I did a webcast radio interview on Saturday, with an operation called The Author’s Show. (You go to this site and then click on The Christian Author’s Show on the tool bar.) Supposedly my segment has been posted now, and you should be able to select it from the menu. But I can’t make it work. Maybe you can. Maybe it’s just my computer.
Dr. Ted Baehr (with whom I apparently have some distant connection, through my publisher) loves the new animated A Christmas Carol, with Jim Carey. I guess I’ll have to see it. If I love it too, it’ll mean I’ll have four different versions to keep on DVD and watch each Christmas. I’m not sure I can carry (or Carey) all those Carols.
Noodling around the internet, I discovered the shocking news that Stuart M. Kaminsky died, just about a month ago. I’m bereaved.
Kaminsky was one of the best, inadequately appreciated, mystery writers in America. He won awards and all, but he never really broke out as I would have wished for him. Instead of writing creepy thrillers full of gore and psychopaths and cannibalism, he wrote old-fashioned whodunnits, frequently brightened by his wit and always lightened by his human compassion.
As it happens, I just found several of his Toby Peters mysteries at the bookstore, and am almost finished with them. I was planning to write an appreciation when I finished the last one—maybe tomorrow.
I haven’t made up my mind entirely whether I prefer his Toby Peters stories (Hollywood in the Thirties and Forties, with our shabby detective pulling a succession of big movie stars out of the soup) or his Lou Fonesca stories (about a sad sack Sarasota process server who mostly gets around on a bike). I’ve read one of his Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov novels, set in Soviet Moscow, but it struck me as kind of claustrophobic and depressing. His Abe Lieberman books were good, but not as good (in my opinion) as the Peters and Fonesca stories.
We’ve lost a true professional, and someone I suspect I would have liked if I’d met him. Rest in peace, Stuart M. Kaminsky.
You would have liked my father. He would have appreciated your comments, as do I.
I like the Fonesca’s the best. They remind me of me. He’s exactly my age, you know.
What a delight to know you’ve seen this! Thank you for stopping by and commenting.
Condolences on the loss of your father, which is (in a smaller degree) a loss to us all.
If Fonesca’s like you, we have much in common.