Mystery Dawg

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noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Thu, 06 May 2010 04:39:00 +0000

Hello all,
I just want to alert you to a special event that is happening for a fellow author. Today is Cinco de YOUNG JUNIUS, which marks the presale release of the limited edition of YOUNG JUNIUS by Seth Harwood.

The good folks over at Tyrus Books along with Seth are producing this beautiful Limited edition. All the details can be found on Seth's site. Click on this link.

If you enter in the promo code DAWG when ordering and you'll receive 3 bucks off the cover price! How can you go wrong?
So go check it out !

Palos Verdes Blue by John Shannon

noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:49:00 +0000

Here is the first chapter of the new Jack Liffey novel, Palos Verdes Blue by John Shannon.

ONE
The Wrong Currency

A small boy stood in front of the pickup holding a plastic machine gun that flashed its red transparent barrel as it clacked away gruesomely. Die, motherfucker, the boy mouthed clearly at Jack Liffey through the windshield, bracing his short little legs for the imaginary recoil, like some TV he-man of death. Then he ran off, squealing. The mock-attack didn't upset him. Because of his job, he dealt regularly with the excesses of childhood.

What did unsettle him was returning to the neighborhood where he'd lived long ago, had actually owned a house. He guessed it was some root phenomenon of consciousness stirring. Inside himself, he sensed a whisking up of inner confusion about who he really was. For instance, Joe Wells, who'd lived in the ranch house directly across the street--now repainted a nameless beigy earth-tone--would never have let anyone park a boat on the block, let alone right in front of his own home. He'd have gone ballistic, called the cops, probably even torched it late at night.

Meanwhile, on this side of the street, the Shelling house was just plain gone, now denuded land ready for something new. A scrape, in the realtors' lingo. Even though this area of Redondo was over the crest and inland from any ocean view, values still had risen astronomically. Down the block there was already one three-story McMansion. You couldn't take your eyes off the poor botched structure, lost between two incompatible waves of banal suburban longing--stylistically somewhere between Taos and Normandy. Parabolic window in front, pseudo-vegas jutting out above, diamond-shaped medieval mullions on the upper windows and a red tile roof so steep it would just have to go on waiting vainly a very long time for the snows. The thing was beyond critique, like a madman's tiny fanatical runes on a cramped sheet of paper.

And where his then-best friend, Dale Nichols, had once parked a well-loved MG-TD, a young man with Buddy Holly glasses could be seen spraying water on a new concrete driveway. Was he expecting it to grow? The neighborhood had become a checkerboard of astonishing tax deductions, he thought. Every one of them nudging a million dollars from one side or the other--probably even Kathy's. "His."

At least his ex-wife's simple frame bungalow was unchanged, except for the creep of entropy. It obviously needed paint and a reroof, but it still looked comfortable. Once his dark tower of retreat . . . but no more.

Kathy had left a message on his machine across town in East L.A., where he lived now with Gloria, a Latina cop. Her words conveyed an ambiguous SOS, and he had to assume it was about their daughter, Maeve. Maeve had just had an abortion after beating herself up for weeks about making the decision. He was in fact relieved that she'd done it, though he'd never let on to her which way he would have voted. She was just finishing up at Redondo High, and she'd already been admitted to three colleges, and what parent wants to see a child turn her back on all that to pin diapers on the kid of a 30-year-old gangbanger who'd briefly infatuated her and then dumped her?

Kathy peered out the front window and noticed him, so he had to pretend he'd just driven up, yanking again on the parking brake and waving casually to her. She did not look happy. She looked instead like someone who'd been kicked as a puppy and had slowly grown ill-tempered.

I will endure, he thought.

She opened the door for him as if he'd never been away and he smelled it right away. Frying fish sticks, probably the cheapest generic brand, Captain Pegleg or something similar. It was her secret food vice that she ate whenever she was alone or in need of comfort, dunked bite by bite into sweet tartar sauce. By deduction, it meant Maeve was away or locked in her bedroom. I guess I really am a detective, he thought.

"How could she already be in trouble?" he asked after their perfunctory greetings, imagining some complication of Maeve's surgery or more likely a calamitous depression. Even an attempted suicide. Stop it, he told himself.

Kathy's forehead wrinkled for a moment before she realized what his question meant. "Oh. I'm sorry, Jack. It's only natural you'd think it was about Maeve. She's still pretty sad but she'll work through it."

"Can I see her?" He followed her out of the entranceway into the living room, radically rearranged now, unable to stop himself from looking for signs of a man--whatever that would be. A leather box, a pipe, a pair of athletic socks casually discarded, Esquire? He wanted it for her, really. He honestly did wish her well. Just not that creep Brad she'd lived with, then married and eventually had to chase away. The man had slapped Maeve once, and Jack Liffey still wanted to frogmarch him out a very long dock and strangle him over open sea.

"The princess is not receiving today," Kathy said. "Not even her beloved dad, so she told me. She said she needs a few days off from normal life to meditate and heal. I started by leaving trays of food outside her door, but she never picked them up, so I've been feeding her flat foods I can get under the door. Swiss cheese. Cooked Pop Tarts--you know how she loves them. Unfortunately, baloney won't work since she's still in her veggie period and you can't really get tofu to hold together."

"She likes Ry-Vita with peanut butter," he said, and they both laughed a little. It was good to see Kathy lighten up some. "Think of it as a whole new flat cuisine," he suggested. "You can write it up for other moms with stubborn girls. Hey, hadn't you better go save the fish fingers?"

She blushed. "You still know my secrets."

"If you find them not within this month, you shall nose them as you pass the kitchen."

"Hamlet?" she asked.

"Bad Hamlet. Get them off the stove before they burn. And let me try to have a word with Maeve."

"Don't be discouraged. She's clinging to her hurt."

He made as much noise as he could going down the hardwood floor of the hallway, hoping that way to announce himself. Jack Liffey knocked softly at the door where a hand-lettered sign warned, If you don't sprout, stay out.

"Hon, it's me. I'm not here on a rescue mission, I promise. I came over because your mom has something else to talk about--nothing to do with you. But I'd love to say hello as long as I'm here."

"Hi, Dad." The voice came softly through the door, causing his legs to go all rubbery with affection. The yearning to protect was powerful and had its own etiology.

"Are you okay? I know I can trust your word."

"That's some kind of reverse blackmail, isn't it? I'm not crazy, Dad. I just need to be alone for a while. Can you do that?"

"Of course I can, hon, but your mom is running out of flat food, and she's worried. Do you think you could put in an order and then whisk a tray of something nourishing into the room if we stay out of the way? Just for my peace of mind?"

"There're some cooked edamame beans in the big brown bowl in the fridge. Could you nuke them a little and sprinkle Tabasco on them?"

"You mean soy beans?"

"Uh-huh. They're great for phosphorous and vitamin A. Protein, of course."

"Sort of pre-tofu," he said.

"Don't joke right now, okay?"

"Sorry. You know I'll talk about anything you want when you're ready. I love you very much, honey."

"I know that, Dad. Thank you."

"Don't go on living with pain for too long, that's all. Proust said a little pain is good for the soul but too much starts closing off paths you may need."

"Wow, I'll have to think about that. That's profound. But go away now, please."

He headed back to the kitchen. As far as he knew, Proust hadn't ever said anything of the sort, but a little extra authority never hurt with Maeve.

*

At the table he declined a share of the fish sticks. He had a secret food, too, but it had nothing to do with the ugly bug-eyed crap left over in the bottom of commercial fishing nets. He could barely look at the kitchen table, green Formica with little flying kidney shapes, the perimeter wrapped with three-ribbed aluminum. It had been his mother's and it screamed of the early 1950s.

Kathy held a small portion of fish up on her fork, liberally daubed with lumpy white sauce, as if she were just coming awake to what she was eating. "I'll tell you a secret, Jack. You were always the strong one. Even in the bad days."

The bad days meant all the drugs and booze right after he'd lost his secure aerospace job, and she'd had to go back to work as a substitute teacher. That was over a dozen years ago now, and he wasn't proud of any of it. However, he knew better than to reply.

"You know how I've always said I disliked your newfound . . . profession. Well, hell. You've turned out to have a talent for it. And Gloria's a good woman--I admit that, too--unlike some you've been with."

This ticked him off a bit. Especially after Brad the asshole had all but insisted she get a breast job and have her pussy stitched tighter. Jesus Christ. But all in all, she seemed pretty mellow now, for Kathy. Somehow she intuited that that he was thinking about doing Brad harm.

"I wanted to hurt him, too," she told him. "You know he left a lot of his stuff in the closet. A few months ago I took all his eBay-ready baseball cards up the cliffs in PV, and sailed them into the ocean, one by one. Until it got boring, and then I just dumped what was left. I had help, actually. It was a kind of coming-aboard ritual to a divorce club I go to up in PV every two weeks. A book club, really, but with an edge."

"Edge--yeah, I get it. Kill the scrotum, the head dies."

She smiled. "Thanks for that. My best friend up there is Helen Hostetler." She took another forkful of Captain Pegleg, dipped it, nibbled and sighed. "Her daughter's missing, Jack. It's right up your alley."

"Which town?" San Pedro, where he'd grown up, was the far eastern flank of the peninsula, down at sea level around the port, a working class town to the core. All the rest of what, back then, they'd basically either hated or ignored--but called "the hill," when they had to call it anything--was made up of five interlocking horsey 'burbs of an ever increasing wealth that oozed uphill toward the crown of Rolling Hills at the top. This was a gated town he'd never set foot in, one where local jokes had it that even the maids were rich.

"Helen lives just west of Lunada Bay. I guess that's Palos Verdes Estates."

All he remembered about Lunada Bay was that the Greek freighter the Dominator had gone aground near there when he'd been in high school, and they'd all delighted in hustling around P.V. Drive every few weeks in their beat-up jalopies to watch as the grounded freighter broke up and began rusting away on the rocks. He wondered if anything was left of it now. Then he remembered that Lunada Bay was also where the spoiled rich surfers who lived nearby had tried to drive away all outsiders, slashing tires and beating up what they called flatlanders, until even the sheriff had had to intervene. Bayboys--that was what they'd called themselves. An angry whiteboy gang. He smiled to himself. Like hamsters with ostentatiously evil tattoos.

"What can you tell me about the girl?" he asked.

"I'd rather let Helen brief you."

"Okay, what can you tell me about Helen?"

Kathy thought for a moment. "Remember, this is a good friend I'm describing so you'll have to consider the source. Hel was a junior tennis champion once, really very very good, but she broke her ankle in about six places coming off the back of a boyfriend's motorbike and that was that. She was already at Loyola-Marymount on a tennis scholarship, and she switched from whatever she was studying to French. After she graduated, she was a secretary for some import-export company down in the harbor where she met Freddy. He was a broker or expediter, no, a freight forwarder--one of those strange-sounding jobs. I never met him. They got married and moved up to where he thought they belonged, among all the fancy folks. Don't make a face. Her place really isn't that pretentious. Biggish, but, basically, just your standard upscale L.A. ranch house."

