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UPdate: December 11, 2007, "A date which will live
in anonymity": unless you, dear reader/collector/customer,
click variously upon the above dustjacket images, and find out why it
shoudn't!" (The info on Love and Night is coming shortly).
Update:February 14, 2007
My most current publication, the "true crime"
speculative fiction novel Dead Horse by Walter Satterthwait, is
receiving excellent reviews in all quarters, and is selling with dispatch
and alacrity through the independent mystery bookstores as well as the
large library wholesaler, Baker & Taylor. To the extent, in fact,
that I may be reprinting very soon, so if you're interested in a signed
first edition of the cloth state ($30. plus $5. shipping), you'll probably
want to get an order in within the next month or so. There are still about
25 morocco state copies left unsold as of this update, too (1/104 copies,
$250. each, signed and lettered by the author, slipcased), so, if you
are perspicacious enough a collector to realize that my morocco state
books are the "real" collectibles that I produce, where "book
posterity" is concerned (to convince yourself of this truth, simply
look at the prices of my earlier morocco state books on ABE or addall.com,
and you'll see that a purchase of almost any of them when they first came
out would have beaten just about any stock market investment over the
same period of years hence, hands down), feel free to join that select
party of true book aficionados who have a standing order for a copy of
each of my morocco volumes, as they come out. But back to Dead Horse
itself, and what respected critics have said about Walter's latest novel.
Bill Ott, publisher of Booklist, the official journal of the American
Library Association, in the Jan. 1, 2007 issue, reviewed Dead Horse
as follows:
"The latest from one of crime
fiction's most reliable publishers of edgy noir [yes,
that's ME, folks, and it only cost me a month's wages to
get him to say that!] goes in a different, but delightfully
entertaining, direction: a historical mystery drawing on
the life of hard-boiled pulp author Raoul Whitfield, who,
in the 1920s, was the most highly paid mystery writer in
the country. In 1933, Whitfield married socialite Emily
Davies Vanderbilt Thayer, and the pair lived the money-guzzling
jazz-age life in a sumptuous home near  LasVegas,
New Mexico. After a tempestuous separation in 1935, Emily
died, apparently a suicide, though many thought she was
murdered. Whitfield, who quit writing after the marriage,
never escaped the cloud of suspicion surrounding his wife's
death. Genre veteran Satterthwait offers his version of
what might have happened, jumping back and forth in time
to tell the story of the couple's storybook romance and
its tragic denouement. The alternate history is completely
credible, and the portrayal of a genre star brought down
by the high life is addictively readable (especially for
its links to Dashiell Hammett, who may have based Nick in
The Thin Man on Whitfield). Great fun, particularly
for pulp fans."
Publisher's Weekly was also very favorably
impressed by Dead Horse, and commented, in part, that: "Having
put a fictional spin on Lizzie Borden in Miss Lizzie and Oscar
Wilde in Wilde West, Satterthwait ingeniously reimagines another
real life event—the mysterious death of Emily Davies Vanderbilt Thayer
Whitfield, the socialite second wife of pulp-fiction writer Raoul Whitfield.
. . . In spare but effective prose Satterthwait depicts the Whitfields'
flamboyant life together and Raoul's later life, while raising some interesting
conjectures about what was in all probability an unpunished crime."
If you have any interest in the Jazz Age, pulp
writers, American "high society," Gertrude Stein's literary
"salon" in Gay Paree circa 1930, or are just plain fascinated
by "impossible crimes" and their possible solutions, you should
pick up a copy of Dead Horse. Once again, I hasten to inform
you that my online store DOES NOT WORK, SO DO NOT ATTEMPT TO ORDER BOOKS
FROM ME THAT WAY (!!!). Instead, just either email me or call me up on
the phone (520-529-6636) to order, and keep tuned for the incredibly interesting
list of forthcoming titles mentioned at the top of this page! Thanks to
everyone for their support: I publish books, fictions mostly, for intelligent
people, so if you know any of that ilk, don't hesitate to let them know
what I'm doing! I've been "fighting the good fight" for 25 years
now, and I'll continue to publish these great authors that New York publishers
won't (because they think the audience is too small for them to make their
customary several hundred percent profit, and because their demographic
analysts tell them that the "average" book buyer is a middle-aged
woman bent a certain way, who wants to be comforted rather than intellectually
challenged by what she reads) as long as I possibly can. The book collecting
world is shrinking, there's no doubt in my mind about that, but there
still ought to be a few hundred, or even a few thousand readers out there,
in a population of 300 MILLION (!) English readers, who will appreciate
Jim Nisbet, Kent Anderson, Kent Harrington, Rick DeMarinis, Charles Willeford,
Bob Truluck, Walter Satterthwait, Cornell Woolrich, Gary J. Cook, and
many others who I've published, and hopefully will publish in the
years to come.
