Laurie R. King

MURDER ON THE FOUL LINE, a collection of basketball-related short stories edited by Otto Penzler, will be out the first of the year’e2’80’94we’ll put the cover and information onto the web site before too long. In the meantime, here’e2’80’99s what Publishers Weekly has to say about it:

Penzler’s choice of contributors is varied and often surprising: sportswriter Mike Lupica is a natural, as is R.D. Rosen, author of the Edgar-winning Harvey Blissberg series about a professional baseball player. But Laurie R. King, author of the Mary Russell series? Her story, “Cat’s Paw,” is one of the best, about a teacher who coaches a girl’s junior high school basketball team, refers to herself as a “twenty-nine-year-old virgin” and has her life shaken up when she almost runs over a cat on the highway.

As I’e2’80’99ve said, I don’e2’80’99t write a lot of short stories, so it’e2’80’99s nice when one gets the attention of a reviewer. One of my earlier stories, ‘e2’80’9cPaleta Man’e2’80’9d (from IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES) received nominations for Edgar and Macavity awards. I liked the judges liked the voice of that particular story’e2’80’94I know I did. It was interesting to see the world through the eyes of a middle aged, male, Hispanic immigrant, and to write in his voice, to the extent that I could almost feel the shift of language in my mouth as I was writing. I think that’e2’80’99s the thing with short stories, and why they’e2’80’99re so exhausting to produce’e2’80’94the writer has to inhabit the skin of the narrator for less time than in a novel, but much more intensely. In a novel, every word has to count; in a short story, every word has to count two or three times.