Mark Moskowitz may seem to be an unlikely literary hero. A Pennsylvania political advertisement producer by day, he used his spare time a few years back to look into a puzzle: What happened to the author of the obscure book The Stones of Summer?

During a search that led to a connection with the book’s author, Dow Mossman, Moskowitz created a fascinating film, 2002’s “The Stone Reader,” a love letter to reading cloaked in the guise of an investigative documentary.

Thanks to the film, Mossman’s book was reissued by Barnes & Noble and found limited commercial success 30 years after its initial publication. But the value of the film goes far beyond that rediscovery. Mossman is writing again with an eye toward publication after years of doing other things with his life, and the film reignited – or just plain fired – the desire in thousands of people to reconnect with books and read.

Moskowitz took that momentum seriously, founding the Lost Books Club, an effort designed to bring back to print the lost classics beloved by like-minded readers. A second book, The Furies by Janet Hobhouse, was released in 2004 by the New York Review of Books imprint.

Things have been quiet out of the “Stone Reader” camp of late. Moskowitz has yet to follow up that success with another film, Mossman is still writing but has yet to publish further work and the Lost Books Club is stalled at two. But like the patience-trying action in a sprawling, unfolding novel, things promise to heat up again soon.

I interviewed both Moskowitz and Mossman back when I worked for the Cedar Rapids paper (my review of the film can be found here), and was pleased that Moskowitz was willing to take the time to answer a few questions about the project for the Monday Interview.

TIRBD: A chance re-encounter with the Stones of Summer a few years ago led you down a very interesting path. Are you surprised about where the decision one day to pull that book off the shelf has taken you?

MM: Yes. Very much so. It’s about eight years now since I first read it and in that time there have been transitions, both professionally and personally. The book led me to take some risks again, in middle age, and like all risks, you sometimes have no way of seeing the repercussions. If I had just put the book back on the shelf after reading it, my mind and heart may still have been stirred, but the path I chose, to start doing something I’ve always wanted to do, create a narrative – the same thing Dow gave up a generation before – led me to places I would never have seen. Good and bad. Garden of Eden kind of thing. Innocence vs. experience and all that. Today, I am surprised how the personal nature of the work played itself out – I never thought that, as the protagonist in the movie, I would be accountable for years to come to audiences, strangers and even family.

Ideally, everyone who saw and loved your film would have followed up by reading and loving the book. Instead, it seems destined to remain a slightly more well-known cult classic. Do you ever reflect on that?

Not much. We started the Lost Books Club before the movie was even finished in order to have a non-profit way of printing some copies for people who might ever want to read it. I thought 1,000. The movie is not about the book, but about books, and so the demand for the book was something that surprised me. Then again, I suppose any reader might want to check it out after the movie – I would have – but I always knew Dow’s work was for a certain type of reader, albeit, readers I would like to meet (and now have and liked).

At its height, the film seemed to reignite people’s passion for reading, particularly for discovering underappreciated works from lesser-known writers. Has that passion remained, and how has it manifested itself?

That struck me as a bit of a surprise. I thought the film would appeal to obsessive readers, of which there’s plenty, but was taken aback how many people who hadn’t read a book since high school, or who loved to read but couldn’t find the time, were moved by it. Certain types of high school students were some of the most engaged by the movie, and I found this gratifying. I think in our culture these days, when someone has an idea, others have it too, it’s in the air, so around the time of the movie certain publishers were bringing back older, forgotten works, and articles started appearing on favorite lost books, and web sites, and so on. I believe the movie validated or instigated some of this, drove some of it, energized some, but it was in the air.

What is the status of the Lost Books Club effort to get similar books back into print?

It took us more than two years to get tax-deductible status for the non-profit (the two are not synonymous) so we can now accept donations, which are needed. It takes about $10,000 per book. We have a list of about a dozen we’d like to help bring back, with hundreds more waiting to be read and thought about (each week we get suggestions). The goal is not to publish them ourselves, though we will if no one else will, but to support such ventures by others and help bring them back. Thus, Barnes & Noble published The Stones of Summer, and New York Review of Books (NYRB) published Janet Hobhouse’s The Furies. We have The LBJ Brigade by William Wilson ready to go but are waiting for the right partner/moment. It’s not enough to bring the book back just to have it die on the shelf. I’m not interested in publishing or retailing, I’m interested in reading and discussion and how the book affects us. I’d like to work out a program where an individual or corporation sponsors a book, and we give it free to libraries with the condition they must always circulate it (not sell it or pulp it).

