All Blog Posts Tagged 'big' (8)

Faith and a Box Full of Clock Parts

Thrilled to see my guest essay on writers keeping the faith despite self-doubt on Psychology Today! Here's an excerpt:

"I’m ten years old. My Big Ben-style alarm clock has stopped working. Maybe I wound it too tightly, maybe it’s just worn out. Whatever the reason, the alarm hasn’t gone off in days.

I know I can fix it, if only I can get a look inside. When I tell my …

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Added by Karen Dionne on January 30, 2013 at 12:04am — No Comments

The city of Indianapolis as a setting

Indianapolis is a middle American city. Until I lived there, I never took it seriously. The bad news was that I was very prejudiced against it. The good news was that, being an Easterner, I knew that I was prejudiced against everything between Pennsylvania and the Pacific Coast states, with possible - but not definite, exception made for the city of Boulder, Colorado where some enlightened souls [yes, that means Hippies] had taken up residence during a spreading of the population of the…

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Added by Miriam Pia on January 25, 2013 at 11:52pm — 2 Comments

Writers, no email until lunch

Raymond Chandler wrote that a writer shouldn’t read letters until lunchtime. The energy that ought to go into his novel would be diverted to correspondence.

If email had been invented 50 years earlier, we might never have had “The Big Sleep.”

Email has an itching urgency that letters don’t have. And a letter leads only to the end of the page – the internet clicks you on into endless pages and seemingly into other worlds. So…

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Added by Matt Rees on September 16, 2010 at 7:58pm — No Comments

Going historical

Writing of the disdain expressed for genre novels by critics, Raymond Chandler said that there were just as many bad “literary novels” of the type favored by critics as there were bad genre stories – except that the bad literary novels didn’t get published. In other words, there’s nothing inherent in so-called genre fiction that makes it lesser than “literary” fiction.

Chandler knew what he was talking about. His great noir novels, such as “The Big Sleep”…

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Added by Matt Rees on September 1, 2010 at 6:06pm — 1 Comment

Sondheim in the West Bank

I’m in between drafts of a novel, so I thought I’d look for something to clear my head. Inspired by a BBC broadcast last week in honor of the 80th birthday of Broadway lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim, I’ve been working on a musical version of my Palestinian crime novels. (Only in the shower, so far…)

I’m thinking of updating the Romeo and Juliet story and setting it in Bethlehem. In tribute to the Sondheim-Bernstein classic “West Side Story,” it’ll be…

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Added by Matt Rees on August 5, 2010 at 5:05pm — No Comments

Novel: SOLITAIRE MONGOOSE

This novel begins in the courtrooms where the main character is exonerated of escape charges. The main character is given money, a new job as an F.B.I. agent in the lone division called the 'Suicide Unit' and as he goes deep under cover on assignments given to him by his superiors who want to see him get killed, he searches his past and present for the truth as to who is trying to kill him and why his government uses him the way they do. This tale of drugs,…

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Added by Mosi Tyrone Wells on June 30, 2010 at 8:29am — 1 Comment

August Reads

August was a slow month for reading recommendations. Part of this was because my schedule was full and didn’t allow for as much reading time as I like. Another part was because I read several crappy books in August. Here are two worth following up on.

Crime Always Pays, by Declan Burke. Not available to the public yet, I was lucky enough to score an advance electronic copy. The sequel to last year’s acclaimed The Big O, Crime Always Pays picks up just a few hours later,… Continue

Added by Dana King on September 5, 2009 at 4:32am — No Comments

Genre vs. Lit - everybody's talking about it

Recently on the Elmore Leonard discussion forum, someone posted this about the novel, Pagan Babies:

"I was a bit uncomfortable at the use of a horrific, real-life tragedy within a crime novel."

Of course, almost every crime novel is inspired by some real-life tragedy. In this case it's the scale of the thing.

Pagan Babies opens five years after the Rwandan genocide with a description of forty-seven bodies, "... turned to leather and stains," in a… Continue

Added by John McFetridge on April 11, 2008 at 12:43am — No Comments