Megan Abbott is the Edgar®-winning author of the crime novels Queenpin, The Song is You and Die a Little. Her new novel, Bury Me Deep, which is loosely based on the Winnie Ruth Judd "Trunk Murderess" scandal of the 1930s, comes out in July 2009. She lives in Queens, New York.

One might call it bold or even arrogant. An author takes on not only one of the most storied scandals of the 20th century as his subject of his new novel but, at the same time, deploys one of America's most celebrated writers as one of its central characters. That is precisely what Ace Atkins does in his new novel, Devil's Garden, a giddy, swaggering take on the Fatty Arbuckle trial, with a young detective named Dashiell Hammett navigating the scandal’s heady convolutions. But you need only get through the dreamy, haunted prologue—based on Hammett's famous account of being offered money to murder a union leader—to realize that Atkins’s choices are not driven by arrogance at all. Devil's Garden is an act of love.

From frothy show girls to sly-eyed grifters, from machinating hangers-on to Arbuckle himself, so shocked by the speed and cruelty of his descent he can barely lift his head up—all of Atkins' characters are treated with wit, understanding and, frequently, clear-eyed affection. While we see repeated glimmers of the Hammett to come, Atkins never lets the story, or the prose, slip into hardboiled kitsch or winking parody. Nor does he let any reverence cloud his vision. Many of characters that populate Devil's Garden feel like they could emerge, gin-clouded and blood-simple, in Hammett's Red Harvest or The Glass Key, but we can see why: they are so clearly the figures that inspired him. While it tips its hat to Hammett’s world, Devil's Garden caroms along with a style and velocity all its own.

A marvelous extension of Atkins' fascination (White Shadow, Wicked City) with the cunning and often cruel ways that hustlers high and low, board room and back alley, manipulate power, Devil's Garden revels in contradictions—it is both sprawling and intimate, rollicking and poignant. The novel begins on Labor Day weekend, 1921, when beloved screen comic Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle threw a wild party in a suite at San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel. One of his guests, a young woman named Virginia Rappe, fell ill and died shortly after from peritonitis brought on by a ruptured bladder. As the story took on momentum and news headlines screamed, Arbuckle himself faced criminal indictment. Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst reputedly boasted that the scandal sold more papers than the sinking of the Lusitania.

The fact that pre-Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett was one of the Pinkerton detectives assigned to the Arbuckle case is pure literary gold and Atkins’s mines it with great care. His Hammett feels real, a raw-boned young man with a sharp eye and a writer’s gimlet eye and beating heart. He is our trusty guide through a seamy tour through the worlds of yellow journalism, backroom politics and the merry band of hucksters, thieves and B girls who circle around Arbuckle’s downfall, picking pockets along the way. As big as the scandal grows, and as larger-than-life as Atkins’s characters (William Randolph Heart, Marion Davies, Arbuckle himself) are, they never feel anything less than human, petty, troubled, heartbroken, real. It’s quite an achievement.

Late in the novel, Atkins gives us a scene of Arbuckle and his wife, actress Minta Durfee, at the piano playing old songs from their journeymen showbiz days, singing as loud as they can until the windows of their soon-to-be-lost mansion shake. It’s the kind of moment that lingers. You have the feeling, as you do so often when you’re reading Devil’s Garden, of watching some shuddery lost Jazz-Age film. It's as glittery and jubilant as New Year's Eve noisemaker one minute, but the next, one of those haunting silent-movie faces loom out at us, telling us their whole, sad stories with just a twitch of the mouth, a flicker in the eye.



* Devil's Garden hits stores in trade paperback this March.
(Photo © Joshua Gaylord)

Last December, BFP reprinted Ace Atkins's first Nick Travers novel, Crossroad Blues (978-1-935415-03-9; $15), with a new foreword by music journalist Greil Marcus (Mystery Train) & a never-before-published Travers story, "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" (which went on to be nominated for the Edgar!). Now, in October 2010, BFP is proud to release a new edition of the third Travers novel, Dark End of the Street (978-1-935415-17-6; $15), with a new foreword by Robert Gordon (Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters) & possibly another original story! Check out the kick-ass new cover of Dark End of the Street, designed by Mark Francis (who worked on Crossroad Blues and who does the design work on Ace's website) and featuring photography by Neil Krug & Nick Findley. What do you think??

Also, congratulations to Ace for winning this year's Alabama Book of the Year (Fiction) Award for his historical crime novel, Wicked City, which is set in 1954 Phenix City, Alabama, once named by Look magazine as "the wickedest city in America."

And Ace's spring tour for his new novel from Putnam, Infamous, has just been announced, with Ace hitting Phoenix, Atlanta, Houston, Oxford (MS), and more!

-- David Thompson
Publisher, Busted Flush Press

Spring will be here soon and that means that annual road trip to promote my latest novel. INFAMOUS hits stores across the country on April 15th. More dates could be added later. Stay tuned.

White Shadow included in recent Top 10 list by St. Petersburg Times book editor, Colette Bancroft

What books should every Floridian read? You know the classics set in the state, and you might even have read them: Marjory Stoneman Douglas' The Everglades: River of Grass, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' The Yearling, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Patrick Smith's A Land Remembered, John D. MacDonald's Condominium. You know the roster of great crime novelists who write about the shady side of the Sunshine State: Carl Hiaasen, James W. Hall, Randy Wayne White, Tim Dorsey, Edna Buchanan, James Swain and many more. You might have read recent Florida books by St. Petersburg Times staffers, like Pilgrim in the Land of Alligators by Jeff Klinkenberg, Paving Paradise by Craig Pittman and Matthew Waite, or Lonesome Point by Ian Vasquez. Here are 10 more books, fiction and nonfiction, to round out your understanding of this crazy place we're living in.
Colette Bancroft, Times book editor

Dream State: Eight Generations of Swamp Lawyers, Conquistadors, Confederate Daughters, Banana Republicans, and Other Florida Wildlife by Diane Roberts. The FSU professor, journalist and descendant of Florida pioneers brings her sharp and riotous wit to an idiosyncratic history of the state.
Florida Frenzy by Harry Crews. This collection of essays and excerpts from novels by the former UF professor and big dog of redneck Gothic literature offers a strong shot of his powerful style and favorite subjects (bodybuilding, dogfighting, heavy drinking and other bad behavior).
Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida by Gary Mormino. The director of USF St. Petersburg's Florida studies program takes a sweeping look at the state's "Big Bang" transformation in the second half of the 20th century.
Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S. by Cynthia Barnett. This incisive book of investigative journalism explains why this month's sudden plague of sinkholes is just one tiny symptom of the state's water problems.
Ninety-two in the Shade by Thomas McGuane. This novel is a hallucinatory, iconoclastic journey through the pre-gentrified Key West of the 1970s; McGuane is married to Jimmy Buffett's sister, but he writes about the dark side of Margaritaville.
7,000 Clams by Lee Irby. Set in St. Petersburg in the 1920s, when Babe Ruth was the star of spring training and the real estate boom was so hot salesmen buttonholed prospects on downtown streets, this novel by Irby, an Eckerd College history professor, is a rollicking caper as well as a trip into the city's past.
Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen. One of America's finest writers spent more than three decades obsessed with writing this magisterial, menacing novel about Edgar Watson, who a century ago was a real-life Southwest Florida planter, developer and serial killer.
The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise by Michael Grunwald. Marjory Stoneman Douglas told us why the Everglades were worth saving; in this book, a Washington Post reporter details the remarkable efforts to do just that in the 1990s — although the results remain to be seen.
Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World by Carl Hiaasen. You know him as a satirical novelist, but here Hiaasen gleefully rakes some journalistic muck about the 10-ton mouse that took over the state 40 years ago.
White Shadow by Ace Atkins. This novel, set with loving detail in Tampa in 1955, is a hard-boiled tale based on the real-life unsolved murder of Charlie Wall, who was born to the city's elite and died a washed-up gangster inside a locked house in Ybor City.

Some strange mojo down in New Orleans these days. Who would have ever thought we'd see the New Orleans Saints playing to become world champs? And who ever thought we'd ever hear from our old friend, former New Orleans Saints defensive end Nick Travers, again?

But in the same week the Saints beat the Vikings in overtime, a Nick Travers short story was nominated for the Edgar Award. A person definitely has to believe some voodoo is at work here.

I have not written about Nick for almost seven years. In fact, the story that was nominated has been sitting on my hard drive for fifteen years. Back then the Saints finished 7-9 and were third in their division.


But one of the best things about being a writer is that an old story is never really old; that story is as new and fresh as when you first wrote it. It’s alive in the hands of your reader in that great collaboration.

I was more than thrilled to get an early morning phone call from Busted Flush Press last week letting me know that "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" was nominated for an Edgar for Best Short Story. This was a story that had a hell of a time finding an audience. This was the first story where Nick Travers, famously kicked off one of the worst teams in pro sports, burst into my imagination and started my career as a writer.

He would go onto to star in four novels. The Saints would continue to lose.

When David and I first spoke about bringing out a new edition of Crossroad Blues, I instantly thought of the short. I hadn’t read it for some time and was really surprised as veteran writer to see how well it held up. Not to say I didn’t make a few small edits, but the story is pretty much as I’d left it back in 1995.

Chandler wrote about the 'animal gusto' of a new writer really pounding the keys, finding passion and energy in those first stories. And I do believe "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" had that in spades. I had always thought of the short appearing alongside Crossroad Blues, a book that was initially written as a novella. But as I said, I was a young writer, and when I mentioned the word 'novella' to my editor at St. Martin’s, he said: "Can you add about 100 pages in a month?"

And so Crossroad Blues and "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" were separated for all these years. The story was relegated to the hard drive of an old computer that never did enter the internet age.

This story was the first time I felt that I could really do this, work as a storyteller. But I had no idea that what I was writing as a fledgling author, only 25, would ever be good enough to be nominated for an Edgar. After all these years and eight novels later, it’s a thrill to see that first tale getting some respect in the same week Nick's old team heads to Miami.

Just a note to those who appreciate classic cinema: The fantastic NOTORIOUS starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman and directed by Hitchcock plays tonight on Turner Classic Movies at 8 p.m. I've seen it a dozen times but never miss an opportunity. The war-time thriller is one of the most stylish films ever shot, it's James Bond before James Bond, with every frame a work of art.