Dot Dead Diary

Lush Life, Literary vs. Genre Fiction, and State of Play

Overwhelmed by the reviews of his Lush Life, I headed over to M is for Mystery yesterday afternoon to hear what Richard Price had to say.  As happens so often, Mr. Price spent too much time of his allotted sixty minutes reading from the book.  If I'm going to buy the book, I want to read it myself and not have someone else steal the juicy parts.  During the Q&A, I asked why reviews seemed to treat Lush Life as "literary" fiction rather than crime fiction.  A little explication here.  I expected him to rant about artificial lines between genres.  In fact, I wanted him to, since such words would be a balm to me who recently received a rejection from a major publisher that said my opus "is a gripping book that kept me turning pages from the very start."  Then came more compliments, before the conclusion:  "However, at the end of the day... the subject matter is just still too firmly in the genre world" for us.  All right, all right.  Enough whining.  Anyway, Price said he was treated as a literary writer because that's the way he wants to be treated.  He said that he himself doesn't read "detective stories" since you forget what they were about minutes after finishing them.  In his mind literary fiction deals with big themes and describes an important slice of the world in a way "detective" fiction does not.  (Remember I did ask about crime fiction.)  He did say he was an admirer of George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, and Elmore Leonard as well as the old-timers like Hammett and Chandler.

In response to another question, Price said what he originally turned into his editor was twice as long as the final manuscript.  He said he and the editor worked together to find the story hidden in that first draft.  How many editors do that kind of thing nowadays?

I had hauled #4 along with me -- he's nine -- since we were due at our synagogue right after the signing.  He sat in the front of the store during the reading and Q&A where he was supposed to be keeping his nose in a Tom Swift: Young Inventor book, but he confessed to listening to Price talk.  I hope the words he heard were new to him, but with three older siblings I fear they were not.

One other piece of advice that I keep forgetting to pass along.  Recently, I watched State of Play, a BBC miniseries about a murder wrapped in a political scandal.  It's available on DVD from Netflix.  Get it.  Watch it.  It's being turned into a big deal movie in 2009 with Ben Affleck, Helen Mirren, Robert Wright Penn and Russell Crowe, but don't wait for that.  It can't be as good (especially since they are moving it, of course, from London to D.C.) 

Closed Borders?

Yes, we writers love independent bookstores.  I myself have sold a ton of books at the independent bookstores listed below in the right hand column of this blog, but I also have done signings at Borders and Barnes & Noble.  A manager at the Borders in downtown Palo Alto was impressed with how many Dot Deads they were selling and sent an email to the managers of all the Bay Area Borders stories.  Thanks to him, I did about ten signings of up to 70 books a session at local Borders stores.

So, what's my point?  No matter how much we love the independents, it cannot be good news that Borders is in financial trouble.  Its stock is down 75% in the last year.  A story in the Times this morning cites competition from Wal-Mart and Amazon.com as a reason for Borders' difficulties.  The company took out an emergency loan at 12.5% interest to avoid "liquidity problems."

According to the news stories, Barnes & Noble, the country's largest bookseller, is the obvious candidate to take Borders over.  Such a merger/takeover would mean less competition and shuttering hundreds of bookstores, a scary prospect indeed to anyone who wants to sell lots of their books and to anyone who wants to buy them.

A Dirty-handed Dentist?

The Spitzer Scandal reminds me of a story my rabbi told me years ago.  He said that you don't much care if your dentist is a tax evader, your accountant cheats on his wife, and your rabbi doesn't wash his hands after going to the bathroom.  But you care alot if your dentist doesn't wash his hands after going to the bathroom, your accountant is a tax evader, and your rabbi cheats on his wife.

People, of course, are comparing the Spitzer imbroglio with the Bill Clinton fling with Monica Lewinsky.  In 1992 people knew, or at least strongly suspected (remember Gennifer Flowers?), that Bill fooled around and voted for him anyway.  (He was like the accountant cheating on his wife.)  He stayed in office.  But Spitzer made his rep on prosecuting wrongdoers.  He was the avenging angel of the law.  (That makes him the rabbi cheating on his wife.)  If true, I suspect and expect he will resign because his wrongdoing goes to the core of the reason the voters elected him.

The Best Double Feature Ever?

Does anybody else remember double features?  You know, when you get to watch two movies with one ticket?  Last night for the princely sum of $7.00 (a small popcorn was $1) I saw two Hitch masterpieces, first "Dial M for Murder" and then "To Catch a Thief."  They went together like an entrée and dessert.  The first is dark, the second light.  In the first the most beautiful woman ever in movies has blue circles under her eyes and in the second she wears clothes and drives a car that shows her off to breathtaking advantage.

I went by myself.  My two best movie buddies were basking in Boston instead of being at the Stanford Theatre with me as the natural order of things ordain.  Last time I saw "Dial M" was in D.C. in the 1980's.  I saw it in 3-D which was loads of fun.  It was filmed that way, but by the time the movie's release date came around, the fad was over and so it was released in 2-D.  One thing I'd forgotten was that Mark, the Robert Cummings character, was a mystery writer.  Using his fertile brain, he figures the whole thing out. 

In "To Catch A Thief," the Cary Grant character tries to pass as a lumber magnate from Portland.  Yeah, right.  (His alias was Conrad Burns, the same name as the future senator from Montana who lost reelection largely because of a YouTube clip showing him napping during a Senate hearing.)  Cary at 51 is seen as just right for Grace Kelly at 26 by the mother played by Jesse Royce Landis who is only eight years older than Cary.  And the teenaged character Danielle keeps trying to get Cary to run away with her.  (Interestingly, Danielle is played by Brigitte Auber who in real life was a year-and-a-half older than Grace Kelly.) Maybe times have changed, maybe not.  The Riviera scenes are almost as gorgeous as la princesse.  One scene that put a frisson up my spine:  when Grace is driving recklessly over mountain roads where a bad turn would lead to a fall of hundreds of feet.  Of course, such a crash is how Princess Grace died in real life.  I really love how smart Francie, the Grace Kelly character, is; she's a more than even match for Cary's John Robie, "The Cat."  And the last line is perhaps the best in any film save perhaps Joe E. Brown's in "Some Like It Hot."

"Vertigo" this weekend and "North by Northwest" the next. 

From Chicago to Cape Town

Nine years ago, Charlie Newton had a mid-life crisis and turned to writing full-time.  A Chicagoan, he's now holed up in Cape Town, South Africa scribbling away.  His debut novel, Calumet City, is attracting notice.  Click here to see my interview with him for The Big Thrill.

Should We Censor Ourselves?

My sister and I went over to Berkeley to see Carrie Fisher in her one-woman show, Wishful Drinking. What a life! Daughter of "America's Sweethearts," Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher. Step-daughter of Connie Stevens. (What do you mean you don't remember Cricket from Hawaiian Eye?) First film playing a 1970's Lolita opposite Warren Beatty in Shampoo. Then in a life-altering role, Princess Leia Organa. Ex-wife of Paul Simon. Novelist. (You should hear her read the audiotape of Postcards from the Edge.) Top script doctor.

In the course of the show, she chats about her drug addiction, bi-polar disorder, second marriage to a guy who turns out to be gay, and good friend's death on her bed. She lowers down from the ceiling a life-size Princess Leia sex doll. She discusses her parents' break-up (Dad ran away with Elizabeth Taylor) and her mother's ill-conceived subsequent marriages. She mentions in passing one of her mother's great ideas -- that she, Carrie, should have a child with her mother's husband. (Advice not followed.) More sex, drugs, and rock & roll. One thing. Five seats over from my sister and me sat her mother. I was aghast. Carrie addressed her mom up in the mezzanine. Debbie seemed both resigned and proud. (The night before George Lucas was in the audience, and in the dressing room after the show, Carrie finally found out why he had told her on the Star Wars set that there was no underwear in outer space.)

Someone once said you should write as though your mother is dead. Carrie Fisher wasn't even fazed when her mom was in the audience. I've told my younger kids that Dot Dead is PG-32. A guy in the audience at one local bookstore asked me why the sex scenes in Dot Dead weren't grittier. I told him I was conscious that I had four kids who would read the book some day.

So I guess I do censor myself. I could never carry off what Carrie Fisher did. (OTOH, my life has not been as "interesting" as hers -- at least from a People Magazine perspective, I mean.)

Writers, do you ever censor what you write because of what your spouse, squeeze, kids, parents, or friends might think?

One Year Later

I was sitting at services this morning and felt a piece of paper in the pocket of my sports coat.  It was a receipt from the cafeteria at the company where I had my day job dated February 27, 2007.  I hadn't warn that jacket in a while I guess.  Anyway, it occurred to me that February 28 was my last day at the company.  Therefore, March 1, 2007 was my first day in a career as a full-time writer.  It's one year later!

So what I have accomplished?  I finished a political thriller/mystery/love story called Two Graves, which my agent is selling.  This month I will complete the first draft of a sequel to Dot Dead, tentatively called Smasher.  I've said before that I have something like career ADD, but I have made it an entire twelve months as a writer with no day job.