So you’re getting out a newsletter, eh? Not gonna let a little thing like a pandemic rein you in?

I won’t pretend it’s what I’m in the mood for. But, self-quarantined or not, I’m fortunate enough to be able to go on doing what I do, and activity seems to suit me better than its opposite. Some of the time, anyway.

And I’ve got books out, and others in the works, and some of y’all might find some of it absorbing, so whose interest does it serve if I seek out a bushel and hide my light under it?

I guess I know what you mean.

Really? In that case let me shine a little of that light on my latest release, The Burglar in Short Order. It’s the 12th book about the lighthearted and lightfingered Bernie Rhodenbarr, and it went on sale one month ago and has, as they say, exceeded all expectations. While the Subterranean Press limited and trade editions were quick to sell out, it’s available now in several forms: as an ebook, a trade paperback, a library-binding hardcover, or an unabridged audiobook, this last narrated by that endearing Voice of Bernie, the superb Richard Ferrone.

In addition to selling briskly, TBISO has been giving a powerful boost to the eleven Burglar books that preceded it. That’s most evident to me with The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons, one of my first ventures in self-publishing back in 2013, but all of the books in the series show an uptick in sales, and that suggests that The Burglar in Short Order is drawing new readers, and that they like what they see.

And what all of them want to know is when you’ll write another book about Bernie.

It’s a question I do hear from time to time. You know, Bernie gives us his own answer in the last item in the book, “A Burglar’s Future.” According to him, he’s done. Game over. Nada mas. Finito.

Maybe he’s wrong.

Wouldn’t that be nice? But I’m not counting on it, and neither should you. Meanwhile, all the way on the other end of the spectrum from the affable bookselling burglar, here’s a novel so dark and disturbing it comes with its own warning label, as you may read for yourself on the book’s product page.

There’s a product page?

There is indeed, because the ebook of Dead Girl Blues is now available for preorder.

Just the ebook?

No, there’s just been a change—you can now preorder the paperback as well. There’ll also be a library binding hardcover, and I’m thrilled to announce that Tantor Audio will be bringing out an unabridged audio edition.

I’ve only shown the manuscript to a handful of people, heavy  hitters all, and their reactions have led me to wonder if Dead Girl Blues might have more impact than I’d expected. I won’t repeat the quotes here, you can find them on that same product page, but I can’t keep from sharing this most recent bouquet from Barry N. Malzberg:

“This is an astonishing novel, the most profound examination and evisceration of identity which I have encountered in decades. A stunning and terminally unsettling work, written in a style so accessible, so controlled, so utterly reasonable, that the reader as witness can only fall and fall into the cauldron of memory into some alteration neither ordained nor random but a terrible fusion of both.”

He makes it sound…important.

He does, doesn’t he? FWIW, I do know that some readers think DGB might be my best book. I know too that my German and Italian translators responded very enthusiastically, and are already busy converting my sentences into the tongues of Goethe and Dante, two fellows with whom I rarely manage to get in the same paragraph. And Richard Heinrich, who’s already narrated and produced Hörbucher of the first two Matthew Scudder novels—Die Sünden der Väter and Drei am Haken—is wrapping up #3 (Mitten im Tod) so he’ll be ready to voice Dead Girl Blues as soon as the translation’s in hand.

As i said, the ebook is open for preorders at Amazon and at these other platforms as well. The preorder price is $7.99; after the book’s release on June 24, I’ll  bump that sum up two bucks to $9.99.

You can double your savings, I might add, by preordering the ebook edition of The Darkling Halls of Ivy, a new anthology coming May 31 in limited hardcover form from Subterranean Press. Just go to the product page for a list of contributors and the starred Publishers Weekly review; I won’t include that here not out of false modesty (which is the only kind I have) but to save space. Preorder price for the ebook is $7.99; price after May 31 is $9.99. (And yes, there’ll be a paperback and a library-binding hardcover down the line, but they’re not yet preorderable.)

What I want is the Subterranean Press signed limited. Their books are always gorgeous and well-made. Please tell me it hasn’t sold out yet.

You’re in luck, although I suspect it’ll be fully subscribed well before publication, as that’s what usually happens. The limited edition is offered on the Amazon page—but I strongly advise against buying it there. Amazon’s brilliant at most things, but not at dealing with small presses and limited printings, and if you order this book from them it’s entirely possible they’ll wind up unable to fill your order. That’s happened before, with At Home in the Dark, and a lot of collectors were disappointed. So if you want the Subterranean hardcover of TDHOI, for heaven’s sake click here. It’s the same $50 as it is from Amazon, and if Subterranean confirms your order, you can rest assured you’ll receive the book.

You look unhappy. Was it something I said?

Don’t get me wrong, I like preorders. But I just wish there was something I could buy now.

Well, today’s your lucky day. Just days ago, Terry Zobeck published A Trawl Among the Shelves, and if that title has a familiar cadence to it, it’s not coincidental. It’s an annotated bibliography of my work from 1958 to the present, and Terry, for whom the word “tireless” would seem to have been invented, has somehow managed to compile over 800  individual listings. He and I were in fairly constant email contact for months, and I wound up rediscovering works I’d written and forgotten ages ago. At one point I suggested he call his book “The Man Who Wrote Too Much,” and he countered with the suggestion that I furnish an afterword for the book and hang that title on it. And so I did.

I won’t pretend that this is an item of great interest to the casual reader. If you’re a collector, of course you want this book. (And you may well have already ordered it in ebook or paperback, or both; Amazon shows it as the #1 new release in literary bibliographies, and it only went on sale a matter of days ago.) If you’re not a collector but are a sufficiently serious fan to want to know what I wrote and when I wrote it and what else I wrote that’s like it, well, you too are a part of the book’s natural audience.

I don’t want to oversell A Trawl Among the Shelves; it shouldn’t be hard for you to know that you want it or that you don’t. If you’re wavering, Kevidently’s review on Goodreads should help you make up your mind. I will point out, though, that if you want the ebook, you ought to order it before its author comes to his senses and boosts the price from a way-too-low $3.99 to at least double that figure. (The paperback is on the low side itself at $14.99. Specialized scholarly works of this sort are typically priced around $75, with the result that only libraries can comfortably afford them. Terry, a devout collector himself, wanted to make the book affordable for fellow sufferers from bibliomania.)

I already ordered the book. Ebook and paperback, because why not? I got that all taken care of just now, while you were nattering on and on.

I think you’ll be pleased.

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And that’s right where this newsletter was supposed to end—a little of this and a little of that, and maybe some news about audio (which I’ll now have to hold for another newsletter).

Because, as you all know, stuff happens.

A few days ago my very close friend of over thirty years, Jerrold Mundis, came off the ventilator that had sustained him for the past week—and died. Jerry had made his living as a writer for well over half a century. He wrote the most useful book on writer’s block I’ve ever encountered, and his books on debt and underearning, from a Debtors Anonymous perspective, have established themselves among the leaders in their field.

If in recent years Jerry has been primarily a presence in those self-help areas, his heart lay in the world of fiction where he first made his mark. As he came to point out himself, for decades he acted as if determined to avoid building a following, doing most of his work under pen names. In later life he embraced the world of ebooks and self-publishing, rescued some fine early work from oblivion, and shared it with a world of readers.

His richly imagined novel, The Dogs, was reissued in a handsome limited edition in 2017 by Centipede Press; Jerry published it as an ebook as well. His pentalogy, the Shame & Glory Saga, dramatizes the whole panorama of African slavery in America in five powerful volumes. And The Retreat is a powerful and unremitting novel of punishment that, while sometimes hard to read, is ever so much harder to forget.

I’m not sure why I’m doing all this—listing his books, describing them in terms designed to render them appealing to you. It’s not as though there’s any reason to hold a fundraiser for Jerry. Not the least of his personal triumphs is that, after spending decades struggling with drink and drugs and debt, he died with as many decades of sobriety and solvency to his credit. We don’t need to take up a collection for him, nor would any effort I might make in this newsletter amount to much in royalties.

But he was a writer, and a fine one, and it strikes me as fitting to remember him for it in the only way one can properly remember a writer—by reading what he elected to spend his life writing.

There are many more books and stories besides the ones I’ve singled out here. You might want to visit his website for a fuller picture of his life’s work.

I’ll miss him.