Author profile: Jim Born
By 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'"

BookMania 2003 and
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.


BookMania 2003

Hats off to Martin County. If you've never been there, picture a small beach town, surrounded by other small beach towns that spread into sprawling suburbs as you travel west; so small that the Interstate had a gap through Martin County until just a few years ago. Yet somehow they managed to build a beautiful library with a large auditorium that has become this wonderful meeting place for authors and their fans. I was unable to attend opening night, which featured Elmore Leonard, but I did spend all day Saturday there, and the lineup was terrific.  

The first panel I attended was called "Women Who Craft the Crimes" and featured Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, Christine Kling and Virginia Swift, and was moderated by Scott Eyman, books editor of the Palm Beach Post. Carolina Garcia-Aguilera is the author of the fabulous Lupe Solano mystery series, the most recent one being Bitter Sugar. Her last book was One Hot Summer, (reviewed here) a complete departure for her into the contemporary romance genre, and it was a very successful foray indeed. There was some Miami politics sprinkled throughout that book, and as anyone who lives in Miami can tell you, it's very difficult to write about the area and not get into the politics. Ms. Garcia-Aguilera told me she was crucified for her politics, but I say you go, girl. If you have the forum and something to say, don't let the critics stop you. She also spoke about how reading was her escape from reality when she was a child. She was born in Cuba, and grew up during the revolution there, and then in exile before moving to Miami.  

Ms. Garcia-Aguilera was a private investigator in Miami for many years, and still does some investigative work now and then, which lends real credence to her Lupe Solano character. If you haven't read them, Lupe is a classic private eye with a feminist twist - she's a loner, but wears high heels. She's sexy, but not romantic, for which she has also been criticized; I'm afraid the old double standard is still alive and well among critics and readers. PI's have been having casual sex forever, but when it's the woman who wants it that way, tongues wag (no pun intended.) I am very excited about her next book, a stand alone thriller about Cubans in Las Vegas, called Luck of the Draw. It is scheduled for release in June.

Virginia Swift is the author of Brown-Eyed Girl and her newest book, Bad Company. My friend Judy just raved about her books, but I haven't gotten to them yet. (Judy, when are you going to start reviewing for me?!?) Ms. Swift, or as she is also known in real life, Dr. Virginia Scharff, is a history professor at the University of New Mexico, and has published several books in her area of expertise, women in the American West. She put herself through school as a honky-tonk singer in Laramie, Wyoming and in the oddest of coincidences, the main character of her series is a history professor who sings in a honky-tonk in, you guessed it, Laramie. Ms. Swift told us that historians are very leery of writing anything that is not true, so it was a bit of a stretch for her to write fiction. But nevertheless she'd been starting novels for years and had a drawer full of "false starts" as she called them, until one day she decided it was time to clean them out. She threw them all away, and that night she had a dream about a character she had written who told her "you can't get rid of us that easily." That character became "Mustang" Sally Adler (for the car, not the horse) and thus was born Brown-Eyed Girl, an homage to one of her favorite authors, Carl Hiaasen. Ms. Swift was very bright, funny and self-deprecating, and I would love to take a class with her. But instead, I'll settle for reading her novels. Soon.

Rounding out this panel was Christine Kling. Her first novel, Surface Tension, made my favorite books of the year list for 2002 (review here) and I gave away several copies in a contest, so it was a real pleasure to finally get to meet her. She mentioned how much fun it was for her to be on the other side of the table after so many years as a mystery fan. Ms. Kling's favorite author is John D. MacDonald and his Travis McGee character, and she based her book and her character on him. She said she loved how Travis always got the girl in the end, and then they would go off to the Keys. So in her book, her main character, Seychelle Sullivan, gets the hunky guy in the end and they go off to the Keys. Sweet! The next book in the series is called Cross Current, and has a political twist with Haitian immigration playing into the story.

Next on the agenda was a talk by S. V. Date, author of Black Sunshine, a politically inspired humorous thriller about the race for Governor. Date has been a journalist in Florida for many years, and is currently working in Tallahassee for the Palm Beach Post. He talked about politics in Florida, and his first hand knowledge of the insanity that goes on at the capital made for a very humorous talk indeed. His writing turned to fiction several years ago when Date and his wife took a year off from work and sailed through the Mediterranean and the Caribbean on a 31' cutter. He started writing his first novel, Final Orbit, about a murder on a space shuttle and the subsequent cover-up by NASA (which stands for "Never A Straight Answer") on that sailing trip. Date's novels are most often compared to Carl Hiaasen's.
Barnes & Noble is the bookseller for BookMania and they donate a percentage of their sales to the library. They also brought in Jill Lamar, the Manager and Editor of their "Discover Great New Writers" program. This is a wonderful program that helps promotes undiscovered authors. Booksellers from throughout the chain volunteer to read several books and make their recommendations. There are annual Discover awards as well, which for 2002 were judged by several prominent authors, most of whom were previously "discovered" by B&N themselves, including Anita Shreve and Susan Orlean. Ms. Lamar set up and moderated a panel with six eclectic and very talented new authors of such diverse work as two novels, a collection of short stories, two memoirs and a nonfiction adventure story.  

Jill Bialosky is an editor at W. W. Norton, a published poet but was promoting her first novel, House Under Snow, which was inspired by her image of the house and her characters, the mother and her daughters that were trapped within it. Ms. Bialosky is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and she credits the workshop with helping her find her own voice. She made a lot of friends there who still critique her work.

Loraine Despres has been writing for TV for years, her claim to fame being the "Who Shot J. R." episode of "Dallas." She started feeling the need for a change, and turned her considerable writing talent to a novel, a wickedly funny Southern charmer called The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc. Sissy lives her life based on the Southern Belle's Handbook (soon to be published as well) which includes much of the savvy sayings Ms. Despres heard growing up Louisiana. Ms. Despres told a story that her grandfather liked to tell about a man who walks into a bar and sees his wife with another man. He turns around, goes across the street to the hardware store, buys a gun, goes back into the bar and shoots his wife and her lover dead. The moral of the story, she was told, was "no guns on credit." Words to live by.   
Cynthia Kaplan is an actress who grew up in Weston, Connecticut. Her memoir is actually a collection of essays entitled Why I'm Like This: True Stories. When she decided to write, she thought about the most interesting character she could think of to write about - herself. She says she is "profoundly, deeply connected to the neurotic workings of my own brain." Her stories are an accurate representation of a middle-class Jewish girl, yet they are universal. She writes about the secrets in life that people think about but don't talk about. Her essays range from dealing with Alzheimer's to the "one girl at camp whom everyone hated" to waiting tables to finding a new therapist. She's funny and bright and sensitive - hearing another author speak brought her to tears, which she blamed on "pregnant hormones," but I teared up too and I haven't had a pregnant hormone for more than ten years. The man who caused the tears was Bob Smith.

Bob Smith is the author of Hamlet's Dresser: A Memoir. At 61, he is a first time published author and the self proclaimed "geriatric new kid" of this group. Mr. Smith started a Shakespeare appreciation class for senior citizens. The first class has 7 students, all over 85 years old. Then next class had 25 students, then 100 and by the end of the first year there were 2000 seniors showing up to discuss Shakespeare's work. The New York Times sent a reporter out to investigate, and it ended up as a front page story. Scribners approached him and asked him to write a book, but Mr. Smith doesn't type, so when he met with them he just read from hand written pages. They got him a typist and he slowly began writing his memoir. It started, as most memoirs do, in childhood. He grew up in Stratford, Connecticut and Shakespeare was not only his escape, but also his guide. Mr. Smith has a sister who is profoundly retarded, and he took care of her. But eventually she was institutionalized and he never saw her again. He told Scribner that the book wouldn't be finished until he saw his sister again, which he eventually did. You have to love a book about how books saved a life.

