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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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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…
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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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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…
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Mystery Writers of America is proud to announce, as we celebrate the 207th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, the Nominees for the 2016 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television published or produced in 2015. The Edgar® Awards will be presented to the winners at…
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In this refreshingly innovative detective novel, Hammett Unwritten author Gordon McAlpine follows the life of a character cut–via the vicious blue editing pencil–from a novel. Takumi Sato is a Japanese-American in the Manzanar relocation camp during World War II who has written a novel featuring Sam Sumida, a Japanese-American sleuth investigating his wife’s murder. In…
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Woman with a Blue Pencil, by Gordon McAlpine (Seventh Street): Don’t let all the highbrow praise for this metafictional head-spinner scare you away–McAlpine’s ambitions may be more high-falutin’ than those of the next ink-stained jasper, but he knows how to tell a kick-ass story. Even when it’s presented in bits and pieces. The snippets from…
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A wonderful trio of discussions about my new novel Woman with a Blue Pencil at three of the best independent bookstores in Southern California: Vroman’s in Pasadena, Book Carnival in Orange, and Laguna Beach Books. So many friends turned out to the events! Thanks to all for coming. And thanks to David Schwartz for snapping…
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Hard-boiled detective fiction needs more writers like Gordon McAlpine. In his last two novels, the Maltese Falcon-deconstructing Hammett Unwritten and the just-released, parallel-narrative marvel Woman With a Blue Pencil, McAlpine has delivered the goods on multiple levels. In each case, he’s pulled off feats of masterly metafiction while sacrificing little—if any—page-turning punch. In Hammett Unwritten,…
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