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

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

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

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

The five Whitbread Book Awards winners are:


First Novel: Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre
Novel: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Biography: Orwell: The Life by D. J. Taylor
Poetry: Landing Light by Don Paterson
Children's: The Fire-Eaters by David Almond

Press Clips
by Cynthia Cotts
Boy, Girl, Boy
Sexism at The NYT Book Review?
January 7 - 13, 2004

The New York Times Book Review overwhelmingly favors books and book reviews written by men, according to a new study from Brown University. Over the course of a year, the study reveals, 72 percent of all books reviewed in the NYTBR were written by men, and 66 percent of all reviews also carried a male byline. In other words, the most influential venue in the publishing world showcases male authors and reviewers by an average of two to one.

Book Review editor Charles McGrath finds the evidence of bias unconvincing, much to the chagrin of Brown adjunct professor Paula Caplan.

"We've known for a long time that if little girls just see books that show pictures of doctors as men, it doesn't occur to them that women can be doctors," Caplan told the Voice. "Similarly, when you see mostly men's names in the Times Book Review, even if you don't consciously count them, it creates a context. It narrows what occurs to girls and young women as possibilities for their lives."

The study was compiled by Caplan, a clinical psychologist and author who specializes in women's studies, and Mary Ann Palko, a psychotherapist in private practice. After analyzing 53 issues of the NYTBR published consecutively between 2002 and 2003, Caplan and Palko concluded that the Times' overreliance on male authors and reviewers is demoralizing to women's psychological development.

The Times profiled Caplan in 1985, after she wrote a book called The Myth of Women's Masochism. An NYTBR review of the book was favorable, though brief.

Before going public last week, Caplan contacted McGrath and Times public editor Daniel Okrent, hoping that once they learned of the situation, they would hasten to fix it. According to Caplan, Okrent deemed her inquiry "of interest" and said he would await McGrath's response.

The controversy arises during a season when McGrath is shifting to a new job as Times writer-at-large. At press time, the paper continues to search for a new Book Review editor.

Alas, McGrath was unmoved by the boy-girl imbalance. In an e-mail exchange provided by Caplan, McGrath informed Caplan that "we don't have any plans at the moment for changing how we review books," adding, "I'm not convinced that we are guilty of a male bias—either consciously or un-."

In defense, McGrath wrote that "in the eight years I have been here we have been making a conscious effort to use more women reviewers and, more important, to use more women on the more prominent, attention-getting books." He added that women have long written the back-page essay (think Laura Miller, Judith Shulevitz), that the Times includes more female authors on its lists of recommended books than it used to, and that women outnumber men on the Book Review staff. No male bastion here!

Focusing on the power handed to male reviewers, Caplan suggested that one remedy would be to increase the number of female reviewers, and offered to supply the names of qualified candidates. McGrath replied that he would welcome suggestions, but "our standards are so high that a great many writers—even published writers—don't meet them." As for the attention to male authors, he explained, "more books are written by men than by women."

Men write more books than women? Caplan and her co-author searched for evidence to support that claim, but found none. When asked for a source, McGrath did not reply. Then Caplan appealed to Okrent, who had been cc'd the correspondence. The ombud wrote back, "If there's no continued progress, you may have reason for complaint. But as it stands, I think the fair-minded would have to agree that he's making every effort to move in the direction that you would like to see."

Caplan calls McGrath's response "patronizing," adding, "He didn't even try to make it look like they were working on it."

A Times spokesperson declined further comment.


The Village Voice: Nation: Press Clips: Boy, Girl, Boy by Cynthia Cotts

Scot's No 1 detective tales sell over 3m worldwide

William Lyons

Key points
• Alexander McCall Smith’s No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series soar past three million
• Sales top 1.7 million in United States
• First published in 1988 by small publisher after Canongate turned it down

Key quote "I am astonished by the whole thing, but really I am just delighted that so many people around the world are enjoying my books."

Story in full THE adventures of a large and likeable lady in Botswana might not seem like a particularly Scottish success story. But as worldwide sales of Alexander McCall Smith’s No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series soar past three million, that is exactly what they have become.

The books, which feature Mma Ramotswe, a Botswanan detective, who relies on good humour and common sense to solve her cases, provide a vivid, upbeat evocation of Africa.

Critics say that their popularity is due to McCall Smith’s charming, but uncomplicated, characters and his unhurried, gentle prose. Yesterday, McCall Smith told The Scotsman that he was surprised by the success of the series.

"It really is very encouraging, I am astonished by the whole thing, but really I am just delighted that so many people around the world are enjoying my books," he said.

"Judging from some of the letters I receive from my readers, they are encouraged by the positive vision Mma Ramotswe, my central character, has. There is also very little aggression in the books; they celebrate the small things in life, like having tea and cake. I think people are reacting against the destructive view of the world in favour of a view that is the opposite.

"So Mma Ramotswe is speaking to people in a fairly healing way. I’m sorry if that sounds terribly pretentious but that is the way I see it."

With sales topping 1.7 million in the United States and reaching one million over here, Mma Ramotswe is set to become to McCall Smith what Harry Potter is to JK Rowling and Inspector Rebus is to Ian Rankin.

McCall Smith initially had the idea for Mma Ramotswe when he was seconded to the University of Botswana in 1981. The series was first published in 1988 by Polygon, a small Edinburgh-based publisher, after Canongate - which had published some of his earlier work - overlooked the series. It is a loss which has been compared to EMI’s famous rejection of the Beatles.

McCall Smith added: "Canongate was originally going to publish the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, but they made suggestions about re-writing and the relationship gradually drifted apart and that is the point at which I approached Polygon."

His success in the United States, where he counts President George Bush’s wife, Laura, as a fan, has exploded in the past 18 months.

Initially his books were imported by Columbia University Press, principally an academic publishing house, with only a handful of books making it to the shelves. But a cult soon evolved in the Boston area after staff at an independent bookshop started recommending the series to customers.

The New York Times was quick to pick up on the story and wrote an article on the series, which in turn was spotted by Random House, the largest English-language publisher in the world, which subsequently bought the series.

When McCall Smith travelled to New York in 2002, he was astonished to learn that the publishing house there was proposing a print-run in excess of 100,000.

Since then, McCall Smith has undertaken promotional tours as far afield as Australia, New Zealand and Alaska as his books have been translated into 26 languages.

Although literary success has come late for McCall Smith, he is a highly respected academic in his own right. As well as teaching at Edinburgh University where he is professor of medical law, he occupies a variety of public positions including vice-chairman of the Human Genetics Commission for the UK, chairman of the British Medical Journal Ethics Committee, and a member of the International Bioethics Commission of UNESCO.

Until 12 months ago his colleagues knew little about his writing, yet he had in fact written more than 50 titles, ranging from a textbook on the criminal law of Botswana to a children’s novel called The Perfect Hamburger.

Another series of novels now being sought by eager readers is Portuguese Irregular Verbs, one of three with Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, a punctilious and fastidious German professor, in the leading role.

He is currently working on a series, The Sunday Philosophy Club, with a new protagonist, Elizabeth Dalhousie, an Edinburgh moral philosopher preoccupied with people’s personal problems and ethics. Television rights have already been sold to the BBC.

Later this month, McCall Smith embarks on something without any equivalent in the history of British journalism, a "daily novel". The serial, set in Edinburgh, will run five days a week for six months in The Scotsman and each instalment will be 850 words long.

His books have also found favour in Botswana, where they have spawned a minor tourist boom in the capital, Gaborone, where a local firm, Africa Insight, has set up Mma Ramotswe tours of places in the books.

"Botswanans like the books because they show the country in a positive light," he said. "And I think that is a reasonably fair portrayal."

This article:

http://www.news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=18292004

The case of the overrated mystery novel
Robert Parker, Dennis Lehane, Lawrence Block, Michael Connelly -- I've read them all. Amid the logrolling and endless hype, one thing gets obscured: Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald did it first, and did it a lot better.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Ben Yagoda

Jan. 6, 2004 | Edmund Wilson's 1945 New Yorker essay "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" (the title referred to Agatha Christie's 1926 novel "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd") more or less demolished the "classical" country-house murder mysteries of Christie and her school. The series detective novel took its place, and today it rules the realm of crime fiction. These books provide pleasure to many loyal fans, which is all to the good. What's not so good is the inflated critical reputation of the better writers, and of the genre as a whole. The American detective novel may be commercially viable, but it is devoid of creative or artistic interest.