.
Update: August 1, 2006.
Quite a number of events of interest to collectors,
and even to casual readers of my publications, have taken place since
my last update. To ennumerate them succinctly, I will proceed as follows,
more or less chronologically:
1) Dark Companion by Jim Nisbet received
(as did Blood Trail by Gary J. Cook, a couple of months earlier)
a starred review, in the May 22 issue of Publisher's Weekly.
Not only did it get a starred review, it got the most laudatory starred
review that I've personally ever read in that journal, which is, for
those of you not in the publishing or bookselling business, the most important
place that a review for a forthcoming book can appear (along with
Booklist, the official journal of The American Library Association,
published out of Chicago). The essence of the review is that the reviewer
characterized Dark Companion as a "perfect noir novel,"
and, since that's the genre in which I seek out good and even great
books to publish, I just don't think a reviewer's comment can get
any better than that, frankly. Click the image of the front cover
of Dark Companion, below on this page, to go to a page that has
the complete Publisher's Weekly review on it (Publisher's Weekly
reviews are, unfortunately, not signed; but in a way, that makes what
he/she said even more remarkable, for its total perspicacity in nailing
almost exactly why Dark Companion is
an important "popular"—as opposed to "academic,"
just to make sure everybody understands what I'm saying here!—work
in several fields, including social criticism, satire in the vein of Swift,
and even philosophy, of the "pop" and eminently practicible
variety, as embodied by the protagonist, Banerjhee Rolf, a mere one generation
removed from his Eastern roots, with the shadow of karma not having yet
been blasted from his interior life by the brilliant onslaught of Western
society's commercial co-option, as almost invariably happens to those
who frantically and joyously throw themselves into the rat-race that has
evolved in and spread out of our corner of the globe since the start [in
Old Blighty, mind you! a mere hop, skip, and soccer-hooligan stomp across
that Pond that was once called the Atlantic Ocean] of the Industrial Revolution;
inviting these intelligent men and women (boys and girls, mainly, of course!)
to come on over and get a share of the spoils themselves—while there
still are any to be had!—becoming, in the process, "one
of us," as the variously deformed and mal-shapen entites we have
become beckon them with lugubrious "smiles" and winks and nods.
. . . I should note at this point, in all fairness, that Otto Penzler
mercilously savaged Dark Companion in his column last week in The
New York Sun, entitled, appropriately enough, "A Failure to Appreciate"
(which negatory comments, among certain readers, would
be the highest recommendation to buy and read the book that could
possibly be obtained, so I will state now, and swear upon the Organ of
the Great Skizerinctum, that I did NOT pay Otto to write that diatribe;
in fact, Otto recently wrote another column entitled, "A Dark Publisher
with a Bright History," in which he [again, without remuneration,
I swear! this time on the jowls of the Great Nylander Suprem-O]
presented an extremely laudatory history of my book publishing [mis-ad]venture,
now almost into it's 25th year, wherein he stated that I had "never
published a bad book." He may still think so, Dark Companion
notwithstanding, as it's hard to tell, just as it was with the late, great
Charles Willeford, whether or not Otto might be having a very psychologically-complicated
and tortuous "leg-pull" at my and Nisbet's expense. True Love
makes a man do strange things, you know, and it's pretty common knowledge
that Otto is in the finest state of bliss possible for the human male
these days, and has been for some time now (and by Crikey! do I envy the
mainge!), so, this all may be. . . 'just one of those things,' in the
final analysis—if, indeed, this sidebar was worth even an initital
analysis, let alone a final one! (only Nylander Jonny Nurns will ever
know, and he's not expected back in this particular galaxy/continuum for
quite some time, I understand).
