The Golem and the Jinni: A magical review of a book by Helene Wecker

The Golem and the Jinni: Helene Wecker

Can you remember reading books as a child?  Do you remember reading tales of magic and wonder that dazzled your mind with wild adventures set in faraway places?  I sure do.  And I think that as a reader, I'm always trying to retrieve that feeling I once had when reading Marguerite Henry's King of the Wind or Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.  Late;y, I've been having trouble recapturing this experience.  So many books are full of slick, quick-paced prose that leaves little chance a reader will become wrapped up in what he or she is reading.  I think editors believe we don't have the time to read such stories any more.  There seems to be this delusion that people won't read stories with detailed description and back stories.  But I was pleasantly surprised to find a novel with these very elements just a few weeks ago.

In Helene Wecker's debut novel, Chava, a magical clay being called a golem, comes to New York City in 1899.  Created to serve a master, she is adrift in this great city after her master dies before he can arrive on the shores of America.  Chava is taken in by a kindly Rabbi who lives in the Jewish quarter of the city.

At about the same time, Ahmad, a jinni  from the deserts of Syria (another magical being, though this one is made of fire), is released from his copper flask of a prison by a tinsmith in little Syria, an Arab section of New York City.  The tinsmith helps Ahmad adjust to life in the city, for the jinni is not yet free.  He is still bound by his jailer, though he has no memory of who that might be.  He only knows he has been trapped for thousands of years.

And then, one night, these two creatures meet.  Though people cannot recognize that they are not human, the golem can see that the jinni is made of fire, and the jinni can see that she is made of clay.  But this does not mean they will immediately become the best of friends.  Ahmad is lonely, and a bit reckless.  Chava is timid, afraid of discovery.  She is not willing to immediately befriend the man of fire.  She is not sure if she can trust him.

And that is all I will tell you.  From this point on the story goes its own way, full of enticing descriptions of Jewish baked goods and Syrian treats.  We are allowed a glimpse of two exotic, pulsating ethnic neighborhoods at the turn of the twentieth century, all through the eyes of these magical beings who are as new to the city of that era as we would be.  

The author, Helene Wecker.  (image source: helenewecker.com)

Wecker is masterful at combining the fairy tale elements of these two mythologies with a turn-of-the-century period novel.  As the story is a marriage of two cultures and mythologies, so too is the writing a marriage of simplicity and complexity.  There were times I thought I was reading text from an old Child-Craft volume followed by times when I thought I was reading the poetic prose of Mark Helprin's A Winter's Tale.  However, at no time does this sink into a childish Disney-like story, nor does it bog down with the weight of a period piece that is filled with too much detail.  Wecker knows adult readers have a desire for mature prose and child-like wonder and magically keeps this balance throughout the whole of the novel.

There are many secondary characters in this book that complimented this balance; a wonderfully villainous Rabbi who practices dark, Kabbalistic arts; Saleh, a mad ice-ream vendor; Fadwa, a young Syrian girl; and many others.  The ice-cream vendor really stood out in this mix.  His story was fascinating.  I can imagine that if this were ever made into a movie (a full mini-series would certainly be worth it here) the character of Saleh would be a juicy part for any veteran actor looking to pick up a top award.

I did feel that the end of the novel lost a bit of its originality at the end.  I had the feeling an editor demanded that the end include a bit of a stereotypical Hollywood-climax.  However, this did not have a negative effect on the book.  It merely was not something I had hoped to find at the end.  It would, however, make adapting this to a mini-series quite simple, and the screenplay could remain extremely true to the novel.

The Golem and the Jinni was nominated for a 2014 Nebula Award for Best Novel.  There have been complaints about its length and pace but if you've ever read any of my reviews you know that I only consider these a plus for any book.

This is the sort of book in which you can really lose yourself, perhaps best read on a cold winter's night.  If you love to read magical stories filled with exotic settings and empathetic characters, be sure not to miss this first novel from a very talented writer.

Check out Helene Wecker at her website: HeleneWecker.com

Click below for the eBook version:

5 Fully Fabricated Facts to Feed the Frenetic, Trivia-Famished Folks on the World Wide Web

Because all of us love lists that allow us to learn the latest ludicrous trivial bon-bons as we surf the truth-challenged waves of the global information sea, I thought it would be best if I offered up this list of fictional facts that in no way relate to the truth.  You'll be shocked at what you are about to read, and will wonder time and again: How is it I've never heard any of this before?  And I hope that once your incautious appetite for counterfeit trumpery has been satiated, you'll merrily and recklessly pass this along for consumption on the World Wide Web.

Hidden Messages lurking within...

5.  Hidden Messages in the Songs of The Beatles.  When you take the notes of any Beatles song and assign numerical values to them based on the Beaufort Scale then substitute letters from a backwards alphabet according to their numerical place value the resulting sentence reveals itself: The Beatles are better than the Rolling Stones.  The only exception to this is in the song I Am the Walrus.  The substitution cipher for Walrus reads quite differently, saying simply: Our fans scream like little girls.

The best tip for removing coffee stains.

4.  The Best Way to Remove Coffee Stains.  Coffee stains on table tops are most effectively removed by rolling the table with an ivory tusk.  Coffee is drawn to real ivory and will adhere to ivory indefinitely.  Since ivory tusks are no longer available you might be forced to use a synthetic tusk, which will work as long as the coffee stains are from a synthetic coffee.

Sleep?  Never!

3.  Children do not need sleep.  In a 2011 study conducted by Stanhope University's College of Psychology and Phrenology, children between the ages of six months and five years remained awake for seven straight months.  The only adverse side effects observed were mostly related to the amount of noise coming from each child.  Male children, while making far more noise than female children, showed less of an increase in noises made as their total number of sleepless days began to mount.  Female children, on the other hand, showed a marked increased in noise level as well as variety of noises created by the second and third month without sleep.  When asked how the researchers were able to keep the children awake, a spokesperson for the Department said they simply did not put the kids to bed.  The study was originally meant to last for twelve months but the researchers found the decibel levels of the sixty-five children intolerable and it was determined that the children should finally be put to bed.  No matter that the children had been awake for seven months, it still took the researchers three hours to settle the kids and get them to sleep.

Don Knotts: Too Violent for the The Godfather?

2.  The Godfather that Could Have Been.  We all know that Tom Selleck was originally offered the role of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark.  But did you know that Francis Ford Coppola first offered the role of Vito Corleone to Don Knotts?  According to sources inside the production of Coppola's 1972 The Godfather, Don Knotts screen tested for the title role and had actually signed a contract before Coppola decided Knotts was too dark and violent.  Mario Puzo supposedly fought against this change, as he felt the frighteningly psychotic Knotts was just the way he had imagined the head of the Corleone family.  Coppola, according to some, refused to change his mind, even when Knotts stormed into his office and threatened to tear out Coppola's liver with his bare hands.  An assistant to the director once admitted that four body guards were required to pull Knotts off the Academy Award-winning director, though he has since tried to say the incident never occurred.

