Where Did the Month of May Go?

Two vacations and a flurry of county book fairs have made the past few weeks fly by without blog posts. Recently, I made a little change to my book cover with a see-through label clearly indicating it’s a thriller (after a book fair visitor kept haranguing me—“It doesn’t signal it’s a thriller!”). The label works like a charm: photo shows how it came out.

Later this month I’m looking forward to a Sisters in Crime reading, a Mystery Writers of America get-together, and next month, the Public Safety Writers Association annual conference. All that hasn’t slowed down my reading. Because I read 40-50 crime/mystery/thriller books each year for CrimeFictionLover.com, a site that focuses on NEW books, and CRIME FICTION, I rarely read books that don’t fit those parameters. But lately, a few exceptions.

Best was Just Mercy, “a story of justice and redemption,” by Bryan Stevenson (one extended story in it became the movie starring Jamie Foxx and Michael B. Jordan, which also was great). Reading it was inspired by our trip to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit The Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Very affecting, as you’d expect and highly recommended. Crime yes; fiction, unfortunately, no.

One of Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics—Obelists at Sea, C. Daly King, 1932—hit my desk. It’s about a murder during a 1930s transatlantic crossing. A group of psychologists on board ship, each with a different theory about how to identify the perpetrator, tries to help the captain. One by one, their theories fail. There are a few good cracks at the profession, but the comic potential wasn’t fully exploited. And it was slooooow. Some of the characters’ rampant anti-Semitism (and knowing what came afterward in real life, so few years later), made it hard to enjoy. “Obelists,” the author explains, are people who harbor suspicions. That’s a word that should come in pretty handy these days.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra, an award-winning literary novel that was a “best book of the year” a decade ago (I’m way behind) is an exploration of the ravages of war, set in Chechnya. In winter. Betrayal, murder, torture, random maiming, privation, inexplicable compassion, and the enduring power of love. A little grim for me. The title comes from a definition of what constitutes “life” found in a medical dictionary. No doubt this could be considered crime fiction on an epic scale.

Favorite Literary Detectives–Who’s Yours?

Last month The Guardian asked a number of today’s best crime writers to ID their favorite literary detectives. This is what they said:

John Banville became a crime novel devotee when he met Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe in the pages of The Big Sleep. He admits Marlowe is “his creator’s dream version of himself: tough, but tender too, wised up but not cynical, a private eye who has read a book.” Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, favorite of author Dreda Say Mitchell, seems to me to similarly represent authorial wish-fulfillment.

Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder—ex New York cop cum private eye—was the choice of Ian Rankin. He says Scudder is a detective with all of the conventional baggage, yet achieving “the perfect hardboiled mix of grit and poetry: cool jazz with surface noise.” Rankin’s own protagonist John Rebus would get this.

Mark Billingham credits Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade with launching the American hardboiled private eye genre in The Maltese Falcon. Yet, the book’s “most enduring mystery” is Spade himself, a character with much more going on than what is revealed on the page. Perhaps this contributes to the perennial appeal of Sherlock Holmes, too (what is going on in that head of his?), the choice of author Saima Mir.

Australian author Chris Hammer’s detective Nell Buchanan is the pick of Ann Cleeves, while Val McDermid’s favorite is Scottish writer Josephine Tey’s chameleonlike Inspector Alan Grant, who appeared in six novels from 1929 to 1952. He’s featured in Tey’s 1951 novel, The Daughter of Time, selected by the British Crime Writers’ Association in 1990 as the greatest crime novel of all time. OK, I’m ordering it.

Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, and even Jessica Fletcher were cited by several of the authors and are beloved by readers of all ages. I most resonated with Stella Duffy’s choice, Trixie Belden, a pre-teen favorite at my house. “almost always fierce and brave, confronting what she saw as injustice.”

David Baldacci picked Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, popular heir to the Los Angeles mean streets of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. He says “Archer brought to the table a heart and a soul, and a way of making sense of the world that was deeply, viscerally connected to the reader.”

In general, these were safe choices. Mostly they represented series—that is, a body of work. Ten years from now, who’d be your nominees? I’d hope to see Joe Ide’s Isaiah Quintabe, Nick Petrie’s Peter Ash, and Mick Herron’s Slough House team in the mix.

So, What’s Santa Reading?

