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But where will it end?
Japanese detective story author Edogawa Rampo was
known, for among other things, his signature glasses. He died in 1965. Yohei
Kusanagi, a young Tokyo designer has come up with a replica of Rampos glasses
as a way to encourage young people to read. One hundred copies of the replica
are offered for sale. The price: Yen 84,000 or roughly US$735.
That
would buy a lot of books. It makes me wonder if young Japanese potential readers
have that kind of cash for a replica of Rampos glasses. ...
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Posted: 10/24/2007 2:58:22 AM |
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Sunday night I lost a long time friend. He died of a heart attack. I just saw
Max last Thursday at lunchtime. Hed lost a lot of weight and said he wasnt
feeling well. I said, Max, take care of yourself. And Max smiled, shook his
head and pushed out the door. He was one of those people with a morbid fear of
doctors and hospitals. Friends offered to take him for a check up. Max just
refused to go past the hospital door.
It is likely you never heard of Max Voigt. Max was an American
lawyer who had lived in Asia for more than half of his life. When I first came
to Bangkok in the late 1980s, Max was head of Corporate Department of a leading
law firm in the City. By chance I saw walking on my soi and struck up a
conversation. A couple of days later, Max sent me my first freelance case. One
case led to another until I had a steady stream of work for the first crucial
years I lived in Thailand. Without Maxs friendship, the work wouldnt have come
my way, and without the work, I never would have had the time or opportunity to
write novels. I owed Max Voigt a great deal. ...
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Posted: 10/22/2007 4:50:37 AM |
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 I finished going through editorial changes to the 5th novel
in the Vincent Calvino series: The Big Weird. BookSiam originally
published The Big Weird in 1996. It was reprinted by Heaven Lake Press in
200. And sadly it had gone out of print. Before Christmas, though, it will be
back in print as in mass paperback edition.
Rereading and editing a
novel that I wrote a dozen years ago is not unlike opening a high school
yearbook and looking at a picture of yourself from the distant past. Ive
written another 10 novels since The Big Weird first appeared. I have
spent a lot more years with Vinny Calvino and Colonel Pratt so that when I go to
an earlier book, the temptation is strong to do a major overall. You just know
so much more. Like all Monday morning quarterbacks, you can see the plays that
could have been made and were botched. Much the same happens to a writer going
back over a book from 12 years earlier. ...
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Posted: 10/12/2007 6:38:04 AM |
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Monks were shot and killed in Rangoon. Crackdown troops have been called into
the capital from the provinces. As the Blues song says, Youve only got your
life to lose.
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Cynthia Ozicks The
Din in the Head discussed in the Joseph Epstein article should spark some
cultural soul searching in other countries. While the Americans worry about the
advance of technological proxies to increase exposure to the crowd, in Asia the
crowd has played a much a different role. The issue isnt technology. The issue
is the cultural constraints on people wishing to withdraw to innerness, to
separate themselves from the crowd. Meditation springs to mind where such a
withdrawal has broad cultural support....
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Posted: 9/21/2007 5:48:24 AM |
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Joseph Epstein is one of Americas foremost social and literary critics. The
rare breed of thinker who draws lessons from the intersection where technology
and literature collide. In his article The Literary Life at 23 Epstein writes:
A good heart
remains the first requisite for a great novelist. *** So many young novelists
appear to be up against the same problem, settling for composing books that go
in for verbal feats and imaginative flights over gripping moral dramas: I have
in mind the novels of Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace, Gary Shtayngart,
Jeffrey Eugenides, among others. Belief goes to the heart of the problem: if you
dont know what you believe in, you cannot construct moral dramas, which leaves
you with making jokes through elaborate literary constructs to make the sham
point about reality not quite existing, or that life is really no more than a
dream, sha-boom, sha-boom....
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Posted: 9/21/2007 12:31:48 AM |
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One question that comes up in publishing fiction is how to get someone in a
bookstore to pickup and buy a book by an unknown author. We have all picked up a
book where we didnt know the author. What makes a reader take the chance on
such a book? Part of the decision is connected with validation. If a friend or a
member of our family has read a book and recommended it, that might be enough to
tip the scales. And often it is. Or if weve read an appealing review of a book
by a critic we trust, then we would often buy it.
