Books to look forward to from Little, Brown

Yasuko lives a quiet life working in a Tokyo bento shop looking after her only child. When her ex-husband turns up without warning her world is turned upside down. Detective Kusanagi of the Tokyo police tries to put together the events that happened that day but finds himself confronted by the most puzzling and mysterious circumstances that he has ever had to investigate. Nothing makes sense and it will take a genius to understand the mastermind behind this particular crime. The Devotion of Suspect X is by Keigo Higashino and has already been made into a cult film. The Devotion of Suspect X is due to be published in July 2011.

When Hostage Police officer Helen Weeks walks into her local newsagent's on her way to work little does she know that this simple daily ritual will change her life forever. It's the last place she expects to be met with violence, but as she waits innocently at the till, she comes face to face with a gunman. The Demand - the crazed hostage-taker is desperate to know what really happened to his beloved son, who died a year before in youth custody. By holding a police officer at gunpoint, he will force the one man who knows more about the case than any other to re-investigate his son's death. That man is DI Tom Thorne. DI Tom Thorne teams up with Helen Weeks from In The Dark in Good as Dead. Good as Dead is due out in August 2011and is the forthcoming book from Mark Billingham.

The People Next Door is the debut novel by Christopher Ransom. In a quiet American suburb, the Nash family lead unremarkable lives until the new neighbours arrive. The Renders are beautiful, confident and charming and all this seduces the Nash’s. However the Renders are hiding a terrifying secret. They are not as perfect as they seem to be and in fact they are not even human. When Mike Nash learns what they are he finds himself in a heart stopping fight to save his family. The People Next Door is due to be published in July 2011.

Cage of Bones is the third book by Tania Carver. Workers demolishing a building in Colchester make a horrifying discovery in the basement: a cage made of human bones… with a feral child inside. As Detective Phil Brennan and Psychologist Marina Esposito investigate, they expose the trail of a serial killer who has been operating undetected for thirty years – a killer with a disturbing connection to Brennan’s father. Cage of Bones is due to be published in September 2011.

On board a Washington State ferry Tyler Locke is informed by an anonymous caller that a bomb is set to detonate in ten minutes. On deck he finds classics professor Stacey Benedict has received the same information and they must work together to decipher a puzzle in ancient Greek. However, this is just a test created by a terrorist cell that is intent on using them to undertake an incredible mission to uncover the legendary riches of King Midas. The Midas Code is by Boyd Morrison and is due to be published in August 2011.

A mysterious plane crash in the American West. A murder at a UK university. An ominous threat from a band of Israeli assassins. As a hard-bitten British cop and a youthful FBI agent investigate, they expose a link to the Dead Sea Scrolls – and a sinister band of ‘fallen angels’ who claim to be descended from Judas. The Dead Sea Deception is by Adam Blake and is due to be published in August 2011.

Broken Home is by Roberta Kray and is due to be published in September 2011. When a stranger brings news of a half-sister Hope never knew she had her world changes. Connie’s in deep trouble and the mysterious Flint needs Hope’s help to find her. To find her sister Hope must enter the dark underworld of the East End. If Connie’s going to be saved, Hope may have to get close to the enemy.

Never Knowing is by Chevy Stevens and is due to be published in December 2011. What if murder was in your blood? Sara Gallagher is finally happy. However, there is one big question that still haunts her – who are her real parents? Sara is ready to find out but after her birth mother rejects her again she discovers her biological father is an infamous killer. Sara soon realises the only thing worse than finding out your father is a killer is him finding out about you…

Dublin Dead is the second novel by Gerard O’Donovan and is due to be published in December 2011. Journalist Siobhan Fallon enlists the help of DI Mike Mulcahy for a story she’s covering about the disappearance of a young woman from Cork. The duo find themselves dragged into the ruthless world of international drug smuggling and murder.

Hotwire sees the return of Maggie O’Dell. On a crisp autumn evening in Nebraska Maggie O’Dell is trying to make sense of the deaths of several teenagers. Sifting through what is real and what is hallucination Maggie realises that the surviving teens are being systematically eliminated. Meanwhile on the East Coast, army colonel Benjamin Platt is desperate to identify the pathogen that has infected children at a Virginia elementary school. Despite the miles that separate them, the two cases collide. Hotwire is by Alex Kava and is due to be published in July 2011.

Panic is by Jeff Abbott and is due to be published in July 2011. Evan Casher had a perfect life: great parents, his first girlfriend and a huge online following for his films. But when he comes home from school to find his father missing and his mother dead. Evan is going to learn the hard way that the people he trusted the most were the people he knew least and that a sixteen-year old boy might be the only one who can be a murderer to justice.

When a storm strikes in the Scottish Highlands, Martin and Sue find themselves stranded in a simple hut miles from anywhere and completely isolated. But Sue starts to sense that they are not truly alone. With no way to escape, Sue and Martin must try to hold on to their sanity, as the shelter quickly becomes a prison – and their thoughts begin to turn murderous. The Haunted is by Niki Valentine and is due to be published in October 2011.

Mystery in the Minster is the seventeenth novel in the Matthew Bartholomew series by Susanna Gregory. It’s 1358 and the near destitute college of Michaelhouse in Cambridge is promised a welcome source of income – a legacy from the Archbishop of York of a parish close to that city. But there has been another claim to its ownership and it seems the only way to settle the dispute is for a deputation from Michaelhouse to travel north. However, once they arrive in the bustling city, Matthew Bartholomew and his colleagues learn that the Archbishop’s executors have died in unexplained circumstances and the codicil naming Michaelhouse as a beneficiary cannot be found. Mystery in the Minster is due to be published in August 2011.

Snakepit by Nick Brownlee sees the return of Detective Inspector Daniel Jouma and ex-policeman Jake Moore in the fourth book in the series. It has been a crazy year and what should have been a relaxing fishing trip together finds Jouma and Moore in trouble. They are kidnapped at see by a gang of murderous Somali’s and held hostage upon a ship skippered by the notorious pirate Omar Abdulle. To stay alive they must pool all their experience together to not only catch a killer but to also survive on the run in Somalia as well. Snakepit is due to be published in July 2011.

And for fans of Val McDermid the yet untitled new Carol Jordan and Tony Hill novel is due out in September 2011.

A sad start for 2009

DONALD WESTLAKE RIP

2009 has started on a sour note with the passing of Donald Westlake. I know other blogs have put up notices before me but I thought that this tribute to the great writer by Mike Carlson is a good one. Note: This appears on Michael Carlson's Irresistible Targets: http://irresisitibletargets.blogspot.com

DONALD WESTLAKE: IN MEMORY OF A CON-MAN by Michael Carlson

Most obituaries of Donald Westlake concentrated, and rightly, on his prolific output, more than 100 novels and an equal number of short stories, as well as some exceptional screenplays. Westlake was one of the last of a dying breed, the generation which followed the great pulp magazine writers, and made their livings pounding out paperback originals on manual typewriters. For Westlake, the habit was so ingrained he never gave up his typewriters; he once explained to me that, although he stockpiled old machines to cannibalize for parts, the real difficulty was finding ribbons, which he went through at a prodigious rate.

I met Westlake a couple of times; the last was a wonderful lunch thrown by Quercus at Chez Elena in Charlotte Street, where Don and Abby were literally the life of the party. I started thinking how that Donald Westlake was the antithesis of his Richard Stark alter ego, in much the same way that the Dortmunder books are a reflection in a fun house mirror of the Parker novels, and then it occurred to me that a central theme of Westlake's work has always been human frailty. His characters are done in, or nearly so, by their weaknesses, their foibles, and in his plots, which he basically made up as he went along, letting the characters find their own ways through situations which usually arise out of those flaws. Then they generally run up against people with more serious flaws, most commonly greed, and things accelerate from there. 'You never really know whay you're doing,' he said to me, and I think that applies to most of his characters too.

Even Parker, who wants to know, and control, everything. In fact, Parker is a successful professional thief precisely because he has none of those human failings, the reason for that being he has very little in the way of human feeling, especially in the first series (the redux is a somewhat kinder, gentler sociopath), and he takes advantage of, or takes revenge on, those who do have them.

Like many great comic writers, Westlake's humour had dark roots. The best comedians see the world as a noirish place, and find it funny. Westlake described the Parker books as growing out of an image he had of a man walking across the George Washington Bridge, the feeling of being an outsider he'd experienced himself coming to New York during a peripatetic youth. When he said that, it reminded me of the somewhat lost hero of 'Up Your Banners', a straightforward comic novel he wrote around the student protest movement in the late 1960s, and Westlake loved being reminded of that. He made the connection to Parker himself, saying he'd introduced Grofield, the actor and part-time thief, to the Parker novels in order to have a little comic relief. Grofield spun off into a few books of his own, and at about the same time Westlake, as Tucker Coe, wrote five novels about the ex-cop Mitch Tobin, whose existential angst in expressed by his working on a wall in his backyard. It was as if Tobin were the antithesis of Grofield. Remember too that the opening of the Grofield novel Blackbird, with its failed armored car robbery, was used as the opening of the Parker novel Slayground which was also made into a British movie starring Peter Coyote, Robbie Coltrane, and Billie Whitelaw, Beckett's favorite actress.

It's tempting to concentrate on the playfulness of Westlake's writing: how he and Joe Gores inserted their characters into each other's books, how Grofeld pops up in The Hot Rock (still one of the great heist movies, and one of Robert Redford's best roles, with Ron Liebman and Zero Mostel stealing every scene they can from him) or how in Jimmy The Kid the Dortmunder gang use a fictional Parker novel, Child Heist, as the blueprint for their own kidnapping. It was while contemplating how one can write the words 'fictional Parker novel' with a straight face that it finally occurred to me that what Donald Westlake actually was, what made him such a treasure as a writer. Westlake was a con man, a first-class con man, and we readers were the marks.

This is no great revelation. Go to Westlake's website and you're greeted with a quote 'I believe my subject is bewilderment' and then another one 'but I could be wrong'. He even wrote a novel called 'God Save The Mark', which won the first of his three Edgars. When he wrote an Arthur Hailey-style paperback original, Confort Station, as J. Morgan Cunningham, the book appeared with a blurb saying 'I wish I had written this book'. Signed Donald E Westlake!

Think about it. Westlake started out working for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, writing critiques of manuscripts sent in, with a fee, by hopeful would-be writers from across America.
Meredith found some great wordsmiths there. Evan Hunter, of course, like Westlake, would establish a second identity for a different sort of book. Lawrence Block would, like Westlake, move between hard-boiled and comic crime. This crowd included Brian Garfield and John Jakes, who would become best-sellers. All of them would write to order under multiple pseudonyms. Some, like Robert Silverberg, could turn out perfectly-typed manuscripts as quickly as they could type. These guys would play poker every week, and practice their con games. They even wrote one novel as a joint enterprise to help one of them out, one player sitting out and writing as chapter while the rest played on, then another sitting out, and so on.

Meredith, as their agent, would get them bulk contracts for paperback originals and contract the work out. This included a huge number of adult novels, of which Westlake claimed to have written 28, though others put the number at 39, or more. He used the name Alan Marshall (or Marsh) for most of them, wrote some with Block who was writing as Sheldon Lord, but also let other writers use the name to sell books published under imprints like Bedside, Nightstand, and the probably unintentionally punning Midwood. It was the same publisher who printed Jim Thompson's later novels, including The Grifters, for which Westlake won another Edgar, and an Oscar nomination. He described writing these books by doing exactly one chapter, fifteen pages a day, for ten days, and figured out that at $900 a pop, he was earning $22.50 an hour. In the Dortmunder novel Bank Shot (filmed with George C Scott lisping for reasons best-known to him) Kelp hits a car whose trunk is filled with adult novels, and all the titles Westlake lists as being visible are ones he wrote.

Westlake then wrote a very funny novel, Adios Scheherazade, about a man who writes porn, cashing in one more time on that genre which is probably the biggest con of all, when you think of con-men as giving the mark what he thinks he wants. I wonder if one of the reasons Westlake wasn't more successful in Hollywood was that those guys never really know what it is they want. But you look at his best work, like the screenplay of The Grifters, or the original screenplay for The Stepfather, or his adaptation of his own novel Cops & Robbers, or the Hammett adaptation Fly Paper (despite some odd casting) for Showtime's Fallen Angels series.
Or maybe it was because he simply liked sitting at the typewriter and being the master of his own destiny.

But I can't escape this sense of Westlake carrying on the con as the reader turns the pages, and I think that's why the Parker books are so special, and may remain the focus of critical attention on Westlake's career. Critics tend to value seriousness over humour, and Richard Stark's books were written with such a taut prose, especially considering the early Sixties milieu in which they first appeared, that they jumped out at you. He was performing that same con, keeping your attention focused, but with such economy that the story-telling was subsumed totally in the force of the story. I remember being transfixed by them when I discovered them, somewhat bizarrely, in the library at Dickinson College, where I found myself teaching. I've written at length for both Shots and Crime Time on the film adaptations of the Parker books, although Point Blank remains a classic film, and was Westlake's own favourite, I remain exceptionally fond of John Flynn's The Outfit, with Robert Duvall the screen's best Parker (though, like all the adaptations, not called Parker). It is a small and perfectly formed crime film that deserves a higher reputation.

Westlake's reputation, on the other hand, has probably never been higher. The early Parker books are being reprinted by the University of Chicago, which says something about American academe as well as the quality of Westlake's writing. Those fabulously entertaining Sixties novels are re-appearing, and as for the early adult stuff, well, let's say university presses need not worry.

But anyone who knew Donald Westlake, even casually, was aware of how full of life he was.
You imagine someone who writes seven days a week as being an introvert, but he was anything but. He died on New Year's Eve, as he and Abby were about to go out, and although that is tragic, I see something touching in the thought that he lived his life at a full pace until he just suddenly stopped.

Writers never die, of course, as long as they are being read. And I believe Donald Westlake will go on being read for a very long time. Readers love being conned, after all, and who could do it better?

MURDER ONE

The famous London Crime Book store MURDER ONE is to close its doors just short of reaching it's 21st birthday. Sarah Weinman was one of the first to blog on this. Every one is the business will have fond memories of the store (where ever it was located). It was a great place to not only find books, but to bump into authors and attend some really good launches. The owner, Maxim Jakubowski, seemed to be keeping it on an even keel whilst all around him failed but alas, the current economic crisis forced him into "early retirement" from the book trade. Mind you, that leaves him more time to write.

ALEX KAVA ON THE MOVE

This isn't the news I was expecting to give you from Sphere/Little Brown this January but Alex Kava has been bought by Nikola Scott and David Shelley at Sphere. She has signed up to write two MAGGIE O'DELL thrillers. Scott and Shelley outbid three rivals for the author, who is moving from Mira. The first hardback, set in Florida during a devastating hurricane, will appear in autumn 2010. "Alex is such a talented writer and I’m a huge fan of her series heroine Maggie O’Dell," Scott said. Sphere has UK and Commonwealth rights; in the US, Kava is moving from Mira to Doubleday.