By Ghad! I've laid on the horseshit here, haven't
I? And I believe I said something about being "succinct" at
the top of the page? Didn't I? Okay, then, friends, fellowe collectors,
and just plain readers who enjoy a "hell of book" (as my old
Polish M.D. advisor in medical school used to say), my final word is this:
Buy a signed copy of Dark Companion before I sell out the first
edition, and enjoy the hell out of it (it's short, at only 144 pages,
and takes the "average" reader about three hours to read, allowing
a total of about 15-20 minutes for uncontrollable belly laughing [this
phenomenon occuring only in those with an extremely well-developed sense
of Black Humor; to an extent, in fact, which other, more "normal"
readers might categorize as "appalling," but so be it!). $30.
plus a flat $5. postage (for 1-3 books sent in the same package) will
bring a signed copy winging your way. I also should mention, for both
those of you who've already bought a cloth copy of Dark Companion,
read it, and realized what a truly great book it is, AND those
collectors who have not yet read the novel, but who trust my judgment
in matters pertaining to what is "great" as opposed to what
is just "good," AND who have the money to spend on something
they really appreciate to add to their collections, I must inform you
that there remain 7 copies of the quarter-morocco state of Dark Companion,
slipcased, of course, UNSOLD, for my usual quarter-morocco price of
$250. (the quarter-morocco state consists of 104 copies, signed and lettered
by the author ["A" through "ZZZZ"]; and these, of
course [again!!!] are the copies that will appreciate more in value over
the coming years than any cloth state copy: although I have never, and
WILL never, advise anyone to BUY A BOOK for "investment purposes,"
as that seems the absolute silliest reason for collecting books that I
have ever encountered, and, in one way, I hope that the shrinkage in the
number of book collectors that every rare and collectible book dealer
in the English-speaking world has seen happening over the past, say, five
years, at an increasing rate, sadly, is due to the type of people who
think books can be invested in like stocks, leaving the "field"—hopefully,
to the people who actually love books; usually in a two-fold way:
1) as physical objects that are made with varying degress of artistry
in their various aspects, and 2) because reading a good book is one of
the greatest pleasures that a human being can participate in. I never
thought that I'd say something like this, but I feel very sorry for those
in the younger generations whose only form of "intellectual"
relaxation, or "escape" from this truly terrible world most
of us find ourselves in, lies in playing some type of video game, no matter
how intellectually challenging it may be. It just ain't the same as reading
a good book, and it never will be. The intellectual partnership between
writer and reader is one of singular joy, probably surpassed only by sex
beween people who really love each other, and playing music with people
of like creative mind.
ENOUGH! On to the new books; and even the forthcoming
books!
I'm currently shipping my limited first edition
of George Pelecanos' latest novel, The Night Gardener, which has
received nothing but rave reviews in every journal and newspaper that
I'm aware of (Publisher's Weekly, Booklist, Janet Maslin's review
in The New York Times), as well as from all of my proofreaders
and friends who've read advance copies of the book. Little, Brown is even
putting a $150,000 advertising budget behind this particular tome—the
first time they've ever done anything so "rash" for one of George's
uniformly excellent tales—and I must deduce from this that somebody
at Little Brown with juice enough to write a check shares the opinion
of the aforementioned that The Night Gardener is probably George's
best book in the past three or four years. Due to one of the Keystone-Kops-like
screw-ups that seem to be an ever-present part of my publishing a book
these days, I had the shipment of books in hand as soon as I got back
from ConMisterio in Austin (July 14-16), only to have to wait another
two weeks for the slipcases, which were actually made in Austin,
and which I had expected to pick up while I was there, being one of the
Guests of Honor at the convention (and don't ask me why, please!).
Of course, my excellent printer in Central Michigan hadn't bothered to
read the work order that told them to send an advance copy of the book
down to Austin so the slipcase maker could get that job finished in time
for me to pick them up mid-July. Then, I was informed by the slipcase
maker that the week after the weekend of July 14-16 is the week that they
close down their plant every year for a short summer vacation, so they
couldn't even start to make the slipcases for me until after they'd returned,
on July 24. Of course, they returned to a building in which the air conditioner
had failed while they were away on vacation, and thus they didn't start
to make my slipcases until mid-week, after it was fixed. I believe that
Charles Bukowski once said that with every broken shoelace, one more man
enters the madhouse. He didn't say what happens to those whose shoelaces
break when they're already in the madhouse, though. . . . I guess
that's why I'm now shipping out these books, isn't it? My edition is 104
quarter-morocco copies ($250. + $5. postage), of which there are 3 still
available as of today (8/9/06); so, if you want one, please order up.
