James Ellroy Previews “Blood’s A Rover”

On Tuesday, September 22, Alfred A. Knopf will publish James Ellroy’s Blood’s A Rover, the third and final installment of the Underworld USA novels that began with American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand. The new book is not only a fine finish to that trilogy but also strikes me as both Ellroy’s most ambitious novel (drawing on seven different perspectives) and the most accessible entry into the trilogy. As with its predecessors, Blood’s A Rover continues to explore how private lives can impact very public and highly political events, spanning in this case from the aftermath of the King and Kennedy assassinations to the eve of the Watergate break-ins. But this new book is also, at its heart, a love story, with each of the three leading men — Wayne Tedrow Jr., employed by Howard Hughes; Dwight Holly, reporting to J. Edgar Hoover; and Don Crutchfield, a window peeper turned obsessive investigator — falling under the spell of women, including a radical liberal activist, Joan Rosen Klein, who may stand as the most complex female character in all the author’s books.

Later this week, the Washington Post Book World will podcast my recent phone interview with Ellroy; I’ll post that link as soon as it’s available. Then on Saturday, September 26, at 7 p.m., Ellroy will make his only D.C.-area appearance at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland — the closing night headliner of the 2009 Fall for the Book Festival. (I’ll be there; shouldn’t you too?) In the meantime, I’m glad to preview that more formal interview and that upcoming reading with a quick conversation that Ellroy and I had earlier this summer, offering insights both into the book and into the man behind it.

Art Taylor: Blood’s a Rover marks a magnificent end to the Underworld USA trilogy, a crowning achievement for sure. Had you seen these books as a trilogy from the very beginning?

James Ellroy

James Ellroy: I knew the second novel would be my big novel of the 1960s. The history was easy to foresee: the civil rights movement, the ultimate assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, more Cuban exile shit, more mob shit, Howard Hughes buying up Las Vegas, general civil rights unrest, the Klan, and my two survivors from American Tabloid, Ward Littell and Pete Bondurant, getting further into the shit. It took longer to put Blood’s A Rover together, because going from ‘68 to ‘72, you’re going to have the summer of the political conventions and the ‘68 election and all that hoo-ha, but my mob guys had to get to a cool locale, and it took me a while to come up with the Dominican Republic and Haiti. It’s full of voodoo, which is cool shit and certainly intensifies all the black militant shit in L.A.

Margaret Maron Talks About “Sand Sharks”

After tackling immigration issues in Hard Row and the crisis of rampant residential and commercial overdevelopment in Death’s Half Acre, Margaret Maron’s latest Deborah Knott mystery, Sand Sharks, finds series heroine Judge Deborah Knott taking a vacation of sorts to a summer judge’s conference down in Wrightsville Beach — and Maron herself seemingly taking a break from some of her exploration of North Carolina’s most pressing social and political issues. But when Deborah discovers the corpse of a fellow judge, her beach trip takes a dark turn. As potential motives for the murder emerge — with a wide range of suspects among the other judges attending the meeting — so too does another pattern take shape: an examination of ethics both personal and judicial and of the costs for letting those ethics lapse.

Sand Sharks has already enjoyed a wave of strong reviews: from the Winston-Salem Journal, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and even the New York Times. Over Labor Day weekend, I’ve finally had a chance to read the novel myself, and not only did reading the book offer a quick holiday beach trip but it turns out that a character with my name shows up as a witness in the novel, so I was “there” in more ways than one. (Check out page 221 for my cameo appearance.)

As Maron prepared for a quick vacation of her own, she indulged me with a quick email interview about Sand Sharks, which I’m happy to share here.

Art Taylor: I enjoyed the novel’s set-up — reminding me in many ways of some classic Agatha Christies: A vacation destination, a group of characters who each have a motive for the killing the victim, all of them together in one place when the killing happens, opportunities and motives abounding.… You even include scenes of investigators charting who sat where at the restaurant where the murder occurs, and who left when, and who saw who last. How consciously were you exploring that classic form?

Margaret Maron: I’m very conscious of writing a traditional fair-play mystery, which means that I have to show the reader everything Deborah sees. I was not consciously trying to echo Christie, but have always resisted trying to plumb the depths of my subconscious, so it’s quite possible.  Playing fair with the reader is harder than keeping things up my sleeve, but I can always misdirect the reader by showing them more than is actually relevant.

NC Literary Review: New Issue, New Look

The North Carolina Literary Review has just announced the publication of its 2009 issue, boasting a focus on N.C. drama and a smart new design! 

