The reissue of my 1996 crime novel, Equation for Evil, by Bourbon Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, comes out Tuesday, Feb.4. Please see my post of September 16, 2013, for a few more details.

In the same vein, Lyons Press, a division of Globe-Pequot Publishers, will be reprinting  In the Shadows of the Morning, my collection of essays and articles, later this year. This will be a deluxe, limited, autographed edition. To bring this off, I’ve had to sign my name to the endpapers, all 3,000 of them. With one exception, this is the most tedious task I’ve ever had to perform. The exception was my summer job in 1960, when I operated a drill press for the Electromotive division of General Motors. Eight hours a day for three months, I drilled holes in the pistons for diesel locomotives. 

Further news: I was in Los Angeles from Jan.23-25 for two reasons. I was interviewed for a 10-part documentary on the Sixties that’s being produced for CNN by Tom Hanks’s company. I met Mr. Hanks for about 15 minutes before the interview, and found his off-screen self to be much the same as his on-screen self: he’s thoughtful and immediately likeable. Second reason: I had meetings with executives from American Entertainment Investors, which has held the film option to my 2009 novel, Crossers, for the last four years. AEI is renewing the option for another year, and has brought in a top producer (whose name I’m not at liberty to disclose) who will be hiring a writer to do a screenplay, either for a feature film or a cable TV series. Many steps remain before this story is brought to the big screen or the small screen, so I’m not looking for  ball gown for my wife to wear on awards night.

Speaking of awards, I wish to share with visitors to this site an L.A. moment. On Friday night, before a dinner meeting with one of the aforementioned executives, I was standing on the balcony of my room at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Century City. On the street below, a lone evangelical Christian marched up holding a sign that read “Repent or Perish!” while vans and limos by the dozen pulled up to the entrance. The Christian raised a bullhorn and bellowed, “Shame on the Hyatt for hosting these awards! Read your Bible, folks! The Bible says that he who lusts after a woman has committed adultery in his heart, and his reward shall be the lake of fire!” I rode the elevator to the lobby to find out what had roused his hellfire-and-brimstone ire. It turned out that the Hyatt was hosting an awards ceremony for porno films, the XAdult Awards Night, or something like that. I was greeted by the sight of many fit, handsome young men accompanied by stunning young women wearing 5-inch heels and 3-inch mini-dresses, some with breast jobs that made their bosoms protrude like the decks of aircraft carriers. Or should I say, Golden Globes? The guys’ inches were not on display, but we may assume they approached double digits. Meanwhile, the Christian continued to warn of the torments that awaited the nominees in the next life. They were, however, unaffected by his message, appearing to have chosen to perish rather than repent. I don’t know who won what. A note on cognitive dissonance in L.A., a city that is very health conscious, with signs posted outside restaurants: “No smoking within five feet of this establishment.”  Had any one of those young men or young women, who do you-know-what on camera, lit a cigarette, he or she would have been immediately arrested.