Let’s have us a Chicago-style election

My debut novel is finally out. You can pick up PENANCE at bookstores, well, not everywhere exactly, but it’s at a lot of them, or through the usual online suspects like Indiebound, Barnes & Noble or Amazon, or, if you’re the ebook type, you can get it direct from Exhibit A. So run out and get a copy. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Back already? Purty, ain’t it?

Chicago’s dubious political history figures prominently in PENANCE, so, to celebrate, I thought I’d commemorate Illinois’s delightful political heritage with an election of my own. What political heritage you ask? Well, a University of Illinois study found more than 1,000 politicians and businesspeople convicted of public corruption in Illinois since 1970. And name another state whose last two governors have spent time in the clink.

So here’s the deal. I’m running a contest to find THE MOST CORRUPT POLITICIAN OF ALL TIME! That’s right, the granddaddy of political malfeasance, the capitain of clout, the ayatollah of pay-ola, the… aw hell, you get the idea.

And ya’ll are gonna help.

Send me a one-paragraph nomination for your political scumbag of choice. It can be anyone from anywhere at anytime in history. I’ll pick the four that amuse me most and then we’ll have us an election. Nominators for each of the Final Four will get to hijack my blog for a day to make their nominating speech, then everybody will get to vote for their favorite.

Remember, this is a Chicago election. Dirty tricks and bribes are not only allowed, they’re encouraged. Vote early, vote often and use any means necessary to curry my favor. You wanna mail me bacon? Cool. Wanna pose au natural with your copy of PENANCE? Who am I to stifle your political creativity. Go ahead, have some fun.

Nominations are due by June 1. June will be convention month. I’ll pick the Final Four and assign guest blog dates. Polls open on July 1 with the winner announced on July 11, to mark a really fun date in Chicago history (more on that later).

The winner gets a signed copy of PENANCE along with a copy of my short fiction collection OLD SCHOOL.

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL! The good folks at Exhibit A are throwing in a one-year ebook subscription that’s worth fifty-two entire British Pounds. I don’t know what that comes to in real American money, but c’mon, what a haul.

STILL NOT ENOUGH? The winner will also be my guest for either burgers at Kuma’s or deep dish pizza at Gulliver’s. (I’ll mail you the books and you get the ebook thingee through the magic of the Interwebs, but you gotta get your own ass to Chicago to collect on the grub.)

So get your nominations in now and start smearing your competitors and sending in your bribes.

May the worst man win.

Old dogs

As I get older, I try to keep the sense of my own decline from infecting my view of everything else. Solipsism is a vice more commonly associated with the young and their often reckless insistence that nothing outside their own minds can possibly matter. They pinball their way through lives, their own and others, until the damage caused and encountered finally breeds a little caution, a realization that there is wisdom in the experience of others, that there are more things on heaven and earth than they had dreamt of in their unseasoned and hormonal philosophies.

There is solipsism in aging, too, the false triumph of experience over memory. The idea that your own creaky knees are the only knees, that the litheness and grace of youth were lies and that decline is truth. The ease with which the optimism and hope you once envisioned is now blotted out by the inexorable yawning maw of the grave.

In short, just because you have your third colonoscopy coming up in a week, you don’t get to assume the whole world is going to shit, too. Your life is esoteric; it’s history that’s universal.

As a younger man, I viewed the arc of history as incontrovertible evidence of the march of progress. Writ large, it still is. Most of us, certainly almost anyone reading this blog, live lives of luxury and privilege that would be the envy of kings and princes in centuries not too long past. Diseases that have been the scourge of man since the dawn of time have been largely eradicated. Instead of regularly confronting starvation we deal with obesity as our bodies, tempered through evolution and tens of thousands of years of scarcity choke on the unexpected largess we have wrung from nature. Politically most of us in the developed world no longer suffer the constant and capricious whims and crushing repression of tyrants and live instead with a balance of security and liberty that, even a few centuries ago, would have seemed the unattainable Utopia of idealistic fools.

