Vincent McCaffrey's Blog

This weekend only, "The Dark Heart of Night" is available for only $0.99 as part of a special Kindle Countdown deal.

Here's how one reviewer described McCaffrey's third mystery novel:

"McCaffery's writing style has been compared to some of the great mystery writers of the past, and I concur. If you are looking for a fast paced, action filled, Jack Reacher kind of thing, then you are in the wrong place. If you like Ross MacDonald or Raymond Chandler, then you are in the right place.

"The writing brings you along nicely, developing the various characters as you go. You never feel like you've been left out of the secret. The dialog is very good and follows closely what I remember from my childhood listening to my grandparents talking about the Great Depression, the aftermath of WW I and the lead up to WW II."

Check it out here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014T9V6LY

The Dark Heart of Night

Here's the first chapter of this short story, available now for Amazon Kindle:

* * *

I am William McGuire. I would say, 'Call me Bill,' in the vein of Mr. Melville and his Ishmael, but it would make a worse joke of all this from the start. It is enough that my life has already been made into a farce.

I am going to tell some things you should not know. Private matters really. But I am going to tell you what I can of these things because they are already a part of what many might think they know, and most of that is untrue. Simply, this is the story of what has actually happened. It's a history that is not so complicated, in the end. And this is an effort to unmake that joke.

Please forgive the gaps. My notes have never been kept faithfully. What I offer here are those parts I think relevant. But to appreciate what I want to tell you now, I believe you should learn all of what follows, just as I did. There is at least some order to that process. I make no pretense of being a reporter.

My father, as it were, is Edward H. McGuire, a Professor of Microbiology at Harvard University, Emeritus. My mother, Mary Eleanor Rice, was for many years a Professor of Linguistics at MIT. Myself? I am nothing of the sort. I did graduate from Boston University with a degree in history, but only just barely and after seven years. I dropped out twice along the way. You may have seen something about me in the news on a few occasions before. But none of that matters now.

A little more than a year ago, I received a call from my mother. It was early in the morning and I work late so I was groggy. She wanted to see me. Her tone was grave. I didn't argue. She had been in remission from breast cancer for two years, but that was after two previous bouts, and I had a sense of what she wanted to say.

She was never over-weight, even in her prime, but she looked so horribly thin when she opened the door. I suppose that recognition was on my face. She pursed her lips just a little, in a ghost of the expressions of disapproval she used to direct at me nearly every day. She was wearing a long cream-white robe that revealed the knobs of her shoulder bones and a blue scarf that, without the familiar coal-black hair beneath, made her head look very small. She had been slightly stooped for years, due to osteoporosis I think, from her first cancer treatments. I bent and kissed her on the cheek, but she didn't really move to offer the usual feigned kiss in return. Either she was already too weary to make the effort, or her mind was on what she was going to talk to me about. She always had that kind of focus. Everything else around her became secondary to what was on her brain.

She might have been brilliant. I don't know. I don't really understand the work she did in linguistics. The semiotics as much as the semantics. She has her name on a couple of texts concerning the evolutionary fertilization of biolinguistics by the algorithms of computer languages. Artificial languages seem pointless to me when we cannot communicate in the languages we have. No matter, I suppose.

She stepped aside like I was a visiting repairman and pointed to the couch.

It was a very nice apartment by some standards. Bright. Mostly off-white. Like such extra care facilities always are. Just the one bedroom, living room and kitchen. Her favorite photographs by Maurice Salvo were on the wall. Enlarged in black and white, they made the room feel even colder than it actually was. Most of her books were already gone. Given away. Only the one shelf behind her desk gave hint of what work had occupied her life.

She had never been one for small talk. She started right in even before she sat in the chair by her desk.

She spoke slowly, almost carefully, "I wanted to tell you something."

"Is it about your health?"

"Two things, actually . . . No, I think you know about my health. That's a foregone conclusion, isn't it? . . . No, it's about you. Things you should know about."

Always a bad host, she would have forgotten to offer me something to drink in any case, but she was licking her lips, so I spoke up.

"Can I get you something? Anything?"

