Associated Press

John Grisham has no desire to ever run for office again.

Though his name pops up every now and then on ballots in Virginia and Mississippi, the mega-selling author, former lawyer and politician emphatically vetoes the idea of a return to public service.

“I wouldn’t take a seat in the U.S. Senate if it was given to me and guaranteed for 20 years with no opposition,” says Grisham, who served as a Democratic representative in the Mississippi state House of Representatives from 1983 to 1990.

Getting fired up, he declares, “Look, I’ve got the easiest life in the world. I don’t want to go to Washington and sit through subcommittee hearings on Medicare. How much fun is that? No.”

Besides, he’s having too much fun writing books. Grisham, who turns 54 on Sunday and has started an official Facebook page to reach out to fans, had an especially good time working on his new legal thriller, The Associate.

Grisham’s 22nd book tells the plight of a bright young attorney who is in over his head at an amoral, high-powered corporate law firm. Shades of “The Firm” , the 1991 best seller-turned-blockbuster movie that established him as the Stephen King of his genre. This time, the drama begins when the handsome lawyer-hero, Kyle, gets blackmailed into spying on his employer after some shady agents discover an ugly secret from his past.

“It really reminded me of `The Firm.’ … It’s an escape. It’s popular fiction,” Grisham says.

With “The Associate,” Grisham tries to recreate the suspense of older hits such as “The Firm,” “The Pelican Brief” and “The Client,” without wrapping his plot around a weighty issue or social injustice. After writing books that veered into sports and coming of age, and a nonfiction account of a rape-murder, he returned to the familiar genre. The demands of fans for vintage Grisham began nagging at him.

“Many times people say things like, `I really like your books but I love your early stuff,’” he says. “And it took me a while to realize that we all tend to think that way — whether it’s about authors or especially musicians, bands we liked when we were younger or we discovered years ago.”

Grisham, eager to satisfy his readers and reclaim some of his 1990s mojo, set out to pen a page turner that would deliver escapist thrills and chills. He couldn’t resist using Manhattan as a backdrop for the action involving corporate espionage and other wicked activity.
“The biggest law firms are here. The most noted, the most prestigious — it’s a long list,” he says in his deep drawl, projecting an air of smooth confidence during an interview at the New York office of publisher Doubleday, a division of Random House.

Most intriguing to Grisham: “The legend and the lore of how (corporate law firms on Wall Street) treat associates. … It was just irresistible. Plus, I love New York.”

The author, who splits his time between his farmhouse in Mississippi and a plantation near Charlottesville, Va., hired a young lawyer to be his research assistant and gather off-the-record stories from associates in New York firms. He also read blogs by disgruntled lawyers painting brutal portraits of the workplace.

“This is not cheap factory labor — these are Ivy League kids,” he says, “and they’re just getting chewed up and treated like (they’re) disposable.”

Doubleday released “The Associate” last week and ordered up 2.8 million copies of the book, already topping best-seller lists.

The publishing world needs superstars like Grisham, J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer to write popular fiction that sells books, says Grisham’s longtime agent, David Gernert.

Grisham, who generally ignores critics’ reviews, loves getting feedback from fans.

“He certainly enjoys going out and meeting or hearing from his readers — and I think, in a slightly perverse way, he even enjoys getting the letters from readers who say, `I found a mistake on page 127,’” Gernert says of the celebrity author. “There’s kind of a connection between John and his readers.”

Paramount Pictures has already purchased the movie rights and cast 22-year-old Shia LaBeouf in the leading role.

“It’s good for the career, good for the book business — very excited about it,” says Grisham, whose books have been turned into movies starring Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington, Matt Damon and Samuel L. Jackson.

Another deal that excites him: Hillary Clinton’s new gig as Secretary of State. Grisham and his wife were big supporters of Clinton during the past presidential campaign and were disappointed when she lost the Democratic primary to Barack Obama.

If Clinton were in the White House, Grisham joked they’d “still be at the Inauguration.”
As for President Obama, Grisham says, “He’s very smart, he’s shrewd. He has good people around him. And he wants to be a great leader and a great president. And I think he’s up to it.”

Grisham thinks Obama’s hope-soaked honeymoon will last a long time. But the political junkie wonders why anyone would want to be president.

Grisham, who has sold 235 million books worldwide, likes his job better.

USA WEEKEND
By Brian Truitt

(King) said he doesn’t know how much of an influence he had on Meyer, but he does know that Rowling read his stuff when she was younger. “I think that has some kind of formative influence the same way reading Richard Matheson had an influence on me,” King explains.

“People always say to me, ‘Well, what about H.P. Lovecraft?’ And the thing was, you read Lovecraft when you were a kid but I never felt that he was speaking my language. It was chillier than my heart was, and when Matheson started to write about ordinary people and stuff, that was something that I wanted to do. I said, ‘This is the way to do it. He’s showing the way.’ I think that I serve that purpose for some writers, and that’s a good thing. Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”

But then King recalls that when his mom was alive, she read all the Erle Stanley Gardner books, the Perry Mason mysteries, obsessively when he was growing up. “He was a terrible writer, too, but he was very successful,” King says. “Somebody who’s a terrific writer who’s been very, very successful is Jodi Picoult. You’ve got Dean Koontz, who can write like hell. And then sometimes he’s just awful. It varies. James Patterson is a terrible writer but he’s very very successful. People are attracted by the stories, by the pace and in the case of Stephenie Meyer, it’s very clear that she’s writing to a whole generation of girls and opening up kind of a safe joining of love and sex in those books. It’s exciting and it’s thrilling and it’s not particularly threatening because they’re not overtly sexual. A lot of the physical side of it is conveyed in things like the vampire will touch her forearm or run a hand over skin, and she just flushes all hot and cold. And for girls, that’s shorthand for all the feelings that they’re not ready to deal with yet.”

Link: High-level Notes After Completing First Draft

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(Reuters) – U.S. author John Updike, a leading writer of his generation who chronicled the drama of American suburban life with searing wit, died on Tuesday, his publisher said.

“It is with great sadness that I report that John Updike died this morning at the age of 76, after a battle with lung cancer. He was one of our greatest writers, and he will be sorely missed,” said Nicholas Latimer of Alfred A. Knopf.

Updike was best-known internationally for his series of four novels and a novella about the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom through the latter decades of the 20th century and for the novel The Witches of Eastwick.

Twice a winner of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize, Updike was also a poet and short-story writer and essayist.

He lived in Beverly Farms, Mass.

(Reporting by Michelle Nichols, Editing by Frances Kerry)

This is an interview John Updike did with Donald Murray – a locally reknown professor of journalism at the University of New Hampshire. Donald passed away in 2006.

 *** The New York Times has a very good and extensive write up on Mr. Updike.

Eight years ago, Higgins, 79, was diagnosed with essential tremor syndrome, a progressive neurological disease. It made him shake so much that two years ago he found he could not even pick up a pen and was going to give up writing.

Then while visiting a friend, he suffered a seizure, fell and hit his head. He ended up in the hospital as a result — and overnight his tremors disappeared, which allowed him to write again.

“In a way it is a bit like Lazarus. It has been a blessing late in life — this unprecedented cure. People have got in touch with me who have got this crippling thing to say what can they do. I can’t tell them what to do. I was just lucky,” he said.

Higgins 1975 breakthrough novel The Eagle Has Landed was made into a blockbuster movie establishing him as an international best-selling author.

Higgins did a stint as a soldier in the British army and then a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. Besides using the Higgins pseudonym, he also wrote novels under the names James Graham, Martin Fallon and Hugh Marlowe.

His latest novel, A Darker Place, released this month, is his 16th featuring Irish hero Sean Dillon.

In a recent interview Higgins spoke about his career:

Q: Did you think “The Eagle Has Landed” would be your turning point?
A: “At the time I was writing for Collins Publishers and it was a good thing when they took me up. But when I wrote “Eagle” the director who handled me rang me up and said what is this book? He said it sounded like a bird book. I gave him the pitch … the book was about German paratroopers dropping in to grab Winston Churchill.

He said that was the worst idea he had ever heard in his life and my readers would hate me as I was not giving them any heroes. Anyway the book was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston who realized they had something special on their hands and it came out in America to be a sensation.”

Q: How did that changes things for you?
A: “It was rather Harry Potter-ish. Obviously no one will get to that level that (J.K. Rowling) did. But suddenly you were known to everybody and everyone wanted to know you and copy you.”

Q: Why have you used so many pen names?
A: “I used all the other names as I was writing books more as a hobby when I was an academic than for the money. I discovered I could write three books in a year but needed a different name on each otherwise the publishers would not use that many in a year.”

