Podcast Summer

By Steve Weddle

As you may have heard, the DoSomeDamage Podcast Network is back with 7 Minutes With, coming to you every two weeks. In each episode I chat with three crime fiction authors about music, movies, and television. Find us on SoundCloud and iTunes and elsewhere.

The new episode with Jedidiah Ayers, Holly West, and Chris F. Holm should be in your ears by the end of the week, as long as you subscribe to the podcast.

Eryk Pruitt and company just launched The Long Dance Podcast, which you can find here. This is a true crime story about an unsolved murder case from the 1970s.

On February 12, 1971, in Durham, North Carolina, a 20-year-old nursing student and her 19-year-old boyfriend left a Valentine’s Dance to park down a secluded lover’s lane. They never returned. Two weeks later, their bodies were found deep within the Carolina pines. They had been strangled, tortured, and murdered. Their murders have never been solved.

THE LONG DANCE is the story of the lives touched by the murders of Patricia Mann and Jesse McBane. Produced by crime fiction author Eryk Pruitt, investigative reporter Drew Adamek, and sound engineer Piper Kessler, it uses recorded interviews to tell the tragic tale of North Carolina’s most baffling murder case.

In creating THE LONG DANCE, we had a very simple goal: To create the substantive record about the lives and deaths of Patricia Mann and Jesse McBane, as well as the forty-six year investigation into their murder, and the stories of those people touched by their deaths. Not only were we fortunate enough to record several hundreds of hours of interviews with our subjects, but we also became active participants in the investigation by helping to secure the DNA profiles of the three suspects who had never been eliminated. We have partnered with the Orange County Sheriff’s Office who believes this may be the final chance to close the book on the forty-six year old murder case. >>

If you want to hear crime writers in conversation with each other, be sure to check out Angel Colon's excellent podcast, The Bastard Title.  He's chatted with former DSDers Holly West and Dave White, as well as current DSDer Renee Asher Pickup.

And be sure to check out the Defectives CRIMEFRICTION podcast here, hosted by DSD co-founder Jay Stringer and the brilliant Chantelle Aimée Osman. You can subscribe on the iTunes here.

And, of course, you've got the Writer Types podcast with S.W. Lauden and Eric Beetner, as well as JDO's JDO interview show here & Luca Veste and Steve Cavanaugh's Two Crime Writers show here.

That should keep you busy.

Oh, and here's a taste of the upcoming DSD 7 Minutes with podcast, featuring Jedidiah Ayres, Holly West, and Chris F. Holm.

Feed Your Ears: Crime Scene Podcast

By Steve Weddle

Soon after we first launched the Do Some Damage blog back in 1964, Jay Stringer got to work on the podcast version. You can find the podcast down the right rail on this here DSD site or at iTunes. Jay has moved on to doing his own Hacks podcast, which you can find here.

Eryk Pruitt

I enjoy listening to podcasts when I have time. I also dig audio books and the baseball channel on XM radio. Like pretty much everyone except my Uncle Clyde, I don't have enough time to do all the things I'd like to do. My appetite is legend. I've tried listening to audio books while I run, but after a few miles it gets pretty hard to hear the story over my gulping for air and then, pretty soon, I can't hear the book at all when I'm throwing up.

Recently, I got the chance to listen to some of Eryk Pruitt's new podcast on WCOM, which you can listen to via the webbernets. The latest episode features a talk about book reviewing, with guests Benoit Lelievre, Keith Rawson, and DSD's own Renee Asher Pickup.

Some highlights:

I was surprised to find that Keith and I agree on something and that it happens to be a movie. He and I share a minority opinion about Mad Max: Fury Road.

Renee went on the record to make sure everyone was clear that Tom Pitts is OK and that she doesn't have any problem with him.

Ben told an amazing story about a less-than-glowing book review that he wrote and ultimately took down when the author's fans began threatening Ben online and posting photographs of Ben's apartment building.

In fact, one of the best aspects of this episode was hearing stories about specific authors and publishers:

- How an indie publisher was upset with a review Keith wrote and has worked to keep him from reviewing their books since.

- How a Big Six Publisher emailed Ben after wrote a review they weren't happy with. In the email, they told him that their editors were at ThrillerFest and that everyone there was talking about Ben and laughing at him behind his back. Then the administration for ThrillerFest got involved. Crazy story.

- How Renee gave a three-star review on Amazon to an author and then had him on her own podcast (Books and Booze) the following day. #Tense

Check out the podcast here and, if you'd like, post in the comments about your favorite book podcast. Thanks

An Ode to the TBR

By Renee Asher Pickup

Ah, the TBR pile.

The digital age hasn't made it easier to get through that long list of "To Be Read" but it's made it a hell of a lot easier to grow it. My relationship with the TBR is a mix of excitement and horror - every time I open a new book I think of all the others left behind, waiting, collecting dust.

Here are some of the books that have been on my TBR list for too long.

It's been over ten years since I worked at Borders book store in Columbia, Maryland, which is where I first encountered STIFF, shelving books. I'd worked in the schoolhouse where the USMC and Army trained service members to retrieve casualties and done a few morgue visits, and an interest in death, dying, and bodies remained. Mary Roach has gone on to pen several other books I really want to read, and haven't actually gotten around to. 

As soon as I added the photo for this book I felt like I had to duck - the readers of Do Some Damage are very likely throwing rotten vegetables at me for skipping this one. If not, wait for this - I've never read ANY Ellroy (if I'm not here next week it's because I've been asked politely to leave). I don't know how something like this happens. I know I should read Ellroy. I actually really want to read Ellroy. My growing interest in true crime says - for chrissakes, woman, read Black Dahlia! Yet, here it sits in the TBR, under a book I borrowed so I really, really need to read it before I get to anything else.

I look at this book every day. It is on a shelf in the living room and I can't walk into that room without looking at this book and yet... Ed Brubaker doing a mix of crime noir and Lovecraftian horror, somehow isn't the first thing on the TBR. I went back and read Deadpool vs. The Marvel Universe but didn't read Fatale. This blog entry is starting to make me feel bad about my life choices.

In addition to never reading Ellroy, I also never watched Justified. Not on purpose, really, I just didn't. I'm a big Elmore Leonard fan, though, and according to Goodreads I'm "currently reading" Pronto. Except, I'm not. A few years ago I downloaded the Raylan novels to see what the fuss was about, and apparently had really high hopes for tearing through them without delay. I also seriously intended to watch Justified. The intricacies of Raylan Givens remain unknown to me.

I've been a huge Stephen King fan since I was ten years old, sneaking books off the shelf. I have a huge collection of first editions, promotional items, and other random book-nerd junk I'm really proud of. Somewhere along the way though, King stopped being an author I bought and read overnight and became an author with a spot saved on the TBR. 11/22/63 was the first King novel to go TBR, and each subsequent release has followed. It's like I don't even know who I am anymore.

This is just a small selection from my ever-growing TBR. If I were to combine the actual pile with the digital list, and look at it long enough - I'm sure the length of the resulting list would make me feel my mortality in a very real way. The "To-Be-Read" is like a pile of hopes for the future and failures yet-acknowledged. 

What's been in your TBR for too long?

Those formative years...

By Renee Asher Pickup

The house I grew up in had a picture window and a giant tree in the front yard. Pretty much all of my memories from inside the living room feature dappled sunlight. Even the ones that feel like they should have taken place on a rainy day. One particular sun-dappled afternoon, both my parents were at work and I'd only been home from school for a little while. I was a senior in high school and it had been kind of a rough year, but it's hard not to look forward to graduation. I looked out the picture window to see a news van pulling up in front of the house and my stomach hit my feet.

Who died?

What happened?

Was it an accident or murder?... Like I said, it was a rough year. For most people who graduated high school in 2002, the most memorable moment was probably similar to me walking into my period 1A English class to see my teacher bent at the waist, wailing as the news replayed the footage of an airplane hitting the WTC over and over again.

The seniors at my high school had more than one soul crushing moment to hang onto.I grew up in the shadow of Steven Stayner. If the name sounds familiar, that's because they made a movie about him.

By the time I was in school Steven had been kidnapped, abused for seven years, returned home, started a family, and died in a motorcycle accident. I went to the same elementary school he attended, hung out at the same local landmarks. It seems like I’ve always known his name, even though I never knew him.Steven had a brother, Carey Stayner. That name probably sounds familiar, too.

He's a serial killer.

Merced wants desperately to be known as the Gateway to Yosemite. While it’s true that any kid who went to public school in Merced has memories of field trips to the national park, most people only associated us with Yosemite because Carey killed four women there. I was a sophomore watching the local news as they searched for, and eventually found the bodies of the missing tourists he'd murdered. I watched when Carey Stayner was taken into custody and Steven’s name was repeated again.

There came a point in high school where you knew the announcement was going to be bad news before the assistant principal got a full sentence out. I can mark life events by deaths. The day I visited my college campus, I got a call that my cousin and two kids I'd gone to school with for years died in a drag racing accident. The day I left for college, I attended a funeral for a friend who died in a drinking related accident.The Santa Clara sheriff who murdered his three stepchildren, five-year old daughter, then shot himself while their mother was on a morning jog wasn't an accident. It was, however, a stomach churning media frenzy that outdid the callous vulture behavior displayed when my cousin died. Is it any wonder I still don't trust the media? The most depressing game of 6 Degrees of Separation I've ever played revolved around a vagrant wandering from one town to the next until he wandered into Merced and terrorized a house full of children with a pitchfork, killing two. I had connections to the victim and the killer that time. That was also my sophomore year.

The year I graduated, our government teacher offered extra credit if we attended a political event. I shook hands with Gary Condit - running for re-election after somehow dodging murder charges. If you don't remember his name, maybe you remember Chandra Levey, the intern he likely killed.

Oddly, I didn't know these were national news issues. They were all local news to me. I didn't realize that anyone outside of my general area knew who Scott Peterson was until I was watching his sentencing hearing in DC bar three years after the remains of his wife and unborn baby washed up in the Bay Area.
Condit and Peterson hailed from Modesto, a mere 45 minutes away.

These events weighed heavy on me, on everyone I knew then. It's a lot for a high school kid to take in. I don't think I realized how incredibly fucked up our high school years were until much later. Merced is crime and gang ridden now, but it didn't seem that way then. I think about the training I received in the military, the way people talk about combat (I never saw any) - nothing ever happens until something is blowing up. That was Merced. Nothing ever happened until it was big enough for news crews to pull in and set up shop.

Nothing ever happened until you had that interesting, but difficult to share story about the first time you saw a dead body and why you can't stand the smell of nag champa (I'll save that one for another day).
So, is it any wonder I read and write dark shit? Is it any wonder I hate the media?

I waited behind the screen door as the news anchor and camera- man approached the porch, and waited to be told that someone was dead. That someone had been murdered in a spectacular fashion and once again, it was someone I knew.

The dappled sunlight didn't ever hit the porch - it was covered.

Turns out, my mom had called a consumer complaint in on the people who printed our graduation invitations incorrectly and refused to fix or refund them.

I’d never been so relieved to be embarrassed.