Finding a Favorite Stick

by
Scott D. Parker

Yesterday, my family and I took a trek through some trails near my Houston home. Whenever I go for a hike, I always find that special companion with which to share my journey: a stick. This one wasn't a tall walking stick, my preference, really. It was short, about twelve inches long, thin, and weather beaten, all the bark gone. It fit in my right hand, with a little knot that separated my index and middle fingers. In some respects, it made me imagine a sword handle, a thin foil at the end of the thing and me the Musketeer. Throughout my walking, my hand learned the feel of the stick, becoming familiar with its shape, texture, and how best it fit into my hand. The wood become comfortable. By the end, when I neared my car, this inanimate object seemed like a part of me.

Then, as much as I loved holding that particular stick, I threw it away and left it in the woods. Next time, I'll find another one.

We're all readers here. We love books and the stories within them. We find a favorite author and devour everything he or she has written. If its a particular series, the joy we get when reading the latest exploits of the central character is like that stick I carried yesterday. It's comfortable. It's familiar. We love it.

But do you ever throw away the author?

Earlier this week, NPR Music ran a survey about bands with whom listeners have fallen out of love. You know what they're talking about. A band you absolutely loved, Loved, LOVED and bought anything and everything they ever put out. One day, however, something changed. Perhaps they did, perhaps you did. Nonetheless, you stopped listening to that band. You moved on.

Anyone ever move on from an author? Stephen King is one for me. I used to read everything he wrote and everything that was written about him. Somehow, gradually, I just stopped reading his stuff. My wife recently read--and loved--Under the Dome but it doesn't ring any bells for me. I will certainly watch the Dark Tower movies, however. Along the way, I've picked up new authors and I'm really digging them.

There are some, of course, that I picked up sometime in the past and they're still with me--Conan Doyle, Dickens, Burroughs--and I can't imagine I'll ever throw them aside.

Y'all ever pick up and discard authors?

Drink of the Week: Sun Tea. Now that it's 90 (!) in Houston in April (!), I can again brew sun tea. It's my absolute favorite drink for hot days. Sweetened, of course. Brew up a gallon. It tastes and smells like childhood.

Femmes Fatales

By Russel D McLean

It was a conversation with a friend that stared me thinking about women crime writers. A simple question; which of the current crop of female crime writers would I recommend? Who do I rate?

They should have known better than to ask.

It was my then-to-be-agent who gave me a copy of Vicki Hendricks’s Cruel Poetry; a novel that knocked me off my feet. Truly, I was smitten – and not just because Hendricks one of the few authors in the world who can write about sex in a way that doesn’t make me want to snort milk out of my nose. She hooked me with her voice, her characters, her attitude. This was a woman I could get; a woman writing about the world in a way that I could understand. She was cynical, dangerous, unpredictable and still did not disguise the fact that she was writing from a woman’s point of view.

I wanted more.

And soon enough I found it.

In Cathi Unsworth, who made my head explode with her thriller/faux punk biog The Singer; a sheer, neck-breaking scream of a novel that could have got me fired from the day job as I turned up late to shifts because I just had to know: what happened next? This book was truly something else, and it is to my eternal regret that this year when I found myself near Unsworth at the bar during the Harrogate Crime Festival this year I didn’t turn and say hello, tell her how that book just plain knocked me out.

I told my friend about how, when I saw the stunning painted cover to the unnaturally talented Christa Faust’s Money Shot, I was sold straight off. And Christa’s novel truly delivered on the promise of that cover – deadly, provocative and beautiful noir set in a world that is often used to denote sin in most crime novels. What I loved was that this author used her unique setting of blue movies in such a way that she didn’t demonise her lead character’s choice of profession so much as normalise it, creating a strange kind of equality for a character one would normally expect to feel “exploited” in a more traditional kind of noir tale.

One of the books that truly captivated me of late – and this book, I didn’t dare put it down unless I truly had no choice – was Megan Abbott’s stunning Bury Me Deep, which continues the author’s fascination with the same 1930’s noir-land that James Ellroy once inhabited, where the gumshoes and femme fatales walked the dark alleys. But she tackles this mis-en-scene but from a decidedly female perspective. Abbott is a stunning writer, one whose voice grips and holds the reader, whose sheer style and energy crackles off the page. And if you want female noir, you have to pick up one of the best anthologies of the last few years, A Hell of A Woman, edited by Abbott herself.

And there were so many others out there I had to tell my friend about. As though, once I started to answer what should have been a simple query, I just couldn’t stop.

I told them about Zoe Sharp’s thrillers that beat most male writers hands down for sheer adrenaline rush. And Canadian Sandra Ruttan’s compassionate take on the police thriller that truly turns the tables on the reader to the point where you reach the last page of her second book and wonder, “did she just do that?”

And how could I not mention Laura Lippman, whose book, The Power of Three, did the most unexpected thing and made this cynical bastard shed a couple of tears by the book’s end. How the hell did that happen?

Closer to home, there is Denise Mina, who got me with her run on the Hellblazer comics, a run that convinced me I really had to pick up her actual books – and, oh yes, let me tell you I wasn’t disappointed (although there was a distinct lack of chain smoking mystics schlepping round the streets of Glasgow in her actual crime novels, but her voice and narrative were so strong that in the end it simply didn’t matter).

A simple question, then. But anyone who has a bookseller for a friend should know better than to ask them who they rate, what they love, the writers they dig. You can narrow it down all you like. You can say, “just the women” or “just the men” or “just the noir writers”, but if they’re anything like me, there’s going to be a whole list of authors they can think of. And along with the names, there’s going to be a host of reasons why they you’ll dig those writers.

So, to continue to help my friend, I turn to you, fellow DSDers (both the contributors and the commentors) to ask which female crime writers you’d recommend they read.