Brief notes

I hope you are planning to attend Left Coast Crime 2010 in Los Angeles next March! I'm the Guest of Honor -- along with some guy named Lee Child. You may have heard of him? Yeah, I think he's great, too. Anyway, we'll be there along with Bill Fitzhugh and lots of others, so please register now. And don't forget to sign up for the Forensic Science Day -- it's going to be so cool!

The Crime Lab Project blog is running a Death Quiz -- find out how much you really know about death investigation in the U.S. -- and then tell your friends to take the quiz. Ignoring the dead can cost us our lives.

My Web Master is as overwhelmed with work as I am, so it may be a little while before my schedule on the site shows this, but -- I'm going to have some new additions to my October schedule, including the Southern Festival of Books, October 9-11 in Nashville, Tennessee. Stay tuned for details.

Speaking of Web sites, don't know if I've mentioned it or not, but one of my nieces, Heather Cvar, is a makeup artist, and her recently updated site has some cool photos on it. You can see them at HeatherCvar.com

Artistic ability runs in the family -- her mom, my sister Sandy Cvar, will be one of the print-makers featured at the International Printing Museum's Los Angeles Printers Fair on August 29. And if you go to the Orange County Fair, look for one of Sandy's prints in the Fine Arts Professional Graphics exhibit!

That's it for now. I have a ton of stuff to post here, but it will have to wait while I work on my next book.

Sculpture on a Monday

I'm back home until Left Coast Crime, and have lots of stuff to talk about from the American Academy of Forensic Science meetings, more about The Messenger, and other topics. But before launching into any of that, I thought, why not take a moment for beauty?

Many thanks to my friend Donald Grant, who told me about Kristen Hoard's sculptures and other works of art. You can see her work by clicking here. ( http://www.metalphoria.com )

Above: "Small Fire Tree" by Kristen Hoard

About ten posts worth of random notes

Many thanks to Maryelizabeth Hart of Mysterious Galaxy for letting me know about this gem.

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My sister, Sandy Cvar, will be teaching "Introduction to Linocut" at the International Printing Museum on Saturday, September 13, 9:30-4:00. This will be an easy way to learn how to carve linoleum to make a print. You don't need to be an artist to have fun with this method of printmaking!

We loved our recent visit to the museum. Even if you don't want to try working with linocut, if you're in the South Bay area, stop by and visit them.

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We just subscribed to HBO. Why? True Blood, which is based on Charlaine Harris's fabulous Sookie Stackhouse series. We are also looking forward to the next David Simon project.

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Last few days have been hectic. Having finished proofreading The Messenger, I sent it back to my editor. Sandy has finished some graphics for the update of the Web site, and Madeira James is at work on the new look.

I made a trip to see my folks, was a party to -- won't bore you with the long story -- destroying the firmware on my dad's iPhone. (Yes, in their 80s, my parents are using iPhones and texting, using Maps, checking stock quotes, downloading apps for games and all sorts of other cool stuff. And yes, at that age, I hope I'm willing to take space shuttle trips or use whatever cool tech is available then.) So I took the phone into the Apple store in Costa Mesa, and with the kind and efficient help of Genius Bar genius Johnny, got it up and running again. So two trips out of town, but I got to see the parents a little more often that way, which is always a good thing.

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One of these days I'm going to have to post something about the Skeptical Inquirer. Which may sound like a strange thing to say, since I've just written a supernatural thriller. But there you have it. I don't really believe there's a city in Southern California named Las Piernas either. Sorry if I just made anyone cry. But I also saved you gas money by preventing you from driving around looking for it.

Anyway, great article in the Nov/Dec 2007 issue (yes, I'm behind on almost everything) by Denis Hamel. It's about a quotation floating around the Internet and elsewhere, lauding astrology and falsely attributed to Einstein. You might say that you don't have to be Einstein to suspect that he probably didn't believe in astrology, but the hoax persists. Hamel's article not only shows that Einstein didn't author this "quote," but shows that even given proof that it's a hoax, some folks refuse to remove it from their sites. I'm not the first person to tell you not to believe everything you read online, right?

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I'm going to do a little work for the Crime Lab Project and then get back to work on the new book. Follow me on Twitter if you want details from here.

Have a good one! And thanks, Vgan -- I'm also glad the world did not implode when they fired up the black hole machine today. Not that I was really worried.

Learning Anatomy the Hard Way

This story on a late 18th/early 19th English surgeon who reputedly benefited from a team of grave robbers caught my eye and made me think again of how dangerous it was to study anatomy before anyone had a good notion of germ theory or antibiotics on hand.

But doctors weren't the only ones risking their health to study anatomy. Veterinarians and artists who made studies of animal anatomy often did so at their peril. If you've read the most recent issue of Bark Magazine, which has several great articles in it, you may have also seen the one about artist George Stubbs (1724-1806), whose paintings (like the one above) of animals broke new ground in part because he was an avid student of human and animal anatomy — he taught at a school of medicine at one point, and published works on anatomy.

If you are anywhere near the Frick in New York, take the opportunity to see a special exhibit of his work. It's only there between now and May 27, and this is its only stop in the U.S..

Dustjacket art

Dust jacket art is worthy of a blog of its own, and probably, somewhere out there, someone has one up and running. Book collectors in the know learn to spot subtle differences in dust jackets that occur between editions. Some are true connoisseurs of the art itself, and shown covers of a certain era, can name the artists and illustrators of frontpieces and plates.
I love some of the dust jacket art from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Frank Krieger of Newport Vintage Books has an intriguing collection of images of dust jackets on his Web site, including these for Rafael Sabatini's novels. N.C. Wyeth (who was the father of Andrew and other famous Wyeth family artists) was among the artists who brought scenes from Sabatini's adventure tales to life.

You might have fun with these Nancy Drew dust jackets from the 1930s and 1940s, many by Russell H. Tandy.

And there is always this site, where you can see the work of Pogany and many others, and read their biographies.

For me, though, nothing beats a little time spent in the virtual art museum of Violet Books' Web site.

How do I feel about the covers on my own books? My books have been wrapped in cover art both delightful, and...umm, not so delightful. (I'm sure readers have their own nominees for the latter category.) I'm also always fascinated to see how the art changes in the editions published in other countries. I think if you look at the International editions pages on my site, you'll see some truly striking cover art, and some that will ... be nominees.

One of the challenges of crime fiction covers, I'm sure, is to come up with images that may be disquieting but which aren't repulsive. In recent years, I've been very pleased with the cover art on my books. I'm especially happy with the work Ray Lundgren has done on the U.S. editions. He's good at capturing some essential something from each of the books for which he's created covers. He manages to do that in a way that always makes me feel drawn to the book while still conveying an intriguing amount of suspense. I can only hope he's elicited the same reaction in my readers!