Singing Outside of the Choir

I am excited about The Rap Sheet publishing Tom Cain’s ‘Bloodsport’ online thriller story next week, which will certainly turn a few heads. Some may wonder why I chose to help facilitate this project; and many other such projects over the years.

Can I be brutal? Can I be Passionate? Yes I can!

I am huge bibliophile and reader who loves to talk and discuss books. I have become saddened by the terrible state of publishing and literacy brought on by books being marginalised, especially in the young. I write for various magazines, and ezines with a strong bias toward Crime and Thriller Fiction [though I read widely including Literary, SF and Horror]. The venues I write for, are peopled and read by my fellow readers [and colleagues]; but sometimes I feel I’m singing to the choir, when I should be trying to get non-readers back into the fiction-reading habit. I spend a lot of my time when not ‘singing to the choir’, telling people about books. My hairdresser [and her staff and customers] enjoy my presence once every two months when I get my haircut, as I tell them about all the books I read and enjoyed since my last visit. At dinner parties, I’m the guy talking about books. I supply photos of writers to many magazines, libraries and ezines worldwide. I write non-fiction about books and the literary world. On Twitter I have many ‘followers’ who don’t read [anywhere near] as fanatically as I do; but if I talk loud enough, many often respond. Many people buy books I recommend, review and talk about. I always give books as presents. Basically what I am saying is that I do sing outside of the choir, enthusing people to read fiction, which I believe is important.

I am passionate about the written word

Look at how totalitarian states suppress books, burn them and dumb down their populations, filling their lives with mind-numbing TV, a form of mind-control. I don’t watch TV, period. I can control my own thoughts thank you very much, and I chose what I read very carefully, including which newspapers, magazines I subscribe to.

Back in 2006, I arranged via Stav Sherez to bring with us writer and Telegraph editor - Damien Thompson to the inaugural Thrillerfest convention held at the Arizona Biltmore. On our return to the UK, Damien had managed to get a three full page feature in the Saturday Telegraph, which included a link to http://www.shotsmag.co.uk/ where I work as assistant editor. This resulted in a huge number of hits forcing us [willingly to invest in more bandwidth]. Since then some of those Shots readers, stayed with us and currently we’re the No 2 website in the world covering Crime, Mystery and Thriller Fiction, second only to Kevin Burton Smith’s Thrilling Detective. Due to the huge amount of material at Shots, which includes author interviews, reviews, features, competitions we get >18,000 unique hits per day, which though not anywhere close to the numbers internet pornography or internet gambling receives, for crime / thrillers is pretty respectable. I have to thank our advertisers who help fund the site; though to be fair it is really a labour of love and takes a huge effort from our staff, especially Grog and Gary our wonderful webmasters and of course Editor-in-Chief Mike Stotter – a great friend and fellow advocate. I owe a huge amount to Mike, a debt I can never repay.

Going back to Tom Cain’s Bloodsport - what we hope to achieve thanks to Jeff Peirce of The Rap Sheet; and Tom Cain is to provide an excellent [if rather controversial] online experiment by featuring Cain’s gripping story. We have a view to reach out to as many people who don’t normally read thrillers as we possibly can. This little [but powerful] story may well provoke casual readers to venture into a bookstore and perhaps pick up a book or two. When you tot-up the ratio of book-buyers to non book buyers, it is very worrying. Next time you’re on a train or waiting at an airport; count up the ratio of people reading novels to those reading the dreadfully written ‘free’ newspapers, or twiddling with I-Pods, cellphones. Then tell me that the publishing industry is not in trouble, because the market for fiction is shrinking fast.

But I refuse to accept this as the future, as the future is not yet set

I see my job as a writer, reader, reviewer and blogger - to enthuse as many people as I can into reading books, because books are dangerous, but in a good way, because they make you think about life and existence. They do this far better than any damned cell-phone, I-Pod, tatty free newspaper or the great controller – TV.

I read this article from David Simon, which worried me about the state of print journalism – When it comes to books and newspapers – use them or lose them. It’s as simple as that. When we lose the writers and journalists who patrol societies edges and extremes, then the men-behind-the-curtain will have succeeded, and we’ve lost. But I will fight on until they tear my books from my bleeding fingers or smash my reading glasses. Sometimes I'm reminded / haunted by the image of the late Burgess Meredith from the apocalptic episode [about the obsessive reader] from The Twilight Zone - you know which one.

So when you next get the opportunity - Please talk about books to everyone; please help get reading back up the agenda, not relegated to ‘any-other-business’.

I hope to see you all on Sunday at The Rap Sheet as Tom Cain will start to tell you about his writing in a new interview, and then on Monday 3rd August starts the 3 part serialisation of ‘Bloodsport’ – and trust me, it’s a blast [literally] and please tell your friends, especially those who don’t read novels. This little story may well remind them how exciting reading is at its zenith.

Let’s remind everyone that reading is a crucially relevant part of existence; and an integral facet of the human experience - End of sermon, fellow choir members.

"After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books." – Albert Camus

Happy Birthday Dennis Lehane

Advance notice for Dennis Lehane’s birthday on Tuesday 4th August which he shares with President Barack Obama [who turns 48]. I was most fortunate to interview Dennis earlier this year when he made a rare visit to London – Click Here to read the feature.

As a big fan of his gothic masterwork Shutter Island, which is coming to a Cinema Screen this autumn - I think it only appropriate that we get Leonardo DiCaprio to light the 44 candles on Dennis’ cake.

Peter James back on top

A writer who I admire, both as a businessman and film producer as well as a novelist is Peter James. I seem to have been bumping into him on a regular basis recently, and he is extremely generous in his nature as well as his time. James also is always brimming with information and trivia, so when in his company I always feel completely at home. Considering his highly successful and award-winning Roy Grace Police Procedurals, he remains one of the most modest people I know. I was pleased to see him joining Twitter, but considering his technological background I was hardly surprised. I strongly recommend his latest DEAD TOMORROW [the fifth novel in the award winning Detective Superintendent Roy Grace crime series] –

Lynn gripped the sides of the armchair, trying to p\ut aside her own inner terror. 'I can't believe I'm thinking this, Ross. I'm not a violent person, even before Caitlin's influence, I never even liked killing flies in my kitchen. Now I'm sitting here actually willing some stranger to die'.

The body of a teenager, dredged from the seabed off the coast of Sussex, is found to be missing its vital organs. Soon two more young bodies are found...
Caitlin Beckett, a fifteen-year-old in Brighton, will die if she does not receive a liver transplant, urgently. When the health system threatens to let her down, Lynn, her mother turns in panic to the internet and discovers a broker who can provide her with a black-market organ - but at a price. Prepared to do whatever it takes, Lynn scrambles to raise the money. A few days later, with Caitlin deteriorating by the hour, the organ broker tells Lynn she has found a perfect match.

With his beautiful girlfriend, Cleo, and his recent promotion, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace knows he should finally be feeling positive for the first time since his wife Sandy disappeared, nine years ago. But this new case haunts him, even more than all the others. Following the clues from the bodies, he finds himself on the trail of a gang of child traffickers operating from Eastern Europe. Soon Grace and his team will find themselves in a race against time to save the life of a young street kid, while a desperate mother will stop at nothing to save her daughter's life.

It was little surprise to see that Dead Tomorrow hit the UK top ten this week.

Peter James kindly invited Shots Editor Mike Stotter and I [with Carla McKay and Barry Forshaw] for lunch at the prestigious Ivy restaurant during the Christmas Holiday. We discussed many matters, including his latest novel –

Were you bookish in your youth?

