Pg. 69: "The Dirt-Brown Derby"

Ed Lynskey is a crime fiction writer and poet living near Washington, D.C. The Dirt-Brown Derby (Mundania Press, 2006) and The Blue Cheer (Point Blank/Wildside Press, 2007) are his first two mysteries featuring his PI Frank Johnson.

I asked Ed to apply the "page 69 test" to his latest book; this is what he reported:

My novel is the debut title in a modern hardboiled detective series. Our hero, PI Frank Johnson, has left the bucolic fox hunt country in Middleburg, Virginia, and driven the short distance to posh, fashionable Potomac, Maryland outside Washington, D.C. Frank is investigating the disappearance of Carl Taliaferro, and this is a side trip to interview Carl’s affluent parents.

Frank’s visit with the Taliaferros becomes a pivotal scene. I wanted a bit more than another PI yarn. A major theme underlying Dirt-Brown is the stratified society entrenched in Middleburg and Potomac. Frank dislikes trafficking between the various castes while pursuing his case. Nonetheless after this exchange of terse dialogue, he realizes the mystery confronting him will be difficult and thorny to solve.

Page 69 to The Dirt-Brown Derby quoted in full:

“I’m Frank Johnson -- ”

“Soliciting is prohibited,” she said. The door flew toward me.

My hand obstructed its path. “No ma’am, you’ve taken the wrong idea. I came to speak to Mr. Taliaferro and yourself.”

“Concerning?”

“Concerning your son, Carl.”

“Who are you with? The Washington Post? My husband is retired and no longer active in those government affairs. Go away. Leave us in peace. Please.”

“No, I’m not the press,” I said. “I’m a detective. Only to talk, I promise you. Five minutes and no more of your time. You’ve nothing to lose except to get rid of me.”

Her tall, lithe profile tucked around the door. “Okay only you’d better make it snappy.”

Their circular two-story foyer was lit in brilliant harshness. My eyes flickered to deal with it.

“Wait in the kitchen,” she said. “I’ll go rouse my husband. The au-pair’s room is now his office.”

I sat at the oval oak table while noticing a copper tea kettle collection on shelves across the center aisle.

“Mr. Johnson?” A man’s baritone filled the room. “I’m Rusty Taliaferro. My wife said you came to talk about Carl.”

He was half a head taller than me even if with the stooped shoulders. He exuded gray sideburns, mustache, eyebrows, and longish hair. His teeth were capped or he wore dentures. A hearing aid clipped over an ear. A hawthorn cane aided in his balance. Man, I couldn’t wait to join AARP.

I handed him my license like a penitent driver does to a disgruntled highway patrolman. “Private agent. Mrs. Taliaferro, Emily’s mother, employs me.”

“Oh Lord.” His sigh was a pained one. “What the devil has her in an uproar now?”

“She questions the official disposition of your granddaughter’s death,” I said.

Rusty Taliaferro wrapped both palms atop his cane and lowered himself into an oak chair opposite me. “That fool woman will undo me yet,” he said. “What has she put you up to? Chasing down phantom killers? She has killers on the brain.”

“Well, she claims Emily’s riding mishap wasn’t accidental,” I said.

“Naturally, naturally,” he said. “What mom wants to believe their daughter fell victim to a random occurrence of ugly misfortune. We both loved Emily but we’re also resigned to accept what tragedy befell her. Life goes on.”

“I won’t belabor that point. Forgive my intrusion, but it has a direct bearing on my case. Did you ever entertain suspicions that your son’s death was anything but what the Coast Guard ruled it as?”

Thanks to Ed for the input.

Among the reviews for The Dirt-Brown Derby:

A great protagonist, a suspenseful story, a wonderful sense of place. It's all here. An impressive debut by Ed Lynskey. He gets it right the first time out, the atmosphere, the characters. Watch out for this guy!
—Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony Award-winner Steve Hamilton, USA Today bestselling author of PI Alex McNight mysteries

There's a new thoroughbred in the noir world of private investigators. Ed Lynskey's The Dirt-Brown Derby is vintage crime — smart, crisp dialogue, a town full of dysfunctional characters, a carefully twisted plot, and a terrifically enjoyable read.
—Nero Wolfe Award-winner Linda Fairstein, New York Times bestselling author of the Alexandra Cooper mysteries

PI Frank Johnson is slated to appear in the sequels Pelham Fell Here (Mundania Press, 2007) and Troglodytes (Mundania Press, 2008).

Ed's work has been anthologized by St. Martin’s Press and University of Virginia Press. His short fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and his poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. His reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post.

Previous "page 69 tests":
Cindy Dyson, And She Was
Simon Blackburn, Truth
Brian Freeman, Stripped
Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood
Jeff Biggers, In the Sierra Madre
Jeff Broadwater, George Mason, Forgotten Founder
Alicia Steimberg, Andrea Labinger (trans.), The Rainforest
Michael Grunwald, The Swamp
Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History
Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism
David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie
Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry
Chris Grabenstein, Slay Ride
David Helvarg, Blue Frontier
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria
Bill Crider, A Mammoth Murder
Robert W. Bennett, Taming the Electoral College
Nicholas Stern et al, Stern Review Report
Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind
Adam Langer, The Washington Story
Michael Scott Moore, Too Much of Nothing
Frank Schaeffer, Baby Jack
Wyn Cooper, Postcards from the Interior
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia
Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden
Paul Lewis, Cracking Up
Pagan Kennedy, Confessions of a Memory Eater
David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow
Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman
George Levine, Darwin Loves You
John Barlow, Intoxicated
Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue

Reading Lolita in Charlottesville

I was aware of some political debate surrounding Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran (which I have not read) but had not bothered to look into it. Now Gideon Lewis-Kraus has waded into the story with a smart summary and evaluation of the competing claims.

I'll not try to summarize the arguments: click here to read the essay.

Lewis-Kraus's conclusion is clear:

what ultimately binds [Nafisi's main critic] Dabashi and Nafisi to each other [is] their shared overemphasis on the politically salutary effects of reading novels and writing literary criticism. Dabashi's purposes are not served by calling the book bad because it is cliché, which would be right but pointless. He must call it bad because it is dangerous. In the end, Dabashi must conspire with Nafisi to make the book more important that it is: The besieged Nafisi gets to preserve her fantasy that removing her veil to read Austen in her home was not only therapeutically powerful but politically noble, and Dabashi gets to preserve his fantasy that criticizing Nafisi makes him a usefully engaged intellectual. But those whose fingers are on the triggers of those targeted nuclear warheads couldn't possibly care about what either of them has to say.

What struck me about Lewis-Kraus's argument--which seems compelling to me if the debate is faithfully characterized--is that it's the sort of thing Lolita's author would say himself. At least, I think that's what Nabokov would have said about politics and literature, based on my reading of Lolita (and its siblings) when I was in graduate school in Virginia. I'll check with some experts to see if I've got that right.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "And She Was"

Cindy Dyson's debut novel is And She Was.

I asked Cindy to subject her book to the "page 69 test."

Her response opens with a passage from page 69, part of the chapter titled "take a minute":

take a minute

My defenses were down, and I got reflective. Not just about the past, but the kind of reflection that flings the past forward to clash with the present. And battle for a future.

I would think a lot about the last time I’d seen my dad.

I had been cocktail waitressing in Redwood City. The man I’d been shacked up with had just decided to go back to his wife and kids. He left me with an apartment I couldn’t afford and a red Fiat with low-profile tires. I packed up everything I wanted to keep, which barely filled the backseat, and left. I can’t say why I wanted to see Dad one more time. I did not love my father. I had no hope that we’d ever be close again. It may have been a need to know that at least I’d seen him once near the end.

The most important part of page 69, for me, is that Brandy, our main character, is shown on this page at her worst. By page six, she established herself as a coke-snorting, loose, emotionally stagnant party girl, but here she lays out the depths of her depravity. She is willing to shack up with a married father.

For me, writing this line was a transition. After those words were down, I couldn’t see Brandy as simply a reckless, wild girl. She became an amoral woman, not even immoral, for she doesn’t contemplate the morality of her actions. She’s an Eve, ignorant and greedy.

