BY OLINE H. COGDILL

(Mystery Scene will be taking an occasional look at new, small publishers. Today, we look at Polis)

Jason Pinter knew he wanted to a part of the publishing industry—even before he knew what that meant.


His first goal was to be a writer, so as a junior in college he sent queries to a number of literary agents asking them to represent him.

It didn’t matter that he didn’t have a manuscript to show them. But he wanted to be a writer and the head of the English department told him that writers needed representation. So he thought he should find an agent who would be interested in the works he “might” write someday.

“My queries were essentially, ‘I’d love for you to represent me once I write a book.’ I figured this was foolproof. Who wouldn’t want to represent a 21-year-old writer with years of productive work ahead of him? Needless to say, the responses I did get basically said, ‘Come back when you’ve actually written something,’” said Pinter in an email to Mystery Scene.

Talk about rejections!

But that was Pinter’s first foray into publishing.

Eventually he did become an author—five novels in his Henry Parker thriller series and one book for middle-school readers—an agent, an editor, and marketing director. Pinter's previous positions include being senior marketing manager at Grove/Atlantic and the Mysterious Press, and working as an editor at Warner Books, Random House, and St. Martin’s Press.

And now, he is a publisher himself.

In 2013, Pinter took a gamble and left his job at a major publishing house to establish Polis Books. Pinter announced Polis in July 2013, and published his first title, Transit Girl by Jamie Shupak, in November 2013.

In November 2015, Polis will celebrate its second full year in business. (At left and right are some of the most recent Polis titles.)

Polis Books allows Pinter to use his experience in marketing and as an editor and an agent.

From the beginning, Pinter had a simple goal for Polis—“to publish the very best in popular fiction.”

“I want it to be a company that has the scrappiness, progressive thinking, and flexibility of an independent press with the professionalism of a major publisher,” Pinter said.

That goal also entered into the naming of the company. Polis isn’t a word that immediately comes to mind when one thinks of books. But the name suits this new company.

“In ancient Greece, the Polis was an independent city-state that was governed by the populace and not beholden to a larger entity. They were self-governed, as well as being hubs for arts and culture. Since I envisioned Polis as being an independent whose direction was solely governed by its employees and authors, rather than a mega-corporation, and since I’ve always loved stories about ancient Greece, Polis was a perfect fit,” added Pinter.

Rather than flood the already saturated market, Polis’ steady, measured publishing approach is working. In 2014, Polis published 18 titles, 17 of which were digital, about half originals and half reissues. In 2015, Polis ramped up its print component with 19 titles scheduled for simultaneous publication in print and digital, plus another 12-15 that are solely digital (primarily reissues), about 30-35 total. Pinter anticipates publishing 50 books in 2016, two-thirds simultaneously in print and digital and the rest as digital originals or reissues.

From the beginning, Polis never wanted to join the legion of self-publishing houses that have started in the past decade.

“It never crossed my mind for Polis to be a self-publishing or vanity press. A publisher taking money from a writer is against everything I believe in. There are so many scams and ethically dubious companies out there that prey on the hopes and dreams of authors, and swindle authors out of their own money, forcing them to pay for their own books,” said Pinter.

“I believe in paying authors up front for their work, paying them royalties if the books sell, and giving them a quality product that doesn’t come out of their own pocket. Polis was never going to be a self-publishing venture or vanity press, and I would also never publish any of my own books through Polis, as I’d never want the company’s resources going directly to my own benefit. We’re a publishing house. Period,” added Pinter.


And Pinter knew that publishing would be a tough field, so he is mindful of the lessons he has learned in his own career.

“I’ve been through the heartache of rejection, joy of publication, and dealt with authors whose books didn’t sell up to my company’s expectations and forced to let them know we wouldn’t be offering them a new deal. I think I have a pretty strong stomach, but also realistic expectations for the company. I never wanted this to be a gazillion-dollar start-up beholden to investors and committee approvals,” he said.

“I feel like in a way I was uniquely qualified to start Polis because I have an extensive professional publishing background, but I can also empathize with what my authors are going through. We’re not [a major publisher], but we don’t need to be. I believe there is room in the industry for start-ups, but at the same time it’s important that we grow slowly and organically. As long as we keep our expectations realistic we’ll do just fine, and we don’t need an announced first printing of 20,000 copies for every book to pay for a lease on Broadway.”

Currently, crime fiction comprises about 50 percent of Polis’ list, but that number likely will be more around a third of its list as the publisher continues to diversify. In addition, Polis publishes science fiction (Occupied Earth, edited by Richard J. Brewer and Gary Phillips), romance (The Scarlet Letter Society by Mary T. McCarthy), Young Adult (Ash by Shani Petroff & Darci Manley, and Extra Life by Derek Nikitas), Middle Grade (The Misshapes by Alex Flynn) and New Adult (The Lonely Hearts Club by Brenda Janowitz).

