Ian Rankin: Great Scot!
Ian Rankin didn't set out to be a mystery writer. "I was never a great fan of crime novels and didn't read them when I was younger," he explains. "Only after my first novel was published in 1986 did I say, 'My God, I've become a crime novelist by accident.' "
The Scottish author of Resurrection Men (Little, Brown, Feb. 2003) reports that he then spent a year immersed in the work of such masters of the genre as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ruth Rendell and Lawrence Block. He's clearly a quick study, as today he is the bestselling crime writer in the U.K.
Despite that popularity at home and his formidable output—Resurrection Men is the 13th entry in the Inspector Rebus series and Rankin's 21st book overall—Rankin remains relatively undiscovered in the U.S. Here a mixed group of publishers has picked up his previous books, which meant they did not appear in their original order of publication. Now Little, Brown has signed him to a three-book contract and plans to stick by him. "Most mysteries take time and the right build-up to hit critical mass," says senior editor Reagan Arthur. "We've made a pretty serious investment and we definitely see him as someone we want to have for a long time."
Part of Little, Brown's strategy is to improve Rankin's visibility through sheer physical presence: he attended BEA this year and will be back stateside for Bouchercon in Las Vegas in October 2003, where he'll be the international guest of honor, as well as for an eight-city tour to coincide with the publication of Resurrection Men, which will have a 25,000-copy first printing.
The Scotland native—he counts himself "the second best known writer in Edinburgh" after J.K. Rowling—finds touring conducive to more than just encouraging sales. "Face-to-face readers tell you what they like and what they don't like, and you get things that help you with the next book. The story behind Resurrection Men came from a cop in Edinburgh who asked me, 'How come Rebus never talks about training college?' " As a result, in this outing the inspector returns for re-training after getting kicked off the force.
There's an even more unusual form of external influence on Rankin's books: he auctions off the naming rights to five or six characters in each. The rights sell for the equivalent of about $8,000, with the money funneled to various charities. "My younger son, Kit, has special needs, so the money goes for kids with visual impairment, epilepsy and motor skill problems," Rankin explains. Buyers have ranged from a man who paid for a gangster's bodyguard to bear his autistic 12-year-old nephew's name (Rankin phoned to ask whether he wanted to be "a good guy or a bad guy"), to a real-life Edinburgh police officer who wished to be included among his fictional peers. Not all the characters are human, either. Recounts Rankin, "A woman has just paid for me to put her cat in a book and wrote a very long e-mail describing the cat's personality."
Great Expectations: Arthur firmly believes that Rankin's U.K. success can be replicated on this side of the pond. "Ian is just too good for Americans not to catch on," she says. "Eventually we always come around to the wisdom of the rest of the world."
Lauren Henderson: Bawdy Brit Babe
"You can get away with anything in America if you're British," quips Lauren Henderson. "You can be so much bawdier. If I were an American author, a publisher might well have edited Sam into good behavior." Not Three Rivers Press, evidently. "We would never ask Lauren to tone Sam down," says Kristin Kiser, Crown executive editor. "We love Sam for her bawdiness."
A founding member of the "tart noir" genre of crime fiction, Henderson credits two classic comic-book characters as seminal influences on her brash, sexy heroine Sam Jones: '60s pop icon Modesty Blaise and punkster chick Tank Girl, who lives in the post-apocalyptic Australian desert with her tank and her kangaroo boyfriend. While Henderson is indeed serious in her homage to these cartoon heroines, it should also be noted that she read English literature at Cambridge University.
In the early '90s, Henderson gave up a job as a London journalist and moved to a small village in Italy to try her hand at writing fiction. To support herself, she waitressed in a restaurant owned by "an Australian woman who brought Pacific Rim cuisine to Tuscany. All the girls were required to wear very short skirts and the waiters wore extremely tight trousers. She's now running a billiard hall in Panama." Henderson pauses. "I have the feeling," she continues, "that it may really be a brothel."
Life in Tuscany, Henderson recalls, was "jolly quiet in the winter. You either worked or you ate the contents of the fridge and then you weren't able to get out the door in the spring." Henderson fell into a writing schedule that she still follows today, a concentrated period of work followed by an extended period of enjoying life to its fullest. By 1996, she had finished her first manuscript, Dead White Female. As she tells it, her old university boyfriend's best friend's girlfriend (they were all at Cambridge together) had become an editor at Hodder & Stoughton. Girlfriend loves book; girlfriend buys book. "It was a mixed blessing, says Henderson. "I sold it without an agent—something I advise writers never to do—but with your first book, you're so grateful someone wants to publish it that you're thrilled if they offer you two p."
With the success of the series, it's no surprise that film producers are in hot pursuit of Ms. Jones. The BBC, reports Henderson, had optioned the rights to move Sam into film, but she was outraged when she saw what was planned. "They wanted to turn her into an angry early generation feminist. Thankfully, they didn't renew the option and Sam and Black Rubber Dress are now being developed by Moxie, a great company in L.A. run by two women."
As with her five previous Sam Jones books, Henderson will be doing a full schedule of book signings and readings, some of which will again feature fellow "tart noir" authors Stella Duffy, Vicki Hendricks, Chris Niles and Laura Lippman (see interview, p 42). The women often come together for signings, each reading from their novels. "I do comic passages and lots of dialogue," says Henderson, "so it's good to have different voices reading." In New York, the voices will once again include Henderson's friend, actor Todd Butera, who "does every conceivable English accent. Todd even has his own reading groupies now, so this time," muses Henderson, "I'm thinking of dressing him in a Speedo with spangles."
Great Expectations: "Sam Jones fans are going to love Pretty Boy," says Kiser. "It's vintage Lauren—wickedly funny, sexy as hell, and always entertaining. And in the unlikely event that readers aren't familiar with Sam, Pretty Boy will entertain them with its irreverent sense of humor, suspenseful story and one bloody good ending."
Tim Cockey: The Hearse Whisperer?
Is there something in the Baltimore air that breeds irreverent humor? Native son John Waters gleefully explored the city's dark side in such camp film fare as Pink Flamingos and Hairspray. Now comes Tim Cockey, whose Baltimore-set comic mystery novels feature Hitchcock Sewell, a wisecracking undertaker—to be seen next in Murder in the Hearse Degree (Hyperion, Feb. 2003).
What is it about Baltimore? "I used to frequent a restaurant that was also frequented by John Waters," explains Cockey, born in Baltimore and now a New Yorker. He conjectures that "the extra spicy Crab Imperial" infected them both with wise-acre-itis. "In my case," Cockey continues, "I plumb forgot to be the class clown when I was growing up and now I seem hell-bent on making up for it."
Cockey has no professional experience with funeral homes, he says, but came upon his undertaking protagonist through a favorite writing trick. "When searching for characters and relationships to kick-start a story, I'd sometimes imagine a funeral—who was being buried, who was attending, that sort of thing. With the tensions that can swirl around these awkward gatherings, it was always easy to locate characters and conflict. When I sat down to start the first book in the series, I employed that writing trick, then saw the undertaker standing off to the side snickering. Hitch was born."
When his first novel, Zen Bastard, went unpublished, Cockey transformed it into a screenplay, which became a semi-finalist for the Sundance Institute's screenwriters workshop. "I met with folks from Sundance and worked feverishly on my Oscar speech. When I failed to make the cut, I flew to Arizona and stared at the Grand Canyon for a few days. Nothing's better for shifting one's perspective."
Literary influences have included "early John Barth, early Robertson Davies, early Kingsley Amis, any-era Anne Tyler, a healthy sprinkling of Larry McMurtry and, as time moved along, Richard Russo." Michael Malone's Time's Witness remains one of his favorite books. "During a period of house-hopping years ago—some might call this 'homeless'—I made a point of leaving a copy behind. Each and every person invited me back."
Cockey's three previous Hearse books have been top 10 BookSense picks, partly because he's made a special effort to connect with independent booksellers. He's even been known to show up at a bookstore in (what else?) a hearse. "Mystery writers have a luxury that many other writers don't have: independent mystery bookstores," Cockey says. "I can't begin to say how important it has been for me and other crime writers to have this network of mystery bookstores hand-selling our books."
According to Cockey, "hearse" is likely to stay in his titles for the foreseeable future. "After the name-the-book contest a few years ago, I've got about a hundred hearse titles lying around waiting for books."
Beyond that, Cockey says he'd like to try screenwriting again. "There's been talk of movie and TV adaptations of my books, but so far the talk hasn't been loud enough and the conversations haven't lasted long enough. I really enjoyed writing screenplays and bet it would even be more fun if I was paid to do it. And you know," he adds, "I still have that Oscar speech lying around here somewhere."
Great Expectations: "We are delighted to see Tim following in the footsteps of Janet Evanovich (who writes mysteries with humor)," says his editor, Peternelle van Arsdale. "There's a lot Tim can do in the mystery category, and he's just getting started."
Philip Davison: A Bit of Irish Luck
With a nibble from U.S. film companies and a two-hour TV pilot of his first Harry Fielding novel, The Crooked Man (Penguin, July), set to air in the U.K. later this winter, 45-year-old Irish writer Philip Davison seems poised to come into his own. Fortunately, he remarks, "a writer is never too old to be a rising star. I suppose that's one of the advantages writers have; they come into it later than sports stars."
However, Davison observes, "it can be quite difficult for writers to get the ear of American publishers." A film editor by trade, Davison published three novels in Ireland starting at the age of 21 and wrote several plays, including one that was performed at Dublin's Abbey Theatre, before his writing career took off in the U.K. with the publication of The Crooked Man. What made all the difference in launching Davison's career in the U.S. was a bit of Irish luck, in the form of fellow Dubliner Roddy Doyle. "Roddy is one of my authors," explains Davison's American editor, Caroline White, senior editor at Viking Penguin. "I was visiting Roddy in Dublin and we were bookstore-hopping. I asked him what's good, and he recommended The Crooked Man."
White was so taken with the main character that she offered Davison a contract for all three Harry Fielding novels. The second book, McKenzie's Friend, will come out in the U.S. from Penguin in March 2003; it has already been published to kudos abroad. A third, The Long Suit, is due out in the U.K. in February. The books appealed to White more for their literary quality than as examples of thrillers. And she is publishing them under a new paperback original fiction program at Penguin, not as mysteries. "There's not really a classic mystery to be solved," says White. "Harry Fielding is not a private eye with a great sex life. He has a depressing sex life and a father who's widowed, and it gives him real humanity."
Penguin is working hard to build Davison's American audience. When The Crooked Man came out last summer, they brought him over for a five-city tour that included literary venues as well as mystery bookstores. "We did a big BookSense mailing and the bookstores have really gotten behind it, especially the mystery bookstores," says White. "They love Philip and they love the character." Although some might see Harry Fielding's life as an understrapper for MI5 ("a contract worker without a contract") as bleak, Davison disagrees. "Harry Fielding is very far from a dark character," he says. "To me, these are stories of moral dilemma in a shadow world. Harry Fielding has a code, but he allows himself to be manipulated for a greater good, which is often ill defined."
As for what's next, Davison doesn't rule out a fourth or fifth Harry Fielding novel. "It was not my intention to write a trilogy, but there was a strong sense of unfinished business. Rather than more episodes, I wrote more character development. At the moment, there's a silence, but I could get a postcard from an obscure place."
Great Expectations: "Philip's a terrific writer, and he's only getting better with each book," says White. "He's funny like Graham Greene is funny, with a bitter humor. My favorite review quote is 'a cross between Graham Greene and Henry Green.' "
James Siegel: Making Infidelity Pay
Call him the author next door.
A couple of years ago, Mysterious Press editor-in-chief Sara Ann Freed got a phone call out of the blue from someone named James Siegel. "He said he worked across the street at the advertising agency BBDO," she recalls. "He said that he really liked Donald Westlake, whom we've published, and would I read his manuscript. I said, 'Well, we don't really read unsolicited manuscripts,' but I'm a bit of a patsy, so I read it."
The book was Epitaph, a mystery featuring a 75-year-old retired detective, which Freed went on to publish and which was eventually nominated for a Shamus Award for Best First Novel.
Freed says she and Siegel's agent, Richard Pine, pushed Siegel to write "a bigger thriller" for his second book, and he delivered with Derailed, due out from Warner in February. "This book is more of a page-turner than the first one I wrote," says Siegel. "I had to learn more about keeping the narrative moving."
The new book, the story of an ordinary Manhattan executive whose fling with a seductive fellow commuter leads to nightmarish consequences, is creating a lot of in-house excitement. "With Derailed Jimmy is taking us on the ride of our lives," says AOL Time Warner Book Group chairman and CEO Laurence Kirshbaum, whom Siegel calls "a tremendous fan and cheerleader."
Not that he minds the fuss. An executive creative director who has created commercials for accounts as diverse as Charles Schwab, Doritos and Pepsi Twist (his post-September 11 Visa spot was nominated for an Emmy, and he has also filmed President Bush in the Oval Office for a USA Freedom Corps campaign), Siegel says writing gives him "an enormous amount of pleasure."
Though he wrote a couple of books in his 20s and had an agent, "nothing got published. Then I concentrated on my advertising career, got married and began to raise two kids. I'd left no time for writing fiction, but when I hit 40 I started to write again." As for what drew him to the mystery genre, Siegel says he's always loved writers like Graham Greene and John le Carré, as well as Alfred Hitchcock movies.
"What's interesting about this second book," he says, "and I think perhaps one of the reasons people have responded to it so strongly thus far, is that it's about an ordinary man caught in extraordinary circumstances. In fact, when I think back, so much of what Hitchcock did had to do with that, as did a lot of what Graham Greene did. I think there's something enormously compelling in that scenario, as it's extremely easy to put yourself in someone else's shoes."
And in what may well be a publishing first, Siegel not only wrote the book, he also created the TV commercial that will promote it. "Since that's my business, and since I said I'd seen commercials in the past that I thought I could improve on, they gave me some funding and said go ahead." The result, which is slated to run in seven urban markets in January, "is going to be talked about," says Freed. "If you look at most book commercials, here's a picture of the author, here's a picture of the new book, buy it, get it and that's it. This is not the same old book jacket/head shot spiel. This is like a little movie. It's very hot. We actually had to turn down the first version, as it was a little too sexy."
Siegel chuckles at this. "I pushed the envelope a bit," he concedes. "But I had fun making it."
Great Expectations: "Once you start this book, you cannot stop, and the ending will blow you away—I promise," says Kirshbaum. "This one is going to put Jimmy on the map," agrees Freed, who notes that Warner recently signed the author for a major two-book deal. The publisher is also backing its enthusiasm for Derailed with a 125,000-copy first printing and a $500,000 marketing campaign that includes Siegel's TV spot. Clearly, in Freed's words, "He's someone to be taken seriously."
Jim Fusilli: Addressing: September 11
Despite the fact that his first novel, Closing Time, was hailed as one of the best mysteries of 2001, Jim Fusilli doesn't consider himself a mystery writer per se—he's concerned with more than suspense and riddle. "I think of myself as a writer who writes mysteries," explains Fusilli, whose sequel, A Well-Known Secret, will be published by Putnam next month. "For me, the characters and sense of reality are just as important."
He started the series, he says, with three goals: to create a detective story that took place in New York; to have characters whose actions were motivated by their rich histories and backgrounds; and to leave room for social commentary. After years of false starts, Fusilli says it took him eight years to write Closing Time, but just two for the sequel.
Fusilli, who's also a music critic for The Wall Street Journal, centers the series on two complex characters. Terry Orr is a troubled father and reluctant private investigator who lost his wife and son in a subway accident. He's having considerable difficulty recovering from the loss and becomes obsessed with finding the person responsible for their deaths. His precocious daughter, Bella, is also dealing with the tragedy as well as her father's guilt.
Since the series is set in New York City, Fusilli felt compelled to address the events of September 11 in the new book. The author, who grew up in Hoboken, N.J., says that though A Well-Known Secret was completed prior to that date, he thought some rewriting was needed. "Since the books take place in real time in a real New York and are supposed to reflect the city's attitude and ambience, Terry and Bella had to be recovering from the attacks," says Fusilli. "They live near the site of the World Trade Center and have been impacted in a psychological and visceral way." Writing about the reactions of Terry and Bella helped to enrich their characters, Fusilli adds. "I knew that even somebody as self-absorbed as Terry would realize that his obsession is dwarfed by all the death around him."
