I read a short story in The New Yorker recently. Nothing unusual about that. Since its inception in 1925, the magazine has been properly praised for its contemporary fiction, and over the years I’ve read its stories often and usually with admiration. The title of the piece was intriguing: “Barbara, Detroit, 1966.” I didn’t know who this Barbara was, but I certainly know Detroit and … Continue reading →
Not long ago I was asked to give a talk to a Jewish adult education group in London, Ontario. The request had come from a member who had learned of two books I had written almost 50 years ago. Now I had spoken and written about those books often over those decades, but never from quite the angle being suggested. And for that reason, and … Continue reading →
There are signs lately that the old saw about old dogs and new tricks may be passé. Take that pathetic old rocker Ted Nugent, for example. Now so far past his way-over-valued prime that he reportedly needs a cane to haul himself on stage (sorry, I just made that up to be snarky), old dog Ted sounds like he’s actually learned a new trick. Remember … Continue reading →
So I had my first cell phone nightmare last night. I’m not talking about some frustrating episode that actually happened involving the ubiquitous little device that has taken over our lives—the kind of experience where you just can’t get the damn thing to do what it’s supposed to. I’m sure many of you are only too familiar with what I’m talking about. No, this was … Continue reading →
We seem to have a lot of them these days. Just read the papers or watch the news. No, I’m not talking about all those tireless journalists working their fingers to the bone, breaking bombshell, after expose, after blockbuster about the crazed, pathetic or frightening antics of our sitting president. There are so many of them at work right now, and the competition among them … Continue reading →
We had friends in from out of town a few weekends back, and because their Dallas Cowboys and our Detroit Lions both had games that started at 1 pm on Sunday, the local sports bar was in order. And so well ahead of game-time the four of us were ensconced in a large booth partaking of typical pub fare and surrounded by big-screen TVs. For … Continue reading →
The past week or so has been passing strange. Every day I’ve driven 15 minutes to the house I lived in for about two decades with the woman I divorced about seven years ago. When I moved out back then, I left behind almost all of my most cherished possessions, my books, stacked in boxes in a basement back room. Now having decided to return … Continue reading →
Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn’s domestic crime thriller, became a publishing sensation in 2012, began its journey to the silver screen with Flynn writing the screenplay in 2013 and is scheduled for its cinematic debut in October, 2014. Recently there’s been a spate of publicity for the movie with the news that it will end in a way substantially different from the ending of the novel. … Continue reading →
There’s been a lot of web chatter lately about what I’d call the morality of book pricing. The loudest noise, with perhaps the widest ramifications, came last year when the Justice Department accused Apple and the Big Five publishers of conspiring to raise e-book prices. In its war with Amazon for consumer dollars, Apple, according to the Justice Department, had colluded with the publishers to … Continue reading →
As it has for most booklovers, both readers and writers, this week has been a sad one for me. We lost Elmore Leonard at 87 this week, for my money the greatest crime novelist of our time. Beyond his greatness as a writer, Dutch was a good man and a good friend. I had not seen him in a few years, and I certainly would … Continue reading →
The other day I went Googling to see if I might have missed a published review of one of my books. I typed in one book and another came up, well down the list and from two years ago. That was before I began publishing, and before any of my books were available, with one exception. There were still old copies of Murder in the … Continue reading →
Recently a reader friend, a woman I’ve never met, but with whom I’ve exchanged emails, left a review of my new novel The Car Bomb on the book’s Amazon page. Previously she had read and reviewed my two non-fiction books, Murder in the Synagogue and Squelched. That’s her preferred type of book, or genre, True Crime, and so I was a little surprised when she … Continue reading →
Let me stop here for a moment to praise Victoria Louise Best. If the name is familiar, perhaps it’s because you know her blog, “Tales from the Reading Room,” one of the U.K.’s top literary/book review sites. It’s the place where she calls herself “Ms. Litlove.” Or maybe you’ve read one of her extraordinary biographical sketches of writers in crisis. You can find the latest … Continue reading →
Last time I spent most of a lengthy post on John Grisham’s hot new one, The Racketeer and promised a comparison of sorts with Gillian Flynn’s super bestseller, Gone Girl. (If you want to catch up first, please click here.) One of the things these books have in common is the timeless power of good storytelling. Yes, I guess by now we’ve all read about … Continue reading →
Sorry, if you’ve dropped by here at all this year, you’ve found the same damn self-serving post day after day, week after week, month after month. And so you probably concluded that I was either dead or too busy to blog. Fortunately it was the latter. I’ve been putting the finishing touches (always a treacherous trap for me ) to a couple of new crime … Continue reading →
Okay, far be it from me to argue with a classic old saying that apparently goes all the way back to Matthew (5:14-16) in the New Testament: “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all … Continue reading →
