A Podcast Interview Reignited a Desire to Revisit HBO's Perry Mason

By

Scott D. Parker

(I listened to a podcast interview with Michael Begler, the showrunner for season 2 of the reimagined "Perry Mason" TV show. I really liked how he described coming to the project, what excited him, and his vision for a season three that will never happen. Give it a listen here. 

Naturally this put me in a Perry Mason mood and I think I'll be revisiting this excellent series. Here's my review of the second season.)

The second season of Perry Mason played more or less like how the original series television show used to: introduce some characters you don’t know, witness a crime (but conceal the culprit), and bring in our main characters. There will be a courtroom scene and there will be a confession of the real culprit on the stand in front of…

Okay, so the analogy only goes so far, and that’s why I am really enjoying HBO’s revamping of Perry Mason. I say revamping because it many ways, it’s not an update, but a throwback. The TV show was broadcast in the late 1950s and early 1960s and the stories were all contemporary. The original books started in 1933 and went all the way up to 1973. As far as I can suspect, author Erle Stanley Gardner kept Mason up to date with the times.

The HBO show is set in 1933 and serves as Mason’s origin to be attorney and man we know him to be. What makes this show special is that the creators do not attempt to press all the existing characters into the existing boxes we all know. Mason is a divorced dad, Della Street is studying to be a lawyer (and not just Mason’s secretary) and is a closeted homosexual. Ditto for district attorney Hamilton Berger, character traits that are explored and exploited. Private investigator Paul Drake is African-American so race comes to the fore often. 

When I think of this modern Perry Mason, I think about the Sherlock Holmes TV show Elementary. Unlike BBC’s Sherlock—which merely updated the old Conan Doyle stories to the present century—Elementary reimagined Holmes and Watson and changed their story. Same with HBO’s Perry Mason. And I have zero issues with it. If I want something traditional, the old TV is airing everyday on MeTV and I can go watch an episode. Or I can pick up one of Gardner’s books. I don’t want a warmed up retread. I want something new. That’s what this show is.

The writers of season 2 do take a page from Gardner’s often intricate plots. Brooks McCutcheon, son of a wealthy father, who has some shady dealings along with his philanthropy and driving desire to be Major League Baseball to Los Angeles. He is the one murdered in episode 1 of this eight-episode season. The accused are Rafael and Mateo Gallardo, poor Mexican-American young men who live in one of the Hoovervilles. (Historical note: I loved the use of “Hoovervilles” among the characters but none of them felt compelled to have an “As you know…” aside.) 

As with any good Gardner story, the more Mason digs into a case, the more oddball things crop up. This one has a few, but the highlights of this series are the individual moments that serve to mature and grow the characters. Mason, trying to make up for being an absent father really tries to be a part of his son’s life and ends up dating one of his teachers. Della meets and falls in love with a rich screenwriter and sees what it’s like not to have to live in a boarding house and be able to go to nightclubs that cater to lesbians. Paul’s story is not as happy, as the case compels him to do things he doesn’t want to do, putting pressure on his marriage and his living arrangements with his wife’s brother. 

Like the intro to this post, a key feature to any Perry Mason story is his courtroom theatrics. There are some in this show that are really good, including one fantastic one, but you’ll have to watch the show to see it because I’m not spoiling it here.

When you get to the end and the culprit is revealed, it will likely cause you to reflect on the entire series and think back to moments and if the writers telegraphed the ending. I’ll leave that up to you, too, but I’ll say that it makes sense. 

With the TV show, by the time you got to the end of an episode, there were clear winners and losers and the end result was as black and white as the film used to make the show. But we’re in the 21st Century now and few things are crystal clear. Both seasons of Perry Mason mirror the era in which we find ourselves living, and I’m perfectly fine with that, too. It’s more real, more nuance, and harkens back directly to a quote Mason heard in season 1 and repeats in season 2. 

I have grown to really like this series and it hangs on a point where a potential season 3 could show us the modern version of the old TV show. Boy, I hope we get a third season.