As a boy, I watched bull-necked sheriffs turn dogs and fire hoses on my fellow citizens because they dared march for their rights. I saw a huge swath of Chicago burn in riot and rage when their champion was shot down on a Memphis hotel balcony. But I saw laws change, attitudes change, realities change – not enough, not yet, but a lot and in the right directions. Nigger was still common currency in my youth, still tossed around casually by many of my race. Now I only hear it in rap songs.

Fag, homo, queer – these weren’t just pejoratives. For a high school jock in the 1970s they were pedagogical tools. Not tough enough? Not man enough? Then that’s what a coach would call you to goad you back into your rightful place in the world of real men. A coach, an officially sanctioned symbol of authority and the guy who also taught history, who would pound the podium in righteous indignation when decrying the treatment of blacks, of the American Indians, hell of pretty much everybody. In my youth, it would have been progress for homosexuality to even be considered a mental illness. Then it was just a disgusting perversion, one I assumed, given the seeming unanimity of that opinion, to be exceedingly rare. It never occurred to me that, every time those words were used, some of my own team mates, my own classmates, for Christ’s sake my own friends, suffered in shamed and secret silence. It never occurred to me to even think about it. I wasn’t tortured with any horrid homophobia beyond maybe a passing thought that the sexual mechanics of it seemed, well, gross, but in hindsight, I was pretty comfortable with the idea that, should I ever encounter and actual fag, I’d know him right off by his limp wrists, lisping voice and mincing manner. And I wouldn’t like him much.

Until college, until I heard the whispers that the guy down at the end of the dorm room hall was gay, him and the other guy, the guy from the other dorm who used to visit him a lot. Well shit, they both seemed, I dunno, normal. I mean the one guy, he played sports and everything. And maybe, just maybe, if that’s what being a homo was, then it was nothing more than whatever the two of them decided to do while they were behind that closed door. Maybe everything I’d been taught was wrong.

Thirty-five years on, I’ve seen laws change, I’ve seen attitudes change, I’ve seen realities change. Not enough, not yet, but in the right direction.

And then there were the women. Nobody hated them when I was a kid as far as I could tell. People loved their mothers. Most of us thought our sisters were OK. But yeah, things were different. In grade school, girls couldn’t be altar boys, couldn’t be patrol boys – well of course they couldn’t, right? I mean “boy” was part of the title. Girls didn’t have sports teams. They were the cheerleaders. When the nuns picked a handful of us to take an ad hoc field trip into Chicago to see these fancy new computer things our classmate’s dad ran, they just picked boys. Never mind that most of the girls had better grades. Never mind that the dad’s kid was a girl. It’s not like the girls were going to be running those things when they grew up. They were going to be moms. There was a natural order to things, that’s all.

I think I already knew that was wrong. I already knew my own sister was at least as smart as I was, that she wasn’t going to settle like that, and that she shouldn’t have to. By college, the idea that the women in my classes were going to do the same jobs as the guys when they graduated, that felt like a given to me. Yeah, they were going to have a harder time because the old farts who still ran things were dickheads, but surely that would all have changed by now, right? I mean my generation wasn’t going to perpetuate this bullshit, was it?

I’ve seen laws change. I’ve seen attitudes change. I’ve seen realities change. Not just in the right direction, but, in this case, I thought maybe close to enough. I thought maybe society was over the hump on this thing. Sure, there were always going to be some reactionary troglodytes that would never get their misogynistic heads out of there asses, there would always be some bible (or Koran) thumping dickheads so drunk on Jesus juice that they really thought women were just spare ribs cooked up by the hand of their bizarre idea of god in the their science-denying Eden and left here for their use and pleasure. There would always be some of those idiots, but fewer and fewer of them, and more and more marginalized. I thought, as a whole, we were past that.

