Going Clubbing

It doesn't officially open until tomorrow, but Charles Ardai has unhooked the velvet rope so you can take a sneak peek at his latest venture: the Barnes and Noble.com "Crime Book Club." From the club's intro page:

Join us and guest moderator, Charles Ardai, author and publisher of the wildly popular Hard Case Crime Series, for weekly discussion centered on the art of crime fiction ranging from its recent dramatic renaissance to its historical roots and powerful manifestations in film and the culture at large. We will be joined by a revolving crew of some of today’s most noteworthy practitioners of the deadly craft, including Ken Bruen, Jason Starr, Allan Guthrie, Charlie Huston, Duane Swierczynski, and Megan Abbott.

Not sure how I managed to squeeze into a stellar lineup like that; I feel like the dumpy guy who somehow got past the bouncers at Studio 54. But I won't say anything if you won't.

Anyway, please do drop by www.bn.com/crime. There's no cover charge, but you do have to register.

And once you're in, remember: Allan Guthrie doesn't give lap dances as freely as he used to. You'll have to romance him a bit, and tell him how much you love Day Keene and Peter Rabe. After that, he'll be like warm butter.

No, I'm Not in Alaska

I do wish I could have made it to Bouchercon this year, but it just wasn't to be. I think this time last year, Al "Sunshine" Guthrie and I had just stumbled into our shared room in Madison, Wisconsin to discover... um, a single bed. Never so quickly was a call made to a front desk in a hotel to beg for a cot. (Ah, Madison. Good times.)

But that doesn't mean I'm all mopey. In fact, looking back the past 16 hours, I have to say it was a pretty damn good day. By way of proof:

* This morning I edited next week's cover story for the City Paper, written my good friend Edward Pettit. It's the lead story in our Fall Book Quarterly, and it's a riot. (In a geeky, literary way.) Then I saw the cover image the art department cooked up, and it made me laugh out loud. So damn perfect. Wait until you see it.

* Accompanying Ed's story will be a short original piece by none other than Laura Lippman. It's a kind of a rebuttal to Ed's piece. Mystery fans will definitely want to check this out.

* At lunch I went off-campus and read a nice chunk of Kevin Smith's My Boring-Ass Life, a new paperback collection of his blog entries. Very funny, very insightful, and as advertised, very candid. (Almost every entry opens with the same, Zen-like routine: I woke up, I took a dump.)

* After lunch I received a slightly upset call from a Philadelphia Phillies rep, who was concerned over a column we ran this week. But our conversation was friendly, rational, and ended on a good note -- you can't ask for more than that. Part of my job as editor-in-chief is to be the guy to take these calls, and they almost never end like this. Chalk one up for my blood pressure.

* The Bride made Stove Top for dinner tonight. I love Stove Top. If I could snort/inject Stove Top, it would become my recreational drug of choice. (Of course, that would not be good for my blood pressure.)

* Two weeks + one day after surgery, I finally feel normal. And my voice is much different. Go ahead, give me a call. You won't believe it.

* This evening, my daughter and I sat thumbing through a copy of The Marvel Vault, which is this great "museum in a book" of Marvel Comics history. To my everlasting joy, she was able to identify a good number of Marvel heroes on sight -- including The Thing, Spider-Man, Sue Storm, the Human Torch, the Hulk and Ghost Rider. She's four. Someday she'll either thank me, or curse me for turning her into a nerd.

* And finally, later this evening I received an offer from someone who wants to option the film rights to The Blonde. Someone very, very cool. Wish I could say who, but we're just starting the dance, and it's too soon to reveal the name of my (potential) partner.

So like I said: pretty damn good day, considering I'm not in Alaska.

Secret Dead Blog Recomends: Dave White's Debut!

There's rumor of a blog-wide Dave White roast today, but I'm not going to participate. Inside of snarky jokes, we should be heaping praise upon Dave and his debut. It's not every day a middle school teacher from Clifton, N.J. breaks into the big leagues of New York publishing with a revealing, honest, and ultimately, life-affirming self-help book like When One Man Diets (Three Rivers Press, $13.95).

I never thought Dave was particularly fat. A little big-boned maybe, but nothing that would suggest he needed a radical fitness and weight loss regimen like the one he details in When One Man Diets. But when Dave's good friend Gerry dies of a heart attack due to obesity, Dave makes a promise that leaves him no choice, and soon he finds himself searching for the ultimate fat-burning solution that will help him release the lean, strong body inside himself.

Dave would like nothing better than to crawl back into a donut box and forget he ever heard of carbs or body fat indices or ab crunches. But now the only way to stay in shape is to keep running forward--and face the demons of his fast food-snarfing past.

In When One Man Diets, Dave White bravely shares his weight-loss secrets. If there's ever a book with "Oprah" all the hell over it, it's this book.

One thing I can't figure out: what the cover image has to do with anything. You'd think Three Rivers would maybe show before-and-after shots of Dave, or a photo of Dave smiling and sitting down to a meal of baked salmon, rice and steamed carrots, or something. Instead there's this creepy, almost noirish photo of a car at night. Perhaps this is meant to symbolize Dave's nightly runs to KFC, pre-WOMD?

Ultimately it doesn't matter, because as Dave White shows us, it's what's on the inside that counts. Er, what used to be inside. After you lose some of it. Um.... okay.

Great job, Dave!

Give Me a Reason(er)

Others have linked to it already, but what the hell: you've gotta check out this great interview James Reasoner over at Saddlebums. James has just finished writing his 200th novel (no, that's not a typo, I mean two freakin' hundred, as in, another hundred and he'll be able to lead his novels into battle against the Persian Army at Thermopylae). But the best part of the Q&A is where James talks about writing and selling his very first--a certain cult private eye classic called Texas Wind.

The book was written (with a fountain pen, as I mentioned) between November 7, 1978, and February 14, 1979. I think this is the first time those exact dates have been mentioned in print. My wife Livia typed the manuscript, I revised it a little (based on some suggestions she made), and she typed up a final draft. Then we went to a drugstore with a coin-operated copy machine and copied it, page by page, so I wouldn’t have to submit my only copy of the final draft.

I love details like that. (I can't remember when I started/finished Severance Package, for Christ's sake, and I just wrote that last year.) But the kicker comes after James sells the novel, only to find that publication wasn't exactly what he'd been dreaming of:

And so it was, in October of 1980, when the book came out—exactly at the time when Manor’s distribution contracts collapsed, so that very few copies ever made it to the stands. They never paid me the six hundred bucks, either.

Which is why the original version is so damned hard to find. Luckily, Point Blank Press reprinted Texas Wind a few years ago, and it very recently earned some nice praise over at Nathan Cain's Independent Crime blog.

It's amazing that after a tortured birth like that, James went on to do it 199 more times. Now that's hardboiled, my friends.

Five Early Pieces

"Scary Parent' Joe Schreiber wrote this great post last week about the first five horror stories he wrote while in junior high. During my high school years, I was pretty much doing the same thing. From 1987 to 1989, I wrote a dozen or so stories, hoping to place them at magazines such as The Horror Show, Grue, Thin Ice and any other markets I could dig up. This was pre-Internet, of course; these kinds of markets were only discovered in places like the Fiction Writers' Market books or the odd horror fiction newsletter (such as Donald Miller's "Nocturnal Express").

I wrote the earliest stories on a Commodore 64 with a pirated word processing program. Karma soon caught up with me, though, and the program died. So I switched to an electric Smith Corona and typed most of the rest. (Thank God for the correction tape built into the ink cartridge.) I used whatever paper I could find; a lot of it was blue and pink, for some reason. But I wrote. And wrote and wrote and wrote and came up with stuff like...

"The Posers" and "Some Dead Stories" (1987, 1988): Heavily inspired by The Lost Boys, this was about a pack of Satanic undead teenagers who terrorize this other teenager one night. The first installment took place over 24 hours, and was incredibly gory. The second installment was a prequel, where I detailed the origin story of each of the undead teenagers. Looking back on it now, each of these three mini-stories were actually hardboiled crime tales, with a demon at the end. Weird.

"Coffee Clutch" (1988): This came right from the E.C. Comics playbook. It was about a loser named Reggie who works in a deli, too shy to ask anyone out. He has a funny way of showing his affection, though. Whenever he digs somebody, he'd slip a little rat poison into their coffee. But one day he meets a young hottie who seems to thrive on the poisoned coffee, and comes back demanding more and more and more... until a grisly climax featuring a lunchmeat slicer and a really lame joke that makes me cringe even today.

"Submission" (1988): I'll admit it; I used this title because I thought it would be fun to write in a cover letter: "Dear Editor, enclosed is my submission, 'Submission'...." Ahem. It's about a kid whose father has been murdered in their trailer, and the kid tries to work up the nerve to walk over the body to go find help. My God, did I write upbeat stuff or what?

"Harmony" (1988): An English teacher is droning on about the year the English language was invented, when all of a sudden a monster named BABEL, hiding behind the number "1066" in a textbook, jumps into the poor guy's mind and threatens to unravel it, with a goal of undoing all of human language itself. Bonus points if you can guess the class I was sitting in when I wrote this little gem. (Sorry, Mr. Oliver.)

"Shed Led" (1988): A hack horror writer dies, goes to Hell, and discovers he's been reincarnated into the tip of a lead pencil. What's cool is: he can control whoever holds the pencil, and starts writing from beyond the grave. What's not so cool: when someone goes to sharpen him.

Surprisingly, two of these found homes.... kind of. "Shed Led" was published by HorrorFest, which was a convention program book. It even had a cool illustration. And "The Posers" was accepted for a new novella line called Nocturnal Classics, but it had folded by my freshman year of college, before it had a chance to see print. And another story called "Best Friends" was accepted at Tense Moments, which specialized in horror and suspense short-shorts. (That appeared in the special "J.N. Williamson Issue.")

It's coming up on 20 years since I first started writing these stories. My God.

Drowning in My Own Blood, or: Where I've Been This Past Week

Surgery's never fun.

But hey, when it's your time, it's your time. Last Wednesday, the day after our 10th anniversary, the Bride and I found ourselves getting up at the ungodly hour of 4:30 a.m. so we could make a 6:00 a.m. appointment so I could be shot full of narcotics and mauled with a blade and other cutting tools for an hour or so.

They call it "minor surgery."

And in the grand scheme of things, it really is. I'm lucky. My ailment was something laughably minor. Non life-threatening.

But I'd also argue that no surgery is minor. It really has a way of screwing with you for a while.

Take the first day. I got home, tucked into a reclining chair, and thought: You know, not so bad. I mean, it felt like my face was hit with a tire iron, right after I decided to snort a pile of cocaine cut with pool chlorine. But I felt a lot better than I thought I would be. Heck, I didn't even need to take all of the nice little prescription painkillers they sent home with me. Who wants to get hooked on that junk, right?

The next day, the residual anesthesia must have worn off, because that's when I really started to feel serious pain.

I wanted the painkillers.

I WANTED THE PAINKILLERS NOW.

FUCKING NOW

But the painkillers turned me more or less into a member of the walking dead. The Bride would ask a simple question, such as, Would you like more Vitamin Water? and I'd act like she just asked me to describe how nuclear fission worked, showing my math.

Another fun part of my post-surgical world has been my inability to read. For days, I couldn't drag my eyes across more than a sentence. Thank God for my iPod, and the loads of Behind the Black Mask, Out of the Past, and The Future is Bleak podcasts I had saved up. (Ben LeRoy's voice, in particular, is especially soothing for the post-operative individual.)

Today's the first day I've been able to sit in front of the computer and do some writing. So far, so good. Working on the next novel and the plot for a new comic book.

But of course, every so often I have to pause to go flush away the blood clots.

Like I said: surgery's never fun.

Ten! Years!

A little over 10 years ago, one of my favorite comedies appeared: John Cusack's Grosse Point Blank. It was a brilliant marriage of hit men and high school reunions, and in one scene, Jeremy Piven remarks how fast the years have gone by.

"Ten years!" he screams. "TEN! YEARS!"

The bride and I were married 10 years ago today, and both of us want to look at each other and yell:

"Ten years! TEN! YEARS!"

We married young. I was 25; she was a blushing bride of 23. After getting hitched in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, we hopped a plane to Vegas, then moved to Brooklyn upon our return. I'd just started a new job as an associate editor at Details magazine; she soon found a job as a teacher in the Time-Warner child-care center. We thought we had the world completely sorted out.

God, we were so young.

Happy Anniversary to my bride, the only woman with whom I want to spend the rest of my decades.

(I'm going to confuse you in the nursing home someday when I start shouting, "Fifty years! FIFTY! YEARS!")

Secret Dead Blog Mystery Theater Presents...

... the way-cool trailer for the German edition of The Blonde (retitled Blondes Gift, or Blonde Poison), which will be available in a few weeks. You'll notice that the book was written by some guy named "Duane Louis." I have a feeling he's going to be huge over there...

He Says Goodbye, I Say Hello

Tom Piccirilli (Midnight Road, A Choir of Ill Children) has set up something the crime fiction world has needed ever since Rickard's old joint closed shop: a rockin' discussion board. It's called The Big Adios, and it is is beckoning to you. Check it out here.

The Lord Taketh, Then Giveth, Then Wouldn't You Know It, Taketh Again

Up and down times here in Philly. Just a few weeks ago I learned that one of my favorite used bookstores is closing its doors. I can't say which one, because I don't think the news was meant to be shared just yet. But man, is this a blow. I've found so many great crime and horror novels there over the years. I've blogged about my finds often.

And then... within the same week... I learned that Brave New Worlds, one of the two comic shops I frequent, is opening an Old City Philly branch that is literally a block away from my office at the City Paper. True enough, BNW2 opened its doors last Wednesday. I was there, about an hour after it unlocked the door, picking up my usual books, as well as the November issue of Marvel Previews, which features a page on my Moon Knight one-shot ("Date Night"). Kind of a cool geek moment.

But then I come home from a nice Labor Day weekend away with the Bride and Brood to discover that the AMC Orleans 8 -- the theater where I pretty much watched every movie from 1987 until 1995 -- has closed its doors and has a date with a wrecking ball. I saw RoboCop there. Friday the 13th Parts VII and VII. (And I think Jason Lives, too.) Leviathan. Deep Star Six. T2. Total Recall. Batman. Phantasm II. A Nightmare on Elm Street Part IV and V. Hellraiser I, II and III. Pumpkinhead. Nightbreed. Lord of Illusions. And thousand other horror and action flicks, most recently being Grindhouse (along with Ed Pettit and Al "Sunshine" Guthrie). This place, along with Marlo Books across the way in the Roosevelt Mall proper, was my teenage dream factory. During high school If I had $20, I'd promptly spend it on paperback horror novels and movie tickets. But now both places are gone, and it depresses the fuck out of me.

If anyone needs me, I'll be in the garage, cradling my back issues of Fangoria.