Ed Lynskey's Blog: Cracked Rearview Mirror - Posts Tagged "hardboiled"

Disclaimer: Your mileage will probably vary.

A drumbeat, please. In no particular order, and away we go...

#1. A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews

#2. Leopards Kill by James DeFelice

#3. Robbie's Wife by Russell Hill

#4. Blonde Lightning by Terrill Lankford

#5. The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler

#6. I, the Jury by Mickey Spillane

#7. The Song Is You by Megan Abbott

#8. The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

#9. The Night Caller by John Lutz

#10. The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy

Ed Lynskey
@edlynskey
Author of Lake Charles

As you can see from below in my signature line, I have two new books out right now. Lake Charles is an Appalachian noir with a hardboiled edge. Quiet Anchorage is a small town cozy mystery featuring a pair of sisters as senior amateur sleuths.

What do these mystery books of polar extremes say about me? Only that I enjoy reading and writing in both subgenres. I tend to lean more toward the hardboiled stuff, but I also like the change of pace that the variety offers me.

At any rate, both titles are ready for your instant download to your Kindle or Nook e-reader.

Lake Charles snared a favorable review from Publishers Weekly while Quiet Anchorage has attracted some enthusiastic reviews from the dedicated reader weblogs.

Quiet Anchorage is the first in a series. If it sells a few copies and if the readers like it, I might be able to bring out the next title, Bermuda Canard. So, if you're a cozy fan at all, please consider adding Quiet Anchorage to your Kindle or Nook queue.

Thanks for your interest. Now it's back to work now.

Ed Lynskey
@edlynskey
Author of Lake Charles and Quiet Anchorage

Right now I'm in middle of the revision rounds to my work-in-progress. So far, I've gone through my manscript a dozen times. I have no idea how many it will take before I'm happy with the product. My last new book was a turkey. It never got past my beta reader. So, I'd sure hate for this one to suffer the same dire fate.

What happens to the books that don't make it to print, and to the readers' eyes? The books get dumped into the trunk. They're called "trunk novels." Trunk novels probably should be locked up, or even burned. I have more of them than I care to think about. That's part of the deal, at least for me it is.

Anyway, after you've read a manuscript, say, twenty times, you either love it or you're sick of it. Where do I stand on my current work-in-progress? Well, I feel like I'm stradding the fence. So, I can fall either way. Of course, I want the book to be a raving success. Stay tuned is what I tell myself all the time.

But then the revisions are important to me. That's when the real story and characters start to come alive. The other big thing I look for is voice. A distinctive prose style emerges. Voice is difficult to describe. It has to remain accessible to the reader, but still carries its own sound. Anyways, that's what's going on with me right now.

Happy reading to you and yours!

By Ed Lynskey
Twitter: @edlynskey
Author of Ask the Dice, a hit man crime novel set in Washington, D.C.

One of my guilty pleasures in fiction reading has been the private eye novel. So I thought it'd be fun to compile a list of my favorite PI novels so far in my reading adventures. 10 of my favorite detective novels would look something like the following. There are other titles I've also enjoyed reading, but 10 is my cut-off point here.

#1. Lawrence Block, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes

#2. Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

#3. Stephen Greenleaf, Death Bed

#4. James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

#5. Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress

#6. Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

#7. Arthur Lyons, Castles Burning

#8. Ross MacDonald, The Underground Man

#9. Mickey Spillane, I, the Jury

#10. Sue Grafton, C is for Corpse

Some authors or maybe their editors are clever at selecting a snappy title for a novel. The title sums up the novel in a few words while at the same time sticking in your memory for years afterward. I thought I'd do a quick round up of such titles for me in today's blog as something fun to do. You might have one or two titles that you put in the same category. Without further ado, here are mine:

#1. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. Author cribbed it from Ecclesiastes 7:4. Great novel, too.

#2. Naked in Garden Hills by Harry Crews. Author said in an interview he thought of it while driving through a phosphate quarry in Florida.

#3. The Sailcloth Shroud by Charles Williams. Not sure how the author derived the title but many of his books sport colorful ones.

#4. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. It doesn't hurt to have a fierce raptor for your famous novel's title, does it?

#5. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain. Why twice? I always wonder about that part.

#6. The So Blue Marble by Dorothy B. Hughes. Catchy, no? Great read, too.

#7. The Shark-Infested Custard by Charles Willeford. I can envision the sharks swimming around in custard, and it sounds great.

#8. Sombrero Fallout by Richard Brautigan. Nifty and bizarre. I've got a number of his books and slowly getting to them.

#9. Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes. A title in the African-American NYPD detectives Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson series.

#10. Clock Without Hands by Carson McCullers. A strikingly odd image, I think.

Happy reading to you and yours!

I find some comedians to be funny, even if their brand of comedy often is silly, crude, or juvenile. In no particular order, I'll give my list of funny guys and gals who can get a laugh out of me.

Who are some of your favorite comedians?

#1. Larry the Cable Guy. I'm not that crazy about his movies or the History Channel series he hosts.

#2. Steve Harvey. Some of his marriage bits are uproarious.

#3. Chris Rock. Some of his live stand up gets me chuckling.

#4. George Carlin. I liked the late comedian when I was younger, so he gets my nostalgic vote.

#5. Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Elaine Benes was a classic.

#6. Candace Bergen. Murphy Brown was fun to watch.

#7. Roseanne Barr. I was a fan of her comedy series ROSEANNE. The blue collar setting felt real to me.

#8. Cheech & Chong. Again, a nostalgic vote. I don't know if I'd find them as humorous now.

#9. John Belushi. Another nostalgic vote.

#10. Steve Carroll. I like him on THE OFFICE, but I believe it's because he works well with the other show stars.

Honorable mentions: Lucille Ball, Redd Foxx, Dick Van Dyke, and Bob Newhart.

I wrote a blog post a few days ago on BLOOD DIAMONDS almost being finished, so since I shipped off BLOOD DIAMONDS to my publisher today, I thought I'd blog to say it IS finished. This is always a nice time. It's almost like coming up for some air. I like BLOOD DIAMONDS, a crime novel about a diamond heist that, well, doesn't go exactly as planned. Otherwise there'd be no story to tell.

BLOOD DIAMONDS is a stand alone novel, so there'll be no sequels or prequels. The characters are just one-hit wonders I'll never meet again in my life. It's said letting go is difficult to do, but I'd no trouble at all shedding this cast of characters. I enjoyed my time with them, but I wouldn't like hanging out with them any longer.

BLOOD DIAMONDS is set in the D.C. suburbs in another fictitious city, and I tried out some new settings for the scenes. BLOOD DIAMONDS is also shorter than any of my eight other novels. It also went through 30 edit cycles which is high for my books. If you enjoyed reading LAKE CHARLES or ASK THE DICE, BLOOD DIAMONDS will probably be to your liking, as well.

As always, thanks for your interest in my fiction.

Ed Lynskey

I just finished reading Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand. Wow. My Goodreads review appears here==> http://is.gd/4l2WvE. The story of Louis Zamperini is worthy of telling in a big book like this one. He's still with us at 95, and sharp as a tack, I'm told by my Facebook friends. I believe it was the TV newsman Tom Brokaw who coined the "greatest generation" term to describe the WW II generation. Now I have a better appreciation of it.

One thing Laura Hillenbrand does is offer a penetrating look at the difficulties the WW II POWs faced with their homecoming. Lots of physical ailments on top of their emotional/psychological scars made their lives extraordinarily hard. For some reason, my perception was they just fought the war and returned to their old lives and everything just flowed from there. Not so for all of the vets.

This book took seven years to write. That's a big chunk of time, but the important story it tells is well-deserving of the considerable effort made. Plus, I'm always a fan of that time period if just from a historical perspective. Check out the book.

In the next day or so, I'll be printing out my current work-in-progress for the first time on old-fashion paper. I ususally do that several times during my editing cycles even in this e-book bonanza era. For some reason, my words just look different when I read the from the printed page.

The small junk like typos, grammar, verb tense, and misspellings jump out at me. But then larger issues like timeline problems and plot holes also bark at me. I wonder if it might stem from my learning to read and write on paper. Maybe if I'd had digital, I'd be more alert and able to do the same edits and fixes online.

Including the paper edits stage can't be helped. It adds considerably to the time it takes me to bring a novel to its completion and to market. On the other hand, I feel more confident in my product's solid quality. Skipping the paper edits would appall me. My beta readers also use paper when I reach that point in the process.

So a paperless office, like it or not, will probably never exist in my niche of the world. I can live with that okay enough.

1. SHIP OF FOOLS by Katherine Anne Porter.
2. YOUNGBLOOD HAWKE by Herman Wouk.
3. FRANNY AND ZOOEY by J.D. Salinger.
4. THE BULL FROM THE SEA by Mary Renault.
5. DEVIL WATER, by Anya Seton.
6. THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY by Irving Stone.
7. THE BIG LAUGH by John O'Hara.
8. DEARLY BELOVED by Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
9. UHURU by Robert Ruark.
10. THE REIVERS by William Faulkner.

Sometimes I like to check the NEW YORK TIMES Fiction Bestseller List (this one from Jnue 28, 1962) just for the fun of it. This week has a few authors I recognize, and others I don't, and still others I have a vague idea about. Of course, I can google each and get the real skinny. But for this blog, I'm just winging it.

Porter, O'Hara, Faulkner, Salinger, and Wouk are all familiar author names to me. I've read titles by them all although not their books listed here. Wasn't Mary Renault a mystery author my mother read? Irving Stone wrote some biographical novels. I think this one is on Van Gogh and was made into a movie starring Kirk Douglas which I've seen. (Correction: I was told by my tweeps the Van Gogh film is LUST FOR LIFE, and AGONY is about the Sistine Chapel starring Charlton Heston.)

Anya Seton and Robert Ruark are not as well known to me. Anne Morrow Lindbergh was the wife of Charles, and famous in her own right as an author. I've not read any of these authors' books, and probably never will. I'll check my public library sometime and see if any of these books are still in their stacks.