We crime writers love to cast bankers as our villains. They’ve got money, so who’s going to have any sympathy for them? And they make us grovel when we go in for a car loan.

I cast a banker as my villain in my thumb novel, Iced, last year. I had him running an investment scam.

Fellow crime writer Mike Manno – we’re both published by Five Star – climbed aboard the anti-banker bus this year with his novel End of the Line.

My banker pops up from time to time and, in the final chapter, I have him arrested at a symphony concert in the rotunda of the state capitol.

Mike shows his banker no mercy. The man’s an embezzler. Mike kills him off before page 1. A city bus driver find the banker, Rhett Butler – I kid you not on the name – dead on his bus. That, too, happens before page 1.

So it’s up to Mike’s state police detective, Jerome “Stan” Stankowski, to solve the crime with deputy state A.G. Parker Noble looking over his shoulder.

Well, no, Noble isn’t looking over Stankowski’s shoulder. He leads the investigation in the way that Nero Wolfe does in Rex Stout’s mysteries. Quirky Parker Noble is the thinking man, and skirt-chasing Stankowski is Wolfe’s skirt-chasing associate, Archie Goodwin. Both do the leg work for their detectives.

End of the Line is not a book to be taken seriously, not after you meet some of the curious characters and critters who inhabit it – the bus driver, Sherman “The Wheel” Wheeler; a mafia type named Johnny Capo; Buffy, a girl reporter and Stankowski’s frequent date; and Parker Noble’s dog, Buckwheat Bob, a basset hound who gets whatever high he gets listening to talk radio. This is pulp fiction intended to be enjoyed like movie popcorn. You just can’t put it down until you get to the bottom of the box.

For fans of William Kent Krueger’s Cork O’Connor mystery series – and I’m one of them – Krueger announced big news on his website this month. He won’t retire Cork, as he said he would a year and a half ago.

Krueger wanted time to write a big stand-alone thriller that would get him a movie contract. To get that time, he said back then, Cork had to go, that Heaven’s Keep, his ninth book in the series published last year, was his last.

Said Krueger this month, “Two things happened. First, the economy went south and I realized that Cork’s been doing a pretty good job of helping me pay the mortgage. And second, I had an idea for another book in the series, one that just knocked my socks off.”

That idea puts Cork in Minnesota’s Iron Range.

Authorities select an abandoned iron mine for a nuclear waste burial site. Residents of the area don’t want radioactive stuff in their backyard and may do something about it, so Cork is called in as a security consultant. The first day on the job he finds six bodies in a poorly hidden chamber in the mine – five of the bodies dead for 40 years, the sixth killed only a week ago. Forensics determines a bullet from Cork’s father’s pistol killed the last of the 40-year-old bodies. Liam O’Connor – Cork’s father – was the Tamarack County sheriff at the time. He died in a shooting some years later.

A bullet from the senior O’Connor’s pistol also killed the most recent body, the gun now owned by Cork.

Vermillion Drift is finished and at the publisher’s. We all get to read it in September when the book comes out.

Tomorrow: A banker gets his

Amazon and Barnes & Noble have had the hog’s share of the e-book market.

Yes, you can buy your e-books directly from the electronic book publishers – most of them small houses – but if you want Stephen King’s or Mary Higgins Clark’s latest book in digital, and those of other top-selling writers, you go to Amazon or B&N.

Now, though – as of this month – you can buy your e-books from Borders’ electronic bookstore. The company hopes to get 17 percent of the total e-book business within a year . . . and maybe they will. Borders sells the two lowest priced e-readers out there, the Kobo at $149 and the Aluratek Libre at $119. Additionally, Borders gives you a $20 gift certificate with its Kobo to bring the effective price of the machine down to $129, $20 below Barnes & Noble’s cheapest Nook e-reader.

The company, in financial trouble for much of the past decade, continues to be. Borders reports that its in-store sales for the first quarter of the year dropped 11 percent from the same period last year.

The company lost $64 million for the quarter.

But that’s better than the first quarter of last year when the company lost $86 million.

Borders is half the size of Barnes & Noble. It has 683 stores and 8 percent of the consumer book market, where B&N has 1,357 stores and 16.7 percent of the consumer book business.

Tomorrow: William Kent Krueger keeps his mystery series going

If more of us writers are getting out there with more books, those of us who survive in this business and profit, says Neil Gaiman, are those who hustle. And few writers are more effective hustlers than Gaiman with his sci-fi novels, graphic novels, children’s books, a British television series, and, yes, movies. Gaiman’s written a flock of television and film scripts that have seen production, and two of his long works – Stardust and Coraline – have been turned into top-rated films. The Graveyard Book is the next slated for filming.

As a promoter of his own work, Gaiman maintains an interactive blog, a Twitter feed, a website, pages on Facebook and elsewhere – all right, he’s got help. And he’s out touring.

Smart authors, he told NPR’s On the Media host Brooke Gladstone, may wind up reverting to the world of Charles Dickens.

Printers here cranked out pirated editions of Dickens’ books and sold them. There wasn’t any profit in that for Dickens, so, when he couldn’t stop the pirates, he decided to go after the Yankee dollar another way. Dickens came here, and he hit the lecture circuit. He gave readings from his books for a price.

Says Gaiman, Dickens gave people the one thing the pirates couldn’t give them – Charles Dickens. And we Americans in that day came out for that. We bought tickets to get into the theaters and auditoriums, so we could see and hear the man who wrote The Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, and so many other books.

Gaiman believes we may be heading for a world, in the next 10 to 15 years, in which Stephen King won’t make any money from his new book, but he instead will pack our country’s arenas and read the book – well, portions of it – to his audiences.

That, Gaiman told Gladstone, will be fun.

Tomorrow: Borders now selling e-books

Newsman Dan Schorr died last week at the age of 93. He had worked up until two weeks before his death, for the past 25 years as a news analyst and commentator for NPR.

Schorr said public radio hired him because he was a living history book.

“A colleague stuck his head into my office [one day] and said to me, ‘Dan, excuse me, you covered the Spanish-American war, no?’” Schorr told All Things Considered host Robert Siegel in a 2006 interview. “He saw the look on my face. He said, ‘No, I guess not. That was earlier, huh?’”

But Schorr was there for World War II, the Korean War, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the first space flight, Watergate and the resignation of President Nixon, and the building of the Berlin wall and its fall 28 years later.

He on occasion got in trouble with his bosses. CBS suspended him in 1976 – he later resigned before the network could fire him – and CNN fired him 1985.

But Schorr collected a bushel of honors for his work, including three Emmys, the George Polk Award for radio commentary, and the Edward R. Murrow Award for lifetime achievement in broadcasting. That one came in 2002.

He also collected a perverse kind of honor from the Nixon Administration. White House aides didn’t like Schorr’s reporting on the Nixon Administration and dispatched the FBI to dig up something they could use against him. Investigators didn’t get much, nonetheless the aides put Schorr on a Nixon Enemies List. That list came to light on September 9, 1971, when John Dean mentioned it during a hearing being conducted by the Senate Watergate Committee.

Schorr got the list minutes before air time that evening, for “The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.” Schorr read the list live on the program and didn’t miss a beat when he came to his name as number 17 and the note “a real media enemy.” Until that moment, he didn’t know he was on the list.

I remember it well. I was watching CBS that evening. A lesser reporter might have stumbled or gasped at the sight of his name on an enemies list. Not Schorr. He read his name and went right on, holding his reaction until after he was off the air.

Schorr was a writer, of his own news stories and commentaries, and of books – six books in his lifetime: Don’t Get Sick in America (1970), Clearing The Air (1978), Forgive Us Our Press Passes, Selected Works (1998), Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism (2001), The Senate Watergate Report (2005), and Come to Think of It: Notes on the Turn of the Millennium (2007).

Working with other writers, he also co-wrote three other books: Within Our Reach: Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage with Lisbeth Schorr and William Wilson (1989), Cradle & Crucible: History and Faith in the Middle East with David Fromkin, Zahi Hawass, and Milton Viorst (2004), and The Idea of a Free Press: The Enlightenment and Its Unruly Legacy with David Copeland (2006).

Tomorrow: The future of the book, part last

More than a half-million new books – new titles, fiction and nonfiction – will be published this year. And that number’s going to go up next year and the year after and the year after that.

See, I can write a book on whatever subject I want and get it out there as an electronic book that you can buy for $1.99 from Amazon. My costs might be a couple hundred dollars. If I sell 300 books, I’ve made my out-of-pocket expenses back.

Hmmm, interesting.

Michael Cader, founder of Publishers Marketplace, says this ease of publishing is great for readers.

“There are more options,” he told NPR’s On the Media host Brook Gladstone recently. “There’s price competition, there’s format competition, there’s new ways to read. You can get things delivered faster. They’re accessible online. There’s more voices, there’s more communities to serve you. So for readers, it’s terrific.”

And readers are moving toward e-books.

Cader estimates that e-books so far this year make up about 8 percent of total book sales, buoyed by the iPad.

A National Endowment of the Arts study showed that two years ago 15 percent of us U.S. adults were reading literature online or on our e-readers or on our cell-phone screens. And a lot of us adult online readers are in the 18 to 24 age bracket. And that’s not a surprise. This group and our teenagers are the first adopters of new reading technology.

Monday – One more look at the future of the book

The publishing world changed in December of 2008.

Scribner, Random House, Houghton-Mifflin, HarperCollins, all went on firing sprees – shedding themselves of hundreds of editors, sub editors, herds of office employees and even a few publishers.

Book sales were in the dumper – flatter than a possum that had been run over by a semi – so the bigs cut staff to cut costs.

Colin Robinson, one of the first fired at Scribner, told Brooke Gladstone at NPR’s On the Media, there were and are just too many books out there.

“There is a huge overproduction of titles,” he said. “Writing books is incredibly easy, much, much easier than it used to be. You can get it edited electronically, you can typeset it yourself, you can easily get short-run printers to distribute it, or you can distribute it electronically. And so, I think it’s a really great time for writers and not such a good time for readers.”

With so many books in the stores and online, Robinson feels we readers are having a hard time picking the really good books to take home.

His answer? Create a company that publishes just a few really good books, then promote the heck out of them.

He and partner John Oakes have done that.

Last year, they’ve started OR Books with the aim of publishing a book a month that they sell directly to readers. Cut out the book wholesalers and the retail stores – even Amazon – and spend on book promotion the money the wholesalers and retailers would have gotten. . . . about $50,000 to $100,000 per book.

That’s a lot of money when you consider that most publishers spend nothing on promotion outside of their quarterly catalogs.

Are Robinson and Oakes elitists in wanting to publish only a few of the very best books?

Maybe.

But if they can bring it off – if they can gather a handful of the top writers under their umbrella – perhaps they will generate enough sales that they will make money for themselves and make very good money for their writers.

That, of course, doesn’t help the thousands of writers who aren’t in that handful – who aren’t Grishams or Pattersons or Kings. What of them?

The future of the book may be very good for them, too. That, tomorrow.

Tomorrow: The future of the book – Part 3

Our country was founded on the written word, says Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants, a book that will be out in October.

“By 1910, three-quarters of the towns in America with populations of more than 2,500 residents had a public library,” Kelly said in a story in this month’s edition of Smithsonian magazine. “We became a people of the book.”

That’s thanks both to Mr. Gutenberg and his printing press, and the stress we in this country put on education.

Now, though, we are becoming less a people of the book, than a people of the screen. The simple truth is, says Kelly, “words have migrated from ink on paper to pixels on computers, phones, laptops, game consoles, televisions, billboards and tablets. . . . Screens fill our pockets, briefcases, dashboards, living room walls and the sides of buildings.”

In becoming a people of the screen, the time we spend reading – get ready for the surprise – has almost tripled since 1980. Says Kelly, “By 2008 more than a trillion pages were added to the World Wide Web, and that total grows by several billion a day. . . . Right now ordinary citizens compose 1.5 billion blog posts per day. . . . More screens continue to swell the volume of reading and writing.”

Traditionally, we writers have measured our success by the number of books we sell and the number of reviews we garner. Not so in the future, says Kelly. Our success will be measured by the degree that what we write “is linked to the rest of the world. A person, artifact or fact does not ‘exist’ until it is linked.”

Screens engage us, oh, do they ever. We read an idea that’s new to us or we come across a fact we didn’t know before, and most of feel we ought to do something – maybe we should research the term, or query our Facebook or our Twitter friends for their opinions, or search out an alternate view, perhaps create a bookmark.

Says Kelly, “Book reading strengthens our analytical skills, encouraging us to pursue an observation all the way down to the footnote. Screen reading encourages rapid pattern-making, associating this idea with another, equipping us to deal with the thousands of new thoughts expressed every day. . . . Screens provoke action.”

Tomorrow: The future of the book – Part 2

This has to be the strangest book story I’ve ever come across.

The town councilmen over in Delavan – a town not far from where I live – found themselves in a real stew. An old building just down from the business district was in a shamefully shabby condition. Heck, it was a fire hazard.

The town didn’t own the building, and Ed Chesko, the man who did, was up in years and couldn’t afford to take care of the place any longer. Chesko kinda wanted to give the building to the town and let the town either save the building or tear it down.

Tear it down would be the cheap way to go, but the Israel Stowell House was historic. It had been built 170 years ago as a hotel and social center for Delevan’s Temperance movement. It’s the last surviving Temperance building in Wisconsin.

Now you’re wondering what books-by-the-truckload has to do with this old wreck of a place. Chesko, when he was an active businessman, owned the Old Delavan Book Company, a bookstore some years back. The Stowell House was his warehouse. He had 50,000 books in the thing, ranging from rare books that are collectible to dime-store paperbacks that aren’t.

Chesko found an out. He gave the Stowell House and all its contents to the Delavan Historical Society. The society’s board of directors are now raising money to restore the place so it can be the society’s headquarters and a repository for its archive.

But those books that filled up the Stowell House, racks from floor to ceiling and up the staircase? An electrical short or a match thrown in would send all that bound paper up in flames, so the town ordered the building cleaned out by last week or it would send in a wrecking crew with endloaders and dump trucks to knock the building down and haul it and the books to the landfill.

The historical society sent out the word: Books for sale, cheap.

A Wisconsin book dealer responded as did a dealer in Tennessee. Each hauled away a truckload of books.

If no other dealer takes the books that remain, the historical society may put them out front in a yard sale – all income to go into the fund to restore the building.

So it may well be that books have saved a historic building in this Wisconsin town.

Tomorrow: The future of the book – Part 1

For readers like you and me, summertime in Wisconsin is the season of used book sales . . . and Marge and I hit our fair share. Look what we came away with from the Friends of Barrett Memorial Library’s sale on a Saturday morning at Williams Bay:

Bedtime Stories for Dogs – you read that right – by Leigh Ann Jasheway, Andrews & McMeel, 1996
My Losing Season by Pat Conroy, Doubleday, 2002
A Native Son’s Return: 1945-1988 by William L. Shirer, Little Brown, 1990
Ring of Truth by Nancy Pickard, Pocket Books, 2001
Legacies by Janet Dailey, Little Brown, 1995
About the Author by John Colapinto, HarperCollins, 2001
No Graves as Yet by Anne Perry, Ballantine, 2003
The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard, Viking, 1996
To the Last Man by Jeff Saheera, Ballantine, 2004
Mimosa Grove by Dianah McCall, Mira, 2004
The Return Journey by Maeve Binchy, Dell, 1998
Northern Lights by Nora Roberts, Jove, 2004
Four westerns by William W. Johnstone: Blackfoot Messiah, The Only Good Outlaw is a Dead Outlaw!, and Deadly Trail
And the treasure find: A Day in the Life of America . . . This last is a coffee table book, a book of pictures taken by 200 of the world’s best photojournalists on one day in the spring of 1986. I couldn’t afford this book at the time it came out and, even today, copies in primo condition go for $40 to $50. Used book sale price at Williams Bay? $1.

So what do you think of our haul?

What have you bought at a recent used book sale?

Tomorrow: Books by the truckload