Kirkus McGurkus

Kirkus is notoriously snarky, so I was braced for a mixed review, at best. I was pleased and surprised when the fabulous K (my editor at St. Martin's/Minotaur) emailed me with the actual review, which came out in the 6/21 issue. As you can see, it's relatively (entirely!) snark free:

Loomis, Jon
HIGH SEASON

Multiple murders rock peaceful Provincetown.
Sheriff Frank Coffin lands a sensitive missing person’s case when Melinda Merkin asks him to investigate the apparent disappearance of her husband, the Reverend Ron Merkin. A charismatic leader in the fight against gay rights, strapping Ron is a hardcore cross-dresser, a fact Melinda would like to keep under wraps. Before long, his body is found, clad in a floral muumuu and strangled by his raspberry-colored scarf. Facing Provincetown’s first murder in six years, Coffin questions his decision to relocate from the Baltimore Police Department to this gay mecca and tourist magnet. Much of this series kickoff is devoted to fleshing out Coffin’s supporting cast: longtime girlfriend Jamie, who issues a sudden ultimatum for a baby; reliable deputy Lola, a lovelorn lesbian who’s Coffin’s closest confidante; Coffin’s mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s in a nursing home; and a volatile old painter named Kotowski. Undercover efforts by Coffin’s deputies in drag yield humor but few leads. The identity of a second victim, a local high roller named Sonny Duarte up to his neck in shady deals, shifts suspicion away from the grieving widow but onto Kotowski, whose house has been seized by local developers. The death toll grows before Coffin deduces the identity of the ruthless killer. Loomis (The Pleasure Principle, 2001, etc.) writes with warmth and wisdom, auguring well for further Coffin adventures.

****

Now, there are a couple of small inaccuracies here (Coffin is a police detective, not a sheriff), but in all I'm very pleased—kind of in the way that one is pleased when one has walked through a bad neighborhood at 3:00 a.m. without getting mugged. Okay, it's better than that. I love the last sentence—that bit about me being warm and wise. Heh.

The blurbs

One of the weirdest things about publishing is the little ritual of the blurb. Other, more senior writers—often complete strangers—consent to read your book pre-publication and write a snappy sentence or two in praise of it, which is then printed on the back cover. It's a little marketing oddity surrounded by incredibly complex layers of protocol (we can ask X, but we can't ask Y; you could ask Z, but it wouldn't do much good, etc.). All anthropological musings aside, I'm very grateful to have gotten these two extraordinarily kind blurbs, the first from Chris Grabenstein: "Witty, gritty and full of unforgettably colorful characters, HIGH SEASON is a highly impressive debut!" And this one from William Tapply: "In HIGH SEASON Jon Loomis absolutely nails Provincetown, arguably the funkiest and most interesting town in the United States, and stakes it out for what I hope will be many more Frank Coffin yarns to come. Loomis is a terrific writer. He's funny and wise, and he knows how to build tension. I really liked this book." Huge thanks to Chris and Bill; very generous of them.

The cover

The original was essentially the same, but with a clear, blue sky. The lovely A_______ and I both thought it needed a little something. So did M, my agent. I downloaded a few pictures of dramatic clouds from the internet, photoshopped one into the background, and emailed it back to the folks at SM/M. "Hm," they said. "Clouds." A few days later, they came back with this. Which seems fine.

Why a mystery?

This is the question my poetry and lit-fic friends generally ask me when I tell them what I've been doing with my brain the past couple of years. They seem a bit nonplussed, as though they'd heard I'd taken up bungee-jumping or crack smoking or become a Buddhist monk. The best explanation I can offer has two parts: first, I've been a fan of mysteries and noir fiction forever—almost as long as I've been able to read. Give me a good bad book and I'm a happy guy. Second, I think the poetry world had started to feel a bit cramped to me—so many of us scrambling after the same pitiful crumbs. There was something ultimately mean-spirited and unseemly about the degree of competition, and the bitterness with which a great many of us approached it. I needed a break, I guess. I think I'll write another book or two of poems, once I've finished MATING SEASON (the sequel to HIGH SEASON) and had a chance to really sit down with the memoir (KING OF HEARTS) and see if there's any there there. At the moment, though, I'm having too much fun with my characters and my setting and working the kinks out of the plot over cocktails with the lovely A_____ to worry much about whether I'm making art.

Apologies

This is the only blogger template that doesn't suck audibly. I know it's hard to read. Sorry.

The author photo St Martin's rejected

What this blog is about

Writing and publishing mystery novels, poetry and memoirs, guitars and guitar gear, having a young family well into middle-age, crazy old houses, atrial fibrillation, maybe some politics, and any other shiny object that happens to catch my interest. Starting with the basics: I published a lot of poetry between 1990 and 2001 in lots of journals--places like The New Republic, FIELD, Tikkun, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, and The Iowa Review. I also have a couple of books out from Oberlin College Press (my first book, Vanitas Motel, won the FIELD prize in 1997), and have lucked into a few nice fellowships and prizes--the big ones being two winter writing fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the Halls Fellowship in Poetry from UW-Madison, plus a couple of state arts council grants and several residencies at Yaddo. In fact, I started writing HIGH SEASON my first summer at Yaddo as a kind of mental getaway from the second book of poems; I was suffering from long-form prose envy, not to mention a degree of infatuation with several of the leggy girl fiction writers in attendance. I wrote about twenty pages in two days, and went around saying "this fiction thing is easy!" It took me almost six years to finish the mystery, which I dropped until 2001, picking it up again when the poetry project of the moment seemed to be foundering. I just couldn't write the book I was working on--a grim and self-consciously academic epistolary thing based on the lives of Abelard and Heloise--in the shadow of 9/11. I needed to work on something fun--and the mystery was definitely that. More about the other stuff soon.