Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind

My Favorite Crime Novels of 2010, and Other Books I Loved

(x-posted from Off on a Tangent, which is my more reliable bloggy home of late.)

Nobody asked me to contribute a list, so I kind of forgot about it in a haze of work, but after a gentle reminder, here’s that list, not in any particular order and not including Stieg Larsson because as much as I love THE MILLENIUM TRILOGY and will defend those books to the death, there’s no need to spill more ink.

SAVAGES, Don Winslow

This more than any other book was my “shout from the rooftops” pick. I read the book 3 times and I could easily have read it another 3 more. That in a way made it hard for me to review SAVAGES, but I gave it my best shot in describing the book as “both a departure and a culmination, pyrotechnic braggadocio and deep meditation on contemporary American culture.” In other words, it’s funny and sad, very rooted in today’s culture while also a damning indictment, and oh yeah, the ending is amazing and absolutely perfect.

THE SINGER’S GUN, Emily St. John Mandel

Widespread and rapturous praise for the book, and for Mandel, is wholly justified. As I wrote in my “Dark Passages” column when THE SINGER’S GUN was first published in May, “The beauty of the novel is that its key truths are those the reader arrives at on his or her own, without the help of a straight-line narrative or a dominating perspective. Instead, Mandel feeds off of our need to make connections, even when the pattern they form doesn’t really exist. We start with anxiety and end with it, thrumming in the background for us to listen in - or ignore, at both cost and reward.”

CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER, Tom Franklin

If SAVAGES was my summer rooftop shout book, CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER occupied that same perch for the fall. I’ve been a huge Franklin admirer for years and have awaited a new novel from him for a long time. Boy, did he deliver with this standout tale of race, boyhood friendship gone wrong, past secrets exposed to the cruel light of the present, and what have you.

From my LAT column: “[Franklin’s] larger aim is to comment on how misunderstandings multiply into easily averted tragedy; how generations-old racism is a scourge that only needs a few small souls to stamp it out, whether they know it or not; how small gestures are full of loaded meaning; and how childhood thoughtlessness — the good and the bad — can be amplified with the greater context of adulthood.”

HELLO KITTY MUST DIE, Angela Choi

Nobody but Tyrus Books could have published Choi’s debut, which has one of the most memorable opening chapters I have ever read. But who cares if the majors didn’t want to touch HELLO KITTY with a hundred-foot pole, this book has its audience - and I am certainly among the enthusiasts. Again from my LAT column: “The real triumph of HELLO KITTY MUST DIE is that it refuses to apologize for Fiona’s behavior and never offers clear-cut explanations for her pole slide down into amoral adventure. As for where she ends up, let’s put it this way: I fully expect Fiona to make partner in a decade or so, and by then there will be new rabbit holes for her to explore and exploit to the fullest.”

I’D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE, Laura Lippman

Laura and I have been friends for almost a decade (!) and I am honor-bound to disclose this, but even if I had never met her once in my life I would still say this is her best book, a feat that still leaves much room for further growth and improvement, which is quite rare and amazing. The way in which she reveals and exposes layer after layer of her characters so that “good” and “evil” really operate on multiple sides of the same empathy coin (Walter, in particular, is a creation Patricia Highsmith would have loved to make her own) is incredibly difficult to pull off, but did she ever - and in the process show that people can experience terrible things and not just survive them, but move on and live full lives as a result.

THE MANY DEATHS OF THE FIREFLY BROTHERS, Thomas Mullen

I am counting this as a crime novel even though it’s more accurately described (at least by me) as a “literary gangster zombie novel.” And did I have such a fabulous time reading it at the beginning of the year. Don’t forget about it, and buy zillions of copies when it’s out in paperback so that Mullen can find his crossover audience, which will no doubt increase even further when his dystopian novel is published by Mulholland next fall. He is a wonderful andd assured writer and we will be hearing tons and tons more from him, I bet.

IF THE DEAD RISE NOT, Philip Kerr

How much longer can Bernie Gunther go on? I almost hope Kerr doesn’t answer that question, because the way he’s extended his urbane, sardonic Berlin-born sleuth’s life has been masterful, again (as in A QUIET FLAME) contrasting a 1930s-era case - and the ramifications of one quick decision - with the pre-Castro Havana of the mid-1950s. Kerr has a complicated story to tell, but his juggling is expert and culminates in one of the best ending confessions I’ve read in ages.

WINTERLAND, Alan Glynn

A decade or so from now, when serious history books recount the hazy crazy days of the Celtic Tiger, its unstoppable boom and calamitous bust, those who seek those books out will also know that WINTERLAND got there first. Through a kaledescopic lens that only fiction - and especially crime fiction - can provide, Alan Glynn shows the depth of greed, the slow slide into corruption, the brutality of murder, and the bonds of family that glue a city, a country, and scores of people together. Is it a masterpiece? I won’t say that now, not yet. But ask me again in ten years.

HAILEY’S WAR, Jodi Compton

You want to talk of comeback kids? Compton, whose first two novels were published a zillion years ago (okay, 2005 and 2006) seemed to have disappeared…before HAILEY’S WAR was published by a different Random House imprint. Thank god. It’s fantastic, or as I said a little more floridly in the LAT, “HAILEY’S WAR serves as a metaphor for dreams so close to realization but for a fault line or two. Weaker hearts would flinch, then crack. But Hailey, instead, summons her inner soldier, the one that tells her, no matter what perilous situation she’s in, to paraphrase Bob Marley, she has to get up, stand up, stand up for her life — a better and truer test of heroism.”

IN FREE FALL, Juli Zeh

Give me a novel of ideas and if the story is good and the characters are believable and entertain me, I am there. Give me a crime novel of ideas, where two physics professors, friends and rivals, opposites but startlingly similar, do emotional battle on an intellectual canvas, raise the stakes through betrayal, the possible kidnapping of a child, and embroil a romantic-leaning police detective in the complicated machinations of quantum theory, and holy hell, this really did end up one of my favorite books of the year. Even if I suspect few others would agree but who needs ‘em?

OTHER GOOD BOOKS I LOVED THAT I READ IN 2010

• Nightmare Alley, William Lindsay Gresham (thanks NYRB Classics for reissuing!)
• The Poisoner’s Handbook, Deborah Blum
• Occupied City, David Peace (I guess it could be a crime novel but Peace is in a genre of his own, so I treat him accordingly, arguments be damned)
• Skippy Dies, Paul Murray
• Our Tragic Universe, Scarlett Thomas
• You Were Wrong, Matthew Sharpe (the writing! How he messes with literary and genre conventions! More people need to read this book)
• Diamond Ruby, Joseph Wallace (obligatory disclosure of family ties, but this book has such warmth and big-heartedness that it will win over even the most cynical of sorts)
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot, and Here Is A Human Being, Misha Angrist, for being voice-driven accounts of scientific strands and stories we need to know much, much more about
• How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu
• Room, Emma Donoghue
• By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart (okay, it was a reread, but for a good cause)
• About 10 novels by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, but especially The Death Wish and The Blank Wall
• The Dogs and the Wolves, Irene Nemirovsky (I have to read the UK/Canadian editions because Vintage isn’t reissuing these books fast enough for me, dammit)
• The Leavenworth Case, Anna Katherine Green (one of the first American detective novels and surprisingly, still quite good!)
• The Lodger, Marie Belloc Lowndes
• C, Tom McCarthy
• The Wagon, Martin Prieb (high on the list of “books I wish I had written about in 2010”, but the depiction of what it is really like to be a cop - in all its sadly hilarious glory - is what makes this book work so well.)
• After Claude, Iris Owens (another gem dug up by the NYRB)
• The Invisible Bridge, Julie Orringer
• The complete works of Aimee Bender, but especially The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
• Kosher Nation, Sue Fishkoff
• Lord of Misrule, Jaimy Gordon

Eventually I’ll tally up exactly how many I read all year. It will be a lot. Hopefully, not as many as in 2008. Or in 2009.

The Culture Q&A: Adam Levin on THE INSTRUCTIONS

My newest Q&A at Currency is with Adam Levin, whose debut novel THE INSTRUCTIONS has been receiving a ridiculous amount of buzz. A lot of it has to do with the sheer length of the book (it clocks just over 1000 pages) but even more owes to its tackling of Jewish questions, past and present, and attempting to be the ne plus ultra of contemporary Jewish humor (Philip Roth is a supporting player; Seinfeld and Woody Allen get mentioned quite a bit, and so on.) For the purposes of this piece, what fascinated me was how Levin survived financially while writing such an epic over almost a decade, and (even though it was cut for space purposes) how McSweeney's ended up with the book. I'll post that part tonight, but for now, an excerpt of the published piece:

How long did The Instructions take to write? What were your financial considerations? It took me nine years. I started at the end of 2001, a couple of months after I got to the University of Syracuse to start my MFA. About four or five years in, I realized this was going to be a pretty long book. I didn't think it would break a thousand pages, but I knew it would be over 300 pages.

I was never under the impression I'd make much money. I was teaching, and I continue to teach. I was living hand-to-mouth.

How so? Well, it's what you'd imagine. I had really crappy emergency health insurance: a $5,000 deductible, and I paid $185 a month. And I used to be a heavy smoker—between two and four packs a day—although I quit 10 weeks ago. If a terrible thing had happened, my parents couldn't exactly have sold their house to pay for my treatment. I didn't have any real savings yet.

Read on for the rest. For futher reading, see:

• Maud Newton's piece in the B&N Review
• Levin interviewed in the Chicago Tribune, and offering his five biggest literary influences
• Levin profiled in Chicago Magazine
• Julie Steinberg's WSJ Q&A
• Michael Miller's NYO rave
• And for a case in how to write a bizarre piece that has less to do with the book and more to do with the reviewer's insecure ego, I present Joshua Cohen's NYTBR review of THE INSTRUCTIONS.

Elizabeth Smart's Impassioned Journey

In Saturday's Wall Street Journal, I wrote about one of my all-time favorite books: BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I SAT DOWN AND WEPT, Elizabeth Smart's prose poem published in 1945. It is vivid and stirring and miraculously captures what it is like to be in the throes of passion and in the thick of a love affair, even one as complicated and troubling as the one Smart found herself in with fellow poet George Barker, father of her four children, never her husband, and frankly, always kind of an asshole.

But BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION is Exhibit A for the uncomfortable nexus point between art and life, when a writer's behavior and actions aren't necessarily palatable for the reader. People are absolutely right to equate Smart's behavior with respect to Barker - essentially orchestrating his and his wife's visit to California under false pretenses, and then instigating the long-running affair based more on words on the page than real-life bearing - with stalking; uncharitable interpretations of their union would conclude they deserved each other.

And yet, BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION is all about those contradictions. It interweaves the mundane and the grandiose, the blase attitude about adultery with flashes of empathy for the wronged wife, the biblical allusions with contemporary concerns about immigration and housework. And as much as Smart's prose poem depended on the complicated cauldron of events swirling around her at the time, it isn't weighed down by them. In the end, it's about emotion; the thrill of falling, the torture of longing, the sense of giving, unconditionally, love that is greater than yourself. That, above all, is why it endures.

The book spoke and continues to speak to me for a number of reasons, some of them a bit spooky. Smart was born and raised in Ottawa, my hometown; I first read BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION in the summer of 2003, while in London, specifically at a friend's place on a weekend stay, with little to read. It was short. The title caught my eye. The backstory was intriguing. And oh, did it move me, even as my 24-year-old self recognized the impracticality of such feelings while also reveling in them, just a little.

Much to my relief, the book held up and then some on this most recent read, and I hope many more people seek out a copy. So what's the spooky part, then? Well, consider Smart's accidental namesake, born a year after her 1986 death. They even resemble each other, a little. I suppose it makes a weird sort of sense that the name would be revived again, in circumstances awful and redemptive, and I wonder if the current Elizabeth, now 23, has read the work of the previous one - and what the first Ms. Smart would have made of the strange coincidence.

Further reading: Ingrid Norton's essay on BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION in the October 2010 issue of Open Letters Monthly.

Dark Passages: Pursued by the Past

My newest Dark Passages column for the LAT heaps praise on Tom Franklin's new novel CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER, which bowled me over in a big, big way, even more so than his previous work, which I've admired for several years. Here's part of the reason why:

Franklin first attracted deserved notice with the compendium of award-winning short stories rounded up in his 1999 collection "Poachers" and later with "Hell at the Breech" (2002), a moody historical novel thick with southern Georgia settings and characters well-practiced at shattering illusions — others' and their own. Then came "Smonk" (HarperPerennial: 272 pp, $13.95 paper) which ratcheted up both the comedy and the violence as a bloody-minded psychopath cuts a wide swath through the American West, building up wild myths and tall tales for others to tell when the truth is more complex, and even more entertaining.

Franklin's writerly range takes yet another startling turn with "Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter" (William Morrow: 274 pp., $24.99), the title derived from the mnemonic that helps Southern children spell the word "Mississippi": "M,I, crooked letter, crooked letter, i, crooked letter, crooked letter, i, humpback, humpback, i." (Franklin includes the extended phrase as an epigraph to begin the novel.) The memory jingle is suitably nonsensical on the surface to provoke sly grins or groans among the children forced to learn it by heart, but it has deeper resonance as a way to tie together two young boys whose unlikely friendship ended up thwarted, only to meet again as adversaries on a collision course with tragedy.

Read on for the rest. It's also gratifying to see how much attention Franklin and this book in particular has received, including being the top choice among indie booksellers and Barnes & Noble this month. For more, see his interview with NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday and the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and Ron Charles' review in WaPo.

A New Monthly Column at Currency: The Culture Q&A

Starting today, I've begun a new column at Currency, an American Express-sponsored personal finance site geared towards the so-called Millenial Generation (aka those aged 21-32 or thereabouts.) Every month, I'll be asking writers about their money and finance habits, mixing up questions about what big purchases they're saving up for, what they worry most about financially, and how they juggle the writing life with fiscal stability (or not.)  First up is Charles Yu, author of the most excellent novel HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE:

Do people assume you earn a lot because you're published? People either think I'm on the verge of being able to write full-time, or that writing is basically an unpaid hobby. The truth is that writing has contributed to our household income, but not anywhere near where it would need to be for me to even consider doing it full-time. But if I were only writing full-time, I'd feel a lot more pressure, and I'd miss the daily interactions with people.

Read on for the rest. And since this is a monthly gig, if you're an author or publicist and are interested in being one of my interviewees, please drop me a line, with the following conditions: The slate for 2010 is booked, so I'm looking for books published from February 2011 onward. I need to know at least 6-8 weeks in advance so the Q&A can be timed to the publication date. And the book must be a good fit for the Millenial demographic (and the author either falls in that age range or is close enough to it.)

Shel Silverstein's Secret, Raucous Recording Sessions

Shel Silverstein's 80th birthday was last Saturday, and since my admiration (okay, uh, general fannishness) is hardly a secret in these quarters, it seemed like as good a time as any to write about the series of recordings he did approximately 40 years ago that were too profane to release to the general public. That piece runs today on TheAtlantic.com's culture channel, and includes YouTube clips for two of the unreleased recordings: "Fuck 'Em" and "I Love My Right Hand."

Because of time and space constraints, the final version of the piece didn't include some of my recollections of how I first got a hold of one version of these bootleg sessions:

In early 1999, I was still a college student, a fan of Silverstein's works for children but barely cognisant of his work for adults. Thanks to a long-defunct site run by one Carol Arnett, I got up to speed in record time, my own dormant archival instincts awakened. On April 17 of that year - just three weeks before Silverstein died - a curious item went up for auction on eBay. It was an acetate, with two sides of eye-popping titles like "Fuck 'Em", "I Am Not a Fag" and "I Love My Right Hand." It bore the marks of Glenbrook, CT-based blank tape manufacturer Audio Devices Inc., which would be bought by Capitol Records in 1972 and closed down just two years later. The seller, now consigned to the dark, dank basement of the Internet, seemed just as bewildered as the small but enthusiastic community of Silverstein fans made aware of the acetate for the very first time: "This acetate was probably never intended to see the light of day because 1) Shel Silverstein sounds as though he is high on something and 2) the subject matter of most of the songs is-shall we say-adult rated? I realize that Mr. Silverstein is a very unusual artist, but this material is out there even for him."

Eventually the acetate sold for $431.60. I, being a frugal-minded college student, didn't bother to bid, though eBay secured me a rare 1963 Silverstein interview published in a college magazine, first editions of out-of-print titles and other material currently gathering dust in my parents' house. But then an out-of-the-blue email came from a fellow Silverstein enthusiast. He could burn me a copy of a slightly different version of the acetate, did I want a copy?

Indeed I did. Per the estate, there are no plans to release these tracks commercially, and it remains to be seen if Silverstein ever intended them to see the light of day or if it was just him having way too much fun in the recording studio. But there are still so many unanswered questions: where were the sessions recorded? Who was the producer who says "take number one, Fornicate Them" and is privy to Shel's madcap lyrical stylings? Was the acetate that sold on eBay a decade ago the master of all the recordings or a multiple-generations-removed copy, like the version I have? Or does the master actually live in one of CBS's vaults somewhere?

One more note: this piece would never have been written without the power of Twitter. So thanks first to Alexis Madrigal for expressing his interest, and to his colleague Eleanor Barkhorn, the culture channel editor at The Atlantic, for signing off and whittling the piece down by about half. And I think I'd better go listen to the "Julie's Working" outtake again...

Richard Price Can Now Truly Call Himself a Crime Novelist

So Richard Price will be writing a series of detective novels for Henry Holt under a pen name - Jay Morris - starting in fall 2011. It's the same publisher that John Banville has for his Benjamin Black novels, and Josh Gaylord for his zombie novel AND THE REAPERS ARE THE ANGELS (as Alden Bell) which kind of makes you wonder if this publishing house is where literary writers go to exercise their genre chops. But with respect to Price, this feels like the right move for him career-wise - and one that I suspect has a lot of folks asking "so what took so long?"

Idle speculation might produce this answer: there have been a lot of changes in Price's life since LUSH LIFE was published to near-universal acclaim in March 2008. He divorced his wife and is now living with the writer Lorraine Adams, who also writes literary fiction with crime elements. He left Gramercy Park and moved to Harlem. Screenplays he was contracted to write, such as an adaptation of Tom Rob Smith's novel CHILD 44, haven't panned out, at least publicly. And at almost 61, a certain cost-benefit analysis might kick in about whether it's economically worth it to spend 4-5 years researching and writing a big literary book with crime elements while writing screenplays that never get made (or aren't offered at all, which means they don't end up paying the bills) or to produce a series of crime novels at a one-a-year pace, which it appears Price is on track to do.

In other words, this strikes me as a classic "fuck it" move, in the way that Banville had already decided upon the Benjamin Black trajectory before winning the Booker for The Sea. That he got to taste the fruits of literary success and have an obvious blast writing crime fiction in the vein of his two main influences, Richard Stark aka Donald Westlake and Georges Simenon, meant man planned and both he and God laughed.

Anyway, to say my hopes are high for these books is an understatement, but mostly I wish for two things: that Price keeps his prose loose and stays relaxed (my chief complaint about LUSH LIFE was that it felt too worked over, and didn't have enough room to breathe) and that he can deliver manuscripts on time. I base this on what he told me when I interviewed him around the time LUSH LIFE came out, and brought up that he tended to get behind on work, even screenplays:

Nobody ever hands in anything on time, and when they do, it's probably because it's superficial and they didn't do a good job. It's like construction work; a guy looks at your kitchen, says the job will take two weeks. Three months later he says "Ah, the stuff from Italy didn't come, sorry about that." From the outside, anticipating how it's supposed to go is nice, but there's that saying, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

Now we know Price's pseudonymous plans, but something tells me this time, he won't be deterred from them.

UPDATE: Here's the deal memo from Publishers Marketplace:

Author of Clockers and Freedomland, Richard Price's crime novel under the "transparent pseudonym" Jay Morris, the first in a series about a 40-year-old New York City police detective whose career was nearly derailed by two controversial shootings when he was a member of an anything-goes anti-crime unit in Harlem, now a night-watch sergeant on a case involving the fatal knifing of a young drunk in the bathroom of a Third Avenue pub, to editor at large John Sterling, who edited two other Price novels, fo Holt, for publication in fall 2011, by Lynn Nesbit at Janklow & Nesbit (NA).

Several interesting things about this: first, Price is back with John Sterling, who edited the two other books mentioned in the deal memo, CLOCKERS & FREEDOMLAND (LUSH LIFE was with FSG and edited by Lorin Stein, who has since moved on to take over The Paris Review; SAMARITAN was published by Knopf and edited by Robin Desser, who coincidentally happens to be Lorraine Adams' editor as well); the other is that the Harlem setting makes me think this is a reworking of the big Harlem novel Price mentioned he was working on in interviews last year, restructured so that it would take as much time and produce more steady work and income.

About Time for Some Sunday Smatterings

Still sporadic, expect to be so for the foreseeable future. But links, they do pile up...

At DailyFinance this weekend, I wrote about Rick Riordan and his extremely successful Percy Jackson novels for children, and what it might take to transform him from the publishing phenomenon he is now to a wider, more cultural phenomenon.

Otto Penzler owns 58,000 first editions, splendidly on display in his Connecticut home, but he emphasizes to the NYT that he's "not a rich guy." Okay, I'm surprised that was part of the story's headline, because the whole point of the Edgar-award winning THE LINEUP was to raise extra capital to keep the Mysterious Bookshop afloat, and I was glad to see the recent British thrillers auction at Swann brought in some good money, especially for the Ian Fleming first editions.

Peter Temple was a surprise winner of the Miles Franklin Prize for his newest crime novel TRUTH, which has the Guardian wondering if a crime novel can win the Booker. Sure, if one is submitted, but with publishers restricted to only two titles per year, the likelihood is pretty slim - and is also why CHILD 44, when it was longlisted a couple of years ago, raised proverbial eyebrows.

On the review front: Oline Cogdill enjoys Craig Johnson's new mystery, while Margaret Cannon has her Globe & Mail roundup, Adam Woog did his for the Seattle Times earlier in the month, as did the Times' Marcel Berlins, while Randy Michael Signor does the same this weekend for the Chicago Sun-Times, as does Jake Kerridge for the Telegraph and John O'Connell for the Guardian. Maureen Corrigan picked thrilling summer reads for NPR, and Patrick Anderson is crazy for Alan Furst. 

That said, I can absolutely see Adam Ross's crime-ish debut MR. PEANUT racking up or being nominated for a slew of awards. He talked with the Nashville Scene and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review about the making of this inventive, Escher-like book.

Nick Bantock, whose GRIFFIN AND SABINE novels were all over the bestseller lists in the early 1990s, is exhibiting his body of work in the Denver area.

Let the David Mitchell media circus begin in earnest in the United States! His wonderful new novel THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET is out on Tuesday, and the NYT Magazine features a lengthy piece on Mitchell and his life & work by Wyatt Mason.

In 2007, literary agent Harriet Wasserman closed up her shop and disappeared. As the Daily Beast reports, it has a lot to do with stealing royalty money from some awfully prestigious clients.

John Updike's literary archive is full of treasure troves, as Sam Tanenhaus discovers and reports back on.

Someone had to write a hit piece on TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, so why not Allen Barra? Meanwhile, a Daily Mail reporter meets the 84-year-old Harper Lee, on the condition that there is to be no talk of the book - ever.

And finally, the new mayor of Reykjavik is kind of awesome.

David Markson, R.I.P.

One of America's greatest writers has passed on, and even though I shouldn't have been surprised - he was 82 years old and not in the greatest of health the last few years - I am. Gutted, actually. And based on the reaction on Twitter and various blogs, I'm far from the only one. In a way, David Markson needed the Internet, or more accurately, vice versa, to find his rightful place in the literary world. Quotation approprations, short declarative sentences, quick bursts with acres of thought, meditation on artists and writers at work, and a tremendous study of consciousness marked Markson's output since WITTGENSTEIN'S MISTRESS (1988) opened with the phrase "In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street." And as our collective attention spans decreased and dovetailed from mass-market pursuits, there was Markson to clue us in to something greater, more amorphous perhaps, but something that pinged the outer reaches of what he termed "seminonfictional semi-fictions."

Others will chime in with more reasoned and coherent essays on what Markson meant for American literature, and I'll link to those as I do to other missives below once they come in. But I got to know the writer's work, and later on, a little bit, the man, through his earliest output, a couple of entertaining and erudite crime novels featuring a scamp of a private detective named Harry Fannin. I'd read THIS IS NOT A NOVEL and had been excited and blown away, and just weeks later I was assigned to write my very first piece for the Los Angeles Times - a double review of those two Fannin novels, EPITAPH FOR A TRAMP and EPITAPH FOR A DEAD BEAT.

Markson clearly wrote the books for money, and a way to make use of some of the genre knowledge he'd gleaned working as an editor for Dell, then one of the pulp paperback mills that couldn't quite hold a candle to Fawcett Gold Medal's granddaddy status. But not unlike John Banville's pseudonymous mystery novels, the Fannin books couldn't help but betray the rudimentary building blocks of themes and topics Markson spent his entire later career working through: baseball, bad puns, William Gaddis's THE RECOGNITIONS, and the writer's struggle for relevance and the artist's relationship to creative pursuits. Years later, I'm still not sure both EPITAPH books qualify as great crime fiction, but they stand out in a way that a great majority of the pulp offerings of then and the more contemporary books of now simply do not. But Markson had greater literary and philosophical goals and those are what he should be remembered for.

After that review he got in touch with me - oddly enough by email, through a friend, since he did not own a computer - and we corresponded a little, by postcard and letter. I'd see him at the Strand Bookstore sometimes, one of his regular haunts, shooting the shit with the cavalcade of managers working the review copy desk in the basement (I hope very much that the Strand will publish its own tribute to the man; one of his very last public appearances was there, in the fall of 2007.) That year, I think, is when the critical tide turned in Markson's favor. He was honored by the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and New York Magazine named him "the best writer you never heard of."

I saw Markson last at the public memorial for David Foster Wallace. I hadn't seen him around for several months and asked after him and his health. But the answer, at least to me, was obvious. He was more frail. He didn't have to articulate his sadness over Wallace's suicide, that a much-younger man with prodigious talent had died too soon, and that it was a far different feeling from watching friends your own age pass on. A thought passed through my head that Markson might not be around much longer and I should get back in touch, lest the inevitable catch me off-guard. Like many good intentions, it wasn't acted upon.

And even if there had been plenty of advance warning, that off-guard feeling would have come for all those who admired what David Markson did, who argued whether the Red Sox really were the best baseball team ever, who listened to his stories of being around the Beats and drinking (too much) at the White Horse Tavern, and who appreciated what he meant to a greater literary culture that, only now, may finally understand him in a greater way and accord him proper due. 

Other Tributes and Links:

• Associated Press obituary - reveals Markson died at home in bed on June 4, and that his body will be cremated following a private memorial service. Markson also asked that he receive no public memorial, but his literary agent and former wife Elaine said "I'm ignoring that request."
• New York Times obit --  with some interesting comments from Pete Hamill
• Albany Times-Union obit - with comments from William Kennedy
• Jacket Copy/LAT
• HTMLGiant obituary
• A.D. Jameson, "Loving David Markson"
• Gigantic Sequins tribute
• Pictorial tribute from Jim Behrle
• Ed Champion pays tribute
• Claude Scales' tribute
• Orbis Quintus tribute
• The Constant Conversation tribute
• Glenn Kenny's tribute
• Mutant Eggplant
• Scott Bowen
• Jeff Laughlin (The Awl)
• James Yeh (The Faster Times)
• John Williams (The Second Pass)
• Tony's Book World
• Early Rising
• Colton Brown
• Kenyon Review obit
• Bookforum obit
• GalleyCat obit
• Metafilter thread
• 1989 interview at Dalkey Archive
• 2005 interview at Bookslut
• 2007 interview at Conjunctions
• 2007 reading/appearance at the 92nd Street Y
• 2008 interview by Michael Silverblatt
• Niagara Falls Reporter appreciation
• A David Markson introduction, MadInkBeard
• The Complete Review's collection of David Markson criticism
• Correspondence with Gilbert Sorrentino

Carry Me Through Sunday Smatterings

Marilyn Stasio focuses her attention on new mysteries and thrillers by Deborah Coonts, Michael Koryta, Lee Child, Sophie Littlefield, Elaine Viets and Tarquin Hall.

Also in the NYT, Charles McGrath considers Jim Thompson and the film adaptations - successful or otherwise - of his work.

Did Janet Maslin like Justin Cronin's THE PASSAGE? Maybe, though it's hard to tell from this piece. Laura Miller is less ambiguous in showing her admiration for the nearly 800-page vampire epic.

Oline Cogdill has her say on the new urban sf novel by James O'Neal (aka James O. Born) in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

In the Globe & Mail, Margaret Cannon rounds up new crime fiction by Thomas Perry, Lee Child, Stefanie Pintoff, Anne Emery and Brent Pilkey.

Also in the G&M, Cannon chats with Deon Meyer about his South African crime novels, most recently THIRTEEN HOURS.

Who better than Zoe Sharp to comment on the horrific killings in Cumbria by Derrick Bird? Her piece appeared on the BBC's World at One.

Speaking of the BBC, PD James is increasingly critical of the broadcaster, saying that most people actually do have an attention span longer than a minute.

Former NYPD and LAPD Commissioner William Bratton tells Crain's New York Business what he's reading - predominantly police procedurals.

The Chicago Sun-Times profiles Martin Preib, author of one of my favorite non-fiction books of 2010, THE WAGON, which is all about real-life stories on the police beat.

Nice to see a good review of THE DARK END OF THE STREET, one of the strongest and highest firepowered anthologies published in a good while.

The books-to-film beat is shrinking and shrinking some more, especially for books that could be made into quality dramas. Variety investigates the situation.

New York's David Edelstein is tremendously impressed with the film version of Daniel Woodrell's WINTER'S BONE. I cannot wait to see this movie.

Let's all drool over Tim Sheard's 1969 Avanti II. That is one good-looking car.

Yes, self-publishing is gaining a greater foothold in the book industry, in large part thanks to digital options. Let's get used to it, but not assume it'll change things irrevocably.