Late last week, Warren Ellis debuted the cover for his upcoming novel GUN MACHINE (Mulholland Books January 2013) on his website, leading to pickup from a few blogs about how awesome it is (RIGHT!?!?), and several pages of feedback in the Bleeding Cool forums.

Marcia Clark appeared on FOX & Friends to promote the return of Rachel Knight in GUILT BY DEGREES! She also dropped by the set of Good Day New York, and FOX 9 has the clip. Also check out the review of GUILT BY DEGREES from SheKnows.com.

Examiner.com loves Joe R. Lansdale’s EDGE OF DARK WATER, too.

Nick Santora can be heard on a few podcasts discussing FIFTEEN DIGITS podcasts–find them here and here.

Our favorite news of the week? Chicago Fire, co-written and -executively produced by Mulholland Books author Derek Haas, has been picked up to be a prime-time NBC show! Check it out Wednesdays this Fall–and don’t miss the e-book omnibus THE ASSASSIN TRILOGY, called by the New York Times “a devastatingly cool series,” this June 12 for only $2.99, and Derek’s new espionage thriller THE RIGHT HAND in November 2012. Trailer follows!

Did we missing something sweet? Share it in the comments! We’re always open to suggestions for next week’s post! Get in touch at mulhollandbooks@hbgusa.com or DM us on Twitter.

The goal is to create a 100-paragraph crime story. Here’s how it works: Mulholland Books will assign interested students specific passages, each student will write a section that branches off of the one before it (except for the first paragraph, of course), and that process will continue until students have composed a cohesive narrative.

Each passage will be posted online until completion, so students can see how the story evolves. And here’s the best part. Mulholland Books will feature the final story on MulhollandBooks.com. We want this project to not only be a testament to appropriation, but also an opportunity for young writers to publish.

How to submit: Write our intern, Dominic, at Dominic.Viti@hbgusa.com, and tell him you’re interested. Participants will be assigned specific paragraphs (between 100-500 words) on a FCFS basis, and because we’re reaching out to students nationwide, we encourage anyone and everyone who is interested to get involved ASAP.

Deadline: April 15, 2012.

First section, by Evan Walker.

Edited by Wes Miller.

John found the body after he’d had his share of sightseeing the dune. He’d scrambled over it as he had in ‘72, sixteen and obliterated, once he’d yanked himself out of the rear window of the VW Squareback and waded through the black water to the shore.

He gave a satisfied hmph and walked the same way he’d walked that night, alongside the ditch and back to the house he’d grown up in—shallower than he remembered, dried up too. He had sloshed through the front door and the two of them just stared as he spoke. Joy riding again. Imagining the way his mother had turned back to her reading after he’d returned, soaking wet, without the car, he’d meandered back toward the edge of the ditch, and found her.

She was dumped in a pile, her sundress, black shorts and pixie brown hair  damp from the humid air, one hand slung over her side and curled up with rigor mortis except for her pointer finger, outstretched in timid protest.

Second section, by Amelia Spriggs.

Edited by Dominic Viti.

John jumped to the other side of the ditch to look at her face and landed heavily, slipping to one aching knee and sending a few small white crabs skittering away. He had seen a lot of dead bodies over the decades, not a few of them young and formerly pretty. But this one pinched his sense of tragedy, niggling the worn callus of his compassion.

There was something familiar about her slim frame, even in its rigid heap. The angular jaw and the set of those large, inert eyes. He crouched down and sat on his haunches for a moment before falling back onto the sand. What felt like the vague pricking of tragedy swiftly turned into the keen piercing of horror. Lena.

Third section, by Joe Oslund

Edited by Dominic Viti.

John stumbled forward in a haze of shock that rang in his skull like the reverberating toll of a church bell, hid behind a shallow hollow of sand, and threw up. He took a few deep breaths before calling Julius, who let the phone ring six times before picking up—a subtle reminder that the old man had more important things to do.

“What is it?” Julius barked.

“They got her,” John croaked. “I mean, somebody got her.”

“Who?” Julius said. “Who got who? Use your words.”

John had no words.

“Is it Lena?” Julius said. “Did something happen to Lena?”

“She’s dead, Dad. Somebody killed her.”

There was silence on the line, and with a soft click, Julius hung up.

Tijuana lies sprawled along the line where the U.S. and Mexico crash into each other like two tectonic plates. This convergence leads to a certain seismic instability, and the city is constantly being rattled by tremors of one sort or another, whether it be drug murders or a political scandal. Business continues as usual, though, because that’s what business does, barely taking notice of all of the little calamities that somehow miraculously never add up to a major catastrophe.

It’s a city of two million hardworking people, 7,000 stray dogs, and lots of noisy black ravens. Technically, it sits in Mexico, 20 minutes south of downtown San Diego, three hours from L.A., but it’s a border city, perhaps the quintessential border city, and as such is neither Mexican nor American. “Tijuana isn’t Mexico,” people say, and they’re right, but it’s not a suburb of San Diego either. It’s not even some strange amalgamation of the two. Instead, like all great cities – Los Angeles, New York, Paris – it’s completely unique, possessing a personality that sets it apart from every other place in the world. It has its own culture, its own language, its own dreams and nightmares.

The city was a sleepy backwater until Prohibition, when Hollywood and the mob began to come down to drink and gamble. Later, it became the playground of servicemen stationed in San Diego, offering all the depravity an 18-year-old sailor could want. Regular tourists started venturing across the border in droves in the 1950s. They came in search of spicy food, cheap margaritas, and souvenirs for the folks back home — an oversized sombrero, maybe, or a silver ring that would turn your finger green after a week, or a life-size plaster skull wearing a Nazi helmet.

Today Tijuana isn’t the tourist Mecca it once was, but it’s still one of the fastest-growing cities in Mexico due to the many foreign-owned factories that have located there in order to take advantage of cheap labor. These maquiladoras attract workers from all over the country. There is also a sizeable transient population made up of people who are waiting to slip cross the border into the U.S. or have been deported from there.

The scrappy metropolis has long fascinated me. I’ve written about it in a couple of short stories, and a portion of my new novel, Angel Baby (Mulholland, Spring 2013), takes place there. Some of my visits are chronicled in the half dozen blurry black-and-white photos I have that show me sitting in carts behind different sad-eyed donkeys painted to look like zebras, all shot by various Tijuana street photographers over the years.

I’m 8 years old in the earliest one. It was taken during a trip with my family. We were only there long enough to have lunch and do a little shopping, but the child-beggars, garishly painted nightclubs, and extravagantly costumed mariachis made a permanent impression. I remember it as a slightly scary whirl of loud music, glaring sun, odd smells, and hectoring voices.

When I got older, it was the city’s strippers and free-flowing booze that drew me and my college buddies like moths to flickering neon. The joke was that if you were old enough to see over the bar, you could get a drink, and we’d drive down from L.A. to spend long, messy nights pounding beer and tequila and stumbling in and out of various dens of iniquity.

One favorite was the Unicornio, where the dancers were transsexuals. We’d bring in a first-timer and sit back and watch the fun as he gradually realized what was going on – or, even better, didn’t. The city felt like the Wild West back then. Anything could happen there, and we hoped it would. Dudes got ripped off by deaf bar girls, thrown in jail for pissing in alleys, and busted for trying to bring fireworks and switchblades and Quaaludes back into the U.S. , and we tell the stories to this day.

My most recent visit to the city took place in January. About to put the finishing touches on the manuscript for Angel Baby, I went down to see if anything had changed since the last time I’d been there a couple of years ago, changes that might need to be reflected in the book. I also planned to hit the dog races and a food stall in the red-light district that I’d been hearing about, one that specialized in chicken-neck tacos. Research, you know.
I parked in San Ysidro and walked over the border on a brand-new pedestrian bridge, part of a massive construction project that will add more traffic lanes at the crossing, more inspection bays, and more office space for the Department of Homeland Security. I’d described the old port of entry in the novel, picturing it in my head as I wrote the scenes that took place there. The area would look very different by time the book came out, so I’d have to do a bit of editing.

Other changes quickly became apparent when I reached the heart of the city’s tourist sector, Avenida Revolucion. While I knew that tourism had dropped off sharply due to negative publicity about drug violence and police corruption, I was surprised to find that I was the only gringo on the street, and one of the few pedestrians of any stripe — there weren’t even many Mexicans around. And while I’d seen some of my favorite haunts disappear or morph into new businesses over the years, this time I barely recognized the neighborhood.

Most of the restaurants were closed, their once-crowded second-floor terraces boarded over with graffiti-covered plywood. Many of the souvenir stores were gone, too, and the colorfulness of merchandise in those that remained had a desperate, pleading quality. The strip clubs had been gutted and converted into pharmacies, and the same skeevy barkers who once tried to lure you inside to see the girls now stood on the sidewalk in dingy white coats, touting cut-rate Viagra and vicodin. A new casino had opened, but nobody seemed to be having much fun there.

It was disorienting. This was no longer the Tijuana I’d written and fantasized about over the years. I wondered if the changes had happened so gradually that I hadn’t pieced them together until that moment in the same the way you might see an aunt of yours every once in a while and not notice anything new about her until one afternoon the sunlight hits her just right and you exclaim to yourself, “Man, she’s gotten old!” Then again, perhaps I was just too busy being and not looking the last few times I’d visited. Or maybe I’d willfully ignored the transformation with a nostalgist’s selective blindness.

Whatever the explanation, by the time I reached the old Jai Alai Fronton Palace – shuttered in 1998 – I needed a drink. I ducked into a cantina called Dandy Del Sur, a dark, divey survivor of the old TJ, and ordered a tequila, something cheap.

I write for a variety of reasons. The main one, of course, is because I can. Writing is the only natural skill I possess, so I experience a feeling of completeness when working at it, a sense that I’m doing the thing that I’m wired to do. Another reason is that people sometimes pay me for what I write, and I need that money to live. And then there’s the fact that I like the me that comes across on paper more than the me I am every day. The writer me is smarter, wiser, kinder, funnier, and much more interesting.

Another motivation is that through writing I’m able to fix in time favorite cities, streets and buildings and thereby arrest the evolution of my personal universe by creating a kind of scrapbook of places that I’ve loved. That day in TJ, though, as I slouched in front of my drink, I brooded over the fact that, in reality, the world changed faster than I could ever write it into permanence and that almost before I’d finished setting down the details of a locale, that locale would become someplace else. A depressing thought.

The owner of the cantina sat at the end of the bar, an old woman wearing a big blonde wig. Faded photographs of her posing with various people lined the walls. She was younger in the pictures, and if I was supposed to know who any of the people were, I didn’t. I ordered another tequila and raised my glass to her. She was lucky to have this memory box, this eddy in the river of time, where she could await her fate with style and grace surrounded by familiar faces and ghostly smiles.