In much of women’s fiction, the heroine can get away with all sorts of despicable actions as long as those actions are firmly laid at the feet of her past-as-tragic-victim — of a man, of her parents, of some circumstance in which she played no culpable role. Brandy doesn’t give readers that chance. She says, “You can like me and identify with me or not, but I’m not going to woo your allegiance with tired appeals to my drunken father, slutty mother, and all the havoc they wrecked upon my formative years.”

I think we all understand the consequences of growing up in dysfunction. This isn’t what interests me. I’m fascinated by what presses some people forward, by what sets them free.

Brandy’s refusal to call up victimhood to assuage her present acts is ultimately the key to her freedom. And this is the core of the book, evolving right here on page 69. The idea that we are morally active agents, that we must choose and we must choose intentionally, even if the choices all seem uniformly gray, even if our pasts did little to prepare us.

Many thanks to Cindy for the input.

For a very interesting Q & A with Cindy--including the response to "First novels are often somewhat autobiographical. How much of Brandy is you?"--click here.

Click here for a long list of reviews and audio interviews.

Among the reviews:

"And She Was conquers the odds to be the beautifully written, soulfully instructive novel that it is.
The odds against it: The book is Cindy Dyson's first adult novel; it is somewhat autobiographical; the plot alternates between a long-ago past and its history lessons, and 1986; its title comes from a song.
But it all works – and fabulously well."
— Claudie Smith Brinson (appeared in: San Diego Union Tribune, Detroit Free Press, The Olympian, South Carolina's The State)

Click here to read "The Story Behind the Book."

For other links, including book club materials, visit Cindy's website.

Previous "page 69 tests":
Simon Blackburn, Truth
Brian Freeman, Stripped
Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood
Jeff Biggers, In the Sierra Madre
Jeff Broadwater, George Mason, Forgotten Founder
Alicia Steimberg, Andrea Labinger (trans.), The Rainforest
Michael Grunwald, The Swamp
Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History
Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism
David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie
Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry
Chris Grabenstein, Slay Ride
David Helvarg, Blue Frontier
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria
Bill Crider, A Mammoth Murder
Robert W. Bennett, Taming the Electoral College
Nicholas Stern et al, Stern Review Report
Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind
Adam Langer, The Washington Story
Michael Scott Moore, Too Much of Nothing
Frank Schaeffer, Baby Jack
Wyn Cooper, Postcards from the Interior
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia
Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden
Paul Lewis, Cracking Up
Pagan Kennedy, Confessions of a Memory Eater
David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow
Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman
George Levine, Darwin Loves You
John Barlow, Intoxicated
Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue

NYT: the 10 best books of 2006

The New York Times has named its ten best books fo 2006.

Here are a couple of the titles, one fiction and one nonfiction:

The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud

This superbly intelligent, keenly observed comedy of manners, set amid the glitter of cultural Manhattan in 2001, also looks unsparingly, though sympathetically, at a privileged class unwittingly poised, in its insularity, for the catastrophe of 9/11. Messud gracefully intertwines the stories of three friends, attractive, entitled 30-ish Brown graduates "torn between Big Ideas and a party" but falling behind in the contest for public rewards and losing the struggle for personal contentment. The vibrant supporting cast includes a deliciously drawn literary seducer ("without question, a great man") and two ambitious interlopers, teeming with malign energy, whose arrival on the scene propels the action forward.

Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir by Danielle Trussoni

This intense, at times searing memoir revisits the author's rough-and-tumble Wisconsin girlhood, spent on the wrong side of the tracks in the company of her father, a Vietnam vet who began his tour as "a cocksure country boy" but returned "wild and haunted," unfit for family life and driven to extremes of philandering, alcoholism and violence. Trussoni mixes these memories with spellbinding versions of the war stories her father reluctantly dredged up and with reflections on her own journey to Vietnam, undertaken in an attempt to recapture, and come to terms with, her father's experiences as a "tunnel rat" who volunteered for the harrowing duty of scouring underground labyrinths in search of an elusive and deadly enemy.

Click here to see the other eight books to make the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "Truth"

Simon Blackburn is the Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Regular readers of the blog will be aware of the high regard I have for his work: here I reviewed his book Lust, and here I took the liberty of subjecting it to "the page 69 test." And here I wrote that while an excerpt from his most recent book Plato's Republic: A Biography does not make me any more confident that I understand Plato, it does make it clearer why I've long been befuddled by the ancient.

All of which is to say I was honored and delighted that he agreed to subject his 2005 book Truth: A Guide (2005) to the "page 69 test." Here is his response:

In the passage of my book which is being discussed, I reflect on the heat that the ‘science wars’ generated. The point of the discussion is to show that ‘relativism’, which is often thought of as a kind of happy-clappy, open-minded, doctrine of tolerations, can actually appear very demeaning and threatening. This happens when the investigator, in this case the practising scientist, is regarded in a purely sociological spirit, that is, bracketing or putting to one side any claim he has to be investigating the fact of the matter. Whether or not it was intended to do this the so-called ‘symmetry thesis’ of the ‘strong program’ in the philosophy of science was read as doing just this, and of course working scientists were insulted and felt belittled by it. I make the comparison with someone conscientiously navigating a ship, using charts and tide tables, but whose use of these things is then regarded as mumbo-jumbo, or indicative of gender or class or some other dark force working in the background. This is emphatically not to deny that money, power, and prestige have their influence (think of the distortion of effort in the pharmaceutical industry, away from the actual disease burden of the world towards the more lucrative goal of providing expensive comforts for people in the first world). But it does imply that there is a difference between going about things in ways designed to find truths, and not doing so. The aim of finding out how things stand imposes a goal, and it is up to our intelligence to find out how to set about hitting it. Man may be the measure of all things, but he has to be careful how he measures them, just as the navigator has to be skilled and careful with his charts and tide tables.

Many thanks to Simon for the input.

For a brief excerpt from the book, click here.

Click here for a NPR segment of Blackburn discussing Truth; there is also an excerpt at the site. To listen to a group discussion on Truth (and "truth") with Blackburn, Stanley Fish, Michael Lynch, and Michael Massing, click here.

Click here for reviews of Truth, and here for the Table of Contents.

Among the praise:

"The pleasure of reading this beautifully written and crafted book is almost sensual, so complete does each sentence seem in its witty unfolding. Blackburn takes up the knottiest philosophical issues--truth, justice, belief, evidence, interpretation--and without dissolving the knots he carefully undoes them, and then, in some cases, reties them. A wonderful embracing tour through the minefield of philosophical controversy that will inform the novice and delight the afficionado."--Stanley Fish

Jim Holt discussed Truth and two other books in this interesting New Yorker review.

Blackburn's other books include Reason and Prediction (1973), Spreading the Word (1984), Essays in Quasi-Realism (1993), The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (1994), Ruling Passions (1998), Think (1999), Being Good (2001), Lust (2004), and most recently Plato’s Republic (2006).

Click here to read a conversation between Simon Blackburn and Peter Momtchiloff, Commissioning Editor for Philosophy at Oxford University Press.

Several of Blackburn's reviews and other essays are available here. One of my favorites is his explication of Truth and Predication by Donald Davidson, a philosopher whose work I used to read with great interest. The review contains this gem of a passage:

Philosophers think of themselves as the guardians of reason, intent beyond other men upon care and accuracy, on following the argument wherever it leads, spotting flaws, rejecting fallacies, insisting on standards. This is how we justify ourselves as educators, and as respectable voices within the academy, or even in public life. But there is a yawning chasm between self-image and practice, and in fact it is a great mistake to think that philosophers ever gain their followings by means of compelling arguments. The truth is the reverse, that when the historical moment is right people fall in love with the conclusions, and any blemish in the argument is quickly forgiven: the most outright fallacy becomes beatified as a bold and imaginative train of thought, obscurity actually befits a deep original exploration of dim and unfamiliar interconnexions, arguments that nobody can follow at all become a brilliant roller-coaster ride towards a shift in the vocabulary, a reformulation of the problem space. Follow the star, and the raw edges will easily be tidied up later.

Previous "page 69 tests":
Brian Freeman, Stripped
Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood
Jeff Biggers, In the Sierra Madre
Jeff Broadwater, George Mason, Forgotten Founder
Alicia Steimberg, Andrea Labinger (trans.), The Rainforest
Michael Grunwald, The Swamp
Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History
Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism
David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie
Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry
Chris Grabenstein, Slay Ride
David Helvarg, Blue Frontier
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria
Bill Crider, A Mammoth Murder
Robert W. Bennett, Taming the Electoral College
Nicholas Stern et al, Stern Review Report
Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind
Adam Langer, The Washington Story
Michael Scott Moore, Too Much of Nothing
Frank Schaeffer, Baby Jack
Wyn Cooper, Postcards from the Interior
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia
Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden
Paul Lewis, Cracking Up
Pagan Kennedy, Confessions of a Memory Eater
David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow
Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman
George Levine, Darwin Loves You
John Barlow, Intoxicated
Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue

Re-phrase a line, win champagne

The ruckus over Ian McEwan's debt to previously published work has already been so widely covered in the culture pages that I hestitate to devote any more space to it. But Jan Dalley's take on the matter in the Financial Times is brief enough--and comes with a prize--that I thought I would pass on the money (pun unavoidable) paragraph:

The recent micro-fuss about Ian McEwan is ridiculous. His offence was to draw on a memoir by Lucilla Andrews, a writer of “hospital romances”. It was factual material about the grim realities of nursing in the second world war, which he used when researching the grim realities of nursing in the second world war. There is no copyright in historical material – the Da Vinci Code case re-confirmed that – although there may be in the form of words in which it is expressed. Writers continually re-work each other’s sentences: how else would history be written? Perhaps McEwan should have done that more thoroughly. I am therefore offering a bottle of champagne to the reader who can best re-phrase this: “she dabbed gentian violet on ringworm, acquaflavin emulsion on a cut, and painted lead lotion on a bruise”.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "Stripped"

Brian Freeman's debut novel Immoral received some very impressive praise, including:

“One hell of a read, gut-wrenching and exciting.”
-Ken Bruen, author of The Dramatist

"Breathtakingly real and utterly compelling, Immoral dishes up page-turning psychological suspense."
-Jeffery Deaver, author of The Twelfth Card

Now with his follow-on novel Stripped fresh in the bookstores, I asked Brian to subject the new book to the "page 69 test." Here is what he reported:

On page 69 of my latest novel, Stripped, Detective Jonathan Stride is interviewing a reclusive film producer about the death of his son in Las Vegas – and about events from the city’s seamy, glamorous Rat Pack days that may be connected to his son’s murder.

Is the scene representative of the book? Absolutely. One common theme in my novels is the way the past lives on and influences events in the present. In Stripped, I wanted a book that reflected the deep yearning in Las Vegas for a time when people like Sinatra ruled the city and summed up an entire era. But beware of what you wish for. The past echoes throughout Stripped, but it’s the dark, dangerous past that comes back, along with the glamour.

One paragraph from that page reflects my approach to thriller plotting: “Stride couldn’t help but think of the photo he’d found of Walker Lane in the 1960s: absurdly tall, a mop of blond hair, Clark Kent glasses. Cocksure, as if he would someday own the world, which he pretty much did today. The price he’d paid was chiseled in his voice.”

There’s always a price to pay. One thing that’s true about the past is that people always keep secrets about what really happened, and they’ll often lie and kill to protect them. Those secrets have a way of catching up with them, even years later.

Many thanks to Brian for the input.

Click here to read an excerpt from Stripped.

Curious about what it's like to be on a book tour? Check out Brian's blog: he charted the 4,000 miles recently logged promoting Stripped.

Stripped's early reviews are very promising:

"What sets the author apart are his rich, complex characters... Recommended for fans of Harlan Coben, who will enjoy the compelling cast and swift sinuous plot."

— Booklist (starred review)

"Freeman consistently hits his thriller marks, keeping the action coming and the tension high... The height of guilty pleasures."

— Kirkus Reviews

"Freeman's ability to drop bombshells --- amply demonstrated in Immoral --- remains fully intact here, with each page becoming more and more explosive right up to the very end. Stripped will only enhance Freeman's reputation as a thriller craftsman; his talent runs strong and, to all appearances, deep. Make room on your bookcase for more.

— Bookreporter.com

"Freeman has crafted a strong narrative, rife with sex and violence."

— Publishers Weekly

Julia Buckley interviewed Brian about "Promotion, Inspiration and The Long Road to Success"--click here to see how that turned out.

Previous "page 69 tests":
Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood
Jeff Biggers, In the Sierra Madre
Jeff Broadwater, George Mason, Forgotten Founder
Alicia Steimberg, Andrea Labinger (trans.), The Rainforest
Michael Grunwald, The Swamp
Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History
Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism
David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie
Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry
Chris Grabenstein, Slay Ride
David Helvarg, Blue Frontier
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria
Bill Crider, A Mammoth Murder
Robert W. Bennett, Taming the Electoral College
Nicholas Stern et al, Stern Review Report
Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind
Adam Langer, The Washington Story
Michael Scott Moore, Too Much of Nothing
Frank Schaeffer, Baby Jack
Wyn Cooper, Postcards from the Interior
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia
Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden
Paul Lewis, Cracking Up
Pagan Kennedy, Confessions of a Memory Eater
David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow
Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman
George Levine, Darwin Loves You
John Barlow, Intoxicated
Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue

Why the hostility toward victims?

Yesterday I posted an item on Alyson M. Cole's The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror.

Coincidentally, yesterday the San Francisco Chronicle also ran an op-ed by Alyson titled "Why the hostility toward victims?" It opens:

IN HIS election-night tribute to the defeated senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum, Republican pundit William Bennett waxed eloquent about the senator's concern for victims -- of AIDS, autism, partial-birth abortion, and those in Darfur.

"The poor, the dispossessed, the helpless, the unborn, whether it be here in the United States or abroad," he proclaimed, "have lost a champion in losing Rick Santorum."

This assemblage of the weak and vulnerable is rather remarkable in and of itself, but the real irony is that William Bennett delivered this encomium. For more than a decade, Bennett has been at the forefront of the campaign against the "victims' revolution." He even blamed "the victimology mongers" for rendering the United States susceptible to evil-doers on 9/11. Indeed, Bennett, among others, is responsible for the doublespeak that warped how Americans have come to think about suffering and sufferers.

Without precedent or much public notice, "victim" has become a term of derision, deployed to dismiss, ridicule and condemn. This sentiment congealed in the early 1990s, when politicians and analysts -- like Bennett -- instigated an alarmist crusade alerting Americans that an excess of grievances imperiled the nation. Anti-victimists cast those who allege to be victims as shamefully passive or as cynically manipulative. As a result, seeking recognition of one's injury indicates a deficient character, or even symptoms of a pathology (the dreaded "victim mentality"). Individuals now must use other designations to avoid stigma. The brutalized Central Park jogger accordingly emerged from seclusion to insist that she is not a "victim" but a "survivor." Similarly, those who died on Sept. 11, 2001 are not "victims" in our collective vocabulary as much as "heroes," posthumously conscripted as soldiers in the "war for freedom."

Click here to read the rest of Alyson Cole's essay.

Click here to read how The Cult of True Victimhood fared at the "page 69 test."

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Noah Wyle reading?

From the Washington Post's "Reliable Source" column:

Noah Wyle, engaging in the popular local sport of stoop-sitting yesterday while on a break from his Baltimore movie shoot. Our colleague Kathleen Cahill spotted the "ER" star -- in town filming the indie flick "Boy of Pigs"-- lounging in a Bolton Hill doorway unnoticed by passersby in his '60s-era costume (olive wool overcoat, shiny black dress shoes). Whatcha reading, Noah? Wyle smiled and showed Cahill his book -- Oscar-winner Walter Murch's meditation on film editing, "In the Blink of an Eye."

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "The Cult of True Victimhood"

Alyson M. Cole is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Queens College, City University of New York.

Her new book is The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror.

I asked Alyson to apply the "page 69 test" to her book; here is her reply:

Comedian Stephen Colbert dedicated a recent installment of his hilarious mock-cable-news show -- The Colbert Report on Comedy Central -- to saluting the “American Lady.” The host explained that the tribute, which featured Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem baking apple pie (“Cooking with Feminists”), was forced upon him after several female employees made allegations of sexual harassment. As Colbert reasoned, he, much like other Americans, “fell victim to the pervasive victim mentality of those who were victimized.” In addition to his pitch perfect delivery, the semantic circularity of victim-talk was part of the joke. Beneath the humor lay a rather poignant remark on the warped way we have come to think about victimization and to treat victims.

Why have victims suddenly generated so much attention and public consternation? In turning ‘victim’ into an epithet, an anti-victim campaign profoundly altered our conceptions of victimhood -- namely, what society owes victims, and who may rightly claim that status. Being a victim no longer depends upon harms or injustices endured, but rather on the victim’s character and purity, what I call “true victimhood.” This transformation, which has gone largely unnoticed, had profound consequences on law, social policy, and popular culture.

By page 69 the reader will be in the middle of the third chapter, immersed in an examination of feminists’ deliberations over how best to politicize women’s oppression. I show that since its inception the modern women’s movement has struggled to balance accounts of past oppression and future liberation, and hotly debated the risks involved in defining gender or feminist identities around static notions of domination and subjugation. The chapter is representative of the book to the extent that it takes up one of several case studies to show how the (anti)victim grammar warps the manner in which we debate and address matters of personal identity, collectivity, and injustice. The material, and even style, differs in other chapters, where I delve into topics such as Black/Jewish relations in the post-civil rights era; a genealogy of the concept of “blaming the victim,” which runs from critics of the culture of poverty argument, to defenders of rape victims, and from there to recent victim rights advocates; and the political consequences of 9/11 (i.e., viewing the nation as a victim).

Many thanks to Alyson for the input.

Click here to read an excerpt from The Cult of True Victimhood, and here for the Table of Contents.

Among the praise for the book:

“Alyson M. Cole provides a remarkably original analysis of a profound transformation in the cultural values informing public discourse in the United States. By tracing the underlying logic of the ‘anti-victim campaign’ over several decades, she illuminates dimensions of privatization that operate well beyond explicit neoliberal arguments to roll back the state. Most importantly, Cole deftly demonstrates how this new version of individualism effectively curtails the possibility for social justice.”—Mary Hawkesworth, Rutgers University

“An engaging and provocative book, historically grounded, theoretically engaged, and pertinent to an understanding of today’s American political culture. Cole argues persuasively that we live in an era of ‘anti-victim’ politics, in which the campaign against victims has had a profound impact in re-orienting our political and social life, making it harder than ever to address injustice and inequality. This book will surely command widespread interest and generate the best kind of debate.”—Austin Sarat, Amherst College, Editor of Law, Culture and the Humanities, Editor of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society

Previous "page 69 tests":
Jeff Biggers, In the Sierra Madre
Jeff Broadwater, George Mason, Forgotten Founder
Alicia Steimberg, Andrea Labinger (trans.), The Rainforest
Michael Grunwald, The Swamp
Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History
Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism
David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie
Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry
Chris Grabenstein, Slay Ride
David Helvarg, Blue Frontier
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria
Bill Crider, A Mammoth Murder
Robert W. Bennett, Taming the Electoral College
Nicholas Stern et al, Stern Review Report
Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind
Adam Langer, The Washington Story
Michael Scott Moore, Too Much of Nothing
Frank Schaeffer, Baby Jack
Wyn Cooper, Postcards from the Interior
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia
Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden
Paul Lewis, Cracking Up
Pagan Kennedy, Confessions of a Memory Eater
David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow
Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman
George Levine, Darwin Loves You
John Barlow, Intoxicated
Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue