Readers & Publishers, Awash in a Book Flood
By Carole Goldberg
Hartford Courant
Sunday, February 15, 2004; Page D06
Like an assembly line stuck in high gear, the U.S. publishing industry is churning out ever more books each year, an embarrassment of riches for publishers, reviewers and readers alike.
R.R. Bowker, the company that maintains the authoritative Books in Print database, says the most recent figures show that, in 2002, total output of new titles and editions in the United States grew by nearly 6 percent, to 150,000. General adult fiction exceeded 17,000 -- the strongest category. Juvenile titles topped 10,000, the highest total ever recorded. And there were more than 10,300 new publishers, mostly small or self-publishers.
No wonder we're all running out of shelf space.
Depending on whether you're a producer or a consumer, that's either good or frustrating.
"Year after year," says Pat Johnson, executive vice president of publishing for Alfred A. Knopf, "we gasp in horror at the numbers, knowing we have to fight for readers." But, Johnson says, "The industry has an amazing capacity for good books to find their way." Although there is intense competition for publicity, reviews and space in stores, "the cream usually rises to the top," she says.
Alexander Taylor, co-director of Curbstone Press in Willimantic, Conn., has a different perspective.
"You can never publish too many if they're of good quality, but for independent presses, it's getting more and more difficult" to compete, Taylor says. "We've learned that we have to communicate directly with our audience through our Web site and direct e-mails to our readers."
Jenny Minton Quigley of West Hartford, Conn., recently left Knopf, where she was a senior editor.
"Publishing is not a business driven by focus groups or market studies but by word of mouth. Every book is a gamble," Minton Quigley says. "Publishers rely on their editors, and sometimes they hit it right on the nose, and sometimes they miss. So the publisher puts out a big list," though only about 10 percent of books each year "earn out" what was invested in them.
It's all about "the risk-reward ratio," she says. "A small advance can lead to a big success, and to attract 'cash cow' authors, you must have a big assortment, a big list."
Laura Miller, whose take-no-prisoners reviews appear in the New York Times and on Salon.com, says a "throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks" mentality prevails.
"There's an economy of scale in the publishing industry. Editors are being urged to acquire books, even those they are not so enthusiastic about. The pressure comes from above -- one winner will pay for many losses," Miller says.
Minton Quigley says because of the dizzying avalanche of books, "as an individual reader, I've lost the capability to discover a good book for myself. There are just too many, so I rely on the media."
But reviewers feel just as overwhelmed.
Kyle Smith, book editor at People magazine whose own debut novel, "Love Monkey," was published earlier this month by HarperCollins, says, "To be a book review editor is to wade to work in hip boots every day. I get bombarded with books from self-published authors and tiny publishing houses that stand zero chance, considering how many books from the heavyweights I leave hopping up and down on the sidelines begging for a chance to get in the game.
"There are many worthy books that aren't going to make it, even though I do brief reviews, which affords me [the chance] to cram in two or three books per page of the magazine," Smith says.
"Everyone's in this business hoping to see the next 'Nanny Diaries' or 'Da Vinci Code,' but if the book is merely worthy, it's probably not going to make much of an impression."
Miller says she relies on a close community of reviewers, book scouts, editors and others in the business to help her decide what to review.
"I don't know that I could do my job without talking to others," she says.
"Even if I just read the first 50 pages of every reasonably serious fiction [book published each month], I'd have no time to do anything else," says Miller, who writes about 30 reviews a year. She spends about 15 percent of her time just sorting and storing the copies she receives for possible reviews.
And although reviewing can be like being a kid let loose in a candy store, Miller points out that "there are a million jars and packages in that store, and a lot of it is joke candy that tastes really bad."
Rebecca Skloot, a science writer for magazines who frequently reviews books on medical and scientific topics and is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, says managing the flow of review copies is "an organizational nightmare" and "endless joke" to her Manhattan apartment building's doormen.
"Reviewing is a labor of love," Skloot says, "but the sheer volume of books is so great that some get lost in the shuffle." Yet even though she wishes publishers would not send out "blanket mailings" of review copies, "the system does work. I can pass along books to others who may review them," she says.
From a bookseller's point of view, says Suzy Staubach, general manager of the University of Connecticut's Co-op Bookstore, "there can't be too many books," though it is getting harder for an author to break out and readers are relying more on "brand name" authors.
"It would be nice to be able to carry everything and to know what every book is about. But there are too many now," Staubach says.
"What people need is more quiet time to be able to focus and read."
Minton Quigley says that despite the intense competition, good books still sell.
"The wonderful thing is, quality books can find passionate audiences," she says.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
Readers & Publishers, Awash in a Book Flood (washingtonpost.com)
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
Monday, February 16, 2004
Amazon Glitch Unmasks War of Reviewers
By AMY HARMON
Close observers of Amazon.com noticed something peculiar this week: the company's Canadian site had suddenly revealed the identities of thousands of people who had anonymously posted book reviews on the United States site under signatures like "a reader from New York."
The weeklong glitch, which Amazon fixed after outed reviewers complained, provided a rare glimpse at how writers and readers are wielding the online reviews as a tool to promote or pan a book — when they think no one is watching.
John Rechy, author of the best-selling 1963 novel "City of Night" and winner of the PEN-USA West lifetime achievement award, is one of several prominent authors who have apparently pseudonymously written themselves five-star reviews, Amazon's highest rating. Mr. Rechy, who laughed about it when approached, sees it as a means to survival when online stars mean sales.
"That anybody is allowed to come in and anonymously trash a book to me is absurd," said Mr. Rechy, who, having been caught, freely admitted to praising his new book, "The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens," on Amazon under the signature "a reader from Chicago." "How to strike back? Just go in and rebut every single one of them."
Mr. Rechy is in good company. Walt Whitman and Anthony Burgess both famously reviewed their own books under assumed names. But several modern-day writers said the Internet, where anyone from your mother to your ex-agent can anonymously broadcast an opinion of your work, has created a more urgent need for self-defense.
Under Amazon's system, any user may submit a review without publicly providing any personal information (or evidence of having read the book). The posting of real names on the Canadian site was for many a reminder that anonymity on the Internet is seldom a sure thing.
"It was an unfortunate error," said Patricia Smith, an Amazon spokeswoman. "We'll examine whatever happened and make sure it won't happen again."
But even with reviewer privacy restored, many people say Amazon's pages have turned into what one writer called "a rhetorical war," where friends and family members are regularly corralled to write glowing reviews and each negative one is scrutinized for the digital fingerprints of known enemies.
One well-known writer admitted privately — and gleefully — to anonymously criticizing a more prominent novelist who he felt had unfairly reaped critical praise for years. She regularly posts responses, or at least he thinks it is her, but the elegant rebuttals of his reviews are also written from behind a pseudonym.
Numbering 10 million and growing by tens of thousands each week, the reader reviews are the most popular feature of Amazon's sites, according to the company, which also culls reviews from more traditional critics like Publishers Weekly. Many authors applaud the democracy of allowing readers to voice their opinions, and rejoice when they see a new one posted — so long as it is positive.
But some authors say it is ironic that while they can for the first time face their critics on equal footing, so many people on both sides choose to remain anonymous. And some charge that the same anonymity that encourages more people to discuss books also spurs them to write reviews that they would never otherwise attach their names to.
Jonathan Franzen, author of "The Corrections," winner of the National Book Award, said that a first book by Tom Bissell last fall was "crudely and absurdly savaged" on Amazon in anonymous reviews he believed were posted by a group of writers whom Mr. Bissell had previously written about in the literary magazine The Believer.
"With the really flamingly negative reviews, I think it's always worth asking yourself what kind of person has time to write them," Mr. Franzen said. "I know that the times when I've been tempted to write a nasty review online, I have never had attractive motives." Mr. Franzen declined to say whether he had ever given in to such temptation.
The suspicion that the same group of writers, known as the Underground Literary Alliance, had anonymously attacked his friend Heidi Julavits prompted the novelist Dave Eggers to write a review last August calling Ms. Julavits's first novel "one of the best books of the year."
Mr. Eggers, whose memoir, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," made him a literary celebrity, chose to post his review as "a reader from St. Louis, MO." But the review appeared under the name "David K Eggers" on Amazon's Canadian site on Monday, and Mr. Eggers confirmed by e-mail that he had written it.
"I've done that one or two times before, when I like a book and the reviews on Amazon seem bizarre," Mr. Eggers said. "In this case I just tried to bring back some balance."
Michael Jackman of the Alliance, which champions "underground writing" and has been critical of contemporary writers' focus on themselves rather than the wider world, called the presumption that his group had written the anonymous reviews "the height of arrogance."
"It's interesting that they find some negative reviews and assume that the reason for it must be partisan ax-grinding and not real taste," Mr. Jackman said. "I mean, there's no accounting for taste, is there?" Whether it is arrogance, paranoia or simply common sense, positive reviews come under suspicion, too.
"Could the five-star reviews (so far all but one from NY, NY) be the work of the author's friends?" asked a one-star review by "A reader from Washington, DC" on the review page for Susan Braudy's "Family Circle," a biography of Kathy Boudin, the former member of the Weather Underground, and her family.
Reviews are not the only features writers take advantage of to improve their image on Amazon. Many have been known to list their own books as alternate recommendations for any given book, and to compile lists of favorite books with their own at the top. Not unlike authors who have manipulated newspaper best-seller lists by buying copies of their own books, one ordered books through Amazon to raise his ranking there.
Books are far from the only products subject to anonymous reviewing these days. The growth of electronic commerce has spawned a new kind of critical authority — one's peers. On Amazon alone, customers depend on one another for advice on CD's, DVD's, garden tools and electronic equipment. On dozens of other Web sites, average citizens anonymously review restaurants, software, even teachers.
The word-of-mouth advice is widely seen as empowering to consumers who no longer have to rely on privileged critics with access to a television station or printing press to disseminate their opinions. But the reliability of the new authorities is the subject of increasing debate, at least among active Amazon users.
As the Amazon sites expand their visitors are seen as an increasingly important. Mark Moskowitz, an independent filmmaker, sent an e-mail message to about 3,000 people this week asking them to review the DVD of his film "Stone Reader," which goes on sale soon.
"If you didn't see it but heard it was good, go ahead and post anyway, (what the heck)," Mr. Moskowitz told them. "It doesn't obligate you for anything, even the truth."
Despite the widespread presumption that the reviews are stacked, both readers and writers say they affect sales, especially for new writers whose books are not widely reviewed elsewhere.
To increase the credibility of the reader reviews, Amazon has introduced a means for users to vote on the quality of each review, and a corresponding ranking of the top 1,000 reviewers. But the site's discussion boards are full of carping about how people are trying to play that system, too. Many prolific reviewers speculate that Harriet Klausner, 55, who has long reigned as No. 1, cannot possible read all the books she reviews.
In a telephone interview, Ms. Klausner, in turn, accused the No. 2 reviewer of getting people to vote for him and against her in a "desperate attempt to be No. 1."
But such concerns among reviewers pale beside those shared by a range of naturally obsessive authors.
Late last month on her radio talk show, Dr. Laura Schlessinger used a call about an anonymous letter to vent her distress over some of her Amazon reviewers, who she described as "scummy, creepy people."
The feminist author Katha Pollitt mentioned in a recent New Yorker article that she had considered anonymously posting a nasty review on her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend's Amazon page, but refrained from doing so. In an interview, however, she said she had chastised a friend whose book had no reviews on Amazon when it came out, telling her to have friends to post some. The friend followed her advice, but Ms. Pollitt was disappointed. "I'm thinking what kind of friends are these? They've only written one sentence."
The novelist A. M. Homes said the one Amazon review that had stuck in her mind was a negative one from someone who signed off "A reader from Chevy Chase," which is her hometown.
"The world of books is a very small world these days, and any time someone takes the time to share their opinion it's incredible," Ms. Homes said. "But I do want to know who that person from Chevy Chase was and what their problem with me really is."
Amazon Glitch Unmasks War of Reviewers
Report: Glitch IDs anonymous Amazon reviewers
NEW YORK (AP) --Many sign their names. Many don't.
They're the book reviewers on Amazon.com who use such words as "masterful," "page-turner" and "tear-jerker."
But the ones who sign their critiques only as "a reader from (fill in the city)" lost their anonymity this week when their identities were revealed on Amazon.com's Canadian Web site.
Among those named were authors who posted glowing reviews of their own work, apparently to boost sales.
The glitch, reported Saturday by The New York Times, replaced pseudonyms with reviewers' real names, laying bare a culture of self-promotion and potential for revenge among authors and users of the online retailer.
Amazon spokeswoman Patricia Smith told the Times the problem, fixed after a week, was "an unfortunate error."
"We'll examine whatever happened and make sure it won't happen again," she said.
Amazon allows readers to write reviews without providing their names or other personal data, an aspect of the sites that the company says is popular. About 10 million reader reviews have been posted, a number that continues to grow.
One writer, John Rechy, confessed to writing a review of his new book, "The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens," under the pseudonym "a reader from Chicago," the Times said.
"That anybody is allowed to come in and anonymously trash a book to me is absurd," Rechy told the Times. "How to strike back? Just go in and rebut every single one of them."
The author of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," Dave Eggers, confirmed to the Times that he reviewed the first novel of friend Heidi Julavits, calling it "one of the best books of the year," after he suspected rivals had panned it anonymously.
"I've done that one or two times before, when I like a book and the reviews on Amazon seem bizarre," Eggers told the Times. "In this case I just tried to bring back some balance."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
CNN.com - Report: Glitch IDs anonymous Amazon reviewers - Feb. 14, 2004
February 9, 2004
'Girl' Appears Not to Have Same Glamour as 'Nanny'
By HUGO LINDGREN
Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, the young authors behind "The Nanny Diaries," which has sold two million copies in hardcover and paperback, appear to be suffering through a sophomore slump. Random House has turned down the latest rewrite of their second novel, tentatively titled "Citizen Girl,'' according to publishing executives told about the plans.
That novel was bought in 2002 by the Random House Trade Group, an imprint of the larger Random House division of Bertelsmann, along with a sequel to "The Nanny Diaries'' in a deal worth a reported $3 million.
"The Nanny Diaries," though a work of fiction, caused a stir with its seemingly true-to-life revelations about the wealthy people who employ others to take care of their children. An early 18-page sample of the prospective new novel suggests a quite different book, about a disgruntled young character named Girl who is fired from a dull job. It starts with this introduction:
"In New York City, if you are of any age, denomination, or race, and own a penis, you can say anything that comes into your penis-owning head to anyone, of any age, denomination, or race, who does not own a penis."
The full manuscript of "Citizen Girl'' arrived at Random House last year after a shake-up that included the firing of its president and publisher, Ann Godoff (who then landed at the Penguin unit of Pearson). An intense period of editing on "Citizen Girl'' culminated in a letter to the writers describing the major changes that were thought needed to make the work publishable, according to one person briefed on the process; Ms. McLaughlin and Ms. Kraus did not agree with the prescribed changes, and sought other opinions through their latest agent, Suzanne Gluck of the William Morris Agency. Among those sent the novel were Kurt Andersen, the author of "Turn of the Century'' and a client of Ms. Gluck.
Ms. McLaughlin and Ms. Kraus, who received an advance of just $25,000 for "The Nanny Diaries," have not particularly endeared themselves to many in the publishing industry. After "The Nanny Diaries'' was finished, they shed two agents before hiring Ms. Gluck. Ms. Kraus, Ms. McLaughlin and Ms. Gluck could not be reached for comment. Executives at Random House declined to comment.
