See HERE for Minotaur Books’ explanation.
…Read the rest over at Moments In Crime.
In an earlier post, I took pleasure in noting how my publisher has really gotten behind me with The Tourist, and on Wednesday another phase of its stellar support will begin. I’ll take off from Belgrade airport and begin a prepublication tour that’ll whisk me through six cities (DC, Boston, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and St Paul) in 10 days. Group lunches and dinners, cocktail parties, and lots of book expos.
It’s going to be hard work, pumping hands, meeting booksellers and editors and librarians, and consuming fine food and wine at the publisher’s expense, but someone has to do it.
No, I mean really. Of course it’ll be a blast, and this is the kind of support all writers—and particularly midlist writers who’ve been at it for some years—dream of. But it’s not just a whirlwind vacation, and the novelist is expected to rise to the occasion. Which means I’ll have to do more than just look pretty (a chore in itself); I’ll have to speak, socialize, entertain, and generally be the kind of person that, even after the hangover’s worn off, one actually remembers in a positive light.
And therein lies the old conundrum. How does the kind of person who chooses a career rife with solitude suddenly turn it on and become a social animal?
I’m not sure. A few years ago, this whole tour would have worried me, but there’s something to be said for toiling away for five books before finally breaking out into the larger world. At this point, I’ve gained enough confidence in what I do to be able to speak about writing with some fluidity, in a hopefully interesting way. Life has changed, and with a wife and a daughter I have reasons outside of my own ego to want this to be a success. Those life changes also give me a few extra stories to tell.
Anyway, the fact is that I’m now about to embark on my first US tour, a full six months before The Tourist will be released. We’ve been talking about setting up a blog to cover the trip, and if so I’ll aggregate it on the Nomad with links to Minotaur’s main blog site. Otherwise I’ll at least drop a few lines from the road.
Stay tuned.
(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)
For answers, [Silverman] asks a bunch of people that I don’t really want answering the question, with the exception of Ernest Hemingway’s grandson, Edward (Bartending Guide to Great American Writers, 2006). I mean, if you’re going to ask writers about drinking, don’t ask writers whose favorite drinks are the Ginger Provincial, the Margarella, the Key Lime Martini, and the Dakota Grand. These people obviously know nothing about drinking.
I could be wrong, but I think if you asked a bunch of Chicago writers about their favorite drinks, you’d get answers that didn’t require recipes and anecdotes to explain them.
You have to be a businessperson as a writer. Half of the job is the actual composing at your keyboard, the other half is selling yourself and schmoozing.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2acnabdX89Y&w=425&h=344]
THE SANDBAGGERS
Having whetted my appetite with this, I looked around for more and quite accidentally stumbled upon The Sandbaggers, a short-lived series from 1978-80 that ended only because the creator, Ian Mackintosh, disappeared while flying his single-engine plane across Canada. His body was never discovered, but he’s presumed to be dead.
The Sandbaggers is an entirely different beast, focusing instead on the intelligence administrators. Much of the time is spent in drab London offices or men’s clubs, discussing operations we get occasional glimpses of. The central character, Neil Burnside (Roy Marsden), runs the “sandbaggers”, a small group of agents sent in to do risky work and occasionally to murder. He was once a regular sandbagger himself, and thus has great empathy for those under him, spending a lot of his time trying to get them out of jobs he deems too risky. Like a good LeCarre novel, we’re constantly seeing the jobs from the top—from the decision makers’ perspectives—and the bottom—going with the sandbaggers into missions that fail as often as they succeed. And things are complicated by the Americans, who help and hinder and sometimes get people killed along the way.
There’s a mystique about the show’s realism that comes from one episode never being filmed because it would have violated the Official Secrets Act (Mackintosh had been in the employ of the British military). But spy shows don’t have to be real to be realistic, so that’s neither here nor there for me. All I know is that The Sandbaggers has some of the most intelligent writing I’ve seen on television, and seldom makes allowances for meek audiences—Burnside, despite his heavy conscience, continuously shows himself to be one of the hardest characters on television, one who’s easy to hate and seldom redeemed by a “heart of gold”. Yet despite this you slowly grow to understand him and appreciate his efforts in the face of seemingly endless disappointments.
He’s an atypical action-packed sequence from the show:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTI1RJw1jWM&w=425&h=344]
CALLAN
It’s only in the last few months that I came across Callan, an amazing, claustrophobic series from 1967-72, which starred Edward Woodward in his pre-Equalizer days as a hired gun for the British government. There’s a similar feel between this and The Sandbaggers, and Woodward’s David Callan is as embittered and ruthless as Burnside. Also, this one spends a lot of time in a drab office, but takes us out in the air a little more often to follow him on his jobs.
The overall feel is lightened somewhat by Callan’s sidekick, Lonely (Russell Hunter), a low-level thief who, we are told endlessly, is in desperate need of a bath. For some unexplained reason, Callan takes it as part of his job to keep Lonely alive, and it’s through this relationship that Callan’s able to show he might have a heart after all.
Callan is probably the gloomiest of the three shows, but it’s consistently entertaining, and like all these excellent shows there’s always an extra level of complication, some extra twist, that’s often unpredictable. And like The Sandbaggers, there’s so much going on that you really have to pay attention lest you miss the boat. But it’s so worth it, every time.
Here’s a typically chatty scene, focusing on one of the brilliant secondary characters, Toby Meres, a psychopathic co-worker.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOQIuQwEpDM&w=425&h=344]
Anyway, these shows have been on my mind lately, and I thought I’d share during one of my rare moments away from children’s music and aborted attempts to actually write my own novel. If you’ve seen any of these, chime in below, or if you know of something I might have missed, then feel free to enlighten. I always love good advice. And if you come across any of these, do yourself a favor and watch.
Since it’ll only be up for a few more days, I wanted to quickly link to something nice my UK publisher, HarperCollins, set up with Amazon UK. It’s a series of weekly author interviews called “Authors in the Spotlight,” and here’s mine.
(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)
It’s a few weeks old, but I just came across this bit in the Guardian:
Francesca Martin
Wednesday June 4, 2008
John le Carré’s hit thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is to hit the big screen. The author, whose real name is David Cornwall, is at work with the scriptwriter Peter Morgan on a film adaptation of the novel, first published in 1974 as the first instalment in a trilogy about cold war spies. To be produced by Working Title - the production company behind most of the British film industry’s biggest hits - it will be the first feature-film version of the novel, which was made into a television series starring Alec Guinness in 1979. According to Morgan - whose other recent credits include the forthcoming films State of Play, Frost/Nixon and The Damned United - le Carré is full of sage advice: “‘When you return to earlier work,’ he cautioned, ‘you feel two rather unpleasant emotions. One is God, this is awful, and the other is how can I ever write something as good ever again?’”
… [F]rom the moment Alec’s voice became that music in my ear, I felt that I was hampered.
I cannot help voicing my characters and listening to them - that’s the failed actor in me - so I think that Alec must have accelerated my departure. I wanted to bury Smiley, I wanted to write about younger people, I wanted to be unencumbered. Alec made that happen faster.
Warner Bros. has set Anthony Peckham to adapt “The Tourist,” an Olen Steinhauer novel being developed as a potential star vehicle for George Clooney.
Smokehouse’s Grant Heslov, Nina Wolarsky and Clooney will produce.
Acquired by WB in the fall, “The Tourist” is a contemporary international thriller about a spy who risks everything to reveal a conspiracy after he’s accused of a murder he didn’t commit.
Peckham’s script “Human Factor” will be directed early next year by Clint Eastwood; Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon will star. Warner just recruited Guy Ritchie to direct “Sherlock Holmes,” for which Peckham did a rewrite, and the scribe also did a rewrite on “Book of Eli,” a project that has Denzel Washington circling at WB.
Clooney will next be seen in the Joel and Ethan Coen-directed “Burn After Reading.”
I’d star, but it’ll always depend on the screenplay and how it comes out because these are those kind of movies that, if you do them really right, it is a Matt Damon film, it’s the “Bourne” films. If you do them wrong, it’s all the movies I’ve done before. (Laughs)
1964
THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD
by John le Carre
1978
THE HUMAN FACTOR
by Graham Greene
1983
BERLIN GAME
by Len Deighton
And in 2009…
THE TOURIST
by Olen Steinhauer
Well, as most of you already know, the Edgar results are in. We at the Nomad had a vested interest in one particular title and author, specifically in the Paperback Original category (an aside: aren’t the PBO covers just a bit more kick-ass than the others?), so color us slightly disappointed.
However, I’ve heard endless good opinion of Ms. Abbott’s writing, so if Mr. Wignall has to miss out on the little Mr. Poe, then I think she’s a fair one to take it instead. When he returns from another of his mysterious trips to a place where the internet is just a rumor, I’m sure he’ll have a thing or two to say. As for me, I’m in Serbia on a questionable dial-up connection—a pulse line, no less!—so I should get out of the way before the line burns out.
Anyway, here’s the big list…fight away!
BEST NOVEL
Down River by John Hart (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
BEST FIRST NOVEL BY AN AMERICAN AUTHOR
In the Woods by Tana French (Penguin Group - Viking)
BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
Queenpin by Megan Abbott (Simon & Schuster)
BEST FACT CRIME
Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy
by Vincent Bugliosi (W.W. Norton and Company)
BEST CRITICAL/BIOGRAPHICAL
Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters
by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower & Charles Foley (The Penguin Press)
BEST SHORT STORY
“The Golden Gopher” - Los Angeles Noir by Susan Straight (Akashic
Books)
BEST JUVENILE
The Night Tourist by Katherine Marsh (Hyperion Books for Young Readers)
BEST YOUNG ADULT
Rat Life by Tedd Arnold (Penguin - Dial Books for Young Readers)
BEST PLAY
Panic by Joseph Goodrich (International Mystery Writers’ Festival)
BEST TELEVISION EPISODE TELEPLAY
“Pilot” - Burn Notice, Teleplay by Matt Nix (USA Network/Fox Television
Studios)
BEST MOTION PICTURE SCREENPLAY
Michael Clayton, Screenplay by Tony Gilroy (Warner Bros. Pictures)
ROBERT L. FISH MEMORIAL AWARD
“The Catch” - Still Waters by Mark Ammons (Level Best Books)
(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)
In between diapers, I ran across an interesting Yahoo news piece on the results of a poll to learn the most favorite book(s) in America. Unsurprisingly, number one among all demographic groups was the Bible, but it’s when we get to number two that things become more complicated:
Men chose J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” and women selected Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” as their second-favorite book, according to the online poll.
But the second choice for 18- to 31-year-olds was J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, while 32- to 43-year-olds named Stephen King’s “The Stand” and Dan Brown’s “Angels and Demons.”
Picks for second-favorite book also varied according to region. “Gone With the Wind” was number two in the southern and midwestern United States while easterners chose “The Lord of the Rings” and westerners opted for “The Stand.”
Whites and Hispanics picked “Gone With the Wind” as their second-favorite book after the Bible, while African-Americans preferred “Angels and Demons.”
“Finally, they may not agree on candidates, but one thing that brings together partisans is their favorite book. For Republicans, Democrats and Independents, the top two books are the same — the Bible followed by “Gone With the Wind.”
Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee, “Angels and Demons” by Dan Brown, “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand and “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger rounded out the top 10 favorites.
