earlemerson.com

John D. MacDonald at work.

When I was an unpublished young writer  searching for authors to read I stumbled upon John D. MacDonald. Nobody told me about him. I discovered him in a second-hand bookstore buried in the paperback racks. Just discovered him. It was like finding a gold nugget. Back in the early seventies, MacDonald was still being published in paperback originals, so his books were rarely in the Seattle Public Library system, which I haunted, and which in those days catered primarily to hardcover fiction.

I also haunted  a used bookstore in the building above what used to be Woolworth’s dime store in downtown Seattle. You had to walk up a set of creaky stairs and check your bags with the clerk. I always had a large satchel which I then filled up with books, most of them paperbacks. I think Nightmare in Pink was the first MacDonald book I picked up. Wow! I knew right away I had to read everything he wrote. And I did, finding most of the titles over a period of several years in that same musty bookstore.

MacDonald had two things going for him. The first was he told a riproaring yarn. The second was he told it with verve. Here was a writer who wrote accessible prose you didn’t have to wade through, yet it was lyrical. He was keenly in touch with all the senses and used color to good affect. Each of his Travis McGee series titles—his best books, I believe—has a color in the title: The Deep Blue Good-bye, Cinnamon Skin, The Quick Red Fox. His descriptions were evocative and sensual. Read the rest of this entry »

Just kidding. Monsieur Lazhar, a film from French Canada may be the best foreign film of the year. It’s a minor masterpiece in which you end up rooting for most of the characters and falling in love with all the children. I’d never heard of it before viewing, so went in blind.

The story concerns a class of Montreal kids whose teacher has committed suicide. The class is taken over by a strange man from Algeria with his own dark history and thus begins the wonderful growing alchemy between these kids and the teacher. Everyone has a secret so the tale unfolds as a mystery as much as anything else. The storytelling is flawless. There is one scene of nothing but an empty hallway that goes on for twenty or thirty seconds and, because of the context, imbues as much suspense as any twenty seconds from any Hitchcock film. Philippe Falardeau, the writer/director, has a real way with actors but especially with children.

Below is the trailer which doesn’t come close to doing justice to this perfect little gem. Do yourself a favor. Get this on streaming or rent the DVD so you’ll have something to watch when your eyes get too tired to read any more.

If you want an automatic notification when I put up a new post, you can sign up where it says SUBSCRIBE TO BLOG at the bottom of the far right column. You can get off the list at any time.

Just behind my left shoulder you can pick out my house if you know where to look.

In the late eighties when my agent and I decided it would be a good idea to come up with a second mystery series, I mentioned this to an editor I’d worked with at William Morrow, Co. His only comment was that whatever I did, I should never, never put a dog or a kid in the series. His claim was that mystery writers didn’t know how to handle kids or animals in their stories. I later suspected he had no particular fondness for either kids or animals.

I knew right then I had to have both in my second series, thus Brendan, Mac Fontana’s son,  and Satan, the German Shepherd he inherits as the first book unfolds. The series went well, with the first book, Black Hearts and Slow Dancing, tagged as one of the ten most notable crime and mystery novels that year by The New York Times. I enjoyed writing it and stopped the series only because I wanted to do a series of stand-alones and didn’t have the time to keep up two mystery series while working on the longer, more-difficult-to-write stand-alones.

The editor who warned me not to include a kid or a dog in the series ended up buying the series and successfully edited the first two books without complaint. The structure of the series is based very loosely on the old television series, The Rifleman, in which a widower raises a young boy in tumultuous times in a small town.

All five of the Mac Fontana titles can now be found on Kindle and Nook.

A few days ago I received this e-mail:

I hope this mail of mine finds you all fine n’ well. I am a big fan of yours and your novels. You are a magician of a writer and a true wordsmith!!! I love the great plot-lines  that you so awesomely create. I was humbly wondering could I please get a book of yours containing an autograph of you please. I know the request of such is very high, but I live so far way from there, I live in a small country called Bangladesh. In fact I live in whole another continent! It would mean a lot to me. adore your writings, like millions out there, and I am just a fan of your thundering wordsmanship.  My land mail address is :

I’ve deleted the name and actual address out of consideration for the sender, should he be legitimate.

Years ago I received several similar messages from somebody in the former Czechoslovakia. The writer professed to be my biggest fan and also confessed to being penniless. All he wanted was one autographed book. To be honest, I cannot remember at this late date whether I sent him a book or not. (Turns out I did not.) A year or so later while at dinner at a mystery convention with eight other authors, one of them began bragging that they had a huge fan in . . .   Czechoslovakia,  but that the man was so poor he couldn’t afford to buy her books so she sent him one gratis. Another author jumped in and said they also had a huge fan in Czechoslovakia  and they also had mailed the fan a free autographed book. It turned out that a majority of the authors at the table had mailed a book to the same guy, all believing they were doing a favor for their most ardent fan. We were each his favorite author.

Of course, it became immediately obvious that he’d found a line of suckers in America about a mile long and was selling autographed books on the street or E-bay. I cannot decide if my newest fan is a scam artist or genuine fan—note the universality of his message, no mention of character names or even of book titles. Send this to a million authors, how many books are you going to receive in the mail? In any case, it sure was a nice e-mail.

My favorite movie of the year, so far: Headhunters. It’s from Norway and it’s a gem. It’s a crime thriller with more twists and turns and unexpected laughs than anything since the Coen brothers put out Fargo. Trust me, I watch probably a movie every evening, sometimes two. I like foreign films. I like chick flicks. I like them all. But this is by far my favorite of the year. It’s a noir thriller, slickly filmed, beautifully acted and it has the added panache of being filmed in Norway, so you get the travel experience, too.

We saw it on Netflix streaming.

Rarely do I give a talk or do a book signing where somebody doesn’t ask me who I like to read. Like most authors, I’m an omnivorous reader and always have been. Most recently I’ve read several excellent books.

Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout. I’m still reading this and find the author paints word pictures of fairly ordinary people in her small town wonderfully. It goes to show that everybody is fascinating if you know enough about them.

The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving: by Jonathan Evison.     This very satisfying story is a first-person account of a sensitive man in a sensitive situation. The writing is straightforward and reads quickly, the tale pulling you along very much like a private-eye novel, though this is not a mystery. Five stars. I enjoyed it immensely.

The Fifth Witness, by Michael Connelly. Connelly never disappoints and this was my second reading of The Fifth Witness. The book is at once complex and real enough and rich enough in texture to be true, though it’s fiction.  I also have recently reread The Lincoln Lawyer, which may be Connelly’s best. I hate saying that, because they’re all so good.

More soon, including my favorite movie of the year.

Here’s a photo taken in early September 2012 of the Puget Sound region from the top of Mount Si, also known as Mount Gadd in the Fontana series. Usually the skyscrapers of Seattle and Bellevue are visible on the horizon, but here they’re obscured by smoke from the forest fires in Eastern Washington. Some of this smoke has already traveled hundreds of miles. The town of North Bend is directly below.

After a trial and error with Smashwords, which I do not recommend, I’ve loaded the five Fontana novels onto the Barnes and Noble site on Nook. You can find the first book in the series, Black Hearts and Slow Dancing,  here. The problem with Smashwords is largely accountability. After six weeks they still hadn’t registered a single sale, although I was getting e-mails from people who’d bought them on Nook through Smashwords. It was simpler to download onto Pubit myself. Now there are registered sales every day.

Help Wanted: Orphans Preferred on Nook  here.

Morons and Madmen on Nook  here.

Going Crazy in Public on Nook  here.

Dead Horse Paint Company on Nook  here.

The current state of affairs is that Monica’s Sister,  my most recently completed novel, a Thomas Black mystery, is currently being looked at by a company relatively new to book publishing. I’m anxious to publish with them but they have been very slow in responding to my agent’s queries. They have the manuscript and have had it for quite some time. One would assume, that at some point they would either say yea or nay, but right now it’s nada. In the meantime, I’m hard at work on another Black. This one is tentatively titled Two Miles of Darkness. I have a sneaking suspicion I’ll finish this before we get word on Monica’s Sister. At that point, somebody’s going to have to make a decision.

I love this photo. It’s on Silver Peak just off I-90 at Snoqualmie Pass.

This is one of my favorite late-summer hikes. It’s about 2 1/2 hours from the car to the top of Silver Peak where there are magnificent 360 degree views from Canada to Oregon. On this particular day there was a slight haze, probably from forest fires in Eastern Washington. Mount Rainier would normally be in full view in the distance but is missing. Note the six hikers below.

At the World Mystery Convention several years ago, also known as Bouchercon, I crashed a party given by St. Martin’s Press. The doors were open and it was a large hall, filled with St. Martin’s authors and other writers, like me, who were accompanied by one or more St. Martin’s authors.

In those days, and probably still today, St. Martin’s had an A-tier route for their top mystery and suspense writers. These very few writers were bestsellers or close to it, and all made a good living writing books. There were also hundreds of St. Martin’s authors writing mysteries for what I call the “Pulp Mill Division.” These writers wrote mostly for libraries and other smaller markets. Writers in the pulp mill could expect anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 advance against royalties for their books. In most cases, the advances I knew about were closer to $5,000, and many were less. Now if your book hit the bestseller lists, which virtually none of the books in this section of St. Martin’s did, you would earn out your advance and you would start getting royalty checks every six months. But most of the pulp mill authors received their advances happily and then went on to write another book, knowing they were never going to collect any royalties on any of their titles, even though it often took as long as a year to write a book. Five thousand dollars for a year’s work is not very much. In fact, one might argue it’s slave labor. Why did these authors suffer under such a regime?

Because every one of them thought they were going to make it into the A-tier one day. How many of those authors in that room that day made it from the pulp mill to the A-tier? My guess is, none.

So, what you had, essentially, was a room full of authors, none of whom were making a living writing books. In fact, none of them were even coming close, even though many had loyal followings, dedicated mystery readers. The mystery bookstore phenomenon was going strong at the time and there were sales to be had there. Most of the titles went on to sell to a paperback house, generating more revenue for St. Martin’s and sometimes a little more for the author.

In a candid moment probably influenced by too many martinis, the editor-in-chief at St. Martin’s stood up and gave a speech. He said a lot of things, but this is the only part I remember, because it shocked the hell out of me but seemed to shock no one else in the room. He said the genre authors in the room had generated more money for St. Martin’s than all their bestselling writers put together, that the St. Martin’s engine was actually fueled by the people in that room, and not by the writers that were hitting the bestseller lists — startling news, since a bestselling book generates one hell of a lot of revenue for a publisher, as well as for the author. This told me that everybody in the room was being taken advantage of.  Not one of the authors in that room was able to quit his or her day job to write full time.  Everybody there could have been paid more money. The publisher was making a fortune off them. The editor-in-chief admitted it. In a just, sane world there would have been a riot and the editor-in-chief might have needed bodyguards to get out of the room.

Everybody who wants to be a writer wants to make a living at it.  In that room the only people making a living off the craft of writing were the publishers, editors, and agents: the non-writers.

On another note, book five, the last book in the Mac Fontana series, is now on Kindle. You can find it here.