The Chum

My brilliant literary agent is the somewhat well known Janet Reid. Honestly, I had no idea at the time that I was signing with one of the world's most famous literary agents.

Janet likes to refer to herself as The Shark -- it's a reflection on the general reputation of literary agents -- which has inevitably led to her authors referring to themselves as The Chum. I don't know how it works with other agencies, but quite a few of The Chum like to keep in touch, mostly over twitter, because writing 6,000 inane but incredibly witty tweets is so much easier than...you know...working.

Two of The Chum have recently released books, and they both got starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, which is a big thing because PW is so influential. The first is Steve Ulfelder, whose day job is building race cars, plus he's a for-real P.I., all of which is just too cool. I met Steve for the first time at last year's Bouchercon, which is a fan conference. Not only do we have the same agent, we have the same publisher. Clearly we're in psychic tune. Purgatory Chasm stars car mechanic and detective Conway Sax, and it's going on shelves even as I write this.

The other is Bill Cameron, whose fourth book is County Line. I'm intensely jealous of Bill's ability to write brilliant one line synopses. He just whips them off while I struggle for days to do half as well. His hero is the rather oddly named Skin Kadash. His books are noir with a dash of subtle humour and a fine sense of the ridiuclous (I'm thinking particularly of Lost Dog, in which the missing canine of the title is a child's toy!).