As you no doubt know, The Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) went on strike for more than three months this past fall and winter.* The main point of contention was their demand for a bigger cut of the revenue from their work in different forms: streaming on the Internet, video downloading, DVD residuals, and so on. The strike has been settled with the producers’ alliance and time will tell if the WGA did well by its members regarding their piece of what’s collectively being called “new media.” As baseball pitcher Roger Clemens said in zen-like fashion during his testimony before Congress about his alleged steroid use, “It is what it is.”

What’s of larger interest is that clearly the Internet and other forms of electronic transmission of news and entertainment, provide opportunities and challenges for writers of various disciplines. For example, during the strike dozens of screenwriters were taking meetings with venture capitalist about creating mini-studios to produce content for the web. In a December 17, 2007 Los Angeles Times article by Joseph Menn, he reported that the Silicone Valley types had historically been averse to backing these kinds of start-ups. But this was before certain websites traded on their popularity for cold hard cash, including Google paying $1.65 billion for YouTube. Which goes to show you what a brand name can fetch considering YouTube is a site where the users supply the content—everything from Paris Hilton flashing her designer underwear to a cool ass music vid of actors and musicians waxing poetic about Barack Obama.

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Of course that might mean that people watch the web for those types of quick clips and flit around from site to site—when they should be grinding out that report for their boss—looking for the next instant thrill. There have been episodics on the Internet, with some of that translating into the “old forms” of movies and TV shows. John Ridley’s Undercover Brother started as a series of ten creaky flash animation five-minute episodes on a now defunct website and became a pretty funny live-action flick starring Eddie Griffin. There are other flash animation sites that populate the web these days as do comic strips such as the offerings on and komikwerks.com and bigheadcomics.com.

Then there was the brief hot blaze that was LonelyGirl15. This supposed reality webcam of a teen girl named Bree became all the rage back in ’06. But suspicions arose that Bree’s musings and revelations seemed too polished, the camera work and editing evident. Turns out Bree was an over-21 actress named Jessica Rose and her trials and tribulations were written and overseen by the LG15 creators Ramesh Flinders, Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried. They said of their hoax they were just looking for a movie deal. Not sure what the show’s creators are up to now, but Ms. Rose has done some big screen work—well, nothing epic, but still. Not surprisingly, in the very competitive field of acting having live action examples of your work is a more compelling card than glam head shots.

Writers also want to see their words live. That’s why we’re seeing more writers spending their own money to produce video commercials with stills and voice-over or live action shorts advertising their books on the web, and for the big stars, TV. As in-store book signings become much of the same, new methods to reach your potential audience are being tried. Another aspect of the digital age has been not only downloading vids to cell phones but reading on them too. This suggests that just as there are now services that for a fee will help you set up advertising or a book salon on the shared virtual world SecondLife (“Get a Second Life,” Mystery Scene #100), you’ll soon be able to send out a chapter excerpt or short story or your vid hawking your book to cell phones.

I’m not sure that reading pages on a cell phone is desirable, but then, there seems to be a lot of people texting these days so who knows? Already there must be viral marketers who have done this on the web, setting up “real” people to text their friends about this great kitchen cleanser they’ve been using or found just the right pair of shoes at a certain boutique. Why not a recommendation from a book club president or a marquee author for a certain book being beamed to your phone’s screen? It beats banking deals from some prince in Nigeria and specials on penile enlargement herbs showing up…doesn’t it?

But even in this era of seemingly constant sensory bombardment, books still have their place. Overall bookstore revenue was $16.77 billion last year, a 1.1 percent increase over the previous year according to Association of American Publishers. Of that $10.8 billion was book sales, up 7.6 percent from 2006. Look, even Kindle needs source material. The old ways aren’t dead yet, grasshopper. We will still rely on the printed word for enlightenment and joy as we continue our journey into the uncharted parts of this vast electronic wilderness.

*This article was originally published in Spring 2008, Mystery Scene #104.

One of the most enjoyable facets of editing a magazine like Mystery Scene is the research. Finding photos, writing captions, tweaking articles and reviews, all this requires a lot of rooting about in the history of the genre.

Which is why I recently re-read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

There’s no doubt that this tale of racial and class injustice in the Deep South of the 1930s qualifies as an important book. First published in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize and has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. It is taught in the majority of American schools, and is regularly chosen for “One Book, One City” programs. Recently, librarians voted it the best novel of the 20th century.

Impressive credentials, but dry, very dry. These kind of descriptions don’t convey the sheer pleasure of reading Harper Lee’s novel. Here’s a typical comment from Scout Finch, the book’s narrator, discussing her brother Jem. Atticus Finch is their father.