It took me a long time to realize this. I got started in this genre in 1969, after reading Eudora Welty's rave review of Ross Macdonald's "The Goodbye Look" on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. I got my parents to drive me to the library, where I took out the novel. I found myself in agreement with Welty, and went on to read nearly all of the rest of Macdonald's novels, which featured and were narrated by private detective Lew Archer. The books worked on multiple levels. As I learned when I later read the greatest worker in this field, Raymond Chandler -- who was at his artistic peak at the time of the Wilson essay -- Macdonald kept the sense of the private eye as a flawed knight patrolling the mean streets, but toned down the emotional volume and the verbal extravagance: Chandler averages one simile a paragraph, Macdonald one a chapter. What the latter writer offered, more than his literary mentor, was, first, coherent plots; second, an almost journalistic interest in the social and economic strata of contemporary Los Angeles; and, third, a consistent and compelling theme: the power of the past to influence the present.

I can't prove this, but it seems to me that the Welty review started a trend: taking a detective writer and anointing him or her as not just a pulp writer (not just a Mickey Spillane) but a purveyor of literature (a Chandler). Such claims were made every year or two, and I dutifully tried each one out. I think the first was Robert Parker. His Spenser books -- I read three or four of them -- were pleasant enough. But they weren't in Macdonald's ballpark, and not in Chandler's sports complex. Some of the observation of behavior and relationships was OK, but what I seem to remember most was a lot of posturing. I went on to the next writer. And then -- like Charlie Brown kicking the football -- to the next.

Each time I'd prowl bookstores and libraries and pick the detective books with the best blurbs. And some have amazing blurbs -- five or six pages of them in the front of the paperbacks, declaring that the book is brilliant or unforgettable or a classic. Sometimes I'd have a slip of paper in my wallet with a recommendation from Janet Maslin, who's inherited Christopher Lehmann-Haupt's habit of devoting a few New York Times columns a year to surveying the best of the best detective novels. In this way I made my way through Sue Grafton, Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke, Lawrence Block, Tony Hillerman, Jonathan Kellerman and a half-dozen others. Sometimes, as in Leonard's case, I truly admired the writer's skill. (I list him as a series writer even though his lead characters have different names. But they are the same guy.) But whether I stayed with the writer for two or three books (Block and Kellerman, who with his sympathetic child shrink, Alex Delaware, follows Macdonald just as Macdonald followed Chandler) or barely was able to finish the first, I always ended up disappointed.

The problem, I came to realize, is that all detective series seem to require two items that run counter to literary values and that, no matter what the author's skills (clean prose, social or psychological observation, plot construction), will artistically doom it. The first is the main character, who is invariably romanticized or sentimentalized and who is always a combination of three not especially interesting things: toughness, efficacy and sensitivity. (When the writer resists applying any or all of these traits, the character ends up being bland.) The second is the very formulaic quality that lets a book be part of a series. Similar things happen in similar ways, which is probably as apt a definition as you'll ever find of how not to make good literature. Chandler -- not to mention Arthur Conan Doyle -- got away with it because he was a genius and an original, Macdonald because he was gifted and started early in the day. Their successors have no such luck.

I've generally been able to resist football-kicking lately, but earlier this year, I was in an airport with nothing to read. So I bought the book with the best blurbs -- "City of Bones" by Michael Connelly, whom Maslin had recently hailed. For another long plane ride a bit later, I picked up S.J. Rozan's "Winter and Night," on the cover of which was a quote from Dennis Lehane: "To read S.J. Rozan is to experience the kind of pure pleasure only a master can deliver." Inside I found the following from another much-praised writer, Robert Crais: "S.J. Rozan paints with the full palette of the human heart, using depth, detail and nuance of character that I haven't seen since Raymond Chandler. (Yes, I mean it.)" One thing that characterizes the current valorized crop -- which also includes George P. Pelecanos and Harlan Coben -- is a lot of logrolling in the blurb department.

It turned out that the admiration for these books went beyond blurbs. Unbeknownst to me, "Winter and Night" had already won the Edgar Award (given by the Mystery Writers of America) as the year's best novel. Then, this past fall, at the Bouchercon convention for fans, writers and editors of mystery books, "City of Bones" won both the Anthony and the Barry awards as best novel of the year, and "Winter and Night" won the Macavity Award for best mystery novel.

