Crime Fiction Dossier

Deal Report: Benjamin Percy - "The Dead Lands"

Sounds like a cool idea.

From Publishers Marketplace:

Whiting Award, Plimpton Prize, NEA grant winner, and author of The Wilding and the forthcoming Red Moon, Benjamin Percy's The Dead Lands, a post-apocalyptic reinvention of Lewis and Clark's epic journey across the West, again to Helen Atsma at Grand Central, in a major deal, by Katherine Fausset of Curtis Brown (world).

New Releases: Mysteries and Thrillers (May 15, 2012)

The following is a list of mystery, thriller and suspense novels that are being published this week. They should be in stores now. If you don't find them on the shelves, any bookstore can order them for you. Visit the IndieBound website to find the indepedent bookstore nearest you.

If you'd like to order books online, you can easily do so via Indiebound, Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

Publishing on May 15, 2012:

John Sandford - Stolen Prey (Putnam, Hardcover)

Steve Berry - The Columbus Affair (Ballantine, Hardcover)

 

John Grisham - Theodore Boone: The Accused (Dutton Juvenile, Hardcover)

 

Also:

• Craig Johnson - As the Crow Flies (Viking, Hardcover)
• Meg Howrey - The Cranes Dance (Vintage, Paperback)
• Robert Pobi - Blood Man (Thomas & Mercer, Hardcover)

Note: This is not intended to be a comprehensive list of all new releases. Rather, it's a list of those books that look the most interesting, promising, etc. Or I just really liked the cover.

New Releases - A New Feature

As you might have noticed last week, I'm trying out a new feature here on the Crime Fiction Dossier. Every Tuesday (it's usually on Tuesday) publishers release their latest books to stores. There are so many books published, though, that it can be hard to keep up with what's coming out and when.

So I'm going to compile a weekly list of the new books coming out that look the most promising or interesting to me. I'm not going to try to list everything, but I will list as many as seems practical. Naturally, I'm going to limit the list to mysteries, thrillers, suspense novels, and the like.

For now, I'm just going to be doing paper books (no ebooks) and just original publications (no reprints). We'll see how it goes. Maybe I'll expand that in the future.

If you're an author or publicist and have a book coming out in the next week, please send me an email with the following information:

• Author Name
• Book Title
• Publisher
• Format (Hardcover, Paperback, etc.)
• Link to Author Website

Please send in the email only a week or so in advance. If you send it in much more than that it's just going to complicate things. I apologize in advance if I can't list your book for one reason or another.

I'm going to try this out for a few weeks and see how it goes. Please spread the word!

New Releases: Mysteries and Thrillers (May 8, 2012)

The following is a list of mystery, thriller and suspense novels that are being published this week. They should be in stores now. If you don't find them on the shelves, any bookstore can order them for you. Visit the IndieBound website to find the indepedent bookstore nearest you.

If you'd like to order books online, you can easily do so via Indiebound, Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

Publishing on May 8, 2012:

Marcia Clark - Guilt by Degrees (Mulholland Books, Hardcover)

Steve Ulfelder - The Whole Lie (Minotaur Books, Hardcover)

Edward Falco - The Family Corleone (Grand Central Publishing, Hardcover) 

 

Also:

• Jefferson Bass - The Inquisitor's Key (William Morrow, Hardcover)
• Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins - Lady, Go Die! (Titan Books, Hardcover)
• Chuck Greaves - Hush Money (Minotaur Books, Hardcover)
• Tamar Myers - The Boy Who Stole the Leopard's Spots (William Morrow, Paperback)
• Paul Goldstein - Havana Requiem (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Hardcover)

Note: This is not intended to be a comprehensive list of all new releases. Rather, it's a list of those books that look the most interesting, promising, etc. Or I just really liked the cover.

Tips for Ebook Authors

I shared these tips recently on Twitter. I wrote them down as they came to me, based on the mistakes that I'm seeing people make. Please feel free to share your own tips in the comments section.

• Make sure your cover art is colorful and eye-catching, with big text. It needs to be readable as a thumbnail.
• Your product description should be interesting, punchy & error-free. Tell enough about the story to attract the reader.
• Don't price your book too high. Somewhere between $.99 and $2.99 is probably best. (You can charge more if you're an established author with a following. But if you're not, you can't.)
• Make sure your title is fairly short, appropriate to the book and spelled correctly.
• Find smart people who review ebooks like yours and ask politely if they want a free copy to review.
• There's a fine line between effective self-promotion and being an ass. Find it.
• It might go without saying that your book should be awesome. But I'm going to say it anyway. Your book should be awesome!
• Your spouse is a wonderful person -- but s/he's not a copy editor. Find a copy editor.
• If you can't afford a professional editor, at least get a couple smart writers to read your manuscript. If they're professional/published writers, so much the better.

