Blog entry:

Jonathan Lopez’s The Man Who Made Vermeers retells the story of Han Van Meegeren, the masterful Dutch art forger of the mid-Twentieth Century, the man who became a sort of folk hero to his countrymen after World War II when he confessed to having sold one of his fakes to Hermann Goering. Although there’s nothing really that mysterious about this read, Lopez’s book was selected in 2009 as one of five finalists for the Edgar (Allen Poe) Award for non-fiction crime writing, so I guess it's a legit topic here.

I recently re-read Dashiell Hammett’s noir thriller, Red Harvest, published in 1929. I wanted to go back to the beginning, get a grip on the type of book literary agents and publishers are saying the market currently favors. I was thinking I might even incorporate a few dark elements into my own mystery. But, although I enjoyed re-reading Hammett--he is after all from my town--in the end, I don't believe I'm cut out for noir (though noir goes well with my hair, I'm told). Anyway, as you might recall, Red Harvest describes the bloody clean-up of corruption in Personville, Montana