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 keep the prices of their new e-books well above Amazon’s uniform pricing of $9.99.

A few of the publishers folded quickly and agreed to pay the government substantial penalties. The others and Apple decided to fight but eventually folded as well, or in Apple’s case, lost badly. The result? Ultimately, lower e-book prices for fortunate readers. But also much debate and discussion concerning the true costs of publishing digitally, what constitutes appropriate retail pricing when there’s no ink, paper and distribution involved, and what a fair share for the author should be.

At the same time there’s been a good deal of controversy over self-published books that are placed on the market for less than a buck or two, or even free. Some publishers, authors and commentators have screamed about these book bargains as if they are some kind of dire threat to the future of civilization. Others have raised questions about what low or no prices say about an author’s self-worth or the true evaluation of his/her own book.

But given the fact that low prices and giveaways are among the very few ways an unknown author can find some semblance of an audience, I think the prevailing opinion on this subject is something like, “Hey, whatever floats your boat.” And that laissez faire attitude is basically where I come down.

Look at what happened decades ago to my own True Crime classic Murder in the Synagogue. About that book, the Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Coles wrote at the time: “I was absolutely enthralled by it. It’s one of those non-fiction novels that one simply cannot put down.” But back then the publisher undermined the book, in part by raising the price by a third. And until just recently, it’s safe to say most readers had never heard of Murder. If you’d like to know the full story, check out my memoir, Squelched: The Suppression of Murder in the Synagogue. Or if you’d like a condensed version, try this blog post: We’re Not in Manhattan Anymore.

Sometimes, having choices on pricing can force you to think more carefully about what’s really important to you. Now I’ve just decided that, more than anything, I want my books in the hands of folks who might find some value in them. How to do that? Well, obviously one way is to drop the price, so that’s what I’m doing on all 13 of my books. For how long? Well, at least until I can notice whether there’s a difference in demand. So for now let’s just use the time-honored phrase, “for a limited time only.”

The two mentioned above, Murder in the Synagogue and Squelched, are now just 99 cents. The same for each of the opening novels in my two trilogies: The Obsession (The Truth Beauty Trilogy, Book 1), and The Car Bomb (The detroit Im dying Trilogy, Book 1). Both just 99 cents. The second novel in each series, The Disappearance (The Truth Beauty Trilogy, Book 2), and Admission of Guilt (The detroit Im dying Trilogy, Book 2) are each now $2.99.

As for my 7 shorts, (all stories, essays and brief memoirs), I’ve set them all free. If one sounds interesting, just pick it up at no cost.

Ahead, before the end of the year, I’ll be publishing a new novel that will be something of a departure for me from the crime thrillers I’ve been writing. And also I’ll be offering two new shorts: a lengthy interview with the great Elmore Leonard, and an in-depth analysis of the two huge best-sellers, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, and John Grisham’s The Racketeer.

How much will these new ones cost? I don’t know yet, but once again, I’ll be delighted to have the choice. And if I decide later that I’ve made a wrong move, how cool to be able to try a different price all on my own. That’s just one fine feature of our Brave New World of publishing.

The post THE MORALITY OF PRICING appeared first on TVLOCICERO.COM.

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 not claim any special bond or connection. Many others were much closer to Elmore. But there is also a sense in which he was a special friend to all writers, with his terrific 10 Rules of Writing and, perhaps even more so, as a model of the devoted, unpretentious and wonderfully productive artist and craftsman.

Actually, I had thought about getting in touch recently, especially after a reviewer, whose taste and judgment I admire, wrote this about The Car Bomb and Admission of Guilt, the first two novels in my new trilogy set in Detroit: “If you like Elmore Leonard, you’ll love these books.” Of course, the words came as an unexpected gift, even though I didn’t believe for a second in the validity of any such comparison.

But I held off calling or putting a note in the mail when I heard through his long-time researcher and assistant Greg Sutter that Dutch, who would have been 88 in October, was intensely focused on finishing the current novel in progress. There was no way I was going to intrude or lay even a small, social burden on his precious time.

Now he’s gone. And like so many others, I have a pain in my heart thinking about Elmore falling to that stroke before he could put the finishing touches to what was going to be novel number 47.

My history with Dutch was limited to only a handful of small events and exchanges, but I thought I’d briefly recount them here for whatever interest they might hold for others and perhaps to make myself feel just a little better by adding a tiny bit to the marvelous collective memory that envelops him now.

So twice he gave me an intro to his agent-at-the-time. The first, back in the early ’90s, was an old guy in Hollywood, the one who followed H. N. Swanson, the legendary “Swanie,” who helped make Elmore Leonard both rich and famous. I worked with that fellow for a while, until I sent him part of an early version of The Car Bomb, and he told me he couldn’t sell anything featuring a local TV anchor.

And then some 20 years later Dutch kindly suggested his big time guy in NYC. That second agent and I never got anything going after he expressed no interest in dealing with the novel I ended up publishing last year, The Obsession.

I also worked with Dutch on a couple of occasions when I was making TV specials. Two decades ago I wrote and produced a one-hour documentary on Detroit’s main artery, Woodward Avenue, it’s heartline running north from the river 25 miles all the way to Pontiac. Arrayed along the way was “every reason for hope and despair in urban America,” if I remember the tagline correctly.

It was Dutch’s favorite avenue, featured in more than one of his Detroit-based novels, and he readily agreed to play a role in the story I was telling. First, we recorded him reading a passage from one of those novels, and then as darkness fell in the city’s New Center area, we shot as he walked the empty sidewalk past chained and boarded up storefronts. Finally, the shot pulled back wide to show how deserted the whole place was, and there at the top of the shot was the illuminated General Motors sign atop the giant company’s headquarters a few blocks away.

Later, after the shoot, when I got back to my car parked on Woodward, I found a window smashed and the radio gone. Of course, we shot the looted car, and that image made the perfect capstone to the sequence that married Elmore’s read and his walk.

Then five years ago I finally got the chance to do a piece I had been wanting to produce for decades, a TV bio sketch of the “Dickens of Detroit.” This time we shot for a couple of days with Dutch, including a lengthy interview at his home in Bloomfield Township, about 15 minutes from where I live. Heading for his 82nd birthday, he was thin and a bit frail but still very lively and as sharp as ever. He could not have been more forthcoming and generous with us.

That video bio sketch is the one on this website. The show was part of a series called “World Class Detroiters,” and, of course, Dutch was the most appropriate subject we ever presented. Minus the commercials, the piece was about 22 minutes, and so I struggled mightily to cram in as much of Elmore, his life and story, as possible. In doing so, I could only use brief snippets from an interview that went on for almost an hour and a half. It was conducted by the show’s on-camera host and my good friend, Emery King, a former NBC White House correspondent, working from a long list of my questions.

A few days ago, after Elmore’s passing, I dug out of my computer a transcript of the full interview, something only a handful of folks have ever seen. I read through it and marveled again at how much Dutch had given us. And I quickly decided to see if I could present it in a fashion that would give others the pleasure of an expansive Elmore talking about his life and work. What follows is just a small portion of the interview. If you find interest and value in it, I’ll include more here on my blog and perhaps also find a place to present the whole thing.

So here’s Elmore Leonard talking about why he used two of his favorite settings, the appeal and essence of his stories, and how to rob a bank.

Emery: Two of your favorite settings are Detroit and the Atlantic coast of Florida. Why those two settings and is there a connection?

Elmore: Because I’ve lived in both. Because I’ve lived in Detroit since 1934 and remember a lot about Detroit. And that Atlantic coast of Florida because we have a place there. I bought a motel for my mother back in I guess the ’70s. It only had three units in it, but it gave her something to do. And then we would go down and stay with her. Now we’ve got a place in North Palm Beach, but we don’t stay there that long, never more than two weeks, once or twice a year, because I’d rather be here. I mean, even in the winter. I like the winter. I like the seasons.

Emery: Why do you think your readers are so interested and drawn into these two worlds of cops and criminals, worlds that most people wouldn’t want to be a part of?

Elmore: No, I think they’re drawn into crime and mysteries because these stories always have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the endings are always satisfying to the readers. They know that the good guys are going to win in the end. I think that’s the main reason. Because you look down the New York Times list, and they’re all crime or mysteries.

Emery: Your major characters are usually trying to outthink each other one way or another, or outwit each other. Do you see your stories essentially as a battle between good and evil?

Elmore: I suppose, when you get right down to it, if I were to analyze my stories. But for that matter, all stories are about good and evil. I mean, there are degrees of evil and good, but I think all stories are asking, what’s the opposition? What are we dealing with here?

Emery: Do you analyze your stories?

Elmore: No, never.

Emery: Why?

Elmore: Because I’m not interested in analyzing them. I don’t know what the theme is, for example. When the screenwriter, Scott Frank, who has written two of mine—Get Shorty and Out of Sight—takes on the job, he’ll ask me, he says, “Well, what’s the theme?” I said, “I don’t know. I have no idea.” So, he’ll read the book, and then he tells me what the theme is, which is always impressive. “Really?” So he feels he needs to know what the theme is in order to write a screenplay.

Emery: About your bad guys, you’ve said this: “I don’t think of them as bad guys. I just think of them as normal people who get up in the morning and wonder what they’re going to have for breakfast. And they sneeze and they wonder if they should call their mother and then they rob a bank.”

Elmore: Yeah. That’s really most of them. I mean, that’s the way it is, you know. There’s a guy in the paper this morning who robbed a bank. He had been let go from his job, and he robbed a bank. And the prosecutor was going to give him less than a year. Now he’s got a job offer, and people feel sorry for him. Bank robbery is attractive to people. Willy Sutton said, “That’s where the money is.” That’s why he robbed banks. But all you’ve got to do is ask for the money, and the teller will give you the money, and then you walk out. They’ll give you the money if you’re convincing enough. There was one guy, the FBI called him, ah, who is that comedian who never got any respect?

Emery: Rodney Dangerfield.

Elmore: Rodney Dangerfield. They called him “the Rodney Dangerfield bank robber,” because he would go in and ask for the money, and they wouldn’t give it to him. Until, finally, he got a gun and went in. But if you go in with a gun, then you’re facing a lot of time, if you’re arrested. So it’s best just to be nice and hand the teller a note and hope that she’s frightened enough to give you the money. Most of them get $2,000 or less. They’ll get whatever is on the top of the open drawer, there in those little sections—tens, twenties, fifties, and one hundreds. But you don’t want to get handed the dye pack. When I first began researching bank robberies, I had a time getting a bank to show me a dye pack. Finally, one of them did, and it is triggered, the mechanism goes off, as you’re going out the door, and there’s something in the door frame that triggers the dye pack and then, phew, you’re covered with red or whatever color dye. And there’s just money on the outside of the pack. You know, inside is what makes it erupt. I had a friend in Florida, a judge, who had a guy who was up for breaking his probation by robbing a bank. So, he did four years, and then he came out and he hoped that having done the four years would suffice for breaking the probation. And the judge said, “Yeah. It’s okay. But how much did you get in the bank robbery?” And the guy said, “$2600.” He said, “But I’m going out and the dye pack went off. And so I had all this red dye, and then I went home, and I tried to wash the money. And I was trying to pass these pink twenties, and they caught up with me.”

So there you have just a taste. If you’d like more of this great writer and wonderful man talking about his life and his craft, just let me know.

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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 the Flynn book’s inventive plotting, fascinating (and unreliable) narrators, rich themes and savvy style. And let me say up front, I liked much of it and for those very traits that so many others have noted.

Also, and this may only be my own strange predilection, I liked the novel for what it lacks. Yes, it’s a crime thriller, but there’s no CIA, no FBI to speak of, no Navy Seals, no black ops crew buried in some super-secret government agency, not a single terrorist foreign or home-grown, no physical torture, little blood and gore, no bible-obsessed serial killer and no deviant genius with an imminent plot to destroy half of mankind. Really, bored and annoyed is what I am with most thrillers these days, with incredible plots running rampant and predictable characters laying bloody awful things on each other.

In Gone Girl we’ve got just a nicely terrifying domestic crime drama featuring a 30-something married couple with complex issues and two seemingly stumbling small-town cops. Well, anyway, that’s the one-sentence version.

Now as you may have already guessed, I have a thing about plausibility. But at first, I found only an occasional unlikely note. Early on in the back story there’s a strange time lapse between Nick and Amy’s dreamy first meeting at a party, where they already seem half in love, and their chance encounter on a Manhattan street eight months later. Nick says he was going to call, but the slip of paper with Amy’s phone number got ruined in the wash. Patently ridiculous: each of them could easily have found the other through the party’s host.

Yet Amy acts as if this is no big deal and is simply delighted to have him back in her life. But the Amy we will come to know would certainly have punished Nick for being such a dolt. So why the time lapse? Does it tell us something about each of them? Perhaps how desperate Amy really is, how careless and incompetent Nick is? Maybe, but as we learn much later, an important plot point happened during those eight months. Amy started dating Tommy who didn’t pay her enough attention and got himself accused of rape.

Both Nick and Amy are laid-off magazine writers in NYC, and his decision to move them back to his hometown, North Carthage, Missouri, and to buy a bar with what’s left of Amy’s inheritance seems a bit unlikely. But he is close to his twin sister Go, loves his dying mother and hates his demented father, and these connections make the decision more credible. Actually, one of the things I liked most about the novel was its convincing treatment of the deep impact of money issues and the financial crisis on these individual lives. It cuts them off from potential and possibility in ways that feel, at least for a while, terribly true.

When Amy goes missing after two years in North Carthage with signs of a struggle in the living room, the front door of the house is left wide open. Whether Nick is the culprit (he is soon a suspect) or someone else is, this detail seems odd, since it means the disappearance will be almost immediately discovered.

And why does the woman detective wait until they’re back at the station in a sit-down interrogation to ask Nick if he and Amy have kids? Of course she had already gone through every room in his house, and one of her first questions to him on the scene would have been about children. (Note: the issue of offspring will surface again near the end.)

Still Flynn’s sense of timing is solid. Just as I was getting annoyed at the way Nick was so obviously playing the reader, repeatedly mentioning phone calls to his “disposable” that he won’t tell us about, his young mistress Andie shows up at his door. Soon Nick tells us, unnecessarily: “I’m a big fan of the lie of omission.”

And just when the story clearly needs a jolt, we get the news that Amy had gone to an abandoned mall trying to buy a gun from Lonnie, one of the homeless folks squatting there. She feared someone, she said. He can’t get her one, but later, in retrospect, all this seems hard to believe. Amy wanted to leave a trail that will incriminate Nick, so why not just go to Wal-mart and buy a gun. Do it on the record—it’ll be easier to trace, which should have been the whole point.

Then half-way in, about the time that alternating Nick’s current adventures with Amy’s diary back story has begun to seem mechanical, manipulative and contrived, Flynn pivots and starts giving Amy a chance to report her adventures directly. And we soon learn that all those diary entries, covering their first five years together, have been concocted by Amy after the fact. They were all part of framing Nick for her own murder.

About the same time, all the economic realism I had previously admired just begins to fall away. They were struggling to make ends meet, but Amy secretly ran up credit card charges of $212,000 in Nick’s name. Did he never pick up the mail? Did she do it all online? Then why didn’t the cops find a trace of it on her computer?

After a week or two on the run she’s hiding out at some rundown Ozark cabin resort and still has about 9 grand in cash. She nonetheless decides she needs the 50 bucks oddball Jeff offers to help him steal somebody’s catfish. She stupidly lets Jeff and another obvious grifter, Greta, see her money belt stuffed with her entire stash, and so, surprise, the next day she’s dead broke. And now the hard-to-swallow stuff is really beginning to pile up.

Plan A had been to send Nick to the chair and then kill herself, since, I guess, she’d be fully satisfied with her life.

Plan B involves looking up her old high school flame Desi, a multi-millionaire living just an hour away with his mother in one of his mansions. For decades from afar Desi has been crazy in love with Amy, so first he rescues her, then he imprisons her in another of his mansions, then he makes love to her, after which she slits his throat and escapes in his vintage Jaguar.

Now believing Nick’s TV pleadings that he adores his wife and desperately wants her back, Amy returns with a cracked story that Desi was the one who abducted her from North Carthage and had been raping her morning, noon and night. Except for his mother (who looks exactly like an older Amy and whose vagina seems to smell—it’s mentioned twice), no one cares that Desi’s dead, maybe since he was such a hopelessly flat cartoon man.

Nick’s twin sister Go is also strangely flat. Other than running the bar and worrying about her brother, she seems to have no life at all. In fact most of the secondary characters have no more than two dimensions, although Amy’s parents, Rand and Marybeth, have some interesting heft. A lesson in how to raise a monster, they are a clueless, selfish pair of psychologists who gave their own daughter’s name to the always perfect little girl at the center of their wildly successful “Amazing Amy” series of children’s books.

Look, there’s other ridiculous stuff, but Flynn moves her story along so quickly and engagingly that I suspect most readers don’t have time to notice or dwell on those less-than-credible moments. They’re too busy turning pages and wondering what’s next in this cleverly devised chess match between two always sharp and often nasty people. Yes, it partakes of the gothic at times, but it’s also full of witty, insightful commentary on various aspects of American life—the media and its obsessions, the impact of a crashing economy on personal lives, and most of all the cracks and fissures of identity produced by hyper self-consciousness in a society that seems both pressure cooker and fishbowl.

Flynn’s treatment of the media cluster-effing this bizarre crime tale is one of the best things about Gone Girl. Using well her stint at Entertainment Weekly, she gets just about everything right, from the Nancy-Grace type doing her crazed-crusader thing, to the TV gladiator/attorney Tanner Bolt doing media training with Nick. You wonder perhaps how wiped-out Nick can afford Bolt’s $100,000 retainer, but then money is never mentioned again, so not to worry.

Of course, when you resort so often to the implausible, what you end up with is a fantasy masquerading as realism. That’s what this novel is, and so the ultimate question is, why has this fantasy become such a huge hit? Unlike The Racketeer, which seems to have lots of male enthusiasts, women especially have flocked to Gone Girl, many seeming to find it a kind of feminist cry. Do they see in Amy aspects of themselves? Is there some kind of strange liberation here? It is certainly the end of artifice, of pretending to be the Cool Girl, an end to worries about what men want women to be. This is from one of the book’s most quoted graphs:

Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

What nerve has been struck here? What deep need filled? My two cents: We live in a time of unprecedented competition between women and men. I know, we have always and forever lived with “the battle of the sexes.” It’s eternal, everlasting. But it has also never, ever seemed so consuming, so constantly present in every corner of our personal, social, economic and political lives.

Equality? It’s only common sense, but benighted forces are still arrayed against it, and so the cries ring everywhere. Gender equality! Equal pay for equal work! Abortion rights! Legitimate rape! The Old White Guy Party’s war on women! Control your own vagina! How many vaginas in the House and Senate? In ’08 Hillary almost made it to that last Glass Ceiling, and 2016 may be hers for the taking. These issues and questions will only gain intensity.

In relationships it’s always been there, and even the male/female cop duo is competing to nab Nick. Not surprisingly the smarter, more competent cop is (maybe just to rub it in) the unattractive woman with the ugly name, Det. Boney.

Heroines (and now anti-heroines) are all the rage these days. No one seems to blink when a wily slip of a girl beats the crap out of a strapping man or two or three. Homeland’s Carrie, despite being bipolar, is more than a match for just about any man in the show. She is smarter, quicker, more intuitive, perceptive and courageous. Saul’s line is definitive: “You were right.” And now we’re hearing that she may have been based on the real life CIA gal (the object of bitter envy at the Agency) who played a major role in getting Osama.

Here’s the fantasy: The woman, Amy, is ridiculously beautiful and smart, but also every man’s worst nightmare. Sensationally desirable, but ultimately despicable, moving somewhere between sociopath and psychopath (more properly the former, although she does seem to swerve from reality at times). She is in fact incapable of genuine warmth for others, condemning her husband to death for cheating and executing in cold blood a man hopelessly in love with her. She, not Nick, has the balls to murder and also that one exclusive natural asset the “weaker sex” has always used to tame the male.

So this story’s baddest badass is not the man but the woman, so super-smart and devious that she can defeat, subdue and control a man who knows her every rotten proclivity because she has confessed it all in the shower, where no tape recorder can nail her.

But now Nick can’t just walk away: Amy has his baby boy in her belly. (She duped him into thinking the fertility clinic they had gone to years ago had destroyed his frozen sperm, then returned there recently to get herself pregnant.) And soon she’ll deliver the unfortunate little tike into a world in which his mother is a monster.

In the book’s final pages we learn that she has carried the baby to term, with submissive Nick there smearing on the cocoa butter and rubbing her feet. And on the marrow she will both give birth and see her new book published, the one that tells her self-serving version of the whole sordid saga.

So she has triumphed. She has won this epic gender war.

Or has she? In their final exchange Amy wonders aloud why Nick is being so good to her. She wants him to say he loves her and she deserves it. Instead he says he just feels sorry for her: “Because every morning you have to wake up and be you.”

At the end Amy tells us she can’t stop thinking about that line from Nick. And so we know without question the war is still on. And, yes, there will be a sequel.

Here’s a final thought from that friend I mentioned in Part 1: About the gender appeal of these two popular novels she says: “Maybe the thrill for women right now is in being bad and getting away with it, while the comfort for men is that being bad does not prevent them from still being good.”

The post EPIC PRISON SCAM VS. EPIC GENDER WAR, Part 2 appeared first on TVLOCICERO.COM.

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 novels, in what I’m calling The detroit im dyin Trilogy. So more about these new books later.

Right now I’d like to offer some thoughts on two novels that have battled lately for those coveted top spots on the NY Times hardcover bestseller list: John Grisham’s recently released legal thriller The Racketeer and Gillian Flynn’s still wildly popular gender thriller, Gone Girl. And I’ll do this in two parts

First, two obvious questions: What do these two have that so many other novels lack? And what, if anything (beside their lodging in Thrillerland) might they share with each other? Because the second is easier than the first, I’ll start there.

So both novels have unreliable first-person narrators. The Racketeer has one, the disgraced attorney Malcolm Bannister. In a minimum security prison as the story opens, he is half-way through a stiff 10-year sentence for a crime of fraud he says he did not commit. Gone Girl has two narrators, the warring married protagonists Nick and Amy Dunne, both clearly not to be trusted, Amy so much so that her diary entries, which carry forward her side of things for the first half of the book, are subsequently revealed to be false and calculated to legally ensnare her husband.

Now while Bannister is also less-than-reliable, he is so in ways more subtle. And it is not his claim of innocence that makes the defrocked lawyer untrustworthy. In fact, we end up buying his story that he was unfortunately caught up in a criminal conspiracy in which he was not actually culpable. No, rather it’s a variety of lies about other stuff that make Bannister unreliable. Lies sprinkled here and there in the narrative, lies of both omission and commission.

To be clear, we’re not talking about the lies he tells FBI agents, prosecutors and others. Those fibs are often transparent and used, along with the information he withholds from law enforcement, to further the intricate plot he has hatched during all those long months and years in prison. See, Bannister, who manages the prison library and has earned a rep as an effective jailhouse lawyer by securing more than one inmate’s freedom, has a plan to win his own release. And once initiated it works like a charm.

Bannister convinces authorities that he knows the identity of the killer of a recently murdered federal judge and gives them the name of Quinn Rucker, the head of a major drug gang “with contacts up and down the East Coast.” Quinn, he says, was his best friend in prison until the guy walked away from the camp a few months back.

So Bannister orchestrates his own move out of prison and into the government’s witness protection program, with a $150,000 reward, a brand new identity complete with the requisite documents to go wherever he pleases, a pleasant beachside apartment in Florida and a job if he wants it. He soon changes his name to Max Baldwin, and after a plastic surgeon also changes his face, he goes rogue.

At first it appears that that he’s been freaked that his cover has been blown, that Quinn Rucker has somehow learned his new name and whereabouts. And so he’s off running, here and there, to Jamaica and Antigua, Virginia and even back briefly to his Florida apartment.

He’s always one jump ahead of his former FBI handlers and presumably the Rucker gang, but it’s never clear exactly what he’s doing. Only much later will we learn that it’s all part of an ingenious plot.

At this point I should tell you that The Racketeer also has another narrator, third person, not first, the more or less classic omniscient third, which the crafty Grisham slips into on occasion for a few paragraphs, pages or chapters. He does this whenever he wants to present information that is beyond the ken of his almost full-time narrator, Bannister/Baldwin, and this shift allows the imparting of data that moves the story along more effectively, making it richer and more compelling.

Now while these narrative shifts can at times be jarring and certainly break some classic rules of fiction, after a while the reader gets used to them and the payoff—a stronger, more detailed story—makes them seem worthwhile. Not for nothing has the perennially best-selling Grisham been repeatedly called a “master storyteller.” And to be honest, I detected no lies or intentional misleading in these third person passages.

So what are the lies that make Bannister/Baldwin a truly untrustworthy narrator? They are the ones he tells the reader. Yes, along the way the scheming lawyer drops occasional bits of info and brief comments tinged with untruth, the real nature and purpose of which we will learn only in the latter stages of the story. So why would the main narrator of this book want to fool the folks who’ve chosen to read his story? For a definitive answer you’ll have to ask his creator, Mr. Grisham.

But my guess is that Grisham’s intention was to let his narrator mislead and mystify his readers for their own good, to make the experience of reading this novel ever more enthralling as we try to figure out what the hell his protagonist is up to. Naturally he wants this to last as long as possible, until the reader finally reaches that remarkably satisfying conclusion in which all the myriad loose ends are tied up neatly and all the characters get their more or less just deserts.

Yes, The Racketeer is a legal thriller—with few exceptions that’s what Grisham writes. But in this one the author goes to considerable lengths to disguise the true nature of his book’s sub-genre. It’s also a caper novel, and to put off full disclosure for as long as possible, Grisham has his first-person narrator lie, mislead and fool the reader every once in a while.

So what if this scheming ex-attorney is just a naturally talented story spinner? A fellow who instinctively knows that to tell a good page-turning tale, there are moments when you need to withhold information, to keep it unspoken until the time to disclose is right?

Well, withholding is one thing; it’s what many a good storyteller often chooses to do. But lying, or deliberately misleading is quite something else. It’s also called cheating, and the problem with cheating is that when it’s finally exposed, it tends to spoil the experience the book provides. Here are a few examples of Grisham’s cheating.

On page 139, while watching on TV as a dull and unimpressive U.S. Attorney named Stanley Mumphrey announces the indictment of Quinn Rucker, Bannister/Baldwin says, “The thought crosses my mind that, with Stanley in charge, Quinn may have a fighting chance after all.”

But, no, that particular thought would not have occurred to Bannister/Baldwin, because the narrator knows something we don’t know at that point: exactly what will happen to his old friend Quinn.

Fifteen pages later Bannister/Baldwin tells us about a comely gal for whom he’s carrying a torch. He met Vanessa Young at the prison when she was visiting her brother, another inmate, and then exchanged letters with her. But, he says, “it became painfully obvious, at least to me, that my infatuation with Vanessa was not exactly a two-way street.”

This passage about Vanessa lasts just a few brief paragraphs, but they withhold a good deal of information and, more importantly, they mislead: as we eventually learn, she is every bit into him as he is into her, and there is way more to their connection than lustful romance.

And finally, Chapter 26 begins, “I sleep with a gun…” Well, now Bannister/Baldwin may be sleeping with that Beretta he mentions, but it is not, as he clearly implies, because the Rucker clan is hot on his heels. As we learn later, he knows there is no one to fear.

There are many more examples to site, but you get the idea.

In books like this one, there is always a battle of wits going on. More than one, in fact, between characters in the story itself, but also one between the author and the reader. The reader is always trying to figure where the author is heading with his story, and the author is trying to keep the reader guessing for as long as possible.

Now there are accepted rules for this kind of match, the most basic and important of which is that, while withholding info is generally okay, prevaricating and misleading are not. And in The Racketeer Grisham breaks this rule several times. And of course it matters not at all that his unreliable narrator is the one doing the lying and the cheating. As we are reminded every time the narrative slides into the omniscient third, from start to finish this is Grisham’s concoction.

So why is The Racketeer parked solidly at or near the top of the bestseller lists? Surely, first of all because Grisham books are almost always there. For decades he’s enjoyed enormous success and by now has a mass of dedicated readers who, with little or no encouragement, will read almost anything he publishes.

But this book in particular? Certainly, as with many a caper story, there is the lure of a huge pot of untraceable ill-gotten gain at the conclusion. That always seems irresistible, but especially so with our current fascination, in a time of global financial flux and perhaps calamity.

Then there’s that trusty old standby: the deeply satisfying comeuppance of corporate greed and corruption. Grisham seems to be a genuinely good sort who cares about the right things and generally writes stories that expose the bad and support the good.

And how about this gender-tinged thought from one of my most insightful female friends: “I wonder if there isn’t something intrinsically masculine going on. I know I’m not supposed to say such things! But there is a comforting fantasy in Grisham, I think, of men doing the wrong thing and yet still being good guys, worthy of love and intrinsically right.”

Finally, and perhaps most telling: despite its flaws, this book offers the timeless power of good storytelling. That’s something else it shares with Flynn’s Gone Girl. And next time I’ll take a close look at that sensationally successful novel.

The post EPIC PRISON SCAM VS. EPIC GENDER WAR, Part 1 appeared first on TVLOCICERO.COM.

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 in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”

The problem is we live in the Era of Snow-Blindness, a time when all of us are enveloped by the digital blizzard, with screens of all sizes shimmering in every corner and the Net buzzing insistently in our pockets. So even if we remove that bushel and allow our light to shine brightly, who’s going to see it?

To shift the metaphor with another old saw, how about Tooting My Own Horn? I mean, who else is going to toot it? Well, actually a number of kind folks have blown flattering notes my way lately. But this is also the Age of Noise-Induced-Deafness, when our ears are afflicted with a cacophony of voices all screaming to be heard.

Look, all this is a self-conscious preamble to my offering, as a public service, of course, a sampling from recent reviews. Actually, I was encouraged in this by an experience I had last month. Across five days in December with a free-book promotion through Amazon’s Kindle Select, I gave away almost 12,000 e-copies of my four books.

What stunned me was that more than 10,000 of those downloads were of two books that are more than 40-years-old.

Now if you know the tale of those books (it’s right on the Home page of this site)—Murder in the Synagogue and Squelched, the story of its suppression—you’ll understand why I felt that every bit of time and effort it took to e-publish them was suddenly worthwhile. Yes, I haven’t made a penny on those books and probably never will. But knowing they’re in the hands of so many readers who wanted them? As the commercial says, “Priceless!”

Fewer people downloaded the novels, The Obsession and The Disappearance, but I could tell myself the confounding route to discovery was now just a bit less daunting. Everybody in the book business is looking for ways to enhance this thing called “Discoverability.” As far as I can tell, nobody has a good answer yet. So in any way you can, let the light shine and the horn toot. I’ll start with the novels:

My deep gratitude to all these readers who took the time to grace my books with their kind and generous thoughts.

The post DON’T HIDE YOUR LIGHT UNDER A BUSHEL appeared first on TVLOCICERO.COM.

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 reasons why writers disappear and then goes into considerable detail on each of those reasons. Of course, I quickly scanned through the list, searching for one or more that might match up with my own experience. Kris says that writers disappear because:

“1. They can’t get a new book contract under that name.” Here Kris refers to the sad and increasingly common fate of traditionally published authors whose readership has not been growing fast enough and thus find themselves out of luck and out of the business. No, not exactly my problem.

“2. They can’t get a new book contract because their genre has vanished.” Obviously this one’s about changing tastes. Also not my problem.

“3. They became toxic—and that toxicity trickled through the entire industry.” In this one Kris cites authors who acted badly in some fashion that was off-putting or threatening to publishers. Well, now maybe I better come back to this one later…

“4. They achieved all their goals.” Hardly my problem.

“5. They were no longer interested in writing.” Nope, not a fit here.

“6. They moved to a different part of the industry.” No, when I left, it was for a very different way of making a living.

“7. They got discouraged.” No, whether early in the morning or late at night, I kept on writing.

“8. They couldn’t handle the solitude.” Sorry, I love solitude.

“9. They couldn’t handle the financial problems inherent in a writing career.” By this, Kris means the perils of freelancing…again not a problem for me.

“10. They had life or health issues that interfered with the writing.” Kris talks about things like a family catastrophe, coma, and either swift self-destruction or the slower version with drugs and alcohol. No, fortunately, not part of my history.

“11. They didn’t keep up with the changes in the industry.” With my own company I just published several books and shorter pieces, so…does not apply.

“12. They sold or gave away too many rights to their books.” No, 40 years ago I demanded and almost immediately secured the rights to Murder in the Synagogue.

So let’s go back to reason #3: “They became toxic—and that toxicity trickled through the entire industry.”

Time for a little back story, though if you’ve searched this site at all you probably already know that my career as an author began in 1970 with the publication of Murder in the Synagogue, a true crime account of the assassination of Rabbi Morris Adler in suburban Detroit on Lincoln’s birthday, 1966. In the book I explored the life of the high-achieving grad student and troubled intellectual seeker who, at age 23, spoke these words before turning a gun on the rabbi and himself:

“This congregation is a travesty and an abomination. It has made a mockery by its phoniness and hypocrisy of the beauty and spirit of Judaism. It is composed of people who on the whole make me ashamed to say that I’m a Jew. For the most part it is composed of men, women and children who care for nothing except their vain, egotistical selves.  With this act I protest a humanly horrifying and hence unacceptable situation.”

The publisher Prentice-Hall saw the book as a kind of Jewish In Cold Blood and a window on the turbulent ‘60s and so gave me an advance of $8500 ($60,000 in today’s dollars). That same year Mario Puzo got $5000 for what would become The Godfather.

Upon publication, Murder drew a number of very positive reviews in mostly odd, out-of-the-way places, and praise from psychiatric experts, religious figures and academics to whom I sent copies. But the eastern literary establishment seemed to have never heard of it, and sales were slow.

Then a remarkable young woman from Detroit’s Jewish community came to me to say she had heard a wealthy and powerful man she had grown up calling “uncle” tell a group of friends that he had reached out to my publisher and “squelched” my book. Of course I set out to verify her story and soon learned that Prentice-Hall had indeed suppressed Murder in the Synagogue, sabotaging its marketing and distribution, and printing 4000 copies from standing type which was then pied or dismantled—the method used for a “limited edition.” It had secretly bowed to pressure from an influential presidential adviser and top Republican fund-raiser named Max Fisher.

So of course I did what any foolishly high-minded young writer would do. I went to Prentice-Hall, accused them of suppressing my book and demanded and secured its rights. And then what? Nothing. No one, neither first-line publisher nor paperback house, would touch what had obviously become a “toxic” book.

Next I wrote another book, this one about what had happened to Murder. It was, I felt, a compelling story of corporate deceit and criminality confronted by the courage of the plucky young woman who had blown the whistle. But facing a sure-fire, deep-pockets lawsuit from a guy who hung out with the likes of Henry Ford II and Richard Nixon, not one of the agents and publishers I approached would even look at my new book. So now I had not one, but two toxic books.

What I needed was a new book project, something completely unrelated to my first two books, and I soon thought I had found it in a sensational trial in Detroit involving several cops and dope dealers all working together in the heroin and cocaine trade that was ravaging the city. For six months I covered the trial, wrote profiles of the colorful cast of characters and described scene after amazing scene in the courtroom—all of it basically on spec, hoping that someone in New York would agree with me on the importance of the story.

And then a famous agent agreed to take me on and seemed certain he could sell my new book. But after several months of encouraging words, he finally announced that the last editor he took the project to had said this was essentially a “black book, and blacks don’t buy books.” And that was that.

Had the toxicity of my first two books “trickled down through the entire industry,” as Kris Rusch puts it? She says publishing back then was “a very small industry” in which publishers, editors, and agents all knew each other and gossiped together. I had no idea back then what I was really facing, and today I still don’t know for sure.

By this time (it was 1975), I was broke and had to find a quick way to support my family. I took a job as a grant writer for a humanities council, thinking the next book project was not far off. But instead I soon found myself in a busy life as a TV producer/writer/director. Over the ensuing years, my output included more than 50 long-form documentaries, 75 shorter features, 30 live event programs and hundreds of editorials.

Actually, over the next three and a half decades I never stopped writing, either early in the morning or late at night. But as an author of books I had disappeared.

Then a few months ago I used my own media company to publish, along with several other items, Squelched: The Suppression of Murder in the Synagogue. Among other things it’s a coming-of-age tale about a naïve young writer blindsided when his book suffers a fate he has no idea was even possible. Then he gropes, blunders and finally learns a few things.

The book’s new epilogue explains how the original manuscript, the last copy of which I had given away back in the ‘70s in order to get on with my life, finally came back to me after more than three decades. And it adds the story of how four years after it sabotaged Murder in the Synagogue, Prentice-Hall did the same thing to another of its books, Du Pont: Behind the Nylon Curtain. The story of what the publisher did to the Du Pont book was first told on January 21, 1975, in the New York Times. The story of what happened to Murder in the Synagogue has never been told. Until now.

How this or any of my newly published books will do, I haven’t the faintest idea. But I do know, after all this time, it can no longer be said that I have disappeared.

The post WHY I DISAPPEARED appeared first on TVLOCICERO.COM.

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 Lebowitz? Something about an author’s premature death from insufficient praise?

So today I came across a review of my novel The Obsession from a woman I greatly admire, Victoria Best, perhaps better known as the blogger Ms. litlove, whose very popular site Tales from the Reading Room offers some of the most acute, insightful and helpful reviews to be found on the web. Imagine my delight when this person with opinions I’ve come to trust and respect not only had very kind and generous words to say about my novel but also compared it favorably to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.

As you probably know, Flynn’s book is the sensation of the current season in American publishing, according to a flock of major league reviewers, an intense, page-tuning thriller with loads of literary value. A million and a half in hardcover and ebook sales and along with the “Gray” books, near the top of the the best-seller lists. Here’s some of what Ms.litlove had to say about both books:

Gone Girl has had a huge impact on the book world since it came out; whilst the other novel I read, The Obsession by T. V. LoCicero will be unknown to most people, I imagine. But both are pacy, gripping narratives about love grown monstrous and out of control…fascinating portraits of gender rancour, or the amazing ability men and women have to love and loathe each other with intensity. The Obsession is more straightforward in its premise; sexuality remains a dark and vexed region where reason holds no sway and the agony of unrequited love can provoke unstable individuals to violence…[T]his was the first self-published novel I’ve ever read, and I was properly impressed and surprised by the quality of the story and the writing. Kindle readers, take note.

You can find the whole post at Tales from the Reading Room.

Now Victoria Best is pretty remarkable, a lecturer for a decade in French lit at Cambridge, the author of a couple of books of academic criticism and now a blogger/reviewer of impeccable taste who also treats her many visitors to fascinating tales from her personal life.

Beyond the much appreciated critical assessment of my novel, I am also grateful to her for even deciding to give my book a look, since it was published by my own company, TLC Media, in the new-fangled way that skirts legacy publishing. As she mentions at the end of her piece, The Obsession was the first self-published novel she’s ever read, and the experience was a good one.

So, no, it will probably never sell enough to constitute a living wage, but, yes, very pleasing and gratifying indeed.

The post PLEASED AND GRATIFIED appeared first on TVLOCICERO.COM.

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 describing a handy little service that once was available but is no more.

The brainchild of a guy named Todd Rutherford, a shrewd entrepreneur with a convenient conscience, GettingBookReviews.com opened for business in the fall of 2010. At first writing all the reviews himself, Rutherford charged $99 for one, $499 for 20, and $999 for 50. But soon he had so much business that he needed the help of a bunch of folks he found on Craig’s List willing to write reviews for $15 a piece. Rutherford made clear that 5 stars were not absolutely required, but if conscience dictated otherwise, their fee would be cut in half. Quickly all of his new employees developed his kind of conscience. And even though Amazon forbids paid-for reviews and online forums were filled with complaints, before long Rutherford was making $28,000 a month.

It didn’t last long…

Ironically, a dissatisfied customer hastened the end. Angry that her review was taking too long, she spread her complaints across the web, and then Google suspended Rutherford’s ad account and Amazon began taking down reviews. After 4531 reviews, GettingBookReviews.com closed up shop.

But David Streitfeld’s biggest bombshell involved a more-than-satisfied customer named John Locke. Everyone who knows their ebook history knows about John Locke, the 60-year-old former insurance salesman who started writing and self-pubbing ebook thrillers. At first he got nowhere, and then suddenly in December 2010 he sold 15,000 books. Soon he would be celebrated as the first self-pubber to peddle a million. And then he celebrated himself with a non-fiction book entitled How I Sold One Million E-Books in Five Months.

In it he generously includes all his success secrets…except one: in the fall of 2010, Mr. Locke paid Mr. Rutherford about 6 grand to buy himself 300 mostly 5-star reviews.

Hey, you think maybe all those wonderful reviews had something to do with all that heart-warming success?

Now naturally with four books of my own just recently up and, of course, looking for reviews, the Streitfeld piece in the Times grabbed my attention. Was I shocked? Not really. Nothing humans do should shock any of us any longer. But in addition to cynical resignation, did I feel annoyance, disgust? Yes, to both.

For one thing Streitfeld’s tone often seems gratuitously disparaging. Occasionally he offers bold, bald factual statements like this one:

“So as soon as new authors confront that imperative line on their Amazon pages — ‘Be the first to review this item’ — the temptation is great for them to start soliciting notices, at first among those closest at hand: family, friends and acquaintances. They want to be told how great they are.”

And then apparently for unimpeachable support for this questionable opinion, he quotes some know-it-all Stanford professor named Robert I. Sutton:

“Nearly all human beings have unrealistically positive self-regard. When people tell us we’re not as great as we thought we were, we don’t like it. Anything less than a five-star review is an attack.”

Okay, then. Tarred with a very broad brush indeed.

In a related piece published in the Times a week earlier Streitfeld described the efforts of a team of Cornell researchers to create a computer algorithm that would smoke out fake reviews. The good news: on hundreds of hotel reviews it worked about 90% of the time. The bad news: hotel reviews and book reviews seem like apples and oranges.

