Killer Year Signing in Nashville Tomorrow

Take note: my Killer Year pals and I will be doing some talking and signing Wed night in Nashville. JT and Toni are two wonderfully charismatic women who've both written fantastic books and I'm, well, you know about me. Stop by if you're in that neck. After that it's off to the AWP Conference in NYC. Busy week, indeed.

01/29/2008 - 7:00pm

Panel Discussion with authors J.T. Ellison, Toni McGee Causey and Edgar nominated Derek Nikitas

Nashville, Tennessee

Davis Kidd, The Mall at Green Hills

J.T. Ellison is a former White House staffer who moved to Nashville and began research on a passion, forensics and crime. She worked extensively with the Metro Nashville Police Department, and utilized these experiences to write her critically acclaimed debut novel, ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS.

Toni McGee Causey lives in Baton Rouge with her husband and two sons; a Louisiana native (and Cajun), she has nearly completed a double masters at LSU. She's placed in top tier screenwriting contests, published many non-fiction articles and edited a popular regional magazine. To support her writing addiction, she and her husband Carl run their own civil construction company. Bobbie Faye is the first in a three-book deal with St. Martin's press on a pre-empt; the chaotic, rollercoaster thriller world of Bobbie Faye owes much to Toni having way more experience than she'd like to own up to in the world of trouble-shooting, disaster-prevention and survival.

Good Old Ed Poe

I spent some time with Ed Al Poe last night. Reread his review of Hawthorne's "Twice-Told Tales," in which he famously argues for the single effect in the prose tale. Everything in the story must orbit around this one thing, whatever it may be. By extention, he argues that poetry is the highest form of literary art (as long as it ain't epic). Followed by the short story. Followed by the lowly novel, which to Ed is crap because it's too long and too unfocused. As the author of a novel, some stories and precious little poetry, I think he's dead right. About the ranking, not about novels being crap.

My friend and mentor Wendy thinks we writers are watched over by dead author spirit guides. Kind of like muses and guardian angels rolled into one. I like that idea, even if I'm a raving skeptic about all things supernatural. My spirit guide is Ingmar Bergman, now that he's gone. Wendy decided this, and I'm for it. Only, this morning I got some news that makes me think I've got it all wrong.

Maybe good old creepy Ed Poe is my spirit guide.

Because, you see, I've learned that one of the nominees for this year's Edgar Awards is me. Best First Novel category. And by "me" I don't mean a "medical examiner" or someone with the initials "m.e." I mean "me," the first-person objective personal pronoun. Your host.

First off, I can't fucking believe it. The Edgars are the big kahuna of mystery writing awards. This kind of stuff doesn't happen to me, but I'm sure as hell glad it did. And I got to feel that maybe something passed between Ed and me last night while I read his work, some communion. And here we are.

Ed nominated me for best first novel! All right, not Ed himself--but those folks over at Mystery Writers of America. Those kind and generous, charismatic, athletic, beautiful, genius, hilarious, affluent, sexually potent people over at Mystery Writers of America.

And my friends at Killer Year, all of whom share exactly those same superhuman characteristics as the people at MWA, have been so supportive and just as excited as me. Some of them even more excited.

I don't know if Eddie would've liked Pyres. I like to think he would've been grudgingly amused, though he would've complained that it couldn't be read in one sitting and there were too many subplots. If I could've written you a poem, Mr. Poe, I would've. But thank you, sir, thank you. You have humbled me deeply, completely.

Here's the run-down of book nominees:

Best Novel Nominees
Christine Falls by Benjamin Black (Henry Holt and Company)
Priest by Ken Bruen (St. Martin's Minotaur)
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)
Soul Patch by Reed Farrel Coleman (Bleak House Books)
Down River by John Hart (St. Martin's Minotaur)

Best First Novel By An American Author Nominees
Missing Witness by Gordon Campbell (HarperCollins - William Morrow)
In the Woods by Tana French (Penguin Group - Viking)
Snitch Jacket by Christopher Goffard (The Rookery Press)
Head Games by Craig McDonald (Bleak House Books)
Pyres by Derek Nikitas (St. Martin's Minotaur)

Best Paperback Original
Queenpin by Megan Abbott (Simon & Schuster)
Blood of Paradise by David Corbett (Random House - Mortalis)
Cruel Poetry by Vicki Hendricks (Serpent's Tail)
Robbie's Wife by Russell Hill (Hard Case Crime)
Who is Conrad Hirst? by Kevin Wignall (Simon & Schuster)

Best Critical/Biographical
The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction by Patrick Anderson (Random House)
A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational by Maurizio Ascari (Palgrave Macmillan)
Deviance in Contemporary Crime Fiction by Christiana Gregoriou (Palgrave Macmillan)
Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley (The Penguin Press)
Chester Gould: A Daughter's Biography of the Creator of Dick Tracy by Jean Gould O'Connell (McFarland & Company)

The awards will be announced at the MWA's 62nd Annual Edgar Awards banquet on Thursday May 1, 2008 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City.

At that banquet, Bill Pronzini, author of the "Nameless Detective" series will be honored with the 2008 Grand Master Award.

Introductions...

The pleasure's all mine.

Been blogging with my compatriots down at Killer Year near about a year now. The lot of us are scribes of noir, thriller, crime. A ragged bunch. But the Killer Year is winding down. Sure, we've got an ass-kicker of an antho dropping first thing 2008: Killer Year: Stories to Die For. It'll be our collective legacy. We've got our solo careers to sow. We've got to make it on our own.

So here's this blog, all me. Don't ask why because I don't know. Things to say from time to time and nobody to say them to. I contented myself at Killer Year with once-a-month essays of sorts. It's the academic in me. But round here I won't burn myself out on long-winded musings. Quick jabs, maybe. The occasional autopsy.

So who the hell am I? My book Pyres came out this year from St. Martin's Minotaur. Blurbs from Joyce Carol Oates, Marcus Sakey, Ken Bruen, Wendy Brenner, Duane Swierczynski.
Great reviews from Kirkus, Pub Weekly, Library Journal, Booklist. Not to mention sweet reviews from such luminary rags as the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Omaha World Herald, and the Wilmington Star-News. Book's about a punky teenage girl Luc who's life gets upended when she witnesses her dad's murder. The crime gets the poor kid all mixed up with some dangerous folks who maybe want to see more of her family go down. Up to Luc and police detective Greta Hurd to keep things from going up in flames. Or not. It's got bits of police procdural, noir, and even some fabulist turns for the literary types. Takes place in Rochester, NY and surrounding environs, my own wintery teenage haunts.

Grew up outside Rochester, went to school at a SUNY, then down to Wilmington, NC for my MFA in creative writing. Wilmington's on the beach, beaut weather, but my mind drifted back to the cold and dark and I invented a place called Hammersport. Western, New York. Amalgam of Brockport and some other Erie Canal towns. Hammersport's been home base for all my published short stories and for the debut novel, too. Said stories have popped up in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, The Ontario Review, Chelsea and The Pedestal Magazine.

Down in Atlanta now, chipping away at a PhD because I can't seem to get my fill of the hallowed halls of academe. Writing novel two on the sly, crawling inside a woman's head yet again. Some say write what you know, but fuck it: write what you're desparate to undestand (somebody else said that first, can't remember who). Fall on your ass maybe, but you've got the "transport of the aim," as Dickinson said. Emily's a woman to strive to understand. She'll slice your soul up. Try this Dickinson quip:

"I shall know why--when Time is over--
and I have ceased to wonder why--
Christ will explain each separate anguish
In the fair schoolroom of the sky."

I'm a sucker for great poets: Ms. Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, G.M. Hopkins, Philip Larkin, and my man John Berryman who supplies the quotation affixed to the front of this blog in "A Sympathy, A Welcome." Poem writ in 1958 on the occasion of the birth ("fall") of Berryman's son Paul:

"Feel for your bad fall how could I fail,
poor Paul, who had it so good.
I can offer you only: this world like a knife.
You'll get to know your mother
and humourless as you do look you will laugh
and all the others
will NOT be fierce to you, and loverhood
will swing your soul like a broken bell
deep in the forsaken woods, poor Paul,
while wild bad father loves you well."

It's that splice of noir and heart that slays me, every time. Berryman, you know, threw himself off a bridge when the knife-world stabbed too hard at him. Not a tale for the festive season, but few true stories fit the bill. If you're looking for answers, I got only questions here, dear.