Larry Karp's Blog

The Ethics of In Vitro Fertilization

2012-02-01T14:33:00.000-08:00

I've begun my bookstore and library talks on A Perilous Conception with remarks to the effect that in vitro fertilization used to be a hot topic, the subject of considerable debate between scientists and liberal ethicists on one side, and religious leaders and conservative ethicists on the other side. I've shown my audiences the cover of the June 13, 1969 issue of Life Magazine, which asked, "When new methods of human reproduction become available - Can traditional family life survive? Will marital infidelity increase? Will children and parents still love each other? Would you be willing to have a 'test-tube" baby?"

Now, more than thirty-three years after the birth of Louise Joy Brown, it's become clear that fertilization in a plastic dish, rather than in a fallopian tube, carries no excess risk for offspring, parents, or society. Today, in vitro fertilization is an accepted standard medical procedure.

But not everyone's convinced. Monday morning's newspapers carried Newt Gingrich's call "for a commission to study the ethical issues relating to in vitro fertilization clinics, where...large numbers of embryos are created."

So, back we go to Square One. Forty years ago, the ethics of in vitro fertilization were extensively discussed and argued, and the issues were resolved to the satisfaction of the great majority of the American public. But Gingrich's proposal has nothing to do with the question of whether IVF babies are at higher risk for physical or mental abnormalities, or whether the mothers might be damaged by the procedure, or whether there might be adverse societal fallout. The presidential candidate is trying to court voters who believe human-ness begins not at fetal viability, nor with a beating heart, nor with organ differentiation, nor at embryonic implantation, but at fertilization. To this bloc, he holds out the hope of exerting official control over the handling of the eight-cell embryos created during the IVF process.

So, hello again, Roe v Wade. Easy to see the coming end-run, another attempt to legislate the will of a minority of the population past a ruling by the United States Supreme Court.

But Gingrich's self-serving gesture to the far right has the ring of a cracked bell. I wonder what would be the political stances and religious convictions of the members of his commission. This candidate has complained loud and long about the intrusion of government into our everyday lives, but he seems to think it'd be just fine for the government to dictate his-size-fits-all reproductive choices. He might do well to consider the beliefs and feelings of the ten percent of American couples who find themselves infertile. Do the math, Newt. They also vote.

Have You Ever Heard Of Artist Trading Cards

2012-01-25T12:38:00.000-08:00

I never had. But that was before I met Mark Hague, a writer from Long Beach, California. Mark was in the audience for my recent talk on A Perilous Conception at Book'Em Mysteries in Pasadena. He told me he was working on a cozy mystery, and when I asked about the background of the story, he said, "ATCs. Artist Trading Cards. Do you know about them?"

When I told him no, I'd never heard of ATCs, he reached under his chair, brought out a three-ring binder, laid it in my lap, opened the cover - and I was looking at nine beautiful works of miniature art in a plastic display sleeve. The theme of the group was Hallowe'en and autumn, and all sorts of materials had gone into the construction: ink, paint, string, fabric, metal, dried leaves. Many cards opened to show a message inside. Turning the sleeves, I saw Christmas cards, cards with sly humor, cards with friendly messages, even a few mildly-naughty cards. The range was endless, the work uniformly impressive. Some of the cards in the binder had been made by Mark, some by other artists.

Mark explained that ATCs were originated fifteen years ago by M. Vanci Stirneman, a Swiss artist and bookstore owner who wanted to establish an artistic parallel to sports trading cards. ATCs are the same size as the familiar baseball cards, and they are exchanged between artists around the world, whether by mail or at swap meets. Selling ATCs is verboten; they may only be exchanged. So far, Mark has made thousands of the little treasures, and completes 123 projects per year. He participates in eight swap meets a month.

I asked Mark the title of his cozy. He smiled, and said, "Death by Paper Cut." If I were a publisher (which, all praise be given, I'm not, but just to make a point), I'd bring out that book based solely on the title and the enthusiasm of the author. I'd even put a little money on this guy's ability to weave a darn good story. Hope to see it soon, whether bound between hard or soft covers.

If you'd like to know more about ATCs, Mark can be reached at mhague13@yahoo.com.

Lovely Voices From The Past

2012-01-18T13:19:00.000-08:00

On my recent tour of indie mystery bookstores, several readers asked whether I missed practicing medicine. My answer was to the effect that my head has always known that trying to help people with medical problems is more important than putting words up on a computer screen, but my heart and gut just don't get it. I'm now into my eighteenth year of full-time writing, and have never looked back with regret.

Still, during the tour, I had a couple of poignant reminders that my time in medicine did have rewards beyond providing background material for murder mysteries.

For the past twenty-seven years, I've scrupulously avoided releasing the name of my patient who delivered the Pacific Northwest's first in vitro fertilization baby - but there she was at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop Debut Signing, dispensing hugs to all of us who'd participated in her success, and saying "I was Number One!" to anybody who didn't already know. Well, okay. Her prerogative.

Another customer at SMB was a patient who'd suffered several mid-trimester pregnancy losses, but was finally able to carry a baby to term after a surgical procedure to strengthen her cervix. More hugs, more happy exclamations.

Then, at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, who should come by but a couple who had just retired to Arizona. Thirty-four years ago, the husband's brother, a medical colleague, had asked me to keep a lookout for a newborn that his brother and sister-in-law might adopt. I told him I thought the odds were mighty low, so of course, the very next week, I got word that a single teenager on the Family Practice Service had given birth, and wanted to put her baby up for adoption. I called the prospective adopters, and they contacted a lawyer, who had some concerns regarding the birth mother's mental capacities. He worried that the baby might be similarly affected. "What you're seeing is depression," I told him. "If you were 16 years old, single, and had just had a baby you were giving up for adoption, you'd be a little depressed yourself." He agreed, and the adoption went ahead. The baby now has a family of her own, and holds a job that requires pretty high-level brainwork.

My patients' outcomes were not always good. But some of the victories were spectacular, and even after all these years, they make me feel that those days, nights, and weekends on call just might've been worthwhile. But when someone at one of the bookstores asked whether I might ever go back to medical work, the head went with the heart and the gut. My headshake was prompt and firm.

The Accidental Mystery Novelist

2012-01-11T08:00:00.000-08:00

I've been visiting independent mystery bookstores to talk about A Perilous Conception. When someone in an audience asked what made me want to write mysteries, all I could do was laugh and say I didn't know.

When I left medical work, I set out to write a mainstream novel whose protagonist was to be Harry Hardwick, a wealthy businessman who lived in New York, and was a fanatical collector of antique music boxes. But as I moved along through Chapter One, someone - I didn't know who - stopped by Harry's house during the night, shot him dead, and stole his most spectacular music box. Over several months, I worked at sneaking Harry past his killer. No luck.

Finally, a writer-friend pointed out to me that I seemed to be trying to write a murder mystery, so why didn't I just let it happen? The result was The Music Box Murders, my first mystery novel. I enjoyed the process, working to create rounded, complex characters with unusual interests who needed to use their specialized skills to work their way through often-ambiguous moral/ethical situations, both to solve a crime and to answer significant questions about themselves and others.

So the decision to write mysteries was not a conscious one, I told my questioner. I just wrote myself into a coroner.

Pass It Along

2012-01-04T08:00:00.000-08:00

The last Christmas my grandfather was with us, he made certain there was a brightly-decorated tree in our house. Then he gave me a little plush Santa Claus, which became a family treasure. That was seven decades ago. I was two.

Through the years, Little Santa came out every Christmastime to sit through the season on the mantel, or on a music box, or on the player piano. At one point I had to fight off a kidnap attempt by my sister, who was under the impression that Santa was actually hers. But possession being nine points and all that, I prevailed. She finally accepted my version of how he came to our house.

This past month, my grandson fell in love with The Polar Express, by Chris Van Allsburg. He'd request four, five, six consecutive readings, then walk through the house, reciting such lines as "My friend told me I wouldn't hear the bells. But I knew better."

I thought I might be able to find a sleigh bell, wrap it, and slip it underneath the pile of gifts on Christmas morning. But as I walked past Little Santa, I noticed that atop his hat was a small bell, a perfect miniature of the one Santa cut off the reins for the boy in The Polar Express. And then it occurred to me: my grandson is two years old.

Some of us write made-up stories, but we all write the stories of our lives. I put together a note to my grandson, telling him the history of Little Santa, folded the note into a box with Santa, wrapped it, and pasted on a tag that said, "Shipped via The Polar Express." My grandson smiled when he opened the box and saw Little Santa, though of course, he didn't come close to understanding the story. But his mother and father did, and in time, he will too.

Silent Night, Joyful Day

2011-12-28T08:00:00.000-08:00

Seventeen years ago this Friday, I walked away from medical work to sit in my writing room every day. It's been a good stretch, nine books and counting, and the job has a bunch of nice little bennies - like the phone never rings after I've gone to bed for the night, or before I get up in the morning.

Then there's the matter of Christmas. I was the senior partner in my hospital-based practice, the only one with adult or near-adult kids, and the only non-Christian. So I routinely drew duty on December 24 and 25. Fair enough.

My wife and I developed our own tradition, though you might also call it a superstition. For three years running, Christmas Eve brought me a night-long progression of pregnant women with problems, especially tough because that was not at all what those poor people had been counting on for their holiday activities.

So on the fourth Christmas Eve, I put the Silent Night disc onto a music box, called in my wife, and we sang along with the music. And, mirabile dictu, the phone could've been under anesthesia. Every year after that, we repeated the ceremony, and it worked...most of the time.

Our family had always practiced Christmas according to St. Dickens, so we cast about for reasonable workarounds. It became clear early on that trying to bull straight ahead was not the way to go. If the phone didn't ring just as the first present was being opened, it went off at the moment my butt touched my chair at the dinner table. So over the years, we had Christmas on December 26, on New Year's Eve, and on New Year's Day. Not quite the same, but it worked.

After my career change, I passed several December 23s thinking I'd better get a good chunk of sleep that night. But over the years, I gradually relaxed into my new routine, sleeping late, enjoying a hearty, unhealthful breakfast, then still in my pajamas, opening presents with my family, and not looking sideways at the phone as we downed a sumptuous late-afternoon feast with dear longterm friends.

It gets better and better. This year was the first time my two-year-old grandson had a clue of what Christmas was about. That was one happy little boy. Santa brought him the blue football and blue bus he wanted (go figure), and he had a blast ripping paper off packages, and wishing the guests a Merry Christmas as they came in. All-adult Christmases were nice, but a Christmas with someone who really did believe in Santa Claus was even nicer.

Writing's a great job. I don't think I'll go back to medicine.

It's All Uphill From Here

2011-12-21T16:52:00.000-08:00

December 21, my favorite day of the year. Not because it's cold, gray, rainy and gloomy. It's my favorite because after December 21, the days start getting longer now. Roughly three minutes more of light each day, glory hallelujah.

Back when I was in high school, SAD Syndrome hadn't been invented, but I didn't need a name for the way I felt in the fall. As daylight inexorably, diminished, so did my stores of cheer and energy, and by the first day of winter, I felt as if I were sitting in a dark cave, and that the sun might soon vanish altogether. Of course I knew it wouldn't. But I felt as if it would. Just get to December 21, I told myself. Then the world would start getting better.

Do you know Seattle is closer to Santa's workshop than Maine? This time of year, the sun sets before a quarter to five, but what with our classic ultra-bleak Pacific Northwest weather, it's dark most days by four o'clock. To get around the winter blahs, someone advised me to set up lights in my bedroom which would go on about the time the sun rises in the summer. But all that did was wake me up at 5:30am, leaving me even crankier. Even worse, they woke my wife at 5:30am, making her...you get the picture. Cure worse than disease.

But what grabs you in real life is grist for the fictional mill. Here's a passage from The Music Box Murders, my first mystery novel. The speaker is Dr. Thomas Purdue, neurologist, music box enthusiast, amateur detective, New Yorker:

Late December, the sun extinguished by half past four in the afternoon, purple darkness deepening by the moment. I felt as if the whole world were dying an unreasonable and premature death...

It was five o'clock and pitch black...Off to my left I heard music...There was Rockefeller Center, down at the far end of that Art Deco channel of shops. In front of the building, the gigantic decorated Christmas tree swayed in the wind. I shoved my hands into my coat pockets, crossed the street, and made my way down the corridor, shops to my right, row of white-wire herald angels with golden trumpets directed skyward on my left. Directly past a little espresso stand, I came to the observation platform above the ice-skating rink...

I tightened my grip on the rail. Out there below the Christmas tree, my mind's eye saw a semicircle of half-erect, hairy men and women wearing rough-cut animal skins, gathered around a massive bonfire. The people raised their arms, following the sweep of the flames up toward the statue of Prometheus. They shouted, they screamed. They implored the sun not to go away forever and leave them in eternal icy darkness.

Well, it does seem to work, every year. I take heart from that. Besides, I guess if every day were a sunny day, what would a sunny day mean?

What A Character

2011-12-14T14:50:00.000-08:00

Many mystery writers enjoy putting real-life people into their stories so they can torture and kill them. Ex-spouses are a favorite target, as are hateful former bosses. The authors who go after them tell their audiences gleefully how much zest that adds to the writing process, and how much more lively it makes their books.

So, early on in my writing career, I decided to give it a try. Why not? I could think of two people I've known who seemed irremediably despicable, and I thought one of them might fit into the story I was then working on. He was lazy, mean-spirited, insincere, a bully and a liar. I figured he'd earned a little fictional what-for.

But then an odd thing happened. My story development ground to a halt, and - very unusual for me - I found myself trying to avoid writing. It was clearly on this character's account. He was sucking all the life out of my story, trying to push the plot in a direction favorable to him, never mind what the story wanted or needed. Very shortly, I decided this approach was not going to work for me. "Get out of my book, jerk," I barked. "You've pissed me off enough in the real world; I must have been crazy to let you into my book." So out he went, and the story promptly resumed its proper flow. My relationship with this guy had been close enough and sufficiently longstanding that his bad qualities had overwhelmed my capacity to see - or imagine - any other side of him.

It works better for me to start with people I don't know well, and about whom I have mixed feelings. That allows the characters to grow into rounded human beings, rather than stereotypes or comic-strip personas. Dr. Colin Sanford, in A Perilous Conception, is the result of such a process. His prototype was the most breathtaking example of a doctor who thought he was God I've ever encountered. Not an admirable trait, but over the years, since I wasn't close to him personally, I could watch him go through god-awful contortions to maintain his distorted self-image and overblown self-regard, and feel some sympathy for him. I was able to be an interested observer, trying to figure out just what did make Sammy run. And that gave Dr. Sanford plenty of space to develop into his own person. In the end, the only attributes that remained of his prototype were the monster ego and short stature.

Dr. Sanford's prototype has been dead a good while now, and you know what? I miss the crazy bastard. I'm not at all sure he's inspired his last character in one of my books.

Captain Hornblower Strikes Again

2011-12-07T17:34:00.000-08:00

As of yesterday, A PERILOUS CONCEPTION is officially in print. A busy time.

We've made good progress in updating the web site. You can go to www.larrykarp.com, and look around, or go directly to http://www.larrykarp.com/chapters/apc.html, where you can read the first chapter-plus of A PERILOUS CONCEPTION.

Here are excerpts from two more reviews:
Karp brings a fresh topic to the medical thriller. Readers will be delighted with his new detective’s debut. Pages will fly by as his action-packed cat-and-mouse chase draws to an unexpected conclusion.
Janice Welch, Library Journal
This game that is played between the detective and the doctor, who both think that they are the best of the best plays out over these pages with a surprise in every chapter. Don't miss this one - it is a definite keeper. The author does a fantastic job with these two main characters. You love them one minute and hate them the next.
Mary Lignor, Feathered Quill Reviews/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Over the past week, my comments have appeared on two guest blogs:
http://www.cncbooks.com/blog/2011/12/02/just-what-the-doctor-ordered/
http://americareads.blogspot.com/2011/12/larry-karps-perilous-conception-movie.html
and in an online interview: http://poesdeadlydaughters.blogspot.com/2011/12/dangerous-medicine-interview-with-larry.html. Thanks to my hosts.

Seattle Mystery Bookshop's debut signing is on December 17. Then, right after the holidays, it's off to California and Arizona to visit indie bookstores. Check out my schedule at http://www.larryschedule.blogspot.com/.

Reminds me of a tour I made a few years ago through the midwest (Apologies to Stephen Foster and Susanna).
I come from Mineap'lis, just a bat straight outa hell.
To make it down to Omaha, where books do seem to sell.
Then on to Kansas City, and then Lawrence and St. Loo.
And don't forget Peoria, Champaign-Urbana too.
Pro-mo touring! You fly, you drive, you run.
You write a book, you think you're through, but no - you've just begun.

Well, before the crocuses are up, I trust I'll be back to my usual routine, locking myself in a room all day with a bunch of imaginary people. Crocuses come up early in Seattle.

Five Reviewers' Meat, One Reviewer's Poison

2011-11-30T13:37:00.000-08:00

We're into the countdown now, with official release of A PERILOUS CONCEPTION scheduled for next Tuesday, December 6. The debut signing will be 11 days later, at Seattle Mystery Bookshop, Saturday, December 17, 12N-1pm. Y'all come.

And if you can't make it in person, please consider calling the good people at SMB: (206) 587-5737, or staff@seattlemystery.com, and reserve your signed, dated debut copy, which they will ship to you.

Or if you live around Scottsdale, Arizona, you can get your signed copy at The Poisoned Pen, 4014 N Goldwater Blvd, No. 101, (480)947-2974. (I'll be there myself on January 10, 7pm).

In these rough times, these outstanding independent mystery bookshops, both with national reputations, will really appreciate your support.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that my web site is under reconstruction/relocation, and it will still be a little while before it's up and running. I hope you'll soon be able to visit www.larrykarp.com, and read about the new book, as well as new developments regarding earlier releases.

In the meanwhile, here are some comments from early reviewers on A PERILOUS CONCEPTION.

In the New York Journal of Books, Sam Millar wrote: "Interestingly, this fast-paced story is told from the viewpoint of both protagonist and antagonist. In lesser hands, it would be muddled and disconcerting, but thankfully, Larry Karp has mastered the technique fluently with not a bump in sight. Detective Bernie Baumgartner is a fascinating and compelling character, and no doubt we will be seeing more of him in future books. If you’re looking for a crime thriller to keep you on the edge of your seat right to the very last page, look no further. A Perilous Conception is just what the doctor ordered."

Publishers' Weekly reviewer Cevin Bryerman said: "Karp...tempers his well-constructed whodunit with dashes of science and a hint of poignancy."

Barbara Bibel concluded her Booklist review with: "Karp lays out a very entertaining puzzle for medical-mystery fans."

Tchris, on Tzer Island, was less enthusiastic. He found Dr. Colin Sanford and Detective Bernie Baumgartner to be "insufferable jerks," and the story to be "slow moving." But he allowed that "the writing style is capable," and that "This isn't by any means an awful novel. It has its moments."

Harriet Klausner enjoyed the book: "This is a super twisting medical murder and historical thriller that brings to life the competition to be first to successfully use in vitro fertilization. Fast-paced with a cat and mouse chess game between two intelligent stubborn men, fans will appreciate Larry Karp's interesting suspense.

Finally (for now), in Fresh Fiction, after asking, "Just how far will some doctors go to be the first to produce a baby by in vitro fertilization?" Tanzey Cutter wrote, "The evolution of this plotline, even knowing some of the underlying facts, still makes for a tension-filled, exciting read. It's a fast-paced mystery with a more than satisfactory resolution."

Five out of six ain't too shabby. Stay tuned.

A Wakeup Call

2011-11-23T13:48:00.000-08:00

I spent this past weekend at the West Coast Ragtime Festival in Sacramento. Three days of ragtime and early jazz, from 9am (no, I didn't come in quite that early) till 11 at night (yes, I did stay that late), with informational seminars, and the opportunity to sit down with friends I see face-to-face only once or twice a year. That Festival has always been a major refresher, a transfusion of energy. Everything upbeat.

But this year was different.

I hadn't been there ten minutes when I ran into a dear friend, and learned that her long-dormant cancer had reawakened. Then, not five minutes after chatting with her, I greeted another very good friend, only to learn she'd recently had the worst kind of diagnosis, and this was going to be her last Festival.

Bummer. All day Friday and well into Saturday, I listened to the music, but I wasn't really tuned in. I started to wonder whether I'd gotten a wakeup call.

A couple of weeks ago, I debated myself in my blog post as to whether I should go ahead with my next mystery novel, or organize, edit, and write up the historical papers I'd acquired from the estate of Brun Campbell, the original Ragtime Kid. Brun desperately wanted to get his history of ragtime published, but he never did. Surrounded by ragtime at the Festival, I asked myself what difference one mystery novel more or less would make, when I could be Brun's second chance.

Brun and I had developed a nice relationship during the five years I'd employed him as protagonist of THE RAGTIME KID and THE RAGTIME FOOL, and given that the old piano man was quite the storyteller himself, I thought I was well-qualified to spruce up his notes and tell his story. Be tough to let an old friend down, especially one as engaging and insistent as Brun.

A passage from COMING INTO THE END ZONE, a memoir by the novelist Doris Grumbach, came into my mind. Ms. Grumbach wrote the book during the year she turned seventy, and it was in large part a compendium of indignation at the nasty stuff old age dumps on people, including the realization of how close one's personal horizon has drawn. The author remembered a friend who said she "thinks we die only when our work is done. I would like to think that is true. I have work still to do." When I googled Doris Grumbach, I was gratified - and amused - to find she is still alive, twenty-three years later and counting, and has written several more books.

Ms. Grumbach's friend could be right, but I suspect she's got it backward. More likely, when we die, our work is done. But either way, the bottom line is the same: Focus on what's at hand, and let the horizon lie where it will. It just might be twenty-three years out there. And if it's twenty-three hours, what are you going to do about it?

By late Saturday I found myself tuning into the music much better, though admittedly not quite as well as at past Festivals. Maybe next year I'll be back to form. And I'll be interested to see what I'm working on then...Lord willin' and the creek don't rise.

Which Of Your Books Is Your Favorite

2011-11-16T17:21:00.000-08:00

I'm in the process of relocating my web site, which is going to take a little while. In the meantime, I'll put any announcements regarding my new book, A PERILOUS CONCEPTION, into these weekly blog posts.

My author copies for APC arrived this past week, and as always, I smiled as I looked at the lovely dust jacket the Poisoned Pen folks designed for the book. Some things never get old.

* * *

People often ask me which of my books is my favorite, then add, "I bet it's like asking which of your kids is your favorite."

Well, sort of. I like at least some things in all my books, and I don't dislike any of them. But no way can I select a favorite.