15 Authors, One Book

 

“Today’s greatest crime writers give Beau Johnson’s blood-soaked creation his due in Bishop Rider Lives, with stories of terrifying violence and satisfying retribution in a world where it’s never been about saving people, but rather making the evildoers pay the price for their misdeeds. Often bloody but never nihilistic, this book will leave your pulse pounding in your ears and slake your thirst to see the bad guys get their comeuppance.” —Bobby Mathews, Anthony Award-nominated author of Magic City Blues and Living the Gimmick

Get yours

Revolution in 35mm

A book I contributed to called Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960-1990 has a release date of August 20th here in the US. The publisher is PM Press. I'm mentioning it here because PM Press is currently doing a pre-order Kickstarter campaign for the book. Basically, it's a campaign to get pre-orders that come with the offer of various rewards.

The book is a collection of essays about particular films from 1960 about 1990, films that looked at and explored political violence and resistance movements of the era whether they were arthouse type films or more exploitive fare. It concentrates on films related to the rise of protest movements by students, workers, and leftist groups as well as broader movements of the time like Black Power and the rise of feminism. There are pieces on films that focused on the violent guerilla strugges of the 1970s and 1980s, a time of groups like the Weathermen and the Black Liberation Army in the United States, the Red Army Faction in West Germany and Japan, and Italy's Red Brigades. 

There are twelve authors involved, and the editors of the book are Andrew Nette and Samm Deighan. It has loads of illustrations in it and delves into subgenres like spaghetti westerns, Italian poliziotteschi, and Blaxpoitation.

My piece is about two very different but equally challenging and subversive-minded directors from Brazil, Glauber Rocha and Jose Mojica Marins. One was a mainstay of the international art house circuit in the 1960s and 1970s (Rocha), and the other (Marins) was the alter ego of a great horror film character, Coffin Joe. These two, who knew each other and were friendly, both quite frequently ran afoul of Brazilian government film censors and had to struggle throughout their careers to get films made.

This should be a fascinating book, and I'm eager to read the whole thing through myself. If you feel so inclined, check out the Kickstarter.

Detailed information about the book can be found here: Revolution in 35mm.

The link for the Kickstarter campaign can be found here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ww3/revolution-in-35mm.

June 23 Will Always Be Batman Day: Batman '89 at 35

[As of tomorrow, the 1989 Batman movie is thirty-five years old. This is a piece I wrote seven years ago. Ever since 1989, the date of June 23 has been fixed in my mind. It will always be the true Batman Day for me and likely millions more.] 

Where were you 35 years ago today? Probably standing in line to see Batman.

The Date

 It all began with a symbol and a date. A simple poster considering what it wrought. For months, all you needed to know was June 23. You could look at a calendar and count down the days until Friday, June 23, 1989. That was the date in which Batman would finally appear on theater screens in the manner akin to his origin.

It may be difficult to imagine now but there was a time when a single superhero film dominated everything. And I mean everything.

The Cast

Batman, the 1989 film directed by Tim Burton and starring Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne/Batman and Jack Nicholson as The Joker, was a cultural phenomenon in every sense of the word. The long gestating film had started production the previous year and if you thought the backlash the casting of Ben Affleck as Batman created was something [or Richard Pattison], you have no idea when the casting of Keaton, primarily known for his comedies, caused. I can’t remember my own impressions for Keaton, but I remember quite vividly my thoughts on Joker. My choice, if you were going by the comic book look and feel, was Peter O’Toole. Sure, he was older, but he had The Grin. But when Nicholson was cast, I was like “Of course!”

Pictures in Starlog the spring of 1989 gave us the first glimpse of the all-black Batsuit and Keaton in it. I was sold! Then photos of Nicholson’s Joker emerged and I was so excited! I was and am an easy mark in that respect. A lifelong comic book fan, it was so cool to see Batman in real life. More thoughts here.

Batman ‘66

Let me pause here a moment to comment on the 1966 Batman. At the time, I was 20 and had come of age just as comics realized they could be darker and grittier. I was almost the perfect age to read The Dark Knight Returns and Year One and The Killing Joke. So, in 1989, I was distancing myself from TV’s Batman, the way I was first introduced to the character. Gone in my mind was the funny Batman. Here was the grim Batman, the way he was in the 1940s comics and the 1970s comics. Ironically, 35 years later and with the passing of Adam West, I’m ready for grimdark Batman to go away or, at least, make a way for more than one version.

The Preview

Back in those pre-YouTube days, the only way you could see a trailer was to go to a movie and buy a ticket. I’m not sure how but I learned that the Batman trailer (or maybe this teaser trailer because I remember the opening on the Batmobile's rocket) was attached to “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” Boom! I couldn’t get to the theater fast enough. There it was, with no music and what seemed like unmixed sound, was Batman, alive, moving, beating up bad guys and driving a kick-ass Batmobile with fire out the back! And Joker. Heavens, how awesome he looked. And I loved the line Robert Wuhl’s reporter asked: “Is there a six-foot bat in Gotham City?” And Batman crashing through the skylight? The only question in the spring of 19898 was how many days until 23 June?

The Movie

I can’t remember for sure if I went to the midnight showing or day one showing. I worked at a movie theater the summer of 1989—a great summer of movies—so I’m pretty confident that I saw it at midnight with the throngs of other folks. Like just about everyone, I lost it. This was the movie we had been waiting our entire lives for! The Danny Elfman score. The opening scene when the mugger asks what are you and Keaton says “I’m Batman” (still my absolutely favorite part). The gadgets. Keaton doing a wonderful job. Nicholson chewing scenery. The fight in the alley with the sword guy. The Batmobile doing…anything. The menace of Joker. The reveal that Joker/Jack Napier killed Bruce’s parents. Prince’s music. The Batplane. The quotes (“Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?” “Never rub another man’s hubarb” “I didn’t ask.” “You wanna get nuts? Let’s get nuts.” “My life is…complicated.”) The final confrontation. The final scene with the Bat-signal. It was utterly awesome.

Batman got everyone. The hard-core comics fans flocked to see the movie multiple times. The casual viewer enjoyed it. Your grandpa enjoyed it. Everyone, it seemed, had seen the movie at least once, and chatted about it. Was it the last great common movie everyone saw? I’m not sure, but it was certainly a milestone.

Oh, and the merchandise! Good grief! Batman stuff was everywhere. And, yeah, I bought my fair share. Why the heck not? Up until then, the amount of Batman/superhero stuff available to purchase was meager at best. Nowhere near what it’s like today.

I can’t remember how many times I saw the film. Enough for me to memorize huge chunks of the movie.

Looking Back

The irony now, for many of us who distanced ourselves from the 1966 Batman in 1989, is that the Batman '89--when compared to the Christian Bale films and Batman v Superman and Pattinson's The Batman and the current comics--looks more campy than we ever saw at the time. But that’s only in comparison to what came afterwards. Sure, the immediate next film, 1992’s Batman Returns, went very dark, only to be brightened by 1995’s Batman Forever and, ahem, 1997’s Batman and Robin. When you compare those four films, Batman is the second darkest. But it’s still funny when you look at it now. 

But not in 1989. In that year, we comic book readers thought our time had finally arrived. We had our dark Batman. What was next? Another Superman? What about those Marvel characters? And when’s the Justice League gonna land in our laps?

Well, we still had to wait another decade until 2000’s X-Men to kick off this current Golden Age of Superhero Movies. This current run of films has produced some truly great movies (The Dark Knight; Spider-Man 2; Batman Begins; all three Captain America movies; Avengers; Ant-Man, Wonder Woman, and, of course, Infinity War and Endgame) but it all had to start somewhere. Technically, the run started in 1978 with Superman The Movie (Boy, am I so happy they didn’t put “The Movie” at the end of “Batman”), but the real start of superhero movies was Batman.

I’m so glad I was alive at the time to enjoy it.

