Pg. 69: "The Dead Fathers Club"

Matt Haig is the author of The Dead Fathers Club, The Last Family in England, and a forthcoming children's novel called Shadow Forest.

I asked Matt to apply the "page 69 test" to The Dead Fathers Club, which will be published in the US in February. Here is his reply:

Okay, my page 69 is mainly white space because it comes at the end of a chapter. Mind you, the white space itself is pretty representative of the book not only because of the short chapters but because when the main character, the eleven year old Philip, is prescribed Diazepam for panic disorder I use blank pages to illustrate his state of mind.

Anyway, there is one sentence on page 69. The sentence is this:

“And I was pointing at Uncle Alan but not looking and my body was shaking and Mum was holding me and spit was out of my mouth hanging and I was in her jumper my face was and I closed my eyes and smelt her warm jumper and it was a nice smell like flowers.”

This is a key point in the book, when Philip finally believes his father’s ghost and is convinced his Uncle Alan is a murderer (there’s a lot of Hamlet stuff going on). It is the first night Uncle Alan stays with Philip’s mother, and the first time Philip expresses his anger.

You will notice there are no commas. There are no commas in the whole book because it is all from the perspective of Philip, and I figured Philip’s thoughts would be too fast to accommodate much punctuation. I am well aware this might put people off the book but the truth is when I wrote with commas and apostrophes it didn’t feel as good, so I changed it. In the UK where I live there is a lot of debate about grammar, especially in education, and knowledge of correct grammar is obviously significant and necessary but in my view there is not enough emphasis put on imagination. After all, Shakespeare was inconsistent with punctuation and even spelt his own surname six different ways and he seemed to do okay.

Another thing that this whole page 69 exercise has made me realise is how many chapters end with Philip needing a hug. Here he ends up in his mum’s jumper (sweater). In other chapters he fantasises about being embraced by his History teacher, Mrs Fell, or his girlfriend (Ophe)Leah.

For instance, page 162 ends: “The bell went and Mrs Fell just looked at me with sad shoulders. I wanted her to hug me and to put my head in her warm boobs for ever. But that wasnt going to happen so I picked up my bag with my weapons in it and I went out.”

So, ultimately, I have no idea how many people would want to read the book after reading page 69. People who love blank space or loose punctuation or maternal hugs or – preferably – all three, are, I suppose, the perfect page 69 readership.

Many thanks to Matt for the input.

Read chapter one of The Dead Fathers Club.

The novel has scored much praise, including:

Philip is a breathless storyteller who seldom stops for punctuation but whose honesty and innocence, which shine from every sentence, are utterly captivating and heartbreakingly poignant. The result is an absolutely irresistible read.
--Booklist (starred review)

We now owe another debt to Shakespeare, and one to Haig, for re-imagining a tragic masterpiece with such wit, force and - yes - originality.
--Kirkus (starred review)

The plucky hero impressively navigates the gloomy, pungent waters of retribution, death and guilt, and Haig gives an enviable job of leavening a sad premise through the words and actions of a charming, resilient young man.
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Totally engrossing.
--Stephen Daldry, director of Billy Elliot and The Hours, (Observer)

Online extras include a video interview with Matt, an audio interview, a reader's guide which includes a Q & A, and some FAQ that Matt's fielded.

Then there are lists-- of favorite writers, favorite movies, books that altered Matt's existence, etc.

The movie rights to The Last Family in England have been optioned by Brad Pitt's movie company, Plan B and Paramount. The movie rights to The Dead Fathers Club have been optioned by film producer David Heyman, the man behind the Harry Potter movies. (Which is just the sort of news to catch the eye of someone who publicly advertises his availability to adapt fine novels for the screen.)

One of my favorite top ten lists of 2006: Matt Haig's top 10 novels influenced by Shakespeare.

Visit Matt Haig at MySpace or his official website.

Previous "page 69 tests:"
Lawrence Light, Fear & Greed
Simon Read, In The Dark
Sandra Ruttan, Suspicious Circumstances
Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography
Alison Gaylin, You Kill Me
Gayle Lynds, The Last Spymaster
Jim Lehrer, The Phony Marine
Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.
Debra Ginsberg, Blind Submission
Sarah Katherine Lewis, Indecent
Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
William Easterly, The White Man's Burden
Danielle Trussoni, Falling Through the Earth
Andrew Blechman, Pigeons
Anne Perry, A Christmas Secret
Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers
Kat Richardson, Greywalker
Michael Bess, Choices Under Fire
Masha Hamilton, The Camel Bookmobile
Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane
Nicholas Lemann, Redemption
Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything
Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile
Josh Chafetz, Democracy’s Privileged Few
Anne Frasier, Pale Immortal
Michael Lewis, The Blind Side
David A. Bell, The First Total War
Brett Ellen Block, The Lightning Rule
Rosanna Hertz, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice
Jason Starr, Lights Out
Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom
Stephen Elliott, My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up
Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies
Sean Chercover, Big City, Bad Blood
Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind
Stanley Fish, How Milton Works
James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry
Margaret Lowrie Robertson, Season of Betrayal
Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
Allison Burnett, The House Beautiful
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History
Ed Lynskey, The Dirt-Brown Derby
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

Tough questions

Check out the brief literary quiz at the Times (London).

The first two questions:

1 WHO HE?
Horace Walpole: “He undoubtedly wanted taste.”
Bernard Shaw: “With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise ——.”
George III: “Was there ever such stuff as great part of ——?”

2 RHETORIC
Is hypostatisation?
a. Exaggeration
b. Significant omission
c. Personification

Click here for all four questions.

Click here for the answers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward Humes, "Over Here"

After noticing this review of Edward Humes' Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream, I clicked over to his website and learned a few interesting things about his literary taste and reading habits, including:

Favorite authors: John Steinbeck, Raymond Chandler, Harper Lee, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, Tracy Kidder.

Reads that wowed me (an eclectic selection): Dispatches, by Michael Herr; Salvador, by Joan Didion; Tapping the Source, by Kem Nunn; The Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy; Watership Down, by Richard Adams, Griffin and Sabine, by Nick Bantock; and “A Boy of Unusual Vision,” by Alice Steinbach (a Pulitzer-Prize-winning story that appeared in the Baltimore Sun in 1984).

Daily Must Reads: New York Times, LA Times, Slate, Salon, Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews, CaliforniaAuthors.com

Recent book I wish I wrote: Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser.

Recent book I wish no one wrote (or read): Slander, by Ann Coulter.

Coming soon to the blog: Ed Humes puts Over Here to the page 69 test.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "Fear & Greed"

Lawrence Light is the Senior Editor in charge of money and investing for Forbes magazine, a post he assumed in late 1999, and the author of an acclaimed thriller series.

Larry put his latest novel, Fear & Greed, to the "page 69 test" and reported back:

Fear & Greed is the second in my Karen Glick mystery series published by Dorchester. The first is Too Rich To Live. Karen is a smart, sassy financial reporter who covers Wall Street for Profit, a big business magazine.

In Fear & Greed, powerful forces are scrambling to get their hands on the Goldring laptop, which predicts the stock market. And they will kill for it. Goldring was created by beautiful stockbroker Linda Reiner and her sisters. It has made them fabulously rich.

Page 69 is tolerably representative of the book. It begins a new scene. Goldring has been stolen and one of the Reiner sisters lies dead. Albert, a psychologically addled computer geek, sits with the magical laptop in his seedy apartment. The unobtainable Linda obsesses him, and he believes she will have him if he, too, becomes rich, via Goldring.

This is a dangerous delusion. Some very ruthless people are watching poor Albert and his prize laptop.

Page 69:

The phone rang yet again. Albert should have shut off the ringer. He reluctantly picked up.

His sister, overwrought as usual. "Why haven't you returned my calls? What's the matter with you?"

"Quit bothering me."

"I lend you $10,000 and you tell me to quit bothering you?"

"You'll have the money back in a week. With interest. I'm going to be a very rich man."

"You worry me," she said. "You haven't been keeping your appointments with Dr. Whetstone. Are you taking your medication?"

"None of your business."

"Albert, FBI agents came by and asked questions about you," Mimi said. "What kind of trouble are you in now?"

"I have to go." He sat entranced by the laptop before him.

"Did you hear that Linda Reiner's sister was shot and killed? They were interested in that." Mimi got shrill. "Did you have something to do with that, Albert? Tell me now."

He hadn't been listening and perked up only when she mentioned Linda. "Who was killed? What's this about Linda?"

"Did you do it?" Mimi blared with enough force to crumble the wax build-up in his ears.

He slammed down the phone. What had she been going on about?

The night gleamed through Albert's window, all that smug light from others' apartments. A mosaic of yellow-white windows from the nearby buildings spoke of happy men and women with love in their lives. Dominating the wall next to his sole window was a massive silkscreen he had made of Linda, lifted from the magazine story. That cost a lot of money, but was worth it. He devoted hours to looking at the picture worshipfully.

Many thanks to Larry for the input.

Among the praise for Fear & Greed:

"Witty, fast-paced and exciting."
--Christopher Reich, author of The Patriots Club

"Another winner. I couldn't stop turning the pages."
--Stephen Frey, author of The Power Broker

"Zooms along like a jet-fueled rollercoaster."
-- Joseph Finder, author of Killer Instinct

Fear & Greed has been chosen as one of the Best Crime Fiction novels of 2006 by January Magazine.

From Anthony Rainone's review:

There are enough surprises in Fear & Greed to keep readers from thinking they know all of what's ahead. The ending holds several shockers, one of which comes out of left field, and is overall plausible and ultimately deeply satisfying. Lawrence Light shows considerable talent in developing his characters and plot, and has a good command of pacing, with an eye for human fallibility and humorous situations. If this author chooses to focus on the illegal foibles of Wall Street, he will never encounter a dearth of material. That will be to every reader's benefit, for Light is a talent to keep your eye on.

Ladykiller, a darker thriller that Larry wrote with his wife, Meredith Anthony, will be published in April. And in June, his short story will appear in Wall Street Noir from Akashic Press.

Visit Larry Light's official website.

Previous "page 69 tests:"
Simon Read, In The Dark
Sandra Ruttan, Suspicious Circumstances
Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography
Alison Gaylin, You Kill Me
Gayle Lynds, The Last Spymaster
Jim Lehrer, The Phony Marine
Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.
Debra Ginsberg, Blind Submission
Sarah Katherine Lewis, Indecent
Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
William Easterly, The White Man's Burden
Danielle Trussoni, Falling Through the Earth
Andrew Blechman, Pigeons
Anne Perry, A Christmas Secret
Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers
Kat Richardson, Greywalker
Michael Bess, Choices Under Fire
Masha Hamilton, The Camel Bookmobile
Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane
Nicholas Lemann, Redemption
Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything
Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile
Josh Chafetz, Democracy’s Privileged Few
Anne Frasier, Pale Immortal
Michael Lewis, The Blind Side
David A. Bell, The First Total War
Brett Ellen Block, The Lightning Rule
Rosanna Hertz, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice
Jason Starr, Lights Out
Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom
Stephen Elliott, My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up
Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies
Sean Chercover, Big City, Bad Blood
Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind
Stanley Fish, How Milton Works
James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry
Margaret Lowrie Robertson, Season of Betrayal
Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
Allison Burnett, The House Beautiful
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History
Ed Lynskey, The Dirt-Brown Derby
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

"Best" romance novel covers

Graphic designer Mark Longmire writes:

I think a lot of us can agree that a large number of romance novel covers are pretty silly and are just asking to be ridiculed. So that's exactly what I did. I bought a few of them at the used book store and got to work on them. The artwork almost writes its own jokes.

See what he came up with at: Longmire Does Romance Novels.

(Hat tip to Kat Richardson.)

Related items here on the blog:
The best book cover of 2006?
The Best Book Covers of 2006
Manolo Blahnik & Madame Bovary
A fashion editor's top books on shoes
Attractive author, seductive book
Books and their covers
Judging a book by its cover

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "In the Dark"

Simon Read is the author of On the House: The Bizarre Killing of Michael Malloy, The Killing Skies, and In the Dark: The True Story of the Blackout Ripper.

I asked Simon to apply the "page 69 test" to In the Dark. Here is what he reported:

Page 69 of In the Dark is actually a sidetrack from the main narrative. Investigators are attempting to piece together the final hours in the life of Evelyn Hamilton, a woman found strangled in a London air-raid shelter in February 1942. Their inquiries take them all over the city, and they question William Parker, a porter at the Baker Street Station, who helped Evelyn with her luggage shortly after her arrival in the city.

Naturally, In the Dark’s wartime setting provides ample opportunities to exploit the atmosphere of 1940s London. In questioning Porter, Scotland Yard detectives learned he and his wife had evacuated their children the three years prior to avoid the onslaught of German bombs. This detail gave me another opportunity to explore one of many hardships endured by many Londoners during World War II and resulted in the following passage:

Parker glanced up at the sky and, out of habit, strained his ears for the drone of approaching bombers. Married, he had a son and a daughter. He and his wife had evacuated the children to Cornwall at the start of the war. It was a torment for parent and child — and one suffered by thousands of families as they packed their children off to the homes of strangers, away from the nightmare of screaming sirens and a burning city. In some strange way, Parker considered he and his wife to be lucky. Some children had been whisked across the oceans to America, Canada, Australia and South Africa. The voyage to distant shores was a hazardous endeavor, and some ships fell prey to roaming packs of U-boats. The Parkers had not been burdened by such a worry. They had put their children on a train bound for the English countryside. Now, they were waiting for the bombs to stop falling and for their children to return home. With these thoughts weighing on his mind, he walked back down the stairs and took up his position on the platform.

I thought it made for a nice aside, which adds another layer of depth to the book’s dark atmosphere.

Many thanks to Simon for the input.

For an excerpt from In the Dark, click here.

Click here for Murder & Mystery Books 101's interview with the author.

Visit In the Dark on MySpace.

Check out Simon's new blog and his official website.

Previous "page 69 tests:"
Sandra Ruttan, Suspicious Circumstances
Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography
Alison Gaylin, You Kill Me
Gayle Lynds, The Last Spymaster
Jim Lehrer, The Phony Marine
Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.
Debra Ginsberg, Blind Submission
Sarah Katherine Lewis, Indecent
Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
William Easterly, The White Man's Burden
Danielle Trussoni, Falling Through the Earth
Andrew Blechman, Pigeons
Anne Perry, A Christmas Secret
Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers
Kat Richardson, Greywalker
Michael Bess, Choices Under Fire
Masha Hamilton, The Camel Bookmobile
Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane
Nicholas Lemann, Redemption
Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything
Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile
Josh Chafetz, Democracy’s Privileged Few
Anne Frasier, Pale Immortal
Michael Lewis, The Blind Side
David A. Bell, The First Total War
Brett Ellen Block, The Lightning Rule
Rosanna Hertz, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice
Jason Starr, Lights Out
Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom
Stephen Elliott, My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up
Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies
Sean Chercover, Big City, Bad Blood
Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind
Stanley Fish, How Milton Works
James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry
Margaret Lowrie Robertson, Season of Betrayal
Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
Allison Burnett, The House Beautiful
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History
Ed Lynskey, The Dirt-Brown Derby
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

Charles McCarry's favorite tales of espionage

Early last year Charles McCarry wrote about his five "favorite tales of espionage" in Opinion Journal.

The more recent title on the list:

The Polish Officer by Alan Furst

Like [The Manchurian Candidate author Richard] Condon, Furst writes about espionage from the outside and manages to create a compelling version of a twisted world in which good men do bad things in the name of a foul cause. Where Condon relied on a fabulous imagination, Furst is a prodigious researcher, and in his fiction he has done for interwar European espionage what the blind historian W.H. Prescott, who had never been there either, did for Peru--that is to say, made palpable a vanished time and place and its political mood swings. "The Polish Officer" is the novel in which Furst hit his stride, and like his other books, it is a dazzling commentary on fate--how the unanticipated leads to the inevitable by way of the unavoidable.

Click here to read about the older classics on McCarry's list.

Melanie Kirkpatrick called Charles McCarry "America's best writer of espionage novels."

In Slate's 2006 round-up of its writers' book picks, the architecture critic Witold Rybczynski praised McCarry:

My favorite bedtime read this year was Charles McCarry's The Last Supper. This political thriller was actually written in 1986, but Overlook Press has been republishing his tales of Cold War espionage at the rate of one or two a year, so I guess it qualifies as "new." Like all the best spy novelists since Graham Greene, McCarry creates a world of his own. It helps some that he spent years in the CIA doing undercover work; it helps more that he's a very good storyteller. I like thrillers; the good ones can be reread many times. I regularly reread early Le Carré (before he turned preachy), and I recently reread all of Alan Furst's World War II novels. Last year, I found some old Len Deighton thrillers in a used-book store and reread those. They seemed so fresh 40 years ago—oh well.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The American masterwork" of fiction?

Jonathan Yardley has a fine short essay on The Great Gatsby in today's Washington Post: he is "more convinced than ever not merely that it is Fitzgerald's masterwork but that it is the American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country's writers."

And, no, that does not make Gatsby the Great American Novel.

His point is:

no American novel comes closer than "Gatsby" to surpassing literary artistry, and none tells us more about ourselves. In an extraordinarily compressed space -- the novel is barely 50,000 words long -- Fitzgerald gives us a meditation on some of this country's most central ideas, themes, yearnings and preoccupations: the quest for a new life, the preoccupation with class, the hunger for riches and "the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."

Read Yardley's essay.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "Suspicious Circumstances"

Sandra Ruttan does “noir like a cheerleader with a coke habit...it seems to come naturally.”

--James Goodman

So reads the epigram to Sandra's blog.

Sandra's debut suspense novel, Suspicious Circumstances will be released in one week.

I asked her to put the novel to the "page 69 test," and here is what she reported:

When people ask what Suspicious Circumstances is about, what I say depends on whether they want the long answer or the short answer. One crime leads to another and another, but this isn’t a serial killer story. The reasons for one murder might not be the same as the reasons for another murder. It’s an intricate web, and the story is more about corruption, abuse of power and how people manipulate others for their own gain.

And in a city known for corrupt officials and police officers, it’s also about trust. My cop, Farraday, was burned by a reporter, so he isn’t happy about working with a journalist at the start of the story.

My initial thought was that I should look up page 96, because I have a habit of doing things backwards, but I did look up page 69.

Vern had asked for the mayor, but had been told Garrett was available. Others praised Walter Morrow, a man who’d take time out of his busy schedule to throw the opening pitch at a school softball tournament.

A mayor too busy to talk about a missing girl but with enough time to roll up his sleeves for a little baseball. Only in America.

Vern is a secondary character. However, for a book that focuses on corruption this is the kind of minor scene that’s essential. What does this scene show the reader? A missing girl isn’t a high priority for City Hall, and it’s probably a safe bet that if the mayor doesn’t care about this investigation he isn’t too concerned with other local crime, which might be part of the reason so many cases are going unsolved and the local cops have developed a reputation for turning a blind eye for a price.

I still wondered if page 96 would be a better indication of what the book was about, so I decided to take a peek. Farraday comes face to face with the reporter who burned him for the first time in the book.

Farraday… grabbed her arm and pulled her out of the way of the other police personnel starting to return from the crime scene.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“I came to see you.” The woman wrenched her arm free from his hold. “You didn’t come home last night.”

“I don’t have to explain myself to you.” Farraday’s back was rigid, his jaw clenched. “You have no business being here.”

“Here as in your house or your crime scene?”

Surprisingly, both pages connect to the underlying themes that form the framework for Suspicious Circumstances. I don’t usually skip ahead in books, in case I read a spoiler, so I’ve never chosen a book this way. As to whether or not these pages would entice people to keep reading, I think that depends on the reader, so you tell me: Did I pass?

Many thanks to Sandra for the input.

Among the advance praise for Suspicious Circumstances:

"Suspicious Circumstances has to be one of the most satisfying mysteries going that grips the reader from beginning to end."
--Clive Cussler

“Sandra Ruttan’s Suspicious Circumstances soars. It is complex, exciting, and elegant. In musical terms, it’s listening to Bach. I’m in love with Lara Kelly, the smart, strong, vulnerable protagonist. Her detective lover better move fast or I’m in there. A gripping adventure, a large cast of marvelous characters, and twists that follow turns. Read it. You’ll love it too.”
--Robert Fate, author of Baby Shark

“Suspicious Circumstances twists and turns and twists again, leaving the reader breathless and unsure which end is up. And that's just the beginning. Ruttan's deft touch intrigues and satisfies, making her a powerful new force in the mystery field.”
--JT Ellison, author of All The Pretty Girls

"Secrets and lies, new murders and old, all unravel and unwind within the pages of Suspicious Circumstances to create a complex and compelling crime-fiction debut. Sandra Ruttan has a keen eye for description, a wonderful ear for dialogue, and an acute instinct for the nuances of characterization. "
--Anne Frasier, USA Today bestselling author of Hush

J.T. Ellison interviewed Sandra in the Winter 2006 issue of Spinetingler, as issue which includes Sandra's interviews with Jess Lourey, Mark Billingham, and Duane Swierczynski.

Julia Buckley interviewed Sandra at Mysterious Musings and Bethany K. Warner interviewed her for The Northwestern.

The two books that most haunted Sandra in 2006: Ian Rankin's The Flood and Anne Frasier's Pale Immortal. (Read the page 69 entry for Pale Immortal here.)

Click here for Sandra's interviews, short stories, and reviews.

Visit her lively blog and official website.

Previous "page 69 tests:"
Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography
Alison Gaylin, You Kill Me
Gayle Lynds, The Last Spymaster
Jim Lehrer, The Phony Marine
Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.
Debra Ginsberg, Blind Submission
Sarah Katherine Lewis, Indecent
Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
William Easterly, The White Man's Burden
Danielle Trussoni, Falling Through the Earth
Andrew Blechman, Pigeons
Anne Perry, A Christmas Secret
Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers
Kat Richardson, Greywalker
Michael Bess, Choices Under Fire
Masha Hamilton, The Camel Bookmobile
Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane
Nicholas Lemann, Redemption
Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything
Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile
Josh Chafetz, Democracy’s Privileged Few
Anne Frasier, Pale Immortal
Michael Lewis, The Blind Side
David A. Bell, The First Total War
Brett Ellen Block, The Lightning Rule
Rosanna Hertz, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice
Jason Starr, Lights Out
Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom
Stephen Elliott, My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up
Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies
Sean Chercover, Big City, Bad Blood
Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind
Stanley Fish, How Milton Works
James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry
Margaret Lowrie Robertson, Season of Betrayal
Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
Allison Burnett, The House Beautiful
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History
Ed Lynskey, The Dirt-Brown Derby
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