Bill James

Bill James's new book is Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence.

From his Q & A with Randy Dotinga of the Christian Science Monitor:

Q: Plenty of high-and-mighty people act appalled when the country gets obsessed by celebrity crime instead of paying attention to, say, poverty or the deficit. Why are stories of true crime are actually worth our attention?

A: Crime stories reveal things about human nature that we keep very carefully hidden most of the time. We're fascinated with crime cases because we're fascinated by what goes on in people's heads, really deep down where you can't normally get to.

We are in a long process of eliminating crime from our society, a process that was thousands of years old before the Romans. The process has come a great distance since the time of the Romans; it has come a good distance in the last 150 years; it has come some distance in our lifetimes, in the last 30 or 40 years. But the process is so slow and so gradual that one can only see the progress by staring back across the centuries.

Eliminating these terrible events from society is not one problem. It is, rather, hundreds of similar and interlocking problems, which we attack one at a time. Crime stories are the knowledge base for that campaign, that endless and eternal struggle to rid the world of events of this nature.

Q: In your years of reading about true crime, what are some of the major lessons you've learned about the justice system?

A: • Well-meaning people create injustice because they are absolutely convinced of things that are not true.

Prosecutors dig in and double down on convictions in cases in which they are just absolutely wrong. Prosecutors don't want to convict anyone who is innocent. So when they accidentally convict someone who is in fact innocent, they very often – and I would say almost always – go into denial. They begin to insist that the accused/convicted person is in fact guilty, even if the evidence to the contrary is obvious and overwhelming.

The best protection against injustice is...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Kirk Russell

Kirk Russell is the author of four novels about California Department of Fish and Game warden John Marquez. A Killing in China Basin, his new novel, introduces San Francisco homicide inspector Ben Raveneau.

From Russell's Q & A with Lenny Picker for Publishers Weekly:

Q: You succeeded in breaking new ground with your Marquez books. How do you think the Raveneau series will distinguish itself?

A: I don't know that it will. The big city detective has been written a thousand times and sometimes very, very well. I wanted to try to make a homicide inspector who fits the times and who might be real, and if he was, you'd want to know him. And I want to write San Francisco. I lived around it most of my life. There's this first book, and a second next winter, and between the two that's enough, I think, to tell if Raveneau will catch on. I'm still getting a feel for the character.

Q: What about San Francisco as a setting appeals to you?

A: The city's presence, how it sits nearly surrounded by water at the end of a peninsula, bridges reaching toward it, and the feel that it is a place you go to, not from. There's the light and the way it changes and a natural moodiness and brilliance. As a city, it's international in a way that you can't sell with a motivated Chamber of Commerce. It's a tolerant city, still carrying the gold rush fever, a place people arrive at to start over or start a new company, or in the case of crime fiction become someone else. And a homicide inspector in San Francisco can...[read on]

Visit Kirk Russell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Courtney E. Smith

Courtney E. Smith is the author of Record Collecting for Girls: Unleashing Your Inner Music Nerd, One Album at a Time.

From her Q & A with Jordan Foster at Publishers Weekly:

You talk about feeling strangely annoyed when a band that you loved—the Shins—hit it big in the film Garden State. Will this ring true for casual music fans?

It's different for everyone. That's the beautiful part about the way you relate to music. Some people want to stay really small. When I was in college, I interned on a radio show that was the "alternative to alternative." People would call in and berate my friend Josh for playing their favorite bands on the radio because they didn't want other people to know about them. He'd let them talk and then explain that your favorite band didn't get into music to not be heard. They want to be successful, and you should want that for them if you're really a fan. And there are plenty of other people who, before Garden State, would have never heard of the Shins, and that movie was their introduction. So there was nothing for them to get mad about. Those were the people that the Shins might be the most out-there album in their record collections.

In terms of cool soundtracks to own for your generation, did Baz Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet kick off the craze?

It's the one I remember. Clueless came before that, but it wasn't cool to own. There wasn't that congruency to it, and I don't know if it had a music supervisor in the same way Romeo + Juliet did. I was surprised when I was researching this section how many of the cool artists who are on the Twilight soundtracks referenced the Romeo + Juliet one. It kept coming up. I felt the cultural impact when it came out because I owned it, all the girls in my dorm owned it, and it seemed like "the thing." But...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian Selznick

Brian Selznick is the author of the 2008 Caldecott Medal-winning novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and the new novel, Wonderstruck.

From his Q & A with Sue Corbett at Publishers Weekly:

Hugo Cabret was a thick book, but you’ve outdone yourself with Wonderstruck. Will we need wheelbarrows for your next work?

I guess Wonderstruck does make Hugo look slimmer. There are 100 more drawings. But I think the size may have maxed out with Wonderstruck. I actually do feel bad, especially about kids lugging these books around.

A hundred more illustrations! Did you do them in the same miniature style as Hugo?

The illustrations are the same size as they were for Hugo Cabret – one-quarter the size of what you see in the finished book. In Hugo, that was a function of the ending – they were the size of a picture the automaton could draw so at the end you would learn that the whole book had been drawn by the automaton, but I liked the technique. When you enlarge them it loosens everything up, as opposed to the artwork of somebody like Chris Van Allsburg who paints these huge illustrations and then has them shrunk down to fit in a book. That has the effect of really concentrating his artwork and it’s glorious. This does the opposite, but I like what that does for my drawings.

Tell us about Sean Murtha, who you credit in the acknowledgments as having planted the seed for Wonderstruck.

In the early 1990s, Sean was a colleague of mine at Eeyore’s on the Upper West Side. He left to work at the Museum of Natural History, painting dioramas and building displays. He invited me to visit his workshop, which I did. Going to the museum and entering doors marked “Do not enter,” or “Employees Only,” was...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Kevin Wilson

Kevin Wilson's new novel is The Family Fang. From his Q & A with Alexandra Alter at the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog:

The literary debut about a dysfunctional family is sort of a cliché at this point, but the Fangs are bizarre enough to stand apart even from other messed up fictional families. What was your family life like growing up?

The one thing I did draw on from my parents — my parents are very insular. They didn’t have outside friends. We were each other’s best friends…My parents were distrustful of the outside world. They didn’t think much good came out of it…The outside world was this strange place that was not so much dangerous as not as interesting as what went on in the house.

How did the idea for the book come about?

In early 2008, we had this baby and I needed to write. Every little thing I did I thought, “We are going to ruin him for the rest of his life, because I don’t know what to do.” That’s when I got the idea for this book. I think I was trying to create worse parents than me.

What made you focus on performance art?

I wanted the parents to be...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Simon Garfield

Simon Garfield's new book is Just My Type: A Book about Fonts.

From his Q & A with Thierry Somers for the blog of 200% Magazine:

200%: In the chapter “What is it about the Swiss” you write about the New Yorker Cyrus Highsmith who tried to “spend a day without Helvetica”. This was quite challenging as the typeface is ubiquitously present in our lives. Whenever Highsmith saw something spelled out in Helvetica he averted his eyes. He wouldn’t take any Helvetica-signed Transport or buy any Helvetica branded products.

After you had written this book, when you walk in the street, do you look at signs of shop windows and try to identify the typeface?

Simon Garfield: Sadly, yes. It’s a disease called Typomania – wherever I go, I see lettering and signs and advertising in a new way, looking behind the message, at the clothing of what’s being said. I might not enjoy a film so much if I can’t recognise the font of the opening credits. So I loved “The Social Network”: Futura – that was easy.

200%: Your background is not design journalism or critiquing, which may be the reason that your book on typefaces and fonts is very light-hearted, amusing and engaging, whereas most books on typefaces are very serious, even earnest. Do you consider it turned out to be advantageous that you don’t have such a background and could approach the subject more as an outsider?

Simon Garfield: Definitely. The world of type designs and typography, like any important and creative world, is full of little debates and spats and wars, sometimes based on elitism, most often based on heartfelt passion. So it helped that...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Megan Abbott

Megan Abbott is the Edgar®-winning author of six books, including Die a Little, The Song Is You, Queenpin, and Bury Me Deep. She has been nominated for many awards, including three Edgar® Award nominations, Hammett Prize, the Macavity, Anthony and Barry Awards and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

From her Q & A with Brendan M. Leonard at The Rap Sheet about her new novel, The End of Everything:

BML: One of the things I really enjoyed about The End of Everything is I thought, even though your book is set a little bit earlier than the late 1980s and early ’90s, you captured the whole idea of “stranger danger,” or looking over your shoulder in the way that The Lovely Bones couldn’t get into, because this is set a little bit later. You evoke Polly Klass and things like that. Were those just things you remember growing up, that kind of fear being omnipresent?

MA: I do. I remember ... there was a post-traumatic change, starting with the Adam [Walsh] case in Florida. ... I remember there being a sudden panic about it, and I remember in my hometown, there was this crazy thing, where at school, they gave everyone these signs, and I don’t remember why it was the letter E--maybe it wasn’t the letter E, but that’s my memory--in red, and you’d put it in your front window, and that was supposed to tell children that this was a safe house. If someone was following you, you’d run to that house. Even then, I remember thinking it was the craziest thing in the world, because if I wanted to kidnap a child, what would I do? I’d put a big sign in my window!

But I remember this sort of palpable (even though I lived a half-block from my school) sense of danger, that didn’t feel natural, exactly, because there didn’t seem to be anything happening to anybody; but so much [was in] the zeitgeist.

And it wouldn’t be like now, with online predators--everything would be so different now. And with how careful we are, with AMBER alerts and everything. There was such a sense of ... if you grew up in the late ’70s/early ’80s, you were allowed to do whatever you wanted. It was a very permissive time for children. “Go ride your bike for five hours, and come back.” And then that suddenly ended, and so it was like, all of a sudden, all...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Megan Abbott's website.

The Page 69 Test: Bury Me Deep.

The Page 69 Test: The End of Everything.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julie Salamon

Julie Salamon is the author of Wendy and the Lost Boys, a biography of playwright Wendy Wasserstein, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for The Heidi Chronicles in 1989.

From Salamon's Q & A with Barbara Chai at the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog:

Why did you pick Wasserstein as your subject?

I arrived at it in the easiest way I’ve ever arrived at a topic — usually that’s the hardest part about writing a book — my editor suggested it to me. I was just coming back from a publicity tour of my last book, “Hospital,” and Ann Godoff at Penguin called me up and said, “I have no idea if this is of interest to you but it’s gotten onto my radar as something I’d like to do, and I think you’d be perfect for it.” I have to say my first reaction wasn’t wild enthusiasm. A book about a playwright just seemed a little narrow to me. It was actually right before we were going to Maine in 2008. My husband and another good friend of mine, a movie director, both said this is great. I was Googling around and pretty early on I found that article Frank Rich had written not long after Wendy Wasserstein died. It talked about all these secrets, and I thought, that’s kind of interesting. It felt like there was something very intriguing.

How did you begin your research?

The next step was meeting Andre Bishop, Wendy Wasserstein’s literary executor. He wanted to have somebody write a biography of Wendy, and he didn’t care about having any control over the book, which is astonishing. He then read several of my books – it was like an audition – and liked them. We met and talked about what the process would be. My process is always the same: I’ve done several nonfiction narratives and it’s always, “I want you to give me complete access to everything and then I’ll let you read the book when it’s all finished.” So it’s a one-sided bargain to a certain extent, but ...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Miriam Toews

Miriam Toews’s first novel, Summer of My Amazing Luck, was published in 1996; it was nominated for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour and won the John Hirsch Award. Published two years later, her second novel, A Boy of Good Breeding, won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. Her most recent novel is the bestselling A Complicated Kindness, which was a Giller Prize Finalist and won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction.

Her new novel, Irma Voth, will be released in September.

From her Q & A with Dan Eltringham at the Financial Times:

Who are your literary influences?

Alice Munro, David Markson, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf.
* * *

What is the last thing you read that made you laugh out loud?

The Meaning of Life by Terry Eagleton.
* * *

Who would you most like to sit next to at a dinner party?

Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada, so I can let him know how profoundly disappointed I am in him.
* * *

What book do you wish you’d written?

A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley.

Read the complete interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Dunn

Matthew Dunn is the author of the debut novel, Spycatcher (aka Spartan in the UK).

From his dialogue with Ali Karim at The Rap Sheet:

AK: So tell us, where did you get the idea to pen this novel? And did you have any issue with your former employers at SIS [Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service] when you completed it?

MD: I was very clear that I wanted to write a novel that really captured the essence of what it feels like to be an operative in the field and to give the reader the feeling that they were actually on a real mission. The plot derives from my imagination, though it is grounded and inspired by real situations that I and others faced. I also wanted my antagonists to reflect the type of people that I was combating when in MI6--evil people, yes, but nevertheless highly intelligent, sophisticated, and often charismatic individuals rather than unintelligent fanatics.

SIS has to vet and approve all of my books. I’m on very good terms with them, and thankfully they made no deletions or amendments to my first novel.

AK: Tell us about your main character, Will Cochrane, as well as the mysterious Megiddo and Lana. And most writers I know mine their personal experiences to craft characters. Have you done the same here?

MD: Will Cochrane is an experienced MI6 operative and the Service’s most effective officer. He is a loner because of the extreme nature of his work and his complex and tragic background. He mentally toys with the idea of another life and love, but his problem is that he worries that if people get close to him, they will die.

Megiddo is a senior general in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He’s planning a massive terrorist operation against a location in the West. It will be his “masterpiece,” and Will is tasked to capture him. For most of the book you do not see [Megiddo] but, rather like Professor Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes’ day, you feel his presence at all times.

Lana is an Arab woman who is trying to carve out a living as a freelance journalist in Paris. She has a connection to Megiddo that goes back to the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s. Reluctantly, Will uses her to try to lure out Megiddo.

These characters, and all others in the novel, are fictional. But...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue