Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind

Hiatus

The post explaining it all is here, but this is the short version:

• I started a new gig as the News Editor for Publishers Marketplace, the first time I have had something approximating a full-time position in almost five and a half years. And it's keeping me rather busy, as it should.
• Typepad is a horrible back-end platform and I have been meaning to ditch it for years. (In fact, Moveable Type in general also sucks.) One day, the long-sought-after, much-needed upgrade to Wordpress will happen, and with it a complete rethink of what the site ought to be.
• I still keep up with the crime fiction world, obviously. I can't not do that, especially since it dovetails significantly with what I most love to read and the latest developments in the publishing industry. But I don't have the desire right now, and haven't for a long time to be the uber-chronicler I once was, which I think should be patently obvious to anyone who's showed up here the last year, if not more. Luckily there are many, many fine online establishments who have taken the slack, picked it up, and run with it. The Rap Sheet, of course. Jen's Book Thoughts. Detectives Beyond Borders. Spinetingler. Crime Always Pays. Crimespot.net by virtue of aggregation. And the great Jiro Kimura's The Gumshoe Site, which I firmly believe will be the last crime fiction website standing, outliving everybody. 
• Seven years is a long time. I was 24 when I started Confessions, and I'm in my early 30s now. My entire life changed because of this blog, and I'm grateful and humbled a blog could take me from graduate student-hood in forensic science to a bookish-minded journalist and freelancer who got fiction published every now and then.
• Which brings me to the "put up and shut up" reason of putting Confessions on ice: to spend more time on fiction. I've been somewhat productive in the last few months, though also aware that my writing process and method differs from several years ago. If I have to put my extra time into writing projects, fiction gets first dibs.

So thank you all, so very much, for reading, commenting and listening. I appreciate it more than I can possibly express. And it's not like I'm hard to find.

Bringing Back The Mysterious Press

As has been widely reported, Otto Penzler and his well-traveled imprint is on the move again, after being domiciled at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the past six years. As of Fall 2011, he'll publish 10-12 titles a year with Grove/Atlantic, but the books will be branded with a very familiar name: yes, The Mysterious Press is returning, as Penzler re-acquired the rights to the name from Hachette Book Group, which (as Warner Books) bought the original name (and press) back in 1989.

That already sounds like a mouthful, but the story is a lot more complicated from a publishing standpoint. That's because Penzler has often tied his publishing fortunes to longtime friend Anthony Cheetham, who is close to the nine life professional limit in the UK. Cheetham and Penzler first started working together around 30 years ago, when Cheetham, who was then with Random House UK, licensed  the UK rights to the Mysterious Press list. Then Cheetham nearly set the venture up again at Century/Arrow before things worked out at Quercus, and when Cheetham moved on to Corvus (part of Atlantic Books) so did Penzler.

The longstanding UK connection thus explains the Grove/Atlantic piece of the pie. But Entrekin, years ago, expressed to me that he was looking to acquire more crime fiction, adding to a stable that already includes Mo Hayder, Deon Meyer, Mike Lawson, Donna Leon, and John Lawton. (A stable, I might add, that is primarily edited by Jamison Stoltz.) Adding Penzler and his 10-12 books a year will certainly do that. The trick will be whether the revamped Mysterious Press can freshen up with some new blood, or if current and longtime Penzler amigos like Thomas H. Cook, Andrew Klavan, Thomas Perry, and John Harvey will follow him to Grove/Atlantic.

It also remains to be seen what will happen at HMH. The deal for Penzler's imprint was done on the Harcourt side, pre-merger; joining Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt together also brought the imprint under the same auspices as the "Best American" anthology series, for which Penzler oversees the Best American Mystery Stories on an annual basis. Now that HMH doesn't have 6-8 slots a year going to Penzler's titles, that frees the publisher to diversify their own crime fiction list, if they choose (and my understanding is that this will be the case.) At the moment, non-Penzler crime writers include Inger Ash Wolfe, Elly Griffiths, Karin Fossum, and Sara Gran. Further titles will likely reflect the sensibility of these books.

In other words, Penzler's peripatetic state (to steal the headline from Publishers Lunch) appears to benefit both HMH and Grove/Atlantic, but it may well benefit crime fiction readers the most. That, however, depends on all the books being published well - no matter the format, no matter who's responsible.

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: Crimes grow in rich Appalachian soil

My newest column for the Los Angeles Times travels through the Appalachian region, looking specifically at recent novels published by Sharyn McCrumb and Vicki Lane. Here's now the piece opens:

Say the word "Appalachia" in some variant or another and the probability is pretty high that someone will come back with a humorous remark — or one he or she thinks is funny, but isn't. It's a region that stretches as far north as the state of New York and as far south as the mid-point of Mississippi, with more than 23 million strong living within boundaries that first began to be recognized as a distinct entity in the 19th century. And yet, the snickers emitted when South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford claimed, in 2009, that he was "hiking the Appalachian Trail" — rather than own up to an extramarital affair — had as much to do with the culturally backward connotations of his excuse as the scandal itself.

It's easier to make fun of something one doesn't understand, and Appalachia's mix of strong religious ties, farming, crop cultivation and Cherokee Indian folklore produces a brew that might be even more potent than the moonshine the region was long famous for. As a result, the crime fiction that originates from Appalachia teems with pungent smells and sounds and is steeped in the roots of generations of families — and, of course, in blood, especially of past sins coming due in the present....

Read on for the rest.

On Patrick and Angie's Return to the Crime Fiction World

For many years crime fiction fans have clamored for the return of Patrick Kenzie & Angela Gennaro, Dennis Lehane's private-eye duo first introduced in 1994's A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR and stars of four subsequent novels. But Lehane, understandably, had bigger things on his mind, and based on the success and critical reception of MYSTIC RIVER (2001) SHUTTER ISLAND (2003) and his 700-plus page historical epic, THE GIVEN DAY (2008), it didn't appear Patrick & Angie would be coming back. There are several interviews that explain why, but here's a sample answer he gave to the Drood Review in 2002 on the question of when, if ever, they would reappear:

I think Spade and Marlowe remain icons because they didn?t wear out their welcome. Would Chandler be Chandler if he'd written 18 Marlowe books? I don?t know, but I wonder. Maybe Chandler could have sustained the level of quality, but the issue is more whether I can. And I have my doubts about that. The only artsy, metaphysical aspect of my approach to writing is that I can only write about characters when they come knocking on the door and tell me to. Patrick and Angie stopped knocking after Prayers for Rain. If they come knocking again, I?ll open the door and welcome them in with open arms because, well, they paid for my house and I?m exceedingly grateful. But if they don;t, then I'll be content to let them live happily ever after without my dropping another case-from-hell in their laps. They deserve that.

As of today, that line of thinking has reversed itself with the publication of MOONLIGHT MILE. Patrick and Angie are, indeed, back. They've grown older, not always wiser, with a child to raise and way too much debt. But as I explain in the Los Angeles Times, going back to them poses something of a double-edged sword for Lehane. There's forward progression, but there's also nostalgia. There are parts of the book that are wonderful and other parts less so. And since 700 words wasn't really enough to do my feelings proper justice, a little more explanation may be in order - admittedly, a dangerous exercise for a reviewer.

Halfway through college in the late 1990s was when I became a serious crime fiction reader. I'd read haphazardly before then, of both contemporary and classic writers, but only around late 1998/early 1999 did I discover the writers who meant the most to me and who were really on the leading edge of where the genre was supposed to be, people like Robert Crais, Lee Child, Harlan Coben, Michael Connelly, Laura Lippman, the Tart Noir gang (Lauren Henderson, Katy Munger, Stella Duffy, Sparkle Hayter, et al.) and Dennis Lehane.

But as good as those authors were at the time, it's been wonderful to watch them all evolve, both critically and commercially. How many people had a real sense that the Laura Lippman who wrote IN BIG TROUBLE would later produce psychologically acute standalone novels like EVERY SECRET THING, WHAT THE DEAD KNOW and I'D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE? Harlan Coben hadn't even written his breakout book, TELL NO ONE, yet, let alone carved out his own niche of domestic-tinged suspense thrillers. Child, Connelly and Crais were bestsellers of varying degrees, but nowhere close to being the perennial inhabitants of the top spots as they are now. Tart Noir is a faded memory now, but I would make the argument for their influence on what types of crime novels women can, do and should produce.

The same goes for Lehane. It was very clear he was destined to write greater things, based in large part on what he had produced with GONE, BABY GONE. PRAYERS FOR RAIN was fun, but also very much the work of, as he's described it often, someone needing to "crank out a book." And then came MYSTIC RIVER, the same month that both Michael Connelly and George Pelecanos published books (A DARKNESS MORE THAN NIGHT and RIGHT AS RAIN, respectively) and the new century in the genre really started to take shape.

So reading MOONLIGHT MILE was like time-travel. And it was nice, in a way, to revisit my early 20s, the promise and seemingly unlimited opportunities that those years represent, with so much latitude for trial and error. But obviously, I'm not in my 20s, and have happily moved on, learned from some mistakes and am doomed to repeat others in perpetuity.It's fine to look back; but I'd rather look forward.

And when it comes to my favorite writers, I am always asking, at the end of a new book, if there's a way for them to evolve further. THE GIVEN DAY, on top of SHUTTER ISLAND AND MYSTIC RIVER, was all about forward motion. MOONLIGHT MILE, while not exactly a step backwards, doesn't quite fit with the upwards trending line, even as it acknowledges changes in Patrick & Angie and Lehane himself, who's now put down more roots in Florida and has a child of his own.

So that underlying thinking is why I closed my review like this: "MOONLIGHT MILE is akin to that 10th-anniversary school reunion: old acquaintances to catch up with, old enemies to ignore or reevaluate, and lots of alcohol served up at the cash bar across the room. After the festivities end, it's time to get on with the business of day-to-day adulthood — and for Lehane to continue the forward motion promised by his most recent, more ambitious works."

I am, however, looking forward to what commentary will be generated within the crime fiction community. There's already plenty of coverage of MOONLIGHT MILE, including:

• Janet Maslin's rave in the NYT
• More reviews by the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Irish Voice Central, USA TODAY, and the Contra Costa Times
• Q&As with New York Magazine, Washington Post Express Night Out, and the Boston Herald

And no doubt there will be much more to come.

BCon Past, NoirCon Ahead

I admit I arrived at Bouchercon with a faraway look in my eye. A day late, with family obligations past and nostalgia trips and unexpected meetings with old friends to come, this year's convention wasn't going to be the immersive experience that BCons past have been for me. But as I've long believed and witnessed again and again, Bouchercon is what you make of it, and this year, it gladdened my heart to see so many fans, authors and book people experience the convention for the first time, or catch up with friends old and new, or share their experiences, photos and thoughts on blogs, Twitter and Facebook, and just generally remind why this community is so freaking great. So all thanks to Rae Helmsworth especially, who had a vision, worked hard to make it happen, and pulled things off in spades.

And I have to say, it was pretty damn cool to interview Kate Atkinson. She read the opening chapter of STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG - out since August in the UK but not available till late March in the US - and the audience clearly wanted more. Kate was funny, charming, and delightfully contradictory, and my job was basically to feed questions and let her entertain the crowd, which she did to great effect (based on the signing line afterwards.)

So onwards to St. Louis. But for those in the Tri-State Area, I'll be at NoirCon in Philadelphia, which takes place between November 4 and 7. There are a lot of folks who were in SF and are migrating to Philly and, being a smaller convention, I expect the pace won't be as frenetic and the five minute conversations will expand accordingly.

Allons-y, Bouchercon!

This more or less dormant* blog will be even more dormant this week thanks to the chock-full-of-wonder that is Bouchercon. It officially starts on Thursday and runs through Sunday at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, but based on Twitter reports, the party's already begun and should be in full swing by Wednesday for sure. And having glanced at both the program schedule and Dan Wagner's highlights, holy crap, this is a convention worth getting to, stat.

From the Anthony Awards to GOH interviews with Denise Mina, Lee Child, Eddie Muller and Maddy van Hertbruggen, a read-through of Declan Hughes' play about Dashiell Hammett & Lillian Hellman, the world premiere of Lee Goldberg's film Remaindered, an open-to-all Reacher Creature party, banquets for the Shamus and Nero Wolfe Awards and tributes to Robert B. Parker and David Thompson, schedule planning should drive people crazy in the best possible way in trying to decide what to see and how much to pack in.

And then there are the publisher parties: HarperCollins is hosting the opening ceremonies Thursday night, while Minotaur, Mulholland, Ballantine Bantam Dell, and Touchstone are having offsite bashes that are invitation-only, and possibly Berkley Prime Crime, too. There will be lots of other offsite events as well, such as Writers with Drinks on Saturday the 16th, Stephen Jay Schwartz's BEAT launch party at the Beat Museum in North Beach on the 13th, and a Nancy Drew 80th Anniversary shindig.

As for me, I'll be interviewing Kate Atkinson on Saturday at 3 PM, talking partly about her new novel STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG - published in August in the UK, and out next March in the US - but also about the Jackson Brodie novels as a whole. And this time, I promise to keep any and all hot liquids away from her.

*Of course, the moment I acknowledge this alleged dormancy, I'm destined to post like a prolific savant for the forseeable future, if past precedent is any indication. But the whole "making a living" as an excuse is kind of getting old, I know. Or perhaps it's a seven-year-itch thing? In any case, blah blah due warning blah blah and all that.

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.)