The noir master (and father of the detective story) was born in Boston on Jan. 19, 1809, and first came to Baltimore in 1829 to live with relatives, according to a timeline of the local Poe House and Museum. After a stint at West Point, N.Y., he returned here and lived on Amity Street in West Baltimore with his widowed aunt and other relatives. Poe wrote a number of short stories here, before moving on to Richmond, Va., and Philadelphia. He died in Baltimore in 1849.

Philadelphia blogger Edward Pettit has been clamoring to have Poe’s body disinterred from the Westminster Burying Ground and hauled north. He even had the gall to make that claim at a Bouchercon panel about Poe. The audience was unmoved. (See for yourself on a video posted on Read Street tomorrow.)

We all know Pettit’s argument is absurd. Poe belongs to Baltimore, where his memory is respected. Our pro football team is the Ravens; theirs is the Eagles. Our Sheraton hotel has a Poe Room; Philly’s has Salon 1. We’ve even named public housing — the Poe Homes — after him. And his passing is honored each year with graveside roses and cognac. In Philly, he might get a cheesesteak and some Yuengling. At best.

You’ll find lots of opportunities to celebrate Poe’s birth. You can visit the Poe houses in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Richmond next year for anniversary events.

Or simply watch for new Poe-related books. Poe’s Children, a horror anthology that includes tales from Peter Straub, Stephen King and Neil Gaiman, went on sale recently. In the Shadow of the Master, a collection of his tales and related essays by mystery writers (including Baltimore’s Laura Lippman), is scheduled for a December release.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM in Edgar Allan Poe, Marylandia, Southern/Civil War | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

"Barth (winner of the National Book, the PEN/Malamud and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement awards) sets these narratives in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay country in the fictional retirement community of Heron Bay. Calling the book a projected history, Barth describes the Eastern Shore in James Michener-like detail in each one of these tales.

"So it’s nearly impossible not to know the setting of Barth’s fictional landscape. But it’s harder to know what’s happening, who’s talking and what’s the point. Barth offers alternate endings and even alternate narrators who jump into and out of the story. He plays games with the elements of fiction, establishing and destroying the illusion of reality.

"Welcome to the world of postmodern metafiction, with its subject being the art of telling a story — not the characters or what they do, not even the setting."

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Here are some new books by local authors:

In Delicious Desserts to Satisfy Your Sweet Tooth, Baltimorean Konya I. Lindsey offers standard recipes such as deep-dish apple pie and more unconventional choices such as Limoncello bars. Lindsey is the owner of SugarPlum Confections, a dessert caterer. (Xlibris/$32.99 (soft), $42.99 (hard)/96 pages)

In The Gwynns Falls: Baltimore Greenway to the Chesapeake Bay, W. Edward Orser provide a cultural history of the linear park, exploring such topics as industrialization and integration. Orser, the principal author, is a professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. (History Press/$21.99/160 pages)

The Secret of St. Nicholas by Ellen Nibali, is a picture book that tells the tale of an orphan, Nicholas, who tries to save three girls from slavery. Nibali is a horticultural consultant for the University of Maryland Cooperative Extension Service; she also writes a weekly gardening column for The Baltimore Sun. (Fairland/$16.95/32 pages)

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 11:03 AM in Marylandia | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

 On Sunday, Tandy will participate in the Susan G. Komen Maryland Race for the Cure. I know there are many people who have had their lives changed forever by this disease, and at times like these, there's something we can actually do about it.

If you're so inclined, send a donation along. And if you're already involved in this rewarding event, leave a comment, tell us your story and maybe we'll see you this weekend.\

Posted by Nancy Johnston at 6:00 AM in Whatever | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Shalom Auslander was at Hampden's Breathe Books last night for a reading and discussion of Foreskin's Lament, his memoir of teenage rebellion amid family dysfunction and Jewish Orthodoxy. Sounds grim, and from his angry-looking portraits and website illustration of a padded cell, you might expect a madman. But he looks like any nice Jewish guy, and his book is a running joke about his relationship with his parents and God. My book club read it and liked it, even though members lean toward more serious stuff, like bios of Maimonides.

For Auslander, family troubles are easier to confront. But God works in mysterious ways. Devious ways, says Auslander the character, who is always looking over his shoulder, waiting for a car crash, disease, lightning bolt or other disaster. He's a walking, worrying ad for religion-induced guilt, with the slogan: Man plans, God laughs.  

Last night, Auslander said he has been criticized by some for his harsh depiction of Orthodox Judaism, and noted that he hasn't talked to siblings in years. But readings often are "mass meetings of the fallen," with Jews, Catholics and others nodding in agreement about struggles against orthodoxy. Sometimes, as audience members try to point him to a new faith, the readings turn into "a sort of theological restaurant. Have you tried the Reform?..."

Still, he worries that God still has it out for him. Why else would one of his Washington, D.C., readings have been scheduled on the night of a presidential debate?   

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

October is flying by! So make sure you hit up one of the many literary events in town before it's over.

Friday night at 6 p.m., Johns Hopkins University is hosting a trio of Southern writers: Bryant Voight, Josephine Humphreys and the very Southern-named Bobbie Ann Mason. (This is coming for a girl named Nancy Jo.) The event, held at Remsen Hall, will include readings from each of the authors' works.

Saturday night brings us another 510 Reading Series event, hosted by Michael Kimball and Jen Michalski at Minas Gallery. Starting at 5 p.m., spend some time with writers Dan Fesperman, Karen Ellis and Charles Rammelkamp.

On Sunday at 2 p.m., join Sharon Knecht, archivist for the Oblate Sisters of Providence, at the Enoch Pratt Library. She's presenting her new book, which details the history of the world's first sustained order of religious women of African descent.

For our poetry lovers, Towson University is hosting a reading for Kurt S. Olsson, the 2007-2008 winner of the school's Prize for Literature. The event begins at 7 p.m. Wednesday night.

For more details on these and many other bookish events, visit the Read Street calendar.

Posted by Nancy Johnston at 8:30 AM in Book It | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Glynn Marsh Alam, author of the Luanne Fogarty mysteries, left Baltimore a little disappointed this week. She wrote: "I was at Bouchercon and expected to find lots of Poe memorabilia in the hotel gift shop among many other places. I actually found nothing, not even a postcard or a t-shirt. We walked to the grave site and found nothing there or on the way. I wondered why Baltimore or someone living there hasn't picked up on the money maker? Surely there are items made in China. I guess I [didn't expect] something on the scale of Elvis, but to find zero was a surprise."

I don't know any Poe shops. (I consider Ravens football jerseys to be Poe memorabilia, but that may be a stretch.) I have a call out to our Poe museum; I could point her to Richmond and Philadelphia, but I'd rather keep the business here.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death, Edgar Allan Poe | Permalink | Comments (9)
        

It doesn't take a lot of effort to find a book that espouses any kind of political ideology you're looking for, or even a few you're not. And with the piles upon piles of right-wing, left-wing and crazycakes-wing tomes being realizes every month, it can be difficult to find the real deal.

Earlier this year, NPR asked a few correspondents what their favorite political classics were, with responses varying from Machiavelli's The Prince to Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72.

 Britain's The Independent announced the Ten Best Political Books in July, a comprehensive list of mostly U.K.-related topics -- except that Barack Obama's Audacity of Hope topped the list. (I happened to find that one a complete bore, but OK.)

And when I posed the quesiton to my friends on Twitter, GregRuby responded with T.H. White's Making of a President series, "anything by Germond and Witcover," and All the President's Men.  

 So I went to our own political powerhouse, politics editor David Nitkin, and asked him what his favorites were.

"Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse is an all-time favorite -- got me hooked on political journalism. There's also a whole series called "The Making of the President" -- by Theodore White," he said. "What's the Matter with Kansas was pretty good, and influential."

He also listed David McCullough's biographies of Truman and Adams, along with Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, which "is on everyone's list." he said.

Finally, he suggested Robert Caro. "[Former Sun editor] Bill Marimow made me read The Power Broker, about Robert Moses, who remade the NYC landscape with bridges and tunnels," Nitkin said. "It's a masterwork."

And I'm going to add my own bit of fun: The United States Constituion: A Graphic Adaptation, by Jonathan Hennessey.

Posted by Nancy Johnston at 6:30 PM in Check It Out | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Online chatter about the Bouchercon conference -- and Baltimore -- has been very positive. Folks enjoyed touring the city, and perfect fall weather certainly helped. When I joked on the DorothyL listerv that some people might have stayed home after seeing episodes of The Wire, I got this response from British author Natasha Cooper:

"Having read about Baltimore's high murder rate and seen some of The Wire, I'd had a few moments of silent panic here in London about what I might find when I crossed the Atlantic. What I actually found was a great city, basking in wonderful sunshine. We walked to Mount Vernon and saw rows and rows of beautiful old houses, went to dinner in Fell's Point, basked on the edge of the harbor and had a really good time."

This from a writer who deals with murder and gore for a living? (Her latest book, A Greater Evil, has this plot summary: Abandoned as a baby and brutalised in care, sculptor Sam Foundling is the obvious suspect when his wife is beaten to death in his studio.) Actually, I'm sure she was partly kidding about our rep, and I'm glad B'coners had fun in our overly maligned city.

But maybe Cooper has unwittingly found a new marketing opportunity for the city -- at least one aimed at mystery writers. One possible slogan: Plot in a rut? Visit Baltimore for new ideas on  mayhem!

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 11:40 AM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Laura Lippman has won more accalim for her latest novel, What the Dead Know, and her short story "Hardly Knew Her."

Her book (reviewed by Nancy here) was named best novel in the annual Barry and Macavity awards, which are voted on by the readers of Deadly Pleasures and Mystery News, and members of Mystery Readers International, respectively. It also won Best Novel in the Anthony Awards, which are named for Bouchercon founder Anthony Boucher.

She won the Anthony for Best Short Story for "Hardly Knew Her," which is contained in a new collection of the same name (discussed here by Dave). 

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown, $26.99). Attorney Mickey Haller gets his biggest case yet: the defense of a prominent studio executive accused of murdering his wife and her lover.

The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America by James Bamford (Doubleday, $26.95). With unrivaled access to sources and documents, Bamford details how the agency has conducted domestic surveillance without court approval in its continuing hunt for information about today’s elusive enemies.

Lion Among Men by Gregory Maguire (HarperCollins, $26.95). In the much-anticipated third volume of the Wicked Years, we return to Oz, seen now through the eyes of the Cowardly Lion.

Here’s the Story by Maureen McCormick (HarperEntertainment, $25.95). The woman who played Marcia Brady describes her troubled life off screen.

American Prince: A Memoir by Tony Curtis and Peter Golenbock (Harmony, $25.95). Curtis revisits his unforgettable classics Houdini, Spartacus and Some Like It Hot — and regales readers with stories of his associations with Frank Sinatra, Laurence Olivier, director Billy Wilder and film-industry heavyweight Lew Wasserman.

I See You Everywhere by Julia Glass (Pantheon, $24.95). This book has female bonding among the landed gentry, a focus on relationships, and devil-may-care, enigmatically charming women of great romantic allure.

Champlain’s Dream: The Founding of North America by David Hackett Fischer (Simon & Schuster, $40). Historian David Hackett Fischer brings to life the remarkable Samuel de Champlain — soldier, spy, master mariner, explorer, cartographer, artist and Father of New France.

