Finders Keepers by Mark Bowden...a review

I was talking about non-fiction writers I admire the other day and I somehow left Mark Bowden (Killing Pablo, Blackhawk Down) off my list. This is the review I did of his book Finders Keepers back in 2002.

In Mark Bowden’s FINDERS KEEPERS, a South Philly loser becomes a folk hero when he finds $1.2 million that fell off an armored car. In 1981, the economy in Philadelphia was like a Bruce Springsteen song—jobs that have sustained families for years have disappeared and they aren’t coming back.  That puts people like 28-year-old JOEY COYLE on the streets without too many options.  Joey never finished high school, but on the docks, he was respected for his almost supernatural knowledge of machinery.  Unemployed, he just another speed freak.  And he’s getting into a downward spiral—using all his money to buy meth and then borrowing from his dealers.

This story really is kind of irresistible.  Joey is a natural born loser, although he has charm to burn.  (There’s literally no one with a bad word for him, even when he’s at his most “hopped up” from the drug he calls ‘blow.”)  There are moments in this strange saga where we’re almost doubled over laughing—from his manic search to find a suitable hiding place for the money to his attempts to shove money into his clothes at the airport before resorting to donning panty hose.

Enjoy a good Cinderella story? Fashionista is Free this week!

Last year I kicked off a series of bite-size, modern retellings of fairy tales. Eventually there will be ten, including Hunter's Kiss (due out in two weeks), a retelling of Snow White, Hero's Kiss (a retelling of Beauty and the Beast), and The Unknown Road (East of the Sun, West of the Moon).

I have a soft spot for this book. Like Bride of the Midnight King, the heroine has an intriguing relationship with her youngest sister, one of the stepsisters. When I write little sisters, I tend to think of my own who was a complicated person I loved dearly, even when she drove me crazy. I miss her and she often shows up in my fiction in various guises.

Fashionista takes place in Chicago, a city one of my best friends now calls home. I had a good time playing around with the fairy tale and if you like that sort of thing, you might like this book. (Did I mention it's free for the next five days?) And if you like the book, would you say a few nice words about it?  Thanks.

History Has Been Made

I think that even if Hillary Clinton is not the nominee of your party or of your heart, you must still recognize what a momentous, hinge of history moment this is. Women have had the right to vote in this country since 1919. It's taken nearly a hundred years to have a woman run for president as the nominee of a major party.

Golda Meier became Prime Minister of Israel in 1969. Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister of India in 1966 (and is to date the only female Prime Minister the country has ever had.) Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979. Isabel Martinez de Peron became President of Peru in 1974. Vigdis Finnbogadottir became President of Iceland in 1980. Corazon Aquino became President of the Philippines in 1986. Park Geun-hye became President of South Korea in 2013. Angela Merkel became Germany's first woman Chancellor in 2009.

If you want to be stunned by just how far behind the U.S. is in giving women a voice in politics, just check out this Wikipedia listing of all the places who have elected or appointed a woman to lead.

Where are the Mer?

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“O, train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note, to drown me in thy sister’s flood of tears.” --William Shakespeare, A Comedy of Errors

I have a fondness for mermaids.  I've written a couple of mermaid stories and I would love to do a series of epic fantasies set in a fabulous underwater kingdom. (The Dark Mer series.)  Everyone I know is telling me not to do it.  (The smart money right now is on Gargoyles being the next big paranormal "creature" and that's fine. I think there are a lot of possibilities in gargoyles. And also, if it means an end to the endless procession of "shifter" stories, I'm there. But mermaids...There need to be more mermaid stories. Chinese filmmaker Stephen Chow (whose hilarious The God of Cookery is must-viewing for any foodie) wrote and directed made half a billion dollars with his movie The Mermaid. there's also a lovely movie about a mermaid and France's Sun King that's stuck in development hell. I read it for a film market a few years ago and there was even a star attached, but it seems to have fallen off the grid. Maybe it's time to reboot Splash!

 

A message from the King--Stephen King, that is

Shakespeare's famous Butterfly Line

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Since we were speaking of butterflies, I went looking for a Shakespeare quote about butterflies. I found this from King Lear:  "We will laugh at gilded butterflies." I don't know King Lear as well as I should--I've only ever seen adaptations of it, like Uli Edel's King of Texas (with Patrick Stewart)--but the play is crammed full of gorgeous lines. "Come not between the dragon and his wrath!!"  Love that one.

TBR: The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchison

Right now this book is number 1 in the mystery category over at Amazon. It is traditionally published and somehow I'd never heard of it until three days ago when I first spotted the cover. I'm not generally a fan of captive narratives, but this one sounds so off-the-wall intriguing that I'm going to have to check it out. It's got a 4.4 star rating on more than 2200 reviews.

Shakespeare in the Raw!

For a May 2016 staging of The Tempest in Central Park, according to production notes: The production uses semi- and full-nudity to celebrate body freedom and free expression and to dramatize the conflict between the visitors to Prospero's island and its inhabitants. 
You can read more about the production and see the pictures here. 
I just hope it was a warm night! 

Shakespeare's Prop Room: An inventory by John Leland and Alan Baragona

I don't know Alan or John but I wish I did because they are my kind of Shakespeare geeks. The idea of this book (inventorying every prop mentioned in dialogue, stage directions or implied in action. (Shakespeare was pretty sparing with stage directions. I only remember the most famous one, Exeunt, pursued by a bear, so I'm curious to know what they came up with. the book came out earlier this year and is available now, but at a price. (Even the Kindle version is nearly $35 which indicates a certain lack of clarity on the concept of digital copies.) The publisher is offering "early review" copies over at Library Thing this month so I signed up. But you know how Library Thing's things go...People click on everything, whether they want them or not. They're what a friend of mine calls "greedy grabbers." So wish me luck because I think it would be a ton of fun to leaf through this book.

And another book to be on the lookout for: Wolf Road by Beth Lewis

When you're marketing something, one of the things you aim for is "frequency" if you can manage it without driving people crazy. (There are those who claim that's actually not a bad thing either, but I disagree.)  The idea is that if you see something once, you might take notice of it, but you probably won't act. But if you see something THREE times, that interest turns to a click on a buy site.

I've seen something about Wolf Road three times now.  I know it was the title that first caught my attention because the cover is actually kind of meh. When I read the blurb, though, I was drawn in. It's 2020, a post-apocalyptic world, and a young girl begins to suspect that the man who calls himself her father is not only NOT her father, but a serial killer who plans to kill her next.  Yes, this book has three things I like:  a plucky young heroine, a dystopian future setting, and crime! the book will be out next month (July 5), so stay tuned!

BOLO: Ben Macintyre's Rogue Heroes

I have a writer crush on author Ben Macintyre. (I hope his wife, novelist/film critic  Kate Muir doesn't mind.) The first book of his I read was Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth. Worth was a fantastic, movie-worthy character and his greatest crime is actually motivated by passion (and not the murderous kind). Macintyre has a new book coming out in October and I cannot wait to read it. Rogue Heroes is a wartime story of Britain's SAS. I'm not necessarily one for war stories, but Macintyre's books Agent Zigzag and A Spy Among Friends, were enough to put me on his list of "followers" on Amazon. (And somehow I missed his Operation Mincemeat.  The subtitle is: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured Allied Victory.  Who is NOT going to read a book with that subtitle?)

Even if you prefer fiction to non-fiction, you owe it to yourself to sample Macintyre's work. He's on my list of best non-fiction writers working today. (Since you asked, some of the others are Sebastian Junger, Erik Larson, John McPhee, Joan Didion, Jon Krakauer, Susan Orlean, Barbara Ehrenreit, David McCullough, and Kathleen Norris.)

Shakespeare for the Soundtrack of Your Life

This is the Earl of Essex Galiard. The Earl of the title was Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, who was the politically ambitious nobleman known to be a "favorite" of Queen Elizabeth I.

Obscure Mysteries with Shakespeare Themes

I love mysteries. I've been reading them since I was a child and I love them all--cozies to Nordic noir and everything in between. If someone's getting murdered and someone's trying to find out why and who did it, I'm there. So it's fair to say that I've read a LOT of mysteries in my time. And yet--how can this be--I have never read a Shakespeare-themed mystery. Not one. So I turned to Goodreads, my source for all things listicle. The site did NOT let me down. (I find Goodreads a PITA to deal with in terms of uploading books and changing covers and things, but the readers are spectacular resources.)

There are 60 books on the list--one a day for the next two months!! And the one that caught my eye was Interred With Their Bones. It's set in modern day, themed to Hamlet, and features a character who goes on to headline a series. My kind of book. And bonus, it's available used for a penny and postage, so $4,

For the TBR pile...We Are Not Such Things

I'm not a big fan of most true crime, but this book by Nadine Justine Van Der Leun caught my eye in my Net Galley newsletters. I remember reading about this south African murder case and wondering, "How did this happen?" I've read the author's magazine pieces and she's a fine writer, so I look forward to reading this book.

Anonymous--a star-studded riff on the Shakespeare authorship question

It's always fun to read the articles about who "really" wrote Shakespeare's plays. In one of the only fan letters I ever wrote in my life, I asked Isaac Asimov (whose two-part guide to Shakespare is terrific) if he had an opinion on the issue. He did not. (Yes, he answered my fan letter with a typed index card reply. Which I still have somewhere. Yes. Isaac Asimov!!!!) But I digress.

I'm a fan of British costume dramas. They're often a little on the slow side but they almost always make up for it with fantastic acting. Anonymous is the perfect example. It's an Elizabethan romp starring mother/daughter actresses Joely Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave as Elizaabeth One at various stages in her life.The premise of the movie is that Shakespeare's work was really written by an aristocrat and that Shakespeare himself was a nasty little man who acted as the aristocrat's "front" and killed Christopher Marlowe because he was about to out him.  (Speaking of fronts, if you love good acting, check out Trumbo.  The movie about the Hollywood Ten's most famous member is a feast of fine acting, with Louis C.K. and John Goodman outstanding in supporting roles and Bryan Cranston and Helen Mirren at the top of their game.)

Saturday Shakespeare Meme

I would believe you Morpheus!

If you've never seen Laurence Fishburne in the 1995 film version of Othello (with Kenneth Branagh as Iago), it's worth looking for. At the time, Fisburne was the first black actor to play the Moor in a major American movie; up to then, the role had always been played by actors in black face, including both Anthony Hopkins and Laurence Olivier.

Shakespeare Earrings

The last time I browsed Cafe Press it was all about the clothing--t-shirts and hats and tote bags and such. Also mugs. I didn't realize they'd gotten into Etsy territory with hand-made jewelry items until I saw these earrings for sale. You can buy them here, but be warned, they come with a warning that the earrings are not for sale to, or use by, anyone under 12.  I'm not sure why that is. I can see they'd be a choking hazard for very young children but surely kids grow out of that phase by the time they start going to school?

Feminist Friday and Shakespeare

Over at the Conversation, a website that celebrates "Academic rigor and journalistic flair," there's an essay on how Shakespeare helped writer Germaine Greer shape her feminist masterpiece, The Female Eunuch. It's a long-ish piece and if you're someone who tags blog posts with TLDR, then you'll want to skip down past the photo of Greer speaking at Sydney University in 2005 for the good stuff. My favorite takeaway from the article was this quote: "Greer cites Shakespeare’s poem The Phoenix and the Turtle, as an example of the fullest expression of the ideal of love “as a stabilizing, creative, harmonizing force in the universe'."

I don't even remember that poem--my knowledge of Shakespeare's poetry is mostly limited to a few of his well-known sonnets. So I looked it up. Wikipedia, bless their hearts, has an entry on the allegorical poem.  they call it one of Shakespeare's "most obscure works" (making me feel better for not having remembered it), and one that is open to multiple interpretations. The one thing I do remember is that the "turtle" of the title is the "turtledove," not the reptile everyone used to have as a pet before fears of salmonella made ownership of turtles a health risk.

The "Phoenix" portrait of Queen Elizabeth I

Some scholars have identified "the Phoenix" as Queen Elizabeth 1 and the turtle as John Salisbury, who was a married courtier from a powerful Welsh family.

The language of the poem is gorgeous:

Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and constancy is dead;
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence

but you'll need footnotes all along the way. The Conversation essay makes a persuasive case for a Shakespearean influence on Greer's work, and it's just one more example of how Shakespeare's work continues to resonate almost half a millennium later.

Shakespeare and Guns

Today is National Gun Violence Awareness Day. Yesterday, there was a shooting at UCLA. Not long ago, there was a shooting at the college where my brother got his law degree. On Thanksgiving, there was a shooting at the college where a friend's son goes to school. We all remember the Virginia Tech shootings, and I have ties to there as well--my father, my brother, my aunt, my uncle, and a cousin all spent time there.So today we're supposed to wear orange to show our solidarity and support for the victims of gun violence and their families. It's a start, I suppose. I remember when the red ribbons first started showing up at celebrity events to promote awareness of AIDS.  And the ribbons spread. And with the awareness came the benefits and the research.

I really hope that the orange t-shirts do the same. Guns have been around a long time--longer, probably than you think. We know Shakespeare mentioned them in his plays, but so did Geoffrey Chaucer two hundred years earlier. Guns and Ammo magazine online has an interesting article that argues William Shakespeare was a "gun writer." The article is well worth reading and the citations are right on the money.

Behind the Scenes of Shakespeare's Stories

I always read the Afterwords in books. I like knowing what bit of stray inspiration sparked a novel, or what random collision of events spawned a tale. (I remember reading Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box and thinking he'd read the same eBay listing I had, a listing where a woman was offering her father-in-law's suit for sale because her kid was afraid of his ghost. I've never seen an interview where he talks about it, but I'd bet that's where he got the idea.)

In school we always get the bare bones explanation for where Shakespeare got his plots but they never explained that King Lear is actually related to Cinderella, as Shakespeare's Storybook does. I read that in the book blurb and now I HAVE to get this book.

Shakespeare-inspired cocktails? Why not?

Over at Shakespeare & Beyond today, there's a little background and a link to a podcast interview with Caroline Bicks and Michelle Ephraim who have put together Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dreams, a whimsically illustrated collection of drink recipes "inspired" by Shakespeare. (The drinks have names like "Caliban's Wrong Island iced Tea.") You'll find a couple of the drink recipes there as well. (If you enjoy this sort of literary/liquor match up, you should check out Tim Federle's books, Tequila Mockingbird, Gone With the Gin, and Hickory Daiquiri Dock.)

Free Frantasy...Bride of the Midnight King

Free for the first five days in June, my vampire version of Cinderella, the first in a three-book series. Check it out here.

Shakespare's Money

I am interested in money. My father had a coin collection that wasn't really worth much but I loved looking through the old coins, many of them European.

I have a fantasy series in which I've worked out various systems of money and the names and denominations of the coins. Working out your own monetary system really gives you insight into how things work. Why is one thing worth a dollar while another thing is worth five dollars, or fifty dollars?

One of the oldest "stories"' there is concerns the thirty pieces of silver Judas was paid to betray Jesus. I've always wanted to write a story about those coins.

This book caught my eye and it is just so annoying that the Kindle price is ore than you'd usually pay for a trade paperback. (There's a REASON why there are no customer reviews yet.) There are only five left in stock, and I suppose if I were the TRUE Shakespeare geek I claim to be, I'd snap one of them up. Maybe I'll put it on my Christmas wish list.