Dave Zeltserman's Blog, page 53

Disturbing news about Julius Katz and Archie

Today I was going to wrap up my series about where the ideas for my books come from by writing about my 15th book, Julius Katz and Archie, but some very disturbing news is coming out of Boston about Julius. Hell, it's easy enough, I'll do in anyway, then get to the breaking news. Readers outside of Boston think that I'm doing some sort of pastiche on Nero Wolfe or Sherlock Holmes, and that a detective as brilliant and as accomplished as Julius couldn't be real. Readers here in Boston know Julius is real, but because of the way I write Archie, they think I'm writing some sort of meta fiction--taking a real person (Archie) and writing them as a tiny advanced piece of computer technology, and doing all this while writing about a real murder they've read about with this fictional device. Well, I'm not doing any of that. I'm simply taking all of Archie's journals and recordings, and cutting them down to either story or novel size. Basically I'm simply editing what Archie has already produced, with a little smoothing of the language here and there.

Now for the disturbing news. Reports are coming out of Boston that there's been an explosion at Julius's townhouse. I've tried calling Archie and have gotten no answer, and by itself that's very distressing. In the past Archie has always answered my calls immediately. I don't have a good feeling about this. Last week I was talking with Archie about the Anton Dupierre murder case Julius is embroiled in, and he was hinting that things were turning treacherous. I've put in calls to the police and Lily Rosten, and when I get more information I'll report about it back here.

The Thrill of A Killer's Essence

In the current issue of The Big Thrill, they're running an interview with me mixed in with a review of A Killer's Essence.

NYJB on A Killer's Essence: "a chilling page-turner"

"Detective Green is a believable character, down on his luck with little going for him but his job. Nonetheless, he meanders through life, precariously balancing all its myriad and conflicting facets, and coming out on top in this chilling page-turner attuned to the most discerning of avid crime lovers. Well written and well paced. Recommended."



You can read the New York Journal of Books complete review here.

Boston Globe: "A writer on top of his game"

And that's saying something because Zeltserman's lean but muscular style, so evident in "Killer'' and "The Caretaker of Lorne Field,'' is just as sharply honed here. His ability to juggle Green's story and Lynch's, develop a riveting murder mystery, and even mix in some Brighton Beach ex-KGB sleazeballs, all in less than 250 pages, is a pretty neat page-turning trick.



I'd like to thank the Boston Globe for their terrific review for A Killer's Essence. You can read the entire review here.



Next Wednesday I'll be wrapping up my series of where my book ideas come from with my 15th and so far final book, Julius Katz and Archie.

Where my ideas come from: Murder Club

Murder Club was the 14th book I wrote, but before I talk about it I need to give some background.



Back around 1998 I started a small software business with a partner. The basic idea for this business was that I was going to use this scripting technology to quickly build a core set of customizable network management products, my partner was going to offer training services, and we would also offer consulting. The idea was really a great one, but I made two very big mistakes. Well, really three. First, I rushed into this without seeing a lawyer and having papers drawn up, and while we had a verbal agreement that I would own my work and he would own his if we separated, we had no legal separation agreement going into it. Second, while I covered most of the startup expenses, including an expensive industry tradeshow, Interop, he volunteered to handle the website. He was thinking ahead and I didn't realize what a killer this would turn out to be. Third, I ignored things I shouldn't have.



So we start this business. I've got my head down as I'm rapidly building our products, my partner is working on his training class, we're meeting with different companies to get some beta testing sites lined up, and my wife, who was working in software sales, quits her job to join us. Interop turns out to be a huge success. This is a giant show--miles of floor space with the big companies building small little mansions for their booths, while we have a small 6-foot table in the Siberia section of the show called Startup City, we still get a steady stream of potential customers to us, many of whom seem excited about what we're doing. But as it turned out due to reasons I can't discuss here, this turned out to be the beginning of the end.



So for the next 3 months things are deteriorating quickly between me and my partner. Even with that, we've gotten about 40 customers and about 100K in revenue--and these customers include Lucent, The US Army, banks, utility companies, financial institutions, colleges and military contractors. And I'm getting customers telling me these are the most useful network management products they have. And we're getting more training and consulting interest. And then the plug gets pulled. My partner takes down the website. This in effect kills us. All our marketing literature we'd been sending out and all the prospects we met at Interop have our website address. With our website taken down, we're dead. Before and after doing this company, I'd worked at a number of startups, all of which were heavily funded with venture money, and none of them were ever able to generate the customer list that we got in only 3 months of having the product available--or generated 100K in revenue in less than 7 months of operation. And now not only were we dead, but now it was going to get really ugly.



Here's where I started acting smart. I hired good lawyers. The first lawyer I hired was just great--a very even keeled man who was able to get the other side to agree to arbitration so we wouldn't have to go to court. Since he wasn't a litigator, he pointed to a real pit bull of a lawyer--if I ever had to go to court again, I'd want this guy at my side. I don't want to go too much into the hearing except that the judge ending up giving me what I asked for, which at this point was simply the products I built (my ex-partner was claiming ownership of them). I'll give one story about the hearings--my lawyer had told me that when I was examined by the other attorney, she should only ask me yes or no questions, but if she asks me a why question, I can say whatever I want. So the very first question is a why question--and I launch into my whole defense. She tries stopping me, and I tell the judge that she asked me "why". And he turned back to her and told her that she did ask me why. So I continue and give out my whole story.



While this whole mess was going on, which was unbelievably stressful, I had a dream where I'm meeting a good friend of mine, this Russian software engineer I'd worked with for years, at a Russian restaurant, and we're getting blitzed on vodkas while I'm telling him my sad story. And this friend of mine, now drunk, starts bragging how he's heard of a guy who for a not too outrageous fee will fly a Russian to this country, and after your problem disappears, the Russian will be flown back to disappear back there.



So all of this had formulated into my idea for Murder Club--a husband and wife whose lives are being ruined by a vindictive business partner, and the rabbit hole the husband finds himself tumbling down when he lets himself go as far as to hire that Russian to make his problem disappear. I had this idea for years, and after writing a thriller (Dying Memories) and a horror novel (Monster), I wanted to write a noir novel again, and something absolutely pure noir with no compromise. And so I finally set about to write Murder Club. Once I was done I showed it to two authors I respect a lot, Roger Smith and Ed Gorman, and here's what both of them had to say with their comments edited to remove spoilers:



"I love it, Dave. It is very tight, very fast and very claustrophobic, left me breathless at times. It also has the stench of pure evil running through it, that is really unsettling. A profoundly pessimistic and very disturbing ending. Difficult to forget." Roger Smith



"I love Murder Club! Just as a pure story it may be my favorite of your books. The Russian angle is fantastic as is the reality of the perils of partnerships. Ill pay you the highest compliment I can--they remind me of my two favorite Lionel White novels The Money Trap and Before I Die. There are no similarities in stories or characters but the mood of desperation so beautifully sustained and twisted even deeper with surprises--masterful, Dave!" Ed Gorman



So where is Murder Club now? It's still unsold. There's no question in my mind that this is the best noir novel I've written, as well as the bleakest, but I also know it's going to a hard sell, especially in today's climate. So far I've shown it to two editors working for Big Six publishers, and both tried to buy it, and both were blocked. At this point I'm accepting that my profile needs to be raised before I can sell this, but I also think there's a good chance that will be happening soon. I've heard from my film agent that Outsourced is moving quickly towards production, I also have a film deal agreed to for A Killer's Essence (and am waiting for an updated contract and will give more information about this once I get it), and things are looking very promising for a film deal for The Caretaker of Lorne Field. So for the time being, I need to put Murder Club in a drawer, and when these things happen Murder Club will find the right home.

Where my ideas come from: Monster

One day when I was walking around the long since defunct Brookline Barnes & Noble, I was noticing all the vampire, dragon, zombie, Wizard of Oz & werewolf books, and was thinking what hasn't been done, and what I came up with was Frankenstein. Yeah, I know, Dean Koontz has his Frankenstein series, but that has been placed in modern times and has little in common with Mary Shelley's novel. I started thinking then of a version written by the monster and where everything a dying Victor Frankenstein tells Captain Walton is a lie to cover his own crimes and depravity. I started getting excited by this idea but also severely intimidated by it. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a great novel, and for those of you who haven't read it you should. It's very unlike any of the movie adaptations, including (especially) Kenneth Branagh's "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein". It's also in it's own way a very powerful noir story. Anyway, the intimidation won out and instead of working on this I wrote Dying Memories.



The idea, though, wouldn't leave me alone, and nine months later I started considering this more seriously. A friend of mine who's a PhD candidate in 18th Century European History and fellow Black Belt student at our Kung Fu studio, Alden Ludlow, put together a reading list so I could properly research, among other things, 18th century witchcraft, satanic cults, London sex clubs, supernatural mythology, folklore and fiction. So after 6 months of research that also included historical figures Marquise de Sade and Samuel Hahnemann, I felt ready to start it.



If you haven't read Shelley's Frankenstein, the book takes place in a lot of different locations--starting with Ingolstadt, Germany, then Geneva, French Alps, London, Scotland, Ireland, back to Geneva, and finally the Artic. What I did was layer my version over these same locations but have different reasons for this traveling, as well as make the monster in my version the hero. The Marquise de Sade and his philosophy also plays a critical role.



Overlook Press will be publishing this next year, I can honestly say this by far the best book I've written, and will probably ever write. More than any book I've written, I'm looking forward to seeing this one in print.

Where my ideas come from: Dying Memories

After seeing how difficult it had been to sell The Caretaker of Lorne Field and A Killer's Essence, books that I thought should've been easy sales to the Big 6 publishers but kept getting blocked because they were deemed too different, I decided to write a more conventional thriller, but one with enough of a noirish edge so I'd be happy with it. So now I needed both an idea and a plot, and after some brainstorming hit upon a very cool idea. I needed to do some research on nanotechnology to better understand and formulate this idea, and while I don't want to ruin the story by giving this away now, the idea I came up with is something I'm convinced that will be developed in the future. Maybe not today, or next year, but give it 10 years or so. And it will be a scarier world when that happens.



So now that I had myidea, I needed to work that into a plot, and I did so by steeping it deeply with paranoia, and Dying Memories was born. I wrote it to follow the standard thriller conventions: shorter chapters than I usually write with a kind of cliffhanger at the end of each of these, and like my other books, lots of twists and ever escalating danger. But I also gave it enough of a noirish edge so it would stand out as a book that my current readers would also be happy with. My friend, Vincent Zandri, was having a lot of success with the ebooks that StoneGate Ink were publishing, so I decided with Dying Memories to play more in the ebook world and have StoneGate publish this one also.

Where my ideas come from: Killer

When Serpent's Tail told me they wanted to publish Pariah, I threw out the idea of a book based loosely on Boston hitman, John Martorano, as a third book to make Small Crimes, Pariah, and now what would be Killer, a 'man out of prison' noir trilogy. Martorano had killed 20 people and then was able to serve out only 12 years in prison when he cut a deal to give evidence against Whitey Bulger. I had no idea what this third book would really be about, but I wanted to have a 2-book deal with Serpent's Tail so I'd get to write a book for once without having to hustle afterwards to sell it.



I never had any intention of writing a 'man out of prison' noir trilogy in the first place. I started Pariah with Kyle Nevin leaving prison because I thought it would be an interesting contrast to what I did in Small Crimes since Nevin is almost the opposite of Joe Denton. While Denton is deep in denial as to how much damage he's caused and what he really is, Nevin is just a force of nature--someone who remorselessly leaves death and destruction wherever he goes.



So now that I had this third book that I needed to write, the trilogy took shape as everything just kind of coalesced. It just ended up fitting so well as you had each protagonist going down their own paths--for Joe Denton it was a search for redemption, for Kyle Nevin it was money, revenge and to reestablish himself as a man to be feared, and for Leonard March, my ex-hitman protagonist of Killer, it was a search for self identity.



So while I had no clue what Killer was really going to be about (other than this very vague notion that it would be loosely about someone like Martorano) when I threw out the idea to Serpent's Tail, I ended up both creating and finishing off my noir trilogy with what many (myself included) feel is the best book of the three.

Where my ideas come from: A Killer's Essence

The ninth book I wrote, A Killer's Essence, will be published this September and will be my 10th book published (with Blood Crimes and Julius Katz and Archie self-published as ebooks). The original title I had for this was Essence, and my publisher and I went through a long list of titles before settling on "A Killer's Essence". While very different than my "man out of prison" noir books, this and my still unpublished, Murder Club, are easily my two best crime novels, and I'm in the process of wrapping up a film deal for this one which I should be able to talk about more in a few weeks.



So the idea for A Killer's Essence came from a very cool idea that hit me. With the book coming out very soon, I don't want to ruin it by talking about what this idea was, but when you read the book you'll see.



So now that I had this idea, I had to work it into a story. I started this in November of 2007. The Red Sox had just won their second World Series in three year. 2004 was a cathartic moment for millions of Red Sox fans, and making it even more so was the way they came back from the dead against the Yankees in the ALCS. Whether this was a conceit on my part or not, I wanted to center this book during the 2004 ALCS, and a good part of the book takes place then with the Sox-Yankees series being more than just a backdrop but in a way integrated into the story. The book didn't seem to fit the Boston area, so I placed in the New York (Brooklyn and Manhattan respectively), and with it set there, I got to have some fun and show the ALCS (and the Yankees massive chokejob) from the point of view of a diehard Yankees fan.



So far I really haven't talked much about what A Killer's Essence is about. Let's just say this is my most character driven novel, and in a way it's about two very damaged people, Stan Green, a decent man and a good cop whose personal life is spinning out of control, and Zachary Lynch, a recluse who is barely able to fit in this world, and how they ultimately end up helping each other.



When I finished A Killer's Essence, I was sure I had a book that the Big 6 publishers would want to buy, and I showed it to an agent who used to be an editor for Gold Medal. She told me if she was still at Gold Medal she'd buy it in a heartbeat, but that the book was too gritty and different for publishers today. I ended up finding an agent, Matt Bialer at Sanford J. Greenburger, who fell in love with this book and ended up selling it and The Caretaker of Lorne Field to Overlook Press. Maybe it is too gritty for the Big 6, but I'll be finding out in the next few weeks whether it's too gritty for today's crime readers.



One last note, Matt, who lives in Brooklyn, was convinced when he read the book that I must've lived there at one time also because of how authentic it felt. Nope. If I ever lived there it was in a previous life, and if that was the case, I hope I wasn't a Yankees fan then!

Julius and Archie could use a little help...

Julius Katz and Archie are currently engaged in the case of the missing tags, and they could use your help... 15 seconds should do...



I read recently how Amazon has these hidden groups that are directly related to tagging, such as mystery series, and that these can have a major impact on book sales. So if you want to give Julius and Archie a little bit of help, please click on the tags already in place for these two books (about halfway down the Amazon book page), and if you can click the Like button at the top even better! Thanks! I know Julius and the little guy will appreciate your help.



Julius Katz Mysteries

Julius Katz And Archie



My series of posts of where my book ideas came from will continue tomorrow with my ninth book.