Editing by Elizabeth

June 06, 2013

And When She Was Good by Laura Lippman

Heloise long ago reconciled herself to the idea that all is fair in love and war, which is just another way of saying that nothing in life is ever fair, because life is love and war.

Helen Lewis has a story that is, sadly, all too familiar. Abused by her father and passively neglected by her mother, Helen was understandably starved for attention and affection, and at the age of seventeen she ran off with the first man who gave them to her.

Unfortunately, her knight in shining armor turned out to be a drug addict and thief, and at the ripe old age of eighteen Helen found herself stripping and giving lap dances to earn enough money to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

So when a dealer her boyfriend owed money to offered Helen a chance to get out of the relationship, she jumped…out of the frying pan and into the fire. Turned out the dealer was also a pimp, and he promptly put Helen to work as one of his girls. Things finally took a turn for the better when Helen’s pimp was arrested for murder and she was able to get away and start over.

The more things change, however, the more they stay the same. Though she has changed her name to Heloise, has a son, and now lives in an upscale neighborhood in the D.C. suburbs, Heloise is still up to her old tricks…literally. Only now she’s the madam as well as one of the escorts. →

May 28, 2013

It’s Supposed To Be Funny, I Swear by David James Keaton

Pleased today to welcome David James Keaton to the blog. Those in the crime fiction community will no doubt recognize David from his work which has appeared in places like Noir At The Bar, Beat To A Pulp, Needle, Pulp Modern, Shotgun Honey and Thuglit, among others. He’s also the author of the ridiculously entertaining “zombie love-story fiasco” novella Zee Bee & Bee (a.k.a. Propeller Hats for the Dead). Today, David is here to talk about his newest release, the short story collection Fish Bites Cop!.

David James Keaton Now that my collection Fish Bites Cop! is out, I’ve started thinking about “reasons” lately, probably due to interviewers asking good questions. One that pops up is, “Why would anybody write a book with several stories seemingly attacking First Responders?”

Well, to be honest, that’s not really what it’s about. That’s not really what happens in here (although there is an experiment to see how many time you can fold a police officer in half, but, hey, science!)

Now, it would be funnier if it was, in an irreverent, anything-goes kind of way, an all out assault on those who “don’t ask to be heroes,” and, yeah, it probably tries to be, and I’ve even been promoting it as such with playful jabs, mostly at law enforcement and firefighters, so why should you believe me now? But it’s supposed to be funny, I swear.

Okay, the law enforcement grudge is probably genuine, the firefighter thing being more inexplicably personal and harder to defend. And, sure, the mocking of religion, middle management, and the military are also legitimate targets. So in other words, forget what I just said. Whoops! No, really, it’s supposed to be funny.

Seriously though, they are fair game. Anyone who holds authority over another is ripe for corruption, at the least incompetence. So much like the firefighter who sets a fire just to put it out later, sometimes I also hypocritically set them up and knock them down a bit. Sometimes. But what about paramedics? Who in their right mind includes paramedics in this equation? Exactly. →

May 20, 2013

Wanted: Men and Women for Pirate Adventure by Keith Thomson

Pleased today to welcome author Keith Thomson (Once a Spy and Twice a Spy) to the blog. It turns out that before he became interested in spies, Thomson was a big fan of pirates and pirate lore, and he’s decided to rerelease his first novel, Pirates of Pensacola. What is it Thomson finds so appealing about pirates? Why the adventure, of course!

Twice a Spy by Keith Thomson If you’re reading Elizabeth A. White’s site, you’re probably, like me, a thriller fiend. Likely you too consider reading a thriller the next best thing to a real-life adventure. So what do you say we dispense with discussion of literature today and plan an adventure?

I’ve essentially had this idea since I was a kid, growing up in a coastal Connecticut town that was whatever the opposite of fun is. But as anyone who’s gazed across wave tops toward the horizon knows, the sea offers boundless possibilities. I hoped to meet the notorious real-life pirate William Thompson—an ancestor of mine, I thought. He spelled Thomson the wrong way (with a p) but pirates weren’t known for their literacy. Also he died in 1825. Regardless, if you’re eight, you can stare out to sea and believe there’s a pretty good chance your pirate ancestor’s masts might appear on the horizon, and that he might row ashore and say to you, “Kid, I need you to go on an adventure to get gold.”

