Andrew Diamond

The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 15:33:01 -0400

This is the book from which Jim Morrison’s band took its name. The title comes from a line by the English visionary and poet, William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

Huxley decides to test Blake’s theory by dosing himself on mescaline, the hallucinogenic ingredient in peyote. Huxley seems to have been inspired by the peyote ceremonies of Native American tribes, who consider the cactus a spiritual gift from God.

In the Café of Lost Youth

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:38:56 -0400

In the Café of Lost Youth opens in the Condé café in Paris in the 1950s. The narrator of the opening chapter, a student in his early twenties, introduces us to some of the café’s regulars, men and women of varying ages who all seem to be adrift. We learn their names and only a sentence or two about who they are. There are no physical descriptions and none are needed because everyone here is temporary, found family, and all will drift apart before we can become too attached.

A History of Western Philosophy

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 08:51:32 -0400

Coming from Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy to Bertrand Russel’s A History of Western Philosophy is an interesting transition. Both men have tremendous knowledge and intellect, but they are very different writers. Huxley’s wordiness, at least in The Perennial Philosophy, dulls the impact of his ideas, and when he quotes at length from various writers and mystics he makes little effort to explain how the quotes tie in to his own ideas. He simply assumes the reader gets it, when often the reader sees only hints of connections that should be more explicitly drawn out.

Software Engineering in the Age of AI

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 08:00:43 -0400

For those of you who don’t know, when I’m not writing novels, I spend my days as a software engineer, writing code. The software industry these days relies heavily on artificial intelligence. Because it has studied trillions of lines of publicly accessible source code, because code solves problems with testable right and wrong solutions, and because code is structured specifically to be understood by computers, AI has gotten very good at writing code.

The Way Some People Die

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:41:39 -0400

Ross Macdonald’s 1951 novel, The Way Some People Die, is the first book in the Library of America’s Ross Macdonald Collection. It’s one of the earlier books in the Lew Archer series, and as I’ve read a number of the later ones, I know this is not Macdonald’s best work. It’s worth a read, if you happen to like Raymond Chandler, and I do, but Macdonald’s later work is much better. Better than Chandler, even.

I’m not the only one who thinks that. The end of this first volume of the Collection includes some miscellaneous pieces from the author, one of which is a letter to his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. In the letter, dated August 28, 1952, Macdonald complains to Knopf that Pocket Books, the paperback publisher, wants him to dumb down the nuance and spice up the action in one of his mysteries for the dime-store audience.

Nihilism by Nolen Gertz

Sun, 10 May 2026 07:55:44 -0400

Nolen Gertz’s Nihilism is part of MIT Press’ Essential Knowledge Series, which includes books about citizenship, waves and the mind-body problem as well a number of less essential topics such as cloud computing, open access and school choice. If I had read the full list of “Essential Knowledge” titles, I might have been more prepared for what this book had to offer. I was expecting something like a college intro or mid-level textbook. Instead, the book is a sometimes meandering essay that includes an overview of nihilism throughout the history of Western philosophy, and a scathing attack on contemporary Western culture.

The Problem of Pain

Wed, 06 May 2026 16:29:34 -0400

I first read The Problem of Pain back in 2024. Here is my review from the initial reading:

I like C.S. Lewis, but I didn’t much like this book. Not because it was poorly written or poorly thought out, but because I don’t think the basic facts of existence require intricate, arcane theological explanations that rely on thousands of years of convoluted religious and philosophical texts.

They Don't Dance Much

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 08:28:47 -0400

James Ross’ country noir, They Don’t Dance Much, published in 1940, takes place in and around Corinth, North Carolina, around the year 1939. Prohibition has ended, the Great Depression is in full swing, and many people, including the book’s protagonist, Jack McDonald, are down on their luck.

McDonald is a failed farmer in a mostly poor Southern town. His crops won’t grow, the bank has a lien on his land, he can’t pay the undertaker who just buried his mother, his chickens won’t lay, and even his cow is mortgaged. Drifting around town one day, looking for a drink, he visits Smut Milligan’s gas station to spend one of his last dollars on a pint of bootleg corn liquor.

Now Wait for Last Year

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 07:18:11 -0400

Philip K. Dick’s 1966 novel, Now Wait for Last Year, is set in the United States in the year 2055. Earth has been drawn into a centuries-old war between two alien species, the human-like ‘Starmen and the insect-like reegs. World government has consolidated into a single entity under the United Nations, and the current Secretary General, Gino Molinari, is responsible for managing the world’s war effort.

The war takes place in the background of this story. In the foreground, we follow Dr. Eric Sweetscent, a surgeon who specializes in keeping wealthy men alive using “artiforg,” or artificially forged, organs. Dr. Sweetscent works for Virgil Ackerman, the 120-year-old owner of the Tijuana Fur and Dye company.

What Is Madness?

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 15:34:19 -0400

Leader writes of Western Culture’s current failures to define and treat madness. Western nations currently aim to treat the symptoms of psychosis and to bring the patient’s behaviors into line with social norms without understanding or treating the roots of the disease.

Many “symptoms” of psychosis, Leader argues, are actually not symptoms of the underlying disease but adaptations the patient makes to try to adjust their understanding of the world to how the world actually works. The disorders listed in the DSM and the symptoms that define each disorder seem to be defined by the pharmaceutical companies that have a drug to treat each symptom.

A Shining Affliction

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:40:13 -0500

A Shining Affliction is Annie G. Rogers’ account of the mutual healing that occurred between her, acting as a therapist, and a five-year-old boy named Ben, who had been terribly neglected as a child. Ben is untrusting, frequently unmanageable, and often violent. His clinical record notes that after the death of his biological mother, while he was still an infant, he was given to a foster family. His foster parents kept him locked in a windowless room for the first eighteen months of his life, ignoring his cries and depriving him of affection and even the most basic contact. Is it any wonder the kid has trouble relating to others? Or that he acts out in violent, antisocial ways?

San Quentin Exodus

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 09:50:51 -0500

San Quentin Exodus opens with Allison Anderson surveying the walls of one of California’s most infamous prisons, wondering if her escape plan will work. Allison is a private school teacher who volunteers in the evenings as a math and writing instructor at San Quentin. While she’s free to walk out of the facility anytime she wants, her escape plan is for one of the inmates with whom she has connected.

Jesse Jackson

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 19:14:10 -0500

When Jesse Jackson was running for president in the 1988 Democratic primaries, I was twenty years old and excited to vote for him. I grew up in Washington, DC, where everyone was familiar with politics, whether they wanted to be or not.

After years of listening to the bland and meaningless promises of congressmen, senators and presidential candidates, I was excited when Jackson came along and actually had something to say. The man seemed to stand for something. He was eloquent, he cared about people, and he believed that government had a responsibility to improve peoples lives in whatever ways were practical and feasible.

Motorcycles

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 05:17:45 -0500

Okay, since no one asked, today I’m going to write about motorcycles. This is a blog, after all, so I don’t always have to write book reviews.

The first bike I ever owned was a 1978 Honda CB 750F. I was twenty-two years old, sharing a car with my brother, and traveling around Washington, DC mostly by bicycle. I wanted a cheap way of getting around when I didn’t have the car. My friend told me he knew someone who was selling this bike for nine hundred dollars. “That’s a good deal,” he said. So I bought it.

The Song Is You

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 08:36:28 -0500

Megan Abbott’s novel is set in late 1940s Hollywood, during the studios’ golden era. The main character, Gil “Hop” Hopkins, is a publicist and fixer for one of the studios. His job is to generate good press for the stars and to suppress bad press that might turn the public off. Hop has plenty of work to do because his wards are always getting into trouble. He is a glib, smooth-talking salesman type, apparently handsome and well-dressed, a bit of a seducer who’s not above bribing cops and waiters when necessary, to keep them from talking about the misbehavior of celebrities whose reputations he is paid to protect.

Doll, by Ed McBain

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 07:39:11 -0400

I give this book five stars not because it’s deep or life-changing. It’s entertainment. It doesn’t attempt the match the depth and insight of the great classics. I give it five stars because it’s a master class in storytelling, and for what it is, it’s very good.

I had not read Ed McBain before, though I had certainly heard of him. McBain is one of Evan Hunter’s many pen names. Hunter wrote across a variety of genres, including sci-fi, mystery, crime, children’s books, and possibly porn, though he never fessed up to it. In what must be one of the most unexpected collaborations in film history, he adapted one of Daphne du Maurier’s short stories into the screenplay of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

The Pursuit of Loneliness

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 08:55:28 -0400

I found this book by chance while browsing the shelves of a used bookstore. The great value of used bookstores, beside preserving some very good books, is that they provide such moments of serendipity. Browsing online just isn’t the same as pulling an intriguing tome off the shelf, opening to a random page and having it grab you.

Molly

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 10:35:48 -0400

Molly is Blake Butler’s attempt to understand his marriage to fellow writer Molly Brodak, who suffered from borderline personality disorder and died by suicide at age thirty-nine. I understand why the author wrote this book, but I wonder why he published it. When you lose a loved one so suddenly and unexpectedly, the grief is hard to process. When you’re in an intimate relationship with someone who has borderline personality disorder, the facts of who they were, what was true, and what was the nature of the relationship are hard to sort out.

Writing can help, but writing about a marriage and about the behavior and thought process of a mentally ill person exposes deeply personal information. Butler has been unjustly accused of writing revenge porn to smear his ex wife after her death. That accusation is not just wrong, but unjust.

The Expendable Man

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 06:37:45 -0400

Dorothy B. Hughes’ 1963 novel opens with Dr. Hugh Densmore driving his mother’s white Cadillac through the desert of southeastern California. Hugh, who is completing his residency at UCLA Medical Center, is on his way to his parents’ house in Phoenix to attend his sister’s wedding.

Driving through the night, he spies a lone figure stirring beneath a tree in the desert outside the town of Indio. He stops to check on the person, a girl of fifteen or so named Iris Croom. She tells him she’s trying to get to Phoenix. He gives her a ride to Blythe, near the Arizona border, buys her a bus ticket from there to Phoenix and bids her goodbye.

Nightswimming, by Melanie Agnanos

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 06:26:51 -0400

Melanie Agnanos’ Nightswimming opens in the early hours of a cold January night in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1979. Owner Randall Low is closing up RJ’s Taproom, a bar and strip club serving a working-class clientele in a city that’s a few decades past its heyday. Dancer Cindy Kaczorek stands with him behind the bar when an unexpected visitor arrives. Hours later, a friend finds Danny’s and Cindy’s bodies in a pool of blood by the register.

Hard Rain Falling

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 10:10:19 -0400

Don Carpenter’s first novel Hard Rain Falling, is almost as bleak as a book can be. The main character, Jack Levitt, was given up at birth by young, troubled parents who both died young. He was raised in an orphanage where kids had to fend for themselves against the cruelty of others.

Run Man Run

Tue, 13 May 2025 20:29:30 -0400

New York, winter, 1966, 4:00 a.m. Detective Matt Walker is wrapping up a shift on the vice beat near Times Square. He’s just finished taking advantage of a prostitute, having promised to let her go in exchange for a favor. He considers this one of the perks of the job. “Vice isn’t free,” he remarks. “Someone has to pay for it.”

Now he’s drunk as hell and he can’t find his car. He needs a cup of coffee to sober up. The lights are on in the diner at 37th and 5th. When he tries to go in, the night porter explains the place is closed. They can’t take any customers.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Thu, 08 May 2025 08:22:02 -0400

My wife bought me this book after I started reading about Buddhism and riding a motorcycle. In the story, the author and his ten-year-old son ride a motorcycle along the back roads from Minnesota to California. As they cross mountains and canyons and deserts, the author reflects on the man he used to be during the years he wrestled with big philosophical questions.

Those questions include, What makes a good life? Why does our current life of material abundance feel so alienating and spiritually unfulfilling? What is it in our culture and our way of thought that led us to create the world we see today? Is there a better way?

Experiment in Springtime

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 07:27:25 -0500

In 2017, Syndicate Books published the collected works of Margaret Millar. Bless them for that. The quality of Millar’s writing, the strength and depth of her mind, her psychological insights and her unusual powers of observation and description should have kept her work in print forever.

Millar’s 1946 novel, Experiment in Springtime, appears in the second volume of the Syndicate collection, called Dawn of Domestic Suspense. The back cover blurb describes Experiment as:

The Girl Goes Home

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 07:06:09 -0500

In The Girl Goes Home, book four of the Emily Calby series, we catch up with twenty-four-year-old Emily as she is launching her legal career in Memphis. True to her nature, she has chosen to represent the voiceless and downtrodden, the people who most need a lawyer, rather than those who can most afford them.

As she’s wrapping up one of her first cases in Memphis, another young lawyer, Zach Skellar, has left the Big Law grind of Chicago and set up shop as a small-town attorney in rural Georgia. Among the old case files of the one-man firm he purchased from a retired local, he finds a carefully sealed envelope containing the birth certificate of Samuel Calby.

The Germans Have a Word for It

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 06:19:36 -0500

Davis has just lost his wife, Rachel. Bewildered and alone, he downloads an app that promises to restore a bit of her to ease his grief and loneliness. He uploads their chat history to train the app’s AI on her thoughts, her style of writing, and their dynamic. Soon, he begins receiving texts from his beloved. They resume their relationship in the virtual world where it left off in the physical world.

Anyone who’s been in a long-distance relationship knows how frequent, intimate communication stokes the desire to see and be with the beloved. As Davis’ desire grows, the AI company behind the app begins to roll out new features. Would you like to see Rachel? Upload some photos, and we’ll show you new ones of her in exotic places.

How to Grow an Addict

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 06:01:35 -0500

Randall Grange, the main character of J. A. Wright’s How to Grow an Addict, is a sensitive and perceptive girl born into the wrong family. Her father is a drunk, insensitive lout. Her mother is, for the most part, too weak to stand up for her, and her older brother, whom she initially idolizes, is a petty, nasty, mean spirited bully.

Randall is earnest, open-hearted and accepting. She tells her story almost as a reporter would, without sentiment or self-pity. The reader develops a deep sympathy for her, and Wright does an excellent job of conveying the addict’s sense of isolation, shame and loss.

Dr. Bloodmoney

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 08:17:46 -0500

Dr. Bloodmoney, published in 1965, takes place in the imagined future of 1980s California. The book opens in Berkeley in 1981, where Stuart McConchie works as a television salesman. McConchie watches a familiar-looking man whose face he can’t place walk into the psychiatric office of Dr. Standstill, across the street.

The patient, we soon learn, is Dr. Bruno Bluthgeld, a former physics professor at Berkeley and researcher at the Livermore lab whom most people blame for an ill-conceived 1972 nuclear test that exposed huge numbers of Americans to toxic radiation. One effect of the radiation is a spike in phocomelia, a condition in which children are born with stunted, fin-like arms and legs. (When Dick wrote the book in 1963, there was an explosion in phocomelic births due to the drug Thalidomide being prescribed as a treatment for morning sickness in pregnant women.)

