Read the first chapter of THE DEVIL'S SHARE

Thanks to the folks at Macmillan, you can read the first chapter of the fourth Crissa Stone novel, THE DEVIL'S SHARE, for free here.

N.J. launch for THE DEVIL'S SHARE and THE FRAUD 7/8/15

Come celebrate the release of Wallace Stroby's THE DEVIL'S SHARE and Brad Parks' THE FRAUD at the Moonstone Mystery Bookstore in lovely historic Flemington, N.J. July 8, 2015. Special offer: 20% off all pre-orders through July 1 (see details below).

When Bernie met Crissa?

Lawrence Block's legendary burglar/bookseller Bernie Rhodenbarr a Crissa Stone fan? Apparently so. You can read all about it here.

( You can pre-order THE DEVIL'S SHARE, the new Crissa Stone novel, here.)

COLD SHOT TO THE HEART in German

Here's the cover for KALTER SCHUSS INS HERZ - aka COLD SHOT TO THE HEART, the first Crissa Stone novel - being released by German publisher Pendragon Verlag this August. It's the first in their series of German editions of the Crissa Stone books, expertly (and laconically) translated by Alf Meyer.

The beautiful abyss

(This essay originally appeared in the Star-Ledger of Newark Aug. 21, 2005 as part of the series "The Muse of New Jersey: Writers on the Roots of Inspiration in the Garden State")

It was a bad way to die.

The evening of Friday, July 22, 1977, my father, William Wallace Stroby, was piloting his 36-foot boat, the Dawn I, a few miles off Monmouth Beach. He'd gone fishing with a friend that afternoon, and as the day wore on the water had turned choppy, the horizon gray.

He was up on the flying bridge, steering the boat, when the buzzer went off indicating the engines had stalled. It was a fairly common occurrence, usually requiring only a quick manual restart.

Later, we would try to piece together what happened.
Maybe he climbed down the wooden ladder from the flying bridge too quickly, the steps slick from spray. Perhaps the boat rolled and he lost his balance, struck his head on the way down.

His friend was inside the cabin and saw nothing. All he heard was the splash. He ran on deck to find himself alone.

He had no idea how to operate the boat or the ship-to-shore radio. The night was closing in and the boat was drifting. He tossed a life preserver into the water, hoping my father might surface, see it and swim to it.

He never did, of course. He was gone.

It was a week before his 55th birthday. I was 16.

****

There is always risk in being on the water. But my father had met the sea once, on its own terms, and bested it. During World War II, he'd been a signalman onboard a destroyer, the USS Cushing, serving in the South Pacific. In the early hours of Friday Nov. 13, 1942, the Cushing was leading a formation of U.S. ships when it was unexpectedly caught up in a chaotic night battle with a Japanese task force off the coast of Guadalcanal.

Pinned in a crossfire, disabled and burning, the Cushing was finished off with a point-blank salvo from the Japanese destroyer Terutsuki. Many of the crew were killed outright. Others were trapped in the battered ship as it slipped beneath the waves. Wounded by shrapnel, my father abandoned ship with the other surviving crewmen, leaping into the water and making for the few lifeboats that had been launched.

The Cushing was the first casualty of a battle that lasted well into the next day. With no chance of rescue while the fighting continued, my father and his crewmates spent 14 hours in the water. When the Pacific sun rose, it illuminated a seascape of burning ships, oil slicks and floating corpses.

American aircraft would eventually drive the last of the Japanese ships away, and boats were launched from Guadalcanal to rescue the men in the water. Once on the island, my father was able to write a quick V-mail letter to his mother on November 18, telling her he was safe. Others were not so lucky. Almost half of the Cushing's 150-man crew had been lost. When the battle was finally over, more than a dozen ships from both sides had been destroyed or disabled in a stretch of water that would come to be known as Iron Bottom Sound.

My father had faced death that night, and he knew it. Though he stayed in the Navy, serving on other ships until war's end, in some ways, those days off Guadalcanal were the most vivid of his life. The official Navy photograph of the Cushing would hang on the wall of his office for the rest of his life.

When he eventually returned to the States, he met my mother - Inez Dorothy Morelli, a nurse from Long Branch. My father had been raised in a rural farm community in western Monmouth County, but after they were married, he moved to Long Branch and became an apprentice to his uncle, Curt Reid, who ran a land-surveying business. My father would succeed him after his death, and in the development-crazed decades that followed, William W. Stroby & Associates would become one of Monmouth County's best-known - and busiest - surveying outfits, with offices in our house in Long Branch.

But my father never lost his love of the sea. We lived only blocks from the beach, and when the business was doing well enough in the early 1970s, he allowed himself his first real toy - a 22-foot cabin cruiser named the Tyella. During the summer, he'd go fishing every weekend and would often spend the night onboard dockside, lulled to sleep by the motion of the water.

When he was able to, he bought a bigger boat - the Dawn I - for $10,000, an unheard-of expense for the time. And it was that boat he was piloting in July 1977, when the engines gave out and the sea called for him again.

****

My father was a rough-and-tumble farm boy, a bar brawler on occasion, but he was a reader. It was a habit he'd picked up in the Navy, where long voyages often meant hours of boredom. He read everything he could get his hands on, and I learned by his example. In the year or so before he died, I'd discovered the great hard-boiled writers of the 1930s and '40s - Hammett and Chandler and, my father's favorite, James M. Cain - and we'd found common ground there.

I had favorites of my own - the pulp action novels of Don Pendleton and the terse, hard-edged crime tales Donald Westlake wrote under the pen name Richard Stark. My father borrowed and consumed these just as eagerly as he did a historical novel by Frank Yerby or a scholarly work by Samuel Eliot Morrison. On the day of that final fishing trip, the Stark novel "Deadly Edge" lay open and face-down on the bookshelf in the headboard of his bed, where he'd left it the night before.

I was the youngest of four children, and by 1977 my older brothers and sister were already out of the house, raising their own families. My mother and I were accustomed to my father's fishing trips lasting well into the night, so I'd gone to bed that Friday unaware anything was wrong.

The next morning I was woken by my oldest brother, Bill, who lived an hour south. He told me what had happened. They were still searching, he said. They might yet find him.

I got dressed and went downstairs to find a houseful of people, my mother sobbing at the kitchen table. The calls had gone out to friends and relatives, and my father's disappearance was already on the local radio news, WJLK out of Asbury Park, the station we listened to in the kitchen every morning as we had breakfast.

The boat had drifted for much of the night, eventually beaching at Gateway National Recreation Area at Sandy Hook. There my father's friend told the park rangers what had happened, and the Coast Guard was called in. Patrol boats and a helicopter were sent out to search.

Later that morning, Bill and I drove up to Sandy Hook. It was low tide and the Dawn I sat high on the beach, battered and abandoned, surrounded by the curious.

On Sunday, they called off the search.

It was weeks before they found the body.

****

I still live near the beach. Closer now than ever, actually. I'm a few towns south of Long Branch, but a block's walk takes me from my front door to the ocean. Most of the seven crime novels I've published have been set at least partially at the Jersey Shore, and the ocean figures in each.

The sea gives me my bearings, geographically and philosophically. I miss it when I'm away, and I feel an edge of nervousness when I'm somewhere that's totally landlocked. I need that unending horizon, that sense of limitless space close by. Living near the ocean is like living on the edge of forever, a beautiful abyss. Eternal but ever-changing, hypnotic and merciless.

But I have no fear of the sea - of swimming or boats or drowning. My father would not have stood for that. The sea was his life. It carried him to adventures far beyond the New Jersey farm he'd grown up on. It was the place he felt most alive. And though I don't own a boat and have little interest in them, I keep the sea close at hand.

What I do have is a sense of impermanence, of the futility of planning too much, or taking for granted the days to come. Of the finiteness of time. I've been told it's a theme in my books, and though I don't think I was aware of it, I have no doubt it's true.

I do know that much of my philosophy and behavior - for better or worse - was shaped by what happened on that summer day 28 years ago. And in those intervening years, nothing has convinced me otherwise. The truths I learned that summer were simple ones, but truths nonetheless, and I can't turn away from them. Like the ocean, they are always there.

We make our plans, we build our nests. We live our lives. And then one day the sea calls.

Why pre-order?

Regarding pre-orders, for those who asked: They've become increasingly important in the current publishing environment, as they help to build momentum both in-house and with retailers. They also count toward that crucial first week of sales, which affects store placement, print run, media coverage, etc., and helps bookstore owners with their stock planning. Also, with on-line preordering from some of the larger retailers, you get guaranteed delivery on the day the book's released.

You can preorder copies of THE DEVIL'S SHARE here via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Indiebound. But you can also preorder through your local bookstore, or any other book retailer.

Whether on-line or via a physical bookstore, preorders really do make a difference. And, of course, they make Bela happy ... .

Publishers Weekly on THE DEVIL'S SHARE

"Razor-sharp ... wastes no words and packs a huge punch." Publishers Weekly weighs in on THE DEVIL'S SHARE.
(Click on image to enlarge)

Kirkus Reviews on THE DEVIL'S SHARE

"Readers hungry for an old-fashioned double-strength heist gone wrong could hardly do better." Kirkus Reviews has an early look at THE DEVIL'S SHARE.

Booklist on THE DEVIL'S SHARE

"Stroby is regularly compared to Elmore Leonard and other greats of hard-boiled crime, and THE DEVIL'S SHARE will only burnish that reputation."
BOOKLIST with an advance review and some kind words for THE DEVIL'S SHARE.
(Click image to enlarge)

Barry N. Malzberg on THE DEVIL'S SHARE

Legendary science fiction/suspense writer Barry N. Malzberg, author of the novels BEYOND APOLLO,THE RUNNING OF BEASTS (with Bill Pronzini), GUERNICA NIGHT and many, many others, had some kind words for the new Crissa Stone novel THE DEVIL'S SHARE:
"Goes like the wind. (Stroby is) the living master of this genre. (The novel) goes and it goes and it goes and it goes and then in one shudder it stops. ... This is a major talent and a tour de force."

Shore music essay in INSIDE JERSEY magazine

Here's a preview of my essay on the Shore music scene in the May "Down the Shore 2015" issue of INSIDE JERSEY magazine, on the stands next week. (And yes, that is my own personal copy of Clarence Clemons' rare single "Summer on Signal Hill.")

Croatian COLD SHOT TO THE HEART

Croatian publisher Skorpion have kicked off their (hopefully) series of Crissa Stone reprints with this new Croatian-language translation of the first book in the series,COLD SHOT TO THE HEART (aka RAVNO U SRCE). Available wherever finer Croatian books are sold.

Proofs for THE DEVIL'S SHARE

Almost there. First typeset page proofs for the next Crissa Stone novel, THE DEVIL'S SHARE, coming in July from St. Martin's Press / Minotaur Books and already available for pre-order.

Joe Franklin: 1926-2015

No one who grew up watching N.Y.C.-era television will ever forget talk-show host Joe Franklin, who passed away yesterday at age 88. His show - which ran on WOR Channel 9 for 43 (!) years - is almost impossible to describe to anyone who hasn't actually seen it.

Where to start? The old-time showbiz patter? The cluttered, crowded set? Celebrities at the beginning - or often end - of their careers? Joe's on-camera commercials for Hoffman Beverages, Streit's Matzos and Martin Paints ("It ain't just paint")? The way the single static camera focused on a singer's face while one of their records played over the studio sound system, leaving them to squirm uncomfortably under its pitiless eye?

A showbiz legend, Franklin wrote jokes for Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson when he was just a teenager, and worked on Kate Smith's radio program. His show aired twice a day on WOR, and I seldom missed it.

Here's just a partial list of his guests over the years (the show ran from 1950 to 1993): Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, John Wayne, Charlie Chaplin, the Ramones, Bing Crosby, John F. Kennedy, John Lennon, Elvis Presley, Andy Warhol, Woody Allen, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Dario Argento, the J. Geils Band,Liza Minnelli, Dustin Hoffman and hundreds of others. We'll never see his like again.
The New York Times has an affectionate obit ("One of the most compellingly low-rent television programs in history.") here.

"Be Angry At The Sun"

"The cold passion for truth hunts in no pack."

I first encountered this 1941 poem by Robinson Jeffers in Hunter S. Thompson's FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL'72. It's stuck with me ever since, and is truer now than ever (click image below to enlarge).

Michael Mann's THIEF

You have to subscribe to read the rest, but here's the first page of my feature in the latest Noir City e-magazine about Michael Mann's THIEF, as past of their "Prime Cuts: My Favorite Neo-Noir" series. It's a great (and heist-centric) issue, with contributions from Michael Connelly, Christa Faust and many others. And your subscription money goes to an excellent cause - the nonprofit Film Noir Foundation's efforts to rescue and restore classic noir films.

THE DEVIL'S SHARE Summer 2015

Above is a sneak peek at the cover for THE DEVIL'S SHARE, the fourth Crissa Stone novel, to be published by St. Martin's/Minotaur in July 2015. It's available for pre-order now. Here's a quick synopsis:

Crissa Stone, the cool-headed professional criminal last seen in Wallace Stroby's acclaimed SHOOT THE WOMAN FIRST is back in THE DEVIL'S SHARE. This time she's acting as a thief-for-hire, partnering with a wealthy art collector to steal a truckload of plundered Iraqi artifacts before they're repatriated to their native country. But what's supposed to be a "give-up" robbery with few complications quickly turns deadly, and soon Crissa is on the run, with both a murderous ex-military hit squad, and her own partners-in-crime in pursuit.

THE DEVIL'S SHARE is an immediate sequel to SHOOT THE WOMAN FIRST, and also features the return of characters from the first Crissa Stone novel, COLD SHOT TO THE HEART.

Hawthorne, N.J., appearance Oct. 3

On Friday, Oct. 3. at 6:30, I'll be at Well Read (New and Used) Books in Hawthorne, N.J., along with Eric Shonkwiler and Brian Mihok. I'll be talking crime fiction and signing copies of SHOOT THE WOMAN FIRST, KINGS OF MIDNIGHT, COLD SHOT TO THE HEART and GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER.

The Star-Ledger Building: 1966-2014

Paid a last visit Wednesday night to the mostly-gutted and soon-to-be-vacated Star-Ledger office in Newark, where the paper's been since 1966 and where I worked for 13 years (1995-2008). The organization's been divided and dismantled, the staff decimated by layoffs, buyouts and attrition, and those remaining have been split up into smaller leased satellite offices in other cities. The building itself was sold to a developer and likely to be razed. Contrary to Thomas Wolfe, sometimes you have to go home again, if only to see that it's not there for you anymore.

(Above, stacked and discarded mailbox trays of former staffers.)
****
UPDATE
And a final photo, taken by Helen Twelvetrees the week of Sept. 22.

BLADE RUNNER's biggest anachronism

Deckard reading a newspaper in 2019.