How a book for reluctant readers might help reluctant writers, plus a cover photo by me

My latest cover photo with accompanying novel has landed.  Linda L. Richards' When Blood Lies, like the book that supports  my previous cover shot, Reed Farrel Coleman's Love and Fear, is part of Orca Books' Rapid Reads line.

I've known the author for a few years, and I wrote about her 2008 novel Death Was the Other Woman, a Sam Spade-like story told from an Effie Perrine-like character's point of view. The Dashiell Hammett love continues here. The protagonist is named Nicole Charles, and the book's epigraph is a nod to The Thin Man.

Linda L. Richards

Rapid Reads target "a diverse audience, including ESL students, reluctant readers, adults who struggle with literacy and anyone who wants a high-interest quick read," and I can add reluctant writers to that potential audience.

I am one such, and the brevity of these books, plus their stripped-down narrative, vocabulary, or both make it easier for me to see how the authors build their plots and what they do to keep the story going. Since plot is not the strong point of my occasional efforts at fiction, I took mental notes as I read Richards' and Coleman's books. Perhaps other would-be writers who want to learn how to build a story could do the same.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

My cover arrives, with a book attached

My copy of Love and Fear, by Reed Farrel Coleman, arrived today, its cover a photo I shot a block from where I work.

I'll be interested in what's under that cover, too, both because Coleman is good at writing emotionally wounded P.I.s, and because the book is part of Orca Books' Rapid Reads line. The series consists of short novels for adults, inspired, Orca says, by the success of its previous books for younger, reluctant readers.

Allan Guthrie's 2007 novella Kill Clock persuaded me that such books can coincide nicely with my own fondness for concise narration in the Hammettian style. So I'll read this book with special interest, though probably more slowly than some readers, because I'll be busy sneaking peeks at the cover.

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The first link in this post will take you to the spring 2016 Rapid Reads releases. I also shot the cover for a second book in the series, Linda L. Richards' When Blood Lies.



© Peter Rozovsky 2016

What they said at the 2016 Edgar Awards, or Paretsky-Mosley for president

All photos by your humble blogkeeper, Peter Rozovsky

Star systems sometimes work. Two of the biggest stars at the Mystery Writers of America's 2016 Edgar Awards dinner also cut two of the evening's most impressive figures. Walter Mosley, honored as the organization's 2016 grand master, spoke with exemplary humility, passion, and great good humor, often about subjects this country finds it difficult to discuss.

Sara Paretsky

And Sara Paretsky, named a grand master five years ago and the MWA's outgoing president, reported on her term in a way that suggested she could run any damned thing she wanted to.  I was even more impressed after a discussion with her at a post-awards party. Mosley and Paretsky would make a dynamic, popular, and, for all I know, capable presidential ticket. They could flip a coin to decide who would be president and who vice. W. Paul Coates, who introduced Mosley, would make a fine press secretary.

Martin Edwards

Other speakers were thought-provoking and inspirational in the best possible non-maudlin way. Margaret Kinsman, a scholar who received the MWA's Raven Award, said: "I would like you storytellers to know we in academics are some of your biggest fans."

Martin Edwards, whose book The Golden Age of Murder won the Best Critical/Biographical Edgar, said he had "tried to address the rather patronizing attitude ... to these thoughtful mysteries of the 1920s."

Janet Rudolph

It was good to see Janet Rudolph receive the Ellery Queen Award. I've written for her Mystery Readers Journal, and she's been a friend to Detectives Beyond Borders for going on 10 years and to the crime fiction community at large for two decades before that.  And it was pleasant to see that Reed Farrel Coleman took the loss of his status as crime fiction's best basketball player with something like good grace.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Walter Mosley

(Find a complete list of the 2016 Edgar Award nominees and winners at the Edgars Web site.)

Duane Swierczynski

Megan Abbott

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

My third and fourth book covers as a photographer: The Year of the Orca

Linda L. Richards' novel When Blood Lies sees the light of day in April (but is available for preorder now), with a cover photograph by me.

From left: Me, Linda L. Richards.

The publishers are the good people at Orca Books, who have also just brought out Reed Farrel Coleman's Love and Fear, with a cover photograph by me. 2016: Feel the Orca.

Linda and Reed join Ed Gorman and Charlie Stella on the select but growing list of authors for whose books I have shot covers. That's a good bunch, and you should be reading all of them. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Reed Farrel Coleman's reconciliation street, or, the ways authors end a series

Reed Farrel Coleman's The Hollow Girl is full of characters who turn out not quite as awful as the reader has been led to expect, and its protagonist, Moe Prager, achieves, if not redemption, then reconciliation with his past.

Fair enough; the novel comes billed as the last of the nine Prager books, and a number of its features, not least the novel's ending, point in that direction. I'll spoil little if I reveal that Prager spends good chunks of the book coming to terms with, and getting himself clear of, aspects of his old life.

That's how Coleman decided to end a series. How do other writers do it? How have your favorite crime writers brought series to an end?

*

The Hollow Girl looks to Moe Prager's past with its plentiful references to Prager's previous cases. It reminded me in this respect of Richard Stark's Butcher's Moon, which brought back a number of character's from Stark previous Parker novels and looked for a while as if it were going to kill off one of the main supporting characters. Indeed, Butcher's Moon was the last Parker novel for 23 years.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014  

No small crimes

Let's begin before the beginning. Here's a bit of Reed Farrel Coleman's introduction to The Lineup 4: Poems on Crime:

"I’ve heard it said many times by veterans of war, by cops, firemen, surgeons, that they never felt more alive than when death was close at hand. Humans are never more human or less human than when mortality is on the line. ... When viewed through that prism, the marriage of crime and poetry makes perfect sense. Poetry has its roots in heightened emotion, in crystal clarity. Poetry has always been about life’s lines and edges, the tensions between love and hate, ugliness and beauty, exaltation and despair. The poet’s job has always been to focus the laser, to distill, to sharpen, to filter and translate for the rest of us."

The poet focuses the laser. Makes sense, doesn't it? Joseph Brodsky once said as much. Americans too busy to read poetry? Nonsense, he replied (if I recall correctly); poetry, packing so much truth into so few words, is perfect for today's busy reader.

Poetry is efficient; poetry gets to what's important, and it gets there fast. Maybe that's why The Lineup's poems feel intimate, like David Goodis' non-heroes huddled in lonely Philadelphia cellars. Here's John Stickney's "Creation":

Make me a long coat of a dark cigarette color
Make the cities dark
No one will notice I am ash
Make me a dark fist
Clenched and subtly bitten
Watching the village’s one prostitute show a vast
Though never sentimental
Sympathy

See what I mean?

No one saves the world in these poems, no one takes over an entire town, knocks over a bank, terrorizes a city, or slaughters a classroom full of students. That would be too easy; that stuff is for the newspapers. These poems are about small crimes or about the quiet, intimate moments before and after big ones. Or rather, they remind us that for those most intimately involved — victims, perpetrators, survivors, a son who prays for vengeance on the man who mugged his father — any crime can radically alter the world. There are no small crimes.

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The Lineup 4, edited by Gerald So, Reed Farrel Coleman, Sarah Cortes and Richie Narvaez, is available from Poetic Justice Press.

Gerald has asked members of the crime-fiction community to write about The Lineup each day in April, National Poetry Month in the United States (and Canada). Kevin Burton Smith, Bill Crider and Patti Abbott were up before me. Here's the full month's schedule.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Death in Brooklyn

He's a jovial fellow, but I've long associated Reed Farrel Coleman with death. Coleman talks about how witnessing a death in the street influenced his writing, and he told a Bouchercon 2009 panel that "I find nothing funny about murder."

This doesn't mean his fiction is devoid of deadpan wisecracks, but none is about death, dying or killing. Soul Patch, the fourth of Coleman's Moe Prager mysteries, offers this somber flight of imagination on how we deal with death and how things might be different:

"When everyone was gone, the three of us stood around watching the backhoe driver unceremoniously dumping bucketfuls of dirt on Larry's coffin. Got me thinking about how disconnected we were from death. It was easy to blame drugs, movies, TV, and video games for violence and the devaluation of human life. Bullshit! The real culprit was the lack of intimacy with death. When you're unfamiliar with death, you're disrespectful of life. No one dies in his or her bed anymore. ... Why should any of us respect death when we make it as remote as the mountains of the moon? I have often wondered whether it would be a little harder for a killer to pull the trigger or shove the blade in a second time if he had washed his dead brother's body or dug his mother's grave. What if he had watched his dad die an inch at a time from cancer and sat by the deathbed day after day after day? What if there was no church, no funeral home, no hospital, no way to pass the responsibilities of death off to strangers. How much harder would murder be?"

Kind of a serious flip side to John Lennon's "Imagine," isn't it?
© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Lines

I don't know what to read, so I'm reading two books at once. Here's a good line from the beginning of each:

"Gustav the Ripper? Werthen doubted it."

and

"We had hit the inevitable impass (sic), that stage in marriage when each day is like a long drive through Nebraska."

(See a related post on the joys of reading here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Tower

One advantage of a book cowritten by an Irish and a Jewish author is the enhanced possibility of good Irish and Jewish humor. The concision of this novel occasionally means both in the same scene:

"`Your father and books, don't get me started.'

"As if she needed an excuse. She was Jewish, she was born started. To say they were a poor match? Man, they were the worst marriage on the block and we had some beauties there. See the street on a Saturday night, after a ballgame and the brews had been sunk? Buckets of blood and recrimination.

"Did the cops come?

"Yeah, right.

"Most of the participants were cops.

"Mick neighborhood, what'd you expect?"

I'm just halfway through this short novel, but that's enough to note that it's hard, violent and funny without, however, making light of violence. It also has much to say about friendship and loyalty and, though it has the feel of an old-time gangster story, its setting is very much of our own globalized world ("Nick discovered he had a talent for boosting cars. He made Boyle and a lot of Third World bastards happy.").

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

More great first lines

Two days ago I wrote about my haul of five books at Murder by the Book in Houston (since augmented by four more titles).

I've been flipping through my new acquisitions feeling like a kid on Christmas morning. The first three of them reminded me how important it is to grab the reader from the start, whether with the title, the opening line, or both -- and how thrilling it is to be so grabbed.

Colin Cotterill's Aging Disgracefully is subtitled "Short Stories About Atrocious Old People." Know that, and you'll love the title of the first story: "Gran Larceny."

Bill James' Off-Street Parking pulled me right in by addressing and challenging me directly: "I'd like to put you right on something. OK?"

Tower, by Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman, offers two grabber opening lines, the first to a short prologue, the second to the novel proper:

"Griffin coughed blood into my face when I made to slip the chains under his shoulders."

and

"`He beats me.'"

What are your favorite openings? How did they pull you into the story? Why did you like them?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009