LEE CHILD & MICHAEL CONNELLY: Book Passage Online Event - October 1

Mark your calendar. Book Passage presents Lee Child with Michael Connelly - Safe Enough (Online Event): October 1, 11 a.m. PDT. 

Lee Child joined in-conversation with Michael Connelly for live virtual event celebrating Safe Enough: Crime Stories by the Author of Jack Reacher. 

Presentation followed by live Q&A session. Get your questions answered! 
Watch the archived recording again after the event at your convenience here. 

And... on Saturday, October 26th at 4PM PT either in-person at Book Passage, Corte Madera location or online in celebration of NYT bestselling author Michael Connelly for his latest work The Waiting : A Ballard and Bosch Novel. 

LEARN MORE>>>

You know Jack Reacher. Now meet twenty more heroes and heavies from the brilliant mind of legendary crime author Lee Child.

A drug-dealing hit man feels that he must unburden his fears and guilt to a stranger in “Ten Keys.” A rookie cop in “Normal in Every Way” is assigned to the department’s file room, where he makes connections to historic dates that could lead to solving crimes. A methodical bodyguard quits his job when he’s outsmarted. A military mission is planned to perfection. A potential worker for the Manhattan Project is carefully surveilled by an FBI agent. A killer preys on other killers. Taken together, these stories are a riotous calamity of criminals and crime fighters; individually, they are expertly crafted, piercing tales that hit hard enough to leave a mark.

These twenty intriguing, thrilling, and rapid-fire fictions are intimate portraits of humanity at its best and worst, sure to please new and longtime fans of Child and to illuminate a side of the author’s work unknown to Reacher devotees. Featuring a colorful new introduction from the author, the collection stands as the first book written entirely by Child in four years.
 

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Lee Child was born on October 29, 1954, in Coventry, England, but spent his formative years in the nearby city of Birmingham. By coincidence he won a scholarship to the same high school that JRR Tolkien had attended. He went to law school in Sheffield, England, and after part-time work in the theater he joined Granada Television in Manchester for what turned out to be an eighteen-year career as a presentation director during British TV’s “golden age.” During his tenure his company made Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Prime Suspect, and Cracker. But he was fired in 1995 at the age of forty as a result of corporate restructuring. Always a voracious reader, he decided to see an opportunity where others might have seen a crisis and bought six dollars’ worth of paper and pencils and sat down to write a book, Killing Floor, the first in the Jack Reacher series.
 

Michael Connelly is the author of thirty-eight previous novels, including New York Times bestsellers Resurrection Walk, Desert Star, and The Law of Innocence. His books, which include the Harry Bosch series, the Lincoln Lawyer series, and the Renée Ballard series, have sold more than eighty-five million copies worldwide. Connelly is a former newspaper reporter who has won numerous awards for his journalism and his novels. He is the executive producer of three television series: Bosch,Bosch: Legacy, and The Lincoln Lawyer. He spends his time in California and Florida.

Michael Connelly will be presenting his latest work The Waiting: A Ballard and Bosch Novel on Saturday, October 26th at 4PM PT both in-person at our Corte Madera location and online. LEARN MORE>>>
 

CARA BLACK in Conversation with Juliet Grames

I love Book Passage, an Indie Bookstore that dedicates a lot of time to mysteries with talks, signings, and workshops. Tomorrow, Saturday, April 11,  they will continue their Shelter-in-Place series "Conversations with Authors"as Cara Black is live in conversation with her Editor Juliet Grames. You have to register, but it's free. Of course it would be great if you ordered Cara's latest book from Book Passage or become a Supporter of Book Passage. Last week I watched two great conversations, one with Anne Lamott and another with Isabel Allende. If you sign up for the Conversations, you'll find last week's are archived.

From Elaine at Book Passage:

Please get ready to join us again Saturday, April 11th, at 7pm est/4pm pacific, for

Cara Black 

live, in conversation with Juliet Grames

Already, more than 9,000 friends have registered to take part in this brand-new online series that re-creates as best we can something we have always been proud to offer our community: intimate conversations with authors as committed to good ideas, to books, and to Book Passage as we are.

If you missed last weekend's wonderful and inspiring conversations with Anne Lamott or Isabel Allende, you can view them now, or any time, at our Conversations with Authors website. (If you know someone who would like see them, please fee free to share this email with them, and direct them there, and encourage them to take part.)

And, please also consider becoming a Supporter of Book Passage. We so appreciate everyone's overwhelming, generous response to this program. too.

BOOK PASSAGE MYSTERY WRITERS CONFERENCE: September 27-30

Book Passage announced it is accepting registration for its 2018 Mystery Writers Conference, set for September 27-30 in Corte Madera, CA. Now in its 25th year, the conference is a popular venue for wide audiences—aspiring writers looking for industry info, an agent, or a publisher; readers who enjoy hearing favorite authors on panels; and published writers looking to find new readers and network with other writers. The Mystery Writers Conference is co-chaired by bestselling mystery authors Cara Black and David Corbett.

The four-day conference offers new and hopeful mystery writers the opportunity to work closely with mystery writers, agents, editors, and publishers as well as investigators and crime-fighting professionals. Established mystery authors offer classes on setting, dialogue, suspense, point of view, and openings. Sessions will include how to write about private eyes, amateur sleuths, and police protagonists, and how to create thrillers and historical mysteries. The conference also features panels of detectives, forensic experts, police officers, and other crime-fighting professionals—including former special agent to the FBI, George Fong, and Marin County Coroner Ken Holmes.

For mystery fans, there will be special evening events open to the public for free, including the Saturday, September 29, presentation “Dead Men Tell No Tales…or Do They? Forensics in Fiction” from 6 to 7 p.m. The event is co-sponsored by Alta Journal of California and will feature Mr. Holmes as well as husband and wife pathologists Judy Melenick and T.J. Mitchell.

“Book Passage’s Mystery Writers Conference has a strong tradition of great authors and teachers—many whom have published hundreds to thousands of books,” says Elaine Petrocelli, owner and president of Book Passage. “Chances are, if you have a favorite American mystery writer, he or she has most likely taught at our conference.”

Petrocelli added that some of the mystery writers on the conference faculty began their career as students at the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference and have returned as published authors and teachers—like Cara Black, the bestselling author of the Aimee Leduc mysteries set in Paris. “The conference bolstered my skills and helped me get published,” Black shares. “You can’t beat the caliber or the inspiration."

In addition to conference co-chairs Cara Black and David Corbett, this year’s conference faculty will include Isabel Allende, Kelli Stanley, Tim Maleeny, Danny Gardner, Rachel Howzell Hall, Lisa Unger and Jacqueline Winspear. (For a complete list of current faculty, please visit bookpassage.com)

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Are you a member of MWANorCal? 

Book Passage now offers MWA NorCal members a $75 discount on their excellent Mystery Writing Conference!  That nearly pays for a year’s MWA membership!

Bill Petrocelli: Solved: The Mystery of the Mystery Seller who became a Mystery Writer

Today I'm very pleased to welcome bookseller Bill Petrocelli. Bill has 'crossed the line' from mystery bookseller to mystery writer, and it's an amazing ride. You have to read The Circle of Thirteen.

Bill Petrocelli and his wife Elaine own one of the country's leading independent bookstores, Book Passage, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Both Petrocellis have been highly active in the bookselling business nationally. Elaine Petrocelli was named “1997 Bookseller of the Year” by Publishers Weekly magazine, while Bill Petrocelli has served two terms on the board of directors of the American Booksellers Association. As a former Deputy Attorney General for the State of California and a poverty lawyer in Oakland, Bill has long been an advocate for women’s rights. His previous books include Low Profile: How to Avoid the Privacy Invaders and Sexual Harassment on the Job: What it is and How to Stop it. The Circle of Thirteen is his first novel. For more information, please visit http://www.williampetrocelli.com.

** Giveaway ** WIN A COPY OF THE CIRCLE OF THIRTEEN. Comment below to be entered.**

BILL PETROCELLI:
Solved: The Mystery of the Mystery Seller who became a Mystery Writer 

Let me introduce you to Julia Moro, the Security Director for the revitalized United Nations. At the moment – which happens to be 2082 – she is trying to foil a terrorist plot against the U.N.

Yes, I’ve now joined the thriller-writing ranks.

The Circle of Thirteen is now sharing space at Book Passage with the hundreds of other mysteries on our shelves. I’m happy to be in such good company. I’ve been hanging around with mystery writers for so long, it’s inevitable that a lot of their ideas would have rubbed off on me. The real question is: why did it take so long?

The Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference is now entering its 20th year. During that time we’ve welcomed more than 600 mystery writers as faculty members. (We’ve also welcomed over 1,500 attendees to those conferences, many of whom have gone on to be published mystery writers. And some of them, have come back as faculty members. But that’s another story). And if you add in the hundreds of mystery writers who stop by the store each year for author events, you end up with many, many hours that we’ve spent thinking and talking about perps, vics, wits, and all the other staples of crime-writing.

That sampling of mystery writers is probably big enough for a statistician – even an amateur statistician, like me – to draw some conclusions. First, mystery writers are nice people. Sure, there are lots of other nice people in the world, but mystery writers are nicer than most. If this were a bell-curve, they’d mostly be huddled over on the right side. And there’s a pleasant corollary to that: mystery writers make good faculty members. They’re easy to work with and willing to share ideas with students.

There’s a theory what could explain this: mystery writers spend so much time getting their aggressions out on paper and channeling the nasty parts of their psyche through their villains, that they are perfectly pleasant when it’s all over. It seems valid to me.

Here’s another generality about mystery writers: they don’t horse around with inconsequential stuff. Good mystery writing is visceral. That’s not just because of the blood, the gore, or – pardon the expression – the viscera described at the scene of the crime. Rather, it is visceral because the language of mysteries is usually specific and tactile, being rooted in characters, situations, details, and clues. Good mystery writers adhere to the dictum of the late, great Elmore Leonard: “Leave out the part readers skip.” In a good mystery, the tension doesn’t wander off in extraneous directions. It’s the kind of writing I like to read.

But is it the kind of writing I could write? That was the challenge I was up against when I began The Circle or Thirteen. The idea behind the story was to take a look at the changing role of women in our society by setting the story a few decades into the future. I wanted the scenes to be close enough to the present to seem relevant, but I didn’t want them so close that readers would expect me to fill in all the missing details (“Who wins the next election?” “How’s the market doing?” “What does the next IPhone look like?”). Readers might think they want that, but those types of scenes would quickly run afoul of Elmore Leonard’s dictum. Readers would skip them and be annoyed with me for even tempting them to read them.

There were other problems as well. Telling such a story in a linear fashion, like a family saga, would force me to make up all kinds of extraneous, intervening detail that would even put me to sleep. The plot would have all the tension of yesterday’s noodle soup.

In the end I employed a plot device used to great success by the British crime writer Robert Wilson in A Small Death in Lisbon. Wilson won a Gold Dagger for that great mystery novel in 1999. In it, he employed two narratives – one a contemporaneous story that was compressed within a few days; the other an historical tale stretching over 40 or so years. As the historical narrative inevitably caught up with the contemporary one, the tension was ratcheted up.

And that brings me back to Julia Moro, as she tries to protect the United Nations. While she is focused on foiling a terrorist plot, the history of the last several decades is beginning to close in on her. She’d love to tell you about everything she is going through.

Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference

July 25-28, 2013 - Corte Madera, CA: 20th Annual Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference. Mystery writers learn all the clues to a successful writing career. Editors, agents, and publishers share with participants what they need to know to get published. Authors offer classes on setting, dialogue, suspense and point of view. Panels of detectives, forensic experts, and other crime-fighting professionals provide invaluable information that allows writers to put realism into their work.

The four-day Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference has a strong tradition of great authors and teachers. It covers everything mystery writers need—from developing ideas and writing skills to finding a publisher. Students work closely with mystery writers, agents, editors, and publishers as well as investigators and crime-fighting professionals. The collegial atmosphere of this four-day conference attracts students and faculty from all over the country, many for repeat visits. Opportunities abound for faculty and students to talk, laugh, and exchange ideas in classes, workshops, panels, and informal lunches. There are optional writing workshops taught by David Corbett and Hallie Ephron, on Thursday afternoon just prior to the Conference. They are available to participants for an additional fee. The Mystery Writers Conference is chaired by mystery writers Sheldon Siegel and Jacqueline Winspear.

2013 Faculty
Isabelle Allende, Matt Bayan, Cara Black, Rhys Bowen, Hallie Ephron, Elizabeth George and many more. 

Schedule

For more information or to register, contact Kathryn Petrocelli at 800-999-7909, ext. 239, or email bpconferences@bookpassage.com.

Czechmate: The Spy Who Played Jazz: Bill Moody

Join Bill Moody, author and musician, in celebration of his latest mystery Czechmate: The Spy Who Played Jazz. Bill will be joined on stage by pianist Dick Fregulia and bassist Steve Webber for a live jazz session to accompany the reading. Czechmate is the latest installment of Moody's popular Evan Horne mystery series. Book Passage, Corte Madera, CA. Saturday, November 3, 5:30 p.m.

I asked Bill to write a few words about Czechmate: The Spy Who Played Jazz. 

BILL MOODY: 

In 1968, I found myself not only at the Prague Jazz Festival, playing with a Czech band, but also embroiled in a political hot spot when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. Based on this experience, I decided to try my hand at a spy thriller, combining the jazz festival with the invasion.  

Czechmate: The Spy Who Played Jazz was born,  but it was difficult to find it a home. I finally connected with a small publisher in 1986, but before it was released, the facility burned to the ground. By the time the insurance investigation was completed, the Berlin Wall had come down, so cold war spy novels were a hard sell.

I never gave up and kept trying over the years, finally finding another publisher now that Czechmate could be labeled historical espionage. The book is also a  lesson in persistence. It only took 26 years.  

I'll be talking about the book and my experience on November 3 at Book Passage in Corte Madera that will include a set with my trio. Hope to see you there.

April Mystery Writing Workshops San Francisco Bay Area

Upcoming April Mystery Writers' Workshops in the San Francisco Bay Area:

David Corbett will hold a one-day workshop on Demonstrate Character: Make a Scene, Saturday, April 4: 10 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Book Passage, Corte Madera, CA (415) 927-0960

Berkeley Mystery Writing Intensive, April 18, One-day workshop Attending Authors: Juliet Blackwell aka Hailey Lind, David Corbett, Sophie Littlefield, Tim Maleeny and Cornelia Read. Berkeley City Club, Berkeley, CA To register: Send a check for $140 payable to Cornelia Read to Berkeley mystery Writing Intensive, 7311 Eureka Ave, El Cerrito, CA 94530. For questions, call 510-525-7059.

Book Passage Mystery Writers Confererence: July 16-19. More to come. Great mystery author instructors