Come back to the raft ag'in, Sue Ellen ...

The American critic Leslie Fiedler wrote an essay called 'Come back to the raft ag'in, Huck Honey!', in which he suggested that much classic American literature contained a submerged theme of homoeroticism. He used Huckleberry Finn as an example of this kind of book, and Joe R. Lansdale's Edge of Dark Water seems to merge both of these texts, so that a trip by raft down river in a southern state of America fuses emerging sexuality, racial issues and death ... all wrapped around the story of a crime of passion.

Another freebie...

Just a quick self-publicising post ... I've now put The Private Lie on a free promotion for Kindle. So if you read Altered Life and liked it, you can have the second in the Sam Dyke series for free. You can get it here if you're in the UK:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004Q9U0Z6

And here if you're in the US:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Private-Lie-ebook/dp/B004Q9U0Z6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340093245&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Private+Lie

To all of you who've bought either of these already, thank you very much. It's made the books something of a success and is very encouraging!

A post will follow soon on Joe R. Lansdale's Edge of Dark Water.

Inexplicable but fun

Sales of my first book, Altered Life, have blossomed since I gave it away for free ...

In the last few days it has risen to no. 2 in the 'hard-boiled' section of Amazon Kindle crime fiction, and no. 105 in the overall best-seller list. Just a few more would push it into the top 100, which would be great! It's a whole new ball game then ...

In other news, I'm close to finishing Joe Lansdale's Edge of Dark Water which, as other critics have said, is a modern take on Huckleberry Finn, one of the Great American Novels.

Altered Life makes number 1

Just a quick post to say that my exercise in offering Altered Life as a free download has brought some success. It's currently number 1 in the UK 'hard-boiled' mystery list on Amazon. I know it was free, but then so were all the others! This link will doubtless change as the numbers change ...

Free Kindle 'hard-boiled' mystery best sellers

EDIT: Now the promotion period has ended the book doesn't show on the best-seller lists. But it's still available for purchase at a very low price. Follow the links on the right of this page to buy.

Self-promotion

Time to get on the marketing wagon ... Gotta join that million-selling Kindle club.

So, from tomorrow my first book, Altered Life, will be available free on the Kindle for 5 days. It's said this boosts sales, somehow, later.

Secondly, I've made a 'Preview' in Amazon Createspace for my second book, The Private Lie, which you can see and comment on here.


Let's see if those sales spike now!

What it Was - How it Is

Like Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the inspiration for Apocalypse Now, George Pelecanos' short novel What it Was is a tale told by a narrator who is partial though he appears objective. Conrad's narrator, Marlowe, tells the story of Kurtz, who ventures into the African jungle and meets himself, and his fate. The hero of What it Was, Derek Strange, tells the story of his own journey into manhood and responsibility.

Readers of Pelecanos will know Strange from previous books, first a trilogy where we met him as an older private detective working in Washington DC; then in Hard Revolution, a book set during the Washington Riots of 1968, when Strange was a street cop. Strange is perhaps well-named for, like Kurtz, he is an anomaly in his environment - a black cop in a largely white police force. Throughout the sequence of books he sees himself as an outsider, which allows Pelecanos to throw an objective light on the environment in which he works. In other words, we side with Strange and see the situations he encounters 'from the outside'. This is emphasized in What it Was by the fact that Strange narrates the book as a long story to his friend Nick Stefanos ... ironically another character in a separate series of books by Pelecanos.

He's all Hart

John Hart's Iron House is his fourth novel and seems to be a culmination of the stylistic tics he developed in the previous three.

Hart specializes in people under pressure, at the limits of their ability to cope with the rough stuff life has thrown at them. The stories usually play out in a sub-Tennessee Williams environment, where close family relationships are fundamental and nothing must be allowed to cast them asunder. In his first best-seller, The King of Lies the lead character has to discover who murdered his father and to protect his sister from accusations or murdering him. Similarly in Down River and The Last Child, the heroes struggle to protect their families or to find out 'The Truth' about what happened in the past. We're in the same territory in Iron House, with all kinds of family secrets being hidden and exposed, hidden and exposed, hidden and ... well, you get the picture.

Elmore Leonard on writing

The Great Elmore Leonard describes how he developed his writing style. With extracts from Get Shorty, with John Travolta. It's a shortened version of his famous 10 Rules, but it's good to see him talking about the origins of some of his methods. I think it dates from 2006. Sorry the video is a bit choppy.

A sweet mystery - Sandford's Stolen Prey

Stolen Prey is John Sandford's 22nd book about Lucas Davenport, an investigator with Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. All of the books have 'Prey' in the title, which distinguishes them from his other series about Kidd, a software expert and thief, and about Virgil Flowers, an investigator who actually works for Lucas Davenport but largely operates on his own.

The Prey books are masterly expositions of how crimes get solved through police procedure. Davenport is extremely bright and intuitive, but Sandford shows time and again how he uses police resources to find the bad guys. He has a researcher, he has street-level snitches, he has friends in High Places. And he uses all of these to provide him with information that he synthesizes to arrive at his deductions and leaps of imagination. What's more, Sandford shows how cops talk to each other - exchanging information, building up their view of the case, sniping at each other or just bantering.

A plot with a Hole in it

Jo Nesbo's Phantom continues the adventures of rogue Norwegian policeman Harry Hole.

Returning from Bangkok to Norway, Hole is intent on proving that Oleg, the son of his former girlfriend, Rakel, is not guilty of the murder with which he's being charged. As usual, the plot involves corrupt policemen, underworld Mr Bigs, and a twisty, turny plot that Nesbo uses to manipulate our sympathies.

Translated from Norwegian by the author's usual translator, the prose has its typical clunky effect. The problem with translating - I speak from a little experience - is that when you come across a phrase in the original that, when translated into English, seems a little odd, it's often difficult to know whether that was the author's intention or not. So for example:

But when he went back to the front door the boy had hopped it.

The phrase 'hopped it' reeks of the 1950s, and is given to us as representing the thought of a policeman in 2011. Does Nesbo want this slightly dated turn of phrase to represent this policeman? Or is it an attempt by the translator to be a bit casual and different, rather than using a simple expression like 'run off' or even 'legged it'? If nothing else, if I were Nesbo, I'd wonder whether my American readers would understand the usage ...

In it for the long Hole ...

Long time since I posted ... trying to get through Jo Nesbo's latest, Phantom.

I think the word to describe Nesbo is 'dogged' - he tells you all there is to know about his hero, Harry Hole, and the numerous bad guys, too. In fact, more than you need to know.

What's striking me about this book - and in retrospect, the previous Harry Hole books - is that it's the structure of his plots that build the suspense. He has several sub-plots going on at once and you need to keep reading in order to see how they all come together. He's very detailed about giving you facts - what music is playing in a bar, for instance - but his prose is a bit leaden. Of course it's translated into English from the original Norwegian, so that probably doesn't help, but even so ...

On another topic, how good is Justified, the US TV series based on an Elmore Leonard short story?
Very good, is the answer you were looking for. Witty dialogue, fast-moving plot, dispensing with characters at will (usually with a gunshot blast) - the show gets better and better. And in Raylan Givens, it has a hero who is smart, funny, good with a gun and brave. But like all good heroes, he has a flaw ... for him, the job takes over his life to the extent that his relationships suffer.

And let's not forget the great Walton Goggins, so good in The Shield, who is now excelling as Boyd Crowder - charismatic, cunning, violent when necessary and inspirational to his troops (when he's not shooting them, that is ... ) If you're not already watching it, do so!

Unbroken Excellence

Some crime writers are very obvious: there's a crime, an investigator, a criminal and finally a solution that includes a resolution. The prose takes you along briskly with perhaps some incidental commentary on society or the immediate environment in which the story is taking place. The investigator is brave, wry, cynical.

Then there are crime writers who are not obvious, but tangential: the originating crime is perhaps minor, the criminal is unclear, the solution doesn't really offer a resolution. And the investigator is uncertain, not brave, and not particularly cynical. The story emerges piece by piece, because the investigator is dogged and shrewd and is good at pattern recognition. Martin Cruz Smith with his Arkady Renko books has been, for me, the chief architect of this type of crime novel. But there are times, as in Wolves Eat Dogs, when it's hard to know exactly what has happened - the storytelling is so tangential as to be obscure. You have the sense that you're reading something good, even excellent, but you also think you must have missed something and have to go back to check up.

Peter Temple's The Broken Shore is another first-rate entrant into this sub-genre, with a style that is also tangential in the way it accumulates detail but is crystal clear in its use of imagery, character and dialogue.