Free Stuff from Grind Joint

Last week the marketing barrage featured the first book of the Penns River series. Worst Enemies. Today my tease is Chapter One of the second book, Grind Joint, released Wednesday past by Down & Out Books and available through the D&OB web site, along with all finer online outlets.

GRIND JOINT

There is always an easy solution to every human problem–neat, plausible, and wrong.

–H. L. Mencken 

[ 1 ]

The building used to be a mini-mall. Penney’s on one end, Monkey Ward’s on the other, with a handful of little local shops in between. Nail salon, barber, wing joint, liquor store. They closed years ago, boarded up the windows. The Blockbuster in an outbuilding went tits up last summer. The toy store next door saw half a dozen re-inventions before it managed to scrape by as one of those operations where everything was five bucks or less. That and the bank were all that were left. Kenny Czarniak would have thought it ironic, how only the bank and the discount store survived amid the shells of failure, but any sense of irony had left him long ago.

He parked fifty yards from the service door in back. Room for at least a thousand cars in the lot. Construction crews didn’t need ten percent of the spaces, but casino management wanted the employees to get used to parking away from the entrances so customers could have the good spaces when the doors opened next week. Pulled his gloves on with his teeth and fished the casino keys out of his jacket pocket.

Some assholes had left bags of trash by the door again. Not everyone loved the idea of a casino in town. Some thought it hilarious to pull teenage harassments like dumping garbage or a flattened road kill in front of the doors. Never bothered to think the only person they inconvenienced was Kenny, who was just like them and didn’t give a shit whether Penns River had a casino or not so long as he had a place to work.

He looked down to find the key and when he looked up he saw the pile of trash was actually a bum sleeping one off. They didn’t often come this far from the old business district. Too spread out here, a five mile walk to the shelter where some of them took a bus into Pittsburgh to bum quarters off shoppers. Kenny’d nudge him awake and tell him to keep moving, point him west on Leechburg Road, town’s that way.

Eight feet away and Kenny noticed the guy’s face had an odd color. Leaned over for a closer look and realized the discoloration was ice crystals. Then he saw the bullet holes, one over each eye, and dropped the keys grabbing the cell out of his pocket.

Worst Enemies and Grind Joint Re-launch October 26!

You may have noticed things are different here at OBAAT. With Down & Out Books announcing the October 26^th re-launch of both Worst Enemies and Grind Joint, it’s time for the Relentless Self-Promotion Machine™ to get cranked up for another assault on your sensitivities and good taste.

Never heard of either of them? You must be new to the blog. Not wishing to be remiss, this should catch you up.

Penns River is an amalgam of three small towns in Western Pennsylvania where I grew up and still have close family ties. (My parents live in the same house I grew up in, bought in 1960, a couple of weeks before Bill Mazeroski’s home run won the World Series.) My memory of the local economy is a constant stream of mills closing and jobs lost. A lot of people my age—me, for example—left for brighter economic futures.

Pittsburgh recovered to become a hub of medicine, education, and finance. The North Hills and South Hills came back with it. Not so much farther up the Allegheny, where population fell along with the economy. Land that used to be a diary farm, with the easiest access to the expressway that runs into Pittsburgh, is now a relatively affluent bedroom community with homes on two-acre lots. The people who live there neither earn nor spend their money locally.

Worst Enemies spends a lot of time around those houses. Tom Widmer makes good money in Pittsburgh’s financial industry. He and his wife Marian spend it just as fast, if not faster. Neither really wants the other around anymore. This is a murder story. You can see where this leads.

Not two miles away as the crow flies sits what used to be a busy shopping center. Montgomery Ward on one end, J.C. Penny on the other, with a connecting waist of small local businesses. Wards closed in 2003; Penney’s two years later. Nothing replaced them. The city is in constant dispute with the owner and has declared the remaining hulk to be unsafe. The owner refuses to do anything with it, including sell it. The city can’t afford to seize it under eminent domain. It decays a little each year, a monument to failure.

Grind Joint’s focus is here. A real estate developer who missed out on the big money when

the commonwealth legalized casino gambling in Pittsburgh had taken over the building and renovated it into a low-roller casino; a “grind joint,” in the parlance of the trade. The casino brings problems of its own. The feeder streets lack the capacity to support the traffic, and ancillary businesses spring up around it that draw crime the way clover attracts bees.

You wouldn’t think organized crime would be an issue in such a town. Ordinarily it isn’t. The towns that inspired Penns River were once hotspots of mob activity, with afterhours clubs and pretty much any action anyone could want. The underboss of the Pittsburgh crime family—a national figure in his day—lived there along with his brother and his crew. The leader of what’s left of the Pittsburgh mob still lives in the fictional Penns River and has declared it a crime-free zone as a way to build goodwill in a town where everybody knows who—and what—he is, but the old-timers still remember the good old days when the Mob had an even bigger presence and life was good.

Tasked with maintaining order among these disparate forces are fewer than 40 cops, hindered by a city government in thrall to whatever might bring some money back to town. There aren’t enough of them, most of those who are there didn’t sign on for this kind of duty, and no help is on the horizon.

Those are the stories I hope to tell in Penns River.

The books are available for pre-order now; the formal release date is October 26. Full information on ordering is on each book’s page at the Down & Out web site:

Worst Enemies

Grind Joint

I’ll have more on both books as the date approaches.

(Editor's Note: Thanks are owed to everyone connected with Down & Out Books; they're day is coming. I do want to point out the brilliant cover art provided by the indefatigable and seemingly ubiquitous Eric Beetner. Well done, sir, and thank you.)

  

Free E-Books

Starting today, all of my Kindle e-books will be free on Amazon through Sunday, June 29. Included are:

 

A Small Sacrifice. Nominated for a Shamus Award for Best Indie PI Novel, it’s the story of Chicago investigator Nick Forte, who is asked to clear the name of a man who has been publicly vilified as the murderer of his young son. Forte learns, while Doug Mitchell might not be guilty, he’s no innocent, and the circumstances place Forte and his family in jeopardy.

Grind Joint. Named by The LA Review of Books as one of the fifteen best noir reads of 2013, Grind Joint is the story of what happens in a small, economically depressed Pennsylvania town when someone gets the bright idea of solving their financial woes by building a low-roller casino. The local cops find themselves up against more than they bargained for when the Russian mob takes an interest. A Small Sacrifice’s Nick Forte plays a supporting but pivotal role.

Worst Enemies. The first of the Penns River books, the story of what can happen when someone takes the scenario of Strangers on a Train way too seriously. Detectives Ben Dougherty and Willie Grabek have to solve two murders organized by a person who is close to both victims, yet operates at some distance.

Wild Bill. A standalone tale of FBI Special Agent Willard “Wild Bill” Hickox, who’s ready to retire but wants to put the cherry on his career by bringing down Chicago’s Number One crime boss. When a gang war re-arranges all the players, Will must choose between duty, experience, and a combination of the two if he is to ride off into the sunset as planned.

I’ve been shoving the reviews of these books down your throats here for months, so that’s all I’ll say about them for the time being. Take full advantage of the free stuff while it lasts. It’s golden opportunity for anyone who might be curious about any of the books, but has been thinking, “That asshole’s not getting any of my money,” so go for it.

Breaking News on Grind Joint; Noir at the Bar Baltimore

Relative quiet here has masked lots of activity on the Grind Joint front. To wit:

· An audio book, read by Mike Dennis, will be available through Amazon, audible.com, and iTunes, hopefully within the next week. Mike’s done a hell of a job, making subtle differences in the accents and inflections in a book with a shit ton of speaking parts, and, best of all, lets the reader decide what’s exciting and what isn’t. I’d never worked on an audio book before, and the process was enlightening. More details will be provided as the launch approaches.

(By the way, Mike’s a fine writer his own self. His work has appeared on more than one of my year end lists, with Setup on Front Street and the short story, “The Session” standing out for me. Check him out in more detail on his blog, http://mikedennisnoir.com.)

· A lot of people have asked when the e-book for Grind Joint will be available. (All right, two people have asked; one asked twice. “A lot” can mean different things to different people.) I now have an answer: soon. By “soon,” I mean by the end of the month. Weather permitting. (I have no idea why weather would not permit the publication of an e-book, but it sounds like something I could ascribe tardiness to, as the weather is entirely out of my control, thus leaving me blameless should the date slip.) Right now I have only the formatting to do, and am waiting on a cover design to be finalized. The good news is, it’s not one of those “the e-book is damn near as expensive as the print version.” Price for Kindle will be $3.99.

Kieran Shea, Nik Korpon, and Steve Weddle hosted Baltimore’s first Noir at the Bar at Slainte on Thames Street last Sunday. Weather held down the crowd a bit, but the writers who were able to make it were worth a snowy slog: Rob Hart and Todd Robinson (both drove all the way from New York, then back that night so Todd could work a double on Monday), Merry Jones, Jon McGoran, Art Taylor, Dennis Tafoya, Jen Conley, and Jeff Alphin displayed the wide variety of what crime fiction and noir are capable of though grit and humor and a severed penis in a jar. The Godfather of N@B, Peter Rozovsky, made the trip from Philadelphia to lend his imprimatur. This was the first such slam The Beloved Spouse and I have been able to attend; it will not be the last.

Grind Joint in the LA Review of Books

Woody Haut, writing in the LA Review of Books, has named Grind Joint among his fifteen favorite reads of 2013. Not in the Top Ten, but that was populated by the likes of Daniel Woodrell, James, Sallis, Max Allan Collins, and Sarah Weinman.

Haut said of Grind Joint: With crisp dialogue and sparse exposition reminiscent of Elmore Leonard and George V. Higgins, it’s an investigation of a town on the edge of a precipice.

Read the entire list. It’s not limited to 2013 books, so there may be a couple you’ve missed along the way.

Audio Interview at The Author’s Show

My radio interview with Don McCauley at The Author’s Show is live all day December 23 (Festivus, how cool is that?) and can be heard here.

Holy Stuff, Free Shit!

I know I’m not going to sell many—hell, any—books through a Goodreads giveaway, but it’s the Season of the Winter Solstice, when early darkness and lifeless, freezing landscapes promote the spirit of giving, so what the hell. Starting Friday—right, Friday the Thirteenth, bwahaha—through December 19, go on over to Goodreads and sign up. I’m giving away an autographed copy of Grind Joint. I’d hoped to have weekly drawings through the end of the year, but Goodreads isn’t letting me set up more than one at a time. (Maybe I have to wait for this one to go active first. Or maybe it’s just Goodreads being Goodreads, since an alarming amount of it is a pain in the ass, such as all the covers for my books disappearing, and the German language BDSM book I found under my name today.)

If this works and is as much fun as I hope, we’ll do more as time goes on.

But wait!!! There’s more!!!!

Anyone who reads Grind Joint* and sends an email to danakingcrime@gmail.com will receive one of my e-books for free. Gratis. Libre. Gratuito. Kostenlos. Бесплатно. Choose from any of these fine works, some of which have sold into the dozens:

Wild Bill - Will Hickox is a decorated FBI veteran with a legendary ability to cultivate informants, much closer to retirement than to the days when he earned the nickname “Wild Bill.” Operation Fallout should cut the head off of the Chicago mob and provide a fitting capstone to his career. When Outfit boss Gianni Bevilacqua dies and the resulting war places Fallout in jeopardy, Hickox does what he can to save it, and his retirement plans with his lover, Madeline Kilmak.

Worst Enemies (Predecessor to Grind Joint in the Penns River series) - Penns River rarely sees two homicides in a year. Two in little over a week is almost too much for the police force to handle. The assigned detectives—Ben Dougherty, a former MP and Penns River native, and retired Pittsburgh cop Willie Grabek—find links to bind the two cases, but their investigation is complicated by the involvement of private investigator Daniel Rollison, a retired spy on a suspect’s payroll who is really working for himself. Pittsburgh mob boss Mike Mannarino also lives in Penns River and has more than a passing interest in the case. The two cops’ savvy competes with the limitations of their small town’s resources and the interference of Rollison and Mannarino in a story that shows identifying a killer and proving it are separate things.

A Small Sacrifice (featuring Nick Forte, a key character in Grind Joint) - Detective Nick Forte is not impressed when Shirley Mitchell asks him to clear her son’s name for a murder everyone is sure he committed. Persuaded to at least look around, Forte soon encounters a dead body, as well as the distinct possibility the next murder he’s involved with will be his own. Clearing Doug Mitchell’s name quickly becomes far less important to Forte than keeping references to himself in the present tense.

The free e-book offer expires midnight, December 31, 2013. Anyone who knows me well can attest my generosity is exceeded only by my stinginess, so there’s no telling when I’ll suffer another such moment of weakness and decide to give things away again.

* - No proof required. I trust not only the readers of this blog, but anyone else they might tell; no need to keep this to yourself.

Grind Joint Launch, November 16, 2013

Grind Joint launched last Saturday at the Mystery Lovers Bookshop in Oakmont, PA. The plan was to post a recap here on Monday, but I wasn’t ready. I told myself it was due to a busy day and travel.

I’ll begin with an apology. This should be about the event, and I’m afraid it’s going to be more about me. So it goes. I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days and have not found a way to adequately express how the day went from my perspective. Anyone who was there and wants to give a more objective account, comment away.

Saturday morning’s events started Friday when The Sole Heir and her mother (aka The Good Ex) made an unannounced appearance at my parents’ home. I had been under the impression they had a conflicting obligation, booked well before the launch date had been finalized. They were wholly unexpected.

And, they bore gifts:

With Saturday already guaranteed to be a good day, The Beloved Spouse and I approached MLB with a spring in our step. I almost tripped from stopping short when I saw Charlie Stella and the lovely Princepessa, Ann Marie, already inside. (Charlie had made many assurances and apologies about his own previous commitment. This was, by the way, the day’s only surprise of which The Beloved Spouse was unaware. I can’t trust anyone to give me the straight story.)

(Charlie Stella with not The Princepessa.)

Laurie Stephens of MLB is the perfect hostess for a virgin author. All I had to do was pretend to be personable (I think I fooled most of them, with one notable exception, the old sonofabitch), do my reading, answer questions without overtly offending anyone, and sign some books. I was made to feel not only welcome, but like everyone was genuinely happy for me to be there. Laurie’s introduction set me up well, she got the Q & A rolling, and stepped in during a brief lag. She was an enormous help and was, is, much appreciated.

The surprises continued to walk in. An uncle I see once a year, if I’m lucky; twice a year, if he’s not. Two dear friends, unknown to each other, came all the way from DC. The Good Ex’s mother and father were there; her aunt and uncle drove in from Philadelphia. My parents’ neighbors came, bringing their grown daughter and a visiting relation, who bought a book and took it back to Canada, establishing Grind Joint internationally.

The event went well. I had some small concern about the reception of how I depict my fictionalized town—everyone there would, of course, recognize it; they live in or near it—so I began with a brief bio and described how the germ of an idea, based on personal observation, grew into the book. Heads nodded. They got it. We sold 25 of the 30 books that had been ordered, which certainly exceeded my expectations; I hope Laurie and everyone at MLB was similarly pleased.

(Charlie Stella, Laurie Stephens, your humble correspondent, Rick Ollerman)

Before we left for lunch, The Sole Heir had one more surprise:

In the end, Mystery Lovers Bookshop and Stark House had an author event; I had much more. The effort and expense undertaken on my behalf was more than gratifying; it was, and is, humbling. Words cannot express how much this has meant to me. It was the single most joyous day I can remember. (No offense to The Sole Heir, but she was born via C-section after 34 hours of induced labor; the first thing I did when I got home was throw up.)

Publishing is a weird business. We may already have sold half of all the copies Grind Joint will ever sell. This could have been my final launch; there may never be another contract. I could reach the bestseller list, win an award, garner national media attention, get a movie deal, whatever. Doesn’t matter. Everything after this is gravy.

Booklist Weighs In On Grind Joint

The following will appear in the November 15 edition of Booklist:

King has created vividly drawn characters, a plot the late Elmore Leonard would appreciate, and dialogue that hits all the right notes. His Penns River recalls K.C. Constantine’s wonderfully rendered Rocksburg, another struggling, soulful Pennsylvania mill town. But the reclusive Constantine has retired. Let's hope Grind Joint is the first in a new series chronicling life and crime in the Alleghenies.

Grind Joint is available for pre-order at Amazon. The “official” launch is at the Mystery Lovers Bookshop, in Oakmont PA, at 10:00 EST, Saturday, November 16.

Hope to see you there.

Submit a Question, Win a Copy of Grind Joint

I have made a conscientious effort to post three blog entries each week for the past couple of months. This is partly to impose some discipline in my blog postings and partly to practice keeping my prose tight in whatever I write. Mostly, it’s an effort to have new material I can tell people about on Facebook and Crimespace and Goodreads which might help them to remember I have a book coming out November 16. (Grind Joint, from Stark House? I may have mentioned it a time or two.)

I have learned that writing a blog is not unlike painting a fence: it’s much easier if you con others to do it for you. A third of all the posts I have to write between now and the end of the year will be written by others, submitting answers to interview questions as part of the Bouchercon project. (Running every Friday till the end of the year. The current installment features Judy Bobalik and Jon Jordan.)

I have done interviews before, of course, especially after reading a book I like. The problem there is, I often don’t read books until they have been available for a while, sometimes years. (Witness my recent “discovery” of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.) Then, by the time I get around to the interview, not only is the book no longer news, I’m lucky the author remembers writing it.

The long tail may be of more importance in this era of e-readers and perpetual availability, but that only goes so far. Authors need exposure most while the print book is still a blushing debutante in the public eye, and print media resources have substantially dried up for all but the most prominent. This blog may have dozens of readers, but the spider web effect means one never knows who may get their initial exposure to a new author because they stopped by for an unrelated reason. (Say, for example, to read a Bouchercon piece, and browsed a few others while they were here.)

My answer is to interview authors before I may have had a chance to read their books. Not a big deal; it’s done all the time. The trick is, what to ask them? The hoary standbys still apply: Who do you read? Who are your greatest influences? Do you outline or fly by the seat of you pants? Do you even wear pants when you write? What are you working on now? Those are gimmes.

There are others that apply to any book: Tell us about your book. Who would you cast in the leading roles when the movie gets made?

Those are all valid questions. I know, because I’d be interested in them; that’s why I asked. Blogs are not written solely for the owner’s personal satisfaction; at least they shouldn’t be. (I know some that are, and it’s a shame.) What’s more important is, what would you, Dear Reader, like to know about the authors I’ll interview and their new books?

That’s not a rhetorical question; I really want to know. I want to know so badly I’m offering a signed copy of Grind Joint as a reward for leaving a potential question in the Comments section below. Everyone who suggests a question for subsequent interviews will be entered into a drawing, one entry per suggestion, even if they’re all in the same comment, and whether I actually select that question for future interviews.

The deadline for consideration is 11:59 PM tomorrow, Tuesday, October 22. Check back on Wednesday to see who won, and to see how to make arrangements to have the book delivered.

Thanks in advance for your help, and good luck. It’s worth entering. The book doesn’t suck. Look what these nice people said at the top of the page. Those of you who know me at all know I’m too cheap to bribe them. That has to count for something.

Breaking News

Two—count ‘em, two—pre-release reviews of Grind Joint are now available at Amazon, with five stars each. Check them out on Grind Joint’s Amazon page.

An Interview With Rick Ollerman of Stark House

As was noted recently, I plugged away for well over ten years before anyone paid me to publish one of my novels. Who was this daring man, who scoffed at conventional wisdom and braved the currents of uncertainty to give an aging rookie a glimpse of the Land of Publication, where food tastes better, the winters are milder, and women ask you to autograph their breasts. (Richard Castle lives in one of the tonier neighborhoods in the Land of Publication.)

Rick Ollerman is such a man, and he proved his generosity of spirit yet again by agreeing to answer a handful of questions that, it is hoped, will provide some insight to his thought processes.

One Bite at a Time: Rick, you’re the first honest to Maxwell Perkins editor we’ve ever had here at One Bite at a Time. Describe your ivory tower for us. How’s the view?

Rick Ollerman: Only about knee high.

Stark House originally started out selling American versions of fantasy books by Storm Constantine. Then there were some collections by the classic fantasist Algernon Blackwood. Somewhere along the way, Stark House printed a non-fiction tribute to the great film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, co-authored by Ed Gorman and star of the movie Kevin McCartthy. A long way from classic hard-boiled and noir fiction, right?

But then Stark House did an original novel by a woman named Catherine Butzen called Thief of Midnight. We released a slightly updated edition of the classic Beat writer collection called The Beat Generation & The Angry Young Men. That came about because one of the original editors, Max Gartenberg, was Peter Rabe’s agent and upon Max’s passing, his daughter offered the book to us. Under the Shepardson Books imprint we released a collection of publisher Greg Shepard’s father’s old newspaper columns that talk about life in old California. After Thief of Night was published, we started publishing new novels by the great Charlie Stella.

All that’s kind of a long way of saying that what I do as an editor is not strictly the same thing that an editor at another house would do. Yes, I read manuscripts–last year I rejected two that were bought by other publishers and kept one, yes, your own Grind Joint. I have a constant trickle of manuscripts to go through and so far none but yours has really measured up.

I proofread every book myself, I’ve started to write many of the introductions for the books, I’ve edited and recreated lost pages for a previously unpublished novel by one of the greats, I sometimes write but more often revise or edit the teaser pages.

For our recent non-fiction book, Paperback Confidential, I edited that book which included writing an introduction, writing six of the 132 entries, and compiling the index of pseudonyms that I hope people find truly handy (the Pseudodex).

I’ve influenced which books have appeared in some of our collections, I’m recruiting possible cover artists for future books, and I’m also heavily involved in some of the publicity that we do.

Maxwell Perkins never had it so good. Better, I’m sure.

OBAAT: Tell us what’s up with Stark House.

RO: Quite a lot, actually. When we publish books by authors who are actually still alive, there’s a lot more work that goes into gearing up each launch, especially if the author is a new one. One of my pet projects is trying to establish what we, as a small house, can do for independent booksellers who are feeling fairly ignored by the Big 5 in New York. There are all sorts of arguments that can be made for doing business as usual, but I think there’s a potentially huge role in the future for small presses. For instance, I could go buy a book by Random House just because it’s published by Random House, but there’s no guarantee, not that there is with any book but go with me here, and I don’t know what I’m getting. But Stark House has a wonderful reputation, thanks to the curation of our publisher Greg Shepherd, that even if you’re unfamiliar with a book or an author, that you know if it’s published by Stark House there’s a good chance you already have a sense of the kind of book you’re going to get.

Recent numbers seem to show that e-book sales are leveling off and that the number of independent bookstore is increasing. By forging new and tighter relationships with the bookstores, I hope that we can deliver new forms of the books that give both the bookstores and the readers what they want, which believe it or not are not always thirty dollar hardcovers and oversized trade paperbacks.

We’ve also increased the number of books we release each year, and we want to keep trying to find top level new writers to introduce to the world. We also have a Crime Club service where readers can sign up and receive deals on each new book as it comes out, shipped in pristine condition in a cardboard wraparound container, and a monthly or so newsletter that not only let’s people know what we’re up to, but also adds discounts to selected back list titles. Joining either or both is as easy as sending us an e-mail.

OBAAT: How did you get connected to Stark House?

RO: That’s the simple question for me. I bought a Stark House book by one of my favorite authors, and after enough instances of people “jumping in their ear and driving off” I knew the proofreading was a little off. Soooo many publishers now just scan, OCR and print and don’t bother proofreading the work. This is especially true with e-books. I just read a half dozen as research for an introduction I’m working on and I couldn’t believe that a name publisher can charge you $9.99, a robust price, and knowingly supply you with a subpar product.

Anyway, I e-mailed Stark House and said I wanted to buy more Stark House books, but not if they were that full of typos. Yes, typos drive me crazy. I’m one of those. I’ve done proofreading for other publishers and I offered to do some for Stark House. Greg sent me the pages for the book I had just finished reading and things grew from there, especially after Ed Gorman ended his relationship with Stark House. I’ve been accumulating additional responsibilities since then.

OBAAT: What’s the best thing about being an editor at a small publisher?

RO: Those five minutes a year when you feel you’ve actually caught up. Otherwise, there are a lot of little joys, like when I can suggest an alternative novel for a collection that gets approved, or when I contribute to some of the things that I know would have come out differently without my involvement. All the positive reviews we get, like when prominent bloggers say they believe everyone out there should just be buying each Stark House title as they come out. The occasional hate mail you get back after rejecting someone’s work is a little harsh, especially when we go out of our way to be author-friendly. You know you’re in trouble when someone starts a sentence with, “I’m normally thick-skinned about my work”–you know that will be automatically followed by irrefutable proof that it really isn’t so.

Another good thing is uncovering previously unpublished works. We have a book coming out by Jada Davis, a man who only published two books in his lifetime, one of which, One For Hell, is like reading Jim Thompson on steroids and deserves to be known as a hard-boiled noir classic. But Midnight Road, coming in early 2014, is his masterpiece, a really poignant coming of age rural story where crime is an element, but only one among many other, more human ones. It’s a brilliant book that deserves the widest possible audience.

OBAAT: What’s your greatest challenge, working for a small house that’s earning its niche?

RO: Trying to keep it all going, trying to figure out where the small fish figure in the Big 5 dominated book world. When New York is simultaneously publishing expensive hardcovers and (relatively) cheap e-book versions, what does the customer do who still likes reading books and not computer files? What do the independents sell when the collectors buy the hardcovers but the only “inexpensive” solution is to get an e-book or wait for a not-quite-so-inexpensive trade paperback? There’s a place for all of it, but it’s a constantly moving target. The Holy Grail would be to give the readers what they want and give the bookstores what they need. The online sales seem to be taking care of themselves.

OBAAT: What do you do when you’re not editing other writers’ work?

RO: Theoretically, I started out as a writer but contracted a chronic illness that at one time left me bedridden for eight straight months. Not good for your workout program. That’s been an ongoing battle for many years now and while at first I didn’t want to do anything that took away from my writing time, I really wasn’t able to focus and concentrate enough to do it well. There’s a long list of writers who have had to stop writing, sometimes permanently, because of illness. Those guys are different from me, because you’ve actually heard of them. But still, the point remains.

Things have been slowly improving, which is good, and I just sold a short story recently, and a two-in-one edition of two of my early books is coming out next year from Stark House. I have a more recent book that’s sitting here in the first draft stage, and another project for Stark House that’s just waiting for a few more hours to be added to the day. I’m working on introductions for Stark House books, as well, that hopefully add to the value of each volume.

Beyond that, I home school our two children and get routinely mauled by three dogs and two Guinea pigs. It’s the pigs that make me bleed, though. Apparently I have fingers that look too much like carrots. I’d rather have the slobber.

(Rick will be accompanying me to the launch of Grind Joint, November 16 at 10:00 AM at the Mystery Lovers Bookshop in Oakmont PA.)

Grind Joint Launch Announcement

I am pleased—and, frankly, shocked—to announce the official launch for Grind Joint will take place at the highly respected Mystery Lovers Bookshop, 514 Allegheny River Blvd, Oakmont, PA. The event will be held Saturday, November 16 at 10:00 AM, as part of MLBS’s Coffee and Crime series.

The Mystery Lovers Bookshop sits about halfway between Penns River—the setting of Grind Joint—and the Burgh, a mile or so from the famous Oakmont Country Club. Getting an opportunity to launch my first book so near to its setting, where the events that shaped the story and characters took place, is a treat and a privilege. Many thanks to Laurie Stephens from MLBS, as well as Rick Ollerman and Greg Shepherd of Stark House for making this possible.

Don’t worry. I’ll make sure no one forgets about it.

Why a Private Eye?

It’s common to read of the demise of the PI novel. In a post-9/11 world, people seem to be more drawn to escapist, non-stop action thrillers starring the superhuman heroes they’d like—and many in authority would like them—to think of as who stands between regular folk and becoming fodder for the 24x7 news cycle.

So why am I reaching back for books I worked on as much as twelve years ago, if no one wants to read them? It’s not like I made so much money from Wild Bill and Worst Enemies I can write what I want and thumb my nose at conventional wisdom. I didn’t make any money worth mentioning from either book, and I’m not going to retire on the proceeds from A Small Sacrifice. I have no sales to lose. I can write—and publish—whatever I want, and I want to put out some PI novels.

Part of this is to inspire what I hope will be cross-pollination: Nick Forte plays a supporting, but pivotal, role in Grind Joint. (Available for pre-order now; in stores November 21, in case you forgot.) He walked into Penns River as a fully formed character, having already been the star of four novels and a flash piece. All I had to do was plug him into the story and let him have at it. People tend to like the character, and I have more of him to share, at little investment of time and effort. It seems to be a natural.

That sounds like a good reason. It might also be an excuse.

The fact is, I still believe that PI fiction, when done right, is the highest form of crime fiction. As I wrote here several years ago, cops are about closing cases; PIs are about closure. As important as it is to find a legitimate reason for the fictional PI to investigate a crime—they rarely do that, you know—it’s the PI who can dig into the peripheral issues surrounding the causes and the victims. The cop needs an arrest and, ideally, a conviction. That may be when the PI’s job begins.

Or maybe he’s working the other end, where there’s no overt crime to be investigated, but something stinks to high heaven and he’s hired to look into it. Or even something that doesn’t seem like much when he starts turns into way more than he, or his client, bargained for. As one man—possibly with assistance—looking in from outside the system, he is free to observe and comment on things in ways cops and prosecutor can’t.

This is likely why the best PI stories are written in the first person. A wise, late friend of mine told me once the benefit of writing in first person is the ability to characterize the narrator by what he notices, thinks is important, and how he chooses to describe it; the ultimate in “show, don’t tell.” Why do Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer, Spenser, Elvis Cole, and Ed Loy inspire such loyalty in their readers? Because we lived in their heads and know them as intimately as we know any real person. Maybe more so. And we like tem. They’re not perfect, but we’d like to think we’d respond much as they do to the extraordinary circumstances into which their authors place them.

It’s become a cliché, and sometimes the subject of ridicule—as in Robert Altman’s film adaptation of The Long Goodbye—but I believe Raymond Chandler’s description of the detective hero from his essay “The Simple Art of Murder” best defines the most lasting detectives, and is still what I aspire to, for better or for worse:

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.

If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.

I was not aware of Chandler’s thoughts when I became enamored of detective fiction, nor when I first came up with the idea for Nick Forte. I was all in when I realized Chandler had summed up what I looked for in a detective hero far more eloquently than I could have conceived it.

There are those who would say such a man is an anachronism; Altman said so forty years ago. It’s entirely possible they are right, and I am wrong in believing such a man exists today, or is necessary. If I am wrong, I don’t want to know about it. I’d never get out of bed.

Enter Nick Forte

The proofread/clean-up/light edit for the PI novel I’ll make available for Kindle at month’s end is complete. Took me six weeks and included removing a chapter, adding a chapter, and cutting almost two thousand words from what I’d thought was a tightly-written 74,000-word manuscript. I take that as a good sign, that something written several years ago and edited at my then-agent’s behest didn’t measure up to my current standards. What that says about my standards will be up to any readers I accumulate.

I’m pushing this story out in advance of the November 21 release of Grind Joint for a reason. My first novels—two that will never see the light of day, and three more currently waiting on my hard drive—were about Chicago private investigator Nick Forte. Forte grew up in Western Pennsylvania and went to Northwestern for a music degree. Became a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools, then a cop when he decided he’d rather be armed and deal with criminals than defenseless in a room full of high school kids. Liked the work more than the discipline and drifted into becoming a PI.

Forte is divorced, with a young daughter he adores. He has separation and guilt issues, which have not led him into a bottle, but have created problems of their own. One way or another, he’s drawn to cases that involve parents and children, which not only rubs his nerve raw, but become increasingly violent. It’s wearing him down.

While drafting the outline for Grind Joint, I realized Forte could be from the same small town where the story takes place. Even better, his mother is the sister of Grind Joint’s main character, and the two cousins are close. Forte then became a secondary, but pivotal, character in Grind Joint. I’m hoping this earlier story will flesh him out a little, even though the events of A Small Sacrifice take place several years before Grind Joint. Anyone who reads both will see how far he’s slipped. Hopefully, they’ll want to read the other Forte novels to see how it happened.

Grind Joint News

The business trip to [location redacted] for [organization redacted] to [purpose redacted] is complete, the jet lag is pretty much over, and it’s time to get back in the saddle again. Let’s start with a good news / bad news combo:

Good news:

Stark House has announced my first physical, you can buy it in stores, it has pages and a cover and everything book, Grind Joint, will be released in November, in time to solve all your Christmas shopping dilemmas. (Unless the intended recipient has issues with bad language and violence, in which case you might want to buy them something else. Just not a cat mystery. I hate cat mysteries. I’d rather buy my mother a large-print copy of The Cold Six Thousand than a book where a [obscenity redacted] cat solves a murder.) I don’t have an actual drop date yet, but I’ll be sure to let you know, which brings us to the

Bad news:

With A Small Sacrifice available for Kindle in August and Grind Joint coming out in November, I’ll be even more insufferable than usual with my blatant and unconscionable self-promotion. The surest way to avoid this is to buy as many copies as you can of each book as quickly as you can, until I’ve made enough to pay for the exorbitantly expensive washer and dryer The Beloved Spouse bought while I was away in [vacation destination redacted]. Then I’ll chill.

Opening the Drawer

May was spent on graduations. The Sole Heir graduated from St. Mary’s College of Maryland; Niece the Younger from Green Mountain High School in Colorado. Now it’s June. Coffee break’s over, back on my head.

I’ve taken summers off from writing the past couple of years. It’s a great way to recharge batteries by reading, watching baseball, and letting ideas ferment. The current project (working title: Resurrection Mall) is on hiatus, but I’ll keep my hand in on other projects.

Chicago PI Nick Forte plays a pivotal supporting role in Grind Joint, which comes out next spring from Stark House. Forte was not created for Grind Joint. I’ve written stories featuring him, off and on, for almost twenty years. He is my original character, originally conceived tongue-in-cheek, who gradually took on a life of his own. Four Nick Forte novels have moldered on my hard drive for several years, not counting a couple that qualify as the experimental attempts at novels most writers have and will never allow to see the light of day.

Since Forte makes an appearance in Grind Joint, I thought it would be nice to bring the character back in my next book. I tried after completing Grind Joint, but I’d been away from him too long, and the voice had left me. Still, I wanted something of him to be available when Grind Joint appears in 2014, so I’m spending the summer polishing some of his original stories for Kindle release. The first, A Small Sacrifice, will be out sometime this summer.

Sacrifice received several encouraging rejections when an agent circulated it about five years ago. It’s interesting to see how things have held up in my opinion, some far better than others. The biggest difference—aside from the first person narrator—is in how my current writing is much tighter, even though the books are longer. A Small Sacrifice is close to 76,000 words; I doubt the Kindle version will be 75,000. Things I now trust the reader to understand, minor redundancies, and things I can live without are being excised a word, sentence, or paragraph at a time. It’s a good writing exercise.

I hope to have all four existing Forte manuscripts available by the time I’m ready to start the novel that will follow Resurrection Mall. The current plan is for it to be a Forte story; we’ll see. The next couple of summers getting back into his head should tell me where I want to take the series, even if it’s into retirement. I may not have this summer as off as I usually do, but at least I’ll be efficient enough to kill two birds with one stone.

Well, I’ll Be Go to Hell

After—let’s see, borrow from the one—eighteen years of writing, about fifteen years of looking to get published, and countless hours and blog posts whining about the current state of publishing, today I signed an honest-to-Chandler book contract with Stark House to publish the second of my Penns River novels, Grind Joint.

The successor to Worst Enemies (currently available for Kindle and Nook for a measly $2.99), Grind Joint is the story of what happens when the 21st-Century panacea for all urban financial woes rolls into a small town: a casino. It features many of the characters and occasionally looks back into an only partially resolved issue from Worst Enemies (yet another reason to get your copy, so you’ll be ahead of the curve).

The release date is tentatively set for early 2014, so there will be plenty of time to torment all of you with my idea of promotion. Suffice for now to say thank you to Greg Shepard and  Rick Ollerman at Stark House for taking a chance on me.

Plenty of future electrons will be devoted to thanking those who helped to get me this far, but three require mention immediately:

John McNally, for treating the lone genre writer in his workshop exactly the same as the more literary types, both in expectations and respect.

Declan Burke, who rounded up a posse of friends to comment here when I thought of hanging up my keyboard a couple of years ago and convinced me to keep plugging along.

And the inimitable Charlie Stella, who pretty much brokered the deal. Charlie is Stark House’s other writer of original novels (they focus on reprints of authors including Margaret Millar, Bill Pronzini, and Bob Randisi), and adopted me a couple of years ago. His counsel and encouragement have been formidable and much appreciated. Yes, Charlie, I did the writing, but I can safely say this book would never have seen print had it not been for you.

That’s enough shameless self-promotery for now. I need to save some for Worst Enemies, available now for Kindle and Nook.

The End

Many writers have a little ritual about their writing to celebrate a manuscript’s completion. I never type “The End” until I’m done with it, or as done as I can humanly be. Today I typed “The End” at the bottom of Grind Joint. Considering I sent another book in to be e-formatted this morning, I’d call that a rich and rewarding day.

Now I intend to take the summer off. Maybe I’ll outline the next book, write a short story or two, but nothing structured as a day in-day out activity. I did that for the first time last summer and it worked great. No burn out from the previous book, raring to go on the new project. (Thanks to Declan Burke for hinting that might be something for me to try. He’s quite wise, considering his youth.)

I’ll also spend some time this summer trying to get the word out about Wild Bill, but, since I don’t know yet when it will be ready (I’ve been told prep times are currently eleven weeks), I’m not going to get my knockers in a knot about it. It’s summer, it’s baseball season, the Pirates are flirting with .500, and if I wanted to stress about those things, I’d still be looking at traditional publishers.

Life is good.