“The sixth grade seemed to please him from the beginning: he went through a brief Egyptian Period that baffled me – he tried to walk flat a great deal, sticking one arm in front of him and one in back of him, putting one foot behind the other.  He declared Egyptians walked that way; I said if they did I didn’t see how they got anything done, but Jem said they accomplished more than the Americans ever did, they invented toilet paper and perpetual embalming, and asked where would we be today if they hadn’t?  Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I’d have the facts.”

This excerpt isn’t a vital part of the narrative but that’s the point. Lee doesn’t skimp on any aspect of writing. The narrative voice, characterizations, setting, plot, and moral vision of this novel are all equally important and equally well-done. This isn’t a dry sermon, it’s a living, breathing slice of life.

Be good to yourself, read, or re-read, To Kill a Mockingbird.

The Fall Issue #101 of Mystery Scene has an interesting article on Harper Lee by Art Taylor which we think you’ll enjoy. It includes opinions from Carolyn Hart, Margaret Maron and Michael Malone—three writers who know about Southern literature.

This article was originally published on the Mystery Scene Blog, September 2007.

Of all the websites that deal with mystery and crime fiction, none offers more breadth and depth than The Rap Sheet. Originally a component of January Magazine’s crime fiction section, The Rap Sheet morphed into the award-winning blog it is today. From its inception, editor and chief contributor J. Kingston Pierce packed his blog with reviews, news, retrospectives, and opinion pieces from writers all over the world.

Aided by a group of regular contributors as well as guests columnists, Pierce is able to use his frequent traveling as a means of introducing his readers to writers from many different countries. His enthusiasm is contagious and more than a few writers owe him a favor for introducing them to his readers.

So who is J. Kingston Pierce?

Ed Gorman for Mystery Scene: Let’s start with you telling us about yourself.

Pierce: I’m a lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest, save for relatively brief and job-related periods spent in Detroit, Michigan, and Boulder, Colorado. I now live in Seattle, Washington, with my wife, Jodi, and our big overindulged cat, Monkey.

I joined the newspaper at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon and, during that same period, I began to freelance for a weekly paper that served a neighborhood near the campus while writing meatier stuff for Willamette Week, which is Portland’s longstanding and very good alternative newspaper.

By the time I graduated college, I had carved out a spot for myself at Willamette Week. That led to writing jobs at other alternative papers and magazines, and eventually editing positions at magazines in Portland, Detroit, and Seattle.

Mystery Scene: Have you always been interested in crime fiction?

Pierce: As a boy, I was a major reader of science fiction, especially Arthur C. Clarke’s work, and later the stories of Larry Niven.

It wasn’t until I volunteered to help out at the library of my boys-only Catholic high school that I started to read heavily in other areas. The assistant librarian there, a generous woman named Rose Lacey, introduced me to thrillers such as Jaws, by Peter Benchley, and The Rhinemann Exchange, by Robert Ludlum. More importantly, though, one day she gave me Ross Macdonald’s The Moving Target and told me I’d like it. Boy, did I!

A decade after Mrs. Lacey encouraged me to read The Moving Target, I had the chance to interview Ross Macdonald (né Kenneth Millar) for Willamette Week. I took an old hippie bus down to Santa Barbara, California, where he lived with his wife, the novelist Margaret Millar. I was overwhelmed that this star of my literary firmament was letting me ask him questions in his untidy study. (What I didn’t know then, was that he was exhibiting the first stages of the Alzheimer’s disease that would kill him, which is why he couldn’t remember a few things, even about his own past work.) I was even more thrilled when he took me out to dinner that night, just he and I, at a little Chinese joint he enjoyed. Naturally, I told him about how Mrs. Lacey had given me his novel, and how it had sent me on my exploration of crime and mystery fiction. I remember he gave me a small smile, said something about how librarians are the smartest people in the world, and then asked me whether I’d read this book, and that book...and pretty soon I realized just how little I knew of the world that he and other authors had helped shape. I have been trying to make up for the holes in my education ever since.

Mystery Scene: How did your association with January Magazine come about?

Pierce: It was back in 1998 and I was just becoming interested in the Internet. I’d penned book reviews ever since my earliest days in journalism, and I was thinking that maybe I could move into reviewing on the Web, too. I stumbled across January Magazine one day, and kept track of it for a while. Finally, I wrote to the editor, Linda L. Richards, asking her whether she was looking for more contributors, and offering her a review I’d done of Larry McMurtry’s Comanche Moon. She wrote back quickly and the rest, as they say, is history. I’m now the senior editor of January, though I no longer have quite so much time to write reviews myself for the magazine.

