Starred Review

I'm thrilled with Publisher's Weekly starred review of the Mystery Writers Of America Anthology, The Prosecution Rests, especially since my short story, Knife Fight, was one of several singled out for praise. Here's the review:

The Prosecution Rests: New Stories About Courtrooms, Criminals, and the Law Edited by Linda Fairstein. Little, Brown, $24.99 (416p) ISBN 978-0-316-01252-2; Back Bay, $15.99 paper ISBN 978-0-316-01267-6

Bestseller Fairstein (Killer Heat) has put together a stellar anthology, presented by the Mystery Writers of America, that will appeal both to contemporary noir fans and devotees of Law & Order. The late Edward Hoch starts things off nicely with “The Secret Session,” a concise whodunit centering on judicial corruption at the appellate level. In Barbara Parker’s deliciously creepy “A Clerk’s Life,” a put-upon law clerk for a major Florida firm stumbles on two murders. Joel Goldman highlights the ethical challenges of criminal defense work in “Knife Fight,” as does Eileen Dunbaugh in “The Letter.” By way of counterpoint, Michele Martinez’s “The Mother” and Morley Swingle’s “Hard Blows” dramatize the challenges prosecutors encounter, even when the defendants they charge are, in fact, guilty. The consistently high quality of the 22 selections will lead many to hope the MWA will sponsor more volumes in this vein. (Apr.)

Order it on Amazon.

Creative Genius

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, gave a talk earlier this month about creative genius, what it is, where it comes from and what it means for each of us. Whether you're a writer or a reader, this is a must listen. Check it out.

Private Investigator Blogs

I ran across an interesting blog called E-Justice Blog which lists what the blogger considers the top 50 PI Blogs. They are written by active and retired cops, private detectives, news organizations, British cops and detectives and crime fiction writers. One of the blogs even calls itself Crime Scene, if you can believe it. Don't let that confuse you. My blog brings you the real Crime Scene. In the weeks ahead, I'll let you know what I think about these blogs and I hope you'll check them out and let me know what you think.

Murder Factory

Kansas City is a great place to live, full of complex cross-currents that sustain and challenge those who live here. Our newspaper, the Kansas City Star, recently ran a three-part series called Murder Factory dissecting the most deadly zip code in town. Check it out and you'll understand why I can't resist setting my books here.

The Jack Davis Back Story

I explore life through the stories I write, starting each book with the same question in mind. What happens when things go wrong, especially when no one is looking? Character and characters are measured by the answer to that question. Crime fiction poses that question when the stakes are the highest, when the answer determines not only who lives and dies but how well we do both.

Flawed characters make the most interesting subjects because authors and readers can identify with them, recognizing our own shortcomings and wondering what we would do in their place without having to bear any of the consequences. Creating Jack Davis allowed me to take this process one step further and learn more about myself as I asked what happens when the same thing goes wrong in my life and my protagonist’s life.

I practiced law for twenty-eight years, trying lawsuits all across the United States. In March 2004, I was in trial in San Francisco. I awoke one morning and, while shaving, began to shake uncontrollably. As Perry Mason and Denny Crain proved, you can get away with a lot in the courtroom but uncontrollable shaking is not one of them.

It took over a year and a half and examinations by doctors in New York, New Orleans and Phoenix to get a definitive diagnosis of my condition. I have tics, a neurological disorder with no known cause or cure and a name so totally unimpressive that no self-respecting telethon would ask it out on a date. It occurs so rarely in mid-life adults, that little is known about it. Its closest living neurological relative is Tourette’s syndrome.

Tics is very idiosyncratic, meaning that there is no set pattern or typical course. The more I do, the more I shake, spasm and stutter. My symptoms vary over time, familiar shaking patterns fading into the background, replaced by spasms that hyperextend my neck, arch my back and twist my torso in ways that makes Cirque du Soleil jealous. Tics is not life threatening or life shortening but it is life annoying and it forced me to give up my law practice.

Fortunately, I already had a second life – crime writer. My first series, four books featuring trial lawyer Lou Mason, allowed me to channel the legal career I’d only imagined. Tics gave me the chance to explore the life I’d won in the be-careful-what-you-ask-for sweepstakes.

Jack Davis is, like me, a man in his fifties. In the first book of the series, Shakedown, his life shakes apart. Forced to give up his career as an FBI Special Agent, he comes to grips with his new normal life. In the second book, The Dead Man, to be published in April 2009, he struggles to find purpose in a life that is forever throwing him off balance. Stick with Jack to find out how he makes it work and stick with my blog to find out how I make it work for him and for me.

Crime Scene

The crime scene is more than the chalk outline marking where the victim falls. It's the world surrounding that pale silhouette, spreading out in uneven ripples from the perimeter cordoned off with yellow tape to the metes and bounds of the jurisdiction that investigates and prosecutes the offense to the ill-defined society that wittingly or not harbors a killer in its midst.

The place where these overlapping scenes congeal and conspire is as alive and organic as any flesh and blood character. It makes and breaks promises, rewards strength and punishes weakness. It fills hearts with hope and drains them without a backward glance. Done right, place becomes a central character, casting heroes and villains against a geographic backdrop, driving the action as surely as any twitchy trigger finger.

Los Angeles has been immortalized as a place character by authors from Raymond Chandler to Michael Connelly. Dennis Lehane created domineering characters in the Points and the Flats of Boston while Elmore Leonard gave Detroit a singular pulse. George Pelecanos made real Washington, D.C.'s struggle to provide justice for all. New York's literary parents are legion and legendary. Fictional places are no less powerful characters as Scott Turow and Nancy Pickard proved with their creations of Kindle County and Small Plains, KS. Click here for a 4-part NPR series, Crime In The City. Read or listen as four of the best mystery authors writing today talk about the cities that are characters in their novels.

My books take place in my hometown of Kansas City where my family has lived for nearly one hundred years. One of my great-grandfathers left Poland in 1881 for the New World under cover of darkness rather than marry the girl his parents had chosen for him, settling in Kansas City for reasons lost to time. Another great-grandfather, also from Eastern Europe, ran a grocery store in Alaska during the gold rush, later deciding to move to Kansas City because it was in the center of the country. My grandfather and a friend, down on their luck during the Depression, asked Kansas City's boss, Tom Pendergast, for permission to sell the scrap from the construction of Bagnel Dam at the Lake of the Ozarks, giving birth to a salvage business that lasted more than forty years.

Originally nothing more than a trading post at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas rivers, in 1838 the founders decided against naming it Possum Trot, settling for the more visionary Town of Kansas, later incorporating it as Kansas City in 1850. Once a wide-open town known for speakeasies, jazz and corrupt machine politics, everything has always been up to date in Kansas City. Mindful of its wooly past, Kansas City has a hard edge and soft heart.

Today, Kansas City is home to more than two million people spread over 380 square miles, though less than a fourth of them live inside the legal boundaries of Kansas City, MO. The metropolitan area covers territory straddling the Missouri-Kansas state line, from the airport north of the Missouri River, to the NASCAR track across the state line in western Wyandotte County, Kansas, to the Truman Sports Complex in eastern Jackson County, Missouri. There are better than forty municipalities spread over five counties and two states, enough for everyone to claim a fiefdom yet many will tell a stranger that they live in Kansas City rather than Raytown, Prairie Village, Independence or Overland Park. The southern reaches aren't identified with an iconic landmark. In Johnson County on the Kansas side, they are defined by large, new and expensive rooftops sheltering more per capita disposable income than all but a handful of the country's zip codes, extending beyond the eye's reach much as prairie grasses must have in another time. The rooftops on the Missouri side are smaller, older and modest, covering the working middle class. Despite its reach, you can drive from one edge of the metropolitan area to the other in forty-five minutes, sixty in traffic.

For more about Kansas City, click here and take a photographic tour here. Much of Shakedown takes place in Kansas City, KS. Learn more about it at wikipedia.org.