August 2008

At the Peak of His Powers

Sometimes you uncover treasures in the most unlikely places.

Nearly fifteen years ago, in the dusty back corner of a convenience store, I happened upon a VHS cassette of Heaven’s Prisoners.

Renting the bulky black tape and returning home to watch it on a small television beside my bed, careful not to wake my sleeping family—which included a newborn who wasn’t much for night sleeping anyway—changed my life.

The movie, starring Alec Baldwin, wasn’t bad, but by far the best thing about it was that it introduced me to James Lee Burke’s novels featuring his Louisiana detective, Dave Robicheaux. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect, as I was just getting serious about writing fiction. -read on-

July 2008

Cops and Cowboys

Environs change, but heroes stay the same.

Long before lone private eyes with heaters holstered beneath their seersuckers walked down the mean streets of uncaring urban back alleys, lone gunmen with six-shooters strapped to their waists walked down the dusty main streets of one-horse towns.

Listen to Raymond Chandler’s praise of the hard-boiled detective and tell me it couldn’t be applied to western gunslingers:

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.” -read on-

June 2008

First Time Novelist, Veteran Offer Stunning New Works

Child 44 is Tom Rob Smith’s first novel; Lush Life is Richard Price’s eighth—but in each case you’d never know it. Smith writes like a skillful old pro, Price like an enthusiastic new novelist. It’s hard to imagine these books being any different—or any better.

Set in 2003 in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Lush Life is as street as any literary novel can be. Richard Price knows the American city, understands its inhabitants—how they look, how they sound, how they interact, how and why they hurt themselves and kill each other. -read on-

Free Book Offer: To receive a complimentary copy of one of Michael Lister’s novels,
send your address to MichaelLister@mchsi.com

May 2008

When Good Writers Write Mediocre Books

It’s inevitable—unless you’re Harper Lee or Margaret Mitchell—write enough books and not all of them will be your best. The question for those of us who write and publish is just how not-our-best our not best books are.

I don’t know a single writer who starts out by saying, “I’m going to write a sub-par book,” but sometimes, despite our best efforts, they just end up that way. Writing a book is a long, idiosyncratic, arduous endeavor. The time between “Once upon a time” and “The end” is often several years. And no matter how long it takes, as authors, we’re not exactly objective about our work. That’s what editors, readers, and critics are for. -read on-

April 2008

True Love or Just a Fling?—a Book for Every Booklover

Spring is in the air, and with it, the bloom of romance.

Whether you're looking for booklove or just a little booklust, the right book is out there for you. Two promising possibilities are Gregg Hurwitz's The Crime Writer and Benjamin Black's The Silver Swan . -read on-

March 2008

The Art of Adaptation

How does one art form become another? It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

For the past six weeks, I’ve been teaching a class at Gulf Coast Community College called The Art of Adaptation. In it, students in the educational encore program and I have examined the relationship between film and literature, how the latter becomes the former, how the former influences the latter. -read on-

February 2008

Pulp Fiction Lollapalooza

The romantic in me imagines that the pulp fiction magazines I read began as north Florida slash pines like the ones that line our rural highways and frame our country dirt roads. I've also always wanted special editions of my books printed on paper produced from the pine trees of the panhandle that I write about, but that's another matter.

Pulp magazines or pulp fiction or “the pulps” were inexpensive fiction magazines published widely in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, though the term has also been applied to mass market paperbacks since the 1950s.

As I alluded to earlier, the name “pulp” comes from the cheap wood pulp paper used to print these magazines. -read on-

January 2008

My Top 7 of 2007

Year-end Lists are strikingly subjective. Mine is no exception. Nothing to be done for it—except perhaps the act of acknowledgment.

Even if, in my review column, I strive for a certain measure of objectivity, I can't claim the same for a Top 7 of 2007. I've read only a tiny fraction of the crime books published this past year.

In addition to the above concern, there's the absurdity of trying to rank art. We're talking about works of imagination, expressions of the soul, not prize pigs, pies, or poultry in a county fair contest.
-read on-

Free Book Offer: To receive a complimentary copy of one of Michael Lister's novels, send your address to MichaelLister@mchsi.com