Ann Pearlman, in a photo taken earlier this month at Great Lakes Chocolate & Coffee on Jackson Road, where she chatted with columnist Domenica Trevor about her work: “I’m just doing things that are fun.”

Which, coming from the Jewish author of a memoir entitled “Infidelity,” makes considerable sense.

The fictional cookie club is hosted by narrator Marnie, whose day begins with preparations for a dozen friends who will be arriving at her Ann Arbor home that evening with food, wine and a story to accompany the ritual exchange of imaginatively presented cookies – with frequent dance breaks. But she’s also anticipating important news that evening from her older daughter and her husband in San Diego and, in a month, a grandchild from her 18-year-old, whose boyfriend is “a black ex-convict and aspiring rap star.”

Pearlman belongs to a real Christmas cookie club here in Ann Arbor, and reading her bestseller had me fantasizing about how lovely it would be put something like that together with friends whose company I treasure all year round and don’t see as often as I’d like. But then I thought again about the generally sluggish crowd I hang with and how the kinder ones would simply laugh at me. Righto. What say we just meet for pink drinks in January, hmm?

Such a lame crew, I suspect, would mystify Pearlman. Among her commitments: She’s a writer (seven published books). She’s an artist. She’s an adventuresome cook (her latest effort extends to homemade liqueurs). By her own account, the boundary between her family and her friendships is often indistinct.  She has maintained a psychotherapy practice in Ann Arbor even as her writing career became firmly established. And the day we spoke, this mother of three and grandmother of four was looking forward to dancing the night away at the Necto’s Townie Party, despite a lingering cough from a bout of illness that put her off the cookies at this year’s meeting of the club.

‘Sacredizing’ Time

Is she “driven”? Such a harsh word; such a joyless concept. Pearlman calls herself “hyperactive,” but that implies frenzy – movement without purpose. Pearlman gets things done.

Pearlman’s father, she says, “didn’t get to finish his story.” He was in his 40s when he died at home of a heart attack. She was 19; she witnessed it.

“For six months afterward,” she says, “I was wandering around, saying ‘Life is meaningless. Life is meaningless.’ I drove my mother crazy.”

She was obsessed, she said, with the unanswerable question: “How could this amazing, vital man drop dead?”

But then came an epiphany. If life could, indeed, be cut short at any moment, the only way to function meaningfully with the knowledge was to spend “every single day” doing what she loved – “and enough with the bullshit.”

It’s not grim, she says: “I’m just doing things that are fun.”

But the creative life is also a serious business. “I ‘sacredize’ time” to write, she says. “Do the most important thing of your day the first thing of the day.” On her blog, Pearlman shares her routine: “The sun wakes me. I grab espresso coffee and sit before my computer.” She writes until noon, at least five days a week. Such discipline, such commitment, brings joy.

Her published books are mileposts of a sort for her personal and professional lives. The first ones were related to her therapy practice: “Getting Free: Women and Psychotherapy” in 1982 and “Keep the Home Fires Burning: How to Have an Affair With Your Spouse,” in 1985. Then came “Infidelity,” a brave account of the pain that marital betrayal inflicted on her grandmother, her mother and – after 30 years of marriage – on Pearlman herself. Thirty-eight publishers rejected the memoir before a fledgling literary house, MacAdam/Cage, published it in 2000.

Her next project was “Inside the Crips,” written with gang member Colton Simpson and published in 2005. The ambitious and acclaimed account of “life inside L.A.’s most notorious gang” also drew Pearlman deep into a subsequent, headline-making drama when Simpson was charged with acting as the getaway driver in the robbery of an $800 earring from a California department store. In what she has described as a devastating experience, Pearlman was subpoenaed by the prosecution to testify at Simpson’s trial; he is serving a life sentence thanks to the Golden State’s insane “three strikes” law.

Pearlman turned then to fiction – “I thought I could say more” – with “The Christmas Cookie Club” (followed a year later by “The Christmas Cookie Cookbook” with fellow “cookie bitch” Marybeth Bayer of Ann Arbor). Her latest, “A Gift for My Sister” (the paperback will be out in February) follows the stories of Marnie’s daughters, Sky and Tara.

A Tale of Two Sisters

Sky, the older one, is cautious and conventional, a law school graduate who married her childhood sweetheart and is raising a daughter. Tara, a gifted musician with sharp edges forged early by her father’s abandonment, has a rising rap career and an intense but uncertain relationship with the father of her young son.

Pearlman says she had a great time writing “Gift.” It gave her a chance to explore the lives of sisters (she has one brother) and, she says, the two distinct sides of her own personality.

“There have never been times when I haven’t made something,” she says. So why would a restlessly creative soul (like Tara) go after psychotherapist’s credentials instead of an MFA?

“I’m Sky!” she replies. “Sky needed to have a job!” And it helped, she says, that even strangers always seemed to find it easy to open up to her: “I was 14 years old, on a bus, and a woman sitting next to me started to tell me all about an affair she was having.” But she offers a deceptively simple purpose for what she does: “People need someone to witness their lives.”

Pearlman is finishing another novel involving characters from “The Christmas Cookie Club” – no dates for publication yet. And she’s also compiling a book of family recipes for her extended clan – a project for which her new tablet is perfect: “I can do it anywhere!”

And of course, she’s reading: “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell, “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins, “The Art of Fielding” by Chad Harbach get enthusiastic mentions; Julian Barnes’ latest novel, “The Sense of an Ending,” gets raves.

Lately, she’s been tackling Lucretius. In comparing several editions, she says, the divergence of the translations was so disconcerting that she thought, “I’m going to read it in Latin and I can translate it myself.”

Righto.

She says she reconsidered. So let’s presume that Pearlman has chosen a satisfying translation and settled in, maybe with a plate of pecan butter balls and a pink drink. Sometimes pleasure is the greatest good.

The Best Christmas Present Ever?

Plans appear to be in the works for a new downtown bookstore. Huron High grad and former Simon & Schuster sales rep Hilary Lowe and her fiance, video producer Michael Gustafson, pulled up stakes in Brooklyn over the summer and moved to Ann Arbor; they’re looking for a spot to set up shop as Literati. Watch this space for an update.

And Happy New Year.

About the writer: Domenica Trevor lives in Ann Arbor – her columns are published periodically in The Ann Arbor Chronicle. The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our columnists and other contributors. If you’re already supporting The Chronicle, please encourage your friends, neighbors and coworkers to do the same. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle.

Cover of "Ghost Writers"

“The Sin-Eater: A Breviary,” Thomas Lynch’s latest collection of poems from Paraclete Press, presents this world and the next according to Argyle, an insurance policy incarnate for unabsolved offenses and, Lynch writes, “the mouthpiece for my mixed religious feelings.”

“Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them,” part of the Made in Michigan Writers Series from Wayne State University Press, serves up a dozen ghost stories – some fiction, some true in their own way – from some of the state’s finest writers, many of them from the Ann Arbor area. Laura Kasischke (“Space, In Chains” and “The Raising”) and Keith Taylor, whose next poetry collection, “Marginalia for a Natural History,” comes out next month, are the editors as well as contributors.

