Feminist Fiction Friday: Edna Buchanan

Photo by Jim Virga/courtesy of Simon & Schuster

In 1986, when I was a newly minted reporter covering total fluff, Edna Buchanan won a Pulitzer Prize for her general assignment reporting at the Miami Herald. The following year she published one of my all-time favorite true-crime books, The Corpse Had a Familiar Face, which was followed in 1992 by Never Let Them See You Cry. Corpse was turned into a television movie in 1994, with Elizabeth Montgomery playing Edna. A terrific reporter, Edna was also a style icon (and still is), rocking big hair and basic black. She covered more than 3,000 murders in her career while looking like the star of her own television series. I wanted to be Edna Buchanan when I grew up. (At the time, the only two women I knew who were writing true-crime were Edna and Ann Rule, also a terrific writer. Other women have since joined the team but the alphabetical list of women true crime writers begins with Ann and Buchanan.)
So I was already a fan of Buchanan's when she published her first novel, Nobody Lives Forever, I was onboard.  And then she created the character many people think is her alter-ego, Cuban-American newspaper reporter Britt Montero who made her debut in Contents Under Pressure.  Britt, with her take no prisoners attitude and deep suspicion of editors, is a terrific character. With Britt, Edna hit her stride as a novelist  The second book in the series, Miami, It's Murder, was nominated for an Edgar Award.
Her most recent book, A Dark and Lonely Place, came out in November of last year. It's based on a true story from Miami's history a century ago and is a change of pace for her, although it is crime fiction.
Edna's official website is here
She is @ednabmiami on Twitter (although she's not terribly active).

Book Review: The Technologists by Matthew Pearl

When a mad scientist terrorizes Boston, it’s up to a group of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to stop him.  Matthew Pearl’s latest novel, The Technologists, returns to the 19^th century Boston setting of his novels The Last Dickens and The Dante Club and once again crafts a novel out of scraps of reality in a way that’s so seamless, you’ll swear you’re reading a beautifully written true crime book. (Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City comes to mind.)

The novel’s hero, Marcus Mansfield, is a working class senior at MIT, and much of the subtext of the story involves the “town and gown” tensions between the elitist Harvard students and those enrolled at the city’s newest establishment of higher learning (including a very smart woman who is the sole female member of “The Technologists” and instrumental in solving the mystery).

From the opening chaos of the deadly harbor incident, we’re drawn into a world where science and technology are beginning to emerge as forces that will shape the next century. Very soon after that the class lines between the Harvard students (particularly a snotty Harvard crew team member named Blaike) and the Institute of Technology students are drawn. We know that there’s going to be fierce competition between them in many ways before the story is over.

Drunk on the Moon--werewolf PI Roman Dalton adventures

Last year, Paul D. Brazill, creator of the werewolf PI Roman Dalton, asked a number of writers to participate in a "shared world" project. The idea was that each writer would write a story using his characters, and those "chapters" would be released as ebooks on a monthly basis, then everything would be gathered into one anthology for print and ebook.
The publisher for the project was Trestle Press and you may have heard about what happened next.  If not, you can read the details here. At any rate, Paul pulled the project from Trestle and it has found a new home at Dark Valentine Press.  I'm very pleased about that because I have a story in the mix ("A Fire in the Blood") and being a part of the anthology reunites me with a number of writers who appeared in Dark Valentine Magazine.
It also means that the incredibly talented Joy Sillesen, my co-publisher, has redone the cover through her Indie Author Services.
Drunk on the Moon will be out in spring. Watch for it!

Feminist Fiction Friday--Quotable Women

I’ve been thinking of women writers and of Virginia Woolf in particular. She of course is the author who famously wrote that women need money and “a room of one’s own” in order to write. And anyone who struggles to balance the demands of a day job against a need to write will say “amen” to that.
But I started wondering what other writers had to say about sexism and found some real gems.  (Who knew Robert Louis Stevenson was a feminist?)
The following quotes are from the Quote Garden, an absolutely fantastic resource for the perfect quote on just about any subject compiled by quotation anthologist Terri Guillemets.
“For it would seem ... that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.” --Virginia Woolf, Orlando:  a Biography 
"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman." --Anaïs Nin
“Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet?  As if they're afraid to plant themselves?”--Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams, 1990
“The little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.”--Robert Louis Stevenson
“If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it!”—Toni Morrison

Coming soon on Feminist Fiction Friday...interview with Jennifer Parsons

Jennifer Parsons is the founding editor of Luna Station Quarterly, a magazine focused on speculative fiction written by up and coming women authors. Coming Friday, March 2.

L.A. Nocturne II is coming!

My new collection of stories from the Misbegotten universe will be available next month and Joy Sillsesen has designed a really "hot" cover for it.  Joy's "Indie Author Services" is about to offer a steal of a deal on indie book covers so if you're looking for something eye-catching and elegant, check out her site herehttp://indieauthorservices.com/blog/.

Tales of the Misbegotten: Customer Service

As I inch toward completion of my novel Misbegotten, I keep fleshing out the paranormal version of Los Angeles where the story takes place. My main character, paracrimes reporter Kira Simkins, does not appear in this story, but she shares the same basic outlook as the protagonist. Neither is especially fond of the vampires who now run their city.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Even before the recession hit, I was struggling. My part of L.A. there’s a dry cleaners on every corner, all of them bigger than me, all of them offering coupons and discounts and while-u-wait service. You need a gimmick to compete and even with a gimmick, you have to keep the price down. It was my daughter who came up with the idea of targeting the needs of the paranormal newcomers who arrived in droves after the city went bankrupt.

Illustration by Mark Satchwill

She put up big signs that said “Stain removal a specialty” and “Discreet and Professional Service.”

We bought ads on Voogle, the vampire-centric search engine, and offered downloadable coupons and two-for-one deals and deep discounts to bring the customers in. We stayed open late.

Business picked up.

We never had to deal with the vampires direct, of course, they always sent their renfields. Most of them were pleasant enough, and usually a bit embarrassed to be dealing with their employers’ dirty laundry.

I made it easy for them by being matter-of-fact, but there were times when even I was taken aback by how badly stained the clothes were.