THE MUSIC BOX MURDERS, as my first mystery novel, will always be special on that basis alone. And its successor, SCAMMING THE BIRDMAN, a caper, not only was great fun to write, but Dick Lochte's comment in the LA Times - "Donald Westlake is the reigning master of this type of fiction. Karp isn't quite in his league, but his ending is one that's worthy of Westlake and then some." - was damn sweet icing on the cake. The third in the Music Box Series, THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL, was satisfying, in that I felt I took a good step forward in exploring the disabilities and anxieties a person inevitably encounters in the process of growing old.

My medical-ethics standalone, FIRST, DO NO HARM, got the best reviews and sold more copies than any of my books. Hard not to love a success like that. But even more pleasing was the fact that I'd finally written a story I'd been incubating since I was a young boy, and had been working on for some twenty years.

The books in my ragtime historical trilogy were thoroughly enjoyable to research and write, allowing me as they did to enter a subculture new to me, and to play with the ideas of birth, aging, death, and renaissance, both literally and metaphorically. As a group and individually, I'm very happy with the way they turned out.

And now we come to the one book I can exclude, where the analogy of books to children breaks down entirely. Who ever turns thumbs-down or even thumbs-neutral on their newborn baby? But a current release is never a contender for favorite. It always seems full of sharp, jagged edges that could make me bleed if I were to expose myself to them. I've learned, though, to give a new book a little time. With distance, and the intervention of a newer story, the nasty points in a book smooth out, and I come to think, well, maybe it's not so bad after all. Let a year or two pass, then ask me how I like A PERILOUS CONCEPTION. But for now, I'll leave the covers closed and just admire the lovely dust jacket.

A Writer's Quandary

2011-11-09T17:22:00.000-08:00

With A PERILOUS CONCEPTION, due out next month, I'm currently in that stretch of time called Promotions, when a writer sets aside writing stories in favor of blog posts, interviews, and inquiries to bookshops, all calculated to get people interested in reading the upcoming masterwork.

Whenever I've been in this space before, I've known what my next book would be, and used the back of my mind (and copious numbers of sticky notes and hotel scratch pads) to jot down ideas, so that once I'd completed my promo efforts, I could sail full tilt into my upcoming story.

This time, though, it's different.

While I was writing my ragtime trilogy, a friend who was helping with genealogical research got to fooling around online one day, and found census records which indicated that my mother, who always claimed she'd been an only child, did in fact have two younger sisters. There they were in the 1920 census - but in 1930, their lines in the census report had been crossed out. My mother was a serious narcissist who had been very strongly attached to her father, and on learning the news, my sister and I had word-for-word reactions: "I'll bet she killed them so she could have her darling father all to herself." Nice start for a mystery novel.

Then, during my early medical training, I participated in a botched surgery that was so horrific, I still dream about it. For years now, it's been crying for fictional treatment.

I thought I might be able to combine the two, but probably not. They work together about as well as two other ideas of mine that started life as conjoined twins, but finally evolved into separate existences as THE RAGTIME KID and THE KING OF RAGTIME.

Complicating the situation, last spring I acquired a collection of manuscripts, musical compositions, correspondence, business records, and personal effects of Brun Campbell, the real-life Ragtime Kid, who died in 1952. Much of it is material Brun once hoped to publish, but never did, and it needs to be carefully preserved, then organized into a nonfiction book, probably with an accompanying CD.

So for once, I'm looking forward to finishing my promotional work on a book with as much apprehension as eagerness. Imagine having made marriage overtures to three lovely women, then facing a deadline to choose among them, and wondering whether you might be able to carry off being a bigamist, or even...what would it be, a trigamist? A pigamist?

Well, I guess I'll just have to see how it works out. In the meanwhile, I feel like Carmen Cohen, the little girl with a Latino mother and a Jewish father. Her father's family called her Cohen; her mother's relatives called her Carmen, so the poor kid didn't know whether she was Carmen or Cohen.

Characters At The Antiques Show

2011-11-02T10:42:00.000-07:00

I spent this past weekend at the triannual Palmer-Wirfs Antiques and Collectables Show at the Portland Expo Center. Years ago, my wife and I rented a booth at Expo as a way to get my mind out of medicine for a couple of days. But now I'm a gimpy-backed writer, and my wife and I are on the other side of the counter, walking slowly from booth to booth, visiting with our old dealer-friends, and making the occasional purchase. And while we go along, I keep my eyes and ears open for more than stuff to buy.

Antiques shows are great for generating characters for works of fiction. Not that I try to lift anyone whole from real life; rather, I keep alert for a specific gesture, a bit of body language, or a spoken line that might launch the actor into a story-in-progress, or set off a string of ideas that generates its own plot. Writing teachers like to toss out material of just this sort, and ask their students to construct stories around them. Want to try a few from my weekend's eavesdropping?

1. A couple approach a display case which contains a small Royal Doulton Toby Jug, clearly of Winston Churchill. "Look," says the man. "W. C. Fields." His wife shakes her head. "No, dear, that's not W. C. Fields. It looks just exactly like Alfred Hitchcock." The husband scowls, then points. "Lookit that cee-gar he's holdin'. Hitchcock didn't smoke cee-gars. It's W. C. Fields."

2. A customer walks up to a dealer whose booth is chockablock with antique hardware, and holds out a hand full of small brass parts. "Would you take 52 dollars for these?" In rapid succession, confusion, amazement, then amusement sweep over the dealer's face. "Well, yes, yes I would," he says. "Actually, I'd be real glad to. 'Cause those pieces only add up to thirty-one dollars."

3. Customer: "What's the best you can do on this teapot?"
Dealer: "Well, let's see...I've got it marked 75. 65's the very best I can do." Customer: "Would you take 50?"

You fill in the dealer's reply, and go from there. Who just might end up dead?

The Company You Keep

2011-10-26T11:59:00.000-07:00

I got an email the other day from my friend, children's-author Peg Kehret, who had just come back from a weekend visit to Whitman College, where her granddaughter is a student. Peg's enthusiasm over her visit was palpable: "Being on campus is invigorating."

I knew exactly what she meant. There's something about being in the company of younger people.

For the past two-plus years, I've been going regularly to Club Zum, a facility in downtown Seattle, where they take care to explain they are not "a gym," but rather, a club, where people go as part of a program to live well and feel good, rather than to pursue a particular physical goal, such as losing weight or getting ripped. If I'm not the oldest person at this facility, I'm damn close, but it doesn't matter. The twenty- and thirty-somethings among the trainers and clients relate to me just as they do to each other. No condescension or fake jollies for the old guy.

The vivacity at Zum is infectious. The sight and sound of all those beautiful young people - men and women - smiling, greeting, and encouraging each other as they pour enthusiasm into their workouts, instantly resets any downbeat mood.

I schedule my sessions for mid-afternoon. After several hours at the computer, I'm usually feeling pretty logy as I go in. Then, for an hour or more, Derek, my trainer, challenges me, paying attention to what he sees as my particular needs and capabilities, all the while tweaking my interest by explaining the reasons for what he's having me do. Yep, some of my muscles may feel a little sore when I'm leaving the facility, but I actually do feel good! Invigorated. My head's clear - ready to take on that character who won't get off his duff and move his plot along.

Don't bother asking when I'm going to move into one of those 55-and-over communities. Keeping up a house can be a pain, but no point taking an analgesic with side effects worse than the disease.

Call Me Sweetie

2011-10-19T12:09:00.000-07:00

The other day, I stopped to fill my car's gas tank at a convenience store station, went inside, and got on the line to pay. As the customer in front of me took the receipt for her carton of cigarettes, the gray-thatched woman behind the counter said, "Thanks, Sweetie. Have a wonderful day."

The customer slammed her cigarettes onto the counter, shot the clerk a look that could've corroded Big Ben's gears, then snarled, "I'm not your sweetie. Don't you call me Sweetie! Or Honey. Or Dearie." Then she snatched up her box of cancer sticks and goose-stepped away, slammed the door open, and disappeared in a cloud of dander.

The clerk blinked a few times, forced an anemic smile. "I was just trying to be nice," she murmured, then added, in a tone like the vox humana of an organ, "It's my first day on the job."

A passage from THE ASSISTANT, by Bernard Malamud, popped into my head: "Our life is hard enough. Why should we hurt somebody else? For everybody should be the best, not only for you or me. We ain't animals."

"You can't win 'em all, Sweetie," I said. "I wouldn't worry about it."

She started to giggle. "I'd like to give you a big hug."

I told her to be my guest.

I know a lot of people are put off by what they consider undue familiarities from strangers, but I figure that if having 6,587 friends, more than 99% of whom you've never set eyes upon, is something to brag about, and when the latest and greatest of anything is always referred to as the ultimate, why should I put someone down for addressing me with a mild form of endearment, and telling me they hope I have the best day ever?

La Belle Josephine: The Spy

2011-10-12T15:04:00.000-07:00

First thing tomorrow, be sure to go to the Poisoned Pen Press Blog (www.poisonedpenpress.com/category/blog/) and read Jeanne Matthews' informative and entertaining report on the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. Jeanne ended the piece with a particular hook for me, the mention of an exhibit having to do with Josephine Baker. "What?" you ask. "An entertainer from the Roaring Twenties, represented in a spy museum?"

You bet.

Josephine was born in St. Louis in 1906, went to Paris in 1925, and took the city by storm with her sensuous singing and dance routines. She continued as a show business superstar for the next fifty years. Racial prejudice prevented her from ever achieving success in her home country, but the French adored her throughout her life - for good reason. Not only was she a singular entertainer, she engaged in dangerous spy work for the French underground during World War II (for which she received the Medaille de las Resistance). Post-war, she adopted twelve orphans of different ethnic origins, to put into practice her belief that children brought up to respect and honor human differences would not engage in xenophobic behavior as adults. She referred to her children as her Rainbow Tribe. When she died in 1975, Paris gave her a military funeral, 21-gun salute and all. Twenty thousand Parisians came to stand outside the church.

It's not surprising that there exists a wonderful Josephine Baker musical automaton, probably manufactured at the time of Josephine's heyday. It's 21-1/2 inches tall, and bears a remarkable resemblance to the real Josephine in facial appearance, hair style, and costume, as seen in the cover photo of the book, Josephine, by Josephine Baker and her then-husband, Jo Bouillon.

Want to know more about Josephine Baker? Aside from the Baker-Bouillon reference, you can read Naked at the Feast, by Lynn Haney; Jazz Cleopatra, by Phyllis Rose; The Josephine Baker Story, by Ean Wood; and Josephine, The Hungry Heart, by Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase. Jean-Claude, the proprietor of New York City's Chez Josephine Restaurant, was a young teenager, working as a bellboy at a French hotel, when Josephine took him into her home and heart many years ago. Any time you're in New York, consider stopping at Chez Josephine for dinner. Jean-Claude is a marvelous host, the food is outstanding, the live music just right, and the walls are covered with Josephine Baker photos and other memorabilia.

Oh...and why not make a habit of tuning in daily to the Poisoned Pen Blog? Start your days with short wake-up pieces on all manner of topics, by one or another of the Poisoned Pen Posse of authors. You'll see why the Press' slogan is "Publishing Excellence In Mystery."

The Power of Music

2011-10-05T17:49:00.000-07:00

Music can unlock some strange and marvelous doors.

The other night, my wife and I went to see the Pacific Northwest Ballet Company's all-Wheeldon program. The first number was Carousel, a gorgeous adaptation of music from the Rodgers and Hammerstein play. The piece began with the "Carousel Waltz," as dancers, portraying merry-go-round horses, kept the young lovers, Billy and Julie, off-balance and apart. But then, the musicians swung into "If I Loved You," and another stage sprang up in my mind, no less HD and 3D than the one before my eyes. Asbury Park, NJ, summer, 1945.

Sixty and more years ago, my family went to Asbury Park for vacations. Loudspeakers at the beach blared non-stop music at the sunbathers. Carousel had opened on Broadway earlier that spring and was the hit of the season, so for two weeks that August, I must have heard John Raitt sing "If I Loved You" upward of a hundred times. And in the opera house a few nights ago, as the dancers moved across the stage, a cascade of sensory memories paraded through my mind. I saw the sandy beach filled with people under colorful striped beach umbrellas. Pieces of paper and discarded soft drink bottles littered the scene; I had to be careful not to cut my foot on broken glass. Gray-green, white-flecked breakers crashed against the slope of the shore. Bathers - the women all wearing white rubber bathing caps - walked gingerly into the water, holding the safety ropes that ran from the shore out to buoys. Gulls squawked, screaked, swooped down to snatch discarded pieces of hot dog roll. Ice-cream vendors toted little freezer compartments on their backs, their names painted on the freezers. One was named Vic, another Son of the Beach, which I thought was curious. Behind us, crowds shuffled along the boardwalk, past game arcades and frozen custard shops; some people rode in wicker pedal carriages. Grannies in cotton print dresses and grandpas in suits, white shirts, and ties sat on benches whose backs could be shifted to permit them to look out onto the beach or back across the boardwalk. Little kids laughed and hollered as they chased each other around in circles. I smelled the tar on the boardwalk, and felt my mother's fingers rubbing suntan oil into my back and shoulders so I'd "get a good healthy tan." Pink cotton candy from the little open-front shop just across the boards melted in my mouth. And as the ballet artists - remember them? - danced to the line, "Off you would go in the mist of day," I watched the big gray cargo ships offshore, slowly vanishing into the far-off haze of the horizon.

These music-generated images come unbidden, but vivid as they are, and representing the viewpoint of a particular person of a particular age, wouldn't it be something if writers could learn to call them up on demand to help set scenes? That would be a skill worth developing.

Our Strengths, Our Weaknesses

2011-09-28T12:41:00.000-07:00

A Cylinder Music Box Made In Prague In The Late 1890s
With Larry's Music Box Mystery Series And His
Nonfiction Book, THE ENCHANTED EAR

This week, Myra and I are enjoying a visit from our friend Dave, a graphic artist, sculptor, and musician who earns his living as a professional restorer of antique music boxes. Dave is widely respected in the field as one of the best in the world at bringing back to life the finest...but hold on. First, a little background information.

Music boxes (self-playing instruments which make music via plucking of a tuned hard-steel comb, in the manner of the African kalimba or thumb piano) were first produced commercially in Switzerland about the time the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth. They were manufactured by watch and clockmakers, initially as luxurious embellishments for timepieces, but they quickly became popular and profitable, and before long, were being made as standalone items. Among the people who could afford these baubles, grand opera was the popular music of the day, so by the 1830s and 1840s, one could buy large, magnificent instruments which played stunning arrangements of music by Rossini, Mozart, Bellini, and Donizetti. Steel pins on a rotating cylinder plucked the comb teeth to produce the desired notes in the desired sequences. Each music box was an individually-produced work of art.

By the late nineteenth century, though, these cylinder music boxes had degenerated into smaller, mass-produced items which played humdrum arrangements of music-hall tunes of the time. And shortly thereafter, a different form of music box came along, one which used individual metal discs to pluck the comb teeth, such that the owner could buy any number of tunes, rather than being limited to the three, four, six, or eight melodies pinned to a particular cylinder.

Now back to Dave. Restoration of disc-playing music boxes and later cylinder boxes requires considerable technical skill, but the procedure is usually straightforward. The construction is standardized; the musical arrangements relatively uncomplicated. But not nearly all restorers possess the musical competence, patience and diligence required to bring back a one-of-a-kind early cylinder instrument to where it was when it left the manufacturer's shop. Every one of the thousands of cylinder pins must be set precisely, to pluck the right tooth at the right moment, with the right degree of strength. And that's where Dave shines. It's not uncommon, after hearing a box of mine that Dave had worked on, for a listener to smile and identify the restorer.

But our strengths are often also our weaknesses. Many times, I've watched Dave struggle for hours over a soft noise or a mistimed note, an error so slight that no one else had been aware of it until he pointed it out. Sometimes, as he persists in trying to make the problem disappear, another, worse, problem arises, and in the end, Dave needs to work his way back to where the diminishing returns originated, and then persuade himself to stop. Not that he's satisfied. When he visits us, he listens to boxes he restored years before, and hears things he'd like to try to work out, but knows he shouldn't.

Perfection just ain't a realistic goal. Our best efforts notwithstanding, it's as if we're constrained by an asymptotic barrier from doing more than approaching that ideal. The closer, the better, but still. I'll try to keep that in mind when I start tearing out handfuls of my hair as I go through the galleys of my next book.

2011-09-21T15:03:00.000-07:00

Couple of weeks ago ("The Days Dwindle Down," Sept. 7), I decided it was high time for my grandson, Simon, to make his first trip to the beach, so Myra and I took him off to Golden Gardens in Seattle for a couple of hours of sand and surf. He loved the sand, and his new bucket and shovel. He loved watching kids and grownups play Frisbee and beach their kayaks and canoes. But the surf was another story. The sound and motion of the waves breaking on the shore put him on guard, and he was not about to entrust his body to that strange and unreadable environment.

But then he discovered a little stream running down from the stand of trees behind the beach. That was much less intimidating. Soon Simon was wading, picking up little stones, throwing them into the water, and gleefully shouting, "Splash!"

We can do better than that, I thought, and bent over a rock about eight inches in diameter. "Help me pick this one up," I said. "Then we'll throw it in."

Simon thought that was a great idea. We stood at water's edge, held the rock by opposite sides, and as we swung it back and forth, I counted, "One...two..." On "three!" we launched the missile. It flew up, then came down with a most satisfying noise, splashing water all over the two of us.

"Want to do another big one?" I asked.

"Okay."

We picked up a rock about the size of the first one, carried it to the water, started to swing and count, but this time, on two, Simon let go of his side, and ran several steps back up the beach. "Hey," I shouted. "I can't throw this big rock by myself. You've got to come back and help me."

He was chortling. "No."

"Come on," I said. "Help me make a big splash."

"No. Larry do it."

"I can't. Not by myself. I need you to help me."

Still grinning, head shaking side-to-side. "No."

I dropped the rock onto the sand. A double milestone, fair enough. He learned Fool Me Twice, Shame On Me. And I learned that an almost-two-year-old kid can be more devious than any adult.

PS: OK - so I like that picture of the two of us so much, I wrote a companion piece for it so I could put it up. Grandfathers are allowed to do stuff like that. And anyway, it's my blog. Back to business next week.

More How Do You Get Your Ideas

2011-09-14T15:08:00.000-07:00

Where do you get your ideas? That's the Number One Question I hear from beginning writers. So many people ask it, it must be a good question.

My wife and I went to visit a friend in Canada over the Labor Day Weekend, and there was no wait at all coming back across the border. Yes! We cruised into the USA in high spirits. But fifteen minutes down Interstate 5, the freeway suddenly morphed into a parking lot. Damn! There we sat, every now and then coasting a few feet forward.

An access road ran parallel to the freeway, and a short distance ahead of us, a spur connected the two roads. A large sign proclaimed in red letters to freeway drivers:

ONE WAY
DO NOT ENTER

But all of a sudden, I saw a car zip through a momentary opening in the right lane of freeway traffic, and onto the spur. Wrong way! The driver turned onto the access road just in front of a car whose driver had to jam on the brakes to avoid a collision.

So, what happened next?
A - The driver of the car on the access road pulled a gun and shot the wrong-way driver.
B - The driver of the car on the access road flipped the wrong-way driver a finger; then the wrong-way driver shot him.
C - The driver of the car on the access road couldn't stop in time, and crashed into the wrong-way car. The two drivers leaped from their cars. One was a hunky guy, the other, a gorgeous gal. Both were mad as drenched cats.
D - The driver of the wrong-way car sped off down the access road. Another freeway driver liked the sight of that, and turned onto the spur himself. So did another driver. Within a few minutes, the spur was clogged with wrong-way drivers, blocked from exiting to the access road by the now-steady stream of cars which had taken the legal exit from the freeway a quarter-mile back.
E - None of the above.

The actual answer was D. Less dramatic than the others...or was it? Any of those first three possibilities (and many more) could be developed into a nice little crime story. I can even imagine C becoming a series with a bit of romance between a male and a female PI who tell people they first met by accidentally running into each other.

But my choice would be to consider the frustration of the impatient drivers who'd made the illegal move, and then found themselves out of the frying pan and in the fire. Easy to picture one of those idiots frantically maneuvering on the narrow shoulder to get back onto the freeway, irritating the living bejesus out of everyone around him. Tempers would flare, cars would crash, a riot would break out, an innocent person would be killed. And after the dust had settled and the blood had dried, the victim's spouse, parent, child, or friend would be obsessed with finding the culprit (who had vanished in the melee), and bringing him or her to justice. Which could work out in any number of ways, endless possibilities. From one event, enough story ideas for years of writing.

The Days Grow Short

2011-09-07T15:34:00.000-07:00

Labor Day has long been my least favorite holiday, signaling, as it does, the end of warm sunny days and the advent, as the days dwindle down, of long, cold nights. On the first Monday in September, I invariably hear Walter Huston singing the Kurt Weill-Maxwell Anderson classic, "September Song. And then I think of Satchel Paige, who said, "Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you."

This year, Labor Day promised to be the most depressing in history. Spring and summer were the coldest and cloudiest in Seattle history, and that's saying something. Even on days when we saw the sun, it didn't break through the cloud cover till mid- or late afternoon. As Labor Day loomed larger and larger on the horizon, my spirits sank lower and lower.

But the holiday weekend saw an amazing turnaround. First thing in the morning on Saturday, there was the sun, and there it stayed till sunset. Sunday, more of the same. Then, my wife and I had the nicest Labor Day in memory, sitting with a friend on the back porch, drinking lemonade, basking in 80 degrees of sunshine. And according to the weatherpersons, this pattern will continue till next week, what a gift.

Something is gaining on us, Satch, but it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to look back to see how fast it's gaining. Nor does it do much good to look too far ahead: one never knows, do one? I'd be smart, as the days dwindle, to spend a little energy to keep my place well-lighted as I focus on both my promotional work for A Perilous Conception, my December baby, and getting my next mystery novel and my nonfiction publication on Brun Campbell, The Ragtime Kid, off to good starts.

But right now, it's 82 degrees - imagine that - and my grandson has never been to the beach. He doesn't know what warm sand feels like between his toes, nor how to build a castle in sand. He doesn't know what a sand castle is. He's about to find out.

Evolution In Language

2011-08-31T10:54:00.000-07:00

I grind my teeth at inappropriate apostrophe's, and have to work to keep my reaction off my mug when someone tells me how pleased they were that "the senator invited my wife and I to the ceremony." And hearing ragtime referred to as a musical genus was at least as painful to my ears as a badly-mangled piano chord in the middle of "Maple Leaf Rag." By gum, language is on its way to you-know-where in a you-know-what.

On the other hand, I've found erroneous apostrophes in well-regarded material from a hundred years ago, and I've read articles which claimed use of the nominative where you'd expect the accusative was commonplace in England two hundred years ago. And as for word choice, I could fill the rest of this page and several more with words in common parlance that used to mean something very different from what they mean today.

So last Thursday's newsletter from the Booked for Murder Mystery Indie in Madison, Wisconsin caught my eye. Sara Barnes, the owner, frequently includes sly and mischievous comments on language, and in this mailing, she presented some common texting terms to show that In the Beginning was The Word - but now it's The Abbreviation.

One of Sara's examples was lol, for "laugh out loud." The second time I ever came upon that particular linguistic abridgement was in pre-texting times, in an early email. When I asked the writer what it meant, she said, "'Lots of luck.' What did you think?"

I hadn't known what to think, because my first association with the abbreviation had been back in the 'sixties, as a medical intern at New York's Bellevue Hospital, where house staff talked about admissions having either the DOM or the LOL Syndrome - respectively, Dirty Old Man and Little Old Lady. (There was even a subcategory of the latter, the LOJL, where the J stood for Jewish. Check out Chapter 4, "The Chicken Soup For Lunch Bunch" in my book, The View From The Vue). And you can be sure, after a night's work, trying to keep a sick little old lady on this side of the River Styx, often in 90-degree temperature with humidity to match, laughing out loud was about the last thing an intern was inclined to do.

But there's evolution in language for you. Today, I'd be considered not with it if I thought lol stood for lots of luck, and thoroughly out of it if I thought the abbreviation had anything to do with little old ladies. So, go ahead. Do as you will to Mother Tongue. She's a tough old bird. She'll see us both into our graves. I could care less.

Let's Do Something Heroic

2011-08-24T15:51:00.000-07:00

Hung up on the human condition, a novelist may spend years working up a story, picking away, trying to gain a bit of insight. But sometimes, even the best fiction can't compete with someone's narrative of his or her real-life story.

When one of my dear friends was only in her sixties, she began to show signs of dementia, and before too long, had become so badly impaired she needed to be placed in a care facility. For the next near-decade, this once-kindhearted, brilliant person became progressively more demented and hostile, often showering fits of rage upon family and friends who came to visit. Gradually, visitors stopped coming by.

But my friend's son David continued to go to the care facility every Saturday afternoon, and tried, without much success, to reach out to the person he used to know. Then one day, when he walked into his mother's room, she greeted him with a smile, and said, "Let's do something heroic!"

"What would you like to do?" David asked. "What would be heroic?"

She just shook her head. She didn't know. Didn't have a clue.

"All right," David said. "I've got an idea."

He took his mother out to the car, and drove her to a lovely heavily-wooded area not far from the care center. "I could actually see her relax," he said, "as if calmness were spreading through her body, all the tension melting away. We sat on a big rock and talked, and for a while, my mother was close to what she used to be. She really was still there. I'd thought if I could get around the fear and the anger, I could find her. Of course, it didn't last - I didn't expect it would - but giving her even a short respite seemed worthwhile."

Insightfulness, perseverance, ability to love, capacity for heroic deeds. Where does a novelist find a protagonist to match this one?

When Fiction Comes Up Against Reality

2011-08-17T14:13:00.000-07:00

For the past few months, I've been doing work that would have to rank at the top of any list of interesting activities for a historical novelist. After writing two books (THE RAGTIME KID and THE RAGTIME FOOL), which featured Sanford Brunson Campbell, the "Original Ragtime Kid of the 1890s" as protagonist, I was lucky enough to obtain three big boxes of items that once belonged to the real-life Kid, who died in 1952.

Imagine my feelings, reading autobiographical manuscripts describing Brun's adventures as an itinerant ragtime pianist during the first decade of the twentieth century, and his efforts during the last decade of his life to revive ragtime music and the reputation of his hero, Scott Joplin. There were also musical compositions unknown to current ragtime enthusiasts, 78rpm recordings of Brun playing his and Joplin's music, personal effects (including his barber's razor strop), business and tax records, and extensive correspondence with prominent musicians, entertainment figures, and politicians.

Brun was known as someone who never let facts get in the way of a good story - no wonder he was such a compelling figure to an historical novelist - and so, some of his written material was contradicted by well-established information. I think what inspired Brun to tell many of his tall tales was the desire to bring Joplin the recognition Brun (rightly) thought his old piano teacher deserved. As my Brun put it in THE RAGTIME FOOL, "Well, the way I told it, that's what Mr. Joplin deserved...That's how it should've been."

Brun did tell some good stories, and told them well. He had a very engaging voice. After five years wandering through the midwest, playing bar-room piano, he decided to go home to Arkansas City, KS, to visit his high-school sweetheart. "While I had been away," Brun wrote, "the local gossips had told her all kinds of stories about me and my ragtime career, the places in which I had played and other poisonous gossip. Some of it was true..."

"I arrived dressed in a loud checkered suit; cloth-top, colored patent leather shoes with pearl buttons, a light-colored hat with a loud hatband around it, and that ever-loving loud silk shirt, together with the loud-patterned necktie, about made my ragtime dress complete. When the natives saw me in that getup, I created quite a sensation.

"I thought my girl would faint when she gave me the once-over, and my mother stood dead in her tracks when she saw my loud clothes. But I was her darling boy and my appearance was soon forgotten by her."

I was pleased and not a little surprised to see how well my fictional Brun fit with his historical profile. But now, what? Some sort of nonfiction book needs to come out of this material, probably with a CD of a ragtime pianist playing Brun's newly-discovered music, as well as transcriptions from Brun's recordings. It'll take some time, especially having to fit the work in as I write my next mystery, and probably the one after that. But it's got to be done. It tickles me that the story of the story-telling man who worked so hard on Scott Joplin's behalf now falls to another story-teller. Gonna be a challenge to sort out what's reality in Brun's accounts, and what's fiction.

The Second Baseman's Wearing Nail Polish!

2011-08-10T14:34:00.000-07:00

When my daughter Erin announced that she wanted to play Little League baseball, the registrar tried to get her to sign up for girls' softball instead. Erin turned her self-described icy glare onto the man, and snapped, "I don't want to play girl's softball. I want to play Little League, like my brother did."

I could see this wasn't going to go well, so I volunteered to coach a team which would include Erin. When it came time for the coaches to select players, two other girls, Stacy and Susan, had also signed up, and none of the other coaches would take them. "You can have all three," one of them said to me. "I don't want a bunch of kids on my team who throw like girls." The other coaches laughed. So I had three girls on my team who threw like girls.

There's all kinds of talk these days about neurological hard-wiring that may explain some of the differences between males and females. And it does seem that most boys hurl a ball from the shoulder, while the natural inclination of most girls is to flip from the elbow, a far less efficient operation.

Erin's brother, Casey, offered to help me coach the team. I wondered whether that had anything to do with the fact that Susan had a killer smile and blonde hair halfway down her back, but I wasn't inclined to be overly analytic. He and I took the three girls out on the field, and after about a half-hour of demonstrations and guided arm movements, all three girls were throwing from the shoulder, slinging fireballs across the infield.

Not that their male teammates were uniformly impressed. Dean, a chunky little sparkplug with a blond pageboy haircut, looked Erin up and down, then tugged at my arm and hollered, "Hey, the second baseman's wearing nail polish!"

"You're right," I said. "She is. So what?"

Dean made a face. "Well, don't blame me if she gets beamed."

It didn't take long, though for the team to settle in. The first time Erin slapped a single past the shortstop to drive Dean in from second base, the little guy turned at home plate and continued on to first base, where he gave his teammate a whopping high-five. And after Susan whacked a triple down the right-field line, and Stacy, our first baseman, snagged a vicious liner and stepped on the bag to double off the runner, gender suddenly became a non-issue on the Magnolia Mets.

That was 33 years ago, before Little League became the first step to the majors for the best players. The idea then was to teach the kids some fundamentals, ground them in teamwork, and most of all, make sure everyone had a good time. But I'll admit, I felt some wicked satisfaction when, at the conclusion of the 15-game season, the Mets stood in first place and the young players received their championship trophies.

More On Endings To Novels

2011-08-03T12:10:00.000-07:00

Writing last week about endings to novels got me thinking about John Cheever, a writer whose work I've admired for a long, long time. A prep-school dropout, Cheever earned a solid reputation as a short-story writer, but he felt neglected and slighted by critics who thought him incapable of pulling off a novel. Not so. THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE, published in 1957, and based heavily upon the author's own New England family, won the 1958 National Book Award. It's a story both wildly funny and indescribably sad, with characters who've refused to leave my mind over the thirty-odd years since I first read the book.

Religious faith was a linchpin of Cheever's life; though not a regular churchgoer, he was a committed Episcopalian. On the other hand, I have difficulty taking anything on faith, and the only reasonable reply I can imagine to questions on the existence or the nature of God is "I don't know. I can't know." So, how is it I find the last page of THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE so deeply satisfying that I can quote it here from memory?

"Fear tastes like a rusty knife, and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the Lord."

That's the conclusion of a note titled "Advice to my Sons," written by Captain Leander Wapshot, the protagonist of Cheever's story, and found in the family Bible by Leander's younger son, Coverly, after the old man's death. When I read that passage, I smiled, closed the book - reluctantly - and said, "Yeah." Spot-on perfect exit lines for Leander, who struggled his life long with demons very much like those that afflicted his creator. Throughout the story, the Captain grappled for meaning, describing his troubled searches through quirky entries in a diary and letters to his sons.

My hat's off to Cheever. It takes formidable storytelling skills - especially character development - to get a serious doubter to rank a story which ends with "Trust in the Lord" among his all-time favorites. I've tried to learn from Cheever. I hope I've succeeded, at least to some extent.

Literary Sunsets

2011-07-27T12:54:00.000-07:00

Readers tell me they think the single most important aspect of a book is the ending. A woman at a Left Coast Crime Convention said, "If the author doesn't get the ending just right, it doesn't matter how good the rest of the book was. It's still ruined for me."

So I work hard at my endings. No exaggeration to say I rewrite them fifty, seventy-five, a hundred times. I may change the whole thing, or just one word. I may reinstate an earlier version, then go back to a different earlier version. I move phrases and sentences around. Square One and I get to know each other very well.

The moral and ethical questions in my upcoming book, A PERILOUS CONCEPTION, are complex, and I struggled to bring the action to a...no, to the proper close. I've never put more effort into the final chapter of a book. As I worked late one afternoon, adding, deleting, revising, I glanced out the window into the sunset. It had been a typical Seattle January day, cloudy, drizzly, damp. In a word, bleak. I was anticipating one of those typical January sunsets, where the sun, absent all day, would go down without notice, leaving us to the gathering darkness. Like the last page of a Patricia Highsmith novel.

But just as the sun approached the horizon, it broke through the clouds and lit the sky, forming a magnificent pattern of brilliant orange and lustrous salmon-pink over ever-shifting streaks of gray. That brief blaze seemed to redeem the whole dreary day. Much more impressive, even, than those sunsets in July, when the flaming sun suddenly drops out of a cloudless sky to vanish behind the Olympic Mountains. All's well that ends well. Like the final number of a stage musical.

A low-note Highsmith ending wouldn't do, I thought. Not for A PERILOUS CONCEPTION, and probably not for any book I'd write. But neither would a stage-musical finale ring true for this story. My protagonist had done seriously wrong (if at least partially for good reasons), and he couldn't march, smiling, out of the novel. There would be sunshine at the end, but it would need to be filtered through carefully-laid out cloud cover, just so, such that when readers would close the back cover of the book, they'd smile, and say, "Yeah."

I think I finally got it right. I hope I did.

Confessions Of The Chocolate Fiend

2011-07-20T19:46:00.000-07:00

I've noticed that mystery readers also have particular fondness for cats and chocolate. I like cats, myself, but chocolate? There's an obsession.

This goes back a long, long time, to when I was a teenager, sprouting the customary crop of acne, which unglued my mother no end. She forbade me to even sniff the brown skin poison, which made it necessary for me to stop at the corner confectionery on the way home, buy a chocolate ice-cream cone, a Hershey bar, or both, and make sure I consumed them before I darkened Mother's door.

Let no one tell you such behavior has no basis in heredity. From earliest childhood, my daughter Erin was also a chocolate fiend. She would sneak packages of chocolate pudding powder from the kitchen shelves, take them up to her room, open the box, wet her finger, dunk, and enjoy. When Myra, my wife, and I found empty boxes under her bed, Myra got upset. I suggested we ignore the matter, figuring that in those days (the early to mid-seventies), there were a lot worse substances Erin could've been sneaking.

One Saturday, when Erin was about twelve, she, her brother, and Myra went out, and I stayed home, writing. All of a sudden, I had an uncontrollable craving for chocolate. But the cupboard was bare. So - and I swear, this is just the way it happened - I walked into Erin's bedroom, opened the top left drawer of her eight-drawer dresser, reached beneath a pile of underwear, and closed my shaking fingers around a 3-inch-diameter lump of dark chocolate. Okay, I thought, I'll take just one bite.

After I'd reduced the heavenly block to about a half-inch square, I told myself I really ought to leave something for Erin for her own next emergency. So I returned the uneaten remnant to its resting place, and went back, sighing contently, to my typewriter.

Nothing further was said until many years later. I don't remember the trigger, but some chocolate-related remark prompted me to ask Erin, "Do you remember...?"

I thought she'd slug me. "Yes, I remember!" she barked. "You left me this tiny little piece of chocolate with tooth marks all over it. But you know what pissed me off the most? I couldn't say a word to you about it because I wasn't supposed to be hiding chocolate."

I told her there were worse substances I could've been sneaking in those days.

Triskaidekaphobe or Triskaidekaphile

2011-07-13T15:26:00.000-07:00

Am I a triskaidekaphobe or a triskaidekaphile? Seven-thirteen's an interesting combination, the lucky number up against the inauspicious one. I always pause on July thirteenth to remember a signal event in my own life. Forty-six years ago today, I reported for active duty in the U.S. Navy. Remember the draft? In 1965, every doctor served in the military.

Talk about culture shock. I'd spent my entire life in schools and medical academic institutions, where reason and logic ruled. No more. Authority was determined solely by the number of stripes on a shoulder, and that authority was absolute and often frightening. On my third day at work, the captain at the little Naval Air Station hospital told me we'd do a cesarean the next day on a woman whose condition not only did not indicate a section; it actually contraindicated that course. "Y'know why we're gonna do a section, Dr. Karp?" the captain asked me. When I couldn't give an answer, he shouted, "Because I'm the captain and I say so." Then, he blew out of the room. Consequently, I was up all night, surreptitiously inducing the woman's labor, and getting her delivered vaginally, an action that could have gotten me court-martialed. When the captain came in the next day and saw the patient had delivered (supposedly spontaneously), he said, "Well, guess we don't have to section her." After he left, the other drafted obstetrician, who'd already served his first year, whispered to me, "Whew. I didn't think he'd let a small thing like there was no more baby inside stop him."

I spent two years on the edge, never sure when the captain might decide to arrange to have me sent to, as he put it, "Veet Nam." At one point, he told all the doctors's wives that they would spend the upcoming weekend making curtains for the hospital, in anticipation of an inspection by D.C. bigwigs which he hoped would lead to his promotion to admiral. When my wife told him she was not in the Navy and subject to his commands, he replied, "That's true, you're not. But your husband is, so you have a choice. Make the curtains, or next week, your husband's in Veet Nam." She made the curtains. The captain did not make admiral, the only bit of proper justice I was witness to in my military life.

I wrote down every scary and weird episode: one day, I'd write a book. And I did. I called it, ARE YOU A REAL DOCTOR OR A NAVY DOCTOR? because of the frequent question from the wives of enlisted men, who believed that some of their doctors were drafted after medical training (real doctors), and the others were corpsmen who'd been promoted to officer status (Navy doctors). But when I was ready to send my book to editors and agents, a friend told me I ought to read another book about crazy military experiences. And when I finished CATCH-22, all I could do was sigh, stick away my manuscript in a desk drawer, and go on to the next project. The Navy got the last laugh.

So, where was the luck? What about the seven in July thirteenth? My military service had interrupted my residency, and the other obstetrician who served with me referred me to a superlative program, where I finished that aspect of my training. In the process, I became aware of professional opportunities I probably would never have thought of in other programs, the upshot being that I landed in Seattle, spent my medical career in a most interesting line of medical work until the scribbling bug became irresistible, and then I was able to do a quick sidestep into full-time mystery-novel writing. Now, seven books later, with the eighth (A PERILOUS CONCEPTION, due out from Poisoned Pen Press in December), I have no cause for regret.

True, I don't know how I might have ended up had the Navy never snagged me, but given the course I was on at the time, I've got to think I did well to have been sidetracked. Bottom line, you play the hand you're dealt as well as you can, and hope the sevens outrank the thirteens.

Say It (correctly) With Music

2011-07-06T16:27:00.001-07:00

I got more than a terrific musical performance this past Sunday. During their concert at Reutlinger's Victorian Palace in San Francisco, violinist David Reffkin, leader of the American Ragtime Ensemble, and St. Louis ragtime pianist Dr. Dave Majzchrak, did a real number on a bit of common verbal misconduct.

"Maple Leaf Rag, by Scott Joplin, is such a well-known composition," said Reffkin, "that pianists often say they know it forward and backward. But when was the last time you heard someone actually play Maple Leaf Rag backward? "

Whereupon, the two musicians proceeded to do exactly that. Very odd experience. Reffkin said it might have been the toughest musical transcription he'd ever done. I believe that.

Reffkin could have taken the fun even further. Does it literally blow you away to hear people say "literally" when they mean "figuratively?" But when the pianist and the violinist said they knew Maple Leaf Rag backward, that's just what they meant, folks. Literally.

Playing The Name Game

2011-06-29T11:14:00.000-07:00

Naming characters is not always easy. You never can be sure you've got it right.

In one of my earlier books, I'd slapped the moniker Dennis onto a character, and the howl out of my editor could have been heard in Zanzibar. "That's a very strong character," she snapped. "A Dennis would be a wimp." I'd never imagined Dennises as being at all wimpish, so I ran the matter past my wife. She shook her head. "I'd think of someone wishy-washy if I read 'Dennis,'" she said. I shrugged, and Dennis became Will, which satisfied both editor and wife.

The biggest snafu I ever got into over a character name came out of SCAMMING THE BIRDMAN, my second mystery novel, a caper. I'd seen a faded painted ad, probably from the '30s, on a brick building beside the Alaskan Way Viaduct here in Seattle. It advertised a meat company named LoPriore brothers. The villain in STB was definitely arch, the nastiest person I've ever invented. Right off, Vincent LoPriore struck me as the perfect name for him. It seemed to ooze menace.

So imagine my surprise one day, after the book came out, when I opened my email and in my inbox saw I had a message from Vincent LoPriore. I could not bring myself to open it until I'd finished dealing with all the other messages, and when I opened the scary email, I found it was from a man named, yes, Vincent LoPriore, who lived in Pennsylvania. Someone had seen a synopsis of my book on the web, and called it to his attention. He asked where I'd gotten the name from, so I told him, said I hoped he wouldn't be upset, and that I hadn't imagined there was any real person anywhere named Vincent LoPriore. Fortunately, he thought the whole thing was very funny, and said he liked being cast as the bad guy in a murder mystery. So I sent him a signed book, and that settled the matter.

Just in case you think you ever have all bases covered in this game.

Watch Your Butt, Tiger Mom

2011-06-22T12:39:00.000-07:00

What to think of the famous/infamous Tiger Mom (BATTLE HYMN OF THE TIGER MOTHER, by Amy Chua, Penguin Press)?

My own parents were tigerish, delivering frequent lengthy, impassioned, high-decibeled lectures whenever a grade short of A appeared on my report card. I'd never get into an Ivy League college, they warned me. Point of fact, they were were right - I was turned down by every Ivy League school I applied to. But Rutgers did well for me. I don't feel as if I've been a failure in life.

I think I was easier on my own kids. I hope so. Anything did not go, but a B or the occasional C was not a trigger for tearing of hair or rending of garments. My son majored in Ethnomusicology in college, my daughter in International Affairs, and both took several years to find their way to careers that engaged them. But at all times, they took responsibility for their lives, supporting themselves and seeming to enjoy themselves as they wandered toward goals they couldn't yet get a fix on. Not all those who wander are lost, right. Today, both kids are doing work they enjoy, and earning decent livings.

More important, they both are in successful marriages, and my wife and I maintain close relationships as friends with all four kids. A far cry indeed from my relationship with my own parents, which finally had to be terminated because of their incessant derogations, criticisms, and demands on both my wife and me. Reason can hold emotion at arm's length for only so long, then the walls come tumblin' down. My guess, prejudiced though it may be, is that somewhere down the road, the Tiger Mom's behavior is going to deliver a bite to her butt that she'll never get over.

Back in Seattle Again

2011-06-15T15:13:00.000-07:00

Round Three of my annual Music Trifecta, the Antique Music Box/Phonograph Show at Donley's Wild West Museum in Union IL, was its customary three-day revival meeting of the faithful, an opportunity to catch up with long-time friends I get to see only once or twice a year, while we all try to sell at least as many machines as we buy. This year, I actually succeeded. Aside from four excellent ragtime discs for my big Regina music box, my only purchase was an odd little Trumpetone gramophone with all original parts, but in need of considerable cleaning and restoring. Which is nice. It's more enjoyable to get one of these musical antiques back into proper condition before displaying it, rather than buying it fully restored and putting it on a shelf. Besides, machines in bad shape command lower prices.

In the picture, you see me last year (the photographer gave me the picture this year) promoting my books at Union. It's been gratifying to develop readerships among both ragtime and automatic music aficionados, and it was especially nice to have so many of them ask when my next book will be out. Not one looked disappointed when I said A PERILOUS CONCEPTION will have a medical, not a musical, background. That's all right, they told me, they'll still want to read it, and I should let them know when it's available. Who says you can't mix business and pleasure?

One cloud on the horizon: for the first time in my experience, next year's Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival and the Antique Music Show will take place over the same weekend. That's going to be one tough decision, and any way I cut it, I'm looking at a mere Music Bifecta in 2012. But I'll deal with that decision later. For now, the first piece of business is to figure out what my next mystery will be, and start getting it underway.

On The Music Trifecta Trail

2011-06-08T10:11:00.001-07:00

Following on the Seattle Folklife Festival, the 2011 Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival in Sedalia MO is history. And speaking of history - the only thing hotter than the music was the weather, the thermometer hitting the century mark, with humidity not far behind. As I wrote in Chapter 5 of THE RAGTIME KID, they say the devil once spent a week in Missouri in June, then went home and set up hell to specifications. At least we had air conditioning for the indoor concerts. They didn't have that in 1899, and considering all the clothing both men and women wore in those days, there must have been an epidemic of heat stroke and fainting in Sedalia around the time Scott Joplin and John Stark signed the contract to publish "Maple Leaf Rag."