Q: How did you settle on Jack Higgins?
A: “My mother was a Higgins from Northern Ireland. I was born in England, she left my father when I was a few months old, a marriage breakdown, and she decided to get out and took me back to Belfast to her extended family, the Higgins family. Jack Higgins was a great uncle of mine. When I was a child if I was ever at his house he opened a little drawer under the stairs as he put his coat on and there would be three or four handguns and he’d put on in his pocket. He was a militant Orangeman.”

Q: What is your proudest achievement?
A: “People are always going on about the OBE’s and honors that Britain hands out but I’ve never had anything like that…there is a famous program in England called Desert Island Discs and people always said it was only a few thousand people who have been asked to do that program and I have been blessed by appearing on it twice.”

In the Shadow of the Master (William Morrow, 416 pages, $24.95), edited by Michael Connelly: The beating of the telltale heart still echoes beneath the floorboards. The cask of amontillado still eludes the wretched Fortunato. The raven still croaks, “Nevermore.”

No matter how many times you read them, Edgar Allan Poe’s classic tales never seem to lose their macabre magic.

In the Shadow of the Master was edited by Michael Connelly and includes vignettes by mystery authors from Sue Grafton to Stephen King.

Their essays provide a range of insightful observations. Some authors reminisce about their favorite Poe tales, while others recall their first exposure to his stories. Still others have come back to Poe’s works after many years and describe how their reactions have evolved as they’ve grown older.

Most of the guest essays sparkle. Each is about two to five pages, a quick read, and each resonates with an unmistakable passion for Poe.

One author, Lisa Scottoline, likens high-school exposure to Poe to broccoli for teenagers — as something forced upon kids because it’s good for them. The lesson she learned after Poe’s William Wilson inspired her own evil-twin story. Eat your vegetables.

A particularly stirring vignette by Laura Lippman traces the legend of the Poe Toaster. He or she is the mysterious figure who celebrates Poe’s birthday every year by stealthily leaving three red roses and half a bottle of cognac on his grave in downtown Baltimore.

Lippman once kept watch at the grave and finally caught a glimpse of the figure. But she refuses to describe the elusive fan, respecting the person’s mystery the same way that person honors the king of mysteries.

All Poe’s classics are here: The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Raven.

So are a number of other works, lesser-known but still distinctively Poe. A Descent Into the Maelstrom, The Masque of the Red Death and Ligeia may not have the same name recognition as his more famous stories, but they are no less gripping.

A number of the vignettes speak of an experience that certainly rings true for this reviewer. Poe was required reading in our sixth-grade class. When we were that young, his formidable vocabulary made some of his stories a little too complex to fully appreciate.

But rereading the tales as an adult brings a fresh sense of admiration. Few authors can match his disturbing detail, few can create such disconcerting worlds of madness.

That’s why the Mystery Writers of America named its annual award the Edgar Award (this years nominees).

The only thing that separates In the Shadow of the Master from any other Poe anthology is the 20 vignettes, most of which are worthy additions. Their collective effect is to create a sense of camaraderie, as though a group of friends has gathered in communal respect of Poe’s genius.

If you just want to read Poe, any anthology will do.

But readers who have loved Poe since they first explored his works will feel a special appreciation for this volume.

SAN FRANCISCO DE PAULA, Cuba (Reuters) – Cuba on Monday made the first of thousands of digitized documents, photographs and books that belonged to writer Ernest Hemingway available to scholars after the items languished for decades in the basement of his home outside of Havana.

Most of the papers have never been published and will give new insight into the 21 years Hemingway spent at Finca Vigia in San Francisco de Paula where he wrote some of his greatest works, said Ada Rosa Alfonso Rosales, director of Museo Ernest Hemingway.

Scholars “will be able to study important documents that shed light on the Cuban period of Hemingway, which was very important and not well known by his biographers,” she said.

The material includes more than 2,000 documents ranging from manuscripts of some of his works to letters to store receipts, 3,500 photographs and 9,000 books, some 2,000 of which Hemingway was known to have read because he made notes in the margins, she said.

The documents included coded accounts by Hemingway of his exploits searching for German submarines off Cuba’s coast during World War Two and letters about his love affair with Italian Countess Adriana Ivancich, believed to be the model for the heroine in his 1950 novel “Across the River and Into the Trees,” Alfonso said.

So far, about half of the 2,000 documents have been preserved and digitized and are now available for perusal by scholars who make formal application to see them.

For now, they will have to go to Finca Vigia, or Lookout Farm, to see the archive, but later this month the documents will also be available at the Hemingway Collection in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, Alfonso said.

The archive is not available on the Internet, but likely will be someday, she said.

The project is part of a joint effort by the Cuban National Cultural Heritage Council and the U.S. Social Science Research Councilworking together under a 2002 agreement to preserve the archives that were stored in Hemingway’s basement.

Decades exposed to humidity, insects and heat took a toll on many of the documents, which Cuban conservationists have painstakingly restored, then scanned into computers.

Hemingway moved to Finca Vigia in 1939, the year before For Whom the Bell Tolls was published, and wrote The Old Man and the Sea, A Moveable Feast and Islands in the Stream while there, Alfonso said.

He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

In July 1960, he returned to the United States and a year later, on July 3, 1961 at the age of 61, he committed suicide in Idaho.

From the New York Times

By Jennifer Lee

Donald E. Westlake, a prolific, award-winning mystery novelist who pounded out more than 100 books and 5 screenplays on manual typewriters during a career of nearly 50 years, died on Wednesday night. He was 75.

Mr. Westlake collapsed as he was headed to New Year’s Eve dinner while on vacation in Mexico, said his wife, Abigail Westlake.

The cause was a heart attack, she said.

Mr. Westlake, considered one of the most successful and versatile mystery writers in the United States, received an Academy Award nomination for a screenplay, three Edgar Awards and the title of Grand Master from the Mystery Writers of America in 1993.

Since his first novel, The Mercenaries, was published by Random House in 1960, Mr. Westlake had written under his own name and several pseudonyms, including Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, Samuel Holt and Edwin West. Despite the diversity of pen names, most of his books shared one feature: They were set in New York City, where he was born.

Mr. Westlake used different names in part to combat skepticism over his rapid rate of writing books, sometimes as many as four a year, his friends said.

“In the beginning, people didn’t want to publish more than one book a year by the same author,” said Susan Richman, his publicist at Grand Central Publishing.

Later in his career, Mr. Westlake limited himself to two pen names, each generally focusing on one primary character: He used his own name to write about an unintentionally comical criminal named John Dortmunder, and as Richard Stark wrote a series about an anti-hero and criminal named Parker.

Mr. Westlake occasionally wrote about other characters, such as Burke Devore, the downsized executive turned murderer in The Ax, whom The New York Times described in 1997 “as emblematic of his time as George F. Babbitt and Holden Caulfield and Capt. John Yossarian were of theirs.”

The full panoply of Mr. Westlake’s books was a spectacle to behold, his friends said. “We were in his library, this beautiful library surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of titles,” said Laurence Kirshbaum, his agent, “and I realized that every single book was written by Donald Westlake, English-language and foreign-language editions.”

Mr. Westlake’s cinematic style of storytelling, along with his carefully crafted plots and crisp dialogue, translated well on the screen. More than 15 of his books were made into movies. In addition, he wrote a number of screenplays, including The Grifters, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1991.

Mr. Westlake wrote seven days a week, his friends said. His productiveness was honed in part by an era in which publishing houses churned out books at a relentless pace. During that time, he also wrote erotic literature, science fiction and westerns.

Mr. Westlake resisted computers and typed his manuscripts on manual typewriters. “They came in perfectly typed,” Mr. Kirshbaum said. “You felt like it was almost written by hand.”

Otto Penzler, a longtime friend of Mr. Westlake’s and the owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in TriBeCa, said, “He hated the idea of an electric typewriter because, he said, ‘I don’t want to sit there while I am thinking and have something hum at me.’ ”

Mr. Westlake kept four or five typewriters and cannibalized their parts when any one broke, as the typewriter model was no longer manufactured, his friends said.

“He lived in fear that he wouldn’t have his little portable typewriter,” said Mr. Penzler, who once gave him a similar typewriter that he had found in a secondhand store.

Donald Edwin Westlake was born to Lillian and Albert Westlake on July 12, 1933, in Brooklyn, and was raised in Yonkers and Albany. He attended colleges in New York, but did not graduate. He married Abigail Adams in 1979, and the couple settled in Gallatin, N.Y. He was previously married to Nedra Henderson and Sandra Kalb.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Westlake is survived by four sons, Sean Westlake, Steven Westlake, Paul Westlake and Todd Westlake; two stepdaughters, Adrienne Adams and Katherine Adams; a stepson, Patrick Adams; a sister, Virginia VanDermark; and four grandchildren.

Mr. Westlake was productive until his death. His next novel, Get Real, is scheduled for release in April.

Associated Press
BY BRUCE DeSILVA

“The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks” (Grove Press, 214 pages, $24), by William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac: More than 60 years ago, when Jack Kerouac was 23 and William S. Burroughs was 30, they were arrested in New York City for helping a friend cover up a murder. Although neither had written anything worth mentioning yet, they fancied themselves writers. So, after they beat the rap, they collaborated on a novel based on the case.

Kerouac, for one, thought the book was darned good. America’s publishers unanimously disagreed. And so the manuscript was tucked away, unloved and forgotten, until, at long last, Grove Press published it this month.
It was not worth the wait.

The real crime, which caused a sensation in 1944 New York, gave Kerouac and Burroughs a lot with which to work, but they failed to do much with it. The story is plodding, the characters uninteresting and the writing listless, with few hints at the innovative styles that would later make these writers icons of the beat generation. Perhaps the book will be of interest to literary scholars, but Grove could have posted it on an obscure internet site and spared the rest of us.

The real killer was Lucien Carr, a youth from a well-to-do family. The victim was David Kammerer, who had become infatuated with Carr years earlier in St. Louis while serving as his Boy Scout leader. Kammerer apparently came to New York to pursue Carr, their dance ending when the youth stabbed the older man in the chest with a scout knife, put stones in his pockets and shoved him into the Hudson River.

Carr promptly confessed to Burroughs and Kerouac, who did not call the police. In fact, the latter helped dispose of the murder weapon. Carr was later found guilty of second degree murder, but he was given only a two-year sentence after his lawyer argued that he had committed the crime to defend his honor from a homosexual predator. Carr served his time and went on to have a distinguished career as an editor. He died in 2005.

The crime, with its bohemian characters and hints of pedopilia, was a lot more interesting in the newspapers of the day than it is in the novel.

Kerouac and Burroughs changed the names of all the characters, including themselves. Inexplicably, they also changed the murder weapon, turning the delicious detail of the scout knife into a hatchet. As “Mike Ryko” and “Will Dennison,” the authors take turns narrating the story in a hard-boiled style, trying to write like Mickey Spillane and making a mess of it.

The characters are aimless, intellectual wannabes who spend most of the book engaging in vacuous conversations while wandering from one seedy apartment and bar to another in pursuit of sex, drugs and whiskey.

It is impossible to work up much concern for what will happen to any of them.

“One Night Stands and Lost Weekends” (HarperCollins, 384 pages, $14.95), by Lawrence Block: Beware the book whose author admits in the introduction he’s afraid to read the stories that follow:

“I’m scared I’ll decide not to publish them after all, and it’s too late for that. So an uncharacteristic attack of honesty compels me to advise you that I am in the curious position of introducing you to a couple of dozen short stories which I myself haven’t read in forty years.”

That’s from one of three introductions Block writes in “One Night Stands and Lost Weekends,” a fun if warmed over collection of the author’s early work, which had already been published in separate collectors’ volumes at the turn of the century.

The stories are just what the title suggests. Quickies sold to pulps and their descendants in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the first part of the book and easily digestible hard-boiled novellas in the second. They’re all easily forgettable — Block, in fact, forgot about a few — but curiously compelling.

Though they mirrored the dreck of the day — full of rapists, murders with semi-plausible twists and an unending line of bombshell blondes pulling a double-cross — Block shows the early promise that would lead him to Grand Master status with the Mystery Writers of America and four Edgar and Shamus awards.

His Matthew Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr characters are the gold standard. “One Night Stands and Lost Weekends” gives fans of Block’s work an early look at the flamboyant fun of the Rhodenbarr mysteries and the wry humor and violence of the Scudder noirs.

The first part of the book is populated with stories whose titles are self-explanatory: “Murder Is My Business,” “The Bad Night,” “Bargain in Blood” and “Hate Goes Courting.” They appeared in such forgettable magazines as Manhunt, Trapped and Two-Fisted.

The second part of the book contains three novellas first collected as “The Lost Cases of Ed London.” London is more anti-Scudder than proto-Scudder with an uncomplicated life — if you ignore the bullets flying — full of clients, drink and nubile young women looking to throw a suave Manhattan P.I. off the trail.

Both sets of stories are tasty like candy and a little addictive. But like Block acknowledges in his introductions, this book is really for those fans who’ve read the author’s contemporary work.

For those who want to introduce themselves to the author, skip this book and head directly to “When the Sacred Ginmill Closes” or “Burglars Can’t Be Choosers.”

You won’t be sorry.