• Amazon — Trade Paperback
• Amazon — Trade Paperback | eBook
• Amazon — Trade Paperback | eBook
• Barnes & Noble — Trade Paperback | eBook
• Kobo — eBook
In addition to writing the short stories, I also took the photos, including several at 891 Post Street #401, Sam Spade’s (and Hammett’s) apartment.
To read more about the book and get yourself a copy, go here.
Read it here on Eclectica Magazine.
• Amazon — Trade Paperback | eBook
• Amazon UK — Trade Paperback | eBook
• Barnes & Noble — Trade Paperback | eBook
• Kobo — eBook
I have done exactly that, attempting to answer the question, “What happened to the black bird?” in a short story titled “Mockingbird” that has been published by Eclectica Magazine, an online literary journal. The story is free for anyone to read, but if you want to brush up on the characters and plot of the Falcon before you do so, check out the Falcon Dramatis Personae on my website.
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Raymond Chandler’s typewriter with quote from PLAYBACK
• Amazon — Trade Paperback | eBook
• Barnes & Noble — Trade Paperback | eBook
• IndieBound — Trade Paperback
• Kobo — eBook
And a little video preview:
My crime fiction podcast Riordan’s Desk was ranked the #2 podcast in the category by Goodpods. Check out the full list here.
If you haven’t been listening, start with Season 1, which is an audio performance of my novel, The Dead Beat Scroll.
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Check out this list of the 30 best crime fiction podcasts put together by Feedspot.
I’m very pleased to have my audio fiction podcast Riordan’s Desk included!
If you haven’t been listening, start with Season 1, which is an audio performance of my latest novel, The Dead Beat Scroll.
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I was interviewed by the San Jose Mercury about a contribution I made to the Bancroft Library’s California Detective Fiction Collection a while ago, but just found out it’s included in a color supplement on Bay Area book news. Check it out here.
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I’m late in noticing this, but the first edition copy of Preston & Child’s book Bloodless uses my photograph of Savannah’s Colonial Park Cemetery. That image was also used to illustrate the first edition copy of Patricia Cornwell’s Red Mist.
I should mention, however, that the angel in the middle of the lawn is the book designer’s little addition.
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Occasionally quotes from one of my novels take on a life of their own, such as this rejoinder from side-kick Chris Duckworth to my PI protagonist August Riordan in Candy from Strangers. (Although it is quite funny to see it shown against the backdrop of breath-taking scenery as though it were an inspirational saying.)
One of the more popular ones comes from my first novel The Immortal Game in a scene where Riordan has been beat up in a San Francisco alley and is waiting for a cab he called to take him home.
Alastair Johnston of Poltroon Press has made a letterpress broadside featuring the quote on Ingres paper with Bulmer type in a limited edition run of 100 copies. Get your copy here.
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Many of you will have seen my street photography on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter–or perhaps enjoyed the photos that served as chapter illustrations for my novels. Maybe you even attended an exhibition that featured one or more of my images.
Today I’m pleased to announce Street Stories, a street photography monograph with the best of my work from the last dozen years or so. Published by Poltroon Press–the house that published my first novel–the coffee table-sized book includes 52 images reproduced in tritone by a printer in Italy. It incorporates a reproduction of my Japanese “hanko” stamp on the cover and features end papers in a matching red color.
You can purchase it on Amazon, the Poltroon Press website or my own Shop page.
]]>Later, I went to the The Poisoned Pen bookstore in Phoenix, where owner Barbara Peters interviewed me and several other writers with new books out. I appear in the first half of this video with Thomas Kies:
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Jack Kerouac (Credit Image: © Globe Photos/ZUMAPRESS.com)
I was very pleased to hear from Down & Out Books that my forthcoming August Riordan novel concerning a previously undiscovered Jack Kerouac manuscript, The Dead Beat Scroll, received a very generous review from The New York Journal of Books. Here’s a pull quote:
Glorious potpourri of violence, black humor, … sex, and a hunt for a lost manuscript… Read The Dead Beat Scroll, and enjoy again the type of mystery novel that defined this genre.
And here is a link to the full review.
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Lee Child
I don’t know how many–if any–blurbs Lee Child has given since he announced he is stepping away from writing the Jack Reacher series, but I was pretty damn happy to get this one for my latest Riordan novel, The Dead Beat Scroll.
Slick, sardonic and suspenseful—everything a great thriller should be.
Down & Out Books incorporated it into the book design by having it appear on the scroll of paper in the typewriter on the front cover, which I thought was pretty cool.
To quote Mr. James Ellroy, hello to all you “peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty-sniffers, punks, and pimps.” I attended an event at Book Passage for the release of Ellroy’s This Storm, part two of his in-progress Second L.A. Quartet (following his first quartet of The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz). This Storm is set in Los Angeles and Mexico in the immediate aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
After the reading, I asked Ellroy to sign my copy of Storm, as well as the 5th volume of The New Black Mask where he had a story. I mentioned to him that I had had my first August Riordan story published in the 4th volume, prompting him to write, “You now rule Black Mask!!” as the inscription.
I certainly never thought I’d live to see the day when Ellroy would tell me that!
]]>- The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
- Hammett by Joe Gores
- Spade and Archer by Joe Gores
- Death and Taxes by David Dodge
- City of Dragons by Kelli Stanley
Randal Brandt
Randal Brandt, Kelli Stanley and Mark Coggins (photo Tana Hall)
Below is one of the 22 images that will be included in the exhibition.
Viking Raiders
My latest novel, No Hard Feelings, was selected as a Forward Reviews INDIEFAB Book of the Year Finalist in the Thriller category. Read more about it here.
]]>Down & Out Books has just released the trade paperback edition of my thriller No Hard Feelings. Get it from Amazon here.
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No Hard Feelings was the number one best seller in hardcover for September at Borderlands Books in San Francisco. Order the book from Borderlands here.
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The Guardian recently published an article about a system that enabled a paralyzed man to walk again by rerouting signals from his brain to electrodes on his knees. This is very similar to the (more advanced) technology envisioned in my new novel, No Hard Feelings. The major components of the system:
- a means to capture motor impulses from the brain and transmit them wirelessly
- a computer to receive the wireless signals and translate them into motor commands
- electrodes that stimulate muscle movement
are exactly the same as the “Neurostimix” system in the book. To quote from the article:
The man walked a 3.5-metre course after being fitted with an electrode cap that picks up brain waves and beams them wirelessly to a computer, which decipher the waves as an intention to stand still or walk. The relevant command is then sent to a microcontroller on the man’s belt, and on to nerves that trigger muscles to move the legs.
Read the full piece here.
]]>Tell us something about No Hard Feelings that isn’t mentioned in the publisher’s synopsis.
Winnie is a quadriplegic who has regained mobility through implants from a sabotaged biomedical start-up (this is explained in the synopsis). What isn’t mentioned is that technology like this actually exists — it’s known generally as Functional Electronic Stimulation (FES) — and a number of biomedical companies have released real-world products incorporating it.
As an example, Battelle Memorial Institute recently announced NeuroLife
Neural Bypass: “A breakthrough technology that empowers paralyzed patients to regain conscious control of their fingers, hands, wrists and arms … [NeuroLife] bypasses damaged areas of the nervous system so the brain can communicate directly with the muscles.”
A general description of FES, its current capabilities and promise for the future may be found on the FES section of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation website.
Read the whole interview here.
]]>Between the two of them, it’s pretty clear that Winnie is more of a badass than Riordan. In fact, at one point he says, “I wasn’t used to a woman being more macho than me, and I certainly wasn’t used to thinking of myself as the levelheaded one.” How would you characterize the dynamic between the two of them?
At the beginning, at least, she is clearly the bad cop and he the good.
I think of Winnie as being somewhat like the Linda Hamilton character in the Terminator movies. Both women have had their eyes opened to a threat that others don’t recognize in very violent and traumatic ways. Rather than buckling, they have toughened themselves mentally and physically to meet the threat.
Part of the dynamic between Riordan and Winnie is due to the fact that he doesn’t yet understand the threat as well she does, nor has he personally suffered the losses she has. Part of it is simply that his worldview is more nuanced, more tolerant of moral ambiguity and shades of gray.
One thing I hope the reader will find interesting is how they affect one another throughout the course of the book, both in terms of outlook and their feelings for each other.
Read the whole interview here.
]]>Ron Hansen’s Atticus is an example of a literary inspiration for the way No Hard Feelings is told. Another comes from a completely different sort of novel: Paul Cain’s hard-boiled gem, Fast One (1933). Fast One is a story of constant action, or as Irwin Faust says in his afterward, “unceasing, unrelieved, unleavened, unnaunced pow, smash, go.” I don’t claim to have fully replicated that pace, nor do I write in the spare, paired-to-the-bone style of Cain, but I held Fast One as a lodestar as I wrote, eschewing interludes, digressions and exposition as much as possible to keep my foot mashed to the throttle. I can’t say I matched the body count of Fast One either, but not for lack of trying. To wit, four bad guys meet their maker in the first 24 pages, three of whom are dispatched by Winnie. (As an aside, it is no exaggeration to say that Winnie is more like Gerry Kells, the tough-guy protagonist of Fast One, than Riordan is.)
Read the whole thing here.
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Swedish publisher Modernista is bringing out an edition of A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments by French writer Roland Barthes in November of this year–and they are using one of my photographs for the cover.
The photo is one I took of the statue of Acis and Galatea by Auguste Ottin in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris, France.
Read more about the book (in Swedish) on the publisher’s site here.
]]>Michael Kellner, award-winning designer responsible for all the wonderful books in the Dennis McMillan list, recently sent me a photograph of proof copies of the hard cover and trade paperback editions of No Hard Feelings, my forthcoming August Riordan novel.
Needless to say, I’m very pleased that Michael designed the cover of the book, which features an evocative image of the female protagonist, Winnie. Michael also designed the interior, which is illustrated with scene-setting black and white photographs by me.
No Hard Feeling will be published by Down & Out Books in September in three editions: 1) a limited hard-cover edition available only from independent bookstores, 2) a trade paperback and 3) an eBook.
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I’m pleased to announce I’ve signed with crime fiction publisher Down and Out Books. To quote from their About page:
Down and Out Books is noir.
Down and Out Books is the private eye.
Down and Out Books is hard boiled.
Down and Out Books is crime.
We are lovers of quality, well-written stories of crime. We look for and publish great writers … some you’ve heard of, some you haven’t. These are folks you should be reading.
You can check out my author page on their site here.
Down & Out will be publishing No Hard Feelings, the sixth in the August Riordan Series, in early September.
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