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Word of the day : lookism : prejudice or discrimination based on physical appearance

Top of the week to you, all my readers.

Today's soul track is taken from one of my favorite albums of all time, Laura Nyro and Labelle's Gonna Take a Miracle.

"Spanish Harlem," the sixth track on what is a full album's worth of covers, is, of course, a re-imagining of the Stoller/Specter classic, done memorably by Ben E. King. It is largely Nyro's album - her fifth, her first of non-original material; Nyro (1947-1997), elected into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this past year, was a Bronx-born singer-songwriter with a stirring, plaintive voice who penned some great, oft-covered songs: "Wedding Bell Blues," "Eli's Comin'," "And When I Die." Labelle was, of course, the soul/pop group fronted by Patti Labelle active from 1959-1977 best known for their smash hit "Lady Marmalade."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWVb5-LtgRY

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Monday means an Author Profile.

Today is Peter Abrahams, whom I had to pleasure to meet at the Savannah Book Festival a few months back.

Born: Boston, 1947

Career: Abrahams is a best-selling writer of crime and suspense mysteries. He graduated from Williams College (in Massachusetts) and then worked a wide variety of jobs - spear fisherman in the Bahamas, a television producer for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation - and then set becoming Stephen King's "favorite suspense novelist."

His career and works can be broken down into three components. As an adult novelist, he has written seventeen thrillers under his own name.

He has also written six young adult novels under his own name - mysteries involving teenage sleuths and high school students. These are fun books, hard-edged, with adult, real-world issues, often with tough, R-rated language. He has a series set in the northeastern town of Echo Falls, featuring Ingrid Levin-Hill, navigating high school and the various, complex secrets of her town.

He also spends a third of his career writing mysteries under the pseudonym of Spencer Quinn. They are Chet-and-Bernie mysteries - Chet is a dog, Bernie is his owner. These novels are unique because they are told from Chet's point-of-view; there are often things, human things going on, that he only hears and deciphers piecemeal. He is an unreliable narrator - and often funny, in the way he observes events.

His influences include mystery god Ross Macdonald, Graham Greene, and Vladimir Nabokov, who influenced, entertained, bedazzled, or inspired just about every writer succeeding him.

Noted Books: (as Abrahams:) Lights Out, an award-nominated novel from 1994 about a recently released prisoner trying to uncover the culprit of the crime he was accused of;

1995's The Fan, which was made into an overwrought, high-octane, badly-directed creeper with Robert DeNiro and Wesley Snipes as a psycho and the baseball player that is the subject of the stalker's adoration, respectively;

his foray into young adult writing, 2005's Down the Rabbit Hole, was popular and clever enough to stand out in an ear of fantasy/paranormal YA series;

2006's End of Story, about the events that befall a man teaching writing to prisoners was acclaimed - though neither Julia nor I really liked it.

(as Quinn): 2009's Dog on It, which kicked off the series of cleverly-titled, noirish Chet and Bernie mysteries, set in the constantly changing American west, was good and fertile enough material for Quinn to keep revisiting them every year with a new mystery.

Themes, Style, Etc: Abrahams is an observer of modern life, so there is always plenty of humor in his novels. If he's anything, though, he's a craftsman - a solid constructor of well-planned, well-paced plots. His writing is tight, his descriptions colorful, his settings all evocative. He rarely wastes words - it's tight, functional writing.

Why You Should Read Him: Because it seems he is incapable of writing a bad book (though End of Story left a lot to be desired in its final-third). It doesn't seem like he will ever write a great, staggering one, bu he's a consistently good, imaginative genre writer who never seems to go through the motions.

Books I Would Recommend: (as Quinn): Dog on It, even though, like me, you might keep expecting the conceit of the limited narrator to grow old (it didn't, though I imagine it might the longer you stuck with the series); his YA books are fine, very likable reads - Down the Rabbit Hole, Behind the Curtain, a 2006 mystery also set in Echo Falls, and 2009's Edgar-winning Reality Check, about a high school quarterback whose ex-girlfriend goes missing at the Vermont boarding school she was shipped to.

Books I Want to Read: the 2011 YA novel Bullet Point, and 2008's Nerve Damage, about a sculptor who uncovers new evidence about his wife's death in South Africa fifteen years earlier.

Other facts about Abrahams that he offered up on both his Harper publishing house websites include that he loves tennis, the city of San Francisco (his favorite), apples, orange/grapefruit juice. He lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He has four children.

(He's also a very nice, personable guy.)

Author's Website: http://www.peterabrahams.com/index.html (though he doesn't seem to update it much)

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Shocking Mad Men last night, just shocking.

R.I.P.

Jared Harris might get an Emmy nod for his undervalued, subtle work as Lane Price - as he should. Only one episode left this season!

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I feel like looking at a photographer today. Going down our list, I see we've reached...

Mario Testino (#46 of 100)

Think of the Peruvian Testino (b. 1954) and think of the high life, high fashion. His insouciant, carefree (almost shruggingly so) vision of high couture and a bright life of glamour seen in his ad campaigns (Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Kors, Versace, Burberry) is pretty intoxicating. Testino moved to London in the mid-1970s and supported an impoverished lifestyle (around Trafalgar Square) by selling his portfolios to wannabe models. He has published ten books of photography and is most famous for his shoot with Princess Diana for the late icon's spread in Vanity Fair in July of 1997 (below).