Thanks to all those who came out during the book tour.  It was good to see each of you.  I know your time is precious, especially at this holiday season.

After two weeks on the road listening to your comments and questions, and talking about Thorn, I'm tired but revitalized.  Knowing there are so many devoted readers out there is such a humbling pleasure.

Below is a promo page my wonderful agent, Ann Rittenberg, put together.  

Publishers Weekly (starred review):
Moral ambiguity seasons the violent action in Edgar-winner Hall's outstanding 13th thriller featuring laconic loner Thorn (after 2011's Dead Last). Thorn, who lives in the undeveloped backwoods of Key Largo and loathes the kind of hyperdevelopment that's ruining Florida, is roused from his isolation to extricate his grown son, Flynn Moss, whose existence he only recently became aware of, from the Earth Liberation Front, a group of ecological terrorists who are planning to shut down a nearby atomic power plant. Thorn actually is sympathetic with ELF's goals--but he doesn't trust them. Meanwhile, FBI agent Frank Sheffield begins uncovering a plot to create a nuclear disaster that could annihilate Miami, while a beautiful female Homeland Security agent and a cocksure psycho who likes to play with electricity are working their own schemes. Hall shifts among the skillfully drawn characters, each uncertain of which ends justify extreme means, as the action races toward a literally explosive climax at the nuclear plant. The result is both thoughtful and white-knuckle tense.

Booklist:
Hall is one of those rare thriller writers who can build character as he ratchets tension, who can do no-holds-barred action scenes with panache and, in the midst of bedlam, never lose sight of nuance. All those skills are on display here, as Hall assembles a full-bodied supporting cast whose stories hold our interest as much as Thorn's attempt to save his son without helping to bring about a South Florida version of Chernobyl. A fine thriller on every level.

Alan Cheuse, NPR:
James W. Hall makes a plot that wrings the most suspense and emotion out of this material, from the effect on Thorn's private life to the danger lurking for all Miami and South Florida.
What else can I say without spoiling the book for you? The novel's finale will have most readers holding on for dear life.

Library Journal:
Like fellow Floridian Carl Hiassen, Hall displays a love of his home state's landscape with criticism of the greed that threatens it, plus a fondness for unpredictable characters. Like an Arthurian knight, his protagonist ventures out of his small world just long enough to put things right in a larger one. Luckily for readers, there will be no shortage of opportunities requiring Thorn's next appearance.
 
BookPage:
Going Dark has cinematic action all the way through and a couple of fine surprises saved for the final few pages. Nicely done, indeed.

Kirkus Reviews:
With its nicely observed characters and lively dialogue—and terrific sex scenes—it keeps readers turning the pages.

Naples Florida Weekly:
There is no more delightful companion for a habitual reader than a new book by James W. Hall.

Tampa Bay Times:
Going Dark, the 13th in the series, is one of his very best, a breathless thrill ride with a brain — and heart.

Charlotte Observer:
For those who enjoy a good steely-jawed mystery man, here's a new Thorn novel from James W. Hall. If you've ever daydreamed of living off the land in a beachfront shack, Thorn's life might be a nice getaway for you.
If you like your mysteries macho and enjoy some Florida scenery into the bargain, this one's for you.

South Florida Sun-Sentinel:
In Going Dark, Hall continues his high standards for gripping, action-packed plots that revolve around Florida's intricate ecology and beauty.

Florida Times-Union:
Another first-class page-turner from the master of mystery.

Sacramento Bee:



High adventure in the sun – what's not to like?

So this is the fourth and final pre-publication review of Going Dark.  A pretty good one like the others have been.  Not starred or boxed, as the Publisher's Weekly one was, but still all in all, one I'm happy with mainly because Kirkus has been so hard on my books in the past.  They have a reputation for being pretty grumpy and often mean-spirited in their reviews.  

Also, they singled out one aspect of writing that I work very hard on.  Love scenes.

Ta-da.

 

In Hall's 13th Thorn novel, the go-it-alone Key Largo PI undergoes a crash course in parenthood when he discovers the grown son he barely knows belongs to an environmental activist group with terrorism on its agenda.

In targeting the Turkey Point nuclear power plant near the Florida Keys, the Earth Liberation Front originally had planned on a nonviolent action. But extremists in the group now have a spectacular demolition in mind, having acquired a superpowerful explosive. Taken prisoner by ELF on the remote island where they're preparing the attack, Thorn is unable to talk his son, Flynn, into escaping with him. But to be around the boy in order to protect him, he convinces ELF that he supports their efforts. It helps that one of the group's leaders is a woman for whom Thorn was a surrogate father when she was a troubled teen. Meanwhile, having been alerted to ELF's presence by the logo they left inside the plant's supposedly impenetrable security system, authorities, including FBI man Frank Sheffield, plan a "force-by-force" exercise in which agents take on the plant's security forces with simulated weaponry. In the end, real shots are fired, Thorn's sidekick, Sugarman, gets more of the action than he bargained for, and betrayals are revealed—the great sex Frank has with a psychologically scarred Homeland Security agent from his past proves to be skin-deep. As ever, Hall is in colorful command of his South Florida setting, occasionally editorializing on the harm developers are doing to it. Compared to other mystery writers, he plays things refreshingly low key, but he's always in control, thriving on the setup as much as the payoff.

The plot of Going Dark doesn't have the zip of some of Hall's other Thorn books, but with its nicely observed characters and lively dialogue—and terrific sex scenes—it keeps readers turning the pages.

So, aside from a totally unnecessary quibble ("doesn't have the zip"), this completes the always fretful pre-publication period in fine style.  

A lot of writers say they don't read reviews of their work, which strikes me as a noble exercise in self-restraint, but also strikes me as a little odd, or perhaps I should say, downright crazy.

I've learned a lot from reading reviews of my books.  As I have also learned a lot from reading reviews on Goodreads and Amazon (which are now merging into the same thing, sort of).  I can get a sense from reading lots of reviews about just how successful or unsuccessful I've been at doing what I set out to do.  This is, after all, a performance art.  We writers are a bit like stage performers and in that sense we can learn from the enthusiasm or lack thereof of the applause.  When are our lines working?  When are they not?  

I used to believe that audience reaction was irrelevant.  Critics be damned.  I thought I was arm-wrestling with the literary gods, and if some poor soul couldn't see the value of what I was writing, then that poor soul was ignorant and not worthy of my attention.  

I used to be a callow fool.  

Naturally, swinging too far in the other direction, being utterly dependent on feedback, is also damaging to a writer.  

I've always liked the metaphor of singing in the shower.  We sing in the shower because the acoustics are good and the roar of the water seems to smooth out the frailties of our voice.  But if a writer is simply singing in the shower, succumbing to self-deception by simply writing what pleases him without concern for what anyone walking by the bathroom might think (who is that screeching in there?), then the whole process of writing is no longer art, but a masturbatory exercise.  You do it to please yourself alone.  The world beyond your bathroom door be damned.

So finding the balance for me is important.  I care about reviews, but I have to be philosophical too.  Good ones are nice and they validate (for a brief moment) the work I've put into the book, and bad ones tug at my sense of self-worth and sometimes invite me to look honestly at what I've done or failed to do.  But when I get back to work, writing the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next exchange of dialog, well, the reviews, good or bad, are a distant memory and have very little if any lasting effect.

Still it was a nice day to see: "terrific sex scenes."

 

Another Nice Review

 Booklist is one of those periodicals that librarians (bless their hearts) read and thus, the book reviews often help them select new purchases.  Ordinary book readers usually are unaware of Booklist's importance in the publishing business, but it carries considerable weight among booksellers, editors, publishers, and other book reviewers.  The folks at Booklist have always been fans of my novels (showing more enthusiasm for some books than others).  

What I always value in a review is a smooth and efficient retelling of the storyline (without spoilers) and an appreciation for some of the other intangibles in the prose that I work so hard on creating.

This review has both.

Thorn is a hermetic, fly-tying loner whose attempts to carve a separate peace for himself on Key Largo are only intermittently successful.  Inevitably, he’s drawn into somebody else’s fight, or, in a kind of reverse serendipity, simply walks into a mess that needs fixing.  And when Thorn gets to fixing something, he doesn’t stop until the job’s done.  Ah, but the collateral damage, there’s the rub.  Too often Thorn’s knight-errantry puts those he loves in danger.  This time it’s a little different.  The problem is Thorn’s newly discovered son (Dead Last, 2011), who has joined forces with a band of ecoterrorists who have designs on Florida’s largest nuclear-power plant. (The plan is supposed to be nonviolent, but a cell within the cell has other ideas.)  Thorn’s only hope of extricating his son is to join up with the terrorists, which raises the bar on possible collateral damage to a new high.  Hall is one of those rare thriller writers who can build character as he ratchets tension, who can do no-holds-barred action scenes with panache and, in the midst of bedlam, never loses sight of nuance.  All those skills are on display here, as Hall assembles a full-bodied supporting cast whose stories hold our interest as much as Thorn’s attempt to save his son without helping to bring about a South Florida version of Chernobyl.  A fine thriller on every level.

--Bill Ott, Booklist, November 1, 2013

Reviews

Like it or not, getting reviewed is part of the deal when you're a writer.  A year's worth of work (and sometimes much more) summarized, praised, dismissed, or castigated in a couple of paragraphs.

I remember at the beginning of my career with Under Cover of Daylight I got dozens of great reviews, including a standalone in the New York Times with my photograph, a half a page of space and it was written by Charlie Willeford, and I thought in my naivete that this was normal and expected and no big deal.

Well, it was a big deal, and my publishing career zoomed off the launching pad in a wonderfully lucky trajectory.  Now I see just how lucky those early reviews were.  They gave my publisher confidence to increase the advertising budget and to place full page ads in the New York Times and elsewhere.  As a result that novel sold many times more copies than the average first novel does.

And I got a big dose of undeserved pridefulness.  The years have cut me down to size.  Under Cover was a good book, and one I'm proud of, but there were dozens and dozens of other books as good that were published at the same time but didn't get the reviews I got, and some of those writers suffered as a result, their careers probably affected by the lack of early attention. 

I appreciate all the reviews now, good and bad.  I'm always interested in seeing how someone writes about something I've worked so hard on.  I've gotten some really wonderfully well-written savagely negative reviews and some ho-hum good ones in the 30 years since Under Cover.

I remember complaining once to Elmore Leonard that I'd just gotten a bad review on one of the novels and he used that wise old adage: 'Did they spell your name right?'  Implying of course that any publicity is good publicity.  Later on at that same lunch he mentioned a journalist he was scheduled to do an interview with in a couple of days and he said he wasn't sure he wanted to talk to the guy because he'd once called Dutch "the most over-rated crime writer in America."  He remembered more of the quote, and knew it word for word. 

So yes, any press (or blog post, or Amazon or Goodreads post, etc.) is good press, but even someone of Dutch Leonard's stature was hurt by some reviewer's zinger.

With that in mind, (and much more that I don't have time to recount right now), I offer the following review, the first to appear on Going Dark, the novel that's coming in December.  It's a good one.  And damn, I'm grateful.  And they did spell my name right too.

Publisher's Weekly

Starred Review *

Moral ambiguity seasons the violent action in Edgar-winner Hall’s outstanding 13th thriller featuring laconic loner Thorn (after 2011’s Dead Last). Thorn, who lives in the undeveloped backwoods of Key Largo and loathes the kind of hyperdevelopment that’s ruining Florida, is roused from his isolation to extricate his grown son, Flynn Moss, whose existence he only recently became aware of, from the Earth Liberation Front, a group of ecological terrorists who are planning to shut down a nearby atomic power plant. Thorn actually is sympathetic with ELF’s goals—but he doesn’t trust them. Meanwhile, FBI agent Frank Sheffield begins uncovering a plot to create a nuclear disaster that could annihilate Miami, while a beautiful female Homeland Security agent and a cocksure psycho who likes to play with electricity are working their own schemes. Hall shifts among the skillfully drawn characters, each uncertain of which ends justify extreme means, as the action races toward a literally explosive climax at the nuclear plant. The result is both thoughtful and white-knuckle tense.

Zombies

 Watched World War Z a couple of nights ago.  I'm not a zombie aficionado, but the film got me wondering about why there's such a resurgence of interest in zombies.

Here's an excellent article that considers the Meaning of Zombies.

I think there's something in the air these days, maybe as a result of the 2008 financial crisis, plus 9/11 that puts the Apocalypse on our psychic radar more prominently than any time I remember since the Cuban missile crisis.

Back then my father built a bomb shelter in our basement.  I grew up in a small Kentucky town less than twenty miles from Ft. Campbell where the 101st Airborne is based.  So we considered ourselves to be a target, at least within the blast zone of the approaching atomic war.

Duck and Cover

I remember the sense of dread I felt for years about that bomb shelter in our basement.  The dread was not about nuclear winter or the destruction and death of the world as I knew it, but I dreaded sitting in a small room for any great length of time with my mother.  Yikes.

What would we talk about during those long hours as we ate canned peaches and beans?  What about the toilet?

When the Cuban missile crisis ended, the bomb shelter was not dismantled.  My father left it in place, only a few feet away from where I'd created a small space to work on building my customized model cars.  I specialized in building 32 Ford hotrods.

In my model car workshop, I built many versions of this car, using pieces of corduroy fabric to imitate rolled and pleated upholstery, and sanded away all the door joints and added blowers and lake pipes to the engine and after doing many many layers of spray paint to imitate the candy apple reds that struck my hotrod fancy back then, I would take those beautiful plastic model cars way out into the backyard and put a cherry bomb inside them and blow them up.

Someone get that poor kid a shrink.

My writing room where I now work is also in a basement (for the half year I'm in Carolina), and I often think of that old basement in Kentucky where I created stuff with such care then destroyed it.

The fear of the Apocalypse that my generation felt was real.  Nuclear war was very possible.  And my parents had already witnessed the Great Depression and World War II and thus they were primed to believe that another End of the World scenario was a credible threat. 

So when I watch a zombie movie like World War Z, it's easy to get back in touch with all those fears, especially now that they are reawakened by a general sense of dread about climate change, terrorist attacks, financial disaster, cyber attacks, and a host of other dangers that seem all too likely to occur.

These days I try not to blow up the things I've worked so hard to create.  But when I think of that kid who lit the fuses of those cherry bombs, I can't help thinking that one thing he was trying to do back then was to keep those beautiful creations out of the hands of the zombies who were lurking just beyond the horizon.

 

Elmore Leonard

I took this photo earlier this month while attending Elmore Leonard's funeral.

This is the tennis court in the backyard of his home.  The net is down.  The court is covered in black mold.  It seems like a fitting image for the way I felt during my couple of days in Detroit.

The funeral itself took place at the Holy Name Catholic church that Elmore attended most of his life.  A beautiful and moving ceremony.  Here's the front and back of the program.  And two photos which I think capture wonderfully two of the sides of Elmore.  Serious, thoughtful, wise.  And twinkling with humor.

I was staying in a Holiday Inn not far from the funeral home in Troy, Michigan, about 15 miles from Detroit itself.  My trusty GPS had steered me from the beautiful new airport (this city is bankrupt?) to my hotel and then it had successfully located the funeral home the afternoon I arrived.

At the funeral home visitation, I spoke with Dutch's family and with Greg Sutter, a wonderful man, a friend, and Dutch's researcher for many years.  The casket was open, a fact I had not fully prepared myself for.  But the guy looked good, even dead, a little more serious than in the photo just above (taken by his good friend Mike Lupica, a terrific guy).  He didn't have his usual twinkle, but who would under those circumstances.

The next day was the funeral service.  I punched in the address and left the motel very early just in case. 630 Harmon Street.  I drove south on the interstate for about twenty minutes, back into the city of Detroit and exited, as instructed by my British speaking GPS lady, on Caniff Street.  Well, the potholes got deeper every block I went and the neighborhood got grimmer.

I told myself, well, Dutch just hung in there with his childhood church long after the neighborhood went bad.  Just like him not to be distressed by such a scary area.  Then the street seemed to narrow, guys in baggy clothes started staring at me, started drifting toward my car, started blocking the way, and I said, well, maybe not.

And U-turned and headed back to the interstate.  Well, the church was on 630 Harmon Street after all, but that Harmon Street was in Birmingham not Detroit, as I had wrongly told my GPS.

Birmingham is to Detroit as Coral Gables is to Overtown.  A beautiful, graceful town well north of the potholes and crack houses.

It felt like a moment from one of Dutch's novels.  In fact, Caniff Street figured prominently in City Primeval, a novel I just finished re-reading.  Two people were gunned down there.

INSPIRING

The service was wonderful.  His sons, Peter and Bill spoke humorously and touchingly about their dad.  The man was a great dad, just as I would've imagined.  The granddaughters sang.  A violinist played a beautiful rendition of "A Little Help From My Friends."  But several of us commented afterwards that the most surprising and most emotional moment came at the end of the service when an officer from the United States Navy led two of his associates through the Military Honors drill.  Taps was played, the flag was folded, Dutch's military service was described.  Another from the greatest generation fades from view.

Dutch was incredibly generous to me.  He entered my life before my first novel was published and he figured prominently throughout my literary career, assisting me in ways that were above and beyond the call.  His novels, of course, were also deeply influential on shaping my own style, perhaps too much so at the beginning of my career, a fact he noted once with a wry wink.  

I've had a couple of literary fathers.  Dutch was one.  

I hope someone cleans the black mold off that tennis court soon and strings up the net.

Been Seriously Slacking

Okay, okay.  It's been months, seems like even longer, since I was here last, but I've decided to get back to work and use my blog again.  See how it works out. 

 I'm going to be focusing on things that relate to my writing life, publication, reviews, book tour.  The creative process.  





For the more personal stuff, I still spend a bit of time on  Facebook, which you can find here.

Or you can follow me on Twitter.