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When I was an unpublished young writer  searching for authors to read I stumbled upon John D. MacDonald.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.