A Great Novelist

I am well into Michael Zimmer's new western novel, Beneath a Hunter's Moon. It is splendid. There is no other living western novelist who pulls us into a different world the way he does. In this case, he recreates the world of the 1820s and 30s, in southern Canada and the northern United States. The world he depicts is not only the landscape and plants and animals, but also the people inhabiting that country, especially the Metis, or mixed-blood French and Indian people who suffered abuse at the hands of Anglo Canadians and others.

His powerful stories are mostly published by Five Star, and I have not seen many of them in mass-market paperback because they don't usually involve a lot of gunfighting of the sort New York publishers persist in producing. Mr. Zimmer's novels are literature, with richly-drawn characters in authentic early western circumstances, including the aspirations and beliefs of the people he is depicting.

I think I could say with some assurance that Mr. Zimmer is the foremost and finest novelist of the West writing in our times. When it comes to handing out Spur Awards, or the Owen Wister award, he should not be overlooked.

Slowed Down

I slipped on ice and broke my wrist before Christmas, and am slowed down. And my wife has had a medical emergency. I'll return to posting some day soon.

Christmas Greetings

Here's a little song familiar to people of my generation, and even some younger people too. Mel Torme (who wrote it) and Judy  Garland sing it joyously .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOQ4JxPDXIU.

The Hotel Dick Is An Ebook

A few years ago I began writing police procedurals set in 1940s Milwaukee, where I grew up. I wrote them under the pseudonym Axel Brand to separate them from my western and historical fiction, and so that reviewers would look at the books without prejudice. I chose the name Axel Brand because it would put my novels at eye level in any alpha-organized book collection. Wheeler novels are usually found at toe level on the extreme right, where they don't sell.

I originally proposed that my hero be Joe Sunday, since I have always been fond of Dragnet, and Sergeant Joe Friday. But the publishers nixed that, so I proposed Lieutenant Joe Sonntag. They laughed and agreed, and I've written several Joe Sonntag novels, published by Five Star and elsewhere, since then.

The first, The Hotel Dick, won some fine reviews. My ace designer and internet magician designed a fine Kindle cover for it, and now the novel is up in the Kindle store.

Down With Remotes

On my chairside table are three remotes. The cable company remote is supposed to be universal, and has 60 buttons. The one for my DVD player has 45 buttons. The one for my TV has 42 buttons. I have little idea what most of these are for. The instruction manuals only add to the confusion. I do know that I sometimes can't sort out which ones to press, and when, and get either no results or wrong results.

I don't know why we have 60-button remotes, and they offend me. I fantasize about them. I think that the lunatics who designed these devices should be rounded up and made to pay a price for their madness. My fantasy is to give each of them a 60-button remote, and then they should be told to select a certain  ten buttons and press them in the proper sequence, and if they get it right they live, and if they fail, off with their heads. There would then be some justice restored to the world.

The Gift Publishers Gave Us.

The are called "Legacy Publishers" these days for reasons that escape me. But I've known them all my life as the traditional publishers who created our literary world. They were, and are, mostly in New York, and many were there when I was a boy, long ago. I'm talking about Alfred Knopf, Simon and Schuster, Doubleday, William Morrow, Viking, and many more of that sort.

They had a number of functions. One of these was the selection of material. They, along with literary agents who did their own selecting, rejected countless manuscripts while selecting only the few that any house could produce. I once read that Doubleday alone received 50,000 manuscripts annually, most of them "over the transom," that is, unsolicited and not submitted by an agent. Doubleday employed a corps of readers, most of them young ladies from the Seven Sisters with appropriate backgrounds, to examine these submissions, weed out a few good prospects and return the rest with rejection slips.

Of course the selection process with imperfect. There are many stories about the  novels that were published with great success after having been rejected by other houses. That is the nature of art. But many of the rejections were simply based on mismatches. Hopeful authors had submitted their manuscripts to houses that had no interest in publishing the sort of material they were offering.

The selection process was long, and often tied up a manuscript for years. It sometimes took three  or four months to have a story accepted or rejected. But that is a mark of the value of the process. It meant that the publishers really did look at the material. It meant that busy editors did find time to evaluate the stories in the "slushpile" as the stack of unread manuscripts was called.

The result was that the reading public was spared the ordeal of reading one mediocre story after another. But the publishers did much more: They also edited and copyedited and packaged the novels. And by editing I don't mean merely checking the spelling. Most of my early novels were returned to me by editors who asked for revisions, some of them major. Maybe the story was slow and needed cutting. Maybe a character wasn't believable. Maybe a scene failed. Maybe the beginning didn't hook readers well. Maybe the ending didn't work. Whatever the case, gifted editors devoted a lot of time to improving the stories, cutting here, adding there, until the end product was far superior to the original manuscript. Then the copyeditors set to work, not only dealing with spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure, but also with style and meaning of words. And while all this was going on, gifted people were packaging the story, designing covers that would sell the book, writing flap copy.

In short, what the "legacy publishers" did was create a good literary project to offer to the reading public. Obviously, art being art, there were bad choices, but most of what was produced was remarkably good, and fostered a golden age of American fiction.

When I look at the sea of self-published material that has never been vetted or improved, I wonder how often readers of that stuff have been disappointed, and having been burned a few times too many, now prefer to buy novels that have a publisher's pedigree.

The Pocketbook Edition

My historical novel, The Richest Hill on Earth, was published in mass-market form on October 30, in the middle of Sandy's devastation. The cover of this pocketbook edition is a rarity because it does not have people on it.

Here is the unusual cover: