Clea Simon's Blog, page 53
November 5, 2017
“World Enough” in the Boston Globe
A Boston story that rocks
Clea Simon’s new noir, “World Enough,’’ is steeped in the 1980s Boston rock scene, with its sticky-floored clubs, radio stations dusted in coke, stars and hangers-on, seedy barbacks, and all the attendant sin and debauch that emerges after midnight when you can still hear the show ringing in your ears. Simon’s protagonist, Tara Winton covered punk bands back then and remains on the periphery of the scene. Now in her 40s and divorced, Tara works as a corporate communications drone, and in revisiting her rock-critic career via a writing assignment, she stumbles into a deadly mystery involving an old friend, an overdose, love gone wrong, and a web of relationships that tangle in twist. Simon, a journalist and novelist, was a local music critic in a former life, and her new book will resonate with mystery readers and former habitués of now-shuttered nightspots like the Rat. – Nina Mclaughlin
I wanted to go but…
I’m hoping to see you on Wednesday (Nov. 8 at 6:30 p.m.) at Mysterious Bookshop in New York City (58 Warren St., in Tribeca). But if you can’t make it and still want a signed, personalized book, you can get one. Please just call the store and tell them you want me to sign one for you – the number is (212) 587-1011. (You can always order a book on line, but please call to make sure they know to put it aside for me to sign.)
November 3, 2017
Mutt Cafe on “World Enough”
World Enough
October 27, 2017
World Enough
A Boston-based noir mystery
by Clea Simon
Severn House
Mystery & Thrillers
Pub Date 01 Nov 2017
Review
Clea Simon is never one to bow to convention. Her highly original, noir infused mysteries stand far above and far apart from the vast quantities of formulaic fare. While I’ve long been a fan of Clea Simon’s unique pet mysteries, World Enough is the first of her non-animal novels that I’ve read. I was very impressed. World Enough takes the reader into the clubland of Boston where in the 80s a generation of hopefuls rocked. Now, years later the scene is tired. Dreams have given way to the realities of growing up and growing older. Tara Winston loved the scene for the music and for the comraderie, but she only begins to delve deeper into the past when Frank, an aging rocker, falls to his death. What begins as a retrospective, a lament for a dying age becomes something more as her suspicions grow and she learns that there was far more going on behind the scenes than she had ever realized, and that the death of a shooting star twenty years before may be linked to Frank’s death.
Clea Simon’s approach to the 80s music scene is frank, nostalgic but not rose tinted. Alcohol and drugs flow as freely as the music, and the long reaching damage caused by both is clearly seen. World Enough is not a traditional whodunnit, and is all the better for it. The novel is about finding the truth and dispelling illusions. The world explored in World Enough is gritty and fascinating, providing readers with a unique taste of the past. I can’t praise the novel enough.
5 / 5
I received a copy of World Enough from the publisher and Netgalley.com in exchange for an honest review.
–Crittermom
That was fun!
Thanks to everyone who made my launch at Harvard Book Store a standing-room only event! (There was enough cake, I’m happy to say.) 
If you missed it, call or drop by for one of the copies I signed before heading to the party – or come to the Mysterious Bookshop on Wednesday (Nov. 8) in NYC for my next event. Boston-based? Brett Milano and I will be holding a conversation about words and music on Monday, Dec. 4, at Brookline Booksmith.
November 1, 2017
Launch party tonight!
FINALLY! We’re celebrating the release of World Enough at Harvard Book Store tonight with a reading, chat, and more (Harvard Book Store is right in Harvard Square, at 1256 Mass. Ave., Cambridge). Won’t you join us? If you can’t be there physically, you can still get a signed/personalized book. Please just call the store at 800-542-READ (or 617-661-1515) and order a copy. Tell them you want me to sign it for you, and they’ll put it aside before arranging for delivery. (You can also order online at harvard.com)
Criminal Element on “World Enough”
FRESH MEAT
Review: World Enough by Clea Simon
THOMAS PLUCK
World Enough is an intriguing, hard-hitting, intricately-plotted mystery set in Boston’s clubland and marks an exciting new departure for cozy author Clea Simon.
It’s only rock ‘n roll, but I like it.
Clea Simon brings us back to the ’80s Boston rock club scene with her newest mystery, World Enough. A journalist by trade, she calls on her own experiences and tells a story unfettered by nostalgia, spinning a twisted tale of rockers, critics, fans, bouncers, club owners, and groupies—warts and all.
Tara Winton has left the rock zine life for that of a corporate office, surrounded by touchy people who consider her the “edgy” one. Her ex Peter got her the job, possibly to kill her dreams of greater things as a journalist, and he lingers in her life like a bad smell—who she sometimes returns to because it’s a comfy bad smell.