At a concert at the beautiful restored Katy Depot, fiddler Mike Myer played a set with Rich Egan, a terrific pianist from St. Louis who specializes in midwestern folk rags, the kind composed by Brun Campbell, the self-proclaimed "Original Ragtime Kid of the 1890s." The duo played Brun's "Frankie And Johnny Rag," and Rich dedicated the tune to me for my portrayal of Brun in THE RAGTIME KID, and for my research into his history. Never thought anything like that would ever come my way. And just for good measure, my books were piled front and center in the Depot Store, one of those nice times when books get promoted with absolutely no effort on the author's part.

In fact, that was Number Two in recent musical honors for this musical illiterate. A couple of months ago, Randy Myers, a friend I've made through music boxes, read my first mystery novel, THE MUSIC BOX MURDERS, then wrote a tune for me, "The Death By Music Box Rag." How about that. Just writing my books has been ample reward in itself, but Randy and Rich have put a delicious icing on my cake. Thank you, both.

On to the antique phonograph/music box show in Union IL tomorrow, which will wrap up this year's spring extravaganza of music. I'm already looking forward to 2012.

My Annual Music Trifecta

2011-06-01T14:41:00.000-07:00

Don't ring my doorbell between Memorial Day Weekend and June 15. Don't call my phone. Don't give me any work to do. I'm otherwise occupied. First, there's the Seattle Folklife Festival, then the Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival in Sedalia MO, and finally the Antique Music Box/Phonograph Show in Union IL.

Folklife was this past weekend, 200,000 energized people crammed into Seattle Center to listen to every musical genre from bluegrass to Bulgarian, and pig out on cuisine from around the world. All performances were free, though relentless promotion for CDs, as many as six or seven pitches during a half-hour set, had eyeballs rolling all over the Center grounds. Take a lesson, authors.

For me, the highlight was an hour-long concert by Seattle legends Reilly and Maloney, who have an uncanny gift for crystallizing emotions into the loveliest displays of words and music you'll ever hear. If you're over 65, and the song, "One Day More" doesn't put a wistful little smile on your kisser, you're hopeless. If you're under 65, you just might not get it, but you can buy David Maloney's CD of the same title, and put it away in a safe place for a while. In time, you'll come to appreciate it.

On to Sedalia, and the Jet Lag Rag. River (and windstorm), stay away from my door.

Disqualifying Qualifiers

2011-05-25T14:28:00.000-07:00

Writing teachers tell us to use adverbs sparingly, if at all, and I think they've got something there. The current popular tic where speakers place adverbs strategically to avoid expressing unqualified emotions or reactions waters down the effectiveness of speech no end. The effect on a piece of writing would be even worse.

A morning talk-show host here in Seattle seems incapable of direct expression of feelings. In one breath, he can be kinda shocked, a bit mad, a little mystified, and sorta blown away. He also finds events and occurrences to be pretty unique. Another local personality, in one short interview, admitted to having felt "a little bit surreal," and said that some correspondence he'd received had been "pretty moving" and "pretty powerful." Which, he added, had been "kind of the most surprising thing to me."

My most impressive example of this emotion-dilutive communication style came from a woman I overheard in animated conversation with a friend on a Seattle sidewalk. "Yeah, yeah," the woman shouted. "I was like, y'know, pretty much just BLEAAAAAAH!" Say wha'?

Could this disinclination to convey unqualified feelings relate to the sense that incivility is rampant in our culture, and maybe we ought to hit the soft pedal when we can? Or is it considered bad form to appear overly controlled by one's emotions? Whatever, listening to the way people talk puts the screws to me to pick up my blue pencil and - aside from their appearance in dialogue, as I might employ dialect or regionalisms to identify speakers - commit unqualified mayhem on those weak, flabby qualifying adverbs in my writing. When my characters are blown away, there's gonna be nothing sorta about it.

The Word Thief

2011-05-18T12:11:00.000-07:00

My wife is forever warning people to watch what they say in my presence, lest their words end up in one of my books. Fiction writers can be - and are - shameless about stealing comments, gestures, appearances, tics, anything that will help move a story along. But until today, I'd never realized how deeply this trait is ingrained.

After last week's blog about Building Brands, I decided to provide my own antidote by writing about my literary hero, the late John Jerome. In the September 29, 2002 New York Times Book Review, Bruce McCall labeled him "hands down...the most successful writer I've ever known." Jerome wrote eleven books, none of which came close to being a best seller. For Jerome, the writing was its own reward, preferable to money or fame. He "inquired into the uncommonness of common things," McCall wrote. "He believed he was mining worthy insights." After having read Jerome's book, ON TURNING SIXTY-FIVE, I'll testify to the worthiness of his insights. I recommend the work to anyone of any age.

According to McCall, Jerome "was up and at the keyboard before sunrise every morning, as close to 365 days a year as he could manage, fashioning his daily thousand or more words of meticulous prose, writing away the years as if he were being paid a thousand dollars an hour." McCall also noted, "He would have made a lousy celebrity in any event. He never met a cocktail party he couldn't bolt in a minute, hated public speaking, cultivated no connections." Not that he was anti-social - he had many friends, and was active daily outside his writing room. But as McCall put it, he "was in the best sense, an old-fashioned kind of writer, inspired by solitude, soothed by privacy, a respecter of craft who couldn't cut a corner or miss a deadline or tolerate a typo." My kind of guy.

But as I read through the article to refresh my memory, I stopped cold as I came across Jerome's maxim: "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without." All I could do was laugh. That quote appeared word-for-word in my own book, THE KING OF RAGTIME, in the mouth of Eleanor Stark, to describe her father, John Stark, Scott Joplin's publisher, to a T. I wrote that book in 2007-2008, five-plus years after the publication of Bruce McCall's article, and when Eleanor Stark's comment popped up on my computer screen, I had no idea where she'd gotten it from. Guilty as charged! Watch what you say around me.

Buy This Book!

2011-05-11T15:46:00.000-07:00

Today, I finished reading galleys for A PERILOUS CONCEPTION, my December release from Poisoned Pen Press. That's the last step in writing the book.

And now comes the promotional work, nothing new and different. Read "Building the Brand," by Tony Perrottet, in the May 1 edition of the New York Times Book Review.

I'm not a salesman by nature. For a while, my wife, daughter and I ran a sideline business in antiques, and I had real trouble when it came time to convince a potential buyer he or she couldn't live without a particular item on our shelves. It was near-routine for one of my associates to tell me to please go take a nice walk around the show, and stay out of their way.

Maybe if I work at it, though, I could become one of those awful shills on the radio. Say, the hard-sell guy: "How much longer are you going to put up with those mystery novels that sink you into a coma after fifty pages? Are you masochistic or something? You owe it to yourself to buy A PERILOUS CONCEPTION. I challenge you! Act in the next sixty seconds, and you can pre-order it from amazon for $16.47, a saving of a full third over the suggested retail price of $24.95."

Or, how about the bird who preys on the need to keep up with the Joneses? "You're having a wonderful day – everything's gone right for you...until you pull up a chair at Happy Hour, and your girlfriend says, 'What do you think of A PERILOUS CONCEPTION? Is that Pulitzer material, or what?' Can you picture her face - never mind the suddenly-empty chair beside you - when you have to admit you haven't read it?"

Then, there's the slime-throated creep who wants us all to go down and talk to his friend...no, his good friend, who you can trust, at the car dealership, the mattress store, or the wellness emporium. "You need to go down and see my friends, the good folks at Seattle Mystery Bookshop. You can trust them to fix you up right with a copy of the very book you simply have to read. I'm talking about A PERILOUS CONCEPTION, the ultimate Seattle-based mystery." Hmm. The staff at SMB really are my friends, and you really can trust them to fix you up with just the right book for your reading taste. (Ignore the final sentence in that palaver, and we've got a first in radio advertising).

Best of all, I think, is the testimonial. "I'm here with Ophelia Waye, prominent reader of mystery novels. Ophelia, tell me, how has reading A PERILOUS CONCEPTION changed your life?" "Well, it's a revelation, Larry, nothing less. For more than ten years now, I've been reading two, sometimes three, mystery novels a day, and never felt satisfied. I just had to read more and more of those darned books. But A PERILOUS CONCEPTION cured my compulsion. I'll never read another mystery. Now, I spend fourteen hours a day watching television. My husband noticed the difference immediately, and I couldn't be happier."

Work As Play - Promotion in San Marino and L.A.

2011-05-04T17:04:00.000-07:00

What a trip, in every sense. Six days of sunshine and seventies is as close to heaven as a Seattleite is likely to get, especially this spring.

San Marino was a blast. Muffy Hunt, the chairwoman of the One Book/One City Committee gave me a eye-popper tour of the Huntington Library and Museum, and then I enjoyed a nice, relaxed lasagna dinner with the Friends of the Crowell Public Library, the librarians, and Phil Cannon, a ragtime guitarist who'd provided the entertainment for a concert the week before. Here I am in the picture to the left, with Ann Dallavalle, the Crowell Librarian(far right), Muffy (next to Ann), and other members of the OB/OC Committee.

Then it was time for my presentation on Brun Campbell, the real and fictional Ragtime Kid. Ann had my talk up and ready on the library's computer, no fuss, no muss, no glitches. Nobody booed, so I figure I was ahead in the game. I signed a bunch of books, courtesy of Book'Em, the excellent independent mystery bookshop in South Pasadena.

Next came the LA Times Festival of Books, where I signed copies of my ragtime trilogy in the Mystery Ink and Sisters in Crime-LA booths. At the SinC-LA booth, I happened to be sitting next to Barbara Reed, a novelist-pianist who writes mysteries set in the world of music publishing, so we had a lot to talk about when we weren't scribbling our names onto title pages of books. Here's a picture of me, telling Sister Jane DiLucchio about my trilogy.

Now, as Gene Autry used to say, I'm back in Seattle again. Back to work. My galleys for A PERILOUS CONCEPTION are waiting. Once I've gone through them, it'll be time to get serious about starting the next book.

And meanwhile, there's unfinished business with Brun Campbell, a Venetian with a colorful history. Venice, a city with a colorful history (and present) ought to pay this guy some attention. How about an exhibit in the Venice Historical Society? Ragtime concerts? A Brun Campbell Ragtime Festival? Wouldn't it be something to walk up to 711 Venice Boulevard, where Brun barbered for some 25 years, and see a statue of a young white boy and his black piano teacher, sitting side-by-side at a keyboard?

Ragtime Mojo

2011-04-27T11:42:00.000-07:00

So yesterday I flew down to L.A. to give my talk on The Ragtime Kid
tomorrow night in San Marino. The flight arrived a half-hour early.
Since yesterday was my birthday, my sister Kate, one of Long Beach's
literary lionesses, was going to take me to dinner at The Sky Room, a
gorgeous thirties-ambience spot with 180-degree views of the Long Beach
harbor. I drove from LAX to Long Beach at 5 in the afternoon, straight
through, no traffic. At The Sky Room, the incomparable Marty served us
an out-of-this-world dinner, capped off by the fabulous chocolate
dessert and message - in chocolate! - you see in the photo above.

Today, I slept nice and late, then checked my email and found a message
that the galleys for A PERILOUS CONCEPTION, my next book, will be
waiting for me when I get home Sunday. How can I collect this mojo in a
bottle? Hope it holds out through (and yeah, why not, beyond) tomorrow
night in San Marino.

The Ragtime Kid Comes To San Marino

2011-04-20T16:57:00.000-07:00

"THE TWO-FOUR BEAT"
by
S. Brun Campbell

Down in St. Louis, on Chestnut and Market Streets,
That was the home of that old two-four beat.
It was there Tom Turpin wrote "Harlem Rag,"
While over at Sedalia, Mo., Scott Joplin wrote "The Original Rags."
But when he wrote "The Maple Leaf Rag,"
He put the two-four beat right in the bag.
Louis Chauvin played piano on Chestnut Street
And was the best of them all on the two-four beat.
That beat spread to Memphis down to old Beale Street,
And then down to New Orleans, to Rampart, Franklin and Basin Streets.
When Buddy Bolden heard it he blew out a loud jazz call
That rocked Lulu White's "Mahogany Hall."
It put New Orleans jazz right on the ball,
And made it the music of the Mardi Gras.
Then up at Memphis Handy blew a fuse -
For in 1912 he wrote the "Memphis Blues."
That was good, so he wrote another, the "St. Louis Blues."
Now Zez Confrey, just to be a tease,
Set a new jazz pattern and wrote "Kitten on the Keys."
Then George Gershwin got into a musical stew
And sat right down and wrote "Rhapsody in Blue."
So from Bolden to Gershwin it's been a musical treat,
But it all goes back to the two-four beat.

Sanford Brunson Campbell, age 15, rode a freight train from his Oklahoma home to Sedalia, MO in 1899, to take ragtime piano lessons from Scott Joplin. The composer nicknamed his student "The Ragtime Kid," and he went on to have a most interesting and colorful ragtime life - so interesting and colorful, he served as a principal character in two of the stories in my historical-mystery trilogy.

One of those books, THE RAGTIME KID, is the focus of this year's One Book/One City Festival in San Marino, CA. I'll be down there next Thursday with a presentation, "The Ragtime Kid - Separating Fiction From Reality." Not an easy undertaking, since Brun could rarely resist the temptation to embellish a story, and he rarely told the same tale the same way. Emerson could have been thinking of Brun when he made his point about consistency, hobgoblins, and little minds. But that was a great part of what made The Kid such an interesting character, in both senses of the word.

The lines of THE TWO-FOUR BEAT don't scan awfully well, but all right. Brun gets his point across, and more charitably than he usually did. Brun hated jazz; for him, it all began and ended with ragtime, and most of the time he was far from shy about making that clear.

My talk will be at the Crowell Public Library, 1890 Huntington Drive, San Marino, CA 91108, April 28, 7pm. Please come by, if you're in the neighborhood. There'll be food for mind and body.

You Gotta Have Heart

2011-04-13T18:06:00.000-07:00

Our Seattle Mariners started their baseball season with two wins, then lost seven games in a row, and fell behind 7-0 in their next game. Fans and sportswriters agreed - might as well call off the season. This team is going nowhere, certainly not to the playoffs. We're looking at a summer of pain and frustration.

But I remember the best baseball season ever, 1951. My New York Giants lost eleven games in a row out of the gate, and started the year 2-12. Things looked so bad, they called up a young outfielder named Willie Mays. After 20 at-bats, Willie had one hit, a batting average of .050. On August 11, the Giants were thirteen games behind the hated Brooklyn Dodgers, and Chuck Dressen, the Dodgers' manager told reporters, "The Giants is dead."

Not quite. The Jints ran off a sixteen-game win streak, caught the Dodgers during the last weekend of the regular season, then won the pennant in a playoff, when Bobby Thomson hit the most famous home run in the history of the game. That team had heart. Miles and miles and miles of heart.

What's that got to do with writing? Writers gotta have heart, too. So many ink-slingers become instant successes only following years of frustration, having doggedly refused to give up even when everything and everyone seemed to be telling them that would be the reasonable move.

After some thirty years of trying and failing to write a novel and get it published, I left my day job to go at book-writing full time. Three years of scribbling produced a novel and twenty-odd rejection slips. Then, a writer-friend volunteered to give my book a once-over. He told me my voice was great - for nonfiction - and suggested I rewrite the book "as if you're telling someone a story, for crying out loud." I listened to my batting coach, spent a half-year adjusting my stance, then hit it out of the park. The first publisher who saw the reworked book bought it, and it became THE MUSIC BOX MURDERS, my first published mystery novel. My eighth, A PERILOUS CONCEPTION, will come out this December. That's twelve years in the majors for me, and if I've never made an All-Star team, it's OK. I just love to play the game.

And oh yeah. The Mariners scored one run in the seventh inning, five in the eighth, and two more in the ninth to win that game. No, they probably won't make it to the postseason, but all right. I'll cheer them on through the summer anyway. They've got heart.

Sedalia, My New Home Town

2011-04-06T13:59:00.000-07:00

Writers know they've done well when they can't walk away from a finished book. A good story leaves something of itself in its author's mind forever.

When I started work on THE RAGTIME KID, the first book in my historical-mystery trilogy, I could have dropped what I knew about life in a bustling 1899 Missouri town into a watch case, and it would have rattled around. So aside from educating myself on the history of ragtime music and its pioneers, I read everything I could get my hands on about social, political and historical aspects of Sedalia a hundred years ago. I studied Sanborn insurance maps for 1899 Sedalia; these gave specifics for every building in the city, every street, every alleyway. At that point, I could have written a decent nonfiction account of the amazing collaboration between Scott Joplin and John Stark, but a novel? No way. Something important was missing, and I knew that to get it, I needed to go to the place where it all happened.

I pulled into Sedalia for the first time on a Sunday morning in June, 2003, immediately after the annual Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival. It was 94 degrees, with humidity to match. This meteorology developed into the opening sentences of Chapter 4 in THE RAGTIME KID: "They say the devil once spent a week in Missouri in July, then went back and set up hell to specifications. Only ten in the morning, but the air was already a sopping blanket..." Ohio Street, the town's major thoroughfare, was deserted, the only sound that of church bells. As I followed the self-guided tour in a C of C brochure, I saw that many of the buildings had stood since 1899 or earlier. In my mind's eye, Ohio Street filled with men in three-piece suits, women wearing long dresses and big floppy hats, scampering children, peddlers, horse-drawn wagons. I walked to Liberty Park, sat on the grass, and could feel myself among picnickers and strollers from a century before, listening to the band on the bandstand.

My story began to come to life. But I knew I needed more, so I planned to come back the next June - but a little earlier, in time for the Joplin Festival.

Which I did. I'm not a musician, and had been wondering how to portray Brun Campbell's piano lessons with his hero, Joplin. My reading had given me a pretty good sense of what Joplin generally would have expected from a student, but as to specific instructions, I was at Square One. So I sat in on some master classes, where prominent ragtime pianists showed their young counterparts how to play the music. I strolled through town, among crowds of people, many of them dressed in period apparel, and it became easier and easier to imagine myself on those streets 104 years earlier. I spent hours at the beautiful Carnegie Library, looking through microfilmed copies of the Sedalia newspapers from the summer of 1899 - what were people concerned about, what were they saying, how did they speak? I pawed through a profusion of photos and documents from the local ragtime era. The librarians opened locked cabinets to allow me to look through histories of Sedalia and Pettis County, written and independently-published through the years by local residents.

My greatest stroke of luck came while I was at the microfilm machine. The woman at the machine next to mine introduced herself as Betty Singer, said she was researching a book about local rural cemeteries, and allowed that my project sounded interesting. She loved to do research, she told me, and if she could help me with material I found I needed once I got home, she'd be only too glad to do so. That she did, over the next two years, providing me with information I only realized I required as the book developed. Without Betty's help, important characters for my story, such as Dr. Walter Overstreet and P. D. Hastain would never have developed.

All the while I wrote THE RAGTIME KID, I felt as though I was making a personal connection with Scott Joplin, John Stark, Brun Campbell, and many of the other real people who became characters in my book. But I also came to feel connected to Sedalia. Images still drift into my mind: the gorgeous century-old mansions along Broadway; lovely Liberty Park with its lake and bandstand; the central downtown district, fighting to survive the onslaught of the ubiquitous highway shopping malls; fields of tall grasses blowing in the warm summer wind north of Lincolnville, the original Black residential quarter of town. Now, I find myself counting time to the first week in June, when Sedalia will host the next Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival, and I'll hop a flight to Kansas City, then drive east on Route 50, through Lone Jack and Knob Noster, for my annual homecoming.

How Do You Think Up Names For Your Characters?

2011-03-30T13:10:00.000-07:00

Roadside signs have been great sources of names for characters in my books. Many of these signs have been along freeways, bearing names of two nearby cities or towns. A surprising number are reasonable people-names, often with just that little twist that makes a character stand out. I scribble them onto a page in my pocket notebook, and wait for characters to claim them.

Some years back, on my way from Malice Domestic to the Mystery Lovers Bookstore Festival in Oakmont, PA, I noticed a sign telling me I was approaching Irwin McKeesport. It took a while, but Irwin finally made the jump into fiction as "Iggy the Key," a locksmith and detective's sidekick in my current project, A PERILOUS CONCEPTION (due out from Poisoned Pen Press this coming December). Can you picture him?

My two favorite character names went into the same book, SCAMMING THE BIRDMAN, my second Music Box Mystery. I was driving from Seattle to Chicago on Rt. 94, bored out of my mind, when I saw the sign on the left above this post, and Cleveland Gackle popped into my mind, full-grown, a 70-something weed-smoking lockpicker with bushy white eyebrows and a perpetually-bemused expression. (Rt. 94 in North Dakota was a particularly rich stretch of road. 76 miles east of Cleveland Gackle, I saw the sign on the right above. I still haven't found a character for Buffalo Alice, but I hope to. Somehow, I don't think she smells very good).

The second sign that launched a character in STB was a faded painted ad, I'd guess from the 1930s, on a brick building beside the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle. It advertised a meat company named LoPriore Brothers. The villain in STB was the nastiest person I've ever characterized, and right off, Vincent LoPriore struck me as the perfect name for him. It just seemed to ooze menace. So imagine my surprise one day, after the book came out, when I opened my email and saw a message in my inbox from Vincent LoPriore. I could not bring myself to open it for over an hour, and when I did, I found it was from a man by that name who lived in Pennsylvania. He asked where I'd gotten his name from, so I explained, and told him I hadn't imagined there was anyone anywhere in real life named Vincent LoPriore. Fortunately, he thought it was funny, and said he kinda liked being the bad guy in a murder mystery. So I sent him a signed book, and that was that. Just in case you think you've ever got all bases covered.

Mucking Around With Writing Groups

2011-03-23T17:58:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, Charlotte Hinger, a fellow Poisoned Pen Press author, guest-posted on Type M For Murder. Charlotte gave what's probably the minority report on writing groups: she never has belonged to one, likely never will, and doesn't want to muck around with someone else's story.

Her attitude and mine coincide. Some good people have invited me to join writing groups, and although I know excellent writers who credit a great deal of their success to their groups, I've said a firm no, with thanks, to all those invitations. Not only don't I want to muck around with someone else's story-in-progress, I don't want anyone else mucking around with mine.

Outlines work really well for me with nonfiction, but in my fictional work, characters simply will not follow an outline. My finished stories bear little resemblance to what was in my head when I began writing them, and it seems to me that anyone else's input, no matter how intelligent or well-intentioned, might shunt me away from where I was subconsciously headed.

Reading Charlotte's post activated a memory from way back. In his 1984 book, "Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons - Literary Authority in American Fiction," Hershel Parker made repeated references to John Dewey's belief in the "moment-to-moment control over the relationships between what [the author] has already done, what he is about to do, what he actually is doing, and what he knows, at least vaguely, that he must do later on." Dewey further stated that art can not be plotted beforehand, that artists "learn by their work, as they proceed, to see and feel what had not been part of their original plan and purpose." Sounds right to me.

On the other hand, Parker held that there are dangers to the integrity of a literary work in revising it after the author has considered it finished. Did Maxwell Perkins damage Thomas Wolfe's trunkful of pages in the process of helping the author sharpen them into "Look Homeward, Angel?" Apparently, Wolfe thought so. But I always look forward to hearing from Barbara Peters, my editor at Poisoned Pen Press, after I've sent her my supposedly-final manuscript. Barbara has recommended further work on every story of mine, and in every instance, this clearly has improved the book.

I swear, there are as many ways to go about writing a novel as there are novelists. Maybe more.

Out Of The Mouths Of Brats...

2011-03-16T22:02:00.000-07:00

I envy authors of children's books. They have at their disposal an endless assortment of characters they can count on to come out with one stupendously outrageous remark or observation after another.

To hear my parents tell it, my stutter never stopped me from opening my mouth when I should've kept it severely shut. My father was a professor at a teachers' college in New Jersey, and one day, before the president and his wife arrived for dinner, he warned me to speak only when spoken to, and then, to be very polite about it. It went well till the president got to talking about the vegetables he'd been growing in his Victory Garden, and bemoaned the fact he'd been unable to grow cucumbers because the soil was too sandy. "No," I piped up. "You can grow cucumbers in sandy soil. Would you like to see?" Then I led him out back, where I'd buried some cucumber seeds in the sandiest soil you'd ever see away from a beach. The patch was covered with vines and vegetables. I compounded my felony by telling the president if he'd water his plants a lot, I was sure he'd get cucumbers too.

Then there was the time my family was taking a vacation in Asbury Park. I was minding my business, rocking in a wicker chair on the veranda of our hotel when an elderly woman came up and asked my name.
I told her, and asked hers. She replied, then asked me my age.
"I'm four," I said. "How old are you?"
"How old do you think I am?" she said.
I took a minute to look her up and down. "I don't know," I said. "But you look old enough to be dead."

A Novelist's Research Near-Disaster

2011-03-09T15:40:00.000-08:00

I closed last week's blog with a research adventure from when I was writing THE RAGTIME KID. Here's one from THE RAGTIME FOOL.

Not a spoiler - the first chapter of TRF reveals the plan of a bunch of Klansmen to blow up a high school in Sedalia, MO during a racially-integrated ceremony to honor Scott Joplin. Since what I knew about explosives would have rattled around inside a watch case, I set out to get information. I learned a good bit about dynamite, but couldn't quite get my head around the specific protocol for its use in bringing down a building.

That summer, I went to Canada to visit my friend Jim, in Sechelt, on BC's Sunshine Coast. We went to lunch with Jim's friend, Ralph, and as I looked around the room, I realized the construction was similar to that of Sedalia's old Hubbard High School. We were sitting in the lower level of a two-story building, the ceiling above us being supported by a large horizontal beam that ran the length of the room. That beam in turn was held in place by two stout vertical wooden beams.

And Ralph was a contractor!

"Tell me something," I said to him. "If you wanted to blow up this building with dynamite, exactly how would you go about it?"

Ralph turned to Jim, who waved aside his concern. "He's a writer," Jim said. "He's probably doing a story. Go ahead and tell him what he wants to know."

So, as Ralph gave me detailed step-by-step directions, I took them down in the little pocket notepad I always carry. When he finished, I thanked him, and told him I'd send him a copy of the book.

Two days later, on my way home, it was only as I was next in line for the customs inspector that I realized I was carrying in my shirt pocket a pad whose first page was titled, "How to blow up Hubbard High School." All of a sudden, air-conditioned car or not, I was sweating profusely. Too late to turn back. It occurred to me that I might tear out the page and swallow it, but I thought no, I'm probably on camera right now. They'd lock me up and pass a tube down one end or up the other. Bad idea.

The inspector waved me forward. Since I'm not a praying man, all I could do was hope. Fortunately, he just asked me a couple of quick questions about purchases, then waved me through. Lesson learned. Next time, information like that gets to my house by mail, snail or e-.

San Marino's One Book/One City Festival Is Underway

2011-03-02T16:10:00.000-08:00

The programs for San Marino's 2011 One Book/One City Festival have begun. Viewings last week of the movie, "The Sting," featuring Scott Joplin's music, were a great success. Here's what's coming up.
-March 3: Gil Gunderson - Ragtime Piano Performance.
-March 17: Brad Kay - Ragtime Piano Performance.
-March 31: Doug Haise - Ragtime Piano Performance.
-April 14: Crown City Dixieland Band - Ragtime/Dixieland Band Performance.
-April 28: Larry Karp - The author of the ragtime historical mystery trilogy will talk about his books, and about Brun Campbell, the real-life Ragtime Kid, a long-term resident of Venice, CA. After Larry's talk, he'll sign copies of the three books.

All programs start at 7pm, and will be held at the Crowell Public Library, 1890 Huntington Drive, San Marino. Refreshments will be served.

I'd love to hear all those concerts myself - too bad Seattle is so far from San Marino. But I've heard Brad Kay on several occasions, and I can promise a terrific hour of music and talk on March 17. Here's a link to Brad playing "Dew Drop Alley Stomp," and here's another of him playing Joseph's Lamb's first classical ragtime hit, "Sensation," with two other wonderful musicians, Craig Ventresco and Meredith Axelrod.

If you're so inclined, you might also rent the movie, "Scott Joplin," from 1977, starring Billy Dee Williams, with Art Carney as Joplin's publisher, John Stark. It's not the most historically-accurate piece, but the Hollywood take on 1899 Sedalia is pretty good. I rented the film myself when I was researching "The Ragtime Kid." When I went into the video store and told the clerk they were holding a movie for me, he asked, "Whatsa name?" "Scott Joplin," I said. The clerk gave me a truly withering look. "No, man," he drawled. "Not your name. Whatsa name a the movie?"

Words, Words, Words. They Run In The Family

2011-02-23T15:16:00.001-08:00

SIMON SAYS, "LAW BOOKS AREN'T BORING"

My old man taught remedial reading. When his students challenged his assertion that children as young as four could learn to read, he brought me into the classroom, stood me up in front, and handed me a book. I stammered my way through "Randolph, the Bear Who Said No," then held the book up to the class, pointed at a picture, and told the students, "See. This is Wandolph."

Encouraged...well, pushed by The Old Man, Myra - my wife - and I had our son, Casey, reading long before his fifth birthday as well. By the time Casey was six, his sister, Erin, was three, and had grown tired of having her brother ignore her in favor of books. She told me she wanted to read too, and I should show her how. I was skeptical, but I read through a book for her, tracing the words with my finger, then had her read it with me. Then I asked her to read it alone, which she did flawlessly. I thought she might've been just exercising a good memory, so I picked up an unrelated book, opened it, and told her to read. Which she did, again flawlessly.

The two kids used to go to the neighborhood library, pull books off shelves, and stagger up to the checkout counter, balancing armfuls as high as the tops of their heads. One day, a new librarian told them perhaps they should take just one or two books at a time. The children's librarian, Ms. Goldmanis, overheard, and told the newbie, "Those two can take as many as they'd like. They'll be back in a few days with all their books read."

Now Erin has a son, Simon, seventeen months old. She and husband Peter have been reading to the kid literally since he was born. Thanks to contributions from his grandparents and family friends such as children's author Peg Kehret and Dennis and Linda Ronberg, former owners of Linden Tree Bookstore in Los Altos CA, Simon has a world-class collection of books, many signed by the authors, and he likes to pull them down from the shelf and present them for reading to his parents and grandparents. Sometimes he'll bring a book off Erin's reading pile, and she'll tell him, "This one doesn't have any pictures. But look at all the words! You'll be able to read all these words one day!"

Yesterday, as Erin was at work in her law office, Simon came in, took a book from a shelf, sat, and opened the book. As he turned the pages, Erin realized he was saying, "Words, words, words." What made it even more funny is that the book was a dictionary - a Japanese-American dictionary.

I think the kid's working up to challenge his mother's family record. And apparently, his father's as well. According to Grandma Marge, Simon has five months to learn to read the numbers on license plates.

A DOUBLEHEADER: Me And Connie Mack, and Follow This Blog

2011-02-16T18:08:00.000-08:00

Having turned in the manuscript for A PERILOUS CONCEPTION, my upcoming mystery novel, people ask what I'm doing now. When I tell them I'm starting on the next book, most of them look like they don't quite get it. One questioner straight-out asked me why. I guess I must have looked like I didn't quite get it, because he added, "You've had ten books published - isn't that enough?"

This week, baseball players began to report for spring training, the annual season of optimism and hope, and in the vehicle of my acquaintance's question, I traveled back in my mind to the spring of 1951, when I was very young and even more impressionable. For the first time in its fifty-year history, the Philadelphia Athletics were going to have a manager not named Connie Mack. During that spring-training session, an east-coast sportswriter wrote a retrospective on Mr. Mack's career, a half-century of some of the highest highs and the lowest lows in the ongoing story of the national pastime. The writer commented to the effect that he'd been asking the elderly manager for some years whether he was ready to retire. But Old Mr. Mack, the reporter wrote, would get a far-away look in his eyes, smile a little, shake his head, and say, "Just one more season."

When Connie Mack finally did throw in the towel at age 87, it was after a dreadful 1950 campaign in which the Athletics lost 102 games and finished dead last in the American League. Probably not the leave-taking the old man had envisioned. But should he have left the dugout after his 1931 AL pennant, walked away on top, and spent those twenty years in uneasy and regretful leisure? As a twelve-year-old kid, I didn't think so. I knew even then that for Connie Mack, baseball was not a pastime. It was his life. I had to admire the guy.

Just one more book.

* * * * *

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The Ragtime Kid in Venice

2011-02-09T18:11:00.000-08:00

It's official now. The Friends of the Crowell Public Library in San Marino, CA have announced the selection of THE RAGTIME KID (and by extension, THE KING OF RAGTIME and THE RAGTIME FOOL) as the 2011 selection for their annual One Book/One City Festival. There's a preliminary schedule of programs during the next three months, leading up to my talk at the library on April 28. If you live in Southern California, you might enjoy taking in some of the ragtime festivities.

The Ragtime Kid was a real person. His name was Brun Campbell, and in 1899, at age 15, he hopped a train in Oklahoma, and traveled to Sedalia, MO, to take piano lessons from Scott Joplin. Before Brun left Sedalia to pursue a career as an itinerant pianist in the midwest, Joplin nicknamed him The Ragtime Kid, a title which Brun carried proudly for the rest of his life.

By the end of World War I, though, ragtime gave way to jazz, and Brun was out of work, so, like his father, he became a barber. In 1929 or 1930, he moved his family from Tulsa to Venice, CA - less than 15 miles down the 110 Freeway from San Marino - both to take advantage of better economic conditions on the west coast, and to provide a more healthful environment for one of his daughters who suffered from asthma. Brun lived in the same house and worked at the same barber shop in Venice from then until his death in 1952. Despite his wife's highly negative attitude toward ragtime (which led me to re-christen him THE RAGTIME FOOL), he was a major player in the ragtime revival of the 1940s. He even appeared as a character, though not in a very favorable light, in Ray Bradbury's homage to old Venice, DEATH IS
A LONELY BUSINESS.

But Venetians these days don't seem terribly interested in Brun; relatively few have even heard of him. That's not as it should be. I'll have more to say on this in upcoming blogs, as I keep you posted on the San Marino festivities. And I'll certainly have my say in San Marino on April 28. Crowell Public Library, 1890 Huntington Drive, 7pm.

Porky, The King, and Me - A Perilous Conception

2011-02-02T18:20:00.000-08:00

When I was a young boy, I had a crippling stutter. My mother used to tell me, well, all right, the King of England stutters too. My reaction was along the lines of "fat lot of good that does me, when I have to go out tomorrow and listen to people finish my sentences, or worse, tell me, 'Spit it out. Just spit it out!'" And then, there were the omnipresent flocks of mocking birds: "What's the m-m-matter, L-L-L-Larry? C-c-can't you t-t-talk? You s-s-s-sound like P-P-P-Porky P-P-P-Pig."

So the movie, "The King's Speech," was a revelation for me, an intense two hours of slam-dunk empathy. King George VI's childhood stuttering history and mine were carbon copies, and when that poor guy grew up, he had to get behind a microphone and talk to millions of people by radio, sometimes while staring at hundreds of anxious faces in a live audience. Talk about blood running cold. My fingers were like ice.

But I got to apply a lesson from the King and Mr. Logue, his speech therapist. Last Thursday, I gave a talk to a group about my ragtime mysteries, and afterward, someone asked what my next book was going to be. "It's about an overly-ambitious obstetrician in 1977, racing to become the first physician to develop a baby by in vitro fertilization," I said. "But there are complications that lead to blackmail and murder."

Then someone asked me the title. My whole body tensed. "A P-p...A P-p-p-" I said, and froze.

The woman's face twisted into concern. How the hell could I have been so stupid, putting a word beginning with a hard P into my title? Now I was going to have to try to spit that out for months of promotional appearances.

Then I thought of the King, giving his critical speech at the conclusion of the movie, and Mr. Logue, like an orchestra conductor, coaching him along. "Slip in an 'ah' and ride it through," Logue whispered, as the King approached a stumbling block. My throat relaxed. "Ahp-erilous Conception," I said.

The woman's eyes widened. "A Perilous Conception" - that sounds intriguing."

Logue's face beamed pleasure. The King smiled.

How To Get A Signed Copy Of An E-book

2011-01-26T13:25:00.000-08:00

Writer/reader blogs and online groups are chockablock with pros and cons (mostly the former) of e-books and electronic reading devices. There's one question, though, that I haven't seen addressed: how do you get a signed copy of an e-book? Like many writers, I enjoy accumulating books signed by authors, whether personalized to me or not.

Recently, my friend Susan Schreyer brought out her first mystery novel, "Death by a Dark Horse" as an e-book. I knew it was an excellent, original work, a cozy in which the principal murder suspect is a horse, and I wanted to buy a copy. But not having a reader and not wanting one (a whole different blog post), the idea of sitting at my computer to read Susan's book, after a full day of sitting at my computer writing my own book, didn't appeal. "Besides," I asked Susan. "How am I supposed to get a signed copy?"

She had no answer to that, and there the issue lay for a short while. But last week, Susan told me she had just brought out a trade paperback version of "Dark Horse" via amazon. I sent in my order immediately, then brought the book to her for a signature. "Do you know - you bought the first copy of my book in paper," Susan said, and now I can proudly display her debut novel, signed to me and inscribed as Number One. Top that!

Which gives one answer to my initial question. I guess I also could have downloaded the book, burned the file to a CD, then gotten Susan to sign the disk. Doesn't quite seem the same, though. O tempora! O mores!

A PERILOUS CONCEPTION - Mission Accomplished?

2011-01-19T15:24:00.000-08:00

Carrying on from last week's post, the manuscript for my next book is finished and submitted. "Just" went from 399 occurrences to 168, "grin" from 84 to 25.

Now, there remains only to respond to recommendations from the editor, copy-edit the galleys, fill out the publisher's Author Questionnaire, and then plan promotions. Sending in a manuscript doesn't mean the book is finished.

A while back, in the middle of a promotional tour, this bit of doggerel came to me, apologies to Stephen Foster and Susanna:

I come down from Minneap'lis like a bat straight out of hell,
'Long Thirty-five to Omaha, sure hope the books will sell.
Then out to Lawrence, Kansas, a quick session with the fans.
And catch a plane to Scottsdale, all those readers with their tans.
Promo touring! You fly, you drive, you run.
You write a book, you think you're through?
Oh, no - you've just begun.

Still, submitting the "final" manuscript does bring a sense of completion. Like many writers, I feel some sadness; it's been likened to postpartum depression. But it's leavened by the howling in my skull of the story that's been waiting its turn for some six months, and now damn well wants me to draw my deep breath and get with it. In addition, as you can see, there's all the stuff I've had to put aside (literally and figuratively) for the past month to get the manuscript finished on schedule. Just because no one's forcing me to do it doesn't mean writing novels is anything but a full-time job.

Oh yes, almost forgot. The title of the book is A PERILOUS CONCEPTION. Poisoned Pen Press will bring it out in December, 2011.

An Award Received, An Award Given

2011-01-12T19:38:00.000-08:00

Bill Farley founded the Seattle Mystery Bookshop in 1990, and ever since has been one of the Pacific Northwest Mystery Community's leading citizens, always enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and helpful to readers and writers alike. Last month, the Northwest Chapter of Mystery Writers of America deservedly honored Bill with its Willo Award (named for mystery author Willo Davis Roberts), as a "member of the mystery community who has contributed with distinction to the Northwest mystery writing scene." Read all about it here.

So I'm proud to report that my book, THE RAGTIME FOOL, was included among "Bill's Best of 2010." Read about that here.

Rampant Redundancies in Rewriting

2011-01-05T19:43:00.000-08:00

My favorite part of writing a novel is the rewrite, where plot tightens, characters emerge, and interesting stuff happens that I never foresaw.

But that final rewrite, directly ahead of the submission deadline - there's a challenge. That's where I am now with my current project. Reading the manuscript line by line, word for word, all kinds of terrible things pop up. The worst may be overworked words.

Something was 'okay' 87 times, one time more than 'maybe' appeared. There were 399 instances of 'just,' many of which I deleted, but sometimes that just wasn't possible. I also got rid of a bunch of the 162 appearances of 'well', most of them lazy sentence-starting interjections. People were urged to 'come on' 34 times. That could wear out in a hurry.

What really made me twitchy was the fact that 'a' popped up 2462 times; 'and', 2314; 'that', 1149; and 'the', 4118. In a manuscript of 100,000 words, then, those four words comprised ten percent of the verbiage. Makes me want to download a copy of "Moby Dick," do a total word count, then search for each of those four words.

A Good Thought To Carry Forward

2010-12-29T20:52:00.000-08:00

The poet-physician William Carlos Williams lived in Rutherford, NJ, near my home town of Paterson. Williams worked all his adult life as a pediatrician and a practicing poet. His modus operandi was to multitask - he called it "stealing." When family or friends talked to him, part of his mind would follow the conversation, while another part would be working over a difficult pattern of words. He'd knock out a few lines on a typewriter in his office, between patients. That approach didn't work for me - in the end, I had to satisfy my one-track mind through serial careers, first in medicine, then in novel-writing.
My favorite Williams quote comes from the second volume of his five-part epic, "Paterson." I keep it on the wall above my desk, so I can't miss seeing it when frustrations start piling up:

"No defeat is ever made up entirely of defeat - since the world it opens is always a place formerly unsuspected. A world lost, a world unsuspected beckons to new places"

Good thought to carry forward into the new year.

Fictional vs. Nonfictional Voice

2010-12-22T20:38:00.000-08:00

My good friend, Bob Resta, recently commented to me as follows:

"Your non-fiction is more relaxed than your fiction. Your fiction is highly thought out, carefully constructed, and meticulously chiseled out of a big hunk of rock. Your non-fiction is more like your feet are up at the end of the day, you're sipping a beer, and saying to the reader 'Hey - isn't this an interesting observation.' One is not necessarily better than the other, just different."

Bob was right. For nonfiction, I set up an outline, write a draft, revise it once, maybe twice, and there it is. Easy. For fiction, my characters pay no attention to any outline I give them, and I end up doing just what Bob said, chiseling away at that rock, first on a macro scale, then in finer and finer detail.

At first thought, that seems opposite to what I'd expect. Shouldn't a relaxed voice be well-suited to telling a story, and a more thoughtful voice be more appropriate to organizing a bunch of facts, theories, or legends for a reader? Not necessarily. In nonfiction, no one's there to mess around with your outline. Even a nonfictional person in the narrative is going to have trouble rebelling against a fact-based outline.

Fiction writers come in two basic groups: Outliners and Seat-of-The-Pantsers. Grabbing a beer, kicking back, and seeing what happens might work for those novelists who outline their stories, then watch, smiling, as their characters march nicely from Point A to The End. But "Seat-of-the-Pantsers" like me are probably condemned to a lifetime of hacking layer after layer off that godawful rock called a first draft that their characters drop on them.

The Christmas Mystery of the Silent Snuff Box

2010-12-15T16:59:00.000-08:00

We had a Thanksgiving Day guest this year to whom I showed a little musical snuff box, c1840s, with a lovely 2-tune Swiss musical movement below the snuff compartment. The man asked whether I'd consider selling it to him, so he could give it for Christmas to his wife, who is ill and housebound. He thought it would brighten her life.
I'd had no desire to sell the piece, which I'd bought 25 years before in England, but I decided, under the circumstances, to let it go. I thought I'd get more pleasure from imagining my guest's wife enjoying the music than I would, listening to it myself.
For the past couple of years, I'd been working intermittently to coax another, more-elegant, snuff box back to playing its music, but nothing I tried had had any effect. After my guest left with the snuff box for his wife, I decided to fill the space on the shelf with the recalcitrant, silent box. At least, I could look at it.
But as I put the box into place, I pushed the start button...and music played. When it stopped, I pushed the button again, and again, music played. I can't begin to tell you why.
As a confirmed skeptic, I'm comfortable saying that mysterious things do sometimes happen, and letting it go at that. Coincidence, coincidence. But what a great little Christmas story.

A Peculiar Case Of Immortality

2010-12-08T16:09:00.001-08:00

The first human cancer cells to be successfully cultivated in a laboratory were called HeLa, an acronym consisting of the first two letters of the name of the patient from whom they were isolated. It was widely assumed, both in professional and lay circles, that the patient's name was Helen Lane. Lectures were given and articles were written, telling of the ironic way Helen Lane had achieved immortality.
But if irony's your dish, try this: an article in the December 1971 issue of the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology included a photo of the woman, along with the information that her name actually was Henrietta Lacks. The paradox of an immortal person being known by the wrong name impressed me to the point that I wrote an article about Ms. Lacks and her cancer cells for Smithsonian Magazine (March 1976).
Imagine my interest, then, when earlier this year, I read a review of a book titled The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. The author had spent ten years talking to Lacks' descendants, and researching the incredible tangle of legal fallout and medical progress and problems which trace directly to HeLa. The full story of Henrietta Lacks, her family, and her malignant cells is beyond imagination. Get a copy of this book, and be prepared to go without sleep until you turn the last page. If you'll be able to sleep even then.

Two Great Performers At The West Coast Ragtime Festival

2010-12-01T13:21:00.000-08:00

Hard to pick favorites among the performers at the recent West Coast Ragtime Festival, but here are a couple with whom I've become friends, and whose performances I especially enjoyed.
Jack Rummel lives in Niwot, CO, where he hosts the Ragtime America show on KGNU, Thursday evenings, 8-9 Mountain Time, http://www.kgnu.org/. He also writes the popular monthly Ragtime Music Reviews, http://www.ragtimers.org/reviews/. Jack writes and plays midwestern-style rags, and at the Festival, he presented two hour-long sets of his own compositions, displaying to full effect this complex ragtime form, which is simultaneously rollicking and nostalgic, even wistful.
Washboard Kitty Wilson is the percussionist in the Raspberry Jam Band, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNxWU6sHlAU&feature=related (whose pianist is the amazing Tom Brier, the man with two hands on each arm and twenty fingers on each hand). Here they are at the Festival, playing one of my favorite pieces, Scott Joplin's, "Cleopha." Historian/pianist Rosemary Hallum interviewed Kitty at the Festival, and it was very interesting to hear what she said and demonstrated to explain the way percussionists need to remember that their role is to enhance the performance of the pianist or the band, not drown them out. A lesson there for us all.

Business Can Be A Pleasure

2010-11-24T13:39:00.000-08:00

Nice every now and again to combine business and pleasure. This past weekend, November 19-21, I was at the West Coast Ragtime Festival in Sacramento, a thoroughly enjoyable three days. I hadn't been in the building ten minutes when my friend Darwyn approached me with a chocolate bar in hand. When an event starts out like that, you know it's gonna be good.
To dispose of the business first, the Ragtime Store sold a good number of signed copies of my three ragtime-based mysteries, some people buying all three of the trilogy. Nice.
As to the music - I can say with truth that I've never attended a festival with better ragtime, as rendered by pianists, orchestras and small groups, string virtuosos, rhythm accompanists, and singers. To list all the terrific performers would take a whole page, but just to mention a few: the Ivory and Gold trio (pianist Jeff Barnhart, flutist Anne Barnhart, and drummer Danny Coots) were back for the first time in ten years, and infused the entire festival with their superb musicianship and great good humor. And pianist Larisa Migachyov's performance of Joseph Lamb's "Bohemia" rag was breathtakingly beautiful.
The weather was wonderful, temperatures in the seventies and eighties, but of course there's always payback. I flew home in the midst of the big Seattle snowstorm; fortunately, son-in-law Peter Greyy, a Wisconsin native, was able to pick me up and get me home. Always better lucky than good.

There's A Message Here

2010-11-17T18:39:00.000-08:00

When I left medical work nearly 16 years ago, I swore that none of my novels would have a medical background. Never. I had walked out a door and locked it behind me.

For three books set in the antiques subculture, I held to that resolve, but then I realized that a mainstream novel I'd written, but never gotten published, many years earlier would work very nicely as a mystery - but only if it had a medical background. By that time, I'd learned that what a story wants, a wise author gives it, so I went ahead and wrote FIRST, DO NO HARM, which to date has received the best reviews (including a starred review in Booklist) of any of my novels.

Never mind. I went on to write three books with ragtime backgrounds, then came up against the realization that my idea for the next book needed a medical background. So I'm just now finishing UNFINISHED BUSINESS (take that as you will). And just this afternoon, it hit me that my thoughts for the next couple of books demand...that's right. A medical background.

Write what you know, know what you write, write what you love, love what you write. Nah. Just write what comes, and don't think too hard about it.

Typos and Copy-Edit Errors: One Never Knows...

2010-11-10T11:38:00.000-08:00

There's been a good deal of chatter lately about typos and copy-editing errors in books, and the headaches they trigger in authors. Here's my contribution.

Toward the end of my medical-historical, FIRST, DO NO HARM, artist Leo Firestone poses a tough question to Martin, his medical-student son. Martin tries to wiggle away with a wisecrack. He recalls a quote from Oscar Wilde - "The coward does it with a kiss, the brave man with a sword," then tells the reader: Quick-step from Wilde to Waller, cue from Fats. I think I smiled. "One never knows, Dad, do one?"

That's how it read, from the first draft, through five rewrites, through two sets of galleys. But when my author copies arrived and I opened one, I saw, "One never knows, Dad, does one?" I never did find the perp.

But one can always make lemonade. At my signings, I told the story of the last-second malfeasance, held up the album you see at the head of this post, and told the audience that in addition to signing copies, I'd be glad to correct the error and initial it. Over time, several people have told me they'd been uncertain whether to buy a book, but couldn't resist that last little incentive.

A Post-Election Day Story

2010-11-03T15:00:00.000-07:00

Back during the 1950s, I read a short memoir by an elderly woman, a reminiscence of a striking childhood event in her life. I can't begin to recall her name, and I can't vouch for the truth of the account. But it's still a good story, and appropriate for today. My version is, of course, a paraphrase.
The old woman remembered a day when she was quite young, I think seven or eight. She'd become angry with her parents, and determined to run away from home. Not long after she started her journey down a dusty country road, a large man in a horse-drawn carriage pulled up, and asked where she was off to. She explained that she was running away from home.
"Well," said the large man. "That sounds like a long trip. Would you care for a ride?"
The girl decided that sounded good, and hopped up beside the man. He questioned her about her situation, and she told him why she felt she had no choice but to do what she was doing. "That's a very big decision," the man said. "Don't you think you should perhaps reconsider?"
"Oh, no," said the girl. "There's no more chance of me changing my mind than there is of Cleveland running again."
The man seemed surprised, and asked her to explain.
"That's what my father always says when he thinks something can't possibly happen. Mr. Cleveland was the last president, but he lost the next election. Some people say he might run again, but my father says there's absolutely no chance of that."
The man and the girl rode on a good way. The day was warm, the girl became sleepy, and she finally fell asleep, her head resting against the large man. When she awoke, the carriage was in front of her house. "You'd best go inside and talk that matter over with your parents," the large man said. "I'm sure they'll be glad to see you. And it's always well to resolve a dispute with honest talk."
The girl felt sheepish, and not a little tired. It had been a long day. She thanked the man for his kindness, and for the ride. He smiled. "And by the way, you may tell your father that he's wrong at least about one thing. Mr. Cleveland will indeed run again."

Of course, the large man was Grover Cleveland, a neighbor of the girl's family, and our 24th president, who served from 1885 to 1889. After losing the 1888 election to Benjamin Harrison, Cleveland did run again in 1892, and won a second, non-consecutive term. To date, he's the only president to have done that.

Computers Down: Sometimes You Do Get It Right

2010-10-27T18:20:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, my desktop computer became unresponsive. Well, I figured, OK. While I get it straightened out, I've got my laptop, with all the data on the desktop backed up to it. I could use that.
Except I couldn't. The laptop became unresponsive.
Bottom line: It was the desktop's motherboard and the laptop's hard drive. Both are at the computer hospital.
The good news: I've been writing my articles and books on computers since 1988, and when the Internet came along, I insisted on having a dedicated computer in my detached writing room, permanently off-line, its only purpose to be for writing. So while my promotional work and correspondence languish, I've been able to keep making progress on my current book.
And oh, yes. Besides the 2 non compos computers, I've regularly backed up my projects on a flash drive, an external hard drive, and an off-site storage facility. This week, I've added a second flash drive. One can't be too careful.
How am I posting this? Via my wife's computer, which also permits me to kinda keep up with email. Of course, the same day my 2 computers fell dead, I could not access the Internet on my wife's machine. Fortunately, that turned out to be the router, and was promptly set right.
Would I like to go back to manual, or even electric typewriters? Perish the thought. I've got vivid memories of when cutting and pasting was literal, and when it took me three months to type a perfect 200-page manuscript. Bad behavior and all, I'll stick with the computers. But with all due precautions.

My Ragtime Historical-Mystery Trilogy Is Honored

2010-10-20T16:15:00.000-07:00

As am I.
The Friends of the Crowell Library in San Marino, CA host a yearly One Book/One City Festival, where a particular book is selected, every reader in the city is encouraged to read it, events are planned around the major theme(s) of the book, and the author visits the city and gives a talk. This year's honoree was T. Jefferson Parker, for IRON RIVER.
Next year, the committee has renamed the Festival OB/OCx3, to select the three books (THE RAGTIME KID, THE KING OF RAGTIME, and THE RAGTIME FOOL) of my trilogy for their community read. During March and April 2011, the library will sponsor programs on music (especially ragtime) and concerts, and I'll talk to the readers on April 28, at 7pm, then sign books. Pretty cool.

Speaking Of E-Book Readers

2010-10-13T16:02:00.000-07:00

My last-week's blog post got me thinking. I've heard all kinds of arguments pro and con the various e-book readers, but one I've not heard seems important. How does reading comprehension from an electronic device compare with that from hard copy?
I wonder about this because I've gotten the same answer from every writer to whom I've posed the question, "Can you do revisions/rewrites off your computer screen?" The answer is invariably, "Not only no, but hell, no." Everyone - myself included - says they can work over a manuscript endlessly on a computer screen, but then when they print out a copy, it's filled with horrible word choices, dreadfully-structured sentences, grammatical errors, inconsistencies of plot and character, and typos.
To be specific: last Friday, I did a careful on-screen rewrite of the first two chapters of my current book-in-progress; then, this morning, I printed out the chapters and went to work on them. Three hours later, the pages were dense with squiggly cross-outs, replacements, and insertion arrows.
Admittedly, writers may read more critically than non-writers. (My daughter tells me I don't read for pleasure, and I can't quite get her to understand that I am, in fact, reading for pleasure, just a little differently from the way she goes about it). But wouldn't it be interesting to do an experiment? Take a bunch of readers, some of whom are also writers, select a pair of books by the same author, and have the readers read one of the books on an E-reader, the other on hard copy. After each book, calculate the reading time per page, and subject the readers to a test of comprehension regarding plot, characters, and setting. I'd bet just a little money that they'll remember more of the books they'd read from hard copy.

What's In A Name, Indeed?

2010-10-06T17:31:00.000-07:00

Who comes up with these names for Barnes and Noble? B&N has just made available a self-publishing platform called Pubit. Considering what they call their electronic reading device, they've got a ready-made slogan: "Get it up on Pubit, and watch millions of readers get it off on their Nook-E readers."

Bad News, Good News

2010-09-29T22:26:00.000-07:00

The bad news is that it's past 10 o'clock on a Wednesday night, and I just realized I haven't written my weekly blog.
The good news is that it happened because I got so wrapped up in my book-in-progress, I forgot about everything else.
For the better part of a year, now, Colin Sanford, a brilliant doctor, determined to produce the world's first in-vitro-fertilization baby, and Police Detective Bernie Baumgartner (Bernie the Bulldog), determined to sort out why people in Sanford's operation have ended up dead or missing, have been going back and forth on my computer in a cerebral life-and-death chess game. But this morning, all of a sudden, one of them spoke just the right words, and there they were, in Sanford's office, slugging away at each other like a couple of kids in a street fight. And when the fight was over, it all came to me. I saw who really were the good guys, and who were the bad, and how it was going to sort out. My working title for the book has been "Unfinished Business." Today, I saw why. I spent the rest of the day joyously scribbling notes that would take me to The End.
And just now realized I hadn't written my blog. Well, there it is.

Alan Chandler, C'est Moi?

2010-09-22T18:17:00.000-07:00

People ask me all the time whether one or another character in one of my books is "you." More disconcerting, sometimes they don't ask; they insist a particular character is me. I usually reply to the effect that I never use real people, myself included, as models for fictional characters, that knowledge of a real person's M. O. would limit his or her freedoms of expression and action as a character in a work of fiction.
But I may have to think this through. My sister told me that Alan Chandler, the 17-year-old ragtime pianist in THE RAGTIME FOOL, is "me." I told her Alan is nothing like I was at his age. I couldn't play a note of music. I would never have run off to Missouri to meet an old man from California, to give him an important book I'd bought for a large sum of money from an old woman in Harlem. I'd never have dared to speak to my parents the way Alan spoke to his. And I was amused at Alan's naivete about racial relations in Missouri in 1951. He was unaware that segregation existed outside the deep South. Just clueless.
But a little while ago, Tim Reed, a friend and fellow music box collector, sent me a link, http://www.njn.net/arts/starts/season05-06/2412.html , he thought might interest me, given that I grew up in New Jersey. The video was from NJN, New Jersey Public Television and Radio, and presented the history of Asbury Park, the resort where my family and I spent two weeks every summer throughout the 1950s.
Did I know that the town was founded by a pious Methodist, who wanted to set up a proper resort for proper, well-to-do Christians? Yeah, kind of.
Did I know this target population had "help," who needed to live somewhere, so a Black section of the city was established literally on the other side of the railroad tracks? No.
Did I know that this Black ghetto was a hotbed of popular music, a major venue for the most popular ragtime, blues, and jazz musicians of the day? Nope.
Did I know that even into the 1960s, Asbury Park remained segregated, that Blacks had their own separate (but not equal) beach; the Black beach was adjacent to the sewer outlet? No.
Did I ever notice that I never saw a Black face on the Asbury Park City Beach during the 1950s? No.
Did that ever strike me as odd? No.

All right, then. Isn't it so that people in our dreams are not "somebody else?" Aren't they completely our own creations, put up by our subconscious minds to populate the stories we call dreams?
- Sounds reasonable.
Wouldn't I have loved to talk to my parents the way Alan talked to his?
- Damn right I would've.
Wouldn't I have loved to hop a train to Missouri with the key to a special ragtime event in my book bag?
- Well, yeah. I guess I really would've.
What would I have given to be able to play piano like Alan?
- Chalk one up for the sister.

When Characters Act Out Of Character

2010-09-15T13:59:00.000-07:00

When a character in a story I'm reading says or does something inconsistent with his or her established beliefs or behavior, I place a bookmark, then watch for the why of that odd statement or action. If it never shows up, I put a big black mark next to the author's name.
In the course of my own work, when a character speaks or acts inconsistently, I also put in a bookmark, to remind myself I need to sort out the oddity. Sometimes, it turns out the character is trying to fool another character. Sometimes, the character's trying to fool him/herself. Sometimes, especially in early drafts, I think I've heard one character speak, when in fact the words came from someone else. Sometimes, I've misunderstood the character. All these possibilities are fine, so long as the variant information is resolved. If a raging white racial bigot takes a little black boy into a confectionary, buys him an ice-cream cone, then sends him on his way with an avuncular pat on the back, it's my job to dig out the reason, and make sure the reader is similarly enlightened before The End.
This necessity also translates out to real-life situations. Taking into account that people do not act out of character without reason may prevent painful misunderstandings.
Many years ago, my friend, Graham Webb, a dealer in antique music boxes in England, called to offer me a very impressive Swiss cylinder box. I told Graham I was very much interested, but would need to sell some of my other music boxes to pay for this one. There was a major swap meet coming up in a week: could he put the box on hold for me until that time? He said he'd be happy to.
The swap meet was successful, and immediately afterward, I called Graham, identified myself, and told him I would in fact like to buy the Nicole Grand Format Overture Box. To my surprise and dismay, he said, in a very cold tone, "I'm sorry. That box is sold."
Understand a hard-core collector's reaction. I was just this far from giving Graham two earsful of anger and indignation when a voice in my mind reminded me how long I'd known him, and how out of character his comment was. There had to be a reason. So I took a deep breath, and said, "Graham, I thought you told me you'd be holding that box for me."
There was a moment of silence, then, "I'm sorry...who did you say this is?"
"Larry," I said. "Larry Karp."
That brought a burst of laughter. "Oh, Larry, hello. I thought you said 'Barry Clark.' These transcontinental phone lines, you know. Just terrible."
From that time forward, I was always 'Barry" to Graham, and we never stopped chuckling over the Great Big Transcontinental Misunderstanding.

Scott Joplin Leads The Way In Any Language

2010-09-08T16:21:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, pianist Karen Pate and I presented a program, Ragtime in Music and Words, at the King County Library in Federal Way, WA. Karen played selections from ragtime composed during the past century, and I talked about the history of ragtime, focusing primarily on Scott Joplin and his efforts to transform folk ragtime into a form of classical music, respected and honored as fine art. Joplin succeeded, but acknowledgement of his success only came years after the composer's death.

After the event, a woman in the audience came up to thank Karen and me, and presented us each with a message in kanji on a small wooden block. She'd written them during the concert. The gift to Karen complimented her musical performance, while mine, the artist said, was her own take on Scott Joplin's lifelong ambition to create a new American musical genre, and translated out to 'beautiful dream,' or 'beautiful vision.' Right on.

A Wednesday Doubleheader - Yankees Suck, Mariners Rock & A Ragtime Urban Legend

2010-09-01T20:43:00.000-07:00

YANKEES SUCK, MARINERS ROCK
To follow up on last week's post, I got a nice phone call Saturday from Randy Adamack, the Seattle Mariners' Vice-President of Communications. Mr. Adamack told me that ever since the original brouhaha over the Yankees Suck T-shirts in 2002, the official club policy has been that fans may wear a 'Yankees Suck' T-shirt (or any T-shirt they'd like) to Safeco Field, and specifically, the alcohol enforcement officer should not have ordered me to remove my shirt and turn it inside out. As part of the apology, Mr. Adamack invited my wife and me to a game of our choice this month, on the Mariners, something not requested, but gratefully accepted.
There always have been and always will be people who set themselves up as guardians of public morality. They need to be opposed vigorously. I'm gratified that the Mariners have taken a clear stance against censorship.

A RAGTIME URBAN LEGEND
I keep coming across a word-for-word story about Scott Joplin, my latest encounter being at this site. The account holds that Scott Joplin was the "first music teacher" of Rollin Rodgers, a young white boy in a "small town" in Texas. Years later, Rodgers was offered the opportunity to sing at the Met, but insisted on bringing his old teacher to hear him. The Met refused to allow a black man in, so Rodgers went back to Texas and never did become a star opera singer. Joplin, so touched by Rodgers' sacrifice, decided to take up the composing he'd abandoned because of "money problems, health problems, and a messy divorce." So, Rodgers allegedly was in large part responsible for our having Joplin's ragtime to hear today.
What really happened: in about 1880, in Texarkana, young Scott Joplin, recognized through the town as a prodigy, came to the attention of one Julius Weiss, a German immigrant employed as a tutor for the children of the wealthy Rodgers lumber family. One of the Rodgers children was Rollin, so he and Joplin were contemporaries. Weiss arranged to give young Joplin free lessons in piano, sight-reading, and harmony, and may also have tutored the boy in academic subjects (which might account for the fact that Joplin, as an adult, was so well-spoken, and moved comfortably in white society). And since Weiss' music lessons focused on European music, Joplin got a healthy exposure to that, and came to know classical and operatic music well.
Joplin studied with Weiss until 1884, when Mr. Rodgers died, the family cut expenses, and Weiss had to leave town. Joplin, then 16, left Texarkana as well, and became an itinerant pianist in the midwest, finally settling in Sedalia MO in the mid-1890s, where he became a central figure in the city's music communities, and began to write the ragtime music that would make his reputation. He (and his publisher, John Stark) called his music "classic" or "classical" ragtime, since Joplin wanted to make over the rough, raucous folk ragtime of the day into a respected and respectable form of classical music.
I can find no evidence of any operatic performances by Rollin Rodgers, only that he played the violin, and had a "lifelong interest in opera." Joplin's not-very-messy divorce was in 1903, before he ever went to New York, determined above all else to compose a ragtime opera. During his subsequent health and money problems, he never stopped composing; by all accounts, he was a tune-writing machine.
And just for the record, Weiss' appearance in my book, THE RAGTIME KID, is pure fiction. Once he left Texarkana, there is only sketchy information of his whereabouts and activities; he may have been in Houston for a while.

The most comprehensive reference on Julius Weiss is: Julius Weiss, Scott Joplin's First Piano Teacher, by Theodore Albrecht, College Music Symposium 19 (2), Fall 1979, pp. 89-105.

Censorship Sucks

2010-08-25T17:45:00.000-07:00

Several years ago, vendors outside Safeco Field in Seattle sold "Yankees Suck" T-shirts, which caused a stir inside the stadium. Management of the Mariners baseball team decided that message ran counter to its Family-Friendly Policy, and under threat of expulsion, forced people wearing the shirts to remove them. Some of those people objected, the ACLU entered the fray, and the Mariners finally decided they would "not ask ticket-holders to remove or cover up any T-shirt."

I'm a Yankee hater from way back in 1949. It fried me, the way the Yankees always stripped the one good player from the Washington Senators or the St. Louis Browns every August, then snatched the pennant, and in the World Series, ran over my Giants or the otherwise-detested Brooklyn Dodgers. As time passed, I gnashed my teeth at George Steinbrenner, who seemed to think that a World Series title was a Yankee birthright, and failure to claim it constituted grounds to sacrifice a manager or a fat toad of a player. And when A-Rod, Seattle's most-despised ex-player, decided that his interests would best be served by pinstripes, I rejoiced. Now, I could hate the Yankees with previously-unimagined passion.

My daughter bought me a Yankees Suck shirt back in the day, and I've worn it ever since to Mariners-Yankees games. I had it on this past July 8, when an alcohol enforcement officer stopped me on the concourse behind Section 333, and demanded I remove my shirt, then and there. She told me that in accordance with the Mariners' Family-Friendly Policy, I should have been stopped at the gate and refused admittance, and that I would not be allowed to stay in the stadium with the shirt on. Since it was a hot night and I wore nothing under the shirt, she settled to have me strip to the waist and turn the shirt inside-out. Because I did not want to create a public disturbance, I complied, never mind the distress that the sight of my paltry corpus must have caused passers-by.

During the game, I'd been sitting among groups of Yankee fans. None were offended by the shirt; in fact, they thought it was funny. It served as an icebreaker, and we were all enjoying the game together. When I returned to my seat with my shirt reversed, one of the fans – a man with two small children – asked whether I'd been compelled to turn my shirt inside out. When I said I had, his comment was, “That's ridiculous. He didn't seem to think his kids had been traumatized.

This is not an earthshaking issue. I know that. Around the world, people are starving, drowning in floods, dying of preventable diseases, being slaughtered individually and wholesale. But as a professional writer, I need to complain about censorship. The actions of the alcohol enforcement officer are insupportable. I'm pretty sure the sentiment expressed on my shirt would get by all three prongs of the Miller Test for Obscenity, but the point seems moot. The expression has long since lost any sexual implication. I see it repeatedly in The Seattle Times and other mainstream publications; I hear it on the radio. If that word, used in that context, can get by the FCC, how can it stick in the throat of Mariners' management?

When I told a friend, a much-published writer of books for children, and a winner of many state librarian awards, what had happened to me at Safeco Field, her reaction was, "Unbelievable. Walk into any elementary school in the country, and you'll hear kids saying that something sucks."

I sent a letter to the Mariners' Director of Community Relations, asking that she clarify whether the alcohol-enforcement officer acted on her own initiative, or whether she was in fact following stated company policy. As a long-time 16-game planholder, I thought I was owed that much in courtesy, But more than five weeks later, now, I've heard nothing.