"I remember P.V. It's the zoning covenants up there that keep them from building those horrid pretentious sugar cubes. I guess that's one of the perks of old money."

"Old money?"

"Well, it's all relative in L.A., isn't it? I guess I just mean before color TV."

He saw she wasn't really registering anything but her own worry. "Hel's a good woman, Jack, who never really got her due in the world. She kept the household together and raised her kids as well as she could after he ran off with some young cunt. She worked part time back at her old company and volunteered a lot at the library. I met her at the Divorcee Book Club. We had very similar tastes. We both hated Snow Falling on Cedars and we voted down The Bridges of Madison County."

"Okay, what's in the other column?"

Kathy made a face. She took her time before answering. "All right, I get it, but you didn't hear this from me. Antidepressants, for one thing, but then, that's everybody on the hill, really. They may as well put them in the water. Prozac, Zoloft--it's a shifting reality. And since the world gets awful cold and lonely after a while, she had an affair with a married neighbor. It happens. Right now I think I'd even have a fling with you."

He avoided her eyes. "Man, that is desperate," he said as neutrally as he could.

*
Maricruz Olivares
Behind Aztec Market
Huépac, Sonora

Dear Maricruz(1),

This is Jaime and I do not know if I will ever be able to post this letter. It may be better for people in the poblano to think I am gone off the face of the earth. I am trying to make my English better but I am going to write in Spanish for now because we will both be more comfortable that way. On that terrible day when I knew I had to leave, I also knew the events of that day would transform my fate completely. Maybe if we were not such a dry country of poor farms there would not now be just a few large industrial farms owned by rich men or by powerful Norteamericano companies. No matter what you heard, on that day the patrón of the chicken farm, Don Ignacio himself, came to me and asked me to procure you, yes you, to work as a maid in his home. I knew what he wanted and so do you because he is famous for abusing women whom he employs. I told him to his face he was a gran pendejo (it just means a big jerk, I am trying to preserve some of the flavor of Jaime's Spanish --ML). He said I was fired at that moment, and he had his bodyguards rush me off the farm. As you know, there would be no other work for me in Huépac after that. I realized I would have to go to el norte. I could have feared this, but I have studied hard and I speak English well, as you know. Mari, I am trying to look upon my fate as a great adventure now. Please remember me fondly.
With all my fraternal love, Jaime

(1) These letters translated from the Spanish by Maeve Liffey.

*

Since he knew it was Gloria's early day home, and that there was already some trouble on that front, too, he drove his old pickup straight back to Boyle Heights after he'd grabbed a fast-food lunch in Redondo. He'd catch up with Kathy's friend Helen Hostetler in the evening. You weren't supposed to say it, but the comings and goings of divorced housewives were pretty easy to predict. And so were those of cops--sometimes.

Gloria Ramirez was in her favorite reclining chair with a beer and a mail-order catalogue open on her lap. Her feet were up on an ottoman and her eyes were closed. He glanced at her thick legs and felt an ache for her. She must have heard him come in the front door. "Love can be a kind of loss," she said without opening her eyes. "You know what I mean?"

Her .40-caliber Glock in its clip-on holster was on the sideboard not far away, and there were a lot of things you didn't say to someone within reach of a gun that powerful. The LAPD had carried 9mm Berettas until they found out you had to shoot a drugged-up attacker as many as twenty-six times with a 9mm to make him go down. It was then the police union started calling the old weapon a poodle-stopper.

"Maybe you could tell me."

"I don't mean you taught loss to me, Jackie. No, not that. It just happens."

His aging dog Loco, allegedly half coyote, wandered in and sniffed at him in a way that made him wonder if the animal was going a bit blind. Don't you dare, he thought. He sat opposite Gloria, and Loco collapsed across his feet.

He nudged the dog off, heading into the kitchen for a ginger ale, which he sipped at. He'd fought his way by himself out of a bad drinking period and been sober ever since, over ten years now--but he knew a lot of folks would call him a dry drunk and not trust the change. There still wasn't a day he didn't want one of those nice cold beers. Especially when Gloria was in a mood like this.

"Shit happens, they say," she said.

A month earlier, she'd driven up to Bakersfield to help him out on a case, and he knew that up there she'd met a man that she'd fancied quite a lot. But he didn't think she'd done anything much about it, and he wasn't even supposed to know the whole flirtation had taken place. He guessed it was a dry affair.

"You upset?" he asked, sensing that anything he said was destined to be a bit idiotic.

She traced her finger around something on the catalogue page. Outside he heard one of the Gomez kids across the street banging hard on a part of the engine under the hood of their family's old Chevy Biscayne as banda music played faintly, pumping out its polka beat. These noises had become the ordinary consoling sounds of the neighborhood.

"I feel a little detached," she said. "Like that woman who gets dressed every morning and then puts on her weapon and goes down to the Harbor Police Station isn't me at all. But cops aren't supposed to have weird feelings like that. Everything's meant to be dialed in for us, hard-ass only, 24-7. If you ever want to make L.T., that's for sure for sure."

I wonder what we're talking about, he thought.

"It's rough," he said. "You're not a hard-ass inside."

Her eyes came up as if just noticing him.

"How do you know that?"

There was no answer to a question like that, but he felt certain he'd better not joke. "I just do. I know you're a good woman."

"That's a real trick, Jackie, if you can know that. Uh-huh. You're full of real tricks." She took a long pull of beer, finishing off the bottle.

There was a louder clang outside on the car and then an angry complaint in Spanish. A helicopter pounded noisily over, thought it seemed a bit early for that. The police buzzed their neighborhood off and on all night, occasionally flicking on their godawful Nightsun searchlight.

Gloria set her empty bottle down on the table and ran it idly in little circles. She never came to rest, he thought. Even several beers in, her hands fidgeted and her attention was clamorous, her black eyes fierce as lasers when they came to focus. At night, she turned over fast in her sleep every few minutes like someone hit by a cattle prod, each time tightening quickly into a new defensive pose. She even yelped once in a while and talked out loud, but too fast to follow. She always woke up fuming.

Loving her was a workout, but he did, and he meant to make a stand on it.

"Can I bring you another one?" He leaned forward.

"Freeze, motherfucker!" she snapped. He couldn't help but flinch as Gloria stuck out a finger to make a pistol aimed at him. She laughed. How funny was it? It was a private laugh, containing more layers of irony than he could access. "Sorry, Jackie. Go ahead, I'd like another one." She shook her head. "You're so nice to me, your balls should fall off."

"Only women get to be nice?"

Her grim smile softened. "I remember when I first wanted to be your girlfriend. On Terminal Island, remember? All that danger but you stayed nice to Steelyard even when he was being a asshole to you. I thought, hey, that's the way a wife's supposed to act. I want a wife. Why shouldn't I have a wife?" She laughed again. "Now I'm being a asshole, and you're still nice. I don't get it, and I'm not gonna try."

As he extracted his feet from Loco and got up, she added, "You looked a whole lot younger back then, boyfriend. It's only been a couple years. Is it being with me makes you look so old now?"

"This is just what I look like now. Sometimes it happens fast." He knew he'd gone mostly gray and his neck was starting to wrinkle up and he had ugly white keloids on his arms but it wasn't what she was really talking about.

She grabbed his sleeve as he walked past. "You up for a matinee?"

"We didn't use to ask," he said. "We'd just start kissing."

"Last one undressed's a chickenshit," she said.

*

In a cheap gas station that evening, a panhandler who looked as if goats had been eating his hair, tried to pump Jack Liffey's fuel for him under the glary light. He gave the old man a dollar and sent him on his wobbly way. He probably needs it more than me, was his automatic thought, but he was really still thinking about Gloria.

After the late afternoon sex, for dinner they'd had a supermarket-cooked chicken, and he'd made a big salad and some garlic toast, and she'd finally become more cheerful. Yet he sensed that, underneath, there was still something more than her normal disaffection eating at her. Gloria was three-quarters-- maybe more--Paiute Indian, and she'd been raised by foster parents to think Hispanics were the bees' knees and indios were dirty and hateful, and she'd never really recovered from all that toxic rancor, not to mention her years as a rebellious delinquent. It was amazing, he thought, that the police and their natural enemies were so genetically similar that she could have crossed that bridge to become one of the keepers of order with so little difficulty. He'd seen her work and she was a very good cop; she remained in charge without swagger, staying sharp and full of empathy just when it was required.

He wondered if the good-humored guy in Bakersfield whom she'd fancied still held attraction for her, if he was a lost opportunity for a little more of the loving that she needed so badly. He was sure it wouldn't have helped for long. But he wasn't sure whether there wasn't even more balm he could apply to that terrible open wound in her psyche. All he could do was keep on trying.

*

On his way to meet Helen Hostetler, he was distracted by a platoon of men in Davy Crockett coonskins and fringed suede jackets carrying a seemingly weightless full-size log cabin across the boulevard in front of him. They had the green light and were hurrying a bit. There were two extra Crocketts carrying big signs in advance and behind the cabin that said: Wide load and I would vote to plow through any gentleman's estate with a road or a canoe.

Jack Liffey gave them a V-sign out the window. He had no idea who they were, but, for him, any madness like that demanded unquestioning encouragement. Whoever you guys are, you're probably going to be sorry, he thought.

*

Dad. This is all just so wussy! I shouldnt show you how much I miss you but I cant help it. Dad Im sixteen in a week please dont forget.

I come home today and ask if you called and mom just hands me some boring official letter I stick in my pocket. You know really heres the picture of the way it is now--shes stuffing Oreos in her mouth with both hands and brown crumbs dropping all around her all day. Jesus. Its been like this since you left. Shes really puffing up toward that awful woman on TV.

She goes your lucky to be so thin but its just a lot of unnecessary crap. To me you know. Shes really bitter I think.

And I go its smoking dope keeps me light on my feet mom. You ought to try it. And I do a little tap dance to the fridge to show off and get me a Corona. All she drinks now are these G and Ts one after another.

So she goes if your going to drink make me a gin-mint sweetie.

I go that stuffs poison.

She goes will you play scrabble with me later?

And I go I got to meet the Bayboys. Im important in the Bayboys dad. Its our duty to guard the bay and keep the best surfing spot in California for us. And I mean by any means necessary.

I go to mom the tides at six-o-six and theres a weak onshore so it wont blow off the waves. Itll be super surf tonight.

She goes in that baby voice just one game and what about your lessons?

You know everybody up on the hill has to have these dum lessons thats the rule we all guess. Tennis and dance and piano and all that shit. I stopped going to violin months ago but Mom doesnt know it. I can tell you tho.

And I go to her that the Surfline on the phone is announcing eight footers. I gotta represent. Ill write more later. Please send me a address to write you dad.

*

"You must be Jack." The woman looked older than her age and plain in a faded print housecoat. For some reason the blond in her hair seemed to have been shot dead, leaving no highlights at all. "Helen Hostetler. Nice to meet you." They shook hands decorously, and she beckoned him in.

He bowed his head and pointed out the bald spot. "No horns. No matter what Kathy's been telling you about me."

She gave a half-laugh, as if unsure what he'd meant to convey. "She doesn't talk like that about you, Jack. You'd be surprised."

He raised an eyebrow, but pleasantly, to keep her at ease. "Please have a seat in here. I know better than to offer you alcohol, but I have coffee."

"That'd be great."

The furniture was a bit beat-up for Palos Verdes, and paint was starting to peel at the baseboards. There was something about her that he liked. A little what-the-hell attitude, he decided. There was an oil portrait of what must have been her--younger, naturally blond, with two teen-age girls. No dad included. But the odd multi-part background included a Corvette and a dog and a sailboat and the house itself. All the objects the man had once possessed. It gave Jack Liffey the creeps.

In the living room, there were two bookcases that he gave the once-over. The first held a lot of women writers, and some damn good ones--Nadine Gordimer, Marilynn Robinson, Katherine Dunn, Muriel Spark. Classics, too. And not a single cozy mystery about a great aunt who let her chihuahua solve the crimes. The second bookcase was all non-fiction, which he never much read, on principle--he just wasn't sure of the principle.

She soon brought them coffee with all the trimmings, and he took a cup untrimmed. It was damn good, some kind of intense French Roast.

"I guess Kathy's already told you something," she said.

"Let's say she hasn't."

So, laying out her story in a straightforward enough manner, she explained to Jack Liffey her seventeen-year-old daughter, Blaine--named for a grandmother--had gone missing two weeks earlier. There'd been no insinuation at all that anything like that was coming. No drugs, only a few innocuous boyfriends, no acting out at home or school, as far as she knew. Blaine was nothing but utterly wholesome, fresh-baked whole-grain bread.

"Tell me more about her."

"She's been working with a group that's trying to save an endangered butterfly, the famous Palos Verdes Blue. I mean, how can a girl trying to save a butterfly be into anything disreputable?"

There was no point telling her about the other innocent girls whom he'd eventually found banging the whole high school football team out of some unspoken need, or mainlining heroin, or burning brands into their arms with kitchen forks. Teenagers had psyches stranger and more convoluted than most adults could imagine.

Carefully edging away from the subject at hand, he nudged her toward taking about herself, which he often found a lot more relevant.

"Do we have to talk about me?"

"If you don't trust me, I can get you somebody else."

"Okay, sorry. I'm an anxious person," she said flatly. "I don't understand why. I used to ride a gutless Solex all over France, no worries at all, and now I can't help feeling apprehensive that I might not be able to pay next month's mortgage or even find a parking place at the supermarket. That's a caricature of myself, but little things have begun to worry me more than they should. And if you’re that nosy--recently, I've become horny as hell."

"Which anti-depressant are you on?" he asked.

"Kathy told you that?"

"No. Everybody is. Some of them are better against anxiety. Paxil, I think. Ask your doc. Do you self-medicate with alcohol? I ask because I once knew all about that."

"I'm not on anything but Prozac."

"Does your daughter know you have affairs?"

"I beg your pardon!"

"You mentioned the horniness, Mrs. Hostetler."

"It's not like I'm hanging out at one of the cougar bars." She sipped her coffee decorously. "I've been discreet. No, I don't think she knows. And, by the way, it's in single digits."

"Single digits could be nine boyfriends," he said.

"It's three. In the twelve years since Freddy left me. None very recently. Can we move on?" This was all imparted in a tone that seemed a bit beyond her natural range. Ease of manner was apparently unavailable to her now.

"I'm sorry. I have to ask things I'd rather not know. The other daughter?"

"Beatrice. She's three years younger than Blaine and into engineering. It's like she has something masculine to prove."

"Girls aren't supposed to be engineers?"

"How many have you known?" she asked sharply.

She was right. "A few, and they were mostly stuck in ancillary jobs."

"See." A placid black Labrador strolled out of the back of the house, demanding attention, and Helen scratched between its ears.

"What was Blaine's major?"

"Biology. I don't know where that goes. Medicine? Teaching biology to other kids?"

"Can I see her room?" he asked.

"Is it important?"

"Yes, it's important. I'm sure you can see that."

"Well, I've poked around in there but it didn't get me anywhere."

The dog looked up at him quizzically and sniffed, as if detecting Loco.

"Not to have a look at her room would be odd, wouldn't it, Mrs. Hostetler? If I'm really a detective. And I'm going to have to ask you for money in advance. A retainer."

"Fine," she said. "I think you can call me Helen. I'm not your mother. And I can pay you in cash. Real dollars."

That was good, he thought. Most of his life had always seemed to be spent in the wrong currency.

###

So much for New Years Resolutions.....

noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 06:03:00 +0000

Well, once in three weeks is not bad for me, I guess.

So far this year, I have published half a dozen stories on Powder Flash Burn and Darkest Before the Dawn. This year I'm expecting the number of submissions to increase. It is a pleasure to see other ezines open up this year and I implore you to check them out:
Bad Things
BEAT to a PULP
Crooked
A Twist of Noir
The Flash Fiction Offensive

I have been busy with CrimeWav (http://www.crimewav.com/) and taking a day trip to San Francisco to meet up with CrimeWav partner Seth Harwood. Seth is the author of Jack Wakes Up that is being released in May by Harcourt's Three River Press.

I was in San Fran also to visit Scott Sigler at his book signing for CONTAGIOUS. This is Scott's 2nd book and first to make the New York Times Bestseller List at 33. It was great to hang with Seth, Scott and all the rest of the podcasters whoo showed up at the signing.

I want to thank all of you who left messages wishing me a Great 2009. It has been a pleasure to be accepted into this wonderful writing community. I wish all the writers out there all the best.

Happy New Years

noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 03:47:00 +0000

Hey All,

The Mystery Dawg is pleased to end 2008 on a good note and ring in 2009 will all the noir hopes and dreams of all writers.

Happy New Years to everyone. I hope that 2009 will bring you hope, joy and prosperity.

My resolution is to try to post to this site at least once a week.

CrimeWav.com - The Webs first Crime Short Fiction Podcast

noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 01:11:00 +0000

Hey everyone. I know that I haven't posted here in a long time because I have been busy with Powder Burn Flash and Darkest Before the Dawn fiction sites.

For the past few years I have been listening to Jack Palms crime, the work of Seth Harwood in the podcast form. He has podcasted 3 books and a few short story collections. If you haven't listen to them, go get them now at Seth's site or on iTunes.

Earlier this year Seth came up with a great idea to provide a place for authors to podcast their work. I asked him if he wanted some help and here we are today, along with web guru Jason Andrews, with the 'webs first crime fiction podcast site!' It's called Crimewav. Yeah, no 'e'

The first episode is up and is also available in iTunes. Open iTune and do a search for it.

First up is Part 1 of Vicki Hendrick's MUST BITE. This short story appeared in an anthology last year and Vicki decieded to add a little more for the Storyglossia edition that Anthony Neil Smith (of Plots with Guns fame and the incredible author of The Drummer and Yellow Medicine).

So take a few minutes and listen to the new wave of crime coming at ya. Seth has some great pieces coming soon, you will not be dissapointed. You have my word!

The Devils of Bakersfield - A new Jack Liffey Novel

noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 03:35:00 +0000

ONE
Decent Folk

Spin around, he thought, then open your eyes. Maybe the actors have changed, the flats depict a different scene, the props are newer, older, more chic. Context is everything. You learned your lines but you may now be Hamlet declaiming to Falstaff in a pub. Mother Courage talking to Willy Loman.

It was just a moment of alienation, really. He had them, even when he was with his daughter who tended to keep him grounded. Maybe it was the spectacle.

Powerful underwater lamps lit the steep-tumbling whitewater of the Kaweah River right below the restaurant and he could tell that a bit later on, when the last sunlight was gone, the inner-lit rapids would be a magnificent if weirdly artificial display. Now in the dusk you could still look north and make out the broken terrain of the Sierra foothills. The western slope was a gradual meandery rise to the really high peaks that were out of sight, a lot less impressive than the abrupt wall of the eastern cascade that he loved.

"Those hills out there," Maeve said, nursing her Shirley Temple or whatever they called it these days. He didn't play at pseudo cocktails himself, just asked for a ginger ale. "They look like white elephants."

Uh-oh, Jack Liffey thought. That was straight from the famously oblique Hemingway story where the dread word abortion was never mentioned. Maeve was back on task.

"I get it. But I'm not pushing you, hon," he said.

"I know," she said glumly. "You've never even stated a preference, though I know what it is."

Right then they would have been settled into a campground amid giant sequoias, having this nice father-daughter chat around a campfire, except some fatuous guru, unknown to both of them, had declared this weekend and Sequoia National Park the very date and site of a multiple harmonic convergence, whatever the hell that was, and every aging hippie on earth had flocked in to claim the camping spots and then to chant and dance and practice some fairly unmentionable behaviors. Jack Liffey and his daughter had retreated to the town of Three Rivers at the park entrance only to find that booked up, too.

"Have some Anis del Toro," Jack Liffey said. "It tastes like licorice. Everything tastes like licorice." That was from the story, too. At one point in his life he had nearly worshipped Hemingway, but like most men he had eventually backed away from all that hard-edge male sentimentality, that steeping in laconic strength, Gary Cooper on steroids.

"No fair," she said. "I didn't really want to talk about Hemingway."

"Okay. We can talk about the baby if you want."

"Baby? I'm only six weeks gone."

"Fetus then. It sounds so clinical. I just--"

The waiter came up to interrupt as waiters always did, this one slim and handsome and about 18, and Jack Liffey could see that Maeve was truly in a distracted state because she didn't even stare at the boy. She'd really been in love with the feckless gangbanger who'd got her pregnant, and Jack Liffey kept reminding himself that a teenager's first loves and losses were every bit as dire and consequential as his own tenth loves, maybe more so. And the pregnancy quadrupled it all.

"How do you make these horrible decisions?" she said. "I know I should go ahead and have . . . the operation, but it's going to wipe me out emotionally. I know it will. I'm always going to wonder what the kid would have been like. Or be like. I sound like I've decided but I haven't."
A hundred platitudes crowded his brain and he managed not to let any of them out. "Have you talked to your mom about it?"

She gave him a dismissive look with her face bunched up like a prune. "She wants to kill Beto. With a thumbtack so it would take a really long time. You know exactly what she'd say."
"Did she tell you about hers?" he asked.

