Dot Dead Diary

An Alternative to Blowing Up Your Neighborhood Library Branch

When I checked the online catalog of the Palo Alto Library soon after publication of Dot Dead, I saw that 80 or so people had reserved it. Here's what I said to myself about that: "Go without a few lattes, you pennypinchers, and buy the damn thing – it’s only $13.95."

I lost the argument with my wife, so I did abandon any notion of blowing up the local branch. Still, as supportive as I am of reading, it does strike me as unfair to authors that libraries buy one copy of their book and thereby enable dozens to read it.

Legislators in 40 other countries have figured out the answer – something called Public Lending Rights. In the UK each time a book is checked out of the library, the author receives a little more than a dime (no, it doesn’t apply to Americans). You’d think that might bankrupt Her Majesty’s Treasury? No, the PLR are not designed to make sure that J.K. Rowling gets even richer. Authors are limited to payments of 6,600 pounds per year. Not a lot, but that $13,000 (at current exchange rates) could really make a difference to authors just starting out. I'm not suggesting a subsidy here.  It's payment for services provided. Writers should be paid when their books are read.  That's fairness, not a subsidy.

Now the U.S. runs a huge deficit and adding billions to it would make little sense. No fear. Guess how much our cousins across the Atlantic spend on their program? In 2006 the entire shebang cost 7.6M pounds. What would we spend here? $50M? $75M?

So let’s get this straight. Libraries buy. The national government pays writers a small sum each time a book is checked out. Writers make a little extra money from people reading their books. (Writers making money? Call the police!) A literary terrorist is discouraged from throwing a Molotov cocktail through an open window of their local lending library. A great idea? I think so. And not that expensive either, especially considering the benefits.

Why not write your senators and representatives about it? I’m going to. And crazy as it seems, I think I’ll bring it up with the boards of the author organizations I belong to: MWA, Sisters in Crime, and International Thriller Writers.

 

A version of this posting also ran on the Inkspot blog.

Not Alone: A Fellow Novelist & Tea Addict

In four or five hours of writing, I might drink a dozen cups of tea.  Today's Times introduced me to a kindred spirit -- Therese Rebeck, the author of Three Girls and Their Brothers.  She says, "I just reread The Count of Monte Cristo, and there's this scene where he imbibes hashish....  And to me a really good cup of tea has a certain hashlike quality, where my mind is open to the universe." 

I've tried all the brands of tea she's tried from PG Tips to Harrods.  I guess it's time to try her book and see just what all that tea does for her writing.

 

 

Photo by Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Self-Absorbed Writers of the Silver Screen

I watched Starting Out in the Evening on DVD downstairs last night while my wife, #3, and #4 watched No Reservations upstairs.  Any serious flick about a novelist gets bonus points from me.  Funnily enough, the film starred Frank Langella as a mostly-forgotten, self-absorbed writer living in an apartment on the Upper West Side.  (Of course, the place looks great.  Real estate porn.)  Into his life waltzes a grad student who wants to resuscitate his reputation as a way to make hers.  Why funnily enough?  Because the first movie I remember Mr. Langella in was Diary of a Mad Housewife where he again played a self-absorbed writer.  Somewhere in the 37 years between the two films he moved from dashing to decrepit.  Anyway the verdict on the movie?  Intelligent and thought-provoking.  See it for what it has to say about aging and the writer's compulsion.  I'm going to track down the novel by Brian Morton that the movie's based on.

As a sidelight, I laughed when Langella's character approached an editor he had known.  The editor tells him that no one prints literary fiction anymore.  In real life, my manuscript was turned down by an editor at a very large publisher who told my agent I'd written "a gripping book that kept me turning pages from the very start," but that what I'd written was "too firmly rooted in the genre world" for her house.  Can't win nowadays.

 

Kick-off of the Thelma and Louise Tour

A few weeks ago the 21st century's version of Thelma and Louise hijacked my blog.  Last night I hightailed it over to to see Jess Lourey and Dana Fredsti in the flesh.  Introduced by store owner, mystery maven, and all-around great guy Ed Kaufman, they proved to be witty and charming.  (According to their anecdotes, not all my fellow male crime fiction authors are gentlemen.  Shocking news.)  After the session, we repaired across the street where Jess even sprung for a beer.  (Thanks, Jess!)  Even in these days of $4 gas, they are hitting the road tomorrow with Seattle as their final destination. Sounds like fun.

Chairman of the Board

I really admire versatility.  I'm so impressed with the way so many crime fiction authors juggle a day job as a lawyer or doctor or executive or what-have-you with their writing.  Jim Fusilli has written the terrific Terry Orr series and at the same time is music critic for The Wall Street Journal.  Impressive?  He has a piece on Frank Sinatra in today's paper which is both insightful and elegaic.  I listen to Frankie (and Ella, Tony, Sammy, Doris, Dino, Rosemary, etc.) on AOL Radio's Sinatra Style station while doing any boring, mindless task -- usually paying bills. 

