This Revolution Won’t Be Televised. It Will Be Blogged

By Mike Knowles

I had a great interview with this week with a guy from The Satellite, the Mohawk College Newspaper. He found out about me through this blog and we got in touch. While we were talking, we touched upon how I got started and the more I thought about it afterward I realized it was mostly from guerrilla tactics. The dictionary says that guerrilla’s are members of an irregular, group operating in small bands in occupied territory. I think this description fits me pretty well.

To start with, it doesn’t get more irregular than writing hardboiled crime fiction in 2009. People reading this will know of plenty of writer’s who do, but go down to any book shop and look for one of them on the shelves. You know 9 times out of 10 you had to order all of your hardboiled stuff on line. And why did you have to do this? Because it is irregular. Cool, but irregular.

I’ve been fighting in occupied territory for a little while now and it has been hard to crack the mainstream. With Generals like James Patterson, Colonels like Robert. B. Parker, and Lieutenants such as the Twilight lady, I find my attacks on success have been superficial. But what progress I make as I shoot from the trees comes from the help of others like me. Crime writers, I have found, are simply put the coolest s.o.b.’s around. I have rarely encountered a crime writer who wasn’t willing to help me out in some way for no other reason than to see me do better.

When I needed to get blurbs for my first and second book, I contacted everyone myself. The publisher didn’t rely on a huge list of contacts that could be coerced into giving me a good sentence to put on the cover. I had to track down people I respected and ask them to read my book. Think about your day. How busy you are. How many things you still have on your to do list. Now imagine you get an e-mail from a Canadian guy asking you to read a book that isn’t even on the shelves yet. How many people are really going to take it seriously? I would have thought none, but guys like John McFetridge, Allan Guthrie, Thomas Perry, Victor Gischler, and Ken Bruen (still makes me woozy) all agreed to help me out. In my war to sell books, these guys are responsible for putting weapons in my hands. I have been able to get my foot in a lot of doors with the help these wonderful men and it’s a debt I can never repay.

This blog is just another tactic. Seven writers needed a voice so we organized and made our own underground news network (I use we loosely because I had little to do with the organization, I was invited to the party by Guthrie. But someone did do some organizing somewhere and they stupidly let me in). Everyday one of seven writers contributes information that furthers our agenda and combats the status quo. We’re sort of like the A-Team only with pens and laptops instead of a van.

While Stephen King invades cities and sells out auditoriums to do his book readings, I come out of the jungle and attack stealthily in the night. Sometimes no one even knows the reading took place until it was too late. Occasionally, no one ever even knows it happened. My attacks do not appear to make sense, nor do they stop my enemy, but that is because they are a part of a bigger plan. One by one I will convert people and turn them into guerrilla’s in my war. They will convert others, and one day Steven King will be slamming his fist down onto a table while screaming into his speaker phone, “What do you mean my signing is postponed. Who is this Mike Knowles?... Oh, the Grinder guy. I love that book.”

Viva la revolution.

Mr. Monk: Adieu

By Scott D. Parker

And so it ends.

Or does it?

Last night, the series finale of the USA program, “Monk,” aired. Eight years after the world was introduced to one of the quirkiest detectives ever created, the creators and stars decided to call it quits. They did it in perhaps the best way possible.

I can’t say for sure why I first decided to watch Monk. Might’ve been the promos because I didn’t know who Tony Shaloub was back in 2002. Could’ve been because it was summer when the show premiered and their wasn’t much on that night. Whatever the reason, one episode was all I needed to latch onto this brilliant detective who just absolutely, positively had to touch every lamppost along his walk or straighten every crooked item he encounters.

For those of you who never watched Monk, it’s a traditional police procedural. There is a crime--usually not too violent--and the San Francisco police bring in Monk, a former SFPD detective who was relieved of duty following his emotional implosion following the death of his wife, Trudy. Monk’s long-term goal is to find the man who murdered Trudy. It’s a thread that runs throughout the entire run of the show and he solves the case in last night’s episode.

As straightforward as the police/mystery part of the show is, it’s not usually enough to keep watching. It’s the characters that made me return week after week, season after season. Adrian Monk himself is a challenge to watch. His quirks and phobias can be, frankly, annoying and get in the way of the show. I’ll admit that my watching lapsed for a season or so because I started rolling my eyes at certain parts. I mean, come on: how many times do we have to see Monk getting weird about the same stuff?

Tony Shaloub’s performances, however, is what gave this show its heart. Originally conceived as an Inspector Clouseau-type person, Shaloub gave Monk’s tics context. There were times when you could tell Monk didn’t want to have to straighten a frame or put all the pencils in a row but he *had* to. A lesser actor wouldn’t played the phobias for fun all the way and all the time. Think Leslie Neilsen. Shaloub gave Monk torment. That torment was never so heartfelt than in "Mr. Monk and the Kid" when Monk took a case involving a young boy. Adrian saw himself in the lad and agreed to look after the boy until his foster parents took custody. Late in the episode, Adrian realizes how much he cares for the boy and know he can’t keep him. Shaloub put so much emotion into Monk’s face that there wasn’t a dry eye in our house that night.

All in all, it was the little moment in the series that set it apart from other cop shows. Both of Monk’s assistants--Sherona the hot head and Natalie the caregiver--catered to Monk eccentricities and allowed his to live a life that was, for him, normal. Captain Stottlemeyer and Lieutenant Disher, the two lead SFPD detectives, knew that Monk was the best detective in the business and he made their jobs easier. One favorite moment with Stottlemeyer was when the crime scene was in a warehouse and there was bubble wrap. A large sheet of bubble wrap. He sees it, knows that Monk will *have* to pop all the bubbles, and calls over a couple of officers in uniform. With determination, he tells them to start popping. They do and the scene fades out. Brilliant.

What was also brilliant was how the show ended last night. Some famous shows, like M*A*S*H or Friends, end by changing the events within the TV show. The Korean War ends, thus, the members of the 4077th go home. End of series. Others, like Everybody Loves Raymond and The Cosby Show, take a different approach. The writers let you know that the characters are still alive, still doing the same old things you’ve seen them do countless times, it’s just that we’re not going to show you any more. (Spoilers ahead for those who haven’t seen the show and want to.) That’s how Monk ended. He solved Trudy’s murder and made some adjustments to his life. He’s still got quirks but he’s moving on. He’s loosening up. He’s sleeping in the middle of the bed...finally. I’m looking forward to seeing how Lee Goldberg, the author of the Monk novels, incorporates these changes into his future books.

I’m re-reading the four Sherlock Holmes novels in advance of the new movie. (The review of A Study in Scarlet is up at my blog now.) Along the way, I’m being reintroduced to the strange, quirky, eccentric things Holmes does. To be honest, Monk makes his strangenesses downright normal compared to the stuff Holmes does. Monk, really, is just a direct descendant of Holmes and, before him, Poe’s Dupin. Someday down the road, we might get introduced to another detective who will be the “next” Monk. That’s the way the marketing executives will try to sell us the product. Suffice it to say, there is only one Adrian Monk. And I, for one, am sad to see him leave.

Are there any Monk fans out there? What are some of your favorite episodes and moments from the show?

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.