1.  Reading a Book is the Number One Activity of All Age Groups.  A recent poll, conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts, in which every citizen of the United States was asked "what is your favorite way to spend time?", has shown that a stunning 89 per cent of the country's population prefers to read books over any other activity.  This included eating (a mere 7 per cent), playing Candy Crush (a paltry 1.2 per cent) and watching "Dancing With the Stars" (which came in as the second most popular on the list at 11 per cent.)  The dramatic increase in book readers is being attributed to the complete conversion of television programming to reality shows such as Top Gear and Myth Busters as well as Hollywood's refusal to produce any more movies unless they are connected to Marvel Comics in some way.  Cultural watchdogs are calling this the single most important step for our society, suggesting we are no longer destined to descend into hell in a hand basket but rather we are ready to climb up yet again to the pinnacle of our hopes and dreams.  One former Librarian of Congress has suggested that the increase in readers is directly attributable to the rise in sales of Kindle eReaders, saying "once the awful smell of books was removed from the reading process, and the thrill of playing with an electronic device was added to the thrill of reading, it was an unfair fight.  Nothing was ever going to be, and nothing will ever be, more fun than snapping open an eReader and reading a book from cover to cover.  There's no way to compete with that sort of experience."

And now you know.  Now get out there and pass this along so everyone else will know what you know.

Electronics and Rockets: February, 1961

Electronics Illustrated, February, 1961

I'm not a big electronics expert.  I can plug things in.  When they quit working, I can throw them away.  In between, I know how to turn most electronic things on and off.  I may even know how to set the digital clocks on them.  But that is about it.  So I was never one to read magazines like Electronics Illustrated.  But I did (and still do) like to look through them for the many cool pictures they had.  And here is a great example of why.  After all, if you didn't know, I'm the editor of Rocket Fire Books, and I love anything to do with rockets.

No, that's not George C. Scott dressed up like General Patton on the cover.  It's a real military officer pointing to America's Courier satellite.  And as it says, this satellite is "the communications brain that receives, remembers and rebroadcasts 75,000 words per minute!"

Sadly, you can see that the public in 1961 has missed the significance of this achievement as a new communications link.  After all, it is a telephonic-telegraphic-facsimile repeating station.  Considering it carries messages across the world through the sky at nearly 15,000 miles an hour, I can't see how all those people missed this achievement.  Perhaps instead of recognizing the impact of this telephonic-telegraphic-facsimile repeating station, they were spending too much time watching Gunsmoke and Wagon Train, the two top shows on TV at the time.  (What shocks me is discovering that Have Gun Will Travel, a show I've never enjoyed, eclipsed The Andy Griffith Show for third place.  I wish someone would explain that one to me.)  So at a time when we were launching this super-sophisticated telecommunications satellite into space, most of the people at home were watching western TV shows.  In fact, there wasn't one science fiction show in the top twenty-five shows that year.

Here we see the Pioneer VI sitting atop an Atlas-Able 3-stage rocket.  The plan here was to launch this one to the moon--well, at least into lunar orbit, where "it will stay there theoretically forever."  Or at least as long as Gunsmoke remained on the air, which it seemed to do metaphorically forever.  

Now here, you can see what the Pioneer VI will look like.  I notice that the author of this piece says the satellite will orbit the moon practically forever, which seems quite different from theoretically.  I wish they'd get their hyperbole straight.  Of a more interesting note, you can see where he takes a shot at the Russians, claiming that the only pictures we have of the dark side of the moon are just "a few blurry pictures of the far side of the Moon as Russia's Lunik I made its single pass."  We have here a double shot at the Russians.  Not only is this an attempt to point out the poor quality of the the Russians' photography skills, but it also points out how they only made one little trip around the moon.  And remember, the Pioneer VI will be orbiting the Grand Luna for all eternity (practically and theoretically speaking.)

In all fairness, Pioneer VI has been fairly successful.  Though NASA does not regularly check on the telemetry of this satellite, it did make contact with it on December 8, 2000, to celebrate 35 years of continual operation.  It is uncertain what Pioneer VI had to say on such an occasion or whether it felt proud of its achievements.  Oddly enough, according to Wikipedia, JPL says the Pioneer VI design life expectancy was only six months.  Which is no where near forever, whether you are speaking practically or theoretically, or even if you are talking impractically.  The only time six months is akin to forever is when you are a kid, and summer is still six months away.  Then yes, six months is practically forever.

Now, in case all of this electronics talk has left you with a desire to be a radio and TV repairman, here's a great little offer from Christy Trades School.  Get your free illustrated book that shows you how to learn every phase of electrical appliance repair.  It doesn't teach you electrical appliance repair, but it teaches you how to learn.  In no time you'll be fixing your own appliances, and your neighbor's appliances, all for the amazing figure of $5.00 to $6.00 an hour.  And, you'll learn so much, your head will be the shape of a beachball, you'll have no hair, and your eyes will give a clear indication that you've been sticking your finger into one too many light sockets.  Don't wait!  Write today!

David Morrell: An Interview with the Author of "Murder as a Fine Art" Part Two

International Best-Selling Author
David Morrell
(photo courtesy of David Morrell)

Last month I had the chance to talk with best-selling author David Morrell.  After discussing his latest book Murder as a Fine Art and its forthcoming sequel Inspector of the Dead, our conversation turned to his early influences.  (Be sure to read part one if you haven’t already.)

Television, Hollywood, and art of Turning Novels into Movies

Read any book of David Morrell’s and you’ll likely come across a foreword, afterword or author bibliography that begins with the story of Morrell’s early inspiration found in the television show Route 66 and one of its creators and head writer, Stirling Silliphant.  The series was about two young men in a Corvette convertible as they traveled across the country in search of America and themselves.

“I was 17 and aimless when Route 66 premiered,” he admitted.  “I had a troubled childhood. My widowed mother was forced to put me in an orphanage for a while because she couldn’t work in a factory and take care of me at the same time. When she remarried, my stepfather turned out not to like children. He and my mother argued a lot.  Afraid, I used to sleep under my bed. As I grew up, I spent most of my time watching television—sometimes 10 hours of it a day. My high-school principal told me that I’d never amount to anything. Then I happened to watch the first episode of Route 66, and it showed me what life could be like if you wanted to bust out (to use a favorite expression from the series) and make life your own instead of surrendering to it.”

Morrell was not just drawn in to watching a television show.  He was drawn to the writing, and the man who did the writing—Silliphant.

“It had an amazing mix of action and ideas. I sent a hand-written letter to him (thanks to a librarian who found the address for Screen Gems, the series’ distributor), telling him that I wanted to be him.  He sent me a two-page typed letter in return, encouraging me, and I was on my way.”

Out of that initial correspondence, they eventually became friends.

“We exchanged more letters over the years. I sent him congratulations when he received a 1968 Oscar for adapting John Ball’s novel, In the Heat of the Night. When my debut novel, First Blood, was published in 1972, he phoned me to tell me how thrilled he was. But we didn’t meet until 1985, during the height of the Rambo phenomenon. He was working on the miniseries for James Michener’s Space at the time. I happened to see a TV piece about the historical highway Route 66. It featured a clip from the series. On impulse, I phoned the Writers Guild and asked them to contact Silliphant and gave them my phone number. He called me a half hour later and suggested that I spend the Fourth of July weekend with him. So I flew to Los Angeles, and he introduced me to his family. He showed me the places where he used to live. At one point, we went to Malibu and had a photograph taken by his wife, Tiana.”

David Morrell with Stirling Silliphant in Malibu
(photo courtesy of David Morrell) 

This was only a few years before they would collaborate on the mini-series Brotherhood of the Rose.

“My espionage novel, The Brotherhood of the Rose, was published the year earlier.  It was the first novel to combine the British and American espionage-novel traditions. Stirling took the book to NBC, who bought it as a miniseries.  I did four drafts of the script. Stirling did one. Someone else finally got the credit. (That’s how television works.)  It was the only miniseries to be broadcast after a Super Bowl, and Stirling was the executive producer. Working with him was the highlight of my writing life.”

In his short story collection Nightscape, Morrell based a character in the short story “Front Man” on Silliphant.  Morrell explained:

“When Stirling was in his 60s, he didn’t get as much work as he once had, because TV networks thought he was out of touch with the culture because of his age. When he went to pitch an idea to a network executive, his agents warned him not to bring a list of his hundred credits, because no one would believe his amazing productivity.  Anyway, I used the anecdotes he told me about his meetings with executives. I combined them within my own weird meetings (a barefoot twenty-something executive swinging a golf club in a tiny putting green in his office), and “Front Man” was the result, about an aging screenwriter who hires a young writer to front for him, with disastrous consequences. It’s a primer about the negative aspects of the business.”

Weird meetings?

“I went to the office of a woman who was the head of production at a major studio. She was just under five feet tall.  She sat on the edge of her desk and indicated that I should sit on a nearby sofa.  As I sat, I realized that the sofa had no springs. I sank until my backside was literally on the floor. In that fashion, she was able to tower over me for the meeting.”

He continued to talk about the movie-making process, and I would have to say that while it was fascinating to me, it was both funny and discouraging.  A case in point was his sotry about the efforts to make a film version of his book The Fifth Profession.

“It’s funny in retrospect. I should add that more than half my novels have been optioned by studios or sold outright, but it takes a miracle to get a picture made.  Too many people need to share the same goal, but directors and actors come in and out of favor, and packages of talent keep falling apart. About The Fifth Profession, there were numerous screenplays, none of which I wrote. One of them depicted black-clad ninja warriors descending ropes into an extinct volcano that had been turned into a rocket-launching site.  This nonsense wasn’t in my novel.  I warned the producers that they risked a possible lawsuit from the producers of the James Bond film, You Only Live Twice, which used the same ending. The producers had no familiarity with that film. As they told me, ‘That’s a Sean Connery Bond movie. We’ve never seen the Connery films. We’ve only ever seen the Roger Moore ones.’ In the end, the picture was never made, but the screenwriter stole the central plot element and used it in another film. It wasn’t blatant enough for me to sue him, but he definitely stole.”

I was even more intrigued when he told me Pierce Brosnan was scheduled to be in the adaptation of his novel Burnt Sienna.

“When Pierce was James Bond (odd how the character shows up here), MGM optioned that novel for him, partly because the novel is a thriller about a painter and Pierce is a painter who wanted to feature some of his work in the film.  But then the screenwriter turned it into a horror movie about a painter whose work predicted the future (which isn’t in my novel). Then Pierce stopped being James Bond, and MGM lost interest in the project.”

“Does this drive you crazy?” I asked him.

“It’s show business. By its nature, it’s unpredictable. But I had a great relationship with Carolco, the company that made First Blood and the first two Rambo sequels.  And I had a great relationship with NBC’s miniseries department. Also I loved working with Laurel Entertainment when I did a script for their Monsters series.  One of the projects that I really regretted not reaching the screen was an adaptation I did of Michael Palmer’s The Sisterhood that Laurel Entertainment was going to produce.  When my schedule got weird, the producers actually flew to Iowa City where I then lived rather than asking me to come to a story conference in New York. Unfortunately the novel became lost in a rights issue, with another studio claiming involvement and the film never got made.  But the experience of working on it was wonderful.  Currently I have three books in development, Creepers, The Brotherhood of the Rose (for a feature), and Murder as a Fine Art (for a TV series). There are so many variables in getting a picture made that I’ve learned not to have expectations. And then, of course, there’s the risk that the finished films will be poorly made. In the end, I can control what goes into my novels, whereas the movies are in the hands of Fate.”

David Morrell and Sylvester Stallone
(photo courtesy of David Morrell)

Donald E. Westlake, Sinatra, and Irons in the Fire

I had once read that Morrell knew Donald E. Westlake.  I’m a big fan of Westlake’s work, which includes his hard-boiled detective novels as well as his hilarious crime-caper novels featuring John Dortmunder, the hapless New York thief.  I asked him how they’d met.

“In 1968, I was a graduate student at Penn State. My fiction-writing teacher was Phillip Klass (pen name—William Tenn), who had an agent named Henry Morrison.  Morrison also represented Westlake.  Klass had bought a house near Penn State, and Morrison and Westlake drove out from New York City for a house-warming party. At the party, Klass introduced me to them, told them that I was working on a novel (First Blood), and then suggested that they let me tell them about it. So in the middle of this housewarming, party, the first pitch I ever did, I had to sit down on the stairs with people going up and down to the only bathroom and I described First Blood. Morrison asked Westlake, ‘What do you think?’ Westlake answered, ‘I think it’s a helluva idea.’ Morrison said ‘I think it is too. David, you have an agent.’”

Westlake ended up reading the first draft of First Blood and passed along some advice.

“At that time, I was still learning about structure. I began the novel, wrongly, with a chase scene in the middle of the plot. I figured that I ought to start with action, but as Westlake pointed out, the reader didn’t know anything about the characters and hence couldn’t feel involved. I restructured the novel and began with the first time that Rambo and the police chief meet.”

Did they ever meet again?

“Every couple of years, most memorably at a Mohonk mystery weekend that he organized in upstate New York. He invited several of his author friends, including me, Brian Garfield, and Justin Scott to be guest speakers.  He was the funniest man I ever spoke to.  No one ever spoke more amusingly or more wisely about writing than he did. In October, the University of Chicago Press will release a collection of his non-fiction, The Getaway Car, in which he talks about his approach to writing.”

  

A real treasure supplied by David Morrell for this interview: The Mohonk Mystery Weekend organized by Donald E. Westlake.  From left to right: David Morrell, Donald E. Westlake, Justin Scott, Alice Turner, Christopher Newman, and Brian Garfield on the far right.  Newman is the author of the Joe Dante police thrillere.  Scott is a veteran writer who is now co-writing with Clive Cussler.  Garfield, who got his start cranking out westerns, is best known for his novel "Death Wish", the book that started the film franchise of the same name.  At the time this picture was taken, Turner was the fiction editor for Playboy magazine.

Just as I was surprised to learn that Morrell had written a Victorian murder mystery, I was also surprised to find that he had written an eBook about Frank Sinatra.  I asked him about Frank Sinatra; the Artist and His Music.

“Just before I discovered Route 66, I considered a career in music. At an early age (16-17), I took lessons in musical theory, harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration. I wanted to be a composer/arranger like Nelson Riddle, who wrote charts for Sinatra and, ironically, later wrote the music for Route 66.  By studying Riddle, I came to realize what a genius Sinatra was as a vocalist. I’ve been studying Sinatra for more than 50 years and finally wrote the e-book about him, just about his singing, about his breath control and phrasing and how he copied the lyrics of the songs he sang, writing them again and again on sheets of paper until he internalized them.  My hope was that anyone who reads my analysis of Sinatra’s technique will think of singing in a new way.  I wrote a companion e-book, Nelson Riddle: The Man behind the Music. I once wrote a similar piece (for Absolute Sound magazine) about Bobby Darin, another genius. I think that my interest in arranging music helps me understand structure in storytelling.”

“And you’ve written similar eBooks on John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe,” I added.

Morrell surprised me yet again.  “Those are more of the magazine pieces I wrote.  I have dozens of similar essays—about Steve McQueen, Rod Serling, and Richard Matheson, for example.  One day I’ll collect them in a book.”

I was amazed at how many irons Morrell had in the fire.  I brought up his involvement with Marvel Comics.  How did he manage to do it all?

“Well, I learned from Stirling Silliphant.  He wrote 5 pages every day. Sometimes he did TV scripts in a week.  In the 1960s, there was a joke, ‘How can Stirling Silliphant writes so fast?’  The answer was, ‘He has an electric typewriter.’  I have a lot of stories to tell, and whenever I feel lazy, I ask myself what Stirling would do. The answer is ‘Keep writing’.”

And he certainly does.  Murder as a Fine Art is a runaway hit (Publishers Weekly called it “One of the ten best summer detective/thrillers of 2013), his fans are eagerly awaiting the release of its sequel Inspector of the Dead next year, and he has a new Wolverine comic coming soon.  He’s been at it since the day he had an idea to write about a Vietnam veteran who goes to war with a local police chief.  Since then he’s never really taken a break.  But despite the odds in this shaky publishing business, he’s kept his writing career relevant and vibrant for over forty years.  And like both characters in his famous debut novel—John Rambo and Chief Wilfred Teasle—he obviously isn’t one to give up.  Even in the face of tragic events he’s found the inspiration to try new things and provide his readers with something fresh and exciting, infused with his never-dying passion for a great story.

Be sure to read Part One of this interview.

(David Morrell is a New York Times bestselling writer who holds a Ph.D. in literature. He has been nominated for numerous awards, including the Edgar, Macavity, and Anthony, and has received 3 Bram Stoker awards.  The International Thriller Writers organization honored him its prestigious career-achievement Thriller Master Award.  With eighteen million copies in print, his books have been translated into 26 languages.  I consider it an extraordinary honor to have been able to interview Mr. Morrell.)

For more information on David Morrell, visit his website at DavidMorrell.net 

I highly recommend the following:

At the end of this month, Marvel is releasing a collection of Spider-Man stories, which will include David Morrell's Spider-Man: Frost series as well as an essay on writing comic books written by Morrell.

David Morrell: An Interview with the Author of "Murder as a Fine Art" Part One

International Bestselling-Author
David Morrell
(photo courtesy of David Morrell)

When I first saw the book Murder as a Fine Art, I was intrigued by the author’s name: David Morrell.  Known the world over as the father of Rambo, Morrell had authored First Blood, a book that many people mistakenly call “Rambo” since its principle character became one of the most recognizable pop-culture icons in the world.  A Victorian murder mystery written by the father of Rambo?  Was this a bad mash-up of testosterone and fog-shrouded streets?  Murder as a Fine Art turned out to be a well-crafted, complex novel about the 1854 gruesome murder of a family that mirrors the unsolved Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811.  Morrell’s foray into Victorian London was richly decorated with what was obviously a great deal of research.  The story and the characters were lots of fun.  Morrell had delivered a crackling-good Victorian thriller.

But I kept returning to my original question: A Victorian murder mystery written by the father of Rambo?

I was curious enough to request an interview.  At the time, in the fall of 2013, Morrell had to turn me down.  His schedule was full.  He was right in the middle of working on a sequel to Murder as a Fine Art.  We eventually agreed to reconnect in the spring of 2014.

During the interval I began to research Morrell’s diverse career.  Look him up online and you’ll find short stories, thrillers, comic books, and essays in addition to his twenty-five-plus novels.  Morrell has completely embraced the eBook revolution.  In fact, he holds the rights to most of his books in the eBook market, since so many of the original contracts he signed were written before the days of digital reading platforms.  One short story that caught my eye was They.   Available as a single, this thriller is something like Little House on the Prairie meets Wolfen.  (Morrell explains in the foreword how Laura Ingalls Wilder’s stories influenced this particular piece.)  Another single, My Name is Legion, is a World War II adventure involving the French Foreign Legion.  These are only a few of the titles available.  It is impossible to read everything out there; the man’s been writing for more than four decades.

I had never read any of Morrell’s books until I picked up Murder as a Fine Art.  One of the benefits of Morrell writing a Victorian murder mystery is that it is drawing in readers who are unfamiliar with his early books.  He had certainly drawn my attention.

Murder as a Fine Art and the Art of Time-Travel

We finally talked over the phone once Morrell had finished a major revision of the text to Inspector of the Dead, the sequel to Murder as a Fine Art.  Understandably, it was foremost on his mind.

Most of the time, editors of mainstream fiction are looking to cut down the word count of any and all manuscripts that come across their desks.  His Victorian novels, however, bucked this trend.  According to Morrell, every time he sent Inspector of the Dead to his Mulholland Books editors, Josh Kendall and Wes Miller, they would send it back, asking for more detail.  This was encouraging to hear.  The prevailing line among writers, editors, and anyone else associated with the publishing industry is that readers today just won’t read anything with detailed descriptions.  They don’t care about them, won’t spend the time it takes to read them, and they haven’t the intelligence to absorb them.  Did this mean there was a new wind blowing through the halls of publishing houses?  Well, there’s more to it than that.

We’ll start at the beginning; how a renowned writer of modern thrillers came to publish a Victorian novel, how the author who gave us John Rambo turned his attention to the London, England of the 1850s, and how this beginning, as with so many beginnings, started with the tragedy of death.

In 2009, Morrell explained, his fourteen-year-old granddaughter, Natalie, died from a rare form of bone cancer known as Ewing’s Sarcoma.  This in itself was a terrible blow.  It is often said no man should outlive his children.  To experience the death of a child’s child is to experience an exponential grief.  But there was a greater despair to be found here.  Morrell had already lost a son to this rare bone cancer in 1987.  The number of people who fall to this sickness in the United States is only a few hundred every year, yet the Morrell family had lost their second loved one to this disease.  Morrell’s response was to retreat.  “I wanted to get away from the modern world,” he admits.  “I wanted to disappear into another era.”

Morrell is known as a tenacious researcher, having been trained in hostage negotiation, assuming identities, defensive/offensive driving, and many other skills he incorporates into his novels.  At times it might even appear he goes a little overboard in this area.  He is a graduate of the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security and the National Outdoor Leadership School for Wilderness Survival.  Not only did he become a private pilot subsequent to his research for The Shimmer but he has also earned honorary lifetime memberships in the Special Operations Association and the Association of Intelligence Officers.

Retreating into the past, he brought this nearly manic obsession for research with him.

Still dealing with grief over his granddaughter’s death, he followed his daughter’s advice to watch a film about Charles Darwin.  The film, Creation, explores Darwin’s breakdown after his own daughter’s death, and includes a mention of Thomas De Quincey and his theories in the same vein as if he were a precursor to Freud.  Morrell was intrigued; soon enough, he was hooked.

Thomas De Quincey was a journalist and essayist best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, published in 1821.  It is an autobiographical account of De Quincey’s laudanum addiction and the effect it had on his life.  Not only did this work influence the literary efforts of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Nikolai Gogol, but it also influenced the study of psychology and abnormal psychology.  And now we can add David Morrell to that list of influences, especially after he read De Quincey’s On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.

Once the idea of a book began to take shape in his mind, Morrell admitted to his agents what he intended to do.  According to Morrell—“They said ‘Well, it’s a big risk’ and I said ‘I know, but you know what?  If I don’t write this I don’t think I’m ever gonna write anything.’”

Surprisingly, and to their credit, they agreed.

He was soon in the midst of writing an imitation Victorian novel.  Morrell felt early on that the style would have to match the story.  “I’m very big on form and content.  That what a book is about should match how it is written.”  He enjoyed the challenge of using techniques that no one uses anymore, including the Victorian habit of inserting journal entries into the story. 

As excited as he was about the book, there were those who questioned his judgment.

“When I told some fellow authors what I was doing they were horrified.”  They assured him he would lose his readers, and destroy his career.  Morrell simply didn’t care.  He was already known for not allowing himself to be pigeonholed as a one-trick genre writer.  He had dabbled in Westerns, Psychological Horror, and even Super Hero comics during his forty plus years as a writer.  And with his current issues of grief and a need to step back from the pain of this world it was easier to follow his heart in this endeavor.

Murder as a Fine Art artwork by
Tomislav Tikulin, courtesy
of David Morrell.

Once the book was completed, it caught the interest of then head-editor at Mulholland Books, Little, Brown by the name of John Shoenfelder.  In Morrell’s words, Shoenfelder “told me that he went in to his boss at Little, Brown and told him that this was an important book and it needed to be published, no matter that it seemed a departure for me.”  Shoenfelder was given the green light.

And that was it.  With the publishers on board, the book, or to be more precise, Morrell’s passion for the book became contagious, drawing in more supporters.  Morrell told me people said, “You know he’s done this weird thing but, my heavens, you know, it’s really interesting.”  Gaining more attention than many of his more recent books, Murder as a Fine Art was chosen by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the top ten Mystery/Thrillers of 2013.  Even better, it made the top five for Library Journal.

Morrell knew his gamble had paid off.  “God knows it could have gone the other way,” he gamely confessed.

Morrell says the email response to Murder as a Fine Art from readers was tremendous.  The good news was that his fan base had joined him as he led them down this new path.  But the better news was that he was hearing from readers who had never read his books before.  They were loving it and asking for more.

So were his publishers.

Morrell is not a series writer.  It is part of what has kept him from being stuck in a rut, like so many of his contemporaries.  (Realize that his contemporaries consist of writers from the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, and the 2010s.  Many of them can no longer be listed as his contemporaries, since their time came and went long ago.)  That he has more often than not found a way to reinvent himself is a big factor in his longevity.  But his tendency to shy away from recurring characters did not prevent him from dipping his quill back into the inkwell for another adventure in Victorian London.  (Morrell was willing to acknowledge that a close friend read the first book and immediately told him he had a trilogy in the making.  Though he didn’t jump at the idea, he says her suggestion has always remained nestled in the back of his mind.  But he’s not making any promises.)

And that brings us back to Inspector of the Dead and his editors’ requests for more detail.  You see, in his modern thrillers, Morrell never felt the need to provide much detail to the world around us, since readers were already familiar with the day-to-day elements that make up our modern lives.  In his opinion, writers don’t need to add details that would be understood by a reader.  But since he had chosen the alien world of Victorian London, and he had learned so much about it, he just felt that readers needed a little help to get them to take the trip with him.

As he wrote that first book he had kept a note by his computer which read: Try to make readers believe they are truly in 1854 London.  Using shelves and shelves of research material on the time period, and at the same time befriending and relying on several historical experts in that era, Morrell began to fill his story with these rich details that would facilitate the reader’s ability to co-exist with him in that bygone London, something unnecessary for writer’s from that era.  Their readers were well acquainted with such things as the hygienic customs of the day and the cultural habits of all the classes.

It was this desire to recreate the past accurately that aided him in avoiding the recent steampunk fad.  I have teenagers who introduced me to steampunk around the time Morrell would have been writing Murder as a Fine Art.  It’s true I enjoyed that little sub-genre for a time, but its overuse in books and movies shortened its lifespan.  I told Morrell I was glad he had avoided giving Thomas De Quincey a steam-powered airplane in which to run around.  Morrell was amused at such an idea but said wasn’t the least bit tempted to go that route.  While he was aware of the steampunk revolution, as it has been called, he was determined to remain true to his goal and that note by his computer.

Morrell wasn’t ready to begin sharing too much of the story of Inspector of the Dead but he did make sure I understood that it wasn’t a simple matter to insert the details as requested by the editors.  Most importantly, it had to be done in such a way as to insure that the pace of the novel remained consistent.  In fact, this last round of edits brought more than a few new details to the book.  According to Morrell, he realized that he needed to change and expand a portion of the book, and it meant an increase of nearly 15,000 words.  While it meant a great deal of time had to be spent getting it right, he was able to complete it in time.  Deadlines, after all, and his ability to meet them, are a personal pride of his.  He emphasized this by repeating something he’d once told a fellow author.  “We all know authors who are more talented than we are, there’s always someone more talented, but can they meet the deadline?  Can they perform professionally and be part of the team in order to take this very complicated process and bring it to fruition?”  His experience has taught him that if you can’t do that, your career will never get off the ground.  “Deadlines are the absolute,” he said, adding off-hand, “I’ve never missed one.”

So we can be assured that if his editors ask him for yet another edit of the second book in his Thomas De Quincey series, Morrell will get the job done in time for his readers to catch that return trip to Victorian London.  I know I’m looking forward to tagging along.

Murder as a Fine Art artwork by
Tomislav Tikulin, courtesy
of David Morrell.

On June 14, Murder as a Fine Art will come out in trade paperback as a book-club edition.  Added material will include study questions, an interview between David Morrell and Thomas De Quincey biographer, Robert Morrison, and an essay by Morrell in which he discusses his approach to writing thrillers.

Inspector of the Dead is scheduled to be released on March 24, 2015.  

(Part Two of this interview, in which our discussion turns to Frank Sinatra, Stirling Silliphant, and Rambo, is available at this link.)

For more information on David Morrell, visit his website at DavidMorrell.net.

eBooks by David Morrell:  I highly recommend his short story They.  

A Weekend Trip to Tennessee

For a short spring vacation I thought we could take a quick trip to a few spots of interest.  These postcards were found among some family papers last winter.  First off, the above photo depicts the new terminal building at the Memphis International Airport.  This beautiful structure was built by Mann and Harrover and was completed on June 7, 1963, for $6.5 million.  Imagine if they could build it for that today.  This postcard refers to the airport as it is currently named; the name was changed from Memphis Municipal to Memphis International in 1969.  According to the postcard, the terminal is designed to provide maximum comfort, convenience and safety for its air travelers.  I believe them, don't you?

Since we landed at the airport at night, we are forced to spend the night before our sightseeing.  Unfortunately there is an Elvis convention in town, so we are forced to travel over one hundred miles northeast to Jackson, Tennessee, which is about an hour and half away.  The good news is, we are able to find a room at this snazzy, relaxing oasis on I-40.  That's right, a holiday Inn, complete with its iconic, eye-catching googie-style sign.  How many nights have you been on the road, tired, in need of a good night's rest, and you suddenly saw that flashing green and yellow sign with the shining white star and felt the warmth and relief in knowing you'd found your home for the night?  Too many to count, right?  And hey, if we delay our departure a little, the kids can take a dip in the pool.  However, with the weather on the chilly side, they might decide to skip this activity, at least for now.  Perhaps we'll just be satisfied to grab this colorful postcard to send to Grandma.

Okay, so we skipped the pool.  Now we've got to jump in the rental car and head back to Memphis.  I know, we just made this trip, but it won't take long.  And once we get there, we'll get the chance to see the Pink Palace in Chickasaw Gardens.  No, don't get too excited.  Chickasaw Gardens is not anything like Busch Gardens in Tampa, or Cyprus Gardens in Winter Haven, Florida.  Chickasaw Gardens use to be the estate of the inventor of the self-serve grocery store, Piggly Wiggly: Clarence Saunders.  Saunders lost the estate, along with his fortune, in 1923, and developers transformed this land into an upscale neighborhood of Memphis.  The good news is, the Pink Palace is now a museum, and we not only get to view the grounds and the gardens, but we can also walk through a replica of the first Piggly Wiggly.  How cool is that?  The tickets are reasonably priced but they only stay open till 5 pm.  But that's okay, since we have to get the rental car back and catch our flight.

Besides, from what I hear, Memphis is crawling with Elvis impersonators during this convention.  

I think the next trip we take will be through Texas and Oklahoma, doesn't that sound nice?

A Passing View of the Santa Fe Chief

Digging through some old family papers, I came across a rather plain envelope.  It read: NOW before you start your trip, ask the Ticket Agent for a TRAVELERS ACCIDENT INSURANCE TICKET.  Written in ink next to this was what appeared to be a dollar amount: 133.79.  Curious, I peeked inside.

My wife was with me, looking at some older furniture, trying to decide what to keep and what not to keep.  Opening the envelope, I drew her attention with a few exclamations.  It must have sounded like I'd come across something extremely valuable.  Actually, I had.  Valuable to me, anyway.

Nestled in the little envelope was a folded ticket for the Sante Fe Chief.  By the time my wife understood what it was I was gasping over, she was a bit confused.  What was all the fuss?  It was only an old train ticket.

I know.  Boys and trains.  She just didn't get how cool this was.

A little background:  The Sante Fe Chief (and later the Super Chief) were famous named trains that ran between Chicago, Illinois and Los Angeles, California.  Beginning in the mid-1920s, this service included sleeper-cars, observation cars, dining cars, lounge cars, and baggage/mail cars.  Originally, these transcon trips took 68 hours, though they eventually ran under forty hours on the upgraded Super Chief.  These trains were a part of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway.  The AT&SF never actually had a main line that serviced Santa Fe, due to its difficult terrain.  But it became one of the larger railroads in the United States.

from the back of the ticket stub

The Chief and Super Chief became known as the Railroad to the Stars, since so many Hollywood celebrities were known to use them.

The ticket stub I had found had been used on March 18, 1966, just two years before the Chief was sidelined and five years before the Super Chief was taken over by Amtrak.  The name of the train, or the engine number, does not appear to be on the stub anywhere.  Is it for the Chief or the Super Chief?  I can't tell.  I hope someone out there can help me with this.

open the ticket and you
can see the passenger's information

The passenger's information is at the top of the ticket.  As you can see, the passenger did not sign the ticket, and neither did the "validating agent".  There is also no stamp on this section.

The lower half of the ticket is just jammed packed with information.  First of all, you can see that the trip is from Ponca City (Oklahoma) to Ann Arbor (Michigan).  Three passengers are on the ticket, all of them 12 or older, and all of them in coach class.  Total cost of the package: $133.79.  

There are a few items I'm not clear on.  Listed both on the front cover and the lower half of the ticket, you can see B-12 and C 44537.  Were these simply the ticket numbers?  Did they denote the rail-car, or a cabin number?  I've not been able to find much information on this.  I'd love any help in deciphering these codes.

Tucked into the envelope with the ticket stub was this itinerary.  It gives us a detailed account of the trip.  You can see that our travelers started at night, at almost eight o'clock, and arrived in Chicago at 9:15 in the morning.  That might mean they were on the Super Chief, since the Chief had discontinued sleeper car service in the late 1950s.  However, I know that Mr. Woosley was known to be frugal and he might have saved a few dollars and spent the night on a train sitting upright.  I suspect this is the most probable since it is coach class.  Again, I'm not sure how bare bones coach class really was then.  If it is anything like coach with the airliners today, then we can be positive they did not have a sleeper car.

You'll notice there was a layover in Chicago of four hours.  I wonder if they took a chance to get out and see the city?  They arrived at a decent hour in Ann Arbor, but whether it was for one day or many, they left at a not-so-decent hour: 11:40 PM.  An earlier arrival in Chicago, a shorter layover, and an all-day trip back home brought them in at 11PM.  A long day in coach class to be sure.  I'm sure they were happy to get home and into their beds.

There are two notations on the bottom of the itinerary.  6449 and 5539.  I was hoping this was a way to identify which train they were on.  Were these the locomotive numbers?  After searching through online lists of Santa Fe engines, I did not see many numbers that seem related to these.  For now, I'll have to be content to not know more than I do.

But I love the ticket just the same.  And I like to think about that trip to Ann Arbor from time to time.

Kiss of the Lazaretto: The Trilogy Comes to an End

After many years of work, and a great deal of sweat, blood, and thrills, I'm finally closing the door on the Lazaretto Trilogy with book three, Kiss of the Lazaretto.  A reader once asked me why Gregor Lepov seemed so defeated, adding " He hasn't given up, but his dreams have certainly shrunk."  She was sure there was someone to blame for his troubles.  Would it surprise anyone to learn that there's a woman lurking in his past?  That might explain why he's a little rough on the women he meets.

Lepov's past catches up to him when his ex-wife Gloria arrives in the Lazaretto.  Even worse, against his better judgement, he agrees to allow her to hire him.  He knows it's a bad idea but he also knows it just might be the best way to keep an eye on her as well as a way to help get her out of the Lazaretto as soon as possible. 

In the following excerpt, Lepov arrives at his apartment to find Gloria waiting for him.  He's been expecting her to try something like this, and wondering how he would respond.  After all, old habits die hard.  Even the bad ones.  Especially the bad ones.

"Here's to foolish people doing foolish things."

(excerpt from Kiss of the Lazaretto)

  She was there, sitting on the top step, huddled against the wall, difficult to see in the stairwell’s poor lighting.  A shadow hid her face, but he could see her eyes, big and scared and he knew it was an act before she said the first word.

  He climbed the last steps, brushing past her without saying a word.  He pushed through the door and let it swing shut without waiting for her.

  Gripping the handle of his apartment door, he heard the door lock disengage.  She hadn’t followed him yet.  He stepped into his front room and left the door open.

  Maybe she really hadn’t been there.  Maybe she was just the product of an unbalanced nervous system.  Maybe it really was just a lack of vitamins as Lilly had insisted.  How nice to think that Gloria would go away if he diligently took his supplements.

  He heard the door beside the elevator finally swing open, its rusty hinges seemingly louder than usual.  Her heels tapped lightly on the wooden floor; her pace too measured to suggest she was upset.  She was, as she always had been, firmly in control.

  He pulled off his coat and stood a few steps inside the door, waiting for her.  When she finally appeared, she stopped at the door, partially hiding herself behind the frame.  She leaned against it, her head tilted so that half of her face was illuminated from the lamp in his front room.

  “If you’re waiting for an invitation you’ll have to stand there a very long time.  I never invite clients into my home.  It’s not professional.”

  “Grey…” her voice was almost too soft to be heard.

  “You’ll have to speak up,” he said, tossing his coat on a hook behind the door.  He turned his back on her and walked away.  “I don’t hear as well as I use to.”

  “Grey, wait!”

  “I’m not gonna wait!”  He spun around and fought the urge to strike out at her.  “I waited plenty when you left.  Gave you time to make as big a mistake as any husband was willing to put up with.  I was willing to wait then.  I waited too long.  You didn’t know that, did you?  You moved on and never looked back.  I’ll bet it never dawned on you that your husband was standing still, letting life flow by him as he waited for you to return.  You can ask me to work for you and what’s-his-name, but you don’t get to ask me to wait anymore!”

  He retreated deeper into the apartment, hoping she would leave.  He jerked open his refrigerator, its single bulb shining bright in the dark kitchen.  There was nothing there he wanted.  He’d opened it just so his hands would have something to do.  Just so his hands wouldn’t ball into fists.

  The glow of the light bulb shone on the counter and he saw his half empty bottle of bourbon.  He slammed the door and grabbed the bottle.

  “Grey.”  She’d followed him.  She was just inside the kitchen now.  “You’re angry at me.”

  “Angry at you?”  He reached next to the sink and switched on a light.  It’s harsh blue-white glare caught her by surprise and she winced.  He grabbed two empty glasses and tossed them on the counter.  One of them fell over.  Righting it, he poured out drinks for both of them.  “Why would I be angry with you?  You left me because I bored you.  Now you show up here with husband number…three, isn’t it?  Or was there another one crammed in there between this guy and the one I carried the furniture for?

  “Well, anyway, it doesn’t matter.  This present husband of yours walks into my office with you in tail and you announce that you’re not only involved in a criminal undertaking but you’re also going to emotionally blackmail me into helping you.  You’ve got me tracking down your new lover and now you show up because you want to remind me that your husband is a danger to you and me and your missing lover.

  “I’m not angry with you, Gloria.  I actually think I’m more amused than angry.  You really ought to see what this looks like from my side of the rubber room.”

