'Sizzling Summer Reads' Promotion

It's with some irony that I'm writing this as the rain hammers hard on the skylight above my head... but the Top Suspense Group, of which I'm a member, is running a day-to-day Summer Reads promotion and yesterday was my day in the sun.

Titles featured so far include Lee Goldberg's Watch me Die, Vicki Hendricks' Voluntary Madness, and Naomi Hirahara's Summer of the Big Bachi. There'll be a new title featured more or less daily until the end of the month.

So if this rain continues, you can always stay in and read a book. With my salesman's hat on, here's what I wrote for the Group's blog.

I was within two blocks' drive of Paradise when the call came over the air. It was a 927, a general code meaning to investigate unknown trouble. The dispatch girl was offering it to Travis and Leonard, both of whom were checking IDs for warrants in the scrubby little park around the Adult Center on Jefferson; knowing that I could have them as backup in three minutes or less if the 'unknown trouble' turned out to be something bigger than anticipated, I cut in and took the call. Squad Sergeant responding, one minute or less.

Valley of Lights is a fusion of crime and horror, a dance between predator and prey in which the story twists, the stakes increase, and the tables are repeatedly turned.

It grew out of time that I spent in Phoenix, Arizona, researching the city and the desert and going on ride-alongs with the Phoenix PD. I was working on a novel that I never actually got to write. That novel idea was ambitious and sprawling. It was everything I ever wanted to say. It was art. It would have been as boring as hell. Instead, I wrote this.

It began as a simple idea for a short story and grew as I wrote it, in the way that no book had ever grown in my hands before. The story flew. All those days in the squad car with Lieutenant Dave Michels, the late shifts with Sergeants Tom Kosen and Jesse James, the flophouses and the trailer parks and the stakeouts in gaudy motels and the millionaires' houses in the Camelback Mountains - everything came together to feed the tale.

This is the book of which Dean Koontz wrote, "If thriller reading were a sin, Stephen Gallagher would be responsible for my ultimate damnation. His work is fast-paced, well-written, infused with a sense of dark wonder, and altogether fresh."

When I selected the title to present as my Sizzling Summer Read, fellow Top-Suspenser Ed Gorman kindly wrote, "I still think that Valley of Lights is one of the coolest - and most imitated - novels I've ever read."

Here's what Phoenix PD Sergeant Alex Volchak finds on his arrival at the Paradise Motel:

We came to the last of the units. Beyond this was some empty parking space and then a high cinderblock wall topped with wire. Not a place, on the whole, that I'd have cared to spend any time in. The desk clerk stood out front and gestured me towards the window as if to say take it, I don't want it, the responsibility's all yours. I was aware that, some distance behind me, one or two people had emerged and were watching to see if anything interesting was going to happen. I stepped up to the window and looked inside.

The sash was open an inch at the top, and some faint stirring of the air had caused the drapes to part down the middle. The bug screen and the darkness inside made it difficult to see anything at all, but as my eyes adjusted I began to make out shapes. Something that had at first looked like a bean bag resolved itself into a human form, slumped, halfway out of a low chair as if he'd fainted while sitting. The details weren't clear, but also in my line of sight across the room was the end of the bed with somebody lying on it. I could see a pair of soiled tennis shoes for this one, not much more.

Just drunks sleeping off a party, I thought, remembering the heavy breathing that was being picked up by the dislodged phone, and I turned to the clerk and said, 'Who's the room registered to?'

'A little s...' he began, but then he caught himself. 'A Hispanic guy. I don't think he's even one of them.'

'Well... all I see is people sleeping. I don't know what's so unusual in that.'

'For four straight days? It could have been longer. He registered weeks ago, he closed the drapes on day one and he musta sneaked the others in when no-one was watching.'

'What about the maid?'

'We're residential, maid service comes extra. She just leaves the towels and sheets outside, doesn't go in. What do you think?'

I felt a definite stirring of interest. I said, 'I think you should get your pass key so we can go inside and find out what the problem is.'

'And that's legal? I mean, I'm all square with the owner if I do what you say?'

'Get the key, all right?'

We went inside; or rather, I went inside and the little monkey in the technicolor shirt hovered in the doorway behind me. My first expectation, which was of the smell of opium smoke, turned out to be wrong; what hit me instead was a rank odor like bad breath and drains. I crossed the room and opened the window as wide as it would go, and then I turned to look at the place in the harsh angles of daylight.

Nobody had moved. There were three of them. Slumped in the low chair opposite the window was a man in a grey business suit, an expensive-looking summer lightweight with the pants stained dark where his bladder had let go. He was the one who'd fallen against the phone and dislodged the receiver, as if he'd been propped awkwardly and hadn't stayed that way. The soiled tennis shoes on the bed belonged to a short, muscular-looking man in his late thirties, while over in the other chair by the key-operated TV sprawled a black teenager in a leather jacket.

All three of them were inert, like corpses; but I checked for a pulse on each one, and they were all alive and steady. The arms of the man on the bed, who was wearing a T-shirt, showed no fresh needle marks or even old scars.

I said to the clerk, 'Did you move anything when you came in before?'

His face was that of an animal that had just been stunned prior to slaughtering. Perhaps he thought I'd read his mind; he probably didn't realise that he'd already given himself away.

'No,' he finally managed. 'I didn't move a thing.'

You can find Valley of Lights for the Kindle right here.

Valley of Lights

It's going great, but the 99c introductory Kindle price on Valley of Lights ends on April 20th. After that, it's back to the full price. Valley was my 'breakthrough book' and is still available in print, in a Telos Classics edition incorporating notes, an interview, and a bonus story.

But you can click here to buy the straight-goods Kindle edition, and for the full range of my available eBooks see the Top Suspense Group website.

When Phoenix Police Sergeant Alex Volchak discovers the true nature of a predator that has survived among us unnoticed for generations, he puts himself and those around him in mortal danger. "An excellent thriller... a cracking pace... large helpings of deadpan gallows humour... a genuine ability to create a sense of evil." Evening Times "The best fusion of crime and horror since Hjortsberg's Falling Angel." Time Out

Ed Gorman, Dickens, Stale Popcorn, and Frescoes

I see that Ed Gorman's short story collection Noir 13 is up for a 2011 Spinetingler Award. With all due respect to the other nominees I hope it picks up a ton of votes and wins.

My first encounter with Ed was as the editor of Mystery Scene magazine. Later I had a story picked up for an anthology on which he was one of the editors. Most recently I've come to know him as a fellow and founder-member of the Top Suspense Group.

From the beginning I've regarded him as a kind of godfather to all the rest of us working in that loose genre group often called crime and mystery. If you follow the blog you may recall that a while back I contributed an intro to the PS Publishing edition of Ed's novel Cage of Night.

I used the opportunity for a riff or a rant about style and professionalism. Not dying arts, but certainly increasingly neglected ones.

There’s a type of writing which I grew up loving, which made me want to be a writer myself, and which for a while I thought was gone forever. I'm talking about spare, intelligent commercial fiction. Pan paperbacks, crime novels, spy fiction, postwar British thrillers... writers from Gavin Lyall to Graham Greene, from John Le Carré to John D MacDonald. Well-paced novels that were as long as they needed to be and not a page longer, from authors with a grip on the English language as precise as a sculptor's on his chisel. Like a sculptor they wasted no strokes, and like a sculptor they had little margin for error.

Their work is light, racy, and full of substance. By “light”, I don't mean frivolous. I mean with a deceptive lightness of touch, an easy sense of direct connection, a sense that the writer’s first job is always to engage the reader. Rather like the effortless people-person who spots you arriving at a party, makes you feel instantly welcome, and starts introducing you around. You know the type. Born diplomats. Even if you don't know them well, they seem to know you. It's a special thrill when they remember your name.

Ah, those books! Well-crafted popular fiction. They came out of a tradition going all the way back to Dickens and beyond. It was storytelling, pure if not always simple. The best writers understood that storytelling wasn't some lower form of literature. It was the ticket to ride, allowing any and all of the freight of literature to be checked in to ride along with it.

(Although it has to be said that some of the writers I enjoyed travelled pretty light, and at their worst could rattle off a nifty 50 or 70,000 words and leave you with very little of permanence beyond the aftertaste of the narrative. But in itself that’s no mean feat. When you think about it, what thousand-dollar bottle of wine has ever achieved more?)

I did my best to spot the good stuff wherever it appeared. However lurid the cover, however downmarket the genre, I’d be drawn to those elements that signalled an intelligent writer with a serious mind, ready to step up to the campfire and put all his energies into riveting our attention, filling us with joy and awe, and leaving us feeling exactly the way that he’d planned for us to feel. When an artist writes straight from his or her nerve endings, without engaging in a long process of study and philosophical meditation, that doesn't automatically devalue the act of creation. Fresco painters didn't get a lot of time to mull over what they were doing, either. It's hard to imagine a more ruthless deadline than four square yards of drying plaster; hard to envisage a greater test of one's craft, or a more compelling goad to invention.

For a few years that kind of writing seemed to vanish from the shelves, driven out by so-called bloat books and 'thick fiction' that look like good value and taste like stale popcorn. A 70,000-worder, in the words of one publishers' rep to me, was deemed "too cheap, and too thin". Marketing was no longer being driven by content; content was being driven by marketing.

Cage of Night, dare I suggest it, was probably a victim of that trend.

In its author's words, "Back in the 90s I wrote a novel called Cage of Night. I liked it but many many publishers didn't share my enthusiasm. The complaint was that they couldn't figure out if it was a crime novel or horror fantasy. How do you market it? The publisher that finally took it on decided to experiment with their returns policy. I'm told, though I don't know this for a fact, that when they told the chains no returns, the book was stillborn."

Well, let me just say something about that... the returns business rings depressingly true, and the mindset that drove it probably explains why it's become possible to walk through an entire book barn and still find nothing you particularly want to read. But I reckon that the reason given by the 'many many publishers' for turning the novel down is the very thing that makes the book.

What’s great about Cage of Night is the line that it walks. On the one hand, there are stories that deny the world of the imagination and couch themselves entirely in the terms of the banal – "the low mimetic", as Angela Carter called it.

At the other end of the reality spectrum there are those narratives where fancy drifts without anchor, tales of wish fulfilment in which no effort is spent devising how those wishes might be fulfilled – they simply are. Chosen ones are chosen, destinies are fulfilled, and whatever powers might be needed are available when summoned.

But somewhere, with all these loose pieces lying to left and right of it, there is a middle way where the two come together and forge something else. A form of storytelling in which the feel of a life is wholly believable yet charged with an imminent sense of gods and monsters, all rooted in the weird and wonderful thing that is human psychology. It’s the way we viewed the world every day as children, a power of vision that our growing-up inevitably taught us to suppress. The right kind of story can take us there again – ultimately, it's what stories are for.

The qualities that I thought had gone for good, driven out of the market by ghosted celebrity novels, hasty journalist-written chick-lit, and lazy big-name franchising, have simply resurfaced in unexpected places. These days my fiction reading pile tends to consist of two kinds of novel. There are the trade editions from the literary shelves, where people like Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon aim for high art with a pulpster's vigour. Then there's the stuff in reprint, from a growing number of houses dedicated to ferreting out and celebrating the eminently readable; Charles Ardai's Hard Case Crime takes the strategy one stage further, commissioning new work from classic cover artists so that the books begin to sing even before you've got them open.

Ed Gorman stands right at the core of everything I’ve been talking about. A master craftsman, a professional's professional, and a steady, reliable, original voice. He writes with intelligence and grace, about people we can believe in, facing situations we can imagine, reacting in ways that are truthful. He makes it real, and in his hands that reality can soar.

Since I wrote the piece, Hard Case Crime faced some uncertain times with the collapse of Dorchester Publishing, which handled production and distribution of its titles. A new partnership with Titan Books looks set to allow the line to continue.

Voting in the Spinetingler Awards is open until April 30th. I'm happy also to see follow Top Suspenser Dave Zeltserman nominated in the Rising Star category for his novel Killer.

The Top Suspense Anthology

I've been allocated twenty-five Advance Reading Copies of the Top Suspense anthology to give away, in the e-format of your choice. All you need to do is agree to post a no-spoilers review, positive or negative, on your blog, website, Goodreads page, Facebook page, or the Amazon listing for TOP SUSPENSE in the next 60 days.

Click here or on the Contact tab, and drop me a line with FREE TOP SUSPENSE BOOK in the subject line. Don't forget to include your preferred eBook format and the name of your blog or website, if you have one.

Hold on tight for a literary thrill-ride into the wickedly clever, frightening, and exhilarating world of Top Suspense, a sizzling collaboration of twelve master storytellers at the peak of their powers in thirteen unforgettable tales... Max Allan Collins, Bill Crider, Stephen Gallagher, Lee Goldberg, Joel Goldman, Libby Fischer Hellmann, Naomi Hirahara, Vicki Hendricks, Paul Levine, Harry Shannon, and Dave Zeltserman.

This unforgettable anthology – packed full of cold-blooded killers, erotic tension, shady private eyes, craven drug dealers, vicious betrayals, crafty thieves, and shocking twists – is coming out on APRIL 1 and is only a taste of the thrills you will find in the breathtakingly original ebooks by these authors at www.topsuspensegroup.com.

US Kindle price will be $2.99.