March 2007 Blog Posts (300)

Blog entries, chatter entries, main page entries...

I don't get it.

But the company's cool.

Except who let the TV writers in here?

Added by Keith Snyder on March 12, 2007 at 8:24am — 1 Comment

Novel POV vs. short story POV

I was trying to figure out why I write my novels from the cops' POV, and my short stories from the criminals'. I can only guess that a novel lets a mystery unfold - it takes time for cops to piece together the evidence enough to find the perp and make an arrest - whereas a short story is a good venue to show the rashness of most criminal acts: crimes not planned, but committed (or at least conceived) in the heat of a moment.

Anyone else notice this trend in their own, or…

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Added by Christa M. Miller on March 12, 2007 at 8:12am — 8 Comments

Random Thoughts

Went to an MWA chapter meeting last night, my first in a long time. The usual suspects: several wannabes, a few very modestly successful authors, some spouses/partners dragged along for the ride, a decent speaker from the Seattle PD explaining the differences between a real CSI department and the fakery seen on television. In other words, bad food, decent company, entertaining speaker.

What struck me most, though, was the fact that so little has changed from the time I went to…

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Added by Michael W. Sherer on March 12, 2007 at 3:53am — 5 Comments

Kick in the Pants

Well, this here party looks to be the encouragement I need to get back to work on my fiction. Right after I read up on what everybody's doing...

Added by Mary L. Wheeling on March 12, 2007 at 2:01am — No Comments

I have been deprived, and enjoy the books-post in the forum. When I got to a bookstore here (Germany, that is), what is featured on the tables happily set out in the crime section are your typical PI…

I have been deprived, and enjoy the books-post in the forum. When I got to a bookstore here (Germany, that is), what is featured on the tables happily set out in the crime section are your typical PI/detective novels that are written in series. There we have Rankin, Kellerman etc. and a huge influx of Swedish writers that, as I had to notice (face etched with surprise), are rather less well-known in the USA (Mankell, Edwardson, Nesser).

The shelves around… Continue

Added by Nick Purvis on March 11, 2007 at 7:51pm — 1 Comment

Follow My Lead

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived. - Gabriel Marcel

Writers are like magicians in their ability to pull characters out of their hats. The well-written protagonists become almost real people that can

stay with the writer and the reader well after the book is finished. They run

the gamut from Beowulf to Hamlet; from Holden Caulfield to the

Vampire Lestat; from the almost iconic Sherlock Holmes and Sam Spade to John

Rebus. The list is…

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Added by Jennifer Jordan on March 11, 2007 at 2:14pm — 2 Comments

Face the Music

How often, while your mind is immersed in a mystery, does the lead

character slip a favorite cd into his player while he’s driving to parts

unknown?

Or perhaps when he’s drinking a bad day away?

When Mr. “Heroic-Lead” listens to music, he listens for the same reasons

we do -

to escape. But in that freedom, we crawl inside his head for a while and

feel his thoughts. Ian Rankin’s “Let It Bleed” is the quintessential… Continue

Added by Jennifer Jordan on March 11, 2007 at 2:10pm — 7 Comments

The Funny Bones

Lenny Bruce said that all of his humor was based on destruction and despair and nothing less can be said of the following writers. They have

melded the two seemingly polar opposites of crime fiction and humor into intelligent

tales of people at their best and their worst. By meeting the darkest moments

of their lives with humor, their characters show a resilience and humanness

difficult to emulate with purely straight fiction. For the…

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Added by Jennifer Jordan on March 11, 2007 at 1:54pm — No Comments

Karp, Marshall – THE RABBIT FACTORY

THE RABBIT FACTORY (Police Procedural-Los Angeles-Cont) – G+

Karp, Marshall – 1^st in series

MacAdam Cage, 2006- US Hardcover – ISBN:

1596921749

*** Detectives Mike Lomax and Terry Biggs have a dead rabbit on their hands. The man who dresses as

Rambunction Rabbit at Lamaar…

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Added by LJ Roberts on March 11, 2007 at 9:00am — No Comments

When a traditional mystery isn't cozy

As a reader who loves whodunits, I was rather dismayed when I made contact with other mystery lovers--readers and writers--five years ago, after a period of literary hibernation--to find that while I wasn't looking, they'd acquired a bad name. The bad name was "cozy." It seemed to be widely assumed that if a mystery had an amateur sleuth, it was shallow, poorly written, and infested by talking cats and pots of tea. I had some trouble understanding this. Wasn't Lord Peter Wimsey… Continue

Added by Elizabeth Zelvin on March 11, 2007 at 1:27am — 12 Comments

Gotta say something

Been wanting to put something here, but I'm doing this juggling thing this week (and next and prolly the next one after that, at least) so I decided to share a little fictoid I wrote. This is an excerpt from a future project with the working title Twenty Dollar Whore:

- - - - - - -

Eager Gillespie was only twenty-two when took one in the face. He and about a dozen others had a guy holed up in a house on Northeast Thirty-Sixth, a man who'd fired a shot that…

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Added by Bill Cameron on March 10, 2007 at 1:39pm — 4 Comments

Traditionally, when books are being discussed I am rather firm on, "I do not like romance, or fantasy, or mystery." I stay rather true to the first, but have noticed both the fantasy and mystery to a…

Traditionally, when books are being discussed I am rather firm on, "I do not like romance, or fantasy, or mystery." I stay rather true to the first, but have noticed both the fantasy and mystery to appear in my collections of reads and books, yet none of them are books that would be sorted into their respective genres as being overly typical for their genre (I am told otherwise, usually). When I think mystery I think 'bad guy, cop, love story, bad guy caught, the end' and I am probably not too… Continue

Added by Nick Purvis on March 10, 2007 at 10:16am — 2 Comments

Knopf, Chris – THE LAST REFUGE

THE LAST REFUGE (Amateur Sleuth-New York-Cont) – VG

Knopf, Chris – 1^st book

The Permanent Press, 2005- US Hardcover – ISBN:

157962118X

Sam Acquillo is unemployed; living on what money is left from his invention after his divorce, drinks too much and lives in a ramshackle cottage in…

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Added by LJ Roberts on March 10, 2007 at 9:00am — No Comments

Hey, can I play too?

Fellow bloggers on Poe's Deadly Daughters, Sandy Parshall and Lonnie Cruse, turned me on to this sandbox for mystery lovers. I hope readers as well as writers will find their way here. I signed my first mystery contract with St. Martin's yesterday for Death Will Get You Sober, and now I have a year to spread the word to people who'll get a kick out of this traditional mystery that's neither cozy nor hard boiled but over easy and kind of crispy around the edges. My protagonist Bruce…

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Added by Elizabeth Zelvin on March 9, 2007 at 1:05pm — 4 Comments

Okay, I'm Pissed

I'm a little pissed at Daniel for stealing my idea.

Well, maybe steal is too strong of a word. It isn't as if I proposed the idea to him and he turned around and executed it. He obviously did that all on his own. But the idea of a social network specifically for crime or thriller writers has been in the back of my mind for months now and I blame the lack of time for never following through.

Now Hatadi has managed to tap into that nebulous part of the universe where all the… Continue

Added by Robert Gregory Browne on March 9, 2007 at 9:05am — 2 Comments

McGee, James – RESURRECTIONIST

RESURRECTIONIST (Historical-England-early 1800s) – VG

McGee, James – 2^nd in series

HarperCollins, 2007- UK Hardcover – ISBN:

9780007212699

Bow Street Runner Matthew Hawkwood is called to Bedlam. A prisoner has escaped by murdering a Reverend who came to visit, flawing his face and…

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Added by LJ Roberts on March 9, 2007 at 9:00am — No Comments

By Mr. Hatadi's Request

Are writers who write about murder more fun than writers who write about women finding empowerment through quilting?

That's the question of the day.

This came up in a bar, naturally, in a confab of writers - some crime, some literary, and some downright criminal. Ad Hudler, literary novelist, admitted to homicidal ambitions. Why?

Because crime writers, he said, have more fun than literary writers.

I know a few literary writers, like Soren Palmer…

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Added by David Terrenoire on March 9, 2007 at 2:46am — 5 Comments

Buy a crime novel on International Woman's Day

"International Women's Day (Thursday 8 March) is an occasion marked by women's groups around the world. This date is also commemorated at the United Nations and is designated in many countries as a national holiday. When women on all continents, often divided by national boundaries and by ethnic, linguistic, cultural, economic and political… Continue

Added by Daniel Hatadi on March 8, 2007 at 8:08pm — 7 Comments

Man Bites Book

By Cornelia [This is cross-posted from the group blog I'm Wednesday's posting child on, Naked Authors] As Patty and Paul have discussed here this week, there's been a depressing development on the book news front in recent days--the announcement that the L.A. Times plans to cut back its book review coverage. In an article titled "Scarcity of Ads Endangers Newspapers'… Continue

Added by Cornelia Read on March 8, 2007 at 11:52am — 3 Comments

Murder on the Cape

I was trying to post this as an attachment but the system seems reluctant to accept it... therefore, I have retrieved the article and posted it below. It would seem that the story would make great "mostly based on fact" fictionalization or a true crime if and when they ever catch who did it...Download Murder On The Cape.doc…

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Added by Janet McClellan on March 8, 2007 at 11:10am — 2 Comments