On Sunday morning, as I perused the first 30 or so of those 330 plus comments in the Times, they ran the gamut:

From, woe is us poor indie authors, this is the last nail in the coffin of our desperate quest for respect. To: Hey, eff it, legacy publishing does the same damn thing!

From: John Locke is a lying pig. To: John Locke is really smart.

From: I would never, ever do such a thing. To: Yeah, but if others are doing it, the rest of us are screwed.

From: This is a dead-certain sign we’re at the edge of the ethical abyss. To: No, man, this is the essence of free enterprise and the glories of capitalism.

From: Reviews are worth shite. Anyone who trusts them is an idiot. To: I can tell a phony/worthless review within the first few words.

From: All I need to do is use “Look Inside” to read a few pages, and I’ll know if the book will be worth my time. To: No, you doofus, those lazy, evil indie authors buff and polish those first few pages so they can get away with writing dreck for the rest of the book.

And, seemingly, ad infinitum.

With many of the comments I found myself agreeing and sometimes also not. A fellow named K.W. Jeter had some cogent things to say, but later on his blog he wrote this:

“There’s a battle going on right now, to demonstrate that indie ebooks are as good and even better than traditionally published print books. The battle is being won by indie writers self-publishing compelling, well-written ebooks which garner genuine positive — and unpaid — reviews from actual readers and not desperate shills recruited from Craigslist. As the comments to the New York Times article indicate, it’s going to be a long battle. We don’t need dishonest writers, willing to do anything to promote their books, raising doubts in readers’ minds about the reliability of the reviews they see on Amazon about our ebooks.”

Again I agree and disagree. Yes, we don’t need dishonest writers. But that’s like saying we don’t need dishonest people. And if there’s a battle going on between indie ebooks and legacy print books, it’s only so if you think it’s so. A battle? More like a free-for-all in which everyone is struggling for notice and survival.

In fact, what’s really happening is that we’re about five years into a huge shift in the publishing business. Things are changing rapidly, inevitably, and the only certainty is that the landscape already looks and feels very different. In another five years?  Who knows? Certainly in a variety of ways today there are many more books being published . Some are good, others not so much. Whatever happens, Good luck to everyone.

Look, if you’ve been out there scouring the web for places to get a new book reviewed…

You know there are multiple sites offering to sell you something that looks like a critical judgment. Often they’ll give you a choice: a free review that may arrive in two or three months (or maybe never), or one that will cost you but will definitely take only two or three weeks. If you chose to pay, that’ll be 59 bucks for one, or three for 129.

Most of these places provide the standard disclaimer: whether free or bought and paid for, good reviews are not guaranteed. Occasionally you’ll see that silly old saw about how there’s no such thing as bad publicity. But com’on, folks, how long will these outfits stay in business if they take your cash and serve up a bad review?

Actually, I found it at least slightly reassuring that those smart people from Cornell are out there trying to devise ways to sort the wheat from the chaff, to spot the phony among the real.

Now if someone will just come up with an algorithm where you could plug in a reviewer’s name and out would pop an accurate notion of that person’s intelligence, honesty, good taste, comprehensive knowledge and common sense.

Of course, each of us could make all those calculations and judgments on our own, but then that would take a whole lot of reading and thinking and the like.

For what it’s worth, here’s my thought…

Yes, most of the pro reviewers are still behind walls manned by gatekeepers who will consider submissions only from established publishers. The best of the online reviewers and book bloggers are swamped with requests, and the amateur enthusiasts often seem to merit little trust. So what happens to all those indie books, dumped in our vast digital sea to sink or swim? How will we find a way to establish their genuine value?

I’m pretty sure this whole indie publishing thing (now obviously at the toddler stage) will sooner or later shake itself out. Maybe with some of the novelty worn off, more of our expectations will float back down to earth. Most likely more resources will evolve and develop to provide us with what we need and want for literary assessment. In the meantime, let’s all relax, take a deep breath and get back to writing our books.

The post BUYING BOOK REVIEWS appeared first on TVLOCICERO.COM.

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 two prominent literary agents on the subject. The very successful Julian Bach gestured at his office window overlooking 48^th Street and told me, “Look, this 20-square-block area of Manhattan is the publishing establishment in this country, and they’ve all had their experiences like this.”

And the famed Scott Meredith advised me that this kind of thing happened with enough regularity that no one of importance would even care if another instance were publicly revealed and documented.

And then there is my fellow victim of criminal shenanigans at Prentice-Hall…

Gerard Colby is the author of another ill-fated book, entitled Du Pont: Behind the Nylon Curtain. Four years after it purposely “botched” Murder, Prentice-Hall did the same thing to the Du Pont book. That story was first told on January 21, 1975, in the New York Times.

It was told again more recently by the author Colby in “The Price of Liberty,” one of several essays about suppression in the media collected in a book called Into the Buzzsaw issued by Prometheus Books. Colby’s research found that the occurrence of this kind of thing was sufficiently common that insiders had a term for it: “privishing”…instead of “publishing.”

My own guess about the real frequency of this industry practice? Perhaps not all that often. But probably more than most of us would guess. But then, really, how can we know?

So isn’t this the Age of the Expose?

A time when nothing can remain hidden for long? When even the most secretive of institutions, like the Pentagon and the Vatican, are subject to massive leaks?

And yet how often will someone come forward as brave and morally driven as the young woman who told me about what she heard from Max Fisher? How rare is it that an editor and a corporate attorney will jeopardize their jobs and careers by going public with their inside knowledge, as happened with the Du Pont book? Answers are hard to come by.

Now, of course, I’m biased…

But there are other reasons why you might want to take a look at these books from four decades ago.  For example, both can be read as coming-of-age stories, a rich, time-tested theme.

Murder is many things, including an account of something we remain afflicted with today, the use of terrible violence as perverse public statement. But Murder is also the haunting story of a gifted, high-minded, ambitious and privileged young man in a time of social upheaval and rapid change. It’s a carefully told tale that finally arrives at a tragic conclusion in which this young fellow not only forfeits his own life but takes with him a prominent, much-loved member of his community in an act of violent despair so shocking that it stains and changes many lives.

How about the uses of history?

The 1960s remain an important and fascinating period in the American 20^th century. And you know what they say about those who ignore history. Murder offers an extraordinary view of the ‘60s in part because Richard Wishnetsky, the young man at its center, was so hyper-conscious of himself as a child of his time, as emblematic of both the great promise and the great failure of American society, and purposely cast himself in that role in order, he thought, to teach that society it was headed for doom.

Squelched in its way is also a coming-of-age tale…

In it a naïve young writer is blindsided when his book suffers a fate he has no idea was even possible. Then he gropes, blunders and finally learns a few things.

If some of the questions raised in these posts resonate, you might give Squelched a try. It’s a meticulous account of a young writer’s sudden plunge into the wiles of publishing and his unexpected, at times unpleasant lessons in how the world works. Its epilogue explains how the original manuscript, the last copy of which I gave away back in the early ‘70s, finally came back to me after more than three decades and brings the story up to date by recounting the passing of Max Fisher in 2005 at the age of 96.

Along the way you may note…

While the details are decades old, the lessons they contain about corporate manipulation and the power and influence of wealth and political connection remain deeply important in our world today.

If you’ve stayed with me this far, I’m grateful and hope you’ll leave a comment.

The post THINGS HAVE CHANGED (Part 3) appeared first on TVLOCICERO.COM.

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 that so many of the details are reminders of things past. For example, the size of the advance Prentice-Hall gave me for writing Murder: $8500 back in 1966 when Puzo got five grand for what turned out to be one of the best-selling novels of all time.

Today the numbers seem almost quaint…

The same for the hard-cover price of Murder, jumped by Prentice-Hall from the more or less typical $6.95, to what seemed like a much-inflated $9.95 as part of what I later learned was the publisher’s effort to stifle the book’s appeal and sales.

Lately I’ve wondered what those figures would feel like if translated to the value of today’s dollar. $8500 in 1966? Today that would be something over $60,000. Not bad for an untried young writer in the current market (unless she were a Kardashian).

And $9.95 in 1970 for a hard-cover non-fiction book? In 2012 that would be about $58. Today, of course, you might expect to pay between 27 and 32 bucks for such a book, but then we’re in the midst of the digital revolution. One wonders what a typical hard-cover price might be today if eReaders and eBooks had never happened.

Really, both sets of numbers point up a not-uncommon problem with such comparisons. In today’s rapidly changing book-publishing world, many a successful mid-list author with a few good-sellers under his belt might be happy with a 5-figure advance.

So with change and disruption shaking the industry…

Does my story of suppression in the publishing business back in 1970 seem only more ancient and irrelevant? Can this story tell us anything useful about book publishing or an author’s experience today? And why publish it now through my own company?

Because I can.

To set the record straight.

Maybe to prove those old saws about truth?

From Shakespeare’s the Merchant of Venice: “…in the end truth will out.”

And from the New Testament, John, 8:32: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” By the way, these words from Jesus are inscribed on a main lobby wall at that bastion of lies, cover-ups and covert ops, CIA headquarters, Langley, Virginia.

And after striking out with a hoard of agents and publishers…

I finally decided that no traditional publisher would seriously consider touching either of my non-fiction books. And since it’s important to me to finally make the story told in Squelched available to the public (after 40 years!), I figured I have neither the time nor the inclination to wait around to see if I might be mistaken about all this.

At the same time, I felt that once I went public with the suppression story, my novels, The Obsession and The Disappearance, would probably have little or no chance as well in the legacy world.

Is Squelched a defining story of legacy publishing?

Well, no. But, yes, in a larger sense books have always been subject to the whims of the companies that publish them. Of course publishers have always made decisions that in large measure determine whether a book, no matter its intrinsic worth, will find its audience. That’s one of the things they do: they make choices about how a book will be presented to the public. Decisions about cover and text design, pricing, promotion, print run, marketing and advertising, whether to push hard for reviews in the places that matter or for certain kinds of in-store display.

They say it’s all about professional judgment.

But often it may be just a gut feeling that the time is right for this story, character, theme or set of ideas. Or that its time has passed. Or that its apparent timeliness was only illusory in the first place. The publisher may decide that, while the author performed competently, the book somehow lacks that spark or special glow that can help it catch fire with a sufficient corps of readers.

And having once committed to a book and its author, a publisher may withdraw its support. That can happen for many different reasons. For example, the editor, whose enthusiastic backing for a book promised it a chance, moves on to a new job at another house. After that, forget it. The book has lost its champion.

There have always been a multitude of ways a book might not succeed, might not reach or connect with its audience. But whether it’s bad luck, bad karma, bad timing or, as in the case of Murder in the Synagogue, bad acting that included collusion with an influential third party opposed to the book’s interests, there is almost always one common factor.

The author is in the dark…

He or she may have picked up hints, from an editor who was unusually candid or just let something slip, or from the tell-tale pattern of screw-ups, failures and neglect. But the bottom line is the author doesn’t really know for sure what the hell happened to his book, whether it was some lame failure of his own—an inability to be brilliant, perceptive, insightful or eloquent enough. Or whether it was lousy luck. Or whether someone just didn’t like him or his baby enough.

Next time I’ll ask how often the kind of collusion I describe in Squelched might be happening to unsuspecting authors. As always, I’m looking forward to your comments.

The post THINGS HAVE CHANGED (Part 2) appeared first on TVLOCICERO.COM.

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 Synagogue, my true crime account of the killing of Rabbi Morris Adler in a suburban Detroit temple on Lincoln’s birthday, 1966. An assassination it was called, one of several, you may remember, in those turbulent years.

I had set out to explore the behavior and psyche of a brilliant 23-year-old graduate student—Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Michigan, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow bound for the Divinity School at the University of Chicago—an idealistic intellectual seeker who accused his audience of 700 congregants of being hypocrites and materialists and then turned a gun on the rabbi and himself.

Murder was a window on those riotous 1960s…

One of the hot literary topics at the time was the rise of the “non-fiction novel.” According to my agent, my publisher, Prentice-Hall, saw the book as a kind of Jewish In Cold Blood, and so in the same year that Mario Puzo got $5000 for what became The Godfather, my advance was $8500.

Published, Murder drew positive reviews in often odd, out-of-the-way places like Pomona, CA, and Allentown, PA, and praise from psychiatric experts, religious figures and academics to whom I sent copies. But the eastern literary establishment acted as if it had never heard of it, and sales were slow.

Then from Detroit’s Jewish community…

A remarkable young woman came forward to tell me she had heard a wealthy and powerful man—an influential presidential adviser and top Republican fund-raiser named Max Fisher—tell a group of friends that he had “squelched” my book. Of course I checked her story and eventually learned that Prentice-Hall had indeed bowed to pressure from Fisher and suppressed Murder in the Synagogue. They printed 4000 copies from standing type, which was then pied, or dismantled—the method used for a “limited edition”—and sabotaged its marketing and distribution.

So what did I do?

Like any foolishly high-minded young writer. I went to Prentice-Hall, accused them of undermining my book, then demanded (and secured) its rights. After which I wrote another book, about what had happened to Murder.

Of course, facing a sure-fire, deep-pockets lawsuit from a guy who hung out with the likes of Henry Ford II and Richard Nixon, not one of the agents and publishers I approached would even look at my new book.

My once-budding literary career soon withered…

So in order to move on, I gave away my last manuscript copy of that hopeless expose and then embarked on a busy life as a TV producer/writer/director. Over the ensuing years, my output included more than 50 long-form documentaries, 75 shorter features, 30 live event programs and 600 editorials. Occasionally I still do that kind of work, but I never stopped writing.

And then the world changed…

Digital disruption hit the publishing business, and it may no longer matter what an agent or a publisher will look at. For 30 years I had lost the manuscript of my book about what was done to Murder, but when it came back to me, I brought it up to date and am now offering it as Squelched: The Suppression of Murder in the Synagogue. Also for sale are an ebook version of Murder and 1200 copies of the original hard-cover edition that I’ve kept in a basement all these years.

So why bother with Squelched?

The book was written more than 40 years ago about the publishing problems of another book written a few years earlier? What could such a story have to tell us about the disruption, confusion and uncertainty in the business today? That’s what I’ll take up next time.

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