If you missed Terry Gross’ ”Fresh Air” interview of the always-fascinating Charles Ardai yesterday, you can check it out online. Although much of the information about the Hard Case Crime publisher was familiar to me from my own interview three years ago (I’m proud to say that Booklist recognized HCC’s potential appeal long before the mainstream media caught on), two things were new to me. One was that both of Ardai’s parents were Holocaust survivors, a fact that obviously had a huge influence on his life. And the other was that his forthcoming novel, Fifty-to-One, is a humorous tale about a character named “Charles” who happens to be the editor of a publishing concern called “Hard Case Crime.”

Metafiction: the hot new trend in crime fiction!

The winners of the Edgar Allan Poe Awards have been announced.

Best Novel

Down River, by John Hart (St. Martin’s Minotaur)

Best First Novel By An American Author

In the Woods, by Tana French (Viking)

Best Paperback Original

Queenpin, by Megan Abbott (Simon & Schuster)

Best Critical/Biographical

Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley (Penguin)

Best Fact Crime

Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, by Vincent Bugliosi (Norton)

Best Short Story

“The Golden Gopher,” Los Angeles Noir, by Susan Straight (Akashic)

Best Young Adult

Rat Life, by Tedd Arnold (Dial/Sleuth)

Best Juvenile

The Night Tourist, by Katherine Marsh (Hyperion)

Best Play

Panic, by Joseph Goodrich (International Mystery Writers’ Festival)

Best Television Episode Teleplay

“Pilot,” Burn Notice, by Matt Nix (USA Network/Fox Television Studios)

Best Motion Picture Screen Play

Michael Clayton, by Tony Gilroy (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Robert L. Fish Memorial Award

“The Catch,” from Still Waters, by Mark Ammons (Level Best)

So, for the first time ever, there’s a short story in Booklist. Called “Reading Is My Business,” it’s in the May 1 issue, our Mystery Showcase, and it’s a hard-boiled tale about a boozy book reviewer named . . . Keir Graff. And it’s written by . . . yep, you guessed it, me.

What’s going on here? Was this some kind of an inside job, a no-bid contract? Well, yes. But I was as surprised as anyone at the way it came about.

What happened was this: on a gray morning in early February, as I was coming up out of the subway, I had an idea that almost made me laugh out loud. I had been reading a lot of crime fiction–well, I always read a lot of crime fiction–but I thought, “What if I took the conventions of a hard-boiled novel and applied them to something really unlikely like . . . oh, say, book reviewing?”

I banged out a draft almost in one sitting, using fictionalized versions of myself and my colleagues as characters, not even thinking about what I would do with the story when it was finished. I was just writing for fun, which, when you usually write with a more specific end in mind, is . . . well, fun.

I made myself laugh several times. Sometimes that’s a danger sign, but I showed the story to a few people and they thought it was funny, too. I showed it to Bill Ott and he liked it. I started thinking that maybe I should try to publish it. But where? It seemed a little offbeat and “inside” for the mystery magazines, and maybe a little too jokey for the literary magazines.

Bill suggested that I send it to Otto Penzler for an opinion. I’ve never met the man, but he was kind enough to reply within a couple of days. You’re a pretty funny guy, he wrote back. Will it be published? Maybe in BOOKLIST?

I told him that a 5,000-word short story would wreak havoc with our page budget. And, I was thinking to myself, Booklist doesn’t publish fiction–we only review it. But it was a nice thought. After all, who would get the jokes as well as Booklist’s readers?

I forwarded Otto’s e-mail to Bill. A few minutes later, Bill was in my office with an encouraging look on his face.

“How long is your story?” he asked.

I told him.

He winced. Clearly we weren’t going to sacrifice 28 book reviews for my story, no matter how funny we all thought it was. But then he had another idea: what if we started it in the magazine and finished it online?

What if, indeed.

I hope you’ll read it, and I hope you’ll like it. I’m honored to have written the first fiction in Booklist’s storied history, and I’m indebted to both Bill and Otto–and my coworkers, many of them named in the story–for their enthusiasm.

And as you read, bear in mind that this peek at the Booklist offices is entirely fictional.

Well, almost entirely.

Just got news of Hard Case Crime’s January 2009 title:

In an e-mail blast, publisher Charles Ardai shared a few facts about this reprint’s provenance:

…this is by far the rarest of all Block’s books. He wrote it under a pseudonym he never used before or since, it’s never been published under his real name (or this title), and he couldn’t even locate a copy of it himself for thirty years!

From the sample chapter:

The taxi, one headlight out and one fender crimped, cut through downtown Tampa and headed into Ybor City. Turner sat in the back seat with his eyes half closed. He was a tall, thin ramrod of a man who was never tense and yet never entirely relaxed. His hair was the color of damp sand, his eyes steel gray. His lips were thin and he rarely smiled. He was not smiling now.

The stub of a cigarette burned between the second and third fingers of his right hand. The fingers were yellow-brown from the thousands and thousands of cigarettes which had curled their tar-laden smoke around them. He looked at the cigarette, raised it to his lips for a final drag. The smoke was strong. He rolled down the window and flipped the butt into the street.

I seem to remember a book written by 13 authors…oh, yes: Naked Came the Manatee (1997). And, in fact, Carl Hiaasen, Elmore Leonard, et al appropriated the concept from a practical joke called Naked Came the Stranger (1969). Now there’s an Internet start-up that’s hoping to turn a hoax and a lark into a business model. According to Publishers Weekly (”WEbook Launches Collaborative Book-Writing Site,” by Lynn Andriani), WEbook “is hoping to do for novel writing what American Idol did for music and what Wikipedia did for information.”

Essentially, WEbook hopes that people will come to its site to write books and then vote on which ones should be published.

Within the site, there are dozens of (mostly nonfiction) subject areas where members can start writing. Members can designate their work as "private," which allows them to keep the rights and share it only with their friends, or make it "public," which is where WEbook makes its money: if a book garners enough votes from the WEbook community, WEbook copyedits, typesets and publishes the book, giving the author and contributors a 5% royalty on sales.

Their first book, Pandora, a thriller with 17 authors (but 34 total contributors), came out last month. Is it any good? Sample chapters are available at WEbook. Sample paragraphs:

Pandora took a deep breath. "You know I love you, but I can’t be with someone I don’t trust," she exhaled. "Is there something I should know?"

Chris shook his head in disbelief. How could the woman resting in the next room, a woman he’d only met twice, know something that only five other people in the world knew? How had she divined the secret Chris had carefully guarded since he was eighteen? What the hell was her secret?

Oh look, here’s another one: Naked Came the Phoenix (2001).

According to recent polls by Harris Interactive, Americans’ favorite genre is crime fiction and their favorite book is the Bible. I’m sure Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great, 2007) could make a one-liner out of that, but I’ll just posit my suspicion that not everyone who picked the Bible has read it cover to cover.

Here’s the rest of the list:

#1 - The Bible
 
#2 - Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
 
#3 - Lord of the Rings (series), by J.R.R. Tolkien
 
#4 - Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
 
#5 - The Stand, by Stephen King
 
#6 - The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
 
#7 - To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
 
#8 - Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown
 
#9 - Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

#10 - Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

The Harris site has breakdowns by gender, race/ethnicity, generation, political party, region, and education. Interestingly, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all agree on Gone with the Wind as the second-best book.

Say hello to The Long Goodbye, Chicago (”Crime thriller ‘The Long Goodbye’ selected for ‘One Book, One Chicago,’ by Deanese Williams-Harris, Chicago Tribune):

“The Long Goodbye” by crime-genre master Raymond Chandler is the 14th and latest book selected for the Chicago Public Library’s “One Book, One Chicago” program. Twice a year, in the spring and fall, the library selects a new title for the program in an effort to promote reading and discussion among all city residents.

A great detective story, starring journalist and author Robert Fisk. From The Independent (”The curious case of the forged biography,” by Robert Fisk):

Needless to say, I noticed one or two problems with this book. It took a very lenient view of the brutality of Saddam, it didn’t seem to care much about the gassed civilians of Halabja - and it was full of the kind of purple passages which I loathe. “After the American rejection of the Iraqi weapons report to the UN,” ‘Robert Fisk’ wrote, “the beating of war drums turned into a cacophony…”

Dare I suggest to readers that this kind of cliche doesn’t sound like Robert Fisk? The only war drums I could hear were those of my own astonishment. For I never wrote this book. It wasn’t plagiarism - a common practice in Cairo, which is why I ensure that all my real books are legally published in Arabic in Lebanon. No, this wasn’t plagiarism. This was forgery.

The 2008 Edgar Nominees have been announced.