Tonight on Paper Cuts

 

At 8 p.m. eastern tonight (Fri, June 21) Steve Weddle joins Brad and J to talk about The County Line.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgL8IloMCMc

"Hit Man" Is a Nice Piece of Counter Programming for Summer 2024

By

Scott D. Parker

Well, that wasn’t what I expected.

But maybe I should have.

“Hit Man” debuted on Netflix last Friday after spending a few days in the theater. Glen Powell stars as Gasy Johnson, a college professor who moonlights as a hit man for the cops. No, he’s not really a hit man. He just take a meeting, gets the perps on tape asking for a murder-for-hire, and then the cops swoop in.

The movie was inspired by a Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth dating back twenty-four years. Gary isn’t just some ordinary joe meeting people in bars or restaurants. He’s a psychology professor who digs deep into his marks, figuring out what makes them tick, and then presents a “hit man” likely to align with the mark’s impression of what a hit man would look and act like. This gives actor Glen Powell the change to change his appearance—just like the real Gary—coming out in wigs and fake teeth and affected accents. It’s all quite fun.

Until Gary meets Madison (Adria Arjona). She wants her abusive husband dead and Gary does the unlikely thing of talking her out of it. She walks away happy. Gary’s cop co-workers can’t believe it. And Gary? Well, he kind of likes the version of himself he created for Madison. He ends up seeing her again. And again. And again. 

Now we have a different tale, just like the entire movie.

It’s the Richard Linklater Effect

I should have known that a movie directed and co-written (with Powell) by fellow Texan Linklater would be a different kind of hit man movie. I mean, this is the same guy who gave us Dazed and Confused (and added Matthew McConaughey’s “Alright, alright, alright” to the movie lexicon) and Slacker, a film that helped spawn the independent film movement of the 1990s.

So this is a movie about a hit man with a lot of talking and zero moments of gun fire (outside of a gun range). Gary and Madison talk about identity and what it’s like to be a hit man, a trait Gary constantly deflects because, well, he’s a psych professor. In fact, while with Madison, Gary begins to like his alter ego better than himself. And a different Gary emerges.

One he has to keep hidden from the cops.

And then things take a weird, funny turn.

What makes this decidedly Hollywood-ized version of this story is the truth at its core. Gary Johnson was a real guy—he actually did his work here in Houston even though the movie takes place in New Orleans—and that’s wilder than any movie. 

A good movie and a nice bit of counter programming for all the usual movies we get during the summer months. Have a look. It’s on Netflix. You don’t even have to leave your couch.

Be Expansive For a Change

In his forward to his second collection of fiction, The Garden of Forking Paths, Jorge Luis Borges laid out, not for the last time, his views on long works of fiction:

"It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books -- setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes."

I agree, and it's one reason that whenever I write a book, I try always to condense, condense, condense. In the five books I've written, I haven't written one that even reaches 60,000 words. They are all in the novella to short novel range, and as I've said once or twice while doing book launches, I could say that I've followed the principle of inverse ratio in writing each book: the more time it takes me to write the book, the less pages it should be in the end, because more time spent writing means more time spent condensing and pruning and eliminating anything not entirely essential. That elimination of everything smacking of the inessential, a necessity in short stories of course, is one reason that I write books so slowly. Prolific as a writer I will never be.

Regardless, I am working on a book now that I'm determined will be a longer length, though nothing in the range of five hundred pages. But let's say something more like 80,000 words, something closer anyway to typical novel length. It's a challenge, a way, among other ways, to get out of what I suppose by now is my comfort zone in terms of length. It means being more expansive for a change without being long-winded. It's something other writers of novels take for granted perhaps, but for me this challenge to be expansive yet tight is something new. That in itself is not a bad thing; every time you write a book, it should contain a challenge for yourself, either in terms of its language or structure or subject matter or something else. For me, this is the challenge: to write a book longer than any I have written before, write it with a kind of precision and conciseness I can live with, and not take forever doing it. So far, the book is going pretty well, and I'm actually finding that not being so strict with myself, not keeping the language on such a tight leash (so to speak) has been enjoyable, even fun. Whether I can continue like this through the book's end I'll find out, but that feeling of uncertainty as one proceeds is par for the course. After all, every book you write, while you're in the act of writing it, feels something like a crapshoot.

This new one, in progress, is no different. 

Always Strive For Your Dreams

 by

Scott D. Parker

Every year during the first week of June, my mind drifts back to the first week of June 1944. The week leading up to D-Day. Even now, eighty years later, the magnitude of the courage of the men who stormed those beaches never fails to take my breath away.

There have been many books written and documentaries compiled, oral histories recorded and movies filmed. One in particular is Saving Private Ryan which features a grueling opening segment. As horrific as those opening minutes are, you know it’s all just make-believe and that it’s only a taste of what really went down that morning.

Every year, I look at the photos of the Allied troops squeezed into those landing crafts. For that one moment when the cameraman snapped his photo, some of those soldiers smiled. Others didn’t. Both tell the same story: the invasion was necessary and they were called on to do it. That was the nature of their birth and world events. 

In these photos as in so many others, the faces of those men were young. So young. I often wonder how I would have comported myself if history called on me to do what those men did. How would I do? How would you do?

As thankful as we are for the courage of those men, it’s sometimes difficult not to get emotional when thinking of them as individuals. As regular humans on this earth. They, like all of us, had dreams of what they’d do when they got home. Many soldiers returned home. So many did not. Perhaps the cure for cancer was in the brain of one of those men. Maybe a great baseball player or an engineer who could invent something we would now take for granted here in 2024.

But today, I’m talking about creatives. Imagine the books or the songs not created, the paintings and the sculptures, the plays and the actors that never were created. All gone. 

The thing is, those men had creative dreams like we do, and then they stormed those beaches to preserve the dreams for all the survivors. For us. For those that’ll come after us. 

We all struggle: with life, with our stories, with our businesses. There are so many books out there that sometimes, every once in a while, I question myself. Why? What’s the point? Who would care?

I do. I care about these plans. I came up with them, after all. They are, to my mind, good and decent ideas. Why not try?

Try because you want to. Try because it could bring you great happiness. Try even though you might fail, but you can learn from that failure. Try because you could reach someone who will need what you create at a precise moment in their lives. 

Try because of what happened eighty years ago this week and the men who didn’t get the chance to try.

Try your dreams. Always.

A Charleston thriller: The Jon Sealy Interview

By Steve Weddle

I've been a fan of Jon Sealy's since The Whiskey Baron came out a little more than 10 years ago. Of that book, the Richmond Time-Dispatch said: "What you’d get if Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner co-wrote the HBO series 'Boardwalk Empire' while on an especially inspired, existentially tinged bender."

Since that time, Sealy has published two other novels, as well as So You Want to Be a Novelist, his memoir and manifesto. 

Jon Sealy

I recently read and loved his new novel, The King Street Affair, his southern crime novel that reaches from South Carolina to Estonia, and deals with lawyers, journalists, spies, and more. 

On Tuesday, June 16, I'll join Jon and Kent Wascom at Fountain Bookstore in Richmond for an "Authors in Conversation" event.

I had a chance to ask Jon some questions prior to that.

Steve Weddle: Why Charleston? Could this story have been set anywhere else?

Jon Sealy: The simple answer is that I'm of the school that believes fiction starts with an image, and the instigating image for this novel is the opening pages. I went to a New Year's Eve wedding at the Francis Marion Hotel years ago and then had breakfast at the Swamp Fox restaurant on a cold rainy January day. Staring out at King Street, watching water drip off the palm trees in Marion Square, the scene just sort of vibrated. Charleston has a unique effect, I think. Some of the plot would work elsewhere, in another port city--Wilmington, say--but it would be a different story.

SW:  Bert and Penelope seem so real and well developed as "secondary" characters. Any plans for a spin-off?

JS: Thank you for saying that. Maybe! I actually did write a few chapters of a book featuring Bert, where I had him retired in the Adirondacks and he gets involved with solving a murder, kind of like Le Carre did with George Smiley in his second novel, A Murder of Quality. But I didn't have the energy to keep at it. Maybe it was the setting, or maybe it was trying to write about Bert without Penelope. The King Street Affair is subtitled "A Holy City Novel," so if I do a sequel or spin-off, it also will be set primarily in Charleston and likely would include Penelope, who became one of my favorite characters in the book.

SW: When you started writing this book, did you know that the story was going to move into an espionage thriller with European gangsters?

JS: No, I actually started this as a sprawling multi-generational Cold War novel about Everett Archer, who ended up being a minor figure in the final version. I have all these pages of backstory about him in the fifties, with Naval frogmen and I don't know what else. After a few years I finally decided I needed to tell a simpler, mostly present-time story, starting with a dead body on a beach.

SW: You tell this story with shifting timelines. Was that difficult? What was the process for you?

JS: As I mentioned, I cut a lot of the backstory going back 75 years, so what's left is essentially three chunks: a guy gets picked up for interrogation in part one; then we see what led the agents to him in part two; then we see what he does to try to get out of his jackpot in part three. It was a project to try to make sure the timelines were clear and consistent, but by the end, the process mostly consisted of me foisting the novel on various beta readers and trying to fix spots where they were confused.

SW: This is your fourth novel, which is clearly written with skill and confidence. What have you learned in the last 10 years since your wonderful debut that helped with this particular story?

JS: That's kind of you. I wrote The Whiskey Baron in my early 20s and The King Street Affair in my late 30s, so I have a better sense of myself and the world, but also, I hope, a little less ego about what I'm doing. I started off like I presume a lot of writers start, wanting to write my story my way and to show off with these linguistic flourishes. The King Street Affair is a bit of a transitional book for me, but I'm moving toward writing for someone.

***

CHARLESTON, SC—Wyatt Brewer has a respectable life as a newspaper reporter in the Holy City. One winter morning, he is assigned to cover the death of a mysterious Estonian who washed up on Folly Beach.

When intelligence agents Bert Wilson and Penelope Lowe pick him up for interrogation, Wyatt understands he’s stumbled into an underground world of crime and corruption. The agents give him a choice: Help them bring down a mole in their division or fend for himself against Eastern European gangsters and dirty government officials.

Part southern crime novel, part cat-and-mouse espionage thriller, Jon Sealy’s fourth novel is a meditation on the many ways the human heart can betray us.

Get your copy

Guest Post: Enter Sloane Donovan

I have a treat for everyone today, a guest post from PI thriller writer J.T. Siemens. He has not-your-average inspiration story for his tough, conflicted, bipolar PI heroine, Sloan Donovan. I’ll let him explain, but not without first recommending the just-released second novel in his series, Call of the Void, from NeWest Press. Take it away, J.T.!     -   Claire Booth

 By J.T. Siemens

            It all started with a murder at my workplace. That’s where the character of Sloane Donovan was born. A colleague of mine—an extremely tough-minded and athletic woman—happened across the victim’s body when she arrived at work just before dawn one morning. She didn’t witness the murder, but in ensuing days and weeks, seeing the brutal aftermath clearly left her unhinged, and as a result she suffered from PTSD.

            The event inspired me to write a short story, told through the eyes of an ex-cop named Sloane, who stumbles across the body of her friend. Sloane became a composite of several exceptionally strong and dynamic women I’d known, and I took a gamble in writing the story in first-person from a female perspective. In truth, Sloane’s voice came to me ready-made, and I understood her from the get-go. The story was well received, but even if it hadn’t been, I knew I had a character residing in me that was simply too powerful and too interesting to be contained in a single short story.

            Sloane deserved a novel. Heck, she deserved a series.

            Deciding to stick with the first-person narrative throughout, I churned out the first draft of To Those Who Killed Me, largely in secret to avoid any naysayers. Sloane was already in my head, so I knew that third-person wouldn’t cut it. She is a fun character to write because she’s a bit of a wildcard; I often don’t know what she’s going to do from one scene to the next, or how far she might go to get the job done—in this case, uncovering the reason behind her friend’s murder, which is the premise of To Those Who Killed Me.

            In between drafts, I became acquainted with a couple of female police officers, both of whom had been involved in significant undercover operations. This helped imbue Sloane’s character with more depth and authenticity. The officers I met, as well as the women I based her character on, all exuded edgy, warrior vibes, and I loved that for the character of Sloane.           

In addition to PTSD, Sloane also struggles with a bipolar diagnosis. In early drafts, I avoided labels as much as possible, but it wasn’t until a medical professional had read the manuscript that I was informed that Sloane’s issue sounded a lot like bipolar disorder. This led to a ton of research, but more importantly, I discovered that I already knew some people who lived with the disorder. The anecdotes they graciously bestowed allowed Sloane to become even more fully fleshed out, especially her backstory. It was very important to me to portray mental illness through the most truthful and respectful lens possible. I also used aspects of Sloane’s diagnosis as an asset, such as when she is able to channel that obsessive, high-energy output into solving cases—albeit to the detriment of other aspects of her life.

In To Those Who Killed Me, Sloane is determined to get to the bottom of her friend’s suspicious death, and is nearly killed in the process. In the just-released book two, Call of the Void, Sloane is now a fully-fledged P.I., who, with the help of her partner, Wayne Capson, takes on the case of Emily Pike, a young woman who has been missing for seven years. The sequel takes place six months following the events of the first book, leaving Sloane still nursing wounds inflicted during the earlier case. The missing persons case triggers Sloane’s obsessive nature to new heights, leading her and Wayne to find clues linking Emily to a series of disappearances of women over the past forty years.

The idea for Call of the Void came when I saw a missing person poster of a young woman hanging from a telephone pole. It was in Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside, a place where an inordinate number of marginalized women go missing each year. When I looked the woman up, I came across the Missing Children Society of Canada, and I was staggered by the sheer volume of missing kids and teens who have disappeared over the decades. Few want to spend any time considering what may have happened to them, or the devastating effects their disappearances have on their families. Thinking about this affected me on a deep, visceral level, and I thought, this would get to Sloane, too. If there’s anyone who would stop at nothing to track down a missing teen, it would be her.

            And off we went.

 

J.T. Siemens grew up in Vernon, BC, and moved to Vancouver to pursue a career as a personal trainer. A longstanding love of books and movies led him to study screenwriting and creative writing, and his short stories have been published in Mystery Weekly, Down in the Dirt, CC&D, and Vancouver Magazine. A murder outside his workplace inspired the novel To Those Who Killed Me, which was nominated for the Arthur Ellis Unhanged Award, and published by NeWest Press in April 2022. The novel introduces Sloane Donovan and is the first in a series about a bipolar ex-cop turned PI. J.T. lives in Vancouver’s West End with his wife and two cats. 

Buy Call of the Void at Bookshop dot org, on Amazon, or through Canada's NeWest Press.

Start Your Summer Writing Project Today

By

Scott D. Parker

Have you started yet? 

Remember how excited you were on New Year’s Day? You had high hopes about the year, and all the things you were going to do, you know, like write a book (or finish one). How’d that go?

If it went well, congrats. I finished my WIP earlier this year and took a break. I wanted to catch up on some reading and prepare for my next project. Which begins today.

I’ve written about this for a few years now: Summer is a great time to start and complete a project. You have the bookends of Memorial Day and Labor Day. As of today, you have 92 days until Labor Day weekend, 65 if you only want to work on weekdays. That’s 13 weeks. More than enough time to make some substantial headway on a new book—or finish it.

Call it National Novel Writing Season, NaNoWriSe. 

Call it a productive summer. 

Call it whatever you want, but have fun doing it. 

And start today.