For superstar authors, the publicity machine runs nonstop. Lesser-known writers hit the road and promote their own books. Never mind that they may have better things to do -- like write

Adair Lara, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, July 12, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle


Hillary Rodham Clinton got a cool $8 million advance for her memoir, "Living History," and a publicity blitz that included prominent journalists from foreign countries flying to Washington to interview her. Right behind that, Harry Potter fans were whipped into a frenzy by an orchestrated campaign of embargoes on the new volume and then treated to bookstore pajama parties across the country.

Alas, the publishers of the estimated 55,000 books that come out every year in the United States must count on lesser-known authors to do more and more of the promoting of a book, from hiring publicists to setting up and paying for tours. Many publishers even expect authors to submit their marketing strategy as part of their proposal. For authors, finding readers for a book is often harder than writing it was.

J.S. Holliday, author of the acclaimed "The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience," recently drove from his home in Carmel to a vast chain bookstore 200 miles north in Roseville for a reading he set up himself. He arrived to find a podium and chairs, a mike turned on and 30 shrink-wrapped copies of his new book, "Rush for Riches," on a table.

But the chairs were empty. The manager refused to make an announcement over the PA system, so Holliday plucked an audience of six from among the store's shoppers. "Look, I'm about to give a rousing speech over there," he said, putting a friendly arm around their shoulders. "Why don't you come over and listen to me?"

He talked to six people for half an hour and sold five books. Then he helpfully took the shrink wrap off the remaining books and signed them. The clerk was aghast. "You've torn the bar code off! We need that to sell the book! " Holliday fished the shrink wrap out of the garbage and restored the bar codes while customers watched, "amazed, no doubt, at the humiliation authors must wade in to make sure that a book gets sold," he said, laughing. Later he learned that every one of those books had sold, and the store had reordered.

When San Francisco's Kirk Read got his coming-of-age memoir, "How I Learned to Snap," published by Hill Street Press, an independent house in Athens, Ga., he understood that publishing it was all they could afford to do. "I told them,

just send me 200 books and I'll sell them," Read said. He drove to 100 tour dates in 40 cities -- everything from book group meetings to huge university lectures. He made purple T-shirts and buttons depicting a hand snapping and gave them out at each stop.

"A lot of authors are better at thinking outside the box than publishers because they live outside the box," said Gerry Howard, head of Broadway Books, a division of Random House. He offered as an example Dave Pelzer, author of the best-selling book "A Child Called 'It': One Child's Courage to Survive."

"He's on a permanent campaign," Howard said. "He travels the country in an evangelical way and sells lots of books in the back of the auditorium."

Even cookbook authors must -- literally -- cook up interest in their books. Joyce Goldstein of San Francisco flew to Miami with six pounds of fresh phyllo on her lap. The former owner of Square One and author of 19 books, she cooked all morning, making 300 "tastes" of bougatsa, a Greek phyllo pastry filled with cheese custard -- and sold five books. Soon she'll fly to Baltimore to attend a conference at the invitation of the Potato Board. She went to Copia in Napa to do "This Is Not Your Mother's Seder."

"I have cornered a rather funny little niche as the resident food Jew in the Bay Area," Goldstein said. "You sell them one book at a time. Drip, drip, drip.

"Bookstores? You might as well kill yourself," she said.

The imagination every author possesses goes to good use in these grassroots marketing efforts. When he isn't setting up readings at bookstores, Holliday speaks at Rotary clubs, always making sure they have his books there for sale afterward. In March he spoke to the American Glaucoma Society. "There are conventions and conferences in town all the time, and they need some alternative to their subjects," he says.

Linda Watanabe McFerrin of San Francisco, author of the story collection "The Hand of Buddha," traveled to 25 states on an Amtrak pass for a month. She taught workshops and stayed with friends. Constance Hale ("Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose") conducts writing and grammar workshops in bookstores and at Media Alliance, the Learning Annex and UC Extensions up and down the state.

"My publisher did next to nothing," she said, "but each time I teach a class there's a little notice in some catalog or mailer about my book."

Laurie Wagner, author of "Living Happily Ever After," said that an aunt threw huge book parties for her in Los Angeles. "At the first event I sold 160 books to family and friends. The next event I sold 120. And the events generate word of mouth."

The downside of all of this is the time taken away from what writers do best: write. The financial realities can be daunting, too. Most authors make $2 to $3 on a hardcover sale. An out-of-town reading might cost $300, even if you stay with friends. An author has to sell 100 books to break even, and bookstores rarely order that many copies.

Yet do-it-yourself promotion pays off, if not in huge sales then at least in keeping a good book in print long enough to find its readers. Joyce Goldstein says her editor knows how hard she works to sell the books and will keep that in mind next time he's considering publishing her. Kirk Read promoted his hardback so vigorously that the paperback was bought by Penguin. Holliday gets books from the publisher at a 40 percent discount, so when he sells them himself he not only makes a few dollars, but, more importantly, helps them stay in print.

Scenes of the crimes

A bloody body in Edinburgh. A frozen, severed arm in North Bay. SANDRA MARTIN talks to mystery writers who take you where tour operators won't go

By SANDRA MARTIN
Saturday, July 12, 2003


You know the routine: Work lands you in a new city, you have an hour between appointments and you want to cram in the high spots. Do you grab a cab, head for the tour bus, or wander around the main square, trying to keep your bearings while you soak up atmosphere?

None of the above. If you are smart, you have planned ahead by checking out the crime-fiction section of your local bookstore. Forget the old cliché, if this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium. Instead try: If this is Bombay, read Leslie Forbes; for Moscow, check out Martin Cruz Smith; for Venice, Donna Leon; for Chicago, give Sara Paretsky a whirl; and if you find yourself by chance in Botswana, Alexander McCall Smith is your man. Under no circumstances should you head to North Bay without packing a Giles Blunt or two.

In the literary world, crime-fiction writers are trusty travel guides. They will entertain you en route, expose you to the social, economic and political issues festering beneath the spires and cupolas, and take you places most respectable tour operators are too scared to venture.