Best Novel

Christine Falls, by Benjamin Black (Holt)
Priest, by Ken Bruen (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)
Soul Patch, by Reed Farrel Coleman (Bleak House)
Down River, by John Hart (St. Martin’s Minotaur)

Best First Novel By An American Author

Missing Witness, by Gordon Campbell (Morrow)
In the Woods, by Tana French (Viking)
Snitch Jacket, by Christopher Goffard (Rookery)
Head Games, by Craig McDonald (Bleak House)
Pyres, by Derek Nikitas (St. Martin’s Minotaur)

Best Paperback Original

Queenpin, by Megan Abbott (Simon & Schuster)
Blood of Paradise, by David Corbett (Random House/Mortalis)
Cruel Poetry, by Vicki Hendricks (Serpent’s Tail)
Robbie’s Wife, by Russell Hill (Hard Case Crime)
Who Is Conrad Hirst? by Kevin Wignall (Simon & Schuster)

Best Critical/Biographical

The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction, by Patrick Anderson (Random)
A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational, by Maurizio Ascari (Macmillan)
Deviance in Contemporary Crime Fiction, by Christiana Gregoriou (Macmillan)
Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley (Penguin)
Chester Gould: A Daughter’s Biography of the Creator of Dick Tracy, by Jean Gould O’Connell (McFarland)

Best Fact Crime

The Birthday Party, by Stanley Alpert (Putnam)
Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, by Vincent Bugliosi (Norton)
Chasing Justice: My Story of Freeing Myself After Two Decades on Death Row for a Crime I Didn’t Commit, by Kerry Max Cook (Morrow)
Relentless Pursuit: A True Story of Family, Murder, and the Prosecutor Who Wouldn’t Quit, by Kevin Flynn (Putnam)
Sacco & Vanzetti: The Men, The Murders and the Judgment of Mankind by Bruce Watson (Viking)

Best Short Story

“The Catch,” from Still Waters, by Mark Ammons (Level Best)
“Blue Note,” from Chicago Blues, by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Bleak House)
“Hardly Knew Her,” from Dead Man’s Hand, by Laura Lippman (Harcourt)
“The Golden Gopher,” Los Angeles Noir, by Susan Straight (Akashic)
“Uncle,” from A Hell of a Woman, by Daniel Woodrell (Busted Flush)

Best Young Adult

Rat Life, by Tedd Arnold (Dial/Sleuth)
Diamonds in the Shadow, by Caroline B. Cooney (Delacorte)
Touching Snow, by M. Sindy Felin (Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing - Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
Blood Brothers, by S.A. Harazin (Delacorte)
Fragments, by Jeffry W. Johnston (Simon & Schuster/Simon Pulse)

Best Juvenile

The Name of This Book is Secret, by Pseudonymous Bosch (Little, Brown)
Shadows on Society Hill, by Evelyn Coleman (American Girl)
Deep and Dark and Dangerous, by Mary Downing Hahn (Clarion)
The Night Tourist, by Katherine Marsh (Hyperion)
Sammy Keyes and the Wild Things, by Wendelin Van Draanen (Knopf)

Best Play

If/Then, by David Foley (International Mystery Writers’ Festival)
Panic, by Joseph Goodrich (International Mystery Writers’ Festival)
Books, by Stuart M. Kaminsky (International Mystery Writers’ Festival)

Best Television Episode Teleplay

“It’s Alive,” Dexter, by Daniel Cerone (Showtime)
“Yahrzeit,” Waking the Dead, by Declan Croghan & Barbara Machin (BBC America)
“Pie-Lette,” Pushing Daisies, by Bryan Fuller (ABC/Warner Bros Television)
“Senseless,” Law & Order: Criminal Intent, by Julie Martin & Siobhan Byrne O’Connor (Wolf Films/NBC Universal)
“Pilot,” Burn Notice, by Matt Nix (USA Network/Fox Television Studios)

Best Motion Picture Screen Play

Eastern Promises, by Steven Knight (Focus Features)
The Lookout, by Scott Frank (Miramax)
Michael Clayton, by Tony Gilroy (Warner Bros. Pictures)
No Country for Old Men, by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, based on the book by Cormac McCarthy (Miramax)
Zodiac, by James Vanderbilt, based on the book by Robert Graysmith (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Robert L. Fish Memorial Award

“The Catch,” from Still Waters, by Mark Ammons (Level Best)
The Simon & Schuster - Mary Higgins Clark Award

In Cold Pursuit, by Sarah Andrews (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
Wild Indigo, by Sandi Ault (Penguin/Berkley Prime Crime)
Inferno, by Karen Harper (Harlequin/MIRA)
The First Stone, by Judith Kelman (Penguin/Berkley Prime Crime)
Deadman’s Switch, by Barbara Seranella (St. Martin’s Minotaur)

[Spoiler alert: If you don’t want to know what happens to Easy Rawlins at the end of Walter Mosley’s Blonde Faith, stop reading now.]

My review of Walter Mosley’s Blonde Faith was due on June 15 (and was published in the July 2007 issue of Booklist; the book was published in October). It was a hectic time, and, uncharacteristically, I finished the book that very morning, on my bus ride to work. In the final few pages, I was reminded yet again why reviewers must read every page of every novel they review: Easy Rawlins’ car goes off a cliff and, apparently, Easy dies.

Holy crap! I read the end again and was convinced that, yep, this was the end of the road for Easy. When I got to work I discussed this startling development with my boss, Bill Ott. Bill was a little more skeptical than I was–having read as widely as he has in crime fiction, he can be forgiven for a little cynicism about the possibility of a next-installment resurrection–but agreed nonetheless that it was newsworthy.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t news we could really break.

I have to confess that I was excited. Reading books long before the general public, and having advance knowledge of plot twists, is a great perk of the job. But while the public wants to know what we think–is the book worth reading?–they don’t want to know all of the details. Like the end, for example. Some people don’t even want to read a book for which they’ve accidentally learned the ending. So to write a review trumpeting the fact that a character dies, well, those are e-mails nobody wants to answer. The pleasure of having privileged information, then, is tempered by having to keep that information secret.

Still, I felt that Easy’s seeming death had to be addressed. It fit in naturally with the review I’d been drafting in my mind, because the book didn’t read as if Mosley’s heart was in it. And given all the other kinds of books he’d been publishing with increasing frequency, the death thing fit the picture of a restless writer who was ready to move on to new challenges.

I went through a few drafts, but even phrases like “shocking ending” seemed to hint too broadly. I settled on this:

But if this extraordinary series is beginning to drift, there are indications that suggest Mosely may be thinking about wrapping it up.

Why am I revisiting the subject now? Because Mosley’s talking about it. In October, he told Ebony (”Could this be his last?” by Lynette R. Holloway) this:

“I’m thinking about not writing any more Easy Rawlins novels,” says Mosley. “But I don’t know. I might wake up one day in 20 years and decide there is a story I want tell about Easy Rawlins. But for now, this could be it. You can’t write [about] something forever.”

A short while later he had apparently made up his mind. The other day, he told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (”Easy does it,” by Bill Ward) this:

“That’s it. I’m finished writing Easy Rawlins novels,” said Mosley, who was dressed in black down to his sneakers, but clearly not in mourning. “I have so many other things to do, to think about, to wonder about. I have a lot of books to write.” 

And he talked about it with Tavis Smiley on the radio.

Smiley: “Say it ain’t so, man. Say it ain’t so.”

Mosley: “It’s so, it’s so. I can’t write about Easy forever…The truth is I have many, many books in my mind, many more books than I could ever write in my life. And even though I love writing Easy and I know people like reading about him, he’s been–in the 3,000 pages that I’ve published on him, I’ve covered him. He’s like, we know everything we need to know about Easy Rawlins in those 3,000 pages. And so it’s time for me to move on and do other things.”

Nobody’s really saying “Easy dies”–they’re talking about “the end of the series” and so on, but it’s clear enough. By the time Patrick Anderson reviewed Blonde Faith for the Washington Post (”Can Easy Rawlins Survive This ‘Blonde’?“)–interestingly enough, alongside Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost–Easy’s demise had become part of the zeitgeist enough that Anderson felt comfortable opening with:

Last week I read two novels that are said to be the end of two admired American series.

(Why not throw in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, too? Oh, he said “American.” Although there’s an interesting tangent here, if I had time, about how the issue of a Major Character’s Death obsessed Potter fans for months before the final book’s publication, and the furor that greeted some supposed spoilers.)

Lost in all of this, I think, is discussion about the larger arc of Mosley’s career. I’ve wondered aloud whether he’s diluting his talents. If Booklist’s reviews are anything to go by–and they certainly are–his non-Easy efforts are pretty uneven.

Is Mosley making a mistake by leaving behind the books that made him famous? Is he writing too many books too quickly? Is he trying to refashion himself from a writer of intelligent entertainments into a literary lion/renaissance man/Important Writer? Is he, in fact, an Important Writer?

As I said, I admire his restlessness and ambition, although sometimes I’ve had to force myself to read the results. As for Easy’s retirement, I’ll let Anderson have the last word:

If I am tentative in writing off Rawlins…it is because, by and large, novelists are not to be trusted.