“I love crime fiction with all my heart, it’s what I’ve spent the majority of my career working on, but I also don’t want our books to be competing against each other for attention, and I don’t want any book to be our fifth-most-important mystery in a given month. And there are so many other genres I absolutely love that we can have a robust crime list while also publishing great books across the spectrum,” he said.

Polis has had a few successful breakout authors. Grant McKenzie has had several books published in the U.K., Europe, and Canada, but hadn’t received distribution in the U.S. Polis reissued two of his novels digitally—Switch and K.A.R.M.A.—for the first time here, and published a digital original, The Fear in Her Eyes, all of which have been very successful.

McKenzie has just re-signed with Polis for two new books. The first, Speak the Dead, will be published in hardcover and ebook in September. Polis also is releasing Switch for the first time in paperback in the U.S. in August.

“He’s going to be our Harlan Coben, with a little Dean Koontz DNA mixed in,” said Pinter, who added that the middle-grade comic adventure novel The Misshapes was Polis’ first hardcover publication, which received “absolutely amazing reviews, went into a second printing, and continues to reorder in hardcover.”

Among the newest authors that Pinter cites are Leah Rhyne, author of a “terrific” young adult horror novel, Heartless, and Vincent Zandri, who’s hit the New York Times bestseller list in ebook and who “we’re looking to reintroduce to the print market in a big way” with Orchard Grove, coming in hardcover and ebook in January. Polis also has picked up Alex Segura. Polis is reissuing his first Pete Fernandez novel, the well-reviewed Silent City, in March 2016, followed by the second Fernandez novel Down the Darkest Street in April.

Segura is thrilled to be a part of the Polis list. "Working with Jason has been an absolute pleasure—I couldn't have hoped for a better home for the Pete Fernandez series. Jason is smart, forward-thinking, and knows all aspects of the industry. Most importantly, he's been very savvy in building an impressive lineup of authors. I'm honored to be part of the Polis Books team—a publisher I was already a fan of before the deal happened," said Segura.

As Polis enters its second year, Pinter is proud of his publishing house’s achievements, especially “that we’ve consistently had a very high quality of writers sign with us, and approach us about working with them. That we’re distributed by one of the largest distribution companies in the country, Publishers Group West. That our books are carried by some of the biggest chains and best independent bookstores in the country, along with many libraries, and we’ve been covered pretty well for a new, small press,” he said.

And adding to the publishers' success, Polis became part of the Mystery Writers of America's approved list of publishers, as of Sept. 1, 2015.  That means that novels Polis publishes are now eligible to be submitted to be considered for the MWA's annual Edgar Awards. This list of MWA-approved publishers also is often used by reviewers in choosing books for review, and sometimes by organizers of conferences when choosing authors to be on writing panels. 

“It was very important to me, when we expanded our print distribution, that we get our books into as many outlets as possible, at it means the world to me that these stores and libraries like our books and authors enough to carry them.

“I’m proud of our authors and their books, and proud that they’ve chosen to go with me on this journey,” he added.

In the third outing for insurance investigator Dan Mahoney, United Life and Casualty has sent him to Florida to investigate a fire that killed five heavily insured racing greyhounds. Seems like an open-and-shut case, so much so that the company tells him to take his newly minted fiancée Elaine, and they’ll look the other way if he spends more time on the beach than working.

Dan soon learns that the kennel owner, Jackson Sanchez, was found lying in a pool of blood with a knife in his back and the word “thief” carved into his forehead. Meanwhile, Fucher Crumm, a track employee, is in jail, accused of setting the fire to cover up the murder. Two catches: the blood doesn’t belong to Sanchez, and Crumm, whom everyone considers sweet, if a little slow, is supposedly incapable of telling a lie. And Crumm says he didn’t do it. Then the track vet, who may have answers, dies under suspicious circumstances.

To add to Dan’s worries, his mother, the indomitable Maggie Mahoney, decides to move with her womanizing boyfriend Stanley to Palm Coast, Florida, a place affectionately called the mob slob dump because it’s where mobsters in WitSec go to grow old. Turns out Maggie has been recruited by the FBI to spy on Stanley, whom they think may be laundering money for the mafia. Relaxing on the beach, Dan realizes, is not going to happen.

Susan Slater, the author of the popular Ben Pecos Indian mystery series and two standalone books, seems drawn to write where she lives. Her previous books have roots in New Mexico, where she lived for most of her life, and now that she’s moved to Florida, so has the locale. Lucky for her, Dan, as an insurance investigator, can travel anywhere. He and the rest of Slater’s cast of engaging characters are all winners: Elaine, his fiancée who’s studying to be an investigator; Maggie, his feisty redheaded mom; and Simon, his lovable Rottweiler. Simply put, a fun read.

When the first sentence of a book starts with a 1978 Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, a public address system mishap, and a severed finger sewn into a skirt, you know you’re not in for a run-of-the-mill mystery. Fans of the Dr. Siri Paiboun series set in Laos have learned to expect solid history combined with near-slapstick lunacy, and Colin Cotterill delivers those aplenty in his latest caper (after The Coroner’s Lunch).

This adventure of the wise and wry ex-coroner follows the aging doctor as he wends his way through a gaggle of corrupt politicians, poverty-stricken villagers, and a ghost who has hitched a ride in his body. When someone mails Siri a severed finger sewn into a traditional “sin,” a hand-loomed Laotian skirt, he deduces—rightly, as it turns out—that it must be connected to a murder case. But it’s left up to Siri to figure out who was murdered, where, how, and why.

The task is all the more daunting, considering the fact that there’s a lot going on in Laos. The Chinese are building a series of roads in the north Laos, crime bosses are running heroin through the Golden Triangle, and graft is as endemic as a mysterious flu. Still, Siri kisses his faithful wife goodbye, and trudges off into the jungle in search of this yet-unknown murder victim.

I’m not giving anything away to say that he eventually identifies the unfortunate as well as the murderer, and sees that justice is served, but in all the Dr. Siri mysteries, discovering whodunit is only part of the fun.

The laughs begin on the first page and never leave. But funny as these books are, they’re too educational to be considered “light” reading. For instance, in Six and a Half Deadly Sins we learn about the uneasy political tightrope Laotians walked between China and Russia at the end of the Vietnam War. We’re also given an insight into the peace-time lives of former guerilla fighters who once went into battle believing communism would make life easier for the common folk, only to discover that Jeeps don’t run without gasoline and refrigerators won’t make ice cubes without electricity. Social and economic failures make great breeding grounds for cynicism, and the snarky cynicism of the books’ put-upon characters make for never-ending hilarity. Siri is the leading cynic, not that his wife Daeng—a retired assassin with a body count even higher than his—is any more idealistic. Daeng assumes people to be thieves, and is seldom wrong. She also expects them to be killers, and she’s seldom disappointed there, either. Especially in this installment, where very, very few of the book’s characters have unbloodied hands.

Still, it’s not all fictional blood and gore in Siri Land. Every now and then, author Cotterill rewards his readers by inserting a real-life character, and this is one of those times. Dr. Tom Dooley, a historical hero of the Vietnam conflict, makes an appearance, but even the saintly doctor gets poked by Cotterill’s rapier wit. There are no sacred cows in this series, not individuals, not principalities. Every country’s foreign policies are skewered, and every man and woman—and dog—is proven a liar. This may be a cynical way of looking at the world, but it’s marvelous fodder for Cotterill’s laugh-out-loud humor.

In the near future, the United States uses robots to keep a troubled peace in a tough world. These robots are powered by soldiers who lie in a dreamlike state in a bunker below Wiesbaden, Germany, but whose minds—through the advances of modern technology—are transferred into heavily shielded metal carapaces. Acting as the world’s police force, albeit without the world’s permission, these “bots” or “tin men,” as they are called, work to destroy terrorist insurgents such as ISIS, while keeping at bay a rising tide of similarly violent anarchists.

The peacekeeping plan changes when a group of anarchists set off a global electromagnetic pulse that destroys electrical connections, thus rendering all forms of communications and most motor vehicles useless. The world is immediately plunged into chaos, and even the wealthy and powerful begin living a Dark Ages existence. Riots abound.

When a detail of tin men policing Damascus, Syria, discover they can’t return to their bodies until the power grid goes back up, they realize they have to get back to their base to help solve the problem. But first, they have to rescue the president of the United States, who has been attending the G20 summit in Athens.

If this plot seems outlandish, author Christopher Golden keeps it grounded through the strong characters of his tin men. Among them is Kate Wade, a US Army corporal who lost her legs serving in Afghanistan. Being a tin man has freed her from her wheelchair and allowed her to return to active duty. Danny Kelso loves the tin man life, too, even though he has dark memories of once destroying the wrong target—a child. Also of particular interest is 17-year-old Alexa Day, daughter of the US ambassador to Syria. When the compound is overrun and her father killed, Alexa proves surprisingly courageous.

The bulk of the action takes place as the tin men battle their way from Syria toward Athens, and, as you would expect, they leave a trail saturated with blood and metal. The humanity inside each of those metal carapaces gives readers good guys to root for and even a traitor (or two) to hiss at. Tin Men is an excellent high-tech follow-up to Golden’s terrifying Snowblind.

This is a creepy book—and I mean that in the best possible way. Imagine a cross between Gone Girl and a Stephen King novel, and you’ll have some idea of what I’m talking about.

Angus and Sarah Moorcroft move with their daughter Kirstie to a cottage on a remote Scottish island after the girl’s identical twin, Lydia, dies in a freak accident. But when Kirstie starts claiming to be Lydia, the couple doesn’t know if it’s just a form of grief—or if they’ve made a horrible mistake.

Both Angus and Sarah are keeping secrets from each other, and while they are trying to rebuild their lives, their lack of communication threatens to topple their efforts.

The eeriness of the Scottish island on which the family’s dilapidated home is located adds a wonderful backdrop to the story. Not only is the family isolated with a mentally unstable daughter, but during a calamitous storm, there’s no way to get help without getting into a boat and braving towering waves. The weather builds to a frenzy just as the book reaches its climax. As the ceiling caves in, so do any preconceptions that the reader has about who is to blame for Lydia/Kirstie’s death.

Is the father at fault? The mother? Or does Kirstie really see the ghost of her dead sister, who she believes now lives in the cottage? While the story took a little while to get going, once it did, it was impossible to put down. Love, hate, betrayal, loss—this book has everything readers could want, including a spine-chilling ending.

Deborah Ellison, a police officer’s daughter, is found dead outside Winsome Bay, Wisconsin, her body covered with wounds and tattoos, and her hand amputated. She had moved to Chicago years earlier, cutting off all contact with her parents and friends, and the Winsome police are puzzled as to why she returned home only to be murdered. But when other young women are found murdered in a similar fashion, it becomes apparent that a serial killer has begun a bloody campaign.

At first, no connection is apparent between the victims—some lived as far away as Chicago—but when Chicago detective James Mangan joins the case, he recognizes that at least two of the women are connected to American Forum Magazine. Mangan’s entrance gives author James DeVita the chance to up the literary tenor of the novel. The detective, who reads a lot, ruminates on Shakespeare quotations every time he sees a new corpse. Those that most frequently come to Mangan’s mind are from Titus Andronicus, in which both the heroine’s hands are amputated.

For a while, these literary allusions work well and add depth to the book, but as the action ramps up, they begin to get in the way—especially since Mangan can’t stop quoting Shakespeare (or Herman Melville) even in the midst of a shootout. This constant intrusion isn’t necessary, because Mangan is so verbally adept that he doesn’t need to rely on the Bard to get his point across. In one of the book’s best scenes, he faces down a barroom full of small-town bullies with a threat delivered as a delicious soliloquy. Watching him tear into the chief Bubba with words alone is even more effective than the punch he later delivers.

Given his verbal tics and solid detecting skills, Mangan makes a fine protagonist, but in A Winsome Murder DeVita introduces another cop who could give him a run for his money: Officer Michele Schaefer, of the Winsome Police Department. Although only a small-town cop, Schaefer—who first identified Deborah’s body—has cojones to match her big-city counterpart.

In 1942 Germany, Philip Kerr’s sometime policeman Bernie Gunther is as insouciant and sarcastic as the best American private eyes of the period, but his survival rate, after ten novels, is more impressive than the Marlowes and Spades because, well, he’s vocal about his hatred of Nazis in general and Adolph Hitler in particular. In 1942 Germany! Here, he’s working for Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda and one of Adolph’s main men. Goebbels, whose ministry controls the country’s main film company, is also a world-class lecher with an eye on a beautiful Yugoslav actress named Dalia Dresner. He wants to cast her in a flick that will make her “the German Garbo,” the Swedish Garbo being Der Fuehrer’s favorite film star. But Dalia will only sign on the dotted line if her estranged father can be located in Croatia and convinced to meet with her in Germany. Bernie gets that assignment, and welcomes it, sort of, because he’s fallen in love with Dalia. Needless to say, the task is not quite as outlined. For starters, Dalia’s father is not a priest secluded in a monastery, as he’d been informed, but the brutally homicidal commandant of a concentration camp. Bernie has that to deal with, a murder to solve, and a marriage to a young woman other than Dalia forced upon him by Goebbels. But he has time for a rant that’s an amusing 180-degree twist to Orson Welles’ famous speech as Harry Lime in The Third Man, comparing the artistic benefits of tumultuous events in Italy’s history to peaceful Switzerland’s cultural contributions. Kerr’s imagination is as active as his style is vividly hardboiled, and while the book on paper is appealing and engrossing, reader John Lee’s crisp, mocking British accent gives Bernie’s narration of the twists and turns of plot an extra boost of sardonic wit. Beyond that are the accents—Austrian, German and even American, all handled effortlessly.