Maeve looked thunderstruck. He wasn't sure he'd ever seen her jaw drop open quite like that, though she was a volatile young woman.

"Oops."

"Are you serious, dad?"

That was a cat that Kathy should have let out of her own bag, but it was too late now. Another lapse his ex could hold against him. He was astonished that Kathy had never told Maeve. "It was before we were married and I was in graduate school. She learned she was pregnant and made her decision without telling me a thing. It was a different time. She thought she was being brave and I think it was considered mildly gallant of me to pay for the abortion after the fact, but to be honest I wouldn't have tried to talk her out of it. We weren't ready."

"Was it an ex-older brother or sister?"

"Hon, that's like asking the shape of the asteroid that didn't hit the earth. The fetus probably still had a tail and gills when its development stopped."

"Interesting euphemism," Maeve said.

"When we bumped it off. I'm not afraid of words. Or acts. I stood by her and would have if she'd wanted to keep it. But I probably would have resented it a bit. It seemed so important to get my master's, but as it turned out a master's in lit--as they say, with that and three bucks you can get a Starbucks." In fact, after a long career as a technical writer and the final layoffs during the collapse of aerospace in L.A., he'd ever since been making himself only about half a living as a finder of missing children, his savings dwindling away.

A couple dressed like refugees from Woodstock were arguing at the door with the headwaiter who was obviously insisting that the restaurant was booked up even though a couple of tables were empty.

"How did mom take it? I mean after."

"I won't lie to you. It surprised her how much the emotion walloped her. She thought she was a toughie. But she got over it."

"Meaning, I will, too."

"Sure, you're a toughie. But you just say you've got to go through with it and I'll stand by you all the way to hell and back. I mean it, hon. I'll go to LeMaze with you and hold your hand while you're learning to pant."

She touched his hand. "Thanks, dad. I appreciate the thought but I'm not sure I wouldn't prefer a big nudge in the other direction."

He smiled. "That's honest. Responsibility is a sonofabitch, isn't it?"

A Mexican server showed up with his fish and her vegetarian delight and set the platter on a folding trestle that he snapped open with a flourish. This one she looked at, maybe out of loyalty.
"Where are we going to sleep tonight?" Maeve asked.

"There's no real problem. Bakersfield is only an hour and a half down the road and they're a pretty big town. There'll be motels galore. We'll be there in time to watch Leno if you want."
"Is he the one with the chin?"

*

Artifact 1877
If it please the court, and the gentlemen of the jury, of all the low, miserable, depraved scoundrels that I have ever come in contact with, these defendants, without any grounds for defense, are the most ornery rascals that I have ever met, and I think the best thing we could do is take them out and hang them as soon as possible.

--The defense counsel, 1877 Bakersfield trial of alleged horse thieves. They were hanged only minutes later.1

*

Maeve was dozing as Highway 99 approached the surprising sprawl of Bakersfield. Just outside town was a billboard all in black letters on white and overrun with underlinings and exclamation marks like a teen's love note: Jesus says Impeach! all Those who support Satan's One World Goverment!!! He liked the fact that the n in government was missing. Someone had actually taken credit for the sign but he was past before he could read the smaller print.

He split off on business 99 and went quite a way before he eventually picked out a likely neon sign, neither a big overpriced chain of "suites" nor one of those gone-to-seed Kozy Kabins, just something middling and hopefully free of roaches. The desk clerk who answered the bell on the counter seemed to be Vietnamese. It was the first time he had seen that. Usually it was East Indian.

Maeve was wide awake now and clutched his arm ostentatiously. "Oh, Humbert, can we have a really big soft bed?" she said flirtatiously.

He glared at her for a moment but the clerk didn't seem to notice one way or another.

"A daughter who's almost 18 deserves the privacy of her own room," he said, enunciating 'daughter' and 'own room.' "Two rooms, please. Single beds will be fine."

"Please, Humbert, at least have them close together." She leaned into him and gave a stage whisper: "I'll sneak over later."

"Could you put one of us here and the other in Fresno?" Jack Liffey said. It only confused the clerk and he waved his remark away. "Anything. This is embarrass-dad night."

Maeve calmed down and fingered her way through the rack of tourist brochures as he dealt with the clerk.

"What was all that?" he said outside, as they retrieved their camping bags from the pickup.
She held his arm again fiercely. "Humbert, don't you know all daughters are in love with their dads?"

"Okay," he said. "You can't get any more pregnant so we may as well make love, just so Freud is happy."

He could feel her stiffen and let go. "Dad!"

"You started it. Don't you know the gods have burdened fathers with a kind of automated self-loathing about incest? I can't even think it. I'd be struck by lightning and turned to a cinder where I stand."

"You know that's not true of all dads," she said.

"Yeah, I do." He'd run across the dispiriting aftermath of incest often enough in his career.

"Anyway, I'm very happy, thank you, with Gloria, as you know."

Sgt. Gloria Ramirez was the LAPD officer he lived with in East L.A., though, for unstated reasons of her own, she would not marry him. He was crazy about her strength of character and her sense of independence. He wasn't quite as crazy about the confused sense of self she'd been saddled with by foster parents who had brought her up to despise the fact that she was a full-blood Paiute Indian.

"Can we do something tomorrow to make up for this fiasco?" Maeve said.

"We could visit where Cesar Chavez used to live, or we could go to the remains of a black farming village called Allensworth that was founded by Civil War veterans . . ."

"That doesn't quite cut it."

"We could even go back and chant to the big trees with all those converging harmonicas."

"We got our walk through the sequoias," she said. "That was enough to recharge my nature batteries for a while. They really are amazing trees."

"Yeah. It's good to be overwhelmed once in a while by Mother Nature. Here's your key for 108."

The key was actually a plastic card with a mag stripe like most motels these days. He was in 114 three doors down. He resisted the urge to go into her room first and look under the bed and into the bathroom to make sure she was safe from whatever.

"How about I call your room about 8 tomorrow morning?" he said.

"I'll try to have my face on by then."

"I'm really sorry the camping didn't work out, hon. Maybe we'll find something better to do."

"Serendipity."

"Sure. Or rationalization. They're about the same."

The motel room hadn't gone ratty yet but it was just waiting for someone to look away for a minute. There were ruffled flounces on the beds that were a different shade of bilious green from the spread and a framed print of a shaggy highland cow the like of which he hadn't seen in years. He sank wearily into an easy chair with knotty pine wings and a man's voice boomed at him, startling him upright.

"God holds them over the pit of hell, just as we would hold a spider or a loathsome snake, and He abhors them. He is dreadfully provoked…."

Slowly an image gathered out of the void on the old TV and Jack Liffey realized he must have sat on the remote. A handsome man with severely raked-back silver hair, sort of an aging Pat Riley, was pacing in front of a giant wood cross wearing a navy blue robe that swirled at his legs like a great flightless bird.

"His wrath will burn them like fire; they are worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fiery abyss. He cannot bear to have them in his sight, they are so vile, they are ten thousand times more abominable in His eyes than--"

Finally he found the device under him and the first button he hit in a panicky stab was the mute. He watched the minister pace back the way he'd come, his mouth chewing away angrily in blissful silence. He wondered if the tirade were live somewhere in the Pacific Time Zone, a midnight service for those needing a little pick-me-up of hellfire. More likely it was taped. He popped the mute on-off on-off.

"--venomous serpent--"

"--God has held you up--"

"--Nev-er would you dare--

He tired of the game and shut the set off. The picture irised down slowly to a spot before expiring. The idea of hell annoyed him immeasurably. For some reason he thought of Loco, his slightly naughty half-coyote of a dog that Maeve's love was beginning to tame into domesticity. If Loco doesn't get to go to heaven, he thought, I want to go where he goes.

*
Artifact 1910s
Allensworth, California
The small town of Allensworth was founded in 1908 by Col. Allen Allensworth, a former slave who had fought in the Civil War. As elected leader of a group of former slaves from the Los Angeles area he purchased 800 acres, 30 miles north of Bakersfield, in a promising area of abundant wells, artesian springs and a small river called Deer Creek. The colonel led the pioneers to the area, and the town they founded became the only all-African American farming community in California.

At its peak the town held 300 families, and contained a hotel, school, library, post office, bakery, machine shop, and many other businesses serving the surrounding farms that raised alfalfa, sugar beets and livestock.

The town became a railroad transfer point for the Santa Fe, and a bustling African-American center grew up offering concerts, plays and club meetings. A small black college on the order of Tuskegee Institute was planned. Unfortunately the town was surrounded by powerful corporate farms that used upstream diversion and massive groundwater pumping to meet their water needs. Deer Creek was mysteriously diverted. The Pacific Farming Company, who had sold Col. Allensworth the land, did not deliver on its promise to continue providing water.

As agribusiness all around Allensworth prospered, the black town and farms were starved of water. Col Allensworth died in a traffic accident, then the railroad was diverted, businesses folded and the town gradually died.

--Tourist brochure2

*

He must have been buried under several slabs of sleep exhaustion because when the unfamiliar phone burred somewhere in space-time his eyes came open like a speared cat but he had no idea where he was. His hand found the phone before he was quite ready for it.

"Wha--?"

"Is that you, Jack? Your voice sounds funny."

"Funny." His mouth tried the word a few ways, as if chewing it over. "I don't think so. Is this Gloria?"

His eyes danced over the murky room and a sense of orientation gathered. Not his own bed. Motel. Bakersfield.

"Slap yourself a couple of times," she said.

"I don't think so. I'm almost touching down. There it is. Three-point landing. Taxiing now. I'll be at the gate soon." He picked up his wristwatch and squinted to make out that it was just before 4. "Are you okay, Glor?"

"I might ask the same. Bakersfield PD woke me a few minutes ago to ask me about one Maeve Margaret Liffey--as they said--and then they handed her the phone. Only time I've heard the middle name is when you or your ex are chewing her out."

"It's the way cops deal with driver's licenses, as you well know. As far as I know she's three doors down in this motel fast asleep."

He was going to add something snide about assassins always having three names on the news but it was penetrating his haze that something relating to Maeve was badly wrong. "What the hell did she say?"

"She's not in your motel, Jack. Get a grip. They've arrested her for prostitution."

"Prostitution?"

"You heard. They've got her at the main sheriff's station which is in some place called Oildale but they're going to be taking her to the Central Receiving Facility in downtown Bakersfield for booking."

"Booking!"

"Jack, please stop shouting random words that I tell you. I guess this was her rights call and she phoned me because she didn't know how to get the motel and she was afraid they'd cut her off if one call was to Information. She remembered the name of the place though and I got it from the operator. Do you want me to come up?"

He rested his forehead on his palm. "It's got to be a mistake. I'll let you know if I need you. Did she say anything else?"

"She sounded a bit cocky and not very worried."

