A Writer's Life

The Edgars

One of the great things about the Edgars, besides meeting so many terrific authors, is all the free books you get when the ceremony is over. I just lugged up to my room two bulging bags of books to send back home. But you don't want to hear about that, you want to hear about the Awards...

Well, as Edgar chair, I've known who the winners are for a while now and I nearly bit off my tongue not leaking the news to Tana French and Susan Straight that they were winners when I met them at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books last weekend. Also Matt Nix, executive producer of BURN NOTICE, won as well...news that my brother Tod (who is writing the BURN NOTICE books) and my publisher Kristen Weber (who is publishing the BURN NOTICE books) would have loved to have known in advance. That's Tana and Matt in the photo to the left and the Southern California contingent of MWA in the photo to the right... Jim Warren, Naomi Hirahara, Leslie Klinger, Pat Smiley, Doug Lyle, Deborah  Atkinson and yours truly.

Al Roker was a funny host, and he even said "fuck" a few times, which is kind of weird to hear coming from him. As a number of people noted, he was like a thinner, blacker, Tod Goldberg.  I sat with my agent Gina Maccoby and my publisher, which is always nice, and I did a lot of schmoozing before the event, though I was too tired to hang out in the bar afterwards.

Galleycat's Ron Hogan has posted more pictures from the pre-Edgars reception here.

A complete list of winners follows after the jump.

Killing Castro

Hard Case Crime is reprinting a long-lost Lawrence Block novel called KILLING CASTRO. It's a book Block wrote under a pseudonym fifty years ago. And if this excerpt doesn't whet your appetite for more, you don't have a pulse:

The taxi, one headlight out and one fender crimped, cut through downtown Tampa and headed into Ybor City. Turner sat in the back seat with his eyes half closed. He was a tall, thin ramrod of a man who was never tense and yet never entirely relaxed. His hair was the color of damp sand, his eyes steel gray. His lips were thin and he rarely smiled. He was not smiling now.

The stub of a cigarette burned between the second and third fingers of his right hand. The fingers were yellow-brown from the thousands and thousands of cigarettes which had curled their tar-laden smoke around them. He looked at the cigarette, raised it to his lips for a final drag. The smoke was strong. He rolled down the window and flipped the butt into the street.

Night. The street lights were on in Ybor City, Tampa’s Latin quarter. Taverns winked seductively in red and green neon. Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Negroes walked the streets, congregated around pool halls and small bars. Here and there butt-twitching hustlers were rushing the season, looking to catch an early trick before the competition got stiff. Turner watched all this through the taxi window, his thin lips not smiling, not frowning. He had bigger things on his mind than corner loungers or early-bird whores.

He was thirty-four years old, and he was wanted for murder.

What's amazing about it is that he was so good from the get-go, long before he would achieve all his well-earned honors and accolades.

Sisters-in-Crime Wrestles with POD

Now that anybody with a credit card and the email address of a Print-on-Demand company thinks they can call themselves a publisher or a published author, professional writers organizations have been forced to carefully define what it means to them to be a "publisher" or a  "published author" to deal with the issue. Now even Sisters-in-Crime is acknowledging the problem.

It seems that the abundance of POD titles in the Sisters-in-Crime's annual  "Books-in-Print" catalog has rendered the publication useless to the booksellers and librarians it was intended for. As a result, Sisters-in-Crime is changing their rules about which titles can be listed in the publication. 

According to a member mailing by Sisters-in-Crime president Roberta Isleib, from now on only books that meet "marketplace standards" will be included in the listing.

Following are the criteria for a book that meets marketplace standards:

Is returnable.

Is offered at standard industry discounts

Is available through national wholesaler, such as Ingram or Baker and Taylor

Is competitively priced

Has a minimum print run of 1,000 copies

(We believe that the minimum print run of 1,000 copies shows a publisher's intent to place the book in the marketplace. It is the same number used by Authors Coalition to determine a 'published book.’)

Any titles that do not meet one of the standards may be petitioned on a case-by-case basis, so long as all other requirements are met.

[...]POD reprints of titles that met industry standards when originally published will be included in the print BIP.

The Mystery Writers of America enacted guidelines this year that excludes print-on-demand "publishers" from their Approved Publishers list. There was, predictably, a lot of foot-stomping in the blogosphere among the POD crowd, who predicted a mass exodus of members from the MWA as a result of the changes. In fact, the exact opposite occurred --- the change actually resulted in a surge in membership renewals and new memberships. We now have more members than ever before.

But unlike the MWA, Sisters-in-Crime has a much more flexible membership policy and includes among its active members many people who've had their manuscripts printed using a POD press and consider themselves "published authors." Expect an uproar.

Tired of the Cliches

I love mysteries, but I'm burned out on all the cliches. I won't read about one more drunken, divorced cop with a tragic past.  I wish more authors had the same attitude as author Laura Wilson.  She writes in RED HERRINGS, the UK Crimes Writers Association newsletter (and in Shots Magazine), that she consciously avoided the cliches when she started her new series:

I decided, at the outset, that I did not want DI Stratton to be a conventionally flawed crime protagonist. He is neither a drunk, a compulsive gambler, nor an adulterer, and his psyche isn't scarred by past personal tragedy -- but nor is he a hero of lonely integrity walking the mean streets or a Dixon of Dock Green-like, salt-of-the-earth embodiment of law and order. He is an ordinary man with a realistic background [...] lower middle class and father of two, he lives with his family and works in the West End. He is an intelligent, humorous man, but with rudimentary education; cynical, but kind and humane; happily married, but with a wandering eye. Above all, he is pragmatic.

S is for Sloppy Editing

I have a theory that when an author becomes really, really big, the editors don't read the manuscripts very closely, if at all. That's especially true with Robert B. Parker. His books are usually laced with errors (for instance, in his latest Jesse Stone novel, STRANGER IN PARADISE, the spelling of the name of a big estate keeps changing).  What brings this to my mind today is a sentence on page 169 of Sue Grafton's S IS FOR SILENCE that really boggles me. Her heroine Kinsey Milhone is in a sleazy motel room and makes this observation:

My bedspread smelled musty, and I was happy I didn't see the article about dust mites until the following week.

How could she have been happy about something that hadn't happened yet?!

Things Aren't Bleak for Bleak House

The MWA has been criticized in some quarters for favoring the big houses over small presses. But as Publisher's Weekly notes, the Edgar nominations this year tell a different story:

To nobody's surprise, when the Mystery Writers of America announced the finalists for the 2008 Edgar Awards last week  titles from the large New York houses dominated the eight (out of a total of 13) categories dealing with books. But one small Wisconsin press is more than holding its own among the 35 books and five short stories selected as this year's Edgar Awards nominees. Three of the 15 titles released this past year by Bleak House Books in Madison, an imprint of Big Earth Books, have been nominated for 2008 Edgar Awards in three different categories: Soul Patch by Reed Farrel Coleman (Best Novel), Head Games by Craig McDonald (Best First Novel), and "Blue Note" by Stuart M. Kaminsky from the Chicago Blues collection (Best Short Story).

Bleak House isn't the only small press represented on the Edgar list this year. There are also titles from McFarland & Co, Serpent's Tail, Hard Case Crime, Rookery Press, Level Best Books, Akashic,  Clarion, American Girl, and Busted Flush.

MWA'S Definition of "Self-Published"

The Mystery Writers of America has revised the language of their definition of "self-publication" for membership application, publisher approval, and Edgar eligibility. The changes were made for greater clarity and specificity. 

“Self-published” or “cooperatively published” works include, but are not limited to:

 a) Those works for which the author has paid all or part of the cost of publication, marketing, distribution of the work, or any other fees pursuant to an agreement between the author and publisher, cooperative publisher or book packager;

b) Works printed and bound by a company that does not sell or distribute the work to brick-and-mortar bookstores;

c) Those works published by a privately held publisher or in collaboration with a book packager wherein the writer has a familial relationship with the publisher, editor, or any managerial employee, officer, director or owner of the publisher or book packager;

d) Those works published by companies or imprints that do not publish other authors;

e) Those works published by a publisher or in collaboration with a book packager in which the author has a direct or indirect financial interest;

f) Those works published in an anthology or magazine in which the author is also an editor, except an anthology or magazine for which the author is a guest editor.

g) Those works published in an anthology or magazine wherein the author has a familial relationship with the editor or publisher.

Good News for Mankell Fans

Variety reports that Kenneth Branagh has signed to star as Inspector Wallander in the BBC's series of TV movie adaptations of Henning Mankell's novels "Firewall," "Sidetracked," and "One Step Behind."
It won't be the first time Wallander has hit the screen...there have already been 13 Wallander films made for the Scandinavian market, three for theatrical release and 10 for TV.  Wallander has been played by Krister Henriksson (left) and Rolf Lassgard (right).

A Footnote to the Ardai Issue

Lately, Hard Case Crime editor and publisher Charles Ardai has gone to great pains to claim he's not really an editor and publisher...and that his book SONGS OF INNOCENCE, which was published under his imprint, isn't self-published and therefore should be eligible for Edgar consideration.
I guess he forgot about the interview he gave for this month's issue of Mystery News about the evolution  of Hard Case Crime:

...and [Max Phillips] went off and mocked up some dummy covers to show me what it might look like if we did publish our own books in the old style. I'd worked as an editor of mystery anthologies for years, so it was simple for me to go to my bookshelves and compile a list of some great and undeservedly forgotten novels it would be fun for us to reprint. And Max and I are both writers ourselves, so we agreed we'd each write a book of our own for the line, guaranteeing that we'd have at least two original novels along with all the reprints.

Dishing on Disher

Perry Middlemiss clued me in to this interview with Garry Disher, the author of the Wyatt novels. I'm a huge fan of the Wyatt books, which I read in one week after novelist Scott Phillips made me buy them all when we were browsing in a bookstore together. Although there are six Wyatt novels and they read like one, big continuous story, so you really must read them in order...if you can find them. They have been out-of-print for years.

Wyatt is an Australian version of Donald Westlake's Parker, which was Disher's inspiration. Disher says:

Yes, Wyatt was inspired by the 1960s Parker novels of Donald Westlake (writing as Richard Stark). I’ve acknowledged this several times in interviews. In fact, I think we crime writers build on the traditions and authors who have come before us — not copying or stealing, but adapting and building on. I liked the cool, focussed, meticulous air of Parker, and I liked the crime-from-the-inside nature of the books, and started with that kind of character and approach when I set out to write crime fiction (I’d already had “literary” novels and stories published). I didn’t want to create another kind of private eye or cop, it had been done before. I know I write about a cop in the Challis novels, but they differ from other types of cop novels in several senses: a regional rather than a city setting; a main cop, but also an ensemble cast of other cops; a main crime, but also several minor crimes; the public, workplace and private lives of the characters; an interest in the sociology of a region.

[...]we never learn much about him (and nor should we), but I think he’s a more rounded and complex character that Parker. Also, the Wyatt novels are longer than, and structured differently from, the Parker novels. Ultimately, Wyatt and his capers are inventions, my inventions, not mere copies. Yes, they’re a tribute, and I had fun with the Parker model, but I worked hard at the writing and ensured they succeeded on their own terms.

The best news in the interview is that Disher is finally working on a new Wyatt novel after a long foray into police procedurals (with the Inspector Challis novels). I can't wait.