Medico-Philosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 08:17:46 -0500

This is a thoughtful and well done translation of the second edition of Pinel’s treatise, which is generally known in English as the Treatise on Insanity. The translators note that Daniel Davis’ 1806 translation of the book’s first edition was poorly done, and that the second, expanded edition was never translated into English until this edition was published in 2008.

The translators include an introduction describing how they translated certain terms from the French, and why they chose the words they did. This helps the reader understand nuance and avoid misunderstanding, and it shows how seriously the translators took their job.

Dead Calm by Charles Williams

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 06:10:19 -0500

John and Rae Ingram are on their honeymoon, sailing across the Pacific towards Tahiti in their private ketch, Saracen. Stuck for days in dead calm, twelve hundred miles from land, they spy another craft, Orpheus, listing on the horizon. John Ingram, an experienced sailor, can tell by the sluggish way Orpheus rights itself in the rolling swell that she has taken on water. He fires up Saracen’s auxiliary engine and heads toward the other boat to see if anyone needs help.

Before he gets there, he encounters a young man rowing furiously toward him with all his strengh. When Hughie Warriner reaches the Saracen, Ingram and his wife pull the young man aboard. He appears to be in shock, as if fleeing some terror.

The Score, by Richard Stark

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 07:09:35 -0500

A good book leaves you with lots of questions. This book left me with three: 1) Why was it written? 2) Who would want to read it? And 3) Why was it included in The Library of America’s Classic Crime Novels of the 1960’s?

My best guess regarding number three is that the editors wanted to preserve it as a cultural artifact, like something an archeologist found in a dig that gives us insight into the mindset of an ancient civilization. It says, Yes, this is what they read back then, and then leaves us to puzzle over what life must have been like for them and what it might have been like to live in such a world.

The Murderers, by Fredric Brown

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 11:14:59 -0500

Fredric Brown’s 1962 crime novel, The Murderers, takes place in Los Angeles around 1960. Willy Griff, a twenty-seven year old struggling actor, lives in the basement of a boarding house known as the Zoo. Griff and his friend Charlie, who lives upstairs, eke out a living with bit parts on TV and in film, plus an occasional television commercial.

The other inmates of the house, as Griff calls them, are mostly beatniks and misfits who have no interest in making a traditional living. They drink, play music, read bad poetry aloud, have sex and generally live the kind of carefree, bohemian life that the squares of the suburbs would never approve of.

Shorting the Grid

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 08:51:19 -0500

Meredith Angwin’s Shorting the Grid primarily covers what the author calls “the policy grid.” As opposed to “the power grid,” which is a physical entity delivering electricity from generation facilities through transmission and distribution infrastructure, the policy grid refers to the collection of organizations that regulate the production and distribution of electricity. These include the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs), state utility regulators, and state and federal legislatures.

These regulations, layered one on top of the other, often work at cross purposes to defeat the goals they’re supposed to promote. Angwin gives a prime example early in the book.

The Grid by Gretchen Bakke

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 07:57:48 -0500

This book describes the history of the US power grid and how technology, regulation, politics and demand shaped it into what it is today. In general, the book is well researched and informative. The author, a cultural anthropologist, gives a much broader view of a subject that others treat as merely a technological or industrial topic. The grid shapes and is shaped by many social, cultural, economic, political and technical forces, and Bakke does a good job of explaining how these forces interact.

Black Rednecks and White Liberals

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 08:19:26 -0400

Black Rednecks and White Liberals is a collection of six essays by American economist and social philosopher Thomas Sowell. Sowell is a traditional conservative in that he views moral character, cultural values, and individual habits as the primary determinants of one’s fate in society. He is sharply critical of the liberal notion that group identity and inter-group social dynamics primarily determine one’s fate.

Each of the six essays refutes, with varying success, the traditional liberal interpretations of history. Whether you agree with Sowell or not, he will make you think about events and issues that are generally not even addressed in current history and cultural studies courses. Though at times he seems to cherry pick facts to support his preferred interpretations, he nevertheless forces readers to confront historical facts that are difficult to reconcile with the current canonical liberal interpretation of history.

Ava Gardner, The Secret Conversations

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 09:09:12 -0400

Ava Gardner, The Secret Conversations, is a book about a writer trying to write a book about Ava Gardner. In 1988, Gardner was recovering from a pair of strokes that had left her with a limp and immobilized one side of her face. She was sixty-five years old, nearly broke, and living as a recluse in her London apartment. The damage from her strokes had ended her acting career, and it looked like her last shot at earning money was to write a memoir.

Peter Evans, a veteran London journalist, was assigned to be her ghostwriter. This book chronicles Evans’ many intimate conversations with the actress. By then, Gardner was an alcoholic suffering the ill effects of decades of heavy smoking.

True Grit

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 09:54:47 -0400

Fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross sets out to avenge the murder of her father in 1880s Arkansas. She hires the hardened and hard-drinking US Marshal Rooster Cogburn to track the murderer, Tom Chaney, through Indian country and bring him to justice. Along the way, they pick up a Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf who is seeking Chaney for crimes committed in Texas.

Mattie is iron-willed, single-minded, guileless and pure in her intentions. She comes from a salt-of-the-earth Christian family, which puts her at odds with the jaded Cogburn who has spent his career hunting down men who have proven themselves immune to ordinary justice. Both characters are practical and unsentimental, though their temperaments have evolved from very different experiences.

IndieReader Names The Sellout Best Humor Novel of the Year

Fri, 31 May 2024 08:03:30 -0400

IndieReader announced its 2024 Discovery Award winners yesterday, and The Sellout topped the list in the humor category. Their take on the novel:

THE SELLOUT by Andrew Diamond intricately weaves together the struggles of an author torn between literary integrity and financial success. With elements of satire and noir fiction, Diamond crafts a compelling narrative that effortlessly transitions between the comedy, drama, romance, mystery, and thriller genres. As protagonist McElwee finds himself stuck in a mediocre crime novel, readers are drawn into a captivating tale of self-discovery filled with twists, turns, and valuable insights with an unexpected but satisfying ending.

The Name of the Game is Death

Thu, 16 May 2024 06:49:11 -0400

This book is a classic among fans of hard-boiled crime fiction. Stephen King called it the hardest of the hard-boiled, and I have to agree with him on that. The plotting is relentless and so is the main character. I’ve never seen a character who so purely embodies animosity and determination.

The story opens with Earl Drake and his partner Bunny robbing a bank in Arizona. Things go awry halfway through the job, and Earl shoots several guards before getting shot himself. To make things worse, their getaway driver loses his nerve just as they’re exiting, and he winds up taking a bullet too.

The Beach Girls

Fri, 10 May 2024 07:11:13 -0400

I’m not sure why this book is called The Beach Girls. It actually takes place at a marina and it’s not really about girls.

The setting is the ramshackle Stebbins Marina in fictional Elihu, Florida, on the Gold Coast just north of Miami. The time is 1959. The owners of most of the boats on D dock live aboard their boats year-round. For various reasons, they have rejected the staid, conventional lifestyle of the middle class in favor of a more carefree bohemian existence that involves lots of drinking and lots of sex.

The Courage to Be Disliked

Sun, 05 May 2024 16:50:09 -0400

The Courage to Be Disliked is an introduction to Adlerian psychology in the form of a Socratic dialog. A young man who feels stuck and is unhappy with himself seeks the counsel of an older philosopher. He wants to know how he can find happiness and meaning in world where he never seems to measure up to the expectations of himself or others, a world in which the paths forward seem to both limited and uninviting and may lead to a life he ultimately doesn’t even want.

The Gnostic Gospels

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 07:06:06 -0400

In 1945, an Egyptian peasant discovered a huge clay jar just beneath the soil near a cliff in Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Hoping to find treasure inside, he broke it open and, to his disappointment, found nothing but books.

Scholars and theologians had known for centuries of the early Christian Gnostic sects. Surviving letters and manuscripts of early church fathers railed against the beliefs and practices of these “heretics,” decried their “false” scriptures, and eventually succeeded in suppressing and destroying the writings that laid out their faith and described their practices.

Permutation City

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 12:52:30 -0500

Note: This review contains spoilers, outlining most of the plot. But also note that Permutation City is not genre fiction, so the plot is not the point. The value of this book lies in its deep exploration of ideas.

Greg Egan’s 1994 novel Permutation City is, first and foremost, the product of a brilliant mind. The story opens, more or less, around the year 2050. The rich have taken to scanning their minds before death and then running their digital consciousness as “Copies” inside of computer-generated virtual realities. They can edit their scans as they please, so they are young and vigorous in the virtual world, and they can even edit out the less pleasant parts of their psyches, if they please–for example, removing negative personality traits like resentment, excessive fear, etc.

Paths of Glory

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 07:25:30 -0500

This is one of the best novels I’ve ever read. The author, Humphrey Cobb, fought with the Canadian army on the front lines in France in World War I. While he points out that the events of the novel are fiction, much of what he describes is obviously based on what he witnessed in the trenches, and the core of the book’s horrifying plot comes from actual historical events.

The book opens with two soldiers watching the tired march of a bedraggled infantry unit. Duval is fresh out of school and has not yet seen any action on the front lines. He’s excited to blaze a path to glory. Langlois is a veteran who has already served with this unit, the 181st Infantry. He has no illusions about the nature of the war.

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 08:28:04 -0500

Having just read Jean Hanff Korelitz’ The Plot, I found this book to be a difficult slog indeed. The Plot is genre fiction (a thriller), and as such, the author takes care to limit her cast to a manageable number of characters, to delineate those characters clearly, to define where and when scenes take place, to focus the scenes on consequential action and dialog, to build tension and steadily advance a coherent plot.

You’ll find none of that in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, and it’s not because he’s a bad writer. It’s by design.

The Plot

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 14:28:37 -0500

This is an exceedingly clever novel. The inside flap of the dust cover gives three definitions of the word “plot,” and this book is about all three:

a sequence of events in a narrative, as in a novel, for example.
an immoral or illegal plan
a designated section of land for a gravesite

The Tenth Man

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 08:12:49 -0500

The Tenth Man opens in a German prison near the end of World War II. Thirty or so Frenchmen, civilian prisoners of war from all walks of life, are packed together in a dingy cell. Cut off from the outside world, and with nothing to do, they hang on to an old watch and an alarm clock, reminders of order in a world that has fallen into chaos, while they glumly await the war’s end.

The only information they can glean from the outside world is the noise they can hear through the prison wall. Though they’re in German-occupied territory, behind the lines, every now and then they hear a grenade or a burst of gunfire.

Dream Girl by Laura Lippman

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 08:23:58 -0500

In Laura Lippman’s Dream Girl, sixty-one-year-old author Gerry Andersen has an accident that leaves him bedridden and heavily sedated for three months. Andersen’s young assistant, Victoria, goes on double duty as both secretary and nurse. In the evening a new woman, Aileen, enters the writer’s Baltimore penthouse as night nurse.

Andersen, a successful author of literary fiction, is best known for his novel Dream Girl, which has brought him wealth, fame, and a number of awards. Since its publication, there has been immense speculation about who inspired the book’s main character, Aubrey. Gerry’s friends and readers believe he neither sees nor hears “ordinary” women. He’s only capable of perceiving women as objects of desire. So how could he have gotten this one woman, Aubrey, so right on the page? How could he have seen so deeply into her inner world?

Martian Time-Slip

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 07:38:36 -0500

Martian Time-Slip, published in 1964, takes place on Mars in the late 1990s. The United Nations has begun colonizing the red planet, “reclaiming” desert to serve as farmland and establishing settlements along the great canals. Water is scarce, as are fine foods and luxury goods. Most people subsist on water rations and whatever meager crops they can raise.

Jack Bohlen is a repairman flying from job to job in his Yee Company helicopter. He’s much in demand on a planet where new equipment is hard to get and old equipment must be kept running as long as possible. He can fix just about anything, from industrial refrigeration systems to encrypted cassette recorders to the animatronic teachers at the local public school.

Lady Audley's Secret

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 07:55:58 -0500

Lucy Graham is a twenty-two-year-old children’s governess in the home of a respected Essex surgeon. She seems to have no past, having arrived penniless from London with a single glowing recommendation from an obscure school mistress. Local widower Sir Micheal Audley, the wealthiest man in the county, smitten by her beauty and charm, makes her an offer she can’t refuse.

“The truth is that Lady Audley had, in becoming the wife of Sir Micheal, made one of those apparently advantageous matches which are apt to draw upon a woman the envy and hatred of her sex.”

People of the Lie

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 07:32:58 -0500

Scott Peck’s People of the Lie proposes that psychology should begin a formal scientific study of evil, and that evil should be added as a diagnosis in American psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Peck mentions along the way that when he made this suggestion to an audience of psychologists and theologians, both sides disagreed with him. Though this book is full of interesting ideas and valuable observations, I agree with Peck’s audience.

Norwood, by Charles Portis

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 11:52:42 -0500

We first meet Norwood Pratt, a red-haired twenty-three-year-old from Ralph, Texas, as he’s being discharged from the Marines on account of family hardship. His father has just passed away, leaving his sister Vernell with no one to care for her. Vernell “was a heavy, sleepy girl with bad posture. She was old enough to look after herself and quite large enough, but in many ways she was a great big baby.”

Norwood leaves his California Marine base in such a rush, he forgets to collect the seventy dollars owed him by his friend, Joe William Reese.

The Widening Gyre by Robert B. Parker

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 08:07:17 -0400

A number of readers have commented on Goodreads and Amazon that my detective Freddy Ferguson reminds them of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser. I had never read Parker, so I picked up a copy of The Widening Gyre at the library book sale and gave it a go.

The plot is fairly straightforward. Meade Alexander, a US congressman who is running for Senate, is being blackmailed by his opponent. Alexander is a devout Christian wooing deeply conservative voters. His wife, Ronni, who is a devoted wife in public and a heavy drinker in private, has had a tryst with a young college boy and someone recorded the whole affair in a graphic X-rated video. Alexander hires Spenser to ensure the tape never goes public.

The Big Con

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 18:55:46 -0400

David W. Maurer’s The Big Con provides a fascinating look into the carefully orchestrated scams pulled off by early 20th century con men. The “big cons” were truly elaborate, involving a large cast of con men, carefully scripted stories, props, role-playing and more.

A typical big con started with a roper identifying a mark. The roper was a smooth-talking, respectable looking traveler who kept up with the news and could converse fluently on any number of topics. The mark was the intended victim, usually traveling by train or ship.

Pronto, by Elmore Leonard

Sat, 24 Jun 2023 16:16:43 -0400

This is the first Elmore Leonard book I’ve read that just didn’t do it for me. One of the great strengths of crime fiction is that its characters’ motivations are always clear. The criminals and the people pursuing them are driven by the most fundamental human desires: greed, lust, ambition, resentment, revenge, justice.

Crime fiction can be compelling because these desires drive us all, to some extent, and because characters who personify the extremes of these desires act out in flesh and blood the battles that most of us struggle with internally. They’re like the old Greek gods, each personifying some aspect of the psyche, and each in conflict with the others.

