The Dave White Roast: They Email Them In

First up is the one, the only Laura Lippman:

So, of all the strange e-mails I've ever gotten -- I guess I should say, of all the e-mails I've ever received from strangers -- how is it that Dave White becomes the one that I actually befriend and invite into my home? (Significant Other: Who is this guy and how did he come to stay with us? Me: I'm no longer sure.)

Seriously, Dave wrote me a nice/insightful e-mail about my work -- insightful because he liked it -- and suddenly I have an IM buddy for life. I know all about his love life, in fact. There are exactly two people on the planet who IM me with any regularity and the other one is Harlan Coben. Is it a New Jersey thing? A tall guy thing? I'm baffled.

I really am old enough to be Dave's mother, by the way, but probably not as exhausted as the actual one must be.

Oh, one of my favorite Dave stories is how he IM'ed Duane Swierczynski and me when I was trying to interview Duane for my website, so the interview ended up with Duane and me chanting Dave's name at various points.

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Our next roaster is Christin Kuretich, who got to know Dave through friends of friends and wound up adopted by a whole slew of crime writing types. She promises she has more stories but starts with these for now:

1) Dave White is one of those rare authors who is actually more enamored by his own stalker [Plot Baby Plot] than scared or threatened.

He actually switches from “stalk-ee” to “stalk-er” by blogging about it each time PbP has a new post up about him. Narcissism reaches new heights.

2) Dave White is one of the most hysterically gullible people in the world. He would be the first to say he is the opposite of gullible, but if you tell him a falsehood, he’ll tell you “bullshit”…but the not knowing will drive him so crazy, he won’t rest until he’s made SURE it’s bullshit. One of the best forms of entertainment…watching White squirm and question and doubt himself, while he tries to figure out if you’re pulling his leg…

3) I once fought Dave White via blog over the movie “War of the Worlds”. My post about it made him so angry, he had to counter each of my points on HIS blog, just to make sure the world knew how he felt. The thing is, most of my blog readers jumped to his blog for a bit to defend my viewpoint even more. Backfire.

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And then we have John Rickards with a late-game limerick:

Ode To Mr White

There once was a man called Dave White,
Whose pants were alarmingly tight,
Confined to his bed,
By the grip on his veg,
He squeaked, "Fuck it, I might just as well write."

Just in from Jason Pinter, aka the man who originally bought WHEN ONE MAN DIES:

Dave White is a man among men, unconcerned with integrity and cleanliness. This bold trait was on display when attempting to solicit a blurb from an author, beginning his query letter with a story about meeting the author in the urinal stalls at the Edgars. Thankfully he has no political aspirations, but if you see a copy of WHEN ONE MAN DIES slip under your toilet stall, followed by a strange foot caressing your leg, you'll know it's just Dave.

Mid-morning update from Edward Champion:

Voltaire's maxim has been mangled so frequently by so many well-meaning souls that it is unthinkable t  apply it to someone of Dave White's questionable caliber.  Nevertheless, if Dave White did not exist, it would be necessary for an infinite number of vaguely sentient chimpanzees to create him.  If Mr. White's fiction is not worthy of Shakespeare, it can certainly stand toe-to-toe with James Patterson's oeuvre.  It is to Mr. White's enviable credit that he neither requires the assistance of a ghost writer in banging out unintelligible prose, nor barks at Entertainment Weekly reporters named Karen about what they are wearing.

Thankfully, none of this has prevented Mr. White from barking at others.  In fact, Mr. White's conversational skills are often limited to yelps and low guttural growls, all this as he is humping your left leg. This limited but nevertheless effective vernacular that has been faithfully translated to prose in WHEN ONE DOG GROWLS, which has been purchased by numerous kennels and animal shelters for literary inspiration.  Here's a choice passage of this award-winning novel from P. 37:

    Woof woof.  Rowwrrrrr.  Yip!  Grrrr....lap lap yip!  Ruff!

This passage comes after Jackson Dogge has been denied a Milkbone from his master.  One is struck by Dogge's clear torment, the startling verisimilitude, and the attention to accurately transcribed speech. There has been talk of neutering Mr. White to see if the torment expressed in the Jackson Dogge stories can be tripled, but Mr. White has a savvy and protective agent known to chop off the scrotums of various executives at Three Rivers Press with a well-honed cleaver.  So I must tread carefully here.

Mr. White has also been known to fetch newspapers with a celerity swifter than a cocker spaniel and, o  at least two occasions, I have observed Mr. White asking a dignified New York waiter if puppy chow is on the menu.  He has also insisted on drinking his water from a bowl on the floor.  Such quixotic bravery committed against Manhattan deportment is laudable, but also quite foolish.  But foolishness has never prevented Mr. White from debasing himself in the company of friends and strangers.  And friends and strangers, hoping to civilize Mr. White in some manner, have not known what to do about Mr. White's feral and frenetic temperament, which has not, as of yet, become rabid.  One suspects that Mr. White is accepted because Mr. White is a Jersey boy who can't be helped.

Nevertheless, the Jackson Dogge books are selling.  Eager readers have returned again and again to Dogge's travails, hoping that they might vicariously experience Dogge's recurrent plight of raising his leg and licking his balls, one of the most unusual protagonist tics to be found in a mystery series.  One might even say that Mr. White's commercial success is representative of an industry that knows quite well that it can make a lot of dinero from regularly insulting and underestimating the intelligence of its readers.  If this means that Mr. White will finally be able to purchase that golden commode with natural spring water ready to lap up, then humanity has a lot to be thankful for.

and from Jim Winter:

It's 2005, and I'm on the outskirts of Chicago on my way to Bouchercon.  My phone rings.  The sound of a panicked Paul Giamatti emerges.

 

"Jim, it's Dave.  I'm on the Ohio Turnpike."

 

This is highly unusual.  No one I know uses the Ohio Turnpike.  I, in fact, only drove it once when coming home from Philadelphia in 1989.

 

"Great," I say, "So you'll hit the Indiana border in about an hour or so?"

 

"The traffic.  Should I get off at Cleveland to avoid the traffic?"

 

"Dude, the turnpike doesn't go through Cleveland.  If you're on the Turnpike, you're not going to Ohio.  You're going through it."

 

"Yeah, but it's rush hour.  The Jersey Turnpike's always a parking lot at rush hour."

 

"Relax.  You're not in New Jersey anymore.  You should be able to floor it through Ohio and be here by six."

 

I should not have said that.  Dave landed in Chicago and announced he'd gotten a ticket in Huron County for doing 100 mph on the Turnpike.

 

"Um...  Dave?  You were in Ohio, not Arizona.  We do have speed limits there."

 

And that's my Dave White story, entitled WHEN ONE MAN FLIES (DOWN THE OHIO TURNPIKE), available in stores today.  Check this speed demon out at a Borders or BN near you.

And now, from Allan Guthrie, aka Mr. White's agent:

Christin says Dave's gullible. Well, how does she explain that when Dave was told that I lived in a shack with no electricity, no running water, and an outside toilet -- just like everybody else in Scotland -- he only believed it for about a week? Gullible, my arse. Swierczynski still believes it. Shhh. Right, have to go shave a lamb.

And more from Jason Pinter:

Along the "Dave is gullible" lines, after Allan and I agreed to the deal terms for WHEN ONE MAN DIES, we decided to have a little fun with Mr. White. We told Dave that in order to make the book more commercially viable, we wanted him to change the character of Jackson Donne to a black lesbian named Shaniqua. Let's just say that led to a slightly panicked email or two from Mr. White.

As for Duane Swierczynski, it looks like he read quite a different book:

In When One Man Diets, Dave White bravely shares his weight-loss secrets. If there's ever a book with "Oprah" all the hell over it, it's this book.

One thing I can't figure out: what the cover image has to do with anything. You'd think Three Rivers would maybe show before-and-after shots of Dave, or a photo of Dave smiling and sitting down to a meal of baked salmon, rice and steamed carrots, or something. Instead there's this creepy, almost noirish photo of a car at night. Perhaps this is meant to symbolize Dave's nightly runs to KFC, pre-WOMD?

Ultimately it doesn't matter, because as Dave White shows us, it's what's on the inside that counts. Er, what used to be inside. After you lose some of it. Um.... okay.