Me, I was destined to go out ugly, running a race there was no way to win, attempting to wrestle into words people and places and feelings that fought like hell to get away. Some days it seemed like a noble pursuit, other days, like that one there in Dandy Del Sur, it felt like nothing but foolishness.

It’s always what you do next that counts though. I finished my drink, nodded a goodbye to the old woman, and flung myself back into the current. I found that taco stand in the Zona Rosa and ate deep-fried chicken necks while watching the streetwalkers troll for customers. I hit a couple of winners at the dog track and saw a blind man play the accordian. I walked over the bridge leading back to the U.S. at sunset, just as the homeless who lived in the riverbed gathered around their campfires.

And the next morning I picked up my notebook and pencil and began to write. The feeling that it was pure folly lingered, but somebody had to capture that cloudy January afternoon in the new Tijuana, or at least somebody had to try. A few more babies had already been born there, an old woman had decided to paint her house hot pink, and one of those stray dogs had been hit by a car. The city was changing as I scribbled, and I was going to have to work fast to get it all down.

Richard Lange was born in Oakland, CA and grew up in California’s San Joaquin Valley. He’s the author of the short story collection Dead Boys and the novel This Wicked World. His short stories have appeared in The Sun, The Iowa Review and Best American Mystery Stories, and as part of the Atlantic Monthly‘s Fiction for Kindle series. He was the 2008 recipient of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009.

Mulholland Books will publish Richard Lange’s newest, Angel Baby, in Spring 2013.

Prologue

He stood still, listening as the car pulled out of the driveway. When the sound of the engine faded into the distance, Zack looked at his watch: 9:36 a.m. Perfect. Three solid hours of “me” time. He eagerly trotted down the thinly carpeted stairs to the basement, the heavy bass thud of his work boots echoing through the empty house. Clutched in his hand was the magazine photograph of the canopy he intended to build. He figured it would’ve cost a small fortune at one of those fancy designer stores, but the copy he’d make would be just as good, if not better—and for less than a tenth of the price. A smile curled Zack’s lips as he enjoyed the mental image of Lilah’s naked body framed by gauzy curtains hanging from the canopy, wafting seductively around the bed. He inhaled, imagining her perfume as he savored the fantasy.

Zack jumped down the last step and moved to the corkboard hanging above his workbench. He tacked up the magazine photo, pulled out the armless secretary chair with the bouncy backrest, and sat down heavily. The squeak of the overburdened springs jangled in the stillness of the dank air. The room was little more than a cement-floored cell, but it was Zack’s paradise, filled to bursting with the highest quality carpentry tools he could afford, acquired slowly and lovingly over the years. Since he was a kid, he’d found that making things with his hands had the power to both calm and inspire him. His brother, Simon, said it was his form of Zen. Zack shook his head. Simon would’ve made a great hippie if he hadn’t been born about twenty years too late.

Hanging on the walls were framed photographs of Zack’s completed projects: the seven-tiered bookcase, the cedar trunk with inset shelving, the wine cabinet. Each one had come out better than the last. His gaze lingered on the photograph of the wine cabinet as he remembered how he’d labored to carve the grape leaves on its doors. It had to be worth at least five hundred dollars.

Zack turned to the bench. He pulled a steno notepad off the shelf above it and snagged a pencil from the beer stein where he kept his drafting tools. The stein had been a Christmas gift from his rookie partner, who hadn’t yet learned that, unlike the other cops in their division, he wasn’t much of a drinker.

He rolled his chair back, put his feet up on the desk, and began to sketch. Minutes later, he’d finished the broad outline. He held the drawing at arm’s length to get a better perspective when a sound—a soft rustling somewhere behind him—made Zack stop, pad still poised in midair. He dropped his feet to the floor and carefully began to scan the room.

He sensed rather than saw the sudden motion in his periphery. Before he could react, the weight of an anvil crashed into the side of his head. Blood-filled stars exploded behind his eyes as he flew off the chair and landed on his back on the hard cement.

Zack opened his eyes, dimly aware of a voice—his own?—crying out in pain. Someone was poised above him. Again he sensed movement, something cutting through the air. In a hideous moment of clarity, Zack saw what it was. An ax.

He watched in mute horror as the blade came whistling down. At the last second, he squeezed his eyes shut—hoping to make the nightmare go away. But the ax plunged deep and hard, the blade slicing cruelly through his neck, right down to the vertebrae. As the blade yanked out, his body arched up, then collapsed back to the ground, and blood spurted from his severed carotid. The ax rose again, then hurtled downward, blood flying off its edge and onto the walls. Again and again, the blade rose and fell in a steady, inexorable rhythm, severing arms and legs, splitting the abdomen, unleashing coiled intestines and a foul odor. When at last the bloody ax dropped to the floor, a fine red spray spattered the walls and the shiny trophy photographs of Zack’s creations.

1

Two Years Later
He moved with purpose. That alone might have drawn attention to the man in the soiled wool overcoat, but the postlunch crowd was a briskly flowing river of bodies.

The homeless man picked up his pace, his eyes focused with a burning intensity on the woman ahead of him. Suddenly he thrust out his hand and gripped her forearm. Stunned, the woman turned to look at her attacker. Shock gave way to outrage, then fear, as she twisted violently in an effort to wrest her arm away. They struggled for a few seconds in their awkward pas de deux, but just as the woman raised a hand to shove him back, the man abruptly released his grip. The woman immediately fled into the crowd. The man doubled over and began to sink to the ground, his face contorted in a grimace of pain. But even as his body sagged, his eyes bored into the crowd, searching for her, as though by sheer dint of will they could pull her back.

Finally, though, unable to resist the undertow, he sank down onto the filthy sidewalk, turned on his side, and began to rock back and forth like a child. The river of pedestrians flowed on, pausing only long enough to wind around him and then merge again. After half an hour, the rocking stopped. A passerby in a janitor’s uniform leaned down to look at the man for a brief moment, then continued on his way. A young girl pointed her cell phone at him and took a picture, then moved on as well.

It would be another hour before anyone noticed the spreading crimson stain under the homeless man’s body. Another hour after that before anyone thought to call the police.

2

Twelve Days Later

I looked out the window of my office on the eighteenth floor of the Criminal Courts Building, sipping my third cup of coffee of the morning and savoring the view—one of my favorite pastimes. It had poured last night; early this morning, an unexpected wind kicked up. All vestiges of smog were wiped out, bequeathing to the citizens of L.A. an uncommonly sparkling day. I watched the sunlight dance over the leaves of tall trees whose branches whipped to and fro, threatening to crack the heads of those scurrying up the street toward the courthouse.

“Rachel, don’t you have a preliminary hearing on that arson murder in Judge Foster’s court this morning?” asked Eric Northrup, my boss and the head deputy of the Special Trials Unit.

As with all cases in Special Trials, my arson murder case was that ugly combination of complex and high-profile. Proving arson is seldom as simple as it sounds. You have to rule out all accidental and natural causes, and frequently the necessary evidence burns up with the victims—who in this case were the elderly parents of the murderer. The press probably wouldn’t hang around for the preliminary hearing, but they’d been making noises about wanting to cover the trial. And that meant I’d have them breathing down my neck while I slogged through the reams of testimony required to stitch together a million little pieces of evidence, praying that the jury didn’t get lost along the way. Fun. But ever since I’d joined the district attorney’s office eight years ago, I’d dreamed of being one of the few handpicked deputies in Special Trials. And this kind of gnarly beast of a case, which swallowed up any semblance of a personal life, was exactly what I’d signed up for.

“Yep,” I replied. My motto: Keep it simple and never offer more than the question asks for. With a little luck, the questioner gives up and goes away. That motto is less effective when the questioner happens to be your boss and you’re in your office when you’re supposed to be in court doing a preliminary hearing on a murder case.

Eric put his hands on his hips and looked at me expectantly. “I know you hate waiting in court, but…”

I hate waiting in general, but I especially hate it in court, where you’re not allowed to do anything except sit there and watch proceedings so boring they make you want to bang your head against a wall.

I held up a hand. “You don’t have to tell me,” I said. I’d heard that Judge Foster was on the rampage about having to wait for DAs to show up. “But he’s got another murder on the calendar before mine, so I’ve got—” At just that moment, my phone rang.

I motioned for Eric to give me a second as I picked up. It was Manny, the clerk/watchdog in Judge Foster’s court.

“Rachel!” Manny whispered. “Stop eyeballing the calendar and get down here. Are you out of your mind? You know what’ll—”

I refused to give Eric the satisfaction of knowing I was already on the verge of being chewed out, so I did my best to put on a relaxed smile. “I’m so glad you called,” I said cheerily, as though I’d just heard from a beloved sorority sister, which it might have been…if I’d ever joined a sorority. “I was hoping we’d get a chance to talk!”

Manny, momentarily nonplussed, sputtered, “What the…?”

I mouthed sorry at Eric and again smiled pleasantly. Eric raised a suspicious eyebrow but moved off down the hall.

I waited a couple of beats to make sure he was gone, then curtly answered, “I’ll be down in fifteen seconds.” I snatched my file and scrambled out the door, strategically heading for the hallway less traveled.

I’d made it down two corridors and was just about to dash out to the bank of elevators when a voice behind me said, “In a hurry, Knight?”

I abruptly downshifted and turned back to see Eric standing at the other end of the hall, his arms folded.

Exhaling through my nose in a futile effort to hide my recent sprint, I forced a calm tone. “No, but I figured I should go see what’s happening, just to be on the safe side.”

He shot me a knowing look, turned, and walked into his office.

I trotted out to the elevator, wondering why on earth I’d ever thought I could fool Eric. Four stops and twelve additional bodies later, the elevator bumped to a halt on the fifth floor. I pushed through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd and made my way to court.

3

I moved swiftly into the courtroom, trying to keep a low profile so Judge Foster wouldn’t notice me. The case before mine was still in play, and defense counsel was making an objection that, fortunately for me, kept the judge occupied. But it didn’t shield me from the wrath of Manny. He gave me a stern look and shook his head. I pointed to the lawyers as if to say, What? No one’s waiting. Manny just rolled his eyes. I took a seat at the back of the courtroom; that way, when they called my case, it would look to Judge Foster like I’d been there all along. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a murder trial or a blind date—it’s always about strategy.

The judge overruled the defense objection, and the deputy district attorney resumed direct examination with the standard nonleading question: “Tell us what you saw.”

The prosecutor looked vaguely familiar, though his name escaped me. He was in his early thirties, and his carefully coiffed brown hair, perfectly tailored navy-blue suit, red power tie, and French cuffs sporting pricey-looking cuff links said that he didn’t have to rely on his civil servant’s salary to pay the rent. Or that he was still getting a free ride with Mommy and Daddy.

The witness, a surfer dude with long, bleached-out hair, stroked his sparse soul patch and licked his lips nervously before answering. “Uh, he reached out toward that lady, and the next thing I knew, he was lying on the ground.”

“And when you saw he was on the ground, what did you do?” the prosecutor asked. “Did you call the police?”

The witness bent his head and hunched over. He looked away from the prosecutor, and his eyes darted between the floor and the top of counsel table for a few long seconds. Finally he sighed and replied in a quiet voice, “No. I, like, I don’t know. I guess I thought he was just drunk or high or something.” The low hum of whispers and shuffled papers suddenly stopped, opening a vacuum of silence around the witness’s last words. The surfer dude reddened, darted another look around the courtroom at all the eyes now fixed on him, and added defensively, “No one else thought it was a big deal either. I mean, no one called…at least, not for a while.”

Every face in the courtroom—with the exception of the prosecutor, who’d been expecting that answer—reflected the ugliness of the mental image those words had painted: of people callously stepping over a man who lay dying on the sidewalk. For me, that image immediately sparked the thought of Cletus, my homeless buddy, who made his bed just south of the courthouse on most Wednesday nights. I’d been bringing him Chinese takeout from the Oolong Café nearly every week for the past couple of years. I imagined Cletus slowly bleeding out onto the cold concrete while people stepped around him as though he were an overturned garbage can. I didn’t know who this victim was, but it didn’t matter. No one should die like that.

“Objection, irrelevant,” the defense attorney said in a bored voice. I recognized him as Walter Schoenfeld, a seasoned public defender. “And no question pending,” he added.

“Sustained,” the judge ruled, his voice equally flat.

It was just a preliminary hearing, so there was no jury and the prosecution only had to show probable cause, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That meant the objections, while legally proper, didn’t matter much. The judge could winnow the wheat from the chaff.

“So you saw the man fall to the ground and stay there. What happened next?”

“I saw the cops come, and one of them came into the shop and asked if any of us had seen anything—”

“Objection to whatever the cops said,” Walter interjected. “Hearsay.”

“Overruled. ‘Did you see anything?’ It’s a question. Questions aren’t hearsay.”

“Do I keep going?” the witness asked.

“Yes.” The judge sighed. “Overruled means you’re in the clear.”

The witness went on. “And then Keshia, uh, the other counter person that day, told them she saw me out by the homeless guy before he, ahh…”

Gun-shy after the reaction to his last mention of the man he’d abandoned to die on the sidewalk, the witness trailed off.

“And then you told them what you’ve told us here today?”

The witness nodded.

“You have to answer out loud,” the prosecutor instructed. His duh was implied.

“Yeah, yes.”

“Do you see the man in court who stabbed the homeless guy?” asked the deputy district attorney.

“Wait, excuse me,” the judge said, stopping the witness and turning to the prosecutor. “‘The homeless guy’? He had a name, and I’m sure it wasn’t ‘homeless guy.’ Have the People not come up with any identification for him yet?”

“No, Your Honor. The defense refused to waive time, and so far he hasn’t turned up in any database.”

So not only was he left to die on a city sidewalk but we couldn’t even acknowledge his passing with a name. The sheer loneliness of it all was a lead weight in my chest.

The judge cast a disapproving look at the deputy. “Then, Mr. Prosecutor, the appropriate term would be either victim or John Doe—not homeless guy.” He turned to the witness. “Is the person who stabbed the victim here in this courtroom?”

“Uh, well…” The surfer dude nervously looked around the room.

The prosecutor sighed impatiently. Now it was bugging me—I knew I’d seen him around before. What was his name? I mentally scanned the nameplates on the doors in the DA’s office. It took a moment, but I finally had it: Brandon Averill. Though I didn’t know him, I knew the type. He was one of those young Turks who are self-impressed, self-promoting, always on the hunt for fame and glory, and just handsome enough to entice press photographers. Everything about his attitude said this case wasn’t worth his precious time.

After more silence from the witness stand, Averill became visibly irritated. “Try looking over there,” he said, pointing to the defense table.

The defendant pulled his head down toward his shoulders, shrinking to make himself a smaller target.

Defense counsel jumped up. “Objection! Suggestive and improper! Motion to strike!”

Judge Foster raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure you want me to strike that, Counsel? You can’t think of a way to use that brilliant move in front of a jury?” he said, the word brilliant soaked in sarcasm.

Walter smiled. “Withdrawn.”

“Indeed,” the judge said.

By forcing the witness to focus on the defendant, Brandon had basically tubed his own case. Now, even if the surfer dude did identify the defendant, Schoenfeld would be able to tell the jury that the witness had been strong-armed into it.

The judge’s tone had been relatively mild, given his notorious distaste for all counsel. I figured he must have a soft spot for Walter. Judge Foster was a big man, six feet three barefoot and about 270 pounds. As smart as he was impatient, he didn’t need a microphone to be heard in court. When an attorney got on his nerves—a more than daily occurrence—you could hear it in the cafeteria, five floors below. I’d always liked him because, although he was a tough old bird, he was equally nasty to everyone. In my book, the perfect judge.

The witness did as he was told and looked straight at the defendant, who was so nervous I could hear him sweating.

“Nuh…uh, no,” the witness said in a thin, wobbly voice. “I seen him there, on the street, but I din’t see him stab nobody.”

“But isn’t it true that you told the police at the scene that this man,” Averill said, pointing to the defendant, “was the man who’d done the stabbing?”

The defense attorney was on his feet again. “Objection! Improper impeachment!”

But the judge waved him off. “Have a seat, Counsel. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. But let’s cut to the chase, shall we? It’s just a preliminary hearing. No sense pussyfooting around.” The judge turned to the witness. “Did you tell the police this was the man who did the stabbing? Yes or no?”

The witness rubbed his soul patch, clearly torn. “Well…uh. Not exactly…Your…uh…Your Worship.”

“Just a simple Your Honor will do,” Judge Foster said. “Then what did you tell the police?”

“I just said I seen the dude,” he said, turning toward the defendant, a man named Yamaguchi. “He was, like, nearby, you know? But I din’t ever say I saw him, like, stab nobody, you know?”

Brandon Averill was red-faced. “Wait a minute, you mean you’re denying that you pointed out this defendant at the scene and told the cop that you saw him stab that guy?”

“Yuh…uh, yeah,” the witness said, casting a furtive look at the defendant. “I’m denying it.”

Brandon turned back to counsel table and shuffled through some papers as the courtroom again fell silent, waiting. Judge Foster had just opened his mouth to tell the prosecutor something he undoubtedly wouldn’t be happy to hear when Averill produced a report with a flourish and marched up to the witness stand.

“Isn’t that your name?” he asked, pointing to the top of the page. “Charlie Fern?”

The witness mouthed the words quietly. “Uh, yeah.”

“Then read this statement aloud for us,” the prosecutor demanded, pointing to a line on the page.

“Objection! Hearsay! What the cop wrote on that report is hearsay!” Schoenfeld shouted, again on his feet.

“It is,” the judge agreed. “Sustained.”

Brandon Averill’s mouth opened and closed without sound like a netted fish’s while he tried to grab hold of a thought. “It’s not admitted for the truth of the matter. It’s…uh, well, it’s offered to prove the witness’s state of mind.”

“And this witness’s state of mind is in issue because…?” Judge Foster asked, his tone sarcastic. “He’s here to identify the defendant as the stabber, true or false?”

“True, Your Honor. But I—,” Averill began.

The judge cut him off.

“There is no but, Counsel.” The judge’s merely annoyed tone of a few minutes ago had given way to truly pissed off. Of all the judges in the building, Brandon had picked the worst one to hear a case this weak, this poorly prepared. The only things Judge Foster hated more than unprepared lawyers were cases that were too thin to be in court. He’d called the district attorney’s filing unit more than once to “order” them not to file cases that couldn’t make it past a preliminary hearing. If a case wasn’t even strong enough to show probable cause, which boiled down to the standard of “more likely than not,” then it shouldn’t be in court, wasting his time.

Now he turned to Brandon Averill, his bushy brows pulled down, his voice ominously low. “Your eyewitness has denied making the statement attributed to him by the officer. If you want to get that statement into evidence, you’ll have to call the officer. This gentleman”—the judge gestured to Charlie Fern, who’d probably never been called that before in his life—“does not seem inclined to go along with the program.”

I could see the skin around Brandon Averill’s collar turn red. “Can I have a moment to call the investigating officer, Your Honor?”

“You may have exactly one minute, Counsel,” Judge Foster said, his voice beginning to rise. “In the meantime, I presume we’re finished with this witness? That is, unless defense counsel would like to try and change his mind?”

“No, thank you,” Walter Schoenfeld quickly replied. “No questions, Your Honor.”

The judge turned to Charlie Fern. “You’re excused, sir.”

Sir. I had a feeling this was yet another first for the redoubtable Mr. Fern.

I saw the bailiff, clerk, and court reporter brace themselves, having recognized the signs of an imminent eruption. Ordinarily I would’ve felt codependently nervous for the prosecutor, but Brandon Averill’s cavalier attitude had me actively rooting for an ass-kicking. I sat tall and suppressed a smile. How often in life do you get to see the right foot meet the right ass at kicking time?

Brandon walked quickly out of the courtroom, and when the door swung shut behind him, the entire place fell silent. Everyone looked away from the bench; eye contact might invite the judge to find a new focus for his palpably growing ire. Walter turned and whispered to his client, and the other waiting lawyers huddled and spoke softly among themselves. One minute ticked by, then two.

“Bailiff,” the judge intoned loudly, “please go and fetch our prosecutor.”

“Yes, Your Honor,” the bailiff said.

“And if he hesitates,” the judge added, “shoot to kill.”

The bailiff was smiling as he walked down the aisle, his rubber soles squeaking on the linoleum. Seconds later, he returned with Brandon in tow. The prosecutor was not smiling.

“Your Honor,” Brandon said, out of breath, “I need a recess to locate the officer.”

“No, Counsel, you may not have a recess,” the judge’s voice boomed.

The looks on the faces of Clerk Manny and the court reporter told me the festivities had begun. Manny grabbed the water glass he kept on the shelf above his desk, and the court reporter’s expression hardened as she prepared her fingers for flight.

“As you know very well, Counsel, the defense has a right to a continuous preliminary hearing. Do you see all these lawyers lined up here?” the judge shouted in his thunderous baritone.

Averill nodded. I noticed the tips of his ears redden, matching the skin above his shirt collar.

The judge continued, “I’ll be damned if I make an entire calendar cool its heels while you figure out where your witnesses are!”

Brandon touched the knot of his tie like a condemned man fingering his noose. “Perhaps the defense will waive the right to a continuous preliminary hearing so the court can take up the next case while I locate my witness?”

