The Word Thief

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!

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.

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

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

"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

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

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.