Yes, I was an avid reader – also an avid letter-writer to authors. I once wrote to Enid Blyton saying that I had just read Five Go To Treasure Island and I was very worried that the five of them had spent seven days on an island and not one of them had gone to the toilet in all that time. She wrote a nice letter back telling me not to worry, they had all gone several times but she didn’t think little boys and girls were interested, which was why she hadn’t put it in her book!

What books had you read in that period that perhaps led you to become a fiction writer yourself?

I really wanted to be a crime novelist when I began reading Sherlock Holmes at about twelve years old. Then one day in my mid-teens I read Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock and I was totally blown away by it – probably even more so because it was set in my home town. I promised myself that one day I would try to write a crime novel set in Brighton that was just half as good as this one.
What I love most about this timeless novel is that it is both a thriller and a crime novel, although police play only a tiny part. The story is almost entirely told through the eyes of the villains and two women who believe they can redeem them. Greene has a way of describing characters in just a few lines that makes you feel you know them inside out, and his sense of "place" is almost palpable. The book has one of the most grabbing opening lines ever written, and one of the very best last lines, clever, tantalising and very, very "noir". Greene captures so vividly the dark underbelly of Brighton, as relevant now as when it was first published in 1937, and the characters are wonderful, deeply human, deeply flawed and tragic. What lifts this even further is the way that Greene uses this novel to explore the big themes of religious faith, love and honour, without ever letting the pace slacken, for even one line.

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More information on the world of Peter James can be found from the following links:

WEB http://www.peterjames.com/
BLOG www.peterjames.com/blog.htm
TWITTER http://twitter.com/peterjamesuk

Thinking the Unthinkable

Understanding and predicting future-reality requires people with imagination; even if the ideas initially appear rather nutty. Think of Tom Clancy and his idea for crashing a plane [or drone missile] into the Pentagon, think of Chris Carter’s Lone Gunmen episode which featured a passenger plane attack on the Twin Towers in New York. I find the use of writers to think the unthinkable very interesting, in fact I have written about it a few times, thanks to my interest in both Science Fact as well as Science Fiction.

This week David Montgomery of The Washington Post has a fascinating article about the fine line between Science Fiction / Science Fact and features Greg Bear, who wrote the wonderful Blood Music, one of the first SF novels to feature Nanotechnology in an SF setting.

The line between what's real and what's not is thin and shifting, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has decided to explore both sides. Boldly going where few government bureaucracies have gone before, the agency is enlisting the expertise of science fiction writers.
Crazy? This week down at the Reagan Building, the 2009 Homeland Security Science & Technology Stakeholders Conference has been going on. Instead of just another wonkish series of meetings and a trade show, with contractors hustling business around every corner, this felt at times more like a convention of futuristic yarn-spinners.

Onstage in the darkened amphitheater, a Washington police commander said he'd like to have Mr. Spock's instant access to information: At a disaster scene, he'd like to say, "Computer, what's the dosage on this medication?"

A federal research director fantasized about a cellphone that could simultaneously text and detect biochemical attacks. Multiple cellphones in a crowd would confirm and track the spread. The master of ceremonies for the week was Greg Bear, the sci-fi novelist whose book "Quantico" featured FBI agents battling a designer plague targeting specific ethnic groups.

The downer in the piece is yet another bookshop facing economic pressure due to the global credit crunch which is seriously pressuring the publishing industry –

At Reiter's, a place for science browsers since 1936, the dystopian future includes the possible demise of another struggling independent shop. It's getting hard to pay the rent, said owner Barbara Nelson. On the shelves was at least one factual hard-science text edited by one of the fiction writers on the panel. The tome, "Observatories in Earth Orbit and Beyond," was marked down to $130 from $179. The same unsold copy had been here a year ago.

This annual sci-fi security event, co-sponsored by the Washington Science Fiction Association, is the only night of the year Reiter's sells novels. The fans lined up for autographs of their newly purchased fiction, ignoring the science.

Read More Here

Gerald and Ali Go To Bouchercon

Many attend Bouchercon to meet their favourite authors; but I also love to meet the enthusiasts who help support the Crime / Thriller genre, with reviews, interviews and their own writing. The enthusiasts publish books, magazines, fanzines, blogs, web-zines, organize conventions, conferences and festivals as well as involvement in award judging – and much of this work is more a labour of love than for financial gain. The enthusiasts [or as George Easter calls them ‘Uber Fans’] have become a family – meeting up at conventions worldwide, and their enthusiasm is infectious and always good-natured. ‘The Daddy’ of conventions is of course Bouchercon, though there are many others such as Thrillerfest, Left-Coast Crime, Harrogate, Crimefest, Murder in the Midlands, Love is Murder, Magna-cum-Murder et. al.

Last year the biggest gathering of enthusiasts occurred at Bouchercon Baltimore. We had Jiro Kimura from Gumshoe Japan, Maggie Griffin, Jeff and Beth of Cincinnati Media, Janet Rudolf of Mystery Readers International, The Deadly Pleasures crew led by George Easter and Larry Gandle, Sarah Weinman, Dana Kaye, The Jordan clan from Crimespree, Jim Huang of the Drood Review, Peter Rozovsky, The Mystery News and Mystery Scene gang, Jeff Pierce from The Rap Sheet, Linda Richards from January Magazine, The Strand Magazine team, David Montgomery of Mystery Ink, Rae Helmsworth, Gangs from Dorothy L and Rec.Arts.Mystery [RAM], Maddy Hertbruggan and her cabal from 4-MA, Gerald So of Thrilling Detective, Sandra Ruttan and Brian of Spinetingler, Russel Mclean of Crimescene Scotland, Ayo Onatade from Mystery Women, as well as myself with many hats including my bullet-ridden Shots, Rap Sheet, Deadly Pleasures, Crimespree, Books and Bytes, Mystery Readers International and CWA Red Herrings Hat[s]. I should also add that there were more bloggers than you can toss a mouse at, and far too many to name here. Apologies for those I haven’t mentioned here, as the genre is healthy despite all the economic gloom that pervades the media.

Events, such as last year’s Baltimore Bouchercon allowed enthusiasts who communicate with each other on the internet, to actually meet in person. Word of mouth today is driven by the internet, so it is good to actually meet physically, and the convention is a brilliant method of linking the enthusiasts – and considering the global reach – as we are all scattered around the world, it’s great fun to sit back and physically meet each other, rather than just Twitter.

I was delighted to actually spend some time [last autumn in Baltimore] with Gerald So - after many years of reading his work as fiction editor at Thrilling Detective, his blogging, his Twittering and his work as editor at ‘The Line-Up’. Gerald and his fellow co-editors Patrick Shawn Bagley, R. Narvaez, and Anthony Rainone have now produced Volume II of their collections of Crime-Fiction Poetry. Gerald kindly asked me to contribute to this volume, but due to my usual deadline juggling battles was unable to meet the timeline. I got my copy of ‘The Line-Up’ Vol II and was very impressed to find amongst the collection, pieces by award-winning poet Sophie Hannah as well as CWA Diamond Dagger Winner John Harvey both of whom incidentally attended the Baltimore event last year.

