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Aug 15 2005

Agents of Buzz Stalk the Unsuspecting

I’ve been following Kevin’s thread about book reviewing, reasons to do it, pro and con. Kevin and I review a lot of books. Sources as varied as publicists for the New York houses and authors themsleves ponder the efficacy of reviews. Do reviews sell books? The jury’s out. They’ve been out for fifty years, sequestered in a seedy hotel, studying sales figures, returns, bestsellers, conspicuous flops. Let’s call it a mistrial. Let these people go.

The heat wave in New York may be clouding editorial judgment. Ed has a link to an article in Newsday about creating buzz for books. Picture this: you’re in Central Park on a Sunday. A person approaches you with the first two chapters of a novel; stunned or alarmed, you accept those pages, if only to make the person go away. It’s harmless in the greater scheme of things. You’ve been buzzed. Curious, you begin to read. A new plan evolves. Why waste time in the park when you could be in a bookstore?

When I lived in New York, thousands of buzz agents approached me on a daily basis. Most wanted change, loose change, sometimes for a purpose, a subway token back then, or bus fare to Tampa. A solid third of these change agents held brochures for restaurants, coffee shops, cheap suits, discount shoes, designer eyeware, the Circle Line tour, shares in penny stocks. No one ever offered me a book. I never allowed the person to get too deep into their spiel.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, out of touch, behind the times. I don’t want perky street people buzzing me. Okay, maybe a star map of Beverly Hills, but that’s the only exception. Once I know where Eddie Murphy lives, I can settle down and read a book review, unless the book is by Brett Easton Ellis. Then I have to go the park.

By davidthayer • Views • 0

Aug 12 2005

Field of Blood by Denise Mina

Denise Mina returns to her Garnethill style with Field of Blood. Her main character, Patricia Meehan, known as Paddy, is a teenager working as a copyboy for a Glasgow newspaper. There is a second Paddy Meehan, a former spy for the Soviet Union, convicted of a crime he did not commit, only to be freed by the efforts of a journalist, Ludovic Kennedy. Both Kennedy and the older Paddy Meehan are real people, and much of the plot thread about the safecracker spy is a cautionary tale about cops and journalists.

When a three-year-old boy is brutally murdered, the jaded newsroom is stunned by the crime. Paddy is a Catholic kid from working class stock, living at home and engaged to Sean, another Catholic kid from a neighborhood much like Paddy’s. When Paddy learns that Sean’s cousin is one of the suspects in the murder, she confides in the only other woman available, Heather Allen. Heather betrays the confidence, reveals the boy’s identity in a syndicated story, and exposes Paddy to the wrath of her extended family.

Field of Blood is set in Glasgow in 1980-1. Denise Mina explores the sectarian rage of the Catholic-Protestant divide, using Paddy’s background to examine the social fabric of Scotland at the time. The bottom up view of society is not a pretty picture, a landscape of failed government housing, broken urban vistas, high unemployment and poor prospects. Paddy is determined to break the pattern of the life she feels predestined to live, her parents’ life. She wants to be a journalist and that drive propels much of the plot. Her impersonation of Heather has consequences beyond Paddy’s darkest fears, and leads her to confrontations she is not equipped to handle.

Some of the novel’s emotional impact is muted by the necessity to set up both stories. North American readers may not understand the references to the Paddy Meehan spy case or his subsequent imprisonment for murder. Yes, the words are on the page, but without the emotional pull of memory or experience, the injustice spelled out never intersects precisely with the primary story. This is a social novel with a crime hook and resolution. Field of Blood is the first of a series, always a tougher task for a writer, as the characters develop in Denise Mina’s meticulous way. Complex and beautifully written, the novel does the heavy lifting for the new series, one I am looking forward to reading.

By davidthayer • Reviews • 0

Aug 11 2005

Raelynn Hillhouse

Here’s an interview with author Raelynn Hillhouse. The mass market paperback edition of her novel, The Rift Zone, is available now.

Hello and welcome. Tell us whatever you’d care to share about your background.

I lived in Central and Eastern Europe during most of my twenties and during that time I was involved in some unique business opportunities: I ran Cuban rum between East and West Berlin, forged East Bloc visas and trafficked jewels and artwork out of the former Soviet Union. I was a smuggler and I loved my job.

I had some close calls. I’ve faced the barrels of Kalashnikovs and I’ve been chased by police. I’ve slipped across borders and I’ve talked my way through closed checkpoints. My phones have been tapped and my hotel rooms bugged. My friends have been questioned about me. In one very chilling experience, a friend disappeared at the hands of the Romanian secret police. And I’ve been recruited as a spy.

How did THE RIFT ZONE get started? Was being a novelist an early ambition?

My early ambitions were about adventure, academics and escaping the confines of rural life, not about writing novels. This changed because of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. I was in Berlin the following year in the winter of 1990-91 on a Fulbright researching my dissertation. East Berlin was a mess. The euphoria of the collapse of the Wall had descended into a deep depression among the East Germans. The social structures of that people had lived with for forty years were ripped away and there was nothing to replace it. There was a big void in everyone’s life. Awful as many aspects of communism were, people missed the good parts. I missed them. Gone was the tension of two incompatible political systems at war with one another, but forced to coexist in the same city. No more spy vs. spy. Pan Am no looped over downtown on approach just to remind the East German regime that they didn’t control their own skies. The West Berlin subway no longer slowed down when it passed through those eerie stations in the East that had been boarded up since 1961. And you didn’t hear those familiar sonic booms of MIGs reminding West Berliners they were surrounded. And one night in my cramped Berlin apartment I realized I could capture some of that amazing time now lost to history. Over ten years later, I finally got around to it and wrote RIFT ZONE.

Keep Reading

By davidthayer • Interviews • 0

Aug 8 2005

A Writer’s Paris

Aspiring writers read plenty of books that reveal the secrets of writing success. Many of them enumerate the exact number of secrets revealed within, such as “Five Secrets to Writing Success” or “Fifty Three Habits of Successful Writers.” One of the habits of a successful writer is cashing royalty checks, a secret revealed here for the first time.

Eric Maisel has written A Writer’s Paris to be released by Writers Digest Books. If you’re not an aspiring writer, the book is an interesting tour of Paris through the eyes of an artist. Maisel addresses the whole person in his books about writing. Part drill instructor, part philosopher, he wants to train his novitiates to write, write, write. There is a continuum to his writing, easily recognized if you’ve read his stuff before. Courage, fear, commercialism, bad drafts, Maisel describes the experience of producing fiction while leading a life, complete with budget worries, relationships, and the root causes of procrastination.

He’s tough on Jean Paul Sartre, literary agents, and sexy ideas for book proposals. Maisel understands the dilemma that to write quality fiction, to add something meaningful to the world, is the fastest way to lose an agent’s interest in your project. If you cannot afford to spend six months in Paris, this book is the next best thing.

By davidthayer • Reviews • 0

Jul 29 2005

Belly by Lisa Selin Davis

In the middle of reading Belly I had the uneasy thought that Lisa Selin Davis, a woman I have never met, had written the story of my father’s life. Belly O’Leary, the main character, returns home to Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. Belly served four years in jail for taking bets in his bar, an ironic crime considering the proximity of the famous racetrack and the plethora of OTB outlets scattered throughout New York. You can place a bet, you just can’t do it in a bar.

Belly’s reentry ordeal rivals anything NASA might offer a returning astronaut. Belly cannot and will not accept the diminished state of his life, his prospects, or his hometown. His daughter, Nora, his probation officer, grandkids, ex-wife, and mysterious mistress Loretta form an archipelago of failure, living reminders of Belly’s shortcomings as a person, a father and husband. Through epic bouts of drinking Belly darkly pursues the ghost of his third daughter long since dead. He is certain that Loretta will return to him, flush with their loot from the bookmaking, lifting him from the grasp of big box employment, the straight life, a nightmare of routine and regimen too harrowing to consider.

The author lets Belly run, but always keeps the hook in his mouth, his hopes and schemes, and the rage that fuels him. “Are you through ruining my party yet?” his grandson asks after a disaster at a confirmation party. The boy asks the question that everyone wants the answer to, certainly Nora whose house is the eye of the storm. Though exiled to the attic Belly prefers passing out on the living room couch, where he is discovered by family members the morning after. Belly is as startled as they are by the dimensions of his predicament. Only Loretta, the woman of his dreams, can release him from delusions of restoration, from the notion that time has stood still pending his release from jail. Equipped with memories both vivid and highly suspect, Belly weaves a universe of possibilities. When reality intrudes, he is forced to acknowledge that the idealized past was not much better than the dismal present.

Ms. Davis wraps things up with a metaphorical reference to a childhood trauma, one that is appropriate to the circumstance. Belly is a superb novel, one I highly recommend.

By davidthayer • Reviews • 0

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