Kindle Daily Post

Guest Blogger: Phillip Margolin, author of "Sleight of Hand"

Phillip Margolin has written sixteen New York Times best sellers. His latest novel is, Sleight of Hand.

In 1994, an amazing idea for a novel occurred to me: Could a President of the United States be a serial killer? How would he do it surrounded by the Secret Service and with the constant scrutiny of the press? My problem was that I couldn’t think of the book’s ending and I never write a line until I know how my book will end.

Then, in 2005, I had one of those flashes of inspiration that seem to come from nowhere. Suddenly I knew my ending and Executive Privilege was published in 2008. Supreme Justice and Capitol Murder followed. All three books featured an ensemble cast but my favorite character was always Dana Cutler, the emotionally damaged, ultraviolent, Washington, D.C. private eye, who stars in my new book, Sleight of Hand.

Dana, an undercover cop in the D.C. police force, was tortured by a biker gang she had infiltrated. When Dana broke out of the basement where she had been held as a prisoner she took her revenge in the most horrible way. It took a year in a mental hospital for her to learn how to deal with her trauma. Dana could not go back to her old job so she became a private detective specializing in non-stressful cases. In “Executive Privilege,” Dana suspects that the President is murdering young girls and has to run for her life. She meets all threats with extreme violence. The books in the Washington Trilogy show how she learns to deal with the problems created by her captivity and the development of her relationship with Jake Teeny, her lover.

“The Maltese Falcon” is my all-time favorite movie and one of the big twists in Sleight of Hand is inspired by it. Dana is hired by a mysterious Frenchwoman to find a gold, jewel encrusted scepter once owned by the Ottoman sultan who conquered Constantinople in 1453. Meanwhile, Charles Benedict, a brilliant criminal defense attorney, amateur magician and hitman for the Russian mob, murders a prominent prosecutor and uses magic not only to frame the prosecutor’s husband for the crime but to trick the husband into hiring Benedict to defend him on the murder charge. The two plots don’t appear to have anything to do with each other, but they do. The battle of wits between Benedict and Cutler is the highlight of the novel. Sleight of Hand gives Dana a chance to shine on her own and, I hope, gives the reader a fun, action packed ride.

--Phillip Margolin

Guest Blogger: Mary Jane Clark, on Valentine's Day

Mary Jane Clark is the New York Times best-selling author of fourteen novels: 12 KEY News media thrillers and 2 Piper Donovan/Wedding Cake Mysteries. A former writer and producer at CBS News in New York City, Clark is the daughter of an FBI agent and mother of two.

A holiday that celebrates love. 

The origin of Valentine’s Day is shrouded in mystery and the story of its patron saint is murky.  But my favorite theory is that Valentine was a priest in ancient Rome.  When the emperor decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and children and outlawed marriage for young males, Valentine defied the ruler and continued to perform secret weddings for desperate lovers.

How romantic!  Love conquering all, even with a government mandate against it.  Love surviving against all odds, the lovers making clandestine vows, sealing themselves forever before God.  Forbidden love triumphant!

As the old song goes: “Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage. This I tell ya, brother, you can’t have one without the other.”  Americans are obsessed with the idea of love leading to the altar.  Billions and billions and billions of dollars are spent on weddings every year. Weddings, modest and grand.  Traditional weddings, unconventional weddings, whimsical weddings and rustic weddings.  Seaside weddings, woodland weddings, tropical weddings and garden weddings. Winter, spring, summer and fall weddings, in the United States or out.

For a suspense writer, the possibilities are endless.  Emotions run high as the bride, the groom, their families and friends and everyone involved in the wedding plans have the potential to be suspects in a crime that has to be solved before a wedding can take place.  All those prospects for murder and mayhem along with my innate desire for happy endings are why I’m writing the Piper Donovan/Wedding Cake Mystery series.

From childhood, we daydream about whom we will marry and imagine our weddings.  Little girls wonder what the dress will be like.   As they grow older, they keep a running mental list of who they will choose as bridesmaids, even when they have no idea who the groom will be.  Will he be handsome and smart?  Will he be kind and have a sense of humor?  Or will he have a dark, mysterious side?  Will he have secrets never suspected?

And, oh, the choices to be made!  Will the church aisle be long enough for a grand entrance?  Would it be better to wed barefoot in the sand at an idyllic beach?  Or marry by candlelight in the ballroom of some grand hotel or historic estate?  But, sometimes, things aren’t what they seem.  Even the most beautiful venue can have evil lurking somewhere.

We are drawn to the pomp and the ceremony, the hope and the promise, the idea of two people loving one another enough that they solemnly pledge to spend the rest of their lives together. We want to believe in the dream, all fresh and frothy and white.  Perhaps the most celebrated wedding, causing tears and cheers, is the one where, after overcoming great obstacles, love conquers all and the bride and groom finally make it to the altar.

Some of us cry as we watch because we realize that life will undoubtedly throw some painful curveballs at the hopeful, unsuspecting couple.  Maybe we weep because we fear the match is all wrong or for failed loves of our own.  But what if, among the genuine emotion of many, there are crocodile tears shed by so-called friends who aren’t really friends at all?

Are you rolling your eyes at this point?  Are you thinking cynical, jaded thoughts, certain that you are not like the rest of us who are intrigued by weddings? Perhaps you think that love and marriage are overrated. Weddings are of no big interest to you, right?

Well, let me ask you this:  When you see a bride on the steps of a church or spot a bridal party posing for wedding pictures in a park or field or on the beach, do you pay absolutely no further attention?  Do you pass on by without a second glance because weddings hold no allure or fascination for you?     

I didn’t think so.    

--Mary Jane Clark

Guest Blogger: Ian Rankin, on the Return of John Rebus

Celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Ian Rankin's first American publication with Standing in Another Man's Grave, featuring the triumphant return of John Rebus, and a riveting story of sin, redemption, and revenge.

Detective Inspector John Rebus retired in 2007 because I had placed myself in a strait-jacket.

Early on in the series, I had decided that Rebus should live in real-time, or a fair approximation of it.  This would allow me to explore the evolving nature of the city of Edinburgh and Scottish (and British) society without my central character appearing as an anomaly, never ageing, never changing.

It was an ex-cop friend of mine who eventually alerted me to the fact that detectives in Scotland in the real world had a mandatory retirement age of sixty.  I did the sums.  We first met Rebus in 1987, by which time he was forty.  Therefore Exit Music, published in 2007, would have to be his ‘last bow’.  It wasn’t that I was tired of Rebus or had nothing new to say about him--quite the opposite.  There was information he was holding back from me, facets of his personality still left to explore.  And yet he had to retire.  Verisimilitude demanded it.

I pondered the consequences of this.  I could go back in time and write about the man in his thirties and forties.  Or he could become a private eye.  Neither, however, really appealed, just as retirement did not appeal to Rebus himself.  I then learned that there was a small unit in Edinburgh comprised of three retired detectives and one serving officer.  This unit looked into unsolved cases from years past.  It was the perfect job for Rebus, and I knew that’s where his future lay.

Meantime, I had become interested in another branch of policing--Internal Affairs.  These were the cops who investigated other cops, and they were almost universally feared and disliked.  They operated as spies, setting up surveillance operations which could last for weeks or months.  They were cautious and meticulous, worked well as a team, and could never cross the line or break the rules.  In other words: the antithesis of Rebus.  So I invented Inspector Malcolm Fox and named his first adventure after the colloquial name for Internal Affairs--The Complaints.

I came to like Fox a lot, and decided to spend more time with him, exploring his psychology and character.  So I wrote him into a second novel, The Impossible Dead.  So far so good, but wheels elsewhere were turning.  The retirement age for detectives in Scotland was in the process of being raised.  Would Rebus--still busy investigating those long-cold cases--be tempted to reapply for CID?  If he did, would The Complaints think him a fit applicant?  And think of all those shortcuts Rebus had taken in his career--would they be lying there, ready to trap him, should someone like Malcolm Fox go looking for them?

Moreover, bringing Rebus back would allow me to show Fox from another perspective--not as hero but almost as villain, his rectitude and stiff moral parameters blocking the maverick Rebus at every turn.

Readers these past few years have been ready with questions for me.  Much as they like Fox and his crew, they ask after Rebus, and his colleague Siobhan Clarke, and his nemesis Cafferty.  I had considered writing a novel with either Clarke or Cafferty as the main character, but instead was drawn towards Rebus, possibly because the timing was perfect.  Rebus was first seen in Knots and Crosses, published in 1987, meaning 2012 is his twenty-fifth anniversary.  Everything was falling into place.

All I needed was a plot--and I already had one of those.  I wanted to look at what happens when someone vanishes from the world.  Can families and friends ever forget, or at least manage to get on with the rest of their lives?  At what point do the authorities become interested, and then lose interest?  I began forging a story, bringing in other elements--our propensity for myth-making; the way a major road can have a life beyond that experienced by those who travel along it.  A shape began to emerge and I gave it a name--Standing in Another Man's Grave.

A good friend of mine, a musician called Jackie Leven, had died unexpectedly and far too young.  We had played together, made an album together.  I was listening to a song of his one day and realised I was mishearing the lyric.  While Jackie sang of ‘standing in another man’s rain’ I was hearing the word ‘grave’.  So it was that Jackie gifted me both the book’s title and its opening scene.  As thanks, the book is dedicated to him, and his lyrics open each section.  We got to know one another because he was a fan of my books, just as I admired his music.  Cheers, Jackie.  You helped me breathe life back into John Rebus.

Somehow I escaped that strait-jacket….

--Ian Rankin

Guest Blogger: James Sheehan, author of "The Lawyer's Lawyer"

James Sheehan is an author, trial attorney and teacher, and is currently the Director of the Tampa Law Institute at Stetson University College of Law in Tampa, Florida.

When I first started writing fiction many years ago the stuff I was writing was awful. It wasn’t that I didn’t have good ideas, I just didn’t know how to write fiction. I had plenty of experience writing because, as a lawyer, I had written hundreds of legal briefs. The process of taking an abstract or complex idea or series of ideas and putting them on paper in a logical, orderly fashion was something I was very good at. Naturally, I assumed that because I had experience getting ideas from my head onto paper that fiction would be a breeze. Boy, was I wrong.

Now, I have to confess that I had no formal training in creative writing. I just thought--I have a good story, I’ve been writing for years--case closed. Not so fast. The first time I sat down to write my story, my book, I was finished in ten pages. My legal briefs were around twenty-five pages, why did my “book” end in ten? I described the characters very well, I thought, and  I used nice descriptive words since I had a fairly extensive vocabulary. But I was done in ten pages! And frankly, it was boring, terribly boring. So I did something that I don’t ordinarily do--I asked for help.

Lucky for me, and I mean very lucky for me, my sister was a literary editor working for a major publishing company at the time. I sent her my ten page story and asked her if she could give me some advice. I can tell you, I was not prepared for her very frank and honest assessment. This story stinks! She told me. It reads like an essay or one of your legal briefs. This isn’t the way you write a story. You don’t “tell” a story, you invite the reader “into” a story.

At the time, I had no idea what she was talking about. I learned though, and it didn’t come overnight. It was a trial and error process and it took a lot of patience, more on my sister’s part than on mine. Eventually, the worm started to turn, and I started to learn how to write.

What did I learn to do differently under my sister’s patient tutelage? The first thing I learned was to stop thinking about the words and start thinking about the picture or, even better, the pictures. What pictures? The pictures I had in my head of a scene and the characters in that scene. I had to get those pictures onto the paper. You’re probably asking yourself as you read this--What the hell is he talking about? You are right where I was when my sister gave me my first lesson. Let me see if I can give you a little taste of what I mean.

I remember a movie when I was a child where the star saw a beautiful pastoral scene in a painting and then magically (because it was the movies) he was able to step into the picture and become part of that scene. That’s what happens with a good work of fiction! That’s what I have to do--have you, the reader, step into the story and be part of it. If you are concentrating on the  nice descriptive words and reading the essay and not ducking from the bullets or wringing your hands, palms sweating, as you sit on the witness chair waiting for counsel’s next question, then you are not into the story and I have not done my job.

So how do I do that? How do I get you to step into the picture? The short answer is that it takes time. I have to build each scene so you can visualize it and I have to create characters and give them backgrounds so that you will identify with them and care about them and see them. I also know that I have to bring you into the story immediately. How many times have you heard people say about a book--”I just couldn’t get into it.”? Or “If it doesn’t grab me in the first three pages I’m done.” James Michener could get away with giving the reader a hundred pages of history before getting started but most of us can’t pull that off. I might want to start off with an action scene, or an emotional scene--something to get you connected to the characters and want to find out more--but I don’t have to.

A lot of mystery writers start out with a murder--the old whodunit. I did that in my first two books, The Mayor of Lexington Avenue  and The Law of Second Chances but since they were not mysteries per se but legal thrillers, you, the reader, knew from the outset who the murderer was or, at least, you thought you did. Isn’t this fun? In my third book, The Lawyer’s Lawyer, I start out with three old friends tending bar. Nothing happens although one friend, Ronnie, says to Jack Tobin, my main character in all three books--you’ll be back here someday, Jack, either for a case or a woman or both. And there it is, the hook. It’s only partially set, though. You have to connect with the characters for that hook to be truly set. How do I get you to do that? Well, dialogue helps. In the opening scene of The Lawyer’s Lawyer, the three friends, who have been tending bar all night, sit down, exhausted, and start ribbing each other as old friends do. This is a scene about three men, but all of us, men and women, have been at that table in our own lives and, if the scene has been set up right, the characters have been described well enough for you to see them, and the dialogue is genuine--then you are there, enjoying the feeling of old friends sparring with each other. You can feel their exhaustion. You can taste the beer. And that will make you turn the next page to find out what Jack is coming back for--a case, or a woman, or both.

That’s just a snippet of the process, but I hope that from this brief discussion you, at least, have a sense of what it’s about and why, at the outset, we all need a little help from our friends--and relatives!

--James Sheehan

David Lender on the Historical Genesis of His New Thriller "Arab Summer"

Guest post by author David Lender whose new title Arab Summer released on January 22, 2013. Explore the entire Sasha Del Mira series and learn more about David Lender. 

My new thriller, Arab Summer, is about an Arab Spring uprising in Saudi Arabia led by fundamentalist Shiite Muslims whose goal is to topple the Sunni Saudi regime and use its oil riches to hold the West hostage. It's the next in the Sasha Del Mira series. Sasha, the heroine of Trojan Horse, is a former concubine to the Saudi royal family who was recruited by the CIA as an informant, and later as an assassin.

The uprisings in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt that brought down Ben Ali, Qaddafi and Mubarak—dictators who brutally persecuted, repressed and murdered their citizens—started Arab Spring in 2011. Since then, over a dozen other Arab states have witnessed at least some level of civil unrest challenging their governments, including the ongoing civil war in Syria between the al-Assad regime and opposition forces.

The darker side of the Arab Spring movement has recently surfaced in the form of murderous acts by Islamic fundamentalists, not against repressive governments, but against innocents. Islamic militants now control approximately one-third of Mali and are aggressively moving to take the entire country. Armed Islamic fundamentalists recently organized the takeover of an international oil and gas facility in Algeria that resulted in the deaths of over 35 hostages, including Americans and Europeans.

Saudi Arabia is considered one of the most stable regimes in the Arab states, but the notion of an Arab Spring uprising there isn't so far-fetched. Protests, some with 70,000 participants, over anti-Shiite discrimination, labor rights, release of prisoners held without charge or trial, and for equal representation in key government offices began in Saudi Arabia in 2011 and continue today.

Imagine this: a group of disaffected Shiite Muslim extremists seizes the Grand Mosque in Mecca—Islam’s holiest site—during the final days of the Hajj, the annual Muslim holy pilgrimage, and take thousands of hostages. Their leader says that among them is the Mahdi, the prophesied “Redeemer of Islam” who will drive out all infidels from holy Saudi soil and lead Muslims into a new era. They broadcast their demands from loudspeakers on the mosque’s minarets, including ceasing oil exports to the US and the expulsion of foreign civilians and military personnel from Saudi Arabia. Saudi forces try unsuccessfully for weeks to retake the mosque, sustaining heavy casualties. The Saudis ultimately enlist the help of foreign military forces to drive out the militants.

That actually happened in 1979.

In Arab Summer, something like that does again. Saif Ibn Mohammed al-Aziz, a ruthless terrorist, leads a Muslim fundamentalist group bent on a bloody coup of the Saudi Arabian government via an Arab Spring uprising. As a prelude to his plan, he has Sasha Del Mira’s husband, Daniel, murdered. Sasha comes out of retirement to avenge Daniel’s death and to help Tom Goddard, her old mentor at the CIA, stop the plot, putting her face to face with Saif, her former ally—and lover.

Q&A with "New York Times" Best-Selling Author Oliver Pötzsch

New York Times best-selling author Oliver Pötzsch turned family lore into popular historical mysteries, starting with The Hangman’s Daughter. A descendant from a famous dynasty of executioners,  he created perhaps one of the most unual detectives in the genre... the loveable hangman Jakob Kuisl. Out this week with the third book in the series, The Beggar King, Pötzsch brings us up-to-date on his work and what life was really like in the 17th century.

Question: The Beggar King is a bit different than the previous Hangman’s Daughter books because the hangman is on trial—why put Jakob in danger this way?

Oliver Pötzsch: Each novel needs a good starting point. A friend of mine asked me: “What happens if the hangman himself gets tortured and hung? Who does the job then?” This was the spark I needed. Everything in the book flowed from this. In real life, it was not unusual for the hangmen himself to end up on the scaffold. For the ambitious successor, this was the best way to demonstrate his skills.

Q: This book showcases a motley crew of supporting characters including the “king” of the beggars who rules a secret, underground world. How much of this was inspired by history, and how much did you invent?

O.P.: There used to be beggar gangs in bigger cities—sometimes their leaders are named in historical records—but I invented “Nathan the Wise,” the head of the beggars of Regensburg. The underground catacombs in which the gang lives do really exist. If you visit them you can see the history of Regensburg: from the Romans, over the Jewish Ghetto in the Middle Ages to the bunkers of the Second World War.

Q: In this book, the romance between Simon Fronwieser and Magdalena Kuisel continues to blossom. In the real world, would there have been any hope for this couple to marry, living in 17th century Bavaria?

O.P.: To be honest, it would have been very difficult for them, but I really wanted to give Simon and Magdalena a chance. Now a lot of my readers are asking if there will be Kuisel- Fronwieser children one day.

Q: If you could spend a week in 17th century, what would you most want to do or see?

O.P.: I like to write about these times but definitely would not want to live in them—not even for one week! No light after sunset, mud on the streets, and an infected tooth is death sentence—what would I want there? If there is one thing I appreciate about that time, it’s the directness.  If you fight for your life each single day you do not think about the meaning of life, your body-mass index, or your work-life balance. A little bit more of that these days wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Q: What are you working on besides the Hangman’s Daughter series?

O.P.: If you spend years studying torture and execution methods, you really need a balance. Currently I’m writing on a novel about the German Peasant Wars of the 16th Century. An exciting time that is often forgotten. You can find plenty of robber-knights, imperial agents, and legendary castle ruins. There’s so much good material for historical novels, you do not really need to invent extra stuff.

You Won't Regret Diving into the Nathan McBride Series

Steve Berry, the New York Times bestselling author of The Columbus Affair, praises the 2012 publishing phenom and bestselling Kindle author of the Nathan McBride series, Andrew Peterson. The third novel in the series, Option to Kill, is now available after participating in the Kindle Serials program. Check out all the books in this thrilling series.

I first discovered Andy a few years ago at the Maui Writers Conference. He’d just landed his first publishing contract and attended my class on craft. He asked, so I provided a critique of Forced to Kill, the second novel in the Nathan McBride series. Andy listened, took extensive notes, and asked a ton of questions. I recall being impressed by his dedication. I knew then this was an author who “had the right stuff.”
   
Andy's protagonist, Nathan McBride, is fascinating because of the dark nature of what lies just below the surface. Early in his career, McBride fell into the clutches of a brutal and sadistic interrogator, enduring three weeks of hell before being rescued. During the worst of it he discovered a part of himself few of us will ever see—a cold and vicious personality that surfaced and helped him cope with the unspeakable horror of being tortured. Although McBride thinks he's come to terms with that pain, the reality still haunts him. That's what Forced to Kill dealt with—Nathan McBride summoning that inner demon, fighting hard not to be controlled by it.

In Option to Kill, the latest McBride novel, Nathan faces an equally difficult dilemma. Through no fault of his own he’s forced to team with a young girl, whose stepdad has just been murdered. Neither of them trusts the other and they’ll have to overcome not only their adversaries, but themselves, if they hope to survive. Option to Kill is a thirty-six hour, action-packed, thrill ride. So sit back, turn off the TV, and dive into Nathan McBride’s world. You won't regret it.

Max Allan Collins on The Disaster Series

Max Allan Collins is the Shamus Award winning, New York Times best-selling author of Road to Perdition and multiple award-winning novels, screenplays, comic books, comic strips, trading cards, short stories, movie novelizations, and historical fiction. We recently had the chance to ask him a few questions about his Disaster Series available on Kindle and in paperback.

Question: It’s unusual for a series of mystery novels to lack a continuing character; however this series is based on a thematic unity. You focus not only on famous historical disasters, but also on a succession of famous mystery and thriller writers, as your hero/detectives.  How did you come up with that approach?

Max Allan Collins: Somewhat by accident. As with most of my series books, this one spun off of a novel intended as a one-shot The Titanic Murders. Shortly after I saw James Cameron’s film, I was talking to an editor at Berkley Books about the movie, and its enormous popularity, and mentioned in an off-hand way that a famous mystery writer of the era had died on the Titanic, Jacques Futrelle, author of the Thinking Machine stories, which I’d read in junior high.  I said, off the top of my hand, that somebody should write a mystery in which Jacques Futrelle solves a closed-environment, Agatha Christie-style puzzle aboard the doomed ship.  Wouldn’t it be darkly amusing for the detective to solve a murder mystery, pronounce all right with the world, and then hear a WHUMP, and say, “What was that?”  And then after a long pause, my editor said, “Can you get me something this afternoon?  Just a paragraph?”  I said sure, did so, and the book was sold.  Same day.

Q: But how did The Titanic Murders lead to a series?

MAC: When it came time to negotiate the contract, I was told that the publisher wasn’t taking on anything but series books and that I had to come up with two more books.  I said, “Well, the detective dies at the end, it is the Titanic, after all.”  Too bad, but you have to do a series, I was told.  Again, off the top of my head, I said, well, I could do other famous disasters, like the Hindenburg and the Lusitania. 

Q: But not all of the writers were actually present when the disaster in the novel took place, correct?

MAC: Most were.  Agatha Christie was certainly in London for the Blitz.  Edgar Rice Burroughs was in Pearl Harbor during the attack.  S.S. Van Dine did travel on the Lusitania, although not during the fateful voyage.  And Walter Gibson, as the creator of the Shadow, had an obvious connection to Orson Welles, making Gibson’s presence at the War of the Worlds broadcast believable.

Q: Will there be more Disaster novels?

MAC: Well, I always say it’s nice to write a novel that’s a disaster on purpose. But during the writing of The Lusitania Murders, 9/11, the worst disaster of recent memory, occurred and took some of the fun out of my notion.  I never made light of the disasters I was dealing with, except perhaps in The War of the Worlds Murder.  But the distance of time does provide a cushion.  I’ll be interested to see how new readers, coming to the Thomas & Mercer editions, feel. 

Q: We understand all of the books will be available on audio.

MAC: Yes, most of them for the first time.  It’s fun to have these stories, these characters, come so vividly to life.

Browse the Max Allan Collins store to view the Disaster series and more of his titles.

Five Noir Films Author Vincent Zandri Loves

Intrepid author and world traveler Vincent Zandri offers up his thoughts on the movies, in honor of his book trailer contest, live now on Amazon Studios, and his newest Dick Moonlight mystery, Murder by Moonlight. Check them both out and try your hand at the contest featuring $3,000 for the winning trailer!

I don’t go to the movies.

Wait, scratch that…I love the movies. Or, films, I should say. It’s just that you’re going to be hard pressed to find me spending a Saturday night at the local mall, buying over-priced popcorn and sitting through the latest Adam Sandler flick while some high schoolers are chatting it up behind me and the seven-feet-six basketball player seated in front of me blocks the entire screen.

Ok, I know, going to the movies isn’t necessarily for the guys, but more for the gals. And it’s what you do for someone you love who is constantly doing things for you that she doesn’t necessarily enjoy doing. Like bellying up to a bar for instance.

But while we’re on the subject, I have a serious confession to make. Until recently, I’ve been single for a long time, dating here and there, enjoying some short-lived relationships, living the George Clooney life more or less, only without the bucks or the Hollywood good looks. In any case, I always find myself telling my date, or prospective date, how much I love to go to the movies. It works like a charm, every time. All I have to do is ask a girl if she’d like to go to a movie this Friday night and dinner afterwards and her eyes will light up and boom, I’m in.

So what I do after that is wait a few days and then I’ll sort of suggest we save the movie for another time since I can only get an early dinner reservation at this really cool restaurant. Usually she agrees and from that point on, I keep promising a movie, but it usually never happens. And that’s usually when the relationship fizzles out.

Problem is, in my business, I can watch movies all the time, anytime, via Netlfix or Amazon Instant Video or even YouTube. In fact, I probably watch and re-watch half a dozen movies per week.  Watching movies and reading books are essential as a fiction writer. Like a musician listening to other bands, watching movies not only sparks my creativity but it also makes me a more enthusiastic writer. I find myself watching not only as a professional, but as a fan.

The  movies I like to watch and, as I’ve already pointed out, re-watch, almost always fall into the noir or hard-boiled categories. The top 5 noir films I simply cannot stay away from are as follows:

1. China Town: Hands down one of the best hard boiled, wise-guy detective flicks ever made. The Robert Towne script is said to be perfect but the performances are even better with Jack Nicholson playing the sarcastic gumshoe and Faye Dunaway the femme fatale. Look for the scene in which Jack slaps Faye around while trying to figure out if the kid upstairs is her sister or daughter. “My sister, my daughter, my sister…!!!” Classic.
   
   
2. Angel Heart: This one came out in the mid-1980s when I was still in college and was more or less a sleeper but a real horrific sexy shocker. Mickey Rourke plays a 1950s era P.I. who has a bit of an amnesia problem. I could tell you the plot but it would spoil the movie. But for atmosphere and acting, you can’t get a better noir performance than this one.
   
   
3. Seven: I’m a big Brad Pitt fan. He makes the big bucks and I believe he should make the big bucks times two. In this one from the mid-1990s, Brad and Morgan Freeman join up to discover who is behind a series of gruesome killings that are mimicking the seven deadly sins inside a city where it always rains and the view is nothing other than the concrete jungle. A contemporary classic with Kevin Spacey as the villain.
   
   
   
4. Double Indemnity: I don’t know about you, but I grew up thinking Fred MacMurray was a real dork considering the dad he played on My Three Sons and the goofy professor in Disney’s Flubber series. But turns out, back when my parents were still having movie dates, old Fred was bad ass. In this one, he and Barbara Stanwyck try and off her husband in order to collect the insurance dough. But it all goes bad in the Hollywood Hills. No one says “Baby,” better than Fred “Flubber” MacMurray.
   
   
5. Foreign Correspondent: This one was made by Hitchcock pre-World War II and it’s more of an atmospheric, paranoid suspense thriller than anything else. Dark shadows, tight claustrophobic settings, crooked camera angles, and in my mind, one of the first and best English speaking foreign noir films ever produced. Joel McCrea’s performance is remarkable in that it’s stood the test of time. I love to watch this one when travelling in Europe.

So those are just five of my tough guy noir favorites. There are of course, many, many more. Tales of the Gun, The Killers, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, among them. My choices range from the classic black-and-white to the horrifying to the campy as all hell. But I love them nonetheless and all have influenced my novels, especially the Dick Moonlight series (Murder by Moonlight), in one way or another. I suspect I’ll be watching them again and again until my dying day.

I’ll leave you with one last confession regarding my movie dating situation, or lack thereof: Just last year, my ex-wife Laura and I decided to start dating again. One of the things that made her come back to me was my convincing her I would take her to the movies once a week. Well, ummm, it’s been a year and we still haven’t gone. But we’re going to get there (I promise, baby). But lately I’ve been thinking that maybe we won’t get there until one of my own films is finally released.

But even then, I might not feel like going to the movie theater. Or maybe I will. I can just see myself sitting in the back row with Laura on one side and some stranger on the other. Knowing me, I’ll poke the stranger on the arm.

“I wrote this,” I’ll whisper.

“Good for you,” she’ll whisper back, maybe with a roll of her disbelieving eyes. Or maybe she’ll get up and move her seat, thinking I’m some crazy dude or full-of-himself tool. Whatever the case, at least I will have finally made it to the movies.

Who Are the Warriors in the Black Helicopters?

Guest post by former Green Beret and NY Times best-selling author Bob Mayer. Mayer is the author of the Sci-fi thriller Nightstalkers, the most recent book in his Area 51 series.

Who are the warriors in the black helicopters?

I remember sitting inside of a Blackhawk helicopter, flying an infiltration mission with Task Force 160 (the same unit that flew the Bin Laden mission) when it was first formed many years ago and wondering that same question, not quite accepting we were the guys in the black helicopters. 

Members of TF-160 are called the Nightstalkers, as is the team I invented in my new book, Nightstalkers (the first in a new Area 51 trilogy). However, my team of fighters is a collection of former Special Ops, Covert Ops, and uncanny warriors drawn together for the most unique mission of all:  to protect us against the things that go bump in the night.

Way back when, I commanded a Green Beret A-Team that was part of a classified program called Trojan Warrior.  It was designed to make an even more elite fighter out of Special Forces soldiers.  If you’ve seen the movie The Men Who Stare at Goats—well, yes, it is was similar to that.  But there was a whole lot more such as martial arts, mentally controlling heart rate and body temperature, and learning how to walk and chew gum at the same time.  Truly elite.

This specialized skillset is needed by the Nightstalkers team in the first book as they face havoc wreaking fireflies that emerge from a rift in space, a killer rabbit, and even a possessed swimming pool.

The books are a lot more fun than the reality of being a warrior, but they reflect the reality.  I remember doing a beach infiltration in a foreign country (to remain unnamed), swimming in, ditching my dry suit, wearing an unmarked uniform with weapons that couldn’t be traced (technically, we couldn’t be traced either).  We moved inland and were in a small town when a taxi came by and the driver happened to glance over and see us:  blackened faces, submachine guns, our vests bristling with the tools of death. The look on his face is part of what I want to convey in these books.

The books in the Nightstalkers trilogy will be both real and a smidge over the top, a little humor never hurt anyone.  In fact, the last thing I would tell new members joining my A-Team during inbrief was:  "Keep your sense of humor; you're going to need it." -- Bob Mayer.