Fans of Post Typography and Double Dagger will already be familiar with Bruce Willen and Nolan Strals. For those uninitiated, the graphic design/teacher/rock stars will have a new label on Thursday: authors.

Their book, "Lettering & Type: Creating Letters and Designing Typeface," is a collection of essays by designers and artists, detailing the history, theory and art of the letters of the alphabet.

As for me, I've loved the letter "W" since I was a toddler. In fact, my mother loves to tell the story of when I was about 2 years old, and I stole a "W" from a grocery store sign. She was riding her bike to visit my grandmother, with me in the back waving my contraband letter and screaming "W! W! DOUBLE-UUUU!" the whole way.

It wasn't until we reached my grandmother's house that she saw I had ninja'd the thing away. And back to the store we went.

OK, so maybe that's weird, and not everyone has a favorite letter. But I'm betting I'm not alone: And this stylish new book is proof of that.

Want to know more? Willen and Strals were kind enough to guest blog for us, and share the inspiration behind their creation.

Continue reading "What's your favorite letter?" »

Posted by Nancy Knight at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Meet the Author
        

Today in The Baltimore Sun, read a profile of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian-born author who last year won a MacArthur "genius" grant. (You can get an even closer look at Adichie, who now lives in Columbia, on Monday when she reads from her new short-story collection, “The Thing Around Your Neck” at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.) Here's an excerpt from Mary McCauley's story, which describes Adichie's "contradictory mix of self-doubt and a self-assurance that borders on audacity":

Though she grew up in an egalitarian household, the outside world could be limiting. Maleness was explicitly prized in Nigeria, as was Western civilization.

“I started writing stories at about age 6 that were just like the books we read in school,” she says, “about children with blue eyes and poodles who played in the snow. My mother kept all my stories and occasionally threatens to give them to local journalists if I don’t do what she wants.”

Though Adichie can be critical of her adopted country — “The Thing Around Your Neck” contains pointed observations about the U.S. — she has “an immense affection” for her second home.

“It is the only Western country that makes an effort to address its past,” she says. “And, I have space here. If I’d gone to school in Britain, I wouldn’t have developed the sense of possibility I acquired here.”

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Meet the Author
        

Bill Wasik, who's probably best known as the creator of flash mobs and more recently wrote And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, has succeed where many "tech" writers fail. He has taken a highly dorky subject: the lifespan of "memes" -- or stories that spread like wildfire on the Internet, and just as quickly die down -- and written a book that you don't need a technical manual to understand.

But first a little background: According to the book, Wasik got bored in the summer of 2003. But instead of getting a drink with friends, or even going on a road trip as most people would do, he created a phenomenon: the flash mob.

One of my favorite examples of a flash mob is this event at Grand Central Station, coordinated by Improv Everywhere, in which more than 200 people simply freeze en masse in the terminal, like living statues. After a few minutes, they then "unfreeze" and continue on their way.

While Wasik's book touches on flash mobs and their popularity, the book goes into more detail about our 15-seconds-of-fame culture, and how silly, frivolous "nanostories" capture everyone's attention for a month or two, before being completely forgotten.

"There was the flash mob project, which I had done semi-anonymously and never intended to write about," Wasik explained during a phone interview Monday. "But when Ford sort of co-opted the flash mob idea for a series of concerts in 2006, I just thought it was too funny not to go and write about it in a sort of tongue in check way, to tell this story."

"I had book editors asking me if I wanted to expand this into a book, and I wouldn't, if it was just flash mobs," he continued, "but instead as an exampe of, and a metaphor for, everything that's going on online. ... We seem to encourage a culture of quick-hit successes, and so I thought that if I could write that kind of book [which explores that phenomenon], I would do that."

Continue reading "New author in town: Bill Wasik, father of flash mobs" »

Posted by Nancy Knight at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Meet the Author
        

Longtime Baltimorean Steve Luxenberg has been writing for all of his adult life, a process that began, he says, when he went to the library as a kid and absorbed lessons about character, plot and style from such masters as Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. Luxenberg is a former reporter and editor for The Sun, and currently, for the Washington Post. His memoir, Annie's Ghosts, about his efforts to find out more about the life of a disabled aunt whom he hadn't known existed, received favorable reviews when it was published last month. (You can learn more about the book here.)

He recently spoke to Read Street about the "free, lifelong turorial" he's getting from the printed page.

  Q: How did he learn to read? My mother liked to tell this story. She claims that when I was three or four, I would bring her the paper and I'd read to her from it, and she thought someone had just told me the words. So one day, she brought me the newspaper and gave me an article to read that I couldn't possibly have seen. According to her, I read it, though I'm sure it wasn't with any comprehension.

Q: First influential book? The Secret Garden, which I read in the first grade. There's no way I could have understood it then, as you need to hear it in a Yorkshire accent. That showed me that a reader doesn't need to understand everything about a book to get something out of it. You can read it at one level at age 6, at another level at age 12, and another as a mature adult.

Q: How did you become a writer? I came to writing through reading. If I didn't have a book in my hands, I had a ball. When I read, I was on Treasure Island. I was the one who was being kidnapped. I sank the winning basket. 

Continue reading "Author, Author -- Steve Luxenberg" »

Posted by Mary McCauley at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Meet the Author
        

So you think you can guess Chuck Palahniuk's favorite books? Guess again.

The author of the blockbuster hit, Fight Club, Chuck has written nine other novels in the genre of "transgressive fiction," a literary movement dealing with taboo topics and featuring characters who live outside society's norms.

Chuck is coming to the Enoch Pratt Central Library at 6:30 p.m. Thursday to promote his newest tome, Pygmy, and took a few moments to describe some of the titles that can be found on his nightstand. (For more on Palhaniuk, check out this story.)

Favorite childhood author -- I read Erma Bombeck's humor writing like crazy when I was little, books with titles like The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank, and If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? She'd write about alcoholism and the same really dark topics in suburbia that John Cheever was writing about, but she'd write about it in a really light way. Check out some of her books. You'll see.

How he became an avid reader as an adult -- I moved to Detroit in the early 1990s, and all my friends were buying houses. So, I purchased a little 500 square-foot house, but I didn't find out until after I moved in that I couldn't get radio reception or TV reception. Books were about the only things left to me, so I'd go to the library and check out stacks and stacks.

Guilty pleasure author -- I tend to re-read books again and again. One of my favorites is the little novella collection by Truman Capote that contains Breakfast at Tiffany's. When you're young, most people like reading books that made them feel special and unique. Now that I'm older, I like books that remind me that I'm part of a larger pattern, and that mistakes I've made have been made by other people in the past.

Famous author he can't bring himself to read -- Michael Ondaatje. I'm sorry, I know he has some beautiful images, but I just couldn't get through The English Patient.

Posted by Mary McCauley at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Meet the Author
        

Fiction writer Junot Diaz comes to the CityLit Festival this Saturday to read from his 2008 novel, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He took a few minutes from his busy schedule to talk to Read Street about his lifelong obsession with the written word (a longer Baltimore Sun story is here).

His Literary Baptism: Mrs. Crowell, the librarian of the Parlin Elementary School in New Jersey, encouraged my love of reading. When I found the library, I felt as though I'd stumbled onto Ali Baba's cave. I'd walk four miles to take out books. She's even let me photocopy lists of books in print, so I could find new titles by my favorite authors.

Favorite Childhood Book: John Christopher's Tripod Series. In the books, the earth is ruled by aliens in giant tripods. When kids get to be about 14, a strange little cap is put on their heads, and then they're considered adults. It's a form of mind control, and it's a metaphor that taps into the fears and anxieties of a lot of young people.

Famous Author Who He Just Doesn't Get: I never badmouth authors, because I don't want to do anything to discourage reading. But if I had to pick a writer whose reputation won't be dented by my poor opinion, I'd have to say Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. My friends and I joke that white people love those books, but we just don't get them.

Guilty Pleasure Book: I make my guilty pleasures my central pleasures. I was reading this horror book by John Skipp and Craig Spector, The Light at the End. My ex-girlfriend picked it up from my nightstand and said, "This is just ridiculous." I have no shame when it comes to reading.

Audio books -- cheating or reading? I don't have an opinion because I haven't really listened to very many audio books, except for The Iliad and The Odyssey. That was amazing, because they were originally written to be heard and not read. Books on tape replicates that aural tradition.

Posted by Mary McCauley at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: Meet the Author
        

Goucher College professor Elizabeth Spires has a fascinating new book that pairs her poetry with photos of the folk art sculptures of William Edmondson. I Heard God Talking to Me is accessible to both young and old, and the poems are as plain as Edmondson's cut stone. Here's a snippet from "Porch Ladies": But here on the porch/everything moves slow,/slow as molasses,/slow as a seven-year itch, slow as the day before Christmas./Slow, we tell you. Slow!

We asked Spires about the book and the creative process.

How did the idea for this book develop? I became interested in William Edmondson's stone carvings on several trips to Nashville (where he lived and worked in the 1930s and 40s). I like the strong sense of presence and individuality that each figure has, as well as the whimsy and humor in many of his pieces. ... He seemed like the perfect artist to introduce to young readers. I'm now finding out, however, that both adults and children like the book and really respond to his life story and his art. 

Are you generally a fan of folk art? I love folk art, especially its simplicity, directness and naivete. Edmondson was a master stone carver, but completely self-taught. He was not afraid to approach the stone in a direct, simple manner. Nonetheless, his style is completely his own and very original.

Continue reading "Elizabeth Spires' I Heard God Talking to Me " »

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Meet the Author
        

Today, Baltimore Sun film critic Michael Sragow releases his book about Hollywood giant Victor Fleming. We asked Sragow about the director who, in a single year, brought two icons to the screen. First question: What are Fleming's greatest accomplishments?

Sragow: Do you mean apart from directing Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz in the same year?
Forget all the tired punditry and academic tomes about American masculinity: Victor Fleming did more than anyone to create the key images of the American male, the ones that continue to have enormous impact both here and around the world. As a cinematographer and in his first films as a director,  he helped mold the image of Douglas Fairbanks Sr., whose blend of athleticism and humor and open-air vitality made him the first action superstar, influencing comic-book heroes, later performers as different as Burt Lancaster and Cary Grant, and even politicians: Do the words “vigor” and “charisma” bring  anyone to mind?
But  that’s just the beginning. The strong, silent  type, who articulated character in action and made every spoken syllable count – Gary Cooper perfected that character when Victor Fleming directed him in The Virginian, back in 1929, and Henry Fonda brought a new, more sensitive variation to it when Fleming directed him in Fonda’s debut film, The Farmer Takes a Wife.

Then there’s the can-do guy who knew how to do anything from run a Vietnamese  rubber plantation (or run a Union stockade for the Confederacy)  to tame a gorgeous hellion – that’s Clark Gable as shaped by Fleming in a series of films, most notably  Red Dust and Gone With the Wind (despite the dispute of his sole directing credit, Fleming directed all of Gable’s major scenes as Rhett Butler – and Fleming was often described as “the real Rhett Butler”).

Continue reading "Guest post: Michael Sragow, author of Victor Fleming" »

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Meet the Author
        

I met Padma Viswanathan at a reading at Johns Hopkins, where she got a master's in creative writing, and was captivated by her story. The Toss of a Lemon is an intergenerational tale set in India, drawn from family lore and her imagination. We did this interview via email:

What was the inspiration for your book? The Toss of a Lemon was inspired by stories my grandmother told me of her grandmother, who was married as a child and widowed at 18. My great-great-grandmother, like my main character, Sivakami, chose to raise her children in her own house, despite severe restrictions on Brahmin widows in south India in the early 20th century. Their heads were shaved; they did not wear colors; and, most cruelly, they were not permitted to touch or be touched--even by their children--from dawn to dusk. My character, Sivakami, essentially doesn't leave her house more than a few times in the remaining sixty years of her life, but still succeeds in running her household on the income from her agricultural properties, in giving her son a secular education, and in raising her grandchildren when her daughter proves incapable, all with the help of a trusted servant, her closest confidant.

How much of the book sprang from your own experience or from stories told to you? I feel as though there is something, if only a tiny detail, on almost every page, that owes to things [my grandmother] told me. My own experiences and observations, both in India and otherwise, also very much figure in ... . I incorporated details gleaned from research as well as from a lifetime of eavesdropping! And then there are elements of pure fancy, but these might not be as obvious as one might think: I have a witch living next door to Sivakami, for example, which fact is taken directly from my family history, though I made up some elements of her biography. Ditto the fact that Sivakami's husband, an astrologer, predicted his own death: my great-great-grandfather did that. But then Sivakami's daughter, in a twist that some reviewers have called magical realist, begins shedding gold dust. This bit was totally my invention, though it has a number of--to my mind!--quite logical links to the world I reconstructed.

Continue reading "Padma Viswanathan, The Toss of a Lemon" »

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Meet the Author
        

"It only costs 25 cents to make a loaf of bread!" Jeff Hertzberg, co-author of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, tells me during our conference call. "Mention that right at the top! I think people are sick of paying $7 for their bread."

And when you can make something that looks as good as this Thanksgiving Cranberry Corn Bread, who am I to argue?

Hertzberg and Zoe Francois, the professional half of this baking duo, have done something remarkable: They've convinced me that I can make onion rye, Vermont cheddar bread, even something called almond brioche.

Continue reading "Bread made fast, easy and fun" »

Posted by Nancy Knight at 5:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (38)
Categories: Meet the Author
        

Baltimore's Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winnning author who has chronicled the life of Martin Luther King, has  another career -- just in case the book thing doesn't work out. He (pictured on the right) and a couple of college bandmates have reunited to produce a new CD called The Blue Album, an homage to the Fab Four. The latest from Off Our Rocker will be released Monday, and judging from cuts available online, it ain't half bad, especially "You're Gonna Lose That Girl."

Here's a bit of the group's light-hearted promotion: "OverTime, their 2006 debut CD, has gone plastic to sell dozens of copies. ... Now the dream continues. Here is The Blue Album, your share of pure wannaBeatles zest and devotion." Other members of the group are Bill Guy, a retired attorney who has recorded Christian music, and John Yelverton, a real estate developer.

Photo by Diane Guy via the Off Our Rocker Web site

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Meet the Author
        

Wally Lamb's first two novels, She's Come Undone and I Know This Much is True, were huge sellers, thanks to Oprah's book club. It took Lamb a decade to create The Hour I First Believed, which was released this week. His book tour was scheduled to start yesterday at the University of Connecticut (he's a huge Husky basketball fan -- just like me). Here's an excerpt from an interview with Publishers Weekly; click here for the complete version.

PW: Your original deadline was 2004. Were you worried when that deadline was approaching? Lamb: The first year was spent spinning my wheels. As the approaching deadline neared, the story had taken hold but I knew I had a lot of work ahead. ... I hadn’t meant to get involved in teaching at Connecticut's York Correctional Institution for women and later editing my incarcerated students’ stories for publication. But as much as that robbed time and energy from me, it also aided the novel. 

PW: Do you still teach that writing workshop? Lamb: I’m still very much involved in the workshop. ... I’ve never been involved with writers who have been so enthusiastic and involved in creating and revising their work. I didn’t know that the women would give me more of an education than I was giving them. As I was reacting to their writing, they would give me feedback to the chunks of chapters I would bring in.

Continue reading "Interview with Wally Lamb" »

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Meet the Author
        

Jessica Anya Blau’s first novel, The Summer of Na-
ked Swim Parties, was a fixture on summer reading
lists. Part memoir, part fiction, it tells of a 14-year-old
California girl with free-wheeling parents. We asked
Blau, a Baltimorean who teaches in the Johns Hopkins University’s writing program, about the novel,
her book tour and what’s next. Here are excerpts
from that interview; for the complete audio, click here.

Continue reading "Meet the Author: Jessica Anya Blau" »

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Meet the Author
        

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.

Continue reading "Hallie Ephron on the writing life" »

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

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.

Continue reading "Carolyn Hart on good vs. evil" »

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

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.

Continue reading "Mark Billingham on lying" »

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

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.

Continue reading "Charles Todd on police procedurals" »

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

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.

Continue reading "Austin Camacho on black detectives" »

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

To mark the Bouchercon "Charmed to Death" conference in Baltimore, visiting (and local) mystery writers will be posting on Read Street all week.

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

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Baltimore author Michael Kimball's third novel, Dear Everybody, is a collection of letters, diary entries, lists, news articles and other snippets that document the sad life and tragic end of a TV weatherman. Kimball, 41, grew up in Michigan and lived in New York City before moving here about three years ago with his wife, who teaches literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. They live in Charles Village. We asked him about his book and writing.

How Dear Everybody was born: I had just finished a novel and had written one letter -- it's about apologizng for standing someone up on a date and wondering whether life would have turned out different if the date had happened. Over a week or 10-day period, I wrote about 100 letters. Then I did it again, and I had over 200 letters. Then I wrote the intro and the last will and testament.

On outlines: I try not to have a planned outline. I try not to know how something’s going to end.

On writing in snippets: I was trying to make each fragment its own finished piece. But I needed the readers, and wanted the readers, to supply certain things. I showed a few pages to a friend who writes here in Baltimore and he said, "You can’t do this."

Continue reading "Meet the Author: Michael Kimball" »

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)