FATHER'S DAY; COMING TO FRANCE THIS FALL...

The Paperback Dolls have been hosting a "Male Authors Rock" series leading into Father's Day.

I wrap up the week with a tribute to the day and some thoughts about how becoming a father changed the way I write and, to some extent, gave me voice as a fiction writer.

You can read the piece here; also, if you leave a comment, you will be entered for a chance to win a limited edition of my second novel, TOROS & TORSOS.

Speaking of TOROS, the French edition of that novel will be released this September by Belfond. Like HEAD GAMES before it, TOROS will be getting a new title for French audiences, BLACK RHAPSODIE, which is surreally close to the title of one of crime novelist Hector Lassiter's own works of fiction.



Also, HEAD GAMES will be coming out in mass market paperback in France this September. Here's a look at its new look:

ROGUE MALES NOMINATED FOR MACAVITY AWARD

Thanks to all who've written, Tweeted or posted to Facebook congratulations on ROGUE MALES being a Macavity Award finalist.

The complete list of nominees follows:



Macavity Award Nominations 2010

The Macavity Awards are nominated and voted on by members of Mystery Readers International. The 2010 Macavity Nominations are for books and stories published in 2009. Mystery Readers Journal is MRI's publication. The winners will be announced at Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention, in October. Bouchercon will be held in San Francisco in 2010. This award is named for the "mystery cat" of T.S. Eliot (Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats).

Best Mystery Novel
• Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott (Simon & Schuster)
• Tower by Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman (Busted Flush Press)
• Necessary as Blood by Deborah Crombie (Wm. Morrow)
• Nemesis by Jo Nesbo, translated by Don Bartlett (HarperCollins)
• The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny (Minotaur)
• The Shanghai Moon by S.J. Rozan (Minotaur)

Best First Mystery Novel
• The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley (Delacorte)
• Running from the Devil by Jamie Freveletti (Wm. Morrow)
• A Bad Day for Sorry by Sophie Littlefield (Minotaur)
• The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville (Soho Crime)
• A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn (Picador)

Best Mystery Nonfiction
• L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City by John Buntin (Random House: Harmony Books)
• Talking about Detective Fiction by P.D. James (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations About the Writing Life by Craig McDonald (Bleak House Books)
• The Line Up: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives, edited by Otto Penzler (Little, Brown & Co)
• Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo (Penguin Press)
• Dame Agatha’s Shorts: An Agatha Christie Short Story Companion by Elena Santangelo (Bella Rosa Books)

Best Mystery Short Story
• “Last Fair Deal Gone Down” by Ace Atkins in Crossroad Blues (Busted Flush Press)
• “Femme Sole” by Dana Cameron in Boston Noir (Akashic Books)
• “Digby, Attorney at Law” by Jim Fusilli, (AHMM, May 2009)
• “Your Turn” by Carolyn Hart in Two of the Deadliest (Harper)
• “On the House” by Hank Phillippi Ryan in Quarry: Crime Stories by New England Writers (Level Best Books)
• “The Desert Here and the Desert Far Away” by Marcus Sakey in Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can’t Put Down (Mira)
• “Amapola” by Luis Alberto Urrea in Phoenix Noir (Akashic Books)

Sue Feder Historical Mystery
• A Trace of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell (Forge)
• In the Shadow of Gotham by Stefanie Pintoff (Minotaur)
• A Duty to the Dead by Charles Todd (Wm. Morrow)
• Serpent in the Thorns by Jeri Westerson (Minotaur)
• Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear (Henry Holt)

PRINT THE LEGEND ON UNABRIDGED AUDIO

This weekend, I completed a listen to the newly released, unabridged audio version of PRINT THE LEGEND by Recorded Books and featuring Tom Stechschulte as reader.



PRINT THE LEGEND is the third of the Hector Lassiter novels and the third to be read by Tom. Tom was my first choice to serve as the voice of Hector Lassiter and all those who people Hector's world including Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, John Dos Passos, Rita Hayworth, Marlene Dietrich and a host of other historical figures.




Tom earlier read my debut novel, HEAD GAMES — one in which Hector narrates the tale — eerily bringing to life the voice and attitude of the man I'd been hearing in my head as I composed the eight novels in the Hector Lassiter series. (Yes, all eight are already written; number four, ONE TRUE SENTENCE, will be released by Minotaur Books in April 2011). You can hear a sample of Tom reading from HEAD GAMES here.



Next came TOROS & TORSOS, which is presented in third-person POV, and required Tom to embody not only a younger Hector Lassiter than the 57-year-old man of the first novel, but also to portray Ernest Hemingway; a young, obsessed Orson Welles and a woman I envisioned as the kind of ultimate femme fatale. A sample of Tom reading TOROS can be found here.

And now we come to PRINT THE LEGEND. Hector Lassiter is 65-years-old throughout most of this book, and Tom gives Hector the charisma and bearing appropriate to a legendary writer who has been dubbed "The man who writes what he lives and lives what he writes," as well as, "The Last Man Standing of the Lost Generation."



PRINT is Tom's best peformance yet, giving us not only a convincing old and ailing Ernest Hemingway, but also the writer's formidable, alcoholic and dangerous widow, Mary...a passel of Hemingway scholars, the deadly FBI agent Donovan Creedy and the book's heroine, young, Scottish and very pregnant fiction writer Hannah Paulson.

You can read an interview I conducted with Tom earlier this year here.

PRINT THE LEGEND, the recording, is available from Audible here, where you can also sample the opening passages of the recording. The audiobook is also available at your local library.

THESE TWO GUYS...& BLOOD, GUTS & WHISKEY

BLOOD, GUTS & WHISKEY, the third anthology in a series gathering stories from Thuglit, and edited by Thuglit kingpin Todd Robinson hit stores earlier this week.

This one is keynoted by a deft introduction by Max Allan Collins — a kind of mini-history of the crime short story and the way it drove the development of the hardboiled novel. BLACK MASK, Hammett, Chandler and company are all there in Collins' quick primer on dark, violent short fiction.

The contributors include the late great Eddie Bunker, as well as Jordan Harper, Tom Piccirilli, John Kenyon, Colin O'Sullivan, Pearce Hansen, Scott Wolven, fellow 2008 Best First Novel Edgar finalist Derek Nikitas, Justin Porter, Glenn Gray, Dana King, Stuart Neville, Michael Penncavage, Kiernan Shea, Jedidiah Ayres, Brian Murphy, Dave Zeltserman, Stephen Allan, Andy Turner, David Harrison, Lawrence Clayton, Sean Doolittle, and, representing all of womanhood, Hilary Davidson — noir rose in a thicket of thorns.

My contribution is a story called "These Two Guys..." that debuted online on Thuglit, became a finalist for BEST AMERICAN MYSTERIES and lives again in BLOOD, GUTS & WHISKEY.

The story comes out of a cycle of stories that follow the path of two New Jersey thugs who have drifted from New Jersey to Ohio through installments that have cropped up here and there including "The Devil's In the Details," (hear the audio version here), "Broken Promised Land" and a few that have since fallen off the web as some other ezines have folded...a few on my hard-drive awaiting a good home...

Anthologies are nearly always a mixed bag — collections in which you have to take the rough with the smooth. I'm about half-way through this one and it's hitting hard on every cylinder. Do check it out this long holiday weekend.

COWBOY'D ALL TO HELL; CANCION MIXTECA

As noted in a post earlier in the week, HEAD GAMES, the first Hector Lassiter novel, was partly dedicated to singer/songwriter Tom Russell whose music inspired and informed not just the character of Lassiter, but some of the plot moves of that first book in the Lassiter series.

One song, in particular, runs like a thread through HEAD GAMES — a Mexican folk-song that was not penned by Tom Russell. Yet Tom Russell introduced me to that song.

It's called "Cancion Mixteca." As HEAD GAMES unfolds, Hector becomes increasingly focused on that tune...it becomes a kind of refrain and theme song for the book, and Hector, circa 1957.

We'll get back to that particular piece of folk music...close the circle in due time.

Tom Russell has a new album out. It's called COWBOY'D ALL TO HELL.

It's a partial re-release of Russell's album COWBOY REAL (Philo 1991). Eight of that vintage album's 11 tunes are re-presented in re-mastered form.

From there, the album pushes out with some new recordings of cowboy tunes that graced Russell's SONGS OF THE WEST, as well as INDIANS COWBOYS HORSES DOGS and THE MAN FROM GOD KNOWS WHERE — all of the tunes re-recorded and peppered with asides and some occasional historical notes about the songs' origins. It's a great, casually assured collection of cowboy songs that are raw and real — never sentimental.

The collection closes with a new recording of the song "The Rose of the San Joaquin," a tune Russell penned with Ian Tyson "one dusty afternoon down in the California desert," according to Russell's on-album aside. When I let myself fantasize about a HEAD GAMES film adaptation, that movie opens with Tom Russell's "Tonight We Ride," and closes with a gunshot and then an over-the-credits rendition of "Rose of the San Joaquin."

At the end of the COWBOY'D ALL TO HELL version of "Rose," Tom disarmingly segues into a raw and wrenching version of "Cancion Mixteca."

As I said, I first heard the song at a Russell concert in Columbus, Ohio many years ago. I looked it up later and found a version of the song by Harry Dean Stanton that appeared in the film PARIS, TEXAS.

Here's Stanton's take of Hector Lassiter's fleetingly "favorite song":



To close out, perhaps my new favorite Tom Russell borderland ballad, sung by its composer (You can find this one on Russell's BLOOD AND CANDLE SMOKE:

THE RAWSON INTERVIEWS

It dawned on me while preparing a Web site update for my official page, that in the haze of the PRINT THE LEGEND tour, I never got around to posting here the two-part interview that the terrific Keith Rawson pulled together during my rainy sortie into Arizona during March.

A lot of ground is covered: Not just stuff about my series and continuing character, but discussion of the state of genre fiction, the dangers of series characters and the like... And, ahem, that Kindle matter.

Craig McDonald part 1 from Damon Cap on Vimeo.

Craig McDonald part 2 from Damon Cap on Vimeo.

MUSIC, THE MUSE & ONE TRUE SENTENCE

I write fiction to music...always have.

Of course that's not particularly unusual in itself. Was a time I did what a number of authors tend to do: create a kind of soundtrack or mix for a book, then listen to that self-generated tape or CD while drafting a novel. George Pelecanos, Michael Connelly and John Connolly, among others, have actually bound such discs into their books, or released them in tandem with advance readers copies of their resulting novels.

Others post their playlists for particular novels on their Web sites.

My own tendency has been to microfocus on a single artist, or album. Sometimes, even a single song. Then I weave the music, song titles, lyrics or even the performers (albeit in fictionalized guise) into the novels the music helped to inspire.

HEAD GAMES was dedicated to Tom Russell and Andrew Hardin because the character Hector Lassiter was inspired by Tom Russell's cover of "Tramps & Hawkers," an old Celtic air given a Tex-Mex spin by songwriter Jim Ringer. That song, essentially, inspired not just Hector, but the short story "The Last Interview," that introduced Hector. Here, the Jim Ringer spin on the old Scottish tune is performed by folk singer Todd Crowley:



When it came time to write HEAD GAMES, I pretty much wrote the novel to a steady diet of selected Tom Russell's albums: THE ROSE OF THE SAN JOAQUIN, BORDERLAND, SONGS OF THE WEST, HOTWALKER and INDIANS COWBOYS HORSES DOGS. The title track of the latter, "Tonight We Ride," is essentially a perfect candidate for a HEAD GAMES theme song.



The other primary disc played throughout the composition of HEAD GAMES was Andrew Hardin's BLUE ACOUSTIC. Hear some here.

The second novel, TOROS & TORSOS, was written to a string of oldies which are named, song for song, throughout the book: Jo Stafford, Billie Holliday...it goes on. But there was a particular song I listened to over and over — so much so that I essentially trashed the CD. That tune was Bryan Ferry's cover of the torch song, "Where or When." The lyrics of the song, essentially, summarize the central plot element of that novel:



PRINT THE LEGEND was a different beast. If HEAD GAMES was informed by Americana music, and TOROS & TORSOS by standards and torch songs, PRINT was conceived to be more operatic...written to a battery of classical compositions for violin, mostly performed by Lara St. John.



LASSITER #4, due out in Winter of 2011, is entitled ONE TRUE SENTENCE.

I wrote this one immediately after finishing TOROS & TORSOS, and conceived it as a kind of companion book. Where TOROS sprawled across space and time (Key West in 1935, Spain in '37, Hollywood in 1947 and Cuba in 1959), ONE TRUE SENTENCE is confined to one week in Paris in February, 1924. Think A MOVEABLE FEAST re-imagined as a noir love story.

It's the last novel in which Ernest Hemingway figures. Again, as in TOROS, Hem is functioning as Hector's sidekick. ONE TRUE SENTENCE effectively completes the Hemingway trilogy that informs the opening movements of the Lassiter series. After OTS, it is a Hemingway-free zone.

Because the novel is centered around the Lost Generation — a generation shaped by an infatuation with the void and living oft-times hedonistic lives with no eye to consequences — I found myself drawn to a particular album while writing the novel. I listened exclusively to that album in the winter months I spent writing the first draft of OTS.

That album is by singer-songwriter Melissa McClelland, and is entitled THUMBELINA'S ONE NIGHT STAND. It's a smart, seductive, engaging collection of songs...informed by suicide. And, if, like HEAD GAMES before it, ONE TRUE SENTENCE has a "theme song," it's this tune from Melissa's album:



If you want to sample a little Melissa in a decidedly noir vein, try this one from THUMBELINA:



So, a question for those writers among you:

Do you write to music? If so, who are your musical muses?