Panic Attack Book Launch

Panic Attack, Jason Starr's 12th book was launched Aug 9th at Otto Penzler's Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan. Otto is the kingpin of crime editing and publishing. He is the series editor for the annual "Best American Crime Writing" and a wide variety of other series and anthologies. Joyce Carol Oates and James Ellroy are friends. Irish writers who have been welcomed and read there include Ken Bruen, John Connolly and Declan Hughes.

Jason in the Q&A showed that he was open, self-deprecating and a quick thinker. He talked about collaborating with Ken Bruen on three books (a fourth is in the planning stage), written collaboratively across the Atlantic and across the web. He recounted the fun they had writing chapters and scenes and submitting to each other. He recalled Ken walking up to him at a book launch for one of their books and saying that's a great line you wrote there and Jason replying you wrote that! Then after a brief silence Ken saying – I know!

Their editor for those books was in the audience, Charles Ardai, author and publisher of Hard Case Crime, a recent but very significant force within noir crime fiction publishing. (Most of the Hard Case Crime covers however objectify women and glorify the women/violence fantasy, a very regrettable situation).

Jason told the audience he has resisted efforts to write a series of books with a recurring character because he likes the novelty of starting with a new set of players each time; that he gets bored easily so he prefers to avoid series and that he is very stubborn (so the more people (editors probably!) say it to him the more resistant he is).

He prefers to write psychological based crime fiction and he finds that his books are tending to get longer. In Panic Attack he uses Multiple Points of View, which is difficult to effect without losing the reader – a capital offence.

He is a recent convert to crime fiction. When he did an MFA in Creative Writing he didn't know there was any other way to write apart from the 'literary' approach so when he was introduced to crime fiction he was amazed by its power and inherent skill (James M Cain, Jim Thompson for example).

His approach to writing is scene-based rather than character based as opposed to George Pelecanos and Michael Connelly who both feel that all books (at least theirs) are character driven. There was some banter in the audience about who these guys Pelecanos and Connelly were!

Many crime fiction writers were at the book launch including Daniel Judson, Wallace Stroby,Megan Abbot, Russell Atwood, Alison Gaylin, and Persia Walker.

The award winning film maker and writer Tim McCann was also at the launch filming for a feature length documentary on crime fiction writers (so far, Jason Starr, Lawrence Block, Megan Abbott and Duane Swierczynski), basically examining their life and process.