Craig McDonald

In 2006, Craig McDonald published Art in the Blood, a collection of probing, long-form interviews with 20 major crime writers that was immediately hailed as a definitive text in the study of modern crime and mystery fiction. Now McDonald a genuine expert on the history of crime fiction (Eddie Mueller, San Francisco Chronicle) returns with Rogue Males, a collection of no-holds-barred interviews with 16 authors who have shaped and defined narrative fiction and songwriting.Rogue Males includes conversations with crime fiction legends Elmore Leonard and James Crumley (in one of his last interviews); premier stylists James Sallis and Daniel Woodrell; noir kingpins James Ellroy and Ken Bruen, and top thriller writers Lee Child and Randy Wayne White. Stephen J. Cannell and Max Allan Collins hold forth on the intersection of crime novels and the silver screen while Andrew Vachss, Pete Dexter, Craig Holden, Alistair MacLeod, Tom Russell and Kinky Friedman round-out this one-of-a kind collection on the craft of writing an array of mavericks, trailblazers and the gadflies. Men of conscience, entrepreneurs and magnificent bastards, as McDonald puts it in his introduction.

Conversations and Confrontations about the Writing Life

Rogue Males

Paris, 1924. A city teeming with would-be poets, writers, and painters. Hector Lassiter, fledgling author and best friend of Ernest Hemingway, is crossing the Pont Neuf when he hears a body fall into the icy Seine — the first in a string of brutal murders of literary magazine editors that throw a shroud over the City of Light. Frantic to stop the killings, Gertrude Stein gathers the most prominent crime and mystery writers in the city, including Hector and the dark, mysterious crime novelist Brinke Devlin. Soon, Hector and Brinke are tangled not only under the sheets, but in a web of murders, each more grisly than the next. As he is drawn deeper into the hunt, Hector finds himself torn between three women with hidden agendas and dark imaginations. When Hector learns that the murders may be the work of a strange cult of writers who are targeting the literary set, Hemingway, Hector, and Brinke must scramble to find the killer before they become the next victims. A Moveable Feast meets The Dante Club in this ­­­­exquisite mystery that takes readers from the cafés of Montparnasse, through the historic graveyards of Paris, to the smoky backrooms of bookstores and salons. As dark as the shadowy banks of the Seine and as addictive as absinthe, this unforgettable book will grab you and never let go.

One True Sentence

Ken Bruen

Sam Hawken

Stories and essays by Ken Bruen, Jim Cornelius, Garnett Elliott, Bradley Mason Hamlin, Sam Hawken, Mike MacLean, Craig McDonald, Manuel Ramos, Steve Rogers, Tom Russell, James Sallis, Martin Solares, John Stickney, Dave Zeltserman. Edited by Craig McDonald Welcome to La Frontera: You're headed way out west this time, intrepid reader, far past where you've dared go before. Your troubled guides along these dusty, bloody stretches of The Devil's Highway are much-awarded crime novelists, journalists, and border-dwelling troubadours. They serve up stories and essays about lives threatened chasing the elusive, often deadly, dream of more money and better futures beckoning north and south of the border. Emiliano Zapata declared, "It's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees." In that spirit, these bards of the borderland are swinging for the barbed-wire fences: all swagger and dark visions, hell-bent on sweeping you along with them across the Rio Grande to a broken Promised Land. Like treacherous Coyotes, they may gut-shoot you or break your heart in the crossing, but however it goes down, know these hombres are determined to make you feel it. "

Stories & Essays of Love & Death Across the Rio Grande

Borderland Noir

Key West, 1925: the USA's southernmost point and the most un-American of American locales; a rowdy border town surrounded by water and populated by sports fishermen, naval veterans and Cuban revolutionists - misfits and mavericks, all. After several years abroad, crime writer Hector Lassiter arrives on "Bone Key" to reunite with his lost love Brinke Devlin, a fellow author and the woman destined to become the first Mrs. Lassiter. Hector finds an island in turmoil - beset by fatal fires and savage attacks against women that the local press attributes to a baseball bat-wielding fiend dubbed "The Key West Clubber." When one of the Clubber's murders hits too close to home, the newlyweds begin to poke around the crimes. What they find casts doubt on the possibility of a single culprit. By turns sexy, sly and sinister, Forever's Just Pretend barrels along at a page-turning pace to a shattering conclusion that casts new light on Hector Lassiter and his legend. "I loved Brinke Devlin the first time she came on the page and I loved her at the end, too. She's a fascinating character." -James Sallis, author of DRIVE

A Hector Lassiter Novel

Forever's Just Pretend

In 2007, the Hector Lassiter series launched with "Head Games," a literary thriller set along the borderlands of 1957 America-a road novel that met with ecstatic reviews and international awards attention, including Edgar and Anthony nominations for Best First Novel by an American Author. With "Three Chords & The Truth," Craig McDonald at last sets the capstone on the Hector Lassiter series and legend. Winter, 1958: Nashville, Tennessee is locked in an icy snow storm doing nothing to cool racial tensions in Music City, USA, or points farther south. Following a midair collision, a U.S. military crew has been forced to dump a hydrogen bomb off the coast of South Carolina-a deadly device still there today, a weapon of mass destruction whose nuclear trigger may be rusting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, potentially still threatening the east coast well into the 21st Century. Once again, forgotten history and historical figures are reanimated and given new life and relevance through the Hector Lassiter series-nothing less than a literary secret history of 20th Century America. In an up-from-the-heels voice that recalls his first-person narration of "Head Games," Hector once again tells his own remarkable story, one that rounds out the saga BookPage has called "wildly inventive" and The Chicago Tribune calls "the most unusual, and readable crime fiction to come along in years." This is a vintage Lassiter novel, at last revealing the ultimate fate of the author-screenwriter famous for living what he wrote and writing about what he lived. "[The Lassiter novels] are compelling, thrilling and darkly humorous. Lassiter is a brilliant creation- a crime writer who learned his trade with Ernest Hemingway and the Lost Generation in Paris in the 1920s. He is also a man who seems dangerously prone to violent intrigue, doomed love affairs, tragic marriages and military campaigns (he's a veteran of the Punitive Expedition, World War One, the Spanish Civil War and World War Two). Lassiter witnesses history unfolding and, occasionally, has a role in shaping it course. With "Three Chords and the Truth," Craig McDonald has crafted a remarkable coda to the series." -Steve Powell, The Venetian Vase "With each of his Hector Lassiter novels, Craig McDonald has stretched his canvas wider and unfurled tales of increasingly greater resonance." -Megan Abbott "Reading a Hector Lassiter novel is like having a great uncle pull you aside, pour you a tumbler of rye, and tell you a story about how the 20th century 'really' went down." -Duane Swierczynski

Craig McDonald

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