I assume you have become a sage for those looking for the great lost book to read. Do you have other books that have made you feel the >way Stones of Summer did that you would recommend?

Many. In fact, I just sent a list off to a movie e-mailer. Whenever I do this I do it off the top of my head. Besides the three mentioned above, David Shetzline’s Heckletooth 3, Silk and Cyanide by Leo Marks and Barefoot in Babylon, the first version, about Woodstock.

What has all of this done for your own career, and do you plan to make projects similar to the Stone Reader a part of it?

It threw it into turmoil for a bit. And I had to pull back. It gave me a lot of opportunity to do things that in the end I didn’t really want to do, but now might like to do a great deal. The trick, I realize, and a lesson I should have learned from own movie, is to just keep working. Inspiration comes from daily work – as if the mundane suddenly is too mundane and you must reach for more, strive to do something else. Like writing, filmmaking is a discipline and you must keep at it to do something worthwhile. Yes, I’d like to continue the story, in a sort of different way. I am still interested in how we, as audiences, are changed by narrative – not just literature, but the narrative of the arts and life and memory in general.

Craig McDonald’s bio proclaims him “an award-winning fiction writer, journalist, editor and columnist.” But summing up his impact in the world of crime fiction might require a buzzword cribbed from the business world: McDonald is really a connector.

Through his efforts McDonald connects people, netting readers for writers, new favorites for readers and a network of fans for all comers. There are quite a few such people out there on the web, offering information, reviews, interviews and other ephemera that have created a sort of alternate universe where crime fiction is king.

McDonald has done as much as anyone to further those efforts, if not more, with his recent book, Art in the Blood. The book collects 20 interviews that McDonald has done over the past few years with some of the leading lights of crime fiction. It includes long Q&As with Ken Bruen, George Pelecanos, Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin and Dennis Lehane, to name only a few.

Great, you might say. I can read about those guys anywhere. Where does that “connector” stuff come in? Well, I’m living proof. I picked up the book to read about the above authors, but was drawn in by McDonald’s erudite questions and easy rapport with them and found myself wanting to read the whole thing. In doing so, I was introduced to the work of Steve Hamilton, Tim Dorsey, Charlie Stella and others. And while you can read interviews with many of these authors in numerous locations, including this site, few can rival the depth and breadth of McDonald’s work.

McDonald also writes fiction, having contributed to Dublin Noir and Best New Noir, as well as online outlets like Hard Luck Stories and the Mississippi Review (when you’re done here, you should go check out his story “Sheriff Andy Goes to Hell” in that site’s Postmodern Pulp issue). Seeing his name is like an imprimatur of cool, helping to continue the expansion of my personal crime fiction network.

He consented to answer a few questions by e-mail for today’s Monday Interview, where we discussed his non-fiction and fiction work, including the great news that a sequel to Art in the Blood is in the works.

TIRBD: How did you choose who to include in Art in the Blood? Were there writers you wanted to include but couldn’t this time out?

CMcD: I went for the broad perspective of the field: mystery writers, crime writers, males and females…American, Brits and Celts. The aim was also to include writers at all spectrums of success: veterans, up-and-comers, mid-listers and mega-sellers.

There was a significant lag between the time the manuscript was turned over to Wildside/PointBlank and its publication. In the interim, I actually conducted interviews with quite a few personal favorites. I’ve just completed a second collection of interviews that’s now being shopped. Rogue Males, as its title implies, focuses exclusively on male crime writers…the mavericks and stylists. It’s almost a pantheon of personal favorites: James Sallis, Daniel Woodrell, more with James Ellroy and Ken Bruen… James Crumley, Andrew Vachss and Pete Dexter, among others.

You clearly did your homework before these interviews. How did that affect the questions you asked, and how did those, in turn, affect the kind of information these authors revealed?

I went into the interviews very familiar with the writers’ works. I also combed through every previous interview each writer had given that I could get my hands on. That exercise probably generated the most interesting questions — follow-ups to answers I wished that the earlier interviewers had posed or pressed harder on… lines of inquiry I sensed could have been taken further.

The unhappy reality is that these writers go out on the road and are faced with all kinds of interviewers. They draw radio jocks, journalists who may or may not specialize in author profiles and, in a few rare cases, they come across an interviewer who knows their novels and really wants to discuss them on a serious level. It’s striking and sad to me how many writers are stunned to be interviewed by someone who has actually read their books. And I imagine it must be very depressing to give several dozen interviews that start with, “Tell me what your novel is about,” or in which the interviewer is parroting back the prepared Q&As or suggested questions sent out by publicists.

As a crime writer yourself, did that background have an impact on the questions you asked or the way you interpreted the responses?

I went in to these discussions as a student of the genre and the craft. It was a key focus of the interviews to really get at the business of writing at all levels. I wanted to explore work habits and the dubious stuff required of writers now: to
uring, promotional strategies… running Web sites or offering blogs. All the things required of a contemporary writer after the final edit is accepted. Writing a book is soulful; promoting one is anything but. With the exception of James Ellroy, I haven’t the sense that many, if any, authors relish touring, or even like it, and even Ellroy nearly destroyed himself aggressively touring to support his most recent novel.

What affect has talking to so many writers had on your own writing?

Demystification. I’ve also concluded that the most successful authors – not necessarily the best-sellers, but the ones who sustain the most stable careers and who maintain the best arc – are the ones who approach it with steady determination. They come at it with wicked self-discipline and they’ve taken the time and trouble to evolve a style and a recognizable “voice.” In most cases, I’ve also been fortunate to interview writers who really care about writing good books and who push themselves in new ways each time they sit down to start another novel. The best ones don’t content themselves with rewriting the same book over and over and counting on their readership to accept that. You can’t help but be inspired by that… to sense that’s the thing to do.

What is it about crime fiction that appeals to you? Is it really, as Bruen, Lehane, Pelecanos and others have said, the best way currently to address social issues in fiction?

Tony Hillerman is credited with saying that contemporary fiction is about not much happening to people you can’t care about. Good crime fiction is really what used to be called good fiction. It has great dialogue, convincing characterization and a compelling story – a plot. Good crime fiction offers everything that what currently passes for so-called “literary fiction” lacks. James Crumley and Daniel Woodrell both came out of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and they’ve both chosen to write crime novels.

Crime fiction is indeed perhaps the most potent fictional format to explore “social issues.” On the other hand, I think increasing numbers of crime writers are unfortunately too focused on that aim. My sense as a reader and reviewer is that increasing numbers of crime and mystery writers are straining beyond nuanced social commentary and instead aggressively freighting their books with political dogma. There seems to me to be more preaching and vitriol in more sectors of crime fiction now. Overt partisan politics are exerting themselves and in ham-handed fashion. It may make those authors feel good, but it doesn’t entertain or even edify. Left or right, I don’t like to be lectured to in a novel. I also think those books are going to date, and furiously.

Looking at your book as a whole, what do you think it says about the state of modern crime fiction? Would a collection of interviews with a similar stratum of writers from 10, 20 or even 30 years ago have yielded a snapshot with a different overall feel?

Going back 30 years, even 20 years ago, I think you’d come away with a sense of writers who viewed themselves as just that – “writers” as opposed to “authors” or “crime novelists.” Max Allan Collins has worked in just about every medium you can name… novels, novelizations, comic books, comic strips and film. I asked him about how he reconciled all that, and he said, “I just feel like I’m a full-time professional writer. I’m not a teacher, lawyer or doctor who writes. I’m a writer who writes.” I think that’s what you’d get if you went at the generation of crime writers just ahead of most of those in Art in the Blood. You would find a crop of writers who didn’t view crime writing foremost as a craft or a calling, but rather as a job that they wanted to do well and make enough money to support themselves and their families.

So far as the current market, there’s a lot of fragmentation in the field now, and we seem to be in the midst of a generational shift. We’ve lost some big names in the past year or so, and several of them had careers that spanned decades… scads of novels and short stories. You look around now and see the consolidation of markets and publishing houses and that doesn’t bode well. You also see the close, computer monitoring of sales figures and the resulting decimation of mid-list writers. You also see fairly established authors who are forced to adopt pennames to try and kick-start their careers or to reboot their sales figures. When you look at all of that, you have to wonder if such a career within genre as an “Evan Hunter” or Mickey Spillane enjoyed is even possible going forward.

By now, we should just expect great things from Los Lobos. The band, which emerged from East Los Angeles more than 30 years ago, has released album after album of inventive, challenging yet always hip-shaking music.

Its latest, The Town and the City, continues its win streak in style, offering the band’s best music in a decade. And that’s saying something considering that the albums in between would be career bests for most any other band.

Fans could be forgiven for wondering if such creative heights were still within the band’s reach. Since 1992’s career apex, Kiko, the band has at times seemed unsure of where to go. In the years directly after that, it released a disc that took the experimentation of Kiko even further, then a short disc of tightly wound rock tunes. A four-CD, career-encapsulating boxed set, a live album and a star-laden disc that mixed re-recorded favorites and new tracks followed.

If all of that seems like the sign of a band easing into a well-deserved retirement, just don’t tell the band itself. The members emerged this year with The Town and the City, a concept album of sorts about Mexican immigrants making their way to the U.S., blending tales of rural romanticism and urban hurdles. It finds the band finally striking the perfect mix of its questing experimentation and its deep Latin roots. All of that was enough to earn the disc the no. 5 spot on the TIRBD Best Music of 2006 list.

I corresponded with saxophonist and percussionist Steve Berlin, who also produces much of the band’s work, about the new album and the group’s future.

TIRBD: The Ride felt like the work of a veteran band winding down and looking back. It’s clear from The Town and the City, however, that it was simply a chance to catch a breath before taking off again down a new path. What do experiences like that – and I’d include the recent live album and boxed set as well – do for the band in terms of offering some context for your work and perhaps pointing the direction to head next?

SB: We honestly don’t look at it that way. Clearly The Ride was a look back, but really there was about an album’s worth of new material in there as well. When we go in to do anything new we try as hard as we can to simply be in that moment and let the new stuff come through us, as dippy as that sounds. We had a thought about The Town and the City being a certain kind of record but it foiled us at every turn and the record that wanted to be, it was.

Critics are calling this disc the band’s best since Kiko, and the first since then that seems to strike the proper balance between the band’s roots and its more adventurous nature. Do you agree, and if so, is that something that you can perceive during the recording process or does it take some temporal distance to realize?

We’re certainly gratified that people are digging it but the only conscious effort we made was to say to each other that we wouldn’t worry very much about song form and structure, which we had kinda focused on on (Good Morning) Aztlan and The Ride. As far as a balance, it seemed really dark to me up ’til the very end when “Gila Bend” and Free Up” arrived, so it’s hard to say it struck any sense of equality between our various sides while we were doing it. I myself still can’t quite get a firm handle on it.

Different albums have had a different feel: Kiko was experimental, Colossal Head even more so, This Time a bit of a retrenchment, etc. Is that established from the outset, or does it evolve as the songs come together? Was there a point with this record where it might have gone in a different direction sonically, or did the songs require the production and treatment they received?

The only time we actually said as a group lets try this was on Aztlan, and I guess we conceptualized The Ride, but only to the extent we would be revisiting some old material and who we would be doing it with. At one point we had thought about making T&C a more acoustic record, but the songs sort of had other things in mind, and I can say from a personal point of view that there were a few occasions when I had something in mind that worked great in my head but for some reason just wouldn’t stick when I actually got them on tape. It was like a stubborn child – this record was gonna be what is was.

How does the band interact at this point? Is there a shorthand to things, or do you need to reacquaint yourselves a bit after each layoff?

As far as recording there’s always a “first day of school” deal where the songwriters play the ideas, but once that’s out of the way we just go to work – we come and go in each other’s lives so much that there’s really no reorienting necessary.

What do the various side projects and outside interests of each member contribute to the whole when you reconvene as Los Lobos to create music?

I’d say probably less than you might imagine. What we learn over and over again is each record just seems to have its own personality and no matter what we think should happen going in, what gets made is the record that wants to be, crazy as that sounds.

Given the band’s restless nature, is there anything that hasn’t been tried that might be at some point, some secret desire to cut a big band record or full-on electronic dance music, perhaps?

Not really, or at least no one has said anything out loud. If we did, we would just throw it into the next record
– that’s the cool thing really, is that we never have any sense of boundaries. If a song wanted to have a big band we’d just go get it done.

On first listen to The Dust of Retreat from Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s you would be forgiven for thinking it was the work of a veteran band. The songs are strong, the singer confident and the arrangements seem to indicate a seasoned ensemble at work.

The band, however, is only a couple of years old, and the disc is nearly as old. The songs are mostly the creative work of singer and guitarist Richard Edwards, a young Indianan with an uncanny knack for writing sweet pop hooks married to melancholy lyrics. That description might bring to mind other artists like Joe Pernice or the Shins’ James Mercer, and while those are certainly bands that would show up in the “recommended if you like” part of a review, they, like most other references cited by critics, don’t quite nail it.

Edwards blends singer-songwriter, folky tunes with strings, inventive percussion and at times charging guitars to create something that transcends all of the influences at work in his songs. The result is one of the year’s best albums, and a sign of greatness to come.

The band may seem to have emerged fully formed from the rock womb, but Richards actually got his start in the Indiana band Archer Avenue. The band issued one disc, I Was an Astronaut, available for free download here. It is solid in its own right, but when compared to the leaps in arranging, melody and hooks found on Dust, it sounds like the artifact of juvenilia it is. If Margot’s next disc shows a similar leap, critics would do well to reserve a spot in the upper reaches of future best-of lists.

Edwards consented to answer a few questions by e-mail about his work and the band. I couldn’t resist asking something about the band’s name, a subject that has been endlessly analyzed. It seems pretty clear that it’s a reference to Gwyneth Paltrow’s character in The Royal Tennenbaums, something that Edwards is often cagey about in interviews. Given the fact that the Tennenbaums lived on Archer Avenue, it’s safe to say there is a precedent for a film-inspired name.

TIRBD: Much has been made about the name of your band, and I’ll admit that I initially dismissed you without hearing a note because I assumed I wouldn’t care for whatever it was you were doing. A track on a sampler and an online show showed me how foolish this stance was, but others might not have been so lucky. Has it been a help, a hindrance or both?

RE: I like the name a lot. I have been surprised by the confusion it has seemed to cause some folks. The process of naming a band is pretty ridiculous, but I don’t see how our name is any more foolish or off-putting than the majority of bands out there. It just doesn’t seem strange to me. I can rarely tell anything about a band by the name, but I guess a long name implies a college-y indie rock thing, which we are not.

Do you have concerns that your name includes a word that is seemingly unpronounceable to a large part of the populace, including our president?

I don’t know if the president could pronounce “the Shins,” so… it’s tough with that guy.

Many of the songs on Dust of Retreat feel like singer-songwriter tunes that evolved to become more fleshed out as the band members began to explore them. Is that an accurate depiction of what happened, or am I not giving you enough credit for composing for a large group?

I wrote the songs on acoustic guitar, but I certainly composed a lot of parts on the tunes. “Vampires in Blue Dresses” had most of the parts written when I brought it in. “Dress Me Like a Clown” was probably just the basic song, and everyone added parts. I guess it varies. Andy, Tyler, and I do a lot of the production. At least that’s how it’s worked so far.

While it will be considered by me and many others as a 2006 release when putting together list of the top CDs of the year, Dust of Retreat was first issued by a small indie label in 2005. Given that, does it feel odd for the disc to still have currency now? Does it reflect at all what the band sounds like today?

I’m still very proud of the record, but I think we’ve grown a lot since that record came out. Maybe “grown” is the wrong word. I write a bit differently and the band plays a bit differently. That’s why we’re excited to go do another record. I think it’s time to move on. Even so, I think that Dust is good, and that it holds up.

Can you tell at this point how the next disc will differ from Dust? In particular, does the extensive touring you’ve done have an impact on how you want to present the band’s overall sound?

I think the next record will be a bit more operatic in terms of melody. Lyrically, it’s not quite as idealistic. Technology based. The touring surely makes us more confident and tighter.

Does most of the band still live together in one house? What does that mean for the way you create music?

Some of us still do live in the same house. I think the only way it affects the music is that we’re very close as friends, and that has to come through on some level. It really is a family that plays music.

Critics seem to have trouble categorizing your sound, leading you to coin the term “scarf rock.” I don’t have an easy answer either, but I do hear certain commonalities between your music and that of bands like the Vulgar Boatmen and Mysteries of Life. Does Indianapolis have much to do with your sound?

Mysteries and the Boatmen may apply more to how Andy (Fry) makes music. He was a big fan of Jake Smith. I came into all that stuff much later. There are certain Indianapolis bands who have inspired me. Gentleman Caller, Everything, now!, America Owns the Moon, Otis Gibbs. I don’t have much in common with the ’90s Bloomington stuff, although a lot of those people are great friends of mine now.

I know you’ve been playing in bands for a while, including with Archer Avenue, but it still seems like you’ve found pretty quick success with Margot. How does that fit with the career you visualized when you were starting out?

I’m happy with where Margot is at. I always wanted to be in a band that grew organically and made better and better records. I feel like we’re in a position to do that.

“Skeleton Key”: mp3
“Barfight Revolution, Power Violence”: mp3

Coming Friday: TIRBD’s best CDs of 2006

The reason you know about James Sallis likely depends on what you like to read. Be it poetry, non-fiction about music, mystery novels, science fiction or literary criticism, it’s likely you’ve come across his work. It even more likely that once you did, you made a note to seek out more of it.

Sallis is perhaps best known for the series of six mystery novels that feature private eye Lew Griffin. He ended the series in 2000 because, as he says here, “it was done.” He went on to start a new series with Cypress Grove and Cripple Creek, this one following Turner, a Memphis cop who retires to a cabin in the rural South. There are shades of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux and Steve Hamilton’s Alex McNight in Turner, but thanks to Sallis’ economical prose, the feel of these compact yarns is entirely his own. In between, he penned the taught thriller Drive, which is headed for the silver screen soon.

Eclecticism ought not to be as rare as it is in the literary world, but few take it as far as Sallis. While he doesn’t seem to find it an extraordinary feat, he does defend it and decry a business that seeks to pigeonhole writers into one slot. “Literature is not a table with three dishes: it’s this huge buffet with all manner of dishes,” he told the Guardian in 2001. “You wander about it at will, take what you want or need, come back for seconds. Everything’s there.”

Sallis can stock an entire buffet himself. From his mysteries to science fiction novels like Renderings to musicological studies like The Guitar Players or literary biographies such as Chester Himes: A Life, he seems to have done it all. That doesn’t count the book reviews he writes for the Boston Globe and elsewhere. Oh, and did I mention his various translation projects?

If that’s not enough, he also plays guitar, Dobro, mandolin, banjo and fiddle with the Phoenix-based roots band Three-Legged Dog.

The prolific writer takes a look back with his next book, Potato Tree, which comprises the stories from the now out-of-print Limits of the Sensible World and many previously uncollected stories, which will be published by Host Publications in early 2007. In the meantime, a great place to catch up with the many facets of his work is with The James Sallis Reader from Point Blank Press.

TIRBD: You left the successful Lew Griffin series behind while it still seemed to have plenty of momentum commercially. Was it simply time to move on, or is this indicative of your seeming reluctance to be pigeon-holed into any one genre or style?

JS: I didn’t leave it behind: it was done. Remember that the cycle began as a short story – essentially the first section of The Long-Legged Fly – and continued only because I kept wanting to know more about this character and his world. I thought the first novel was it. Then I thought the second was. With the sixth, Lew’s story had been told. Incidentally, I tend to think of the cycle not as six novels but as one very long one.

It’s not that I’m reluctant to be pigeonholed – I don’t stay up nights figuring out how to dodge bullets – but that I just naturally go back and forth; that’s the way my mi
nd works. And while in my criticism and reviewing I do sometimes carp against categorization, I am speaking up for others. I’ve no problem with being characterized as a crime novelist. It puts me in excellent company.

Regarding that eclecticism in your work, do you consciously choose a particular discipline to write in at certain times – such as deciding to write a mystery or a poem – or do you simply write what comes to you?

The discipline chooses me. If you look at something like The James Sallis Reader or my forthcoming new collection, Potato Tree, you’ll see quite a stew: fantasy, science fiction, poetry, mainstream fiction, “literary” fiction. The substance of the thing comes to you – the feeling of it, the weight of it, the characters, a voice – and you go looking to find the right container.

Drive was a critical and commercial breakout for you. Why do you think it connected so well, and do you have any thoughts about it being made into a film?

A commercial breakout, yes, though in a small way; and I’ve always received great reviews. I’ve no idea why that novel got the attention it did, except for what I tell my students: It’s all the luck of the draw. I think it could make a great film. One could almost film it directly from the novel.

You will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at Bouchercon 2007, recognizing your mystery writing. Any qualms about receiving notice for that part of your work as you try to keep your pen dipped in many different inkwells?

For many years, while being nominated again and again, I’ve successfully evaded receiving any major award. Fast footwork is everything. Now those feisty people at Bouchercon have spoiled a perfect record. Qualms? Well, it’s a lifetime achievement award, which might give one pause – what my friend Larry Block calls the “Look, he’s still alive!” award.

You have another collection on the way (Potato Tree), this time gathering some of your short fiction. Do such glances over your shoulder offer you any insight into your own work, or provide any meaningful context after the fact for what came next?

Not really. It’s rather interesting getting reacquainted with the person who wrote those stories, though. And they do bring a flood of memories. Sometimes it’s like looking at old photos of yourself: “Why did they let me buy those shoes? I wore my hair like that?” Then you come across a story that you just know you could never write today – now that you know how, now that you always look three ways before crossing the street.

Does writing critically about writing and writers, as you do for the Boston Globe and elsewhere, teach you anything about your own work?

Nothing specific. But what it does – as with teaching – is cause you to think about what you are doing, to get out of your own head and gain perspective. Good to climb the tree from time to time and look down on that small clearing you thought was the world. The most important benefit, with both teaching and critical writing, is rededication: remembering why this is important, and why I do it.

Music plays an important role in your work, both in your non-fiction specifically about music and in your fiction. It’s difficult to inject music into fiction without it coming off as a ploy to show how hip the author is, and you are among the few that can pull it off. Any reason why, and why do you make the effort to do so?

Yes, all too often music is brought onstage as a shibboleth, a badge of exception – or is employed in the way that brand names are, as a shortcut to characterization. I never set out to write about music in the stories and novels. Music, obviously, is very much part of the fabric of my life. So it tends to bubble up out of the stew, just as so much else does: my being Southern, my liberalism and skepticism, my disaffection for religion and psychiatry, my love of food and books and those pushed to the margins by our society.

Mark Anderson’s work will be familiar to any TIRBD readers who have taken the time to explore the lefthand sidebar on this page.

Andertoons, which has been a feature on this page (and many, many others) for several months, offers a daily, topic-specific cartoon panel. Anderson draws cartoons about business, family and, in the case of what we run here, entertainment. These free, pop-up cartoons offered to blogs, is part of Anderson’s creative ways to spread word about his work and add a few chuckles to readers’ days.

Anderson has been an independent cartoonist for three years, having left his sales job with a company that sold hardware to pursue cartooning full time. He since has had cartoons published in Reader’s Digest, The Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review and elsewhere.

This Chicago-based cartoonist also keeps a blog where he writes about cartooning and, in a feature of interest to anyone fascinated by the creative process and how it (sometimes) dovetails with commercial pursuits, details how some of his cartoons evolve from an idea written on a scrap of paper to a finished cartoon appearing in a national publication.

For this Monday Interview, Anderson answered a few questions via e-mail about his work and the creative process.

TIRBD: You mentioned on your blog recently that it has been three years since you moved to self-employment. What were you doing before (did it involve cartooning?) and what led you to make the jump?

MA: I’ve been cartooning professionally for about eight years, but only full-time for three. And that’s assuming by “full-time” you mean when I can fit it in between diapers, tantrums, Play-Doh and more diapers.

Before that I had a string of mostly sales-oriented jobs. I sold screws, metal and online advertising.

Cartooning full-time is as much about staying home with the kids for me as it is cartooning. My wife and I always felt strongly about having a parent at home with the kids; cartooning seemed to fit nicely within that schedule, and with my wife having the stability of tenure it all sorta fell into place.

How has that been going and what has it meant to your artwork to have a different set of constraints?

I love it! My editors, customers and readers are very kind to me.

As far as constraints, other than making sure I’m selling, I don’t really have any. I pretty much get to write and draw whatever I like. And with the web’s long tail effect, there’s probably someone out there looking for whatever I come up with.

Being a stay-at-home dad, do you find it more difficult to find source material for your work than when you were (presumably) in an office setting, or is it simply different?

In a way I sort of miss being immersed in the office culture – it gave me an awful lot of really true material. But I don’t think I could ever go back. It’s just too awful.

Where did you get the idea for your blog cartoon project and how many blogs use your cartoons now? What has been the response in terms of exposure and getting work?

There’s been a lot of self-syndicating web-based cartoonists, and when blogs took off it made sense to me to try to tap that as well. Honestly, I have no idea how many blogs use it, but it seems to be popular.

You blog about the status of certain cartoon submissions. What has that process been like for you in terms of having a record of your successes (and the sometimes long road to them)?

I like the whole blogging thing. And I think it’s interesting to see a submission from beginning to end, successful or not. Honestly, I wish there’d been this sort of information when I was starting out.

I hope it reflects the real life of a working cartoonist – 95 percent of your material will be rejected by the magazines – suck it up and draw more cartoons. It’s not pretty, but if you’re persistent, fast and funny, you can make it.

Who are your favorite cartoonists, past and present?

Let’s see… Peter Arno, Jack Ziegler, Charles Addams, Henry Martin and, of course, Schulz. Cartoonist friends that I’m insanely jealous of include Mike Lynch, Adam Koford and Mark Heath.

What is the state of cartooning today?

It’s an absolutely wonderful time to be a cartoonist. The globe is your market and you can sell to it from your laptop at the coffee shop. How great is that?

Next Monday: James Sallis

Welcome to the official launch of the Monday Interview. After a couple of test runs earlier this year, I’m ready to make this an official weekly feature here at TIRBD. I couldn’t be happier to kick things off with George Pelecanos, one of the country’s finest writers.

Fans of Pelecanos’ crime novels are keenly aware that the author is a music fan. Both through the presence of contemporaneous artists and songs in his work and the now-familiar “tour music” postings on his web page that highlight the CDs he takes on book tours, he makes it clear that tunes are an important part of his life.

Recently, he took that to a new level, penning the lyrics for a song by musician Steve Wynn. The track, “Cindy, It Was Always You,” was a stand-out on Wynn’s latest disc with his band, the Miracle 3, …tick …tick …tick. Wynn also backed Pelecanos at a few readings done to promote the author’s latest book, the riveting The Night Gardener. The cover of a limited edition disc issued by Wynn to commemorate that pairing quotes Pelecanos as saying “Steve paints short stories with guitar. I’m just out here trying to have some fun. Enjoy this aural cocktail, mixed at the intersection of sonic and noir.”

As Pelecanos’ stature grows, so does the number of interviews with him available on the web. Some of the best are here, here and here. I decided to choose a slightly different tack and questioned him about music and the way he uses it in his work. What follows is our Q&A, conducted by e-mail earlier this month.

TIRBD: Do you play an instrument or write music of your own, or have such forays been limited to projects like that with Steve Wynn on “Cindy”?

GP: I’m strictly a fan. I played trumpet when I was a kid but I didn’t really have the aptitude for it. I admire musicians the same way I admire master carpenters or good car mechanics, which is why I like checking out live music but rarely go to book readings. I know all about the man behind the curtain. There’s no sense of wonder for me there.

Did writing lyrics for that song and seeing how Steve put them to music give you any insight into music in general or about how good songs are put together?

What he did surprised me. I was thinking he would record one of his epic, slow-burn numbers like “The Deep End” or “Good and Bad.” Instead he turned it into a garage band thing. And it really worked. What I learned was that lyrics are overrated. In the end, it’s the music that makes you reach for the dial on the dash. That song is nothing without Steve Wynn and the performance of the band.

Does the mention of songs in your work happen organically or is there research involved to ensure that they are contemporaneous with what is taking place? If research has been involved, what discoveries have you made that you’ve added to your collection?

Both. I try to keep the mention of songs organic to the arena and especially to character. With some of the period novels I do extensive research, which can be little more than buying a shitload of music before I start to write the book. Hard Revolution was like that. I was alive in the Sixties but I was a kid. Rock and soul really gets into your consciousness when you start feeling your sexuality. So I had to give myself an education in Deep Soul. I read many books (the best was Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music) and soul obsessive web sites, like the John Ridley page. I bought and downloaded a bunch of tracks. Meanwhile, fans were sending me obscure compilations. Discovering all of those artists and that type of music left a lasting impression on me. I wrote that book three or four years ago and I am still collecting soul music from that period. It’s a perk that comes with my job.

Do you listen to music as you work, particularly the songs and artists that your characters are listening to?

I can’t listen to vocals when I write. The singing collides with the words racing through my head. I listen to film soundtracks, mainly. Morricone, Lalo Schifrin, Elmer Bernstein, John Barry, Bernard Hermann… like that.

What are your thoughts about genre as it relates to racial groups and other ethnographic distinctions? Correct me if my memory is faulty, but it seems your black characters listen exclusively to R’n’B and soul music. You are evidence that not everyone fits into a narrow category, though at times it seems as if you use music tastes as shorthand for character traits (Derek Strange vs. Terry Quinn for example).

Don’t forget go-go, the sound of D.C. But yeah, I think that’s accurate. I’ve never lived anywhere but the Washington area, and everything I know is what I see around here. In my experience, black people of a certain generation generally listen to R&B, soul and hip-hop. White folks are generally into rock and blues. Black and white teenagers, in my neighborhood at least, listen to hip-hop and go-go. Sure, there are exceptions. But there’s no reason to stretch credulity. Strange would listen to R&B and soul. It’s embedded deep inside him. Quinn is a Springsteen/Steve Earle guy. That whole outlaw highwayman thing is part of his self image, and his downfall. The differences make for some interesting conversation between the two men.

When referencing music in writing, you are somewhat dependent on the reader being familiar with the artist or song for the atmosphere to truly be set. Does that affect what you choose? Is writing for TV on “The Wire,” where music is a part of the finished product, a different experience because of that?

I don’t go out of my way to use obscure references. The choices are all about what the character would be listening to. As for “The Wire,” many of the music choices are tied to the budget we have for the show. You can blow half your licensing budget for the season on one song if you’re not careful. As writers we have some input, but ultimately it often comes down to money. What we’ve tried to do, whenever possible, is plug some house music, indigenous to Baltimore, and Baltimore hip-hop into the mix.

Have you written any non-fiction about music, or do you restrict your writing to your novels?

Only on my web site. I do an annual Tour Music feature that talks about the stuff I’ve been listening to and why I’m into it. I’m just having fun.