The Bughouse Affair by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini

From Publisher's Weekly:

Fans of Steve Hockensmith’s Holmes on the Range historicals will welcome this Carpenter and Quincannon novel, billed as the first in a new series from husband-and-wife MWA Grand Masters Muller and Pronzini (Beyond the Grave). In 1891, Sabina Carpenter, one of the original Pinkerton female operatives, the Pink Roses, moved to San Francisco to join former Secret Service agent John Quincannon in establishing the city’s “premier investigative agency.” In 1894, two simultaneous cases preoccupy the pair: a pickpocket is targeting the patrons of the Haight Street Chutes Amusement Park, and six policyholders of the Great Western insurance company have been burglarized. Meanwhile, Quincannon is bemused by press reports that Sherlock Holmes has survived his supposed death and has taken up residence in San Francisco, until the claimant to the master detective’s mantle becomes an unexpected rival. A doubly impossible crime only adds to the enjoyable plot. 


Ed here: This novel is so chock full of twists, surprises, humor, classic ratiocination and amused/bemused portraits of historical San Francisco you literally don't want it to end. Thank God the sequel is already on the Forge schedule. I sincerely believe this would make a great TV series for either network or cable. Sabina Carpenter and John Quincannon are characters made for the millions in the fashion of the great BBC series.

Pro-File MarciaMuller and Bill Pronzini

   Tell us about your current novel or project.

Marcia:  Although Bughouse is the first of a new collaborative series, Bill originated the characters in his solo western novel, Quincannon, in 1985, and then continued their adventures in a Quincannon—Elena Oliverez mystery we wrote together and in a number of short stories.  A couple of years ago, as a lark, we collaborated on a C&Q short for EQMM, with me writing the scenes from Sabina’s viewpoint and Bill those from Quincannon’s.  I had no difficulty slipping into Sabina’s voice and persona, and the story turned out so well that we decided to use the same method on a batch of novels.  Tor was enthusiastic enough to give us a three-book contract.

Bill:  We’ve delivered the second, The Spook Lights Affair, and will start work on the third, The Body Snatchers Affair, sometime after the first of the year.  There’ll be more after that, sales permitting. 

2.     Can you give us a sense of what you’re working on now? 

Marcia:  The next Sharon McCone, The Night Searchers, for Grand Central Books.

Bill:  The 2014 Nameless, Strangers, for Tor/Forge.

3.     What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

      Marcia:  Positive feedback from readers, especially those who tell me that my books have helped them survive difficult personal crises.

Bill:  Peer respect.  There’s nothing more gratifying than favorable reaction to my work from writers I admire.

4.     The greatest displeasure? 

Marcia:  Facing the blank computer screen every day with the irrational fear that it’ll stay that way.

Bill:  Having my work unfairly trashed by anonymous, clueless idiots passing themselves off as reviewers.

5.     Advice to the publishing world?

      Marcia:  Invest more time in and attention to your new authors.  Give them a chance to grow, as publishers did back when I first entered the business.

      Bill:  Quit judging a novel’s merits and promotional value based on its length.  Word-bloat isn't a synonym for quality.

Are there any forgotten writers you’d like to see in print again?

      Marcia:  Too many to list.

      Bill:  Ditto.  Our library is full of books by forgotten writers.

Tell us about selling your first novel. 

Marcia:  In 1976 I submitted Edwin of the Iron Shoes over the transom to Michele Slung at David McKay, who had foolishly put an ad for manuscripts in The Writer.  She was inundated with submissions, and I was fortunate enough to be on top of one of the piles.  She called and told me she wanted to buy it, but she was about to leave on a 3-week vacation in Europe.  Four weeks passed, then five; I panicked and wrote her a pleading note, which arrived on her desk the day after she called again and made me an offer.

Bill:  I was lucky enough to sell The Stalker on its first submission in 1970, to Lee Wright at Random House.  She asked for several revisions, which I was happy to make.  After reading and cringing my way through portions of the published version a while back, I wish she’d asked for a whole lot more.

