Hardcover:
E-Book:
Digital Audiobook:
Audio CD:

Hardcover:
E-Book:
Digital Audiobook:

Digital Audiobook:
MP3 CD:
Audio CD:

We have a giveaway again of two books – the new Trash ‘n’ Treasures mystery, Antiques Ravin’, and the new Caleb York western, Last Stage to Hell Junction. Ravin’ is a finished hardcover book and Last Stage a nice, trade paperback-style Advanced Reading Copy, including the color cover. Nine copies of each are available. State your preference but also your willingness to look at the other title as a substitute (or your lack of willingness/interest in doing so).

As usual, the idea is that you will write a review at Amazon and/or Barnes & Noble, or at your own blog (multiple appearances encouraged). I ask only that if you hate the novel you receive in the giveaway, you consider not reviewing it at all; but that’s up to you, of course.

Write me directly at macphilms@hotmail.com. If you have won before, don’t assume I already have your address – you must give me your snail-mail info in that e-mail. No foreign (and this includes Canada) entries.

Ravin’ is out now, so reviews can appear immediately. Last Stage isn’t out till the end of the month (May 28 to be exact), and Amazon won’t run reviews until the book is published. So wait before you submit. Not sure what the Barnes & Noble policy is.

Now for my first audio giveaway. I have three CD versions of Girl Most Likely and three MP3 CD audios of it, as well. You must specify which format(s) you can use. Your review will appear with the regular reviews of the e-book and “real” book write-ups, so I’d encourage you to mention you are reviewing an audio and address the quality of the narration, as well.

Speaking of reviews, Murder, My Love has a rather skimpy number of reviews (although very good ones) at Amazon, and if you’ve read and liked the book, I’d appreciate you weighing in there. Reviews need not be lengthy – you can go long and detailed or short and sweet, as you like.

It occurred to me to do my first audio giveaway here because Barb and I just finished listening to Girl Most Likely as read by Dan John Miller. Dan is a terrific reader, and – as some of you know – he has been the “voice” of Nate Heller for years now. He’s also narrated a Quarry and two Mike Hammer novels, as well What Doesn’t Kill Her and the Reeder and Rogers political thrillers by Matt Clemens and me. He’s a fantastic narrator and in much demand, and I’m lucky to have him.

Remember when I said I wouldn’t talk about Girl Most Likely reviews here anymore? Did you really believe that? Truth is we’ve had many very good reviews (I’ll link to one really nice one below), and continue to hold at four stars on Amazon, with 72 reviews currently. What is different about the Girl Most Likely reviews is the nastiness of the outlying bad reviews, which – as I’ve said – seem largely to come from fans of my more overtly noir-ish material (like Quarry, Heller, Hammer) and from young women with politically-correct agendas.

When the novel came out, I kept track of the reviews at Amazon and Goodreads (including the bizarrely nasty ones from the UK, where readers had access a month early). I did this because Girl Most Likely is published by Amazon – actually, Thomas & Mercer, their mystery/suspense line – and I am keen to keep working with them, so I needed to know what kind of response they were getting.

So, in the process, I got a little battered by the occasional snarky, nasty reviews. This made hearing Dan John Miller read Girl Most Likely (Barb and I listened to it on a recent Chicago trip) a pleasure and, frankly, a relief. It reminded me that I’d been proud of the book when I delivered it, and allowed me to be proud of it now.

I did understand some of the negative response better. Some readers were really put off by the cover labeling the novel “A Thriller.” What a thriller is, exactly, no one really knows. Like noir, it’s a term that everyone defines for themselves and then holds others to that definition.

Otto Penzler, for example – a mystery fiction expert if ever there was one – holds the ludicrous position that no private eye book or movie can be considered noir. Okay, but nobody told Chandler that when he wrote the Marlowe novels and certainly nobody told Mickey Spillane when he created Mike Hammer. One Lonely Night isn’t a noir novel? Kiss Me Deadly isn’t a noir movie? Otto, you prove that an informed opinion is still just an opinion.

The closest I can come to defining the modern thriller is that it has, well, a lot of thrills in it – action and suspense – and the antagonist is known to the reader and the protagonist. In other words, not a mystery.

But I conceived Girl Most Likely as a hybrid of thriller and mystery. The killer would get point of view chapters, but I would withhold the killer’s identity and add a mystery aspect to the plot. This seems to have wildly confused certain readers. (By the way, the killer’s chapters are not “first person,” as many reviewers have stated – they are in second person.)

