Larry Beinhart's Blog
July 7, 2022
The Deal Goes Down
Library Journal - Prepublication Review
MYSTERY
The Deal Goes Down
by Larry Beinhart
Melville House. Aug. 2022. 288p.ISBN 9781612199900. $27.99. M
COPY ISBN
Edgar Award winner Beinhart (The Librarian) returns with a new novel starring detective Tony Casella (last seen in 1991’s Foreign Exchange). Now a 70-year-old ex-PI, Casella boards a train in upstate New York. In the club car, he’s approached by a woman he’s never met who asks if he can kill her bad—and fabulously wealthy—husband. Tony’s broke, his house is up for foreclosure; he says yes. It needs to be done soon, before the husband can hide his money. Eventually, Tony notches up three kills, though none in ways he expected. En route, everything that can go wrong does. An associate tries to take Tony’s earnings. Government agents trail him. He’s sent to Switzerland to assassinate a truly scary Russian oligarch. One of the great creations in the book is Tony’s accomplice, Allison, a young sex worker who looks like (and was) a Bard College undergraduate. An interesting twist: Beinhart appears as a character in his own novel. As one might expect of the author whose novel American Hero morphed into the DeNiro film Wag the Dog, Beinhart is a sly dog who glories in surprise twists and lards his story with unexpected land mines.
VERDICT There’s enough action in this thoroughly enjoyable comedy of errors to please the most discriminating reader, but it’s the humor that captures. For fans of crime capers and Donald Westlake’s “Dortmunder” tales.
MYSTERY
The Deal Goes Down
by Larry Beinhart
Melville House. Aug. 2022. 288p.ISBN 9781612199900. $27.99. M
COPY ISBN
Edgar Award winner Beinhart (The Librarian) returns with a new novel starring detective Tony Casella (last seen in 1991’s Foreign Exchange). Now a 70-year-old ex-PI, Casella boards a train in upstate New York. In the club car, he’s approached by a woman he’s never met who asks if he can kill her bad—and fabulously wealthy—husband. Tony’s broke, his house is up for foreclosure; he says yes. It needs to be done soon, before the husband can hide his money. Eventually, Tony notches up three kills, though none in ways he expected. En route, everything that can go wrong does. An associate tries to take Tony’s earnings. Government agents trail him. He’s sent to Switzerland to assassinate a truly scary Russian oligarch. One of the great creations in the book is Tony’s accomplice, Allison, a young sex worker who looks like (and was) a Bard College undergraduate. An interesting twist: Beinhart appears as a character in his own novel. As one might expect of the author whose novel American Hero morphed into the DeNiro film Wag the Dog, Beinhart is a sly dog who glories in surprise twists and lards his story with unexpected land mines.
VERDICT There’s enough action in this thoroughly enjoyable comedy of errors to please the most discriminating reader, but it’s the humor that captures. For fans of crime capers and Donald Westlake’s “Dortmunder” tales.
May 19, 2021
The Self-Publishing Adventure
Every time I watch TV - actual old-fashioned programming with advertising - I see commercials for the marvels of Pharmaceutical World. There are people out in the world with diseases, disabilities, discomforts. Sorted out by labels, they take prescription medication, and once they do, they become members of special happy clubs. They frequently feature dancing. Also water. (For some reason, as a percentage of the population, people in these Pharma Clubs, do a lot more swimming, canoeing, boating, and beaching than the gen pop.) Also eating.
There are enough diseases that everyone can have one.
Once they have one, they can take a drug. Join an imaginary happy club.
Actually, it works, in part, the opposite way.
Once there's a drug, a disease, even multiple diseases, are found to fit what it does. To give it a reason to be sold. This became particularly evident with psychotropic meds. Like Prozac.
The process became more pernicious with opioid based pain meds. Anybody in the medical profession, in public health - in normal everyday life and politics - knew there were immense problems with opioids. They knew that opium, morphine, heroin, the alternate versions of them, caused severe addiction problems. It happened in the 2nd half of the 19th Century, it happened after WWI, WWII, and Vietnam. It happened in New York in the 1950's & 60s. (That's what wiped out the West Side Story type of fighting gangs. An odd historical fn.)
But there was money to be made. Careers to be built. So pharmaceutical companies - and doctors - and doctor associations - essentially rewrote reality so that all sorts of routine pain could be treated with opioids and they all could pretend that they there were no addiction problems.
Then, of course there were the kids, as young as pre-schoolers who were being put on Ritalin and Adderall and such. My wife, as an artist-in-residence at the local community college, taught some kids who had been put on such drugs early. What they described was years lost to them, a kind of mental numbness, zombification if you will.
That's the short version of how I came to the idea for Zombie Pharm.
It combines the Prozac kind of thinking - with our new drugs everybody can be improved - with the corporate accounting that as long as the cost of harm is less than the profits on the way, the harm is just a cost of doing business - with the urge to make everyone a customer - with the mentality of people who believe that since they're doing good, no matter how much harm they do, it can't be bad.
I took that and put it into a version of the classic zombie story, pretty much defined by Dawn of the Dead. It takes place in an isolated area. The zombie threat grows larger and larger. Our main non-zombie characters have found shelter right in the middle. Now their characters come into play. There's the betrayer, the foolish collaborator, the potential hero, the innocents who don't deserve such fate.
It's dramatic. It's fast-paced. It has some real content (not enough to slow things down). It's very funny in places.
My agent at the time was sure he was going to be very successful with it.
Then he didn't sell it.
I accepted that. Though I truly didn't understand it. The agent either didn't understand it either or didn't think it was worth the effort to tell me.
So it sat there. In a virtual drawer. For several years. Then I just felt it was too good a book, too much fun, to leave it there.
So the self-publishing venture began.
There are enough diseases that everyone can have one.
Once they have one, they can take a drug. Join an imaginary happy club.
Actually, it works, in part, the opposite way.
Once there's a drug, a disease, even multiple diseases, are found to fit what it does. To give it a reason to be sold. This became particularly evident with psychotropic meds. Like Prozac.
The process became more pernicious with opioid based pain meds. Anybody in the medical profession, in public health - in normal everyday life and politics - knew there were immense problems with opioids. They knew that opium, morphine, heroin, the alternate versions of them, caused severe addiction problems. It happened in the 2nd half of the 19th Century, it happened after WWI, WWII, and Vietnam. It happened in New York in the 1950's & 60s. (That's what wiped out the West Side Story type of fighting gangs. An odd historical fn.)
But there was money to be made. Careers to be built. So pharmaceutical companies - and doctors - and doctor associations - essentially rewrote reality so that all sorts of routine pain could be treated with opioids and they all could pretend that they there were no addiction problems.
Then, of course there were the kids, as young as pre-schoolers who were being put on Ritalin and Adderall and such. My wife, as an artist-in-residence at the local community college, taught some kids who had been put on such drugs early. What they described was years lost to them, a kind of mental numbness, zombification if you will.
That's the short version of how I came to the idea for Zombie Pharm.
It combines the Prozac kind of thinking - with our new drugs everybody can be improved - with the corporate accounting that as long as the cost of harm is less than the profits on the way, the harm is just a cost of doing business - with the urge to make everyone a customer - with the mentality of people who believe that since they're doing good, no matter how much harm they do, it can't be bad.
I took that and put it into a version of the classic zombie story, pretty much defined by Dawn of the Dead. It takes place in an isolated area. The zombie threat grows larger and larger. Our main non-zombie characters have found shelter right in the middle. Now their characters come into play. There's the betrayer, the foolish collaborator, the potential hero, the innocents who don't deserve such fate.
It's dramatic. It's fast-paced. It has some real content (not enough to slow things down). It's very funny in places.
My agent at the time was sure he was going to be very successful with it.
Then he didn't sell it.
I accepted that. Though I truly didn't understand it. The agent either didn't understand it either or didn't think it was worth the effort to tell me.
So it sat there. In a virtual drawer. For several years. Then I just felt it was too good a book, too much fun, to leave it there.
So the self-publishing venture began.
May 13, 2021
Way of the Writer
I'm blogging for the first time. Because the Publishing World has changed.
Once upon a time, long ago, I made TV commercials and industrial films. I enjoyed the making of things. I hated the selling. Sadly it was 70%-90% selling.
When I started writing, quite awhile ago, it was 99% writing and 1% selling. Even the selling was not the hey, look at me, I'm jumping up and down, in bright colored clothes, saying oh so sharp things. It was set up by others and being sent out to book stores and for interviews in a genteel fashion.
That's all changed. That percentage has shifted more and more away from the writing to the selling. Time for me to grow up and accept it! Goddamn it!
I have just started on a new adventure. My first self-published book. ZOMBIE PHARM.
As it progresses, presuming it progresses, I will blog about it.
Once upon a time, long ago, I made TV commercials and industrial films. I enjoyed the making of things. I hated the selling. Sadly it was 70%-90% selling.
When I started writing, quite awhile ago, it was 99% writing and 1% selling. Even the selling was not the hey, look at me, I'm jumping up and down, in bright colored clothes, saying oh so sharp things. It was set up by others and being sent out to book stores and for interviews in a genteel fashion.
That's all changed. That percentage has shifted more and more away from the writing to the selling. Time for me to grow up and accept it! Goddamn it!
I have just started on a new adventure. My first self-published book. ZOMBIE PHARM.
As it progresses, presuming it progresses, I will blog about it.