Glitz by Elmore Leonard

Thu, 08 Jun 2023 16:43:50 -0400

Elmore Leonard’s Glitz opens with Miami Beach detective Vincent Mora getting shot by a dopesick junkie in his way home from the grocery store. The bullet goes all the way through Mora, just missing his hip. After surgery and a brief hospital stay, the main character seems to disappear from the story.

We next find ourselves, inexplicably it seems, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, following an American tourist and the cabbie who has become his full-time chauffeur. The tourist is polite, generous and curious. He wants to see the city as a native. He takes a lot of photos. The cabbie is happy with his reliable, well-tipping fare, but the cabbie’s wife has a bad feeling about the pale-skinned American who seems to have taken a shine to a local prostitute named Iris Ruiz.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Sat, 27 May 2023 18:39:33 -0400

The unnamed narrator of Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold pieces together a picture of events that unfolded on an infamous day twenty three years prior. In a small town at the mouth of a river on the Caribbean coast of Columbia, in what appears to be the second decade of the nineteen hundreds, a wealthy young man with no apparent enemies was murdered in broad daylight, in front of a crowd that included most of the town’s citizens.

The Stranger

Thu, 25 May 2023 07:50:47 -0400

Meursault, the main character of Albert Camus’ The Stranger, is so passive and indifferent, he simply lets life happen to him, and what happens isn’t good. He tells his story as if he’s an uninterested and slightly befuddled spectator watching things happen to someone else.

Meursault lives in Algiers. The year is around 1942, though the events of the war in Europe don’t impinge on the story. Meursault lives in a simple apartment and, working as a clerk in a shipping company, earns just enough to get by. He doesn’t much care for his job, or anything else.

The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker

Mon, 22 May 2023 09:13:15 -0400

In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker examines the central and unique tension of the human creature: we are going to die, and unlike other animals, we know we’re going to die. This is the fundamental source of human anxiety. It’s not culture-specific. It’s universal to the species, affecting all humans everywhere.

We’re born into a world we don’t initially understand. We arrive helpless and dependent, and we know that. Bewilderment, helplessness and dependency are terrifying. Soon, we also learn that we and everyone we know will die. How can anyone function in the face of such terror?

The Answers Are There

Tue, 25 Apr 2023 06:50:19 -0400

This book came to my attention when the Independent Book Publishers Association named it as a finalist for the 2023 Franklin Award. It describes the grassroots effort to rebuild rural communities in Sierra Leone after its bitter, decade-long civil war ended in 2002.

The war left the country wounded and deeply polarized. Neighbors had committed atrocities against neighbors. Communities broken by distrust were barely functioning, and there didn’t seem to be a path forward.

The Reisman Case is free this weekend!

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 14:59:52 -0400

The Kindle edition of The Reisman Case is free April 21-25, 2023. Grab a free copy at Amazon.com.

We’ll also be featured on Free Kindle Books and Tips this Saturday.

Ubik, by Philip K. Dick

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 07:39:05 -0500

Published in 1969, Philip K. Dick’s Ubik takes place in a fictional future of 1992. The corporate world is plagued by spies from Ray Hollis’ psionic agency. The psionics have various psychic powers including telepathy and precognition. They infiltrate organizations to steal their valuable secrets.

Joe Chip is a tester for Runciter Associates, the world’s leading prudence organization. Prudence organizations find “inertials,” people whose psychic counter-talents can neutralize the talents of Hollis’ psionics. They’re in high demand by companies that have been infiltrated by psionics and are bleeding information.

Sunburn by Laura Lippman

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 07:14:51 -0500

Sunburn opens with a thrirty-something man, Adam Bosk, observing a thirty-something woman, Polly Costello, in a roadside restaurant in the small town of Belleville, Delaware. She’s come from the beach, forty or so minutes to the east, and her sunburnt shoulders are starting to peel. Her observer wonders if he should make a move, introduce himself, strike up a conversation.

She wonders too, as he takes a seat two stools down at the bar. She doesn’t know he’s followed her from the beach, where she walked out–without warning, and forever–on her husband and child. Her observer has been told to get close to her, and has been warned: not too close.

The Bouncer

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 08:52:27 -0500

David Gordon’s unique thriller opens with a series of police raids in New York City. Local and federal law enforcement are under pressure from above as worries of an impending terrorist attack escalate.

The cops, not knowing who their targets are, or where they may be lurking, have to look like they’re doing something to quell the public angst. So, like the authorities in Casablanca, they round up the usual suspects in a series of high profile raids. Caught up among the small fry in one of those raids is Joe Brody, a loner and former Special Ops agent with an opiate habit.

A Nasty Piece of Work

Sun, 19 Feb 2023 14:43:26 -0500

The plot was good enough, but this one fell short on several levels, reading like a journeyman’s immitation of a John D. MacDonald novel. I didn’t like the strained smart-guy dialog, the wisecracks that fell flat or the banter between main character Lemuel Gunn and his girl Friday, aka Ornella Neppi. Much of the humor and wit just wasn’t that funny, though it might appeal to an older generation. Neither Gunn nor Neppi came off as fully-formed characters worth caring about until the very end.

Ordo, by Donald Westlake

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 06:39:14 -0500

Ordo, a novella of just 73 pages, is the second work in Hard Case Crime’s Double Feature. Ordo Tupikos, a sailor in the US Navy in the early 1970s, is enjoying some down time with friends during a work break. One of them asks him why he never told them he had been married to movie star Dawn Devayne.

Ordo thinks his friend, a practical joker, is kidding, so he brushes him off. But the friend is serious. He shows Ordo a magazine article about Devayne, in which she describes her life before Hollywood. The article mentions her early marriage to Ordo, and includes a photo of them on the courthouse steps just after they’d taken their vows.

A Travesty, by Donald Westlake

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 09:29:33 -0500

A Travesty is the first of two short novels in Donald Westlake’s Double Feature. The story opens with New York film critic Carey Thorpe looking down at the body of the girlfriend he’s just accidentally killed in her own apartment. A series of thoughts run through his mind, most of them converging on self-preservation: how can he get out of this mess without being fingered as the killer?

Truly, Madly

Sun, 25 Dec 2022 15:48:16 -0500

Stephen Galloway’s Truly, Madly describes the long and tragic arc of one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary love affairs. Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh fell in love while each was already married to someone else. Each had a child, and neither was suited to parenthood or fidelity.

Olivier’s first wife, Jill Esmond, seemed to recognize early on the intensity of the Olivier-Leigh bond, and what it meant for her marriage. She told their son, Tarquin, “I have seen true passion only once. God help you if it gets a hold of you. There’s nothing to be done.”

The Case of the Velvet Claws

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 10:06:32 -0500

Perry Mason makes his first appearance in The Case of the Velvet Claws. The book begins with a Mrs. Eva Griffin approaching Mason for a favor. She’d been out on a date the night before with a man who wasn’t her husband. The police showed up to investigate a robbery at the hotel where said date occurred, and they took statements from witnesses.

Eva Griffin’s date was a powerful local politician, powerful enough to get the police to exclude his name from the witness list. A local gossip paper, however, knows he was there and they’re going to publish the story, which will ultimately expose Eva’s infidelity to her husband.

My Cross to Bear by Gregg Allman

Sun, 04 Dec 2022 05:17:53 -0500

Gregg Allman’s memoir, My Cross to Bear, covers a lot of ground, from the murder of his father to the musician’s coming to terms with his own fatherhood late in life. Gregg and his older brother, Duane, were born in Nashville and raised by a single mom who could barely keep the family afloat.

Seven Theories of Religion

Sat, 26 Nov 2022 12:09:10 -0500

Daniel L. Pals Seven Theories of Religion describes seven different attempts to describe what religion is, how it arose, and what it means to society. The book begins with a look at the two writers who first attempted to study religion through a scientific lens: E.B. Tylor and James Frazer. Both men described what they perceived as the evolution of religion across numerous societies around the world.

The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 09:31:45 -0400

The premis of The Holographic Universe is not that the universe is a literal holograph, but that a holograph may be the best metaphor for understanding the universe.

Michael Talbot describes how holographs are made: using mirrors and lenses, you split a laser beam into two parts, the object beam and the reference beam. The object beam reflects off the object you want to record (a strawberry, or a bird, or whatever) onto holographic film, while the reference beam hits the same film at the same time from a different angle. The film records the interference patterns from these two beams.

The Art of the Cover Letter

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 08:35:58 -0400

I graduated college way back in 1990, in the midst of an economic recession. Jobs were scarce, especially for new graduates who had no real work experience. I spent quite a bit of time looking for work, to no avail.

In those days, the job hunt involved getting a copy of the Sunday Washington Post, with its thick classifieds section, combing through the listings, circling the interesting jobs and then making calls and mailing paper resumes with cover letters.

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Sat, 20 Aug 2022 09:19:47 -0400

Everything in this book is common sense, but it’s the kind of common sense people need to be reminded of all the time. Want to get along with people? Consider things from their perspective and treat them well.

Kill Romeo is Now Available

Sat, 02 Jul 2022 08:44:02 -0400

Kill Romeo is now available on Amazon.com. “What begins as a puzzling murder,” writes Diane Donovan of the Midwest Book Review, “turns into something unexpectedly even more complex on many levels… The story provides a riveting blend of personal and investigative conundrums that keep Freddy and his readers on their toes.”

Suburban Dicks by Fabian Nicieza

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 07:33:42 -0400

Fabian Nicieza’s Suburban Dicks opens with the murder of a gas station attendant in West Windsor, New Jersey. As a pair of inept young cops are trying to secure the crime scene, a minivan pulls into the station. The pregnant driver’s toddler has to pee, and she does… all over the evidence.

The Maltese Falcon

Wed, 25 May 2022 07:30:54 -0400

Hammett’s books are dense with action and full of twists. Snooze for a second and you’ll have to go back and re-read the whole chapter. While many have commented about Hammett’s hardboiled style and seedy underworld characters, what really struck me in this one was how the author keeps the reader grasping throughout. You never know what’s going to happen next, nor do you know the significance of events as they’re happening.

Kill Romeo

Wed, 04 May 2022 10:38:57 -0400

The second book in the Freddy Ferguson series, Kill Romeo, goes on sale July 2, 2022. It’s available for pre-order on Amazon . Advance review copies are available on NetGalley .

Cropper's Cabin by Jim Thompson

Fri, 08 Apr 2022 14:58:18 -0400

Jim Thompson sure can be bleak. Cropper’s Cabin takes place in the author’s home state of Oklahoma, in the 1940s or early fifties. Tommy Carver is the son of a mean-spirited, resentful sharecropper who is barely getting by.

Tom is a bright student in his final year of high school. He’s a favorite of his teachers and of the school principal. His girlfriend, Donna Ontime, is the beautiful daughter of the county’s richest man, a Creek Indian who owns the thousands of acres surrounding Tom’s father’s ten-acre plot.

Bad Boy by Jim Thompson

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 16:56:05 -0400

Bad Boy was Jim Thompson’s first take at autobiography. Although he was only forty-seven when he wrote it, he had already lived a pretty full life. This volume covers his escapades through age twenty-three.

Thompson spent his early youth in Oklahoma, where his father was a county sheriff and one of the most popular men in town. When his father ran for state office on platform that included a commitment to racial equality, he was run out of town.

Devil in a Blue Dress

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 08:50:50 -0400

Devil in a Blue Dress is the first installment in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series. The story opens in Joppy Shag’s near-empty bar above a butcher shop in Watts, Los Angeles. The time is 1948. Easy Rawlins, just fired from his manufacturing job at Champion Aircraft, is having an afternoon drink, wondering how he’s going to cover his next mortgage payment, when a white man walks in and makes him an offer.

DeWitt Albright, with his pale skin, white suit and strawberry blond hair doesn’t seem to care if he looks out of place in this scene. He offers Rawlins cash up front to find a missing woman, the devil in a blue dress who’s been known to frequent the same dive bars and jazz clubs that Rawlins himself hangs out in.

The Late Monsieur Gallet

Sun, 20 Mar 2022 08:27:35 -0400

This is the first I’ve read of Simenon’s Maigret series. I can’t believe the author was only twenty-eight when he wrote this. His writing has a surety and solidness that many never achieve. The few who do find it take many years to get there.

This case involves what appears to be the simple murder of a traveling salesman in a Loire Valley hotel during the hot summer of 1930. Maigret approaches the investigation with the dread of one assigned a sordid, depressing, and tedious task. The wife of the deceased is proud and disagreeable, the son cold and distant, the hotel a second rate holiday stop for families on a budget.

Free Kindle Books

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 10:52:34 -0400

Are you a voracious e-book reader looking for free Kindle books? Check out the new Free Books Page at JustKindleBooks.com . You can browse by category, genre and sub-genre. The list of books changes daily, so check back often.

A Practical Guide to Self-Publishing

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 09:00:03 -0500

I just published a guide for indie authors called A Practical Guide to Self-Publishing , also known as TitlesToMarket.com .

For years now, I’ve been hearing the same questions from new indie authors:

How do I get my finished manuscript onto Amazon?
How do I lay out my book?
How do I get a cover?
How can I market my book?
How can I get reader reviews?
Where can I find images for my book cover and website?

Why I've (Mostly) Stopped Reading the News

Sun, 23 Jan 2022 08:18:19 -0500

There’s an old parable about a conversation between a Native American boy and his father. The boy had been practicing his shooting skills with bow and arrow and had just killed his first rabbit. In celebration of this rite of passage, the elders skinned and cooked the rabbit and the boy and his friends had a little feast.

Target: The Girl

Sun, 26 Dec 2021 09:12:10 -0500

Emily Calby is twenty now. The scarred but ever-hopeful survivor wants to put her brutal past behind her. Her instinct for justice has led her to enroll in law school on the sunny Florida coast. Things are finally looking up.

Irrational Man by William Barrett

Mon, 06 Dec 2021 10:00:00 +0000

In this superbly written overview of the Western philosophical tradition, William Barrett traces the roots of 20th century existentialism back through Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard all the way to the Greek and Hebrew traditions that formed the foundations of Western European civilization. Writing in 1958, Barrett begins by describing Europe’s spiritual and intellectual crisis after two world wars. If twenty centuries of religious faith and scientific progress led only to slaughter and destruction, then what was the good of science or religion? And what better system of knowledge and belief could replace them?

The Girl with a Clock For a Heart

Sat, 04 Dec 2021 08:22:50 -0500

The title alone made me want to read this one. It’s supposed to be a noir thriller, though it lacks the brooding spell and the sense of inevitable, darkening fate that distinguish the classic noirs. The book has a number of glaring flaws, but the story has enough twists to keep you reading.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Sun, 28 Nov 2021 08:05:45 -0500

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch opens in New York City in an unnamed year of the twenty-first century. Barney Mayerson, a pre-fash consultant for Perky Pat Layouts, drank too much the night before and slept with his new assistant, Rondinella “Roni” Fugate. Mayerson and Fugate are both precogs, blessed with a talent for seeing into the future.

