about the witty and dapper celebrity ghostwriter Stewart Hoag and his faithful, neurotic basset hound, Lulu, including the Edgar- and American Mystery Award--winning The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald. Handler lives in a two-hundred-year-old carriage house in Old Lyme, Connecticut.His new Berger-Mitry novel is The Blood Red Indian Summer.
Earlier this month I asked him what he was reading. His reply:
I'm currently up to my hips in the climax of my next Berger-Mitry mystery, The Snow White Christmas Cookie. I've found that when I'm focused real deeply on the complexities of one of my own plots I can't keep track of someone else's. If I try to do that my head feels as if it's going to explode. Too much information. So I don't usually read novels during this stage of the creative process. Yet I still need to read myself to sleep at night. Can't fall asleep unless I have a book in my hands. The solution that I came up with is short stories.Visit David Handler's website and blog.
I am a huge fan of John O'Hara, Irwin Shaw and James Thurber. All three of them were masters whose collected works I'm continually re-reading. Another of my favoritesis Jack Finney, who wrote one of my all-time favorite novels, Time and Again, as well as The Body Snatchers, which was made into the 1956 sci-fi classic film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Finney was also a tremendously gifted short story writer. A volume of his stories called About Time happens to be the book that's sitting on my night stand right now. The stories are incredibly imaginative, enchanting, sprightly and funny. I especially love "The Third Level," which is about a thoroughly modern man who becomes convinced that he has found a secret third level below Grand Central Station where it's still the year 1894. I first read this story at least 30 years ago and yet to this day I always think of it every time I walk through Grand Central. I promise that you will, too.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