Taylor, who teaches English at the University of Michigan, and “Ghost Writers” contributor Elizabeth Kostova (“The Historian,” “The Swan Thieves”) will read from the collection at Zingerman’s Roadhouse on Wednesday, Oct. 26, at the sixth annual Vampires’ Ball, a benefit for Food Gatherers. (Hunger. In Washtenaw County. In America. Sin? Horror story? This theme is definitely hanging together here.)

Scary Stories

The standout in “Ghost Writers” is “Not Even Lions and Tigers,” Steve Amick’s wryly funny tale of enforcer Harry Bennett driven mad by the “haints” of strikers and organizers he bloodied in the service of Henry Ford (though, he’d insist to his disappointed ma, “he was in his office for most of it”). As he exhibited so well in his novel “Nothing But a Smile,” Amick is just great at nailing place and period with the energizing element of utterly authentic speech. His Bennett flings off sentences studded with gems like “whorebath,” “hoohaw” and “cooked up the wheeze” (translation: authored the joke). Plus, we get some local history: Harry Bennett, born on Ann Arbor’s Wall Street; stepson of an early member of UM’s engineering faculty; a frustrated artist who raised Wyandotte chickens on his Geddesburg estate. Now you know.

With “Ghost Anecdote,” Kasischke again gives us a story of a bad-ish girl, a dead mom and suburban vice and again leaves us marveling at her lethal skill with the lightning-bolt detail (and, again, imagining she would have been a blast to cut class with in high school). Nicholas Delbanco’s “Pier Road” offers a meditation on what vanishes from a place and what remains: “What are we haunted by, and why?”

Anne-Marie Oomen’s “Bitchathane” introduces us to “spider ghosts,” via the red-haired narrator’s Aunt Toots and in the Upper Peninsula, where women in steel-toed boots do construction work alongside their husbands, have their hearts broken and, sometimes, pieced back together in a tight package of revenge. And this captivating story introduces me to Oomen’s wonderful voice, and will lead me to check out her latest collection of essays, “An American Map” (from Wayne State University Press, 2010).

Scary stuff aside, it’s fun just to do some Michigan sightseeing in the pages of “Ghost Writers.” Greenfield Village. Harbor Springs. At the Detroit Institute of Arts, the up-north high school teacher in Taylor’s “The Man at the Edge” encounters Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry panels – they “all looked as if they pictured disembodied organs of the female reproductive system.” And it’s the place – Michigan – as much as the theme of haunting, of a present given deeper meaning by an undead past – that makes this collection worth the read.

Cover of "The Sin-Eater"

“The ghosts in Michigan, perhaps like ghosts everywhere, seem to stay close to home,” the editors observe in the preface. And to this Taylor’s daughter, Faith, gets off a good one: “‘Well, good for the ghosts! At least they still call it home.’”

The Sacred and Profane

The next generation adds a special dimension as well to “The Sin-Eater.” To accompany “a couple dozen poems, a couple dozen lines each,” are a couple dozen truly fine photographs taken in Ireland by Michael Lynch, the poet’s son. (Another son, Sean, contributes a watercolor.)

Both Milford, Michigan, and Moveen in County Clare are home to Lynch, in whose magnificent “Walking Papers” Argyle made his first appearance. As with “Ghost Writers,” place and the dicey transition to an afterlife are central themes in “The Sin-Eater.” It is medieval (in sensibility if not in time) Ireland, where for a loaf of bread, a bowl of beer and six pence Argyle will squat beside a laid-out corpse, “eating sins and giving souls their blessed rest.” Like any working stiff, there are gigs he prefers more than others:

Maybe steady work with nuns whose vices

were rumored to go down like tapioca.

But no, those clever ladies lived forever

and for all their charities would starve the man

who counted for his feed on their transgressions.

No, most of Argyle’s work comes from rank-and-file sinners, whose resentful mourners may suspect a racket but will cover all the bases nevertheless. And he catches it from both sides. In “Argyle in Carrigaholt,” the “grinning” sin-eater gets chewed out by a prelate “famous for / the loud abhorrence that he preached against / adherence to the ancient superstitions.” But Argyle harbors his own contempt for those “who do a brisk trade in indulgences / and tithes and votive lamps and requiems.”

Cruelty toward the defenseless turns his stomach, and more than once he finds himself in profound solidarity with wronged innocents who succumb to the deadly sin of despair and are denied “requiem or rosary.” This refusal of official mercy is at the heart of two of the collection’s most powerful poems: “Argyle’s Ejaculations” and “He Posits Certain Mysteries.”

The father’s words and the sons’ images create a haunting whole. “The Sin-Eater” is a beautiful work of art.

About the writer: Domenica Trevor lives in Ann Arbor and can be scary when she sets her mind to it. Her columns are published periodically in The Ann Arbor Chronicle. The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our columnists and other contributors. If you’re already supporting The Chronicle, please encourage your friends, neighbors and coworkers to do the same. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle.

Book cover for "The Ugliest House in the World" by Peter Ho Davies.

Two works of fiction by University of Michigan creative writing teacher Peter Ho Davies spent way too much time on my “gotta get to” list. And “The Welsh Girl” (2007) and “The Ugliest House in the World” (1997) were fine company when I finally claimed for them a couple of snowy weeks in February.

“The Ugliest House in the World” (Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin) is a collection of deftly composed short stories that are tragic, comic and often a dead-on blend of the two. They take us from colonial southern Africa to anti-colonial Kuala Lumpur, from Wales to – hilariously – Welsh-speaking Patagonia. (“Butch should have known it would come to this when the Kid started shooting ostriches again.”) And while we know things won’t end well for the British in Natal, the officers’ dining-table tales of heroism in the face of Zulu savagery are a ripping good time.

Davies’ tragicomic pitch is perfect in “The Silver Screen.” Meetings of the central committee of the Fourteenth Branch of the Kuala Lumpur Communist Party also serve as life-study sessions for Lee, an aspiring local artist who paints posters to advertise Hollywood films (the operator of the local movie theater is a comrade):

There was an unwritten law that during meetings Lee would be ignored, while the serious business of world communism was conducted. Yet on certain evenings – the night that Lee was sketching his poster of Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath, for instance – the communists would argue longer and more passionately, with more sweeping strokes of the hand, their heads held higher and their brows creased deeper.

On the other hand, no one would look up from his food the night that Lee was trying to get a likeness of Sydney Greenstreet. They all held their bowls of rice that much closer to their lips and waved their chopsticks before their faces as they talked.

The branch is eventually ordered into the jungle to join the fight against British occupation, and Lee finds himself with the platoon, documenting the drama with his sketchbook and pencil.

There is little to relieve the poignant sorrow in some of the stories. In “Union,” striking Welsh quarrymen struggle to hold their families together and to hold out against the English mine owners who employ starvation and Cornishmen as strikebreakers. In the title story and “I Don’t Know, What Do You Think?” Davies is stealthy in sliding a revelation in here, slipping the tissue off another there, until he’s laid the full, sad state of affairs before you.

