THE LATEST NEWS 2009 The city of Brentwood chose Deadgame as the book they read for their CityRead program this year. The California Center for the Book at UCLA gets people into libraries to read and talk what they've read. They picked four books set in different parts of California: Laurie R. King's The Art of Detection, Nadia Gordon's Sharpshooter, Nina Revoyr's Southland, and Kirk's SHELL GAMES. The Art of Detection is set in San Francisco, Sharpshooter in Napa, Southland in LA, and Shell Games on the north coast. Check out the DVD trailer for this event, Mysterious California: Four Authors, here: 2008 Mysterious California: Four Authors Last winter I got an email from Mary Menzel who directs a non profit called California Center for the Book at UCLA. They're affiliated with the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, as well as the California Library Association, and try to get people into libraries and reading and talking what they've read. The email was an invitation to be part of a program they were working on that would explore California as a place through crime fiction. They read mysteries set in the state and picked Laurie R. King's, The Art of Detection, Nadia Gordon's Sharpshooter, Southland by Nina Revoyr, and Shell Games. Laurie's The Art of Detection is set in San Francisco, Nadia's Sharpshooter in Napa, Nina's Southland in LA, and Shell Games on the north coast. The California Center for the Book puts together "book clubs-in-a-box, and to quote Mary that means, "we send libraries everything they need for a multi-meeting book discussion: multiple copies of four books, publicity materials, discussion questions, and anything else needed to stimulate a lively discussion. You can see details about these programs at www.calbook.org. Pamela Beere Briggs produced and directed the movie, Women of Mystery: Three Writers Who Forever Changed Detective Fiction. That movie was the genesis of a film/book link for these library programs, and Pamela and her husband, filmmaker, Bill McDonald, took on this project. They've made a DVD titled Mysterious California: Four Authors. It's thirty-eight minutes long and goes out with the book clubs-in-a-box program, but can also be purchased from the Pamela Briggs Film Library, P.O. Box 1084, Harriman, NY, 10926, or through a call to 800-343-5540. You can see part of this film here. For libraries in California the book clubs-in-a-box are free or close to it, and there seems to be strong interest already, but if you've got a library in your area that you get to, run it by them. Laurie, Nina, and Nadia have written three very good books and it's lucky to be included with them, and part of the great film Pamela and Bill made. The DVD really comes across and I'm sure the four of us will try to make it to as many of the library events as we can. 2007 There's a road that runs along the narrow ridge between Fallen Leaf Lake and the Angora drainage at Tahoe. I drove up it a couple of days ago with my wife, Judy, and parked near the old Angora lookout station. From there you can look down a steep slope of fir, pine, and manzanita to Fallen Leaf Lake, where on that afternoon there were a few boats out on water that was almost turquoise. On the other side of the road we looked down a steep slope of burned trees and brush and ground that is in shades of gray and black, and well below where the Tahoe fire burned through streets and many houses had only chimneys and metal debris, the remaining hulks of cars and aluminum roofing melted and twisted by the heat. You can see where the wind drove fingers of the fire and the trees that were scorched and not burned, but already brown. And then the dark green of the summer trees where the firefighters stopped the fire, the yellow-green of a long meadow in south lake, and the homes threaded through the trees on streets that did not burn but came close. To the right away from Lake Tahoe and up the mountains toward upper Echo Lake you can see where it must have slowed with less fuel, and off the the left the stands of trees saved before the fire's much reported on run toward Richardson Bay. Whenever the media covers something en masse as they did this fire, and you have a chance to check it out yourself and fit it into your own reality I think it's worth it. Television doesn't really cut it. At least not for perspective. I drove a couple of the streets where homes had burned and then backed away because it seemed an invasion of privacy and wrong to stare at the personal loss of others. From Angora lookout it was a much broader picture and the road was empty and our curiosity did not seem base, and more the common desire to understand the bad that can happen to any of us. Looking down from Angora lookout you could see from the skeletal trees and whiter ash that the fire must have burned very hot at the base of the drainage. It brought to mind the day after the Oakland fire years ago when the company I was a partner in was looking at a school we were being asked to rebuild and the steep slopes behind the school had a layer of white ash on them that made you think of new snow. And yesterday we hiked up Freel Peak which is southeast across the Tahoe Basin, at least fifteen miles as the crow flies and high enough at summit to where you look down on the whole of the very very beautiful Tahoe basin. You see the lake cupped in the mountains and the scar of the fire much smaller in the distance and with grandeur of the basin. The burn scar made small by distance and the great beauty of the lake and the forests of the basin does nothing for those who lost their homes, but it does it put it in a kind of scale that in it's own way is hopeful. I'm not sure what lessons we draw, whether thinning trees before the fire could have made a difference, whether thinning could have saved some or even a good percentage of homes, or whether there's an unavoidable risk in living so close to open country. It seems to be one more thing we'll have to come to terms with in the American west where more and more homes are being built up against national forest. 2007 About a month ago I spent a day and a half up the coast with the SOU, stayed in the safehouse and rode with them in the dawn as they made a sweep down highway 1 checking beaches and coves already crowded with abalone divers. There was a two-foot minus tide that morning and the low tide made the ab beds more accessible. It seemed a daunting task for the undercover team because from Fort Bragg down there were many divers and among them invariably poachers. I listened to the back and forth on the radio, the cell calls, the quick observations as a warden drove past a beach and cued on small details I'm sure most of us would never notice. From time to time I talk to writers who say they don't do any research and sometimes make the point that that all truly good fiction is about people and what kind of gun a protagonist carries or what car they drive, those details are passing anyway. It's the human heart you're writing about and no matter how many ride-alongs you go on, or who you hang out with, you can never know what it's like to live the life. The most common counter is, sure, it's the human heart, but as a crime fiction writer you've got to create verisimilitude. The scene, the novel, needs to feel real, and that's in details, or maybe just one detail. I could never pretend to know what it's like to be Kathy Ponting running the SOU, but getting out there I think sometimes I've seen pieces of the picture that reveal much more. What struck me most on this ride-along and has found its way into the novel I hope to finish in August was Kathy's logbook. I knew all wardens keep a logbook, a detailed record of everything. It is both a record for the department and in some very real way a personal record. Wardens cover a lot of territory and the job requires certain basic facts recorded in the logbook, but the logbook is also a glimpse into how that officer sees the world. The SOU logbook is green and made by the Boorum and Pease Company. The green color is particular to the SOU, different than the rest of the department's logbooks, and so too, I suspect, are the entries of the patrol lieutenant of the SOU. She carries the four previous logbooks with her. Some of the covers are water-stained. All are filled with notes and she keeps them with her because the struggle to insert the team between the poacher and wildlife is ongoing. You might have a note made years ago in a logbook, a description or maybe a vehicle, something that triggers a memory as you watch a diver stash a dive bag filled with abalone in the rocks to retrieve later. When it's safe. When there's no warden around. She carries the green logbooks, writes in the one that's current, but keeps the others where she can reach them if needed. When her career is over she'll turn them all in and they'll be the record of what she saw in California in those years. It's the way in which the logbook is personal that caught me. 2007 It's been a while so here's an update. The novel I wrote last year didn't sell where I'd hoped to sell it, so I wrote a second with a San Francisco homicide inspector and that's circulating at the moment. It may be stubborn to go back at the publishing market with another big city detective novel, but I think San Francisco is a great city for that sort of character. The city isn't large but it's diverse, complex, and often beautiful. The homicide department in SF is also relatively small and I'm hoping if this character catches that'll allow a kind of intimacy with the city that lets the reader feel like you get to know the department and the streets. Meanwhile, I'm working on a new Marquez novel that I hope to finish this summer. It starts in Mexico and plays out on a broader screen than Shell Games, Night Game, or Deadgame. Much of it is set in California and there is poaching but the story doesn't rotate around breaking down a poaching ring, so the action is more varied. It's been fun to write a draft and there's a lot of work ahead still, but I'm hopeful that I can make it whole and that when it's done it reads like something that might have actually happened to this guy, John Marquez. That's where things are. That, and it's a warm spring morning here, garden in bloom, hills bright with new grass, the bay about as blue as the sky. I'm going to step out into it for a little while, get something to eat, and then go back into the story. I also plan to start updating this page more frequently, so please check back soon. Kirk Want to keep up to date? Join the MAILING LIST!