Now in Stock: Hard Case Crime

Regular customers have been asking us to carry Hard Case Crime's excellent line-up of vintage repackaged noir and new hard-boiled titles for some time now, and our initial order just arrived, including books by Lawrence Block, David Goodis, Donald Westlake, and the almost criminally underrated Charles Williams. Also coming soon: books by Fredric Brown, Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, and even more David Goodis.

(Illustrated: Charles Williams' A Touch of Death, one of the finest noir novels ever written)

Buying Update, April 2009

Unlike many other bookstores in the Pacific Northwest, we are still actively buying books for cash.

We are particularly interested in the following:

• Recent mass market science fiction, fantasy, and mystery paperbacks (cover price $9.99+ CDN)

• Literary classics in either mass market paperback or trade paperback (examples: Orwell, Dostoevsky, Huxley, Woolf, Austen, Faulkner)

• Trade paperback "literary" fiction, (examples: Roberto Bolano, Kurt Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace, Elizabeth Gilbert, Elizabeth Hay)

• Trade paperback "popular" nonfiction (examples: Jerad Diamond, David Quammen, Steven Pinker)

• Classic children's lit (examples: Richard Scarry, Roald Dahl, later J.K. Rowling)

• Nicely illustrated cookbooks

• Philosophy and cultural studies (examples: Agamben, Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault, Arendt, Zizek)

• Graphic novels

• Any author/title that we carry new.

We consider books for purchase at both stores every day up until 5pm. There's no need to phone unless you're bringing 100+ boxes of books; simply show up and we'll be pleased to go through what you have. Please note that we do not buy textbooks, computer books, ex-library books, trashed or damaged books, series romance, and very common mass-market paperbacks (examples: Mary Higgins Clark, Danielle Steel, John Grisham).

Build Your Own Letterpress!

Details here. Assistance and general aesthetic solidarity available up Main Street from our friends at The Regional Assembly of Text.

Brand-new edition of Easton and Hardy's The Ethical Slut, #1 special-ordered book of all time up at Main Street. Published by Greenery Press, distributors of many fine sex-positive titles, including Jay Wiseman's excellent SM 101 and the Erotic Bondage Handbook.

"The Ethical Slut discusses how to live an active life with multiple concurrent sexual relationships in a fair and honest way. Discussion topics include how to deal with the practical difficulties and opportunities in finding and keeping partners, maintaining relationships with others, and strategies for personal growth."

(Entertaining OK Cupid.com test based on the book here)

Ian Rankin on Comics

Via staff comics guy James N:

Ian Rankin, best-selling author of the Inspector Rebus series, will have his first graphic novel released this summer. It's kicking off DC Comics/Vertigo's new crime imprint and stars London's occult detective, John Constantine.

Comics website Newsarama featured a two-part interview with Rankin about Dark Entries, his love of comics, and his approach to writing for a new medium.

Part One; Part Two

NRAMA: See, I was going to ask if you were going to have Constantine going to Edinburgh...

IR: Sadly, no. It’s mostly set in a haunted house in England. So it’s his territory – rather than take him to mine, I’ve gone to his territory. And he’s got a gig as a psychic investigator. It’s sort of like of those reality game shows where people are locked up together, but there’s a haunting going on, and people are starting to disappear, which is great for the ratings. But Constantine is brought in to see if he can solve the mystery.
So I structured it almost like Ten Little Indians, you know, the Agatha Christie mystery, where people are disappearing one at a time. It’s sort of tongue-in-cheek.

NRAMA: So this won’t have a supernatural element...?

IR: Oh, it will. Big time.

NRAMA: I was wondering about that, because of the nature of the crime line.

IR: Oh, yeah. But I had to be true to Constantine’s universe, and he’s always battling demons. So there were always going to be demons in the story. It wouldn’t just be a haunted house scenario; it would grow and grow until we had the demons of Hell involved. Which is something I don’t normally get to write about, so it was quite fun.

But what appeals to me is that he’s like a private eye. He’s got the coat, and he’s shambling around with the bottle of Scotch on the table when he goes home at night, and he takes these cases where he just gets sucked in. There’s a mystery he’s trying to unfold, and he operates almost like the Sam Spade character from classic American crime fiction, only with a horror twist, a supernatural twist.

Plus, he doesn’t have superpowers. He can’t fly. And he’s not a billionaire, so he can’t afford to build a flying ship or a rubberized suit that’ll take bullets and things. He’s only got his own wits that he lives by. He’s as human as you and I. Well, there’s the question as to whether he has some demon blood running through him, but that’s making this more difficult to discuss. (laughs)

And he’s fallible. He’s very fallible. People get killed around him, and it’s his fault sometimes. He screws up. And that’s what I like about him.

Rankin isn't the first best-selling novelist to write for DC Comics:

• Fellow Scot Denise Mina wrote two Hellblazer graphic novels (Empathy is the Enemy and The Red Right Hand), and helped Rankin adapt his scripts for his artist.
  
• Greg Rucka, author of the Atticus Kodiak thrillers, has written many excellent Batman stories and gave us a worm's eye view of Gotham City through its corrupt police department in Gotham Central.
  
• Brad Meltzer wrote a murder mystery that drew attention from all of DC's superhumans in Identity Crisis as well as launched the latest version of the Justice League of America.
• Even Jodi Picoult has written a Wonder Woman graphic novel.
• Paul DiFillipo, Mike Carey, Peter David, Douglas Rushkoff, and of course, Neil Gaiman are some of the other authors who have graced comics with their literary genius.

Dark Entries will be available from us in August, and the other graphic novels mentioned can be special ordered today.

Kem Nunn's The Dogs of Winter -- excellent surf-noir novel set on California's Lost Coast, now in stock at Main Street.

"The Dogs of Winter is a book of big, dark moods. It has about it an electric gloom, part of which has to do with crimes and obsessions, and part with the vivid portraits of the decaying reservations and lumber towns and the cold, cloudy, jagged coastal landscape of Northern California. But most of which has to do with the hard specificity and somber music of Nunn's prose."

"Amazon's Gonna Put You Out of Business!"

...or not.

"[H]ow does the publishing industry fund the creation, editing, design, production, marketing, e-warehousing, and sales of ebooks, if the income isn’t there? How do ebooks cover the huge advances needed to buy books if we cannot generate the cash, especially at their extremely low, discounted prices, [to] cover the advances that an entire industry has come to require? The answer is that ebooks, alone, cannot."