Devoted to publishing, publishers and to those who craft the written word

Too many people expect the job of "writer" to mean one thing--sitting around quietly working on your novel. Those people will get very hungry. 

Author Allen Rucker's writing career reads like a vocational manual for writers: he's written a comical television book (The Sopranos Family Cookbook), co-written non-fiction books for celebrities (Hollywood Causes Cancer), and most recently, a personal memoir about paralysis (The Best Seat in the House (in hardcover now, look for the trade paperback in January 2008)).

Today, this television and film writer explains the books and writers who influence him, giving us a big long reading list for the weekend.

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson's mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:
You have a deep love for crime fiction. Do you have a reading list for aspiring crime writers? Who are the writers, generally, who inspire you? Which websites, magazines do you read for material?

Allen Rucker:
I’m not a crime-fiction writer, just a crime-fiction reader. I read the literary stuff, too, and a lot of the current entries – like Ian McEwan’s Saturday, for instance – has its share of criminal activity. Continue reading...

Or T.C. Boyle’s fine novel, Talk Talk, another example. I got hooked on crime fiction reading Ross MacDonald in college and realizing his deft sense of place and character was equal to anyone else I was reading.

Crime writers are best at capturing, you know, criminals – Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen, in their own peculiar ways, are masters at this. Some of the Florida scumbags that Hiaasen digs up are the literary equivalents of Mark Twain’s The Duke and The Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn.

Right now I’m particularly fond of really depressing Scandinavian crime writers who write about the lonely, tormented souls in small-town Sweden and Norway. Henning Mankell is the reigning master of this genre.

My latest discoveries are the Swedish writer Asa Larsson and the Norwegian writer Karin Fossum. Someone recently wrote in the New Yorker that the best writing from Northern Europe is crime writing and specifically mentioned Karin Fossum. I think it’s where low and high culture meet these days.

Then there’s Scotland’s Ian Rankin, America’s Michael Connelly, and probably the best of the best, England’s Ruth Rendell. I like true crime writing, too, but that’s another interview.