According to Christine Pepe, Fusilli's editor, "We talked about the rewriting. We decided to try and incorporate it without being heavy-handed and Jim did it just right, in a way that's very appropriate." Revisions were apparently no problem for the author, who Pepe says "writes so well and so fast. I've never had trouble keeping up with writers until Jim. The fact that he was already a writer, as a music critic, is great, because he comes with all the professionalism needed."
Fusilli is contracted with Putnam for four more books, but has notes on what will occur all the way through the ninth. He believes that this complex series requires that kind of forward thinking and attention to detail. "There has to be a lot of foreshadowing," says Fusilli. "I know a lot of things about Terry that haven't been revealed explicitly." Pepe says she doesn't know all that Fusilli has in store for his readers and that's fine with her. "I'm reluctant to know too much because I want to enjoy the reading experiences as they come."
Great Expectations: In Pepe's words, "If I had to tell people why I think Jim Fusilli is so great, I'd have to say it's because he's wrapped a crime novel inside a multi-layered love story—the complicated love Terry Orr has for his dead wife, the desperate love he has for his daughter, and the absolute love of place, New York City. That love is painful and joyous and mysterious, and that's what makes us want to read more, because families are the greatest mysteries of all. My hope is that more and more fans will want to become a part of this family with every book. Once you start, you'll never turn your back on them."
Michael McGarrity: Knowing the Beat
When Michael McGarrity began his Kevin Kerney mystery series in 1996, he was able to draw on a somewhat unusual, double-barreled background—in psychotherapy and law enforcement. The crime writer has also taught courses in psychology and counseling at several colleges and universities and, as a trained psychotherapist, specialized in treating high-risk children and adults. As McGarrity puts it, "Because of my own experience in law enforcement as an investigator, deputy sheriff and trainer at the New Mexico Law Enforcement Academy, I wasn't happy with the idea of a protagonist who worked outside the color of law. I wanted my protagonist to be an official, real cop, not the private eye, not the gumshoe."
McGarrity also felt it was important to "swim against the tide" by creating a hero without a lot of emotional baggage. "I wanted to portray somebody who was a well-put-together individual with a sense of right and wrong, who practiced his profession proudly and ethically—most of the time. I think I hit a chord among readers of crime fiction who may feel the same way I do about the walking wounded protagonist. That was something that I did intuitively based on my own needs to create a character who was fully human and not the guy who is always the loose cannon or struggling with some traumatic backstory."
Having a lot of law enforcement officers as fans means a great deal to the author. "Police officers come to signings and say, 'You get it right. You write about what really happens and what cops really do.' That's high praise. I love hearing that, and I hear it from prosecutors and retired judges that I know, along with U.S. attorneys and FBI agents."
To broaden his audience, McGarrity attends a lot of free library events because he thinks it's a great way to reach two major book-buying audiences: the general public and librarians. "If you look at the fact that there are thousands of libraries in the country—wouldn't it be great if every one of them bought a copy of Michael McGarrity's latest hardback, or two or three or four? That would automatically put you way ahead of the game."
At Dutton, which has published the last three Kevin Kerney titles—the most recent, The Big Gamble, was out in July—senior editor Brian Tart believes his author is on the verge of becoming a major bestseller. "The criteria that we look at are: is he writing a better book each time? In Michael's case, yes. Does he get uniformly great reviews? Yes again. I've read the first half of his next book and it's extraordinary, so this is really the one to take the leap on."
Great Expectations: One of Dutton's strategies is to give McGarrity's next book (as yet untitled) a September 2003 pub date so that galleys will be ready for the fall sales conference. Says Tart, "We really want people to have a chance to read this to get word of mouth going. People are also interested in seeing him and hearing him talk, and he's very good at it. That's part of the plan, too, to break him out a bit more with more publicity and get him out there. We want Michael to be a national best seller within two books. He's already hit several regional lists, but I want to see him on PW's and The New York Times."
Laura Lippman: Keeping It Difficult
To every city its own sleuth. Laura Lippman's Tess Monaghan, print reporter turned private investigator, has become the toast of Baltimore. She broke onto the local crime scene in Lippman's first book, Baltimore Blues (1997), an Avon mass market paperback. Seven titles later, in the Morrow hardcover, The Last Place (Oct.), she is still hard at it, criss-crossing the state of Maryland in search of a serial killer.
For her lively heroine, Lippman, 43, a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, has picked up almost all of the major mystery awards: the Edgar (Charm City and In Big Trouble), the Shamus (Charm City), the Agatha (Butcher's Hill) and the Nero Wolfe (The Sugar House). Though none of the books has yet made a national bestseller list, The Last Place is a BookSense 76 pick, and Lippman has been treated well by the media, with a feature on CBS's Sunday This Morning and a guest spot and a forthcoming appearance on NPR. She was recently awarded the City of Baltimore mayor's award for literary excellence, in appreciation of her depiction of and dedication to the city.
"It's the way publishing should go," says Morrow executive editor Carrie Feron, who has groomed Lippman from the first book, leading her into the lead position in Avon's mass market mystery program and then into hardcover when sales began to surge.
"When I first read Laura, I had an incredible sense of who, what, when, where and why," Feron says. "Her skills have only strengthened over the years. She is so dedicated and such a hard worker, and in every book she does something different."
The "something different" is no accident. Lippman credits Feron with pushing her along at every step, a good fit with her own attitude of artistic daring. "I don't think writers should feel safe," Lippman explains. "I like things that are chaotic, messy, frightening." Feeling a little too settled with Tess, Lippman put her aside for a short while. Her next book is a standalone tentatively titled Missing Children, about a pair of 11-year-old girls who kill a baby. "The idea of the book doesn't sound very good, and I haven't yet found a way of talking about it," Lippman says. "Longtime fans shake their heads in dismay. But it's not gruesome, and not about the act itself. It's about adults not thinking about what children do."
Lippman became a reporter in order to get paid for doing what she loved doing, but fiction was her goal from the beginning. Until last year, when she left the Sun, she squeezed the novel-writing into her spare time. "I can do a semi-good job on the first draft because of my journalism skills. The challenge is to not settle for a B or B-, to go back and back again and have it be really good."
Tess will return to print in the next book after the standalone. "I missed Tess," Lippman says. "I have a rich life but I spend most of my time with her. I was so happy when she popped into my head the other day. I know her next story but I wanted to wait a year. Again, I want it to be difficult each time. Otherwise it's the death of me."
Great Expectations:The Last Place has shipped 65% more copies than the previous title, In a Strange City, and went back to press once before publication. "It's incredibly exciting," says Feron. "People are constantly discovering her. Our expectation is that within the next few books she'll be a major bestseller. The writing is there and stories are commercial." Furthermore, Feron says, Lippman's complex plots rest solidly on convincing motivation and human nature. "She understands what goes on in people's heads."
Steve Hamilton: Paradise Gained
Winning the University of Michigan's prestigious Hopwood Award for fiction as a college student was clearly a harbinger for Steve Hamilton. In 1998, his first novel, A Cold Day in Paradise, won the Private Eye Writers of America/St. Martin's Press Award for Best First Mystery by an Unpublished Writer, and also landed him a veteran editor—Ruth Cavin, associate publisher at St. Martin's/Thomas Dunne imprint. When published, the book won both the Shamus and Edgar Awards for Best First Mystery, making Hamilton the only writer to hold that distinction.
Despite these honors, writing did not come easily to the Michigan native, who was born and raised in the Detroit area and spent summers in the state's Upper Peninsula. After winning the Hopwood Award, Hamilton assumed fiction writing would always be a part of his life, but 10 years after graduating, he still hadn't written one word. Feeling like a total failure, he forced himself to write something. "Alex McKnight [the series' protagonist] came to me in that bad mood—somebody who was a failure himself. I asked myself what made him feel that way and came up with this guy sitting in a cabin all by himself in the absolute middle of nowhere—the most remote place I could think of, this little town up in the Upper Peninsula called Paradise. I just followed that and wrote that book."
Hamilton feels that what sets him apart from his mystery-writing peers is the nature of his protagonist. "He's this licensed private eye who can't stand the idea of being a private eye. He wants nothing to do with that business—which is a little challenging to write a whole private eye series—but there's always something that will drag him back into it."
According to Cavin, Hamilton's writing has gotten better and better over his four Alex McKnight novels, with "more depth and more reality. Steve has a distinctive voice and you really get into his books because of the way he is telling the story."
In fact, St. Martin's associate publisher John Cunningham feels it's time to pull out all the stops for Hamilton's fifth novel, Blood as the Sky, due next June under St. Martin's Minotaur imprint. Says Cunningham, "This is a book that can really take Steve up a few levels. He's found this beautifully spare yet imagistic way of writing, and combines that with the great insightful mystery and crime thriller plots that you need to break an author out like this. I think he is going to pop out and become a bigger mainstream writer."
Great Expectations: According to Cunningham, "Our goal with Steve is to get him that level of exposure where people start thinking of him outside the genre, as a mainstream writer." Minotaur is already sending out bound manuscripts to big-name mystery writers for advance quotes. Says Cunningham, "We'll use that as a way to wedge people into reading the book, because that's ultimately what it boils down to. We're confident they're going to see that this is a writer they need to pay attention to and sell in their stores and, hopefully as part of that, go back and read all the backlist books, too."
Clinton McKinzie: A Fast Climb to Success
As a Deputy D.A. in Denver, Clinton McKinzie was working 80-100 hour weeks and often prosecuting two trials a month. He knew he was facing serious job burnout the day he passed a plumbing truck on his drive to work and found himself thinking, "That doesn't seem too bad, you don't have to wear a suit...."
In early 2000, he decided to take a leave of absence and try writing a novel. His co-workers, recalls McKinzie, "just laughed. And secretly, I wasn't too sure I could do it. The only thing I'd written since elementary school were legal briefs and I was terrible at those—just ask any judge who read them." The fact that there might be some risks involved in this career move didn't give McKinzie pause—an extreme athlete, his idea of a relaxing afternoon is scaling an Alpine wall using only his bare hands and ice tools.
Six months later, McKinzie finished the manuscript for The Edge of Justice. With the help of a book on literary agents, he soon found representation with John Talbot, who sold the book to Bantam Dell in just two weeks; it was published this past June by Delacorte. The publisher was so enthusiastic about the first-time author that they wanted a two-book deal. "I'd never really thought about a second book," admits McKinzie. "I didn't know where to go with a sequel, so I agreed to write a prequel." As Bantam Dell senior editor Danielle Perez was working on that second book, she decided that "his voice was so unlike anyone else, so really special, that I bought two more. I tell people we bought a fourth book before we even published the first one."
The Edge of Justice combines McKinzie's two passions—the law and climbing. His protagonist, Special Agent Antonio Burns of the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, is a both a cop and a climber. McKinzie set the book in Laramie, his home for almost five years in the mid-90s. "I'd been bumming around, backpacking in the Rockies and walked into Laramie on the 4th of July 1993 after not seeing another human being for about a week. It was snowing and everyone seemed to be having so much fun I decided to stay." While establishing residence in order to attend University of Wyoming Law School, McKinzie worked as "the smallest bouncer in Wyoming," a job he calls far more terrifying that any rock he's ever climbed.
Considering the fact that The Edge of Justice revolves around the murder of a female climber and subsequent cover-up at the highest levels of Laramie law enforcement, what was the local reaction when he returned for a book signing? "No one had read the book yet," quips McKinzie, "so the reception was very warm."
While McKinzie can now spend mornings climbing in the mountains outside Denver and afternoons and evenings writing, being an author is much harder than he imagined. "In climbing you can always retreat, but when you're a working writer, you have to just muscle on ahead."
Great Expectations: "We want to get Clint to would-be fans quickly," says Perez. "When you're trying to build a writer's career, faster is usually better." With that goal in mind, The Edge of Justice will appear in April as a Dell mass market, Point of Law (the prequel) as a Dell Super Release in May, and Trial By Ice and Fire as a Delacorte hardcover in July. It promises to be, says Perez, "the summer of Clint."
