Hey, There's A Dead Guy in the Living Room

Goodbye, and a re-boot

Robin Agenew

I'm one of the original bloggers on "Dead Guy", and I've enjoyed the ride.  It's been a learning experience, good discipline, and a challenge every week to come up with something new to say.  Well, I think the well has run dry!  If there's more to say about the roller coaster world of bookselling, in the future, it will have a new voice on this blog.  There's plenty of change still to come, of that I'm sure.

Aunt Agatha's will celebrate 20 years of existence next fall, which seems hard to believe.  As I pass these milestones I'm grateful for my life as it's taken shape, part of which includes this blog.  If you've been a reader of mine, thank you!  And check out the other very interesting voices here going forward.

As a good bye treat, I'm re-posting one of my favorites, "My Favorite Events of all Time".  I started this blog writing about a Loren Estleman event - it seems right to finish up with a post about favorite events (including Loren Estleman's!)  Happy reading!

And another last note - a shout out to the authors who have been so loyal to Aunt Agatha's, who have provided reading pleasure for us and for our customers, and who have indeed helped our doors to stay open.  Loren Estleman, Steve Hamilton, William Kent Krueger, Julia Spencer-Fleming & Louise Penny - you know what you did!    Thank you!

 

Originally, I thought this would be a list of my five favorite author events, but we've been open 18 years now.  That's a lot of events.  Some of these were great just for sheer volume but most of them are memorable or interesting for different reasons.  It's weird to be able to look back so far now - some of these authors have died, or are out of print.  But they live on for me.  This list is (roughly) chronological.

1.  Alzina Stone Dale  Alzina Stone Dale writes "Walking Tour" books, but she also wrote a very nice, concise bio of Dorothy Sayers.  She came to sign it in conjunction with the book club reading of Gaudy Night.  Merely the fact that we were reading Gaudy Night drew a lot of people, but Alzina was so lively and interesting she got people all fired up over her book - we ran out of copies as people (politely, they were Sayers fans, after all) fought over the ones we had.  It was great fun.

2. Craig Holden  Holden's first book, The River Sorrow, got lots of attention.  He was the first author I read about in the paper and contacted out of the blue because I thought he sounded cool.  We didn't have a huge turnout, but he arrived ready to sign in his Burberry trenchcoat.  As did Loren Estleman.  Same trenchcoat.  He came by to "meet the new guy", but I think he was checking out the competition, as Craig had gotten so much press.  What stays in my head are the two of them kind of mentally circling each other, like predatory lions.

3. Kate Ross, Sujata Massey and Lev Rahapel  This was set up by Lev, who is local (sort of), and who said he was bringing along his "friend", Sujata.  Cool friend!  I became a huge fan.  What made it special though was that the stars aligned and Kate Ross, whose wondrous book The Devil in Music had just come out, was able to join them.  It was a nice, casual event, with Lev and Sujata chatting away (Sujata was making fun of Lev's cover, I think) and all of a sudden Kate appeared.  This was not too long before she died, but she radiated intelligence.  She couldn't stay very long, but it was really kind of magical to meet her.  Conversation sort of stopped when she arrived.  If there was ever an author I felt extreme regret about not being able to talk to longer, she was it.  

4. Steve Hamilton This event was also with Lev Raphael, as it happened.  Both of them had new books out - Steve's was A Cold Day in Paradise - and while Lev is pretty comfortable speaking in public, I don't think Steve started out that way.  The event was at a library, and I was sitting there with Lev and the librarian, chatting before the event started, when we saw Steve drive up.  Then Steve drove away.  I make no assumptions, but there was a bar down the street.  When he did show up, he seemed pretty relaxed, though that first signing, it was Lev who did most of the talking.  Of course I wish I'd ordered a couple of cases of A Cold Day in Paradise, but you live and learn.  Steve has since gotten a lot more relaxed about speaking in public!

5. Deborah Morgan  Writer Deborah Morgan is married to Loren Estleman, but when she is signing books, he tends to stay in the background.  Or he makes the gracious attempt.  This was a cozy event with Debi and Sharon Fiffer, who both write about antiques, so the discussion was interesting, and the two women had nice chemistry.  Loren made a few comments from the cheap seats in the back, but it really ended up being a discussion that involved everyone present.  It was a really sweet event.

6. Detroit Noir Launch Party This was a blast because I basically went through the table of contents and started inviting all the local authors.  The editors were friends, and they apparently also got the word out.  The authors I invited and had heard from showed up - around 7 or 8 of them - but then other authors started to show up.  By the time all was said and done, I think we had 15 authors through the door, we ran out of books, and Loren Estleman got black icing on his teeth from the "noir" cake.  We ran out of books around the time the last author, Lolita Hernandez, turned up.  She said, "Did I miss the wine?"  with a real note of panic in her voice.  Thank god we had wine left...this one was fun for the sheer chaos.

7. Megan Abbott and Mitchell Bartoy  While Mitch's books are out of print, he and Megan are pals and they are two of the truest "noir" writers I can think of, and they have a great chemistry together.  They are also two of the smartest writers I can think of.  The evening was topped off (for me at least) with Megan quizzing Mitch about his characters and his need to "imprint them with stigmata."  I think that's the basic gist, anyway.  This was not a well attended event, but it was spectacular.  I still regret that Mitch didn't find a larger audience as his books are really wonderful.

8. Elmore Leonard  Do I need to say more?  He was interviewed, along with his son, Peter, by Loren Estleman at the library, we draw 250+ people, and the evening ended with the 3 men discussing their favorite movies.  

9.  Steve Hamilton, Kent Krueger and Julia Spencer-Fleming  These are three of my favorite writers, the stars aligned, and they were able to all come on the same day.  It was our 15th anniversary of being in business, and we couldn't have celebrated it in a better fashion.   Julia squeaked into town in the nick of time on the notoriously late Amtrak.

10. Deborah Crombie  Again, another all time favorite writer.  I simply love her books.  When I picked her up at the airport, I felt I could die happy.

11.  Louise Penny  The first time she visited (with her second book) she and her husband came and ate dinner with the suddenly very expanded book club before the event.  As anyone who has met Louise and Michael knows, they are two of the nicest people on the planet, the book club fell in love, and I don't think any of us have recovered.

12.  J.A. Konrath introduces Rob Kantner  Rob Kantner is big in Michigan, as his books are set here, and he's notoriously difficult to get to come to sign books.  He's very shy.  The outgoing Konrath, a fan, wrote an intro to Rob's book of short stories, and, even better, he got Rob to show up.  We had a lot of Kantner acolytes at the event, and we had a nice time in the bar when it was over.

13.  Peter Robinson    Peter was just supposed to be doing a noontime "drive by" but when he arrived and saw the 40 or 50 people jammed into the store, his face fell.  He had had a rough morning - early flight, no food, ditsy driver - but when I offered to get him tea and a cheese bun, he started to perk up.  Then when he met the audience, who were in awe of him and immediately started telling him how great he was and how much they loved him, he warmed up completely.  (As who wouldn't?)  I love his books, and I loved having him in the store.

14.  Maureen Jennings and Cordelia Biddle.   I love both women's books but the real highlight was when sweet, kind of shy Maureen got up and sang a little ditty about Hitler in the bathtub.  It was hilarious.  The evening was continued when along with Maureen's husband, Iden, they joined us and my mother at our house for dinner.  The stories were fantastic, and I wish I'd had a tape recorder.

15.  Gerald Elias  Gerald Elias is a concert violinist who happens to also write very good traditional mysteries (though he asked me what that term meant) set in, unsurprisingly, the classical music world.  But the really cool thing about Gerry is that he travels with his "fiddle", in reality an 18th century violin which he played all too briefly.  It was absolutely magical.  Other than the street noise, you could have heard a pin drop in the store.

 

An Interview with Elly Griffiths

I’m such a big, geeky fan of Elly Griffiths - whose most recent book, The Janus Stone, was on our 2011 favorites list - that I was more than delighted when she agreed to an interview.  Her latest Ruth Galloway novel, The House at Sea’s End, comes out next month, with the 5th in the series due in the spring.  There’s a spoiler in the interview if you haven’t read the first novel.  Otherwise, enjoy an interview with one of my favorite new authors.

Q:First off, the obvious - why archaeology?  Do you have an expertise, or just an interest?

A: Well, my husband is now an archaeologist although when I met him he worked in the city. About six years ago he decided to give up banking to retrain as an archaeologist and that – indirectly – led to the Ruth Galloway books. But I‘ve always been interested in history, archaeology, myths and legends.

Q: On the same topic, I heard Erin Hart, who also writes about an archaeologist, say she liked the ideas of layers and layers of the past waiting to be discovered.  It made her feel like she had plenty of territory left to mine, so to speak.  Do you feel the same way?  

A: Definitely. I do think that archaeology fits very well with crime, after all archaeologists and detectives do very similar jobs. Also I think it helps avoid a crime fiction common trap – you know, the one where a small country village becomes unfeasibly crammed with bodies. There are lots of bodies in Norfolk – it’s just that some of them died hundreds, even thousands, of years ago!

Q: Now, let's get on to Ruth - she is fabulous!  She is seriously one of the best characters in a recent mystery I have encountered - she is so comfortable in her own skin.  Can you talk about how you came up with her a bit?

A: Thank you so much! I really like writing about Ruth but I’m not quite sure where she comes from! She really just appeared one day out of the mist. She shares some characteristics with me – love of Bruce Springsteen and cats for example – but she is emphatically not me. Perhaps I have also drawn on my two older sisters who are both strong, independent women.

Q: I'm enjoying the arc you are laying out - Ruth discovers her pregnancy, she suffers through it, and now she's juggling motherhood and a job in a very realistic way.  Sophie Hannah's recent THE WRONG MOTHER also did a good job with the motherhood juggling act, and I'm enjoying seeing that reflected in mysteries.  I think it's not a recent trend - you could trace it back to Celia Fremlin's THE HOURS BEFORE DAWN, which is about living with a newborn - but it's almost a subversive one.  It's a part of life not often seriously discussed.  Was this conscious, or a reflection of your own life, or both?

A: I did want to write a book in which a woman got pregnant and had a baby and also had to just get on with her job. After all, this is what most women do. One of my favourite films is ‘Fargo’ and I love the fact that the detective in it is heavily pregnant but this isn’t a ‘plot line’, it’s just part of life. I also wanted to show that it is hard to juggle a baby and a career. You can make childcare arrangements but you still end up feeling guilty most of the time. I had it easier than Ruth because I had a very supportive husband but I also had it harder because I had twins!

Q: Lots of recent British mystery fiction is pretty dark.  I enjoy Val McDermid, Ian Rankin, Denise Mina, Mo Hayder, and S.J. Bolton very much, but they are pretty grim at times.  I like that you are writing books that are not unrelievedly dark.  Can you talk about that a bit?

A: I love Val McDermid and Ian Rankin and I think I actually intended The Crossing Places to be darker than it is. I really don’t know why it didn’t turn out that way...

Q: Also, since we've discussed Ruth, let's talk about my other favorite character, Cathbad!  He's a hoot, but he's also kind of a spiritual mooring for the books, don't you feel?  Do you know someone like Cathbad?  What was your inspiration for him?

A: I live in Brighton which is famous for its rather eccentric inhabitants. There are plenty of Cathbads walking about! I also have a friend who is very into alternative spirituality and I think I have drawn on her a little bit. I intended Cathbad to have a walk-on part in The Crossing Places but he refused to stay in the background. I’m now writing Book 5 and he has become an integral part of the books.

Q: And are you going to continue to almost torture Nelson and Ruth?  Cynthia Harrod-Eagles did something similar with her Bill Slider character, to great effect.  That's another series I really enjoyed.  But the tension keeps it interesting, don't you think?

A: I don’t know what will happen to Ruth and Nelson but I comfort myself that this is just like life. I think the tension probably does make it more interesting but you have to be careful not to draw things out for the sake of it. However, Ruth and Nelson are now bound together for life and there’s no easy solution for them...

Q: What starts you off when telling a story - narrative, place, or character?  I think your books are strong in all three, and I have to say every time I pick one up, I find myself zipping through the book, which speaks to a narrative expertise.  

A: The Crossing Places started with the location. I was walking across a marsh in Norfolk with Andy (my husband) when he mentioned that prehistoric man saw marshland as sacred. Because it’s neither land nor sea, but something in between, they saw it as a kind of bridge to the afterlife – neither land nor sea, neither life nor death. The entire plot came to me in that instant. That has never happened again but, for me, the place has to come first.

Q: How do you work - unwieldy first draft?  An outline?  Notecards?  I've heard so many answers to this question, all interesting.

A: I start with a rough handwritten outline, chapter by chapter. I write straight onto the computer and I don’t change much as I go. I don’t have much time in the day to write (I have two children and help look after my elderly mother) so, by the time I get to my desk, that day’s words will have gone round in my head hundreds of times.

Q: Why mysteries?  Was that always what you had in mind?  You reference other crime writers through the books so I'm assuming you're a fan.

A: I have written other non-crime books under my real name, Domenica de Rosa (I know it sounds made up!). When I started The Crossing Places I wasn’t even aware that it was a mystery. It was my agent who said, ‘This is crime, you need a new name and a new publisher.’

Q: Finally, who are your writing influences?  

A: I love Victorian fiction and my favourite writer of all time is Wilkie Collins. I think (I hope!) you can see his influence in my books. I also love the ghost stories of Charles Dickens and M.R James. My favourite modern writers are David Lodge, Alison Lurie and Anne Tyler.

What is a thriller, anyway?

Robin Agnew

Recently a customer asked me for a list of both the 10 Greatest Mysteries and a seperate list of the 10 Greatest Thrillers.  Then he asked if my husband, without looking at my list, would do the same.  With a straight mystery list I was on pretty solid ground, though keeping something like that to 10 titles is the devil (give it a try).  

On thrillers, I felt on shakier ground since there are plenty I've given a miss to, and I stuck to those books I had read that I felt were a fit.  Then, hoping for a couple comments, I posted the list on the store's facebook page to see if I could get a few suggestions.

Wow!  Did I ever!  I got a full blow discussion, plus a wonderful description of a thriller from Laura Lippman:  "I define thrillers as race-against-time books in which the story is driven by the reader's more omniscient view of events."  That's as good a definition as I've ever seen, and it confirms my opinion that thrillers are kind of a modern form.

Here's my list, in no particular oder:

A Maiden's Grave, Jeffrey Deaver

Vanishing Act, Thomas Perry

The Enemy, Lee Child

The Poet, Michael Connelly

Tell No One, Harlan Coben

Postmortem, Patricia Cornwell

When the Bough Breaks, Jonathan Kellerman

The Eye of the Needle, Ken Follet

Harvest, Tess Gerritsen

Judas Child, Carol O'Connell

Now, lists are personal.  Some of these books are real personal favorites I've read more than once, some hit me at a time in my reading journey where they were kind of transformatve, and they're by authors whose other books I then devoured.  The Poet, for example, I read when my children were little and, frustrated, I drove them around in the car until they fell asleep so I could finish it.

But as it shook out, there were about 50 or so comments.  Pretty clearly I should have included Val McDermid's The Mermaid's Singing, Thomas Harris' Red Dragon, and something by Karin Slaughter, also one of my favorite writers (though I'm still off her for killing  a certain character).

There was a lot of talk otherwise about John LeCarre, James Patterson, Wilkie Collins, Robert Ludlum, and Tom Clancy.  I'll go ahead and admit it.  I haven't read Clancy or Ludlum.  I don't like Patterson.  And I don't think LeCarre or Collins write thrillers, though my husband and many others insist that Woman in White is a thriller.

Too late I thought of Charlotte Armstrong's brief masterpiece, A Dram of Poison, which surely is a thrller.  Christianna Brand and Mary Roberts Rinehart were also mentioned, writers I love, but not really thriller writers though a case could be made for A Circular Staircase.  And lastly, Day of the Jackal.

Facebook so rarely hits this kind of nerve, but when it does, and the posts are really a virtual discussion, it's great.  It made me think and it gave me a good working definition of thriller.  And it made me want to go and check out The Bourne Identity.

What thrillers do you think we missed?

Black Friday Report

Robin Agnew

Yes, I am a retailer, the type of business that's vilified by all right thinking news outlets this time of year.  Black Friday happens in our store, too, but it all goes down so differently from the reports I hear and read.  Listening to NPR the other day I was almost puzzled.  It's as though I operate in a different universe.

I don't have people lined up on lawn chairs, waiting to get into my store Thanksgiving night.  I don't open on Thanksgiving.  I don't open until 11 the day after Thanksgiving (I need my sleep, after all).  There isn't a crush through the door first thing - we're a downtown business, and Black Friday is a mall and big box event.

Yet, Black Friday still rolls forward, and it's always a busy day.  When I heard people on NPR talking about how shopping on Black Friday - waiting in line, the thrill of the hunt - is an "experience" , I just thought, we offer a different kind of experience, but not just on Black Friday.

Our experiences focus instead on author events.  The comraderie of the line, the thrill of the hunt (will there be enough books left?) - that's all there.  Plus the delightful experience of meeting an author, and asking him or her questions about their book, their writing process, what they like to read.  Our "experiences" are sprinkled judiciously throughout the year.

And yet, this Black Friday did feel a bit different from the past few.  It was busier, for one thing (for us, the traditional "busiest day" is the Saturday before Christmas) but this was a steady, buying crowd.  And they weren't buying gifts, for the most part, which was the interesting bit.  They were buying stuff for themselves.

I sold a car load of true crime (these are not gift items), many of them titles we'd had on our shelves for years.  I was happy to blow off the dust and send them on their way.  We're about sold out of any kind of Doyle anthology, those always go this time of year, the bigger the hardcover, the better.

There were people looking for the darkest, grittiest type of British stuff - Mo Hayder, Stuart McBride - there were folks looking for an author whose name I forgot but who wrote about the policeman in London whose wife was killed?  (Easy one).  There was a family first thing who come to Ann Arbor from out of town to enjoy walking around.  I saw them across the street afyer they left - books in hand - huddling outside, having a coffee.  Now, that's the holiday spirit!

If this Christmas will be busier than last year, that would be great.  Last January was especially tough and it would help very much to have a busy holiday season.  We're not offering "door busters", but we do have a top 12 list, discounted, and a heap of recommendations and ready conversation.  In fact, a perpetual book buying "experience."  

Today Ann Arbor is a full on U of Michigan vs. Ohio State "experience", probably leaving book buying out of the equation.  I won't leave the house myself until the game is underway at noon.  I'm buckling in for the holidays, whatever form they take.   It's always a surprise.

Favorite Reads of the Year

Now You See Me, S.J. Bolton.

Bolton goes from strength to strength, delivering an original read every time.  While her first three books were set in remote British locations, this one takes place in London, and is a straight up police procedural - or is it?  As the cops working what quickly become obvious are copies of Jack the Ripper’s killings, it’s also obvious that the killer is fixated on one of the policewomen, who the rest of the squad keeps under close watch.  What isn’t clear is - is she being watched because they think she’s connected to the killer, or because they’re worried about her?  Or both?  Bolton keeps you guessing, and this is a wonderfully twisty thriller with her trademark wonderful use of setting.  What also sets this book apart is her look at the crimes, and at the work of the policewomen involved, through a gender lens.  It’s not a polemic, but it gives the reader a female-centric view of crime, not only the murder cases, but also some rape cases in a correlated thread.  You could also just read this book because it’s a terrific thriller.  Either way, this is not an author to be missed.

Killed at the Whim of a Hat, Colin Cotterill.

Colin Cotterill has transplanted the charm and humor of his Dr. Siri series to his now native Thailand, and created an entirely new family of eccentrics for readers to love.  His gentle and ironic touch is unchanged, though his new central character, Jimm Juree, is a young woman instead of a 70-something man like Dr. Siri. Jimm lives with her family in crowded Chang Mai, and as the story opens she discovers her mother has sold the family business and bought a resort in the middle of nowhere.  The photos of the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant made it look beautiful; the reality is slightly different.  A former crime beat reporter, Jimm is bored by the tiny fishing village where the resort is located.  However, she is delighted when two skeletons are discovered buried in a VW bus, and as she explores the mystery, she also begins to love her new town.  She shares the stage with her eccentric and strong willed mother, her grandfather, who rarely speaks, and her brother, Arny, a sensitive 31 year old virgin and bodybuilder.  The story is clever and surprisingly complicated, tied together with chapter epigraphs taken directly from the lips of George W. Bush, whose malapropisms are somehow wildly appropriate to Jimm’s new life in the provinces.  The gentle interplay of the family – the grandfather who starts to speak; the mother who appears to be getting forgetful and is sneaking around in some kind of Ninja costume, and the changing love fortunes of the shy and awkward Arny - are the true heart of the book.  This is one of the reads of the year.

Murder Season, Robert Ellis.

If there is a writer to resemble, it might be a good idea to resemble Michael Connelly. It is no disrespect to say that Robert Ellis’ tightly plotted police procedurals set in LA and featuring homicide detective Lena Gamble resemble Connelly’s Harrry Bosch novels. However, the gender change up makes the whole enterprise fresh. Ellis happily also shares Connelly’s sharp plotting and ability to give the reader a twist that has been fairly laid out for the reader, yet is still a surprise.  I think police novels are the modern equivalent of the private eye novel – the police in contemporary mysteries often think and operate somewhat outside the box, much like an old school private eye – so using the old P.I. tropes are a natural fit. Ellis embellishes the tropes and makes them his own, and one of the ways he does this is with evocative prose.  In this tricky story involving a notorious Hollywood murder case, Lena has much territory to navigate, with the help/hindrance of an old cop on the way down.  In true noir fashion, she’s never sure who to trust, but the reader can easily trust Lena, whose smarts never lead her in the wrong direction.  Beautifully written and plotted, it would truly be a shame to miss this wonderful novel.

The Janus Stone, Elly Griffiths.

So many people I respected told me to check out Elly Griffiths I finally did, and boy, am I hooked on Ruth Galloway.  She’s fabulous.  Unapologetically overweight, with no interest in clothes, Ruth instead focuses on her fascinating job as an archaeologist.  Set on the coast of England, Ruth lives in a remote location, and she’s a convenient expert whenever bones are discovered - in this novel, some are Roman, some are more recent.  When I read the first book, The Crossing Places, I liked it so much that I ordered 25 copies right away and proceeded to hand sell them.  I can safely say every reader I’ve introduced to Ruth is looking forward to the January publication of The House by the Sea.  These books, aside from featuring a great character - in fact many great characters - also have a good, complex story and a lovely setting and background.  I think I’m a life time fan.

Buffalo West Wing, Julie Hyzy.

I always like to include a book on this list that’s simply the most fun I had “between the covers” all year.  For me, it was this book, the 4th  in Hyzy’s wildly entertaining series set in the White House Kitchen.  In this one, executive Chef Olivia Paras gets a new boss in the form of a new first family, and the new first lady is skeptical, as are her children.  Olivia tries her hardest to please her new bosses, big and small,  but an incident early on sours things, and it takes a kidnaping toward the end of the book to get the first family on Olivia’s side.  I found this entry as funny and fast paced as the others but also surprisingly moving.   Hyzy really seems to have hit her storytelling stride.

Season of Darkness, Maureen Jennings.

Maureen Jennings hits the ball out of the park with this first book in a planned trilogy set during WWII England, and helmed by local policeman Tom Tyler.  This tiny Shropshire town is populated not only by an interment camp for Germans - mainly intellectuals, one of them a student of Freud - but it’s also full of Land Girls, the young women who helped to bring the crops in all over Britain during the war.  When a body of a Land Girl is found with a mysterious bunch of white poppies, it takes all of Tom Tyler’s instincts and some help from the Freudian to help unravel what becomes a series of killings.  The killing are tied in a complex way to the town, with emotional repercussions for many of it’s citizens.  A master at complex plotting, wonderful characters, and a vibrant setting, it’s wonderful to see the talented Jennings at work on a  new series.

Northwest Angle, William Kent Krueger.

Krueger uses one of his trademarks - a high drama weather event, tied to an emotional one - to great effect here.  As Cork O’Connor’s family is enjoying a vacation in a secluded area called the Northwest Angle, a storm comes up and Cork and his daughter Jenny are separated from the rest of the group, and for a time, from each other.  While alone, Jenny finds both a dead body and a baby, and the first half of the novel is a bravura chase sequence, with Cork and Jenny’s main goal keeping the foundling safe.  Skillfully balancing a complex story, some deep emotional threads, and a beautiful rendering of the north woods and waters, Krueger’s book is also simply a wonderful, well written thriller.  It’s another great read from one of our top notch contemporary crime writers.

The Girl in the Green Raincoat, Laura Lippman.

This slender paperback, culled from a serial that appeared first in the New York Times, is such a perfect book in it’s own way that I had to include it.  In this book Tess is pregnant and on forced bed rest (something she’s not taking well), and with a bravura nod to Hitchcock’s Rear Window, the bedridden Tess uncovers a mystery as she watches the action unfold outside her front window.  At the same time it allows Lippman to have almost every important-to-Tess character come through the door, and she gives them each their own chapter, so as a reader you learn more about series stalwarts like Mrs. Blossom, Whitney, Lloyd, her Dad, and Crow. While Lippman works with very familiar tropes, she makes them fresh, sometimes through originality of character, sometimes through humor, and always with a snap of her crisp plotting skills. Moving, fast paced, and clever, this is a purely delightful read, and if you are a Tess Monoghan fan, one not to be missed.

A Trick of the Light, Louise Penny.

Penny’s latest novel is a long awaited look at the marriage and careers of series characters Peter and Clara, both artists.  As the book opens, most of Three Pines is headed to Clara’s gallery opening in Montreal.  When one of Clara’s old frenemies (and former art critic) Lillian Dyson turned up dead in Clara’s garden the day after the art opening, all hell breaks loose.  While Penny hews to almost golden age conventions in some ways (her story set ups) her emotional truths and revelations are far more contemporary, and this novel is a mediation on jealousy and it’s destructiveness in any kind of relationship.  The mystery part is as skillful as ever, but here is also the trademark beautiful prose and memorable characterizations Penny’s readers have come to expect, as well as her ultimately optimistic viewpoint. Long may she write.

Wife of the Gods, Kwei Quartey.

I hear Kwei’s series hasn’t been picked up, and that’s a real shame because both his novels, set in Ghana and featuring Detective Darko, are knockouts.  This book moves him to the head of the class as Darko is in his home city of Accra, dealing with the deaths of the some of the incredible number of street children there.  While giving the reader a heartbreaking picture of the city, he also gives a balanced one, as Darko’s own family life, while not uncomplicated, is far from bleak, and he loves his wife and son.  Darko is one of my favorite new mystery characters, as he’s not uncomplicated himself - he has anger issues, a little problem with pot, a bit of a wandering eye, and he can “hear” a lie in someone’s voice - and at the same time he’s a very smart and capable policeman.  The novel moves at a fast pace with lots of clues scattered throughout, as Quartey is also a devotee of the classic mystery.  I’m truly hoping Detective Darko and his creator find a new publishing home, as I was looking forward to many more outings.

The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes, Marcus Sakey.

This book, like all of Sakey’s novels, was impossible to put down, and like the best of them, it also carries some emotional heft.  Daniel Hayes wakes up on one side of the country with no memory (or clothes) - but finds a convenient BMW nearby, with clothes that fit - and he drives the car back to Los Angeles, which feels like home to him.  As his memory comes back to him in bits and pieces he starts to remember that he was married to a fairly well known television star, she’s dead, and he’s the main suspect.  As Sakey teases out Daniel’s memories, as a reader, you’re working as hard as Daniel, since what you’re working with is no different from what Daniel is working with.  Daniel is a writer, and Sakey uses that skill to help him figure out what’s going on. The thoughtfulness that Sakey brings to his explication of memory, desire, love and loyalty as a part of Daniel’s quest adds to the book’s depth. Sakey is also a gifted prose stylist.  He makes his prose simple but it’s crisp and memorable, with never a misplaced word.  A Sakey novel is always something worth celebrating, especially when it’s as good as this one.

One Was a Soldier, Julia Spencer-Fleming.

I think I can safely say there was no more anticipated return to the mystery reading community than that of Clare Fergusson and her creator, Julia Spencer-Fleming.  Happily, this book is not a disappointment, but a great, sprawling, complex read, one that finds Clare back from Iraq, planning her wedding to Russ.  Her return is complicated by her struggles with addiction. Her membership in a returning vets support group illuminates different folks in town as Spencer-Fleming skillfully weaves her story to include a wide swath of Miller’s Kill, New York.  The emotional wallop of this novel is huge, as Spencer-Fleming spares heartbreak neither in her stories of the veterans, nor in her depiction of Clare’s struggle.  When there’s a murder in town, with ties to the vet’s group, Clare of course gets involved, more or less shutting Russ out, in classic addict behavior.  Things are coming right by the end of the novel, but not before a lot of emotional struggle and heartbreak.  The narrative is complex and tricky, as Spencer-Fleming continues to proves that she’s also a devotee of the traditional mystery structure.  I’m already looking forward to Clare’s next appearance.

Reading Rapture

Robin Agnew

This time of year I have what I call "free reading time".  Most of the year I'm reviewing several books a month for our newsletter and I am now reviewing books for the local paper as well.  But this time of year my December newsletter will consist of a "Top 10" list, i.e., books I've already read!  So I look forward to free reading time, usually reading something I've specifically set aside.

I like it to be something different, not a mystery.  Of course I love mysteries and 11 months out of the year I'm happy to read them exclusively, there's so much variety, etc.  Well, readers of this blog know how good mysteries are! But one month of the year, I like a bit of a change. This fall I was at the weekly library sale with my husband where we pick up lots of our used stock, and I saw a nice oversize paperback copy of Anna Karenina, which I haven't read since I was in my 20's.  It called to me.  When a book calls to you, I generally think you should heed the call.

So it sat next to my bed, looking at me, and when I finished up the November newsletter I picked it up. It is as wonderful reading it the second time, after 25 years or so in between.  I was able to give it wide swaths of reading time on a couple Sundays and am close to finishing (though I'm reading a few mysteries to review in the paper in between) that I am completely in the thrall of Anna, Vronsky, Kitty and Levin.

The first time I read the book I hated the dull and boring Kitty and Levin, and I thought Anna was the most romantic creature on earth.  This time around I find myself somewhat fascinated by Levin's obsession with farming, and his awkwardness at finally (3/4 of the way through the book!) getting Kitty to say "yes".  I am finding Anna is reminding me more of Mme. Bovary than a Jane Austen heroine, and she is driving me crazy.

The other bonus I've found in re-reading Anna K. is that I've now encountered serveral people - some likely, some unlikely - who are also reading Anna.  One (likely) is my husband's aunt, who was reading it for a book club.  She was having the same reaction to Anna as I am.  The unlikelies where the young father of one of my son's friends, and a young man I volunteer with.  Both of them were reading "Anna" on their phones!  I can't imagine a sprawling novel like Anna read on a tiny phone screen, but at least they are reading it.

The young father said it was a "hard go", but he was dutifully plowing through it.  The young volunteer was more passionate about it, and when I said I was at the part where Anna had left her husband and was in Italy with Vronsky he shreiked "NO!  Don't give it away!"  Cool to have to give a spoiler alert more than 100 years after the book was published.

My reading rapture continues tomorrow - Sundays being set aside for "free reading" - and I'm looking forward (spoiler alert) to Anna's inevitable demise.  Free reading time always helps me freshen up, so to speak, for the reading year ahead.  And I don't take sugestions, the book has to "find" me, as Anna, with all her selfish vanity, happened to.  I'm already looking forward to next November!

 

Do Men and Women Write Differently?

Robin Agnew

I have asked this of several people,  and all the writers I have asked, male or female, have denied that they do.  But I, a mere reader, disagree.  There are exceptions to every rule – Memoirs of a Geisha, anyone? – but on the whole, I always think you can tell whether the writer is male or female.

 I’m not saying one is better, either – just different.  A male writer is (usually) more focused on direct action, plunge ahead narrative.  The male writer’s character often has a certain kind of guy “code” he lives by – doing the right thing, helping the downtrodden, etc   I think we are all familiar with the “White Knight” P.I. trope.

 A female writer may be just as concerned with narrative, of course, but as she achieves her goal of telling a story she may notice along the way what’s for dinner, what went into shopping for the dinner, how messy her house/apartment is, what color her sofa is, etc. I know the kind of china collected by Deborah Crombie’s main character.   I know Spenser cooks, but he does “guy” cooking – i.e., he finds an onion and some mayo in the fridge and manages to make something out of it.  He hasn’t planned ahead.

 Sara Paretsky, who writes a series every bit as hard boiled (perhaps more so) than Robert B. Parker’s, never the less has left her readers with the knowledge that V.I. has a treasured collection of her mother’s wine glasses.  I have an idea of what her apartment looks like.  I have no idea what Spenser’s looks like, though I do have a good idea of what his office looks like.

 Again, not better, just different.  A woman is interested in her mother’s wine glasses, and assumes you might be too.  And – I am!  I imagine Spenser drinking out of jelly glasses.  Or whatever.  And of course, wait, you say – I know what Harry Bosch’s house looks like.   And what Elvis Cole eats (again, guy cooking – lots of barbeque and beer).  But the emotional details Paretsky shares when she talks about V.I.’s wine glasses are a different emotional detail than one Parker includes when he talks about Hawk’s sweat suit and bare chest, or even the ones Harry Bosch shares as he wanders gloomily around his sparsely furnished home, listening to jazz.

 I guess what I’m saying is that the detours male and female writers take on their story telling paths are different.  Women plan ahead – they buy groceries, for example – and men forge ahead, grocery-less.  That’s not so different from real life, in my experience.  One of my favorite quotes is from a  series  by Lee Martin, encapsulating one difference (in my mind):

 When Harry arrived he had my shoulder holster and service revolver with him, packed neatly in a brown paper grocery sack.  He handed the sack over and collected Cameron and while he was tucking the baby in his safety seat I was donning the shoulder holster.  Of all the trade-offs I have ever made in my life, I think that was my least favorite.

 Deficit Ending, Lee Martin, 1990

 Of course this is a female narrator – so it may not be a fair example, but this quote captures the juggling act that most modern women – who work, have families and lives – are a part of.   It’s a trade off, and this character knows it’s a trade off.  Sophie Hannah’s main character in The Wrong Mother has a cascading pile of tasks that if brought only slightly out of balance will make everything else fall apart.  That’s a book written two decades after Lee Martin’s, as are Deborah Crombie’s.  Her Gemma Kincaid is managing a blended household – with a very agreeable partner, certainly – but she’s often the one figuring out what’s for dinner.  

 Running a household is still a detail women don’t leave out.  Women’s lives may have changed since the overwhelmed new mother in Celia Fremlin’s 1950’s classic The Hours Before Dawn,  but somehow there are some familiar details that persevere. 

 An interesting case in point is Robert Ellis’ fine LA police series which has a female main character.  I love the series, but I still know a man wrote it.  Lena juggles nothing (except emotional baggage) – she forges ahead. 

 Here’s another quote, this time from Barbara D’Amato’s terrific novel, Death of A Thousand Cuts, where the main character is a female cop:

 Park and I stood in the Hawthorne House kitchens with the evidence tech.  My arms were folded across my chest, but lightly.  I was trying not to wrinkle my clean linen blazer, which was just as crisp as my sharply creased navy pants.  It was important in my department not just to be efficient but to look as if you were efficient.  Unfortunately these clothes would look like dishrags by tonight.  And I hate to iron.

 OK, so here’s a character obviously on the job (the evidence tech) but she’s worried about wrinkles (thinking ahead to the end of the day) and she manages to throw in a bitch about ironing.  This paragraph, to me, could never have been written by a guy.

 Here’s one from Dennis Lehane’s Prayers for Rain:

 Tony sat in the back of the black ’91 Cherokee I’d picked up when the engine of my Crown Victoria seized up that spring.  The Cherokee was great for that rare bounty hunt because it had come with a steel gate between the seats and the stow bed in back. Tony sat on the other side of the gate...cracked open his third beer of the early afternoon, then burped up the vapor of the second.

 OK, this is a pretty “guy” paragraph – his engine seized up (um, what?) so he needed a new car, the bounty hunting, the beer, the burping…and yet, Dennis Lehane’s emotional punch is every bit as strong as any female writer’s.  He just gets to it differently.

 As I said, not better, just different.  Can you tell, dear readers?  I always think you can

 

 

A Little Conversation

Robin Agnew

On a rainy afternoon in Ann Arbor, a guy brought a box of books into the store.  Not an unusual occurence, by any means, but this guy a) wanted no money; b) liked Lee Child but said "Does Connelly sell?"; and c) turned out to have owned stores devoted to another media being squeezed by the digitization of the world: music.  As I have trained my children to read actual books, so he has trained his to listen to actual vinyl records.  His children have met some of his favorite recording artists; mine, some of my favorite writers.  

As you can imagine we had plenty to talk about on a quiet afternoon.  The arrogance of the old Borders store's music department which he saw first hand when he was part of a music store across the street; the fact that the month Napster launched, his buinsness declined about 95%; and the idea that younger people feel content should be free.  I did point out that at least folks using the kindle or other tablet are paying for the downloads, which differs from what has happened to the music industry.

We then talked about the now infamous youtube video where the baby is trying to open a book and can't figure out how to flip the pages like you can on an ipad or kindle...I haven't seen the video, but plenty of people have.  

The talk then turned to browsing.  I had recommended a few authors as he mentioned he loved jazz (Peter Robinson, John Harvey) and he said that's what's different from shopping online.  I'm not sure Amazon would turn a Lee Child fan onto Peter Robinson or John Harvey, but i could be wrong.  Anyway his comment was, "It's not the end, it's the journey."  I.e., it's nice to enjoy LOOKING, and discovering what you might never have discovered without browsing.  He said "the end is the same for all of us", but we might as well enjoy getting there.

One of the many things I enjoy about running a physical bookstore is this very kind of interaction.  I love to recommend and discuss books and could do it all day long.  Since Borders closed, I am finding myself enjoying busier days in which to offer more recommendations.  I am enjoying this, since who knows what's next.  I am enjoying the journey.

 

 

 

A Personal Fave

Robin Agnew

Everyone has favorite books from their past, books that hold you in their thrall long after you've closed the covers.  One of my favorite mysteries of all time is The Rembrandt Panel by Oliver Banks (1980).  I had remembered that my mom gave it to me when I was 12 or so, but I see I was actually 22.  I was sitting with my mom in a waiting room recently, and I showed it to her - she had totally forgotten it.

When I first read it, I was still in college, and Mom had given me the book for Christmas.  I spent that Christmas happily glued to the book. As I was growing up, my mother was a docent at the Art Institute of Chicago, and our household was an art loving one. My sister and I grew up drawing every minute (this does have a point).  The Rembrandt Panel, needless to say, is an art mystery.  There aren't too many, and not very many of them are even that great, but this one, written by an art historian, really sparkles.

As I re-read it recently, I found it combines some of the things I like most about contemporay mysteries - the combination of the gritty (two quite brutal murders take place) with the quotidian; the author's concern with the aftermath of the crime; something very specific to hang the story on; and a vivid local setting (in this case, Boston).  As a reader, you know who the killer is throughout the book, the mystery part is following the main characters as they decipher the clues leading to a missing Rembrandt, using only the frame as a reference.

The main characters - an Art Detective and a gallery assistant - are a little corny, but it doesn't really matter because Banks is such a good, natural storyteller and because his knowledge of art was obviously encyclopedic.  There's a little lesson early on on the proper way to really look at a painting - I remember going to the Met once with my mother, both of us practically in tears after walking through a room of Rembrandt portraits - and reading that passage helped me understand why.

Working now as a book dealer I also see some similarities between the gallery described in the book - something of a hodge podge, with unexpected treasures, kind of a mess - and our bookstore.  Obviously as a 22 year old I didn't foresee my future as a bookseller (I thought I would be an artist!) but it resonates for me now, adding even more to my enjoyment of the book.

Like many books held in youth to be great, this one, looking back, does have a few apparent flaws, but the story and the art details hold up really well.  As a present day book dealer, however, I can tell you that if you're looking for this book the 80's in general are a teeny bit of a black hole, with lots of forgotten authors (kind of like some of the terrific American woman writers of the 40's and 50's). However, I'm sure there are copies available on ABE books.

My own copy came back to me.  When we first opened the store, some of our used stock came from my personal collection (my Rex Stouts!) and one of those books was my copy of The Rembrandt Panel.  I always knew who had bought it - and I still remember the pang I felt when selling it to her - but when this customer died years later and her book collection turned up at the local Kiwanis sale, my husband found my old copy.  I'm happy to say it now sits in mylar protected glory on the shelves of my personal library.  If you should come across it, snap it up.  There's a second book (Banks only wrote two), The Caraveggio Obsession,  which is almost as good.  But I never liked Caraveggio as much as Rembrandt...

 

 

What's so magical about old Agatha?

Robin Agnew

At Bouchercon last month I attended an early morning panel dicsussion of Agatha Christie  - with fans on the panel as diverse as Val McDermid and Carolyn Hart, there's something magical going on.  (Other authors over the years who have personally cited Agatha as a favorite to me are Jeanne Dams, Barbara D'Amato and Louise Penny). Our store sells new and used books, and as far as used books, our bestselling authors year in and year out are Agatha Christie and Rex Stout.  While there are other acknowledged "Golden Age" mistresses of crime - Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey - Christie is the "big" one, the one that almost everyone reads, from large tattooed black men (a former customer who has sadly completed Agatha's ouevre) to foreign students polishing up their English, to professors, to tweens starting in on "grown up" mystery fiction.

While Marsh, Sayers, Allingham and Tey all have their devotees (and I count myself among them) it's still Christie that's the Big Kahuna.  I've been re-reading her lately, and trying to parse just what it is that makes her books so absolutley charming.  I started reading her first in middle school, and once started, just went ahead and read everything I could get my hands on.  By the time I started high school I was finished with Agatha, and it wasn't until college that I discovered Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy Sayers, the former at the suggestion of a favorite history professor.

Here's a few things I came up with, assisted here in some cases by other readers smarter than myself:

Humor.  Re-reading Agatha is a crash course in dry social humor.  Re-reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd recently, one of my favorite bits is the opening breakfast scene with the narrator and his sister, a woman who her brother describes thusly

"The motto of the mongoose family, so Mr. Kipling tells us, is 'Go and find out.'  If Caroline ever adopts a crest, I should certainly suggest a mongoose rampant.  One might omit the first part of the motto.  Caroline can do any amount of finding out by sitting placidly at home."

There's so much in that little scene, and her detailed, yet lightly humorous look at middle and upper class life is echoed today by a writer as different from Christie as Harlan Coben.  His chronicle of life in the suburbs should stand the test of time much like Christie's chronicle of day to day life in her time.

She's Organic.  Barbara D'Amato said this to me years ago, and it took me more years to figure out exactly what she meant.  When I read a book by Elizabeth George back to back with one by Agatha, I finally got what Barb meant.  While George's cleverly interlocked plots and characters are indeed the work of a very gifted writer, you can sometimes see all the work she's put into it.  With Agatha, whatever the effort it may have taken her, it all seems effortless, with each plot development appearing to arise naturally (i.e. organically) from the one before it.  Before you know it, she's got you all twisted up - if only one had as clear a view as Agatha herself!  (Again,  I would cite Harlan Coben as an author excellent at this very same skill).

She makes it look easy.  While this may seem like the same point as above, it's really a quality of her writing - one that appears simple and clear on the surface but has murky depths below.  

She's not really a cozy writer.  Her body count is FAR too high for her to be considered a cozy writer.  In Hallowe'en Party she kills off not one, but two, children.  Few authors today would dare to do that.

She inspires imitations.  Only the great inspire imitations, imitations that can have their own "series" life.  Miss Marple and Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver?  Surely they are related.  The subversiveness of Dorothy Gilman's somewhat elderly Mrs. Pollifax?  Again, she and Miss Marple are surely related to one another.  And her plots have been endlessly copied - just two examples:  Jill McGown's take on Murder at the Vicarage, Murder at the Old Vicarage.   Jo Bannister's take on And Then There Were None, The Lazarus Hotel.  I could go on.  And I won't rub it in by pointing out which of those books are still in print.

She goes down easy.  No matter what, if you're tired, distracted or have a horrible head cold, somehow you can always wrap your mind around an Agatha book.  They never loose their sparkle.  She's  gotten me through many a bout with the flu.

She's frequently deep.  Another book I re-read recently, The Hollow,  contains quite a few thoughtful meditations on the nature of creativitiy.  It's from 1946, about mid-way through her Poirot books, and well worth re-visiting if you haven't lately.

Well, what are you waiting for?  Dive in, there's 60 or so books to be had...

 

 

 

Report from another Bookselling Front

 

Robin Agnew

I'm a member of IMBA, the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association.  We're a loose association of the nearly 50 mystery specific bookstores sprinkled all over the country.  We all benefit by our member list-serv, emma-l, where we can figure out problems and issues that affect all of us.  On emma-l, we hammered out our list of "100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century".  IMBA also provides a list of 5 "Killer Books" every month - books our member booksellers recommend - and we annually present the Dilys Winn Award, given to the book we most enjoyed handselling throughout the year.

IMBA was founded by Barbara Peters, Jim Huang and Tom & Enid Schantz, and it's carried on by those of us who still remain.  Sadly, we recently lost Enid, though she and Tom "retired" from IMBA a few years ago.  I've served in all sorts of capacities - as administrator, as director for a few years, and for a long time as the Dilys award coordinator.  This year the Dilys mantle passes on to Deb Beamer from the Machanicburg Mystery bookshop in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.  Thanks to working with the enthusiastic Deb on last year's Dilys, we've forged a nice e-mail friendship.  I knew she had a big event last weekend, and I asked if she wanted to write it up.  What follows is Deb's account of what looks like a successful and fun book event.

From Deb:

Mechanicsburg Mystery Bookshop hosted its first mystery conference – Murder As You Like It - on Saturday, September 24, 2011.  The event was for fans of mystery, spy, thriller and horror novels.  An enthusiastic 48 people attended and 16 authors participated on panels and workshops. 

 

Authors included: Cordelia Frances Biddle, Chris Grabenstein, Kathryn Miller Haines, Robin Hathaway, Don Helin, Larry Kerr, Paul Malmont, Valerie Malmont, Alan Orloff, Marta Perry, Dennis Royer, Elena Santangelo, J D Shaw, Mike Silvestri, Maria V. Snyder and David R. Stewart.

 

Chris Grabenstein read a selection from his newest kids’ book The Black Heart Crypt and his John Ceepak book Fun House scheduled for release next year.  One of our bookshop friends interviewed Valerie Malmont and Paul Malmont while Cordelia Frances Biddle ran a writer’s workshop on “Mystery and History.” Mike Silvestri’s writers’ workshop was a “primer on writers’ technical issues and how to get the most for your technological dollar.”

 

Panels covered topics ranging from Keystone State Mysteries (mysteries that take place in Pennsylvania) to historical mysteries.

 

The hit of the conference was Cordelia, Chris and Kathryn doing improv to show how they come up with their stories ideas.

 

Numerous people came up to me after at the close of the conference and said how glad they were that they attended and how much they learned.  The conference was held at a local church and their youth group took care of the food for the event.  The morning fare (coffee, tea, rolls, etc) and the afternoon break (pretzels, cookies, etc.) were provided for a donation.  Lunch was $4 per person.  This allowed us to keep the registration extremely low ($7.50 early and $10.00 late) since lunch was not included and gave registrants the option of not buying the lunch.  Our goal with the registration fee was simply to pay for the church rental which we did.

 

The only slight problem we had was registration.  Registration was supposed to run from 9:00 am until 9:45 am.  We set up the two church rooms the night before and arrived at the church at 8:00 am to finish the registration area … connect the computer to the printer, etc.  However, people started arriving at 8:40 so we had to ask the early birds to have a seat and we would let them know when the registration desk was open.

 

From all reports a good time was had by all … fans and authors.  Now next year…

 

Report from St. Louis

Bouchercon is always a blast and this year was no exception - reconnecting with old freinds and new ones, and hearing intelligent and thoughtful people discuss our favorite genre.  My husband and I brought along our friend Aline and we also got out into St. Louis - ate some wonderful food, went to the Arch, and made it to the museum (where there was a stunningly moving 9/11 memorial).  But of course most of what we were there for were panels, and I'm handing it over to writers far more talented than I to give you a slice of Bouchercon.

I moderated a panel on Thursday, the first official conference day, and I was nervous about it - my panel consisted of Deborah Crombie, Erin Hart, Jan Burke and Hank Phillippi Ryan, an unlikely combo but a thoughtful and dynamic one.  The panel was over before I knew it (it never hurts to over-prpare!)  and we were all stuck on the question, "Do women write differently from men?"  I say yes but it was a pretty lively discussion.  Two of my favorite quotes from the panel:

"It's really easy to get people to shoot each other, it's really hard to make them kiss." - Erin Hart

"If I can get you to stop doing housework and stay up all night reading, I've done my job." - Jan Burke

In the case of Jan Burke, mission accomplished!  It was a real pleasure to meet one of the great women writers of our genre, and a complete delight to meet Hank Ryan who is funny, smart and entertaining.

From other panels - this one on the "Nature of Evil" with Reed Farrell Coleman, John Connelly, Laura Lippman, Thomas Cook, Peter James and Daniel Woodrell.  This panel was almost overpopulated - I could have listened to each author seperately for an hour.  Daniel Woodrell, should the name not ring a bell, is the author of Winter's Bone, and boy is he impressive.  Sadly much of what he writes about - meth dealing in Appalachia - is knowledge he gained from looking out his front window.

"(Evil is) small levels of willful ignorance." - John Connelly

"I often get evil confused with plain old mean." - Daniel Woodrell

"To be a sociopath is the best qualification to get to the top, and the worst qualification once you're there." - Peter James

"I don't want to read a book where 20 prostitutes are killed so the detective can go home and hug his daughter." - Laura Lippman

"I think sometimes they are just words on a page but they are real to the reader." - Reed Farrell Coleman

"It (evil) is mundane, it's just right outside the window." - Daniel Woodrell

From "No Way to Treat a Body" with Michael Black, Neal Baer, Kathryn Casey, Connie Dial, Matt Hilton, and Morley Swingle.

We went because we are huge fans of Kathryn Casey's true crime writing (though she now writes fiction), but I was star struck by Neal Baer, who wrote much of ER and LAW & ORDER: SVU.  He says he is responsible for 500 hours of TV - I may have seen all of them!

Kathryn Casey, on why it's nice to write fiction instead of true crime:  "I don't have to worry about the bad guys getting out of prison and showing up at my front door which is a nice thing."

"In the US it's stop or I'll shoot, in the UK it's stop or I'll shout stop again." - Matt Hilton, former British Bobby

"Small things can escalate into huge problems if left unchecked." - Matt Hilton

From "Passengers" which was basically all the guests of honor - Charlaine Harris, Colin Cotterill, Val McDermid and Robert Crais.

"I see the world as a big cartoon." - Colin Cotterill

Robert Crais, on why he reads his manuscripts out loud:  "The eye is very forgiving but if you then read aloud your tongue is unforgiving, and so is your ear."

"I always start with something that breaks my heart." - Robert Crais, on how a book begins for him.

"Storytelling is something I really enjoy a lot, maybe because I have a really boring life." - Charlaine Harris

"The characters have taken over my series." -Colin Cotterill

"I have a feeling if the characters took over my books all they'd be doing would be going to the pub." - Val McDermid

"She couldn't be stupid because I don't write stupid women." - Charlaine Harris, on Sookie S.

"Writers are at their heart vampires, we suck the life out of everyone we know." - Val McDermid

My favorite panel may have been "Trouble", moderated by Hank Ryan (who did a great job), with Steve Hamilton, Harlan Coben, Ridley Pearson, Joseph Finder and Jeff Abbott.

Tapes in the car during first book tour taken by Harlan Coben and Jeff Abbott: The Lion King & Blue Oyster Cult

"Would you kill someone? No.  Would you kill someone to save your child? Yes." - Harlan Coben

"Everyone tells you to do research, I'm here to give you the other side of that, write the damn book." - Harlan Coben

"All we really mean when we say research is tax-deductible travel." - Ridley Pearson

"If you chase the reader's heart, the dollars will eventually come anyway." - Harlan Coben

What they read as kids:

Ridley Pearson:  Kipling & Poe

Jeff Abbott:  Hardy Boys

Steve Hamilton:  Hardy Boys, Agatha Christie

From the interview with Robert Crais (he is a very pithy and funny speaker, unsurprisingly):

"I took a left turn toward hell because I developed this obsession with writing."

Desert Island book: The Old Man and the Sea (I'd take L.A. Requiem before Old Man and the Sea,  personally)

"I'm a 15 year overnight success - it was a long night."

On being told that Lee Child claims Jack Reacher could beat up Joe Pike, after a long moment's thought: "Jack Reacher is Joe Pike's bitch."

Quality he most likes in a woman:  Strength

Quality he most likes in a man:  "Deference to my superiority."

We both enjoyed meeting Kathryn Casey, reconnecting with Jim Huang, Steve Hamilton, Kent Krueger and Sharon Fiffer, and in general just getting away for a few days. See you in Cleveland in 2012!

 

 

 

 

 

 

A couple of working writers

Robin Agnew

Rececntly we hosted a gathering of the midwest chapter of Mystery Writers of America - set up by the ever efficient Tony Perona, the event featured Kelly Nichols (one half of PJ Parrish) and Doug Allyn.  They had never met, but as it turns out, Doug is a big fan of Kelly's and had lots of questions for her.

Both writers have been hard at work for a long time.  Doug, best known as a short story writer (though he's also published several novels) has won two Edgars and countless other awards for his stories.  The Parrish sisters are award winning as well - they in fact are up for a Shamus this year, the only women nominated in their category (paperback original).

Both writers have a work ethic and sensibility that would be familiar to old school workhorses like Rex Stout, John D. MacDonald, and Erle Stanley Gardner, all of whom reliably and quickly churned out book after book, all of them leaving behind a voluminous body of work.  Doug insisted that the best advice he ever got - from Loren Estleman - was "there's no such thing as writer's block."  (Estleman, of course, is another writer with an old school work ethic - at last count, he's written over sixty novels).

Both insisted that no matter what - whether the work comes easy or hard - you just get down to it.  Both also said that some of the hardest things for them to write have turned out to also be some of their best work.  As their conversation went on, their mutual admiration seemed to increase.  It was particularly interesting to hear Kelly talk about her writing process.  She and her sister Kristy now Skype each other but they don't look at each other's faces (making it easier, Kelly pointed out, to work in pajamas) but at the page of the manuscript they are working on.  This type of collaboration takes longer (previously they e-mailed back and forth, one of them writing "descriptions", one "action") but Kelly said requires less revision.

Doug also talked about his recent Edgar win for best short story - he said he was so sure he would lose that he was nice and comfortable.  He was ready to applaud Jeffrey Deaver (who incredibly has never won) and was actually speechless - something his wife says was a first - for a few moments before accepting the award.

These writers are the worker bees of crime fiction.  Parrish's relaiable output of top level crime fiction on our paperback table is always a sure sign of a quick sale.  And there aren't too many issues of Ellery Queen or Alfred Hitchcock that aren't graced by a Doug Allyn story.  It was one of the more enlightening evenings I've spent at the store, one which truly gave a look inside the process of a hard working writer - emphasis on "work".  These two are welcome back any time.

 

Event Anxiety

Robin Agnew

I suffer from event anxiety.  Not frequently, and much less than I did when we first opened, but still it occasionally it pops up.  I imagine it's something like stage fright. When we first opened, my husband and I felt compelled to attend every single event - big, small, in between.  Once Loren Estelman and Doug Allyn sent him out for coffee, "or just walk around the block", so he could calm down.  His event anxiety has disapated, while mine sometimes still flares up.

Over the years, there are certain events that are no brainers.  We don't worry about Steve Hamilton, for example (except where to squeeze everyone in), but there are all kinds of factors that play into a successful event, some of them beyond your control, some within it.

The morning of an event I usually have a "feeling" if it will go well or not.  This far along I am often right.  An excellent indicator of events that go right are phone calls (or better, pre-sells) in advance of the event, or questions on facebook confirming the time.

I have a big event coming up and I'm filled with anxiety, anxiety I know is irrational.  I'm talking about the book festival I help to run, and that I program.  Since I am the one who tracks down and secures the authors, I am the one who worries that people will show up, that the experience of both author and audience will be a good one, that sales will be strong.  

Hoping sales will be strong for 56 people (the number of folks we have scheduled, though not all are writers) is exhausting!  Last night I became irrational and was sure our event - which usually draws between 4,000 - 5,000 people for the day - would be deserted. Empty.  

Our centerpiece this year (for me at least)is Louise Penny.  Now, we've been handing out the date of the festival and telling people about her appearance for close to nine months.  There are folks coming from Wisconsin and Long Island to see her.  So I know in my rational mind that people will be there.  And I know that we'll sell some books.

Part of my anxiety comes from wondering if we will sell the massive quantity of books I've ordered for this event.  It takes place at the Farmer's Market, just a few blocks from the store, but we fill two cars full of "product" (as I've fondly come to call heavy boxes of books) before the festival.

Part of my anxiety comes from wanting to please the publisher, who after all is sending us one of their marquee authors.  I'd like them to continue to share in this way.  For this event we even became a store that reports bestsellers to the New York Times (a mysterious and arcane process in itself).  

So I guess my anxiety is both well founded and unfounded.  The past eight years of success should give me some hope, and I do feel the event will go well.  If any of you readers live in Southeastern Michigan, I hope you'll join us next Sunday!  See if you can relieve my anxiety...

 

Whistling in the graveyard

Robin Agnew

As some of you may know (I've blogged about it lots) I serve on the board of a local book festival, The Kerrytown BookFest, which celebrates it's 9th birthday this coming September 11.  It's a day filled with activity - 40 speakers, 100 vendors, a kid's tent, free workshops, and book arts demonstrations, as well as the chance to letterpress print a little broadside postcard yourself.  This year's has a lovely poem and an original drawing.

