Bang!

We Never Close

2012-01-19T21:08:00.013-05:00

So that was a year.

Ho, Internet. It has been some time.

Let me refresh my drink and we'll reintroduce ourselves.

In the meantime, here's a few highlights from my scribbling last year, which was violently limited for a giant multiplicity of reasons, including work, work and more work mostly. At least I have these mad skillz to fall back on.

From the bottom, up.

I talked manners with the acidly funny Henry Alford.

Carl Richards scribbles on napkins about money.

An English giant lost his greatest fight.

We talked movies and much more with Robert Ebert.

Fellow former denizen of the Ozarks Daniel Woodrell earned a Kirkus Star from me.

My Greek amigo Dimitris and his pirate friends were thrilled I got to interview George Pelecanos.

I leaned the phrase "Sino-American Relations" and what it really means.

I interviewed my favorite writer. Review of his latest, Sacre Bleu is forthcoming, although he doesn't know that yet.

I read comic books. Lots and lots of comic books.

I quizzed the fantastic reporter Juliet Eilperin about fish. Fish with really big teeth.

There are robots. And then there are killer robots, as penned by Daniel Wilson.

I talked about the West with Stephen Harrigan, author of the classic Gates of the Alamo.

What better to get into with the creator of Artemis Fowl? Let's talk about killing people.

My other favorite author came out of the woodwork with a new GroVont book.

Brad Pitt? Moneyball? I got your real source for Moneyball right here.

This guy? Knew Sinatra. Blue Angel Met Kennedy and Giancana. Hung out with the Rat Pack. You couldn't make this up.

If I had known, I would have seriously paid more attention to *that trial.*

I work in the non-profit industry, helping people help each other. I could be dealing heroin and accomplish the same thing, as it turns out.

Or I could just peer pressure people into doing the right thing. Which would be cool, too.

The author of The House of Sand and Fog and I talked about beating people up. Mostly ourselves.

I made my pitch to reboot Shogun and Rainbow Six.

I quizzed the Usual Suspects about their plans for the year.

We learned the dangers of the "Virtual You."

We deconstructed Harlem.

And I interviewed one bad @#$@#$$$#.

Cross your fingers, boys and girls. It's a new year, after all. I'll make my wishes if you make yours.

I Am Very Busy and Important

2011-02-25T17:54:00.004-05:00

Okay, so I'm really not. I've been been writing for a while like I've been reading this blog but the truth is that I've just been busy with a new day job, just like everyone else.

That said, the work has started to pile up so I thought it might be time to compile a few nice pieces that have come out lately, thanks to Kirkus Reviews.

Kirkus is evolving into more of a hybrid print/web model with a focus on the reader, which has led to some fun assignments lately.

First, you can enjoy "The Dirty Dozen: Killer Mysteries and Thrillers for 2011." Get in early on great new books from the likes of Larry Block, Andy Diggle, Cara Black, Paul Doiron and Denise Hamilton, all of whom graciously sent along their appreciation this week. See, they're not always thinking about killing people. Just most of the time.

Next, you can enjoy the piece I should label "Jamie Fraser Fans Want to Kill Me." Actually, it's a well-meaning piece called "Reboot! Five literary franchises that deserve the Hollywood nip-tuck treatment."

Also featured on the front page today was my interview with the great Andre Dubus III, the talented author of The Garden of Last Days and The House of Sand and Fog. Andre also graciously opened up about his memoir, Townie, a remembrance of the culture of violence in small-town New England. It's a tremendous book and a great interview.

Also on the slate is my Q&A with Dr. Jonathan Gill about his history of Harlem, a groundbreaking historical survey that traces the life and times of one of America's greatest cultural epicenters.

And finally, you can call this one a warning bell. If you're an online junkie, you'll want to steer well clear of Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality by Dr. Elias Aboujaoude. Read more in this interview with Dr. Aboujaoude about how technology affects our behavior, whether we know it or not.

I think next month it's a chat with Marcia Clark, and then we get into the robots.

Yes, really.

A Very Short Interview with Neil Gaiman

2010-10-11T12:34:00.003-05:00

I don't know if it's still true, but at the time I did this interview, I was the first journalist to speak with the great Neil Gaiman about his editorship of this year's Best American Comics collection.

The conversation went on quite a lot longer than what you see in the interview. Here's a few missing bits - consider them your interview extras for the day.

On novelists like Ames and Lethem starting to work in comics:

"In the old days, you would get, for lack of a better word, a ‘real’ prose novelist coming into the business. But they tended to create punky comics. What I love now is that we have a generation of prose writers who grew up reading and loving comics and wanting to put their own mark on them."

On the fantastic DC experiment, Wednesday Comics:

"I had so much fun doing Wednesday Comics. My first reaction when Mike Allred asked me to join him on the project was to wonder how we could take advantage of the size. How could we play with the hugeness of this thing? And we went off and we did. And the accusation that I had leveled at me on people’s blogs and reviews was the first one with which I agreed completely and said, you’re completely right. Guilty as charged. People said, he looked like he’s having too much fun.

It really was done in an interesting way. I thought that the idea of giving a bunch of people a character and telling them to go do something awesome was fantastic. The idea of someone reinventing Kamandi as Prince Valiant. Mike and I deciding to go off and do Metamorpho as a mad tribute to Bob Haney and Ramona Fradon. There really aren’t enough Bob Haney tributes in the world.It got to the point where I was thinking things like, ‘we could actually do a games of snakes and ladders that would actually be playable.’ And realizing that I didn’t care if anyone else thought it was a good idea because it made me happy.

Why comics after all this time?

It’s not at all nostalgia. The bit that I find fascinating is that nobody would ever ask a novelist why he writes plays occasionally. No one asks screenwriters why they occasionally write poems.

On Your Way Out

2010-09-07T20:23:00.011-05:00

Thanks, everybody.

My last column as the Mystery Strumpet (my most unlikely sobriquet ever at Bookslut) came out today, in celebration of the online magazine's 100th issue. I just haven't been able to keep up in recent months, and as I've explained in the column, I think it's irresponsible for me to keep the title if I can't keep up the work. Will I keep writing for Jessa, Michael and the gang? Oh, you bet. (and I'm still writing like crazy for Bookslut, The Denver Post, Kirkus and others, for all you booky publishing types who think of sending me books or assigning assignments).

That said, there's a great advantage to be had in having a free range in which to let your thoughts roam, not to mention not worrying about dropping a dirty word now and then. There's a whole wide world of books to chew up, and anyone who gets my attention earns my attention and efforts for sure, and will continue to do so.

As I told Jessa when I turned in my badge, I never had more fun writing for anyone than I did writing for Bookslut. There's a good chance you may see me again someday with a different column, but for now I'm all shot to hell, so it's time for there to be a new Sheriff in Town.

For the record, I wrote a lot of okay columns and a few good ones. If you stumble across this blog in the ethernet long after I'm gone, go read "Radio Noir," my favorite column of all time. If that's cool, go read "Talking Crime," my crazy-quilt conversation with Don Westlake, Elmore Leonard and Walter Mosley, or "Pulp Fiction, Hard Cases and the Travis McGee Retirement Plan."

You joining me among the living can tune in one more time for a few words from Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, and myself weighing in on Arkady Ranko, great first lines, Travis McGee and Black Mask magazine. If you're interested in taking on the role of Mystery Strumpet for Bookslut, feel free to contact myself or Michael Schaub, the managing editor of Bookslut, to apply for the gig.

I pretty much said what I had to say in the column, but let me add a little coda with some words from others that have gone down over the years.

"Any desire to do a regular mystery/suspense column?" --Jessa Crispin

"If I’d been Bookslut’s Clayton Moore, fielding calls on a pre-holiday morning from a trio of prominent crime novelists--Walter Mosley, Donald Westlake, and Elmore Leonard--all with news to share about their next books, I might just have crawled back to bed afterward, content that my Christmas had been present-rich enough." --the great J. Kingston Pierce of The Rap Sheet

"I had the opportunity to talk with reviewer Clayton Moore when he was writing for Kirkus Reviews. Now he's writing about mysteries for Bookslut (his sobriquet is Mystery Strumpet). I enjoyed our conversation and I'm glad he enjoyed my book:

I’ve never been one for the outdoorsy sub-genre, although I certainly understand the attraction of CJ Box and his ilk. Yet somehow Paul Doiron’s debut novel The Poacher’s Sontranscends its setting, lending a bleak austerity to its milieu while simultaneously infusing its main character with Steinbeckian humanity.

Any reviewer who mentions Steinbeck and me in the same sentence has earned a lifelong place on my Christmas card list." - Paul Doiron, author of The Poacher's Son

"I was pleased to see The Wheelman included in a roundup of car-related crime novels over at Bookslut.com. "Mystery Strumpet" Clayton Moore takes a spin through my novel, as well as James Sallis's Drive, Andrew Vachss's The Getaway Man, Timothy Watts's Grand Theft, James H. Cobb's West on 66 and Joe Gores's 32 Cadillacs. Cheers to Moore for the kind words." --Duane Swierczynski

"It’s a great article, and I really appreciate your kind words! You really captured the essence of the line and where we are right now with our major foray into graphic novels" --Karen Berger, editor of Vertigo Comics

"In his column Five Off the Top, Mystery Strumpet Clayton Moore trumpets The Serialist:"Last month's winner for funniest book of the month was a killer." - David Gorson

"And finally, from the Bookslut blog, Clayton Moore, a.k.a. the Mystery Strumpet, gives us the benefit of his refined taste. Moore's "Mystery Strumpet's Nifty-Keen Beach Books Round-Up" conveniently organizes books by crime type -- for example " Cold-Blooded, World-Shaking Murder, 1968," for the new Hampton Sides biography of James Earl Ray , Hellhound on His Trail . These are well-chosen and unusual books, including Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre and James Sullivan's book about the late "criminal" George Carlin, Seven Dirty Words . " - Novelist

"I rather enjoyed this piece by Clayton Moore, the Mystery Strumpet of Bookslut on "Age, Wisdom, and Treachery," about creative people, age, wisdom and, well, you get the idea." - The Bookgrrl

"Speaking For the Dead: The June "Mystery Strumpet" column for Bookslut is at once a meditation on the meaning of Memorial Day and a look at recent historical novels (literary thrillers, mostly) about historical characters from the not-so-distant past. Edgar Allan Poe, anyone?" - Reading The Past

"Like so many others before him, Clayton Moore, Bookslut’s “mystery strumpet,” ponders the definition of 'thriller.' 'I usually have my own perspective on the question,” Moore writes, 'but my position waffles depending on the book, the day, and my current medication.' Moore doesn’t spend a lot of time on his pondering, however, but jumps right in and looks at three upcoming books whose thrillerish pedigrees probably won’t be much questioned: The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall (Canongate), Killer Weekend, by Ridley Pearson (Putnam), and Free Fire, by C.J. Box (Putnam). (“Okay,” says Moore, “I’m going to skirt the boundaries of this month’s topic a little bit and leave you with a genuine, Edgar-winning mystery writer.”) The piece is engaging and it’s here. " - The Rap Sheet

The Rocky Mountain News ran a great piece on Dead Boys, by Clayton Moore. Also, check out Moore's blog, Bang!" - Richard Lange, author of This Wicked World.

I love this headline: 'The Spy Who Didn’t Suck.' In fact, I’d steal it in a New York minute, had Bookslut not just used it to crown a quite wonderful essay by Clayton Moore, in which the critic discovers that fictional British secret agent James Bond isn’t a one-dimensional figure who appeared in novels by Ian Fleming that are all but unreadable today. In fact, writes Moore, contrary to the contemporary zeitgeist that would have us believe that Fleming’s protagonist is a rather embarrassing leftover from another era, 'maybe James Bond does still matter.'--The Rap Sheet

"Clayton Moore's Bookslut column has a decidedly dangerous edge to it." --Sarah Weinman, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind

"We're heartbroken to announce that this issue brings the final Mystery Strumpet column from longtime Bookslut contributor Clayton Moore. Clayton is a good friend of mine, and I still plan to extort him into writing for us, but he's passing on the Strumpet mantle to an as-yet-unnamed successor. (Interested? Let me know.) Clayton, man, we'll miss you, and thanks for everything. --Bookslut's own Michael Schaub

"Dear Clayton, Your article is obviously heartfelt and tremendously flattering. I appreciate it very much. Thank you. Mongo and Garth send their regards. Best, George C. Chesbro."

What's Next

2010-08-22T15:32:00.003-05:00

Well, this is getting to be a habit. For the second week in a row, the featured review in the Denver Post books section is by yours truly. Enjoy my review of Zero History by William Gibson.

I think the review is pretty good, but I was well-prepared by interviewing the author a few months ago. It's always a pleasure to hear Gibson's unique voice, whether it's in print or on the telephone. I mentioned to him that his most recent books are rather unnerving because they make the future feel like a place where no one knows what's going to happen next.

"Well, I think that is what the future feels like now," he said. "It’s what I was feeling a decade ago. I had to be really honest with myself and with the reader in admitting that I didn’t know what was going to happen, even in a limited way. I couldn’t even pretend I knew what was going to happen. I’ve never meant to predict what might happen in the future. I’ve just written about pretending that. It got to a point where it all just seemed like everything was going to be random. But we were a decade into it being kind of random, and I started to think about how I might fit into that place."

Fascinating conversation, and a terrific interview subject, even if he does make my brain hurt just a bit...

Dead Celebrities

2010-08-16T14:11:00.003-05:00

Okay, technically there are no dead celebrities in the latest kick to the funny bone from Florida satirist Carl Hiaasen, but it's not for lack of trying.

To enhance your enjoyment of Star Island, the celebrity-skewering latest novel by Hiaasen, please enjoy my interview with the novelist in the Sunday Post. Carl has been on my short list of authors to interview for a very long time, in fact since I reviewed his last book, Nature Girl, in the dearly departed Rocky Mountain News. And he was a terrific interview subject, one of my favorites so far - open, articulate, opinionated and much like the rest of us, infuriated about current events in the Gulf of Mexico. When I can have a conversation about corporate malfeasance, idiocy that's too good to be fiction, and Travis McGee, I'm a happy writer.

If that's not enough, you can backtrack a few years to "Something in the Water," my mystery column that delves into all things Florida-related, including gents like Randy Wayne White and Tim Dorsey. You can also get a refresher on John D. MacDonald with one of my first columns, "Pulp Fiction, Hard Cases and the Travis McGee Retirement Plan."

And as a late addition, here's something cool that I didn't know existed: the U.S. Library of Congress' Center for the Book once commissioned an essay by MacDonald. In response, MacDonald crafted a 26-page short story, "Reading for Survival," that features a conversation about the importance of reading between Travis McGee and his philosophical buddy Meyer. What a great way to end the day...

Not The First Answer I'd Expect

2010-07-19T20:28:00.001-05:00

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Funny Business

2010-07-10T17:13:00.003-05:00

Definitely worth checking out: the new Kirkus Reviews Graphic Spotlight, with big chunks of it contributed by yours truly. Dive into funny books to your heart's content, and enjoy my conversations with Samuel L. Jackson, Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury), award-winning novelist Neil Gaiman, the dudes at IDW and Boom Studios! who are rocking the A-Team, G.I. Joe and the eagerly awaited CBGB book (left) as well as a fond remembrance and tribute to Dave Stevens, who left behind the unforgettable Rocketeer. All this, plus a round-up of the most anticipated mainstream comics collections, a visit with Outlander creator Diana Gabaldon, and a guest appearance by Stan the man himself.

Maybe all those Wednesday afternoons paid off after all...

Beach Books For The End of the World

2010-06-08T20:36:00.003-05:00

Hell, why not yet another review of the best beach books? The beach is ruined, unless you're in California or Italy, where you can't afford it anyway. Might as well put a few beverages on ice, stay home and kick back with some slam-bang entertainment. In the new (killer) issue of Bookslut, you'll find my latest column, "Mystery Strumpet's Nifty-Keen Beach Books Round-Up," taking a jaundiced eye at some unusual suspects, among them James Earl Ray, George Carlin, Ian Fleming, Steve McQueen and Johnny Depp ('s big brother), among many others.

In the same issue, you'll find a hilarious essay on "Stalking Dave Eggars" by Elizabeth Ellen, an interview with the immortal Joe Kubert by Bookslut's increasingly impressive Aussie Martyn Pedler, an interview with rising star Brady Udall (The Lonely Polygamist) and a truly depressing but enlightening piece on the aging of Gen-X writers.

Reading Bookslut will make you a new man. Even if you didn't start out as one. Good trick, yeah?

Hell and Gone

2010-05-24T21:22:00.004-05:00

Writing about crime isn't always fun. Writing about crime fiction has always been about the fantastic, the fictional, the capers and hard knocks that capture our imagination.

Writing about the evil that men do is a lot tougher.

I'll do my due diligence and point you towards my feature review this week in the Denver Post, "A Riveting, True-Crime Approach to King's Assassination." It's a review of the well-researched and deeply creepy Hellhound on His Trail, an examination of the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. by James Earl Ray. Written by journalist Hampton Sides, it's well worth picking up for those that want to know how the deal went down.

That said, if you're at all interested in the man and his great work, please consider visiting some other digs instead.

The King Center

Audio from Dr. King's speeches, including his unimaginable "I Have a Dream."

From 1956, the comic book Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story.

From Time Magazine, a photo essay on the last days of Martin Luther King.

"He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really accepting it." MLK

Why The Long Absence?

2010-05-04T23:11:00.003-05:00

More soon, brothers and sisters. Survival requires my presence at the moment. In the meantime, enjoy my review of The Girl Who Fell From the Sky at the Denver Post, and last month's Bookslut column, "Five Off The Top."

Further bulletins, as they say, as events warrant.

A Deep Drag

2010-03-17T21:55:00.005-05:00

I saw this with my own eyes.

In 1989, I met a guy named Peter Smith, who was in the process of reinventing his life. In the process, he gave me a copy of Let It Be, by the Replacements, and one evening invited me out to a little club in the industrial outskirts of Columbia, Missouri called The Blue Note. It was a little scary - the balcony seemed on the verge of giving out - but I got to hear Alex Chilton perform "The Letter," after taking a deep drag on a cigarette to replicate what you hear on the record by The Box Tops.

I saw Alex again a few years later, after Pete left town to become a chef, at the new Blue Note on 9th Avenue in Columbia, across from my work at a little deli that served sandwiches and Rice Krispies treats to the downtown work crowd (I loved that place - if you heard Bob Dylan or Tom Waits, or Alex Chilton, for that matter, while you ordered your corned beef in 1990, it was me making it). Hell, for that matter, I heard Alex had dinner at some BBQ joint nearby, so he could have sullied my place, too.

In terms of performance, to be kind, Alex was ****-up. But brilliant, in the way only the hardcore veterans at the time could be. I've never seen that kind of messy, star-gazing show again. You haven't lived until you've heard "No Sex" and "Bangkok" performed live, and they never will be again. In that room, I saw Chuck Berry and The Breeders and The Cramps and Henry Rollins and Fugazi and the last performances of Concrete Blonde and Uncle Tupelo, and sang the "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" with some 1,000+ other revelers. I did okay with my little college career.

And I saw Alex one last time, in 1993, almost by accident. I heard through the grapevine that Alex might be playing an event called Springfest. It was a little event put on each year by our college radio station KCOU, which regularly played such friends as Ditch Witch and a little band called Uncle Tupelo, which is another story entirely.