Editors at other major trade publishers said that there was doubt from the outset about the two authors' ability to duplicate their success, particularly with a book that was not a sequel.
St. Martin's, which published "The Nanny Diaries," tried to sign up the two authors again. "We had a positive, profitable experience," said Jennifer Weis, their editor at St Martin's. But, she added, "our editorial vision diverged from what was presented to us."
?Girl? Appears Not to Have Same Glamour as ?Nanny?
Monday, February 02, 2004
Edgar Nominees: Mystery Unveiled
The Mystery Writers of America has released its nominations for this year's Edgar Awards. The winners will be announced Thursday, April 29, at the 58th annual Edgar Awards dinner gala at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City. For more information about the awards and organization, go to the Mystery Writers' Web site (http://www.mysterywriters.org ).
Best Novel
* The Guards by Ken Bruen (St. Martin's Minotaur)
* Out by Natsuo Kirino (Kodansha International)
* Resurrection Men by Ian Rankin (Little, Brown)
* Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear (Soho Press)
[Note: Lost Light by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown) was also nominated in this category, but Connelly withdrew his book from consideration because he's president of MWA.]
Best First Novel by an American Author
* 12 Bliss Street by Martha Conway (St. Martin's Minotaur)
* Offer of Proof by Robert Heilbrun (Morrow)
* Night of the Dance by James Hime (St. Martin's Minotaur)
* Death of a Nationalist by Rebecca Pawel (Soho Press)
* The Bridge of Sighs by Olen Steinhauer (St. Martin's Minotaur)
Best Paperback Original
* Cut and Run by Jeff Abbott (NAL-Penguin)
* The Last Witness by Joel Goldman (Pinnacle)
* Wisdom of the Bones by Christopher Hyde (NAL-Penguin)
* Southland by Nina Rovoyr (Akashic Books)
* Find Me Again by Sylvia Maultash Warsh (Dundurn Group)
Best Critical/Biographical
* Mystery Women, Volume 3 by Colleen Barnett (Poisoned Pen Press)
* Amelia Peabody's Egypt: A Compendium edited by Elizabeth Peters and
Kristen Whitbread (Morrow)
* Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light by Patrick
McGilligan (HarperCollins)
* The American Police Novel: A History by Leroy Lad Panek (McFarland)
* Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith by Andrew Wilson
(Bloomsbury)
Best Fact Crime
* Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder by Steve Hodel (Arcade)
* The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson (Random/Crown)
* Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders by Dick
Lehr and Mitchell Zuckoff (HarperCollins)
* And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching
of Leo Frank by Steve Oney (Pantheon)
* Rothstein: The Life, Times and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who
Fixed the 1919 World Series by David Pietrusza (Carroll & Graf)
Best Short Story
* "Bet on Red" in High Stakes by Jeff Abbott (NAL-Penguin)
* "Black Heart & Cabin Girl" in Blood on Their Hands by Shelly Costa
(Berkley Prime Crime)
* "Aces and Eights" by David Edgerley Gates (AHMM, December 2003)
* "The Maids" in Blood on Their Hands by G. Miki Hayden (Berkley
Prime Crime)
* "Cowboy Grace" in The Silver Gryphon by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
(Golden Gryphon)
Jan. 31, 2004, 7:24PM
Book turns leader's daughter into Ireland's literary darling
Cecelia Ahern is garnering publicity, six-figure deals and Hollywood interest
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK
Associated Press
DUBLIN, Ireland -- In Ireland, a first-time author is garnering bucketloads of publicity, six-figure deals and Hollywood interest for her new tear-jerker novel. She also happens to be the prime minister's daughter.
Cecelia Ahern, 22, who spent a recent Saturday signing newly minted copies of PS, I Love You for several hundred fans at a Dublin bookstore, rejects claims her success is due to the high profile of her father, Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern.
"I think it's very flattering for Dad, actually, to think he has all this influence with Hollywood and all over the world," she said.
She may have a point. The novel already has proved exceptionally attractive to publishers in countries where, as the young author puts it, "the reaction is, `Bertie who?' "
PS, I Love You has been snapped up by publishers in 23 countries, including a $1 million deal with Hyperion in the United States. Hollywood producer Wendy Finerman, who shared a 1994 Oscar for Forrest Gump, snapped up the film rights for $100,000 -- altogether enough money, Ahern says, for her to buy her first laptop and move out of her mother's house.
Cecelia Ahern's lineage is the buzz topic in Dublin, where an initial print run of 50,000 copies has made PS, I Love You an immediate best seller.
The novel tells the story of Holly, a 30-year-old Dubliner whose husband, Gerry, dies unexpectedly of a brain tumor. Holly discovers he has left her 10 sealed envelopes containing monthly tasks Holly must complete or challenges she must face -- each designed to help her come to grips with her grief and embrace life again.
Ireland's airwaves and newspapers have devoted unusual space to discussing whether Ahern's work is an exceptional piece of "chick lit."
"Heartbreak, intrigue and love letters from beyond the grave -- read that lot on a back cover, and you'll find it hard to put it down," said a review in the Irish Times, Ireland's often-stuffy newspaper of record, which found Ahern's style flawed but "neither syrupy nor stilted, with promising flashes of humor and a relaxedly bawdy use of expletives."
Other critics have been nastier, quoting particularly wooden bits of dialogue from the book. But the level-headed Ahern said her political pedigree means she's tough enough to take it -- and she's already written her second novel.
"I grew up seeing people write terrible and untrue things every day about my dad, who works 24/7 in politics and is an amazing man," she said. "So if there is constructive criticism, I'm going to take it -- if I agree with it. Fortunately, there's nothing I agree with so far!"
Her success story has added a new twist to one of Ireland's longest-running soap operas -- the life and loves of Bertie Ahern.
Ahern is Ireland's first prime minister to suffer an openly broken marriage. His daughters, Cecelia and Georgina, have remained close to their father but grew up with their mother, Miriam, in a country where divorce was illegal until 1997.
As prime minister since 1997, Ahern traveled across Ireland and the world with his longtime partner, Celia Larkin, at his side, courting criticism from religious conservatives in this overwhelmingly Catholic country. But their relationship fell apart last year. Since then, Irish tabloids have speculated about a Bertie-Miriam reconciliation.
The Ahern clan also gained in the domestic glamour stakes last year when Georgina married Nicky Byrne of Ireland's best-known boy band, Westlife.
Cecelia Ahern says she has no intention of drawing on her parents' troubles for inspiration.
"I have an imagination of my own," she said. "There's plenty of ideas floating around up there already."
HoustonChronicle.com
The book that spawned a monster
By Stephen Dowling
BBC News Online entertainment staff
It is 30 years since Peter Benchley's tale of a menacing Great White shark was published. BBC News Online looks at the book's legacy.
If anything helped to make a modern villain of sharks - and especially the Great White - it was Peter Benchley's debut novel Jaws.
In 1974 Benchley struck a chord with the story of a resort town menaced by a giant shark - a terror older than man himself.
The book starts with a Great White shark lurking off the eastern resort town of Amity, which kills a girl taking a midnight swim.
Her remains are found by local police chief Martin Brody , who believes the killer is now lurking offshore, but the local mayor, afraid a summer shark scare will bankrupt the town, refuses to close the beaches.
The book came, the author said, from a simple newspaper story.
'Moral crisis'
"In 1964 I saw a small item in the New York Daily News about a fisherman who caught a 4,550lb Great White off the beaches of Long Island," Benchley told BBC Radio 4's Front Row programme.
"And I thought right then 'What if one of these things came round and wouldn't go away?"
Thomas Congdon, an editor at publishers Doubleday in the US, had read some of Benchley's articles. In 1971 he took the 31-year-old writer to lunch to see if the journalist had any book ideas.
None of Benchley's ideas were suitable for a book, the now-retired Mr Congdon told BBC News Online.
"So at the end of the lunch meeting, for something to say over coffee, I asked him if he had an idea for a novel, half-hoping he'd say no. 'Yes,' he said, 'I want to tell the story of a Great White shark that marauds the beaches of a resort town and provokes a moral crisis."
Mr Congdon was certainly interested. "He did a page in my office, and I gave him a cheque for $1,000," he said. "On the basis of that he did me 100 pages.
"The first five pages were just wonderful. They just went in to the eventual book without any changes. The other 95 pages though were on the wrong track. They were humorous. And humour isn't the proper vehicle for a great thriller."
One suggestion for the book's title was The Stillness in the Water - not, Mr Congdon said, a name that rolled off the tongue.
When the book finally got its toothy title it became one of the publishing sensations of US book history, rivalling Herman Melville's other tale of great white denizen of the deep, Moby Dick.
Compared to Steven Spielberg's resulting film, the book had a darker underlying theme. Matt Hooper, the marine biologist brought in to fight the shark, has an affair with Brody's wife Ellen.
Mayor Vaughan's insistence on keeping the beaches open, meanwhile, may have something to do with the fact he owes money to the mafia.
Spielberg has admitted that when he first read the book he found most of the characters unlikeable, and wanted the shark to win.
On publication Jaws was certainly popular - it had already been well-received in book clubs. It stayed on the bestseller list for 44 weeks, according to Carl Gottlieb's The Jaws Log.
Change of heart
By the time summer arrived, Jaws had become a genuine phenomenon.
Sunbathers leafed through the book lying yards away from the sea - the very environment that hid Benchley's finned killer.
Jaws spawned a wave of copycat novels with mutant rats and crabs or rabid dogs as the nemesis - one of the 1970s less enduring literary trends.
Still, Mr Congdon is still happy to praise it. "It's a good novel - it's not great literature and it's not Moby Dick, but it's a well-written book."
The book - great literature or not - did spawn Steven Spielberg's 1975 film version, which arguably kick-started blockbuster movie-making.
Another legacy of Jaws is less trivial. Benchley began to feel guilty about how his novel had turned sharks into villains, and had a very public change of heart: he is now an ardent ocean conservationist - saving sharks is at the top of his agenda.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/3400291.stm
Published: 2004/02/01 12:59:08 GMT
© BBC MMIV
Friday, January 23, 2004
Mark Haddon: This year's big read
A 'difficult' novel whose teenage narrator is incapable of expressing emotion is already being hailed as a literary classic to rank with the greats - and will be seen on every Mediterranean beach towel this summer. John Walsh explains how the uniquely beguiling Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time struck publishing gold.
22 January 2004
Next Tuesday evening, at the head offices of the Whitbread brewery in the City of London, amid the glammed-up writers, publishers, literary journalists, television celebrities and media horizontales of the metropolis, among the picturesque dray-horses in the company's front yard and the camera crews in the main dining hall, in all the howling paraphernalia attending on the Whitbread Book of the Year award, the focus of attention will fall on a 15-year-old boy.
The kid will not be there in person, because he's a fictional character, the narrator of Mark Haddon's much-admired, bestselling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - but if he were, he would a) absolutely hate it, and b) have no clue what was going on. Because Christopher Boone doesn't understand why people do things. He suffers (though the book never actually tells you) from a form of autism called Asperger's syndrome. He can't understand the motivation behind actions or the reasons for everyday human behaviour. He can feel pleasure and contentment, sadness and fear, but can't intuit or grasp the emotional vocabulary of others. A mathematical genius, and a whizz at physics and cosmology, he lives in a world of facts and logic, in which people are scary and threatening because they tell jokes he can't understand, they use figurative language that makes no sense, and they're always trying to touch or embrace him.
He is by some distance the oddest and most original narrator to appear in years; indeed the book's appearance has created a stir comparable to the early days of JK Rowling. It has the quality of making everything around it seem a little muddy and indistinct. In the five categories from which the eventual Book of the Year will be drawn, Haddon's book won Best Novel, while the winner of the Booker Prize last October - DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little - had to be content with Best First Novel. The Curious Incident is, technically, Haddon's first novel for adults, but it was also published as a children's book (his 16th) and won the Guardian Children's Prize in November. Confused? Even if it doesn't win the overall prize on Tuesday and is pipped by DJ Taylor's biography of Orwell or Don Paterson's poetry collection Landing Light, it will still be the season's most talked-about book and the strangest bestseller to hit the nation's shelves since Flaubert's Parrot.
Since publication in June, Jonathan Cape has shifted 150,000 copies in hardback, and sold the rights to 40 countries. Sales in Italy, for some reason, almost match those in the UK. It's been praised by reviewers across the spectrum, by Ian McEwan, doyen of the novel of ideas, and Oliver Sacks, the presiding genius of neurological drama, and chosen as Book of the Year by such literary stars as Anne Tyler and Peter Carey. It has the potential to become a world-seller, with a paperback print run of half-a-million copies - the kind of book that shows up on the top deck of every bus in Britain and every beach towel in the Mediterranean - and becomes a "classic" in 20 years' time.
But why? It's no Birdsong or Captain Corelli's Mandolin. It eschews the standard attractions of the bestseller. There's no sweeping narrative, no backdrop of war, no international canvas. It's set in the suburbs of Swindon. There's no transporting love story (there's the fag-end of an infidelity-and-wife-swap story, but that hardly compensates). There's a murder mystery (Christopher tries to find out who killed Wellington, the neighbour's poodle), but it's solved halfway through. There's no character with whom to "identify" apart from the autistic narrator who, it's safe to say, couldn't possibly identify with you. The story is without stylistic flourishes. Because Christopher can only tell an unvarnished story, most of the paragraphs - and hundreds of sentences - begin with "And". Mathematical formulae, diagrams and grids chequer the pages...
Just to make things slightly more puzzling, the book was published by two different houses under the Random House umbrella - by Jonathan Cape (for adults) and David Fickling (for children) - each of which deployed its own sales force for a two-pronged attack on the bookselling trade. Amazingly, it seems to have generated a publishing phenomenon.
"The ground for its success was laid with JK Rowling and Philip Pullman," says Nicholas Clee, editor of The Bookseller. "No one in publishing will let the over-used word 'crossover' pass their lips anymore, but there are books that clearly appeal to adult and child readers, and can be sold to them in ways that weren't possible before Harry Potter came along. If it had come out 10 years ago, it would have been much harder to market to the book trade, and harder to persuade reviewers to take it seriously. Publishers would have been confused about how to categorise it, booksellers wouldn't have known where to stock it. Now if you say, 'It's a children's book that appeals to adults', everyone knows what that means."
"I read it in proof before I knew anything about it," says Sue Baker, books editor of Publishing News. "I knew it had got it - that magic ingredient. It's a perfect book, completely of itself; it doesn't have to be like anything else. It puts you so strongly in the mind of this kid that you know just what it's like to be him. It's probably a classic to be passed on to the children of the next generation."
To meet the author is to meet a very happy, slightly dazed man at his small, comfortable house in Oxford, among the rat-run of student dwellings between the Cowley and Iffley Roads. Mark Haddon is 40, stocky and boyish, in his sloppy blue jumper, green cords, Caterpillar boots and shocking pink socks. He makes real coffee with studied vagueness ("I never know how much to put in"), while his wife Sarah (known all her life as "Sos", and now lecturer in English at Brasenose College) bustles about with the tiny new arrival, Zac. It's a jolly household, bursting with colour and creativity. A vase of red and orange tulips explodes over the coffee table. In the grate, a long tube of winking lights substitutes for a fire. Haddon has had a number of careers - artist, cartoonist, poet, illustrator - and talks as energetically about his favourite artists as he does about his literary ambitions.
"When I first started this book, I thought, 'Oh look - it has layers'," he says. "It helps you get immediately into the mind of someone who would be totally closed from you in real life. It's a fiction about someone who says they can only tell the truth, but actually he gets everything wrong. He's a guy who should be a really bad narrator because he takes everything literally, who doesn't understand emotion and misses the big picture. But he turns out to be a really good narrator because he leaves a lot of space for you to add your own stuff to the story."
Haddon is a serious literary cove with a liking for the cutting edge. While little contemporary fiction gets him excited, "I feel like I'm out there on the runway in the dark, waiting for the Big One to come in, thinking, 'Maybe this is it'. I'm the sort of person who gets excited when someone like David Eggers comes along. I've always really liked experimental writing."
Had he started writing with big ambitions? "I've always had those. I've written great baggy monsters of purple prose - lots of high-concept stuff. One book was called The Blue Guitar Murders, about which I remember very little except that it involved the Via Negativa and a singing policeman. It should be published as a stern warning to over-intellectual 21-year-olds who want to write a big book. But you learn to throw all that out and I think writing children's books helped in that process because you can't indulge yourself when writing those."
So did he write The Curious Incident for kids? "No, I wrote it for me. I thought, there are no rules this time. I don't have to take into account who's going to read it, I'm writing for myself. I'm really glad that David Fickling [the children's book publisher] wanted to do it as well as Cape, and that teenagers are reading it." What response has he had from younger readers? "Very pleasing. Although there are a few prudish reactions from well-brought-up 13-year- olds, warning others that there's bad language..." Indeed there is. Most of the grown- ups in Christopher's life seem to talk in a blizzard of effing and blinding. "Do you think there's too much swearing?" asks Haddon in mock alarm. "Don't grown-ups swear a lot? We just don't notice it. I hear swearing a lot during the day, although admittedly it's usually from myself..."
I point out that his Radio 4 play, Coming Down the Mountain, broadcast last year, gave a voice to a Down's syndrome teenager called Ben. Was Haddon trying to corner the market in mentally skewed ways of seeing the world? "Am I going for the Disability Boxed Set?" he asks, laughing. "The answer is, you always want to get people in extreme situations because it shows who they are. You can't get through a novel on tea parties. You've got to have people in the burning building or the lifeboat. I wanted to be contemporary and ordinary, but have an edge. And this book - Christopher's adventure - does that." His experience of physical and mental handicap came in the early 1980s, when, just out of Merton College, Oxford, with an English degree, he worked for Community Service Volunteers in Scotland, looking after a patient with multiple sclerosis. "I worked in 24-hour shifts, doing everything for him - washing, toileting, smoking - and it was very black and very funny. It displayed the truth that, if you're sharing a house with someone who's paralysed from the neck down, it's often the person they're living with, the one with all his faculties, who really needs looking after. The guy we were supposed to be looking after, 99 per cent of his problems were about religion, sex and having rows with neighbours - the usual things. He had a serious disability, but it didn't define his whole life."
Moving to London, he continued his saintly progress working for Mencap and a Children's Action Workshop in Muswell Hill ("Everyone says, 'What's with all the caring?', but at the time it seemed very normal. We were quite a political generation"). "It was full of kids of all ages, with various physical handicaps and learning difficulties, some with mental handicaps. But there were no labels. When you went in there, you had to work out, 'Am I talking to a very articulate seven-year- old, or to a 12-year-old with growth and developmental delay?' That was a real eye-opener."
When did he first find evidence of the alien landscape that's inside his narrator Christopher's head? "Oh, I think that if you're a writer you have that in your own head from quite an early age. I think it's true there are two types of kids as school. One type probably breezes through school like gazelles across the veldt. For the more troubled types on the edge of the playground, how you get from one day to the next is a mystery. All writers come from the latter, because only if you're in that group does the working of the human mind become an object of interest."
At Uppingham School ("which produced John Schlesinger, Boris Karloff and, briefly, Stephen Fry before he ran away"), Haddon was himself a bit of a Christopher Boone about maths. "I'm periodically obsessed with the subject. And if you are, and you write novels, believe me, it's not that easy to drag it in." We talk about madness and eccentricity, how supposedly close to madness are some forms of artistic endeavour - and how autism is considered very much a male complaint (for some women, it's practically a definition of maleness). "The ratio of men-to-women Asperger's sufferers is nine to one. And we all know some middle-aged men with undiagnosed Asperger's. Go to a maths department in a university town and the ratio goes up sharply. A friend said: 'This not a book about Asperger's; it's about a young mathematician with behavioural issues. If Christopher was real, he'd go on to have a perfectly adequate place in any maths department, and be surrounded by people not very different from himself.'"
The news that film rights to this wholly unfilmable book have been bought by Warner Brothers, in cahoots with Heyday (the producers of the Harry Potter movies) and Plan B (Brad Pitt's production company) gives a pleasing arc to the phenomenon, which began quietly in June last year; grew through public disputation when John Carey, the chair of the Booker judges, publicly regretted his fellow judges' failure to share his enthusiasm for this "masterly and amazing book"; picked up the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Book Trust teenage fiction award; hit the top of the bestseller lists twice; and began the new year by winning the Whitbread Novel prize. If Haddon walks off with the Book of the Year award on Tuesday, no one will be very surprised. Though they may find it hard to say why it has done so well.
"When I read it, I didn't think it was a kids' book anyway," says Nicholas Clee. "But it was a book I could confidently recommend to a lot of people, knowing that 90 per cent of them would like it - and you can't say that about many books now."
Blake Morrison, who also chose it as one of his books of the year, says: "I suppose if I were a Booker prize judge, I might be concerned with questions about its 'seriousness' or its 'major' status. But it was the thing I most enjoyed reading last year, and I'd recommend it on the pleasure principle."
Perhaps the reason for its success lies in a subtle trade-off between high seriousness and teenage playfulness. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is, in fact, a dazzling work of post-modernism. It has an unstable narrator, a plot full of holes and a whole smorgasbord of metafictional devices. It turns its back on the conventions of the classic novel as Henry James would have conceived it, with its subtly calibrated emotional shifts. Instead, it asks the reader to supply what Christopher's narrative is missing, and then to marvel at the pathos of his foreshortened world-view. And behind this clever structure, it tells a gripping story of a dysfunctional family, and a fractured consciousness going out to confront the world for the first time. Every reader has, I suspect, been responding to both his Inner Child, his Inner Nice Guy and his Inner Smart-Alec, all at the same time.
Draft copy of Harry Potter book auctioned
LONDON (AP) — A draft copy of the first Harry Potter adventure which incorrectly identified author J.K. Rowling sold at auction for $2,642, the auctioneer said.
An anonymous bidder on Monday purchased the proof copy of Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, first published in 1997, the Bonhams auction house said. The proof incorrectly identifies the author as J.A. Rowling.
The book was released in the United States as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
The sale generated interest from collectors worldwide because of the printing error on the title page.
Bonhams book specialist Gill Atkins said only 100 draft copies of the book were printed, "which is why the Harry Potter books have a high valuation."
"They were produced ahead of the first editions and were published in very small numbers and just circulated within the publishing industry," she said.
In December, a signed paperback first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone sold for $9,900 at Sotheby's in New York.
All prices included the auctioneers' commission.
USATODAY.com - Draft copy of Harry Potter book auctioned
Thursday, January 22, 2004
Poynteronline
Posted, Jan. 21, 2004
Updated, Jan. 21, 2004
The Plot Thickens at The New York Times Book Review
With a new Sunday book editor on the horizon, The New York Times takes a hard look at its literary coverage paper-wide.
By Margo Hammond and Ellen Heltzel
Publishing insiders have watched nervously since Steven Erlanger became cultural editor at The New York Times and began altering the focus of the daily "Books of the Times." Well, they ain't seen nothin' yet. When we sat down with executive editor Bill Keller last week, he promised "dramatic changes" in the Sunday section now that head honcho Chip McGrath is stepping aside. He also indicated that the top brass is rethinking book coverage top to bottom.
Well, if you write non-fiction, review non-fiction, or prefer to read non-fiction, break out the champagne. "The most compelling ideas tend to be in the non-fiction world," Keller says. "Because we are a newspaper, we should be more skewed toward non-fiction."
What's more, if you're perplexed or simply bored with what passes for smart fiction these days, the Times feels your pain. More attention will be paid to the potboilers, we're told. After all, says Keller, somebody's got to tell you what book to choose at the airport.
And who will carry out this mandate? Regarding McGrath's replacement, Keller won't name names yet. But he did say that they're down to three or four finalists, none of them inside staffers. An announcement is just weeks away.
Bill Keller
A big step in this process — and the one that may have sent the higher-ups into brainstorming mode — involved inviting about a dozen of the most promising candidates to write "diagnostic essays" on how the Sunday section ought to change. The consensus: Reviews need to be more varied in length, and more contentious. But that's just tinkering around the edges. The bigger news concerns what will be covered. Author interviews, a column on the publishing industry, a decrease in fiction reviews and more about mass market books — this appears to be the recipe for making the NYTBR less formulaic and more vital.
Although Keller's ascendancy has brought plenty of reshuffling at the Times, in the case of the Sunday book review, perceptions in and outside the paper seem to have meshed. Critics have dunned the section for dullness. Even while praising McGrath's exceptional editing skills, Keller made clear that he has different priorities.
"I love that Chip championed first novels," he says, then offers the rhetorical question: But why take up 800 words when a paragraph will do? Based on our interviews with Keller, McGrath, and Erlanger, top management thinks contemporary fiction has received more column inches than it deserves.
Bill Keller: "Of course, some fiction needs to be done ... We'll do the new Updike, the new Roth, the new Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith. But there are not a lot of them, it seems to me."
"Of course, some fiction needs to be done," Keller says. "We'll do the new Updike, the new Roth, the new Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith. But there are not a lot of them, it seems to me." He gets no argument from Erlanger. "To be honest, there's so much s---," the new leader of the daily arts section observes. "Most of the things we praise aren't very good."
Traditionally, chief critic Michiko Kakutani has handled most of the literary fiction for daily. Her star remains untarnished; Keller refers to her appreciatively as "queen of the hill." Former movie critic Janet Maslin has shown a predilection for commercial fiction, a taste the Times endorses. As with most newspapers, management is obsessed with attracting younger readers and sees mass market titles as one entry point — as long as they're done, Keller says, in a "witty" way appropriate to the Times' sophisticated reader.
Regarding daily coverage, under Erlanger the book review team has been reduced from three to two (book reviewer Richard Bernstein has been dispatched to Berlin, and his slot was given to a reporter). That leaves freelancers to handle most non-fiction. But instead of reducing coverage, Erlanger claims to be increasing it, using former Times staffer Robert Berkvist to vet titles. Erlanger reinstated the weekly review in his Saturday section Arts & Ideas, with emphasis on the more topical releases from university presses. "We need to do more policy and history," he says. "We need to be more urgent and journalistic."
For him, this means assigning books with hopes of eliciting some sparks. Example: He asked Max Boot, a conservative on the Council of Foreign Relations, to review "Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars and America's Response," by Clinton Administration veteran John Shattuck. "I like to mix it up," Erlanger says. "If I could start another Mailer/Vidal fight, I'd gladly do it."
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Some of the non-fiction books he reviews for "urgency" are poorly written, he admits, but for him this is less important than the book's contents. He and Keller, both prize-winning former foreign correspondents, see books as a launching pad for discussion. "Book reviews are partly a consumer service," Keller says, but they also "should be written for people who don't have any intention of buying the book."
So there's the recipe: Emphasize non-fiction books. Demote literary fiction. Promote (judiciously) commercial novels. Cover the book industry more and individual titles less (Keller says he intends to fill the long-empty book publishing industry slot in business, which -- as with other media beats -- requires "a thick skin to stand up to the spin and the whining.")
Given its pivotal role in the marketing of books, the Times is likely to accelerate trends already apparent in book publishing. The potential implications are huge, suggesting bigger advances for blockbusters and celebrities, including those who wish to exploit their "public service" in the nation's capital, and scaled-down high-brow fiction lists, based on the assumption that if such books can't get ink in the toney Times, they won't have a prayer in USA Today or Entertainment Weekly.
Whether or not the Times' analysis of the market and its readers is correct, it's based on logical reasoning. In the views expressed by its decision-makers, too few works of fiction rise to the level of a "novel of ideas" — that is, stories that express the concerns and issues of the day as Dickens did. And given these odds, the Times would rather devote resources to fostering debate than discovering and nurturing imaginative writing.
We'd like to hear from feature editors and book editors about their views. Do you agree with the Times' direction? Are you in the process of reevaluating your own approach to book coverage? If so, what kind of changes do you anticipate?
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http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=59576
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
Judge unmoved by court poet
January 8, 2004 - 3:22PM
His verse brought tears to a lawyer's eyes, but Brisbane pensioner Neil Maciejewski's poetry was not enough to get him off a public drunkenness charge.
Maciejewski, a recovering alcoholic, was stone cold sober as he recited his poem "What Matters?" to a hushed Brisbane's Magistrates Court today.
The 46-year-old was so drunk when he was arrested last month he was unable to remember swearing at police as they tried to handcuff him.
He was drinking at an inner-city hotel and stumbled onto Charlotte Street where police saw him stopping traffic at an intersection.
He spent the night in the watchhouse and was charged with behaving in a disorderly manner, obstructing a police officer and using obscene language.
He used language of a different sort in pleading guilty today, saying he wanted to give the magistrate an insight into his character.
He recited one of his own poems, which included the lines:
"Some have done it much harder than most, some have done it much better, does it matter?
"They come and they go, they slip and they fall, get up again, experience more pain, does it matter?"
The court fell silent during the recital and one lawyer had tears rolling down her cheeks.
Maciejewski said outside court he had resorted to poetry to try to reduce his fine.
But there is no way of knowing what the effect was on Magistrate Rob Quinlan, who told the court: "It is not every day that I have a poem read to me."
He fined Maciejewski $425.
AAP
Judge unmoved by court poet - www.smh.com.au
Borders 2004 Original Voices Award Nominees
Borders has nominated five books in four categories for its 2004 Original Voices Award. Each winner will
receive $5,000 and be featured in Borders stores throughout the spring. Finalists for the awards are chosen by both corporate and
store employees; the winners will be announced in March.
The finalists are:
Fiction
1. Brick Lane by Monica Ali (Scribner)
2. Jennifer Government by Max Barry (Picador)
3. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
(Doubleday)
4. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead)
5. The Time Travelers Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (MacAdam/Cage)
6. How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer (Knopf)
Nonfiction
1. A Million Little Pieces by James Frey (Doubelday)
2. Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling by Ross King (Walker)
3. Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (Scribner)
4. Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World
Series of Poker by James McManus (FSG)
5. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi (Random)
6. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach (Norton)
Children's Picture Books
1. The Spider and the Fly by Mary Howitt, illustrated by Tony
DiTerlizzi (S&S)
2. Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! by Mo Willems (Hyperion)
3. The Story of Frog Belly Rat Bone by Timothy Basil Ering
(Candlewick)
4. Eleanor, Ellatony, Ellencake, and Me by C.M. Rubin, illustrated by
Christopher Fowler (McGraw-Hill/Gingham Dog)
5. The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds (Candlewick)
6. Stranger in the Woods by Carl R. Sams II (Carl R. Sams)
Intermediate/Young Adult Books
1. Eragon by Christopher Paolini (Knopf)
2. The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud (Hyperion/Miramax)
3. The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau (Random House)
4. Granny Torrelli Makes Soup by Sharon Creech (HarperCollins/Cotler)
5. After by Francine Prose (HarperTempest)
6. A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly (Harcourt)
Cloak, dagger, carpool lane and diaper bag: There's a suspicious number of female mystery writers in the Bay Area
Adair Lara, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, January 8, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback | FAQ
URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/08/DDG1944M6O1.DTL
A man, fatally stabbed, lies bleeding on a sidewalk in San Francisco. His last words, though faint, are overheard by a passer-by -- "When is she going to write a real book?" A woman with a laptop is seen hurrying away.
The suspects? Six ordinary Bay Area women who make no secret of having turned to a life of crime. They are mystery writers: Gillian Roberts of Tiburon, Ayelet Waldman of Berkeley, Marcia Muller of Petaluma and three San Franciscans, Nadia Gordon, Cara Black and rookie Jacqueline Winspear.
Of course there is no real dead person -- that was made up, to get you reading and make you wonder about a different mystery: How do female crime writers -- a surprising number of whom live here in the Bay Area -- defend a violent and unladylike choice of career?
For each, the mystery seems a means to an end, a way to delve into the deeper mysteries of life, humanity or the moral imperative.
Winspear, the rookie of the group, sees the genre as a means of exploring social and historical issues.
"The mystery as a vehicle draws me because life is a mystery," says Winspear, who grew up in England and whose first book out this year features protagonist Maisie Dobbs, a private investigator and amateur psychologist in post-World War I London. "The archetypical notion is that you use the search for a solution to ask a lot of questions.
"What I'm exploring is how a terrible social phenomenon, such as a catastrophic war, affects people afterward. When I read the First World War poets in school, I'd cry my eyes out. I've always been interested in what happens to ordinary people. Where do you put all that grief? "
Though her settings are contemporary and American, Gillian Roberts, a.k.a. Judith Greber, is also less interested in the sensational than in the more mundane -- but in her case it is the ordinary and awful things people do to each other.
''I write about crimes that have no laws against them," says Roberts. "I'm interested in the cruel things people do to one another that can destroy a life without killing anyone." The series has been optioned for television. Of Roberts' 17 books, 11 chronicle the adventures of Amanda Pepper, a high school teacher in Philadelphia, a position Roberts herself once held. Her latest from Ballantine Books is "Claire and Present Danger."
Marcia Muller, who has been called the mother of the modern female sleuth, and has won a fistful of awards, likes to write about undiscovered past crimes that affect present action -- and which the baddie has to cover up by committing further crimes. "The character sets things right," she says. Her heroine is San Francisco P.I. Sharon McCone. One reader told Muller that Sharon McCone was so realistic that she went to the library and looked under "McCone" to find more of her books. Muller even builds tiny scale models of her crime scenes, complete with furniture.
Ayelet Waldman, who is also a law professor at UC Berkeley, writes her Mommy-Track Mysteries from her brown-shingle house in Berkeley, where she lives with husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, and their four young children.
"My villains aren't villains. They're people whose crime you understand - - someone who commits a murder out of jealousy, like a man who will lose his place in his family," Waldman says. Her titles include "Death Gets a Time- Out'' and "A Playdate With Death."
Parisian inspiration
Cara Black got her inspiration on a visit to Paris in 1994.
"I was revisiting the Marais, treading the cobblestones and absorbing the place, when the story of my friend's mother's hiding during the French occupation came back to me,'' she said. That story inspired her first book, "Murder in the Marais," featuring Aimee Leduc, a spike-haired half-French, half-American security computer detective ("with a penchant for bad boys,'' says Black).
Nadia Gordon, whose real name is Julianne Balmain, has no deep agenda. She sees the mystery genre as a means of entertaining her readers. Like a good host, and like her protagonist, chef Sonny McCoskey, who owns a restaurant in St. Helena, Gordon wants to leave her readers well fed and satisfied. The second book in her series, published in October, is "Death by the Glass.''
"I really love to write about food and wine," she said. "There's a connection between those things and friendship. The people in this world bond this way. It's a special environment.''
While all six roam through various time zones, eras and a universe of ideas en route to solving crimes or delving into base intentions, they all agree that an idea for a book can crop up almost anywhere.
Winspear says, "I was driving along in San Rafael, and a picture came to me of a woman walking through a turnstile from the London tube. I'd driven half a mile and I knew the whole story. Went home and wrote 15 pages that became the first 15 pages of the book." Her second Maisie Dobbs title, "Birds of a Feather,'' will appear next June, and she went to France to see World War I battlefields to research the third.
For Roberts, who nowadays shares an airy glass house in Tiburon with her husband, Robert Greber ("That's how I got the Roberts"), a book will begin with a newspaper clipping or a conversation with friends. "Your daily paper is a treasure trove of human passion run amok."
Once she found a book on spousal abuse in the Corte Madera library that a woman had underlined copiously in the margins, saying, "This happened to me!"
Roberts could not bring herself to look the woman up but couldn't stop thinking about it, either, and finally her husband said, "You write a mystery series. Write a book about it."
Muller got her idea for "The Dangerous Hour," the book she's just finished, when a judge in Sacramento asked if she'd be interested in hearing how an investigator loses his license. Another time the idea started with a title. Her husband, the even more prolific mystery writer Bill Pronzini, heard the phrase "till the butchers cut him down'' from an old song and urged her to write a book called that.
"I had to come up with an individual people were trying to destroy," says Muller, who alternates the McCone books with stand-alone books set in the fictional Northern California county of Soledad.
"A lot of rewriting in a non-series book is about getting to know the characters, their back stories,'' she says. "In a McCone, it's about plot."
Although all mystery relies heavily on plot, these authors all do an extraordinary amount of research. Black's "Murder in the Sentier" takes place in the Paris garment district, where she has spent a lot of time.
"It spoke to me. I wanted to know about this vibrant place with hookers, software startups in crumbling mansions and the garment sweatshops below.'' Black gathers facts by talking to French friends, interviewing French detectives, going to libraries and taking lots of black-and-white photos. Then she comes home to San Francisco to write the book.
Gordon sent her manuscript to "a million" experts on wine, guns, poison. "I still get a lot of nitpicks. People want to know why the character in the first book, 'Sharpshooter,' is drinking Spottswoode Cabernet. I researched Brix -- the measurement of sugar in the grape juice that tells when it's time to pick -- and still got arguments. I got so into Armagnac (which kills character Nathan Osborne) that I wanted to go to France to look at the barrels. My editor said, 'Stay home and write!' ''
She did, but the editor ordered the '71 Armagnac from France for herself.
Fearless alter egos
They all log time in libraries. And those with kids spend more time in the carpool than in the morgue or the gritty back streets. Maybe this is part of why all six of these writers like having an intrepid alter ego.
"Sonny is the person I would like to be,'' Gordon said. "The obvious question will hang in the air for weeks with me, but she will ask the tough ones.''
The character, she said, is based on a friend of hers who skins her own rabbits. But "not on a daily basis,'' she is quick to add.
"It's like kicking ass in high heels,'' says Black, who used to be a preschool teacher and drives carpools in Noe Valley in real life. Her husband is Jun Ishimuro, and they have a son, Tate, 14.
Keeping characters fresh
McCone, her snoop for 31 books now, is taller (Muller is 5 feet 3 inches), thinner and braver than she is. "She does her investigating on the mean streets, while I do my research from inside a locked car."
Roberts was never able to find the tormented woman who wrote in that library book, but "my heroine would take apart the library system if necessary. "
Don't the writers get bored, following the same character from book to book? Sometimes it feels, Waldman admits, "as if you're writing a book you'll never finish." At the same time, she adds, "It helps that she's so like me."
Her sleuth, Judith Applebaum, is, like Waldman herself, a former public defender turned mother. "I'm fundamentally self-absorbed, and I never get tired of myself, so I'll never get tired of her."
"It's good to keep some things the same," says Muller, "because we're asking people to accept such preposterous notions. The average detective is sitting at the computer doing skip traces, not stumbling over bodies and getting beaten up and shot at."
"That's why I had to make Judith go pro," says Waldman. "How many baby sitters can you have die?"
Yet, as Muller points out, people change, so fictional characters must, too. "Sharon, for instance, is not at all the way she was in the first book,'' she said.
"Whenever I get bored, I shake up her life."
Starting with what she says was a pivotal book in midseries, "Wolf in the Shadows," Muller made McCone tougher, more professional. The latest is "Dead Midnight," in which McCone's brother jumps off the Bay Bridge. (Unfortunately, the cover shows the Golden Gate).
Waldman has just brought out a stand-alone novel, "Daughter's Keeper." "I'd like to alternate the books I write the way I do the ones I read," she says. "I use murder mysteries to relax. Non-crime is much harder. My ideal scenario would be two mysteries and then something where I get to make up new people."
None of these writers enjoys hearing people sniff, "I don't read mysteries." But the question that sends them all into a murderous rage is, "When are you going to write a real book?" They don't feel they get the respect of the literary world; mysteries are often not even referred to as novels but as installments.
Together these writers have killed a lot of people. Mostly strangers they invented -- but not always.
"I did kill someone I know once," Roberts admits. "It was the best feeling." We assume she means in a book.
Roberts says the mystery writer is the least aggressive of authors. "Romance writers, now, are vicious. You should be talking to them."
E-mail Adair Lara at alara@sfchronicle.com.
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle
Cloak, dagger, carpool lane and diaper bag: There's a suspicious number of female mystery writers in the Bay Area
Saturday, January 10, 2004
Who cares whodunit? Read crime novels just for the fun of it
Sunday, May 11, 2003
By Bob Hoover, Post-Gazette Book Editor
"For years I have been hearing about detective stories. Almost everybody I know seems to read them, and they have long conversations about them in which I am unable to take part," wrote critic Edmund Wilson in 1944 in The New Yorker.
To bring himself up to speed, he decided that he "ought to take a look at some specimens of this kind of fiction which has grown so tremendously popular and which is now being produced on such a scale that the book departments of magazines have had to employ special editors to cope with it."
His findings raised such a stink (and this was during World War II) that they drew responses from no less than Jacques Barzun, Somerset Maugham, Raymond Chandler, Joseph Wood Krutch and Bernard DeVoto.
Clearly, "Bunny," as his friends called him, was not a fan.
His conclusion about detective stories was that they are "simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmlessness, ranks somewhere between smoking and crossword puzzles."
People don't smoke as much as they did in the 1940s, but the popularity of the mystery just goes on. I know this firsthand from the unbroken stream of them flowing month after month into the office.
Up to my knees in crime, I decided to retrace Bunny's steps to deal with four highly touted titles by using his comments as a map.
"No Second Chance" By Harlen Coben. Dutton ($24.95)
"Lost Light" By Michael Connelly. Little, Brown ($25.95)
"Shutter Island" By Dennis Lehane. Morrow ($25.95)
"Good Morning, Killer" By April Smith. Knopf ($24)
Wilson was careful to distinguish the English puzzle-style works of Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie -- works he despised -- with the hard-boiled school of Chandler, to whom he was more charitable but still not impressed.
My selections are drawn mostly from the progeny of Chandler, although "Shutter Island" takes a turn toward Christie.
Wilson calls such books novels "of adventure. It is not simply a question here of a puzzle that has been put together, but of a malaise conveyed to the reader, the horror of a hidden conspiracy that is continually turning up in the most varied and unlikely forms."
Wilson's real complaint, I believe, although he doesn't come out and say it, is that the crime novel is artificial in both character and story, hence not real literature at all, but entertainment.
I have no objection to entertainment. I go to adventure movies and watch a certain TV cliffhanger regularly. I also enjoy a skillfully crafted suspense story, and my quartet provides plenty.
The difficulty arises when the books are marketed with the "literature" label; for instance, April Smith "illuminates the human condition through the pain and complex lives -- and deaths -- of her compelling characters."
These creations -- chiefly, FBI agent Ana Grey, her bulked-up police officer boyfriend Andrew Berringer and wacko villain Ray Brennan (most fictional bad guys today are sired by Hannibal Lecter) -- are not real people.
The characters shed no light on genuine lives but are designed to keep the plot plodding along to its predictably gruesome conclusion. The relationship between Ana and Andrew is, well, boring, and clearly designed to go south at the appropriate time.
The supporting cast is a collection of stereotypes found in law enforcement and in rich Los Angeles neighborhoods. Even a transient who might "illuminate the human condition" of the homeless is just a plot device.
The L.A. setting is really a character as well, providing Smith with the opportunity to display her inside knowledge of its sprawling excess.
It's a city made for dirty deeds, portrayed so often in books and film that all a writer needs to do is invoke its name, and you can almost hear the notes from a lonely trumpet player hanging moodily in the smog.
Michael Connelly's publisher guarantees you'll hear that West Coast jazz with his new book by offering a companion CD heavy on Art Pepper, a favorite of his hero, Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch.
Now retired from the LAPD, Bosch spends his days listening to Pepper while he tries to reopen an unsolved murder case. Plus, he takes sax lessons from an elderly jazz man.
There are plenty of Wilson's malaise and conspiracy in Connelly, especially when he places Bosch in conflict with a Gestapo-like unit of the FBI that uses the excuse of Sept. 11 to trample on constitutional rights.
Connelly labels it the BAM (By Any Means) Squad.
Beaten, bound and held illegally, Bosch sees men of Middle Eastern appearance held under the same conditions in a secret jail.
"It used to be a free country. That used to be enough standing," Bosch lectures a particularly odious "special agent."
However, Connelly has other, more touchy-feely plans for his aggrieved crusader, causing the book to take a sharp turn toward domestic bliss. Before Bosch has his epiphany, Connelly does allow him to hurt a few bad guys along the way.
Malaise and conspiracy fuel Dennis Lehane's follow-up to the popular "Mystic River," a murder tale with a literary flair and realistic surroundings.
This time, Lehane drops the realism for a creepy tale at a hospital for the criminally insane on an island near Boston.
Setting it in the 1950s, he tries to invoke the paranoia of the Cold War, with its history of mind games, brainwashing and drug treatments.
This is no adventure novel but a variation on the technique of "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd." In other words, a gimmick that knocks the air out of a promising story and lets the reader down.
Of course, I can't tell you how. One difficulty with crime fiction is reviewing it. It's against an unwritten rule to reveal the plot, but that's like leaving your shot of bourbon half finished.
Lately, Harlan Coben has been using young, idealistic doctors rather than world-weary cops as his heroes, but the effect is the same: The bad guys get theirs.
The struggle for the reader is to accept that a physician can have the same skills of detecting and toughness that are standard equipment for a detective.
Critically wounded, his wife dead and their daughter missing, plastic surgeon Marc Seidman must solve the crimes himself when kidnappers demand that no police be involved in getting the girl back. His foes are a pair of those Lecter offspring, the kind of pathological and sadistic folks found only in crime novels.
Coben's a skilled writer with a knack for a twist here and a turn there that impels his readers to cover the 338 pages to find the solution -- which, of course, I can't divulge.
But, for my summation, I turn to partner Edmund Wilson:
"The explanation of the mysteries ... is neither interesting nor plausible enough. It fails to justify the excitement produced by the elaborate build-up of picturesque and sinister happenings, and one cannot help feeling cheated."
I rest my case.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bob Hoover can be reached at bhoover@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1634.
Who cares whodunit? Read crime novels just for the fun of it
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