In fact, entrepreneurial tourist operators have clicked on to the trend by offering guided tours of Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, Ian Rankin's Edinburgh, Colin Dexter's Oxford, featuring rambles through the seedier parts of town and stops at the pubs haunted by Rebus and Morse. The owners of John's Grill in San Francisco, the place where Sam Spade dined on chops in The Maltese Falcon, have capitalized on the connection and turned the diner into a shrine to author Dashiell Hammett.

A sense of place has been integral to crime fiction since at least the days of Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue or Wilkie Collins's Woman in White 150 years ago. All of the best crime novels are built like three-legged stools: character, story and place. Strip away one of these and either the book totters to a conclusion or the reader falls off long before the murder is solved and finds something more absorbing to read.

Transporting the reader to a particular place is essential, argues Margaret Cannon, crime-fiction columnist for The Globe and Mail. There are two ways of doing this, in her opinion. Either you can have an imaginary set of stock places, as Agatha Christie did in the manor house or the vicarage where she set her whodunits, or you can describe a room or landscape or a city so superbly that it becomes transformed into a place of mystery and suspense.

Poe did it with Paris by gaslight, she says, adding that "anybody who has read any crime fiction at all can describe Sherlock Holmes's room right down to the tobacco he kept in a pipe slipper."

Two of her favourite examples are the settings evoked by Raymond Chandler and James Lee Burke. Chandler remade Los Angeles to suit his fictional purposes in his Philip Marlowe series, she contends, while Burke's prose is so potent you can "smell" Dave Robicheaux's Louisiana. With writers of this quality, place is not just part of the narrative, it is a character.

Ian Rankin makes no bones about the fact that Edinburgh is an essential character in his bestselling series of police procedurals about dyspeptic and cynical Detective Inspector John Rebus. In Toronto on a 24-hour junket for Book Expo Canada last month, the dark-haired Scottish writer took time out from book signings to chat about his own connections with Edinburgh. "I started writing the books because I wanted to make sense of Edinburgh," he said candidly, over a glass of water -- unlike his creation Rebus, who never seems to say anything without a double whisky to hand.

Rankin arrived in Edinburgh at age 18, the first person in his family to go to university. "My parents were very working class," he explained. They never owned their own house, or a car, his sisters left school at 15 and 16 and he grew up feeling very much like the cuckoo in the nest. He always wanted to read books and sit in his room scribbling poetry, a fact that he kept hidden from his family. "I think they thought I was doing drugs," he shrugs. "That would have been more understandable." Having spent much of his teenage years loitering on the periphery of local gangs, he arrived in Edinburgh and found it a complex, enigmatic city in which people kept their secrets behind thick stone walls and net curtains.

"There was the city that the tourists saw," he remembers, "or were allowed to see -- the castles, the monuments, the festival. And then there was another, hidden Edinburgh, where there were massive problems with heroin and AIDS and HIV."

He came to crime fiction after a literary meander worthy of one of his own subplots, through Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Spark's novel, set in a private girls' school, is about the proper refined Edinburgh -- an Edinburgh that Rankin feels never existed. Although Stevenson located his classic novel in London, he was really writing about Edinburgh, Rankin says, through the character of Jekyll, a repressed man riddled with heinous urges.

While Rankin was ostensibly working on a PhD about Spark, he was really trying to turn himself into a Stevensonian-style writer with Edinburgh as his central character. His first few Rebus books were supposed to be updatings of Jekyll and Hyde, but because he pitched them as crime novels about a repressed detective haunted by his past, nobody realized his intention. He even called his second Rebus novel Hide and Seek, but nobody caught on, or so he says.

For a long time, Rankin says, he felt guilty about making Edinburgh darker and more desperate than it really was, but he had to be true to the character he had created. "A detective like Rebus can only see certain aspects of Edinburgh," he says. "He will go for a meal with his girl and they will come out of the restaurant and she will say, 'Look how beautiful the castle looks tonight' and all he sees is a crime scene waiting to happen." His feelings have been mollified by the hordes of tourists coming to Edinburgh demanding to do the Rebus trail, which invariably ends up in the Oxford Bar where Rebus and Rankin both drink.

Writing from a sense of place came naturally to Peter Robinson, the Yorkshire-born, Toronto-based author of the Inspector Banks novels. "That was one of my interests as a poet," he explains, adding that he wrote his PhD thesis at York University on the sense of place in contemporary British poetry. "I don't know that writers consciously do it," he says, pointing out that "an Agatha Christie could take place in any country," while the sense of place in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles is "almost like an extra character" that precipitates the action.

Robinson, a native of Leeds in the north of England, is proof that a crime writer doesn't have to inhabit his fictional locale to make it real to his readers. Anybody can dig up facts about street corners, restaurants and local landmarks. What marks the difference between a book that limps along and one that captures the wanderlust of a reader is the passion -- whether it is love or hatred -- with which the writer creates his crime scenes.

It was absence that sparked Robinson's descriptive passions. He began writing crime fiction only after he immigrated to Canada in the early 1970s. These days, while he sets up his laptop in the east end of Toronto, his imagination still wanders around the dales of Yorkshire where he was born and raised. In fact, he was driven to reading and writing crime fiction as a doctoral student and a frustrated poet much enamoured of traditional narrative poetry replete with capital letters and rhyme.

He now realizes that a lot of the images and impulses from his poetry found a happier home in crime novels written about a character who could have been his alter ego. Robinson deliberately made Banks physically different from himself -- short and dark-haired -- and wrote about him in the third person to distance the character from his creator. "We probably shared very similar childhoods, and when we hit the age of 18, we went in different directions. I went into literature and the arts, and he went on a course that took him toward the police as a career. So our paths have diverged and run in parallel universes ever since."

Canadian Giles Blunt sets his crime novels (Forty Words for Sorrow and his new one, The Delicate Storm) in Algonquin Bay, a fictionalized version of North Bay. Although he was born near Windsor in the southern part of Ontario and spent a couple of decades in New York, North Bay, the town where he lived from ages 10 to 17, is the place -- despite bugs in the summer and frozen nostrils in the winter -- that he calls home.

"I lived in the U.S. so long that North Bay is completely exotic," he says. "It astounds me that people live in such a place." It is so cold in the winter that "it hurts your face to go from the house to the car," and the summers are "brutally" hot with "plagues of black flies" starting on Victoria Day. "I remember going on an ill-advised camping trip with some friends after we moved up there," he says with a laugh. "I think it was the first time I ever got angry at God. I was about 12."

Setting is about much more than geography. It is an opportunity for writers to send a message to readers about social or political issues.

Think of Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park, in which Renko exposes us to the dying days of the Cold War in a much more telling way than vast numbers of magazine or newspaper articles could do. Similarly, Alexander McCall Smith, who lives in Edinburgh and writes in Vancouver, sets his Precious Ramotswe novels in Botswana because he wants to show that this is one African country that, despite AIDS, has had a fairly stable and peaceful history since independence.

People write best about places that evoke passionate feelings, says British crime writer Val McDermid. "Otherwise the writing becomes flat on the page." She has written a series of books about a private detective named Kate Brannigan that piece together a social history of Manchester in the 1990s. "It was the place where I lived and the place where I worked [as a journalist] and the place that excited and stimulated me and I wanted to write about it," she said during a visit to Book Expo in June.

McDermid wrote Killing the Shadows after a holiday trip to Toledo in Spain. What a fantastic place to have a serial killer operating, she thought, staring at the honey-coloured medieval buildings nestled atop a mammoth chunk of rock towering over the Tagus River and thinking of Toledo's bloody history dating back through the Civil War and the Inquisition all the way to Roman times. She dumped the body of a young tour guide in La Degollada, a gorge named after a gypsy woman who had been found there centuries earlier with her throat cut. And she hung the sodomized corpse of an American graduate student from the manacles adorning the façade of the monastery church of San Juan de los Reyes.

Inspiration does not always flash so quickly. McDermid fell in love with the White Peak district of Derbyshire in northern England when she moved there from her native Scotland in 1979 and spent 20 years trying to figure out a way to use the limestone landscape in a novel. The mysterious, narrow, twisting dales and the little rivers that disappeared in the summer and rose up again in the winter got under her skin in a "weird" way, and it took her a long time and a rereading of W. H. Auden's poem In Praise of Limestone to find a way of combining plot and atmosphere in what became A Place of Execution.

"There is a wonderful bit in the middle of the poem," she recalls, "where he says something about how they lead constrained lives in their narrow valleys, and never go out into the wider world, but when one of them goes to the bad, we all understand why. And that was like the penny dropping."

She still had to work out the myriad details about the child living in an isolated, incestuous community who goes missing and why her friends and family are so grudging in their co-operation with the police. They clearly love the missing girl, and want her back, but that loss is pitted against the fear of letting the police know a diabolical secret about their past.

Reading Execution, I was struck by how even though serious practitioners of heinous fiction eschew the locked-room murders of, say, Agatha Christie, they still have to find a way to create an isolated crime scene -- the lonely house on the outskirts of the village, the village cut off from the city, the woman who misses the bus and walks home late at night. The problem is the same -- putting victim and murderer in each other's sights; it is the setting that has changed.

"The whole structure of the way we use place is actually a big trick to pull the reader into the book," McDermid says. "The more convincing you can make your world, the easier it is for the reader to suspend his or her disbelief about the things they know you are lying about."

Just as there are conventions about putting real people in fiction -- you can't ignore the historical record by changing known biographical facts such as death and birthdates -- there are unwritten rules about how you use geographical locations. Writers who violate them risk destroying their imaginary pact with readers. A writer such as Rankin has Rebus drinking in an actual pub and walking down real streets so that readers who know Edinburgh can identify landmarks and visualize themselves in the same setting. Then, based on that reality, the writer creates a fictitious but convincing crime scene.

If you want to write about a nightclub where drugs are dealt, it is best not to give it the name of an actual club, unless you are willing to risk a lawsuit. Similarly, you can't put a raunchy nightclub in the wrong part of town. Readers who know the area won't believe it and will lose faith in your story. The final level at which a sophisticated crime writer uses setting is to make a particular place universal so that readers can transfer from the page to their own experience. You may not know Paretsky's Chicago, for example, but in reading about it, you are reminded of certain aspects of your own city.

No matter how many books they write, or sell, there is one thing that all crime writers seem to have in common: the feeling that they don't get enough respect for what they do. J.D. Singh of the Toronto bookstore Sleuth of Baker Street, says crimewriters have a lot of trouble shaking the feeling that they are second-rate despite a growing number of scholarly articles praising their work as "real" literature. So why don't they switch to writing mainstream novels? Partly it is habit. Like actors who have created a famous role, crime writers with a memorable character can find the mould so comfortable they don't want to risk breaking it. And the pressure from publishers and fans to keep writing a sure thing is enormous.

But there is more to it than that. Unlike many mainstream novelists, crime writers are enthralled by storytelling. They are drawn to books that have beginnings, middles and ends, even though the form has now become so stylized that a reader cannot expect the three parts to be in the traditional order. Solving the puzzle is often the least important part of crime fiction, with all sorts of writers, from Ruth Rendell to Rankin to Robinson, telling us who did it to whom on the very first page. It is the why, not the how, that intrigues them and keeps us turning the pages.

Novel guidebooks

A reading list of other crime-fiction novelists and their favourite locations:

Total Recall by Sara Paretsky -- Chicago

The Wailing Wind by Tony Hillerman -- New Mexico

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett -- San Francisco

Basket Case by Carl Hiaasen -- Miami

Mystic River by Dennis Lehane -- Boston

Death of a Hawker by Janwillem van de Wetering -- Amsterdam

Auprès de ma blonde by Nicolas Freeling -- Netherlands

The Russia House by John le Carré -- Moscow

Silence of the Rain by Luiz Alfred Garcia-Rosa -- New Mexico

Wonderland by John Brady -- Dublin

From Doon with Death by Ruth Rendell -- Suffolk, England

Death in Holy Orders by P.D. James -- London, England

Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett by Georges Simenon -- Paris

The Angst-Ridden Executive by Manuel Vazquez Montalban --Barcelona

Cabal by Michael Dibdin -- Rome

Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon -- Venice

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith -- Italy

The Night of Wenceslas by Lionel Davidson -- Prague

The End of Lieutenant Boruvka by Josef Skvorecky -- Prague

The Third Man by Graham Greene -- Vienna

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene -- Havana

Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg -- Denmark and Greenland

The Key to Rebecca by Ken Follett -- Cairo

The Bank of Fear by David Ignatius -- Iraq

Alexander McCall Smith

The Kalahari Typing School for Men

Botswana

"In a dry country like Botswana, shade netting made all the difference to a plant's chances, keeping the drying rays of the sun off the vulnerable green leaves and allowing the earth to retain a little of any precious moisture left over from watering."

Ian Rankin

A Question of Blood

Edinburgh, Scotland

"The car was parked on North Castle Street, but they walked past it, heading for George Street. Directly ahead of them, the Castle was illuminated against the ink-dark sky. They turned left, Rebus feeling a stiffness in both legs, the legacy of his trek across Jura."

Raymond Chandler

The Long Goodbye

Los Angeles

"Everything was the fault of the smog. If the canary wouldn't sing, if the milkman was late, if the Pekinese had fleas, if an old coot in a starched collar had a heart attack on the way to church, that was the smog."

Val McDermid

Killing the Shadows

Toledo, Spain

"The first body had been found in a deep wooded gorge running down to the River Tagus about a mile from the city gates. According to local custom, the gorge boasted the revolting name La Degollada -- the woman with her throat slit."

While I hate to give even an inch of space to promote anything Ann Coulter does, here is what I'm sure she would consider a treasonous review of her new book, Treason, written by Joe Conason of Salon.com, courtesy of Powells.com.

If the Shoe Fits, Eat It!


"I really want you to notice, Tucker, that this is a wingtip. It's a right-wing wingtip," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said to "Crossfire" host Tucker Carlson. (Claire Duggan - CNN)

• In CNN's crusade to squeeze all the ink it can out of "Crossfire" host Tucker Carlson's vow to eat his shoes if Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) sells a million copies of her memoirs, the network devoted much of yesterday's show to Simon & Schuster's announcement that this milestone had indeed been reached.

The author of "Living History" herself showed up as a "surprise guest" to present an allegedly shocked Carlson with a shoe-shaped cake.

"I really want you to notice, Tucker, that this is a wingtip. It's a right-wing wingtip," Clinton said to laughter from the studio audience. "And I was a little worried about, you know, how you were actually going to be able to eat and digest a shoe. I didn't even know what kind you were going to choose. So I had a friend of mine . . . do this for you because I figured you've had enough embarrassment and humiliation over this episode."

"Yes, I have," a sheepish Carlson replied. "Thank you. . . . You are awfully gracious. I appreciate that, senator."

Afterward, Carlson acknowledged to us that he won't get away with eating a cake shoe. He's going to chew and swallow a real shoe -- probably a loafer.

"I'm screwed," he explained.

Toymaker finds librarian who's a real doll

By Jack Broom
Seattle Times staff reporter


Nancy Pearl is already a woman of action: innovator, iconoclast, radio personality and author of an upcoming book with the word "Lust" in its title.

But in the next month or so, it will be official. She'll join the ranks of Jesus, Sigmund Freud, Rosie the Riveter, Nico the Barista and a striped-shirted hipster/philosopher named Fuzz.

What puts Pearl, executive director of the Washington Center for the Book, into such heady company? She's the model for a 5-inch-tall plastic "action figure" by Seattle-based Accoutrements, parent company of Ballard's Archie McPhee store, where zany meets kitschy meets glow-in-the-dark.

Granted, librarians aren't known for Terminator-style stunts. Rarely do they need to be faster than a speeding bullet or leap tall buildings in a single bound.

Pearl herself comes across as modest and unassuming, but she's an unabashed booster of her profession: "The role of a librarian is to make sense of the world of information. If that's not a qualification for superhero-dom, what is?"

Amen, says Mark Pahlow, owner of Accoutrements. In addition to historical characters, he looks for action figures in "people in unusual or underappreciated jobs."

"Nancy is the quintessential librarian!" Pahlow said, " ... She is an iron fist inside a velvet glove. And she does not take herself too seriously."

Let the big toymakers crank out combat characters and toy military equipment, Pahlow said. "We have to be unlike them to survive."

Seattle City Librarian Deborah Jacobs, Pearl's boss, said anyone who doesn't view a librarian as a potent force doesn't understand the job. "Ideas are more powerful than bombs," she said. "Information is the way to take over the world."

Pearl, with the library for 10 years, does book reviews on public radio KUOW-FM (94.9) during "The Beat" at 2 p.m. Mondays. But she's best known for "If All of Seattle Read the Same Book," an effort to build community connections through an appreciation of books.

That campaign has been emulated in cities across the country — even in other countries — and is a key reason Pearl was recently chosen to receive the 2003 Washington Humanities Award. Jack Faris, board chairman of Humanities Washington, said the same-book idea "may be the single most significant public-humanities program in the past 10 years."

But what's that got to do with being immortalized as a toy?

Pahlow and Pearl, who met four years ago, both serve on the board of bookclubpartner.com, an organization that helps book clubs and promotes literacy.

At a dinner party last year, Pahlow was talking about the success of his company's Jesus action figure, and the potential for others. Why not make a librarian, someone asked. And why not use Pearl as the model, asked someone else.

But even after Pahlow said he wanted to do it, Pearl didn't know he was serious until he called her earlier this year and said, "We need to set a time for you to go to Mukilteo and be digitized." Pahlow's action figures are designed here and made in China.

Pearl, 58, enjoyed sitting with a group of creative twentysomethings who batted around ideas about what the action figure might do, or carry, and what attributes — such as likes and dislikes — would be detailed on the package.

How about a cardigan sweater draped over the shoulders? Or glasses on a chain? Those were considered and rejected, Pearl said.

To Pearl's delight, the figure will be holding a (removable) copy of her new book, "Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment and Reason." The book, Pearl's third, is being published by Seattle's Sasquatch Books and is due out in September.

No action figure can exist without action; Pahlow said talk boiled down to two options: Put the figure's hair in a bun that could pop off, or have her right arm rise to put a finger in front of her lips in a silent shushing gesture.

"The ejectable hair bun had many technical hurdles to overcome and we thought doing two clichés was over the top," he said. "So, we went with the shushing action. It gives the figure a certain dignity."

Pearl predicts that the shushing motion — triggered by a button on the doll's back — will determine "which librarians have a sense of humor." She likes to believe that today's librarians are secure enough in their work that they won't take offense at the old cliché.

The action-figure line will continue, Pahlow said, with a range of historical and contemporary characters. Also in the pipeline: Ludwig van Beethoven and another figure with strong Seattle appeal: TV clown J.P. Patches, host of a local children's show on KIRO-TV for 23 years.

Pahlow's experience in the amusement biz goes back to childhood. When he was 8, he and a brother ran wires from a toy train transformer to a metal patio chair — and got neighborhood kids to pay a nickel for the privilege of being zapped.

He expects interest in the Nancy Pearl doll to be strongest in Seattle, where she is best known. But Pahlow said he's already received inquiries about it from librarians around the country. "We've discovered librarians are very networked and seem to know about everything before it happens."

Jack Broom: 206-464-2222 or jbroom@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company

I tried posting this interesting article about Randy Wayne White's current book tour, but Blogger said it was too big. I hate just posting links to newspaper articles because most papers only keep the articles up for a short time, a week or so, then they want you to pay to read them. So I'm hoping that Blogger will see the light and put it up, but if not, here is a link --
http://www.news-press.com/news/local_state/030705white.html

Eric W. Leuliette has kept a record of every book he's read since 1974. He has them all listed on his website at http://www.whatihaveread.net/ including bar graphs, averages, etc.

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/books/128404_tf227.html

Olsen's true-crime tale a best seller ... after 13 years
Friday, June 27, 2003

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER STAFF

Thirteen is suddenly a lucky number for Gregg Olsen, the true crime writer from Olalla on the Kitsap Peninsula.

That's because his account of an Amish serial murderer in the 1980s, "Abandoned Prayers," will be No. 7 on The New York Times' paperback best-seller list this Sunday, 13 years after its initial publication.

It is Olsen's first appearance on the vaunted list and a mystifying development for the author of six books because there is no known engine driving sales of the new paperback edition.

"This is a complete fluke," Olsen says. "It got there by sheer sales -- no promo, no nothing. No TV connection. The funny thing about it is that publishers put big bucks behind books to get on the list and seldom make it. So this is kind of cool."

© 1998-2003 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

HARRY POTTER MANIA!

Like magic, local fan gets early Potter fix

NATALIE ALCOBA
The Gazette

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

CREDIT: MARIE-FRANCE COALLIER, THE GAZETTE

Steve and Melissa managed to get their hands on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on June 12 even though the book is not scheduled to hit stores worldwide until this Saturday.


Whether it's luck, a mistake or maybe a little magic, a copy of the newest Harry Potter book is in the hands of a Montreal woman before its official release.

Melissa, who spoke to The Gazette on the condition her last name not be used, bought Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the highly anticipated fifth volume in J.K. Rowling's series, on June 12 at a Wal-Mart on the South Shore.

Book 5 in the Harry Potter series isn't scheduled to hit stores worldwide until this Saturday.

But two more copies were bought by a friend within an hour of Melissa's purchase, just as the books were being taken off the shelves.

"I think it's just pure luck," Melissa said in an interview in the Gazette newsroom yesterday.

The soon-to-be bestseller lay on the table in front of the 23-year-old. Yesterday, she was on page 567 of the 768-page book.

News of the novel's early circulation caused a stir at Raincoast Books, the Canadian publisher of Harry Potter books.

Melissa's boyfriend, Steve, who also didn't want his last name published, called the company and Scholastic, the U.S. publisher, to tell them he had the book.

"I could tell they didn't believe me at first," said Steve, 27, yesterday.

As a test, a Scholastic employee asked Steve to read from the second line on page 73.

He did.

Then the companies asked him if they could have the book back. Raincoast Books even offered to pay $5,000 for the three books, Steve said.

But it wasn't his book to give.

"I asked Melissa, and she said she wasn't finished reading it," Steve said.

"I want to finish it. After I'm done, I don't care," Melissa said.

The $5,000 offer could not be confirmed with Raincoast.

An embargo on the book prevents anyone from selling it before June 21, said Allan MacDougall, president and CEO of Raincoast Books, the Vancouver-based publisher.

"Anybody who has sold it is in violation of a worldwide contract," he said.

"If there are any breaches by any store in the contract, we will take action."

That would mean reserving the right not to supply the store with Harry Potter books in the future, he said.

"It's probably human error," MacDougall said.

A manager at the Wal-Mart in St. Constant would not comment on the matter and referred questions to Wal-Mart Canada headquarters in Toronto. No one could be reached for comment last night.

Raincoast will seek a court-ordered injunction preventing the store or individuals from releasing any information about the book before the release date, MacDougall said.

He added that the company has already prepared the paperwork for such an occasion, after a recent Harry Potter-related incident in England.

A printing plant worker pleaded guilty in May to stealing pages from the unreleased novel. Donald Parfitt, a forklift operator at Clays Ltd. in Bungay, eastern England, claims he found the pages in the parking lot as he was leaving work May 5.

Harry Potter has been a sensation since the release of the first book in 1998.

Boy-wizard mania escalated to magical levels for the debut of the fourth book, Goblet of Fire, in 2000.

Bookstores across the continent organized release parties, some opening their doors at midnight to let in lineups of eager readers itching for the continuing story.

Melissa, who has read all of Harry's adventures, knew the fifth book was coming out soon but didn't know the date.

So she wasn't shocked when, on the afternoon of June 12 while walking by the book aisle in the Wal-Mart near her work, a familiar name caught her eye: Harry Potter.

"Hmmm," she thought to herself as she leafed through the book's pages, "I don't think I have this one yet."

She took the book to the cash register, paid $29.83 before taxes - Wal-Mart's price compared to the regular cost of $43 - and walked out.

No questions asked.

Later that same day, she told a co-worker's wife about the purchase. The woman went and bought herself and Melissa's friend a copy, just as employees were taking the books off the shelves.

Melissa said her only regret about the early find is that she's going to have to wait longer than everyone else for Book 6, since she plans to finish reading this one by Saturday.

"It's really good," she said. "It refers to the book before, so you don't get lost. It's very hard to put down."

But the true testament to the book's quality comes in a sentiment often voiced by those who love Harry Potter books:

"I'm sad it's going to end," Melissa said.

nalcoba@thegazette.canwest.com

© Copyright 2003 Montreal Gazette

Shamus Award Nominees Announced

The Private Eye Writers of America (PWA) is proud to announce its nominees for the 2003 Shamus Awards. Books and short stories first published in 2002 were eligible for consideration. In each work the main character must be a person paid for investigative work but not employed by a unit of government. Thus books and stories about private investigators (licensed and unlicensed), lawyers and reporters who do their own legwork, and other hired agents are eligible; works centering on law enforcement officers or amateur sleuths are not.

The Shamus Awards will be presented in October at the PWA banquet to be held in Las Vegas, Nevada, during Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention.

The nominees are:

Best P.I. Novel
BLACKWATER SOUND by James W. Hall (St. Martin's Press)
NORTH OF NOWHERE by Steve Hamilton (St. Martin's Press)
THE LAST PLACE by Laura Lippman (Harpercollins)
HELL TO PAY by George Pelecanos (Little, Brown)
WINTER AND NIGHT by S.J. Rozan (St. Martin's Press)

Best First P.I. Novel
WESTERFIELD'S CHAIN by Jack Clark (St. Martin's Press.)
THE BONE ORCHARD by D. Daniel Judson (Bantam Books)
THE DISTANCE by Eddie Muller (Scribers)
OPEN AND SHUT by David Rosenfelt (Mysterious Press)
PRIVATE HEAT by Robert Bailey (M. Evans and Company)

Best Paperback Original P.I. Novel
CASH OUT by Paul Boray (NAL)
JUICY WATUSI by Richard Helms  (Back Alley Books)
THE LUSITANIA MURDERS by Max Allan Collins (Berkley Prime Crime)
PAINT IT BLACK by P.J. Parish (Kensington Publishing Corp.)
THE POISONED ROSE by D. Daniel Judson (Bantam Books)

Best P.I. Short Story
Setting Up the Kill by J. Michael Blue (Hand Held Crime, Summer 2002)
The Second Coming by Terence Faherty (EQMM, 11/02)
Aftermath by Jeremiah Healy (MOST WANTED, NAL)
Second Story Sunlight by John Lutz (MOST WANTED, NAL)
The Jewels of Atlantis by James Powell  (EQMM, 11/02)

Just out, being compared to Richard Russo and John Irving, so I'm putting it on my to-be-read pile...
Long for This World by Michael Byers
From Publishers Weekly
Dr. Henry Moss, the protagonist of Byers's compassionate, richly detailed debut novel (after an acclaimed short story collection, The Coast of Good Intentions), is a gentle, committed physician who studies a rare syndrome that causes rapid aging and premature death in children. While treating two sons from the same family who are both stricken with the syndrome, Moss discovers the holy grail of the medical profession, a blood mutation that has the potential to arrest the human aging process. On the one hand, the use of his discovery might tangle him in severe ethical dilemmas, and perhaps even cost Moss his license. On the other hand, he could make a lot of money. Byers cleverly sets his tale in late-1990s Seattle, at the height of the dot-com craze; the good doctor, like most everyone around him, is far from oblivious to the immense financial reward his discovery might bring him. With infinite tiny, prosaic and precise brush strokes, Byers depicts not only this riveting dilemma but also Moss's relationship with his family: his wry, critical Austrian wife, Ilse, his clownish, good-hearted 14-year-old son, Darren, and his 17-year-old daughter, Sandra, a talented basketball player who falls in love with a black player on a boys' team. These characterizations are so vivid and convincing that they are nearly hyper-real, as if Byers had set his protagonists under a microscope. Herein lies the book's great strength: while lesser writers would probably allow the compelling plot to dominate the narrative, Byers takes equal time to deliver a sympathetic but unflinching portrait of the American middle class and its discontents, brilliantly capturing the texture of late-20th-century life and the innate decency and fallibility of human beings trying to cope with its challenges.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Life of a Saleswoman
By THOMAS BARTLETT

Willimantic, Conn.

At the moment, Tessa Lyons is lost. In one hand is a campus map. The other grips a rolling suitcase stuffed full of brochures. "OK, that's the library, so that must be science," she says, nodding at one of the nearly identical brick buildings. "No, wait. Science is over there." She sticks the map in her coat pocket and takes off in a new direction, the suitcase rattling at her heels.

Her confusion is understandable. This is Ms. Lyons's first trip to Eastern Connecticut State University. What's more, she has been on a different college campus nearly every day for the past three weeks.

Finding your way around is one of the challenges of being a textbook sales representative -- or "traveler" in the romantic argot of W.W. Norton & Company. Another is trying to make intelligent conversation about Wittgenstein one minute and plate tectonics the next. And please, don't even mention the driving.

It can become overwhelming. Especially if, like Ms. Lyons, you've been on the job for less than a month.

At 23, Tessa Lyons isn't much older than the undergraduates she passes in the hallways. Professors often mistake her for a student. But she isn't there to ask about the next test or beg for a better grade. She's there to make a sale.

Her pitch is friendly, low key -- the opposite of slick. A knock at the door and a handshake, followed by a slew of questions. Ms. Lyons wants to know if professors are satisfied with the textbook they're using. If not, she asks them why. If she thinks Norton's book would be better for them, she says so. If she doesn't think Norton has what they need, she tells them that, too. No hard sell. No pressure.

Some professors seem happy to have a visitor. They greet her warmly and invite her to sit down. "It's nice to talk about this," a sociology professor tells her. "Great! Shoot me an e-mail!" an English professor cries. If there's a pause in the conversation, Ms. Lyons has a surefire solution. She looks directly into the professor's eyes and says brightly, "So, tell me about your research." This works like magic. They lean back in their chairs. They steeple their fingers. "Well, I wrote my dissertation on ..."

The lecture has begun.

Others are less chummy. When Ms. Lyons gives a brochure to a psychology professor, the woman pinches it between two fingers as if it were a dirty napkin. "I don't take anything I won't use," she sniffs, handing it back. One professor crosses his arms and scowls at Ms. Lyons. A department secretary doesn't look up from her computer screen or say hello after Ms. Lyons introduces herself.

Slammed doors and unkind remarks go with the territory, according to veteran representatives. Not all academics are gentle, tweedy souls. In fact, some of them are jerks.

Over a chicken sandwich and fruit juice, Ms. Lyons explains how she ended up selling textbooks. When she graduated from Duke University in 2001 with a degree in English, she already had a job offer from a business consulting company in Los Angeles. Everything seemed perfect.

Then, with little warning, the offer was withdrawn. It's the economy, they told her. So she moved to New York City and took a low-level editorial position at Norton. When the sales slot came open a few months later, she applied. At Norton, the path to the top passes through sales. Even the company's president served his time in the field, hawking textbooks door to door.

After lunch, she runs into two men in front of the history department's main office. They are wearing dark suits. They are carrying leather briefcases. They are the competition.

James and Patrick work for Houghton Mifflin. Patrick is her counterpart. James is Patrick's boss. Once introductions are made, stiff chitchat ensues. "So I guess you're here to steal my business?" Patrick says. Everyone laughs. Of course, that's exactly what Ms. Lyons is here to do. She makes a base salary of $28,000. But depending on her sales numbers, that figure could climb much higher. Top performers in the industry earn six figures. Consequently, if Ms. Lyons persuades a professor to go with Norton instead of Houghton Mifflin, she is taking money out of Patrick's pocket, and vice versa. And there's nothing funny about that.

Patrick suggests that they "do lunch" sometime. When the pair is out of earshot, Ms. Lyons wonders aloud whether it's possible to "do lunch" in a college cafeteria. Besides, what would they talk about?

They could always commiserate about life on the road. This week, Ms. Lyons is visiting Central Connecticut State University, Eastern Connecticut State, Sacred Heart University, Yale University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Each night she drives home to her apartment in Amherst. In all, she will add more than 700 miles this week to the odometer of her 2001 Pontiac Grand Prix, the car Norton leases for her. In the world of textbook sales, that's not unusual. (Just ask the Norton representative who covers Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Alaska.)

Logging that many miles would wear on anybody. But for Ms. Lyons, there is an added complication: She tends to nod off behind the wheel. Something about the drone of the engine and the endless parade of white stripes makes her eyelids droop. This is a problem, she admits. So far she has staved off disaster with a combination of caffeine and loud music. But the fear of an accident is always there.

Likewise, the fear of failure. Everyone told her it would be hard, and she believed them. But somehow she never thought it would be this hard. There have been tearful, late-night telephone calls to her parents in Red Bluff, the small town in northern California where she grew up. She was homecoming queen at Red Bluff High School. In the photograph taken moments after her coronation, her smile is both pleased and amused. I'm not taking this too seriously, it seems to say. She has tried to maintain the same aplomb in her new position, but it hasn't been easy. "No job can be this bad all the time," she says. "That's what I keep telling myself."

It is near the end of the day and Ms. Lyons has one minor task to complete before going home. All she has to do is hand a brochure to a professor and thank him for using Norton textbooks. Afterward, she'll grab a quick dinner and begin the 90-minute drive back to Amherst. She will then answer 25 to 30 e-mail messages and spend a couple of hours preparing for the next day. Many nights she works well into the small hours.

She arrives at the professor's door. Fortunately, he is in his office. Unfortunately, he is talking to a colleague.

Several minutes pass. The two professors are killing time. They're talking about their weekends, their kids, the weather. Tessa considers interrupting, but she can't bring herself to do it. She doesn't like disturbing people. For that matter, she doesn't like selling things. She never has. As a child, she hated selling candy bars for school fund raisers so much that she bribed her brother to sell them for her.

She uses the downtime to reflect on her day. Except for a few unpleasant encounters, it's been fairly good. Not great, but not terrible either. There have definitely been worse. She has waited hours for professors who never show up. She has been stared at as if she were peddling fake Rolexes rather than textbooks. In short, she has been treated with the special contempt reserved for people in sales.

While she may pretend otherwise at times, the rudeness and rejection have taken their toll. (Just over a month after her visit to Eastern Connecticut State, Ms. Lyons will resign from Norton and move to Los Angeles.)

"I'm pretty sensitive, you know, and when someone is mean, it kind of hurts inside for a few minutes. I want to say 'Please be nice, this is my job.' But you just have to -- " she doesn't finish the thought, dismissing the rest of the sentence with a quick wave. The two professors are finished talking and it's time for her to go to work. "Hi! I'm Tessa Lyons," she says, reaching to shake another hand.

http://chronicle.com
Section: Money & Management
Volume 49, Issue 38, Page A48

What is the Derringer Award? Three awards given for three different story lengths, by the Short Mystery Fiction Society. Congratulations to Del Tinsley, this year's winner in the short-short category for "A CUT ABOVE."

