Tonight!

The Minnesota Crime Wave is coming! The Minnesota Crime Wave is coming!

Tonight is the last big event for The Big Read of Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon". All month long, along with discussing the book and watching movies we've been reading mysteries.

I've had the privilege to read MINNESOTA mysteries this months - thanks to the fine folks you see in costume here - Carl Brookins, Ellen Hart and William Kent Krueger.

Each writes mysteries set in Minnesota that are unique to the genre. Ellen's are more of the "cozy" type - involving amateur sleuth/restauranteur Jane Lawless. This doesn't mean they are timely or pertaining to current events. In her latest "The Mortal Groove" Jane's father Ray is running for Minnesota governor. What could be more timely than political races that dig into the private lives of candidates?

The author of over 20 novels, Ellen is a five-time winner of the Lambda award for Best Lesbian mystery, and twice winner of the Minnesota Book Award for Best Crime & Detective Fiction. She was made an official GLBT Literary Saint at the Saints & Sinners Literary convention in New Orleans in 2005, and she has been awarded the Alice B. Readers Appreciation Medal. She teaches mystery writing at the University of Minnesota and at the Loft Literary Center.

Carl Brookins latest "Bloody Halls" is set on a college campus right in the middle of downtown Minneapolis. Jack Marston is an administrator who has been asked to look into the murder of a student. Brookins writing is sharp, funny and compelling.

Carl has written crime fiction reviews for Mystery Scene Magazine, two Internet sites, Reviewing The Evidence and Books n' Bytes, and for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press. An avid sailor, he is the author of a sailing mystery series featuring Michael Tanner and Mary Whitney, published by Top Publications. They are titled Inner Passages, A Superior Mystery, set in Wisconsin's Apostle Islands, and Old Silver, published in May, 2005. His first detective novel, featuring PI, Sean NMI Sean, was released in September 2005 in hardcover from Five Star Mysteries called The Case of the Greedy Lawyers.

William Kent Krueger is the award winning writer of the mysteries with Cork O'Connor at the center. The latest "Thunder Bay" sets Cork on the trail of his spiritual advisor/Mide's long lost son and long lost love. Krueger's work is set firmly in the wilds of Northern Minnesota and Canada, with setting almost important as character. In Thunder Bay he also writes a seering love story, a tale of a Native medicine man, and a contemporary family drama.

His first two books, Iron Lake and Boundary Waters, received a number of awards including the Anthony award for Best First Novel, the Minnesota Book Award and the Loft-McKnight Fiction Award. His third novel, Purgatory Ridge, won the Minnesota Book Award for 2001; his fourth, Blood Hollow, won the Anthony Award for Best Novel of 2004. One critic has dubbed him the Michael Connelly of the Midwest.

Join us tonight for the free event at Itasca Community College. It's at 7pm at Davies Hall!

The Minnesota Mysteries continue with William Kent Krueger

I talked with MN Mystery writer William Kent Krueger today - you can hear it Wednesday night from 6-7 and Sunday morning from 9-10. OR, you can come hear Kent speak as part of the MN Crime Wave happening in Grand Rapids on Monday evening at 7pm at ICC's Davies Theater.

Kent's mysteries take place in fictional Aurora, Minnesota - a landscape that he says "cried out to him". Kent went on to say:

"A fiction writer looks for conflict. Conflict drives great stories.
Aurora has conflict in the land, conflict in the weather and conflict within
the community. Stories rise not just out of the landscape but out of the
incredible melting pot up north."

As a wannabe-writer myself, it is always interesting to hear of the rituals that writers have. If you look at Kent's website you'll see he has a habit of writing early in the morning at a coffeeshop. For most of his career he did that at booth #4 at the St. Clair Broiler in St. Paul. I asked why he writes in a public place, he said:

"Ernest Hemingway had always been one of my favorite authors and what I
knew about Hemingway was that he loved nothing better than to rise at first
light and spend a couple of hours writing. He thought it was the most
creative time of the day - so I thought, well, whatever's good enough for
Hemingway....I was living a block from the St. Clair Broiler, a classic
coffeeshop in St. Paul - and they opened the doors at 6am. So I would get
up at 5:30, get myself ready for when they opened at 6 and write for about 1
hour and 15 minutes until the bus came to take me to work. "

"I tried to write at home but I couldn't do it for this reason: when
I'm at home what happens around my house demands my attention. At a
restaurant it all becomes white noise and I think myself really deeply down into
the imagining of whatever I need to work on at the moment. I think
we all have rituals - those elements of magic that help us accomplish this
incredible process that I think none of us understand."

What I'm reading - upcoming interviews

I just finished reading "Seeing Me Naked" by Liza Palmer - I got a review copy of this and was excited to read it, because it looked a little "lighter" and I'd like to stop having nightmares from all the mysteries I've been reading in the last few months. Well, I was right - kind of - it took my mind off of mysteries but I couldn't go to sleep until I finished it.

There's a few things that appeal to me about it: the main character is a pastry chef (which is the next career I'd like to tackle) , the Food Channel is involved, it involves the literary world and the characters make some profound changes. Here's a little synopsis:

Elisabeth is the daughter of a living literary legend - and has grown up in a wealthy and genteel old money world. She's bucked the family though, and studied and worked furiously at being a french pastry chef. Brother Rascal is fast usurping his father's writing career and Elisabeth is beginning to wake up and see her life for what it is: baking, farmer's markets and an occassional visit from her equally dysfuntional childhood love. She begins to see isolation is not all it's cracked up to be and plugs her nose and jumps into the deep end. Publisher's Weekly wrote:

"If it sounds chick litty, it is, but consider it haute chick lit; Palmer's prose is sharp, her characters are solid and her narrative is laced with moments of graceful sentiment. "

I'm also reading Felicia Sullivan's "The Sky Isn't Visible From Here - Scenes from a Life". It's scenes from her life - and it too is affecting my sleep, like reviewer Dani Shapiro wrote "Read this book at your own peril. It will keep you awake at night and haunt your dreams."

Felicia's memoir is about her growing up in 1980's Brooklyn. From a young age, Felicia was a caretaker to her drug addicted mother. When she graduated from college, her mother disappeared. Instead of looking for her or mourning her loss, Felicia decided that her mother was now dead to her - and she would rebuild her life and become who she always wanted to be. What happens is eerily similar to her mother's lifestyle.

Lucky for us, Felicia is now clean, sober and busting with literary talent - writing honestly of finally finding who she really is.

Also in the hopper: award winning Minnesota mystery writer William Kent Krueger's new Cork O'Connor mystery set in Aurora, Minnesota "Thunder Bay" (nominated for this year's MN Book Award). I haven't gotten too far into it yet - Cork is trying to find the long lost son of his Ojibwe spiritual advisor, Henry Meloux. William Kent Krueger will be in Grand Rapids as part of the MN Crime Wave on Monday February 25th with Ellen Hart and Carl Brookins.

I've got a mysterious weekend ahead of me!

some notes on tonight's Realgoodwords

Tonight is a fun show; you'll hear my conversations with Jon Scieszka and Carl Brookins. If you missed it, check out the archive. Jon Scieszka (which is as hard to spell as it is to pronounce "cheska") made me laugh a lot....he's a funny guy who thinks kids are the funniest things ever. You see that in his writing with a very distinct sense of humor. He's the new ambassador of young people's literature for the Library of Congress and is serious about getting kids to read. They couldn't have picked a better guy for the post in my opinion.

You've got to check out his website; it's hilarious!

He's got a special website for parents and kids for the Trucktown series too, along with a blog.

Jon mentioned some of his favorite children's books authors - including Adam Rex, Mo Willems and Brian Selznick.

We also talk about how to get kids reading, and how to get boys reading especially. We talked about Minnesota author Will Weaver's latest endeavor - a series of novels for middle-high school age boys about the life of a stock car racer called "Saturday Night Dirt". Will's got lots of information on his website and a blog on writing as well.

My other conversation on Realgoodwords is with Minnesota mystery author Carl Brookins, as part of The Big Read of Dashiell Hammet's "The Maltese Falcon". Carl's latest, the first in a series, is called "Bloody Halls". Carl and I talked alot about the process of writing...

"My detective in "The Case of The Greedy Lawyers", Sean Sean, just showed up in my office one day with a stack of files and said to tme that he had these stories he thought he wanted me to tell. One of the things that happens to people when they get what's called writer's block - I don't think it really is writer's block - it's when the characters refuse to do something that the writer is trying to get him to do that is out of character."

"I hear these voices and when the characters come to me sometimes I don't know where they are going. I sometimes say that I write these stories to find out what's going to happen just like the readers do...The reader and the writer have a contract -
you bring certain expectations to the book - I as the writer bring certain expectations. It's not a question of who wins - it's a question of whether I'm successful in writing the kind of a book that
will get A reaction from you - it may not be the reaction that I necessarily want, but some kind of reaction . To be ignored is the worst thing."
Carl also mentioned his favorite, first mystery as a kid, Freddy the Pig.

Mysteries, shmysteries!

It is Big Read time 'round these parts and so far, everything's swimming along fine. Our choice this year is Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon". There are a ton of events to be apart of - book discussions - author talks - movies - to join in on. Coming up next:

I will be co-leading a discussion at the Grand Rapids Area Library at 10:30 on Wednesday morning, February 13th to discuss "The Maltese Falcon".

What did you think of it? What did you think of the Flitcraft parable? Have you seen the movie?

After seeing the movie again after many years, I forgot how much dialogue was in it! It certainly paved the way for other film noirs, but I don't think I'd say it was the best by any means. Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre are great in it - and it's worth a watch just to see Peter Lorre's tiny little gun and his crybaby antics.