A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF is now available in paperback–don’t miss out on Block’s “elegaic….lament for all the old familiar things that are now almost lost, almost forgotten” (Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review).

I remember the time some fifteen years ago when I walked into Jimmy Armstrong’s saloon. Jimmy himself was at the bar, and he told me about a recent visit by a group of visitors from Japan. It seems they had come to see the place they’d read about in my Matthew Scudder novels, and they spent an hour there, taking pictures of the bar, taking pictures of Jimmy, and taking pictures of each other in the bar and in poses with Jimmy.

“It was fun,” he said. “They were excited to find out that this was a real place.”

I was reminded of this on my recent visit to Beijing, when I met some Chinese fans who are members of a virtual club called Armstrong’s Bar that has meetings online. It was my sad duty to tell them that the real Armstrong’s Bar no longer existed, and that its owner, my old friend Jimmy Armstrong, had died in 2002. (A nephew of Jimmy’s took it over and ran it for a couple of months, but then he sold it to somebody else, and the name was changed, and that was the end of that.)

I know that those Japanese readers who dropped in on Jimmy are not the only tourists who have combined a visit to New York with a search for traces of Matthew Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr in the city they call home. This can be difficult, because some of their locations are hard to find for several reasons.

Some of the places mentioned never existed. The books are works of fiction, and some of the locations are fictional as well. A favorite restaurant of Matthew and his wife, Elaine, is one called Paris Green. Fans sometimes look for it, and I can understand why; I’d eat there myself if I could! But no such place ever existed in reality.

The same is true for many of the places where Bernie Rhodenbarr hangs out. His bookstore, Barnegat Books, is fictional, and so is his pal Carolyn’s dog grooming salon, The Poodle Factory. The two often eat lunch from a neighborhood restaurant that keeps changing its name as different nationalities run it: Two Guys From Addis Ababa, Two Guys From Bucharest, Two Guys From Phnom Penh, etc. It sounds like a fine establishment, but don’t look for it. Or for the Bum Rap, the saloon on Broadway where the two friends meet after work for a drink. It’s fictional as well.

Another thing to bear in mind is that I’ve been writing about Matthew and Bernie since the mid-1970s. As a result, there are many establishments that were real when I mentioned them but that have since gone out of business. That’s true of Armstrong’s, as I mentioned, but it’s also just as true of Polly’s Cage, McGovern’s, Antares & Spiro’s, and most of the placers where Matthew used to drink bourbon. (Maybe they went out of business because he stopped drinking!)

Bernie lives at 235 West End Avenue, and you can look at the building and enjoy a walk through the neighborhood. Carolyn lives in Arbor Court, and there’s no street to be found with that name, but there are several private streets in that part of the city (Greenwich Village) that fit the description of Arbor Court. You could have a look at Patchin Place or Milligan Place—or Grove Court, which comes closest to the street in the books.

Matthew and Elaine live at the Parc Vendome, on the southeast corner of West Fifty-seventh Street and Ninth Avenue. It’s a real building, and a very fine one. The hotel where Matthew lived for many years, the Northwestern, is directly across the street from the Parc Vendome; it never existed under that name, but there was a hotel there called the Henry Hudson which was very much like the Northwestern. (A few years ago, it changed its name to The Hudson, and became a boutique hotel, very chic and trendy and expensive. In the books, it’s still the Northwestern, and Matthew’s young friend TJ now lives in Matthew’s old room.)

The church where Matthew used to light candles, and now attends AA meetings, is St. Paul the Apostle, on Ninth Avenue and Fifty-Ninth Street. It’s very real, and worth a visit; for a dollar or two, you can light a candle yourself.

There are two coffee shops Matthew mentions often—the Flame, where his AA friends go after meetings, and the Morning Star, where he and TJ often have breakfast. They are real, and just a block apart, the Flame at Ninth and Fifty-eighth, the Morning Star one block to the south. Both have extensive menus, so you’ll be sure to find something you like.

Matthew has spent many hours with his friend Mick Ballou, most of them in Mick’s saloon, Grogan’s Open House. It’s located in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen, on Fiftieth Street and Tenth Avenue, but don’t waste your time looking for it. Although it may be very real in the books, it doesn’t have any counterpart in the real world.

On the other hand, the church where Mick would occasionally attend mass did exist, and so did the Butchers’ Mass as described in the books. (Mick would show up wearing his father’s bloodstained butcher’s apron.) The church was St. Bernard’s, but the neighborhood’s Irish population has declined, and the meat markets have mostly closed, and the church in recent years has become Hispanic, and is now called Our Lady of Guadalupe.

New York is a beautiful and exciting city, and I hope many of my Chinese readers will be able to come pay it a visit. Overseas visitors often find New York surprisingly familiar, because they’ve already become acquainted with so many of its locations through film and television. I hope some of you may find, as you walk through its streets and explores its parks and museums, that your own prior acquaintance with Matthew and Elaine and Bernie and Carolyn will enrich the experience for you.

Via CHUD, Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper have signed on for an adaptation of Ron Rash’s Serena. Count us excited.

Edgar nominations are out! What do you think of the picks?

BookLoons posted a rave of Donato Carrisi’s THE WHISPERER, writing of the novel: “Carrisi continues tossing shockers at readers till the very last page. If you enjoy thrillers, don’t miss The Whisperer, the best of the year so far and one that will be hard to beat!”

EDGE Boston also ran a rave in which the reviewer writes: “THE WHISPERER is a puzzle, a challenge, an intriguing reflection of society.”

Don’t miss the amazing trailer for Donato Carrisi’s THE WHISPERER.

Superbowl Sunday’s coming up–and with it will come an Avengers trailer! Here’s exactly seventeen seconds of it:

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

Today Mulholland Books celebrates the paperback publication of A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF! Missed out on the “totally gripping….Great American Crime Novel” (

Larry’s essay on writing A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF follows.

I was afraid I might be done writing about Matthew Scudder.

I’d certainly spent enough years in his company.  From 1975’sThe Sins of the Fathers all the way to All the Flowers are Dying in 2005, I’d written sixteen Matthew Scudder novels, along with a handful of short stories.  And, because the fellow has aged in real time throughout the series, he’s now reached and passed the biblical high water mark of three score years and ten.  Even if you’re optimistic enough to argue that 72 is the new 71, the fellow’s still a little old to be leaping tall buildings in a single bound.

Now I should point out that this was not the first time I thought Scudder and I were done with each other.  In the fifth book, Eight Million Ways to Die (1982), the fellow confronted his alcoholism and, not without difficulty, chose sobriety.  That was all well and good for him, but I figured I’d written myself out of a job.  The man had undergone a catharsis, he’d confronted the central problem of his existence, so what was left to say about him?  His d’etre, you might say, had lost its raison, and I’d be well advised to go write about somebody else.

And it took a while for me to discover that Scudder could have a post-alcohol career.  After a sort of prequel, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, in 1989 I picked up the story in Out on the Cutting Edge. And I’ve been writing about Matt ever since.

But nothing goes on forever, and if All the Flowers are Dying was the end, well, the book had been very generously received by readers and critics.  So Matt and I would be going out on a high note.

But what do I know?

