Meme: First Time Meetings with Authors

I got tagged by J. Kingston Pierce over at The Rap Sheet. The rules are simple:

1) List the authors that were new to you this year, regardless of year of publication.

2) Bold the ones that were debuts (first novel, published in 2008)

3) Tag some people

The year 2008 was a year of self-education in crime literature for me. I tried a lot of material, most of it old but new to me. I wanted to learn as much as I could about crime fiction as I continue to write new fiction. Also, much to my surprise, my blog exploded into a review site. Didn’t see that coming. A lot of these books were published by Hard Case Crime. Here’s what I read.

Don Winslow (The Dawn Patrol)
Christa Faust (Money Shot)
Duane Swierczynski (Severance Package)
Megan Abbott (Die a Little)
Arnaldur Indridason (Jar City)
Ed McBain (Cop Hater [87th Precinct] and The Gutter and the Grave)
Ed Brubaker (Criminal [graphic novel])
Donald Westlake (Somebody Owes Me Money)
Harry Hunsicker (Crosshairs)
Robert Parker (The Godwulf Manuscript)
James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity)
Erle Stanley Gardner (The Case of the Velvet Claws [Perry Mason]
E. S. Gardner as A. A. Fair (Top of the Heap [Cool and Lam])
William Colt MacDonald (Mascarada Pass)
Allan Guthrie (Kiss Her Goodbye)
Day Keene (Home is the Sailor and Guns Along the Brazos)
Ross McDonald (The Moving Target)
Lawrence Block (Sins of the Father; Lucky at Cards; A Diet of Treacle)
Mickey Spillane (Dead Street)
Pete Hamil (The Guns of Heaven)
Chris Matthews (Kennedy and Nixon)

I’ll write more about which books I enjoyed and what I learned later this month.

Here are the folks I’m tagging:

Patti Abbott
David Cranmer (The Education of a Pulp Writer)
Barrie Summy
David Thompson (Busted Flush Press)
Chris (from The Louis L’amour Project)
Doug Warren (Bombast and Thunder)
The Archavist
August West (Vintage Hardboiled Reads)
Jay Stringer

Note: yeah, this'll teach me to read my e-mail before spending time collecting links. Some of these folks have already been tagged and have tagged me. I'm keeping the list because, well, I took the time to find the links. Enjoy.