Copy, Copy, Do You Read Me?

Yeah, the blogging's been light. I've been up to my neck with proofreading final galleys for The Blonde (they're, um, a few days late at this point) and writing the next novel. I've also been sending out many Blonde ARCs, due to the mutiple requests I received last week. Huge thanks to everyone who emailed. Your copy is either on the way, or being prepped for the mail right now.

But back to proofreading galleys for a second: I'm the first to admit that absolutely suck butt at catching typos and missed words. The latter is a big deal with me. I often type so fast and furious that I'll skip whole words. And when I reread what I've written, my fever-addled brain fills in the missing word... so I think it's really there. Creepy, eh? Ask Al Guthrie about it. He laughs at me.

So I'm extremely grateful for the two people who went beyond the call of duty and marked up their early copies of The Blonde. The first is my lovely wife, aka The Bride. The ARCs arrived just before we went on vacation last week, and she graciously wasted valueable beach reading time on my silly little thriller, catching a host of typos and missed words. Not only did she suffer through this book once, but twice. Some lawyer might consider this "cruel and unusual."

The other person who pulled my keister out of the frying pan was Terrill Lankford, the mega-talented and possum-loving author of Blonde Lightning (which is out this month in paperback... buy it if you missed it in hardcover, punk). I sent Terrill an early copy of manuscript to see if he'd be willing to give me a blurb. Not only did he send a beaut, but he also took the time to mark up the manuscript and mail it back to me. And man, did he catch some doozies... mistakes that even slipped past the eagle-eyed St. Martin's copy editor.

Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for The Bride and Mr. Lankford. Their hard work means there's less of a chance you'll read The Blonde this fall and think, Christ, what was Swierczy smoking?

(Note: You'll probably find typos in this post. I suck! I suck!)

My Latest Novel, Free, on the Internet!

Okay, so it's not exactly a novel. It might even be a stretch to call it a novella. Or a short story. Or a photo caption. To be competely honest, it's only fourteen words. But that was challenge presented by Bob Sassone, the deeply disturbed man who curates Professor Barnhardt's Journal: write a complete story using 20 words or less. My contribution, for better or worse, is called "Untitled Hardboiled Pulp No. 7."

My story is joined by much lengthier contributions from Tod Goldberg, Marty Beckerman, Paul Davidson, Jade Walker, Adam Finley, Joe Lavin, Brian Lewandowski and Bob Sassone himself. Read 'em all. Come on, like it will take you longer than 16 seconds total? (My personal favorite is Jade Walker's supremely twisted take on a certain Sherwood Schwartz classic...)

When my editor starts barking at me for the next novel, I'm going to tell him: Dude, I wrote, like, 14 words back in June. Lay off.

The Friday Book Report... On Monday?

Sorry for the radio silence. Secret Dead Blog took a short family vacation down the Jersey shore. Secret Dead Blog didn't say this ahead of time, in case any burglars got any funny ideas. Not that burglars should have funny ideas about knocking over the Swierczynski home. I'm still not finished with the last burglar I caught sneaking in here, and I have enough IV bags to keep him alive clear through August. Plenty of propane and skewers, too. If my neighbors haven't heard his freakish cries for mercy so far, they never will.

Anyway... while the kids were frolicking on the beach, and the Bride was working on her Irish tan, I hit an excellent used bookshop in lovely downtown Wildwood, New Jersey and walked away with a baker's dozen of cool crime paperbacks:

Without Fail, Lee Child (big fat British paperback edition, at left). This became my beach read. Reacher's just plain righteous in this one.
Island, Thomas Perry. I've been looking for this one for months.
Tropical Heat, John Lutz
Florida Straits, Laurence Shames
Rambo: First Blood Part II, David Morrell. I'm not a rabid Rambo-the-movie fan, but the novel First Blood is one of my all-time favorites. Had to go for it.
Die like a Dog, Brett Halliday, mostly because I recently watched (and loved) Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which took some inspiration from the Mike Shayne series.
Miami Mayhem, Marvin Albert. Tony Rome, baby!
Rough Cut, Edward Gorman. The main man of mystery's first novel. What a find.
The Butcher of Glastonbury, David Bowker. Rare, early Bowker. Can't believe I found this at the Jersey shore.
One Man's Law, John Clarkson. David Thompson, of Busted Flush Press, gave me a copy of the first Devlin thriller, And Justice For One, which was excellent. This one's the sequel.
The Prime Roll, Eugene Izzi. Slowly, I'm completing my Izzi collection.
Sacrifice, Andrew Vachss. The Ivy Books edition from the summer of '92.
A Cool Breeze on the Underground, Don Winslow. I've been reading the Neal Carey books in backwards order, and for no good reason. But this, the first, is what I've been missing.

Don't look at me that way. What else are you supposed to do on vacation?

Boxes of Blondes

Three boxes full of books arrived in the mail yesterday, which had The Bride completely panicked. She probably thought I'd ordered three boxes full of pricey vintage paperbacks. And she most likely found herself wondering how fast she could have the locks on the house changed, and if I'd be okay sleeping on an Aerobed on the front lawn.

But The Bride need fear not; they were merely a bunch of advance review copies of my third novel, The Blonde. The good people at St. Martin's really came through for me. About six weeks ago, I was talking to my editor, "Marquis" Marc Resnick, about the possibility of shooting a few extra ARCs my way--mostly to pass around at Bouchercon. Marc said he'd see what he could do. A few days later, Marc sent me an email: "Tell your wife not to be shocked when three boxes of ARCs arrive at your house."

Marc's awesome like that.

Of course, I forgot to warn The Bride.

Anyway, there's really no thrill like seeing your novel in bound form with a kick-ass cover (designed by the mega-talented Kathryn Parise)... times one hundred. God help me when the actual hardcover arrives in a few months. It's a thrill that will never get old. And if it does, then it's probably time to me to retire and weave baskets, or something.

The Blonde isn't out until November, but if you're a mystery bookseller, or a reviewer, or some other godlike entity in the mystery community, and you would like a signed ARC, I'd be thrilled to provide one. Just shoot me an email (duane.swier at verizon.net) and I'll send you a Blonde posthaste.

Believe me: the boxes are still making The Bride very nervous.

Damn Near Dead: The Cover Story

Busted Flush publisher David Thompson and I started kicking around cover concepts for Damn Near Dead last December in Houston. One idea was to mimic a patient roster in a nursing home, with contributors' names listed instead of patients. I may have floated the idea of a death certificate, but that was quickly dismissed. (Thank Christ.) Then we started talking about book covers we really liked, and the name that kept popping up was Hard Case Crime. Both David and I really dig the retro stuff. With that in mind, I went home and dug through my stack of Manhunt magazines and found the image you see above (at right.) I thought it would be fun to take this classic image, from the Christmas 1954 issue, and tweak it a bit. Show the characters as they would appear today, 52 years later.

Well, Busted Flush artist Greg Fleming took that idea and ran with it. But instead of making both characters senior citizens, he just aged the dude. (The green sweater vest is an especially nice touch.) This was probably the right move. The contrast, old and young, gray and blonde, is striking. Kind of a Michael Douglas/Catherine Zeta-Jones thing going on there.

My only regret is that in our version you can't see the gun. These two characters could be dancing. Or practicing tae-kwon-do. But perhaps that makes it all the more mysterious. And compelling.

Coming soon: How (not) to assemble an anthology.

Damn Near Published

Here she is. The full cover of Damn Near Dead. (Click the image for a larger view.) Sweet, eh? You'll notice that every contributor is listed on the front cover, in descending age order. Why? Because that's how publisher David Thompson and I roll. You'll also notice that somehow, impossibly, my long-ass last name fits on the bottom yellow band along with our special guest James Crumley. I'm not sure how designers Greg Fleming and Jeff Smith were able to pull off that little trick, but I'm grateful.

For those of you tuning in just now, Damn Near Dead is a collection of "geezer noir" stories -- mystery and crime tales where the protagonist is over 65 years of age. It's the first anthology I've edited, and hopefully, not the last. This affordable ($18 for 27 action-packed stories! plus two introductions! and afterwords for every story!) 400-page trade paperback will be making its debut at ConMisterio in Austin in a little less than a month, and then will be available for purchase at fine mystery purveyors everywhere.

Go ahead. Savor. Let me know what you think. And a little later tonight, I'll be back with the story behind this cover.

Because there is one, you know.

The Friday Book Report

This past week I was all over the place. I read...

The Husband by Dean Koontz. At Amazon Fishbowl, host Bill Maher asked Koontz to describe this book's plot. Koontz said: Guy gets a call from people who have kidnapped his wife, and demand $2 million otherwise he'll never see her again. Maher cracked: "For some guys, that would be a fantasy." Joking aside, this is Koontz in Cornell Woolrich mode, with some of his sharpest writing since last year's Velocity and 1996's Intensity. I love Koontz in this mode.

Loveless: A Kin of Homecoming and Superman: For Tomorrow (Volume One), written by Brian Azzarello. Two new titles from my favorite comic book writer. One's a brutal western set in the South right after the Civil War. The other is about a guy in a red cape with a horrible case of the guilts. Both are fantastic.

The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont. This has been receiving huge props in the blogosphere, and it's easy to see why. I loved that Malmont fused a history of pulp writers with a rockin' pulp-style plot. Malmont also sent me looking for old Doc Savage paperbacks--something I never thought I'd do.

Art in the Blood, by Craig McDonald. A must-read collection of interviews with crime writers at the top of their game by an interviewer who's at the top of his. It's brand-spankin' new from PointBlank Press.

And I've just picked up: Vintage PKD, a Whitman's Sampler-style collection of Philip K. Dick stories and novel excerpts, and We'll Always Have Cleveland by Les Roberts, because of the mention over at The Rap Sheet.

Somewhere, the Philebrity Staff is Giving Each Other High-Fives, Saying "Now That's What I'm Talking About"

You want vagina? We got vagina. Well, okay, not quite. What we have is an oral sex expert in a bikini and knee socks. And a garden-variety garden gnome performing what appears to be the act my grandmother once delicately referred to as "cunnilingus." But what do we know? We're just mystery novel geeks here at Secret Dead Blog. You'll find the reason for this photo, along with much, much more, over at the new issue of the Philadelphia City Paper, which hit the streets (and the web) today. For my issue rundown, check out the Clog.

We now return you to Secret Dead Blog's usual coverage of David Goodis, noir flicks, and photos of bearded Scots carrying bagpipes.

Black Mask, Scotch and Vaginas

Last week or so I bigged up the excellent Out of the Past: Investigation Film Noir. Well, that show's creators, Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards, will be launching a new podcast, Behind the Black Mask: Mystery Writers Revealed, on July 15. Their first guest: Paul Malmont, author of the pulptastic The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril. Their second guest (in August): Rian Johnson, director of the Hammett-soaked hit film Brick. And their third guest? You're lookin' at him. We did the interview via phone at 6:30 tonight and I think I managed to avoid making myself sound like a total idiot. The podcast won't be available until September 15, but that's good, because it'll give me time to forget all of bad things I said about the Russian mafiya.

In other news....

Well, bad news: My mother-in-law is in town for a few days. But the good news: My 1.75L bottle of Dewars is two-thirds full, which will be more than enough to get me through until the liquor store on 2nd Street in Old City opens its doors at 9 a.m. Cheers!

Also: Philebrity.com dubs Secret Dead Blog a "vagina-free zone." Because you know there's nothing more important going on in Philly than tracking the lack of vagina at a married writer's personal blog. Go get 'em, Joey!

The Lord Giveth...

... but He Mostly Taketh. Especially in the crime fiction blogosphere.

Last week, Kevin Burton Smith announced he was putting his excellent Thrilling Detective Web Site on hiatus. Fucking hell. It's been a Secret Dead Blog favorite since 1998. Back before Secret Dead Blog was even a gleam in its daddy's eye.

Then today, John Rickards announced that he would be pulling a Kevorkian on his new -but-awesome Mystery Circus. This is a friggin' crime, because in a short time he's managed to gather some of the best writing columns I've seen anywhere, mystery fiction or otherwise, from some of the top voices in the genre. (Plus, there are columns by Dave White.) It's just not right.

I mean, sure, there are bright spots. J. Kingston Pierce's new Rap Sheet blog has quickly become a must-read here at Secret Dead Blog. Woody Haut, author of Pulp Culture, Neon Noir and Heartbreak and Vine, started up his own blog. Which is groovy.

But why God why must you take my Thrilling Detective and my Mystery Circus?

Why!?

As usual, God offers no comment.

Oh wait.

Look.

Leprosy.

Texas Style, Philly Wild

The bad news: I'm only going to be at Con Misterio for approximately 25 hours. My daughter Sarah's third birthday is that Saturday, and there's no way I'm missing a minute of it.

The good news: I'm making up for it by serving on three times as many panels as I did at Bouchercon in Chicago. Co-chair Karen Meschke is keeping me very busy:

Friday, 10:00 AM: Is Hardboiled Hip?
Friday, 11:00 AM: Journalist or Author--Which is Easier?
Friday, 1:00 PM: Damn Near Dead--Older Characters as the Focus

Full word on my co-panelists to follow later. (I'm not sure exactly who is stuck with me yet.)

What's the third topic about, you ask? Damn Near Dead, the geezer noir anthology I edited for David Thompson's Busted Flush Press, will be making its official debut, with many contributors on hand to sign your copy, including Jeff Abbott, Megan Abbott, Milton T. Burton, Reed Farrel Coleman, Bill Crider, Sean Doolittle, Victor Gischler, and last but certainly not least, Con Misterio Guest of Honor James Crumley, who wrote the antho's introduction.

I hear that the folks at Busted Flush are finalizing the cover as we speak; I'll post it here as soon as it appears in my in-box.

Book Report Friday Returns!

Okay, let's take a look at the bookshelf and see what I've been reading lately...

The Power of the Dog. Don Winslow. What a stunner. "Epic" isn't usually a word used to describe crime novels, but in this case it's absolutely necessary. Dog is a white hot, blistering novel about the U.S. war on drugs that will either break your heart or make you want to move to Canada. At 540-some pages, it's about 300 pages longer than most novels I dig, but there's not a word I would cut. Easily one of my favorites of 2005. (Even though I read it in 2006.)

I read 30 pages of Joel Townsend Rogers' The Red Right Hand and liked the oddball voice, but had to put it down. It was too much of a fight to stay in it. (I know, I know. I'm a heathen.) I want to return to it, because I've read there's a trick ending or two, and I love those. But not this week.

I've been picking away at It's a Bitter Little World by Charles Pappas... and that's not a knock. You're supposed to pick away at it, and savor it, because it's a roundup of the "smartest, toughest, nastiest quotes from film noir." (One of my favorites: "You shoot me in a dream, you'd better wake up and apologize." Mr. White in Reservor Dogs.) I'm hoping to lure Mr. Pappas to Secret Dead Blog so I can grill him with a few questions.

Up on deck: a pair of Wade Miller novels (Shoot to Kill, Uneasy Street), in those Harper Perennial trade paperback editions from the early 1990s. It's June. I'm in a Wade Miller kinda mood.

Also, Brian Azzarello's fucked-up-in-all-the-right-ways twisted western Loveless: A Kin of Homecoming.

The Dennis McMillan reprint of Howard Browne's A Touch of Ashes.

And the latest Hard Case: Straight Cut, by Madison Smartt Bell. Even though the guy has an extra "t" in his middle name. (And you thought I was consonant-happy.)

What are you guys reading?

"The Curtain Can Come Down At Any Time."

One of the best things about being involved in the upcoming GoodisCon is finding new bits of David Goodis material. Lou Boxer and I had lunch with the two Philly lawyers who handle the Goodis estate -- Corey Field and Jamie Bischoff -- and they were kind enough to share two extremely rare documents with us. One of them is a hand-written letter from Goodis to a friend. And damn if it doesn't sound like one of his own characters talking:

Because of the fact that I have a coronary condition, there's really no telling how long I can last. I'm trying as best I can to make a physical and emotional comeback. On the emotional level, I feel that I can climb out of this mess. But with a coronary situation, the curtain can come down at any time.

The date on the letter is September 15, and if I'm not mistaken, that means it was written less than four months before his death.

Life Imitates Woolrich

Cornell Woolrich. That's the first name that popped into my head when I saw this story on CNN, about two girls who looked an awful lot alike, and had the misfortune of being in the same grisly auto wreck a few months ago. Turns out, the girl who everyone thought was alive turned out to be dead, and the girl who was presumed dead was actually in a coma. Bruises, cuts and extreme facial swelling fooled one set of parents:

VanRyn's parents did not begin to question whether she was actually their daughter until, as she regained consciousness, she started saying things that did not make sense to them, including referring to VanRyn's father by a pet name he did not recognize.

Fans of Woolrich's classic suspense novel I Married A Dead Man may be doing a double take right about now.

Asleep at the Blogging Wheel

Posts have kind of slowed down here because I'm all hot and heavy on a writing project, and it's taking up most of my spare time. And when it comes to choosing between writing and this blog... well, sorry Secret Dead Blog. Meanwhile, I did have a few homeroom announcements: 1.) Anthony Neil Smith has a lovely reading voice, and we had a really crackin' time here in Philly last Thursday, despite the fact that the humidity level was 190 percent. 2.) Today is the birthday of Al "Sunshine" Guthrie (shown at left). Wish him well, and please, for God's sake, can someone mash up his haggis into little easily-digestible pieces for him? 3.) Dave White emailed to tell me that he finally, at long last, finished his revision of When One Man Dies. I'm half tempted to ask Sunshine (Dave's agent) to tell Dave that the revise is well and good, but Christian conservative pastoral fantasies are big this year in the UK, and could he revise accordingly? Anyway, play nice amongst yourselves. I'll be back soon.