Scott Montgomery is a BookPeople employee and host of the Hard Word Book Club, which focuses on mystery and detective novels.
BP: How long have you been into mystery novels? SM: At least since high school. Earlier, actually. Since junior high. Ever since I cracked open an Elmore Leonard novel and thought this is it. This is for me. 
BP: What do you like about the genre? SM: It’s highly stylized. You can use metaphor, and a lot of the great [mystery] authors do, but it’s really about talking about the here and now. You can talk about race, crime, or anything else and be up front about it.
BP: How did you get into Reed Farrel Coleman? SM: Everyone at the last bookstore I worked at [The Mystery Bookstore in LA] was talking about him. I went on vacation and found one of his books at a second hand store. I am working on my own private eye novel and at the time I thought, this is novel I want to write.
BP: You’ve had Reed as a visitor (via phone) to meetings of the Hard Word Book Club. How did you first meet him? SM: I met him at a few of his in-store appearances while I was working in Los Angeles. My friend David Thompson owns Busted Flush Press. They publish his stuff now, and together we kind of preach the gospel of Reed Farrel Coleman.
BP: Can you tell us a bit about the Hard Word Book Club? SM: The Hard Word Book Club came about to have a forum for a lot of my regulars in the Mystery section, who were into the hard boiled crime novel that started with Hammett and Chandler and continues with guys like Coleman and Bruen. I also wanted to throw in a western now and then, since many of us loved that genre as well. These are American genres that have as much style and substance as anything out of the “literary” field.
We started with Craig Johnson, since he mixes both genres, and he was kind enough to call in. We’ve read books like Charlie Houston’s Caught Stealing, which was a straight forward modern pulp read, to Pelecanos’ The Night Gardner which uses the genre to explore urban decay and how an individual lives with it. In over two thirds of our meetings we’ve had the authors call in for a Q&A. We’ve had Reed, and Edgar winner Megan Abbott talk to our group. In November we’ll have Scott Phillips doing it for his book Ice Harvest.
The Hard Word Book Club meets at 7 PM on the last Wednesday of every month. Check in next week for our interview with mystery author Reed Farrel Coleman.
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