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Alafair to Remember: Alafair Burke at Murder on the Beach

3/8/2016

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     I arrived at the Murder on the Beach bookstore in Delray Beach, Florida, fifteen minutes early for mystery writer Alafair Burke’s speaking engagement. I sat in my car. February 15th was a Monday, after all, and I didn’t want to be nerd-early, pretending to browse as I waited for the event to begin. At ten minutes to seven, I walked in to find the place nearly full.
     Murder on the Beach is a small mystery bookstore with blood red walls and strategically ripped crime scene tape strewn around the doorways. On Monday night, many of the floating bookshelves had been pushed into corners to make room. It was a packed house. Nearly thirty people showed up, and extra chairs had to be brought out from the back room.
     Alafair Burke is the author of two mystery book series. She is currently on a publicity tour for her latest novel, The Ex, a stand alone mystery centering around a prosecutor, Olivia Randall, whose ex-boyfriend, Jack, calls her from the police station asking for legal help. Jack is a chronically sweet man, and Olivia expects his legal trouble to be some trivial mix-up. But no, Jack stands accused of triple homicide. The novel asks the question, did Olivia ever know Jack at all?
     Many members of the audience seemed familiar with Burke’s previous novels, but some did not. Burke began the event by introducing herself and sharing her background. She was a prosecutor in Portland, Oregon, and an avid reader of mysteries. She found herself skimming any scene featuring a prosecutor. She found them to be cardboard cutouts who never contributed to the mystery. This didn’t line up with how Burke experienced prosecutorial work. Being a prosecutor was fascinating, and so she decided to try her hand at writing a mystery novel of her own. (She has some advantages here. Her father is none other than crime novelist James Lee Burke.)
     She opened with a joke. “I used to be a prosecutor, but now I’m a law professor and novelist,” Burke said. “I’ve gotten very good at enunciating when I say that. I once told a man at a dinner party that I used to be a prosti.... Needless to say, he misunderstood my background and found me a lot less interesting when I turned out to be a lawyer.” This much is certain, Burke is comfortable in front of a crowd, and she spent a solid twenty minutes talking about her background, both with the law and with writing. She then opened the floor for thirty minutes of Q & A, and everybody’s hands shot up. Some had questions about her writing process, and about her family.
“Would you ever collaborate with your father?” one man asked. “Not if we wanted to stay friends after,” she quipped.
     After half an hour, she brought the Q & A to a close, though it felt as if one or two people might have had more questions. To me, this is a testament to her ability to work a room. There is nothing more painful than when somebody stands in front of a room and asks two, three, even four times, if anybody has any more questions. She left the audience wanting more.
     I was in the minority last night, because I went into the event unfamiliar with Burke’s writing. This will not be the case for long. She was charming, and her description of The Ex had me headed to the register where I bought a copy for her to sign.

         —Jaimie Eubanks
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Tim Dorsey at Murder on the Beach, February 11, 2016

2/11/2016

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     Murder on the Beach welcomed Tim Dorsey to Delray Beach’s artsy Pineapple Grove district on Tuesday night. The author is currently touring to promote his 19th Serge Storms novel, Coconut Cowboy (see my review on our Crime Fiction page). Dorsey began by saying that Murder on the Beach is one of the few stores at which he has stopped on all nineteen of his book tours.
     I’ve probably attended at least a dozen Dorsey appearances, and he’s never been one to read from his books. Very fan friendly, Dorsey prefers more of a roundtable-like vibe and opens the floor to questions right off the bat. The very first question, which came as news to me, an obviously slacking Tim Dorsey fan, was in regards to the progress of the TV show.
     WHAT?
     Yes, the author confirmed, Florida Roadkill, Dorsey’s first novel, which has been optioned for film countless times, is coming to the small screen in the form of a series. (Please be HBO or FX! Please please please!) No casting has been announced yet, but the show will be produced by Sonar Entertainment, which also produces MTV’s The Shannara Chronicles and the upcoming FX miniseries Taboo, starring Tom Hardy.
     Dorsey said he had to keep the news under wraps for about seven months. It wasn’t until he was greeted by hundreds of congratulatory emails and social media posts one morning that he knew how serious things had become. Sonar had released news of the show to industry trade magazines. Still, after seeing his novel optioned for film numerous times, Dorsey isn’t allowing his expectations to soar too high.
     “Next year I’ll be coming around telling you what went wrong,” he said.
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Tim Dorsey at Murder on the Beach with Coconut Cowboy and Serge regalia.
     The tone got serious for a bit, as one audience member asked Dorsey at what age he started writing, which presented the author with an opportunity to rage against the public education machine.
     “Boys are at a higher risk of becoming non-readers,” he said, “because schools make every effort to turn them off to reading with horrible curriculum. They make boys read stuff like Beowulf. It’s no wonder kids are like ‘This is what reading is? No thanks.’”
     He added that he was lucky enough to start reading authors like Vonnegut, which made him want to write.
     Dorsey was asked how, in a state known for odd news (In the last few days a guy threw an alligator at a fast food worker), he decides which stories to use and which to let go.
     “It really is an embarrassment of riches,” he said.
      Dorsey related an experience his daughter, a fast food worker herself, shared with him last year. A customer approached her counter, and he was the kind of guy we’ve all bumped into at least once in our lives, who makes every effort to let any and every person near him know exactly how important he is. Dressed head-to-toe in designer clothes and dangling a pair of $300 sunglasses from his mouth, the man loudly asked of the manager, “How much would it be for me to reserve the next franchise in this market?” Essentially saying to all around, “You may be buying the food, but I can but the restaurant.”
     After eating his meal, Daddy Warbucks approached the counter and ordered a cookie, which he paid for by removing two dollars and change from Dorsey’s daughter’s tip jar.
     Dorsey mentioned that was finishing a novel when heard this, and had to stop to make a note for his next one. Needless to say, Coconut Cowboy features an encounter eerily similar to that, only Serge and Coleman are there to witness it. Naturally, Serge refuses to let the deed go unpunished.
     That’s where he differs from his character, Dorsey says. “I have the impulse control Serge lacks,” he said. “But I still have to think these things that Serge does.”
     Dorsey calls Serge a vessel through which all of those who take the high road when faced with the rudeness Dorsey believes is pervasive in modern society can live.
     “Through Serge they are able to live out the things they would like to do.”

          —Ed Irvin

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Tim Dorsey at Murder on the Beach 2/10/2015

2/11/2015

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    Tim Dorsey was in Delray Beach on Tuesday to promote his newest Serge Storms novel, Shark Skin Suite. As always, Dorsey was introduced by Murder on the Beach's Joanne Sinchuk, who recently graced the cover of Where to Retire magazine. Sinchuk began by listing the authors who will be appearing at Murder on the Beach in the near future. When she mentioned Stuart Woods Dorsey laughed so hard he nearly spit his coffee on guests sitting in the front row. 
     "Stuart Woods is such a wonderful human being," Dorsey said..
     "He's much better now that he's married for the fifth time," Sinchuk replied.
     Apparently Woods has a reputation for being cantankerous.
     Dorsey always shares tales from the road—he averages 105.2 appearances a year—from the people he meets to the research he gets to do while driving across the state. "So many funny things happen during the course of a tour," he said. He's met people so enamored with his Florida-phile protagonist they've gotten tattoos of book covers and various Serge-isms, something that Dorsey acknowledges is an honor. "I don't have the sales," he said. "But Grisham doesn't have the tattoos."  
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    During the Q&A Dorsey was asked how he finds the quaint, back road places that Serge frequents. "When I go into an area," Dorsey said, "I map it the way a cat maps a house or NASA mapped the moon." 
   
He was also asked how long he has to be off his meds before Serge comes out. He responded with a story from a past book tour, during which he was asked to speak at a fundraiser. As he was addressing a large auditorium Dorsey had to do his best to contain a violent case of the giggles. One of the event organizers was standing at the back of the room, the audience turned away from her, trying to signal the author to put the microphone closer to his face. Unbeknownst to her, though, she was using the international hand signal for performing fellatio on a man, her hand going back and forth in front of her mouth while wrapped around an invisible microphone.

     "My literary goal is to get my dignity back," Dorsey said at the end of the story.
    I've attended at least one Dorsey reading for the last six novels and often find myself annoyed by people who ask questions I've heard countless times. If I've heard someone ask, "Who would you like to see play Serge in a movie?" dozens of times I can imagine how many times Dorsey has heard it. He always handles the questions with diplomacy, though. His go-to reply has always been, "If someone wants to turn my books into movies I don't care who plays Serge." Or something to that effect.
    
On Tuesday Dorsey took a different approach to the question. "Normally I avoid answering that question," he admitted. "But, although he's too old to play the character now, I would think Christopher Walken, mainly because I would like to see him deliver one of Serge's death monologues."

     Shark Skin Suite has a much different vibe than his previous novels. Half of the book is every bit a Serge novel, while the other half is written much like a legal thriller. In each of Dorsey's books the author estimates that Serge appears on only forty percent of the pages, thanks to the many plot threads going on. But forty percent is enough for the character not to go stale or seem too contrived.
     "Serge is like super-hot sauce in a bowl of chili," Dorsey said. "It may be just a drop but it feels like it's everywhere."

            —Ed Irvin
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James W. Hall at Murder on the Beach 1/15/15

1/16/2015

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    James W. Hall is working on a new recurring character and he asked a small crowd of fans at Murder on the Beach what characteristics they are drawn to in a character. Character-wise I've got no idea but, if he's looking for a name, perhaps it should be Storm, because one has followed Hall to Delray Beach for the last two years.
 
    A monsoon kept the crowds at bay for Hall's appearance to promote last year's Going Dark. There were four people, including me, that night, for what turned into more of a fireside chat than a reading. While it was stormy last night, the wind and rain weren't at monsoon levels, so the audience was a little bigger. Keep in mind, the previous times I've seen Hall at Murder on the Beach the store was SRO. Still, the author's discussion of his newest, and possibly last, Thorn novel, The Big Finish, was just as intimate as last year's.
    Hall started by talking about the pitfalls of book touring itself, saying that by the end of a book tour he wants to talk about any book other than his own. The disjointed path his tour has taken him on surely isn't helping maters. He flew into Jacksonville for an event earlier this week, then came south to Vero Beach. Makes sense. Then his itinerary took him to northwest to St. Petersburg, then back east to Murder on the Beach. From Delray he will head back to Tampa, before driving cross-state to Jacksonville to fly out. Maybe publicists should be required to minor in geography. (That's my own opinion, not the author's.)
     As far as The Big Finish goes, Hall said he started with the title, something he never does. Thorn was never intended to be a recurring character, Hall said, adding that "publishers over the years have bullied me into continuing with Thorn."
     "If I would have known that he was going to be around for thirty years I would've done him differently," the author said.
      The Big Finish takes Thorn out of his comfort zone in Key Largo and into the mountains of North Carolina in search of his son, Flynn Moss, who Hall says is "Thorn to the tenth power." Thorn is what might be called an old-school environmentalist. He loves being on the water and realizes the symbiotic relationship man has with nature, but he isn't in any hurry to join a protest. Flynn, a member of an eco-activist group called the Earth Liberation Front, or ELF, "has that DNA, but he takes it to another level."
     Of The Big Finish and its theme of the damage concentrated industrial farming can do to the environment Hall said "This book isn't my soapbox," before jokingly saying that "I just thought it was high time that someone wrote a thriller set on a pig farm."
     Is this really the end of Thorn, though? "At the very least," Hall said, "I need a break from Thorn; Although I'm not sure if this is The Big Finish."
            —Ed Irvin
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