It turned out to be little, but not small. Big Star reunited on April 25, 1993. We all gathered in a little tent outside the Hearnes Center (the big auditorium) because the big hit Bryan Adams had the place booked for the evening. Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow from the Posies stood in for the noticeably absent Chris Bell, and they played like it was the poignant reunion it was. From the opener "In The Street" (see That 70's Show - and I hope Alex had fun with his money) to a lovely cover of "I Am The Cosmos" to a heart-stopping "September Gurls," Big Star was everything you would ever want them to be.

Alex Chilton died today. I don't care why. I'm just sorry.

I don't say this often enough. Thank you, Alex, for everything you did for me.

Godspeed to one more rock star.

Where The Hell Is Don Winslow?

2010-03-09T22:09:00.005-05:00

I can't recall if Bang! has ever had an exclusive before, but this one's not bad.

To the left, you'll find the preliminary art for Don Winslow's new novel SAVAGES, due from his new publisher, Simon & Schuster, in July.

And if you wander over to Bookslut, you'll find this month's column, "Waiting for Don Winslow," in which I track the elusive author to his lair in California to talk about crime, the P.I. trade, Surfbonics and literary minimalism. When you combine my own obsession with a single author's output, a gracious interview subject, and a hell of a good book - in this case, two - it turns out pretty good every now and then, much to my surprise.

Go read something good, and give Don your nod of approval by tracking down The Dawn Patrol, The Winter of Frankie Machine, and pretty much anything else he writes. He's the real deal.

Another Brick in the Wall

2010-02-23T22:30:00.004-05:00

Arianna Huffington on why writers at the Huffington Post (8.9 million visitors in February alone and more than $20 million in capital investment) don't get paid (via Galleycat):

"Self expression is the new entertainment," she explained. "We never used to question why people sit on the couch for seven hours a day watching bad TV. Nobody ever asked, 'Why are they doing that for free?' We need to celebrate that moment rather than question it."

Words fail me.

UPDATE: But they don't fail Drunk Hulk: "WRITERS ON HUFFINGTON POST NO GET PAY! DRUNK HULK NO IDEA IT WAS HIGH SCHOOL NEWSPAPER!"

Finest Kind

2010-01-19T22:11:00.005-05:00

This is why you do the work. You do it to the best of your ability. You do it every day. And that's how you hit a career average that puts other writers to shame.

Robert B. Parker keeled over at his desk in Cambridge, Massachusetts yesterday. He was 77 years old. He was working. When he checked out, he'd written more than 75 published books, with more on the way.

Whatever you might have thought of his output, Parker was a giant of a writer. I myself have been reading his books since I was ten years old. The man wrote three books a year near the end and you could tell he wrote them, unlike a lot of other bestseller-fodder novelists I could name who just turned over their name to a paper mill. His books were almost always "For Joan," which is a lesson for everybody.

I've long thought of compiling a book of interviews with crime writers, both the legends and the new kids coming out swinging, precisely because we ought to capture their stories for this very reason: nobody is around forever. Bob was on a very short wish list of mine for a real interview, largely interrupted for personal reasons, when we were living less than a hour away from each other in Massachusetts. I'll always be sorry we didn't get the chance to talk, but I'll always be glad I could walk into any airport bookstore and breathe easy knowing his books were waiting for me.

As usual, the great and wise Sarah Weinman has better words than I, as well as a comprehensive list of the tribute pouring in.

I believe in good guys and I believe in bad guys. Unlike most people, I'm just not sure which is which. Guys like Parker? They were pretty sure about who was wearing the white hat.

Thanks, Bob.

Oh, speaking of the new kids on the block, the Edgars were announced today. Congratulations to everybody involved, but especially our comrades Charlie Huston, Dennis Lehane and Megan Abbott. You folks keep killing people and I'll keep writing about you.

The Latest From Limbo

2010-01-10T19:22:00.003-05:00

I wonder if this is what purgatory feels like. Not in the original sense, as explained so well by George Carlin in his famous bit "Heaven, hell, purgatory and limbo." But I'm told that purgatory is supposed to be a temporary purification that prepares one for a state of grace. I like that idea, both that these tough times are temporary and that there' s a little grace on the way. Can't do limbo, man. Got to keep moving forward.

I've been keeping up with the writing, but it's definitely heading in new directions. Economic pressures have finally led me back to holding down a day job, which often makes me feel like I'm between two worlds at the moment. On the bright side, it's letting me make less mercenary choices about the things I write, but on the other, there's less time to write. But you make your choices, take your chances and hope for the best.

That said, here are a few new pieces to share while I figure out what the new writing model looks like.

At Bookslut, now under the new management of the charming and hilarious Michael Schaub, you can find the first column of the year, "The Writing on the Wall," which details some of my own internal struggles with the business of writing and visits some fascinating titles, both very new and very old.

At The Denver Post, you'll find my latest review of A Good Fall, a fantastic new collection of short stories by the eminent immigrant writer Ha Jin.

The new column reveals one of the drawbacks of writing a monthly column: sometimes, you speak too soon. In it, I lamented the recent decision by Nielsen to suddenly and precipitously kill off not only Editor & Publisher but also one of my last remaining venues, Kirkus Reviews. But it seems that for the moment, Kirkus has gotten a reprieve.

So, at least for the moment, I'm still in the business, part-time. For starters, you can read the publication's special, "The Best Books of 2009," featuring my own interviews with some fascinating writers. See inside for a chat with Don McRae about The Last Days of Clarence Darrow, Richard Flanagan about his devastating novel Wanting; Andrew Rice about his terrific journalistic work about Uganda in The Teeth May Smile But The Heart Does Not Forget; and newly-minted National Book Award-winner T.J. Stiles about his biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, The Last Tycoon.

Elsewhere around Kirkus, the year finished up with some strong other specials. In the "Religion and Spirituality Special," I got to interview one of the world's foremost religious scholars, Karen Armstrong, as well as the imminently cool Reverend Scotty McLennan (the basis for Doonesbury's Reverend Scott Sloan!) about the fantastically titled Jesus Was A Liberal. Nearby, you can also find rundowns of the Best Children's Books and Best Young Adult Books of 2009.

To end, here's a few links that have caught my jaundiced eye recently.

The media column at the LA Times hits the problem right between the eyes in "Freelance Writing's Unfortunate New Model." Myself, I'd lean towards something like Ginsberg's line about watching the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness, as I watch my friends and colleagues struggling to squeeze their creative selves into the new matrix of the publishing industry. Fortunately, James Rainey is a bit more upbeat: "The sooner they can take the free out of freelance, the better."

GalleyCat looks at "How Writers Survived The Great Depression," and "A Peek At Our Tablet Reading Future." Be interesting to see how one impacts the other. Also there at the publishing industry watchdog, they list "Publishing's Brightest Moments in 2009," which is all about the words Twitter, Digital Reader, Stephenie Myer and Dan Brown. Seems like there ought to be some sort of hotline number at the end of that one.

When do you know something has gone terribly wrong? When Rupert Murdoch makes sense: "There's no such thing as a free news story."

There are still things to say, and surely more to come later, but let's end on a high note: "Goodbye (At Last) To The Decade From Hell."

See you around the water cooler.

Burning Down The House

2009-11-10T14:46:00.004-05:00

I thought it worth sharing an article from today's Guardian that seems to be sparking fierce debate in rainy old London. In the midst of the larger debate over the fate of the publishing industry, the book market in general, and, at least over here, the looming Christmas war on book prices, writer Stuart Jeffries has written a well-articulated observational piece on his country's biggest bookstore, titled no less than "How Waterstone's Killed Bookselling."

You can read, debate and twitter about the piece to your own heart's content, but I thought it was worth passing along if for no other reason than this quote by literary agent Bill Hamilton about one of my own favorite writers, Ian Rankin.

"Rankin was selling nothing at all for the first few novels he wrote, but publishers knew he would take off and so they kept with him. The opportunity isn't there to do that any more because sales are so low that you lose too much money initially, even if you make money later. That old, very successful business model doesn't make sense any more. Thanks to the prevailing way in which books are sold there would be no new Rankin."

Welcome to Rome. Now where's my fiddle?

House of Cards

2009-11-03T17:53:00.004-05:00

One more, while it's crossing my mind. This past Sunday, The Denver Post published my review of Cowboys Full by James McManus. You can get the full lowdown in the review but it's my humble opinion that this thing is the definitive history of poker up to this point.

I interviewed McManus by email, briefly, a few months ago and anybody who has even the slightest interest in the guy's work ought to chase him down for a longer interview. I have a feeling he pours most of his effort into his work but I'll bet he tells a great bar story.

He wouldn't tell me what attracts him to poker in the first place, and a lot of that angle is covered in Positively Fifth Street anyway. But I did get an answer to what turns him off about a game: "What repels me," he said, "Is how easy it is for a person to play his hand perfectly and lose all his money to an idiot who gets lucky on the final card."

And that's life, in a nutshell.

You can also set alternate takes on the book from Jack Broom at The Seattle Times, and even more intriguingly from Rick Kogan at The Chicago Tribune, who opines, "Now that this book is on the shelves and what should be a number of best-seller lists, perhaps he will have the time and the inclination to finish his long brewing novel about Las Vegas."

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

2009-11-03T17:19:00.006-05:00

The good: the newest issue of Bookslut is up, right on time. Inside you'll find my preview of some books due out next year, and a few that seem not to exist at all. Go forth, and read, "Things That Are Good" to get the lowdown on new titles by Don Winslow, Charlie Huston, John Burdett, Walter Mosley, Duane Swierczynski and Dennis Lehane, among others, that should be out within the next year.

The (not-so) Bad: I gave some good-natured ribbing to Winslow's publisher for not releasing the eagerly awaited (by me) sequel to The Dawn Patrol, called The Gentlemen's Hour, this year, even though it's already been published in the UK. As happens, I'm not the only one who's been giving that absence some thought. I got to chatting with the unassailable publishing industry overseer and crime writer extraordinaire Sarah Weinman about the subject over the past few days.

Not only did Sarah dig up her own scoop - that Winslow is getting beaucoup bucks to write Satori, a sequel to the Trevanian thriller Shibumi, for Grand Central Publishing - but she managed to find the lowdown on the missing sequel. Don Winslow is jumping ship.

The Ugly? Publisher's Marketplace reports that (tragedy!) The Gentlemen's Hour will be published in the United States...in July of 2011...by Simon and Schuster, and not Alfred A. Knopf. Apparently, there are more books in the deal, too. S&S will first publish Winslow's standalone thriller, Savages, plugged as "a gritty, humorous, and drug-fueled ransom thriller set amidst the Baja Cartel in Laguna Beach, CA."

So, good news and bad news in the mix. Does it balance out? We'll see when the ink hits the paper next year. I think the lesson here is always ask Sarah first. She knows all.

EDIT: No, I am not ambitious. Yes, I am tenacious. I managed to track down the great and gracious Don Winslow for an interview about Savages, Satori, and The Gentlemen's Hour. Further bulletins as events warrant.

Yes, It Is Rocket Science

2009-10-14T16:21:00.003-05:00

Oh, and while we're at it, I did do a little interview with the fella in the picture there, one of only 12 men to walk on the moon.

Buzz Aldrin was a great interview subject: funny, smart, and truthful. If you wander over to Airport Journals, you can read my very long and ambitious profile of the Gemini 12 and Apollo 11 astronaut, "Buzz Aldrin: Venturing Forward."

My favorite moment in the interview came when I mentioned reading in the NASA transcripts that when Mission Control cleared the Eagle for takeoff, Buzz replied, "Roger. Understood. We're number one on the runway."

"You know, the definition of humor is to take a normal situation, throw in an absurdity and then act as if it's normal," Aldrin told me. "When you're able to do that twice in the same sentence, you've really accomplished something. To say that we were number one on the runway ... Well, there wasn't anybody else up there and there sure as hell was no runway."

You can find out more about the mission and life after NASA in Buzz Aldrin's memoir, Magnificent Desolation or by visiting his official website.

People Who Write For Money

2009-10-14T13:25:00.004-05:00

I'm a bit late in putting this out there in the wider world, but the new column is up at Bookslut. The latest examination of books far and wide, "American Psychos," gets down on the latest titles from Sara Paretsky, Andrew Vachss, and the always entertaining James Ellroy, who finishes up the Underworld USA trilogy with Blood's A Rover.

I haven't decided yet whether to go take another hit of Ellroy's performance art when he comes to town to sign books next week, but I've been following the latest news. The most interesting interview so far comes on video from the eagle eyes of Mediabistro's Galleycat, who interviewed Ellroy last week. In it, he offers some questions for working writers to ponder.

"It's survival of the fittest," Ellroy said. "Who wants to write? How bad do you want it? Will you write, even if you're poorly paid? I will. That gives you a leg up on people who write for money. I got 3500 bucks for my first novel, 3500 bucks for my second novel. Five K for my third, five K for my fourth. Six K for my fifth, ten K for my sixth. Then big jumps to twenty. All of which was realistic renumeration at the time."

Just to give you some perspective, Ellroy's first novel, Brown's Requiem, was published in 1981. In relative terms, the author's renumeration would be somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 dollars in present-day value depending on the economic indicator you use. $20,000 for his seventh novel, 1987's The Black Dahlia, would equate to nearly $40,000 today.

Things to think about.

Max Brooks Talks Zombies

2009-10-12T13:06:00.004-05:00

Well, it's finally out. I was out of town for the big release myself, but I'm told that while I was away, The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks has landed with a splat on bookstore shelves, comfortably on the heels of Zombieland's surprising opening (it's a killer flick, by the way).

What seems like a million years ago, I got the very cool opportunity to ask its author, Max Brooks (the author of the deeply creepy World War Z, producer of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, and son of Mel Brooks, to boot) about his new graphic adaptation of a slim chapter from his now-famous Zombie Survival Guide. The project is illustrated by Brazilian artist Imbraim Roberson, and depicts, as advertised, various zombie encounters throughout history. Like World War Z, it's a unique perspective on zombie lore and one that makes for a much better Halloween read than all those terrible vampire books out there.

"I've always written my fiction as a fan, not an artist," Brooks said, when the project was still in production. "I always start from a place of answering the questions I wanted answered in other movies, or writing the stories that I wanted to read. The only reason I wrote The Zombie Survival Guide was because I couldn't find one already out there."

Most fanboys already know that World War Z is slated for a film production after Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment snapped up the rights. J. Michael Straczynski has taken a first pass at the script and it's now in the hands of screenwriter Matt Carnahan (State of Play, etc). But Recorded Attacks seems to lend itself even better to a graphic adapation rather than film.

"I'd wanted to do The Zombie Survival Guide as a graphic novel for a long time, actually before I even wrote World War Z, " Brooks said. "There were a lot of rejections along the way, and one potential deal ended up with the comic book company folding before we could start. I'd always wanted to 'flesh out' the recorded attacks, not just for their 'zombieness,' but because I'm a huge lover of history and I'm always trying to find ways to inject it into my work."

It turns out that more than a little of Brooks' dramatically visual writing style is rooted not in literature, but in comic books.

"I've always loved the concept of visual storytelling," Brooks said. "I am very, very dislexic, and as a kid, sometimes comics were the only way I could process information. The graphic novel that first inspired me was Sam Glanzman's A Sailor's Story. I'd grown up hearing my uncle's stories about Navy life during World War II, but actually seeing it in Glanzman's artwork suddenly gave it life. Graphic novels still continue to inspire me, works like Andrew Helfer and Randy DuBurke's biography of Malcolm X or Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe."

While the "zombieness" of Recorded Attacks is inherently terrifying, there's also a lot of hardcore research at play in the book.

"I wanted these stories to be as realistic as possible, right down to the fashion, architecture, technology, even the facial hair of the period," Brooks said. "I gave myself a mountain of extra work trying to find accurate historical representations of each period to pass on to the artist. Every hour I spent writing the actual script, I must have spent three trying to find some picture of correct Roman armor, or the hold of a slave ship, or a North African fort of the French Foreign Legion."

The process must have made an impression on him. These days, Max says he's working on a "top secret" writing project in addition to a gig writing G.I. Joe comics over at IDW Publishing.

"To be honest, it's the hardest work I've ever done," Brooks said. "I never realized how much description I had to put into each story, each page, each panel. And I'm not just talking about the artist's subjects. I had to be very specific what angle we were looking at, how close the shot was, where the light was coming from, etc. I've heard this from friends who write for cartoons or animated movies and now I have a whole new respect for both them and the comic book industry as a whole. I guess I'm making up for all that homework I never did in college."

The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks is in bookstores now. You can also download a free chapter at the book's official website and dig the book's animated trailer below.

The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks by Max Brooks from Crown Books on Vimeo.

And Justice For All

2009-09-15T12:24:00.007-05:00

I also had to share a piece that I'm really quite proud to have written. In the most recent books section of The Denver Post, you'll find my first feature for the paper, "Schooled in strength: LaNier's lessons from the Little Rock Nine."

I expected my recent interview with Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin to be the highlight of my summer, although that story seems to have been mercilessly delayed by production problems. But a few weeks ago, I was tasked do an interview with Carlotta Walls LaNier, who quietly lives here in Denver. She's an incredible person and one I consider to be just as historic a figure as anybody in the Civil Rights Movement.

Most people know that in 1957, Little Rock's Central High School was forced to integrate - very nearly at gunpoint - by President Eisenhower, who federalized the Arkansas National Guard and stared down the state's intractable Governor Orval Faubus. But let me tell you, hearing that story from someone who was there is a moving experience.

Just before my own interview with her in late August, I attended a packed house at The Tattered Cover in Denver, where an enthusiastic audience came to see Carlotta Walls LaNier, the youngest member of the Little Rock Nine. There were maybe 300 people in this room, and Mrs. LaNier shook every single hand and gave a moving tribute to her mother, husband and children, all of whom were there to support her.

Today, LaNier is arguably the Little Rock Nine's most vocal and public member but for years, she was understably reticent to talk to anybody about her experiences. Yet after reuniting with her classmates in 1987 for the 30th anniversary of the Little Rock action, she began to feel that her side of the story ought to be told.

She recounts her experiences in A Mighty Long Way, her memoir, co-authored by Washington Post journalist Lisa Frazier Page and forwarded by President Bill Clinton, a longtime admirer. In it, she tells not only of growing up during these turbulent times in Little Rock but also about the cost inflicted on her family and friends, her willpower to succeed when so many people were rooting for her to break down so many barriers, and her journey to make peace with her incredible past. You can read more about it in the review/interview but trust me that this book is going to outlive all of us. History is better for her sharing this story.

The most important parts of our short conversation made it into the article, but I'll share a couple of supplementary stories I found fascinating. One of my favorites was about the day that Carlotta Walls invented passive resistance all by herself.

"I might have been angry at times – and I was angry at times, " she said. "Especially at this one redhead who used to walk on the back of my heels. But I knew I could not retaliate, not that I was a fighter in that manner anyway, a physical fighter. Anyway, I knew I could not fight back so I had to come up with defensive mechanisms. After a while of dealing with her, I thought of something. So I stopped dead one time. I walked real fast during my younger days. This time, she was keeping up with me and walking on the back of my heels and I figured I’ll stop this, today. I just stopped immediately and she slammed right into me. I just had to learn to use the defensive abilities I had."

Another amazing aspect to interviewing people is getting to see other people through their eyes. When I interviewed George McGovern, you could see the delight in his eyes when he talked about going toe-to-toe with Hunter S. Thompson. In interviewing Mrs. LaNier, you could see the whole of the Civil Rights Movement, people she had known and seen with her own eyes, whether it was the amazing NAACP president Daisy Bates organizing the defense of the Little Rock Nine or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sitting in his shirtsleeves over a plate of barbecue and a beer, mapping out the future of America in a Little Rock basement somewhere. One of her most memorable connections was the great Thurgood Marshall, who argued Brown V. Board of Education in the very Supreme Court where he would later serve as Justice. She remembered being worried that the movement was losing one of its greatest assets when Lydon B. Johnson appointed Marshall as Solicitor General in 1965, but she has since changed her view.

"I thought that we were losing someone that was needed to get things changed," she remembered. "I’m now 66 myself and I look back and understand that he did the right thing. It was time for younger people to start moving on, and giving them the opportunity to take what he had done and move it to a higher level. I think that’s what we all need to do each day. I see organizations today that have always had the same public face. Teach the younger ones. Help them to take on some of this responsibility, because they have good ideas too. Get the best out of the old experience too, of course, but those things you feel were not effective, leave them behind."

The last third of A Mighty Long Way may be its most dramatic segment, as LaNier describes the devastating events of February, 1960, when her house was bombed, her father arrested, and two young black men jailed for years for a crime they didn't commit. But true to LaNier's positive nature, the book ends on a high note, as she remembers the night that Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. I have to note, too, that Carlotta Walls LaNier puts her money where her mouth is. She made phone calls from Obama's Denver headquarters for more than 10 hours that day, not as any kind of celebrity but as a private citizen working hard to make things better for everybody.

"It’s not over just because Barack Obama was elected President," she said. "We all have to help him. If you notice in each one of his speeches, he brings up service all the time. I think if people got back to that, giving service to someone else, that they will feel better about themselves and aspire to do better in their daily lives whether they are getting to know other people or just being an honest citizen. I really do think positive change is coming. It's not just hot air."

I strongly encourage anyone with an interest in American history to read A Mighty Long Way and to visit and support The Little Rock Nine Foundation in its efforts to promote the ideals of education and equality for all.

Back from the Dead

2009-09-15T11:50:00.004-05:00

No, I am not dead. I have felt like I was dead a few times during the last month, and during the ear-splitting ache that infected my skull last week I might have prayed for death a few times, but no such luck. Here I remain upon this mortal coil. Which is more than I can say for poor Jim Carroll, god rest his punk-rock soul.

Which doesn't mean I haven't been relatively busy. Between looking for work like everyone else on the planet, stalking the numerous clients who owe me money, and trying to pour out the contents of my brain out onto paper in my semi-regular attempts to light a fire under my creative side, you could never exactly peg me as lackadaisical.

After a brief intermission to visit family last month, I'm back at Bookslut with a new column. And really, what did Bookslut need more than a good dose of indie comedy? So go forth, and read "Paperbacks and Fever Dreams," turning out the innards of three great new paperback novels, Huge, Something's Missing and How To Rob an Armored Car, among a few other tidbits.

Elsewhere in the September issue, you'll find lots of good stuff including interviews with Kate Greenstreet, Sarah Manguso and Christos Tsiolkas; lots of new book reviews covering the widest range of topics available to man; and some really great columns that get down on Leonard Cohen, Richard Stark, the Apollo moon landing and Rosemary's Baby, among myriad other subjects. Go give a hand to our new day-to-day editor Caroline Eick and Berlin-bound commandant Jessa Crispin. This kind of output makes me proud to be among these writers. As an added bonus, if you're in Chicago tonight, the Bookslut Reading Series goes to town with Barry Schechter and Dave Reidy.

If you're into the homebound thing, let me suggest a bit of television entertainment that complements the new column perfectly. HBO is showing off its new series, Bored To Death, for free on various outlets including Itunes all week. The series was created by Jonathan Ames (The Alcoholic) and stars Jason Schwartzman as a blocked writer who's supplementing his creative process by pretending to be a private detective. Wait, are we sure I didn't write this?

Friday's Forgotten Books

2009-07-31T15:43:00.003-05:00

Before I take myself online for a few days, here's one last bulletin from the electronic trenches. A few weeks ago, I got a very polite and kind request from Patti Abbott, the prolific short story writer and blogger, who also happens to be the mother of Edgar Award-winning novelist Megan Abbott (Bury Me Deep).

Patti asked me if I'd be willing to contribute an entry for her popular and wide-ranging series of blog posts called "Friday's Forgotten Books." Naturally, I'd seen plenty of J. Kingston Pierce's entries at the Rap Sheet and told Patti I would be happy to contribute.

So, today at Patti's blog, you can find my entry on the two more mainstream novels by the late novelist James Robert Baker, both of which I've been raving about since I was 17 years old. Go forth, and discover the buried treasure of Boy Wonder and Fuel-Injected Dreams as well as Patti's entry on Michael Frayn's terrific boyhood drama Spies and novelist Craig Johnson's take on James Norman Hall's Doctor Dogbody's Leg.

And just for the record, my runners-up were Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers (the basis for the Kubrick film Full Metal Jacket); the spellbinding chess drama Queen's Gambit by the late genius Walter Tevis (who famously wrote The Hustler and The Man Who Fell To Earth), and the only true mystery in competition, Roger L. Simon's launch of the Moses Wine series, The Big Fix. I can think of plenty of other contenders off the top of my head, but somehow Forgotten Books makes me nostalgic for all my old paperbacks. I just might have to do this more often.

If I Could Just Get It On Paper

2009-07-30T18:14:00.006-05:00

My head is about swimming this month with all the work that's piling up around me, but I thought I'd record a couple of links to some new writing that's actually in paper-and-ink publications, as well as online.

First off, there's my inauspicious debut as a reviewer for The Denver Post, who has kindly seen fit to assign me some non-fiction books, which is a category that I really enjoy, but haven't had much opportunity to review recently. First up is a book that's mostly about the only sport I really like, baseball, and arrived with a hand-written note of praise from award-winning novelist Kent Haruf (Plainsong).

It's the tough-luck story of a kid from the bitter south side of Pittsburgh who grew up with even tougher parents and managed to escape the city to become a professor of English at Southern Illinois University and a widely published writer on - you guessed it - baseball. So, in the city's last old-school newspaper, you can read my review of Growing Up With Clemente by Richard Peterson.

For even more book-related goodness, you can check out the Kirkus Reviews "Big Book Fall Preview," which weirdly turned out to be the special in which I didn't interview hardly anyone at all because they're very busy and important. Or locked in a cave by their publishers, chained to a typewriter, which I suspect was the case with Dan Brown and his new book about Robert Langdon.

In other hard-hitting journalistic accomplishments, I did not interview (despite much pleading with publicists) Nick Cave about his funky new novel The Death of Bunny Munro. "Busy rocking out" will always be a valid excuse for not submitting to my interrogations.

But here, also from Kirkus, was my take on Cave's mutant creation. And if you're really game, you'll slap on some Grinderman, which is the perfect musical accompaniment, while you read it.

After a two-decade pause, the post-punk singer-songwriter finally follows up his well-received first novel (And The Ass Saw The Angel, 1990) with a lurid fantasia about a drug-addled salesman.

This could easily be the literary companion to Cave's recent howling performances with garage band Grinderman. When we meet long-since-gone-to-seed Bunny Munro, he's shacked up with the latest prostitute, multitasking by phoning to comfort his mentally disturbed wife Libby. A sex-obsessed peddler of beauty products, Bunny numbs himself by limiting his input to the next selfish pleasure. Returning home, he finds Libby has slashed all his clothing and hung herself in a locked bathroom. Instead of comforting their nine-year-old son Bunny Junior, the once-charming lothario fills himself with poisons, packs his bonnet full of inventory and hits the road with his son for a series of misguided lessons about manhood. Bunny's melancholy worldview takes some getting used to, but he's fitfully sly and unabashedly narcissistic, which also makes him unpredictably funny. Told he should be extinct, Bunny declares, "I resent that. I take personal hygiene very seriously." As the story develops, he achieves a broken grace that belies his repellent character and faintly hints at redemption. Things get weirder when Bunny starts seeing Libby. "He realizes, in a shadowy way, for a brief moment, that the imaginings and visitations and apparitions that he encountered were the ghosts of his own grief and that he was being driven insane by them," Cave writes in characteristically lyrical and macabre prose. "He knows more than he knows anything that they very soon will kill him."

Profane and profound by turns—not for everyone, but Cave still knows how to command an audience.

Nor did I go toe-to-toe with American literary legend John Irving, who declines to grant interviews to writers who haven't read his book. That's Last Night In Twisted River, the book with which he was still tinkering, therefore eliminating any chance for said writer to read the book and prompt an interview. Circle of life. What can I say? The man wrote The Cider House Rules. I say he gets a pass.

Other writers did get to sink their teeth in, and elsewhere in the issue you can unearth great little spotlights on new books by Nick Hornby, Joshua Ferris, Joseph Kanon, Michael Chabon and my extremely funny friend Alexander McCall Smith.

Thankfully, I did interview one author, who turned out to be the most gracious and insightful of the lot, as it turned out. Said author was the acclaimed New York playwright Victor Lodato, who has composed a fantastic first novel called Mathilda Savitch, about an adolescent girl with a most unusual point-of-view, who is desperately trying to make sense of the death of her older sister. Prior to landing the interview, Lodato had already earned a starred review from Kirkus Reviews, with which I'll leave you with today.

A wildly precocious adolescent girl searches for the truth behind her sister's death in playwright Lodato's creative and engaging debut novel.

The author crafts a singular voice that combines the disjointed confessional tone of Holden Caulfield with the ethereal sadness of Susie Salmon in The Lovely Bones. The13-year-old narrator's matter-of-fact reflections on her dysfunctional family hold the whole amazing concoction together. Mathilda Savitch is blessed with a unique point of view. "I've been told I have an 'artistic temperament,' " she confides, "which means I have thoughts all over the place and not to be concerned." A year after the mysterious death of her sister Helene, crushed under a train, Mathilda is on the trail of the killer, breaking into Helene's e-mail account to flush out a suspect among her sister's many boyfriends. Simultaneously she's deceiving her shrink; trying to hold together the remains of her parents' fractured marriage; and balancing her affections for best friend Anna McDougal with their mutual interest in a handsome young classmate. The story Lodato tells, while compulsively readable, isn't the main selling point. It's the way he occupies Mathilda so completely, giving her marvelous lines like, "Sometimes I'd think I'd like to be a person with brain damage, with nothing but the whale of joy jumping around inside of me," or, "The thing is, I don't want to end up like Ma and Da. In a house with books and dust and all the love gone out of it." His portrait of a damaged but hopeful girl stands up to classics like Walter Tevis' Queen's Gambit (1983).

Crossover potential could be limited by some PG-13 material, but both mature adolescents and adult readers will find much to love in Lodato's remarkable creation.

You may go buy books now. The literary world thanks you for your kind attention.

Latest Whiteout Movie Trailer

2009-07-23T10:03:00.001-05:00

IGN Video: Whiteout Movie Trailer - Trailer

While I Was Away

2009-07-06T14:46:00.007-05:00

Well, I've been away for longer than I thought again. While I was away for a month percolating on other projects, this long, weird summer doesn't seem to be moving along any faster. I'd much prefer to offer a more interesting update - "What I did on my summer vacation when I was supposed to be slaving over a hot keyboard," or something - but this little bulletin will have to do for now.

Over at Bookslut, Jessa Crispin's reign of terror has officially ended in a bloodless coup. Well, okay, it wasn't really terror, and it really only involves our supreme leader moving to Berlin to get her deutsch on. But we're left in the capable hands of new editor Caroline Eick, who seems very nice, even if she made me feel a bit like Methuselah when I saw her on the teevee.

In this month's issue, I've contributed "Enemies, Public and Private," which offers a glancing blow at the mid-summer movie season and a fairly in-depth look at what is easily my favorite non-fiction book of the past six months, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI 1933-34 by Esquire contributor Bryan Burroughs, the much more extensive source material for the new film Public Enemies. I saw the film over the holiday weekend and while it's pretty good, especially Mann's superb command of digital photography, I can still only wish it had stayed at HBO and been made into a miniseries. Maybe someone smart will realize that there's no reason it can't still be done, regardless of the film's relatively sedate $26 million opening.

In the column, I also made a short ricochet off of Loser's Town, the debut novel by Daniel Depp, the big brother to movie star Johnny. Just in case I didn't leave enough information about that particular title, here's a bit of the much-quoted review of the book I wrote for Kirkus Reviews.

After a droll introduction during which two thugs-for-hire bicker while disposing of an inconvenient corpse, we meet David Spandau, an atypical investigator decked out in Armani and Tony Llamas. Irritable, terse and late for an assignment, Spandau is on a movie set to meet with high-strung Hollywood celebutante Bobby Dye. The actor believes he's about to break into the A-list with a western called Wildfire, but he's losing his cool after receiving a series of death threats. Still suffering from rodeo injuries, a little melancholy owing to a soft spot for whiskey and ex-wife Dee, the cowboyish Spandau reluctantly takes the case. He discovers that Bobby is being blackmailed by gangster Richie Stella, who wants the hot actor to headline his mob-financed flick. Even if this L.A. noir treads ground already covered by the likes of Elmore Leonard, screenwriter Depp blends its familiar elements with enthusiasm. He demonstrates a wicked behind-the-scenes awareness of Hollywood's inherent absurdity and utilizes a wealth of old-school venues ranging from the haunted dwellings of Wonderland Avenue to the nightclubs of the Sunset Strip (including one "Voodoo Room" that strongly resembles the infamous Viper Room once owned by the author's celebrated half-brother Johnny). Depp also turns the rare trick of creating supporting characters as charismatic as his lead, among them Terry McGuinn, an eloquent, Tolkien-obsessed runt enlisted by Spandau to co-opt one of Stella's underlings, and Amos Potts, one of Stella's go-to heavies who's just trying to make ends meet. "How Dashiell Hammett," as Terry remarks in one scene. Readers will join him in adding, "Pray go on." Sharp-tongued debut that obviously knows the City of Angels well.

There are bound to be plenty of cash-in titles about Dillinger hitting shelves any second now, but for anyone who wants more than a Wikipedia entry about the elusive bank robber, you ought to take advantage of your tax dollars at work. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has an interesting historical site about Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and other criminals of the era, including .PDF versions of the original Dillinger case files, which make for an afternoon's worth of entertainment by themselves.

Meanwhile, back at Kirkus, the Graphic Spotlight 2009 has arrived online. From my own finely-tuned pen you'll find spotlights on Rick Geary's new biography of Leon Trotsky, Tim Hamilton's really fantastic full-color adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451, a chat with Hideyuki Kikuchi about his truly weird novel Wicked City (the original inspiration for both the popular manga and anime adaptations of its future-noir storyline), and finally a round of hide-and-seek with R. Crumb about his new literal adapation of The Book of Genesis, part of which is being excerpted in The New Yorker as we speak.

There's plenty of good stuff throughout the issue, as other writers take on the great Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza, Ghostface Killah's Cell Block Z, David Mazzuchhelli's much lauded Asterios Pulp, and Joe Kelly's I Kill Giants. There's even a quick look at Ian Rankin's shot at Hellblazer, Dark Entries.

And if anyone from Vertigo, Marvel, Dark Horse, Image or anybody else wants to send comic books here, they'll be in good hands. I swear.

Is that all I've been up to? There seems to be a lot more scribbling going on around here these days.

Oh, yes. I also talked to a man who walked on the moon. But more on that later.

Dead Boys Giveaway

2009-06-01T10:47:00.007-05:00

The good news: Richard Lange has finished the follow-up to his fantastic book of short stories, Dead Boys. His debut novel, This Wicked World, will be published at the end of the month by Little, Brown. Kirkus Reviews calls it "Smartly entertaining noir, and a promise of better reviews to come."

You can get a sneak peek of the book by reading my new column at Bookslut, "Beautiful Losers," which includes a brief sampling of the prose as well as a brand new interview with the author. "It’s got drug dealers, dog fighting, crazy strippers, big guns, kung fu, a rattlesnake, and a fortune in counterfeit bills: something for everyone," says Lange.

The better news: I talked Little, Brown out of a few copies of Dead Boys, and I'm giving them away as a public service. For a shot at winning one of my three copies, do the following:

1. Email me at claywriting (at) yahoo.com, using the subject line "Dead Boys." Include your name, email address and a mailing address.

2. Tell me your favorite Los Angeles-based book or film, and why.

That's it. On June 12, I'll randomly pick three winners and mail copies of Dead Boys to the lucky trio.

Good luck.

UPDATE: The books are on their way, and weirdly enough, all of the winners are from Southern California. Congratulations to Kathy, Nolan and Victor for winning. I think. They might change their minds once they read the book and start looking around. But let's hope not.

GI Joe The Secret of the Mummy's Tomb (Jim Sweet)

2009-05-23T01:12:00.001-05:00

Having once owned this book and record set does not in any way detract from its retro greatness.

The Big Books Cometh

2009-05-13T12:02:00.005-05:00

Hot off the press - literally, as Kirkus Reviews remains among one of those full-fledged magazines with a print edition - is the new Big Books Special from Kirkus, featuring titles likely to make a big splash at BookExpo America (BEA), being held May 28-31 in New York City, and the American Library Association's annual blowout July 9-15 in Chicago.

Inside, you'll find two feature interviews written by yours truly, the first with the very articulate NPR and ABC analyst Cokie Roberts, and the second, well, a bit more of a revealing interview with human guinea pig and Esquire writer A.J. Jacobs. You'll also find interviews (by other contributors) on the fiction side with Tracy Kidder and Jonathan Lethem. I also wrote smaller spotlights on new books by The NFL Today's James Brown (an outstanding interview subject), super-evolutionist Richard Dawkins (not so much), MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, and debut novelist Paul Harding (Tinkers).

Elsewhere in the issue are glances at some outstanding new titles, including rundowns of Pat Conroy's South of Broad, Pete Dexter's Spooner, Joseph Kanon's Stardust, and Richard Russo's That Old Cape Magic, including a comment I love by Russo: "I was determined that my next novel wouldn't leave me alongside the road for dead."

Now, after writing nearly 7,000 words in the past week, I'm going out to the desert to clear my head. I might not even bring a book with me when I go. So there.

BEAT THE REAPER by Josh Bazell trailer

2009-04-24T11:29:00.001-05:00

Reaper Goes Hollywood

2009-04-24T11:05:00.005-05:00

So Variety reports that Josh Bazell's Beat the Reaper is going to the big screen. The writers of Ocean's Thirteen (Brian Koppelman and David Levien) will adapt the murderously funny ER-set debut novel as a vehicle for...Leonardo DiCaprio? As a hitman whose real name is Pietro Brnwa?

Myself, I think the role needs somebody with a little more heft, humor and menace (see: Clive Owen). But we'll see how it turns out. DiCaprio is producing, so due credit to him for picking up on the book's lurid appeal.

