Five on Friday - Craig McDonald

Happy Friday everyone! I hope you've been having a great week and that you have something fun planned for your weekend.

Thought I'd mention some events you may want to keep in mind for possible attendance.

Coming up very quickly is Malice Domestic in Bethesda, MD. If you want to attend you need to kick it into gear as that convention will be May 3-5. This year's Guests of Honor: Peter Robinson and Laurie R. King. 

May 6th brings about Mystery Lovers Bookshop's annual one-day Festival of Mystery, featuring over 40 authors in Oakmont, PA (right outside Pittsburgh)

June 8-9 in Chicago is Printers Row. This is a fun festival in the heart of Chicago. Among the names I saw listed for this year's festival: Michael Harvey, Marcia Clark and Marcus Sakey.

Thrillerfest has a pretty hefty line-up July 10-13. I've actually not had a great desire to attend this one primarily because it's geared more to the writers than the readers--and New York is quite pricey. But it may be something you want to check out.

September 8th brings about the Kerrytown Book Festival up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Some of the authors attending this year include Cara Black and William Kent Krueger.

Of course Bouchercon will be in Albany, NY, this year. But if you're not able to make your way to Albany, you can check out the National Book Festival in DC that same weekend (September 21-22). While many crime fiction writers will be in Albany, Brad Meltzer is slated to be at the National Book Festival.

November 9th in Muskego, WI (outside Milwaukee), the spectacular one day event Murder and Mayhem in Muskego will take place. Great line-up is expected, including Marcia Clark, Gregg Hurwitz, Megan Abbott...

And speaking of Gregg Hurwitz...my NE Ohio friends, be on alert. Gregg will be making an appearance here this year. I am SO EXCITED!! As soon as I have the specifics, I'll let you know. This is an event not to be missed. You must come meet Gregg and hear about his amazing new book.

O.k. that's that. Now the round-up of contests to check out this week:

• Don't forget today's the last day to enter to win Sara J. Henry's A COLD AND LONELY PLACE here at Jen's Book Thoughts. 
• For those who love the lighter side of crime fiction, Lesa has two cozies in her contest this week.
• Criminal Element is hosting two giveaways right now (a third if you high-tail it over before 9:30a.m. Eastern time)
• If you want to improve your chances of winning A COLD AND LONELY PLACE, you can check out this week's Friday Reads contest. They have ACaLP as well as two titles from Peter Robinson.
• And finally, my friend George, who blogs over at The 30 Year Itch, is hosting his first book giveaway. He has a copy of Bill Loehfelm's upcoming THE DEVIL IN HER WAY. Head over and support George's giveaway so he'll host more! ;-)

Sheesh, that should have been a post in itself, right? Sorry about that. I didn't mean to be so long today. Especially given the fact that our guest today is Craig McDonald. Regular readers are familiar with Craig as I'm a big fan of his work. He's also a fellow Buckeye!

Craig has writing in his blood for sure. During the day he's hard at work at one of the few remaining newspapers, he has a regular column in Crimespree Magazine and he's constantly working on a novel...or other crime fiction piece. Recently he's been releasing a series of ebooks in anticipation of his next Hector Lassiter novel.

I'm also a big fan of Craig's work on interviews. He published two collections of interviews with a third one in the works.

Now I know I should be talking all about Craig here. And actually, you can see my interviews and reviews of his work here, but I also have to mention one of Craig's finest accomplishments, and that's marrying his wife Debbie. Talk about a great couple!  O.k. so I'll quit my yammering now and let Craig take over.

Ladies and gents, it is my great pleasure to welcome Craig McDonald today!

Craig McDonald with Svetlana Pironko in Paris

1. My biggest pet peeve is: People who slaughter cliché terms or morph words abusively, typically saying the flat opposite of what they intend or something simply nonsensical. For instance: “I could care less,” or “by the power invested in me,” or “it was so heart-rendering”… And, of course, the always irksome, “irregardless.” The journalist in me also cringes at, “drowned to death,” or “totally destroyed,” among others.

2. My favorite T-shirt that I own is: My daughter picked up a shirt for me in a tourist town a couple of vacations ago. It’s emblazoned with a quote from Hemingway: “Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” Runner up would be a shirt earned for a story published by Thuglit. It’s got an image of brass knuckles with the phrase, “Writing About Wrongs.”

3. When I’m feeling under the weather I: Try to write anyway. For instance, doing this now, while under a quarantine triggered by my eldest daughter’s weekend pertussis diagnosis. We’ve had calls from the CDC, all been ordered out of school and work for the week, and put on some very large and nasty-looking antibiotics. This is all very dramatic stuff to be sure, but it also makes for being very tediously housebound. So I’m catching up on writing columns, owed articles and doing fun things like this Five On Friday exercise.

4. My five favorite movies of all time are (in no particular order and based on number of repeated watchings):

1. The Moderns 
2. Night of the Hunter 
3. High Noon 
4. From Russia With Love 
5. The Third Man

5. The #1 item on my bucket list right now is: I strongly resist the whole bucket list premise. First, it requires you to think about death, a lot, in order to generate a list. Thinking about death isn’t the best idea for an inherent melancholic (which I believe most writers to be). Second, it forces you to think about all the things you haven’t got done in your life. That is also pretty depressing. Third, presumably bucket list items are going to be activities or pursuits of some scale or inherent risk that will likely hasten the actual need for a bucket list. Having said that, one thing I would like to do sooner rather than later, is to get myself back to Paris, the greatest city on Earth.

The great picture that Craig included for his Five on Friday was taken by his above-mentioned wife, Debbie. And Craig mentioned this for the caption: "This is my foreign rights agent, Svetlana Pironko, and I in Paris, shortly before midnight. Svetlana was doubling as my guide and translator. It was my last night in the City of Light, so she took me to Les Deux Magots, one of Hemingway’s favorite cafés and the place where Hector Lassiter first met Brinke Devlin in ONE TRUE SENTENCE." What a perfect photo for this post!

Well not that I wish Craig any ill will, but I'm glad that diagnosis resulted in his being able to participate in Five on Friday. Craig's been a regular on my year-end favorites lists and he's a regular name I recommend to readers as well. If you haven't checked out his work yet, I highly encourage you to rectify that situation!!

Thanks to Craig for his great contribution to the series. And thanks to you all for stopping in again this week. Have a super weekend and happy reading!

A Visit from Hector Lassiter

Good Guys, Bad Guys

&

The Not So Simple Art of Murder

By Hector Lassiter

(Originally printed in Writer’s Review, October 1957)

I live and die by words.

In addition to writing novels, I’m an occasional screenwriter and journalist.

On any given day, the newspaper I string for has more than its share of crime reporting. Occasionally, when somebody gets murdered by another in the reading area, family members from both sides of the crime—the loved ones of the victims and of the presumed perpetrators—reach out to the reporters or editors.

They maybe do that in an attempt to shape coverage. Sometimes it’s to try and give the paper’s staff a fuller sense of the victim. Sometimes it seems it’s simply to talk. Their grief is always unimaginable. Their sense of loss is palpable and clearly nearly insupportable.

The family of the villains are particularly tricky to talk to. They can’t get around their own memories of their loved ones. There’s an old saying among fiction writers: “The villain is the hero of his own story.” I’m not sure villains really think that way about themselves, but their loved ones unquestionably do.

Then there are the instances when loved ones of the victims are still trying to kindle the fire under cold cases. They come seeking a retrospective news story that might put backward pressure on law enforcement to give an unsolved crime a fresh look. The crime might be a decade old, but wounds of survivors are still raw and hurting.

This is all to make clear that every death means something.

Consequently, I can’t take a crime like homicide casually, even in fiction. To my mind, too many crime and mystery authors do just that. They trivialize or gloss loss. Corpses, like car chases, are just another genre trope to these so-called writers.

In truth, most murder victims know their killer.

Terrible fact is, if you’re going to end up murdered, you’re probably going to be killed by someone you know, and it’s going to be on impulse. It’s going to be messy and it’s apt to be stupid or spastic in its execution.

This is where I run into trouble with a lot of my presumed peers. I call myself a “crime writer” for a reason. I’m emphatically not a “mystery writer.” That term I regard as a kind of obscenity.

Treating murder as a bloodless affair, something cozy mystery writers like Estelle Quartermain and her ilk do all the time, is a more offensive creative choice than depicting a crime in all its graphic squalor, at least to my mind.

In Paris, in the 1920s, I made the acquaintance of a very talented female “mystery writer” who came around to my way of seeing things in terms of murder and its treatment on the page.

Having just witnessed the commission of a couple of true-life, brutal killings, mystery author Brinke Devlin was left questioning the morality of her own previous writings.

She confessed, “I write comedies of manners with bloodless murder stirred in… Locked-room mysteries can get a little deadening after a while… In life, arguments escalate and a too-hard blow falls. A man comes home from work early because he’s feeling ill and finds his wife in bed with his brother, or with the fellow down the hall. Sex fiends murder strangers as opportunity arises. Robberies go bad and somebody innocent dies. Killers simply don’t kill for the complex or arcane reasons that they do in mystery novels.”

Her epiphany ultimately drove Brinke Devlin to reinvent herself; to write very different kinds of novels in which the terror and obscenity of murder wasn’t slighted simply to advance some puzzle plot.

My new novel, The Land of Dread and Fear, focuses on a single murder. A rock is thrown into a quiet pond and the ripples not only spread wide, but gain momentum as they radiate out from the point of impact. Actions have consequences; sometimes terrible ones.

I feel a sacred obligation to give a true sense of what the act of murder exacts in every direction.

It’s an old argument really—this debate between how realistically murder should be depicted in crime and “mystery” novels.

In a famous essay titled “The Simple Art of Murder,” my old Black Mask stable mate Raymond Chandler famously wrote of Dashiell Hammett, “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.”

I have my own guidelines for the stories I tell: “Character is plot. Obsession is motivation. The quest, whatever else it may appear to be, is always a search for self—a race against time to a blood-spritzed epiphany. When that light bulb goes on, the world goes dark. No happy endings.”

Dear reader: Every life touches other lives.

Consequently, the snuffing out of a life should do the same thing.

© Hector Lassiter, 1957

Author, screenwriter and journalist Hector Lassiter makes his home in southern New Mexico. He is the author of numerous, critically praised crime novels and the screenwriter of several critically acclaimed thrillers.

2011 Overall Favorite Reads

Wow! We've come to the end of yet another year. Next month I will celebrate four years of blogging. Doesn't seem possible at all. A lot of growing and changing have happened in those years. A lot of new friends and of course a lot of books! I love that we can share that common bond.

But, before I start getting too sentimental, let's concentrate on 2011. This year I read 98 books, which was four below last year's total of 102. I try to aim for 100 each year, but given all the wonderful busy-ness of this year, I'm not at all disappointed in that total.

Of the 98 books, 47 were audiobooks - so almost half.

There were 83 different authors in the 98 book mix, 51 were new-to-me authors and 14 were debut novels. 65 books were written by men, 3 were written by male/female duos and 30 were written by women.

Now for the hard part. Winnowing down my favorite 10, but here we go:

10. THE HANGING TREE (Bryan Gruley) - this book was released in Summer 2010, so I was a little late in reading it, but Gruley blows me away with each book and I'm very much looking forward to his next book in this series, SKELETON BOX, that comes out next summer. I won't be waiting long to read that one, rest assured. STARVATION LAKE was great and THE HANGING TREE was even better. Can't wait to see what awaits Gus next. (Touchstone)

9. EL GAVILAN (Craig McDonald) - Craig consistently writes great fiction and with EL GAVILAN he stretched his wings a bit. I love that this book shows both his versatility as a writer and his traditional strengths as well. I love that he drew me in with characters I couldn't decide if I loved or hated. (Tyrus Books)

8. LONG GONE (Alafair Burke) - with every book Alafair Burke grows as a story teller and in LONG GONE she veered off the path she's been so successful with to date. She blazed a new trail proving yet again that she's got writing chops, y'all! Spending time with her characters in the NYC she so expertly creates is a treat. LONG GONE is possible the sweetest treat yet. (Harper)

7. DOMINANCE (Will Lavender) - WATCH. THIS. MAN. He is flat-out amazing. And he's young and with luck we will be seeing a lot more from him. DOMINANCE is complex and puzzling and mysterious and brilliant. This book was so much fun to read. And Will Lavender is a new-to-me author this year. DOMINANCE is his second novel. (Simon & Schuster)

6. SATORI (Don Winslow) - the very first book I read in 2011 and back then I said, "this will be on my favorites list" and it is. I loved SATORI as a book by itself, having not read SHIBUMI beforehand. After I read SHIBUMI I realized further how astounding SATORI is. Winslow managed to stay true to Travanian's characters and still infuse his own style and technique. SATORI is a work of art. (Grand Central)

5. THE SURROGATE/CAGE OF BONES (Tania Carver) - I'm putting these together, not trying to cheat, but CAGE OF BONES is not yet released in the U.S. I read both books this year, THE SURROGATE being the debut novel from Tania Carver - which is the writing team of Martyn Waites and his wife, Linda. Martyn writes independently under his own name as well, so it's not really his debut, but semantics. Like Bryan Gruley, I see the Tania Carver books as starting out great and only getting better. For those of you who like dark suspense, this is an absolute DO NOT MISS series. I'm hooked. I have to jump back and read THE CREEPER (due out in the US in 2012) - the middle book in the series - but once I'm all caught up this is definitely a series I'll be waiting impatiently for each new installment. Martyn's just thankful that he's across the pond so I can't camp outside his house waiting for the next book! ;-) (Pegasus)

4. THE TWO DEATHS OF DANIEL HAYES (Marcus Sakey) - The fact that I get to be a high-powered, kick-ass lawyer in this book has nothing to do with it's appearance on this list. And you should not hold Marcus' questionable choice in character names against him. This is the most amazing of his books. It's smart, fast-paced, brilliant plot twists. It keeps you on your toes and while the momentum of the book drives you to turn pages faster and faster, you don't want it to end. It's just too much fun. And that's what reading should be. (Dutton)

3. HELL IS EMPTY (Craig Johnson) - Yes indeed, I am an evangelist for this series. I do indeed have a crush on Walt Longmire. And if I didn't adore Vic so much, I'd want to kick her butt! O.k., don't worry, I do realize these are fictional characters, but when you're caught up in the books, they're friends. Breaking open a new Walt Longmire is like taking a vacation to my favorite destination. Prior to HELL IS EMPTY, KINDNESS GOES UNPUNISHED stayed my favorite, stayed my favorite, stayed my favorite and then HELL IS EMPTY rocked my reading world. There are so many wonderful layers to this book and you can enjoy one, some or all. (Viking)

2. YOU'RE NEXT (Gregg Hurwitz) - This book is always the hardest one for me to articulate why I love. Not because it's for bad reasons but rather because it affected me so deeply. This is a book that still resonates with me months after finishing it. The relationships that Hurwitz created between his characters are pulchritudinous (yes, I did learn that word just for this book...nothing else seemed to embrace the magnitude of what I was trying to say). I don't know how Gregg can tops this one, and how the heck can I top pulchritudinous if he does? (St. Martins)

1. THE RIDGE (Michael Koryta) - I, of course, revealed this last week in the year end meme. Michael's approach to both his human and feline characters is stunning. The world he created is dark and haunting, but I so wanted to be there. THE RIDGE gets the top spot this year because Koryta did what few are ever able to with me - he enticed me to let go of the reality I cling to and willingly follow into his. With any luck, Koryta will never want to be a cult leader. I think I'm a goner if he does. (Little, Brown)

In year's past, I've had debut authors in my top favorite 10. This year I didn't, but not because there weren't excellent debut authors, those danged veterans were just showing their experience! Anyway, I wanted to recognize a few debut authors as my favorites for 2011:

Sara Henry released LEARNING TO SWIM this year. I look forward to watching her grow as a writer and experiencing her work.

James Barney released THE GENESIS KEY which I felt did a wonderful job blending science, religion and crime! (Harper)

And Daniel Palmer released DELIRIOUS and I was glued to it. I've actually had the chance to read his follow-up to DELIRIOUS which is still a thriller, but quite different in content, so I can already see his versatility as writer in this genre. Problem with getting to read those ahead is you have to wait longer for the next one to come. I'm sure I can keep busy in the interim, though! (Kensington)

I feel very blessed that I learned to love reading and can appreciate the wonder and magnificence. While it's a challenge to narrow down a list to 10 favorites, it's also a tremendous gift to have experienced all of these worlds and characters - friends. My heartfelt thanks go out to all the authors who have shared their talents.

