The Inner Sanctum

Best-selling authors from Ruth Rendell to J.A. Jance to James Lee Burke struggle to retire their beloved and now iconic detective characters. The crime-fiction landscape is being altered as the protagonists from decades-old series must now battle “creaky joints, hearing loss, poor eyesight, declining mental powers and the existential dread of retirement”—in addition to the bad guys!

Read Alexandra Alter’s The Wall Street Journal’s article “The (Really) Long Goodbye” here to find out how author’s struggle with putting their characters to rest and to see what’s next for your favorite detectives!

And keep an eye out for Ruth Rendell’s The Vault (Scribner, Hardcover: 9781451624083, eBook: 9781451624090, September 2011) and James Lee Burke’s Feast Day of Fools (Simon & Schuster, Hardcover: 9781451643114, eBook: 9781451643145, September 2011), featuring Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford and Sheriff Hackberry Holland, respectively.


Rendell’s latest, Tigerlily’s Orchids: A Novel (Scribner, Hardcover: 9781439150344, eBook: 9781439154380), is out now!



Celebrated crime master James Lee Burke returns with a gorgeously crafted, brutally resonant chronicle of violence along the Texas-Mexico border in FEAST DAY OF FOOLS, out September 27.

Below, read Burke’s note of thanks to booksellers!

Dear Bookseller,

I learned long ago that the success of a book is not dependent on simply the author’s personal investment of time and work in it. Ultimately many people share in the production and sale of a book and the influence it has on others. However, only one name appears on the jacket and of it course it’s the author’s. But every professional writer knows the reality: His book would not be a success if others had not made a very large contribution to it. Those who edit and proofread, and do the artwork and flap copy, and create the ads and shepherd the manuscript through the long process of production each turn the book into something larger than the original work. Then comes the time when the book hits the shelves. This is when an author learns how booksellers and bookstore owners and his publisher’s sales team affect an author’s career in ways he had not imagined.

I was on the book circuit for fifteen years and my wife and I did thirty-five-city tours and attended most of the major book conventions and during that time we made many wonderful friends. Some of them changed my career. They hand-sold my books at every opportunity, mentioned my name to media whenever they could, introduced the books to Hollywood studios, and one lady, on her own, even started a bidding war that resulted in my being able to quit my teaching job and write full time. I can never adequately repay these people.

It’s a great pleasure to be a writer, because the world of books is made up of decent and intelligent men and women who are not only people of good will but who are fun to be with. I wouldn’t trade my life for all the money in the world, and the reason I have the life I do is in large part due to the wonderful people I’ve been privileged to know in the book business.

Anyway, this is just a small note of thanks to all of you out there who have been so loyal to me and my work. I’ll always be indebted to you.

James Lee Burke

If you would like to read FEAST DAY OF FOOLS, email Wendy.Sheanin@SimonandSchuster.com for an ARC.

I am excited to share with you some exciting, advance praise for Ron Hansen’s new novel, A WILD SURGE OF GUILTY PASSION (9781451617559), which Scribner will publish in June 2011. It is just as the title suggests—wild, guilty, and a definite pleasure to read. Set in the colorful, roaring 1920s of New York City—where men made bathtub gin and women wore bobs—and based on a real case that scandalized a generation, this work of historical fiction follows the affair and demise of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray. 


Both meet at exactly the wrong moment—Ruth is a promiscuous, gorgeous, and reckless housewife trapped in a loveless marriage, while Judd, an eager, smooth-talking corset and brassiere salesman, drowns his own marital boredom with illegal whiskey. Soon the two are engaged in a torrid affair—spending nights at the new Waldorf Astoria, taking secret trips, and at the urging of Ruth, plotting how to murder Ruth’s husband. I’ll let James Lee Burke take it from here:


“Once again, Ron Hansen has proved that he has no peer in the writing of fiction about biographical characters. No one writing today is better at re-creating the past than Hansen, and no one gives better insight into his characters. In this instance, Ron Hansen re-creates the Roaring Twenties with a sense of immediacy and authenticity that I haven’t seen since the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara. James M. Cain once said that the greatest of human tragedies usually takes place when people get what they want. That’s the story we find in A WILD SURGE OF GUILTY PASSION. Could this happen to us, we ask ourselves. The question is a haunting one. Ron Hansen takes us into the heart of America, and the journey never allows us to stop turning the page.” 
—James Lee Burke


Email Wendy Sheanin at Wendy.Sheanin@simonandschuster.com for a galley!