I strongly urge you to grab both volumes – which you can order here and if you’re not convinced, let me leave you with a few lines from someone who is far more persuasive than I -

"Like the best crime fiction, the best poetry concerns itself with mortality and anguish, and The Lineup explores this terrain with a candor and fearlessness that is sure to shake readers from their slumber. You can keep your 400-page tomes with their windy, discursive narrators -- this is the real stuff, as concentrated and corrosive as a shot of 190-proof Everclear."
— Charles Ardai, award-winning author and co-founder of Hard Case Crime

If you want a sample – check out a downloadable MP3 file on Seth Harwood’s CrimeWav Here

I really enjoyed chatting with Gerald in Baltimore; who like myself has his family origins in Asia. Being from an ethnic minority can have its challenges, believe me. Whenever I see positive role-models of Asian Americans, or British Asians I am always pleased because there are so many negative images feed by the media. As a kid growing up in the 1960’s and 1970’s in England things were less enlightened; so I was proud to let my friends know that the lead singer from Queen, Freddie Mercury [Farrokh Bulsara] was actually a British Asian like myself.
While at Bouchercon, I remarked to Gerald jokingly, that the two of us look like grown-up versions of Harold and Kumar, the two Asian-American stoners who feature in two of the funniest, if somewhat silly movies I’ve seen in recent years. The popularity of the Harold and Kumar movies have helped the careers of Asian-American actors John Cho and Kal Pen; with Cho featuring in the recent J J Abrams’ Star Trek film in the role of Mr Sulu.

If you’ve not seen the two Harold and Kumar Movies I strongly urge you to do so. Despite the silly premise, and the idiotic adventures they find themselves in, there is a serious message about how people from ethnic minorities can be stereotyped by some people. The two stoners first appeared in ‘Harold and Kumar go to White Castle’ [2004], which was re-titled ‘Harold and Kumar get the munchies’ for European release. In truth it is a very silly film, but one that made me laugh so much, I actually felt I was stoned!

The duo returned last year in the very funny ‘Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay’ [2008].

Both Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg have announced plans to write and direct a third Harold and Kumar movie, with Greg Shapiro returning as producer, and Kal Penn and John Cho expected to return in their title roles. Though their co-star Neil Patrick Harris may not return as he was shot in the whore-house scene; but we don’t know if he actually died. If the producers are looking for co-stars then look no further than Gerald and Ali and Jon Jordan.


Neil Patrick Harris for Harold and Kumar
So if the poor state of the economy is getting you down, then why not order in a case of beer, get your friends round, and sit back and watch a Harold and Kumar Double Bill on DVD – it just might cheer you up, and make you look at stereotypes in a different light.

The scene below always makes me laugh out loud no matter how many times I’ve seen it, a coda to the Wayne’s World scene when the characters sing along to Freddy Mercury and Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.

And make your plans for Bouchercon 2009 in Indianapolis if you want to meet fellow crime thriller enthusiasts as well as the authors who populate the crime and thriller genre.

Maxim and Wootton on Chandler

I was sorry when Maxim closed Murder One bookstore earlier this year, but knowing how busy he is anyway, I knew he would be back writing, editing, publishing – but he is taking up teaching at Faber & Faber with Adrian Wootton.

How to Read: Raymond Chandler

with Maxim Jakubowski and Adrian Wootton [photo (c) 2004 Ali Karim]

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Raymond Chandler’s death, the Faber Academy presents a one-day course on the life and works of the man without whom crime fiction as it is today might never have existed. Chandler himself claimed that he had brought back mystery writing to the gutter where it belonged and almost single-handedly created the archetypal, imperfect private eye, the melancholy loner who roams the mean streets in search of justice or redemption. He was also the author who brought Los Angeles to life like no other in his books, anchoring a sense of place which is often unique to the best of crime writing. The course will examine Chandler’s place in the history of popular fiction, his major novels, his short stories, his often conflicted life which took him from Dulwich to California, his time in Hollywood and the way cinema has treated him as well as his illuminating letters and essays about the art of writing. The principal tutor will be writer and critic Maxim Jakubowski and guest lecturer will be film expert Adrian Wootton.The day will take place at the beautiful Georgian offices of independent publisher, Faber and Faber.

There are no hard and fast criteria for attendance, save the following:

To have read some or all of Chandler’s work
To come with a lively, open mind
To ask interesting questions and be prepared to have your opinions challenged

Saturday 12 September 2009
Faber and Faber

Bloomsbury House

74-77 Great Russell Street

London

WC1B 3DA

England

More Information on booking a place here from Faber & Faber

Finding Thrilling Comics

Many Thriller writers and readers [of a certain age] were weaned on US comics from Marvel, DC and the other superhero stables during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Now with the popularity of Comic Book Superhero film adaptations reaching a zenith with recent box-office hits such as Batman, Wolverine, Watchmen etc - there is a full circle movement going on, with many of the top thriller writers now getting involved writing comics. As a long term thriller and comics reader, this is a welcome addition to my reading.

A few years ago, I interviewed Robert Crais over breakfast in Manchester, and was impressed at Crais’ knowledge about comics, and discovered that his first published work [like my own] was in the letters page of a Marvel Comic [as an adolescent] -

Ali : Going back to your childhood in Louisiana, did you read avidly when you were growing up?

Robert : Yes, I read a great deal, starting with comic books, and this grew into my life-long love of comics.

Ali : Which ones did you read?

Robert : I started with DC, which is now known as the Silver Age, Batman, Justice League of America, Superman, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Flash, Green Lantern and on, and on. Then I got turned onto Marvel Comics when I read issue #7 of Spiderman.

Ali : Steve Ditko?

Robert : Yes I consider Steve Ditko as a comic-book God, he was amazing. I think it might have been Spiderman vs. Green Goblin and his work with Stan Lee really transcended the genre. This contrasted with what DC Comics were doing at the time – Marvel were doing superhero as human being. Peter Parker was very relatable as a human being [as well as being Spiderman’s alter-ego] and very vulnerable, very human, the misplaced outsider, the child who needed a strong father figure.

Ali : And that’s interesting as we touched upon the theme of father-figures in your work, especially within the plot of your latest The Two Minute Rule.

Robert : Yes, we begin to see how this all loops together and so as a youth I got totally turned onto Marvel.

Ali : I acknowledge the importance of Ditko but what about Jack Kirby?

Robert : Yes Kirby was brilliant but Ditko remained my favourite because of the emotional power of his work. There was also Dick Ayers and a whole load of other guys, but for me it was always Ditko centre-stage as his artwork was perhaps more expressive as to what the characters were feeling - he better defined the emotions in the characters than perhaps the others working the field, or so it seemed to me. I became a total Marvel maniac; I had a massive comic book collection at the point. One of the highpoints of my career was my first national publication, which was a letter in a Marvel Comic.

Ali : [laughing]….and the highlight of my career was also having a letter published in a Marvel Comic. Mine was in Kazaa The Savage aged sixteen.

Robert : [laughing]….it’s hard to beat that…[laughing]…everything is downhill from there on in…

Ali : I guess it is…[laughing]…so where did you get your letter published?

Robert : It got it published in The Amazing Spiderman, I think issue #67 by which time John Romita had taken over. I got a ‘no-prize’ and was a member of the Merry Marvel Marching Society, and - cut to many years later - I’m in Hollywood with quite a nice career as a TV writer/producer and I’ve been hired by Warner Bros. Television to write two TV pilots – the first being The Amazing Spiderman.

Ali : Is this the Hammond series?

Robert : No, this is after the Nick Hammond series, as someone got hot to do another series, so I was hired to write Spiderman as well as Dr Strange. So when I first got the call, an executive at Warner Bros. asked me to come meet Stan Lee. So I go to this lunch to meet Stan Lee.

