One city, one crime novel — but which novel?

I have in the past gently chided the Free Library of Philadelphia for the high-mindedness of its "One City, One Book" choices. Why can't Philadelphia do what other cities and institutions have done and sneak a Chandler or a Hammett in there once in a while?

Hammett has long enjoyed popular and critical esteem, and his work, I was surprised to learn recently, can appeal to younger readers. Julie M. Rivett, Hammett's granddaughter and recent editor, told me last week: "I talk to kids about Hammett. The Maltese Falcon has helped reach some reluctant readers."  Teenagers, she said, responded especially to the novel's celebrated "Flitcraft Parable," a story of sudden, cataclysmic, arbitrary change.

Alan Glynn's novels could serve as a springboard for discussion of corporate and government infiltration into our lives. Kevin McCarthy's could meet American interest in its immigrant populations and their histories. So could Paco Ignacio Taibo II's. Same with Andrea Camilleri's, which would also tally nicely with the boom of interest in cable television food shows and diversity in dining. Want a contemporary view of China? How about Qiu Xiaolong's Death of a Red Heroine?

If Philadelphia wants to stay local, why not David Goodis' Black Friday? Sympathy for the downtrodden. Survival against daunting odds. Finding one's own destiny.  Black Friday is full of big themes, the sort of thing to generate big discussion and draw in even readers who have not read the novel. Or how about Hammett's Red Harvest? That book would lend itself easily and deliciously to discussion of Philadelphia's history of rotten politics.

Or what about— But that's where you come in. What crime novel or story collection would you have your city, county, province, state, or country read? And why? It's not enough that the book be good or great. It must have the potential to appeal to readers young and old, to crime fans as well as to those who normally don't touch the stuff, and to those who might need a nudge to pick up a book in the first place. How does your choice meet these criteria? How will it grab readers the way "The Flitcraft Parable" snared Julie Rivett's teenage existentialists?
 
 © Peter Rozovsky 2013

Form and content on book covers

I was a bit of a formalist when I studied art history.

With that in mind, see if you can figure out why I like these covers of three of James R. Benn 's Billy Boyle novels — especially if you've read the books.


© Peter Rozovsky 2010

He wrote the book on e-books

(At right, a page from the world's largest book. No word whether the book is available for download.)

Apropos of recent discussion about e-books and short crime fiction comes this interview with Jay Hartman of Untreed Reads, courtesy of an interested reader.

As you might guess from its name, the company publishes e-books. To this publishing outsider, it seemed that Hartman had much of interest to say. Particularly salutary is the reminder that "market forces" is a deceptively benign term. A market winds up the way it does because of specific actions that people take, or do not take when they could or should have.

Among the highlights:

"Untreed Reads didn't initially set out to have such a large focus on short form, but it just happened and the response has been HUGE.

"The overseas markets are especially hungry for shorts."

and

"Every retailer out there claiming to offer 70% royalties has some catch: the title has to be purchased in the US, the title has to be priced at $2.99 or more, there's a fee for transmitting the story, there's a fee for processing the credit cards ... SOMETHING. And in those cases the author SHOULD be getting the 70%, because the retailers aren't doing any publicity, promotion, marketing or anything else to help them get the word out. They're not designing covers, they're not formatting the title."

and

"Do you know that before Amazon created DTP the average price of an ebook over a ten year span was $5.99 and nobody had any problem paying for it? Then, places like Amazon and Lulu made it possible for anyone to publish their own work. What happened was a huge influx of material into the market filled with poor writing, bad grammar, typos, bad layouts and all sorts of other things that set the ebook industry back years.

"People weren't willing to trust they were going to get good content because they kept picking up titles that were poorly written and filled with flaws. Then, along came $9.99 pricing which only made things worse. Authors, fearing a backlash to both the $9.99 pricing and the badly written stuff that was hurting the industry, panicked and started setting their prices ridiculously low in an attempt to woo back a jaded audience. The result? The market that it is now. The market still has poorly written material that anyone can throw up there, but it also has some of the BEST material to come along in a long time. After all this, it's not the PUBLISHERS who caused anything over $2.99 to be considered expensive, it's the AUTHORS."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Writers on the wall

A local outlet of one of the major chain bookshops displays in its café two murals of great writers at a café of their own, coffee being almost as serious a pursuit as Literature.

Alone among the depicted authors, John Steinbeck shows something approaching a healthy complexion. He also smiles knowingly and raises an eyebrow at William Faulkner, who gazes out over the spectators' heads, as remote as Jesus in Piero della Francesca's Resurrection.

At the next table, I.B. Singer smiles and Pablo Neruda rubs his chin (his own, not Singer's) and daydreams with a vague, insinuating grin. And that's it for anything like gaiety or amusement. The rest of the gang is pasty-faced, green and sullen. That may be fine for Henry James, but James Joyce? Dorothy Parker? Oscar Wilde, for the love of God?

Why is this? Great writers create worlds, and since when does the world not include laughter, fun, and skin that looks as if blood has recently circulated beneath it? Why did Barnes & Noble choose to depict the authors as such a solemn, worried lot, like Thomas Hart Benton (top) or George Tooker (left)?

In post-literate America, writing, at least of the Serious Literary variety, apparently retains a vestigial aura of solemnity and awe even as the folks in the real café below the mural read the New Yorker, Symptoms and Remedies and Obsessive Compulsive Order for Dummies, not a novel in sight.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Niche marketing

What's your favorite example of blatantly money-grubbing niche marketing in the book trade? (Your title need not include chicken soup.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010