And many, many thanks to everyone who has entrusted me with books this year. I wish I was able to read every last one. And there are so many that I still intend to read. As things continue to change in my world, I hope that it offers me more opportunity to read and share and enjoy books with you all.

Thanks for hanging out with me this year! Let's do it again in 2012, o.k?

The Devil's Highway to the Buckeye State - Craig McDonald

Last week I posted my review of Craig McDonald's EL GAVILAN. I have a guest post as a special holiday treat from Craig today. I know I really enjoyed this piece as it's especially relevant to me where I live. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Happy Holidays!

The Devil's Highway to the Buckeye State

—Craig McDonald

My new novel, El Gavilan, examines the effects of illegal immigration and a single murder on one Ohio town. Many of those undocumented workers came to the Buckeye State via a torturous path dubbed the Devil's Highway.

The Devil's Highway technically runs between northern Mexico, across the Sonoran Desert wastelands of blasted-out ironwood and saguaro, and on up into Arizona. It's considered the deadliest stretch of ground to cover for those who would flee Mexico to America, yet thousands try every year and many don't make it to the other side.

El Gavilan opens with a quote of unknown provenance: "Never attach more feeling to a thing than God does."

The poet Ofelia Zepeda said of the region through which the Devil's Highway runs, "You need a new kind of prayers to negotiate with this land."

I'd argue the Devil's Highway knows no true end. The ones who do reach the American portion of the borderlands don't always opt to live out their days in Arizona, California or Texas. They head in deeper, trekking further north to make their meager living at myriad Mexican food restaurants . . . by mowing lawns or picking fruit for half-minimum wages in Georgia or Michigan and all points in-between.

Like the Oakies chased from their homes by the Dust Bowl tragedy nearly a century before -- the destitute immortalized in John Steinbeck's novel, The Grapes of Wrath -- men and women fleeing Mexico for El Norte found their path hastened by the American highway system. Route 66, "The Mother Road," may not be doing so dandy these days, but the U.S. interstate system is cranking right along.

A recent immigration study puts a fine point on it: "Ohio has the nation's 10th largest highway network and is within a single-day drive for half of North America's population. Ohio contains 70 percent of the country's manufacturing capacity. The state links the Northeast and Midwest; thus, much business and cargo traffic passes through its borders on this well-developed highway network. Ohio's economy is primarily based in Agriculture and Industry."

In other words, and in any language: Ohio=Prosperity. (Or it used to; these days, Ohio is just about the hardest hit state economically outside of Michigan.)

But circa 2005, or thereabouts, before the housing bubble burst, my corner of Ohio was literally swamped with undocumented workers. Like drunken sailors, developers were plowing under acres of corn and soybeans and platting out vistas of cookie-cutter subdivisions constructed largely through the sweat and effort of illegal immigrants. The bastards trucked them in by the dozens in old Ford Aerostars to frame-out houses for chump change wages. (An exposed wall of one side of my garage—a house built circa 2000—is covered with Spanish writings scrawled in Sharpie).

The influx of undocumented, unassimilated workers changed the face of central Ohio, nearly overnight. As a journalist, I saw results some while before the average Ohio citizen maybe took notice. When the citizenry of central Ohio realized what was happening, handwringing ensued. Racial tensions rose, then spiked.

The impact on infrastructure and public services here in Ohio was profound.

The immigration report put it this way, by the numbers: "Seventy-two percent of the total population growth between 2000 and 2006 in Ohio was directly attributed to the immigrant population . . . The annual fiscal cost to Ohio taxpayers for emergency medical care, education and incarceration is currently $224 million and is estimated to rise to $372 million per year in 2010 and $627 million per year in 2020."

When the Great Recession hit, a number of undocumented workers ventured back across that dusty line, suddenly finding prospects more enticing in the Mexico they'd earlier fled than in the financially decimated wastelands of post-recession America.

My aim in El Gavilan was to take one family's immigrant experience, trace it up into Ohio, and then watch the ripples flare out when a member of that family falls prey to a seemingly racially motivated spasm of fatal violence.

But before the murder that fires the story of El Gavilan occurs, there is another scene of violence and loss, very near the start of the book:

El Gavilan opens with a tragic fire that claims more victims than necessary when first responders and Latino firebombing victims aren't speaking the same language. Failure to communicate literally kills. The scene is based on all too real firebombing in Ohio that occurred in a mostly Latino, non-English-speaking apartment enclave in what had formerly been a white, working class neighborhood.

The victims were part of a family who'd chased prosperity from central Mexico all the way to Ohio's Capital City -- braving and surviving the passage through the desert wastelands only to be taken down deeper along The Devil's Highway, taken down in Ohio, "the heart of it all," as our state's publicists like to phrase it.

© 2011 Craig McDonald, author of El Gavilan

Author Bio
Craig McDonald, author of El Gavilan, is an Edgar®-nominee and an award-winning journalist, editor and fiction writer. His short fiction has appeared in literary magazines, anthologies and several online crime fiction sites. His debut novel, Head Games, was published by Bleak House Books in September 2007. Head Games was selected as a 2008 Edgar®-nominee for Best First Novel by an American Author. Head Games was also a finalist for the Anthony, Gumshoe and Crimespree Magazineawards for best first novel. His nonfiction books include Art in the Blood, a collection of interviews with 20 major crime authors which appeared in 2006, and Rogue Males: Conversations and Confrontations About the Writing Life, a second collection of interviews published by Bleak House Books in 2009. McDonald was also a contributor to the NYT's nonfiction bestseller, Secrets of the Code. He recently won national awards for his profiles of crime novelists James Crumley, Daniel Woodrell, James Sallis and Elmore Leonard. His new novel, El Gavilan, is available from Tyrus Books.

For more information please visit http://www.craigmcdonaldbooks.com, and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter

EL GAVILAN - Craig McDonald

My review of EL GAVILAN is appearing here with permission from Shelf Awareness. This review appeared in Tuesday's Readers' edition. If you are not already subscribed to Shelf Awareness, you can do so here for free and have the twice-weekly newsletter delivered to your email.

First line: "Her grandmother was the first to die of thirst crossing the Sonoran Desert."


Craig McDonald veers from his Hector Lassiter series to tackle the timely issue of illegal immigration in the United States. Taking neither a pro nor con stance, McDonald probes the gray areas while illustrating the volatile effects of the rape-murder of a Mexican-American mother in small town Ohio.

El Gavilan follows three law men: Sheriff Able Hawk, Police Chief Tell Lyon and Sheriff Walt Pierce as they battle each other for the territorial rights in the rape-murder investigation. Each law enforcement officer has his own agenda and none wears an unsullied white hat. Through their actions, McDonald smudges the lines between right and wrong – is it really wrong if it’s done for the right reasons - leaving his readers with conflicting feelings about the characters. It’s this conflict that makes El Gavilan so irresistible. As Hawk, Lyon and Pierce delve into the investigation, the reader delves into his/her feelings for the characters. Love or hate them, you can’t help but invest in them.

In his previous novels, McDonald brought the past to life for readers. In El Gavilan, he crafts a fictitious small town as real as any on an Ohio map. The sights, sounds and even the smells reach from the pages to pull the reader into this world.

El Gavilan proves that Craig McDonald’s talents aren’t limited to the historical thriller novel, and we can only hope that he has many more opportunities to bring his stories to print.

El Gavilan is available in both trade paper (ISBN: 978-1-4405-3191-0) and in hardcover (ISBN: 978-1-4405-3194-1) from Tyrus Books.

A Look at What's Going On...

In all the traveling craziness lately, I haven't done a look at what fun things are going on around the web. So I thought I'd share what's come across my computer screen today and then you can share other things YOU know about in the comments!

Brilliance Audio has a podcast with Iris Johansen about her upcoming suspense novel, BONNIE.

Things are gearing up for the Murder and Mayhem in Muskego conference. You should really try to come if you can. I mean, look at this awesome lineup!

And speaking of conferences, don't forget that you can register for Bouchercon 2012 now. It's in my neck of the woods next year, and if you register before the end of the year, you can get a $25 discount.

