Mike Cooper: Camping = Reading

Much like we were, only cleaner

MIKE COOPER: When I was a kid, in the 1970's, our family went camping in the summer. Nothing fancy: mostly state parks in the Ozarks, where we could drive the station wagon right up to the campsite and unload our canvas tent, Coleman stove, big cheap sleeping bags and all the rest. We weren't alone. Other sites had more families, older folks taking their summer vacation, college kids down from St Louis, the occasional long-distance traveler with a pop-up trailer. Not so many RVs back then. No one seemed to spend much money -- hot dogs was about as gourmet as the food got, and typical gear wasn't much more complicated than an air mattress.

Campsite with Boston on the horizon

Today it's a different story. We still go camping -- my favorite destination is our annual trip to one of Boston's harbor islands, where we can cook mussels at the water's edge while jets take off from Logan and party boats cruise noisily past. But almost no one else we know does. Instead, there's the Patagonia catalog, with its gorgeous photos of trekking in the world's most difficult and spectacular terrain. Somehow we've gotten to the point that "camping" means thousands of dollars of high-tech gear and a National Geographic destination. If you're not bivouacked halfway up a sheer wall in the Himalaya, or sea-kayaking to remote islands in the Andaman Sea ... well, you can always watch Travel Channel. Something similar may be happening to reading. Decades ago people commonly read books, and they did so casually, without much thought. Sit on the bus, pull out a paperback. Take your lunch in the park, bring along a library book. Wait an hour at the DMV, finish that novel your friend passed along last week. 

The book club meets

I recently read two memoirs of the 1930's, and both mention that old magazines and paperbacks were common in hobo jungles: men who had to beg food and sleep on the ground still had books around them, to read and share. Today, reading a book is moving from "now and then" right through "uncommon" and into "eccentric." I often carry a book to the playground while our children are there, and that draws comments. Our pediatrician was quite struck by our children having books with them, rather than smartphones. What was once utterly commonplace is now almost ... odd. Furthermore, the cost curve is accelerating. Just like "proper" backpacking now requires an Arcteryx pack and Marmot outerwear, reading increasingly requires an expensive electronic device. So is this the end of literacy? Perhaps not. Radio should have been killed off years ago, and yet thrives. Despite cars people still ride bicycles -- more and more of them all the time, in fact. Just because the book is no longer the default go-to for transient entertainment doesn't mean we've given up on it completely. And perhaps technology will be its savior, in the end. Once everyone is wearing whatever succeeds Google glasses, they could watch videos and take pictures of their annoyed friends. But maybe, maybe they'll find something to read while they walk instead. 

  Mike Cooper is the pen name of a former jack-of-all-trades. Viking will release his novel FULL RATCHET, sequel to CLAWBACK, on July 3rd. Mike lives outside Boston with his family.

Note from Lucy: I love talking to Mike when I'm stymied while writing--he either recommends shooting someone or a chase scene. The writing always goes better after that...

SILAS CADE SMOKES 'EM by Mike Cooper

LUCY BURDETTE: I loved visiting with thriller writer Mike Cooper at Bouchercon. Somehow we always gravitate to talking about food. So I thought you'd enjoy his take on something culinary. Welcome Mike!

MIKE COOPER:  My protagonist Silas Cade in CLAWBACK is no gourmand -- he's too busy hunting down armed riffraff along the Greenwich-Wall Street axis.  Here he is at a nice restaurant:

"I sawed away at my fish, which seemed not to have been cooked enough.  Maybe it was supposed to be that way."

Because I'm the at-home parent, on the other hand, I do a lot of cooking.  One place that my interests and Silas's intersect is barbecue.  The grill here runs pretty much all year, and not just the Weber; a few years ago I built a little smokehouse.

The hope was to reproduce my grandmother's kielbasa.  Most years she and my grandfather kept a hog, butchering it in the fall for sausage, bacon, ham and everything else.  I copied her recipe from the scrawled scrap of paper she'd written it on about fifty years ago.

