Tour Reading

Now and then, we all go through a spell of reading where everything we pick up, well, sorta sucks. I'm having the pleasure of blazing through a winning streak, where I like every book as much as the last. Having just wrapped my main part of my book tour (which gives me lots of reading time), I have a few new favorites to report on.

Caught Stealing by Charlie Huston. This was recommended to me by my editor at Marvel, as Charlie writes Moon Knight for him. It is gritty, smart, intelligent, and fast-paced. A great down-and-dirty noir read. I've heard his next up, The Shotgun Rule, is also excellent.

Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk. I came into this one reluctantly, having never read Palahniuk, and being the only male in the United States who didn't love the movie version of the Fight Club. I was really blown away by Palahniuk's skill—amazing character development, sharp dialogue, and real poetic beauty.

Bangkok 8 by John Burdett. I know, I know, I'm behind the times, as usual. I generally don't like books set in "exotic locations" (forgive the term), because said locations are usually an excuse to avoid a plot, but Burdett handles all sides of this dirty little mystery with mastery.

Fuck Noir, anthology edited by Jennifer Jordan. A cracking, really smart introduction by Mark Billingham sets the tone for this edgy collection. And a variety of names you'll recognize contribute, all giving an homage to that king of all words.

Along my tour, smart mystery booksellers insisted I buy: Big City, Bad Blood, by Sean Chercover, and The Blonde, by Duane Swiercynski. So I have more reading—recommended from reliable sources—to come.

I See You

I SEE YOU is the name of THE CRIME WRITER in the UK, and the book has just rolled out these past few weeks (jumping from #22 to #7 on the bestseller list for Ireland). Chris High, master of crime-fiction reviews and interviews, posted one of each for me on his superb website. Click here for an interview with yours truly, and here to see his take on I See You.

I've been getting lots of emails from readers of I SEE YOU, from England to Ireland to Australia. Keep 'em coming!

Tour Update

Hello all,

Apologies that I've been scarce around here. I've been on tour, and so far have hit San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Minneapolis, Houston, and Phoenix. Great events, and even greater meeting readers from all over. The booksellers have been really spectacular this time around, making The Crime Writer a staff or club pick in numerous places, and I've greatly appreciated that. The Crime Writer hit the top ten on bestseller lists in Los Angeles and Ireland this week, too, which has been great. I've got a few more stops left -- around LA, Boston, Milwaukee, and will be adding more, so if you haven't yet, please come by and say hello.

Tales From Minneapolis

You've probably read about the terrible bridge collapse by now. While I was stock signing, my escort/driver, Tim Hedges, decided to take a different route into the city, so we steered clear of the bridge. This was in the same half hour of the collapse.

The city was pretty shocked, but I was pleased to arrive at Scene of the Crime to a happier scene; Gary and Pat had gotten married in the store about 15 minutes before my arrival. I've never had to be the follow-up act to a wedding, and I fear I paled in comparison, but here's wishing two wonderful people a wonderful marriage.

The Opening of The Crime Writer

I woke up with IVs taped to my arms, a feeding tube shoved through my nose, and my tongue pushed against my teeth, dead and thick as a sock. My mouth was hot and tasted of copper, and my molars felt loose, jogged in their beds from grinding. I blinked against the strong light, and squinted into a haze of face, too close for casual—a man straddling a backward chair, thick forearms overlapped, a sheet of paper drooping from one square fist. Another guy behind him, dressed the same—rumpled sport coat, loose tie offset from open collar, glint at the hip. Downgraded to bystander, a doctor stood by the door, ignoring the electronic blips and bleeps. I was in a hospital room.

With consciousness came pain. No tunnels of light, no bursts or fireworks or other page-worn clichés, just pain, mindless and dedicated, a rottweiler working a bone. A creak of air moved through my throat.

“He’s up,” said the doctor from faraway. A nurse materialized and fed a needle into the joint in my IV. A second later the warmth rode through my veins and the rottweiler paused to catch his breath.

I raised an arm trailing IV lines and fingered my head where it tingled. Instead of hair, a seam of stubble and stitches cactused my palm. Lightheadedness and nausea compounded my confusion. As my hand drifted back to my chest, I noticed dark crescents caking the undersides of my nails.

I’d dug myself out of somewhere?

The cop in the chair flipped the piece of paper over and I saw that it was an 8 x 10.

A crime-scene photo.

A close-up of a woman’s midsection, the pan of the abdomen caked with dark blood. A narrow puncture below the ribs faded into blackness, as if a stronger flashbulb were required to sound its depths.

I raised a hand as if to push away the image and in the dead blue fluorescence I saw that the grime under my nails carried a tinge of crimson. Whether from the drugs or the pain, I felt my gorge rise and push at the back of my throat. It took two tries and still my voice came out a rasp, barely audible around the plastic tube. “Who is that?”

“Your ex-fiancée.”

“Who…who did that to her?”

The detective’s jaw shifted once, slowly, left to right. “You did.”

Crimespree

Crimespree is one of my favorite magazines, run by Jon and Ruth Jordan, two of the smartest people in Crime Readerland (and the fiction editor is the inimitable Jen Jordan). So I'm flattered to be on the cover of the latest issue with Lee Child. Inside, Lee and I discuss everything from drinking to James Bond to sock puppets.

Crimespree is well worth checking out. Oh, and there's a supplemental blog, too, with more tidbits about crime, books, flicks, shows, and comics.

First Person

I'm getting asked a lot, in pre-pub interviews, why the move to first person for the first time in my career. I started out with three stand-alones, and then came the four Rackley books--all in third person. I knew somewhere during my writing of Last Shot that the next book was going to be a departure. A big departure. I love the stand-alone, and was ready to create a completely new world and cast again. I needed some fresh blood. I think the fact that I wrote The Crime Writer in the first person is probably because of how close I felt to Drew. The main challenge (aside from not starting every sentence with “I”) is, of course, viewpoint. In that all information—and all clues—are funnelled through one man’s perspective. And since it’s a novel of paranoia, well, there are distinct pragmatic advantages to first person, in that you can keep twisting the reader's understanding, one turn of the screw at a time.

Meet the Foolkiller

Here he is, in all his glory. The first comic in the 5-book Foolkiller arc will be released from Marvel in October (along with a Wolverine Annual that I wrote), later to be compiled as a graphic novel. The art (and cover) are from the inimitable Lan Medina.

I talk about the inspiration behind the character here.

For an interview about Marvel Max (and Foolkiller) with my editor, Axel Alonso, click here.

Wolverine

This weekend, Newsarama ran a sneak peek of the Wolverine Annual I wrote, titled, THE DEATH SONG OF J. PATRICK SMITTY. The art, by Marcelo Frusin, is amazing -- I couldn't be more pleased with the job Marcelo is doing. I'm quickly learning that the artist, in comics, makes the writer look more talented.

Bum Beating

I'd say this article wins the award for Most All Around Ugly. The event, the parallels drawn, and the interpretation offered.

Note the ominous phrasing of "influenced by" below. I wonder what else those young men were influenced by, and what the respective weight of those influences was. People are influenced by anything they come into contact with. There is an enormous—enormous— difference between influence and causation, as the article suggests, and as countless morally indignant groups will surely maintain. (I also love the sneeringly sanctimonious statement at the end from the Bumfights website).

--

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- One of several teenagers who beat a homeless man to death was influenced by videos featuring homeless people brawling and performing dangerous stunts, according to a television interview transcript.

Jeffery Spurgeon, 19, expressed his first public remorse for the May 2005 killing in the interview that will air Sunday on CBS' "60 Minutes." It was conducted from a Jasper penitentiary where Spurgeon is serving an up to 35-year sentence.

Spurgeon said he and the others beat Michael Roberts, a frail 53-year-old homeless man who lived in the woods, "for fun." He said they were emulating scenes from "bum-rushing videos," according to the transcript. He mentioned "Bumfights," a video series available online, as a favorite.

Roberts died after three separate attacks with sticks, fists and logs. Justin Stearns, 19, Christopher Scamahorn, 16, and Warren Messner, 17, also were convicted and are serving prison terms from 22 to 35 years. Phi Huynh, 16, the fifth member of the group charged in connection with the attacks on Roberts, is awaiting trial.

Neither Spurgeon nor the others explained why they attacked Roberts during a weeklong sentencing proceeding in April, and Spurgeon's attorney Mitch Wrenn said the "60 Minutes" interview surprised him.

"I don't remember anything about bum fighting coming up," he said.

The videos depict homeless men and women engaged in humiliating, self-destructive acts, including ripping out teeth and ramming themselves into doors.

According to the Bumfights Web site, the videos are satire meant to call attention to the problems of poverty and violence.

My Favorite Vonnegut Quotation Of All Time

"If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts."

Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country

Welsh Bar Lays Down Folk Wisdom

PISCES MORTUI SOLUM CUM FLUMINE NATANT -- an inscription over a Welsh bar. Translation: “Only dead fish go with the flow.”

Quotation of the Day

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

--Anais Nin

Burn Books For Literacy!

Check out Tod Goldberg's article on this bizarre argument here at Jewcy. In the piece, I offer my thoughts on the bookstore that is burning its stock.

Gary Ross on Screenwriting

If you do it for yourself, it will come out fine. If you do it for other people, you will turn into an ungodly disposable beast and you won't recognize yourself in a few years."

The Problem (or not) with Reviewing Mysteries

In this article on detective fiction by Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker, he claims, "I began to nurse a rankling conviction that detective stories in general profit by an unfair advantage in the code which forbids the reviewer to give away the secret to the public—a custom which results in the concealment of the pointlessness of a good deal of this fiction and affords a protection to the authors which no other department of writing enjoys. It is not difficult to create suspense by making people await a revelation, but it demands a certain originality to come through with a criminal device which is ingenious or picturesque or amusing enough to make the reader feel the waiting has been worth while."

This is interesting -- sort of like the dilemna faced when editors cut a trailer for a movie or when editors write flap copy. How much are you allowed to give away without revealing too much? Trailers often err in the direction of giving too much away just to get you in the seats. I noticed a trend starting maybe five years back of trailers revealing the second act close (usually around 60-90 minutes into a film). Which leaves little in the movie to surprise you.

Do you think reviewers are handicapped by the inverse problem? They can't give too much away without readers and authors crying foul play? So if a mystery is bad, they're limited in how they present their argument?

What's your vote?

The Master

We understand that fiction is a lie to begin with. To ignore the truth inside the lie is to sin against the craft, in general, and one's own work in particular.
--Stephen King

Oldboy

Oldboy is one of my favorite films, a South Korean thriller, and -- some are claiming -- a piece of the inspiration behind the Virginia Tech mass murder.

I'm certain this will reignite debate over whether violence in entertainment leads to real-life violence. Those of you familiar with my books probably can guess my position on that. The notion that a film or book would be the impetus to a mass murder (rather than merely providing sick-minded stylistic flourishes) seems to me inane. Back to the old saw about book censorship -- you never hear anybody say, "I believe this book should be banned because it might be harmful to ME." Does anyone out there believe they shouldn't see Oldboy in case they suddenly feel compelled to murder 33 innocents?

One of my favorite lines on this topic was given by A.M. Homes (one of my favorite authors). She wrote a brilliant novel called The End of Alice, which depicts a girl being stabbed to death. When asked by a reviewer how she would feel if her book was found in the house of someone who murdered a child, A.M. replied, "That’s like asking somebody who makes steak knives how they would feel if their knife was found in the home of someone who murdered someone."

Are we to believe, if we regard the constellation of illnesses and influences that turned Cho Seung-Hui into a mass murderer, that Oldboy was a major one? Or even the straw that broke the camel's back?

However, I do take issue with NBC's decision to air the self-aggrandizing footage Seung-Hui took time out to film between rounds of gunfire. Televised sports long ago made a decision not to air footage of streakers or people who storm the field or court. Because, hell, if it gets you international air time, it'll encourage more people to do it. NBC's complying with Seung-Hui's wishes that he be made a star hold him up, oddly, as a figure for other twisted minds on such a path to emulate.

The Oddest Book Title Awards

And now, the moment you've all been waiting for...

Quotation of the Week

"I would live to study, and not study to live."
-- Francis Bacon