by Edward Champion

Grand Central Spams Twitter While Westlake’s Corpse is Still Warm

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Not less than 24 hours after the news of Donald E. Westlake’s death was broken by the New York Times‘s Jennifer 8. Lee, Grand Central (Westlake’s publisher) has seen fit to flood Twitter with endless retweets of what others have written about Donald E. Westlake, while simultaneously promoting Westlake’s final novel, Get Real.

How would you like it if some huckster was trying to sell you something while you were attending a funeral? In all likelihood, you would punch the huckster in the face. Unfortunately, Grand Central can’t be punched in the face through Twitter.

Adding insult to injury, @GrandCentralPub has been offering a retweet every one or two minutes, polluting all of the collective tweets. So when one searches for “Westlake,” one now has to sift through endless garbage promulgated by the Grand Central people. These “marketing efforts” not only deface Twitter’s community with crude spam, but they are exceptionally crass and highly insensitive towards the feelings of those who loved and revered Donald E. Westlake.

Other publishers, such as Soft Skull and Algonquin Books, have actively engaged with other people on Twitter, participating in conversations but without any prolific marketing efforts. But Grand Central Publishing simply doesn’t get it. Grand Central lacks the maturity and the understanding to view Twitterers as human beings and apparently perceives you as unthinking consumerist sheep. Because of this, I strongly urge all fellow Twitterers to block and unfollow Grand Central. If Grand Central can’t sit at the grown ups table, they need to be relegated to the kid’s room where their base and tacky efforts will be responded to with the appropriate puerile responses.

[UPDATE: For what it’s worth, Grand Central has now apologized, although they have interpreted these feelings as “feedback.”]

by Edward Champion

Why Was Adam Buckman Let Go From the New York Post?

buckmanOn December 31, Gawker’s Gabriel Snyder reported an unconfirmed rumor. Adam Buckman, the New York Post‘s television editor, according to Snyder’s “tipster”, was escorted out of the offices and his computer was seized. While it is true that Buckman’s last column appeared on December 15, 2008, the story grows more mysterious when one considers that the New York Daily News‘s Jonathan Lemire likewise reported on this story, only for the Daily News to retract the link days later. (The cached version can be found here.)

Lemire reported that “[i]t was not immediately known if his computer was turned over to a law enforcement agency,” and he also reported that a police spokesman informed him that Buckman was not charged with any crime.

There are some questions here: (1) Why was Buckman let go? (2) If the information can be confirmed, why was his computer seized? (3) Why aren’t The New York Post and Buckman talking? (4) Why was Lemire’s article pulled by the Daily News?

I do not believe it is fair to Buckman to toss around accusations until we have some quotes or hard evidence, and I will be conducting some independent investigation on this story to determine some answers.

Nevertheless, if both Snyder and Lemire are relying on rumors (rather than hard information) to smear a man’s reputation with insinuations (there have been unsubstantiated suggestions of potential impropriety in the Gawker thread), they need to come clean and reveal their specific sources.

[UPDATE: I have made efforts to contact Lemire, New York Post editor-in-chief Col Allan, and related parties to this incident.]

[RELATED: It’s worth observing that Mr. Allan has a reputation for a fiery temper in December. On December 18, 2007, the New York Observer‘s John Koblin reported that metro editor Dan Colarusso was upbraided in front of his colleagues and was, at one point, kicked out of a meeting. Like Mr. Buckman, who remains silent, Mr. Colarusso declined then to go on the record.]

by Edward Champion

Donald E. Westlake Dead

The New York Times is reporting that Donald E. Westlake is dead. I am exceptionally stunned by this. Westlake was a very important writer. And I hope to have something coherent later. Needless to say, if you haven’t read the Dortmunder books or the Richard Stark Parker novels, get on it now. This man was just about the finest writer in mystery. His loss leaves a staggering chasm that won’t be filled anytime soon.

[UPDATE: Assorted links over at Sarah’s.]

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Patricia Cornwell

Patricia Cornwell appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #257.

Patricia Cornwell is most recently the author of Scarpetta. This interview serves as a companion piece to Sarah Weinman’s Los Angeles Times profile.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Checked in for narcissistic personality disorder.

Author: Patricia Cornwell

Subjects Discussed: The genesis of Kay Scarpetta after three unpublished novels, Sara Ann Freed’s input into Cornwell’s early career, on being rejected by the Mysterious Press, Susanne Kirk, the unexpected success of Postmortem, how Charles Champlin’s Los Angeles Times review changed the publisher’s perception, writing a Scarpetta book before the last one was published, switching from first-person to third-person midway through the series, tinkering around in the movie business, being unable to write anymore in the first-person perspective, on later books lacking the warm element of character interaction, trying to get better through experimentation, listening to fans and readers, bringing back Benton Wesley from the dead, the differences between Cornwell and Scarpetta, writing sex scenes, privacy and reluctant fame, reporters who have the temerity to follow Cornwell into the bathroom, cops and submachine guns, Ab Fab, Judd Apatow’s films, Cornwell’s continued involvement with forensic science, taking out full-page ads to correct being misquoted by a journalist, pursuing the Jack the Ripper case, making various investments, surviving in the dour economy, and Cornwell’s political involvement.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

PATRICIA CORNWALLCorrespondent: What’s interesting too is that your career essentially started at the behest of very legendary people in the mystery world.

Cornwell: Right. That’s right.

Correspondent: And then Susanne Kirk found it at Scribner and picked it up from there.

Cornwell: And she was quite a champion for it. Because the publishing house, from my understanding back then, was very dubious about it. This was so different. Nobody wrote books like this back then really. First of all, you had a serial killer who was a stranger to the victims and a stranger to everybody. And the tradition of “mysteries” is that it was someone in your midst. And there were so many traditions that were shattered. Because real crime shatters those traditions. And I was writing about what I saw, and really taking a journalistic point of view. Although I was weaving it into fiction. And some of the rejection letters were “Nobody wants to read about morgues or laboratories.” And certainly not a woman who works in an environment like this and sees what she does. It seems silly now. But back then, that just wasn’t done.

Susanne though had the futuristic vision to think, “This is new and different. And this is pretty cool. And I want to publish this book.” But she had to have yet another opinion. She had to have another person read it. And they deliberated. And they just barely decided. In fact, the telephone call I got — the famous telephone call that changes your life — it was iffy. It was “We think we’re going to publish Postmortem, but we want to get one more person to read it.”

Correspondent: So it had to go to the editorial board in other words.

Cornwell: It was actually an outside consultant they had. Someone they considered an expert. A man, whose name I don’t remember. And they needed one more person to look at it to see if they really were going to do this. And that was my great turning point. My telephone call was a maybe. And then they did decide to take it on. But it was a very small printing. 6,000 copies. $6,000 is what I got paid. No advertising. No marketing. No nothing. And by the time people discovered it, it was out of print in hardcover.

BSS #257: Patricia Cornwell (Download MP3)

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