These two books' sweep of the accolades seals the case. To start with "City of Bones," the best way I can characterize it is with an oxymoron: amazingly ordinary. The detective, Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch of the Los Angeles Police Department, is a knight of the Chandler-Macdonald school, without any notable individuality or insight. He tries to do the right thing, despite roadblocks of various kinds in his path. In a perfunctory way, he gets the girl, despite being twice her age. He solves the mystery, which turns out to be neither surprising nor interesting. The girl dies, gratuitously. Harry broods over that, and also whether to quit the LAPD because it is a dehumanizing bureaucracy. He does. End of book. It was a competent piece of craft and a painless enough way to kill a few hours, but nothing more.

Connelly has since published another Bosch book, "Lost Light," and the first few sentences of the (glowing) Publishers Weekly review tell me all I need to know: "Even though this marks the ninth outing for Harry, the principled, incorruptible investigator shows little sign of slowing in his unrelenting pursuit of justice for all. Disillusioned by his constant battle with police hypocrisy and bureaucracy, Harry quits the department after 28 years on the job. Like so many ex-cops before him, he finds retirement boring: 'I was staying up late, staring at the walls and drinking too much red wine.' He decides to take advantage of his newly minted private-eye license and get back to work."

"Winter and Night" turned out to be as negligible as "City of Bones," but more annoying. Although the setting is New York rather than L.A., and the main character a classical-piano-playing private eye (Bill Smith) rather than a cop with a saxophone, it's driven by the same warmed-over angst: It's just that Rozan's pathetic fallacy involves cold overcast days instead of Connelly's smog and Santa Ana winds. (The Boston Globe called the book "very well-written, displaying Rozan's ability to describe place and weather." I don't know about you, but I'm always in the market for a good weather novel.) The book is overlong (388 small-print pages), overwritten and overly dependent on the convention of moving the plot by means of cellphone calls, and on bits of business involving preparing and drinking coffee and lighting and smoking cigarettes.

Unusually for this genre, the novel, much of which is set in the all- or mostly male worlds of high school football teams and police departments, has an agenda, or at least a thesis, having to do with the burden of violence that all men must confront and deal with. This is at least arguable, but Rozan, who is female, has no clue how males talk among themselves. She seems to have gotten her ideas about this from observing the conversations of 10-year-old boys. That is, her guys swear at roughly the rate of every fourth word and always address each other by their last names.

Here's what one character says after Smith points out the Harvard diploma on his wall:

"Harvard fucking Law. Rutgers undergrad, where I worked my fucking ass off to get into fucking Harvard. Because I was going to goddamn be somebody, Smith."

We can be thankful that Chandler and Macdonald are not alive to read that nonsense. I am, however, and it has strengthened my current resolution that even if the blurbs glow with the intensity of the midday sun, I am off these books for good.


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About the writer
Ben Yagoda is the author of "About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made" and the forthcoming "The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing." He directs the journalism program at the University of Delaware.

Know what books qualify as Literature

DAN HAYS
Statesman Journal
January 4, 2004

What is Literature?

Yes, Literature is a purposefully capitalized word. That capital “L” sets it aside from other meanings of the word. You have, for example, the literature of quarks. And you have English Literature.

So Literature is the written heritage of a language or an ethnic group, right? Well — here’s a good question to help you begin to understand: Is J. K. Rowling Literature?

No.

Literature is the complex, meaningful writing of a language or of an ethnic group. While it entertains and instructs, its primary purpose is to enrich lives, to foster and encourage speculation and thought. It reveals the truth about an era in the history of its creators. Its primary purpose is artistry.

By that standard, Raymond Chandler’s mystery stories are Literature — they make a statement about American society in his time. But the roughly contemporaneous mysteries of Ellery Queen aren’t literature because they do not make such an analysis or statement.

This is not to say you cannot read Chandler for fun — but you will get something more from Chandler than you will from Mickey Spillane. Spillane is fun — probably much more fun than Chandler (as is Queen). But he does not have anything much to say about American society and doesn’t claim he ever did.

Queen and Spillane have a place in the literature of America’s 20th century, but they are not Literature.

Neither is Rowling. “Harry Potter” has nothing to say about England or the rest of the world in the end of the 20th century or the first of the 21st century.

Now look at Stephen King.

Recently, a lot of people resented the fact that he received a lifetime achievement award at the National Book Awards. They know those awards are reserved for Literature, not popular literature.

King felt receiving the award was important enough to risk his health. He went and gave his speech even though he was getting pneumonia. He was that determined to let people know that Literature sometimes is something different than they think it is.

When the analysis of King’s work is made after he no longer is with us, there are several of his books that will make the Literature list — even though they made a lot of money. A couple of those include “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” and “Bag of Bones.” Their depth of expression and classic themes put them in the Literature class.

Being literature instead of Literature is not a bad thing. It’s just a different thing.

Let’s face it: Danielle Steele and Anne Rice never will be the likes of Joyce Carol Oates or Margaret Atwood. They outsell them, but they will not outlast them. Because Literature lasts.


Life - StatesmanJournal.com

Books are back, and their pages are filled with politics, biography, and history
By David Mehegan, Boston Globe Staff, 1/1/2004

Like a battleship, book publishing doesn't turn on a dime, so the old year's trends don't usually determine a new year's books. However, conversations with literary agents, who are always trying to sniff out what publishers want, turn up a few trends in publishing that may affect our reading in 2004 and beyond.

The readers are back. Book publishing and selling were hit hard by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, says Ted Weinstein, a San Francisco agent. But people still want to read, and they still want books. And publishers have regained their confidence.

Weinstein says: "People have looked up and said, `The world is not coming to an end.' There's a real feeling, if not of optimism, at least of aggressiveness. Publishers are saying, `If we don't get out there and sign up books, there won't be anything to read in 2005.' "

Extremely partisan political books. Such books as Ann Coulter's "Treason," Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," Michael Moore's "Dude, Where's My Country?," and Bill O'Reilly's "Who's Looking Out for You?" dominated the nonfiction bestseller lists for 2003.

"The big surprise is the polarization of politics," says Boston agent John Taylor Williams. "It's all `go for the jugular.' People believe so strongly about their team, the left or right, that they're willing to spend $30 to read about it."

More Founding Fathers. Three years after David McCullough's "John Adams," Walter Isaacson struck it big with "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life." Below bestsellerdom, but widely reviewed, were several books about -- or partly about -- Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, or John Adams. This year's lineup has a biography of Alexander Hamilton, and several books about Abraham Lincoln are on the way.

Book clubs. People may be bowling alone, but increasingly they're reading in groups, which is giving word of mouth more power in making bestsellers. Publishers' websites now have instructions on starting book clubs, and of course they also have books to recommend.

"I keep meeting people who say about a particular new book, `Oh, my wife's reading group is reading that,' " says New York literary agent Philip Spitzer. "It's one of the most positive trends."

The bust of e-publishing. Two years ago, there were widespread predictions that the printed book might go the way of the dinosaur, as more people did their reading on electronic devices. Not so. In 2003, the giant Barnes & Noble stopped selling e-books through its website, while both Palm Digital Media and Gemstar dumped their e-book businesses. It seems that people still want to read an old-fashioned book the old-fashioned way.

As for the books themselves, 2004 looks like a bigger year for nonfiction than fiction, at least through summer. There are plenty of books by hot younger writers but relatively few from marquee names. As befits an election year, there are both contentious and lighthearted books on politics, and lovers of biography won't be disappointed.

In literary fiction, the biggest name in the year's first half may be Anne Tyler, with a January novel called "The Amateur Marriage," from Knopf. The author of "The Accidental Tourist" and "Saint Maybe" writes about a Baltimore couple who copes for decades with the consequences of a hasty World War II marriage. Kids, grandkids, money woes, yet they keep at it. Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat also has a new book coming out, in March, "The Dew Breaker."

One of the hottest Massachusetts writers is Sabina Murray of Amherst, whose short-story collection, "The Caprices," won the 2003 PEN/Faulkner award for fiction. Her new novel, coming in July from Grove/Atlantic, is "A Carnivore's Inquiry." A young woman, newly arrived in the United States from Italy, travels about the country. Horrifying murders seem to happen wherever she goes, as she reflects on cannibalism in life and literature.