I guess I was sheltered. I’ve seen young women I know go to Division I schools on athletic scholarships. I’ve been treated by female doctors. In the fields I’ve worked in, women are so common, increasingly even in leadership positions, that the idea of them being sexual chattel in anyone’s mind just seemed laughable. I wasn’t paying enough attention. I was too ready to dismiss the idea that things had not progressed as far as I believed as the strident ranting of overly sensitive feminist types.

Then this Steubenville thing happened. Live and on camera. A girl, either unconscious or barely conscious, being used as a sex toy by a laughing, preening crowd so certain of the propriety of their revolting behavior that they not only weren’t conducting their rape in secret down some dark alley, but that they were taping it, photographing it, tweeting it, celebrating it. And the rapists weren’t products of some distant culture that had indoctrinated them into a woman-hating mindset foreign to our shores. They weren’t even deprived and impoverished inner-city youths desensitized to violence from an anti-childhood spent in an urban war zone. They were normal small-town Midwestern kids.

When their unconscionable acts were revealed, this horrific rape was not met with universal condemnation, but rather with equivocation, as a subject of controversy, as if there was some lens through which it could be viewed that made this rape other than monstrous, that made these rapists other than monsters. When these monsters were found guilty, but guilty as juveniles and so sentenced to one and two years, with the likelihood that their records will be sealed when they are adults, the focus was not on the scars that the victim would bear for the rest of her life, it was on how these fine young gentleman with their shiny GPAs and football skills would now face a tougher lot in life, as though the choice to commit a felony was a tragedy that had befallen the poor boys, not a conscious act of narcissistic and rapacious greed.

The people making these excuses? They weren’t hate-mongering Westboro-baptist nutjobs, they were reporters on CNN. Christ, they were people like me.

And it hit me. Things weren’t moving in the right direction. They were going backwards.

I’m no prude. I think sex is fine. I think it’s great. I think the US has an unhealthy puritanical attitude toward a normal biological impulse, an attitude that is far too influenced by religious traditions bent on the oppression of women and too little influenced by common sense. Paradoxically, we are also a culture that has taken the objectification of women to levels that far exceed those of my youth.

Sure, when I was a kid, women were often used as sex symbols, were often objectified – hell, were usually objectified. But there as the attendant idea that they should be protected. Neither idea was right. Sex should be part of being human, not what makes you inhuman. And nobody should be protected because she is a woman. We all should be protected equally because we are human beings.

Instead, the objectification of women has been amplified as our culture has coarsened. The sexualization is more overt, starts younger and is more constant as technology bombards us through more devices, with more types of media and with fewer constraints. Simultaneously, any idea that a man shouldn’t take advantage of a woman, should instead protect a woman, has been jettisoned as paternalistic sexist garbage. Steubenville is the predictable result.

Should mature, healthy adults be able to celebrate their sexuality in any consensual fashion they choose? Sure. But instead we seem to be raising a society of males turned into voracious sexual gluttons, too many of whom now see the female gender as a self-serve buffet of breasts and genitalia from which they have license to take whatever they want, whenever they want, and with so little fear of consequence that they can tape and tweet their rapes as if life was nothing but a YouTube video, each act itself just a momentary diversion, the reality of it gone when you click the next link. And we seem to be conditioning a generation of young women to accept this as their lot in life, or worse, to encourage and defend it, if the two young women just arrested for threatening the Steubenville rape victim are any indication.

The arc of history, it turns out, does not tilt automatically toward progress. It goes where we drag it.

When it comes to the right of women to control their own sexuality safe from coercion or outright force, when it comes to their right to be seen as complete human beings whose sexuality is no more or less important than that of someone with a penis, when it comes to their right to be treated equally and fairly, we are dragging history in the wrong direction.

Send me your audio book tips and get a signed ARC of PENANCE

PENANCE is coming on April 30.

For most of my life people have been telling me I’m inordinately fond of the sound of my own voice. Well, it turns out a few other people like it too. Chuck Wendig had me do a book trailer, John Hornor Jacobs has borrowed my pipes a couple of times, I’ve recorded a mess of my short fiction, and now I’ll be reading the audio book for my debut novel, PENANCE.