Don’t Mind if I Do: A Memoir by George Hamilton and William Stadiem (Touchstone, $26). With a front-row seat for classic Hollywood’s biggest secrets and scandals, Hamilton tells his story and the story of Tinseltown’s heyday.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Today's the last day to register to vote in order to be eligible by Election Day. So if you haven't done that yet, get on it!

Now, I won't attempt to give a rundown on every relevant issue up for a vote this election cycle. If you've been reading the papers, you know all about the slots referendum, and possibly even Question C on the Baltimore ballot.

(OK, Question C is about library funding; I will be posting more on that soon.)

What I will focus on is presidential politics. With all the ruckus, it's easy to get caught up in the politics, and overlook the issues.

That's what's so great about the Internet: You can read all about your candidates from the comfort of your own home, office or local library, without those pesky campaign volunteers at your door, or commentators yelling for your attention.

Also, it brings you this fantastic blog, but that's the subject of another post.

So here are your presidential options:

Gene Amondson/Leroy Pletten, for the Prohibition Party.*

Chuck Baldwin/Darrell Castle, for the Consitution Party.

Bob Barr/Wayne Allyn Root, for the Libertarian Party.

Roger Calero/Alyson Kennedy, for the Socialist Workers Party.

Charles Jay/Thomas L. Knapp, for the Boston Tea Party.

Alan Keyes/Brian Rohrbough, for the America's Independent Party.

John McCain/Sarah Palin, for the Republican Party.

Cynthia McKinney/Rosa Clemente, for the Green Party.

Brian Moore/Stewart Alexander, for the Socialist Party USA.

Ralph Nader/Matt Gonzalez, running as independents.

Barack Obama/Joe Biden, for the Democratic Party.

Gloria La Riva/Eugene Puryear, for the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

Ted Weill/Frank McEnulty, for the Reform Party. (McEnulty is also running for president, with the New American Independent Party.)

Yeah, I was shocked at the number of candidates, too. Happy reading! And please don't be too angry with me if I missed anyone...

* I do not normally condone the use of Wikipedia to get your presidential information, but www/geneamondson.com wasn't working when I tested it.

Posted by Nancy Johnston at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Here's Mary: I'm an inveterate listener of books on CD my car. I go through three or four books from the Enoch Pratt Free Library each month. Because of their seductive charms, my blood pressure no longer hits stratospheric heights when I'm rushing to the theater, only to be caught in an inevitable traffic jam. But, after years of sitting in my Mini Cooper with the engine running because I can't stand to go inside before I've finished the chapter, I've realized there's an art to selecting the right titles.

A good book on tape should be long on plot, but short on complex character motivations or detailed descriptions of scenery. You want to concentrate enough to be pleasantly distracted, but not so distracted that you cut off the semi bearing down on your left. Perhaps for that reason, the ideal book on tape is not necessarily the same as the book on your nightstand. You don't want to "spoil" a nuanced piece of fiction by experiencing it with only part of your brain.

Some of my favorites include anything by Joyce Carol Oates. ...

We Were the Mulvaneys is probably the most satisfying of the three novels of hers that I have completed so far, in the way that it explores the breakdown of a seemingly perfect American family. The Gravedigger's Daughter tells the story of a young German immigrant who claws her way up in the world after violence claims the lives of the rest of her family. And My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike was clearly inspired by a notorious unsolved murder case involving a real-life family with a similar last name.

On a very different vein, I can't resist anything by P.G. Wodehouse, creator of that quintessential gentleman's gentleman, Jeeves. The listener quickly realizes what a consummate craftsman Wodehouse was, how carefully he honed every phrase and metaphor. The tone is light, and it's great fun to go back to an era when wearing black tails for dinner was considered dressing down."

Thanks Mary!

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM in Audiobooks | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

As a thank you to the many folks who stopped by Read Street during the Bouchercon conference, we're giving away several books by some of the more than 20 authors who were guest posters.

Up for grabs: Trigger City, a new release from Sean Chercover; Angel's Tip by Alafair Burke; and The Archangel Project by C.S. Graham. 

To enter the giveaway, somply post a comment (with a short explanation) on this question: Who's your favorite type of sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade or Miss Marple?

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 2:38 PM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (8)
        

Wandering through Bouchercon in Baltimore, I was impressed by the love and loyalty that conference-goers held for the mystery genre. And every author I bumped was down-to-earth, funny and entertaining, the kind of folks you'd want to relax and have a beer with. In that spirit, I hereby create Mystery Monday on Read Street, and promise to feature the genre each week.

For the first MMoRS, here's Louis Bayard, author of The Black Tower, on Edgar Allen Poe, whose "Murders in the Rue Morgue" is seen as the birth of detective fiction. In 2009, the 200th anniversary of his birth. there will be a renewed focus on the noir master, and we'll be writing more about that on Read Street. But first, Bayard recounts a Poe sighting (of sorts) at Bouchercon:

This morning, I was approached by a young man bearing an Edgar Allan Poe action figure.  I very nearly wrapped him in a bear hug because I had the exact same action figure sitting over my desk when I wrote The Pale Blue Eye, my fictional account of Poe’s days as a West Point cadet. 

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 10:29 AM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

I hope everyone had a great weekend, and you're ready for a book-filled week ahead! Today, I've got an update on that Poe flash mob scheduled for the Baltimore Book Festival.

Well, the flash mob met flash flooding, and the water won the battle. But that can't keep a good mob down! They regrouped during the Fells Point Fun Festival, and fun was had.

So 2009 is the year of Poe; I can't wait.

Posted by Nancy Johnston at 6:00 AM in Edgar Allan Poe | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Today's the final day of Bouchercon, the international conference that brought hundreds of mystery writers and fans here. Throughout the week, visting authors have been writing guest posts about their experiences and about the craft of writing. Our sincere thanks to the more than 20 authors who contributed. 

This doesn't end our Bouchercon coverage -- tomorrow we'll give away books by several of our guest posters, and Nancy is preparing some video of the conference. Meanwhile, here are some highlights and insights:

"A good mystery novel makes you stop and think, how will the hero solve this puzzle? A good horror novel makes you stop and think, should I check the locks?" — Mario Acevedo, on combining horror and mystery.

"Your powers of observation are always tested. When people argue around a dinner table, for example, do they touch? Do they shout? Do they guard their language, or pour it on? Do women join in, or drift to the margins?" — Dan Fesperman, on writing about foreign locales.

"Hard-boiled detectives are always outsiders, but in the case of black detectives, it's easy to understand why. White clients may expect them to have a hidden, anti-white agenda. Other African-Americans, distrustful of authority figures in general, sometimes have a special resentment of black men who question them or try to associate them with crimes." — Austin Camacho, on race.

"We were astonished how this supposedly second-string character took over and elbowed himself into the number one position. We were obviously naive, because we had thought that writers controlled their characters rather than the other way around." — Stanley Trollip, half of the writing team Michael Stanley

"Death is something that has increasingly become hidden in our culture, been tucked away behind the curtain. It remains, not to be too awesomely cheesy or literal, the ultimate mystery." — Jonathan Hays

"And unlike the majority of average citizens, I know what it’s like to pull a gun on someone, feel my heart pounding, wondering if I’m going to have to kill this person I’m facing." — Robin Burcell, who has worked in law enforcement

"Once I traveled relentlessly; now, I rarely leave the house. ... Once I stayed awake at night plotting growth strategies. Now, I’m still awake, just plotting." — Andrew Gross, former sportswear executive

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 2:00 PM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Before we end Bouchercon, let's pay tribute to the man for whom the conference is named. We turn to Jeffrey Marks, who has written a biography of Anthony Boucher, for insight into this "tireless force for genre fiction":

Bouchercon, the annual world mystery conference where authors and fans of all types of mystery meet and talk about their favorite books, was named after Boucher, a renaissance man in genre fiction. He mastered the novel, the short story, radio, and genre criticism in not only mystery but science fiction. Boucher suffered from ill health his entire life and passed away at the age of 56 from lung cancer. Following Boucher’s death, the mystery community decided to honor him by starting a conference in his name.

The first Bouchercon hosted 82 mystery fans and writers, including Robert Bloch, best known as the author of the book on which Psycho was based, as guest of honor. Bloch and Boucher had known each other for years through their mutual love of science fiction.

The following year the conference was moved to October to avoid conflicts with the annual Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar dinner, held in late April in New York City. The conference was a success, in that they had enough funds to plan future conferences. Phyllis White, Boucher’s widow, was still given membership number one and she attended each Bouchercon until her death in 2000.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 10:03 AM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

And for authors, there's a certain nervous anticipation when the panel assignments come. Will you get a topic that's been done a hundred times before? Will it be a good time slot? (Preferably not first thing in the morning when fans might be sleeping in after too much meet-and-greet in the bar the night before; preferably not the last of the afternoon when everyone is paneled-out and just wants to chill a bit before the evening activities kick in.)

Luckily for me, I hit the jackpot this time, Friday afternoon at three. The panel's official title is Three Goddesses Talking: Louise Penny, Rhys Bowen, Deborah Crombie.

Goddesses? Now there's a concept we were collectively not sure we felt comfortable with, but then Louise suggested we should just wear sheets and send the audience screaming for the door. Well, maybe we won't go that far--we might get in trouble with the fire marshal--but in the spirit of fun we will be goddesses for an hour.

Rhys and Louise, both much more organized than I, had us each draw up a list of topics we might cover, ranging from the serious to the ridiculous -- from how our childhoods affected our interior life, to whether it is humanly possible to write without caffeine.

The childhood question I find particularly intriguing. I have an unproven theory that most writers were in some way physically or emotionally isolated as children. I find it hard to imagine that today's proscribed non-stop rounds of soccer, dance, softball, and playdates leave much time for reading or daydreaming.

For me those are the essentials, the kickstarters of the imagination, and I was the classic isolated child. Before I started school, we lived in what was then country, so that the only times I saw other children were the much-anticipated visits of my cousins. My only brother is 10 years older, so that I grew up more-or-less as an only child. Both my parents worked, and my grandmother, a former schoolteacher, lived with us, and taught me to read before I was four.

I spent long days reading, playing outside, and making things up.

(There were a family of bald trolls that lived under the creek bank near our house and would ask me in for tea. Yeah, I was a seriously weird kid.)

When I was five, my parents sent me to kindergarten, where we made tissue paper flowers and took naps on mats. I cried for two weeks until my parents let me come home again, back to my books and my gran and my stories, and so I officially started my career as a drop out (high school would come later).

The next year, of course, my charmed life ended with the start of first grade, but by that time I was thoroughly addicted to the rather odd phenomenon of other people talking in my head. This did not auger well for my academic future.

The isolation was not merely physical, however--I always had a sense of not quite belonging, a predisposition to observe, and that, I suspect, is also common to writers. Maybe that has something to do with why we create imaginary friends and worlds in which we feel we do belong. Or maybe by some genetic quirk, we are just born geeks, and environment has nothing to do with it.

And as for caffeine -- I am absolutely certain it is not possible to write a book without consuming copious amounts of tea -- hot, of course.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

I started small, visiting the same Spanish Harlem botanica for months, buying candles and herbs recommended by the proprietor and becoming friends. Eventually I told her about my novel and after much scrutiny (that I was portraying Santeria in a good light) she set up a meeting with a local santera, also an espiritista, someone slightly higher up on the Santerian spiritual food chain. The espiritista came up with a prescription for me: a ritual cleansing known as a limpia, the cost $40 (like psychotherapy, you just don’t get well if you do not pay for your treatment).

I showed up for the cleansing in a new white shirt (recommended and soon to be removed), stood in the back room of the botanica shivering (nerves or the bare chest or both), lit candles and repeated Spanish incantations, When I complained of a headache the espiritista dappled my forehead with blue-colored water – and it worked! After that she poured a mixture of egg yolks and herbs over my bare neck and shoulders (more shivering), and crushed gladioli into my chest (a slight burning sensation). I was told to stop eating red meat (how she knew I had just eaten a hamburger I have no idea), that I should wear white beads or link-chains around my wrist (I now do), and to avoid casual sex (no comment).

At the end of the ceremony I was told to roll up my white shirt (purchased specifically for the occasion at Banana Republic), wipe the egg goo and gladioli off my chest and throw the shirt away as it had now absorbed the evil spirits, which I did. With my lightweight jacket drawn around my naked torso I shivered all the way home from Spanish Harlem. But I used the experience – almost exactly – in Anatomy of Fear, and frankly I’d do it again (this time with a prepared list of ailments and desires).

Spending time and money on research just goes with the territory. I own way too many books on forensics, true crime, crime scene photos and serial killers, which I needed for my first two novels, The Death Artist and Color Blind; books on the art the insane (Color Blind); hate crime (Anatomy of Fear), Gulf War Syndrome and human experimentation (The Murder Notebook). I often wonder if someone is keeping track of the books I buy online (The Evil That Men Do, The Psychopathic Mind, Faces of Evil, to name just a few) and worry that one day this library of horrors will come back to haunt me.

In the name of research I have walked the back streets of Harlem and perused the last rotting docks along the Hudson River late at night (The Death Artist); flown to Houston to see the Rothko Chapel (The Killing Art); contacted and befriended officials in the U.S. Army and the FBI (The Murder Notebook); and tried my best to think like a woman for my first three novels featuring ex-cop Kate McKinnon which meant a day perusing Barneys upscale women’s clothes and even trying to imagine myself in the uh, woman’s role during sex (please note that I said imagine).

Six days on the road? I would say closer to 60 and still counting. But right I am looking forward to hearing my fellow panelists recount some of their best – and worst – days.

To read all Bouchercon author posts, click here.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 12:00 PM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Tasha Alexander's  characters hearken from another time, which can be limiting when your heroine is in a tough spot. Back in the day, no too many women packed heat. Thoughts from the author of Elizabeth: The Golden Age and A Fatal Waltz:

Now, I haven't been to Baltimore in a number of years, but I'm assured that the city does, without question, kick ass. So I'm more than a little enthusiastic about Bouchercon. Perticularly given the topic of my first panel, "Janie's Got a Gun: Do you need to kick ass to be kick ass?"

Crime fiction is known for books that are edgy and full of weapons and violence—but as an author of historical suspense, I deal with some extra constraints. Victorian ladies didn’t tote guns and weren’t martial arts experts. My heroine, Lady Emily Ashton has to kick ass without doing it literally.And that can be a challenge.

In the novel I just turned in, Emily is trapped in an underground cistern with a really, really bad guy who’s wielding a gun and would happily kill her. 

She could have used a gun of her own. Or an explosion. Or something. But I can’t give her those things—they wouldn’t fit with the period or her character. She has to rely on her wits to overwhelm her enemies, something that in the face of danger can be difficult in the extreme.

But it’s also immensely satisfying.

When you’re writing, sometimes getting backed into a corner can be the best thing ever—it forces you to think more creatively and keeps you from being lazy even for a moment. I spent about three days banging my head against the wall before an elegant solution came to me. But once it did, I knew that it was a better ending than one in which Emily managed to physically overpower her nemesis. She kicks ass, but by using her brain.

To read all the Bouchercon guests posts, click here.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Sean Chercover is the author of Big City, Bad Blood and Trigger City (out next week), but is relatively new to writing novels. We asked him to talk about starting out (for all Bouchercon author posts, click here): I know writers who can tell you inspiring stories about how they queried hundreds of agents and kept submitting and never gave up until their walls were papered with rejections and their persistence finally paid off. I wish I could inspire you with a similar story. But the truth is, getting published wasn’t that hard.

Truth is, I got lucky. Timing is a big part of getting noticed. Your manuscript has to land on the right agent’s desk at a time when said agent is in a relatively positive frame of mind and in the mood to read the kind of thing you’ve written. That happened for me after only 23 rejections. And a few short months later, we had a two-book deal with HarperCollins.

I was also lucky because I met some very supportive people along the way. People who showed me the ropes, encouraged me, and made introductions. Two in particular, Jon and Ruth Jordan, opened a lot of doors.

Now, as the second of those two books hits stores, I look back and realize how very lucky I was, and I am grateful. If the universe had been configured slightly differently, I could just as easily been a guy with his mattress stuffed full of rejection letters.

Yes, getting published was easy; the hard part was writing the book…

I’d known that I wanted to write crime fiction since I was a teenager, but it took years for me to get over my fears and embrace that desire. Many of the same authors who influenced me and made me want to write, also paralyzed me, because they were so much better than me.

Lawrence Block (coincidentally, one of the guests of honor at this year’s Bouchercon) was a huge influence, but reading his novels set the bar so high that I often despaired and gave up. Same with Walter Mosley. And SJ Rozan. And Laura Lippman (another guest of honor this year, and local star). I started a lot of novels during these years, but never finished one.

Block’s books about the craft of writing, however, were helpful. And that started me on a binge of reading "how to write a novel" books. Which is a lot easier than actually writing a novel.

Finally, I woke up one day and I was 35 years old and I had a bunch of half-written manuscripts at the bottom of various drawers, and I just got fed up with myself. So I resolved to stop reading books about how to write a novel, and write a damn novel. More important, I would finish what I started.

I remembered a piece of advice from some book or another, wrote it on a note card and stuck it to the wall above my computer screen. I referred to it often. It said:

And the manuscript I finally finished was my first published book.

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So, readers, I’m driving down the turnpike to come to Bouchercon on Thursday. I have fond personal memories of Baltimore. For six years I worked in Columbia, Maryland as president of HEAD Sportswear, makers of ski, tennis and golfwear, and spent a lot of time here in town. This is my first time back.

It’s a good meditation on the vagaries of life to think back on that time. Then, I was a 24/7 guy who was pushing with everything he had to restore luster to a tarnished tennis and ski brand. I had an MBA from Columbia, a lot of chutzpah and ambition, traveled two hundred days a year, and my final thoughts before falling asleep each night were generally how to rebuild the brand. Writing crime thrillers then was about as far from my reality as conversing in Chinese. In 1989, when HEAD became #1 again in both tennis and ski, (and we celebrated with a massive party in Las Vegas,) I felt a sense of personal triumph I doubted would ever be equaled in my life.

Flash forward 20 years. A couple of turnaround opportunities didn’t quite turn around. All the chutzpah and ambition in the world couldn’t fight a market declining 15 percent a year. One day I found myself out. Desperate, I gave myself over to this nagging whim I had carried since college, more outright fancy than thought-out.

I had this cool idea for a thriller.

I begged my wife for a year. Got her to agree. We took the kids out of private school. I went at things with the same determination and single-mindedness I had shown in business — vacuuming in whatever knowledge I could, applying it to whatever skill I brought — monitoring, auditing, improving, until I had this heavy draft that shone to me like a diamond, that was going to make the publishing world stand up and welcome me in.

It didn’t.

It never sold. Got close. Found a fancy agent, raised a few brows. What it did do, though, was miraculously find its way into the hands of a top-selling author looking to partner up with someone to get out a few more ideas. That first breakfast with Jim Patterson changed my writing life. We did a book. It went to #1, his first. We did five more. They all went there too. Over, seven years it became probably the best co-writing gig in the business. And what I learned from Jim was invaluable-- like a combination MFA-MBA.

Seeing my name at the top of the lists, boarding planes and counting my books as I passed the rows, it was that same triumphant feeling all over again.

So here I am in Baltimore again. This time I have two novels of my own, The Blue Zone and The Dark Tide. Both made the N.Y. Times list. Maybe not #1, but climbing. I’ve been writing crime thrillers for twelve years. I’m struck by the amazing way life has come full circle—diverse, rewarding, fulfilling in ways I never imagined. And also by how it’s changed. No one here would ever even recall I once had something to do with the HEAD company. Once I traveled relentlessly; now, I rarely leave the house. Once I was so obsessed I yelled at a Miami sales rep for not being out on the road in Hurricane Andrew. Now I talk about seeing your kids grow up, finding balance, advising burnt out business people on how to reinvent their careers.

Once I stayed awake at night plotting growth strategies. Now, I’m still awake, just plotting.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 2:00 PM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

Elizabeth Zelvin, author of Death Will Get You Sober, is a psychotherapist who has directed alcohol treatment programs, including one on the Bowery. So she's the perfect person to discuss the role of alcohol in crime novels. Her view: 

Ever since I first learned of Bouchercon, I’ve heard that for a writer, the best place to network is the bar. This is slightly awkward for me, since I’m an alcoholism treatment professional whose first mystery, Death Will Get You Sober, is about people in recovery. ("Don’t drink, go to meetings, and investigate a murder.") The fear that I’m marching to a different drummer in the great army of crime fiction writers became acute when I was invited by this year’s Bouchercon organizers to be part of what’s being called "the booze panel."

I’m certainly not the first mystery author to explore the theme of recovery. The great Lawrence Block’s tough-guy protagonist Matt Scudder got sober more than twenty years ago. In recent books, he’s maintained his sobriety and attended an occasional AA meeting. Scudder’s sobriety has the ring of authenticity. Yet Block still takes readers for a walk on the dark side. Far from finding a new family in AA or a spiritual path through the Twelve Steps, Matt still meets his best friend, a career criminal, in a bar. Another fine writer, James Lee Burke, presents New Orleans homicide detective Dave Robichaux in novels frequently described as "brooding," "dark," and "gritty." I suspect that Robichaux is depressed.

Alcoholic fictional cops and private eyes still outnumber their recovering counterparts. And the possibilities are far from exhausted. I conceived my protagonist, Bruce Kohler, as an amateur sleuth mostly because I didn’t know any cops or private eyes when I started writing the book more than ten years ago. (That has changed, thanks to the mystery community, my clinical work, and the Internet. I’ve talked to a thousand cops about post-traumatic stress and even hugged a few, in addition to tapping their expertise on guns and police procedure.)

Some crime fiction aficionados will tell you a traditional mystery featuring an amateur sleuth is by definition a cozy. (Think Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple.) Not so. At the beginning of Death Will Get You Sober, Bruce wakes up in detox on the Bowery, New York’s Skid Row. I even included the word "puke" in the first sentence. It was appropriate. But my intention was not to write a dark and gritty mystery. I dedicated the book "to recovering people everywhere, whose courage and honesty are a constant inspiration." I wanted to write about getting a second chance and how people get beyond not drinking to the transformation that makes recovery so deeply moving.

I’ve had my work cut out to make sure my fellow panelists on the booze panel get it. They include Ken Bruen, the award-winning Irish master of literary noir, the even noirer Jason Starr, Con Lehane, whose protagonist is a New York bartender, and thriller writer Michelle Gagnon, who used to be a bartender herself. When moderator Ali Karim emailed us his first draft of possible subjects to discuss, he included such questions as "What’s your favorite poison?", "What’s the funniest thing that ever happened to you while you were drunk?", and "Do you write better when you’ve had a few?" I’ve paraphrased, but that was the gist. Clearly, I had to fight back.

I’ve been called for jury duty many times, but never gotten onto a jury, and it’s usually because I’m an expert on alcoholism and substance abuse. When they describe the case, I can’t help focusing on the role addictive substances have played in it. Even if they don’t mention drugs or alcohol, my mind immediately moves beyond what jurors are instructed to consider. Once, a judge who was determined not to dismiss anyone called me up to the bench. She asked if I couldn’t put my professional expertise aside as I considered the case. I couldn’t — no more than she could have put aside her knowledge of the law.

The same thing happens when I read a mystery. When characters struggle hopelessly with alcohol, I long to get them into treatment and/or to an AA meeting. Sometimes it’s apparent to me that the author is aware the character is alcoholic. Sometimes it’s not. Alcoholism is a progressive disease, and the falling down drunk stage comes late in the progression — or not at all, since that hard head or hollow leg heavy drinkers boast about is a sign of increased tolerance, one of alcoholism’s hallmark symptoms.

Consider my fellow panelists’ fictional characters. Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor, for example, has been dry for the last two books. But terrible things keep happening to him. Does he go to AA? No. He periodically goes into a bar, where he orders a shot of Jameson’s and a pint of beer and sits there glaring at them. So his rage is unabated, his head remains clouded, and he can’t see the use of sobriety.

Jack’s a loner who’s experienced more than his fair share of tragedy. But if he went to AA and tried to explain that’s why recovery is not for him, they’d laugh. "Get over it," they’d tell him. "We were all terminal loners when we came in here. Every one of us has had devastating losses. You say bad things happened when you weren’t even drinking? You’d been off the sauce for five minutes when a child died because you couldn’t focus. Of course you couldn’t focus. Sobriety takes time, and not drinking is just the beginning. Forgiveness takes time too, but there’s no merit in never forgiving yourself."

Con Lehane’s fictional New York bartender, Brian McNulty, sees plenty of alcoholics in his work. They’re the guys who have to be carried home, the women in a blackout who can’t remember in the morning whom they slept with the night before. But Brian himself is not an alcoholic—or so he thinks. He doesn’t drink to oblivion every time. Sometimes he lets days go by without a drink. When he does drink, he continues to function, a sign of tolerance. He’s had blackouts, a sign of alcohol dependence. As he works, we see him topping up not just the alcohol but a little "blow"—cocaine—all evening just to feel normal. That’s characteristic of the mid-stage chemical dependent. Brian’s a decent guy, so in addition to solving murders, he struggles to be a good son, a good father, a good friend. I want to tell him, "Trying to work on relationships in your condition is like trying to swim through oatmeal. Get into recovery, stay clean and sober for a while, and see what happens in the rest of your life. If you don’t like it, as they say in AA, ‘we’ll gladly refund your misery.’"

Zelvin's Death Will Get You Sober (St. Martin’s Minotaur/Thomas Dunne Books), came out this year. St. Martin’s will also publish the second in the series, Death Will Help You Leave Him. A related short story was nominated for an Agatha award for Best Short Story. Liz blogs on Poe’s Deadly Daughters. 

To read all of the Bouchercon author posts, click here.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 10:00 AM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

One had his character bricked up in a cellar, another injected a seven percent solution, and a third chased down a Maltese falcon. These great moments from revered mystery writers (I’ll assume you know who they are) inspired the latest group of authors that are descending on Baltimore for the Bouchercon conference. I’ve just joined the ranks of them, having sold my debut thriller a few months ago, but my novel won’t launch until May, so I get to wander around the halls dropping in on the panels that I find interesting.

And if there is one thing I’ve learned this past year, hanging with this crowd beats anything you could do otherwise. Granted, I’m a trial lawyer, and while trial lawyers can be fun, they are most often simply too exhausted from their killer schedules to be entertaining after hours. Especially in these past two weeks, when we all have watched a parade of similarly white-faced people stumbling out of late night meetings regarding the economic crisis. I don’t know about you, but I need a break, and a conference addressing my favorite genre of all time, mysteries, is just the ticket.

These people are funny, charming, intelligent, and sometimes wacky. Okay, most of the time wacky, but in a good way, not in a tragic way, if you know what I mean. Sometimes profound, other times pragmatic, and always willing to sign a book, I have learned that this crowd will put you in an upbeat mood in minutes.

There’s a trick to the signing part, I might add. Buy the book, bring it to them, print your name on a yellow post-it and attach that to the front. This way, the hapless author won’t spell your name wrong. My name is spelled "Jamie," and I can’t tell you how many times people have tried to write "Jaime."

I’m going to cruise around, hang with my friends, hit some after parties, and generally live it up. So, if you want to read what’s going on in Baltimore with your favorite authors, check back in here, or at my web page, I’ll also upload a couple of lines at Twitter when the mood strikes. Feel free to follow!

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

With all the amazing guest bloggers we've had, my posting schedule has been a little scattershot this week. But I wanted to make sure to highlight a few events happening this week, since so many fantastic authors will be in the area.

Tomorrow at noon you'll have a chance to meet Laura Lippman and Denis Lehane at the Charles Commons Conference Center signing their latest works, Hardly Knew Her and The Given Day, respectively.

 The Southeast Anchor branch of the Pratt library is hosting a mystery and romance discussion with Heather Graham and Alexandra Sokoloff. I had the pleasure of hearing Graham's views on the convergence of the mystery and horror at a panel earlier today, and she was a lot of fun. Make sure to ask her about the Lalaurie House in New Orleans; talk about horrific.

 Later that day, Read Street's guest blogger Austin Camacho will be at the Canton branch of the library to discuss his craft. And author Laurie King will moderate a mystery panel at the Orleans Street branch, featuring Frankie Bailey, Charlaine Harris, Gary Phillips and Cara Black.

For those of you who don't live and breathe mystery, breathe books will host Shalom Auslander, author of Foreskin's Lament, on Wednesday.

Posted by Nancy Johnston at 7:00 PM in Book It | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

When I walked into the middle of Bouchercon 2008 at the Sheraton City Center, I was greeted with smiles and books. It was heavenly. Co-chair Judy Bobalik told me that they had roughly 1300 registered attendees, and every one that I talked to was friendly, helpful and very, very talkative.

A typical exchange at the mystery convention sounded like lines you'd hear at a family reunion -- "I haven't seen you in a while," "Yes, I was so sorry to miss the last one," "You look beautiful! Even better than last year!" -- these people clearly relish each Bouchercon and the friends they make at them.

Even an interloper like me was welcomed.

I noticed that the attendees were mostly authors themselves. At the horror mystery panel, I sat next to an aspiring legal thriller author from Florida. Afterward, Leigh from Orlando, Fla., explained his motivation for attending.

As a new writer, "I've learned how much I still have to learn," he said. "This is a great place to come to to pick up hints on my writing." He then pointed to his friend, James, from Los Angeles, who he said introduced him to this world of mystery.

James has attended Bouchercon events for the past 10 years, and he says there's no better place for comraderie. "Essentially, we only have one type of plot: Someone dies, and then you have to figure out who did it," he said. "So we help each other out with the details."

Local author Charles Colley, whose novel Sister Baby's Monkey was recently released, summed up the appeal of Bouchercon nicely: "Writers here are very accessible. You'lll be sitting next to someone, they're chatting with you ... and then it turns out they're a best-selling author."

Posted by Nancy Johnston at 6:00 PM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Robin Burcell, author of Face of a Killer (out in November), has had experience as a police officer and forensic artist. Does that help her as a mystery writer? Here's what she says: 

I've been a cop for at least a couple decades, and still work in law enforcement. Along the way I've dabbled in various cop-like duties, such as working patrol, detective, hostage negotiator, and FBI-trained forensic artist. It's that forensic artist skill that I decided to explore — coupled with murder and government conspiracy — in  Face of a Killer (If you're really curious, visit my website for a sneak-peak at the first chapter, as well as books from my SFPD Kate Gillespie series.)

But back to those cop-like duties. In many ways, my job makes it easier to write authentic police procedurals. Obviously the forensic art stuff I can write about. I've drawn everything from murder suspects to dead people in hopes of coming up with an identification. I did CSI work before TV made it seem glamorous (trust me, it so isn't). And unlike the majority of average citizens, I know what it's like to pull a gun on someone, feel my heart pounding, wondering if I'm going to have to kill this person I'm facing. There have been a number of times my finger has pulled the trigger, only to release it at the last second before that final click. While I've never killed anyone, I've witnessed an officer being killed. And high speed chases? Been there done that. Even crashed in a couple. So, yeah, the adrenalin-rush-stuff I get and try to include in my books. Short answer, talking and walking like a cop is easier to write about.

There are times, however, when knowing how cop work is really done gets in the way of a good plot. Obviously I don't include the boring hours of paperwork, or the mundane "just the facts, Ma'a'm," when trying to cull information from witnesses. That's a given. It's more that police procedure is bound by rules and regulations, whether from the penal code or the department code, and I must admit that spinning a good story around those rules and regs can be stifling.

So what's a good cop do? Unlike my real-life police reports, in fiction I can bend those rules a tad to fit with a plot. Need to enter a building without a search warrant? Not a problem, because I can write in exigent circumstances to fit my needs. Need to skirt departmental rules to solve a case, especially the rules that'll get you fired? (Like when you're ordered off a case, but your motivation to find the murderer outweighs your lieutenant's warnings, and you run off to another country in search of the killer, because it's a way-cooler plot?) Again, not a problem. In real life? A whole different matter — especially in this economy — I do have a house payment to make.

Of course, there are those cases and incidents that just scream to be written into a book. Only problem is trying to get them to fit into your plot. If it's not the cases, then it's the people. I can't tell you how many times I have run into someone while working a case, and knew this person had to become a character in my book. (Not that anyone would recognize him or her.) Real cases are a bit different. I don't write about actual cases, but I might take parts from one, combined with another, then add a twist of my own. I won't even go into the cases that are so convoluted that if I tried to write about them, the editor would toss it back and say it was too unbelievable. And she's probably right. But that's what juries are for.

To read all our Bouchercon author posts, click here.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 5:30 PM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

William Lashner, author of Blood and Bone, has also worked as a prosecutor. Here he talks about the space between guilt and innocence (for all Bouchercon author posts, click here): When I write about lawyers and the law, or talk about writing legal thrillers as I will be doing with a brilliant group of lawyer-writers at a Bouchercon panel on Saturday morning, I always think back on the sad case of Caleb Fairley.

