"[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.

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.

"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.

John Lennon: The Life by Phillip Norman (Ecco, $34.95). Author and journalist Norman’s biography draws on previously unknown sources, unpublished letters and unprecedented access to all the key figures.

A Member of the Family: Cesar Millan’s Guide to a Lifetime of Fulfillment with Your Dog by Cesar Millan and Melissa Jo Peltier (Harmony, $25.95). The Dog Whisperer offers advice for integrating your canine companion into your household.

A Most Wanted Man by John le Carre (Scribner, $28). A half-starved young Russian man in a long black overcoat is smuggled into Hamburg in the dead of night. He has an improbable amount of cash secreted in a purse around his neck. He is a devout Muslim. Or is he?

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell (Riverhead, $25.95). Essayist and public radio regular Vowell revisits America’s Puritan roots in this witty exploration of the ways in which our country’s present predicaments are inextricably tied to its past.

For tried and true fans, The Graveyard Book does not disappoint.

(I know, I know, I said I'd get started on the new Lippman collection. I was just cleansing my reading palate before jumping back in, I swear.)

I mentioned Gaiman last week, for his star status in the comic book world. But he doesn't pigeonhole his talents -- although we do have him to thank for the source material of that abysmal Stardust movie. Stardust has the distinction of being the first and only movie that I've walked out on, and I still don't care how it ends.

But please, don't judge him for that trainwreck. Instead, give this book a try.

Dan Fesperman (shown here), a former Baltimore Sun foreign correspondent  wihose novels have been set in Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and Guantanamo, will discuss writing about a distant place. Austin Camacho, who lives in Washington, will talk about African-Americans in mysteries. And many other writers will take a turn on Read Street.

Have a question about mystery writing? Post a comment here and we'll ask our guests. And stay tuned all week to learn secrets from the masters of mystery writing.

Photo from danfesperman.com

Under this licensing agreement, some writers are literally giving their books away, as long as the readers promise not to use their works for commercial purposes.

Download it, read it, pass it along to your friends. Word of mouth is the original form of advertising, and writers are starting to bank on it.

The latest incarnation of this arrangement that I've seen is Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners. Link has a new book, Pretty Monsters, and getting attention for it by allowing readers to download her older work for a year at no charge.

And this marketing strategy seems to be working, since I'm writing about it.

Link's Magic collection was honored with the Nebula, Locus, British Science Fiction Association awards, and was a Hugo and World Fantasy awards finalist.  With a pedigree like that, what do you have to lose? Nothing. It's free!

And from the publishers' perspective, if they get readers hooked, they'll then be more interested in buying the new Pretty Monsters. So what are you still doing reading this? Go find your new favorite author!

 I don't like Laura Lippman's writing.

Well, let me clarify, which is another way of saying, let me hedge my bets. I don't like THIS Laura Lippman book.

With Bouchercon coming up, I thought the least I could do was read some classic Lippman, in preparation for the festivities. Lippman's returning to Baltimore as a guest of honor, and they sure are excited to have her.

So I picked up What the Dead Know. I chose her 2007 mystery detailing the 30-year-old cold case on two missing sisters, rather than a Tess Monaghan classic, because I wanted to get a feel for the writing, not just a character. And in the past I've picked up a mystery novel from a series, and grew quickly annoyed that the lead of the story far surpassed the plot.

So I began. I was looking forward to some suspense, some twists and turns, and some amazing characterizations. After all, this is Laura Lippman. Instead, I found myself wondering why the heck this wasn't a short story.

Philip Pulllman, author of The Golden Compass, told the Guardian that his "immediate and ignoble response was glee. Firstly, I had obviously annoyed a lot of censorious people, and secondly, any ban would provoke interested readers to move from the library, where they couldn't get hold of my novel, to the bookshops, where they could." The Guardian also has a quiz to test your knowledge of banned books.

That raises a question: Should any books be restricted -- if not banned -- for children according to age. Most parents are careful about what young children read (or what movies they see), guarding against topics from monsters to sex. Now British publishers are adding a "recommended for ages ... " mark to their books. Is that helpful, or a step down the slippery slope to censorship?

This is the wise man who hired me, so I think we can all agree he has impeccable taste.

Tonight at 6, you can head up to the Aberdeen library for their monthly urban fiction book club. They'll discuss books by authors such as KaShamba Williams, Nikki Turner, Teri Woods, and Kiki Swinson. For more information, call 410.273.5608.

Tomorrow is Atomic Books' 16th anniversary party. Head to Hampden for music and books, including the release of Brian Ralph's Daybreak Vol. 3. Expect to see Jesse Reklaw, Ken Dahl, Brian Ralph, Ben Claassen, Lauren Weinstein, Laura Park, Julia Wertz, Austin English, Closed Caption Comics, and more.

You can meet Michael Kimball, a Baltimore resident and author of Dear Everybody, tomorrow at The Ivy. The book, written in snippets of letters, diary entries and encyclopedia entries, details the life -- and regrets -- of a television weatherman.

And OK, I'll include one mystery event, because I get a kick out of murder-mystery parties myself. Tuesday night, join British author Ann Cleeves in an evening with four suspects in a murder at the library. You'll hear them state their cases, then you'll decide who committed the murder.

As always, for details and more events, see the Read Street calendar.

James Patterson placed a distant second on the list, earning $50 million during the 12-month period. Among the other leaders were Stephen King ($45 million), Marylander Tom Clancy ($35 million) and Danielle Steel ($30 million). Futher down the list are Nicholas Sparks, Janet Evanovich, John Grisham, Dean Koontz and Ken Follett.

I recommend that all parents print the list, tape it to the refrigerator and point Junior to it next time he wants to watch TV. 

Janet Horn, a Baltimore doctor and former faculty member at Johns Hopkins' med school, is co-author of The Smart Woman's Guide to Staying Healthy After 50. It deals with topics ranging from fitness and nutrition to cancer. (New Harbinger/$19.95/280 pages)

Notes on Democracy by H.L. Mencken, is a reissue of The Great One's classic. Among his cutting observations are our "tendency to crowd competent and self-respecting men out of the public service" and democracy's "parade of obvious imbecilities." (Dissident Books/$14.95/204 pages)

Giraffes in the Savannah is a children's book described as a "fairy tale about harmony in nature" by Gopal Dorai, who has worked as an adjunct professor in economics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. (American Literary Press/$15.95/22 pages)  

House of Good Hope by Michael Downs, an assistant professor of English at Towson University, is part memoir and part narrative. The book follows a group of teenagers in a troubled section of Hartford, Conn., and includes Downs' own thoughts on living in the city. The book was a finalist for the 2008 Connecticut Book Award in the biography/memoir category. (Bison Books/$19.95/326 pages)