Cartoon of the Day: Cats

MARK COGGINS & REECE HIRSCH LITERARY SALON: September 18

Upcoming Literary Salon in Berkeley, CA

When: Wednesday, September 18, 2019, 7 p.m.

Who: Mark Coggins & Reece Hirsch

Where: RSVP for venue address (Berkeley, CA)

This is a free event, but YOU MUST RSVP to attend.

Space is limited. Venue address sent with acceptance.

Please make a comment below with your email address.

Mark Coggins

Born in the Four Corners region of New Mexico, Mark Coggins earned two degrees and a Phi Beta Kappa Key from Stanford University. He has worked for a number of Silicon Valley computer and venture capital firms, including Netscape Communications and Hewlett Packard Company.

While at Stanford, he studied creative writing with Tobias Wolff and Ron Hansen and wrote the first story featuring his series character August Riordan in a class taught by Hansen. This story, “There’s No Such Thing as Private Eyes,” was later published in The New Black Mask, vol. 4, Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich.

His books have been nominated for the Shamus and the Barry crime fiction awards and have been selected for best of the year lists compiled by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Detroit Free Press and Amazon.com, among others.

Runoff and The Big Wake-Up won the Next Generation Indie Book Award and the Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) respectively, both in the crime fiction category. The Immortal Game was optioned for a film. His latest mystery, The Dead Beat Scroll, has just been published.

Coggins has published short fiction in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and the anthology Masters of Technique, as well as nonfiction in View Camera and Distributed Object Computing magazines.

He is also a photographer. Images of his have been shown in galleries across the United States and Europe, including exhibitions jurored by acclaimed photographers and curators Amy Arbus, Elizabeth Avedon, Judy Dater, Henry Horenstein and Michael Kenna. He has won multiple awards, participated in solo and small group shows, and he has published a monograph entitled The Space Between.

REECE HIRSCH

Reece Hirsch is the author of four thrillers that draw upon his background as a privacy attorney. His first book, The Insider, was a finalist for the 2011 International Thriller Writers Award for Best First Novel. His next three books, The Adversary, Intrusion, and Surveillance, all feature former Department of Justice cybercrimes prosecutor Chris Bruen. His thriller Black Nowhere was just published.


Hirsch is a partner in the San Francisco office of an international law firm and cochair of its privacy and cybersecurity practice. He is also a member of the board of directors of the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation (www.valentinoachakdeng.org).

Reece earned his law degree from the University of Southern California and a B.S. degree in journalism from Northwestern University. Prior to law school, Reece worked as a journalist in Atlanta for several years, including a stint as an assistant editor of a business magazine. He also edited and published an arts and entertainment magazine in Atlanta.

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Through the Past, Darkly: Guest Post by William Shaw

Play With Fire is set in London in 1969, the era when everyone used typewriters and carbon paper. It was written on a Mac.

I like to think about that difference sometimes between then and now. I imagine a room full of beat-hardened constables from London’s Metropolitan Police one-finger typing, fight-scabbed hands angrily stabbing the keys, one at a time.

Back then, the Metropolitan Police force of the late sixties was staffed with men from a totally different era; it was a force that was institutionally corrupt and contained more than a few officers who thought nothing of fabricating evidence to convict whoever they assumed was guilty. This was a force in which the newly formed Drug Squad would later be discovered to be selling drugs they’d confiscated back to drug dealers. As for procedure, in those days there was almost no forensic evidence gathered at a crime scene beyond finger prints. Officers would happily trample mob-handed all over the evidence.

Play With Fire is also set in an era 20 years before the demise of the Soviet Union, which nobody could ever imagine collapsing back then. It seemed monolithic; unstoppable.

The book features a real-life spy exchange that happened that year - members of the infamous Communist Portland Spy Ring were exchanged for an unfortunate British lecturer who had been caught in Russia with anti-Soviet leaflets. The KGB spy ring, who were connected to the Rosenbergs in New York, worked with short wave radio and microdots to pass on secrets about British nuclear submarines. The Cold War was very present in London around that time; it was just one of the facts of life along with red phone boxes, thruppeny bits and double-decker buses.

On one level it feels like 1969 was such a long time ago. And yet, the book also opens at the Rolling Stones Hyde Park concert of that year, when Mick Jagger recited Shelly and released thousands of white butterflies into the air as a memorial for ex-Rolling Stone Brian Jones.

Jones had died in a swimming pool only a few days later and the mystery surrounding the 27-year-old guitarist’s death is part of my story too. Was he deliberately killed, or was it just what happens to young people if they take too many drugs, drink too much and then decide to swim on their own?

On the set list that day in Hyde Park were songs like Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Satisfaction, Honky Tonk Women and Sympathy For The Devil, songs you can still hear any day on the radio, songs that still sound as alive and modern and abrasive as they did fifty years ago. In amongst that old world was the soundtrack for our new one, shiny, new and outrageously arrogant.

That’s what I enjoyed, writing this book and the others in this series so much. In some senses 1969 was such a long time ago, and yet in others it was a year that was still very present in our lives. There was a war going on in 1969, and it wasn’t just in Vietnam. The clunky old certainties of the post-war world were doing battle with blaring, cocky individualism of the rock generation; and that makes for a great backdrop for any crime story.

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William Shaw is an award-winning music journalist and the author of several non-fiction books including Westsiders: Stories of the Boys in the Hood. Prior to becoming a crime writer, he worked at the post-punk magazine ZigZag and a journalist for The Observer, The New York Times, Wired, Arena, and The Face. His latest novel Play With Fire is a gripping police thriller set in the ever-intriguing world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Think Prime Suspect 1973 meets a throwback episode of Law and Order: SVU set in the ’60s!

Cartoon of the Day: Feline Chess Tournaments

Happy Caturday!

NED KELLY AWARDS: Australian Crime Writers Association

The Australian Crime Writers Association announced the winners for the 2019 Ned Kelly Awards.

2019 Best Fiction
The Lost Man by Jane Harper

2019 Best True Crime
Eggshell Skull by Bri Lee

2019 Best First Fiction
The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan

Ann Cleeves' The Long Call TV News!

From Deadline:

Silverprint Pictures is set to adapt Ann Cleeves' new mystery The Long Call for television. The producer has optioned the book which is the first in Cleeves’ new Two Rivers series.

Silverprint previously adapted Cleeves’ Shetland, which has run for five seasons on the BBC, and Brenda Blethyn-fronted Vera, which was recently renewed for a tenth season on ITV.

The book, which is published by Pan Macmillan (Minotaur Books in the U.S.) was just released today. It's set in North Devon, where the author spent her teenage years. It follows the reserved and complex Detective Inspector Matthew Venn, as well as an ensemble of characters, evoking the stark beauty of the North Devon coastline, and a community where murder and intrigue bubble just beneath the surface.

The opening of The Long Call has Detective Matthew Venn standing outside the church as his estranged father’s funeral takes place. When he left the strict, evangelical community he grew up in, he lost his family, too. But a call to investigate a murdered body found on the beach nearby soon brings Matthew back to the people and places of his past. What he discovers there will force Matthew’s new life into a collision course with the world he thought he’d left behind.

I loved the book. It's such a wonderful addition to Cleeves' oeuvre. Totally gripping! Can't wait to see it on screen.