Tuesday, February 16, 2010

What is John McFetridge reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: John McFetridge, author of the crime novels Dirty Sweet, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, and the newly released Let It Ride [Canadian title: Swap].

His entry begins:
To get ready for James Ellroy’s Blood’s a Rover, I read the first two books in the Underworld trilogy, American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand. I love Ellroy’s writing, the staccato prose style fits the characters and the situations perfectly, draws me into the action completely. I also really like the way he mixes the real characters with the fictional and how he expects the reader to know the background of what’s going on (I had to look an awful lot of it up). I’m just about to start Blood’s a Rover ...[read on]
View the trailer for Let It Ride.

Among the early praise for Let It Ride/Swap:
"...an eye-opener... It’s high time we all stopped thinking of Toronto as a nice city."
National Post

"He's a class act, and he's creating fictional classics — maybe even that great urban literature of Toronto the critics now and then long for."
—Joan Barfoot, London Free Press

"The pacing is hell on wheels -- sharp and bloody, with dialogue to match.... Authentic and riveting."
—Don Graves, The Hamilton Spectator
See McFetridge's Author Snapshot at January Magazine.

The Page 69 Test: Dirty Sweet.

The Page 69 Test: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

John McFetridge lives in Toronto and works as a staff writer for the TV cop show The Bridge, airing on CBS this fall. Learn more about the author and his work at John McFetridge's website and blog.

Writers Read: John McFetridge.

--Marshal Zeringue