One day in the late summer of 2009 I went out racewalking.  (I wrote about my life as an aging and unskilled racewalker in a memoir, Step By Step, but don’t pretend you read it.  Nobody read it, and I have the sales figures to prove it.)

I went out walking, as I said, and my mind wandered, as it tends to.  And what struck me was that there was a seven-year stretch of Matt Scudder’s life that never found its way into the books.  In 1982 he puts down a drink and walks into an AA meeting; when we catch up with him in 1989, he’s six or seven years sober and getting through the days.

Now something interesting had to have happened during those unrecorded years.  It’s been my observation that early sobriety tends to be an eventful period in a person’s life, and why should it be otherwise with Scudder?

I let myself think about it, and elements of a story began to filter in.  I remembered how an old friend had said that, of a particular group of kids in his high school, half had become cops and the other half crooks; any of that particular social stratum could have gone either way.  That sent me back even further in Scudder’s past, to his boyhood in the Bronx.

Oh, who knows how a story comes together?  I knew a little about it when I sat down and started writing.  I found out more as I went along.  In A Drop of the Hard Stuff, Scudder would have to get along without some of the people who have become important in his life in more recent books—his wife, Elaine, for example, and his young friend TJ. On the other hand, he’s keeping company with Jan Keane, and has the good advice and counsel of his sponsor, Jim Faber.  (And it was good for me to be able to have those old friends around.)

He was also back again in a world without cell phones or computers.  For me, writing the book, it seemed like only yesterday—but it was close to thirty years ago.

And will there be other stories from Matt’s lost years?  Or from deeper in his past?  Or will I somehow find a way to continue his story in present time?

Hey, why are you asking me?  I’m generally the last person to know what’s going to happen next. . .

The Outfit is based on a Donald Westlake novel, written as Richard Stark. If you’re reading this, you know all about the Parker novels written by Stark. Needless to say, I am a big fan. Westlake had a very smart agent who sold his books to the movies many times, with the condition that the character of Parker not be named Parker in the films. With this rule in place, no one studio or producer could own the series, and multiple films could be made from the source material. So in the films Parker is alternately named Walker (Lee Marvin in John Boorman’s masterpiece, Point Blank, based on The Hunter), McClain (Jim Brown in The Split), Porter (Mel Gibson in the phony, awful Payback), and, in Slayground, Stone, played by Peter Coyote. (I am omitting two French films, one of which was Godard’s Made in U.S.A., which starred Anna Karina; for more information, check out the website “The Violent World of Parker”).

In The Outfit, adapted for the screen and directed by John Flynn, Parker is named Macklin, and he is played by Robert Duvall. Though Lee Marvin most physically resembles the rawboned, loose-limbed man described in the opening pages of The Hunter, Duvall is, in his own compact, tight-lipped way, also a fine Parker embodiment. While Boorman’s Point Blank is a wildly imaginative, uber-cinematic head-fuck of a film, The Outfit most closely replicates the flat, hard, all-business tone of the Parker books. Westlake himself once said that Flynn’s version is the closest translation of Parker to film.

The plot is rudimentary; we’ve seen it many times before. Macklin robbed a bank with his brother and an accomplice, Cody (Joe Don Baker, kickass cool, as always). They didn’t know they had stolen Mob money. Macklin’s brother is murdered by button men, on orders of kingpin Mailer (the great Robert Ryan, in his final role before cancer claimed him). When Macklin is released from prison, he and Cody go after the Mob to reclaim their money (In Don Siegel’s Charley Varrick, which has a similar central plot, the Mafia is after Charley, who’s on the run; here. Macklin is the predator.) What unspools is an episodic trail of conflict and confrontation (basically, a series of hit-and-run robberies) between Macklin’s team (Cody and Bett, Macklin’s girlfriend, played by Karen Black) and a host of extraordinary character actors, pugilists (Archie Moore) and real-life thugs, leading to a climatic assault on Mailer’s compound.

Flynn’s style is of the TV-lighting, standard-setup school (master shot, two-shot, over-the-shoulder, tighter, tighter, etc.) and unflashy. Locations are real, not sets, and look like the working class and out-of-work America of 1973. The style fits the material. The dialogue is clipped, straight to the point, and musical, if jazz is your music. You have the scene of the men buying black market firearms. You have pump-action shotguns, .38s, .357 Mags, and silencers. You have beautiful, braless women (Miss Black, Sheree North—good God—and Joanna Cassidy) in full bounty. You have the scene where our anti-heroes pick out their hot, hopped up Mopars (The Dirty Dozen’s Richard Jaeckel as the coveralled mechanic, The Outlaw Josey Wales’ Bill McKinney as his half-wit, cuckolded brother). You have Elisha Cook Jr. behind the counter and Jane Greer (Out of the Past) behind the stick. And you have cinematography by Bruce Surtees and music by Jerry Fielding. The stars could be no better aligned.

Want to know what this film is all about? Check out the sequence where Macklin robs a hotel card game. Macklin first pistol-clips Al (Roy Jenson), the guy guarding the door (“Make it to the left side, will ya, I got a bad right ear”) then breaks into the room and takes the players off, confronting a mobbed-up vulgarian named Menner (a reliably nutty Timothy Carey), who earlier had tortured Bett by burning her inner forearm repeatedly with a lit cigar. Menner explains the setup to Macklin, and the audience, poetically: “You hit a bank. You and your brother and a guy called Cody, before your stretch. Midwest National in Wichita. The Outfit owns it. So you know how it is: you hit us, we hit you.” Before Macklin leaves the room with his money, he says, “You shouldn’t use a girl’s arm for an ashtray,” and puts a silenced round through Menner’s hand.

If this is your sort of thing, The Outfit belongs on your shelf. John Flynn directed two of my favorite pictures: The Outfit and Rolling Thunder (1977). He is largely forgotten today. It will cost you thirty bucks for two to see the latest bullshit actioner at your local theater. For half of that, you can own this classic, and watch it again and again.

George Pelecanos is the author of several bestselling novels set in and around Washington D.C. He is also an independent-film producer, an essayist, the recipient of numerous international writing awards, and a producer of the HBO hit series The Wire. He currently writes for the Emmy-nominated writer of the HBO series Treme.

His newest novel WHAT IT WAS is available as an ebook for only 99 cents for one month only. A trade paperback edition is also available at $9.99, as well as a knockout of a limited edition hardcover signed by George.

This review was originally published on Tom Piccirilli’s website The Cold Spot. EDGE OF DARK WATER hits bookstores March 23.

We all know Joe Lansdale can do it all. He’s written thrillers, westerns, young adult, and horror novels, as well as fusions containing elements of each. His latest, EDGE OF DARK WATER, is more or less one of these composites that gives a perfect arena to Lansdale’s strengths as a classic storyteller.

When teenaged May Lynn’s body is pulled from the Sabine River tied to an old sewing machine, her friends Sue Ellen, Jinx, and Terry take it upon themselves to give her a proper fond farewell. They decide to burn her remains and carry the ashes to Hollywood, a place where pretty May Lynn always believed she would someday become a movie star. The adventurous trio, along with Sue Ellen’s alcoholic mother, steal a raft and escape from town with some stolen loot, barely ahead of Sue Ellen’s abusive step-father and several other cretinous, criminal characters. As their trip unfolds they run across an odd array of broken and lamentable folks, including a preacher with a horrible guilty secret and an ancient crone with no reason to live except passing on her bitterness. They also learn that Skunk, a legendary beast of a man raised in the river bottoms who’ll commit any atrocity he’s hired to do, may be on their heels.

Despite the novel being set during the Depression, the story has a certain timeless nature. We get the feeling that this tale could almost have taken place at any period between the 1880s and the 1980s. East Texas remains as dark and romanticized as Hannibal, Missouri, full of wonder and possibility, thick with traps and villains.

This is a sharp, incisive, fun tale showing Lansdale’s fortitude at roping the reader into an impressive, alluring narrative. The flaws of our protagonists are what make them so sympathetic and relatable, their journey such an earnest and archetypal one. Even though this is only January, I’m certain EDGE OF DARK WATER will wind up on top ten of ‘12 lists come a year from now.

By the way, look for my interview with Joe in the first online issue of the new ezine The Big Click edited by Nick Mamatas, premiering in March.

Tom Piccirilli is the author of twenty novels including Shadow Season, The Cold Spot, The Coldest Mile, and A Choir of Ill Children. He’s won the International Thriller Writers Award and four Bram Stoker Awards, as well as having been nominated for the Edgar, the World Fantasy Award, the Macavity, and Le Grand Prix de L’imagination. Learn more at www.thecoldspot.blogspot.com.

Need a cheat sheet on Joe O’Loughlin before you dive into the just-released Mulholland Books paperback edition of SHATTER or the upcoming BLEED FOR ME? Curious how a series writers keeps all the those character traits in order? Check out the below dossier on the principle characters from Robotham’s acclaimed psychological thrillers.

Name:            Professor Joseph O’Loughin (commonly known as Joe)

Profession: Clinical Psychologist

Born:            November 29, 1960, at Penrhyn Bay, Wales.

Height:          6’1”

Weight:          175 lbs

Eyes:             Brown

Joe’s own descriptions of himself:

(BLEED FOR ME) I am not handsome in the conventional sense. I am tall and pale with watery brown eyes and when I look at myself naked I am reminded of a winter animal that sheds its fur in the hotter months and looks out of place until the cold returns. That’s one of the reasons that I don’t wear shorts or T-shirts or flip flops which Australians call thongs. I wonder what they call G-strings?

(SUSPECT) Not even my mother would call me handsome. I have curly brown hair, a pear-shaped nose and skin that freckles at the first hint of sunlight.

(SHATTER) Sadly, I inherited my father’s tangle of hair. If it grows half an inch too long it becomes completely unruly and I look like I’ve been electrocuted.

Early Education:

Joe was sent to boarding school from the age of eight, attending the exclusive Charterhouse School in Surrey, England.

A single memory comes back to me, with all the light and shade of reality. I am standing on the front steps of Charterhouse as my father hugs me and feels the sob in my chest. ‘Not in front of your mother,’ he whispers.

He turns to walk away and says to my mother, ‘Not in front of the boy,’ as she dabs at her eyes.

At Charterhouse he excelled academically but not on the sporting field.

Saturday mornings and soggy sports fields seem to go together like acne and adolescence. That’s how I remember the winters of my childhood – standing ankle-deep in mud, freezing my bollocks off, playing for the school’s Second XV.

God’s-personal-physician-in-waiting (my father) had a bellow that rose above the howling wind. ‘Don’t just stand there like a cold bottle of piss,’ he’d shout. ‘Call yourself a winger! I’ve seen continents drift faster than you.’

Tertiary Studies:

Joe did three years of medicine before changing courses to study psychology and behavioural science at London University. In 1985 he obtained his Masters degree in Clinical Psychology.

I stayed on at university determined to sleep with every promiscuous, terminally uncommitted first-year on campus, but unlike other would-be Lotharios I tried too hard. I even failed miserably at being fashionably unkempt and seditious. No matter how many times I slept on someone’s floor, using my jacket as a pillow, it refused to crumple or stain. And instead of appearing grungy and intellectually blasé, I looked like someone on his way to his first job interview.

Career:

Trainee psychologist, West London Health Authority, London

Merseyside Health Authority, Liverpool

West Hammersmith Hospital, London

Royal Marsden Hospital, London

Private Practice, London

Lecturer Behavioural Science Bath University

Police Work

2004 – SUSPECT

An unknown young woman is found dead with multiple stab wounds – all of them self-inflicted – and the police ask Joe to help them understand the crime. Are they dealing with a murder or a suicide? Reluctantly, he agrees but the victim turns out to be someone he knows: Catherine Mary McBride, a nurse and former colleague.

At the same time, Joe is grappling with a troubled young patient, Bobby Moran, whose violent dreams are becoming increasingly real. As Bobby’s behaviour grows increasingly erratic, Joe begins to ponder what he’s done in the past and whether there is a link between his terrible dreams and Catherine McBride.

2005 – LOST

When DI Vincent Ruiz is found floating in the Thames with a bullet in his leg and a bigger hole in his memory, Joe O’Loughlin is summoned. Accused of faking amnesia and under investigation by his colleagues, Ruiz’s only hope is to retrace his steps and try to remember what happened that night on the river.

2008 – SHATTER

A naked woman perched on the edge of Clifton Suspension Bridge with her back pressed to the safety fence. She’s suicidal, talking on a mobile phone, and Joe O’Loughlin is trying to talk her down. Turning to him, she says, ‘You don’t understand’, and lets go, falling to her death.

Two days later, Joe has a visitor – the woman’s teenage daughter. ‘My mother didn’t kill herself,’ the girl announces, ‘she wouldn’t …not like that. She was terrified of heights.’

2012 – BLEED FOR ME

Ray Hegarty, a highly respected former detective, lies dead in his daughter Sienna’s bedroom. She is found covered in his blood. Everything points to her guilt, but Joe isn’t convinced.

Sienna is his daughter’s best friend and Joe has watched her grow up and seen the troubled look in her eyes. Against the advice of police, he launches his own investigation, embarking upon a hunt that will lead him to a predatory schoolteacher; a conspiracy of silence and a race hate trial that is captivating the nation.

Family:

Father: Dr Joseph O’Loughlin (retired)

Joe refers to his father as God’s Personal Physician in Waiting because of his unfailing ego and sense of self-importance.

(SUSPECT) My father has a brilliant medical mind. There isn’t a modern medical textbook that doesn’t mention his name. He has written papers that have changed the way paramedics treat accident victims and altered the standard procedures of battlefield medics.

His father, my grandfather, was a founding member of the General Medical Council and its longest serving chairman. He established his reputation as an administrator rather than as a surgeon, but the name is still writ large in the history of medical ethics.

This is where I come in – or don’t come in. After having three daughters, I was the long awaited son. As such, I was expected to carry on the medical dynasty, but instead I broke the chain. In modern parlance that makes me the weakest link.

Mother:

(SUSPECT) Everything about my mother denotes her standing as a doctor’s wife, right down to her box-pleated skirts, plain blouses and low-heeled shoes. A creature of habit, she even carries a handbag when taking the dog for a walk.

She can arrange a dinner party for twelve in the time it takes to boil an egg. She also does garden parties, school fetes, church jamborees, charity fundraisers, bridge tournaments, car-boot sales, walkathons, christenings, weddings and funerals.  Yet for all this ability, she has managed to get through life without balancing a chequebook, making an investment decision or proffering a political opinion in public.

Joe has three older sisters, Lucy, Patricia and Rebecca.

Joe’s Marital Status:

Estranged from his wife Julianne – the great love of his life.

Joe on Julianne:

(SUSPECT) I still remember the first time I laid eyes on her in a pub near Trafalgar Square. She was doing first year languages at the University of London and I was a post-grad student. She’d witnessed one of my best moments, a soapbox sermon on the evils of apartheid outside the South African Embassy.

After the rally we went to a pub and Julianne came up and introduced herself. I offered to buy her a drink and tried not to stare at her. She had a dark freckle on her bottom lip that was still utterly mesmerising…it still is. My eyes are drawn to it when I speak to her and my lips are drawn to it when we kiss.

I didn’t have to woo Julianne with candlelit dinners or flowers. She chose me. And by next morning, I swear this is true, we were plotting our life together over Marmite soldiers and cups of tea. I love her for so many reasons but mostly because she’s on my side and by my side and because her heart is big enough for both of us. She makes me better, braver, stronger; she allows me to dream; she holds me together.

(SHATTER) There is an abstract sort of intimacy in our conversations now. She is the same woman I married. Brown-haired. Beautiful. Barely forty. And I still love her in every way but the physical one where we exchange bodily fluids and wake up next to each other in the morning. Whenever I see her in the village I am still struck by wonder: what did she ever see in me and how could I have let her go?

Julianne on Joe

(SUSPECT) ‘If you’re such a brilliant psychologist, you should start looking at your own defects. I’m tired of propping up your ego. Do you want me to tell you again? Here’s the list: You are nothing at all like your father. Your penis is the right size. You spend more than enough time with Charlie. You don’t have to be jealous of Jock. My mother really does like you. And I don’t blame you for ruining my black cashmere jumper by leaving tissues in your pockets. Satisfied?’

Ten years of potential therapy condensed to six bullet points. My God, this woman is good. The neighbourhood dogs start barking and it sounds like a muffled chorus of ‘here, here!’

Joe on Fatherhood:

(BLEED FOR ME): I have learned some remarkable things since becoming a father and I appreciate how much there is still to learn. I know, for example, that a pound coin can pass harmlessly through the digestive system of a four-year-old. I know that regurgitated chicken flavoured ramen noodles and tomato sauce will ruin a silk carpet; that nail polish sticks to the inside of a bath and too much beetroot turns a toddler’s urine a neon crimson colour.

(SHATTER): Looking after young children is the most important job in the world. Believe me – it is. However, the sad unspoken, implicit truth is that looking after young children is boring. Those guys who sit in missile silos waiting for the unthinkable to happen are doing an important job too, but you can’t tell me they’re not bored out of their tiny skulls and playing endless games of Solitaire and Battleships on the Pentagon computers.

Joe on Charlie: (Born 1996)

(BLEED FOR ME) Charlie is telling me I don’t understand. I’ll never understand. I’m old. I’m stupid. I have no taste in clothes or music or friends. I don’t own the right language to talk to her. I don’t dread the same things or dream the same dreams. I’m caught in that in between place, unsure whether I can be a father or a friend, but not both.

Meanwhile, Charlie is like a separate nation state seeking independence, wanting her own government, laws and budget. Whenever I try to avoid conflict, choosing diplomacy instead of hostility, she masses her troops at the border, accusing me of spying or sabotaging her life.

Joe on Emma (Born 2005)

(BLEED FOR ME) We reach the terrace and Emma changes out of her uniform into a Snow White dress she has been wearing obsessively for the past two months. By now the neighbours will think she’s strange but it’s not worth arguing over. I’m sure she’s not going to be wearing it when she accepts her Nobel Prize.

I’m more concerned about her other ‘foibles’, which is a polite way of describing her neuroses. Last week she launched her dinner plate across the table because a meatball ‘touched’ her macaroni. What was I thinking, putting them on the same plate!

Joe on Parkinson’s

(SHATTER) It is four years since my left hand gave me the message. It wasn’t written down, or typed or printed on fancy paper. It was an unconscious, random flicker of my fingers, a twitch rather than a letter. A ghost movement. A shadow made real. Unknown to me then, working in secret, my brain had begun divorcing my mind. It has been a long drawn-out separation with no legal argument over division of assets – who gets the CD collection and Aunt Grace’s antique sideboard?

It began with my left hand and spread to my arm and my leg and my head. My body is now being operated by someone else who looks like me only less familiar.

(SUSPECT) Muhammad Ali has a lot to answer for. When he lit the flame at the Atlanta Olympics there wasn’t a dry eye on the planet.

Why were we crying? Because a great sportsman had been reduced to this – a shuffling, mumbling, twitching cripple. A man who once danced like a butterfly now shook like a blancmange.

We always remember the sportsmen. When the body deserts a scientist like Stephen Hawking we figure that he’ll be able to live in his mind, but a crippled athlete is like a bird with a broken wing. When you soar to the heights the landing is harder.

(BLEED FOR ME) Mr Parkinson will not kill me, but I will die with him unless the race for a cure beats his unrelenting progress. Some people think news like this would change their attitude towards life. They have fantasies of self-transformation, of climbing mountains or jumping out of planes. For some reason when dying becomes a reality (and no longer theoretical) it liberates them.

Not me. You won’t catch me running with the bulls in Pamplona or searching for the source of the Amazon. I’d rather a mundane end than a gloriously brave or stupid one.

Where Joe lives:

(SUSPECT) In real estate terms we live in purgatory. I say this because we haven’t quite reached the leafy nirvana of Primrose Hill; yet we’ve climbed out of graffiti-stained, metal shuttered shit-hole that is the southern end of Camden Town.

The mortgage is huge and the plumbing is dodgy, but Julianne fell in love with the place. I have to admit that I did too. In the summer, if the breeze is blowing in the right direction and the windows are open, we can hear the sound of lions and hyenas at London Zoo. It’s like being on safari without the mini-vans.

 (SHATTER) We live in a village called Wellow, five and a half miles from Bath Spa. It’s one of those quaint, postcard sized clusters of buildings, which barely seem big enough to hold their own history. The village pub, the Fox & Badger, is two hundred years old and has a resident dwarf. How rustic is that?

I don’t know what I expected of Somerset but this will do. And if I sound sentimental, please forgive me. Mr Parkinson is to blame. Some people think sentimentality is an unearned emotion. Not mine. I pay for it every day.

(BLEED FOR ME) Home now is a small two-storey terrace in Station Street, less than half a mile from my old life. My terrace is darker than a cave because the windows are so small and is full of faded oriental rugs, wobbly side tables and old lady furniture. Charlie and Emma have to share a bedroom when they sleep over, but Emma often crawls into my bed with me, forcing me downstairs onto the sofa because her core body temperature is akin to nuclear fusion. I don’t mind the sofa. I can watch late night movies or obscure sports that don’t seem to have any rules.