I did 200 cloth copies, signed and numbered by the author ($125. + $5.
postage), and there are a few of those left as well, so, again, if you're
an appreciator and/or collector of either George Pelecanos or just fine
books in general, give me a ring or an email, and a copy of The Night
Gardener will be winging its way to you posthaste.
The second week of Sept. will see the appearance
of my limited first edition of Michael Connelly's Echo Park, and,
once again, Michael Keller has outdone himself on the dustjacket, for
which he has used the classic mid-1950s Signet mass market paperback as
his inspiration. Damned cool, if I do say so myself; mirroring perfectly
Connelly's latest new wrinkle on the Harry Bosch brand of police procedural,
a field in which he stands quite alone, like an intellectual Dirty Harry,
brought forward two and three decades, and then recently given unsolved
cases from various
periods in the past; some of which occured even before he joined the L.A.
police dept. Not so, Echo Park, though, as it harkens back a mere
10 years and some change, to the year of the last big riots in Los  Angeles;
the year that everyone with a television got to watch Rodney King being
bludgeoned for quite a length of time by a goodly number of L.A.'s finest:
1993. The novel opens with the investigation of the disappearance of a
young lady, one Marie Gesto, who lived at the High Tower Apartments, a
uniquely L.A. art deco environment that's pictured on the rear panel of
the dustjacket. Combined with the front panel, which shows part of Echo
Park itself, a jacket that is as near perfect a physical wrap for the
story inside the covers as anyone could conceive, snikes its way up from
the depths of M. Kellner's creative unconscious (or, perhaps, even conscious?)
mind, to become a wonderful reality. This is one of the reasons I really
love to publish books: I can become a conduit for a much better artistic
presentation of a work by a major writer like Mike Connelly than a "commercial"
New York publishing art dept. would ever come up with, since I don't have
to answer to a committee, but only to my own taste and intuition as to
what is "great" rather than just "good enough" ("for
gov't woik," as they used to say, and nowadays, of course, wish that
they could get anything half as good as that which they
used to scorn: but we won't get into that, now will we?). Anyway,
it's just a "killer" dustjacket for a tremendously good book,
in which Connelly once again shows he's a true genius at coming up with
new plot wrinkles (probably the single hardest thing to do, when
writing a "genre" novel, given the shear number of mysteries
that have been published over the past century, with the author of every
one of them trying to do at least something new, and many of them
succeeding, given the time and circumstances) that will keep any aficionado
guessing until the very end. My limited first ed. will appear at the end
of the first week of Sept., so reserve your copy now if you haven't already:
I'm publishing 156 quarter-morocco copies ($250. + $5. postage), signed
and lettered by the author, slipcased, and 300 copies bound in Brillianta
cloth ($125. + $5. postage), signed and numbered by the author, also slipcased.
Don't miss this one or the Pelecanos!
I'll bring out Walter Satterthwait's Dead Horse,
about which more in a day or two, in October, and then either Kent Anderson's
long-awaited third Hanson novel, Green Sun, for Christmas, or,
if he doesn't get it all in to me in time to make that schedule, I'll
bring out Love and Night: Early Stories of Cornell Woolrich, collected
by Mike Nevins, and with an introduction by him as well. Hopefully this
will be the start of a series similar in scope to the 20-volume Fredric
Brown in the Detective Pulps series that I brought out from 1983-1991.
Woolrich certainly deserves, even if posthumously, to have his stories
presented in a classy and informed manner, and I can do that! Spring 2007
will see the appearance of my fourth Jim Nisbet novel, for which his
title is How I Got Work. Since it's the story of how a junkie
jazz guitarist does finally "get work" (among many, many
other things that most readers would consider of greater import) I doubt
that I'll finally end up publishing it under that title. There's also
a totally brilliant new Kent Harrington novel finished and now making
the rounds of the NY publishers, and I will do at least a limited first
ed. of it by summer 2007.
