Why Don’t They Publish Theresa Schwegel in February?
Wellington Leg: It’s maddening. In order to select the best books of 2007 this reporter has until mid-November to choose the five for review in January Magazine. This means that 2007 runs from January through late September by publication date because to get them read, thought about and written about takes me six weeks, less if a book is assigned, but, come on, that’s only happened to me twice. Good books slip through the cracks, good writers don’t get talked about.
Theresa Schwegel and Megan Abbott come to mind. Neither of these writers are on my top five list this year although the reasons are different; Schwegel’s PERSON OF INTEREST arrived in a torrent of fifteen books one afternoon last week and Abbott’s QUEENPIN never arrived at all. Maybe Jeff Pierce or one the other Rap Sheet All Stars will pick me up here. In this case both writers hardly need my help in launching their careers since the NY Times is covering their work. Theresa Schwegel won an Edgar and Megan Abbott will win one too.
There were a few noteworthy reviews from the weekend: Christopher Sorrentino reviewed TOKYO YEAR ZERO very well in the NYT. Sorrentino nailed both the substance of the story and the presentation. He had some things to say about mysteries in general in his opening paragraphs “while contemporary crime writers are capable of more than tossing on the dish known as “noir” too often the mystery today seems ossified.”
In my mind there is a huge difference between mystery and noir. These are not interchangeable terms: mystery is ossified more or less by design by the form and the need to create the puzzle-sleuth solution formula. Noir is wide open, character driven, owing less to Agatha than to Aristotle and his Poetics.
Sorrentino, to his credit, examines TOKYO YEAR ZERO as literature and treats the book accordingly.
Ed Champion and Ian Rankin? Like Hugo Chavez at a Mike Huckabee rally Ed visits the heartland of thriller writing using words like “agnomina” and “minatory” in hashing over an early Rankin manuscript now published in book form. Hilarious.