Good News All Around

This has been a veritable weekend of good news for people I like, be it family or friends, but I’m especially pleased about these two bits of news concerning book deals for cool people.

First up is Al Guthrie, whom Ray Banks dubs “the hardest working man in Crime fiction” for good reason. Editor, bookseller, and oh yeah, he’s written a couple of damn fine novels too, that you must all read. Luckily, if you’re in the UK, you’ll be able to more readily thanks to Polygon signing Guthrie up to reprint TWO-WAY SPLIT and KISS HER GOODBYE in spiffy trade paperback formats, the first later this year and the latter sometime in 2006. And if you’ve heard of Polygon, they are the little Scottish publisher that could, introducing a couple of nobodies to the literary scene, after all…

Meanwhile, it’s a bad news/good news thing for Ken “Cult Leader” Bruen, as for inexplicable reasons, his Irish publisher Brandon decided to drop the rest of the Jack Taylor books. But the good news is that Transworld, who publish some damn fine writers in the crime genre, has picked up the slack. So look for the next two Taylor books, PRIEST and CROSS, starting in the Spring of 2006.  The delay will allow the US and UK publications to be a little more in line, as St. Martin’s will only be one book behind instead of two. Never mind that it’s the first time Bruen’s had the weight of a Really Big Publisher behind him in the UK, so no doubt we’ll look forward to tube adverts that bear a suspicious resemblance to this one…