ECHO PARK, January 2 - And, oh yes, I am still trying to make a living at this stuff.  That’s a little misleading.  It suggests that I’m struggling to make a living as a writer.  Certainly I work very hard.  Hard in terms of a writer as opposed to someone who makes a living digging bottles from trash cans.  And certainly I am not, by any material measure, a rich man.  I do however make a living.  And I do it without some of the considerable sweat that the majority of other writers ooze from their pores as they restlessly sleep.  This is due to the good fortune I’ve had in terms of signing new contracts.  Since signing my first contract with Ballantine I have never been been without one.  Each new contract has expired as a new one has been negotiated.    In the writing game that’s some pretty damn good job security.   As with most jobs, that security last only so long as it is associated with productivity that results in profitability. I score pretty high on productivity.  As for the other, I’m not making anyone over at Ballantine rich.   But the books are in the black.  And here it is, the selling season.   Just in time for economic armageddon and post-holiday credit card bill hangovers, I have not one, but two books coming out this month. First, and foremost in my mind, is THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH. While I’ve tended to refer to MYSTIC ARTS as a stand alone, I’ve always had it in mind as the first in an open-ended series.  Whether that end will actually be ended will depend on whether people like the damn thing.    My first book set in LA, it concerns Web Goodhue, a smartass piece of damaged goods who spends the bulk of his time slacking on the couch in his roommate’s tattoo parlor.  Said slacking is interrupted by the unexpected appearance of a job cleaning trauma scenes.   What’s a trauma scene?  Pretty much anyplace there’s been trauma.  Physical, fluid spraying, trauma.   There’s a girl with a problem. Some heavies.  The angel of death as manifested as an ex-gang banger corpse-hauler, a Hollywood casualty case with a porn star mom, past infidelities, misadventure and accidental death, and a pipe bomb inserted in an asshole.  The orifice, not some jerk. It’s a nice family book.  Here’s what Stephen King says about it on Amazon:    “There are some things you never wonder about until someone–usually someone whose mind lives on Weird Street–brings them to your attention. Who cuts the barber’s hair? How does a guy wind up with the job of test-smelling armpits for a deoderant company? Or de-wrinkling dress shoes before they’re put on sale? Why does one kid become a college dean while another grows up to be a key grip? And just what is a key grip, anyway?Here’s another one. Who scrubs down the scene after a spectacularly messy death–a guy who shoots himself in the head, let’s say, or dies of natural causes in a hot back room and then goes undiscovered for a couple of weeks? What sort of janitorial problems would such work entail? It turns out there are firms that specialize in those problems, and in the Weird Street world of Charlie Huston, a couple of these companies might even do battle over the smelly, maggoty spoils of war.“Trauma scene and waste cleaning is a growth industry,” remarks Po Sin, the owner/operator of Clean Team. The observation comes early in Charlie Huston’s terrific new novel, which is about just what the title suggests: getting rid of the messy stuff after the deal goes down.When The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death opens, Webster Fillmore Goodhue–another in a long line of likeably slack Huston protagonists–is sponging off his friend Chev, who runs a sleazier-than-thou tattoo parlor. Enter the proprietor of Clean Team, who knows Web from Web’s previous life as an elementary school teacher (a career that ended badly). Po Sin needs help in his particular growth-industry. Web agrees to a little blood- and brain-scrubbing not because he particularly wants a job but because he’s suffered his own trauma and finds cleaning up other people’s end-of-life messes strangely soothing.Enter Soledad, a beautiful young girl whose father just aired out his brains with a 9mm. Also enter Jaime, her half-bright half-brother who imagines himself a Hollywood playa but can’t get out of his own way. There are many things to love about Charlie Huston’s fiction–he’s a brilliant storyteller, and writes the best dialogue since George V. Higgins–but what pushes my personal happy-button is his morbid sense of humor and seemingly effortless ability to create scary/funny bad guys who make Beavis and Butthead look like Rhodes Scholars.There are a lot of those in this book, and several I-can’t-believe-I-laughed-at-that scenes of grue (I can’t even talk about the pipe-bomb thing, not on a family website), but the best thing about Mystic Arts is how decency and heroism rise to the top in spite of everyone’s best efforts to crush them under heel.Web wanders from the nightmarish underworld of body clean-up into the equally nightmarish worlds of hijacking and smuggling; he endures cross, double-cross, and triple-cross; he pees his pants while trying to shield his girlfriend from a bullet. He’s scared but never cowardly, down but never completely out. He is, in short, a guy worth watching.So’s Charlie Huston. He’s written several very good books (including the Caught Stealing trilogy and the Joe Pitt novels, which concern a PI who’s also a vampire), but this is the first authentically great one, a runaway freight that feels like a combination of William Burroughs and James Ellroy. Mystic Arts is, however, fiercely original–very much its own thing.Besides, admit it: you’ve always wanted to know how to get blood out of a deep-pile carpet.”    Yes, that was me bragging again.  As for the second book, that’s just the paperback version of THE SHOTGUN RULE come home to roost for those folks who like their literature to be flexible enough to fit the contours of their ass when stuffed in a back pocket.   So, new books.   A living to be made.  Profitability to prove.  Filthy lucre, filthy lucre, filthy lucre.  Expect to hear much more of this kind of crap the next several weeks.  Oh, burying the lead here: BOTH BOOKS GO ON SALE JANUARY 13th.  Thanks for reading,  -c (formatting: yeah, um, I’m doing this from a computer with a different operating system than I have in the past and things are a little sloppy. Bear with.)