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Books

• Books

  Borders is Bankrupt. Who’s Next?

  02.22.11 | Permalink | 3 Comments

  So the long-anticipated Borders bankruptcy has finally come to pass. Too bad, really, because despite some of its shortcomings, Borders was a really good store. I’ve been shopping at one Borders or another since I moved to Atlanta in 1992, and began shopping at the Roswell Road store.

  Back then the chain bookstores were Waldenbooks and B. Dalton’s, typically housed in the local mall, and limited in size and inventory. These quickly became obsolete as Borders and Barnes & Noble began opening the Wal-Marts of bookstores.

  That’s an important note – despite its upscale presentation, with the comfy chairs and the cappuchino cafe, Borders was essentially a warehouse store that competed primarily on the size of its inventory, and to a lesser extent on price. In modern retailing you either want to be at the top, selling luxury goods, or the bottom pushing commodities, and there’s not much of a luxury market in book.

  So I personally think Borders had a viable business plan, except for some extraordinary bad luck. By the late nineties, they were faced with a new rival, one that stocked every single book in print, and was a close as your home computer. Amazon, naturally.

  Since becoming the major player in bookselling, Amazon has also been the prime mover in the e-book revolution. This turn of events has made it easier for authors to take their books directly to readers, threatening another segment of the book industry: publishers. Some well-established authors are electing to reject their publishers’ offer of e-book royalties and go independent. This may be a great move; it may be a terrible one. But it has to have the publisher worried.

  That’s because one of the things the Internet is great at is disintermediation – cutting out middlemen. Books are produced by writers, not publishers, and they’re sold to readers, not bookstores. Those segments are just itermediaries, and technology is making it easier to bypass them all the time.

  What does this mean? For one thing, it means that now I can get books electronically that I would never have been able to get in print, because their small sales would not be profitable under the old model. I hope this trend continues; if it does I may even have to break down and buy a reader.

  But as I’ve said before, I like books, the physical feel, the smell, the heft. I like bookstores, and can spend hours browsing there. And I like any publisher that can bring me the books I want. So I worry about the future of publishing. It will bring many benefits, I’m sure, but I hope it doesn’t bring along too many drawbacks with them.

• Books, Friends

  Buy This Book: “Killing Ways”, by Steven Torres

  02.10.11 | Permalink | Comment?

  Another new ebook makes its debut today – Killing Ways, a collection of stories by the estimable Steven Torres, author of the “Precinct Puerto Rico” books, among others. I may have had a hand in this one, as I badgered Steven about putting together some of his short stories and even volunteered to format them for the Kindle. I’m pretty happy with the results:

  

  And the inside is even better. Two brand new stories featuring Ray Cruz, a mob enforcer in 1970s New York City. Four stories about Russian mercenary Viktor Petrenko. And three never before seen stories of horror, urban fantasy, and science fiction (one of each, actually).

  If you’ve never read Steven, check out “Padrino“, a Ray Cruz story from last summer’s Plots with Guns.

  I’m chuffed beyond words at how this turned out, and you will be too, once you get off your bum and grab a copy.

• Books

  David Thompson, 1971-2010

  09.15.10 | Permalink | Comment?

  

  David Thompson, co-owner of Houston’s Murder by the Book bookstore, passed away yesterday at the age of 38. I met him at ConMisterio in Austin back in 2006. This was also the convention where the anthology Damn Near Dead, from David’s Busted Flush Press, was launched. I got him to sign my copy, though he didn’t have much room crammed in between some of the other signatures. Or maybe he just wanted to let them get the attention.

  He drew a little arrow to Busted Flush, I suppose to remind me who he was. As if we could forget.

• Books, Reviews, Writing

  Strictly Shut-Ended: “Quiller Balalaika”

  12.21.09 | Permalink | 3 Comments

  So last night I finished Quiller Balalaika, the 19th and final novel about British superspy Quiller by Elleston Trevor (under his pen name “Adam Hall”). It was written in 1995, and deals with the rise of organized crime is post-Soviet Russia. It’s an above average entry in the series, and seemed especially good after the disjointed Kobra Manifesto. I intentionally saved Balalaika until then end, and not just because it was the last in the series. I read it last because, as he wrote it, Trevor was dying from cancer.

  If the reality of his daily life affected the story, I didn’t notice it much. Perhaps in Quiller’s gambit to bring home the big prize, in which he risks more than he ever has before, and even admits to it, or in his open spirituality, but even these are not out of character with the rest of the books. And this is no “last episode”; unlike “M*A*S*H” or “Cheers”, for example, this is just one more adventure in a string of them. Trevor had said what he wanted, and didn’t have anything to add.

  More remarkable is the fact that this book includes afterwords by Trevor’s wife and his adult son, in which they describe the last months and even days of his life. The writer loved life, wanted more, and keenly felt the loss of things he would never do. One thing he was damned sure he would do: finish his final work, dictating the last few pages as he was too weak to type.

  Then the book was done, and so was he.

  I wish I had met him. He was attending conventions as late as 1995, when he was already quite ill, and if I had been involved at all in mystery fandom then, we might have met. He sounds like such an interesting man, a proper gentleman, but engaging rather than reserved.

  I wonder if we can see reflections of him in Quiller, his greatest creation. Quiller’s passion, his compassion, his discipline and neuroticism. Quiller could be fatalistic, could see that there may be no way out, could know that one day there would be no way out, and yet he always tried to pull one last rabbit out of the hat…

  When I finish up a series like this and know that I’ll never read another Quiller book, I always feel a sense of loss. I always want more. But in this case it’s not just the books I’ll miss. I could have met him if I’d only known, and now, it’s too late.

• Books, Movies

  Quiller Beats Bond

  10.05.09 | Permalink | 9 Comments

  In the past year I’ve become a big fan of the Quiller novels of Adam Hall, a pseudonym of English novelist Elleston Trevor (most famous for The Flight of the Phoenix).

  Quiller is unusual for a fictional spy. He’s extremely taciturn, with no personal relationships outside of work, and no real friends in it – only people he respects. Despite this, he frequently shows compassion to those wounded, physically or emotionally. When in the field he’s all business. He never engages in casual conversation, he probes for information. He seems to be an expert on just about every subject, especially martial arts, and has such a complete knowledge and mastery of his own physiology that he can, for example, make himself faint it required.

  Now, none of that is really so unusual, but Quiller is also deeply neurotic. He loves living on the brink, but at the same time it wears away at his nerves so that he’s always at the breaking point. He frequently lies to himself or ignores his own better judgement to find the guts to continue. And there’s not a speck of humour to be found in these books, only grim irony.

  Physically he’s left undefined but I always pictured him as slightly built but wiry, blonde, and generally nondescript.

  Contrast that to Bond, the philandering clubman, always quick with a quip (moreso in the movies). Bond certainly sees to his business but, compared to the aescetic Quller, he certainly indulges his vices, with considerable relish.

  While watching the cheesy early-80s Bond flick Octopussy the other day, it occurred to me that there’s a spy out there right now who matches up to my image of Quiller in just about every way: James Bond. The “rebooted” franchise, with its darker tone, its emphasis on skill instead of seduction, and, most of all, its Bond in Danial Craig, is just about exactly the way I’d pictured Quiller.

  Go read the books, though, they’re really unique, and with the “Harry Palmer” novels of Len Deighton, really make up a sort of alternative universe of spies to the one we normally think of.

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