Other Bay State writers with new novels this year are Ward Just of Martha's Vineyard ("An Unfinished Season") and Dennis McFarland of Cambridge ("Prince Edward"). Both novels concern young men struggling with conflicting cultural forces involving their parents -- Just's on the North Shore of Chicago, McFarland's in a small Virginia town in 1959.

Alice Randall rocked the publishing world two years ago with "The Wind Done Gone," her satire of Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind," which the Mitchell estate tried unsuccessfully to stop. Randall returns in May with "Pushkin and the Queen of Spades," a novel about an accomplished African-American mother who is appalled when her son becomes engaged to a Russian lap dancer.

Chang-Rae Lee's new novel, "Aloft," appears in March from Putnam. Lee's first novel, "Native Speaker," won the PEN/Hemingway award. The new novel concerns a middle-class Long Island man whose small plane flying becomes a metaphor for his approach to life's puzzles and challenges.

Literary fiction will reach bestseller lists, as Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Namesake" and Toni Morrison's "Love" did in 2003. But thrills and suspense, in books disdained by critics, will doubtless dominate the lists, as they always do. New books are on the schedule this year by John Grisham, Catherine Coulter, Dean Koontz, Clive Cussler, Danielle Steel, and Mary Higgins Clark. More-literary mystery writers with books on tap are Robert Parker, Rita Mae Brown, and Walter Mosley.

It's an election year; that mandates a bumper crop of books on politics and policy. John Kenneth Galbraith, professor of economics emeritus at Harvard, weighs in with "The Economics of Innocent Fraud," from Houghton Mifflin. We expect household names will be mentioned.

President George W. Bush comes in for tough treatment at the hands of Kevin Phillips and John Dean. Phillips roughs up the president in "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," from Viking in January. Dean chimes in with "Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush," from Little, Brown in April.

For the defense, there's "The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty," by Peter Schweizer and Rochelle Schweizer, from Doubleday in January, which is described as "the complete, unvarnished story of the Bush family from its humble origins in Plymouth, Massachusetts, to George W.'s tenancy in the White House."

Local writers show up in this year's nonfiction lineup. In January from Random House, there's "The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness," by Harvard Medical School professor and New Yorker essayist Jerome Groopman. From Somerville-based psychologist and writer Lauren Slater, author of an acclaimed book about her struggle with depression, comes "Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century," from Norton in January. Former Globe reporter Larry Tye offers "Rising From the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class," from Henry Holt in July. It's the tale of a brotherhood that became the first black trade union and the core of a more prosperous black America.

Atlantic Monthly staff writer William Langewiesche, a hot property since his bestseller "Uncommon Ground: The Unbuilding of the World Trade Center," has a book about the use and misuse of the oceans called "The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime," from Farrar Straus & Giroux in May. In biography, Ed Cray writes of the legendary singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie in "Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie," published by Norton in February. Among other modern icons, there's Gavin Lambert's "Natalie Wood: A Life," from Knopf in February, and "Somewhere: A Life of Jerome Robbins," the famed choreographer, from Broadway Books in March. The author is Amanda Vaill, who has written a best-selling biography of Sara and Gerald Murphy.

Former Boston Globe sports columnist Leigh Montville's biography of the Kid appears in March from Doubleday, titled "Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero." Not only the story of origins and the great Red Sox years, the book is said to recount the Williams family's quarrel over the decision to turn the Splendid Splinter into the Splendid Icicle.

One of the oddities of the history lineup is the profusion of books about Lincoln. Only a few weeks ago, David Herbert Donald published "We Are Lincoln Men: Abraham Lincoln and His Friends," from Simon & Schuster. The theme continues in the first few months of 2004, and if it continues through the year, Lincoln buffs will need to buy new bookcases. From Ballantine in February, there's "Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington," by Daniel Mark Epstein, described as a portrait of "two great men and the era they shaped through their common vision." Also in February, Simon & Schuster publishes "Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America," by Allen C. Guelzo. March brings "Lincoln's Avengers: Justice, Revenge, and Reunion After the Civil War," published by Norton, by Colby College historian Elizabeth D. Leonard. From Random House in April comes "Lincoln's War: The Untold Story of America's Greatest President as Commander in Chief," by Geoffrey Perret. Also in April, political commentator and former conservative Michael Lind offers "What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America's Greatest President," published by Doubleday. Ron Chernow looks back a few administrations and gives us "Alexander Hamilton," from Penguin Press.

The truth about publishing, of course, is that no amount of tea-leaf reading will tell which, if any, of these books will hit the bestseller lists. Every year, there are improbable hits, such as Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones," Laura Hillenbrand's "Seabiscuit," and former president Jimmy Carter's first novel, "The Hornet's Nest." Some book none of us has heard of -- and might laugh at now -- could well be the blockbuster of 2004. People love to read; that much is clear. But as to what they will want to read this year, even they don't yet know.

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.

Boston.com / A&E / Books / Books are back, and their pages are filled with politics, biography, and history

The Fab Five of Words
A Man of My Words by Richard Lederer
The Cunning Linguist by Richard Lederer
A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict by John Baxter
So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading by Sara Nelson
Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason by Nancy Pearl

Five terrific titles await those who love language and books as I do. A Man of My Words is a collection of essays on language, including sections entitled “The Glamour of Grammar,” “The Romance of Words” and “It’s a Punderful Life,” among others. Lederer takes the subject of our language and turns it into grist for his humor mill. He gets down to specifics in The Cunning Linguist, a collection of “Ribald Riddles, Lascivious Limericks, Carnal Corn, and Other Good, Clean Dirty Fun!” This is the type of book you can open to any page and be guaranteed a laugh. On a slightly more serious note is Baxter's A Pound of Paper, another collection of essays but these are about book collecting. Both humorous and educational for anyone who has an interest in books and their value – monetary value - and it's a fast, fascinating read. Sara Nelson is determined to read a book a week, and So Many Books, So Little Time charts her progress. Her insights are always intuitive and interesting. Finally, Nancy Pearl has delivered a booklover's best friend in Book Lust. Loaded with suggested reading based on using careful reader's advisory strategies, this book is sure to unearth books to try that you never would have thought of. And she should know; the Librarian Action Figure is based on this librarian extraordinaire.

Best mysteries of 2003
Oline H. Cogdill

December 21, 2003

1) Shutter Island. Dennis Lehane. (Morrow). Shutter Island is the home of a foreboding federal institution for the criminally insane where, in 1954, two U.S. marshals are assigned to hunt for a female patient who has done the impossible -- disappeared from a prison from which there is no escape. Twists, secret codes, an off-limits hospital ward and a creepy lighthouse lead to a logical, yet totally surprising ending.

2) No Second Chance. Harlan Coben. (Dutton). Coben has become one of the top thriller writers with his emotional, harrowing plots as realistic as your daily routine. In his 10th novel, a doctor's search for his missing infant, kidnapped when his wife was murdered, centers on the foundation of bonds between parents and children, lovers and friends and the consequences of one's actions.

3) Every Secret Thing. Laura Lippman. (Morrow). The death of a child at the hands of two 11-year-old girls launches this tale about how this horrific event could have happened to normal families and how it defines lives. A disturbing subject explored with depth, compassion, heartfelt sincerity and with little violence.

4) Close to Home. Peter Robinson. (Morrow). Teenage memories abound as Yorkshire Detective Inspector Alan Banks realizes just how little of his world he knew when skeletal remains are identified as a friend who disappeared more than 35 years ago. This series keeps getting fresher.

5) The Distant Echo. Val McDermid. (St. Martin's Press). Four British college students are forever tainted when they are falsely accused of murder in this elegantly plotted look at the bonds of friendship and the insidiousness of revenge.

6) Resurrection Men. Ian Rankin. (Little, Brown). Edinburgh detective John Rebus is assigned to The Resurrection Men -- a group of Scottish cops with a propensity for bucking authority -- as this police procedural focuses on the politics and corruption that have seeped into the detective squad.

7) Off the Chart. James W. Hall. (St. Martin's Press). Long considered a leader in the "Florida School of Mystery Writing," Hall delivers a rousing tale of modern-day pirates while excavating the depths of personal change of his singularly named hero, Thorn. A fine addition to the author's superior body of work.

8) The White Road. John Connolly. (Atria Books). Irish author Connolly superbly combines crime fiction with the supernatural for a thoroughly American darker-than-noir series. The White Road leads private investigator Charlie Parker to South Carolina, where a young black man is accused of murder.

9) Winterkill. C.J. Box. (Putnam). Few mystery authors who use the environment as a plot foundation are as even-handed and clear-eyed as Box. In his third novel, Box blends the hot-button issue of survivalists, the FBI interventions at Waco and Ruby Ridge and personal freedom into a thrilling and heart-wrenching plot.

10) Dead Famous. Carol O'Connell. (G.P. Putnam). NYPD Detective Kathy Mallory, a sociopath who's a hard-as-nails cop, navigates the harsh spotlight on shock radio, reality shows and celebrity trials gone terribly awry. Dead Famous pulls together far-flung, often incongruous, story threads that have been finely kneaded into a cohesive plot.

11) Lost Light. Michael Connelly. (Little, Brown). Connelly continues as his generation's answer to Raymond Chandler. Rogue LAPD detective Harry Bosch's career -- and life -- take a drastic turn when he investigates a 4-year-old, once-high-profile case.

12) The Last Detective. Robert Crais. Doubleday. Robert Crais theme of family has never been more evident than in The Last Detective in which the L.A.-based Elvis Cole makes a much welcome return investigating a kidnapping.

13) Done for a Dime. David Corbett. (Ballantine). The murder of an aged black saxophonist who used to play with the greats of blues music lays the foundation for a look at a community under siege, family ties, greed and lost ambitions in Done for a Dime.

14) Man Eater. Ray Shannon. (Putnam); and Scavenger Hunt. Robert Ferrigno. (Pantheon). The cliche of Hollywood as a vapid, back-stabbing, ruthless industry gets fresh turns in these two novels. Each channels Elmore Leonard with realistic characters, snappy dialogue and wry looks at criminals and moviemakers. Sometimes, there's no difference between the two. (Ray Shannon is the pseudonym for Gar Anthony Haywood).

15) Scaredy Cat. Mark Billingham. (Morrow). Heady psychological suspense runs through this flawlessly plotted police procedural in which a squad of dysfunctional London cops hunt a serial killer. British writer Billingham again creates a contemporary twilight zone that feels all too real.

16) Mr. Timothy. Louis Bayard. (HarperCollins). In his mystery debut, novelist and critic Bayard delivers an enthralling, dark thriller that is also full of optimism and the strength of the human heart featuring the iconic characters of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. The hero in Mr. Timothy is "mostly able-bodied" Timothy Cratchit, all grown up at age 23, living in a brothel, teaching its madam to read and, with Christmas nearing, dealing with quite a few ghosts of his own.

17) Blood Is the Sky. Steve Hamilton. (St. Martin's Press). A tale about a missing person ratchets up into a complex novel about friendship, betrayal, hate, heritage and the coldness of revenge.

18) A Faint Cold Fear. Karin Slaughter. (Morrow). The alleged suicide of a student at the local college catapults the residents of a small Georgia town into a tension-laden, often grisly tale about the vagaries of family, the psychology of abuse and the treatment of victims.

19) Dirty Laundry. Paula L. Woods. Ballantine Books. A campaign strategist's murder sets the stage for Paula Wood's continued, forceful look inside Los Angeles' ethnic enclaves.

20) The Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown (Doubleday) This best seller about a symbologist on the trail of a secret society is like a potato chip -- 10 minutes after finishing it I couldn't tell you any plot details. But the pacing, the energy and the characters sure were enjoyable.

Best debuts

Haunted Ground. Erin Hart. (Scribner). The body of a young woman, buried for centuries in Ireland's peat bogs, intensifies the search for a young wife and her infant son who disappeared two years ago. This highly atmospheric mystery is complete with a creepy castle, Irish history and realistic characters.

Rendezvous Eighteenth. Jake Lamar. (St. Martin's Press). Ricky Jenks found a home and a cobbled-together family among other black Americans living in Paris until his arrogant cousin arrives.

Judgment Calls. Alafair Burke. (Henry Holt). Portland, Ore., deputy district attorney Samantha Kincaid is pulled into a swamp of office and sexual politics as she investigates the beating of a teenager. A personal story wrapped around a likable heroine also dives into the ethics of law.

Mystery Columnist Oline H. Cogdill can be reached at ocogdill@sun-sentinel.com.
Copyright © 2003, South Florida Sun-Sentinel


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