The Girl and The Genie

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AF0R2YC

The Girl and the Genie [Kindle Edition]

E. M. Lilly (Author)

Be the first to review this item | Like (2)

---

Digital List Price:	$4.50 What's this?
Kindle Purchase Price:	$4.50
Prime Members:	$0.00 (borrow for free from your Kindle) Prime Eligible

---

Book Description

Publication Date: November 28, 2012

"Emily Mignon’s love life is a disaster, and she’s not at all happy
about it! When she finds a genie and is granted nine wishes, she’s
determined to use one of them to find her one true love. But the genie
warns her that any wish for romance always ends disastrously. Emily,
not to be denied, will try to find a loophole to this rule.

The Girl and the Genie is a fun, exciting and charming mix of
paranormal romance and urban fantasy, that will leave you rooting for
Emily, the genie, and a fat little English Bulldog named Winston.

E. M. Lilly is the nom de plume of an award-winning mystery author."

Forgotten Books: The Plastic Nightmare by Richard Neely

The Plastic Nightmare

I've written here before about Richard Neely. He wrote non-series crime novels that pretty much covered the entire range of dark suspense. I mentioned that in the best of them the weapon of choice is not poison, bullets or garrote. He always prefered sexual betrayl.

Plastic is a good example. Using amnesia as the central device Dan Mariotte must reconstruct his life. Learning that the beautiful woman at his bedside all these months in the hospital--his wife--may have tried to kill him in a car accident is only the first of many surprises shared by Mariotte and the reader alike.

What gives the novel grit is Neely's take on the privileged class. He frequently wrote about very successful men (he was a very successful adverts man himself) and their women. The time was the Seventies. Private clubs, privte planes, private lives. But for all the sparkle of their lives there was in Neely's people a despair that could only be assauged (briefly) by sex. Preferably illicit sex. Betrayl sex. Men betrayed women and women betrayed men. It was Jackie Collins only for real.

Plastic is a snapshot of a certain period, the Seventies when the Fortune 500 dudes wore sideburns and faux hippie clothes and flashed the peace sign almost as often as they flashed their American Express Gold cards. Johny Carson hipsters. The counter culture co-opted by the pigs.

The end is a stunner, which is why I can say little about the plot. Neely knew what he was doing and I'm glad to see his book back in print. Watching Nerely work is always a pleasure.

Capricorn One

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2008

Capricorn One

Cinema Retro ran a piece (in its usual fine intresting style) on a new DVD of Capricorn One. I have a special interest in that film because one night when Carol and I were driving back from Chicago we decided to listen to loopy late night radio. In those days (not sure how its goes these days) late night was rarely political. It was, instead, about conspiracy theories of all kinds.

Here's a piece of the Cinema Retro review:

"Capricorn Onewas the first major release to center on a clearly crackpot theory and present it as a plausible thesis. In this case, the notion is that corrupt NASA executives concoct an audacious plot to fake the first landing on Mars. They gain the co-operation of the three astronauts involved using a combination of appeals to their patriotism coupled with implied threats against their families. As crazy as the scenario sounds, Hal Holbrook, as the plot's mastermind, delivers a speech to the men that makes it sound sensible (they have to have a triumph or public apathy for NASA will result in cancelation of the space program). Things quickly go awry when technical glitches make it appear the capsule was destroyed en route back to earth. In order to maintain the facade, Holbrook has to order the assassination of the astronauts, played by James Brolin, Sam Waterston and O.J. Simpson. The men realize they are expendable and make a daring break for freedom across the desert."

The show we heard had listeners calling in from the US and Canada claiming that this was in fact what happened when we claimed to have landed on the moon. It was all staged in a TV studio by the US government.

I'm pretty sure this theory still has credence among the full-mooners. In fact I heard Sarah Palin promise to look into it if she and that nasty old bastard she's running with ever happen to take the White House.

Movie Day

Movie Day

I spent a good share of the day watching two movies. I'd been waiting for the Independent Film Channel to run Claude Chabrol's Story of Women (1990 USA) again. Here's a partial review from IMDB:

Abortion in Nazi-occupied France

Author: Dennis Littrell (dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal

"Claude Charbrol's stark and unsentimental masterpiece about the last woman to be executed in France--she was guillotined for performing abortions in Nazi-occupied France during World War II--forces us to see a side of war not often depicted. What does a woman with two little children do when her country is occupied by the brute forces of the enemy? How is she to find enough to eat, to buy the increasingly scarce and costly necessities of life? How is she to find joy in life? Women often turn to prostitution during such times, but Maire Latour does not. Instead she aborts the foetuses of the prostitutes and of other women impregnated, often by the Nazis. In a sense this is her "resistence." However she prospers and takes up with a Nazi collaborator. In the process she reduces her husband to frustration and humiliation.

"Isabelle Huppert as Marie Latour is mesmerizing in a role that allows her talent full latitude. She is clear-headed and sly as a business woman, warm and ordinary as a mother, cold and brutal as a wife, childish and careless as an adulteress, resourceful and fearless as an abortionist, and unrepentant as she awaits the executioner (foreshadowed, by the way, by her son, who wants to be an executioner when he grows up). "

Ed here:

The more movies I watch the more I feel drawn to Chabrol and his seminal actress Isabelle Huppert. I know I am in a minority for admiring what the two of them did with Madame Bovary but I think that film will have its day eventually. In terms of both intelligent and sexual beauty I can't think of another actress who comes close to Huppert. I could imagine her face dominating the days of silent films; with her gentle hesitant style given voice she's all the more remarkable. A lesser actor would have donned masks to show us all the different sides of Marie. But somehow Huppert integrates all contradictory aspects of Marie into one believe whole. This is a masterpiece.

------------------Libeled Lady (1936)

IMDB "Warren Haggerty is the chief editor of the New York Evening Star. He keeps on delaying his marriage with Gladys because of problems his newspapers must face. When it is filed a 5 million dollars claim by Connie Allenbury for having printed she is a marriage-breaker, he organizes the unconsummated marriage of Gladys and the don Juan Bill Chandler. The goal is to catch Connie alone with a married man... Written by Yepok"

I laughed all the way through this screwball comedy that could never have been made after the Hayes office took power. Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow as editor and fiance reminded my of why I never much cared for the Tracy-Hepburn pictures. Too chaste. Harlowe takes the picture for me. This is the best I've ever seen he and I'm a big fan. Funny, sexy, a little bit trashy and cunning in the way she battles Tracy, who keeps breaking his promise to marry her, they dominate the screen in a way the more staid William Powell and Myrna Lowe don't. The latter two are good but predictable. Harlowe and Tracty spill real blood. The last six minutes give us three plot twists.

The Pat Hobby Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

FORGOTTEN BOOKS - The Pat Hobby Stories

Losers have always interested me more than winners. There's a line from a Leonard Cohen poem "The simple life of heroes/The twisted lives of saints." I'll take the saints (though Cohen isn't talking about folks the Vatican bestows sainthood on that's for sure).

My formative years were the Fifties. The films that influenced me the most were the noirs my father took me to and such fare as The Sweet Smell of Success and A Face in the Crowd. No heroes there. The same for my preferred reading (in additon to the Gold Medals and sf)--Hemingway, James Jones, Irwin Shaw (short stories), Graham Greene and Richard Wright among others. No heroes there either. Same for theater (I was writing terrible plays early on). O'Neill, Miller, Williams. Not a hero in sight.

We call a good deal of crime fiction dark. But is it? Cops replaced cowboys and now we have Cops (or investigators of any kind) with Personal Problems and reviewers think this is some kind of dangerous fiction. Not to me.

