The Levee--William Kent Krueger

DEBORAH CROMBIE: We've talked a lot about audio books here on the blog lately (you all know it's one of my soapboxes!) Audio is the thing in publishing these days, and it's very fertile ground for authors to explore--as our very special guest today, WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER, will tell us. His audio novella, THE LEVEE, is just out and it's fabulous. Here's Kent with the story behind the project:

The Levee: A Literary Experiment

 

For the past several months, my publisher and I have been collaborating on a literary experiment. Last Tuesday, our work came to fruition. My novella The Levee was released by Simon and Schuster as an original audiobook. This has all been a completely new experience for me, and I’m still waiting to see the full outcome.

Why did I agree to be a part of this experiment? Here’s the main reason: I consider myself an artist. I believe all writers should think of themselves as artists, and words are our medium. If we do this, it means that we should always be trying to grow, to push our limitations, expand our reach. The Levee represents a new kind of storytelling for me, both in its length and in the venue of its offering.

Briefly, The Levee is set in the spring of 1927, during the worst flood in our nation’s history. In that spring, the lower Mississippi River spilled from its banks and covered more that 27,000 square miles with water up to thirty feet high. The river below Memphis, Tennessee, reached a width of eighty miles. In my story, at the height of this flood, four men are assigned the task of battling the treacherous river in a desperate attempt to rescue a family trapped by the rising waters.

This flood of Biblical proportions inspired William Faulkner’s classic novella The Old Man, which is the story of a convict conscripted to rescue a pregnant woman trapped by the raging river. I read that novella when I was in my mid-twenties. As with most of Faulkner’s work, I found the prose to be complex and difficult, but I also found the storyline compelling. As a young man dreaming of being a writer, I was inspired to create what I hoped might be a more accessible story of my own, which I titled “The Levee.” I never tried to get the story published. But, as every writer knows, you never throw anything away. So, I set the piece atop the pile of the other unpublished stories I’d written and moved on.

 In my mid-forties, still unpublished, I resurrected and reworked “The Levee” for a creative writing class I’d enrolled in at the University of Minnesota. Across the twenty intervening years, the heart of the piece had haunted me. I continued to be intrigued by the idea of an adventure story that probed deeper themes. The class and the instructor quite liked what I’d written, but the general consensus was that there was still a larger tale to be told. Again, I set the story aside.

In the long period of self-isolation that followed the descent of the pandemic in 2020, I entered one of the most productive periods of my life as a writer. I completed two novel-length manuscripts for my publisher, Atria Books, and drafted a couple of novellas. But I was still eager for more. So I reached into my vault of old, unpublished stories and pulled out “The Levee.”

Rather than merely rework that earlier attempt, I completely rethought the story. Maybe because I’ve been telling tales for a living for nearly a quarter of a century now, this new piece just seemed to flow from my imagination. For me, it became a story of the conundrum of both man and the natural world, the idea that each can behave in surprising ways and yet those surprises are predictably a part of the nature of each.

 When I announced the release of the novella, I got a lot of pushback from readers who insisted that they never listen to audiobooks. Holding a real book in their hands was the only way they wanted to access literature. If that’s the way the feel, it’s perfectly fine. But I’ve tried to point out to them that for countless millennia, long before the advent of written language and before the printing press made books accessible to the masses, storytelling was an oral tradition, and the storytellers were celebrated. Good stories are meant to fall trippingly off the tongue. I don’t know about other writers, but I always read my work out loud, both as I’m writing it and as I’m revising. I find that I can hear the clunk, the redundancies, the unnecessary words, the cadences that don’t quite work. It’s important to me to hear the flow of the story.

I’ve become a huge fan of audiobooks myself. Because I make a lot of speaking appearances across the country and because I’m not fond of flying, I drive thousands of miles every year. Just before I depart, I download audiobooks for the trip. Oh, my god, do the miles fly by when I’m listening to a good story read by a compelling narrator.

The question I’ve been asked most frequently is whether there will be a print version. I don’t know the answer. There aren’t a lot of platforms for a novella-length piece these days. Magazines such as Life that, in the old days, regularly published longer fiction, don’t exist anymore. And most publishers don’t consider a novella to be a viable length for print publication, unless it’s a part of a larger collection of work.

So, for the moment, The Levee is just available as an audiobook. Will this experiment succeed? In my own mind, it already has. I feel that I’ve grown as a writer, as an artist. So who knows? Maybe there will be more novellas down the road.

If you’d like to listen to an excerpt of the audiobook, here’s the link. 

DEBS: Let me just say that The Levee is absolutely gripping and if you're new to audio, this novella is a great place to start. It's available on many platforms--you don't have to have a subscription to listen.

Here's more about The Levee:

An audio original novella from the bestselling author of Ordinary Grace and This Tender Land, The Levee is a powerful, captivating story of a family, a storm, a complicated rescue, and the true cost of survival.

It’s 1927, and the most devastating flood in American history has swelled the Mississippi River to a width of eighty miles. In an attempt to save a family trapped by the rising water, four men in a tiny rowboat battle the treacherous flow: three are convicts, on loan from the local prison and pressed into service; the fourth, the leader of the team, is driven by his own hidden motives. But to their surprise upon arrival at Ballymore, an ancestral home protected by a high, circular levee, not everyone in the family feels the need to be saved. Pride, greed, loyalty, and even love create their own complex currents behind the massive wall. As the threat from the flood increases and time ticks away, the crew and the family must decide on a course of action, and a desperate plan is hatched to save the weakening levee and all it was built to protect.

The Levee is a propulsive, heartfelt tale of courage, cowardice, and sacrifice in a historic moment when the indomitable human spirit is pitted against the awesome and destructive power of nature.

And here's more about Kent (who is, I have to add, one of the nicest people in the mystery writing business, and I'm so tickled to have him on the blog!):

Raised in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, William Kent Krueger briefly attended Stanford University—before being kicked out for radical activities. After that, he logged timber, worked construction, tried his hand at freelance journalism, and eventually ended up researching child development at the University of Minnesota. He’s been married for nearly fifty years to a marvelous woman who is a retired attorney. He makes his home in St. Paul, a city he dearly loves.

Krueger writes a mystery series set in the north woods of Minnesota. His protagonist is Cork O’Connor, the former sheriff of Tamarack County and a man of mixed heritage—part Irish and part Ojibwe. His work has received a number of awards, including the Minnesota Book Award, the Loft-McKnight Fiction Award, the Anthony Award, the Barry Award, the Dilys Award, and the Friends of American Writers Prize. His last nine novels were all New York Times bestsellers.

Ordinary Grace, his stand-alone novel published in 2013, received the Edgar Award, given by the Mystery Writers of America in recognition for the best novel published in that year. The companion novel, This Tender Land, was published in September 2019 and spent nearly six months on the New York Times bestseller list.

DEBS: How about it, dear readers? Are you willing to give something new a try? Pretend you're sitting around then campfire... Then pop back in and visit with Kent, who will be here to chat!

Tucson Report

RHYS BOWEN: For those of you who are still knee deep in snow, I thought I should share some sunshine and warmth. This weekend I took part in the Tucson Festival of Books. For those of you who have never attended, it is huge! They reckon over 100,000 visit during the two days. It takes place at the University of Arizona with panels going on in all the various auditoriums and in tents along the mall. Hundreds of authors, ranging from children's writers, poets, science fiction, to cook books. There is a culinary tent with demonstrations. CSpan is there. And the mall is lined with booths: publishers, bookstores, non-profits, national parks.

Unfortunately I didn't have time to browse because I was given a full schedule, and let me tell you that it takes half an hour to walk from one end of the mall to the other. So on Saturday I had a signing at a booth, had to run back to meet my escort to be taken to my panel (at the other end again), then had to grab a bite for lunch before I was back at the other end to conduct a workshop on writing the historical mystery.

On Sunday the same sort of thing. I signed in the morning with Tess Gerritson whom I had never met, although we share the same agent.

Then a panel on women in wartime: with the fabulous Kate Quinn (of Alice Network fame) and Lynda Loigman whose new book is The Wartime Sisters

Packed house. Lots of good questions, and I learned so much. Kate's new book, just out this week, is called THE HUNTRESS. There is plenty of buzz about it. It features the Night Witches--an all female squadron of Russian  bomber pilots in WWII. They were called Night Witches because they used to cut the engine on their planes and coast in silently to drop their bomb, restart the engine and get out of there. So the Germans thought they sounded like witches on broomsticks. They would return to base, take ten minutes to refuel, reload and be off again. Over ten missions per night, seven days a week for three years. And only 27 percent of them were killed!

What a great story. And Lynda's was equally fascinating. Two sisters working in the Brooklyn Armory, which was  like a small town during the war, with all amenities, entertainment, gossip columns. One of the things I like about conferences and panels is that I always learn such a lot and come away with fabulous books to read.

The other thing I like is having time to catch up with dear friends. On Saturday night I had dinner with Cara Black and Kent Kruger. We sat outside, under the stars, and had Middle Eastern food. And laughed a lot. Perfect.

 Now it's back to work again. I'm so near the end of my first draft that it's hard to stop.
And by the way--everyone sold out of my new book, which was very nice!

I do hope this has brought a glimpse of sunshine to you! If you want to plan a winter escape next year, then you might want to consider this festival. I met a lot of people who had flown down for a week in Arizona, escaping from blizzards and cold.
 Which bookfairs have you attended?

What a difference a coast makes…

 

HALLIE EPHRON: Last weekend I had the great pleasure of being guest of honor (along with William Kent Krueger) at the California Crime Writers Conference. Culver City where planes are landing at LAX just outside your window.

At Logan (we got off 30 minutes early, arrived an hour early: how bizarre is that?) I was the only one who cracked up at the announcement from TSA on the loudspeaker: "Please return to security if you left an I-Pad and  eyeglasses..." which of course I heard as I-glasses... A writer's joke.

As the plane landed, the sun was shining and I could see ocean one way and mountains the other. Mountains I never knew were so close by, growing up there because the air was so much more polluted. Back in the 60s your plane descended into an impenetrable brown haze.

 

The fun started when I got picked up at the airport by TammyKaehler (now blond!). Not in a race car, sadly. Driving utterly sanely if a bit, um, fast.

What a conference! Two hundred and fifty authors, editors, agents, publicists, rubbing shoulders and sharing tips. They pull it off magnificently every other year. All overseen by an incredible board headed by the indomitable and uber-competent Rochelle Staab. From one control freak to another, I tip my hat.

The conference opened Friday night with a twist: an event dubbed MISCAST, held in the only appropriate place, a dark wood-paneled bar that needed smoke to feel authentic. Authors switched places and read each other’s work. Hardboiled writers read softboiled excerpts and vice versa. Glen ErikHamilton, Harley Jane Kozak, Matt Coyle, Elaine Ash, Jeri Westerson, KateCarlisle, SW Lauden, and Daryl Wood Gerber. It was a hoot!

I'm not sure if these guys were photographed before or after: John Edward Mullen, Dave Putnam, Matt Coyle, Beth Yarnall. In the bar.

I knew we weren’t in Kansas any more when (Matt Coyle, maybe... someone correct me if I've misremembered) read an excerpt from Foxe Tail (by Jerri Westerson writing as Haley Walsh), a bawdy mystery starring a gorgeous young gay man (think Tab Hunter) on the make in old timey Hollywood. To say it was blue would be an understatement. Got me thinking: Do we even write sex in New England?

Saturday and Sunday were packed with outstanding writing, marketing, and forensics panels and there was a crime scene room with an FBI expert. I came away determined to create my own podcasts (thanks Laura Brennan – dialing into DestinationMystery to hear some), and a new appreciation of swag (Thanks, Ellen Byron, Cajun Country Mysteries).

A real pleasure of this conference was the many screenwriters who are now writing crime novels. They are SO SMART about plot! Ellen Byron, Craig Faustus Buck, Wendall Thomas, and more… I could listen to you guys talk the ins and outs of the 3-act structure all day long.

All of which is to say once again, I pinch myself. Crime fiction writers are the best, most generous, hilarious, and smart people you could ever hang out with. I am so lucky!

Morning after the conference I went out to breakfast… don’t you love this place, Dinah’s Diner? (Me cracking up because here in Boston, the way we say Diner is Dinah.) A relic of the 60s. I could have hung out here with my high school friends, drinking coffee and, yes, smoking cigarettes. And the hash browns with my eggs were the kind I grew up with, shredded and crisp. Yum.

So when you think Los Angeles, do 60's diners or crispy hash browns, mountains or beaches, noir or California cozies come to mind?

Reds at the New England Crime Bake

HALLIE EPHRON: Last weekend was one of my all-time favorite conferences, the New England Crime Bake. It's my local

conference, sponsored by New England Sisters in Crime and the New England chapter of Mystery Writers of America, and held in Dedham, MA, practically in my backyard.

I've been to every single Crime Bake, 15 and counting. The first was one day, held in a college lecture hall with maybe 100 attendees. The first Guest of Honor was the late great Jeremiah Healy and the Jungle Red Writers hadn't been invented.

This year we packed a suburban Hilton with about 300 attendees for three days. As usual, the conference sold out in a few weeks. Guest of Honor was William Kent Krueger. Hank and Lucy and I represented the Reds. Conference chairs were Sharon Daynard and Ray Daniel.

Highlight for me was Kent's Saturday keynote. He talked about being miserable at his day job and yearning to be a writer -- correction, not just any writer, yearning to be Ernest Hemingway. It wasn't until he gave up on that goal and settled for being his own writer that he found success. And what a formidable success it's been.

It was a message for all of us aspiring writers: Don't reach for someone else's stars, reach for your own. 

Second highlight is always the banquet. This year we dressed to honor Kent's Minnesota (plaid shirts, moose antlers), dined on shepherd's pie laced with cheese curds, and danced to songs by Michigan artists. Lucy and Edith and I were first on the dance floor.

 Here's me and Kent in our plaids and caps. Lucy a reindeer and Hank a moose (Bullwinkle -- Jonathan, Hank's husband, came as Rocky.)

Of course we signed books. Hank signed a gazillion of her hot-off-the-presses SAY NO MORE.

My favorite thing is when someone brings me a copy of my mystery writing book to sign, and it looks like this:

 

Biggest challenge: The Wheel of Why. The nefarious Julie Hennrikus devised a diabolical challenge. Hank and I were on TEAM THRILLER. Competing against TEAM POLICE PROCEDURAL and TEAM COZY.  Given two character names (Fred and Ginger), four clues (lizard, umbrella, and two I've conveniently forgotten), and a motive (lust), in three minutes we had to come up with a thriller plot.

Can I just say that for a challenge like that, you want Hank on your team.  She had me at: "Fred and Ginger... not their real names..."

Join us next year, but register early or you'll be shut out! 

Who else was there? Share your highlights.

And what are your favorite events to hang out with readers and writers?

Karin Salvalaggio--Setting the Perfect Place

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  This seems to be our week for talking about place in novels.  I was fortunate last autumn to be given an advance reader's copy of Karin Salvalaggio's debut novel, BONE DUST WHITE, which I think is stunningly good. The book leaves such a strong physical impression that whenever I think about the story I feel a bone-deep cold. Like William Kent Krueger's Minnesota novels, the setting becomes a character in itself.

Someone is knocking at the door to Grace Adams' house, and he won't stop. Grace thinks she knows who it is, but when she goes to her second floor window for a look she sees a woman she doesn't recognize. The woman isn't alone for long before a man emerges from the dark of the surrounding woods, stabs her, and leaves her for dead. Trying to help, Grace goes to the woman and is shocked to find that it's her mother Leanne-a woman who abandoned her 11 years before. There's nothing she can do, and Leanne is already past the point where she can tell Grace what happened all those years ago or why she came back now.

While Grace was only a child when Leanne left her, Detective Macy Greeley has been waiting for Leanne ever since she disappeared from Collier, MT. She's looking to close a case that has been haunting the town for far too long, but Collier is a hard-bitten place where the people are fierce when it comes to keeping their feuds between themselves and keeping secrets hidden in the past. 

Here's what the advance reviews have to say:

“The suspense meter spikes dramatically… This complicated, peel-away-layers debut procedural intoxicates from the opening page and has word-of-mouth selling power... Recommend for fans of Archer Mayor, Gwen Florio, and Craig Johnson. C.J. Box’s The Highway comes to mind, too.” –Library Journal (Debut of the Month)

“Salvalaggio’s debut deftly intertwines a town without a future and citizens without hope, people in need and people who need to be needed, and a new murder that brings closure to four unsolved cases.” –Kirkus

“In Salvalaggio’s haunting debut… the author creates a hardscrabble community of characters that readers won’t soon forget.”  –Publishers Weekly

And I couldn't agree more. Here's Karin to tell us a little bit about why she chose Montana and the fictional town of Collier.

KARIN SALVALAGGIO: Novels are often full of memorable settings, but some of these locations are more remarkable than others because they serve both the narrative and create the desired mood. What would The Shining by Stephen King be without the Overlook Hotel and the grand seclusion of the Rocky Mountains? Daphne du Maurier’s short story “Don’t Look Now” wouldn’t work as well with out those eerie Venetian canals and alleyways as its backdrop. In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson Hedeby Island serves as the perfect setting for both a ‘locked room’ mystery and an isolated environment where our intrepid reporter Mikael Blomkvist investigates members of a highly dysfunctional family, one of whom is certainly guilty of murder. A novel’s setting can be real or imaginary. It can be as isolated as a mountainside or in the middle of a teeming metropolis and as exotic as a Caribbean Island or as humble as a housing tract. Whether it’s a location that haunts your reader for a lifetime or inspires them to book a flight, it is important that the author makes a conscious decision regarding their novel’s setting. So much depends on the reader coming away with a lasting impression. The more visceral the experience the more likely the reader will want to visit again.

For my debut novel Bone Dust White, I’ve created the fictional town of Collier, but placed it in a very real location, the Flathead Valley in Northern Montana. Collier is an amalgamation of places I’ve visited and read about. This is small town America viewed with a long lens. I don’t claim to be an expert. This is fiction. I wanted the backdrop of my novel to be as down in its luck and hard bitten as its residents. Collier is claustrophobic in scale and the harsh winter storms and darkness that sweep in as the novel opens only serve to make the atmosphere more sinister. It is set on the borders with Canada and surrounded by deep impenetrable forests that jut up against the Whitefish Mountains. The main highway goes straight through town, clogging Main Street with eighteen wheelers and choking its residents with exhaust fumes. The Flathead River flows around in the town like a ‘distended belly’. Once a source of commerce for the closed saw mills, the only thing the river carries now is debris washed down from the higher elevations. Crime, high employment, prostitution, alcoholism and meth addiction are among its more visible problems.

It is within this backdrop that a haunted young girl named Grace Adams comes of age in the cruelest of ways. Having been given a new lease on life she is finally ready to embrace her future on her own terms, but there are forces working against her. She witnesses a brutal murder just yards from her back gate and as the woods close in on her and the victim she once again retreats into herself. This is truly a case of her past coming in from the cold and she will have to negotiate a tangled web of betrayals if she’s going to survive. Detective Macy Greeley is the outsider brought in by the state to investigate the murder as it is believed to be linked to an unsolved case she worked 11 years earlier. She to must peel away layers of lies and complicated family feuds as she works a case that will bring the town of Collier to its knees.

I feel I’ve created the perfect backdrop for my novel Bone Dust White and I hope the town of Collier haunts my readers for years to come. Are there locations and settings both real and imagery that have left an impression on you as a reader? Are there writers out there who choose locations for reasons that I may not have entertained? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

DEBS: We have some interesting cross-cultural things going on this week as well: I'm an American who chooses to write British crime novels, Peter Robinson is a Yorkshire native who lives in Canada but sets his books in Yorkshire, and Karin is an American who lives in London and chose to set her novel in Montana. Does our physical distance from our setting make it more intriguing for us as writers?


Karin will be giving away a copy of BONE DUST WHITE to one of today's lucky commenters, so get your name in the hat!
 
KARIN SALVALAGGIO received in MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck at the University of London. Born is West Virginia and raised in an Air Force family, she grew up on a number of military bases around the United States. She now lives in London with her two children. Bone Dust White is her first novel. http://www.karinsalvalaggio.com/

Debs Reporting from the Tucson Festival of Books

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  I arrived in Tucson, Arizona, yesterday for my first visit to the Tucson Festival of Books. The festival is only six years old, but already has 120,000 attendees, 1800 volunteers, and more authors than you can shake a stick at. I can't begin to name all the wonderful writers here in all genres, so have a look at the festival website. I think every author who comes wants to come back, so I can imagine the riches growing and growing.

As I can't begin to describe all the activities, I'm going to throw out a few of my pictorial highlights.

Here's the view from my hotel room before last night's event, a literary fundraising author's reception and dinner.

The Girls' Fab Four at the pre-dinner reception: Cara Black, yours truly, Libby Fischer Hellman, and our RED Rhys Bowen.

Wonderful writers Bryan Gruley and Steve Hamilton.

A fuzzy shot of Rebecca Eaton, producer of PBS's Masterpiece Theater, who was the keynote speaker. She was fabulous.

Today's Bloody Murder panel with me, moderator Patti O'Brien, G.M. Malliet, and Jenn McKinlay.

Our best audience, Kendall, our friend Reine Carter's assistance dog. You know we were fascinating!

Kendall giving me a kiss!

Loaning my festival cap to author Brandon Sanderson during our afternoon signing. The sun was fierce!

A little more evening fun--a festival sponsored reception for the authors. With William Kent Krueger, G.M. Malliet, Susan Shea, and Terry Shames.

Kent and I sport our festival caps!

Another panel and more signings tomorrow, and then I'll be sorry to say goodbye to Tucson. 

I hope everyone had as great a weekend, and it was great to be warm!

A last but not least bit of JRW business--here are the 5 winners of Peter Swanson's The Girl with a Clock for a Heart. Winners, please email me your mailing addresses at deb at deborahcrombie dot com and I'll forward them to Peter.

And here I quote Peter:

Joan Emerson, for being first
James Montgomery Jackson, because he gets up at five AM
Kathy Reel, because she's posing with a statue
Denise Ann, because she was up front about wanting to win the book
Beverly Fontaine, because she says there is no such thing as reading too much