First Thrills Anthology

My short story, “The Thief,” is coming out in an anthology June 22 from Forge Books. Other featured authors are Lee Child, Steve Berry, Sean Michael Bailey, Ken Bruen, Ryan Brown, Bill Cameron, Rebecca Cantrell, Stephen Coonts, Jeffery Deaver, Karen Dionne, JT Ellison, Theo Gangi, Rip Gerber, Heather Graham, Alex Kava and Deb Carlin, John Lescroart, John Lutz and Lise S. Baker, CJ Lyons, Grant McKenzie, Michael Palmer with Daniel James Palmer, Marc Paoletti, Cynthia Robinson, Karin Slaughter, Kelli Stanley, and Wendy Corsi Staub. This anthology is a great mix of established authors and some first-timers, so it promises a good blend of thriller shorts stories. At risk of sounding overly promotional (hell, it is my website), I will say that of all the short stories I’ve written, “The Thief” is the one closest to my heart. I hope all you out there in Readersville will pick up the anthology and check out all these great tales from known authors and some fresh talent new to the game.

New Comics and Bad-Ass Covers

Sorry I’ve been a bit behind schedule posting here – been busy in the writer’s room for V.

Here’s the skinny on new comics – I have a story called RED MERCURY in a Super Issue, art by CP Smith and one of my favorite covers of all time by Rafa Garres.

Marvel released a collection of Vengeance of the Moon Knight 1-3 so folks can catch up.

A new Moon Knight featuring Deadpool comes out next – pencils by Tan Eng Huat, Dan Brown on colors (and cover by Adi Granov).

And the last in the SHOCK AND AWE first arc of Vengeance came out – KNIGHT FALLS. Pencils by Jerome Opena (and Jay Leisten), colors by Paul Mount, cover by Leinil Francis Yu. I had a blast writing this arc, and I’m glad it’s come to its conclusion…Full steam ahead!

Wednesday Dec 16, All Hell Breaks Loose

Vengeance of the Moon Knight #4, cover thanks to Leinil Yu. Now we’re at my favorite part of an arc – endless kick-ass action.

Jump on it now since the first three sold out their first day.

Spoken Interludes, New York – Bizarrely Personal Q&A

Spoken Interludes, an old-fashioned salon-style spoken word event run by the delightful Delauné Michel, is one of my favorites. As authors, we have time to present our work, reading to a restaurant full of readers happily satiated with good food and drink. And there are always terrific questions afterward – the gig tends to feature the most engaged audiences.

This time around, after a brief reading, I get into personal therapy, humiliating summer jobs, and childhood resentments. What could be better?

I shared the stage with Justin Fox, author of The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street – a terrific guy who offered some next-level insights into the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into – and Julie Metz, who wrote Perfection, a memoir about the path of discovery she went on after her husband dropped dead and she found on his computer numerous trails to various relationships he’d been maintaining in not-so-secret. You may have seen her on that little Chicago talk show.

Here’s the link. I’m the last third of the clip. Hope you enjoy.

Moon Knight #3: The Bushman Cometh

Recognize this purdy face from your childhood stack o comics? Well, he’s back – steel teeth and all – in comic shops today. Hope you enjoy. And for those of you snooty folks who only read well-reviewed comics, get a load of this. See – you can read comics AND feel good about yourself! (The other day I was stretched out in bed reading me some Goon and my wife came in and regarded me with cocked eyebrow and I remarked, “Not now, dear, I’m working.”).

I shall end comic book Wednesday with two Questions of the Day: From which comic is the following line (my new favorite line)?: “That thing don’t kill you….It mates with you.”

And the second question is thus: “Which famous performer gave his baby daughter the middle name CrimeFighter?”

Moon Knight 2nd Printing/Alternate Title

“MOON KNIGHT–?! BUT WE THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD!”

“MAYBE I WAS, BOYS, BUT I’M BACK NOW…BACK WITH A VENGEANCE.”
–Doug Moench

On sale today, the David Finch variant. In case you missed the first edition/sell-out.

“Murder Mystery” by Nina Storey – a song based on The Crime Writer

So one of my readers – who incidentally has become my favorite LA singer – wrote a song based on The Crime Writer/I See You called “Murder Mystery” – top link. I have to say, listening to it ranks up there as one of the coolest things to happen to me this year. She really gets the book and delves into the themes and dark undercurrents, while also putting them on their ear and making a whimsical love song. So people, welcome to the music stylings of the fabulous Nina Storey. Check her tour schedule – she’s got some NY dates coming up, and always lots of LA. She’s a great talent, an old-fashioned torch singer, blues artist, or jazz singer, and her voice is versatile and startling. My favorite song (before “Murder Mystery”) is a number called “This Naked Woman” – video here – one of the steamiest songs to fog up the car windows in some time. I met Nina at a “wake” for Brian Azzarello’s 100 Bullets at Meltdown Comics in Hollywood. She started singing at the party and within a few moments, the party had completely silenced, enraptured by her voice.

Again, you can stream or download “Murder Mystery” here.

Punisher #75: The Swan Song

Double issue featuring short stories by Charlie Huston and Ken Lashley, Peter Milligan and Tomm Coker, me and Das Pastoras, and Thomas Piccirilli and (one of my favorite artists) Laurence Campbell. This issue will clear the decks, making way for Jason Aaron and Steve Dillon’s MAX relaunch. The cover art is staggering – I love the “Central Park as a grave” motif portrayed by the good Reverend Dave Johnson, and Steve Dillon drew a helluva variant. These stories go back to the source, playing on Castle’s origin. I was really goddamned excited to write a tale that touches on that fateful day in Central Park and the birth of the Man as we know him now.

Moon Knight #2 Cover (and Zombie Variant!) and Signing

Is there anything better than a zombie variant cover? I thought not. MK2 hits stands today – go early since #1 sold out in a day (wa-hoo).

I’ll be signing today at: Galaxy of Comics, Van Nuys, from 12:30-2.

A Drive Through the City: Writing About LA

The prospect of writing a crime novel based in Los Angeles was so daunting that I had to live here three years before trying. If I was going to take on a city already explored by Chandler and Ellroy, Crais and Connelly, I wanted to make sure that I knew it. That I had some way to make this place live and breathe, to take readers beyond the fake tans and the Hollywood sign into the beating heart of a city where anything is possible.

Most everyone (except for the eleven people, including my wife, actually born here) come to L.A. looking for something. It’s an intriguing city, full of promise, but it’s also a place where dreams come to be strangled. A lot of bitterness and glamour, resentment and money—a rich, dark undercurrent to all that glitz. Which, of course, makes it a great place for crime.

I wrote five novels that took place in Los Angeles before I wrote what I consider an L.A. novel. The Crime Writer, my eighth, is an L.A. novel because it couldn’t take place anywhere else. It’s about crime and story and infamy, and it features a protagonist who finds himself in that hottest of all spotlights—the L.A. high-profile murder trial. And so it required a more intense grounding in the streets and alleys and personalities of this place.

There’s a convention, in fiction centered here, of the drive—whether real or imagined—through the city. When I hit a certain point in my first draft, I found it was time to write my own dirty noir love song to Los Angeles. The virtual tour of the city comes through the eyes of Drew Danner, my protagonist, as he sits on his back deck and takes stock of a town that has dismissed him as another lurid cautionary tale. After, he observes, “My cheeks were wet with the breeze and the swell of my heart for the lights below. Los Angeles. A mirage of a town that sprang up like a cold sweat on the backs of gold diggers and railroad workers, and took form when pirate film distributors, fleeing Edison’s patents, took a train and a gamble backed by East Coast muscle. Los Angeles, land of endless promise. And endless failure….L.A. of the high-octane sunset, the warm night air that leaves you drunk. L.A. of the prolonged adolescence, the slow-motion seduction, the ageless, replaceable blonde. L.A. where a porn star runs for governor and an action figure wins. L.A. where anything can happen at any time to some poor schmuck or lucky bastard. Where anything can happen to you. Where anything had happened to me.”

And that’s really it, isn’t it? That sense of possibility—good and bad.

In addition to the obvious—crime and punishment, Rodeo and Sunset—L.A. is a city of hidden textures, of many hues. People come here searching for, above all else, identity. No one here is a caterer or bartender—we are all rock stars and dancers, installation artists and cinematographers. Everyone is on the run from a past more ordinary than they’d like to admit, toward a dream they can never fully attain. This search for identity is something I literalize in my latest book, Trust No One. Nick Horrigan had his life taken away after his stepfather’s murder when he was seventeen. For reasons unclear to him, he was forced away from his family and on the run, and as the book opens, he’s returned to this city, to Los Angeles, to seek his identity. He is an ordinary guy, like you or me. Like so many Angelinos, he wants to know who exactly he is, what he’s running from, what he’s moving toward. And we meet him, on page one, on the worst night of his life. His world is about to explode in on him. He’s dragged from his bed to a waiting helicopter where he’s told that a terrorist has just seized control of a nuclear power plant—and will only talk to Nick. This confrontation will lead, of course, back to the events of Nick’s childhood—back to his identity. And there is no better place for this to unfold than against the backdrop of a city that lives to repackage faces and names and sell them the world over.

There’s the fun stuff, too, of course. The trends and fads, the day spas and conceptual dining experiences. My wife took me to a restaurant a while back without telling me what dinner would entail. I was stripped of my cell phone and led by a blind woman through several dense curtains into a pitch black room. We ate in perfect darkness, an experience that was supposed to (and did) heighten our sense of taste. But the entire time, I was thinking, What a great place for something awful to happen! A mysterious meet, a stranger who has information but doesn’t want his face known….As my mind wandered, one of the key chapters of Trust No One took shape. Perhaps that defines L.A. more than anything else: It’s difficult to concentrate here or chew your steak—there’s always a scene waiting to happen.

–Gregg Hurwitz, Los Angeles, 2009

This essay originally appeared in Mystery Readers Journal

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