Saturday, July 12, 2008

What is Patrick Lennon reading?

This weekend's featured contributor to Writers Read: Patrick Lennon, author of the Corn Dolls (2006) and Steel Witches (2008).

One book he mentions:
Up In Honey's Room by Elmore Leonard. The great feeling - as always with him - is of characters shooting around the book like pinballs, one of them a Detroit butcher who thinks he's Heinrich Himmler's twin. A real pleasure. I've always been conscious that three of my favourite writers - Elmore Leonard, Franz Kafka and Thomas Hardy - were all alive at the same moment in the mid 1920's. I don't know what that means, but I find it interesting. [read on]
Learn more about Patrick Lennon at his website and The Fletcher File, the blog marking the publication of Steel Witches.

Last month he was guest blogger at The Rap Sheet.

The London Times' crime fiction maven Peter Millar on Lennon's Steel Witches:
'In Steel Witches, Patrick Lennon's hero Tom Fletcher is a former policeman now struggling to make a living as a private investigator in his native Cambridgeshire, deeply disillusioned with the force he belonged to. He is also troubled by his own family, not least when the father he hasn't heard from in 18 years suddenly calls up and tells him “we have to kill” an unknown man, who turned out to be an American ex-serviceman tied up with a high-profile defence firm. Fletcher finds the man's body and discovers that a bright girl physicist who moonlights as a call girl has gone missing, and had a picture of him as a child on her desk.

A few of the author's inventions - fictional place names and colleges - jar, but beyond that this is a richly imaginative follow-up to Lennon's debut novel Corn Dolls that could just possibly turn Tom Fletcher into another Morse.'
Writers Read: Patrick Lennon.

--Marshal Zeringue