Annamaria Alfieri is the author of five historical mysteries, including The Idol of Mombasa, now available from Felony & Mayhem Press. The Idol of Mombasa is the second in a series set in British East Africa, a projected ten-novel series featuring an idealistic English colonial policeman and his wife, a Scottish missionary’s daughter, who was born and raised in Africa. We asked Alfieri a few questions about this novel, the series, and her writing in general.

Felony & Mayhem: Where did the “British East Africa” mystery series begin for you? Was it an image, an idea, a character?

Annamaria Alfieri: All my stories have started with the place and its history. In a sense, British East Africa embedded itself in my imagination when I read Out of Africa as a teenager. That book gave rise to my longing to see the African wilderness for myself and fed my already pre-existing wanderlust. Once I went to Africa twelve years ago, I was completely infatuated with the experience of being there. Setting a book in British East Africa seemed a natural. Then, while I was contemplating the series and beginning some preliminary research, in an unrelated task – I was going through some memorabilia of my father’s – I came upon a leather bookmark that he had had inscribed with the Ten Commandments. BAM! There was an idea fully formed, that the series would follow the Commandments. I had already learned that the Protectorate of British East Africa became the Colony of Kenya in 1920, and it seemed only natural to begin with 1911 and count the Commandments through to 1920. So the series will end when BEA becomes the colony of Kenya.

F&M: You have now written five historical mysteries, books set in different locales and different time periods. How do you go about researching a time and place so far removed from your personal experience?

Alfieri: I have the enormous privilege of being a writer in residence at the splendid New York Public Library. What I want most, in addition to a small smattering of historians’ opinions, is memoirs of people who had feet on the ground in the place and at the time I am writing about. People who are writing about what happened to them — AND what they wore and what they ate, what they did in their free time! They also reveal their own attitudes and opinions about what they saw and experienced. This gives me such insight into the life of ordinary (or extraordinary) people, what they were feeling and thinking about the historical events that were swirling around them. Fortunately, the NYPL has an extensive collection of such books. An embarrassment of riches. With early twentieth century characters, I can also look at photos of what they saw. Sometimes I have to remind myself that their world was not sepia tinted.

F&M: What is it like to recreate the way people speak in those different time periods?

Alfieri: This is a technique that all historical novelists develop on an individual basis. For me the most important thing is to sound neither too modern nor too arcane. With the South American novels, I dropped in a Spanish word once in while, to remind the reader that she is not in twenty-first century USA, but only in a way that made its meaning obvious. And, depending on the period, I might or might not use contractions. 1945: Contractions work very well. 1650: no contractions at all. With the Africa series, I have the added issue of writing dialogue for English and Scottish people. So my goal, without being too precious about it, is to throw in a typically English expression. One character, in a moment of exasperation, shouted “Poppycock!” It worked because he’s a blowhard. Or I might have a tony upper-level administrator say, “Whilst you were away…” On the other hand, even if an expression was in common use in 1912, if it sounds too modern, I can’t use it. “Got the drop on me,” for instance, shows up in the writing of a real 1909 BEA policeman. But I can’t let Justin Tolliver say or even think that expression, or the reader will think I have used an anachronism, which would pull the reader out of the story. Nothing I do in the way of technique should ever do that. The story is the most important thing.

F&M: What are your favorite things about your characters, and what do you see as their flaws? And how, if at all, is the plot of your mystery novels connected to either their best qualities or their flaws?

Alfieri: My favorite thing about them is that they all have a foot in two worlds. Vera is African-born, so she is not really Scottish, but she is not really African either. Not 100% grounded in either culture, she can be impetuous, a bit overly self-reliant. Tolliver is an English aristocrat, but he is too in love with Africa and Vera to adopt the line of thinking of the King’s loyal empire builders. He was brought up to follow the rules of his class but is too intelligent and good-hearted not to prickle at the flaws in British attitudes towards the Africans. He is treading a thin line, and can overcompensate when he strays what feels to him to be too far in either direction. Ah, and Kwai Libazo. I love Kwai. He isn’t exactly flawless, but nearly so. His loyalties are his problem: he’s neither Maasai, nor Kikuyu. He’s also not British, but he serves the ideal of justice that he is learning from Tolliver. He follows his heart and his intelligence, but sometimes the two are in conflict, and he can paint himself into a corner on such an occasion.

F&M: You have said in the past that, when it comes to plotting, you are a “pantser,” which is to say, instead of writing from a plot outline, you construct the story as you go along. In writing The Idol of Mombasa, were you at all surprised by where the events took you? What discoveries did you make along the way?

Alfieri: My stories aways surprise me as they unfold. I did not know the murderer in Idol of Mombasa would even be in the story until that person showed up unexpectedly. Just last month, at dinner with the organizer of a famous British Mystery/Thriller conference, I got into a friendly debate about this. (He is not a writer of fiction, by the way.) He insisted that the writer must always know what’s going to happen, otherwise he or she would never be able to write the story. I could not convince him. But there are many like me. My friend Charles Salzberg, a fine mystery/thriller writer and teacher of fiction writing described his and my attitude best: “If I knew what was going to happen, I’d be bored with the story.” My sentiments exactly. And If I get bored, what chance would the reader have of staying intrigued? For pantsers like me, once the characters take on a life of their own, we know they are “alive” enough to seem real to the reader. Then I let the characters tell me the story. I will do here what I did at that dinner table. I refer any doubters to Chapter 13 of The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles. He describes the experience of writing a novel better than I ever could. The great E. L. Doctorow said, “It’s like driving a car at night in a heavy fog with the headlights on. You can’t see very far ahead, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Also by Annamaria Alfieri: Strange Gods and City of Silver

The post “My stories always surprise me”: An interview with Annamaria Alfieri appeared first on Felony & Mayhem Press.

The Amazon review went something like this:

I am outraged, and I am never going to buy from Felony & Mayhem Press again! They had the nerve to edit Ngaio Marsh, one of the most beloved writers in the history of mystery fiction, and actually remove entire blocks of text! Avoid this publishing house.

Not surprisingly, our hearts hit the floor. We knew we had not deliberately changed a word, not an apostrophe, of Dame Ngaio’s prose. But maybe gremlins had snuck in during the night? And, ummmm…deleted stuff? This is publishing: Stranger things have happened.

Quick like bunnies, we checked the digital edition against the tattered pages of the book from which we had taken the text. And they were…identical. Was the reviewer crazy? Were we crazy?

No. We were American. And so was the edition from which we had taken our text. But that American edition, we soon realized, was in fact somewhat different from the earlier, British edition. And it was that British edition to which the Amazon reviewer was referring. She was hollering at us, but it was actually some long-gone publisher from the 1940s to whom her anger was really directed.

Was her anger justified? The truth is, when a book goes into a new edition, text is often changed. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of correcting proofreading errors that weren’t caught on the first go-round.Then there’s the fact that “vintage” novels (written prior to the 1960s, say) frequently contain language that contemporary readers would find offensive in the extreme. That might be ok if the speaker is a villain, but what happens when the protagonist, a character you’re supposed to like, casually mentions that he was talking to a ________ earlier in the day, or that he bought something from a __________, or that the butler is a ______ _______ _______? What do you do then?

If you’re us, you change the language. To our mind, the sanctity of Ngaio Marsh’s prose – or Margery Allingham’s, or Elizabeth Daly’s, or any of the old-school writers we publish – is not worth stopping a reader dead in her tracks, unable to enjoy the rest of the book. We work hard to come up with phrasing that preserves the meaning of the original and the sense of period, but is less likely to cause the reader to throw the book across the room. (There is, of course, an argument that the original, repellent language should be preserved, as a sort of museum-exhibit of the bad old days. To our mind, this argument has some merit, but is outweighed by our belief that few readers pick up our books as historical documents; they are seeking entertainment, and we seek to provide it with as few impediments as possible.)

The switch from a British to an American edition often gives rise to editorial changes – U.S. publishers routinely dump lifts and lorries in favor of elevators and trucks, for instance, or clarify slang. I can’t swear to it, but I suspect a similar system prevails in the other direction.

And then we come to the world of more subjective changes. We made a big one, when Felony was still wearing training wheels. We published a book called Missing, by Karin Alvtegen, in a translation (from the original Swedish) that had first been published in the UK. But before we went to press, I emailed the author. As published, the book opened with a crazed religious rant in the mind of a serial killer, followed by a scene in which the novel’s protagonist, a homeless woman, pulls an intriguing scam in the dining room of a fancy hotel.

I wanted to change the order of those two scenes.

At first, Ms. Alvtegen was very distressed: Why did I ask for such a change? Well, I thought the hotel-scene was a much stronger opener. Additionally, the success of The Da Vinci Code had flooded the market with Vatican thrillers, many of them featuring crazed religious serial killers. I didn’t want this subtle, quirky Swedish mystery lumped in with the Catholic Conspiracy brigade.

With some reluctance, Ms. Alvtegen agreed to the change. And a few months later, the book was shortlisted for an Edgar award for Best Mystery of the Year. Coincidence? I couldn’t possibly comment.

At the moment, we’re dealing with a challenge that requires us to make almost all the sorts of changes I’ve discussed – or at least consider them. We’re getting ready to print the last four novels in the Marsh line-up, and in one of them the differences between the various editions are the most significant we’ve come across. Our default decision is to use the earliest edition (which is typically, though not always, the British), but in this instance, we felt that the editors of the first American editions had made some very worthwhile changes. Some scenes had been made clearer, some transitions smoother. Did we really want to discard these worthwhile changes? We did not. So we made the unusual decision to go with the American edition.

And that’s when things got interesting.

As we went through the book, we discovered that the original American editors hadn’t only made additions: They had deleted text as well. And after going through both versions with a couple of fine-tooth combs, we determined that, really, we liked some of the deleted scenes, thank you very much. So we restored some of the British text.

The result is essentially a first: A Ngiao Marsh novel that, we believe, combines the best of the original British and the original American edits. Is this the definitive version? Absolutely not, but it is our stab at it.

We would like nothing more than for you to take your own stabs (hey, we publish murder mysteries; we’re all about the stabbing). Compare our version to the crumbling paperbacks that we know are on your shelves, and tell us which text you like better and why. One of the cool things about the new publishing technology is that it is now relatively simple to make changes, even after a book has been printed. So give us some great changes – with some great reasoning to back things up – and we’ll not only make them, we’ll acknowledge your contribution.

Which book exactly are we talking about? We’ll dribble some clues out in the next few weeks. But if you want the answer, you’ll have to do some sleuthing. We think you might have a knack for that.

The post Edition and Subtraction appeared first on Felony & Mayhem Press.

It has come to our attention that the paperback edition of Ngaio Marsh’s Singing in the Shrouds contains a serious printing error: namely, toward the end of the book, pages from Death of a Fool, another Ngaio Marsh title, replace pages from Singing in the Shrouds. We are very sorry for this error, which occurred during the printing of the book (a press error caused by using the wrong plates during printing) and which our printer assures us they have never had before. When we heard from irate readers with defective copies, we combed through our existing inventory, opening every single copy of the book, and found 261 misprinted copies. We destroyed all of these copies, and everything that has left our warehouse since January has been error-free. Unfortunately, an unknown number of erroneous copies were shipped to book sellers, and then sold, and we have no way to identify these copies and recall them (though we did indeed try to find one). So instead, by way of apology, we are offering every one of you who has purchased a misprinted copy of Singing in the Shrouds a replacement copy of that book (verified by an actual human as correctly printed) shipped to you at no charge, as well as a free copy of a Felony & Mayhem book of your choice. Email us at mail@felonyandmayhem.com to get started.

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The iconography of Valentine’s Day tends to be pretty limited in scope. Absent some Very Special Episode, we’re almost always talking about young lovers, attractive and able-bodied, heterosexual and of the Caucasian persuasion.

Well, boo to that. Everyone deserves a valentine, and love takes many forms. We’re therefore offering a sale on a hatful that have some splendid sleuthing, of course, but also some true love. Sometimes the lovers are young and lovely, and sometimes they’ve got the soft bodies of folks well into middle age. And sometimes they’re not lovers at all, but the friends that can mean even more.

So give a little bookish joy this Valentine’s Day to someone you love. And if you can’t be with a one you love, honey, love the one you’re with – even if that’s the one you see in the mirror.

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Generalizations are the hobgoblins of little minds, but nevertheless, I’ll make one: The vast majority of mystery readers cut their sleuthing-teeth on either Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes or the Nancy Drew series, the first volume of which – The Secret of the Old Clock – was published in 1930 (making Nancy – with her roadster and her neat bob – the very model of the Golden Age heroine). True Nancy-ites (Drew-ids?) know that, beginning in about 1959, the series was rewritten, ostensibly to get rid of racist language and bring the books “up to date.” Unfortunately, “up to date” went hand in hand with “dumbed down”; the language of the rewritten books is noticeably more simplistic and less nuanced.

Nor do the changes stop there. As Cara Nicoletti notes in her irresistible new collection of essays Voracious: A Hungry Reader Cooks Her Way Through Great Books, the Nancy of the early editions is much less compulsively perfect, and considerably more approachable. But the weirdest change has to do with Nancy’s pal Bess, who makes her debut in Book 5 of the series, The Secret at Shadow Ranch. In the rewritten edition, Bess is introduced as “slightly plump,” and this description “precedes her name in nearly every sentence for the remainder of the book,” according to Nicoletti. Furthermore, she is forever being taunted about her weight, mostly by her skinny cousin George, who has morphed from a goofy tomboy in the original version into a bona-fide Mean Girl. George is “always drawing attention to how much Bess has eaten,” says Nicoletti, “while Nancy giggles demurely in the background.” “Eating is really a very fattening hobby, dear cousin,” smirks George, smugly sipping a soft drink while Bess prepares to dive into a chocolate sundae with nuts.

But, says Nicoletti, “in the original Secret at Shadow Ranch, there is no mention of Bess’s weight.” In fact, she is described as being “noted for always doing the correct thing” and for being prettier and better dressed than George. Nicoletti’s literary analysis, throughout the essays, is clever and engaging, but she doesn’t offer any theories as to why a virulent vein of fat-shaming should have been inserted into a book that is otherwise about three teenage girls solving crimes. On the other hand, she does offer a swell-looking recipe for a double-chocolate sundae with nuts, and many readers will regard that as more than a fair trade-off.

The post Nancy, We Hardly Knew Ye: Nancy Drew revised appeared first on Felony & Mayhem Press.

“The best appetizer is herring,” goes one famous Russian aphorism. Maybe yes, maybe no, but we’re quite certain of this: The best present is books. Always in style, never the wrong size, they comfort the melancholy, inspire the despairing, provide a chuckle, a diversion, a window onto another time, another place, another life, another mind.

We’re so certain that books are where it’s at (baby!) that we’ve come up with a holiday offer: Give some Felony books to a friend, and we’ll give one to you. That’s a fancy way of saying we’re running a buy-three-get-one-free offer, good through the end of the year. And of course, if you want to keep all four for yourself, we won’t tell. At the same time, though, we are kinda serious about the “give them as presents” thing. The conversation that begins with a book – “Do you think he knew? Should she have sent that letter? Why did she leave so quickly? I can’t believe he was stupid enough to marry her” – makes that book the gift that keeps on giving. So at this season of good will, we hope you’ll consider giving one.

Need help deciding? Shoot us an email, twit us a tweet, or drop us a line on Facebook: WE LOVE TO MAKE SUGGESTIONS.

(Enter coupon code HOLIDAY443 to take advantage of the Christmas sale.)

The post The Best Present is Books: The Felonious Christmas Sale appeared first on Felony & Mayhem Press.

Miracles come with time-limits, right? Or they wouldn’t be miracles, they’d just be the New Normal. So our Miraculous Hanukkah Sale must, sadly, come to an end. The sale-candles will continue to burn until 5pm Eastern time, after which they go POOF! blown out for another year. (To get in on all that miraculous fun, check the slider above.)

But but but, you may say, I don’t CELEBRATE Hanukkah! (You have something against crispylicious fried potatoes?) Where, O where, is the miracle for the Rest Of Us?

Patience, grasshopper. Have we ever let you down? In the meantime, have some of that mulled wine. You know, for quality-control purposes.

The post Last day of our Hanukkah special appeared first on Felony & Mayhem Press.

Tonight is the first night of Hanukkah, an eight-day commemoration of a miracle that, according to tradition, occurred in about 160 B.C. Enemies vanquished (for the moment), the Israelites turned their attention to the Temple, which had been defiled by the bad guys. An important element of the Temple was the “eternal light,” a lamp that burned sacred oil and was never permitted to go out. The baddies, of course, had put it out, and when the Jews re-lit the lamp, they discovered they had only one day’s worth of oil. Sanctification doesn’t happen overnight, and acquiring a fresh supply of sacred oil would require eight days. Miraculously, that single day’s supply of oil lasted for the necessary eight, and today Jews around the world celebrate the “festival of lights” by lighting special candles (because: eternal light) and eating fried things (because: oil) (also because: delicious).

From a religious standpoint, Hanukkah is actually a fairly minor holiday, but its association with both glittering lights and special foods, combined with its tendency to be celebrated in December, has framed it, in the popular imagination, as the “Jewish Christmas.” As a result, for the past 100 years or so, the Hanukkah celebration (in the USA at least) has featured not only sparkly candles and delicious fried things, but also presents, making it pretty much a trifecta of terrific. And just to gild the lily (and give Jewish kids something to brag about to their gentile friends), custom dictates that presents are given on every single one of the celebratory eight days.

Eight days of presents AND potato pancakes! It’s difficult to imagine a better combination. And yet, for me, the most important part of Hanukkah is the candles. It’s not because I’m particularly religious – though hey, thumbs up for the eternal light of faith, mercy, truth, whatever you’d like it to embody – but because I need light to read. The one-day lamp that burned for eight days? I’m all for the rededication of the Temple, but the really critical part? EIGHT DAYS’ WORTH OF READING.

Of course, reading has two requirements. We’ve already covered light; here are the books. For the eight days of Hanukkah, we’ll be running some especially tasty discounts on some of our favorite books. Get with tradition (albeit a fairly recent one) and give the books as presents, or give’em to your own self. Just don’t dribble them up with pancake greasies. Check in daily to see the featured title.

Ok, and about those pancakes. First of all, if you are the Pancake Maker, then ABSOLUTELY get the books for yourself: He or she who grates the potatoes and stands over a skillet full of hot fat is more than entitled to some righteous reading matter. And second, if you are craving some latkes and have no family tradition in that department? I’d recommend any recipe (and they’re widely available online) by Joan Nathan: She’s never steered me wrong.

The post A Felonious Hanukkah: Eight Days of Light (Reading) appeared first on Felony & Mayhem Press.

Second part of an interview with Felony & Mayhem publisher Maggie Topkis (you can read the first part here). And, if you’re curious about some of the books mentioned below, you can read the Donald Westlake “Sam Holt” books at a discount this week.

Tell me more about the early covers.

So much of what we did in the early days was defined by having no money and no contacts, and needing to make something work. For the Ganja Coast cover, Margaret, our cover designer, found a great image online. She emailed the photographer, and he sent back this snooty email, saying he only licensed his work to non-profits. So I emailed him and said, look, I promise, we have never made a profit. He agreed to let us use the image.

One of my favorite stories: We published a book by William Marshall called Yellowthread Street. The book is set in Hong Kong, while it was still under British control, and it’s about cops. I knew I wanted a police badge on the cover, but it had to be a badge from the British days, a pre-handover police badge. Margaret found this guy in Norway who was obsessed with police forces. He had a collection of police ephemera from around the world, including several Hong Kong badges from the right period. And yes, he’d be happy to send us a high-resolution image for our cover. What did he want in exchange? Well, it seems there is a book that lists the address of every police station in the United States, a book that is not allowed to be sold outside the U.S. This frustrated him enormously. So we bought a copy of the book, and sent it to him, and he sent us our badge.

Quite a few of our books have covers that feature illustrations, rather than photographs. Donald Westlake’s books, the four he wrote under the name Sam Holt, were among the earliest titles we illustrated. And I know there’s a good story there.

Actually, there are a couple stories about those books. I really wanted Don’s “Dortmunder” series, but Don’s agent, Larry Kirshbaum, wanted to go with a bigger publisher (that was understandable; Felony & Mayhem was roughly the size of a lemonade stand). In the hope that we might begin a relationship (that would go on to embrace the Dortmunders), I wrote to Don, asking if we could publish the Sam Holt books. He said yes. And then I asked if we could publish them under the name Donald Westlake, and he said absolutely not. Hunh? Don explained that he had essentially written the books to win a bet with himself. He had become very successful, as a writer, getting wonderful reviews, and he wanted to know if he could sell books and get good reviews without trading on his name. So he brought the books out as written by “Samuel Holt,” swearing his agent and his initial publisher to secrecy. Ultimately he decided that enough time had gone by that he could allow the secret to come out.

Anthony Kosner had by that point become our art director, and I told him that I wanted pictures of a guy who looked like Magnum P.I. These were 1970s books, the guy should be sexy and happy; he’s got a convertible and a gun and a couple of babes, life is good. Remember, we had no money. So Anthony found an illustrator in Poland who worked cheap. Unfortunately, he kept sending us images of this guy with really hollowed-out cheeks, deep-set eyes, and a pencil mustache. He looked like a Latvian pimp who hadn’t eaten in a long time. I kept sending back emails saying “No, no, happy, happy,” and enclosing images of a grinning Tom Selleck. But we kept getting the guy who looked like he was saying “I will not smile again until my people are free.”

Were you still tiny at this point?

Yes, but tiny is relative. We launched in June 1995, and in October I went to Bouchercon, in Chicago. By the time we registered, all the publishers’ tables were gone, but I was told that a company called Ramble House might be willing to share its table with me. At the time, Ramble House published the work of only one writer, Harry Stephen Keeler, who wrote sort of wacky, hard-boiled stuff in the 30s and 40s, and apparently has a small but passionately devoted audience. We were brand new, we had a grand total of six books to sell, but Ramble House made us look like Simon & Schuster. The publisher, Fender, and I had a lot of time to talk, sitting at this table doing nothing. So I asked him, Who’s your printer? (This is classic publisher small-talk, the equivalent of “What’s your sign?”)

Well, Fender didn’t use a printer. He had a copy machine at home, and a paper cutter, and he wound run off copies of the books on the copy machine, use the paper cutter to trim them, and then (he was very proud of this), he had developed his own recipe for glue, which he would boil up in one of his wife’s saucepans. His wife had gotten very annoyed at this, so he had finally bought his own saucepan. Anyway, he would glue the pages together, and iron on the cover, using his wife’s iron, but she got tired of this, too, since glue always got on the iron, so she made him buy his own book-ironing iron.

We were not exactly boiling up our own glue. We did in fact have an actual printer – Sterling Pierce, which I had found through the small-press book fair. But the pre-print process was not exactly high-tech. Xerox had come out with a new machine, a souped-up copier that had a footprint the size of two shoeboxes. That was good, because my office was the size of four shoeboxes. With just a click of a button, you could scan a page and copy it, and turn it into a Word or PDF document. This was revolutionary. I would pull apart an old edition of a book, turn it into a badly OCR’d Word document. Someone would proofread that document, we would typeset the proofread copy, someone else would proofread the typeset version, and then we would send that proof to a fellow named Dan Smullyan, an old friend of Donna Miller’s who has for years acted as our final set of eyes.

Astonishingly, the process has remained similar to this day, except that we don’t do our own scanning anymore, and we’ve switched from Quark to InDesign. But still, because we are dealing with reprints of, often, fairly old books, OCR is the only method we’ve come up with for extracting the text. As a technique, it’s clunky and almost comically old-school, but…it’s what we’ve got. And as dopey as it may be, it’s a technique we’ve used to put out more than 300 books.

To be continued

The post Behind the Music: Felony & Mayhem’s First 10 Years (part 2) appeared first on Felony & Mayhem Press.

On our 10th anniversary, we have been talking a lot about our early days. Here is the first part of an interview with Felonious publisher Maggie Topkis:

You started Felony & Mayhem in 1995. What did the publishing world look like then?

The early 90s were a really interesting period. Publishing was making a transition from a really inefficiently run industry of passionate amateurs (in the best sense) to a professionally run corporate industry. There was massive consolidation, and when companies consolidated and (often) went public, they jettisoned their midlists, which meant that hundreds of thousands of books were taken out of print. And that, of course, was where I saw an opportunity for Felony & Mayhem – well, sort of. Mostly I was just pissed that I couldn’t get these books for my customers as the bookstore.

When we did the launch party for Felony (and we did it at the bookstore, natch), a surprising number of people turned out. I mean, I had been kind of thinking my mom would come, you know, and maybe bring a friend. But in fact there were all these people from the world of publishing, all of them passionately wishing us good luck. I remember saying to somebody at the party, “Why are all these people so excited about this?” And she said, “Don’t you get it? You’re doing what they all want to do. They got into publishing to publish books they love, and now they find themselves working for another faceless corporation, putting out books like Ten Days to a Tighter Tummy.”

Felony books have a pretty distinctive look. How did you come up with that?

I knew from my experience at the bookstore that readers had very little sense of publishers’ identities, of publishers’ brands. With one exception: Soho Crime. Many times a customer would come up to the cash register with a pile of Soho Crime books. I’d ask he chose these books, had he read reviews? Did he recognize the authors’ names? No. Inevitably he’d say he had read other books from this publisher, had liked them, and knew from the design of the covers that these books were from the same publisher. I decided to steal that idea: I wanted our books to be recognizable as Felony books from halfway across the room.

So we needed a design. I spent hours and hours at the bookstore, looking at covers, trying to find covers where I liked the architecture. I finally found a good designer, Jose, and I told him that we wanted a design that would feature the author’s name more prominently than the title; I knew we had authors, like Edmund Crispin and Reginald Hill, whose names people would recognize. Jose initially gave us a sort of wedge running across the middle of the cover, and this didn’t work for me. I knew that the majority of our readers were likely to be women, and I didn’t want angular shapes; I wanted something more sensuous, which I thought would be more appealing to our audience. And so the Felony “swoosh” was born, that weird curving band where the author’s name is displayed.

As much as I might like the idea of designing each book’s interior, specifically for that book, I knew we couldn’t afford that approach. Jose knew a woman named Donna Miller who had designed the interiors of a number of books, so we hired her to create our templates. Actually, we hired her for more than that. One of our early books was Satan’s Lambs, by Lynn Hightower (which is currently out of print, but we really should reissue it, because it’s wonderful). A pivotal scene in the book is set in an all-but empty house. Our heroine is sitting in the house, waiting for nightfall, waiting for the man she knows is coming to kill her. She has deliberately stripped away everything – every side-table, every throw-rug, every piece of furniture – that could impede movement. The house is like a theater of war. And that was the scene I wanted to illustrate on the cover. My friends Fred and Maureen had just moved to Hong Kong, leaving behind their empty apartment, so I had an empty space. Now I needed a wiry, tensely muscled woman with short hair, to approximate the book’s protagonist. Well, that’s what Donna looked like. So we shot a roll of film starring Donna, sitting in Fred and Maureen’s empty apartment, clutching a rifle.

Read part 2 of this interview

The post Behind the Music: Felony & Mayhem’s first 10 years (part 1) appeared first on Felony & Mayhem Press.