Quick updates - Updated!

The Asbury Park Press feature on me is in today's (1/31) edition, on the cover of the Entertainment section, and online.

Over at WBGO's site, my interview with WBGO Journal host Andrew Meyer, the outtakes, and a web-only reading can be found here.

Thanks to everyone in Texas for coming out to the events, especially in Houston. And thanks to two great Florida authors - James W. Hall and Bob Morris - for letting me fly along as wingman.

The definition of bad timing

As some of you may have heard, Amazon has temporarily pulled all Macmillan books - including St. Martins Press books - from its site, due to a dispute over e-book royalties. However, GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER can still be ordered online via Barnesandnoble.com or the Indiebound network of stores.

More reviews, Kindle, Nook, etc. *Update #2*

The Nook e-book of GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER is now available. The Kindle version should be by the end of the week as well. The unabridged audio version, read by actress Karen White, is due out Jan. 29.

- An interview I recorded yesterday (1/25) at WBGO-FM in Newark will air in edited broadcast form Friday (1/29) night at 7:30 on 88.3 FM and via the live stream at www.wbgo.org. After that, it'll be archived on the station's website, along with a reading I did from the book.

- Last week saw two more reviews, from January Magazine and BookReporter.com.

- An interview I did with the Asbury Park Press will appear in this Sunday's (1/31) edition, and will also be available online at www.app.com.

- The GTN tour begins this Friday at Book People in Austin, Texas, then moves on to Houston, before circling back for the official East Coast launch party at Manhattan's Mysterious Bookshop Feb. 5, and then Words! in Asbury Park the following day. More dates to come. Hope to see some of you on the road.

Where I've been

GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER, which goes on sale today, is my first new novel in five years, following 2003's THE BARBED-WIRE KISS and 2005's THE HEARTBREAK LOUNGE. Both those books had paperback editions as well, so I wasn't totally absent from bookstores in the interim, but it has been a solid half decade since I had a new hardback out.

What was I doing in the meantime? Well, most of my time and energy was taken up with my other job, as the Sunday Entertainment Editor at the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger. It was a good gig, one I was lucky to have. It was (and is) a great paper, and I worked with some of the smartest and most talented people in the business. It was a wonderful time. I did publish a pair of short stories during that period, especially one close to my heart called "Lovers in the Cold," which appeared in the anthology MEETING ACROSS THE RIVER, a collection of stories inspired by the Springsteen song.

And then there was 188 pages of a standalone third novel, tentatively titled SHADOW LAND, which I worked on for a good part of 2005. I liked the plot (as far as I'd figured it out. I never outline), and I was eager to jump into another book quickly after finishing HEARTBREAK. But something was wrong. After an energetic start, the going got tough. Though it was a standalone, it began to feel too much an echo of the books I'd already written, in both tone and content. And although I liked the main character, a disgraced former U.S. Marshal, he was clearly walking the razor's edge of cliche - troubled man with a past seeking redemption.

In an interview I did with Stephen King once, he described two modes of writing, one in which the story is a speedboat and it carries you along behind it, like a skier. In the other, you're the skier and you're dragging the boat. If it's the right story at the right time, and all your cylinders are firing, you're often in the first mode - it's energizing and invigorating. If you're spending a lot of time in the second, you're in trouble. By the time I got to page 180 of SHADOW LAND, I felt like I was dragging the Queen Mary.

I remember vividly one afternoon sitting down at the desk, about to write a scene I was actually looking forward to - a character gets out of his pickup, goes into a bar and has a confrontation with one of the minor villains. I love those kinds of scenes. They come easy to me and they play to my strengths - terse dialogue, action and ambient detail. But I realized, as I described him getting out of the truck, that I had no interest whatsoever in what happened to him once he got inside. I couldn't have cared less, and I figured a reader wouldn't care much either.

The next morning when I woke up, I knew I'd decided to bag the novel, all 188 hard-fought pages of it. And when I came to that realization, I felt a tremendous sense of relief flooding through me. Not long after that, I started working on a short story about one of the characters who would eventually figure in GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER. And suddenly writing was fun again.

I haven't thought about that novel much since, which I guess is another indication it was never meant to be. I may eventually revisit the plot, but it would be with an entirely different cast of characters, I think. Life's too short to write the same thing twice.

So I hope you enjoy GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER. And if you're wondering about that lost novel in between, trust me - you didn't miss anything.

Ledger review

Writer Vince Cosgrove reviews GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER for the Star-Ledger/Newhouse Newspapers today. And if that link doesn't work directly, The Huffington Post has picked it up as well.

Saturday night in Asbury

Website update

The website has been updated to reflect GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER and the current tour schedule (more dates to come, including a cool multimedia one I'll have more details on later). And over on the OTHER WRITINGS page, I've added the feature obituary I wrote for Mickey Spillane (above) that appeared in the Star-Ledger in July 2006.

For those who've asked about the long-promised Part Two of my James Lee Burke interview, I'm still trying to locate the transcript, and when I do, I'll post it. It's a good one too, with Burke talking at length about writing, drinking, and the hazards of success. I'm hoping it turns up soon.

More words

The inimitable Harriet Klausner weighs in on GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER over at The Mystery Gazette, as does Library Journal and reviewer David Marshall James on Yahoo's "Shine" forum.

Washington Examiner 12/27/09

(Click on photo for larger image)

Ocean Grove, morning light 12/24/09

Kirkus' last gasp

As most of you know, the venerable Kirkus Reviews, part of Nielsen Business Media, is shutting down for good this month after 76 years in the business (also folding is its sister pub., Editor and Publisher, after 108 years). However, Kirkus did manage to sneak a review of GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER into its final issue.

GONE ’TIL NOVEMBER
Wallace Stroby
(Starred review)


As if it weren’t nerve-wracking enough to be a deputy and a mom, suddenly she’s a target.

Privacy’s a joke in tiny Hopedale, Fla. So when Deputy Sara Cross and Deputy Billy Flynn become lovers, everybody knows it almost before they do. Nor does it stay news long when two years later they break up. Sara’s coming to her senses, conventional wisdom maintains, since everybody also knows that for all his charm and good looks, Billy lacks substance, whereas all you have to do is watch Sara mothering her ailing six-year-old son to know that she’s a rock. But rock or no, Sara is one of those women who all too often lets her heart rule her head, and on the night of a fatal shooting, part of her senses that it’s a mistake to accept Billy’s version of how it all went down. Yes, the explanation is plausible; yes, there are weapons stashed away in the young black man’s car; and yes, when Billy fired it might well have been by the book. But soon enough strangers arrive in Hopedale—hard, big-city, dangerous men following stolen money, who are after Billy because they’re sure he knows where it is. And after Sara, certain she does, too.

A strong cast and energetic storytelling. But it’s Sara, so human and so beset, who makes this another standout for Stroby.

Happy Holidays

Spam, spam, spam, spam ....

... so I'm going to turn Comment Moderation on until this storm of Asian spam and escort service links blows over.

Quick updates, Pt. 2

+ My piece on the 1973 film THE OUTFIT, based on Donald E. Westlake's third "Richard Stark" novel, is up over at Steve-O's Noir of the Week blog (that's the film's Italian poster above). Some great stuff there, including a pair of excellent essays by Megan Abbott on CLASH BY NIGHT and PRIVATE HELL 36.


+ The tour is shaping up like this (some details tentative, more to come):

JAN. 29 - Book People, Austin, Texas, 7 pm.

JAN. 30 - Murder by the Book, Houston, Texas, 5 p.m., with James W. Hall and Bob Morris.

FEB. 5 - Mysterious Bookshop, N.Y.C., 6:30 p.m.
APRIL 13 - New York Public Library, Fifth Ave. and 40th, 6:30-8:30. Panel discussion on "Crime Scenes: From Cities to the Back of Beyond; Why and How Mystery Writers Choose Their Settings," with Lorenzo Carcaterra, Peggy Ehrhart, Henry Chang, Julia Pomeroy and Laura Joh Rowland.
OCT. 14-17 - BoucherCon, San Francisco, Calif.
NOV. 4-7 - NoirCon, Philadelphia, Pa.

Quick updates

A little stopgap news as we head toward the end of the year and into 2010:

- Tantor Media will release an unabridged audio version of GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER in January, read by actress Karen White.

- Thorndike Press will publish a Large Print edition of GTN in 2010 as well (might be needing that one soon myself).

- I'm now on Facebook!

- I'll have a poem, titled "Independence Day, 1976," in the next edition of THE LINEUP: POEMS ON CRIME, due out in April. That issue will also include works by James W. Hall, James Sallis, Reed Farrel Coleman and Patti Abbott, among others.

- On Dec. 14, I'll be guesting on Steve Eifert's great Noir of the Week blog, with a piece on 1973's THE OUTFIT, the Robert Duvall film based on the Donald E. Westlake/Richard Stark novel of the same name. All I have to do now is finish writing it.

- There's a little bit of a tour taking shape, bit by bit, more info soon.

- Speaking of noir, this week I finally caught up with Peter Yates' THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE (also released in 1973, a good year for noir and films in general - SERPICO, BADLANDS, CHARLEY VARRICK, DILLINGER, EMPEROR OF THE NORTH, THE LONG GOODBYE, MEAN STREETS and THE SEVEN-UPS all came out that year). I'd seen bits and pieces of it on television, but never the film in its entirety. Criterion just put out a DVD version a few months back, with a restored print and a commentary by Yates (he also directed BULLITT, the Brit noir ROBBERY and Westlake's THE HOT ROCK, and was developing the Stark novel DEADLY EDGE before the project fell through).

COYLE is the antidote to most gangster films - it's low-key and downbeat, as chilly as its late-November Boston locales. But it's quite brilliant too, and steadfastly faithful to the George V. Higgins novel. It does for the underworld what REQUIEM FOR A DREAM does for heroin addiction - it makes you very happy not to be part of it.

NORTH BY NORTHWEST revisited

On an impulse last week, I picked up the new 50th anniversary edition of Alfred Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST. Hadn't seen it in decades, and then only on commercial television, so the restored 2-disc DVD set gave me an excuse to take my first look at it in years.

It's a great movie. Or maybe that should be, it's a great movie.

That's because, watching it, it occurs to me it's as close to pure cinema as most films get. It's a confection that works only as a movie. As a novel, it would make no sense. As a television series, it would seem redundant and silly (though shows like CHUCK and BURN NOTICE owe a debt to it). On radio, it would be absurd. But as a film, it's an almost perfect merger of images and sound, expertly used to evoke emotions. It's funny, it's suspenseful, it's beautiful to look at and, despite its two-hour-plus length, it moves like lightning.

On the face of it, Hitchcock's tale of an advertising executive (Cary Grant) mistaken for a spy and chased cross-country by enemy agents, police and his own government, bears no resemblance to reality. In the first place, it's Cary Grant, not exactly the American Everyman. Secondly, the plot mechanisms that launch the chase are outlandish bordering on ludicrous. An assassination in the U.N. lobby is nearly a parody in itself, and fifteen minutes into the film, when the villains have poured a bottle of bourbon into Grant and set him behind the wheel of a sports car careening along a cliffside Long Island road, one wonders why he doesn't just pull over to the shoulder. But they're both great sequences, rich with color and detail and enhanced by Bernard Herrman's iconic score (for an earlier variation on it, check out his orchestration for Nicholas Ray's 1952 noir ON DANGEROUS GROUND).

The same applies to the film's most famous sequence, in which a crop-dusting plane chases Grant's Roger Thornhill along an empty Indiana road. It's one of the great scenes in cinema, despite the fact it makes little sense. Why lure a man out into the middle of nowhere and then try to kill him with a plane, of all things? (Not to mention, if the plane had actually hit him, it would likely have crashed). Certainly a bullet in the head and a quick drop in Lake Michigan would have been a more efficient - and cost-effective - solution. And what does "North by Northwest" mean anyway? The chase takes Thornhill south before it takes him north, though it does end, memorably, at Mount Rushmore (actually a cleverly painted studio backdrop) in South Dakota.

But in the end, none of this matters. You could say NXNW is greater than the sum of its parts, except those parts are all pretty great on their own. Eva Marie Saint is luminous as Eve Kendall, Thornhill's love interest/nemesis, delivering some pretty risque (for 1959) sexual innuendo without ever breaking eye contact. James Mason is smooth and charming as the chief villain, Martin Landau subtly menacing as his henchman, and Ernest Lehman's script is full of sparkling dialogue ("That wasn't very sporting," Mason's character deadpans at the finale. "Using real bullets.").

Few films utilized the VistaVision/Technicolor process as well as it was used here, and this restored/remastered print is a sheer pleasure to look at, with its vibrant colors and perfectly framed shots, whether they be wide masters (the many action scenes) or detail inserts (Landau's eerily blue eyes). The art direction and wardrobe are practically characters themselves - check out Eva Marie Saint's black and red dress in the Chicago auction house scene. And when was the last time you saw bright green used so well in a title sequence?

The special features on the set are excellent as well, including lengthy documentaries about Grant (a frank and forthright one), Hitchcock and the making of the film. Also included is a feature-length commentary by screenwriter Lehman retained from an earlier release (he died in 2005 at age 89). Newark, N.J., native Eva Marie Saint appears prominently in all the features and is still going strong at age 85 (she gave an interview to the San Francisco Chronicle about the film on Friday, and there's another recent one on Kim Morgan's Sunset Gun blog.).

In some ways, NXNW marked the end of Hitchcock's "Old Hollywood" period. It was his final film (of four) with Grant, and though he would continue to use soon-to-be-major stars (Paul Newman, Sean Connery) in his remaining seven films, it's the last gasp of the man who made TO CATCH A THIEF, REAR WINDOW and other thrillers steeped in Hollywood glamor. The next year, he would get down and dirty with PSYCHO.

BLOOD'S A ROVER

I don't write many book reviews these days. I use to do quite a few during my newspaper years, but now I only dabble with the occasional freelance piece, usually for nonfiction works, such as the recent biography of actor Warren Oates. I shy away from reviewing fiction now, especially since I've had my own books published and reviewed. Part of that is karmic fear (what goes around comes around) and part is that I now realize how much work it is to actually write a book. As a result, I'm more reluctant to be critical of someone else's work (plus, the odds are greater now that I might actually bump into the author at some point).

However, while on the road the last two weeks, I read James Ellroy's new novel BLOOD'S A ROVER, the conclusion of his "Underworld U.SA." trilogy, and feel inclined to say a few things about it (coincidentally, one of my first reviews for The Star-Ledger was of Ellroy's memoir MY DARK PLACES).

First off: BLOOD'S A ROVER is long - that's looonnnnggg - topping out at 640 pages. THE COLD SIX THOUSAND, the previous book in the trilogy, published in 2001, was a little longer, but seemed to read tighter. Ellroy's writing style in BAR is probably more accessible than it was in CST - there are fewer three-and-four-word sentences filled with punchy alliteration ("The Deuce was dead. The dealers yawned. The barman yawned. Stray dogs meandered through. They beat the heat."). But Ellroy's headlong pace lags several times in BAR, and I sometimes felt myself stopping to take a breather before gathering the energy to read on.

It also feels slightly padded. Ellroy often halts the narrative to insert diary entries from his main characters. However, a lot of those entries seem to be written in the same voice, despite the fact they come from characters with varied backgrounds. At least three of them use variations on the phrase "I ride the zeitgeist" at one point or another. That is to say they speak like no one else in the world - except James Ellroy.

BAR is also a direct follow-up to CST, and if you're not familiar with the previous book, you may find yourself a little lost, even though Ellroy helpfully drops in several pages of backstory early on. BAR opens in the aftermath of the MLK/RFK assassinations, which were orchestrated by some of the major players in the trilogy, a few of whom are now seeking redemption. Others, like the French/Corsican mercenary Jean-Philippe Mesplede, who took out JFK with a shot from the grassy knoll, have moved on to other evil business, including illegal commando raids and scalping expeditions on Castro's Cuba. Rogue FBI agent Dwight "The Enforcer" Holley (a nickname recycled from Ellroy's 1992 novel WHITE JAZZ, whose main character was rogue L.A. cop Dave "The Enforcer" Klein) is regretting his career as a "right-wing thug," yet planning another assassination and setting up a likely fall guy to take the rap - and a bullet. Ex-Las Vegas cop Wayne Tedrow, son of a white supremacist hatemonger, is racked with guilt over his own role in the killing of MLK. And young "peeper" Don Crutchfield (a name Ellroy borrowed from a real L.A. private detective) is learning at the feet of them all. And like them, he's soon obsessed with the mysterious Joan Rosen Klein, the left-wing radical at the center of all the mysteries, who men kill and die for without ever really understanding.

Throw in Haitian voodoo, the mob, Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, Dominican Republic casinos, anti-Castro extremists, black revolutionaries, various psychedelic drugs and a 1964 armored car robbery that somehow sparks the whole plot and you have an idea of why it took took Ellroy 640 pages to get it all in, in a way that makes sense. Well, sort of makes sense.

Still, BAR is a James Ellroy novel, and there's only one writer in the world who can pull that off. For scope, complexity and breadth of ambition, no one else comes close. He doesn't always succeed in his efforts, but the arrogance and energy of them can be invigorating in itself. BAR would work better if it were tighter - 100 pages could have been easily chopped - but it's still unlike anything else out there.

Some other quick notes:

- The title comes from an A.E. Houseman verse ("Clay lies still/But blood's a rover"). That's also the long-announced title of Harlan Ellison's yet-to-be completed novel about the adventures of Vic and Blood, the post-apocalyptic duo from his award-winning novella "A Boy and His Dog."

- Dwight Holley is haunted by the death of George Diskant, a Nyack, N.Y., man whom Holley killed in a drunken driving accident. George Diskant is also the name of a celebrated cinematographer who shot some of greatest films noir of the 1940 and 50s, including THEY LIVE BY NIGHT, THE NARROW MARGIN, ON DANGEROUS GROUND and KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL.

- Ellroy isn't always so good with technical details. He repeatedly has his characters use "silencered" Magnum revolvers. Silencers/suppressors don't work on revolvers (what law-enforcement types call "wheel guns"), much less with high-powered Magnum rounds. Any noise abatement at the silenced muzzle is more than canceled out by the blowback through the open cylinder.

Still, like him or not, if you're attempting to write serious crime fiction these days, you have to read Ellroy. His slow output and occasional stumbles aside, the Demon Dog still leads the pack.

First reviews

Publishers' Weekly, Nov. 2, 2009
(Starred review) Gone 'til November
Wallace Stroby.
Minotaur, $24.99 (304p)
ISBN 978-0-312-56024-9

Tormented lives brutally intersect in Stroby's powerful thriller, the possible first in a new series to feature Sara Cross, the lone woman sheriff's deputy in Florida's St. Charles County. One night, Cross, a single mother who's coping with her son's leukemia and the remnants of a two-years-gone postdivorce fling with fellow deputy Billy Flynn, arrives on the edge of a cypress swamp where Flynn has just shot a 22-year-old black man from New Jersey allegedly fleeing a traffic stop. Sara tries to smother her still-simmering lust for no-good Billy, but her cop instincts drive her toward a dismaying truth that hurtles her into a violent showdown with an aging New Jersey contract killer stricken with a rare cancer. While relentlessly probing the eternal mystery of why bright and capable women fall for dangerous losers, Stroby (The Heartbreak Lounge) explores moral choices that leave his devastatingly real characters torn between doing nothing and risking everything. (Jan.)


Booklist, Dec. 1, 2009 issue
"GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER is rock-solid crime fiction that melds compelling characters, crisp writing, and a finely rendered portrait of Old Florida, the state's thinly populated, less-storied interior. Sara and Morgan, an aging career criminal who has just been diagnosed with cancer, are Stroby's best creations. Morgan is ruthless and resourceful, but he also has a quite dignity and a streak of humanity that may have readers picturing actor Morgan Freeman."

Final cover and early words

Here's the final, slightly tweaked, cover for GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER (due out from St. Martin's/Minotaur Jan. 19), along with some very generous early responses from a trio of terrific writers:

"In GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER, Wallace Stroby’s mastery of character and dialogue is mated to a hellacious narrative engine. His heroine, Sara Cross, is a wonderful creation.”
- George Pelecanos, author of THE WAY HOME and producer/co-writer of THE PACIFIC and THE WIRE

"Just when you think that you can't be surprised anymore, a writer like Wallace Stroby ups the ante, finds a way to use familiar elements in new and surprising ways. This is a first-rate novel, with characters who live on in the reader's mind long after the book is finished. I always expect great things from Stroby, and GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER is a significant addition to an already impressive body of work."
- Laura Lippman, author of WHAT THE DEAD KNOW and ANOTHER THING TO FALL


“In these days of mega formulaic blockbusters, it seems almost impossible to find a novel that not only has depth of characterization, but a compelling plot. GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER achieves both and seamlessly. The novel takes off like a freight train... the writing is a joy, full of beautiful asides, an almost weary compassion and some passages that literally break your heart. Sara Cross is a wondrous character. This novel sings, darkly and irresistibly.”
– Ken Bruen, author of LONDON BOULEVARD and THE GUARDS

Random Readings, Vol. 8

This uplifting installment of Random Readings comes from Don Carpenter's brilliant 1966 novel HARD RAIN FALLING, recently reprinted by New York Review Books. In this passage, a down-on-his-luck ex-boxer named Jack Leavitt - who's gone from orphanage to reform school to penitentiary in short order - contemplates the ironies of lust late one night on his bunk in San Quentin. HARD RAIN is only peripherally a crime novel, but this passage is a noir as it gets:

"It struck him with horrible force. His parents, whoever they were, had probably made love out of just such an itch. For fun, for this momentary satisfaction, they had conceived him, and because he was obviously inconvenient, dumped him in the orphanage; because he, the life they had created while they were being careless and thoughtless, was not part of the fun of it all; he was just a harmful side effect of the scratching of the itch; he was the snot in the handkerchief after the nose had been blown, just something disgusting to be gotten rid of in secret and forgotten. Cold rage filled him, rage at his unknown parents, rage at the life he had been given ....
Fifteen or twenty minutes on a forgotten bed between two probable strangers had given him twenty-four years of misery, pain, and suffering, and promised, unless he were to die soon, to go on giving him misery for another forty or fifty years, locked up in one small room or another without hope of freedom, love, life, truth or understanding. A penis squirts, and I am doomed to a life of death. It has got to be insanity; there has got to be a God, because only an insane God could have created such a universe."