Sunny Interlude

my excuse for not writing this week

Right now I’m not in a good place to write. A real place, I mean. I’m on vacation. Can a setting be so perfect that it is distracting? The sea is a seductive turquoise and the fine sand beaches are white. Yesterday I saw a kid running around with an inflatable unicorn. Of course, where else would you find unicorns? They know a thing or two about paradise. All this—and the rum cocktails—isn’t conducive to coherent thought. It’s perfect however for making a dent in my massive to-be-read pile. A modest dent.

(Photo M.E. Proctor)

I packed a few paperbacks and my tablet, in case I tore through the print books and ran out of material—I’m a really fast reader. I also grabbed my favorite bookmark. Do you have a go-to bookmark? This one is very clever, and deceptively simple. It comes from a secondhand bookshop in Vancouver, Canada, called The Paper Hound Bookshop (well worth a visit). There’s a picture below. As you can see, it’s properly dog-eared, ahah, after a year and a half of use. My bookmarks usually don’t make it that far. I’ve had metal ones (I remember one topped with a butterfly, not very practical), magnetic ones, leather ones … all gone, disappeared, somewhere. I’ve used postcards (it’s fun to find them stuck in a stashed away volume), birthday cards, various scraps of paper. I used to dog-ear wildly but I’m trying to give up the habit. I hear it’s frowned upon …

Right now the doggie bookmark is stuck in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I may or may not finish before the trip home. It’s the last of my packed paperbacks.

I started this reading trip, on the plane, with Adrian McKinty’s The  Detective Up Late, #7 in the Sean Duffy series. It’s a quick read. I didn’t care for it as much as the other Duffy books. The telegraphic, one-word sentences get annoying after a while. Quick-fire fragments usually convey tension and speed. Here they emphasize how tired of his job Duffy has grown. It’s effective and well done, but I got a touch of burn-out myself. That’s what empathizing with the character will do to you. And on a couple of plot turns I could hear the editor’s voice: Raise the stakes! Which McKinty did, with a wink, I suspect.

Major change of pace on my next read, a couple of gears down to Louisiana Cajun country. Jolie Blon’s Bounce, by James Lee Burke. Dave Robicheaux investigates a couple of murders around New Iberia. This is Burke’s favorite territory, heavy on the atmosphere and the senses. What does spawning fish really smell like? Nobody does lyrical rot in both men and nature like Burke. Here he creates a tremendous villain that will stick with the reader for a very long time, and he takes care building him up, playing with past and present, myth and reality, all terrifying. The entire gallery of characters is extraordinary. The book easily makes it into my top 3 of the Robicheaux books. For those of you that don’t know Burke, this is a perfect entry point.

The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes is a different kind of punch to the sternum. I bought the book because Ben Mankiewicz, host on Turner Classic Movies and “noir” fan, said that it was un-filmable. So I went to check for myself. Let’s say, without spoilers, that Ben has a point … a resourceful director (the Coen brothers?) might find a work around but it won’t be easy. It is a remarkable, immersive book. It all starts with a fateful encounter with a hitchhiker on the road to Phoenix, Arizona. The book was published in 1963. Last year I found Hughes’s In a Lonely Place in that Vancouver bookshop I mentioned above. Hughes is a master of disquiet and dread, all wrapped in a sleek and elegant style that hides its teeth. If you’ve seen the excellent Nicholas Ray movie with Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame, be aware that apart from the title and the main character’s name, book and film have very little in common. I can imagine what somebody like David Fincher could do with that one …

That’s it with the book report for now. A good crop overall. Next week, back to writing!

Meanwhile, in the publishing sphere …

I was invited to do a guest post on the Ladies of Mystery blog. Most of their guests write cozy mysteries, so I had an opportunity to talk about crime short stories and how the two formats, long and short, complement each other, the same way varying fitness exercises is beneficial to your health. Here it is: The Long and Short of It. Have a read.

My story Pillow Candy was published by Grande Dame Literary. It is a little strange, a little fantastic, and perfect as a Valentine’s Day appetizer… you’ll see.