All Blog Posts Tagged 'robert' (6)

Where Do Ideas Come From?

I saw Robert B. Parker at a book signing many years ago. He told a story of being on one of those morning wake-up shows all television stations have, sharing a spot with Elmore Leonard. They were sitting in the Green Room, passing the time, and agreed the question they least liked answering was, “Where do you get your ideas?”

Ten minutes later, on camera, the helmet-haired blonde hostess’s first question was to Parker: “Where do you get your…

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Added by Dana King on October 3, 2013 at 1:05am — 4 Comments

Review: the new oil curse

Seizing Power: The Grab for Global Oil Wealth by Robert Slater (Bloomberg Press, $29.95)

Just when Goldman Sachs had you convinced that Wall Street would be the instrument of global doom, this excellent primer on the future of oil arrives to demonstrate that the specter of diminishing crude reserves could be just as lethal. And not just to the world…

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Added by Matt Rees on December 16, 2010 at 3:40am — No Comments

My voice and his voice: first- or third-person narrative in the novel

Robert Harris has been one of my favorite authors since I first laid hands on “Fatherland,” his “what if the Nazis had won” thriller. “Enigma” and “Archangel” were even better. His first two Roman ventures “Pompei” and “Imperium” were by no means the worst books I read in the years of their publication.

Then came “The Ghost.” The story of a hack hired to ghostwrite the multi-million-dollar memoirs of a former British Prime Minister — transparently Tony…

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Added by Matt Rees on April 23, 2010 at 9:00pm — 2 Comments

How does that grab you? Great openings to new books

The first line of a top-notch novel usually has a lot of punch -- to "grab" you. My long-time favorite is "The Sun Also Rises," which manages to tell you a great deal about one of the main characters, but even more about the narrator: "Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn." This weekend The San Francisco Chronicle has… Continue

Added by Matt Rees on February 28, 2010 at 7:31pm — 4 Comments

Are You Going to Believe Me, or Your Private Eyes?

(Also posted in One Bite at a Time.)

I’ve been lucky over the past few weeks to have read three books that reminded me why I got interested in crime fiction and writing in the first place: first person private investigator stories.

Libby Fischer Hellmann’s Easy Innocence takes the attitudes of an affluent suburb and shows consequences not often considered. Her… Continue

Added by Dana King on September 19, 2009 at 2:38am — 4 Comments

Anybody Else a Sherlock Fan?

If so, you have to try this new promotional website.

Fill in the five gray boxes with the password, IRENE, and you will hear and see Warner Bros. video for the new Holmes movie set to open Christmas Day.

If you're a Holmes fan, you know the password IRENE remembers Irene Adler, the woman who once tricked Sherlock into revealing the…