Art Taylor's Blog, page 23

The First Two Pages: “Death Floor” by Martin Limón

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.

I’ve long been a fan of Martin Limón‘s short stories featuring U.S. Army investigators George Sueño and Ernie Bascom—and I’m not alone here, of course. The first book featuring these characters, 1992’s Jade Lady Burning, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and since then, they’ve appeared in fourteen more novels, plus a short story collection, Nightmare Range, published in 2014 and gathering all the tales up to that point. More recently, Robert Lopresti chose the latest Sueño and Bascom story, “Death Floor” from the March/April 2022 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, as the Story of the Week at Little Big Crimes (the fifth time one of his stories as been selected by Lopresti as best of the week). I’m honored to welcome Martin here to share some reflections on the first two pages of that story.

While Martin had stressed that he did not serve as an intelligence officer himself in the service, the novels and stories do draw on other aspects of his twenty-year career in the Army, ten of them stationed in South Korea. Those experience help to inform what Martin describes in the essay below as the “tactile feel of the geographical and cultural setting” and “the details of the historical era.” To find out more about the author and his work, visit his website.

And in the meantime, enjoy this peek into the his latest tale—and be sure to pick up the full issue of AHMM before it leaves newsstands soon!

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.

Limon-Death-Floor

Cover Reveal: Lawyers, Guns, and Money

Thanks to Kristopher Zgorski at BOLO Books for hosting the cover reveal for the forthcoming anthology Lawyers, Guns, and Money: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Warren Zevon, forthcoming in June from Down & Out Books.

I’m honored to have co-edited the anthology with Libby Cudmore and thrilled with the list of contributors featured in these pages. Here’s the jacket copy for the book ahead:

From classics like “Werewolves of London,” “Excitable Boy,” and “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” to lesser-known gems across a career spanning nearly four decades, the songs of Warren Zevon are rich with crime and intrigue and suspense—guns and gunners, assassins and drug dealers, a supernatural serial killer, and a heap of hapless losers along the way too. And Zevon himself was a fan of crime fiction, especially the work of iconic mystery writer Ross Macdonald, to whom Zevon dedicated his 1980 album Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School.

Edited by Libby Cudmore and Art Taylor,  Lawyers, Guns, and Money features fifteen fantastic writers—avid fans of Zevon’s genius—offering fresh spins on his discography with tales that span the mystery genre: caper, espionage, noir, paranormal, private eye, and more.

Contributors include 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.

You can find out more—and pre-order!—at the Down & Out Books website.

AWP Panel: “Noir as an Agent for Social Change” • Thursday, March 24

On Thursday, March 24, at 9 a.m., the virtual panel I organized for this year’s AWP Conference goes life—and I hope conference attendees will join us for the discussion! (It should be available for viewing afterwards as well, but registration is required.)

“Noir as an Agent for Social Change: A Look at Transgressive Genre Fiction” features panelists Steph Cha, Jay Gertzman, Elizabeth Hand, and Richie Narvaez, and it can be accessed via the AWP22 Virtual Conference Platform (registration required).

Here’s the event description:

Should people dare to dream with the forces of the world allied against them? Though “noir” has morphed into a buzzword for any darkly themed thriller, its traditional elements are more specific: an outsider perspective, economic insecurity, systemic injustice, distrust of the status quo, existential despair. Five fiction writers and critics discuss the roots of noir and how writers today, both genre and literary, can build on and transform this tradition to explore similar themes today.

And here are the bio of our participants:

Art Taylor is the author most recently of The Boy Detective and The Summer of ’74 and Other Tales of Suspense. His fiction has won the Edgar Award, four Agatha Awards, an Anthony Award, four Macavity Awards, and four Derringer Awards. He is an associate professor at George Mason University.

Richie Narvaez received the 2021 BRIO Award, a $5,000 grant for artistic excellence. His latest book is the anthology Noiryorican, which was nominated for an Anthony Award. He teaches crime fiction writing at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan.

Steph Cha is the author of Follow Her Home, Beware Beware, and Dead Soon Enough. Her fourth novel, Your House Will Pay, will be out from Ecco in 2019. She’s the noir editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and USA Today. 

Elizabeth Hand is the author of sixteen multiple-award-winning novels and five collections of short fiction and essays. She is a longtime reviewer for numerous publications, including the Washington Post, LA Times, and Boston Review, and is on faculty at the Stonecoast MFA program.

Jay A Gertzman is studying the contemporary version of the mid-twentieth century pulp crime “newsstand” paperback. In 2018, he published a study of the work of David Goodis, a leading twentieth-century pulp crime writer. It was a finalist for the 2019 Anthony Award for best critical or nonfiction work.

This year’s AWP Conference & Bookfair takes place in Philadelphia, and Jay, Richie, and I will be there in person as well—keep an eye out for us if you want to continue the conversation!

The First Two Pages: “Wrong Notes” by Andrew Taylor

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.

The new Crime Writers’ Association anthology Music of the Night, has claimed a prime spot on my nightstand—such a joy all the stories I’ve read so far and still more yet to read. Edited by Martin Edwards, Music of the Night features short fiction connected by the theme of music and penned by a terrific group of writers: Abi Silver, Alison Joseph, Andrew Taylor, Antony M. Brown, Brian Price, Cath Staincliffe, C. Aird, Chris Simms, Christine Poulson, David Stuart Davies, Dea Parkin, Jason Monaghan, Kate Ellis, L.C. Tyler, Leo McNeir, Martin Edwards, Maxim Jakubowski, Neil Daws, Paul Charles, Paul Gitsham, Peter Lovesey, Ragnar Jónasson, Shawn Reilly Simmons, and Vaseem Khan. (I’m in there too with my new story “Love Me or Leave Me” as well—honored to be in fine company!) The collection was published in late February by Flame Tree Publishing and available through Simon & Schuster in the U.S.

The First Two Pages has already welcomed two contributors with essays on their work: Peter Lovesey’s on “And the Band Played On” and Christine Poulson on “Some Other Dracula.” And it’s a joy this week to host Andrew Taylor on his story, “Wrong Notes” —a short story set in the same world as his popular Lydmouth series of novels.

Taylor (no relation to me, I should add) was nominated for an Edgar Award for his first novel, Caroline Minuscule, and he’s written nearly 50 books since then, including most recently The Royal Secret, the fifth book in his Marwood and Lovett Restoration series. Taylor’s awards include the Diamond Dagger, the highest honor from the Crime Writers’ Association; the Historical Dagger (three times); the John Creasey Dagger, Sweden’s Martin Beck prize, and the Historical Writers’ Association Gold Crown for best novel of the year.         

You can find out more about Taylor and his work at his website and be sure to follow him on Twitter too.

In the meantime, enjoy his essay below and check out all the stories in Music of the Night 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.

Taylor-Wrong-Notes

The First Two Pages: “Some Other Dracula” by Christine Poulson

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.

Last week, Peter Lovesey’s essay on “And the Band Played On” opened a short series featuring contributors to the new Crime Writers’ Association anthology Music of the Night, published in late February by Flame Tree Publishing and available through Simon & Schuster in the U.S. This week, it’s a pleasure to welcome Christine Poulson with reflections on her story “Some Other Dracula,” which brings back Cassandra James, the protagonist of Christine’s first three crime novels: Dead Letters (published as Murder is Academic in the U.S.), Stage Fright, and Footfall. As Christine explains at her own blog, fans have been asking when Cassandra might return (the last Cassandra James novel was published in 2006), and this story might well be a stepping stone to more ahead—fingers crossed! In the meantime, Christine’s more recent novels have featured scientist Katie Flanagan, including Deep Water, Cold Cold Heart, and An Air That Kills—the latter of which earned this praise from the Morning Star: “Poulson is currently unrivalled as a writer of scientific mysteries combining elements of both the thriller and the whodunnit.”

The anthology Music of the Night, edited by Martin Edwards, features short fiction connected by the theme of music, and Lovesey and Poulson are joined in these pages by a stunning group of writers: Abi Silver, Alison Joseph, Andrew Taylor, Antony M. Brown, Brian Price, Cath Staincliffe, C. Aird, Chris Simms, David Stuart Davies, Dea Parkin, Jason Monaghan, Kate Ellis, L.C. Tyler, Leo McNeir, Martin Edwards, Maxim Jakubowski, Neil Daws, Paul Charles, Paul Gitsham, Ragnar Jónasson, Shawn Reilly Simmons, and Vaseem Khan. (I’m putting my own contribution, the story “Love Me or Leave Me,” outside that list, because otherwise I’d be calling myself “stunning” too!)

To find out more about Christine, her books, and her short fiction, visit her website here, which also includes links to other short fiction and blog posts—and enjoy the glimpse below at this latest story, a stepping stone, I hope, to picking up the full collection!

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.

Poulson-Dracula

Virginia Festival of the Book • Saturday, March 19

The Virginia Festival of the Book starts next week, and I’m looking forward to moderating a panel with three terrific authors: “Thrillers for a Wild Ride” on Saturday afternoon, March 19, at 2 p.m. with Yasmin Angoe, S.A. Cosby, and Vera Kurian. I’m including bios below, but do check out the full event info at the festival website—and hope to see a good crowd there. In-person!

Yasmin Angoe, author of Her Name is Knight, is a first-generation Ghanaian American who grew up in two cultural worlds. She received the 2020 Eleanor Taylor Bland Award for Emerging Writers of Color from Sisters in Crime, of which she is a proud member. Yasmin lives in South Carolina.

S. A. Cosby, author of The New York Times bestseller Razorblade Tears, is an Anthony Award-winning writer from Southeastern Virginia. His critically-acclaimed Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland were both named a NYT Notable Book and named a best book of the year by NPR, The Guardian, and Library Journal, among many others. When not writing, he is an avid hiker and chess player.

Vera Kurian, author of Never Saw Me Coming, is a writer and scientist living in Washington, D.C. Her short fiction has been published in magazines such as Glimmer Train and The Pinch. She has a PhD in Social Psychology, where she studied intergroup relations, ideology, and quantitative methods.

The First Two Pages: “And the Band Played On” by Peter Lovesey

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.

It’s an extraordinary honor—and I can’t overstress either of those words too much—to host Peter Lovesey at the First Two Pages today. The only living British writer to have earned the Crime Writers’ Association’s Cartier Diamond Dagger and been named a Grand Master by Mystery Writers of America, Peter joins us today with an essay about his story “And the Band Played On” from the new CWA anthology Music of the Night, published in late February by Flame Tree Publishing and available through Simon & Schuster in the U.S. Edited by Martin Edwards (another Diamond Dagger honoree), Music of the Night features short fiction connected by the theme of music and written by a tremendously fine list of contributors: Abi Silver, Alison Joseph, Andrew Taylor, Antony M. Brown, Brian Price, Cath Staincliffe, C. Aird, Chris Simms, Christine Poulson, David Stuart Davies, Dea Parkin, Jason Monaghan, Kate Ellis, L.C. Tyler, Leo McNeir, Martin Edwards, Maxim Jakubowski, Neil Daws, Paul Charles, Paul Gitsham, Ragnar Jónasson, Shawn Reilly Simmons, and Vaseem Khan. (And I’ll echo that phrase “extraordinary honor” to add that I’m so pleased to have my own story “Love Me or Leave Me” included in the collection too.)

Peter’s story actually appeared in two collections in February; his own latest book, Reader, I Buried Them and Other Stories, was released in early February by Soho Press in the U.S. and by Sphere in the UK—and that collection stretches from his first published short story from fifty years ago to three new stories, spanning the career of this master of short-form crime fiction. Peter is, of course, a master of long-form fiction too, with three well-known, well-loved series featuring Sergeant Cribb, of Scotland Yard in the 1880s; Bertie, Prince of Wales; and Peter Diamond of the Bath police.

Beyond his fine writing and storytelling, Peter is also one of the kindest and most generous people I know in the crime writing community, and I’m grateful again for his appearance here today.

To find out more about Peter and his career, visit his website——and do pick up both Reader, I Buried Them and Music of the Night. In the meantime, enjoy below a preview of “And the Band Played On”—and stay tuned for essays ahead by other contributors to Music of the Night, including yet another Diamond Dagger winner!

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.

Lovesey-Music

Suffolk Mystery Authors Festival

This Saturday, March 5, is the annual Suffolk Mystery Authors Festival, and while I wish we were all getting together in person, the slate of authors for this year’s virtual event is tremendous and the readers and attendees are always the best. It’ll be great gathering together with everyone online—such an honor to be part of the show!

I’ll be kicking off the day’s program by moderating the panel “Story Road: Crafting Big Stories in a Short Story Format” with a great group of short fiction writers: Teresa Inge, Jayne Ormerod, Shawn Reilly Simmons, and Heather Weidner. Teresa, Jayne, and Heather are regular contributors to the terrific anthology series Virginia is for Mysteries, in addition to stories in other collections and to their longer-form writing. And Shawn is also terrific at both novels and short stories—an Agatha Award winner for her short fiction and a finalist for this year’s Agatha as well!

Our event begins on Zoom at 9 a.m. ET—and registration for the entire day’s programming is free.

To register and to check out the full schedule, visit the Suffolk Mystery Authors Festival website—and do check out the preview of the festival in the Suffolk News-Herald. I was so pleased to be quoted there myself about my enthusiasm for the event and the readers who attend!

The First Two Pages: “The Road to Hana” by R.T. Lawton

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.

Today’s post completes a series of essays penned by and celebrating this year’s finalists for the Edgar Awards for Best Short Story—and it’s an honor to be rounding out the series by hosting an old friend: R.T. Lawton. I first met R.T. in a grocery store (was it?) at the St. Louis Bouchercon (am I remembering right?) and he and I have continued to correspond since then and to serve together as contributors at the group blog SleuthSayers. It’s been great to follow his stories, many of them in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and terrific to see him honored this year for “The Road to Hana,” which appeared in AHMM‘s May/June 2021 issue. His essay below joins those published earlier here by the other finalists: Michael Bracken & James A. Hearn on their story “Blindsided” from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; V.M. Burns on “The Vermeer Conspiracy” and Tracy Clark on “Lucky Thirteen,” both from Midnight Hour: A Chilling Anthology of Crime Fiction from 20 Authors of Color. ; and Gigi Pandian on “The Locked Room Library” from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The final story on the slate is “The Dark Oblivion” by Cornell Woolrich, who died in 1968.

R.T. is a retired federal law enforcement agent, which he’s written about regularly at SleuthSayers, and his work includes more than 150 published short stories, nearly 50 of which have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. He currently has six short story collections in both paperback and e-format on Amazon with three more collections forthcoming in 2022. You can read more about him and his work at his website.

For a sample of his short fiction, his inspirations, and his approach, enjoy the essay below. And good luck to all of the finalists! I’m hoping to be there in April to help celebrate you all in person 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.

Lawton-THE-ROAD-TO-HANA

“Love Me Or Leave Me” in Music of the Night

This week marks the publication of the new Crime Writers Association anthology Music of the Night—and with it, my first major full-length story in well over a year: “Love Me or Leave Me.”

“Love Me or Leave Me” begins with a man searching to find the source of some music heard dimly in the distance—at night, of course, given the anthology’s theme—only to discover that his girlfriend doesn’t seem to hear it at all. The search takes on an obsessive turn, and then a twist—before shifting to the girlfriend’s point of view. In all, the story has four sections, four different perspectives, and four different ways of storytelling, including a section comprised entirely of text messages.

The full title of the story is “Love Me or Leave Me: A Fugue in G Minor”—and while I doubt that subtitle will make the final edition of the book, it hopefully gives its own clues to my approach. While each of those four sections of the story are distinct, each of them strives to incorporate a set series of elements, playing on some variation of the given theme.

Music of the Night is edited by the great Martin Edwards, published by Flame Tree Press, and distributed in the U.S. by Simon & Schuster. The list of contributors is simply terrific—full contents below. I’m so proud to have my story alongside theirs, and feeling fortunate as well that three contributors will offer First Two Pages essays on their stories: Peter Lovesey, Christine Poulson, and Andrew Taylor. Stay tuned for those essays ahead.

Abi Silver – Be Prepared Alison Joseph – A Sharp Thorn Andrew Taylor – Wrong Notes Antony M. Brown – The Melody of Murder Art Taylor – Love Me or Leave Me Brian Price – The Scent of an Ending Cath Staincliffe – Mix Tape C. Aird – The Last Green Bottle Chris Simms – Taxi Christine Poulson – Some Other Dracula David Stuart Davies – Violin – CE Dea Parkin – The Sound and the Fury Jason Monaghan – A Vulture Sang in Berkeley Square Kate Ellis – Not a Note L.C. Tyler – His Greatest Hit Leo McNeir – Requiem Martin Edwards – The Crazy Cries of Love Maxim Jakubowski – Waiting for Cornelia Neil Daws – The Watch Room Paul Charles – The Ghosts of Peace Paul Gitsham – No More ‘I Love You’s’ Peter Lovesey – And the Band Played On Ragnar Jónasson – 4×3 Shawn Reilly Simmons – A Death in Four Parts Vaseem Khan – Bombay Blues