You don’t know what’s going to happen your first time out on the road. Will a reading draw a crowd, or will you be snuffed out? One thing you can say for sure: You’re gonna be surprised.

Even the most intimate events yield astonishing moments: Seeing K.K. Beck at the Mystery Bookshop in Seattle; finding old customers of Campagne at “M” is for Mystery in San Mateo; reading in the poetry room at City Lights, one of my most sacred book spaces on the planet; sitting across from a retired homicide detective at Copperfield’s in Santa Rosa; having dear friends from Seattle appear at Readers’ Books in Sonoma.

And then there are the unexpected, impossible-to-imagine experiences of the tour, most notably the astonishing “happening” put together by Toby Barlow in Detroit at which 200 artists, hipsters, and underground entrepreneurs showed up; food prepared by Dave Mancini of Supino Pizzeria, Torya Blanchard of Good Girls Go to Paris Crepes, and Pete’s Gourmet Chocolates; wine selected by Joseph Allerton of Roast; words from the prose poem that opens the novel projected on the façade of the Park Shelton’s rooftop; the whole event anchored by Leopold’s Books. Une grande soirée, if there ever was one.

I recommend the combination of wine and books. Holding court in a corner of Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant the afternoon of Kermit’s Provence Festival; weaving a wine tasting through my reading at The Book Cellar in Chicago; and having Brandon Wright of New York Vintners pouring a lovely Chablis and Bourgogne Rouge for the folks at Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan. Helps break the ice.

April 3, 2011 : Benefit for Slow Food NOP & Jefferson County Farmers Market : 5-7 pm

Reading & Signing with food prepared by Sweet Laurette’s

$30 donation includes light French bistro-style buffet. No-host bar.

For information write www.slowfoodnop@gmail.com or call 360.379.4169

Sweet Laurette’s : 1029 Lawrence Street : Port Townsend, WA

DEAD IN THE DREGS

Cloth: 284 pages, $25.00  (978-1-58243-610-4)

Trade Paper Original: 284 pages, $14.95  (978-1-58243-548-0)

Renowned wine critic Richard Wilson makes a living elevating and destroying winemakers’ reputations with the stroke of his pen. When he disappears after a tasting at Napa Valley’s Norton Winery, his sister Janie looks to her ex-husband, Babe Stern, for help. But when Wilson’s body is found floating in a vat at Norton, Stern’s search turns into a hunt for the killer.

Working in the shadow of the Napa Valley police, Stern identifies a string of suspects, all with one thing in common: their desire to get retribution for the reviews that shattered their livelihoods. But as the police work to quickly clear the case, those same suspects provide alibis and the trail begins to fade.

Stern digs into the circumstances of Wilson’s death and finds himself following his only lead to Burgundy, France. In cellars and tasting rooms from Beaune to Nuits-Saint-Georges, Stern tracks the troubled son of a family of vignerons, one of the few people in the winery the night Wilson died. But the wine families of the Côte d’Or are secretive and entangled, and the deeper Stern goes, the more he himself becomes a target. In DEAD IN THE DREGS, Stern’s only choice is to uncover the truth.

PRESS

Read “A Nose for Murder” by Dick Adler from The Rap Sheet

Read Harriet Klausner’s blog post on Dead in the Dregs at The Mystery Gazette

Mary Ann Gwinn’s profile of Peter Lewis in her column, “Lit Life,” from The Seattle Times

The novel appeared on Cynthia Bertelsen’s remarkable list on her blog,  “Gherkins & Tomatoes”

Ronald Holden’s fine blog, cornichon.org, gave Dead in the Dregs a serious plug

Maureen Bouffard’s review in I Love a Mystery Newsletter

Louis Peitzman wrote a piece on Peter Lewis in the “96 Hours” section of the San Francisco Chronicle

The fine people of Detroit created this marvelous short video of the extraordinary event they threw for the novel

Providence Cicero wrote about Peter in the recent wine issue of The Seattle Times’s Pacific Northwest Magazine

Dead in the Dregs was named by Wine Spectator as one of the ten “Best New Reads for Wine Lovers” in their latest “100 Best” issue

The novel is out in the world, finding its way. I just returned from Santa Fe where the book was officially launched at a reading and signing event at Garcia Street Books. Edward and Eva Borins, the owners, could not have been more gracious. It was lovely, and we even sold a few books.

What I’m learning in these first few weeks of reading and signing and tasting is that the point of connection for many readers is wine: which wines you’ve enjoyed, which you’ve disparaged; the wineries you’ve visited; the viticultural geographies with which you’re familiar, even intimate.

I love this—that I can meet a total stranger but that we’re not strangers because we share a knowledge about a particular wine or winery, a vineyard or a tasting room, and suddenly we’re talking as if we had been there together only yesterday.

We’re accustomed to speaking of the “food chain,” but for some years I’ve been talking and writing about the “wine chain.” As sommeliers, restaurant professionals and wine retailers travel to meet winemakers all over the world, they bring to their restaurants and shops a sense of personal connection. I did this annually to renew and nurture my own relationships, visiting vineyards and cellars to taste and see and learn.

As a restaurateur I realized that I occupied a unique place on this chain as it stretches from winemaker to consumer. Now, as a writer, it would appear that I occupy no less special a place and relish meeting readers who love wine and feel that they know the characters and locales in my novel.

I look forward to meeting more of you down the road.

Santé!

This isn’t precisely accurate. I wrote a story. Taking a story someone has written from manuscript to book is another “story” altogether.

I write to write: To explore certain questions I’ve posed to myself, to play with language, to follow characters who interest me and see where they lead me. Writing proposes its own peculiar grace.

Rick Simonson, a dear friend and one of the great booksellers in the country, may have put it best after reading a few hundred pages that, in my mind, constituted a finished piece of work: “Yeah, I think there may be a book there.”

What I considered “done” was just the beginning.

I have been unusually blessed in the copains I have found along the way. Eric Overmyer and Richard Rosen read early, unformed versions of the manuscript and provided a little “tough love.” Patrick McNierney and Judy Hottensen gave me faith at an early stage that it might find its way into print and encouraged me to persist. Jim Crumley read it a year before he died and called me a “shithead” for writing so well—high praise, indeed—and said the story made him hungry. Jim Fergus sent the manuscript to his agent, Al Zuckerman at Writers House, who became my agent. Jim Harrison told Charlie Winton he should consider the novel.

Al Zuckerman, an astute line editor in addition to being a masterful literary agent, put me through a year and a half of grueling rewrites. Charlie said he would consider the novel but only on the condition that I work with an editor before he’d make a decision. He put me in touch with Michele Slung, an old pro, with whom I worked for two years before Charlie accepted the manuscript. And then I worked with Michele for another year to prepare the novel for publication. Maybe seven or eight rewrites in all.

This relationship—that between a writer and an editor—is an especially intimate one, and to say that I was blessed in mine with Michele is an understatement. In many ways, she saw the book more clearly than I did. She could be quite ruthless in her cutting and commentary, but coaxed and encouraged and praised. The story would not have metamorphosed into a book without her.

Once Charlie accepted the novel, another process commenced: copyediting, proofreading, body and cover design, marketing. Julie Pinkerton, Sharon Donovan, Laura Mazur, Tiffany Lee and April Wolfe—the “midwives” of Counterpoint—have been patient in their tutelage of me as an author, and I wouldn’t have given birth to this book without their help.

There’s an explosion of self-publishing going on at the moment prompted by the cataclysmic changes in the industry. Even Amazon and Apple have now announced their intention to get into the “self-publishing” business, and Lulu.com begins to resemble a stripped down version of an “indie” to a remarkable degree.

But there’s utility in an industry that compels a writer to chip away at the rough material he or she has fashioned. The first question most people ask me about Dead in the Dregs is, “How long did it take you to write it?” A long time. Probably six years, if you cut out the early “scribbling” phase.

It was worth it.

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Pas de tout. The wine is called “Vin de Constance.” It was, and is, produced in South Africa. The unlikelihood of its name and pedigree is only matched by the fact that Vin de Constance happens to be the favorite wine of Nelson Mandela.

Welcome to the world of startling juxtapositions that make up the Rainbow Nation.

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