“Oh, indeed?” the judge replied acidly. “Let’s find out, shall we?” He turned to the defense. “Counsel, do you waive your right to a continuous preliminary hearing?”

“No, Your Honor,” said the attorney. “The defense does not waive.”

“Shocking,” the judge said. “Any other bright ideas, Mr. Prosecutor? Or, better yet, any other witnesses? Some incriminating evidence for a change?”

“I don’t have any other witnesses, Judge,” Brandon said, trying to regain his cool with a nonchalant shrug.

“People rest?”

“I suppose so.”

“I have a motion, Your Honor,” Schoenfeld said, beginning to rise.

“Don’t bother, Counsel,” the judge said, signaling him to sit down.

The judge banged his gavel and barked, “Dismissed.”

4

The spectators gave a collective gasp, then erupted in a buzz that built and rolled through the courtroom. The dismissal of a homicide wasn’t a typical day for even the most seasoned courtroom veterans.

The defendant, a wiry, lean, young Asian male with black shoulder-length hair, sat quietly at first, absorbing the shock. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to hit him like a thunderclap. He thumped his fist on the table, the clanking of his waist-to-handcuff chains underscoring the gesture, and turned to his lawyer. “I told you! I told you it wasn’t me!”

Judge Foster gave another loud rap of his gavel, stopping the defendant in mid–fist pump. “This is a court of law, not a sports bar!” he thundered. “Get your client under control immediately, or I’ll do it for you!”

Walter grabbed Yamaguchi by the arm and whispered through gritted teeth. I couldn’t hear what he said, but it worked. The defendant folded his hands on the table and sat quietly.

Legally speaking, the dismissal was well justified. But it rankled. Maybe this defendant really wasn’t the guy. And maybe I would’ve let it go at that if it hadn’t been for the “I could give a shit” look on Brandon’s face. Because maybe it was him, and the murderer was about to walk out of that courtroom and away from this victim for no good reason—just like everyone else had walked away while he bled out on the sidewalk.

I couldn’t just sit there and let it happen. For Cletus, and for all the others who wound up on the periphery of an overpopulated, uncaring world, I had to do something. I quickly moved up the aisle and walked over to Brandon.

“What the hell?” I whispered heatedly. “Where’s your cop? Did you subpoena him?”

Brandon glared at me wordlessly for a moment. “Of course I subpoenaed his ass,” he shot back.

“Then tell the court you’re going to refile so they don’t let this guy out,” I said as I watched the bailiff take the defendant back into the holding tank.

By law, the prosecution can refile a case that gets dismissed at the preliminary hearing, and we usually do if it’s been dismissed just because a witness didn’t show up. But the sheriffs don’t have bed space to waste. If Brandon didn’t tell them he intended to refile, the defendant would be released.

“You’re never going to find this defendant again,” I said heatedly. “He’ll be in the wind the minute they open the gate.”

Averill threw the last report into his file. “Tell me, since when does a Special Trials hotshot give a shit about some homeless guy?”

“Tell me, since when did it matter whether a victim drove a Mercedes or a shopping cart?” I fired back.

“Maybe since the ‘victim,’” he said, making air quotes—which I hate almost as much as I detest snotty prosecutors—“had just grabbed a lady and was probably going to rob her.”

“Based on?”

“Based on the fact that he was found holding a box cutter, and surprisingly we didn’t find any packing tape nearby.”

“But surprisingly he’s the only one who’s dead, and if someone killed him in self-defense, then how come they’re not around to say so?”

“You’re so fired up about this dog, why don’t you refile?” he said with a smirk. “Be nice to see one of you Special Trials hotshots get down in the muck with the rest of us.”

If he hadn’t been such a huge jerk, I might’ve taken a moment to think about whether there was any hope for this case. But as it was, he’d pissed me off so royally on so many levels that I didn’t pause for a second. I grabbed the file out of his hand and turned to the judge.

“Excuse me, Your Honor,” I said, loud enough to break through the courtroom chatter. “I’d like to notify the court that the People will be refiling the case of”—I paused to look at the file—“People versus Ronald Yamaguchi.”

Judge Foster raised an eyebrow. “I had no idea the Special Trials deputies were in the business of trolling for cases. Must be my lucky day,” he said dryly. “Deputy Stevenson,” he said, addressing the bailiff, “tell your folks not to rush. It appears Mr. Yamaguchi will be staying with us a little longer.”

The bailiff nodded and picked up the phone on his desk.

“And I have the next case, Your Honor,” I said, setting down the murder book—the binder cops put together that holds all the reports on a murder case—on counsel table with a heavy thump.

“You ready?” the judge asked.

“I am,” I replied.

“But I’m not, Your Honor. Sam Zucker for the defendant.” He was a really young, slick-haired type in a chocolate-brown pin-striped suit that said wowee-look-at-me-I’m-a-lawyer. “I’m standing in for Newt Hamilton, who’s got the flu. We’ll be asking for two weeks—or more if the People want.”

Since Newt Hamilton had been privately retained, I had the feeling the onset of his “flu” might be related to the defendant’s lack of cash. I knew the judge wouldn’t force a stand-in to go forward on a murder case, so I didn’t bother to object. We quickly picked a new date, and as the judge called the next case, I saw a detective come barreling in, his eyes on fire and his jaw working sideways. He headed straight for the clerk’s desk.

“Detective Stoner, investigating officer on the Yamaguchi case.” He pulled out his badge and handed Manny his card. “I just heard the case got dismissed,” he said, his voice tight with barely restrained fury.

Manny, who’d had enough fury for one day, quickly pointed to me. “Yeah, but she’s refiling.”

Thanks, Manny. The detective turned to look at me, steam blowing out of his ears. I motioned for him to meet me out in the hallway and braced myself for the nuclear blast. He nodded curtly, turned on his heel, and headed for the door in rapid, angry strides. Although I was closer to the exit, he moved so fast he got there ten steps ahead of me.

I found the detective out in the hallway and walked over to introduce myself. “Hi, I’m Rachel Knight. Guess I’ll be handling the case—,” I began.

The detective turned toward me, but before he could respond, his attention was drawn to a point over my left shoulder. His eyes narrowed and his chest filled. “Excuse me,” he said roughly, and marched past me.

I turned to see where he was headed, and there was Brandon, sauntering out of the snack bar, carrying—what else?—a cinnamon-covered latte.

Detective Stoner flew at him like a heat-seeking missile. “Why the hell didn’t you give me a subpoena for the uniform?”

Brandon had enough sense to blanch, but not enough to back down. He took exactly one second to find his voice. “I did. I sent it over. You just never picked it up. You blew it, Stoner, so don’t try to blame me for your fuckup.”

“You never sent anything over, you dumb punk! And I can prove it! The subpoena records show nothing was ever issued for the uniform!”

“Yeah? And who controls those records?” Brandon said in a grating voice that’d probably set people’s teeth grinding since he was in kindergarten. “Oh, that’s right, you guys.”

Everyone has a breaking point. Brandon had just found Stoner’s.

The detective pulled back his right fist with a vengeance that would’ve knocked Brandon into his next life if he hadn’t flinched just in time. The potentially lethal blow glanced off Brandon’s left shoulder. Even so, the force was enough to send him and his latte flying. Stoner’s momentum carried him forward, knocking them both to the floor. The detective seized the opportunity to land a solid punch to the kidney.

Brandon managed a strangled “Help!”

I wasn’t strong enough to break up the fight if I’d wanted to—though I admit I didn’t mind having an excuse to stand by and let Averill get what he so richly deserved. But there were about twenty cops standing around at the time who were more than capable of taking control. They gave Stoner at least a solid minute before stepping in. I made a mental note to get all of their names. I wanted to personally write them thank-you cards.

It took three of them to pull Stoner off, and when they yanked Brandon to his feet, still dripping with the remains of his latte, he couldn’t straighten up. But did that stop him from yapping? Holding his side with one hand and the wall with another, he went off: “I want that asshole arrested! He attacked me! You all saw it!”

We glanced at one another blankly. Nobody moved. Stoner looked Brandon over with hooded eyes, then, cool as a cucumber, flipped open his cell phone and called for the paramedics.

After they’d carted Brandon off to get checked for any possible major damage, I turned to Stoner.

“Want to try again?” I said, extending my hand. “I’m Rachel Knight.”

“Stoner,” he said, taking it and giving it a firm shake.

“No first name?”

“None I want to share,” he said flatly.

“Fair enough.”

“You really going to refile?” he asked as he straightened his sports jacket and adjusted his tie.

I paused. Common sense was beginning to enter the picture. “You really think it’s a righteous case?”

“We got blood on the defendant’s sleeve,” he replied. “No lab results yet, but it looks good so far.”

Meaning: enough to keep the case alive and see what else pans out. But I had one big question before I took the plunge.

“What about that box cutter? You think our victim was about to mug someone?”

Stoner shrugged. “It’s possible. You know, cut the purse straps and run.”

I nodded.

My expression must’ve shown my reservations. Stoner went on, “I know what you’re thinking. It looks like a possible self-defense case. Tell you the truth, I would’ve been willing to let this one go as a manslaughter, if the suspect had said the guy threatened him.”

“The defendant didn’t say he’d been attacked?” I asked.

“Nope. Claimed he wasn’t there when the victim got stabbed.”

It was classic. Suspects generally don’t get nailed by confessing. They get nailed by saying something provably false. Like claiming they’d never been in a house after their fingerprints were found all over the place.

“But your eyewitness backed up on you big-time,” I pointed out. Translation: maybe this defendant is telling the truth.

“Our eyewitness is a little sketchy,” he admitted.

I nodded, but if the only eyewitness was sketchy—and from what I saw, that description seemed accurate—that didn’t leave much to rely on. Again, Stoner read my expression.

“Look, I’m one hundred percent aware that we’re going to need a lot more,” he said. “Just give me the time to get it.”

“And if you don’t?”

“Then I’ll be the first to say, let it go.”

They always say that. Maybe no-first-name Stoner was one of the few who meant it.

But I knew that if I didn’t refile the case now, it might never see the light of day. A victim with a box cutter looked bad, but neither the defendant nor anyone else had claimed that the victim tried to attack them, which told me this probably wasn’t a self-defense killing. If so, our homeless man was a real murder victim. I didn’t know much about the case, but I knew one thing for sure: he didn’t deserve to die nameless and abandoned on a dirty stretch of concrete.

“I’ll go put the paperwork through,” I said.

“I’ll make sure the defendant stays in pocket.” Stoner turned to go, then stopped. “I may not be able to keep the case if that DA makes a stink about this. So…thanks,” he said. “In case I don’t get the chance to tell you later.”

