SOME LOVE FOR PRINT THE LEGEND

It's more than three years since PRINT THE LEGEND—my novel about the death of Ernest Hemingway and J. Edgar Hoover's secret war on writers—saw the light of day, but in the past week it was given fresh attention from a couple of very different directions.

Nick Harmer of Death Cab for Cutie recently recommended PRINT THE LEGEND, along with key books by Ken Bruen, James Sallis, George Pelecanos, Gillian Flynn and several others. You can read Nick's tour list of crime fiction reads, and listen to his thoughts on crime fiction, here.

On Tuesday, PRINT, and the greater Hector Lassiter series, was touted by Kaite Stover as a favorite spring read on the Book Doctors on KCUR out of Kansas City. The discussion about PTL occurs around the 12:30 mark, but the whole show is interesting and has some engaging discussion on audio books, eBooks, Amazon.com and a number of other great recommended reads. Check it out here.

CARNIVAL NOIR FREE FOR KINDLE & A CONTEST

Today (Sunday, March 24) only, CARNIVAL NOIR, the second novel in the Chris Lyon Thriller Series, is free for Kindle. You can get your copy HERE.

If you've read EL GAVILAN, you've already made the (brief) acquaintance of Chris and Salome Lyon, who had cameo appearances in that novel. Chris, too, cropped up fleetingly near the end of the Hector Lassiter novel, PRINT THE LEGEND.

The Chris Lyon novels are the books I wrote many years before the Lassiter novels I've become known for. In writing my series about Hector Lassiter, I rather liberally dipped into the Lyon novels to borrow occasional characters or the like.

At least once, I even picked up a few lines of prose from a Lyon novel and dropped them into a Hector Lassiter novel. More on that in a second.

Consequently, the two series entwine in a very deep way, and, in Lyon #4, ANGELS OF DARKNESS (coming in early April), Chris Lyon and Hector Lassiter will actually appear on the page together.

To mark that occasion, and today's free giveaway of CARNIVAL NOIR, the book in which Chris and Salome first meet, I'm offering a chance to win a copy of the ultra-rare and collectible limited edition of Hector Lassiter #2, TOROS & TORSOS.

The first person to write me via my website and correctly identify the lines I wrote in CARNIVAL NOIR in the early 1990s and then dropped into the Hector Lassiter novel ONE TRUE SENTENCE, will claim the limited edition of T&T.

JUDGING (AN EBOOK) BY ITS COVER

Last year, I put my toe in eBook original publishing’s treacherous waters.

I started out with my own, already-published novels for which I had retained electronic rights—HEAD GAMES and TOROS & TORSOS. That went pretty well, so I started thinking about moving on to some original stuff.

This wasn’t a hard decision: In a print market dedicated to a one-book-a-year publishing concept, I knew a lot of stuff I’ve written was never going to see publication anytime soon, or maybe not ever.

That sobering prospect made e-publishing seem a no-brainer. And so came PARTS UNKNOWN, CARNIVAL NOIR and new-this-week CABAL.

It’s been a heady experience so far, and one that allows the former art student in me to at last get some visual artistic urges out of my system via cover design.

Before putting my own eBook originals out there, I spent a lot of time looking at how others packaged their stuff.

The thing that struck me most is the terrible execution of the cover art for the bulk of eBook originals.

Fact is, as readers/consumers we do judge books by their covers.

Many a great tale has been commercially wrecked by a lousy cover.

Conversely, more than one mediocre book has seen its sales driven by a great piece of packaging.

***

I’ve always been a prolific writer and I was at this trade a long time before securing publication. Consequently, I have a lot of manuscripts in the hopper.

Looking over my unpublished backlist, I made the decision to first publish a long-languishing series of novels I wrote about a writer. Most of the books were written in the 1990s, and the series came close to earning me publication back around 1991 or ’92.

The author in those books was a guy named Chris Lyon. The novels turned largely on historic, unsolved crimes. They were, at base, literary thrillers.

In 2007, my debut novel, HEAD GAMES, was published. It was a literary thriller about an author named Hector Lassiter who pokes around famous historic, unsolved crimes and brushes shoulders with historic figures in the process. The Lassiter series clearly owed a lot to my experience writing the Lyon novels.

In the course of writing the Lassiter cycle, I sometimes picked up characters from the Lyon series (Lassiter sidekicks Bud Fiske and James Hanrahan, for instance, got their first work outs/mentions in long-ago written Lyon books).

Pretty quickly, the timelines, events and even some storylines from the unpublished Lyon series and the emerging Lassiter series got tangled up with one another.

The two series seemed bent upon speaking to and expanding upon one another. At some point, Chris Lyon insinuated himself into PRINT THE LEGEND.

Hector, particularly, began to push himself into Lyon’s unpublished saga in a big way.

As a result of that mingling, last year, I took the time and actually wrote a new novel uniting the two series after making the decision to launch the Chris Lyon thrillers myself as eBook originals. (More on that in a minute.)

***

For better or worse, with the notable exception of ROGUE MALES, I’ve always been pretty hands-on in terms of cover design and packaging concepts for my published books.

For good reason, most authors are not allowed anywhere near the design end of things. Somehow, that rule hasn’t applied to me.

HEAD GAMES’ cover was strongly modeled on concepts I put forth to Bleak House after seeing some first passes by designers that frankly left me cold.

For the Bleak House edition of TOROS & TORSOS, I negotiated my own contract with the estate of Diego Rivera for the painting that stands as that book’s cover.

PRINT THE LEGEND’s cover was drawn from a handful of suggested cover photos of Hemingway I provided St. Martin’s at my then-editor’s request.

EL GAVILAN’s cover, again, was drawn from an image I suggested of razor baling wire.

When it came time to design the covers for my own eBooks, I was thrilled by the prospect to have more cover control than ever before.

And I knew exactly this much: I wanted the Chris Lyon covers to be clearly linked visually, and to have a very bold, straight-forward branding concept that stood out from the pack.

Looking over the genre series covers that most resonated for me over the years, I turned immediately to two popular series.

The first was the Bantam Doc Savage pulp novel reprints of the early 1960s. These were executed by the brilliant, realist painter James Bama.

Bama chose an unusual monochromatic approach in painting his best and most iconic Doc Savage covers.

I decided the Lyon covers would also follow a monochromatic approach to immediately link them in the reader’s mind and eye.

The other works I seized on were the hardcover James Bond illustrations, particularly the British first edition covers painted by Richard Chopping (working with significant input from author Ian Fleming).

The Chopping covers tended to feel of-a-piece, and they rely on a single, in-your-face image drawn directly from each novel.

In my mind, I saw some blending of the Bama/Chopping covers: strong image and one hue.

To execute these hypothetical covers, I approached the brilliant JT Lindroos, who designed the cover for my first published book, 2006’s collection of author interviews, ART IN THE BLOOD.

In discussing cover ideas with JT years ago, I suggested an image for ART IN THE BLOOD of a blood-splashed typewriter. JT took that shorthand suggestion and expanded upon it to brilliant and striking effect.

I followed a similar, minimalist design suggestion approach with JT for the Lyon covers.

I provided him with samples of some key Bama and Chopping Doc Savage and Bond covers (reprinted here), the overarching concept I saw for combining their styles, then the Lyon book titles and a couple of suggested images for each novel.

JT ran with all that, in nearly every case providing the perfect cover for each title on his very first pass—covers that seemed drawn directly from my mind’s eye.

CABAL, the third Lyon novel, made its Kindle-exclusive appearance this week. It shifts back and forth in time, from the 1990s, to the 1880s and Victorian London. The Whitechapel murders attributed to Jack the Ripper are key to the plot, and Mr. Lindroos’ bloody red cover conveys that fact in simple and evocative fashion, I think.

At this writing, I’m finalizing plans for Chris Lyon number four, which will bring Chris Lyon and Hector Lassiter together on the page in a very big way.

The novel is a kind of Rosetta stone for my fictional universe, underscoring the overarching themes of both the Lyon and Lassiter series, and setting up a new crime-solving author who could conceivably be passed the torch by Hector and Chris somewhere down the line.

This new eBook original also directly links back to my second Lassiter novel, TOROS & TORSOS.

The  new book will appear in April, exclusively for Kindle, and is entitled “ANGELS OF DARKNESS,” a title that is a nod to Arthur Conan Doyle, who also suggested the title for ART IN THE BLOOD.

Mr. Lindroos got my suggestions for Angels’ cover last night.

It’s pretty simple imagery I suggested for this one: Something golden or bronze… Something with forbidding looking angels or images evoking menace and Scotland, the setting for much of the novel’s early action.

A bit ago, I got his first pass at an ANGELS cover. Two concepts; the second one, a very striking and unusual take, was perfect.

I'll share that image soon for book #4. In the meantime, if you're looking for a brilliant cover artist, check out Mr. Lindroos other work here.

REMEMBERING PANCHO VILLA'S AMERICAN RAID

A few years back, one of the last of Pancho Villa's Columbus, New Mexico, raiders passed.

Today is the anniversary of Pancho Villa's 1916 raid on Columbus, an event central to the plot of my debut novel HEAD GAMES (AKA, Hector Lassiter #1).

HEAD GAMES, in all three of its American formats (softcover, hardcover, and collector's edition, is sold out and effectively out of print in the U.S., though still available in eBook format. The novel will be making its Mexican debut in a few months with a great new cover I'll share soon.)

To mark the anniversary of Villa's raid, a look back at the column I wrote upon word of the last Villa raider's passing:

TONIGHT WE RIDE

Time is a funny thing: stuff that seems so long ago, really isn't. This man passed away last month. A very old man. He lived a lot of the things I wrote about it in my first novel. He experienced Pancho Villa, up close and personal.

1916: That was the year Pancho Villa attacked Columbus, New Mexico and triggered the Punitive Expedition.

The expedition into Mexico was Woodrow Wilson's kind of foreshadowing of George W. Bush's invasion of Afghanistan in search of Bin Laden. Wilson's incursion across the border stoked a lot of resentment against America on the part of Mexico's people.

Wilson sent 100,000 men down into the desert to chase Pancho Villa...to bring him back "Dead or alive." The chase didn't go well.

In my literary world, one of the men who rode down into the desert after Villa was a young Hector Lassiter, who lied about his age and rode off after Black Jack Pershing into the Mexican desert (all of this fuels my first novel, HEAD GAMES).

Like Bin Laden many decades later, Villa proved infuriatingly elusive. Once we lost interest in him, Villa eventually settled down on his ranch, put on some weight, stepped up his womanizing, and started amassing this arsenal. What he meant to do with that latter remains a mystery: Villa was gunned down by parties unknown before he could stir up further revolts or revolutions. A few years later, Pancho's grave was robbed and his head stolen. (Again, all described in HEAD GAMES.) The head remains missing. We'll get back to that, shortly...

Now, I don't consider myself a relic, but I have actually known/met a couple of Punitive Expedition members (both dead for some number of years now). One I met as a child. The other I met as a young reporter...spent an afternoon with him hearing tales of the trail and looking through old photo albums only to be told by the lonely old man he forbid any article be written about him. He just wanted company to pass a summer afternoon. That man, and the other man from my hometown who rode with Pershing, are both name-checked in HEAD GAMES.

I'd come to believe most of the men of that time were long passed. But last evening I ran across this obituary for a man pretty wonderfully named Juan Carlos Caballero Vega. He claimed, at the age of 14, to have ridden with Villa into New Mexico that night to attack Columbus. He claimed to have been Villa's young chauffeur. In a sense, his actual story reflects an opposite-sides-of-the-border version of Hector Lassiter's tale.

Vega passed away on March 30, 2010, at the age of 109. He'd hoped to live to see November 20, the centenary of the Mexican Revolution in which he fought alongside Villa.

According to an article in the Telegraph, he attributed his long life to "love," much walking and an active sex life (he remarried at the age of 99). You can read Vega's story, much of it in his own words, here. An image from Corbis of the old Villista shows a man with some real character etched into his face:

So Vega's gone. And Pancho's head remains elusive. Interestingly enough, the Wall Street Journal this past week took another look at Villa's missing remains (more than just his noggin, really)... Of course, Skull & Bones (the culprits behind Villa's grave-robbing as posited in HEAD GAMES) also got a mention... You can read that piece here.

THE BLACK DAHLIA: A DARK ANNIVERSARY

Elizabeth Short's Mug Shot.

On Jan. 15, 1947, somebody killed Elizabeth Short, a pretty, dark-haired girl with bad teeth from Medford, Massachusetts who lit out for Los Angeles to find fame and fortune or maybe just true love depending on which version of her story you choose to accept.

Most prefer to go the course of that tired old Hollywood dream: Some small-town girl boards a bus to the City of Angels and ends up in Hell.

Certainly, Ms. Short infamously found her name in the headlines in due course. But the happy flavor of fame and fortune “Beth” or “Betty” Short sought tragically eluded her. On January 15, 1947, she became Los Angeles’ “Jane Doe, Number One,” now, of course, better known to us as “The Black Dahlia.”

That moniker is one with a noir pedigree all its own—allegedly lifted from a Raymond Chandler-scripted film by some druggists who hung Beth with the handle.

Or, maybe not.

Contemporary D.A. investigator reports say it was actually a cynical, headline-driving newspaper concoction.

Like so much of the stuff of Beth’s dark legend, securing even the trivial stuff as solid fact is more than a little like trying to nail down mercury.

Regardless, “The Black Dahlia,” is a name that conjures up images of a curvy, black-clad femme fatale. By all accounts, that sexy, sable specter is pretty damned far from the reality of the pale-skinned, asthmatic, dreaming girl from Massachusetts.

When her nude, bisected and savaged corpse was found on display in Leimert Park in sinful L.A., Beth Short deftly and darkly passed into the stuff of noir dreams. Her mug shot from a 1943 arrest for underage drinking was plastered over newspaper covers coast-to-coast. (Beth’s body was first identified through a revolutionary use of fingerprints and an early form of newspaper facsimile technology.)

Once the newsboys (and gals) got a hold of her, Beth was variously portrayed as a man-devouring vixen, an aspiring actress, a ditzy and dipsomaniac farm girl, a lesbian, a stag actress and/or hooker and as a luckless party girl who enticed the wrong pick up.

Over the years, she’s collected some other pieces of eyebrow-raising casting from conspiracy mongers—ranging from Orson Welles’ girlfriend, to victim of mobster Bugsy Siegel.

Beth’s sketchy background—and several missing days before her body was discovered—fire conspiracy theories and the imaginations of novelists.

Actor, director, and magician Orson Welles

Depending on the theorist, she was maybe murdered by Orson Welles, film director, actor, and amateur magician, her severed body dumped on almost the same spot where Welles previously sawed actresses in half to raise money for the war effort.

Maybe she was killed by a twilight character named Jack Anderson Wilson, or maybe somebody’s psychopathic daddy. Maybe it was night club owner Mark Hansen or maybe one of several L.A. doctors (Hodel, O’Reilly and Bayley, please stand up) or, if you buy one long-gone mystery writer’s solution, a dwarf who had to cut the body in half for easier transport.

And the crazy conspiracy beat goes on… (Perhaps the oddest suspect is folksinger Woody Guthrie, who was notorious for drawing nude and sometimes disturbing sketches of women, some of which drew him official attention after Short’s murder.)

TOROS & TORSOS, the second novel in the Hector Lassiter series,
uses Beth Short's murder as a key plot point. 

Hell, maybe a band of killer surrealists did the deed, a notion I explored in my second Hector Lassiter novel, Toros & Torsos, inspired by haunting concepts put forth by authors Steve Hodel, Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss.

MINOTAURE, the notorious surrealist magazine. This Dali piece, and its carvings in the thighs, anticipate similar mutilations to Elizabeth Short's body.

I suppose Beth Short first entered my consciousness through the 1975-TV movie, “Who Is The Black Dahlia?” It was pretty heady stuff for a kid from Ohio. Beth was played by Lucille Ball’s darkly fetching daughter, Lucie Arnaz. Efrem Zimbalist Jr., who I then knew mostly as Inspector Lewis Erskine on the old “F.B.I.” series, played the lead detective.

After that viewing, I’d seek out the occasional true crime account of the murder…maybe stumble across some reprint of Craig Rice’s musings on the killing and so forth. In a Walden’s bookstore, I stole a look at the grainy morgue photos in Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon.

It was James Ellroy, of course, who put her back on the pop culture map in the late 1980s with his corner-turning novel, The Black Dahlia.

Sometime after that I picked up John Gilmore’s Severed, a haunting but controversial “True Crime” account of Beth Short’s murder whose perceived veracity is not helped by a decided lack of sourcing or even basic footnoting.

I went on to interview Gilmore at some length in 2002. When I pressed him for documentation for many of his claims—when I pushed him to explain why he didn’t provide even the most basic of bibliographies—he said, “The books are an experience. The books are portraits of these bleeding sides of beef. That is what as a creative writer I was interested in doing. I’m not a historian in that sense. The reason I didn’t put dates and such in the book is that I want the reader to be thrust into the thing. I don’t want to take the reader by the hand and say, ‘Okay, now we’re going to learn about this crime.’ I want the reader exposed to the crime as it goes down. The reader becomes a part of it. When Dante goes down to Hell, he has a guide, but, remove the guide, and he is just thrust into Hell. I wrote them as literary pieces. I have a novelist’s mind. I chose in Severed not to put in dates because—and I am still convinced I am right—that the minute a reader sees a date, he logs it into his mind and moves on. That date shuts off your experience of what’s being told. It takes the reader out of the experience.”

Okay…

He may not have been saying it so many words, but I think the gist of Gilmore’s point was we prefer the story; we crave the myth, however dark and bloody.

I interviewed Ellroy a few times, too. Several times, we spoke of the Black Dahlia case and various theories pointing to suspects.

James Ellroy

As Beth Short’s most obsessive scribe, it seems appropriate to give The Demon Dog the last word on the subject of Beth Short and her legend on this 66^th anniversary year.

In a 2006 interview I conducted with Ellroy during his tour in support of the film adaptation of The Black Dahlia, we discussed the continuing fascination and fictionalizing of Beth Short’s horrific murder.

Ellroy concluded, “We’re trying to find a language for this horrible act—the murder of Betty Short. Imaginative people want to certify their language as authentic. I don’t. I gave you the most psychologically sound, pathologically valid, lunatic language that I was capable of in describing Betty Short’s death. And I have not the slightest idea who did it.”

Craig McDonald’s current novel is EL GAVILAN, published by Tyrus Books. The fifth novel in his Hector Lassiter series is coming soon.Toros & Torsos, the second Lassiter novel, is centered around Elizabeth Short's murder.

(This article originally appeared in slightly altered form in Crimespree Magazine.)

REMEMBERING DAVIS GRUBB & THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

I guess it was back about 1991 or so that I went through a brief but intense Davis Grubb period.

Grubb, a West Virginia author, made a splash with his debut novel, THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, a wicked tale about a homicidal preacher chasing a couple of kids down the Ohio River after murdering their mother in the early days of the Great Depression.

The novel earned good reviews, got a fair amount of attention, and swiftly inspired a classic film with Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish mounted by one-time-only director Charles Laughton. James Agee wrote the script that hews pretty closely to the original source material.

Back in the day, I made a kind of barnstorming run through Moundsville and some parts of Wheeling that still smacked of Grubb country, but it was a pretty informal and scattered pilgrimage.

In this month’s Crimespree (#49 should have hit store shelves or mailboxes sometime over the last few days, or soon will), I write of NIGHT OF THE HUNTER and, particularly, its murderous inspiration and author.

I wrote the article over the Thanksgiving holiday where we were staying in a mountain resort a short distance from Wheeling and more significantly, from Moundsville, Davis Grubb’s long-ago abandoned hometown.

(Grubb spent most of his adult life in New York. When, closer to the end of his life, a movie based on his book FOOL’S PARADE was filmed in Moundsville and its world premier held there, Grubb took a taxi all the way from NYC to Moundsville and back, racking up one of the world’s great cab fares.)

I decided to use my holiday proximity to spend a bit more time in Grubb country for a second time; to see some key places that shaped the author and to take a few pictures along the way (most of which do not accompany the Crimespree article).

NIGHT OF THE HUNTER was based on the real life lonely hearts murderer and so-called “Bluebeard” Harry Powers, a pretty twisted piece of work who racked up a string of aliases and an unknown number of victims. In the 1930s, Powers was hanged in the fearsome-looking Moundsville Penitentiary, which still looms a few blocks from the childhood home of Davis Grubb.

Powers is buried in a prison cemetery and figures prominently in the museum room of the no-longer in service state pen, which is open to the public for tours and whose walls in the old visitor's area are adorned with Davis Grubb memorabilia.

In the course of preparing my Crimespree article, I toured the prison and located Grubb’s old home. His family lost the place when Grubb was still a child. They say Mr. Grubb was so attached to the old homestead that he carried around a photo of the house for the rest of his life.

Grubb died in July 1980 in New York City.

A new independent film about Powers, and his inspiration of Davis Grubb’s most noted novel, is also now making the rounds on the Indy film circuit.

You can read more about that here, and even listen to a long-ago popular song about the murders that inspired NIGHT OF THE HUNTER here.

If you wish to order or subscribe to Crimespree, you can do so right here.

EL GAVILAN & READER'S CHOICE AWARDS

EL GAVILAN finished fourth in a field of 21 American titles over at the House of Crime and Mystery's 2012 Readers Choice Awards.

(The awards were divided into several geographic divisions; overall winner worldwide was Gillian Flynn and GONE GIRL).

In the U.S. section, EL GAVILAN trailed Flynn, Dennis Lehane (LIVE BY NIGHT), and Michael Connelly (THE DROP). Along with EL GAVILAN, Chris Holm's DEAD HARVEST rounded out the top five on the U.S side of competition.

Thank you to all the readers who took the time to vote (for EL GAVILAN or otherwise) and your continued support of authors everywhere.

EL GAVILAN also made several year's best lists this year, including a very nice appreciation at January Magazine, which can be found here.