Crime Fiction Dossier

Interview with Otto Penzler

My friend John J. Miller conducts an interesting interview with Otto Penzler over at National Review Online. Otto talks about his new book, The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, and shares some details on the history of the pulps and the hard-boiled tradition.

Two things of note:

Otto's description of hard-boiled: "Hard-boiled fiction is tough, with a certain amount of violence. There’s occasionally a nihilistic overview, as there was in much of Hammett. There’s also a sentimental side, a real romantic [sense of], 'I’m the white knight and I’m going to defend justice and fairness and the pretty lady down the street.'" (quote may not be exact)

He also calls James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss "the single best private eye novel ever written."

3 Favorite Books of 2007 - Part 7

Read this post to see what this is all about. For more favorites, see here.

Barry Eisler, author of Requiem for an Assassin

I read a bunch of lot of great books earlier in the year, but the most recent are naturally, if unfairly, a little more on my mind. So:

• Mark Bowden - Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War. Read this for background for my new book, and it's an up-close, beautifully detailed, emotional roller coaster ride through the nightmare of modern urban combat.
• Charlie Huston - The Shotgun Rule. I have two words for this book: holy shit! I've heard great things about Charlie from several people I trust, and they were right: fascinating characters, staccato dialogue, and gripping violence, all of it set in motion by secrets that bind a family together, and could tear them apart.
• Steve Martin - Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life. A short, insightful, and (naturally enough) at times hilarious memoir of Steve Martin's stand-up years and rise to fame. I listened to Martin reading it on CD, which seems the ideal given the delivery talents of the author.

Christopher Reich, author of The Patriot's Club

• Robert Harris - The Ghost. One of the smartest, most suspenseful (and at times cuttingly funny) books I've read in years. Loved it!
• David Ignatius - Body of Lies. A class act from page 1 onward. Clean prose. Great story! As good as the best Forsyth and that says a lot in my book.
• Irwin Shaw - The Young Lions. I re-read it for the fourth time this year. My all time favorite WWII book. Shaw is such a great storyteller; the action scenes come to life with vivid detail. You are literally there - in Italy, in North Africa and during the Normandy invasion.

Kristen Weber, Senior Editor at New American Library

• Lisa Lutz - The Spellman Files
• Jacqueline Sheehan - Lost & Found. Just give me a dog in a book and I'm hooked - but this one had me not even minding my awful flight to Bouchercon in Anchorage.
• John Elder Robison - Look Me In The Eye: My Life with Asperger's

Cameron Hughes, book reviewer for CHUD and January Magazine

• John Connolly - The Unquiet. A funny, harrowing thriller with a very human heart and unlike most P.I. novels these days, it tries new things with un-reliable narration, the blending of the gothic horror story and gritty crime novel. A gem of a novel.
• Mark Coggins - Runoff. The most surprising novel of the year. Mark Coggins has been around for awhile and while his August Riordan novels are always great, Runoff takes it to the very next level. Paranoid about the Gore/Bush 2000 Election? You'll be twice as paranoid about the state of democracy and the election system after reading this bad boy.
• John Meaney - Bone Song (pub date 2008). A police procedural in a fantasy world, but un-like the Garret novels where it takes place in a world with classic fantasy elements like elves, Bone Song is decidedly steampunk, mixing magic and technology with the best of police procedural noir. Witches and other supernatural creatures co-mingle with scientists and Meaney's world is a truly alien one, with certain familiar aspects like a police force and our hero Donal Riordan is a great dark fantasy version of familiar cop characters like Harry Bosch and John Rebus. Zombies, werewolves, a truly alien fantasy setting that is powered by the corpses of the dead. Who could ask for more?

Brett Battles, author of The Cleaner

• Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye. A thrill ride from beginning to end. Read it in two sittings only because I was so tired and had to sleep.
• Haruki Murakami - After Dark. Murakami's not for everyone, but I'm a big fan. And this one does not disappoint.
• Travis Holland - The Archivist's Story. Moscow during the Stalinist period. I went into this one cautiously, but wow. Haunting. Sad. Insightful. I still think about this one.

 

What do you think of 3 Favorites?

Are you folks tired of 3 Favorites yet? 'Cause I've still got more to post.

Let me know what you think. (I'm going to post them anyway, but I'm curious if anyone is reading them.)

3 Favorite Books of 2007 - Part 6

Read this post to see what this is all about. For more favorites, see here.

Laura Lippman, author of What the Dead Know

• Richard Price - Lush Life (pub date 2008). I was lucky enough to read an ARE.
• Abigail Thomas - A Three Dog Life. Purchased on impulse in Kennedy Airport, on the basis of a Stephen King blurb. A section of this memoir had been excerpted in the New York Times' Modern Romance column, which is always being ridiculed at Gawker.com, and I was curious to see a book-length treatment of a story I thought had been told, more or less. Outstanding.
• Jack Pendarvis - The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure. I have flogged this book so relentlessly for much of 2007 that all I say is, "Why stop now?"

Gregg Hurwitz, author of The Crime Writer

• John Burdett - Bangkok 8
• Chuck Palahniuk - Lullaby
• Bill Bryson - The Mother Tongue

Patrick Anderson, reviewer for The Washington Post

• Charlie Huston - The Shotgun Rule
• Laura Lippman - What the Dead Know
• James Lee Burke - The Tin Roof Blowdown

Dave White, author of When One Man Dies

• Jason Pinter - The Guilty (pub date 2008). Just a book that kept me turning the pages the whole way through. Really great pace, really great premise.
• Duane Swierczynski - Severance Package (pub date 2008). A action packed roller coaster. One of my favorite books of all time. Period. I am truly lucky to have read this book early.
• Robert Crais - The Watchman. Just getting to see Pike on the center stage was well worth it. Fun read.

Ben Leroy, Publisher of Bleak House Books

• J.D. Salinger - Franny and Zooey
• Mikal Gilmore - Shot in the Heart
• Sebastian Junger - The Perfect Storm

3 Favorite Books of 2007 - Part 5

Read this post to see what this is all about. For more favorites, see here.

John Lescroart, author of The Suspect

• Ken Follett - The Pillars of the Earth
• Bill Buford - Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
• T. Jefferson Parker - Storm Runners

Otto Penzler, proprietor of New York's Mysterious Bookshop

• James Lee Burke - The Tin Roof Blowdown
• Thomas Perry, Silence
• Lee Child - Bad Luck and Trouble

Karen E. Olson, author of Dead of the Day

• Laura Lippman - What the Dead Know
• Peter Spiegelman - Red Cat
• Gillian Flynn - Sharp Objects. I was late to the party on this one, but I read it in June and it still haunts me.

Michael Homler, Editor at St. Martin's Press

• Jess Walter - The Zero. My absolute favorite this year. This book does and has everything in it.
• Michael Chabon - The Yiddish Policemen's Union. You can't go wrong with Chabon.
• David Hadjou - The Ten Cent Plague (pub date 2008). A great book about censorship and the history of the American comic book during an era few know a lot about except for the people that were there.

Victor Gischler, author of Shotgun Opera

• Joe Meno - The Boy Detective Fails
• Vicki Hendricks - Cruel Poetry
• Al Guthrie - Hard Man

Book of the Week: Your pick?

I've only read one book so far this month that I thought merited selection as the Book of the Week, and that was Sue Grafton's T is for Trespass, which I chose last week.

So I'm fresh out of picks! What do you think should be the Book of the Week? Have you read anything that's coming out around now that you really liked?

Happy holidays from the Naked Authors

This is just plain wrong.

(Courtesy of Paul Levine and the Naked Authors.)

3 Favorite Books of 2007 - Part 4

Read this post to see what this is all about. For more favorites, see here.

T. Jefferson Parker, author of Storm Runners

Fantastic books, all three.

• Marcus Sakey - The Blade Itself. My favorite crime novel [of the year].
• Cormac McCarthy - The Road. My favorite novel.
• Joan Didion - The Last Thing He Wanted. I was blessed to discover this, which blew me right out of my crib.

Julia Spencer-Fleming, author of All Mortal Flesh

• Lee Child - Bad Luck and Trouble. And not just because I saved Jack Reacher's life at the New England Crime Bake jury trial. The final tally was 1 to acquit, 1 to convict, and 18 hung! Since a hung jury is as good as an acquittal, even while Reacher admitted to two more murders on the stand, I considered the outcome quite fortuitous. Although what roomful of women is going to flip the switch on Jack Reacher?
• Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer - Agnes and the Hitman. They call it romantic adventure; I call it funny, sexy, compelling. Oh, to one day write a book in this league!
• Kate Braestrup - Here If You Need Me. The memoir of the first female chaplain in the Maine Warden's Service. So real; so moving.

Mark Tavani, Senior Editor at Ballantine Books

• Cormac McCarthy - The Road.
• Lawrence Wright - The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
• David Maraniss - Clemente

James Rollins, author of The Judas Strain

• Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner. Yes, I finally got around to reading this...loved it.
• Cormac McCarthy - The Road. Read this before it was an Oprah pick, and it's the first book in a long time that I read in one sitting. Brutal and brilliant.
• Allison Bechdel - Fun House. A literary graphic novel...spectacular.

Charlie Stella, author of Mafiya

• Craig McDonald - Head Games
• George V. Higgins - The Digger's Game
• Rick Marinick - In for a Pound

3 Favorite Books of 2007 - Part 3

Read this post to see what this is all about. For more favorites, see here.

Thomas Perry, author of Silence

Your rules for this list indicate that you don't like rules. So I'll live up to them. Here are three picks in no particular order.

• Joseph Mitchell - McSorley's Wonderful Saloon (with an introduction by Calvin Trillin). These are essays Mitchell wrote between his arrival in New York the day after the stock market crash in 1929 and his death in 1996. He was a fine prose stylist with a supernaturally good eye and ear.
• Azar Nafisi - Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. A brilliant professor of literature recounts her long struggle to run a seminar on Western works in her home after it became impossible to carry on at the university in post-revolution Iran. Her humanity and intelligence are demonstrated both in her contemplation of events, and in her discussions of the great works and why they're useful to real people in an emergency.
• Ray Banks - Saturday's Child (pub. date 2008). This is one of several new crime novels from the UK that Harcourt has been publishing lately, and it's terrific. Another is Hard Man by Allan Guthrie. The sensibilities of these writers are grim and funny, and the world they portray is just alien enough to us to make it worth exploring.

Richard Pine, literary agent and founding partner at InkWell Management

• Michael Chabon - The Yiddish Policemen's Union. A brilliant and completely original novel that's also a thoroughly entertaining read.
• Theresa Schwegel - Person of Interest. With this book I experienced the great joy of discovering the work of a novelist who is both new to me and wildly talented.
• Denise Mina - The Dead Hour. The second installment in the wonderful Paddy Meehan series; it's as good as any UK crime fiction I've read in years.

Paul Guyot, screenwriter and short story writer

• James Lee Burke - The Tin Roof Blowdown. It'll be a joke (again) if this doesn't win the Edgar.
• Stewart O'Nan - Last Night at the Lobster. A tiny little story where nothing happens, and it's brilliant.
• Michael Craig - The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King - Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time. Entertaining and suspenseful enough to be a novel, but every word is true.

Elaine Flinn, author of Deadly Vintage

• Judith Freeman - The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved. This was so engrossing, I spent most of my reading time (?!) catching up on Chandler, which led me back to Hemingway, le Carré and Cain -- which left little time for much else.

Ace Atkins, author of White Shadow

• Daniel Woodrell - Winter's Bone. An absolute little masterpiece.
• Elmore Leonard - Up in Honey's Room. Proving time and again why he's still the best.
• Dashiell Hammett - The Big Knockover. More than 80 years later, few can reach his level. He makes it look so damn easy.

3 Favorite Books of 2007 - Part 2

Read this post to see what this is all about. For more favorites, see here.

George Pelecanos, author of The Night Gardener

• Willy Vlautin - Northline (pub. date 2008). The second novel from Richmond Fontaine's bandleader is a stunner.
• Don Carpenter - Hard Rain Falling. Long out of print, a lost American classic. Get it any way you can.
• Richard Lange - Dead Boys. The best short story collection I've read in years. Lange's voice is singular and earned.

Ken Bruen, author of Priest

• Craig McDonald - Head Games
• Megan Abbot - Queenpin
• Duane Swierczynski - The Blonde

Hallie Ephron, Crime fiction book reviewer for the Boston Globe and author of Writing & Selling Your Mystery Novel

• Leonie Swann - Three Bags Full
• Donald Westlake - What's So Funny?
• William Landay - The Strangler

Keith Kahla, Senior Editor at St. Martin's Press

• Joe R. Lansdale - Lost Echoes. You don't have to have roots in East Texas to love Lansdale's writing, but it sure doesn't hurt.
• Juan Rulfo - Pedro Paramo (trans. by Margaret Sayers Peden). I read the earlier translation twenty five years ago and have been meaning to read this newer one for more than a decade. It's brilliant by the way.
• Colin Cotterill - Anarchy and Old Dogs. Could be any of the books in this series but this is the one I read most recently.

Steve Brewer, author of Cutthroat

• Charlie Huston - The Shotgun Rule. Probably the most memorable book I've read this year
• Olen Steinhauer - Victory Square. Fifth and final book in his incredible Eastern Europe series. I've read them all
• John Ridley - The Drift. A gritty 2002 novel about a deranged railroad bum who pulls himself together long enough to hunt for a missing girl. Unforgettable.