KIELBASA

Grind 45-50 lb pork.  Leave fat in, but you don't have to add more if it's a good shoulder cut.  I use a cast-iron crank grinder.  (BTW, adjust all these amounts down for more typical family-sized volumes; my grandmother was cooking for multitudes.)

Mix in well:
1 cup + 2 tsp salt
2 garlic heads, crushed and soaked in 1-1/2 cup water
1 whiskey glass coarse pepper
3/4 whiskey glass paprika

Stuff the casings (I use the same hand grinder with a stuffing funnel).  1" casings seem best for kielbasa. Twist them off and hang overnight, not touching, in the refrigerator.  I have a cut-open plastic bin for this purpose that just fits into the bottom of the refrigerator.  This is an important step -- to dry the sausage slightly, and make sure the exterior is not at all damp.

Next morning, hang them in the smokebox, get a fire going, and hot-smoke them at around 160 degrees until the interior temperature is also 160. It can take hours, which is a lot of fussing around with the fire to maintain a level burn.

Note that grandma's recipe does not include a "cure" -- the sodium nitrite.  The USDA, along with the rest of the free world, insists that you should put this in to prevent botulism, which certainly seems like a good idea.

As you can see from the photo, the smokebox hasn't seen much use this year (though the morning glory vines will all die off at first frost, quite possibly this weekend).  You will also notice that we live surrounded by neighbors, including upstairs.  October is the best time for smoking not just because crisp cool air is pleasant to work in, but because most people have closed their windows for the season and will be less annoyed by the smoke.

Really good kielbasa is available in the Polish markets in South Boston, but homemade sausage is always a bit better -- even if I've never quite matched my grandmother's.
___________________

Mike Cooper is the pseudonym of a former jack-of-all-trades. Under a different name his work has received wide recognition, including a Shamus Award, a Thriller nomination, and inclusion in BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES. The sequel to his novel CLAWBACK will be published by Viking in 2013. Mike lives outside Boston with his family. Read more at his website.

Where Are the Corporate Hitmen? by Mike Cooper

LUCY BURDETTE: Mike Cooper made all of us salivate when two books were sold at auction to Viking about a year and a half ago. Now CLAWBACK is finally out and we're so happy to introduce Mike and his book. Mike is a superb writer--and I can tell you the plot is jammed with action. And he's visiting today to tell us about his wild theories about corporate crime...take it away Mike!

MIKE COOPER: Because I write thrillers with high-finance themes, I pay attention to the dark side of corporate competition. In a hyperactive, constantly changing landscape, the smallest edge matters. Especially under today’s total-deregulation approach, companies have become thoroughly ruthless. Dirty tricks, hacking rivals’ computers or stealing their code, pernicious lawsuits, patent trolls – it seems like anything goes.

Almost.

Why don’t more CEOs go after their rivals directly … by hiring assassins?

Oh, it happens often enough abroad. Russian biznesmen are notorious for taking such shortcuts (though following consolidation of the crime/business syndicates under Putin, victims now tend to be interfering bureaucrats, investigative journalists, and the like). Countries like Pakistan are almost beyond the rule of law. Even Britain sees the occasional rival-tycoon killing.

And it happens in fiction all the time. Just not in the USA.

Why not? Here are some possible reasons:

1) Because it’s morally wrong. Ha ha ha! Maybe in grandpop’s industries — smokestack manufacturing, mass retail and so forth — but that’s sure not the case in finance, which, we should remember, now accounts for roughly a third of US corporate profits. There’s a reason stockbrokers and bankers rate abysmally low in Gallup’s annual Honesty and Ethics poll.

2) Because you might get caught. Thanks to a justice system skewed in favor of the rich and powerful, that’s not really a worry. Of course there’s no danger whatsoever of jailtime for white-collar offenses except, possibly, insider-trading. But even bloody crimes go unpunished. In 2010 a Colorado fund manager ran over a cyclist, permanently crippling him, and was granted a plea deal reducing all charges to some trivial misdemeanors. “A financial manager for wealthy clients will not face felony charges for a hit-and-run because it could jeopardize his job, prosecutors said” – a perfect summary of bankster impunity.

3) Because we’re all in the same club. Top corporate CEO’s are a homogeneous bunch – generally white, male, similarly educated, and by virtue of their vast wealth, living on a plane of existence far removed from what most people recognize as reality. The idea is that it’s harder to shoot someone you probably know socially, and certainly feel affinity for. On the other hand, any number of vituperative, no-holds-barred business rivalries (Ellison v. Gates, etc) would seem to suggest it doesn’t actually matter much.

4) Because it doesn’t work. Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Maybe it’s not worth taking out your CEO rival over at your biggest competitor because someone else will just step up. And quite possibly he (rarely ‘she’) will be meaner, hungrier, and even more eager to stomp you back.

I like that explanation the best. After all, elite business managers are supposed to be all about rational decision making, game theory, and unemotional risk-benefit calculation. That’s what MBA school teaches them. So: they’re not taking contracts out on each other because, well, the percentage is too small.

But there might be one more possibility. Perhaps billionaires – being billionaires – can simply hire extremely competent contractors.

The kind who leave no trace. Who can rig any scenario, and make an intentional death as unremarkable as a slip-and-fall. Who’s to say all those skiing tragedies and cardiac events and careless driving incidents were really accidental?

Nah. That only happens in fiction.

LUCY: thanks for visiting JRW Mike! In honor of his new release, Mike is giving away one copy of CLAWBACK to a lucky commenter today.


Mike Cooper is a novelist. In his latest, CLAWBACK (Viking, March), an assassin has begun shooting the rottenest, worst-performing financiers on Wall Street. “Don’t bail them out, take them out!” – it’s a good tagline for a thriller, and Mike rather hopes it remains fiction. More at www.mikecooperbooks.com.

Sources:

Russian businessman-killings: http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/12/contract-killings-antonov-markets-face-equity-russia.html

Pakistan violence: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-14391824

British tycoon killer: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-144582/Tycoon-jailed-killing-business-rival.html

“happens in fiction”: http://www.stephenwfrey.com/

finance sector profits: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/30/financial-profits-percentage_n_841716.html

Honesty & Ethics Poll: http://www.gallup.com/poll/1654/honesty-ethics-professions.aspx

Colorado hit-and-run: http://www.vaildaily.com/article/20101104/NEWS/101109939

Mike Wiecek comes roaring out of the pack

You’d think imminent arrest for a forty-million-dollar fraud might slow a guy down, but nope, there he was, wandering out of Bazookas at midnight.

From CLAWBACK by Mike Wiecek.
You saw it here first!

HALLIE: Mike Wiecek has been a fixture in the New England community of mystery writers--his first novel came out in 2005 and he's had a steady stream of short stories published since and plenty of accolades.

So, Mike, I guess Santa came early to the Wiecek's this year! Congratulations on your two-book contract with Viking. Tell us about the book. I love the title.

MIKE WIECEK: The premise of CLAWBACK is that an assassin has begun shooting the country’s worst-performing financiers. A bottom-ranked investment manager; a hedge fund partner down ninety percent; a rotten banker. Someone’s slogan seems to be, "Don’t bail them out, take them out!"

A coalition of banksters hires a fixer, the sort of contractor whose job description opens with "total deniability" and ends with "unlicensed machine guns." As bodies fall and markets plunge, he ranges the Greenwich-Midtown axis with an equalizer and an attitude -- only to realize he's become a target himself.

HALLIE: High stakes, jeopardy -- sounds like a page turner. And I gotta ask, what was it like having publishers fighting over you? How did you get the good news?

MIKE WIECEK: The experience was certainly a first for me :) Thanks to hard work by my agent, Heide Lange, in drumming up interest, the book went to auction. That means that more than one house was interested, and they bid back and forth against each other -- for nearly three days. As you can imagine, I was checking my email about every five minutes during that time. In the end we went with Josh Kendall at Viking, who has a lot of ideas for shaping the manuscript and placing it in what is an already-more-than-crowded marketplace.

HALLIE: THREE DAYS! The mind boggles. So you must be celebrating, big time.

MIKE WIECEK: Celebrating – why, yes! My wife and I hope to have a nice dinner sometime, if we can find a babysitter and a free weekend … both in short supply, this time of year!

HALLIE: Your first novel, Exit Strategy, published by Penguin in 2005, got great reviews, fabulous blurbs (Lee Child: "A fantastic debut"). It was a finalist for ITW's award for Best Paperback. Then, a dry spell, punctuated with some spectacular, multi-award-nominated short stories. Your 2009 story in Ellery Queen, "The Shipbreaker," got picked for "Best American Short Stories of 2010."

Can you give us some words of wisdom about perseverance?

MIKE WIECEK: None that haven’t been said a thousand times already. After EXIT STRATEGY, I worked on several novels, finally finishing one a couple years ago. But it didn’t sell. On the other hand, I was publishing two or three stories a year, and as you mention, several were well-received. Without that encouragement I might not have kept going. You can bang your head on the wall forever if you like, but if the plaster doesn’t at least BEGIN to crack, you might consider trying something different.

Oh, and I don’t see anything wrong with “writing to market.” That doesn’t mean yet another vampire-dog-detective story, perhaps, but ‘gunning down investment bankers’ seemed timely. Perseverance is necessary; so is listening to what readers say, and taking seriously what they like and dislike.

HALLIE: I know you're a stay-at-home dad, have been for ten years. Tell us about your kids, your wife, and how you keep yourself energized and motivated?

MIKE WIECEK: I’ve always been happy in my own company, so the solitary part of the job is not a problem. Of course, I spend an hour or two a day at the playground after school, hanging around with other parents – it might turn out to be harder once the children are in high school, and my social life entirely evaporates. My wife works one of those demanding, more-than-full-time jobs, but fortunately rarely on the weekend, so we get our time together.

As for motivation: far and away the best motivator is a deadline! Which is one reason why breaking in is so difficult – before that first contract, no one’s standing at your shoulder, pointing out how late you are already. Oh, and critique groups can be very helpful. Not just for the critiques, but for the expectations they place on you. Just knowing that I’m supposed to bring something in every couple of weeks is a surprisingly powerful force. Kim, Samantha, Lynne: I couldn’t have done it without you!

HALLIE: And a question I'm very familiar with--what's it like having such a spectacular successful writer for a sister?

MIKE WIECEK: Actually it’s been great! Sophie Littlefield and I have sort of leapfrogged: she was publishing stories years ago, before I ever started writing. Then I got a few in print, followed by EXIT STRATEGY -- but three years later she sold her first book, A BAD DAY FOR SORRY, and soon had another dozen under contract.

Sophie used to ask my advice and opinions on the business. Lately it’s been me asking her the questions, because she’s become much more knowledgeable and connected. It’s keen having someone to talk to who understands everything. And also, frankly, someone to gossip with. Triads, mafiya, forget it -- there's no omerta stronger than that among writers. It’s a rare opportunity to be able to ignore that and snark freely.

Sophie is the hardest-working writer I know (seriously; she’s now publishing three major-house hardbacks every YEAR) and I can’t tell you how fantastic it is to see that effort finally rewarded. She is an inspiration in all senses of the word.

HALLIE: I know we'll have to wait until 2012 to get our hands on a copy of CLAWBACK. Would you just share with us the opening line?

MIKE WIECEK: Gladly.

“You’d think imminent arrest for a forty-million-dollar fraud might slow a guy down, but nope, there he was, wandering out of Bazookas at midnight.”

Hallie, thanks for taking the time for this. I can’t wait until CLAWBACK is out in the world!

HALLIE: We're all so happy with your success!

Mike will be checking back today so please, chime in with questions or just a pat on the back!