Worlds Collide: James Bond and the Vesper Martini

Perhaps no one in thriller literature, or literature in general, is as associated with the Martini as James Bond. With just three short words he launched countless thousands of Martini drinkers off into the arms of Bacchus: "shaken, not stirred."

I won't go into why this is the wrong way to prepare a Martini -- actually, I will: briefly, it spoils the crystalline purity that is one the drink's sublime pleasures -- nor will I offer a diatribe on how Bond convinced so many drinkers that a Martini should be made with vodka instead of gin. (Something akin to making cookies with peanut butter and calling them chocolate chip.)

No, the purpose of today's post is to discuss something that Bond -- actually his creator, Ian Fleming -- did right: he created a new drink.*

Here is the relevant passage, from Casino Royale (1953), the novel that introduced 007. Bond walks up to a bar, accompanied by his CIA contact, Felix Leiter, and orders a drink:

"A dry martini," [Bond] said. "One. In a deep champagne goblet."

 "Oui, monsieur."

 "Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel. Got it?"

Bond called the drink the Vesper, after the book's love interest, the beautiful double agent, Vesper Lynd.

It's basically a Dry Martini with vodka substituted for some of the gin in order to mellow out the flavor a little. Kina Lillet, used instead of vermouth, was a French aperitif flavored with cinchona bark (quinine), giving it a slightly bitter taste, but leaving it still a little sweeter than the typical dry vermouth.

All in all, a tasty way to make a Martini. Sadly, Bond never drank it again. The book does not end well for Vesper Lynd -- it never does for Bond's ladies, does it? -- and he discarded the drink along with her memory.

Here is the recipe:

 

The Vesper Martini

Shake with ice:

3 oz gin
1 oz vodka
1/2 oz Lillet Blanc

Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Add a lemon twist for the garnish.

 

Bond liked his cocktails on the large size (see below), so this will make a hefty drink. You can adjust the quantities if you'd like. Just keep the ratios the same.

For the gin, I recommend a strong-flavored London Dry, like Tanqueray. This will approximate the flavor of the British Gordon's gin of Bond's time. (A different animal from the Gordon's sold in the U.S. today.)

For the vodka, Bond preferred Russian or Polish, but distillied from grain, not potatoes. So you might use Stolichnaya or Sobieski. (In the movies Bond usually drank Smirnoff, but that's because Heublein paid the studio a lot of money for product placement.)

For the Lillet, it gets more complicated. The Kina Lillet that Bond requested is no longer available. The company now makes an aperitif called Lillet Blanc, which is similar, but doesn't have the quinine (and thus the bitterness) of the original. The drink will still have the same basic flavor profile, but it will be slightly different.

One possible substitute, first proposed by Jason Wilson, is to use Cocchi Americano instead. Cocchi Americano is a French aperitif wine akin to Lillet Blanc, but flavored with gentian root, giving it a similar bitter flavor to the original Kina Littlet. I have not tried this combination, but it sounds promising.

Regardless of how you choose to prepare your Martini, I will leave you with one final piece of advice, also related by Monsieur Bond in Casino Royale:

"I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold and very well-made. I hate small portions of anything, particularly when they taste bad."

Sound advice from a man who knows.

*According to Dale Degroff, the recipe was actually created for Fleming by Gilberto Preti, who tended bar at Dukes Hotel in London. Ted Haigh, however, says this is doubtful.

Worlds Collide: Raymond Chandler and the Gimlet

I recently started a website called Professor Cocktail that covers another passion of mine: fine spirits and cocktails. I've been writing a series of posts over there called "Worlds Collide" that deals with the intersection of my two major pursuits, namely crime fiction and spirits. I'm going to start cross-posting those essays here.

Raymond Chandler, one of the great American writers of all-time and one of the two finest practitioners of the classic hardboiled detective novel, is best known for his immortal creation, Philip Marlowe. The Los Angeles private eye appeared in several novels and solved many cases. But perhaps his greatest achievement lay in the spirituous realm, for Marlowe (and Chandler) gets credit for helping to popularize a classic cocktail: the Gimlet.

The Gimlet is reputed to have been invented by Sir Thomas D. Gimlette, a surgeon who served in the Royal Navy around the turn of the 20th century. He supposedly created a drink made from gin mixed with lime-juice cordial as a way of inducing sailors to consume Vitamin C, and the cocktail eventually took his name. (This story is quite possibly not true, but it's a good story.)

Despite its antiscorbutic properties,  the Gimlet failed to catch on in the United States, where the Martini and the Manhattan still held sway. That began to change, allegedly, when Raymond Chandler, one of the most popular authors of his time, introduced his readers to the Gimlet in the pages of The Long Goodbye (1953).

Early in the novel, Philip Marlowe meets up with Terry Lennox, an alcoholic British ex-pat, in a bar called Victor's. The pair get to talking and begin to bond over several rounds of cocktails. Marlowe recalled:

We sat in the corner bar at Victor’s and drank gimlets. “They don’t know how to make them here,” [Lennox] said. “What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice and gin with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.”

There's no doubt that the Gimlet is a fine cocktail -- a true classic that any bartender worth his salt can make, and many drinkers will enjoy. And Lennox is right that a Gimlet must be made with Rose's Lime Juice. If it's made with anything else, it just isn't a Gimlet.

But those proportions! That's enough Rose's to make a fish pucker, and drown the gin like a medievil witch. So here's a recipe for a Gimlet that's a little more palatable. It still has more Rose's than most recipes you'll find, but we're mixing it in honor of Marlowe.

 

Gimlet

2 oz. Gin (Plymouth Gin is a good choice)
1 oz. Rose's Lime Juice

Shake (or stir if you'd rather) with ice. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lime wedge.

 

Nothing could be simpler. The bartender at Victor's eventually buys a bottle of Rose's so that he can make Marlowe a Gimlet. But by that point Lennox is gone and the detective has lost his taste for them.

That won't stop us, however, for mixing up a cocktail and raising a glass in honor of one of the finest writers who ever lived.

Cheers, Mr. Chandler!

Read This Book: "Headstone" by Ken Bruen

I once called Ken Bruen "the dark poet of contemporary noir" (yes, I'm quoting myself -- sue me) and his latest novel, Headstone, confirms that his status is unchallenged. This is a fascinating, powerful and, yes, dark crime novel that only enhances Bruen's already amazing reputation.

Irish private eye Jack Taylor is back for his ninth go-round with demons both natural and otherwise. A gang of young thugs is preying on some of Galway's innocents, and Taylor takes it on himself to stop them.

Headstone is typical of the series. The plot is straightforward, but elegantly wrought. It's violent, but not bloody. The prose is beautiful, idiosyncratic and evocative. As always, Bruen's style is uniquely his own. Nobody else can write like this and they'd be crazy to try.

Venerable editor and bookseller Otto Penzler could not have chosen a better novel with which to relaunch the Mysterious Press, his publishing imprint now located at Grove/Atlantic. Headstone is one of the year's best reading pleasures.

Read This Book: "What a Wonderful World" by Paul Guyot

When I read The Blue Religion, the short story anthology edited by Michael Connelly in which "What a Wonderful World" first appeared, I was especially impressed with a few of the stories. One of them was Connelly's, of course. Stories by Alafair Burke and Ed Hoch were likewise commendable. But perhaps my favorite was from Paul Guyot.

Guyot is a veteran screenwriter -- he's worked on shows like "Judging Amy," "Leverage" and "Felicity" -- so it's no surprise that he knows how to write. But the short story medium is very different from screenwriting. Writing great shorts requires razor-sharp storytelling and elegant prose. As "What a Wonderful World" demonstrates, Guyot's got those skills in spades.

"What a Wonderful World" is the story of an obsessed cop and his search for the killer of a young woman. It's dark, atmospheric and edgy. The story moves to a jazzy rhythm, shifting from a hard-driving bop to Tommy Dorsey swing to an elegiac New Orleans funeral march. This is gorgeous stuff -- moving and real, and definitely worth your time.

Note: This is a story, not a book. But you should read it anyway.

Social Media Etiquette for Writers

The following is some of the annoying behavior I have observed by authors on various social media platforms. Maybe other people aren't bothered -- but I'm not known for being especially sensitive. So if you're getting on my nerves, chances are that you're alienating other potential readers as well.

• Don't post an ad for your book on someone else's Facebook wall. Yes, posting a link to Amazon and writing "My book is now available for Kindle" is an ad. Post that on YOUR wall.
• Don't add someone to your group without their permission. If you do this, I'm liable to immediately block you.
• Don't accept a friend request and then immediately post "Like me on my fan page" to your new "friend's" wall. This is obnoxious behavior that will also get you blocked.
• As far as that goes, I'm not sure you should ever ask someone to "like" you on your fan page. But if you must, don't do so more than once. Under no circumstances should you ever send multiple messages to the same person asking them to "like" you.
• Along similar lines, don't send people more than one message telling them your book is now available. One message is fine. Anything more than that is annoying.
• Don't post a comment in someone else's discussion saying, "Congrats on your new book! My new book is just out, too. You can buy it from Amazon."
• Don't retweet every positive message you get. If it's someone notable (i.e., with a ton of followers or name-recognition), fine. Retweet it proudly. But for the others, just write back and say thank you. It's classier.
• Don't constantly tweet or post that your book is now available or your book can be bought here, etc. You don't want to be silent about it either. But it shouldn't be five posts in a row every morning.
• By all means, tweet your positive reviews. Maybe even do it twice if you spread it over a couple of days. But not more than that.

I'm sure there are others, but these are the ones that bugged me the most. What are some of your social media pet peeves? And what are some strategies you've found that work without annoying people?