Riordan's Desk

Ride a Red Dragon

2011-12-19T07:01:00.000-08:00

I'm pleased to announce my short story, "Ride a Red Dragon" is available on Amazon Kindle for a mere 99 cents! Here's the set up:

When speakeasy and gambling hall owner Scooter Hawkins puts a call into private eye Vic Lane to investigate an extortion attempt, Lane barely has time to hear the assignment before two men with Thompson sub-machine guns burst through the door to ratchet up the stakes with a stream of lead.

Lane’s investigation leads to a rival gambling house known as the Red Dragon, and soon he is caught up in a ruthless struggle with its beautiful proprietress, Wan Jung.

Set in 1920s San Francisco with flappers, speakeasies and roadsters, “Ride a Red Dragon” is a two-fisted tale of deceit and revenge reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op stories.

Pick it up here.

Patricia Cornwell's RED MIST

2011-12-03T10:30:00.001-08:00

#1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell's new novel, Red Mist, goes on sale this Tuesday, December 6th.

What's that go to do with me? The book is set in and around Savannah, Georgia and when her publisher, Putnum, went looking for a atmospheric photograph from the area to use for the book's end papers, they found my shot of a foggy morning at Colonial Park Cemetery.

They printed it in silver on both end papers and I think it looks tremendous:

(Notice the image is reversed to keep the tree clear of the dust jacket flap.) Patricia is also featuring it on her website:

I don't think the Putnum folks realized that I am also a crime fiction writer, but of course the fact that I, too, write crime makes me all the more proud to have the photo on Patricia's book.

Coming to a Bookstore/eReader Near You!

2011-10-20T20:29:00.000-07:00

I can now say with confidence that Prom Night and Other Man-Made Disasters, my collection of humorous first-person essays, will be available in spring 2012. Keep an eye peeled for it!

Dollar Store-like Pricing on eBooks in the August Riordan Series!

2011-09-29T20:27:00.000-07:00

All five novels in the August Riordan series, including The Immortal Game, Vulture Capital, Candy from Strangers, Runoff and The Big Wake-Up are now available in eBook format for a mere 99 cents.

Get them while they are hot!

Candy from Strangers Podcast Complete!

2011-09-29T20:20:00.000-07:00

The free podcast for my third novel, Candy from Strangers, is complete! Download individual episodes or subscribe to the feed on Apple's iTunes here.

THE IMMORTAL GAME in Chinese!

2011-07-06T19:45:00.001-07:00

Traditional Chinese Translation of THE IMMORTAL GAME, a photo by Mark Coggins on Flickr.

Here's the cover and the promotional give-away (a USB drive in the shape of a chess king) for my first novel THE IMMORTAL GAME.

To Gertrude

2011-05-31T07:07:00.001-07:00

Check out my post on Gertrude Stein and a bit of "found prose" from her grave in Paris here on SFGate.com.

True Fiction

2011-05-20T09:37:00.000-07:00

Susan Harkema, research director at the Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Center in Louisville, recently published an article in Lancet regarding her work to help spinal cord injury victims regain mobility by using electrical stimulation to the spine. Read about it in the New York Times here and TechCrunch here.

The real life technology is very similar to that developed by the fictional start-up company NeuroStimix in my novel Vulture Capital. Read about the book here or listen to the free podcast here.

My New Celebrity Endorsement ...

2011-05-11T16:24:00.000-07:00

Appearance on the Kindle Author Blog

2011-05-04T11:48:00.000-07:00

Check out my interview on David Wisehart's Kindle Author blog right here.

Making Some Racket on PodioRacket

2011-04-07T09:32:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm podcasting my first novel, The Immortal Game for FREE. Listen to my interview about the book and the process of podcasting it with the great folks from PodioRacket here.

Pick up the actual podcast at Seth Harwood's CrimeWAV here or at PodioBooks here.

Martin Cruz Smith

2011-03-25T11:30:00.001-07:00

I was on a panel today at Left Coast Crime 2011 in Santa Fe, New Mexico with one of my literary heroes, Martin Cruz Smith of Gorky Park fame.

Reuniting Cissy & Ray

2011-02-15T19:35:00.000-08:00

Read my Rap Sheet post about the ceremony to reunite Raymond Chandler and his wife Cissy here.

New Career

2011-02-06T11:43:00.000-08:00

My wife says I have too many "hobbies," and she includes novel-writing among them! Well, here's another one to add to the list: author photographer.

Barbara Fister used a photo I snapped of her at a Left Coast Crime conference for her latest, Through the Cracks.

And Seth Harwood posed in my professionally furnished studio (i.e., my back yard) for his latest, Young Junius. (Say, Tyrus Books, what happened to that photo credit?)

Finally, I snapped a picture of another big name author at last year's Bouchercon. You'll see it on a book he has coming out this June.

The Many Faces (and Formats) of THE IMMORTAL GAME

2011-01-24T07:49:00.001-08:00

Over the years, my first novel, The Immortal Game, has been issued in four (paper book) editions. Today I'm announcing release of a another edition in an entirely new medium: audio.

If you've not read the book, listen to a one minute promo for it here:

And subscribe to the free podcast of the entire novel here.

Der Malteser Falke

2011-01-18T11:18:00.000-08:00

Swiss Publisher Diogenes borrowed the photograph I use for the masthead of this blog to promote their German translation of The Maltese Falcon.

The text in white is a line from the book, "Most things in San Francisco can be bought, or taken," which Sam Spade tells Brigid O'Shaughnessy.

The photo was originally done to promote my novel The Immortal Game, and if you look closely you can see the first paragraphs of Chapter 6, "Jodie's Tip," sitting in the typewriter. Quite an honor to have my words on a poster for one of Dashiell Hammett's books!

Joe Gores

2011-01-13T07:32:00.000-08:00

Joe Gores, one of my favorite authors and an all-around wonderful guy, died on Monday, January 10th, 50 years to the day that Dashiell Hammett passed away. Read my tribute to him on The Rap Sheet here.

Podcast of Vulture Capital Complete!

2011-01-09T16:55:00.000-08:00

The free podcast of my novel Vulture Capital is complete. Check out the 1 minute promo for the podcast here:

And download or subscribe to all the episodes here.

Stockton Street Tunnel

2010-12-20T09:13:00.000-08:00

The latest in my "Polaroids from the Metropolis" series, featuring noirish photos from San Francisco, is available here on the San Francisco Chronicle website.

Riordan eBook Bonanza

2010-11-24T08:34:00.001-08:00

Get 'em while they are hot: all five of my novels in the August Riordan series are available as eBooks in Kindle, Nook and Apple iBookstore (iPad) Format--and most are being sold for the low-low price of $2.99.

If you've not read any of the books in the series, I suggest you start with the first, The Immortal Game. There's no need to continue in sequence from there, but Vulture Capital is a quasi-standalone, so you may wish to save that until after you've got a few of the other books under your belt.

The Immortal Game: A Retrospective

2010-10-26T07:45:00.000-07:00

"Just how good can a work of pastiche be?" is the question asked by Michael Slind on his blog Only Detect about my first novel, The Immortal Game.

For those who aren't familiar with the term, Wikipedia defines pastiche as "a literary technique employing a generally light-hearted tongue-in-cheek imitation of another's style; although jocular, it is usually respectful."

Michael is right: The Immortal Game is a pastiche of Raymond Chandler's work--with a dash of Dashiell Hammett thrown in.

Read his very generous answer to the question of how good it can be here.

USA Book News Awards

2010-10-26T07:44:00.000-07:00

The USA Book News "Best Books 2010" Awards have been announced, and my novel The Big Wake-Up placed as a Finalist in the "Fiction & Literature: Mystery/Suspense" category.

How 'bout them apples?

Sherlock, Old School

2010-10-26T07:43:00.000-07:00

Given the interest generated for the new PBS-TV mystery series, Sherlock, I thought it might be fun to use my blog on the San Francisco Chronicle's website to serialize my Sherlock Holmes pastiche, "The Adventure of the Black Bishop."

I'm releasing it in five weekly episodes on Monday morning. Read the first here.

Ted's Invite

2010-10-21T07:00:00.000-07:00

I recently received this invitation via e-mail:

Hi -----, is now a better time to reach out to you in regards to the CIO Summit? You received a request on behalf of our Board due to your key role in the technology field and I'm curious to know if a decision has been made.

The CIO Summit is an invitation-only group comprised of the very best executives and visionaries in technology. We meet monthly by teleconference to exchange what is working, what is not, strategies and ideas. It is a confidential forum with dedicated groups of other successful VPs and key executives whose only agenda is to help each other outperform. Our site is at www.theciosummits.org

I am certain you will find the experience both enjoyable and useful in your efforts. Please take a look and let me know of your decision. Thanks, -----.

Although the e-mail ended up in my in-tray, the individual being invited isn't me. It's a gentleman named Ted: Ted Valmont. If you follow the link to Ted's bio, you'll see he could be lumped in a group that includes the "very best executives and visionaries in technology," being the founder and CEO of VALeDiction, a revolutionary company in the speech recognition space, and all.

Only problem is, Ted is a fictional character from my novel Vulture Capital.

I'm half way tempted to accept the invitation on his behalf--except I'm not nearly as successful or as good looking as him ...

Vulture Capital, the Podcast

2010-10-20T18:00:00.000-07:00

As you might have noticed from my earlier posts of mystery author photos, last week I attended the Bouchercon mystery conference in San Francisco.

My favorite panel was one of which I only attended a portion: "Ten Crime Novels You Must Read Before You Die" moderated by the Irish duo of Declan Hughes and John Connolly. As Kathleen Ryan of the Women of Mystery blog documents, the first book on their list is The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett, and the second is The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler.

One of the reasons I so liked the panel is that I happen to think that Key and Long Goodbye are the best efforts of Hammett and Chandler respectively. The other reason is the passionate and articulate case Hughes and Connolly made for their ten selections.

So why am I blabbing about the panel in a post titled "Vulture Capital, the Podcast?" As I've written before, my novel Vulture Capital was intended as a homage to The Glass Key. So much so, that Poltroon Press, the publisher of the first edition, actually embossed the front board of the book with silver key, exactly like the one on the front board of Hammett's novel. You can see it in this photo of the limited edition of the book, along with the special photo that accompanied the volume in a custom-made box:

After that long wind-up, here's the pitch: if you haven't read Vulture Capital, I'm making it available as a free audio book in a series of podcast episodes. Familiarity with The Glass Key isn't necessary to enjoy the book, which deals with a biotech start-up in Silicon Valley.

Read more about the plot here, and select from a range of options to access the (in progress) podcast episodes here.

Young Junius: Free!

2010-10-19T07:46:00.001-07:00

Jack Wakes Up author Seth Harwood is making the text of his next book, Young Junius, available in PDF for free. That's right, for free! Here's a teaser:

In 1987, fourteen-year-old Junius Posey sets out on the cold Cambridge (Mass.) streets to find his brother’s killer in a cluster of low-income housing towers—prime drug-dealing territory. After committing a murder to protect his friend, he finds himself without protection from retribution. His mother gives him fifty dollars and instructions to run, but Junius refuses to live a life in hiding. Instead, shocked by the violence he’s created and determined to see its consequences, he returns to the towers to complete his original mission.

Get the whole book here. And once you get hooked with YJ on your unergonomic laptop, buy the hardcover or paperback for an improved reading experience. (Because it's the right thing to do.)

Lee Child

2010-10-16T15:53:00.001-07:00

Lee Child
Originally uploaded by Mark Coggins

Lee Child at Bouchercon 2010 in San Francisco.

Walter Mosley

2010-10-16T13:54:00.003-07:00

Walter Mosley
Originally uploaded by Mark Coggins

Walter Mosley at the 2010 Bouchercon in San Francisco.

John Connolly

2010-10-16T13:54:00.001-07:00

John Connolly
Originally uploaded by Mark Coggins

John Connolly at the 2010 Bouchercon in San Francisco.

Michael Connelly

2010-10-15T16:16:00.001-07:00

Michael Connelly
Originally uploaded by Mark Coggins

Michael Connelly at Bouchercon 2010 in San Francisco.

Barry Eisler

2010-10-15T16:03:00.001-07:00

Barry Eisler
Originally uploaded by Mark Coggins

Barry Eisler at Bouchercon 2010 in San Francisco.

David Baldacci

2010-10-15T15:51:00.001-07:00

David Baldacci
Originally uploaded by Mark Coggins

David Baldacci at Bouchercon 2010 in San Francisco.

Two Flavors of James Ellroy

2010-09-29T07:00:00.000-07:00

Take a look at these two pictures:

On the right is the illustration of James Ellroy from the New York Times review of his latest memoir, The Hilliker Curse. On the left is the picture I took of him for The Rap Sheet when I covered his talk at The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

I've Photoshopped my picture a bit to make it look like a watercolor, but even without the manipulations, I don't think there's much doubt that the artist used it as a model for his efforts. Look at the ears in particular.

It's not surprising, really, since the photo adorns Ellroy's Wikipedia entry, but it was an odd deja vu feeling to see it in the paper.

Read All About It ... For Free!

2010-09-19T10:25:00.000-07:00

Check out this collection of the openings of all five of my August Riordan books, which you can view on Scribd for FREE!

Toga!

2010-09-19T10:20:00.000-07:00

My essay about planning and throwing a toga party is up on SFGate, the San Francisco Chronicle website.

Here's a taste just to get you started:

Getting a degree part time is like getting a root canal part time. Completing classes and homework while juggling a career and personal life, particularly a screwed up personal life, can be torment. And so, in the late 80s, after painfully chipping away at MS degree requirements for five years, when I finally donned the graduation gown with special orange regalia to represent the Stanford School of Computer Science (yes, it takes a real computer geek to pick orange), I was ready for a party. A big one.

Read the rest here.

Graduate Program in Mystery Blogs

2010-09-19T10:15:00.000-07:00

The web site Best Online Colleges has been going to school on mystery blogs, and has chosen Riordan's Desk (this here blog) as one of its 50 best blogs for mystery readers. Check it out.

Zanzibar Editions

2010-09-14T08:35:00.001-07:00

Check out the 2011 catalog of French publisher Zanzibar Editions, featuring Joseph Wambaugh's famous 1973 effort, The Onion Field.

And what's that in the first slot of the second row, Le Plus Vieux jeu du Monde? I believe that roughly translates as "The Oldest Game in the World," which is apparently is the preferred French translation for the title of my first novel, The Immortal Game.

Find it in Paris bookstores in one year!

Chinatown Banquet

2010-09-07T09:45:00.000-07:00

I had to chuckle when I read the Labor Day edition of Jeff Kingston's "Bullet Points" feature on The Rap Sheet.

He relays the report that the annual Private Eye Writers of America banquet will be held this year at the Empress of China in Chinatown on 838 Grant Avenue in San Francisco.

The restaurant, and indeed the whole building at that address, serves as the model for the headquarters of Leonora Lee, a character from my private eye novel Runoff. Ms. Lee is referred to as the "Dragon Lady of Chinatown" in the book because of her abrasive personality and the enormous power she wields in the community. My private eye protagonist, August Riordan, makes her acquaintance after chasing a thief on a backhoe through Chinatown in the middle of the night, causing the thief and his backhoe to crash through the front window of the art gallery on the first floor of 838 Grant.

You can read a review of the book from Rap Sheet contributor Steven Miller here, check out the first chapter of the book here, and follow the route of Riordan's chase on this special Google Map (zoom into Chinatown to see the chase route; click on the blue markers to see photos of locations from the book):

View Runoff by Mark Coggins in a larger map
As I suggested, Leonora Lee is a pretty feisty character. I hope the other PI writers will be mindful of that during the banquet!

A Complicated Holmes ...

2010-09-07T07:30:00.000-07:00

"Chess Notes," the chess column of the Boston Globe, provided a small write-up on Masters of Technique, the chess fiction anthology recently published by Mongoose Press.

My contribution to the anthology gets a passing mention:

Mark Coggins’s “The Adventure of the Black Bishop’’ is the inevitable Sherlock Holmes story, in the Holmes mode, but somewhat more complicated. We find that Holmes likes the English defense. In the original stories, Holmes thought that chess players were devious individuals.

I can only concur that the story is indeed "somewhat more complicated," but have to point out that my Holmes pretty much shares the opinion of the original Holmes regarding chess players--at least as far as the ones in the story go!

Read the whole article here.

The Immortal Game: Reboot

2010-08-30T20:19:00.000-07:00

My first novel, The Immortal Game, was published in December 1999 by Poltroon Press. They did two editions: a hardcover followed by a trade paperback--with a dust jacket, no less. Bleak House Books kept the party going with a trade paperback reprint in 2006.

That edition sold through, and since Bleak House is no longer printing (or reprinting) new (or old) titles, the rights reverted to me.

I've "rebooted" the book with a trade paperback edition available through Amazon:

The cover design is a variation of the original Poltroon Press edition, which featured my photo of two (replica) Lewis Chessmen: a bishop and a knight. This time I just went with the knight, who is intended to represent the lonely "knight" in the book, PI protagonist August Riordan.

I've also done an eBook edition on the Kindle, which you can find here. Apart from being cheaper and more portable, it also includes the original chapter illustrations from the first edition.

If you haven't read any of my books before, The Immortal Game is a good--and obvious--place to start. Not to mention the three award nominations and its selection as a San Francisco Chronicle book of the year along with my good friend Robert Crais' Demolition Angel. ;-)

The Junior Scientist Club

2010-08-08T10:38:00.000-07:00

Check out my essay about the dangerous "science" experiments I undertook in my childhood over on SFGate, the San Francisco Chronicle website.

Here's a taste to get you started:

According to the National Vital Statistics System, life expectancy at birth for an American boy born in the late 1950s was somewhere between 66 and 67 years. That number is an average of course. Factors that might influence it include diet, access to medical care, environment—and membership in the Junior Scientists Club.

The Junior Scientists Club is a name I invented in the second grade to give an academic underpinning to the “studies” of chemistry and physics I roped my best friend into. My friend’s name was Tommy, but he did not stay with the club long—or more accurately, the club did not stay long with him. Membership shifted as my family caravanned through various neighborhoods and school districts in 1960s Phoenix, Arizona. Throughout the moves, I retained a firm grip on leadership, recruiting new participants as needed.

Read the rest here.

(Photo by Joshua Dysangco.)

Mountain View Cemetery

2010-07-26T07:36:00.001-07:00

This Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle has an article about Bay Area cemeteries. They rightly point out that Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland is the jewel in the local necropolis crown, but they fail to point out that (according to my warped view of history) Evita Peron is buried there!

Check out this plot summary for my latest novel, The Big Wake-Up, for a hint about why I claim that might be the case.

"Waiting Angel" at Mountain View Cemetery
Another grave for a famous person buried at Mountain View that the Chronicle didn't mention is the one for the Black Dahlia.

Gravestone for the Black Dahlia
Yes, although Elizabeth Short's gruesome murder took place in LA and inspired many films and novels set there--including James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia--her mother lived in Oakland and had her interred in Mountain View.

(Elizabeth Short gravestone photo by Gregory Wild-Smith. CC 2.0 license.)

What's Next?

2010-07-23T07:27:00.001-07:00

I've gotten a few questions from readers and friends about what's next for me after the publication of my novel, The Big Wake-Up. Usually the question is phrased more directly: "Are you working on another Riordan?" (Riordan being the name of my private eye protagonist.)

Well, I've got a new protagonist. His name is Coggins.

That's right--I'm working on a memoir of sorts. But rather than coughing up a book-length fur ball about my not-so-exciting life, I'm doing a "greatest hits"--or more accurately, greatest misses--compendium of first person essays a la David Sedaris.

I've tentatively titled it Prom Night and Other Man-Made Disasters and this is a mock cover for the book:

I'm a ways off from completing it, but if you want to get a flavor for the sort of essay I'll be including, check out "Confessions of an Email Forger" on the Huffington Post.

(Photo by Northpolemama. CC 2.0 licensing.)

I Write Like ...

2010-07-13T20:09:00.000-07:00

A site sponsored by Coding Robots and Mémoires, (journaling software for Mac) offers a statistical analysis tool that analyzes the word choice and writing style from a sample you provide to suggest a famous writer whose style is closest to your own.

My initial submission consisted of the text from the first chapter of my latest novel The Big Wake-Up. To be honest, I was hoping the tool would say that I wrote like Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett since I was certainly trying to write like them. Nope. Here's the result from the Magic 8-Ball:

I write like
Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I decided to give it another sample where I was absolutely, positively--no holds barred--attempting to precisely mimic the style of another writer:

I write like
Arthur Conan Doyle

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Better. The sample in question was my Sherlock Holmes pastiche, "The Adventure of the Black Bishop," which was recently published in the chess fiction anthology Masters of Technique.

Finally, I couldn't resist submitting the text of the first chapter of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. Is there any excerpt of his writing that could be more quintessentially Chandler? Check it out:

I write like
Vladimir Nabokov

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Oops. Apparently not!

Update:

I couldn't resist trying it one more time with a selection from my novel Vulture Capital. As I describe here, Vulture is modeled after Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key, including the use of the (now less common) "objective" third person POV. If anything I've written should come up Hammett-like, this would be it.

Check out the results:

I write like
J. K. Rowling

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

No sale!

Paranormal Cover

2010-07-01T10:57:00.001-07:00

Fog over Colonial Park Cemetery
Originally uploaded by Mark Coggins

The latest Mystery Readers Journal just shipped. It's the paranormal mysteries edition and the cover features my photo of Colonial Park Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia. There's some dripping Southern (paranormal) Gothic there for sure.

Check out the cover and the table of contents here.

Could Alvin Green Be a Character in RUNOFF?

2010-06-12T15:50:00.000-07:00

The recent primary victory of Alvin Green, the South Carolina Democratic nominee for Senate, has caused some consternation among Democratic party leaders in the state. As the Washington Post says,

He didn't start a Web site or hire consultants or plant lawn signs. There's only $114 in his campaign bank account ... [and] in a three-hour interview, the unemployed military veteran could not name a single specific thing he'd done to campaign. Yet more than 100,000 South Carolinians voted for him on Tuesday, handing him nearly 60 percent of the vote and a resounding victory over Vic Rawl, a former judge who has served four terms in the state legislature.

There are several theories that attempt to explain his victory: his name came first on the ballot so voters defaulted to him, large numbers of Republican voters crossed party lines in the state's open primary to insure a weaker Democratic candidate faced the Republican nominee, or he was an outright plant by the Republican Party.

It's also been suggested that his election was the result of e-voting fraud or error.

These posts on The Brad Blog and Tech Dirt discuss the possibility, pointing out several red flags in the results, such as the fact that the absentee ballot results were wildly different than the e-voting tally from election day and the fact that Green received 75% of the vote in a number of precincts, which is unusual even for a popular incumbent. Another flag is that the voting seemed to go against racial preferences. White counties gave Green large majorities, while black ones picked Green by slim margins.

The kicker is the machines that South Carolina uses have no audit trail (i.e., no permanent paper record of each vote cast), so as The Brad Blog puts it, South Carolinians have engaged in "faith-based voting" with no way to confirm the results.

All of this--particularly the red flags--will sound familiar to readers of my novel, Runoff. In it, a powerful business woman in Chinatown hires August Riordan (my PI protagonist) to investigate the results of a San Francisco mayoral election when the Chinese candidate she is backing fails even carry the Chinese precincts. She is convinced that someone must have rigged the outcome by hacking the city’s newly installed touch-screen voting machines.

Check out Runoff if you want to find the solution to that election mystery. I'm not sure the answer to the one in South Carolina will be as easy to uncover.

(Hat tip to Ann Hillesland for pointing me to the Tech Dirt article.)

More Masters

2010-06-09T08:53:00.000-07:00

I did a longer write-up on the chess fiction anthology Masters of Technique over on the Huffington Post.

Check it out here.

Masters of Technique

2010-06-02T07:57:00.001-07:00

Chess literature publisher Mongoose Press has just released their first fiction anthology: Masters of Technique, edited by Howard Goldowsky. The anthology features short stories with a chess theme from bestselling authors like Stephen L. Carter (The Emperor of Ocean Park) and Katherine Neville (The Eight), literary writers such as Wells Tower and Paul Eggers and even (in spite of what the title suggests) a patzer or two like me.

My story is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche titled The Adventure of the Black Bishop, and to my knowledge, chronicles the first instance of Holmes participating in the "King's Game" in the cannon.

There are other firsts--as the opening paragraph suggests:

Mr. Sherlock Holmes' aversion to women has oft been documented in these little narratives I have produced to illustrate his extraordinary powers of deduction and reasoning. So clearly and uncompromisingly documented, in fact, that as I take up pen and paper in the twilight of my years to describe the single case which proved the exception to this rule of Holmes' psyche, I fear there will be protestations of disbelief among my long suffering readers. Some may even question the authenticity of the account. Yet there can be no doubt—on at least one occasion of which I have personal knowledge, Holmes broke his habit of cold aloofness toward the fairer sex, and engaged in relations with women that more closely corresponded to the common pattern of behavior between men and women the world over.

I should mention that Masters of Technique is a labor of love. All of the stories were contributed by the authors, editor Howard Goldowsky donated his time and all of the proceeds from the sales will be donated to support chess schools and clubs. I hope you'll check it out--even if you aren't the biggest chess fan in the world. While all the stories do have some reference to chess, they span the gamut from historical fiction, to horror, to mystery to more literary offerings.

And while you're on the Mongoose Press website, you might want to check out the autobiography of Women's World Chess Champion Alexandra Kosteniuk, Diary of a Chess Queen. Hubba-hubba!

Pulp Fiction

2010-05-31T14:45:00.001-07:00

I wanted to update the banner graphic for my website, so I enlisted the help of my wife, borrowed a photo layout idea from Mark Krajnak and, voila, we have a new banner.

Skeleton Says

2010-05-28T07:02:00.000-07:00

Scot Siegel's new book of poetry, Skeleton Says, is now available for presale at Finishing Line Press.

Does the cover look a tad familiar?

It should if you've read my blog or my latest book. It's based on this photo of mine of two lovers from a fountain at the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris, which was also used to illustrate a chapter in my latest, The Big Wake-Up.

The Big Wake-Up Takes the Gold!

2010-05-14T17:34:00.000-07:00

As a follow up to my earlier post about The Big Wake-Up being shortlisted for the 2010 Independent Publisher Award (IPPY) in the crime fiction category, I'm thrilled to announce that Wake-Up took gold.

See all the results here.

IPPY Awards

2010-05-06T07:55:00.001-07:00

I'm pleased as punch (as Hubert Humphrey would say) to report that The Big Wake-Up was short-listed for an Independent Publisher's award--aka an IPPY--in the Mystery / Suspense / Thriller category. See here.

Gold, silver and bronze medals will be awarded to all finalists and presented at a ceremony in New York on May 25th during Book Expo America.

LA Times Festival of Books: The Stars Come Out

2010-04-27T08:46:00.001-07:00

Check out my coverage of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books with thirteen--count 'em, thirteen--author photos over on The Huffington Post.

(And that's not even counting the bonus photo shown above of Gayle Lynds, Denise Hamilton and Naomi Hirahara at the Mystery Bookstore pre-party.)

Evita Plays Oakland?

2010-04-21T06:56:00.000-07:00

Travel writer Wayne Bernhardson, who is author of the Moon Handbooks to Buenos Aires, Chile, Argentina, and Patagonia, has a nice post on my latest novel, The Big Wake-Up, over on his Moon Handbook blog. Check it out here.

I particularly enjoyed his observation that The Big Wake-Up has a connection to both his homes--the apartment he and his wife keep in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires and his home base in Oakland, California (which is very close to a certain cemetery).

The Lady from Shanghai

2010-04-11T15:29:00.000-07:00

My recent piece on the "Subterranean San Francisco" event with Domenic Stansberry, Peter Maravelis and Kelli Stanley over on The Huffington Post featured this photograph of the Li Po Lounge:

where the event took place.

Li Po was featured in another well-regarded noir outing: Orson Welles' 1947 The Lady from Shanghai, starring himself and his then wife Rita Hayworth.

Here's a screen capture from late in the movie when Welles runs past the bar:

And another as Hayworth follows him:

It's amazing how little the bar has changed. Same neon sign, same faux gold cave-like entrance.

Ray and Cissy

2010-04-10T11:02:00.000-07:00

As reported by The Rap Sheet, there's an effort afoot to reunite Raymond Chandler and his wife Cissy at Mount Hope Cemetery in San Diego.

Read more about it, and find out how to register your support if you're so inclined, in my piece on The Huffington Post.

Subterranean San Francisco

2010-04-07T06:37:00.001-07:00

Check out my write-up of an evening of hardboiled fare with Domenic Stansberry, Peter Maravelis and Kelli Stanley over on The Huffington Post.

EQMM on THE BIG WAKE-UP

2010-03-20T10:20:00.000-07:00

In his Jury Box column for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Jon L. Breen weighs in on my latest novel, The Big Wake-Up. To quote, the book:

Begins with a stunning action scene of murder by cable car and proceeds to unveil a[n] ... utterly entertaining pulp-magazine plot, including a sinister female villain known as Isis. The Maltese Falcon-style treasure hunt has a most intriguing MacGuffin ... The author's photographs from cemeteries enliven, so to speak, the chapter headings. Coggins continues to favor Chandler's recipe for saving a scene: the sudden appearance of a man with a gun.

That's pretty kind of Jon, especially considering I selected his last name (at random) from a mystery conference program to use for the villain in my second book, Vulture Capital!

ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Finalists

2010-03-15T08:45:00.000-07:00

ForeWord Reviews just announced the finalists in their 2009 Book of the Year Awards. There are some books by friends in the mystery category, including Jump by Tim Maleeny and Tower by Ken Bruen & Reed Farrel Coleman.

There's also a title by yours truly called The Big Wake-Up.

Check out the full list of finalists here. Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners will be determined by a panel of librarians and booksellers selected from the magazine's readership in time for BookExpo America.

Hurwitz & Child

2010-03-14T16:40:00.000-07:00

Go here to read my coverage of Gregg Hurwitz's interview of Lee Child at Left Coast Crime 2010.

The Flights of Angels

2010-03-13T09:02:00.001-08:00

Check out my post on Left Coast Crime 2010 over on The Rap Sheet.

The Singer Affair

2010-03-12T07:26:00.000-08:00

In my first foray into non-fiction memoir, I've got an essay up on the book page of The Huffington Post. It's called "The Singer Affair" and you can check it out here.

I thought it might be fun to share scans of a few of the supporting materials that go with the post. Here's a scan of the first paragraph of one of the short stories I mention, "Sunstroke and Seduction:"

And here are Brett's comments on my final story for the quarter:

Here's a scan of the cover of The Petting Zoo:

And here we have the back cover with Brett Singer's picture:

And, finally, the relevant snippet from page 89:

Ed Thomas

2010-02-28T20:00:00.001-08:00

In Michael Connelly's 2004 book The Narrows, Harry Bosch talks about a clue involving a character named Ed Thomas who owns a bookstore called Book Carnival:

I was sadden to read in The Rap Sheet that the real Ed Thomas who owned the real Book Carnival died recently.

When my first novel, The Immortal Game, came out from a tiny press, I called around to independent mystery bookstores to encourage them to stock it. In the beginning, only a very few were willing to take it on and Ed was one of them. He ordered and hand sold a dozen first editions in the space of a couple weeks. That was big news to me as a debut author in 1999.

He stocked all of my subsequent books, and although I never met him in person until I came down to the Book Carnival to sign Runoff, I spoke to him on the phone a number of times.

After the signing, we spent what must have been an extra hour or so chatting. I was curious about Michael Connelly's early days, and the experience of being a character in one of his books. Ed was happy to oblige. He first told me about Connelly's meeting with President Clinton (Clinton is a big fan of Connelly's)--and then he produced photos Connelly had sent him of the two shaking hands!

He also told me how Connelly had called him one day out of the blue to ask if he was going to be at the store for a couple of hours. Ed said sure, and Connelly showed up with two boxes of unread first editions of Connelly's debut novel, The Black Echo. Connelly told Ed that there was no point in his hording them and Ed should have them. This was well after Connelly had hit it big and the books were worth quite a bit--and of course still are.

As for being a character in The Narrows, Connelly asked him early on if it would be okay if he used his name, but he had no clue until the book was published how extensive a role he and his store had in the plot.

Connelly's generosity is only one manifestation of the debt many writers felt to Ed. As the Orange County Register obit linked above describes, Dean Koontz, Ray Bradbury and T. Jefferson Parker all appreciated the support he gave them. Count me in their number.

Gallery Opening

2010-02-28T16:55:00.000-08:00

The juried show, "Photography: Impact of a Medium," opened last night at 2nd City Council Art Gallery in Long Beach, CA. The turnout was very good:

My photograph in the show, Factory Blower, got its fair share of attention:

And rock musician Jessie Deluxe helped to entertain the crowd:

On CrimeWAV

2010-02-22T07:48:00.001-08:00

William P. Arney, the voice of Noir City reads the first chapter of my latest novel The Big Wake-Up from Dashiell Hammett's apartment on Seth Harwood's crime-fiction podcast, CrimeWAV.com!

Check it out here.

Photography: Impact of a Medium

2010-02-18T07:39:00.001-08:00

I'm pleased to report I had a photograph accepted in the juried show "Photography: Impact of a Medium," which opens at the 2nd City Council Art Gallery in Long Beach, CA on February 27. Robbert Flick, noted photographer and Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California, was the juror.

And here's the picture in question:

It was taken at the Gladding McBean pottery factory in Lincoln, California with a Sinar Norma view camera. This was the same camera I used to take all the photos in the first edition of my debut novel, The Immortal Game.

Hey, I'm Not the Police Reporter

2010-02-15T10:05:00.001-08:00

Blogging for Mystery Scene Magazine, Oline H. Cogdill recently reported that Laura Lippman has optioned her Tess Monaghan series to TV production company Ostar Enterprises, which is owned by Bill Haber.

While we wait for the series to make it to prime time, we shouldn't forget that Lippman herself had a cameo role in the first episode of the fifth season of The Wire, the ground-breaking HBO series produced by her husband David Simon.

She plays a reporter for The Baltimore Sun and is featured in a scene with Clar k Johnson who plays editor Augustus "Gus" Hayne. Gus notices Laura's character and another reporter in a conference room, staring at a column of smoke from a burning building. He goes to investigate.

Here's a rough transcript of the dialog that follows:

OTHER REPORTER (pointing)
Something's burning.

GUS
You, ah, you wonder what it might be?

LAURA
Hey, I'm not the police reporter.

GUS
But you called [him], though, right?

At this point the other reporter moves to the phone and Laura grimaces in acknowledgment of their failure to alert their colleague to the story.

Turns out the plot line may well have been drawn from Lippman's own experiences as a reporter on the Sun. To quote from an essay, "Gone, Baby, Gone" on her website:

My last day at The Sun was on Sept. 30th [2001], although I didn't know it at the time. No one did. I worked the Sunday cop-shift, part of a weekend rotation shared by most of The Sun's metro reporters. It was a busy-if-inglorious shift. There was ... a three-alarm blaze in West Baltimore that had left a homeless man dead and created three new homeless people - an elderly woman and her two tenants...

It wasn't a big story, I'm sorry to say. The death of a nameless homeless man seldom is in the pages of the Baltimore Sun. But there were holes, some confusion about what had happened. I knew the night editor, the incomparable David Michael Ettlin, would razz me (justifiably) if I didn't at least make every effort to answer those questions. And while Dick Irwin, the regular night cop reporter, is used to batting clean-up for the Sunday rotation, I didn't want to dump my undone work on him.

So you see, the only difference from real life and the scene in The Wire is that Lippman did follow up on the story of the fire herself.

Another interesting point is the theme of homeless deaths is key to the entire fifth (and concluding) season of The Wire.

Tomás Eloy Martínez

2010-02-10T06:45:00.001-08:00

Argentine writer Tomás Eloy Martínez died in Buenos Aires a week ago Sunday from a brain tumor. His name may not be familiar to most Americans, but his writing--in particular his book Santa Evita--was very familiar to me because the information he provided in it about the "afterlife" of Eva Perón was key background for my latest novel, The Big Wake-Up.

As his New York Times obituary notes:

Perhaps nowhere more than in Mr. Martínez’s novel “Santa Evita” did fact and fancy conspire to capture the slippery reality of Argentina. The book follows the bizarre but true wanderings of Eva Perón’s embalmed corpse after her death from cancer in 1952.

After General Perón was overthrown, the new government took pains to hide Eva’s body, which they feared might be used by the opposition to rally support. Over the next two decades, the corpse was spirited around Argentina, off to Rome and eventually to Madrid, where it reposed in splendor in General Perón’s home, before making its way back to Argentina.

At the same time (this part is also true), several decoy corpses, fashioned from wax, fiberglass and other materials and said to look remarkably like the real thing, were making contrapuntal journeys.

Read more about the "story behind the story" of The Big Wake-Up in the post I did on the topic for The Rap Sheet. Read more about Mr. Martínez in his obit from The Independent.

I feel compelled to offer a morbid postscript: this is the second writer whom I quoted in The Big Wake-Up who has died in the few months since the book was published in November. The first was J.D. Salinger, whose quote from Catcher in the Rye I used as an epigraph:

Boy, when you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something.

Martínez is quoted by my character Chris Duckworth outside the crypt where Duckworth and private investigator August Riordan discover Evita's body. Duckworth notes that Martínez has described Evita as:

the Robin Hood of the 20th century … the Cinderella of the tango and the Sleeping Beauty of Latin America.

And as he knocks on the crypt door, he declares it's time for her "big wake-up."

Author Photo

2010-02-01T08:43:00.001-08:00

Check out British crime writer Peter Lovesey's updated home page. You'll see a certain photo taken by me at last year's Bouchercon.

Evita Stories

2010-01-29T10:27:00.000-08:00

Here's a kick in the pants--for me, at least. A gentleman with the YouTube user name of "evitastories" and (real) first name Andrew posted the attached video about my new novel The Big Wake-Up and Helen Davis' book Evita: My Life. Both treat Evita Peron's life (or afterlife) in a fictionalized fashion.

Andrew's YouTube bio mentions that he's "a former exchange student to Argentina ... [and] the primary contributor to the Wikipedia article about Eva Perón." He goes on to say that he put together his collection of YouTube videos to "discuss the true history of Eva Perón, as well as the experiences I had while in pursuit of the true story of this legendary woman."

Well, Andrew, thanks for making the video and thanks for writing the Wikipedia article. I referred to the article frequently while writing The Big Wake-Up.

The Book Addict

2010-01-26T08:34:00.000-08:00

I do a "virtual sit down" with Angela Wilson on her blog The Book Addict. Check it out here.

Chandler's Post Card from the Springs

2010-01-24T11:44:00.000-08:00

Swiss book dealer YGRbookS has a collection of Raymond Chandler books and papers available for sale, including issues of Black Mask where his short stories appeared, first editions of his novels, books by other authors from his personal library and correspondence. They are asking about $80K for the collection and you can see its description here.

Among the items included is a postcard Chandler wrote in 1957 to his English publisher Hamish Hamilton from Palm Springs, where Chandler had gone to complete his last published novel, Playback. YGRbookS included a scan of the card which I've reproduced here:

If you spend a bit of time at it, you can just make out the message Chandler penned to Hamilton:

There are so few of these oversized nonsenses that I may have sent you this one before. But don't kick me, I'm old and weak. Thanks for letter, which I shall answer very soon. Went to a party last night at a house which is the ideal setting for the 8 million dollar girl Marlowe is going to be married to in my next after the one I am finishing up. They'll have hell of a time squabbling. The party was elaborate but the same old thing. Elaborate catering and decorations but the same loud empty alcoholic voices. Love to all. Ray

The "next" Chandler refers to is the novel Poodle Springs, which Chandler left unfinished at the time of his death, but which Robert B. Parker would later complete with the blessing of the Chandler estate in 1989. In it, Chandler marries Linda Lorring from The Long Goodbye and goes to live with her in Poodle Springs (Chandler's pseudonymous name for Palm Springs).

As Frank MacShane writes in his biography of Chandler, The Life of Raymond Chandler:

Linda Loring's house was to be modeled on one owned by Mrs. Jessie Baumgardner, an acquaintance. It had some unusual features. "The front wall, for example," [Chandler wrote,] "is made of Japanese glass with butterflies in between the two sections. Every room has a door to the outside and a glass wall. There is an interior glass-walled patio which has an almost full-sized palm tree in it, a lot of tropical shrubs, and some pieces of desert rock which probably cost somebody nothing but some petrol, and probably cost her $200 a rock."

To see how this description was incorporated into Poodle Springs by Parker, you need only read the opening of Chapter Two where Marlowe describes the house he shares with his new wife:

It was a very handsome house except that it stank decorator. The front wall was plate glass with butterflies imprisoned in it. Linda said it came from Japan ... There was an interior patio with a large palm tree and some tropical shrubs, and a number of rough stones picked up on the high desert for nothing, but $250 apiece to the customer.

I was curious what the front of Chandler's postcard might have looked like so I did a little digging on the Internet. This seems likely to be the photo that adorns it:

At least it comes from a card by the same photographer and the same subject, the "picturesque Palm Springs Plaza."

In any case, the card provides an interesting link between two great writers--Chandler and Parker--both of whom sadly now "belong to the ages."

Touring La Recoleta

2010-01-19T07:34:00.001-08:00

In November, when I told the "Story Behind the Story" of my new novel The Big Wake-Up for The Rap Sheet, I explained how the book was inspired by a tour of La Recoleta Cemetery led by travel writer Robert Wright.

Robert isn't giving guided tours of the cemetery anymore, but if you are planning a trip to Buenos Aires and would still like to check out La Recoleta with the benefit of Robert's years of research into the cemetery and its inhabitants, you are in luck! Robert recently completed a guidebook for La Recoleta which you can purchase directly from his website here.

It's wonderfully produced with handsome maps, great commentary and a well-marked itinerary that takes you past 70 of the famous cemetery's most important tombs. Here's a look at a sample page:

And lest you worry the commentary leaves out any of the macabre details of the "afterlife" of Evita Peron that inspired The Big Wake-Up, let me leave you with a quote about the military leader Ossorio Arana, who is buried in a tomb with a sword-bearing female statue in front:

Ossorio Arana came into the picture when he was given custody of Eva's embalmed body. He held it in a Secret Service office not far from Recoleta Cemetery for several months (now an abandoned building at the corner of Callao and Viamonte). Arana eventually transferred Eva to others for safekeeping, and she moved all over Buenos Aires ... The last officer to have custody of Eva slept with a gun underneath his pillow, afraid that someone would enter & find the casket. One night, his pregnant wife came home late and he got scared ... scared enough that he shot and killed her by mistake.

Reviewing the Evidence

2010-01-18T10:12:00.000-08:00

P.J. Coldren of Reviewing the Evidence has just posted a nice review of The Big Wake-Up (my latest novel). Here's an excerpt:

Coggins has written a very entertaining mystery. His ... take on a contemporary P.I. is enjoyable and refreshing. He manages to combine mean streets and humor in a main character with some depth to him.

See the whole piece here.

Basis Ventures

2010-01-14T07:51:00.001-08:00

My novel Vulture Capital is about a fictional venture capital firm called Basis Ventures and the deadly shenanigans that go on there. (Think of The Firm, but with VCs in place of lawyers, and perverse applications of biotechnology in place of connections to the mob.)

Although the book has been out for a while, I thought it might be fun to throw up a website for Basis Ventures, including all the partners with their bios and short descriptions of the portfolio companies in which they've invested.

You can find it here.

I used royalty-free stock photos for the pictures of the individual partners, and I had a lot of fun trying to match my descriptions from the book to the available photos from stock photography sites. The photo featured at the top of this post is the one I selected for Larry Breen, co-founder and Managing Partner of Basis Ventures.

Coming up with the names and logos of the portfolio companies was nearly as much fun. I used a name-generator service and royalty-free logos I found on the web for many of them. For their product and service descriptions, I tried to pick hot technology areas and then gin up offerings that seemed consistent with what was already being done in the space--or jump ahead a bit to suggest entirely new capabilities or technologies. For example, in the category of start-ups with offerings consistent with the current state of the art, the company Mizu purports to be the leading SaaS platform for mobile phone applications.

Of course the most important portfolio company is the one described in the book: NeuroStimix. As the Basis Ventures site describes, NeuroStimix develops neurostimulation devices to restore mobility to spinal cord injury victims. The technology from NeuroStimix is definitely pushing the envelope of what's possible now, but check out Neurostream for an example of a company offering products in this area right now.

If all this has whet your appetite for the book, you might also check out this review of it on Salon.com.

A December to Remember

2010-01-13T07:45:00.001-08:00

Last month Michelle Gagnon and I made a stop at The Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona to promote our new books, The Gatekeeper and The Big Wake-Up.

The December bestseller list is up on the store website and it appears we both did pretty darn well. Michelle came in #2 in the mass market paperback category and I managed the number 5 spot for hardcovers against such competition as Sue Grafton and Joseph Wambaugh.

That's good news, but it's hard to beat the showing I made nearly ten years ago with my first novel, The Immortal Game. Check out Poisoned Pen's bestseller list from February, 2000:

What is it about debut novels that makes them so compelling? I think (hope?) I've written better books since then, but that still seems to be the one readers associate with me.

eBook Q&A

2010-01-12T07:54:00.001-08:00

At the end of last year, Allen Pierleoni of the Sacramento Bee interviewed me and several other authors--including John Lescroart and Cara Black--on our opinions about eBooks and how they might be changing the publishing industry. Read the article here.

Since Allen (naturally) only used a portion of his Q&A with me, I thought I'd also post his full set of questions and my responses below:

As an author, what are your thoughts re: e-readers steadily making inroads into the multibillion-dollar book industry?

I welcome them. My hope is that they will encourage more reading—both among the demographic groups that buy the most traditional books and among those that currently spend more time with other entertainment media.

They are also empowering for a “mid-list” author such as myself. Since Amazon enables authors to place e-books for sale on their site directly, it allows us to republish our out of print titles or titles that we have retained the e-book rights for without cost and without involving a publisher. We are also free to set pricing as we wish to encourage sales.

For example, I uploaded my novel Vulture Capital and set the price at $1.99 for a limited time to try to build a broader readership and encourage subsequent sales of other titles. The book reached number 564 overall in Amazon’s rankings for e-books.

A final advantage e-readers and the e-book format offer to authors is the opportunity to include rich content such as links to web sites, videos or audio files with the book. That can ultimately mean a wider range of options for telling a story.

Do you think e-readers affect what readers read, and do the readers change their reading habits?

Yes. I found that I’m actually buying more books than I did before. If it’s late at night and you’re lying in bed with nothing to read, it’s very easy to switch on your Kindle, browse for a title that interests you, download it and start reading immediately. Before e-readers with wireless connectivity to the Internet, you would have probably just switched off the light or (if you had a TV in your bedroom) flipped it on.

In terms of the types of things readers read, I think e-readers work best for novels, or nonfiction that’s read serially. Based on the little I’ve used e-readers to bookmark and/or annotate text, I think they would not work very well for text books or books where there’s a need to do a lot of skipping back and forth between sections.

You for or against e-readers, again as an author. Or neutral?

I’m for them professionally for the reasons I mentioned, and personally because I do enjoy the convenience and the rapid access to new titles.

That said, I do collect first editions and I will continue to buy copies of books I cherish and want to have on my shelves as a physical keepsake or work of art. And I still read a lot of hard copy books that I’ve purchased from a bookstore or borrowed from a library.

Is there an electronic reader on your shopping list?

I bought a Kindle in the first few months after they were released by Amazon. We are planning to buy a second one for my wife.

Has the e-reader phenomenon affected your reading habits or those of someone you know? Are your reading habits changing because of e-readers and digital books?

Yes, as I mentioned I’m purchasing more books and I’m probably also reading more books in a particular topic area. The Kindle browser encourages you to do this by suggesting titles that are related to ones you have already purchased.

Do you prefer reading books on an e-reader, or in the traditional book form - or both?

I would say both. It’s hard to beat the convenience and access of an e-reader, but I still collect first editions and enjoy the experience of reading a physical book. And in my opinion, e-readers do not work well for textbooks or books where there are detailed illustrations, maps, diagrams or high resolution photographs.

Split Writing Personalities

2010-01-06T07:19:00.000-08:00

Today Riordan's Desk welcomes guest blogger Lou Berney to discuss his debut novel, Gutshot Straight, and talk about the difference between writing screenplays and prose fiction.

When I tell someone that I’m a writer, the invariable question is: What kind? I explain that I write both screenplays and prose fiction, but this is not strictly true. The more precisely correct answer would be: One part of me writes screenplays, another part writes prose fiction. And rarely the twain do meet, at least not without it turning into a heated argument.

Preparing for Take-Off

A screenplay is all about moving parts and meshing gears. Screenwriter Me, especially if he’s on deadline, constructs an insanely detailed pre-draft outline. He breaks down the narrative and calculates how many pages each component part – act, scene, beat – will run, and how many amps each will draw. If, for example, you blow your circuits in the middle of act two, you won’t have anything left for the big finish.

Fiction-Writer Me dreams up a fairly detailed pre-draft outline too, but Screenwriter Me would roll his eyes to hear it described as such. It’s more impressionistic and asks as many questions as it answers. It includes notes like, “Maybe some kind of confrontation here? Or a love scene? But does she love him? See what feels right at the time.” (Screenwriter Me is rolling his eyes again.)

The Helluva-It Principle

When you write a screenplay, you’re living in a room with four walls and square footage set in concrete (only 112 or so script pages), so efficiency is crucial. Every scene, character, and description must serve the story. If it can be cut, it probably should be. Screenwriter Me is a ruthless, cold-eyed assassin who enjoys his work. Faulkner wouldn’t have to tell him to kill his darlings, because those darlings are already dead, dismembered, and neatly buried in the backyard.

When you write a novel, you’ve got all elbow room you need. You can add a scene, a character, or a description just for the helluva it – just because, in other words, the addition might help create a richer, more textured fictional world. Fiction-Writer Me likes to throw parties and invite the whole neighborhood. While writing my novel, Gutshot Straight, I happened to read an article about the creepy, fascinating, wonderful “international marriage business.” So I found a way to work that in. Why not? The more the merrier! Just bring beer.

And the Winner Is

There are a lot of other differences between the two kinds of writing. I could probably write a book (but probably not a movie) about them. To sum up, though, I will state unequivocally that it’s a lot harder to write a screenplay than it is to write a novel, and vice versa.

A screenplay’s defined limits can comfort but also confine. A novel’s wide-open landscape can liberate but also disorient. It can be relief, in a screenplay, to be responsible for just the writing and not the acting, art direction, or cinematography. In a novel, by contrast, you have to light the cobbled streets of Casco Viejo in Panama City at midnight, and you need to provide your exotic dancers with watermelon-scented body spray. But how cool is that, that in a novel you get to do, to be, everything?

In the end, I think writing screenplays makes me a better fiction writer, and writing fiction makes me a better screenwriter. Because even though my split writing personalities don’t really get along at all, they can occasionally be coaxed to – grudgingly – read the other’s work and provide a few helpful notes.

Lou Berney is an accomplished writer, teacher, and liar. He has written feature screenplays and created TV pilots for, among others, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Focus Features, ABC, and Fox. He is the author of THE ROAD TO BOBBY JOE, a collection of stories, and his short fiction has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, New England Review, Ploughshares, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. He has taught at the University of Oklahoma, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and in the MFA program at Saint Mary's College in California. GUTSHOT STRAIGHT, his first novel, was written during the 2007-2008 film and TV Writers Guild strike. Visit his website at www.louberney.com.

Police Procedural vs. Thriller

2010-01-05T07:53:00.000-08:00

Today Riordan's Desk welcomes guest blogger Robin Burcell to discuss her latest novel, THE BONE CHAMBER, and the transition from writing police procedurals to thrillers.

They say write what you know and I did just that when I started my police procedural series with San Francisco Homicide Inspector Kate Gillespie. I was a cop, so I figured writing about a cop was the right thing to do, since much of police work was about solving mysteries, so to speak. The mystery genre, what’s not to love?

The Kate Gillespie books are definitely in the mystery genre. A murder occurs and we follow the cops as they investigate and begin to put the pieces of the puzzle together to solve the crime.

But what if your editor asks you to jump ship and dive into the thriller genre? What elements do you need to move from mystery to thriller? A thriller might have a mystery in it, and a mystery might have thrilling elements, but there is a difference between the two genres.

In my former series, Kate Gillespie investigates crimes, and her life is often endangered as a result. But the risk is usually only to Kate and maybe a few other characters and it is contained within the San Francisco bay area.

Not so in my new series, which I began moving into the thriller genre, primarily because I am in love with conspiracy theory, and it seemed a tad improbable that a police investigator would continually end up battling world conspiracies in a San Francisco backdrop.

Much like my first series, Face of a Killer (11/08) starts off with FBI agent/forensic artist Sydney Fitzpatrick looking into a murder, her father’s. All too soon she begins doubting the guilt of the man due to be executed for that murder. That’s where the similarities to my SFPD mystery series ends. A thriller must be bigger in scope, with an imminent threat that has larger than life implications. The investigation in Face of a Killer leads to a cover-up that involves top US officials, the military and the CIA. Should Sydney fail, it isn’t just her life at stake, but that of her family, a number of FBI agents and a worldwide banking scandal that could send the nation’s economy reeling.

My latest novel The Bone Chamber delves even further into thriller territory when FBI’s Sydney Fitzpatrick teams up with black ops agents to battle larger than life enemies (a cabal bent on taking over the world via shadow governments), a setting that encompasses several continents (North America, Europe and Africa), and with even more at risk than just the world economy. It also links three periods in history to the present day: the recent past (1980s), a few centuries past (1700s), and the biblical past (1400s BCE). Add a dash of forensic science, throw in an investigator from the Vatican to assist with all things biblical, threaten the world when the past collides with the present, and voilà!

That’s my path from mystery to thriller. Of course I’m not the only author who’s gone that route. Like I said about the mystery genre, what’s not to love? So, which camp are you in? Mysteries? Thrillers? A little of both? And which authors do you think do them well?

Robin Burcell, an FBI-trained forensic artist, has worked as a police officer, detective and hostage negotiator. THE BONE CHAMBER is her latest international thriller about an FBI forensic artist. FACE OF A KILLER received a starred review from Library Journal. She is the author of four previous novels. For a sneak peek of THE BONE CHAMBER, view the video trailer on her website at: www.robinburcell.com/

Subdued Magic Has a Cover

2010-01-02T16:34:00.000-08:00

Subdued Magic, the forthcoming biography of Raymond Chandler by Tom Williams that I blogged about earlier, now has a (cool) cover:

And some associated jacket text:

To describe a book as Chandleresque is instantly to conjure a particular world. A world of violence; of mean streets trodden by lonely, hard-drinking private detectives; of shady bars inhabited by dangerous femme fatales women with the kind of bodies that would make a bishop kick out a stained glass window. It's the world of Philip Marlowe. A world left to us by Raymond Chandler the writer who, more than any other, defined modern fiction. What we know of Chandler himself, however, is shrouded in secrets and half-truths as deep and deceptive as anything in his magisterial novel The Long Goodbye. Born in Chicago in 1888, loneliness and desertion marked Chandler from the outset the disappearance of his alcoholic father forcing the boy and his doting mother back to Ireland, and eventually London, where he enrolled in the prestigious Dulwich College the proving ground of Wodehouse and Forester. Later, dissatisfaction as a civil servant and failure as a journalist sent him back to America, to Los Angeles, where after heroic, but rarely spoken of combat in the trenches during WW1 he began an affair with Cissy Pascal, a married woman eighteen years his senior who, following the death his vehemently disapproving mother, became Chandler's wife and the most troubled and troubling relationship of his adult life. It was only during middle age, after worsening alcoholism wrecked a lucrative career as an oilman, that Chandler seriously turned to the pulp and crime fiction that would soon make his name as well as open doors in Hollywood. Although success was to prove at best bittersweet. As Tom William's new biography demonstrates, Chandler's inability to realise his literary ambitions, a depressive and obsessive attitude toward his craft, infidelity, alcohol and a suicidal turn after the death of Cissy in 1954, were to prevent him ever recapturing the success and verve of his earlier novels. But what remained, as contemporaries as great as Auden, Waugh and Fleming recognised, was a body of work amongst the finest of its time, or any other, and a life touched by subdued magic. Tom Williams is a writer and journalist living in north London. He has previously written for the Observer and the Spectator, and is a protege of John Sutherland whose shared passion for Chandler, and own abandoned biography of the novelist, inspired Tom to embark on this book.

See the UK Amazon.com entry for it here--although Tom tells me the release date they list is a bit optimistic.

The Big Wake-Up Goes Electronic!

2009-12-31T11:35:00.001-08:00

Granted it doesn't look quite as colorful as its hardcover or trade paperback brethren, but I'm pleased nonetheless to announce availability of the eBook edition of The Big Wake-Up. Now available through Amazon or Mobipocket. Check it out.

Collector Alert

2009-12-23T10:50:00.001-08:00

The Big Wake-Up
Originally uploaded by Mark Coggins

Bleak House Books only printed 1,000 copies of the hardcover edition of my new novel, The Big Wake-Up. I found out today (12/23/09) that there are less than 25 copies remaining in their warehouse.

If you are interested in a first edition of the (collectible, small print run) hardcover with the wonderful Owen Smith cover illustration, I suggest you snap one up soon!

On Bookgasm

2009-12-23T06:57:00.000-08:00

Bruce Grossman, Bookgasm reviewer and author of the weekly column, "Bullets, Broads, Blackmail and Bombs" has posted a nice review of The Big Wake-Up (my latest novel). Here's an excerpt:

In what easily could have been called The Maltese Peron, Coggins’ detective novel is infused with enough humor that it will make you forget how bloody things get... Coggins’ writing will have you ... engrossed... He’s a gifted storyteller who infuses not only humor to balance out the brutality, but also throws in plenty of pulp-like affectations, leaving readers to clamor for more.

I'm particularly pleased Bruce made the connection to The Maltese Falcon. Like Falcon, the plot of Wake-Up is driven by a mad hunt for a much desired, almost mystical object. In addition, there are several references to Falcon text in the book for Hammett cognoscente.

Read the whole review here.

On an Indie Best List

2009-12-22T07:33:00.000-08:00

Nathan Cain of Independent Crime has put together a best of the year list for independent crime fiction and--what do you know--The Big Wake-Up is on it.

Check it out here because, as he says, "I've decided that if you don't read the following books you are a loser and suck."

Win a copy of THE BIG WAKE-UP

2009-12-15T09:46:00.000-08:00

You have just two days to enter to win a copy of The Big Wake-Up (my latest novel) in a contest sponsored by Lesa Holstine on her blog, "Lesa's Book Critiques."

Entering is easy--you just have to e-mail her! Get the particulars here.

Get a Clue and Vote for a Cover

2009-12-14T07:16:00.001-08:00

The editors of the Hidden Staircase Mystery Books have a new Mystery Godoku Puzzle up on their blog. This week's clue?

Mark Coggins’ fifth August Riordan mystery has this title (without “The”, 9 letters).

You can see the post and the puzzle here.

And speaking of that particular book, The Rap Sheet has an electronic poll up for their annual "Best Crime Fiction Covers" competition. You might want to wander over there and put in a vote for the cover of a certain book with 9 letters in its title, not counting "The." Do it here.

Writers with Drinks

2009-12-13T15:38:00.001-08:00

I was a guest for Charlie Jane Anders' Writers with Drinks at The Make-Out Room in San Francisco last night.

The monthly gathering is kind of variety show for authors. I read part of the first chapter of my new novel, The Big Wake-Up, but was by far the straightest, unhippest, most-white-bread-with-mayo-est of the group.

It was an SRO crowd and all the other guests gave tremendous readings and/or performances. Furthermore, I got to meet and hang out with Dan Fante--who read from his novel 86'd--and Domenic Stansberry (one of my favorite crime novelists), who dropped by for the show.

As you might expect, The "Make-Out" Room is pretty dark, but I managed to capture some grainy no-flash pictures of emcee Charlie and the other guests. Check 'em out below ...

Charlie Jane Anders

Dan Fante

Mystery Scene on THE BIG WAKE-UP

2009-12-11T11:02:00.001-08:00

Here's an excerpt from Charles L. P. Silet's review of (my new novel) The Big Wake-Up from the latest edition of Mystery Scene Magazine:

[August] Riordan is ... a tough, wisecracking, chip off the old Philip Marlowe block. Mark Coggins writes a fast-paced, and at times very funny crime novel.

Given that Mr. Silet has written a book of essays on Woody Allen's films, I particularly appreciate his assessment of the book's humor.

Read the full review here.

Three Guys at a Mystery Event

2009-12-11T00:01:00.000-08:00

Three "finely aged" male crime writers overheard at this year's Men of Mystery Event:

Writer 1
(Speaking of a friend)
And now he has a 24-year-old girlfriend. Can you imagine that? I wouldn't even know what to do with a 24-year-old girlfriend.

Writer 2
Not even for an hour?

Writer 1
An hour? Maybe 5 minutes.

Writer 3
With a thirty minute warning for the pill to work.

Afterlife in Recoleta

2009-12-08T07:43:00.000-08:00

As I discussed in my Rap Sheet post on my new novel, The Big Wake-Up, the inspiration for the book came from a tour of Buenos Aires' famous La Recoleta Cemetery led by travel writer and photographer Robert Wright.

Now Robert has returned the favor by writing about The Big Wake-Up on AfterLife, his fascinating blog about La Recoleta. Check out the post in English here--or in Spanish here.

Postcards from a Signing

2009-12-07T07:49:00.001-08:00

Artist, photographer--and friend--Daniel Friedman attended Michelle Gagnon's and my signing at Poisoned Pen last week and took a few pictures of me doing my PowerPoint presentation on the book. If you missed it, check out the web-based version of my presentation here.

Rube Photographer in the Big City

2009-12-06T16:15:00.000-08:00

As I reported earlier, I recently managed to garner an honorable mention in in The Camera Club of New York’s (CCNY) 2009 National Juried Competition for my photograph of a Savannah Police Statue. The CCNY, established in 1884, is the oldest camera club in the country and among the most respected. A total of 300 photographers submitted their work.

On Saturday, I attended the reception for the competition exhibit, which was held in a Manhattan gallery. All the winning photographs were on display and many of the winning photographers were present, including the top three finishers: Antonio Chirinos, Mark Fernandes and Curtis Hamilton. It was humbling to say the least.

There were handouts with bios and artist statements from all the winners and I believe just about everyone but me had a degree in photography (most commonly an MFA) and had previously exhibited their work nationally and/or been selected for other juried competitions.

I faked my way through my bio since I've done that often enough in my crime-fiction writing career, but the artist statement really had me sweating. I'd never done one before. Here's what I came up with:

"Savannah Police Statue" comes from a documentation of crypts, funeral monuments and statues undertaken to illustrate my Fall 2009 novel, The Big Wake-Up. In making the image, I sought to emphasize the dripping Gothic atmosphere as a contrast to the rather severe and rigidly upright (stainless steel) representation of law enforcement.

I was particularly leery of having the thing made public because I had poked fun at artist statements in my novel Candy from Strangers. Here's what PI August Riordan says about one from a character who has an exhibit at a Noe Valley Starbucks:

I lingered a moment at the table and then went back to the photo exhibit. I found an artist statement tacked up in one corner ... which included quotes from Plato, Carl Jung and the obligatory reference to Joseph Campbell.

I guess mine quite wasn't quite that pretentious--despite my use of the word "documentation"--but I did find it hard not to do what I ascribed to the character in Candy: watching people as they examined my photograph!

It's for sale at the gallery for the low-low price of $300 throughout the rest of December. Get it while it's hot.

Coggins @ the Teague

2009-12-05T06:28:00.000-08:00

Lesa Holstine has a great write-up on Michelle Gagnon's and my visit to the Velma Teague Library in Glendale, Arizona. Read it here.

Page 69 Test

2009-11-27T10:08:00.000-08:00

My new novel, The Big Wake-Up, is subjected to the Page 69 Test at Marshal Zeringue's wonderful blog. Here's the photo illustrating page 69 of the book. Check it out.

Of Mermaids and eBooks

2009-11-25T10:03:00.000-08:00

Apropos of nothing to do with crime fiction, here's a picture of a mermaid statue I took at the Allerton Garden on the grounds of the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Kauai. One interesting detail about the statue is that Mr. Allerton apparently felt that her (original) forked tail contrasted too much with the spear-like shape of the surrounding foliage, so he cut it off! Hey, maybe there was a connection to crime after all ...

An item more congruent to the topics typically covered in this blog may be this article on ebooks and ebook readers from the Sacramento Bee. In it, John Lescroart, Cara Black and I (among others) are quoted on our opinions about them. Turns out I'm the only one in the bunch who has an ebook reader, which did surprise me a bit.

Mr. De Mille, I'm Ready for My Close-up

2009-11-19T08:28:00.000-08:00

Although my new novel, The Big Wake-Up, came out at the beginning of November, it's only recently that I've been able to lay my hands on my very own copies of the hardcover and trade paperback editions of the book.

Here they are on my kitchen counter. Pretty handsome looking twins, aren't they?

Have Camera, Will Travel

2009-11-18T07:34:00.001-08:00

Carol Thomas, the Mystery Series Examiner for Examiner.com, did a nice write-up on my other avocation (as distinguished from crime fiction writing) : playing paparazzi to the (real) crime fiction writing stars.

She's put together a list of some of the bigger crime fiction celebs I've bagged, and a nice slide show of the photographs. Head over to her column and check it out.

If You Can't Make the Book Tour ...

2009-11-16T00:01:00.000-08:00

To promote my new novel, The Big Wake-Up, I have been touring a select number of bookstores with partner-in-crime Michelle Gagnon, who is promoting her thrilling new book, The Gatekeeper.

Instead of the usual dry readings, we've been trying to spice things up a bit with PowerPoint presentations.

For those of you who haven't been able to check out our show live, here's a recorded version of the really big shoe ...

Riordan's Character and a Holiday Shopping Guide

2009-11-13T06:49:00.001-08:00

My private eye protagonist August Riordan gets put under the microscope over at Ann Chambers Theis' site Overbooked. Here's an excerpt about his TV-watching habits:

It's not clear that he owns a functioning TV at present. If he does, he probably missed the digital conversion. All that said, he would enjoy Mad Men if he could receive it.

Read the whole profile here. (And check out the profiles for other characters, including Alafair Burke's Ellie Hatcher here.)

For even more background on Riordan, take a gander at his page on Kevin Burton Smith's Thrilling Detective site. And don't miss the banner ad at the bottom of the page for my new novel, The Big Wake-Up, while you're at it.

Speaking of my new book, syndicated columnist Terri Schlichenmeyer provides a holiday shopping guide for book lovers h ere, and makes The Big Wake-Up one of her two mystery picks.

The Not-So-Poisonous Pen

2009-11-10T07:21:00.001-08:00

I received the latest edition of The Poisoned Pen newsletter yesterday and was very gratified to find that owner Barbara Peters and her husband Robert Rosenwald (who is President of Poisoned Pen Press) both selected The Big Wake-Up as a November staff pick.