Felice Picano's Blog

Well, not so suddenly. My third published novel, The Mesmerist, was a historical novel, based on an actual law trial that took place in the Nebraska Territory in 1900. I came upon the case when I was gifted with an issue of the New York Journal newspaper for St. Patrick's Day, March 1900. The lead story. with a vivid illustration, read, "Prosecutor Shoots Defendant During Trial." I read the story, did some historical sleuthing, thinking this would make an interesting "non-fiction novel" in the style of Capote's In True Blood. But when I was headed to Nebraska to look into the trial's case files I was stopped cold. There had been a fire in the County (i.e. Territory) Courthouse, and all files before 1912 had been destroyed. So, I did an investigation of what is called supporting evidence. It wasn't enough for a non-fiction book, but I had enough characters and plot for a big juicy novel. So I wrote it. The book was published by Delacorte Press in the late Spring of 1977, then in a Dell paperback. Picked up by a few book clubs, translated into French, German, and Portuguese. Also a British Commonwealth sale and widespread distribution. Maybe even nommed for a UK book award. It will be republished by ReQueered tales which has been doing such a great job of putting out earlier novels of mine.

I call the two Victorian era novels published in 2021, Pursuit: a Victorian Entertainment and in 2022, Pursued: Lillian's Story--a duology. It was written as one book but too long -- a real Victorian triple decker--for current audiences. When I kept being able to place excerpts from Addison's story, but not Lillian's, I made that a separate volume. The two mesh at several places, especially toward their simultaneous crises and conclusions. These books came out of my extensive reading in non-fiction of the Victorian period, especially various diaries and journals as well as in novels. Private journals and then mid 20th Century professional studies of various hidden aspects of UK life then, as well as craft notebooks, and even the 3 volume, Diary of a Victorian Girlhood. I'd read it all over several decades for fun, all played a role as sources.

Two more historical novels have been written and undergo polishing at various times awaiting publication. One is based on the life of my ancestor, Giuseppe Francesco Picano (1717-1801) an acknowledged "Old Master" sculptor and painter with works in US and European museums.

While I was writing Nights at Rizzoli, I was also trying my best to interview people I knew who had worked there. I’m in contact with four of them, and there were four more, but all eight were hesitant, reluctant, and mostly claimed to know little or nothing of what actually went down in the rather complex politics and personal relations in the shop during the years I was there. At first I thought it was poor memories. Blessed with a terrific one, I shortchange people thinking theirs are as good. Then I thought, well, maybe they’re afraid. I, of course, have burnt so many bridges in so many books so many times, that I suppose I’ve ended up rather stupidly fearless. Not tactless. Not unkind. Where I can only infer and imply and hint at because well, the material is just not being backed up by others, well, that’s all I will do in print.
Only a few weeks before I finished a solid third draft, one of my contacts who had been most reluctant, Dennis Sanders, decided to sit down and write his entire history at Rizzoli and email it to me. I knew the beginning and parts of the middle, but virtually nothing of his ending since by then I was gone, writing novels in Key West or Big Sur. So that ended up being useful. Especially since not long after he was hospitalized in Spain with a condition he never specified and then quite suddenly died. I tried getting to Ada Calabrese, who’d worked with Dennis in the art gallery but those between us never really connected us. She sent short statement from Italy before she too passed on. I’d interviewed other colleagues, Ruth Oesch when I last saw her in New York, and also Vicki Roth. I got info from each but not nearly enough. Still I went ahead and wrote the book.
Since it has been published and reviewed and I guess also read, people have been more or less crawling out of the woodwork to clarify, to add to, to amend, and to add on. I had written some thirty books before this; did they need proof I was actually doing this one before they would respond? Or what?
Now is write back to their lengthy and detailed e mails saying: “if there’s ever another edition, I’ll be sure to add some of this in.”
“On your own day,” the I Ching reads in Hexaram #49, Transformation, “You are believed.” I guess my day has come.

In a way, this book is one that I’ve been writing for many years.
My family is from Rhode Island, and the city of Providence is surprisingly rich for being the residence of masters of supernatural fiction; among them Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. My much older aunt Lillian and Uncle Bert lived midway between the residences of both men, and they knew the latter author briefly in his last years. Whenever I stayed with them during childhood summers in the early 1950’s I would read volumes of both author’s works, both at their home and at the local library on College Hill.
Poe of course is a classic, although in truth he is rather spottily known. Some of his best work is not the half dozen poems and tales he’s known by, but instead longer works like The Gold Bug, The Adventure of Hans Pfall, and the utterly mad The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym. Those were the tales that stuck with me, and rereading them recently proved them to be wonderfully subversive and ga-ga.
Unlike today, at that time, Lovecraft had virtually no reputation as a writer outside of faithful readers of Weird Tales magazine in the 1920’s and 1930’s. That he does today is partly thanks to the staunch and persistent efforts of Arkham House imprint in Sauk City, Michigan which reprinted everything, even the poetry, in editions usually limited to a few thousand copies. But also thanks to the San Francisco Hippie Rock group , H.P. Lovecraft, and their eerie hit song “The White Ship.”
Today his books are fittingly part of the huge Library of America series. Rereading them I’m always surprised how fittingly he uses the odd geography of Rhode Island – half water, half land: and of the latter, half city and half rural -- in his stories and novels. At that time, however, most of Lovecraft’s titles were out of print and unobtainable. By the way, a handful of movies were made out of Lovecraft’s works in the ‘70’s based on his books, too. Most are odd and bad but some are very surprisingly true to the source and even watchable.
Later in life, once I was writing fiction myself, I was fortunate enough to come into contact with two master authors of Science Fiction, Arthur C. Clarke and Harlan Ellison. Individually, and entirely unprompted, they reviewed my books, praised them, and encouraged me -- and so unwittingly they set me on the path that would end up at this volume, and with my Sci-Fi trilogy, City on a Star, still being written.
In a way Twelve O’Clock Tales is an homage to those unique and astonishing talents. Poe, Lovecraft, Clarke and Ellison. As well as to M.R. James, Walter de La Mare, Ambrose Bierce, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Saki, Algernon Blackwood, etc. all of whom I’ve read and still read today.
For people who keep track of things, Twelve O’Clock Tales is my fourth collection of short stories, following Slashed To Ribbons in Defense of Love in 1983 (reprinted as The New York Years in 2003), Tales From a Distant Planet in 2005 and Contemporary Gay Romances in 2011 (also Bold Strokes Books). The 2005 title was published by French Connection Press in Paris, France and had a very limited distribution, although the book is still available for sale in the U.S. and I’m including two of its most praised stories here.
Although I am primarily known as a novelist (and lately also as a memoirist) stories are my favorite way of writing fiction: whether it is a 1,750 word “amusement in prose” (the second story here), a 35,000 word novella, or anything in between.
When I can know, sense, or even merely get a hint about an ending while I’m writing, I think I’m simply a better writer, certainly a tighter one. Doing that with a novel usually means a five to ten year period of gestation before I even begin, and equal years of commitment on the other end. With stories I can start and end in a few sessions, or in the case of longer works do so within a month. Any more time than that and it becomes something else.
My first story was written when I was twelve, and my first published story (collected in Slashed to Ribbons) was written as far back as 1972. I’ve now written almost fifty shorter stories, of which (with this volume) now 47 have been published in one form, format, place or another, from magazines and newspapers to anthologies to on-line magazines. Very early on I wrote “strange” stories: My second “finished, adult” story, in fact, could have easily fit into this collection.
Among the stories here, a few included here were popular: “Absolute Ebony,” has been published several times in mainstream magazines and other people’s collections, ditto with “Spices of the World,” and “One Way Out” and it’s amazing that readers find them fresh and relevant. Another tale, “Love and the She-Lion” was second runner up as “story of the year” for the late, lamented Story magazine
The other tales are recently written: from 1995 to 2011: and brand new. Most of the stories here are strange, a few comical, and others rather sinister. They came from different places and times –a Hebrew backwater in B.C.E. Israel; a California highway some fifteen years from now; an unnamed New England rural area, time unknown; East London around 1950; New York City etc, in as far as I can determine the 1970’s. Other places are difficult to determine: the Midwest for two of them, for one, the British Midlands. One takes place in Venezuela, a country I’ve never visited, was never in any way interested in, and maybe thought of three a total of times in my life.
Reviewing my recent non-fiction collection, True Stories: Portraits from My Past, Thom Nickels pointed out that among those relationships were several which dealt with experiences that cannot be explained, and that I dealt with them as objectively and honestly as I could. He was surprised; saying it’s seldom done and mostly frowned upon in “literature.”
Since I—and people around me -- have actually had such unexplainable experiences, I believe they are valid loci and foci for writing as well as discussion. Anyone who denies to my face that the “unseen world is all around us” is usually met with a laugh—if not a giggle -- I know better. And the more it is written of and discussed, the less it will be demonized; the more it might be understood.
Unfazed, my intrepid publisher, Bold Strokes Press, has issued Twelve O’Clock Tales, so named because around midnight is when I sat down to write most of the tales, and it’s a good time for you to read them too. ….Boo!

Felice Picano