Update: March 21, 2006.
I now have my books set, with one possible exception,
for the remainder of 2006: Blood Trail by Gary J. Cook (now
available); Dark Companion by Jim Nisbet (April 20 pub.
date); a limited first edition of The Night Gardner by George
Pelecanos (June pub. date); a limited first edition of Echo Park
by Michael Connelly (July or August pub. date); Dead Horse
by Walter Satterthwait (September pub. date, for the Bouchercon in Madison,
WI); and finally, Green Sun by Kent Anderson (December pub.
date).
First off, I'm publishing a fabulous modern adventure
novel, set in Japan and Montana (with a few Viet Nam War era flashbacks),
by a writer probably nobody reading this has ever heard of: Gary J. Cook.
The book is Blood Trail, and in a starred review in Publisher's
Weekly (March 20, 2006), the PW reviewer comments: "Graphic
violence, penetrating, incisive analysis of complex cultural and historical
events and one man's heroic defiance make Cook's long overdue second novel
(after 1988's Graveyard Rules) an event to celebrate. This is a
writer with something to say and immense skills with which to say it."
It doesn't get much better than that in a PW review, folks,
so I'm definitely not crying in the wilderness on this one (in fact, I
rarely cry in the wilderness, if you've been following the critical reception
of almost all the books I've published since the start of my "Second
Incarnation" as a publisher [1995]). Gary Cook writes, in many ways,
like Kent Anderson, and he has a similar background as well, having been
a combat Marine in Viet Nam, and then, after returning to the States,
working undercover for the sheriff's dept. of a Western Montana county
for a few years. He has one previous novel—Graveyard Rules, referred
to above in the PW review of Blood Trail—published
in 1988 as a mass market paperback by Pocket Books. It's a "Missoula
narc novel," as the guy who introduced me to Gary's writing put it,
and well worth hunting down and reading, in my opinion. For the past 16
years, Gary and his wife have run a non-profit student exchange program
between the State of Montana and the country of Japan (his wife is Japanese,
so that helps!). This venture is probably coming to an end, which gives
him the time to start writing novels again, and we can all be thankful
for that, if they all turn out as wonderfully as Blood Trail. Click
on the photo of the dustjacket of Blood Trail at the right-hand
side of this page, and you'll be taken to a page where you can read the
"Prologue" of the novel yourself, to get an idea of how good
a writer Gary really is. My first edition of Blood Trail consists
of 104 quarter-morocco bound copies, slipcased, signed and lettered ("A"
through "ZZZZ") by Gary, selling for $250. each (you're getting
in, essentially, on the start of a major writer's career here, if you
have the perspicacity to buy one of these morocco editions), and 1,000
copies bound in Brillianta (100% rayon cloth from Holland, considered
the best cloth extant for book-binding) cloth, at $35. each, which can
be signed, signed and dated, or inscribed in some manner pleasing to the
purchaser, starting at the end of April, when Gary, Jim Nisbet, and myself
will all hook up out in Los Angeles at the L.A. Times' Festival
of Books (April 29-30, on the UCLA campus).
Dark Companion is the shortest novel Nisbet
has ever written, at only 144 pages, but it packs the same wallop, if
not more so, than the almost-500 page Syracuse Codex of last year,
and I expect it to receive an equally excellent reception. Jim Nisbet
is simply one of the best w riters,
period (whether you want to try to pigeonhole him into a "genre"
or not is up to you, but I'd say, Why bother?), that we have in the English
language these days, and if you're an intelligent person who knows there
are no satisfactory answers to most of the important questions
that we feel compelled to ask ourselves and the Universe-at-Large—over
and over!—you will find a fellow ponderer in Jim Nisbet; one who
can tell some of the most bizarre tales you'd never think of yourself
while he's doing his pondering, as part and parcel of same; amusing
us, his readers, and challenging us to follow his mental peregrinations
(see, I'm even starting to write like him! just by trying to succinctly
explicate the man's insanity). This particular tome might lead
one from abstract speculations on the new "science" of Chaos
Theory to a very real/fictional instantiation of same in the little story
of Banerjhee Rolf, good citizen and moral man—not because he grew
up learning to fear society's strictures and coercions, but simply because
that's the way he was made in the genetic caldron and, possibly,
if one believes in reincarnation, as many of Banerjhee's forebears undoubtedly
did, his present "good" life was also the result of a karmic
summation of some obscure kind, the Brownie points of which moral sum
can be seen receding (and growing?. . .or diminishing?) generation by
generation into the misty reaches of bygone Time. . . .; but we'll leave
that for Banerjhee himself to ponder in some small section of Dark
Companion. Suffice to say, as with almost every Jim Nisbet novel I've
ever read, Jim Thompson's old maxim holds as true as an iron sledgehammer
with a right sharp edge to 'er, descending smartly to clove thy brain
in twain, my friend and Deaer Reader; to wit: "There are many stories,
but only one plot, really; things are not as they seem." Sometimes
they're even more not as they seem; and Jim Nisbet has written
a mind-blower in that vein with Dark Companion. My edition consists
of 104 quarter-morocco bound copies, slipcased, signed and lettered by
the author, $250. each, and 1,000 Brillianta cloth-bound copies, signed
or inscribed on request, for $30. each. Get them before the ravening karmic
wendigo devours the entire print run, and they become merely another aspect
of his sere "feet of flame!!" Now I know you wouldn't
want that to happen. . . would you?????
June will see the publication of my limited first
edition of George Pelecanos' The Night Gardner (the title of the
book might seem a little strange for a Pelecanos novel, but it's a reference
to the nickname the police have given to an apparent serial killer who
has a penchant for leaving his victims to fertilize some of the urban
communal gardens to be found around the Washington, D.C., metro area).
I'm doing a very small limited first edition, of 104 quarter-morocco copies
(slipcased, signed and lettered by the author; $250.), and 200 Brillianta
cloth copies (also slipcased, and signed and numbered by the author; $125.).
More particulars on this novel after I read it!!!
In July or August, depending on when Little, Brown,
the publisher of the trade edition of the book, brings that state out,
I'll publish my limited first edition of Michael Connelly's latest Harry
Bosch tale, Echo Park, which I also have not read yet (as of March
21, in other words). I'm doing the same print run that I did for last
year's The Closers (which oversold), of 156 quarter-morocco copies ($250.,
signed and lettered by the author, in slipcase), and 300 Brillianta cloth
copies ($125., signed and numbered by the author, also in slipcase). The
dustjacket will be by Michael Kellner. More information on the novel will
appear here after I read it! If you are a Connelly fan, however,
take note that, whenever I announce a new batch of books that includes
a Michael Connelly limited first edition, that book is always the
first to sell out, so reserve your copy(s) now, if you want to be sure
of getting one.
As many of you have noticed over the past year or so, I don't keep this
site up worth a damn. It's just a simple fact. So, the best way to keep
abreast of what I'm doing, book-wise, is simply to either call me,
at (520)-529-6636 (remembering that I live in the Pacific Time Zone for
most of the year—Arizona being the "last bastion of the
rugged individualist" as I'm sure almost everybody in the Entire
Universe knows by now, the denizens hereabouts long ago voted to not
let the Federal Gov't push them around as far as the time they
lived their lives by is concerned, by cracky, and, along with certain
rare and wonderful counties in the southrun part of the Great State of
Indiana, they chose to not observe Daylight Savings Time, thus
stalwartly philosophically distancing themselves from those other meek
and mild-mannered Skronkenheimers whose abodes happen to be in any one
or more of the other 49 benighted States of Our Great Union—always
and forever excepting those aforementioned counties in Southrun Indiana,
of course!—in other words, if you live on the East Coast, don't ever
call me before noon, your time, if you want to have a coherent conversation
with a person who is not enraged at having been woken from the bliss of
dreamless slumber, a state rarely attained in this Modern Era, but which
I sometimes manage in the early morning hours; those hours which our more-attuned-to-themselves
ancestors termed the "second sleep" of a given night, and which
most people these days cannot get back to, no matter now hard they try,
once awakened, so they just finally get on up and face another tired &
angry day), or email me at dennismcmillan@aol.com. There you have it.