Ali : Amazing – meeting Stan Lee!

Robert : Yes, amazing. I told the executive that it would be nice to have lunch with Stan Lee…[laughing]…So as I put down the phone I immediately ran around the house screaming, hunting around for my ‘no-prize’. Now comes the day of meeting, and I arrive at this lovely restaurant. There are a load of suits from Warner Bros. in their Armani jackets, and I’m there trying to look like an adult when Stan ‘The Man’ Lee walks in. The suits introduce me, ‘Mr Lee, this is the writer we’ve talking about, Mr Crais, and then they introduce themselves to him, and then there’s the yada, yada, yada….and in the middle of all these suits talking millions and millions of dollars, I say, ‘Stan, look at this, I got a “no-prize”’….[laughing]….and Stan just laughed and signed it for me. Hey, no matter who I am, or what I do, that ‘no-prize’ means so much to me. It is the real me, addressed to Bobby Crais and has my Baton Rouge home address when I was a kid. Stan was thrilled, and he wrote this inscription while the suits watched in confusion as we were meeting to discuss a ten million dollar production, while here’s me doing this total fan-boy act with Stan Lee. I had it framed and it hangs in my office…

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Stephen King as ever the pioneer, found many of his works adapted for the comics medium, as did Ian Fleming’s aristocratic spy James Bond, who has been adapted many times in comic book form. More recently we’ve seen David Morrell writing Captain America, Duane Swierczynski, Victor Gischler and many others penning comics. I was pleased last fall [thanks to Jon Jordan] to be introduced to Brian Azzarello, author of 100 BULLETS at Bouchercon Baltimore so I was rather pleased to read this snippet from one of my favourite thriller writers, Boston based Joe Finder –

Before I wanted to be an author, before I wanted to be a secret agent, before I wanted to be almost anything, I wanted to draw cartoons. I love cartoons, and always have. Visit my office and you’ll see several classics framed on my wall, including a Charles Addams original.

Reality got in the way, as it often does. The only D you’ll see on my college transcript was – yes – an art class. I realized I was better at words than at pictures, and the rest, as they say, is history.

But the dream never completely died, and at last year’s Bouchercon (the World Mystery Convention), I met a couple of guys from DC Comics. By coincidence, I was working on a subplot in VANISHED involving the main character’s teenaged nephew, Gabe, who was writing and illustrating what he called a “graphic novel” about a superhero based on his uncle, Nick Heller.

So I took the opportunity to talk comics and graphic novels with them, and discovered a world I’d barely imagined. I knew that several major mystery and literary authors were working in the graphic novel arena – Michael Chabon, Brad Meltzer, Gregg Hurwitz, Duane Swierczynski, to name a few – and at Bouchercon I met Brian Azzarello, author of 100 BULLETS and (with Lee Bermejo) THE JOKER.

This fired my imagination; I’m always looking for ways to introduce my works to new audiences, and what better way than a comic book, especially if a comic book was part of my plot? And what if the comic book included a clue to the central mystery of VANISHED, itself?

I took this idea to DC Comics Senior Editor Will Dennis, who was kind enough to encourage me. He helped me find a Spanish artist, Benito Gallego, who could create the images I imagined for Gabe’s fictional superhero, The Cowl – classically heroic images in the tradition of the comics I read as a kid, by artists such as John Buscema and Joe Kubert.

Writing a comic book, however, isn’t like writing a novel. It’s somewhere between writing a screenplay and writing a series of epigrams, and it’s not what I do. I had a story for The Cowl, but didn’t know how to bring it to life.

Brian Azzarello to the rescue. I asked if he’d be willing to take over The Cowl’s story, and he agreed – and came up with a script even better than I’d imagined, about the origins of The Cowl in a post-Apocalyptic Washington, DC.

The Cowl – the secret identity of international security consultant Nick Heller – takes to the streets of Washington, DC to fight the nefarious Dr. Cash, a scientist who rules with an iron hand and an endless supply of a mind-altering chemical that enslaves the city’s young men.

The idea of a comic book based on the creation of a fictional character is a little complicated, and putting it all together was complicated as well – me in Boston, Benito in Spain, Azz in Chicago. But the first copies came off the press a couple of weeks ago, and I’m delighted with the result. Over the next several months I’ll be giving copies away, and my publisher, St. Martin’s, will make copies available to booksellers along with advance reading copies of VANISHED.

It’s been a great adventure, and I’m grateful to Brian and Benito for letting me achieve my childhood dream, with a little help from my friends.

To learn more about Joe Finder’s Vanished Click Here, or follow him on Twitter Here.

James Herbert to Headline the WHC 2010

I’m so damned glad I registered as I just got this press release -World Horror Convention 2010 is proud and delighted to announce that our very Special Guest of Honour is Britain's most influential and successful horror writer of all time -- JAMES HERBERT

James Herbert created the modern mass-market horror genre with thepublication of his first ground-breaking novel, THE RATS, in 1974 (for the record, Stephen King's CARRIE was published a few months later). Since then he has reigned as Britain's undisputed #1 author of chiller fiction, with more than 20 novels to his credit -- which have sold more than fifty million copies world-wide. His books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages, including Russian and Chinese. THE RATS has never been out of print, and Jim's list of best-selling titles includes THE FOG, THE SURVIVOR, FLUKE, THE SPEAR, LAIR, THE DARK, THEJONAH, SHRINE, DOMAIN, MOON, THE MAGIC COTTAGE, SEPULCHRE, HAUNTED, CREED, PORTENT, THE GHOSTS OF SLEATH, '48, OTHERS, ONCE, NOBODY TRUE and THE SECRET OF CRICKLEY HALL.

THE RATS (aka DEADLY EYES), THE SURVIVOR, FLUKE and HAUNTED have all been made into movies, the latter starring Aidan Quinn, Kate Beckinsale and Sir John Gielgud. In his 1992 Introduction to the bio-bibliography JAMES HERBERT: BY HORROR HAUNTED, Stephen King wondered "with real excitement" what James Herbert might be up to in the year 2010. Well, now we know -- he'll be at World Horror Convention in Brighton!

ALSO . . . registered members of the convention can now vote for the World Horror Convention's prestigious GRAND MASTER AWARD, which will presented at a sit-down Banquet on the Saturday evening. An electronic voting form is available on the convention website and will also be included in the forthcoming printed Progress Reports. A list of past recipients -- who have included Stephen King, Dean R. Koontz, Anne Rice, Ray Bradbury, CliveBarker, Peter Straub, Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell . . . and for 2009 Tanith Lee!!! -- is displayed on the same page.

