Basking on the Beach #1 with Alafair Burke

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... Well, it seems like a long time ago since I edited and published a weekly electronic and print newsletter called Hellnotes. I won't go into its long and notable history except to mention that under the reign of David B. Silva and Paul Olson, it won an International Horror Guild Award and during my stint it was honored with the Bram Stoker Award.

One of the summer segments I loved was called "Hell on the Beach" where a few horror and mystery writers offered suggestions for which books to drag along while on vacation.

This time, in honor of the global-warming summer we've been experiencing, I've asked a few writers (because who reads more than writers?) to toss out their suggestions while "Basking on the Beach!"


First up is crime novelist Alafair Burke. By day a professor of law and a former deputy DA herself, Burke has created two main series protagonists including Oregon Deputy DA Samantha Kinkaid and NYPD detective Ellie Hatcher. Her latest book, Never Tell, is the fourth book in the Hatcher series.

Here's Alafair's list:

1. Dare Me by Megan Abbott
"Dare Me is going to earn Megan the recognition she deserves. It's the story of two cheerleaders and a new coach who disrupts the accepted pack order."

2. Heartbroken by Lisa Unger
"Lisa Unger and I met about four years ago. She was such a cheerful, happy person, I wondered what kind of crime fiction she would be writing. Turns out she's carrying around some pretty dark thoughts... This might be my favorite. She builds tremendous suspense in telling the four generations of a family drawn over and over again to an island." 

3. Criminal by Karin Slaughter
"Any book by Karin Slaughter is a treat, but this one is earning the reviews of a lifetime. I'm looking forward to cracking this one open next!"

4. Precious Blood by Jonathan Hayes
"Hayes has an amazing gift for writing beautifully about violence. As a senior medical pathologist in Manhattan, he writes with utter confidence and authority."

5. The Drop by Michael Connelly
"If anyone who likes procedurals isn't reading the Harry Bosch series, it's time to dig in! I love the way The Drop features two cases that pull at different parts of Bosch's personality. What a great character!"

Thanks so much, Alafair, and by the way, 212, Hatcher novel #3, is currently available for the BN Nook e-reader for a mere 99 cents!

There's Just Something About a Cemetery...

I heard about a seminary professor of homiletics who told his class that if they had nothing to say about the cemeteries sprawled outside some of their rural churches, they had nothing to say. There's a lot to ponder in that statement and not just for future preachers.

My mother was a rebel. She defied her Irish family, running off to marry not only a non-fellow clan member, but a Protestant of German-English linage. From that time on, her family kept her at a distance. But there were no conflicts for Christmas or Easter festivities. No summer family reunions. Visits from any of her siblings were sparse and often happened when my brother and sister and I were in school and my Father at work. She did maintain a somewhat close contact with two of her sisters, but they had violated the family "traditions" as well.

It wasn't until I was older that I attended any funerals of her family, but on our journey to Cincinnati (where it seems most of her family is buried), she finally opened up about how when she was growing her family visited this very cemetery several times during the summer, not only to lay flowers on the graves, but to spend the entire day, picnicking, praying, and singing songs. While the older ones walked among the gravestones, reliving cherished times their loved ones, the children would frolic about and play games. Special attention would be paid to cleaning and maintaining the markers and areas around them, but mostly it was a time for the dead to be with the living again.

My own attraction to cemeteries came most probably because we wound up living so near to several. Then later, they seemed such quiet reflective spots. Finally, I began dragging my camera along because there were such amazing pieces of sculpture marking so many of the graves.

And yet as I clicked away, I became oddly driven to create motion in the very stone where there most definitely was none.

A twist, a turn...

Playing God, was I? In creating motion was I giving life? Breathing into the stone.

As a writer, that's precisely what is required. I toss out characters onto the mat and puff into them my own experiences/dreams/passions/imagination/senses/and... learning which comes from what I have gleaned from the writers I have allowed to teach me. A clever twist of phrase. The precise word. An unexpected jolt.

Just as the homiletics professor advised, if as a writer you have nothing to say about the books already written (because you have read a goodly number of them), you have nothing to say.

The End... No, The End... No, This is the End. Really?

“That is all there is to the story. Catherine died and you will die and I will die and that is all I can promise you.” One of Ernest Hemingway's endings to A Farewell to Arms.

According to a nytimes.com story, a new edition of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms has been released which includes a variety of endings he grappled with. The proposed parting shots, along with early drafts of other passages, have been dug out of the Ernest Hemingway Collection, housed at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, MA.

Since Hemingway wrote pre-computer, he has left an amazing paper-trail of his creative process, and this volume should offer quite an interesting look inside his genius. (And make a lot of other writers feel better about their own revisions.)

Also included will be the other titles Hemingway considered using. Love in War? Nope. He even crossed out The Enchantment. (Thank God!)

Personally, I can't wait to read this. A Farewell to Arms was my very favorite Hemingway book when I was younger.

I'm certain I wrote that in the diary I kept back then. Wonder where I put it?

Happy Independence Day!

Whether you're picnicking with the family, trundling everybody off to an air-conditioned movie theater, or splashing happily in some barely cool pool, please have a happy Fourth of July!

What I'm reading...

Pulpy: In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick which tells the story of the tragic sinking of the whaleboat Essex in 1819. Though the crew drifted for 90 days after their tangle with a nasty sperm whale, only two lived to tell the tale.

Nook e-reader: Just finished the Pirate Wolfe trilogy by Marsha Canham which follows the Simon Dante/Isabeau Spence family of privateers. The individual books include Across a Moonlit Sea, The Iron Rose, and The Following Sea.

I know... me and the sea.

Tell Brave Deeds...

There was a man who lived a life of fire.

Even upon a fabric of time,

Where purple becomes orange

and orange purple,

This life glowed,

A dire red stain, indelible,

Yet when he was dead,

He saw that he had not lived.

Stephen Crane

Independence Day. A time set aside to celebrate our freedom and the struggles men (and women) make to earn that freedom. What better way than diving inside a book? And, yes, I have suggestions.

I was introduced to Stephen Crane in high school. No, he didn't ask me to the prom, but we dated. Well, since he died exactly forty-nine years (to the day) before I was born, it proved a curious relationship. It began with Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and spred to his other stories and poems. Crane's style was easy and familiar. His most famous work, The Red Badge of Courage, was one of those stories that snagged me fully and didn't let go until Henry Fleming "had rid himself of the red sickness of battle."

But Crane's The Open Boat had plunked my tush on the vast ocean and somehow I fell in love with the sea. What a convenience when the next required book just happened to be Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim. 

Jim, along with the other crew members, abandons the sinking Patna, only to find the ship doesn't sink. But it's Jim who faces the music, standing trial and being sentenced to be land-bound. But he does it with grace and bravery. Jim, like Fleming, bears his own personal trials, only this time instead of a red badge, we find Jim in white. And the meaning? Well, I want you to read the story yourself to find out.

Which brings me to one of my favorite books of all: Billy Budd: Foretopman by Herman Melville.

I used to faithfully read this book every summer. Billy Budd. Innocent, pure Billy Budd comes up and against a true baddie in literature, Master-at-Arms John Claggert. Melville unstoppered the barrel and let the brew flow. Of course Moby-Dick had been Melville's most noted novel, but I believe Billy Budd, like The Red Badge of Courage and Lord Jim, offers out the striving of true courage which is what we Americans are celebrating on this Independence Day. And to never give up, despite the ultimate cost. Lives unwasted.

But I think Crane might have gotten it wrong in his poem. In the end the man does live. Every time one of us opens his book.

Thank you, Dean Koontz, for John D. MacDonald!

"He hung around quite a while, entertained the folk, and was stopped quick and clean when the right time came." John D. MacDonald's proposed own epitaph

I imagine a lot of us play the three-degree game in some form or another. Personally, I'm not interested in discovering how far apart I am from Kevin Bacon. It's only been in the past couple of years that I stumbled onto just how close I have come to my very favorite author, John D. MacDonald.

Sadly, too many younger writers may not have read John D.'s twenty-one book Travis McGee series or what I lovingly call his "little books," those awesome Gold Medal paperbacks with the titillating covers, or any of his later and fatter books. And I may have missed them as well if it hadn't been for writer Dean Koontz.

Which brings me to my other favorite game: How did I get here from there?

While researching a story I was working on, I found a fictional book through my local library that included my subject. Curious as to how one Dean Koontz handled it, I checked out the book.

Of course,  B I N G O! I fell madly in love with Koontz's writings which means I also had to read Katherine Ramsland's Dean Koontz: A Writer's Biography which led me to The Dean Koontz Companion, edited by Ed Gorman. And Koontz said this about one John D. MacDonald:

"He was a brilliant writer. The McGee series is terrific, but about forty of the earlier books are so stunning, they eclipse the McGee series. When I read something like Slam the Big Door, Cry Hard, Cry Fast, The Damned, or The End of the Night, I usually turn the last page, thinking, "Okay, Koontz, you don't belong in the same craft as this man; go learn plumbing, Koontz, get yourself an honest trade."


Okay, you guessed it. I had to read this MacDonald guy, and where better to begin than at the beginning. Well, almost the beginning. I started with The Deep Blue Goodbye, the first book in the Travis McGee series. I have now read all the Trav books at least three times, but not just for entertainment. There's a lot to be learned about writing from John D.

He was a Storyteller with a big "S," capturing the period he wrote in with honesty and without apology. He's still being criticized for his treatment of women, but really he reflected the times, but I found him to be so totally taken with the fairer sex. He bravely took on the challenge of allowing his main character, Trav, to be be utterly unleashed in The Green Ripper, only to be honored with the National Book Award the following year for his effort.

Stephen King has argued that John D.'s The End of the Night "is one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century." I say it's the story Truman Capote yearned to tell.

I've found mentioning MacDonald's name to writers I have come to respect usually nets a knowing grin. Yup, Koontz and Gorman are not alone in their appreciation for the mystery master. Count Stephen King, Joseph Finder, James W. Hall, Tim Dorsey, Joe R. Lansdale, Ace Adkins, Michael Slade, Jack Ketchum, Les Standiford, Jonathan Maberry, Tom Piccirilli, and Bill Crider among the writers who have lavished praise on John D. MacDonald's writing.

Which brings me back to my original degrees' game. Joe Hensley, who wrote a number of novels and short stories including the Robak novels, served in his day-job as an attorney and judge in Jefferson County, Indiana. A Democrat, Joe also wore the cap as the Chairman of the Madison, IN, city campaign many moons ago. And under that same moon, I served as the city campaign treasurer. I knew Joe well. What I didn't know was that he and his wife knew John and Dorothy MacDonald well enough to take cruises together. Heck, I didn't even know was a writer then, and he had already penned two short stories with Harlan Ellison.

But thank you, Dean Koontz, for turning me onto John D. MacDonald. But, oh, my, what that's led to: Discovering the real Florida (including that sugar-sand beach at Siesta Key); the George Smathers Library at the University of Florida in Gainesville; a wealth of stories I have not yet plumbed; fellow JDM-lovers; and my own word-wrestling.

[Cal Branche has a wonderful site dedicated to John D., why not take a peek.]

Something Awesome This Way Comes: Shadow Show

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them." Ray Bradbury

I don't remember the first story I read by Ray Bradbury, but I do remember he was the first writer to grab me by the neck and yank me into one of his worlds. It was as though he'd taken this huge bottle opener and uncorked my senses.

From Dandelion Wine: "Dad stood comfortably saying this and that, the words words easy in his mouth. He made it easier by laughing at his own declarations just so often. He liked to listen to the silence, he said, if silence could be listened to, for, he went on, in that silence you could hear wildflower pollen sifting down the bee-fried air, by God, the bee-fried air! Listen! the waterfall of birdsong beyond the trees!"

Though on June 6, 2012, a terrible silence fell when Bradbury died, we can still hear that "bee-fried air" and "waterfall of birdsong." All we have to do is pick up one of his books and immerse ourselves in his stories.

And be inspired by his generous gifts.

"Love is the answer to everything," he once said. "It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love, you'll never make it. If you don't write stories people love, you'll never make it."

Obviously, quite a few writers listened, especially these: Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, Harlan Ellison, Audrey Niffennegger, Joe Hill, Mort Castle, Sam Weller, Alice Hoffman, David Morrell, Kelly Link, Thomas F. Monteleone, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Don Chaon, Jay Bonansinga, Robert McCammon, Ramsey Campbell, Bayo Ojikutu, Julia Keller, Gary A. Braunbeck, John Maclay, Charles Yu, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Dave Eggers, Lee Martin, Joe Meno, and John McNalley.

These fine writers contributed stories to Shadow Show, a tribute anthology, edited by Sam Weller and Mort Castle. Set to be released on July 10, Shadow Show also includes an introduction written by Bradbury.

And to whet your appetite, here's a sneak peek at Margaret Atwood's story "Headlife."

The book will be available from the usual suspects like Barnes & Noble and Amazon. And your local independent bookseller.But why not go order Shadow Show now?