Where there is no
worth of mouth from friends or family, and no review, but you are attracted to
the title, the subject and the cover, what can help you make up your mind? A
recent article in the Denver Post says it is the blurb on the back of the novel you
are holding. And bookstore employees are also readers, how do they view blurbs?...
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Posted: 9/19/2007 10:18:55 PM |
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The best fiction is often the result of character development that creates an
arc of intellect and emotion, finely tuned, elaborately structured, and with
broad spectrum or range. Such characters bore deep into our own consciousness as
if in the story telling, the author has found a way to channel our own thoughts.
The advances in psychology and cognition research continues to reveal
more about the way our emotions and intellect are networked. A recent article in
The Edge worth reading on the subject is by Jonathan Haidt and titled: MORAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION
Heres an excerpt:
The basic idea is that we did not evolve
language and reasoning because they helped us to find truth; we evolved these
skills because they were useful to their bearers, and among their greatest
benefits were reputation management and manipulation. ...
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Posted: 9/19/2007 4:25:25 AM |
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 Manchester based novelist Michael
Walters has written two crime novels set in Mongolia. Walters is a
management consultant by trade. I would expect he would have an interesting
angle on business deals in Mongolia. The English editions are available on
amazon.co.uk, and the American edition of the first book will be released by
Berkly Books in 2008. Meanwhile English edition of The Shadow Walker released in
May 2007 by Quercus is available on amazon.com.
 The
Shadow Walker, a British geologist turns up in a Mongolia minus his head.
The hero is a police officer named Negrui. And the first two books have drawn
praise for the description of Mongolia, the culture, the people, and the legal
system. Negrui partners with an English police inspector and they track the bad
guys through the Gobi desert. ...
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Posted: 9/18/2007 4:25:27 AM |
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Yesterday a MD-82 twin-engine departing from Bangkok crashed as it attempted to
land at Phuket airport. Reports here list 88 known dead about around 42
passengers survived the crash. Among the dead 50 were foreigners. The flight was
on One Two Go flight OG 269. There had been heavy rain and gusting winds at the
time of the crash.
Last night all the local stations along with CNN
carried footage of the crash. The plane split in part on impact. Some passengers
were thrown out of the crashed plane; most died for fire or suffocation inside.
The plane caught fire after the impact. Apparently there wasnt much time until
the entire plane was consumed in flames. Reports indicate that many passengers
had been knocked unconscious by the force of the impact and still had their
seatbelts on when the flames incinerated the aircraft....
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Posted: 9/16/2007 11:13:23 PM |
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Authors of crime fiction often draw from real events to interject the feel of
reality into their novels. Sometimes, though, reality becomes stranger than
fiction, and the author may using facts that spoil the fictional world. For
example, take a long trial before a jury and the judge nods off. No doubt this
has happened on more than one occasion. But what if the judge has a condition
that predisposes him to suddenly slip into a coma like sleep?
There is a
court decision on this precise point that deserves wider circulation. In this
case a judge who presided (when he was a awake) over a criminal case where the
defendants were accused of drug offense. The judge fell asleep during the trial.
Not once, but many times. The two defendants were found guilty by a jury, and
they appealed on the not wholly unreasonable argument that the judge should have
been awake during their trial....
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Posted: 9/9/2007 11:44:41 PM |
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 Peter Temple has been on a hot streak. His last novel The
Broken Shore won a CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger.
In a recent interview by Bob Cornwell, he goes into the nuts and bolts of
writing crime fiction. Heres a taste from the pot of porridge he offers up: ...
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Posted: 8/29/2007 11:09:33 PM |
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Thomas Fuller had a good article titled Thais ask: Whats in a Nickname where he reports on the
trend for parents to resort to the use English words as a substitute for the
traditional Thai nickname. Instead of Dam (Black), Fon (Rain) or Meaw (Cat), the
new generation goes by names such as Money, Bank, Seven.
A school
teacher told Fuller about the confusion when more than one kid is nicknamed
Bank. He solved the problem in a creative way: In one classroom there were
three children nicknamed "Bank." To tell them apart, fellow pupils had renamed
the children "Big Bank," "Medium Bank" and "Small Bank." ...
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Posted: 8/26/2007 10:41:00 PM |
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 While a number of authors fly by the seat of
their pants when setting their books in Southeast Asia, one writer who lives in
Thailand and knows the region and gets the details right is Colin
Cotterill.
His latest novel set in Laos is ANARCHY
AND OLD DOGS and has received a rave review by Janet Maslin in The New York Times. ...
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Posted: 8/24/2007 6:08:03 AM |
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In the beginning was the Word. Crime fiction, in its current trajectory, owes
much to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross MacDonald to name the obvious
trinity that many current crime fiction writers light a candle in homage. Of
course the lineage is longer and deeper, including Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar
Allen Poe.
The BBC has picked up on the popularity of crime fiction with
the story: The Genre that just wont die The cozy novels of Agatha
Christie continue to sell. ...
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Posted: 8/24/2007 1:41:00 AM |
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 Ever so often a professional writer will open
the blinds on the creative process and unveils what lies behind the writing of a
book. Peter Straubs wonderful new book Sides has several essays which uncloak the mystery of the writing
process. Straub has won multiple awards for his fiction that includes horror,
science fiction, fantasy, and mainstream fiction. ...
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Posted: 8/15/2007 4:46:12 AM |
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Price of most things is related to their scarcity. As most of the English
editions of my books have been published by Heaven Lake Press in Thailand and
are not widely available outside of the Kingdom, it isnt unexpected to find the
relative scarcity reflected in price. When you buy a second hand edition,
though, make certain you know what you are buying. Most of my novels have gone
through many editions. For example, A
Killing Smile has gone through 8 different print runs. Only the original
White Lotus edition 1992 is a first edition. If you pay for a first edition and
it is a later edition, youve overpaid. I have yet to see a special edition of
A Killing Smile or Gambling on Magic on offer. The main point: if you are buying
a second hand copy make certain you understand that price is correlated to
whether the book is a first edition or a later printing....
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Posted: 8/9/2007 12:22:01 AM |
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 The Altantic Monthly hardback edition of The
Risk of Infidelity Index is scheduled for release in the United States and
England on 21 December 2007. You can pre-order your copy from amazon. If you are in England, you can pre-order from amazon.uk.
RISK will retail in bookstores for $22.00. The
Amazon.com price is $14.96 -- a 32% discount, and less expensive than the trade
paperback edition in Thailand. The UK price is £9.66. This is one of the many
advantages of having a large print run by a major publisher.
What is
important for any author is the support of his publisher. Grove/Atlantic have
made The Risk of Infidelity Index their lead title in the Winter 2008
catalogue. No writer could ask for a better show of faith in a book. For an
author to have the full backing from a major publisher means a huge amount of
effort will go into the promotion and distribution of the book....
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Posted: 8/9/2007 12:06:35 AM |
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 The Thai version of Pattaya
24/7 is available in bookstores throughout Thailand. Though I suspect
you will have to find it at a Thai language bookstore. I doubt whether the
English language bookstores in Thailand will have it on sale.
The Thai
edition of Pattaya 24/7 is on sale for Baht 200. Below is the cover
art. Lots of bullet holes, lots of leg; all the elements required to catch the
eye. The neon signs advertising entertainment establishments in Pattaya should
also attract attention. ...
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Posted: 8/6/2007 3:52:40 AM |
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Kevin Burton Smiths 100 Eyes of the Mystery Scene Era has been published in
the 100th issue of Mystery Scene Magazine. Vincent Calvino is listed under
#9.
9 VINCENT CALVINO (Christopher G. Moore)
A transplanted New York
shamus is our man in Bangkok,
doing the ex-pat shuffle. This is the world
calling.
Kevin observes that the list is in alphabetical order as any
other sort of order would surely led to madness. ...
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Posted: 8/2/2007 12:15:17 AM |
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