Art Taylor's Blog, page 40
July 16, 2020
“Better Days” Named a Macavity Finalist
The 2020 Macavity Award finalists have been announced—and such a thrill to see my story “Better Days” from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine among the contenders for Best Short Story! And “Better Days” is in great company too, alongside stories by Michael Chandos, Terence Faherty, Barb Goffman, G.M. Malliet, and Dave Zelsterman.
Below is the full list of finalists—and special shout-out as well to my wife, Tara Laskowski, whose One Night Gone has been named a finalist for Best First Novel too! Thanks to Janet Rudolph, Mystery Readers International, and subscribers to Mystery Readers Journal for their support of all these authors.
Best Mystery Novel
Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha (Ecco)
This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger (Atria)
Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman (Wm. Morrow)
The Chain by Adrian McKinty (Mulholland)
The Murder List by Hank Philippi Ryan (Forge)
Sarah Jane by James Sallis (Soho Crime)
Best First Mystery
The Ninja Daughter by Tori Eldridge (Agora Books)
My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing (Penguin)
Miracle Creek by Angie Kim (Sarah Crichton Books)
One Night Gone by Tara Laskowski (Graydon House)
Call Me Evie by J.P. Pomare (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson (Random House)
Best Mystery Short Story
“West Texas Barbecue” by Michael Chandos (The Eyes of Texas, edited by Michael Bracken—Down & Out Books)
“Alex’s Choice” by Barb Goffman (Crime Travel, edited by Barb Goffman—Wildside Press)
“The Cardboard Box” by Terence Faherty (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Jan/Feb 2019)
“Whiteout” by G.M. Malliet (EQMM, Jan/Feb 2019)
“Brother’s Keeper” by Dave Zeltserman (EQMM, May/June 2019)
“Better Days,” by Art Taylor (EQMM, May/June 2019)
Best Mystery Nonfiction/Critical
Hitchcock and the Censors by John Billheimer (University Press of Kentucky)
Frederic Dannay, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and the Art of the Detective Short Story by Laird R. Blackwell (McFarland)
Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan by Ursula Buchan (Bloomsbury)
Norco ’80: The True Story of the Most Spectacular Bank Robbery in American History by Peter Houlahan (Counterpoint)
The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and Her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women, by Mo Moulton (Basic Books)
Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall by James Polchin (Counterpoint Press)
Sue Feder Memorial Award for Best Historical Mystery
Murder Knocks Twice by Susanna Calkins (Minotaur)
The Pearl Dagger by L.A. Chandlar (Kensington)
A Lady’s Guide to Gossip and Murder by Dianne Freeman (Kensington)
Satapur Moonstone by Sujata Massey (Soho Crime)
Charity’s Burden by Edith Maxwell (Midnight Ink)
The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott (Vintage)
July 15, 2020
Read the 2020 Anthony Finalists for Free!
Thanks to Bouchercon for posting links to each of this year’s Anthony Award finalists for Best Short Story—PDF versions of each story online, free reading for all!
You can find the list of stories with those links and all of the finalists at the Bouchercon website, and I’m pasting below as well. Pleased to have two of my stories on this slate!
“Turistas,” by Hector Acosta (appearing in ¡Pa’que Tu Lo Sepas!: Stories to Benefit the People of Puerto Rico)
“Unforgiven,” by Hilary Davidson (appearing in Murder a-Go-Gos: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of the Go-Gos)
“Red Zone,” by Alex Segura (appearing in ¡Pa’que Tu Lo Sepas!: Stories to Benefit the People of Puerto Rico)
“Better Days,” by Art Taylor (appearing in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, May/June 2019)
“Hard Return,” by Art Taylor (appearing in Crime Travel)
The photo above also shows this year’s Anthony Award finalists for Best Anthology—congrats again to those collections and their editors as well, and not surprisingly, some overlap between the short story category and the anthology one too!
The Eyes of Texas: Private Eyes from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods, edited by Michael Bracken (Down & Out Books)
¡Pa’que Tu Lo Sepas!: Stories to Benefit the People of Puerto Rico, edited by Angel Luis Colón (Down & Out Books)
Crime Travel, edited by Barb Goffman (Wildside Press)
Malice Domestic 14: Mystery Most Edible, edited by Verena Rose, Rita Owen, and Shawn Reilly Simmons (Wildside Press)
Murder A-Go-Go’s: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of the Go-Gos, edited by Holly West (Down & Out Books)
July 14, 2020
The First Two Pages: “Numbers Don’t Lie” 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.
Over the past two weeks, the First Two Pages has hosted essays by contributors to the anthology Low Down Dirty Vote, Volume 2: Jackie Ross Flaum on her story “Two Dead, Two Wounded” and David Hagerty on “An ERA of Inequality.” The full collections features a great line-up of additional writers, including Faye Snowden, Stephen Buehler, Tim O’Mara, Stormy White, M. J. Holt, Frank Rankin, Bev Vincent, Puja Guha, Gary Phillips, James McCrone, Madeline McEwen, Robert Lopresti, Camille Minichino, Jim Doherty, Terry Sanville, Ben Harshman, Sarah M. Chen, Gabriel Valjan, and Travis Richardson—and I’m especially pleased to welcome James McCrone, a good friend and a writer I’ve long admired, to talk today about his story, “Numbers Don’t Lie.”
McCrone is a novelist first and foremost, as he points out in the essay below—and a fine novelist too. I’ve recently finished reading (and blurbing!) McCrone’s forthcoming book, Emergency Powers, the finale to the “Faithless Elector” trilogy that also includes 2016’s Faithless Elector and 2017’s Dark Network, so I know how well he writes on that larger canvas—stories that are rich and complex and compelling. (You can find out more about McCrone’s novels at his website here, and check out his previous First Two Pages essay on Dark Network. ) But as he explains in the essay, “the short story form forced me to think and work differently.”
Find out more about McCrone’s new thinking, new working, and the new story below—and do check out his novels, terrific political thrillers often running neck and neck with the headlines!
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-Numbers
July 11, 2020
Mystery in the Midlands • July 25
I’m so excited to be part of this year’s Mystery in the Midlands—which I’d planned to attend in person but which made the decision to move online as a virtual event. And what a line-up!
Below is the information from Sisters in Crime, co-sponsoring with Mystery Writers of America. The virtual event is on Saturday, July 25, and I’ll be part of a panel on short fiction with John Floyd and Tara Laskowski.
Title: “Mystery in the Midlands”
Date: Saturday, July 25, 2020
Time: 10:00 am – 2:30 pm EDT
Presenter: Charlaine Harris, Jeffery Deaver, Gigi Pandian, and many more; and facilitator: Dana Kaye
Cost: $FREE
Overview:
Mystery in the Midlands, a mid-summer conference sponsored by the Palmetto Chapter of Sisters in Crime and the Southeastern Region of Mystery Writers of America, was scheduled to be held in “Famously Hot” Columbia, South Carolina on Saturday, July 25, featuring guest of honor, Charlaine Harris, and an array of guests. Then, the pandemic hit! What to do?
Our scheduled guests were too wonderful to cancel Mystery in the Midlands, so we decided to go virtual via Crowdcast with a half-day workshop moderated by Dana Kaye. Now, any member of SinC and MWA can participate in Mystery in the Midlands for FREE
What better way to beat the heat of July than spending time in your air-conditioned home or sunbathing outdoors listening to Charlaine Harris? She’ll be joined by John Floyd, Tara Laskowski, and Art Taylor (short stories), Alexia Gordon, Toni L.P. Kelner, and Gigi Pandian (paranormals), and Charlaine Harris, Dana Cameron and Jeffery Deaver (novels to screenplays).
July 7, 2020
The First Two Pages: “An ERA of Inequality” by David Hagerty
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.
Commemorating Independence Day this past weekend, editor Mysti Berry released a second volume in her anthology series Low Down Dirty Vote. This new collection focuses on the theme “Every stolen vote is a crime” and features stories by Faye Snowden, Stephen Buehler, Tim O’Mara, Jackie Ross Flaum, Stormy White, M. J. Holt, Frank Rankin, Bev Vincent, David Hagerty, Puja Guha, Gary Phillips, James McCrone, Madeline McEwen, Robert Lopresti, Camille Minichino, Jim Doherty, Terry Sanville, Ben Harshman, Sarah M. Chen, Gabriel Valjan, and Travis Richardson. Proceeds from the book will benefit the Southern Poverty Law Center‘s programs to fight voter suppression and defend voting rights.
Last week, the First Two Pages hosted Low Down Dirty Vote contributor Jackie Ross Flaum for an essay on her story “Two Dead, Two Wounded,” and this week, we’re welcoming David Hagerty from the anthology. What’s particularly interesting in having these essays back-to-back is that both authors were inspired by people from their personal history in crafting their story—in Hagerty’s case, his mother, as you’ll see in the essay below.
The main character in Hagerty’s story, Duncan Cochrane, is also the protagonist of his novels, political thrillers set amid the crime and corruption of his native Chicago; the latest in the series is They Tell Me Your Are Cunning. Hagerty has a short story featuring Cochrane in the first Low Down Dirty Vote anthology as well, and his short fiction has also appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’ Mystery Magazine, among other print and online venues. He is currently at work on a series of linked stories about a Navajo man accused of killing his white employer.
Check out Hagerty’s essay below, and check back next week when we welcome James McCrone to wrap up the series.
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.
Hagerty-Low-Down-Dirty
July 5, 2020
Quail Ridge Books: Thursday, July 9
Though our in-person event was cancelled in late March, we’re grateful that Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, NC, was eager to reschedule Tara Laskowski and me for a virtual event about our new books: Tara’s debut novel, One Night Gone, and my new short story collection, The Boy Detective & The Summer of ’74 and Other Tales of Suspense. That conversation will take place online this Thursday, July 9, and we’re thrilled to have our good friend Sarah Shaber in conversation with us as well!
You can find full information here about the event and how to register. Looking forward to it so much!
July 2, 2020
Reviews & Shout-Outs
I’ll admit it: I’ve been feeling a little spoiled with the attention coming my way lately.
In the new issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, critic Jon L. Breen gave my new collection The Boy Detective & The Summer of ’74 and Other Tales of Suspense four stars and called me “one of the finest short-story writers to come to prominence in the twenty-first century.” You can see the full review below from the July/August issue—though sorry for the curved pages, I did my best to photograph it!
More recently, Michael Dirda gave the collection a shout-out in the Washington Post, putting my book on his summer vacation reading list—alongside some other distinguished authors and titles. That reading list is linked here, and a screenshot of the webpage is below—great to see my bookjacket so prominently displayed (though my book is neither the “scandalous memoir” or the “obscure literary journalism” mentioned in the headline).
Finally, on a more private note, I recently received an email from novelist and long-time friend John Gilstrap, with whom I’ve been in a writing group for the last decade. The email started out, “We’ve known each other for a long time, and I’ve always had great respect for you as a writer…”—which frankly left me girding myself for the “but….” I thought I heard waiting in the wings.
Instead, however, John wrote that as he was reading through the new collection’s title story, “I realized that you are not just a great writer, but that you are also an important writer—the kind that can change people. I was entirely caught off-guard by the simple complexity of that story. If comparisons to Harper Lee have not started coming your way yet, it’s just a matter of time. What a masterpiece!”
Having my story mentioned in the same sentence as Harper Lee’s? I’m only half-joking when I say, “Wait, why didn’t I ask John for a blurb?” But honestly, it means so much more to have gotten this unrequested, unexpectedly. And no, no one has brought up that comparison before….
As I said: Feeling spoiled.
Seriously, I can’t express how appreciative I am of the attention and enthusiasm that I’ve been receiving for the new book—in these three cases and from other readers who’ve reached out my way in emails and text messages and on Facebook.
All this—it truly means the world.
June 30, 2020
The First Two Pages: “Two Dead, Two Wounded” by Jackie Ross Flaum
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 Saturday—July 4, in case you’ve lost track of the days—editor Mysti Berry will release the anthology Low Down Dirty Vote: Volume 2, a follow-up to the successful first anthology, published on Independence Day in 2018. Contributors to the new collection wrote toward a specific theme—””Every stolen vote is a crime”—and the line-up is terrific, including Faye Snowden, Stephen Buehler, Tim O’Mara, Jackie Ross Flaum, Stormy White, M. J. Holt, Frank Rankin, Bev Vincent, David Hagerty, Puja Guha, Gary Phillips, James McCrone, Madeline McEwen, Robert Lopresti, Camille Minichino, Jim Doherty, Terry Sanville, Ben Harshman, Sarah M. Chen, Gabriel Valjan, and Travis Richardson. Proceeds from the book will benefit the Southern Poverty Law Center‘s programs to fight voter suppression and defend voting rights.
The First Two Pages will be hosting three of the anthology’s authors for essays on their stories—beginning today with Jackie Ross Flaum, author of “Two Dead, Two Wounded,” inspired by some episodes from her own family’s history, as you’ll see in the essay below.
Jackie is the author of the forthcoming Civil Rights Era novel Justice Tomorrow, to be released later this summer, and of the recent novella The Yellow Fever Revenge. Her stories have also appeared in several anthologies: Elmwood Stories to Die For, Mayhem in Memphis, and Stories through the Ages: Baby Boomer Plus. And she’s currently president of the writing group Malice in Memphis. You can find our more about her work at her website here.
In the meantime, enjoy this introduction to her work—and stay tuned for essays ahead by David Hagerty and James McCrone as well!
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.
Flaum-Two-Dead
June 23, 2020
The First Two Pages: “Tongor of the Elephants” by Buzz Dixon
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 final essay this week wraps up a series celebrating contributors to the just-published anthology Heartbreaks and Half-Truths, edited by Judy Penz Sheluk and available here. The collection features stories by Blair Keetch, Buzz Dixon, Chris Wheatley, Christine Eskilson, Edward Lodi, Gustavo Bondoni, J A Henderson, James Blakey, James Lincoln Warren, John M. Floyd, Joseph S. Walker, Judy Penz Sheluk, Kate Flora, KM Rockwood, Paula Gail Benson, Peggy Rothschild, Rhonda Eikamp, Robb T. White, Sharon Hart Addy, Steve Liskow, Susan Daly, and Tracy Falenwolfe. Over the last two weeks, we’ve hosted James Blakey on his story “The Greatest Secret” and Christine Eskilson on “For Elizabeth,” and today Buzz Dixon talks today about “Tongor of the Elephants.”
As Buzz Dixon’s website explains, he “wrote a big hunk of your childhood, from Thundarr to Tiny Toons, G.I. Joe to Jem, Transformers to My Little Pony, Batman to Chip & Dale — and he ain’t done yet!” Buzz’s new story hearkens back to B-movies and old-time serials, as you’ll find in the essay below—and he also reveals, quickly, that beyond that, he didn’t entirely plan out what he was going to do. But like a good chess player….
Well, read the essay below, and you’ll not only learn about Buzz’s approach but also get a nice taste of his fiction. You can find our more about his work at his website 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.
Dixon-Heartbreaks
June 19, 2020
Quail Ridge Books & Beyond
Thanks to Quail Ridge Books for rescheduling an event with my wife, Tara Laskowsi, and me after our March appearance was cancelled. Tara and I will now be part of a virtual event on Thursday, July 9, at 7 p.m. and our chat will be moderated by our good friend Sarah Shaber, author of the Louise Pearlie mystery novels.
Information at the event is at Quail Ridge Books’ site here—register to save your spot! And feel free to show support for the event on Facebook here as well.
Beyond that, we’re already looking forward to the virtual Mystery in the Midlands in mid-July as well. Full information on that is below in my schedule of upcoming events.
UPCOMING EVENTS
Thursday, July 9, 2020
Quail Ridge Books virtual event with Tara Laskowski, conversation moderated by Sarah Shaber • 7 p.m. EDT
Saturday, July 25, 2020
Mystery in the Midlands, a virtual conference through Crowdcast, sponsored by the Southeast Chapter of Mystery Writers of America and the Palmetto Chapter of Sisters in Crime • 10 a.m.-2 p.m. EST, FreeGuest of Honor Charlaine HarrisShort Story panel with John Floyd, Tara Laskowski, and Art TaylorParanormal panel with Alexia Gordon, Toni L.P. Kelner, and Gigi PandianNovels to Screenplays panel with Dana Cameron, Jeffery Deaver, and Charlaine Harris
