Ed Gorman's Blog, page 25

Gravetapping: THE SHADOW BROKER by Trace Conger

THURSDAY, AUGUST 27, 2015Ben Boulden: Finn Harding is a private investigator who lost his license for unethical, and really, illegal behavior. A corporation hired him to do a background check on a CEO candidate; what it really wanted was access to the candidate’s medical records. Finn got the file, but he also got caught. Now he is trying to make a living as an unlicensed investigator, which limits the pool of clients to those who work in the shadows (i. e. the wrong side of the law). 
Finn is approached by a man who runs a website called The Shadow Brokerage where stolen credit cards, social security numbers are bought and sold. The website was hacked, and the hacker is extorting Finn’s client for $50,000 a month to keep the information secret. The client, a man named Bishop, wants the hacker found, and dealt with. Finn agrees to do the finding, but he doesn’t want to know what “dealt with” means. The job goes sideways, and Finn finds himself running for his life.
The Shadow Broker is an entertaining private eye novel. The setting is Cincinnati, and Finn lives on a decrepit house boat on the Ohio River. He has an ex-wife, a daughter he fears losing, and a father living in a nursing home who wants out. It is written in both first and third person—Finn’s perspective in first—and the author makes it work very well. There is a bunch of violence, and Finn makes a number of bad moves. The prose is smooth, the story interesting, and there are a couple very nice twists.
The Shadow Broker is a finalist for the 2015 Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award for Best Indie P.I. Novel, and I hope it wins.

Purchase a copy of The Shadow Broker at Amazon. POSTED BY ED GORMAN AT 7:33 AM NO COMMENTS: LINKS TO THIS POST 

New Book: When Somebody Kills You: A Rat Pack Mystery

   Just a quick mention that WHEN SOMEBODY KILLS YOU, the 10th book in my Rat Pack series, featuring Frank and Dino as well as Judy Garland, was published in the U.S. Aug. 1st in hardcover, and will be released Sept. 1 as an ebook. When I started writing this series I don't know if I anticipated getting to 10 books--and beyond?   Here's what the Historical Novel Society had to say about it: When Somebody Kills You: A Rat Pack MysteryBy Robert RandisiFind & buy onIn this tenth installment of Randisi’s fun Rat Pack Mysteries, our favorite pit boss, Eddie Gianelli, is asked to help out yet another friend of Deano and Frank: Miss Judy Garland. Judy feels as though she’s being followed, so Eddie steps in to keep an eye on her, enlisting his good buddy, Jerry Epstein, to help him discover what’s really going on. It doesn’t take long for Eddie to become skeptical of Judy’s newest fiancé, and to wonder if perhaps the young actor is out for more than just Judy’s companionship. Unfortunately, Eddie also has his own big problem: it seems someone in Las Vegas has put out a hit on him, and it’s not clear just which powerful figure has decided to take him out. Could it be mobster MoMo Giancana, or someone related to the Kennedys? Or someone else entirely?This novel, like the other mysteries in the series, is good fun that weaves real people and events effortlessly around a mystery that is plausible enough to have happened just that way. Eddie always seems to get himself involved in serious problems despite his best efforts, and his usual cast of cohorts is there to keep him alive while he figures out what’s going on. Randisi is an expert in bringing the era to life, using the Rat Pack members fully and giving Old Vegas a personality all its own. This book is just as good as the others in the series, and is recommended as quality escapism and intriguing mystery at their best.  

Joseph Lewis

Joseph LewisI watched Gun Crazy last night and was struck as always by the folk tale power of the story and the bravado with which it was directed. Mystery writer Mike Nevins has written a long and to me definitive piece-interview on Lewis' career and through it I came to understand Lewis' notion that to have suspense you first need to have characters who are slightly askew. You never quite understand their motives so you never quite know what to expect from them.

Most evaluations of Lewis' career speculate what he would have done with A picture budgets. He ended up doing a lot of TV work. He made a good deal of money but presumably wasn't as satisfied with his Bonanza stories as he was with his more personal work. He started in westerns and finished in westerns.

As for what he would have done with A-picture money...who knows. But there's at least a chance that he was most comfortable working with the money he was given. Hard to imagine that pictures as gritty as Gun Crazy and The Big Combo could have been shot the way he wanted them to be in an A-picture environment. These are films that took no prisoners and Hwood, especially in those days, wasn't real keen on grim movies.

I found this evaluation of Lewis by David Thomson, my favorite film critic:

"There is no point in overpraising Lewis. The limitations of the B picture lean on all his films. But the plunder he came away with is astonishing and - here is the rub - more durable than the output of many better-known directors...Joseph Lewis never had the chance to discover whether he was an "artist," but - like Edgar Ulmer and Budd Boetticher - he has made better films than Fred Zinnemann, John Frankenheimer, or John Schlesinger." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002)
POSTED BY ED GORMAN AT 2:15 PM 9 COMMENTS: LINKS TO THIS POST 

On sale NOW Fiction River #14

Valor
Edited by Lee AllredFuture wars will be fought with new technologies and even on new planets, but one military constant will remain: the need for human valor. Eleven skilled authors explore science fiction’s military dimension as they rocket toward a doomed interplanetary invasion, grapple with cold-hearted aliens on the galaxy’s lonely rim, and outwit space conquerors with nothing but their wits and two strong fists. This latest volume of Fiction River celebrates the bravery and courage beating within the human heart.

New Books: The Overlooked American Women of World War I Elizabeth Foxwell

The Overlooked American Women of World War IElizabeth Foxwell
The new film Testament of Youth, an adaptation of Vera Brittain’s wrenching account oflove and loss in World War I, has received enthusiastic reviews. Brittain’s autobiographyhas never been out of print, but those seeking a work with equivalent impact by anAmerican woman in the war would be hard pressed to find one.
Accounts do exist, but tend to be lacking the status of T of Y. I enjoyed Joyce Marlow’santhology The Virago Book of Women and the Great War, with its primarily Britishcontributors. But when I looked for a similar U.S. collection, I could not find one. Whythis state of affairs, when American women did serve in the war, as documentation suchas books, diaries, and letters attests? Did their published accounts have a short shelflife, given the relatively brief period of official U.S. involvement in the war compared tothat of European nations? Were they affected by official and familial constraintsregarding the roles they could play and discuss during the war? Did they feel thatrecording their experiences would be self-aggrandizement when they viewed theirservice as their patriotic duty, and the men were the ones doing the fighting and thedying? Did their roles mean that they could not discuss their activities (such as servingin the armed forces)?
Irritated by the absence of a resource that captured these women’s varied experiencesin their own particular voices, I set out to collect first-person accounts of U.S. womenthat dated from the war period, wanting the immediacy and the “I was there” point ofview. I would attempt to find women who pursued diverse work in relief, medical,journalistic, military, entertainment, and other positions; served in different theaters ofthe war; and represented various faith traditions. I would annotate their narratives sothat the casual reader could understand references that time might have made cryptic,and I would find biographical material that would provide details on backgrounds andoften astonishing postwar activities. Wherever possible, I would try to locate photos thatcould put faces to accounts.
The process was gratifying, frustrating, and even disturbing. Some amazing storiessurfaced, such as that of Marie S. Dahm Shapiro, the naval fingerprint expert turnedZiegfield Follies showgirl turned fashion designer. The postwar trails of women couldgrow faint due to marriage, family, work, and other demands, but the greater availabilityof online genealogical and archival information assisted in this task. Promising lines ofinquiry often resulted in dead ends. For example, no personal story emerged by PaulineJordan Rankin (1892?–1976), a nurse imprisoned by the Germans (in World War I) andthe Japanese (in World War II) and founder of the first school for the blind in Armenia.The suicides of poet Gladys Cromwell and her sister, Dorothea, en route from Franceappears attributable to PTSD, and the letter to the editor from “A Yeomanette” showsmen’s fear of women’s encroachment into the previously male-only territory of militaryservice.
I hope that readers will find the collection enlightening and interesting, perhaps leadingthem to read further and see the many parallels between now and then. My blog,American Women in World War I, provides links to WWI resources and details onwomen for whom I could not find a first-person account.
Elizabeth Foxwell is editor of In Their Own Words: American Women in World War I, staff editorof the Catholic Historical Review, managing editor of Clues: A Journal of Detection, and editor of
the McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction series.POSTED BY ED GORMAN AT 4:22 PM NO COMMENTS: LINKS TO THIS POST 

Brash Books: New Books- GO DOWN HARD by Craig Faustus Buck

1. Tell us about your current novel.

Go Down Hard is a noir romp from the POV of Nob Brown, an ex-cop turned bottom-feeding tabloid crime writer who investigates the 20-year old unsolved murder of a rock and roll goddess who was the headliner in his adolescent sexual fantasies. When he looks under the wrong rock, he inadvertently triggers the murder of one of the rock star's daughters. Nob and his best friend (with benefits) LAPD Detective Gloria Lopes must dumpster-dive into the murky worlds of '90s rock, live Internet porn, Russian mobsters, abusive psychiatrists and estate planning to uncover the sordid ties that bind the two murders together. I had a total blast writing this novel and I hope it shows.

2. Can you give a sense of what you're working on now?

Nob is the narrator of Go Down Hard. It's sequel Go Down Screaming, which I'm about 80,000 words into,  is told from Gloria's perspective and is more of a thriller than a mystery, as she goes mano a mano with a female serial killer who collects souvenir eyeballs. When Gloria and Nob were LAPD cadets, they were having wild sex in a motel when someone screamed in the room next door. Gloria wound up catching the "Party Girl Slasher," call girl Billie Breech, who'd already racked up four victims by the ripe old age of sixteen. Almost two decades later, Billie gets out of the penitentiary having spent her entire prison life planning a particularly demented revenge against Gloria. Scary, sexy, tear-jerking, revolting and funny if all goes according to plan.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

Perhaps the greatest pleasure of a writing career is having written. There's no satisfaction quite like typing "The End," except, maybe, getting an acceptance letter, publishing offer or green light. Putting the sense of accomplishment aside, there are moments in writing when something unexpectedly clicks in, especially following a period of frustration (i.e., writer's block), when you feel work come together. These rare feel-like-dancing endorphin floods are hard to beat.

4. What is the greatest DISpleasure?

The endless loop of extended writer's block. Unlike the gastrointestinal version of blockage, writers block responds to neither drugs nor surgery. The only cure is to bang your head against the wall until one or the other of them breaks. Persistence does work, but it can get ugly.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Support more new and midlist authors. 

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

Brash Books has pretty much taken care of this problem for me.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.

I'd received a string of rave rejections from mainstream publishers who were allegedly anxious to see my next book yet passed on Go Down Hard despite professing to love it. These were long, adoring, personal rejection letters from big time editors and publishers. So when Lee Goldberg and Joel Goldman called to tell me they both loved my book I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Instead, they said they wanted to publish it. I was ecstatic, especially because they seemed so enthusiastic, something I wouldn't expece from a traditional publisher. I didn't know Joel at the time, but I'd socialized with Lee at various writers conferences and both liked and respected him. I also relished the idea of a publishing company run by authors. My agent was a bit wary, primarily because Brash was challenging the traditional publishing paradigm in ways that had not been tested before. We were swimming in uncharted waters and still are. But I'd much rather take a chance on the future than depend on an old business model that's clearly dying if it's not dead already.
BIO
Author/screenwriter Craig Faustus Buck's debut noir mystery novel, GO DOWN HARD, was published by Brash Books in 2015. His short story "Honeymoon Sweet" is currently nominated for both Anthony and Macavity Awards. He is SoCal chapter President of Mystery Writers of America. CraigFaustusBuck.comThanks,  
Craig Faustus Buck

Anthony and Macavity Award short story nominee "Honeymoon Sweet"

New Books: Showing The Rifle by Dennis Green

Showing The Rifle
Like anyone who has spewed forth a book, I’m occasionally asked what the toughest thing is about writing. I’ll mumble something about the difficulty of making time to write when you have a full-time job and family, or trying to write when you’re not inspired, or something equally cliché.
But I’m lying. I don’t want to talk about it, but there is one thing that even after writing two books is BY FAR the hardest thing to do.
Knowing how to show the rifle.
You probably recognize the phrase. Anton Chekhov famously wrote that if you show a rifle hanging over the mantle in Act I it had better go off in Act III or you shouldn’t mention it.
Chekhov was referring to keeping extraneous detail out of your writing. If something doesn’t serve a distinct purpose to plot or characterization, chop it out. Great advice.
But for me, “showing the rifle” is more about burying the clues that my protagonist uses to solve the mystery the book is about. Because what you want to do is show the rifle, sure, but do it in such a way that when the gun goes off, it’s a complete and utter surprise to the reader. For my money, the hardest trick in literature.
In this context, of course, mystery is an all-encompassing term, not a particular genre. Every book... heck, every tale ever told is at its heart, a mystery. Every protagonist has a problem that must be solved, and the story consists of the obstacles and clues he finds along the way that enables him to solve the problem, be it romantic or galactic.
I’m a pretty easy audience. I’ll put up with wooden characters, familiar scenes, trite dialogue. As long as the story is moving at a good clip, I’m happy. But the second the detective suddenly produces a clue that was conveniently not mentioned when she first “noticed” it, or pulls some piece of arcane knowledge out of thin air, I’m out of there.
Of course, the opposite is true as well. There are few things more irritating than reading a setup that is so obvious it might as well be outlined in red, then biding your time for the rest of the book for the “big reveal” on page 277 that you knew has been coming since Chapter 3.
So I obsess over the rifle.
It’s nerve-wracking. You painstakingly plant clue after clue, then scuff just enough metaphorical dirt over each one, hoping they go unnoticed even though to you it’s like there’s a big, red arrow pointing at each one that screams “LOOK, LOOK! SETUP FOR THE END OF THE BOOK HERE! RIGHT HERE! HE’S GOING TO REFER TO THIS LATER DURING HIS *SHOCKING* PLOT TWIST! BE WARNED!”
Fortunately, of all the reviews of my books, no one has ever said anything about the big red arrow. In fact, I have even gotten a few “I totally did not suspect the twist at the end!” What I consider to be the absolute highest praise any plot-driven author can receive:
There is no rifle in the Traveler books. At least, not yet. But if I put one in, it will definitely go off. And if it’s still a surprise after I telegraphed it for you just now, I’ll take that as a compliment.



Dennis W. Green’s just-released novel, “Prisoner” is the second book in the Traveler Trilogy, a sci-fi detective thriller about a police detective who slips between parallel universes. The first book in the series, “Traveler,” scored in the Top Ten in the 2014 Ben Franklin Independent Publishing awards.
A popular radio personality in his native Iowa, Dennis has also worked on the stage, TV, and independent film. As a DJ, his adventures have been covered by newspapers from Anchorage to Los Angeles. By day, he is now the general manager of Iowa’s only jazz radio station, KCCK-FM. And if it’s 5:30 am, you can probably find him in the pool, working out with the Milky Way Masters swim club.

MY FIRST NOVEL PAUL BISHOP

MY FIRST NOVEL
PAUL BISHOP
Technically, my first novel was a title in the Diamondback series of adult westerns. Written under the house pseudonym Pike Bishop, the series of paperback originals was created by Raymond Obstfeld and published by Pinnacle. My entry was Diamondback #6: Shroud of Vengeance. It featured plenty of six-gun and sagebrush action built around the two required explicit sex scenes – the raison d’etre for the very existence of the successful adult westerngenre.
I would never disparage the genre or disavow my connection to it, but despite my gratitude to Ray Obstfeld for taking a chance on a novice – and the coolness of the Pike Bishop pseudonym echoing my name – I actually consider Citadel Run to be my first novel…I created the characters, the plot was uniquely mine, there were no required sex scenes to wedge in, and my real name was right there on the covers of both the hardback and the paperback.
To understand how Citadel Run evolved, I need to digress. In 1977, I joined the Los Angeles Police Department. While still pursuing my writing aspirations on the side, I made the move out of uniform patrol and was working as a detective. For most writers life necessitates another career – one that pays the bills, provides health insurance, and has all the other perks of a real job.
Still, I’ve always considered myself a very lucky guy as I’ve been able juggle two careers doing the things I enjoy most – putting villains in jail and putting words on paper. One career is a lot more dangerous, but it is also a lot more financially secure. I spent thirty-five years with the LAPD. For thirty of those years, I was also working as a professional writer, completing twelve published novels, two dozen hours of episodic television, and a produced feature film.
Police and detective work often fed my creative muse, but there were also many occasions when the creativity I honed as a writer led to a breakthrough in a case. This was particularly true in the latter part of my LAPD career as I moved deeper and deeper into the artof interrogation.
When I joined the LAPD in 1977, Joseph Wambaugh was my writing idol. He was and continues to be the gold standard against which all other police writers are judged. Wambaugh’s early novels, including The New Centurions, The Onion Field, and The Blue Knight, influenced both my writing and my police career. I was already on track from an early age to pursue both of my chosen professions, but Wambaugh’s books were the light in the window guiding me home.
As a writer, Wambaugh was a great storyteller. He also told his stories in a complex, layered, provoking manner which rocketed his prose into the stratosphere of literature. Wambaugh know cops at a primal level. He also knows how to capture them on the page in all their flawed glory.
However, in my era of LAPD’s history, things were changing fast. The Wam-boys – cops who woke up hungover in beds other than their own, spent all day trying to get and keep their act together while dealing with the worst denizens of LA’s gutters, and then drowning it all in a bottle of forget juice at night – were not the cops I saw daily working around me.
The era of Wambaugh’s choirboys was transforming into a sharper, harder, more professional LAPD as the demands of the job itself changed. There were still colorful characters within the ranks, but the harsh penalties for questionable behavior dampened all but the most innocuous hijinks. It wasn’t anywhere near as much fun as Wambaugh’s generation of cops, but it did provide me with a slightly different perspective and approach to bring to my own cop novels.
While I aspired to Wambaugh’s prose as art, I had to earn my own chops and skills first. This explains my foray into the adult western genre, but Diamondback was a far cry from the brilliance and emotional power of The Onion Field.
While I had always read voraciously and widely in an autodidactic manner, it was the world of hardboiled mysteries, high adventure novels, and pulp that sparked my imagination. If I was going to find my own unique voice as a writer, I had to find a way to marry my Wambaugh-like aspirations with my love of popular fiction – and I thought I had found just the story I needed to do it.
While my early years with the LAPD might have been the tail-end of the wild days Wambaugh had chronicled so assiduously, but there was still some bite left in the dog. As a rookie I often heard rumors and stories about Morning Watch (graveyard shift) patrol cops driving, while on-duty and in their police cars, to either Tijuana or Vegas and back in one shift. All the other Morning Watch cops would cover for them by handing any calls for service assigned to the missing unit (in those days, all on-duty cops heard every call for service over the radio in their divisions and could buy calls from other units). The cops doing the run would get their photo taken (remember Polaroids?) with their patrol car prominently displayed outside a Vegas Casino or behind a guy in a sombrero leading a moth-eaten donkey. Proof of the deed was always needed.
Since the statute of limitations hasn’t run, I’m not going to admit to any involvement in these types of outrageous japes. However, from the first time I heard about a run, I knew I had a never before told story. This was as valuable as all the gold in Fort Knox to a novelist with grand aspirations.
Like with any great idea, the hard work of turning it into a story was still ahead. I knew I had to up the odds to create conflict, so I turned my fictional run to the Citadel Casino in Vegas into a grudge match between two sets of police partners.
I knew my hero, Calico Jack Walker, was an old school cop – so old school, he is only a week away from retirement. If he were to get caught doing something as foolish and out of policy as driving to Vegas and back in his police car, he could lose his pension. This was something Calico’s brown-nosing, politically crawling, promotion lusting sergeant, Sal Fazio, would love to see happen. Fazio hated the freewheeling and popular Calico for any number of reason – plus he’s dating Calico’s ex-wife.
Alright, conflict and confrontation, but I still needed more. Enter Tina Tamiko, Calico’s Asian rookie partner.
In 1977, women were only just making inroads into the department. A lot of old time cops were virulently against what they saw as an invasion of their testosterone loaded men only club. There was a lot of grumbling about how a female partner couldn’t cover your back in a physical confrontation, shouldn’t be doing a man’s job, and were far too emotional – and that was just the tip of the iceberg of sexist ignorance. Since those days, it has become clear having women on the job has proven to be one of the best things to ever happen to law enforcement. However, Citadel Runwas set in less enlightened times.
What I wanted was for Tina Tamiko to be the complete opposite of what the male chauvinist old school cops were expecting. What I didn’t want was for Calico to be one of those male chauvinists. I wanted him to be evolved enough to see through sexism and judge his partner by how she did her job, not by the fact she didn’t have man bits down below.
While I didn’t want to create the typical partnership clash standard in bad police movies, I also didn’t want a May/December romance to develop between Calico and Tina. Both approaches were too cliché, and I was determined not to go there. But here’s the rub so many writers have come up against – sometimes your characters just won’t do what you want them to do.
The more I fought against Calico and Tina becoming romantically involved, the harder the two characters fought to get together. My battle with them created a bonus of unexpected tension. Calico was non-judgmental and willing to give his new partner a chance. Tina was very confident and competent while being respectful (and a little in awe) of Calico’s legacy. But as the pages flowed, the characters grew on the page to take on a life of their own. Calico came to be completely sold on Tina’s abilities and intelligence. Tina knew she had to cover her more experience partner’s back – even if it meant saving him from himself or going down in flames with him.
Then the story hit a major snag. Driving from LAPD’s Van Nuy’s Division to Vegas and back during an eight hour and forty-five minute shift was a high speed, sit down, shut up, and hang on endeavor. It was also kind of boring if there was no time for anything fun and dangerous to happen along the way.
This niggled at me and niggled at me until my subconscious set free a solution – I could have them do the run on the day the clocks were set back for daylight savings as Morning Watch always has to work the extra hour. I knew if I openly addressed the time crunch in the story then explained about the extra hour, I could have all kinds of things happen along the way. It didn’t matter if these things added more time than an hour. I had given readers a way to willingly suspend their disbelief – which is all you can ask of somebody entering your fictional world.
Energized, I went back to outlining the story, which was my process when I started writing novels. Soon, however, another issue raised its ugly head. I had created an action piece akin to the popular fictions I loved so well, but what I hadn’t done was bring a different level of meaning to the story as Wambaugh always did.
I couldn’t see it, but what I needed was actually already in my outline. I fretted for a while until I finally asked myself what my story was about. It was about two sets of battling cops racing each other to Vegas and back, in their patrol cars, during one Morning Watch shift, wasn’t it? That certainly was the framework of the story, but was there something deeper?
When Wambaugh writes about cops he takes readers past the badge to the human behind it – to what made the human a cop and price paid. Wambaugh’s take was most often on damaged individuals, often corrupted by the things they saw and the work they did. I knew some cops like that, but the cops and detectives I admired were different. They weren’t screw-ups, they didn’t take the law into their own hands, and they never lost their altruistic goal of helping others. They were good cops. They kept their integrity and always did the right thing – even when it was hard or came at a personal cost.
So, what was it inside the man or woman behind the badge that made a good cop good?
I looked at my outline and there it was…When our heroes and villains arrive in front of the Citadel Casino, they realize there is a major robbery going down not just in the Citadel, but up and down the Vegas Strip. Villains do what villains do and started hauling ass back to LA with a few minutes lead. But what would good cops do and, more importantly, why?
Calico Jack Walker was a good cop. So was his partner Tina Tamiko. There is a crime going down. They are way out of their jurisdiction. But people are in trouble and there is nobody else to help. Good cops run toward gunfire not away – no matter what the cost to them personally.
That’s what I wanted to write about. That was the layer behind the action. It wasn’t at the level of what Wambaugh does, but it was in the right direction. I couldn’t write a Joe Wambaugh novel. But I could write the best Paul Bishop novel I was capable of writing with the skills I had then.Was the writing easy after my epiphany? No, because I was reaching out of my comfort zone, pushing myself to be a better writer. Eventually, however, I’d sat my butt in front of my small K-Pro computer screen enough times to finally type the end in little green phosphorous letters. Many times this is where the difficult mountain of finding a publisher rears up, but I had a secret weapon.
Michael Siedman was a popular and successful mystery editor at Tor Books. I had met him once at Bouchercon – the annual world mystery convention. Sitting in the bar one evening, I had explained the rough outline of Citadel Run. Michael was kind enough or drunk enough to tell me to send it to him when I finished it. I’m sure he never expected me to finish the book as most aspiring novelists never get past the aspiring part. I chose to take him at his word.
I called the number on the business card he had given me. Michael answered.
I said, “This is Paul Bishop.”
Michael asked, “Who?”
“I’m the LAPD cop who met you last year at Bouchercon. You told me if I ever finished my book you would take a look at it…”
“I did?” Michael’s reaction was not helpful.
“Er…yes…” I was beginning to understand the depth of my naiveté.
“Was I drunk at the time?”
“Probably…”
“Ah, then you do know me.” Michael’s voice became friendlier as he went on to utter a magic incantation with the words, “Send me your manuscript.”
I immediately boxed up the unbound pages with return postage, and sent the it all out into the wilds of the publishing world.  Three weeks later to the day, Michael called me.  “I love the book,” he said. “We want to publish it.” I was elated, but them Michael said, “And we want a sequel. When can you have it to us?”
It was a good thing I was near a chair. A sequel? How the hell was I going to write a sequel? I’d put everything I knew into the first book. What was I going to write about? Then a little voice in my head said, “How about what makes bad cops bad?” And suddenly, I was beginning to see the outline of Sand Against The Tide.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Novelist, screenwriter, and television personality, Paul Bishop spent 35 years with the Los Angeles Police Department, where he was twice honored as Detective of the Year.  He continues to work privately as a deception expert. His fifteen novels include five in his LAPD Homicide Detective Fey Croaker series. His latest novel, Lie Catchers, begins a new series featuring top LAPD interrogators Ray Pagan and Calamity Jane Randall. www.paulbishopbooks.com , www.fightcardbooks.com , Twitter @bishsbeat , Facebook , Amazon

Forgotten Books: Learning To Kill

A year or so before he was diagnosed with cancer, Evan Hunter seemed intrigued by my idea of doing a massive collection of some of his earliest tales. Intrigued enough, anyway, to have somebody make copies of sixty-some stories and send them to me.

The stories covered virtually every pulp genre – crime, western, adventure, science fiction, horror – done under seven or eight pen-names.

We had everything ready to go when Evan had second thoughts. There were just too many of these stories he didn’t want to resurrect.

In Learning to Kill (Harcourt, $25) Evan and Otto Penzler have brought together the very best of those early stories in a stunner of a hardback package. This shows you how early Hunter was a master of both form and character.

The stories are divided into categories: Kids, Women in Jeopardy, Private Eyes, Cops and Robbers, Innocent Bystanders, Loose Cannons, Gangs.

He wrote well across the entire spectrum of crime and suspense stories, so well in fact that several of these stories are true classics that will be reprinted for decades to come – “First Offense,” “Runaway,” “The Merry Merry Christmas,” “On The Sidewalk Bleeding” and “The Last Spin” aren’t just for readers. They’re also for writers. These particular stories yield great insights into use of voice, plot, character and milieu. I could teach a full semester of writing using just those stories I mentioned.

Hunter/McBain was one of the two or three best and most influential crime writers of his generation. Otto Penzler has paid tribute to that fact with this hefty and important contribution that belongs in every mystery collection.
POSTED BY ED GORMAN AT 12:47 PM 2 COMMENTS: LINKS TO THIS POST 

Forgotten Books: Looking For Mr. Goodbar

When Looking For Mrs. Goodbar was published in 1975 it was such a sensational hit that I put off reading because I assumed it would be not much more than trendy titillation. When I finally got to it I was stunned by how fine a writer Judith Rossner was and how truly her novel reflected the times.

Based on a particularly ugly murder in New York City, Rossner offers us the life of one Theresa Dunn, a lower class but good looking Irish Catholic teacher much respected by her colleagues and much pursued by the men she finds in the singles bars she haunts looking for sex and a release from her self-loathing and depression, the by-product (she has always thought) of polio that left her with a warped spine. Even though surgery corrected the spine, it did not correct her image of herself as as a freak, especially when she contrasts herself with her glamorous sister.

To me this is one of the most important novels of the 70s, the so-called "me" decade. Theresa has always sought out men she believes can rescue her in some way--from the bastard professor she had an affair with as a student to the numerous hot shots of various kinds (Madison Avenue, theater) she meets on her nightly excursions. Her illusion is the illusion of the decade, as Rossner suggests, that the freedom so many people enjoy is a spiritual prison. Waiting in the wings was AIDs of course.

Then comes the time when she meets the drifter who will kill her the very night he meets her. Rossner, both here and in all of her novels, demonstrates that serious literature can find mass appeal when the story is as powerful as this one. An overplayed movie version appeared soon after publication of the book but its ham-handedness destroyed the subtle and ironic truths of Rossner's brilliant novel.