Twenty-one year old Caleb Fairley’s life was a flat out mess. This is all true, by the way. His younger brother had accidentally killed himself which left a huge hole in his life, Caleb had been ridiculed at school for his weight, and his mother was a nightmare of blame and recriminations. Not to mention that Fairley was avid a collector of pornography and one of those guys who lived to get lost in role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. On the night of September 10, 1995, a fateful night in a number of lives, Caleb attended the concert of a gothic rock band and asked the keyboardist if he could help Caleb establish a more personal relationship with Satan. If ever there was a lost boy, it was Caleb Fairley.

Earlier on that same evening, in a small town outside Philadelphia, Lisa Manderich took her 19 month old daughter, Devon, into a children’s clothing store called Your Kidz & Mine to go shopping. I could spend paragraphs talking about their lives, their loving family, the hopes for their futures, but it’s enough to say they were mother and daughter running an errand. Neither Lisa nor Devon were ever seen alive again.

It didn’t take long for the police to connect our Caleb Fairley with the disappearance of the Manderichs. Lisa Manderich had told her husband exactly where she was going to shop and Caleb Fairley was the clerk on duty at the store.

In fact, Your Kidz & Mine was actually owned by Caleb’s parents. An examination of the store indicated that something untoward had gone on there, blood and hairs matching the missing woman were found. In addition, perverse little peepholes were discovered that gave a view of the children’s changing areas.

Fairley was the prime suspect in the investigation by the time he was first questioned by the police. He denied everything, and though he had scratches all over his face, he claimed he received the scratches in the mosh pit at the concert he had attended. Everything pointed his way, yet the evidence against him was still only circumstantial and the bodies of Lisa and Devon Mandarich had not yet been found. It wasn’t until they dug up the body of young Devon in Valley Forge Park that Caleb Fairley was finally charged with murder.

The prosecutor sought the death penalty against Caleb Fairley, but nothing on the child’s body linked it to Fairley. There was the expectation that Lisa Mandarich’s body would definitively link Fairley to the crime, either through Fairley’s DNA found beneath her nails or through evidence of a sexual assault. But as the days went by, the possibility of that evidence deteriorating beyond usefulness became more and more likely. Without Lisa Mandarich’s body there was no sure route to conviction. Against the sharp wishes of the public, the D.A. offered Fairley a deal: Tell us where the body is and we’ll take death off the table.

Okay, now you’re the defense attorney trying to figure whether or not to take the deal. Remember, you don’t represent society, that’s the D.A’s job; you only represent young Caleb Fairley, lost boy. It’s a winnable case, not a certain win, but you see a definite avenue to an acquittal, which would be Caleb’s only chance of ever spending a single day out of prison. Not to mention that an acquittal would make you famous. Also you figure that with Caleb’s background and sad sack story, even if he gets convicted you’ll have a chance to save his life based on extenuating circumstances. On the other hand, taking the deal would, yes, save your client’s neck, but also consign him to prison for the rest of his life.

So quick, what do you do?

When I write about lawyers, I’m always trying to write within the gaps between guilt or innocence. Of course I throw in mystery and humor, action and sex, because these are all the things that make any life worth living, even a lawyer’s life. And yes, I am especially talking about the sex. But lawyers have their own series of questions that are raised in every case.

What does it mean to truly represent an individual? Does the truth of things really matter? Can a lost boy ever find himself? Where lies the greatest opportunity for repentance and salvation for both the defendant and the lawyer?

This is the juice in all our novels, where the facts end and the more difficult questions await. This is where the writer and reader both have to ask themselves the fundamental question that awaits all criminal defense attorneys, what kind of defense is truly in the best interests of Caleb Fairley?

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 2:00 PM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Alafair Burke, author of Angel's Tip, has seen crime from a prosecutor's vantage point. Saturday at Bouchercon, she'll be on a panel called Murder What Fun: Why we love writing crime fiction. Her take: For me, the fun of writing crime fiction comes from a sick collision between my childhood in Wichita, Kansas, under the shadow of a serial killer, and my years as a prosecutor in Portland, Oregon.

My parents moved our family to Wichita in the late 1970's. The moving boxes had just been unpacked when police announced a connection among seven unsolved murders of women and even children. The man who claimed responsibility called himself BTK, a gruesome acronym, short for "Bind, Torture, Kill." Our home fell squarely within the serial killer's stalking territory. Like other Wichita children of that era, I learned some pretty dark lessons: check the phone line to be sure the wires aren’t cut, keep the basement door locked at all times, barricade yourself in the bathroom with the phone if you have to call 911.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I suddenly started reading mysteries after moving into a world where the killer could be anyone, and where an arrest appeared hopeless. My mother, a school librarian, would take me each week to the public library for a new stack of books. I moved from the Encyclopedia Brown series to Nancy Drew to Agatha Christie and eventually to Sue Grafton. In the books, as opposed to Wichita, smart sleuthing always paid off, and order was always restored.

I was still an avid reader of crime fiction years later when the First Assistant called me – at that time a rookie Deputy District Attorney in Portland, Oregon -- into his office for a special project. Police in Washington had just arrested a man for killing his girlfriend. In the course of confessing to the crime, the man also confessed to several other murders, including the strangling death of a Portland woman five years earlier. The problem was, two other people had already been convicted of that crime.

Naturally, Portland police and our office were skeptical. But then the man led detectives out to the Columbia Gorge, pointed to five years’ growth of blackberry bushes, and said, "I threw her purse over there." Sure enough, beneath the dense tangles of knotted vines, police found a weathered and battered purse. The victim’s identification was still inside.

The man’s self-incrimination didn’t stop there. He also claimed to be the author of a series of confessional letters that had been mailed to and published by a local investigative reporter, all signed with a Happy Face. I’d read the articles about those letters with the same fear and gruesome fascination I’d experienced so many years earlier in Wichita. And now I was working on an actual case: My job was to draft the documents that would explain to a judge why we needed to release the two defendants who’d already served five years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit.

Halfway into a long weekend of work, I found my imagination wandering. How do we know, I asked, that the so-called Happy Face Killer doesn’t know the two original defendants? Couldn’t the three of them have acted in concert? We eventually discarded the theory, but the idea stuck with me: What if?

As years passed, I continued to ask, and answer for myself, the question of "What if?" By the time I left the District Attorney’s Office, I had fictionalized that case in so many ways that I had the plot for a crime novel about a Portland prosecutor named Samantha Kincaid. That manuscript became my first novel, Judgment Calls.

Since then, I have continued to re-imagine actual cases by asking myself, But what if this, and what if that? In my most recent novel, Angel’s Tip, Indiana college student Chelsea Hart is murdered on the last night of spring break after telling her friends she wants to stay behind for one last drink in the VIP lounge of a Manhattan club. The case is caught by NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher, who, by the way, was raised by a Wichita detective who spent his career hunting a serial killer who was never captured.

The fun for me in crime fiction is that I can create as much chaos as my mind -- and my willing readers -- can handle. Twists and turns abound. The unexpected always manages to occur. The likely suspect is never so likely after all. By page 250, it’s enough of a mess to create one serious mind explosion. But in the end? Wow. In the end, the story always comes together. The crime is always solved. The clues always add up. And the bad guys always get their due.

There’s a neatness and order to crime fiction that’s often missing in real life. It was missing for me as a child in Wichita. It was missing too often in my cases as a Deputy District Attorney. But it’s always there for me in crime fiction, both as a writer and as a reader. And while some of the fun in crime fiction is actually a funny kind of fun -- the practical jokes played among cops, the X-rated banter, the pop culture allusions that I love so much -- the real fun for me is the unraveling of a mystery.

The Bouchercon panel Murder What Fun: Why we love writing crime fiction, starts at 11:30 a.m. Saturday with moderator Rhys Bowen and fellow panelists, John Billheimer, Chris Grabenstein, and Tom Schreck.

For all Bouchercon author posts, click here.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 10:00 AM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

So, when I wrote Precious Blood (Harper Collins), the first Jenner book, I tossed in a quick placeholder of a response, intending to craft a snappier comeback in the second draft:

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (5)
        

During the 1980’s, I would rent a small airplane in Johannesburg and fill it with friends, wine, and food. One of the friends was Michael. After take-off, we would head for Zimbabwe or Botswana to view and photograph wildlife and birds. And to savour South African wines in the middle of the African bush around a hardwood camp fire.

In the early evening on one trip to the Savuti plains of the stunning Chobe National Park in Botswana, we witnessed lions stalking and killing a wildebeest. Right behind was a pack of hyenas, harassing the lions to get to the carcass. Sometimes one hyena would bite a lion’s tail. When the lion angrily turned on it, another hyena would dart in and steal some of the flesh. By morning there was nothing left except the horns of the late wildebeest. The hyenas had finished anything left by the lions, bones and all.

That night, over a glass or two of wine, we decided that if we were ever to commit murder, the best way to get rid of the body would be to leave it for the hyenas. No body, no case. And that suggested an intriguing premise for a mystery novel.

When I retired in 2003, I suggested to Michael that we should do something more about this idea than just think about it. A month later, I received a draft of the first chapter of a mystery novel. In it our perfect murder became imperfect as a game ranger and a professor stumbled upon a corpse just before a hyena finished devouring it. So there was a body, and there was a case. I liked the chapter and asked Michael what happened next. Michael didn’t know.

Thus started a long-distance collaboration that resulted in the publication in April 2008 of A Carrion Death in the United States (HarperCollins) and in the UK (Headline). Using email and VOIP (voice over internet protocol) in the form of Skype, we hammered out the outline of a novel and started writing.

And what an adventure it was. Believing in the age-old advice that one should write about things one knows, we decided early on that the professor should be the book’s protagonist. Both of us having been professors, we liked the idea of a smart professor solving a mysterious murder in the Kalahari. It quickly became obvious to us, however, that the police would have to be involved. So in Chapter 2, an Assistant Superintendent in the Criminal Investigation Department of the Botswana Police, David Bengu by name, jumped into his Land Rover in Gaborone and set off to investigate.

By the time he arrived at the scene of the murder, Bengu, nicknamed "Kubu" – Setswana for hippopotamus for his considerable bulk – had become the protagonist. We were astonished how this supposedly second-string character took over and elbowed himself into the number one position. We were obviously naïve, because we had thought that writers controlled their characters rather than the other way around.

Kubu continued to evolve throughout the book, ending up as an appealing character, who loves his wife, his food, and his wine. He is normally placid with a keen brain and sly sense of humour, but like his animal namesake, he can be formidable and dangerous. Kubu is a policeman one does not want to cross.

From the outset, we wanted to write more than a murder mystery. We wanted readers to learn something about the sights, sounds, and cultures of Botswana. We wanted them to smell the desert and imagine the spectacular sunsets over the Kalahari. We were committed to depict this remarkable country as authentically as possible.

So we continued to visit Botswana regularly to verify the factual aspects of the book, as well as to ensure that the fictional aspects made sense in today’s environment. In all of this we were blessed with good luck. For example, the director of the Botswana Criminal Investigation Department (CID), spent a whole Saturday afternoon showing us around. And what an afternoon it was. We learned about the Botswana police and a number of famous cases. He showed us the Police Training School that he had been instrumental in establishing. He gave us information about the workings of the CID and the relationship of the Botswana police with their counterparts in South Africa and Scotland Yard. And while we were touring Gaborone, he deflected repeated phone calls from a subordinate who wanted the his advice on handling a gang the police had just arrested, who were armed to the teeth with AK47s. The Director brushed the phone calls off with an abrupt "I can’t talk now. I’m busy showing some people around."