This morning I was in bed more or less minding my own business, and I decided to do what I often do under such circumstances: read my email on my very smart little mobile. The first new one was from someone I don’t know, a fellow named Waziri Ahmed, and in the subject line I read, “Kindly get back to me……” Now, perhaps like many … Continue reading →
Kristine Kathryn Rusch, one of our most prolific and important bloggers on the business of writing and publishing, recently wrote a lengthy 3-part series of posts titled, “Why Writers Disappear.” There is something in it for just about every writer, and it certainly caught my eye, because, after all, I am a writer who, about 40 years ago, disappeared. Kris starts by listing a dozen … Continue reading →
There’s been lots of chatter lately about the importance of populating a novel with sympathetic characters. We’ve had advice from agents about what will entice a traditional publisher. Editors have warned about what is or is not acceptable these days if you want to sell books. Reviewers complain and readers fulminate about how they just couldn’t get into a particular piece of fiction, because they … Continue reading →
So here’s just one way of looking at last night (November 6). It was a stunning defeat for: Mendacious Mitt The One Percent and those self-serving billionaires who tried to buy an election Intolerance Those who would yank health care from our newly covered millions Ayn Rand Lies and deception as essential campaign tools Secrecy and hidden agendas Those who would deny women the right … Continue reading →
If you’re a writer, you know there may be nothing as pleasing and gratifying as a warm word of approval from someone whose opinion you deeply value. Well, yes, sufficient book sales to allow full-time work on the next book is also pretty cool. I’ve been fortunate enough to experience the former, though not the latter, but what was that line from the incomparable Fran … Continue reading →
That things have changed is a pretty common observation from those interested in books and publishing these days, but my story about the Great Transformation might shed a different kind of light. I started working on my first ebook in 1970. Yes, people still lived in caves back then, and ereaders were only a gleam in the eye of some techie savant. But for me … Continue reading →
Is fiction dying? Or, in this early flowering of the ebook age, is it resurgent? You can find advocates for each position, but what continues to fascinate me are questions surrounding what each kind of narration, fiction and non-fiction, can do best. If you’ve glanced around this site, you know I’ve written and published both fiction and non-fiction, true crime reportage, memoir, short stories and … Continue reading →
In my last post… I offered some thoughts on the currently heated discussion of genre versus literary fiction and said I’d look at the experience of constructing my own novels. So I did not begin with any such intentions, but it turns out that my novel The Obsession is a kind of hybrid, a cross between a psychological and a literary thriller, with elements of … Continue reading →
In two recent posts titled Why Crime?… I’ve talked about why we’re so taken with crime books and why crimes usually happen in my own books. One more (rather stray) thought occurred, and I decided to drop it in here: It may be a good thing at times to remind ourselves that the most efficient, ruthless and, to my mind, disgusting criminals in our midst … Continue reading →
Suddenly two weekends ago (8/25-26)… All those contentious words flying around the web for weeks on the subject of book reviews (Too nice? Too nasty? Not worth the trouble?) got trumped. In a sprightly expose in the New York Times with the irresistible title, “The Best Book Reviews Money Can Buy,” David Streitfeld caused a firestorm of comments (331 the last time I looked) by … Continue reading →
In my last post I asked… Why do so many of us seem to love books that feature crime? You might want to check it out here, before heading into this one. But in any case, as promised, I want to talk about why crimes usually happen in my own novels. (Check out The Obsession, and The Disappearance.) Certainly I hope they’ll add a measure … Continue reading →
Why do so many of us seem to love crime with a passion? Why do we devour book after book as if we’re in the clutches of an addiction? All kinds of crimes in all kinds of books: True Crime practitioners and confessional scribes dealing in white collar and organized wrong-doing, mass and serial murder, assassination and the lethal encounter with family member, lover or … Continue reading →
So this is the third and last installment of this series… In Part 1 and Part 2 I’ve been asking, are Murder in the Synagogue and Squelched: The Suppression of Murder in the Synagogue irrelevant, ancient history? If not, why not? So how common is what Prentice-Hall did to Murder? As I recount in Squelched, soon after the publication of Murder, I heard directly from … Continue reading →
Last time… I wrote about my books Murder in the Synagogue and Squelched: The Suppression of Murder in the Synagogue and ended by asking what, if anything, their fate 40 years ago might add to the conversation we’re having about the Great Shift in publishing these days. You can catch up with that post here. One of the things people say after reading Squelched is … Continue reading →
Oh, you’ve noticed? Yes, a pretty common observation from those interested in books and publishing these days. But I’ve got a story about the Great Shift that’s a bit unusual and might shed a different light. It was 1970—I know, people still lived in caves back then, but stick with me for a moment—a big year for me with the publication of Murder in the … Continue reading →