Blatant Self Promotion And Slightly Subtle Celebration — 25 Years With Deets Shanahan

Last Shanahan, May 1 Release

My new book, Killing Frost won’t be released until May 1.  The good news is that Amazon and B&N are offering pre-release discounts on advance orders.  Some bookstores might do so as well if you place an advance order through them. This is good for collectors, I suspect.  So too is the fact that this is the last Shanahan novel and also celebrates the veteran detective’s 25th anniversary in print.

It’s a fairly big deal for me. The first book, Stone Veil made a good impression back in 1990 when it launched, and the reviews of all 10 published so far — Killing Frost being the 11th  — have encouraged me and its publisher, the UK’s Severn House, to keep the Shanahan books coming. Some writers say they don’t read reviews. That’s probably true in some cases.   I won’t pretend I don’t care about reviews. I do care.  I eagerly and anxiously await them for this new book as well, understanding that just because I believe it is one of my best doesn’t make it so. But I do believe it is.

Why is this the last in the series?

The First Ten Shanahans

There have been discussions about how many books are reasonable for any given series. The authors of the excellent Martin Beck novels said that ten was enough. Writers disagree.  So do readers. Agatha Christie wrote 33 Hercule Poirot mysteries and 12 featuring Miss Marple.  There were 75 novels in Georges Simenon’s Maigret series. Robert B. Parker wrote 40 Spenser novels. His series, like Mickey Spillane’s legendary Mike Hammer, continues beyond the creator’s death.  Other writers stepped in (good ones, thankfully), pushing for an endless series of each – immortality of sorts. 

But Shanahan was 69 when he first appeared (don’t try to do the math) and I was very interested in the aging process as part of his character and perspective on the times.  I knew there weren’t that many stories. I can’t be sure what I would have done if Shanahan had achieved the status of some of the other fictional private eyes.  Even so, there is a kind of emotional satisfaction having come full circle, having finished what I started, being able to wrap it up myself.

First Shanahan, 1990

When I heard about the authors pulling Beck after ten, I was ready to do the same.  I did some tidying up at the end of Bullet Beach, my tenth novel about Shanahan and his love, Maureen.  However, I had spent a couple of decades writing about the elderly detective, when at his fictional departure, I began to personally experience what age really does to our ability to function. After all, I began writing about the 70ish private eye when I was in my forties. I’ve now caught up with my aging protagonist.  I wrote a novella to incorporate this new perspective. But the unexpected continued to intrude and there was a separate, more substantial novel brewing even as I finished the novella. The novel became Killing Frost.

As the Shanahan years end, I continue to write. In May Killing Frost will appear. This fall, the novella, Blue Dragon, will be released by Raven Books, an imprint of Canadian publisher, Orca. This marks a focus on different people and different places as well as different approaches to the mystery genre. And all this brings with it a kind of excitement that my aging gray matter could use.

Opinion and (Subliminal) Promotion — Noir and Me Revisited: Urban Noir, Rural Noir, '50s Noir, Pre-School Noir, Glee Club Noir

“Good God Man!” exclaimed the colonel as he nearly stumbled over the corpse. He handed his glass of sherry to the butler and straightened his blazer. “Have you no shame?” The man on the floor with the knife in his back didn’t answer.

Or

She looked out of her swollen, soulless, drunken eyes. “You don’t even know you’re a bottom-feeder, do you, pal? You knew you were about to take a trip, but you didn’t know where.” She coughed. The empty hypodermic slipped from the bruised, blue and yellow flesh of her arm and her eyes began to roll back. “Well, sucker, you’re five minutes from the tropic of Hell. Hope you brought your shorts.”

That was fun. I don’t know if it was helpful, let alone publishable, but I wanted to make a point. The extremes may be clear, but within the genre many of the lines are fuzzy. Cozy, soft-boiled, suspense, thrillers, hard-boiled, noir are genres or subgenres or maybe sub-subgenres. Noir is a subgenre of crime novels — at least that’s my understanding. But then there are books described as urban noir, rural noir, ‘50’s noir, neo noir. Can you say “neo noir” five times really fast? Are these sub-subgenres? The problem for me is that I’m not really sure what I write. (Don’t take advantage of that straight line in the comment section. Too easy.)

None of my books are cozies. That much is clear. And because any sense of doom is dealt with before the last page, I’m not writing noir. With the exception of the standalone Good to the Last Kiss, there’s not a whole lot of nihilism going on in anything I write. Well maybe a little. In the end though, I’d even have trouble convincing anyone that the Shanahan mysteries are hardboiled. Shanahan is no Mickey Spillane or Jack Reacher. He can’t take out 15 guys in a bar all by himself. And he doesn’t relish killing people, even people he dislikes. He likes to solve cases. He’s 70. He’s smart and determined. But he’s not likely to scare a room full of ex-cons.

“Wry,” the critics often say of the Shanahan books. He is often described as “curmudgeonly.” The stories aren’t soft-boiled either. Nor are they sunny-side up. More like over not too easy. So, if Agatha Christie’s books are poached eggs and, say Mickey Spillane’s are ready for the Easter basket, maybe my Shanahan novels are “scrambled with onions and mushrooms.” Add a little basil and you have my San Francisco series, Death in Pacific Heights and Death in North Beach. Because they take place in Northern California, we’ll add some wine as well and call them Pinot Noir.

But the news of the day is that the first four in the Shanahan series will be re-released in trade paperback and for the very first time in e-book. You should see the announcement here — along with new covers — in a couple of weeks.

Caption: Bullet Beach is the tenth and most recent Deets Shanahan mystery and is now available in hardback, trade paperback and e-book.