Another one for the to-be-read pile...thanks to Lauren at Random House:

GETTING MOTHER’S BODY, by the award winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. If you haven’t heard of Parks yet, trust me, you will soon enough. Not only is she a well known playwright, screenwriter, and novelist, she is also the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for “Topdog/Underdog.”

In GETTING MOTHER’S BODY, we meet Billy Beede, a teenage girl pregnant with an illegitimate baby, living with her aunt and uncle, and dirt poor. Billy’s mother, Willa Mae has been dead for six years, yet one day Billy comes home to find a fateful letter telling her that her mother’s burial spot in Arizona is about to be plowed up to make way for a new supermarket. As Willa Mae’s only daughter, Billy is said to be the heiress to her mother’s substantial, yet unconfirmed fortune. The twist? Milla Wae’s jewels are said to be buried with her!

With her aunt and uncle in tow, Billy steals a pickup truck and heads to Arizona…possibly to claim her fortune.

Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls says, “Suzan-Lori Parks is a terrific writer whose characters don’t so much talk to us as sing,
full-throated, of their joys and miseries.”

Read this book!
In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer by Irene Gut Opdyke

Irene Opdyke, 85; Hid Jews in Poland During the Holocaust

Irene Gut Opdyke, who risked her life in World War II by hiding Jews in a cellar beneath a German major's villa — a story of courage that decades later would make her an internationally known speaker — has died. She was 85.

Opdyke was 25 and working as the major's housekeeper when, in 1943, she overheard that the Gestapo was about to sweep through a local Jewish ghetto in Poland. Concerned that the 12 Jews with whom she had worked in a laundry would be taken away, she decided to hide them in a cellar under a gazebo.

They remained a secret for eight months, when the major discovered the Jews. Then she bought more time for her friends by becoming the major's mistress. All of the Jews survived.

After the war, Opdyke immigrated to the United States, where she became a citizen, married and settled in Yorba Linda. For almost 30 years, she never spoke of her actions, even to her daughter.

Then, in 1974, when she filled in for a canceled speaker at her husband's Rotary Club, the story tumbled out.

A write-up about her speech in a local newspaper caught the eye of a rabbi, who persuaded Opdyke to tell her tale to the world. She agreed, embarking on a new career.

In the ensuing years, Israel honored her as a "Righteous Gentile"—one of thousands of non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. She also has written two autobiographies and tirelessly recounted her story in thousands of synagogues, churches and schools throughout the United States, Canada and Europe.

"She became a moral compass to tens of thousands of children," said Haim Asa, rabbi emeritus at Fullerton's Temple Beth Tikvah, the rabbi who first urged Opdyke to take her story to others.

"It's an incredible story," he said. "At first, it pained her, reliving the intimate details of her life." But once she got a taste of public speaking, "She couldn't stop a star was born."

Despite failing health in recent years, Opdyke kept a busy schedule until she broke her hip April 12. She died Saturday from liver and kidney failure brought on by a long battle with hepatitis.

"She knew that eyewitnesses to the Holocaust were quickly dying off and that if she didn't speak out, it could happen again," said her daughter, Jeannie Smith. "She had a very thick Zsa Zsa Gabor accent, and her biggest fear was that people wouldn't understand what she was saying. But she was amazing, and her love for people and her message of love translated, and her story always got through."

Opdyke, who was born Irene Gut on May 15, 1918, in Kozienice, Poland, was a nursing student when Germany invaded in 1939. Opdyke fled but was captured by Russian troops (then allied with the Nazis), who beat and raped her. She spent a year recovering and working in a Russian hospital.

When she tried to return home, she was captured by German troops and forced to work at a munitions factory in Ternopol, in southeastern Poland. She was later recruited to be a housekeeper at an officers' compound.

About the same time, a German major had taken the petite blue-eyed, blond Opdyke to be his personal housekeeper, which presented an opportunity to hide her threatened acquaintances in the gazebo cellar.

"She told me, 'When stuff like that happens, you don't have time to think through what you are going to do. You've got to react,' " her daughter said. "She said, 'You have to think with your heart and not with your head.' "

When the major discovered the Jews, he gave Opdyke a choice: Sleep with him, or he'd turn them in. She became his mistress.

When she sought comfort from a Roman Catholic priest, he told her she was living in sin and should leave the major to save her soul.

Opdyke, a Catholic who would later be honored as a hero by the Vatican, went back to his bed.

"I was pretty. He was an old man," Opdyke said five decades later. "It was a small price to pay for the many lives I really didn't know them. But I saw people in need, and I saw I could help them."

In 1944, the major in Ternopol evacuated the villa and took her with him. The Jews were rescued by the Polish underground. She ended up in a camp for displaced people.

After the war, Opdyke was interviewed by a United Nations worker in the camp. When she immigrated to New York City in 1949, she met the worker again while having lunch in the U.N. cafeteria. Six weeks later, she and William Opdyke were married. He died in 1993.

"As I grew up, I heard about my aunts and her childhood in Poland — all the good stuff," her daughter said. But not the rest.

"She told me that when she came to the United States and saw the Statue of Liberty, she said, 'I'm here in a fresh country to make a new start.' To do that, she had to put up a 'Do Not Disturb' sign on her memories."

In the 1970s, Opdyke, who was working as an interior decorator, became aware that revisionist historians were questioning whether the Holocaust happened. Enraged, she agreed to speak to her husband's Rotary Club as a substitute speaker.

Over the years, she was reunited with several of the people whose lives she saved.

"All I want to do in my life is bring people together regardless of their race or religion or creed or sex," Opdyke told a reporter in 1993. "We need to learn never to hate again. The children need to learn that."

She is survived by her daughter, who lives in Woodland, Wash.; two grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.