I just have to say, I called this one real early on. I ought to get a finder's fee.

"The past comes knocking for a physician with a fistful of secrets.

Medical resident Bazell opens his debut novel with a bone-crunching interlude between Manhattan ER doctor Peter Brown and a mugger whom he beats senseless, then treats for injuries. Brown soon confesses that his real name is Pietro Brnwa. He's a former hit man whose lethal trade drove him into the witness-protection program, where he reinvented himself as a pill-popping trauma physician. "It's a weird curse, when you think about it," says the killer turned doc. "We're built for thought, and civilization, more than any other creature we've found. And all we really want to be is killers." The past catches up with Brown when a terminal patient at the hospital recognizes him as the mob assassin called "Bearclaw." The patient threatens to out Brown if he does not work to save the man's life. Bazell's profane, hyperactive novel is readable and fun, and no fan of shoot-'em-ups or medical dramas can afford to miss it. Among the book's highlights is a riotous set of doctor's rounds that find Brown making out with a cancer patient, chasing down a wheelchair-bound fugitive and suffering a particularly vile needle stick.

A wildly funny mashup between genres that makes ER and St. Elsewhere look tame." - from Kirkus Reviews.

See also last year's Bookslut column "Power and Responsibility" and Josh Bazell's site for more coverage.

New Kirkus Specials

2009-04-16T14:11:00.004-05:00

While I'm thinking about it, it's worth posting up a couple of projects from the good folks at Kirkus Reviews that have recently gone to print.

Last month saw the release of the Audiobooks Special, celebrating a format that remains near and dear to my heart. Within, you'll find an audience with the talented narrators who tackled Issac Asimov's The Stars Like Dust (Stephen R. Thorne), John Grisham's The Associate (Erik Singer) and a terrific new BBC Audiobooks adaptation of Peter Benchley's Jaws, read by veteran actor Erik Steele, who's lately been burning up Broadway with his performance in 33 Variations with Jane Fonda and Samantha Mathis.

You'll also find a bit of my conversation with novelist Dan Simmons about his new novel Drood as well as plenty of features by other contributors including an interview with presidential debate moderator Gwen Ifill, spotlights on new audiobooks by Stephen King, Jimmy Carter and Larry Wilmore, and a peek at a cool new collection of shorts read by Academy Award winner William Hurt.

Meanwhile, in the just-released Nonfiction Special, a hellacious variety of writers speak truth to power about subjects ranging from dirty movies to guerilla warfare. I got to talk to an old acquaintance from way back, Brad Matsen - well known for his psychedelic scientific collaborations with artist Ray Troll - about his fascinating submersion into the life of Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Up-and-coming dramatist Said Sayrafiezadeh talked about his new memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, while Larry Tye gave me the rundown on his new biography of Kansas City legend Satchel Paige.

I recently had a near-miss with one of the world's most controversial evolutionary biologists in working on a special coming out next month. But I got a good practice run in by talking with Robert Wright about his new book The Evolution of God, due out in June. I also got a real treat in getting to read an early copy of the new book from James McManus, who wrote the classic crime story Positively Fifth Street. I expect a huge showing in the fall for his new history book Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, due out in November from FSG.

Within, you'll also find Craig Nelson's massive history of the moon shot (Rocket Men), an illustrated history of the Obama campaign by the editors of the New York Times (Obama: The Historic Journey) and a terrific interview with French cartoonist Emmanuel Guibert about his new collaboration with late photojournalist Didier Lefevre, The Photographer.

There. Isn't it nice to have things to look forward to?

Warren's New Column @ Wired

2009-04-15T16:21:00.006-05:00

"Correctly tuned, the internet brings a staggering volume of detail about every moment on the planet right to my desk. For someone who earns a living through consideration of outbreaks of The Future, it’s all useful information, but that’s all it is. For the parsing and condensation of that information into knowledge, it seems we still need the structure of print publishing, a form that insists on time to think, digest and present."

[Wired UK via Warren Ellis]

These Are Fantastic

2009-04-14T12:42:00.002-05:00

"...the private intensity of moments rendered in such a small scale draws the viewer in, allowing for the intimacy one might feel peering into a museum display case or dollhouse.Though surrounded by chaos, hazard, and longing, the figures’ faces betray little emotion, inviting viewers to lose themselves in these crucibles—and in the jumble of feelings and memories they elicit."

(Lifted from Boing Boing)

Short Cuts

2009-04-13T10:55:00.003-05:00

So I had several interesting diversions from work last week but the one that captured my interest most was an out-of-the-blue email from fellow Bookslut contributor John Madera, who embarked on a huge project and ended up with really interesting results.

John asked a whole bunch of writers, critics, bloggers and other ne'er do wells to come up with a list of their ten favorite...novellas?

I'm not much of a list-maker, but this particular task struck my fancy for some reason. For obvious reasons, John asked me to direct my attention to mystery and crime novellas in particular in order to fill some of the genre gaps in the list. I thought I'd have trouble coming up with that many bloody novellas but once I started digging, I was surprised how quickly it filled out. You can see my list here.

It was damned tricky business, actually, and I'm sure at least a couple of the items on my list don't fit the technical definition of a novella, but I did try to stick to the rules of the thing. Because of their length and specificity of subject, all the entries on my list at least lean towards that category in my mind.

You can also find John's introduction to the project here, as well as links to all the other contributions. Other items of note include Paul Kincaid's list of science fiction novellas, and a discussion of the whole thing over at HTML Giant.

Any gig that manages to tie together H.G. Wells, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad and Amy Hempel is okay with me.

The book I would have put on the list, had I had more time to think about it? Graham Greene's The Third Man.

The Hold Steady's Murder Mystery

2009-04-09T15:47:00.004-05:00

Against my better instincts, I'm going out this weekend. Out to see an all-ages show in fact, mingling with youngsters who are probably young enough to be my own children. And why, pray tell, would I expose myself to the elements in such a perilious fashion?

Because Craig Finn is driving me crazy with his bamboozling lyrics. I'm out to see The Hold Steady, a band I'm surprised hasn't become even bigger already. How Kings of Leon gets to play the O2 in London but The Hold Steady has steadfastly remained a bar band is beyond me. Anyway, the tightly-knit members of The Hold Steady are out touring behind the new double-disc live album A Positive Rage.

I think my biggest trouble is that I approached the band's albums piecemeal. I'd hear a song here and there - I think I got turned onto "Stuck Between Stations," which references the suicide of John Berryman after hearing Okkervil River's "John Allyn Smith Sails," a really haunting version of the same sad event. After I got a couple of copies of the band's new album Stay Positive, and 2006's Boys and Girls in America, I started catching the repeating references to characters and places.

I still don't know if there's a coherent narrative there, and that's a question that someone should ask Finn, whether there's a truly whole story in his head. But in stitching together all the disparate threads in my head, it builds a fantastic murder mystery.

Finn told the Seattle PI, "I think there is a little bit of everyone in those characters, and I think everyone can see themselves in my songs and these characters. The more you firm them up with more and more details, the more you exclude people from relating to the stories."

Among the repeating characters are a couple of dangerous boys - Gideon, the destructive "cowboy on the crosstown bus," and Charlemagne, a pimp and drug addict, last seen in "Ask Her For Adderall" - "Skinny, scared and off his game, he's been hiding from those gentlemen with the same tattoos as Gideon."

There are also a couple of girls, Holly, whose real name is Hallelujah, dates all the way back to "Barfruit Blues" from the 2004 album Almost Killed Me. Certainly most of Separation Sunday is built around her. Another is Sapphire, the center of the lovely and underrated "Yeah, Sapphire," a recent track, and reportedly the psychic girl from the fan favorite "Chips Ahoy."

There is at least one murder during the course of these albums, and possibly a couple. In "Both Crosses," one of the girls recalls, "She's known a couple boys who died and both of them were crucified." Naturally, one of these might be a Catholic/religious reference, but I'm not entirely sure it is. In "Joke About Jamaica," the line is revisited as "One summer, two kids died, and one of them was crucified."

I'm fairly sure the narrator of this particular narrative is Sapphire: "She saw him gushing blood just before he got cut. She saw them put a body in a bag in the trunk." Now, is this the kid who gets killed in the spectacular "One For The Cutters," which recounts the incident from a different point of view? "The night with the fight and the butterfly knife was the first night she spent with that one guy she liked?" But then the "one guy" splits for Cleveland, and comes back with blood on his jacket.

Certainly someone has gotten what's coming to him in "Yeah, Sapphire": "I'm not drunk, I'm cut, I'm gushing blood and I need someone to come pick me up." The working theory is that it's same fatal fight and Sapphire wasn't physically present for it, even though she saw it coming. See how this thing will bend your noodle if you think about it too much?

But back to the original theme, Finn and The Hold Steady build these great little scenes that are straight out of a crime novel, like the investigation in "One For The Cutters."

"Now the cops want to question everyone present. They parade every townie in town through the station. But no one says nothing and they can't find the weapon," followed shortly by the song's best (and oft-misinterpreted) line: "One drop of blood on immaculate keds." That's all it takes to put somebody away these days.

There's another elegant little song on the new album, "Sequestered In Memphis," during which somebody is obviously getting sweated over a liaison gone wrong: "I think she drove a new Mustang. I guess it might be a rental. I remember she had satellite radio. I guess she seemed a bit nervous. Do you think I'm that stupid? What the hell, I'll tell my story again."

Even the songs that aren't about murder are heartbreaking, like "Lord I'm Discouraged," in which I imagine Holly has succumbed to the things she's seen, and someone is doing their best to look after her. "I know it's unlikely she'll ever be mine, so I mostly just pray she don't die."

Is there an answer to all these riddles? I don't know, but it's damned intriguing to try to stitch all these threads together. Maybe best to leave it with a line from Separation Sunday.

"Do you want me to tell it like boy meets girls and the rest is history? Or do you want it like a murder mystery?"

Writer, Los Angeles, California, Fiction

2009-04-09T10:58:00.004-05:00

I'll be damned. Usually the books I champion fall by the wayside, lost in the swells of marketing gibberish or are buried in all the other crap out there.

But every so often, very rarely, somebody gets it right.

My friend Richard Lange, the blisteringly talented author of Dead Boys, won a Guggenheim Fellowship. Right. On.

The title of this post mirrors the deceptively simple description the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation granted to their latest honoree: "Writer, Los Angeles, California, Fiction."

For the six or seven of you left to whom I haven't already given copies of the book, you can catch up by going back to read my review of Dead Boys from the dearly departed Rocky Mountain News, and read my column, "Radio Noir," that integrates an interview with the author.

While we're at it, let's also grant a small preview of the man's next novel, This Wicked World. Here's a very small slice at the new book, due out from Little, Brown in June, from the Kirkus Reviews Mystery Special.

After laying bare the ragged soul of Los Angeles in Dead Boys (2007), his critically acclaimed collection of short stories, Richard Lange opens a wider canvas for his debut novel. “It’s a crime story set in Los Angeles and the desert outside,” says Lange. “It starts as something of a whodunit and morphs into a revenge caper told from the points of view of a bunch of different characters, good and bad. It’s got drug dealers, dog fighting, crazy strippers, kung fu, a rattlesnake and a fortune in counterfeit bills.” The book finds ruminative ex-con Jimmy Boone backing up an amigo by tagging along to look into the case of a dead kid on a downtown bus. It’s a wider-ranging story than those in Dead Boys, but one that resonates with the same forlorn sense of humanity. “What I tried to retain from the stories is that overarching sense of desperation and desolation, characters with complex psychologies that you find yourself liking in spite of their many failings,” says Lange. "I hope people will fall for the people in this book as well. I sure did. I felt bad every time I had to kill one."

The book is already garnering a few complimentary blurbs, like this one from Joseph Wambaugh: "The down-and-dirty events and street talk in this debut crime novel reminds me of a young James Ellroy, and like Ellroy, Richard Lange can really write."

I'll have more to say about This Wicked World next month, but in the meantime you can do yourself a favor by pre-ordering the book.

The Long Fall

2009-04-06T10:52:00.003-05:00

Because of my slightly delayed schedule in taking it to print, it seems like I'm the last person in America to interview Walter Mosley about The Long Fall, but I was actually the first. I managed to squeeze in what's becoming a semi-annual call to the author in December, long before the book's publication just a few days ago, but Walter has rightly and deservedly been on a publicity riot for weeks now. Anyway, you can get my take on the book, and his, in "Walter Mosley Takes New York," my 45th (!) column for Bookslut.

As usual, the rest of the issue is well worth checking out. I'm impressed as hell myself with a whole bunch of the newer writers, not to mention all the other crusty old columnists like myself. Paul Morton sits down with 80-year-old legendary cartoonist Jules Feiffer about The Phantom Tollbooth and Carnal Knowledge, among myriad other topics. Michele Filgate talks Tesla with novelist Samantha Hunt (The Invention of Everything Else), while David Varno talks punk rock and short stories with Wells Tower (Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned), and Geoffrey Goodwin gets weirdboiled with debut novelist Paul Tremblay (The Little Sleep). Go read. This is the good stuff.

A Zombie Comedy With Brains

2009-04-03T15:25:00.006-05:00

Just adding a little update to the movie trailer below. The movie, and its complimentary site are promotional vehicles for a new novel called Breathers by S.G. Browne. I didn't actually realize it was out yet until I passed by a bookstore at lunchtime (new Doctor Who magazines, thanks for asking) and saw it was on a Barnes & Noble table of "Notable Books," which made me choke with laughter.

That's my fault, actually. I can't tell you how funny this thing is. It's so funny it made me laugh out loud in a hospital waiting room and scare the bejeezus out of everybody else in the room.

Oh, wait, come to think of it, I can tell you how funny it is. I wrote the blurb that's on the back cover of the book: "A zombie comedy with brains." Here you go.

"The dead shall walk the earth, and they’re hungry for…love?

Debut novelist Browne branches out from his mostly horror-related short stories and delivers a rousing entry in the Rom-Zom-Com genre. Based on his short story “A Zombie’s Lament,” Browne’s mortality tale begins rather grimly but almost immediately picks up speed and humor to evolve into a terrific comedy about the perils and joys of life beyond death. Browne’s hero is Andy Warner, who survived, so to speak, the car crash that killed his wife but lost his vocal chords along with his life. Reduced to a pathetic existence consisting mostly of downing his father’s wine collection, suffering Glade spray-downs from his mother and attending the occasional Undead Anonymous meeting, old Andy is in pretty wretched shape. His afterlife takes a turn for the better when he meets Rita, a pale but lovely girl who slit her own throat, and Ray, a feisty undead hunter. Before long, Andy is fighting against zombie discrimination, mutilation and other forms of abuse by those unenlightened “breathers”: “After all, what do I have to lose by standing up for myself? If being a rotting corpse with no rights and no future isn’t the worst thing that can happen to me, it can’t be that much further to rock bottom.” The book has its share of gruesomeness, but it also offers astute observations on the world in which we live. A zombie comedy with brains. --Kirkus Reviews."

If that's not enough for you, Fox Searchlight has already bought the book up as a production vehicle for Diablo Cody (Juno and The United States of Tara, etc.) One idiot on the Internet already dubbed the project (without so much as reading a line of the book): "Twilight for zombie lovers." Um, no. The offending line that made me burst out laughing in the waiting room?

"Is it necrophilia if we're both dead?"

Check it out. It's paperback - cost you less than an afternoon at the movies. If that's not enough to convince you, you can read the first chapter here.

Necrobufrin Kills Depression

2009-04-03T12:20:00.001-05:00

Two-Minute Warning

2009-04-01T13:53:00.003-05:00

Turns out Elmore Leonard hasn't had enough of the movies quite yet. It looks like Harper Collins is looking for a trailer for his new book, Road Dogs. The fan-made trailer is to be no longer than two minutes, has to be submitted by May 1st, and should have "intrigue, edge and energy," according to the publisher's web site.

A better deal than most: the winner will be selected by Dutch himself, and will win a signed copy of Road Dogs, which is pretty cool. And a Kindle, but still.

You can read the first eight chapters of Road Dogs at Entertainment Weekly, so you can get caught up on Jack Foley, Cundo Rey, and Dawn Navarro, who all star in the book.

If I were entering the contest, I'd be digging up some illegal footage from Out Of Sight, personally. When I talked to Elmore Leonard about the book back in January, he said, "Foley, of course, was played so memorably by George Clooney. He says he doesn't know if he wants to play this character again, but you never know."

Come on, George. You'll go back to ER, but you won't get back in the trunk with J-Lo?

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

2009-03-24T15:04:00.001-05:00

Here's a clever trailer put together for Wells Tower's collection of short stories, which you can find reviewed a few posts below.

Public Enemies

2009-03-16T13:28:00.001-05:00

I just can't stop watching this. What a surprise to find the book, by Bryan Burroughs, is even more addictive.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

2009-03-10T14:41:00.002-05:00

Book in a nutshell: Things go to hell not with a bang, but a whimper, in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, a collection of nine vivid short stories by Wells Tower about men who have seen too much, failed too often, or simply lived too long. Cribbed from venues like McSweeney’s, Harper’s, and The Paris Review - which awarded him the Plimpton Prize in 2002 – Tower’s stories of masculine despair carry a peculiar sense of humor and a ringing sadness.

Just listen to the parched dialogue in “Retreat,” where two brothers confront their poisoned relationship. Matthew Lattimore, a boozy, wealthy divorcee, answers his younger brother Stephen’s query as to what’s wrong. “Nothing,” says the elder brother. “My life is on fire.” A liaison of a different sort emerges in “Door In Your Eye,” as eighty-three-year-old Albert engages the drug dealer next door.

Other pitfalls await our leftover narrators. In the prize-winning opener, “The Brown Coast,” everyman Bob Munroe loses everything after his father’s untimely death, a car accident and a foolish affair. Everyday catastrophes, but Tower makes them tragic nonetheless. Other men are disasters waiting to happen, like the simmering narrator of “Down Through the Valley,” who grudgingly agrees to transport an unlikely passenger. “You can’t sit in a little Datsun car with your wife’s new lover without recollecting all the nice old junk about her that you’d do better not to haul up,” he says.

A pair of standout stories ends the collection with rare humor and elegance. In “On The Show,” Tower finds the poetry in the lives converging at a traveling carnival, while the hilarious title story depicts the office politics of a group of Viking marauders. “After that trip, things changed,” says Harald, the reluctant raider. “It seemed to me that all of us were leaving the high and easy time of life and heading into deeper waters.” Judging the human condition by these characters, it’s easy to believe we all wind up in the deep end eventually.

Sample of prose: Dusk at the carnival: “Now it’s dark. The sun has slipped behind the orange groves, disclosing the garbled rainbow of the carnival rides. The blaring reds of the Devil’s Choir and the blue-white of the Giant Wheel and the strobing greens of the Orbiter and the chasing yellow and purple of the Chaises Volante mingle and the sky glows hyena-brown.”

Pros: There’s an everyday humanity to each of these characters that makes them appealing.

Cons: No matter how well-written, this is pretty bleak stuff.

Final word: A sublime collection of deftly composed cautionary tales.

AMBERVILLE - Tim Davys

2009-03-09T12:32:00.001-05:00

A Fistful of Pain Killers

2009-03-05T14:46:00.008-05:00

I hate wasting things. Doesn't really matter whether it's throwaway ideas I've scribbled on a napkin, interview material that didn't make the final cut, or fully-fleshed out articles that never saw the of day for some reason.

