Mystery

Okay, so It Happened One Knife is a terrible pun on the movie title It Happened One Night, but don't hold it against Jeffrey Cohen--either the title or the knife. Cohen, who has been described as "the Dave Barry of the New Jersey Turnpike" (which actually makes him, er, Jeffrey Cohen), is a first-rate comedic mystery writer. It Happened One Knife features independent movie theatre owner Elliot Freed. Elliot Freed couldn’t be happier—his all-comedy-all-the-time movie theatre has gotten a makeover, he might be getting back together with his ex-wife, and he's lifted his ban on non-comedies so he can show his projectionist’s gory film-school debut. Then things go seriously wrong. The film goes missing and one of his boyhood heroes is implicated in a fifty-year-old murder. And that's just the beginning of Freed's troubles...

The first novel in the series, Some Like It Hot-Buttered, was nominated for a Lefty Award for best comedic mystery. Cohen himself has an interesting back story: he's very active in the mystery community and writers for, among others, The New York Times, USA Weekend, Premiere, TV Guide, and the Newark Star-Ledger. He's also written more than 20 feature-length screenplays, and his work has been developed by  Jim Henson Productions, CBS, and Gross-Weston Productions. He is the author of three previous novels and two non-fiction books, and lives in New Jersey with his wife and children.

Of Cohen's Double Feature mystery series, Linda Ellerbee, famed TV journalist, has said, “Movies, murder, characters who are real people, laughs, danger, and damn good writing...truly has something for everyone: a comedy tonight—and so much more!” Check it out! (And don't forget to visit the really cool website.)

Jack O'Connell's The Resurrectionist is one of the most original American novels of the year. A quest by a father to save his son, a tale of mad scientists and dream-logic, the story of a band of "freaks" on their own strange journey, and the chronicle of an odd coma clinic, the book defies easy classification. As I wrote in my recent Washington Post Book World review, "I've read The Resurrectionist twice now, and both times it came as something of a revelation. It seems odd we should care so much about the freaks, for example, when we know they're merely characters in a boy's comic book. Nor should the dream-life of a coma patient be so resonant, and yet it is."

The Resurrectionist has been reviewed by the LA Times, BookPage, The San Francisco Chronicle, and many others. The New York Times Book Review wrote of the book, "“To call Jack O’Connell’s novels imaginative, or even original, doesn’t begin to say it...There’s something both exciting and unnerving about [his] kind of hallucinatory writing.” Ron Hogan at Galleycat also posted a very nice feature. A website for The Resurrectionist exists at Enter Limbo.

The novel comes nine years after O'Connell's last, in part for reasons revealed in the interview below and in part because his previous novel, Word Made Flesh, "was an extremely dark book. By the time it was published, I had two young kids. And I didn’t want to go back in the darkness for a while. So I spent a couple of years writing a satirical road novel. It’s a book I still like but my agent convinced me that it was not what readers expected or wanted from me. And that it might diminish whatever small readership I’d built up over these last 15 years. So I put it in a drawer and launched Sweeney’s story. Which was soon invaded by a troupe of wandering circus freaks." Other novels by O'Connell include the cult classic Box Nine, The Skin Palace, and Wireless, all set in his iconic, uniquely American creation, the rustbelt city of Quinsigamond.

As a long-time fan of O'Connell's unique surreal noir approach to fiction, I was thrilled to have a chance to interview him. When I asked where he was while answering my emailed questions, he replied, "I’m in the lab. The sepulcher. The dreaming vault at the top of the house. Hermetically sealed and insulated with 40 years worth of collected pulp. It’s about 5 a.m. and I’m stupid with jet-lag..."

Amazon.com: Where did your city of Quinsigamond come from? How has it changed over the years?
Jack O'Connell: Quinsigamond is my home-city as refracted through a quarter century of fever dream. I’ve lived my whole life within about three square miles of central Massachusetts. That was not the intention. No kid ever fell so hard for the standard clichés of an imagined writing life. I haunted the corner Rexall store and memorized the bio-blurbs on the rear covers of the paperbacks. Was long convinced that I needed to travel the globe, drive dynamite trucks, pan for gold in the Yukon, and fight fascists in Spain in order to become a writer. Things didn’t work out that way. And so, to paraphrase Thoreau, I have traveled much in my old, rustbelt, native city.

Basically, and over time, Quinsigamond became my supreme noir machine, the eternally dark and unknowable American metropolis. A nefarious, urban, capitalist hive where cycles of mystery, violence, manipulation, degradation, fear, loathing and meaninglessness play out repeatedly. Quinsigamond is the enormous, shadowy, chaotic, violent city that you have seen in so many films: It is Alphaville. It is Chinatown. It is Gotham City, Sin City, the Naked City. It is the Asphalt Jungle, the Nightmare Alley, the Shock Corridor and the Street of No Return.

But it’s also the archetypal real-world urban industrial city of the northeastern United States. So, Quinsigamond is Detroit, Michigan, of 1976. It is Akron, Ohio. It is Allentown, Pennsylvania. The Bangkok Park section of my city is Watts of 1965 or the most ravaged section of the Bronx in New York in 1972 (crossed with the Harlem of a dozen b-budget crime movies). The Canal Zone section of Quinsigamond is Manhattan’s East Village, on a Halloween night when someone slipped a particularly potent brand of acid into your punch. In one sense, Quinsigamond is this stew of my perceptions of what happened to all these once-teaming, once-vibrant metropolises of the American empire; these large urban municipalities that were emblematic of the industrial age. And as we moved into a post-industrial era, these cities were sort of abandoned and left to decay.

From the beginning, I was writing stories set in some version of my hometown. By the time I hit my 20s, it had morphed into Quinsigamond. And to this day, I continue to watch it evolve...or, maybe, devolve. It has grown in ways that amuse and repel and surprise. These days, I’m most interested in the totality of its history, which I’ve been mapping in the notebooks with ever-increasing detail over the last decade or so. I know how Quinsigamond began and how it ends. And I’m discovering with a good bit of excitement what happened in between.

Amazon.com: Your writing often mixes noir, horror, and the grotesque with your own brand of what I'd call American Surrealism. What influences on your work might surprise readers?
Jack O'Connell: Not sure how surprising any of the influences might be. I came of age in the late 60s/early 70s and, like a lot of my peers, I confess to a crazy amount of joy derived from wallowing in the pop of that era. What I get a kick out of is discovering, via the Web, that though we often thought we were the only Secret Martians on the planet grooving on the weird stuff at 1 a.m. in our parents’ paneled rec rooms, we were actually part of a teeming, semi-hidden nation of pulp-devouring geeks. I really dig that shock of recognition when somebody references that ancient ABC Movie of the Week that played with his head for two weeks in 1971. Or that German horror flick that triggered a month of dissociation when it was screened at the downtown grindhouse one weekend in ’72.

But the writers who really knocked me over and shaped me were people like Bradbury and Richard Matheson and Harlan Ellison. I always loved stories that seemed rooted in the mundane here and now until about three pages in. Then someone turns down an alley and everything becomes bathed in a growing aura of weirdness. I had the good fortune to spend a day in Phoenix a couple weeks ago with Jim Sallis, and, as always, I couldn’t help but hound him for anecdotes about the New Wave cabal – about Ellison and Delany and Spinrad and Dangerous Visions and New Worlds and such. Those guys hit me at a crucial time. From someone like Ellison, I took this lasting notion that you could mix things up, that you could retain the coolness, the flash, of SF, and merge it with mainstream literary devices and concerns. That you could cross-breed genres. That you could experiment, you could have fun. You could play with new effects, styles, approaches. That you were allowed to use whatever you felt best illuminated the story at hand.

A lot of noir writers that I know acknowledge an adolescent love of mystery stories. But during those crucial years when I was driving around my hometown with my father and soaking up my particular landscape, I was also feasting on different kinds of stories, which, though often housed inside a variety of different mediums, shared tone--a kind of weird, noirish, dystopian-but-still-romantic, individualistic, visionary vibe. Whether in stories and novels, or films, or even in TV shows or record albums, I was hungry for fables about the tensions between rebellion and conformity, the individual and the faceless state, control and freedom, illusion and reality, comfort and liberty. I was always a sucker for neo-Orwellian weirdness. I guess I’m thinking of stuff like The Prisoner, this blatant, strident, anti-totalitarian serial--Mod Kafka for the late night tube. And that trickle of early ’70s SF films about near-future dystopias--movies like A Boy and His Dog, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green and Rollerball--which all seemed, even to my hormone-engorged, pubertous brain, incendiary critiques of contemporary culture. You know, I’d even include Springsteen’s “Jungleland,” which was a corner drugstore JD paperback novel set to music, exploded into a Wall of Sound, electrified, supercharged, made epic and operatic, a teenage Iliad staged inside the noir daydreams of my own city.

Amazon.com: What was the hardest part of writing The Resurrectionist?
Jack O'Connell: Everything was difficult throughout the course of this composition. I started out imagining that I was writing one book and ended up realizing, at one point, that I was writing another. I’ve never had a writing experience like this one. Originally, my intention was to write a sleek noir story that could have been sold in a 1959 Detroit bus station. In four or five months, I had completed most of a first draft of that book. In that draft, I had my protagonist repeatedly reading a comic book to his comatose son. Then one day, I asked myself, “What’s the deal with this comic book? What’s the story?” And thus was born the sub-plot about the Goldfaden Circus Freaks and their travails, as detailed in the comic book, Limbo. In short order, the freaks’ story began to expand and grow. And before I knew it, the freaks’ tale was rivaling my little bus station noir. Then it was mirroring the original story. And then it was making moves to merge with the noir thriller. 

Amazon.com: Did you write the "comic book" sections all at one time and then layer them into the novel, or...?
Jack O'Connell: Yes. Once I realized the comic book story was going to be a running secondary narrative throughout the book, I wrote the freaks’ tale beginning to end. In fact, there is a larger, longer version than the one that appears in the book. I sliced and reshaped and rewrote in order to layer it into the primary narrative.

Amazon.com: There's a remarkable scene between the (mad) doctor and his prized newt. What did you want that scene to accomplish? Was it as fun to write as it is to read?
Jack O'Connell: Ha! Glad you liked René! Mostly, I guess, it’s an expository scene, of a sort. And I was hoping to shine some light on Dr. Peck’s character, I suppose. But the fact is, I’m not done with René. René will return. He and his kind have played a significant role in the history of Quinsigamond and will continue to do so. You know, a couple weeks back, I was walking around Portland, Oregon, late at night and I debated getting a tattoo of René the newt on the bottom of my left foot…

Amazon.com: How much revision do you do? And how much of what you wrote in rough draft made it into the published version of The Resurrectionist?
Jack O'Connell: I’m a compulsive reviser. And I wish I were not. And the compulsion seems only to get worse. I go through multiple drafts of a book and the changes from draft to draft are considerable. Then I work with my agent on additional, successive drafts. And then with the book’s editor once it’s sold. I’ll put it this way: I always begin with an outline. Once a book is about 100 pages along, I put the outline in a drawer and give myself the freedom to take some detours and see where they lead. When the book is finished and I’m packing up drafts and notes and the ephemera that surround composition, I’ll often take another look at that original outline. It rarely bears much resemblance to the published novel.

Amazon.com: Who is the biggest "freak" in The Resurrectionist, in your opinion?
Jack O'Connell: My gut says that the biggest freak of all is the guy who dreamed up the story. And I’m more than a little ambivalent regarding that confession…

Amazon.com: Would you ever consider writing an actual Limbo comic book?
Jack O'Connell: Yup. After the book sold, word got around, apparently, about the comic book subplot. There were some casual discussions between my agent and some comics people. One day, I received an envelope in the mail that contained some pencil sketches of some of my Goldfaden freaks. The artist really nailed some of those characters, I thought.

It’s funny--because of the Limbo story, people think I have some background in comics. I wish that were the case. Growing up, comics were a seasonal, passing fancy. I never read the terrific superhero stuff my friends were reading. Late ’60s, I was feasting on the stories of “Chuck White” in Treasure Chest and things like Archie and Sad Sack. It wasn’t until the 1980s that I became aware of some of the amazing work people were doing in comics. My brother turned me on to Dean Motter’s Mr. X. Right now, I’m smitten with Warren Ellis’s Dr. Sleepless. And while I’ve been out on the road, lots of people have raved over and pointed me to Criminal by Brubaker.

Amazon.com: Buzz the motorcycle gang leader is pretty complex, but basically a sociopath, I thought. Would you agree with that assessment? And if so, what does it say about Sweeney that he in a sense weds his fate to Buzz's by novel's end?
Jack O'Connell: I do agree. And I think it says that Sweeney has come down a pretty harrowing road and emerged at its end a fairly altered individual. One who can no longer accept the consensus reality that, in the past, had defined his existence.

Amazon.com: What are you currently working on?
Jack O'Connell: About ten years ago I started writing a novel about a group of surfistas--the kids who try to “surf” atop speeding commuter trains. Back in the early ’90s, someone gave me a photo of these streets kids in Rio who weren’t allowed onto the tourist beaches. And, so, they found their own way to surf--they’d climb up on the roofs of trains and try to surf them as they sped down tracks and around curves. Until recently, I couldn’t find the correct voice for the book. Now I think I’ve got it. Hopefully, I’ll have a draft done in the next year.

Meg Gardiner's China Lake was released earlier this month by Obsidian Mysteries after a convoluted path to U.S. publication. It's a firecracker of a novel featuring Gardiner's trademark character Evan Delaney. In this first of a five-book series, Delaney gets deeply involved in a murder mystery after her ex-sister-in-law Tabitha joins the religious group called the Remnant. The writing throughout is taut and exciting, and I'm looking forward to reading the other books in the series, which Obsidian will release shortly. I recently interviewed Gardiner via email about the novel...

Amazon.com: Can you tell us where you are as you’re answering these questions?
Meg Gardiner: I’m sitting at my kitchen table, watching thunder clouds knock around the skies of southern England. 

Amazon.com: The story of how you got a U.S. publisher is an interesting one...
Gardiner: I wrote China Lake after moving to London for my husband’s job with an American IT company.  We expected to be in the U.K. a short while before going back to Santa Barbara.  But our time in London was extended, so when I finished the book I sent it to a British literary agent. He assumed that because I’m American, I’d get a U.S. publisher right away. He thought he’d have to coax the Brits into taking me.  Instead, a British publisher snapped up China Lake. French, Dutch, and other foreign language publishers did too.  But American publishers said, No thanks.

I don’t know why. I’ve heard theories: that U.S. publishers thought I was English--and wanted English crime novels about England, not about California. Or that the plot, featuring a survivalist sect that tries to bring on the apocalypse, ticked off the authors of the Left Behind series, and might have riled up fundamentalists. (Yes, that sounds nuts. But I’ve heard it more than once from publishing executives.) Or that New York publishers weren’t in the mood for a novel that mentioned biological warfare.

Anyway, once U.S. publishers shrugged at the first novel, they shook their heads at the rest. Nobody wanted to pick up a series part way through. Back home, my relatives began looking at me funny. They’d smile and say, “Of course we believe you write books, dear. I’m sure they’re very nice.” Then they’d point at their heads and make a circling motion with their index finger.

Then luck intervened. It intervened in a great, loud, Maximum Overdrive way.  Stephen King was looking for a book to read on a flight to London. He and I have the same British publisher, so from a stack of novels they’d sent him, he grabbed China Lake.  He liked it. He read the whole Evan Delaney series. He thought I should have a U.S. publisher. He mentioned my novels on his website. He wrote a column about the books in Entertainment Weekly. Within a week of his column appearing, ten American publishers wanted to publish the Evan Delaney series, along with the new novel I was writing, The Dirty Secrets Club. And I swear, I didn’t pay Stephen King off, or threaten him, or take his dog hostage. Scout’s honor. He truly wanted to help another writer he thought deserved a boost. I can’t express how grateful I am for his support.

Amazon.com: Are you at all nervous about the first novel’s reception in the U.S.?
Gardiner: Not at all.  And by “not at all,” I mean of course I am. Sending a novel out to a new audience is nerve-racking.  It doesn’t matter that the book already has complimentary quotes on the cover.  This novel is my baby. And I’m holding it up in public and asking: Do you like it? But I’m not crazy-nervous. I’m less edgy than I’d feel parachuting into Dodger Stadium, say, to sing the national anthem, dressed in a Batgirl costume...Actually, that could be fun.

Amazon.com: What’s the difference between a cult and religion in your opinion?
Gardiner: A religion is a system of beliefs about the true nature of existence and humanity’s connection to the divine--to a supernatural reality beyond what we can see with our eyes.  And it’s a community that shares convictions about what people must do to bring themselves closer to God. (Or bliss, or enlightenment.) A cult, to vastly simplify, is a group that takes religion to extremes.  It’s fanatical, manipulative, and in the end, destructive. Cults demand total commitment. They often have charismatic leaders who require absolute subservience from followers. And they’re coercive. They tear members away from their previous lives to isolate them from the wicked, tempting world. They may force followers to break contact with family and friends who are “unsaved” or “infidels.” 

Cults divide the world into Good--them--and Evil--the rest of us. To those in their blessed little band they offer love, salvation, and paradise. They promise members a unique role at the center of great cosmic events.  Some promise followers a front row seat for Armageddon. Sometimes they just take people’s money and hollow out their spirits. But cults feed on us-versus-them thinking.  They may believe they’re embattled, and nurture a raging sense of grievance. This makes them prone to conspiracy theories. They can become paranoid, and start to believe that great forces are not just persecuting them, but massing to strike. And at that point they can spiral into violence, self-destruction, or terrorism.

Amazon.com: People get suckered into scams all the time, of all kinds. Are people naturally gullible or...?
Gardiner: People want certainty. They want meaning. Some want purity. Unfortunately, the world is messy.  Faced with the jumble of everyday life, some people jump off the reality ship, and join groups that promise answers. Simple, total, black-and-white answers.  Some of these people are naive.  Others are lost or needy. Some are seeking permission to unleash the violent impulses they feel. And remember: Nobody sets out to join a cult. They join that really exciting church. Or this prayer group that’s got it all figured out.  Or some right-thinking folks who are going to dish out the punishment the world deserves. Brew up all their rage and fervor, add the promise that believers get glory and goodies in paradise, while everybody they hate (the boss, foreigners, that nasty girl who teased them in school) goes to hell, and you get… the Remnant.

Amazon.com: What do you enjoy in the fiction you read? One thing I noticed immediately with China Lake is a dual narrative urgency wedded to an ability to give the reader unusual specific detail or description. That’s hard to do.
Gardiner: I enjoy powerful stories. By that I don’t mean books featuring explosions, but stories where people face tough dilemmas, and under pressure must try to find the strength to make courageous decisions. I especially love strong stories told with wit, insight, dazzling writing, or off-the-wall humor. Annie Proulx, Carl Hiaasen, James Lee Burke--I could go on. 

Amazon.com: Where’s the art in what you do, and where’s the craft, or is there a difference?
Gardiner: Art is transcendent creativity. It’s an outpouring of beauty. Craft is creativity harnessed to tactics: It’s good work. I would never claim to be an artist. If I can reach the level of craft, I’m pleased.

Amazon.com: What do you personally most fear?
Gardiner: I’m a parent. Ask no more. 

Amazon.com: Is there anything political, social, literary, or other, that’s been on your mind of late, and do you mind telling us what and why?
Gardiner: Free speech.  We have to fight for our right to speak the truth and to express robust opinions even when they’re hard to hear.  We mustn’t let anybody tell us what we can and cannot say, much less what we must and must not think.  Especially not the government.  When only one school of thought or point of view is acceptable, when we fear saying anything else, we lose insight, ingenuity, and courage. We close our eyes, plug our ears, and hideous things happen.  It’s vital to stand up for the right to free speech...I’m also in withdrawal from American Idol. And when does the new season of 24 start?

Amazon.com: What are you currently working on?
Gardiner: A thriller set in San Francisco, the sequel to The Dirty Secrets Club. Forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett must track down a mercenary who has severe memory loss, before he goes on a spree of revenge killings.

For more information on Meg Gardiner, visit her website.

The Foreigner by Francie Lin is one of my favorite novels of the year thus far. It's a smart, sometimes slyly humorous mystery that gives readers a gritty look at the urban underbelly of Taipei, Taiwan. The writing is also first-rate, and the narrator is unique and complex.

My view of the book is probably best exemplified by the Publishers Weekly review: "In Lin's stunning debut, a crime novel set in Taiwan, Emerson Chang, a 40-year-old virgin who's a financial analyst, travels from San Francisco to Taipei on a quest to scatter his mother's ashes and re-establish contact with his shady younger brother, Little P, who's been bequeathed the family hotel. At a meeting with Little P, Chang encounters two peculiar cousins, Poison and Big One, as well as Little P's devious friend, Li An-Qing (aka Atticus), who's anxious to get Little P to sell the family hotel to him. Emerson soon finds himself mixed up in machinations involving Atticus and extortion due to Little P's unsavory dealings. In addition, Emerson loses his job back in California, and the property he's inherited in Taipei turns out to have its own mysteries. Chang's distinctive voice propels a strong and original plot...this novel will satisfy readers of thrillers and general fiction alike."

Recently, I interviewed Lin via email...

Amazon.com: Emerson Chang doesn't strike me as your average fictional narrator. Was it hard to find and keep his voice throughout the novel or did it come naturally?
Francie Lin: The general tone wasn't that hard to find, but it was hard to refine and maintain, definitely. Emerson was originally more pathetic, and he was prone to long, poetic, ruminative passages about death and love. He had no edge at all, which made him kind of tiresome to write. Only after a few revisions did he develop a little more backbone, and then it was fun to play his fastidiousness off the more hardened characters.

Amazon.com: Did you know you were writing a kind-of mystery novel when you started creating The Foreigner?
Francie Lin: Sort of. Certainly I wanted to, but I'm not that good at thinking up plots, and didn't have the guts to write a mystery at first. But I did want to write something about the little local crime syndicates in Taipei, so I kind of sidled up to the genre under the guise of writing something more "literary."

Amazon.com: The novel is at times funny because Emerson Chang can be funny, but the events are very serious. I'm curious if this translates into what you as a reader love in fiction.
Francie Lin: I had Graham Greene in mind much of the time I was writing, especially Our Man in Havana and Travels with My Aunt. I do like some levity, especially if it's contained in the character's voice or in the incongruity of a particular situation. I love Richard Price; his novels aren't funny per se, but his characters are punched through with odd little tics and ironies.

Amazon.com: How much of the setting did you have to research and how much did you have some first-hand knowledge of?
Francie Lin: Most of the details came from a year I spent in Taipei. Not that I hung out much with petty thugs. But the TV news there is terrific--I don't think they have any laws or scruples about personal privacy or decorum, so you get to see the most bizarre things on the evening broadcast: drug busts, the insides of politicians' bedrooms, girls' panties, brothels, anything. That probably doesn't count as first-hand knowledge, but I guess it doesn't exactly count as research either. Certainly all the atmospheric details came from first-hand exploring. The bar scene with prostitutes in Hong Kong was written almost exactly as I experienced it when I spent a New Year's Eve in Wan Chai, and I did wander around a bit in Chungking Mansions as well.

Amazon.com:  Had you written other fiction before The Foreigner?
Francie Lin: A couple of short stories, but not much otherwise. I wrote a lot of reviews and essays after I graduated from college, but no fiction.

Amazon.com: What, thus far, has been the most satisfying part of being a writer?
Francie Lin: I'm not sure it can even be defined. I suppose the sense of being able to make something just the way you want it, to leap around in space and time, to bring ideas and characters into a kind of resolution and clarity--all of that is very addictive.

Amazon.com: What are you currently working on?
Francie Lin: A new novel about a Chinese spy and her American handler who are caught up in an information war to find a cure for an international epidemic of premature aging spread by contaminated groundwater. It's not as Hollywood as it sounds--this time instead of Graham Greene, I'm keeping movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Straw Dogs in mind. I'm aiming for that kind of grim, gritty atmosphere.

John Domini's distinguished career has included fiction in the Paris Review, nonfiction in The New York Times, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his last novel, Earthquake I.D. Now he returns with A Tomb on the Periphery, which takes place in contemporary Southern Italy and features Fabbrizio, a fatherless twenty-something looking for work around, as the press release puts it, "the rotted husk of a turbulent urban hive." Encounters with the mob and a beautiful archaeologist provide the fuel for this intricate and nuanced novel. Jay Parini had this to say about the novel: "This is a delightful crime novel, with a setting to die for, and at the same time a moving story that should interest a wide range of readers."

I recently interviewed Domini. Here are his thoughts about the novel, and fiction generally, which form a kind of reverie...

***

[Right now] I’m in my home office in Des Moines, happy among my papers and books. But let's look further: out a window is the patch that passes for a back yard in old neighborhoods, where we've got basil and tomato going. Beyond that, within a couple blocks, I have all the necessary: post office, copy-and-fax, coffee shop, a grocery, banks and dry cleaning and places to eat, even an independent bookstore. It's a Midwestern American pocket of the model originally developed in the cities of the Fertile Crescent--Christopher Alexander's “timeless way of building,” which every metropolis comes to sooner or later, even in a culture built on cars and, these days, communication satellites. From the human skeleton out to internet’s vertebrae.

My imagination tends to stories: to the crossroads of a situation and the ways in and out. A novel must select from among those. Myself, though, as I'm hammering the closed set of a novel into place, I’m aware of other possibilities, the fractals proliferating beyond. That's why I’m drawn to a city like Naples, fractals everywhere. Tomb is the second third of a loose trilogy set in that city.

In the situation or two that prompts a novel, there’s always a person with complications looped around the ankles. Those I follow, through months of rough drafts (years, back when I was hustling to pay the bills), working to shoo alternative plots back into their holes and place weight-bearing covers over the openings. The process offers plenty of satisfaction, sure--but never when the closure becomes too neat. Even on the umpteenth run-through, I’m trying to deliver story and character as they’re experienced, as a surprise. I think of Thelonious Monk, how he can trounce the ordinary and, in so doing, provide resolution and delight.

Is Tomb on the Periphery crime fiction? Maybe it's ghost fiction, or even cubicle porn (there's sex on a desktop, after all). But if we set labels aside, if we just talk good novels, crime figures again and again, crucially. Story itself, in presenting an alternative life, functions as an illegal alien. In Europe, too, the crime novel isn’t divorced from the literary novel. Among Italians, the best example might be Leonardo Sciasca. Thus, that old fedora and overcoat just won’t fit a novel like Tomb. Genre is all about the reassurance of closure; it can’t abide the untidiness of genuine depth, whether depth of personality, style, or theme. So I do read in the genre, but I never need more than a single sample out of a detective series. That applies even to the esteemed sourpuss, Commisario Brunetti.

If I'm seeking to avoid the predictable and still deliver the spin and satisfaction of story, then what I’m making has got to be full of knuckles. Full of lived-in density. At its best, it's like Ben Webster on sax, putting a whole moody season in a single note. The power of "things," as you put it, seeps down to the level of the arresting phrase or word. Syntactical flow can never be unvarying, since different scenes make different demands. Myself, I often need to work out choices by hand, or sound them aloud, going back to the technology of cave and campfire. Also, think about this: the Q-&-A tends to quip and aphorism. The interview tends to valorize the smart mouth. And I have one, yes. The cross I bear. But a smart mouth isn't nearly enough to sustain a novel of any complexity.

[As for the reader,] I’m asking, can he or she track this scene? To think of the reader and the whole... well, as a novelist yourself, you realize this can be paralyzing. Marketing takes one to the question of reportage: what news is this author bringing? But literary work doesn't offer breaking news so much as eternal quandaries, cloaked in idiosyncratic tribal gear. Fabbrizio’s gear is supposed to be interesting. His tribe is that of the Naples periphery, the breeding grounds of the mob, and so his ethical struggle has a context unknown to Americans. He's closer to a hand-to-mouth entrepreneur in New Delhi than to the cardboard figures who populate Under the Warm Tuscan Sun. Books like that--the chianti-dazed Anglo-American romance of Italy--are what I’m working against, and my reader shares my regard for a cross-cultural encounter that has more bite. He or she appreciates how a fantasy touch, like a voice from the dead, can enhance a story's reality. Ideally, too, such a reader will be interested in the entire Naples trilogy, all set after the next earthquake. This began with last year’s Earthquake I.D. and continues with Tomb (the speed of the followup is thanks to my luck with the national contest run by Gival Press). The final novel is titled The Color Inside a Melon, and I should finish this year. Each story stands on its own, entirely. The first is from the point of view of American visitors, the second of course from that of a native, and the third will be from that of an African immigrant. But all three share certain themes, and there are overlapping details, I hope illuminating details. I'm going for a 360-degree portrait of a place stippled by shadows out of history, out of myth and legend as well, and saddled besides with all sorts of brass-tacks problems, since Naples must be counted the multicultural urban center that's lasted, in its present shape, longer than any other in the West. And now it faces yet another new millennium and its shakeups. What reader, I ask you, wouldn't be interested in that?

Niche mysteries are very popular these days, and the New American Library Obsidian series has just released a bevy of them out into the wild this month. From haunted bookshop mysteries like The Ghost and the Femme Fatale by Alice Kimberly (aka Cleo Coyle) to garden mysteries complete with gardening tips like Perfect Poison by Joyce and Jim Lavene (authors of Poisoned Petals), no matter what your interests in life, you can find a novel you'll enjoy.

Dance enthusiasts may want to pick up Natalie M. Roberts' Pointe and Shoot, a Jenny Patridge dance mystery, while clay crafters and crochet hobbyists may flock to The Cracked Pot by Melissa Glazer (okay, now, c'mon, Obsidian--surely that's a pseudonym?!) and Hooked on Murder by Betty Hechtman respectively. Both books include interesting tips and projects in addition to the fiction.

Finally, if you like mysteries about mysteries, Selma Eichler's Murder Can Crash Your Party, featuring Desiree Shapiro, might be just your thing. When Shapiro is invited as a speaker at a mystery writers' convention, she receives a truly bizarre proposition from a special fan: read my unpublished novel and if you can solve the mystery between the covers, I'll give you $25,000. What follows is more sinister than Shapiro could possibly expect.

All of this is light, harmless fare for readers looking for some entertainment, especially on vacation--on the plane, at the beach, while getting a pedicure. Mystery purists and lovers of brutal noir fiction need not apply. But never fear--a Ken Bruen or Tom Piccirilli novel can't be far around the corner. In the meantime, have a little fun--read a niche mystery in your particular area of interest. You might be surprised at what you find.