Tim Zimmermann is the author of The Race: The First Non-Stop, Round the World, No-Holds-Barred Sailing Competition, an adventure story in the style of Junger's The Perfect Storm. He talked about the type of people that get involved in a race like that - eccentric, to say the least - willing to only change their underwear three times in a year. He also addressed the "write what you know" school of thought; he likes to write about what he doesn't know, and learn something in the process. That hasn't helped him find another topic to write about though. He needs to feel passionate enough about something to commit to writing a book about it, so meanwhile he continues to write articles for Outside, Sports Illustrated and Sailing magazines.

The last panelist was the short story writer, and the most commercially successful author of the group, (which if you know anything at all about the publishing business, has to be one of the strangest sentences ever written.) Adam Haslett is the author of You Are Not a Stranger Here, which rocketed up the New York Times bestseller list after Jonathan Franzen picked it for the Today Show book club. The stories are an "emotional autobiography, not a literal" one. His writing has been influenced by William Trevor, one of my favorite short story writers. Mr. Haslett is also a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and is currently in his last year of law school at Yale. He plans on writing a novel after he takes his law boards. While waiting in line to meet him, the woman behind me, an attorney, remarked that "he doesn't look like a lawyer, he looks like a judge." He looks like a writer to me, and I am looking forward to reading more words from this remarkably gifted young man.

Ask the Author was the next panel, featuring James Grippando and Stephen Horn, both of them lawyers now writing legal thrillers. Stephen Horn had a huge success with his first novel, In Her Defense, which was started from a first line and a last line. He just filled in the middle and hit the NY Times bestseller list. When he began thinking about what he'd like to write next, he was inspired by a couple of images. One was of a woman falling from a building in the Bronx (Mr. Horn grew up in the Bronx in the 1950s) and the other was of a man going to work in an overcoat with grass and dirt stains that he got from sitting by the grave of a little girl. Those images formed the basis of his new book, Law of Gravity. Horn, a Washington D. C. attorney, will be bringing back his character, Washington D. C. attorney Frank O'Connell, the Vietnam vet (Horn served with the 101st Airborne in Vietnam) from In Her Defense for his next book.  

James Grippando has written several books including some of my favorites; The Pardon, Found Money and the superb A King's Ransom. Truth be told, every book the man has written has been terrific, he is one gifted storyteller. He is a real planner, working from an outline that he describes as a 30 page "Reader's Digest" version of the book. His books are always rich with character and story, and there is good reason for that. Mr. Grippando feels that a good story needs compelling characters that the reader gets to know, using the analogy of riding a roller coaster versus taking a very fast car ride with someone you'd like to hang around with - he opts for the latter. That analogy works for me - I won't go on a roller coaster but fast driving is, well, never mind. His most recent book, Beyond Suspicion, brought back Miami defense attorney Jack Swyteck, a character from his first book, The Pardon. Grippando is stretching in a new direction by writing a series after writing stand alones. He is contracted to write three more Swyteck books, and the next one, Last to Die, will be published in July. With this new committment, Mr. Grippando was forced to finally give up his law practice. The law's loss is the reader's gain.

The last author I saw spoke to a standing room only crowd. The fabulous Edna Buchanan, wearing her trademark "I Love Miami" necklace, gave a funny, insightful and often moving talk centered around her theme - it's "not easy to write fiction in a place that is stranger." Example: the young police officer who walked into a crime scene where the victim had just been decapitated, and the perpetrator threw the head at him. His involuntary response? He threw it back. She talked about how Florida is "a gun shaped state" and living here often feels like living in an episode of the Twilight Zone - with Rod Serling as Governor. She talked about her early inspiration, her 7th grade English teacher, Mrs. Tunis, who encouraged little Edna with her writing inspirations. She started sending stories out to magazines, and brought Mrs. Tunis her first rejection letter. Mrs. Tunis continued to encourage her and asked her student to dedicate her first book to her.

Unfortunately, she died the following year, but Ms. Buchanan never forgot her or her request, and her first book, her memoir, was dedicated to her teacher. 
Ms. Buchanan spent twenty years as a journalist covering the police beat in Miami, winning the Pulitzer Prize in the process. During the drug years in the 1980s, she had one memorable year that gave her over 650 murders to write about. "I take evil seriously," she said, and that's why she loves writing fiction. In her books, "the good guys win and the bad guys get what they deserve, unlike real life." Her alter-ego, Britt Montero, is helping the good guys win again in her newest novel, The Ice Maiden. It was very pleasant hour with the "Queen of Crime" and a wonderful day at BookMania.

Killer business: Murder on the Beach bookstore

By 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)

Books and the single girl

BY AILEEN JACOBSON
STAFF WRITER

May 11, 2004

The last time single women were celebrated in fiction, they were called New Women, says Elaine Showalter, the recently retired chairwoman of Princeton's English department. That was when the 19th century became the 20th.

Now the 20th has turned into the 21st century, and a genre concentrating on the lives, loves, adventures and misadventures of unwed females is once again booming. This time around, it's called Chick Lit.

Many of its best-selling books are wrapped in pink covers featuring swirly letters and curvy legs ending in stiletto heels - though recent trends include an expansion of the color palette.

"Aqua is the new pink," says Sessalee Hensley, Barnes & Noble's fiction buyer, adding that lime green has also entered the mix. So has a host of subgenres, from widow lit (young woman looks again) to bridezilla lit (young woman gets man) to lad lit (sensitive guy looks for Ms. Right) to hen lit (for the more mature woman, who may conclude chick isn't such a bad label after all). "Where does it stop?" asks Brad Parsons, a senior editor at Amazon.com. "The umbrella is getting bigger and bigger."

Did the women's movement ever happen?

"To feel that every piece of literature has to empower women to come out on top, well - what I write is just real life, about those days when you aren't empowered and winning corporate wars or whatever. You're losing your pantyhose and you're lusting after a bag you can't afford. I mean, there's room for both," says author Sophie Kinsella, 34, best- known for her amusing trio of novels known as the "Shopaholic" series.

Her current bestseller, "Can You Keep a Secret?," is also to become a movie starring Kate Hudson. The book - which starts with a young woman blurting out, during a bumpy plane ride, her most embarrassing secrets to a handsome stranger later revealed as her company's chief executive - comes wrapped in retro pink.

Beach reading season

It's one of a recent beach- weather-ready cluster of high- profile entries in the genre, which, most observers agree, jump-started with Helen Fielding's 1998 "Bridget Jones's Diary," was bolstered by TV's "Sex and the City" and has swelled to at least 240 new novels a year, according to Charlotte Abbott, book news editor of Publishers Weekly. Five mainstream publishers have established imprints specializing in chick lit, she says, and they're "now reaching full steam, so that's pumping a lot of books into the market." Other publishers make occasional forays.

Authors have mixed feelings about the grouping and the term "chick lit."

"I think a man might have invented it. I don't think girls would label themselves that way," says Plum Sykes, 34, author of the current bestseller "Bergdorf Blondes" - about the haute world of a Manhattan party-girl narrator who calls herself Moi, her best friend, a fictional department store heiress, and their pals, who get their tresses dyed every 13 days at the Bergdorf family store. (Publishing experts think chick lit was first applied to the popular genre in England, where it's easily as popular as in the United States.)

Sykes, a Vogue contributing editor, fashion celebrity and London-born Oxford graduate, prefers to call her first novel a social comedy, in the manner of "Breakfast at Tiffany's." She also likes the fashion-conscious label "chic lit," as one magazine dubbed it. She did research, she says, to reflect accurately the lifestyles and lingo of Park Avenue princesses: ana for anorexic or perfect, A.T.M. for rich boyfriend, M.I.T. for mogul in training, and M.T.M. for married to mogul, better than the previous two.

"I feel that most chick lit, unfortunately, is about depressed girls eating lots of chocolate," Sykes says over a plate of one sliced apple and one sliced orange at a trendy West Village restaurant, though she admires Fielding and Allison Pearson, author of "I Don't Know How She Does It." On the other hand, she says, "It's great if it helps to sell the books" by getting them to "that huge market that Helen Fielding created sort of single-handedly."

Marian Keyes, 40, another popular author whose seventh novel, "The Other Side of the Story" (aqua cover), debuted two weeks ago and is expected to become a bestseller, defines a different divide, speaking by phone from her home in Ireland prior to her American tour.

"I think that the term is meant to be pejorative, to put women down: Oh, you silly little women with your silly little concerns in your silly little books. But chick lit authors for the first time are helping post- feminist women navigate this world, trying to be the best friend, have a job, have a thin body, have the shiniest hair. For the first time, those conflicting concerns are being addressed, and with humor. The term has made it easier to denigrate these books, not address their substance."

Her newest book tells the tangled tale of three women involved in publishing and love affairs. "The whole career and relationship conflict is very real," she says. "These women are looking for balance, and confused by the demands forced on them."

Funny isn't easy

Both Keyes, whose first novel was published in 1993 (before "Bridget Jones" turned scattered prose into a genre), and Kinsella, a former financial journalist and mother of two, point out that turning out good, funny books isn't easy. Kinsella, in fact, wrote several well-regarded novels under her real name, Madeleine Wickham, before combining her middle name and mother's maiden name into a new moniker, so as not to confuse her readers when she switched styles, she says.

"These books never get reviewed in the Times [of London], but I've put as much, if not more, time into them, and consider them as good, if not better," than her previous novels, says Kinsella over lunch at a midtown hotel during her recent extensive American tour. Her chick lit books take "months of planning. Plots really need to be worked out. It doesn't just sort of fall off the pen."

Showalter, Princeton professor emeritus and author, admires the work of Kinsella, Keyes and Princeton grad Jennifer Weiner. (Weiner's "Good in Bed," about an overweight young woman, is being developed for a series by HBO, while her second book, "In Her Shoes," about two sisters, is being made into a movie starring Toni Collette, Cameron Diaz and Shirley MacLaine. Her third book, "Little Earthquakes," due in September, has just been purchased by Universal.) Showalter plans to read Sykes' book: "I read Vogue. I don't see myself as above any of this."

On the other hand, Showalter - who contributed an essay on lad lit for a 2002 Oxford University Press book, "On Modern British Fiction" - says she thinks chick lit is developing in two directions, one thoughtful and the other commercial, such as Miramax's commissioning of a chick lit novel by Kristen Gore, Al Gore's 26-year-old daughter, to be published in September. "They were looking for a D.C. Bridget. It's just like marketing Barbie dolls - surgeon Barbie, beach Barbie."

However, she adds, "With some of these writers, people will look back in a century and think, this is the way it was for young women then. Some will be ephemeral and lost. Under the guise of this rubric, some of these women are writing really fine work about what women face in these times." She thinks some are writing work "as intelligent and insightful" as Doris Lessing and Margaret Drabble, though lighter in tone. The New Women literature of a century ago, she adds, was also more serious, and sometimes written by men, including H.G. Wells and George Gissing.

The 'mother chick'

One writer who has been called the "mother of chick lit" has a decidedly different view from Showalter's. Erica Jong, speaking up via e-mail, is scathing: "Chick lit is nothing more than the contemporary version of the 'How to Get Married Novel' invented by Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen - and done much better by them (needless to say)."

Her landmark "Fear of Flying," she says, "details the disappointments of marriage and the search for freedom and individuality, while Chick Lit is a retro form that details the search for and nabbing of a husband, any husband." Today's 20- and 30-somethings, she says, "are looking for the opposite of what their mothers looked for. Their mothers sought freedom; they seek slavery. They want The Ring, The White Wedding, The Bugaboo Frog Stroller - and hey - let them have it all." They'll come around as they age, she predicts.

Jong's view is "a narrow-minded description of the genre," says Margaret Marbury, executive editor of Harlequin's Red Dress Ink, the first U.S. imprint dedicated to chick lit when it launched in November 2001. "These are coming-of-age stories, finding out who you are, where you want to go," she says. Finding Mr. Right is part of that, she adds, but so are such themes as getting a more meaningful job, dealing with family and perhaps never finding someone to marry.

"One of the most powerful things about this literature is that it can hold up a mirror and make you feel you're not alone.... These books don't trivialize women's problems." The often-pink covers featuring "body elements or shoes or women's underwear" signal the humor and fun inside the books, she says, and also aid bookstore visitors seeking this type of novel to "make your purchases and get out of there."

New author opportunities

Red Dress now publishes three books a month (culled from 200 submissions each month, many through the company's Web site): one "traditional" single-girl chick lit, one internally called "Red Dress grows up" (for readers older than 40) and the third a "wild card" - perhaps multicultural, mommy, lad or young widow lit.

In October, another division of Harlequin (yes, the romance publisher) will launch a chick lit series "for modern Christian women." The first offering, Judy Baer's "The Whitney Chronicles," features on its pink cover the bottom half of a woman with her skirt covering her knees and her heels more sensible than stiletto. It's about a 30-year-old looking for her Mr. Right, a "fabulous, single, Christian man."

"Another thing chick lit has really provided," says author Cara Lockwood, "is that it has given opportunity to a lot of young women writers." Lockwood's second book, "Pink Slip Party" ("When you lose your job, can your mind be far behind?" the cover asks), has just been published by Downtown Press, an imprint of Pocket Books, which is part of Simon & Schuster, devoted to chick lit. A former journalist who now works in the dean's office of Northwestern University School of Communications, she hasn't given up her day job. She's working on book three, which is "inspired by my mixed-race background," Japanese and Caucasian, "but it's still chick lit," a label she doesn't mind.

"I think it's great.... It's another place women can go to find things that are meaningful to them." But she does think it "unfair" that books that appeal to women often are shown less respect than those that appeal largely to men, such as science fiction.

Perhaps a name change is in order? Carrie Feron, executive editor of Avon Trade (tagline: "... because every bag deserves a great book!"), says her HarperCollins imprint is trying to recast the genre it publishes as metro chic. "We just feel happier saying it ourselves." Almost three years old, Avon publishes two to three books a month, she says, and is getting more diverse. Kim Wong Keltner's "The Dim Sum of All Things" recounts the adventures of a 25-year-old "Chinese-American wage-slave" who lusts after a "white devil" in her office. July brings the debut of "Goddess for Hire" by Indian-American Sonia Singh.

Trade paperbacks are preferred over hardcovers by many chick-lit publishers, she says, because they're more affordable for avid readers, the right size for toting to the beach, and "more attractive" than pulpier mass market paperbacks.

That hasn't stopped Hyperion from going to hardcover with several chick-lit titles, including the recent "P.S. I Love You," a young-widow novel by Cecelia Ahern, the 22-year-old daughter of the Irish prime minister. Ahern has another book coming out in 2005, says vice president and publisher Ellen Archer, as does "Sex and the City" author Candace Bushnell, whose more recent "Trading Up" is about to make its paperback debut. (Also coming in paperback for this summer, from a different publisher: "The Devil Wears Prada," Lauren Weisberger's skewering of her former boss, Vogue editor Anna Wintour, along with its spawn: a host of new assistant lit books, aka underling lit.)

Archer sees Bushnell's books as "social satire," a label that she also applies to her company's July novel, "Gotham Diaries," by Tonya Lewis Lee, wife of Spike Lee, and Crystal McCrary Anthony, wife of former Knicks player and ESPN commentator Greg Anthony (who also co-authored with Rita Ewing, ex-wife of Patrick Ewing, Avon's "Homecourt Advantage").

"Gotham Diaries" is being touted as "an exclusive peek into the world of the super-rich, super-connected African- Americans." Also in an upscale African-American niche is Putnam's new "The Accidental Diva," in which TeenPeople beauty director Tia Williams focuses on an African-American beauty editor of a top, white-oriented fashion magazine.

Barnes & Noble fiction buyer Hensley keeps an eye both on trends and on TV and movie releases - the second "Bridget Jones," she notes, has been postponed - because she has to make sure store shelves are stocked properly. TV's "Sex and the City" and "Friends" boosted the whole genre, she says: "Once people found there are books written like that, they came back." And now that both shows are over, "what can they do but read?"

The genre's evolution

Chick lit is evolving in several ways. Not only is it expanding toward older readers (her summer pick in this category is the upcoming "This Side of Married," by Rachel Pastan) and teens, but it's also building a healthy back list. When readers discover a writer they like, she says, they go back to her previous work. The bestselling back list authors, she says, are Kinsella, Keyes, Fielding (whose "Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination" debuts next month) and two more Brits, Wendy Holden and Anna Maxted.

Amazon's Parsons says much of chick lit is "guilty pleasure ... commercial, disposable stuff," while other books are more literary. Among books he'd place in the latter slot are Elizabeth Robinson's "The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters" and Rachel Cline's "What to Keep" (both of which show a leaping young girl on their covers), and two June books, Jenny McPhee's "No Ordinary Matter" and Bonnie Marson's "Sleeping with Schubert." The Marson book, he thinks, will appeal to "chick lit and classical music fans," especially since it has "a really sharp cover, a drawing of a naked woman playing piano from behind, a bust of Schubert and Manhattan in the background."

While some authors may be "the last to embrace" the term chick lit, he says, "it shows no signs of going away." Adds Hensley: "The main thing is that, despite being called chick lit, the books are really good."

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

Newsday.com - Book Reviews

Blame it on the cucumber

May 8, 2004

Ban me? Not without one hell of a fight. When the moral right in Florida turned on novelist Linda Jaivin, a bitter and at times comic censorship battle ensued.

Last July, an 83-year-old grandmother called Loretta Harrison visited her local library in Marion County, Florida. A brightly covered book with a funny title caught her attention. After reading just a few pages, she filed an objection with the library that the book was "to [sic] obsene [sic] for general reading".

"Like a character in the Tom Clancy novels she enjoys," reported the county newspaper, the Star-Banner, Harrison became "a player in an intrigue", triggering "forces she was hardly aware of" and which were out of her control. The result, the paper wrote, would have an "indelible impact on the library system and the community". Marion County, 480 kilometres north of Miami and home to many horsebreeders, Republicans and retirees, has been embroiled ever since in a bitterly contested battle over censorship, sex and the role of the public library.

The book at the centre of the controversy is my first novel, the comic-erotic Eat Me. In the opening, highly parodic chapter, a woman shopper samples both the produce and the store detective in a late-night supermarket. Published in a dozen countries and almost as many languages, Eat Me was a bestseller in Australia and France, and was a book club selection in Italy and other countries.

It made the San Francisco Chronicle bestseller list as well as those of independent bookshops in the US from Rhode Island to Seattle. Vintage, in Britain, is publishing a special edition of it as one of the 12 books for its Summer Reading promotion this year, alongside Portnoy's Complaint, Fear of Flying, Jeanette Winterson's The Passion and novels by Martin and Kingsley Amis, among others.

In 1997, the internet filtering company CyberPatrol put the entire website of The Booksmith, an independent bookseller in Haight Ashbury, San Francisco, on its CyberNOT list for publishing the cover of my book, a summary of the contents and a description of me reading the first chapter at the shop. The Booksmith launched a courageous (and successful) fight against the ban. But not even then was Eat Me the subject of moral panic such as we've seen in Marion County.

One member of the library committee that considered Harrison's complaint alleged "emotional shock" as a result of reading the novel from cover to cover. In the end, a majority vote deemed that the book would stay on the shelves. It was a brave decision. Fundamental Christianity and patriotism are the dominant religions of Marion County: at last year's Patriotic Celebration in the First Baptist Church, congregants found inspiration in such hymns as Bring This Nation Back to God.

A few years earlier, the library's director, Julie Sieg, ruled against complainants wanting to remove the sex-education book It's Perfectly Normal from the shelves because it told kids that homosexuality and masturbation were just that, perfectly normal. She decided to have a look at Eat Me for herself. The fruity adventures of my heroines were not to her taste. In fact, she gagged on them, decided that Eat Me was "not worth defending", and pulled it off the shelf.

Enter Brian Creekbaum and Mary Lutes. Creekbaum, a Marion County native, had fought several censorship battles over the previous three years, including the one over It's Perfectly Normal. For this, the informal citizens group he chaired received the 2001 Intellectual Freedom Award from the Florida Library Association. Creekbaum has a lazy Southern drawl, an indefatigable devotion to civil liberties, a sharp mind and a dry wit. Referring to one of chapter one's naughtier bits, he wrote to me in an email, "I find it hard to believe the cucumber has nothing to do with this decision."

Dr Lutes is a former chair of the Library Advisory Board (LAB) and a voracious reader who holds a PhD in social science. She told me she found the first chapter of Eat Me a "knee slapper". Lutes and Creekbaum believed the book was absolutely worth fighting for; there were higher principles at stake. Lutes lodged an appeal against the removal.

This put the ball back in the court of the LAB, an appointed citizens' committee. County commissioners got involved. The Star-Banner published articles, editorials and letters on the subject. One of the editors remarked to Creekbaum when they met, of all places, in a grocery shop: "If you were going to censor a book, that would be the book." But the paper came down publicly on the side of the civil libertarians, with such published sentiments as "let freedom ring - loud and clear". The National Coalition Against Censorship weighed in against the ban. The book's opponents grew more hysterical by the day.

I began to look forward to Creekbaum's emails - he sent as many as half a dozen updates in one day. His thumbnail sketches of the characters involved made for riveting reading. There was the foul-mouthed guardian of public morals and another opponent who accused my book of being part of a "jihad" against America's children. A third was nearly arrested for attempting to read the entire first chapter of Eat Me into the public record. Like others in the anti-Eat Me camp, he's done a great job of advertising the book. A right-wing shock jock, who calls it "absolute pornography", even put a link to the chapter on his website.

As a comic novelist, I could not have dreamed up such fabulous characters as the 76-year-old anti-Eat Me LAB member whose public activities included penning letters to the Star-Banner alleging that "the liberal-dominated media has tried to turn the United States into a matriarchy with weak and powerless men dominated by powerful, aggressive women". (He ended with the reassurance: "Relax, men - in the hierarchy of the sexes we will always be on top." His proof? That young women "work their buns off" to fit into bikinis "to attract a bunch of guys with beer guts".)

The dispatches from the Marion County morality wars were as engrossing as the push for censorship was alarming. The library system in Marion County is one of the largest in America, serving 128,000 registered users in 11 locations. And with the rise of the Christian Right nationally, the same table was being set all over America. Four years ago, the American Library Association received 700 letters of complaint for daring even to raise the topic of erotica at its annual conference.

Pro-censorship activists in Marion County and elsewhere were taking cues from the likes of Karen Jo Gounaud of the Virginia-based Family Friendly Libraries (FFL). Fighting unfiltered internet access in her own library, Gounaud warned of "aroused teen patrons dumping their DNA on the library bathroom floor" and, where private booths were provided, "disgusting unsanitary accidents and rug damage". (A national magazine faxed Gounaud a page from a children's book for her comments; her response was, "That is definitely the kind of book that we would ask to be moved." It was Mother Goose.) It's in this context that Janet Jackson's right breast could bring a nation to its knees.

Maybe it's because our first colonialists were convicts and theirs were Puritans, but Australia seems less prone to this particular style of moral panic. I say this despite censorship battles over movies such as Lolita and Baise-Moi, and the rare book, including American Psycho. So far as I'm aware, there have been no challenges to Eat Me's presence in libraries here; it's even on some university reading lists.

I've read the infamous first chapter aloud dozens of times in Australian bookshops, at festivals and in performance spaces, usually with a bowl of fruit, a large cucumber and a small whip as props. It's a send-up, not a sex act, a fact that most Australians seem to have little trouble grasping. I'm not saying civil libertarians don't have to be vigilant: Helen Vnuk's excellent Snatched: Sex and Censorship in Australia (Vintage) is a sobering read. But we're not the US yet.

Six days after the first article on Eat Me appeared in the Star-Banner, a Marion County resident urged the library to dump a children's book called A Stone in My Hand, by Cathryn Clinton. It is set in Gaza City during the 1988 intifada and is narrated by a young Palestinian girl; the complainant alleged it would contribute to anti-Semitism.

On December 2 last year, the LAB voted 9-1 to retain A Stone in My Hand. Then it turned to the question of Eat Me. After a heated debate in which I was called an "intelligent pervert" and my novel "pure pornography", and it was asserted that people who wanted to remove Christian prayer from public schools were the real censors, the LAB voted 7-3 to recommend that Eat Me stay in the collection.

At the end of February, after nearly three months of dithering, Sieg finally put the book back into circulation. It went straight out to the first person on a long waiting list.

A local shock jock warned that on Judgement Day, Jesus would be questioning Sieg about the pornography she'd made available to little children. Of more immediate concern, Conservative county commissioners, assisted by their county administrator, a retired two-star general from the US Marines, launched a push for more political control over the library collection. A self-titled fundamentalist preacher put his hand up to be on the newly reorganised LAB. The meeting to decide the library's fate was scheduled to take place this week.

Last month, the Star-Banner opinion editor, Brad Rogers, clearly over it, wrote of both Eat Me and It's Perfectly Normal: "That two books out of an estimated 400,000 could be directly responsible for the moral destruction of our community is a bit of a reach."

Linda Jaivin's most recent book is The Monkey and the Dragon.

Blame it on the cucumber - Books - www.smh.com.au

NOTE: The Palm Beach County Library does not own a copy of EAT ME. Let 'em eat spinach.

May 6, 2004

Press Release

Murder on the Beach Mystery Bookstore Hosts Naked Booksigning

Saturday May 22 at 6 pm.

Murder on the Beach Mystery Bookstore is pleased to announce a booksigning for the serial novel Naked Came the Flamingo at its store in Pineapple Grove in Delray Beach on Saturday May 22, 2004 at 6 pm.

Naked Came the Flamingo is the brainchild of bestselling author Barbara Parker, who saw it as a chance to give some “publishing challenged” authors the opportunity to participate in a serial novel. And along the way, she has discovered some very talented writers.

With the first chapter written by Elaine Viets, Chapter 10 by Barbara Parker, and the Epilogue by PJ Parrish, Naked is a tongue-in-cheek spoof on the Florida hard-boiled detective novel. As Reinhard Motte, MD, Associate Medical Examiner for Miami-Dade County, says in his disclaimer in the front of the book, “If only my actual homicide cases were this much fun!”

Appearing at this booksigning will be Barbara Parker, P.J. Parrish, Britin Haller, Stephanie Levine, Randy Rawls, Joan Mickelson, Victoria Landis, Diane Warner, Joan Bond, Barbara Schading and whichever other Naked authors show up.

Admission is free, refreshments will be served, and the public is invited.

Murder on the Beach Mystery Bookstore is an independent locally owned community bookstore, specializing in the mystery genre, located at 273 Pineapple Grove Way (NE 2nd Ave). Owned by Joanne Sinchuk, Murder on the Beach Mystery Bookstore has been in business for seven years.

For further information contact:

Joanne Sinchuk
Phone: 561-279-7790
Fax: 561-279-7759
Email: murdermb@gate.net

May 9, 2004
Watching the Detectives
By BRUCE WEBER

Anyone who wonders why crime stories dominate our popular culture should spend a day with Tim Marcia, Rick Jackson and Dave Lambkin. They're Los Angeles police detectives, members of the department's two-year-old cold-case squad, which is responsible for re-examining unsolved crimes through the lens of the latest forensic advances. A conversation about their work sounds like a pitch meeting for a new ripped-from-the-headlines TV series: ''L.A. Law and Order.'' The stories go on literally for hours, and, well, you couldn't make this stuff up, which is ostensibly why the best-selling crime novelist Michael Connelly is here in the squad room, a stuffy, essentially characterless enclosure with a few desks pushed together. He's just starting a new book, and on this January morning he's foraging for material.

He has a lot to select from. There's the story about the rapist and murderer who, in his portable crime kit, along with several pairs of handcuffs and precut lengths of duct tape, carried a vial of another man's semen, which he sprinkled on the rug of the crime scene to throw off the cops. There's the one about the murder suspect being monitored on a wiretap who revealed -- long before divulging the details of his crime -- that he was a homosexual and, to the great glee of the police officers listening in, that he had a crush on Detective Jackson. And then there's the one about the guy arrested for sexually abusing his daughter. The cops tested his semen, but as Detective Jackson recalls, ''they come back and they say to the guy: 'We got good news and bad news. The bad news is that we made you on the DNA. The good news is that she isn't your daughter.'''

Connelly, 47, listens with gratitude and amazement; he isn't used to this kind of openness. He first got to know the Los Angeles Police Department as a reporter for The Los Angeles Times. He arrived from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to take a job on the police beat in 1987 and stayed until 1994, a span that included the Rodney King beating and the Los Angeles riots and ended just before the O.J. Simpson case got under way. They were years when the department was riddled by scandal, the scrutiny of the press was ever-present and the institutional animosity between the department and the newspaper was intense. ''I can't tell you how many times I'd approach a guy and introduce myself, say I'm Mike Connelly from The L.A. Times, and he'd say, 'Good for you,' and turn away,'' he says.

A compact man with short gray-blond hair and a trimmed beard, Connelly has the solicitous manner of a reporter who knows that today a vein has opened for him and doesn't want to stanch the flow. When he speaks, it's in a soft monotone, and his questions are mostly about the details of police procedure:

''If you have DNA, and you send it through the Department of Justice,'' he asks, ''how long until you get the results?''

''Is it just an urban legend that if you get a bone-marrow transplant, it changes your DNA?''

''Have there been changes in the law regarding wiretaps since 9/11?''

