Well, hello there. We’re just a few days back from St. Petersburg. I liked the town so much during Bouchercon that we booked an airbnb apartment for two weeks, and had the great good fortune to be there when the Polar Vortex struck.

And now it’s really good to be back, right?

I have to say I wouldn’t have minded another week or so of sunshine. But never mind. I have things to report, and let me get to it.

First of all, A Time to Scatter Stones is now available in ebook, paperback, and audio form. (Subterranean Press’s deluxe signed limited edition is long-gone, I’m afraid, and their $25 hardcover trade edition is thin on the ground, although you can still find copies at Amazon.)

Reviews have been good, and ebook and paperback sales are brisk. I feel honor-bound to report, though, that a significant number of Amazon reviewers were disappointed. I didn’t check out all the negative reviews—I don’t even read the positive ones—but a quick scan pointed up two sources of discontent:

#1—the book’s not the full-length novel the reader would have preferred.  #2—A Time to Scatter Stones has a prominent sexual element.

True enough on both counts. It’s a novella, and Scudder’s client (and Elaine’s friend) is a call girl trying to get out of the game. I’m not inclined to apologize for either the length or the theme, and in fact rejoice in having been able to produce exactly the book I set out to write. (How often does that happen?) But if either of those aspects is likely to ruin things for you, you may want to find something else to read.

You sound a wee bit bitter.

More bemused than bitter. But never mind.

Let’s move on to At Home in the Dark. As you may recall, this cross-genre anthology is coming in April from Subterranean in a 500-copy deluxe limited edition. (I’ve no idea how long copies will be available, but it’d be my guess they’ll all be spoken for in advance of publication. Several of the contributors are eagerly collected—Joe Hill, Joe R. Lansdale, Joyce Carol Oates—and there’s a Crissa Stone story by Wallace Stroby, a lengthy shocker by Duane Swierczynski, and not a bad story in the bunch.)

This will be AHITD’s only hardcover version. I’ll be self-publishing ebook and paperback editions, and while I was in St. Pete I made the ebook available for pre-order. (I tried to do the same for the paperback, but setting up pre-orders proved to be Amazonically impossible, so you won’t be able to order the paperback until its end-of-April release.)

This is one of two anthologies of mine scheduled for 2019. (The other, From Sea to Stormy Sea, is an art-based collection similar in form to In Sunlight or in Shadow and Alive in Shape and Color; all the paintings are by American artists, all the stories are by brilliantly accomplished fictioneers, and Pegasus will bring out the book in the fall. When I know more, so will you.)

And now, speaking of Italy—

Italy? Did I miss something? When were we speaking of Italy?

We weren’t, if you want to get all technical about it, but who’s to say we can’t speak of it now? As you may recall, I’ve been teaming up with translators to self-publish my books in various languages. One title, Godimento, is the work of Annalisa Passone; it’s her rendition of Getting Off, the sex-and-violence saga of Kit Tolliver. (And if the sexual aspect of A Time to Scatter Stones puts you off, you really don’t want to go near Godimento/Getting Off in any language.) Annalisa, I’m pleased to report, is now at work on an Italian translation of another of my Hard Case originals, The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes.

Luigi Garlaschelli has translated many of my books, including several of the Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries, and he came up with the idea of putting together a small Italian ebook of the four Bernie Rhodenbarr short stories. That struck me as way too slender a volume, and then I remembered some Burglar book excerpts that would fit in nicely, and an essay on the filming of Burglar that I wrote not long ago for Hollywood vs. the Author, and a whole batch of newspaper op-ed pieces written over a whole batch of years, and before I knew it I had a book. I wrote a foreword for it in which I discussed the birth and evolution of Bernie as a character, and an afterword in which Bernie himself gets to address the question of whether there will ever be any more books about him.

And Luigi performed his linguistic alchemy, transmuting English into the language of Dante and Boccaccio, and Jaye Manus cobbled up a cover. She even put Raffles on it, and outfitted the little chap with a burglar mask and a tail. (What better disguise for a Manx?) And Il Ladro in Poche Parole is available now on all major ebook platforms; there’ll be a paperback edition on offer in a couple of weeks.

It sounds like a book every Bernie Rhodenbarr fan will want to own.

I can only hope you’re right.

But there’s just one problem. I can’t read Italian.

You could take a course.

Uh—

Or take a flat in Rome for a year or so. Pick up a gig teaching English as a second language, that’ll cover your expenses, and next thing you know you’ll be fluent in Italian.

Um—

Or you could wait  until January of 2020, when the wonderful people at Subterranean Press bring out a deluxe limited edition ofThe Burglar in Short Order. Once they do, I’ll be publishing the ebook and paperback.

So what began as your translator’s idea for a book for the Italian market has turned into a twelfth volume for the Burglar series. That’s what happened, isn’t it?

Pretty much, yeah.

And did Luigi have to translate everything back into English? No, don’t bother answering that. You’re getting pretty good at making something out of nothing, aren’t you?

You want to make something out of that? Never mind. It keeps me out of trouble. Well, most of the time, anyway…