Martin J. Smith's Blog: Book Blather and Random Mutterings

I scroll through the nearly 1,300 names in my smartphone’s contact list around this time each year, with an eye toward editing. That’s when I’m haunted by the dead.

At present, there are 15 friends, colleagues, and kin who have passed from this life to whatever waits beyond. Seeing their names always gives me pause—a smile, a twinge, a pang. Deleting them would seem an affront, somehow disrespectful of the roles they played in my life. So for now they live on in the ephemeral world of silicon and proprietary software. Their entries are little memorials, the cellphone numbers and addresses serving as Digital Age epitaphs. Each one tells a story.

I just wish my collection of dead contacts weren’t growing at such an uncomfortable rate. I’m now 58, and as I continue down the alphabetized list of names, I wish I didn’t feel quite so much like a melancholy elephant at a graveyard, sifting and swaying as it sorts the bones of the fallen.

Look here, near the top, under the B’s:

Mark Bowling, my cousin’s son, his body battered since childhood by diabetes, dead at 39 while awaiting a liver transplant. Seeing his name reminds me that diabetes runs in our family; my grandfather, father, and both brothers have it, though I’m as yet unaffected. Mark reminds me to keep fit, eat sensibly, and nag my kids to live smart in the long shadow of that disease.

And just down the list, Margaret Burke, who along with former Orange Coast book critic Marylin Hudson, even farther down, co-founded O.C.’s fabled Round Table West book-and-author program. They were like Lucy and Ethel, only funnier, and were inexplicably kind to me in the early days of my writing career.

The C’s include fabled TV-writer and novelist Stephen Cannell, a bigger-than-life character who, despite vast success, treated me like a peer, and once invited me for a drink in the back seat of his ancient black limousine after we appeared together on a panel.
I scroll on, past Jay Dantry, a bookstore owner in my hometown, and Oakley Hall, who founded UC Irvine’s MFA writing program and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers; past Kirk Hawkins, with whom I coached our sons’ soccer team, and whose death left behind a devastated young family; past Michael Parrish, at whose USC magazine-editing class I was a regular guest.

The most troubling ones are those who were just about my age, or younger, when they died. Cousin Buddy Parsons went earlier this year, at 64. He’d battled cancer, and apparently won, only to succumb to something he picked up during a hospital visit. Cancer did get Joel Pasco, a big-hearted veterinarian and husband of my friend Jean. Joel passed in 2009 at 62, a few months after Steve Plesa, once my boss at the Register who fell to liver failure at 55. Watching Steve die convinced me to be especially kind to that particular organ. I’m still processing the news that Jason, a long-time soccer buddy in his early 50s, committed suicide not long after sending his only son off to college. He left behind an angry young man and a beautiful, lightning-struck wife.
There are more, but you get the idea. Together they’re a club whose members are bonded in death as they never were in life. Their common link was an acquaintance with me. But this club never has meetings, and I’m the only one who knows it exists.

I return to the top of my list, then go through it again to make sure I’ve found them all. Which is creepier: killing, or keeping? I consider dialing their numbers, but then imagine my disappointment if a stranger answers.

In the end, I do nothing. My lost acquaintances remind me that life is unpredictable, in ways both good and bad. Strangers become friends. Families survive the unthinkable. Tragedies befall the most honorable people. The good die young, and sometimes for reasons that make no sense.

The dead people in my phone are my personal Greek chorus, chanting over and over: Right now is all we’re guaranteed.

More from author Martin J. Smith at www.martinjsmith.com.

Thanks to Rege Behe of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for the fine piece about my new novel, THE DISAPPEARED GIRL, in today's paper. And thanks to photographer Heidi Murrin for making me look a bit less like a Civil War veteran than usual. Here's the link for those who may be interested:

http://triblive.com/aande/books/57526...

Every adoption story is a mysterious stew of longing, loss, and searching love. I learned that firsthand from my sister Lisa, my oldest sibling, who was 19 in October 1961 when she found herself pregnant and unable to keep her infant daughter. I was just five at the time, and three decades passed before Lisa ever told me her secret. On the day she finally did—sitting with me on my front porch in Southern California—something extraordinary happened. At her home in Phoenix, the phone rang. The caller spoke briefly with my sister’s husband, but left no message. We later learned that coincidental call was from her lost daughter, then 30 and living in Ohio, trying for the first time to contact her birth mother.
Like I said, mysterious.
So when people ask me what inspired my novel “The Disappeared Girl,” which Diversion Books launched on March 4, 2014, that’s the story I tell them. I saw firsthand how both mother and child carry the weight of adoption, and how that burden can last lifetimes. And I came to understand in a personal way an adopted child’s need to know, and a mother’s enduring bond with a missing child.
I carried that experience into “The Disappeared Girl,” which is a suspense thriller about an American father and his adopted daughter who plunge into a high-stakes search for the truth about her past. That search leads them into a deep, dark well of family secrets, and into the crosshairs of an international fugitive who’ll do anything to keep those secrets buried. Researching the novel took me back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, into the grim, now-open secrets of Argentina’s Dirty War, during which an estimated 30,000 people vanished into a shadowy government system intent on rooting out subversives.
My sister’s story of disconnection and searching love took on a global dimension when I learned that some of the Dirty War’s political prisoners were pregnant women, and that about 500 babies born to those women were stolen and funneled into a now-notorious adoption pipeline designed to shore up loyalty to that morally bankrupt government. After giving birth, many of the mothers simply disappeared.
Then something extraordinary happened. The mothers of the women who endured that ordeal formed a collective conscience called The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Beginning in 1977, and at great risk, those brave women began gathering in front of the presidential palace in Buenos Aires to focus world attention on that tragedy, and to learn the fate of their lost children and grandchildren. Their drama may have played out on a world stage, but their driving motivation was precisely the same as the one that eventually reunited my sister and her first daughter. The courage and determination of those mothers—of all disconnected mothers and children—should humble us all.
By comparison, my role was relatively simple: To knit those twin strands of reality into a novel that not only entertains, but also acknowledges and celebrates that courage. If “The Disappeared Girl” does all that, it will have succeeded.

One month from today, Diversion Books will launch the long-awaited fourth book in my Memory Series crime novels, called "The Disappeared Girl." In the e-book exclusive, Argentina's Dirty War comes home for memory expert Jim Christensen, who also starred in the previous three books -- Anthony Award-nominated "Time Release," "Shadow Image," and Edgar and Barry Award-nominated "Straw Men." To those who have been asking for a sneak peek, here's the official book jacket description:

"A mysterious, long-ago military plane crash plunges memory expert Jim Christensen and his adopted daughter into a high-stakes search for the truth about her past that leads to a deep well of dark family secrets, and into the crosshairs of an international fugitive who’ll do anything to keep those secrets buried."

I'm pretty excited about this one, as is bestseller Rebecca Forster, who blurbed: “Smith is at once a reporter and storyteller, weaving a gruesome wartime reality deftly into the lives of the most engaging characters. A terrific read for lovers of political suspense.”

If the story idea intrigues you, pre-order today at http://martinjsmith.com/book/disappea...

I feel so cheap, but at the moment, I am! Diversion Books today launches digital editions of my first three crime novels with a special 99-cent price (actually, a free download for a limited time at Amazon and iBookstore) for Anthony Award-nominated "Time Release," the first book in my "Memory Series" featuring memory expert Jim Christensen. So here's your chance to start the whole series at a rock-bottom price, and get all three suspense thrillers read before the March release of the long-awaited fourth book, "The Disappeared Girl." Easiest way to find and order all the books is through http://martinjsmith.com/books/ And if you're feeling especially generous his holiday season, kindly share the news with every thriller lover you know. Thanks.

From the day in 2009 I began work on my most recent book, "The Wild Duck Chase," I've believed that the story someday should be told as a documentary film. We were lucky enough to find the right filmmaker, Brian Davis, and now it's time to help his team finish the project they began six months ago. Here's your chance to preview "The Million Dollar Duck" and help bring the fabled Hautman brothers, iconoclast Rob McBroom, and the rest of the book's wonderful cast of characters to the screen. And you'll have a chance to win an autographed copy of the book as well. They have my support, and I hope they'll have yours when they officially launch their funding campaign soon. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1...

There's been a lot of debate lately about creating a new stamp for birders and other "non-consumptive" conservationists, so they don't have to buy a (hawk, spit) "hunting stamp" (better known as a Federal Duck Stamp). This is a great debate, and I'm thrilled that it's taking place. But I'd like to challenge the notion that birders are "non-consumptive." As USFWS Director Dan Ashe argues in my book, "The Wild Duck Chase," don't birders use the roads, bridges and trails in the National Wildlife Refuge System, much of which was assembled with Duck Stamp money? Does their presence not require staffing and maintenance? I'm not a hunter, but how can the people who most enjoy our wild places deny the incredible contributions of hunters since 1934 to preserving the resource they enjoy? I'd suggest that the goals of the Federal Duck Stamp Program are precisely aligned with those of the birding community -- to preserve habitat for waterfowl -- and that any effort to create an alternate stamp will only dilute the effectiveness of that singular mission.

Those of us who respect the rights of law-abiding, non-insane Americans to buy and own guns have news for the U.S. Senate: This week's vote on modest gun control legislation was not an assault on gun rights. It was an intelligence test. Alas, a majority of you failed. Now, let's try this again.

Got a call today from a marketing company that's competing for a contract to better market the Federal Duck Stamp. The folks I talked to seem smart and well-intentioned. And I have to say it: After two years of dealing with the Federal Duck Stamp office, and after discovering the limits of its resources and vision, I think finding good outside marketing help might be a critical step forward in terms of helping the American public understand the program's true value. I'm not endorsing any single marketing company, because many other good ones may be competing for the same contract. But I am urging Duck Stamp officialdom to get the help it needs, for the sake of the program.

Is there anything in the new gun control proposals that's more than an inconvenience to law-abiding hunters? Didn't think so. So hunters, please let's drop the chest-thumping about the Second Amendment and deal with the problem at hand. We as a culture have a big problem, and solving it need not involve threatening any upstanding citizen's right to own guns. And I say this as an author whose most recent book celebrates hunters as the absolute heroes of American conservation. www.wildduckchase.com