What I'm Writing: Emails, To-Do Lists and Comments

 JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: As you're reading this, I'm at New England Crime Bake (along with Hank, Hallie, and many of your fave authors.) This is a kind of prelude to the main event upcoming in my life: the release of AT MIDNIGHT COMES THE CRY on November 18. (Rhys's FROM CRADLE TO GRAVE comes out the same day, so make sure you've pre-ordered!)

 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an author with a new release is in need of a book tour. My last release day was April 4, 2020. Do any of you remember what you were doing on April 4, 2020? Were you going to a library or a bookstore to hear me speak? No, you were not. You were home tearing old t-shirts into toilet paper and washing the groceries.

 

So it's been a while. I'm booked for a shorter tour this time - I'm only flying to Scottsdale (PHX) and Houston (IAH.) Fortunately, there isn't any nation-wide, record-breaking problem that might interfere with my travels... 

I'm not saying I'm causing these things to happen, you understand. I'm just saying - maybe stop hoping I'll put out a book each year. 

 

After I get back home (please, God, please) I'm touring around New England and upstate New York, staying with friends and, you know, just enjoying the vacation paradise that is upstate New York in late November. 

 

 So the writing I'm doing? Emails - emails to confirm, to make changes, to find out when my REAL ID is going to arrive (that's a whole other story.) To-Do lists: packing, what I need to do to get things ready for the pet sitter, finishing touches on the new website, keeping up with my college students (yes, still teaching two sections this fall!) And commenting as everything ramps up; on Facebook, here, on the aforementioned students' papers. (Most frequent advice to students: proofread.)

 

If you're going to be around and about (assuming this time, like, a meteor won't strike the earth,) here's where I'll be:

 

Tues, Nov 18 - Poisoned Pen, Scottsdale, 7pm - with Rhys and Jenn!

Wed, Nov 19 - Murder By the Book, Houston, 6:30pm

Thurs, Nov 20 - PRINT, Portland, ME, 7pm

Fri, Nov 21 - Book House at Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, NY, 6p,

Sun, Nov 23 - Battenkill Books, Cambridge, NY, 2pm 

Tues, Dec 2 - Baxter Memorial Library, Gorham, ME, 6pm

Thurs, Dec 4 - Wellesley Books, Wellesley, MA, 7pm - with Paula Munier!

 

I hope to see some of you in person, dear readers!

Bookstores: past present and future!

 

HALLIE EPHRON: If you open my kitchen cabinet in search of a coffee mug, here’s what you’ll find, front and center.

Every time I see that mug from Mystery Lovers Bookshop in Oakmont, PA, I think of Mary Alice Gorman and the wonderful bookstore she and her husband Richard Gorman made into a required pilgrimage for mystery writers. They hosted a ton of author events and local Sisters in Crime chapter meetings. And an annual event that drew scores of mystery authors on their way home from Malice Domestic and hundreds of crime fiction shoppers.

Watching Mary Alice hand sell books was like watching a virtuoso violinist. She knew just which strings to pluck. Her customers came in empty-handed and left with armloads of books.

What booksellers have a special place in your heart, and do you have any keepsakes from your visits that you treasure?

RHYS BOWEN: I have memories and memorabilia from so many bookstores. When I first started writing mysteries John had just retired and we drove coast to coast several times visiting bookstores along the way.

I have particularly fond memories of Mystery Lovers Bookshop, Mary Alice and Richard and their wonderful festivals of mystery. As a new mystery author I sat at my table at my first festival and saw a long line waiting to get books signed by me. Wow! Amazing!

I remember so many dear friends and stores that are no more. M is for Mystery in San Mateo and dear Ed Kaufman, Robin and Aunt Agatha’s, the store in Thousand Oaks plus several others around LA, Kate’s in Cambridge, Joanne Sinchuk’s Murder on the Beach in Del Ray Beach Florida. 

I have a mug from Kansas City, a little box from Orange County, and I remember the store in Denver where they made a cake to look like the book cover. What a loss these little stores are to our community–they’d hand sell newcomers like me, make us welcome, put on spreads, have a friendly cat…

Thank heavens a few favorites have managed to thrive: Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale is always a favorite, as is Murder by the Book in Houston. Most of the other stores I visit on Book Tour these days are big indies, not specialty mystery bookstores, but I miss those cozy nooks and store pets. 

HALLIE: Reminds me of the potbellied pig who hung out in the mystery bookstore in Tucson. She was a heavy-breather with a gristled snout. 

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I’ve been to every one of those bookstores you mention, Rhys, and their loss is keenly felt. We do have fewer mystery-only bookstores around than when I debuted as an author 20 year ago.

On the plus side, there are actually more independent bookstores opening, as more and more readers come to value what good booksellers can do for your TBR pile and for the community! Over 300 have opened in the past few years, according to the New York Times, and the average bookseller is getting younger and younger - good news, because hauling those boxes from the publishers around isn’t easy.

In that vein, I’d nominate PRINT: A Bookstore, right here in Portland, ME, as my special place.

Founded just six years ago by veteran booksellers Josh Christie and Emily Russo (yep, her dad is Richard Russo,) PRINT has made a big splash in our already great indy bookstore scene. I’ve taken part in several great events with them, including interviewing Michael Koryta and taking part in a lively Sisters in Crime panel presentation. 

Josh and Emily were one of the first booksellers to pivot when everything shut down in early 2020 - we went from canceling my live appearance to streaming to several hundred viewers in a matter of ten days. I don’t have any merch from them, but I do have a stack of books… 

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: The very first such a store I remember visiting, with great– well I almost said joy, but it was really more like terror–was Kate‘s Mystery Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Remember, Hallie? 

In a ramshackle Victorian house, with a crazy front lawn and all kinds of decorations on the porch, and then you would open the door to this bookstore and there were stacks and piles and overflowing tables of mystery novels in some order that no one could ever figure out, no one but Kate Mattes at least, with the entire store ringed with a all kinds of ceramic cats. 

Cats everywhere. It was nutty and wacky, and Kate never got a computer or a cash register, she would just write out a sales slips by hand and make change from an envelope in a drawer, if I remember. Buying a book from her was incredible, absolutely everyone in mystery world came to Kate’s, but I also remember how long it took to buy a book! The paperwork was so complicated!

She told lots of stories about when she opened the store, most memorably, Robert B. Parker helping her build the bookshelves. Her Christmas parties were famous, everyone came. She’s long gone, (not too long, I guess), but still such a presence in mystery world. (And talk about a gift from her–she hooked me up with RBP, who gave me a wonderful blurb for Drive Time, on his personal stationery, which I have framed in my office.

And of course the incredible Aunt Agatha‘s in Ann Arbor Michigan. Where Robin Agnew, queen of the universe, knew every single mystery novel and every single mystery author, and talk about a virtuoso, could match every reader with the perfect book. 

When their store closed, after 25 years, Robin sent me a framed note from Mary Higgins Clark note that she’d sent as congratulations. I look at that every day.

Two more? Continuing the standing ovation for the indomitable and brilliant Barbara Peters at Poisoned Pen, what would we do without her and her amazing team? And I point you to Page 158 Books in Wake Forest North Carolina, where the Dave and Sue Lucey have taken care of me gorgeously since the beginning of the pandemic. I cannot wait to go visit in person.

JENN McKINLAY: Since I live in the same neighborhood as the Poisoned Pen Bookstore, it’s small wonder that I have a longstanding relationship with Barbara Peters, the owner, and her employees - Patrick, PK, Susan, Tracy, and John - to name just a few. 

Barbara and her crew aren’t just booksellers to me. They’re friends and mentors and their shop is a sanctuary when the writing gets hard and I need to get out of the house and visit with book people. 

Also, Barbara and her husband Rob have taken to Tik Tok, which impresses to no end and is forcing me to raise my game. LOL. 

Another favorite is Murder by the Book in Houston. My friend Dean James (Miranda James) worked there the first time I signed in Houston and it’s become a favorite stop of mine ever since. And I can’t forget Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego. I love this quirky little shop and the staff who work there are the nicest booksellers in the biz.

And here’s some happy news from the NYT: “But there has also been a sharp and sustained rise in new bookshops, and more than 200 additional stores are preparing to open in the next year or two, Ms. Hill said.”

Read more here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/10/books/bookstores-diversity-pandemic.html

YAY!!!

LUCY BURDETTE: Can you believe I’ve never been to either Poisoned Pen or Murder by the Book? Maybe this year… I adore indie bookstores and I feel so lucky to have them in both my hometowns.

RJ Julia Booksellers in Madison CT has been an amazing supporter, starting with my very first book launch when SIX STROKES UNDER came out in 2002! I love having book parties there–I always bring cake. And I’ve spent a truckload of $$ buying books in that gorgeous space. 

In Key West, we have two wonderful but very different indie bookstores. 

Suzanne Orchard runs Keywest Island Bookshop, a little shop on Fleming St with tons of local, used, and some new books. She handsells the Key West mysteries like nobody’s business. 

Books and Books on Eaton Street was founded by George Cooper and Judy Blume. It’s a gorgeous little store with a great collection and sometimes the bookseller is Judy herself!

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I'm not much of a keepsake keeper, but if I were, I'd have mugs from Murder By the Book in Houston, and from The Poisoned Pen. I've been to many wonderful bookstores, but these two began as, and remain, my favorites. I've never missed a book launch signing at either store, and they were so kind and supportive when I was a newbie author and not sure of the ropes. Barbara Peters at the Pen is a force of nature in the mystery world!

HALLIE: Bookstores are the glue that connects authors to readers, and we've all been privileged to be invited into their worlds. 

What are the bookstores that have connected you with the writers of the books you love?

The Island Where It Happens

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Nantucket changed my life. Truly. It’s where Jonathan and I met, and my every memory of the place is wrapped in gossamer happiness. So when I heard about Steven Axelrod, who sets his mysteries (from the amazing Poisoned Pen Press) on the island, I was instantly hooked. 

So—welcome Steven! And I laughed and laughed when I heard about his main character--a bad poet! Brilliant.

HANK:  Your protagonist, Henry Kennis, has to be the world's most literate police chief, bar none. How did you decide to create a cop who writes poetry on the side? 

STEVE: First of all, I write poetry myself -- very much like the accessible reality-based verse that Henry composes, which is not really in fashion now. The wife of one of my MFA program professors, a very prominent modern poet, read Nantucket Five-Spot (which was written as my creative thesis) and remarked. "I love the fact that hero is such a bad poet! So charming." I guess I couldn't resist the urge to let some of these "bad" poems see the light of day. 

But it's an appropriate hobby for a detective. Crime solving and poetry require the same leaps of intuition, the same ability to make and recognize odd connections and relationships. Beyond that a poem is a good x-ray of a character's heart and soul. The poems help the reader get to know my Police Chief a little better.  

HANK:  The backdrop of your new book is the backstabbing world of local theater, in this case Nantucket's. The vicious confrontations between the characters who populate this  novel feel quite authentic... Have you yourself participated in local theater and experienced this level of drama?

STEVE: I did a fair amount of community theater acting when I was Henry's age, and I saw my fair share of high drama and low comedy in that milieu. The theater scene on the island seems much more serene these days. But  that's okay -- inventing conflict and setting crazy characters at each others' throats is part of my job description.

HANK:  You spent a portion of your childhood in a Hollywood environment, with your father being the famous writer/director George Axelrod. (Listen to this, reds and readers. His father is  best known for his play, The Seven Year Itch, which was adapted into a movie starring Marilyn Monroe. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his 1961 adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's and also adapted Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate.  MY total FAVORITE. ) Anyway. So cool! 

STEVE: My Hollywood ties have frayed somewhat over the years though I remain a member of the WGA(w) thanks to a development deal some years ago with a big TV producer. There is currently some interest in the Kennis books as a series from different "content providers" I guess I should call them, to be as vague and cryptic as possible ... but it's hard to tell how serious any of them are. I keep my fingers crossed, though it tends to interfere with my typing.

HANK: I know the feeling!  So--When you prepare for a new novel, do you first outline everything from soup to nuts? Or are you a write-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of guy?

STEVE: I'm a combination of the two. I've always envied writers like Stephen King who apparently just charge into a book and let the plot details sort themselves out, with what Nabokov called "the velocity of intuition". 

HANK: Oh, I’ve never heard that. I love it. Is that what you do? 

STEVE: I tend to be more cautious. I need to know the ultimate outcome before I start -- who done it and why, and at least some of the clues red-herrings and detours that will lead Henry to the culprit. You're always telling two or three parallel narratives in a mystery, with several of those scenarios throwing  suspicion on the wrong people. The links between these versions of reality are the clues, which can be interpreted different ways -- the RACHE written on the wall in blood that Gregson and Lestrade assume to be an almost completed name -- Rachel. But Sherlock Holmes knows it's the German word for revenge.

HANK: Oh, we have to talk. More I cannot say. But wait til you read my new book The Murder List. J  But we digress.

STEVE:  So ... within that macro-structure, the big picture of the novel, I attack the story one chunk at a time, carefully outlining the piece I'm working on and usually emerging from it with only the vaguest idea of where I'm going next. So I read through the notes, refresh my memory about the larger story and start outlining the next bit of the plot. 

This gets simpler as the story goes on. Tales narrow down and pick up speed as they approach their climax and the writing becomes easier as more and more decisions have already been made. 

My father always told me, "If you have a problem with act three, the real problem is in act one." He referred to those final blissful writing days that sweep to the end of the story as "picking the daisies" -- flowers you meticulously planted many pages ago. All that being said, the actual content of each scene remains wildly improvisational. Except for a few essentials, I really have no idea what my characters are going to say to each other, or which way their conflicts will go. 

And that makes every writing day fun.

HANK: We are the same! But you are so eloquent about it. I just freak out and cross my fingers. Last question:

With Nantucket being so tiny, is it a challenge to come up with new plot concepts that don't tread on the ground already covered?

STEVE: I wrote a thriller twenty years ago and my agent at the time warned me "You better know what your next couple of thrillers are going to be. I'm branding you as a thriller guy." That scared me. I had literally used every idea, gimmick, action set-piece and plot device I had ever come up with in that book. I had been pebble collecting for it since high school. Now I was supposed to write another one? I had nothing, and told her so. Maybe I should have faked it -- the book never sold. Anyway, it's just the opposite with Nantucket. The little resort island teems with stories, plots, feuds, grudges, history and conflict. I'm always learning new things, from the existence of secret cock fighting clubs (Which I used on the first page of the new book) to the fact that the dump was built on an Wampanoag Indian graveyard. Spooky! The material seems inexhaustible. 

Nantucket is America in miniature, with all the wealth inequality, immigration issues, opioid addiction, gang crime and bureaucratic malfeasance a crime writer would wish for. The island is experiencing massive tectonic social changes. The larger aim of my books is to chronicle those changes  -- and try to make sense of them.

HANK: Yes, yes, this is so thought provoking! Reds and readers, have you ever been to Nantucket? Would you like to? What’s your image of it? Or where’s one place that changed your life?

 

Nantucket Counterfeit by Steven Axelrod 

The fifth Henry Kennis mystery takes us into the closed, gossip-riddled, back-stabbing world of Nantucket’s community theater.            

Horst Refn, the widely disliked and resented Artistic Director of the Nantucket Theater Lab, has been found stuffed into the meat freezer in his basement. Most of the actors, all the technical crew, and quite a few of the Theater Lab Board members, whom Refn was scamming and blackmailing, are suspects in his murder. The island’s Police Chief Henry Kennis has to pick his way through a social minefield as he searches for the killer.

At the same time, Henry’s daughter’s new boyfriend, football star Hector Cruz, has been accused of sexting her. Carrie knows the offending pictures didn’t come from him, and Henry has to prove it before the boy gets suspended, which means probing into the family secrets of Hector’s father, a firebrand agitprop playwright, who happens to be a prime suspect in Refn’s murder.

Every story is a fiction, every identity proves false, and every statement a lie. The counterfeit bills found at the scene of the crime are the most obvious symbol of the deceptions and distractions that obscure the investigation. The truth lies buried in the past, in Refn’s earlier crimes and the victims who came to Nantucket seeking revenge.

When the culprit has been revealed, the last masks torn off, and final murder foiled—live, on stage, during the opening night of Who Dun It, the eerily prescient opening drama of the Theater Lab Season—Jane says to Henry, “Is everything counterfeit?” He smiles. “Almost.”

Steven Axelrod holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and remains a member of the WGA, despite a long absence from Hollywood. His work has been featured on various websites, including the literary e-zine Numéro Cinq, where he is on the masthead; Salon.com; and The Good Men Project; as well as the magazines Pulp Modernand Big Pulp. A father of two, he lives on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts.

New England Gothic

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Two things today. No, three.

One.  My dad was the music critic for the old Chicago Daily News. As a result, he got to see many productions before the rest of the world.

One was Kismet. (I mean—the musical, Kismet.) Another was West Side Story. Yup. West Side Story. In press previews.

Many years later, I asked him: did you know, when you heard it? When you heard This is My Beloved? Or Tonight?  Did you know they were special?

Yes, he told me. I did.

Two. And it’s the same for books. I get asked to blurb a lot of books. A lot. And often, I say no. I truly do not have time. And I do not want to give a book short shrift.

But sometimes, I say yes.  And then—when the book is fabulous, I feel as if I—like my dad—I have been privy to something special. Something that the rest of the world will soon discover.

Doug at launching Mysterious Books

Three. Meet Doug Burgess. And his (Publishers Weekly starred reviewed!) Fogland Point.

And a copy of his debut novel to one lucky commenter! My name is on the cover. With Nick Petrie, and Michael Koryta. See? Fabulous.

What is Fogland Point about? Please welcome Doug Burgess to tell you.

New England Gothic: 

Mystery and Memory in a Rhode Island Village

When I was a kid, my Uncle George figured large in our dinner conversations. There were stories of his war exploits, his travels around the world, the time he met film star Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Fall River Line ferry to New London and proposed (unsuccessfully) somewhere in Long Island Sound. Finally I brought up the nerve to ask why this remarkable person was never invited to our house.

“Because he died in 1939,” my father answered.

Growing up in a damp and ancient house deep in Swamp Yankee country, the dead were everywhere around me. Our once-large Rhode Island family had dwindled down through the generations until the only remnants were my grandparents, parents, brother and myself. Yet both my elementary and high schools were named after relatives, as was the posh university across the street. The many branches of the family tree lent their names to half the streets of Providence and Newport. 

My father liked to pull the car into random cemeteries, point to a weathered piece of granite and announce brightly, “There’s your Great-Aunt Lydia!”

All this could make a child morbid, or worse. In my case it gave me a curious sense of time. My grandparents, both near-centenarians at their death, had been born when ice was delivered in horse carts and there was still an Austro-Hungarian Empire. 

But when they spoke of the past it did not seem so long ago: the people they described were as real to me as my friends. Vignettes from their lives were offered like a basket of rolls at every holiday dinner: Grandpa Butler gifting his wife with peaches at Christmas because he fancied peach jam, Cousin Betty feeding Alka-Seltzer tablets to the despised seagulls that terrorized her Chihuahua, Uncle Walter in his fisherman’s sou’wester paying for a Steinway piano with a scaly roll of hundred-dollar bills. 

Soon I, too, began telling their stories—eventually, as my grandmother’s mind declined, I told them back to her.

The places, likewise, did not seem impossibly distant, but that was because they were still there. Like much of New England, Rhode Island never changes. The main street of my parent’s town looks much like it did when John Quincy Adams passed through on his way to Washington; the town library where I borrowed my first Agatha Christie was once a congressional hall that voted down the U.S. Constitution in 1790. 

Even the furnishings of my house unmoored me: in school there were Game Boys and Backstreet Boys, yet each evening I wrote my calculus homework on a table brought back from Burma in 1850 and slept in a bed that had birthed three generations of ancestors.

When I came to write Fogland Point, history, memory and place were much in my mind. The story of a young man who returns to the small Rhode Island village of his childhood to take care of a grandmother now coping with dementia, only to discover a body in the house next door, there is much beyond the mystery that is both personal and autobiographical. 

What few people realize is that dementia is not just about what one forgets, but remembers.

As it progressed in my Nana’s mind, she began to move through time at random. One moment she would be a little girl describing the fixtures of her parents’ house in Riverside; next she would begin a conversation with her friend Florence who died in the ‘80’s. 

Once in our car she became convinced that my dad, her son, was abducting her from school and said angrily, “My father is going to be so mad with you!” But then she turned and saw me in the back seat and immediately asked how my studies were getting on. It was as if she had finally transcended the fragile bonds of past and present that I had brushed against my entire life.

Dementia brings the concept of the unreliable narrator to a new level, and this, too, I wanted to explore. Were my grandmother’s memories to be believed? Were her confessions to be trusted? Was my Great-Uncle Bob Daniels really a pedophile, as she suddenly and startlingly claimed? Secrets came pouring out of her, but each left more questions than answers. Much of this translated into the novel.

 Nevertheless I was surprised when a friend read an early draft and said, “Well, you certainly brought Southern Gothic to Southern New England.” So surprised, in fact, that I looked up Southern Gothic on Wikipedia. 

And there it was: “deeply flawed, disturbing or eccentric characters who may be involved in hoodoo, ambivalent gender roles, decayed or derelict settings, grotesque situations, and other sinister events…”

Substitute hoodoo with the Congregational Church and this could have been on the dust jacket for Fogland Point. The world of a dementia sufferer—and those around them—is indeed a kind of gothic landscape where the veneer of the familiar overlays horrors, real and imagined, beneath.

There is a line in the book that strikes particularly close to home: “The house looks just the same as it always has…like nobody has told it the bad news. All my grandmother’s things are waiting for her to come back.” The backdrop remains both homey and comforting, even as the story becomes increasingly bizarre. This was my experience with my own grandmother, and I expect for many others as well.

That porous barrier between real and imagined takes on an increasingly desperate dimension as the disease progresses. We want to hold onto the memories before they are gone for good. A plot device that frames much of the novel—a series of stories told into a tape recorder by multiple narrators—came from one such reel I discovered myself in the family library.

 On it was my father’s youthful voice, and my great-grandfather’s, which I had never heard. Dad asks Grandpa about life during the Depression. “What Depression?” Grandpa wonders. Already the confusion has begun to claim him, as it would his daughter. Sometimes I think I wrote Fogland Point out of fear—that I, too, must tell my stories before it is too late.

I certainly did not set out to write a New England Gothic mystery; on the contrary, in their speech, mannerisms, histories and lives, each of the characters is as real and down-to-earth as I could make them. But the phlegmatic New England Way is a mask we all wear. Anything ugly, unsightly or not-quite-right is shunted behind the house, hidden in the garden shed, so that we can present a pleasant face to company.

In that sense, Rhode Islanders make the best murder suspects anywhere—we conceal everything. The exquisite distress that family and friends experienced as my Nana began voicing her truth is mirrored by the characters in Fogland Point; as Aunt Constance says in the novel, “You shouldn’t pay too much mind to the things she says. She can’t keep stuff inside anymore.”

New England also lends its atmospheric presence to gothic mystery: no craggy moor or swampy fen was ever so desolate as Easton’s Beach on a blustery November afternoon. I chose the town of Little Compton partly because of family connections, but mainly because of its rugged beauty and curiously isolated location, a peninsula jutting out into the North Atlantic without even a bay to protect it. 

The place names were so evocative that I sometimes feared to include them, lest the novel seem garish: Quicksand Pond, Despair Island, even Fogland Point itself. In rendering them I tried to remain as true to the landscape as possible (although my father experienced a moment of panic when he realized, after consulting the map, that Fogland lay just over the town border in Tiverton. Oh, well).
If Fogland Point is gothic, it is only because Rhode Island is equally so: a place where the dead are never truly gone and the past seems forever present. Gothic mystery doesn’t need rotting plantation houses or Spanish moss. A whitewashed Colonial, a neatly trimmed yard and a secret that can’t stay hidden will do just as well.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Whoa. Fabulous. And this is a terrific book. SO—do you love Gothic novels? What does that mean to you? And what do you think about what Doug says?

And a copy of FOGLAND POINT to one very very lucky commenter!

"Elegant prose, a veritable Chinese box of puzzles, and authentic, well-rounded characters make this a standout." Publishers Weekly starred review

Preorder HERE.

Doug Burgess was born in Connecticut. After moving to Rhode Island, where his paternal family has lived for over three hundred years, he received his first education from the Quaker Friends at ses Brown School. Burgess received a BA  from McGill,   a JD from Cornell,  , an LLM from the University of British Columbia and a PhD from Brown University . He now teaches at Yeshiva College.

In 2003, Burgess wrote a dissertation arguing for the legal linkages between piracy and terrorism, and for the possible use of piracy law as a foundation for defining international terrorist organizations. This concept was later articulated in articles for Legal Affairs Magazine,  the National Security Law Report, the New York Times  and other publications. It appeared in book form as "The World For Ransom" (2010). Burgess continues to lecture around the world on counter-terrorism and the law.

Burgess has authored numerous articles for trade and scholarly journals, and one novel, FOGLAND POINT —a mystery set in Little Compton, Rhode Island.

He is a featured blogger for The Huffington Post.  

A Bookseller's Advice to Authors: A Visit with the Poisoned Pen Bookstore

Jenn McKinlay

One of my very favorite places inmy neighborhood is the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, AZ When I moved to Arizona in 1992, it was one of the first places I visited and came to be the place I frequently brought out of town guests to visit, well, after a pop in at the iconic Sugar Bowl, which is right down the street.

As an aspiring writer, I dreamed of one day signing at the Poisoned Pen. While I suffered years of rejection, the Pen was a place I would visit to be inspired. It's shelves are full to bursting with books, the staff always knows exactly what book you need to read when you need to read it, and hanging from the ceilings are dozens and dozens of portraits of visiting authors, smiling down at you in a most engaging way. 

The driving force behind the famous bookstore is Barbara Peters. Full disclosure, when I first met Barbara I was terrified of her. To begin with she holds a BA from Stanford, an MA from Northwestern and an MSLS from the University of Tennessee. She founded the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in 1989 and it is now, and has been for a long while, one of the world's largest mystery-centric bookstores. Together with her husband Rob Rosenwald, they have been recipients of the Raven Award from the Mystery Writer's of America and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Bouchercon, the annual mystery writers conference. She is charming and engaging, no question, but she is formidably brilliant (librarian!), reads voraciously, seriously, I think she reads over a hundred books per month or is that per week, and has traveled the world extensively, next stop Peru!

Jenn reading her dedication to Barbara

Luckily, since my first mystery published in 2009, I have signed at the Pen at least twenty-five times (I'm going for the record of person who has signed there the most) and Barbara has become a very dear friend. In fact, I dedicated my book At the Drop of a Hat to Barbara and the staff of the Pen, which, for all that they do, should really have been entitled --A Tip of the Brim.

When I was invited to blog with Jungle Red (thank you, ladies) I knew that one of the very first posts I would do would be an interview with Barbara. Some might think it is revenge for all of the times she's had me in the hot seat. You would be right! Without further ado, I give you my QandA with Barbara Peters, Bookseller Extraordinaire.
         

1. What was the impetus for opening a mystery bookstore? 

On the fatal day when my new husband Robert Rosenwald (little did he know where it would lead) said to me, "Now that you can do whatever you want, what is it you are going to do?" I replied, I'd like to go back to books. To Rob that meant I'd return to the Library of Congress where I'd been a librarian in its fast track to the top Intern Program (now defunct) and he said, I am not moving to DC. So I said, "Ok, a little bookstore." Drawing from my law background I knew a specialty was the key in the face of the rise of BN and Borders, both huge in Phoenix, so I thought, a mystery bookstore would be fun. In truth I'm a romance history and biography reader as much as a mystery fan, but mystery was just too cool to resist. Besides in 1989 there was a whole community of mystery bookstores which, sadly, is now gone. The Pen has become a bookstore for fiction, and whatever else we like. 

2. What advice would you offer a new author on their first book tour?

Rhys and Barbara in hats!

Assuming it's been arranged by the publisher, email ahead to offer information, a short statement about your book and why you wrote it. Ask what time you should arrive. Be on time. Dress appropriately (seriously, you'd be amazed how many do not). Prepare a short pitch for your book. Reply to questions cheerfully, not contentiously. It can get personal sometimes, you never know, but don't let it get to you. Bring a pen. Fans might like little promo items but most bookstores haven't got room to display them and don't want to keep track of them, so don't go crazy with bookmarks, etc. Leave your email address with the store and/or cell phone in case follow up is needed. If you have any serious complaints, tell your publicist but don't air them on social media.   

3. You've seen a lot of authors break out. What similarities have you seen amongst them?

Sadly it's often a function of whether your publisher is sold on your book (ie did your editor pitch it well to sales?) and thus devoted promo bucks to you. You can never discount the effect of serious publisher push. You can't discount the role of luck either: your topic got hot; someone influential liked your book. Series can gain momentum; a first book can make a small dent but then it builds. Perseverance and patience in building is a key. Another today is social media; how well can you use it? And how often is the author out and visible? Personality, the ability to perform, can propel careers. BUT for me, it's all about your voice, how well you tell your story, your enthusiasm for your work. If an author writes well and believes in the work, the odds rise. It's all very mysterious and a writer is both in charge of his destiny and at the mercy of factors beyond control and unforeseen (like the books that got dumped after 9/11 made them irrelevant). 

Hank at the Pen with CJ Box and  Linwood Barclay

A great example of an author with faith in his work is Craig Johnson. His first book got attention, but hey, it featured a Wyoming Sheriff in a small county. Viking sent Craig to The Poisoned Pen on a small tour. His second book, no tour so Craig asked if he could still come and he rode his motorcycle to Scottsdale. It took the two of us, him determined to showcase his work, me happy to cooperate. Book three might have been Viking, might have been The Pen paying. And then, here's the luck factor, TV came along and now he's a bestseller. 

4. What do you see for the future of brick and mortar bookstores?

Ingrid in the hot seat!

Bright. Digital sales are dropping, print sales rising. 2016, more print books sold than digital. Recent Book of the Month club reporting said a significant percentage of its 70% women members were readers in their 20s and 30s. Bookstores are a place to experience, to browse and make serendipitous finds, and for community. It's a safe night or afternoon out to attend a function or just browse. It's a parent/child bonding place as well as a date place. Every bookstore is different, and reflects its location, its staff, and its community. Many of those that crashed in the wake of the now imperiled BN model were not businesses but hobbies so one positive of more competition online and brick and mortar is that bookstores have to be better run as a business.

5. And lastly because you own the Poisoned Pen Press, as well, what makes you buy a book from a new author?

Voice. I can fix anything else but if you are boring, or offensive, I can't help you.


JENN: And the answer to that last question is one of the many reasons, I adore Barbara.  She cracks me up!

Every month, the Poisoned Pen sends out a postcard of upcoming events (see picture) and note two of our very own Reds are coming to town -- Deborah on Feb 18 and Rhys on Mar 1. To sign up for their mailer or to order autographed books from your favorite authors, visit: https://poisonedpen.com



And now, Reds, tell us what's your favorite bookstore? Do you go to author events? And if you have a question for Barbara, ask away! One lucky commenter will win this snazzy Poisoned Pen tote bag!