Santa Claus, reading

Santa has eclectic tastes in literature, but confesses to a soft spot for stories about Christmas, especially the ones about himself. Well, who wouldn’t?

Death on a Winter Stroll

Reading Death on a Winter Stroll, the new holiday mystery by Francine Mathews, seventh in a series, would be perfect for S. Claus. In December, Nantucket Island’s popular restaurants and shops are brightly lit and open for business, pine and potpourri scent the air, Santa arrives in a Coast Guard cutter, and residents and tourists alike join in the three-day Christmas Stroll.

Stroll Season is about to start, and this year, two sets of visitors warrant special attention. First, the US Secretary of State, her husband, and his twenty-three-year-old son. The second, much larger group comprises cast and crew of a new streaming television series. Hollywood stars, fawning diplomatic assistants, old friends and new loves—in short, a delicious cast of characters.

You’re very aware of the ocean here, grey and enticing, wind and white caps. At times, it’s as easy to get around by boat as by car. (Santa does.) So, how did a murderer find his way to the cottage of a reclusive woman photographer, and why did he kill her? When a second murder occurs, this one among the Hollywood contingent, the two deaths appear completely unconnected. But are they? Take heart, police chief Meredith Folger is on the job.

The story moves along briskly with plenty of local color and numerous plot twists. It just goes to show that people who spend their lives looking at the world through the lens of a camera—not just the dead woman, but the film people as well—sometimes miss things just out of frame. A fun, quick read, perfect for stuffing Christmas stockings! Order right here with my Amazon affiliate link.

The Santa Klaus Murder

A British Library Crime Classic, The Santa Klaus Murder by Mavis Doriel Hay, was first published in 1936 and has all the comfy hallmarks of a traditional English country-house mystery—rural setting, large cast of slightly uneasy family members, unwelcome holiday visitors, and the dead body of the wealthy patriarch, Sir Osmond Melbury. It’s complicated, and, sorry, Santa, you appear to have committed the deed. Or at least someone dressed like you may have. Motives galore. It’s up to Chief Constable Halstock to figure out where everyone was at the time of the murder and why some of them are lying. Order here with my Amazon affiliate link.

Architect of Courage

Santa also encourages you to read (and give!) one of his favorite books of 2022, Architect of Courage. “It’s perfect for people who like mysteries and thrillers,” he says, “and on those long winter nights up at the North Pole, we need good, solid entertainment!” Amazon affiliate link here.

The Brooklyn Book Festival: A Washout

Following the book promotion dictum to “say ‘yes!’ to everything,” I volunteered to help out for an hour at the Brooklyn Book Festival yesterday. What fun (it should have been)!  Alas, the windy weather put people and tents and books at risk, so as much as possible was moved indoors, and the Mystery Writers of America and other booths in the Marketplace were cancelled. I’m looking forward to next year now.

Sunday was day seven of the eight-day festival—a free event, being held on the street and in the parks and plazas surrounding the Brooklyn Korean Veterans Park (at the entrance to the pedestrian access to the Brooklyn Bridge), all the way down to Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. It advertises “more than 100 literary events over 9 days.” And that’s not even counting my planning to be there to sign copies of Architect of Courage, a major missed opportunity (yes, I’m kidding).

With the goal of celebrating published literature and connecting readers with authors and booksellers, the festival began in 2006 as a one-day event involving some 300 authors. Except for today, it also hosts a Marketplace with 250 book publishers and literary organizations, including Mystery Writers of America. My would-have-been co-hosts at the MWA booth were Tim O’Mara (Crooked Numbers, Sacrifice Fly) and Phillip Cioffari (novels, story collections, a movie, and plays). Sorry to have missed becoming acquainted with them.

Sunday was Festival Day, a highlight of the event. Included were US and international authors, including such well-known names as Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn, The Feral Detective), Gary Shteyngart (Our Country Friends, Lake Success), Jennifer Egan, (The Candy House, A Visit from the Goon Squad), Geraldine Brooks (March, Horse), and many, many others.  

Getting into Brooklyn from where I live in Central New Jersey takes some time—an hour plus on New Jersey Transit, then connecting to the subway to Borough Hall in Brooklyn. Just enough enforced sitting to work up a good appetite. For excursions like this, my friend Joanne is often my companion and chaperone, and we’d worked out a good schedule and picked an enticing place for lunch. Next year!

