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.


- - - - - - - - - - - -

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


Sun-Sentinel: Books

From the Los Angeles Times

Book marketing campaigns borrow glitz from TV, movies
As book sales slip, publishers turn up the hype with Hollywood-style events, toy tie-ins and contests.
By Renee Tawa
Times Staff Writer

December 28, 2003

Meet Stephen King! Put your beagle on the cover of a best-selling book! Win $4,000 (and a free paperback)!

Ah, the gentle art of book-ish persuasion. This was a year in which the publishing industry kept its literati tendencies in check and infused a Hollywood-style razzle-dazzle into contests and other promotions intended to nudge books into at least a glimmer of the popular culture spotlight. With book sales down from last year, publishers are being forced to abandon their high-brow position above the fray and dive right in with movies, TV and other competing forms of popular culture.

"Publishing for so many years was viewed as a fussy gentleman's business, as an academic corner," said Jacqueline Deval, publisher of Hearst Books and author of this year's Publicize Your Book (Perigree). "That hasn't completely gone away, but it's certainly attenuated. Publishers are becoming more slick and savvy on reaching potential audiences."

The hype doesn't take the shine off books, doesn't diminish the importance of literature in our culture, she said. "It's a mistake to treat books as precious things, as part of that rarefied academic realm of the world. That's the kind of thinking that makes books feel inaccessible."

Who says new books aren't fun in a movie premiere kind of way?

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) promoted her memoir, Living History (Simon & Schuster), on a Barbara Walters TV special this year. In November, Madonna talked up her second children's book, Mr. Peabody's Apples (Callaway), on Late Show With David Letterman.

There also were troubling signs that a book alone, minus the celebrity, isn't sexy enough to turn a consumer's head. In June, after Oprah Winfrey featured John Steinbeck's East of Eden on her show, for instance, Penguin released a new edition of the classic with this plug: "The book that brought Oprah's Book Club back."

Even publishers with sure-fire hits on their hands tried to come up with new ways to cannonball their books into the public consciousness.

In June, a moving billboard on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood and an electronic sign on Times Square in New York were timed to mark the exact moment that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Scholastic) was released. It's impossible to say whether the marketing of J.K. Rowling's latest added to the novel's star power, but it didn't hurt -- and more than 11 million copies have been sold in the United States.

Largely, though, big-splash publicity campaigns didn't pay off. In the first 10 months of the year, for instance, sales of adult hardcover books were down 5.8 percent, to $965 million, compared with the same period last year, according to the Association of American Publishers.

In this uneven economy, consumers consider new books to be luxury items, noted Robert Baensch, director of New York University's Center for Publishing.

As a result, major publishers are forced to think globally, Baensch said. "The big guys are taking the lead of saying, 'I'm not just publishing a book. I can have a miniseries [tie-in] on TV, a mega-event with movies, plastic figures at McDonald's or Burger King, and the fluffy toys at Toys R Us.' "

In the past few years, the industry's expansion has perpetuated the frenzy. Last year, U.S. publishers released 150,000 new books, up 5.86 percent, according to a recent study.

Publishers are taking no chances with even brand-name authors, designing marketing campaigns to build and sustain buzz.

In a contest promoting the latest volume in The Dark Tower, the series of novels by Stephen King, Simon & Schuster and Penguin invited readers to submit videotapes dramatizing an excerpt from one of the books. The winner will meet King in New York next year -- travel expenses are not included -- have one photograph taken with him and can ask "one or two questions."

Dan Brown's colossal bestseller The Da Vinci Code (Doubleday) already is on its second contest since its publication in March. In the first one, participants worldwide had to solve a complicated puzzle based on the book's plot. Brown will name a character in his next novel after the winner. The second contest is offering a three-night stay in Paris.

Books with lower profiles got into the game too. The winner of an online sweepstakes for This Book Will Change Your Life (Plume) by Ben Carey and Henrik Delehag will receive $4,000 and a copy of the book.

In time for the holidays, DK Publishing is offering to put readers' snapshots on the cover of America 24/7, a photography book put together by the team behind A Day in the Life of America. Submit a digital photo to a DK Publishing Web page, and the publisher will send America 24/7 with a custom jacket for about $6 extra.

DK Publishing calls the offer "the first mass-customization of a best-selling book."

Renee Tawa is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.
Copyright © 2003, The Los Angeles Times


OrlandoSentinel.com: Business

Best In fiction
By David Abrams
Long Island Press

It was a great year for fiction.

It was also a good year for truth-is-stranger-than-fiction. Ten months ago, if you'd told me that Stephen King would be hobbling up to the podium to receive a Distinguished Contribution To American Letters medal at the National Book Awards in November, I'd probably have said, "Yeah, right. Next, you're gonna tell me aliens have landed and unleashed a killer flu virus on our unsuspecting population."

But there was Steverino in his tuxedo standing at the microphone, chastising literary snobs for not reading more chunky mass-market paperback novels by his pals Koontz, Clancy and Grisham. "What do you think?" King scolded. "You get social or academic brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture?"

A day later, he came down with the flu. Coincidence? I think not.

King's cultural pot-stirring was trivial compared to the Paris Hilton sex video, but at least it got literature in the headlines for a couple of hours. It also got me thinking about the books I read this year—only one of them by a King-approved author (Peter Straub). Still, it's a big world out there, and I believe there's room for both Camus and Clancy.

Here, then, is a list of the best novels of the year. By the way, each of these novels can be redeemed for 10 brownie points.

1. The Clearing, Tim Gautreaux

This is the kind of novel that so completely transports us to another time, another place—the cypress forests of Louisiana in the 1920s—that we emerge on the other side of the story blinking and not quite sure of our surroundings. The story and characters—a man tries to redeem his brother from a swamp of corruption and finds himself getting pulled into the mire as well—will be familiar to readers of Dostoevsky, Steinbeck, Faulkner and countless others who've brought us tales of sibling salvation. In Gautreaux's hands, however, the plot transforms into a lyric, epic experience, and we feel as if we're hearing it for the first time. The best book of 2003.

2. The Time of Our Singing, Richard Powers

My year began with a symphonic cymbal crash when I cracked open Powers' massive portrait of one family coming of age in the mid-20th century. The patriarch is a German Jewish refugee physicist, the mother is a young black woman studying classical music; together, they raise prodigal children and teach them the ways of the world. Using classical music as a springboard, Powers surgically dissects America's race relations.

3. Wonder When You'll Miss Me, Amanda Davis

Perhaps the saddest literary news story of the year came when 32-year-old Davis died in a plane crash while on tour promoting her first novel, a tender story about Faith Duckle, an overweight teenager who's assaulted during her school's Homecoming game then later runs away to join the circus. Just as the Big Top transforms Faith into a girl with a sequin-speckled future, Davis turns her descriptions of circus life into parables about how it's possible to find beauty, even among the sawdust and elephant dung.

4. The Mammoth Cheese, Sheri Holman

Who knew that the story of a 1,200-pound wheel of cheese could be such a funny, moving and accurate portrait of American life? In order to revitalize their local economy, the residents of a small Virginia town decide to deliver a giant hunk of cheese to the President. As she demonstrated in her previous novels, Holman has a keen eye for detail, and even though she's painting on a big canvas here, she never loses sight of the value of the smallest brushstroke.

5. Old School, Tobias Wolff

After a distinguished career in short fiction and memoir, Wolff finally delivers his first novel. The wait was well worth it. Thinly-veiled autobiography, Old School (no relation to the movie) may well be the author's crowning achievement. In his story of a boy's life at prep school, Wolff gently instructs us on how to be better writers and better people.

6. The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger

Niffenegger's debut novel bends a traditional love story into new and unusual shapes. Henry is a time-traveler who drops in and out of various moments in his life; Clare leads a chronologically-normal life. The two of them intersect, in "real time," when Clare is 20 and Henry is 28. Their relationship turns as sweet and tragic as an Emily Dickinson poem.

7. In Open Spaces, Russell Rowland

I'm cheating a bit here, since Rowland's book was published in 2002, but I didn't discover it until this year. Covering one Montana family's story across a broad swath of years, this novel is filled with smothered dreams and unrequited longing. It's a big, potentially messy plot, but Rowland never lets the reins slip from his hands.

8. Slow Monkeys and Other Stories, Jim Nichols

Another cheat with a 2002 book, but I'm willing to bet Nichols' collection had an even smaller audience than Rowland's novel. Nichols' characters inhabit a world of hard reality—the losers, loners and loafers you might find in trailer parks, soup kitchens or even caves. But these people aren't just bums and dregs—they're characters the author invests with compassion, even love. Nichols writes about the sweat-drenched, beard-stubbled, stinking mass of humanity and manages to find a glimmer of beauty in even the worst situations.

9. "Train Dreams" (from the 2003 O. Henry Prize Stories collection), Denis Johnson

The end of every year always brings a small battalion of "Best of" anthologies, and while most of the stories have the too-polished sheen of New Yorker fiction, it's possible to find gems in these collections. This year, Johnson's 52-page novella, "Train Dreams," sparkled like a miniature masterpiece. Grainier, a laborer on a railroad crew in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1900s, suffers Job-like catastrophes as he tries to eke a living from the unforgiving land. The story unspools with slow, deliberate precision, climaxing with a devastating sentence that tells us what we've just read is really about the loss of an era: "And that time was gone forever."

10. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, ZZ Packer

These eight short stories arrived on the already-crowded short fiction market with all the fiery energy of Flannery O'Connor on a good day. Nothing is wasted in a ZZ Packer story; every word relentlessly moves the reader forward to climaxes that pierce our hearts.


Long Island Press:

A few of their favourite things
National Post
December 27, 2003
We asked some of Canada's best writers to tell us which book they enjoyed the most this year. Here's what they had to say.

M.G. VASSANJI

J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (Secker & Warburg/Random House) is more and less than a typical novel. Its unadorned but seductive prose draws you easily into complex ideas, even as it paints a sympathetic and complex character, and as usual with Coetzee, leaves you thinking, if not reeling.

JANE URQUHART

I was most moved, this year, by The Romantic, by Barbara Gowdy (HarperCollins), a story of serious adolescent romance and tragedy told -- often with humour as well as pathos -- by a life-enhancing, unselfconscious narrator who, as the book progresses, the reader cannot help but come to love.

DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS

I would have to pick Distance, by Jack Hodgins (McClelland & Stewart) -- a glorious, funny, redemptive look at the losses of faith we all suffer as we grow older and our need to still try to hold on to what matters.

JOY FIELDING

One of my favourite books of the year was Maneater, by Gigi Levangie Grazer (Simon and Schuster). It was certainly not the deepest book I have read this year, but it's been a long time since I laughed out loud as frequently (almost every page) as I did while reading that book. I brought it to Italy with me and it was the perfect travel read.

LEON ROOKE

Barbara Gowdy's The Romantic (HarperCollins), because of the fine way it balances the folly and beauty of the topic. And Jose Saramago's The Cave (Harvest Books), which will haunt anyone who enters its pages because of its stunning depiction of what happens when the corporate world and government become one and the same, and for its extraordinary portrayal of the quality of one family's love.

GUY VANDERHAEGHE

My discovery of the year was John Bemrose's The Island Walkers (McClelland & Stewart), a work written with such assurance and felicity that it is hard to believe it is a first novel.

ANNE MICHAELS

W.G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction (Knopf). Sebald is an archivist of dispossession, all his work is elegiac, deeply provocative, humane, haunted by history and by all the grief of the last century. And Alberto Manguel's Stevenson Under the Palm Trees (Thomas Allen) -- also concerned with wounds of dispossession, but very different -- a novella of beautiful restraint and insight.

PIERRE BERTON

My favourite book of the year was Paris 1919, by Margaret MacMillan (Random House). I'm fascinated by the period.

MICHELLE BERRY

Michael Redhill's book of stories, Fidelity (Anchor Canada), is, without a doubt, the best book I've read this year. These stories resonate. They are rich and complicated and funny, but most of all, they are wise. When you read Fidelity, you feel like you're reading something great. Something that will stick to your guts. Something that will make a difference in your life. Something that will tell you a little bit more about humans ... and frogs and gambling and ex-husbands and old university roommates and sperm banks and ...

BILL GASTON

Jim Harrison's Off to the Side (Atlantic Monthly Press), a memoir. Brilliant, brilliantly funny and profoundly sad, this poet, novelist and food critic is a compassionate iconoclast with world-class appetites. His style is disarmingly casual and you are made to feel intimate with his engrossing life.

GIL COURTEMANCHE

Ignorance, by Milan Kundera (HarperCollins). A profound reflection on exile. Do you have the right to find a new life? For the people who stayed, you may become a traitor even if it took courage to leave, even if the whole country wanted to leave.You did it, they did not. And now they judge you.

SUSAN SWAN

My choice is my friend Alberto Manguel's novella, Stevenson under the Palm Trees (Thomas Allen), about the last days of Robert Louis Stevenson in Tahiti. It's an elegy, spare and haunting, on the subject of the creative demons that drive a writer, with the eerie suggestion that the emotional boundaries between life and art are more blurred than we think. It's always inspiring to see a colleague do masterful work and Manguel's book is proof that the novella form can do the novel's job and then some.

FRED STENSON

Sitting Practice, by Caroline Adderson (Thomas Allen), is about tragedy and how we deal with it -- in this case, a young woman thrust into a wheelchair by a car accident weeks into her marriage. What no one would ever guess is what a richly humorous, sexy and emotionally rewarding novel Adderson finds in this material. And Twenty-Six, by Leo McKay Jr. (McClelland & Stewart), is about a coal mine disaster in a Nova Scotia town, the 1992 Westray mine disaster in thin disguise. McKay does a compelling job of mapping the calamity not just after, but before the methane and coal dust ignite.

DAVID BERGEN

My pick is John Updike: The Early Stories, 1953-1975 (Knopf). I cut my literary teeth on Updike and his early work is still the best. A wonderful collection that includes "Pigeon Feathers", "A&P" and "Lifeguard." Updike writes about women and God and sex and death and he succeeds in giving "the mundane its beautiful due." The introduction to the collection is worth the price.

P.K. PAGE

The Cave by Jose Saramago (Harvest Books) is unquestionably the best book I have read in the last year. It may be one of the best books I have ever read. Nothing could be more timely -- nor more timeless. And it is suffused with love. We need it.

MICHEL TREMBLAY

My choice is La Heronniere, by Lise Tremblay (Lemeac Editeur). It's a magnificent collection of news, moving and funny, describing the life of a little island in Quebec. Pertinent, caustic, surprising.

LEWIS DESOTO

A character in my next novel is thinking a lot about God, so I read John Horgan's Rational Mysticism (Houghton Mifflin). Horgan's search for mystical reality encompasses meditating nuns, psychedelic gurus and scientists measuring where in the brain visions arise. While the religious impulse is near-universal and as varied as we are, whether God is delusion or the truth behind illusion remains unanswered. We might be better off exercising our free will and embracing the wonder of this world, which is as mystical and extraordinary as anyone could possibly desire.

ANDRE ALEXIS

I felt deep respect for T.J. Binyon's biography of Pushkin (HarperCollins). The book is all that biography should be: restrained, fairly impartial, told by a writer with a fine eye for an anecdote, and above all, restorative -- in the sense that it brings a human being (a peculiar one) into closer view and drags his time and place back with him. I envied, while reading Pushkin: A Biography, all those who can read Pushkin in the original, and all who know St. Petersburg.

LISA MOORE

My favourite book this year was Cosmopolis, by Don Delillo (Simon & Schuster). I loved it because it was magical, unpredictable and desperate and had the best, funniest, sexiest sex scene -- without any actual touching -- that I've ever read, ever, ever, ever.

KEVIN CHONG

My choice is Tobias Wolff's Old School (Knopf). It's about a prep-school boy and the trouble he gets into so that he can meet Ernest Hemingway. A contemporary master of the short story, Wolff has written a gem of a novel about truth and deception in life and letters.

LEE HENDERSON

Chester Brown's graphic novel Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography (Drawn and Quarterly) is an overwhelming, eye-boggling achievement, my favourite book of the year. What you have here is Brown at the height of his abilities as an artist, his handling of line and composition is absolutely beautiful, and he's made a fascinating and intelligent portrait of one of Canada's most controversial historical figures. To me, this isn't just the best book of the year, it's one of the most important graphic novels ever published.

MARGARET MacMILLAN

I've always heard that Charles Ritchie's diaries (McClelland & Stewart) are wonderful and this year, I finally got around to reading his account of his boyhood in Nova Scotia, his time in England at Oxford and then again in London as a young Canadian diplomat during the Second World War. And, yes, the diaries are wonderful -- witty, perceptive and quite moving. My other best book of the year is quite different -- Simon Sebag-Montefiore's Stalin (McArthur & Co.). It uses the new material that has come out since 1989 to paint a grisly picture of the tyrant and his court of sycophants and murderers. A compelling and deeply depressing read.

HELEN HUMPHREYS

My favourite book of the year is a book of poems called Persuasion for a Mathematician, by Joanne Page (Pedlar Press). It's a book with fabulous reach and the poems argue life or death with passion, wisdom, and honesty.

JEAN MCNEIL

My favourite book of the year was Waiting for an Angel, by Helon Habila (Norton). Set in 1990s Nigeria, this memorable first novel by a young Nigerian writer now resident in England tells the story of a journalist and sometime novelist who gets caught up in a demonstration and jailed by the dictatorship. A vivid, compelling portrait of one man's resistance of oppression, but beyond the politics and serious theme it is marked by sparkling, often funny dialogue and precise character portraits.

LISA GABRIELE

Against Love: a Polemic, by Laura Kipnis (Pantheon). I loved this skinny diatribe against the pat notions of everyday monogamy and the modern relationship. It was funny, smart and shocking. And unfortunately, probably true.

© National Post 2003

National Post