Blatant Sales Pitch 2 — Holiday Gifts Indy’s Own Fictional Private Eyes

Sam Spade worked out of San Francisco.  Marlowe was based in LA.  Spenser operated in Boston.  Mike Hammer and many other fictional private eyes went about their business in the nation’s largest metropolis, New York.   It wasn’t until Albert Samson came along that Indianapolis had a gumshoe of its own.  In fact, many credit Samson’s creator, long acclaimed novelist Michael Z. Lewin, as a pioneer in a movement that gave “regional private eyes” a national presence.

With no small amount of self-interest, I’m proposing that Indianpolitans who like detective novels explore the fictional sleuths who made their city home.  In addition to the story telling in a place that might be especially familiar to the reader, there is a bit of the city’s history embedded in each book.  While there are other writers who have set mysteries and thrillers in the Circle City, I believe there are only three of us who have created a series private eye protagonist in this setting.

Michael Z. Lewin’s Albert Samson series

Recent Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus award winner Lewin’s first Samson novel, Ask the Right Question, was published in 1971.  I found my paperback copy of The Way We Die Now the other day as I went through a stack of books in a vain attempt to dematerialize.  The book was first released in 1973.  So, I’m able to visit my hometown in a way that my faulty memory won’t allow and see vividly, in some cases, the places Samson visits. One senses that Samson is the kind of P.I. who actually exists.  The stories and the characters are believable. There are eight novels in this highly acclaimed series, the most recent Eye Opener, which has been made available in e-book format.  Many of his earlier Samson novels are no doubt available at your local mystery bookstore and a few are, fortunately, becoming available in electronic formats. There is a great article on Samson on the Thrilling Detective web site, which also points out that Lewin has written other, standalone novels and has two other series. But the Samson novels are an especially great idea for a holiday gift for the reader in your family, especially if he or she has a special affection for the city. To find out more about the author and all of his work, click here and here.

“Michael Lewin has just about the best private detective who has been around in many a day…Lewin has brains and style.”  — Los Angeles Times

Ronald Tierney’s Deets Shanahans series

My first P.I. novel, Stone Veil was published in 1990. The book introduced a blue-collar, semi-retired, former Army intelligence sergeant turned P.I. After settling down in Indianapolis, Deets Shanahan meets the love of his life in a massage parlor and the two of them appear, along with a regular cast of characters, in ten novels so far, with the most recent being Bullet Beach in 2011, when in a time-defying fashion he finally turned 70.  He is not so much tough as he is stubborn.  To get a look at the city in the ‘90s, take a look at the early Shanahans, which have been reissued as trade paperbacks and ebooks.  Restaurants, neighborhoods, bars, some of which may be gone now, remain in spirit as ink on a page or light shining up from a screen.  A few are out of print, but many are still available.  You might find, for example, Nickel-Plated Soul and Asphalt Moon in the backroom of your favorite bookstore. All the early Shanahans are available as e-books and in trade paperback.  And your local bookstore can order the latest, Bullet Beach.

"A series packed with new angles and delights." — Booklist

David Levien’s Frank Behr series

The new guy in the city arrived with a bang as well as lots of blood.  Frank Behr is a super tough ex-cop, with a tragic past, who takes on the toughest of the tough on the darkest of the streets of Indianapolis.  Levien, a screenwriter with plenty of credentials, has four books so far in the Behr series, City of the Sun, Where the Dead Lay, The Contract, and The 13 Million Dollar Pop.  His books, which I think feature a kind of super-big, super-hero protagonist similar to the Jack Reacher model have received a number of award nominations and sell a lot of copies.

“Levien is the new must-read thriller writer. — Lee Child

Because we’re entering the last gasps of holiday shopping and there are many desperate folks seeking a quick solution.  How about a sampling of novels featuring fictional Indianapolis private eyes?  Pick one or two from each author.

