Although we couldn’t attend the entire awards ceremony for the Mystery Writers of America‘s Edgar Awards last night, we were very glad for the opportunity to meet with newly appointed Grand Master James Lee Burke before the pre-banquet reception, where he shared his thoughts on the cultural significance of American crime fiction, why he didn’t have to encourage his daughter, Alafair Burke, to pursue a writing career of her own, and what it means to be a Grand Master.
After we stopped running the video camera, Burke continued to speak admiringly and affectionately about Charles Willeford (who’s also one of our favorite authors), and encouraged us to track down I Was Looking for a Street, a memoir of Willeford’s Depression-era wanderings across the United States.
Burke wasn’t the only Grand Master appointed last night: In a separate phone interview, Sue Grafton was enthusiastic about the opportunities that had opened up for women crime writers since A Is for Alibi first appeared in 1982. She also talked about why new books in the series have been appearing two years apart as she nears the finish line. “It used to take me nine months to write a book, then ten, then thirteen, and so on,” she explained. “Over the years, the publicity has begun to encroach on the writing process. Around the time of K Is for Killer, I began to realize that every time I had to do a phone interview, I was getting annoyed—’leave me alone, I’ve got work to do!’ And I thought, this is just not good for me. I needed to know I had enough time to do the job properly, and I went to my publisher, which was Henry Holt at the time, and they were very good about it.”
That arrangement continues with Putnam, her current press, and since she turned in the manuscript for U Is for Undertow two months ago, it’ll come out in December, “and then V Is for… whatever will probably come out in 2011. I’d like to write faster, but I just can’t do it.” She told us she hasn’t given any thought to what she might do when she’s done writing about private eye Kinsey Milhone: “I’m just trying to figure out how to get from U Is for Undertow to Z Is for Zero,” she said—and just because she knows the endgame title for Z, she emphasized, doesn’t mean she knows what V, W, X, and Y will be.