Special Release — Penguin Group’s New Mystery Imprint & My Blatant Self Promotion

I am honored to participate in Dutton’s re-launch of Guilt Edged Mysteries.  Penguin, through this Dutton line, is celebrating the 65th anniversary of the imprint that had among its original writers — Mickey Spillane, Frederic Brown and Gore Vidal (writing as Edgar Box) — by publishing new works that reflect the tough, fast reads of the early books, but with a decidedly fresh, contemporary sensibility.  

The launch of the e-book line includes the novella by NPR editor Krishnadev Calamur, Murder in Mumbai as well as “Skin,” a Mike Hammer short story begun by Spillane and completed by the legendary author’s respected collaborator and award-winning mystery novelist Max Allan Collins.  These two are available now.  I’m pleased to announce that my own novella, Death in the Haight, is next in the series of new books released by Dutton as part of this revival and will be available August 21.  Dutton Guilt Edged Mysteries plans to release many more short stories and novellas in the months to come. 

My contribution is a new work that features private eye Noah Lang from the Paladino/Lang San Francisco mysteries.  When Michael Vanderveer goes missing in San Francisco Lang assumes it’s just another runaway escaping to the Haight, San Francisco’s home to the displaced… until the homicide cops pay him a visit. Fifteen-year-old Michael has been implicated in the murder of a prostitute, and the police don’t want Lang mucking up their investigation — especially Inspector Stern, who has strong opinions about Lang’s questionable past. But Lang becomes inextricably involved when Michael’s parents hire him: Michael is being ransomed, and they want Lang to ensure the exchange goes smoothly.   As everyone waits for the kidnappers to make their next move, Lang struggles with the Vanderveers, who are far from their Michigan home; confused by the twisted details of the case; and wrestling with the moral implications of rescuing Michael, only to have to turn him in for murder. All the while, Lang must deal with Stern, whose increasingly volatile behavior may just put Lang’s life in as grave danger as Michael’s.

Death in the Haight will be available August 21 from the usual e-Book sources.

Opinion — The Art of the Insult & the Demise of Literary Feuds

It doesn’t seem so long ago when we were entertained with the antics of literary lions. There was Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, all hanging out in Paris. That was followed by witty insults zinging back and forth among the next crop of well-known writers — Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer. Time passes, however. If there are literary lions, they remain in the shadows as the media focuses on the wit and wisdom of Sarah Palin and Donald Trump. Vidal, the last of the living titans, has had to be content with just tossing his feisty and smart criticism at ghosts.

(A brief aside: Vidal has not only outlived his literary enemies, he has also lived long enough to see his stint as a mystery series writer re-Boxed so to speak. His three mystery novels — Death Before Bedtime, Death Likes It Hot and Death in the Fifth Position were recently redesigned and republished by Vintage/Black Lizard in a boxed set under Vidal’s mystery-genre pen name, Edgar Box.)

However, even Vidal wouldn’t have picked this fight: V. S. Naipaul, apparently having just made up with literary foe Paul Theroux, decided he wasn’t going to be so petty as to single out an individual author for his scorn. Instead he picked half the world’s population to insult. That would be women, women writers in particular and apparently all of them, dismissed as “sentimental” with a “narrow view of the world” and his “inferiors.” The New York Times mentioned it in passing; but it isn’t worthy of any national coverage. Such a comment by a Nobel Prize winner just doesn’t have the gravity of Mr. Weiner’s tweet.