As always, NCLR offers a combination of scholarly criticism and creative works. For example, this issue includes both a recently discovered interview with Paul Green and the text of White Dresses, one of Green’s plays; and  the balance of the drama section includes both critical perspectives on works by Tennessee Williams (whose Clothes for a Summer Hotel was set in Asheville), Elizabeth Spencer, and Jim Grimsley, and insider views on the state’s history of “musician’s theater” by none other than Bland Simpson himself, and original plays by June Guralnick, Richard Krawiec, Kat Meads, and Sam Post. 

Beyond that focus on drama, the new issue also covers the full range of genres: an interview with Betty Adcock, a review of one of her poetry collections, and a sample of her own poetry; a short story by Malcolm Campbell, winner of last year’s Doris Betts Prize in short fiction; an interview with first-time novelist William Conescu (also interviewed by me in Metro Magazine), and much more. I’m proud to have an essay of my own included here as well, discussing mystery novelist John Hart’s three books, The King of Lies, Down River, and The Last Child.

In all, a great issue, even without my bias in being included in its contents! I can’t wait to work my way through it, and glad to encourage it here.

N.C. Events: Margaret Maron’s Sand Sharks & Pamela Pease’s Pop-Up Tour de Frances

Topping the list of this weekend’s literary events is an annual favorite: the debut of Margaret Maron’s latest Deborah Knott novel. The new book, Sand Sharks, takes Judge Knott down to Wrightsville Beach — and wouldn’t we all like to be there right now?! But it can’t all be sun and fun, of course. Soon our intrepid heroine stumbles upon a murder, and quickly Wrightsville Beach and Wilmington seem much more dangerous places for a vacationing judge with an inquisitive mind. A recent email exchange with Maron found her hard at work on her next novel, but she agreed to an interview about this latest book, which should be posted at this site soon. In the meantime, don’t miss the Sand Sharks launch party on Friday, August 14, at 7:30 p.m. at Raleigh’s Quail Ridge Books. (Please note that this is one of Quail Ridge’s signing line events; get your ticket with purchase of the new book. And if you can’t make it, Maron has more area readings planned soon; check out the MetroBooks Calendar to the right for more information.) 

While we’re on the subject of Wilmington-Wrightsville Beach mysteries, I just got off the phone with Wanda Canada, author of the delightful Carroll Davenport mystery series, including Island Murders and Cape Fear Murders. That interview is slated to appear in the North Carolina Literary Review next year, but I did want to take a moment now to recommend those books as well to anyone looking for a little beach reading — in any sense of that phrase (a book for the beach, a book about the beach, etc.). 

Back to the schedule of weekend readings, another fun author also has an event this Friday: Pop-up artist Pamela Pease will unveil her latest creation, Pop-Up Tour de France: The World’s Greatest Bike Race, at the Cary Barnes & Noble on Friday at 7 p.m. For an behind-the-scenes look at how she crafts these books, check out my interview with Pease here about her previous books, The Garden is Open, Macy’s On Parade, and Derby Day.

Sorry to be off of my interview schedule lately, but plenty coming up, including the Maron interview above, and talks with Fred Chappell, Marianne Gingher, and Jessica Anthony. Stay tuned!

Mysteries Upon Mysteries

In my classes on crime fiction, I’ve sometimes likened literary analysis and criticism to a kind of detection: We read the text for clues, we interpret them and build connections between them, we reveal something new. Fellow critic Sarah Weinman did some real literary sleuthing over the weekend when she unearthed the secret behind Hard Case Crime’s surprise December title. Her account of that adventure is a pleasure in its own right, and Hard Case Crime’s treatment of the classic novel may have many readers looking at it in a new light. As tempted as I am to reveal the name myself, I’ll leave that honor to the woman who discovered it. Check out Weinman’s story here, and Hard Case Crime’s take here.

As for me, I’m deep in figuring out the mystery of the syllabus, arranging the texts for my class in hard-boiled crime fiction at Mason this fall. Already ordered and just needing to be slotted into reading blocks are:

• Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest
• James Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere (in honor of his visit to Fall for the Book)
• Dorothy B. Hughes’ In A Lonely Place
• Ross MacDonald’s The Underground Man
• Sue Grafton’s A Is For Alibi
• Chester Himes’ Cotton Comes To Harlem, and
• George Pelecanos’ Hard Revolution.

“Where’s Chandler?” you might ask. Well, that’s another piece of the puzzle here. Fourteen weeks and seven books is already enough. What to give up here for Chandler? Or is it OK to skip him this time?