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A Case for Books

Last week, Nora Krug’s article in The Washington Post described how nine best-selling authors organize (some of) their book shelves. A few years ago, I was advised, in a friendly way, to exile to some other place the towering TBR stacks that made walking through our bedroom a risk to toes and shins. How do people solve this problem?

Novelist Elin Hilderbrand has organized her shelves semi-chronologically, based on the era in which she read the books they hold, except for her “favorite books” shelf, pictured in the article. Aha! On it are some of my favorites, too—& Sons (David Gilbert). Also Richard Russo, Jane Smiley, and Margaret Atwood!

Diana Gabaldon has a rather arcane shelf of medical and healing-related reference books in her 3500-volume collection (The Curious Lore of Precious Stones sounds irresistible). Another author heavily into research is Garrett Graff, who writes about politics. His shelf is stuffed with nonfiction books about 9/11.

Vanessa Riley’s shelves display her own colorful books, along with an array of Barbie dolls of prominent black women. I spotted two of my recent faves: The Mirror and the Light (Hilary Mantel) and The Rose Code (Kate Quinn)—books that, as Riley says, “make the past come alive in new, rich ways.

Emma Straub’s collection caught my eye with a shelf from the bookstore she owns containing numerous titles by Michael Chabon (yay!), and Dan Chaon (also yay!). Then Julia Child’s My Life in France. At this point, I realized the shelf is alphabetical. Author Hernan Diaz (just long-listed for the Booker Prize) is another alphabetizer, with solid collections of George Elliot. Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In the photo of Jennifer Weiner’s shelves, she’s organized the two shown by color. Yellow above, blue below, like an upside-down Ukrainian flag. This may seem an odd way to arrange books, except to someone like me, who is more likely to remember the color of a book’s jacket than its title. A refitted “gigantic closet” serves as the library for her overspill. To demonstrate that no closet is too small to be repurposed in this way, the picture at the head of this piece is my “TBR Closet.”

Chris Bohjalian’s shelves are a study in wild contrasts: Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Louise Erdrich and William Faulkner. Two whole shelves of Fitzgerald’s works, including several editions of The Great Gatsby, including one in Armenian, FSF’s letters, and biographies. As in my house, he organizes his history collection chronologically.

On Christopher Buckley’s alphabetized shelves are Ben Macintyre’s nonfiction Operation Mincemeat, recently adapted for film, and several familiar history books, as well as books emblematic of their moment. I vividly remember reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Catch-22, and Deliverance. As an aside, perusing these shelves is a lesson in how unreadable a lot of spine copy is!

On your own, I’m sure you can divine the theme of this bookshelf of mine:

You Can Help the Authors and Books You Love

You Can Help the Authors and Books You Love!

Raymond Chandler, Philip Marlowe, Humphrey Bogart
(art: wikimedia.org)

Friends and family members can be incredibly patient when they ask an author in their circle solicitous and innocent-sounding questions—like “How’s the book coming?”—and are met with blank looks, or, worse, groans and sighs.

Most authors today—OK, James Patterson’s an exception, and so’s JK Rowling—find that reaching “The End” is just the beginning of their work. Now they have to let the world know about it.  

If you have a sense of how much time and effort authors invest in their books, maybe you’ve wondered “What can I do? How can I help?” Yes, indeed, there are things you can do that will help! And, whatever you find time to do, you can be sure it will be greatly appreciated!

Ten ways you can help promote an author or book you admire:

  1. Buy the books! The author may have written it with readers like you in mind.
  2. Don’t be too quick to pass around a book; instead, encourage others to buy it. Amazon, or book stores, and the author’s publisher keep most of the price of the book. If a book sells for $16, the author receives $2 to $4.
  3. Remember, books make great gifts! Maybe a friend or family member needs a thank-you or has a special day coming up.
  4. Word of mouth is the most powerful form of book marketing. So, tell people about a book you’ve loved.
  5. What you say about the book in an Amazon or Barnes & Noble review will influence other would-be purchasers. No need for cringy flashbacks to high school book reports. Just say the two or three things you’d tell a good friend who asked, “Read any good books lately?”
  6. Share a few words about what you’re reading on social media—GoodReads, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.
  7. If you enjoyed a book, your book club might too! Many authors are willing to participate in book club discussions in person or by Zoom, etc.
  8. You can “follow” your favorite authors on Amazon. Search for one of their books, click on the author’s name, and their author page will come up.
  9. If your author has a newsletter, sign up! Author newsletters often include interviews, reviews, and favorites.
  10. An author’s blog and website are another way to keep track of their new releases and to learn more about them.