Joe on Psychology

(SHATTER) ‘Forget everything you’ve been told about psychology. It will not make you a better poker player, nor will it help you pick up girls or understand them any better. I have three at home and they are a complete mystery to me.

‘It is not about dream interpretation, ESP, multiple personalities, mind reading, Rorschack Tests, phobias, recovered memories or repression. And most importantly – it is not about getting in touch with yourself. If that’s your ambition I suggest you buy a copy of Big Jugs magazine and find a quiet corner.’

(BLEED FOR ME) ‘A really effective psychologist is someone who commits. Who goes into the darkness to bring someone out. Years ago I told a friend of mine that a doctor is no good to a patient if he dies of the disease but that wasn’t the right analogy. When a person is drowning, someone has to get wet.’

KNOWN ASSOCIATES

Vincent Ruiz

A former Detective Inspector with the London Metropolitan Police, Ruiz retired in 2006.

Joe on Ruiz 

(BLEED FOR ME) Broad like a bear with a busted nose and booze-stained cheeks, Ruiz has had three marriages and three divorces. World weary and fatalistic, I sometimes think he’s a walking, talking cliché – the heavy-drinking, womanising ex-detective – but he’s more complicated than that. He once arrested me for murder. I once rescued him from himself. Friendships have flourished on less. 

(SHATTER) Ruiz is a former a detective inspector with the London Metropolitan Police. Five years ago he arrested me on suspicion of murder. A former patient of mine had been found stabbed to death beside the Grand Union Canal in London. My name was in her diary. It’s a long story. Water under the bridge is probably not the best metaphor given the circumstances. Let’s call it history.

Ever since then Ruiz has been one of those peripheral characters that drift in and out of my life, adding brightness to the beige. Before he retired, he used to invite himself to dinner, flirt with Julianne and pick my brains about his latest murder investigation. He’d tickle the girls, drink too much wine and spend the night on our sofa.

Julianne’s soft spot for Ruiz is bigger than the man’s liver, which says something about his drinking and her ability to attract strays and mavericks.

Ruiz on Joe

(LOST) Professor Joseph O’Loughlin has arrived to see me. I can see him walking across the hospital car park with his left leg swinging as if bound in a splint. His mouth is moving – smiling, wishing people good morning and making jokes about how he likes his martinis shaken not stirred. Only the Professor could make fun of Parkinson’s disease.

Joe is a clinical psychologist and looks exactly like you’d expect a shrink to look – tall and thin with a tangle of brown hair like some absent-minded academic escaped from a lecture theatre.

Knocking gently on the door, he opens it and smiles awkwardly. He has one of those totally open faces with wet brown eyes like a baby seal just before it gets clubbed.

‘I hear you’re suffering memory problems.’

‘Yeah, who the fuck are you?’

‘Very good. Nice to see you haven’t lost your sense of humour.’

He turns around several times trying to decide where to put his briefcase. Then he takes a notepad and pulls up a chair, sitting with his knees touching the bed. Finally settled, he looks at me and says nothing – as though I’ve asked him to come because there’s something on my mind.

This is what I hate about shrinks. The way they create silences and have you questioning your sanity. This wasn’t my idea. I can remember my name. I know where I live. I know where I put the car keys and parked the car. I’m tickety-boo.

Michael Robotham was an investigative journalist in Britain and Australia before his career as a novelist. SHATTER is in bookstores now, and BLEED FOR ME  will be released in February 2012. Both will be available wherever books or eBooks are sold.

Michael lives in Sydney with his wife and three daughters. Learn more athttp://www.michaelrobotham.com.

Today marks the on-sale date of Mulholland Books’ paperback edition of SHATTER by Michael Robotham–the first time the acclaimed psychological thriller has been published in the format. To celebrate the release, Michael Robotham has written an essay about the origins of series protagonist Joe O’Loughlin that looks back on his debut in SUSPECT and returns in SHATTER and BLEED FOR ME, coming from Mulholland Books in February 2012. Check it out below!

When I began writing my first novel I had no idea it was a psychological thriller. I wasn’t even sure it was a crime novel. I wrote in the first person, using the voice of clinical psychologist, Professor Joseph O’Loughlin, who was perched on the roof of the Royal Marsden Hospital in Chelsea, London, trying to talk to a teenage boy who was threatening to jump.

‘This is some view,’ I say, glancing to my right at a teenager crouched about ten feet away. His name is Malcolm and he’s seventeen today. Tall and thin, with dark eyes that tremble when he looks at me, he has skin as white as polished paper. He is wearing pajamas and a woollen hat to cover his baldness. Chemotherapy is a cruel hairdresser.

There was no hint of a crime in SUSPECT until the second chapter and depending upon which version you read (the US edition is slightly different to the rest of the world) Joe O’Loughlin doesn’t get involved in the investigation until page 65.

When the novel came out, the first question I was asked was: ‘Why crime?’

To be honest, I couldn’t answer it. I had no idea. To start with I didn’t read much crime fiction. My fascination as a reader and a writer has always rested with the characters and their motivations. The plot is important, but only as a vehicle to explore the human condition.

All crime is psychological. When a university graduate in urban preservation flies a passenger plane into a skyscraper killing thousands of people; or when a student barely out of his teens sprays a university campus with bullets; or when a teenage mother give birth in a toilet and leaves the baby in the wastepaper bin, it all comes back to some aspect of human behaviour and interaction. Everything we think we know and understand – the good, the bad and the inexplicable – is produced by four pounds of grey matter between our ears.

Clinical Psychologist Joe O’Loughlin has appeared in all but one of my novels and has narrated three of them (a fourth is coming). Joe isn’t your typical fictional hero, as he admits himself.

I am not handsome in the conventional sense. I am tall and pale with watery brown eyes and when I look at myself naked, I am reminded of a winter animal that sheds its fur in the hotter months and looks out of place until the cold returns. That’s one of the reasons that I don’t wear shorts or T-shirts or flip flops which Australians call thongs. I wonder what they call G-strings?

I gave Joe a brilliant mind, but then threw a cruel twist into the mix – a diagnosis of early onset Parkinson’s Disease, which has turned his life upside down.

Nobody ever dies of Parkinson’s Disease. You die with it. That’s one of Jock’s trite aphorisms. I can just see it on a bumper sticker because it’s only half as ridiculous as ‘Guns don’t kill people, people do.’

I began to realise something was wrong about five months ago. The main thing was the tiredness. Some days it was like walking through mud. I still played tennis twice a week and coached Charlie’s soccer team. During our training games I managed to keep up with a dozen eight-year-olds and picture myself as Zinedine Zidane, the playmaker, dispatching through balls and doing intricate one-twos.

But then I started to find that the ball didn’t go where I intended any more and if I took off suddenly, I tripped over my own feet. Charlie thought I was clowning around. Julianne thought I was getting lazy. I blamed turning forty.

In hindsight I can see the signs were there. My handwriting had become even more cramped and buttonholes became obstacles. Sometimes I had difficulty getting out of a chair and when I walked down stairs I held on to the handrails.

It seems especially cruel to give Joe Parkinson’s, but I have always been fascinated by the idea of someone having a brilliant mind but a crumbling body. Think of Stephen Hawking, the greatest mind of our generation, trapped in a wheelchair and suffering from Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

Joe cannot out-run, out-fight and out-bed his adversaries. He’s not a fictional superman like James Bond, Jason Bourne or Jack Reacher. Instead he has to outsmart his enemies. He has to use his prodigious talent to pick apart their crimes and put a face in the empty frame.

Of all my characters, Joe is probably the most autobiographical in the sense that we’re both the same age. We both have daughters. We have similar views politically and socially. He’s a far braver version of me, but also more tortured.

When I wrote SUSPECT, I never imagined bringing Joe O’Loughlin back. Instead, I chose lesser characters to star in subsequent books. It wasn’t until I came up with the idea for SHATTER that Joe returned to centre stage because the story was so dark and confronting, that I felt it needed someone like Joe to guide readers safely through it and not leave them traumatised. He has such a wonderful sense of humour and sense of humanity that he lightens up the darkest moments.

In my upcoming novel BLEED FOR ME, Joe is back again, this time at the request of my wife, who insisted that I couldn’t leave Joe with is private life in tatters and had to give him a happier ending. (Which I can’t promise. No spoilers here.)

Although Joe is a fictional creation, I have worked with clinical and forensic psychologists who have helped the police investigate violent crimes. Fifteen years ago I spent a lot of time with Paul Britton, the forensic psychologist, who became the inspiration for the brilliant BBC series CRACKER in the early 1990s.

Experts like Britton aren’t called into most murder investigations, because most murders are mundane. (Tragic, of course, but also boring and pointless.) When two men get into a fight in a bar and one hits the other over the head with a barstool, you don’t need a psychologist to tell you what happened.

The police call on psychologists when the crime is beyond their comprehension – either so violent or random or motiveless they have little grasp on where to start looking for the perpetrator.

Britton once described to me the process of examining a crime scene, looking for the psychological clues left behind.

‘People sometimes talk about ‘reading between the lines’ as a way of explaining the abstract processes used in inference and deduction. In my work the analysis has to leave the page and go into the mind of the killer. To know him, I have to be able to see the world through his eyes.

‘This means putting aside my own compassion and moral values. I step away from the vocational impetus of my clinical career and sink fully into the killer’s sense of climactic achievement. At the same time, I see the shock, pain and final terror of his victims.

‘As always, I asked myself four questions: What has happened; how did it happen; who did it happen to, and why? Only when I had answers to these questions could I address the fifth: who is responsible?’

This is what fascinated me – the process of ‘walking through the killer’s mind’. In February 1994, Paul Britton was called to 74 Cromwell Street in Gloucester where police had recovered the remains of three people in the back garden. The house belonged Frederick and Rosemary West and the bodies were believed to include the couple’s eldest daughter Heather Ann West who was last seen alive seven years earlier.

The police struggled to understand what they were dealing with and asked Britton to help. He read the statements and viewed the remains. He walked through the garden and the house and looked at Fred and Rosemary West being interviewed. At this point they were denying all knowledge of how these bodies got into their garden.

Finally the psychologist sat down with the senior investigating officer and listed point by point what the police were dealing with.

‘These are sadistic sexual psychopaths,’ he said. ‘They have a combined depravity – a husband and wife working together, each legitimising the actions of the other. These victims were play things who were tortured and abused.’

Paul revealed how this couple, driven by their corrupt fantasies, had kidnapped, raped and tortured their victims, keeping them alive for as long as possible before burying their bodies close because they lied to fantasise about what they had done.

‘So that’s why he used the back garden?’ sad the senior detective.

‘No,’ said Britton. ‘They used the garden because the house is full.’

That is when the police dug up the basement of 74 Cromwell Street and discovered five more bodies.

I wasn’t interested in how those young women died – and they died in terrible ways – I wanted to know how Paul Britton knew where they were buried. Where did that sort of knowledge come from?

That’s why I write psychological thrillers. I’ll leave it to Joe O’Loughlin to explain. In SHATTER he talks to a group of first-year university students:

‘Forget everything you’ve been told about psychology. It will not make you a better poker player, nor will it help you pick up girls or understand them any better. I have three at home and they are a complete mystery to me.

 ‘It is not about dream interpretation, ESP, multiple personalities, mind-reading, Rorschach Tests, phobias, recovered memories or repression. And most importantly it is not about getting in touch with yourself. If that’s your ambition I suggest you buy a copy of Big Jugs magazine and find a quiet corner…

‘Apiece of human brain the size of a grain of sand contains one hundred thousand neurons, two million axons and one billion synapses all talking to each other. The number of permutations and combinations of activity that are theoretically possible in each of our heads exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe…Welcome to the great unknown.’

Michael Robotham was an investigative journalist in Britain and Australia before his career as a novelist. SHATTER is in bookstores now, and BLEED FOR ME  will be released in February 2012. Both will be available wherever books or eBooks are sold.

Michael lives in Sydney with his wife and three daughters. Learn more at http://www.michaelrobotham.com.

Oscar nominations are out! Congrats to Gary Oldman for his first Oscar nomination for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy–but where’s Ryan Gosling and Albert Brooks for Drive? And where’s either film (or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) in the Best Picture category?

Did you know that Contraband, the #1 movie in America earlier this month, is adapted from an Icelandic film penned by Gold Dagger Award-winner Arnaldur Indridason (Jar City, Outrage)?

You’ve probably heard by now about Miles Morales, the biracial teenager whose taken over Peter Parker’s mantle in the Brian Michael Bendis-penned Ultimate Spiderman late last year. Life and Times has a great interview with Marvel Editor-in-Chief Alex Alonso about the characters’ creation and reception.

Joe Lansdale’s EDGE OF DARK WATER has continued to receive high marks from Publishers Weekly–in addition to the earlier-mentioned starred review, EDGE OF DARK WATER has been chosen as an Editor’s Pick of PW roundup of Spring 2012 releases.
The bargain-priced publication of George Pelecanos’s WHAT IT WAS is making the rounds–check out pieces in the Wall Street Journal, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Media Bistro.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune offered up a review of Michael Robotham’s THE WRECKAGE calling it “a pulse-pounding read perfect for these cold nights.”

And a terrific review for THE WHISPERER by Donato Carrisi ran in Shelf Awareness for Readers yesterday–not to mention the great review from Luan Gaines at Curled Up with a Good Book!

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

Wipers thrash and a siren wails. From inside the car it sounds strangely muted and I keep looking over my shoulder expecting to see an approaching police car. It takes me a moment to realise that the siren is coming from somewhere closer, beneath the bonnet.

Masonry towers appear on the skyline. It is Brunel’s masterpiece, the Clifton Suspension Bridge, an engineering marvel from the age of steam.Taillights blaze. Traffic is stretched back more than mile on the approach. Sticking to the apron of the road, we sweep past the stationary cars and pull up at a roadblock where police in fluorescent vests patrol onlookers and unhappy motorists.

The constable opens my door and holds an umbrella above my head. A sheet of rain drives sideways and almost rips it from his hands. Ahead of me the bridge appears deserted. The masonry towers support massive sweeping interlinking cables that curve gracefully to the vehicle deck and rise againto the opposite side of the river.

One of the attributes of bridges is that they offer the possibility that someone may start to cross but never reach the other side. For that person the bridge is virtual; an open window that they can keep passing or climb through.

The Clifton Suspension Bridge is a landmark, a tourist attraction and a one-drop shop for suicides.has always been popular with jumpers. Well-used, oft-chosen, perhaps “popular isn’t the best choice of word.” Some people say it is actually haunted by past suicides; eerie shadows have been seen drifting across the vehicle deck.

There are no shadows today. And the only ghost on the bridge is flesh and blood. A woman, naked, standing outside the safety fence, with her back pressed to the metal lattice and wire strands. The heels of her red shoes are balancing on the edge.

Like a figure from a surrealist painting, her nakedness isn’t particularly shocking or even out of place. Standing upright, with a rigid grace, she stares at the water with the demeanour of someone who has detached herself from the world.

The officer in charge introduces himself. He’s in uniform: Sergeant Abernathy. I don’t catch his first name. A junior officer holds an umbrella over his head. Water streams off the dark nylon dome, falling on my shoes.

‘What do you need?’ asks Abernathy.

‘A name.’

‘We don’t have one. She won’t talk to us.’

‘Has she said anything at all?’

‘No.’

‘She could be in shock.Where are her clothes?’

‘We haven’t found them.’

I glance along the pedestrian walkway, which is enclosed by a fence topped with five strands of wire, making it difficult for anyone to climb over. The rain is so heavy I can barely see the far side of the bridge.

‘How long has she been out there?’

‘Best part of an hour.’

‘Have you found a car?’

‘We’re still looking.’

She most likely approached from the eastern side which is heavily wooded. Even if she stripped on the walkway dozens of drivers must have seen her. Why didn’t anyone stop her?

A large woman with short cropped hair, dyed black, interrupts the meeting. Her shoulders are rounded and her hands bunch in the pockets of a rain jacket hanging down to her knees. She’s huge. Square. And she’s wearing men’s shoes.

Abernathy stiffens. ‘What are you doing here, Ma’am?’

‘Just trying to get home, Sergeant. And don’t call me, Ma’am. I’m not the bloody Queen.’

She glances at the TV crews and press photographers who have gathered on a grassy ridge, setting up tripods and lights. Finally she turns to me.

‘What are you shaking for, precious? I’m not that scary.’

‘I’m sorry. I have Parkinson’s Disease.’

‘Tough break. Does that mean you get a sticker?’

‘A sticker?’

‘Disabled parking. Let’s you park almost anywhere. It’s almost as good as being a detective only we get to shoot people and drive fast.’

She’s obviously a more senior police officer than Abernathy.

She looks toward the bridge. ‘You’ll be fine, Doc, don’t be nervous.’

‘I’m a professor, not a doctor.’

‘Shame. You could be like Doctor Who and I could be your female sidekick. Tell me something, how do you think the Daleks managed to conquer so much of the universe when they couldn’t even climb stairs?”

‘I guess it’s one of life’s great mysteries.’

‘I got loads of them.”

A two-way radio is being threaded beneath my jacket and a reflective harness loops over my shoulders and clips at the front. The woman detective lights a cigarette, exhaling slowly. She pinches a strand of tobacco from the tip of her tongue. Although not in charge, she’s so naturally dominant that the uniformed officers seem more ready to react to her every word.

‘You want me to go with you?’ she asks.

‘I’ll be OK.’

She nods. ‘Tell skinny Minnie I’ll buy her a low fat muffin if she steps onto our side of the fence.’

‘I’ll do that.’

Temporary barricades have blocked off both approaches to the bridge, which is deserted except for an ambulance and waiting paramedics. Motorists and spectators have gathered beneath umbrellas and coats. Some have scrambled up a grassy bank to get a better vantage point.

Rain bounces off the tarmac, exploding in miniature mushroom clouds before coursing through gutters and pouring off the edges of the bridge in a curtain of water.

The masonry towers support massive sweeping cables that swoop down to the deck and up again. Suspended from it are dozens of vertical cables thicker than my forearms.

As I approach along the walkway, I can see the woman ahead of me.

My hands are out of my pockets. My left arm refuses to swing. It does that sometimes – fails to get with the plan.

I can see the woman ahead of me. From a distance her skin had looked flawless, but now I notice that her thighs are criss-crossed with scratches and streaked with mud. Her pubic hair is a dark triangle: darker than her hair, which is woven into a black plait and falls down the nape of her neck.

There is something else – letters written on her stomach. A word. I can see it when she turns toward me.

SLUT.

Why the self-abuse? Why naked? Possibilities fall like dominos in my head, cascading from one tile to the next. This is public humiliation.

Perhaps she had an affair and lost someone she loves. She wants to punish herself to prove she’s sorry. Or it could be a threat – the ultimate game of brinkmanship – ‘leave me and I’ll kill myself.’

No, this is too extreme. Too dangerous. Teenagers sometimes threaten self-harm in failing relationships. It’s a sign of emotional immaturity. This woman is in her forties with fleshy thighs and cellulite forming faint depressions on her buttocks and hips. I notice a scar. A caesarean. She’s a mother.

I am close to her now. A matter of feet and inches.

Her buttocks and back are pressed hard against the fence. Her left arm is wrapped around an upper strand of wire. The other fist is holding a mobile phone against her ear.

‘Hello. My name is Joe. What’s yours?’

She doesn’t answer. Buffeted by a gust of wind, she seems to lose her balance and rock forwards. The wire is cutting into the crook of her arm. She pulls herself back.

Her lips are moving. She’s talking to someone on the phone. I need her attention.

‘Just tell me your name. That’s not so hard. You can call me Joe and I’ll call you…’

Wind pushes hair over her right eye. Only her left is visible.

A gnawing uncertainty expands in my stomach. Why the high heels? Has she been to a nightclub? It’s too late in the day. Is she drunk? Drugged? Ecstasy can cause psychosis. LSD. Ice, perhaps.

I catch snippets of her conversation.

- ‘No. No. Please. No.’

‘Who’s on the phone?’ I ask.

- ‘I will. I promise. I’ve done everything. Please don’t ask me…’

‘Listen to me. You won’t want to do this.’

I glance down. More than two hundred feet below a fat-bellied boat nudges against the current, held by its engines. The swollen river claws at the gorse and hawthorn on the lower banks. A confetti of rubbish swirls on the surface: books, branches, chamber pots and plastic bottles.

‘You must be cold. I have a blanket.’

Again she doesn’t answer. I need her to acknowledge me. A nod of the head or a single word affirmation is enough. I need to know that she’s listening.

‘Perhaps I could try to put it around your shoulders – just to keep you warm.’

Her head snaps up and she sways forward as if ready to let go. I pause in mid-stride.

‘I’ll stay just here. I won’t come any closer. Just tell me your name.’

She raises her face to the sky, blinking into the rain like a prisoner standing in an exercise yard, enjoying a brief moment of freedom.

‘Whatever’s wrong. Whatever has happened to you or has upset you, we can talk about it. I’m not taking the choice away from you. I just want to understand why.’