Most commentators on A Carrion Death mention Alexander McCall Smith’s Botswana series featuring Precious Ramotswe. Although A Carrion Death deals with death, murder, and corporate shenanigans, which Precious would find abhorrent, it shares with McCall Smith’s books a love of this part of Africa, the dignity of its people, their friendliness, and their respect for friends and family.

We have been delighted by the positive reception Detective Kubu has received. He will re-appear in our second book, The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu, which HarperCollins will release in Jnue 2009. Unlike A Carrion Death, which was set in the arid Kalahari Desert, The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu, is set in the lush riverine forests of the Linyanti River in northern Botswana. The back story is about the turmoil in Zimbabwe and how the Rhodesian Bush War forged strange relationships, both good and evil. The story itself, set in present day Botswana, is about the dissolution of two such relationships.

To read all Bouchercon author posts, click here.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 5:30 PM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Six years ago I would have told you there was simply no way I could ever write a book with a partner. Impossible. Unthinkable. Ridiculous even to contemplate. I’m a loner by nature and I have this thing about control—both in my writing, and in my life. So how did I end up as part of C.S. Graham?

Well…I met this guy named Steve Harris. Turned out he was an ex-spy. Not only that, but he’d been involved in a bizarre but very real program run by the U.S. Army: the remote viewing project at Fort Meade. It all sounded like a great starting point for a thriller series. Unfortunately — or maybe fortunately — it wasn’t something I personally felt up to writing. Verisimilitude and accuracy are important to me, and I knew that if I tried to write those kinds of books by myself, I’d be making a lot of embarrassing mistakes. So the idea went on the back burner.

At the time, I was just starting to write a new series of my own — the Sebastian St. Cyr historical mystery series — which I publish under the name C. S. Harris (the name "Harris" is a clue to the evolution of our relationship: we got married). But while the Sebastian books are very much my own, I quickly discovered that Steve makes a great plotting partner. He was particularly helpful when it came to orchestrating chase scenes, fight scenes, and what I call "macho strut" scenes (you know, those testosterone-laden posturing scenes, where male characters show each other how tough they are). We worked so well together that I started thinking, Well, maybe I could write a book with a partner.

Thus, the team known as "C.S. Graham" was born. Our first collaboration, The Archangel Project, hit the stores this fall, earned a starred Publishers Weekly review, is an Indie Next pick, and is attracting a lot of attention from Hollywood.

So how do two people write one book? I suspect there are as many different ways of collaborating with a writing partner as there are writing teams. Our particular method is one that is best suited to our own individual strengths. We brainstorm ideas together, then plot out our books together, first laying down the general outlines of the story before fine-tuning individual scenes. We talk about characterization and motivation; sometimes we even lay down stretches of dialogue. We both do research. But when it comes to the actual writing, I’m still the one who sits down at the computer and puts the words on paper.

We like this approach because it gives the book a uniform voice, and because it, ahem, satisfies my need for control. If Steve were a Type A control freak like me, the partnership would never work. But because he’s mellow, and very wise, and very diplomatic, it works just fine.

People frequently ask, So how do you handle disagreements? The truth is, Steve and I rarely disagree. When we do, we go with the opinion of whoever is the expert. Since I’ve written more than a dozen books, my opinion carries more weight on things like story arc and pacing, and Steve will bow to my superior wisdom in those areas. But Steve is the acknowledged expert on everything from spycraft to Washington, D.C., politics to guns. So if I come up with an idea and he says, "That’s impossible," or, "They wouldn’t do it that way," I drop it. Each of us also has the deciding word on characters of our own gender. If Steve suggests a line of dialogue or a course of action for Tobie, our female protagonist, and I say, "A woman like Tobie would never say or do that," he drops it. And when I’m writing a scene involving a lot of the aforementioned masculine strut, we work the action and dialogue out together in meticulous detail, to make sure I get it right.

Because our series involves both a female and male protagonist—remote viewer October (Tobie) Guinness and disgraced CIA agent Jax Alexander—some people think that Tobie is me and Jax is Steve. The truth is, both characters are a blending of both our personalities, combined with histories and quirks and talents that are all their own. In some ways, Steve is actually more like Tobie, and I’m more like Jax. Tobie has an inner peace and wisdom that reminds me in many ways of Steve; Jax is the hothead, the avowed realist with a secret dedication to truth and justice who’s been described as "one mistake away from being fired."

One of the benefits of writing together that came as a surprise to both of us is just how much fun we have "working" on our books, devising twisted new plots, doing on-sight research, choreographing fight scenes, weaving fact into fiction. Writing can be a very lonely profession, but writing together turns the books into something we share. The truth is, neither of us could have written The Archangel Project or its sequel, The Deadlight Connection (coming in the fall of 2009) by ourselves. And I’ve found that the more we work together on the Jax and Tobie series, the more I tend to turn to Steve when it comes time to write my Sebastian St. Cyr mystery series. Because the truth is, when it comes to creating fiction, two imaginations are better than one.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 2:00 PM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

We continue on the topic of writing with Dan Fesperman, a former Baltimore Sun foreign correspondent. His five novels, including The Amateur Spy and The Prisoner of Guantanamo, have settings in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and the Middle East. Here's Dan:

The toughest thing about writing in a foreign setting is putting yourself into the minds of all of your foreign characters. Even a tourist can get the sights, sounds and smells right, as long as he’s observant and takes good notes. Nailing the local point of view is another matter entirely.

About the only way to do this is to hire an interpreter and start talking to people, the more the better. You set up formal interviews, but you also strike up conversations in cafés and outdoor markets. You become a genial pest, insinuating yourself into homes and offices, or wrangling invitations to family dinners, rudely taking notes all the while.

The goal of this immersion is to craft characters that will feel right at home; personalities you will be able to don like disguises, speaking in their voices and seeing the world as they do. Your powers of observation are always tested. When people argue around a dinner table, for example, do they touch? Do they shout? Do they guard their language, or pour it on? Do women join in, or drift to the margins?

In some countries, where the outlook and way of life has remained virtually unchanged for centuries, this immersion can feel like time travel. Remote hill towns in Bosnia, with their ox carts and kerchiefed old women, take you back to the 19th century. In Afghanistan, particularly the lawless borderlands where Osama Bin Laden is supposedly hiding out, you drift a further 300 years into the past. It is a heady experience, full of wonders.

Just ask Skelly, a character in my third book, The Warlord’s Son. As a burned out American hack, he was an old pro at this sort of thing, and when he landed on the Pakistani frontier shortly after 9/11, he reveled in the knowledge that a great adventure in cultural discovery lay ahead:

“In the weeks to come, Skelly knew, he would enter realms of old codes and unbreakable taboos. His hosts would be men wondering one minute how they might cut his throat while in the next they’d offer tea and refreshment, breaking bread pulled from a smoking ceramic hole in the ground, just as they would have done it five hundred years earlier.”

Capture these feelings while they’re fresh, and their mood will seep unavoidably into your prose.

Once you’re home, the challenge is to re-create this mindset even as you sip coffee in a suburban office, writing scenes of exotic upheaval while a school bus passes outside your window, and a lawn mower drones next door.

The key to staying focused is in your memory, of course. But it is also in your notebooks. Certain descriptions, sometimes even a word or two, can instantly unlock the mood, the smell, the sense of an entire scene or place, or the way people were dealing with one another.

It is a distillation, like a magic potion. A mere sip and you’re transformed. The school bus might as well have disappeared into a sinkhole. The sound of the mower fades. And you are again back in that bazaar, or standing in a grimy alley, seeing another world just as the locals did.

If the charm wears off too soon, your readers will know right away, because your prose will ring false, the hollow tone of forced authority. But if you become comfortable in this second skin, they will, too.

For all Bouchercon author posts, click here.

Fesperman’s travels as a writer have taken him to three war zones and more than 30 countries. His books have won two Dagger Awards in the UK, plus a Dashiell Hammett award in the United States. His sixth novel, The Arms Maker of Berlin, will be published in August 2009 by Knopf.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 10:00 AM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Today, our Bouchercon author posts deal with the craft -- and art -- of writing. Leading off is Hallie Ephron, author of Never Tell a Lie (for all author posts, click here). Here's Hallie: I'll be on a panel revealing the inside scoop -- what we wish someone had told us about this writing business, back when we weren’t too deep into the woods to turn back.

So, here’s my scoop: It doesn’t get easier. Even with seven published books and my first standalone psychological suspense novel, Never Tell a Lie, due out in January, writing a novel is still the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do.

Sure, I no longer struggle with the mechanics of writing. Point of view and internal dialogue are no longer my enemies.

But one thing doesn’t go away. Somewhere in the middle of each manuscript (and often more than once) I get stuck for weeks, sometimes months, in a “what happens next” rut. I know because I’m stuck there now with my current work-in-progress.

When I was writing Never Tell a Lie, I’d gotten my nine-months-pregnant protagonist locked in a windowless attic. For months she languished there while I tried in vain to write her out.

I was determined that her means of escape would not require “Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God” (all prohibited by the esteemed Detection Club oath). She could not scale the wall and burst through the roof because, though she was that desperate, it had to be in character and believable (remember, she’s nine months pregnant). No white knight (police, neighbor, husband, friend) could gallop in on horseback; she had to save herself.

The only good news was that whatever escape I finally managed to engineer, it was going to surprise the hell out of the reader because it was going to surprise the hell out of me.

Outlining should have helped, right? Wrong. I had outlines. Synopses. They told me what was supposed to happen next. But what had looked perfectly plausible at 4,000 feet when I was planning felt preposterous at ground level when I went to write. The characters just refused to go there.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s trust the rut: When a character won’t do what’s in that plan, there’s usually a good reason for it. Sadly, there’s no nice, neat twelve-step plan to recovery. Just trial and error, with precisely one fewer of the latter than the former.

With poor Ivy waiting in the attic for me to figure out how she was going to rescue herself, I tried to bull my way forward. I forced out pages and pages that I ended up trashing. I tried backing up and revising, but that got us right back in the same rut.

I tried transferring my outline to colored index cards and creating mind maps like they teach in creative writing classes. All of which got me precisely nowhere. I tortured fellow writers, friends, and my long-suffering husband—if they really loved me they’d medevac me and Ivy out of the attic.

Eight weeks in, I was driving to Connecticut (AKA not writing) and, for some reason, thinking about a game I loved as a kid, Chutes and Ladders. I won’t say whether it’s a chute or a ladder that became Ivy’s escape route, but the answer came to me like a bolt from the blue. I pulled over at a rest stop and wrote pages that had been eluding me.

And just like that, I was out of the rut and my story was on its way…to the next rut.

At least now I recognize a rut when I see it. Rather than experience sheer panic, I groan and hunker down to some serious wheel-spinning.

Looking back to 12 years ago when I started writing fiction, if someone had painted “It Doesn’t Get Easier” on a sign post as I entered these woods, would I have turned back? Definitely not.

Ephron is a novelist and award-winning book reviewer for The Boston Globe, whose Never Tell a Lie, is coming out in January from HarperCollins. Laura Lippman calls it “Unputdownable. A great discovery, compelling and chilling and all too credible.” Hallie teaches at writing workshops all across the country. Her Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel was nominated for Edgar and Anthony awards. She is also the author of 1001 Books for Every Mood and co-author of a series of five psychological thrillers by G. H. Ephron.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death, Meet the Author | Permalink | Comments (4)
        

Mario Acevedo, author of The Undead Kama Sutra, is among the authors mixing mystery and horror genres. Here's his take on the stew (for all Bouchercon author posts, click here):

Weasels Ripped My Flesh is not the latest name given to the taxpayer bailout of Wall Street. Rather, it’s a Bouchercon panel on which novelists Maria Lima, Kat Richardson, F. Paul Wilson, Heather Graham, and I will discuss mixing mystery and horror. (Being writers, we stole the weasel inspired title from Frank Zappa though we cover our butts by calling this rip-off an homage to his musical genius.)

So why mix mystery and horror? I feel they complement one another, as do a knife and a stabbing. What greater shock, what greater horror than coming home and finding your spouse murdered? Unless you did it. In which case you may stop and admire your handiwork. The wounds. The blood spatter. (It helps to think like a mystery novelist.)

Mystery is the who-done-it. Horror is the creepy tingling crawling up your arms. A good mystery novel makes you stop and think, how will the hero solve this puzzle? A good horror novel makes you stop and think, should I check the locks?

As novelists, we write fiction, which means we’re professional liars. As mystery novelists, we spend a lot of time thinking about killing people and how to get away with it (hence why we practice so much lying). Add horror to our stories and no wonder we’re known as creepy professional liars.

My hero is a vampire private detective, a bloodsucking killer and he’s the good guy. Which means the bad guys are really bad. As the good guy my hero can’t go around doing horrible things (except in the end when he goes all Dirty Harry and kills the villain in gruesome ways that make you say, YES, the bad guy deserved it.).

While I write supernatural mystery (medium on the supernatural, heavy on the mystery), I don’t try for the horror angle. It’s not like the old days when the simple mention of the animated undead was enough to make people wet their pants. Today, even young adult romance novels have the nice girls necking with the vampires. However, I’ve had readers tell me they’ve been thoroughly creeped out when they came across passages in my books where the vampires smothered their lasagna and enchiladas with blood.

Many mystery writers don’t use the supernatural in their stories. But these same writers can strike deep into your heart with horror based firmly in reality. Ha! you say, how scary can reality be? Have you peeked recently at the financial page? That’s enough to give even zombies a case of the heebie-jeebies.

This being my first time in Baltimore, I’ll do my best to swamp my low-carb diet with plenty of your famous crab cakes and beer. You in turn, are invited to our conference, Bouchercon 2008, Charmed to Death. I promise that weasels won’t rip your flesh.

Acevedo is the author of the Felix Gomez vampire detective novels published by Eos HarperCollins. His debut novel was The Nymphos of Rocky Flats. He lives and writes in Denver, Colo.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 PM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Charlaine Harris has seen a lot of success, both with her wildly popular book series featuring strong heroines including Sookie Stackhouse, Lily Bard and Harper Connelly; and the new HBO drama based on the telepathic Stackhouse, True Blood.

Harris has made the crossover between mystery and horror look easy, and that's no easy task. Many genre readers -- and writers -- are notorious for sticking to their comfort zones, but Harris predicts that those "rigid reading parameters" won't be around for long.

"I think the crossover field is blooming," she said. "I don't know what the attraction is ... But many, many readers seem to enjoy the blending of mystery and science fiction that's being called 'urban fantasy.'

Mystery readers seem to be able to accept a little more sexual content in urban fantazy than is general included in conventional mysteries, too," she adds.

With a growing base of such readers, it was no surprise that there was interest for an adaptation such as True Blood. And Harris made sure that her characters were in good hands before signing off on the project, which many longtime fans have noted stays very true to the original books.

"Yes, I had some misgivings," Harris admits. "but when Alan Ball expressed an interest, I felt I would be much more likely to see something on the screen that reflected the spirit of my work. I knew he wasn't scared to look into dark corners, and I knew from my conversations with him that he understood what I was doing witht he books." 

Ball, the series creator, is the widely acclaimed creator of HBO's hit, Six Feet Under. 

"The mixture of humor, violence and sex that made the books so hard to sell initially was the very element that attracted Alan. When I was sure of that, I relaxed," Harris says.

You can find Harris in Baltimore this week, both at Bouchercon and at a book signing at the Power Plant Barnes & Noble for the anthology Wolfsbane and Mistletoe, with fellow editor Toni L.P. Kelner. Harris is already proud to call the collaboration a success.

"Toni and I had already collaborated on editing a previous anthology, Many Bloody Returns. MBR did very well, so we were encouraged to co-edit a second time ...  We already have plans for a third anthology."

"It's actually a relief to edit some short fiction, rather than writing my own long fiction," Harris says of the anthologies' attraction. "I get to work on my own short story for the book, and I get to read a lot of other good writers' work. It's really proved to be a lot of fun."

And for fans craving more Charlaine Harris, she has another short story included in collection Usual Suspects, coming in December.

(Photo by Caroline Grayshock, courtesy of charlaineharris.com)

Posted by Nancy Johnston at 3:00 PM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death | Permalink | Comments (18)
        

Carolyn Hart, author of Death Walked In and Ghost at Work (released this month), is on a Bouchercon panel about crime fiction's role in revealing the darkness of human emotions. That topic, she says. goes straight to the bedrock of mysteries and mystery writing (for all author posts, click here):

Mystery novels, from the most hard-boiled to the most genteel, all spring from the same truth: Humans succumb to evil and evil destroys.

It isn’t fashionable in our secular world to speak in terms of evil, but evil - or the dark side of the moon - is at the heart of all mysteries. Yet, where there is darkness, there must be light or the depth of the darkness cannot be seen. The detective in a mystery novel represents goodness or the hope for redemption.

When the detective sets out to solve the crime, the detective seeks to understand what fractured the relationships among those involved. The focus is not murder. The focus is what went wrong in these peoples’ lives. What dark emotions caused this turmoil?

Human failings - anger, deceit, jealousy, greed, denial, deception, selfishness - destroy relationships. In a traditional mystery, murder is the exaggerated symbol for the outcome of ordinary, everyday quarrels. In real life among ordinary people, greed does not usually result in murder, but an overpowering hunger for money or sex or excitement twists and corrodes character. A quarrel in real life does not usually end with a stabbing, but the results of that quarrel can affect a life or lives for generations.

I write about the effects of jealousy, anger, greed, fear, lust, and treachery among ordinary, everyday human beings, neighbors, friends, family. I am not interested in aberrant personalities. My province is the world of everyday life and my characters are a selfish sister, a mean neighbor, a false friend, an overbearing boss, a cruel family member, an adulterous husband or wife.

The world I know and write about is a world made up of all human emotions, including humor and lightheartedness and happiness. In Ghost at Work, a new series which will debut later this month, my protagonist is Bailey Ruth Raeburn, an impetuous, redheaded ghost, who comes back to earth to help someone in trouble. My editor describes the book as whimsy with a mystery.

I had enormous fun writing about my ghost. I loved the Topper books. Prim and proud banker Cosmo Topper’s life is upended by dashing ghosts George and Marian Kirby.

Ghost at Work is very different from Topper because the ghost is the protagonist, yet I hope I achieved the same themes of lighthearted fun and laughter springing from incongruity.

However, Ghost at Work, despite its humor, springs from those emotions on the dark side of the moon. The victim is a selfish, exploitive, overbearing bully. The suspects include a young wife who feels neglected, a member of the Altar Guild with a guilty secret, a wronged wife, an estranged son, a spurned lover, a priest unfairly treated, a desperate businessman, and a vindictive policewoman. The emotions that drive them are resentment, jealousy, pride, despair, anger, and revenge.

The book is unsparing in its appraisal of darkness within the characters. At the same time, I hope Ghost at Work succeeds in reflecting both the light and the dark.

When free-spirited Bailey Ruth receives her earthly assignment, she is warned about the dangers of reverting to human failings while on earth and urged always to remember that she is on the earth, not of the earth. Almost as soon as she arrives on a dark October night near the rectory of St. Mildred’s Episcopal Church in Adelaide, OK, Bailey Ruth runs afoul of the precepts for earthly visitation, shocking the rector’s wife when she appears. Bailey Ruth suggests moving the murder victim from the back porch of the rectory to the nearby cemetery. The subsequent journey using a wheelbarrow is fraught with difficulty, all of which I hope will amuse readers.

Dark motives, light moments, but that is the tapestry of our lives. Within mysteries and within ourselves, the desire to be good and the struggle to avoid evil is forever waged.

Agatha Christie compared the mystery to the medieval morality play. It is an apt comparison. In a mystery, the reader sees what happens when characters succumb to evil, that dark side of the moon. Yet the mystery in its resolution always celebrates goodness, and the light overcomes the dark.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 10:00 AM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death, Meet the Author | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Mark Billingham, writes the detective Tom Thorne series among other thrillers, and his latest novel is In the Dark. He has always enjoyed conference panels that were a little bit different, so at Bouchercon, his topic is lying. (For all author posts, click here.) His take:  

Writers lie for a living, right? So I thought it might be fun to see how well they could lie to a live audience. The idea is simple: each of the writers on the panel – myself, Karin Slaughter, Chris Mooney, Laura Lippman and John Connolly – will reveal secrets in a variety of different categories, but we will each be slipping in three lies. Big ones, little ones, who can tell? Some truths will be so outrageous that they might sound like lies and some of the lies will have the disturbing ring of truth.

Each of us will talk about our secret skills, secret recipes and secret admirers. We will reveal our dirty secrets, our ugly ones as well as what each of us believes to be the secret of happiness. But we will also be lying our asses off and hoping that we can get away with it. If not…it’s going to cost us.

If, at any point, a member of the audience thinks that they have caught a whiff of bullshit, they are at liberty to stand up and shout “Liar!” If they are wrong, they must drop two dollars into one of the buckets being passed around the room, but if they are right the lying writer will have to cough up ten! All money raised will be donated to the Pratt Library in Baltimore, one of the Bouchercon charities, so each accusation, successful or otherwise, will be made in a good cause.

An extra twist is that we will not be revealing our lies to one another beforehand, leaving any writer free to accuse another, if they want to risk parting with some cash.

The traditional Q&A that usually forms the last fifteen minutes or so of any panel event will be replaced by something closer to an interrogation. If, for example during the ‘secret skills’ discussion, John Connolly has revealed that he once represented his country at Irish Dancing, he may be asked to stand up and demonstrate. If Laura Lippman announces that she is an expert on firearms, a member of the audience may ask her to talk us through the assembly of an AK47. This will be a further chance, if any lies remain unexposed, to make the writers pay for their falsehoods.

We will of course be talking about our books, though I can’t guarantee any of what we say will be true. I can guarantee that this will be among the most entertaining hours of the entire convention. The five of us are good friends, and I think a rapport between the panellists can be the key to a good event. This will be a chance though, to find out just how well we know one another.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death, Meet the Author | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

I read an interesting article in Slate today that outlined the Nobel committee's distaste for American literature. The author, Adam Kirsch, maintains that the roots of their disdain go as far back as 200 years, when America was viewed as Europe's backwater cousin, all strut and no stuff.

"[T]he real scandal of Engdahl's comments is not that they revealed a secret bias on the part of the Swedish Academy," Kirsch writes. "It is that Engdahl made official what has long been obvious to anyone paying attention: The Nobel committee has no clue about American literature."

He names the Americans who have been graced with a Nobel nod -- Pearl Buck, John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis -- as examples of the prevailing sentiment that America is a backward, anti-intellectual country.

I can't say that I know much about the politics of international literature. But the committee's argument that American authors are isolated from the global conversation looks preposterous, if only because the global conversation seems to orbit around America's authors.

Amazon.co.uk's best-sellers list includes Americans Christopher Paolini, Alice Schroeder and Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan by birth, but now an American citizen.

Their French site's best-sellers include Douglas Kennedy, Terry Goodkind and Harlan Coben. Germany loves Erica Spindler and Lara Adrian.

Now, I'm not saying that any of these authors are worthy of a Nobel Prize in Literature. I'm just saying that the committee seems to have some pretty impressive blinders on, if they think the world isn't paying attention to American writers.

Posted by Nancy Johnston at 7:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

For Caroline and Charles Todd, the mother and son writing team who write the Ian Rutledge series, including A Pale Horse and A Matter of Justice (on sale in December), police procedurals are second nature. So while Bouchercon is on, we asked for a guest post (for all author posts, click here). Their view:

There are always problems getting your police mystery “just right”. Much of what police do is about as exciting as mud: writing reports, double checking evidence and interviews, looking at files, waiting for forensics, attending meetings where nothing happens of the page-turning variety to keep a reader enthralled.

To sell, a murder mystery has to be fast paced, electrifying. The old cops and robbers at its best. If an author must skim over the boring stuff to achieve that, it’s literary license. But that license comes at a price. It’s important to keep the essence, the feel of what happens when a real crime is being investigated. You also have a responsibility to your characters, these men in blue who people your novel. There’s a tendency to make them more macho, more burnt out, more devious than they are in real life, and to some extent, that’s all right. After all, it’s a book. But how far over that line can you go without losing touch with the reality? That too must be addressed. 

There are restrictions on using weapons in real life police work. Restrictions on the way evidence is acquired. Restrictions on physical contact with suspects and interviewees. Etc. And here it becomes another question. How believable will your characters be, if you transgress these restrictions? In short, you are dealing with a rather inflexible framework, in which you must create a make believe world that entertains and still lives up to the recognizable world that your reader sees in newspapers, on TV, on the street corner and in squad cars every day.

Research is essential, so that the author knows where the lines are drawn. In our case, since our Inspector Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard was at work just after World War 1, we can’t very well ride along in a cruiser and watch how things are done. We must delve into whatever material we can find and piece together what his work day was like. We must look at how he went about finding evidence and interviewing witnesses—and in this time frame, what people felt about policemen in general. Murder wasn’t all that common in England in 1919. But people did kill, for reasons that were very important in the period in which they lived.

As authors we must stay within the reality of their lives—but when you are dealing with psychological suspense, as we do, there is the commonality of human nature to draw from. No terrorists as such, no drug dealers, no race problems, but the seven deadly sins of greed, envy, lust, avarice and so on are as true then as they are today. We must reach back in time to a different country and a different world to find first of all the murder, then the suspects, and finally the murderer. Rutledge, without the aid of forensics as we know them today, really must delve deep in his own experience, his intuition and his knowledge of human nature to solve the crime. And that’s the fun of writing—to create a world you never saw, that exists now only in memories and reference books and first hand sources, and make the people who live in it available to twenty-first century readers. It’s always a challenge, and that’s why writing about another time and place is so rewarding.

And always, in the forefront of our minds—as it must have been in the forefront of Rutledge’s mind, if he’d actually lived then—the penalty for murder in 1919 is death by hanging. Whatever we think about the justice of the death penalty today, in Rutledge’s day, he’d better get a crime’s solution right—or he’d be sending an innocent man or woman to the gallows. Here is where art and life must meet. The reader too must be satisfied that when Rutledge makes his arrest, justice has been served.

If we are going to borrow the men on the force or at the Yard for our livelihood, as authors we owe them the courtesy of presenting their story to the best of our ability. Critics can love a book and readers can buy it, but our toughest audience will always be the policemen we’re trying to capture on the printed page.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 4:00 PM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death, Meet the Author | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

All week, we'll feature visitors from Bouchercon's Charmed to Death international conference of mystery writers (for all their posts, click here). Here's Washington author Austin Camacho, discussing how far race goes in defining his characters. His topic: Black Ain’t Nothing But a Detective’s Color. 

"It’s not about race. It’s about the characters. It’s about the mystery.”

That statement has become a mantra for me since I started writing detective fiction. Hannibal Jones, my fictional private eye, lives and works in Washington DC. Yes, he has African ancestors. He is also a hardboiled gumshoe in the MacDonald mold – Ross or John D., take your pick. He describes himself as a troubleshooter, a defender of the weak. In this sense his literary forebears include Simon Templar and Travis McGee. The archetype is familiar and the conventions clear. I take great pride in the complex, clue-laden puzzles I have crafted for novels like Blood and Bone and Collateral Damage. Yet when people talk about Hannibal’s stories, they always want to call him a Black detective, as if that were its own genre.

If my work must fall into a subgenre, let it just be hardboiled detective fiction. That means my hero lives in a dark, gritty world. It’s the part of the world most of us don’t visit much. Organized crime is a powerful force there, part of an underworld subculture. Violence is an everyday thing; corruption is everywhere; and people tend to be hostile instead of helpful. It takes a special kind of man to walk though all that muck and not get dirty. Hannibal Jones is such a man, and contemporary Washington D.C. is such a place. True, the District does have a large African American population, and that does mean that crime is organized differently. Violence grows from different motivations, and racial tension is the source of much of hostility in the District. The fact that Hannibal works in the African American community means he can’t do things exactly as Sam Spade did.

There’s also a social element to hardboiled detective stories. They often revolve around the friction between upper crust society and the lower economic levels. The relatively honest, survival crime of the streets meets the higher level corruption of the wealthy or political elite. Early writers illustrated this in San Francisco. Both Hammett and Chandler created tales of petty thieves and confidence men getting used and then destroyed by corrupt businessmen. I try to work the same elements on the East Coast, where Washington D.C.’s poor live side by side with the upper class. The conflict is real, and it takes a special man to walk in both worlds without getting crushed between the two. Sometimes one group is disadvantaged more because of color than income, and having money doesn’t automatically propel a person into the upper class. In fact, a black man or woman who is financially successful may face prejudice from both sides. Hannibal, born of an African American solder and his German national wife straddles all these lines, but never really fits into any one camp.

These stories always include action, and it’s often brutal. The hero has to be able to take a beating as rough as one he might hand out. Unlike TV, people really get hurt and the reader sees it up close. Fans of these stories know what really happens when a bullet hits a man in the chest, or a fist smacks against someone’s jaw. And the effect is the same from a white fist as it is from a black one, isn’t it? Except that bystanders are more likely to choose a side if they look like one of the fighters and not the other, or if they perceive the attack to be a hate crime. So, even a simple fight scene must be written differently if the combatants are different colors. Even if they’re not, African Americans do it differently. More trash talk, fewer bottles or car antennas, and a very different style of knife-fighting.

Like all good storytelling, hard-boiled stories revolve around the characters. This is largely because the detective is neither Sherlock Holmes nor a CSI. Forensic evidence is seldom the clincher in his cases. He solves the mystery by talking to people, lots of them, and they’re all lying. He does the legwork, collecting a boatload of facts, hoping that eventually he’ll see a pattern or turn up a clue. Everything hinges on the motives and personalities of the cast. For this kind of writing to work, all the people in a story must be well rounded and fully developed. They all have their flaws, and most have a spark of decency too. Surely that much is the same no matter race, color or creed. Except that, just because Hannibal’s skin is dark, some people are more likely to open up to him while others will refuse to speak to him, or will lie to him out of pure spite. If my writing is honest, I have to take into account that human motivations really do vary based on race. The basics are the same – love, hate, greed, jealousy. But race adds the elements of prejudice, fear of the establishment, distrust of those who are different, and blind faith in total strangers based on traits in common. A racially diverse cast really does complicate the puzzles I build, and I have to admit that I love having those additional hues on my mystery-writing pallet. How does race complicate things?

Of course, the most important defining characteristic of hardboiled detective fiction is the detective himself. He knows there’s a job to do, and he’s the only one who can get it done. He may be a tough guy, but he knows what’s right and wrong. He’s on a quest for the truth, or justice, or simply against the evil of the world. He has a clearly defined moral code, even if it’s only clear to him. He may shoot a man in cold blood, but he’ll never park in a handicap space, dishonor a lady or turn his back on a person in real trouble. Like most of his peers, Hannibal is not well-off financially, because in his world, being moral doesn’t pay very well. But how did our hero get to be this impoverished paragon? Surely his personal history shaped his character. The fact that Hannibal is a black man in a white man’s world shapes him just as much as the fact that he was raised by his mother after his father died in Vietnam and has little feel for the hip hop, red-black-and-green, whitey-distrusting culture of his neighbors. Hardboiled detectives are always outsiders, but in the case of black detectives it’s easy to understand why. White clients may expect them to have a hidden, anti-white agenda. Other African Americans, distrustful of authority figures in general, sometimes have a special resentment of black men who question them or try to associate them with crimes.

Okay, one thing must be the same across all hardboiled detectives - his style. It’s his air of relaxed confidence, whether he’s talking to a Rockefeller or a Capone, and the deadpan wit that’s so dry it crackles. So when the dame says, "Tall, aren’t you?" Marlowe doesn’t say "Yeah," or "So what?" but rather... "I didn’t mean to be." Hannibal might respond the same way if someone mentioned that he’s black. When a client’s butler calls him a colorful character he says, “I’m just me. You’re the guy that’s colorful.” And he recognizes the shade of difference between just being a P.I. and being a black one. So, when asked what kind of detective he is in Damaged Goods he quips, “I’m like the illegitimate child of Spenser and Hawk, if it was possible for them to do such a thing.”

Ultimately, the reader identifies with the hero of these stories, which are most often written in first person. You have the detective’s point of view. For him to be accessible to his audience his viewpoint, attitudes and feelings must be true. This is especially important for a black detective because those who would most naturally identify with him have been largely disenfranchised in this regard. It’s a lot easier for an African American to identify with Hawk than Spenser, but the choice of blacks in detective fiction is still disturbingly narrow.

So maybe, in a way it is about race. Because it’s about the characters more than it’s about the mystery.

Austin S. Camacho is the author of four detective novels in the Hannibal Jones series - Blood and Bone, Collateral Damage, The Troubleshooter, and Damaged. Camacho is active in several writers’ organizations and teaches writing at Anne Arundel Community College. After a career as a military news reporter, Camacho is now a public affairs specialist for the Defense Department. Camacho lives in Springfield, Virginia with his lovely wife Denise and Princess the Wonder Cat.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 1:00 PM in Bouchercon/Charmed to Death, Meet the Author, Southern/Civil War | Permalink | Comments (5)