So in the interests of self-preservation, I'll hit you with this brief review of Jerry Stahl's new novel, Pain Killers. This would have run in the Rocky Mountain News soon, had the newspaper survived.

A couple of notes. First, this was written for the broad audience the Rocky enjoyed, so it's not quite as personal as, say, my column. Secondly, this is entirely self-edited. When I wrote for the Rocky, I relied heavily on the advice and expertise of books editor Patti Thorn, a fantastic editor and stellar talent. But this one is all on me.
***********************************************************
Pain Killers by Jerry Stahl

Book in a nutshell: Talk about a guy who’s done it all. Jerry Stahl has written episodes of television ranging from ALF to CSI, plumbed the depths of his own heroin addiction in Permanent Midnight (later made into the 1998 film starring Ben Stiller) and is currently pitching a biopic of Fatty Arbuckle around Hollywood with Johnny Depp.

To his credit, the ambitious noir writer has kept up with his fictional pursuits, most recently in Plainclothes Naked, a volatile, over-the-top detective caper that introduced Stahl’s muse, former crack addict and private eye Manny Rupert. In its sequel, Pain Killers, the author resurrects Rupert to go undercover in California's notorious penal system to ferret out the true identity of a rather unusual prisoner.

What reaction does Manny have when he catches senior citizen Harry Zell planting Photoshopped fakes of a bikini-clad L. Ron Hubbard and bondage-favoring Jerry Falwell in his bedroom? Take the proffered gig, naturally. “This one is real,” says Zell, tapping a photo of a gap-toothed SS Officer. Zell wants an inside man to get into San Quentin to out the infamous Nazi “Doctor of Death,” Josef Mengele, clipped on a hit-and-run charge. Rupert takes ten large from the cryptic septuagenarian to infiltrate the prison posing, ironically, as a drug rehab counselor.

With characteristically profane brio, Stahl weaves together an anarchic plot that incorporates Rupert’s tart ex-wife Tina (now employed by Internet-based escort service), provocative twelve-step confessions from the prisoners, an indictment of governmental torture techniques, and some graphic new experiments by the bad old doctor.

Sample of prose: Manny Rupert does some soul-searching. “What if I met Mengele and just lost it? Started to cry? Or what if this was all a front and I was actually being delivered to him? Like a lab animal. How did I know he still wasn’t doing experiments? Maybe my own shoe-leather liver – the third of three transplants, thanks for asking – would be used for some infernal, Mengele-esque purpose.”

Pros: Stahl wields black humor, profanity and the mechanics of addiction with inspired confidence but he also knows how to propel a story forward, peppered with Tarantino-esque dialogue.

Cons: Stahl’s prose sometimes comes laden with a seedy, narcissistic tone. It makes you ask yourself if he's trying too hard to achieve the desired shock value.

Final word: Bonus points for daring to make Mengele funny but Stahl’s off-the-wall take on prison, war crimes and human rights appeals to a pretty narrow band.

The Hell You Say

2009-03-02T17:00:00.005-05:00

For every thing that dies, another is born. Even as The Rocky Mountain News goes on to its final reward, my online musings continue unabated at Bookslut.

Here, you can find my new column, "The Hell You Say," and get the inside scoop from three terrific writers. Dan Simmons talks about his Dickensian gothic Drood, while my British amigo Tom Cain comes out from under cover to discuss No Survivors. I also finally accomplished the longtime goal of questioning Greg Rucka, a writer I much admire, about his latest Atticus Kodiak novel, Walking Dead.

In other words, lots of discussion of Charles Dickens, renegade assassins, human trafficking, the character development of action heroes, the mechanics of writing, and exploding nipples.

It didn't make the final cut, but I would have been remiss if I hadn't quizzed Rucka about the status of Whiteout, the film adaptation of his stellar graphic novel. The movie stars Kate Beckinsale, and Greg tells me that what he's seen is visually very cool and that the rest of us will get to see U.S. Marshall Carrie Stetko on the big screen in September. He also gives a good account of visiting the set in Montreal.

"I don't think I'll ever forget the moment I first saw Kate Beckinsale," Rucka recalls. "I had walked into a dark soundstage. The red lights went off and she came off the set wearing the cold weather gear and the army hat. She had these bits of ice and snow on her and she was just so pretty she made your chest hurt."

I'm also pleased to report that Rucka and longtime collaborator Steve Lieber are making progress on the last of three Whiteout stories, the final chapter now titled Whiteout: Night.

"Steve and I always joked that if they made the movie, we would craft the last story," he says. "I've always known what the last story would be, ever since we made Whiteout: Melt. I even knew what the ad campaign would look like. It was always going to be one of those galvanized metal coffins being loaded into the back of a C-130. The tagline reads, 'Carrie's leaving the ice. The only question is how.'"

If for some lunatic reason you haven't taken a shot at Whiteout, here are some nearly full-issue previews of the original graphic novel and its sequel, thanks to our buddies at Oni Press. Enjoy.

The Angel of Death Is Here For You

2009-03-02T11:16:00.003-05:00

Here's some good news on a Monday morning. It looks like comic book writer Ed Brubaker has launched his direct-to-web series "Angel of Death," starring stuntwoman and actress Zoe Bell (looking particularly dangerous over on the left). Here's a description of the show, from Crackle.com:

"Nobody looks for the Beretta, when all they see is a slinky chick in a cocktail dress. Noir comic book legend Ed Brubaker cuts deep with the story of Eve, a hot woman with a heart of ice. Zoe Bell steps in as an assassin haunted by visions after a bloody encounter with a very big knife. In this, the most ambitious web series ever created, Zoe makes bare knuckle boxing a thing of beauty, and a head wound as sexy as sin. Lucy Lawless, Doug Jones, and Ted Raimi all show up for the ride, but few come out alive. If the sight of blood bothers you, just keep your eyes on her other assets, and remember she can grab your heart with her looks or her hand, your choice."

Get the good stuff at http://crackle.com/c/Angel_Of_Death

The End.

2009-02-27T11:44:00.000-05:00

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Don't Bogart That Review, My Friend

2009-02-13T12:26:00.003-05:00

I'm not sure I've taken quite as grave an approach to this peppy new title by Joe Gores as some others have (*Cough* New York Times) but I think it's fair. In today's Rocky Mountain News - still publishing! - you can find my review, "Hammett Homage Revisits Sam Spade," which takes a brief look at the new Maltese Falcon prequel Spade and Archer.

For more detailed takes on the book, you can also check out reviews by the lovely Sarah Weinman (L.A. Times) and Cara Black (SF Gate), not to mention quite a bit of story-behind-the-book at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.

So what's this bird that everybody's all steamed up about? You Netflix subscribers can watch the original movie online. Or there's always the trailer if you're in a rush.

People lose teeth talking like that.

Questioning The Usual Suspects

2009-02-10T15:16:00.008-05:00

Wow, it's early this year. Now online, you can find the results of the project that I spend my entire December holidays working on every year: The Kirkus Reviews Mysteries and Thrillers Special.

Within these bloody pages, you can find the bite-sized spotlights boiled down from hours and hours of conversations about bad guys, blunt objects, and the mechanics of the fugitive life. My personally scribbled spotlights include interviews with Elmore Leonard, Charlie Huston, Walter Mosley, Richard Lange, Tom Cain, and Greg Rucka, as well as the feature on Charles Ardai and Hard Case Crime.

And that's just my two cents. Also inside, you'll find previews of a bunch of great books heading for store shelves (or your Amazon wish list, if you prefer), including the good doctor Josh Bazell's Beat The Reaper, Cara Black's Murder in the Latin Quarter, Denis Johnson's Nobody Move, and Loser's Town by Hollywood insider Daniel Depp (whose brother is in a bunch of pirate movies or something, apparently. Yeah, that Johnny).

Enjoy. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Christopher Moore Talks FOOL

2009-02-09T16:23:00.001-05:00

I haven't seen too much about this book yet (although I've had a copy in my hot little hands for a little while) but here's a brand spankin' new video featuring the Author Guy talking about the roots of his forthcoming novel, Fool. Lots and lots more, including the first chapter, audio samples from the reading by Euan Morton, a contest to win an Ipod (or, er, a hat), and a free reading of A Dirty Job, all at www.chrismoore.com.

Ah, and a new author interview here: http://ah.utdallas.edu/sojourn/pdf_documents/Moore_Interview.pdf

Everybody loves a fool.

Cleaning Up With Charlie Huston

2009-02-03T12:02:00.005-05:00

Waste not, want not. In the new issue of Bookslut, you can find all the parts of my little chat with killer author and Pulpnoir.com perpetrator Charlie Huston that can be published in places that let you use Bad Words, which are few and far between these days.

Go forth, and read "Charlie Huston, The Cleanup Hitter," to find out more about The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, what it feels like to have Stephen King write you a review for Amazon, how Los Angeles vibrates a writer's antenna, and a modest take on his new scribbling from a guy who represents the future of crime fiction. If we're lucky.

What's not in the interview is that Huston is working on something he calls, "More ambitious than anything else I've ever tried." Whatever it is should blow people's mind after a downright frenetic crime trilogy, an epic vampire fusion series, and two hardback bestsellers. He's supposedly doing something else for Marvel Comics (after Moon Knight) but nobody seems to be able to tip me off about it yet. Further bulletins as events warrant.

Elsewhere in the February offerings at Bookslut, you'll find reviews of The Way Through Doors (the second novel by noodle-bender Jesse Ball) and Arthur Conan Doyle's novella The Poison Belt, an interview with aforementioned noodle-bender Ball, a long, long, long talk about Spider-Man with Marvel's lord and savior Brian Michael Bendis, and Colleen Mondor's take on Charles Darwin.

There. That should keep you busy for a little while.

Medal of Honor

2009-01-27T17:47:00.003-05:00

Tales from a hotel room in Los Angeles.

"THE GRAVEYARD BOOK," said fourteen loud voices, and I thought, I may be still asleep right now, but they probably don't do this, probably don't call people and sound so amazingly excited, for Honors books....

"...just won..."

"THE NEWBERY MEDAL" they chorused. They sounded really happy. I checked the hotel room because it seemed very likely that I was still fast asleep. It all looked reassuringly solid.

You are on a speakerphone with at least 14 teachers and librarians and suchlike great, wise and good people, I thought. Do not start swearing like you did when you got the Hugo. This was a wise thing to think because otherwise huge, mighty and fourletter swears were gathering.

Congratulations to Mr. Gaiman for his latest achievement. Even though he totally and unfairly killed us in the Best Literature category for this year's Weblog Awards. For more fun, you can go watch my boss interview him, with movement and sound and everything, just like on the teevee.

Blood and Arrows

2009-01-23T10:40:00.005-05:00

In this morning's edition of the Rocky Mountain News (fingers crossed, the ink is still flowing down there) you'll find my review of Agincourt, a riveting, blood-soaked adventure novel that recounts the famous battle in the words of Bernard Cornwell, the famous British author of the Sharpe series.

War is hell. The mechanics of combat and the justification for conflicts fluctuate between centuries, but the primal terror and rapture that grip men facing combat are inevitable.

One of our most gifted historical novelists, Bernard Cornwell, brings his storytelling skills to bear in capturing war's terrible drama in Agincourt, depicting a remarkable, costly English victory during the Hundred Years War....

Just for kicks, here's a few more takes on the novel. At the Washington Post, the book is reviewed (with a close look at its historical accuracy and religious undertones) by, of all people, Diana Gabaldon, the Arizona-based novelist and author of the Outlander series.

Back at Harper Collins, you can read an excerpt from the novel and hear an interview with Bernard Cornwell at the publisher's Prosecast podcast site. Over at Powell's, the author has contributed an original essay with some very readable back story of the famous battle.

Giving Malpractice A Whole New Meaning

2009-01-22T18:18:00.003-05:00

Just thought I'd share the fun little website that's been set up for Josh Bazell's Beat The Reaper. I talked up the book in a recent column (and in point of fact, wrote one of the earliest reviews praising the good doctor's profane shoot-em-up, a bit of which you can find in the website's press section under Kirkus Reviews).

In addition to the usual excerpts, the site has a nifty game of diagnosing the patient, for which one of the options is always "Shoot patient," as well as an audiobook sample and a video trailer that finds Doctor Peter Brown opening fire from his surgical theater, no less.

Check it out at beatthereaper.com

Spring At Last

2009-01-20T16:21:00.003-05:00

So. Things to look forward to (besides the obvious transition of power going on today). Kirkus Reviews has just published its annual Spring & Summer Preview Special, which I think is worth a look. I contributed my own brief interviews with several authors about their new books, all of which were worth seeking out.

Look inside for more on Greg Grandin's Fordlandia, an epic examination of Henry Ford's doomed attempt to civilize the Amazon; Clancy Martin's caustic tale of brotherly love in the jewelry business, How To Sell; and a rumble in the jungle with the New Yorker's David Grann, whose Lost City of Z is an absolutely inspired page-turner (and a tome soon to be on the big screen with Brad Pitt in a starring role).

Elsewhere in the issue, you'll find previews of The Beats: A Graphic History by Harvey Pekar and other scribblers, as well as glimpses of new novels by Jodi Picoult, Robert Boswell, and Joe Queenan.

Noforgive.com

2009-01-12T14:14:00.004-05:00

Here's an update to my earlier post about Andrew Vachss' live webcast on Wedneday, January 14. The gig has an official URL (which I knew, but wanted to wait until it was public knowledge). To participate in Wednesday's happening, take your pointy fingers and click here:

www.noforgive.com

The event starts at 8:30 P.M. Eastern Time and will run for three hours. Questions can be submitted in advance or live online, but you have to preregister in order to play. This should be tons of fun but if you miss out, it sounds like parts of the party will be replayed on The Zero.

High Adventure

2009-01-08T11:14:00.003-05:00

While I'm thinking about it, there is actually a new column up at Bookslut this month. "Wrong Way Down" started out as a rumination on the majesty of Africa and ended up as a meandering journey involving Chinese bandits, hard-bitten mercenaries, King Solomon's mines, cross-continental motorcycle excursions, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Alexander McCall Smith and a teaser from Charles Ardai about a nifty project being launched in 2009 (See left).

Do I look like a guy with a plan?

Your Chance to Grill Andrew Vachss

2009-01-05T16:19:00.006-05:00

Ever wanted a chance to interrogate a favorite crime writer? You never know where it might lead you. I interviewed novelist Andrew Vachss, the celebrated and controversial author behind hardcore criminal Burke, way back in 2003, and it opened a lot of doors that I never anticipated.

It's your turn. Andrew is going to answer questions from the readership of his 18 Burke novels (not to mention the equally interesting recent one-offs The Getaway Man and Two Trains Running) during a one-of-a-kind webcast on January 14th. The only catch is that you have to pre-register to be heard.

I just spoke with Andrew a couple of days ago, the occasion being the December 30th publication of Another Life, the very last Burke book. He says bring it on.

"I really think we can replicate one of my book events, which means none of that author-reading from his work stuff," he said. "The audience fires away and I fire back. I don't duck questions. There's no reason it can't work as long as people register in advance, so they can click, and there I am."

He's a busy man, and although he's always done his part to promote his own work, Andrew has plenty of other irons in the fire, not least Protect, the national pro-child, anti-crime membership association that he helped to found, and which passed some serious legislation in October of 2008. That doesn't mean he's done writing, though, and you can see a sample of his upcoming work in the January issue of Esquire with the (very) short story "Sure Thing." So this is a pretty rare opportunity to get up close and personal with him during any one of the planned three one-hour segments.

"The whole world doesn't live in big cities," Vachss said. "I can't visit all the places I've been asked to come to, or accept all the invitations I get to speak. This is the most democratic way. I couldn't close the show and ignore people who have wanted to ask questions for years. It doesn't matter where you are. Dial it up."

There you go. Go to http://www.vachss.com/anotherlife/webcast_2009.html to sign up to see the prizefight. I'll update a little closer to the event with the new URL, but registering should get you in the door just fine.

To get prepped about Burke, Vachss, and other topics sure to rattle your cage, visit AV's official site, The Zero. For more information on Protect's mission & efforts, visit Protect.org.

RIP Donald E. Westlake

2009-01-03T18:16:00.008-05:00

Donald E. Westlake (who also famously composed under a half-dozen pseudonyms, among them Richard Stark) died in Mexico, on vacation with his wife, on New Year's Eve.

I don't really have the words (though judging from the outpouring of grief from the crime writing community, I'm probably the only one). For a really comprehensive look at Mr. Westlake's life and legacy, it's better to see Sarah Weinman's thorough collection of posts about his life and her heartfelt tribute to his work in the Los Angeles Times.

There's also a ton of coverage at The Rap Sheet, but what jumped out at me was J. Kingston Pierce's comment that, "After the death of somebody famous, such as author Donald E. Westlake, absolute nobodies pour out of the woodwork to recall their encounters--even if ever so brief--with the deceased."

I'm a little stunned right now to offer much insight to augment the terrific tributes that are out there in the wider world - see Charles Ardai's wonderful post at the Guardian books blog for just one example - but I did interview Mr. Westlake just two years on the occasion of the publication of What's So Funny? for the Kirkus Reviews Mystery Special, and some of his comments subsequently ended up in one of my columns at Bookslut. He was, as advertised, funny, insightful, smart and thoroughly straightforward about his work.

Anyway, in the spirit of that dichotomy between giants and nobodies, I'm going to shut up for a while and clear the floor. Here's a few gems from my conversation with Donald E. Westlake, many of them unpublished. Godspeed, sir.

On the dangers of writing series characters:

“This is the time that I’ve truly violated my own rules. For years and years, the deal was this - this is what I decided myself and everybody always said I was right. I have seen a lot of people who have series characters who go to the well too often and they end up doing shtick. ‘There he is in his funny hat again.’ The characters get thinner and thinner instead of more complex. It just becomes a vaudeville routine after a while. The writers very often don’t see that they’re diluting the mix.

So I was afraid of it. I didn’t want to do it to Dortmunder, myself, or anybody reading the books. So the rule was one Dortmunder novel in three under my name, exclusive of Richard Stark. The other two books could be anything. So in-between books I write things like The Ax and The Hook and an adventure novel set in Africa, and Smoke, an invisible man novel, and Money for Nothing.

What’s funny, is I just did three in a row. You do three in a row, you’re really going too far. I’ll have to write a greeting card or something next.”

On the differences in writing as Westlake and Stark:

“It always begins with the language. You’re using a different vocabulary and it leads you in a different direction, be it comic or serious. The Dortmunder novels are much more baroque than the Parker novels, who is much more blunt.”

On The Hot Rock:

“The Hot Rock was originally supposed to be something for Parker. Parker deals badly with frustration so it would really get up his nose if he had to keep stealing the same thing over and over again. But it was such a comic notion that just discussing it, I would start to laugh. The worst thing you can do to a tough character is to make him inadvertently funny. So I started to think about who this guy really was.”

The secret origin of Dortmunder:

“I was in a bar. One of the signs on the back bar said ‘Dortmunder,’ underneath ‘BEER.’ That’s what I wanted: an action character with something wrong with him. In seeing the name Dortmunder, I saw the guy: sloping shoulders and dead hair. I just saw the guy. This guy is operating under a black cloud but won’t give up. It all came from that name, Dortmunder.”

