Duane Swierczynski

Duane Swierczynski is the author of several crime thrillers, including the Edgar-nominated and Anthony Award-winning Expiration Date, as well the Charlie Hardie series (Fun and Games, Hell and Gone, Point and Shoot), which have been nominated for Anthony, Shamus, Macavity and Barry awards. Many of his novels are currently in development for TV.

From Swierczynski's Q & A with Robb Cadigan:

Hey Duane, when did you know you wanted to be a writer? When did you know you were one?

Sophomore year of high school, when I would write short horror stories and pass them to my friends -- who'd laugh or be grossed out, or ideally, both. I can't remember a moment where I 'knew," but I remember obsessing over the question during my high school and college years.

Who or what inspired you as a kid?

The Splatterpunk school of horror writers -- Clive Barker, David J. Schow, Skipp and Spector -- were huge influences. For their attitude as much as the material. It was my version of punk rock.

What creative work most recently inspired you?

I learn something from everything I read or listen to; right now I'm reading BURNT OFFERINGS by Robert Marasco, and it's a great lesson in how to write a slow burn. (Seriously, no pun intended...)

The most underrated creative (writer, musician, artist) is …

Pretty much everyone I admire.

In moments of self doubt, how do you push through?

Like Mickey Spillane, I...[read on]

Visit Swierczynski's Secret Dead Blog.

My Book, The Movie: The Blonde.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Loftus

From false-memory expert Elizabeth Loftus's Q & A with Alison George for New Scientist, reprinted in Slate:

G: You're known for debunking the idea of repressed memories. Why focus on them?

EL: In the 1990s we began to see these recovered-memory cases. In the first big one, a man called George Franklin was on trial. His daughter claimed she had witnessed her father kill her best friend when she was 8 years old—but had only remembered this 20 years later. And that she had been raped by him and repressed that memory too. Franklin was convicted of the murder, and that started this repressed-memory ball rolling through the legal system. We began to see hundreds of cases where people were accusing others based on claims of repressed memory. That's what first got me interested.

AG: How did you study the process of creating false memories?

EL: We needed a different paradigm for studying these types of recollections. I developed a method for creating "rich false memories" by using strong suggestion. The first such memory was about getting lost in a shopping mall as a child

AG: How susceptible are people to having these types of memories implanted?

EL: Depending on the study, you might get as many as 50 percent of people falling for the suggestion and developing a complete or partial false memory.

AG: Do you think it's not possible to repress memories of traumatic events?

EL: It is possible not to think about something for a long time, even something unpleasant that happened to you. But what's been claimed in these repressed-memory cases is something, by definition, that's too extreme to be explained by ordinary forgetting and remembering. They're saying that in...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates's 2013 novel The Accursed deals with the scourge placed on the founding families of Princeton University, where Oates teaches.

From the author's Q & A with Jane Ciabattari for The Daily Beast:

What made you think of Princeton as the setting for a gothic novel?

As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era; and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University. The phenomenon of the rich white Christian community that becomes afflicted by a "curse"—the emergence of the repressed, the denied, and unconscionably cast-off moral responsibilities to protect Negroes—(as African Americans were called at the time) from the harm of racist threats, intimidation, and mob violence. White Christian leaders might have spoken out against racism, and against extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, but did not. The Accursed is also about the roiling struggle of women's rights—politically, socially, psychologically, sexually. Wilhelmina and Annabel are heroines, of a kind. And they don't surrender romance and love, but end the novel married, we are to assume happily.

You wrote a draft of The Accursed in the early 1980s, then abandoned it. Why did you wait thirty years before returning to it? Did you use a new focus while working on the final draft?

I'd returned to the manuscript a number of times over the years, worked on it but set it aside; the challenge was to find a point of entry, a narrative "voice" that wasn't so 19th century, and a structure that could accommodate numerous characters and perspectives. I had not ever "abandoned" the novel—it was rather more that I wanted to totally rewrite it, but had not quite the key to structuring the story. For some reason, in 2011, when I returned...[read on]

Learn about the book that changed Joyce Carol Oates's life.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lisa Jean Moore and Mary Kosut

Lisa Jean Moore and Mary Kosut are the authors of Buzz: Urban Beekeeping and the Power of the Bee. From their Q & A at the NYU Press blog:

Question: What got you interested in studying urban beekeeping?

Lisa Jean Moore and Mary Kosut: We got interested in studying urban beekeeping because it seems as if the bee is the animal of the moment. Lisa Jean said, doesn’t it seem like bees are popping up everywhere? In farmer’s markets, at city fairs, people are taking beekeeping classes, and essentially it was a question of the fascination with bees in New York City.

We were also interested in the DIY movement that is very popular in many urban centers in the United States and in particular Brooklyn, where we live. The ways in which the DIY movement cleaves with urban homesteading. Urban homesteading is where people take some of the country into the city and do things like bake bread, make beer, knit, and raise chickens. Or have fermentation parties – there is connection between fermentation parties and bees – making mead. (And apparently bees are also the gateway drug to chickens.)

As professors, we were also interested in the trends regarding what students do the years after college. It used to be that students would take the year off and go get a Eurail pass and travel around Europe. But we find now that our students are traveling around to different urban farms, or even rural farms, and doing organic farming – or Woofing – where you stay on organic farms and work in exchange for your room and board. We were fascinated by this need for the return to the land and how it has been modified from the 1970s to be in urban spaces.

Like the green-roof – the Eagle Street Rooftop Farms in Greenpoint, Brooklyn where they have an extensive rooftop farm with all sorts of vegetables, bunnies, chickens and bees. One of the many places in the city that is bringing nature into the urban as part of greening initiatives. Dropping out while staying in. Having all the luxuries of urban life while at the same time having this alternative identity and practice it. Bees are part of that practice.

We were also interested in people making...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel Woodrell

Daniel Woodrell's latest novel, the first since 2006’s Winter’s Bone, is The Maid’s Version.

From the author's Q & A with Noah Charney for The Daily Beast:

You have a wonderful way of provoking in the reader a creeping dread, and I mean that as a compliment. From a writer’s perspective, is this something that you proactively seek to inject into your stories and novels, and if so is there a sort of recipe that you would recommend to other authors who admire the provocation of that sensation in your work?

Dread may be provoked because I don’t think about doing so, at all. I tell the story by feel, most of the time, and I am not much given to labyrinthian digressions, but seem to be naturally drawn to compression and pace, and the feelings come about on their own. Miles Davis once said (about ballads, I think) that starkness of presentation makes the romance all the more compelling. And there’s this from Thelonious Monk: “Just play the notes you really mean.”

The first page of The Maid’s Version has some haunting, incantatory prose. I was particularly struck with your use of some verbal repetitions: “She’s sit on the edge of her bed, long hair down, down to the floor and shaking as she brushed and brushed.” This produces a sort of songlike, ghost-lit campfire storytelling effect. Is this a conscious authorial technique on your part, or do you just let it flow and see what appears?

That sound and rhythm are ingrained by now. I learned a lot from Hemingway, Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, the Bible, Dylan Thomas. All sorts of Irish writers: McGahern, O’Brien, O’Flaherty, Trevor, Bowen, Michael McLaverty, and a boatload more. And writers from the American South: Shirley Ann Grau, McCullers, O’Connor, Capote, McCarthy, Barry Hannah, and have always had very strong feelings for anything James Agee wrote. Add A.J. Liebling, Raymond Chandler, Hammett, Cain, and the boys, Nelson Algren and William Kennedy. Rhythm, repetition, incantation—all good to...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Douglas Corleone

Douglas Corleone is the author of contemporary crime novels published by St. Martin’s Minotaur. His debut novel One Man's Paradise was a finalist for the 2010 Shamus Award for Best First Novel and won the 2009 Minotaur Books / Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award. His third novel Last Lawyer Standing is his latest book featuring criminal defense attorney Kevin Corvelli.

Corleone's new international thriller is Good As Gone.

From his Q & A with Michelle at the Beauty and Lace blog:

Where do your story inspirations come from?

My inspiration for Good As Gone came from a one-page article I’d read online about a private investigator in Tampa, Florida, who specializes in retrieving children kidnapped by their estranged parents and taken overseas to countries that don’t recognize U.S. custody decisions. Fortunately, I printed the article and saved it for two years at the bottom of my filing cabinet. When my agent said that my editor would like to see something new from me, I immediately went digging and had a one-page synopsis for Good As Gone a few hours later. My earlier books, the Kevin Corvelli legal mysteries, were based largely on my experiences as a New York City criminal defense attorney and a newcomer to the Hawaiian Islands.

How do you choose your settings?

My first three novels were set in Hawaii, because I’d just moved here and I wanted to capture a New Yorker’s first experience with the islands, particularly the culture shock. But my love of travel led to my choice of settings for Good As Gone. I wanted to take Simon Fisk through...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Douglas Corleone's website.

Writers Read: Douglas Corleone.

The Page 69 Test: Good as Gone.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Weinman

Sarah Weinman is the editor of Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense.

From her Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:

What was the moment that sparked this book?

I'm not sure there was a specific moment, but the anthology could not have happened if I hadn't written an essay for Tin House for their Spring 2011 issue that first outlined my whole idea of domestic suspense and this lost generation of largely women writers. I knew, as I was working on it, that I had a lot more to say, and when I ended up having lunch with the editor who ended up acquiring TROUBLED DAUGHTERS and talking at some length and passion about this void, he suggested there might be an anthology in this. And so there was!

Tell us how these writers were so pioneering? And what can modern mystery writers (both men and women) learn from them?

Crime fiction is customarily thought of as having two distinct paths: the hardboiled/noir path (Chandler/Hammett/Cain, then Thompson/Macdonald/McDonald/Spillane, etc) and the Golden Age/cozy path (Christie/Allingham/Sayers/Marsh, etc.) But there was this whole group of writers -- almost all of them women -- who won awards, were critically acclaimed, published and sold well in hardcover, that were dealing with more domestic themes. Subtle terrors. Family matters, toxic marriages, crumbling relationships, social issues. And they never got their critical due in the same way their male counterparts did.

In terms of what modern mystery writers can learn, it's that the current crop of domestic suspense -- Gillian Flynn's GONE GIRL being the most famous example -- had...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Amanda Lindhout

Amanda Lindhout is the author of A House in the Sky: A Memoir, an account of her 460 days held captive by Somalian kidnappers.

From her Q & A with Emily Bazelon for Slate:

Slate: How did you decide to write this book, and then go about doing it? Tell me about the process.

Amanda Lindhout: I knew what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to write a typical captivity narrative, beginning and ending with only that snapshot in time. That seemed to be what most publishers were interested in. But Sara and I had a mutual friend, Robert Draper, another writer who was in Somalia when I was, and appears briefly in the book. After my release, he connected us. For me, it was instantaneous when we met, because Sara, like me, saw the story as a much bigger one. We agreed that it should encompass my years of travel around the world and my childhood. We’ve said since we started that we see the world as a character in the book. There’s a lot of adventure and even fun in the first 100 pages. Yes, the captivity is often very brutal, but as a reader you also go on a larger journey with me as this young woman. It’s more honest and real that way, and to understand why I was in Somalia, it’s important to understand who I was at that point in my life.

Slate: The most riveting scene in the book is your escape attempt, excerpted here. You and Nigel managed to pry open a bathroom window and run into a nearby mosque. Dozens of men surround you. One of your kidnappers fires his gun, parting the crowd. One Somali woman steps forward and calls you her sister. Your kidnapper starts trying to drag you out of the mosque. “I don’t remember any of the onlookers trying to stop him,” you write. “It was only the woman who tried.” What do you want readers to take from this scene?

Lindhout: As you probably know, I...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Yangsze Choo

Yangsze Choo's first novel, The Ghost Bride, set in colonial Malaya and the elaborate Chinese world of the afterlife, is about a peculiar historic custom called a spirit marriage.

From the author's Q & A with Miwa Messer, Director of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program:

The Ghost Bride centers on a girl who marries the ghost of a wealthy family's recently deceased son. Can you please explain the concept of a "ghost marriage"? When did you first become intrigued by this practice?

I think I was vaguely aware of this practice as a child. My grandmother lived in a small town in Malaysia opposite an old cinema that often showed scary Chinese movies. We children were not allowed to go and watch them, although from the front window we could see people lining up to go in. I remember the gigantic cinema posters that would cover the billboard in front. In those days, they were all hand painted so that they looked even more lurid - both fascinating and forbidden to us!

The folk tradition of marriages to ghosts, or between ghosts, usually occurred in order to placate spirits or repair familial relations. There are a number of allusions to it in Chinese literature, but its roots seem to lie in ancestor worship. Matches were sometimes made between two deceased persons, with the families on both sides recognizing it as a tie between them. However, there were other cases when a living person was married to the dead. These tended to be the fulfillment of a dying sweetheart's wish, or to give the rank of wife to a concubine who had borne a son. Sometimes, an impoverished girl was taken into a household as a widow in order to perform the ancestral rites for a man who died without a wife or descendants. This is the case for Li Lan, the main character in my book.

More recently, however, one of the things that sparked this novel was a sentence in an old newspaper article. While researching another book I was writing, I happened to go through the archives of our local Malaysian newspaper and found...[read on]

Visit Yangsze Choo's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jillian Cantor

Jillian Cantor's latest novel for adults is Margot, a re-imagining of Anne Frank’s sister in post-war America.

From the author's Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:

Can you tell me how the idea for this novel sparked? I always believe that writers write the book that they themselves need to read. Would you say this is true for you, too?

Yes, I absolutely think that’s true. Writing is always such an emotional journey for me that I feel my stories come from the emotional point I’m at at a particular time. Margot’s story first came to me a few months after the shooting in Tucson in 2011. I live in Tucson and happened to be having coffee in the shopping center at the time of the shooting. I was very fortunate that I didn’t get shot or even see what happened, but for months afterwards I felt paralyzed by sadness, and I had trouble writing anything. I reread Anne Frank’s diary during that time, and I realized that in real life Margot Frank had also kept a diary during the war, but that hers was never recovered after. I wondered how Margot would’ve felt had she survived and saw what had happened with her sister’s diary after the war. Margot’s story in my novel is very much one of finding her way through grief and fear, of learning how to live and love again after horrendous tragedy. That’s what I needed to read – and write – at that particular time.

I’ve read and enjoyed your other novels, and this one seems a departure for you--it has a new, kind of thornier feel to it, a more moral depth, almost, which I absolutely loved. Did you feel the writing of this book was different than your others? Can you talk a bit about that please? What was the research like? Did anything surprise or startle you?

Thank you, Caroline! The writing was definitely different, first because this was the first historical novel I’ve written so it required a lot of research on my part. I definitely labored over the first draft more, not only to get the writing right but also to get the historical details right. But I think I also wrote Margot purely for...[read on]

Visit Jillian Cantor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue