Crime Fiction Dossier

Why is David Montgomery the most hated man in German media?

See the Guardian for the answer.

I was afraid this was about me, until I got to the line about him being "diminutive." I'd have really been sweating if it had said "portly."

(Tip o' to Maxine.)

Support a good cause -- First Book

First Book's mission is to give disadvantaged children the opportunity to read and own their first new books. They were named a Gold Star Charity by Forbes Magazine and received a Four Star rating (the highest) from Charity Navigator.

Happy holidays from the Naked Authors

This is just plain wrong.

(Courtesy of Paul Levine and the Naked Authors.)

Update

There was no Book of the Week (or anything else) last week because my daughter was sick. (She's fine now.) But I'll be posting something this week.

Assuming you were waiting with bated breath...

A fun new time waster

If you feel like putting off work a little longer, you might pay a visit to crimespace, a new interactive community for readers and writers of crime fiction.

A lot of fine folks are participating, and there are always some interesting discussions going on.

Best wishes to Dick Adler

I've just learned (through The Rap Sheet) that my friend and colleague Dick Adler is ill. I don't have any more details than that, but I did receive an email message from Dick last night and although it was brief, it didn't sound like he was doing very well.

Hopefully this will only prove to be some minor malady and Dick will soon resume his critic's duties. He has been one of the finest champions of crime fiction over the past few decades and an invaluable contributor to the scholarship of our genre.

Dick and I are "rival" critics in the same way that Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel were. Dick writes for the Chicago Tribune and I write for the Chicago Sun-Times. Of course, neither of us live anywhere near Chicago, we never appear on TV, and almost nobody knows who I am. So it's not much of a rivalry.

Dick, you're in my thoughts and prayers and I wish you all the best.

In honor of Barbara Seranella

M.J. Rose has started a linking campaign in honor of Barbara Seranella, who passed away recently from liver failure, and the Crime Fiction Dossier backs her all the way.

Please consider signing up to be an organ donor. There is no better way to give meaning to the end of one's own life than to give a new start to another's.

Day job

Like most writers, I have a day job. I write event listings for Goldstar Events, an online ticket seller. (The hook with Goldstar is that the tickets are only half-price.)

I've been doing it for the past four years -- used to be full-time, but I went down to part-time to finish my novel and then to take care of the baby. Day jobs suck, but as such things go, this is a pretty good one.

The company recently expanded into New York and Boston and today we got a nice write-up in the New York Times. This doesn't have anything to do with books, but I thought it was cool, so I wanted to share it with you.

It wasn't me!

The other day, I woke up to an inbox full of hate mail about an article I'd written. No, not because I chose a list of writers that didn't include a woman. This was serious business: an article in the Washington Post about the recent controversy surrounding Rush Limbaugh's comments on Michael J. Fox and the political ads he filmed.

The article was a straight piece of journalism, not commentary, but it still enraged a handful of readers enough to write to me and complain. Interestingly, the outraged letters were split between those who were fans of Limbaugh, and those who think he's an idiot. That suggests to me that it was in reality a fair and even-handed piece.

Of course, I wasn't the person who actually wrote the article. Believe it or not, there is more than one person in the world named David Montgomery. The David Montgomery in question is a staff reporter for the Washington Post, while I am a book reviewer who spends most of his time changing diapers.

There is also a David Montgomery who is a very distinguished professor of labor history at Yale, and a David Montgomery who is a pianist and conductor. (I used to get the latter's phone calls all the time when we were both at UCSB.) There's even a David Montgomery who snagged my domain name, even though he uses it to no good purpose.

So remember: even though Google is your friend, you still need to put on your thinking cap before sending hate mail. Either that, or next time I'll pull a Goldberg and post the emails on here.

Email address

Until further notice, and probably permanently, my old email address ([email protected]) is no longer valid.

Please send all emails to: [email protected]

And, just for the record, GoDaddy.com is an inexpensive place to register domains, but, man, does their customer and technical service suck. You get what you pay for, right? Well, it's certainly true in this case.