Westlake goes to the movies:

“Dortmunder has been played by Robert Redford and Martin Lawrence. That’s a bit of a stretch.

It’s not as bad as Parker, actually. The first time they did Lee Marvin in Point Blank, which is a great movie. The football player Jim Brown plays him in The Split, which is not a wonderful movie. Then the third one was Jean-Luc Godard, who took another one that had been published in France in which he turned Parker into a girl reporter played by Anna Karina (Made in USA, 1966). An old friend of mine said, ‘So far, Parker’s been played by a white man, a black man and a woman. I think the character lacks definition.’

Parker was played by George Segal in The Outfit and that was well done, but Dortmunder has never quite been done right in the movies. Nobody has even come close. Every once in a while, producers will actually ask me who I see as Dortmunder. My answer was always Harry Dean Stanton, who starred in Paris, Texas. They would tell me he doesn’t sell tickets. I said, ‘You didn’t ask me that.’”

On writing genre fiction:

“I started writing everything. And anything. My first published story was science fiction and my second was sort of a romantic comedy/playboy imitator. The third was mystery. After a while, the mysteries were getting accepted more than the others. You tend to go where you’re liked. For the first ten years that I was making a living, I joked that I was a writer disguised as a mystery writer but after looking back at ten years of output, I decided that I might just be a mystery writer after all.

But I’ve never been only a mystery writer. I saw a quote from Stravinsky that was in an advertisement in the Times – he said, I don’t write modern music. I write good music.

I still think I’m a writer first and a lot of it happens to be in the mystery field.”

How to write:

“I learned years ago that it’s not good for a writer to know what he’s doing because if you know what you’re doing, you can’t do it. When you’re actually doing the writing, do it. Don’t stare at it.”

Blood Spattered Televisions

2008-12-09T16:47:00.005-05:00

I know you people are at home salivating over the new Dark Knight DVD and trying to unravel the fourth season of Lost, but an item of note just came across my desk that might interest all you CSI and Dexter addicts.

A&E (home to Criss Angel's Mindfreak and other perversions of nature) is out flogging several of its more interesting crime-related shows. Among their latest offerings are the criminally underrated S.W.A.T (getting down and dirty with the boys in blue from Detroit and Kansas City, where they really need them from time to time), Jacked! (which really could be a how-to show about car theft if you approach it in the right frame of mind) and Crime 360, which is kind of like training at home for a better career, only with crime scenes and blood spatters and stuff.

Anyway, starting this week on Itunes, all these A&E true crime shows are going on sale for 99 cents each. Seriously. You were looking for something to watch at the gym that will make you run faster anyway. This should do the trick.

Blowback

2008-12-05T12:15:00.006-05:00

This morning's offering is my latest review at The Rocky Mountain News, a judicious analysis of the latest Kay Scarpetta novel from Patricia Cornwell. Not that it will make a bit of difference to the legions of the novelist's fans who have already snapped up the novel via pre-orders, most of whom will like this offering just fine.

Anyway, it looks like Cornwell's long-running forensic investigator could outlive the Rocky, which has been put up for sale by Scripps just a shade before the paper's 150th anniversary. The headlines say that the company will entertain offers for the next four to six weeks but after that point, its future remains uncertain. Well, hell.

For more cheerful reading, check out USA Today's profile of Cornwell (and her Ferrari Spider and Bell 407 helicopter and many other toys...) or better yet, Sarah Weinman's list at the L.A. Times of her favorite mysteries of the year, including a host of books I've celebrated myself this year like Don Winslow's The Dawn Patrol, Tara French's The Likeness and Tom Rob Smith's Child 44.

Bad News

2008-11-19T18:47:00.009-05:00

My very favorite mystery author is gone. I just found out from Sarah.

NEW BALTIMORE - George Clark Chesbro, 68, of New Baltimore, died Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at St. Peter's Hospital.

Born in Washington, D.C. on June 4, 1940, he was the son of the late George W. and Maxine (Sharpe) Chesbro. An author of over 25 novels and nearly 100 short stories, George was a recipient of an Ellery Queen Award and had served as president of the Mystery Writers Association of America. Earlier in his career, George had worked as a special education teacher at Pearl River and at the Rockland Psychiatric Center where he worked with emotionally troubled teens.

Survivors include his wife, Robin N. Chesbro; a son, Mark Chesbro;, a daughter Michelle Chesbro; two stepdaughters, Rachael and Leah Gass; a sister, Judith (Richard) Ragone and many nieces, nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews.

Services are private at the convenience of the family.

In lieu of flowers, those who wish may send a remembrance in his name to the Mohawk and Hudson River Humane Society, 3 Oakland Ave., Menands, NY 12204.

**********************
One of the first things I wrote for Bookslut was an essay about his books and what a fantastic, lost treasure trove of fantasy, science fiction and iron-jawed noir they were. To this day, I still buy Chesbro paperbacks every single time I find them in used bookstores, just so I have a stash to give to friends. A few days after the column appeared, I got a nice email from Hunter, the webmaster at his site, Dangerousdwarf.com. And then a few hours later, I got this email.

"Dear Clayton,

Your article is obviously heartfelt and tremendously flattering. I appreciate it very much. Thank you. Mongo and Garth send their regards.

Best,

George C. Chesbro."

There was nobody like him.

Further reading:

A Mystery One interview

An interview with Inkwell Newswatch

The 'lost' Mongo novel, published in French in 2007 but that hadn't yet found an English publisher.

Short, Sharp, Shock: The Work of George C. Chesbro

More from the Rap Sheet, including a brief personal remembrance from J. Kingston Pierce.

The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks Trailer

2008-11-03T16:32:00.001-05:00

A MOST WANTED MAN by John le Carré

2008-10-17T12:07:00.001-05:00

Truth To Power

2008-10-17T11:09:00.006-05:00

Briefly, I have a review in today's Rocky Mountain News covering the latest from British novelist, literary puppetmaster and as it turns out, former spy John Le Carré. Tread lightly to the Rocky's book section to read the review of A Most Wanted Man.

For more intriguing background, it's also worth taking the time to read CNN's interview with the writer, in which he discusses the roots of the new book, the icy reception he anticipates in America, and the derailment of his own intelligence career courtesy of Kim Philby.

"In my day -- in the spook world -- we saw ourselves almost as people with a priestly calling to tell the truth," he said. "We didn't shape it or mold it. We were there, we thought, to speak truth to power."

Freshen That Drink?

2008-10-09T17:31:00.000-05:00

Lehane's Last Word

2008-10-03T10:25:00.007-05:00

Poor Babe never looks happy, does he?

After reading it in truckstops and hotel rooms across this great fractured country of ours, I finally have the chance today to weigh in on Dennis Lehane's great experiment, The Given Day, which creates a great work of messy, anachronistic art from such disparate ingredients as Babe Ruth, Calvin Coolidge, and one of the most stubborn (and savagely beaten) Irish cops ever put on paper. You can read all about it online or in the paper this morning in The Rocky Mountain News.

By coincidence, after moving away last month from the woodsy hamlet of Sudbury, Massachusetts (where Babe Ruth reportedly drowned his piano) I got to meet the author last night at a sparsely attended but enthusiastic gathering at The Tattered Cover, where Lehane was in a a great fighting spirit over some electoral event next month and had great stories about how the book came about. He was insightful, articulate, and as funny as you might think, which makes me regret the fact that I didn't have time to interview him for this particular bit of history. Maybe next time, if he goes ahead and pushes forward with the same characters in the Roaring 20's.

Here's a bit of bad news though for all of you waiting on another chapter in Lehane's crime series about Dorchester private eyes Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. It ain't happening. Lehane gets this question every single night on tour but had a bit of a different answer for the questioner last night. The standard answer is usually that the series was written by a younger man, and he touched on that aspect last night. And a little more.

"I've tried but they just won't come. And you know, I just got married this year, and she asked if Patrick was going to come back. I miss him, because I miss writing jokes and Patrick was really funny. And I really wanted to get this woman into bed so you know I tried but he just won't come. I'm sorry, but if Patrick won't come back for sex, I don't think he's coming back."

There's more good stuff about Dennis Lehane including video interviews, historical photos and the author's back catalogue at his official website. And Harper Collins also tells me there's a good healthy dose of the book online here.

UPDATE: Waste not, want not. For more on The Given Day, you can check out the newest issue of Bookslut (which was apparently delayed by technical difficulties and small fish), which features my latest column, "Dennis Lehane's Dirty Water." And if that's not enough, there's always Sarah Weinman's take in the LAT, or Janet Maslin's in the NYT. Now please, God, let me read something else.

Moving On

2008-08-05T08:57:00.002-05:00

For your reading pleasure while I'm away.

Wander on down the road to Bookslut and you'll find this month's contemplations on "Age, Wisdom and Treachery," or more specifically an inadequate but heartfelt salute to George Carlin and a passing nod to James Lee Burke and Lawrence Block's latest anti-mysteries.

And over at Kirkus Reviews, you can peruse some of the more eclectic (read: not hyped into the stratosphere already) choices from the Fall fiction and nonfiction catalogs in the Fall Preview Special. My entries included a nice correspondence with David Liss about lawyers, guns, revolutionaries, whiskey and his new novel, The Whiskey Rebels, and with marketing professor Don Thompson about The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, in which he dissects the mass appetite for modern art and the weird mechanics that drive the auction market.

I'm also about hip-deep in Dennis Lehane's magnum opus The Given Day and will report back on the Boston-based author's achievement if it doesn't get me first. I also suspect that if you wander over to the Rocky Mountain News books section in the next week or two, you'll find my feature review of Christopher Buckley's new comedy Supreme Courtship.

But I won't be around to walk you through it. Bang! will be offline for a few weeks while I relocate the lair back where it belongs.

The Spoken Word

2008-07-14T12:38:00.007-05:00

Apparently, it's a banner day for publication over here where we're cooking up book reviews.

If you're the sort to curse the day Henry Ford was ever born as you sit and stew and burn four dollar-per-gallon gas - or you're simply an Ipod addict like the rest of us - you might get a few good ideas for entertainment from the new Kirkus Audiobooks Special.

For my part, I had the novel pleasure of writing the included feature review with the great expatriate humorist David Sedaris, who talked, among other subjects, about the eccentricities of life in London and Paris, the absurdities of reading out loud to hundreds of bookstore patrons, and the recording of his audiobook, about which I'll give this little unpublished tidbit.

"We were going to this studio in Soho and even when I was walking from my house in London and getting on the tube and going to Soho, I’d look around and think, 'Look at us all, going to work. A train full of people going to work.' It felt so good because I felt a part of it in a way that I normally don’t. I take the train but maybe I’m going to the movies or down to Selfridge’s but I’m not going to work usually, not in the traditional sense. I’m not going to work with everybody else. I miss that. I miss feeling a part of things. "

Elsewhere in the special you'll find me chatting with Dean Koontz about his Odd Thomas series, quizzing the smart-as-a-whip Kate Reading about occupying Stephenie Meyer's alien beings, and talking with James Patterson and his narrator Ellen Archer (the voice of Ambien!) about Sundays at Tiffany's. I also wrote the spotlight feature on Stephen King's super-creepy novella The Gingerbread Girl but horrors, the novelist was traveling and unavailable for questions, as was his superb narrator, Mare Winningham.

Elsewhere in the issue, thrillers and mysteries are well represented with entries from David Baldacci, Harlan Cohen, Janet Evanovich, and Stuart Woods. Lend an ear.

Doc Savage, Eat Your Heart Out

2008-07-14T08:29:00.003-05:00

So if you were lucky, you grew up on beaten-up copies of paperback pulp fiction (think old Conan novels, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Doc Savage, and a host of melodramatic imitators). If you're that kid at heart, this news from Charles Ardai at Hard Case should make your ears perk right up.

New York (July 14, 2008) – Charles Ardai, Edgar Award-winning author and creator of the acclaimed pulp mystery series Hard Case Crime, today announced a new series of pulp novels scheduled to debut in the summer of 2009: The Adventures of Gabriel Hunt. Featuring painted covers in the grand pulp tradition by artist Glen Orbik, the series will chronicle the travels and travails of modern-day explorer Gabriel Hunt, who scours the globe in pursuit of precious artifacts, lost civilizations, and secrets that could save the world…or destroy it.

These books are for anyone who grew up reading H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs or watching Harrison Ford wield his bullwhip at the movies,” said Ardai. “We’re talking classic adventure fiction, complete with horses, snakes, shovels, pickaxes, torches, traps, bottomless pits, barroom brawls, jungles, jewels, and just about everything else that’s ever made your heart beat faster.”

Authorship of each book will be credited to Gabriel Hunt himself, with the hands behind the Hunt nom-de-plume scheduled to include some of Hard Case Crime’s most popular authors. The first title is due to hit bookstores in May 2009, with subsequent titles following every other month. Readers eager to get a glimpse of Gabriel Hunt in action can visit www.HuntForAdventure.com, where one of Orbik’s paintings depicts the hero in a characteristic moment of peril.

Like Hard Case Crime before it, the Gabriel Hunt series is a true labor of love,” said Ardai. “Everyone working on it is doing so with a wild gleam in the eye and the gas pedal pressed to the floor, and the result is the sort of exultant seat-of-the-pants storytelling that makes you feel 14 years old all over again.” Gabriel Hunt’s initial adventures are expected to take him to Borneo, Guatemala, Turkey, Egypt, Antarctica, and the Kalahari Desert

Thrillers Unbound

2008-07-14T07:56:00.003-05:00

Well, I'm told that the Rocky Mountain News' new all-thriller section hit print over the weekend. It's a pretty exciting bunch of books, too, including an exclusive interview with Daniel Silva as well as pulse-pounding rundowns of new books by James Lee Burke, Ridley Pearson, Christopher Reich, and Lisa Gardner. It's a great section but I drew the short straw this time. If you dare, you can read my fair warning to avoid Stephen L. Carter's new historical Palace Council, which is a drag by any standards. I know he wrote The Emperor of Ocean Park and it seemed pretty hefty. Stop it. Put down. Walk away now.

Back to plotting my next move. As you were.

Gravitas

2008-06-30T14:50:00.001-05:00

Enjoy a little film from the other strange side of my freelancing life. I wrote these tributes to aviation legends for one of my publications late last year. I had heard that they had gotten Morgan Freeman to read them for an event but I hadn't actually gotten to hear him read my writing until now.

A Cool World

2008-06-18T08:31:00.006-05:00

What better way to celebrate a sunny Wednesday (it's the day that new comic books hit the shelves, you Philistine) than to pop over to Kirkus and read the new 2008 Graphic Spotlight. For my part, I got to interview some very cool purveyors of the graphic arts including Mike Mignola, the creator of Hellboy; Max Brooks, who gave us World War Z and the Zombie Survival Guide; historian Todd DePastino, who has curated a terrific new collection of the WWII cartoons of Bill Mauldin; and Takashi Okazaki, the gifted manga artist whose twisted mind launched Afro Samurai. Oh, and Dean Koontz, talking about some bloke named Odd Thomas.

The rest of the special is well worth delving into, too. Other spotlights include interviews with Lynda Barry, Jeffrey Brown, Scott McCloud, Art Spiegelman, Bryan K. Vaughan. And Method Man. Can't forget Method Man, man.

As a little treat before lunch, here's a little bigger look at the cover of The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks.

Death And All His Friends

2008-06-18T08:00:00.006-05:00

I should probably be ashamed of myself for cribbing a title from the new Coldplay album but it was just too appropriate for these reviews to pass up. I nearly forgot to mention that I had two reviews in the Spotlight section of Friday's Rocky Mountain News.

The more well-known title is probably David Guterson's new novel, The Other, which I've given the brief once-over to here. You can also read my equally brief exchange with the author over at the Kirkus BEA/ALA Guide, but I'll reproduce it here for the sake of continuity.

Kirkus proclaimed that David Guterson outdistances the long shadow of his bestseller Snow Falling on Cedars (1994) with The Other. Through thoughtful deliberation and a heartbreaking denouement, it follows narrator Neil Countryman’s endeavor to define himself via his friendship with fortunate son John William Barry. “It’s the story of two friends who share an avid interest in the outdoors,” says Guterson. “With time, they go their separate ways, one into a very conventional life, and the other becoming increasingly hermetic, to the point where he isolates himself in the forests of Washington State. Yet the friendship remains intact and yields surprising results for both men.” The novel draws parallels to works as diverse as Thoreau’s Walden and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, but Guterson was more inspired by reclusive poet Emily Dickinson as well as his own deep regard for the Pacific Northwest. “I was interested in that question of the role of ‘the other’ in one’s life and the way that concept might be embodied not only in someone else but also in the way we carry the other inside of us as a shadow our whole lives,” he says. Even Barry’s notoriety as “the hermit of the Hoh” can’t overwhelm Countryman’s (and the author’s) obvious passion for their native territory. “Psychically, I think it’s true that home is a place that gets under your skin,” says Guterson. “I can’t help feeling a powerful connection to this place no matter where I go in life.”

I've also written another brief review of debut author Nam Le's powerful little book of short stories, The Boat, which appears in the same issue. Between this book and Dead Boys I'm going to have to give some more thought to the possibilities of short fiction. In any case, this guy is somebody to keep an eye on.

Deep Blue Hero

2008-06-16T07:38:00.005-05:00

Funny how much weird information about a project you can gather if you start turning over stones.

Via The Rap Sheet and In Reference To Murder comes news via The Hollywood Reporter that director Gary Fleder (Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead) is in talks to direct a film adaptation of John D. MacDonald's novel The Deep Blue Good-By featuring errant knight Travis McGee.

Although you do have to take film media with a grain of salt. Like this gem, from the PR bite. "MacDonald, who wrote the novel on which both "Cape Fear" movies are based, is seen as a predecessor to Carl Hiaasen and other darkly comic crime novelists." Right. Predecessor. Idiots.

This is not terribly exciting news, given this is the guy who also gave us Kiss The Girls (not that a Patterson film was going to blow anybody's skirt up) and Runaway Jury but he did shoot an episode of The Shield and some other halfway decent television work.

Meanwhile back in the world of print, Entertainment Weekly has a little blurb about the project in this week's issue. "Robert Downey Jr. is being courted by studios that want to help him sustain his much-heralded comeback. Following his role in the year's highest-grossing movie (Iron Man), he's one again on their must-have list. In recent weeks, the 43-year-old actor has had his eye on various projects, including Twentieth Century Fox's Travis McGee (based on John D. MacDonald's detective series), Warner Bros.' Sherlock Holmes update from director Guy Ritchie, Gary Ross' fantasy/comedy Dog Years at Universal and Brett Ratner's Hugh Hefner biopic, among others."

Realize, too, that this is the third go-round for McGee. As recently as 1983, McGee came to the small screen in a television adaptation of The Empty Copper Sea with Sam Elliot, of all people, as old Trav and television staple Gene Evans as Meyer. McGee's first outing was in 1970's Darker Than Amber with Aussie actor Rod Taylor in the lead role and Theodore Bikel as his philosophical sounding board.

Maybe the third time's the charm.

Postcards From The End of the World

2008-06-02T14:23:00.010-05:00

Okay, after an all-too-short break at the other end of America, I think I've got my head screwed back on straight enough to catch up a little.