He exhibits an unsentimental compassion for human frailty, and there are recurring allusions to what ordinary people risk when they choose to claim simple pleasures. And his narratives are marked by quick bursts of horror – a new lamb is untangled from fence wire, but not before it has lost an eye to a patient crow; a machete-wielding rebel commander gives a fearful villager a swift lesson in the paramount importance of the present moment; a dragoon sergeant crushes a defiant Welshman’s fists with a rifle butt: “The sound of breaking bone could be heard all the way down High Street.”

Book cover for "The Welsh Girl," by Peter Ho Davies.

The centrality and illusoriness of ethnic identity is the unifying theme of Davies’ work (little accident – he was born in Britain to a Welsh father and Chinese mother) and at the heart of “The Welsh Girl.” Outside a village in the hills of North Wales, unwelcome English soldiers have finished a camp that is to house German prisoners seized after D-Day. Many of the villagers are indifferent or feign to be – the English are the real enemy – but the foreigners behind the fence are irresistible to the boys in the village.

Jim, a child evacuee from the Blitz, at first calls them “nasties.” One prisoner in particular – Karsten, whose “smattering” of English gives him the power to choose whether his unit will surrender or burn – fascinates Esther, the Welsh girl of the title and the literal embodiment of cultural ambiguity. A parallel story – that of a German refugee whose language skills are of use in the British interrogation of the captive Rudolf Hess – adds another layer of profound complexity to Davies’ novel, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

“The Welsh Girl” is a remarkable meditation on nationalism as both the impetus to destructive power and a bunker for the powerless. When is a sense of place a curse instead of a comfort? What kind of powers do captives hold? What happens to innocents caught on the fence?

Davies, who is on the faculty of the MFA program in creative writing at UM, says he is at work on a novel and a new collection of stories, “but they’re a couple of years away as yet.” In the meantime, delve into Davies’ backlist. And after you finish “The Welsh Girl,” check out “Deleted Scenes” in the Odds, Ends & Outtakes section of Davies’ website. Yes, there’s more.

The Steads at Nicola’s Books

Ann Arbor’s Erin Stead, who won the 2010 Caldecott Award for her illustrations in “A Sick Day for Amos McGee,” will visit Nicola’s Books with her husband, Philip, the book’s author, at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 8. The store is located in the Westgate Shopping Center, at the corner of Jackson and Maple. And check out a very charming profile of the couple in February’s Ann Arbor Observer.

Book cover of Steve Amick's "Nothing But a Smile."

Score another Michigan literary honor for Ann Arbor dirty-book writer Steve Amick.

Two novels. Two appearances on the annual listing of Michigan Notable Books. And two small-town Michigan libraries that canceled an appearance by Amick when somebody had a chance to actually take a look at the book.

“Nothing But a Smile,” which came out in paperback (Anchor, $15) last month, was chosen by the Michigan Public Library of Michigan as a 2010 notable book. It’s a charming 1940s story about Sal, the owner of a struggling Detroit Chicago photography shop, who comes up with idea of staging – and posing for – girlie pictures to pay the bills until her husband comes home from the war. While it is, in a sense, about soft-core porn and its, ah, uses, “Nothing But a Smile” comes off “decent and true” – which is also how Amick’s hero, Wink, describes his war buddy’s wife.

“It’s an old-fashioned, sweet book,” says the author, “but … yeah, people have sex. That’s how we got here.”

“Smile” also features an Ann Arbor-related plot twist – one that turned out to have an ironic, real-life parallel.

The Michigan Notable Books program chose Waldron District Library for a reading by Amick, but he was uninvited after parts of the story were deemed a bit much for the tastes of some of the library’s patrons.

And that was déjà vu all over again for Amick and the books program.

Amick’s debut novel, “The Lake, the River & the Other Lake,” was named a 2006 Michigan Notable Book and got great reviews. But the sexual situations in that story, of the Michigan lake resort town of Weneshkeen and some of its more colorful characters, were too frank for the Jonesville District Library, which ultimately took a pass on Amick’s scheduled visit.

Amick was taken aback – but admits to a momentary thrill. “We thought possibly they’d pulled the book from their shelves,” he said. “My editor (at Pantheon) and I got very excited, because that would have been a windfall for me. I mean, to have a banned book? That could have translated into dollars!” Fortunately (or not – it depends on who’s getting paid), “Lake” stayed in circulation.

“People came to the first book thinking ‘Oh, this is about a small town, so it must be about very cute, innocent little people,’” Amick said. “I think that has to do with people’s need to categorize things: ‘Oh, he was trying to be Garrison Keillor – but Garrison Keillor wouldn’t write like that!’”

And you’d expect at least a little smut in his second book – it’s about a homegrown girlie pin-up business, after all. But the innocence of the sex in “Smile” is as convincing of the period as seamed stockings and live dance bands on late-night radio.

“I think I made the marketing department a little nuts,” Amick says.

Amick said he wishes there was “a way to shorten the gap” between the time the notable books are announced and the tour is scheduled.

“Percentage-wise, you’re lucky as a library, especially a small library with few resources, to get somebody to come and do this. It’s kind of a big gift – you’re picked,” Amick said. The libraries apply for consideration “and they don’t know who they’re going to get from the list, and by the time they’re told who you are they probably haven’t read your book. “

Amick says his “Smile” tour schedule includes Central Lake, Spring Lake and Allendale Morenci and Monroe to St. Joseph and Grand Rapids.

Making the 2010 list puts Amick in the company of Bonnie Jo Campbell, Brad Leithauser, Mitch Albom and other writers from Michigan and the across the country. Publishers range from Wayne State University to Norton and Knopf and the list includes a pair of titles from University of Michigan Press: “Isadore’s Secret: Sin, Murder, and Confession in a Northern Michigan Town,” by Mardi Link, and “Bath Massacre: America’s First School Bombing,” by Arnie Bernstein.

“I love the small towns and I love being part of the program,” Amick said. “I’m not setting out to write about Michigan, but it turns out that it’s becoming an important context for me.”

“This is a Michigan boy, born and bred.”

Amick spoke by phone on a Saturday afternoon – outside his Ann Arbor house, so as not to disturb his napping son. “When he’s up, he’s up,” dad said of 3-year-old Huck Lightning, “and I’m writing in the middle of the night.” (Okay. But if you name your kid after a dangerously insightful juvenile delinquent and a manifestation of atmospheric electricity, aren’t you begging for trouble?) He’s working on a novel that “has a lot to do with the culture of celebrity bios and that sort of thing.”

It is set in the 1930s, and Amick says the book will take readers from Escanaba and Traverse City to Hollywood and Belgium. A la E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime,” he says, “some very unexpected real-life celebrities have walked into the book.”

But next up for publication is a “novella-like short story” about Harry Bennett – Henry Ford’s enforcer – from Bennett’s “fairly troubling point of view,” Amick says. Should readers look forward to something even more lurid than the cracked skulls of striking autoworkers?

Says Amick: “I should never underestimate my ability to offend people.”

About the writer: Domenica Trevor is a voracious reader who lives in Ann Arbor and doesn’t mind reading a little smut now and then.

Book cover of "Wild Bells to the Wild Sky" – not written by J.D. Salinger or the author of this column.

He can say that again.

Or not, because he died last month. But Jerome (whom, I should make clear, I never met) and I do have that in common. We both spared ourselves the haunting, humiliating spectacle of publication, although he had to learn the hard way and produce an American classic first.

I, on the other hand, wrote a romance novel so bad as to be unfit for print.

Let’s understand one thing. Everybody loves some kind of trash sometime. Tabloid gossip is, of course, the biggie. In a class I’m taking on probate law at Eastern Michigan University, the professor brought up Michael Jackson’s kids to illustrate how the rights of the surviving parent to custody are ironclad unless those rights have been terminated by a court. “The minute he died,” we were told, “she could have pulled up to Neverland and grabbed those kids. She – heck, I don’t even remember that woman’s na–”

“Debbie Rowe!!” volunteered way too many of my classmates.

Trash, trash, irresistible trash.

Over Thanksgiving, my sister-in-law kept checking out the newly exploded Tiger Woods scandal. “TMZ!” she grinned, waving her iPhone at me across the table. Silly thing. Doesn’t she know that TMZ is what you look at when your employer is paying you to do something else?

According to my calculations, when I worked at The Ann Arbor News pulling wire copy about celebrity “news,” Si Newhouse paid me $27.71 plus pro-rated health, tuition and retirement benefits to read the mean things Alec Baldwin called his adolescent daughter. Recorded on an answering machine, no less. A “little pig”? Ow! I don’t remember much else about that episode, except that in its wake he threatened to quit the acting business (not before NBC cancels “30 Rock” – please!) and that his kid’s name is Ireland. Ireland Baldwin. Swear to god.

No, Sorry. Vampires Are Trash (Except for Dracula)

What was my point here? Oh, yes. My point is that it was not my own valuable time I was wasting. No. I was having trashy fun on a billionaire’s dime.

Trash, trash, fun trash. Everybody loves it, and until very recently most of us were too embarrassed to own up to our specific brand (vampires, say, or Madonna, or “Fantasy Island”) unless it qualified as camp or until it became the subject of doctoral dissertations. This is especially true of men, at least as far as literary trash goes.

Book cover for "The Battle at the Moons of Hell"

Take my husband and dopey science fiction. I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure he eats it up. Occasionally he’ll send one of his brothers a stack of paperbacks to clear some space on his shelves. He says they are about string theory. I suspect he’s lying because the covers feature stuff like robots shooting fire out of their eyes, and you never see that sort of thing on “NOVA” even when it’s a Neil deGrasse Tyson night.

The men in his family frequently engage in e-mail debate over the worthiness of the latest gimmick-heavy comic-book movie or the merits of one laser-‘em-up computer game over another. But here’s the best part: When these guys get together for holidays, they’ll hold forth loudly on black holes or the expansion of the universe or the nature of perceivable reality, and they’re not fooling anybody because each one of them will sneak off at some point to play with little Cody’s “Star Wars” Legos thingie. Trash, trash, dorky trash.

The first romance novel I ever read was a contemporary story by the doyenne of virginal romance fiction, Barbara Cartland. I checked it out of the public library. I can’t recall why I picked it up, but I couldn’t put it down. The woman on the cover looked like Fredo’s bimbo wife in “Godfather II” and the guy resembled George Chakiris in “West Side Story,” only meaner. Of course it was trash; even a seventh-grader could figure that out.

I can’t recall how the blonde ended up an unwilling resident of George’s magnificent estate, but there she was and the servants treated her like a queen all day while George managed his ranch or whatever, and every night an elaborate dinner for two would be served and he would sneer at her by candlelight and she would haughtily demand her freedom, and then he’d spend a couple of hours kissing her passionately before leaving her to toss and turn alone until dawn. In the end she realized she was in love with George and they got married and you could just guess what they did after that because Barbara Cartland certainly wasn’t going to tell you.

My mother saw me curled up in chair, my face in this book. “Why are you bothering with that stuff?” she asked mildly. “It’s trash.”

When we were growing up Mom would frequently sweep her hand in the direction of the University of Chicago Great Books, which held pride of place in the living room bookcase. She and Dad bought that set in the ’50s, when they really didn’t have much money to spare. Aristotle! The Federalist Papers! Darwin! These were important ideas!

But what book was open, face down, on the end table when we got up to go to school in the morning? The one beside her empty coffee cup and the ashtray and the remnants of a slice of lemon meringue pie? “Mistress of Mellyn” by Victoria Holt, thank you very much.

Summer Love

I love that Mom’s trash was so resolutely chaste. I, however, discovered the unprecedentedly steamy “The Flame and the Flower” by Kathleen Woodiwiss during the summer of the Watergate hearings, which were spiced up by a romance, too. No, not John and Martha Mitchell. Remember Maureen Dean, the soignee blonde who sat loyally behind husband John while he tattled on the Nixon administration? Her striking good looks were even more intriguing because, as some of you surely recall, even for the ’70s, John Dean was a serious dweeb.

Book cover of "On the Night of the Seventh Moon."

Anyhoo, that summer I scoped out Mo Dean during the hearings and gobbled up the story of Heather, whose raven-haired, violet-eyed loveliness of course meant big trouble from her step-uncle or some such lech. She takes flight one night in the belief that she has slain the cad in a struggle to preserve her honor. Roaming the dark streets of some English port city, Heather is soon snatched up by a pair of ruffians who take her to a ship, which she thinks is a jail but it isn’t, and Brandon, the captain of the ship, thinks she’s a prostitute, which she isn’t, and … well.

What happened next is what often happened in historical romance novels written in the 1970s. The heroine is raped by the, um, “hero.” And she ends up falling in love with him anyway. Now, at that time I was more than vaguely aware that what Brandon had done to Heather was bad, but clearly the repugnance of rape as a convenient plotting device hadn’t fully sunk in. Women spoke up and publishers eventually got the message: “Sweet Savage Love” can be a wild romp, but sexual assault is no longer an opportunity for meet-cute.

College is, of course, a time for more ethereal means of escapism. But I still found time to inhale the occasional bodice-ripper. I toyed with the idea of writing my own, but historical romances are a lot of work even if they do get away with inserting such unlikely elements as frequent bathing during the time of William the Conqueror.

After college I got a job with a regular wage and paid vacation time – which at the time I actually believed to be a permanent condition of adulthood. Talk about trashy fiction! For several summers in a row, my best friend from journalism school and I drove from central Illinois to Nag’s Head, N.C. In the back seat were the latest additions to our substantial and growing collection of Harlequin and Silhouette romances that featured plucky lady reporters.

In Nag’s Head we found a kind of bliss that was never to be recaptured. Jan and I discovered this amazing place called the Brew Thru: we could stock up on a week’s supply of beer without even getting out of the car! (Years later, Jan’s eyes brimmed with nostalgic tears when I pointed out Ann Arbor’s very own Beer Depot.) Cold Pop-Tarts for breakfast, Ritz crackers and Velveeta for dinner, and day after blistering day of beer on the beach with wonderfully bad books.

We’d read the best lines aloud to each other:

“Lexie wasn’t the kind of obsessive reporter who read the newspaper every single day. She hungered for a real life.”

“Vanya stifled a glower of annoyance and flashed his ice blue eyes at the inquiring correspondent.”

“She hurled her pen aside. ‘Shut up and kiss me!’ she spat.”

I came away from those seaside summer vacations with a chronic skin allergy caused by too much sun and, even better, the soul-searing knowledge that I could write a category romance every bit as awful as the ones Jan and I traded back and forth from our side-by-side beach chairs on the hot sands of the Outer Banks.

Time to Get Plucky

Fast-forward to Ann Arbor, 1992. Husband and I want to buy a house. But this was a long, long, time ago, in the days of what was known as the “down payment.” We had none. What to do?

I set to work, pluckily, on a tale of the wounded, impoverished widow of a crazy young man whose rich and grudge-bearing parents want to make her life a living hell but will settle for custody of their adorable grandson. She meets a guy who is hardened by his own heartbreak. He’s aloof, she’s tormented, he’s baffled, she’s leery, passion smolders and they resist it and waver and come together and part again and then it ignites ka-blammo! … and when the smoke clears they iron out the remaining complications and it’s all good and she isn’t poor anymore.

The most rewarding part of crafting my story was reading the hot parts to Jan. Invariably I’d catch her at work: “You’re not one of those obsessive journalists who pays attention to deadlines, are you? Of course you’re not. Put down those sewer commission minutes and listen to this.” Then I’d read her a draft of one of my novel’s excruciatingly cheesy sex scenes, none of which shall be available for review here or anywhere else as long as I live.

After some six months of dogged labor, I confidently mailed a query letter, a synopsis, the first three chapters and my pen name to Silhouette.

In no time they wrote back, requesting the entire manuscript.

GOOOOOAAAL!

Off it went, and I sat back to await that packet that would be so fat it would barely fit through the mail slot. The one that would whisper “contract,” hotly, into my shell-like ear. The one that fairly throbbed with the promise of sweet, so-long-denied, only-dared-to-be-dreamt-of money.

A few weeks later a one-page letter arrived from Silhouette to inform me that “while you write very well, we suspect that your heart really isn’t in this.”

WHAT? They could tell? They could see the difference between a heartfelt love story and, well, trash?

Like J.D. Salinger in his long later period, I was spared the humiliation of publication. I mean, really. If you had ever aspired to be a serious writer, do you really want “The Cashier and the Cowboy” on your vitae unless you really loved that cowboy and really felt that cashier’s pain? My cynical effort sits on a bookshelf, reminding me of my own time wasted and that, maybe, someday, there might be even more reward to sincere effort than the effort itself.

Still, all’s well that ends well.

Fifteen years later, my husband and I find that the fates have assigned us to that strange subspecies of 21st century American homeowner that actually owes less on their house than what the market says it’s worth.

As it turned out, we didn’t need a down payment. In 1995, my husband was still eligible for a VA mortgage. How vividly I recall the night he revealed the existence of this secret treasure …

She watched him at his computer, his strong, intelligent profile bathed in the electric-blue light that pulsed from the monitor. Manic asteroids, pinpoints of pixelated color, skittered and flashed as he fired away at them, his hand skilled and sure on the joystick.

“If only I had known!” She felt herself sway, buffeted by a sudden gust of white-hot feeling that threatened to overwhelm her, to rob her of reason. “Why? Why didn’t you think to tell me, before … before I… did what I did?”

“I dunno,” he murmured, his focus rock-steady, unblinking. Zap! Whoosh! Beepbeep! Boodledeebip! “I guess I forgot.”

It was as if her hands had, in that instant, claimed a life of their own. They trembled with it. They reached out for him. Inexorably. Irresistibly. She wrapped her fingers around the warm, muscular column of his neck … tight, tighter ….

Who the Hell Is Heidi Montag?

People magazine is my trash of choice nowadays. Every eight weeks or so I pay a visit to my hairdresser, and while she works her magic I catch up on the red-carpet photos of actresses in fabulous gowns and update my count of the number of kids in the Brangelina household. Jennifer Aniston celebrated her 41st birthday in Mexico, in a sombrero, with her toned arms and her best girlfriends. George Clooney? Oh, yeah.

But this isn’t going to do it for me much longer. Easily 80% of the “famous” people in People are people I never heard of. Jason? Kristen? Zac? Huh? Never mind why I should care that Heidi Montag can’t move her face – who the hell is Heidi Montag? It gets to the point where you wonder what Mo Dean is up to these days.

Well, I’ll tell you. She’s enjoying Salinger’s “marvelous peace.” The one that comes from not publishing.

Mo’s first novel, “Washington Wives,” came out in 1988. Her second, in 1992, was “Capitol Secrets”: “Aiming to be the first female speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives,” blurbed Library Journal, “Rep. Laura Cristen unexpectedly learns that the cosmetics company she founded is about to secretly distribute a mind-control drug. “

They’re both out of print. Dawn Treader, here I come.

About the writer: Domenica Trevor is a voracious reader and gratefully unpublished romance novelist who lives in Ann Arbor.

Domenica Trevor

Once upon a time there lived a pretty lady named Jiselle who was always a bridesmaid and never a bride. But one night she is swept off her feet by a handsome pilot with green eyes and a tragic past. He proposes! She says yes!

But the “happily ever after” part snags on a few complications. Her new husband spends way more time in flight than he does at home. He has three motherless kids, one of them a middle-schooler with the mother of all attitudes. Jiselle’s own mother has an attitude of her own, marked by a particular contempt for unreliable charmers and her own daughter’s pathetic naïveté.

Oh – and a deadly plague is sweeping the land.

“In A Perfect World” is a dystopian fairy tale by Chelsea novelist and poet Laura Kasischke, set in an America whose citizens have become global pariahs – shunned, quarantined and loathed as potential carriers of the gruesomely fatal Phoenix flu. A distant war drags on vaguely. The power grid fails for hours and then days, and then for good. The mysterious plague kills the rich and famous along with everybody else.

In the small Midwestern town of St. Sophia, “regular codes of conduct” give way to casual licentiousness. Fearless rats hang out in the drugstore parking lot like a gang of bored teenagers. The schools eventually close and so do the malls, and soon there’s no going to the office in the morning, either. The local newspaper manages to publish an occasional edition with feel-good items about the Boy Scouts; it has stopped running obituaries altogether.

High drama of the apocalyptic kind is scarce in this novel, hence much of its allure. As often in Kasischke’s fiction, including “The Life Before Her Eyes” (which a few years ago was made into a film starring Uma Thurman), creepy developments glide through the same door as the day’s ordinary doings. And as what Kasischke calls “a trickle of disasters” seeps in from the coasts, “In A Perfect World” becomes a tale of quiet, determined domesticity. Jiselle and the children plan trips to the increasingly barren grocery store, pass the evenings with games by candlelight and husband the firewood in anticipation of winter. Jiselle does what a mother must, and while the family unit contracts with death and despair it expands, too, nourished by a primal love swept clear of grudge and resentment by the demands of existential crisis. Life goes on, will go on.

Book cover for "In A Perfect World" by Laura Kasischke.

Kasischke says she knew when she began her latest novel – it arrives in bookstores next week – that it would be “about motherhood … the primacy of the children and the family.” But like Jiselle, Kasischke ended up with a story unlike the one she’d initially envisioned. What finally emerged as “In A Perfect World,” she says, was a manuscript half the length of the original draft.

“Until I get really far into it and then start pruning things away I really don’t think it’s going to be a novel,” she says. “I always think, ‘well, this probably won’t work out.’” But when she has a novel in progress, “I always have something to think about. It’s like people who carry their knitting around with them. … I can be sitting in a meeting doing my knitting, and no one even knows.”

Her early research for “Perfect World” led Kasischke to plague histories and accounts of the Crusades. But only a few pages into the story, it is hard not to feel thrown back into the dark ages of George Bush the Second: “You think the Europeans have any sympathy for us?” Jiselle’s neighbor tells her; he has armed himself with a rifle and a year’s supply of water and advises her to do the same. “Ha! We burned that bridge, and all the other bridges are burning as we speak.” But political commentary wasn’t necessarily Kasischke’s intention.

“I think I had bird flu in mind, and I had wars and anti-American sentiment and that sort of thing,” she says of the time when the novel was taking shape. But she adds: “I don’t know that I feel like things have radically changed, as far as that sort of thing goes, since he’s out of office. I mean – now we’ve got the swine flu.”

Author Laura Kasischke in her Angell Hall office at the University of Michigan.

Still, in the form of running communiqués from an ever-receding mass media, Kasischke wryly observes how American society makes sense and nonsense out of disaster. Trendy spirituality and other absurdities of popular culture initially rise to the challenge: A flourishing crop of gimmicky evangelists push atonement, silver-bullet nutrients, back-to-the-land movements or various forms of positive thinking. There’s something called the “Whale Prayer Project”; “New Amish” groups lay the blame on radiation from cellphones. Inevitably, as the panic mounts, mobs go after SUV drivers with baseball bats. And the market segment that rejects introspection is served, too: “If you don’t want to hear the bad news out there, folks,” a radio announcer shouts, “we’re just playing music and telling really stupid jokes!” We know it’s grim when only the roughest of raw staples remain on the supermarket shelves and the celebrity rags at the checkout are chillingly out of date.

This is Kasischke’s seventh novel. She teaches creative writing in the Residential College and the MFA program at the University of Michigan; before joining UM she taught writers at Washtenaw Community College. She has also written several books of poetry.

“Writing poetry,” Kasischke says, “is a high-energy thing that only happens once in a while.” But reading and writing it, she says, enhances the imagery in her prose. True – from “In A Perfect World,” here’s a description of hummingbirds outside the family’s cabin:

One night at dusk, there’d been masses of them swarming … glistening and iridescent and beating their wings in a supernatural blur. They zigzagged through the air around the house as if they were working together to sew an elaborate net, tying the house to the ground.

Kasischke remarks on what she calls the “really lively” community of performance poets when asked about the local literary scene. But, she adds, “we’re yet to see what happens now that Shaman Drum is gone. … It would be bad if the only writing community stuff that lasts now is at the university, because of course that excludes so many people.”

Kasischke is taking a break from teaching at UM this term; she received a Guggenheim fellowship that’s allowing her to complete a book of poems. And she’s working on another novel.

More from an interview with Laura Kasischke:

On “In A Perfect World”: “I knew I wanted it to have these fairy-tale elements. … I always see so many fairy tales as having a dark undercurrent, anyway.”

On why she writes: “I really do love it. It helps to get published and all, but if you’re looking for validation, all you have to do is look at the next bad review.”

Her favorite novels: She mentions Edith Wharton’s “Ethan Frome,” Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway.”

What she’s been reading lately: “Await Your Reply,” by Ohio writer Dan Chaon, and “a lot of poetry in translation.”

On the literary community: “We’ll have to see if something takes the place of Shaman Drum, because I think that’s what brought a lot of people together.”

“In A Perfect World,” by Laura Kasischke, is being published in October by Harper Perennial.

About the writer: Domenica Trevor is a voracious reader who lives in Ann Arbor.

Robin Agnew

[Editor's note: Robin Agnew and her husband Jamie own Aunt Agatha's mystery bookstore in Ann Arbor. She also helps run the annual Kerrytown BookFest.] 

“Shanghaied” by Eric Stone (Bleak House Books: hardcover $24.95; paperback $14.95)

“I love Chinese food. But sometimes China doesn’t do much for my appetite.” – Ray Sharp

Though this novel might at the beginning be categorized along with books by writers like Barry Eisler, Brent Ghelfi and maybe even Lee Child, halfway through Eric Stone turns his action story on its ear in an entirely unexpected way.

This is the fourth book in a series featuring detective Ray Sharp, a Hong Kong-based investigator who does “due diligence” investigations with his partner, the Chinese-Mexican dwarf Wen Lei Yue. As the story opens Ray and Lei are looking into a missing monk. What they can’t decide is if the monk is just having a little illicit fun or if the monk is the money man for his well-endowed monastery, in which case his disappearance is more worrisome.

The missing monk, however, is merely the kick-off for a non-stop action and adventure story through the streets of Hong Kong and eventually Shanghai. Stone is very adept as weaving the feel of the city into the narrative, so while you’re breathlessly following Ray and Lei on their quest, you’re also absorbing some details of life in Hong Kong. The book is set slightly in the past – on the day after the 1997 handover of Hong Kong by the British back to the Chinese. This is a place, the reader begins to feel, where anything might happen.

The complicated permutations of the plot eventually lead Ray and Lei to a shady banker, possible Triad involvement, and the workings of both slave labor and prostitution. The latter seems ubiquitous, and Ray – to his ultimate detriment – has a weakness for what his friend Lei calls putas. The complicated interweaving of his partner’s life and his, their mutual sense of right and wrong, and their dedication to uncovering the truth naturally lead them into a lot of trouble.

Most noteworthy is Lei’s growing involvement with a prostitute nicknamed “Big Breasted Korean Housewife,” someone who Ray has uncovered as an unlikely lead. When the monk is discovered murdered (not a surprise, really), the “Korean Housewife” is a big help to both partners. Unexpected to me was the shift in narrative about halfway through the book from Ray to Lei, and the gruesome depiction of her re-addiction to heroin. To me this was the strongest, and most disturbing, part of the novel.

Also integral to the plot is a depiction of a factory in Shanghai where the “workers” have been brought in from the country on the promise of fantastic (to them) wages, and where they end up living as virtual slaves, indentured to the factory owners who use them more or less like animals. Also highlighted are the way so called “snakeheads” are paid a fantastic fee to bring human cargo across the ocean in metal containers (Jeffrey Deaver covers this same horrible topic in his excellent book, “The Stone Monkey”) on a similar promise, of better wages in Mexico or the U.S.

In the end, though, Stone’s focus isn’t on the society as a whole or even on the non-stop action of the plot, but on the very human feelings and reactions of both Ray and Lei. If you’re like me, these are characters that you’ll be invested in by the time you close the covers of the book – and you’ll want to know more. This is a well-written and compelling book, and if you are at all interested in this area of the world, it’s well worth a look.

Editor’s note: Author Eric Stone will be giving a presentation at Aunt Agatha’s on Saturday, July 11 at 3 p.m. He’ll discuss his books, set in modern Shanghai where he worked as a journalist. 

“Last Known Address” by Theresa Schwegel (Minotaur Books, $24.99)

Theresa Schwegel is that rare writer who embraces mystery as a genre – the police novel in particular – and also transcends it. The eye for human behavior she brings to her books is preternaturally precocious. Schwegel is a young woman, but all of human behavior seems like an open book to her.  A simple description of a single girl dressing to go out – “I’m single. Leg is important.” – says a lot without saying more than it needs to. You get the picture.

Schwegel’s new novel is the chilling story of a serial rapist, and she uses her trademark first person/present tense to tell the rape victim’s stories from their point of view. It’s a scary, effective, and ultimately moving technique. The cop in charge of the investigation, Sloan Pearson, is a youngish woman whose personal life is a mess, whose partner lets things slide, and who herself has the kind of relentless eye for detail all good cops seem to have. Unfortunately, in this case her eye for detail gets her into trouble.

The subtext of the book – and it’s not really too “sub” – is the treatment of women. While rape victims are an obvious illustration (and Schwegel takes you through a rape exam with an insensitive male doctor), less obvious and less straightforward are the ways Sloane herself makes her way through the world, and the way she’s treated by all the men around her. She’s even slotted herself – much in part to her childhood – as the caretaker to her father, her boyfriend, and even, to a degree, her partner.

Mixed into this is the atmosphere at work – the jokiness and the dismissal of women as an entirety – and the interactions she has with the men around her sometimes make her job seem almost unbearable. Here Schwegel is entering territory tread by other authors like Lillian O’Donnell, Barbara D’Amato and Leslie Glass, who all wrote about female cops in a male world. Schwegel seems to bring the extra subtlety of all human behavior into her observations, which seem less like observations and more like a documentary or primer on human behavior written by a master observer.

The plot is terrific too, as Schwegel folds a seemingly unrelated string of rapes into a high tension narrative that takes in, very Chicago like, the world of political corruption that surrounds her city and her job. There’s also the business of Sloan’s personal life, which is a mess, and which Schwegel explicates in a straightforward fashion, holding back details until the right moment. This is a gifted writer who combines narrative skill, character development and an ability to take in the entire surroundings of her character (also known as setting) with panache and seeming ease. Even better, the book leaves you thinking. This writer is fast becoming one of the crown jewels of mystery fiction.

Robin Agnew

[Editor's note: Robin Agnew and her husband Jamie own Aunt Agatha's mystery bookstore in Ann Arbor. She also helps run the annual Kerrytown BookFest.]

“The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu” by Michael Stanley (Harper, $24.99)

As everyone knows, there is a very famous series of books set in Botswana, by Alexander McCall-Smith. McCall-Smith’s delicate prose is matched by the charm of his main character, Precious Ramotswe. Now there is a new series set in Botswana, with a slightly darker take, though the main character, Detective Kubu, would surely be friendly with Precious were they to meet.

Detective Kubu (the Botswana word for “Hippo”) is hugely fat and hugely smart. If Precious is the African Miss Marple, then Kubu is the African Nero Wolfe. Kubu and Wolfe both share a deep appreciation for the pleasures of the table, and both of them have brains that work best with their eyes closed.

The settings in the book are so gorgeously rendered you can almost see and hear them, and obviously the writers have a deep love for their subject. The mystery is in the classic vein: the scene opens at a tourist camp where two of the guests have been murdered and one of them has disappeared. Detective Kubu is put in charge of the case, which turns out to be remarkably complex and involves the horrors of the Rhodesian Civil War (there’s a note about it in the book in case you need to brush up). This is a very rich novel – rich setting, rich characters, and many of them with a complicated story that is told in a kind of laid back way. The author has his own rhythm, but if you give yourself time to adjust to it (as with a Tony Hillerman novel, for example) the pleasures are many.

Making this book even more delightful are the snippets of Kubu’s home life with his wife, Joy. (Every woman in the book has a wonderful name like “Joy” or “Pleasant” or “Beauty.”)  I think the inclusion of Kubu’s strong marriage and his weekly visits to his parents flesh out more than anything what life might be like for a normal African living in a city. While Kubu relishes his time in the bush investigating the crimes at the Jackalberry camp, he also longs for home, where a good meal and a good bottle of wine are always available.

The crimes at the camp are almost Agatha Christie-like as each member of the camp, visitor or owner, turns out to have a tie or a motive to the crimes. Even more puzzling is the character of the deceased, Goodluck Tinubu himself, who appears to be a good-hearted teacher, yet all signs point to him being a drug runner. None of the easy assumptions make sense to Kubu, who is, after all, a gifted detective in the classic mode. His determination is paired with his desire to finish a case that ends up endangering his beloved Joy, and makes him, like a charging hippo, hard to stop once he gets going. Clues are many and various and while the astute reader may pick up on some of them, plenty of them aren’t so obvious.

Detective Kubu is a gift to mystery readers – he’s an instant classic. These books are a shade darker than McCall-Smith’s, including rape, drugs, and several brutal murders, but the surroundings are just as comfortable. Somehow, only two outings in, I feel certain that Kubu will get to the bottom of everything.

“The Collaborator of Bethlehem” by Matt Beynon Rees (Mariner Books, $13.95)

“It was a mistake to think that detection was a matter of figuring out what had happened in the past and then taking revenge for it.  He understood now that it was about protecting the future from the people that committed evil and who would do so again.”

When enough customers ask you about a certain author in a short period of time, it makes you take notice. When several of my more discerning “guy” readers mentioned Matt Rees as a wonderful writer, I was intrigued enough to pick up the first book. Rees was a longtime bureau chief for Time in Jerusalem, and his familiarity with the area certainly shows. The book is set in Bethlehem, with characters that are a mix of all the peoples that crowd into this tiny area – Jews, Christians, Muslims, Palestinians. The central character, Omar Yussef, teaches at a UN Refugee school. He is a Muslim originally from Palestine, and his view of the world is out of sync with many of those around him.

He remembers with fondness a time when differences were more tolerated; the violence and suicide bombings that surround him now fill him with anger. He’s 56, an age where he teeters on retirement, and he knows his way of seeing the world – through a veil of politeness and civility – is long past, but he feels that if he can just get his message through to a few of his students, his time on earth will not have been wasted.

This is a large, rich, complex chunk to bite off and work with, and the wonder is that not only was Rees apparently a gifted journalist, he is also a gifted novelist, with a real ability to breathe life and emotion into the characters he writes about. After reading this book it’s almost upsetting to me that Omar Yussef is not actually a real person. More than that, the way he sets up the story is the work of a full blown pro. Yussef meets one of his students, George Saba, for coffee. George has recently brought his family back to Bethelehem from Chile, and he is not sure it was the right decision, even though his children can now live with, and know, their grandfather. George is also one of the students that Yussef feels was a success – George’s kindness and decency, he hopes, came about partly because of his teaching.

The second part of the set-up is the next scene, where George and his family are crouched in their apartment, hoping to avoid the sniper fire that is whizzing around them. The bullets are imbedding themselves in the walls of his apartment – over the heads of his children –and he is angry. He goes up on the roof with an antique gun (so rusted it can’t be loaded or fired) and threatens the gunmen with it, telling them to leave. Right then I was invested completely in the story, but then Rees takes it one better: next day comes the news that George has been arrested as a collaborator. Yussef is stricken – he knows his friend is innocent – but in Bethlehem innocence and guilt mean very little, something he already knows, but which is hammered home to him throughout his quest to save George from inevitable execution.

Yussef, who is able to accept and adapt to many of the vagaries of life in such a violent corner of the world, is continually frustrated in his quest to free George. His old friend Khamis Zeydan, now the frequently drunk police chief of Bethlehem, seems like he might be involved, and Yussef questions even this old friendship. The “collaborator” of the title is not only the innocent George Saba, but almost every one else who lives in and around Israel and the West Bank.

Rees is able – like the very best of novelists – to convey absolute horror without sentimentality. Some of the things that happen in this book will probably haunt you, but they also seem like things that can and do happen. The real bit of grace in the book is the way Yussef chooses to deal with what happens. He shows that even a somewhat frail 56 year old can find a reason to move ahead in the world. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

Elmore Leonard, left, signs a copy of "Road Dogs" for Derek and Laura Ortega after Thursday night's panel discussion at the Ann Arbor District Library.

If you own a mystery bookstore, you want to hold an event with Elmore Leonard. That’s what Jamie Agnew, co-owner of Aunt Agatha’s mystery bookstore in Ann Arbor, told a crowd at the Ann Arbor District Library downtown Thursday evening, while introducing Leonard. Partnering with the library to bring the famed author to town, Aunt Agatha’s was living the dream.

Leonard – who has written over 40 Western and crime/mystery books since his first was published in the 1950s – sat down for a joint interview with his son Peter Leonard (also a crime writer, with two novels under his belt and a third on the way). Fellow Western and mystery author Loren Estleman acted as the interviewer.

The three writers – all Michigan natives – spoke to more than 200 people in the library’s multipurpose room. Every seat in the audience was taken. People who couldn’t find chairs leaned against the walls, novels by the Leonards and Estleman in their arms for the book signing to follow.

Although it was technically an interview, the dynamic between the three authors was more like that of a casual conversation. Seated at the front of the crowded room, they shared their feelings on everything from prologues to writing tools to dealing with editors, often drawing appreciative laughter from the audience with their anecdotes.

One of the first questions Estleman asked was for the younger Leonard: Why did he take so long to get into writing fiction?

Peter Leonard explained that he wrote short stories in college and one six-page short story after he finished school. “I sent the six-page short story to my father…and he sent back his three-page critique,” he recalled, drawing laughter from the audience.

Peter Leonard said his father compared his characters to “strips of leather drying in the sun,” in that they all looked and sounded the same. “And of course, he was right.” After a pause, he concluded (to more audience laughter), “I didn’t write fiction for 27 years.”

Later on, Elmore Leonard helped his son revise the manuscript of his first book, “Quiver.”

Elmore Leonard suggested working the back story in the first chapter of the draft into later sections, Peter Leonard said.

“One of my rules is never use a prologue, no matter what you write,” Elmore Leonard said on Thursday. “It’s always back story, and you can always sprinkle it in other places.”

Although they said they don’t share ideas, they both find inspiration for scenes at family gatherings: a word or expression that comes up in conversation might be included in a future book, Peter Leonard explained. But they don’t compete either.

“I don’t think writers compete,” Elmore Leonard said. “I think they’re all doing separate things in their own style.”

Another topic Estleman brought up was dealing with editors. Elmore Leonard mentioned that his editor doesn’t like what he’s working on now – a novel called “Djibouti.”

“He’s been negative about everything about the book I’m writing, even the title,” Elmore Leonard said. “’Djibouti.’ How can you not like ‘Djibouti’?”

He didn’t seem too concerned with the negative feedback, saying that his editor would come around eventually. From there, he started recalling encounters with past editors, drawing more laughter from the audience.

“One before said, ‘This book ends rather abruptly,’” Elmore Leonard said. “And I said, ‘Well, but it’s over!’”

Both of the Leonards previously worked in advertising. Estleman wanted to know if it had helped their writing.

Peter Leonard said it didn’t have any effect on his work now, although he did get ideas for characters based on people he worked with.

“I had a purchasing agent who was giving me a hard time,” he said. “I made him a gay prison chaplain.”

Elmore Leonard said he also puts the names of people he knows into his books, calling it a way to say “hello.” 

“Sometimes I put an editor’s name in there, just to see if he’s read the book,” he said.

As for how the Leonards capture the dialogue and personalities of criminals in their books, Elmore Leonard said he had talked to inmates in a few places, including the Wayne County Jail. He said he also uses articles he reads about convicts as references. And sometimes he just makes it up.

“I pick it up different places, different ways,” he said.

“I haven’t hung around criminals,” Peter Leonard said of his characters. “I just made them up.”

Finally, the authors talked about other writers who inspire them. Elmore Leonard said Hemingway was a big influence for him for a while. “By the mid-fifties, I’d realized that Hemingway did not exercise a sense of humor in his writing,” he  said.

Peter Leonard also said Hemingway had an impact on him, along with Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men.”

“My father has been a great influence,” Peter Leonard added. “There have been a lot of writers.”

Estleman shared his influences as well, including Edith Wharton, Jack London and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” by Ron Hansen. He recommended the “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” by George V. Higgins.

Elmore Leonard agreed: “I think ‘Friends of Eddie Coyle’ is the best crime book written.”

After the talk was over, Kerri Pepperman was one of many people standing in line to have their books signed by the authors. Pepperman carried three copies of Elmore Leonard’s newest novel “Road Dogs” in her arms; she explained they were for her, her mother and her brother.

Pepperman, who described herself as a big Elmore Leonard fan since her teenage years, said she liked the humor and dialogue in his writing.

“I thought it was great,” Pepperman said of the authors’ interview that night. “It was really interesting how it really became just a conversation.”

Away from the line, Jim Lowry removed stacks of books from a brown paper grocery bag. He brought nine total for the authors to sign: three for Elmore Leonard, two for Peter Leonard and four for Estleman (“Which isn’t many, actually,” he remarked).

“I’ve been a big fan of Elmore and also of Loren Estleman for many years,” Lowry said. “I love hearing the insights to how they work.”

Jenny Hoffman, the Ann Arbor District Library community relations assistant, said the library’s multipurpose room was filled to capacity, with overflow. The event was also simultaneously broadcast to another room for those who came after the main room was full. Overall, 222 people showed up to see the Leonards and Estleman.

“I think it was a great event,” Hoffman said. “We were thrilled to have these authors come.”

About the writer: Helen Nevius, a student at Eastern Michigan University, is an intern with The Ann Arbor Chronicle.