Thomas Mullen

January 26 -- my pub date -- is finally here, and the Firefly Brothers are on the loose. They're lurking, fedoras pulled low, at your favorite bookstore; they're zooming along from wireless device to wireless device in their newest stolen car, maybe a '33 Ford or a '34 Terraplane; and they're (hopefully) making their way into the hands of some readers. They have traveled a long and winding road, beginning as mere figments of my imagination, with no idea where they were going or how their story would end, but at last they've reached their destination. Sort of. Actually, as you'll see when you start reading, it gets kind of complicated from there...

For another take on how and why I wrote the book, click here to see a column I wrote for Book Page magazine.

Happy pub day, everyone!

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What a great weekend -- the new book got a wonderfully enthusiastic review from the Los Angeles Times, which called it "a stunning work of fiction that is intense, deeply satisfying and always uniquely American." And they compared it to one of my favorite writers, Michael Chabon, in the opening paragraph -- not bad at all.

The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers also got another strong review from the Associated Press. One of the only upsides to the shrinking of newspapers' Book sections across the country is that if you get a good review from AP, a number of newspapers will borrow the story (or at least link to it from their web sites), so that one review has already appeared in papers (or their sites) from San Luis Obispo to Corpus Christi to Stamford, CT.

And in related newspaper news, count me in favor of the New York Times' recent announcement that they will begin to charge people for frequently visiting their Web site. With newspapers dying even as more and more people are reading them online, someone had to make this bold move. I'm sure there are naysayers, and I risk sounding like a Luddite or sounding oh-so-20th-Century, but the fact is, we need to pay for the service that newspapers provide if we want to continue to have them. Those people cannot work for free. All the brave new Internet models (Web advertising, etc) have failed to bring in enough dollars. The emperor has no profit. Newspapers shouldn't be afraid to ask people to pay a little something if they want to make use of their services, just like we have to pay for everything else in the world. Otherwise more newspapers will shrink or simply disappear.

As a native Rhode Islander, I'm a huge Sox and Pats fan. I've lived south of the Mason-Dixon line since 2000, so I read the Boston Globe's indispensible Sports section every day online. And I haven't paid a cent for it over these ten years, nor has anyone else. As a result, the Globe has downsized and downsized, and now some of my favorite sports writers have been fired or let go, and the formerly best-in-the-country Globe Sports section isn't what it used to be. I would have gladly paid for the right to read their Sox and Pats coverage over the past decade, and I'm sure other people would have as well. Some people wouldn't have, of course, and they would have wandered over to the free www.espn.com, but I can't help but wonder if enough of us would have kept paying, therefore helping to Globe hang on to some of those writers.

Time will tell if the New York Times' move gets repeated across the media landscape or if they get slammed as being old-school, but count me as strongly in favor.

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Robert B. Parker died yesterday at age 77. His Spenser novels were the first adult fiction that hooked me--by the time I was a high school sophomore, I had read everything he'd written up to that point. I haven't read him in close to 20 years, as, like so many self-serious teenage would-be writers, I started to look askance at "genre fiction" like mysteries. The Spenser novels were old-fashioned, hard-boiled private eye stories narrated by the good-hearted, modern-age tough-guy Spenser--an ex-boxer, Red Sox fan, straight shooter and smart aleck. I was a quiet kid in suburban Rhode Island, and the stories of the dark underbelly, corruption, and assorted evils in the big city of Boston enthralled me. Years later, when I graduated college and moved to Boston, the proud sense I had of making it in the world of grown ups probably owed at least something to the fact that this was the same city that had been portrayed so dramatically in those books I had read in high school.

Parker was one of those ungodly prolific writers--he wrote nearly 40 Spenser novels, as well as two other detective series, some Westerns, young-adult books, and other stand-alone novels--who eventually loses the critical spotlight even as he grabs and holds on to so many readers. When you have at least one book out every year, your readers are thrilled but the critics and literary publicity folks get bored. So I confess I haven't thought of him much over the last few years, as I've gone about starting my own writing career. But now I remember, as a high school student, the many afternoons I would spend typing on my family's Apple 2C, writing my own mystery series, about a star Red Sox pitcher who is shot in the arm by an unknown bad guy and has to reinvent himself as a private detective (yeah, I really wrote something like that. I was probably 15. I think I wrote two of them and had plans for a third, which never happened; my literary trilogy was probably waylaid by the introduction of a high school girlfriend or maybe my job at McDonald's). Clearly I was trying to write a Robert B. Parker novel, albeit one as seen through the eyes of someone not yet old enough to drive, someone whose sense of good and evil (not to mention plot lines and character development) hasn't progressed much beyond a big weekend series between the Sox and Yanks.

Many years later, when my wife and I picked a name for our son (at close to the last possible moment), a few days passed before I realized it was a name very similar to one of Mr. Parker's characters. I thought it was a fitting, if accidental, tribute to one of my first literary heroes.

And as I type this a mere six days before the release of my second novel, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers, I see more of Parker's influence. Although my new novel is not a private detective yarn, it does draw inspiration from the early masters of the hard-boiled form (Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett), as did the Spenser novels. While writing the book I read a ton of Thirties fiction, including Chandler and Hammett and many lesser-known pulp writers, and I tried to embue my tale with that sense of danger and intrigue and disillusionment with a world gone suddenly and horribly wrong. I don't think my book qualifies as "genre fiction," but I did try to write something that straddles the border between the adventurous, suspenseful world of detective fiction and the more introspective, quiet, big-picture social analysis of literary fiction. The classic detective tales have spawned so many imitators and tributes, not only in books but in film--think of the Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski, which is basically a Chandler story in which the hero is a stoned ex-hippie instead of a private eye, or Michael Chabon's Yiddish Policeman's Union, which transported hard-boiled noir to an imagined Alaskan homeland for Jewish settlers. I've tried something similar, taking bank-robbing heroes (or villains?) from Thirties lore and placing them in a world where reality and mythology are hard to distinguish, a world where everything has been turned upside down. I hadn't thought of the Spenser novels, but now I can't help wondering whether I would have tried anything like this without that early education I'd had, way back in my teen years, in the hard-boiled world as seen through the eyes of Robert B. Parker. I'm already looking forward to reading my first Spenser novels in years, and I'm curious to see what other discoveries I'll make in its pages.

Thanks for the adventures, Mr. Parker.

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A recent article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the prevalence of bank robberies in the wintertime made me think not only of eerie parallels with my new book but also about an unexpectedly interesting encounter I had at a bank last year.

I had just moved to the Atlanta area and had finally gotten around to setting up a local bank account. I was sitting in the office of one of the bank managers, and in setting up the account I mentioned that I couldn't do direct-deposit paychecks, as I'm not paid in regular cycles like a typical employee. So he asked what I did, I mentioned that I write novels, and he asked what my new book was about. Without quite realizing the potentially awkward nature of my revelation, I told him that my new book was about bank robbers. He looked up from his computer monitor. "Oh, really?"

There was for the rest of our encounter an undeniable air of tension in the room. Every time I had to reach into my pocket for a drivers license or credit card (or, worse, when I bent over to reach into my shoulder bag to pull out some other paperwork), I felt that I was being watched very carefully.

Lesson learned: Just like those airport signs warn us not to joke about bombs or guns while in the security line, it is similarly unwise to discuss bank robberies, even fictional bank robberies, with a bank employee while inside of a bank.

And in other news, here's the latest good press about The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: a great review in Atlanta Magazine written by Teresa Weaver, who calls the book "magical and inventive" and says that it "gracefully interweaves themes of justice, mortality, and fame among quieter issues such as what makes up a family." You can read the review, and a short interview with me, here.

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Hope everyone's New Year is off to a great start. When I hear "2010" now, the first thing I think of is my new book. I know that sounds insanely self-centered, but allow me to explain:

I had lunch with my editor back in July of 2008 during a visit to New York. I had recently sent her a second draft of The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers, and things seemed to be moving right along. I asked her when Random House was planning to release the book, and she explained that, given the long lead times required for publicizing and producing a novel, Firefly Brothers theoretically could have been ready for fall of 2009, but they'd decided instead to push it back a few months so my little volume wouldn't be buried in the noise of the Big Fall Books, when bestsellers like Stephen King and Richard Russo and Barbara Kingsolver (and, um, Sarah Palin) get all the attention. Which meant that my book was slated for "Winter 2010." Sitting there a day before Independence Day, in the year 2008, the thought of 2010 was borderline science-fictionally futuristic. It seemed like forever. And it kind of has been.

But, at long last, 2010 is here, which means my book is less than a month away from being published! Rumor has it I should be getting some hardcovers in the mail any day now. Better still, good reviews are already trickling in: Publishers Weekly recently gave it a starred review, predicting that readers "will be engrossed," and Amazon just named it one of the Best Books of the Month, calling it "an exciting and provocative tale about the vagaries of justice and truth." (Side note: Being named a Best Book of the Month means that if you buy it from Amazon this month, you'll get a 40-percent discount, if you're into that sort of thing. Not that I'm recommending the Kindle-addicted Amazon over actual, real bookstores or anything.)

That's all for now, but hopefully there will be more good news soon...


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