David Thayer

<p> My review of Steve Hockensmith’s latest novel ON THE WRONG TRACK is up at January Magazine. Steve’s main characters are the Amlingmeyer Brothers, a very tough name for your reporter to spell correctly, so I’m asking Steve so shorten it up on behalf of reviewers everywhere. Otto is good: palindromes are great.

<p> Niagara won the playin game so now they face Kansas. The Purple Eagles are my Dad’s alma mater, and I use to listen to their games on the radio. They shouldn’t have trouble with the Jayhawks, unless the game extends beyond the five minute mark.

<p> No word from Andrew Lloyd Webber on the musical WELLINGTON LEG. This may be due to the earl’s disappearance or simply because blog based musicals haven’t fared well. Our own WELLINGTONIENNE has yet to ink a book deal despite three blog entries since the first of the year. Three! I thought Salon or the Observer pegged that as a magic number. Is the cultural press reliable?

<p> On the shag carpet: the Wellington Leg Literary Faire is shaping up as the largest in the event’s history. Publishing guru, Walt of Goth, will explain how slaughtering a lamb in the correct manner is an excellent predictor of success. Everyone in the audience will receive a complimentary lobster bib for this year’s demonstration. “We’re sparing no expense,” said organizer Prudentia Chalfont-Smythe. She also reports that the memoir category has been expanded to include documented, prolonged hallucinations. The cost of each entry remains at five dollars per head: if you bring an extra one, you will be charged. “No exceptions,” vowed DCI Borchardt. As always gastropods get in free.

<p> One of the more interesting voices from the NBCC assembly last week is that of Reagan Arthur, an editor at Little Brown. Her list of authors include many of Wellington Leg’s favorites: George Pelecanos, Elizabeth Crane, Kate Atkinson, Denise Mina, Joanna Scott, Ian Rankin, and Rachel Cusk. Not all crime fiction writers by any means, but stay tuned. Ms. Arthur made the comment that Kate Atkinson got reviewed for CASE HISTORIES because of her fame as a literary writer. It’s an intriguing thought, one that brings us close to the maddening question of what is literary, which is another way of asking what is an important novel, one that many people read, or one that elite readers find worthy?

<p> I don’t know Reagan Arthur, but since I enjoy so many of her authors I will take a stab at identifying the shared elements in Pelecanos and Elizabeth Crane’s work. These two writers by genre seem miles apart, their work would be marketed to different audiences. Am I comparing ALL THIS HEAVENLY GLORY to THE NIGHT GARDENER? Am I crazy?

<p> I’ll throw Kate Atkinson and Joanna Scott’s LIBERATION into the mix and say that all four of these writers use character and setting to dislocate and surprise the reader, to cross invisible borders with great consequence to the story. Crane and Atkinson can be very funny, but they’re not kidding around when it comes to the emotional terrain they work in. Pelecanos and Scott take very ordinary places and infuse them with a living memory that street corners and train cars evoke. Everyone has the experience of walking past a Buick and thinking of their old man in an unexpected association as powerful as the more obvious icons of collective experience. It’s not only the Statue of Liberty that knocks us on our backs, but a little bodega on a dead street that conjures powerful associations of personal experience. That’s what I think these writers have in common, the ability to shape perception into recognition, even if you’ve never been a DC cop, an eight year old girl, an English detective, or a grandmother on a train.

<p> Kiran Desai, author of THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS won the National Book Critic Circle’s fiction prize Friday night at the untelevised gala at the New School in NYC.  Congratulations to Ms. Desai who was an underdog against what some might consider the usual literary suspects.

<p> Two days late? Time is standing still on my computer what with March Madness, Li’l Dubya in Uruguay ( neocon alert: let’s invade Uruguay. They thumb their noses at us. First, let’s grab a world atlas so we don’t invade Paraguay by mistake.) Hell, let’s invade both countries and combine the guays into an over 55 community with strict covenants.

<p> More tomorrow if the hands of time can be pushed, pulled, or bent into shape. In the meanwhile I remain 48 hours behind all the late breaking news.

<p> Earl update: he and Depew have entered the Java Sea. Looks like they’re taking turns rowing. They should reach Australia in time for the earl’s Down Under Tour featuring The Who and the Wellington Leg Chorale. Sorry, New Zealand: you’re out of luck.

<p> Dateline: The Drift. I don’t know why but this blog is experiencing a surge of the sort not seen since the earl’s ill-advised attempt at making the Yankee roster last spring. I know the category for this post is “publishing news,” but take it from me there isn’t any publishing news fit to print late on a Friday two days before we relive y2k all over again setting the clocks ahead in these United States. So we’ll have rehash the stories that have riveted 84.5% of you 23% of the time like an all night drive through Dixie on the AM radio band.

<p> What with the yen spiking and distillate levels falling most of the publishing industry went home on Friday wondering if the story about teenagers and baby boomers is true. You know the story: teenagers and baby boomers, separated by the ages, are reading a lot of books. Not just insta books about Scooter, but novels. You wonder if the great novelists, Plum Sykes, Carmen Elektra, Pam Anderson can handle the pressure now that everyone is reading. Ghost writers: this is a wakeup call.

<p> Don’t try to sell things to Boomers: sure, they have a lot of money, blah, blah, blah. But at the Prince of Denmark Shopping Centre a recent experiment revealed the following: during the limited time only lederhosen sale Boomers drifted by bin after bin of “one size fits all” hosen without buying any. How do you reach these people? You can’t.

<p> Good luck with the time change if this applies to you or your loved ones. Chances are there will be more publishing news unless all the computers implode and the blogosphere suffers a cosmic flat tire and is left by the side of the road as Baby Boomers and Teenagers drive by, their noses in a book. Deepak Chopra won’t panic. Neither should you.

<p> You know its late in the business cycle when ravenous investors scoop up Initial Public Offerings having plans involving Wi or Fi or Spectrum Breadth or social networking. Even worse are the gatekeeper floats a variation on monkey in the middle wherein two tall people toss a ball over a short person’s head. Gatekeepers don’t produce anything, and that’s okay. They enhance, they tweak, they refine and serve the midstream, that gaping hole between producers and end users. Natural gas can’t heat your apartment without a midstream pipeline.

<p> If you’re a writer, you’re a producer. You’re a wildcat well in Irian Jaya. A volcano has swallowed your neighbor and triple canopy jungle shrouds your hideaway: life is good. Insects hum. You get the idea of sending a message to the outside world. But who are you going to contact? It’s like uh oh we ate the missionary, please send another. We’ll behave.

<p> Literary agents! As boiling lava fills Main Street you happened to grab a copy of Writers Digest from somebody’s cold dead fingers and scan the ads. Writers wanted. Your first thought may be wanted for what? The post office has photographs of writers who are wanted, but is this a good thing? At this point you have to resist the temptation to flee upriver: you gotta put some product in the pipeline.

<p> Year One: the letter you wrote to the agent may have gotten lost. It may have been stolen, shredded, lost at sea, vaporized, vulcanized, ionized, briefly pitied by a third party, misdirected, or subjected to extremes of heat and cold.

<p> Years Two and Three: Well, your letter may not have captured their imagination. Anyway you have more product. A wellhead fire kills your cousin. You write another letter.

<p> Year Nine: Phrases like “sorry, not for me,” now infest your vocabulary. If you don’t want a banana, just say so. You check the ads in Writers Digest: “Writers wanted!” Who are these people? What is the source of this insatiable want?

<p> Panic in the Year Zero: alligators eat people wearing pith helmets! This is the last straw. Those weren’t missionaries, they were literary agents and those are your gators. You better hope no one finds out about that. Wait a week, write another letter. Feed your pets.

<p> A pile of books arrived at the Druidical & Literary’s posh offices yesterday prompting this reporter to rip open the envelopes before searching for shelf space. A couple of notable arrivals bear mentioning on a day when Wellington Leg broke records in a heat wave: 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Time to inflate the Fred Flinstone pool and smoke a cigar.

<p> By the way Mariano Rivera is working on a changeup. Tremble, Red Sox Nation, tremble.

<p> Okay, I’m reading THE DARK STREETS by John Shannon from Pegasus Books. It may be early in the year for “best of” kind of praise but this novel reminds me why crime fiction transcends marketing labels and snide put downs to simply explore the human condition in extremis. Jack Liffey is looking for a missing college student, a Korean-American involved in making a documentary about comfort women during the Japanese occupation. That’s all I will say for now, other than to say that John Shannon deserves recognition as one of the elite writers in our beloved genre.

<p> Spare a thought for Jason Pinter one of the Killer Year founders and author of the forthcoming novel, THE MARK. As Sarah Weinman reported yesterday, Jason was fired by Crown over a blog post that suggested Starbucks book program was moving product. It’s hard to say what the brass at Random House found threatening in Jason’s observations other than he used Barnes & Noble as a reference point in his comparison to Starbucks. You’d think that Publishers would be excited by the Starbucks program, but no, Howard Schultz & Co. don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know how to select books. They don’t know how to market. Starbucks might as well close all their stores and throw in the towel. And if it’s true about Mariano Rivera’s changeup, we should cancel the baseball season, close the Piltdown Exchange, climb the Alaska Way Viaduct and wait for the Big One.

<p> Although I’m sure Barnes & Noble has their hands full with cranky shareholders and friendly staff are they frightened by Starbucks? ( I am, but who am I?) What if Starbucks were to acquire BN in a hostile coffee throwing takeover greenmail short squeeze throw caution to the winds deal? Hey, they need another book. BN has books in there man.

<p> Friends and Neighbors: Your reporter has a review of David Stone’s THE ECHELON VENDETTA up at January Magazine. Jeff Pierce was kind enough to highlight this event at The Rap Sheet. Links to same may be found on the right ( your right) in the mysterious self-sorting blog roll.

<p> Sistah Terri has a new website. She will be added to the author role this very day. Her novel, WILD GOOSE CHASE, will appear next January from Midnight Ink. Her agent, Jessica Faust of Bookends, has a good blog also found on the blogroll.

<p> Mickey Reidel will guest blog here next week. Look for “How Antimaccasar Can Brighten Any Room.”

<p> Time for a long overdue chat with Detective Mickey Reidel the protagonist of FLAMINGO DAWN. Mickey moved from a supporting role in THE WORKING DEAD to the lead in FLAMINGO DAWN. In a surprise move Mickey has chosen to ignore his author and put up a MySpace Profile.

<p> Mickey you’re forty one years old. Aren’t you afraid that MySpace reaches the wrong demographic?

Yeah, I’m scared shitless about that. Keeps me awake at night. Oh, wait a minute, according to my profile I never sleep.

<p> Tell us something shameful about yourself. People love that.

I shot Mother Theresa. I’d like to say I didn’t mean it or that I was drunk at the time, but I did mean it although it’s kind of funny if you think about it. I shot a poster of Mother Theresa that I put up on my bedroom door.

<p> You live in Kew Gardens, Queens and love garage sales.

Yeah, I live in a big house my parents bought way back when. My sister and I inherited the house. She and her husband lived with me for a while before they moved out to Rockaway. Some guys I know are gonna remodel my kitchen. And, yeah, I go to garage sales. One time I went to a garage sale on York Avenue and bought a famous painting for seventy five cents.

<p> Did you acquire the Mother Theresa poster at a garage sale?

No, it came from a Catholic church over toward Maspeth. They had a whole bunch of them.

<p> You list your hobbies as guns and Tylenol.

That’s a joke, I was kidding. I like to cook, paint, I collect Irish lace.

<p> How did feel about being the lead in FLAMINGO DAWN?

Well, shit, it was about time. Armand DiPino was the lead in what, three books? Sure he’s younger and better looking but let’s face it when those literary agents read my shit…you know what I’m saying.

<p> So you resent DiPino?

Hell no. I’m saying he had three cracks at this thing and now I get one. I mean we had a famous literary agent on the line and he blew it, man, he whiffed. Life’s tough, you know? I’m a lot more mainstream; I own a house, I got a boss truck, a detached garage, a cool girlfriend, a nine year old daughter. DiPino lives in the West Village. He does his laundry in a basement.

<p> What sets you apart from other fictional detectives?

My problem is I’m always getting tangled up with ordinary people who’ve broken the law. I’m a sucker which is why I maintain my distance. My house is neat and orderly. I don’t drink a lot and I don’t like to socialize too much. ADAs and whatnot think I’m a wiseguy and I’m always pissing important people off, but I don’t do that for sport. If I can keep someone decent out of the system I do it. Hey, my house is paid for.

<p> Thanks Mickey.

Oh, wait, there’s been a rewrite: I don’t have a cool girlfriend anymore. I need some control over here, you know?

<p> Here’s an interview with Keith Dixon, author of the ART OF LOSING from St. Martin’s Press. Keith is an editor at the New York Times.

THE ART OF LOSING is a first person narrative. Did you set out with that approach in my mind when you began the novel?

From the ready-set-go I knew that I wanted this novel to have the immediacy of a first-person narrative—it’s really all about one person’s experience, the push and pull of his angels and demons, and I felt that a third-person narrative wouldn’t accurately convey the urgency of the stresses and strains.

Tell us about yourself, how writing fits in with the rest of your life.

Writing’s an essential part of my day—I write three hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year save two: my anniversary, and my wife’s birthday. (Truth be told, I usually manage to sneak in a page on those days, too.) I’m drawn to the craft because I’ve always loved books, because I love the transformative quality of literature, because I love the obliteration of the self that comes with the work. And the work is made all the more interesting by the fact that I’m totally in control of it: I get to decide exactly where I want it to go, which is a far cry from the rest of my life.

What sort of books do you gravitate to as a reader?

I’ll read anything that’s well-written and made with an attention to the basics of the craft: I’m just as happy reading Philip Roth as I am James M. Cain. Too, I’ll happily leap from genre to genre, magic realism to stark realism, comedy to tragedy. So long as the chops are there, I’m interested.

Guilt is the subtext of THE ART OF LOSING. Is obsessing about money a commentary on the larger question of values?

Absolutely. The writing of the book was a response to a broader paradigm that had taken hold of my own life, that of recognizing that one’s artistic success in no way guarantees commercial success. I had spent an awful lot of time obsessing about the fact that my writing was getting positive attention from the critics but was making me no money whatsoever. This sucker-punches you right in the confidence-bone: you begin to think, Why aren’t I making any money at this? What’s wrong with me? Then you realize that the failing is not yours—all you can do is write the books as well and truly as you can. Once you start thinking first and foremost about the money you’re making off them, you’re in big trouble. I think we all at some time or another face a situation that asks us to compromise our values, and more often than not that situation involves money.

A lot of readers are writers and they enjoy understanding the process of writing book length fiction. Did you plan THE ART OF LOSING from an outline or wing it from an idea?

I’m a wing-it writer. I write the first sentence without knowing what the second is going to say, and so on. I think that’s because I get the same pleasure from writing that most readers get from reading: I love the sense of discovery, the feeling of a new world opening up right before your eyes. To plot the book out on an outline would not only deaden my enthusiasm for the work—it would kill the book outright. The excitement of watching the thing unfold is what sustains me through the writing.

You have a solid grasp on horse racing and the vagaries of gambling on the ponies: did you haunt the OTB for research?

I did lots of research—and yes, some of it at the OTB (I work in Times Square and they have one on West 48th Street just south of Rockefeller Center). I also hit the track myself, and interviewed extensively with one friend who once worked as a professional Las Vegas and Atlantic City gambler, another who professionally gambles on the horses at Belmont and Aqueduct. It’s a world unto itself, with its own language, its own rules, its own mythology. Fascinating, but also a bit threadbare, and certainly reeking of anxious hopes.

THE ART OF LOSING might have been sub-titled FATHERS AND SONS. Tell us about the novel’s slant on parental expectations.

So often the stresses between age and youth are that of experience versus desire. The old want to convey all that they’ve learned; the young will not listen because they’re too busy talking about their hopes. The old want to be young, and the young want to be old—or rather, the young want to have experience behind them, and of course the only way to gain experience is to make mistakes and learn, and get old. The novel’s slant on expectations might be characterized thusly: the old cannot bestow experience on those who will not listen. And Michael Jacobs sure as hell doesn’t seem to be listening. He’s too busy listening to the gibbering voice in his head, which wants independence, success, an audience and money all at once. Poor fellow—he’s in for nothing but trouble.

Free will is the philosophical cornerstone of western religious belief. Without spoiling the plot I wondered if you came to the end of your story believing Mike had surrendered his?

Indeed Mike has surrendered his free will by the book’s end: because at the end he is yoked to a horrible mistake that will inform his every move for the rest of his life. This is what true guilt is: not an ache of the conscience, but a recognition that your life is no longer your own. The true penitent cannot serve himself, but only the process of reachieving the state of grace that he’s lost.

What can you tell us about your next project?

I’m appallingly far into a novel about, strangely enough, writer’s block. And about literary envy. It tells the story of two novelists each committed to the other’s destruction. I’m having a wildly fun time writing it.

Thanks, Keith.

<p> Wellington Leg: Lettuce served at a lavish party celebrating the annual swimsuit edition of the Druidical & Literary was contaminated according to sources with close ties to produce and literature. Several guests were rushed to Big L Casualty where surgeons were standing by. Lettuce was removed from the ear, nose, and throat of Mr. Gavin Hastings of Henley Hornbrook who may have been the victim of “hazing” according to DCI Borchardt. “No one puts lettuce in their ears,” he said, ignoring the obvious fact that someone had, that someone being Mr. Hastings. Doctors reported that despite a poor credit score and the derivative nature of his admittance essay they removed the offending lettuce at a cost of $44,000.

<p> The swimsuit edition, eagerly awaited in Wellington Leg, will feature “Druids at the Beach” this year. Last year candid photos of Hizzoner sunbathing caused many to cancel their subscriptions to the D&L as well as a severe cashflow crisis at City Hall. Many blamed the Internet for the sudden nosedive in readership.

<p> Graf von Sitzbaedchen, caterer to the stars, ordered his celery and lettuce sous-chef to be beheaded at the Tower “as soon as those in the normal course of jurispridence lose theirs.” He expressed regret in a brief but touching postcard that simply read, “sorry.”

<p> The swimsuit edition is available at Eddie’s Book Nook for a song, according to afternoon cashier Marge. A big bald guy will provide door security for Eddie’s: free celery for the first forty visitors! Hurry!