A good number of reviewers – both amateur and professional – have gotten hung up on the thriller definition provided by the cover. One particularly smug reviewer at Amazon said the novel was a “cozy.” Right. A cozy with three on-stage butcher knife slayings by a maniac, and a nighttime chase in the woods by said butcher knife-wielding maniac of the two protagonists, with the maniac (SPOILER ALERT) dying a graphically bloody death, as well. Yessir, a cozy. Pass the tea and cookies.

Probably what hearing the audio did for me was remind me that some of the things certain people don’t like about the book – the lack of a tough guy hero, the somewhat abrupt (Spillane-style) finish, the clothing and physical descriptions, the setting descriptions, the Chicago mob sub-plot – were all very deliberate choices. And I don’t regret one of them.

A writer of fiction, as I’ve noted here before, is collaborating with each reader. I always assume that the reader is at least as smart as I am, and this has never really failed me. Yet not all readers, even very smart ones, know how to meet a book (or a film or a piece of music) on its own terms. And, of course, not everyone’s taste is the same.

Take Antiques Ravin’. There are four “trade” magazines in the publishing business, and these days it’s rare for a book in a long-running series to get reviewed at all. Just scoring a notice from one of these publications – even if it’s a negative review, and these are all tough places to get good reviews – is a big deal these days, for a novel in a series.

But take a gander at these (all of these originally included lengthy plot summaries):

That, my friends, is a Grand Slam, and I don’t mean at Denny’s. I can’t think of another time in my career when I got reviewed by all four of these trades, and favorably, in one fell swoop.

And yet the Lesa’s Book Critiques blog finds the humor too broad in Ravin’, complaining about the wordplay, even though she admits, “Their characters certainly are original, and, as I said, the mystery is actually well done,” but she “won’t be picking up the fourteenth in the series, but I know this cozy series has a devoted following.”

Is Lesa wrong?

No, Lesa knows what she likes, and her review is well-written and thoughtful. But we are not to her taste. Humor is a very personal thing. So she doesn’t make a good collaborator for us. But she does not go off on a hissy fit about it, or a snarky rant either.

Barb and I knew from the beginning that the Antiques novels would not be to everyone’s taste. I knew the same thing about Quarry, even back in 1972 when I created him. What I wanted to do – and what Barb and I, as “Barbara Allan,” wanted to do – was create something of our own. Something distinctive.

When you do that, you won’t please everybody. Of course, nothing pleases everybody, but with Quarry, and with the Antiques series, we knew that we would turn a certain number of people off. But we also knew, instinctively, that the people who connected with us – who were good and, well, worthy collaborators – would love what we were doing.

Now, the tricky thing for me is that I have rather broad tastes, and somewhat oddball ones at that. So I have had to come to terms with the fact (and it is a fact) that very few readers out there are going to like everything I do. That within my readership will be groups who only like this, or only like that.

Here’s an example. A good number of Quarry fans won’t read Heller because the books are long. If you read both series, you know how compatible they are, thematically and stylistically and so on. But a Heller novel is a commitment for the reader (just as it was to me). And some fans of a certain style of novel – think Gold Medal Books – just don’t know how to handle a book that’s 100,000 words long.

Here’s another. Some readers of comic books (okay, graphic novels) are not anxious to read prose novels. They are fans only of my comics work. To me, the idea that you would love Ms. Tree, but not gravitate as well to Quarry and Nate Heller is nonsensical. But there it is. And even more common is the reader of my novels who disdains comics. Look at the Amazon reviews of my graphic novels and you’ll see outraged one-star reviews – “This is a comic book!”

As we say in the funnies, sigh.

So what can I do about it?

Not a damn thing. Somebody once said something about following a quest and following a star. Of course, hopeless was in there, too, but what the hell.

Anyway, no more talk about reviews.

I promise.

At J. Kingston’s Pierce’s wonderful Rap Sheet, he announces the honor that A. Brad Schwartz and I have received for Scarface and the Untouchable. Very cool – do check this out.

A lot of you seem interested in my appearance (and my Scarface co-author’s) in the Dick Tracy strip (thanks to my pal, writer/cop Jim Doherty). This link will take you to a nice write-up about the continuity, with more links to read the entire thing.

Here is a lovely review for Girl Most Likely.

Check out this nice review and interview with me for Girl Most Likely. This was an actual phone interview as opposed to the usual e-mail one.

Another nice Girl interview here, with fun graphics.

Finally, I don’t exactly know what this is, but it looks like a good deal – a “book bundle” that includes some titles of mine.

[Note from Nate: I’ll copy Humble’s explanation below. The short version is: DRM-free highly discounted bundles of eBooks that benefits charity. This bundle includes The Consummata and the Mike Hammer and Quarry’s War graphic novels at the $1 tier, The First Quarry at the $8 tier, and Seduction of the Innocent at the $15 tier.]

M.A.C.