As Covid deaths soar and Trump dispatches secret police to Portland, NYC is hunkered down against a heat wave. Fortunately the time has proven productive and I'm making steady progress through Act III of Six Girl Smile. I'm also working with Shane Keene at Inkheist...
Work on SIX GIRL SMILE continues apace, but it is a slow pace as current events gnaw at me. Still, I've pivoted into the third act and we're on the downhill slide. I will chain myself to the typewriter until it's finished. ...
As I prepare for a special edition of Crime Wave centered no Walter Mosley, I thought it high time I shared Crime Wave #4, "Contender for the Crown," in which I discuss the genius that is Megan Abbott's noir novel Queenpin. You can read the...
I interviewed Ryan Wick about his forthcoming novel Safe Cracker, hand to hand combat and picking locks. Behold! The third installment of Crime Wave is on Ink Heist. https://inkheist.com/2020/04/02/crime-wave-3-picking-locks-with-ryan-wick/...
People have been sharing work to help us pass the time during the pandemic lock down, so here are the opening pages to Six Girl Smile, (aka Mister Madame), my current WIP. Six Girl Smile By John C. Foster CHAPTER ONE 1. “Go to Hell, Wrecker,” the old man said....
Ink Heist ran my second Crime Wave column, Will the Real Donald Westlake Please Stand Up? You can read about this titan of crime fiction here...
Just a quick update to let you know that the crime novel MISTER MADAME is coming along swimmingly. I expect the rough to be done by the end of March and will have more updates as things proceed. ...
Laurel Hightower said this in her review of THE ISLE: There's an excellent blurb on the front of this book along the lines of it being from one of Nathanial Hawthorne's nightmares. It's a great quote, because it credits the way Foster has captured that archaic...
The Crime Wave article for February is off to the gentlemen of Ink Heist. This time I used the wayback machine to examine my favorite Crime writer, Richard Stark. Here's a sample: When a fresh faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told...
Last night Linda Jones and I spent two hours talking with Rich Duncan, Laurel Hightower and Shane Keene - the Ink Heist crew. We covered all manner of subjects about writing and narrating and our favorite books but also went seriously off the rails and...