The constraints of commercial fiction are such that you risk losing a sale if your protagoist is an outright loser. The Brits were way ahead of us Yanks. Derek Raymond has spawned two generations of daring writers. The first time I read him I was struck by how much the texture of his prose remided me of one of my five favorite books of all time, Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell. I read fifty pages of it the other day. What with globalization the world is once again as Orwell described it in the Thirties.

The literary writer Brian Moore (who started out writing Gold Medals and Dell originals under three different names) made a brief early career out of losers. The Lucky Of Ginger Coffee, for only one example, is about a daydreamer most people love but ultimately a selfish man whose daydreams are destroying his wife and children. He can't accept that he's an average guy--a loser. And that turns him into a dark loser indeed.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's work is filled with losers. Handsome, poetic ones, yes, but losers nonetheless. Winter Dreams, as one of his best stories is called, describes the near lifelong love of a man for woman he can never have. He has great business success but still there is his failure to possess her. The last few pages will give you chills.

Here we have The Pat Hobby Stories. They are set in the Hollywood of the late Thirties and feature a once prominent screeenwriter who is reduced to virtually begging for work at the various studios that once wined and dined him. The Fitzgerald myth is so tied to the notion of Romantic Loss that we forget that he was also funnier than hell. And causitc.

As Arnold Gingrich said shortly after Fitzgerald's death, "These stories were the last word from his last home, for much of what he felt about Hollywood and about himself permeated these stories."

And damned good stories they are, too. Not major Fitzgerald but cunning and crafty tales of bars, studios, whores of both genders, unhappy winners and drunken losers.

My favorite here is "Pat Hobby and Orson Welles." The luckless Hobby is hanging around the writer's building trying to cadge anything he can get--even a B-western--when somebody mentions Orson Welles. And Hobby almost loses it. Everywere he turns he hears about Orson Welles--newspaper, magazines, radio, movies. Orson Welles Orson Welles.

Fitzgerald uses Welles as a symbol of generational turn. Hobby and other men his age were major players in their time but now their time is gone. One studio head admits (reluctantly) to Hobby that he doesn't know what the hell all the fuss about Welles is either but dammit the young people on his staff swoon every time his name is mentioned. So this studio head and others push enormous sums of money on Welles. Hobby bitterly wonders why Welles doesn't stay in the East where he belongs---with the snobs. The West, dammit, is for common folk. (Well, except for the mansions and Rodeo Drive.)

This is a book fille with boozy grief, hilarious bitterness, shameless self-pity and  and a fascinating look from the inside as to what writers went through under the old studio management.

As Fitzgerald himself said, "This was not art, this was industry. (Who) you sat with at lunch was more important than what you (wrote) in your office."

A fine little collection.

Forgotten Books - Dog Soldiers

Forgotten Books - Dog Soldiers

I've always had the feeling that Robert Stone, not unlike Graham Greene, was a bit too much of a storyteller for the literary crowd and a bit too literary for the storytelling crowd. Which is shorthand for saying that he's never had the giant bestseller he's long deserved. He doesn't quit fit into a marketing plan.

"In Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong for him. "

Stone uses Converse as our guide through underground America in the early 70s. Through him we meet drug dealers, killers, hippies, flambouyant street bullshit artists, police informers, crooked agents and high-minded intellectuals who find themselves reduced to babbling helplessness in the face of all their political nightmares.

Bare bones this is a powerful crime story. The real thing. Real criminals. Real cops. Real streets. Nothing tarted up for effect.

But it is also, for me, the truest portrait of that time I've ever read. His portrayl of the narcissistic foolish left and the brute fascist right are without peer in the literature of the time. And we see all this through the eyes of a man who is at least as delusional as everybody else in the novel. What redeems him is his cynical humor (the book is very funny in places as when Converse recalls stories he once hacked out for a low-rung tabloid, "Hungry Skydiver Eats Woman") and his obsession with trying to find a philosophical justifcation for existence. Good luck.

From the NY Times 1974 review:

"The plot is melodramatic: A confused and traumatized hack journalist in Vietnam buys three kilos of pure heroin and has it smuggled to his wife in Berkeley. She has gone from a job in the university anthropology department to selling tickets at a San Francisco porn film theater. The drugs are brought from Vietnam by an ex-Marine Corps friend of the journalist, a self-styled samurai, a zen psychopath, a desperado. The money will be very good, they "don't respond to the moral objections," they're all very frightened and fascinated by death.

"They are immediately discovered by "regulatory agents," who are extremely violent and obviously dealing in drugs themselves. The ex-Marine and the journalist's wife flee south from Berkeley to L.A., where they try to unload the stuff on a small-time Hollywood actor with gangster connections: he doesn't buy it; in a very crazy and chilling displaced act of revenge, the ex-Marine kills a naïve writer with an overdose. He has by now hooked the wife and fallen in love, of sorts, with her. She is terrified and attracted by him and enjoys the righteous and serene pleasure of a heroin high. They flee east into the desert and take refuge with a German zen roshi who had been a Ken Kesey-like master of dope (I am not now--nor have I ever been--God"). The journalist returns from Vietnam and is immediately picked up by the agents, tortured and put on his wife's trail. The book concludes with a Vietnam-style fire-fight on a California mountainside and a trek across the salt flats.

"It is all very suspenseful and convincing and cruel. It is very frightening. It is elaborately grim. Only the ironic energy and wit of the author's imagination and the authority of his voice suggest a less nihilistic or satanic way of living, acting, feeling. Stone took the epigraph for the novel from Conrad's "Heart of Darkness": "I've seen the devil of violence and the devil of greed and the devil of hot desire. . .I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land, I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly." This is indeed the spirit that drives his desperate characters."
 

ED HERE:

For thrills I rank it with the best of Greene's "entertainments." Non-stop thrills rendered in prose as stripped-down and evocative as early Hemingway. It has the power to truly shock.

A novel that deserves reading many times over.

Karl Riez's film adaptation of the novel is powerful for two acts but then becomes so melodramatic it  begins to stumble. But it is filled with fine performaces by Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld, Michael Moriarty, Ray Sharkey and many others. If you want to know what the Sixties were like get your hands on this movie.

The Murder Vine by Shepard Rifkin

The Murder Vine

The Fifties were packed tight with private eye writers trying to out tough Mickey Spillane. I Eat Your Kidney etc. By the early Sixties a general reaction had set in. Larger-than-life became life size. Some private eyes even began to have the same problems we all do--taxes, upset stomachs, women who don't find you all that attractive. So long Mike Hammer hello Dustin Hoffman.

Joe Dunne in The Murder Vine splits the difference. He has some of the cynical attiude of the Spillane era but none of the bombast. No evictions for him. He runs his business as a business and does well.

The book focuses on the murder of three Civil Rights workers in the South in the late Sixties. We all know the real story. It still enrages me, makes me sick.

One of the dead boys has a wealthy father who hires Dunne to go South and find his boy's killer. Very big dollars for Dunne for even trying to find him; enormous dollars if he succeeds. As cover (Dunne is an unreconstructed Yankee and sounds like it) he takes his fetching and magnolia-dripping secretary Kirby along as cover.

Rifkin is a fine man with a sentence. He understands that written language has some of the same rythms as spoken language. Some parts of this book really sing. And while many of the scenes are s.o.p. for a private eye novel each is enlivened with one of those little grace notes that make you feel you're reading something fresh.

The story is a brutal look at a brutal period of time when the CivIl War was being fought again by proxy. I admire Rifkin for never speechifying and for never turning Dunne into a saint on a mission. He's comfortable in his own seediness.

Rifkin is a good and too-long overlooked writer who made a difference in the paperback world of the Fifties and Sixties.

Forgotten Books: Deadlier Than The Male by James Gunn

Deadlier Than The Male

Ed here: Happy Thanksgiving everybody.

Of Deadlier Than the Male by James Gunn*, the novel that became the basis for the Robert Wise film Born To Kill, the French Director Claude Chabrol said: "It has a freely developed plot and an absolutely extraordinary tone, pushing each scene towards a violent, ironic and macabre paroxysm...an unexpected dimension, a poetic depth..."

I'd put it more simply: If there is a hell, these are the people you'll find in its deepest part.

The story concerns a psychopath (in the movie well played by Lawrence Tierney) and a beautiful brittle gold digger (played with equal skill by Claire Trevor) and how they come first as partners of a sort and then as enemies. It is Swiftian in its contempt for humanity. The ugliness of Jim Thompson (whose favorite writer happened to be Johnathan Swift) was redeemed somewhat by the madness and occasional pathos of his people.

No madness or pathos here. These are the two most hard-boiled ruthless people I've ever encountered in crime fiction. Of necessity (censors) the film softens them slightly but only slightly.

In broadstroke the movie plot is generally like the movie plot. Here's IMBD:

In Reno a man kills a girl he likes and her boyfriend out of jealousy; it may not be the first time. A woman whose divorce has just come through finds the bodies but decides not to become involved. The two meet next day on the train to San Francisco unaware of this link between them. They are attracted to each other, and the relationship survives his marriage to her half-sister for money and status. It even survives the woman discovering that he was the murderer, though she may not realise how easily someone who has killed this way before can do so again. Written by Jeremy Perkins {jwp@aber.ac.uk}

Ed here: The cast of characters, with very few exceptions, fit exactly Chabrol's description: "violent, ironic and macabre." The attitude of the book, which which Chabrol also notes, reels between black comedy and surrealism drenched in a misanthropy that is occasionally stunning. The two old floozies we meet in the early boarding house scenes are worthy of Thompson at his best.

Deadlier Than The Male is one of those odd litle books that is both unique and successful on its own terms. This should definitely be back in print.

*not the science fiction writer

Anthony Hopkins Interview

Add caption

Anthony Hopkins, "Hitchcock" star, photographed in 2011.
FROM THE HUFFINGTON POST

Anthony Hopkins, 'Hitchcock' Star, On Oscar Season Glad-Handing: 'It's Disgusting'

Sir Anthony Hopkins doesn't suffer fools gladly. Not even icons like Sir Alfred Hitchcock.

"I think later in his years, he could have retired because some of the films became terrible," Hopkins told HuffPost Entertainment in a recent interview. For the record, Hopkins prefers Hitchcock's fertile period between 1954 and 1960, when the director produced "Rear Window," "Vertigo," "North By Northwest" and "Psycho." That last film is at the center of Hopkins' newest effort, appropriately titled"Hitchcock." Directed by Sacha Gervasi ("Anvil: The Story of Anvil"), "Hitchcock" focuses on the making of "Psycho," as well as the relationship Hitchcock had with his wife, Alma Reville. Hopkins plays Hitch in the film, transforming his features and voice to embody the oft-imitated director; fellow acting legend Helen Mirren plays Reville.

"She was exactly what I expected," Hopkins said about his co-star. "Very professional, friendly, very good. Excellent actress. No-nonsense."

Neither is Hopkins, which is why it wasn't that surprising to hear the Oscar-winning star rail against both Method acting and the dog-and-pony show known as awards season.

You've played historical figures before. Did you have any apprehension about taking on another real-life character?
Initially, yes, I did. I had apprehension all the way through the movie. I had done all my preparation, but being a perfectionist I wanted to make sure it was absolutely right. But Sacha said, "You're not Alfred Hitchcock, you're Anthony Hopkins playing him." I said, "Yeah, I know." But I wouldn't even look at the monitor screens [during production]. I didn't want to see myself or hear myself. I had done enough preparation to do the part.

What was the most difficult part of preparation?
I think getting the makeup right was the first one. It wasn't difficult in itself, but we did about four or five camera tests to modify to make sure there wasn't too much makeup. Getting the voice right, too. I watched a lot of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" on television.

Did you ever meet Alfred Hitchcock before he died?
I did in West Hollywood. My agent took me to this restaurant one day and said, "There's Alfred Hitchcock down there." I said, "Oh, God. Can I meet him?" Hitchcock had just gotten his knighthood, so we're walking past him and my agent said, "Good afternoon, Sir Alfred." He said, "Hello. How are you?" He said, "This is my client Anthony Hopkins." Hitchcock said [to me], "Charmed, I'm sure."

for the rest go here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/19/anthony-hopkins-hitchcock-oscars_n_2156179.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

Pro-File Reed Farrel Coleman

Gun Church reviewed by Publisher's Weekly:

New Jersey community college teacher Kip Weiler, who was “a writer to watch” in the 1980s before drug addiction and an utter lack of self-discipline ended his career and his marriage, gets a second chance in this superior crime thriller from Shamus Award–winner Coleman (Hurt Machine and six other Moe Prager novels). When Frank Vuchovich, one of Weiler’s creative writing students, pulls a gun and holds him and the rest of the class hostage, Weiler manages to temporarily disarm Vuchovich so the others can escape. Weiler’s heroism attracts the attention of a publisher interested in reprinting his work; a sexy blonde finds a way into his bed; and another student, an unabashed fan, invites him to join a secret group that gathers to shoot guns at each other wearing protective vests. As Weiler’s new relationships progress, the line between his reality and his fiction blur. Coleman keeps readers guessing to the end. Agent: David Hale Smith, Inkwell Management. (Oct.)

Advance Praise for Gun Church

“Reed Farrel Coleman is again operating at a very high level in Gun Church.”

—Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter’s Bone & Tomato Red

“If this is church, I might start going. Sign me up as a parishioner.”

—Don Winslow, New York Times best-selling author of Savages

“Coleman’s Gun Church is wonderful. His protagonist, Kip Weiler, is one of the most fascinating characters in years.”

—David Morrell, New York Times best-selling author of The Brotherhood of the Rose

Reed Farrel Coleman:

1. Tell us about your current novel or project.

I have many projects. As you know, such is the life in the new world of publishing. But the novel I'm touring right now is a real labor of love: GUN CHURCH. I got the idea for it in a flash six years ago and struggled to get it right for five of those years. It's the story of a former 80s wunderkind, Kip Weiler, a supremely talented writer with a supremely big ego and big addictions. We find him many years after his fame has faded and his money dried up. He's teaching creative writing to, as he says, "rural yahoos" in a small mining town community college. Oh how the mighty have fallen. One day, a student tries to hold Kip's class hostage and Kip, much to his own surprise, saves the class from harm. He gets a second fifteen minutes of fame and his life takes a bizarre twist from there. He gets involved with a cult that worships the essential nature of handguns. Once he's in, he's in, and life begins to imitate art imitating life.

2. Can you give us a sense of what you’re working on now? 

I'm working on the final book in the Moe Prager mystery series. It's called THE HOLLOW GIRL and it's scheduled out sometime in 2014. It will feature Moe solving his last case while living through terrible grief and a downward spiral. I don't want to say more for fear of spoiling it.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

The greatest pleasure is the writing itself. I learned a long time ago that a writer should fall in love with writing, not with what he's written. Well, I'm still deeply in love with the process. Of course there's always those few moments when you finish a sentence or paragraph and it hits you that no one else in the world could have written those words quite that way.

4. The greatest displeasure? 

Marketing. I love fans and readers, but the pressure to do more than my job, which is to produce the best books I can, weighs heavily on me. I don't hate social media, but I don't like it when all I do is say, "Hey, look at me." And I'm hopeless on Twitter.

5. Advice to the publishing world?

Don't fight battles you've already lost. Adjust to the new reality. I have an author friend who says that traditional publishers are guarding the gate, but that the walls have already been breeched. I didn't love the whole ebook phenomenon either at first, but they're here and here to stay. I think traditional publishers need to do more than hold their noses and accept the new reality. I hope they embrace it and the marketing strategies that come with that. Traditional publishers hate the concept of free giveaways, but they are the reality. I also think indie bookstores have to come to grips with Thomas and Mercer and other similar imprints. People are going to want that product and to not carry those books will be self-defeating. Authors have had to adjust because in some ways we are at the bottom of the food chain. But tomorrow all of this can change. That's what makes the new world of publishing so frightening and exciting.

6. Are there any forgotten writers you’d like to see in print again?

I'm sure there are hundreds, thousands, but there's no one I can point to specifically. For example, about eight years ago my late friend David Thompson recommended I read Daniel Woodrell. Problem was I couldn't find any of his work in stores. Finally, I got hold of an ARC of TOMATO RED. I was stunned at his amazing talent and at the beauty and hopelessness in his work. It dawned on me that my books were mostly all in print and his were out of print. It was a great injustice that has since been undone. His career is thriving and he is finally getting the recognition he deserves. I urge readers to look beyond the best seller list and dig beneath the surface. There really are treasures there.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel.  

 

It was in the ancient days when you could submit unsolicited manuscripts. I got a friend in a big NY law firm to make copies of the manuscript on the side and I would send them out five at a time. I was about to give up when I got a call from Marty Sheperd at Ther Permanent Press. I think the first thing he said was, "We want to publish your novel." I thought he was one of my friends breaking my shoes. But it was real.  I've tried not to look back.

• Amazon: amzn.to/SK6GiG
• B&N: bit.ly/NKIUmB
• Tyrus Books: bit.ly/S1QABW

The 25th Hour

The 25th Hour

I watched the 25th Hour again last night. I've recommended it before. Flawed as it is--the first act needed to be trimmed--it is still one of the most powerful crime films I've ever seen simply because it doesn't rely on any of the neo-noir tropes so fashionable today. It is the story of an intelligent, otherwise decent young man so fucking stupid he started dealing drugs. And in so doing lost his claim to both intelligence and decency.

The film takes place in the final 24 hours before he goes to prison. Ed Norton as the dealer, Phillip Seymour Hoffman as his hapless friend, Rosario Dawson as Norton's lover and Anna Paquin as the teenage student Hoffman is fixated on form a crushing ensemble. The acting is flawless.

The final twenty minutes, in the scene with Norton's father and the scene with Norton and Hoffman and another friend, are as good as anything I've seen in the last fifteen years.

I am a lonely voice recommending this movie but I think it will eventually get its due.

PEEPER

PEEPER

This is my annual shout-out to Loren Estleman's demented and hilarious destruction of the Lonely But Honorable Private Eye myth.

Detroit private eye Ralph Poteet is a sink-hole dirtbag whose grubby life manages to get even grubbier with the each chapter.

Even after three readings over the years, Peeper keeps me laughing--many times out loud--all the way through. This isn't cheap parody. It's a witty take on many private eye cliches filled with people you wouldn't want to meet without wearing a bio-hazard suit, including a monsignor who dies in a whorehouse. Poteet is asked to help secret the man's enormous body to a more discreet location. And he decides while he's at it...to snap a few pics of the corpse. Never know what kind of money they'll bring on the open market.

Estleman takes numerous shots at Churchly cover-ups and this was before (1994) the scandals broke. What makes this work is Estleman's enormous skill. Nobody writes a better classical private eye story better than Loren and even when he's having fun with the tropes. He does so with his usual mastery of language, pacing and storytelling.

Trust me. You'l like this one a lot.