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For the western fans: Wait for Signs/Spirit of Steamboat Package

Wait for Signs: Twelve Longmire short stories available for the first time in a single volume—featuring an introduction by Lou Diamond Phillips of Longmire

Ten years ago, Craig Johnson wrote his first short story, the Hillerman Award”“winning “Old Indian Trick.” This was one of the earliest appearances of the sheriff who would go on to star in Johnson’s bestselling, award-winning novels and the hit series Longmire. Each Christmas Eve thereafter, fans rejoiced when Johnson sent out a new short story featuring an episode in Walt’s life that doesn’t appear in the novels; over the years, many have asked why they can’t buy the stories in book form.

Wait for Signs collects those beloved stories—and one entirely new story, “Petunia, Bandit Queen of the Bighorns”—for the very first time in a single volume, regular trade hardcover. With glimpses of Walt’s past from the incident in “Ministerial Aide,” when the sheriff is mistaken for a deity, to the hilarious “Messenger,” where the majority
of the action takes place in a Port-A-Potty, Wait for Signs is a necessary addition to any Longmire fan’s shelf and a wonderful way to introduce new readers to the fictional world of Absaroka County, Wyoming.

Spirit of Steamboat: A Christmas novella for fans of the hit show and the New York Times““bestselling series

Sheriff Walt Longmire is in his office reading A Christmas Carol when he is interrupted by a ghost of Christmas past: a young woman with a hairline scar and more than a few questions about his predecessor, Lucian Connally. With his daughter Cady and undersherrif Moretti otherwise engaged, Walt’s on his own this Christmas Eve, so he agrees to help her.
At the Durant Home for Assisted Living, Lucian is several tumblers into his Pappy Van Winkle’s and swears he’s never clapped eyes on the woman before. Disappointed, she whispers “Steamboat” and begins a story that takes them all back to Christmas Eve 1988—a story that will thrill and delight the bestselling series’ devoted fans.

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For the history buffs: Forgotten Fifteenth: The Daring Airmen Who Crippled Hitler’s War Machine

In his new book, Forgotten Fifteenth: The Daring Airmen Who Crippled Hitler’s War Machine, Tillman brings into focus a seldom-seen multinational cast of characters, including pilots from Axis nations Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria and many more remarkable individuals. They were the first generation of fliers-few of them professionals-to conduct a strategic bombing campaign against a major industrial nation. They suffered steady attrition and occasionally spectacular losses. In so doing, they contributed to the end of the most destructive war in history.

Forgotten Fifteenth is the first-ever detailed account of the Fifteenth Air Force in World War II and the brave men that the history books have abandoned until now. Tillman proves this book is a must-read for military history enthusiasts, veterans, and current servicemen.

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For the sherlockian: In the Company of Sherlock Holmes

 Laurie R. King, author of the New York Times-bestselling Mary Russell series (in which Holmes plays a co-starring role), and Leslie S. Klinger, editor of the New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, have assembled a stellar group of contemporary authors from a variety of genres and asked them to create new stories inspired by that canon. Readers will find Holmes in times and places previously unimagined, as well as characters who have themselves been affected by the tales of Sherlock Holmes.

The resulting volume is an absolute delight for Holmes fans both new and old, with contributions from Michael Connelly, Jeffery Deaver, Michael Dirda, Harlan Ellison, Denise Hamilton, Nancy Holder, John Lescroart, Sara Paretsky, Michael Sims, and more. The game is afoot—again!

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Or try these favorites of ours from the past year:

 

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Dana Haynes, author of four thriller novels from St. Martin’s Press, will offer a workshop and a signing from noon to 2 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 14, at The Poisoned Pen,  4014 N. Goldwater Blvd. No. 101, Scottsdale, AZ. (www.poisonedpen.com)

 

His latest novel, GUN METAL HEART, has just been released under the Minotaur Books imprint of St. Martin’s Press. (www.dana-haynes.com)

Haynes will offer a workshop titled, “It Ain’t Rocket Surgery — Secrets to Make Novel Writing Easier.” Haynes helps aspiring writers master the shortcuts and tricks of the trade that will help them get from concept to those ellusive words, “The End.”

 

In GUN METAL HEART, Daria Gibron is a former soldier and spy now working as a freelance operative with a long and deadly history. While hiding in Italy from her various enemies, Daria gets dragged into battle against a Serbian hit squad, a renegade band of ex-CIA agents, and a woman whose skills and background are a match for Daria. The tale rockets from Florence, through the mountains of France, and into the former Yugoslavia, including Sarajevo and Belgrade.

 

Daria made her debut in Haynes’s 2010 thriller CRASHERS, which focused on a team of airline crash investigators. She also appeared in Haynes’s BREAKING POINT and Daria’s own breakout novel, ICE COLD KILL.

 

The reviews for GUN METAL HEART have been pouring in since its debut in August:

 

“Fans of the Brad Thor and Robert Ludlum vein have a new author to enjoy.” — RT Book Review.

“A fine entry in a series that’s espionage at its most fun” — Booklist

“Frenetically fast-paced and fun international thriller. Conspiracies, double crosses and drones — oh my!”– Early Word

“What’s a girl to do? If she’s Daria, she kicks butt. … Daria is an arresting character, like a female, petite Jack Reacher.” — Shelf Awareness

“Daria is … irresistible and lethally dangerous … in Haynes’s most fully realized book to date.” — bookreporter.com

 

   

       As it is probably unnecessary to say to Tony Hillerman readers, he drew heavily on Navajo mythology and was made by the Navajo an honorary member.  His use of myths went far beyond drawing on them as background.  To invoke a metaphor from the theater, they do not provide a backdrop for his mysteries. Rather, his characters, I would argue, are incarnations of well-known Navajo mythological characters.  Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, for example, correspond to the Monster Slayer twins he often alludes to in his books. And research into the Monster Slayer mythology (is there a better image of crime investigators?) is to realize they are not twins in the usual sense but older and younger brothers.

 

     Other than the Navajo stories, Hillerman is not an allusive writer, as is Robert Parker, for example, who peppers his mysteries with literary allusions most readers are not likely to pick up.  For those who do, the allusions provide additional fun in reading his books. Even Hawk, in the later books, has become a reader and there is an allusion to a particular author he is reading, Simon Shama, a Harvard scholar of history and writer.  This reference supplies Hawk with another dimension for those who try to fathom this often unfathomable character.

 

     It is arresting, therefore, to find a particular allusion by Hillerman in one of his early Chee mysteries (sorry I am not taking time now to consult my notes).  Before Chee marries Bernadette Manuelito, he has two failed relationships with Anglo or part-Anglo women.  One of these as I remember is Janet Peete, whom he takes to see his trailer home. Not for the perhaps usual reason—Hillerman once announced that he received letters for readers asking why he never let Leaphorn or Chee get laid—but just to show her around.  On Chee’s shelves are books and one of these is specifically, again a rare allusion to anything but Navajo myth.  It is by Paul G. Zolbrod and its title is DINE BAHANE: THE NAVAJO CREATION STORY. It is a very readable collection of stories with very significant notes for those interested in the mythology. Despite its readability, it is a very scholarly work with notes to other historians and scholars who have studied the Navajos and their myths.

 

     One of these notes  has to do with the Navajo version of the Coyote tales, Coyote a figure written about widely and told in stories of many tribes.  This is what Zolbrod argues, and it is in my reading experience a unique approach to this mythological figure. He says that Coyote is the individualist among Navajo mythological figures. Those of us who have read the Chee books know that he does often march to a different drummer and he oscillates between continuing as a tribal policeman and joining the FBI, as he takes investigative roads that are often at odds with his superiors, later Joe Leaphorn until Leaphorn retires and, like Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Reginald Wexford, works unofficially from the sidelines.  Chee certainly is within his culture an individualist and finding his place in that culture although he consistently studies the rituals of his people. It is interesting to note that Hillerman said he invented Chee when, because of a movie contract, he lost for a period of time exclusive rights to Leaphorn.  In the later books both Leaphorn and Chee appear.

 

     Did Hillerman intend that some of his readers would pick up his allusion to Zolbrod and his interpretation of Coyote?  Or was he intending to suggest a very good book on Navajo mythology to those who wanted to know more about it.  He may very well have made the connection to Chee and Coyote but that would be hard for me to prove definitively based on secondary material that exists.  And the first Chee novel was published in 1980  and Zolbrod’s book is copyrighted 1987 (University of New Mexico Press). When he decided to create Jim Chee, he did have at hand the figure of the younger Monster Slayer, and Chee is certainly reflected in Coyote. Fine writers have a special creative imagination and while research may be reflected in their work, it would be unusual for a secondary source to shape the essentials of their major characters. 

 

     More likely, Hillerman, who must have read many of Zolbrod’s sources, found in the latter’s notes an interpretation of Coyote he had already written into Jim Chee.  I have certainly not read all of the books on Navajo myth available, but I have read the major ones, such as that by Gladys Reichard, as well as the works of the many folklorists cited in Zolbrod’s bibliography, who write not only on Navajo myth but the mythology of other peoples and, theoretically, on folklore in general.

 

Mystery Writing: It Ain’t Rocket Surgery

Mystery writing isn’t some grand art or arcane
science, it’s a craft. Dana Haynes, the author of
four thrillers from St. Martin’s Press and three
mysteries from Bantam Books, will walk you
through some simple steps that will get you
started, help you maintain momentum and get
you to those elusive words,”The End.”

Cost: $30.
Includes a copy of his new book Gun Metal Heart