Hey, I’ve just won the Falcon Award from the Japanese Maltese Falcon Society! It’s given for the best hardboiled book published in Japan in a given year. My winning book was PAPER SON, which came out here in 2019 but was only recently published in Japan.
The award itself is a hand-carved falcon statuette. It’ll be here in 6-8 weeks — it’s being carved as we speak. In the meantime, here’s Sam Spade contemplating the original.
Yes, folks, the 2023 SJ Rozan Calendars are now available for your date-keeping pleasure. This year we have four: Bella the Cat, Colors, Plants, and New York City. All money raised goes to The Planned Parenthood Action Fund. Get one for your home, one for your office (even if they’re the same), one for a friend, and one to put above your cat’s water dish!
Hey, youse guys (as we say in the Bronx)! The 2022 SJ Rozan Calendars are here! For your gift-giving, including to yourself, pleasure. Extra added attraction: all profits from this year’s calendars will go to Planned Parenthood. Because dammit. Helpful hint: click the link, not the photo.
Through the wonderfulness of a friend I scored a ticket to the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera season. This was a particularly exciting opening night because of course last year there was no season at all. Still, I might not have gone; opening night is fancy and I’m not a fancy kinda gal. But the season opened with FIRE SHUT UP IN MY BONES, Terence Blanchard’s opera based on Charles Blow’s memoir. I very much wanted to see it, so I accepted the challenge of dressing as though I almost fit in. Silk shirt, silk trousers, embroidered silk Chinese slippers — I don’t wear heels — and there I was, among the ball gowns, capes, embroidered sequined jackets… and you should have seen the women, too. No, seriously, everyone looked great.
And the opera? I’m far from knowledgeable enough about opera to be qualified to review it, but it seems unfair to tell you I went and then not tell you how I felt about it. So: the performances were great. Angel Blue, especially, and Will Liverman, were mesmerizing, and Walter Russell III, who plays Charles as a child, has probably had his life ruined by getting a standing ovation on opening night at the Met. The music I also loved. Blanchard drew on many sources and handles his transitions seamlessly. I was disappointed in the libretto. An opera’s not about the libretto, and most are probably disappointing but luckily in languages I don’t speak. I’m probably too word-oriented and placed too much emphasis on it.
The most interesting thing about this opera, though it’s by a Black composer based on the memoir of Black man and performed by an all-Black cast, is that it’s not a Black story, if by Black story you mean a story about racism, a story that defines Black people in terms of how they’re situated in the White world. This opera is about making choices, about a child becoming an adult, about leaving, or not leaving, the past behind. That these universal themes are dealt with in the context of a Black man’s life, instead of the default White life, is, if you ask me, the real cause for celebration.
It’s spring and the waterfowl on the river are busy as bees, or beavers. This morning two pairs of mallards were swimming around, with a male Gadwall in attendance. One of the male mallards swam away from the little flock, which caused two events. First, the female he’d been with zipped over to him, swam right in front cutting him off, and then settled in right beside him, reminding him who he belonged to. The Gadwall, meanwhile, came over to harass them. That left the other mallard pair on their own, but not to worry: a female Gadwall came flying in, landed behind them, and started annoying them. What does this say? That the Gadwalls, as they’ve done before, are nesting in the bushes by that stretch of river and the mallards were getting too close in their own search for a nest site. Also, that female mallards like to keep their males in line.
And speaking of nesting, those of you who remember the goslings born last year on the rocks by the Sanitation Pier and raised in the park by Mama and a very fierce Papa may be happy to know M and P have nested again, and I think she must have eggs in there because he’s been swimming back and forth patrolling for enemies. This is the best photo I could get so I’ve circled them in red. Papa in the water, Mama in the upper left of my circle right up by the wall. Just after I took this a crow flew in and landed near her. Papa lifted out of the water and flapped over, practically sat on top of it. It left in a hurry. Hatchlings coming, I hope!
It’s 2021. Well done, all. Here’s to peace, good health, and good work in the new year.
Standing third from the left, Parnell Hall one of the ways I remember him best: on the basketball court, where he had a funny (of course) one-legged stork shot that always went in. I remember him at the poker table, too, where he’d shake his head sadly at his cards, sigh at his luck, and leave at the end of the night with great piles of other people’s money. He was one of the first people I met in the crime-writing world. I was a last-minute substitute on a panel at Bouchercon Seattle in 1994. My first book had been out about an hour, I hadn’t expected a panel assignment, and I was terrified of being up there with the grownups. Turned out nothing I did mattered. Parnell and Donald Westlake spent 40 minutes being hilarious and ended the panel with a cream pie in the face. Parnell’s face, of course. He was generous, kind, funny, smart, and I’m going to miss him terribly.
If you were wondering where the SJ Rozan 2021 photo calendars were, they’re here!
Happy Thanksgiving, my friends. It occurs to me that if we’re gathering in spirit and not in person, many more of us can be together than would actually fit in my living room. You’re all invited over in spirit to share gratitude and hope. And spirit pie.
I know most people who read me think as I do about the political and cultural moment we find ourselves in. That means I’m preaching to the choir, but here’s the thing about the choir: a lot of choir members don’t sing. They come in on the “Amens” but their voices are missing in the long passages.
Mike Pence says, “The hard truth is you will not be safe in Joe Biden’s America.” Well, do you feel safe now?
People of color, do you feel safe?
People out of work, do you feel safe?
People depending on Social Security, do you feel safe?
People depending on Obamacare, do you feel safe?
People trying to educate your children, do you feel safe?
People suffering the effects of climate change — monster hurricanes, forest fires — do you feel safe?
People with disabilities, do you feel safe?
People who live on fracked land, do you feel safe?
People who want to control your own bodies, do you feel safe?
If you don’t, it’s because you’re not. So go beyond the “Amens.” Work from now until the election for the Democrat of your choice. VOTE and get other silent choir members to VOTE. We can raise our diverse voices in a never-before-heard harmony in this country, the aural equivalent of the gorgeous mosaic we are, if everyone will sing.
