By the way, not only is “Woe is me” a horrible cliche, it’s a grammatical atrocity that offends even me, the guy who promotes split infinitives and singular they as good grammar. Does anyone really say that?

I digress.

All I did was read. I did tweak a couple of things, like switching “site/sight,” “your/you’re,” and so on. Occasionally, there was a word missing or I typed something in a hurry without really thinking about it. Other than that, I made no changes, no flagrant notes “Hey! Murdoch is 29 on page 42, and he’s 37 on page 254! WTF, man?” There were a few continuity problems, but this has been one of the cleanest drafts I’ve written in a long time.

Does this mean I’m done when I finish the revisions? Ready to pack off to an agent to earn me fame and fortune?

Oh, hell no! I’ve recruited a new first reader, having divorced the original one. I need someone who did not write this to tell me if this passes the smell test. And he’s edited before, so he’s exactly what I need to take the next step.

But it’s good to see first round of revisions won’t be as traumatic as they usually are. Some of this has to do with Holland Bay having an earlier incarnation. It kind of told the story, and the first few chapters resemble that earlier version. But then I took a different route to the ending and put a different bow on the package.

All I need now is to get this beaten into shape for the next step.

Then I gotta go write another one.

Happy anniversary, baby. I love you very much.

The skinny: Nick and Elaine are shadowing Roy Sutton, the pastor of a suburban church. So far, they’ve found nothing on him, but one of Nick’s operatives comes across something that tells them they’ve been on the wrong track. But a collision on a lonely rural road keeps Nick from finding out what. It also forces Nick to look more closely at the church itself. Who’s really skimming the money? Is it Calvin Leach, the church leader who wants to be the next great televangelist? Is it Alex Pullman, whose real estate fortune was made paving over perfectly good neighborhoods to build upscale shopping malls? Is it one of the church board? Or is there more going on here, a religious schism that’s closer to Nick’s past than he imagined.

In the background is Nikolai Karpov, the Russian mobster who seemingly likes Nick enough to want to bring him into his organization. Meanwhile, Elaine is dealing with the disintegration of her marriage and what her budding partnership with Nick means, both personally and professionally.

This book was written in 2005 as the third book in the Kepler series. As often happens in small press, the book never saw the light of day. As I began releasing the first two Kepler novels and the collection, I dusted off the old manuscript and went through the beta reads that had been sitting around since 2006. I was pleasantly surprised to rediscover this story. It’s more complex than the first two Keplers.

I’d like to thank Jennette Marie Powell for the awesome cover on this one. Covers are something I’ve struggled with. Jen began her career as a graphics designer. So doing a little back-and-forth and thinking about how crime novels normally look really brought this together quickly. I hit on the “keyhole” idea for the cover, and boom, Jen had it together a couple days later, better than I expected.

This will be the first print novel I’ve offered since Northcoast Shakedown‘s original release in 2005. It’s time to return to print.

The ebook editions will be $3.99. Print details will become available when that edition is ready.

Print | Kindle | Nook | Smashwords

No one. I was 17. The kid was 14. We were snobs of a different sort. Imagine if that had happened in my prog phase. Part of the problem with Van Halen for me was that it was all pyrotechnics. But there’s something there in his playing that makes him standout from other fluid players. He’s technically brilliant, yes, but there are other players even better technically than Van Halen.

And they sound like complete crap. Why?

Eddie Van Halen has feel. Listen to a snippet of him play, and you know which band it is. It’s why Deep Purple tolerated Ritchie Blackmore’s ego for so long. It’s how Jeff Beck ended up on everyone’s wish list in the late sixties and early seventies (including the Rolling Stones. Twice.) It’s how Steve Vai became Eddie V’s surrogate when David Lee Roth went solo.

So who won that argument?

It’s still Clapton. Much of what Clapton does is subtle. He, along with fellow ex-Yardbirds Beck and Jimmy Page, pioneered the technique of playing two guitar lines simultaneously or playing the bass line along with the lead guitar. And the thing is they don’t need to show off. Page needs the bombast because Led Zeppelin is bombastic. Except when it’s not. Beck is actually flashier than Page, but it’s so ingrained into the music that you don’t notice it as much.

That’s not that technically brilliant can’t have feel. Queen is nothing without Brian May. (Well, they’re nothing with Freddie Mercury gone, but even they acknowledge that.) Steve Howe not only can machine gun his guitar faster than Van Halen, but he plays it classically. His counterpart in the early Genesis, Steve Hackett, is even faster, yet he sounds like he’s playing a harpsichord sometimes.

What drove it home for me was an interview with Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham is usually not held up as a guitar god. He’s more of a song writer. When asked, though, why he didn’t go for the flash and the volume, he said it wasn’t needed for Mac’s music. He then proceeded to play a Van Halen guitar solo. When he finished, he pointed out that a lot of guys who play like that aren’t really playing. They’re just showing off.

The greatest example of this is my favorite guitarist ever, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. I’ve heard Gilmour described as someone who “puts more Gilmour through the guitar than anyone else.” In a recent documentary about Pink Floyd, he was shown during the Dark Side of the Moon sessions playing a solo from “Time.” Stripped of the rest of the song, it could easily have been part of a heavy metal song, played over a classical piece, or even woven into jazz. It’s not anything. It’s just David Gilmour. I’ve heard him get as loud and flashy as Brian May, and I’ve heard him as subtle and almost subliminal as jazz great Stanley Jordan. He is, to me, the perfect guitarist and musician.

But try to tell me with a straight face that Eddie Van Halen is replaceable in the band that bears his name. Go on. I’ll wait.

Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly takes a break from Harry Bosch to look at a serial killer known as “The Poet.” He is difficult to spot because of his method of operation. The Poet kills homicide cops, making it look like a suicide and leaving notes behind that quote Edgar Allen Poe. The deaths are convincing as they follow the normal pattern of a cop suicide. There is always a hard-to-solve child killing that obsesses the cop. Two shots are taken, one supposedly to steel the nerves, the other do the deed. Only The Poet kills Denver homicide detective Sean McEvoy. Not only is Sean’s twin brother a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News, Jack McEvoy specializes in writing about murders. After a short mourner’s leave, Jack looks at his brother’s death and talks with his sister-in-law. It doesn’t add up to suicide, and soon he has convinced the Denver Police and his editor that something more sinister is happening. McEvoy soon uncovers two more “suicides” and soon finds himself embedded in an FBI investigation. It’s about that time that pedophile photographer William Gladden gets into trouble with the Santa Monica Police, then leaves a body behind similar to the murder Sean McEvoy hoped to solve at the time of his death.

Connelly seems far more comfortable in Jack McEvoy’s skin than in Harry Bosch’s or Terry McCaleb’s (Blood Work, A Darkness More Than Night, The Narrows). At the same time, he is such a master at misdirection and miscues that he leaves The Poet’s true identity in flux until almost the last page. Like Reed Farrel Coleman (whose The Hurt Machine I’ll review next week), Connelly likes taking the standard, serviceable solution and tossing it out as soon as there’s a false climax in the story.

Connelly is also a tech savvy writer, lacing 1996 technology throughout the story to give the reader a feel for how things are done as a reporter or an FBI agent than trying to beat them over the head with geek speak. (A couple of writers from that era wrote some cringe-worthy tech passages that probably passed in the 90′s but would throw many readers out of the story now.) The end result is that the story has a feel for its time frame, sounding intentionally dated, but not obsolete.

So I went with crime. I think I would have been OK if I’d have started on Northcoast about two years earlier and been more patient looking for an agent. As it was, I pulled the trigger too fast and signed with a small press that was way too small for its own good two weeks before an agent called me. Ouch. So while I tried to find a way out of that mess, the market for crime collapsed. If you weren’t already in, you were done.

Meanwhile, science fiction underwent a sort of renaissance. And the paying markets for short stories did not evaporate as badly as those for crime had. I made a critical mistake.

See, there are crime geeks. One gent calls himself the “Nerd of Noir.” They are definitely loyal to their authors, but their numbers are small. SF geeks, fantasy geeks, game geeks, and comic geeks comprise a much bigger ecosystem that never really went away. If they find something they like, they latch onto it with a tenacity that makes tax examiner look like a slacker. I never tapped into that, and shame on me. I was one of them for a very long time. I might have spent the 90′s sharpening my writing skills, but I should also have been building a world for readers to dive into. That sort of thing was and is tailor-made for the Internet.

So I will be “building” another writer, an SF writer. I still have contacts in that realm, so it won’t be nearly as hard to build up the network writers need to get started. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped with crime. I mean I just posted the cover for the new Kepler, which will be the first one to see print in eight years. At the same time, if I can’t sell Holland Bay or get people excited about it, that’s probably going to be it for crime. It’s been fun, and I’m proud of the work I’ve done, but a decade and a half is enough time to know if the rabbit’s going to survive the experiment.

I did this on all the books listed on the Books Page. When I finished the first draft, I let it go. I know a lot of authors, particularly on deadline, like to dive right back into the manuscript and start revisions. That is probably a mistake. You’re too close to the story then. It’s still… my baby!

This is probably the shortest layoff I’ve had from a long work. I like three months, an entire season. The weather changes. The daylight hours change. Life changes. It’s long enough for one to become a different person from the one who typed “The End.” But I was lucky. Northcoast Shakedown was written on spec. Second Hand Goods was written while Northcoast was shopped. While Northcoast never had a deadline, Second Hand was in third draft by the time it had a deadline. Bad Religion had a deadline, but the publisher collapsed before I could start the third draft. I had not looked at it from 2006 to about July of last year or so. That was the longest I ever let a finished manuscript lie with the intention of getting back to it.

I hope I never have to pass chapters to an editor or agent as I write the story. That’s madness. Thomas Wolfe wrote The Bonfire of the Vanities that way, serializing it in Rolling Stone. There is no way I’d fly without a parachute like that. If the story goes off the rails, it does so with in front of a live studio audience, in Wolfe’s case, the still-substantial readership of Rolling Stone. It’s not so bad when it’s you and someone involved in bringing the novel to the public, but you still lose some control over your story.

If I were a perfectionist, I would rework every scene and every page until I liked it and write detailed outlines of everything. I can see a time where that’s going to become necessary, but for now, I prefer ignoring a story until it’s ready for the next stage of development.

Stephen King tells of writing this way, leaving the draft in a drawer for a month or two or three. He prefers work to become almost a foreign thing when he looks at it again, like someone else wrote it. That’s the way it should be. The bookshelves, Amazon pages, and even POD self-pub houses are strewn with the literary corpses of those who defended “their baby!” (Including mine.)

Cover by Jennette Marie Powell.

Rush is hardly weird, beyond some of Neil Peart’s scifi-inspired lyrics. Pink Floyd, for all its innovation and musicianship, has more in common with Cream, Led Zeppelin, and The Beatles than Yes, ELP, or King Crimson. Plus, the last successful progressive rock group to be touted under that moniker was Marillion. If you’ve listened to them or original lead singer Fish lately, you know they’ve left any pretense of being the second coming of the early Genesis in the dust. Fish wants to be a Scottish poet. Marillion wants to be an indie Brit pop group unburdened by enormous egos the way Oasis and Coldplay are overtaxed by them.

