McKinty's stock rises; analysts say buy

The Wall Street Journal profiles Detectives Beyond Borders favorite Adrian McKinty on the occasion of the U.S. release of I Hear the Sirens in the Street, a novel as good at its title.

The article also invokes McKinty's "Dead" trilogy: Dead I Well May Be, The Dead Yard, and The Bloomsday Dead, the books that got me reading McKinty.

Not many newspapers devote space to crime fiction these days, so props to the folks at the Wall Street Journal. Something is happening, and you know what it is, Mr. Dow-Jones.

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McKinty's novel The Cold Cold Ground recently won a 2013 Spinetingler Award for best novel. That's a worthy feat; those Spinetingler folks and the people who follow them are some of the sharper and more discerning minds in the crime community. And hey, we Spinetingler winners have to stick together.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Yes, Jasper Fforde does write crime fiction

The cover blurb for The Eyre Affair, first of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels, invokes Monty Python, Harry Potter, Stephen Hawking and Buffy the Vampire Slayer; the Wall Street Journal's reviewer was obviously doing some dedicated zeitgeist mining.

Neither that blurb nor any of the ones on the back cover mentions one of the richly imaginative Fforde's many inspirations: crime fiction — strange, since Thursday Next is a Literary Detective.

But that's all right. Several reviews quoted inside, safely away from the prying eyes of impulse buyers, number crime, suspense, hard-boiled mystery and, in a wince-inducing allusion, James Bond among the ingredients in Fforde's fantastic stew.

Having read Fforde's Nursery Crime novels, The Big Over Easy and The Fourth Bear, I am willing to bet this book, first in a series that comprises five novels so far, will be just as much fun and just as inventive in its integration of fantasy and science fiction with its obvious crime elements.

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Visit Jasper Fforde's Web site. Read what I had to say about The Big Over Easy and The Fourth Bear.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010