Dear Bloodhound Blog
◊ I was up until 2 a.m. helping Dean and his co-workers set up the new bookstore.
I got to alphabetize the mystery novels and thrillers. This meant staring at the spines of paperback novels and shuffling books and muttering "'G' goes before 'N,' right?" to myself for hours.
So many hours, in fact, that the alphabet started to seem like a bizarre abstract philosophical exercise devised purely to torture me. I stared blankly at ranks of books by approximately a million Marrs and Marshalls and Marstons. Mystery writers had obviously conspired to make the job more difficult; why couldn't their surnames be spread out a bit more across the alphabet? Couldn't some of the "M" authors have had their names changed to something starting with the unfashionable letter "I" and made my life a little easier?
Then again, if they were compassionate creatures, they wouldn't be churning out crap books at such a high rate.
Now, I don't want to talk shit about mystery novels, but damn, mysteries are lame. All you need to make serious bank in the genre is a consistent character and some kind of formula for the title. Call your first book Wind Dancer, call the second one Dream Catcher and call the third one Wolf Watcher — after that, you can call the next books Nose Picker and Sheep Fucker and nobody will look twice, as long as the names fit the pattern.
Oh, and anyone who writes a mystery series involving animals or house pets, especially ones that help solve crimes, needs to be shot. I mean, Christ on a stick — Blind Bloodhound Justice?