I'm always looking for a good book and one of my stops on the Internet is Michael Allen's Grumpy Old Bookman. That's where I found out about A Woman from Cairo by Val Landi, which I wanted, but couldn't have. I wanted the book because it was getting rave reviews, but no publisher was willing to publish it.
Well, on March 31, I saw that Michael Allen's book is going to be published. Did I know he was a fiction writer? No. Why?
"If you've been paying attention to the book world in general, you will know that the perceived wisdom these days is that a publisher should begin banging the drum for a book several months in advance of publication. After all, on this very blog you may have read reviews of books well before the publication date... Why then, have I never (well, hardly ever) mentioned my own new book until just before its publication date?"
Not only did I see that How and Why Lisa’s Dad Got to Be Famous was soon to be published, but Allen had published many books, not all under his own name. He says:
"If you want to be taken seriously these days, you have to write a series of books in more or less the same style, like Jilly Cooper or James Patterson. In the 1970s I wrote three whodunits featuring a detective called Ben Spence. These were quite well reviewed and sold tolerably well. They were published in the UK, the USA, and a couple of other countries. So the smart thing to do would have been to go on writing more of that series. If I’d done that I might, just possibly, have achieved the same degree of success as Colin Dexter, with the Morse books, or Reginald Hill with Dalziel and Pascoe. But I got bored with writing whodunits and did other things instead."
So, I am intrigued. Then yesterday I got an email from Allen that said in part:
"In the past two years, Michael Allen has reviewed a large number of novels on his widely-read blog, the Grumpy Old Bookman — and he has not always been enthusiastic about them. He has also had some uncomplimentary things to say about publishers, creative-writing degrees, slush-pile readers, and various other denizens of the book trade."
So... Michael Allen can dish it out, all right. Question is, can he take it?
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