A delicious dilemma

I'm currently reading the latest Barry Eisler novel, Livia Lone.  When I checked my mail today, I found waiting for me two books from the UK:  the new Jack Reacher novel, Night School, from Lee Child, and the newest entry in the Rivers of London series, The Hanging Tree, from Ben Aaronovitch.

This is the sort of delicious dilemma that every avid reader enjoys.  Which book do I read next?  Which one thus has to wait?

I love having that choice.

The real problem, of course, is that I have stacks and stacks of great book candidates, and never enough time to read them all.

That is just a bigger version of the same problem, and I feel lucky to have it.

Time to give Lee Child some money

If you're in the mood for fun entertainment you can't put down, plan to get a copy of Lee Child's new Jack Reacher novel, Night School, on November 7.

While you're planning your amusements, you might as well schedule a trip to the theater this weekend to see the new Reacher movie, Never Go Back.

Yes, I'm doing both.

You can thank me later.

Yes, Tom Cruise is way shorter than Jack Reacher

in the books, but I don't care:  I am excited about this upcoming second Reacher film.



Of course, I am more jazzed about Night School, the new Reacher novel from Lee Child.  You can bet I'll have a copy as soon as it appears on November 7.

If you don't know the Reacher novels and like compulsively readable novels, check them out.

Don't blame me if you're late for work the day after you start one.

Lee Child on creating suspense

If you don't know the Jack Reacher novels of Lee Child, you should.  Entertaining, fun, and always page-turning reads, these books keep you moving forward like no other.  Child has published seventeen of them so far, and the franchise still has plenty of legs.  Plus, the first movie based on one of his books, Jack Reacher, which comes from the novel, One Shot, debuts December 21.  (I'll comment later on whether the relatively short Tom Cruise manages to pull off the role of the 6'5" Reacher, but I certainly have my doubts.)  Child's writing has many strengths, but chief above them is how much they keep you reading. 

Kyle pointed me to this New York Times article from Child, in which he tackles the question of how to create suspense.  I won't attempt to summarize what he explains in relatively short order, but if you're at all interested in writing suspenseful books or understanding how they work, I recommend you check it out.

I am greatly interested in a secondary aspect of the article, which is that we so often ask the wrong question.  More on that in another post. 

Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher?

I'm a stone fan of Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels.  They're reliably fun and often more, their pacing is relentless, and Child is a very entertaining writer.  The books frequently have little to do with reality, but that's okay; he sells the departures well enough.  Reacher himself is a huge presence, both as a fictional character among mystery fans and in stature:  six-foot-five and anywhere from 220 to 240 pounds of muscle. 

Every single Reacher fan I know thus said (at best) "Huh?" when the news broke that Tom Cruise would star in the Jack Reacher film due this Christmas.  After all, Reacher is nearly a foot taller and vastly larger than Cruise.

At cons, I've heard Child defend the casting on the grounds that Cruise has the presence to carry it off.

Though I will, of course, go see the movie, I've been convinced Child was wrong.

This trailer, though, gave me some hope that the movie could be good.  (Thanks to Steve for pointing me to it.) 



Some hope.  I'm not convinced, but I am more hopeful now than I was before.   

On the road again: Bouchercon, San Francisco, day 4

If you know me at all well, you know that I am not a morning person. I don't like being awake before the hour hits double digits, and I relish every chance I get to sleep late. It should come as some surprise, therefore, that I set a wake-up call for eight, and mere minutes later was heading into the Ferry Building Farmers Market. What could lead me to such an act?

Cheese.

More specifically, the Acapella goat cheese from Andante Dairy. We encountered this cheese Wednesday night at Coi, where it soloed as the meal's cheese course. I would normally have popped into my mouth in one bite the entire tiny wedge they served, but when they told us it was from Andante, I instead took a sliver of the piece. That was a good choice. Acapella is, hands-down and by far, the best goat cheese I have ever tasted. Period. When we learned that it might be on sale by Andante at the farmer's market, but that they brought relatively little to market and closed as soon as that was gone, I knew Saturday would be an early rising day for me.

Of course, once there, I had to learn what cheeses traveled well--Acapella does not, alas--and then had to buy them all so that I could treat those at home to them. (Cheese tasting at my house Friday night!)

As I write this, my tummy is happily digesting half a small circle of Acapella and some fine, fresh-baked bread from the stall next to Andante. Each taste was as good as the first.

Andante is something of a celebrity dairy, if there can be such a thing, and its cheesemaker, Soyoung Scanlon, a bit of a food celebrity herself. She offers her cheese to few restaurants, Coi and The French Laundry among them, but if you ever get a chance to taste one of them, take the opportunity. I'm very glad I did.

Today's Bouchercon highlight was the interview with Lee Child, the author of the insanely popular Jack Reacher series. Child makes everything he does look effortless, but after producing over a dozen consecutive bestsellers (his first book among them), he clearly possesses great skill. Each time I listen to him talk, I learn something new; if you get a chance to attend an event where he is speaking, check it out.

On the road again: Bouchercon, Indianapolis, day 4

One of the mysteries of mystery conventions is why they schedule the way they do. At every Bouchercon I've attended, the hotel bar roars with activity until the hotel forces out the last writers and fans and locks the doors. Also at every one of these events, the panels kick off at 9:00 a.m.--and usually with the very best presentations of the day. Perhaps the fans doing the scheduling don't care about the writers, or maybe it's all a diabolical plot to get a famous author to break in the face of sleep deprivation and reveal some major secret; I can only speculate. In any case, one of today's best panels began at the ungodly hour of 9:00 a.m., so I got up early enough to shower and be in my chair just as the moderator grabbed the microphone.

The stated topic was must-read thrillers, but the real discussion point was the book of essays about one hundred must-read thrillers that the International Thriller Writers association will be putting out next summer. David Morrell acted as moderator, with ITW co-founder Gayle Lynds and Lee Child the other people I'd come to hear. As it turns out, Child's essay on Theseus and the Minotaur will kick off the book. At about age eleven, Child was reading the story of Theseus in Latin for school, then on his own time was reading Fleming's Doctor No. Child said he was struck that the plots were essentially the same and that later he came to see Theseus and the Minotaur as the first thriller story. The other panelists were fine, but this tidbit alone made the early awakening worthwhile.

We ate lunch with Karen, who picked us up at the hotel and took us to the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, which is, oddly enough, here in Indianapolis. We had time only to eat in the cafe there and tour the lovely grounds a bit, but it was a nice time and good to catch up with Karen. I had no clue that Indianapolis had canals, much less a canal walk.

The highlight of the afternoon was a panel on the rules of paranormal mysteries, which proved to be quite funny. As is usually the case, Charlaine Harris stole the show.

I'm happy to report that the three signed, first-edition hardcovers I donated to the charity auction prompted some bidding. When last I looked, five different folks had bid on them, which, given their SF covers, bordered on miraculous. I didn't get to see the winning bid, because when I wandered by the dealers' room in the late afternoon, the books were already gone, but I did see one bid of $60, so at least they went for more than the sum of their Amazon list prices.

Dinner was back at 14 West, both because we knew it would be reliably good (t was) and because it was across the street from the movie theater near the hotel. At said theater we watched Law Abiding Citizen, which I liked more than the vast majority of critics. Other than failing hard with the mechanism by which the cops learned about the protagonist's operational secrets, a narrative gadet that was as close to a true deus ex machina as I've seen in a while, the film ran its course as one might expect from the premise.

Ah, well, enough blather. A book beckons me, and write it, I must.

On the road again: Bouchercon, day 2

Though multiple folks have asked me for pictures of last night's extremely cool dinner and of some big-name writers here at the con, I'm way too tired to post the former and forgot to take any of the latter. I'll try to do better, I really will, but right now my fumes are looking for fumes to run on, so I'll keep this short.

I really like Bouchercons, because everyone I've ever met at one is an avid reader. Aside from the fact that they put great panels at obscene hours (8:30 a.m. here), and they mostly shut down early due to the graying demographic, the cons are just fun for readers. The dealers room is full of--gasp!--books, and people talk about books and reading and writing. I wish I could simply attend and not have to cram in ten to twelve hours of work a day, but so it goes; at least I get to some panels.

One dealer had both my novels, so I signed stock and chatted with her. I was tickled to see that three people (as of about 1:15 p.m. today) had bid on my contribution to the charity auction, and even more pleased to see that the most recent bidder was best-selling author Toni L.P. Kelner. I'd love to get her into my Wild Side anthology, and though I don't expect much chance of that, if I can find her at the con, I will try. More to the point of this mention, however, is the fact that it's always cool when other writers like your work, and if you also like theirs, that's all the better.

The panel highlight for me today was one in which Ace Atkins, William Kent Krueger, and Lee Child just stood around talking shop. I enjoyed hearing Atkins and Krueger, but for me the best parts came from Lee Child.

I've watched Child on multiple panels over the years, and each and every time he's struck me as a sensible, grounded, intelligent man who's also witty and, of course, a very talented writer. If you don't read his Reacher books, you should try one just to see a master of spare prose and rapid pacing in action. Child had many good lines today. Here are a few of the bits, which I must paraphrase because I was not taking notes.

Some years ago, a fan asked him to sign a novel and to put above his autograph his favorite line in the book. Child wrote, "$24.95".

Krueger asked Child what the down sides were of being rich and famous. Child said, "None that I can find."

Krueger talked about how hard writing was. Child commented that we needed to put it in perspective, that yes, we worked as writers, but really, we had it easy. Coal mining is hard. Writing is, by comparison, easy.

In response to a question about how writers must hate Hollywood ruining their books, Child pointed out that the movie and the books were separate things. "The books are still out there, in bookstores and libraries. It's not like Hollywood scours the Earth and destroys every copy."

Child has spoken in the past about how hard Reacher could be to cast. At one point, Tom Cruise's company had optioned a Reacher book. In response to people commenting on how much too small Cruise is for the part (Reacher is, if memory serves, about six foot five inches tall and 220 pounds or so--about the same size as my own Jon Moore), Child commented, "For what they would have paid had they made the movie, Katie Holmes could have played Reacher."

Like I said, a fun, sensible guy, someone I'd love to get to know better.

Now, back to my own work. Maybe in some distant future my sales will approach Child's. How cool would that be?

(My apologies to Lee Child if the quotes are wrong.)

Nothing To Lose

is the title of the new Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child, I have it, and I'm quite excited about reading it. It came out in the UK a bit ago but arrived here just yesterday; I pre-ordered it but wasn't willing to pay for rush shipping from the UK.

If you don't know Child's work, do yourself a favor and check it out. Great pacing, snappy dialog, a hero who's larger than life and wins your heart, and a different setting in every book.

For now, though, reading must wait, because I have a novel of my own to write.