Charles Finch

Just a reminder: the contest to win a signed 1st edition of A Beautiful Blue Death ends this week; I'll be taking entries at charles@charles-finch.com up until Wednesday evening, and I'll send the winner their book on Thursday morning.

Many thanks to all who have entered so far! I appreciate the response.

It was nearly 60 degrees here in New York yesterday, and as I walked through Central Park I thought of Larkin's poem The Trees:

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

I haven't had a contest yet, but I really like the idea, so this week I'm offering a signed hardback copy of my first book, A Beautiful Blue Death. Please email charles@charles-finch.com to enter; I'll pick the winner at random next week. I'd be happy to inscribe the book too, if you let me know who it's for, whether there's an occasion, etc, in your e-mails.

Good luck!

I've never been good at cooking anything more complex than corn flakes, but in the past few months I've started to learn with a friend. So far our greatest triumph has been a batch of Guinness cupcakes, but we've also made meringues, homemade pasta and sauce, oatmeal cookies, beignets with cafe au lait (inspired by my fantastically fun trip to New Orleans with a friend from England), mulled wine, and most speculatively, hot cider with buttered rum and cinnamon.

Part of what triggered this urge to cook for me was what has become one of my favorite websites: FX Cuisine, an endlessly entertaining roster of recipes shot step-by-step in beautiful, high-res photographs. If you like to cook, or even if you just like food, I would recommend spending about fifteen hours looking through every nook and cranny of the site, but for starters check out two of the recipes that most intrigue me, Swiss Apple Pasta and Scandinavian Sour Cream Apple Pie. They're both a little bit daunting, but I vow to try them anyway.

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Watch this space in the next week or so for a contest, my first one! There should be a couple of good prizes.

The paperback of A Beautiful Blue Death is now available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble, though of course it doesn't come out until July, a few weeks before The September Society. Strangely, the idea of a paperback makes this whole enterprise seem somehow more real, separated from me. And I still love the cover.

One thing that puzzles me about Amazon is the pairings of books that they offer on sale together. For instance, the paperback version of ABBD is paired with (what I'm sure is a terrific) novel by C.S. Harris, rather than my - well, my second book, its sequel. Peculiar. But inconsequential; only all authors, I think, become Amazon watchers to some degree or other.

Exactly thirteen months ago I was living in a small, cheerful apartment just by the Place des Vosges, in Paris, and reading Alan Bennett's miscellany Writing Home, a mix of diaries, essays, radio broadcasts, and other assorted odds and ends. Or bits and bobs, as he would say. Now I'm reading his second book of the same sort, the absolutely wonderful Untold Stories. As a writer Bennett may be closest in spirit to one of my other favorite memoirists, Bill Bryson. He has a wider angle than Bryson, though, and to be fair he's not as funny. Bennett is best known for his plays, I guess, which use glibness as a means of disavowing the depth they generally have.

But really I think he's best in the fragmentary style of these two books - which seem to point out that after all fragments might be the art form best suited to describing an entire life. Take the following passage, about his parents; his father has asked the vicar to marry them at 7:30 in the morning.

Lovell Clarke says that this is out of the question; the law does no permit him to marry anyone before eight in the morning. However, he has no objection to performing the ceremony beginning at eight o'clock, and surely if he is getting married the Co-op won't mind if he is half an hour late for work? Dad enquires: the Co-op does mind; he has to be at work by eight-fifteen.

There are occasions in life, often not in the least momentous, which nail one's colours to the mast. There was the morning, ten days before the end of my National Service, when a sergeant in the Intelligence Corps at Maresfield made me scrub out a urinal with my bare hands; another when a consultant at the Radcliffe Infirmary discussed my naked body without reference to me with a class of smirking medical students; and though it occurred years before I was born, this moment in St. Bartholomew's Vicarage when my father, baffled at every turn, tells Mr. Lovell Clarke that he cannot get a quarter of an hour off work in order to get married is another. Logic, education, upbringing leave such moments unshifted and unforgotten. They are the self at its core.

There's so much in this passage; it's a certain gift in some writers, for instance, to let the dead live on in their minds, gaining complexity. And I love and admire how Bennett tacitly aligns himself with his father, tacitly lets his father know that he isn't alone, all these years later, by recounting two of his own humiliations. And then there's the gift of language - that phrase "nail one's colours to the mast," or the two words "unshifted" and "unforgotten." (The "un-" construction reminiscent of Hardy, as Bennett himself points out in The History Boys.) Even in passages like this, which induce some strange, passing sorrow in me, it's good to have what the best books can give you: the sense of being with an old friend, whether you've met him before or not.

I haven't had a contest on this site yet, though I'm cooking one up, but for anyone who'd like to win a free, signed copy of A Beautiful Blue Death, head on over to Lesa Holstine's great mystery blog, where she's giving one away. She also has a copy of the book's galley, or ARC, that she's handing out. It's worth sticking around to read her thoughts on current mystery fiction, too. She was one of the first people to spot my book and her recommendations often send me over to Amazon.

My young career as a mystery novelist has had a few definite high points - getting an agent, selling my first book, holding a copy of it in my hands for the first time, finding out that I was on the Library Journal's Best of 2007. A week or two ago I got a phone call which instantly took its place among those great moments when I found out that A Beautiful Blue Death was nominated for an Agatha Award, in the category of Best First Novel.

The Agathas are among the most prestigious mystery novel awards, along with the Edgars and the Anthonys, and I'll be on a panel with the other nominees at Malice Domestic at the end of April. I'm really excited.

One more note: my friend Louise Penny was nominated in the category of Best Novel. Her books, about a police inspector in Quebec, probably comprise my favorite mystery series right now.