Twenty-some years later, this was pretty much the premise of my first novel, Pirates of Pensacola: A landlubbing accountant’s life is anything but exciting until his estranged pirate father shows up after twenty-some years in jail and says, “Let’s hit the sea, lad, there’s treasure to be got.” And the adventure is underway. →

May 16, 2013

When A Short Story Gets Completely Out of Hand by John McAllister

A book I’ve really been looking forward to, The Station Sergeant by John McAllister, was recently released by Portnoy Publishing. My review is forthcoming, but today I am extremely pleased to be able to host John for a guest post about how this novel came to be. As seems to be the case more often than those of us who aren’t authors may think, it appears that The Station Sergeant was the result of another character who just had a mind of their own and a story too big to be limited to a ‘short.’

John McAllister ‘Barlow’ wasn’t supposed to be a novel called The Station Sergeant. He wasn’t supposed to be the inspiration for five stories. Barlow was only a ten minute exercise in the discipline of writing regardless of time or tiredness – that got out of hand.

During 1998 / 99, I was running my accountancy practice AND doing a full time Masters course in Creative Writing at Trinity College, Dublin. That often meant a five o’clock rise. Two hours creative writing followed by hours in the office then a late morning train to Dublin and getting home near ten o’clock at night. I always wrote on the train but one night I was particularly tired and promised myself that I’d write for only ten minutes and then sleep the rest of the way.

I poised my pen over the scratchpad with absolutely no idea what I wanted to write about. A childhood memory of a local policeman, John Barlow, came into my head and I wrote it down. More memories came back of the things the man had got up to and I scribbled them down as well. Ten minutes and a page of notes later Station Sergeant Barlow was striding through my imagination.

I wrote five stories about Barlow as part of my submission for an M.Phil. in Creative Writing, included them in my short story collection, The Fly Pool, and then forgot about Barlow. Except that… →

May 10, 2013

The Magic Circle by Jenny Davidson

“Your game-players might like to experience something of a gothic frisson.” – Anna

In The Magic Circle by Jenny Davidson, friends and roommates Lucy and Ruth are joined by a neighbor down the hall, Anna, in putting together a virtual reality game designed to take place in the Morningside Heights neighborhood surrounding Columbia University as it appeared in the 1880s. Players will be led through a series of events and challenges, needing to accomplish each in order to receive the clue needed to move on to the next challenge.

Early on, however, the idea starts getting kicked around about what would happen if, instead of remaining a sterile online experience, the game was brought to life via live-action role-playing instead? Wouldn’t that make things more interesting, more absorbing? If people were playing “for real” instead of nestled behind their computers or smartphones, wouldn’t that raise the stakes? Perhaps, if the game was done well enough, even challenge people to question what was real and what was just role-playing?

More than they could ever possibly have imagined. →

May 09, 2013

Blood Red Turns Dollar Green Vol. 2 by Paul O’Brien

He needed to mourn but he couldn’t yet, because he knew there would be more death to come. – Danno Garland

Paul O’Brien’s debut, Blood Red Turns Dollar Green, was one of the more enjoyable books I read last year, a wonderful combination of organized crime and professional wrestling circa the early 1970s. The book ended with a rather intense cliffhanger, and fortunately for fans of the first entry O’Brien is now back to pick up the story in Blood Red Turns Dollar Green Volume 2

As we learned in the first outing, professional wrestling in the early 70s was not the huge, centralized business it is today, but rather was broken into various territories held by individual owners spread throughout the country. And though the owners worked together to a certain degree for the greater good of the sport in general, at the same time each protected their turf ruthlessly.

One owner, Danno Garland, has managed to claw his way to the top of the heap and now controls the World Heavyweight Champion, which gives him tremendous power. It wasn’t an easy climb, however, and the backstabbing and double-crosses are now catching up with Danno. When his rivals lash out at him in a particularly horrific way, Danno turns his back on everything he’s ever known and loved and directs the same single-minded focus he used to build his wrestling empire to a new purpose–revenge. →

May 08, 2013

A Series I Never Planned to Write by Bill Loehfelm

Very pleased to welcome Bill Loehfelm back to the blog today. Bill’s novel The Devil She Knows was one of my Top 10 Reads of 2011, and the follow-up to it, The Devil in Her Way, was just released by Sarah Crichton Books. Today Bill explains how a character can take on a life of their own, whether the author planned on it or not.

Bill Loehfelm Maureen wasn’t supposed to be the new beginning. She was supposed to be the end.

She first appeared as a worn out and nameless waitress as the subject of a flash fiction piece I wrote over fifteen years ago – my attempt to tell the story of a tuxedo-clad woman I saw standing on a Staten Island bus stop in the early afternoon. I moved on to other work, to other stories and characters.

The waitress hung around through all that, appearing in various expanded versions of that first story. She materialized under a different name in another story, fleeing her job in a diner and an abusive lover on a stolen motorcycle. In my grad school thesis, she appeared in yet another incarnation as head cocktail waitress in a Caribbean resort, when she first started carrying a knife.

She makes an extremely brief walk through appearance on Staten Island in my second novel. That was when she got her name. Maureen Coughlin. I’d always liked her, and thought she had depth and resonance as a character. I’d suspected she would not be satisfied in short stories and supporting roles, but I had yet to build the right place for her.

Now, with her in the lead for me third novel, I’d found a place for her in a story about a woman who sees something she shouldn’t have. I was thrilled when, finally, Maureen came into her own enough to carry her own novel. I was excited for this character I’d known for so long to have her time in the spotlight. →

May 03, 2013

I’ve got a confession to make… by Dan O’Shea

Though he’s been known in crime fiction circles for quite some time, both for his own short story work (see, Old School) as well as his amazing readings of other people’s work (most notably, Steve Weddle‘s Oscar Martello stories), Dan O’Shea hit a milestone this week when his first full-length novel, Penance, was released by Exhibit A. Dan is truly one of the good guys, and it’s my extreme pleasure to welcome him for a guest post to celebrate the occasion of Penance’s release.

Some Ruminations on Short Fiction by Dan O'Shea I’ve seen some of the early reviews of PENANCE. One of the things I look for is what the reviews have in common. If there’s something, good or bad, that’s showing up in most of them, then it’s worth considering.

And one thing that’s popped up a fair amount is Chicago’s key role in the book – that it’s more than just the setting, that it is almost a character. I’m glad to see that. And a little worried.

‘Cause I made some stuff up. And I started with the very first scene.

I was just starting out, and I knew what I wanted. I wanted this old woman being blown away just stepping out of church after going to confession – and being blown away from a long ways off. That was causing problems. Because I didn’t know a specific church where I could set that scene. I knew it had to be a Catholic church. I knew I wanted it on the northwest side of the city. Now, I know the city pretty well, but it’s not like I know every church in town. I mean c’mon, there are 356 parishes in the Chicago archdiocese. So I started Googling, and then Google Earth-ing, trying to find exactly the right one.

I was wasting a lot of time. Then it hit me. Just make one up. It’s not like the Chicago in my book is a carbon copy of the one in real life. I mean yeah, there’s a dynastic Irish family running the mayor’s office and the political machine in my book and there sure was one in real life. But in real life, the succession from one Daley to another was interrupted by three different intervening administrations. Hell, Little Richie even lost the primary his first time out. And neither Daley ever had anyone killed as far as I know. Daley Sr. never had a dead son chopped up with an ax. I was already making stuff up. →

May 03, 2013

The Hardie Memorandum by Duane Swierczynski

The third book in Duane Swierczynski’s Charlie Hardie series, Point & Shoot, was released this past Tuesday (Mulholland Books). For both previous releases, Fun & Games and Hell & Gone, I was fortunate to have Duane stop by for a guest post. Today I am very pleased to welcome him back to complete his guest post trilogy, this time with an overview of how what started as a standalone book evolved into an amazing novel in three parts.

Duane Swierczynski Now that the final installment of the Charlie Hardie trilogy is out, you probably think you know everything about our friendly neighborhood house sitter/prison guard/spaceman. Au contraire! Sure, a little more of his origin has come to light, but you don’t know the origin behind the origin. Not unless you were standing behind me, reading over my shoulder. (Which would have been creepy.) For instance, I’ll bet you didn’t know that…

Originally, Charlie was supposed to be a character readers have met before. In its earliest incarnation, my idea was to bring back a security guard named Vincent Marella from Severance Package and send him off on his own boozy, violent, sun-dappled adventure. Shaken and depressed from the events of that novel, Vincent takes a trip to Santa Monica for a few days using some insurance money. Of course, trouble follows him, as he’s a loose end in this international conspiracy. I kept the part about going out west part, but scrapped the rest.

Fun & Games was almost set in the backwoods of Pennsylvania. Although L.A. inspired the original idea, for a while I’d convinced myself it was better to stick to my own turf. In this version, Charlie would have been a house-sitter, only he’d be watching a cabin up in the Pocono Mountains—isolated and drunk, as one tends to be in the mountains. And then eventually he’d make his way back to Philadelphia for the big showdown with the Big Bad (who weren’t quite the Accident People—and there was no Mann yet). But SoCal continued to tug at my soul… and the Pocono Mountains soon became the Hollywood Hills, and the Philadelphia morphed into Studio City. And I’m glad I did, because… →

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