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 09:29:31 -0500

Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest is mayhem from beginning to end. The book opens with The Continental Op (an unnamed detective from the Continental Detective Agency) arriving in the corrupt Utah mining town of Personville (aka Poisonville) at the request of newspaper editor Donald Willsson. Willsson is gunned down before the Op has a chance to speak with him, and this sets the tone for the rest of the book, which is an orgy of unrestrained killing.

The Coddling of the American Mind

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 08:14:55 -0500

The Coddling of the American Mind examines the political left’s intolerance of challenging and uncomfortable ideas, especially as it appears among the young on college campuses throughout the US. The authors examine a number of incidents in which university students have staged violent protests, shamed and ostracized fellow students, disinvited speakers, and tried to force the firing of professors whose ideas challenge their worldview.

Lukianoff and Haidt call this “safetyism,” and define it as the belief that students must be protected at all times from risk and discomfort. Safetyism is the manifestation of three intertwined untruths, which have become habits of thought:

The Plains of Cement by Patrick Hamilton

Sun, 14 Nov 2021 07:19:29 -0500

The Plains of Cement is the third and final book in Patrick Hamilton’s Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky collection, which follows three down-and-out characters through the streets of London in the fall and early winter of 1929.

Book one, The Midnight Bell, follows the waiter, Bob, as he falls in love with prostitute Jenny Maples. Book two, The Siege of Pleasure, picks up with Jennie’s story just days after book one leaves off. Most of it is a flashback to events three years earlier that led Jennie into prostitution.

The Siege of Pleasure by Patrick Hamilton

Thu, 04 Nov 2021 06:30:47 -0400

The Siege of Pleasure, the second book in Patrick Hamilton’s 1930’s London trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, picks up just days after the end of book one. Jenny Maple is walking the streets around the London Pavilion looking for a trick while trying to avoid a plainclothes cop who has recently arrested one of her friends.

A seedy-looking middle-aged man has his eye on her, but can’t quite pluck up the courage to approach. Desperate to get off the street, into a warm hotel and away from the threat of arrest, Jenny approaches him. The man is physically unattractive, sneaky, furtive, nervous and evasive. She takes the lead in negotiating a price for the night, and then they’re off–first to a pub, and then to a hotel.

The Midnight Bell by Patrick Hamilton

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 11:57:08 -0400

Bob, a waiter at a London saloon called The Midnight Bell, leads a relatively simple life. He works the lunch shift from 11 to 3 and the evening shift from 5 till 10. In between, he reads in his room, wanders the streets, goes to movies. The son of an American man and an Irish woman, he has no living family, no clear path ahead, and only the vaguest of dreams.

The time is 1929 or thereabouts. After years of working at sea, Bob, now twenty-six, has landed in this saloon that serves an odd assortment of down-and-out regulars.

Discover Great Reads on BookDNA.com

Tue, 26 Oct 2021 08:20:49 -0400

Ben Fox from BookDNA.com recently asked me to write about five of my favorite books in any genre. You can check out my list of the best books from the golden age of American crime and noir and perhaps discover something new.

1414° by Paul Bradley Carr

Fri, 22 Oct 2021 13:15:38 -0400

Paul Bradley Carr’s 1414° is a satirical thriller that reads like Carl Hiaasen’s take on Silicon Valley, “An industry built on the promise of limitless memory, by people who can’t remember what happened last week.”

The book opens with former tech titan Joe Christian counting out his final hours in a filthy flophouse in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Someone, he is sure, has deliberately ruined his life. Someone he calls “Fate” has orchestrated his long descent from wealth and power to this sad, sordid end. But who is Fate?

Mutant Message Down Under

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 08:26:51 -0400

[Note: This book’s preface claims it’s based on a true story. It’s not. If you read this novel as an accurate account of Aboriginal culture, you’ll be misled. It should be categorized as New Age Fantasy. The end of this review contains a link to a story in which the author retracts her claims to the book’s authenticity. As fantasy, though, it’s a pretty good read.]

Marlo Morgan, an American living in Australia, is invited by an Aboriginal group to what she thinks is an awards banquet. Her guide, Ooota, picks her up from her hotel in a beat up Jeep and drives her deep into the Outback to meet a waiting tribe whose members call themselves The Real People. The tribe burns her clothing, wallet, camera, passport and all other possessions and invites her on a walk across the continent.

RadCity 4 vs. Bafang 750 Watt Mid-Drive Kit

Tue, 31 Aug 2021 07:16:07 -0400

A few months ago, I bought a RadCity 4 electric bike from Rad Power Bikes. I got it for commuting into town (5 hilly miles) and to the office (8 miles, with steep hills).

The bike arrived about a week after I placed the order. It comes in a box, mostly assembled, with the customer having to do the final steps of attaching the pedals and handlebars, and connecting some wiring. The assembly was pretty easy. You don’t need much mechanical ability.

The Man in the High Castle

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 09:07:34 -0400

Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle presents an alternate reality in which the Allies lost World War II and the Axis won. The book was written in, and takes place in, the early 1960’s. Unlike many of today’s dystopian alternate-history novels, which tend to be dark and somber, Dick’s story is darkly humorous.

Instead of focusing merely on how the victors oppress the vanquished, Dick transposes the absurdities and petty quarrels of twentieth century life onto an America colonized by Japan, a world in which two cultures, fundamentally at odds, must coexist without being able to fully understand each other.

(Low)life by Charles Farrell

Thu, 12 Aug 2021 18:12:42 -0400

I recently had the pleasure of reading Charles Farrell’s Low(life): A Memoir of Jazz, Fight-Fixing and the Mob. If you’re into true crime, boxing, jazz, or just good writing from a sharp-minded observer who has led an interesting life, check it out. Follow the link below to read my full review on Medium.

Book Review of “(Low)Life: A Memoir of Jazz, Fight-Fixing and the Mob"

We Germans by Alexander Starritt

Tue, 20 Jul 2021 06:24:13 -0400

Alexander Starritt’s We Germans tells the story of a small group of German soldiers retreating from the disastrous invasion of Russia in 1944. The German soldiers on the Eastern front know the war is lost. Pursued by the ruthless Red Army, they’ve retreated a thousand kilometers on foot and are crossing the Polish countryside they destroyed years earlier, when they looked and felt invincible.

The main character, Meissner, was drafted into the war at age nineteen as an artilleryman. He spent four years fighting in Russia before the tide turned decisively against the Germans. Retreating and in defeat, he begins to contemplate the atrocities of the war in which he’s participated.

(Low)life by Charles Farrell

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 05:37:17 -0400

Charles Farrell’s Low(life) is a tour of the underworld from the 1960s through the 2010s told in a series of anecdotes and reflections that are sometimes entertaining, sometimes cringeworthy, sometimes enlightening and almost always fascinating.

In the 1960s and seventies, Farrell worked as a musician in mostly mob-run clubs in New England and New York. Later, he worked as a boxing manager and fight fixer. This isn’t a crime memoir, though those who are drawn to pulp fiction, classic crime novels and movies like Goodfellas will find plenty to like here.

Blood on the Moon by James Ellroy

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 08:32:40 -0400

James Ellroy’s Blood on the Moon introduces LAPD Detective Sargent Lloyd Hopkins, a “genius” homicide investigator with a reputation for solving tough cases. First published in 1984, the book contains what are now a set of common tropes.

Hopkins is a rogue cop working against the strictures of the department that employs him. His self-sworn duty to protect the innocent is born of his own childhood trauma. He can be as single-minded, violent, and relentless as the killers her pursues. He understands how they think because the traumas that distorted their minds are similar to the ones that shaped his own. Finally, as the author himself notes in his preface to the L.A. Noir trilogy, the final climax wherein the cop must fight the psychotic killer one-on-one has since become a cliché.

The Cocktail Waitress by James M. Cain

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 19:55:48 -0400

The Cocktail Waitress was the last book James M. Cain wrote before he died in 1977. Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai pieced it together from a number of manuscripts and published it in 2002.

The book, as Ardai says, “is a classic Cain femme fatale story that’s told for once from the femme fatale’s point of view.” And what a point of view it is.

What Do Digital Archivists Do?

Sat, 24 Apr 2021 17:25:52 -0400

Archivists preserve cultural artifacts and do their best to make them accessible to future generations. These artifacts traditionally included books, articles, images, music, legal documents, letters, and just about any other item that contains important or meaningful information.

Until a few decades ago, these artifacts were primarily physical. Preserving them required good storage conditions and good handling practices. Making them available meant providing an index, such as a card catalog, to tell people where they were stored, and a physical space, such as a library or museum where people could physically access the items. Most items also included some kind of metadata, such as the plaques beside museum paintings that tell you the artist’s name, the title and date, and a few sentences about the subject or style.

The Girl in Cell 49B by Dorian Box

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 13:19:13 -0400

In The Hiding Girl, Dorian Box’s tough and resourceful young protagonist, Emily Calby, flees a horrific murder and spends months on the streets and on the run. Her survival depends on toughness and determination, and the help of a former gang member who recognizes in her shades of his own youth.

The Bhagavad Gita: The Song of the God Retold in Simplified English

Sun, 07 Mar 2021 16:48:43 -0500

Edward Viljoen’s Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God Retold in Simplified English is sort of a CliffsNotes retelling of the Hindu classic. Viljoen paraphrases the story’s eighteen chapters in twenty-six pages of simple, straightforward English. The remaining seventy or so pages of the book are devoted to backstory about the main characters and definitions of some of Hinduism’s core concepts.

Viljoen understands that no simplified paraphrasing can do justice to the poetry of the original work. His purpose in writing this book, as he says in the introduction, is to provide an accessible introduction to the work for those who might wish to study it in more detail later.

The Greatest Hoax on Earth by Alan C. Logan

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 06:17:48 -0500

Alan C. Logan’s The Greatest Hoax on Earth is a journalistic examination of the life of Frank Abagnale, the infamous con man immortalized in Steven Spielberg’s 2002 file Catch Me if You Can. That film, based on Abagnale’s autobiography of the same name, portrays a smooth charmer living a life of glamour and adventure.

The young Abegnale cons his way onto free flights around the world with beautiful women in tow. When he needs money, the master forger simply cuts himself a check at the expense of some international corporation so huge it will never notice the missing cash. When he needs a job, he becomes a doctor, a lawyer, a university professor. He has no training or experience in any of these fields, but he’s such a convincing impostor that no one notices. Except the FBI, who spends years pursuing him, and whom he repeatedly eludes.

The Troubled Man by Henning Mankell

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 09:23:36 -0500

The Troubled Man is the final installment in Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series, and the only one of the series I’ve read. I found the book in a Little Free Library in a park in Virginia. I picked it up, because I felt quite troubled at the time. I saw the title and thought, “That’s me.”

In this book, Wallander, a police officer in a small coastal town in Sweden, is sixty years old and spends a lot of time reflecting on his life. His daughter, Linda, also a police officer, has just had her first child with a man named Hans.

The Choice by Edith Eger

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 07:06:01 -0500

Dr. Eger gives a powerful and harrowing account of her youth, of being taken from her home in Hungary, herded into the cattle cars, separated from her parents at Auschwitz. She and her sister survived more than a year in the death camp, and for months more on the death marches that followed before an American GI lifted her from a pile of corpses. Hope and remembrance of the good in life sustained her through unspeakable horrors.

After the war, she came to the US and eventually became a psychologist, helping others through hardship and trauma. Her message is simple, though it’s a hard one for many people to realize, and requires vigilance and effort in practice. We don’t always have a choice about what happens to us, but we do always have a choice about how we respond.

No Room at the Morgue by Jean-Patrick Manchette

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 12:28:28 -0500

Jean-Patrick Manchette’s No Room at the Morgue is the first book I’ve read from NYRB Classics that’s just flat out bad. The back cover includes a blurb from Kirkus Reviews that says, “If Marx, Freud, and Jim Thompson collaborated on a noir, this might be the result.”

Actually, if Marx, Freud, and Jim Thompson had had an editor, this book would never have been published.

The Cut by George Pelecanos

Sat, 28 Nov 2020 21:25:08 -0500

I wanted to like George Pelecanos’ The Cut, but it left me a little cold. I’m a huge fan of Elmore Leonard, and Pelecanos has a lot in common with the master. Both rely heavily on dialog to convey character, and both have a good ear for the language. Leonard’s characters come off a little sharper, at least compared to this book, in which the testosterone-drenched wise guys on both sides of law do too much posturing and smart-mouthing.

Bring Him Back Dead by Day Keene

Sun, 22 Nov 2020 09:26:44 -0500

In the opening of Day Keene’s Bring Him Back Dead, sheriff’s deputy Andy Latour seems to be stuck in the wrong job and the wrong marriage. His wife, Olga, a descendant of the faded Russian aristocracy, barely speaks to him. He had promised her a life of wealth and ease as the oil boom struck southern Louisiana and the Delta Oil Company had opened a test well on his land.

But the well didn’t pan out. Latour couldn’t deliver on his grand promises, and had to settle for a $250-a-month deputy job in his once-sleepy hometown of French Bayou. After the discovery of oil in the parish, and in the nearby Gulf, the town is awash in money. The roughnecks working on the offshore rigs like to drink and party when they’re off the clock, and the town’s main street has become a carnival of swindlers, drunks, prostitutes and brawlers. The sheriff and his deputies, unable to control the mayhem, find it’s more profitable to let it all happen. Their generous share of the oil boom money comes from turning a blind eye to whoever pays them off.

Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 08:42:02 -0500

I’m often disappointed by contemporary mystery and thriller bestsellers. The characters are flat and unengaging, the writing is often heavy-handed, as if the author is telling us through a bullhorn what we’re supposed to feel. Many writers jack up the action to make up for a lack of depth, like a bad guitarist turning up his amp to try to bowl us over with power because he doesn’t have the skill to win us over with substance.

I read a lot of older mysteries, not because earlier eras magically produced better books, but because after the publishing hype machine dies down and a book is left to survive solely on its merits, the bad ones sink and the good ones remain. If a book has been in print for fifty or sixty or a hundred years, it’s because several generations of readers have found reasons to like it.

Decline and Fall by Bruce Thornton

Mon, 16 Nov 2020 09:48:46 -0500

Bruce Thornton is a classics professor at Cal State Fresno and a fellow at the Hoover Institution. Decline and Fall is both a lament and a criticism of Europe’s weakening culture and declining moral stature.

Liberals and progressives (among whom I count myself) will hate this book (though I don’t) because Thornton unabashedly advocates traditional European values such as individualism and freedom of speech, along with Christian values, including spiritual devotion to a higher power and clear and firm moral boundaries.

Dead End at Buffalo Corner

Sat, 24 Oct 2020 12:06:23 -0400

One of the downsides of indie publishing is that there are so many titles out there, it’s hard for the good ones to get attention. This is one of the good ones.

D. J. “Jock” MacDonald ran the police station in the mining town of Kilembe, Uganda in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and was responsible for keeping order in a broad swath of the country’s rural Western Province. Dead End at Buffalo Corner recounts actual events in a novel-like third-person narrative.

Collected Millar: The Master at Her Zenith

Sat, 03 Oct 2020 11:52:10 -0400

These five works show Millar to be a brilliant mystery/suspense writer. I’ve reviewed them all separately, and they’re all four or five stars. She really deserves to be more widely read.

Note that the negative reviews of this book on Amazon complain about the small print size, not the content of the works themselves. The print is indeed small. That, combined with large pages and narrow margins makes reading hard on the eyes.

The Listening Walls by Margaret Millar

Sat, 03 Oct 2020 09:13:12 -0400

Margaret Millar’s The Listening Walls opens in a room in the Windsor Hotel in Mexico City in the late 1950’s. Two American women are vacationing together. The mousy, deferential Amy Kellogg is feeling some resentment after getting roped into this trip by her domineering friend Wilma Wyatt.

Wilma, thirty-three and just coming off her second divorce, is alternately high-spirited and moody, arrogant and temperamental, a drama queen seeking attention and excitement to distract from a life that wasn’t going as planned. Her presence fills the room and leaves no air for the quiet Amy, who is slowly awakening to see how her own compliant nature has led to a lifetime of her doing only what others want her to do.

Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam

Sun, 27 Sep 2020 10:42:21 -0400

Phew! This one was a long slog. Putnam provides exhaustive data in his examination of the decline of “social capital” in late 20th-century American society. The author defines social capital as the network of informal social bonds within a society.

These bonds tie individuals and communities together, providing social, economic, and emotional support for all. The social networks of church, clubs, interest groups and sports leagues embody an ethos of trust and open-ended reciprocity: you watch my kids this afternoon, and I’ll watch yours some day in the future. In a society rich in social capital, individuals and families have much to lean on.

Six Days of the Condor by James Grady

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 21:00:12 -0400

I’m generally not a big fan of spy thrillers, but I wanted to read this one because so many fans of the genre consider it a classic. The plot itself was okay, but the writing and characterization left a lot to be desired.

I think much of the book’s initial success came from it being the right story at the right time. At bottom, it’s a conspiracy novel exposing some of shadier operations of powerful governments, and the lengths to which those governments will go to cover up their crimes.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 08:36:41 -0400

The Woman in White opens with a mysterious encounter between artist Walter Hartright and an unnamed woman dressed entirely in white. Hartright runs into her late at night along the dark road from Hampstead Heath to London. The woman is clearly frightened, fleeing some unseen pursuer. She asks Hartright for directions, which he gives. He doesn’t know who she is, but his instinct tells him to help her.

In her disconcerted ramblings, she tells him she had spent a brief portion of her youth in the country house he is planning to visit, and she warns him of an evil man he will soon encounter. After helping her on her way, Hartright eavesdrops on her pursuers: wardens from the insane asylum from which she escaped.

His Master's Voice by Stanislaw Lem

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 09:02:40 -0400

Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice is science fiction of the highest order: a meditation on man’s place in the cosmos, an examination of the limits of our knowledge, and a scathing condemnation of how politics influences the practice of science. Originally published in 1967, this title, along with a number of Lem’s other works, was reissued in 2020 by MIT press.

The opening chapters provide a brief backstory. Australian scientists, granted access to the Palomar Observatory, spent two years studying neutrino emissions raining down from space. Nothing came of their work, and they left behind only the computer tapes containing recordings of the emissions.

The Hiding Girl by Dorian Box

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 18:31:34 -0400

The Hiding Girl begins with an ominous scene. Two men, whom our gut tells us are not to be trusted, approach a woman and her daughters as they carry groceries into their isolated country home. Twelve-year-old Emily has the same foreboding instinct as the reader. Something bad is about to go down. But her mother is too trusting and her sister is too young to share her concern.

Something bad indeed goes down, and Emily is the only one to escape alive. Traumatized, hyper-alert, and stuck in survival mode, she goes on the run. She knows her family’s killers are aware that she escaped, and she fears they’ll come after her. She also wants revenge.

An Air That Kills by Margaret Millar

Wed, 27 May 2020 08:19:34 -0400

Margaret Millar’s 1957 novel has a simple setup: a bunch of men in their late thirties are meeting for a weekend away from the wives and kids at a remote country lodge to fish, play poker, and drink. Only one of them never arrives. The boys call the wives, and together they reconstruct a picture of where Ron Galloway was last seen and where he was headed.

Millar’s novels of the mid to late 1950s are brilliant studies of what actually goes on under the surface of middle-class American and Canadian life. (This one happens to take place in and around Toronto. Millar herself was from Kitchner, Ontario.)

The Door by Magda Szabo

Wed, 20 May 2020 18:03:26 -0400

Usually, when I finish reading a book, I write a thousand-word review. I can’t do that with a book as deep, thoughtful, and moving as this one. There’s just too much there. This will be one of those rare books I’m still digesting months or even years after finishing. This is also one of the few that will go onto my re-read list.

For the first 90 pages or so, I felt the book was going nowhere, and I would have given up if not for the many glowing reviews. The Door is a social study, a psychological study, a study in religion, a character study and a profound and visceral meditation on the meaning of existence. In a book like this, the character under the microscope has to be interesting. For the first 90 pages or so, Emerence just wasn’t interesting enough.

Initial Cover for The Friday Cage

Wed, 06 May 2020 19:01:46 -0400

My designer, the brilliant and stunning Lindsay Heider Diamond , has come up with yet another excellent cover for my next book. We hope to have this one out sometime this summer.

I Heard You Paint Houses

Thu, 30 Apr 2020 08:49:25 -0400

Charles Brandt, an attorney from Delaware, spent years interviewing Mafia hit man Frank Sheeran. Sheeran was one of the prime suspects in the disappearance of Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, but because of all of the suspects refusal to talk, neither the local police nor the FBI could ever gather enough evidence for a conviction.

After decades of investigation, the FBI closed the case and left it unsolved. Brandt, who had extensive experience in criminal law and who helped win Sheeran’s release from prison on medical grounds, thought he could draw a confession from the elderly Sheeran who had begun to reconsider his life as he approached death.

No Country for Old Men

Fri, 27 Mar 2020 07:13:46 -0400

I finally got around to reading this, three years after it was recommended to me by a pair of retired federal agents who had spent much of their careers pursuing drug runners in South Texas.

No Country for Old Men opens with Anton Chigurh, one of the most pitiless and chilling figures in modern fiction, escaping a police station after his arrest. From the ease with which he kills the deputy, it’s clear that local law enforcement in South Texas in 1980 isn’t prepared to handle such ruthlessly efficient criminals. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, the only first-person narrator in the book, spends a lot of time ruminating on what kind of world would produce this new breed of criminal, and on the destructive effect of having such evil at large in society.

North and Central by Bob Hartley

Tue, 17 Mar 2020 08:09:54 -0400

Bob Hartley’s North and Central opens in a bar in a working neighborhood of Chicago in the late 1970s. Andy, the bartender/narrator serves a clientele of factory workers, drunks, neighborhood characters and cops, many of whom are as brazenly corrupt as the city’s infamous politicians.

From the opening chapter, which depicts the bar’s collection of oddball regulars exchanging crude insults, you might get the sense that this book is going to be something like Animal House meets Goodfellas. It’s not that at all. This is one of those rare volumes that deeply rewards a reader’s patience.

Pick Up by Charles Willeford

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:04:06 -0400

In the opening scene of Charles Willeford’s Pick Up, counterman Harry Jordan is wrapping up a long day’s work in a San Francisco diner in the early 1950s. One last customer straggles in around 1:00 a.m. Helen Meredith is drunk, seeking a cup of coffee. She’s well dressed and obviously better off than Harry, who lives in a boarding house and has trouble keeping a steady job.

When it’s time to pay for her coffee, Helen confesses she’s lost her purse and doesn’t have a dime. Harry pays for her coffee and the two leave together to retrace her steps through the bars in search of the lost purse. As they walk, Harry confides to himself, “Gin was my weakness, not women, but with a creature like her… well, it was enough to make a man think.”

One Fearful Yellow Eye

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 15:08:43 -0500

Published in 1966, One Fearful Yellow Eye is the eighth book in John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. This one takes place mostly in Chicago, where McGee has travelled to help an old friend. Gloria “Glory” Doyle was one those “broken birds” McGee had taken in and for a period of healing after her life had gone wrong. Her happily-ever-after came in the form of marriage to the good and caring Dr. Fortner Geis.

This story opens with a call from Glory. It seems someone had been extorting the late Dr. Geis in the final year of his life, draining his savings bit by bit until there was nothing left of the substantial estate his family had expected him to pass on. Dr. Geis’ children from his first marriage, Heidi and Roger, despise Glory for marrying their father, an older widower, just three years before his death. They see her as the gold digger who stole all their money, and she wants to clear her name.

Beast in View by Margaret Millar

Thu, 30 Jan 2020 06:50:27 -0500

Margaret Millar’s Beast in View opens with thirty-year-old Helen Clarvoe receving an unnerving, vaguely threatening phone call from a woman who claims to have once been her friend. Clarvoe is the sole daughter of a wealthy Southern California family whose dysfunction will be familiar to readers of the Lew Archer mysteries written by Millar’s husband, Ross Macdonald.

The time is 1955, the place, Los Angeles. Miss Clarvoe, estranged from her mother and brother, spends most of her days alone in her room in the Monica Hotel, her door “locked against the ugliness of the world.” The caller, Miss Evelyn Merrick, tells Helen she has foreseen in her crystal ball an accident that will befall her, and goes on to describe the wounds. After Helen Clarvoe suffers an accident close enough to the one described, she calls the only man she knows and asks for help.

American Pain by John Temple

Sun, 26 Jan 2020 09:51:03 -0500

John Temple’s American Pain describes the rise and fall of America’s largest pill mill. A pill mill, in case you didn’t know, is a medical practice set up specifically to dispense narcotic pain killers. Patient appointments typically last only a few minutes, just long enough for doctor to write the prescription.

Chris George, the wealthy son of a successful South Florida builder, was running a semi-successful shop selling anabolic steroids when he started seeing pain clinics pop up all over Broward County around 2008. If he made decent money selling steroids, he figured, why not take a shot at selling opioids?

Wanda Wiley Is on Bookish First

Mon, 13 Jan 2020 07:23:49 -0500

The opening chapter of Wake Up, Wanda Wiley is available on BookishFirst this week, January 13-20, 2020. Take a look, leave a comment, and enter to win one of 100 free copies of the ebook.

American Kingpin by Nick Bilton

Thu, 09 Jan 2020 07:50:43 -0500

Nick Bilton’s American Kingpin describes the rise and fall of the darknet market The Silk Road, and its creator, Ross Ulbricht. The book focuses primarily on Ulbricht and a handful of agents from the DEA, FBI, IRS, and Homeland Security who wage a semi-coordinated effort to identify and capture the Silk Road leader, who was known online as the Dread Pirate Roberts.

Ulbricht grew up in Austin, Texas, a middle-class kid with strong libertarian leanings. According to Bilton, he had thought about creating an unregulated online marketplace long before the Silk Road went online in 2011, but the technology he needed didn’t exist yet. By 2011, those technologies were widely available. The Tor web browser provided online anonymity, while Bitcoin allowed users to complete purchases without the buyer or seller having to reveal their idenities.

Pimp by Iceberg Slim

Sun, 05 Jan 2020 11:17:08 -0500

This is one brutal book, and a damn good one. Slim writes with a fire that you rarely see even from great authors at their best. He doesn’t sugarcoat anything, nor does he lace his narrative with apologies to reassure delicate readers. He simply gives a straightforward account of a cruel world in which the cruelest rise to the top… at least for a while.

The book takes place mostly on the south side of Chicago between the late 1930s and the late 1950s. Slim, then going by the name Young Blood, arrives from Milwaukee with about one week of experience pimping his girlfriend, Phyllis. He finds a hotel on a street where rich white tricks cruise for black whores, turns his girl out on the street, and then goes looking for more to recruit.

First Draft of Book Number Six

Tue, 31 Dec 2019 12:27:05 -0500

I just finished a draft of a new novel, tentatively titled Evidence of Aggression. This one features a strong female lead who gets caught up unawares in a Hitchcock-style thriller that unfolds in my old hometown of Washington, DC. Think North by Northwest in current day DC, with a sharp, strong-willed woman in the Carey Grant role.

The Body Keeps the Score

Wed, 25 Dec 2019 16:34:44 -0500

The Body Keeps the Score describes what Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk has seen and learned in his thirty-plus years of treating trauma survivors. The author describes the causes and manifestations of trauma in a number of patients from his clinical practice: abused children, combat veterans, victims of accidents, rape, and assault. He describes how the intense emotional impact of trauma can linger for years when the mind is unable to assimilate the unbearable terror of events.

Focusing in the Age of Distraction

Sun, 01 Dec 2019 15:01:29 -0500

After months away from the keyboard, I’ve started work on a new novel, a mystery/thriller with a female protagonist. I wrote the first draft of Wanda Wiley over a period of about eight days in August, and the published version was closer to the first draft than anything else I’ve written. I had recently read and was powerfully moved by Donald Goines’ Dopefiend, and I understood his writing method even as I read: just pour it all out. Following that practice is what made Wanda Wiley feel so different from my other books, which had been more carefully planned.

Wives and Lovers by Margaret Millar

Mon, 21 Oct 2019 07:39:05 -0400

Margaret Millar was best known for her mystery and suspense novels. Wives and Lovers, published near the height of her career in 1954, is somewhat of a departure. The story takes place in Channel City, a thinly veiled version of Santa Barbara where Millar lived with her husband, mystery writer Ross MacDonald.

If you come to this this book expecting a hook and an immediately engaging plot, you’ll be frustrated. Wives and Lovers is set of interwoven character studies and a sociological portrait of a fairly wealthy small city in mid-century California. The value of the book lies in Millar’s exceptional depth of insight, the richness and complexity of her characters, and the eloquence and grace of her writing. You have to slow down to read this one, and it’s well worth it.

First Review of Wanda Wiley

Sat, 19 Oct 2019 08:41:30 -0400

Readers’ Favorite posted the first review of Wake Up, Wanda Wiley today, giving it the full five stars. From the review:

Johnny Manic Is on Sale

Mon, 14 Oct 2019 07:09:06 -0400

To Hell with Johnny Manic is on sale this week on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Johnny Manic combines the old-school crime fiction of Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson with the multi-layered deceptions of Gone Girl.

“A truly riveting tale of deception, murder and psychological suspense. One of the year’s best thrillers.” - BestThrillers.com

Wanda Wiley: Coming November 1, 2019

Sat, 12 Oct 2019 17:28:52 -0400

My next book will be available on November 1, 2019. Wake Up, Wanda Wiley is a romantic comedy with a twist of satire and magical realism. Here’s the summary:

Hannah Sharpe has been written out of all eighteen of Wanda Wiley’s romance novels. A runaway heroine who won’t conform to the plots laid out for her, Hannah has been consigned to a realm of fog deep in the recesses of the author’s imagination.

Vanish in an Instant by Margaret Millar

Fri, 30 Aug 2019 06:17:37 -0400

Margaret Millar’s Vanish in an Instant opens with a rich, cranky old woman arriving at the Detriot airport in December, 1950 to try to extricate her spoiled daughter, Virginia, from some trouble. It takes a chapter or so for us to learn that the trouble is the violent murder of a local philanderer with whom Virginia was having an affair.

Millar has the reader and most of the characters off balance from the beginning, creating an instant air of suspense that continues to deepen throughout the book. Virginia is in jail when the book opens, but the sheriff hasn’t yet charged her with a crime because he’s not one hundred percent sure that she did it. Neither is she. She was so drunk the night of the murder, she doesn’t remember anything.

A New Cover for Johnny Manic

Sun, 18 Aug 2019 12:21:41 -0400

Johnny Manic came out on August first. After re-examining the cover, Lindsay and I decided we didn’t like it. Lindsay came up with something much simpler and more striking.

Eight Million Ways to Die

Thu, 18 Jul 2019 05:44:27 -0400

Eight Million Ways to Die is the fifth in Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder detective series. You don’t need to have read any others in the series to follow this one.

Scudder is a former New York City cop who quit the force after accidentally killing a child while pursuing two thieves. By the time the book begins, he has long since left his family, and has been living for years in a mid-town Manhattan hotel. He makes his living under the table, as a cash-only unlicensed detective. His training helps him out, as do his connections on the force and on the street. His chronic drinking hinders him.

Dopefiend by Donald Goines

Sun, 14 Jul 2019 08:11:53 -0400

Dopefiend by Donald Goines opens in a shooting gallery on the east side of Detriot. The time is around 1970. The obese drug dealer, Porky, sits in an easy chair watching his customers shoot up, nod off, scratch themselves, and bleed.

The Billion Dollar Whale

Fri, 12 Jul 2019 13:59:09 -0400

The Billion Dollar Whale, by Wall Street Journal reporters Tom Wright and Bradley Hope, describes the looting of Malaysia’s 1MDB sovereign wealth fund by con man Jho Low and his associates. Although this story has been in the news for years, and many are familiar with its outlines, the book provides rich details about a series of financial crimes whose scope and audacity is breathtaking.

Black Money by Ross Macdonald

Tue, 02 Jul 2019 06:46:10 -0400

Black Money is the thirteenth book in Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer series. It opens with Archer discussing the terms of a new case over lunch at a tennis club in the fictional coastal town of Montevista, CA, an hour or so south of Los Angeles. The client, Peter Jamieson, is twenty-four years old, rich, depressed, and increasingly fat as he eats away the sorrows of a broken engagement.

Early Praise for Johnny Manic

Tue, 25 Jun 2019 06:25:38 -0400

BestThrillers.com

The first advance copies of Johnny Manic went out two months ago, and I’m starting to get some good feedback. BestThrillers.com calls it one of the year’s best thrillers.

The Religions of Man

Wed, 19 Jun 2019 14:30:23 -0500

This is a good overview of the basic tenets and flavor of world’s major religions. I found the sections on Hinduism and Islam to be the most interesting. Before reading this, I knew very little about the fundamental beliefs of Hinduism, other than what had filtered through in my readings of Alan Watts. I knew more of Islam, having read some of the Koran.

Sorry

Wed, 12 Jun 2019 08:12:43 -0400

There was a problem processing your form. The server thinks you are a bot.

Thank you

Wed, 12 Jun 2019 08:10:51 -0400

Your info has been submitted. I will respond to contact messages as soon as possible. If you signed up for the email list, thank you. I won’t spam you or share your information with anyone.

Contact

Fri, 07 Jun 2019 09:52:14 -0400

Something you want to say? Lay it on me.

About

Fri, 07 Jun 2019 09:29:32 -0400

Andrew Diamond writes mystery, crime, noir, and an occasional comedy. His books feature cinematic prose, strong characterization, twisting plots, and dark humor. Amazon editors named Impala a best of the month mystery, and IndieReader named it to their best of 2016 list. Impala also won the Readers’ Favorite Gold Medal for mystery and the 24th Annual Writer’s Digest award for genre fiction.

Gate 76 was named named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2018, while BestThrillers.com selected both Gate 76 (2018) and To Hell with Johnny Manic (2019) to their best of the year lists. The Sellout (2024) won the IndieReader Discovery Award for humor.

Johnny Manic Cover Poll

Mon, 29 Apr 2019 11:28:45 +0000

Option one, the original cover:

Option two:

Thanks to all who voted. This poll is closed. The winner was the second cover (the one with the road). After a few design iterations, we came up with the final cover, which appears below.

Credits: Road photo by David Everett Strickler via Unsplash.com.
Woman and eyes by RetroAtelier via Getty Images.

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

Sat, 20 Apr 2019 22:07:32 +0000

Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time is the fifth in a series of mysteries featuring inspector Alan Grant. The book is perhaps best known for the praise it received from mystery writer and critic Anthony Boucher, who called it one of the best mysteries of all time. That’s high praise to live up to, but the author began the book with higher aims than most mystery writers ever aspire to, and she made it clear in the first chapter that she wasn’t going to follow the traditional path to achieve them.

The Girl on the Velvet Swing by Simon Baatz

Sat, 13 Apr 2019 14:53:21 +0000

The Girl on the Velvet Swing tells the story of the 1906 murder of famed American architect Stanford White, who was shot to death before a crowd of New York’s elite at the opening night performance of a play at Madison Square Garden, one of the city’s architectural landmarks, which he himself designed. After the shooting, White’s assailant, the young millionaire Harry K. Thaw handed his pistol to a fireman and calmly walked to the police station in the company of a single officer.

To Hell with Johnny Manic is Now Available on NetGalley

Sun, 07 Apr 2019 14:19:52 +0000

My next book, To Hell with Johnny Manic, is now available for review on NetGalley .

Johnny Manic is a psychological suspense/thriller in the classic noir tradition. The cast of characters includes a very intelligent but slightly deranged and impulsive protagonist who’s doing his best to keep it together, a beautiful woman who pushes all his buttons, and a sharp, cynical detective in the mold of Philip Marlowe.

The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

Sun, 24 Mar 2019 22:15:19 +0000

This book, set in London in 1941 during the blitz, begins with a man on the outs, Arthur Rowe, strolling through a church fair fundraiser. He plays a few penny games, then has his fortune told. By a stroke of bad luck, he utters the wrong words to the fortune-teller. In exchange, she tells him the weight of the cake in a nearby stall. Whoever guesses the weight correctly, wins it, which is a big deal, because it’s made with real eggs, which are a prized rarity in wartime London.

The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts

Sun, 17 Feb 2019 16:53:22 +0000

It’s hard to write of a review of Alan Watts’ books because there’s so much in them. It’s like trying to summarize the ocean. Each time I re-read one of his works, I come away with something different. So I’m not going to try to encapsulate all that Watts says. Instead, I’ll just described what impressed me in this reading, using mostly Watts’ own words, since he can express himself better than I can paraphrase him.

You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up by Richard Hallas

Sun, 10 Feb 2019 22:36:21 +0000

Hallas’ novel opens with Richard Dempsey returning from a long day’s work at the diner to an empty house. Before he enters, he knows from the darkened windows that his wife has left him. Inside, he learns she’s taken their son and the family savings. She says he’ll never find her, but he knows she’s always dreamed of going to Hollywood.

Vernon Subutex One by Virginie Despentes

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 14:06:33 +0000

I received the UK edition of this book as a gift a few months ago (it won’t be published in the US until later in 2019). I twice tried to start it, and twice put it down after a few pages thinking, “I can’t read this. This reminds me of the most depressing parts of the DC punk scene back the eighties and early nineties, the guys who spent their last dollars on beer instead of heating their apartments. This is about the ones who didn’t grow up.”

Night Has a Thousand Eyes by Cornell Woolrich

Sat, 26 Jan 2019 15:24:30 +0000

Woolrich is a master of suspense and a brilliant writer. I was hoping to like this one more, but unfortunately, I could never fully buy into the story.

The book begins with Detective Tom Shawn walking home from work at one A.M. along the river, where he finds a young woman, Jean Reid, about to kill herself. He stops her from jumping and asks her why she wants to end her life when she’s young, wealthy, and beautiful. Her explanation forms an unusually long and well-written chapter of backstory.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 12:30:30 +0000

The most disturbing thing about this book is that the vapid, false, and mind-numbing world that the media produces and the population so whole-heartedly consumes is so much like our own. The narrator points out more than once that the government didn’t take the initiative to ban books (and by extension, reflection and depth of thought and experience); the people themselves stopped wanting them.

Awareness by Anothony De Mello

Sun, 13 Jan 2019 14:42:45 +0000

This book reads like a transcription of talks given before live audiences. The initial chapters read like the joke-filled exhortations of a professional self-help writer, but the book begins to deepen around pages 60-70. De Mello was a Jesuit priest, a trained psychologist, and apparently a devoted student of both Eastern and Western religion. His knowledge is broad and deep, and he has obviously brought great passion to his learning.

The Long Dry by Cynan Jones

Wed, 02 Jan 2019 12:58:45 +0000

In this extraordinarily beautiful and deep short novel, author Cynan Jones follows four characters through a summer day on a draught-stricken farm in Wales. Gareth begins his day by checking on two cows that are due to give birth. He finds the first one in the barn, kneeling beside her stillborn calf, “lowing sadly and gently.”

First Cover for Johnny Manic

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 13:03:01 +0000

Thanks to my artist/designer wife for this lovely cover. We hope to have this one out in 2019. What is your first impression of the cover? What do you think the book will be about? Leave comments below.

Note: Comments closed

Loose Girl by Kerry Cohen

Sun, 30 Dec 2018 14:47:41 +0000

Kerry Cohen’s Loose Girl is a memoir of emotional need in which the author recounts the compulsive sexual promiscuity of her teens and twenties and the underlying feelings of loneliness and desperation that drove that behavior. I was friends with a few girls like her during my own teens and twenties, and I had no idea they were feeling any of the things Cohen describes.

Chasing Phil by David Howard

Fri, 28 Dec 2018 01:47:24 +0000

David Howard’s Chasing Phil follows the story of two agents from the FBI’s Gary, Indiana office who go undercover to infiltrate a ring of stunningly audacious and startlingly successful con men in the mid-1970s. When agents Jack Brennan and J.J. Wedick get a tip about a guy who ripped off a pizza store owner with bogus loan papers, they ask permission from their supervisor to go undercover. The idea was to record the con man, Phil Kitzer, making incriminating statements and possibly mentioning the names of other scammers the FBI could pursue. The scope of the operation was expected to cover one or two meetings.

Kirkus Reviews Names Gate 76 One of the Best of 2018

Mon, 17 Dec 2018 15:33:58 +0000

Gate 76 was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2018 . There were only five books on the indie mystery/thriller list, so it’s quite an honor.

A Touch of Death by Charles Williams

Mon, 29 Oct 2018 11:41:25 +0000

Williams is one of the great underappreciated American crime writers of the 20th century. A Touch of Death, first published in 1953, bears the hallmarks of many of his other works: a down-and-out guy around thirty years old who’s not as smart as he thinks he is, a very smart and practical woman who’s more interested in getting things done than in sticking anyone else’s ideas of morality, and a seemingly simple caper that turns out to be vastly more complicated than it first appears.

Blood and Money by Thomas Thompson

Sun, 14 Oct 2018 13:46:48 +0000

This is a superb piece of journalism and one of the best true crime books I’ve read. In fact, it goes far beyond true crime, richly portraying every stratum of an entire culture and era. The core of the story concerns the sudden and mysterious 1969 death of a wealthy young woman who was well known and well liked throughout her community. The woman’s marriage had been in trouble at the time of her death. Her unhappy husband had a new lover, and immediately after the death, her vindictive father blamed the husband for murder.

The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton

Wed, 03 Oct 2018 12:38:18 +0000

Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude is set in a boarding house in the London suburb of Thames Lockdon during the winter of 1943. A number of Londoners have abandoned the city after the German blitz and taken up residence in the Rosamund Tea Rooms, where they live under the weight of the war and government-imposed nighttime blackouts.

I Was A Spy by Marthe McKenna

Thu, 20 Sep 2018 13:24:29 +0000

I picked this up after the New York Times ran a belated obituary for Marthe McKenna in September, 2018. This book reads like a non-stop adventure novel. McKenna (nee Cnockaert) was in her early twenties and studying to be a doctor when the war broke out. The Germans overran her native Belgium before their progress was halted and the front-line trenches formed just past her hometown of Westrozebeke. Her town was destroyed and she and her mother were forced to move a little further behind the lines to Roulers, where the Germans had set up a hospital.

I Married a Dead Man by Cornell Woolrich

Tue, 11 Sep 2018 20:09:47 +0000

I can’t believe I’ve gone this long without discovering Cornell Woolrich. I had heard of him, but I had never read his work until now. The blurb on the cover of the book compares Woolrich to Raymond Chandler. I would actually say he’s quite a bit deeper and more nuanced. While Chandler focuses on the social world, Woolrich focuses much more tightly on the interior world of his main character.

The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

Sun, 22 Jul 2018 13:16:28 +0000

This book contains some brilliant writing and colorful characters. It’s a freewheeling 1970s update on the classic noir detective novel.

The book begins just as private eye C.W. Sughrue is catching up to famed author Abraham Trahearne. Trahearne has been touring the seedy dive bars of the western states on an epic bender since his second wife disappeared. Sughrue was hired by the author’s first wife to bring him back home. The detective and fugitive are well matched for adventure. Both are war veterans and literate, intelligent, reckless alcoholics.

Best of the Year So Far

Thu, 28 Jun 2018 23:50:06 +0000

BestThrillers.com just listed Gate 76 on their “Best of the 2018 So Far” list, right after The President Is Missing, by James Patterson and Bill Clinton.

The Best Thriller Books of 2018 So Far

Two More Nice Reviews for Gate 76

Thu, 31 May 2018 15:31:36 +0000

Gate 76 just picked up a couple more nice reviews. It goes on sale tomorrow, June 1, 2018. You can pre-order through the links below.

Gate 76 Gets a Starred Review from Kirkus

Fri, 18 May 2018 15:42:41 +0000

Here’s a nice bit of news. Kirkus Reviews calls Gate 76 “A consummate thriller with some of the best characterization you’ll see all year.”

See the review at Kirkus. .

And we got a star too!

The Great Divorce – C.S. Lewis

Sun, 01 Apr 2018 15:08:57 +0000

C.S. Lewis’ allegory opens with the narrator, presumably a middle-aged Englishman, walking through the rainy streets of a city at dusk. He happens upon a line of bickering people waiting for a bus and, almost by accident, he’s in the queue, and then aboard the bus, not knowing where it’s bound.

Gate 76 is available for pre-order

Wed, 21 Mar 2018 14:39:21 +0000

Gate 76 is available for pre-order on IndieBound, Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and a number of independents like Politics and Prose. Advance copies are available for reviewers through NetGalley.

Gate 76 – Coming This Summer

Tue, 27 Feb 2018 01:28:10 +0000

A mysterious woman fleeing an unknown terror boards the wrong plane at San Francisco International and disappears into the heart of the country. Freddy Ferguson, a troubled detective with a violent past, believes she’s the last living witness to a crime that has captivated the nation.

Sifting through the wreckage of her past, he begins to understand who she’s running from, and why. Now he must track her down before her pursuers can silence her for good.

What's Wrong with Genre Fiction?

Tue, 06 Feb 2018 15:10:52 +0000

I read a lot of classic crime fiction, and when I go back to the best writers in the genre, I consistently find that they pack more substance, insight, and emotional weight into 200 pages than today’s bestselling authors can get into 500 pages. And yet, a handful of authors manage to consistently sell millions of copies of books about uninteresting characters doing far-fetched things described in prose that is not compelling and sometimes not even convincing. Why is this?

The Big Bite by Charles Williams

Tue, 30 Jan 2018 00:45:59 +0000

Charles Williams’ The Big Bite is very good crime/noir thriller, though it’s not quite up there with his brilliant 1953 noir The Hot Spot .

The Stepford Wives

Sun, 21 Jan 2018 14:05:11 -0500

This classic has good suspense and, as always from Levin, is well plotted. I won’t bother to summarize, since so many others already have, but it’s interesting to see a writer bring out the spooky side of sunshine and clean floors and fresh-smelling laundry.

The Hot Spot by Charles Williams

Sat, 13 Jan 2018 22:27:12 +0000

Harry Madox has drifted in and out of a number of jobs, and has one failed marriage and some unspecified debts under his belt. When the story opens, he’s just landing a job as a car salesman in 1950’s small-town Texas. He’s not in town long before he meets two women. The young, sweet Gloria Harper brings out the best in him, against his nature and sometimes against his will. And then there’s the boss’ wife, Dolores Harshaw, who has a knack for getting him into and out of trouble.

Help Design My Next Cover

Thu, 11 Jan 2018 11:38:39 +0000

After two rounds with the editor and many drafts, Gate 76 is just about ready for the proofreader. Below are some cover ideas from my lovely and talented wife . Please let me know which cover you prefer and why.

A Kiss Before Dying

Sun, 26 Nov 2017 07:09:54 -0500

This is an excellent mystery/suspense novel, with plenty of twists. It’s exceptionally well plotted, and I enjoyed Levin’s clear, straightforward writing.

I read Dorothy Hughes’ “In a Lonely Place” just before reading this one. The books have some things in common. Both follow a disturbed young man, both men are about the same age, both are World War II veterans, both yearn for a life beyond their reach, both are murderers, and both target women.

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes

Sun, 19 Nov 2017 00:00:00 -0500

This is a brilliant book by a brilliant writer. Unlike so much contemporary genre fiction in which killers are portrayed as inhuman two-dimensional monsters, Hughes portrays Dix Steele as a human being gone horribly wrong. Though the story is told in third person, we see the world from the killer’s perspective. We occupy his unsteady mind as he becomes increasingly unhinged, and we see how his actions arise from feelings that most people experience as difficult and uncomfortable but that he experiences as intolerable, torturing, and unresolvable.

Paris, Sept. 2017

Sat, 16 Sep 2017 16:13:00 +0000

I forgot how beautiful and inspiring this city is. The last time I was here was 1985. The train from London was smooth, fast, comfortable and quiet. Here are a few photos.

Impala Wins Gold in Reader's Favorite Book Awards

Sat, 02 Sep 2017 13:39:21 +0000

ReadersFavorite.com announced the winners of their 2017 awards contest yesterday. Impala won the gold medal in the General Mystery category. Here’s a screenshot from the awards page, showing Impala with its alternate cover:

The Bestseller Code

Sun, 20 Aug 2017 14:12:45 +0000

The Bestseller Code , by Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers, describes the results of a five year computer analysis of over 20,000 novels. The authors wanted to figure out what differentiates the 500 or so New York Times bestsellers in their corpus from the rest of the titles that didn’t make the bestseller list.

How's this for coincidence?

Sat, 19 Aug 2017 13:55:22 +0000

Back in April of this year, I was heading to south Florida to present at a conference at the University of Miami. By coincidence, my wife was returning from Miami just as I was packing to go. She had been visiting her father, and she said, “My dad wants a copy of Impala . Will you bring him one?”

I said, “Sure.” I signed a copy of the book and tossed it into my suitcase. And then for no particular reason, I tossed in a second copy. I flew out on a Tuesday for the conference that would occupy all of Wednesday and Thursday. On Thursday night, I would have dinner with my father-in-law and his wife in Key Biscayne, where I’d give them the book. On Friday, I’d fly back to Virginia.

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 06:25:22 -0500

Normally, I don’t read anything about vampires, the undead, or a zombie apocalypse because the tropes have become tired and worn out. However, the Literary Darkness group on Goodreads chose I Am Legend as its book of the month for August, 2017, and I’m glad I read it. When a book comes along and spawns a whole new genre, as this one did, it’s because the author did a really good good job in bringing a world to life, and he/she hit on some timeless themes in a new way. The problem with derivative works, like many of the vampire/zombie/apocalypse novels of the past decade, is that because readers are already so familiar with the tropes (thanks to the hard work of past writers), the authors don’t bother to flesh out their characters, worlds and scenes in the deep, visceral way that the originators of the genre had to do.

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

Sun, 13 Aug 2017 10:15:37 -0500

Reading Wilkie Collins was a revelation to me. How could I have taken so many English Lit. classes and not read this guy?

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Sun, 06 Aug 2017 08:18:43 -0500

The narrator of We, D-503, is a mathematician and engineer, the primary designer of a rocket called the INTEGRAL. D-503 is a citizen of the totalitarian OneState, in which the Benefactor presides over a society of perfect reason. People are “Numbers.” There is no I anywhere in the society, no concept of an individual. Each Number is simply a component of the larger We.

The Knife Slipped

Sun, 16 Jul 2017 00:00:00 -0500

This is the first I’ve read from Gardner, and it’s a good one. It’s more of a straight-up detective mystery than a noir, and it doesn’t attempt the reach the depth or weight you find in the best crime and noir novels, but it is entertaining.

Bertha Cool is the unapologetically unorthodox head of the B. Cool detective agency. Donald Lam, “the runt,” is her new, wet-behind-the-ears junior detective. He’s got plenty of brains and more than enough street smarts to do his job, but he has a weakness for women in trouble, or perhaps for any woman who will give him the time of day. As Bertha puts it, “You pick some little tart and fall in love with her every time.”

The Power and the Glory

Thu, 22 Jun 2017 09:42:12 -0500

I’ve read many of Greene’s books, and this is the most powerful and intense of the lot. The book follows the travels of a priest on the run from a communist regime that has sworn to abolish religion, and has got rid of every priest in the state, either by execution or by forcing them to marry. The “whiskey priest” is the last in the state. He’s been on the run for years and is wearing down.

First Draft of a New Novel: Gate 76

Fri, 02 Jun 2017 12:49:44 +0000

A few months ago, my wife brought home a book by Micheal Tolkin called Among the Dead . Tolkin was the author of The Player , which was made into a film directed by Robert Altman, and like The Player, Among the Dead is a dark satirical look at the vanity and egotism of the bit players in the entertainment industry.

Shoot the Piano Player

Thu, 11 May 2017 13:50:48 -0500

This book is dark, in the vein of Jim Thompson and Elliott Chaze. It starts out with a guy who’s troubled and hiding from life. In fact, he’s engineered his whole life to avoid entanglements, responsibilities and feelings.

The Deep Blue Good-By

Thu, 06 Apr 2017 21:03:09 +0000

Two things struck me while reading John D. MacDonald’s The Deep Blue Good-By. The first was the quality of his writing, which can be witty and insightful, and is never cliché. The second was how, especially in the case of this book, the hard-boiled detective genre can pander to male fantasy in the same way romance panders to women.

So Nude, So Dead by Ed McBain

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 07:29:23 -0500

I picked this up in a bookstore the other day because I liked the lurid, 1950s pulp style of the cover, and the opening chapter was good. I hadn’t read Ed McBain before, and I was surprised to read a first novel in which the plotting, dialog, and characters are solid throughout.

The main character, Ray Stone, is an addict who finds himself framed for a murder and has to prove his innocence. Some elements of the book are dated, such as the descriptions of fight scenes, which play out exactly as they did in the movies of the forties and fifties–a little slow, with guys in suits kicking each other in the shins and trying to wrestle pistols from each other’s hands. Some of the dated elements of the book, however, actually make it interesting. This book was first copyrighted in 1952, and slang of jazz musicians in this novel didn’t seem to appear in film until a few years later.

The Death of the Heart

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 10:03:57 -0500

I picked this up off the library shelf after reading an article that praised it. I had difficulty with a few things in this book. Bowen’s writing can be uneven. I often lost the thread of a scene, a conversation, or an interaction. Her dialog can sometimes be long-winded. Eddie especially goes on at length. Sometimes there’s a disparity between what she says about her characters and how they actually present themselves through their words and actions. (For example, why does she keep calling Eddie innocent when he knows exactly how he’s manipulating people?)

An Award and a Sale

Sat, 18 Feb 2017 15:14:39 +0000

Impala won first place for genre fiction in the 24th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards . They announced it in the March/April issue of the magazine.

IndieReader Names Impala one of the Best of 2016

Thu, 08 Dec 2016 21:20:06 +0000

IndieReader just published their list of the best indie books of 2016, and Impala was one of their choices. The list first appeared on The Huffington Post on December 8th. As of December 14, it’s up on IndieReader.com as well.

Thirty Years a Detective

Sat, 26 Nov 2016 23:14:11 +0000

Although this is by no means a great book, it is well worth reading as a historical document. The book is not a biography or autobiography of Allan Pinkerton. If you want that, look elsewhere. It is a fascinating description of the practice of crime in 19th century America.

This book’s main flaws are 1) it often reads like advertising or even propaganda for the abilities of the Pinkerton agency to thwart crime and protect moneyed interests, and 2) the prose is wordy and overwrought, even by 19th century standards.

In Memory of O'Neil McGean

Fri, 11 Nov 2016 16:59:13 +0000

I knew O’Neil since I was about 12 years old. We called him Neil back then. He was about 16 years old, and my mother used to have him come to the house to watch my brothers and me when she went out. Neil’s main job was to keep my older brother, Dan, from beating the crap out of my younger brother, Paul. Neil was very good at distracting Dan, who was 13 at the time, and the two became close friends.

After he graduated high school, Neil worked for the small business my mother owned and ran. The company collected data from the Labor Department and from the Securities and Exchange commission, verified it and cleaned it up, then published it in volumes that were sold to professionals in the financial industry. Neil’s job was to call the companies that had filed documents with Labor and SEC, and verify that all the data was still accurate. He was good at it, because he was good at talking to people.

Impala Wins Writer's Digest Award

Fri, 14 Oct 2016 11:52:00 +0000

I just got news that Impala won first place for genre fiction in the 24th Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards. The genre fiction category covers all genres (mystery, thriller, sci-fi, romance, historical, etc.). The announcement and the book will appear in the March/April 2017 issue of Writer’s Digest.

Solaris by Stanislav Lem

Thu, 13 Oct 2016 08:38:50 -0500

Solaris is a planet in a distant galaxy that orbits two suns. The laws of physics say that the planet should have been swallowed up by one of the suns as gravity drew it closer and caused the orbit to descend. Curious as why this hasn’t happened, scientists from Earth send satellites to observe the planet.

The satellites find that Solaris is covered entirely by a vast sea, and this sea moves against gravity when it needs to, in order to affect the orbit of the planet. This is what keeps it from falling into the sun. Curious, the Institute back on Earth sends a number of manned expeditions to study Solaris’ mysterious sea.

Impala Is Here!

Wed, 21 Sep 2016 15:16:15 +0000

In addition to Amazon.com adding _Impala_ to its list of best of the month list for September , they also added it to this week's Kindle Select 25 list.

I got word yesterday that Bibliolabs and Library Journal added Impala to their Self-E Select list as one of the notable indie titles of the month. They'll help make it available through local libraries around the country. Since Kirkus also featured it in their September issue, I'm interested to see if libraries pick up the paperback.

The Comedians by Graham Greene

Sun, 11 Sep 2016 09:47:05 -0500

This one starts off a little slowly, and as I reached the end of the first chapter, I started to think it might be the first Graham Greene novel I wasn’t going to like. I’m glad I stuck with it. This book builds quietly and subtly, and in the end has tremendous power, portraying tragedy on the scale of both the individual and the nation.

Amazon Names Impala One of the Best Books of September

Thu, 01 Sep 2016 11:45:37 +0000

Amazon.com released its list of the best books of September, 2016, and Impala is up there in good company with Harlan Coben, James Patterson, and Carl Hiaasen. Take a look! .

And Kirkus Reviews is running a very positive review of Impala in their September 1, 2016 issue. You can read the full review at Kirkus Reviews .

Writing and Selling

Tue, 30 Aug 2016 13:47:20 +0000

My new book, Impala, was finished in May–not just the writing, but the editing, proofreading, design, and layout. I decided to have it ready four months before release so I could do some of the promotional work that traditional publishers do: get the book into the hands of reviewers, talk to bookstores and news outlets. The ebook market is quite competitive, and like the app market for smart phones, it often seems like a race to the bottom. The writers and app developers who appear to be winning are the ones who are working really hard to sell their product for 99 cents, or to give it away for free in hopes of drawing attention to their paid works.

An Update on the Classic Crime Novel

Fri, 15 Jul 2016 14:56:48 +0000

My new novel, Impala, is a thriller in the vein of the classic crime novels of the thirties, forties, and fifties. The best of those novels follow a pattern that goes like this: An intelligent but flawed character gets in trouble after he gives into to some desire or compulsion, like lust, greed, or revenge. He finds himself surrounded by people and powers that will not let him go. His attempts to extricate himself from his troubles only lead to deeper trouble. He’s usually involved with a woman who is either in love with him or betraying him, but either way, their fates become inextricably intertwined. Finally, these stories always convey a mounting sense of inevitability, as if the fates of these specific characters in these specific circumstances could have only one inevitable conclusion.

Iceland, June 2016

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 16:01:38 +0000

I’m sitting here in Keflavik airport on a Tuesday afternoon, waiting for a flight back to the US. I stopped here for a couple of days on the way home from Dublin, and I’m glad I did. When you fly into Iceland, the first thing you see is the huge lava field of the southwest coast. It’s a broad, flat plain of lichen-covered rock, with huge swaths of purple. The color comes from Alaska lupine flowers, brought to the island in 1945. There are now millions of them along the coast and in the interior plains and valleys. They seem to grow even in the stoniest soil.

Ireland, June 2016

Sat, 18 Jun 2016 13:38:37 +0000

I arrived in Dublin on June 12 for the 2016 Open Repositories conference at Trinity College. By coincidence, my brother Paul arrived the same day from Seattle, on unrelated work, and had a room in the same hotel, two doors down the hall from mine. We met in the lobby around 5pm and were approached immediately by a drunk American woman in her 60s who asked Paul where his wife was. When he said she was at home, the woman said, “Well then, maybe you’d like to join me for a drink.” (She already had one in her hand.) Paul said no thanks, and the woman turned to me and asked where my wife was. Also at home. She invited me for drink, but I declined. Then she started cursing the “eighty year old losers” in her tour group and walked off, but not before reminding us both that we could find her at the pub next door at 8pm.

The pub next door was The Bleeding Horse, though the sign says something a little different.

They Shoot Horses, Don't They

Tue, 24 May 2016 13:57:57 -0500

This story follows Robert Syverton and Gloria Beatty, a pair of young people struggling to survive as extras in depression-era Hollywood. A day or so after meeting, they enter a dance marathon, partly in hopes of winning the $1000 prize, and partly for the promise of free food, which they get as long as they continue dancing.

The Talented Mr Ripley

Mon, 23 May 2016 08:00:00 -0500

Thomas Ripley is a petulant, emotionally stunted young man with a victim mentality, a colossal inferiority complex, and uncontrollable feelings of resentment and envy. He’s not likable, but Patricia Highsmith writes well enough to make you understand and even identify with his feelings, and to make you care what happens to him. Though the novel is narrated in third person, Ripley’s undulating moods color the description of every scene and character.

How To Make a Mess of Things

Sun, 08 May 2016 11:55:17 +0000

The other day, I was trying to buy a new phone and sign up for a mobile service plan online. I added a phone to my cart, and then when I selected a payment method, the page disappeared, and I found myself looking at a different page full of phones I didn’t want.

“OK,” I said. “Let’s try that again.”

Impala Summary Poll Results

Tue, 03 May 2016 12:03:13 +0000

Last week, I asked readers to vote on a blurb for my next book, Impala.

Two thirds of the respondents favored the “Summary” blurb, which described the main character and his predicament in straight expository prose. One third preferred the “Flavor” blurb that gave a good sense of the books’ style and tone, and encouraged the reader to piece together what the book was about.

The Postman Always Rings Twice

Thu, 28 Apr 2016 10:09:50 -0500

This seems like the prototype of American crime/noir novels. At just about 100 pages, it’s quite short. Cain doesn’t waste any time in getting to the story, or any words in telling it. In fact, many of the chapters read like a screenplay, with lots of dialog and little or no narrative. The dialog isn’t even tagged, meaning there’s no “he said” or “she replied.” Sometimes you have to back up half a page and re-read, just to keep track of who said what.

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Wed, 20 Apr 2016 14:35:27 -0500

This brilliant and original book is deeply disturbing, and at times difficult to read because of its dark subject matter and its portrayal of violence, cruelty, and destruction. I won’t go too far into the plot, since the book summary and many other reviews cover that.

In short, a young man who has become alienated from his job, his culture and himself starts “fight club,” where guys take out their frustrations by beating the hell out of each other. After fight clubs spring up in a number of cities, the members start Project Mayhem, which is an attempt to force their violence on all of society and to destroy civilization itself through a series of small, vicious, petty, spiteful destructive acts.

A Hell of a Woman by Jim Thompson

Wed, 20 Apr 2016 09:07:50 -0500

Although the plot is a bit clumsy and farfetched in places, this is still an excellent book. As usual with Thompson, he wastes no time getting the story started. Frank “Dolly” Dillon spies the woman who will will be his undoing in the first sentence of the book, and by the end of the first chapter, you know that these particular characters meeting under these particular circumstances are bound for trouble.

Thompson is simply brilliant at conveying how character and circumstance combine to form destiny. And he does it in simple, straightforward language, with no wasted words, no precious metaphor or long-winded descriptions. He simply takes you by degrees down into hell, and by the time you realize where you’re going, it’s too late to turn back.

Q and A: On Writing

Tue, 05 Apr 2016 11:04:12 +0000

What do you try to accomplish in your writing?

The first thing, I guess, is to write something I would like to read. I like books that make me think and feel. I like books that are emotionally and intellectually honest, that tell a good story, but also strive for depth. I like to see the author’s heart in their work, and to get a sense of the flavor of their mind. So I try to put all that in my work.

Indie Reader Interview

Thu, 31 Mar 2016 13:21:15 +0000

IndieReader published a brief interview with me about Warren Lane.

A Cool App with Real World Value

Wed, 23 Mar 2016 13:39:49 +0000

I don’t often write about my day job here, but I have to say, it’s always nice to see a project you worked on having an impact in the real world. Several years ago, an entrepreneur named Phil Reitenour had a scary run-in with an enraged driver . That gave him an idea. What if someone built a mobile app that could stream live audio and video of an unfolding emergency directly to a security monitoring station? Better yet, what if it could stream that data to the nearest police or public safety office? What if it could even show security personnel your movements along a map as the incident unfolded?

Q and A on Warren Lane

Sun, 20 Mar 2016 13:02:24 +0000

Where did the name Warren Lane come from?

Warren Lane is the name of a tiny street in Charlottesville, VA. It’s only a block long. I passed by it one day in 2006 when I was biking to work and the first thing that popped into my head was, “That’s the name of my first book.”

For many years, I told myself that I’d write a novel someday. Now I had the title. Two words down, fifty thousand to go.

Strangers on a Train

Sat, 19 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0500

In Patricia Highsmith’s first novel, architect Guy Haines meets psychopath Charles Bruno on a train to Texas. Bruno isn’t the kind of lunatic who instantly terrifies people. He just comes off as a little odd at first. In the course of a long conversation on the train, Guy reveals his troubles with his estranged wife, and Bruno discusses his hatred of his father.

Bruno likes to read detective novels, and he mentions, off-hand at first, how it would be the perfect crime if two strangers who met on a train were to exchange murders. Bruno could kill Guy’s wife and Guy could kill Bruno’s father, and no one would ever be able to solve the crimes, because no one knows Guy and Bruno ever met, and neither has a motive to kill someone they don’t know. Guy dismisses the idea and walks away, but Bruno becomes obsessed with it.

On Being a Self-Published Indie Author

Fri, 11 Mar 2016 14:40:03 +0000

Are you a self-published indie author by choice, or are you one of those losers who couldn’t get a book deal?

Yes.

What’s the process like? What happens between conceiving a book and getting it into the marketplace?

You get an idea, and you turn it over in your head for a while. You write a draft, and you think it’s great, so you show it to some friends. Then you think it sucks.

Black Wings Has My Angel

Sat, 27 Feb 2016 17:47:38 +0000

Back in the 1990’s, I wandered into Twice Sold Tales in Seattle, and the clerk asked if she could help me find anything. I wasn’t really looking for anything in particular, so I said, “How about something dark? That I can’t put down.”

She lit up and said, “Oh. Have you read Jim Thompson?”

The Expressman and the Detective

Wed, 17 Feb 2016 15:47:50 +0000

The Expressman and the Detective, originally published in 1874, describes Allan Pinkerton’s 1859 investigation of a messenger suspected of stealing from the Adams Express Company in Montgomery, Alabama. Nathan Maroney had been an exemplary employee with a strong reputation, and there was no hard evidence against him, but the company’s Vice President suspected him of stealing a package containing $10,000.

After a lengthy investigation turned up nothing, Adams Express gave up and wrote the money off as a loss. A few months later, a package containing $40,000 went missing from the Montgomery station. The express company wrote to Allan Pinkerton of the North-West Police Agency in Chicago and asked him to investigate.

Readers and Viewers

Sun, 31 Jan 2016 14:37:15 +0000

I’ve been getting a lot of feedback about Warren Lane. While the positive feedback provides much-needed encouragement, the negative feedback has been the most useful. There have been three consistent themes to the negative feedback:

The story isn’t told from the point of view of a single character that I can get behind and root for.
There’s too much dialog.
It’s hard to sympathize with the characters because they’re all messed up and they make bad choices.

IndieReader's Review of Warren Lane

Mon, 04 Jan 2016 20:56:50 +0000

IndieReader posted a nice review of Warren Lane today. 4.5 stars! Their verdict:

WARREN LANE is a charming comedy of errors, with a good heart and a light touch.

I’m glad they liked it!

Impala Sample Covers

Sat, 02 Jan 2016 21:16:13 +0000

After some feedback from Ingrid Emerick at Girl Friday Productions , I rewote the opening chapters of Impala. The book is ready for editing, and my wife, Lindsay put together some sample covers.

This is an old-fashioned thriller/suspense that starts out a little like Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, with a guy who’s not quite sure who is after him or why. I spent a couple of days writing and polishing a query letter for an agent, and that came out well enough to earn me an immediate rejection. I may put this up on Inkshares , which is like Kickstarter for books, but I’m not sure yet whether that will be a good fit. They seem to lean pretty heavily toward Sci-Fi and Fantasy, which this is definitely not.

Authenticity, by Dierdre Madden

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 13:13:27 +0000

I just finished reading Dierdre Madden’s Authenticity , which explores some topics that have been very much on my mind lately. The book looks at the lives of four artists in Dublin, around the year 2000. Roderic Kennedy is a successful painter in his late forties. “Successful” here means he’s able to practice his art full-time, keep a studio, and not starve. He has a little reputation and some respect among the local critics and patrons.

His brother, Dennis, has an artistic soul, which is to say, he’s sensitive and unusually attuned to and appreciative of beauty. He learned early on that he didn’t quite have the talent to fulfill his dream as a concert pianist, so he chose a career in a bank that would offer him a stable life.

Everything Noir

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 00:31:40 +0000

Thanks to Bryan Cyr at Everything Noir for posting a review of my book!

E-books and Pricing

Sun, 29 Nov 2015 15:40:19 +0000

I got an email from a fellow author who is considering raising the price of his Amazon Kindle title. At $2.99, his e-book is so much cheaper than his paperback that people aren’t buying the paperback.

I’ve seen this same phenomenon with my book . The electronic version sells about 10 times as many copies as the paperback. Amazon’s more voracious readers tend to go for e-books, because they consume so many of them. When self-published authors advertise through any of the promo sites that send out email blasts to their subscribers, we’re reaching mostly those voracious Kindle readers.

Stoner by John Williams

Wed, 25 Nov 2015 09:52:05 -0500

This is one of the best novels I’ve ever read. Williams’ writing and insight are far above most of the writers we praise today. He is consistently deep and clear, driving directly to the heart of meaning. When I find books like this–and there are few in the world–it makes me wonder why so many people bother reading all the crap that’s out there. In fact, I had a hard time reading anything for several weeks after finishing this book, because everything else seemed so poor by comparison.

Waiting for the Barbarians

Tue, 24 Nov 2015 08:56:49 -0500

I’ve read a number of Coetzee’s books, and this one is my favorite. It’s been a few years since I read it, but it made quite an impact. It’s not quite as dark as Disgrace. I haven’t read every book out there, but among the ones I’ve read, this and John Williams’ Stoner are the two best novels of the late 20th century.

Misreading

Mon, 19 Oct 2015 21:22:58 +0000

Years ago, I wrote a story that included one character who was crass, uncouth, racist and sexist. He was a minor character, making one brief appearance.

Impala – First Draft

Thu, 15 Oct 2015 15:34:35 +0000

I finished the first draft of a new book a couple of weeks ago. That means I have a lot of work ahead. My wife, Lindsay , has already started making comps for the cover.

52 Pickup by Elmore Leonard

Sun, 11 Oct 2015 07:36:42 -0500

I’ve read a few of Leonard’s books, and this is my favorite so far. This one stands out from the others primarily for its portrait of the protagonist Mitch and his wife, Barbara. Leonard always does a good job of portraying criminals and people whose lives are on the decline. In Mitch and Barbara, he does an exceptional job of portraying two strong, intelligent people determined not to let their lives go down the drain.

Summary of an E-Book Promotion

Sun, 27 Sep 2015 13:24:33 +0000

I changed the e-book price on Warren Lane from $4.99 to $0.99 on all platforms, from Saturday, Sept. 19 through Sunday, Sept. 27. I posted a link to the book on my Facebook page, and friends shared it. That resulted in 2 sales before the promotional sites started pushing the book on Monday. (Most people in my FB network who wanted the book already had a copy. Hence the low sales.)

The aim of the sale was to increase readership, not to make a profit. I knew I’d be taking a loss here. I spent about $600 to promote through a number of sites, which are listed below. I was going to post the actual sales figures for the book, because I like openness and transparency (I’m an open source developer by day). But I learned that publishing sales numbers violates the terms of service for both Amazon and Kobo. So the most I can do here is talk about how the promotions affected my sales rank.

The Most Insecure People In the World

Sat, 20 Jun 2015 17:55:08 +0000

I’ve been reading Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s Plato at the Googleplex , in which Plato shows up in 21st century America to promote his books and engage in Platonic dialog with contemporary American thinkers, writers, researchers and technologists.

In one of the early chapters, the woman who is escorting Plato through Google headquarters (the Googleplex) mentions to a friend that she has escorted many writers on their book tours, and that “writers are the most insecure people in the world.”

Producing a Book Is a Lot of Work!

Thu, 28 May 2015 14:06:27 +0000

Warren Lane is finally out there, available for purchase as both a paperback and an electronic book. You can get it at Amazon , or you can order a copy through your local bookstore.

You can also read a sample chapter right here.

Warren Lane – Almost There

Fri, 22 May 2015 02:53:48 +0000

So I wrote this book called Warren Lane, and it should be available for sale in the next week or two. I made the final revisions to the paperback proof copy, and the electronic versions are ready to go. I’m just waiting to review the updated paperback.

The other day, I came across a blog post that said all writers should answer these three questions:

Why did you write the book?
What do you want readers to get out of it?
Why should anyone buy it?

Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson

Fri, 15 May 2015 06:13:40 -0500

I just re-read this this week. What a book! I think this might be Thompson’s best. I forgot how funny it is in places, especially the first few chapters and the chapter near the end with Rose’s tirade about Lennie, which has to be one of the raunchiest things ever printed. How did Thompson get away with that in 1964?

This book also happens to be one of the most scathing indictments of Southern small-town life ever written. It’s a little over the top in places, which comes off as bawdy, farcical and harrowing all at the same time.

Writing and Programming

Sun, 25 Jan 2015 21:17:04 +0000

I’ve been a software developer since 1998. I didn’t actually like computers until I started working at Amazon.com back in the days when they sold only books. I got a job in their customer service department after a brief stint of teaching in the Seattle public schools. At the time, Amazon’s customer support was delivered primarily through email. If you had a question, you’d write to orders@amazon.com, and one of the customer reps in Seattle would write back.

Everyone in customer service worked at a Unix terminal, using Emacs as a mail client, and a set of command line tools with names like orderstat and customerstat to track down problems.