Dave Zeltserman's Blog, page 28

Some thoughts on noir

One crime writer's thoughts on noir

Under the covers: The Boy Who Killed Demons

From Hartford Library's Under the covers blog:

"Zeltserman has pulled off a neat trick here: this coming-of-age novel is genuinely scary and genuinely funny, two things that do not often work together. You could, I suppose, read the whole story as an allegory about the shock and horror so many teens experience when they figure out just  how nasty adolescence and adulthood can be, or you can just take it for what it is: boy meets demons, boy fights demons, boy triumphs. Either way, it’s a fascinating tale. And the devils are in the details."

KILLER makes the cut for Germany's Best Crime Novels List

I'm very happy to see that Germany's crime jury made up of the country's leading crime fiction reviewrs has named KILLER #4 on their monthly list of 10 best crime novels.

Julius Katz and the Case of Exploding Wine

The latest Julius Katz story is available in the current issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and you can read an excerpt from it online. 

Those who'd like to catch up on the earlier stories (plus read the original novella, Julius Katz and the Case of a Sliced Ham), The Julius Katz Collection is available as both a paperback and as a kindle ebook.

The Julius Katz Collection on sale!

My collection featuring 7 Julius Katz stories, which have so far won 4 awards, is on sale now for $0.99. This will be the only time this year this collection will be on sale.

Killer on German Radio

Killer was recently reviewed on German radio by one of the Germany's top crime fiction reviewers, Thomas Wortche. A good friend of mine who's fluent in a half-dozen different languages translated the review for me:

As of a few years ago one can observe a small renaissance of this romantic, yet often tasteless pathetic subgenre of criminal literature. The American author David Zeltserman and his novel "Killer" clearly belong to this tradition.

The story is, quite properly, nicely depressing. The main character is a contract killer for the mafia, who eliminated 28 people for his boss, but who at the end, for other reasons, blows up and gets an advantageous deal from the District Attorney. He rats out his boss and for that is freed again from a comfortable prison after just a laughable 14 years confinement.

A killer who kills well and gladly
Now he is an old, tired man who for a few dollars works as a cleaner [janitor] and must live in a dreadful, shabby apartment. All people hate him, all people despise him, his own kids are disgusted and traumatized by him. As he hinders a robbery, his person lands in the media, and we know that now the hunt for him is opened. And of course there is a pretty woman, who serves as coauthor of his autobiography, which, in light of [both] his misdeeds and his heroism will bring in a lot of money.

All will end, of that one is perfectly sure while reading, very horribly. But then Zeltserman spins the standard constellation of the Noir [genre] around, and fate is not inevitably tragic, there is worse than being unloved, joy can also be bought. Above all, when one reflects upon the virtue that one really has: the Killer can well and gladly kill.
Zeltserman makes out of a typical Noir loser, without greatly altering the environment, something a bit different: A species of neo-liberal version of the genre, in which he brings out that man whose actions will not be influenced by sentimentality. Only one thing is left over from the Classical concept: that beautiful women are not to be trusted.

Some more Demon reviews

WBUR Artery has its say

As does author Paul Tremblay

And a Regular Guy Reading Noir

Kingdom Books too.

Readers have also been finding Demons compulsively readable and a lot of fun. Here's what one reader from LibraryThing has to say:

"This was really fun. I haven't read a book that felt so compulsively readable for quite some time (and, like most LibraryThing members, I read a lot). The title pretty much tells you what to expect content-wise. Stylistically, the writing seemed excellent. Fans of Stephen King will very likely enjoy this one, although the tone felt a little lighter. Recommended for horror fans looking for something fun to devour in a couple of days."

And here are two recent reviews from Goodreads:

"Really good. I think this might be young adult but it's easily adult too. I was skeptical when I read the reviews but it was fast and funny and hard to put down."

"Very PG-13 for a high school classroom book, but I loved it. The protagonist has a great voice! I plan to check out the other books by this author"

Three Very Different Books in 2014

In 2014, I released 3 very different books, one through a traditional publisher, one through a kickstarter effort, and one that was a compilation of previously published Julius Katz mysteries (with a new novella added for good measure).

The Interloper was my kickstarter project. Earlier I had written two ultra-hardboiled novellas, The Hunted and The Dame, that were a mix of government conspiracy and Richard Stark-like crime heists. and readers, especially Richard Stark fans, seemed to like them, so I decided to write a third one, The Interloper (with this one more the size of a Gold Medal-type novel) and then tie all them together as a single novel.

The Boy Who Killed Demons is my 4th novel published by Overlook Press, and this one is somewhere between horror and fantasy. Written as a journal by a 15 year-old kid who decides he needs to save the world from demons, this book is lighter and with more sarcastic humor than my other books. It's also written for both new adult readers (16 and up) and adults.

I previously had my Julius Katz stories divided up among different ebooks, but with two more stories published earlier in 2014 by Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, I decided to clean this up and put all 6 of them in one collection, while also writing a brand new Julius Katz novella for it. These are charming, lighthearted mysteries, although with a hardboiled edge, featuring my brilliant and very eccentric Boston detective, Julius Katz, and his erstwhile sidekick, Archie. So far these stories have won a Shamus, Derringer, and 2 Ellery Queen Readers Choice awards, and more stories will be coming soon in Ellery Queen.

Thanks Wolfe Pack!

I'd like to thank the Wolfe Pack for their endorsement of The Julius Katz Collection!

"A brilliant, eccentric detective who loves food with an assistant named Archie. Sound familiar? It should, and it's obviously intentional. There are other similarities to Rex Stout's Nero Wolf series in these stories, including a masterful writing style...."

A Killer Review From The Past

With PulpMaster releasing Killer in Germany, I thought I'd bring back Ed Siegel's review of Killer which ran in the Boston Globe:

Dave Zeltserman is at it again writing about ex-con antiheroes with the kind of panache that would make Jim Thompson, king of the psycho killer novels, proud. In fact, there's more than a passing resemblance to Thompson's classic, "The Killer Inside Me."

Even Thompson might be taken aback, though, by the matter-of-factness with which Zeltserman gets inside the head of Leonard March, just released from jail 14 years after cutting a deal to turn state's evidence on a Mafia boss who assigned him a couple dozen hits. It isn't until after the DA grants him immunity, though, that the full scope of the March madness comes out.

As the story picks up, in Waltham of all places, March is trying to go straight. He's working a menial janitorial job, trying unsuccessfully to forge a relationship with his children while grieving about his wife's death, and making a virtue of his working-class lifestyle. He's even more sympathetic than the protagonists of Zeltserman's previous ex-con books, "Small Crimes" and "Pariah." He can't even bring himself to kill the mouse that's scurrying around his apartment.

The problem is that nobody else intends to let him get away with mass murder. Not the hoods. Not the media. Not the public. And certainly not the beautiful woman who wants to write the 62-year-old's biography.

And what about you, dear reader? Are you going to let March get away with it or fall prey to Zeltserman's seductive story? It isn't so much that the Needham writer elicits sympathy, though he certainly does. March prevents the robbery of a liquor store and a possible homicide or two. He stands up to a macho abuser. We don't forgive him for past sins, but he seems to loathe himself more than we do. The affect is similar to Mickey Rourke's in "The Wrestler" a world-weariness that still holds the possibility of redemption.

This is only part of what's going on, though. The point isn't to elicit sympathy, but to get inside the mind of a murderer, to see the world as he sees it. A life of crime seemed to be the logical career move for a half-Jewish kid in a Catholic neighborhood who was better with his fists than his schoolwork. Add an unhealthy dose of amorality, a sprinkle of psychopathology, and voila.

Even that doesn't really address what makes "Killer" seem so, sorry, dead-on. More than in his previous books, Zeltserman makes a virtue out of the spareness of his writing. Other noir writers try to emulate the purpleness of Raymond Chandler's prose or the toughness of any number of crime writers. Zeltserman is content to let the narrative flow uninterrupted. As the story shifts from present to past, the precision of March's observations, even when he's fooling himself, drives the action on a steady path without a hint of cliche or sentimentality.

Zeltserman could be even more precise. When March reads a book or goes to a movie, why not tell us what they are? Maybe Zeltserman's saying that it doesn't matter; they're only ways for March to kill time. Still, I sometimes wish his characters would stop and smell the cordite.

That's a minor cavil, though. It might be considered something of a guilty pleasure to walk on the wild side with Zeltserman's killers. But there's no need to think of the pleasure as guilty anymore than the characters think of themselves as guilty. Their days at the office are bloodier than ours, but sometimes that's the only difference. That we neither celebrate nor condemn March is the unsolved mystery of the book and what gives "Killer" its special kick.