First of all, there's a new column at Bookslut, where you can find my addle-minded ramblings on beach books and gets some suggestions for some decent, if eclectic, summer choices. The list includes hot comic book writer of the moment Duane-how-the-hell-do-you-say-Swierczynski-anyway, who gives us a whole new take on office politics in Severance Package; the vastly underrated Don Winslow, who contributes the bitterly cool surf noir The Dawn Patrol; the return of Elvis Cole in Chasing Darkness by Robert Crais; and the upcoming comedy by Adam Davies, Mine All Mine, which gives emotional security a whole new interpretation.

Elsewhere in the issue, Mark Doten talks to the lovely and talented Rivka Galchen about her rabbit hole of a debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances while Collen Mondor goes down a more historical road in her YA column. In reviews, you can sample a hit of ecstasy, get graphic with Freddie Mercury, or sample this year's O. Henry Prize-winning stories.

Over at Kirkus Reviews, the annual Graphic Literature Special has some very cool selections this year and was a hell of a lot of fun to write, but it isn't quite ready for its debut yet this month. In the meantime, you can browse the new guide to the big books being showcased as we speak at Book Expo America and the American Library Association, including my own interviews with novelist David Guterson (The Other) and war historian Alex Kershaw (Escape From The Deep) as well as spotlights on new titles by Dennis Lehane, Michael Connelly, Lewis Black and America's last combat reporter, Richard Engel. I was lucky enough to lay mitts on the new Lehane myself and will report back from the battle lines when the time is right.

I've been mostly in absentia where books and other mediums are concerned but here's a few items from the culture trenches to pass the time.

First, congratulations go out to two of my favorite addictions, Sarah Weinman and The Rap Sheet for their Anthony Award nominations for best web site and in Sarah's case, another nod for Special Services. Right on.

At the Los Angeles Times, John Cusack holds forth on War, Inc., a satire of combat and corporate America that seems like it should be great but isn't holding much critical ground. I still think the world would have been better served by a Martin Blank sequel, and God knows Cusack looks the part to this day, but what the hell do I know?

In other film news, I think I'm the last one to realize that Lawrence Block scripted the Wong Kar Wai's film Blueberry Nights. In a nice bit of alchemy, Buffalo's ArtVoice takes a taciturn interview and turns it into a thing of substance.

There's obviously something bent about the cinematic adapation of Greg Rucka's Whiteout but whatever it is hasn't made itself apparent yet. But the film does, finally, have a release date.

The Guardian digested read does not bode well for the new James Bond book, Devil May Care: "James Bland trudged round St Peter's Square in Rome."

And finally, you can find all the BEA news from Los Angeles (where all the publicists of the writers I'm currently chasing are hiding from my phone calls) over at GalleyCat, but I think I prefer the authors' perspective best, where you can find Neil Gaiman getting cozy with Judy Blume and Christopher Moore tilting his head at nervous-looking thrillerists and convincing famous guitarists to sign strange things.

Men In Black Hats

2008-05-05T12:48:00.006-05:00

It's a one-two punch of detective fiction at Bookslut this month. For starters, you can peruse my decidedly retro-oriented column this month with the overly wordy title, "Turn Off, Tune Out, Drop Dead." A title which, come to think of it, won't make any sense whatsoever to anybody under the age of 20 without a working knowledge of Tom Wolfe or Ken Kesey. But irrelevant asides aside, it delves into a fistful of new crime novels set in those heady days before technology got the best of us.

In another terrific and well-thought-out column, the talented Colleen Mondor also gives us a rundown on "Kid P.I.," taking on crackerjack mysteries (starring protagonists who probably still eat Cracker Jack, actually).

In my last stab for the month at black hat fiction, the Rocky Mountain News has my featured review on the sophmore western by Leif Enger, the bestselling author of book club favorite Peace Like A River. Dubbed "The new pulp Western," by my gifted editor, the review gives a nicely rounded and complimentary take on So Brave, Young and Handsome.

As you were.

Meanwhile, Down On The Lower East Side

2008-03-03T15:31:00.006-05:00

...and so you may have noticed I was gone for a while. An aforementioned crisis decided to relaunch itself as a full-on volcanic relapse last month, necessitating my presence in other places in the meantime. So.

But I haven't been resting on my laurels. Here's a few reviews and stories to catch up to where we were before things went all to hell.

For starters, there's the Kirkus Reviews Mystery and Thrillers Special, now available to download in Acrobat/PDF format. You can check out my feature on Tom Cain's The Accident Man and an interview with literary novelist-not-a-crime-author-dammit Richard Price as well as sneak peeks at new titles by Lee Child, Benjamin Black, George Pelacanos and other usual suspects.

In the interest of waste not, want not, I've also utilized the surplus of my conversation with the author of Lush Life into this month's mystery column, "Richard Price and the Lush Life," now available at Bookslut.

As an aside, I discovered quite by accident that somebody must be reading the column each month. I was reading the new issue of Entertainment Weekly on Friday, enjoying their lead critic Jennifer Reese's similarly-minded take on Lush Life and found one of my interviews quoted in the sidebar. An odd moment, to say the least.

I'll also have my own review up eventually at the Rocky Mountain News, but in the meantime, you can go to their characteristically eclectic books section to find my short review of Charles Baxter's new mind-melter The Soul Thief as well as several stories on the upcoming Left Coast Crime conference in Denver and an interview with guest of honor Stephen White.

I'm taking a month off from Bookslut to catch my breath, but should return to form in April to launch year four of this babbling sideline of mine.

Beautiful Children

2008-02-01T11:39:00.001-05:00

I'm preoccupied with other more important things, to my dismay, but enjoy today's review of the super-hyped debut novel from Las Vegas novelist Charles Bock. My review of Beautiful Children appears in the spotlight section of today's Rocky Mountain News. And you might as well read the NYT profile of the author that's got the book world all a-twitter. And it is actually worth a visit to the book's creepy official site, where you can enjoy some West Coast punk rock tunes that inspired its creation.

At the Rocky, There's also a nice feature review by Jenny Shanks of Russell Banks' new book, The Reserve, as well.

The Wire, Breathlessly

2008-01-21T13:59:00.001-05:00

So it turns out that Barack Obama's favorite television show is The Wire, which lends itself to all kinds of odd insights. I'm a little cool myself, having just gone toe-to-toe with one of its screenwriters, but here's a quick-and-dirty way to catch up before it all comes to an end this season.

Show Me What You're Made Of.

2007-12-27T11:27:00.000-05:00

Here's a confession that should come as no suprise to anyone. I hate all this confectionary end-of-year content that's slathered across every magazine, every television program, every possible entertainment delivery venue this time of year. Endless warmed-over remembrances of the marginally criminal offenses of teen pop princesses, eye-blink remembrances of the dead and half-hearted lists of books or movies that most people never delved into in the first place, punctuated by brain-reducing weight-loss advertisements don't interest me in the slightest. It's over. Moving on.

Every once in a while you'll get a decent attempt at revisitation without nostalgic rose-colored rubbish. Those of you wanting a second crack at 2007 might take a minute to peruse the Kirkus "Best Books of '07" special, currently available as a PDF file here. I always admire that the publication takes the time to go back and give a nod to books that maybe didn't get fully recognized the first time around. I had the interesting opportunity to talk with three distinctly divergent authors. Greg Behrman gave me the lowdown on his gripping historical reconsideration of The Marshall Plan, The Most Noble Adventure. Debut novelist Wayne Caldwell took me back to the rural savagery of North Carolina's mountain folk in Cataloochee. And French novelist Christian Oster delivered some rather esoteric observations about drink, death and the perils of life in The Unforeseen.

Plenty of other trippy selections lie within, and not a whiff of brownnosing Denis Johnson to be found. (Not to knock the novelist, who's terrific, but I'm sick of the dogpiling of acclaim from publications who seem to have perfect hindsight now that Tree of Smoke is a big, fat success).

I'm also digging David J. Montgomery's year-end project over at his eminently readable Crime Fiction Dossier. David has splayed open his rolodex, apparently, and asked a plethora of crime novelists, agents, publishers and other malcontents to name their three favorite books from 2007. A very cool, open-ended question as the books don't have to fall within our beloved genre or even have been published this year.

There's plenty of good crime fiction fodder including a lot of love heaped on James Lee Burke, Lee Child and Charlie Huston, among others. But it's the left-field choices that are fascinating me so far. Check out David Morrell revealing his newfound love of flight; Bourne inheritor Eric Von Lustbader getting all teary-eyed over Eat, Pray, Love, Robert Crais echoing my own newfound fondness for King progeny Joe Hill's immensely creepy book of short stories Heart-Shaped Box; and Charles Ardai putting the spurs to Elise Blackwell's acid remake, Grub. I was pleased to see one of my own choices, Dead Boys, was given high praise by no less than George Pelacanos, who calls it, "the best short story collection I've read in years."

I wasn't asked, but I'm willing to play. I don't keep too many of my affections for books to myself, so naturally most of these titles have made it into my Bookslut columns.

Dead Boys by Richard Lange. The real deal. The most startling debut fiction I've read in a decade.
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. Other critics seem to love or hate this book with equal passion but I thought it was an immensely gripping setup and a preturnaturally unusual debut novel.
Blonde Faith by Walter Mosley. If Walter never writes another word about Easy Rawlins and his bloody soulmate, I would be perfectly satisfied with the ten books in his series and its awful, elegant denouement.

It's deathly quiet right now, as Jessa notes: "All that's really left on the Internets are lists of authors that died, bad Best of the Year lists, and YouTube videos of pandas." But here's a couple of other items of interest to pass the time until Amateur Night on Monday.

It looks like Mosley is branching out even further with a three-book deal at Riverhead and a new series starring New York private eye Leonid McGill from last year's short story, "Karma."

January Magazine is doing the best-of thing in a more thoughtful fashion with its own rundown of the year's best crime fiction.

I'm ambivelent about running down the death queue but I'm always fascinated by Larry Kirwan's star-studded remembrances of the lions of the New York arts and music scenes. Here, he remembers getting cozy with Norman Mailer by fixing the man's Porsche.

Enough of you. I'm going back to performing linguistic surgery on a sticky interview with a fêted but brutally brusque novelist and then it's a stiff drink and about ninety-seven hours of film class by watching the newly released five-disc version of Blade Runner.

Too bad she won't live...

She's Just A Little Tease

2007-12-11T13:45:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure the graphic here does the column justice but if you wander over to Bookslut, you can read my latest mutterings, "Books For Dangerous Women," which lands a few well-deserved blows aimed at those Dangerous Book knock-offs currently wasting space on bookstore shelves, gives a little tease of a newly minted female noir anthology, and points hard-hearted readers towards a few other femme fatales lurking in the mystery section.

It's a little light this month owing to the holidays but the issue also contains a pair of nice pieces by the effusive Colleen Mondor, a look at the highly praised new graphic novel Shooting War by Jeff Vandermeer and a shootout between Gourmet and Bon Appetit, no less. I imagine hurled cutlery and bloodsoaked aprons, but it's probably just me.

Bulletin ends. As you were.

Money Shot Aims to Please

2007-12-04T14:48:00.001-05:00

How did I miss this when I was trolling around for column fodder related to femme fatale-specific noir novels last week? Run off to the Rap Sheet to get the full story but here you can enjoy the delicious DIY trailer for Christa Faust's debut novel for Hard Case Crime, "Money Shot." Yowza.

War, Inc.

2007-12-03T16:29:00.001-05:00

It should be interesting to see how this comes off. Cusack is usually worth watching, especially playing off his wacky sister. But something about this revisit-the-hitman role is sounding an off note. Time will tell.

Fear and Loathing

2007-12-03T14:49:00.000-05:00

I'm currently plumbing the depths of an entertaining but somewhat intellectually heavyweight volume on mathematical probability. You'll have to excuse me while I take a break to unload some of the accumulating reading material here at Bang!.

First of all, let's ponder this headline from the Sunday Times, an article that as far as I know hasn't even so much as earned a blink here on our side of the pond: "US says it has right to kidnap British citizens." You hear that, you cockney bastards? Better stay on the right side of Uncle Sam's naughty or nice list or we're sending Jack Bauer in with the full weight and authority of the well-defined and morally unambiguous (snicker) U.S. legal system to kidnap your grungy-toothed ass and drag it back to the land of milk and numerous prisons, bounty-hunter style, dog. He's bringing a lamp. Hide your nipples now.

Christ. Some days I wish someone from England would come kidnap me. "An American writer was subdued and brought back to London by a crack strike team from the Special Air Service. Once he stopped his whiny prattling, he was promptly served tea and crumpets and settled in nicely as an offbeat but tax-contributing member of British society." You hear that, Gordon? Come and get me. I could be a panelist on the News Quiz and get paid in pounds worth like, seven dollars apiece . That would be terrible punishment. Teach me a right lesson, that would.

I'm not the only cynic, it seems. Back in frigid Edinburgh, our man Ian Rankin is causing a minor stir. It seems he told a German newspaper - say it isn't so! - that governments use fear to manipulate their own people: "The fear of terrorism helps to keep the population under control," he said. "That is very useful for politicians, but no one actually needs that. First of all we had the Soviet Union, and we were all scared that they were going to attack us all with atomic bombs. When the Berlin Wall fell, everything looked OK for about five minutes. And all of a sudden we now have other wars there, such as climate change, terrorism. All these fears are being used to keep us in our places."

God, I'm depressed now. On with the news.

The devoted editors at the Rocky Mountain News are doing the best books for your bibliophile relatives thing, too. Because they're kind enough to employ me from time to time, Richard Lange is on that list. Give a copy of Dead Boys to Aunt Gertie, for chrissakes. She could use a little more graphic content in her life.

Also at the Times is a short but elegant profile of Mr. Donald E. Westlake, who is also sometimes the snarling crime novelist Richard Stark. “Parker came back to say: ‘I'm older than you but I'm still smarter than you. I'm better than you, faster than you and I'm still prettier than you.'”

At the Telegraph, Jake Kerridge drills down a nice list of the best crime novels to buy for your loved ones for Christmas. You know, for the ones you love that find themselves enflamed by tales of murder, autopsies, alcoholic Scottish misanthropes or, say, great bloody theoretical sharks.

Sarah has been murderously prolific lately. Check out her toast to alcoholic misanthropes at the Los Angeles Times and her newest thoughts on a subject close to my heart, murder in exotic places, in "Have Gun, Will Travel."

Good news from the virtual trenches: Plots With Guns is coming back to life in the new year.

I'm trying desperately to find a way to get rid of books before I wind up buried under them, wild dogs gnawing at my cheekbones, so I need to make a trip into the city. Somewhere out there is Kate's Mystery Bookshop, who is having a special Edgar Award visited upon it. This place bears investigation.

And finally, CommanderBond.net has gotten a copy of the cover art for the new James Bond book. No one has taken any notice of the oddly phrased credit, "Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming." I wonder why that is. Oh, that's right. Nipples ahoy! You people are so easily amused.

There you go. That should keep you busy for a few minutes. Bookslut column in a few days. Bunch of hot chicks in it, swear to God. You savages.

Crash and Burn

2007-11-30T16:56:00.000-05:00

Well, damn. If Evel Knievel can kick the bucket, we're all in a lot of trouble.

Now what the hell did I do with my Daredevil Stunt Set? That was a great toy, back in the days when Chinese plastic didn't set off some kind of international incident every time one of these waterheaded modern-day youngsters gets the bright idea to wolf down a Transformer inbetween bouts of perpetual media barbardment.

Ah, well. It's a little quiet right now but I'll try to gather more thoughts on murder and mayhem after the frigid weekend.

See you on the other side of the Snake River Canyon.

Heh.

2007-11-26T14:48:00.000-05:00

Tilda Swinton and The Raw Shark Texts

2007-11-20T15:23:00.001-05:00

I hadn't realized this short film was out already (and I'm told may disappear at any moment) but enjoy Tilda Swinton reading from our boy Steven Hall's remarkable debut novel The Raw Shark Texts.

Eavesdropping

2007-11-20T11:28:00.000-05:00

I'm preoccupied with an assignment that's requiring me to learn the modern history of Pakistan and a not-insignificant amount of information about nuclear proliferation, but I've decided to break radio silence before the American holiday to get rid of the idle links that are starting to stack up on my desktop like virtual cordwood. Peruse or ignore at your leisure.

CNN gives Walter Mosley the once-over about the end of the Easy Rawlins series. “I may be representative for somebody else, but not for me. I'm doing what I think is important. I love writing, and I write about black male heroes. I don't really want to write about anything else, so I don't." The Times reviews Blonde Faith and gets a tiny bit of self-inquisitive insight: “It could very well be that we critics fail to fully appreciate Mosley’s talents because his Rawlins mysteries appear to come off so effortlessly.” What? Writing might take work? Say it isn’t so.

Empire Magazine continues its much-appreciated month of crime with “The Wiliest Lawbreakers on Planet Film.”

I met Kurt Loder once, by accident, at some kind of post-Columbine event for teens in Denver. Always thought he was too thoughtful for MTV. But I suppose it gives him the opportunity to write things like this pensive review of Alan Moore’s new entry in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, Black Dossier. I was waiting for paperback but I think Loder’s recommendation has tipped the scales in favor of picking it up this week.

Following my adaptive theme as of late, The New Yorker has a very weird feature on “The Ten Videogames That Should Be Movies,” complete with a nod to Michael Gondry and a clip of the famous “Hot Coffee” sequence from Grand Theft Auto. Kind of racy for them, don’t you think?

Meta link of the day: USA Today has a short and uninformative article about books about books. Let me get this straight: the newspaper written for people who don’t read has an article about books about books that people don’t read. Right? Right.

On an offbeat, somewhat related note, I skimmed a few pages of the recently released The Bookaholic’s Guide To Book Blogs this weekend, which was a source of endless amusement. Bookslut is in there. Apparently for years, I’ve been writing “Riot Lit.” Who knew?

My brother (an equally loquacious sports fiend) might be the only one to appreciate the hilarity of this headline: “FOOTBALL + TERRORISM + SPIES = PULITZER!” Apparently Broncos kicker Jason Elam has teamed up with his pastor to write the future bestseller Monday Night Jihad. No, seriously.

Cracked used to be Mad Magazine’s retarded sibling but it seems to be having something of an renaissance online, as demonstrated by features like “The 5 Most Unintentionally Hilarious Comic Strips.”

Geek-out link of the day: A few years ago, I made a fascinating trip to Bletchley Park in England, recorded in a feature I wrote called “The Secrets of Station X.” While I was there, I met a quiet and unassuming gentleman named Tony Sale, who had spent the past decade of his life trying to rebuild the wildly inventive early computer called Colossus, which had been used to break the German “Enigma” codes in the worst days of World War II. I’ll be damned if he didn’t get the thing up and running.

And off-topic, I’m fascinated by this story about a P-38 Lightning that has turned up on the beach in Wales. Eerie photo. Very Clive Cussler, but in a good way.

Adaptations, Part Deux

2007-11-20T11:24:00.000-05:00

The first snow fell today, making it the kind of day you want to stay home and watch movies.