A Helluva Thriller That Ought Not Be Forgotten

Some thoroughbreds not only race fast themselves, but have the ability to pass talent along to their foals.  Maybe authors work the same way.  Patti Abbott is a fine writer who recently garnered a Derringer Award for her story "My Hero" and is the mother of this year’s Edgar winner for best paperback original, Megan Abbott.  Anyway Patti is asking some of her friends to recommend “books we love but might have forgotten over the years.”

Now I don’t want to brag about a memory which can’t always recall where a car was parked thirty minutes ago.  But....  if I love a book I don’t forget it.  I cherish the memory.  Still, the thrust of Patti’s request makes sense.  Who’s overlooked nowadays?  My first inclination was to name a book by Ross Thomas, maybe Briarpatch.  Still, I’ve blogged about him before as have others.  So I went for a stroll along the bookshelves in my office and bedroom.  I cradled this book and that one.  When I came to an old British Penguin paperback of Lionel Davidson’s The Sun Chemist, I stopped.  Now that wasn’t my absolute favorite of his books although it was terrific.  Davidson’s premise was that Chaim Weizmann, the British chemist, first president of Israel, and distant cousin of yours truly, came up with a formula for synthetic oil that had been lost and the hero of the book tries to track it down.  Wonderful.  As were The Menorah Men, The Rose of Tibet, and The Night of Wenceslas (a Gold Dagger winner).  Davidson won a second Gold Dagger for The Chelsea Murders published in 1978, wrote a children's book that saw the light of day in 1980, and then went dark for years.  Finally, like the swan whose last song is its sweetest, Davidson came out with Kolymsky Heights in 1994, one of the two or three greatest thrillers ever. 

There’s more derring-do and adventure in Heights than is typical in Davidson’s oeuvre.  Johnny Porter is not exactly your everyday kind of guy – a Gitksan Indian from British Columbia who happens to be a Rhodes Scholar, too.  A melding of the ancient and the new.  He goes on a mission for the CIA, which he distrusts, to discover a secret inside Russia of inestimable humanitarian value that had been hidden under Stalin's orders.  (As with the missing formula for cheap oil in The Sun Chemist and the original Temple menorah in The Menorah Men, something of tremendous value has been lost and our hero races to find it.)  Porter stands apart, an outsider in his own country and in Siberia an outsider again.  He falls in love or does he?  There’s arcane technological and anthropological lore, a beautiful doctor to fall in love with (or not), and an incredible chase across the frozen tracts of the far north.  In the end Porter proves his loyalty not to a country but to individual people and to humankind.  Read this book.  (You can read the New York Times review here.)

We can’t expect another book from Mr. Davidson who turned 86 in March.  But what a way to leave ‘em wanting more Kolymsky Heights is.

Blog-Jacked by Virtual Thelma & Louise

Jess Lourey's Murder by the Month series is published by Midnight Ink as was my Dot Dead.  Her latest, August Moon, is just out and has been piling up raves.  ("Move over Stephanie Plum.  There's a new bad girl in town!"  - Anthony Winner William Kent Krueger.)  I met Dana Fredsti last December at M is for Mystery's annual holiday party.  Her first novel, The Peruvian Pigeon (not, mind you, The Maltese Falcon) is also on the shelves of bookstores across the country.  A cover blurb warns us that "The ending will wash you away."  When these two gifted, witty, and insistent authors stuck a Glock in my belly and asked me if I wanted to turn my blog over to them today, I thought it over for some time.  Too long, I guess.  A nudge in the solar plexus from the gleaming carbon black weapon decided it for me.  I'd been blog-jacked!  Keith

The Troubles with Touring, by Dana Fredsti

When Jess first emailed me about doing a joint book-signing road trip from the Bay Area to Seattle, I immediately pictured us cruising up 101 in a convertible a la Thelma and Louise.  We would be two pistol-packing mamas, tempting amoral drifters and book store clerks alike with our sexy southern accents (never mind I'm from California, like, y'know?, and Jess is from Minnesota, ya, fer sure!).

Of course, we'd substitute pens for pistols (comment from Keith: "Yeah, right.") and neither of us would be stupid enough to get all our money stolen by one of those sexy drifters. And we'd be driving my Saturn SL2 instead of a convertible and probably forgo driving off the edge of the Grand Canyon since it's several hundred miles out of our way and gas ain't cheap. Oh, and no head-scarves or mom jeans. But aside from all that, it would be just like Thelma and Louise. If they visited bookstores and begged passers-by to purchase their mystery novels. 

