Dennis McMillan Echo Park
The second week of Sept. will see the appearance of my limited first edition of Michael Connelly's Echo Park, and, once again, Michael Keller has outdone himself on the dustjacket, for which he has used the classic mid-1950s Signet mass market paperback as his inspiration. Damned cool, if I do say so myself; mirroring perfectly Connelly's latest new wrinkle on the Harry Bosch brand of police procedural, a field in which he stands quite alone, like an intellectual Dirty Harry, brought forward two and three decades, and then recently given unsolved cases from various periods in the past; some of which occured even before he joined the L.A. police dept. Not so, Echo Park, though, as it harkens back a mere 10 years and some change, to the year of the last big riots in Los Angeles; the year that everyone with a television got to watch Rodney King being bludgeoned for quite a length of time by a goodly number of L.A.'s finest: 1993.
The novel opens with the investigation of the disappearance of a young lady, one Marie Gesto, who lived at the High Tower Apartments, a uniquely L.A. art deco environment that's pictured on the rear panel of the dustjacket. Combined with the front panel, which shows part of Echo Park itself, a jacket that is as near perfect a physical wrap for the story inside the covers as anyone could conceive, snikes its way up from the depths of M. Kellner's creative unconscious (or, perhaps, even conscious?) mind, to become a wonderful reality. This is one of the reasons I really love to publish books: I can become a conduit for a much better artistic presentation of a work by a major writer like Mike Connelly than a "commercial" New York publishing art dept. would ever come up with, since I don't have to answer to a committee, but only to my own taste and intuition as to what is "great" rather than just "good enough" ("for gov't woik," as they used to say, and nowadays, of course, wish that they could get anything half as good as that which they used to scorn: but we won't get into that, now will we?). Anyway, it's just a "killer" dustjacket for a tremendously good book, in which Connelly once again shows he's a true genius at coming up with new plot wrinkles (probably the single hardest thing to do, when writing a "genre" novel, given the shear number of mysteries that have been published over the past century, with the author of every one of them trying to do at least something new, and many of them succeeding, given the time and circumstances) that will keep any aficionado guessing until the very end.
My limited first ed. will appear at the end of the first week of Sept., so reserve your copy now if you haven't already: I'm publishing 156 quarter-morocco copies ($250. + $5. postage), signed and lettered by the author, slipcased, and 300 copies bound in Brillianta cloth ($125. + $5. postage), signed and numbered by the author, also slipcased. Don't miss this one or the Pelecanos!
*Images and text from http://www.dennismcmillan.com/*
