Mystery Writing

My friend Jerrilyn Farmer has teamed up with Joan Rivers to write MURDER AT THE ACADEMY AWARDS. The Pocket Books hardcover comes out in February and is the first in an intended series of "Red Carpet Murder Mystery" novels that draw on Rivers' showbiz background.  Jerrilyn has a pretty wicked sense of humor herself so I'm sure these books are going to be a lot of fun.

The Missoula Independent solicited memories and anecdotes about author James Crumley from the folks who knew him best… bartenders, drinking buddies, and fellow authors:

The newspaper was swamped with contributions and couldn't publish them all. But you can find each one, in their entirety, here. (Thanks to Richard Wheeler for the link).

One of the great things about the Edgars, besides meeting so many terrific authors, is all the free books you get when the ceremony is over. I just lugged up to my room two bulging bags of books to send back home. But you don’t want to hear about that, you want to hear about the Awards…

Well, as Edgar chair, I’ve known who the winners are for a while now and I nearly bit off my tongue not leaking the news to Tana French and Susan Straight that they were winners when I met them at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books last weekend. Also Matt Nix, executive producer of BURN NOTICE, won as well…news that my brother Tod (who is writing the BURN NOTICE books) and my publisher Kristen Weber (who is publishing the BURN NOTICE books) would have loved to have known in advance. That’s Tana and Matt in the photo to the left and the Southern California contingent of MWA in the photo to the right…
Jim Warren, Naomi Hirahara, Leslie Klinger, Pat Smiley, Doug Lyle, Deborah  Atkinson and yours truly.

Al Roker was a funny host, and he even said "fuck" a few times, which is kind of weird to hear coming from him. As a number of people noted, he was like a thinner, blacker, Tod Goldberg.  I sat with my agent Gina Maccoby and my publisher, which is always nice, and I did a lot of schmoozing before the event, though I was too tired to hang out in the bar afterwards.

Galleycat’s Ron Hogan has posted more pictures from the pre-Edgars reception here.

A complete list of winners follows after the jump.

Read more

Hard Case Crime is reprinting a long-lost Lawrence Block novel called KILLING CASTRO. It’s a book Block wrote under a pseudonym fifty years ago. And if this excerpt doesn’t whet your appetite for more, you don’t have a pulse:

The taxi, one headlight out and one fender crimped, cut through
downtown Tampa and headed into Ybor City. Turner sat in the back seat
with his eyes half closed. He was a tall, thin ramrod of a man who was
never tense and yet never entirely relaxed. His hair was the color of
damp sand, his eyes steel gray. His lips were thin and he rarely
smiled. He was not smiling now.

The stub of a cigarette burned
between the second and third fingers of his right hand. The fingers
were yellow-brown from the thousands and thousands of cigarettes which
had curled their tar-laden smoke around them. He looked at the
cigarette, raised it to his lips for a final drag. The smoke was
strong. He rolled down the window and flipped the butt into the street.

Night.
The street lights were on in Ybor City, Tampa’s Latin quarter. Taverns
winked seductively in red and green neon. Cubans, Puerto Ricans and
Negroes walked the streets, congregated around pool halls and small
bars. Here and there butt-twitching hustlers were rushing the season,
looking to catch an early trick before the competition got stiff.
Turner watched all this through the taxi window, his thin lips not
smiling, not frowning. He had bigger things on his mind than corner
loungers or early-bird whores.

He was thirty-four years old, and he was wanted for murder.

What’s amazing about it is that he was so good from the get-go, long before he would achieve all his well-earned honors and accolades.