Setting up the actual tour made me rethink the "no pistols" part, however. (Another comment from Keith:  "I warned you.")  Both Jess and I are published with small presses: Midnight Ink and Rock Publishing, Inc. And while there are many advantages to being published by a small press (lots of personal attention, a quicker turnaround from acceptance to publication, more say in cover art), being taken seriously by bookstores isn't one of them.  After dealing with rejections from several unnecessarily snotty bookstore clerks and owners, the idea of going in with a gun and snarling "You're gonna carry my book AND give me a signing AND have a cheese tray available!" is very attractive.  "Do you know how many people I talk to every day?" said one local San Francisco bookstore owner when I stopped in with a review copy of my book. He declined it because he "didn't have time to read." A friend of mine went into this same store a few weeks later and asked about my book. She was told by the clerk they didn't carry "self-published" books.   

(Note to snotty bookstore owners and ignorant clerks: having a book published by a small, un-Murdochized publisher who pays all the costs of publication, provides free marketing and review copies of your book as well as other publicity materials and support is NOT self-publication. Not that there's anything wrong with that.) 

The dichotomy here is the independents want people to support them and not buy books through the big chains such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Borders, where many books can be bought at a discount. However these same stores can't always support the independent publishers who give many new authors their first break because these smaller publishers don't offer the bookstores the discounts they get from the large publishing houses. Ah, the irony!

This all being said, not all bookstores are created equal and there are plenty of perfectly lovely independents willing to host new authors for signings and take a chance by ordering copies of our books. Jess and I are starting off our tour at M is for Mystery in San Mateo as well as hitting Murder by the Book in Portland. As far as the larger chains, the District Event Manager of the Seattle and surrounding area Borders stores has been fantastic and we have signings lined up at the Olympia and downtown Seattle stores. Thank you, Don! 

We'll be driving from San Francisco to Portland after two days in the Bay Area. The plan is to take a full day to drive from SF to Portland with time to meander up the coast, make pit stops as needed, visit a few wineries, and see what kind of trouble we can get into and still keep on schedule. We're still arguing over who gets to be Louise. Neither of us wants to be the naive housewife even if she does get to have hot sex with Brad Pitt. Isn't this how Janet Evanovich and Sue Grafton started out?

Jess Lourey and Dana Fredsti's pacifistic Thelma and Louise-type book tour starts in San Francisco on May 21. By then, they will have decided which of them gets to be the Susan Sarandon character. The person who makes the best case on this blog for why it should be Jess wins a free copy of August Moon, the latest installment in her Lefty-nominated Murder-by-Month series. The person who makes the best case on this blog for why it should be Dana wins a free copy of The Peruvian Pigeon, the first in her Murder for Hire series featuring warm, wise, and witty Connie Garrett. Check here for the latest tour dates and stops.

A Worthwhile Schlep

I've been trying to get to get to one of Cara Black's appearances for a couple of months now.  Tuesday night Libby Fischer Hellmann was at M is for Mystery, but I couldn't make that either.

Yesterday, though, I schlepped up to the City and sat in the audience at Stacey's Bookstore on Market Strret with about four dozen women and three other men to listen to the two of them along with the peppery and prolific Rhys Bowen.  What a treat!  Three masters of the female P.I. novel.  Now Cara has always written about the hip Parisienne detective, Aimee Leduc. Rhys started with police mysteries set in Wales, but her long-running Molly Murphy series features a detective in early twentieth-century New York City.  With her latest, Libby resurrected Georgia Davis, a character from book three of her Ellie Foreman series, and turned her into a P.I.   

Cara's been working hard publicizing her latest Parisian mystery, Murder in the Rue de Paradis.  She was just back from the LA Times Book Festival where the mercury stretched up into the low 90's.  Last year she and I sold together in a booth at the LATBF, and I've never had such a good time flogging books.  She bragged to passersby about blogging Dot Dead (she has a very generous soul indeed) and I snagged potential buyers for her with a line (in truth, her line) about getting to Paris for the price of a book.  We each sold out in about 20 minutes.  Cara has a huge fan base in California, north and south.  No surprise to see Murder on the Rue de Paradis on the San Francisco Bay Area bestseller list.  She deserves it.

Libby and I were on a panel together at the late, lamented ConMisterio Conference a few years ago.  Easy Innocence has been garnering terrific reviews and is into a second printing in both the hardback and paperback editions.  Her hometown Tribune wrote that Georgia Davis "is tough and smart enough to give even the legendary V.I. Warshawski a run for her money."  (BTW, I interviewed Libby myself for The Big Thrill.)  While Cara was chatting with fans, Libby was pulling on her sleeve and saying, "Cara, we have to go.  I have a plane to catch."  She was on her way home to Chicagoland for one night before heading today to the Edgar Awards in New York.  "Blue Note," a short story by the wonderful Stuart Kaminsky in the anthology Chicago Blues Libby edited, is up for an award.  As a glance at her schedule proves, Libby's working hard .

So is Rhys.  She's juggling two series and to keep her fans happy she writes a book in each every year.  Her latest Molly Murphy, Tell Me Pretty Maiden, is just out and the second in her series about Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie, an impoverished British royal in 1930's, is out in July.  She's a dynamo in person, too.

Even with gas at $3.99 a gallon, listening to (and chatting with) these three was well worth the expedition north on US101.