On a related note, Julia Holmes and I participated in a roundtable on first books for Hobart recently. We had the chance to discuss the editorial process, as well as a host of other matters. Many fine writers were involved, and you can read the whole conversation here.

What else? Soon I leave for Germany, to speak to the German people about Handbuch für Detektive. But first I’m off to a super secret stronghold in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Speaking of which, here’s a little video about beards.

GUARD
What is your destination?

WRITER
Toronto, for two days. I’m attending a conference.

GUARD
What kind of conference?

WRITER
It’s for mystery fiction.

GUARD
Ah. What is your favorite kind?

WRITER
My favorite wine?

GUARD
No, your favorite kind. Kind of mystery. You like murder mysteries? Ghosts?

WRITER
Yes, the weird kind. Ghosts are good.

GUARD
And you write mysteries? Have you printed anything?

WRITER
Printed? My first book was published last year.

GUARD
Do you have a copy?

(At this point, a little terrified as I dug out a Manual of Detection paperback, I was beginning to think of the final scene of Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch. But the guard only took the book and set it down in his booth.)

GUARD
OK, how much?

WRITER
You want to buy the book?

GUARD
Well, it’s mine now. How much should I pay you for it?

WRITER
Alright. Ten dollars.

GUARD
This is a used copy. Do you have a new one?

WRITER
No, I’m sorry.

GUARD
Then you’ll have to sign this. Sign it to Sophie.

(The guard gave me ten dollars Canadian, returned the book, and handed me a pen. I started to sign.)

GUARD
Can’t you write bigger than that?

WRITER
Yes, sir.

(I have small handwriting but I did my best. The guard took back the book and the pen.)

GUARD
Do you have any firearms, weapons, mace, or pepper spray?

WRITER
No, sir. Who’s Sophie?

GUARD
She is my wife. Me, I like to support the arts. But this better be a good book.

WRITER
I hope she enjoys it.

GUARD
I hope so too. OK, you move along.

On the way home, I decided to cross at Niagara instead. Getting back into the U.S. turned out to be a different kind of experience. The American guard took the keys to my car, opened the back hatch, and searched through everything there—leaving clothes out and bags unzipped, as my traveling companion and I later discovered.

The Hammett Prize thin man, pictured (for purposes of scale) next to one of Small Beer Press's World Fantasy Awards.

He also discovered some apparent contraband: copies of the five free books given to everyone who attended the conference, which I’d completely forgotten about and hadn’t thought to declare. He wanted to know why I hadn’t told him about these books, and threatened to fine me, and to confiscate everything I’d acquired in Canada.

If he’d gone through with his threat, he’d now have some great reading material, as well as a shiny new Dashiell Hammett Prize. But in the end he let us go, and the thin man sculpture is safe at home.

I often feel like a border-crossing nomad in my writing life. Mostly I try to pretend that the borders—between genres, between forms—don’t exist, or can be redrawn as needed. So far, thanks to the many wonderful readers and writers of various communities, as well as organizations like the International Association of Crime Writers and the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, that experience has been more like the former border crossing and not at all like the latter. I’m sincerely grateful.

In other words, mystery folks, thanks for letting me be weird. And thanks, fantasy folks, for letting me smuggle in all those guns and trench coats. I’ll see you on the other side.

You have to give them back, though.

The paperback tour for The Manual of Detection brought me on Thursday to Portland, OR. It was my first time in that city, though I knew a bit about it from the many friends who live(d) there, and from Benjamin Parzybok’s novel Couch. I made the pilgrimage to the Powell’s mothership, did an interview for Reading Local, bought a pile of zines and ephemera from Reading Frenzy, then read to a wonderfully warm crowd at Powell’s on Hawthorne while the rain pattered on the roof. Ben Parzybok was there, and after I refused to answer his question during the Q&A, we went to a Thai restaurant called Pok Pok. There, I was faced with a conundrum: Do I eat boar? It turns out that yes, under the right circumstances, I do eat boar.

I was telling Ben and his wife, writer Laura Moulton, and their friend, writer Lisa Hoashi, about how much I appreciate the yellow umbrellas, made available for public use, that I’d been seeing around the Northwest. They said they had no idea what I was talking about, but then, right there in front of Pok Pok, we spotted a repository of these umbrellas, so they knew I wasn’t crazy.

It's like a hall of mirrors, except with books instead of mirrors.

I wish I could have seen more of Portland, but it was off to Berkeley the next day for a signing at Dark Carnival. This is an extraordinary place, a labyrinth of science fiction, fantasy, and mystery books, spilling out of the shelves to pile over the carpet and the stairs. You have to climb over the kids reading comics on the floor and duck under inflatable monsters to find what you’re looking for—in my case a copy of Gene Wolfe’s The Urth of the New Sun.

At Dark Carnival I made some more mystery bookmarks. This one here is waiting in a copy of The Manual of Detection for someone to find.

Later I was reunited, after eleven years, with my friend Deborah Steinberg, a writer who also sings in Conspiracy of Venus (check out their cover of Rain Dogs!). We attended a MediaARTS event curated by Tanya Vlach, which was a bit like a rave, except everyone was in theater seats and watching—well, it’s hard to describe. How about: “an exhibition of the intersection of emerging technology, performance, and the moving image attempting to compute what it means to love and to lose.” The performance by Ghosts and Strings was especially good, and I also liked the floating video cube that ocul8r made.

On Saturday I visited the Belmont Library, saw the headquarters of Tachyon Publications, and read with Laurie R. King for the SF in SF series. Among the many fine people in attendance was Edward Gauvin, whose excellent translations of stories by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud are forthcoming in book form from Small Beer Press.

I had an early flight home the next day, and just when I thought I might meet someone who isn’t a writer, it turned out that my cab driver has written four books, including this one.

I guess now it’s time to write something other than blog posts, mystery bookmarks, and LOST haiku for a while.

Goodbye, goodbye, California.

A few updates from the road. I had some extra time in Chicago, so I went with my friend Sondra (snailsaregood.blogspot.com) to visit the Art Institute, which is free in February (thanks, Big Shoulders!).

The French sure know how to promenade.

We explored the excellent collection of impressionist art, visited the American wing, and then spent some time among the Thorne Miniature Rooms, which make one wish for a shrink ray. I saw the work of Ivan Albright for the first time; his Picture of Dorian Grey is appropriately nightmarish, and it’s hard to stand in front of it for long. The Art Institute has on display some iconic works of American art, which are always worth seeing in person, if only because the experience can breathe fresh life into too-familiar images. There’s one bench with a view of both American Gothic and Nighthawks—I highly recommend sitting on that bench for a while.

The reading at 57th Street Books was an intimate affair—there was a blizzard on its way—but those in attendance had some great questions, and I made everyone a bookmark. Everyone , that is, except the gentleman who left a bit early, as though to avoid the matter of bookmarks as soon as I brought it up.

That blizzard kept me in Chicago an extra day, and that’s when the extraordinary news came in that The Manual of Detection is a finalist for the 2010 Hammett Prize. Here’s the full lists of nominees:

• Megan Abbott, BURY ME DEEP (Simon & Schuster)
• Ace Atkins, DEVIL’S GARDEN (Putnam)
• Jedediah Berry, THE MANUAL OF DETECTION (The Penguin Press)
• Walter Mosley, THE LONG FALL (Riverhead)
• George Pelecanos, THE WAY HOME (Little, Brown)

I’m deeply honored to be in such fine company, and it’s especially exciting to see Megan Abbott on the list. I had the opportunity to do a reading with Megan last year, and I’ve been a fan of her work ever since. More information on the Hammett Prize is available from the International Association of Crime Writers.

I’ve now arrived in Seattle, where I just signed books at Seattle Mystery Bookshop. I made some more bookmarks there, and wrote about that and some other things for the store’s blog.

Tonight at 7 I’ll read at The Elliott Bay Book Company. If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll come by. It’s raining, but if this tube of lip balm I found today is any indication, then there are plenty of umbrellas in this town.

In addition to reading from The Manual of Detection (just out in paperback), I may also read something new, something that changes every time I read it because it’s written on a pile of index cards that I shuffle every day. Also, I’ll be giving away handcrafted bookmarks, each with a mystery conjured just for you, on the spot.

Other ways to track my movements: facebook, twitter, booktour, spy satellite. I hope that I’m coming to your town and I hope you’ll say hello.

Monday, February 8, 6pm
Seminary Co-op
57th Street Books
1301 East 57th Street, Chicago, IL

Wednesday, February 10, 12pm
Seattle Mystery Bookshop
117 Cherry Street, Seattle, WA

Wednesday, February 10, 7pm
Elliott Bay Book Company
101 S Main Street, Seattle, WA

Thursday, February 11, 7:30pm
Powell’s Books on Hawthorne
3723 SE Hawthorne Boulevard, Portland, OR

Friday, February 12, 5:30pm
Dark Carnival Books
3086 Claremont Avenue, Berkeley, CA

Saturday, February 13, 1:30pm
Belmont Library
1110 Alameda de Las Pulgas, Belmont, CA

Saturday, February 13, 7pm
Variety Preview Room
582 Market Street @ Montgomery
San Francisco, CA

From: Great & Mysterious Powers

Re: The Crawford Award

By the time you see this, you may or may not have slept. The phone call you received last night from Gary K. Wolfe, esteemed science fiction editor and critic (not to be confused with Gary K. Wolf, creator of Roger Rabbit), left you giddy, disorientated, and exhilarated. You were, after all, at a gas station somewhere off Connecticut’s Merritt Parkway when Mr. Wolfe informed you that you’d been named winner of the 2010 IAFA Crawford Award for your novel, The Manual of Detection. You were also parked in a 15-minute parking space—and are these, you couldn’t help wondering as they passed, those fifteen minutes?

Afterward, you went into the gas station, wandered the isles for a while, forgot what you were doing there, and left. You called your brother and mumbled incomprehensibly. You sent a text message to a friend. That text message consisted of the letter “a,” repeated perhaps two dozen times, followed by the letter “h” and several exclamation points. Minutes later, you remembered how to drive, continued onward to New York, missed every exit you were supposed to take, and regained consciousness somewhere in Chinatown. Luckily, you knew the way from Canal Street to your sister’s apartment in Brooklyn, and your sister knew the way from there to a good bar.

The second person perspective has never much appealed to you, but certainly you’ll allow us to communicate this much: that receiving the Crawford Award is one of the coolest things you can imagine happening. No wonder you can’t sleep.

Now get yourself together: the paperback’s out today and you’re giving a reading in a few hours.

•

Some additional information, now being reported by Locus:

The award committee shortlisted Deborah Biancotti’s collection A Book of Endings, Kari Sperring’s novel Living with Ghosts, and Ali Shaw’s novel The Girl With Glass Feet, and wanted to commend two other authors whose works were ineligible this year but were highly regarded: Robert V.S. Redick, whose The Red Wolf Conspiracy appeared in 2008 and whose The Ruling Sea appears in 2010, and Michal Ajvaz, whose The Other City originally appeared in Czech in 1993 but was first translated into English by Gerald Turner in 2009.

I’m thrilled and honored to be among the nominees, and deeply grateful to the members of the IAFA for this recognition.

Here are some things you’ll find in this book:

• typewriters and telephones, often in pairs
• a mummy with modern-day dental work (suspicious, no?)
• a carnival in ruins
• the author’s dog (see page 79)
• one instance of the word “eldritch”
• some advice on investigative techniques including shadowing, surveillance, skulduggery, and dream detection
• somnambulists
• the answer to that most ancient of riddles: what does the pretty young lady have in her lunchbox?

Here are some nice things people have said about the book:

“This debut novel weaves the kind of mannered fantasy that might result if Wes Anderson were to adapt Kafka…. [Berry creates] the feeling of inhabiting a strange and haunting dream, with its own persuasive logic and somnambulant pacing.”
—The New Yorker

“[Berry] defies many mystery novel conventions, but adventurous readers who stay with his strange and fabulous debut work will be handsomely rewarded…. There is nothing mysterious about the appeal of this inventive, outrageous and often amusing dream-within-a-dream.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“The plot’s bursting with as many twists and surprises as you could hope for…. It steams along the smooth rails of Berry’s neatly constructed sentences, barreling round each well-cambered turn with barely a judder.”
—London Review of Books

“Jedediah Berry has an ear well-tuned to the styles of the detective story from Holmes to Spade and can reproduce atmosphere with loving skill.”
—Michael Moorcock

“Inventive, atmospheric, and fiendishly delightful. If you’ve ever fallen under the spell of Borges, Ray Bradbury, or Angela Carter, I urge you to acquire your own copy of The Manual of Detection.”
—Kelly Link

There are many events and readings planned for the weeks ahead, in cities and townships including Brooklyn, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. All the details are available on the sidebar to the left, on this google calendar, and at BookTour. Please come out and say hello.

More information on the book, including links to purchase a copy of your own, are available on The Manual of Detection page.

While working on The Manual of Detection, I did a good bit of research into the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. My own Agency’s logo (an open eye) and motto (“Never Sleeping”) were adapted from those of the Pinkertons, and intended in part as a nod to that outfit’s influence on the conception of my fictional mystery-solving organization. Both found their way onto the hardcover edition of the book, and that design, by Glenn O’Neill, was just voted best crime fiction cover of 2009 over on The Rap Sheet blog.

The Pinkertons have a fascinating history. Allan Pinkerton, founder of the agency, served as security to President Lincoln during the Civil War, and prevented an assassination attempt. (He wasn’t there at Ford’s Theater that other time.) The Pinkertons earned a degree of infamy during the events of the Homestead Strike of 1892. They were feared by outlaws, and were hired to track Jesse James as well as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. There is, according to this wikipedia article, a federal law still on the books which prohibits Pinkerton employees from working for the United States government.

What I didn’t know until recently was that Allan Pinkerton published several collections of real-life detective stories, “transcribed from the Records” of the Pinkerton Agency. All are in the public domain, and have been made available in electronic editions at feedbooks.com. I’m looking forward to reading these, and I wish I’d known about them a few years ago. In the preface to one volume, Mr. Pinkerton writes:

If there be any incidental embellishment, it is so slight that the actors in these scenes from the drama of life would never themselves detect it; and if the incidents seem to the reader at all marvelous or improbable, I can but remind him, in the words of the old adage, that “Truth is stranger than fiction.”

Indeed. Feedbooks also has on display some of the wonderful old cover designs for those books. Of particular note—to me, at least—is the cover of The Expressman and the Detective, with its green cover and gold foil never-sleeping stare. And for reasons which anyone who’s read The Manual of Detection will understand, the title The Somnambulist and the Detectives came as a fine surprise.

The paperback design for my book is quite different—“Magritte noir,” I’ve been calling it. The paperback will be available from Penguin on January 26th, and I’ll have more to say about it soon.