Later, asked what he got from the day's research, Connelly says that the wiretap information was helpful. The detectives had described a communications center where several taps were being monitored at once. It's not the usual image of a wiretap in progress, he says. You know the one: a couple of guys hunched in the back of a van with headphones on. Still, the lion's share of his gleaned information was not in the particulars.

''I don't want to underplay procedure and technology,'' he says, ''but to me what's really important is the emotional stuff.''

He noticed, he says, that each of the three detectives had photos of victims prominently displayed on their desks. ''Early on, one of them said, 'You always have one case you fall in love with,''' he says. ''Most people in life have pictures of kids or wives festooned around their desks. These guys have dead people.''


To inform those without a weakness for detective stories, Michael Connelly is the emerging star of the genre. He routinely sells about 300,000 copies of his books in hardcover and about a million more in paperback. While that doesn't approach the really heavy hitters like John Grisham, whose legal thrillers sell upward of two million hardcovers, Connelly is an avowed favorite of critics and other mystery novelists, who give him credit for elevating, if not transcending, the genre. He has been called the natural heir of the Los Angeles crime family, which begins with Raymond Chandler and descends through the likes of Ross MacDonald, Joseph Wambaugh and James Ellroy. And others have been more complimentary than that.

''In the old mystery tradition, in which a crime is committed at the beginning and solved in the end,'' says George Pelecanos, whose 10th book, ''Hard Revolution,'' was just published, ''he's the best mystery writer in the world, I think.''

Connelly is a student of police procedure -- he keeps a small library of manuals at home -- and he comes equipped with a reporter's eye for detail and, as a setting, a city that is rife with atmosphere. He also has a nose for plot; he knows where the skeletons are buried (the bare bones of an early novel, ''The Concrete Blonde,'' were snitched from a procedure manual), and he has the writerly ingenuity to provide their page-turning, seductive flesh.

But what may distinguish him most is his interest in the psychic toll of police work: not how a cop works on a case, as he puts it, echoing a line of Wambaugh's, ''but how a case works on a cop.'' His admiration for the police officers who manage to do the job right is as viscerally felt as a little boy's. He was first intrigued by the police as a 16-year-old, he says, when he witnessed a carjacking in Fort Lauderdale and spent the night in the police station answering questions about it. ''There was definitely a bit of hero worship in it,'' Connelly says of his decision to write novels about cops, which happened not long afterward, when he was in college.

Since then, he says: ''I've come to respect them more, probably. It's a hard job to do correctly, and when you do, it's not noticed. But if you make a mistake or fall victim to the myriad lures of corruption or the other things that can happen to you, then you get noticed. They accept that, and their acceptance of it is the nobility of the job.''

Connelly has written 14 novels since 1992, 10 of them -- including ''The Narrows,'' just published by Little, Brown -- featuring a Los Angeles police detective named Harry Bosch. And in many ways the Bosch novels amount to a chronicle of life in the Los Angeles Police Department in the post-Rodney King era. In Connelly's unflattering portrayal, it is an angry, paranoid force, hamstrung by bureaucracy and riddled not so much by corruption (though there is some of that) but by petty jealousies, small-mindedness and self-aggrandizement.

In such an environment, Harry Bosch is a rogue cop, and real cops like Tim Marcia, an 18-year veteran, say Connelly gets it almost exactly right. Things are changing under a new police chief, William J. Bratton, Marcia says, but for years too many L.A. cops were preoccupied with not getting in trouble themselves rather than with putting bad guys in jail. Harry, Marcia says, is an idealized version of what you have to be in order to do a good job. ''He's very methodical, and he's never interrupted,'' Marcia says. ''That's the way we would like to work.''

Growling, contemplative and skeptical, a man who suffers fools and authority figures with ill-disguised contempt, Harry is an iconoclastic throwback, the kind of guy whom men test themselves against and who challenges women to make him love them. He smokes, listens to moody jazz; he isn't averse to either drinking or heading into danger alone, and he is constitutionally unable to walk away from an innocent in peril or a criminal who might be getting away with it. In short, he is the old-fashioned sort of detective protagonist about whom Chandler wrote in the famous essay, ''The Simple Art of Murder'': ''He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge.''

Look closer, however, and Harry is a hero for our age. In fact, his tough exterior and noir milieu notwithstanding, he's actually rather soft-boiled. He has a past and a personal life; his mother was a call girl who aspired to higher things; she was murdered when Harry was 11. (Connelly borrowed this detail from the life of James Ellroy.) She gave her son the name Hieronymus, after the 15th- and 16th-century painter whose view of the hellishness on earth becomes a metaphor for the way Harry perceives Los Angeles.

And crucially, unlike just about every other fictional detective, Bosch is aging in real time. He was born in 1950. He served in Vietnam. He has an estranged wife he still loves -- and a young daughter he's just getting to know.

Harry's not a wiseacre, like Robert Parker's Spenser, nor does he have the deep sadness of P.D. James's Adam Dalgliesh. He's a brooder, though, a blue-collar philosopher who believes that the empirical evidence tells him evil exists in the world and that it is his mission to confront it.

''The idea of whether there's such a thing as a waiting evil, it's a question I don't know the answer to,'' Connelly says. ''I ask about it, but it's hard to bring it up with a cop. You have to wait for an alone moment, but I've never gotten a good answer from anybody, which is why it comes up over and over in the books.''

Connelly says he built Harry from a number of cops he met while he was a reporter. And parts of himself? Is Harry's heart his heart?

''If that would be the case, I'd be proud of that,'' Connelly says. ''His heart is the heart I'd hope to have on my best day.''

ou might not expect the Los Angeles chief of police to be a Connelly fan, but he is. Chief Bratton, in his second year on the job, says that Harry's problems with department bureaucracy are ''on the money,'' and that Connelly's portrayal of a 9-to-5 culture in the department is, sadly, accurate. ''Harry would welcome the changes we're trying to bring here,'' Bratton says. ''A year ago, you could be the victim of a rape on a Friday, have three uniformed officers take you to the hospital to do all the lab work, but not see a detective until Tuesday morning. So we're getting closer to his work ethic, in the sense that his work is his life.''

Unknown to Bratton, he's playing a part in Harry's life. A couple of books ago, Harry was fed up and left the department. In the last book, ''Lost Light,'' and in ''The Narrows,'' he's working on his own, as a private detective. But Connelly found that he missed having Harry trying to turn the battleship of the department bureaucracy. In ''The Narrows,'' a new police chief announces a policy that will allow officers who took early retirement to return within three years -- a policy that, in real life, has been championed by Bratton -- and in the next book, Harry will return.

This time, however, he won't be working homicide. He's joining the cold-case squad -- the real one was formed just before Bratton took over -- which explains his visit to the squad room.

He has kept in touch with the three detectives, and since January, one thing he has learned, to his delight, is that the investigation of unsolved cases often leads out of town, offering a whole new set of possibilities for Harry. The three detectives are discussing bringing a serial killer in Delaware back to Los Angeles in connection with an old case, Connelly says, ''and I've been asking them things like, 'What do you say to a serial killer on a five-hour flight?'''

The impetus for the cold-case setting ''was the idea that these guys are coming back to cases that are 15, 20 years old and seeing the long-term damage of violence in our society. Harry's used to dealing with people in a state of shock, not with years of letting something this bad settle into their bones.''

One thing the detectives provide in January is a crucial theme -- that recent technology has turned police work upside down. Once it was the job of detectives to identify a suspect and then take fingerprints and blood samples from him to compare with evidence at the scene. Criminalists, that is, forensic experts, played a subservient role. Now, Detective Lambkin says, with the establishment of data banks for fingerprints, ballistics and DNA, ''the criminalists can come to us and say, 'This is your guy.' So you can't do the job anymore like we used to.''

This is especially pertinent to their current assignment, in that the changes have created an almost laughable backlog of work. Astoundingly, there are nearly 11,000 unsolved murders since 1960 on the books in Los Angeles, and the seven detectives on the cold-case squad are sifting through them to decide which ones might benefit from the application of techniques that were unavailable when the crimes were committed.

Connelly asks specifically about the difference between investigating cold cases and fresh ones. The speed necessary in pursuing a fresh case, he is told, means that you don't often form attachments to victims or their families. Cold cases, however, involve an enormous amount of desk work and research, of reading investigation reports and examining old evidence to familiarize yourself with the particulars of a case; murder books -- the notebooks kept by detectives as chronicles of each case -- can be more than 500 pages long. So even before you do any interviews, you know the victim almost intimately.

Detective Marcia tells Connelly a story about his recent visit to an elderly hardware-store owner to inform him that the investigation of his sister's 1969 murder was being reopened. The man broke down in tears. ''We were premature on that one,'' Marcia says, ''because we just got the DNA report back, and we don't have enough evidence to work with. So we just put this man through the ringer again, and even though we gave him hope for the moment, we're going to have to call him back and say we're sorry, but we don't have the evidence to continue. Emotionally, that's tough.''


Connelly came to writing crime novels first by accident and then by design. The son of a real estate developer who moved his family from Philadelphia to Fort Lauderdale when Michael was a boy, he was at the University of Florida, studying building and real estate, when he went to the movies one night and saw Robert Altman's film adaptation of Raymond Chandler's novel ''The Long Goodbye.'' ''That led me to the book, which led me to all of Chandler's books, and something hit me,'' he says. ''I wanted to switch my future and become a writer.''

Of course, other than witnessing a carjacking, he'd had no experience with crime or the cops. It was his father's idea that he become a reporter to learn the territory. So Connelly went to journalism school, where among other things he met his wife, Linda. (They have a daughter, now 7.) And in 1980 he went to work for The Daytona Beach News Journal; in nine months he covered one murder.

He moved back to Fort Lauderdale and spent six years on The Fort Lauderdale News. There he was luckier; in 1986, the city had more murders per capita than any other city in the country, earning it the title ''murder capital of America.''

By the time he moved to The Los Angeles Times in the summer of 1987, he had tried twice to write a novel and hadn't succeeded. But on the day he first set foot in town, he received what amounted to a sign. The headlines that day were about a mammoth bank heist, in which the crooks tunneled into the vault from underground. To this day, the crime has never been solved. But it became the centerpiece of Connelly's first novel, ''The Black Echo.''

He left The Times in 1994, and three years ago, he and his family moved back East, to Tampa. But Los Angeles continues to provide fodder for his fiction, and he visits frequently. All the books are filled with descriptions of contemporary L.A., tidbits from its history, glimpses of its underworld. Many of the plot points were born in the city as well. ''The Narrows'' has its climax during a roaring rainstorm that turns the ordinarily placid Los Angeles River into a furious torrent, an idea Connelly borrowed from a historical incident in which a boy drowned in the river in spite of a massive effort to rescue him.

In his view, however, the greatest influence on his writing occurred before he arrived. He was in Fort Lauderdale, shortly after the city earned its unfortunate sobriquet, and the police department, to earn some counterbalancing publicity, granted a reporter, Connelly, a week's access to the homicide squad.

''And lo and behold, we had three murders, all in the middle of the night,'' Connelly says. ''So I'm filling notebook after notebook, fantastic stuff. But the epiphany came in the last five minutes of that week. I'd noticed at the murder scenes that the sergeant I was staying closest to would at some point go up to the body, take off his glasses and put the earpiece in his mouth. It was always a solemn moment, and I was building all kinds of things into what he was doing. Was he silently promising, 'I will find who did this?' That kind of stuff.

''So then at the end of the week I'm sitting in the squad room doing the final 'thanks a lot,' and he starts remarking that he'd spent three nights without sleep, and he takes off his glasses and drops them on his desk to rub his eyes. And I noticed that the earpiece of his glasses had a deep groove cut into it. And I realized that it was from his teeth, that his teeth are clenched so tight when he's looking at a body that they cut into his glasses. It dawned on me at that moment that that might have been the most important thing I'd seen.

''And that, now, is what my life is, a pursuit of that kind of detail.''




The New York Times > Magazine > Watching the Detectives

Take this quiz: Which book are you?

The Book Quiz, by BluePyramid InterActive

This is how I scored:
(and I use the word loosely...never mind)

>>You're Lolita!
by Vladimir Nabokov

Considered by most to be depraved and immoral, you are obsessed with sex. What really tantalizes you is that which deviates from societal standards in every way, though you admit that this probably isn't the best and you're not sure what causes this desire. Nonetheless, you've done some pretty nefarious things in your life, and probably gotten caught for them. The names have been changed, but the problems are real. Please stay away from children. >>

He was 16, I mean 18, I swear!
Sheesh.

Authors use farts, other irreverent humour to get kids reading

MARTHA IRVINE
Canadian Press

Sunday, May 02, 2004

Author Glenn Murray, a co-writer of the children's book "Walter the Farting Dog" during a book signing in Chicago. (CP/AP - Aynsley Floyd)

CHICAGO (AP) - The content of Glenn Murray's Walter the Farting Dog books may seem quirky and even off-colour to some.

But these days, potty humour is big in the world of popular children's literature - from the Captain Underpants series to such bestselling titles as Zombie Butts from Uranus!

Parents jokingly call the genre the kids' version of pulp fiction - or "poop fiction."

"You gotta give kids something they want to read," says Murray, who lives in Fredericton, N.B., and who firmly believes that his smelly but well-meaning protagonist has become an ambassador for literacy.

It would seem that kids agree, since the genre's books regularly appear on children's bestseller lists.

Derek Morgan, an 11-year-old Chicagoan, recently picked up the second Walter picture book, subtitled Trouble at the Yard Sale.

"If you want to laugh," the fifth-grader said at one of Murray's book store appearances, "read this book."

Kaylee Paul, a six-year-old from Riverside, Calif., has latched onto Captain Underpants, a cross between a cartoon and a chapter book, written by author Dav Pilkey. Her favourite is about the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy.

"I like to read it every day. I really, really do," Kaylee says. She's been inspired to create her own cartoon series - "about a chubby man that farts everywhere he goes," she explains, then giggles.

Kaylee's parents say they originally bought her the Captain Underpants stories because, as an early reader, picture books became too easy. She likes the series so much that now her dad, Stan Paul, sometimes has to tell her "That's enough reading for today."

Editors at Scholastic Inc., which publishes Captain Underpants, say that's the goal - especially when it comes to kids who are "reluctant readers."

"For many, many kids, this is the first book they read that starts them on a path of reading," says Barbara Marcus, president of Scholastic's children's books division.

Librarians call such stories "book hooks," says Barbara Genco, immediate past president of Association of Library Services to Children.

Scholastic also publishes Zombie Butts from Uranus! by Andy Griffiths. It's the sequel to The Day My Butt Went Psycho, a story about a 12-year-old named Zack whose back side is prone to detaching itself, running away and causing trouble.

Gail Glover, a mom from Port Crane, N.Y., bought the latter book for nine-year-old son Robbie, but later wondered if she'd made a mistake.

Among her objections were "descriptions of bodily functions that made my hair curl."

"But of course, they solicited howls of laughter from my son," Glover says, chalking it up to "a rite of passage in the development of his sense of humour."

She notes, however, that her son still likes to read the "classics" - including the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings books, as well as works by authors Roald Dahl and Jack London.

Those are the books he should be reading, say some parents who've persuaded their school libraries to take Captain Underpants and other titles off their shelves. Some educators agree.

"I don't want to be a prude about it," says Sister St. John Delany, a nun who heads the School of Education at New York's Pace University. "I just don't think kids need to be exposed to that kind of language."

Murray - who's worked in the education field as an administrator and consultant - is well aware of the "two camps," those who love Walter and those who turn up their noses.

But the author still hopes his books become a classic of another breed.

The inspiration for Walter came from a story co-author William Kotzwinkle told Murray about a real 150-pound bull mastiff whose troubles with gas came from the beer and doughnuts his owners fed him.

While they wrote the first book more than a decade ago, it took several more years to persuade a publisher to print it.

Now each book carries a simple dedication: "For everyone who's ever felt misjudged or misunderstood."

© The Canadian Press 2004


National Post

Librarians Say No to Occupation!
- a petition calling for an immediate end to the occupation of Iraq.

Now, with the bloody occupation of Iraq continuing, with the farce of a 'transition' to a US puppet-government with no sovereignty poised to operate under military occupation, with the occupation's brutality against the city of Fallujah among many other areas, with the death toll of Iraqis and occupying troops climbing daily, with partisan calls in the US Congress for even more troops being heard as a proposed solution to the problems created by the present 'inadequate' force of occupying troops...

We the undersigned librarians re-affirm the petition 'Librarians Say 'Stop the War Now!' and demand:

End the occupation of Iraq by the coalition armies, foreign corporations and mercenaries!

Bring the troops home! No new troops to Iraq!

Stop the violence of the doomed imperial project in Iraq!

No cultural aid to the occupation.

Librarians around the world once again voice their collective opposition to the militarism and imperialism of the US mission in Iraq. We also affirm that the Iraqi people's fate is in the hands of the Iraqi people themselves and progress ultimately must mean a peaceful, democratic solution based on the national sovereignty of Iraq. Progressive-minded librarians everywhere will support reconstruction of Iraq only if and when occupation and war end.

SIGN THIS PETITION


Librarians for Peace

Check out the incredible new library in Seattle... click on the link then click on the picture to see lots more pictures and read all about it.

The Seattle Times: Pacific Northwest Magazine

Poets 'die younger' than authors

Poets die younger than novelists, playwrights or other writers, a new study in the US suggests.

It may be because poets are tortured or self-destructive, or achieve notoriety younger, James Kaufman of California State University, San Bernardino, said.

Dr Kaufman studied 1,987 dead writers from all over the world over the past centuries, and found poets died "significantly younger".

On average, a poet had a life-expectancy of only 62, he said.

It compared to playwrights' average age 63 years, novelists' 66 years and non-fiction writers' 68 years.

Dr Kaufman, who is part of the Learning Research Institute at the university, also studied mental illness and poets.

'Plath effect'

"What I found was pretty consistent with the death finding actually, female poets were much more likely to suffer from mental illness than any other kind of writer and more likely than other eminent women," he said.

"I've dubbed this the 'Sylvia Plath Effect'," Mr Kaufman said.

Dr Kaufman said there may also have been another explanation for poets' early deaths - their prodigious output usually made them more noticeable.

"Poets produce twice as much of their lifetime output in their twenties as novelists do," he said. "If an unpublished novelist was to die, fewer people would notice.

"A great novelist or non-fiction writer who dies at 28 may not have yet produced her or his magnum opus," Mr Kaufman said.

But he said that poetry is not a hazardous occupation.

"The fact that a Sylvia Plath ... may die young does not necessarily mean an Introduction to Poetry class should carry a warning that poems may be hazardous to one's health."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3648773.stm

Published: 2004/04/22 09:04:32 GMT

© BBC MMIV


BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Arts | Poets 'die younger' than authors

WAY TO GO, MARY ANNA!

ARTIFACTS, a novel by Mary Anna Evans, has been named
one of three finalists for the Benjamin Franklin Award
in Mystery/Suspense. The Publishers Marketing
Association has established this prize to honor
excellence in independent publishing. It will be
given at an awards banquet just prior to the June 3
opening of Chicago's Book Expo America. Ms. Evans is
at work on RELICS, the sequel to ARTIFACTS and the
next book in her Faye Longchamp archaeological mystery
series.

Turn over a new leaf with debut authors

JUDY MULLEN
Special to the Herald

Once upon a time, you may have read books by new authors such as Dan Brown, John MacDonald, Sue Grafton, Nora Roberts and John Grisham when they were unknown.

Each year more debut authors are published and some may achieve similar success. In addition to acquiring books by popular authors, the Manatee County Library System searches out new authors and selects the best for our collection. Readers like you will decide if these debut authors become popular.

In "Shadows at the Fair," author Lea Wait (herself a fourth-generation antiques dealer) smoothly combines homicide and antiques. Widow Maggie Summer, an antique print dealer, gets involved in solving the death of a fellow dealer when a friend's nephew is wrongly suspected. A realistic background and fascinating information about antiques and antiques fairs makes this a solid debut for fans of the "cozy" genre of mysteries.

Indian author, Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel focuses on Gogol, the American-born son of an Indian couple. Gogol's unusual name, together with conflicts between his Indian heritage and American lifestyles, are the basis of "The Namesake."

Already well-known as an actor, Harley Jane Kozak has written her first novel, the whimsically titled "Dating Dead Men." This lighthearted mystery concerns Wollie Shelley, her struggling card store, her attempts to date (living) men for a research study, and what goes wrong when she stumbles across a body.

Deanna Kizis, West Coast editor of "Elle" magazine, puts a new spin on the "chick lit" novel, in "How to Meet Cute Boys." Benjamina Franklin is a star L.A. journalist whose dating disasters serve as a regular feature in "Filly" magazine. When she meets the man of her dreams, he turns out to be a lot younger and exhibiting signs of Benjamina's worst nightmare: male commitment phobia. The dating world's highs and lows provide plenty of laughs and tears.

In the intriguingly titled, "Shoveling Smoke," Austin Davis has written a hilarious crime novel set in the tiny East Texas town of Jenks. Houston lawyer, Clay Parker attempts to leave the rat race behind when he moves to Jenks. From the start, he finds it a bumpy road as he tries to prepare for his first case while a cast of quirky characters (corrupt officials, crazed survivalists, incompetent hit man, an emu and a naked county clerk) hinder him from every side and Clay discovers that nothing is what it seems to be.

In Ken Bruen's "The Guards," ousted Irish policeman, Jack Taylor, surprises himself by getting hired by a dazzling woman who has heard Jack is good at finding things. Stark, violent, sharp and funny, "The Guards" gives the reader a close look at the gritty Galway streets, and is a promising new addition to contemporary crime fiction.

Jilliane Hoffman's first novel, "Retribution," relates the events unleashed by the brutal rape of recent law school graduate, Chloe, in 1968. Twelve years later, the case against a vicious serial murderer is being built by a compassionate police (male) officer and an aggressive (female) prosecutor, but the officer is concerned about the urgency of the prosecutor's actions. Plot twists and turns and a breathtaking ending make this a debut novel to remember.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Mullen is a reference librarian at the Central Library.



Bradenton Herald | 04/18/2004 | Turn over a new leaf with debut authors