Ed Gorman Day

Today, November 2, would have been genre novelist and editor Ed Gorman’s 75th birthday. Unfortunately, he didn’t quite make it long enough to blow out candles and lick cake frosting: he passed away this last October 14, having finally lost his long battle with multiple myeloma. Shortly after hearing of his death, I posted a fairly long tribute to his decades of labor as an author and to the support he’d given me as a blogger.

I hadn’t anticipated writing more about Gorman in the short term. But when author Patricia Abbott put out the call for as many bloggers as possible to applaud that late Iowa writer’s work today, I began racking my brains, determined to come up with some new angle to mine, some further way to enshrine his place in crime-fiction history. I thought about reading (or re-reading) and commenting on one of his numerous novels, but realized I didn’t have free hours enough right now to tackle such a project. I thought about profiling one of his series characters—private eye Jack Dwyer, perhaps, or 1950s small-town attorney Sam McCain—but again, time constraints inhibited my ambitions. So instead, I did what I do so often these days: I began with a Web search, keying up every article I could find about Edward Joseph Gorman Jr., hoping that somewhere amid all of those electronic bytes, I’d come up with a brilliant idea of how to proceed.

Instead, I found myself pleasantly immersed in long stories and briefer anecdotes about his life and literary career. I read Jon L. Breen’s piece (pdf) about Gorman’s role in founding Mystery Scene magazine back in 1985. I was delighted by this profile (pdf) of the author from that same periodical, published in 2002. I revisited Cullen Gallagher’s reviews of Gorman’s books starring a lawman-turned-bounty hunter named Leo Guild, and leaped beyond that to this article from Criminal Element, in which David Cranmer critiques a re-released Gorman Western called Relentless. Then I discovered this piece, from Blogcritics, about the McCain books—featuring the author’s particularly wonderful explanation of why he decided to set those mystery yarns during the Eisenhower era. The original quote comes from Gorman’s blog:

Part of the reason I started writing the Sam McCain novels was because I was sick of hearing about how wonderful the decade of the Fifties was. You know, Ozzie & Harriet and Father Knows Best. Most egregious, to me, was Happy Days. By then even the Republicans knew better. If you were white, Christian, middle-class, straight and white collar, the decade was probably more decent to you than not. But given the racism, sexism, Communist witch hunts, union-busting and large pockets of poverty, not even Ozzie’s dopey smile could make the excluded Happy.

From there, I went on to listen to this podcast by author Dean Koontz, in which he recounts his first meeting with Gorman (a sometime literary collaborator) and “describes why it was both an unusual and wonderful visit.” Then I re-read this fine Mystery*File interview Gorman had (lucky guy) with John D. MacDonald, creator of both the Travis McGee yarns and a number of non-series works that Gorman actually preferred. Beyond that, I found and enjoyed this essay, by Tipping the Fedora blogger Sergio Angelini, in which he enthuses over Gorman’s 1993 thriller, Shadow Games. Finally, I revisited Gorman’s “What Ed Read” columns, which he composed for Bookgasm (with varying regularity) between 2006 and 2009—and in which he both mused on his own experiences in the crime and horror genres, and applauded the efforts of younger wordsmiths toiling in those same fields. (Ed always was a generous guy.)

Somewhere in the course of all this Internet surfing and links accumulating, I realized that I didn’t have to produce another protracted encomium to Ed Gorman. What I was doing—reading as much as I could find about this author and his years of word production—was exactly what I should recommend other people interested in his prose undertake. Writers offer themselves to the world through their art, but they protect themselves in the very same manner, showing us only what they want folks to know. We frequently learn more about authors by digesting what others have to say of their life and their work, than they confess themselves. The tributes Patti Abbott has gathered together today, plus previous pieces by and about Gorman on the Web, provide windows into his tastes and ambitions and quirks that help illuminate him as a writer, and also as a human being. Actually reading his novels or short-story collections will, I guarantee, be a rewarding way to complete the picture.

READ MORE: “Interview: Ed Gorman (from 2007, Annotated and Updated),” by Ben Boulden (Gravetapping).

A Happy Homebody

I took up the sad task on Sunday of eulogizing genre novelist Ed Gorman, who passed away last Friday at age 74. Today, it was Max Allan Collins’ turn. Writing in his blog, Collins (Better Dead) delivered remembrances of his years-long association with his fellow Iowa author that are both humorous and endearing. I am particularly fond on this section in which he remarks on Gorman’s phobias:

It took me a while to learn that Ed rarely traveled, and that he was in fact something of a hermit. Because we both lived in Iowa, and had writing styles that were not dissimilar, I for a time had the honor of being accused of using “Ed Gorman” as a pseudonym. What a writer that would make me.

“Is it true,” people would ask me, “that you’ve actually met Ed Gorman?” I actually had.

The thing is, being around people made Ed nervous. This still strikes me as strange because he made his pre-writing-career living as an ad man, PR guy and also writer of political speeches (politics being a lifelong interest, even obsession).

Stranger still is how charming and effortlessly social he was on the telephone. Scores of writers are bound to now come forward and say how well they knew him, but admit that they never met him. …

Once, responding to my efforts to get him to a Bouchercon, Ed told me didn’t like driving long distances because he’d once been in a car crash. I asked him why he didn’t fly there. He said he’d also been in a plane crash. I asked him why he didn’t take a train. He said he’d been in a train crash. Asking him why he always took the stairs in tall buildings, he said he’d once been in an elevator when it fell. There’s also a story about an escalator, but you get the drift.

Was he kidding me? I’m not sure. Really I don’t think so. He was a self-described bundle of neuroses, yet as grounded a writer as I’ve ever known. He worked hard and well and fast, and never compromised his craft and art. Now and then he would rail on about some writer whose work he disliked, but never in public, and no one had more generous, enthusiastic things to say about other writers and their work than Ed.

You can, and should, read the whole piece here.

FOLLOW-UP I: Gorman’s hometown newspaper, Iowa’s Cedar Rapids Gazette, has posted its own obituary. It acknowledges Gorman’s “literary success as a mystery and crime novelist and short story writer,” but the most memorable part might be its conclusion, which portrays this author as “an engaging and outspoken figure.”

“We were married for 34 years, and he was still one of the most interesting people I know,” [his wife] Carol Gorman said. “He was very funny, he had quirky tastes and made everyone laugh. Even the people at the oncology department, he loved them all and they loved him.”

[Iowa City author and book reviewer Rob] Cline, who worked at a Cedar Rapids used bookstore years ago, first met Gorman as a frequent customer there—buying new authors, selling his old books and wanting to chat about what he was reading.

“As much as I loved his writing, what I’ll always remember is how much I liked him,” Cline said.

FOLLOW-UP II: Gravetapping blogger Ben Boulden, who knew Gorman both as a colleague and a friend, writes this about the late author:

Ed Gorman was a great writer. It is true he was a great mystery writer. A great western writer. A great suspense, both dark and straight, writer. He was all that, but he was, simply, a great writer. He could write anything and he frequently escaped the genre where he wrote and created something very much like literature. His stories always said something about the human condition, the world we live in. His characters, always vivid, were three dimensional. He never wrote a wholly good hero, or a completely stained villain. He wrote about us—our experience in the world—in stories that were larger than life with players so real we can very nearly see them in our bathroom mirrors.

READ MORE: “R.I.P., Ed Gorman,” by Mike Stotter (Shotsmag Confidential); “We’ve Lost Ed Gorman, a Great Friend to Writers,”
by Lee Goldberg.

“He Leaves Behind a Great Literary Legacy”

There seems to be a discernible change, a shift, a reorientation of the world today, the day I learn that Ed Gorman—the prolific author of mysteries, horror novels, and Western fiction—has passed away, his long fight with an incurable cancer, multiple myeloma, finally over. Actually, according to his Wikipedia page, Gorman died this last Friday, October 14, at age 74, but most of us just heard the news today. “I am heartbroken,” one author who knew him wrote this morning on Facebook. “This is miserable news,” another remarked on the same site. “Ed Gorman was a national treasure.” While a third added that “Ed had a huge heart, genuine humility, and an immense talent.”

(Left) Ed Gorman with his wife, Carol.

Edward Joseph Gorman Jr.’s résumé is both extensive and downright impressive. He started his career scratching out advertising copy, later labored in public relations and penned political speeches. But in his mid-40s, he witnessed the publication of the first of what would eventually be his many novels, a book called Rough Cut, which introduced a Midwestern private eye named Jack Dwyer. He went on to release five more Dwyer books, as well as series featuring Sam McCain (Riders on the Storm), a small-town investigating attorney in 1950s Iowa, and political consultant-troubleshooter Dev Conrad (Elimination). Gorman always considered himself a genre writer, but he didn’t stick to one genre, instead concocting Westerns (some of which featured “aging bounty hunter” Leo Guild), and other fiction in the fields of horror, science fiction, and fantasy.

Author James Reasoner observes, “Ed was one of those guys who could write just about anything. His mystery novels and standalone thrillers were all top-notch. He could do excellent ‘house-name’ books, although he preferred working on his own stuff, and who can blame him for that. But for my money, his best novels are his Westerns. Intricately plotted, tinged with melancholy, full of painfully sharp observations about the human condition. … We might as well just go ahead and say that Ed Gorman was the best author of Western noir of all time.”

With fellow writer Martin H. Greenberg, Gorman edited a variety of short-story anthologies, including several dedicated to “cat crimes,” and during the opening decade of the 21st century he assembled collections of what were deemed The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories. Together with author Robert J. Randisi, Gorman created Mystery Scene magazine in 1985, and for many years contributed a regular “Gormania” column to that periodical. From 2008 to 2009 he served as president of the Private Eye Writers of America. Along the way he received the Shamus Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Spur Award, and The Eye, the PWA’s lifetime achievement award.

I can’t say for sure whether it’s a complete account of his literary production (Gorman himself wasn’t sure how many novels he’d penned—somewhere between 70 and 100), but the online resource Stop, You’re Killing Me! offers this listing of his book credits. The Thrilling Detective Web Site’s record of his work features Gorman’s numerous short stories. Meanwhile, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) says three of his yarns were adapted to film.

Like so many of the people eulogizing Gorman today, I never had the chance to meet that author, editor, anthologist, and supporter of so many other hopeful wordsmiths. My association with him came primarily through The Rap Sheet, which he was kind enough to applaud both in print and in private e-mail messages to me. In the pages of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine he said ofthis blog: “Part pure journalism, part critique, and part just plain fun, The Rap Sheet is a tribute to the intelligence and wit of a single person. Pierce gives opinionating a good name.” He was equally supportive of my paperback-art site, Killer Covers, writing at one point: “I want to thank you sincerely for all your eminently readable and fascinating scholarship visited on both forgotten writers and cover artists. Honest to God, Jeff, when you finally put this material in a book it will become a staple for generations to come. I ain’t just woofin’, either.”

It always felt good to have such an authority on the crime-fiction genre looking over my shoulder, even when I wasn’t always aware of it, gently encouraging my explorations of the field and its numerous contributors. Sometimes his praise made me laugh, as when he commented on the abundance of my blog posts: “I honestly don’t know how you do it unless you’re secretly Larry Block’s character who never sleeps.” Other times he was capable of raising a blush upon my cheeks, as when—in response to a piece I composed about Los Angeles critic Tom Nolan and his work on last year’s compilation of Ross Macdonald’s early novels—he commented: “This is [a] major piece on Ross Macdonald with the man who wrote the definitive book on his life and his work. I hope this appears in the front of your someday Collected Pieces, which will certainly win the Edgar.”



Gorman’s generosity extended beyond the occasional thumbs-up, however. In 2009, he kindly promoted my modest contributions to the reading public’s understanding of crime fiction by interviewing me for his “Gormania” column. In 2013, I tried to return the favor by interviewing him at considerably greater length, part of our exchange appearing in my Kirkus Reviews column, the remainder finding a home in The Rap Sheet. Not long after that, I e-mailed him, asking which of his many novels he thought were the best. About a week later, a package arrived on my doorstep, filled with Ed Gorman books, all personally inscribed, among them a hardcover copy of The Autumn Dead (1987), and paperback editions of Blood Moon (1994), The Midnight Room (2009), and Death Ground (1988, which he described as being “my favorite of my Westerns”).

Among today’s landslide of online tributes to Gorman, I most like Bill Crider’s obit, which reads like the work of an unabashed fan.

He leaves behind a great literary legacy. I hardly know which titles to recommend to you. Just about anything has sharp writing, empathetic characters, and a deep compassion for flawed people. Sometimes, as in the western werewolf novel, Wolf Moon, he pulls off something you’d think nobody could. His series of Sam McCain mysteries is a wonderful portrayal of an era of the recent American past. If you’ve never read one of his books [before] this week, honor his memory by giving one a try. Just about anything you pick up will reward you.

So this is the first weekend in a changed world, the first weekend A.E. (After Ed), the first weekend I live with his gentle, encouraging voice silenced. Despite the fact that I have myriad newer novels to read and review, I have just cracked open my copy of The Autumn Dead. Reading it again seems like a small way of paying Gorman back for all he’s done for crime fiction, and for me. But, humble man that he was, I know he would enjoy the gesture.

READ MORE: “Ed Gorman, 1941-2016,” by Todd Mason (Sweet Freedom); “Ed Gorman Passes,” by Jon Jordan (Crimespree Magazine); “R.I.P., Ed Gorman,” by Sandra Seamans (My Little Corner); “Ed Gorman,” by Patricia Abbott (Pattinase); “R.I.P., Ed Gorman,” by Jake Hinkson (The Night Editor); “A Giant in the Field Has Left Us: Ed Gorman (1941-2016),” by Steve Lewis (Mystery*File); “Riders on the Storm: Ed Gorman’s Sam McCain Novels,” by Tom Nolan (Mystery Scene); “Prolific Ed Gorman Continues Writing While Battling Cancer,” by Dale Jones (The Gazette).

Pierce’s Picks: “Riders on the Storm”

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

Riders on the Storm, by Ed Gorman (Pegasus)

The Gist: It’s 1971, and Iowa attorney/private investigator Sam McCain (last seen in 2011’s Bad Moon Rising--which was supposed to have been his final outing, but wasn’t) “is back home after a boot camp injury prematurely ends his military career as a [Vietnam War] draftee,” explains The Gazette, Gorman’s hometown newspaper in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “But the consequences of war have reached everywhere, including Black River Falls, where emotions run high on both side of the issue. One of McCain’s friends [Will Cullen] joins a group of veterans against the war [led by future Secretary of State John Kerry] and is brutally beaten by another veteran because of it. When the one who delivered the beating”--a newly minted Congressional candidate, Steve Donovan--“turns up dead, his victim is the obvious suspect. McCain doesn’t agree and begins a quest for the truth.” As Kirkus Reviews relates, “His suspicions fall on Lon Anders, Donovan’s rapacious new business partner, and on Valerie Donovan, a widow who’s one piece of work. As usual, there are plenty of other guilty secrets to discover. The final revelation, however, will take most readers by surprise, even if some of them are still scratching their heads after the curtain comes down.”

What Else You Should Know: “Ed Gorman manages to wind every messy and unruly concern that plagued America in 1971 into one taut story,” writes Terrie Farley Moran in Criminal Element. Publishers Weekly opines, “Gorman skillfully depicts Vietnam veterans’ complex, often contradictory feelings toward the war--from rabid patriotism to rage toward the government--but is less subtle in the way he presents his female characters, who are all mysterious, arousing, and wear clothes that ‘love’ their bodies (e.g., ‘A gray skirt that loved every inch of her lower body as the turquoise blouse loved the upper’).” Fellow author Bill Crider is rather more generous on the matter of Gorman’s cast descriptions: “As usual in Gorman’s books, the characters are a lot more complex than they first appear. As soon as you think you know them, you find out that you don’t. People are never simple black-or-white creations. They’re complex mixtures who will leave you thinking about them when you lay the book aside. Also as usual, the writing is clear and clean and sharp with astute observations about the times, the politics of the era, and human nature. It’s enough to make you envious if you’re a writer and prone to that sort of thing. Not that I am, of course.”

Bullet Points: Typewriter Nostalgia Edition

Sorry for the less-than-consistent postings this week, but I have learned that my day-job is going to end in a couple of months. As a consequence, I’m having to figure out how to replace that work with something else. If you know of an opening for a high-quality editor--one that doesn’t require my relocating from Seattle--please let me know. Now on to another collection of crime-fiction news items that don’t necessarily justify separate posts:

• Although she tried to hide behind a pseudonym, at least initially, British author J.K. Rowling seems now to have embraced her role as a crime novelist. Following up on The Cuckoo’s Calling, which she published last year as “Robert Galbraith,” Rowling has happily announced the coming of a sequel, Silkworm, in June of this year. “According to the novel’s publisher, Little, Brown, Silkworm will find [series sleuth Cormoran] Strike hired to investigate the disappearance of writer Owen Quine,” reports The Christian Science Monitor. “His wife, who hires Strike, believes Owen has simply left for a few days and wants Strike to locate him, but the detective soon discovers that Quine’s whereabouts aren’t quite so easily solved and that the writer recently finished a book that contains thinly veiled and nasty versions of just about all his acquaintances.”

• February is Black History Month in the United States, and author John F. Allen is celebrating with a look back at the life and work of African-American crime writer Chester Himes (Cotton Comes to Harlem, A Rage in Harlem, etc.)

• A posthumous honor for Rex Stout: The New York Center for the Book has selected the renowned creator of detective characters Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin for induction into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame (even though he was actually born in Indiana in 1886). The ceremony--which will also honor half a dozen other inductees--is scheduled to take place on Tuesday evening, June 3, 2014, at the Princeton Club on 43rd Street in Manhattan. “For cost and further details regarding the dinner,” advises a news release, “check the Wolfe Pack Web site, www.nerowolfe.org, or send an e-mail to the Wolfe Pack ‘Werowance’ (‘Indian Chief,’ as Archie addressed Mr. Wolfe in Too Many Cooks), Ira Brad Matetsky, at Werowance@nerowolfe.org.”

• Who remembers this 1970-1971 TV crime drama?



• If you’re planning to attend the 2014 Left Coast Crime convention, to be held in Monterey, California, from March 20 to 23, be sure to check out this tentative program schedule and this “nearly final panel schedule.” I wish I could attend.

• Thank goodness for The Gumshoe Site and its longtime writer, Jiro Kimura, who always seems to catch the deaths of prominent people when I miss noticing them for one reason or another. Kimura recently mentioned the passing of Eric Bercovici, who was

the writer-producer of TV movies and miniseries and co-won an Emmy for the NBC epic Shogun with author James Clavell. He penned TV scripts for I, Spy, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Mission: Impossible, [and] Hawaii Five-O, among others.” He also wrote three crime novels: Wolftrap (Antheneum, 1979); So Little Cause for Caroline (Antheneum, 1981); and Tread Lightly, My Dear (Birch Lane, 1990). So Little Cause, a private eye novel set in California, was turned into the 1982 TV movie One Shoe Makes It Murder, starring Robert Mitchum. Its TV script writer, Felix Culver, was nominated for the 1983 Edgar in the TV feature category.

You can watch a clip from One Shoe Makes It Murder here. Bercovici was 80 years old and died at his home in Honolulu, Hawaii.

• For The Philadelphia Inquirer, Peter Rozovsky talks with Julie M. Rivett, Dashiell Hammett’s granddaughter and the co-editor (with Richard Layman) of The Hunter and Other Stories, “a new volume of previously uncollected and/or unpublished writing” by Hammett.

• This is International Typewriter Appreciation Month!

• Shotmag Confidential reports that “AM Heath, in association with The Writers’ Workshop” has announced the creation of “Criminal Lines 2014, a new crime-writing prize open to unagented, debut authors, born or resident in the UK and Ireland.”

• From The New York Times: “Harper Lee, the author of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ is settling a lawsuit filed last year against a museum in her Alabama hometown claiming that it had sold merchandise featuring her name and the title of her novel without compensation.” You can read more about that settlement here.

• If only I had $20,000 to $30,000 to spare …

• With the first season of HBO-TV’s dramatic new series, True Detective, set to conclude its U.S. run on March 9, it might be a good idea to check out BuzzFeed’s list of “dark, weird, and southern gothic books,” prepared especially for fans of the show. Even if True Detective is renewed for another season (and my guess is, it will be), there’s still going to be a whole lot of time in between for viewers to get better acquainted with the mythology and philosophy behind the series. These books might help you fill the hours.

• It seems there’s a great deal being written about True Detective lately. The always-captivating Michelle Monaghan talks with The Playlist about her role as Maggie Hart, the wife of Woody Harrelson’s Detective Martin “Marty” Hart. In The New Republic, Isaac Chotiner says the series’ detractors are just plain wrong. And Chris Philpott, TV critic for The New Zealand Herald, writes that “if you’re not watching True Detective yet, you should be.”

• Or is NBC’s Hannibal really the program to watch? Matt Zoller Seitz tells the readers of New York magazine that it’s “the best drama you’ll find on network TV.” He elaborates:

Drawn from the fiction of Thomas Harris, this brooding drama from Bryan Fuller (Pushing Daisies) seemed a bad idea on paper--especially if, like me, you found the Howard Roark-like Hannibal the Cannibal more tiresome with each book and movie sequel and the Diabolical Serial Killer genre intellectually and aesthetically bankrupt, with a few exceptions. But in practice, this program is serenely unlike anything else on TV or anything that ever has been on TV. Although it’s intricately plotted and packed with strong actors playing psychologically complex human beings--including Caroline Dhavernas as psychiatry professor Alana Bloom, who adores and wants to save Will, and Laurence Fishburne as Jack Crawford, the FBI’s agent-in-charge of the Behavioral Science Unit--it goes against the grain of so much so-called quality TV, in that it is not interested in being a mere script-delivery device.

• I mostly disagree with Flavorwire’s new rundown of novels that we should stop calling “classics.” But I think it’s worth checking out, nonetheless--if only to marvel at how dismissive some critics can be of writing superior than their own.

• Ed Gorman champions “old” fiction writers--and does it well.

• Damn! I wish I’d thought of this first: For everybody who’s been tuning in so hungrily to watch televised events from the Winter Olympics in Sochi, the Open Road Media blog highlights four “tales of historical intrigue [and] high-stakes espionage” set in Russia--in addition to a collection of Cold War zombie stories.

• Congratulations to our good friend Mike Ripley, who writes the “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots. As blogger Ayo Onatade notes, “A new Telos Crime edition of his 1989 novel Angel Touch has been published this week [in the UK] to mark the 25th anniversary of the title winning the first-ever Last Laugh Award, created by the Crime Writers’ Association to celebrate comedy in crime writing. Nowadays sponsored by Goldsboro Books and presented during the annual CrimeFest convention, winners of the Last Laugh have included Carl Hiaasen, Janet Evanovich, Christopher Fowler and Ruth Dudley Edwards.” You can order Angel Touch here.

• I haven’t given much thought to Richard Hoyt’s Trotsky’s Run in many years. However, I just happened upon Ben Boulden’s new review of that 1982 novel in Gravetapping. “Trotsky’s Run is as smooth an espionage novel as you will read,” Boulden says. “The prose is sparse and economical. It is long on narrative and short on dialogue. The plot is crisp, complicated, and at times outlandish--although not in bad way, but rather in a mildly satirical manner that feeds off extreme cold war paranoia.” I remember the novel fondly myself.

• Are books that receive awards more likely to be reviewed negatively online than other works? The question is addressed here and here.

• You haven’t forgotten about Matt Houston, have you?

• Louise Doughty, the author of Apple Tree Yard and other novels, shares with The Guardian a list of her 10 favorite courtroom dramas. Please forgive the fact that this list is offered as one of those gimmicky, time-consuming slide shows.

• Patrick Stewart continues to be cool.

• Finally, it’s a shame that newspapers and so many other publications these days have made the cost-cutting decision to reduce the size of their proofreading staffs--or do away with them altogether. That’s the reason you now see typographical errors plaguing the print media. I’m pleased to learn this woman has stepped up to fix the problem, at least in Florida’s St. Augustine Record, but it’s unfortunate that she has to do it on a volunteer basis. Why must intelligent readers accept poorly copy-edited and proofread material, in order that corporate owners can pocket bigger profits? You can read more thoughts on the importance of copy editing here.

What Ed Said

Turnabout’s fair play, right? Three years ago, novelist, editor, and anthologist Ed Gorman interviewed me for Mystery Scene magazine. (You’ll find that piece here.) Today my Kirkus Reviews column is devoted to a brief inquisition of Gorman.

I’ve wanted to ask this author about his life and career and literary contributions for what seems like a very long time. But I never found the right reason or opportunity to do so until just recently, after I enjoyed reading his new novel, Flashpoint (Severn House)--the fifth and possibly final entry in his series about Dev Conrad, a modern American political consultant and troubleshooter, who debuted in Sleeping Dogs (2008). The now 71-year-old Gorman, an almost lifelong resident of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has been laboring in the trenches of crime fiction (as well as horror fiction and western fiction) ever since the mid-1980s, following his transition from commercial advertising work to full-time writing. During those decades--and occasionally under the pseudonyms Daniel Ransom or E.J. (for Edward Joseph) Gorman--he’s turned out something between 70 and 100 novels, enough that he’s actually lost count. He’s penned novels in series as well myriad briefer tales, and edited numerous anthologies of short stories (several, like By Hook or By Crook, with Martin H. Greenberg). He’s been so prolific over the years, Bookreporter once joked that he “seems to have printer’s ink flowing through his veins ...”

Gorman’s efforts have not gone unrecognized. As I mention in today’s Kirkus column, he has at various times received the Shamus Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Spur Award, and The Eye, the lifetime achievement award given out by the Private Eye Writers of America (PWA). But his influence doesn’t stop there. Together with author Robert J. Randisi, in 1985 he created Mystery Scene magazine, for which he still pens a regular column, “Gormania.” From 2008 to 2009 he served as president of the PWA. And he’s been a frequently enthusiastic supporter (occasionally through his blog) of efforts by other wordsmiths looking to break into the fiction-writing game or win greater recognition for their talents.

“Ed Gorman’s talent as a writer is matched only by his generosity to other writers,” Randisi told me in a recent e-note. “Indeed, he’s a true Renaissance man because he has also been columnist, reviewer, and publisher in this business. But I’ve also been privileged over the years to have Ed as a friend, and perhaps that is where he has been the most invaluable.”

Although Gorman himself leans heavily in the direction of modesty, it’s certainly not uncommon to hear colleagues sing his praises.

“I became an Ed Gorman fan in the mid-’80s after buying one of his Jack Dwyer books, Murder Straight Up [1987], on impulse,” explains author Dick Lochte (Blues in the Night), another PWA ex-president. “Since then I’ve never read a sentence he’s written that I didn’t like, but I’ve a special fondness for his Sam McCain novels which, aside from being cleverly crafted whodunits, are evocations of small-town America on the brink of the 1960s shake-up; [they’re] as sweetly nostalgic and poignant and politically astute as any you can find in fiction. Aside from being a fine writer and a tireless supporter of genre fiction, Ed happens to be a good friend. No matter what’s going on in his life--and a lot usually is--he always seems to find time to offer help when needed. Were it not for his encouragement, my admittedly thin bibliography would be a couple of books and at least half a dozen short stories shy. Bottom line, the man is a true gent.”

(Left) The prolific Ed Gorman

Muscatine, Iowa, novelist Max Allan Collins (Target Lancer), who Gorman acknowledges was instrumental in showing him how to compose fiction at length, says that “One of my proudest achievements is being part of Ed Gorman’s transition from writer of literary short stories to full-fledged mystery novelist. This is not to say he stopped writing short stories or being literary, either--I think he’s probably my generation’s best writer of short crime fiction, meaning not to take away from his fine and distinctive novels. Ed’s work is characterized by melancholy and compassion, and he is among the most human and humane of contemporary crime writers. We’ve been friends for many years and he is generous and thoughtful, to say the least, and I get a kick out of having once been thought to be Ed Gorman. Ed is notoriously reluctant to make public appearances, despite an affability second to none. For the first 10 years of his crime-writing career, people would occasionally assume that that other Iowa writer was me under a pen name. I’m pleased that anybody would think I’m that good.”

Although he’s been slowed down over the last dozen years by an incurable cancer, multiple myeloma, Gorman continues to get up every day and fulfill the demands of his self-inflicted sentence as an author. It’s what he does. It’s what he loves. Earlier this month, I sent him dozens of questions via e-mail, asking him about his personal and professional history, his proclivity toward writing in a variety of genres, his debts to the classic Gold Medal novels, his dislike of rewriting, why he thinks we’re seeing another “golden age” of crime fiction, and ... well, many other subjects. His responses to a few of those fit into today’s Kirkus column; the rest can be found below.

J. Kingston Pierce: Were your parents big readers?

Ed Gorman: My mother and father both came from Irish farming communities and moved to Cedar Rapids when they were young. My mother consumed magazines by the ton and my father was a reader of pulp magazines until the ’50s, when he switched to paperbacks. He especially enjoyed hard-boiled mysteries, westerns, and history.

JKP: And were they the ones who got you interested in reading?

EG: My mother started taking me to the library when I was 4. I was hooked immediately.

JKP: As a boy, what did you want to be when you grew up?

EG: From fifth grade on I wanted to be writer. I never thought about being anything else.

JKP: I understand that you grew up in some fairly rough neighborhoods, and practiced a certain amount of petty thievery and shoplifting in your youth, but that you were eventually scared straight. What’s the story there?

EG: My criminal career, as such, ended because of two experiences. A guy who wanted to get back at a friend of mine convinced his [female] cousin to accuse [my friend] of stealing one of their purses. I happened to be with him the night she came into the Rexall where we were having burgers after pumping gas for six hours. We didn’t know either one of them. We ate and left, and later that night detectives came to our homes and accused us of stealing the purse, which, according to the girl, contained enough money to make it grand larceny. That was followed by two weeks of hell--the line-up, four or five times at the police station, and a lawyer who advised my parents maybe I should plead guilty to avoid reform school, though there was no guarantee I wouldn’t wind up there. Finally the girl, apparently feeling guilty about setting us up, turned herself in.

The other incident concerned a friend of mine who started hanging around this guy who’d just gotten out of prison and come back to the old neighborhood. We all remembered him. He was a punk, violent but a coward. I’d seen him back out of two or three fights he’d started. But he had a big influence on my friend. One night they held up a gas station and killed a poor 16-year-old kid with a shotgun.

During this time I’d been expelled from two high schools. My girlfriend had broken up with me and I’d gone insane. ... I was in pain 24/7. Alcohol helped. Then much later I started in on various drugs. I was a terrible angry drunk.

JKP: But you went on to attend Coe College in Cedar Rapids, right? With what sort of degree did you graduate from there?

EG: I didn’t graduate. The alcohol took its toll. I love Coe and owe it a great deal. Such great professors. I was a bum; my occupation for a long time.

JKP: Like your fellow mystery writers Dorothy L. Sayers and Philip Kerr, you started out doing advertising work. Can you tell us what you did in that field?

EG: I started out as a copywriter in Des Moines, then worked by phone and mail for a small group in Chicago, then went back to Cedar Rapids and worked there for three different agencies, and finally had a three-person shop of my own. I worked for a time out of Chicago producing commercials.

I should say here that in my 18 years of editing Mystery Scene I probably talked to 50 writers who were or had been in advertising, and only three or four of them had anything good to say about the experience. I met some decent, humane people, for sure, in the business, but more often than not I met people who saw advertising as this great romantic calling. I worked for two weeks for a creative director who said that if you didn’t own a Porsche after two years of working for him you weren’t doing your job. A deep thinker, obviously. He just couldn’t believe I was walking away from such a very nice salary. That was when I started writing political speeches. I’m sure I learned things writing copy. Brevity if nothing else.

JKP: In what year did you stop drinking, and why?

EG: In May of 1974. One Friday night I got into some drunken, angry scene in a restaurant and was reminded of this by a young woman who called me at 2 a.m. She said she’d gotten my name off a toilet wall. I still have no idea who she was. Or why she called. I remember, being semi-sober by then, telling her all sorts of lies about myself. We must have talked for half an hour.

When I woke up the next morning one of the first things I thought of was going to a pawn shop and buying a gun. I really was at the end. My life was completely out of control. I’d realized that for years, but for some reason that morning I couldn’t handle it any longer. I’d destroyed a marriage, been a terrible father, had turned myself into both a demon and a public joke--and knew I couldn’t go on. I rented a rustic cabin far up on the Iowa River. I stayed there and got clean. I walked a lot and cried a lot. I was terrified of going back. I was also scared that I couldn’t stay away from alcohol and drugs, that the cabin stay had been a fluke. And facing [the past] 16 years of various selfish sins and moments of bottle and drug craziness--facing my past sober was really scary. Every once in a while, as the months rolled on, I’d buy a fifth of whiskey and just set it on the table. Tempting myself but never giving in. I loved being clean and I still do. I’m one of the blessed ones.

JKP: I read online that you “began writing to fill time after giving up drinking.” Is that an accurate statement?

EG: Partly. Even during my drinking days I managed to do some writing, but after I got clean I had so much time on my hands--I used to sit in bars for hours--that I went at it seriously, writing a lot of short stories, selling them mostly to downscale literary magazines and some very downscale men’s magazines. In 1976 I won a Charles Scribner’s prize for a short story and that gave me a lot of encouragement.

JKP: Were you still laboring away in the advertising trenches at the time you began working on fiction?

EG: Yes, after I’d sobered up. I always tried to sneak an hour or two on my stories during the workday. I was not what you’d call a loyal employee.

JKP: Is it correct that you became a full-time writer in 1989?

EG: Yes. That was when I turned my three-person agency over to my artist co-worker, Gail Cross, who is now one of the most in-demand book designers in the field. As I said, I needed to take on quickie writing gigs from time to time. I had no trouble selling novels generally, but publishers are not noted for their quick pay practices.

JKP: My understanding is that you’ve been married twice. During what period did your first marriage last?

EG: From 1964 to 1968. I destroyed it with my drinking.

JKP: And later you wed the former Carol Maxwell, who’s now an author in her own right. How and when did you meet her?

EG: In 1979 I did TV commercials for a bank. Somebody told me that a Carol Maxwell was a good actress with a lot of work behind her at the University of Iowa and numerous other venues, so I called her and asked her to audition. Sometimes I pulled in Chicago talent, but I’d taken a bath on an industrial film I’d done and wanted to make up for it with this campaign. She read beautifully and was great looking, It took awhile for us to get together romantically, but it was worth the wait. She’s given me the life I’d always longed for. Thirty-plus years of it. I got the better end of the deal, believe me.

JKP: I’m pretty sure that my initial exposure to your work was the 1995 novel The First Lady, a standalone tale about a president’s wife who’s accused of murder. However, that book came out a decade after you started publishing fiction. I believe your first two novels to see print were Rough Cut and New, Improved Murder, both released in 1985--and both of which starred cop-turned-private eye Jack Dwyer, who solved crimes in a barely disguised Cedar Rapids. Were those actually the first two novels you wrote, or did you try your hand at earlier books that never saw print?

EG: The First Lady was one of three bestseller-type novels I wrote. They weren’t personal books.

I’d never been able to finish a novel until I met Max Allan Collins. I must have started and stopped novels 50 times (not an exaggeration) over the years. Max let me read his books in manuscript. Seeing novels in typed form took away the mystery. Plus, he gave me the single best piece of writerly advice I’ve ever gotten: Write the book all the way through without looking back. Then do your revision. Don’t stop and start.

Two agents and six or seven houses turned down Rough Cut. They all complained that the narrator was a borderline psychotic. A young junior editor at St. Martin’s picked it up out of slush, liked it, fought for it, and bought it. One of the big Eastern newspapers headlined the review, “A Hate Letter to the Advertising Industry.” I still don’t think that’s accurate. As I said, I met a lot of decent people in advertising. By the time Rough Cut was published (a year and a half after I finished it), I’d written two more novels and they both sold quickly.

JKP: Can you describe how you felt, seeing your first novels in print?

EG: Thrilled. When the first copy arrived I just sat down and stared at it. I was 40 years old and this had been my dream since I was 8 or 9.

JKP: How has publishing changed for the better--and for the worse--since the time you sold your first novel?

EG: It’s corporate now. I feel sorry for the editors. So many have lost jobs, so many can’t get published books that they love.

JKP: Your fiction has been all over the map, falling into genres from crime fiction and political thrillers to horror and westerns. Most people would be pretty happy to master just one field of fiction. Was a tighter focus ever in the cards for you?

EG: Being all over the map has seriously damaged my career. Most successful writers stick to one genre; some successful writers write the same book again and again. I didn’t choose all these genres consciously. It was just that I’d grown up reading all over the place, so I had genuine interest in them. I also had heroes in each of these genres and I tried to emulate them.

JKP: In an interview you did three years ago with Diabolical Radio, you suggested that some of the books you’ve produced have been of, let’s say, lesser quality than others. And Mike Ashley wrote in The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction that you’ve actually dismissed the horror/science fiction novels you wrote under the pseudonym Daniel Ransom as “trash.” Being as prolific a writer as you are, do you simply accept that you have to put your name on a clunker now and then? Or have you only decided in retrospect that some of your books didn’t measured up to your expectations?

EG: The first three or four Daniel Ransom novels really are trash. One of them I don’t even have a copy of. Don’t want one. Starting with Night Caller [1987] they began getting respectable, even--sometimes--enthusiastic reviews. The early ones I wrote strictly to market, trying to make sales. When I moved Ransom to [publisher] DAW the books improved a good deal, thanks to my fine editor, Sheila Gilbert. I’ve learned a lot from her. I do my best with every novel and story. As John D. MacDonald, a man even more prolific than I used to be, said, no matter how hard you try, some just work out better than others.

I will say that I’ve tried my best to honor the genres I’ve worked in. [Critic] Dorothy B. Hughes felt that The Autumn Dead [1987] was a successful new approach to the private-eye novel; and The Washington Post ran a long rave by the literary writer Carolyn See about the first Sam McCain novel, The Day the Music Died [1999]. In thrillers, both Blood Moon [1994] and The Midnight Room [2009] were hailed as significantly fresh approaches to the serial-killer novel. In horror, Cage of Night [1996] is still in print after 18 years, and my collection Cages [1995] won the International Horror Award for the year, the previous winners being Stephen King and Richard Matheson. And I won a Spur award for my short story “The Face,” and of my four Leo Guild novels, Publishers Weekly said that my westerns were “written for grown-ups.”

JKP: It’s been said that the two “overriding influences” on your fiction are old Gold Medal novels and Ernest Hemingway. Do you think that’s true?

EG: Certainly the Gold Medal novels shaped me, Hemingway less so as the years go on. I owe a great debt to Max Collins and Bill Pronzini for my crime fiction; I made a study of their books just as I did the work of Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block, Ed McBain, and John D. MacDonald.

JKP: Younger readers might not be familiar with Gold Medal Books. What contributions would you say that that publisher made to the crime-fiction genre?

EG: The key Gold Medal writers such as John D. MacDonald, Peter Rabe. Charles Williams, Vin Packer, Gil Brewer, Lawrence Block, Malcolm Braly, and others brought style and shrewd social and psychological assessments of various American societies to the crime novels.

JKP: You told Vince Keenan in a 2010 interview that “Ross Macdonald was the finest writer of private detective fiction ever. Flat out.” First off, why do think that way?

EG: Voice, style, and a generous troubled heart. There are scenes in his novels that can hurt you. And haunt you.

JKP: And in what ways has Macdonald’s work influenced your own?

EG: I’ve never felt any influence. I would never even try to imitate him in any way, because he was too good.

JKP: You’ve also mentioned Ed McBain as a principal influence on your fiction. In what specific ways do you think that’s been true?

EG: Voice and a social sense and scene structure. He could move you through a book like nobody else.

JKP: You’ve been working hard at this game a long time, so it’s likely that you’ve influenced other writers, in turn. Being immodest for a moment, tell me: What do you think other, younger wordsmiths can learn from your own fiction?

EG: I see on various blogs that some of the younger writes like my books and stories--and a number of them have written me letters--but the only impression I have is that they like the writing itself and my viewpoint as an outsider. They also like the consistency of that viewpoint being the same whichever genre I’m working in.

JKP: You have said that you think your fiction is, on the whole, generally optimistic. Yet so many others define it as “dark.” How do you explain that difference of viewpoints?

EG: By that I meant that I’m not nihilistic. Certainly a good deal of my work is dark. Both Publishers Weekly and Kirkus have pointed out that the Sam McCain books, for all their wry humor, are dark and serious books. Booklist even compared them to novels by Lawrence Block and Elmore Leonard. But I’m not much for good and evil writ large. I do believe there are some truly evil people, but in my experience most folks will do the decent thing when they have to consciously choose.

JKP: I’ve heard that you are not fond of rewriting, that you’d rather throw a book away than go through any significant efforts to rework it. Is that true, and if so, how many books do you think you’ve round-filed over the course of your career?

EG: That was true until I got cancer the first time. I can no longer afford that indulgence. Now I do two and sometimes three drafts of everything. I also have a private editor, Linda Seibels, read my final draft. She tears into it for one more go-around. As for how many I’ve round-filed, I’d say at least 10 and maybe a few more.

JKP: OK, since you’ve brought it up, let’s talk about your health. As I understand it, you were diagnosed around 2001 with an incurable cancer. What sort of cancer do you have?

EG: In November of 2001 I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. A few people thought I was sort of cavalier about it--in denial--but my chances of survival were 90 percent. Three months later, though, I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, which is incurable. I was not cavalier about that.

JKP: Earlier this year, I believe, you went to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for a stem-cell transplant. How did that go, and what’s your current prognosis?

EG: It was the worst physical experience of my life. Nothing ever came close. But I’m now 100 percent cancer free, so it was worth it. Because multiple myeloma is incurable, it will come back. I know people who’ve gone only three years before it’s returned, and I’ve also known a man who’s 12 years cancer free and a woman who’s eight.

JKP: You’ve written eight or nine series over the last 30 years, but also dozens of standalone novels. What, to you, are the relative merits or producing series versus standalones?

EG: I prefer standalones. They offer me more freedom.

JKP: Do you identify with any one of your series protagonists more than the others?

EG: I suppose Sam McCain and Dev Conrad are the two most like me, but they really aren’t in any strict sense me.

JKP: You’ve earned a great number of fans with your series about Sam McCain, a compassionate lawyer/private eye in 1950s and ’60s Iowa. How did that series come in to being, and what is it about McCain that makes him such a durable protagonist?

EG: I got tired of all the Happy Days B.S. The ’50s were a good time if you were white, Christian, middle-class, and straight. If you weren’t you had big problems. I wanted to tell the truth about the ’50s.

JKP: Reading the McCain tales, I get the impression that you identify strongly with the era in which they’re set. Is that the case?

EG: I do identify with the ’50s and ’60s. For all the turmoil writhing beneath the official Ozzie and Harriet mentality, the country was more understandable. For good and ill alike there was a commonality that was destroyed during the anti-[Vietnam] War years. I hated the war, but the political schism it created has never been resolved. And it was then that the destruction of the middle-class began.

JKP: I keep hearing that you’re going to end the Sam McCain series ... and yet you continue to come up with new installments, mostly recently 2011’s Bad Moon Rising. That makes nine McCain books. Do you expect to keep the series going?

EG: One more I think. Sam was drafted at the end of Bad Moon Rising. I think readers will be surprised by Riders on the Storm.

JKP: Your 2008 novel, Sleeping Dogs, introduced yet another series star, resourceful political consultant Dev Conrad. You’d concocted novels before about politicians and their races and woes before, but here you were committing yourself to a succession of books that examine the ins and outs, ups and downs and turnarounds of modern American campaigning. What do you hope to achieve with the Conrad series?

EG: As I said earlier, those three political best-seller type novels I wrote were done for market. My editor, a very wise and nice guy, wanted me to sell better. But they weren’t personal novels for me. Dev Conrad is very personal. He’s a version of me, for one thing, and he certainly reflects my cynical opinion of our political sewer.

JKP: What do you see in Conrad that makes him a distinctly different character from your previous series protagonists?

EG: He’s hipper, more worldly, more jaded.

JKP: Your new Conrad novel, Flashpoint, focuses on a longtime U.S. senator from Illinois, Robert Logan, who’s implicated in the beating death of a younger woman who had been present at several of his recent campaign events, and with whom some of his staffers (as well as his aggrieved wife) are convinced he’s been having a relationship. However, the tale is also about the feeding frenzy that the modern media engage in when they think an officeholder has been tripped up by scandal. You spent some time penning political speeches during your early years as a freelance writer. Did you see these dynamics at work then, or was your story inspired by more recent developments?

EG: I think being deserted by your friends in political scandals has always been the case. I remember that a few of [Richard] Nixon’s friends stood by him till the end. Whatever you thought of Nixon, you had to be moved by the loyalty of his friends.

JKP: Deep into Flashpoint, someone says to Conrad: “I’ve talked to a few of your other clients. We all think that deep down you hate politicians.” Conrad insists that he doesn’t hate politicians any more than he despises political consultants, that “we’re all guilty” of turning politics into a sporting event divorced from real-world outcomes. Does that reflect your own viewpoint?

EG: Absolutely. And it’s true. Pols are certainly cynical; the people who handle them even more so, including Dev.

JKP: Are you currently working on another Dev Conrad book?

EG: There may not be another Dev. I haven’t made up my mind yet.

JKP: What other projects are you laboring over right now?

EG: I’m writing a Sam McCain short story to help me feel my way through the next novel. I’ve done this trial-run thing before and it generally helps.

JKP: In 1985 you co-founded Mystery Scene magazine with fellow author Robert J. Randisi. Why did you think that the world needed such a publication? And did you expect Mystery Scene to still be available and popular in 2013?

EG: Science fiction had the great news magazine Locus, we just thought mystery deserved its own. I have to say that I ran the magazine for 18 years pretty much as my own fanzine--I covered anything I felt like: Westerns, horror, even romance sometimes. [Publishers] Kate Stine and Brian Skupin have turned it into a brilliant, beautiful professional magazine.

JKP: When critics talk about the “Golden Age of Crime Fiction,” they’re most often referencing the 1920s and ’30s. Yet you’ve referred to the 21st century as being another such Golden Age. How do you make that case?

EG: Marcia Muller, Laura Lippman, Megan Abbott, Michael Connelly, Nancy Pickard, James W. Hall, Lawrence Block, Vicki Hendricks, James Lee Burke, and so on. The so-called Golden Age didn’t come close.

JKP: Among the folks who might be considered up-and-coming writers in this genre, whose work has impressed you?

EG: Tom Piccirilli, Dave Zeltserman, Duane Swierczynski, and many more.

JKP: As an author, what do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment? Conversely, what has been your greatest regret?

EG: I think the voice in my best books is their greatest recommendation and the voice informs the writing. My regret is that I wish I had tried larger-scale novels, but I am a child of Gold Medal. To me the ideal number of words is still 60,000. Look at those perfect little novels of [Georges] Simenon, how rich they are.

JKP: Now this: As a man, what’s been your greatest accomplishment? And your greatest regret?

EG: Accomplishment--getting clean and sober. Regret--how I destroyed my first marriage.

JKP: If you could have grown up to be any other novelist, who would it have been? And why?

EG: Graham Greene. To be such a great storyteller and at the same time such a gifted and powerful observer of the human condition.

JKP: After all these years, what weakness do you still have as a writer?

EG: I still think I wander away from the story sometimes. I revere tight novels, which is just one of the reasons I’m such a Megan Abbott fan. Not a word too many, not a word misplaced.

JKP: Finally, you weren’t among the guests at the 2011 Bouchercon in St. Louis, during which the Private Eye Writers of America named you the recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award, The Eye. But how did it feel to win that sort of recognition from a group of writers dedicated to the detective story?

EG: I was completely surprised when Bob [Randisi] and Max [Collins] told me about it over one of the long lunches we have with our wives in Amana, Iowa. I’m not sure I deserved it--I mean that--but I am not about to give it back. It is a real milestone in my career and I really appreciate it.

Rockin’ the Sixties

He’ll probably be pissed at me for saying this, but Ed Gorman is the tooth fairy of the mystery world--dispensing not only wisdom but actual paying jobs. We have never met, but one day I received an e-mail note from Gorman. He had read a piece about Fredric Brown’s The Fabulous Clipjoint which I’d written for the Chicago Tribune, and he asked if I’d like to write the introduction to a new edition of Brown’s Madball (1961) for a series he was putting together. A nice fee was mentioned. Madball was one of the first mysteries I ever read, and I would have written the introduction for nothing--but I didn’t tell Gorman that.

In addition to being kind, Gorman is one of the best writers of mysteries in recent memory. His eight-installment Sam McCain series, about a lawyer in Black River Falls, Iowa, during the 1960s, earned these glowing comments from Booklist: “Sam McCain is cut from the same cloth as Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder and Bill Pronzini’s ‘Nameless’-- series heroes who change as time passes. The sweet, nonviolent, naïve young man we met in the series debut (The Day the Music Died, 1999) is now comfortable pistol-whipping a witness ...”

Gorman also edits, along with Martin H. Greenberg, the annual Best Crime and Mystery Stories of the Year compilations, the most recent one titled Between the Dark and the Daylight (Tyrus Books).

Now for the best part: His latest Sam McCain outing, Ticket to Ride, just published by Pegasus, is one terrific read. The story is set in 1965, and the basically conservative townsfolk are planning to burn records by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan in front of a local church on Labor Day. That’s when the first young soldier from Black River Falls finally returns home from a strange place called Vietnam, in a coffin.

Ticket to Ride is a fascinating look at the war from both sides of small-town America. Sam is very active in the antiwar movement, and when a rich and powerful warmonger is killed in a fistfight with a young radical, Sam is the only lawyer in town who has the guts and heart to take his case.

If you’ve missed any of the Sam McCain series, you can rectify that by going to Gorman’s page at Amazon.com.

I’ve Been Gormanized!

Over the last couple of days, several people have sent their compliments on an interview author-editor Ed Gorman did with me for the Summer 2009 issue of Mystery Scene magazine. The public mails must be slow way out here in Seattle (blame it on all our recent sunshine--the local postal carriers just aren’t used to it), because my copy of that issue arrived only this afternoon.

As usual with Mystery Scene, there’s plenty of great reading to be found here. I want to draw your attention especially to Oline H. Cogdill’s interview with Tom Rob Smith, author of the much-praised historical thriller Child 44 and its new sequel, The Secret Speech; Cheryl Solimini’s profile of George Dawes Green, who wrote the Edgar Award-winning The Caveman’s Valentine (1994) as well as the forthcoming thriller, Ravens; Michael Mallory’s look back at the too-oft-forgotten work of Stuart Palmer, the creator of Hildegarde Withers, a “fictional schoolteacher turned sleuth who had a talent for tripping over bodies”; and Kevin Burton Smith’s wrap-up of five worthy American women private eyes who have sprung unto the scene since the “female P.I. boom of the ’80s and ’90s”--a selection that includes Diane Wei Liang’s Mei Wang, Mary Wilbon’s Cassandra Slick, and Libby Fischer Hellman’s Georgia Davis.

Then, of course, there’s that interview with yours truly.

I’m usually reluctant to blow my own horn. But Ed Gorman is a nice guy, a persistent promoter of this genre, and an unabashed admirer of The Rap Sheet. So when he requested an interview with me for Mystery Scene ... well, how could I say no? There was some editing done to the 3,000 words worth of responses I sent to Gorman, though not as much as I expected; and all of the best stuff made it to the printed page. I don’t want to inhibit Mystery Scene’s single-issue sales by posting the entirety of our exchange here. However, I think my response to one query might be interesting (with links added).

This would seem to be the true Golden Age of detective and crime fiction; so many fine writers. Would you agree?

Yes and no. While there are indeed many fine writers, bottom line oriented publishers aren’t always willing to pay those authors enough to keep them working. And not everyone can write a book a year. So publishers concentrate their resources on big-name wordsmiths who keep producing, even though they may be churning out the same sort of yarns over and over again. (Sadly, readers don’t always notice this betrayal.)

And while I’m thrilled to have so many reading options in crime fiction, I am disappointed with many of the myriad books hitting the shelves. Too many try to copy previously successful works, or they run a good theme to death. How many more books, for instance, can I be expected to read about serial killers? You would think that such murderers were running rife in the United States, when in fact they’re fairly unusual. And does every mystery story have to be about murder? There are other crimes of sufficiently absorbing magnitude, other ways to build up tension than having somebody new die every two or three chapters.

But then, editors and publishers would have to encourage such innovation. And I don’t think they do, at least not strongly enough.

I’ve found myself lately looking back at older works in this field, books by mid-20th-century writers who were searching for new veins of writing gold, trying to do something unlike what their fellows were up to at the time. Admittedly, there was a lot of trash, but I think no more trash being turned out then than what is being published now. And occasionally, I come across real gems, such as Stanley Ellin’s The Eighth Circle (1958) or Harold Q. Masur’s Bury Me Deep (1947) or Erle Stanley Gardner’s series about mismatched gumshoes Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. All of those--as well as the works of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Thomas B. Dewey, Ed McBain, and of course [Ross] Macdonald--provide the source material mined by today’s crime fictionists. But some of that older stuff still boasts an air of novelty, rather than the reek of repetition.

So, while I am happy to see crime fiction be so popular today, I fear that we’re not getting everything we could from this genre. The willingness of publishers and authors to emphasize profits and productivity over creativity may ultimately be the genre’s undoing. And maybe that’s a good thing, to let the genre burn itself out now and then lie fallow and recoup its innovation in preparation for some future renaissance.

Read the full piece in the Summer 2009 issue of Mystery Scene.

UPDATE: Scans of the pages containing my interview appear below. Click on the images to bring up enlargements in new windows.

Bullets and Ballots

Along with bills and books, yesterday’s snail-mail brought with it the latest edition (#104) of Mystery Scene. That magazine’s contents include not only the usual informative profiles (this time of Benjamin Black and Jane K. Cleland) and an excellent retrospective on the work of reclusive novelist Ernest Bramah (creator of the granddaddy of all blind detectives, Max Carrados), but also a most entertaining piece by Kevin Burton Smith about politics and private eyes. Just in time for this year’s U.S. presidential contest. As he explains:

[T]he P.I. novel is arguably the most political of all the subgenres of crime fiction. Cozies and amateur sleuth mysteries tend to be closed (and relatively complacent) worlds, and too often spy fiction and thrillers reduce politics to the cartoon level. The police detective, meanwhile, particularly in procedurals, is shackled by the bonds of organization. But hard-boiled detective fiction, with its dysfunctional, loner dicks moving easily through all levels of society, following the clues where they may, seems perfectly suited to asking those rude and impertinent questions. And the P.I. genre is arguably where all that hard-boiled cynicism about politics got codified in the first place.

Smith doesn’t limit his remarks to crime novels constructed overtly around political machinations (though he does mention Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key (1931) and Mark Coggins’ recent Runoff), but instead extends his commentary to cover gumshoe yarns that address or challenge social or justice issues that have been brought on by politics. “When you’re writing about law, justice and society,” he quotes Sara Paretsky as saying, “you are either challenging or supporting the status quo. ... I don’t know how much more political a writer can be.” Thus, Smith manages to corral within his commentary Linda L. Richards’ Death Was the Other Woman (in which gender issues are a point of contention) and Michael Harvey’s 2007 novel, The Chicago Way (which focuses in significant part on the corrupt practices of the powerful).

Nor does Smith try--thank goodness--to guess who Philip Marlowe might vote for this year (Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton?), or muse on whether Mike Hammer would have found John “100 Years War” McCain a sufficiently competent or conservative candidate. (He does, however, pull a quite wonderful related Marlowe quote out of The Lady in the Lake: “Politics ... asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So, we have to work with what we get ...”)

Rather, critic Smith simply makes clear the inevitable intersection between political fact and crime fiction.

[A]lthough it’s rarely completely partisan, it’s easy enough to see much hard-boiled private eye fiction as political. As for the cynicism, it’s there as well, left or right, in the fact that these are “private” investigators, answerable to nobody but themselves (and maybe--but not always--their clients). They’re not part of the police or any other public, official agencies that ultimately serve those in power. And so private eye novels lift the lid, revealing corruption in places of authority and power, be it the police ([Raymond] Chandler’s notorious Bay City), government (Hammett’s The Glass Key or Red Harvest), or even the boardrooms of industry (almost everything Paretsky’s ever written). Not a campaign poster in sight, but it’s all politics. Even the decision not to take a political stand could in itself be considered a political stand.

By the way, this same issue of Mystery Scene features an interview with veteran author Ed Gorman, whose latest novel, Sleeping Dogs, unleashes a new series starring political speechwriter and sleuth-by-necessity Dev Conrad. In the book, Conrad has just signed onto the unexpectedly troubled re-election campaign of a U.S. senator, and must deal with dirty tricks, campaign sabotage, a suicide, and his increasing suspicions about the very man he’s supposed to be helping stay in Congress. Gorman apparently drew from his own professional background of putting words into the mouths of politicians, but as he notes, “everything’s changed” since he worked the campaign arena in the 1980s.

My favorite quote comes in answer to interviewer Linda Siebels’ comment that, while she “laughed out loud” at Gorman’s tale, “it’s a very cynical look at politics.” You can almost hear the shaking of Gorman’s head, as he responds, “Have you watched the news lately? I honestly think I restrained myself.”

Unfortunately, these two pieces are not available on the Web. But copies of Mystery Scene will set you back only $7.50 apiece. Less than any politician is likely to ask of you.

READ MORE: “Our Vote Goes to Phillips,” by J. Kingston Pierce (The Rap Sheet); “Death in the City--Runoff,” by Betsey Culp (San Francisco Flier).