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Owen Fitzstephen: Turning Dashiell Hammett’s Real Stories into Crime Fiction Novelist Owen Fitzstephen shares how a quote from crime novelist Dashiell Hammett unlocked multiple crime novels, the silver lining of a moved publication date, his best tip for other writers, and more! ROBERT LEE BREWER SEP 15, 2020 In this post, Fitzstephen shares how a…
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Con artists working the angles, digging for answers, searching for a way in – and a way out. It’s a familiar world for crime fiction fans, but this protagonist is not your usual ‘investigator’, she one of the bad guys – or is she? ‘The Big Man’s Daughter’ takes much from Hammett’s ‘The Maltese Falcon’, adding…
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Author Gordon McAlpine (under pen name Owen Fitzstephen) has a brand-new book available today entitled, The Big Man’s Daughter, and we here at NTG were lucky to sit down with Gordon/Owen to discuss his new book and the craft of creative writing. Nerds That Geek: What can you tell us about your new book? Gordon McAlpine:…
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“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…
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An ebullient mashup/revision/sequel perfect for knowing readers who don’t mind (spoiler) missing the Falcon yet again. –Kirkus Reviews
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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…
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“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…
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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…
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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.…
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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”;…
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