Featured News & Events
“Just as Hammett made imagined crime feel real, McAlpine makes metafiction mischief suffused with meaning; from the masterful Hammett Unwritten, to the too-wonderful-not-to-mention Woman with the Blue Pencil, and now the mesmerizing The Big Man’s Daughter, McAlpine’s novels prove as moving as they do dazzling.” John Huston’s classic 1941 film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The…
Read More
On May 19 Seventh Street Books will publish the e-version of The Big Man’s Daughter, a new novel from Owen Fitzstephen, the mysterious and acclaimed author of Hammett Unwritten. Owing to coronavirus-19 circumstances, the physical book will be available on September 15. The first reviews are in and they’re good…
Read More
An ebullient mashup/revision/sequel perfect for knowing readers who don’t mind (spoiler) missing the Falcon yet again. –Kirkus Reviews
Read More
Owen Fitzstephen‘s book is called The Big Man’s Daughter, and it doesn’t really have a detective in it, but… Explaining one of his books is a bit like skiing about soup. This is really just the author playing fast and loose (and possibly avoiding lawsuits from the Dashiell Hammett estate) with The Maltese Falcon (again). Like, really…
Read More
“This arresting mystery from Fitzstephen (Hammett Unwritten) explores what might have happened to a minor character in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. In 1922 San Francisco, cunning 18-year-old Rita Gaspereaux is at loose ends after her con artist father, Cletus, “known to some in the rackets as the Big Man,” dies in a shootout over…
Read More
Believe it! Sherlock Holmes actually said, “while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.” Thus does he foreshadow quantum mechanics in this pastiche that has the old bloodhound—he’s 73 now—moving through a literary detective novel. It’s to author McAlpine’s credit that he makes what might have been…
Read More
Set in 1920s’ London, Cambridge, and Paris, Holmes’s final adventure leads him through labyrinths of crime and espionage in a mortally dangerous inquiry into the unseen nature of existence itself. Sherlock Holmes, now in his seventies, retired from investigations and peaceably disguised as a professor at Cambridge, is shaken when a modestly successful author in…
Read More
FIGHTING ERASURE by Yutaka Dirks JANUARY 25, 2016 LIKE ITS AMERICAN COUNTERPARTS, my Japanese-Canadian family was interned by their own government in the horrible years after Pearl Harbor. Most of my Canadian-born grandfather’s family lost their homes in Chemainus, an island mill-town, when they were taken to a camp in the mountains of British Columbia.…
Read More
Is it “Write what you know,” or “Write to discover what you know”? Acclaimed author Gordon McAlpine explores this question, drawing from his experience writing the Edgar nominated novel, Woman with a Blue Pencil. Thanks Flannery O’Connor, Thanks Dad All students of writing fiction are familiar with the dictum to “write what you know”;…
Read More
What if your life had been erased by an editor holding a blue pencil over a manuscript? In Gordon McAlpine’s new novel Woman with a Blue Pencil (Edgar Award nominee!) he takes the reader on a meta-fictional investigation of this question. A serious exploration of racial tensions during WWII, wrapped up in a hard-boiled detective story, this…
Read More