My Black Friday splurge

P.D. James, that illustrious and industrious crime novelist, has made a liar of me.

Three years ago, in one of my last acts as book review editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, I wrote about her Adam Dalgliesh mystery The Lighthouse that "the final pages are unsettlingly elegiac, as if Lady James were at last saying goodbye to her beloved commander." At the time, James was 85 years old, and it was more than reasonable to conclude that she was wrapping up her career as the finest mystery writer of the postwar era.

Without her, I wrote, "the lover of the literary whodunit would be lost in a desert of bang-bang, boink-boink."

She is not everyone's cup of tea. Many readers, spoiled by modern pell-mell plotting and quick, shallow characterization, don't care for the deep detail and careful setting with which she clothes her crimes. They haven't the patience to read slowly and study the tiny clues threaded through her highly intellectual narratives. Pity, for every one of those exquisite details counts -- and, when they finally come together, always result in a deeply satisfying windup.

Now James is 88 and she's still going strong, like the recently departed Studs Terkel, who kept on writing well into his 90s. Those two shame less productive but not quite so elderly geezer-writers like me.

Nope, The Lighthouse wasn't the last Adam Dalgliesh novel. Whether she had it hidden up her sleeve all this time or changed her mind about saying farewell to her hero, I don't know. But she had still another coming.

This week she published The Private Patient (Knopf, $25.95). In this 14th outing, Commander Dalgliesh investigates the murder of a journalist at a private plastic surgery clinic.

Today I'm off to brave the Black Friday crowds at the local Barnes & Noble to buy it, and before long I'll report back on my investigation.

[LATER: Scored a copy of The Private Patient this morning for 70 per cent off the jacket price -- the standard 30 percent cut for a new popular novel plus a 40 per cent Internet coupon. If my B&N membership hadn't run out earlier this year, I'd have saved an additional 10 per cent. Incidentally, the local B&N was almost empty at 9:15 a.m. despite the Black Friday discounts; it took me five minutes to find the book and deal with the single clerk on duty. Times may be even harder than we thought if readers aren't patronizing bookstores.]

This wasn't what I meant, but . . .

A friend, knowing my interest in the captioning (or subtitling) of streaming video, sent me the link to this recent YouTube music video. I have no idea what language the audio is in, but the subtitles seem to have been strained through a German-to-Russian dictionary, and then Russian-to-English. Or something.

Warning: Some of the "translated" lyrics are more than linguistically questionable.

Tinkering, tinkering . . .

With my web site, that is. Yesterday I suffered an unaccustomed attack of ambition and redid part of the home page of www.henrykisor.com so that it emphasized the mystery novels rather than the entire lineup of books. Simpler and sleeker, maybe.

Now, a favor, please: Would you go to the site and have a look? If anything seems amiss -- if stuff doesn't line up squarely, for example -- please let me know, either in a comment below or e-mail. Please specify the browser you are using and whether you are on a PC or Mac.

Thanks, and Merry Thanksgiving. Slap another ladleful of gravy on your mashed potatoes and don't be niggardly with the cranberry sauce.

When good writers commit bad sex

"JM's hands are caressing my breasts, now, and I am allowed to kiss him back, but not for long, for he breaks off, to give each breast the attention it deserves. As he nibbles and pulls with his mouth, his hands find my bush, and with light fingers he flutters about there, as if he is a moth caught inside a lampshade.

"Almost screaming after five agonizingly pleasurable minutes, I make a grab, to put him, now angrily slapping against both our bellies, inside, but he holds both by arms down, and puts his tongue to my core, like a cat lapping up a dish of cream so as not to miss a single drop. I find myself gripping his ears and tugging at the locks curling over them, beside myself, and a strange animal noise escapes from me as the mounting, Wagnerian crescendo overtakes me. I really do hope at this point that all the Spodders are, as requested, attending the meeting about slug clearance or whatever it is."

And there she is, the winner of the Literary Review Bad Sex Award for 2008: the British novelist Rachel Johnson, for Shire Hell. She is the 16th victor in the competition, established by the British critic and novelist Auberon Waugh to discourage literary lions from committing, well, bad sex in their work.

Johnson is in good company. Such luminaries as Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe and Sebastian Faulks have won the award. And at the ceremony in London last night, John Updike was bestowed a lifetime achievement award, having been nominated four times for the top prize, including this year for The Widows of Eastwick. A sample:

"She said nothing then, her lovely mouth otherwise engaged, until he came, all over her face. She had gagged, and moved him outside her lips, rubbing his spurting glans across her cheeks and chin," he writes. "God, she was antique, but here they were. Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room, there on the far end of East Beach, within sound of the sea."

Other passages from novels short-listed for the 2008 awards can be found here. Viewer discretion is highly recommended.

It's enough to drive a writer to dump all his stock in Pfizer (maker of Viagra).

[With thanks to Mediabistro.com for the tip.]

Hard times for writers, too

A bit of a bombshell exploded in the publishing world today: the venerable house of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has stopped acquiring new manuscripts for an undetermined period. Presumably it will go ahead and publish the new books it already has in its pipeline -- it produces 400 fresh titles a year -- but that'll be all for a while.

For the last few months the publishing industry has been fretting about constantly declining book sales, and, like other retailers, bookstores are expecting a very, very poor holiday harvest this year. It stands to reason that publishers would be forced to cut back the numbers of manuscripts they accept, offer much lower advances against royalties, and print far fewer copies, hoping to sell through a modest first printing rather than having to accept large numbers of returns to be dumped on the remainder market -- or pulped.

"It seems tougher and tougher to make sales," said a literary agent I know. "We've definitely noticed a change since the fall. First, MacAdams/Cage stopped acquiring and now HMH is putting a freeze on their acquisitions as well. That being said, HMH is such a well-established house that we are hopeful that they will bounce back. It seems to us that in these hard economic times, people would want to curl up with a good book."

The cutbacks may be the harbinger of a long, long drought for "midlist" writers, those whose books sell in middling numbers. If other publishers follow suit, writers are going to have to find other jobs, if there are other jobs to find -- or try to live on what remains of their pensions and 401Ks.

It's not going to be easy to win new book contracts with publishers on the basis of a couple of chapters and an outline. More and more authors will have to submit entire manuscripts in order to get their projects considered, and it'll be a brave and dedicated (and maybe foolhardy) writer who'll go to this length. And God help him if his offering is a "niche" book -- most publishers, increasingly ruled by the blockbuster mentality, are likely to take only new works they think will bring large piles of revenue.

This contretemps has been a long time in the making; it's not just collateral damage from the financial crisis. For years more and more new titles have been chasing fewer and fewer readers. Increasingly the printed book, like the printed newspaper, appears to be an obsolete business model whose audience is simultaneously aging and shrinking.

When this mess is over, the publishing world will have changed immensely. Text will still be delivered, but the chief means of delivery is likely to be much less costly than the printed and bound book sold in stores. I'll go out on a not very shaky limb and predict that in five to ten years the majority of books will be sold in electronic form and read on Kindles and their kith. (Right now only about 1 per cent of books appear first in e-book form, but the number tripled this year.)

I'll also predict that there will be far, far fewer authors who can make a living at full-time writing. Already most of us, at least the lucky ones, have day jobs.

How are we going to make it? Maybe we will need a new Federal Writers' Project, the Depression scheme that employed large numbers of starving authors in the 1930s.

Brother, can you spare a dime?

Now this is how it should be done

Barack Obama's Change.gov website is now captioning the streaming YouTube video of the president-elect's weekly fireside chats. Here's yesterday's address on the economy:



To get the captions, start the video rolling. If the captions don't appear immediately, click the "up arrow" at the right side of the screen, then the "CC" symbol. You'll see the transcript, word for word as Obama speaks, at the bottom of the screen. (You could teach yourself how to read lips by turning off the sound, then glance at the captions as you focus on Obama's face.)

Now why can't the American news organizations do this with their streaming videos? There are a lot of hearing-impaired and deaf people in this country -- perhaps 20 million of us -- and regular captioning would attract a lot of new business to a news web site. Besides, goddam it, it would be the right thing to do.

(With thanks to Tina Davidson for the heads-up.)

Two days in a railfan's heaven

Here's a selection of photos from last week's visit to the rail buff's shrine at La Plata, Mo. Click on each photo for a slightly larger version. (See the Nov. 20 blogpost below for the story of my trip.)


A handcar and other railroad implements greet guests at the front door of the Depot Inn. Train stuff of all kinds is scattered around the property.


Inside, the check-in desk looks like a railroad station ticket office.


There's enough reading material in the lobby to please the most dedicated railfan, and an old-fashioned pool table as well.


The wall separating the breakfast area from the pool features a huge, detailed model train that bears close study.


This stained glass Super Chief in one window gives the place almost a religious ambience for rail buffs.


There's no dearth of rail memorabilia, even in the hotel's swimming pool.


The pool is refilled from a replica of an old steam locomotive water spout at upper left.


The amenities of the Pullman Suite, where I stayed, include a fireplace and a big flat-screen television . . .


. . . and a jacuzzi big enough for two.


The long corridor to the standard bedrooms features rail memorabilia . . .


. . . including dozens of signal lanterns from a variety of railroads . . .


. . . and, of course, model trains of all makes and sizes.


The old Santa Fe Ry. station at La Plata is a photographer's paradise.


Art Deco ambience marks the station's interior.


Where's the train? When is it going to get here?


A remarkably large contingent of passengers from a small town greets the eastbound Southwest Chief.


The polite and patient Amish were the last to board the train.


Above the tracks near the station lies an enclosed, heated railfan's lookout, complete with His and Hers outhouses to the left.










On the short path from the hotel to the lookout lies an old roadside memory for railfans of a certain age.


The lookout itself is modest but snug and warm, with tables and chairs inside. The antenna beams continuous video of passing trains to all the TV sets at the Depot Inn.


During two and a half hours at the lookout, only one freight train came by, appearing so quickly that I was able to get only one photograph. That was the only disappointment of the trip. (The building across the tracks hosts Trainweb.com and its sister operation, Trainparty.com.)