Postscripts

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Going Back to Miami

Edna Buchanan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter whose 12th detective novel, You Only Die Twice (Morrow, $24), has just been published, will be at BookPeople on Friday, March 30, at 7pm. While covering the cops and murder at the Miami Herald, Buchanan rightfully became famous for her lead sentences that gave readers far more of a jolt than their coffee ever could (examples: "Bad things happen to the husbands of Widow Elkin," "Gary Robinson died hungry," "On New Year's Eve Charles Curzio stayed later than planned at his small TV repair shop to make sure customers would have their sets in time to watch the King Orange Jamboree Parade. His kindness cost his life"). Then she wrote an autobiography, The Corpse Had a Familiar Face, which became a TV movie starring Elizabeth Montgomery. What she really wanted to be was a "writer," so she created a series of crime novels starring Britt Montero, ace reporter for the Miami News and kind friend to stray, vagrant cats and dogs everywhere. As You Only Die Twice opens, beautiful Kaithlin Jordan washes up strangled on a Miami beach, which is strange since her husband, convicted for her murder 10 years ago, is on Florida's Death Row with mere weeks before he's going to be executed. Why are dead people who are somehow once again among the living always showing up in the same city they used to inhabit? If you wanted people to think you were dead, wouldn't you stay away from the places where people knew you? Apparently, it also doesn't hurt to have lots of money when you're dead and living again: Britt is able to verify the fact that Kaithlin was staying at the posh Amsterdam Hotel before she was murdered, again. Though You Only Die Twice has its regrettable share of gag-worthy moments ("The food, comforting and sustaining, didn't fill the empty place where my heart should be, but it was fortifying"), it's a thrilling evocation of place: "An itch afflicts natives who leave this place. Live elsewhere, as I learned to my dismay in college, and an uneasy sensation nags, as though you went to bed forgetting to brush your teeth. Suddenly wide awake in the dead of night, you sit up, slap your forehead and say, Oh, yeah, I forgot something today. I forgot to go home, to go back to Miami."

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Upcoming

Anthony Giardina, who has spent time as a visiting professor at the Michener Center, has a new novel, Recent History (see p. 48); he'll be at BookPeople on Wednesday, April 4, at 7pm, to read from it… Elizabeth Martinez, Chicana activist and author of De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views of a Multi-Colored Century and 500 Years of Chicano History, will present a lecture titled "The Battle for Memory: What Borders Did You Cross?" The event will take place in Garrison 1, the building just south of the UT Tower, at 7pm on Thursday, March 29.

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Inside Books Project

Austin's Inside Books Project, a nonprofit that distributes books free of charge directly to Texas prisoners, needs donations of books, time, and money. Here's how to help: drop off books, preferably paperback, at 12th Street Books (827 W. 12th) between 10am and 6pm Monday-Saturday, or donate your time by answering mail from inmates. Call 647-4803 for more info.