Just wanted to wish everyone Happy New Year. I’ll be out of the office and offline until January 2. My New Year’s resolution, by the way, is to catch up on all the great ideas I had planned to write about in 2006 but didn’t quite get to. We’ll see how that goes.

Here’s a holiday story that’s sure to give you the warm fuzzies. In New York City, the CEO of a media company spent more than a quarter of a million dollars on an original, handwritten copy of Clement Clarke Moore’s classic poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” and then–in an act of wonderful Christmas cheer–read it aloud to a group of underprivileged family members and business associates in his luxurious Manhattan apartment.

The Associated Press story quotes the auctioneer who sold the poem to the CEO (and then hand-delivered it to the party) as saying the guests “couldn’t believe it.”

I’m sure they couldn’t.

Actually, call me a grinch, but I take some comfort in the fact that the poem with which this jolly gentleman gifted himself was probably plagiarized by Moore, a wealthy Manhattanite himself.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

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From The New York Times:

Murder Ink, the mystery bookstore on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is going out of business after 34 years, along with its younger sister store, Ivy’s Books and Curiosities. On Monday the owner, Jay Pearsall, posted a sign in the window announcing that Dec. 31 would be the final day.

Fingers point to some of the usual suspects: rising rent, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, eBay. But there’s something even more sinister at work, according to owner Jay Pearsall: death.

"I used to do apartment buys," he said. "Children of people in the neighborhood who had died would sell their parents’ books; lots of them immigrants, lots of them Jewish, educated, liberal, and they just had all these great books. I realized that our clientele was dying."

I don’t think you have to be a New Yorker who shops at Murder Ink (I’m not one) or even a fan of crime fiction to be bummed out by this.

R.I.P., Murder Ink.

By the way, even though I could have really, really used the sleep, I stayed up last night and finished C. J. Box’s Free Fire. I couldn’t stop reading. I wrote yesterday that I loved it up to page 192 and that I was really hoping it would hold up.

Well, it holds up. Boy, does it ever.

You can read my review in the January 1 & 15, 2007 issue of Booklist, unless I can’t wait that long and publish it here first.

The HarperCollins vs. Regan bout is clearly going to go all 15 rounds. Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at the Wall Street Journal quotes Judith Regan’s lawer, Bert Fields, and a spokesman for News Corp., Andrew Butcher, each offering different versions of Regan’s alleged anti-Semitic statements:

In the next breath, Mr. Butcher said, Ms. Regan said that literary agent Esther Newberg and HarperCollins employees David Hirshey, Jane Friedman, and Mr. Jackson constitute “a Jewish cabal. All of you people are conspiring against me.”

Mr. Fields said his client didn’t use the words “Jewish cabal” in the conversation. “She said there was a cabal, not a Jewish cabal,” he said.

The source of HarperCollins’ version, attorney Mark Jackson, was said to have been taking notes during the conversation. But without a smoking MP3, it’s hard to imagine there will be any satisfactory resolution.

At first this story was kind of fun. Now it’s just depressing. But at least we can go back to ignoring O. J. Simpson.

John Shannon is one of my favorite crime writers. C. J. Box is another. Yesterday I read about half of the latest in Box’s Joe Pickett series, Free Fire, and over lunch I made it to page 192. As much as I love reading, there are times when opening a book is about as exciting as picking up a shovel to dig a camp latrine.

This is not one of those times.

Reading Free Fire gives me the rarest of sensations, making me feel not like a professional paid to offer a cold-blooded assessment but like a fan who can’t wait to keep turning the pages of the newest book by his favorite author. It’s series gold, a perfect blend of the fresh and the familiar. And it’s really, really fun. I’m already kind of bummed out, knowing that I’ll be done reading in a day or two.

In April I wrote at length about In Plain Sight (2006) and my feeling that it wasn’t up to Box’s usual stellar standards (see Out of Range [2005]). So when I picked up Free Fire I was hoping that it would be a return to form. Much as it seems unfair to hold Box to his own high standards–it hardly seems possible that a series can get better indefinitely–I want each new book to be as terrific as the last.

(Like an addict, I also wonder sometimes if it’s the potency of the stuff that’s diminishing or if I’m merely learning to metabolize it better.)

Anyway, it’s too early to say for sure–it depends on how things wrap up–but so far, Free Fire definitely feels like a return to form.

Welcome back, Joe Pickett.

From the New York Times:

 . . . a stunned Ms. Regan was confronted by security guards who arrived with boxes and ordered her to leave . . .

Judith Regan, she of the O. J. Simpson book imbroglio, has been sacked, allegedly for making anti-Semitic remarks. People who scrutinize the industry much more closely than I do have all sorts of theories about this. (And, as usual, you should read Galleycat. And also this interesting opinion in The New York Sun.) They examine the “real” reasons, factor in the personalities of the players involved, and so on.

I’m not qualified to make a pronouncement on the particulars of this case, but–call me a cynic–I really wonder if the same slurs (if uttered as alleged) would have been grounds for dismissal before If I Did It blew up in the face of News Corp./HarperCollins/ReganBooks. Regan has long been famously difficult, after all, and most corporate behemoths manage to look the other way at all sorts of unsavory behavior–until the behavee is perceived as hurting the brand or the bottom line.

Stay tuned for Regan vs. Friedman. (Jane Friedman, the CEO of HarperCollins Worldwide, is apprently the one who signed Regan’s pink slip.)

(I know I said I wasn’t going to blog about If I Did It anymore, but I had no idea it would lead to this!)

Just added to the upcoming slate of celebrity prizefights: crafty veteran Kitty Kelley, a scribe who’s never pulled a punch, takes on the worldwide champeen of all media, the belle of book-dom, the Isis of image, the tsarina of talk, yessir, Oooooooooooooooprah Winfrey!

In this corner, wearing a svelte black Armani suite with a taupe blouse, clutching a notepad and a tape recorder…oh, wait. She likes Oprah? Well, that could be boring.

From the AP via USA Today:

NEW YORK (AP) - Congratulations, Oprah, you have been selected by Kitty Kelley as the subject of her next tell-all, unauthorized biography.

“Oprah Winfrey has fascinated me for many years - as a woman, she has wielded an unprecedented amount of influence over the American culture and psyche,” Kelley said in a statement issued Wednesday by the Crown Publishing Group, an imprint of Random House, Inc.

The book does not yet have a title and a publication date has not been set. Financial terms were not disclosed.

And here’s the disappointing part:

While the author has spoken disparagingly of the Bushes, likening them to the Corleones, she appears to have a higher opinion of Winfrey.

“She has built an empire around her personality and has been one of American’s most admired business women and philanthropists,” Kelley said in her statement. “Oprah’s story is one of hope, promise and realization of the American dream.”

By the way, a Booklister has beaten Kelley to the punch in at least one regard: Children’s Books Editor Ilene Cooper will publish her own book about Oprah, Up Close: Oprah Winfrey (Viking), in April.

(Ilene is also an Oprah fan, and the book is for young readers, so don’t expect too much dirt. Sigh.)

Rather than offer anything original today, I will copy down the words of another writer. Peter Rabe is one of my favorite pulp fiction writers, someone who deserves to be better known today than he is. I recently finished reading a two-for-one reissue, My Lovely Executioner/Agreement to Kill (Stark House), and I did a lot of underlining. Rabe had the hard-boiled gift–the ability to boil a sentence down to its essentials while still rendering it more evocative than a paragraph’s worth of glorious adjectives.

From My Lovely Executioner:

Jessie sat next to me, but it was just clothes.

You wake up innocent as the morning sometimes, and that feeling may last for as long as a minute.

The men were short, tall, with jackets, without jackets, ties on and off, but all of them noisy.

She was wearing an evening gown which didn’t seem to start until you looked down to the waist.

“You’re not a drunk, Jimmy.”
“I may not look like one, Jessie, but the spirit’s there.”

I put the glass down, turned her the right way, and we had a fearful kiss. It was so technical I could hear gears clanking and rattling.

Tooley’s ears were getting pointed, he was listening so hard.

I shot him someplace high. I wasn’t going to have him following me around any more.

From Agreement to Kill:

His eyes were open the way a box is open.

This was something to learn, Spinner thought. Keel seemed to have no troubles to speak of, but drove a big car, liked all the chores he was doing, or, at any rate, didn’t have any feeling about them, like an ape. This was something to learn.

Executioner is a better book, but I doubt anyone who starts reading will be able to stop until they’ve finished both of them.

The Booklist Book Club, which I lend a hand with, but which is really the domain of my colleague Mary Ellen Quinn, has taken a great leap forward by forming a partnership with the amazing folks at Downers Grove Public Library.

You can read all about it here. Or you can just go straight to the book club and join the conversation.

Here’s to talking–and arguing, but always civilly–about books.

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