She’s coasting along this way until Frank, the singer of a band she loved back in the day, dies in an accident that might not be an accident. His funeral brings friends from the rock scene who haven’t seen each other for ages back together. Her bestie Gina, now a nurse, who held a torch for Frank; bouncers turned bartenders; has-beens; and never-weres—all haunted by the overdose of Chris Crack, the one star back in the day who might’ve made it big but died young and, coincidentally, whose ex became Frank’s wife.
Her old pal Scott, who put the zine she cut her teeth at together, wants her to write a piece for a trendy local mag that focuses on the drugs and the nastiness, all set to be washed away by a final surge of gentrification.
That was how she met everyone. Underground Sound never became a must-read, nothing like Boston Rock, and with everything that happened, it didn’t last long. But while it did, it got her name around. And Tara was glad to have her own way in, something besides her friendship with Gina. The paper got her into bigger shows, too, once it became established. Once people could count on it coming out on time. She remembers the first time she went backstage, into the cramped closet they called a dressing room at the Rat. She’d come to bring in an issue, but had forgotten about it from the moment she walked through the door. The room was tiny, and covered in graffiti. Sharpies, paint, ballpoint. The band names alone mesmerized her. She could’ve spent hours reading the walls, and she watched as the Painkillers, the band on the cover, added their names, dripping and sloppy with red nail polish.
You can tell from the writing that this is a personal novel and that Simon has lived not only through the era but in the city where it is set. Boston isn’t quite a character in the book, but we get a vivid picture of how it has changed since her days at the Rat. Like New York’s Lower East Side, Southie has changed. There’s money to be made, and the owner of what was the most money-hungry rock club—where the bouncers were quick to bash your face in and not just toss you out—also happens to run the rag where Scott is now editor.
This isn’t “The Big Chill,” but the story isn’t a traditional mystery either—despite Tara’s investigative chops. Both Frank’s death in the present and Chris Crack’s in the past fall under scrutiny. Chris was deep into heroin, and Frank barely escaped it. He and Gina, Chris’s ex, have lived clean for decades. But questions keep piling up as Tara pieces together a story of what was.
Her memory is clouded by rose-colored John Lennon-glasses as she reminisces about the crowd that once accepted her. They weren’t the fun-loving rockers she remembers. There was a darker side.
Except for Chris Crack. She can still see him, lounging by the door to the Casbah’s office. From there, he could see the stage. See the fat man in the thousand-dollar suit as he waited, staring at the empty stage. Chris didn’t seem to care. He might as well have been at some Allston house party as a sold-out rock club. The way he leaned against the open door frame, his lace-edged tank hiked up to show some skin. His head lolling back against his upraised arm as if his career weren’t on the line.
Despite the looming presence of money and corporate greed, Simon keeps the story focused on the personal, like all the best noir. I was a little too young to hit the clubs in the early ’80s, but a friend I grew up with from grade school overdosed in the tub in the early ’90s, right after he got a record contract. This story brought me back to that time when our innocence began to crack, and we became conscious of hidden motives and manipulations by people we thought were our friends. How everything seemed so important; when we had world enough and time, we acted like we had neither, and all that mattered was “right now.”
Tara’s struggle with her job and relationships are as intriguing as the mystery of whether Frank’s or Chris’s deaths were accidental or something more sinister. Is Peter as protective as he seems, or is he more of a controlling bastard? Same with Gina, who knows her friend so well she can play her like a piano. In the end, Tara will learn that we never have world enough and time, as her friends learned the hard way.
October 31, 2017
Chatting with the Speaking of Mystery podcast
Talking about cities, rock music, memory, and what we’ve lost with Nancie Clare of “Speaking of Mysteries.” Listen here
“Gritty and gripping” – Thank you! BOLO Books on World Enough
by Kristopher | Oct 31, 2017 | Review |
Crime fiction and music have always been inextricably intertwined. Fans of the genre can tell you what their favorite fictional detectives are likely listening to at any given moment – perhaps even more accurately than they can list their own playlists. With World Enough, former music critic Clea Simon takes the idea one step further, immersing the reader in a very specific place and time within our musical landscape.
World Enough is a memory piece, in which the main character, Tara Winton reminisces nostalgically about the Boston club scene of the 1980s. However, with the wisdom of age also comes the realization that the underground music scene may have been hiding more unsavory activity than expected sex, drugs, and Rock ‘N’ Roll.
Hired for her dream gig – writing a Behind the Music-type article covering the hottest bands of the past – Tara stumbles upon a cover-up. A recent death within her circle of colleagues raises red flags and digging deeper into it exposes more fissures in her history than Tara could have ever imagined. Unsure who to trust, Tara must rely on her own talents to uncover the truth.
Count me as a fan of The Aught Nines
Clea Simon so expertly renders the 80’s music scene that readers will find themselves fully transported back to that heyday. As she describes the atmosphere within the clubs, readers will undoubtedly feel the slick moisture on the beer bottles and smell the questionable odors permeating the air. Tara’s research for her article allows the past and present to flow into and from each other like a drug-induced fantasia.
Surrounding Tara – in both time periods – are an oddball collection of comrades with varying degrees of self-awareness. Some have delusions of grandeur, clinging to whatever notoriety they can muster; while others have accepted the harsh realities required when adolescence is left behind for adulthood. Tara stands firmly at the crossroads between these two worlds, able to understand both viewpoints, separate fiction from reality, and able to express it for others to understand.
The crime elements in the storyline are completely organic within this trip down memory lane. World Enough is a perfect example of how to blend setting and plot. Readers will long to hear the songs of The Aught Nines as the background soundtrack to their reading escapades. This gritty and gripping standalone will please fans of both noir and traditional mysteries.
Buy Links: World Enough by Clea Simon
October 30, 2017
“Compelling entertainment…” Thank you, Arts Fuse!
“Compelling entertainment…WORLD ENOUGH recreates the punk era within the framework of a noir whodunit,” says the Arts Fuse.
Book Review: “World Enough” — and Punk Time
Oct302017
Set in Boston’s rock scene during the ’80s, the mystery World Enough serves up plenty of compelling entertainment.
World Enough by Clea Simon. Severn House, 205 pages, $28.99. There will be a book launch reading of World Enough at the Harvard Book Store on November 2 at 7 p.m.
By Ed Meek
During the months when the days grow shorter and snowy evenings accumulate, many readers reach for a satisfying mystery. You know what you are getting with a mystery. A death at the beginning that is unexplained, a main character who won’t rest until the answer is found, and a writer who holds information back from us, divulging clues and secrets one at a time to keep us intrigued. World Enough has the added local interest factor of being set in Boston in the ’80s, during the Punk era of The Cars, The Ramones, and The Dead Kennedys.
The main character is Tara, a music fan nostalgic about that period, the musicians, and the community she was once a part of. She delves back into the past when asked to write an article about what it was like back then by an old editor of hers. In those days, Tara wrote music reviews and features for an underground publication. Now she works in communications, but she is happy to take on the project because she misses the old times, when Tara and her friends felt they were part of something bigger, hitting the clubs to listen and to dance to cutting edge music, on the hunt for the next breakout group. But, as Tara chats with old contacts, she finds herself questioning the circumstances of the death of a former musician; did he really fall down the stairs of his house to his death? Might it have something to do with another musician’s OD twenty years before?
“I wonder if there was something else going on?” she asks again.
“You still think like a writer.” Peter leans toward her. She feels his lips, warm and dry, on her cheek. “But this isn’t some story, Tara. This is real life.”
The passion the main character, Tara, feels for the music and her knowledge of the club scene ring true. Author Clea Simon wrote extensively about the period and the music for The Boston Globe, The Herald, and The Boston Phoenix, back when the city boasted a number of alternative newspapers. The mystery may deal with the past, but it is set in the present tense — and that gives it a pleasing feel of immediacy: “the Shakers take the stage. Two guitars and a bass bash out the first chord. It is loud and lively, and the drummer jumps in with a fill, kicking everyone up to speed.” Writing well about music, describing its power over listeners, is not easy to do — Simon does so with authority.
There are flaws in World Enough. Because Tara needs to look back into the past for carry on her investigation, the narrative is filled with flashbacks. These are also told in the present tense, which requires the use of the conditional. She thought she’d brought her phone. She hadn’t remembered to lock the door. She’d been in a rush. That device, used throughout a novel (rather than a short story) becomes somewhat affected: after a hundred pages you begin to long for the convention of just having the action related in the past tense.
Also, Simon is more at home writing in the voices of women. There’s an enormous amount of dialogue and the banter keeps things moving along. But not always convincingly. Here’s an exchange with Tara’s new love interest, Nick, who was a bartender during the punk era. She has fallen into a reverie thinking about the past, and he says to her:
“A penny for your thoughts?”
Tara looks up into the impossibly blue eyes once again.
“Or another Alligash perhaps?”
Nick doesn’t exactly sound like a bartender (or a guy) for that matter. There are other questions regarding the story’s credibility. At one point, Tara comes out of work and finds four tires slashed on her car. Even though she is researching a mysterious death — that her ex has told her is an open case with the police — she does not report the incident to the cops. Nor does she ask the cops about the case. In addition, the novel starts off with Frank’s death as a result of falling down his basement stairs. Yes, falling down stairs is a suspicious way to die. It turns out that 18,000 Americans die from falls each year and nearly 100,000 kids are injured on stairs! Most of those who die, though, are either really young or really old. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up…” as the old advertisement goes. But Frank is in his forties. Wouldn’t there be questions raised?
Clea Simon and cat. Photo: Cleasimon.com
Another problem is the number of characters. If I count correctly, there are at least a dozen. By the third chapter I made up a chart — around halfway through the novel I gave up on the project. You can still follow the plot without remembering who all the characters are, but the pile-up is annoying.
The final quibble I have has to do with the invention of names. Simon sometimes uses real names like The Rat and The Cars, but other times makes up names and the made-up names don’t (to may ear) work as well as the real thing. The Casbah instead of The Channel. The Whirled Shakers. Why not The Dead Kennedys? The Voodoo Dolls? Simon also has a character whose name is Chris Crack.
Still, there is plenty of compelling entertainment here. World Enough recreates the Punk era within the framework of a noir whodunit and keeps you guessing. And, if you are from Boston, or went to college here, you’ll enjoy the references to the Rat and the music of the period, which took us from Disco to Grunge.
Ed Meek is the author of Spy Pond and What We Love. A collection of his short stories, Luck, came out in May. WBUR’s Cognoscenti featured his poems during poetry month this year.
“A most enjoyable book…” Thank you, Bookblog of the Bristol Library!
Reviewed by Jeanne
Tara Winton is divorced, working in communications for a large corporation, and really just marking time. Her job doesn’t excite her; she could do most of her tasks in her sleep. Her days are pretty much routine. It wasn’t always like this. Back in the day, she was a music reporter for an independent ‘zine, covering the burgeoning Boston music scene. Those were heady days, watching the musicians that made it, the ones that didn’t, and the ones who flamed out too soon. It was more than that, though: it was a community. Relationships were forged then that had repercussions from then until now. But that seems like another world, another lifetime.
She still hits some of the clubs with long-time friends, listens to the music. Some of the bands are still around, the ones that were good but not good enough; the ones who had a sound, but whose members, like Tara, work other jobs to pay the rent and only get together to play because they love it. Then Tara hears that Frank, one of the old gang, has died from a fall. It seems a sad and unlikely ending.
The news prompts Scott, Tara’s old editor from the ‘zine days, to give her a call. He’s now the editor of City, a glossy publication full of puff pieces, but he wants to make it edgier. Maybe a story about the old music scene, tying it in with Frank’s death, will attract a wider audience.
Tara is reluctant, but soon discovers this is just what she’s missed: real journalism, digging for a story, and maybe enjoying reliving the old days. Memories come flooding back, along with some nagging questions about what happened to Chris Crack, the star who was on the verge of superstardom before that accidental overdose . . .
Since I’ve never been to Boston and my musical tastes run more to folk, bluegrass, and Americana, I wasn’t sure if I would be able to get into this book which, as the jacket copy emphasizes, is all about the Boston music scene of a particular era. I need not have worried; Tara is an easy character to relate to, and the whole feeling of the book was nostalgia for the past, when the world was new and exciting, rather than esoteric music knowledge. Simon does an excellent job of conveying what it was like in those heady times, when it seemed superstardom was on the horizon for some of the bands, and everyone was chasing dreams. (Actually, it all reminds me of a country song called “Life Happened.”) I particularly enjoyed the way that layers were peeled back, revealing that rosy memories had more than a bit of amnesia to them. For example, Tara was always too high on music to be part of the drug scene, but she gradually realizes that there was a sudden upswing in the amount of drugs available, cocaine especially—a fact of which her friends were well aware. She also finds that Frank had been asking some questions about those old days before his convenient fall.
World Enough has turned out to be one of my favorite books by Simon. I liked the deft way the author handled Tara’s gradual re-evaluation of her memories about events and even her friends, questioning her perceptions, and even the way she’s currently living. It’s a book that will stay with me for some time, bolstered by strong characterization and a near-universal tendency to revisit our past at certain points in our lives. You don’t have to be a rock fan to enjoy this book, but it helps if you’re old enough to have attended (or avoided!) a high school reunion or two. There’s enough grit to qualify it as noir, but it’s never overly graphic.
In short, it’s a most enjoyable book even for those who aren’t mystery readers or rock fan fans but who appreciate good characterization and atmosphere.
Full disclosure: I was given an advance copy of the book by the author without any stipulations or conditions.The book is due out in the U.S. on November 1.