"Great. Your cop pals love that attitude. Thanks a lot, Glor. I'll put some clothes on and take care of this."

"Nice picture to leave me with."

"I miss you, too."

*

He woke up the young night clerk, who had a plastic nameplate on his shirt that said Slick, and was grizzled and skinny and wasn't Vietnamese for sure. He was young but looked a lot like someone who'd be found carrying a Will Work For Food sign at a freeway offramp. It took some convincing to get him to run off a new cardkey for Maeve's room 108. Her Gore-tex bag was zipped open on the made bed but he didn't see anything obvious gone. He felt slightly guilty poking around the bag but not guilty enough to stop. At least there were none of the hooker-look clothes from her binge only a month or so back when she'd been running with the bangers. Gloria had shown him the red bra and shorty spaghetti top and what even Gloria called Fuck-Me Pumps with four inch heels. They'd never had a full debriefing on all that because he'd been out of town then, exorcising his own devils, and right now dealing with the pregnancy had to be first up on the hit parade, which was what this father-daughter junket was supposed to have been all about.

Jack Liffey walked out of the motel past the Rancho Bakersfield sign that creaked a little in the wind high above Union Avenue, and just on general principles he walked in the direction that looked like it led toward town. A little fog hung on the air and the pools of deep shadow amongst the second-rate motels were not very inviting. One shadow seemed to stir and flex with the retreat of a human shape.

He was fairly sure that Maeve had probably gone out for a walk. You could never teach her prudence.

Before long a tall young woman with hair blasted white by chemicals came out of a bus shelter wearing a short skirt and a tube top. She looked up the road as if for a bus. "Want a date?" she asked languidly in a gravelly voice.

"I think the prom is over," Jack Liffey said.

"Are you lost?" There was an almost genuine concern in her voice.

"How about I give you some money and you answer a few questions."

"Depends. You want some nice French?"

"Mais, non. My daughter is missing. I wonder what the cops are like around here. I know there's no-go zones. Would the cops tend to arrest a girl just for being out at night in this area?"

"You mentioned money, amigo."

He took out a twenty, which didn't seem princely but he wasn't exactly flush after blowing a lot of his cash on the rapids-enhanced dinner, and he handed it to her. She took it the way she might a used-up bus pass.

"This is the row," she said. "Actually you're in the hotspot for boys. Rough trade and all that."

She grabbed at her crotch like Michael Jackson and there seemed to be something there so he guessed all at once that he was probably talking to a pre-op transsexual. They were getting a lot better at faking it.

"The local cops hot to trot?" Jack Liffey said.

"Don't you know?"

"Know what?"

She whistled once on a descending note. "Twenty bucks don't buy that, amigo. But I were you I'd get my daughter and just book out of this place. I can tell you're probably L.A."

"Are you saying the cops are dirty here?"

She laughed, with genuine humor. "Even god is dirty in this town." Then she turned her back and hurried away from the road along a path worn through the weeds that aimed between motels.
"Thanks," he called. "I think you like your job too much."

She paused in her fleeing stride just for an instant. "Life is all the same shitbag when you ain't got a choice, amigo."

*

The central jail was a low structure wearing big horizontal louvers and cowering down behind the tall glass courthouse downtown like a baby seal behind its vigilant mother. The fog had thickened a little and he remembered warnings about the valley's tule fog that could go to whiteout in the late fall so Highway 99 saw fifty- and hundred-car pileups. But this fog was mostly ribbons and wisps from the cloudbank overhead carved free by streetlight poles and a light breeze. There was a false sense of impending dawn, probably just city lights making the cloud incandesce. A handful of beat-up cars disturbed the eery silence as they carried early risers to whatever crummy jobs demanded them this early.

He parked on a dead-end street between dozens of bail bond shops and nobody inside the jail had ever heard of a Maeve Liffey.

"Could it be because she's still going through booking?"

The woman cocked her thumb over an ample shoulder to a glass door that offered a clear view of a big empty room with a long counter and several unoccupied desks.

"That's booking, sir. You see anybody in there?"

"I got a call relayed from the Sheriff's office in Oildale."

She pursed her lips as if deciding whether he was worth taking the trouble, but sometimes the stars were aligned right. She went back to the one-piece computer that had notes taped all around the edges and typed for a few moments.

"Okay, there was a girl out there--was she wearing a long-sleeve blue workshirt?"

He nodded.

"She's not there no more."

"Could they be on their way here?"

She shook her head. "That was hours ago."

"Can I have the arresting deputy's name?"

"You got to go to Oildale for that."

"Look, pretend it's your daughter and you're on vacation in a very pleasant faraway town full of nice people and your daughter's gone missing and you get a call that she's been arrested but she's not at the jail when you try to find her. What would you do?"

"I'd probably scream bloody murder until somebody found her, but I don't recommend that, sir."

"What do you recommend?" He did his best to hold back a gathering rage.

"She's okay, I'm sure. Don't you worry. This is a very law-and-order-times-ten kind of town. They don't let nobody get out of line here, not even the neeg-rahs and the Mexes. Why don't you go home and wait for a call, sir."

"I had my call," Jack Liffey said patiently. "Could you tell me how to get to Oildale."

"That's up Chester just across the river."

She gave him directions and it was an easy trip, three miles through a bit of town that got pretty rough-looking just across the mudflats and stream that passed for a river. The Kern County sheriff's headquarters was a big flat campus of buildings under cottonwoods at the edge of a shuttered airport, but Maeve wasn't there either, and he started to get frantic in front of another puzzled receptionist who'd just come on duty.

*

Just the usual screw-up, he thought when the sun was finally coming up on the solution to the mystery. They'd already let her have her call at the sheriff's station when they'd discovered she was under 18, and they'd driven her to Juvenile Hall out in East Bakersfield instead of the jail.
He caught the night social worker or whatever they called her coming off duty in the parking lot. She must have weighed 300 pounds and gave him the fish-eye from within a hooded sweatshirt thrown over commodious green scrubs.

"Give me a break here," he said. "I'm a father and we just dropped off the highway to grab a motel to sleep."

"Well, she'll be asleep now. Let her snooze it off."

"Can you just clue me in to what went down?"

"They caught her cruising the row on foot. That's a bad place. The deputies might not have hit her for the 647b--that's prostitution--but they found three quarter-bags of crystal meth in her shirt. We're not a town that winks at that, I'm afraid."

"My daughter did not have meth on her. Believe it."

The big woman looked him over. "I wouldn't take that attitude, sir, if I was you. Maybe it's somebody else's shirt. That might work. Maybe it's your shirt."

"I don't even drink but if I were going to ingest something it wouldn't be a trailer park drug." He regretted it as soon as he said it but in his defense, he thought, he was very tired.

"I'm from proud Okie stock, mister. They's a lot us here and we come up in the world a lot."

"Bless you, ma'am. Forgive me if I insulted anyone at all, truly. But my little girl is a paragon of virtue. There must be a mistake."

The woman unlocked the door of an old Ford Escort that was too small for her and then slowly wedged herself behind the wheel. "I don't care what sort of polygon she is. You both better straighten up and fly right. People that buck the morals of decent folk go down hard here, and that sure goes for smart-ass hippies."
____

1Quoted in Edward Humes, Mean Justice, Simon and Schuster, 1999.
2Slightly adapted and condensed from several sources.

Copyright © John Shannon 2008. All rights reserved.

Good Physician

noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 22:25:00 +0000

1
They could hear it coming, a plane approaching from the west. It flew low; first over the beach, its dark silhouette trailing across the white sand, then past the high dunes, and then past the windsock at the end of the runway. They could hear when it finally touched down.

Someone said it was the mail plane back from the Gulf run. They were mostly older turboprops that called the airport home: Fokkers, DC-7’s and Brazilian Bandeirantes. The airport was primitive. It sat alone on the desert near Cabo San Lucas. Nothing much to the place but a few dismal hangers, the stained tarmac, and men who knew a lot about planes and flying them.

Jimmy Hidalgo, the owner of one of the cargo companies, had been saying that the runway at San Javier, where the doctor and his friends were going, was tricky. It was too short, he ex-plained. You had to drop in very quickly as soon as you cleared the mountain.

“And on the way out it’s worse; you have to clear the date grove,” he said. He glanced at his son, who was talking to the German girl, Marita, who’d come with the doctor and Alfredo from Mexico City for the weekend.

Dr. Collin Reeves looked at the old DC-5 on the tarmac. His father flew and owned a plane, so the doctor had grown up with talk of airplanes and difficult landings. The plane that was to take them to San Javier was far too old to still be in service. He understood now why the man at their hotel in Cabo San Lucas had suggested driving to San Javier, rather than risk flying in.

They were drinking coffee in the hangar and watching the dawn break outside, suddenly, the way it does in the desert. The cargo boys had arrived for work, and the place seemed more like an airport now.

The owner told them that he’d bought his DC-5 from a Dutch mining company two years before in Ecuador. According to Hidalgo, it had been built in 1935 and seen action with the Marines at Guadalcanal—“and been shot at by Japanese gentlemen that didn’t like her.” Hidalgo had found her abandoned in an Amazon boom town where, he said, everyone was digging for gold, covered in muck, and drunk. He’d always wanted a DC-5, and bought her from the Dutch owners, who were using her for parts.

He loved the plane, he told them. “Sometimes you love things you shouldn’t love, doctor,” Hidalgo said. “But that’s life. I’ve spent more restoring her than she’ll ever make me.” Collin’s friend Alfredo, a painter, said that had to be the definition of love, and they all laughed.

A mail pilot stopped by the hangar to report that visibility was poor over the coast between Loreto and Cabo. The doctor listened as the two professionals talked about the weather. Hidalgo bit his lip. He nodded twice when he heard the word “fog,” his expression serious. Before he left, the mail pilot turned to the doctor and said that conditions were actually pretty good for the end of March, when things could be quite bumpy.

The pilot gave them a fey smile, as if he understood something Collin didn’t. Then he wished them all buena suerte and rode his bicycle back across the tarmac, the morning sunlight making the airport’s old hangars seem somehow beautiful and ugly at the same time.

Collin had asked why Hidalgo wasn’t flying them. Hidalgo explained that he wasn’t allowed to fly because he’d had a bad crash up at San Quintin in a Fokker 27 the year before. His right leg and foot had been badly burnt before he was pulled from the wreck. He’d been lucky to survive it, he said.

“So when you take off at San Javier, the date palms end right up under you, doctor—just a few feet under you. You could pick the fruit as you go by! The trick is to clear the date palms.”

Collin understood that it was probably dangerous to take off from San Javier, and that Hidalgo missed doing it.

“Are you a pilot, doctor? You seem to know something about it.”

“No, but my father is,” Collin said.

“Then he would understand. I finally ran out of luck at San Quintin in that Fokker,” Hidalgo said, before his mechanic inter-rupted him.

Everyone runs out of luck some place, Collin thought. It was just a question of where. Everyone gets their San Quintin.

The mechanic started the DC-5’s engines in the cold. Each one turned over slowly so you could see the propeller shudder-rotate, cough black exhaust and then finally go strong. The sound was thrilling once they got going. The plane was definitely too old, Collin thought again, watching the mechanic. But this was Mexico, and there were no rules about things like that. If there were, no one paid them any attention. Everything had two or three lives here, before it was finally allowed to die.

Collin watched as the mechanic popped out of the cabin, listening carefully to the engines for any sign of trouble. The ground crew began loading a crazy assortment of cargo to be dropped off at various airstrips along the way: a horse, some scuba gear for a hotel in Loreto, and a motley assortment of luggage.

“Of course, sometimes there are accidents at San Javier,” Hidalgo said over the sound of the engines. “Usually pilots from Texas or Arizona who aren’t familiar. It’s only fair that we charge
more to land at San Javier. At least we’ve done it before,” he said, laughing. Then he went outside. Collin noticed how big Hidalgo was, walking with his cane, limping, his right leg shot, to check the plane himself.

They flew with the rear hatch open and no thought of personal safety, the cargo door long ago removed for convenience’ sake. They landed thirty minutes later at a desert airstrip, seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

A rancher and a young boy came and helped take the horse off the plane, leading it off on a makeshift ramp. Then they’d taken off again, the rancher waving at them as if he’d met them all.
The doctor, standing near the open cargo door, waved back feeling like they were on the edge of a lonely, beautiful world, the last ones left. Sometimes you fall in love with things you shouldn’t.

They flew over the mountain, and then he saw the date palms and the dirt landing strip of San Javier below, stained dark by the March rain, all looking like a painting. They dropped hard, as Hidalgo had said they would, just as soon as they cleared the mountain. The nylon netting—kept for bundling large cargo—slid at the doctor, and he had to turn away from the open cargo door to brace himself against it.

Hidalgo’s son throttled the engines back and landed the plane expertly, mano-a-mano, just as he’d been taught. When they’d landed, the son, big and handsome like his father, shook everyone’s hand and promised he’d come for them that Sunday at noon, unless the weather got bad. The pilot shook the German girl’s hand twice. While their luggage was loaded into the taxi, they all watched the son take off and clear the wall of date palms by a good six feet.

On the way to the pensión they’d agreed that the son was a good pilot and that his father had done a good job with him. The German girl didn’t say anything, but she’d watched, too. She was
just quiet, Collin thought, in that way that made you know she was paying close attention to everything.

• • •

Dr. Collin Reeves’ specialty was tropical diseases—parasitology, his card said. They were the diseases travelers feared most, some tiny invertebrate that had penetrated the unsuspecting patient’s defenses and gotten down to its nasty god-given biology, thriving while their host suffered. As one of his professors had been fond of saying: “If you have one, you’ve probably got several.”

He was listed as a “go-to” doctor by the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, where he saw American tourists—either at their hotels, which he preferred, or at his combination office and apartment downtown, not far from the Zócalo.

Several doctors were on the list, but he was the only young American. He was boyishly handsome; being a doctor still seemed secondary to his obvious youth. He’d played basketball as an undergraduate, so was naturally commanding. His patients seemed to feel better in the hands of a tall man.

He’d fallen in love with Mexico and with painting it and was paying the price, something he wasn’t yet aware of. If anyone had told him that he was a bohemian in the making, he would have laughed.

His parents, very well-to-do, had despaired completely when he hadn’t come home after medical school. They’d expected a successful physician, not what they thought he’d become: a hand-to-mouth backwater doctor, throwing his life away in various slums.

His father, a prominent San Francisco surgeon, had announced the previous Thanksgving that his son had failed to live up to his promise. It seemed to slip out of his father’s mouth without his being able to stop it. It was a shock. Collin had thought, sitting at the table, that it all sounded true. He couldn’t really deny it. Yet it wasn’t right to say it like that, in front of people Collin had known his whole life. He hadn’t tried to defend himself. He couldn’t. Everyone at the table was quiet for a moment; it was out of character for his father to speak that way. His younger sister managed to change the subject.

They’d gone on from there, but the damage had been done. His parents had expected a wedding at their country club, a pretty young blonde wife, and grandchildren they could spoil. They’d gotten none of it. They were angry at him now, because he hadn’t lived up to his end of the contract.

After two years in the intelligence service, he regretted joining. They hadn’t used him for much, kept undercover as a go-to doctor first in Kuwait, then in Mexico. But he could do little about it, other than quit and go home, and he couldn’t face that.

He didn’t miss the States at all; that was the truth. Part of him loved the backwater existence: the tramping without a clear destination, playing the rôle of a country doctor to the hilt. He couldn’t explain it, really. He was angry at his parents, especially his father, but he couldn’t explain exactly why, other than he hated his father’s arrogance, which his father thought—in his stupid way—was how he was supposed to be a father. Collin had learned to hate arrogance of any kind.

After graduating from medical school, rather than go back home to San Francisco, he’d gone to study, on scholarship, at the University of London’s famous school of tropical diseases. Then he’d gone to Brazil, where he’d volunteered for a program treating poor people in the fávelas. Later he’d joined Médecins Sans Frontières, confronting strange and frightening diseases in various African bidonvilles.

He made no money. In fact, sometimes he had to borrow it just to go on. He enjoyed living from day to day in the bush with no one to answer to. It was the first time he’d felt free and done whatever the hell he wanted.

He had a certain quiet confidence that worked for him. While other doctors gave up, or wouldn’t go that extra mile, afraid for their own safety, he always had. He was always certain he could beat whatever was thrown at him. The more filthy and dark the hut, the better he liked it. He hated the diseases he fought and took the misery they brought his patients personally. They were the enemies of his State. He believed in Science’s power to do good. He was inspired by the power of human intelligence and believed in it. It was his religion.

He had been recruited in Africa where scouts were attracted by his having gone native, a talent the agency sought for their clandestine service. The fact that he was a brilliant young doctor hadn’t been very important. They simply needed doctors—brilliant or otherwise—for those moments when they couldn’t call a “civilian” doctor.

Someone called Bill came to see him after 9/11, while he was working in Nairobi. Collin wanted to do his bit to help fight the terrorists, and he’d agreed to go to Virginia to see some people in a company called “International Recruiting Services.” He was hoping to be sent to Afghanistan.

The agency had lied to him. They’d promised him he’d be in the front lines of the war on terror; instead, they’d sent him to Kuwait for a year to be at the beck and call of some local Emir who was the Embassy’s darling. The man’s greatest fear was that his live-in Russian prostitutes were going to give him some horrific disease, or kill him outright when they were drunk.

“You check good. Take all the time you need. You check every-thing, young man,” his master said to him over the phone whenever he expected a new girl. Collin would be called to his white marble palace in the desert, built by the Bechtel Corporation. He would be forced to wait like any other flunky in the Emir’s pay, in an enormous foyer chilled by air-conditioning and staffed by young Filipino girls in uniform, who seemed never to speak to anyone. His Emir would appear suddenly with his retinue of bodyguards, shake his hand perfunctorily, and politely remind him to check her for everything one more time, in case Collin hadn’t understood before. They’d all wait for the limousine carrying yet another diffident and breathtaking 18-year-old from Belarus whose visa said “administration services.” The girls were changed frequently, for safety’s sake.

Collin realized one day while shaving that he’d become an on-call brothel doctor. It had shocked him at first; he’d graduated at the top of his class at medical school. He would certainly have been more valuable to his country doing real medical work somewhere in the front lines of the War On Terror—but he’d had to get used to it. His Emir was important to his bosses at the Embassy, and that was that.

The rest of the time he was free to play golf in one of the hottest places on earth. He’d spent hours alone with a caddy from China who couldn’t speak a word of English. He’d come close to going mad.

His service in Mexico had been no less boring. He believed he deserved revenge on the system, and took it by leaving the city at every opportunity to paint, something he’d discovered he loved. He no longer thought much about the War On Terror. No one seemed to notice when he was gone.

2
They took the taxi from the runway to a rustic pensión near the church. The room, when Collin opened the door, smelled of the sea and the ancient timbers used to build the place years before. He had gotten a room on the desert side. Its one small window offered a good view of a treeless mountain, almost blue, scarred by jeep tracks that seemed to wander aimlessly across the mountain’s face like scars.

He found a bark scorpion in the shower and killed it with a newspaper. Its amber-colored body scrambled on the tiles to avoid the blows; then suddenly it was dead. As he cleaned up for breakfast he wondered where else they were hiding.

He thought about the German girl while he put his things away. He couldn’t help it. He’d always liked women too much: not just the sex, which he enjoyed, but their company. He loved the company of women. He loved them for being mercurial and taciturn at times, the very things that most men he knew disliked.

He met his friends for breakfast on the pensión’s second floor balcony, under a green market umbrella with a view of the oasis. In the distance the doctor could see the tops of the date palms sway from the weight of the pickers, some shirtless, who were already up in the trees, harvesting the fruit before it got too hot. Everything was done in the town before it got too warm, their waiter told them. Children, he joked, were all conceived at dawn, or after midnight.

After breakfast they’d all gone out to paint. The doctor wanted to work alone; he thought he wasn’t as good a painter as the others. They were professional artists, and he considered himself a rank amateur. He’d stayed out of the oasis, where his friends all wanted to be, or in front of the town’s famous church. It was better if he were alone, he’d told himself, not getting in their way, taking up a valuable position that rightfully belonged to the professionals.

Instead, he’d wandered down a dirt track running by the back of the pensión. The dirt road became very rough and rutted as he walked towards the sea. He carried a cheap backpack that he’d bought in the market at San Angel in Mexico City. It carried his portable easel, paper, his watercolors, and a bottle of iced tea he’d bought in the town.

He walked for a kilometer or so and found nothing of interest. The heat, building suddenly after eleven, pressed down on him almost like a weight. The intense sunlight started to rob the landscape of its hard, clean edges. He was going to give up and go back, because all he’d seen was the strange landscape with its hulking barrel cacti and the odd signs of civilization: a rusted and defiled car and an unfinished building’s foundation sprouting steel rods, oddly surreal in the middle of nowhere. But he kept going, enjoying the walking, the feeling of being completely alone, not wanting to waste the morning.

He stopped finally at an abandoned one-story adobe rancho sitting by itself. Someone’s homestead? He couldn’t tell for sure, but it had that feel. From the look of it, whoever had built it had abandoned it years ago. Its roof had been smashed in; its adobe walls, once whitewashed, were pocked now by the weather, big brown patches of mud showing through the lye. He knew right away that he wanted to paint the place, to render its lonely deserted dignity, the worn face of someone’s dream all gone wrong. He unpacked his things and worked standing in the sun, adding a few shadows, like people standing inside the rancho.

He got a good painting out of it because he worked fast: all impressions, no explanations, no over-thinking or consciously trying. He’d left a lot of white from the paper showing, which gave the rancho’s blistered lye walls a stark quality that excited him. The week before he’d had to tell a patient of his, an engineer, that he was going to die and that there was nothing he could do for him. It had stuck with him, the sadness of it all, because he’d gotten to know the fellow, personally. And now a little of that moment was forever in the painting, too: the rancho vulnerable, deserted, left to face the desert alone, no illusions about failure or hope. He decided it was truly stoic, and painted it that way.

He drank his tea, which had gotten warm, and carefully rolled up the painting by one o’clock. He was slightly sunburnt around his arms and the back of his neck, but he felt satisfied in a new way he couldn’t explain with words. It was as if the act of painting were some kind of catharsis that for a moment had purged him of everything he’d been through lately. He felt good heading back with it to the pensión. It was a small, still-wet victory tucked into his backpack when he walked up the stairs eager to show it, but also afraid to.

At lunch, everyone in the party was impressed with what he’d done. The German girl, Marita, looked but said nothing. She painted in oil, and his was a very small watercolor. He assumed she would dismiss it as sophomoric. Alfredo told him he should abandon his “straight” life and become an artist and stop screwing around with medicine and science, because he had real talent. It was the first time he’d ever said that. He seemed to mean it.

Alfredo had propped up the doctor’s painting in the center of the table without asking him, so they could all see it. They were all intellectuals, and it was intimidating but exciting, too. By then the painting was completely dry and looked pretty damn good. He’d gotten the sky, too, Collin thought—the dry empty-beauty and the blue nothingness in it.

At lunch they talked about Goya and his paintings of the French invasion of Spain. There was a white tablecloth, and the doctor, without wanting to, started looking at the plates and people’s faces, the sweat on the water glasses as the others spoke, making a kind of music as it was in Spanish. The others talked about what was happening in America, which everyone hated now and he was tired of defending, after the awful photos from Iraq. He composed a still life in his head as they inveighed against his country.

They assumed he was against the war because he seemed sensitive and was a doctor. He wasn’t sure anymore what he felt. He’d joined the intelligence service to fight terrorism. They’d sent him to Kuwait, and he’d run pap tests on whores. When he’d complained about it, they’d accused him of not being a team player. His artist friends had no idea he was an intelligence officer and had believed in the war.

Twice he looked at the German girl and wondered what she was thinking, and why she looked so good without obviously trying to. Maybe it was the bright light in her hair when she sat down, or the fact that she was bra-less, or because she was quite intelligent. He just looked at her beauty as he would at a very good painting, a Sargent maybe, and got lost in it.

After lunch they were all a little drunk because they’d drunk wine. They all met at the pool to read and do nothing but lie around the verge and wait for the late afternoon; it was too bright to paint during the heat of the day.

He’d been pretending to read a paperback by the side of the pool, but in fact had been looking at the girl. She was wearing a two-piece orange bathing suit. He watched her boost herself out of the water. Her body glistened wet, the curve of her ass womanly. Her shoulders were very straight. The sun in her short blonde hair sparkled so you could see all the different colors of blonde in it. The doctor had an overwhelming desire to make love to her, a full blast of lust. It was like when he’d seen the island in the Gulf from the plane, and wondered how it might be to go ashore and explore.

The girl had sat next to him in Alfredo’s beat-up Volvo for the drive to the airport. When she’d jumped into the car, she was wearing a peasant blouse and cutoffs. No luggage, just all her stuff in one of those cheap plastic market bags that the poor carry. Everything seemed to be spilling out: her painting stuff, food, a bottle of wine, and mostly her youth. She bought a bathing suit at the airport in Cabo. She’d smelled, because she didn’t have a shower in her studio. She’d smelled like clay and turpentine and woman. He was a little overwhelmed by her, by her goddess-girlness.

He was hopelessly attracted to her physically, and now by the pool, he was suddenly tired of trying to play it cool. He wanted her to notice him in that way men want women to notice them. He was always decisive with women; it worked because he was handsome. He had been lucky in that regard.

He decided, putting the book down, that he was going to flirt with her. Try and get her away from the others, if he could, and take it from there. He had a plan. Like the painting he’d done that morning. He’d had a plan from the moment he’d come across the rancho, not to over-think it, but just to get it down.

He felt the concrete’s heat on his ass immediately when he sat down next to her. The heat seemed to go all the way up his spine and to warm his crotch. The heat of the concrete made his sexual fantasy somehow more tangible. Looking at her while he’d pretended to read, he’d been afraid he’d get an erection and embarrass himself, like he had once in high school.

“How do you live,” he asked her, “without a job, I mean?”

“From day to day,” she said. “My mother sends me a little money. It’s just enough for the studio and tortillas. . . . She’s a judge. In Hamburg.” Like so many Europeans, she spoke English almost perfectly. He thought her accent charming.

She was twenty-five. She lived in Mexico City where she had some kind of studio space which, according to his friend Alfredo, had to be seen to be believed. She was a painter’s painter, Alfredo had told him. “She has all her sheets to the wind,” he’d said. He supposed Alfredo had been her lover at some point.

Apparently it was rough living. No water, a dangerous neighbor-hood. She thrived on it, she told him. The neighborhood toughs were all in love with her, she claimed; he believed it, too. Her small body was so alive-looking.

Alfredo had lent her the money to come painting with them, as she was broke all the time. Collin’s friend Alfredo came from a very rich family and never had to worry about money. Alfredo was kind to her, even after they’d broken up, checked on her to make sure she had food and a little cash. He was old-fashioned that way, a gentleman.

“That must be difficult,” the doctor said to her. “No potable water, I mean.”

“Yes, it’s difficult,” she said. “You can’t wash dishes with tequila.”

She smiled. She was wearing the big sunglasses that had come back into fashion; the doctor remembered them from his child-hood.

She slipped her dark glasses up and took notice of him now, not as a member of the group, but as Collin, the man who was obviously pursuing her. He could see into her eyes. They were like the pensión’s pool; very, very clear and light blue. Her intelligence zigzagged there at the very back of them. She gave him an “Okay, I get it” look.

Later, when she was in bed with him, in that room that smelled like the Gulf of California, he was amazed by just how physically strong she was. She was kind of a beast, really. They’d made the
wooden bed move on the tile floor. She asked him to do some-thing he’d never done before and he liked that, the danger of what they did. The adventure of it.

The clinical approach to sex taken in medical school had almost ruined it for him. Sometimes while making love, though, he’d see the old-fashioned medical drawings of coitus from the 19th century texts that med students had passed around for laughs, and those drawings and their stark, lyrical beauty had recaptured the romantic tenderness and intimacy of it all for him.

She seemed hungry for everything, where he was more careful and always had been. She was all about the Right Now, it seemed: the pleasure of painting, the pleasure of legs-in-the-air screwing, drinking at lunch, dope smoking, blowing him in a hammock on the deck overlooking the oasis, where they could be caught by a maid or a passerby.

He watched the tops of the palm trees while she went down on him. He’d struggled against the orgasm like a man who doesn’t want to get off an escalator—going up, the palm trees blurry now in the sun. Then orgasm. The mind and body suddenly pushed together. A wash of sunlight and sweat on his face. A small delirium. Her fatuous smile.

He’d slipped off the verge into the pool.

“You have a job?” she’d asked. She was interested, he could tell. She said she liked the painting he’d done. She said it had a “male quality,” but didn’t explain what she meant by that. He’d decided right then, feeling the cool water around him, that he was going to do everything he could to get her into bed. He watched her wet her knees, dipping water out from the pool.

“Alfredo says you’re a doctor, and you work for the U.S. Embassy.”

“Yes. I’m a doctor,” he’d said. She’d broken out laughing and said something in German that he didn’t understand, but that must have been something like “Oh shit!” She jumped into the pool and stood next to him in the water. Sometimes you can feel another person’s body without actually touching it. He’d felt hers then because she stood very close, the unseen tendrils of energy moving around them like the light in the water.

“And I thought you were just another down-and-out American painter,” she’d said. “I meet them all the time at parties at Alfredo’s house. They always want to borrow money!”

He got what he wanted that night, and then some. Love making, tile sounds. The sound of her voice when she came filled the candlelit room. Very good.

Later, she’d told him she couldn’t sell any of her paintings. She wasn’t going to give up, she said, but he’d heard the desperation in her voice. She said he couldn’t understand; he had a straight job and didn’t live like she had to live, like an artist. It stung a little because it was true. He’d been a kind of voyeur, watching his friends be artists. Alfredo kept telling him it was a dangerous occupation, but he hadn’t really understood that until he saw the fear in Marita’s eyes. For some reason he thought of the old pilot and his kind of bravery, the silent get-up-and-do-it kind. He thought maybe the German girl had it, too.

“People like you—straight people—will never understand us,” she’d told him in bed. “Not in a million years.”

He didn’t try to answer her back; it hadn’t seemed right.

The above is protected by copyright to Kent Harrington , 2008.

F.M. Meredith - Smell of Death Review

noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:27:00 +0000

I'm pleased to day to be participating in a virtual book tour for F.M. Meredith. The Smell of Death has just been recently released and for the month of February there has been a virtual book tour going on to spread to the word of this wonderful novel. After reading my review take a few minutes to see the other stops along the way. Here is the link to Pump Up Your Book Promotions.

Smell of Death

F.M. Meredith

Tigress Press, LLC

ISBN 10: 0-9793857-5-X

ISBN 13: 978-0-9793857-5-9

US. Price: $13.95

Book Description:

A missing child, strange burglaries, and the inexplicable murder of a mother and her daughter disrupt the peaceful beach community of Rocky Bluff, CA. Officer Stacey Wilbur, first on the scene for both murders, assists Detective Doug Milligan with the investigations and finds herself breaking her long-standing rule to never date anyone who works for the Rocky Bluff P.D.

Smell of Death is the fourth book in the Rocky Bluff PD series. The novel contains all the elements of great crime story and includes a realistic portrayal of Stacey Wilbur, a young mother, who is widowed and devoted to her job as a police officer with the force. There are three investigations running through the book, the deaths of Darlene Brantley and her mother, a missing toddler and the search for the Barefoot Burglars. Throughout the story Meredith does a fine job off exploring the private lives of the characters and adds a layer of realism to what motivates the police to do their job and how they deal with the pain and guilt of their work. In doing so, the reader gets caught up in the story and feels the emotions also.

There is a nice balance in the book as Meredith allows Wilbur to explore the idea of breaking her long standing rule regarding dating someone on the force. As Wilbur and Detective Doug Mulligan work closely on a few cases it is easy to understand how a temptation at romance can begin. In allow Wilbur to have a taste of romance and deal with her past, the death of her husband, it nicely balances some of the unpleasantness of the crimes that she is involved in solving.

In addition to the romantic nuances that are present, Meredith also does a nice job with exploring the depth of guilt in Felix Zachary. Zachary shot and killed an unarmed suspect and this has cost him his change at a promotion in the department. But, this is not all that it has cost him as Zachary has to deal with the internal emotional turmoil of what this event means to him.

Smell of Death is a nice police procedural and adds a nice element of romance to soften some the horrors of the crimes that are solved in the book. Meredith demonstrates her ability to write well defined characters and to deftly handle multiple subplots in this novel. This is one book worth checking out.

This virtual book tour is brought to you by:

GRANTA - 100th Issue

noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 18:26:00 +0000

Look what arrived in the mail this week...yes, the 100th issue of Granta magazine. This has to be one of the best short story literary magazines around and the this 100th issue is jam packed with 32 great stories and poems.

Here is the blurb from the Granta site:

In 1979, a young American graduate revived an old Cambridge university magazine and created a home for good writing of all kinds—reportage, fiction, memoir, biography—as well as photography and, occasionally, poetry. In the years that followed, Granta established itself on both sides of the Atlantic, and continues to publish the best new writing in English from all over the world. This special issue celebrates Granta’s 100th issue.

Guest-edited by novelist William Boyd.

A short sampling of contributors:

William Boyd

Harold Pinter

Mario Vargas Llosa

Ian McEwan

Martin Amis

Tash Aw

Salman Rushdie

A. M. Homes

If I were you I would rush out to your favorite book store and grab a copy. This issue will move fast and trust me you will not be disappointed.

Patry Francis Blog Day

noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:41:00 +0000

Today I'm joining over 300 other bloggers in celebrating the release of Patry's book THE LIAR'S DIARY.

I was moved by Patry's amazing story of hard work and dedication to her family and in those few moments that are rare in any busy family that she was able to pursue her dream of writing a book. When the book was completed she found an agent who was able to sell the manuscript and get that book published. Then, as sometimes happens in life, fate throws you a curve. Upon seeing her book being published, Patry was diagnosed with an aggresive form of cancer.

I'm proud of the writing community to rally around such a wonderful project, to support a new author pursuing her dream and fighting valiantly to beat back a terrible illness.

Over at Lit Park you can read the complete story. A big thanks to Laura Benedict and Karen Dionne of BackSpace for pulling this celebration together.

What can you do to help? Go out and buy Patry's book. Tell your friends about this incredible story.

eZine update

noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 18:22:00 +0000

I hope everyone is starting to enjoy the holiday season and find some time to relax with family and friends.

I have many things to be thankful for during this season and one of them is the great authors who have submitted some wonderful writing for all of to read.

Over on Powder Burn Flash, John DuMond offers us some fine noir cheer in his story CHRISTMAS BONUS. Pam Ward adds a wonderful little flash in TAKING CANDY FROM A BABY.

Over on my longer fiction site Darkest Before the Dawn, Jon Bassoff offers a wonderful tale that requires your reading in THEY'RE ALL MAD.

Check out all these wonderful authors and their writing at the above sites.

Submissions are now open for all interested. I would like to suggest a Holiday Noir theme for the remainder of the holiday season at Powder Burn Flash. So, yor slugging down that brady flavored eggnog or sipping Jack or Jamisons straight from the bottle take a few and write us some holiday cheer.

Hell of a Woman - the real pictures....

noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 02:29:00 +0000

Earlier today I tried to upload pictures from Saturday's book signing. Blogger I guess lost those pictures and then found them.

So, steer you to....
http://acalcagno.blogspot.com/2007/12/hell-of-woman-los-angeles-style.html#links

for those pictures.

Hell of a Woman - Los Angeles Style

noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:59:00 +0000

Here are some pixs from the signing of the group anthology signing at the Mystery Bookstore last Saturday.

Charlie Huston, Kevin Burton Smith and Megan Abbott

Eddie Muller, Christa Faust and Charlie Huston

Megan Abbott, Robert Ward and Cornelia Read

Cornelia Read, Naomi Hirahara and Eddie Muller

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noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 17:32:00 +0000

Pardon the interruption......but this site seems to have some problems.......

Fire Update

noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 23:55:00 +0000

Well the skies are all black again today in my neighborhood and the smell of smoke has creeped into the house.

Here is the latest update....
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-fire26nov26,0,1924645.story?coll=la-home-center

Otherwise just winding down the weekend. I wrote another 5,000 words in the NaNoWriMo and I'm up over 40,000 words. I hope this last week I can pump out 2,000 words a day to meet the deadline.

Here We Go Again...More Fire

noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 01:35:00 +0000

Yep, just when I thought I was going to have a peaceful weekend, more fires in the surrounding hills.

http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2007/nov/24/wildfire-burning-homes-malibu/

I'll keep you updated as the day goes on........

UPDATE>>>>>
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-fire25nov25,0,1465891.story?coll=la-home-center

The end run

noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 16:50:00 +0000

ipI'm up over 35,000 words of gibberish in the hollowing NaNoWriMo month contest. Alas, there is still the weekend and I'm thinking maybe I'll just add in some of the grant wording that I'm currently writing that is due on December 3. Nah, that would be cheating, but it would get me over the 50,000 word minimum easily. The current grant is 22 pages long and is in the editing mode at this point.

We'll check in around Sunday night and let you know how it went. In the meantime, the shopping madness has hit and I'm gonna run out and buy up all those deals on blank CD-Rs and DVD-Rs that are being advertised.

Coming up next month, more books to review.

Return of PLOTS WITH GUNS

noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 17:01:00 +0000

Yes, you heard that right. According to Anthony Neil Smith's MySpace blog, PLOTS will return in 2008 as a quarterly. Hell, let the man tell you himself...directly from his blog...

PLOTS WITH GUNS: "Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold This Body Down" Current mood: crazy
Here's how this is going to work: PLOTS WITH GUNS will go back online in the new year, as soon as I get enough good stories to fill an issue. I'll be doing quarterly issues. The pay will be...well, it'll be me buying you your drink of choice the next time I happen to see you. The standards will be higher than ever, and I'll be pickier than ever. Looking for hard-boiled, noir and transgressive crime fiction. Every story has to have a gun in it somehow, some way (doesn't have to play a big role. Just needs to be there). No pastiche. It's got to feel right to find a home in PWG.
Why zombify this thing? Well, when the Crimedogs packed it in back in 2004, it was because we were juggling our own writing with our day jobs, and PWG was taking up a lot of time. Hard to balance. So we took time off, put together a print anthology with Dennis McMillan, moved all over the country, and wrote some books. I also learned a lot more about how to reinstate PWG back into my life and not have it be a giant headache. Plus, I got inspired, and I am just really hungry for new noir short stories that take literary risks. Want to find them and share them with the world on a really sharp looking website.
The archives of the first run are still available on the Way Back Machine here. We're damned proud of this catalog. Some amazing stories from heavy hitters, new voices, and plenty of surprises. An Anthony Award nominee, and a few who made it into Best Of anthologies. We hope to find an equally strong showing amongst the noir-istas out there this time around (if you don't mind sharing it for the price of a cocktail). Since we also wanted the thing to always have a striking look to it, we're also on the prowl for great photos or artwork from artists looking for a little exposure.
In 2008, we're starting over with Issue 1. Send me your best (email only). You know how to get in touch. And I promise you this won't be a Ross Perot thing (he's running, he's not, he's running again, he's not). This time, I'm sticking around for the long haul.
Submissions are now open.

The 25,000 + word mark

noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 01:51:00 +0000

I'm taking a break from my marathon writing day to try and write something for this blog.

Even at 25,000+ words, I'm still behind the mark in the NaNoWriMo contest. I'm a little scared to look back and see what I have written. The outline and notes I started with no longer make sense and the story has already twisted itself inside and out and is heading a different direction than I planned. I guess that means that I have no idea where the story is heading.

My plan is the spend the rest of the weekend, minus the time I plan to spend online tomorrow talking about Dave White's new book WHEN ONE MAN DIES at Detect Today.

Also, If I haven't bored the blogsphere with this so far, I opened a new fiction site called Darkest Before the Dawn http://darknessbefore.blogspot.com/

OK, so now I'm off to the airport to send one by kids to New York on the redeye to celebrate Thanksgiving with relatives. No, I'm not going, but that is another post, well, maybe.

Cross Posting Danger Ahead.......

noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 06:11:00 +0000

for an important message.......

Greetings all.Over the past year I have recieved many submissions that were longer than the guideline for my flash fiction site - Powder Burn Flash.

So, after much thought I decided to open an additional venue for writers wishing to explore their stories more indepth. Tonight I have opened Darkest Before the Dawn. This site is open to short story submissions up 10,000 words in length.

Ring of Fire

noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 18:54:00 +0000

HI All,

I have been up half the night keeping an eye out on the fires surrounding my neighborhood. Winds kicked up last night and increased to 35 mph by 5 AM and then the fires started. We are surrounded by fires to the north of us in Fillmore and Piru, to the east in Simi Valley and eastern edge of Moorpark and then to the west in the hills of Malibu.

UPDATE:
Here is a link for more details. They are now saying to expect gusts up to 80 to 100 mph this evening. Better make sure everything is tied down and the cars are away from any trees.

http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2007/oct/21/ventura-county-high-winds-fires-are-battering-area/

News of My Demise is Greatly Exaggerated

noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 04:06:00 +0000

Well I knew it was bound to happen sooner or later. On the most excellent Rap Sheet , Jeff Pierce has offically announced that do my inactivity that I may be "in some housekeeping" on his blogroll. While I can't blame Jeff for doing this, there are many worthwhile site that can be added to this worthy list.

I have been so busy over the last few months that I have to let the Dawg lie low until all the other required jobs, like work, 6 children and their assorted sports, dance, music performances, etc. and spending quality time with the love of my life. But, i can assure that this Dawg has been busy reading lots of books (currently on a Ross MacDonald binge), reading manuscripts and actually squeezing in some writing.

I'm also busy with my flash fiction site Powder Burn Flash.

So, I promise things should be looking up in the 4th quarter of this year.

A word of advice, sometimes it may be better to let sleeping mystery dawgs lie....

Until then, I'll try to lurk less and post more.

Writer to Writer Podcast - Character is King!!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Mystery Dawg) — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 18:49:00 +0000

Robert Gregory Browne and Brett Battles are venturing into the podcast world. They've started a series of talks about writing, which, in the near future, will also include interviews with other authors and publishing industry professionals. Their first podcast on writing characters is now up. You can find it here:

http://www.battlesandbrowne.com

This will be the first of a series of conversations about different aspects of writing. They'll also be venturing into interviews with other author and publishing professionals in the future.