Posts

J. Michael Orenduff’s POT THIEF Mysteries on Sale Today from Open Road

J. Michael OrenduffReaders of this blog may recall that I’ve posted about author J. Michael Orenduff (l.), whom I represent as his literary agent. He’s written the delightful POT THIEF mystery series, which were an indie- and self-publishing success beginning in 2009. Last year I licensed the six-book series to Open Road Integrated Media for new ebook and paperback editions. I’m happy to post today that the new POT THIEF editions have just gone on sale from Open Road, whose site leads to all the major ebook and brick & mortar booksellers, such as  OverdriveGooglePlay; Indiebound and Amazon.

As a devoted mystery reader myself, I adored these books when I first read them in 2011. They’re set in and around Albuquerque, New Mexico, featuring dealer in Native America pottery Hubie Schutz and his sidekick in sleuthing, wise-cracking Susannah Inchaustigui, a descendant of one of the region’s old-line Basque ranching families. They meet most afternoons at Hermanas Tortilleria, to sip margaritas and discuss their latest puzzler. After years running Undercover Books, a bookstore where I sold lots of mysteries, and as an editor publishing mysteries, I am especially excited that the many readers of Tony Hillerman’s Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn mysteries, also set in the American Southwest, will now also be able to discover the POT THIEF books. In their earlier editions the POT THIEF books won numerous awards and raves from mystery readers, including Anne Hillerman, the late mystery master’s daughter who’s recently revived the bestsellerdom of her father’s series with her own book, Spider Woman’s Daughter, featuring Navajo Nation Police Officer Bernadette Manuelito. Hillerman said this about the sixth POT THIEF book:

“I inhaled this book. Witty, well-crafted and filled with unexpected plot turns, The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid will delight J. Michael Orenduff’s many fans—and win him new ones.”

If you haven’t yet heard of Open Road, please note they have more than 3000 active titles, including five books by my longtime author Ruth Gruber, as well as titles by dozens of important authors such as William Styron, Rachel Carson, Andre Dubus, Sherman Alexie, and Mary Glickman, always in digital editions, and sometimes in print editions, too. They’ve been operating for about five years, innovating and growing along with the emerging ebook market. The company was profiled last year in a profile at paidcontent.org.

If I were still running a bookstore, I would urge all my mystery-loving customers to read the POT THIEF books. Please click here to see Open Road’s new covers with their uniform look.Enjoy!

#FridayReads, Oct 18–A.B. Guthrie, Jr.’s Classic Western, “The Big Sky”

 

Today my #FridayReads is a re-read, prompted by a book discussion during the past week about novels of the American West. It all began seven days ago, with last week’s post in this vein: “#FridayReads, Oct 11–Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler  & Anne Hillerman’s Spider Woman’s Daughter.”  I had shared the post in my social networks, including with authors Urwand and Hillerman, and was delighted mid-week when I heard from Ms. Hillerman  with a thank you for my piece.* Her new book–a revival of the mystery series written over several decades by her late father, the mystery master Tony Hillerman–though only on sale about a week, had quickly leapt on to the NY Times bestseller list. On the Wordharvest Writers Workshop Facebook page, Anne had linked to an article about books and asked this question:

Craig Johnson’s work [the Sheriff Longmire series] was the subject of an article about Western archetypes. The writer praises Johnson’s Walt Longmire character as a perfect example of the Western hero. Who do you think is the quintessential Western hero in fiction? 

In response, I got up from my desk to dig out my copy of a favorite Western novel,  The Big Sky, by A.B. Guthrie, Jr., a terrific novel set in the old West. I needed to check the year of publication, to include it in my answer, so I went over to a nearby bookcase where, though it’d been a long time since I took it off the shelf, I knew I’d find my old copy of Guthrie’s modern classic. There, residing between a New Directions edition of Lars Gustafsson’s The Death of a Beekeeper and a Dover Classics copy of H. Rider Haggard’s Ayesha. I quickly found the copyright page in the Guthrie–1947. Then my hand landed between the cover and the book’s first leaf, discovering there an inscription. Hmm, I didn’t remember this book had one. Looking at it, I realized it was to me, written by my brother Joel, who died suddenly in December 2009, age 58. Dated 9/22/72, on what would’ve been my 18th birthday, the note was written in Joel’s still-familiar hand, a firm print that brought with it an instant evocation of his personality and character. Joel wrote:

Phil– 9/22/72

You will like this story and the following two, The Way West and These Thousand Hills. Do not ! read the foreword by Stegner until you finish  The Big Sky; he gives everything away. Love, Joel

Over the years I’ve also noticed the way old samples of handwriting from my father Earl or mother Sylvia prompt a strong sense of them. They died respectively in 1992 and 2006. Though Earl’s been gone the longest, his handwriting–also in print, not script except for his signature–still carries all the sweetness of him. My mother’s less legible script is tremulous, bespeaking some nervousness when she sat down to write.

The Big Sky beautifully captures the era of the lone mountain man, as personified in pop culture by the 1972 Robert Redford film, Jeremiah Johnson, which was itself based on a novel, Mountain Man, by Idaho writer Vardis Fisher. Guthrie’s later novels, which Joel also recommended to me in his inscription, cover subsequent epochs–the wagon trains in The Way West and the advent of the first great ranch herds of cattle in These Thousand Hills. The three books are a proper trilogy, with each covering about a twenty-year period of American history.  To Guthrie’s trilogy I will also add  The Awakening Land Trilogy, a great series by Conrad Richter, made up of The Trees, The Field, The Town, again describing one arc of American history.  

By the way, my answer to Anne Hillerman’s good question went like this:

I do like the literary character of Walt Longmire [also a good TV show], but to keep climbing higher up the pinnacle of literary greatness I’d go to A. B. Guthrie’s Boone Caudill from The Big Sky (1947). Also, from history, I want to put in a word for Hugh Glass, true life survivor of a grizzly bear mauling in the 1820s, who’s been a character in fiction as recently as 2001, when I edited Montana writer Michael Punke’s terrific novel The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge

Thanks to Anne Hillerman, for prompting me to re-read A.B. Guthrie’s fine novel. Here are pictures I’ve taken of all the relevant books in this post. The links to the books above are all ‘live,’ and if clicked on will take you to Powell’s Books of Portland, OR, where you can buy any of them if you wish, with a fraction of the purchase price being returned to me for the upkeep of this website.
* Coincidentally, I also had a pleasant encounter with Ben Urwand, author of The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, when I heard him lecture last night at the Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance, which I will write about in the week to come.

#FridayReads, Oct 11–Ben Urwand’s “The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact w/Hitler” & Anne Hillerman’s “Spider Woman’s Daughter”

Collaboration#FridayReads, Oct 11–Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler & Anne Hillerman’s Spider Woman’s Daughter, a new installment in the long-running Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee mystery series established by her late father, the mystery master Tony Hillerman.

Notwithstanding the controversy I’ve reported on earlier that’s greeted publication of The Collaboration, which I had made part of my #FridayReads a few weeks ago, I have been continuing to methodically read it, even while still reading fiction. It’s ironic about all the hubbub, because I am finding it so far, about 80 pages in, an unsensational, moderately engrossing and well-documented account.

The narrative opens by examining “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the 1930 WWI drama released by Universal Pictures that to German officials, dangerously advocated pacifism while also showing cowardice and dishonorable conduct by their troops. The government, two years before Hitler was to win power, viewed it as a threat to to the nation, and sought to have whole passages of the film cut, scenes changed, and dialogue rewritten.  They threatened to remove it from all German screens, and to make it harder for other American pictures to be exhibited in Germany.

After this key opening example, the book becomes a chronicle of the willing cooperation of some American film industry executives–who along with a number of American functionaries and bureaucrats, and at least one Jewish communal organization, the Los Angeles branch of the Anti-Defamation League–worked to suppress American-made movies being produced about contemporary Germany.  Some of this suppression was triggered by German trade officials who after the Great War’s ignominy zealously attacked films from foreign countries that seemed to hyper-sensitive German governments (even preceding Nazi rule) prejudicial against their country and “damaging to their reputation abroad,” or potentially “demoralizing to morale” at home, as they put it, as with “All Quiet on the Western Front.” Hitler was an enthusiast of cinema and theatrical performances of all kinds, as earlier shown in a book I edited and published,  Ibsen and Hitler: The Playwright, the Plagiarist, and the Plot for the  Third Reich. Once Hitler was in power, with hyper-awareness of both the positive and the damaging  effects of propaganda, he focused his regime on how messages might be spread by movies. With that, the Nazis began even more aggressively lobbying foreign filmmakers to alter the scripts of movies in production, or edit and recut ones already being exhibited on German screens.

For a rundown of the controversy surrounding the book and the overheated things some of its critics have said about it, please see my recent post, Questioning the Critical Reaction to Ben Urwand’s “The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact w/Hitler”Collaboration blurbs

A Second #FridayReads, Spider Woman’s Daughter, Anne Hillerman’s new Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee Mystery Novel

While reading The Collaboration, I am intercutting it with Anne Hillerman’s Spider Woman’s Daughter. I’ve read and loved the Leaphorn and Chee series for years, and made his 1982 book Dark Wind one of my #FridayReads last year.Hillerman paperbacks

Tony died in 2008. About the revival of the series, Anne has written, “When I emerged from the worst of my grief after Dad’s death, I realized that I was also mourning the end of his mystery series. I missed those detectives [Leaphorn and Chee], and I especially regretted that Bernadette Manuelito would never get a book that put her in the spotlight. And then I thought: I could try writing Bernie’s book myself. . . .In addition to Tony Hillerman’s Landscape, I had written several other books, so I knew part of the challenge that faced me. I jotted down some ideas as a rough outline and got to work.”

I’m loving her new book. The protagonist, Bernadette, is a young police officer in Navajo Country, married to Jim Chee, who learned how to be a cop under the tutelage of Joe Leaphorn, wise man of the tribal police force. She witnesses a startling assault on a fellow cop in the book’s opening chapters, which forces her to the sidelines of an important investigation. Despite her chief’s order to drop any involvement with the case, she continues trying to riddle it out, even while Chee and her fellow officers pursue every lead. Bernie’s unauthorized efforts take her all across the dramatic landscape of Navajo Country, speaking with people who may help her understand what’s really going on. Just as in Tony’s books, the sense of place and people is indelible.

Coincidentally, over the summer, working as literary agent for author J. Michael Orenduff, I licensed his 6-book POT THIEF mystery series to Open Road Integrated Media who will publish them in ebook and print editions in January 2014. The books are are set in and around Albuquerque, New Mexico, and feature dealer in Native American pottery Hubie Schutz. They’re titled The Pot Thief Who Studied PythagorasThe Pot Thief Who Studied PtolemyThe Pot Thief Who Studied EinsteinThe Pot Thief Who Studied EscoffierThe Pot Thief Who Studied D. H. Lawrence, and The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid.  When not digging in the desert for ancient pots, or crafting copies of artifacts with his own hands, Hubie’s usually absorbed in reading a classic text. In their earlier editions, the POT THIEF books won numerous awards and raves from mystery readers, including this one from Anne Hillerman herself: “I inhaled this book. Witty, well-crafted and filled with unexpected plot turns, The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid will delight J. Michael Orenduff’s many fans—and win him new ones.”

It’s a small world out there for mystery writers and readers and I’m really excited that Anne Hillerman’s brought back her father’s great characters, and that fans of the Leaphorn and Chee books will soon be able to discover and enjoy the POT THIEF mysteries.Anne HillermanAnne Hillerman back cover