Dug Up This Time” – Damages, Teleplay by Todd A. Kessler, Glenn Kessler &
Daniel Zelman (FX Networks)
“Grilled” – Breaking Bad, Teleplay by George Mastras (AMC/Sony)
“Living the Dream” – Dexter, Teleplay by Clyde Phillips (Showtime)

ROBERT L. FISH MEMORIAL AWARD
"A Dreadful Day" – Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine by Dan Warthman (Dell Magazines)

GRAND MASTER
Dorothy Gilman

RAVEN AWARDS
Mystery Lovers Bookshop, Oakmont, Pennsylvania
Zev Buffman, International Mystery Writers’ Festival

ELLERY QUEEN AWARD
Poisoned Pen Press (Barbara Peters & Robert Rosenwald)

THE SIMON & SCHUSTER - MARY HIGGINS CLARK AWARD
Awakening by S.J. Bolton (Minotaur Books)
Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof by Blaize Clement (Minotaur Books)
Never Tell a Lie by Hallie Ephron (HarperCollins – William Morrow)
Lethal Vintage by Nadia Gordon (Chronicle Books)
Dial H for Hitchcock by Susan Kandel (HarperCollins)

I've long wanted to write about the work of Dorothy Uhnak, a police officer with the NYPD who wrote procedurals before Joseph Wambaugh put his stamp on cop novels in the early 1970s, but the opportunity didn't present itself until I finished reading the only one of her books still in print (nominally, since it's a UK edition distributed here in the US), LAW AND ORDER, first published in 1973 and a million-copy bestseller.

The results of these most recent labors takes shape in my newest column for the Barnes & Noble Review, which opens like this:

In 1953, the idea of a single female police recruit to the New York City Police Department, let alone a handful, was big news. And when the New York Times wrote up the-then shocking idea of these women engaged in public outdoor physical activity as part of the examinations they needed to pass, naturally they included photos of the department’s newest members -- including one young mother and engineer’s wife, born and raised on Ryer Avenue in the Bronx. A decade later, Dorothy Uhnak immortalized her beat-walking experiences -- which included knocking down a robber more than twice her size -- in her memoir Police Woman.

 By the end of the 1960s, Uhnak had added to pioneering police work literary acclaim with a trio of award- winning novels following the career of Christie Opara, a detective protagonist as cool and methodical on the trail of multiple murderers (The Bait) political protesters (The Witness) and mobbed-up types (The Ledger) as she was raising a child on her own and considering a romance with her brash and sharp-tongued boss. Consciously or otherwise, Uhnak was planting the seeds for female detectives more private-minded  -- like Millhone, McCone and Warshawski -- and subsequent generations of hard-boiled literary women.  But until the Times reported Uhnak's death of a self-administered drug overdose in 2006, her contributions went unnoticed by a great many readers  -- including me. I soon realized this void was shameful on several levels...

Read on for the rest, and see Ed Lynskey's 2004 interview with Uhnak for further background.

Oline Cogdill chats with Robert Crais about his new Joe Pike novel, THE FIRST RULE, which she also reviews, as does the LA Times' Paula Woods.

In the Guardian, Laura Wilson raves about Belinda Bauer's BLACKLANDS and John O'Connell has his say on new thrilers by Sam Eastland, T.S Learner, Joseph Wambaugh and Peter Temple.

The G&M's Margaret Cannon rounds up new crime fiction by Barbara Nadel, Russel McLean, Charles Todd, Sam Hayes, and Michael Slade. Also in the paper, Andrew Taylor weighs in on PD James' TALKING ABOUT DETECTIVE FICTION.

Another week, another article about the enduring appeal of Scandinavian crime fiction. This one, a long and thoughtful treatise, comes from Laura Miller in the Wall Street Journal.

Speaking of the WSJ, they are chock-a-block of bookish feature pieces this weekend, what with a profile of a somewhat transformed Joyce Carol Oates, a Q&A with It-Lit-Boy Joshua Ferris, and Katie Rosman's "Death of the Slush Pile" article, a decade off but still a useful reminder that it takes a hell of a lot of nerve, drive and determination to be published, whatever methods one chooses.

The Austin-American Statesman's Jeff Salamon talks with Charlie Huston about his new speculative novel SLEEPLESS, writing about L.A., and his dialogue-dash tics.

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review talks with the pseudonymous Noah Boyd about his "debut" novel THE BRICKLAYER. Boyd's real name? Paul Lindsay, the author of six novels published between 1992 and 2000.

Bob Cornwell catches up with Peter Temple to discuss the Australian author's newest crime novel, TRUTH.

The New Jersey Star-Ledger praises Wallace Stroby's GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER, his first crime novel in far too many years.

Maggie Barbieri discourses to the Hudson Valley Journal News on her mystery-writing career and staying cancer-free.

Charlaine Harris makes the interview rounds in Australia now that TRUE BLOOD is airing there - and sales of her books are skyrocketing.

Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels have turned him into a bona fide star - and launched Swindon's literary festival, as the Times of South Africa finds out.

The NYT's Motoko Rich looks at recent examples of "layoff lit", including the book version of Alexandra Penney's Bag Lady Papers originating as a series of articles at The Daily Beast.

I've been remiss in praising Katharine Weber's TRUE CONFECTIONS, but Jincy Willett's NYTBR review pretty much says what I would have said.

Jackie Collins claims her teenaged self had an affair with Marlon Brando. She also has a new book out.

Whatever happened to Richard Colvin Cox? 60 years later and still no one really knows.

And finally, R.I.P. M.R.D. Meek, whose Lennox Kemp legal novels entertained many masses for over two decades. She was 91, and actually died on November 27, but no one bothered to write an obituary until the Times of London did so on Saturday.

Knox Burger, who died on January 4 at the age of 87, wore a great many career hats throughout his life. as editor of Collier's, he introduced Kurt Vonnegut to the world. As an editor at Dell and Fawcett Gold Medal, he published John D. McDonald, Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Peter Rabe and scores of other mystery writers remembered, forgotten or neglected. And as a literary agent (for Westlake, Block, Max Allan Collins, Bill Caunitz and many more), he bolstered his name by securing a $1 million dollar deal for Martin Cruz Smith's GORKY PARK - a very risky move since the book had already been bought and rejected by Putnam, but that didn't stop both men from sticking to their guns, and for the payoff to be very handsome (and career-changing, for Smith.)

As long as I've covered and been around the world of crime fiction, there's been an aura around Knox Burger. I wish I'd met him, but at least a majority of his papers between 1969 and 2000 are stored at New York University as part of the Knox Burger Archives. But it does feel like another door shut on an era when paperbacks were king, when it was still possible to be a relative unknown and sell hundreds of thousands, even millions of copies of books with racy covers and fast-moving tales of doomed men and women, and on publishing's so-called glory years.

And okay, I have to admit, for years I wondered who stood in for Knox in Rona Jaffe's THE BEST OF EVERYTHING, even though their time at Gold Medal didn't actually overlap (she was gone by the mid-50s; Burger didn't join until 1960.) But more importantly, another vital piece of crime fiction history died last week, one that is impossible to replicate.

UPDATE: Quicksilver Books' Bob Silverstein writes in with his memories of working with Burger:

I worked with Knox Burger in the 60s as an editor at Gold Medal Books. He was a great mentor, smart, quick, witty, at times curmudgeonly, but always fun to be around. Just as he took a chance with me – fresh out of City College when publishing was mostly an Ivy League enclave - he took chances with talented new writers and nurtured many of them into literary prominence. After work, editors, authors and agents would often gather around Knox in the Algonquin lobby for drinks and good times, swapping stories and decompressing amongst friends. When I read Knox’s obituary in yesterday’s Times, tears came to my eyes as I remembered what a big-hearted person he was, and how much he had meant in my life.

Thank you, Knox – your indelible smile and hearty laugh will stay with me forever.

This year's recipient of the CWA's Cartier Diamond Dagger Award, which honors outstanding achievement in the field of crime writing, is Val McDermid. Margaret Murphy, chair of the CWA, said in the accompanying release: “The CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger award acknowledges the work of an author who has made an outstanding contribution to the genre. Val McDermid is a worthy winner whose work has entertained and thrilled millions of readers as well as many more who have enjoyed the TV adaptations her books have inspired.”

The Guardian caught up with McDermid when the news broke earlier this morning. "I'm thrilled and proud but also a bit gobsmacked,"McDermid told the paper's Michelle Pauli. "The Diamond Dagger is the jewel in the crown for any crime writer, and this makes me a member of a pretty stellar club. But I still think of myself as a young Turk, and it's hard not to see this honour as placing me firmly in the Establishment. I guess I'll just have to regard it as something to defy as well as to embrace!"

It caps off a year in which McDermid was inducted into the crime-writers' Hall of Fame and elected to an honorary fellowship at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She'll receive her latest prize at a ceremony whose venue, date and time is still being determined.

Laura Hruska, co-founder, longtime publisher and editor-in-chief of Soho Press, died on Saturday after a long illness. She was 74 years old. Hruska had been at Soho, which began publishing literary fiction and crime novels since 1987, from the very beginning, and took over as publisher from Juris Jurjevics (the house's fellow co-founder, along with her husband, Alan Hruska) in 2006. Her daughter, Bronwen, was recently named publisher; now it appears we know why this announcement was necessary so recently.

Through Soho Crime, Hruska worked with and launched the careers of writers such as Dan Fesperman, Rebecca Pawel, Tod Goldberg, Stan Jones, Martin Limon, Jacqueline Winspear, Cara Black, James Benn, Adrian Hyland, Stuart Neville and Leighton Gage, to name just a few. Soho also published literary and mainstream works by the likes of Edwidge Danticat, Stephen Fry, Sara Gran, Barbara Gowdy and Susan Richards. Earlier in her career, Hruska published three novels, two under the pen name of Laura Chapman and one under her real name.

A memorial service for Hruska will be held this Friday, January 15th, at 11:30AM at the Campbell Funeral Home, 1076 Madison Avenue, New York, NY.

Julia Keller's newest "Lit Life" column in the Chicago Tribune focuses on the still-strong appeal of Scandinavian crime fiction, and quotes, among others, Andrew Gulli, Centuries & Sleuths' Augie Alesky, and yours truly.

In the NYTBR, Marilyn Stasio rounds up recent crime fiction by Charles Todd, Steve Hamilton, Betty Webb and Andrea Camilleri.

The Seattle Times' Adam Woog drops his first review of 2010, the "ultra-violent and elegant" new novel by Robert Crais. And there's more! Woog also has his say on new offerings from James Thompson, Stan Jones and Jonathan Gash, not to mention PD James' TALKING ABOUT DETECTIVE FICTION and THE LINEUP, edited by Otto Penzler.

Jason Goodwin has his say on John Burdett's new Bangkok crime novel THE GODFATHER OF KATHMANDU in the Washington Post.

Edmund Gordon examines Peter Temples newest crime novel, TRUTH, in the Observer.

The Telegraph's Roger Perkins extols the virtues of Mark Sanderson's evocative 1930s-set noir, SNOW HILL.

Tom & Enid Schantz opine on new mysteries by Paul Adam, Martin Edwards and Lenny Bartulin.

The Guardian puts together James Ellroy and David Peace for a short conversation piece. (I know. Couldn't resist.)

Scott Timberg looks at the perils and pleasures of adapting Elmore Leonard in the Los Angeles Times.

Bookgasm's Rod Lott interviews Lou Berney for the Oklahoma Gazette about how GUTSHOT STRAIGHT, Berney's first work of prose in almost 20 years, grew out of the 2007 writer's strike.

T. Jefferson Parker talks to the OC Register about his new Charlie Hood tale, IRON RIVER.

It's supposed to be a golden age for Irish writing - but John Spain is skeptical.

The Observer tours Brooklyn with Jonathan Lethem on the occasion of his new, Manhattan-set novel CHRONIC CITY.

Melanie Benjamin tells the Chicago Sun-Times about the impetus for ALICE I HAVE BEEN, which re-imagines all of Alice Liddell's life -not just the parts to do with Lewis Carroll.

Wow, there's a hell of a literary fight going on in France between two of its leading female writers, Camille Laurens and Marie Darrieussecq.

And R.I.P Art Clokey, dammit.

My newest LA Times column finishes up a two-part look at the state of contemporary fiction by being just about the last person to analyze PD James' analysis of the genre, TALKING ABOUT DETECTIVE FICTION. Though there are some issues I take with the book, most of them a matter of taste, James is as incisive and sharp as she was on BBC Radio 4 as guest editor late last year, when she expertly took the company's Director General to task about bloated management salaries.

Here's how the piece opens:

In order to understand and properly appreciate contemporary detective fiction, it is vital to look back to the past. That can be hard to do when one's nominal occupation requires staying on top -- and reading many -- of the year's releases, which total in the thousands in a given 12-month period. But even the shop-worn excuse of "too many books to read" wears thin after a while.

Still, this regrettable gap can be filled by an essay collection like Otto Penzler's "The Lineup" (which Dark Passages reviewed last month) or a good reference book, like William DeAndrea's "Encyclopedia Mysteriosa" (1994) or Julian Symons' 1972 tome "Bloody Murder." Or still, by the distinct perspective of one of the genre's most important practitioners, who at the age of 89 engaged firsthand with mystery's Golden Age as a reader and then, as a writer, put her own spin on her crime-writing ancestors....

Read on for the rest.

Two and a half years in the making, my essay on the complete works of Don Carpenter runs in the January 2010 issue of The Believer, which should be on newsstands very soon if it isn't already. The piece is not online, but the magazine has excerpted the opening paragraphs, which I will now excerpt from:

Starting in the late 1960s, a group of writers got together every Friday night at Enrico’s, a tiny café in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. Sometimes they talked about writing, but mostly they drank, reminisced, and traded insults—the hallmarks of male bonding. The group’s personnel came and went, depending on who showed up to shoot the breeze and liquor up, but the core remained the same: Curt Gentry, the lesser-known coauthor of Helter Skelter; Evan S. Connell, who had risen to literary acclaim with Mrs. Bridge; Richard Brautigan, author of the cult novel Trout Fishing in America; and Don Carpenter, who would eventually mine a decade’s worth of these get-togethers for his final novel, Fridays at Enrico’s.

Brautigan was the de facto leader of the quartet. With his six-foot-four-inch frame, potent charisma, and celebrity, he attracted legions of hangers-on and beautiful women who might not otherwise darken Enrico’s door. Carpenter, on the other hand, was the wingman, whom Brautigan’s conquests turned to for insights into their lover’s mind. The supporting-player motif extended into Carpenter’s writing career: after initial success with his debut novel, Hard Rain Falling (1966), the seven novels, two short-story collections, and many screenplays that followed met with critical acclaim and commercial indifference, yet aspiring writers were eager to pick his brain on the craft of writing, the vagaries of Hollywood, and how to persist at putting words on the page when recognition continued to wait around the corner.

When I say "two and a half years in the making", I mean it. The first draft was done in the summer of 2007, when Carpenter was being touted online by the likes of Jonathan Lethem and George Pelecanos, but who, otherwise, was forgotten. But in truth, my interest in Carpenter is a little more than a decade old, spurred by the discovery of several connections he shared with Shel Silverstein. They were in the Army at the same time, working on the Pacific Stars & Stripes (Shel on daily cartoon strips, Carpenter on feature articles) then back in touch in the late 1960s/early 1970s thanks to the movie PAYDAY (1973), which Carpenter wrote and produced, and Silverstein scored. At one point, I learned, the two men even shared office space in Northern California. But eventually they would lose touch again, and to the best of my knowledge, were not in communication by the time Carpenter committed suicide in 1995. 

With memory jogged, I set about to reading through Carpenter's backlist, and was more than impressed. His first novel, HARD RAIN FALLING (1966), is the book I spend the most time on in the essay, not only because it's a stone-cold masterpiece about manhood, imprisonment and emotional entrapment but because the New York Review of Books' Classics imprint reissued it last fall (with an introduction by Pelecanos) - which allowed scores of others to discover its excellence. Edwin Frank explained how the reissue came to be in the Washington City Paper, and also illuminated why the book still resonates today:

[I]t speaks very interestingly of the pathologies of being a man, and an American man in particular. It’s a subject of interest to at least half of the population. And I think it does it in an unusual way. There’s also another thing going on, complementary to the first: I think people are interested in thinking about the different kinds of things novels can do. So there’s a little bit of looking back and just seeing the lay of the land and all these interesting exceptional things put out in the past as opposed to the latest greatest books.

In any essay for The Nation, Charles Taylor also made the case that Carpenter's Hollywood novels merit rediscovery, and I agree. A COUPLE OF COMEDIANS, with its rollicking, sometimes unreliable account of a comic duo's rise and fall, is a natural for reissue, though the Hollywood fiction - rooted in the cynicism Carpenter developed as a result of years in the belly of the real thing's beast - that still stays with me are the linked novellas "Hollywood Heart" and "Hollywood Whore", collected in his first short story collection THE MURDER OF THE FROGS (1969).

And then there is FRIDAYS AT ENRICO'S. Anne Lamott, who knew Carpenter so well she dedicated her writing memoir BIRD BY BIRD (1994) to him (and one of the most oft-quoted parts of the book, about Lamott's publication day rituals, features Carpenter in a supporting role) claimed the book was a masterpiece. It made the rounds but never got published. Will the resurgence in Carpenter interest provoke additional desire for his supposedly last and "lost" novel? That remains to be seen.

But I must say, I'm glad there's more attention being paid to Carpenter, even on the basis of his debut novel. He never deserved to be forgotten, and maybe, just maybe, the newfound interest will stick - and extend to the rest of his output. And special thanks to Ed Park for never losing patience (and always coming up with excellent edits), Andrew Leland for shepherding in the final hours, and Lisa Tauber for judicious and necessary fact-checking.

I'm not sure if the lateness of this post and the lack of posts between this and last week's roundup is indicative of how 2010 will go, but expect posting to be - more or less - back to normal come Monday or Tuesday. To wit:

Oline Cogdill has her say about Tami Hoag's DEEPER THAN THE DEAD, which is less a serial killer tale and more a creepy, Dreiser-echoing saga of 1980s suburbia at its worst.

Marcel Berlins reviews new crime fiction releases by Cathi Unsworth, Peter Temple and Frank Tallis for the Times of London.

Megan Abbott talks with Robert Crais about his new Joe Pike novel, THE FIRST RULE, in the Los Angeles Times Magazine.

BBC Radio 4 looks at the intersection between crime fiction and reality, as discussed by practitioners and crime writers alike.

That segment was part of PD James' guest-editing stint for the radio station, in which she now famously skewered Beeb director general Mark Thompson and showed why, at age 89, she kicks serious ass.

Joseph Peterson chats with the Chicago Sun-Times about his debut noir novel BEAUTIFUL PIECE, an idiosyncratic and off-kilter tale that does wonders with the power of repetition.

Katharine Weber is interviewed in the Hartford Courant about her delightful, rambunctious new novel TRUE CONFECTIONS. (See also The Bat Segundo Show, complete with wild and crazy intro.)

Jonathan Galassi, publisher of FSG, thinks he's talking about e-books in this op-ed but reallyl he appears to be railing against anyone who dares to reissue out of print books, reprint plates from one English-language edition for another, and the likes of Modern Library, NYRB Classics and the Library of America. Which is to say, WTF?

Katie Roiphe delivers the State of the Union essay for the NYTBR. And yes, you can interpret that to mean anything you like.

The Guardian Review celebrates the lives and works of authors who died over the past decade.

The Babysitters Club is being rebooted! My nine-year-old self is absurdly excited about this.

Marilyn Stasio's last crime fiction column of 2009 rounds up new crime fiction by Sue Grafton and Christopher Fowler, and new-to-US books by Pierre Magnan and Ken Bruen.

Also in the NYT is an excellent piece on Open Letter, the literature-in-translation house based out of the University of Rochester.

Oline Cogdill looks at a debut novel by the newest Tony Hillerman Prize winner, Roy Chaney.

David Montgomery gives his verdict on mysteries & thrillers by Brad Parks, Sophie Littlefield, Tom Piccirilli, Joseph Wambaugh and Dave Heinzmann.

Hallie Ephron reviews new crime offerings from Katherine Hall Page, Ken Bruen and Brad Parks in the Boston Globe.

Margaret Cannon has her say in the G&M about crime fiction by Lee Lamothe, Jonathan Gash, Ruth Rendell and Yasmina Khadra, as well as a new Sherlock Holmes-themed anthology.

What is Canada's Environment Minister, Jim Prentice, reading on airplanes? Lots of crime fiction and weighty history tomes, as he tells the National Post.

Christa Faust wonders why there's a dearth of tales that invert the LAURA template - i.e., instead of a man obsessed with a beautiful dead woman, it's the woman obsessing over a gorgeous dead man.

The Chronicle Herald reviews Inger Ash Wolfe's new novel THE TAKEN, and no "her" identity still isn't out yet.

The Observer analyzes why Henning Mankell's recent crime fiction centers around a brand-new female character instead of Linda Wallander, daughter of Kurt, who was meant to carry the fictional torch.

William E. Butterworth IV breaks down the collaborative state between him and his father, now age 80, on the W.E.B. Griffin novels for the Dallas-Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Mark Haskell Smith reveals the lengths to which he'll go to research the marijuana industry -- all background for his forthcoming novel, BAKED.

150 years after its initial publication, Wilkie Collins' THE WOMAN IN WHITE still haunts all manner of readers.

Sherlockians give a big thumbs-up to the new film version of SHERLOCK HOLMES, which did rather well in its opening weekend. And in the WSJ, John J. Miller looks at the often complicated relationship between Arthur Conan Doyle and his world-famous creation.

Finally, Kei Suzuta, who writes crime fiction under the name Toshiyuki Tajima, has gone missing under suspicious circumstances.

Earlier this fall, Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch announced that the company would start its own imprint devoted to crime and suspense fiction. Back when I reported the news they were still looking for an editor to acquire and oversee the imprint, but now they are no longer: starting January 11, John Schoenfelder will take the reins for the still-unnamed imprint, which is on track to publish its first titles in early 2011.

In the accompanying announcement, Pietsch said about Schoenfelder: "His deep knowledge of the field, his broad idea of what suspense fiction can encompass, and his marketing creativity struck us as just right for our idea of what this imprint can be--a place for novels that aim to knock our socks off by gripping us from the first page, whether they're thrillers, crime novels, or supernatural suspense."

Those who read and write noir and suspense know Schoenfelder well from his most recent stint as assistant editor for Thomas Dunne/SMP, where his authors - usually published or are about to be published by Minotaur - included Alan Glynn, Russel McLean,John McFetridge, David Moody, Cortright McMeel, Craig McDonald and David Wong. But I've long suspected his tastes were more varied and, given the right environment, he could stretch his editorial muscles that much further. Suffice to say I'm looking forward to seeing what books make up the new imprint's first list, and which authors he signs up thereafter.

Oline Cogdill selects her best mysteries of all stripes in 2009 for the Sun-Sentinel.

The Guardian's Laura Wilson rounds up new crime offerings from Linwood Barclay, Catriona MacPherson and Tonino Benacquista.

Ron Charles is impressed with John Smolens' fictional account of the McKinley assassination as told in THE ANARCHIST. Earlier in the week, Donna Rifkind had her say on Michael Connelly's 9 DRAGONS in the WaPo.

Regis Behe talks with Otto Penzler about the impetus for his newest anthology THE LINE-UP.

The Los Angeles Times looks back at the last ten years - in reading, in fiction, saturated with vampires, and in stories. no matter the medium.

The movie versions of the Millenium Trilogy will be remade for American audiences, thanks to Scott Rudin.

Margo Rabb looks at those who steal books - in print and digitally - for the NYTBR.

Kate Figes once again asks UK publishers which of their books they hoped would do better -- and which ones they wished they had published.

Some of those disappointments could be due to the fact that in the UK, hardback publishing fell off bigtime. 

And finally, it is now illegal to stick your tongue out in Italy. Oookay...

The Los Angeles Times runs my profile with Sue Grafton today, based on a fairly wide-ranging conversation about her writing methods, why she's never content to rest on her laurels, and why "Z is for Zero" - the title of the last book in the series, with a presumed publication date of about a decade from now - isn't necessarily inevitable. Here's how it opens:

In 1982, reviewing Sue Grafton's first private detective novel, "A Is for Alibi," the pseudonymous New York Times crime fiction critic Newgate Callendar wondered, "Will the series take hold? This first book is competent enough, but not particularly original." Twenty-seven years on, Callendar's dismissive attitude toward the book -- and its tough-minded thirtysomething heroine Kinsey Millhone -- demonstrates the dangers of prognostication and how instantaneous judgments don't age well.

Grafton's alphabet-titled series not only took hold, but the books are also available in 28 countries (and 26 languages) in abundant quantities, well into the millions of copies. In the last two years, Grafton has won lifetime achievement awards on both sides of the Atlantic. Without her and crime-writing colleagues Sara Paretsky and Marcia Muller, the female private detective subgenre would simply not exist. And with the end of the alphabet in sight, no author is more closely identified with reader expectations -- especially when "Z Is for Zero" shepherds Kinsey and her hometown of Santa Teresa to a fictional end.

Grafton has certainly reaped the rewards of this bigger picture: But what's been lost in the collective race toward the finish line is that Grafton, interviewed on the first day of her book tour for "U Is for Undertow" (Putnam: 404 pp., $27.95), has produced a better book each time out, and "U" is her most structurally complex, psychologically potent book to date....

Naturally, there was a lot of material that didn't make it into the piece, so stay tuned for another excerpt coming later on.

At the Barnes & Noble Review, my newest column looks at the wonderfully entertaining Bryant & May novels by Christopher Fowler. The plots harken back to the Golden Age of mystery but are very much of our time now. Here's how the piece opens:

In 1928, Willard Huntington Wright (better known as S. S. Van Dine) set down "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories", which attempted to cement what should and should not be done in detective fiction. His colleagues and readers took Van Dine’s edicts seriously by virtue of the acclaim he’d racked up for his own rule-abiding sleuth, Philo Vance. Eighty-plus years on, the list seems rather quaint. Many of the greatest detective novels written since then gleefully ignore Van Dine’s rules -- especially No. 16, which guards against any “long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no "atmospheric" preoccupations,” for “such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction.”

 I have a mental image of Arthur St. John Bryant and John May, the London detectives created in Christopher Fowler’s continuing series, chancing upon Van Dine’s fictional detection guidelines not long after publication. They would have been youngsters then, a couple of years past learning how to read, a decade and change from their first meeting as fresh-faced recruits to the Metropolitan Police Force, and 75 years removed from their first joint appearance in Full Dark House (2003) by their creator. And in my fantastical conjuring I see clearly their respective reactions to Van Dine’s treatise: May would have shrugged his shoulders and gone on with whatever more important task he was doing, while Bryant would have noted every word in his head, resolving to do the exact opposite – especially contradicting rule number eight, “chasing about the fourth dimension of metaphysics.”

Read on for the rest - and for another take, see Robin Vidimos's review at the Denver Post.

Marilyn Stasio looks at recent mysteries and thrillers by Joseph Wambaugh,Charles Finch and Stan Jones, as well as PD James' TALKING ABOUT DETECTIVE FICTION.

Margaret Cannon rounds up new crime fiction by Sue Grafton, Archer Mayor, Massimo Carlotto & Marco Videtti, Anne Perry, Vivian Meyer, and Joanna Challis.

At the Wall Street Journal, Albert Pyle has his say on PD James' TALKING ABOUT DETECTIVE FICTION.

Adam Woog selects his best crime fiction of 2009 for the Seattle Times.

Maureen Corrigan picks her "Most Mesmerizing Mysteries of 2009" for NPR's Fresh Air. 

Brad Parks talks with the New Jersey Star-Ledger about his debut crime novel FACES OF THE GONE.

L'Affaire Larsson, and the battle over the royalties of the Millenium novels, gets another airing in the LA Times.

TIME's Andrea Sachs Q&As with Sue Grafton about U IS FOR UNDERTOW.

M.R. Hall chats with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's Rege Behe about his forensically-focused crime novel, THE DISAPPEARED.

Patricia Cohen goes on a Patricia Highsmith walking tour with the suspense writer's biographer, Joan Schenkar. This most excellent book was also reviewed recently by Daniel Mallory at the LAT, Leonard Cassuto at the B&N Review, and Alexander Theroux in the WSJ.

Why are publishers uncomfortable putting people of varying ethnicities on the covers of books? Lizzie Skurnick looks at this conundrum, as filtered through the controversy surrounding the cover of Justine Larbalestier's YA novel LIAR.

And finally, the news has reverberated many times over by now, but yes, Kirkus Reviews is toast. And the reactions are mixed, to say the least.

Pursuing such a subject is utter madness, of course, which is why I decided to crowdsource things last night. And boy, did people deliver! But being an unenlightened despot, I want to list my own choices - ini no particular order, some conventional, some more off the beaten track, and easily subject to change - first, before turning the proverbial floor to everybody else:

MYSTIC RIVER, Dennis Lehane (2001): Looking back I can still remember what a game-changer this book was, not just in terms of elevating Lehane's own writing and style, but in blowing up even further what a crime novel can, and should, accomplish with regards to character and emotion.

CASE HISTORIES, Kate Atkinson (2004): another of those books that widens one's horizons of what a crime novel should accomplish, and almost a near-perfect brew of witty phrases, pithy humor and deep melancholy. The other Jackson Brodie novels are very good, but this is the best.

BURY ME DEEP, Megan Abbott (2009): yes, it is early, but yes, it is that good.

FARTHING, by Jo Walton (2006): The whole trilogy (HA'PENNY and HALF A CROWN) all measure up, but this established Walton's utter mastery of alternate history (what if the Nazis and the Brits had brokered "peace in our time"?) and traditional mystery. I'm still kind of in awe of these books, actually.

TOKYO YEAR ZERO, David Peace (2007): The rhythm, the sentences, the utter and total despair and the absolute beauty of Peace's stark vision. The Red Riding Quartet is great, but this (and the follow-up, OCCUPIED CITY) totally knocked me out.

THE BLUE TANGO, Eoin McNamee (2001): The way he interweaved the real-life murder of an Irish woman in the 1950s with a dream-like, claustrophobic style impressed the hell out of me - and set up his very unique blend of "faction" that recurs in later books like 12:23 and THE ULTRAS.

STILL LIFE, Louise Penny (2006): It's not the best of the series, but it established Penny as the Queen of New Traditionalism, i.e. rethinking Agatha Christie for the 21st Century.

THE MILLENIUM TRILOGY, Stieg Larsson (2004-present): I'm lumping all three books together because in a way, they have to be taken as a whole in order to parse what a global phenomenon the books are.

JAR CITY, Arnaldur Indridason (2003): Mankell started the Nordic Crime boom, but Indridason, I believe, put the most indelible stamp on this subgenre.

THE SMALL BOAT OF GREAT SORROWS, by Dan Fesperman (2003): his work of late has been more overtly espionage and politically minded but this is still my favorite, and the one I feel best merges larger political themes (of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s) with more micro concerns of individual murder.

THE ICE HARVEST, by Scott Phillips (2000): this is how you do noir.

THE LINCOLN LAWYER, Michael Connelly (2005): truth be told, it's a toss-up between this and CITY OF BONES (2003), but the edge goes to Mickey Haller and Connelly's ability to inhabit the legal thriller mold in his own detail-oriented, express-train way.

THE BUSINESS OF DYING, Simon Kernick (2002): For the pure, unadulterated glee I felt while carried along with the voice of Dennis Milne, that no-good cop who was so bad and so great at the same time.

EVERY SECRET THING, Laura Lippman (2003): Her books have only gotten better since, but this was the one that showed where she was heading, and what story risks she was willing to take that didn't fit in the Tess Monaghan universe. 

ABSENT FRIENDS, SJ Rozan (2003): For tackling 9/11 head on with grace and with care.

THE NIGHT GARDENER, George Pelecanos (2006): It's not my all-time favorite Pelecanos - that would be THE SWEET FOREVER or the DC Quartet as a whole - but it's the turning point of his newer, more controlled, mature style that we're going to see persist for a while. 

THE POWER OF THE DOG, Don Winslow (2005): Sure, THE DAWN PATROL is kickass-tastic and almost everything he's written is great, but this is Winslow's great, underrated epic, a panorama about the drug trade that says more than you thought you'd want to know that turns out to be everything you must know.

WINTER'S BONE, Daniel Woodrell (2006): For the beauty of the writing and how much Woodrell packed in, emotionally and narratively, in just under 200 pages.

Truth be told, there's probably a good list of 50 books that could easily qualify for "best of the decade", and maybe by the end of this year a good consensus list can be built. What surprised me, though, were how many books I wanted to include that were published in the late 1990s  which I view as something of a turning point for crime fiction as it is being published now. Enough of me, though, what say everybody else?

"What a lovely surprise!" Gilman said in the accompanying press release. "The list of past Grand Masters is like a Who's Who of the great mystery writers of the last century. To be chosen for this award by my professional peers has to be the greatest honor of my 60 years as an author."

Zev Buffman, a Broadway producer and the man behind the International Mystery Writers Festival in Owensboro, KY, and Mary Alice Gorman & Richard Goldman, proprietors of the Mystery Lovers Bookshop in Oakmont, PA, will receive the Raven Awards. Barbara Peters & Robert Rosenwald of the Poisoned Pen - Bookstore and Press - are the Ellery Queen Award winners.

When THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST, the final book in Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy, was published in the UK in October, I knew I had to get my hands on a copy almost immediately*. I was far from the only impatient one, as it turns out, and the New York Times' Motoko Rich was on the case to figure out why American readers were ready and willing to fork over as much as $45 for McLehose Press's airport edition of the book, and independent bookstores like Partners & Crime and Murder by the Book have sold about 100 copies each of the title:

The imports are attracting fans like Joan Morgenstern, a retired property manager in Houston who had already torn through the first two books in the series and was eager to read the third when she discovered that her favorite bookstore in Houston, Murder by the Book, imported several copies of the British hardcover version shortly after it was published in October.

Ms. Morgenstern, 64, paid $40 for her copy and read it over the Thanksgiving holiday. “I’ve never been extremely patient when it comes to stuff I can find and read,” she said...

...Bridget Lennon, an interior designer for retail stores, visited the shop last week to buy a copy of “Hornet’s Nest” as a Christmas present for her fiancé. “You put down the first one, and you want to read the second; and you put down the second, and you want to read the third,” Ms. Lennon, 27, said. Although she said the $45 price tag was steep, she figured that by the time she, her fiancé, her fiancé’s sister and his father had all read it, “between the three or four of us that we know immediately who want to read it, it will pay off eventually.”

So why is Knopf, which publishes Larsson in the States, holding off on releasing THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST until May? Spokesman Paul Bogaards said the company wanted to allow interest to build as more and more readers discovered the first two volumes in the series. “The sales on Book 1 and Book 2 are so strong that you wouldn’t want to add Book 3 to the mix immediately."

And here's the thing: Bogaards is probably right. The hard-core fans may not want to wait until May to read it, but their early buzz essentially acts the same way that advance copies do, and if the early adopters are enthusiastic (so far, they have been) then the much larger market segment of less hardcore fans will not only be primed to pick up book #3, they will also have plenty of time to catch up with THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (764,000 copies sold in all formats, according to Bookscan) and THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE (199,000 copies sold of the hardcover, also according to Bookscan)

Now, the funny thing is that originally, HORNET'S NEST was supposed to come out in early 2010, keeping the one-a-year pace of the first two books. But McLehose Press, a division of Quercus, moved it up, and the combined sales of all the Larsson books pretty much salvaged their year. They are far more in need of the cash boost the books provide than is Random House, which started off being 9 months behind (DRAGON TATTOO was published in January 2008 by Quercus, September of that year by Knopf) and has been publishing the series at a slightly accelerated pace, too (PLAYED WITH FIRE came out in late July; HORNET'S NEST will be out this coming May.)

If anything, publishing HORNET'S NEST so "late" makes it more likely that 2010 will provide the needed boost for the entire company - Dan Brown did all right, but they needed plenty of other books to perform well, too. And by 2011, when all three of the books are in paperback, Knopf - through its paperback arm, Vintage - will see plenty more money still from perennial backlist sales. 

Importing UK titles happens all the time, and I expect that issues of territory will become far more serious once e-books have more than a 3-4% market share. But with regards to Larsson, the number of people too impatient to wait versus the expected market for THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST is still so tiny that, to my mind, Knopf is hardly losing out - if anything, they're gaining more attention and potential sales as a result. Because many early adopters will turn around and buy the US edition come May - for themselves, for loved ones,  for anyone they can think of. And that way they benefit Knopf and McLehose Press (who, by the way, get first dibs on US sales because they bought World English rights back in the day) double. 

UPDATE: Publishers Lunch (subscription req'd) points out one aspect that Rich didn't touch much on in her story but "is of concern to some trade publishers: bulk imports for resale by US retailers (portrayed as a savvy "way to lure customers into paying premium prices") are a violation of copyright law." I followed up with Knopf's Paul Bogaards on a couple of points. First, to my question about whether they might pursue any action against booksellers who imported the Larsson books en masse, he said:  "I'm not at liberty to discuss action we may be taking against booksellers who are operating in clear violation of copyright law, other than to say, we are carefully reviewing our options with counsel."

The release dates for HORNET'S NEST and the paperback editions of THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE remain unchanged as well, and with general regards to issues of high demands, Bogaards had this to say:

Import sales, while illegal, are not a new phenomenon, and we witnessed some of the same consumer behaviors with book two in the series (the UK sale preceded our own, and some readers purchased UK editions). The term "high demand" is relative one, and could easily be substituted with another, more accurate turn of phrase (ala "a cadre of die-hard Larsson enthusiasts in concert with their lawless, book smuggling brethren") -- and it is important to note that what is driving current demand for The Girl Who Played with Fire in the US marketplace are the phenomenal paperback sales of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Generally, it is the wide availability of a paperback, in all channels of distribution, that helps broaden a hardcover readership, as has been the case with Larsson. As this story continues to unfold in the months to come, it is the wide availability of both paperback editions of The Girl Who Played with Fire, coming in March, as well as the attendant marketing campaigns for Fire and Nest, that will spur readers to purchase The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest when it is released in May.

Also see BookNet Canada's Morgan Cowie's post for yet more food for thought. 

*(thanks, A.K.)

So many best-of lists! So many gift guides! So many favorite books! So I'll keep it to a minimum:

Marilyn Stasio's notable crime fiction picks for the NYTBR are wide-ranging and expansive and reserves a spot for Hannah Berry's awesometastic graphic novel BRITTEN & BRULIGHTLY. 

Tom Nolan presents his crime fiction holiday gift guide in the WSJ. 

Oline Cogdill is impressed with Brad Parks' debut crime novel FACES OF THE GONE.

Tom & Enid Schantz reviews new mysteries by Christopher Fowler, Jonathan Gash, Charles Finch and P.D. James.

PW's Jordan Foster talks with Robert Crais about his new Joe Pike novel THE FIRST RULE and PD James about her brief tract on detective fiction.

Carol Memmott conducts a brief Q&A with Sue Grafton about U IS FOR UNDERTOW.

Mark Billingham gets into the nitty-gritty of finance and house-buying with the Daily Telegraph.

Joseph Finder and Lee Child share their e-reading experiences with the NYT.

CJ Box picks his top ten American crime novelists who "own" their territory for the Guardian.

Al Roker chooses his six favorite mystery novels for The Week.

Cathi Unsworth talks with Metro UK about BAD PENNY BLUES, which might have made my "Best of 2009" list if I'd read it in time.

Philip Kerr discourses on Bernie Gunthier and socialism to the Socialistworker.co.uk.

From now through January, The Rap Sheet will be a showcase of all things Derek Raymond, which is all too fine by me. He doesn't get nearly enough attention.

And finally, part I: Quentin Tarantino, WTF?

And finally, part II: I cannot stop giggling about this.

My newest column for the Los Angeles Times reflects what was some unconscious gravitation on my part towards non-fiction that looks at contemporary detective fiction, and so it's the first of a two-part series, this time concentrating on the relationship between author and reader and how series characters are viewed by their creators. Here's how the piece opens:

In an essay for the Wall Street Journal last spring, Alexander McCall Smith explains the curious relationship readers have with characters created by other people and the expectations that build up for authors as a result. He describes one encounter with a reader highly critical of a plot turn in one of his Isabel Dalhousie novels, to the point where McCall Smith muses, after the fact, "that was me put in my place. After all, I was merely the author."

The phenomenon McCall Smith described -- best exemplified by the hordes of fans clamoring for any new speck of information on the next "Twilight" novel by Stephenie Meyer or the conclusion to the "Hunger Games" trilogy by Suzanne Collins -- is what I term narrative investment. The author creates a world whose story and characters ring so true and inspires readers to care a great deal about what happens next that they enter a fugue state mixing reality and fantasy -- with readers' needs placed far ahead of writers' -- especially if said stories are adapted for movies and television, expanding the narrative's reach and cementing the level of investment by potential fans.

Though the larger world of science fiction, fantasy and comics attracts more fans with heavy emotional and wallet-based investments in their chosen genre, crime fiction is hardly immune. Last month's column touched on what authors do when a series threatens to go stale, and some of their choices drive their readership into apoplexy -- especially when a beloved supporting or main player is disposed of. The total amount of time readers spend with a given series character, however, is dwarfed by the years of writing required to set each installment down on paper. And if writers don't always know best about their detective alter-egos, they usually know better because they have access to inside information lurking inside their minds that readers simply do not....

After that I spend more time on Otto Penzler's anthology THE LINE-UP, where 21 of the best and brightest in crime explain their protagonists' origin stories. The quality is very high, and the best pieces are the most essayistic. I also have a funny feeling it'll make a good gift for the holidays, too...

As for Part II - coming next month - it'll be on PD James' TALKING ABOUT DETECTIVE FICTION. More anon.

For those who need a quick recap, Harlequin, the romance publisher who also publishes thriller and commercial fiction writers including Elizabeth Flock, Jason Pinter, Heather Graham, Susan Wiggs, J.T. Ellison, Paul Johnston and Heather Gudenkauf, partnered with Author Solutions Inc. last month on a subsidy publishing venture, Harlequin Horizons. Controversy and a big brouhaha ensued. The Romance Writers of America dropped Harlequin as an approved publisher. Harlequin changed the name of the venture to DellArte Press and scrubbed all mention of the parent company from the website.

The Mystery Writers of America had looked into the matter and was set to make their decision on Harlequin's status on December 15. Turns out that came eleven days earlier, and Harlequin is no longer an approved publisher:

The Board of Mystery Writers of America voted unanimously on Wednesday to remove Harlequin and all of its imprints from our list of Approved Publishers, effective immediately. We did not take this action lightly. We did it because Harlequin remains in violation of our rules regarding the relationship between a traditional publisher and its various for-pay services.

What does this mean for current and future MWA members? 

Any author who signs with Harlequin or any of its imprints from this date onward may not use their Harlequin books as the basis for active status membership nor will such books be eligible for Edgar® Award consideration. However books published by Harlequin under contracts signed before December 2, 2009 may still be the basis for Active Status membership and will still be eligible for Edgar® Award consideration (you may find the full text of the decision at the end of this bulletin).

Although Harlequin no longer offers its eHarlequin Critique Service and has changed the name of its pay-to-publish service, Harlequin still remains in violation of MWA rules regarding the relationship between a traditional publisher and its various for-pay services.

The bolded emphasis is mine, and the full statement is available at Lee Goldberg's blog. What this means, if my interpretation is correct, is that most, if not all, mysteries and thrillers Harlequin will publish in 2010 will still be eligible, and some of the 2011 books might be. But after that? A no go. And while I can see the MWA's side on this, especially as they want to make sure the money flows in the authors' direction, but I also think, over time, this - and similar de-listing decisions by RWA and SFWA - may be seen as the turning point that breaks apart traditional writers' organizations into a million scattered pieces.

Is it fair to punish authors who signed contracts with a company that does adhere to MWA's guidelines, and keeps HH (now DellArte) as a separate entity? Will this prevent agents from doing business with Harlequin? Of course not. Will disaffected thriller writers gravitate even more towards ITW, which emphatically stressed they would not de-list Harlequin, thus creating more strife in a community that already has enough fragmentation going on?

And what happens if Harlequin isn't an anomaly, and other major houses decide they want in on the subsidy publishing game because it actually makes money when legacy publishing is either flat or down? I don't know the answers; no one does. But publishing's going to look different sooner than we think, and as a result, this decision may mark the end of something, not the beginning.

UPDATE: Indeed, my interpretation of what Harlequin-published books will remain eligible is correct, Lee Goldberg said by e-amil. "But anyone entering into a contract now will not be eligible. We wanted to lessen the impact on current Harlequin authors of our decision. So most 2010 titles will probably be eligible for Edgar consideration."

It is also worth noting that the MWA ended its decision with the following: "MWA's Executive Vice-President, and her or his designates, are directed to continue discussions with Harlequin in an effort to reach an agreement that would allow for Harlequin to be an approved publisher according to MWA's rules." And Harlequin CEO Donna Hayes' response is available here.

I can list caveats until the cows come home about not having enough space to expound on all the very good books I read this year, but in the end, I whittled my "Best of 2009" list to eight books for the Los Angeles Times, in no particular order:

RAVENS, by George Dawes Green

A QUIET FLAME, by Philip Kerr

BRITTEN AND BRULIGHTLY, by Hannah Berry

BURY ME DEEP, by Megan Abbott

BLACK WATER RISING, by Attica Locke

THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST, by Stuart Neville

THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, by Stieg Larsson

BONE BY BONE, by Carol O'Connell (technically published around the last day of 2008, but let's not be technical, shall we?)

I would also strongly suggest checking out Dick Adler's fine list of his best picks at the Barnes & Noble Review, and expect Oline Cogdill, the last of the LA Times Book Prize judge trifecta, will list her top choices fairly soon. I'll keep an eye out for other "Best of Mystery" lists coming down the pike as well...

Okay, that's not at all the most accurate headline, but just as Russia embraced detective fiction as if it was a brand new genre when Boris Akunin's Erast Fandorin novels started selling in gigantic quantities there in the late 1990s, so too is China taking more confident steps towards molding the genre to its particular whims, according to the China Daily.

"Interest in mystery and detective stories has seen a sharp spike in recent years. Besides the well-known Western classics, we want to introduce more works from different parts of the world," Julia Chen, editor-in-chief of Feel Publishing Co Ltd, one of the leading publishers of detective fiction, told the paper. Authors cited include Soji Shimada, who visited China for the first time last week to promote the new Chinese edition of his novel JACK THE RIPPER: ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, Seich Matsumoto, Keigo Higashino and Hirotaka Adachi, for offering "a whole new reading experience" as opposed to crime fiction from the West.

So what does that mean for native-born Chinese who want to try their hand writing mysteries? Turns out it means a fair bit:

Wang Jiajun, a designer from Shanghai, released his first detective novel Magic Murders last year. He was later nominated for the First Soji Shimada Logic Mystery Award in Taiwan. He recalls that just a decade ago, detective stories were hardly popular. "Even now, readers tend to buy detective novels by prominent writers. Emerging Chinese writers need time so their stories become more mature," Wang says.

Computer science graduate Pu Pu (pen name) is another promising talent. He has published two novels, with the one released this year, titled Rules of Guilt (Zui Zhi Faze), already selling 20,000 copies.

"Detective novels are still new to Chinese readers. With more masterpieces from abroad being introduced to the market, the number of readers is increasing. This will certainly spur Chinese writers," says Pu.

The only noirish novel from China I've read to date is Wang Shuo's PLAYING FOR THRILLS, which was published 20 years ago and is in the vein of what Ryu Murakami was up to later on (in other words: dark and very very weird.) So I'd love to see more along those lines, but am also curious to see what sort of "school of mystery" develops in the next 5 to 10 years generally, too.

The G&M's Margaret Cannon reviews new crime fiction by Reginald Hill, Nevada Barr, Kenneth Cameron, James W. Nichol, Jill Edmundson, Janet Kellough, and Mary Jane Maffini, among others, and also picks her top eleven books of 2009.

John O'Connell admires the talent on display in BLACK WATER RISING, Attica Locke's debut novel.

David Ulin looks at the reissue of two novels by W.R. Burnett - one early, one mid-career - in the Los Angeles Times.

At the Times of London, the best crime novels and the best thrillers of 2009.

Michael Berry picks his top SF-ish books for holiday gift-giving in the SF Chronicle.

Motoko Rich catches up with Colum McCann a week after his National Book Award win.

Nicholson Baker is an inspired choice to review Ken Auletta's GOOGLED, if only for the paragraph where he recounts all those search engines of old that, well, no longer exist (or barely do.)

John Banville writes about his dog, Ben the Labrador. Because he could. And because it is good.

Scott Martelle profiles Terry Teachout in the LA Times on the occasion of his new biography of Louis Armstrong, which has garnered all manner of rave reviews of late.

Celebrity memoirs: finally on the wane in the UK, it looks like.

The Daily Beast runs my profile of Al Roker, the TODAY Show's weatherman and feature reporter, on the day that his first mystery novel, THE MORNING SHOW MURDERS, is published. Here's how it opens:

Al Roker is a marvel of time management. He has to be, to keep up the rising-before-dawn regimen he’s maintained for more years than he can possibly count, the last 13 as the Today show’s weatherman and feature reporter. Since July, he’s had to roll back the wakeup call even earlier to co-host Wake Up with Al on The Weather Channel, starting at 6 a.m. Once his smiling face signs off NBC and its many affiliates by 10, there’s another few hours to put in at the office of his eponymous production company, responsible for a range of programming, from edible delicacies to murder and meth addiction. And that’s not factoring in last-minute travel plans, speaking engagements, or hosting gigs, like the two years he emceed the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Awards.

Now Roker has added another project to his already jam-packed schedule. The Morning Show Murders, written with award-winning crime writer Dick Lochte, is Roker’s first foray into fiction, and as the title suggests, it’s a mystery, and a pretty good one at that. Roker’s been reading the genre since he was 7 years old, he told The Daily Beast in a telephone conversation late last week. “The Hardy Boys, Edgar Allan Poe, the Nero Wolfe books in high school,” he said. “I’ve always loved the genre. My mother was an avid mystery reader, too. For years I told myself, ‘I’d love to write a mystery,’ but I never really thought I’d do it. Then in the last couple of years I figured it was as good a time as any to try.”

Eventually we get a bit more into process since much of the credit (right there on the book's cover, in fact) owes to Dick Lochte, whom I really hope benefits from the attention Roker's book has already received, including a lengthy piece by Craig Wilson in USA TODAY on Monday and more at Reuters and - of course! - the TODAY Show.

And yes, there are undoubtedly some similarities between real people and fictional characters, but oddly, Ben Lyons wasn't whom I was thinking of in this context.

In this week's Publishers Weekly, Jordan Foster looks at what happens when mystery becomes literary fiction and vice versa - aka, we've got another round of the genre wars debate, but from the angle of dispensing with categorization altogether:

“Categories are like walls,” says bestselling author Michael Connelly, “and walls keep people out.” What separates the genre of crime fiction from literary fiction may be more membrane than wall, but it's still a barrier that is often tricky to penetrate. The very act of categorizing brings with it an implicit ranking and the idea that anything shelved under “genre” is somehow lacking.

John Banville, the Booker Prize–winning author who also writes crime fiction under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, reignited this longstanding debate at last summer's Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. When he writes under his own name, Banville told the audience, he manages to put 100 hard-fought words down on paper each day; writing as Black, he manages several thousand. In his post on the Guardian UK's Books Blog, Stuart Evers summed it up well: “the intimation was quite clear, Black's sentences simply weren't as important.” Evers goes on to say that “at its best, crime writing offers unique insights into society, psychology, and human behavior. It can be both engaging and literate; compelling and well-written. It can be innovative and surprising, but what it can't be, it seems, is feted in the same way as literary fiction. The most a crime writer can hope for is to be told, as Ian Rankin indeed was, that their novels 'almost transcend the genre.' Faint praise indeed.”

But do these categories—crime fiction, mystery, suspense, whodunit—actually come into play when an author is staring at a blank computer screen, about to start a new novel? Or is categorization, as Dennis Lehane claims, “a marketing issue, not a writing issue”? Kate Atkinson—whose series featuring U.K. detective Jackson Brodie usually falls under the umbrella of crime fiction while her early work, such as 1995 Whitbread winner Behind the Scenes at the Museum, is classified as fiction—says, “When I sit down to write, I simply feel as if I'm writing a book. It doesn't mean I'm unaware of the tenets and structures of 'the crime novel,' and the plotting certainly feels a lot more complex, but really I'm still writing character-led novels.”

Lots of ace people - Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman, Tana French, Jess Walter, Cornelia Read, John Hart, Cara Black and Karin Slaughter - are quoted in the piece, which also includes a sidebar about how Poisoned Pen saved itself from the brink and six debut writers to watch for in 2010.

Maj Sjowall, in this amazing profile by Louise France of the Observer, talks about the ten-book Martin Beck series, her life with Per Wahloo, and why the money she's made off the books is nowhere near what it ought to be.

Which sounds somewhat similar to the Stieg Larsson estate situation, no? But more importantly, as Prospect Magazine points out, Larsson's Millenium novels extend the Sjowall/Wahloo "Story of a Crime" series further by showing how Swedish society could desecend into an individualist nightmare.

Alex Berenson explains why China is such a fascinating subject for a spy novelist for the Week in Review, while James Fallows looks at Charles Cumming's China-oriented spy novel TYPHOON in the NYTBR.

Why does Jason Bourne still have legs, many years after his creator Robert Ludlum's death? David Samuels ponders this question in the National.

Michael Moorcock will write a tie-in novel for Doctor Who, which he talks about at more length in the Guardian.

Oline Cogdill has her say on Joseph Wambaugh's newest novel of the LAPD, HOLLYWOOD MOON. 

Hallie Ephron reviews new and upcoming mysteries by Sue Grafton, Mark Arsenault and the folks who comprise the anthology BOSTON NOIR.

More thrillers by Philip Kerr, Val McDermid, Stella Rimington, Michael Crichton, Gerald Seymour, Attica Locke and Liam McIlvanney get rounded up by John Dugdale in the Sunday Times, while the Saturday paper's Marcel Berlins looks at recent crime offerings by Elmore Leonard, Frances Fyfield and James Lee Burke.

SPADE AND ARCHER has made its way to the UK, and Joe Gores speaks to Metro about its impetus.

Val McDermid chats to the Irish Independent about how men and women tackle violence in crime fiction differently, her new novel FEVER IN THE BONE, and Alan Glynn's WINTERLAND.

From a while back: Michael Connelly and his unconscious connection to the disappearance of Ani Ashekian in Hong Kong over a year ago.

All April Smith needed was a toy gun; what she got was a bit more than she bargained for.

Jane Alison, after three novels, has penned a memoir, which tells the extraordinary story of two couples who swapped partners - and what happened to their children afterwards.

Speaking of non-fiction books I can't wait to read, Terry Teachout's biography of Louis Armstrong gets a rave review in the Times of London.

Alice Munro talks about the dark side of her short stories to the WSJ's Alexandra Alter.

Emily Arsenault discourses on skulduggery at a dictionary company in her debut novel THE BROKEN TEAGLASS to the Hartford Courant.

And finally, is it a pig? Is it a sheep? Or some combination thereof?

Over at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Rege Behe gathered an impressive number of writers like Anne Rice, Gregg Hurwitz, Ayelet Waldman, Alafair Burke and Hallie Ephron to talk about authorial presence on the Internet - what works, what doesn't, and how much is too much:

Rare is the writer who doesn't have a Web site, from best-selling authors such as Rice and Stephen King to literary novelists the likes of A.S. Byatt and Ian McEwan. Writers have turned to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to interact with fans and market their work.

"(Publishers) expect you to not only write the book, but you also have to sell it," author Hallie Ephron says. "And the selling is with new media. It makes it both easier and more daunting, because there's so much noise out there. How are you going to make yourself heard?"

I'm in there as the resident critic, too, worrying about over-exposure: "I can't tell you how many examples I can come up with of authors who are out there semi-spamming Web sites, blogs, social networks, mailings lists, etc., because they are desperate to get their names out, and forget that interactions with prospective readers have to have meaning and purpose."

But this topic is more important than ever, especially in light of the news that Oprah's daily talk show has a definite end date - even if it only means she's going to move it to her own cable network (or barring that, someplace else.)

A couple of choice items at The Bookseller today. First up, Otto Penzler re-establishes his self-named imprint in the UK, moving from Quercus to Atlantic. The common thread? Anthony Cheetham, who used to run things at Quercus and is now doing the same for Atlantic as director and associate publisher of its new commercial and crime imprint, Corvus. This is the 3th time Cheetham and Penzler are working together in a publishing capacity - they first did so at Random House UK a couple of decades ago when the published licensed the UK rights to the Mysterious Press list.

The imprint, which will publish 6-10 titles a year, will kick off with RIZZO'S WAR by Lou Manfredo, published in the US by Minotaur Books - and blurbed by Penzler. Corvus will also publish the UK edition of AGENTS OF TREACHERY, a massive anthology of espionage stories that will be out here next year from Vintage. 

Meanwhile, the Crime Writers' Association has announced it will host Crime Week, which will run the week of June 14th, 2010. During that time, members of the CWA will take part in readings, discussions, readers' group events and workshops all over the country and the winner of the Young Crime Writers Competition will also be announced.

Declan Burke's post this morning at Crime Always Pays is a real heartbreaker, and while I hope (as I suspect many do) that he will change his mind, there is a sense of resoluteness about his decision to put aside fiction writing that makes me think it will stick. He has two books out on submission, and it would be great to see either (or both) published, but then reality sets in:

That’s the natural way of things, but lately I’ve started to hear a little voice in the back of my head suggesting that it might not be the best thing for me right now were either book to be published. That’s because, barring a miracle, what will happen is this: an offer will be made that will amount, in practical terms, to no more than a couple of months’ worth of mortgage payments. Following acceptance, edits and rewrites will follow (a good thing, by the way, because I like both stories and their characters, and I wouldn’t mind at all getting back into the stories, especially if doing so is going to improve them). Then the pre-publication promotion will begin, which is very time-consuming; then the publication promotion; and then the post-publication promotion. Most of this will be conducted via the web, given that I am (a) not wealthy enough nor remunerated enough to do it in person; (b) married with a small child, of whom I don’t see enough of as it is; (c) a freelance journalist who works a minimum of 70 hours per week at the job, and can’t afford to take time off, let alone spend good mortgage money on hauling my ass around the world at a time when house repossessions are starting to climb at an alarming rate back home.

  It really is becoming as stark as that. I decided over the weekend, after interviewing James Ellroy, that it is actually immoral of me to steal time to write fiction when I could be writing freelance material that will actually earn real money. And that’s not even factoring in the time I steal away from my family on the ‘writing’, a catch-all word which includes, these days, reading and blogging too. Someone who liked my books asked me over the weekend, rather facetiously, how come I haven’t sold a million books. I said, rather facetiously, that it was because no one put a million dollars worth of advertising spend behind them. It’s not quite that simple, of course, but there’s a significant element of truth in that.

Burke''s story is far from unique; other writers I know, talented ones who by rights should have been published even 2 or 3 years ago, are chucking it in because the economic realities of publishing fiction clash against necessities like earning money, supporting families, and making sure there's still even a smidgen of time to devote to, oh, rest and relaxation.

The Malthusian part of me wonders if it's just the universe performing natural selection, but luckily that part of small, dwarfed by the more empathetic take that if you, as a writer, know exactly what your strengths and limitations are, and realize your own specific gifts aren't wanted at this juncture in time, then that's a damn shame.

Burke certainly seems to recognize where he stands:

Yes, I understand that making it in any business means making sacrifices, but in this particular business, what ‘making sacrifices’ actually means is asking others to make sacrifices on your behalf. Maybe if I was a genius I’d feel comfortable with that, or I simply wouldn’t care. But I’m not. The books I write are (at best) an enjoyable diversion, a pleasant waste of time. They’re not important enough, vital enough or relevant enough to be worth anyone else’s sacrifice, and while there was once a time when I was selfish and ruthless enough to not care about the sacrifices I was asking others to make on my behalf, that time is long gone, and good riddance.

All I know is, I hope one of those two books sells - but even if there's a sale, economic realities may actually make this a worse outcome than if he doesn't find any takers.

Oline Cogdill chimes in with her thoughts on Louise Penny's newest neo-traditional mystery THE BRUTAL TELLING.

Adam Woog rounds up recent crime fiction by Michael Connelly,Patrick McManus, Martin Limon and Christopher Fowler for the Seattle Times.

Laura Wilson compiles reviews of new crime and thrillers by Alan Glynn, Cathi Unsworth, David Hewson and Arnaldur Indridason.

Lee Child puts on a different hat of interviewer for PARADE Magazine, talking to Robert De Niro about family life, giving credit to others, and his upcoming movie.

Ed Pettit writes of how much almost every writer for any medium owes a tip of the hat to Edgar Allan Poe.

More Stieg Larsson-related news, what with the latest battles between his longtime partner and his father & brother and Mark Lawson's essay on the books as they reflect Sweden and the globe.

James Parker's take on Stephen King's UNDER THE DOME may have one of my favorite ledes of 2009.

Nicholson Baker, Richard Powers, Junot Diaz, Laura Lippman and Dan Chaon are among the major writers telling the Wall Street Journal how they write their novels.

Could someone alert Juan Williams that a novel that went to auction for half a million dollars and was bought - then published - by Knopf in 1996 doesn't actually qualify as "ghetto lit"? Which also explains why his essay slamming this genre is fundamentally flawed.

And finally, this opening line is so going to be stolen by a novelist.

In an act of serendipity, both of my crime fiction columns appeared online on the same day. At the LA Times, my newest "Dark Passages" column looks at how authors try to freshen up a detective series - most recently Marcia Muller, who's taken a rather audacious step with her newest Sharon McCone novel, LOCKED IN: 

When "Locked In" (Grand Central: 282 pp., $24.99) opens, it's "a typical July night in San Francisco. Mist swirling off the bay, a foghorn bellowing every thirty seconds out at the Golden Gate." McCone's on her way back to the office to retrieve a cellphone, a three-block trip from where her car ran out of gas. And then typical becomes atypical when she's shot in the head: The next thing she knows she's in the hospital, able to understand every word and every gesture without reciprocating in kind, a victim of "Locked-in" syndrome: "[N]ow a fragmented bullet was lodged near her brain stem, doing more harm than all the criminals and aeronautical malfunctions could. A deadly little piece of metal, that none of her smarts and guts could combat."

So it would seem, at least: How on earth will Muller write her way out of this brazen predicament she's placed McCone into?

Obviously, Muller does, and in doing so injects her series with some added verve.

Meanwhile, at the Barnes & Noble Review, my newest "Criminalist" piece centers around a non-fiction account of criminal doings abroad. TOKYO VICE by Jake Adelstein, an American reporter working the police beat in Japan, is an amazing book on its own and reflective of a culture that has produced some very strange and wonderful fiction, as I explain in the piece's opener:

Contemporary Japanese crime novelists explore violent territory that Americans, even with their love of serial killings and on- and off-screen horror, would be loath to touch. The 1999 novel Battle Royale by Koushun Takami, as controversial as it was in Japan for its depiction of youthful brutality, might never have seen the light of day here had it originated from an American writer, especially as its initial publication came about around the same time as the Columbine school shootings. Women writers based here certainly do go deep into the heart of the gruesome (Chelsea Cain and Karin Slaughter are the most recent examples), but Natsuo Kirino’s Out, coolly brilliant in its portrayal of four desperate women resorting to the dismemberment (and beyond) of a dead man formerly viewed as a threat, barrels straight through every limit of tolerance.

The fearlessness of Japanese crime writers (not to mention the violence pervading a great deal of the manga published there) owes something to the news they find at hand, despite the fact that the rate of violent acts in Japan pales next to that in America. Consider the case of Issei Sagawa, who murdered and ate parts of a fellow student while studying abroad in the early 1980s. Upon returning home, Sagawa was declared not responsible for his crimes and never served time in jail – instead, improbably, he became something of a celebrity, and now has several books to his name. A series of child murders that terrorized Tokyo in the late 1980s turned out to be the horrible handiwork of a psychopathic teenager. Violent crime may be rare, but when it does happen, it explodes with the force of multiple powder kegs.

Read on for the rest, and an extended Q&A with Adelstein will also appear soon at the Review, and when it does, I'll link here.

I suspect reading Motoko Rich's story on "the Glenn Beck effect" on thriller writers might have caused a trace of discomfort among many writers and publishing industry types. It's certainly different than a spot on Oprah, or Craig Ferguson, or NPR, or the Daily Show or the Colbert Report, as those media outlets lean more towards the left, or the comedic, or keep politics to a minimum, let alone whip up a frenzy of cartoonish propaganda Warner Bros. would have balked at during the apex of World War II.

But publishing casts about for anyone resembling a savior, someone whose recommendations will lead to the magic elixir of book sales. Even Oprah's own transformative powers have decreased this year (picking a short story collection that, while exceedingly well-written, centers around poverty and violence in Africa) So now Glenn Beck, that "outspoken media darling of populist conservatism," gets his turn.

There are a number of interesting takeaways, the first being the types of books Beck gravitates towards and who is writing them. They are, by and large, thrillers that hinge more on elaborate plot twists, conspiracies and grand schemes, featuring protagonists who are more absolutist (what they do is good, who they battle is bad, with little room for grey areas or introspection) and more conservative in outlook. In the past couple of years, Beck's interviewed David Baldacci, James Patterson, Brad Thor, Ted Bell, Andrew Gross, Brad Meltzer, Vince Flynn, Christopher Reich and Daniel Silva, among others - in other words, it's like Beck has a line into the upper echelons of ITW. (The most notable absence at first blush would be Lee Child, but consider that the first of his Reacher novels to top the NYT list, NOTHING TO LOSE, was also the most heavily criticized by the right.) Beck definitely has a line into what his viewers - especially the 800,000-odd people in the coveted 25-54 demographic - might be interested in reading. Chances are they are not avid book buyers, lucky to put a couple of hundred bucks' total into publishers' coffers.

Beck's viewership also skews predominately towards white males, and at the risk of gross overgeneralization, fall into the stereotypical category of those who shy away from reading books outside their own gender (or ethnic and cultural worldview.) I didn't search through Beck's entire interview archive of radio programs and tv episodes, but at least since he's moved over to FOXNews, he doesn't appear to have talked with a female thriller writer. Not doing so cuts off access to the larger, predominantly female book-buying demographic, but they aren't really Beck's audience - and I'm not sure he's all that interested in catering to that particular group.

Increasing overall ratings is certainly of high priority - 3 million or so watch Beck daily, a loud minority that's only about 1% of America's total population. (Such is cable television.) But to put things in perspective, that's a phenomenal number of potential book buyers. So no wonder William Morrow attributes Beck as the reason James Rollins' THE DOOMSDAY KEY stayed on the NYT bestseller list longer than they anticipated, since all it takes to stay on the list is a steady sales stream of several thousand copies per week.

But then comes the proverbial problem: now that Rich's story has run, will Beck's producers be besieged by writers wanting to appear on his show? And if they don't share Beck's views, or deviate considerably from them, will they run into similar situations as befaced Andrew Gross?

"I'll get people who are obviously fans of his who write me e-mails, saying, 'I paid $27 for this, and I didn't want to buy a bunch of lefty [shit,] Mr. Gross said. “And then I get calls from people on the left who say, 'I've always liked your books but now that I see you have an association with Glenn Beck, I'm reconsidering.'"

Mr. Gross said he defended himself to both sides. "Invariably, I've had people who said, 'I wasn't going to read it because I saw it was endorsed by Glenn Beck,'" he said. "And I've pushed them to hold their judgment. And several of them have written back and said, 'I take it back.'"

In other words, Beck's reach works because it's self-selecting to his chosen audience, and when there's a sales bump of a certain author's titles, the publisher beams. Threshold, the conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster, will have plenty of occasion to do just that when Beck's own thriller (still untitled) is released next spring. But move outside that self-selection bubble and the happy scenario may play out far, far differently. It's a dance that requires a great deal of delicacy - a far cry from Beck's own outsized, button-pushing persona.

Jason Pinter, as part of his new gig as a columnist for the Huffington Post's recently launched books section, gathered together an excellent group of crime fiction critics, observers and prognosticators to consider where the genre is at and where things are headed. Here's a sampling from the round-table featuring Patrick Anderson, Jon Jordan, Oline Cogdill, Kate Stine, David Montgomery and yours truly:

What do you feel is your individual mission statement when it comes to covering crime novels?

Anderson: To steer intelligent readers toward good crime fiction and away from bad crime fiction.

Cogdill: I want to cover the crime novel/mystery genre to showcase new books that deserve an audience. To show what is the best and brightest of our times. I don't have a problem giving a book a negative review and in fact do it all the time, but I would rather guide the reader to what they should be reading. In a way, it is consumerism. I think the state of the mystery genre is the strongest it has ever been. I think the stories are stronger than ever, characters more vivid and plots more involved. And that is both in hardback and paperback. Some very strong novels are paperback originals.

Jordan: With Crimespree we hope to turn people on to some books and authors they might not have heard about and give them some insight into authors they might not otherwise get.

Montgomery: I try to highlight the best of the genre, whether by popular authors or unknowns, and help readers to gain a greater understanding and appreciation of crime fiction. My goal is to cover the genre in both a serious and entertaining way, to give the great books and authors the recognition they deserve, but also to emphasize the pleasure to be had by reading crime novels. I also take a particular pleasure from discovering new writers and helping to bring their work to a larger audience.

Stine: My mission as an editor is to hire expert writers and reviewers and make sure that Mystery Scene readers get excellent critical coverage of the entire crime and mystery genre.

Weinman: Ideally, to talk about books I love that others will love as well. But when it's a book I don't love, then I want to tell the truth in an honest but informed way, pointing out what works, what doesn't, or why I may not like it but others might.

But I'd strongly urge reading the whole thing and perhaps coming up with your own answers, predictions and thoughts - the comments box is wide open...

When I left GalleyCat a couple of years ago the prospect of covering the publishing industry on a daily basis had become something of a grind. There were other projects to pursue - some successful, others less so and hence never discussed publicly - that stuck closer to my beloved genre of crime fiction or flew further afield.

But a funny thing happened in the intervening years: I didn't burn out on publishing. Far from it, as the convergence of a recessed economy, the rise of e-books (even if just in terms of how many stories are published about said rise) and the enthusiasm of many observers and insiders who want to mold publishing into a model that better fits the 21st century all make this a very exciting - albeit disturbing and not-so-occasionally depressing - time for publishing. Twitter helped keep track of that, and occasional stints hosting Publishers Lunch over the last year and a half confirmed I had too much of a personal stake to stay away.

Now comes a new gig: As of last week, I'll be writing about the publishing industry for DailyFinance, AOL's money and finance news blog. There will be short posts (like this and this) when news breaks and longer features every week or two. DailyFinance is a business-oriented site, and so too will my stories for them, which means I can cut loose on more stat-and-numbers geekery and learn more about the twin engines - technology and financials - that will drive publishing forward.

So a word of warning: between DailyFinance, my crime fiction columns at the LA Times and the Barnes & Noble Review and other freelance assignments - not to mention some larger projects in the works - Confessions will likely operate at a reduced frequency (aka when the mood strikes me.) Of course, the moment I announce such things, I end up blogging like a demon, which is how I've stayed at this for over six (!) years. But unpredictability is a wonderful thing, isn't it?

Marilyn Stasio reviews new crime fiction offerings by Michael Connelly, Ruth Rendell, Archer Mayor, and Anders Roslund & Borge Hellstrom.

Oline Cogdill hears the McBain-like echoes in Lou Manfredo's debut cop novel RIZZO'S WAR.

Janet Maslin adores THE LINE-UP, Otto Penzler's anthology of crime writers talking about their iconic series characters.

Denise Hamilton hails John Connolly's THE GATES as a potential middle-school Halloween classic in the LA Times.The Chicago Sun-Times' Jeffrey Westhoff is also enthusiastic about the book.

The Guardian's John O'Connell has his say on new thrillers by Michael Connelly, James Lee Burke, Michael Robotham and Emili Rosales.

Over at the Times of London, Marcel Berlins looks at new crime novels by Attica Locke and Ryan David Jahn as well as PD James' nonfiction treatise on detective fiction.

The Globe & Mail's Margaret Cannon analyzes recent mysteries and thrillers by Arnaldur Indridason, Louise Penny, Barbara Fradkin, R.J. Harlick, Leslie Crewe and Ethan Brown.

Tom & Enid Schantz round up new mysteries by Tasha Alexander, Carola Dunn, Louise Penny and Ann Cleeves in the Denver Post.

The Scotsman fetes Philip Kerr on his Ellis Peters Historical Dagger win for IF THE DEAD RISE NOT.

Ian Rankin talks about his newest standalone novel THE COMPLAINTS with Maclean's.

Val McDermid explains to Janet Rudolph how her deservedly acclaimed novel A PLACE FOR EXECUTION was adapted for a film, now airing on PBS.

Michael Connelly relates how the fictional premise of NINE DRAGONS intersected with a real-life (and still unresolved) missing persons case in an essay for CNN.

John Le Carre, who recently switched UK publishers from Hodder to Penguin after 38 years, is profiled in the Observer.

NPR's Glen Weldon talks up a new comics anthology of noir stories.

And finally, yeah, I want to read Andre Agassi's memoir. Even if it seems to have left out the most important part.

Lionel Davidson, a notable British writer of thrillers who was a three-time Gold Dagger winner - not to mention the 2001 recepient of the CWA's Diamond Dagger - died on October 21 at his home in London. He was 87, and according to the NYT obit, the cause was lung cancer.

I'm sorry to say I never got around to reading Davidson's work, and years of good intentions will, once again, fade away into post-mortem catch-up (thankfully, Faber & Faber has been reprinting Davidson's eight novels over the last little while.) So I'll urge people to take their cues from Christopher Fowler, who wrote about Davidson's work as part of his "Forgotten Authors" column in the Independent just last month.

I first heard about this piece of news a little while ago but yesterday, the news was more or less official: Don Winslow has been tapped to write SATORI, a prequel to Trevanian's excellent 1979 thriller SHIBUMI, for Grand Central Publishing. According to Mitch Hoffman, who acquired the novel, SATORI will be published in early 2011. I'm hoping to hear more from Hoffman (and from Winslow), and when I do, I'll add their respective information to this post, but the news is interesting on multiple fronts: first, Trevanian's backlist was reissued around the time of his death in 2005 by Crown/Three Rivers, but they aren't the ones who'll publish this prequel. Second, Winslow's own publishing status in the US is in a bit of limbo, as THE GENTLEMEN'S HOUR - the even-better sequel to the amazing THE DAWN PATROL - was published in the UK, but there's no US publication date in sight. Finally, Trevanian is just the latest author to continue posthumous publication (cf. Nabokov, Bolano and most recently, Isaac Asimov.)

More soon, and suffice to say, a lot of people are quite excited about this.

In the September issue of Standpoint Magazine, Jessica Mann - a regular reviewer for the Literary Review and a writer of crime fiction for over 35 years - expressed her disgust over how a number of crime titles she gets for review increasingly resort to graphic violence:

When a female corpse appeared on the jacket of a crime-writing colleague's new book, she pointed out to her publisher that the victim in the story was actually a man. Never mind that, came the reply, dead, brutalised women sell books, dead men don't. Nor do dead children or geriatrics. Which explains why an increasing proportion of the crime fiction I am sent to review features male perpetrators and almost invariably female victims — series of them.  Each psychopath is more sadistic than the last and his victims' sufferings are described in detail that becomes ever more explicit, as young women are imprisoned, bound, gagged, strung up or tied down, raped, sliced, burned, blinded, beaten, eaten, starved, suffocated,  stabbed, boiled or buried alive. 

And so, having had enough, Mann concluded: "So however many more outpourings of sadistic misogyny are crammed on to the bandwagon, no more of them will be reviewed by me."

Almost two months later, after a bit of discussion by Martin Edwards and Maxine Clarke, now the broadsheets have climbed aboard this old bandwagon and blown it up to their liking. Instead of just giving up on serial killer thrillers and uber-violent crime novels, now Mann is purported to be quitting reviewing altogether, which makes for a catchy headline but isn't quite the truth (oh, well that's so inconvenient.)

But Mann's out-of-context statements aside, here we are, back on another go-round of a conversation that's raged in crime fiction circles for years. Are we too desensitized to violence, as Val McDermid says in the Observer piece that's been cited most this weekend? Or, as Transworld publishing director for crime Selina Walker says in the same piece, is it that "readers like to be vicariously frightened by stories of what's going on in the wicked world outside but closure is always a total given?"

The answers are manifold, depending on perspective as a reader or writer, and what sort of threshold is in place for how much is acceptable, violence-wise, within the pages of a crime novel. (And I agree with Steve Mosby - you want real, disgusting, balls-to-the-wall violence, read a horror novel.) But all the discussion about graphic violence masks what seems to me the larger issue: if all the other elements of a crime novel work, then be as violent as necessary, because if I'm engaged by the characters, when they go through turmoil, I feel alongside them and the cause and effect is heightened that much more. But too many novels of an uber-violent bent that I've picked up lately - no names, because I never got far enough into such books to count them as "read" - think that violence for violence's sake, without taking the time to invest in believable characters or a good story or making sure I, as a reader, actually care about what's going on, will save the book. It doesn't. And as a result, the serial killing action turns into cliche and bores the ever living crap out of me.

Consider, too, that as scary and lurid and disgusting as some of these books are (at least to Mann), the problem is exacerbated by their being an orderly ending that dispenses with the unruly, graphic chaos. The reality is more mundane, and thus, more scary. I spent the past weekend reading up on an unknown killer now dubbed EAR-ONS, whose pathology is orderly, fascinatingly textbook, and - by virtue of being a phantom who suddenly stopped in 1986, that much scarier than fiction. I've read a lot about serial killers, real and fictional, and yet this purported recording of the UNSUB's voice* is one of the creepiest I have ever heard (it didn't help that I clicked on the link late at night.) 

Chances are, if EAR-ONS is ever caught, his backstory will prove to be as unscriptable and unspeakable as that of Dennis Rader, whose unmasking as the BTK Killer proved to hinge on a twist so stupid - the metadata on a 3.5" floppy disk - it would never pass muster in a novel. But it's the little things, the most incidental ones, that really resolve order into chaos, turn horrible violence into a proper narrative - and when such connections, and more importantly, emotions are lost in the pursuit of telling yet another cliche-filled story, everyone loses out.

*According to the EAR-ONS website, "the last known contact made by the EAR/ONS was a phone call that he made to one of his victims either in 1990 or 1991." Unfortunately I haven't been able to find independent corroboration, so I have no idea why the UNSUB would have called one of his victims years after his last known murder, or if this event took place.

Hallie Ephron reviews new mysterious tales by Ruth Rendell, Emily Arsenault and Keith Raffel for the Boston Globe.

At the Sunday Times, Peter Millar rounds up recent thrillers by Michael Robotham, Gerald Seymour and Mehmet Murat Somer.

The Missoulian recaps the recent James Crumley panel at the Montana Book Festival, which had Laura Lippman, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos and James Grady pay tribute to the late, great crime writer.

George V. Higgins gets his due from WBUR, as does his first (and best-loved) novel THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE.

Dennis Lehane appears to be almost done with his upcoming, untitled, Kenzie/Gennaro novel, about which he talks further with the Tampa Bay Tribune's Colette Bancroft.

Michael Connelly discusses his new Harry Bosch novel NINE DRAGONS with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

John Hart poses with his newly won Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for the Greensboro News-Record.

The Sacramento Bee chats with Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller, arguably the First Couple of P.I. fiction.

Julie Rivett, the granddaughter of Dashiell Hammett, offers a glimpse into how the family has kept his literary legacy alive to the Tri-City Herald.

Sara Paretsky discourses on HARDBALL, her latest V.I. Warshawski outing, to the SF Chronicle.

Ruth Dudley Edwards can't be happier about the recent Irish crime wave.

Jess Walter talks with the Oregonian about moving from journalism to writing and his wonderful new novel THE FINANCIAL LIVES OF THE POETS.

Megan Abbott chats with Lee Horsley, who is one serious expert on all things noir fiction, in two parts for The Rap Sheet.

Anne Rice may have moved on, but she does dig the current vampire-lit craze.

The National Post's Afterword blog has perhaps the most comprehensive coverage of the International Festival of Authors in Toronto, which goes on until next weekend.Though the Globe & Mail is giving the Post a run for its IFOA coverage money, too.

What to do about William Heirens? Something tells me that we're not going to know the whole story until he dies - most likely, behind bars.

To close out Tablet Magazine's Jewish Body Week, I wrote about the autopsy - spefically, religious objections, technological innovations, and the conflicts that come up. Here's how it opens:

A three-year-old Israeli girl was strangled to death by her father earlier this year, and the nation was shocked—by the luridness of the crime, by the father’s subsequent suicide attempts, by the divorce-gone-bad story it emerged was behind the crime, and, not least, by the fuel the child’s mother poured on an ongoing battle between ultra-Orthodox circles and the country’s law enforcement agencies over the permissibility of autopsies when she initially refused to allow one on her daughter’s body.

The objection grew from the Talmud’s interpretation of the biblical imperative for a speedy burial, first spelled out in Deuteronomy, where it states that a hanged man “shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt surely bury him the same day.” Not only must he be buried within 24 hours of death, according to the tractate Sanhedrin, but there can be no “disfigurement of the body as a result of postmortem dissection.” In other words, Jewish law mandates that the body, whenever possible, should be kept whole. An autopsy—with its incisions and tissue extractions, preservations and excisions—violates that mandate...

Read on for the rest, and check out at this 3-D image gallery of various facets of the virtual autopsy, which has become a viable alternative (but not an outright substitute) for autopsies.

As presented tonight at a gala event at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London, which will be televised on October 27th:

Gold Dagger: A WHISPERED NAME, William Brodrick (Little, Brown)

Steel Dagger: THE LAST CHILD, John Hart (John Murray)

New Blood (Creasey) Dagger: ECHOES FROM THE DEAD, Johan Theorin (Doubleday)

ITV3 Viewers' Favorite Crime Author: Harlan Coben

The Bookseller also reported that HBO's "The Wire" picked up two awards for best drama and for best actor (to Dominic West) while Juliet Stevenson won the best actress dagger. Colin Dexter, Lynda La Plante, Ian Rankin and Val McDermid collected trophies to commemorate their inaguration into the Hall of Fame.

UPDATE: The Daily Mail has a more image-tastic writeup of the event, while the Bookseller reports on it as well and picks up on Lynda La Plante's gripes against celebrity authors (some of whom were in the audience last night) "enjoying 15 minutes of fame."

So Howard Unruh is finally dead. I think I've been waiting for the news all year, ever since his longtime lawyer, James Klein, informed me some time ago that Unruh's health was in very bad shape - evidently to the point of no longer being lucid. He'd spent the last 60 years of his life in various mental institutions, most recently the Trenton State Hospital. And at 88 years old, Unruh was 16 years older than Charles Cohen, who had spent those same 60 years hoping and wishing for Unruh - the man responsible for the deaths of his parents and grandmother as the then-12-year-old hid in a closet - to die. That wish came 6 weeks too late for Cohen, who himself died of cancer on September 4 - and was buried on September 6th, the six-decade anniversary of Unruh's crimes, which became the template for modern mass murder as we know it.

The NYT obit I linked to above is very good - especially for including Meyer Berger's Pulitzer Prize-winning "you are there" account of Unruh's spree, which left 13 people dead in Camden, N.J. - but the Philadephia Inquirer's obit is more immediate, more personal, in large part because it reaches out to Unruh's living victims, like Charles Cohen's wife:

"It came six weeks too late," a tearful Marian Cohen said yesterday, adding that her husband believed his loved ones never rested in peace while Unruh was alive. "He waited and he waited. We talked about it so many times. . . . I feel his spirit with me."

Cohen said that, once Unruh died, her husband had planned to bury all the paraphernalia he kept of that day and to remember the dead with Kaddish, a Jewish prayer of mourning.

"Our thoughts are with the families of the other victims touched by this heinous tragedy," the Cohen family said in a statement released after hearing of Unruh's death. "We know that our family members and the other victims can rest in peace from this day forward...."

....Ron Dale, who still lives in Camden, was 8 years old and waiting to get his hair cut when he witnessed Unruh kill one of the victims. His father never let him attend court hearings, fearing Unruh would be released one day and go after those who helped keep him in custody.

"I figured he would die in there [prison]," said Dale, who is being treated for lung cancer and seemed unfazed by news of Unruh's death. "I'm too old to worry about it and too sick to worry about it. What are you going to do?"

For some, a bogeyman of sorts will be put to rest, as Unruh is no longer a living symbol of mass horror in a recognizable place. He's no longer the representative of post-war attitudes on justice and mental health, which ruled he was incompetent - a far cry, I suspect, from how his case would have been handled had it happened in the present day. But for me, it's a bit more complicated, as I wrote in a post this past January, the day after his 88th and final birthday:

There are a number of reasons why Unruh's crimes fascinate me. He lives on, sequestered away from the world and likely in severe decline. Before him there were serial murders and mass murders but Unruh essentially created the template for lone gunmen "going postal" or shooting up a school, and for carrying out a grudge with epic, bloody, senseless gunfire. Most of his descendants in mass killings turned the gun on themselves, were shot dead by police, or were sentenced to die in prison - or by the government's hand. And the biggest reasons are that he's never talked publicly since that September 6 morning, and we have no real sense beyond stray appearances at annual reviews as to his current state.

There is no getting around what Unruh did. He ruined the lives of an entire town and ripped families apart with the bullets from his Luger. HIs last reported public words, per the Berger article, were "I'm no psycho. I have a good mind. I'd have killed a thousand if I had bullets enough." But six decades later, I wonder why he's outlived so many - and whether there's anything to glean from it other than the cruel randomness that is this universe, and that it truly is the quiet ones to watch out for.

Now that Unruh has passed, we're left with that very randomness. And it will probably take sifting through what must be a voluminous collection of documents housed at (or at least the property of) Trenton State Hospital to understand, even a little, how and why Unruh was what he was, and why his pathology resulted in crime once terrible and unthinkable, but now, sadly, much less so.

This is the last thing any author should have to deal with a new book coming out, as Patricia Cornwell is now doing while getting ready for today's publication of THE SCARPETTA FACTOR, her latest Kay Scarpetta novel. But Lloyd Grove at the Daily Beast reports that Cornwell (along with her partner, Staci Gruber) has filed suit against her former financial advisers Anchin, Block & Anchin LLP, for mismanaging and losing up to $40 million worth of her total earnings:

“Patricia has found this process to be very distracting and upsetting, but I think she has some level of comfort knowing that the lawsuit has been filed and is now in the hands of the court,” Cornwell’s Boston attorney, Joan Lukey, told The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview, noting that Cornwell has just launched a book tour for The Scarpetta Factor, her 17th novel in the hugely successful series. As for Cornwell and Gruber, “I think this has been a very difficult time for both of them.” Cornwell declined to comment.

Her complaint, filed in Boston federal court, singles out Anchin executives Ira Yohalem and Evan Snapper for special attention.

She claims Yohalem, who oversaw Cornwell’s investments at his previous business management and accounting firm, brought her along as a client in 2005 when his company merged with Anchin, where her assets have dropped significantly in value—just how much, she isn't sure. She alleges that Anchin’s financial managers apparently disregarded her stated wish to “invest conservatively.” Yohalem—who was sanctioned last December for “improper professional conduct” by the Securities & Exchange Comission for putting his own money in a restaurant that his accounting firm was auditing—didn’t respond to my detailed voicemail message.

Cornwell accuses Snapper—who once allegedly told her that Anchin would “do everything for its clients including buying and delivering their toilet paper”—of a variety of misdeeds. These apparently include everything from purchasing goods and services on her behalf from favored Anchin clients, to mishandling rental properties, construction jobs, and tax returns, to cutting a check for $5,000 as a bat mitzvah gift for his daughter (“whom Ms. Cornwell has never met,” the lawsuit notes dryly).

the 20-page complaint makes for pretty grim reading, as it goes through, line by line, just what sort of shenanigans Anchin was allegedly up to - the most egregious, to my mind, being that they went ahead and filed 2007 tax returns on behalf of Cornwell, Gruber and Cornwell's company, CEI, without actually getting their signatures (in other words, they never saw the return in question.) Then there's how Anchin handled New York City apartment rentals (as Cornwell stays in the city frequently for business, especially around book publication time), such as signing a lease for One Central Park West (aka Trump International Hotel & Tower) just as construction took place in adjoining apartments, making the place uninhabitable for a couple of years.

Sure, some might say that Cornwell could absorb such losses, and her net worth is still considerably greater than the average American. But when I interviewed her last year, I was struck by how ruthlessly self-made she was - no need for apologies or explanations, this was who she is, take her or leave her. She knew what her flaws were and had finally reached some level of stability, albeit at a fairly high tax bracket than most of us could ever hope for. But as those who lost money to Bernard Madoff found out, massive decreases in net worth play great psychological havoc on one's well-being. And now, just like other authors who took a massive financial hit, it seems likely the only way she can rebound is to write - at, perhaps, a far more rapid pace than she expected to maintain at this point in her career.

Tonight at 7 PM, Scandinavia House hosts Norwegian crime novelists Kjell Ola Dahl (THE FOURTH WINDOW) and Anne Holt (WHAT IS MINE) as well as Police Counselor Odd Malme Barner as they discuss "Where Reality and Fiction Collide" as moderated by me. Here's how it's being advertised all over the city:

Despite the fact that the Global Peace Index ranked Norway as the third most peaceful country in the world and the homicide rates in Norway are among the lowest on the planet, more people are murdered every year in the pages of Norwegian crime novels than are murdered in Norway itself. A panel comprised of Norwegian crime authors Kjell Ola Dahl and Anne Holt, along with Norwegian Police Counselor, Odd Malme Berner and moderator Sarah Weinman, will discuss the rise of Norwegian crime fiction.

Sweden has been getting quite a bit of attention in the crime world (thank Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson) but Norway, of course, is no slouch, and no doubt we'll be discussing the country's recent invasion, as well as the similarities and differences to real-life crime rates. Look forward to seeing any and all who attends tonight!