On that note, the Onion's A.V. Club, always a source of high praise, delivers a list of twenty-one books worthy of adaptation to film, which contains several odd but interesting choices. I think Jonathan Strange is utterly unfilmable but I could be wrong; some people say that about Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games and I think that would make an outstanding cop movie. People would be shoveling down popcorn for King Dork and World War Z, granted. But please don't invite me to see another bitter Cormac McCarthy adaptation or anything starring those freakish hobbits.

Surely we can do better than that. Here's my nominations for screen adaptation off the top of my head, ignoring books that have already been slated for production (Bangkok 8) or that have been simmering in movie purgatory for years (Ender's Game).

Miniseries: It will never get made because HBO's Rome has already stolen its thunder but I think Conn Iggulden's Emperor trilogy about Julius Caesar would have been tremendous. Starring Gerard Butler (300) as Caesar and Clive Owen as best bud Brutus. Also in this category would be an inspired adaptation of Charlie Huston's slow road to hell, the Henry Thompson trilogy, marking the former baseball player's escape with the Russian mafia's cash in Caught Stealing, his progression to becoming A Dangerous Man, and concluding with the violent denouement of Six Bad Things. Maybe you could do them as two hour films the way the British handle the Rebus novels.

Cinema, comedy category: The top of my own list will almost always include Hugh Laurie's The Gun Seller. Starring Paul Bettany as the Kawasaki-riding mercenary Thomas Lang. Laurie wrote a screenplay for the film for United Artists but whether it, like its theoretical follow-up The Paper Soldier, sees the light of day is anyone's guess.

Alternatively, I’d put good money down on a film of Night of the Avenging Blowfish by John Welter, starring a Grosse Point Blank-era John Cusack as beleaguered secret service agent Doyle Coldiron.

Cinema, crime: Hands down, Anthony Bourdain's vignettes of violence, redemption and cookery in Bobby Gold. The Open Critic thinks along the same lines. “The thought hits around page 75; Bobby Gold is perfect movie fodder….this collection of vignettes is perfect, each in their own low-life noir type of way. Jim Jarmusch would be a natural. Bobby Gold busting his uncle’s arm. The corpse in the bathroom. Nikki, tall and beautiful and sweaty at her chef station. They’re all cinematic. I’m guessing, Anthony Bourdain was seeing pictures in his head when he wrote this book.”

I’m having trouble picturing an actor in the role, though. Bobby’s a big dude, and you definitely need someone who pulls off that New York leather jacket, bone-breaking presence.

Cinema, uncategorizable: Anything by Warren Ellis. Hell, pick one. Transmetropolitan, which has reportedly been acquired by Patrick Stewart, who has made some noises about voicing the character as played by a virtual avatar. The debut novel, Crooked Little Vein, which would require a director with the visual acuity of Luc Besson, the temper of Sam Peckinpah, and the visceral sensibilities of David Fincher. Global Frequency even made it, briefly, as a television pilot and it’s still stunning to me that that idea – a global anti-terrorism force made up of whoever’s available at the time – didn’t pass muster.

Any other ideas? While you’re thinking, you can peruse these great fake movie posters by graphic artist Rob Kelly.

Adapt and Evolve

2007-11-06T16:26:00.000-05:00

Leave it to Sarah to tell me my new Mystery Strumpet column has gone live, which she deems has an "adaptive quality." Feel free to pop on over to Bookslut to read "Audio Slave," a not-entirely straightforward rundown of the crime genre's better recorded adaptations.

It includes my take on the audio-only serial novel The Chopin Manuscript, read for your pleasure by our man Alfred Molina. Yes, you know him from someplace. He's Doctor Octopus, among many better dramatic roles. More importantly, he's the man who will live forever in our hearts for nine breathless words: "You throw me the idol, I'll throw you the whip!" You can also get a more cautious second opinion on the audiobook from David Montgomery at the Chicago Sun-Times.

Meanwhile, the column also allows me a moment to flog the brilliant and impassioned human rights activist-slash-comedian Mark Thomas, and touches on the thespian performances of books by Elmore Leonard, John D. MacDonald and other usual suspects, with special appearances by Darrin McGavin, Henry Rollins, and Burt Reynolds.

In utterly unrelated work, I published an interesting article this month on the curious resurrection of Florence "Pancho" Barnes, the groundbreaking aviatrix and hooch-monger to test pilots and astronauts at the Happy Bottom Riding Club.

A few other items of note...

Denise Hamilton lent me better words than my own a few months ago when I was ruminating on Los Angeles in a Mystery Strumpet column. Today at LA Observed, she revisits her city's past with Judith Freeman, the author of the new literary hybrid The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved. They walk the city in a fascinating slice-of-life piece that attempts to conjure up the departed writer and his somewhat mysterious spouse.

I work for the other guys, but it's worth glancing at Publishers Weekly's "Best Books of the Year" list (although it seems awfully damned early to go to press with it already). There's a few truly great novelists on the list (Mohsin Hamid, Denis Johnson) but it feels like a soft list to me. I'll give you The Collaborator of Bethlehem as one of the year's best books period, and I'm glad to see Charles Ardai on the mystery list, but that Ruth Rendell title is about as thrilling as watching grass grow and putting James Lee Burke and a ton of other crime/mystery/thriller writers in with the big kids in the general fiction category doesn't suddenly make them Graham Greene.

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is reporting that the idiots prosecuting comics shop owner Gordon Lee (arrested for giving away an artsy-fartsy comic book by the gifted Nick Bertozzi depicting Picasso in the buff) blew their prosecutorial advantage already. It's a mistrial.

And someone in London thinks they've captured an image of the illusive graffiti artist known as "Banksy." Flower power, man.

You Think I'm Dead

2007-11-02T14:37:00.000-05:00

…but I sailed away, on a wave of mutilation. I’ve been away on a mission of dire importance, hence no fuel for the fire. But I’m back in the lair, caffeined up, and ready to dance for your entertainment like some kind of Ebola-infected monkey raised by his malevolent circus masters to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting public. Hit it.

If you open up today’s Rocky Mountain News (virtually, of course; why on earth would anyone buy a newspaper when you can just read TMZ for free?), you’ll find my brief review of Dr. Robert Greer’s new CJ Floyd mystery, The Mongoose Deception. To his credit, Greer is swinging for the rafters here with a seriously complex, brain-pounding conspiracy that starts with a dead guy in Colorado’s Eisenhower Tunnel and quickly sends Floyd and his posse chasing no less than JFK’s killers. I think he's done better work but kudos to him for mixing it up.

What is it about the Eisenhower Tunnel anyway? The tunnel also figures largely in the denouement of Stephen White’s ice-dry Kill Me from last year. I used to live in Colorado. It’s a hole in a mountain. It’s not that exciting in real life. Maybe to Hitchcock, but what does he know?

Elsewhere in our slowly decaying semi-blue sphere…

Before I forget (for the American readers, mostly), the September issue of Empire Magazine is on newsstands now at the bigger box stores. Two words: kicks ass. Dubbed “The Crime Issue,” it features interviews with all the principals on American Gangster, reports on No Country For Old Men and the splendid Eastern Promises, and a brilliant deconstruction of Michael Mann’s Heat. It’s pricey but after the slow death of Premiere magazines, it’s the best ten bucks you’ll spend this month, I swear to God.

Online, Empire runs down the five writers who have had the most influence on the crime film: Doyle, Hammett, Chandler, natch, but also James Ellroy (who should puff up like a blowfish at the very mention of his name, as usual) and, in a surprising and dead-on final choice, Patricia Highsmith.

At the Philly Inquirer, David Montgomery celebrates the remarkable “last entry” in the Easy Rawlins series, Blonde Faith. On that same note, Walter Mosley gives a short but characteristically well-composed interview to the Miami New Times. You can get my take on what is possibly Mosley's best work in the most recent Mystery Strumpet column at Bookslut.

The Rap Sheet runs down all the news that’s fit to print about Elmore Leonard and his lovely new bound version of his Rules for Writing. It includes, no less, a hand-typed interview with the author passed down via his publicist, which is kind of weird considering that while he doesn’t use a computer, he does have a phone. And a lovely speaking voice, if I may add.

I’m soft on the humor of The Onion, but their A.V. Club interviews are outstanding. There’s a nice one this month with Peter Dinklage, who is slated to star as Mongo the Magnificent in a film version of George C. Chesbro’s An Affair of Sorcerers. More on the lost classics featuring Chesbro’s ferocious dwarf at Bookslut.

As I’ve indicated before, I think John Burdett’s Bangkok novels are wildly underrated. The International Herald Tribune did a terrific interview with the author in which it’s also revealed that the film adaptation of Bangkok 8 will be directed by James McTeigue (V For Vendetta).

Finally, there are things in the world that don’t involve guns, puzzles and other hard-boiled components.

Stephen King reviews Eric Clapton’s autobiography and invents a new literary term: drunkalogue. You’ll want to add that to your dictionary now.

At the Los Angeles Times, RJ Smith kicks the corpse of Gram Parsons in a really sad, caustic review of David Meyer’s The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music that is less of a critical drubbing than a microwave reheating. Get over the Nudie suit already.

Slate runs down the best books we never read.

David Sedaris is doing his thing in Boston tonight at the Symphony Hall. (Remember when authors used to come speak for free? And bring those things, what were they called again? Oh, yes. Books.) The Chicago Tribune interviews him about quitting smoking, the New Republic nonsense, and applying for British citizenship (Now there’s an idea).

Finally, check out this great letter to the editor. The brightest minds of Charleston, West Virginia have elected, in their inbred wisdom, to ban the great works of Pat Conroy (specifically The Prince of Tides and Beach Music). Pat’s not happy, nor should he be. Idiots like those shouldn’t be allowed around perfectly good children.

And if that isn’t enough to rattle your faith in mankind, I’ll leave you with the history of earth in a roll of toilet paper. How poetically appropriate.

I’m going to the movies for about nineteen hours in a row. Don’t wait up.

The Book of Norman

2007-10-19T15:43:00.000-05:00

This was a little out of my comfort zone, but in today's Rocky Mountain News, you can find my take on Norman Mailer's very suddenly released book, On God. Subtitled "An Uncommon Conversation," the book features conversations about faith, God and the Devil himself between Mr. Mailer and Michael Lennon, the author's 'literary executor" (and I have no clue what function that means).

While I think the review is fair, I'll be the first to admit that it's something of a softball pitch and probably far from the critical drubbing he'll get from, say, the Times. After all, Norman has never been the least contentious writer in the world and once called its most prominent book critic, "a one-woman kamikaze."

That said, asking me to give my full attention a book about religion is like being asked to choose between two doors marked "things you don't care about," and "more." The book is, as indicated above, the gnostic-leaning contemplations of Mailer, left to his own devices out there on the end of Cape Cod, staring at the sea. A personal cosmology, if you will, no twist.

For a different approach, you can also check out David Ulin's take at the L.A. Times. "God, however, is a more amorphous concept, and Mailer's inability to deal with that condemns 'On God' to failure by closing the book to the vagaries of faith."

The guy's under the weather, too, I'm sorry to report.

In other news, there's a new interview with Richard Lange over at Things I'd Rather Be Doing.

By way of Neil Gaiman, I've spent the morning memorizing Carny Lingo.

I'm also engaged in memorializing World War II flying ace Tex Hill, who passed away last week.

And to kick off your weekend, here's a website dedicated to the photos and videos of iconoclast Allison Jackson. Jackson, you'll recall, is the British photographer who uses celebrity lookalikes to create some very disturbing fake images of celebs at their worst moments. It's kind of like US magazine, only with satiric and artistic value. Not, as they say, safe for work.

One More Rider

2007-10-11T14:41:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure how many mystery fans this will appeal to but I know plenty of crime buffs who like to settle in with a good Steve McQueen movie every now and again, be it Bullitt or The Great Escape or that Peckinpah classic The Getaway.McQueen was close friends with a hotshot motorcycle racer and stuntman named Bud Ekins. It was famously *not* Steve McQueen who made the 65-foot motorcycle jump pictured to the left, but instead his mate Bud Ekins, who performed the first $1,000 stunt in the history of the movie business.

Bud was inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 1999. And he died on Sunday, at the age of 77.

You can read a very well-written obituary at the Times here, and an interesting latter-day interview with Ekins here. It's also worth looking at Bud's entry at the Motorcycle Hall of Fame.

For an interesting look at the world that McQueen and Ekins ran in during the 1950s and 60s, you can read my interview with another Motorcycle Hall of Fame inductee, Ed Kretz, Jr., here. Ed was friends with James Dean, McQueen, Ekins, and many other hell-raisers of the day, and drove McQueen's motorcycle in the 1965 International Six-Day Trials on the Isle of Man.
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On a brighter note, it's Elmore Leonard's 82nd birthday. Happy Birthday, Dutch. You don't look a day over completely cool.

You can read a mostly unpublished interview with hisself about his latest novel, Up In Honey's Room, here. It's also worth noting that a nifty little hardback edition of Elmore's 10 Rules For Writing will be published by William Morrow on October 23.

See you on the other side of the fence.

Karma Slap

2007-10-08T14:29:00.000-05:00

The new issue of Bookslut is up, containing yet another scintillating Mystery Strumpet column written by your unforgiving host. This month, we turn with baleful eye to the topic of revenge in "The Payback," a rumination on karmic chameleons, ice-cold reprisals and the odd justifiable retribution, inspired by the title track from the 1974 James Brown double album and not the movie, thank you very much. The column considers the roots and consequences of bloody vengeance and more importantly recommends the fictional settling of scores in new books by Walter Mosley, Kevin Wignall, Tom Piccirilli and Chelsea Cain.

Elsewhere in the issue, Colleen Mondor indulges her love for all things Bradbury in "October Country," Melissa Lion debates whether Mario Batali is just one of a host of "Prissy Little Bitches" of the culinary world, Eryn Loeb takes on Susan Faludi's "The Terror Dream," and Liz Miller puts out the call for "Young Adult Adaptation Anguish". There's also other stuff, not least an interview with the celebrated Shalom Auslander about his new novel, and a rather disappointed review of Douglas Coupland's latest satire.

Elsewhere in the literary universe...

Susanna Clarke (Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell) must be feeling much more sprightly these days, I'm very happy to see. She recently did a Q&A in London with Neil Gaiman and now she interviews Alan Moore for The Telegraph.

Here's a student project worth mentioning. A graduate student in the Netherlands has created a very cool videogame featuring full-motion video, a futuristic detective-ish storyline filmed in black-and-white no less, and a distinctly noir sensibility. And, go figure, it's free. You can watch the trailer for "Fate By Numbers" and download the game here.

Finally, in other science fiction news, I'm a little suprised to report that the planned film version of the classic John Carter novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs have gained significant ground with the announcement that they'll be produced - wait for it - by Pixar as a live-action project. I personally would have started with the Venus series, as Carson Napier and the pirate sensibilities and devious traps (the dreaded Room of the Seven Doors) always seemed more ripe for cinematic translation. Is Kerry Conran still on this thing?

Subversives

2007-10-03T14:18:00.000-05:00

I bear two recommendations from current reading, one well outside my realm of experience and the other soundly within.

I finally managed to ‘obtain’ a copy of Wall and Piece by the obsessively anonymous (which is not the same as reclusive, in this particular case) British artist known far and wide as Banksy. His art is well-known and for further examples, you can start by visiting the artist’s web site, although whether it’s really his website or if he makes any contribution to it is anyone’s guess. The copyright page of his book reads “Copyright is for losers ©™,” if that gives you any insight into his attitude towards ownership.

I knew his work in London before I knew that he was becoming a big deal in the art world, primarily because my own reaction towards it was so instantaneous. In 2003, I lived on the South Bank of the Thames and it seemed like his stencils were everywhere. A rat here. A monkey wearing a placard bearing “Keep it real.”

The night I saw a blow-up doll tethered to a balloon bearing the McDonald’s logo, floating ominously over the statue of Eros in the midst of Piccadilly circus and couldn’t decide whether it was a joke or not.

My own favorite image is this little girl that lived on a wall near the exit to London Bridge Station. I took this picture before I knew anything about its origins. Its parallel in the book is accompanied by a single white page that reads, “When the time comes to leave, just walk away quietly and don’t make any fuss.”

The art is well-recorded in the book but I’m surprised to find how insightful, caustic, and tentatively hopeful his writing is.

Yes, he pretty much calls for pretty much open warfare on the plague of corporate advertising (“Any advert in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.”). This, accompanied by the gagged and bound characters from a Disney film facing a head-cutter.

But more often, his messages are meant to impart a greater good on the world. (“I like to think I have the guts to stand up anonymously in a western democracy and call for things no-one else believes in – like peace and justice and freedom.”). This, accompanied by an image of a child hugging a bomb.

Graffiti has never been one of my creative impulses but I can see the attraction. Moreover, I like how Banky’s artwork has become part of London. Far from being an eyesore, it became, at least in my experience, the pleasant surprise of finding rats painted on walls and tunnels and other dead spaces all along my walk home from Waterloo to Borough High Street, each of them cutting locks, protesting vandalism, propping up brellys or plotting other minor crimes and misdemeanors.

“I’d been painting rats for three years before someone said, ‘That’s clever it’s an anagram of art,’ and I had to pretend I’d known that all along,” he writes. You have to give props to a man who’s in on a joke, even if it's on him.

It’s interesting to note that the use of stencils developed out of the need to cut down his painting time, to thus avoid getting pinched by the cops. “I got home and crawled into bed next to my girlfriend. I told her I’d had an epiphany that night and she told me to stop taking that drug cos it’s bad for your heart.”

Anyway, I’ve been bored stiff and creatively stifled for a couple of weeks now and this is the first thing to shake me out of my reverie so I wanted to share. In the interest of fairness, you can either buy a ticket to London and go see for yourself, or go buy a copy of Wall and Piece. Or steal it. I don’t care which. I’m not sure he does, either.
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On a similar note, I’m completely addicted to Brian Wood’s high-concept political satire-slash-war drama DMZ. Set in a near future way too close to our own, open warfare has broken out in the United States between the federal government and a set of rogue “free states.” The line of demarcation is the island of Manhattan, the titular DMZ where the action is set, and where the people that are left live in a no man’s land of social unrest punctuated by the occasional carpet bombing of primary sites like Times Square. The Empire State Building still stands, occupied by snipers who toss visitors off the observation deck. Central Park is held closely by a tightly wound group of environmentally-minded special ops soldiers who grow bamboo in the vestiges of the zoo. It’s a lot to take in, and Wood (Local and Demo are among his other works) and Vertigo regular Riccardo Burchielli make the most of it.

The trade paperbacks are cheap and totally worth every penny. They introduce DMZ’s nominal hero, a greenhorn photojournalist named Matty Roth who goes off the reservation to tell both sides of the conflict what’s really happening on the killing floor, and Zee Hernandez, a med student turned local guide who provides introductions between Matty and the various denizens of the DMZ.

If that doesn’t convince you, it’s worth picking up the latest issue that tells the story of “Decade Later,” a graffiti artist who spends years dodging the cops, live ordinance, and the other terrors of war just so he can finally see the Big Picture. It’s the first of a series of stand-alone stories planned by Wood to focus on particular citizens of his fractured little world, and you can get a free taste of it here.

For more, visit Wood’s professional website here. You can get the scoop on his other projects, download whole issues of DMZ and other books, and buy the good stuff from a variety of retailers.

Guess I'm done shaking the tree for now. We now return you to your lives of crap advertisements, junk food, and television.