One funny result of my association with Richards, by the way, is that she wasn’t that familiar with crime fiction before I started reviewing it in January. Yet now she is making a living, in part, from composing crime novels such as this year’s Death Was in the Picture, her second book featuring 1930s detectives Kitty Pangborn and Dexter J. Theroux. I like to think I had some influence on her present career.

Mystery Scene: What made you decide to make The Rap Sheet a blog?

Pierce: I began producing The Rap Sheet in the spring of 1999 as a sort of crime-fiction newsletter within January Magazine. I’d long wanted someplace where I could offer up news and other tidbits that didn’t fit within the magazine’s usual framework of reviews and author interviews. The Rap Sheet, which I wrote on a more or less bimonthly basis, was my solution.

But the longer I worked on The Rap Sheet, the bigger it became. The first edition ran to only 2,684 words long. However, in the ensuing years, what with the addition of mini-reviews written by others, that crime-fiction report expanded to more than 16,000 words and turned into a daunting project for all concerned.

By late 2005, I was feeling frustrated with the venture. But, just when I was ready to throw in the towel, January Magazine’s crime fiction department won the Gumshoe Award for websites. It would’ve looked strange to fold up The Rap Sheet at that moment; so instead I persevered, hoping to ride the invigoration brought on by the Gumshoe win for at least a year or two more. No such luck. A few months later, I was right back where I’d started—exhausted and needing a change. Therefore, as January closed out 2005, I placed the newsletter on an unannounced hiatus, unsure of its future.

Meanwhile, I’d been experimenting with blog publishing. The “new” Rap Sheet debuted on May 22, 2006. Three years—can it really have been that long ago?

Mystery Scene: Is your blog what you’d hoped it would be?

Pierce: I think we do a pretty good job of staying on top of news developments within the genre. And we have posted a fine array of feature-length pieces over the years, focusing on individual authors, championing forgotten crime novels, highlighting copycat covers (the use by publishers of the same artwork to illustrate more than one book—for shame!), and also reporting on crime fiction in media other than books (television, radio, magazines, etc.). Even though I have no money to pay contributors, and make not a dime off this venture myself (sigh), I have been able to talk professional writers and authors into submitting their work to the blog. I’m extraordinarily proud of what it has become, and judging by the volume of appreciative comments, I believe readers find value in The Rap Sheet, too.

Mystery Scene: What’s your greatest satisfaction with your blog?

Pierce: I’ve spent much of my journalism career editing magazines, and I see The Rap Sheet as a mini magazine on the Web. It manages to present a pretty good breadth of news and information, despite the fact that there’s really only one guy at Rap Sheet “headquarters,” and he has to sleep sometimes. I am a fairly demanding editor, and the quality of work in The Rap Sheet remains pretty high. I think all of that is demonstrated by the fact that we’ve won several noteworthy prizes. I mentioned the Gumshoe Award before, but we also picked up a 2009 Spinetingler Award (from Spinetingler Magazine), and I was nominated for an Anthony Award in 2008. Although that latter commendation (in the category of Best Web Site) ultimately went to Stop, You’re Killing Me!, I intend to refer to The Rap Sheet as “Anthony Award-nominated” for as long as I can—or until I actually win an Anthony.

Mystery Scene: What is your greatest frustration?

Pierce: That I don’t see a way yet to make money with The Rap Sheet. The absence of financial recompense is the bane of bloggers. I don’t know of a good model for profitable advertising through blogs, and there’s a noticeable shortage of deep-pocketed do-gooders willing to pay me for what I’m already doing with The Rap Sheet. Over the last few years, I have become increasingly disenchanted with mainstream journalism. This blog offers me writing satisfactions I never expected; however, I still have to make a living. I can’t devote myself entirely to The Rap Sheet, though I sometimes wish I could.

My hope is that there will come a day when I can divide my working hours between writing/editing The Rap Sheet and composing crime novels of my own. But first, I have to actually finish work on a novel—an accomplishment that seems ever elusive.

Mystery Scene: Do you read a lot of other blogs?

Pierce: Yes, and not just those devoted to crime fiction, but others that focus on politics and national/world news. As far as crime-fiction blogs go, though, there are several distinguished examples that I look at every day, including Peter Rozovsky’s Detectives Beyond Borders, Declan Burke’s Crime Always Pays, Sarah Weinman’s Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, Lesa Holstine’s Lesa’s Book Critiques, Cullen Gallagher’s Pulp Serenade, and—with a slightly broader brief—Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine. Hundreds of others exist, but unfortunately many of them look and read like hobbies, with their writing only passable and poorly edited (their authors would do well to buy a copy of The Associated Press Stylebook), and their futures dubious, at best.

Mystery Scene: This would seem to be the true Golden Age of detective and crime fiction. Would you agree?

Pierce: Yes and no. While there are indeed many fine writers, bottom line oriented publishers aren’t always willing to pay those authors enough to keep them working. And not everyone can write a book a year. So publishers concentrate their resources on big-name wordsmiths who keep producing, even though they may be churning out the same sort of yarns over and over again. (Sadly, readers don’t always notice this betrayal.)

And while I’m thrilled to have so many reading options in crime fiction, I am disappointed with many of the myriad books hitting the shelves. Too many try to copy previously successful works, or they run a good theme to death. How many more books, for instance, can I be expected to read about serial killers? You would think that such murderers were running rife in the United States, when in fact they’re fairly unusual. And does every mystery story have to be about murder? There are other crimes of sufficiently absorbing magnitude, other ways to build up tension than having somebody new die every two or three chapters.

But then, editors and publishers would have to encourage such innovation. And I don’t think they do, at least not strongly enough.

I’ve found myself lately looking back at older works in this field, books by mid-20th-century writers who were searching for new veins of writing gold, trying to do something unlike what their fellows were up to at the time. Admittedly, there was a lot of trash, but I think no more trash being turned out then than what is being published now. And occasionally, I come across real gems, such as Stanley Ellin’s The Eighth Circle (1958) or Harold Q. Masur’s Bury Me Deep (1947) or Erle Stanley Gardner’s series about mismatched gumshoes Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. All of those—as well as the works of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Thomas B. Dewey, Ed McBain, and of course Macdonald—provide the source material mined by today’s crime fictionists. But some of that older stuff still boasts an air of novelty, rather than the reek of repetition.

So, while I am happy to see crime fiction be so popular today, I fear that we’re not getting everything we could from this genre. The willingness of publishers and authors to emphasize profits and productivity over creativity may ultimately be the genre’s undoing. And maybe that’s a good thing, to let the genre burn itself out now and then lie fallow and recoup its innovation in preparation for some future renaissance.

Mystery Scene: Given the range of your coverage, how do you feel about mystery publishing in general? The New York City scene versus the small houses?

Pierce: It’s the smaller houses, such as Hard Case Crime, Bleak House Books, Poisoned Pen Press, and Crippen & Landru, that are producing some of the most interesting works nowadays. Unfortunately, they don’t have the money for promotion that the New York giants possess. So authors like Craig McDonald (Toros & Torsos) and Christa Faust (Money Shot) aren’t selling as well as Dan Brown, James Patterson, and Robert B. Parker, even though their fiction might show more creative promise.

Mystery Scene: Do you see The Rap Sheet changing in any substantial way over the next few years?

Pierce: It’s necessary to change, if the blog is to remain appealing. But I think our commitment to high-quality writing and reporting, interviews with knowledgeable authors, and coverage of crime fiction in all media should not waver. They all help set The Rap Sheet apart from many other blogs in this field. Given the limited time I can devote to this blog, I’d rather concentrate on building upon those strengths than spreading my energies around, trying to build up Twitter and Facebook pages.

This article first appeared in "Gormania" Mystery Scene Issue #110, Summer 2009.

When Sashi Bluntstone, an 11-year-old art prodigy used by her financially-strapped family as their personal ATM is abducted, semi-retired PI Moe Prager is brought in to find her. Prager isn’t thrilled to be back in the detecting business, though, since his personal ATM is in good shape; he and his brother own several high-end wine stores. But egged on by a personal request from his estranged daughter, he picks up his discarded skills and plunges back into the game. Immediately, he is faced with several questions: Was the child murdered in order to drive up the dollar value of her paintings? Was she kidnapped for ransom? Or is she simply in hiding somewhere, no longer willing to face the outrageous financial pressure her parents have put her under? Besides being a terrific read, Monster spotlights the often vicious side of the art world, where even young children are savaged for sport (“She’s a no-talent freak,” snipes one critic).

If you enjoyed the Work of Art television program, you’ll definitely cotton to this book, but you don’t have to be an art expert to enjoy it, because Coleman’s deliciously snarky snipes at the art world’s pretensions could elicit snickers from a long-dead Rembrandt. The author has twice been nominated for an Edgar, and National Public Radio picked the Moe Prager series as a favorite in 2009.