White Shadow included in recent Top 10 list by St. Petersburg Times book editor, Colette Bancroft

What books should every Floridian read? You know the classics set in the state, and you might even have read them: Marjory Stoneman Douglas' The Everglades: River of Grass, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' The Yearling, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Patrick Smith's A Land Remembered, John D. MacDonald's Condominium. You know the roster of great crime novelists who write about the shady side of the Sunshine State: Carl Hiaasen, James W. Hall, Randy Wayne White, Tim Dorsey, Edna Buchanan, James Swain and many more. You might have read recent Florida books by St. Petersburg Times staffers, like Pilgrim in the Land of Alligators by Jeff Klinkenberg, Paving Paradise by Craig Pittman and Matthew Waite, or Lonesome Point by Ian Vasquez. Here are 10 more books, fiction and nonfiction, to round out your understanding of this crazy place we're living in.
Colette Bancroft, Times book editor

Dream State: Eight Generations of Swamp Lawyers, Conquistadors, Confederate Daughters, Banana Republicans, and Other Florida Wildlife by Diane Roberts. The FSU professor, journalist and descendant of Florida pioneers brings her sharp and riotous wit to an idiosyncratic history of the state.
Florida Frenzy by Harry Crews. This collection of essays and excerpts from novels by the former UF professor and big dog of redneck Gothic literature offers a strong shot of his powerful style and favorite subjects (bodybuilding, dogfighting, heavy drinking and other bad behavior).
Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida by Gary Mormino. The director of USF St. Petersburg's Florida studies program takes a sweeping look at the state's "Big Bang" transformation in the second half of the 20th century.
Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S. by Cynthia Barnett. This incisive book of investigative journalism explains why this month's sudden plague of sinkholes is just one tiny symptom of the state's water problems.
Ninety-two in the Shade by Thomas McGuane. This novel is a hallucinatory, iconoclastic journey through the pre-gentrified Key West of the 1970s; McGuane is married to Jimmy Buffett's sister, but he writes about the dark side of Margaritaville.
7,000 Clams by Lee Irby. Set in St. Petersburg in the 1920s, when Babe Ruth was the star of spring training and the real estate boom was so hot salesmen buttonholed prospects on downtown streets, this novel by Irby, an Eckerd College history professor, is a rollicking caper as well as a trip into the city's past.
Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen. One of America's finest writers spent more than three decades obsessed with writing this magisterial, menacing novel about Edgar Watson, who a century ago was a real-life Southwest Florida planter, developer and serial killer.
The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise by Michael Grunwald. Marjory Stoneman Douglas told us why the Everglades were worth saving; in this book, a Washington Post reporter details the remarkable efforts to do just that in the 1990s — although the results remain to be seen.
Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World by Carl Hiaasen. You know him as a satirical novelist, but here Hiaasen gleefully rakes some journalistic muck about the 10-ton mouse that took over the state 40 years ago.
White Shadow by Ace Atkins. This novel, set with loving detail in Tampa in 1955, is a hard-boiled tale based on the real-life unsolved murder of Charlie Wall, who was born to the city's elite and died a washed-up gangster inside a locked house in Ybor City.

Some strange mojo down in New Orleans these days. Who would have ever thought we'd see the New Orleans Saints playing to become world champs? And who ever thought we'd ever hear from our old friend, former New Orleans Saints defensive end Nick Travers, again?

But in the same week the Saints beat the Vikings in overtime, a Nick Travers short story was nominated for the Edgar Award. A person definitely has to believe some voodoo is at work here.

I have not written about Nick for almost seven years. In fact, the story that was nominated has been sitting on my hard drive for fifteen years. Back then the Saints finished 7-9 and were third in their division.


But one of the best things about being a writer is that an old story is never really old; that story is as new and fresh as when you first wrote it. It’s alive in the hands of your reader in that great collaboration.

I was more than thrilled to get an early morning phone call from Busted Flush Press last week letting me know that "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" was nominated for an Edgar for Best Short Story. This was a story that had a hell of a time finding an audience. This was the first story where Nick Travers, famously kicked off one of the worst teams in pro sports, burst into my imagination and started my career as a writer.

He would go onto to star in four novels. The Saints would continue to lose.

When David and I first spoke about bringing out a new edition of Crossroad Blues, I instantly thought of the short. I hadn’t read it for some time and was really surprised as veteran writer to see how well it held up. Not to say I didn’t make a few small edits, but the story is pretty much as I’d left it back in 1995.

Chandler wrote about the 'animal gusto' of a new writer really pounding the keys, finding passion and energy in those first stories. And I do believe "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" had that in spades. I had always thought of the short appearing alongside Crossroad Blues, a book that was initially written as a novella. But as I said, I was a young writer, and when I mentioned the word 'novella' to my editor at St. Martin’s, he said: "Can you add about 100 pages in a month?"

And so Crossroad Blues and "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" were separated for all these years. The story was relegated to the hard drive of an old computer that never did enter the internet age.

This story was the first time I felt that I could really do this, work as a storyteller. But I had no idea that what I was writing as a fledgling author, only 25, would ever be good enough to be nominated for an Edgar. After all these years and eight novels later, it’s a thrill to see that first tale getting some respect in the same week Nick's old team heads to Miami.

Just a note to those who appreciate classic cinema: The fantastic NOTORIOUS starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman and directed by Hitchcock plays tonight on Turner Classic Movies at 8 p.m. I've seen it a dozen times but never miss an opportunity. The war-time thriller is one of the most stylish films ever shot, it's James Bond before James Bond, with every frame a work of art.

INFAMOUS won't hit bookstores until April 15th but in expectation, here's an overview of George Kelly's life from www.alcatrazhistory.com. Enjoy -- Ace

George "Machine Gun" Kelly is probably considered one of the most famous "gangsters" from the prohibition era. "Machine Gun" was born George Kelly Barnes on July 18, 1895, to a wealthy family living in Memphis, Tennessee. Kelly's early years as a child were essentially uneventful and his family raised him in a traditional household. His first sign of trouble began when he enrolled into Mississippi State University to study agriculture in 1917. From the beginning, Kelly was considered a poor student with his highest grade (a C plus) awarded for good physical hygiene. He was constantly in trouble with the faculty and spent much of his academic career attempting to work off the demerits he had earned.

It was during this time that Kelly met a young woman by the name of Geneva Ramsey. Kelly quickly fell in love with Geneva and made an abrupt decision to quit school and marry. Kelly fathered two children with Geneva, and to make ends meet, took a job as a cab driver in Memphis. He worked long hours with little reward for his time. Kelly and Geneva were struggling financially, as the job was failing to provide enough money to support their family. Distressed and broke, Kelly left his job with the cab company to seek other avenues to make ends meet. The strain proved to be overwhelming and at 19 years old, he found himself without steady work and separated from his wife. It was about this time when Kelly took up with a small time gangster and started a new venture as a bootlegger. Kelly began to enjoy the financial rewards of his new trade along with the notoriety.

Along with the new success also came the quandaries of working in the underground. After being arrested on several occasions for illegal trafficking, Kelly decided to leave Memphis along with a new girlfriend and head west. He adopted the new alias of George R. Kelly to help preserve the respect and name of his upstanding family back home. Kelly's luck continued to saw tooth with great monetary scores and several unfortunate predicaments. By 1927, Kelly had already started to earn his reputation in the underground world as a seasoned gangster, having weathered several arrests and serving various jail sentences. In 1928 he was caught smuggling liquor into an Indian Reservation and was sentenced to three years at Leavenworth Penitentiary.

After serving-out another long sentence at the State Penitentiary in New Mexico in 1929 for another similar conviction, Kelly gravitated to Oklahoma City where he hooked up with a small time bootlegger named Steve Anderson. Kelly soon fell for Anderson's attractive mistress Kathryn Thorne, a seasoned criminal in her own right. Thorne had come from a family of outlaws and had been arrested for various charges ranging from robbery to prostitution. Thorne was twice divorced and her second husband had been a bootlegger who had later been found shot to death under suspicious circumstances. The official determination of death was suicide, but many people (including one of the investigators) had long suspected that Kathryn was involved since only days before, she had made comments to a gas station attendant that she was going over to "kill that god-damned Charlie Thorne." Kelly and Kathryn became inseparable and married in Minneapolis in September of 1930.

Up until his relationship with Thorne, Kelly had been a relatively small time criminal. Kathryn's influence soon became obvious, as Kelly's crime sprees would launch him to the prestigious status of "Public Enemy Number One." Kathryn purchased a machine gun for Kelly and pressured her husband to practice. It was said her purpose was premeditated. She was a master at marketing her husband to the underground circles and public. She was known to take the spent gun cartridges and pass them around to acquaintances at many of the underground drinking clubs, introducing them as souvenirs from her husband "Machine Gun" Kelly.

Many historians (and fellow inmates of Kelly) believe that Kathryn was the creator of the "Machine Gun Kelly" image and became known as the mastermind behind several of the successful small bank robberies Kelly pulled off throughout Texas & Mississippi. In August of 1933, the FBI published Wanted Posters describing Kelly as an "Expert Machine Gunner" and created a public frenzy that would later place Kelly into the history books.

In July of 1933, Kathryn and Kelly plotted a scheme to kidnap wealthy oil tycoon & businessman Charles Urschel. Kelly, carrying his trademark Tommy Gun, and two other men carrying pistols entered the Urschel's mansion in Oklahoma City. The Urschels were playing a game of bridge with friends when Kelly stormed in threatening to "blow everyone's head off." Kelly's new hostages were non-cooperative and he was unable to determine which man was Urschel. The two men were forced into a sedan, covered with a tarp and searched for identification. Once they found the ID on Urschel's friend, a man by the name of Walter Jarret, they robbed him of $51 and left him on the side of a deserted road. Urschel was taken into hiding on a rural ranch in Texas and the Kelly Gang made demands for a $200,000 ransom.

The Urschel's family friend E.E. Kirkpatrick made drop arrangements and delivered the ransom in denominations of $20 bills. The money was delivered near the LaSalle Hotel in Kansas City on July 30th, ending the eight-day ordeal. The following day Urschel was released near Norman, Oklahoma, and casually walked into a restaurant to call for a cab. Urschel was sharp, and though blindfolded throughout the ordeal, made sure that his fingerprints were spread everywhere, counted his footsteps to various areas when blind folded, and audible sounds of his surroundings were mentally cataloged, all of which would later become useful in the FBI's investigation.

After splitting the ransom money with their accomplices, Kathryn and "Machine Gun" started state hopping trying to stay two steps ahead of law officials. From the several clues that Urschel was able to provide, the FBI raided the ranch and made an arrest of one of the other conspirators. The bills that had been used for payment in the ransom, had traceable serial records and the Center Bureau of Investigation (now the FBI) started a nationwide search for whom they now suspected was George R. Kelly.
Machine Gun Kelly being led by United States Marshals to prison following his conviction.

George and Kathryn bounced around different states with Chicago becoming their main hub. Both dyed their hair to conceal their identities and enjoyed a lavish lifestyle. After several weeks in hiding, the couple finally made their way back to Memphis to stay with longtime friend John Tichenor. On the morning of September 26, 1933, Memphis police, along with FBI Agents, surrounded the Tichenor house and then made a violent forced entry. It was said at that moment, that Kelly coined the phrase: "G-Men, please don't shoot." Kelly was found badly hung over from the prior evening's drinking binge (still in his pajamas) and Kathryn was in bed still asleep. The couple was quickly flown to Oklahoma where they stood trial and both received life sentences. Eventually all of the accomplices were apprehended, and out of all of those involved, six were issued life sentences.

The City of Lost Angels

Another woman slain makes a crime fiction writer conclude: It’s a man’s world. We just die in it
By Christa Faust

Los Angeles magazine, December 2009

In August a 28-year-old swimsuit model was murdered, her mutilated corpse stuffed into a suitcase and dumped behind an apartment complex in Buena Park. In an attempt to prevent the identification of her remains, her killer had pulled out her teeth and sliced off the tips of her fingers. But his plan was foiled by one of the most obvious, widely reviled symbols of this city’s superficiality. Jasmine Fiore was identified by the serial numbers on her breast implants.

As a child, Fiore had dreamed of becoming a star. As an adult, she’d appeared in chat-line ads, but the fame she longed for continued to elude her. According to news reports, a friend of Fiore’s said men “…fell in love with her at first sight.” This power to mesmerize was not diminished by her murder. In fact, her death made her dream of immortality come true.

Fiore’s heart-shaped, kittenish face was all over every newscast, newspaper, and magazine. The Web was flooded with images of her provocative, scantily clad body. Even after the mystery of her death was solved—her ex-husband, a former reality-show contestant, was ID’d as her killer and later committed suicide—people couldn’t get enough of her. Everywhere you turned, there was Jasmine, the beautiful lost angel.

As an author of noir and hard-boiled crime fiction in L.A., I couldn’t help but be drawn in by Fiore, too. Her story reminded me how much of crime writing—both fiction and nonfiction—is still about damsels in distress. Women have made some progress toward achieving equality in the larger world, but we continue to fight to be taken seriously in my genre.

The Fiore case made me think of a recent conversation I had with Megan Abbott. Megan and I are rare birds—women writing in a genre historically dominated by men. She’s the author of the novels Die a Little, The Song Is You, the Edgar Award winner Queenpin, and this year’s Bury Me Deep. I’ve just completed my tenth novel, a sequel to 2008’s Money Shot. Both Megan and I gravitate toward female protagonists. Megan’s Queenpin features a ruthless female crime boss and her ambitious protégé. The main character of Money Shot is a former porn star.

Which is why the other day while sitting in a café, we found ourselves talking collaboration and trying to think up a story line that we’d never read before. In his 1987 novel, The Black Dahlia, James Ellroy, the self-described “Demon Dog” of American crime fiction, explored the idea of a man who becomes sexually obsessed with a murdered beauty. The classic film noir Laura delved into the same theme in 1944, just two years before the bisected body of Elizabeth Short, the real Black Dahlia, was discovered in Leimert Park. Why, Megan and I wondered, hadn’t anyone ever told that story the other way around? Were there really no books or films about a woman sexually obsessed with a murdered man? We couldn’t think of a single example.

Female characters in classic noir fiction tend to fall into one of three categories: the murderous femme fatale; the long-suffering wife who keeps asking the hero, “Why can’t you just let this case go?”; and, of course, the beautiful victim. But what if women started stepping up to fill the traditional male roles? The tarnished knight? The stone-cold amoral thief? The wisecracking sex machine? These questions were at the heart of my conversation with Megan. Would a Black Dahlia-style victim-obsession plot work if the genders were reversed?

Turning gender expectations inside out is nothing new for me. I’ve never been a girly girl. I hate shopping, gossip, and chick lit. I don’t want anything to do with babies. I was a tomboy growing up and only figured out how to access my feminine side when I started working in Times Square peep booths and later as a professional dominatrix.

I met people in these worlds who were hypermasculine, hyperfeminine, and every possible shade of in between. I learned that gender could be fluid, a game rather than a given. Many of my sessions as a pro domme involved the “feminization” of male clients. I learned to wield a strap-on, to appropriate the ultimate symbol of male power and turn it against them. I took power away from powerful men and made them pay for the privilege. I became fascinated by the deconstruction of gender stereotypes—a recurring but not always conscious theme in my fiction for more than 20 years.

When I sat down to write Money Shot, I wanted to take on these stereotypes more directly. It was to be published by Hard Case Crime, a critically acclaimed publisher of two-fisted hard-boiled fiction. I was to be their first-ever female author, going toe to toe with the legends of the form. Mickey Spillane. Donald E. Westlake. Lawrence Block. An intimidating prospect for any writer, never mind that I was the only dame in the lineup.

I set out to tell a classic revenge story but with a female protagonist. Not just the standard-issue action babe—there are already more than enough books, comics, and movies about gorgeous 21-year-old supermodels who also happen to be kick-ass ninja sharpshooters. Most of them are conceived by men. I wanted to create a realistic, middle-aged woman who doesn’t automatically turn into Chuck Norris with tits when her life is torn apart. She is both tough and vulnerable. Sexy and street-smart but still worried about her aging figure. A woman who has no idea whether she’s capable of cold-blooded murder until it’s time to pull the trigger. That woman became Angel Dare.

Angel is a former adult film star who runs her own adult modeling agency. She gets a call from an old friend asking her to do one more movie, but when she agrees, she winds up left for dead in the trunk of a car. Instead of dying like a good girl, Angel goes after the men who destroyed her life. She learns the hard way that revenge isn’t always sweet.

Having broken open one macho stereotype in Money Shot, I wanted to play around with others. Would it be possible to create a female version of Bucky Bleichert, the obsessed detective in Ellroy’s Black Dahlia? Would a traditionally feminine woman ever fall for a murdered man? Would she moon over his handsome photo, promising his image that she would bring his killer to justice? Or is there something so inherently masculine about the archetype of the white knight avenging the dead maiden that its opposite just doesn’t work?

There’s another force hidden beneath the surface of that archetype: a deeper, profoundly unfeminine dynamic. The detective might be secretly aroused by the brutal violation of the victim and then driven to mete out justice as atonement for his unspeakable desire. Or maybe he feels a need to punish her killer for acting on the murderous lust they share. This compulsion is particularly strong in Ellroy’s fiction. It’s the same dark and shameful desire that fueled the recent media exploitation of Jasmine Fiore.

Maybe that’s why, after reading the coverage of the Fiore case, I found myself needing to reconnect with Megan and take a second look at the postmortem fetishization of sexy victims. “Technically,” Megan responded in a recent e-mail, “a fetish, in Freudian terms, can only be attached to an object, not a person, which seems to demand an objectifying gaze. I can imagine an argument made that women simply don’t tend to objectify the male body as men do with women.”

While I can speak from personal experience and say it is possible for a woman to fetishize a living, breathing man standing right in front of her, it’s completely different when the fetishized object is just a photograph, a disembodied concept. It’s undeniably far more common for men to, as Megan put it, “respond visually” to a Jasmine Fiore or an Elizabeth Short and “project the rest, bring all their own private desires to bear on the ‘blank slate’ before them.” Which made Megan ask, “Is male victimage just a sign of weakness and thus unappealing?”

I think this is the central question. Women certainly have protective instincts, but the female urge to protect and avenge is usually more maternal than sexual. A murder victim seems helpless and childlike, qualities that have little power to arouse standard female desire. On the other hand, I don’t write about “standard” females. Since I love a challenge, I decided to see whether I could find a way to reconfigure the Jasmine Fiore story. I started sketching out the bare bones of a narrative about a sexy male victim and an obsessed female investigator.

The cop is the first one on the scene, and she can’t get the images of the violated body out of her mind. She finds herself spending way too much time in the young man’s apartment, going through his things and consumed by every little detail of his short life. She finds nude photos, even an explicit video of the young man and his new wife. The video features scenes of bondage and submission, which the cop finds especially arousing. The images of his bound body in the video become tangled in her mind with those of his corpse. Driven by guilt and shame, she works night and day on the case, determined to find his missing, possibly murderous wife and bring her to justice. To punish the killer, punishing herself by proxy.

But would anybody buy that book? Would you?

Christa Faust, author of Money Shot, has been described by Quentin Tarantino as “a Veronica in a world of Bettys.”

After electrifying the recording world, television and live audiences of the 1950s with his bump-and-grind brand of rock-and-roll, Elvis Presley made his movie debut in the 20th Century Fox Western Love Me Tender (1956). He seemed at least partly intent upon becoming a serious actor in some of his early roles: a semi-autobiographical part in Paramount's Loving You (1957); an ex-con rocker in MGM's Jailhouse Rock (1957); and, back at Paramount, a young delinquent (a part once mentioned for James Dean) in King Creole (1958). Once he returned from military service, however, Presley seemed content to turn out lightweight musical comedies in which he essentially played himself and appeared to be having fun.

Born in Tupelo, Miss., in 1935, Presley moved to Memphis, Tenn., with his family at age 13. After recording a number of singles, he signed with RCA in 1955 and became an instant sensation. By the time of his premature death from a heart attack in 1977, "The King" had sold millions of singles and albums. In all, he made 33 movies that grossed a total of more than $150 million.

Among the films released through United Artists and MGM were Follow That Dream (1962), which has Elvis as the most responsible member of a rural family of itinerants who claim "squatter's rights" on land owned by gamblers; Kid Galahad (1962), another attempt at drama with Elvis playing a neophyte boxer who tangles with gangsters and sings seven songs including his hit "I Got Lucky."

In MGM's It Happened at the World's Fair (1963), Elvis plays a small-plane pilot who helps an abandoned child at the fair and sings 10 songs -- most memorably, "One Broken Heart for Sale." Kissin' Cousins (1964) casts Presley both as a brunette Air Force lieutenant and his blond cousin, who's part of a hillbilly clan that owns property needed by the government for a missile base. Presley's best MGM movie was Viva Las Vegas (1964), directed by Golden-Age musical master George Sidney (Show Boat, 1951, Bye Bye Birdie, 1963) and featuring for once a costar who could more than hold her own with Elvis -- the beautiful and dynamic Ann-Margret. He's a racecar driver; she's a swimming instructor - but they both have enough talent to have their own nightclub acts. The movie's 12 songs include Presley's lively take on Ray Charles' "What'd I Say?"

Also at MGM, Presley made Girl Happy (1965), playing a rocker hired by a gangster to protect his pretty daughter, Shelley Fabares. In Harum Scarum (1965), Elvis plays a singer kidnapped and taken to the Middle East, where the sets include some once used for Kismet (1944) and the silent The Ten Commandments (1923). Presley's other MGM roles include a rock star/racecar driver in Spinout (1966); a Mississippi gambler in Frankie and Johnny (1966); a rock star touring England (an ambition Presley himself never realized) in Double Trouble (1967); a photographer who works for both a "skin" magazine and a conservative newspaper in Live a Little, Love a Little (1968); and a mixed-blood Native American in Stay Away, Joe (1968).

Presley's last film as an actor was Universal's Change of Habit (1969), co-starring Mary Tyler Moore as a nun tempted by his charisma. In 1968, freed from his movie commitments, he made a triumphant return to live shows with an NBC television special and spent the rest of his career performing on recordings and the concert stage. Elvis on Tour (1972), a documentary released by MGM, shows Presley backstage as well as performing a long list of hits including "Polk Salad Annie," "Johnny B. Goode" and "An American Trilogy." The world mourned Presley's death in 1977 (he was 42), his premature end apparently hastened by increasing weight and dependence upon drugs. He was divorced from Priscilla Presley, with whom he had one child, singer Lisa Marie Presley.

by Roger Fristoe