Much of the festival, of course, focuses on writers and what's new.  But a slant that sets it apart are the book arts - and for me, this has been an ongoing learning process.  The book arts include book binding, letterpress printing, papermaking  - for several years there was a woman demonstrating how to make marbeled papers.  There's always a letterpress printer set up, and usually what you get to print is a bookmark.  This year it will be a little postcard celebrating our Community Book Award winner, Margaret Noori, who translates the spoken Ojibwe language to the written word.

One of our new board members, Jon Buller, was the long time owner of the Bessenberg bindery, a shop that specialized in hand book binding.  You could take (as I did) your mother's old beat up Joy of Cooking, for example, save the "guts", and get a nice new binding put on it, complete with gold stamping on the cover.  As you might expect this is a diminishing art form, but it's still one in demand by collectors.

Anyway, this past year, the bindery was acquired by local printers/publishers, Thomson-Shore, who bought and moved all of Jon's equipment into their warehouse, where Jon is training new people in his particular art form.  He's added much to the board, creating some beautiful leatherbound award plaques, for example, and he's been a part of the day for years.

As we lurch into the future, celebrating the book seems like a trickier and more difficult prospect, but we are a passionate bunch, and we find a good laugh in the oddest spots.  At this week's board meeting, Jon mentioned that he'd retrofitted an actual book to accommodate someone's kindle as folks were laughing at him while he was reading on the bus!

The kindle jokes started flying and I realized that it's important to enjoy the moment, and to celebrate what's here now.  The future will probably bring a continued uneasy alliance as Jon's recent project so vividly illustrates, but for now we are  celebrating the book, and as this year's poster proclaims "The Books are Everywhere."

And on Sunday, September 11, we'll welcome authors as varied as Louise Penny, National Book Award winner Jaimey Gordon, Stefanie Pintoff, hot off great reviews in the NY Times Bonnie Jo Campbell, Tasha Alexander, Maureen Jennings, Caldecott medalist Erin Stead, Brian Freeman, Mark Terry, Andrew Grant, Karen Dionne, and many, many more.  It seems like a great way to celebrate a grim anniversary. If you're near Ann Arbor, come join us!

 

Changes

Robin Agnew

As my daughter heads off to her junior year of college, I should be used to her leaving by now.  We've even "replaced" her - another teen has moved in with us for the time being.  But she was gone all summer, interning at a library up north and staying with my sister.  When she got home she decided her room needed painting so the house looks like a cyclone hit it (hard) - but her room looks great.

She's finally sorting through little girl things - old baby dolls, Clifford books, old girl scout stuff - and getting rid of it.  For some reason all of that makes her upcoming return to school somehow more final. Her "new" room even looks more grown up (and when she leaves, the new teen in the house moves off the library floor and into her room.   He travels with 3 guitars and a mandolin, so the house is pretty full).

When she leaves, she'll leave me with a (male) dog, my husband, and two boys who will be living here at least this year as they start Community College here in town.  I'm delighted to have them here and to have the house so populated, but there's something missing with the departure of the only other female. The bathroom smells like Old Spice and Axe (on a good day) instead of like Dove soap.  

The kitchen is full of pizza rolls and Sunny D, instead of her favorite fresh salsa and artichokes.  No one to watch old Jane Austen movies with.  Instead of the fairly peaceful music she plays, my son likes (loud) rap and his pal walks around strumming his guitar (beautifully, I must add).

But it's not the same.  And the evacuation of the baby doll and the old Puppy Patrol books makes it all seem more real.  This winter she's even going to Europe.  We've gotten Skype on our computer, but I'm sensing that won't be the same either.

The possibilities of life are open to her, though, and that's certainly something to celebrate.  Margaret Frances, here's to a great junior year at the wonderful Ripon College!

Bad bookseller!

Robin Agnew

I was feeling like a bad, or at least inefficient, bookseller last night, though all turned out well.  I had agreed to sell books at a library event, went on a short vacation, and promptly forgot all about it.  I came back from vacation, realized I needed books (eek) and I better get ready or else as the event was in a couple days.

As it happens, the book was one I read in manuscript for for the University of Michigan press, and it was one I liked, a novelization of a true story about a woman poisoned with arsenic in Michigan in the 1840's.  I got the books and showed up on time at the library and then proceeded to act like the most uncaring bookseller of all time.

I've noticed over the years that first time authors bring their spouses or partners along, and at those first events, the spouses or partners hang on every word.  This was no exception: a first timer with a book ten years in the making, her partner was dogging her footsteps with a look of pure delight.

After a couple more books, the spouses or partners would rather go shopping, meet with friends or just not show up at all.  I think I've reached this stage of bookselling.  I set up, sat in the outer lobby with my little pile of books, and proceeded to read my Jan Burke novel, order Indian food for dinner, and help my son decide his plans for the evening as my phone chirped away (no one inside could hear it).

In fact I had a nice chat with the author's partner, a former bookseller herself who was run out of business by Borders back in '97.  She wasn't at all sad they were closing.  We also talked about how matching the right book with the right customer was about the best thing in the world.  She still misses it.

I realized I shouldn't take my wonderful job for granted after speaking with her.  Being a bookseller IS lots of fun, mostly, even when I'm ignoring it by ordering indian food and talking to my son.  And I sold all the books but two, an excellent result.  The author had slides which in my experience is a real sales closer.  People LOVE slides.

Next event:  Julie Kramer and Sarah Zettel in a couple weeks on a relaxing Sunday afternoon.  Last event before last night's:  Loren Estleman, with book #64.  When he came in the store, he wasn't sure which book he was signing!  (Uh, the really large stack of INFERNAL ANGELS).  

As I walked back to the store with my little cart, I refelected that it was nice to be downtown, nice to be close enough to the library to walk over and sell books, and nice to have an almost sell out with an unknown, and thrilled, first time author.  

The indian food, by the way, was terrific.

Some summer reading

Robin Agnew

With a whole, hot month left in the summer, here's a few books to tote to the beach or the woods or wherever you might go in August to relax, read, and recharge.  No fair ordering these titles on your kindle...find a nice bookseller near you who pays taxes in your town (just paid my summer city taxes myself) and perhaps employs a few folks and buy a book from them.  These are all paperbacks so none of them will break the bank - you'll need six,as I once unwittingly told the wife of the governor of Michigan, not recognizing her in a book signing line.

Silencing Sam, Julie Kramer.  I LOVE Julie Kramer.  Are you sick of Janet Evanovich?  Meet Minneapolis TV reporter Riley Spartz, who as always is in the thick of the action, this time looking into the death of a notorious St. Paul gossip columnist.  She's funny and her plots are terrific, as is Riley.

The Killing Song, P.J. Parrish. This isn't in the Parrish sisters' terrific Louis Kincaid series, but it's a wonderful standalone serial killer novel, cleverly using songs and music as clues, taking you all over the globe (Miami, London, Paris, Scotland) and winding up in the ultra creepy Paris sewers.  Give those a google...Meanwhile you'll fall for the main character, reporter Matt Owens.

The Hidden Man, David Ellis.  Intelligent thriller writer, thy name is David Ellis. While Ellis has won an Edgar he's still not a giant besetseller but his whip smart thrillers sure should put him on top.  This one is about a bereaved Chicago attorney who's asked to defend an estranged childhood friend in what looks like a hopeless case.  If you thought Mr. Jeffrey Deaver was the King of the Twist, give Ellis a try.

Wanting Sheila Dead, Jane Haddam.  Ihave a little love hate thing with Jane Haddam. Some of her books make me want to shriek in frustration, while others, often the ones hewing most closely to the traditional mystery format, are a delight. This one falls into the "delight" category as super sensitive sleuth Gregor Demarkian tries to figure the ins and out of a murder on the set of a reality TV show. If Peter Winsey came back as a 21st century Armenian detective, he might be Gregor Demarkian.

Buffalo West Wing, Julie Hyzy.  I read this in, I think, two hours (so pack 2 or 3).  Hyzy's entertaing and well written mysteries set in the White House kitchen hit a new high with this one, as a new first family is ushered in and a bumpy adjustment is had by all.  Hyzy's plotting, pacing and characterization skills are all on display.  Fun!

A Hard Day's Fright, Casey Daniels.  I usually steer clear of anything "paramormal", but I enjoyed this one, where an insistent ghost accosts cemetary worker Pepper Martin on the bus and demands her help in finding her body.  Setting her story partly in the past - this ghost died happy, after a Beatles concert - Daniels delivers a smooth and easy read, perfect for the back porch and a glass of lemonade.

Happy Reading!

 

 

 

So, Borders is gone

Robin Agnew

A few years back I would have cheered the demise of Borders, a super store that viewed us as ant like detrius, ready to be quashed.  We surely couldn't match the magnitude of their book orders, or the magnitude of their author star power.  We had to operate like guerilla fighters, thanks to Borders.  And in fact I talked to a fellow bookseller this morning who WAS delighted - citing the aformentioned quashing of many, many independents.  The thought of this particular bookseller was that they got what they deserved.

And yet.  My husband's first job in Ann Arbor was as a Border's employee, back when they were one of the greatest bookstores on earth, with backlist so deep it and clerks so intelligent (they had to take a very difficult test to become one) that there was no comparison.  We still know folks who are working there who are going to lose their jobs.  That is beyond sad.  Borders is an anchor of our downtown, and one of the last local standing businesses in the university saturated part of town they are in, which is filled with chain restaurants and even a Rite Aid and a 7 Eleven.

I am hopeful of course that we'll benefit by picking up some of their mystery readers.  There are plenty of them.  But it still seems like a sad day for bookselling in general, and probably not a good sign for the future of bookselling.  The bookseller I talked about in the first paragraph thinks the benefits will out weigh the negatives.  I guess that remains to be seen, but I love books and bookselling.  I hope my fellow bookseller is right.

Adios, Borders.

 

 

Deep into Summer

It's deep into summer - days are hot, there's ice cream to be had - and the town feels like it's in a bit of the doldrums, but luckily here in Ann Arbor we get hit next week with one of largest street art fairs on the planet.  I love it.  Other buisness owners, not so much - my hairdresser leaves town, for example - but I look forward to it as a week long off loading of, ahem, older merchandise.

It's a week when driving through downtown just isn't possible - over four days, 500,000 people visit the Ann Arbor Art Fairs - and it's almost a guarantee that one day it will pour buckets and one day at least will be sweltering.  I don't mind, I'm in an air conditioned store, but I feel for the artists siting on concrete for four days.  I only let artists and customers use our bathroom!

This week my husband has spend culling unloved books from corners of the store, from our store basement, and next week he and my son will haul them upstairs in readiness for selling on the street.  The first couple years, we actually paid someone to sit outside with the dollar books, but it no longer seems worth it.  If someone feels moved to steal a tattered Sidney Sheldon paperback, there's not much I'm going to do about it.

This year though we've tried to put out some better material - newer hardcovers that have gone paperback, for example.  For a dollar, they're a bargain.  We also have - the box.  The box has books we've been hauling up and down the basement steps for 18 summers now.  I think soon we need to have - a bonfire.

While I love books, and have made my life about them, the darn things replicate like crazy and it seems almost unstoppable.  Somebody cleans out their basement, and we get the fruit of their labors, recycling old books back through the community.  Sometimes there are certain treasures that it takes an odd ball to truly love, and frankly, there's always a few of them I sell during art fair where I mentally think -"Really?  You want THAT?"

But often the pleasure of art fair, as it so often is during the summer months, is meeting people from out of town, including artists, who only come to town once a year and have made us one of their stops, where they can check in, re-fuel their book habit, and have a chat.  I look forward to all those returning travellers.  They make my July.

Yesterday, as it's the week before art fair, the store was full of regulars, getting their fix before the town is taken over.  At one point I knew the name of every shopper in the store (and one on the phone).  I'm not sure if that means the readng community is a small one, or a communal one, or both.  Either way, July is full of pleasures not often found in January.  I may as well enjoy it while it lasts.

 

 

 

 

A Few Great New Characters

Robin Agnew

There are numerous reasons to read - a sense of place, story, characters - all are important but I think one of the major reasons mystery readers love their books are the characters they find there.  There are many characters in mystery fiction that seem almost real, that readers will visit again and again.  I know I personally have re-read Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver mysteries countless times, not least because I so envy Miss Silver's ability to manitain a pleasant conversation in the most difficult of circumstances.

When a few new characters enter the mystery arena that are pretty memorable and make you want to read more, it's something to take notice of. There are a couple of new series I've really enjoyed, and much of the reason are the main characters in the books.

Detective Darko Dawson, Kwei Quartey's memorable creation,is an inspector in the Ghanaian police force, working out of the capitol of Ghana, Accra.    Darko works some tough cases but he has a stong relationship with his wife and an adorable son who suffers from a heart problem.  He also has the unique ability to spot a lie by listening to the timber of someone's voice.  He's smart and relentless, but he's also compassioante and willing to learn.  Quartey's so far two novels, Wife of the Gods and Children of the Streets,  are knockouts.  Get to know "Dark", as he's called by his friends.

Ruth Galloway is someone I wish I knew in real life.  The creation of the gifted Elly Griffiths, she's an unapologetically overweight forensic anthrologist, who eschews fashion of any kind but is so much herself and so comfortable in her own skin that she's irrisistible.  Her bravery is of the regular human variety, not the super human kind (see Jack Reacher).  She lives alone in the most deserted, desolate place imaginable with her two cats, and is neither lonely nor seeking a man.  There are two books so far, The Crossing Places and The Janus Stone, with a third to come in January.

Willis Gidney, the P.I. at the center of Thomas Kaufman's two novels, Drink the Tea and Steal the Show (the first one was the St. Martin's PWA contest winner), has so many quirks it's a wonder he's walking around.  He grew up rough in the tough foster care sytem of Washington D.C., so normal social cues are sometimes foreign to him.  As he's always worn hand me downs, new clothes feel scratchy and weird, and his girlfriend, instead of being a babe like Susan Silverman, is instead a computer geek with dreadlocks and piercings.  He's a bit overweight and makes plenty of wrong choices, but he's only trying to do what's right.  Check him out.

Will Magowan, Ken Mercer's former cop-junkie-grieving dad, is pretty unforgettable.  Mercer may be feeling his way in  terms of the direction he wants his series to head - the first was set in the wilds of California, the second in LA - but if he keeps things anchored with Will, all should be well.  Will is damaged - he's a recovering addict, grieving the loss of his son, who's trying to get back with his estranged wife.  In the new novel he works security for the LA Dodgers, in the first he headed up a tiny police department.  Mercer writes like a dream, and Will is a big reason why.  His two books so far are Slow Fire (a top 10 pick for me last year) and East on Sunset.

I'm sure you have your own favorites, but it's great to welcome some new faces to the party.  I've spent the early part of the summer handselling The Crossing Places with great success.  Here's a toast to Darko, Ruth, Willis and Will.  

 

Backstage at a book signing

Robin Agnew

Recently, the New York Times ran a piece about book stores charging for author events to help meet their costs.  I shared the link on my website and got quite a few comments, but one of them was simply "I don't understand - how do book signings work?"  Probably all of us on this blog could tell how a book signing works from their point of view, and I often blog about the "day of" result, but there's obviously lots of work that goes into an event before it ever happens, which is unseen by the public.

Let's take our recent event with Julia Spencer-Fleming.  Back in December of 2010, I got an e-mail from Julia's publicist at St. Martin's, wondering if I'd be interested in hosting Julia in May of 2011.  As I had been bugging my sales rep about this very possibility, of course I was delighted.  Not only do I love Julia's books, but I consider her a friend.

In fact, in AUGUST of 2010, I had heard from Julia herself, asking me if I would mind (mind?) reading her manuscript so I could write a blurb for the ARC, but she needed it done quickly.  I was of course delighted, I loved the book, and this led to me bugging my sales rep which I imagine helped produce the December e-mail from the St. Martin's publicist.

OK, so in Deember, I said yes to St. Martin's who was busy setting up Julia's tour.  While I don't work on that end of things I know it involves figuring out where to send the author, how to get them there, and where they should stay.  I have picked up authors at the airport, dropped them off, and had them stay at my home (including Julia on early tours when she wasn't as well known).

Meanwhile, back at the ranch in Ann Arbor, I had a few other irons in the fire.  But I'd read Julia's book, I was delighted she was coming, and I put the date on the website and on facebook and started getting incredibly early pre-sells.  Pre-sells, obviously, are books sold ahead of time, and getting a pre-sell a few months ahead of the event is a sure sign of a good turn out.  (Usually pre-sells arrive a few days or hours before an event.) 

All well and good.  I realized, when it came time to put together my April newsletter where I would be running a review of Julia's new book, that I would need to re-read it since I had last read it in August.  This was not a hardship and I breezed through it a second time, crying just as much as I did the first read through, and was able to write a coherent and positive review.  That was probably mid-March.

I also placed an order for books with my St. Martin's rep, trying to parse just how many copies we would need, something that's always tricky.  While we didn't sell out the night of the event, we sold out the next day so I was wishing I had ordered a few more after the fact, but a sell out is always ideal.  Left over books mean returns which aren't so hot either for the author or for your own hopes of landing future events.

By this point I had notified the calendars of the remaining print media outlets in Ann Arbor and Detroit, making them aware of Julia's visit.  This is done a month out at minimum.  I also mail in the neighborhood of 500-900 postcards - in Julia's case, the full monty of 900 - which need to be printed, labelled and stamped, as well as mailed on the optimum date.  Not too early, or people will forget, and not too late, or people may have already made plans.

I also send out e-mail reminders to book club members, and in Julia's case, I blasted it on facebook, posting the review and reminders of the event.  Facebook has become as an effective an advertisng tool as anything else.  The day of the event I had a large pile of pre-sells and Julia, bless her, showed up early to chat and signed her pre-sells ahead of time.  

The day of the event I picked up 50 chairs, cleared that the borrowed space we use in the back of the building would be open, and made sure my crew of strong teenagers was standing by to set up chairs and get the room ready for Julia's talk.  The night of everything went smoothly, I enjoyed dinner with Julia and a few other nice folks after, she dropped me off at home in her rental car, and I breathed a happy sigh that all had gone well.  An event lasts a few hours, but as you can see, this particular one in one way or another was about 10 months in the making.

Not all events are planned so far ahead of time.  Some are set up by the authors themselves, who rarely give you that much notice, some are for less well know folks that I have to figure out how to market, but all of them require thought and effort, which brings me back to the New York Times article.  The stores charging for events are dismayed that people are buying the book online, or downloading it, and using a bookstore as merely a "book museum".  That model, obviously, doesn't work for bookstores.

I guess time will tell if folks still want to meet an author and talk to them about their book, exchanging ideas in real time instead of in virtual time.  Those are the moments that, as a bookseller, I feel can't be replaced.  But it's up to the public to decide what they want.  And only time will tell.

Steve Hamilton

Robin Agnew

Steve Hamilton, our biggest draw of the year, was in the store Thursday night, his first event for his new Alex McKnight novel, Misery Bay.  We've known Steve since A Cold Day in Paradise was published, and he was feeling a bit nostalgic, comparing the huge crowd on Thursday to the first one at the store attended by his Mom and his friend from grade school who drove him to the event.

He also talked about his first event at Borders - he said they'd put him in the music section, as far from actual books as it was possible to be.  He said the buyer had bought so many of his books they could have made a castle with them - and the groans of the crowd (and this bookseller) thinking of the stacks of fresh copies of Cold Day in Paradise were many.  That event was also quite sparsely attended.

It's cool how things change - sometimes.  When I introduced him, which was brief as I think everyone in the room had read all of his books - I mainly mentioned that he'd recently won an Edgar for best novel, and he got a nice round of applause.  Steve is a pretty modest fellow, though - that friend that drove him to the first event?  He was there (as he has been for every event) and he hadn't known about the Edgar win, asking Steve after things wound down, "So, there was some ceremony in New York or something?"

Steve was enjoying the growth of his readership on Thursday, as was I, and the event had a seat of the pants feel as he mainly fielded questions from the audience, one of the more interesting bits being the way he researched The Lock Artist (by shadowing an actual safecracker).  The event evolved into a discussion about the future of bookselling and publishing, as well as of course e-books.  Steve made a passionate plea for support of independent bookstores - and as I looked around, the crowd full of book club members and regulars, I knew he was preaching to the converted.

Many in the audience said e-books had boosted their reading - Steve's included - though many also said they also liked to have actual books in their hands (Steve included).  Events like Thursdays surely help us stay open and pay the rent, and the generosity of an author like Steve Hamilton, who has been loyal to our store since the beginning of his career, is a part of our continued existence.  Sometimes that existence is a struggle, sometimes a joy.  Thursday was a joy, and a reminder of why I sometimes love being a bookseller.

 

Graduation

Here's a photo of something I wasn't too sure would actually happen - my son, Robert, graduating from Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor this past Thursday evening.  The blood, sweat and tears it took to get to this point are a real triumph on his part, and he's now looking forward to job hunting and Community College.  We're all really proud of him - Congratulations, Robert!

Three Events, Three Outcomes

Robin Agnew

Here's an example of how events play out, one way or another.  We had three very close together events and the outcomes were all slightly different.  The first event, with Rhys Bowen, had a very strong turnout.  Rhys had visited the year before to a great turnout.  This year, the crowd was full of new readers - unusually, I saw lots of people I'd never seen before.  At a book signing I usually have seen or know about 80% of the folks there.  This was not the case here.

At the end of the evening, while I hadn't sold as many hardcovers as I'd hoped to, the backlist we had ordered - especially of the first Molly Murphy book - was decimated.  I think that eventing created lots of new fans who will hopefully return for the rest of the books.

The next week we hosted first Julia Spencer-Fleming and then two days later, at the downtown libray, Brian Freeman and Craig Mconald.  Julia's books are beloved by our readers and it had been two years between books.  We borrow space for larger events and weren't able to get in until "showtime" - the crowd was restive and when they were released they surged in. We have NO hardcovers left from this event, while we didn't sell as many backlist titles - every one there had already READ them.  One notable point:  two women who NEVER come to events, despite professed love for many of the authors we've had at the store, showed up to this one.

A library event is a whole different animal.  The most successful one we've done, not surprisingly, featured Elmore Leonard.  The library adds their pwn publicity and they have a much bigger ad budget than we do (they can afford pictures!)  For this event, with Brian Freeman and Craig McDonald, I noticed the attendees (who were mostly male, unlike the crowds for Bowen and Spencer-Fleming, who were mostly female) were in fact split.

Craig Mconald lives reasonably close (Ohio) and has been to the store a couple of times, so we've introduced people to his books and among some of our customers he has a following.  Brian Freeman, who writes scary thrillers (but who is as sweet as pie, go figure) has a large web prescence.  He hasn't been here before and lives in far away Minnesota, so our customers weren't initiates. His readers came from far and wide and almost to a man they had read about the event on his facebook page or on his website.  There was little crossover in terms of readers, which is unusual.  The interview with the guys went well, they were funny and charming, but it was the first beautiful Saturday afernoon we'd had and the event was somewhat sparsely attended.

I'm not sure what the lessons are here.  Maybe wait two years between books (meanwhile writing a terrific one)?  Don't host an event when everyone will be out in their gardens?  I'm still learning after 18 years on the job and still trying to maximize readership in every way I can, so I'm parsing these events closely myself.  Event I had the most presells for (except for the day of):  Freeman and McDonald.  Some things just can't be understood by man or beast.

 

 

Guest Blogger: Mark Terry

Guest blogger Mark Terry is a "neighbor" author - he lives in Southwest Michigan, and he writes kick ass thrillers featuring Dr. Derek Stillwater.  The new book comes out in June and is available on various platforms (including actual print) - visit him at www.markterrybooks.com for more information  In addition, Mark will be joining us at the Kerrytown BookFest in September on a thriller panel featuring Brian Freeman, Andrew Grant and Karen Dionne.

 

Is The Boogeyman Dead?

Mark Terry

As a few of you may have noticed, last week SEAL Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden during a raid on a compound in Pakistan where he’d apparently been hiding out since about 2006 or so. As a writer of novels that typically focus on terrorism, this was of more than passing interest. After all, my next novel, THE VALLEY OF SHADOWS, (Oceanview Publishing, June 7, 2011) begins with a joint U.S.-Pakistan raid on an al-Qaeda cell in Islamabad. Really.

In fact, the novel starts with two FBI agents discussing who in the Pakistan police or government they can trust:

     The new guy said, “Do you trust any of these people?”

     Agent Dale Hutchins stood in front of his locker, adjusted his flak jacket, and took a moment to consider the question. He had worked here for five years, at first directly with Pakistan’s National Police Bureau and now in the FBI’s own headquarters.

     “Some of them,” he finally said. Hutchins checked his SIG-Sauer P220 for the fifth time, and slipped it into his tactical holster.

     The new guy, Jason Barnes, said, “You want to give me a hint? Who can I trust at my back, man?”

 

Well, give myself a pat on the back for being prescient, or at least having the good dumb luck to not have written a novel in which bin Laden is a major character.

 At the same time, you have to kind of hunch your shoulders and hope your “timely and topical” novel didn’t come out at entirely the wrong time. Are we now sick of terrorism in fiction? Is al-Qaeda gone as a villain?

A little background, then. THE VALLEY OF SHADOWS is the fourth book to feature Dr. Derek Stillwater, a former Army Special Forces soldier now working as a troubleshooter for the Department of Homeland Security. In the first and third books, THE DEVIL’S PITCHFORK and THE FALLEN, I intentionally chose a make-believe terrorist organization for Derek to battle. In the second book, THE SERPENT’S KISS, I chose what is called a “lone-wolf terrorist.” Think Timothy McVeigh, someone not necessarily affiliated with an organization, but who commits an act of terrorism for some singular ideology and personal motivation.

Having written three books on terrorism, I considered going after the early twenty-first century’s boogeyman – al-Qaeda. Luckily I kept bin Laden out of it. I was very tempted to not write about al-Qaeda at all. First, when I wrote it I suppose it was theoretically possible that the so-called “Global War On Terror” would be basically over, we would have cleaned up Iraq and Afghanistan and dismantled most of AQ’s networks. Okay, no, I really didn’t believe that. Somewhat cynically, I have a hard time seeing the endgame with AQ or even envisioning it. I expect it’ll die – if it ever does – with a whimper, not a bang, that it’ll just become a bunch of malcontents with very little structure. But if our history of the IRA and Baader-Meinhof et al. are any indication, it will probably take quite a while to get there and a political solution may be a major factor.

But I digress. The other reason I was a little reluctant to write about AQ is precisely because everybody knows so much about them. I wanted to satisfy, in my mind if nowhere else, that I understood their motives and modus operandi reasonably well so that readers wouldn’t nitpick the novel to death instead of enjoying the page-turner story. So I did the research.

Which all brings up the question. Now that bin Laden’s gone, is the boogeyman dead? I doubt it. The end of the Cold War didn’t do the espionage genre much good, but it bounced back with terrorism and corporate espionage and Asia and the always popular Catholic Church as villain/conspirator. Bin Laden may be dead, but AQ’s still around and as I note at the end of my novel THE FALLEN, the problem with devils is there’s always another one to take his place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Circle of the Book

Robin Agnew

On the book festival board I serve on, our board president is fond of talking about "the circle of the book."  The only other bookseller on our board, he is an antiquarian, something vastly different from a new bookseller.  The rest of our board consists of a newspaper editor; a student; an art gallery owner and teacher; the former (now retired) owenr of a book bindery; a professional publicist; a business owner; a Zingerman's employee; a librarian and artist; and a woman who is so busy serving on so many boards I am delighted she is a part of ours.  All of us have different ideas of the "circle" and what it might mean.

To me the circle begins with the author.  Without words, there would be no book, no circle, no community of book lovers.  They have to have something to love!  For some on the board, however, the book is a beloved object. They are experts in binding or letterpress printing or papermaking.  To them the circle starts with a piece of paper.

For others on the board, the words are important no matter when they were written.  Timeliness is not of the essence.  For someone who programs a book festival (me), timeliness is key.  How else to obtain the creator of these words if not that they are on a book tour?

If the circle begins (as I say it does) with the author, where does it go from there?  Well, the author has written a book, he or she has to sell it, so next I assume it would go to an agent, then to an editor at a publishing house, then it would be published.  What happens next?  A book is published, how does a reader discover that book?  The sales staff at the publishing house is part of the equation.  But it's not the whole equation.

Booksellers and reviewers are the next piece, and it explains publishers reaching out to booksellers with free copies and enthusiastic letters of recommendation. It also explains the need for book reviews. They want us, as booksellers on the front lines, to recommend the book.  I think booksellers and reviewers are a joint piece of the circle.

But since booksellers are quirky and opinionated and sometimes, apparently, wrong (the list of fellow booksellers who picked up an advance copy of The DaVinci Code and laid it back down as unreadable and unsellable is a long one), this is where the whole process can take a turn.  Say we take up the cause of a book we love.  We read it, we love it, we review it.  And more importanlty, we press it in someone's hand.  And there's no telling what we might love.  I loved John Hart's The Last Child but could get few people to buy it; another bookseller said it flew off the shelves.  Go figure.

The other day a woman came into the store who said "God told me to park in front of your store."  Well, thank you God, as she then proceeded to buy lots of books.  But I was able to recommend a couple favorite writers to her - Deborah Crombie and Erin Hart - and send her on her way, knowing she'd have a wonderful reading experience.  That's my part of the circle.  And of course this woman is the last part:  she's the reader, and that's what every writer, way back in the beginning of that circle, needs to have.  

Once I pressed a Ngaio Marsh book into someone's hands and said "I'm improving your life."  The thing is, I think that's true.  After that reader read Death of a Peer, I'm sure his life was improved.  I was having a disussion via e-mail recently about whether personality plays a part in bookselling - if a particular author is very likeable, does that mean they sell more books and win more awards?  I think the original product - the book itself - has to be a good one.  Personality helps, but it isn't everything.  Ngaio Marsh, of course, is long dead (and who knows what she was like) but she's still improving people's lives.  As is our bestselling author, Rex Stout.

So the circle, to me, goes like this: author; agent; editor; publisher; sales staff; reviewer; bokseller; reader.  We are all a part of it but none of us would be there without the words on the page.   

 

 

The Soaps

Robin Agnew

I'm a proud viewer of General Hospital, a habit I picked up in college when a group of us gathered in the TV lounge to give Luke and Laura a champagne toast on their wedding day.  30 some years later, I'm still hooked (and Luke is still a venerable GH presence).  GH has gotten me through laundry, breastfeeding, and bouts of sadness.  It's been a constant.  Many moons agao I worked at a downtown hotel in Minneapolis (pre-VCR) and I'd sneak into the kitchen to trade GH tidbits with one of the cooks.  

I can only imagine the sadness and teeth gnashing occuring for fans of One Life to Live and All My Children - two shows I watched occasionally during between college summers.  I love Erica and Vicki as much as the next person, though a favorite character of mine was Judith Light's.  But this constant is going to go away for thousands and thousands of people.

There are all sorts of ways I hate the way the world changes so fast, and I guess this is just a small piece.  I do think narrative storytelling - of which soap operas are about the purest form you can come by - is something hardwired into the human brain.  I've never called them watching my "stories" as some people do, but I feel that way.  The charm of them is that the characters age and even die - it's like life, only they have better hair and better clothes and they don't have to work so much.  It's just plain better!

As I've watched the writing on soaps has only seemed to get better, as has the acting, and indeed there's a huge roster of A-list stars who got their start on soaps - Melissa Leo, Amanda Seyfried, Kelly Ripa, Leonardo DiCaprio to name a few - the list is a long one.  Recently on GH there's been a storyline with a lost child and a grandparent responsible for the death, a story taking in grief, alcoholism and even organ donation.  Across the board the writing and acting have been wonderful.

I'd have a definite hole in my life without GH (which I now watch on hulu much of the time) and I'm not sure that hole could be filled by "The Chew", a replacement show scheduled by ABC featuring cooking.  I like scripts, actors and sets - I'm sure all those things are expensive.  But in a changing world my "stories", which still include Luke Spencer, are something to hold onto.

 

Booksigning Etiquette

Robin Agnew

This is a topic I don't think I've covered.   For so many years I was so happy that ANYONE showed up for a book event, I wasn't too picky about who bought what where.  Though at one of our very early events, for Susan Holtzer (who wrote a series set in Ann Arbor), a customer showed up carrying all of Susan's books - in a Border's bag.  I was pretty irritated but I sucked it up and let Susan sign the books - what could I do at that point? - but since then I've grown a bit more of a spine.

This also happened at a very early Sharan Newman event - Sharan was irritated enough for the both of us (thank you Sharan).  But as time went on and we started booking better known authors and started drawing more people to events (though the second one with Steve Hamilton attended by his mother and his pal from 5th grade remains memorable) we started to rethink our policy.

Now in some ways I'm the "nice" one between my husband and I - he'll step in where I wouldn't want to, but when it comes to signings I've drawn the line.  It's ridiculous to advertise, do a mailing, talk up an event on facebook, contact the calendars of various newspapers, read and review the book for the newsletter and website and display as well as order a quantity of books and not expect to reap a sale.  I love books but I also want to SELL them.

As time has progressed and events have become even more key - a pretty sure way to draw customers to the store - this has become even more important.  When a woman called about an upcoming event with a well known author (an event I've had in place for nearly 6 months) asking how early she could come and saying sorry, but she'd pre-ordered the book from Barnes & Noble, I exploded.  Luckily I wasn't at work that day.  My husband more gently suggested that she buy some book from us.  

Our rule has been you can get any number of books signed but you must buy at least ONE from us.  This is not unreasonable, and most every customer follows it.  It's common courtesy.  I have no problem with a customer bringing two shopping bags full of proofs and foreign editions to Loren Estleman events, because he always buys the new one (and sometimes more than one copy) from us.  He calls to order books by authors he likes.  This relationship has some give and take.

Keep in mind that when you attend a book event, a great deal of effort has gone into setting it up and getting the word out in every way possible.  Have some respect for the bookseller, the author, and the publisher and do the right thing.

 

 

You say Tomato, I say Tomahto

Robin Agnew

I've tumbled to something over the years: men and women buy books for different reasons.  Both want to read a compelling story, obviously, but they emotionally relate to the books they buy in a different way.  What got me thinking about this was the fact that we have a long slate of events coming up, some male writers and some female writers.  Makes sense, right?

For the male writers I have coming up (and they are appearing together) I have a couple pre-sells.  The people buying the books won't be at the event, they just want them signed.  They are male book buyers buying (in this case) a thriller and a noir book.

For the female writers I have coming up, I don't have any presells, but I have plenty of interest in the events.  In one case, several of us are joing two female authors for dinner before their event.  While I can't guarantee this, this dinner group will be 98-100% female.  Once at a similar dinner for Rhys Bowen, one of my best male customers turned up, saw the crowd, and fled in alarm!

My conclusion?  Men like to own the object.  Condition, edition, signature and date are all important to them.  The book is an object, one they'll read, but mostly one they'll want to have on their shelf.  Women like the experience.  They like to meet the author and talk with them, and they often like some kind of inscription.  They want to know what has happened, and what is going to happen, to the characters.  Two of the authors we have coming up, Rhys Bowen and Julia Spencer-Fleming, have series characters people are especially attached to.  I've held long conversations with customers about Molly and Clare both as if they were actually real.

The most dramatic experience of a female author signing - the "girliest" though I'm sure she'd object to that word - was Nancy Atherton, who not only inscribes her books but travels with a pack of rubber stamps and inks to really personalize the books.  One of them is a stamp of Reginald, the pink bunny that appears in all the Aunt Dimity books.  There is not a male author on the planet - and I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say this - who would use a rubber stamp of a bunny.  But I treasure my own copy.

Last week, Jacqueline Winspear shot through on a drive by.  Now, Maisie Dobbs is one of my all time favorite books, and I happen to own a beautiful first edition.  I was so excited (and this hasn't happened in awhile) I was absolutely goofy.   I made my husband drive my copy into the store so she could sign it (she signed stock too, of course).  I'm pretty sure I made an absolute ass of myself, but it was apparently unavoidable.  And my signed copy of "Maisie" sits gloriously on my shelf of favorite books, only one of them unsigned (Ngaio Marsh's).

My dad, on the other side of the gender divide, has been the recipient of many a signed book, by authors he reads and enjoys, but he doesn't really care.  His comment:  "They all read the same, dont they?"  I guess so.

However.  Women are getting a social experience from their book event; men are getting a good read and a solid, displayable object, no bunny inscluded.  It's just different.  I like my pink bunny book, personally.  Hop on!

 

The Dilys Trophy

Since 2002, I've helped to administer the "Dilys Award", which is given by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Associaition (IMBA) for the book we "most enjoyed selling".  That is a pretty hard to define thing, but somehow, we always "know", and during the time I've helped with the award, books like Mystic River, In The Bleak Midwinter. Still Life and Thirty-Three Teeth have all won, all of them books we sell on a regular basis, and I'm pretty sure that holds true throughout the IMBA stores.

When I first was helping with the award, we gave a certificate and a glass paperweight to the winner.  The paperweights were lovely, handmade ones, but there was a limited supply, and eventually we ran out of them.  The next year we had to figure out a new plan of action.  

My husband has a high school chum, Greg Anthony, who had turned up in our neck of the woods around that time, spending holidays with us.  Greg is a talented photographer and gifted artist - one of the things he likes to do is create these nutty sculptures which he would give to us at holiday time - the easter bunny with a bloody head on the ground, that kind of thing.  Anyway, he had given us a few real classics, including a skeletal hand holding a Christmas ornament that still adorns our store window, when I had the thought that he would be the perfect person to create the Dilys trophy.

The first one he made was for William Kent Krueger, who won for Thunder Bay.  Kent wasn't at Left Coast that year and I had Greg mail it to him at home.  When he opened it I got a delighted e-mail from Kent, who says the extra large trophy is now the focal point of his family room.  Sean Chercover (who won for Trigger City) said the same, and last year he made a beautiful stamp inspired one for Alan Bradley.  

This year, his last year making the trophy, I sent him the winning book (which, as you can see above, is Louise Penny's Bury Your Dead) and waited to see what he would come up with.  I think he outdid himself, using a monument he'd seen in Montreal years ago as a basis for this year's work of art.

Sometimes in life a little gift comes your way, like Greg making these beautiful and memorable trophies for us.  Whatever we find to replace them couldn't possibly be as special and original as his have been.  The gift must be appreciated for what it is.  And for that, I say thank you to him.

Doris Day

Robin Agnew

It's been a LONG winter.  Longer for those of you on the east coast, I know, but it's been long and cold and miserable here in the midwest too.  Sometimes that only thing that brings me sunshine on a day in March when it should be 60 degress but is instead 20 degrees, is a dose of Doris Day.  I recently loaded up my netflix cue with some old Doris faves and had a viewing orgy.

Doris herself is a contradiction.  She's petite and lovely and chic, but she's also very American in her healthy, musular arms, shiny hair and sweet girl next door voice.  In this she resembles an earlier American film icon, Louise Brooks, who looked exotic but when she opened her mouth, there was no doubt of her pure American roots.

She's also a contradiction because in her actual life she left home early to be a big band singer with Harry James and moved from man to man.  She was always a creer woman, becoming for a time one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, and her own son was raised very much by her mother.  The only thing she shared with her onscreen persona appears to have been a cleanliness obsession.

In most of her movies she either plays a housewife or if she has a job, what she really wants is to get married and have a baby and settle down.  In "the Thrill of it All" with James Garner she plays a doctor's wife (Garner's) who becomes an accidental TV star.  But it's all too much, her hub doesn't like her working, and things get back to "normal" by the end of the movie.  In "Please Dont Eat the Daisies" she plays the fruustrated wife of a theater critic (based loosley on the great Walter Kerr) who moves the family out to the wilds of Conneticut.  In real life, of course, Jean Kerr was the successful author of "Please Don't Eat the Daisies."

In a more typical formula, she has some kind of a job, often an ad exec.  In one of the odder ones, but still one of my favorites, "That Touch of Mink" she plays a youngish working gal who gets splashed by Cary Grant's limo on a rainy New York City morning.  Grant is lots older and the camera is smeared with a bit of vaseline for Doris' closeups but there's still a great fashion show sequence and the bizarre plot - Grant takes her to Bermuda, but as a companion, not as a wife, and she breaks out in hives rather than hook up.  Her roomie Audrey Meadows works in an automat, my other favorite part.

But of course the pinnacle of the Day films are those where she was paired with Rock Hudson, a gay man playing a straight one.  It's best not to think about the reality because "Pillow Talk", my favorite of all her films, is a lovely confection.  It actually won an Oscar for best screenplay, and really, it's nicely structured and has some actual humor, thanks to Hudson, who does a funny imiatation of a southern oil man to win Doris' heart.  Doris plays a decorator in this one, but she snags Rock in the end by giving his apartment a hideous makeover.  There's a dandy scene with Hudson and Thelma Ritter, who plays Doris' housekeeper, where she drinks him under the table.  And Tony Randall, the straight man who seemed gay, plays the best friend.

Oh, and in "Pillow Talk" she gets to sing a bit, one of my favorites, "Roly Poly Baby."  They set her up in a piano bar (in a red dress to die for) and let her go to it.  She bursts into song in several of her movies, but they aren't really singing vehicles, though she had a lovely clear voice.  It wasn't subtle or heartbreaking, but it was pretty.  

It's too bad she's now such a recluse, because her films have given so many people so many hours of pleasure, as has her music.  I have a favorite CD I listen to often.  However she's just the ticket out of a long, cold winter.

A Couple Cool Characters

Robin Agnew

I love mysteries, I make no bones about it.  Never the less, it's not a genre known for its high "cool" quotient. In fact it's a genre that in general embraces the generous "middle" of life - middle age, middle class.  While the point of view of many mystery writers is decidedly nuanced, intelligent and yes, "cool", the characters themselves are often comfortable, even if they are angsty like Rebus or Bosch.  

So of course as I was reading the latest Cara Black book, my mind started clicking along and cataloguing a few characters I DO think are cool.  None of them are middle aged, which may explain it.  They're all unsettled in different ways. Here's my short list, I'd love to hear some of you chime in on the ones you think are "cool".

Aimee LeDuc  In the first chapter of the new book, Murder in Passy, Aimee has to change out of her leather catsuit and clamber into vintage Chanel to attend a party. Nuff said?  Much of the time she's tooling around Paris in her leather pants and red high tops on her pink scooter.  Yet, she's not "girly", nor are the books.  

Sweeney St. George  Sarah Stewart Taylor's central character, in her late and much missed series, is so cool she's an expert on gravestone iconography and victorian mourning jewelry.  A young academic, she's still finding her way through the world, complete with men she's uncertain about (though she needs to get a clue in that department).  This is actually a trait she shares with

Rei Shimura  Sujata Massey's keen central character.  Rei is half Japanese, half American, mostly living in Japan and working as an antiques dealer.  Japanese antiques.  Some of these books are actually swoony, for different reasons - in one, The Typhoon Lover she's more or less stuck in the middle of nowhere with a really dishy guy.  In another (my favorite) Girl in a Box, she goes undercover in a Japanese department store.  The description of the high class underwear she must have to be authentic is, well, swoony.

Tess Monaghan even though Tess is fromn the more standard P.I. mode, she's still pretty cool, able to kick ass and make witty conversation in the same paragraph.  She also has a cool boyfriend, a cool dog and a cool sidekick, Whitney, who Lippman allows to be as funny and earthy as Tess.  Her cool quotient sadly may fall a bit as she becomes a mother but that happens to us all.

Lastly Madeline Dare Cornelia Read's creation, one who doesn't really feel like a series character, but one you'll want to follow through her world of former debutantes and prep school buddies to her excurisons with a serial killer (Field of Darkness) into a school for troubled kids (The Crazy School) and most recently into a forgotten New York City cemetary (Invisiible Boy).  Not only is Read's language rich, unexpected, and often funny, Madeleine's efforts to find herself and her place in the world are totally memorable and, well, cool.

As always, happy reading!

 

So, you want to be a writer?

Robin Agnew

Owning a bookstore, with my nose almost constantly in a book (since birth) I get asked this question a lot, and most people are surprised when I say "no."  I love writing, I love books, but I know I don't have the skill or talent to write an entire one.

In my job, I do write a lot, however.  For about 15 of the 18 (almost 19) years that the store has been open, we've had a newsletter, which of course while it lists events and awards nominations also has book reviews, written mostly by me but sometimes when the fancy takes him, by my husband, who, I must add, is a far better writer than I am.

However, I will say over the years I've become a much more fluid and confortable writer.  My first reviews were very short and almost fearful.  I didn't want to say the wrong thing!  Then around year two I realized I could say whatever I wanted, however I wanted to say it.  That was sort of liberating and I began to feel more comfortable writing reviews, which over the years, have gotten longer.  With some authors, I even dare to discuss a theme.

Every ten reviews or so (I write 4 to 6 reviews a month) I feel I've written a good sentance or paragraph, and that's very pleasing.  Somehow I've managed to convey the complexity of whatever the writer is concerned with in a coherent manner.  This is why I admire good writers:  they can do this kind of thing through an entire book!  Amazing!  I'm happy to do it for a few paragraphs, at which point I wipe the sweat off my brow with relief.

I enjoy author interviews more than the reviews, and I only do them on a whim.  Something about the book has to capture my interest so completely that I'm compelled to "stalk" the author - i.e. e-mail them and ask them some questions.  I'm always fascinated by not only the diversity of answers but by the way the questions are answered - tersely or expansively, as fits whoever is answering them  But the spirit only moves me occasionally, while the reviews must be witten every month.

That is the only way I feel akin to the great Margery Allingham, who described hersef as "an ink stained wretch."  You know what?  This blog is the same - some weeks I'm pleased, some weeks I feel my effort is more crnge worthy.  It seems to be the repetition that does the trick.  I figure if I hit 25 years of writing my newsletter, I'll really have something.  

Borders

Robin Agnew

Yesterday's post on Borders was a very thoughtful one, and I have another perspective.  While all around the country Borders is known as the big box bookstore, here in Ann Arbor, where we are few blocks from store #1, it's a homegrown product.  My husband's first job when we moved to town twenty some years ago was as a clerk at Borders.  Borders was a great bookstore with the deepest backlist you can imagine, with clerks as smart as university professors.  My husband, who has a masters in English, told me the test he had to take to apply for his job at Borders was one of the harder ones he had ever taken.

Each section was stocked by a different and knowledgable employee.  There was a well known local poet who stocked the poetry section; I can't remember where my husband began but he ended up in fiction and as a precursor to the future, he also stocked true crime, as he actually read it.  I know the book test was eliminated and the number of employees has dwindled; shopping at Borders is not the experience it once was.

They are obviously competition to us but it's heartbreaking to see this hometown company that did so well for so many years struggle, and for our downtown to lose the large Borders store would be a real loss.  At the moment, it's not on the chopping block.  

It's also heartbreaking from a bookseller's perspective, to see all the changes, many of them unwelcome, I admit, in our industry.  We are still selling a personalized, boutique style shopping experience, which sets us apart, but books are available many places.  There just will be a few less as of this week.  It reduces the mix in the pot and the variety available to readers.

To readers, I say support your local independent retailer.  Keep the mix of original, quirky and vivid reading material available alive and kicking.

 

Can a book with a cat be taken seriously? (Answer: yes).

Robin Agnew

While I often am approached by writers wanting to send me ARCs and have me read, possibly review them, and certainly try to sell them, it’s not often that I say “yes,” send the ARC, and less often when I actually read and enjoy them.  However, such was the charm and erudition of author Clea Simon (who I hadn’t heard of, despite the fact that she had nine books to her credit) that I agreed to an ARC.  When she contacted me a few months later - I’d set it aside, because it was so far ahead of when the book came out - that I thought, OK, I’ll give it a try.  I even thought my daughter had squirreled it away with her when she went back to college, because it has the magical word “dog” in the title.  After frantically contacting Poisoned Pen for another copy, lo and behold, it turned up on one of my dining room chairs, and now I felt well and truly obligated to read it.

The title of the book is Dogs Don't Lie, and it will be published by Poisoned Pen Press in April.  I wasn’t too hopeful when I discovered that the premise was that the main character, Pru Marlowe (yes, a nod to the great one) can “hear” what animals are saying and thinking.  But somehow, the premise works.  I asked Clea if she herself was psychic, as her character is, and she answered “I wish I were psychic....I do end up getting the strong feeling that my cat is trying to tell me something, if only I weren’t too stupid to hear it.”  The rest came about from necessity.  “I really wanted to write a bad girl heroine for a change.  How did she become a bad-girl animal psychic? I don’t know, except that I also knew I wanted her to have a snarky cat as a sidekick and I guess I needed a way for them to communicate.”

The detail Simon brings to her premise is what sells it.  For one thing, many of the animals she communicates with have a name they’ve given themselves, not the same one their human owners have given them.  Pru walks a Bichon named Bitsy whose private name is actually “Growler.”  The premise that kicks off the book is that a rescued pit bull Pru’s been helping to train is found in a room with it’s dead owner, his throat ripped out.  The cops are pretty sure it’s an open and shut case, and impound the dog, though naturally, this being a mystery, things are more complex than they appear on the surface.  So while the storyline is somewhat dark in itself, it’s leavened by the interactions Pru has with various animals throughout the book, parts of the story I began to look forward to, especially when it came to a Ferret named Frank (Bandit to it’s human).  

This is the kind of cozy that’s kind of a half breed.  While Pru communicates with her cat, it’s not a story that easily vacates your brain after you close the book; it’s pretty vivid and memorable.  The pain of the pit bull who is incarcerated in the pound is very moving, and Pru herself is undergoing a type of midlife crisis, something I asked the author about as she’d apparently left her job as a journalist to become a writer. She says her first few books were autobiographical, and “It takes a while to think you can just make up stories that anyone would want to read.”  While this book isn’t really autobiographical, Simon deftly captures the unsettled quality of Pru’s life and the fact that she’s on a personal journey, one that looks like it will take more than one book to complete.

When I asked Clea about her own personal reading tastes, they were much darker than what she writes - Megan Abbott, Henning Mankell, Tana French.  She says “I guess I go for character as much as anything, although a good plot...can keep me going too.”  Simon’s book has the sharp kind of character detail I think she herself appreciates.  Her crisp writing and polished plot are a pleasure from start to finish.  

The Art of Browsing

Robin Agnew

As the world careens forward, changing every nano second, one of the things I've seen change since we opened the store is browsing.  When we opened our customers almost to a man or woman liked to "have a browse", but that's not so true anymore.  Maybe it's the general speed of the planet, but whatever the reason, the leisurely art of browsing is becoming a lost one.

While many of our older customers still enjoy browsing, the younger ones don't seem to know how.  Long ago I mentioned to Ellen Hart that if I noticed a potential customer wasn't touching the books, they weren't going to buy anything.  I think the older customer who has a fondness for books also has a fondness for books as an object, the texture, feel, and smell of the things.  They want to touch them.

This is a giant generalization, of course, because there are always exceptions to every rule. but younger people don't seem to get the idea of browsing.  While we've made our store very browser friendly, with tables and shelves with historical mysteries, first in series books, Top 10 recommendations, signed books and even cards on our used book shelves directing lovers of Agatha Christie to say, Ann Purser, the younger reader is usually a directed one.

They want a specific book, they want it now, and if it's not there they're willing to move on.  This of course is where an online sales site is a perfect fit.  You think, I want Michael Connelly's REVERSAL, go to the online site of your choice, and order it up, no browsing required.  

The thing is, what are you missing out on?  I can think of scores of writers I discovered rifling through used book shelves - it's the way I found Patricia Moyes, Elizabeth Daly, Lynn Hightower, Leslie Glass- the list goes on.  I liked the look and feel of the books, I read a couple pages,and I was hooked.  I think the secret is giving your mind the chance to wander and to think about something unexpected.  It's something you need a little time for, and that is probably why it doesn't work for a younger person with a very hectic life.  It may also be tied into instant gratification - browsing isn't instant, and it requires some thought.

But it may also be a different way of thinking, of looking straight ahead and never to the side.  For some things this is a good plan - for others, not so much.  You're simply closing off part of the journey, which could be a wonderful one. The thing is, if you don't give yourself a chance to browse,you'll never know.

 

 

Favorite Movies of 2010

Robin Agnew

I figure since it's New Years - Happy New Year, by the way! - few people will be reading this today.  So I thought, what the heck, I'll just write up something fun.  One of the things my family enjoys doing over the holidays is going to movies - inhaling in a big gulp all the good, award worthy stuff that's released this time of year.  So here's a list of our favorites, I'd love to hear yours!  The caveat:  there's a few I haven't seen yet - like True Grit - but I'm a giant fan of the original.  I was around 10 when it came out and was fascinated by Kim Darby's portrayal of a strong and sensible young woman.

In no particular order, here's what we enjoyed:

Toy Story 3 - Maybe my favorite of all of the movies.  I loved the writing, the humor, the characters, and the last scene is a killer.   I cried both times I saw it.  Maybe it hit me more because my kids have grown up with the movies and like Andy in the movie, are off to college, but any way you look at it this is a terrific movie.

The King's Speech  - I talked my Dad into seeing this with us.  He hasn't liked a movie since, say, Casablanca, but he liked this one.  We all did, a diverse family group, not all of whom were familiar with the royal story behind the perseverance of King George VI to overcome his stammer.  When we told my Dad what it was about, he said "Are you kidding?"  but he was a convert by the end.  And I'm a sucker for Colin Firth.  Nice touch:  Jennifer Ehle plays the speech therapist's wife, reuniting briefly on screen the all time best Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy.  Yum.  You may not recognize her with graying hair, but her beautiful face is the same.

Black Swan - my husband said "It's ballet porn!"  I loved it!  It's kind of over the top but of seen few better movies, ever, about the creative process.  And Swan Lake itself is so iconic, and the music is so gorgeous, there's lots to love here, especially for a ballet fan. But what about the end?  Anyone else seen it?  Do you think she dies...or not?

The Social Network - Loved the dialog, the characters, the acting, and the story, which was strangely fascinating.  It seemed like it would be boring but like Black Swan was a cool look at a different kind of creative process.  I liked how fast they talked and thought.

The Kids are Alright - What great acting, and a great portrayal of a family.  It felt so authentic, except for the part where Julianne Moore, in a committed relationship with Annette Benning, sleeps with a guy.  I realize this was a plot device but it was jarring.  Annette Benning was a heartbreaker, though, and I think I cried as much at this one as I did during Toy Story.

It's Kind of a Funny Story - I know this one disappeared quickly but if you an find it on Netflix or on demand, it's worth it.  While I wouldn't say it was great it was very sweet, nicely written, with characters you really felt for.  It's a story about a depressed teenager who, feeling suicidal, checks himself into the psych ward.  It's kind of like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest lite.

Easy A - Funny, Emma Stone is adorable, and it's a cool look at The Scarlet Letter.  Think Clueless with Hawthorne instead of Austen and you get the idea.  The plot concerns the cutest high school girl on the planet, Emma Stone, pretending to have sex with a gay friend to save his rep.  She finds she's hit a nerve, and she's branded a slut, and so starts wearing a red "A" on the new, slutty wardrobe she makes herself.  This girl is cool!

Please Give - This is actually towards the top of my list.  With one of my favorite actresses, Catherine Keener, playing the wife half of a couple who own a retro furniture store in NYC, the business side of their store was very familiar to me as a bookseller.  She and her husband are kind of waiting for their unpleasant next door neighbor to die so they can get her apartment and expand theirs. ( In a cool bit of casting, the old lady is played by the actress who played Millie Helper on The Dick Van Dyke Show.)  Keener is feeling very guilty about her privileged lifestyle and is constantly offering strangers on the street money, but she won't buy her daughter a new pair of jeans.  One of the things I loved about this movie is that it honored and illuminated every generation - teenager, young adult, middle age, and old age.  And the obligations and pull of family.  It's a beautifully written and acted movie.

And yeah, I saw Inception, and I thought it was kind of cool and dreamy but it didn't engage me on an emotional level.  I think it's a guy movie.

Happy New Year!  Here's hoping 2011 brings lots of great things for all.

 

 

An Interview with Kwei Quartey

Robin Agnew

Every now and then I read a book by a new author that gets me so fired up, I feel compelled to reach out and ask them a few questions.  Recently our book club read Kwei Quartey's first book, WIFE OF THE GODS - we all loved his setting, Ghana, and his realistically flawed Detective Darko.  I thought I'd share his interview with you as a kind of holiday gift - he has lots of interesting things to say about writing, living in Ghana, mysteries, and narrative structure.  This will also run on the Aunt Agatha's website next month.  Enjoy!

Q:  I think all strong novels start from three places - character, setting, and narrative.  What is your starting point? What's most important to you of the three?

A: I had to think about that for a moment, and then I realized that the starting point for me as a crime novelist is setting, but even more importantly, what murder(s) in that setting?   Where the murder occurs has a lot to do with the plotting, which will inform the narrative. Then the characters form and I keep building on them until they feel real to me within  the setting and in the murder's context. 

Q: Essentially you've written a locked room mystery - not in a literal sense, but because of where you placed the body there were few ways to approach it logistically.  Are you a devotee of classic old style puzzle mysteries at all?

A: Interesting. I never even thought of it that way. But yes, I love the locked room mysteries. The acknowledged master is John Dickson Carr, but Sir Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie did it as well, and all these three writers I read when I was a kid. It seems "locked rooms" are harder to write in this modern era, not the least of which because we don't have those marvelous drawing rooms much any more - at least we don't call them that - and the contrived nature of the locked room is sometimes hard to sell in our techno age.    

Q:  I of course loved the setting, which is not one that's been covered by mystery writers.  Did you grow up in Ghana, or spend time there?

A: Grew up in Ghana until I was about 18, then moved to the States with my mother, who is African American and was married to a Ghanaian. After my father died of pancreatic   cancer, my mother decided to return to her hometown, New York City, where her own mother lived. However, in order to write about modern Ghana, I had to, and will continue  to have to, frequently visit because of the rapidity with which changes are taking place in Ghana, particularly in the private sector.

Q: I DO think modern mysteries are about the "aftermath" of crime - and that's what you seem to be quite good at detailing, the sketching in of the way the victim's family is affected by her death, for example.  The last revelation leaves an aftermath for Detective Darko.  Will he be dealing with that in future books (if it's not giving anything away)?

A: I agree with you, and the murder's aftermath and how it affects those close to the victim is of particular interest to me. You'll see that again in the upcoming CHILDREN OF THE  STREET, release date July 12, 2011. I believe Darko will indeed be dealing with the revelation to which you refer, but I haven't yet decided exactly how. 

Q: I loved Detective Darko.  He's a character that should really have long legs - I think a long series will suit his strengths.  How did you come up with him?  I liked that he had some very human, yet understandable flaws - his anger, for example.

A: Much of him is pure invention while other parts subtly take elements from people I know, although it's not easy for me to concretely define which elements and from whom precisely. I don't have him completely figured out, which paradoxically I think is good. I like to puzzle over him sometimes, you know - what's he going to do now, or how will he  react to this situation? He shares some features with me - his interest in the deprived and downtrodden, for instance. He's liable to be irritated by unnecessary rules, and his    taking shortcuts around them can and does get him in trouble. I have neither his temper nor his tall stature - I wish I had the latter - but like him, I do tend to get depressed when I perceive I've failed at something. 

Q: The other books I have read set in Africa, while I have liked them (Michael Stanley, Alexander McCall-Smith) were by white authors.  Do you feel you are bringing a slightly different viewpoint to the table as far as that goes?
 A: That's a perceptive question that I think other interviewers don't bring up, consciously or unconsciously, and I appreciate your perspicacity. If you read and study at least one of your examples in comparison to my books, I think you will perceive differences in narrative that speak to my being a black man with a black African father and African-American mother, rather than a white man who grew up and/or spent time in Africa. Having said that, everything is still relative. For example, some Ghanaian critics of     WIFE OF THE GODS caustically commented to the effect that I was probably one of those privileged "American" kids in Ghana who lived in an upscale neighborhood and      wasn't fully "Ghanaian" - similar to the expression in African American circles in the US that a person is "not black enough." 

Q: That said, I actually see some similarities between Michael Stanley's Detective Kubu and your Detective Darko - they both have a strong home life, for example.  Not all contemporary mystery fiction characters have this attribute.  Was this something that was important to you in your portrayal of Darko as a person?

A:  In fact, Raymond Chandler said a really good detective never gets married, so I guess Darko is pretty much doomed to failure. But seriously, I think this aspect is quite important to me on a number of levels. I like the "refuge" Darko's family life provides not only for him, but for the readers and me the writer, and I mean refuge from the grisly, gritty world of crime that Darko goes out to confront. In CHILDREN OF THE STREET in particular, there are raw, graphic scenes that are hard to take. I don't want Darko to leave those scenes  only to return to an empty, somber home, or even worse, a strife-ridden household. If you have downer material relentlessly slogging at you without respite, it can get grim and exhausting. I don't think I need to depress my readers. Another aspect I enjoy is the tension between Darko's faithfulness to his wife Christine and the ever-present temptation of at least one drop-dead gorgeous woman he will encounter in every case he tackles (that's a promise). Finally, his fatherhood may have something complicated to do with my own psyche  as a non-father. I'm not sure I want to dig any deeper than that right now, if you see what I mean.  

Q: In shaping your first book, what are some of the lessons you learned as a writer?  Are these skills that you'll be taking forward as you continue writing your books?

A:  When I submitted my first draft to my agent-to-be Marly Rusoff, she pointed out that I'd laid the groundwork for so many story threads - for example, the heart disease of his  son Hosiah and his rocky relationship with his mother-in-law, but that I hadn't followed through with them to the end, even though they had potential for some good stuff. As I went back through the manuscript to build those storylines, I found I had one or two superfluous and expendable characters. It's not the number of characters that increase the complexity of the story, it's the quality of the characters and the world they bring with them. So each character should be a person of interest, not just a useless appendage. As  I tried to rewrite the  novel by inserting and removing material, I realized I was only making it tougher for myself. I threw the entire first draft out and started fresh at page 1, which was pretty daunting, but it had to be done. So one of the lessons is: only as many characters as you minimally need.

 Funnily enough, I discovered something else after the publication of WIFE OF THE GODS. My agent and publisher Random House caught me somewhat by surprise when they one day asked me for the synopsis for the second book. Uh, synopsis? Oh, yeah, that. Sure, no problem, I can have that for you in a week or so. I almost killed myself trying to come up with it in a week. I finished it at 3AM on the day I was to submit it. Unlike the way I'd written the first novel, I found that writing from a synopsis made          production of the book faster. I finished the CHILDREN OF THE STREET first draft in three-and-a-half months, which, compared to WIFE OF THE GODS, is blistering speed.  So this is the way I intend to do all my subsequent novels. By the way, many writers do not write from a synopsis.

Q: There's some heartbreaking material in this book.  I always wonder if that kind of thing is hard to write, especially the injustice that occurs in the prison.  That was hard to simply read about.  Was that very difficult for you to write?

A: Painful is a better word. Some of these events developed in the story without my realizing they were going to happen. This is when the story is writing itself. So at that point,  my fingers are flying over the keyboard trying to keep up with the unfolding tale. The scene is flowing, but so are my tears. When I get tearful as I'm writing a scene, I tend to  over-write it, and I usually have to come back later to moderate it when I'm less emotional.

Regarding the prison episode in WIFE OF THE GODS, it arose from two components - one real, one fictional. In the excellent British TV crime series Prime Suspect, an imprisoned young man comes to the same tragic end as the wrongly accused teen in my story. That scene deeply affected me when I was watching the series. The other component was my own experience as a young student in Ghana during the then military regime when I was imprisoned for political activism.

Q:Do you have literary or mystery influences?  Who are they?

A: Everything I read as a boy: Sir Conan Doyle, John Dickson Carr, John Creasy, Agatha Christie, Enid Blyton (a children's mystery writer), Kingsley Amis, Doris Lessing, and Chinua Achebe. Note how a good number in that list are mystery writers. As a boy growing up in Ghana, an ex-British colony, much of what I read was penned by British authors. I was writing at 8 or 9-years-old, so the influences were established early.

Q: Finally, what's next for Darko?  What will he be dealing with in his next adventure?
A:  In CHILDREN OF THE STREET, the next Darko Dawson novel, he's challenged by murder in the environment of a serious and real problem that exists in Ghana's modern-day capital, Accra as well as other urban areas: homeless children who live on the streets. They come from local communities or rural areas, and it's not a world for the faint-hearted. The kids have to be tough, and they are, but is one of them a murderer? There are other questions: what will happen to Hosiah with his congenital heart      disease, is Darko still wrestling with his addiction to marijuana, and how is he managing with his contentious mother-in-law?

Tentatively planned for the third novel (I'm trying to think ahead, like JK Rowling) is crime in Ghana's brand new world of oil exploration and discovery. As long as I can physically and mentally write, I'll keep doing so.

 

 

 

What makes a cozy....good?

Robin Agnew 

My reading spans a variety of different types of mysteries.  I enjoy Elaine Viets as much as I enjoy Michael Connelly, for example.  Too often, "cozies", for want of a better term, are somewhat dismissed, and I think very unfairly.  For one thing, done well, they are one of the more entertaining and comforting segments of our beloved genre.  If you're sad or lonely I doubt you'll pick up the latest Ken Bruen, but you might turn to Ann Purser.  That's not a light responsibility, cozy writers.  What makes this genre so entertaining, and even more, what makes it good?  What makes it worthwhile?

There's a few rules of thumb I thought of that make a cozy good for me.

1.  Sidebar characters.  In a poorly done cozy, there are indeed many sidebar characters, but they are often indistinguishable from one another.  At the end of the book, one of these sidebar characters may be the guilty party, but you're forced to flip back, because you simply can't remember which is which.  In a well done cozy, not only are the sidebar characters memorable, but they are a key component of the story.  The story would not function without them.

2.  As an addendum to sidebar characters, in a poorly done cozy the romantic interest of the main character is often introduced in a way that makes you think (unless you have read other books of this type) that they don't actually like each other.  To the savvy reader, the world weary cop/P.I. with a mustache is actually the love interest, no matter how much the characters may seem to fight it.  In a well done cozy any romance is developed off to the side and over time.  

3.  In a well done cozy, the plot turns are somewhat unexpected and surprising.  I don't demand that I actually gasp in surprise as I read, but it's a nice touch.  Any part of any story that takes a somewhat unexpected turn is a welcome one.  In a poorly done cozy, the plot turns are often extremely predictable.  Going into an empty house alone if you are accompanied female - and nobody knows where you are - is a big no-no!  It takes a spectacular writer to pull off the female alone in the woods/house/old building.  Just don't do it.  Please.

5.  Subversiveness.  In a well done cozy, the main character often has a bit of a subversive element.  Think of the original cozy character, Miss Marple.  Miss Marple was dismissed because of her age and her knitting and her nosy ways, but unseen by everyone else she saw everything.  She is not someone to be toyed with.  A modern example of this would be Elaine Viets' Helen Hawthorne.  Because Helen works "dead end" jobs, she is as unseen as Miss Marple - and just as dangerous.

6.  Finally, what's good about cozies?  What makes them worthwhile?  Like every kind of well done writing, there's some kind of discovery to be made.  Because the discoveries in a cozy may seem to be more small scale - they often unearth the secrets of domestic life  - they are dismissed, just like Miss Marple.  But I think that's a mistake.  Cozy writers are chronicling life as we are living it.  Just as Agatha Christie was a master at dissecting manners and class in a light way, many excellent contemporary cozy writers are doing the same thing.  The themes may seem small, but sometimes they are the biggest of all.  As my brilliant husband once said of one of Celia Fremlin's characters, she may have been a doormat, but the doormat is the toughest mat in the house.

Who are your favorites?  I have mine, and like everyone else's, I bet it's a pretty personal and idiosyncratic list.  I'd love to know.

A Little Help, Here, Please...

Robin Agnew

I guess in my job I'm insulated from certain things.  For a woman, reaching a "certain age" often also means "invisible", especially if you resist hair color, as I do.  In my job many of my own customers are woman of, ahem, a certain age - I often actually feel young - so this is not something I give a thought to too often.  I admit when a kind of cool looking rasta type on the street said "Old grey head!  You a librarian?"  I was taken aback but I go about my day to day business sometimes actually relishing being invisible.

This is not always the case, however.  I was in a Best Buy recently looking for a wireless router because ours had died.  And there you have the extent of my knowledge of wireless routers.  I was standing there looking cluelessly as a box containing, probably, a wireless router, but I had no idea.  My husband had confidently told me that morning "Oh, just go to Best Buy.  They'll be happy to tell you which is a good one."

As I stood, lonely and unloved, I noticed a fellow wearer of the invisibility cloak, a nice, intelligent, eyeglass wearing, grey hair sporting woman of a fellow "certain age."  We nodded to each other in absolute recognition, and since no one else was talking to us, we approached each other.  Hardly a word needed to be spoken, as we knew what was on each other's minds.  We were doomed to complete cluelessness and lack of assistance.

My fellow traveler said, "Just watch, they'll go help all the guys first."  She was mostly right, but they also made a beeline for an attractive much younger woman (watch it baby, your cloak is coming).  After those all had been helped an employee finally noticed us standing there and came over to help.

He helpfully explained that there were several kinds of routers - "G" and "N'  ("nice" and "good"?  Just asking) and apparently he helped me pick an acceptable choice as my husband seemed satisfied with my selection.  As I was checking out I noticed the attractive young woman breezing ahead of me through the door, her purchase complete.

In the "Princess Diaries" someone actually sits on Princess Mia without noticing her before her makeover moment.  She also is invisible before she dons her tiara.  Well, I'm here to tell you, I am far too old for a tiara, but being old has certain perks.  I feel much free-er about speaking up and when I do, I don't mind NOT mincing my words.  So if you hear a squawk coming out of an apparently uninhabited corner, watch out.  It's probably just an intelligent grey haired woman of a certain age.

Does it ruin the book if...

Robin Agnew

What ruins a read for you?  What will you put up with - what "x" makes "y" worthwhile?  I recently finished a book where I mostly liked the characters; I thought the dialogue was pretty good, and the writing original; but for me it was ruined because I thought the actual crime was boring.

This is rare.  I will put up with almost anything (or so I thought) if there are good, interesting, complicated characters driving the story, but it turns out the crime in a crime novel is pretty important - to me at least.  I've only read a few mysteries where the crime was actually dull, and it must actually take some work on the part of an author to pull it off, so a half hearted "bravo" to this particular author, who shall remain nameless.

A few rules I seem to have mentally established (authors, are you taking notes?): the crime should involve interesting characters.  You may not know anything about the dead person when he/she is killed, but it's essential to learn something about them either before or after the crime.  Otherwise, you might as well be reading the police blotter (admittedly this is often entertaining.  A recent favorite of mine was 3 people calling 911 when they saw a man attacking his parrot - yes, his parrot - near a local park).

It shouldn't be NEEDLESSLY complicated.  I realize as far as mystery plotting goes, complicatons are the very spice of life, but I read one novel where every possible detail surrounding the crime was so darn tricky and complicated that by the time I got to the end of the book I didn't say "aha", I said "Phew!  I'm finished!"  Again, a tricky line to straddle - I remember finishing Minette Walter's The Echo and wanting to start it over immediately - same with David Ellis' In the Company of Liars. Some complications are welcome.

A certain amount of gore is OK.  I have discarded a few authors when I thought it was gratuitous or over the top, and this is probably a matter of taste.  Sometimes a graphically violent book substitutes the graphic stuff for actual plot and character.  Blood does not equal an interesting crime or crime novel, but there should be some.

The novel I mentioned above - which I finished about 5 days ago - was so interestingly written I can recall certain passages, but I cannot for the life of me recall the crime. The author made the crime needlessly complicated and obscure, and then salted it over with some humor.  It may have been thought out but it was so deeply buried in the text I simply didn't care by the time I got to the end of the story.

A example of a "good" crime is Peter Robinson's recent Bad Boy, where he takes a pretty surface simple crime, and then he shades it in.  I won't soon forget the travails of Inspector Bank's daughter.  Or Louise Penny's Fatal Grace, where the person murdered is quickly established as so totally rotten that you're not only pleased she's dead, you kind of hope the killer will get away with it.

What "x" ruins "y" for you?

 

Facebook & quotations

Robin Agnew

Sometimes I'm puzzled by what the uses of facebook and social networks in general might be, but setting up a page for Aunt Agatha's was one way it made sense to me.  I was struggling to figure out what to post on the page that would make it different from the store website, and I hit upon adding a quote every day.  They vary in popularity - sometimes I'm surprised by what gets a lot of comments, but the pithier ones seem to have more appeal than the "poetic" ones.  In any case, there's no denying that mystery writers are a profound bunch.  Here's a list of our top 10 favorites according to our facebook followers.  Enjoy!

10.  "I have thrown all reason out the window and got knocked up by a manic depressive mobster." - Alexis Davis on GENERAL HOSPITAL

9.  "You would be surprised to know how much unnecessary worry a simple policy of polite disinterest can save one." - More Work for the Undertaker, Margery Allingham, 1948

8. ""No one ever got in trouble keeping his mouth shut." - Fifty-Two Pickup, Elmore Leonard, 1974

7  "Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading." - A Judgement in Stone, Ruth Rendell, 1977

6.  "Getting kisses out of a woman is like getting olives out of a bottle.  The first may be devilish difficult, but the rest come easy." - The Scarlet Imposter, Dennis Wheatly, 1940

5.   "Coincidence exists, but believing in it never did me any good." - Pale Kings and Princes, Robert B. Parker, 1987

4.  "He's been dragging red herrings around this house until it smells like fisherman's wharf." - The Affair of the Fainting Butler, Clifford Knight, 1943

2.  "The trouble with mornings is that they come when you're not awake." - Three for the Chair, Rex Stout, 1957

3.   ""Horse sense is the instinct that keeps horses from betting on men."  - The Franchise Affair, Josephine Tey, 1948

2.  "Librarians are wonderful people.  They should be in the detective buisness." - The Chinese Doll, William Tucker, 1946

1.  "God, in his bounty and generosity, always creates more horses' asses than there are horses to attach them to." - Metzger's Dog, Thomas Perry, 1983

 

Our favorite events of all time

Robin Agnew

Originally, I thought this would be a list of my five favorite author events, but we've been open 18 years now.  That's a lot of events.  Some of these were great just for sheer volume but most of them are memorable or interesting for different reasons.  It's weird to be able to look back so far now - some of these authors have died, or are out of print.  But they live on for me.  This list is (roughly) chronological.

1.  Alzina Stone Dale  Alzina Stone Dale writes "Walking Tour" books, but she also wrote a very nice, concise bio of Dorothy Sayers.  She came to sign it in conjunction with the book club reading of Gaudy Night.  Merely the fact that we were reading Gaudy Night drew a lot of people, but Alzina was so lively and interesting she got people all fired up over her book - we ran out of copies as people (politely, they were Sayers fans, after all) fought over the ones we had.  It was great fun.

2. Craig Holden  Holden's first book, The River Sorrow, got lots of attention.  He was the first author I read about in the paper and contacted out of the blue because I thought he sounded cool.  We didn't have a huge turnout, but he arrived ready to sign in his Burberry trenchcoat.  As did Loren Estleman.  Same trenchcoat.  He came by to "meet the new guy", but I think he was checking out the competition, as Craig had gotten so much press.  What stays in my head are the two of them kind of mentally circling each other, like predatory lions.

3. Kate Ross, Sujata Massey and Lev Rahapel  This was set up by Lev, who is local (sort of), and who said he was bringing along his "friend", Sujata.  Cool friend!  I became a huge fan.  What made it special though was that the stars aligned and Kate Ross, whose wondrous book The Devil in Music had just come out, was able to join them.  It was a nice, casual event, with Lev and Sujata chatting away (Sujata was making fun of Lev's cover, I think) and all of a sudden Kate appeared.  This was not too long before she died, but she radiated intelligence.  She couldn't stay very long, but it was really kind of magical to meet her.  Conversation sort of stopped when she arrived.  If there was ever an author I felt extreme regret about not being able to talk to longer, she was it.  

4. Steve Hamilton This event was also with Lev Raphael, as it happened.  Both of them had new books out - Steve's was A Cold Day in Paradise - and while Lev is pretty comfortable speaking in public, I don't think Steve started out that way.  The event was at a library, and I was sitting there with Lev and the librarian, chatting before the event started, when we saw Steve drive up.  Then Steve drove away.  I make no assumptions, but there was a bar down the street.  When he did show up, he seemed pretty relaxed, though that first signing, it was Lev who did most of the talking.  Of course I wish I'd ordered a couple of cases of A Cold Day in Paradise, but you live and learn.  Steve has since gotten a lot more relaxed about speaking in public!

5. Deborah Morgan  Writer Deborah Morgan is married to Loren Estleman, but when she is signing books, he tends to stay in the background.  Or he makes the gracious attempt.  This was a cozy event with Debi and Sharon Fiffer, who both write about antiques, so the discussion was interesting, and the two women had nice chemistry.  Loren made a few comments from the cheap seats in the back, but it really ended up being a discussion that involved everyone present.  It was a really sweet event.

6. Detroit Noir Launch Party This was a blast because I basically went through the table of contents and started inviting all the local authors.  The editors were friends, and they apparently also got the word out.  The authors I invited and had heard from showed up - around 7 or 8 of them - but then other authors started to show up.  By the time all was said and done, I think we had 15 authors through the door, we ran out of books, and Loren Estleman got black icing on his teeth from the "noir" cake.  We ran out of books around the time the last author, Lolita Hernandez, turned up.  She said, "Did I miss the wine?"  with a real note of panic in her voice.  Thank god we had wine left...this one was fun for the sheer chaos.

7. Megan Abbott and Mitchell Bartoy  While Mitch's books are out of print, he and Megan are pals and they are two of the truest "noir" writers I can think of, and they have a great chemistry together.  They are also two of the smartest writers I can think of.  The evening was topped off (for me at least) with Megan quizzing Mitch about his characters and his need to "imprint them with stigmata."  I think that's the basic gist, anyway.  This was not a well attended event, but it was spectacular.  I still regret that Mitch didn't find a larger audience as his books are really wonderful.

8. Elmore Leonard  Do I need to say more?  He was interviewed, along with his son, Peter, by Loren Estleman at the library, we draw 250+ people, and the evening ended with the 3 men discussing their favorite movies.  

9.  Steve Hamilton, Kent Krueger and Julia Spencer-Fleming  These are three of my favorite writers, the stars aligned, and they were able to all come on the same day.  It was our 15th anniversary of being in business, and we couldn't have celebrated it in a better fashion.   Julia squeaked into town in the nick of time on the notoriously late Amtrak.

10. Deborah Crombie  Again, another all time favorite writer.  I simply love her books.  When I picked her up at the airport, I felt I could die happy.

11.  Louise Penny  The first time she visited (with her second book) she and her husband came and ate dinner with the suddenly very expanded book club before the event.  As anyone who has met Louise and Michael knows, they are two of the nicest people on the planet, the book club fell in love, and I don't think any of us have recovered.

12.  J.A. Konrath introduces Rob Kantner  Rob Kantner is big in Michigan, as his books are set here, and he's notoriously difficult to get to come to sign books.  He's very shy.  The outgoing Konrath, a fan, wrote an intro to Rob's book of short stories, and, even better, he got Rob to show up.  We had a lot of Kantner acolytes at the event, and we had a nice time in the bar when it was over.

13.  Peter Robinson    Peter was just supposed to be doing a noontime "drive by" but when he arrived and saw the 40 or 50 people jammed into the store, his face fell.  He had had a rough morning - early flight, no food, ditsy driver - but when I offered to get him tea and a cheese bun, he started to perk up.  Then when he met the audience, who were in awe of him and immediately started telling him how great he was and how much they loved him, he warmed up completely.  (As who wouldn't?)  I love his books, and I loved having him in the store.

14.  Maureen Jennings and Cordelia Biddle.   I love both women's books but the real highlight was when sweet, kind of shy Maureen got up and sang a little ditty about Hitler in the bathtub.  It was hilarious.  The evening was continued when along with Maureen's husband, Iden, they joined us and my mother at our house for dinner.  The stories were fantastic, and I wish I'd had a tape recorder.

15.  Gerald Elias  Gerald Elias is a concert violinist who happens to also write very good traditional mysteries (though he asked me what that term meant) set in, unsurprisingly, the classical music world.  But the really cool thing about Gerry is that he travels with his "fiddle", in reality an 18th century violin which he played all too briefly.  It was absolutely magical.  Other than the street noise, you could have heard a pin drop in the store.

I'm looking forward to more memories.  Coming up soon is Gary Corby, a fellow ice skating fan who happens to have a new book out about Ancient Greece, The Pericles Commission.  Stay tuned!

 

 

 

 

 

Goin' on a Treasure Hunt

Robin Agnew

Recently my husband went to an estate sale and came away with several boxes full of books, many of them hard to find Simenon and John Dickson Carr titles, in various editions and conditions.  The used book biz varies a good deal from the new book biz in two central ways:  pricing depends on supply, and availability fluctuates.  While my husband hits up the Ann Arbor Library sale every week, the real treasures are often found when he gets a call from his antique dealer friend, telling him "I'm going through a house."

While many of these books are mass market paperbacks, some of them are very old paperbacks, actually collectible, as is a pocket book edition of Carr's It Walks By Night from October, 1941.  Astonishingly, the paper it's printed on it still bright white and it's in lovely shape.

Many of them are more run of the mill paperbacks, but still an excellent addition to our shelves since, as I've mentioned, availability of used books fluctuates wildly.  There's not a warehouse where you can order up a dozen copies of Carr's The Corpse in the Waxworks, but now we have one on the shelf.

And as I price books there are always surprises.  I use the ABE books website, where dealers from all over heck list their wares.  If, for example, you call up a common title, say Lee Child's The Enemy, probably hundreds will surface, and they'll start at a dollar.  But with more unusual and scarcer titles, the prices vary wildly, and as I wait each time for the screen to pop up, I am always amazed at what's hard to find and what isn't so hard to find.  

I was surprised this time around when I looked up some International Polygonics hardcovers from the early 90's, with introductions by Douglas Greene (who came to the store once, to shop, when we first opened.  Boy, would I love to pick his brain NOW).  These are scare and the prices start at $99 and go up from there.  I like to stay reasonable myself, though, and always lowball my prices.  A sale, after all, is a sale.

In one of them I found a Borders receipt from January of 1992, which only made me think about how much the book business has changed (92 was one of the years, in fact, when my husband was a clerk at the original Borders, which truly was a great bookstore).  Borders now probably wouldn't carry this book at all, as the press is too small, and Carr is too much of an oddball writer to attract anyone but the serious aficionado.

Serious aficionados, we're here to serve.   And we've gone through the dusty basements of Ann Arbor to do so! 

 

What is Noir?

Guest blogger Jamie Agnew is the co-owner of Aunt Agatha's.

What is noir? It's such an overused and amorphous term that I'm tempted to answer, as Louie Armstrong did when asked a similar question about jazz, if you don't know by now, don't mess with it.  But when I think about noir in the same way as other modernist movements like, say, Impressionism or Bebop, there appears the glimmer of an answer. Since the French critics coined the term after the fact, in the beginning for movies and then the hard-boiled literary work which inspired many of them, the people who originated noir had no idea they were doing so, followed no rules, wrote no manifestoes and joined no professional organizations. Still, it can be associated with a specific time frame shaped by historical influences, starting with the materialism and nervous, jittery doomed gaiety of the twenties, continuing with the grim thirties and finding full flower in the disillusionment of post World War Two America. Add to this psychological background the massive rise in literacy, and the profusion of cheap pulp magazines consumed by guys with a taste for short, brutal fiction and the time to indulge that taste because they were out of work or in the downtime of war. Anybody who could crank out such fiction fast enough could make a precarious living out of it, and in fact their fiction gained immediacy and power by emerging so immediately from the subconscious. The historical movement died with the pulps, it's vitality withering, as is the case with many other things, at the moment it was named and codified. To me you can't really speak of contemporary writers as being noir, but only of having noir tendencies in their work.

Which brings me to an anthology that has the temerity to call itself The Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy and Otto Penzler, two individuals who have more than enough chutzpah to make such pronouncements. The first obvious thing about the book is how weighted it is to the present day. Even though in his introduction Penzler locates the golden age of noir in the forties and fifties, there are only three stories from the former and six from the latter while the nineties and two thousands produce ten each. Perhaps he intends other books he's edited like the just published The Black Lizard Book of Black Mask Stories to pick up the slack on the old guys, but any book claiming to be the best noir and not include Lester Dent's "Sail" doesn't really live up to the title, and I'm sure there are many more vintage gems that deserve to be included more than some of the contemporary, presumably more commercial, offerings. Noir may literally mean black, but just because a story is dark, or has a downbeat ending, it ain't necessarily noir. In my opinion the only two contemporary writers who approach true noir status are Ellroy and Megan Abbot, and Abbot isn't even represented here. Instead for some unaccountable reason the reader is subjected to Harlan Ellison's tedious not even close to noir "Mefisto In Onyx," and, as in so many mystery anthologies, the inappropriate Joyce Carol Oates is trotted out like a desiccated but aristocratic maiden aunt presumed to class up the proceedings.

Noir has become the talismanic force it has because it is visionary - in the world of the noir holy trinity of Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Cornell Woolrich it isn't just the good guys versus the bad guys, but an almost Gnostic view of nature, humanity and society itself as inherently malevolent. In the best stories in this collection "Spurs," by Tom Robbins, "For the Rest of Her Life" by  Woolrich and "When the Women Come Out to Dance" by Elmore Leonard the conclusion of the story brings the epiphany that the protagonist is in hell right here right now, and the torment threatens to be pretty close to eternal. Not enough of these stories live up to them, at least not enough to be called the best, particularly the more high toned literary gents at the end.

Which doesn't mean, of course, that I didn't read or reread all of the stories in this volume and enjoy most of them. In truth, it's a pretty darn good collection of creepy, perverse dark fiction. If only it weren’t called The Best American Noir of the Century.  

 

A Couple Great Books

Robin Agnew

Every year, I read LOTS of great stuff.  Sometimes it's astonishing how much great writing there is out there.  And some of these books, despite their obvious excellence (and my enthusiastic recommendation of same, natch) just don't grab the audience they should grab.  So, doing my part to support me beloved genre, here's a few I've read this year that I thought were knockouts.

Frozen Stiff, Mary Logue.   I flat out love Mary Logue, and I haven't missed a series entry yet.  There are seven books in this wonderful series (one that's found Logue bounced around from publisher to publisher, she's now with Tyrus Books) and they all build on one another, though any book in the series can stand on it's own.  Her central character, Claire Watkins, is a deputy in a tiny Wisconsin town; she's left the Twin Cities because of a personal tragedy (the death of her husband).  She's raising a daughter and lives with pheasant farmer Rick.  Her true skill is rocket powered story telling.  In this outing a man stumbles out of his sauna into a deathly cold winter night, to be found by his wife in the morning.  Was it too late?  Read it and see.  Any acquaintance you make with the talented Logue is bound to be a happy one.

The End Game, Gerrie Ferris Finger.  This is a terrific first novel.  It won the St. Martin's Malice Domestic prize, but it's not really a cozy, though it has a traditional structure.  It's about a woman who finds missing children; in the opening sequence her cop boyfriend is called to a fire where the adults have been killed, but their two foster daughters are missing.  Finger has several strong aces up her sleeve:  she's very adept at describing the tiny Atlanta neighborhood where the fire occurred; without you really realizing it, her main character has visited every suspect in turn, and while she's done that, she's sketched in neighborhood loyalties and ties.  To satisfy traditionalists there's a locked room mystery and clues that involve train whistles.  Her material is pretty dark, but her writing soars. A very original and memorable debut.

Snakes Can't Run, Ed Lin.  Following my police procedural passion, I heard Ed Lin speak on a panel at Bouchercon and was captivated.  I was equally captivated by his book.  Set in the 70's, his central character is a Chinese cop who is a Vietnam Vet.  The breakdown of the Chinese class system is exquisite; and in truly noir fashion, nothing is what is seems, and no one can be trusted, except maybe Lin's cool cop, Robert Chow, caught between the America he grew up in, and his Chinese cultural roots.  This is a knockout.

The Good Son, Michael Gruber.  Wild premise?  Check.  Thoughtful consideration of, in this case, the war in Afghanistan?  Check.  Interesting, memorable writing?  Check.  Characters you can't forget?  Check.  All of Michael Gruber's books are mind benders and this one is no exception, though it's more immediately topical than his usual fare.  The main character is a special forces black ops guy who grew up in Pakistan.  His mother is infamous for dressing as a boy, going on a haj,  and writing a bestselling book about it.  While Gruber is always concerned with story -  this one kicks off when the mother is taken hostage in Pakistan  - he usually has another issue on his mind.  In this one, the differences between Muslim and Western culture.  He takes a look at the validity of each and poses the question: why can't our two sides get along?  It's also a thoughtful look at religion.  Oh, and you won't be able to put it down.

What these books all share is a very vivid view of whatever and wherever they're writing about, be it Wisconsin or Atlanta or Chinatown or Afghanistan.  Who says mysteries don't grow your mind?  Get reading, people!

 

Kerrytown BookFest, Part Deux

Robin Agnew

Usually I write a bookfest blow by blow in this space, but this year we on the bookfest board were spared some of the more onerous physical labor that we've had to do in the past and I could focus more on the actual selling of books.  It's never been an afterthought after all the time I spend programming the day, but sometimes our actual store booth is an afterthought, and my husband and I (and kids) are caught running back and forth to the author's tent with boxes of books to sell.

This year I took a more coordinated approach to the whole matter.  I had my programming locked down early and I started splitting bookselling duties with another local bookseller, Nicola.  After that my wheels again began to turn:  why not program our booth just as I had programmed the author's tent?

I started to fill it in in half hour increments, and was helped mightily by the fact that the first two panels of the day were all mystery authors.  In addition, Loren Estleman, our Community Book Award winner, had a brand spanking new collection of Amos Walker stories available.  Available because on the Friday evening of bookfest weekend, I drove to Thompson-Shore, the printers (who happily are local) and picked up 25 copies.  By the skin of my teeth.  They closed at 4:30 and I was there at 4:45.  Luckily the delightful Angie was still in the building and she cheerfully loaded two boxes of books into the car.

Saturday I had about 50 of the speakers and their families over for a drink and dinner and lots of conversation.  I ended that evening sharing a beer with Steve Hamilton and Bryan Gruley, feeling very short, and listening to them talk about hockey and the Shamus awards.

Thanks to my turning wheels, the booth schedule became more and more filled up, and the latter part of the day took on a car theme.  (We ARE near Detroit).  This year, Dan Johnson, an author with another brand new book out, The Detroit Electric Scheme, a mystery about the early workings of the car business (circa 1910 or so) brought a friend who brought his 1916 electric car.  It was gorgeous, and made me think we always need a prop of one kind or another, as people were walking around it admiringly all day.

I had scheduled myself a free hour at the end of the day to walk through and look at all the other exhibitor's booths - we have 110 or so, which pretty much fills up the Ann Arbor Farmer's Market.  Little did I realize that by the end of the day, by dint of running from the tent to the booth to our other venue across the street I not only looked as beautiful as the road runner but my legs probably felt pretty much like his did.  A little rubbery.

I did get to take a walk through though and was impressed by the variety, from jewelry to notebooks made from old album covers to fairy wands to, or course, lots and lots of books, many of them of the used variety. Most of the sellers I talked to seemed pleased, and I hope they were.

The program overall was certainly successful.  The panels were all full - a dream I've had since I started to help with programming 7 years ago - and Nicola mentioned to me that the program was almost too good.  There was almost too much going on.  

And the Thursday after, when I was doing the inevitable return routine, I encountered yet another bookseller - looking for the Amos Walker book - who had also moderated a panel.  He looked at all the boxes that covered the store and he said, "That's the book business, isn't it?  You stack up the books, you pack them up, you sell them, you move them somewhere else, you send them back."  I heartily agreed.

While returns were many so were sales, and we left with a much lighter car than we'd started with.  We also estimated about 4,000 people enjoyed the day, many of them friends - lots of librarians who had come to town for the day to spend it shopping and enjoying hearing their favorite authors speak.

Friday morning, we started talking about next year's event.  2011, here we come!

Kerrytown BookFest

Robin Agnew

I've been a part of the Kerrytown BookFest for seven years now, the first year as an exhibitor only (that was a fun and relaxing year!)  The rest of the time I've been a board member, now in charge of programming.

Some years programming is a dream, other years it's more difficult.  There are so many wrong ways to put a panel together, and I think I've done them all, but I've gotten steadily better.  It's always a chemistry experiment:  how will the panelists interact?  Will they spark off one another, or will it be a flat discussion?  That's beyond my control, though I try to bring togather good matches.

Last year our topic was food - we ended up with a great line-up, but it was difficult to program, as that is something completely out of any area of expertise of mine.  This year our topic - Michigan - was far more broad ranging and programming went like a dream.  My parameters were writers who live in Michigan, write about Michigan, or were from Michigan.  I have talent travelling from as far away as Duluth, Minnesota and Cottekill, New York, but they all, one way or another, have a Michigan connection.

Practically everyone I asked said "yes", and we have speakers raging from Loren Estleman to Thomas Lynch to Steve Hamilton to David Small.  If you think you don't know who David Small is, but you have teenage kids - google him - you've read aloud a David Small book, I guarantee it!  As I programmed I also found other speakers who cited David as a mentor, which seemed like a lovely circle to me.

While I feel this year we have one of our very strongest panel lineups, with all the panels being focused and interesting, it's always hard to tell.  I have learned over the year that each panel needs to have a fairly narrow focus, and it's best to keep the panel to 4 people so if one cancels, you still have 3.  (And there are always cancellations, it's part of life.)  We have also found that focusing the programming as a whole is more interesting and helps to draw people with a particular interest.

And to the panelist who cancelled a trip to Shanghai to attend the bookfest: your Vodka Soda awaits, special glass and all.  Thanks to everyone who is participating and hopefully attending - it all takes place at the Ann Arbor Farmer's Market on Sunday, September 12 from 11-5.  Visit www.kerrytownbookfest.org for a complete schedule.  

 

Sounds like Heaven

Robin Agnew

We had a celestial event the other evening, an event I had almost forgotten about in the whirl of preparation for the Kerrytown BookFest, which is next Sunday.  Our store is full of boxes of books written by the authors attending that festival, but I agreed to squeeze Mr. Elias in when his St. Martin's publicist gave me a call.

Then she sent me the books, which were a delightful surprise.  Hopefully lots of you will hear of Gerald Elias eventually as his book are really wonderful.  They're really traditional mysteries set in the classical music world, not surprisingly, as Mr. Elias is himself a concert violinst.

I approached the books also with some trepidation.  Veering over from another career doesn't automatically assure that you'll also be a good writer (unless you were already a journalist, and there are certainly many examples from that field).  Writing is a craft like any other craft.  However, Mr. Elias is a very skillful writer.  His books have narrative drive, a great main character and a wonderful setting.  Plus he has that indefinable "something" which marks a natural writer.  A turn of phrase, a use of prsoe that's particularly deft.  He seems to be the real deal.

At dinner he talked about his affection for Donna Leon and the fact that long rehearsals (he's the associate concertmaster with the Utah symphony) gave his mind freedom to plan his books, as do long car drives.  He was toting his "fiddle", a surprisingly casual appellation for his beautiful 18th century instrument.

Part of the reason I had agreed to host the event was that his publicist told me he'd be playing his violin.  I figured that would help me reach out to the musical community in some way, but several of my book club members were also intrigued when I told them about the event.

On the actual evening, the store filled up with book club members, as well as various musicians Gerry had known for a long time, including a woman he'd gone to college with.  He seemed to relax as his friends turned up: his world was in place.  He talked for awhile, a typical author talk, but then he got out his violin.

It was completely magical.  My lack of knowledge when it comes to classical music is fairly vast, but when Gerry picked up his violin it simply didn't matter.  In our crowded store, you could have heard a pin drop. It was a shame when he had to stop playing.  It was one of those moments that make me extremely grateful to do what I do, and that I get to meet the people I get to meet.

It was also a "perfect" event - we sold every book!