Don't forget to go and nominate your favorite 2011 crime novels in the Independent Literary Awards! I'm part of the committee reading and voting on the short list, so nominate a good bunch of books for me to choose from. Make my job VERY HARD! :-)

Those of you looking forward to Stephen King's 11/22/63, Simon and Schuster are posting audio samples on Mondays and Fridays through October 24th. 

Todd Ritter has his Magical Mystery Tour going on right now. If he's in your area, stop out and say "hi." Buy a book and you could be a big winner!

Tama Ryder is making her debut with a memoir about Len Lesser who passed away in February. You probably know him from Seinfeld as "Uncle Leo" but he has also had character parts in many television crime dramas, including Hardcastle and McCormick (remember that one?), The Rockford Files, The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, Simon & Simon, Remington Steele, and more.

Mark Harmon's role as Lucas Davenport in a TV movie adaptation of Certain Prey was announced earlier this year and it's set to air on November 6th. I'm wondering if I should watch this. I'm a huge Harmon fan; Davenport, not so much. Wondering if the movie might change my feelings about Sandford's character.

It isn't coming out until December, but I'm reading Craig McDonald's EL GAVILAN right now, and I can't recommend highly enough that you check this book out. It's just...WOW! You'll hear more about it from me later, but in the mean time, check out his website and here's the trailer for the book.



This is a book that will come in under the 2011 wire and make my favorite's list. Few books are able to keep me up past my normal bed time these days, this is one of the exceptions.

O.k., your turn. What do you have to share for the good of the order?

Patrick Millikin - Crime Readers Caught Reading Crime...

...at an indie bookstore.

Patrick Millikin is not only a crime reader, he is also a crime seller! Even though he's supposed to be managing The Poisoned Pen, he seems to have found some time to sneak away and work on Craig McDonald's latest in the Hector Lassiter series, ONE TRUE SENTENCE.

The Poisoned Pen is pretty important to Patrick. According to his staff profile he was a "literary snob" before his position at this renowned indie introduced him to crime fiction. He says, "I devoured these books...like the flea that found its dog, and I've never looked back since." See the difference an indie bookstore can make?

Check in tomorrow for our final fan of The Poisoned Pen Bookstore!

Catching Up and Around the Web

Well between me doing a ridiculously unusual amount of traveling, and Blogger being sick last week, things got a little off course.

I apologize if you've contact me recently and I haven't returned your email or message. I'm still catching up. Hope to get there soon!

I have been starting some crime fiction-related groups over at Copia to have a nice place to post questions and discussion topics. My plan next month is to start a book discussion on THE TWO DEATHS OF DANIEL HAYES. If you read my review, you know I just felt like I wanted to talk to people about the book. And I still do. But I don't want to give spoilers or wreck twists for anyone who hasn't read it. So, I thought I'd use the forum at Copia to create a place where we could chat about the book. I'll put up some questions, thoughts, etc., and you can comment in those areas or add your own questions and thoughts. If it works out, maybe I'll try it the following month with YOU'RE NEXT. I'm reading that right now and just having an amazing reading experience. What are you thoughts? Anyone interested in participating with me?

I'm actually still figuring out all the ins and outs of Copia; I hope you'll come log in and find me: Mysterious_Dame. I think it'll be fun to share a book club of sorts across the miles.

In other news, I've shared with you that I'm working with Maddee James of xuni.com. Absolutely loving that. The dangerous part, though, has been finding even more authors I want to check out and read. If you're on Facebook, come like the xuni.com page and I'll corrupt YOU with new authors, too. And if you read YA at all, or have some YAs in your house, xuni is a great place to find books and authors!

And speaking of Facebook, I received an email from someone trying to find me on Facebook. I don't have a link for that up here, do I? Shame on me. I think I usually manage to mangle Facebook links, but let me see if I can get my own right here. Try this.

Next week I'm headed to BEA and will be on a panel at the Book Bloggers Convention right after BEA. Looking forward to that. Definitely say hi if you see me. I'll likely be the person looking completely overwhelmed and lost!

And now for a few fun tidbits to share. In addition to my traveling, I've had the opportunity to see a slew of great author people lately. At the very beginning of May, Brian Freeman was here in the Cleveland area. It was a lot of fun to meet he and his wife. They both have a great sense of humor and it was fascinating to learn about his road to writing crime fiction.

Last Monday and Tuesday, Chris Grabenstein came to Lorain County for the annual Young Author's Conference and he was a huge hit with all the county's aspiring young writers. I had the honor of being his chauffeur for those days. Here are some fun pictures of Chris:

And finally yesterday I went to the Marion Public Library to see Craig McDonald. There was just a small group of us there, but the discussion was fun, I was able to see his wife Debbie again, and this time I also had the chance to meet Craig's daughters.

Just a reminder about Bouchercon. If you are planning to attend but haven't registered yet, you'll want to make sure you do so soon. The host hotel is already booked for the convention-rate rooms, but there are plenty of surrounding hotels in close proximity.

I don't think I had a chance to mention here that my friend and fellow blogger Pop Culture Nerd is hosting the first Stalker Awards. Be sure you stop over there and nominate your favorites for those awards. They're great categories!

Just today Naomi from The Drowning Machine announced the ten qualifiers for the Watery Grave Invitational Short Story Contest. I can't believe it's that time again already. Check out The Drowning Machine for all the fun on that contest.

I'll wrap up today's post with a video from Joseph Finder about being "buried alive." Have a great week and happy reading!

Craig McDonlad - Crime Reader Caught Reading Crime...

...at an indie bookstore.

Last week we caught Brian Freeman reading Craig McDonald's HEAD GAMES, and this week we've caught Craig McDonald reading - wait! I see a stack of his ONE TRUE SENTENCE books; is he supposed to be doing a signing? Is he slacking on the job? Well, if he is, he's at least chosen a great book for slacking. Craig's dipped into a classic, James Crumley's THE WRONG CASE. And Craig's indie store of choice happens to be Foul Play Books located right here in the Buckeye State! Westerville, Ohio, to be precise. I've been fortunate enough to visit Foul Play myself several times. They are a renovated Victorian home and it's a very fun store.

Many thanks to Craig, as well as to this photo's photographer, Leslie Miller. And we'll be back tomorrow to catch another crime reader. See you then! Happy Reading!

**please note: you can order online from Foul Play Books, but for whatever reason, when I added the direct links, they didn't work properly, so I included book links to Mystery Lovers Bookshop. But Foul Play does have online search and order. PLUS, you receive free shipping with any order over $50.

Get Caught Reading Month

May is "Get Caught Reading" month. If you recall, last year we had "Crime Writers Caught Reading Crime." This year, I decided to put a new twist on it. 2011 brings you "Crime Readers Caught Reading Crime...in and Indie Bookstore." I have asked readers near and far - authors included - to submit a pictures of themselves reading crime novels at independent bookstores.

I am kicking off the series with a picture of an author I will be meeting in person this week, Brian Freeman. And I think this is a fitting start because Brian is reading Craig McDonald's HEAD GAMES at this year's Raven Award-winning bookstore, ONCE UPON A CRIME in Minneapolis.

Brian's most recent book is THE BONE HOUSE, which I happen to be reviewing later this week. I'm also excited to be meeting Brian this week when he makes his way to Cleveland for two library events.

Thanks for kicking off "Crime Readers Caught Reading Crime...at an Indie Bookstore" Brian!

ONE TRUE SENTENCE - Craig McDonald

First lines: "Snow falling on the Seine. It was half-past-two and it was quiet as it gets with the heavy falling snow and Hector was just starting to cross Pont Neuf, heading home after a long night of writing."

In 1924 Paris, Hector Lassiter finds himself tangled in a love triangle that works its way into a multiple murder investigation. Someone has targeted publishers of small literary magazines and the police have roped Hector into being their eyes and ears on the inside of the Paris literary community. With the help of such historical figures as Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, Hector must not only determine who is committing these heinous crimes, but he needs to ensure it isn't one of the women he's tangled up with and he's her next victim.

ONE TRUE SENTENCE is the fourth book in Craig McDonald's Hector Lassiter series and the third featuring Ernest Hemingway. As with the previous novels, McDonald weaves the historical events and characters into the story so deftly that it's often difficult to determine where the fiction stops and the fact begins. He's taken his writers pencil and shaded the border between the two.

The characters populating ONE TRUE SENTENCE are masterfully drawn. As a reader I envision their physical appearance, their sound, mannerisms, and scents. This isn't a result of specific detail but rather overall character development. With the historical figures, McDonald blends his sharp knowledge and his colorful imagination.

"To stay warm, Hem was trading punches with his shadow on the passing walls; with his reflection in the storefront windows."

The friendship between Hector and Hemingway is both humorous and sentimental. And while it works to develop Hector's character, it is actually the relationship between Hector and his lover, Brinke Devlin, that truly develops Hector. Brinke is significant right down to her nickname - Brinke, "on the brink." And "on the brink" is exactly where Hector finds himself through most of ONE TRUE SENTENCE: on the brink of the law, on the brink of relationships, on the brink of his career. In ONE TRUE SENTENCE, Hector's character is highly malleable, and Brinke is in many ways forming him like she forms her own characters. Who Hector will become is essentially taking shape here based on his experiences with this woman.


McDonald's knowledge of the time period also works to bring Paris to life for the reader. The setting is as much a character as Hemingway or Lassiter. McDonald is true to the language, the environment, the culture. And unlike the previous three novels in this series, the entire novel takes place in Paris over the course of a week.

ONE TRUE SENTENCE, like the three books before it, is a work of art. Hector Lassiter consistently finds himself in various artistic communities and it's fitting. The novels are full of spirit and creativity and individuality. Experiencing the work of Craig McDonald is akin to experiencing a painting by Picasso, a dance by Baryshnikov, music by Tchaikovsky. No two people will experience it exactly the same, but everyone who does experience it will walk away richer.

ONE TRUE SENTENCE is available from Minotaur Books in hardcover (ISBN: 978-0-312-55438-5) and will be available in May on audio from Recorded Books (ISBN: 978-1-4561-2172-3).

Special Guest: Craig McDonald

Today is Craig McDonald's release day for his fourth Hector Lassiter novel, ONE TRUE SENTENCE. Regular readers know I'm a huge fan of this series. With last year's release of PRINT THE LEGEND, Craig graciously agreed to submit himself to an interview. You can see that here at Part I and Part II. Today he's been kind enough to take over the blog and he's posting today. I'm very excited about this because this post is incredible. If you haven't read Craig's work yet, here's a look at his style. So let me move out of the way and let Craig do what he does best!

The Woman Behind the Man
By Craig McDonald

A few years back, I was in New York City chatting with the person who casts voices and selects readers for Recorded Books’ unabridged audio treatments of novels and nonfiction titles.

We’d finished touring the Recorded Books studios and offices and had settled in to discuss my recurring character, crime novelist Hector Lassiter, and how Hector and all those real, now-gone people who populate the Lassiter series of historical literary thrillers might best be transitioned to audio.

Tom Stechschulte was already a virtual lock to “be” Hector. But when I mentioned there would be shifts in point of view from book to book in the latter going — some presented in third-person, others narrated by Hector — it raised the issue of whether a second reader might be in order. Say…an actress.

“If Hector was to have a recurring love interest,” she said, “well, then…”
I assured the Recorded Books studio director that was not the case; that each novel would likely have a different female character playing against Hector.

That was true up to a point. But across eight novels in the series (four have now seen print), there are two women in Hector’s life who potentially hang in there for more than a single book or even two.

There was this one formidable woman, in particular, whom I had already committed to paper.

One True Sentence is the fourth novel about Hector Lassiter, a man variously known as “the man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives,” as well as, “the last man standing of the Lost Generation.” OTS is the fourth novel in publication sequence, but was actually conceived to be number three.

Pre-publication, but with several of the Lassiter books already written or in my head, I figured after just two previous installments, readers would likely form a fairly strong and fixed notion of Hector Lassiter, the man.

In this cycle of novels that has never taken the direct, chronological route that ninety-nine percent of other mystery series hew to, it seemed to me that around book three the time would be ripe for a major change up.

Through newspaper articles and magazine profiles excerpted in the first Lassiter novel, Head Games — through other characters asides and Hector’s own admissions — a kind of informal biography of Texas-born Hector Lassiter emerges through the first three published books.
But most of that biographical material is confined to the late 1920s and beyond.

We know little, if any, about Hector’s childhood. We haven’t been afforded a glimpse of how Hector became Hector.

One True Sentence is the first of two, back-to-back books that supply those answers.
While previous novels have sprawled across continents and decades, One True Sentence occurs across a single week in Paris, circa February 1924.

OTS introduces THE woman in Hector Lassiter’s crowded life, the fetching and bewitching mystery writer Brinke Devlin.

Brinke was name-checked in Print the Legend (Lassiter #3), but she’s always been lurking in the background. Hell, I’d fully written her story before my debut, Head Games, ever saw print.

It is Brinke, who, at base, “created” the Hector Lassiter his readers know. Brinke is a darkly creative woman who moves Hector from the path of a struggling, often-blocked literary writer to the pulp-frenzied, dark-end-of-the-street, crime fiction novelist Hector is fated to be.

Years before Hector is tagged with his designation as an author who writes what he lives and puts his turbulent life down on the page, slightly older and much more worldly Brinke is already pioneering the dark art of living one’s life to feed one’s fiction.

From conception, Brinke was formulated to be très formidable.

I put at least as much effort into shaping Brinke and her back-story as I did Hector’s. Though I never envisioned writing a series about her, I approached the task with the notion that I actually intended Brinke to stand as her own series character.

At the same time, One True Sentence also casts Brinke as a potential villainess — a complication that further kick-starts the evolution of Hector’s own eventual, shades-of-gray persona and sets him up for the rather controversial love affair(s) depicted in Toros & Torsos.

If, as the saying goes, the boy is father to the man, then equally true, I think, is the fact that a bewitching, dark muse arriving at the right wrong moment in that man’s life makes him the author he’s fated to be.

ONE TRUE SENTENCE is available today from St. Martin's Minotaur (ISBN: 978-0-312-55438-5). And since this is one of my must-read series, you can be assured you'll be hearing from me on ONE TRUE SENTENCE as well.

This, That and the Pictures!

Just a few odds and ends to share on this warm Sunday.

First, a very happy 50th to TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Not only is it still my favorite book, but it was also the book I most loved teaching. I know, probably a direct relationship. The movie also happens to be one of the few book-based movies I actually think made a nice representation of the book. So, here's to at least 50 more in the spotlight, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. And many thanks to Harper Lee who never gave up on it and changed lives through her words.

Next, some congratulations go out to the winners of "Love and Whispers." Sheila K. in Florida and Lethea B. in Alabama were the winners of the John Connolly book soundtracks. I have contacted them and their CDs will be going out tomorrow. Congratulations!

And finally, because June just got away from me, I haven't had a chance to share some pictures from various events. PLUS, I have pictures to share from Gregg Hurwitz's launch party, courtesy of the wonderful Michael from Lazy Thoughts from a Boomer. So, here are a few from Printer's Row:

(I think there may be rules against having as much fun as these folks did on this panel, but I'm not saying anything. I had fun, too!)

(yes, that would be me with the AWARD-WINNING Jamie Freveletti!)


(And one of my heroes of crime fiction writing, Craig McDonald!)

Here are a few pictures from the other two events I attended for Michael Koryta:

And last but, Lord, certainly not least, Gregg Hurwitz celebrated the launch of THEY'RE WATCHING in Southern California on Thursday at a bookstore called Diesel Books. Michael attended for us and brought back these wonderful pictures:

(Yes, that would indeed be Tim Hallinan at Gregg's book launch party! Celebrities galore!)

Have a great week and HAPPY READING!

The Man Behind the Legend - Part II

Welcome back everyone. And welcome back to Craig, too. I am so excited to be back again with the remainder of my interview with PRINT THE LEGEND author Craig McDonald. I had such a great time with this interview and Craig was exceptionally tolerant of all my questions. But, I know you're more interested in getting back to what Craig had to say, as am I, so let's jump right back in.
Q. Ernest Hemingway’s death and the subsequent actions of his wife, friends, the scholars, this is the focus of book three, PRINT THE LEGEND. Can you talk a little about the conspiracies that we see in this novel (without giving too much away of course)? You bring out elements of the relationship of Hemingway to the FBI, and thus to Hector. And while all three books deal with conspiracies, PRINT THE LEGEND really gripped me. Made me want to run to Google about every six pages.

Craig: Thanks very much, Jen— I’m thrilled to hear that. The book that started much of the plot in PRINT rolling in my head was Herbert Mitgang’s DANGEROUS DOSSIERS that details J. Edgar Hoover’s surveillance of many writers and painters including such menacing figures as Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost. Part of the tragedy of Hem’s last days is that he was regarded as paranoid and delusional based on his claims the FBI was trailing him, but they in fact were: Agents followed him right into the Mayo Clinic. We have their reports to Hoover regarding the fact that electroshock therapy was being considered for Hemingway. Hoover was also quite upset that there was a period of time in which Hemingway had direct access to President Roosevelt via Hem’s third wife, Martha Gellhorn.

The other ongoing plot thread in PRINT relates to Hemingway’s posthumous papers/works. All of the books printed after Hemingway’s death were meddled with, some to great extent, by Hem’s fourth wife, Mary, and by subsequent editors. Mary also burned some materials in Cuba…allegedly letters and magazines, but who’s to say for certain?

Q. Hemingway was not as prominent in HEAD GAMES as he was in TOROS AND TORSOS and now in PRINT THE LEGEND. From several references in PRINT THE LEGEND, I’m assuming we’ll see more of Hector’s friendship with Papa in the future. Is that a safe assumption?

Craig: There will be a brief Hemingway cameo in number four, ROLL THE CREDITS…something that happens in occupied Paris. Apart from that, Hem has a major roll in the novel I wrote set in 1920s Paris. There he really is Hector’s sidekick through the duration of the novel. But that’s about it for Hemingway.

Q. I found myself looking up people and events from the Lassiter books to see how they blended into the history books. A prime example being Orson Welles’ flight from the U.S. in 1947. How have you gone about your research into these areas? Are these tidbits you’ve collected over the years or did you sit down with the express purpose of finding this information for a book concept? You’ve located a lot of “pockets” of time that aren’t necessarily recorded in detail in the history books and made use of them in your plots. And where do you draw your line at fact and fiction, or do you feel like it’s already drawn for you?

Craig: A lot of it is frankly serendipity and having a lint-trap mind for odd historical details picked up over years of reading. The bit about Orson fleeing the U.S. was stuff I picked up from reading far too many accounts of the Black Dahlia murder. Really, all that TOROS stuff was just weaving together things from different sources regarding the surrealists whom I’ve always regarded as a very twisted bunch.

In the grander sense, I hope the lines between fact and fiction don’t show much. I try to have the real people in the right places in time based on what we know of their movements. I try to have them talk “in character.” But I’ll trump history for story every time because it is, in the end, a novel.

I was a kid who read a lot of stuff about classic true crimes, read it far earlier than I should have, and yet you start to play games in your own head about how things marry up. My first full crime novel/manuscript, written in the late 1980s/very early 1990s, one I’d love to get out someday, is written around the Cleveland Torso murders. It was actually written before so many others took their own swings at those Cleveland crimes. That first novel kind of set the template and style for the eventual Lassiter novels, though it remains, for now, in a kind of limbo. And again, to illustrate my stubbornness, the character of the Irish cop, James Hanrahan in PRINT THE LEGEND, actually is one of the key characters from that first novel. Hanrahan, by the way, will be back in a much larger role in ROLL THE CREDITS.

Q. Do you hear many of those “detail” complaints about any of the books, especially seeing as you’re dealing with a lot more historical information? You know…those, “that gun doesn’t have [fill in the blank]” or “it wasn’t raining on that [enter date] in [enter location].”

Craig: To tell the truth, I purposely built a couple of anachronisms into HEAD GAMES to undermine the sense of accurate history — something to be paid off later in the series — but those “gaffes” went right by readers, nearly as I can tell. But yeah, I had a couple of small glitches in TOROS. One involved Styrofoam…the other a vehicle I had on the road a couple years too early. We fixed it for the French translation. You do your best to check these things. I’ve got some pretty bizarre emails between my agent and me regarding the availability of a certain kind of oysters in a certain place and time. As your agent is now really your front-line editor, mine is always looking for these problems, too.

Those confessions aside, my goal is to give a sense of shared memory of time and place rather than an accurate but embalmed time capsule sense of an era. I’ve read too many historical crime novels that read like a 1936 Sears & Roebuck catalogue: all these product and brand names…long descriptive passages about vintage kitchen utilities. In TOROS, I knowingly put that brick wall around Hemingway’s Key West house a year or two before it was really built just because I wanted that wall there in 1935. At that point, historically, Hem’s place was actually bound by a wire fence.

Q. The age-old debate comes through in Hector’s story through his friendship with Hemingway. Hector the “genre” writer and Hemingway the “literary” writer. And it is especially pronounced in PRINT THE LEGEND with all the scholars present. But there are also some interesting viewpoints on that debate in this book. For example, when Patricia introduces herself to Hector and says, “ ‘My pupil made a compelling case for you as one of the pioneers of postmodern fiction, despite your classification as a genre writer by most critics.’” This has always been an interesting distinction to me because as I look at history’s “literary” writers, if they were writing today, many would fall into genre categories. Shakespeare, Poe, Dickens, not to mention Arthurian literature would certainly be in the crime fiction realm. Are there crime fiction writers today that you think we’ll look back on and find that they’ve influenced writing as a whole? How do you feel about the legitimacy of the debate?

Craig: This past week, in fact, brought the usual dust up about that fissure on the web…a debate about putting a moratorium on the term “transcending the genre” and so forth. Having this year sampled something like 300 crime and mystery novels, speaking as a former genre critic, interviewer and current genre writer, I’d submit we desperately need to push boundaries and “transcend genre” more than most authors in genre currently seem impelled to do or many publishers are willing to buy. Many acquiring editors won’t buy things that fall between or meld genres. A lot of current crime and mystery fiction, for me, is frankly stultifying as written. There are astute people in publishing houses in New York who’ll say the same thing to you, quietly. Staying in the lines is choking genre fiction.

I’m trying to think of anyone writing today who I think might have that kind of reach or influence you’re pointing to…and I’m coming up dry. Cormac McCarthy runs as a literary writer, but he has stormed across a couple of genres with his two most recent novels, and he certainly wrote a western with BLOOD MERIDIAN. This past year, I’ve read a lot of novels using obvious Anton Chigurh knock-offs — these kinds of existentialist/metaphysical sociopaths. Coming at your question from the opposite direction in time, as you did with Poe and Dickens and so forth, I’d say Hemingway was a genre writer in TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT…certainly in “The Killers” and seven or eight other short stories. Same can be said of Faulkner. I’d say Flannery O’Connor was our first great female noir novelist and short story writer. For my money, THE GREAT GATSBY qualifies as crime fiction. Algren and Wallant wrote novels I think you could say are cusping crime fiction. I could go on in that sense… Maybe with hindsight we’ll see a few of today’s genre writers having wielded real influence, but I can’t point to them just yet.

Q. Kind of branching from that question, what do you think Hector Lassiter’s views on today’s crime fiction would be? Are there changes in the genre that would send him off the deep end? Are there new elements of the genre today that he’d be thrilled to see emerging?

Craig: In a short story that first introduced Hector called “The Last Interview,” I have Hector riffing on some contemporaries and some emerging trends that had him aghast (cat mysteries). Without getting too far into spoiler territory, in PRINT we begin to get hints that Hector actually kind of abandoned genre in favor of some other kind of writing as the middle 1960s encroached. That Paris novel I’ve alluded to a few times actually makes it clear that Hector was there in the City of Lights in the 1920s to establish himself as a literary writer — an ambition he never quite shook.

As to how Hector would regard crime fiction today, he’d probably share a lot of my own tastes in contemporary fiction, focusing most heavily on James Sallis and Daniel Woodrell. He’d probably have higher regard for more writers working in genre now than in his own time. Hector always chafes when someone calls him a mystery writer because of what the term “mystery novel” embodied in his day—plot-driven puzzles low on polished prose and stingy on character development. I think, on balance, more of today’s writers are swinging for the far fences than maybe did in the previous generations of crime genre writers.

Q. You mentioned that you’ve read quite a bit of crime fiction this year, and you’ve also mentioned that you make an effort to grab the newest Megan Abbott, the newest Michael Koryta. Who else is on the list for you? With all the reading this year, any new names that you feel will make an impression on the genre?

Craig: I’ll read anything new by Sallis, Woodrell… Ellroy when he writes them — it was a long time between novels this ’round. I try to stay current with Mosley and Pelecanos. I read both of the new Connelly’s and THE SCARECROW certainly resonated for me on countless levels as a journalist. Other novels that have caught my eye this year include one by an Ohio author writing as “Kenneth Abel” called DOWN IN THE FLOOD. I was impressed by Jedediah Berry’s debut, THE MANUAL OF DETECTION. Tom Piccirilli’s SHADOW SEASON was excellent and did some very interesting things related to its narrator’s blindness. I actually read Ellroy’s BLOOD’S A ROVER twice…once to read it and once to prep to interview him. It is, in most ways, monumental, I think.

But in all of the year’s reading, what I found, most frustratingly, were a lot of novels that went along great for two-thirds’ length or more, then just made a tonal shift in the final turn that was almost whip-lash inducing. I’m not sure why so many books seemed to do that, but it was a definite running motif in my year’s reading, and I was reading all over the place, so it wasn’t just a matter of my own tastes producing this result.

Q. In PRINT THE LEGEND we find out that Hector is writing a book that may be bordering on the autobiographical. He’s created a working title…TOROS AND TORSOS. And he says about this work in progress, “I have my own long game to think about. Maybe I’ll let that sucker sit for awhile. Arrange to have it published thirty or forty years down the road, and maybe under some other byline…Maybe something Celtic sounding.” Well, hmmm. This leads me to the question – how much of you is in Hector?

Craig: Some of that is postmodern gamesmanship…having some meta fun. Another part of it is I’m increasingly underscoring the fact that these novels, whether written in first- or third-person, are really Hector’s own books…works he’s put forth for highly idiosyncratic agendas or personal reasons. He is the man “who writes what he lives and lives what he writes.”

To the other half of your question, in HEAD GAMES, Hector was frankly more of a character for me. I was thinking of James Crumley a lot while writing that book. By the time I was halfway through writing number two, TOROS, the distances between Hector and me had closed pretty alarmingly, as I began to see in retrospect. Fact is, I think Hector kind of hijacked my head in some ways and he’s yet to give it completely back. Between the eight novels, I’ve written well over half-a-million words about the guy, and having done that over a period of just a few months, something had to give and I guess it was maybe my own persona to some mild extent.

Q. O.k., I’ll quickly apologize for so many questions because I’m not done yet! I’ve directed most of my questions to you about the series as a whole, so is there anything you’d like to add specifically about PRINT THE LEGEND before I wrap this up with my last question?

Craig: Honestly, I think you’ve covered it all and thank you so much for this — it’s been a really rewarding exchange and you are one very close reader.

What would I add? Just that I’ve tried to make each novel very different from the one before because I rue series where the books become indistinguishable from one another. In the case of PRINT THE LEGEND, I see it as very much a shared book…as much belonging to the character of Hannah Paulson, the young, pregnant and aspiring fiction writer whom Hector comes to mentor to some extent, as the novel belongs to Hector himself.

And touching again on the unusual use of time in these novels, the good news is you can actually jump on board with any book in the series, really…there isn’t a pressing need to read them in publication sequence.

Q. Last question (as Craig wonders why in the world he agreed to this interview) – One True Sentence: “Hector Lassiter…”

Craig: No wondering on my part: thank you, Jen — this was, sincerely, a blast.

Okay, One True Sentence. Hector Lassiter would have relished the chance to contribute a six-word memoir: “Life is what happens between novels.”

Yep, you all know I have my goofy grin right now. Don't ya just love it? I love it! No money changed hands for that answer either! Thanks so much to Craig for all his time and wonderful responses. It's been a sheer joy learning more about him, the Hector Lassister series, and specifically PRINT THE LEGEND. And of course PRINT THE LEGEND comes out this Tuesday from St. Martin's Minotaur. Craig's had numerous posts at his blog regarding some of the conspiracies, characters, interviews, etc. that play parts in PRINT THE LEGEND. So you can mosey around over there and find out some additional fascinating facts.

Today is the last day you can enter to win my ARC copy of the book. So if you haven't done that already, jump on over and get your entry in. I will announce the winner tomorrow.

And of course, if you have some additional questions - if any of these questions sparked something for you, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

Thanks to everyone for stopping by. I strongly urge you to put this series on your must read list. It really is one I highly recommend. For those who have the chance to get out to see Craig when he's on his book tour for PRINT THE LEGEND, there is a limited edition short story, "Colt," you will be able to buy from some of the independent book stores he's visiting. You'll want to get your paws on one of those. Here's Craig's tour schedule for that. And now I'll be waiting patiently for the arrival of ROLL THE CREDITS.

Thanks everyone! Happy reading!

The Man Behind the "Legend" - Part I

As I mentioned earlier this week, I am humbled to have had the opportunity to chat with Craig McDonald and learn a bit more about him and his writing. Hopefully by now you are aware that he is the author of two Hector Lassiter novels, HEAD GAMES and TOROS & TORSOS, with a third, PRINT THE LEGEND, to be released on Tuesday. He also authored two collections of interviews, ART IN THE BLOOD and ROGUE MALES. He is an award-winning journalist, a husband and father, and simply an all-around great guy.

Of course in my blog interviews I have the benefit of being the one who comes up with the questions, so I get to ask about what interests me, but I hope you also find this interview as utterly fascinating as I did. As is often the case, I started asking and just kept going. So, I'm going to divide the interview into two days.

So without a bunch of extra chatter from me, here is day one of my conversation with Craig McDonald:

Q. I’d like to start out with a question about Craig. You’ve published two books of interviews, and PRINT THE LEGEND makes your third crime fiction novel. And prior to that, you were a journalist. What transpired in the life of Craig McDonald to bring you to this point in your career? Why writing? Why crime fiction?

Craig: My goal, very early, was to make a living as a writer. Journalism was partly a first-step toward realizing that aim and a way of gaining discipline, potential source material and developing a voice. I actually tried to write a mystery novel at about the age of eight or nine. The character who centered that early work of fiction I name-dropped into PRINT THE LEGEND (very near the end). I don’t let go of things easily in that way.

As to why crime fiction — it’s what I was raised on. My granddad had a basement full of crime novels he accumulated from this place called Murph’s Bar on the main drag of my hometown. It ran a kind of lending/trading library of pulp-lit stuff, lots of Gold Medal paperback originals and the like. I pretty much skipped the Hardy Boys and went straight to Lester Dent/Kenneth Robeson…on into Ian Fleming and Richard S. Prather.

Q. Aha! A man with a life-long calling. So, you've prepared to get to this level in the game. Nowadays, how do you prefer to write? Do you have a certain time of day that you like to write? Do you set word goals for yourself? Is it mandatory that you write at least something every day? Do you outline? I have to tell you that I love this question as cliché as it is. I have yet to hear an author on either side of the fence not say, “I don’t know how they do it” when they reference writers who write opposite of what they do.

Craig: Preferably early morning, back in the day. Now, it’s just whenever I can fit it in. I don’t have any real routines, and write on the computer, or longhand on a legal pad…more of the latter, lately. I revise as I key it in. I definitely don’t outline, and, yeah, I don’t understand how those who do outline ever write the book. To me, outlined books usually read as outlined books.

I usually start a novel with a beginning and an end in mind. I have a first and last sentence; it’s improvisation in between. James Sallis describes his own process as being a little like throwing yourself off a cliff knowing you can grab enough bracken and limbs on the way down to break your fall. As writing metaphors go, that works well for me. As to daily output, I shoot for 2-3K words, though I’ve done as many as 10-15,000 in a day.

Q. Switching gears here from the written word to the spoken, I was very intrigued to read your interview with Tom Stechschulte and the corresponding blog post. You said that it’s through his voice that you experience your books as the audience, instead of as the creator. This is so different from what I hear most of the time from authors. I typically hear, “I can’t listen to the audio book because it’s so different from what I hear in my head when I write.” What do you think is the reason you’re able to listen and experience as a member of the audience?

Craig: I think film adaptation I’d have a tough time settling into. There’s a story about some author, I forget which one, but I know he wrote a Western. He said he fell out of the film in the first shot because the hero rode in on his horse from the wrong side of the screen. I think because I selected Tom as my audio book narrator, and because he was close to the voice I heard in my head, I can just go with it. Really, by the time a novel is in finished form, I may have read it in total at least 50 times; in parts, maybe a hundred times. I’m always rereading as I key in, so every work is always being revised, all along the way. When I settle in with Tom’s narration, I really forget where it’s all going and just take it in like an old-time radio play. And now, when I edit Hector, his voice sounds just like Tom’s in my head.

Q. You also mentioned that you learn things about your style, about your dialogue that you notice through Tom’s audio book performances. Many authors will tell me that they read out loud to themselves as they write. What different kinds of things are you picking up from the audio books that you wouldn’t pick up from your own readings to yourself as you write?

Craig: I’m actually one of those authors who revises aloud. I know Walter Mosley does that. Ken Bruen, too. In the early days, I’d even read into a tape recorder and listen in the car as I drove to-and-from work: it is a great way to check dialogue for “sound.” Listening to Tom read my stuff, I think I key in on how characters’ are distinguished through my dialogue — helped no end by Tom’s acting, of course — and I learn to further sharpen characters’ voices in that way.

Q. Tom does an exemplary job with the Lassiter books. I’ve listened to his readings of both HEAD GAMES and TOROS AND TORSOS. Then I listened to James Lee Burke’s RAIN GODS, which Tom also read. I spent the first two chapters trying to re-orient myself so that I wasn’t thinking Hector Lassiter was talking. Do you hear your own voice or do you hear Tom’s voice when you write?

Craig: That’s strange: Tonight I’m about a third into reading RAIN GODS. Now that you mention it, I never hear my own voice when I write, though I didn’t consciously realize that until you made me think about it. I really write the movie I’m watching in my head. I hear distinct voices for all the characters. Before Tom was narrating the novels, Hector actually sounded like singer/songwriter Tom Russell’s speaking voice in my head. Now it’s all Tom Stechschulte. Bud Fiske, Hector’s sometimes sidekick, also sounds like Tom’s Bud, now.

Q. We have discussed before that I was a big fan of Mark Hammer’s before he passed away, and I am also a huge fan of George Guidall. How about you? Other audio book readers you’ve really been affected by?

Craig: I like Guidall quite a bit. Richard Poe is great. I enjoyed the late-Frank Muller’s readings very much. David Rintoul did my favorite narrations of the James Bond books. What I tend to notice even more are badly cast voices. There were some unabridged recordings of Hemingway’s novels that were cast so badly it smacked of sabotage. For my money, the best readings of Hemingway’s works are those by Alexander Scourby and Stacy Keach.

Q. O.k., let's get back on track here. Please pardon my drift there. Your “series” with Hector Lassiter doesn’t follow a traditional chronological order. Instead the events from each novel intertwine with each other. It’s kind of like taking the concept of the epic novel and blending it with the serial novel. What made you decide to use this approach? What are the greatest benefits and what are the greatest drawbacks or challenges?

Craig: For better or worse, events in our own lives are never discrete from one another: it’s all like a kind of oil spill. I wanted to capture some of that in a series format which is something I don’t think has ever been done before. For me, it’s all one big book. This way of using time also allows me to recontextualize things and kind of never shut off Hector’s evolution as a character. In the fourth novel, ROLL THE CREDITS, we’re going to see a twenty-something Hector in flashback. I have an entire novel written, set in one week in Paris, in which Hector is 24. If we get that far into the series, the later books will tend to give you a younger Hector than the first four did.

I think the only way to pull this concept off is to do the crazy (or audacious) thing I did: Draft all eight novels, then revise them tightly as a block. Then cross your fingers and hope nothing falls apart in the process of preparing/polishing the books with an editor.

Q. You have completed the Hector Lassiter series, correct? And PRINT THE LEGEND was, in your plan, to be the penultimate book. Your publisher, however, wanted to move the book to the third publication. Did you have to make any changes for this? Or how has it (if at all) changed your concept for the entire Hector Lassiter arc?

Craig: All the books are written. And, yes, my editor at Minotaur, John Schoenfelder (since moved on to Little, Brown), read them all and picked what I regarded as the last two books to relaunch the series at Minotaur. The strange thing was, the opening pages of PRINT THE LEGEND come right off the end of TOROS & TORSOS. So, in terms of the master plan, nothing was disrupted. It even looks planned. We’ve since made a change in publication schedules, and what I regarded as the last novel, set in the late 1950s in Nashville and building to a revelation at the end regarding the whole series, is now off the table in that sense — to my relief. Number four will instead focus on events tied to World War II and the German expressionist film movement’s influence of film noir. Hector will narrate book four, as he did in HEAD GAMES. Number four is fully edited and in cue, and that will be ROLL THE CREDITS, winter of 2011.

Q. When you started HEAD GAMES, was a seven-book series always your ultimate goal for Hector Lassiter? Did you plan out the entire series at that time or did that evolve after writing HEAD GAMES?

Craig: HEAD GAMES was a probable standalone with some secret wiggle room built into the end if I decided to do more with Hector. As I was writing the second novel, TOROS & TORSOS, I came up with the idea for the 1924, Paris book that I originally envisioned as number three. From there the others quickly unfolded. I saw it as a contained series with a definite end. I ended up going to eight because in a first phone conversation with John Schoenfelder, he expressed keen interest in a kind of WWII epic tied to film noir. My eldest daughter, who was also going through an obsessive period over that war and Anne Frank, kept urging me to do something with WWII. Maybe when she’s a teenager she’ll be allowed to read the result.

Q. So, with Hector simply waiting for the publishing green light at this point, what’s in store for Craig McDonald?

Craig: I wish I could tell you with certainty. There are several things out there now and it could go several different ways. I have a trilogy that’s running to the outer edges of genre that’s under consideration…a couple of standalones lurking. And another whole series I wrote before Hector I’d like to get out someday. It’s always an infernal waiting game. Some of this is all just waiting on the genre wheel to turn. My sense of the market right now is that the drive is for the big story…the high-concept novel. I’m thinking series are going to be a harder and harder sale outside the cozy market. The age of the small case is over. I think hard noir and pastiche noir have run their course, too, in some sense.

Q. In addition to being a crime fiction series, the Hector Lassiter series is also very much historical fiction using not only events in history but also very prominent figures from history: Pancho Villa, Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, members of the Surrealist Movement, J. Edgar Hoover. What were the driving factors that made you decide to plop Hector’s life into this time frame and have him associate with these figures?

Craig: I was into the notion of writing a secret history of the 20th Century, so Hector was born on January 1, 1900. His actual checkout date is one of the things the series will perhaps address in time. Living up to its title, the events in HEAD GAMES, particularly in the last third, are not necessarily to be trusted.

But there came a point after I wrote the third novel, which is kind of A MOVEABLE FEAST as crime novel, that I decided to actually run from history in that sense of layering in lots of real people. I wrote a Hector set in 1925 Key West that contains no historical figures. It does use a couple of historical crimes, one lifted from Toledo, Ohio, and dropped into the Keys. My greatest fear with this series is to have it turn into something that starts to feel like Forrest Gump or Young Indiana Jones where Hector can’t swing a dead cat without smacking up against a notable personality. So I’ve tried to keep the cast of historical characters to a minimum in terms of numbers. Historical figures will recur, more often than not. Hoover was there lurking in HEAD GAMES and TOROS and others to come. Hemingway is an ongoing Hector friend, ditto Orson, though I’m pretty much done with Welles at this point. Oddly enough, Gertrude Stein crops up in quite a number of the novels.

Fun stuff. Are you enjoying getting to know the man behind the "Legend"? O.k., everyone groan because this is where I say "to be continued" tomorrow! We'll hear more about Craig, his books, and crime fiction. If you have any questions for Craig, leave them in the comments. I'm confident he'll stop by and chat with you if you have some nagging questions, too. In the meantime you can check out his website. You can also check out where he's going to be live, promoting the release of PRINT THE LEGEND.

And, if you haven't already registered to win my ARC copy of PRINT THE LEGEND, time is running out. Make sure you register here to get your name in the drawing. I will see you back here tomorrow for the conclusion to my conversation with Craig McDonald.