Prog is often called bloated and overproduced. Quite often it is. On the other hand, prog fans have an annoying tendency to forget that the second half of progressive rock is rock. (Punk fans have a similar pretentiousness about their music. Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong is a personal hero to me for being willing to piss all over that pretense. How’s that for punk?) Never mind that rock is not rock without some element of the blues in it. Yet call one of these overly dogmatic fans a “prog nazi,” and they’ll thank you for it. The problem is they then want to pigeon hole their favorite bands. “No, no, no,” they say. “You do not get the privilege of having a Trevor Rabin line-up of Yes in your catalog.” Genesis ran afoul of this, as did their original lead singer, Peter Gabriel. Some prog fans were aghast that Robert Fripp of King Crimson fame would “stoop” to play on an album by Daryl Hall. And Marillion and Fish mentioned earlier? Prog nuts who continued to listen to them after the split still don’t understand that their last remotely progressive rock album was 1984′s Misplaced Childhood. (A sort of reboot of The Wall with a happy ending.)

But what’s the appeal? Why listen to it if it’s the same thing over and over again? Newer prog bands have an annoying tendency to want to rehash early Genesis or try and do Yes’s harmonies or find some rhythmic weirdness worthy of any incarnation of King Crimson. Why aren’t they big?

Because it’s not original. Now the Stones and The Beatles actually did not break any new ground when they first appeared. Mick and Keith were all about Delta blues and Memphis blues and Chicago blues. The Beatles wanted to be Buddy Holly in the worst way, and according to Pete Best, early on, that’s exactly what they were. But conventional rock is about feel and emotion, a point driven home as I write this by the John Fogerty concert I have running on the DVR. I’ve heard the licks Fogerty plays by dozens of other guitarists, but the emotion and the execution is always different. He and Clapton and even classically obsessed Ritchie Blackmore aren’t trying to be Mozart. (Blackmore just occasionally beats the hell out of Beethoven for fun.)

When it works, it works great. Genesis started out as a psychedelic band that tossed everything they knew into a blender and hit frappe. If you listen closely to the final Phil Collins effort, We Can’t Dance, you can clearly hear the original blueprint laid down on 1970′s Trespass. But when they had that six-album run from 1971 through 1977, the whole point was to make the listener go, “WTF?”  From Nursery Cryme, which features the finest epic about a noxious weed ever written in the 20th century, to Winds and Wuthering, which has a similar song about mice, Genesis went out of their way to keep the listener off-balance. But there was also a feel to the music. I’ve seen “Supper’s Ready” move some people to tears. Sorry, but no one’s going to accuse ELP of that by beating the listener over the head with a pipe organ.

So who were the best at this weird version of rock that sometimes fails to be rock? It’s Friday. How about a list?

5.     KING CRIMSON

Robert Fripp’s 45-year weirdgasm. Crimson came out of the gate with a forty-minute acid trip called In the Court of the Crimson King that pretty much defined progressive rock. For the next three years, he went through an ever-shifting line-up trying to duplicate Court without success before settling on the trio of himself, future Asia singer John Wetton, and former Yes man Bill Bruford. This incarnation veered wildly from heavy metal to jazz and back again, often in the same song. After a few years off, Fripp resurrected Crimson with new partner Adrian Belew and began playing a game of finding how many bizarre time signatures they could put Belew’s punk sensibilities over. There have been so many members of Crimson over the years (It even spawned Foreigner and slipped a tentacle into Bad Company, two of the most un-Crimson-like bands ever) that they’ve spent the past eight years as three separate bands.

4.   YES

The tight harmonies, twenty-minute epics, bass that’s not really a rhythm instrument, and spacey lyrics all packaged in those Roger Dean album covers. Yes is the poster band for progressive rock.  When they’re on, they’re really on, as with 1972′s Fragile and 1973′s Close to the Edge. Sometimes, though, they trip over themselves, and a decade of more aggressive music driven by Trevor Rabin was probably a good thing. They’re still around with Alan White, guitar virtuoso Steve Howe, and Chris Squire, bassist and the only member to have been in every line-up. However, it’s hard to imagine Yes without lead singer Jon Anderson, and the classic line-up’s later efforts sound a bit forced.

3.    RUSH

Rush survives and gets mainstream respect because they get that it’s progressive rock. Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson started out taking cues from Led Zeppelin (“Working Man” anyone?). When they brought in the acrobatic Neil Peart, the lyrics got epic, the rhythm got complicated, and the music broke ground. And yet when I and my junior high classmates first heard of Rush, we thought they were in the same vein as Black Sabbath or Judas Priest. It was the aggressive sound. Prog is a means to compose music for them, not a religion.

2.     GENESIS

The costumes. Steve Hackett’s guitar. The twenty-minute epics. The classical influence. And The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway? They weren’t out to invent a genre. They just wanted to sound different. Later, after Steve Hackett left, people asked Phil Collins why they didn’t do things like “Supper’s Ready” and “Dancing with the Moonlight Knight” anymore? His response? They’d already done it twenty years earlier. Many complain about the music they did in the eighties, and even complain about Gabriel’s solo work, but Genesis was smart. Prog was a method, not a religion.

1.     PINK FLOYD

With Meddle and Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd showed how prog was supposed to be done. The right way, the Floyd way. Meddle is a thread that weaves through every Floyd album all the way to 1994′s The Division Bell. The point was not to meet anyone’s expectations. With the exception of The Wall and The Final Cut, when the message moved front and center, the burning question on every Floyd album was, “Does it sound good?” On Dark Side, it sounds perfect. Oh, by the way, which one’s Pink? According to David Gilmour, it was keyboardist Rick Wright. According to Roger Waters, it was Syd Barrett. According to their albums, it was all five of them.

Ed McBain

The Deaf Man returns to taunt the 87th Precinct in 1968′s Fuzz. It starts with a phone call to the precinct informing the detectives that, if $5000 is not delivered to Grover Park by noon tomorrow, a city commissioner will die. The police don’t take it seriously. The commissioner is actually annoyed. They put a lunch pail, per instructions, on a park bench full of phony money, then nab the guy sent to pick it up. They lose him. The commissioner is shot dead hours later. When $50,000 is demanded to save the deputy mayor’s life, no one thinks it’s a crank call. The deputy mayor is put under police protection. This time, they pick up the guy sent after the money, a random construction worker, or so it seems, who not only seems to know nothing, but is also involved in something else entirely. The deputy mayor is surrounded by protection.

Which does no good, since his car explodes, killing him and his police protection. By now, the police commissioner is breathing down Lt. Byrnes neck, tragically named Meyer Meyer, vertically challenged Hal Willis, and Detective Arthur Brown realize they’re chasing the Deaf Man, who blew up Isola’s port a few years earlier to cover up a bank robbery. Where’s Steve Carella?

Posing as a homeless guy trying to get set on fire so he can arrest two teenaged dirt bags. Guess how well that works? It’s been a couple of novels since McBain put Carella in the hospital, and this time, it results from a painful series of Keystone Cop incidents.

The Deaf Man, who finally makes an appearance about half way through the book, is a hint that this is going to be more of a comedic action thriller.  He fancies himself a modern-day Moriarty and believes the detectives of the 87th aren’t really all that bright. Of course, the Deaf Man always manages to let his ego get in the way.

Fuzz marks the return of Eileen Burke, last seen in The Mugger, and the debut of Richard Genero, who is a patrolman in this story, but clearly on his way to becoming a detective. Like Cotton Hawes, who was created to phase out Carella early in the series (which never happened), Genero seems to be filling a role once filled by Bert Kling, who also started out in uniform. Kling has lost his fiancee, gone through a severe depression, and come out the other side almost as experienced as Carella and Meyer.

Speaking of the 87th’s resident Eisenhower look-alike, Meyer has his own personal crisis in this one. Someone’s written a book about a character named Meyer Meyer, also the title of the book. That just ain’t right, Meyer thinks, and spends part of the book trying to learn if he can sue the author.

This book is also a transitional entry in th 87th Precinct series. The detectives are dealing with Miranda rights now. Eileen Burke seems a bit more liberated than in her last appearance. Andy Parker, the resident bigot, is toned down a little bit, being just generally annoying in this one.

It seems whenever McBain wants to update the series, he brings in the Deaf Man to shake things up, then sends him away again with his tail between his legs.