Beams Falling
"...an evocation of evil all the more powerful for its understated style...a literary achievement."— Don Crinklaw's review of Last of the Independents in Booklist Online.
This will be a big month, followed by an ever bigger month, followed by the biggest month. LAST OF THE INDEPENDENTS drops August 30th. Before and after, I'll be doing signings and promo to get the word out.
June 5th is the Crime Writers of Canada awards ceremony; I'm nominated for my short story "The Third Echo."
June 10th I'm reading with Robin Spano, E.R. Brown, Dietrich Kalteis, Linda Richards and Owen Laukkanen at the Irish Heather for "Noir at the Bar." That should be fun.
There are some other things in the works. You'll hear once I've confirmed.
I'm three days into writing the first draft of a new novel. It's going to be different than anything I've done before, and it's somewhat daunting. But daunting is good. We should be daunted every now and then, lest we grow complacent. One of my big peeves with college is that it's become so competitive it gives you zero chance to try something completely out of your element. An A+ physics student is better taking unchallenging physics courses than sojourning into history, or women's studies, or literature. If a student wants to go into economics or business, they can't afford to fail. And because we learn by failing, ergo, they can't afford to really learn. The negative incentive against curricular experimentation is very high.
Speaking of school:
This semester I have a chance to teach two of my favorite novels, the inimitable Maltese Falcon and Charles Portis's True Grit. Teaching the "Flitcraft story" from Falcon is a lot of fun, as it's one of the best-known philosophical episodes in crime fiction. If you're not familiar, it's about a man who, narrowly escaping catastrophe, makes a clean break with his life, and then unwittingly reconstitutes that same life in another city. "He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling." Dashiell Hammett: what a writer.