“Glad to help,” I replied. “And thank you too. On behalf of those who didn’t get to see you in action.” I had a feeling there were many who would’ve danced in the streets if they’d witnessed Stoner bitch-slapping Brandon.

The detective nodded.

5

It took the better part of the morning for Sabrina to go from head-turningly gorgeous to invisible functionary, but the success of her efforts was undeniable. No one noticed the woman in the dull brown pantsuit with the flat-colored hair that lay in a low bun against her neck. She moved around the edges of the cocktail-wielding guests in tentative steps, blinking rapidly, nervously pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. A timid little mud bird, so inconsequential that even the security at the door hadn’t given her credentials more than a fleeting glance.

Not that the others around her exactly glittered. It was a low-key-​looking bunch: pearls and tastefully small diamonds, navy blue and black, pumps and wing tips. But a word from any one of the men and several of the women in that room could shake Wall Street and rattle the NASDAQ. And, in fact, they had.

Sabrina was unaccompanied, but she was not alone. Now and then, she’d duck her head and offer a twitch of a smile to a man or woman passing by. They weren’t friends. Every single one of them worked for her. Sabrina moved from the fringes of one group to another, watching each individual with a fierce, penetrating intensity. That gaze would have been disturbing had it not been effectively masked by frequent sips from her drink—water disguised as vodka—and fidgeting with her glasses. Sabrina could “watch” like no other—it was one of the many unusual arrows in her quiver that made her the best at what she did. With the patience of a sniper, she surreptitiously tracked every nod, turn of the head, and gesture made by the key figures, but she made sure to take in the more peripheral figures as well: noting who spoke to whom, who leaned in closely to whisper, who left with whom. In that time, she’d seen what no one else would ever have noticed…and then some.

Finally, she signaled to a waiter (another of her employees), put her half-empty glass on his tray, and—shoulders hunched, head tilted obsequiously—​​approached the circle of suits surrounding the congressman, a tall, slender man whose blond head hovered above the crowd.

A lull in the conversation gave her an opening. “Congressman, it’s an honor to meet you.” She extended her hand. “Sabrina McCullough. I was wondering whether you intend to oppose the cap and trade bill?”

The congressman glanced at her, then turned a warm smile on the circle surrounding him. “That’s a complex bill. I never like to form any final conclusions until I’ve had the chance to consider all of the possible ramifications. But I’d love to hear what you gentlemen think of it.” Dismissing Sabrina completely, the congressman put his hand on the shoulder of a solid man with heavy jowls that swayed with every turn of his head. “Senator Beasley?”

Sabrina nodded, though she knew he wasn’t looking and didn’t care. Frankly, neither did she. She’d made the necessary contact with her target. Her employees, especially Chase, had pointed out the danger of these encounters, insisted they weren’t worth the risk. But Sabrina said that the personal contact, however brief, gave her unique insight. The truth that she didn’t admit, even to herself, was she craved the adrenaline rush of physical proximity to her targets—it was an addiction, not a choice.

Sabrina waited to find out if the congressman would say anything of interest. But after the senator “fumphed” his nonreply regarding the cap and trade bill, someone changed the subject to the congressman’s upcoming vacation to Martha’s Vineyard, which set him off on a journey of boring reminiscences about his boyhood summers on the Cape. Sabrina slowly melted out of the room. On her way down the stairs—she avoided elevators, which threatened tight proximity with too many eyes, not to mention the close-up security cameras—she took off her glasses and, masking her movements from any unseen surveillance, removed a small item from the frame. Just before stepping out into the lobby, she put on her sunglasses. One of the valets came to attention, and when she nodded, he ran to get her car. His tip came wrapped around Sabrina’s microcamera—which he quickly pocketed. Sabrina never traveled with anything that could be traced back to her job. The valet would send his intel about all of the guests, along with the camera, by a well-established secure route.

The next morning dawned bright and warm. Sabrina tossed her carry-on into the backseat and tilted her face up to the sun. Winter in Miami—there was nothing like it. Even California didn’t have it this good. She started the engine, pushed the button to roll back the convertible roof, and sped off to the airport, her long black hair a darkly glowing streamer in the wind.

She pulled out her cell phone and hit the number 1.

“ ’Lo?” Chase answered, his voice thick with sleep.

She’d forgotten she was three hours ahead, but she didn’t care. An early start wouldn’t kill him. “I’m done here.”

“When do we have to deliver?”

“Yesterday.”

Silence. Chase always got nervous with tight deadlines. But she knew he worked best under pressure.

“You find our friend yet?” she asked.

“No. But we know he’s not in any of the hospitals.”

“You saw him go down? You’re sure?”

“There’s no doubt,” Chase replied.

Sabrina nodded to herself. So far, so good. As long as he stayed down.

Marcia Clark’s Guilt by Association, the first novel starring Los Angeles prosecutor Rachel Knight, was released to critical acclaim and success in 2011. The paperback of Guilt by Association came out in March, and now, Rachel is back in the gripping Guilt By Degrees. A former prosecutor herself, Clark has a deep fascination for the wheels of justice and contemporary criminal trials. This laces Guilt By Degrees with a gritty authenticity sure to appeal to fans of Michael Connelly’s Mickey Haller series. Like her lawyer-writer compatriots Scott Turow, John Grisham, and William Lashner, Clark understands the nobility of the legal profession and knows how to craft a thrilling narrative.

Ms. Clark spoke to Mulholland Books about her long-standing passion for the mystery novel and the process of crafting a new Rachel Knight adventure in Guilt By Degrees. This is the second of a two-part interview.

We pick up our conversation by continuing to discuss Ms. Clark’s writing process:

What’s your writing process like — do you have a set number of pages or goals for a day? How do you get from the idea and outline process to putting words on the page?

What I like to do is give myself a little bit of a road map, so I’ll bang out one line or even a paragraph per chapter, just to set myself in motion…I don’t sit down at a set time everyday because I’m working criminal appeals and I have other things going on that take up time in unpredictable spurts. But I do sit down every day, especially when I’m writing the first draft, seven days a week, and I write for as long as I possibly can. I make it a minimum of ten to fifteen pages a day. I feel like it gives me pacing, it keeps the pace of the story going if I’m in it continuously. So that first draft is a real bitch (laughs), because I’m writing constantly, seven days a week and a minimum that is a pretty long minimum.

Now, it doesn’t happen invariably — some days are bad, I get only five pages done, but it pretty much goes that way so the first draft gets done in a month and a half.

Once that first draft is done, what’s the rewriting process like? Do you take a break, do you revise as you go, or do you start immediately on rewrites?

I try not to revise as I go, because that makes you redo, and redo, and redo, and you don’t move forward. And you lose pacing–that sense of urgency and you’re living with your characters, what are they going to do now? There’s always some type of pressure in a case to get things done, whether because you’ve got a trial date looming or you’re going to lose a witness who’s gonna run away or going forget, you’ve got to trace down your evidence before it deteriorates. There’s always some type of time pressure, and if you keep going back, you’re going to lose that sense of urgency — I will, anyway.

So I have to stay with it, and I don’t find it’s very helpful to keep rewriting. I did that with in the first book. I’d go back, and fix this and that and think of this and that…and now what I do is I make notes, so that when I finish the first draft, when I go back, as I’m going to literally go back line for line, I can insert or add whatever notes I’ve given myself.

The rewriting process…what do they say, “it’s all in the rewriting?” That’s where I really feel I shape things and give it more twists and more nuance and color. You kind of set out the bare bones of the actions and the way it’s going to flow and in the rewrite is where you give it all the richness. But it’s a long process, I try to walk away. I walk away for as long as I can–a minimum of a week–to let things fly away out of my head, so that when I come back, I bring as fresh eyes as I can to the party.

And then literally start  with “Prologue.” First word.

Is there an example–without spoiling anything, of course–from Guilt By Degrees where you added something when you were rewriting? Or maybe you had to take something out all together that changed the way you were shaping the novel?

Of course, the last thing that happened is the one that comes to mind — by no means it’s not limited to this, but towards the end of the book there’s a big event that happens that literally becomes life and death for both Bailey and Rachel. And Rachel realizes in the aftermath that she put them in that place because of her obsessive nature, because all she could focus on was justice and the capture of the bad guy, because she had her blinders on that way. She’s used to being a little personally reckless with herself, but she realizes for the first time that her singular focus and obsessive drive for justice, which in part stems for what happened to her sister, caused her to put Bailey in harm’s way as well.

I went back a few times to make it clear that she’s had an awareness here, an epiphany, about how crazy she can get, and how dangerous that is, not just for herself, but the people around her. At first, when I first took a pass at it, I neglected it. I took my second pass at it, I overwrote it. I took my third pass at it, trimmed a lot away, because I don’t want characters to explain themselves. I hate self-referential writing…you’ve got to show it–they do it. So I didn’t want her to go in this long, Hamlet-like soliloquy…It wound up getting trimmed down to just a few lines, but hopefully the lines are evocative enough of the epiphany that I hope to convey.

I’m curious about the language — how to choose which particular words to use. One of the things I was impressed by is you’re able to use description to put the reader in places we haven’t seen before, certainly places in Los Angeles that we haven’t seen in this genre before. Is that something you’re conscious of as well? How do you stay aware of your style and your language, or is that something you’ll go back and look at during the rewriting?

You know, I’m not aware of it, I have to say. I didn’t take English composition courses and I don’t have an MFA because I went to law school instead, so I’m not really…I just kind of write it the way I see it. What I strive for is to put the reader there with me, to see the parts of Los Angeles that are not very much described but are very much a part of the city, and to get a sense of  the enormous differences and variation in the city, because it’s so geographically huge and spread out. Los Angeles from one end to the other can take you hours to get through, and that’s unique to Los Angeles. And in each pocket of the city you have differences that are enormous. In one part of the city you can feel like you’re in the Midwest, in another part, New York, in another part, Miami. It’s that kind of variation in this city that makes it so fascinating to write about.

So what I try to do is try to convey the differences you can encounter in just one city in just one day. Like in Guilt By Association, I very deliberately described the sense of going to Mordor to Heaven, in going from the Men’s County Jail downtown to the Pacific Palisades, one of the most beautiful places in the world. It’s an effort on my part, always, to make it feel like you’re there, and deliver the sights, the smells, the sounds.

You, John Grisham, Scott Turow are all lawyers. What is it about the fact you have some of the more famous writers in the genre who are also lawyers, who are able to tell good stories? Do you think there’s something about being a lawyer that lends itself to being a good storyteller, or being good at fiction?

First of all, I love being put in a category with John Grisham and Scott Turow! (laughing) I’m not so sure I belong in the same breath with them, but I think there is definitely something about being a lawyer that translates very easily to this kind of crime fiction. Lawyers, especially criminal lawyers, but civil lawyers, too, are storytellers. Especially trial lawyers. That’s what you are — you’re a storyteller. You get up in front of the jury and tell them a story.

And you put together all the facts and all the evidence into a story that’s as compelling and dramatic as you can make it, to tell your story effectively. And that’s what you do in a novel. I think it’s a pretty natural transition from one to another.

As a final wrap-up, is there one thing you’d like readers to know about this novel, your fiction, or Rachel, as a whole?

I think what I would say in general, I like to deliver stories with some meat on their bones, with the kind of twists and turns that keep us interested…that I like. I deliver the story I like, I think that’s the honest truth. But also with humor.

Number one, the truth of the matter is between prosecutors and cops, there has to be — especially detectives, homicide detectives, if you don’t have a sense of humor, you cannot survive that job. It’s too grim, the realities of it are too harsh, and if you don’t have a really strong sense of humor, you will not make it through. And so homicide detectives are some of the funniest people I’ve ever met. And that’s is the truth of the camaraderie, the banter, the way they live, they way the see the world…I had a couple of detectives tell me “wow, you really nailed it.”

These are serious crimes, they’re dramatic crimes, but the story is delivered with a heavy dose of humor and fun, and also a deep love and bond between the three women of this book — Bailey, Rachel, and their friend Toni — that underlies and drives all of the stories, and will drives all of the books. And of course, there’s the love interest, that of course happens, because they live in the world and they’re real people. There’s a balance here. It’s not a grim procedural…There’s richness and life and humor and fun involved.

Guilt by Degrees and Guilt By Association are in stores now.

Marcia Clark is a former LA, California deputy district attorney, who was the lead prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson murder case. She wrote a bestselling nonfiction book about the trial, Without a Doubt, the national bestselling thriller GUILT BY ASSOCIATION introducing DA Rachel Knight, and is a frequent media commentator and columnist on legal issues. She lives in Los Angeles.

Brendan M. Leonard is a freelance writer, filmmaker, and crime fiction junkie living in New York City. He has written for CHUD.com, The Rap Sheet, and January Magazine. There are days he worries about becoming Ron Swanson. Visit his blog here, or follow him on Twitter here.

Marcia Clark’s second Rachel Knight thriller GUILT BY DEGREES is in bookstores now–and the reviewers love it! John Valeri of The Examiner raves about how the novel “takes the strongest elements from an already assured debut and melded them into near perfection,” while Kirkus proclaims that Knight “transmutes the dull and ordinary into the bright stuff of legends…serious fun.” CNN champions its “fast-paced story” that “crackles with authenticity,” and the Financial Times called Clark’s newest a “blade-sharp read.”

Also check out the great love that Marcia’s newest is getting from bloggers like Christian Manifesto, Mystery Scene, The Review Broads, and S. Krishna’s Books.

Nick Santora’s recently released FIFTEEN DIGITS has also been receiving great blogger reviews from the likes of BookReporter and Booking Mama. And don’t miss Nick’s interview at Bitter Lawyer.

Joe R. Lansdale’s EDGE OF DARK WATER continues to earn rave reviews online, most recently from White Cat Publications, The Mystery Reader, and Serial Distractions. Kirkus also chimed in, calling the novel “a highly entertaining tour de force.” Even the self-proclaimed World’s Toughest Book Critics can’t resist this one!

In other news, Joss Whedon’s THE AVENGERS film had the biggest opening weekend, ever, by a longshot. Which already has industry blogs like Cinema Blend and LA Times’ 24 Frames pondering just what went so drastically right for the franchise. Two words: HULK…SMASH!

We’d shared this last week, but in case you missed it the first time around, Nick Santora’s video of the opening scene of FIFTEEN DIGITS is leagues better than most book trailers and well worth your time…

Did we missing something sweet? Share it in the comments! We’re always open to suggestions for next week’s post! Get in touch at mulhollandbooks@hbgusa.com or DM us on Twitter.

Marcia Clark’s Guilt by Association, the first novel starring Los Angeles prosecutor Rachel Knight, was released to critical acclaim and success in 2011. The paperback of Guilt by Association came out in March, and now, Rachel is back in the gripping Guilt By Degrees. A former prosecutor herself, Clark has a deep fascination for the wheels of justice and contemporary criminal trials. This laces Guilt By Degrees with a gritty authenticity sure to appeal to fans of Michael Connelly’s Mickey Haller series. Like her lawyer-writer compatriots Scott Turow, John Grisham, and William Lashner, Clark understands the nobility of the legal profession and knows how to craft a thrilling narrative.

Ms. Clark spoke with me about her long-standing passion for the mystery novel and the process of crafting a new Rachel Knight adventure in Guilt By Degrees. This is the first of a two-part interview.

You’re a former prosecutor and a lot of being an attorney is crafting a narrative. Was that something you always had an interest in? Were you a big reader as a child? What kind of got you interested in the idea of telling stories in general?

I was a big reader as a child. From, like, three. And murder mysteries in particular got to me when I was really young.  I mean, Nancy Drew was somebody I was reading when I was six. So I’ve always been kind of wedded to this genre. I have to say I think I thought about writing, I loved writing when I was a kid, but I never believed in the ability to live that way…you know, indoors. And so I thought I didn’t have the confidence to try it. And then, even when I was a prosecutor, I was still reading murder mysteries–addicted to James Ellroy. I would literally work all day on murders and come home and then read about it and then watch Law & Order. You know, total immersion. This is kind of a life-long passion for me, I’ve always kind of been like this, so to speak.

I think what got me the confidence to finally try to write a book is having the experience of writing in Hollywood, writing scripts. That got me doing it, and so I thought, “you know, I really want to try to write a book.” (laughing) I had, thank god, no clue how hard it would be! Scripts are short, they’re like haiku, and you bang them out in a week. You may rewrite a bunch, but you bang them out pretty fast because they are so much shorter. And writing a book was daunting, but I was in it to win it. I really loved it and I just wanted to do it anyway. I persevered for years before I turned out something that was worth sending out for someone to read.

You mentioned that you are a fan of James Ellroy. That’s really fascinating. What about his work appeals to you so much?

I think his ability to deliver a really bizarre set of characters and situations that is entirely somehow believable…These are unusual characters, they’re fringe characters, their situations are odd. And yet, stepping into the world, I believed every word of it. And I thought “That is just such an amazing gift.” It’s also a gift that gives you great insight into the world, into characters, into places and things that you wouldn’t ordinarily know. I love that.

I think the other inspiration that I had was Armisted Maupin, on the end completely of the spectrum. Tales of the City…that was, again, the ability to deliver a world with quirky character that were somehow very engaging and very warm. I loved the idea. That’s what gave me the idea of writing a series. “I want to do that too.” I want to create a world that I can go back to over and over again, share with readers over and over again, like a family that you watch develop.

And so the idea of revisiting the [real] world of a prosecutor, which I love…where there was a real sense of community with the cops, with fellow prosecutors, and that the wonderfulness of working a job that was a mission, and not just a job. You know, the belief that you were fighting for something important in the world and helping the victims. It was just a wonderful, great feeling. And so I wanted to go back to that world and share it, and have an ongoing series about it.

It’s definitely something that comes across in both books. What can you tell readers about this second novel, where you got the idea for it, and what fans of the first book can expect from this one?

I can tell because I’m just finishing my third book that every book has its own inspiration from whatever hits me at the time that I’m working up the book.

With the second book, I was inspired by a completely different dynamic. I was inspired by a true story of a homeless man who was killed in New York–this was in Queens, I think. He was killed in the process of trying to defend a woman who was being attacked by somebody on the street. He got stabbed, and lay on the ground after the attack–she got away, he saved her–and he was left to die, bleeding out on the sidewalk, while people walked past him, took pictures of him, stepped over him…It was one of those amazingly heart wrenching stories, and it did get press, and I thought I want to write about that.

There were also, then, stories that I had been interested in that involved white supremacists…I’m also fascinated by the bias people bring to a case when it’s time to judge guilty [or] not guilty. People bring biases that they’re both aware of and unaware of to every case. This is always true. The biases that are of most concern are the ones they’re not aware of, because, generally speaking, I think jurors come in to do a noble thing. They want to convict the guilty. They want to acquit the innocent. They want to follow the evidence. But they can be undermined by the biases they’re unaware of.

One of those biases is that women don’t commit violent crime. Women won’t do certain things. They won’t do bloody, violent crimes. They won’t harm their loved ones in that kind of way. We see it in Casey Anthony. I think there was bias definitely in play there. I call it the Pretty White Girl Exception, but it also had to do with the unwillingness that a mother could kill her baby in the manner indicated in that case. It was cruel, it was horrifying, and cold-blooded to think that a mother would drug her baby and deliberately suffocate that baby by duct-taping its face and throwing it in the woods. No, we don’t want to believe that women would do these things. I think that bias came into play, and they looked for any other solution to this problem, and they found it her father, who was a much more “believable” suspect in their mind.

I think those kind of biases come into play, and it reminded me again of Lizzie Borden. What nobody remembers about her is that — in honesty, the Casey Anthony case did not inspire the story because the story was almost completely written by the time I was aware of the case, but Lizzie Borden did inspire me, and the memory that she was acquitted. What people forget is that yes, she was the only suspect standing tall for the whole thing, but they acquitted her. They never did find anyone else to blame for the murders, and it seems pretty clear in hindsight as I look at the evidence–she did it! But nobody wanted to believe she did it. Nobody wanted to believe a woman could take matters into her own hands in a bloody, gory way, and commit a crime like that.

So I wanted to explore a woman like that–and Lizzie Borden continued to live her life…she seemed to rather thrive, and she did just fine. I liked the idea of having a female sociopath who was not just a killing machine. I’m very, very weary of all these serial killer stories. Serial killers are statistically insignificant when it comes to real crime, and I do want to stay as close to real crime as I can. But sociopaths, generally speaking, are simply flawed characters who always act out of their own self interest. What they tend to have is no conscience, so when it’s to do something to help themselves, protect themselves, defend themselves, unlike you or I, they don’t necessarily think in terms of what needs to be done and resist screwing someone over or committing a violent act. They’ll go straight there, because they don’t have a conscience. But that doesn’t mean they’re killing machines looking for reasons to kill everybody. Not the case. So I wanted to create a character, more sociopathically speaking,  realistic.

And in general, I like to try to tether my stories, my characters to some kind of realism. Keep one foot on the ground, so to speak. You can’t tell the complete truth in terms of real crime, because real crime is very boring and very simple. The story’s over very quickly: Johnny goes into a liquor store and shoots Brucie–done. That’s a very short story, so of course we have to embellish, but embellish in a way that take you step-by-step through the crime, through the investigation, in a way that has logic to it, in a way it really would happen.

