Art Taylor's Blog, page 21
June 23, 2022
Death on the Nile at OLLI
I had a great time talking about Agatha Christie’s novel Death on the Nile (and her short story “Death on the Nile” and her stage adaptation Murder on the Nile and various other adaptations too) at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at George Mason University. This was a hybrid event with a good showing in-person and a nicely robust attendance online as well. Hope folks enjoyed!
And in case you’re interested, here’s the full list of versions of the story—though my focus primarily on the short story, novel, and the two film adaptations. (I’ll admit I’m pro-Kenneth Branagh here—and won at least one person over to my view over the hour-and-a-half course!)
[image error]“Death on the Nile,” short story, Cosmopolitan, April 1933, and Nash’s Pall Mall,
July 1933
[image error]Death on the Nile, novel, Collins Crime Club, November 1937,
US following year
[image error]Hidden Horizon, stage adaptation by Christie, Dundee (Scotland) Repertory Theatre, 1944, then as Murder on the Nile, London’s West End and on Broadway in 1946
[image error]Murder on the Nile, TV adaptation, Kraft Television Theatre, 1950
[image error]Death on the Nile, film, 1978
[image error]Death on the Nile, TV adaptation, Agatha Christie’s Poirot, 2004
[image error]Death on the Nile, film, 2022
[image error]Also: a 1997 radio play, a 2003 graphic novel, and a 2007 computer game.
June 21, 2022
The First Two Pages: “Something Bad Happened to a Clown” by William Boyle
In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.
One of the first authors I recruited for the anthology Lawyers, Guns, and Money: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Warren Zevon was William Boyle—drawn his way by his terrific essay “Screwball Noir: A Personal History” for Criminal Element. In addition to short sections on actress Barbara Stanwyck and directors Shane Black and Alan Rudolph, Boyle’s essay examines Zevon’s songs as exemplars of screwball noir. “I always find myself compelled to investigate what Zevon leaves out, how his work lives in this hazy middle ground between humor and hopelessness,” Boyle writes, and then praises what he sees in the lyrics as “some quintessential element of screwball noir: laughter serving as some sort of remedy to death and violence in all of their awful unpredictability.”
Several of the songs Boyle mentions in that Criminal Element essay inspired other contributors to Lawyers, Guns, and Money, including the title song of the collection, “Werewolves of London,” “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” “Excitable Boy,” and “My Shit’s Fucked Up,” and Boyle himself took on “Something Bad Happened to a Clown,” which he discusses in his First Two Pages post below.
Boyle is the author most recently of Shoot the Moonlight Out (the title coming from another singer-songwriter, Garland Jeffreys), and his other books include Gravesend, which was nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France and shortlisted for the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger in the UK; The Lonely Witness, which was nominated for the Hammett Prize and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière; A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself, an Amazon Best Book in 2019 and winner of the Prix Transfuge du meilleur polar étranger in France; and City of Margins, a Washington Post Best Thriller and Mystery Book of 2020. You can find out more about him and his work at his website.
In addition to Boyle’s story, the collection—which I co-edited with Libby Cudmore—features a stellar line-up of authors including Libby herself, as well as Gray Basnight, Dana Cameron, Hilary Davidson, Steve Liskow, Nick Mamatas, Paul D. Marks, Matthew Quinn Martin, Josh Pachter, Charles Salzberg, Laura Ellen Scott, Alex Segura, Kevin Burton Smith, and Brian Thornton.
In addition to Boyle’s essay below, please do check out Laura Ellen Scott’s reflections on “Crawling Distance” based on “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” and Nick Mamatas’ essay on “Detox Mansion”—and stay tuned for Alex Segura next week, wrapping up this series. Plus, be sure to pick up Lawyers, Guns, and Money itself—a great batch of stories, though I’m obviously biased!
Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay to read off-line.
Boyle-ClownJune 14, 2022
June Newsletter
My June newsletter published this week, with news about the new Warren Zevon anthology, a round-up of recent reads I’ve enjoyed, and a preview of events ahead.
The First Two Pages: “Detox Mansion” by Nick Mamatas
In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.
This week, Down & Out Book presents the anthology Lawyers, Guns, and Money: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Warren Zevon, which I co-edited with Libby Cudmore. The collection features a stellar line-up of authors (if we do say so ourselves), including Libby herself, as well as Gray Basnight, William Boyle, Dana Cameron, Hilary Davidson, Steve Liskow, Nick Mamatas, Paul D. Marks, Matthew Quinn Martin, Josh Pachter, Charles Salzberg, Laura Ellen Scott, Alex Segura, Kevin Burton Smith, and Brian Thornton. And I was pleased last week to host Laura Ellen Scott at the First Two Pages with the first of four essays by contributors for the anthology. You can find her essay here.
This week, Nick Mamatas reflects on his story “Detox Mansion”—and interestingly, as with Laura’s essay, Nick’s looks back to his childhood and the music he listened to (and what he didn’t listen to as well). And with a timely angle, he also reflects on the legendary music magazine Creem, which has recently been in the news again.
Nick is a prolific writer and a distinguished anthologist as well. He is the author of several novels, including Move Under Ground, I Am Providence, and The Second Shooter. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, and three different Akashic Noir volumes—Long Island, Vancouver, and Berkeley—among other venues. He co-edited the Bram Stoker Award-winner Haunted Legends with Ellen Datlow, and the Locus Award nominees The Future is Japanese and Hanzai Japan with Masumi Washington, and his latest turn as editor is Wonder and Glory Forever: Awe-Inspiring Lovecraftian Fiction. Nick’s fiction and editorial work has been variously nominated for the Stoker, Hugo, World Fantasy, and Shirley Jackson awards. You can find out more at his website here.
Hope everyone enjoys Lawyers, Guns, and Money—and stay tuned for more essays ahead!
Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay to read off-line.
Mamatas-First-Two-Pages-1June 7, 2022
First Two Pages: “Crawling Distance” by Laura Ellen Scott
In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.
On Monday, June 13, Down & Out Books will publish the anthology Lawyers, Guns, and Money: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Warren Zevon, which I co-edited with Libby Cudmore. I first came up with the idea for this anthology several years ago, only to learn that there had already been loose plans afoot in another direction for a collection like this—and even after a consolidation and streamlining of those efforts, Kevin Burton Smith suddenly tweeted asking about why wasn’t there an anthology of crime fiction inspired by Zevon’s work? We immediately recruited Kevin to contribute, of course, and many of the other contributors here arrived the same way—having revealed somehow their fandom for Zevon’s work, in interviews, blog posts, casual conversation, etc. Is there something about crime writers and Warren Zevon’s songwriting that inspires mutual respect? As I mention in my introduction to the new anthology, it was a revelation several years ago to discover that Zevon and Ross Macdonald were good friends—and Zevon even dedicated his 1980 album Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School to Macdonald (using Macdonald’s real name, Kenneth Millar).
Lawyers, Guns, and Money: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Warren Zevon ended up with a great list of contributors: Gray Basnight, William Boyle, Dana Cameron, Libby Cudmore, Hilary Davidson, Steve Liskow, Nick Mamatas, Paul D. Marks, Matthew Quinn Martin, Josh Pachter, Charles Salzberg, Laura Ellen Scott, Alex Segura, Kevin Burton Smith, and Brian Thornton.
Throughout June, I’ll be hosting four of these contributors with First Two Pages essays on their stories for the collection—beginning today with Laura Ellen Scott, whose story “Crawling Distance” was inspired by the song “Lawyers, Guns, and Money.” We’ll also have essays ahead by William Boyle, Nick Mamatas, and Alex Segura.
Laura’s also celebrating another recent publication: her latest novel, Blue Billy, book three in the New Royal Mysteries from Pandamoon Publishing. Blue Billy released in late May, and you can see her launch event at One More Pages Books in Arlington, VA here—and get a signed copy of the book from OMP here. The first two books in the series are The Mean Bone in her Body and Crybaby Lane, and Laura is also the author of Death Wishing and The Juliet, and she’s one of my colleagues in the English Department at George Mason University—a friendship which is one of the ways I knew she was a Warren Zevon fan in the first place! Follow her on Twitter at @LauraEllenScott.
A quick extra note here. Some readers here may have previously seen a different cover for our anthology, but we did change the cover design within two weeks of the collection’s publication—a very last-minute decisions. Here’s the official statement on that change:
The last two weeks before a book’s release hardly seem the ideal time to radically change that book’s cover, but with the number of mass shootings in the news recently, we and several of our contributors have had mixed feelings about the original cover image for Lawyers, Guns, and Money. Clearly, these stories are crime fiction—violence regularly an integral part of the genre and gun violence specifically central to several plotlines within these very pages—but images often speak louder than words, louder and less clearly, and having a semi-automatic weapon as the key image associated with this anthology felt uncomfortable… but fortunately was not unavoidable. We’re grateful that our cover artist, Zach McCain, had designed two cover treatments for the book and that Down & Out has been able to make a swift change so close to our publication date. Thanks to them, to our contributors, and to our readers for understanding and support here.
Hope you enjoy the anthology—and stay tuned for more essays ahead!
Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay to read off-line.
Scott-Crawling-DistanceJune 3, 2022
New Cover: Lawyers, Guns, and Money
This week my co-editor, Libby Cudmore, and I worked with Down & Out Books to shift plans for the cover for our forthcoming anthology Lawyers, Guns, and Money: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Warren Zevon, forthcoming June 13 from Down & Out Books.
Here’s the official statement we prepared with the publisher: “The last two weeks before a book’s release hardly seem the ideal time to radically change that book’s cover, but with the number of mass shootings in the news recently, we and several of our contributors have had mixed feelings about the original cover image for Lawyers, Guns, and Money. Clearly, these stories are crime fiction—violence regularly an integral part of the genre and gun violence specifically central to several plotlines within these very pages—but images often speak louder than words, louder and less clearly, and having a semi-automatic weapon as the key image associated with this anthology felt uncomfortable… but fortunately was not unavoidable. We’re grateful that our cover artist, Zach McCain, had designed two cover treatments for the book and that Down & Out has been able to make a swift change so close to our publication date. Thanks to them, to our contributors, and to our readers for understanding and support here.”
May 31, 2022
The First Two Pages: “Nostalgia” by James McCrone
In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.
Three is a magic number—at least that’s what the old Schoolhouse Rock told us—and today James McCrone completes a series of three two ways. His First Two Pages essay is the third post by contributors to the new anthology Low Down Dirty Vote, Volume 3, edited by Mysti Berry and centering on the theme “The Color of My Vote.” The earlier essays were by Eric Beetner on “Pick a Color” and Sarah M. Chen on “Riviera Red,” and the anthology features 19 additional authors, from veterans to first-times. But this is also Jamie’s third appearance at the First Two Pages blog. I first welcomed him to discuss his novel Dark Network, the second book in his Imogen Trager trilogy, and he also contributed an essay on “Number Don’t Lie,” his contribution to the previous Low Down Dirty anthology. Each volume of Low Down Dirty benefits a new charity, with proceeds from earlier volumes benefiting the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center, and this one helping Democracy Docket, “an organization that is successfully fighting against voter suppression in the United States.”
Jamie and I first met at the Deadly Ink Mystery Conference several years ago, and I’ve been a fan of his work ever since. Publisher’s Weekly described the first Imogen Trager novel, Faithless Elector, as a “fast-moving topical thriller,” and Jamie succeeds in all his work with balancing those aspects of brisk pace and thoughtful topicality, as you’ll see in his essay below too. And I was pleased to provide one of the blurbs for the third and final book in the series, Emergency Powers—here’s what I wrote:
Emergency Powers brings the Faithless Elector trilogy to a nail-biting finale. A dynamic mix of political intrigue and high-stakes personal drama, ultimately offering keen portraits of true patriotism—its weight, its costs, and the courage that drives it.
You can find out more about Jamie at his website here.
And be sure and pick up Low Down Dirty, Volume 3—a great collection and for a great cause too!
Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay to read off-line.
McCrone-Nostalgia-First-Two-PagesMay 30, 2022
“A Close Shave” in Black Cat Weekly
The new issue of Black Cat Weekly is out, and I’m thrilled that Barb Goffman asked to reprint my story “A Close Shave,” which had originally appeared in The Swamp Killers: A Novel in Stories, edited by E.A. Aymar and Sarah M. Chen. The story was inspired in equal parts by Ring Lardner’s story “Haircut,” the film Donnie Brasco, and the ubiquitous claims of #fakenews on social media. Here’s the write-up I offered to Barb:
Any barbershop worth its Burma Shave will give you not just a cut but a conversation too. In “A Close Shave,” that chat becomes more of a monologue—but pay attention to the quiet fellow under the bib, because he’s got an agenda of his own. Ready for a cut? Step on up—two chairs, no waiting!
The issue also features a story by Joseph S. Walker, “Last Seen Heading East”—that one selected by Michael Bracken.
You can find more about the issue here
May 24, 2022
The First Two Pages: “Riviera Red” by Sarah M. Chen
In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.
Sarah M. Chen joins us this week to continue a series of essays celebrating the release earlier this month of Low Down Dirty Vote, Volume 3. Edited by Mysti Berry, this new volume centers on the theme “The Color of My Vote” features 22 authors exploring, as Mysti says, “the terrifying reality of life at a global turning point: will we choose to be creatures ruled by law or by raw power? What happens to us when we measure the color of our votes?” A charity anthology, this volume of Low Down Dirty Vote benefits Democracy Docket, “an organization that is successfully fighting against voter suppression in the United States.” Proceeds from the two previous volumes benefited the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
I’ve been fortunate to work with Sarah M. Chen in a couple of ways in recent years. She co-edited with E.A. Aymar the novel-in-stories The Swamp Killers, which featured my story “A Close Shave,” and she also took part recently in a roundtable discussion of short stories I hosted for The Third Degree, the newsletter for Mystery Writers of America. Sarah’s novella Cleaning Up Finn was an Anthony finalist and IPPY Award winner, and she’s co-edited several anthologies, including Avenging Angelenos from the Los Angeles Chapter of Sisters in Crime. Follow her on Twitter at @sarahmchen and check out her website here.
In addition to Sarah’s essay this week, please do read Eric Beetner’s essay on “Pick a Color” from last week, and watch this space for another essay by James McCrone ahead.
Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay to read off-line.
First-Two-Pages-Riviera-Red-ChenMay 20, 2022
Anthony Award Finalists
Such a joy to see the announcements about this year’s Anthony Award finalists—so many friends on the list, and a particular thrill to see my wife’s sophomore novel, The Mother Next Door, on the slate for Best Paperback/Ebook/AudioBook!
I’m fortunate as well to have my own work included in two more books named as finalists. My story “Little Martha” appeared in Trouble No More: Crime Fiction Inspired by Southern Rock and the Blues, edited by Mark Westmoreland, a finalist for Best Anthology. And my essay “The Short Mystery” was part of How To Write a Mystery: A Handbook from Mystery Writers of America, edited by Lee Child and Laurie R. King.
Congrats to all of this year’s finalists—find the full list here!
