"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."
—Robert Wilensky
Testing My Title
The Web is a wacky and wonderful thing. Spend enough time browsing, and you're bound to come across some elegant time waster. Recently, I stumbled across Lulu.com's Title Scorer, an app that uses algorithms to determine whether the proposed title of your novel will increase or decrease the chances of it being a national bestseller. Of course, I plugged in "The Poacher's Son" as a test. According to Title Scorer, my book has a 35.9% chance of hitting it big. That's not very reassuring, although it could be worse. Then again, Lulu (which specializes in self-publishing and print on demand) thinks Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets has only a 14.6% chance of being a bestselling title, so maybe there's hope for me yet.
Not a Bad Way to Go
In the days before he died, Senator Ted Kennedy — may he rest in peace — spent his time visiting with friends and family and watching every James Bond movie on DVD.
Boyle at His Best
Full disclosure: The company I work for now publishes Gerry Boyle's mystery novels. But my own self-serving interest in recommending his work shouldn't stop you from discovering one of the most consistently entertaining detective writers out there today. As a veteran newspaper reporter and columnist, Boyle understands the funny, freakish, and foul nature of crime in Maine better than anybody. Read his new blog, and you'll get a sense of his sensibility.
Welcome to the Dark Side
I'm a little late to this story, but I want to give a shout out to Malcom Jones' well-observed Newsweek piece on literary writers who "go slumming" by writing detective novels. This summer, it's been Denis Johnson and Thomas Pynchon who have tried on trenchcoats, but Jones notes that some of America's canonical authors (Faulkner, Dreiser) have dabbled in noir over the years. What these literary authors discovered, says Jones, is that writing an exceptional mystery is no easy task:
So what happens when mainstream novelists tackle noir? More often than not, they find it's harder than it looks. Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance contains some brilliant passages, but mostly it's a mess (paradoxically, when Mailer took on real crime in The Executioner's Song, he wrote arguably his best book). McCarthy's No Country for Old Men is also occasionally wonderful, but it might be his worst novel—who would have thought that we would ever accuse him of sounding preachy?
I agree with Jones about Mailer but not about McCarthy. That said, I read No Country for Old Men after seeing the film, and I think the book probably benefited from the vivid memory of Javier Bardem's perfectly rendered Anton Chigurh.