Posts Tagged: Chicago

The Inside Story: Death of the Detective by Mark Smith

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Today is pub-day for our re-release of Mark Smith's The Death of the Detective , a National Book Award finalist and widely regarded as perhaps the best crime novel ever written. Author Ed Gorman, founder of Mystery Scene Magazine, took this opportunity to interview Mark. Here's their talk. It's got to be hard to top what many consider to be an American classic. What are you working on now? I have just finished a 168,000 word novel entitled Da Gama's Gold (a line from Robert Frost's "America Is Hard to See"), a reworking and reduction from a longer novel I spent too many years writing. It's likely my most ambitious work since The Death of the Detective, and whereas that novel took on... more

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Mark Smith on Writing THE DEATH OF THE DETECTIVE

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I think it was Heywood Hale Broun who said, “When a professional man is doing the best work of his life, he will be reading only detective novels,” or words similar. I hope, even at my age, I have my best work ahead of me, but when I was writing The Death of the Detective, in my leisure hours I was exhausting the classic English who-dun-its written between the Wars, favoring Dorothy Sayers and Freeman Wills Croft, while also re-reading Raymond Chandler and re-discovering Nero Wolfe. In this regard I shared the addiction with the likes of William Butler Yeats, William Faulkner and FDR, among others. My first two novels, the companion novels, Toyland and House Across the White... more

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