Confession — What The Reader Wants, The Reader Gets. Maybe. Maybe Not.

Occasionally people who read my books email me. And I welcome them. I encourage them. I once received a note from a resident of Louisiana who said he knew I had at least spent some time in New Orleans to research my book Glass Chameleon because I didn’t once use the phrase “Sacre Bleu.”  Another said that his mother had finished all of the Shanahans and if I didn’t write another one soon, he’d have to enroll her in a 12-step program. Many of the Shanahan readers write to me about the places in Indianapolis I’ve mentioned, sometimes correcting something I got wrong and occasionally telling me they know the exact house on Pennsylvania Avenue where the murder occurred.

Those who have read the San Francisco mysteries enjoy the local references as well — especially those who have visited the city often or who lived here and moved away. The places are real.  Last week’s post about oldest five San Francisco restaurants was inspired by a reader, a San Francisco native now living in Vancouver, who told me how much she missed the city. She reminded me of the Black Cat I had mentioned in one of my books. She also talked about restaurants she remembered from the 1950s. She mentioned two German restaurants Shadows, on Telegraph Hill, no longer there and Shroeder’s,* which still exists. She recommended I find a copy of a book published in the 1940s — Where to Sin in San Francisco. I’ll start looking.  I could have used it as a reference for Death in North Beach, which is a little more nostalgic than most of my mysteries set in San Francisco.  The city has always had a wonderfully bad reputation.

Another reader started sending me emails as she started the Shanahan series, telling me what she thought of the last one she read and which book was next on her list.  I always replied. This continued through the early Shanahans. Her last email said she was about to read an out-of-series book (and out of print) of mine called Eclipse of the Heart.  I never heard from her again.

Eclipse of the Heart is mystery about a closeted gay male, a celebrated San Francisco chef, who preferred to live life at a comfortable distance from it. During a trip to Mexico, he was forced to engage in real life by a series of unavoidable events and the unexpected friendship of a young, street-wise hustler.  Gay characters have appeared in many of the Shanahans, including The Stone Veil, the first one. But in Eclipse, the gay character was the central figure, the protagonist.  The book was the best-reviewed book I’ve ever written, but clearly very different from the Deets Shanahan series.

I wondered about the abrupt end of emails from my loyal reader. Perhaps she simply didn’t enjoy the story and thought quietly moving on was the kind thing to do. I suppose I could have emailed her, asked her why? Did the story offend her?  Bore her? If she simply couldn’t relate to Eclipse, she could have returned to the Shanahan series. Nickel-Plated Soul was certainly written in the spirit of the early books, the ones she liked.  But asking her what happened seemed intrusive. I’ve heard of readers stalking authors, but authors stalking readers? Unseemly. It’s entirely possible she left me for someone else a little more exciting. Maybe she found Robert Parker and it is taking her a considerable amount of time to read her way through his 70 or so Spenser novels before she returns to my measly ten.

In the end though, this relatively small event in my life caused an inordinate amount of speculation. And, as one thing leads to another, I wondered if this out-of-series, and quite different book affected overall sales of future Shanahan series in general. Being slightly paranoid is probably a positive characteristic for crime writers. Did I betray my readers’ trust or, at minimum, his or her expectations?

I sensed something similar happening after Good to the Last Kiss was published, this after a particularly long run and seemingly revived interest in new Shanahans.  Kiss was met with near dead silence, or so it seemed to me. It too was different, especially in tone.  A tougher book with an ending that didn’t tie everything up in a neat bow.

The reason I bring this up is that the rights to Eclipse of the Heart reverted to me several years ago and the novel was originally published in the pre-ebook era.  I am thinking about putting it out there again, perhaps as an e-book.  Of course, I ask myself, “Will I ever learn?”  Will I spoil any momentum that might develop with the reissues of the early Shanahans? Will this simply further confuse the marketplace about what to expect from this writer?  Should I write more Shanahans or more books similar to the Shanahans? Or should I simply write what I want to write and let nature take its course? This has to be a question many series writers face from time to time, especially those whose series books are better known than mine in the first place.

Recently, my brother proposed a plot for a future mystery during our usual Sunday morning conversation. I told him that it wasn’t a subject that I would take on. Why not, he asked. It didn’t interest me, I said insensitively.  You don’t think it’s an important subject? He wanted to know.  It’s a very important subject, I told him.  But I already know how I feel about it.

I’d never thought about why I write except in the very general sense that I enjoy writing. It’s what I’ve done all my life in one capacity or another. In the last few years, I have been fortunate enough to be able to scrape by doing fiction. But why do I enjoy writing mysteries?  I enjoy it because writing allows me to explore questions that I am curious about or that are unsettled in my mind. It is a form of discovery.  For example, the book I’m engaged in now is, on the surface, about solving murders in a nursing home. Who did it and why, of course.  But it is also about the question: Can someone live too long? I didn’t have an answer when I began the story. I really hadn’t framed the question.  But it was buzzing about in what’s left of my brain.

In the end, I’m not sure that this is a subject the masses would find interesting. It’s not good-looking young vampires or erotically adventurous housewives.  There’s no gimmick.  The protagonist isn’t endowed with special powers or burdened with anything, except advancing age. I didn’t discuss the idea with a focus group.  I’m not examining trends in mysteries and thrillers. The first draft is done and it falls short of the standard length publishers want, yet far too long to be a short story.  But that’s how it turned out. The mental exercise prompted by my brother’s proposal and my flippant answer, allowed me to answer the question about whether I write for money or to satisfy my curiosity.

I discovered that my primary goal isn’t to earn a lot of money,** a goal I continue to not only meet with nearly unprecedented success, but also engage in without an ounce of noble purpose.  Other than my proclivity to put ordinary folks in circumstances that forces them (and me) to come to terms with ethical issues, I’m not trying to change any minds.  Not really.  Just think.  Many of us — and I’m slightly too old to be an official “boomer” — have faced or will face the dilemma of aging parents or others important to us who no longer recognize us or know how to exist in the world.  Two final “ors.”  Some of those we love, as they age, seem to be entirely absent or actually suffering mentally as well as physically.  Is that a subject worth exploring?  It is for me.  And I suspect it is for quite a few of us.

*Shroeder’s was established in 1893, making it one of the city’s oldest surviving restaurants, certainly the oldest German restaurant in the city. **As a matter of principle, I’m not against earning a lot of money.

Blatant Promotion, From The Beginning — Book Number One: Stone Veil

This is the first of four posts about the early Deets Shanahan mysteries, just now reissued in trade paperback and e-book formats.

Dietrich Shanahan was born late in life — mine and his. I had this notion that if I created an older private eye and set him in a city like Indianapolis that I was being original. As it turned out, I wasn’t original at all. There were other, older PIs plying the gumshoe trade and lauded mystery writer Michael Z. Lewin, who pioneered the idea of regional private eyes, set his Albert Samson private series in Indianapolis years before. However, the dogged, curmudgeonly Deets Shanahan made it anyway. Stone Veil is his very first case. And in this premiere, the reader meets many of the characters who appear throughout the ten Shanahan novels.

What the story is about:

The sixty-nine-year-old semi-retired private detective reluctantly takes the case of Mrs. William B. Stone who seems to have lost track of her husband. Shanahan, who finds his once lonely life complicated by an attractive younger woman, nevertheless finds his client's husband almost immediately. But the job isn't over. The problem is the man is dead and buried in his own back yard. Who did it and why leads the detective to the city's meaner streets where the veil of secrecy is finally lifted.

What the reviewers said at the time:

“Intricate, lusty, funny, moving adventure about believably vulnerable characters.” — Publishers Weekly

"The interest in this fine novel lies.in its characters, especially the appealing Shanahan, keenly aware of death's proximity as he re-engages with life." — Houston Post

"The pragmatic investigator makes a good first impression." — The New York Times

UPDATE: At the moment, Stone Veil is available in trade paperback from Amazon and in ebook on Nook from Barnes & Noble. Kindle and i-Book versions coming soon.

A Little Promotion, a Little History — Shanahan, Then and Now

St. Martins Press published the first “Deets” Shanahan mystery, The Stone Veil, in 1990. Despite the fact that it was critically well received, a nominee for a Shamus, went into a second printing, and briefly optioned for a film, the book never came out in paperback. (It was serialized in a Latvian magazine, I’m told.) And, of course, an ebook wasn’t even a gleam in anyone’s eye at the time.

Lately, I’ve been working on the four “early Shanahans” (1990-1995, St. Martins Press), getting them ready for release as both trade paperbacks and ebooks. Because there were no “electronic” versions of these books, they had to be scanned into electronic files. I’ve been going through them, correcting what the scanning process misread, “litde” for “little,” for example, as well as fixing odd line breaks —getting them in the best shape possible before the book designers do their magic.

This means I’m reading them again — 21 years later. And oddly, while I’m taking this trip down Memory Lane, I’ve just begun the first draft of what might be — if the Gods are kind — the eleventh Shanahan.

The reissuing process puts me face to face with the character on page one of book one — at the moment of his birth full-grown, and too soon old. I was a little apprehensive. How much has he changed over the decades? Surprisingly little. He is slightly mellower, but only slightly. That was to be expected. In The Stone Veil, after having been bitterly separated from his wife and child for many years, Shanahan met the love of his life, Maureen. She has accompanied him through every volume and every crime.

Though 21 years have gone by, Shanahan has only aged a few. During this time warp the real world has changed. Things have appeared and disappeared. In today’s Shanahans, there are smart phones, but no telephone booths. No VHS. No typewriters for the most part. People don’t light up a cigarette every five minutes. Can you buy a pack of Chesterfields? Social media has emerged, giving writers a new dimension in which his or her characters might live. So has Google, not only helping the writer with his or her research, but an obvious boon to the P.I., real or fictional. DNA has become a big deal in crime solving. While this has freed some innocent people from prison and even death row in the real world, many a fictional murder is solved these days with a strand of hair, which makes crime solving no more interesting than a math test. Also, many of the casual references to ‘90s pop culture in the early books are now candidates for trivia games as are certain brand names. Shanahan’s favorite bourbon, for example, J.W. Dant, once available in every liquor store at least in Indiana, is now very hard to find.

Many of the places in ‘90s Indianapolis are gone as well. This is especially true of restaurants, but also of department stores, grocers, pharmacies and movie theaters. Local stores were replaced by local chains, and local chains by national and international ones. This leaves early books a bit dated. The upside to having these books in print is that they have inadvertently, and maybe entertainingly, recorded a bit of history. The idea that making old books available through new technology has made me more aware of what else is new and what else is gone, or slipping away.

The other consideration for those wonderful readers who have followed Shanahan through the decades is that there is a serious time warp between book four and book five. In the more recent books, all six of them published by Severn House, Shanahan still lives in Indianapolis. However, he no longer lives in the ‘90s. Readers, who have read only the more recent books and who volunteer to travel back to the beginning, will have to do a little time-traveling. I hope they will enjoy it as much as I have. Revisiting these early books turned out to be a productive exercise for me, informing what might be the eleventh Shanahan.

UPDATE: Good to the Last Kiss (not a series book) will join the list of my recent mysteries to be available on Kindle. Others are: Bullet Beach (latest Shanahan), Death in North Beach (latest Paladino & Lang) as well as Mascara, Death in the Tenderloin, a novella that acts as a prequel to the San Francisco mysteries and that reveals how Lang and his gender-bending pal, Thanh, met — a secret never explained in the series.