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How To Piss Off A Marine*
“Marines? That’s like the Navy’s Army, right?”
*Please only try this on a Marine with a functioning sense of humor. Possible side effects include headache, nasea, and having a mud-hole stomped in your ass.
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WTF?
11.17.05 | Permalink | 3 CommentsWhat have I been up to lately? Damned if I know. It’s I spent the past week drifting around in the Bermuda Triangle on a rubber raft – it’s just gone. I remember working… eating… working… sleeping… working… and that’s about it.
So, what have you been up to?
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Light House
11.04.05 | Permalink | 6 CommentsA recent debate on the merits of art vs. entertainment (a good roundup by La Weinman here) got me started thinking about what kinds of stuff I myself want to write, and why. The upshot: I want to write entertaining stories, and if they rise above “mere” entertainment, well, that’s a bonus.
That’s not to say I don’t want to write stories with great characters, or stories that say something about the human condition, but it is true that, to me, their value as entertainment trumps most other considerations. In part this is because sometimes great writing comes with drawbacks built in. Raymond Chandler, David Goodis, and James Ellroy all write directly from their psyches to the page, and they’ve produced some great and powerful stories, but their stories are also flawed in some ways.
Part of this is a renewed emphasis on craft on my part – how can I take these characters and this plot and write them as cleanly as possible? I remember reading, years ago, that light verse must be much more tightly constructed than the more serious variety, and I’d say that’s true with fiction, too. You can forgive whatever flaws you find in “Rew Wind” or “Trouble Is My Business”. You might not be so generous to “Bonnie And Clyde’s Last Ride”.
The power of a realization like this is that it frees me from guilt, the guilt of not writing what I “ought” to be writing. I did my best to leave that behind when I chose to write crime fiction, and I’m not going to feel bad about it now.
OK, that’s pretty ponderous stuff, so let’s switch gears: “It was the only job I was qualified for, besides running around in my underwear beating the shit out of people.” Can we just decide that Pat Lambe is “the Ray Banks of America”? He’s got the same dark humor, the same keen eye for the day-to-day realities of the working class, and a powerful narrative voice to match the inimitable Banquitez.
The rest of the latest issue of Thug Lit is also pretty good. This one and Crime Scene Scotland, also new to me, make the passing of Plots With Guns a litle easier to take.
(Oh, and Dave, if you’re lucky you’ll someday be known as “the Graham Powell of New Jersey”. If you’re lucky.)
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Girls, Guns, and Money
That’s the title of a nice article on CNN.com about Hard Case Crime, which seems to have been prompted by Stephen King’s return to the bestseller list with The Colorado Kid. There were a few hysterical errors – the “reprinted” one of Domenic Stansberry’s “decades-old” novels (which first saw print last year), Wade Miller is a guy (actually a pen name of a pair), Black Lizard is an imprint created by Vintage in the early ’90s (they date at least to the ’80s, and I think the line predates Vintage’s involvement).
But as the article says, “That’s worth a drink. Straight up.”
An added bonus – the distinctive Hard Case spine makes it easy to spot their books on the shelves of the local Half Price Books, where I picked up Branded Woman this past weekend.
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Shredded Eloquence
10.30.05 | Permalink | 2 CommentsIn some ways, short story writers are like migrant fruit pickers. We go where the work is. That’s especially true for mystery writers. So when you show up at the camp, you’re not really surprised to see some old friends, as well as a few new faces.
And so it is with the latest issue of Shred of Evidence. Familiar names like Steven Torres, Stephen D. Rogers, John Broussard, and Fleur Bradley appear (what, Ed Lynskey and Nick Andreychuk were too busy?), as well as a few new names. Best of all is the return of “Bullet” Bob Tinsley and his detective Jack Brady. And I’ve got a story there too, “Bystanders“. So mucho kudos to Megan N. R. Powell (“No Relation”) for another terrific issue.
And I owe a big shout out to a couple of guys who helped me out with the story. And I won’t even mention a certain editor who saw fit to reject what some people are calling a “modern masterpiece” (my wife replied, “Yeah, whatever.”). So in your face!
If you read the story, be sure to leave a comment and let me know what you thought of it.
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