I'm not particularly in a mood to defend Dorchester, heaven knows --
but...
> I read fine print for a living.
> There was no notice.
Well...maybe there was no notice *to you*. I contacted Dorchester about
what happened and supposedly they did prepare a letter of notice to go
to all their book club members but the letter only went to some rather
than all members, with the Hard Case Crime club having the most failure
cases (as opposed to their Western club, their Horror club, and so
forth). Why were there any failures at all? It's a long story and one
I'm not sure they'd like me to share publicly, so I'll respect their
confidence, but if what they told me is true it's an embarrassment and a
screw-up, but stops short of either callous indifference or fraud. Of
course, it's possible they're lying to me and never sent a letter to
anyone...but after 6+ years of working with these people I'm prepared to
believe what they're telling me.
Now, even if they failed to notify just one person -- you -- that's
still a problem. And we know they failed in significantly more than one
case (maybe hundreds). But apparently not every case, for whatever
that's worth.
As for whether a Sunny Randall novel is a fit for a line that calls
itself 'hardboiled' -- well, she's obviously less hard than Spenser, but
I, at least, don't feel it's *too* ridiculous a stretch. If Parker had
offered to write us a Sunny Randall novel while he was alive (and we
approached him several times about writing for us), I'd have said yes.
Might have encouraged him to take her in a bit of a harder direction,
but I wouldn't have felt I was abandoning the integrity of the line by
including Sunny in it.
Of course, if I were Dorchester, I would have chosen a broader new name
for the club rather than calling it the "Hard Boiled Crime Club," since
that would offer the flexibility to ship some novels that are noir but
not hardboiled, or some that are detective stories but not hardboiled,
etc. But I'm not the guy making the decisions.
--Charles
--- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "chuckelp" <chuckelp@...> wrote:
>
> I read fine print for a living.
> There was no notice.
>
> And I do not consider a Sunny Randall novel Hardboiled.
>
> Ralph Nader would surely deem this consumer fraud.
> I deem it Stupid Business Practice.
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 04 Nov 2010 EDT