Her toes are dropping and she has to force herself up onto her heels to keep her balance. Her calves must be in agony. The lactic acid is building in her muscles.

‘I have seen people jump,’ I tell her. You shouldn’t think it is a painless way of dying. I’ll I tell you what happens. It will take you less than three seconds to reach the water.

By then you will be traveling at about seventy-five miles per hour Your ribs will break and the jagged edges will puncture your internal organs. Sometimes the heart is compressed by the impact and tears away from the aorta so that your chest will fill with blood.’

Her eyes are fixed on mine. I know she’s listening.

‘Your arms and legs will survive intact but the cervical disks in your neck or the lumbar disks in your spine will most likely rupture. It will not be pretty. It will not be painless. Someone will have to pick you up. Someone will have to identify your body. Someone will be left behind.’

High in the air comes a booming sound. Rolling thunder. The air vibrates and the earth seems to tremble in sympathy or fear. Something is coming.

My eyes return to her.

‘You don’t understand,’ she whispers to me, lowering the phone. For the briefest of moments it dangles at the end of her fingers, as if trying to cling on to her and then tumbles away, disappearing into the void.

The air darkens and a half formed image comes to mind – a gapemouthed melting figure screaming in despair. Her buttocks are no longer pressing against the metal. Her arm is no longer wrapped around the wire.

She doesn’t fight gravity. Arms and legs do not flail or clutch at the air. She’s gone. Silently, dropping from view.

Everything seems to stop, as if the world has missed a heartbeat or trapped in between the pulsations. Then everything begins moving again. Paramedics and police officers are dashing past me. People are screaming and crying. I turn away and walk back toward the barricades, wondering if this isn’t part of a dream.

They are gazing at where she fell. Asking the same question. Why didn’t I save her? Their eyes diminish me. I can’t look at them.

My left leg locks and I fall onto my hands and knees, staring into a black puddle. I pick myself up. The ground slides under my feet and I fall again. I wipe the sting from my eyes. Up again, I push through the crowd, ducking beneath a barricade.

Stumbling along the side of the road, I splash through a shallow drain, swatting away raindrops. Denuded trees reach across the sky, leaning toward me accusingly. Ditches gurgle and foam. The line of vehicles is an unmoving stream. I hear motorists talking to each other. One of them yells to me.

‘Did she jump? What happened? When are they going to open the road?’

I keep walking, my gaze fixed furiously ahead, my left arm no longer swinging. Blood hums in my ears. Perhaps it was my face that made her do it. The Parkinson’s Mask, like cooling bronze. Did she see something or not see something?

Lurching toward the gutter, I lean over the safety rail and vomit until my stomach is empty.

Michael Robotham has been an investigative journalist in Britain, Australia and the US. One of world’s most acclaimed authors of thriller fiction, he lives in Sydney with his wife and three daughters.

WHAT IT WAS is available as an ebook for only 99 cents for one month only. A trade paperback edition is also available at $9.99, as well as a knockout of a limited edition hardcover signed by George.

I had a few days off between Christmas and New Year’s and decided to check out some of the notorious Italian crime movies from the 70’s that I’ve been reading about for so long.  These are exploitation films in the sense that they contain explicit violence and gratuitous skin shots, but like their American blaxploitation counterparts they’re not without merit.  Some folks watch these kinds of pictures to laugh at them and the era in which they were produced but I’ve never bought into that brand of ironic detachment.  In fact, I’ve always felt simpatico with filmmakers who work with relatively low budgets, do their jobs with sincerity, and are trying.  So take the suggestions below with the following caveat: these are not great films or important films, but they do have their moments.  At the very least they provided me with more signposts on my continuing film education journey.  All were available for streaming on Netflix.

Caliber 9 (1972), directed by Fernando Di Leo

Gaston Moschin plays Ugo, an ex-con who gets entangled with missing money and the Mob in the initial entry of Di Leo’s infamous Mafia trilogy.  Mario Adorf is the heavy, and beautiful Barbara Bouchet is the nominal love interest.  The first five minutes of Caliber 9 are a master class in Italian crime filmmaking, set to the score of Luis Bacalov (Django).  Moschin is a cool presence, a cross between Jason Stathem and, when he’s behind the wheel of his car, Steve McQueen.  Shades of American noir, with a nice take on criminal loyalties and an ending as fatalistic as it gets.

The Italian Connection (1972), directed by Fernando Di Leo

Luca Canali, a Milano pimp (Mario Adorf) is set up to take the fall on a lost heroin shipment and marked for death by two New York hitmen (skull-faced Henry Silva and rock-hard Woody Strode).  Violence and nudity ensue in this nasty, efficient piece of work.  Adorf is a primitive force as he goes from passive pussy-pusher to revenge machine.  The foot-and-car chase that anchors the film is worth the price of the ticket and predates Harry Callahan’s ride on the hood of the car in Magnum Force.  No one is safe in this film: mothers, children, not even kitty cats.  With Adolfo Celi (Thunderball) and Cyril Cusack.  Music by Armondo Trovajoli.  Alternate titles: Manhunt and, to entice American blaxploitation audiences into theaters, Black Kingpin.

The Boss (1973), directed by Fernando Di Leo.

The last entry in the Di Leo trilogy is a straightforward Mafia story, with button man Henry Silva involved with two warring families.  Reportedly this is a fairly accurate portrait of the Sicilian mob in the 70s.  The players here are not romanticized, and are portrayed as animalistic and amoral.  Di Leo pays tribute to The Godfather with a slaughter montage that rivals the body count of Coppola’s masterpiece.  The Boss opens with a grenade launcher assault in a movie theatre, a scene which Tarentino “referenced” in Inglorious Bastards.  Of the trilogy, this is my least favorite, but it has its champions, and its pleasures.  Music by Bacalov.  Alternate title: Wipeout!

And…

Street Law (1974), directed by Enzo Castelarri

Legendary Italian crime film cribbed from the then-popular Death Wish.  Despite its similarities to the Charles Bronson/Michael Winner smash, Street Law delivers its own brand of goods.  Franco Nero plays Carlo, the beaten and abducted bystander of a bank robbery who goes after the perpetrators when the police ignore his pleas.  After the nifty, propulsive opening, the film slow-burns to the finale, an inventive shootout in an airplane hanger.  Castellari (director of the bizarre Spaghetti Western, Keoma) was a Peckinpah freak, so there is plenty of slo-mo action and exploding squibs; he lacked Bloody Sam’s talent in the editing room, but the set pieces are nevertheless effective.  With future Bond girl Barbara Bach in the thankless role of Carlo’s girlfriend/punching bag.  This one is a little more political than the Di Leo films, and also more polished, with top notch production values and cinematography.  Features a surprisingly effective rock score by brothers Guido and Maurizio De Angelis.

George Pelecanos is the author of several bestselling novels set in and around Washington D.C. He is also an independent-film producer, an essayist, the recipient of numerous international writing awards, and a producer of the HBO hit series The Wire. He currently writes for the Emmy-nominated writer of the HBO series Treme.

His newest novel WHAT IT WAS is on sale today. Check out clips of George discussing WHAT IT WAS in DC spots that figure prominently in the novel after the jump: