Ariel S. Winter

Ariel S. Winter is author of The Twenty-Year Death, "the brand-new and quite extraordinary crime novel" (according to crime fiction maven J. Kingston Pierce of The Rap Sheet).

From Winter's Q & A with Pierce:

JKP: This new novel is really three books in one, evoking the storytelling styles of Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler, and Jim Thompson. Whose style did you find the most enjoyable to work in?

ASW: I know the answer “all of them” is not very satisfying, but I don’t think I preferred one to another, really.

JKP: Have you long been a reader of crime and mystery fiction?

ASW: I’ve always been a mystery reader, though without considering myself a mystery reader. When I was a kid I read Sue Grafton, but really I was (and am) a die-hard comic-book reader. Most superhero fiction is actually detective/crime fiction, and I was especially a Batman fan, which is all detective/crime fiction. That, along with books like Sin City and One Hundred Bullets, fueled my interest in the hard-boiled aesthetic.

Then in the summer between senior year of high school and freshman year of college, a friend and I set ourselves the goal of watching all 100 of [the American Film Institute’s] best American films. We made it through about 60 of them, and many of those films are noir crime films: The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Chinatown, The Godfather, etc. So when I had the opportunity to take a hard-boiled fiction and film noir class in college, I signed up. That cemented my interest in classic hard-boiled crime: Simenon, Chandler, and Thompson, obviously, but also James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and Patricia Highsmith. The only modern I have read in depth is James Ellroy, but he’s working in the same milieu; and I love Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon, who’ve both written within the hard-boiled aesthetic as well.

As an aside here, I’ve recently become...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Ariel S. Winter's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Twenty-Year Death.

--Marshal Zeringue