For more information about JAMES HERBERT, who joins Author Guests of Honour TANITH LEE and DAVID CASE, Artist Guests of Honour LES EDWARDS and DAVEC ARSON, Editor Guest of Honour HUGH LAMB and Mistress of Ceremonies JO FLETCHER as part of our exciting line-up of Guests of Honour, please go to the convention website. Other writers, artists, agents, editors and publishers already registered as attending World Horror Convention 2010 include: ANGRY ROBOT BOOKS (UK), Randy Broecker, Edward W. Bryant Jr., Pat Cadigan, Ramsey Campbell, CENTIPEDE PRESS (USA), Basil Copper, Peter Crowther, Ellen Datlow, Christopher Fowler, Gary Fry, GRAY FRIAR PRESS (UK), Simon R. Green, John Jarrold, JEMMA PRESS (Greece), Stephen Jones, Paul Kane, Allen Koszowski,T im Lebbon, Samantha Lee, Brian Lumley, Dorothy Lumley, L.H. Maynard & M.P.N. Sims, Gary McMahon, Farah Mendlesohn, MORTBURY PRESS (UK), Mark Morris, Lisa Morton, Yvonne Navarro, Adam L.G. Nevill, NEWCON PRESS (UK), Kim Newman, Reggie Oliver, Weston Ochse, Sarah Pinborough, David Pirie, John L. Probert, PS PUBLISHING (UK), REBEL E PUBLISHERS (South Africa), Tony Richards, David A. Riley, Mark Samuels, SCREAMING DREAMS (UK), RobertShearman, Michael Marshall Smith, SNOWBOOKS (UK), Alexandra Sokoloff, DavidA. Sutton, TARTARUS PRESS (UK), TELOS PUBLISHING (UK), Lisa Tuttle, Stephen Volk, Conrad Williams, and F. Paul Wilson, amongst many others.

Celebrating its 20th Anniversary, The World Horror Convention will be held over March 25-28, 2010, in the historic Regency seaside city of Brighton, on the picturesque south coast of England.

This is the first time that theevent will have been held off the North American continent. The theme is "BRIGHTON SHOCK! -- A CELEBRATION OF THE EUROPEAN HORROR TRADITION FROM VICTORIAN TIMES TO THE PRESENT DAY"

WORLD HORROR CONVENTION. MARCH 25-28, 2010. BRIGHTON, ENGLAND.

http://www.whc2010.org/

The Rap Sheet's Crimefest Competition

Coming soon from Adrian Muller and Myles Alfrey is this summer’s Crimefest Convention to be held in Bristol England.

We’ve organised a competition at The Rap Sheet for three lucky winners to get weekend passes to the event – Click Here to enter

I’m looking forward to attending next month’s CrimeFest with Shots Editor-in-Chief Mike Stotter [pictured ©2006 Ayo Onatade]. Last year’s convention offered plenty of opportunities to mix with notable authors. It was also an excellent opportunity for organizers Adrian Muller and Myles Allfrey -- who had previously put together the one-off Left Coast Crime convention in Bristol in 2006--to show that the most populous city in South West England can become home to one of the world’s foremost annual gathering of crime-fiction enthusiasts.

Good luck and remember the competition closes Friday 1st May

More information about Crimefest available here

US vs. UK Thriller War

As an [associate] member of International Thriller Writers [ITW]; and judge for the ITW [2006, 2007 and reserve for 2008]; like my American colleague, the renowned critic David J Montgomery we have occasionally pondered upon the differences between American and British Thriller novels over beers. I’ve never considered either nation superior to the other in terms of thriller writing, but rather enjoyed the diversity and popularity the thriller genre enjoys.

At least two Thriller Critics [Photo from Thrillerfest 2006 Pheonix, Arizona] - David J Montgomery [US] and Ali Karim [UK] are available for a peace accord, as long as beer is provided.

As a renowned ‘Thriller enthusiast - I was asked to contribute an essay for the ITW ‘100 Best Thriller Novels’ book organised by David Morrell and Hank Wagner as well as writing extensively about Thriller Novels and Espionage Fiction for Barry Forshaw’s Greenwood Encyclopaedia of British Crime Fiction – So while taking a break at yesterday’s opening of The London Book Fair, I noticed a rather odd article in The Bookseller about a trio of British Thriller Writers who founded ‘The Curzon Group’ attacking American Thriller Novels –

Battle lines are being drawn across the Atlantic with the launch of a group designed to “end the reign of the production-line American thriller writers” and return the focus to domestic British authors. Authors Matt Lynn, Martin Baker and Alan Clements, who are respectively published by Headline, Pan Macmillan and Mainstream, are the founder members of the Curzon Group.

Jeffrey Archer will be advising the trio. Curzon’s manifesto specifically attacks American thriller writers—James Patterson, John Grisham and Dan Brown are all in the firing line. The group hopes to spark a debate, through TV chat shows, radio and national news media, about the "fantastic position" British thriller writing had in the past but which has declined in the past decade.

Lynn said: "Too many of the American thrillers are just being churned out to a rigid formula. The great British thrillers of the past had a quirkiness to them, an originality, and a passion for storytelling and writing that is absent from the market right now. All the writers in this group believe in bringing that back."

Archer said: "These were some of the greatest storytellers in the world. The flame has to be kept burning by a new generation."

The trio will draw on the tradition of writers such as The 39 Steps author John Buchan, Alistair MacLean, who wrote The Guns of Navarone, and the man responsible for the James Bond franchise, Ian Fleming, "reviving them for the 21st century".

Read More from The Bookseller

There has always been the old chestnuts of ‘What is a Thriller?’ as well as the ‘Why are Thrillers dominated by Male Writers?’ and now we have this new chestnut. Now healthy debate is useful in promoting literacy as long as it doesn’t get divisive.

‘The Curzon Group’ have also set-up a website to further promote the virtues of British Thriller Writing –

From Wilkie Collins to John Buchan, Eric Ambler to Hammond Innes, Ian Fleming to Alistair MacLean, and from Len Deighton to Frederick Forsyth, the British thriller is one of the richest traditions in world literature.

But in the last decade the British thriller has fallen into a sad decline. The market has been colonised by production line American thriller writers.

The Curzon Group is dedicated to reviving the traditions of Buchan, Fleming, MacLean and Forsyth, bringing the British thriller bursting back to life in the twenty-first century.

Read More from The Curzon Group

I wonder if these three writers attended James Patterson’s key-note address at yesterday’s LBF or if they’ve pre-ordered Dan Brown’s latest?

The cynical side of my nature considers this venture by ‘The Curzon Group’ as a method of promoting their own work; work which I am unfamiliar with. Personally speaking; the Thriller novel is split into many subgenres; and this UK vs. US debate from ‘The Curzon Group’ is a tad too jingoistic for my taste. Diversity is everything.

Incidentally Readers Digest have an interesting article on what they consider are the best of these thriller sub-genres Here and Here. The listing features both British as well as American landmarks of the Thriller Genre. The problem is where does British Born, American thriller writer Lee Child fit?

More Debate from Sarah Weinman here

2009 Hillerman Competition

GUIDELINES FOR THE 2009 HILLERMAN MYSTERY COMPETITON POSTED

From The Desk of Hector De Jean – PR Manager at Minotaur Books -

4/17/09 -- WORDHARVEST Writers Workshops and Thomas Dunne Books/ Minotaur Books announced today that updated guidelines for the Hillerman Mystery Competition are available online. The Tony Hillerman Prize is awarded annually to the best unpublished mystery set in the Southwest written by a first-time author.

Among the changes of note, the contest is now accepting stories set in Southern California, and the deadline is now June 1st, 2009 (it was previously announced at July 1st). Complete guidelines can be found here

Previous winners of the competition include Roy Chaney’s The Ragged End of Nowhere, coming out in the fall of 2009, and Christine Barber’s The Replacement Child, available in stores now.

Anne Hillerman, Tony Hillerman’s daughter, launched the first Tony Hillerman Writers Conference: Focus on Mystery in 2003 through the business which she co-founded (with Jean Schaumberg), WORDHARVEST Writers Workshops. The conference highlights writing by Southwestern authors.

Tony Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee mysteries, set on the Navajo reservation, were the first “regional” mysteries to become national bestsellers. His work has been praised by reviewers and the Navajo Nation for its ability to combine Navajo traditions and beliefs with a well-told mystery story. Hillerman’s writing reflects his appreciation for the natural wonders and stark beauty of the American Southwest and its people, particularly the Navajo. His books have been translated into many languages and frequently make the New York Times bestseller list. At age 83, Hillerman passed away on October 26, 2008.

Thomas Dunne Books and Minotaur Books are imprints of St. Martin’s Press, which is a subsidiary of Macmillan.

The Last from Michael Crichton

I was very sad last year when I heard the terrible news about Micheal Crichton’s passing. As a reader of his work since adolescence, as well as a follower of his cinematic work, I heard today that he has left a couple or novels for us to enjoy, reports the New York Times –

Michael Crichton, the best-selling author of technological thrillers like “The Andromeda Strain” and “Jurassic Park” who died of cancer in November, left behind at least one finished novel and about one-third of a second. Both will be released over the next year and a half, his publisher said.

HarperCollins, Mr. Crichton’s publisher for his previous three books, will release “Pirate Latitudes,” an adventure story set in Jamaica in the 17th century, on Nov. 24. The company also plans to publish a technological thriller in the fall of 2010, a novel that Mr. Crichton was working on when he died. Jonathan Burnham, publisher of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins, said Mr. Crichton evidently wrote “Pirate Latitudes” at the same time that he wrote “Next,” his last published novel.

The new novel, discovered by Mr. Crichton’s assistant in the writer’s computer files after his death, features a pirate named Hunter and the governor of Jamaica, and their plan to raid a Spanish treasure galleon. “It’s eminently and deeply and thoroughly researched,” Mr. Burnham said. “It’s packed through with great detail about navigation and how pirates operated, and links between the New World and the Caribbean and Spain.”

The novel represents a departure from Mr. Crichton’s longtime fictional preoccupation with the moral and social ramifications of science and technology. But Mr. Burnham pointed out that “Pirate Latitudes” also harks back to the kind of historical yarn that Mr. Crichton wrote in the “The Great Train Robbery,” first published in 1975. Mr. Burnham said that the book needed little editing and that Harper planned a first printing of 1 million copies.

At the time of Mr. Crichton’s death he was under contract for the second of a two-book deal that began with “Next.” He had begun that second novel, a technological thriller, but was only about a third of the way through. Mr. Burnham said that the publisher would work with Lynn Nesbit, Mr. Crichton’s agent of 40 years, and his estate to select a co-writer who would finish the book, working from Mr. Crichton’s notes.

“We want a high-level thriller writer, somebody who understands Michael’s work,” Mr. Burnham said. “From what I gather, there are notes and indications of which direction the novel was going, so the writer has material to work from apart from the actual material that was finished.”

Neither Mr. Burnham nor Ms. Nesbit has seen the unfinished novel. Ms. Nesbit said that Mr. Crichton was “the most private of all authors that I have ever met in my life,” and that he never showed his agent or his editor any material before he had a complete draft. She said that other than the general category of technological thriller, she had no idea what the incomplete novel was about.

Read More and if you are Thriller Writer looking for a gig, there can be nothing more impressive than speaking to HarperCollins USA to enquire about finishing Crichton’s last work.

Stieg Larsson's Millennium Vol III

I was fortunate to be invited by Christopher MacLehose and Quercus Publishing to a private gathering to celebrate Stieg Larsson’s nomination at the Galaxy Book Awards, which Incidentally won the Crime Thriller of The Year Award.

I have a report at The Rap Sheet Here which may help explain my fascination with Larsson’s work in a somewhat surreal twist.

Legendry British PublishersChristopher MacLehose is very protective of the Manuscript for Stieg Larsson's Millennium Vol III as this photo indicates. The UK release date has been brought forward to October 2009

Kenzie Gennaro Investigations Return

I finally finished the transcription of my Dennis Lehane interview for The Rap Sheet during which Dennis kindly signed my monster collection of his work.

Dennis was in very good form even when I pumped him about the new Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro novel he’s working on -

AK: You once made it sound as if you’d never go back to the Patrick and Angie P.I. series. But it has now been widely reported that you are indeed returning to their fictional world. Why the switch?

DL: I don’t want to say too much at this stage. Just, “Hey, they’re back,” and that’s it. In fact, I won’t say any more until the book comes out.

AK: I’m still going to pump you. … Boston seems to be a familiar location as a backdrop for your work. So will Patrick and Angie operate in Boston in the new book?

DL: [Laughs] To answer your question, “Yes.” Yes, they will. I took them once to Florida in Sacred (1997). That was fun, but as a reader I always hated reading a P.I. novel [in which] the P.I. and sidekick head to L.A. to hunt down a missing actress, and this was because all the writers were out in L.A. working on movie deals. So I decided that I’ll never do that; hence, Patrick and Angie will operate on their home turf of Boston. OK, if there was a reason to take them to Dublin, I’d do that. No West Coast travel, though.

AK: Will the next Patrick and Angie novel carry on immediately after the events contained in Prayers for Rain [1999]? Or will some time have elapsed? After all, it’s been a decade since that last novel appeared.

DL: I know there will be gap, but it won’t be a full 10 years. I don’t see them in a pre-9/11 America. A lot has happened in the last decade. It would be ridiculous to take them back in time, if you follow me.

Read the full interview here

Part II will feature an interview with Tess Gerritsen

Remembering Rand

In 1957 Ayn Rand published the metaphysical SF novel “Atlas Shrugged” which has been re-issued and is selling well; so Existentialist Man poses the question “Did Ayn Rand predict the current economic collapse in her work?”

“Since I am to speak on the Objectivist Ethics, I shall begin by quoting its best representative-John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged: "Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required” - The Opening of The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand

As a businessman and scientist I have always been interested in science and mystery fiction, as well as philosophy and reality. Pondering on the current economic collapse, I was intrigued what SF has to say about this situation. I always thought that the civilization / reality we have crafted around us would collapse [in golden age SF traditions] by an asteroid impact, an alien invasion of Triffids, a virus destroying plant life, Body Snatchers, a Mega-Volcano eruption, or a Nuclear Exchange, Martians or a man made virus escaping. It seems that Amy Rand’s 1957 novel ‘Atlas Shrugged’ was closer to the reality we see emerging since the economic crisis, as reported by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian -

Some products do comparatively well in times of recession: alcohol, chocolate, cinema tickets, cigarettes. But one surprise bestseller of the economic Armageddon is a decades-old science fiction novel about an imaginary economic Armageddon - popular now, its fans insist, because the collapse of civilisation it describes is on the verge of coming true.

Sales of Ayn Rand's 1957 book Atlas Shrugged - a hymn in praise of radical individualism, extreme self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism - are surging as the crisis deepens, according to TitleZ, a service that tracks sales trends on Amazon.

As of yesterday, the book's 30-day average rank on the website was 110, far above its average rank of 542 over the last two years. On 13 January it even briefly outperformed Barack Obama's wildly popular work The Audacity of Hope. Yesterday it was in 55th place, between The Reader and a book on cultivating very small gardens.

Atlas Shrugged tends to inspire either cult-like devotion or sarcastic mockery in readers, who are either thrilled or appalled by Rand's vision of a world in which the "men of the mind" - inventors, entrepreneurs and industrialists - withdraw their labour from a society intent on bleeding them dry with taxes and regulations.

Furious at being exploited by the government on behalf of the masses, who are described as "parasites" and "moochers", the striking capitalists retreat to a camp in the mountains of Colorado, protected by a special holographic shield.

Starved of their genius, society collapses and wars break out until eventually bureaucrats are forced to beg the rebels' leader, John Galt, to take over the economy. There is a reason, then, that Amazon categorises the book as fantasy. But Rand adherents see looming parallels in today's Washington.

The Obama administration's support for beleaguered homeowners and banks, they argue, smacks of tyrannical socialism, forcing the strong and successful to prop up the weak, feckless and incompetent. "The current economic strategy is right out of Atlas Shrugged," the commentator Stephen Moore wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal. "The more incompetent you are in business, the more handouts the politicians will bestow on you."

Obama's frequently expressed view that the crisis demands that all Americans make sacrifices - and that those earning the most will need to "chip in a little more" - would have disgusted Rand, who believed that altruism was evil.
Read the full feature here

These are surreal times indeed and worrying so perhaps it’s time to listen to what Rand described in ‘Atlas Shrugged’

Atlas Shrugged sweeps the reader into its own world of larger-than-life characters—including the productive genius who becomes a worthless playboy and the great industrialist who doesn’t know that he is working for his own destruction. The story is a mystery about a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world—and did. Society disintegrates, food shortages spark riots, factories shutdown by the hundreds. Is this man a vicious destroyer—or the greatest of liberators? What is the motor of the world? What is required to restart it?

The answers emerge in the novel’s logical yet astounding climax. The answers are of profound significance not merely for the resolution of the story’s central conflict— but also for man’s life in reality, today.

The Existential French Bookstore

I love bookstores and have visited many over the years throughout the world; but perhaps the most existential is the renowned Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Of course from the land of Camus and Manchette it is little surprise to find such a curious bookstore. In today’s Guardian, novelist Jeanette Winterson has a feature article on the history of this Parisian tourist attraction for Bibliophiles who visit from all over the world. Winterson’s piece reminded me of when I spent an entire day browsing reading and talking about books, which was one of the most remarkable memories of Paris I have.

Winterston reports today –

Way back, in 1913, the original Shakespeare and Company was opened by a young American called Sylvia Beach. Her shop in rue de l'Odéon soon became the place for all the English-speaking writers in Paris. Her lover, Adrienne Monnier, owned the French bookstore across the road, and she and Beach ran back and forth, finding penniless writers a place to stay, lending them books, arranging loans, taking their mail, sending their work to small magazines and, most spectacularly, publishing James Joyce's Ulysses in 1922 when no one else would touch it. Hemingway was a regular at the shop, and writes about it in his memoir A Moveable Feast. His spare, emotional prose makes a poignant story of those early days, when material things weren't so important, and if you could get time to read and write, and live on cheap oysters and coarse bread and sleep by a stove somewhere, then you were happy.
It was Hemingway, as a major in the US army, who at the liberation of Paris in 1945 drove his tank straight to the shuttered Shakespeare and Company and personally liberated Sylvia Beach. "No one that I ever knew was nicer to me," he said later, rich, famous and with a Nobel prize.

But after the war, Beach was older and tired. She didn't reopen the shop that had been forced into closure by the occupation. It was George Whitman who took over the spirit of what she had made, but not the name - until 1962, when Beach attended a reading by Lawrence Durrell at the bookstore and they all agreed that it should be renamed Shakespeare and Company.
George took in the beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. Henry Miller ate from the stewpot, but was too grand to sleep in the tiny writers' room. Anaïs Nin left her will under George's bed. There are signed photos from Rudolf Nureyev and Jackie Kennedy, signed copies of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.

George opened his doors midday to midnight, and the deal then is the deal now: sleep in the shop, on tiny beds hidden among the bookstacks; work for two hours a day helping out with the running of the place; and, crucially, read a book a day, whatever you like, but all the way through, unless maybe it's War and Peace, in which case you can take two days.

George still reads a book a day, and gets very cross if he hears that anyone is wasting his time. You can be bawled out of Shakespeare and Company just as suddenly as you are invited in. The spirit of the place has to be honoured, and there are no exceptions.

At any time there are six or more young people from the compass points of the world, reading, talking, thinking, boiling spaghetti in the kettle, running across the road to the public showers, stacking, carrying, selling, stock-taking, and all in a spirit of energy and enterprise that is not to be found in any chain bookstores. They stay for two weeks or two months, and some just sleep outside on a bench until there's room inside.

If you are a published writer, then you might be able to stay in the tiny pod of the writers' room, and huddle against an ancient plug-in radiator and not worry too much if the electricity goes down and you have to abandon your laptop for a notepad. "There was no running water, no electricity when we started," George says. "It didn't matter. That stuff doesn't matter. Books, people, ideas, that's what matters."

Thousands of people have come through his doors, slept in his shop, eaten at his table, and many of them still write to him, or return. There's nothing quaint or historicalised about Shakespeare and Company. The values, the ethos and hospitality don't change, but the shop goes forward with the times. In 2006, aged 92, George retired, and his daughter, named after the original Sylvia, took over. She was 25 - the age difference tells you a lot about George, his appetites and his energies.

Sylvia lived in the shop until she was seven; then, after her parents' divorce, she went with her mother to be educated in England. It wasn't her intention to take over the shop, but she was drawn back in, and she has made it her life. "When I first arrived, we didn't even have a phone and Penguin was threatening to cut us off for not paying their bills, so I had to run round St Michel looking for a pay phone and ring Accounts in Essex." She adores her father, and is committed to carrying on his legacy - but in her own way. "Dad was furious when I took out one of the beds and installed a computer. When I told him we were going to start a literary festival and a publishing business, he said: 'Who's gonna cook for all those extra people?'"

Read all of Jeanette Winterson’s Guardian feature on Shakespeare and Company here and next time you find yourself in Paris and need something to read that will feed your mind, then head to Shakespeare and Company –

More information here and notes from the 2008 literary festival here the next one is in 2010

Directions Here

Shakespeare & Company
37 rue de la Bûcherie
75005 Paris
Tel : 00 33 (0) 1 43 25 40 93
Mon - Sat 10am - 11pm
Sunday 11am - 11pm

History of Shakespeare and Company Here

Peace comes to TV and Cinema

I have followed the complex world of David Peace since he debuted with his ‘Red Riding series of “novels”. These books are a fictional re-telling of the Yorkshire Ripper case. I was impressed that it was UK independent publisher Serpent’s Tail that first published Peace. I was fortunate to interview David Peace a few years ago for Crimespree Magazine when he launched GB84, a fictional and politically charged look back at the British Coal Miner’s Strike in 1984. I interviewed David with fellow Northern Crime Writer Martyn Waites in the Yorkshire city of Leeds.

A section of my interview was featured at The Rap Sheet, and naturally I was interested in his response to my asking about the origins of the Red Riding series -

AK: So how did you get Nineteen Seventy Four published, as I understand you had a series of rejected books in your third drawer?

DP: Lots, in fact. ... In fact, one of the reasons why I went to teach abroad was that I couldn’t get my books published. I wrote Nineteen Seventy Four purely for myself, to amuse myself in Tokyo. My dad came out and he read it, and told me that I should give it another go and submit it. He also brought some books by some new British crime writers and told me that he thought that Nineteen Seventy Four was better than those he had just read. I read them too and felt the same. I went to Serpent’s Tail first, as I admired what they were publishing--Walter Mosley and George Pelecanos; in fact, they had just published the early Nick Stefanos novels at the time.

Now David Peace has been in the press a great deal of late due to the screening this week of the Channel 4’s adaptation of the Red Riding series, as well as the Film Adaptation of his fictional re-telling of the Brian Clough Management of Leed United Football Club – ‘The Damned United’.

The Observer’s Euan Ferguson meets the three film directors behind Channel 4’s Red Riding series –

The three individual directors of Red Riding, the C4 trilogy adapting David Peace's haunting evocations of 70s and 80s Yorkshire - interlinking tales of very fallible coppers, very noir hacks, very human killers - are sitting down talking about the process for pretty much the very first time. They had a couple of suppers together way back at the beginning, but today, they're talking, really talking, for the first time.

Julian Jarrold, James Marsh and Anand Tucker, three very different directors, were trusted by producer Andrew Eaton with his long-term labour of love: the on-screen evocation, after it had been wrestled into a blinding screenplay by Tony Grisoni, of Peace's sprawling, unforgiving series of books set loosely around the time of the Yorkshire Ripper. The result is whatever the plural is for more than one tour de force. We're only in March, but if it doesn't clean up at next year's awards I'll eat that chintz. The filming, of three discreet but linked films (1974, 1980, 1983), had, by definition, to dovetail, collide, overlap, but the directors didn't.
"We tried not to liaise too much, really," says Jarrold. "The freedom we've been given is incredible. But, in a way, the script was so strong that it would have been hard to misinterpret."

While The Times runs a profile on David Peace –

Peace was born in 1967 and was raised in Ossett, near Wakefield, where his parents were primary school teachers. There was plenty to read at home, ranging from his mother’s “religious” books to his father’s library of fiction: “We had the Penguin Classics as well as things like Raymond Chandler and Ernest Hemingway, and local writers such as John Braine, Alan Sillitoe and Stan Barstow [who lived in Ossett].” He spent as little time as possible at Batley grammar school, diverted by mischief and comic books: “I would have wanted to be a comic-book writer if I could draw.”

He bought Das Kapital when he was about 12, “though I didn’t read much of it”, and subscribed to Soviet Weekly and Peace News. Clubs and drinking had more appeal: “I was the kind of person who was beaten up a lot. Usually it was brought on by the fact that I’d insist on having the last word on any subject.”

In the musical thrall of the Sisters of Mercy, at about 13 he joined a band, yelling his own lyrics in pubs and at gigs supporting the miners. Peace’s father was branded “Red Basil” in the local press for giving harvest festival donations to striking miners’ families rather than to needy pensioners. “[The Ripper] dominated the conversation. A lot of the time you were really sick of it; you just wished it would go away.” On the day Sutcliffe was arrested and charged in 1981, Peace bunked off school to witness the scene outside Dewsbury magistrates’ court, although he denied that he joined in the mob’s baying. After “a bit of messing about”, he ended up at Manchester Polytechnic in 1987, but left the following year to attempt the great British novel, roundly rejected by every publisher in the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. “At the time I thought I was the William Burroughs of Manchester. Looking back, it was pretentious rubbish.”

While the Guardian has a fascinating interview with Peace –

He casts around a bit in his childhood. His parents were both primary school teachers, he went to Batley Grammar. Who knows? "Partly it was Yorkshire. Looking back, it often seemed tinged with violence to me somehow. It's quite a hard place, I suppose, and for a while I was the kind of person who was beaten up a lot. Just in pubs and wherever. And usually it was brought on by the fact that I'd insist on having the last word on any subject. Then further back there was all the Ripper stuff. I remember saying in an interview once that I used to worry that my dad was the Yorkshire Ripper. That is true, but only in the way that everybody feared their father was. That was the effect it had. What I was trying to convey was the level of paranoia it created."

To start with, Peace relieved his angst in a band he likes to think sounded like a cross between the Fall and the Birthday Party. He wrote the lyrics and screamed them, at local pubs and miners' benefit gigs. "And then there was an obsession with Joy Division, and all that, dead poets. My dad once pointed out to me that all the writers I admired had killed themselves. He was right."

In a sense, moving to Tokyo seemed to lock him into some of that gothic sensibility, at least in his work. He's charming, modest and relaxed in conversation, a good listener, but he describes himself as obsessive in some respects also. "If I like a certain writer or a band, you know, I definitely have to know and probably own everything they have done." That kind of obsessive tendency seems to inflect his writing in different ways. At times, he gets so entranced by the rhythm of a paragraph or the cadence of a phrase that he seems to want to keep turning it over, endlessly. It's hypnotic, crafted and sometimes alarming. I wonder if, to begin with, he thinks the style had anything to do with his day job, parsing sentences for uncomprehending Japanese students?

"Friends have said that. I don't know. My wife isn't a fluent English speaker. Perhaps that has made a difference to how I write. What I do know is I walk round this room and say everything out loud over and over to get it right. Or sometimes I'll get a kind of obsession where you will have to have in a sentence the first word as six letters, the second as five, the third as four and so on. Mad stuff. That became a problem. If you look in Tokyo Occupied City, there are bits that are left over from the months I was doing that. Balancing the number of words in a line."

Those months, he suggests, coincided with a period of depression that began around the time he turned 40, two years ago. "There were things going on at home, problems with being in Japan. But it was the writing really. One of the points I reached was a sense that language had no meaning." He laughs now. "That was quite disturbing." In the end he wrote his way out of it, tried on different voices. "If I had been in Britain, I would have sought some help, but that wasn't an option here."

While Peace wrote a fascinating article for The New Statesman about the case of The Yorkshire Ripper –

The hunt for the man who would become the Yorkshire Ripper began in Leeds on 30 October 1975 with the murder of Wilma McCann. His first four victims were described by the police and press as "good-time girls" - prostitutes. But then, in June 1977, the Ripper killed a 16-year-old shop assistant. This murder caused public outrage, bringing intense pressure on West Yorkshire Police, pressure that was to increase with each murder and assault. In April 1979, the Ripper killed another "innocent girl" in Halifax. It was in the aftermath of this tenth death that the police decided to release excerpts from a cassette tape and letters that they believed had been sent to them by the Ripper.

No one who heard the tape will ever forget the Geordie voice that taunted the police and threatened to kill again. Nor will anyone ever forget the siege of fear it laid to the entire north of England. The tape convinced senior Yorkshire detectives that the Ripper was from Wearside. They believed that the tape and letters contained information that only he, the killer, could have known. They also believed the Ripper had left behind clues that would eventually help catch him, and so launched a million-pound publicity campaign to "flush out the Ripper". One clue was the reference in the first two letters to the murder of a woman called Joan Harrison in Preston, Lancashire, in 1975. This murder was now regarded by West Yorkshire Police as the work of the Ripper.

Three murders later, two uniformed policemen approached a parked car in Sheffield's red-light district on 2 January 1981. Inside it were a prostitute and her punter. The punter was Peter William Sutcliffe, a 34-year-old, married lorry driver from Bradford. He was not a Geordie. But, two days later, he confessed to being the Yorkshire Ripper.

Twenty-two years after the arrest of Sutcliffe for 13 murders and seven assaults, there is no end in sight for the communities he terrorised. Uncertainty remains as to how Sutcliffe could have done what he says he did and why, and how the police could have let him and why. Sutcliffe's trial at the Old Bailey and the subsequent review of the police investigation by Sir Lawrence Byford, the chief inspector of constabulary for England and Wales, should have answered the public's questions. Neither did.

Look out for Red Riding on ITV this Thursday [in the UK] and I am pretty sure DVD releases will follow shortly.