So after coming up with a premise and a story based on the elements I’ve told you about, I thought, “okay, what really would happen?” “And how would this woman deal with her life after the crime? What would Rachel do logically? What would Bailey do logically to solve this case?” And from there, once you get the premise, I work it through in a way that’s as real as it can be to what police and prosecutors do.

You mentioned you were working as a screenwriter before starting writing books and fiction. How did that inform your process? With screenwriting, it can be fairly outline heavy–do you outline before writing a novel? Once you’ve got that idea, like you were discussing, how do you proceed through sitting down and writing a first draft?

You know, I do outline, but it’s not really a very good outline. (laughing) I outline because I think as I write. I do better thinking in motion. Sometimes I think as I’m walking. I hike with the dogs, and I beat stories out in my head that way. If that’s not possible, writing as I’m thinking helps me to do it.

I know some writers say they like to think of one premise and just let it fly as they go on the page. I think Hollywood kind of got me in the habit of thinking through outline form–at least the bare bones of the story. But when I say I don’t outline well, I do outline, I write it all out, just for a sense of security, not necessarily in a form that anyone understands, but I do. But then, the thing is, I change it radically as I write. I’m wondering whether, as I get more experienced and more confident, I might dispose or dispense with that initial steps, because the story winds up being so much different than the outline. (laughing)

You have quite a bit of experience as a lawyer and as a prosecutor. At this point, is research still very important to you? Do you check in at the DA’s office, or speak to police officers? If you still research, what’s the process like?

I don’t research because I lived it. I keep current on the way cases are being handled today because I’m still practicing law. I handle criminal appeals in which you don’t have to go to court, you just read transcripts and look for technical errors and write briefs. But it lets me read through many many many many trials that are happening today. So that’s part of the ongoing research that’s part of my life.

This is the second novel in a series. Do you feel an obligation to your reader to either inform them of the events of the past book? Can a reader pick up Guilt By Degrees in the shop and be informed of what’s going on and enjoy it without having to go back and read the first one?

I deliberately wrote Guilt by Degrees in a way that would give people the chance to get right on board with it without having to go back to read Guilt By Association. Certainly, it helps, I think, to have read the first book, because you get to see, as we call it, “the meet cute.” Graden and Rachel, and that’s kind of a fun dynamic to see how it starts out from the very beginning…she’s doing her thing, he’s doing his, and each of them is very wedded to their job and doing it correctly, and neither one of them wants to put up with the other one’s issues.

In Guilt By Association, she wants to be in on that crime scene, she wants to see what’s going on. Graden sees that she shouldn’t be there, and throws her out, and she’s pissed. So it sets up a dynamic for two very strong people who are very wedded to their jobs. You don’t get to see that happening from the very beginning in Guilt By Degrees, but you do learn about their relationship, and you do learn about Rachel’s traumatic childhood history–more so in the second book than the first, and that was on purpose, too–so you don’t need to have read Guilt By Association, and I did that deliberately so that people could pick up the second book and jump right in.

But I always think it helps to have seen a series like this, where you have recurring characters, from the beginning, so you can enjoy the development of them. Rachel in particular is a character who plays her cards very close to the vest, guards her privacy very jealously…she’s not somebody you’re going to meet at a party and is going to spill their guts and tell their life story. You know that guy. (laughing) “And then, I was in junior high…” and you’re looking at your watch going “Dude, I gotta go–what was your name again?” Rachel’s the opposite of that. She doesn’t like tell anybody anything about her personally. She’ll talk to you endlessly about cases, but not about herself. And so, in the first book, I thought “Okay, but this character, then, is not going to spill her guts about her childhood trauma, which she’s taken great pains to distance herself from, and hide.” She has a lot of survivor’s guilt about it. It’s something that she doesn’t like talking about, and as a result, keeps it very quiet and under wraps as best she can. I thought she’s not to reveal to the reader–or to anybody–until she has to, until her hand is forced. So you don’t learn what that trauma is in the first book, but in the second, only because her hand got forced, she does reveal it, and then the reader will find out.

So I think there’s some nuance you can miss if you don’t read the first book, but there’s no sense of not understanding who the characters are when you just pick up the second book.

The conversation continues Thursday.

Marcia Clark is a former LA, California deputy district attorney, who was the lead prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson murder case. She wrote a bestselling nonfiction book about the trial, Without a Doubt, the national bestselling thriller GUILT BY ASSOCIATION introducing DA Rachel Knight, and is a frequent media commentator and columnist on legal issues. She lives in Los Angeles.

Brendan M. Leonard is a freelance writer, filmmaker, and crime fiction junkie living in New York City. He has written for CHUD.com, The Rap Sheet, and January Magazine. There are days he worries about becoming Ron Swanson. Visit his blog here, or follow him on Twitter here.

The Biltmore: Rachel Knight’s home: “A grand historical landmark in the heart of downtown L.A. I’d been lucky enough to score a sweet deal as a long-term resident after getting a sentence of life without parole for the murderer of the CEO’s wife. Recently, the CEO had upgraded me to a suite with two bedrooms, claiming it wasn’t getting much use anyway. I’d been a little reluctant to be on the receiving end of even more of his generosity. But when he continued to insist, I caved in. It did make sense that my old room, being smaller and more affordable, was easier to book.”

The Tar Pit: “The cozy, art deco–style restaurant and bar on La Brea had great food and  amazing drinks. Though I was kind of a purist when it came to booze, anyone who was even slightly more adventurous raved about their cocktails, like the Fashionista and the Warsaw Mule.”

Guido’s : “Strings of white lights hung from windows facing the small inlet of water next to the restaurant, giving it a festive holiday feel. At six o’clock the dining room wasn’t yet busy, but the small, intimate bar near the entrance was packed with regulars, some talking, some watching the basketball game on the television that hung from the ceiling. The atmosphere was relaxed and convivial, and the manager greeted us like we were his favorite cousins.”

Les Sisters: “Famous among those in the know for serving up some of the best Southern-style cooking this side of the Mason-Dixon Line, it would fit the bill for us in more ways than one. Aside from the killer food, the prices were reasonable, the people were great, and it was way off the beaten path, so we wouldn’t risk being seen together, which would’ve been bad for the shot-caller of a gang and not so great for a prosecutor either.”

Griffith Park: Griffith Park is a beautiful place, miles of green and home to the famous observatory as well as the Greek Theater. But what most don’t know is that it’s also a notorious body dump – as some unsuspecting hikers have had the misfortune to discover.

Rivera: ”Toni told us we owed her dinner—why, she didn’t say. But we’d been meaning to check out Rivera, a Nueva Mexicana restaurant downtown that was supposed to be the bomb, so I got us reservations. Whatever Toni thought we owed her, I figured that would settle the score.”

The Courthouse: Rachel’s home away from home: the Criminal Courts Building – now known as the Clara Shortridge Folz Justice Center. Her office is on the 18th floor, giving her a great view of downtown LA.

Marcia Clark is a former LA, California deputy district attorney, who was the lead prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson murder case. She wrote a bestselling nonfiction book about the trial, Without a Doubt, the national bestselling thriller GUILT BY ASSOCIATION introducing DA Rachel Knight, and is a frequent media commentator and columnist on legal issues. She lives in Los Angeles.

Both Laura Lippman and myself are ardent, perhaps obsessive fans of the James M. Cain novel,

—MA

LL:  In the final episode of the five-hour plus adaptation of Mildred Pierce, I began to wonder if it just might be quicker to read the audiobook. Not quite, not at all—it’s 10 hours. But whatever happened to pictures being worth 1,000 words? Stranger still, the last two episodes seemed rushed. It was almost as if someone at HBO said, ‘Oh my god, we authorized how many hours? Pull the plug!’ (Full disclosure, I know and admire/like Cary Antholis, who oversees miniseries there, so I know this couldn’t be the case.)

I know the book so well that I wasn’t sure I could give the miniseries a fair shake. But two things strike me. First, James M. Cain, as a former newspaperman, knows how to write very tight compressed scenes. He violates the principle of ‘show, not tell’ over and over again—and the book is better for it. Take, for example, the scene of Mildred and Monty’s jaunty banter, en route to Lake Arrowhead. It zips by in the novel, written indirectly.

“Going through Pasadena, they decided it was time to tell names, and when he heard hers, he asked if she was related to Pierce Homes. When she said she was ‘married to them for a while,’ he professed to be delighted, saying they were they worst homes ever built, as all the roofs leaked. She said that was nothing compared to how they treasury leaked, and they both laughed gaily. His name, Beragon, he had to spell for her before she got it straight, and as he put the accent on the last syllable she asked: ‘Is it French?’’’

Put in straight-forward dialogue, this exchange loses so much of its charm and breeziness.

The second problem is that it’s a very internal novel. Mildred can’t express her feelings and she often doesn’t understand them. All credit to Kate Winslet for trying to play this literal, humorless character. I think she was miscast. I think almost everyone is miscast, except for Guy Pearce, who made me see Monty’s charm at last; Mare Winningham; Melissa Leo; and maybe young Veda.

I will say I’m convinced that Todd Haynes loves the novel.

MA:  I think you’re right on in terms of compression of scenes. Cain uses dialogue in a completely different way than movie dialogue. When he *does* employ it tends to be to show something other than what the characters are saying (which is frequently very bland things, e.g., ‘Say, that meringue looks two inches thick.’).

You have mentioned, and I was always think of it, that Raymond Chandler famously said that Cain’s dialogue worked on the page but didn’t work for film. I don’t think he sees dialogue as a way to express but rather to fail to express, to conceal or even to highlight the chasm between his character’s inner lives and the words that come out of their mouth. It’s often spare, purposely bland, as in ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Ida, what’s yours?’ ‘Mildred.’ Or, in this exchange when Mildred tells her daughter Veda her business plan.

‘There’s money in a restaurant, if it’s run right, and—’

‘You mean we’ll be rich?’

‘Many people have got rich that way.

That did it.

I’m not sure the miniseries knows what do in the place of moments like this, where so much is happening (this moment of portent, this power exchange between Mildred and Veda that will rule much of the book) without the words said. And I think this goes directly to your idea of it being an internal novel. Mildred isn’t someone who articulates her feelings and we rely on Cain’s narration to give us what she won’t. But what do you do with that on film? for instance, Cain’s narrator tells us Mildred is vain about her beautiful legs. In the miniseries, this idea is replaced by Monty referring several times to her lovely legs and at one point he says that she is vain about them. The problem is that we don’t believe him. And this is because we have only Monty to go on.

And it’s also because of the larger problem: the Mildred of the miniseries does not seem vain about anything. She is a different animal. Because we get tiny dollhouse windows into Mildred’s rich strangenesses in the book, she becomes richer (and helps overcome what is quite true: that humorlessness). In the miniseries, she’s not strange at all. Is a kind of classier Stella Dallas noble mother. This makes the humorlessness stand out more baldly, especially alongside the wry deliciousness of Guy Pearce’s Monty. the closest we get to expressing Mildred’s deepest weirdness—her quite physical and almost unbearably intense love of her daughter Veda—is a lingering bedtime kiss.

To me a fundamental moment in the novel is when Mildred admits to herself (or the narrator does it for us) that when her daughter Ray dies she feels a ‘guilty, leaping joy that had been the other child who was taken from her, and not Veda.’ Beyond the sentiment itself, consider the harshness of that phrase ‘the other child’ rather than saying Ray’s name. The closest the miniseries comes to acknowledging this is having her crawl into bed with Veda after Ray dies, holding onto her and saying, ‘Thank god.’ Unless you know the book, you’d miss the import of that entirely. Or maybe the miniseries doesn’t want us to feel that side of Mildred, truly.

What do you think of the way Haynes handles the Mildred-Veda relationship?

LL: I couldn’t decide, watching the miniseries, if that moment you reference above—which is a seminal moment in the book, key to the shock of the confrontation with Veda at the end—is impossible to convey in film, or if no one wanted to convey it. It is a very ugly truth, a Sophie’s Choice. Cain knew how ugly it was. Mildred knows. It is one of her few truly self-aware moments.

In the book, Mildred’s relationship to Veda is almost like a chum and not just any chum, but the toadying sycophant, the happy-to-be-bullied girl who follows around a mean girl, convinced that she’s somehow better. She doesn’t quite disagree with Veda’s assessment of her, even though she knows what a poor prize Bert was, how little his good family/name was worth when bad things happened. It’s a masochistic relationship, not a noble one.

In the book, Mildred’s relationship to Veda is almost like a chum and not just any chum, but the toadying sycophant, the happy-to-be-bullied girl who follows around a mean girl, convinced that she’s somehow better. She doesn’t quite disagree with Veda’s assessment of her, even though she knows what a poor prize Bert was, how little his good family/name was worth when bad things happened. It’s a masochistic relationship, not a noble one.

But, again, without access to Mildred’s internal life, it’s so hard to make sense of things and it just putters along, a story about a well-intentioned woman and her spoiled child. In the miniseries, her decision to pursue Monty seems accidental, spur of the moment. In the book, it is absolutely ruthless. At the climax, it’s hard to feel true sympathy for Mildred as a result. I experience her shock, but I also see how she created this problem. In the miniseries, I watched Mildred trying to absorb the news—again, Cain’s novel is a model of compression here, with Monty’s speech rendered as paraphrase—and waited to see if Veda would be naked when she got out of bed.

Which leads me to a small note: I will Veda had been more voluptuous. I always felt the early emergence of the Dairy—the breasts she sprouted at a very young age—helped to undermine the creep factor with Monty. Veda has been a woman all her life; Monty says as much. Now there’s a little whiff of ‘ewwww’ that isn’t helpful.

What about the look of the miniseries? Wasn’t it filmed on the East Coast? Could I possibly be remembering that correctly? It seems to me that Southern California is a major character in Mildred Pierce and I don’t feel it was present, not really. Was that a concern to you at all?

MA: The dairy—I’d forgotten! I agree on all counts. In the book, it’s so much clearer than Veda is Mildred’s creation, is the result not just of spoiling Veda but in fact smothering her, hoisting all her own desires, disappointments, shame and ambition onto her. That Veda’s cruel hustles are just distorted echoes of Mildred’s own. In the scene when Mildred discovers Veda and Monty’s betrayal (and emerges naked from the bed), there seemed to be a strong attempt to draw a visual parallel between the elfin, doll-like Evan Rachel Wood (the anti-’Dairy’) and that famous Munch painting that we know as ‘The Vampire.’ But it’s Mildred, in many ways, who’s the blood sucker and in the book we see, as monstrous as Veda is, that she is trying to escape Mildred’s parasitic qualities. It’s a haunting

The location, though, was a problem for me. The interiors were pitch-perfect and showed Haynes’s fetishistic attention to period detail, which I appreciate. But the exteriors didn’t look remotely Southern Californian to me. I watched the DVD commentary (because that’s the kind of geek I am) to confirm and most of it was shot in Long Island, some of it even here in Forest Hills, Queens, near where I live (the faux Tudors Monty decries in ‘Pasadena’). I absolutely sympathize with their budgetary demands, but the book is so much about the physical space of Southern California in that era—the expanses, the new developments, the immense stretches between communities—that it felt disconcerting watching so much visually crowded, East Coast scenery. It is, after all, fundamentally a book about real estate development.

Further, so much of the book, in fact, is Mildred in her car, driving. The exhilaration she feels pushing her foot onto the gas pedal. That American freedom, the freedom, traditionally, of the (white) American male:

‘She gave the car the gun, exactly watching the needle swing past 30, 40, 50…The car was pumping something into her veins, something of pride, of arrogance, of restrained self-respect that no talk, no liquor, no love could possibly give.’

I missed that in the miniseries. What I thought they did well, though, was the restaurant business elements. The move Mildred makes from waitress/pie-maker to restaurateur. I always think of what you wrote in your piece on the book in Slate, that the book doubles as a ‘solid little primer on how to run a chicken-and-waffle joint.’ What did you think of the miniseries rendering of that?

LL: The location problem is a shame. It’s probably difficult, if not impossible, to replicate the Southern California of the 1930s eight years later. But the first time I saw the ocean, I was dubious. And the lighting of the outdoor scenes seemed wrong to me. But you’re right about the interiors.

The miniseries opens with shots of Mildred making the elaborate cake for the newsboy and it was beautifully done. (I wondered if Kate Winslet had a hand double.) And, yes, overall, I thought the business information was depicted very well, even when it got tricky and complicated. I was unbearably excited at the moment when Wally turned on the lights in the display case, knowing what he was about to show Mildred. I found myself brooding over the brief, meteor-like life of Baltimore’s only chicken-and-waffle place. Mildred had a good idea.

And, yes, the car culture was lost, as were some of the lovely details about clothing. That was one place where I wished for utter fidelity—the not-quite-right costume that Mildred wears on New Year’s Eve, the bizarre uniform she designs for herself when she opens the restaurant. She is, by Cain’s telling, a little dowdy and dumpy by the time of the final showdown with Veda. Kate Winslet is brilliant, but she can’t do dowdy.

I now believe, having watched this, that it’s possible to love a book too well. I happen to be a big fan of Adaptation, the Charlie Kaufman non-adaptation of The Orchid Thief. I have no desire to adapt my own work and, so far, I have been blessed with two extraordinary writers: Nicole Holofcener (Every Secret Thing) and Jay Cocks (the Tess Monaghan adaptation currently under contract to TNT). I also just re-read The Devil’s Candy recently, which I appreciate much more now that I know quite a bit more about the film business. Love and passion can be quite ruinous. Fidelity in and of itself is not a bad thing; I think the Coen brothers did really well by True Grit and while I understand that others prefer the first version, what they like is at odds with the book. (The traditional look of the first one, for example. True Grit takes place in an area that does NOT look like a John Ford film. And I like the fact that the charismatic gang leader, Ned Pepper, isn’t handsome in the Coen brothers version.) But Out of Sight wouldn’t have worked as well if it did if Soderbergh had kept the original ending, even though it’s what made the book brilliant.

Mildred Pierce is a very, very dark view of parenthood. (I say parenthood, not motherhood, because I think Cain would have been equally adept at telling a story about a warped father-son relationship.) I know that Cain always said it was a story about a woman using men to achieve her ends, but he chose such an interesting end—not money or fame, but a woman’s attempt to create, in her daughter, her own superego. Yes, all parents hope their children will have better lives, but Mildred pushes her daughter to greater heights, encouraging her snobbery, even as it punishes her. It’s just so damn weird and masochistic, which I think is its charm. Let me put it this way: I wouldn’t have done better by it. I feel like I should be in a support group with Todd Haynes: People Who Love Mildred Pierce Too Much.

MA: Yes, exactly. In the end, the books we love—well, we’ve fused with them. Or maybe more accurately we swallow them whole. We transform them into the aspects of them that touch us the most. I think that Haynes made Mildred Pierce into a melodrama because he loves melodrama. But, for me (as a fellow lover of melodrama, mind you), Mildred Pierce is not remotely a melodrama. As you say, it is not about sacrificial maternal love, which almost all melodramas are, but about the classic Cain theme of unwholesome desires, the opening of the forbidden box. And precisely as you say: a kind of terrifying egoism at the root of a particular kind of parenthood (and I think you’re right: Cain could dissect a father just as masterfully, but he sure takes advantage of the mother convention: e.g., ‘how could a mother ever love too much?’ ‘What could ever be wrong about a mother’s embrace?’).

Love and passion can be ruinous indeed. I don’t know if anyone could ever really adapt any book we love because if we knew why we loved it, if we had to look at it, it might collapse under the hard gaze. It’s an emotional thing, when there needs to be some distance, don’t you think?

It’s telling to me that I love the Joan Crawford version because it isn’t really an adaptation at all. So I can view it as a separate thing. Haynes’s love for Mildred, though, feels genuine, ardent, as you say. And he comes, in some ways, so close to the things I love about it, which makes me harder on him. With book we love hopelessly, we are like those vampires in some way, sucking it dry and not wanting anyone else to feed on it. And when our child turns into this thing we don’t recognize (a Veda?), it’s too horrible to bear. And it feels like a betrayal. As beautiful as it looks, as talented as it is, it’s not what I want it to be. Still, I don’t know who could do better, who could show their love more.

And there is Guy Pearce, pitch perfect, and Mare Winningham and Melissa Leo, both of whom seem to have slipped seamlessly from a pre-Code gem. And there’s a whole lovely golden wonder to it that kept me entranced (and when the soft gold turns to hard Deco silver as time passes, as everyone hardens—well, nicely done). And the thing I’m most grateful for? Keeping the last line of the book, even as think the delivery is all wrong, the tone of it is all wrong. But it’s there:

“Let’s get stinko.”

LL: I literally held my breath, willing for the line to be there.

Speaking of which . . . ?

See also Megan’s blog post on the book and Laura’s Slate essay.

In other news, Lawrence Block’s much-acclaimed return to Matthew Scudder A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF was just awarded a Spinetingler Award for Best Novel in the Legend category. Congrats Larry!

A new section of our social writing project Triggers Down is up…

And Nick put together this absolutely incredible short film of the first scene in FIFTEEN DIGITS with a little help from a few of his friends–check it out below! Now THAT’S what we call a book trailer! Fullscreen it–you won’t be disappointed.

Did we missing something sweet? Share it in the comments! We’re always open to suggestions for next week’s post! Get in touch at mulhollandbooks@hbgusa.com or DM us on Twitter.