Mountain View Cemetery
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 CemeteryAnother 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 DahliaYes, 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?
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 ...
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 decided to give it another sample where I was absolutely, positively--no holds barred--attempting to precisely mimic the style of another writer:
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:
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:
No sale!
Paranormal Cover
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?
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
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
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!