Many thanks, and happy reading!

Look It Up!

Colleagues who heard University College of London professor Dennis Duncan was writing a book about indexes regarded him skeptically, saying, “Isn’t that a bit . . . niche?” He described the experience in a recent American Ancestors Webinar.

His cleverly titled Index, a History of the, turns out to be livelier than those people may have anticipated. Its significance was underscored when it appeared on the front cover of the New York Times Review of Books last February. What’s more, the history of the index is still developing. When we do a Google search, for example, we are not searching the entire Web, we are searching Google’s index of the Web. The possibility that such an index could be manipulated to provide or obscure certain results has thrust indexing into the political arena.

Having an index was such a good idea, Duncan says, that monks invented it simultaneously in two different places, around the start of the 13th century. One of them (Hugh of St. Cher, pictured; the glasses are an anachronism) was based in Paris, and the other (Robert Grosseteste—“big head”) was in Oxford.

St. Cher wanted to index the Bible by recording the occurrences of every word in it. Starting with “a  a  a  a,” which appears four times, the list was alphabetical and was created to facilitate preaching. As long as monks used their Bibles to read and meditate, an index wasn’t necessary, but once they started preaching they needed to navigate the Bible more efficiently. This type of index was like using Control-F, Duncan says.

Grosseteste, by contrast, created an index much more like the ones we’re familiar with. It was a subject index. But he went far afield with the concept, including in his index all the books he’d read. It was a parchment Google.

For the next approximately 150 years, every copy of every book was still hand-lettered (manu-script, manus being Latin for hand). And the copy was not necessarily the same size as the original. As a result, the page numbers and index were copy-specific; what’s on page 50 in the original may be on page 70 in the copy, if the pages are smaller. Once printing was invented, copies were duplicates, page numbers were consistent, and scholars referring to specific content could be sure they were “all on the same page.”

From the beginning, naysayers criticized people for being “index-readers,” rather than working their way through an entire text. This questioning of colleagues’ scholarly rigor reminds me of today’s critics of Wikipedia users and headline-scanners (guilty).

Several well-known battles between intellectuals broke out in indexes. “Brown, Jeremiah, his dullness, 24, 40-45, 213” and the like. A more recent tweak in an index resulted after Norman Mailer refused to let William F. Buckley quote from his letters in Buckley’s book, The Unmaking of the Mayor. When the book came out, Buckley sent Mailer a copy and in the index, next to Mailer’s name, he wrote “Hi!,” knowing that would be the first thing Mailer would look for and calling him out on it.

Books on Exuberant Display

It takes more than a some Ikea bookshelves to make a memorable display. A beautiful, thoughtfully designed library or bookstore incites the imagination. People who love to read are certain a beautiful display of books–whether bookstore or library–holds unknown, but discoverable treasures of knowledge and imagination.

We recently visited Manhattan’s beautiful Morgan Library to see the Hans Holbein the Younger exhibit and were equally intrigued by the exhibit on Woody Guthrie. Two more different experiences are hard to imagine, except with the common thread of explaining and reflecting their times, separated by five centuries. The accompanying photo shows the library behind an open copy of the Gutenberg Bible.

One library that turns up on every list of “world’s most beautiful” is the Admont Abbey Library, (above), part of a Benedictine monastery in Admont, Austria. The gold-and-white library is a confection of baroque excess. Not only is it the world’s largest library in a monastery (about 70,000 volumes), it looks like it belongs on a dessert plate.

We’re visiting Portugal later this year, and the bookstore, Livraria Lello, in the city of Porto is something I hope to see. Porto is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the bookstore is more than 115 years old.

This neo-Gothic structure, with its pinnacled grey exterior, is one of the oldest bookstores in the country. Not only does it contain a wealth of history, but keeps one foot firmly in the modern era.

JK Rowling once lived in Porto and reputedly frequented the store while she was working on the Harry Potter series. You now need a paid voucher system to enjoy this exuberant architecture.

One of my favorite bookstores is the Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, Arizona. As its name suggests, it mainly features the crime, mystery, and thriller novels I enjoy. Plus it offers an ambitious program of conversations with noted authors. A Rogues’ Gallery of past presenters is tacked to the ceiling beams, and, if you like this genre, you’ll find many favorite authors pictured, some from their early writing days. We heard Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child talk about their most recent work there. Someone in the audience asked Preston, whose background is in science, about his predictions about the likelihood—even the inevitability of—a major pandemic. Barely a month later, we were in lockdown.

Successful Reading Experiments: 2021 Edition

I read a lot.  Forty to fifty just-published books a year that I review for the U.K. website CrimeFictionLover.com, Audiobooks of prize-nominees and winners. And books that have been out a while picked by my mystery readers book club. And a few books that have nothing to do with crime or espionage or the Dark Side.

Here are a half-dozen authors, debutantes and established, that I “discovered” last year. Maybe you would enjoy them too.

Two New Jersey writers who not only write with style and precision, they offer a nice dose of humor are Bill Baer, who has two books in his New Jersey Noir series, and experienced writer but new-to-novels Fabian Nicieza, with Suburban Dicks.

The unlikely team of characters in Chris Brookmyre’s The Cut—an elderly woman who spent her career devising grisly stage makeup for horror films and a young Black guy who’s the consummate horror fan—were a delight to chase around Europe with.

If you asked, I’d say I’m not a horror fan, but Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians presented horror in a way that made it work for me. One of the best books I read last year. (If you can, listen to the audio version, narrated by Shaun Taylor-Corbett. Genius.) Jones has a number of others, including My Heart is a Chainsaw, which NPR picked as a best book of 2021. Will have to get to that!

Liz Moore’s Long Bright River, nominated for a number of prizes, is the painful story of two sisters—one a cop, the other a drug addict—and the corners they’re forced into. She has more where that came from too.

About once a year, I scrub sentimentality out of my brain with the caustic prose of authors like Cormac McCarthy. The book that accomplished that job this year was Australian author Paul Howarth’s Dust Off the Bones. This year, maybe his Only Killers and Thieves.

Did you find a favorite new author last year?

Between Author and Reader: Amazon

A recent New Yorker article by Parul Sehgal that asks “Is Amazon is changing the novel?” sure sounds like a must-read for authors. There’s some history in there and some juicy stuff about the company some writers call “The Great Satan.”

The struggle writers face in meeting the demands of the book marketplace (versus readers) is not a new phenomenon. Sehgal cites an 1891 novel, New Grub Street, as an example of “pitiless portraits of the writing life.” A character in that book asserts that “literature nowadays is a trade,” and how many versions of that have you heard in recent years? The term potboiler was coined to reflect books created without regard to craft, but just to keep the stew pots boiling.

A hundred thirty years ago, the Amazon of book distribution was Mudie’s Select Library. Mudie’s market power–along with publishers’ financial incentives—demanded hefty three-volume works, much as publishers today like series books and for much the same reason. One popular book in a series sells the others.

But nine-hundred pages (roughly) were a lot to fill, then or now, and writing styles and habits developed to support that requirement. Victorian writers larded in subplots, created large casts of characters, and wrote desperate cliffhangers to carry readers (and themselves) through that long slog. Toward the end of the 19th century, new publishing forms began to take hold, notably less expensive books printed on cheap pulp paper, which opened book purchasing to new markets. As night follows day, new forms of reader enticement emerged, including the development of popular genre fiction—crime novels, Westerns, and the like.

Now, Amazon controls almost three-fourths of U.S. online book sales to adults and almost half of all new-book sales. In that river of print are the company’s own book imprints—16 of them. Do authors write a different kind of book when they know readers have power over not only their own book purchases, but can influence others, as well? Not one-on-one, either. Success or failure is right there on screen, thanks to reader-posted stars.

Kindle Direct Publishing takes reader feedback even farther, right to authors’ wallets. KDP writers are paid based on the number of pages read—increasing the financial incentives for producing lots of pages, new books every three months, and littering them with cliffhangers to keep readers hooked.

Whether all this has an impact on book quality, I’ll leave to you. In my opinion, it helps account for the increasing violence in crime novels, and the bizarre and gruesome nature these crimes. The frequency of plots with “girls” (usually not a child) and children as victims is simply used to raise the stakes. Do you see other evidence of Amazon’s effects? on you? on other writers? on readers?