Local sportswriters have complained in print about the Mariners' overzealous Family Friendly Policy, and I couldn't agree more. One thing to be hassled by drunk and aggressive fans, another to be forced to disrobe so as not to possibly offend someone with an antediluvian acquaintance with American slang. Sorry, Mariners, but censorship sucks.

Unfortunately, on the field, unlike another team I could name, the Yankees don't suck. Still, win or lose, the Ms have been my team since 1977, and I'll continue to go regularly to their games, and cheer for them, even during massacres that would've turned ancient Romans pale. I admire Jack Z as a person and as a G.M., and think he's building a team that one day will make it realistic for me to wear a T-shirt saying, "Send 'em back to New York with their pinstriped tails between their legs." I just hope the Safeco Booze Bouncers won't tell me that reference to what's between legs is not Family-Friendly, and pitch me out onto Edgar Martinez Way.

A Break in the Action

2010-08-16T17:39:00.000-07:00

That mystery guy from Seattle
Took a break from his fictional battle.
All that cop-and-crook strife
Said his spouse, "Get a life."
He'll be back in a week, all a-prattle.

Get That Worm Out Of My Ear

2010-08-11T10:55:00.000-07:00

An earworm is a tune that goes round and round in your mind until you manage to drive it out with another one. It's a translation of a German word, ohrwurm, which means "earworm," and it has the same sense in Berlin as it does in Seattle. People with characteristics of O.C.D. are more likely to have frequent and severe earworm infestations, and yes, I've harbored the little critters all my life. Guilty as charged. The shoe fits.
What may be odd about my earworms is that many of them are induced by dreams, then rage between my ears for hours after I wake up. Some of them are (as best I can tell) original compositions; some are ragtime melodies; some, themes from pieces of classical music. Some are operatic. Wagner seems to over-represented. I wonder if the Master of Beyreuth suffered from ohrwurmen.
Yesterday morning, I woke up with what might have been my most unusual earworm ever. I'd been dreaming I was watching a Seattle Mariners baseball game, and the players in the dugout were singing a chorus about Ichiro's skills. The only line I remember was, "He's a real...cool...cat; he's the King-of...the Bat." And then, Ichiro sang the verse, but I can't tell you how it went, because he sang in Japanese. How do I know it was Japanese, and not just some gibberish my subconscious cooked up? Because I knew. The subconscious is often wrong, but never in doubt. Whether Japanese, Japlish, or junk, the tune stuck in my mind in Ichiro's voice nearly the entire day. I could actually hum it aloud.
I guess it could've been worse. I could've been stuck all day in a stadium-full of old-time Yankee fans chanting, "Joe, Joe, DiMaggio, we want you on our team," while their Red Sox counterpoints bellowed, "He's better than his brother Joe, Dominic DiMaggio." Or Teresa Brewer, singly coyly, "I love Mickey. Mickey Who? Mickey Mantle." There was also a song about Willie Mays from those years, but I think I'm safe from that one: all I can remember of it is Willie's boyish countertenor breaking in every now and again with a loud, "Say Hey!"
I once woke my wife by sitting bolt-upright in bed at three AM, and shouting, "Null and void!" at the top of my lungs. She wanted to know what I'd been dreaming, but I had no idea. Maybe I'd stumbled on an auditory vermicide. If so, it's probably suitable for use only by solitary sleepers.

Do It Now or Kick Yourself Forever

2010-08-04T15:03:00.000-07:00

Some real-life events just couldn't make it as fiction.
For more than thirty years, I've made it a point to reserve the three days of Memorial Day Weekend for Seattle's Folklife Festival, an extravaganza of ethnic music, dance, and food, a glorious welcome to summer.
One of my favorite Festival performers, year after year, was Jim Hinde, a regular busker at the Pike Place Market. With his guitar for accompaniment, Jim projected his music through a warm, resonant baritone, rich with energy and emotion. Many of Jim's compositions were protest songs, taking their origin from the composer's experiences in Viet Nam, and the PTSC that followed that stint.
Sometimes, a tall, thin, white-haired man named Bob Crosby sang along with Jim, and the combination of Bob's counter-tenor and Jim's baritone never failed to raise every hair on my neck and arms to attention. If there's ever been a more gorgeous-sounding male duet, I've yet to hear it. At the 2008 Festival, when Jim's set was finished, I nudged my wife. "Crosby sings one song on one of Jim's CDs, but that's it. If they'd like to consider making a joint recording, what would you think of looking into bankrolling it?"
Myra said she thought that was one of my better off-the-cuff, off-the-wall ideas. So I walked over to the singers, and briefly pitched my idea. They said yes, it did sound interesting. I told them my wife and I were going out to the midwest the following Monday, to attend the Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival and do some book promoting, and I'd check in with them when we got back.
The day before our return, we were visiting with friends in Milwaukee, and I told them about my plan. "I'm going to get right on it," I said. "Bob's pretty well along, and this is something people ought to be able to hear. I'd hate to have regrets."
We returned to Seattle June 17, and as is her habit, Myra promptly set to work putting the past two-weeks worth of the Seattle Times into order, to read over the next few days. All of a sudden, she stopped shuffling pages, and looked stricken. "You're not going to believe this," she said. "There's not going to be any CD."
It took me a moment to catch on. "No, you're kidding. Bob Crosby died?"
She held out the article to me. Six days before, Jim Hinde, to all outward appearances the picture of hearty, enthusiastic health, had had a heart attack in his sleep. He was 56.

Hasn't EVERYONE Heard of Scott Joplin and Maple Leaf Rag?

2010-07-28T14:16:00.001-07:00

Apparently not.
Early on in my search for background material for my historical mystery, THE RAGTIME KID, I called a local video shop to reserve a copy of SCOTT JOPLIN, the 1977 movie, starring Billy Dee Williams and Art Carney. I told them I'd come in the next day to pick it up.
First thing next morning, I walked into the store and up to the counter, and interrupted a clerk's daydream by telling him I wanted to pick up the movie they were holding for me. He showed his displeasure by muttering, "Whatsa name?"
"Scott Joplin."
If looks really could wither, I'd have been a cornstalk in October. The clerk looked me up, down, and sideways, then growled, "No, man! I don't mean your name. Whatsa name of the movie?"

Shortly after THE RAGTIME KID came out, I went on tour through California. At a big-chain bookstore north of Los Angeles, the assistant events manager asked me to tell him "a little" about my book, so he could make an announcement over the store's P.A. system. "Well," I said, "It's a historical mystery, set in Sedalia, Missouri in 1899, when Scott Joplin signed the contract to publish Maple Leaf Rag, the tune that started the ragtime craze in America."
I was going to say more, but the A.E.M. was ready to roll. "Great. I'll go make the announcement."
A couple of minutes later, I heard, "Please stop by the table near the checkout counter, and meet Larry Karp, author of THE RAGTIME KID, which tells all about Scott Joplin and his knockout hit, the Make Believe Rag."
There's a punch line...two, in fact. In June, 1979, ragtime performer, composer, and historian David Jasen actually did publish a tune he called Make Believe Rag.
And I could send you to youtube to hear Make Believe Rag, as transcribed for guitar by Tony Ackerman. That's what the caption says. But the tune Ackerman will play for you is Maple Leaf Rag.

Writing Characters From Real Life: Better To Know More Or Less?

2010-07-21T14:08:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Nothing To Be Frightened Of, an intelligent, witty musing on death and dying, by the British novelist Julian Barnes. To quote noted children's author Peg Kehret, "He is funny and thought-provoking at the same time, and he does it all with such glorious language." The book is also a memoir, featuring stories about the author's family and friends which influenced and inspired his thanatopsis. And especially in the final pages, Barnes brings to the fore some thoughts about the ways and means of fiction writers.
One of these thoughts is that in basing fictional characters upon real people, an author is wise to not know too much about the source. Barnes tells about a writer-friend who eavesdrops on conversations, but is careful to walk away from the speakers before he's been overexposed, and therefore limited in developing his characters.
At first, I agreed with Barnes. I've been unable to use people I know as characters in my books, because as a seat-of-the-pants writer whose characters and plots develop during the course of the first draft and beyond, knowing all I do about my friends and acquaintances seriously restricts their fictional development. There are things these people simply will not say or do on a computer screen.
For this reason, when I set out to write my history-based ragtime mystery trilogy, I was leery of over-researching people like Scott Joplin; his publisher, John Stark; and Brun Campbell, the Ragtime Kid. But as I went along, I found the more I learned about a particular person in history, the more possibilities opened for characterization and plot. Without having a first-hand take on someone whose life I knew was over, all the information I gleaned from historical documents set itself up as a supporting structure, and the more extended that structure became, the more compatible fiction the character could build upon it as my story developed.
One post-facto example: Nan Bostick, a ragtime pianist/historian/composer from the San Francisco Bay Area, is the great-niece of Charles N. Daniels, a prolific composer and publisher from the Ragtime Era and beyond. After Nan had read The Ragtime Kid, she told me she'd enjoyed the book, and had loved seeing Uncle Charlie as a character. But I wish you'd talked to me about him, she said. At one point, your Uncle Charlie said, 'Goddamn,' but my Uncle Charlie never, ever, used profanity or blasphemy. And during a heat wave in Sedalia, your Uncle Charlie loosened his tie and opened his shirt collar. My Uncle Charlie wouldn't have done that. He used to drive his wife crazy by going fishing in a properly-set up white shirt and tie, and his best wool suit.
Not that I thought my knowledge deficit had done my book mortal harm, but had I known about those quirks, my picture of Uncle Charlie might have been that much more arresting. And beyond that, Uncle Charlie's real-life peculiarities might have made the plot an even richer stew. I have to think, in historical fiction, more background information, used judiciously, is never going to be less.

Twisting History

2010-07-14T14:32:00.000-07:00

Discussion can get pretty heated when writers of historical fiction talk about whether it's all right to change historical facts in the interest of a story. I tend to go with the naysayers. Tell it like it was. Whenever I hear a sportscaster these days say, "Spahn and Sain, and two days of rain," I think no, wait. That's not how it went.
I first became a baseball fan in 1948, listening to games on a big floor-model Philco radio in our dining room. That year, the Boston Braves won the National League pennant, though their starting-pitcher staff was supposed to be pretty thin. "Spahn, Bickford, Sain, then pray for rain," the broadcasters said.
But Boston pitcher Vern Bickford, a rookie, managed an excellent 11-5 won-lost record and a fine 3.27 earned run average. Nor was he a one-year wonder. Before an arm injury ended his career, he pitched seven seasons of major league ball, made the National League All-Star team, threw a no-hitter against the powerful Brooklyn Dodgers, and one year led the National League in complete games and innings pitched. Somebody somewhere really must not have liked him; he lived to only 39, dying in 1960 of stomach cancer.
And when you come down to facts, the story told by the 1948 broadcasters was hardly spot-on to history. A fourth starting pitcher on that Braves team, Bill Voiselle, also an All-Star one year, pitched more than 200 innings, won 13 games (only two less than Spahn),and had an ERA of 3.63, lower than Spahn's.
Include Bickford and Voiselle, and you're telling an entirely different story, a truer one. "Spahn, Bickford, Voiselle, Sain. We don't care if we get no rain." I wouldn't mind seeing that quartet in Seattle Mariners uniforms this year.

The Power of Privilege

2010-07-07T18:29:00.000-07:00

Doctors who use their honorific to secure good tables in restaurants irritate me. But I guess we all have our price.
There's a great neighborhood theater here in Seattle, Kenyon Hall, and one of the performers who appears there is Peter Mintun, a marvelous café pianist from New York by way of San Francisco. Peter came to Seattle this past weekend, and a few days before his performance, Lou Magor, Kenyon Hall's major domo, brought him around to our house to see and hear our music boxes. Peter's major musical interest, early 20th-century American music, is well-represented on disc-playing music boxes, so we had a spirited audition of several instruments. And when it came time for Lou and Peter to leave, I hesitated only briefly before I asked Lou whether it might be possible to seat us up front for the concert. He said he thought he could oblige.
As befits his customary venues, Peter's style is intimate, and for an hour and a half, we sat, Myra and I, six feet from the side of the piano, nothing separating us from the pianist as he played and sang from his repertoire of American show and movie music from the 'teens, 'twenties, and 'thirties - tunes I'd first heard in New York hotel lounges more than a half-century before, songs that had promised an enchanting, beguiling forever to a teenaged boy, nursing his grossly-overpriced glass of coke or ginger ale. At the end of Peter's concert, it took an effort to blink myself back to Seattle and 2010.
While I was listening to the music, had I felt guilty for having sidestepped into those front-row seats? Not in the least. Could I summon up the slightest regret for my reprehensible behavior? I have to confess, I couldn't. O tempora! O mores!

Go to youtube, search Peter Mintun, and see and hear for yourself what I've been talking about. Be prepared for a long stay. Peter's put up a tune a day for the past 140 days.

Word Bloat

2010-06-30T12:36:00.000-07:00

I was about to open a box of breakfast cereal yesterday when I noticed this message on the box: "We are passionate and committed..." That brought up quite a mental image of what life must be like in that perfervid cereal factory.
Nothing new, just more and more so. I remember a day, close to twenty years ago, when CD players were just beginning to appear in cars. I needed to fly from Seattle to Minneapolis, then was going to drive to Chicago, and I wanted to listen to music on the way. So I made certain to reserve a car with a player, but when I arrived, the clerk told me she had no CD-playing cars available, and I'd have to take a radio-only model. I pointed to the large sign on the wall behind her, the company's pompously-worded mission statement, which ended with "We are completely committed to your total satisfaction." I told the clerk I supposed I was partially satisfied - after all, I did have a car at my disposal - but to be totally satisfied, I'd need a car with a CD player, and unless she provided me with one, she would clearly not be committed to my satisfaction, let alone not completely committed. The episode ended with my getting a bit knocked off the rental price, but leaving me still short of total satisfaction.
Now, cereal makers are passionate, mortgage brokers are one-hundred-percent committed to my financial well-being, every latest movie is the ultimate, any mundane accomplishment is awesome, and radio personalities urge me to see not just their friends, but their good friends, down at the local used car lot.
Up your ante, Buster. Talk about collapsing money markets. What's going to happen when the language bubble bursts, and our over-inflated verbiage collapses under the weight of its bloat? Words will have no meaning whatever, and we'll be left mumbling meaningless incoherences to each other. Or are we already there?

Musical Dialogue

2010-06-23T14:38:00.000-07:00

I can sit through a musical performance and not notice sour notes that bring groans from my wife. On the other hand, cliched, stilted, or inappropriate dialogue in plays or books go right past my spouse, while I grind my teeth and mutter. I figure I'm doubly-blessed: I can enjoy music that she can't sit through, and I have a leg up in writing dialogue.

A few months ago, I was talking to ragtime composer-pianist Tom Brier, from Sacramento, and was surprised to hear that he writes a musical piece very much the same way I write a story. He starts with a theme and, at most, a general idea where it's heading, then follows where it leads him, all the way to the end. After that, he revises, cleans it up, sharpens focus here and there, and sometimes shifts a musical phrase from one part of the composition to another. And occasionally, when he gets stuck on one part of the composition, he works on another for a while.

So, at the recent Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival in Sedalia, MO, my ears pricked up during “Perfessor” Bill Edwards' seminar on the origins of ragtime. Many people believe ragtime originated as a combination of characteristic black and white rhythms, the linkage of a regular march-like duple beat in the left hand, and a syncopated (emphasis shifted off the regular beat) melody in the right hand. Supposedly, syncopation originated in African music, and was brought to the United States by slaves.

But recently, ethnomusicologists, studying the rhythms of African music, have noticed that syncopation is conspicuous by its absence. Following up on this, “Perfessor" Bill suggested that syncopation actually might have originated in regional, possibly racial, speech patterns.

Okay. Listen to this performance of the “Merry Widow Waltz”(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k7UjwGPpRs), then plug in these words: Please cut me some roast beef, and then pass the salt.” Nice, steady rhythm, isn't it, all words falling directly on the beat.

Now, listen to legendary ragtime performer/composer/historian Max Morath, singing a hit tune from 1909, by Brymn, Smith, and Burris. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrWGn2g1BN4). It's got a long title, which is also the first line of the chorus: “Come after breakfast, bring 'long your lunch, and leave 'fore supper time.” The rhythm of this speech is strikingly different, with emphasis frequently falling off the beat. Syncopation.

So, here's another arrow for the writer's quiver. When a particular character's speech marches or waltzes sedately along, that person is going to come across as pretty formal, maybe even stuffy. But a character who speaks in syncopated rhythms will strike the reader as far more lively. Something to keep in mind, particularly during rewrites.

Read all about “Perfessor” Bill Edwards' ideas on this and other ragtime subjects at http://perfessorbill.com/

Get acquainted with Tom Brier and his music via youtube. Watch his fingers during the concluding portions of Scott Joplin's "Cleopha." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej7XEt4suPg&feature=related

The Third Music Festival

2010-06-15T18:11:00.001-07:00

Two weekends ago, Seattle's Folklife Festival. The next weekend,
Sedalia's Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival. And this past weekend, Union
Illinois' Annual Antique Music Show and Sale. Union is 45 miles west of
O'Hare Airport, and the site of the Donley Wild West Town Museum, where,
in 1976, a group of antique phonograph collectors held a swap meet, and
had so much fun, they repeated it the next year. Now, 35 years later,
it's the biggest Buy-Sell-Trade event of its kind in the world, with
attendees from around the globe, most of whom are long-term friends and
correspondents, but actually see each other only once a year - at
Union. Picture a large hall with six rows of tables holding
hundred-year-old talking machines with beautiful horns, music boxes from
Switzerland and Germany that play the hit tunes of the days of our
great-great grandparents, and other strange and rare old-time musical
contrivances. No wonder I was so entranced, I forgot to take a photo.

Now, I'm in Scottsdale, basking like a lizard in the three-digit heat,
and will have an appearance tonight for "The Ragtime Fool" at the
Poisoned Pen Bookstore. Tomorrow, it's Borders in North Scottsdale, and
Clues Unlimited in Tucson, then Thursday, the Velma Teague Library in
Glendale for an interview with Librarian Lesa Holstine. That'll wind up
my 17-day tour. It's been a blast, but it's time to get back to my
writing room on Puget Sound.

Ragtime Is Dead? Hell, It Ain't Even Sick.

2010-06-09T09:28:00.000-07:00

That remark by the late Bob Darch was much on my mind this past
week, at the Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival in Sedalia, MO. 'Maple Leaf
Rag,' the tune that started the ragtime craze in America, was published
in Sedalia in 1899, and every year, during the first
Wednesday-through-Saturday in June, the city hosts a music festival to
honor composer Scott Joplin and his publisher, John Stark.
The future of ragtime looks bright, with many young players and
composers, some only in their teens, showing off their pianistic skills,
compositional knowhow, and knowledge of ragtime history. To name only a
few, there were Adam Swanson, Wesley Reznicek, Morgan Siever (who is all
of 13!), Luke Vandermyde, and Max Keenlyside.
In the photo we see Brett Youens and Larisa Migachyov, both past
teenage, but still very much in their salad days. Larisa is turning
pages for Brett, because he's playing his composition, 'Rag Doll Rag,'
which was inspired by listening to a number of Larisa's compositions.
You can listen to Brett, Larisa, and all the ragtime wonder-kids by
searching their names on youtube. And then you just might be inspired,
yourself, and decide to come to the 2011 Festival and hear them live.
--Larry

A Trio of Music Festivals

2010-06-02T10:10:00.000-07:00

I'm in a stretch of a great three weeks, musically speaking. Every
Memorial Day weekend for the past 30+ years, I've spent a solid three
days at the Seattle Folklife Festival, and if the program has gotten
more into world music, there's still plenty of bluegrass, string bands,
jug bands, and hundred-year-old syncopated stuff, enough to let me prove
once again that my bad taste in music knows no bounds. This group of
banjo, trombone (mostly hidden), clarinet, sax, and bass was terrific.
And this year's multiethnic menu contained plenty of pleasant
surprises, such as a huge, complicated Irish pipes instrument, with keys
like any woodwind instrument and a bladder to be pumped by each arm.
Much more mellow than the usual bagpipes.
Speaking of menus, there was the customary dazzling array of food
vendors. One doesn't want to listen to music on an empty stomach, and
not many ones at Folklife do.
As always, the Seattle Folklife Festival was over far too soon,
with a long year ahead till the next one. But there are two more to go
in this year's trio. Tune in next week for the report on the Scott
Joplin Ragtime Festival.

Is Writing a Mystery Novel Painful?

2010-05-26T13:15:00.000-07:00

I've heard and read a goodly number of comments by writers about how painful a process writing is. They say that each day, as they begin a session, they're sure they'll never get a single word onto paper or screen, and if they do, that word and any others they manage to squeeze out will be terrible, unsalvageable. Then, when they finish a manuscript, they dread going back to start the next book. Facing a blank page reduces them to fidgets.
I don't get it. I wake up every morning and can't wait to get to my computer and see what's going to happen. Does something big explode into prose every day? Not close. Is every piece of prose deathless? Hey, I live in Seattle; is every day a sunny day? But eventually, the sun always does burst through, and after an extended spell of nasty weather, that glow often seems wondrously brilliant.
Maybe personal history plays a role. My previous line of work involved looking after people with serious medical problems - talk about performance anxiety. The idea of a bad day on the job then was unthinkable. So if my characters decide to take a day off here and there, no problem. They're just trying to get themselves together. They'll shape up tomorrow.
Maybe it's just that a person has to be a little off-center to willingly spend all day locked in a room with a bunch of imaginary people. But that's the key word: 'willingly.' No one's forcing me to go down to that writing room five mornings a week. If it weren't enjoyable, why on earth would I ever do it?

The Little Mystery of the Trains of Littlefield

2010-05-19T12:56:00.000-07:00

There's been a longstanding conflict among the citizens of the town of Littlefield. Some of the residents are convinced their town was the setting for a miracle. Others insist the event can be understood through rational processes.
It all began early on a foggy morning many years ago, when Olaf Nielssen climbed into the engine of his train in Calico, fifty miles west of Littlefield. His fireman looked concerned; the old Norwegian engineer had that set to his jaw that said he'd had another argument with his wife, and would be stubborn, pigheaded, and obnoxious all day.
At the same time, Sam Gibbons stumbled into the engine of his train, in Sea Flats, fifty miles east of Littlefield. Sam's fireman shook his head. The engineer had been drinking again. It was going to be a long day.
The trains set off at seven A.M., one eastbound, one westbound, and an hour and a half later, as they approached Littlefield, Harold Mallon, the stationmaster, walked out onto the platform, and to his horror, saw the trains speeding toward each other on the same track. The westbound train was supposed to slow, permitting the eastbound train to be shunted aside to another track. But both trains were going full speed ahead.
The reason why the westbound train didn't slow was that Sam Gibbons, drunk as a lord, had passed out atop the throttle. The fireman had tried to pull the engineer away from the controls, but slipped on some oil on the floor and knocked himself cold.
On the eastbound train, the fireman pleaded with Olaf Nielssen to hit the brake, but the engineer shook his head. By gum, he had the right of way. He was not about to yield.
As the trains approached, hell-bent for leather, Harold Mallon buried his head in his hands, and waited to hear the horrible crash. But it never came. A moment later, the stationmaster peeled his fingers off his face, and to his astonishment, saw the two trains, still on the same track, vanishing eastbound and westbound.
To this day, Littlefield remains divided. Half the citizens are certain divine intervention spared their town a disaster. The other half claim that the event is easily explained through straightforward logic and reason: Norse is Norse and Souse is Souse, and never the trains shall meet.

OK, I've got that out of my system for a while. I'll be better behaved next week.

Death of a Dentist

2010-05-12T14:07:00.000-07:00

My dentist is a very nice man, but just seeing him come around the corner into the examining room breaks me into clammy sweats. I've taken in stride a number of uncomfortable medical procedures performed on unmentionable parts of my anatomy, but having a dental cavity filled leaves me feeling like a soaked dishrag.
I know why I feel this way, and it still doesn't help. My first dentist was, believe it or not, my godfather, a long-time family friend. He was a large person, topping 300 pounds, bald, and usually with a cigar sticking out from one or the other corner of his mouth. Unfortunately, my baby teeth were persistent devils, wouldn't fall out to provide space for their successors, so they had to be pulled. This was always done under nitrous oxide, which induced terrible dreams and had me throwing up for hours after I awakened. Consequently, routine dental checkups came to be events which would keep me awake for several nights beforehand.
When I was ten, an X-ray showed the need for another extraction. I jumped out of the chair, and told the dentist and my mother I wouldn't have it done unless I could "have the needle" I knew Mother got for her dental work. They both agreed, but when I sat back down, the dentist threw his hairy arm across my chest, slammed the nitrous mask over my face, and pushed. I started hitting, kicking, screaming, until finally I lost consciousness.
After I woke up, my mother scolded me for kicking "Uncle Doc" in the shin, and so hard. In between barfs, I told her I was sorry I hadn't kicked him higher, and that I'd never let the liar near me again. Nor, I added, was I terribly pleased with her. Several solemn promises later from both miscreants, I relented - what's a ten-year-old kid going to do? - and got my dental maintenance and repairs done under local. But the damage was done. There's no way I can anticipate a dentist-visit with anything short of terror.
So, when I began to write murder mysteries, you know what was one of the first ideas to come into my head. But I've never written Death of a Dentist, and I doubt I ever will. Whenever I think about spending every day of a coming year and more in a dentist's office, I get the cold collywobbles.

Don't Jazz Me, Man. It's Ragtime

2010-05-05T12:08:00.000-07:00

I've been delighted at how many people have told me they've enjoyed my three ragtime-based historical mysteries. But churlish as it may be, my stomach tightens when I hear, "I really liked your jazz series."
Let's clear up a couple of points.
First, the books comprise a trilogy, not a series. In three parts, they cover the story of popular ragtime music in America, from its birth in 1899, to its death in 1916, to the early stages of its revival in 1951.
More important, it's ragtime, not jazz. As conceived by Scott Joplin and his publisher, John Stark, popular ragtime, a blend of the syncopated melodies of early Black Americans and the classic regular double beat of the European march, was intended to be a form of classical music, no different from a Schubert song or a waltz by Brahms, and so, was to be played strictly according to the score.
Joplin and Stark's caution, "Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast" became famous, but not everyone agreed. One (possibly apocryphal) story has Charles L. Johnson, a fine composer of midwestern folk ragtime, a more rollicking form, putting Allegro Vivace on a composition, then telling John Stark at a party, "You know what that means? It's Latin for 'Stick it in your ear.'"
Nor did the hot piano players from the saloons, barrelhouses, and brothels take heed. They competed to see who could play ragtime fastest and with the most impressive embellishments, and gradually, the music evolved into an improvisational form which was first called jass.
John Stark, no surprise, hated jazz. Not long before the publisher's death in 1927, Paul Whiteman, the self-titled King of Jazz, came to St. Louis with his orchestra to play a concert, and dropped by to issue Stark a personal invitation. But no amount of persuasion succeeded in convincing the old man to come.
So let's give proper consideration to one of our very greatest American composers, and the publisher without whom we might well never have heard this lovely music. Nothing wrong with jazz, folks, but this is ragtime.

Marjorie May Campbell's Concluding Comments on her Ragtime Fool Husband

2010-04-28T16:09:00.000-07:00

I guess it worked out all right, me letting Mr. Karp write in my place the last two weeks. He finished up his California signing tour yesterday by getting put on a puddle-jumper airplane from San Francisco to Portland, and then on another one from Portland to Seattle. Me, I always swore I would never ride on one of those airplanes, and I never did. Even Brun wasn't such a fool, he'd do that. And then, last night, Mr. Karp got up at 3AM to drive his daughter, son-in-law, and grandson to the airport so they could go to Virginia for the son-in-law's brother's wedding. So, he's danged glad to have me filling in today.
Where I left off last time was when that Mr. Paul Affeldt came by with Mr. Spiller, they were going to make some acetate records of Brun playing ragtime. Brun was out in the garage, getting ready, so when Mr. Affeldt rang the bell, I told him he'd have to go back to the garage, 'cause that's where Brun's piano was. But then Mr. Affeldt started asking me questions about Brun, like when we were young, back in Oklahoma. I just told him I had nothing to say. I wasn't about to do ragtime or ragtime people any favors. They sure hadn't done any for me.
After that recording session, Brun was excited like I'd never seen him. He was sure this was going to be the big break he'd been waiting for. Him and Scott Joplin were going to be famous, and Brun and I were going to have all the money we could ever use. Fat chance, I told him, you get to be a bigger fool every day. And I was right. I don't know if Mr. Affeldt made anything off the records, but we never saw a nickel from them.
Back in November, 1952, when Brun was dying, he still wouldn't give up. Stubborn? Like no other man I've ever seen. He said that Scott Joplin used to tell people no one would appreciate his music for 25 years after he was dead, and Brun believed that was starting to happen. I didn't have the heart to tell him no matter how hard you a person might want some things to happen, that isn't going to make them happen. After Brun's funeral, I told our daughters, well, that's the end of that.
Except it wasn't. I lived until 1988, and I saw and heard a lot of things. When nobody was around, I read that book, They All Played Ragtime, by Rudi Blesh, who you can read about in Mr. Karp's book. I'll sure tell you, it made me even gladder I didn't ever let those trashy ragtime people inside my house. But then one day, around 1970 or so, I heard some music on the radio that I thought was really beautiful. When the announcer said it was called "Maple Leaf Rag," by Scott Joplin, I almost had a conniption, but then the man said it was played by a person named Joshua Rifkin, who was a classical piano player, and he was playing it like a classical piece, which he said was what Joplin wanted. Now, I don't know if I believe that, but I figured Mr. Rifkin had to be pretty darn good if he could turn a piece of garbage into such beautiful music. And then, of course, I saw that movie, The Sting, in 1975, where it had Scott Joplin's ragtime music in the background. Which seemed right to me, because the movie was all about con artists and killers.
These days, people can buy a CD record of Mr. Affeldt's acetate discs, with Brun playing piano and having an interview. There's other piano players who've made CDs of Brun's music, too, and some of them call themselves "Brun's Boys" (which I doubt they would do if they ever really were Brun's boys). I bet wherever Brun is now, he's laughing, and saying, "So, who's the fool?"
I knew Brun was different from all my other beaux, but I thought maybe I could change him. So, I guess that does make me the biggest fool of all. I'm glad Mr. Karp wrote this book, The Ragtime Fool, and it's my hope that every young woman in the country will read it, and let what happened to me serve as an example to them not to be foolish like I was about choosing a husband. And I thank Mr. Karp for letting me write this down on his blog.

You're welcome, Mrs. Campbell. And thank you for being willing to appear in my book.

On the Road Again

2010-04-21T11:33:00.001-07:00

What with my being on the road to publicize The Ragtime Fool, and having to post this week's blog from my Sidekick device, Marjorie May Campbell agreed to wait one more week to finish telling us about her fool husband. Not that she was happy about it, but as she said, after all those years trying to deal with Brun, a person learns to make do.
The first event on the trip was Monday evening at The Avid Reader in Sacramento, where ragtimers Tom Brier, and Bub and Petra Sullivan came by to hear how I came to write the ragtime trilogy. Then, last night at San Mateo's M is for Mystery, Camille Minichino, a physicist who, as Margaret Grace, writes mysteries set in the world of miniatures,and I had a lively discussion about how we write, why we write what we write, and doing and not doing research. The audience included ragtimers Washboard Kitty Wilson, and Phil and Darwyn (who commented that she'd read Mrs. Campbell's remarks on this blog, which prompted Marjorie May to say she was glad SOMEONE listens to her).
Now I'm on the way to L.A. I'll go to Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego Thursday, and the L.A. Times Festival of Books Saturday, to sign in the LA Sisters in Crime Booth, the Mysterious Galaxy Booth, and the L.A. Mystery Bookstore Booth. And do a little research in between. More on that later.

--Larry

Help Keep the Seattle Mystery Bookshop Open

2010-04-13T13:34:00.000-07:00

Marjorie May Campbell has graciously agreed to postpone the rest of her story to allow a pressing matter to be posted a day early, in the hope it will help publicize a serious problem for a terrific local independent mystery bookshop.
The Seattle Mystery Bookshop, on Cherry Street between First and Second Avenues, has long been the city's major resource for readers of crime literature, and the major support for crime-literature writers. Located just off Seattle's historic Pioneer Square, the shop depends heavily upon the tourist trade, and to this end, places a sandwich-board sign at the corner of First and Cherry, to direct tourists the half-block to the store. I've walked past that sign (and others like it, belonging to other area small businesses) for at least a decade, and have never had to swerve to avoid tripping over them.
About a month ago, a city inspector cited an ordinance, and directed Seattle Mystery to remove the sign, under threat of fine. Shop owner J.B. Dickey reports that since this occurrence, sales have declined significantly. J.B. is concerned that, with tourist season just beginning in Seattle, poor sales through the summer might compel him to close the store. This would be a disaster for local mystery readers and writers.
Seattle radio host and supporter of the arts, Dave Ross, will interview J.B. tomorrow, Wed. April 14, just after 11am PDT, on KIRO, 97.3FM. Seattle-area residents, please tune in if you can, and consider sending a request to Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, www.Mike.McGinn@seattle.gov, asking him to rescind this ordinance which threatens to close a small-business Seattle arts landmark - which in the process, will deny the city a nice little chunk of sales tax.

The Ragtime Fool is a Killer Book...and Introducing Mrs. Marjorie May Campbell

2010-04-07T12:49:00.000-07:00

Good news for the week: The Independent Mystery Booksellers Association selected The Ragtime Fool as one of its Killer Book recommendations for March. www.killerbooks.org

Now to the business at hand. Having read The Ragtime Fool, Mrs. Marjorie May Campbell, Brun's wife, has requested space to tell her side of the story of the Ragtime Fool. I'm glad to let her do that. The keyboard's yours, Mrs. Campbell.

Well, hello. My name is Marjorie May Campbell. I was Brun Campbell's wife, and I'll say right off, if anybody was ever a Ragtime Fool, it was Brun.
I want to thank Mr. Karp for letting me have my say on this blog of his. He promised not to change anything I write, and I intend to hold him to that. It's not that I think he wrote me up unfair, but there are always reasons why people do and say things, and if I come across a little bit prickly in his book, well, you just try being married to Brun Campbell for upwards of 30 years.
Brun and me got married in Oklahoma in 1918. I knew he had some bad habits, but don't all men? But he was very good looking then, and charming besides, and he promised sincerely, no more drinking, and no going to low places to play that ragtime music of his. He'd cut hair in his barber shop 6 days a week, and go to church on Sundays.
Well, in the next seven years, we had three beautiful daughters. The youngest had asthma, and the doctors said we should move to Venice, California for her health. I was glad, even though I'd be leaving all my friends and family in Oklahoma, but I figured so would Brun, and it was them who kept getting him to drinking and playing ragtime, and I figured in California, we could start off new.
Not that it didn't work pretty good for a while. Every so often, Brun would fall off of the wagon, which did grieve me, but like my mother always told me, men are just plain going to do that, so I put up with it best I could. But then around 1940, these musicians in California, this Lu Watters and Turk Murphy, and I don't know who-all else began playing ragtime again, and people took note,. And that was all Brun needed to hear. I could put up with a drink here and there, but when he started playing ragtime on our piano, that was the last straw. I mean, that music is the devil's own, it leads young people into temptation, and the low places they go to hear it just pours gasoline on their fire. And it's not only the preachers who say it's bad - I've read lots of articles by medical doctors, brain specialists, and they all say the same thing. Ragtime can damage young peoples' brains. Well, I had to look out for my daughters, didn't I? I told Brun, no ragtime in the house, period, so he went and moved his piano into the garage out back. Sometimes he and his pals took it down to the barbershop a few blocks away.
But that wasn't the end of it. He started spending all of his time writing articles for magazines about ragtime and that Scott Joplin person who invented it, who I figure he's burning in you know where on account of that. Then, Brun started to make records of it, and sent the money to Mrs. Joplin, who was still alive then in New York. Never mind what it cost us to make those records. I tried reminding Brun about his promises, but of course, he said he didn't remember making any such promises. Isn't that the living end? Well, you can believe who you want.
Some man, his name was Paul Affeldt, came to interview Brun around 1948, and he brought along a Mr. Spiller, with some new music recording paraphernalia...hold on. Mr. Karp says I've got to stop here, else it's going to be too long for his blog. He says I can go on next week if I want, and I'll hold him to that.

THE APRIL RAGTIME FOOL

2010-03-31T14:06:00.000-07:00

Happy April Fool's Day, the official release date for The Ragtime Fool, the concluding book in my ragtime historical-mystery trilogy.

Calculated publicity stunt? No. Until recently, Poisoned Pen Press released books near the end of the month. When I finished writing The Ragtime Fool last May, which projected to an April publication date, I assumed the book would come out in late April.

Where'd that title come from? In 1951, Brun Campbell, the real-life Ragtime Kid, was old and sick, and questioning what he'd done with his life. His wife seems to have had no doubts; she thought her husband was a fool for having devoted his existence to Scott Joplin and ragtime, the Devil's music.

But late in writing the story, I wondered whether Joplin's Journal might be a better title, since my fictional Brun's hope for validation centered upon recovering a diary his mentor had written many years before. But my editor pointed out that as the final volume of a trilogy, coming after The Ragtime Kid and The King of Ragtime, The Ragtime Fool was right on, and should stay. Feeling just a little foolish, I agreed.

I built my story around an event which I believe was the first public honoring of Scott Joplin and his music, a 1951 ceremony in Sedalia, MO, at the Hubbard (Black) High School. The racially-mixed audience listened to speeches and music, and applauded the presentation of a plaque proclaiming Joplin's accomplishments, which was to be hung on a wall in the school. To make the fictional antecedents fit a proper time line to the real-life ceremony, I had the story begin on April 2. But in the second draft, I realized I'd omitted a critical scene, and to remedy that, I needed to push Page One back to April 1. I resisted the change, because April 1, 1951 was a Sunday, and in 1951, in Missouri, Sunday was a day of rest, when nothing much happened. But I finally saw a way around that problem, and the plot of The Ragtime Fool began to unfold on April 1.

For ragtime enthusiasts, April 1 is The Day the Music Died. On April 1, 1917, Scott Joplin, ravaged by syphilis, and exhausted by years of fruitless attempts to get his opera, Treemonisha, into performance, died on a psychiatric ward in Manhattan State Hospital. Old Brun Campbell refers to that sad day in Chapter 2 of The Ragtime Fool.

In addition, some jazz authorities list April 1, 1917 as the date Victor Records released the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's “Livery Stable Blues,” the first recorded example of the music then called jass. Ragtime then stretched out beside its most illustrious composer, not to stir for a quarter-century, when music historians and musical performers began to breathe new life into the corpse.

Until about a month ago, these coincidences never caught my attention. But as I looked through Poisoned Pen Press's spring catalog, and noticed the date for The Ragtime Fool, a chain of associations cascaded through my mind: April 1...April Fool's Day...The Ragtime Fool...the day Scott Joplin and his music died...the day a bunch of damn-fool diehard Klansmen set a plot into motion to blow up Hubbard High School, with its integrated audience gathered to honor a great Black composer.

I'm glad I didn't think along these lines sooner. If I had, I'd have tied myself in knots, trying to avoid having people think I was trying to pull off a cheesy publicity stunt.

Now, all I can do is eat a little crow with my cheese.

While you're wondering whether to marvel at the way the stars have aligned for this book, or condemn me for over-the-top disingenuousness, click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tx1jky1D1A , and enjoy “The April Fool Rag,” composed by Jean Schwartz, in 1911. I don't know the precise date of publication, but I could make a good guess.

To leave this blog and return to the main Larry Karp Books website, click here

More On the Poisoned Pen Web Con

2009-10-15T11:14:00.000-07:00

Please be our guest... Participate in the world's first virtual mystery and crime convention. The benefits of a major mystery convention, from the comfort of your home computer!

PP Webcon
Saturday, October 24, 2009

PP Web Con
Saturday, October 24, 2009
The world's first major virtual mystery and crime convention bringing authors and readers together on-line from all over the world

The convention you can attend from the comfort of your own home.

Live interactive events bringing authors and others together in real time
Author Panels and Debates in Video, Audio and Text
Author Presentations - authors discuss their writing in Video, Audio and Text
Coffee Shop - a live chat room where visitors can mingle and chat with each other or with visiting authors
Recorded "on-demand" video and audio presentations, and articles.
Book Trailers
Author Interviews - Barbara Peters' in-depth interviews with over 80 top mystery and crime writers
Goodie Bag with book voucher, free E-books, and privileged interactive access to live events for all registrants

Register Now!
Register now to be part of this revolutionary experience. 100% of all profits go to the public library system.

Our Price: $25.00

Come To The Poisoned Pen Web Con, October 24

2009-10-13T17:56:00.001-07:00

PPWebCon - the world's first interactive virtual mystery convention on October 24th - brings the benefits of no hotel bills, no air fares, and the chance for crime and mystery authors and readers around the world to meet, mingle and chat live online. Check out the day's activities at ( http://www.ppwebcon.com)

For a registration fee of just 25 US dollars, attendees will receive:
- Privileged access to live events - 64 authors are participating in more than 50 panels and presentations, on live and recorded video and audio, as well as in text. See the line-up here: ( http://www.ppwebcon.com/panels.html )
- The chance to meet and chat to authors in the online Coffee Shop chat room.
- Goody Bag - more than thirty authors have contributed over fifty items to the goody bag! The gifts range from entire novels, through brand new short stories, to fun items like entertaining articles and even recipes!
- Book Voucher - A 20 US dollar book voucher for The Poisoned Pen Bookstore

Larry Karp's contributions include an audio presentation, "Where Do You Get Your Ideas, and Which Comes First, Character or Plot?" and a text presentation, "Rewriting: Gotta Do It, Might As Well Enjoy It." Larry will also participate in two panels, "The Path to Publication," and "Historical Research: making it real without boring the reader." And there are two Larry Karp contributions in the Goody Bags: the first chapter to his upcoming mystery, "The Ragtime Fool," and an article, "What Ever Happened to Sarah Purdue," which tells the fate of Thomas Purdue's wife, who was left in a coma at the end of Larry's most recent Music Box Mystery, "The Midnight Special."

Guest of Honor, Dana Stabenow and International Guest of Honor Lee Child will participate in live interviews along with 62 other writers from Hawaii to New Jersey in the USA, and from all across the world including Canada, Iceland, Ireland, the UK, France, South Africa, and Australia.

And right now visitors to the website can be entertained by Barbara Peters' TV show " The Criminal Calendar". More than 90 one-hour interviews with the world's top crime writers. ( http://www.ppwebcon.com/authorinterviews.html )

Two October Writing Events Not To Be Missed

2009-08-27T11:18:00.000-07:00

     The Poisoned Pen Web Con, the world's first virtual mystery convention, takes place on October 24. It's not to be missed. Come visit with your favorite authors (myself included) via panels, presentations, and coffee-shop chats. Pitch a manuscript to an editor. Some events will be via video, some by audio, and some, text. All attendees will receive a goodie bag full of writings by those same favorite authors.
          When's the last time you could attend a major mystery/crime writing conference for $25, travel and hotel costs included? For full information, go to http://ppwebcon.com/

     Warm up for this virtual extravaganza by attending the Field's End presentation, "Refueling the Creative Mind, with creativity coach, Jurgen Wulff. This takes place on Bainbridge Island, WA, on October 17, just a week before the Poisoned Pen Web Con. Check out Field's End Fall Event Page, http://www.fieldsend.org/Event.html

   Here are the details for the presentation:
Date: Saturday, October 17
Time: Registration: 8:45 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.
          Presentation from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
(lunch break from 12:00 noon to 1:30 p.m.)
Location: Bainbridge Pavilion Cinemas
          403 N. Madison, Bainbridge Island
Cost: $65 early registration (August 1 – 31)
         $85 regular registration (after August 31)
         $60 group fee (5 or more people registering together)
In a presentation by this popular writing coach, writers will be led through a series of connected seminars to explore four innovative, right-brained ways they can prepare their creative minds for the acts of writing and revising. The seminars include
I. Alter Ego Strategies
II. Right Brain Visualization
III. The Q Method of Analyzing Text
IV. The Transformation of the Inner Critic
Writers will be guided through a few brief interactive exercises during the presentation to illuminate these strategies and will be provided with useful handouts for application afterward.
• The goal of Wolff's presentation is to help creative writers to discover fresh, personally meaningful insights into their own creative lives as a way to unlock and engage their strengths.
• This presentation offers benefits not only to writers of all disciplines and genres but also to other creative people for whom storytelling and narrative are important components of expression.
• Come prepared to explore potential breakthroughs in your own creative process! Participants are not required to have a work in progress in order to attend.
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ABOUT JURGEN WOLFF
Jurgen Wolff has taught creativity techniques and workshops worldwide for more than 15 years. He was also the publisher and editor of Brainstorm: The Creativity Newsletter for ten years (it now continues as an online publication).
His creative writing books include Your Writing Coach (Nicholas Brealey, 2007) and Do Something Different (Virgin Books, 2005; published in 5 languages).
His own work includes a long list of writing credits in the world of entertainment, including feature films, plays, short films, television movies and miniseries, animated films, journalism, short stories, radio scriptwriting and television series. He divides his time between London and California.
Jurgen's website: www.yourwritingcoach.com
Brainstorm: www.brainstormnet.com
Time to Write (blog): http://timetowrite.blogs.com/weblog