That's how to find out what's going on with Dennis McMillan Publications,
if this site hasn't changed in six months or so, which is often the case.
Finally, and this is also important: My online
store does not work, period. I may get it fixed, some day,
but I know not when. So, if you want to order a book or books with a credit
card, no problem—just call me up at (520)-529-6636 (or, if I'm on
a trip, try my cell phone, [520]-331-6636, which I only turn on
if I'm on a trip, by the way), or email me your card number in two
separate emails, for security purposes. I can take any credit card
save American Express.
News from last September 25 (2005):
Good News Dept.—My new Jim Nisbet novel,
The Syracuse Codex, has gotten a starred review in the Oct. 1 issue
of Booklist, from Bill Ott, the publisher himself. This, after
a very good review in Publisher's Weekly (the PW reviews
are unsigned), in the September 5 issue. I've been telling people that
Nisbet is a kick-ass writer for years, and now I feel somewhat "vindicated,"
as both of these reviews are from "uninterested parties" who
know neither Jim nor myself (uninterested, that is, in anything other
than a great read, which this book most definitely is!). As of the date
of this comment (Sept. 26, 2005), there are still 16 morocco copies of
The Syracuse Codex left, so if you want to get the most limited
state of this killer novel for your collection, you still can. Just give
me a ring or an email ($250. plus $5. postage). I'll post the entire Booklist
review here after it comes out on Oct. 1. Update,
March 21, 2006: The morocco state is long sold out, and I've reprinted
another 1,000 copies in Brillianta cloth, of which, as of 3/21/06, about
400 copies remain, so you can still buy the book ($35. plus $5. postage,
flat rate for 1-3 books), to read (after all, that's ultimately what it's
for, isn't it?), although it's not a first edition. I haven't heard
one single negative comment on this novel. Literally everybody
has loved it, and Robin Smiley, the publisher of Firsts magazine,
the only magazine devoted solely to book collecting, gave it yet another
rave review in the December 2005 issue, where the final two sentences
of the review sum things re The Syracuse Codex up quite nicely:
"The Syracuse Codex is entertaining, and bound to become an
underground magnum opus. Nisbet is still not for everybody, but I doubt
whether he gives a damn." Couldn't have said it better myownself.
More Good News: The world premiere of The Ice
Harvest, the movie, was Sept. 3, 2005, in Dieuville, France, at the
Dieuville International Film Festival, where it was very well received.
Scott Phillips missed the Bouchercon to attend (can you blame him? I certainly
don't!), and was photographed with the director, Harold Ramis, and female
lead, Connie Nielsen, before the paparazzi. The Hollywood premiere will
be November 7, and the nationwide premiere will be Nov. 23, the day before
Thanksgiving. This will be Focus' and Universal's big "Christmas
picture" this year, and I expect it to be a major hit. Hell, they've
certainly got the right people involved (in addition to Connie Nielsen,
the male leads are John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton, and the screenplay
was written by Robert Benton and Richard Russo; you just don't get
any better than that!). Go see it!!! Update, March
21, 2006: The DVD version of The Ice Harvest came out a couple
of weeks ago, at a special price of $19.95 (I don't know how long that'll
last, of course, but I bought a copy yesterday for that price), and its
got some terrific extras to lure you, the consumer, into buying it (hell,
I've already bought three copies—two for presents), including a three-way
discussion between Scott Phillips, author of the novel (which, as you
may recall, I published the true first edition of; all in quarter-morocco
binding, and only 225 copies, since that's all good old Ballantine Books
would let me publish), and Robert Benton and Richard Russo, the
two screenwriters. It's at least a half-hour talk, and very interesting.
The alternate endings, including the one from the novel (!) are present
on the DVD as well. Then there's a scene where John Cusack and Billy Bob
Thornton play it with Cusack as the straight man and Billy Bob doing the
scene as his character from Slingblade. Ummm-hmmmmm! Pretty damned
funny. Really. Go out and buy it and watch it. You won't be disappointed,
although it's too bad, as per usual, that they just didn't film the book
as it was written, period. But they never do, do they?
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Update, September 26, 2005: Red Jungle is completely
sold out, and a very good agent now has it and is showing it to
various New York publishers, one of whom will hopefully be perspicacious
enough to buy the book for either hardcover or trade paperback
reprint. I have a few morocco overrun copies that I can get signed
by Kent if anyone is interested, for $125. There are no cloth
copies of any kind left.
Red Jungle was picked as one of the "Ten Best
Mysteries of the Year" by Booklist in its May 1, 2005
issue.
Previous comments:
Shipping to readers the first week of January 2005 is
the long-awaited masterpiece by the author of Día de
los Muertos, Dark Ride, The American Boys, and The Tattooed
Muse, Kent Harrington's own "Night Dogs"
(i.e., Red Jungle is as much autobiography
for him as Night Dogs was/is for Kent Anderson,
which is what puts it head and shoulders above most other books
that are strictly "made-up" fiction, even though, of
course, all books/tales/stories are made-up in one way or another
from the author's personal experience). Red Jungle is set
in a very near-future Guatemala, after coffee has tanked in the
international markets, the 35-year long Civil War is "over,"
but most of the former communist insurgents have no jobs or prospects
of getting any, the same situation as the now-unemployed coffee
plantation workers. Into this sad milieu Russell Cruz-Price, half-Guatemalan
(on his mother's side), half-American, returns to the country
of his birth, as a journalist working for the Financial Times
of London. Having grown up via U.S. military schools and then
attending the U. of Chicago, where he was a brilliant student
of economics, and after a stint as a bond-trader where he literally
"won" and lost millions of dollars in the game of international
currency manipulation, he is a Lost Soul, searching for . . .
.what? The missing part of his identity? The part that will make
him care about his life, and the lives of others? Or has
he come back to the country of his birth to somehow avenge the
murder of his mother, killed by communists years ago during the
long Civil War. . . .? (to be continued on 12/6/04)
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Click the image and go to the Monkology page. .
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The limited, true first edition of Scott Phillips' Cottonwood,
which Kirkus, in its starred review, called "an
entirely new form of the Western," is now available, to be
followed the second week of February by my limited first edition
of George Pelecanos' Hard
Revolution: 1959-1968, which Publisher's Weekly commented
was the "type of genre novel that should win the National Book
Award." The
limitations on both these novels are 300 cloth copies ($125) and
104 (lettered from "A" through "ZZZZ") quarter-morocco
with hand-made paper covered boards copies ($250). The Hard Revolution
morocco state sold out in mid-January, but there are still cloth
copies available of both books, as well as a few morocco copies
of Cottonwood. Next, the big news for all Michael Connelly
aficionados is that my limited edition of his next Harry Bosch
novel, The Narrows, will be out April 1 (no joke!). Since
the major publisher of the book, Little, Brown, isn't even doing
an ARC (Advanced Reading Copy) as per usual, my edition will be
the first chance that many fans will have to even read the
book, let alone acquire a collectible edition for their own libraries;
at least until the Little, Brown edition comes out the first week
of May!dt
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The reviews
couldn't have been any better for this incredible noir novel by Rick
DeMarinis, which also features a quite amusing (and only slightly
obscene) introduction by his old friend James Crumley. A starred review
in Publisher's Weekly (Oct. 6), followed by a boxed review
by the publisher himself, Bill Ott, in the Nov. 15 issue of Booklist
(the official journal of the American Library Association), and finally,
in the Dec. 28 New York Times' Book Review Supplement, a rave
review by Marilyn Stasio. I'm the sole publisher of this book, and
there are cloth state (signed) copies still available (end of Jan.
2004), although it's getting ready to go into a second printing, so
order up fairly quickly if you're a collector and want a first edition.
DeMarinis wrote a humorous noir novel three years ago, A Clod of
Wayward Marl, which I also published, but Sky Full of Sand
is his attempt to write a straight noir, set on the border in and
around El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. I say "attempt," because
he just couldn't quite keep that DeMarinis weirdness out of it, you
know? It's pretty much instantly recognizable as a DeMarinis novel,
by anyone who's read a few, although much more serious with regard
to the plot and what the characters do to each other, than anything
he's ever written before, no question. Just another "killer"
book from Rick. I can't wait for the next one! The "next one"
actually is a brand new short story collection, to be published by
Seven Stories Press this coming fall, entitled Apocalypse Then!
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