Oh Lad, Poor LadBy LAURA MILLER
A new genre of commercial fiction, lad lit, was recently pronounced stillborn by Publishers Weekly, a mere month after its arrival had been announced by The New York Times and The Associated Press. Nothing stings quite so bitterly as cold numbers, so when the magazine printed that Nielsen BookScan had detected sales of only 1,716 copies of Kyle Smith's ''Love Monkey,'' an ostensible leader of the well-publicized ''trend,'' it had to hurt. An events planner at a Chicago bookstore chain was quoted saying that lad lit might attract women readers interested in ''spying on the other side, getting a look into the locker room,'' but she had to admit that the 10 stores in the chain she works for hadn't sold a single copy of either ''Love Monkey'' or another exemplar of the genre, Scott Mebus's ''Booty Nomad.''
Like Jayson Blair's tell-all, sell-little memoir, ''Burning Down My Master's House,'' the fizzling of lad lit demonstrates that press coverage doesn't always translate into cash receipts. It also proves that novels that don't appeal to women are a tough sell. Market research firms consistently report that men make up as little as 20 percent of the readership for adult trade fiction, and with the exception of a few franchise authors like Tom Clancy, writers who appeal mostly to men have a tough time of it. By contrast, a half-dozen ladies, each armed with three names and the capacity to churn out two books a year, manage to sell millions of novels while barely registering on the media's radar. The likes of Mary Higgins Clark and Anne Rivers Siddons are the Godzillas of the fiction trade, towering over the scurrying masses who think of Jonathan Franzen as the big time. Even Bridget Jones shrinks to the dimensions of a minor phenom in comparison.
Nevertheless, chick lit is a legitimate and booming genre, perhaps the only new one to spring up in the past 25 years. Most bookstores now devote a shelf, or two or three, to its candy-colored, cartoon-bedizened offerings. What makes these books so appealing and the lad lit novels so not? The chick lit formula has been tweaked to accommodate heroines who are, among other things, black, Latina, middle-aged and married, often to great success. How come the sex change attempted by lad lit turns out to be a tweak too far?
Helen Fielding's innovation was to fuse a fond, satirical take on the contemporary cult of feminine self-improvement to an old-fashioned romance plot. ''Bridget Jones's Diary'' is famously based on Jane Austen's ''Pride and Prejudice,'' but while Fielding's Mr. Darcy isn't too big a departure from Austen's hero, Bridget Jones is no Elizabeth Bennett. Instead, she's the creation of modern women's magazines. She wouldn't be funny -- and to work, chick lit has to be funny -- if she weren't perpetually falling short of the absurdly inhuman standard of perfection to which she aspires. You wouldn't want her to succeed. She'd be insufferable if she did.
The narrators of lad lit carry no such cross. It's not that pop culture has no paragons of masculinity -- the fictional genres aimed at men are staffed with strong, masterful, good-looking, altruistic heroes. It's just that the average guy rarely feels pressured to equal them. He may resent the need to behave with adult decorum around women, but when he transgresses, the results are more likely to be boorish than endearing. So, for example, the narrator of ''Booty Nomad'' can't remember the names of the women he's slept with and gives them nicknames like ''Bendy Girl'' and ''Totem Pole.'' The narrator of ''Love Monkey'' says things like, ''This girl is harder to get into than Rao's.''
The titles of the books alone tip you off to the precarious line they try to walk. (Has anyone but Nick Hornby ever managed it?) ''Monkey'' says rude, animalistic behavior, guys! But we've softened it with ''Love,'' girls! From the unholy mating of ''Sleepless in Seattle'' and ''Jackass'' only misshapen progeny can spring. As for ''Booty Nomad,'' what woman wants to sympathize with the kind of man who thinks of her bed as a pit stop? ''Love Monkey'' and ''Booty Nomad'' have enough similarities to suggest the germ of a subgenre: each is about a 30-ish man pining for an unavailable woman while trying to get into the pants of several others; each features a scene in which a spectacularly crass buddy (put in to make the hero look decent by comparison) drags the narrator to a strip joint.
Lad lit authors may be truthful about young men's preoccupations, but the recipe for great escapist reading does not include ample servings of stuff people would rather not know. The promoters of lad lit confuse the way women exhaustively analyze a boyfriend's smallest words and gestures with genuine curiosity about men's inner lives. What could be mistaken for a process of detection is actually an act of construction on the part of women who already have a pretty good sense of what's going on in the locker room and prefer to imagine something more appetizing. However realistic the chick lit heroine may be, her love object, the brass ring that makes all her misadventures worth suffering, is usually a figure of fantasy, an initially intimidating alpha male who secretly cherishes her wacky antics and inner goodness. He isn't that different, really, from the kind of hero featured in the thrillers, westerns and spy novels read by men. A little less brooding and violent, perhaps, but an honorable and decisive fellow anyone can admire. That's one thing men's genres share with women's: they're all in love with the same guy.
Lad lit is intent on spoiling the fantasy, and this could result in something even worse than the despair of being caught on a cross-country flight with a tiresome book. If female readers allowed themselves to believe that most straight men spend their time holding conversations with their penises, watching the Cartoon Network, fiddling with their rotisserie baseball teams and contemplating the fine art of passing gas on subway trains, romance -- and perhaps even human reproduction itself -- would grind to a halt. So for the good of the species, they're staying away from lad lit, in droves.
The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > The Last Word: Oh Lad, Poor Lad
THE LAST WORD; Divorce That Book By Laura Miller
A READER recently wrote in to say she was ''amused -- vindicated in fact'' -- to discover in this column some disparaging comments about a certain historical novel she'd read. ''I knew,'' she continued, ''like a bad marriage, that I had made a mistake halfway through the first chapter. I was bored, irritated and actively offended,'' but ''brought up in New England on various strictures of the clean-your-plate school, I did skim it from start to finish with no change of heart.''
Yankee resolve is justly celebrated, but this is over the top. Why subject yourself to an irksome book when so many sublime ones are available? Nevertheless, every reader recognizes the threshold my correspondent has yet to cross: the moment when you decide that you don't have to finish every book you start.
For some, it's like a loss of virginity; you never forget the book that defeated your naïve faith in the contract between an author and his or her reader, the promise that your time and effort, even your irritation, will be fairly repaid. (In my case, it was ''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man''; I had had about enough of Master Dedalus, thank you very much.) For anyone who reads books professionally, that faith dissipated long, long ago, and even the perversely principled stick-to-itiveness that makes a person gut out a book that reminds her of a badly chosen spouse has become a distant memory. Even critics who start out as hungry readers, devouring fat volumes in single, 10-hour sittings, learn to nibble, sampling a chapter at a time from each of the dozens of new books that arrive in the mail every week. It's a warped, unnatural way to read, dictated by uncommon circumstances. ''I now finish no book I start,'' says David Gates, a novelist and critic, ''unless I'm reviewing it. Or if it's wonderful fiction, but I haven't seen a wonderful novel for a long time.''
But surely authors, who aren't responsible for filtering through piles of new releases and who know what it's like to pour years of work into a book that people will pass over with a glance at the cover and the jacket copy, are more generous? Not really. ''I'm very unforgiving,'' says Michael Chabon, the author of ''The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.'' If the book doesn't grab him in a page or two, he's out of there. ''I guess I'm less responsible to books than I should be, but my time for reading is so limited and the competition is so fierce. It's a Darwinian process.'' Being perfectly willing to bail out when the going gets dull is, for many writers, less a matter of lost idealism than an apprehension of mortality. ''As time goes on, I'm more apt to abandon them,'' Diane Johnson, author of ''Le Divorce,'' writes via e-mail. ''I quite often lose books, leave them on buses or whatever,'' which she interprets as her unconscious relieving her of a duty when her conscious mind is playing the martinet.
Even younger writers feel the press of time. Myla Goldberg (''Bee Season'') tells herself that reading a mediocre book ''would mean that I would eventually be on my deathbed having been deprived of the opportunity to read some other book, perhaps one that would have been really fun, or exciting, or even life-changing.'' Chabon gives a book two pages, Goldberg allows it 15 to 50, and a book editor I know says that ''publishing turns you into a person who decides within five pages whether you'll like something or not and who puts it down (whether it's work or personal reading) without one ounce of guilt if the answer is no.'' She added, ''I know someone who swears by nothing more than the first sentence.'' What puts these readers off? The most complained-of quality is ''lyricism,'' the piling on of metaphors, similes and extravagant imagery. Also hated are long passages of description (particularly of weather and geology) and hokey framing devices like ''I remember well the summer I turned 14. . . .'' For the writer, the pitfalls are many, and one imperative rules: ''Your beginning better be just killer,'' Chabon says.
Some might see this as evidence of a culturewide case of literary attention-deficit disorder, but it's hard to justify time wasted in the reading of unloved books. The burden is on the author to prove that what you're holding is something exceptional, and if not in the first few pages, then where? It's also unwise to idealize the passionately committed reading habits of youth; becoming a writer yourself can make you realize how low you once set the bar. ''I had an insatiable appetite for complete narratives,'' says Jonathan Lethem (''The Fortress of Solitude''), remembering the years when he finished every book he started. ''I needed to know what happened. I'd fillet a novel of its story. Now I read more slowly, less to get to the end than for the pleasure of the sentences and paragraphs. Before, it was pure consumer frenzy.''
Others described their need to read to the end of even the worst book in similarly pathological terms: ''an obsession,'' ''a sick sense of loyalty,'' ''masochistic.'' Ayelet Waldman, a novelist (''Daughter's Keeper'') who is married to Michael Chabon, claims to have ruined a family vacation in Hawaii because she refused, with a tenacity her husband found maddening, to jettison a book she loathed. ''The rage that it engendered kept me going,'' she says. ''I have to feel personally betrayed by a book to quit, but sometimes, exactly like some relationships I've had, the betrayal becomes so catastrophic that I keep going back to it.'' Most will persevere with a trying book only if it comes highly recommended. ''It's like dating,'' says Tom Bissell, the author of ''Chasing the Sea.'' ''You need to know if this is serious or just a fling.''
The editor Robert Gottlieb, a prodigious reader, maintains that he never deserts a book, although closer questioning reveals that it takes him quite a bit of ''reading in'' a volume to decide that he's started it. Gottlieb, who says he'll sometimes read an old, forgotten book just because ''I feel sorry for it,'' also believes that he'll get back to the many partly read books in his life eventually, which makes them half-finished, rather than un. The distinction is fine, but useful; by the time fate obliterates the difference, you won't care.
Published: 05 - 09 - 2004 , Late Edition - Final , Section 7 , Column 1 , Page 27
NYTimes.com Review THE LAST WORD; Divorce That Book
Billy Joel signs publishing deal for children's booksby liveDaily Staff
May 18, 2004 12:00 PM - Singer/songwriter Billy Joel has signed a publishing contract with Scholastic to create two new children's books, the publishing house announced on Tuesday (5/18).
The first book, "Goodnight My Angel: A Lullabye," is a picture book based upon a similarly titled song that first appeared on Joel's "River of Dreams" album and was written for Joel's daughter. It will be published in September.
The book features paintings by artist Yvonne Gilbert that "illustrate the relationship between a father and daughter and the profound ways that small moments--like tucking a child into bed--affirm parents' devotion to their children," according to a press release.
The second book will be based on the Joel song "New York State of Mind," and is tentatively scheduled for release in the fall of 2005.
Billy Joel signs publishing deal for children's books
Who reads the book of love?Book group for singles has everything but the guys
By Ron Fletcher, [Boston] Globe Correspondent | May 16, 2004
Single readers with no interest in being left on a shelf gathered on a recent weeknight at Village Books to make a solitary pleasure social.
"A customer had heard about a book club we were sponsoring that was made up entirely of men," said Annie Bauman, the co-owner of the store. "She said she wanted in.
"It turned out that that club was a closed one -- and made up of married men. So, we started talking about a club for singles. The response was overwhelming. Here we are."
Thirty- and forty-somethings browsed among the book-lined walls, enjoying red wine, cheese, and the softly playing music of the English duo Everything But the Girl. The tune was tinged with irony, though, when the 7 p.m. start time ticked by and the shop filled with everyone but the guys.
But Bauman had anticipated what she called "a slanted ratio" and had come up with a proposal: a $5 store gift certificate for any woman who brought along a male friend.
"It's common practice to offer an incentive when seeking some sort of gender balance," said Bauman. "One customer told me if she had a guy to bring then she wouldn't be here."
Of the 30 book lovers who pre-registered for the event, about half made this May 5 opening night: 12 women and 3 guys, each arriving of his own volition.
Bauman assured the slanted ratio that there would be better gender balance at the next meeting.
"This night isn't so much about meeting someone else," said Bauman, a wife and mother-to-be, "but a way of expanding a network of single people, of people at a similar stage in their lives."
The single women took the news in stride. Asked to put a price on the value of male company, Janis Khorsi of Roslindale laughed.
"You might have to offer $25 to get a guy into a bookstore these days," said the Oregon native and WGBH employee.
Sporting nametags bearing the title of the last book they read, singles scanned the shelves, lauding one author and pooh-poohing another. A woman who had recently read "Le Divorce" chatted with a guy claiming to have read "Sophie's Choice."
Elsewhere women turned to women to joke about that rare species: the single male reader.
"I'm not surprised that it's mostly women," a recent reader of "I Don't Know How She Does It" told "Life of Pi." "My ex-husband didn't read. He did not read. I couldn't share anything with him. He was into TV. I could never again be with someone who doesn't want to read."
I wanted to tell her that men do read, but that many prefer to do so the same way George Thorogood took his drink and Henry David Thoreau took his walks: alone.
I wanted to tell her how after the opening game of my hockey season last fall, Chris Hobson, a teammate not above an on-ice donnybrook, pulled me aside at T's Pub and spoke in hushed tones.
"Hey, Ronnie Boy," began Hobby. "What do you think about starting a book club this year? We could invite the Crawdaddy. You know, just the three of us. You name the book."
I agreed sotto voce and told him I'd have a title for him by our next game. We clinked beer glasses.
The book club, alas, remained a "pints dream," despite the fact that each of us voiced good intentions and purchased Ian McEwan's "Atonement," a title I went on to read with another all-male book club: the roomful of high school juniors I teach.
"Fear of commitment" provides a convenient but facile explanation for why three guys couldn't orchestrate the reading and discussion of something that takes time, a novel.
Yet I don't imagine that the club would've happened had we chosen a short story -- or a haiku. Seems that informality and spontaneity trump A Plan when it comes to guys and books. Between hands in poker or while suiting up for a hockey tilt, guys have been known to mention an author's work, yet they seem to need the freedom to digress, to punctuate the serious with the trivial, talk of metaphors with talk of models.
But I digress. Back at the Village Books's cheese and crackers, one intrepid man's stock seemed to be plummeting as he extolled the virtues of a book on serial killers to an incredulous stranger.
Bauman unwittingly came to the rescue of that pair when she asked the group to listen to a talk on building the perfect book club. The advice eerily paralleled a successful relationship, with its lauding of chemistry, commitment, and communication.
"Be passionate, speak honestly," advised Bauman, "but come to the table capable of defending your emotions one way or another. That leads to discussion and that makes this thing work."
After the talk, Khorsi took the books-romance analogy a step further, describing her last date as "definitely non-fiction," someone she said she would title, "I, Narcissus."
"My last date had four pints in two hours," added Ms. Le Divorce, who declined to give her name. "It was like a date with Charles Bukowski -- without the poetry."
Ed Langley, one of the trinity of men -- and not a fan of serial killer prose -- was unaware of the going rate of his Y chromosome.
"Five dollars?" he said, with a laugh. "That's very undervalued."
By the exit, Khorsi bundled up for the cool evening. Despite the night's lack of knights, she remained optimistic about the next meeting. "You never know who will be there," she said. "Could be Mr. Right -- holding a book."
Boston.com / News / Local / Mass. / Who reads the book of love?
Author profile: Jim BornBy Lona O'Connor, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 16, 2004
If there was an instant when the proverbial light bulb went on, when the idea for writing a novel was born, then that light would have been a flashlight in an unmarked police car, in the middle of the night.
During endless hours of surveillance as a federal drug officer, Jim Born found plenty of time to read by flashlight: Tom Clancy, Larry McMurtry, James Michener, history books.
Finally, he looked up from his reading and said to himself, "I think I'll write something."
It illuminated the moment when Jim Born, agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, began a 14-year morph into James O. Born, crime fiction writer.
Now, according to those who know, he's headed up the charts -- with a bullet.
Born's first novel, Walking Money, is due next month from Putnam.
A West Palm Beach native with 18 years in law enforcement, Born is keeping his day job in Fort Lauderdale as supervisor of special agents at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. But his future looks brighter than a police spotlight.
"Jim Born is the real thing," wrote Elmore Leonard in a blurb for the cover of Walking Money.
It's a rare compliment from the author of Get Shorty and dozens of other popular crime novels, according to Peter Rubie, Born's agent.
"Elmore does not give (book jacket) quotes," Rubie said. "If you can find more than two, I'd be surprised. But he knew this guy's work and felt satisfied that it was of a certain quality."
It's true that Leonard has a soft spot for Born.
"I'm so happy he stuck with it and made it," Leonard said, calling from Beverly Hills, where he was visiting the set of Be Cool, the latest movie based on one of his novels. Leonard said he helped Born with punctuation and dialogue when Born was starting out. "But he had that perspicacity to stick to it, and go right back to work," Leonard said.
Born, 43, who lives in suburban Lake Worth, drew on his prolific experience in high-profile crime cases, collected over his years working for the DEA and the FDLE.
His career highlights read like a list of instances where truth is stranger than fiction: He was a police diver in the Everglades after the 1996 ValuJet crash. He was part of the hunt for Andrew Cunanan, who shot designer Gianni Versace on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion. He worked on the anthrax investigation in Boca Raton and went undercover to investigate the Ku Klux Klan.
It was all fodder for Walking Money. Set in Miami, the novel is titled for a satchelful of ill-gotten cash that keeps moving from hand to dishonest hand -- with bad things befalling just about everyone who handles it. Somehow Bill Tasker, the detective hero of the tale, ends up framed for murder.
Neil Nyren, Born's editor, thinks he has what it takes to build a following in the world of mystery book readers.
"He's very smart about what he needs to be doing and he's eager to learn," said Nyren, who liked Born's work so well that he first gave him a two-book deal, then made it a four-book deal.
Even taking his real-life experiences into account, Born's arrival in the big time makes success sound infuriatingly easy. He is a self-taught writer who doesn't even suffer from writer's block. He's ahead of schedule on his next novel and fleshing out outlines for three more.
"When I'm running or at the gym or playing tennis with the kids, I'm working out where the story is going," he said.
Born, whose father was the late Palm Beach County Circuit Judge John Born, sees himself as someone who just keeps plugging away. He's a guy with two black belts in karate who likes to work and is determined to succeed.
"That's the cop side of him," said his friend Mike Sheehan, a Florida Highway Patrol lieutenant. "You want success, you don't want failure. We're a prideful bunch."
Leonard met Born through a mutual friend, the late Circuit Judge Marvin Mounts, the model for Leonard's fictional Maximum Bob. A stickler for realism, Leonard and his researcher, Greg Sutter, started calling Born for answers to detailed questions.
For Out of Sight, a novel and later a movie about a Florida prison jailbreak, Born's knowledge of the 1993 prison escape at the Glades Correctional Institution in Belle Glade came in handy. For Get Shorty, Sutter wanted to know how someone could sneak a gun into an airport.
After Born decided to try writing, he began making notes when he had time. He squirreled away details, such as the little old lady on the porch at the retirement home for greyhounds west of the Palm Beach International Airport. She showed up in Born's still-unpublished novel, Snitch.
He started writing Snitch when his wife, Donna, was pregnant with their son, John, 14 years ago. After John was born in 1989, he wrote late at night or during his son's nap time.
He learned as he wrote. Sutter suggested how to structure his first draft into chapters and scenes. He kept getting rejection letters, but the rejections got more encouraging as time passed. He hired a professional editor to polish the book.
"Jim could take criticism, and I'm good at criticizing," Sutter said. "I went at it like a chain saw. I told him, 'Hang in there, it'll happen.' (When he got a publishing deal), we were giddy for him."
When Born finished Walking Money, it got a warmer reception from agents than Snitch. About a year ago, he received a phone call from New York agent Peter Rubie. After years of rejection letters, this was another light-bulb moment.
"It immediately dawned on me that nobody had ever called me to reject me," said Born.
Within weeks, Born signed a deal with Putnam, and shortly thereafter started showing up at mystery writers' conventions, making friends with writers, asking questions. Meanwhile, Sutter recommended him for a job providing technical assistance for the short-lived cop show, Karen Sisco, based on the Jennifer Lopez character in Out of Sight.
Born's characters are often crusty and politically incorrect. Their adventures are likewise salted with the gallows humor of law enforcement.
"In this business, you just constantly look at the lighter side," said Sheehan. "It keeps us mentally on track."
Born is breezy and relaxed, married to his FSU college sweetheart, a family man living on a lake in a placid suburban neighborhood.
"My life is boring because I got everything I wanted," he said.
But as publicists line up book signings and interviews for the launch of Walking Money, Born senses he is on the cusp of something very different.
His second-biggest thrill so far was finding the book mentioned on a Japanese mystery fans' Web site. The best, though, was seeing his book cover advertised on the Wal-Mart Web site.
"Come on, I'm a redneck from Palm Beach County," he joked. "Wal-Mart is the Holy Grail."
Being on the cusp also has its humbling moments. A radio interviewer accidentally called him "James Hall" (another Florida mystery writer) on the air. And his wife jokes, "Hemingway, will you take out the garbage?"
There has been no big celebration, no big changes. He did indulge in a truck -- a used, gray, Dodge Dakota pickup he bought from a friend. It took some cajoling for him give up his 11-year-old truck.
"We had been begging him to get a new truck," said his wife. "The one he had was in such bad shape, the neighbors didn't want to borrow it."
Donna is already planning a summer "pickup book tour," day trips to book signings around Florida, with John and daughter, Emily, 10.
"They need to know that Dad plugged away for 14 years before he met with any success," she said. "He just stuck with it."
Author profile: Jim Born: "Moore Lets Bush Be Star of 'Fahrenheit'"
The Spinach Philosophy of Book Selection is my term for the way books are selected at some libraries. For instance, when The Sexual Life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet, translated by Adriana Hunter, was first offered up for purchase, I recommended it not because it was well reviewed, because it was not. I recommended it because of all the buzz - I knew there would be a demand for it. My supervisor placed it on her order, but the branch manager squashed it. Not one of the 14 branches in the Palm Beach County Library system ordered it, and I can understand why she didn't want to be the first. But we have a contract with a vendor that automatically ships us a set number of copies of any book that lands on the NY Times best seller list. Sure enough, the Millet book hit two weeks after publication and eventually hit the library shelves.
Unfortunately, we don't have that automatic ordering process in place for the NY Times Children's best seller list. A book has been on that list for quite some time now which the Palm Beach County Library System refuses to purchase. Why? They don't like the title. This particular book has been very well reviewed and has been cited as a great book to bring "reluctant readers" to the table. The title of this oh-so-offensive children's book? Walter the Farting Dog, by William Kotzwinkle. Which brings me to my rant on the Spinach Philosophy.
The Spinach Philosophy works this way: we don't provide the public with what it wants, we buy what is good for them. We decide what is good for them, and even more importantly, what is bad for them, then we avoid the bad no matter what. No matter that this is a public library, supported entirely by tax dollars that are paid by the public we serve. They might love French fries, but everyone knows they are bad for you, so instead, we offer you spinach. Have a lovely new reissue of the Black Stallion, a fine piece of literature to be sure, but does it hold the same appeal as the aforementioned Farting Dog book? Maybe. But maybe not. Why not offer both spinach and French fries? Anne of Green Gables and the Farting Dog can happily coexist on the same shelves. They do in bookstores, where the bottom line is providing what the public wants or hey, go out of business. There are no stores selling only spinach. It's the fries, baby, that the public craves, and if they are paying, give it to them.
If the Spinach Philosophy was used for only children's books it would be bad enough, and if it was only used as a prurient-meter for books for so-called grown ups, that would also be pretty bad. But it's also poorly reviewed books or books that haven't been reviewed by an authoritative source [Booklist, Library Journal.] I understand that libraries have to have some standards - I'm certainly not complaining about the lack of Hustler magazines or the latest in sado-masochist erotic fantasy, not that there's anything wrong with that. It just seems to me that a public library should carry what the public it serves wants, and if they want to read a poorly reviewed book or one with an offensive title, they should be able to do so. Sure, there has to be a line drawn somewhere, but personally, I don't think that Walter the Farting Dog is the proper place for that line.
Killer business: Murder on the Beach bookstoreBy Scott Eyman, Palm Beach Post Books Editor
Sunday, May 16, 2004
There are those who think that running a bookstore must be romantic and relaxing: wearing your smoking jacket, sitting in an armchair with pipe clenched firmly in teeth, indulging in civilized badinage with like-minded customers as you peruse leather-bound copies of Proust.
Once you've actually done it, you find out it's a lot closer to laboring on septic tanks, but by the time you learn the truth, the illusions of youth can never be recaptured.
Joanne Sinchuk's Murder on the Beach has been in Delray Beach's Pineapple Grove section for a year and a half now, after seven years in Aventura, and there are times when she pines for her old job as a certified public accountant.
Well, not really. But being a CPA was certainly less work.
"Before I opened," she says with a sigh, "I did the right thing and wrote out a business plan. And when I look at it now, I laugh at how much I didn't know."
There are 60 mystery bookstores scattered throughout the country, but Sinchuk's is the only one in Florida. Her store carries somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 titles, in hardcover and paperback.
Because Murder on the Beach is a specialized store, it has a specialized clientele. "I have customers from Miami Beach who drive up here," she says. "I have customers from all over the world on the Internet."
Sinchuk is an independent, and can't offer the deep discounts of the chain stores, so she has to be nimble and concentrate on obscurities and figure out who the Next Big Thing will be before anybody else does.
The customers at a mystery bookstore also have different levels of sophistication. For instance, Sinchuk has yet to sell her first copy of John Grisham's latest thriller, although it has been out for several months.
"My clientele is more intellectual, and more serious about the form. I sell very few books to people who don't like to read, which I think describes a lot of the mysteries that make the bestseller list."
Sinchuk owes it all to Agatha Christie, with whom she fell in love while growing up in Bridgeport, Conn. "I made up a list of all of her novels, and I would check them off as I read them."
When she was working as a CPA in New York City, she would regularly shop at Otto Penzler's Mystery Bookstore, and would indulge herself by thinking how much fun it would be to run a similar place.
Finally taking the plunge, she opened her store in Aventura, and did well, but the increase in the Hispanic population made the survival of a English-language bookstore problematic. It was time to head north.
"I didn't see anything I liked in Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton, but a customer told me about Delray Beach, and I loved it immediately."
Fully 30 percent of Sinchuk's business derives from mail order and Internet, largely autographed copies of books set in Florida, which seems to have joined Los Angeles as a primary setting for the genre. (Sinchuk sold more copies of Fort Lauderdale author Jonathon King's The Blue Edge of Midnight online than she did in her store.)
Because of her sales of autographed books by mail and online, author appearances are particularly important. Sinchuk regularly nabs such stars as Michael Connelly, who appears at the store tonight, and John Sandford. Her main target for a future signing is Alexander McCall Smith, the author of the popular series about a detective agency set in Botswana.
The market for mysteries has metastasized in the past 15 years. There are knitting mysteries, animal mysteries, cooking mysteries and hairdresser mysteries to go up against the usual private detectives, cops and bounty hunters. There's even a mystery series set in Cleveland, which would seem to limit your audience.
"I'm not even sure Cleveland was the worst choice," says Sinchuk. "Elaine Viets had a series set in St. Louis, but nobody outside of St. Louis wants to read about St. Louis. So she started setting stuff in Fort Lauderdale, and her career took off."
While independent bookstores all over America have gone belly up in the past 10 years, niche stores like Murder on the Beach have managed to survive even though, to an outsider, it would seem hard to fail in a business where you can return all your unsold inventory for full credit.
But as Sinchuk points out: "If I sell a book for $20, I paid $14 for it. And how many other businesses are there where the retailer has no control over price?"
For the future, Sinchuk sees no particular signs of weakening in the genre. Her business is headed up, even though about 50 percent comes from snowbirds, and she has the usual summer downdraft.
She sees the best new writers as being Jonathon King, the Irish writer John Connolly and the mother-daughter team that goes by the name P.J. Tracy.
Divorced with no children, Sinchuk remains an avid consumer of mysteries, although it's not what she reads for relaxation anymore.
"I read chick-lit," she says, "especially English chick-lit. Meg Cabot is my current favorite. You can polish a book off in one night, and it's fun."
Killer business: Murder on the Beach bookstore
A Tax Dodger Meets the Man By Nancy McKeon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 7, 2004; Page F01
Some people define themselves by their job, some by their hobbies, yet others by their family relationships. Josh Kornbluth and Richard Yancey are two very different men who can be defined, at least in part, by the Internal Revenue code.
Kornbluth is a West Coast writer/performer who, in his twenties, worked office jobs to pay the rent. At some point he dropped out of The System and, even though he temped for a tax attorney, didn't file tax returns for seven years.
Yancey spent those same years in Florida, and he too bounced around from job to job, trying to be a writer. He wound up -- until four months ago -- a revenue officer for the IRS, spending his days going after people like Kornbluth.
Tax dodger, meet tax collector.
Kornbluth was in Washington last week performing his monologue "Love and Taxes" at Arena Stage (through March 14). Yancey was in town promoting his new book, "Confessions of a Tax Collector" (HarperCollins). Here, in this edited transcript, they interview each other.
Kornbluth: Your book is really a story about becoming a grown-up.
Yancey: Yeah, a coming-of-age story. The IRS just happens to be where I come of age.
Kornbluth: I picked up on that right away because, in my show, we're actually telling a very similar story. Although we are, like, point-counterpoint, as we're being set up here. But as you describe yourself, you're pretty much a slacker. [Grins]
Yancey: Oh, yeah. I was a ne'er-do-well in the classic sense. If there was something to fail at, I could achieve that failure. By the time I got into the Service I was 28 and I didn't know what I was doing with my life. I didn't have a life, I didn't know what I was doing.
Kornbluth: You were the antithesis of what you were about to become. It's as if the car thief became the repo man.
So what was the job like?
Yancey: It was a lot of things. In some ways it was a terrific job. We had fun, especially in the early '90s before Congress ruined everything and put all these inhibitions on the IRS. [Laughter] We had a blast, and every day was different.
Yancey tells of a married couple -- apparently tax protesters -- who owed about $20,000 after failing to file for three years. They had no real estate in their names. Their 1989 truck had a large note on it. Only a 1968 Chevrolet Chevette had no lien against it. No way was Yancey going to get the government's $20,000 by seizing that.
Yancey: That car's basically a little box on wheels. But I thought, I gotta close the case, so I'll go out and get the Chevette. I knew where he worked, I knew he probably drove his car to work, and so I go there and was cruising his parking lot, three or four times. I can't find a red Chevette anywhere. Then I stop and I see this For Sale sign on a car. And it's a cherry-red '68 Corvette, not Chevette. It's a classic, in mint condition, worth back then, what, $70,000? $80,000? Within 10 minutes I had a tow truck there. The guy comes running out of his office, and the tow truck driver says, "If he's got a gun, you're my human shield. Stand there!" Anyway, we hooked it up, we took it in. I didn't get to sell it, though -- the guy came up with the money.
It kind of illustrates the real lesson I learned in the IRS.
Kornbluth: Which is?
Yancey: Which is how to control and manipulate people, which really didn't have anything to do with the power of the federal law that I had behind me. It had to do with learning how to push people's buttons. What I learned was, First you find what they love and then you take it. If you can't find what they love, find what they fear and exploit it.
Kornbluth: In your book, the [IRS interviewer] asks you, Why do people pay their taxes? You give the "right" answer, which is due to their patriotic duty. And he says, No, it's fear. Is that where it comes down?
Yancey: That's my experience. I can't tell you how many people, when I knocked on their door, said, "Are you here to arrest me?" And when everything was done, they would say, "I can't believe a person from the IRS is, like, a human being."
But when you were going through this ordeal, how were the IRS people in general? Were they the typical, you know, pocket protectors?
Kornbluth: I didn't actually -- what I did was, I called. First, I avoided.
Yancey: That's common.
Kornbluth: . At first I was working almost entirely at jobs that had withholding tax. I filed, and I got refunds, but then someone told me I was supposed to itemize, because I was also writing freelance. And I couldn't: I looked around and everything would look like a deduction [laughter] and I didn't know how to deal with it. Not only that, but I couldn't find things -- under socks, or KFC boxes.
Yancey: That sounds just like me. Oh, yeah, I'm a terrible organizer. I can't keep track of papers -- no, I was good at work. When I had to be, I was.
Kornbluth: Yeah, I recognized a fellow spirit. And I was around the age that you're talking about too -- I was in my twenties then. So anyway, I just fell out of the system. I had an appointment with a tax person, a preparer, and on April 15 I was scrambling and then I just overloaded and I got really sleepy --
Yancey: Sleepy?
Kornbluth: Yeah, sleepy. And I needed to lie down on my receipts, and when I woke up it was the 16th. Just like that. And I just couldn't -- it was late -- and then, nothing happened.
Yancey: Nothing happened?
Kornbluth: Nothing happened. And so I continued to let nothing happen for seven years, until I was a secretary for a great tax attorney. And I was doing a show about, in part, how I hadn't done my taxes for seven years, and he said, "That was a very funny joke, Josh," and I said, "Well, it wasn't a joke," and he flipped out and sent me to a tax lawyer. And that's why I started dealing with it and going inside the system.
I wasn't trying to get away with anything. The tax lawyer said that if I had filed I would've gotten refunds. But then I made a little money, for me a lot of money, $50,000 over two years 'cause I had movie options for my monologues. And then, instead of another refund I owed $27,000. So, at first I just wasn't thinking about it. Then I was thinking about it, it was on my mind all the time. I had been filing for years and then I stopped. So I eventually called the IRS, and they were really nice. I was on hold a lot, but I will say that, the music on hold, I found very relaxing.
Yancey: [Laughing] Really?
Kornbluth: But as I put in my Social Security number, my heart was pounding and I thought, "What is that person going to say, like, 'You're going to jail' ?" But at the same time, I really had the inkling -- and I'd be curious from your end -- the inkling of, I owe this. [Laughter]
Was it your experience, or did you have any connection with whether the money you were being sent to collect was a fair assessment of these people?
Yancey: I never got into that unless they brought it up.
Kornbluth: That wasn't your job, right? Your job is like, "Rick, go, get that money."
Yancey: No one ever called me -- well, some CPAs would call me by my first name, but most people wouldn't. And I didn't even use my real name.
Kornbluth: Oh, that's right! So, that's something I wondered -- so the woman I talked to on the phone was named Mrs. Williams --
Yancey: [to laughter] Yeah, right!
Kornbluth: I suspected that maybe it wasn't. So I was right about that?
Yancey: Well, on my level they don't release "this percentage of employees are using pseudonyms," but I made a personal choice and we're allowed to do it. I mean, I worked with people like you, but I worked with some real bad guys. There are those who openly flouted the system, who were, like, I know I owe this money and I don't care, I'm just not going to pay you. And plus questioning the legitimacy of the tax laws, just in general --
Kornbluth: Which, from my reading, is stuff that's thrown out whenever it gets to court, right?
Yancey: Yeah, but that doesn't stop some people --
Kornbluth: Well, there's the Flat Earth Society people too.
Yancey addresses some of the people he dealt with in his career, many of whom seemed never to have had anything and yet wound up owing the IRS thousands of dollars.
Yancey: Most of it came about through self-employment, where people are basically living beyond their means, they're not thinking when they get a check that part of the money belongs to the government.
One of the nice things about being a wage slave is that your employer is going to pay half of your Social Security tax. When you're self-employed, like you and I are, you're responsible for the whole thing.
Kornbluth: Yeah, independent contractors, the self-employed, need to put the money aside. People like us, who are not by nature responsible, not dedicated to details, need to learn that. That's what I did. I didn't attend to it, I didn't put the money aside, and then I owed it, and then it got bigger and bigger. But that's not the IRS's fault.
But the tax attorney was great. And I picked up a lot of the language, like the shotgun provision and the classical corporation ruling and the reverse double dummy maneuver.
Yancey: What's that?
Kornbluth: It had something to do with, you set up these sort of companies that are sort of -- well, I'm not the person to explain it. Nonetheless, it's a maneuver, it's legal, or apparently, and it's a great name I like to use in my show.
Yancey: I guess a lot of professions are like that. You have your own language, your own culture. And I get this pang [about the IRS] that I'm going to miss it. Sometimes, I feel, I need to be in the know.
Sandy [his wife] is still in the Service, so she can talk about some of these things. I mean, she can't give names, but for instance, she's training five new people and that helped me bring up the feelings that I had when I was in training that I talk about in the book, these feelings of being overwhelmed and learning a whole new language. I mean, you're pulling your hair out thinking, "I'm never gonna get this," but then you have an epiphany, something clicked at one point.
And all of a sudden you find yourself rattling off sections of the [tax] code. And, to get back to language for a second, in the IRS we don't call taxes taxes. They're not taxes, they're modules.
Kornbluth: So you're not really dealing with tax evaders. You deal with module evaders.
Yancey: Right, module dodgers.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
A Tax Dodger Meets the Man (washingtonpost.com)