  He gave her one of the glasses and lifted his with a nod of his head.

  “Here’s to foolish people doing foolish things.”

  “You aren’t foolish,” she said, grabbing his hand to prevent him from taking the drink.  “Maybe I am, but you’re anything but foolish.  It’s why I came to you.  Why I convinced Kry that we should hire you.  I knew that once you were involved, you’d know the best way to deal with this.”

  He pulled away from her and finally took that drink.  She took a sip of hers before speaking again.

  “At least you aren’t angry, Grey.  That’s important to me.”

  “I never said I wasn’t angry, Gloria.  You’re missing the point.  I said I wasn’t angry at you.  But that doesn’t mean I’m not angry at me.  And I can assure you that I’m plenty angry with me.  I hate watching a man stick his head into a noose for no logical reason.”

  “You can quit if that’s what you want.  I would walk away and I wouldn’t come back.  If it’s what you really want.”

  “Oh, don’t be a hero.”  He poured a second drink—he was well aware how bad an idea that was—and carried it into the front room.  He set it on a side table and began unrolling his sleeves.  The room was becoming unexpectedly hot.  “You really don’t get it, do you?  If I thought I could just quit this job whenever I decided you and Dannen had lied to me one too many times, I wouldn’t be angry with myself.  But I knew full well the moment I said I’d listen to your story I was in this thing all the way.  I knew you’d get hold of me and I wouldn’t be able to get free.  And don’t stand there with those big eyes and your innocent look of surprise!  You knew it too.  You probably even knew it before the first day you rode the elevator to my office.  You counted on it.”

  “Grey—”

  “And cut out that Grey nonsense, Mrs. Dannen.  Cut out all of it and tell me why you’re here—the truth—or so help me God I’m gonna throw you down those stairs.”  He tossed down the second drink and wanted badly to throw the glass at her.  Instead, he dropped it on the table and dropped himself into the corner of his sofa.

  Lepov’s head was spinning.  The drinks weren’t to blame, but they weren’t helping either.  He knew he was overreacting to her but he couldn’t find a way to turn it off.  Her scared eyes and shaky voice had not only failed to elicit his compassion, they had awakened a dormant anger he had not realized still existed.  He took several deep breaths and stared at her, willing her to either explain herself or exit the apartment.  He didn’t care which one she chose.

  “I told you I can help you find him.  But you have to promise me—you have be sure you don’t tell Kry when you’ve found him.  Tell me.  Only me.  Kry would kill him.”

  She had slowly been moving toward him.  Now, she stood beside him.  The light was behind her and he could only see her silhouette.

  “And you too, I suppose?”  His tone had softened.  He recognized that it had and though he didn’t want it to, he couldn’t hold on to his earlier fury.

  “I don’t know.”  Her words a mere whisper.

  “So tell me where he is.”

  “Promise first.”  She put a hand on his.

  “Not to tell your husband where your lover’s hiding?”

  She pulled her hand back.  “I told you he’s not my lover.  You’re being just as jealous as Kry.”

  “It’s an inherent fault with all past and present husbands.  We don’t like our wives running around with future husbands.”

  “He’s not a future husband.  And the only man Kry really needs to worry about is—” she slowly sank onto the edge of the sofa.  Before he could stop her, she’d leaned against him and her lips brushed his.  He turned away at the last moment.  Her kiss wet his cheek.

  “You just called me your wife.”  Her breath was hot.  The drinks were souring his stomach.  He pushed her away but she resisted.

  “So now you’re gonna tell me where to find Jardyn, and I tell you where he is, and you two slip off into the night and Dannen gets drunk and waits for you long enough to realize you’re never coming back.  Is that the picture you were hoping to draw?”

  “It isn’t my first choice.  There are other possible outcomes.”

  “Yeah, I guess there are.”  He turned to look in her eyes.  He had to know just how far gone he was.  He needed to know if he had any chance of surviving her game.  He shifted so that he could put an arm around her, pulled her tight, and kissed her.  She was no longer resisting him.

  Despite the years, despite the bitterness, in that moment they were young lovers again, saturated with the familiarity that overtakes two people who have managed to become one: the taste of her mouth, the feel of her tongue on his, the knowledge that her hands would slide up between his shoulders even as his slid down the curve of her legs.  The feel, the smell, her transformation from scared girl to a hungry woman, it was a moment that Lepov had feared and desired and known he would have to conquer.

  He pulled back and looked into her eyes again.  She waited, her ragged breathing yet one more distraction.  He waited too.  Long enough to allow the fog to lift.

  “You’re gonna have to remember something, my dear.”

  “Okay, I will.”  She put her head against his shoulder.

  “I’m an investigator.  I may not be a damned good one, but I’m competent enough.  Enough that I’ve already found a witness who saw Louis Jardyn leave Alpha quadrant shortly after his pal Frobe was killed.  A witness who has a very good memory.  Good enough that his description of Jardyn’s traveling companion was very detailed.”

  She sat up, wide eyes sparkling in the lamplight.

  “You see, I would have known he was describing you even if I hadn’t known you were in the Lazaretto.”

She drew back and he was sure she was going to hit him.  Instead, she simply pushed away from him and stood to her feet.  "You’re trying too hard, Gloria.  And for no reason.  I told you I was going to find Jardyn.  I already agreed to the job.  Stop treating me like I’m made of glass.  I’m not gonna fall to pieces.  I’ll do what you want.  Because I want you out of here more than you want to get out of here.”

  “He called me the night Frobe was killed.  He was scared—”

  “I don’t want to hear your story.  I really don’t care.  I told you to tell me the truth.  You didn’t do it.  That was stupid.”  He could taste her lipstick on his lips and he wiped it away with two fingers.  “Now tell me the truth this time.  Do you know where he is?”

  “The Malibu Hotel.”

  “I already know about the Malibu.  He wasn’t there.  Something—someone spooked him.  Where was he supposed to go if that happened?”

  “He said he would leave a message.”

  “Where?”

  “With a bartender, at a little place called The Maple Leaf.”

  There were any number of reasons to kick her out and quit the case.  But the fact remained he wanted to do whatever it took to get her out of the Lazaretto.  The only real good news had been his victory over their past.  At least for that one moment he had proven that he could keep his head no matter how much she worked at confusing him.

  Now he just had to figure out a way to take all of her lies and reshape them into the truth.  If he could do that, he’d be a miracle worker.

Officially, the book's release is listed as April of this year but due to the oddities of modern-day publishing, the book is already available.  If you want, you can grab an early copy at the link below.  Signed copies are also available at Rocket Fire Books.

And be sure to get books one and two if you don't have them yet: