Walter Satterthwait and Ernie Bulow: Sleight of Hand (USA 1993)

From the Publisher:
Mystery buffs, especially those in the Southwest, have been curious for several years about Walter Satterthwait, whose Joshua Croft detective novels, set in a very authentic Santa Fe, have been published in a series beginning with Wall of Glass in 1987. In Sleight of Hand, mystery maven Ernie Bulow, whose interview with Tony Hillerman was published in 1991 as Talking Mysteries, talks to his friend Satterthwait not just about the Joshua Croft mysteries but also about Satterthwait's "historicals": Miss Lizzie, a novel about Lizzie Borden, and Wilde West, in which Oscar Wilde pays a visit to the Old West. Anyone who loves to read mystery stories or wants to write genre fiction can learn a lot from Satterthwait's honest discussions of the genesis of his career as a writer, the interplay between his own instincts and the marketplace, and his insights into the psychology of evil.

In addition to the fun of eavesdropping on the unmistakable camaraderie of these two friends, readers will enjoy the several Satterthwait short stories included here -- one of his African series, one featuring his latter-day version of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op in a New Mexico setting, and one previously unpublished masterpiece of comic horror that, as Ernie Bulow points out, was influenced by nothing so much as E-C comics, the popular horror books of the early 1950s.

Walter Satterthwait's most recent books are Flower in the Desert and The Hanged Man. Ernie Bulow is the co-author with Tony Hillerman of Talking Mysteries. He lives in Gallup, New Mexico.

Jacket and back flap photo by Gaye Brown
Jacket design by Harold Augustus

Walter Satterthwait and Ernie Bulow: Sleight of Hand. University of New Mexico Press, ISBN: 082631466X (November, 1993), 165 p., $24.95.