Crime Fiction Dossier

Ask the Critic: Can you help identify these books?

Readers wrote in asking for help identifying books. Both of these questions stumped me, but maybe you can help.

First one:

A few years ago, maybe three or four at most, there was a crime/mystery novel out in hardback and the cover was white with walnut shells on it (like a shell game).

Second one:

It's crime fiction with a little comedy twist here and there, and it's set in Texas. It is also the first book in a series. Is the story of this dude, his ex wife tells him their daughter is disappeared so he sets off with his best friend who is a huge gay black dude named Lawrence or Leonard or something like that.. they find out their daughter is involved with a gang of bikers and some sort of illegal activities. then his wife joins them, and i remember the finale being them trying to stake out the bikers or something similar. there's a chapter when the dude goes and try to get some guns from some hillbilly and he rescues an armadillo that was used as a target, and the dillo ends up being his friend's pet. also, one of the two dudes is either a PI or an ex cop, if I remember correctly.

Ask the Critic: "Best of" List for 2008?

C. T. Henry asks:

Are you going to post a BEST OF list for 2008?

A couple weeks ago I went over my reading list for the year to narrow it down to a list of the ten best...And the truth is, I couldn't really come up with a list. I read a lot of books in the past year that were good, but very few that were great. So the selections feel like they'd be even more arbitrary than usual.

Overall, it seems like 2008 was an okay, but not great year for crime fiction. I think it was an especially weak year for debut novels. (On that short list I put together, there was only one debut novel.)

I enjoyed a lot of books by the usual suspects -- Connelly, Pelecanos, Lippman, Block, Ferrigno, Crais, etc. -- but putting together a list of books with familiar names like that just doesn't seem very useful. You already know those people's books and know that they're good.

However, I think I can probably come up with three books that knocked my socks off, so maybe I'll do another "3 Favorites" poll instead.

Ask the Critic: Can you identify this book?

A librarian in Illinois writes in:

A library patron is looking for an author whose detective is a bumbler who does everything wrong; may be Irish or British; his boss drives a Jaguar; and in an early book, a suspect pees in the front seat of the detective's car.

It sounds vaguely familiar to me, but I don't know what it is. Can you help?

Ask the Critic: Why don't you review self-published novels?

An anonymous self-published author asks:

Why don't you review self-published novels along with the traditionally published books?

The short answer is: time and quality.

The long answer is that I don't have enough time to read but a fraction of the trade-published crime novels released in the U.S. each year. That number is somewhere around 2000 books per annum. Out of all those I read maybe 120 or so -- figure 10 a month*. The other 94% of crime novels, I don't have a chance to read.

That's a stunning number of books that it's simply impossible for me to get to. Now imagine if I were to add all the self-published novels to that figure. I can't imagine how many of them there are, but surely that number is in the high hundreds if not thousands. When would I have the time to read any of them? So I have to draw a line somewhere. (More later on why I draw the line here.)

The second aspect of time has to do with reviews. I review five books each month in my Chicago Sun-Times column. It takes a lot of books to get down to that five; at a minimum the 10 books per month mentioned earlier. Since newspapers generally won't run reviews of self-published novels, and since the majority of my reading is driven by my review obligations, I can't afford to give up any of the slots in my reading schedule to them.

The other factor, and this is why I draw the line where I do, is quality. In my experience the overall quality level of self-published fiction is not sufficiently high for the books to be given serious consideration. This is not to say that all self-published fiction is bad. The law of probability alone would indicate that at least some of it must be readable. But the vast majority of it is not.

There are many reasons for this (e.g., self-published fiction has no third-party vetting, most of it is not professionally edited, much of it was already rejected by agents/editors for a variety of reason), but the bottom line is that most self-published fiction just isn't very good.

I used to consider self-published fiction -- I even reviewed two books that I can recall. But those were the only two out of scores of books that I looked at. The rest weren't worthy of consideration. And nothing I've seen in the intervening years has compelled me to change my mind.

So that's it in a nutshell. I wish I had the time to read more books or were somehow able to read faster. But even if that were the case, I'd have to increase my productivity by an order of magnitude before I could even consider adding self-published novels to the mix.

*Note: Over the past three years I've averaged about 13 books read per month. That accounts for the new crime fiction mentioned above, along with older crime fiction and a limited amount of science fiction, non-fiction and other assorted stuff. But not much of it.

Ask the Critic: What is an ARC?

Chris in the UK asks:

What on earth are ARCs?

I sometimes forget that readers of this blog might not be hip to all the publishing lingo. So let me explain...

An ARC is an Advanced Reading Copy (also known as a bound galley or uncorrected proof). It's a pre-publication edition of a book that is printed by the publisher to send out to reviewers, producers, booksellers and other trade people in hopes of generating reviews, word-of-mouth and orders.

ARCs are softcover editions, printed in limited quantities and usually sent out 3-6 months before the book is available in stores. They are generally 99% the same as the finished product, although sometimes they are edited slightly -- either for content or, more typically, for typos, grammar, etc. -- before publication.

Ask the Critic: Reviews of non-crime fiction

An anonymous reader in Huntsville, Alabama writes:

"Why do you never review bass fishing books?"

I initially assumed that "Hooked in Huntsville" (as I like to think of him) was just a joker, and not a very funny one. But our subsequent email exchange indicated that he was indeed serious.

So it's a good question: Why don't I review books other than crime novels?

I do occasionally write about a SF or Fantasy novel or book of non-fiction, but it's true that I don't do it often. The simplest reason is that I don't really have much time to read things other than crime fiction (which is my bread and butter genre). I can't keep up with more than a fraction of the mysteries and thrillers published each month, let along try to read anything else.

More than that, publishers rarely send me other kinds of books. And I have a hard and fast rule: I only review books that publishers (or authors) send me. If I have to buy it, I ain't writing about it.

But the bottom line is that I'm open to writing about other kinds of books. (Especially other genre fiction, like SF, horror, etc.) Someone just needs to convince the publishers to send them to me.

Now I have a question for my Alabama reader: Other than the intended target, how does bass fishing differ from other types of fishing? Is the bass in and of itself such a wonderful fish that it deserves its own sub-genre of fishing?

Ask the Critic: Dashiell Hammett

Reshma Thomas writes in to ask:

Have you ever read any works from Dashiell Hammett? If so, what do you think of him as a person and as a writer? Are there any authors that remind you of him?

I have had limited, but enjoyable experience with Hammett's work. He was a very talented and influential writer -- his book The Maltese Falcon in particular had a huge effect on the development of popular fiction in the U.S.

He essentially created the genre of the American detective novel -- a distinct, more realistic and harder-edged form than that of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes -- and helped to garner literary regard for the mystery novel more generally.

All the subsequent American detective writers, from Raymond Chandler to Mickey Spillane and John D. MacDonald, all the way up to Sue Grafton, Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly, owe him a debt. You can see echoes of what Hammett created in all of their works.

Hammett drew in some ways on his personal life -- where he had been a Pinkerton detective -- in his writings, but I don't know much about his life other than that.

Ask the Critic: Can you identify this book?

I couldn't... But maybe you can.

The main character is an L.A. detective (recently promoted, I believe), and the book starts quickly with him witnessing the murder of a criminal by his senior peers, iirc in a parking garage, and he is troubled by how to handle it. This is one plot, intertwined with that of a serial killer on the loose. I cannot recall how it all comes together, but basically the young detective winds up in a race to catch the serial killer before being killed or framed by his senior peer detectives, and also to catch the killer before the killer catches him. He tracks the killer to Europe, is helped by a detective over there (Russian I believe). Another sub-plot is this detective has an adult sister who had some trauma so he cares after her... and it turns out the killer is some sort of Duke or something who is about to marry her in Europe..and a big blazing shoot-out in a train garage was one scene. Also the end came together at a museum.

Sounds pretty silly the way I described it, but it actually was a pretty good read...kept me turning pages...

Any ideas?

Ask the Critic: Book trailers -- yea or nay?

A reader wrote in yesterday to ask my opinion of book trailers. I answered that I don't think very much of them. In my opinion, they're not terribly effective and probably a waste of money. (Although, if they can be produced cheaply, they probably won't hurt.)

When pressed for an explanation of why I think they don't work, I shared the following reasons (off the top of my head):

• Most book trailers are amateurish.
• They appear to be advertising something other than a book (e.g., a movie) and are thus confusing to the consumer.
• Most of the audience is unfamiliar with or unaware of book trailers, and thus their impact is minimal.
• Most readers don't seem to like them very much. I've never heard readers talk about them and never seen them generate word of mouth.
• They're a form of "push marketing" and thus have to be combined with additional forms of marketing in order to be effective -- but most authors don't use them that way. They post the trailer on their website and on YouTube and that's it. But how is the prospective audience supposed to find them?

I do think book trailers can be somewhat effective when used as part of a larger marketing campaign -- the kind of thing done for bestselling and other high profile authors. But for most writers, especially midlist and debut writers, I believe they're better off spending their (very limited) promotional dollars elsewhere.

But what do you think? Do you like book trailers? Do you ever watch them? Have you ever bought a book based on one?

Ask the Critic: Time spent reading/writing

C.T. Henry asks:

How many books do you read in a week?  How much time do you spend writing vs. reading?

I already shared some numbers in my post summing up my stats for 2007. But, in general, I try to read 3 books per week. I didn't quite make it there this last year, but I was close. It takes me a fair bit of reading time to get to that, as I'm not an especially fast reader.

I don't spend much time writing reviews in an average week. Although I'm a slow reader, I'm a fast writer, and can produce a column or single-book review in a couple of hours at most. So I spend far more time reading the books than writing the reviews.