(A hat tip here to the folks at AudioGo, who are producing the audio book, for giving a first-timer a shot, and to Emlyn Rees, my editor at Exhibit A, for going to bat for me when I told him that reading the book is something I’d very much like to do. Going to bat, Emlyn, that’s an American thing, has to do with baseball.)

Now, though, I gotta deliver.

See, I like doing voice work. I like the challenge of bringing a story to life by reading it out loud. I’d like to do more of it. But that ain’t gonna happen if I gum this up. Not to mention PENANCE is my book It’s my first book. So I really don’t want to fuck it up.

But I haven’t been a big audio book consumer over the years. Long car trips a couple of times. I still remember the time I was driving the family down to squat at the joint my parents used to rent for the winter in Florida. My Dad did a fair bit of driving in those days and was an audio book fan. We had compatible tastes and he’d just finished Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith. He knew I’d have some long late-night stretches when the kids were asleep and I could finally shut off that damn Raffi tape, so he lent me the cassettes. It was a great production of a great story. (It’s not like nobody’s heard of Martin Cruz Smith or his Arkady Renko novels, but they’re a few years back now, maybe something some of you newer or younger readers haven’t read. I heartily endorse them. In fact, I just finished Stallion Gate, another Smith novel, this one centered around the final weeks of the Manhattan Project in New Mexico that was also tremendous – so a write to check out if you haven’t yet.)

Sorry, where was I? Oh yeah, I’m driving to Florida and listening to Polar Star. Now remember, I’m kinda old, so this thing was on a mess of cassette tapes. It’s asshole dark thirty AM somewhere in the bowels of southern Georgia and the story is rocketing along to its climax. The tape ends, one more tape to go. And it’s not there. I even pull over to look for it, and I never pulled over. You can ask my kids. As a parent, I was usually a pretty tolerant, easy going guy. But stick me in a minivan with three young kids and 1,200 miles to cover and I changed. Maybe it was just the daunting task. Maybe it was a side effect of my standard travel diet – Diet Dr. Pepper, Hershey’s Minatures and No-Doz. Stopping was not on my agenda. You need to go to the bathroom? Really? You can take a leak when I need gas, kid. So pulling over, that was a big deal. But I did. I pulled over, woke up the kids and ransacked the van. The tape wasn’t there.

We finally get to my parents’ joint and the first thing my old man does is wiggle that last tape at me with a nasty little smile on his face and say “Looking for this?” Dad didn’t let his evil streak off the leash often, but when he did he knew how to stick it in and break it off.

Anyway, the point is I understand how good an audio book can be. And I’m looking for some help here. Are you and audio book fan? What makes one work for you? Or not work? How much “acting” do you expect – how much differentiation between characters’s voices and such?

Finally, what’s one of your favorites – especially in the thriller genre. I’m listening to several as I prep for my taping, and I’m looking to learn from the best.

So drop your tips and favorites in the comments box. To reward you, I’ll pick two comments at random and send the lucky ducks signed ARCs of PENANCE.

Looking in windows

It would have been Christmas Eve, 1967, just at dark.  So I was eight, third grade. The last Christmas we lived in the house on Kensington. My mom had kicked us out – my grandparents and my aunt were on the way over, she had things to do, didn’t need a mess of Christmas-crazed rug rats tear-assing around the place. So I’d grabbed the kid next store and gone down to the park to go sledding. Now the sun was just about down and we were headed back, I couldn’t wait to make the corner at Kensington. I’d be able to see the driveway from there. If my aunt’s tan AMC Rebel was in the drive, then Christmas had officially begun.

PENANCE is coming on April 30.

There was a house at the corner of Harrison and Lakewood, a fifties ranch design, but one of the better ones. Dark brown cedar and stone, a big bay picture window facing the street. Christmas had begun there for sure – the room was full of adults, all in festive dress, all with drinks in their hands. Younger than my parents, more stylish, no kids running around. It was full dark almost, so the well-lit scene behind the picture window glowed like a TV screen and the people in the window had the trim, confident air of a gathering from one of the Christmas specials that used to run back in the day, Maybe the one where Perry Como would just be hanging around his place in a ski sweater when Harry Belafonte happened to stop buy with some friends and they’d all swap some scripted wisecracks before they broke into a calypsoed-up version of The Little Drummer Boy. One guy in the window really caught my eye – a little taller than most of the room, broad shouldered. his hair long enough to have just an edge of hippie to it, but still combed neatly, the guy wearing a pair of caramel corduroys and a bright red V-neck over a white shirt.  He had a rocks glass and a cigarette in his hand, something dark in the glass, and these two women, mid-twenties I’d guess, stood rapt, flanking him – one blonde, one brunette, both with long, loosely curled hair, both in mini-sweater dresses that stopped mid-thigh.

I was eight, didn’t have much in the way of a fantasy life yet, but I knew if you wanted to one guy in that room, it was him, and that if you wanted to be at one Christmas party ever it was that one. Better than forty years on and I can still tell you everything about that scene – the way the tree was tucked in the back right corner, the way the blonde gave her head this little tilt-and-shake that sent this wave down her platinum tresses, how  she did that a couple of times in the thirty seconds or so that I watched from the sidewalk, how the wattage on her smile would ramp up for just a instant when she did, how I had no idea what that meant, but how I’ve spent the rest of my life wishing that a woman who looked like that would shake her head and smile at me that way someday, the way the brunette saw her do it and looked down, like she’d lost at some game to which I didn’t even know the rules, and how the guy looked up, saw me on the sidewalk, how I must have had that orphan-with-his-nose-pressed-against-the-glass look on my face, how he raised his drink just a little and gave me this wink that seemed to say I could be him someday  but that only instilled a melancholy certainty that I never would be. Even then, even at eight, I knew myself well enough to know that I was never going to be the guy the room revolved around. That I was always going to be the guy watching and taking notes.

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You aren’t a “pirate,” you’re a thief, asshole

PENANCE is coming in April 2013.

Today is the first annual Please Don’t Pirate My Book Day. Says who, you ask? Says Chuck Wendig in this post here. Since he is the Lord Emperor Penmonkey of Interwebistan, that makes his declaration binding. What the hell else do we need? We have a Sweetest Day just ‘cause Hallmark was overstocked on cheesy Valentine’s Day cards one year, so I guess we can have a Please Don’t Pirate My Book Day on the say so of a pants-less, shaggy-faced wordslinger.

My take on this is antiquated and likely will be dismissed as quaint by you young whippersnappers who’ve been bathed in a ceaseless flow of screen-emitted electrons since birth and thus mutated into this barbarian horde of virtualosos who keep changing shit without my permission and making me cranky.

My take is this. Books are things. So, too, for that matter, are songs (or records as we used to refer to them in those Halcyon days now lost to the mists of antiquity). So, too, are movies and whatever other shit you young punks have turned into so much digital vapor with your interwebby, file-sharing malarkey.

See, in the analog world I grew up in, books weren’t just words, they were objects. Songs came on these vinyl discs, unless you were that cool kid with the Chevy conversion van that had the wizard and the chick with the big bazongas painted on the side and all the good pot connections, then they came on eight tracks. Movies? Hell, you had to go to a theater to see movies.

Back then, if you wanted to get your mitts on a book without paying for it, you couldn’t “pirate” it, you had to actually steal the thing.

Sounds harsher, don’t it? Stealing?

See, the thing is, that book is the product of somebody’s labor. Even if it’s a self-published e-book, it took the author a butt-ton of hours to write it, format it and release it into the wild. Is it worth the $0.99 or $1.99 or $2.99 or whatever they’re charging for it?  Subjective question. That’s up to you, as the consumer, to decide. But that’s the value they’ve ascribed to it. The way you get to weigh in on that value is to decide to pay it or not. You can always tear the author a new one in a review if you like.

If it’s not self-published, if it’s a book released by a traditional publisher, then there is a whole chain of folks with work invested in the product. The author still, of course; probably an agent; a publisher – which translates into an editor; copyeditor; proofreader; a designer; various folks who do the typesetting, formatting, printing and binding; sales and distribution teams; booksellers, whether bricks and mortar, virtual or both. All of these people do this for a living. It’s how they pay their mortgage, feed their kids. I mean you have a job, too, right?  Whatever it is that you make, or that the capitalist oppressor who pays you makes, selling that book is how all those people earn the money to buy it so that you get the paycheck that lets you buy the computer gadgets you are using to steal their work.  See how that works? If people decide to stop paying for things, pretty soon nobody has nothing.

Yeah, I’ve heard all the arguments. How pirates aren’t thieves, they’re readers. How piracy isn’t theft, it’s exposure. How the fact that the game is now digital changes all the rules and how we old codgers have to stop trying to apply quaint concepts like property rights to this brave new world.

Yeah, and hiding behind the internet’s wall of anonymity to terrorize some kid you don’t like because of his sexual orientation or her looks isn’t bullying ‘cause it’s done with electrons instead of fists so there’s no reason for you to feel bad when they hang themselves or snap and go on a shooting spree.

Can I stop you from stealing my book? No. Is it easier than ever to steal intellectual property? Yep. Are my words going to make any difference? Probably not.

But you aren’t romantic. You aren’t Robin Hood breaking down the old analog barriers that prevented the dissemination of art and knowledge. You’re just a thief. Just another punk with no respect for the labor of others, a jerk who thinks that the gratification of your wants trumps the right of other people to earn a living.

Make up whatever bullshit rationalization you want about how you’re actions are harmless, about how you are the vanguard of some new paradigm – that’s what assholes always do to justify their crap. Just don’t ask me to buy it.

See, you don’t have a “right” to read my book. It ain’t a liberty. It’s a product. My product. My publisher’s product. We’ve offered it in a free market for your enjoyment at what we consider to be a fair and competitive price. If you aren’t willing to pay the price, that doesn’t mean you get to steal it. Check it out of the library, you lazy ass. Borrow it from a friend. Wait until a dog-eared copy shows up on online for a nickel.

Can I stop you from stealing it? Probably not. But you can’t stop me from calling you a thief, either.

Because that’s what you are.

Giving death its due

PENANCE is coming in April 2013.

After the Sandy Hook massacre, I saw a few bits by various other crime writers agonizing over their choice of genre, wondering if, by writing stories that featured violence and mayhem they weren’t contributing to a culture that makes violence and mayhem possible.

I applaud the sentiment. Whenever there is evil, it seems our first impulse is to point the finger at somebody else. Taking the time to look inward instead, making sure you’re not part of the problem, that’s a good thing.

I can’t say I was one of them, though. Maybe ‘cause I’m old. Had that impulse years ago, after some other senseless and horrific act. And back then I figured a couple of things. First, folks have been writing stories chock full of violence since, well, forever. Hell, the Iliad and the Odyssey are pretty much the oldest stories we’ve got. In the first one you got Greeks and Trojans carving each other up over some hot chick and in the second, Ulysses gets home and wastes a mess of guys who were hanging around his house and hitting on his wife because they thought he was dead. Second, assuming that anything I wrote was much more than a mosquito fart into the sails of popular culture felt a little presumptuous.

Death is something I do think about, though. Maybe also ‘cause I’m old, I dunno. Lots of philosopher and psychologist types have done their share of navel gazing on the relationship of death and the creative process, how the yawning maw of the grave and the prospect of eternal nothingness have us scrambling to leave some mark, to mean something. Maybe that’s so.

But any way you slice it, death is a big deal. For each of us, at some point, it’s gonna be the entire freakin’ deal. So what I don’t like, in crime fiction or otherwise, are stories that trivialize death. Stories chuck full of red-shirted Star Trek characters, people tossed in to the story for no reason other than to die so the author can move the plot along.

Hey, I get it. I’ve got plots, I’ve got to move them along, and I’ve killed characters to do it. I understand that it’s all Deus ex Machina when you’re behind the curtain. You’re the author. You’re god of this world. So characters live and die at your pleasure. You are pulling the strings and levers. You just want to Rube Goldberg it up enough that the reader doesn’t call Deus ex Machina bullshit on you, doesn’t think you’re a lazy fuck who just pulls shit out of your ass because you couldn’t be bothered to do the work, to make a world with some rules and logic, one that makes sense. In the end, the story is a machine of your creation. You are the Deus and it is your machina, but you want it to be something special, some big steam-punky monstrosity full of gears and levers that is effective in its operations, but that is also mysterious and a wonder to behold. You don’t want it to be the Coke machine in the hallway that spits out a dead guy whenever you push a button.

Where the hell was I? Oh yeah, death.

I guess this. If you’re gonna be god of this place, then you owe something to your creations. If you’re gonna dream up some poor bastard just to bump him off because that’s what the story needs, give him a little dignity. Make him an actual character, not one of those shooting-range profile targets. If you’re gonna make somebody die, then make the reader care that you did.

In my second novel, MAMMON, a guy goes on a little killing spree just to trigger a war between a couple of criminal enterprises that are in his way. Wants to give them something to keep them busy so he can accomplish his mission. And yeah, that’s making up characters just so they can die. When I read back over that part of the draft, I was really pissed at myself. The scene felt empty, lazy, machina-y. It was just a line in one of those dot-to-dot drawings, a line from plot dot A to plot dot B, except a line drawn with human blood (OK, imaginary human blood).

So I went back and rewrote it.  And a good chunk of that scene ended up as a stand-alone story that ran over at Shotgun Honey a while back. (You can read that here if you’re curious. http://www.shotgunhoney.net/2012/05/north-star-by-dan-oshea.html )

The point here? Don’t waste it, not anything. Not a character, not a death. Give things the weight they deserve. Then you aren’t being cheap, you aren’t being exploitive. Then you’re telling a story, not writing violence porn.

We need stories. And things like Sandy Hook are one of the reasons why. The world does waste lives. It doesn’t make sense. So we all need diversions. We all need other worlds to visit, maybe to help make sense of this one, maybe just to get away for a while. If you’re in charge of making one up, make it one worth visiting.

My favorite read of 2012 – RATLINES by Stuart Neville

I’m cheating, because RATLINES didn’t come out until 2013. So sue me.

I’d heard of Stuart Neville, of course. THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST had been loitering near the top of my to-be-read pile for better than a year. But there are so many damn books, so much to do, I just hadn’t gotten to it yet.

So I get to Bouchercon in Cleveland and a mess of people are heading over to his party for RATLINES. Hey, free booze, maybe a free book, why not? Turns out the party was upstairs in maybe the hardest bar to find in all of Ohio, which worked out great for me, because we beat the crowd and there were still a few ARCs left when I got there, so I managed to snag one.

Damn, am I glad I did.

Maybe the name Otto Skorzeny means something to you, maybe not. But I’m a bit of a military history buff, so I recognized the Waffen-SS Obersturmbannführer’s name right off. Hitler’s pet commando, the guy that snatched Mussolini away from the allies. I’d never given much thought to what happened to him after the war, though.  Certainly never imagined he’d spent a good chunk of his retirement living on a nice estate outside Dublin. (I’ve done a little more reading on Skorzeny since and found that, while he managed to get “de-Nazified” by the German government, he was also a major player in ODESSA, a network of former SS officers that helped Nazis facing war crimes trials or other issues escape prosecution and establish new lives. Charming guy.)

In case my name didn’t tip you off, my ancestors are Irish. My grandfather emigrated from County Kerry back in 1916, a teenager, alone, packed off to an unfamiliar country with nothing more than the name of some people in Chicago. When he got here, he found out the quickest way to get his citizenship was to join the army, so he did, headed off to France to join Black Jack Pershing and the boys to fight the Kaiser. Fortunately for gramps, the fighting was pretty much over by the time he got there. Means he didn’t end up dead in a trench, which is good for me, too, I guess. Also means he didn’t have to spend his time trying to decide between shooting at the Germans or the British. Came back to the US and joined the Chicago PD just in time to get a little experience in before Prohibition made guys like Al Capone and Bugs Moran household names. Little easier to know who to shoot at then.

The thing is, a lot of Irish Americans have a romanticized view of the Auld Sod. Saint Paddy’s Day in Chicago, they dye the freakin’ river green, everybody’s pawing through their ancestry trying to come up with some Irish credentials. That’s before they hit the bars and end up puking in the gutters during the parade, or one of them. There’s the official city shindig, but also the South Side Irish parade for those who find the municipal authorities insistence on at least a modicum of sobriety and civilized behavior too constraining for celebrations of the holy occasion.

I grew up with some of that, hearing the old Irish Rover’s tunes about “how the boys from County Cork tore up the Black and Tans.” I remember the Up The Provos sign that used to hang on the wall at The Emerald Isle. Imagine my surprise at learning that the IRA had turned into a mess of murderous terrorist thugs – and that a fair bit of their operating capital came out the pockets of drunks in bars in Irish neighborhoods in Boston, New York, Chicago. Imagine my shock at learning that “the Troubles” weren’t a cut and dried fight against English oppression, not anymore, and that the Republic of Ireland had spent WWII being cozy with Hitler out of reflexive anti-British sentiment and a long history of anti-Semitism. It’s 2013 now, yet a woman suffering a miscarriage just died in a Galway hospital because they wouldn’t perform an abortion, not even to save her life. You couldn’t get a divorce in Ireland until 1996. If you think you need to travel to burqa country to find a theocracy, think again. Something we here in the good ol’ US of A might want to keep in mind as we tip-toe around idiots who think the world is only ten thousand years old and who want to teach creationism as science and use our tax dollars to do it.

Back to RATLINES. It’s 1963. President Kennedy is coming to visit. The last thing the Republic needs muddying up that love fest is a series of murders involving the host of former Nazis the country has clasped to its bosom. So, when a few of them end up dead and a note addressed to Otto Skorzeny reading “We are coming for you” is found on one of the corpses, the powers that be turn to Lieutenant Albert Ryan in the Directorate of Intelligence. His charge? Find the killers, protect the Nazis, and keep the whole thing out of the papers.

Protect the Nazis. The same enemy that Ryan had risked – and almost lost – his life fighting during the war. Because, while he might be Catholic, he isn’t your usual Irishman. He’d volunteered for the British army and served with distinction in the battle against Hitler. Which had caused more than a little trouble for him when he returned home. As a Catholic, he’s distrusted by Protestants. As a soldier, he’s distrusted by Catholics. And he’s learned that it’s dangerous to trust anyone too much.

RATLINES offers everything you want from a crime novel. A tight, believable plot that keeps you turning the pages. Taut writing with top notes of lyricism. A host of compelling characters, each well and efficiently drawn. Had the story been invented from whole cloth, it would have been a compelling read. But its foundation in fact and its insights into this troubling and under-reported period in Irish history elevate it to masterpiece status.

OK, so you weren’t in Cleveland, or maybe you were, but you couldn’t find the bar before the ARCs were gone. Your wait is over. RATLINES is on the shelves now. Get a copy. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. And Stuart Neville has joined the list of authors who will never languish in my to-be-read pile. I’m promoting him to the must-read list.