February 17, 2012
I was taught as a child that it’s tacky to brag, so somewhere my mother is looking down at me with her lips pursed, because I’m about to brag something serious. Felony & Mayhem Press has been nominated for its fourth consecutive Edgar award.
This is a big deal on several fronts. First, the Edgars—named, of course, for Mr. Poe—are essentially the Oscars of the mystery world; it actually is an honor just to be nominated. And did I mention that we’ve been honored four times in a row? We’re the first small press in the history of the awards to be honored like that. That’s just….buckets of honor.
Then there are the odds. One of my favorite lines in theater history comes from the Tennessee Williams play Sweet Bird of Youth. We’re in a crummy Florida hotel room, where the Princess Kosmonopolis, an aging movie star, is sleeping off a night of excess. She wakes to find Chance Wayne, a young gigolo, preening at the dressing table. Her arm over her eyes, the Princess asks who the hell he is, and Chance replies “Well, M’am, I used to be the best-looking boy in this town.”
The Princess considers this. And then she asks, “How big is the town?”
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January 10, 2012
I am fortunate enough to spend my Christmases with some friends who live in a small town in Pennsylvania. Their location is so rural that deer occasionally wander up to stare at me as I sit on the deck with my morning coffee, and that snow actually stays on the ground, deep and crisp and even, rather than turning in minutes to citified slush. A lifelong New Yorker, I am charmed to the bone.
I’m also a passionate cat-lover, but I am delighted to spend time with my friends’ big, boisterous dogs. My Jewish soul is thrilled by the decorated tree, piled with presents wrapped cack-handedly in Walmart’s shiniest. (And my Jewish soul was profoundly ticked off this year, when the tree proved “too much of a bother,” and was replaced with a listing jade plant hung with a handful of ornaments. BRING BACK THE DAMN TREE!) All in all, my few days in Pennsylvania offer, every year, the most wonderful vacation from my life.
This year, though, it wasn’t the tree or the dogs that provided the most profound reminder that I was not in Kansas anymore: It was my friends’ twenty-three-year-old son. Or, more specifically, his unrelentingly sunny disposish. (“He’s always been like that,” says his mother. “When he was little, he’d come running into the kitchen and say ‘I had THE BEST DAY!!!’ I’d ask what had happened and the answer was always something like he had found a pretty pebble.”) New Yorkers, we’re not like that. We regard cynicism as our birthright, and tend to think of happy people as being too dumb to have discovered self-loathing.
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November 7, 2011
I am what you might call very attuned to names, because my own surname is weird and almost always spelled wrong. (The worst version I got was a result of registering at a Welsh bed-and-breakfast over the phone; when I got there they had me listed as Maggie Hopeless.) I “collect” peculiar names, often from the “society” pages of the New York Times (my longstanding favorite is a couple named Boykin and Celerie; I’m not allowed to make a lot of fun of them because they donate heavily to political causes of which I approve). And many years ago, for reasons I’ve long forgotten, I wrote the beginning of a gothic parody, several paragraphs of deeply purple prose about beautiful Felony Mayhem and her younger sister, Dyptheria. They lived in a crumbling mansion on the moors, attended by a maid named Larceny. Felony was being courted by the cousins Arson and Ague, one of whom was evil but I can’t remember which. And that, aside from much smug snickering on my part, was as far as it went.
Flash forward to 2004, when I was setting up this odd little publishing…well, custom would call it a publishing house, but I tend to think of it more as a publishing shack. I wanted a name for it that would echo some of the great, double-barreled English firms (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, for example) only…bent. I wanted something that would sound a bit flowery, but with (as the great S.J. Perelman would put it) somewhere a roscoe. Felony & Mayhem was born.
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