You Know the Word

Okay, so I’m posting again earlier than expected. Because of the unexpected news learned first from Sarah, who learned it from Anthony, who learned it from the angels. What was once known as Fuck Noir has received a more review-friendly title, Expletive Deleted, and will be coming out—after a long wait—this November. Says Bleak House Books:

Crime writing is a dirty business—dealing in death, isolation, ruin and decay—and sometimes it calls for dirty words. In this gritty, gorgeous collection of short stories, new and veteran crime writers alike celebrate that granddaddy of all cusswords; that most adaptable and descriptive grouping of letters; that searing, offensive, musical, perfect sound: fuck.



Contributors include Ken Bruen, Charlie Huston, Anthony Neil Smith, Jason Starr, Sarah Weinman, John Rickards, Libby Fischer Hellmann, and Reed Farrel Coleman. With an introduction by Mark Billingham. (Soap not included.)


Ms Jordan



Kissinger

EQMM Readers' Award

EQMMI got a pleasant surprise in the mail yesterday—a complimentary copy of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Why? I wondered. Well, an enclosed note told me that I’d made it into the top-ten of the 2006 readers’ poll for my story, “Investment in Vevey”. (Okay, “top-ten” is a misnomer, since I tied with three others for 9th place, one of whom is Joyce Carol Oates, so I’m still pleased.) I didn’t even know they had a readers’ award, which kind of made it all the nicer.



Here are the top 3, and thus the actual winners:



1. “Swamped” by Leigh Lundin (August 2006)



2. “The Black Chapel” by Doug Allyn (Sep/Oct 2006)



3. “A Convergence of Clerics” by Edward D. Hoch (December 2006)



(Hoch also pulled off the feat of claiming 4th place too, with “The Theft of the Blue-Ribbon Pie”.)



Congrats to them all, and my fellow long-listers, especially fellow Edgar-nominee, Steve Hockensmith, whose “Wolves in Winter” pulled in at 6th place.

(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)

The Enemy Agent and You

Here’s another YouTube piece, also with a 60s flair, but of a decidedly different stripe. A little something I like to call DOD-1S 7. When you’re traveling overseas, watch out! Or at least remain puritanically moral at all moments. That’s the only way to defeat the Red Menace.



(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)

Literature tells stories. Television gives information.

Yesterday, The Guardian printed an interesting, previously unpublished Susan Sontag essay on the novel. It moves through a lot of territory in a relatively short space, but one thing I found particularly appropriate to my writing these days is the idea that each novel storyline hints at other stories that are not told. You can’t tell all of them, no matter how interesting they may all be. This is one of my central writing questions at the moment: Which to tell, and which not to tell? Sontag offers me no guidance, but her thoughts are always worth listening to.

A novel is not a set of proposals, or a list, or a collection of agendas, or an (open-ended, revisable) itinerary. It is the journey itself - made, experienced and completed.



Completion does not mean that everything has been told. Henry James, as he was coming to the end of writing one of his greatest novels, The Portrait of a Lady, confided to himself in his notebook his worry that his readers would think that the novel was not really finished, that he had “not seen the heroine to the end of her situation”. (As you will remember, James leaves his heroine, the brilliant and idealistic Isabel Archer, resolved not to leave her husband, whom she has discovered to be a mercenary scoundrel, though there is a former suitor, the aptly named Caspar Goodwood, who, still in love with her, hopes she will change her mind.) But, James argued to himself, his novel would be rightly finished on this note. As he wrote: “The whole of anything is never told; you can only take what groups together. What I have done has that unity - it groups together. It is complete in itself.”



We, James’s readers, may wish that Isabel Archer would leave her dreadful husband for happiness with loving, faithful, honorable Caspar Goodwood: I certainly wish she would. But James is telling us she will not.



Every fictional plot contains hints and traces of the stories it has excluded or resisted in order to assume its present shape. Alternatives to the plot ought to be felt up to the last moment. These alternatives constitute the potential for disorder (and therefore of suspense) in the story’s unfolding.


Read the rest

Somebody Don't Like Me

I’ve often said, and with good reason, that critics have thus-far treated me pretty well. While certain lines in a review may point out weakness in my books, generally the overall assessment is quite good. Because of this, I often pay attention to those mentioned weaknesses, and see if I a) agree, and if I do, then b) see if I can fix them next time around. I consider it a pretty constructive relationship.



However, last night I came across another review at BellaOnline, “The Voice of Women”, and was surprised by what I think is my first truly negative review, by Karm Holladay. After giving a run-down of the story (which is admittedly hard to sum up given the structure I used), she says:

My problem with Liberation Movements is threefold: first, it should have been set in a real country, not just an unnamed Soviet place. The setting is colorless, and it could have been rich with ethnic tensions. Second, the 1968 story is weak and too obvious: I knew what Peter was going to do the minute he met Stanislav.



Third, and worst, the book is a mess of conflicting viewpoints, tenses, and events happening out of sequence. An author should craft the best story in the most clear-cut way. With simple writing as an effortless vehicle for strong characters and plot, an author can immerse readers in the experience. An author who insists on showboating just gets in everyone’s way.



Liberation Movements felt like a product of author arrogance: never mind the story! Look at me, dazzling you with literary exercises! This renders what could have been an experience into a mere stylistic in-joke. It is a disservice to the readers, and gets one star (* = not recommended). Follow the link to Amazon if you must, but buy something better than Liberation Movements.




















Chantal Goya on Masculin Feminin

I’m still neck-deep in the work, and will be for the foreseeable future, so any posts I make are probably going to be pretty slight. For example, here’s an interview from 1966 with Chantal Goya, young singer and one of the stars of Godard’s Masculin-Feminin.





I post it because there’s something charming about the sixties interview style, with questions like, “Chantal Goya, you sing and act. Is there anything you haven’t yet done that you’d really like to do?” You know…hard-hitting questions.



If you haven’t seen Masculin-Feminin, I suggest you go out and rent it. Don’t take this interview as a suggestion that it’s anything like the film. While the film uses a group of young people (a teenage revolutionary, a burgeoning ye-ye singer—Goya, etc) and dances lightly across the screen, the film is full of Godard’s typical cynicism and sarcasm.



In an interview, Godard was asked why he chose Goya, who the interviewer referred to as “beautiful”. Godard said that had nothing to do with it. For him, her face was “empty” and she completely exemplified “the Pepsi Generation”. Ouch!



(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)

Give me money, I'll write

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Here’s an interesting semi-aside from the Guardian, where they discuss the fervor (particularly from one suicidal critic) around them having suggested Martin Amis was Britain’s Greatest Living Author.







Ms Love’s hate prompted us to ask whether Amis really is Britain’s GLA. And if not, who is? Helpfully, The Book Magazine polled its readers last year, and the results were illuminating. McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Harold Pinter, AS Byatt, Doris Lessing, Alan Bennett, Iain Banks, David Mitchell, Ian Rankin, Pat Barker, Alasdair Gray, Philip Pullman, Nick Hornby and, yes, Martin Amis all scored well. Muriel Spark also made the top 20, even though she had died two months previously. But the winner by a landslide was JK Rowling, with almost three times as many votes as her closest challenger, Terry Pratchett. The wisdom of crowds.





Which makes me wonder if the word “market,” which I use so casually above, really means these teeming crowds, voting for Rowling’s pre-eminence?



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* I took out poets, because it’s not fair to include them—really, you just can’t make much of a buck off of poems.