"No . . . Yes. There is a glass of mineral water on the counter. You can get me that. There isn't much else, I'm afraid. I've been ordering from the service lately. I don't have the energy to cook. No! As a matter of fact, there's half a bottle of scotch I bought the last time I found out I was in remission. There's that, if you'd like it."

I brought her the water. She was never one to drink beer in any case, so I didn't look in the fridge and I poured myself a couple ounces of scotch in a wine glass—the only glass I saw in the cupboard—and sat down again on the couch.

"So, tell me what I should know about myself."

A flinch of an eyebrow. "Everything."

I said, "We can agree on that, at least. But I haven't been doing so well with that project on my own."

"It may not be your fault."

"Maybe. But I'm not one for the blame game. You and Father gave me a lot of advantages in life. I chose my own road. I have to live with it."

She pursed her lips. The criticism implied in my words was ignored.

"I mean that you might have issues you do not understand."

Now, at that instant, my thinking stopped cold. Over the years, there has always been some undercurrent of matters they would not speak to me about. I had formed my own ideas long before, of course.

Some of my first memories were of a small room at MIT, no more than a booth, with no one else and no sound, just the lights and the large colorful buttons, and my mother's voice coming from somewhere I couldn't see. I hated it. I know it was MIT because I remember the walk to the building along the river, holding Mother's hand.

By the time I was fourteen, I was sure I was adopted.

About that same time, I managed to find a copy of my birth certificate. I think it was in Mother's personal file in her closet. My mother had given birth to me by cesarean section at Brigham's Hospital. There was no doubt about that. And my father's name was listed right there on the proper line following hers. But things had been said in strange ways that always seemed to carry another load of mischief, if you know what I mean. Especially when my parents argued.

After they divorced, all that stopped, and I had not really thought about it for years.

There were other matters to concern me then. But you have to understand. I was taller than my father by the time I was fourteen. I was twice his weight by the time I was in college. I am not particularly fat. I try to stay in shape. I work at it. If nothing else, out of self-preservation. After I won the wrestling championship my freshman year at BU, there seemed to be something of a sport around town in finding fellows to challenge me. Big guys just make easy targets.

Simply put, I don't look like either of my parents.

I suppose she was probably watching my face. She stopped and looked at me with what passes for pity in her own way. The way she would look at a hungry dog, really. She might take away a totally incorrect conclusion, but she is a good observer. That is the scientist in her, I suppose. After jamming up altogether, my own thoughts were suddenly racing. I knew just then that I was going to learn about the one thing that had always lurked at the back of my mind. Why was I different?

She sighed. That weariness of sound was her habit long before she became ill. "Maybe three things, then. The first is that I am dying. The medical review board has denied my request for additional treatment for the cancer."

What should be said? "I'm sorry. Knowing you, I'm sure you've tried everything you can."

She was shaking her head, as if to say this was not the matter of importance. "Yes. I believe so. Secondly, you should know that you are not my child. Not actually."

I did not say anything to that. I think I just released my own lungful of breath—a lifetime of breath held back, waiting.

"You see, it was just an experiment, to start. You have to understand. Twenty-eight years ago, your father and I were having an affair. He was already a full professor at Harvard then, and married. I hadn't gotten tenure yet at MIT. It was your father's idea that we should try an experiment and I was foolish enough to go along." She paused. I supposed to reflect on the event. "I believe his wife had already refused. He denied that, so it must be true . . . In any case, I agreed to become a surrogate—to carry a child that your father—more your step-father, actually—had essentially invented in his lab."

She had run right to the point. No elaboration. No niceties or detail that might have taken the edges off. No. Not my mother. Right to the point.

"I was an experiment."

"Essentially. Your father knew what he was doing. For him it was not an experiment. It was just a procedure. The experiment was in the result. He thought that would come later."

"But, why?"

"Just to see."

"To play with a human life?"

"It was science. We just wanted to know."

"And you are telling me this now? You're dying, and this is your confession? That you've played with a human life? With my life?"

"Well, . . . More than one. We aborted the first. I got cold feet . . . I've always had cold feet, you know. It's especially terrible now . . . But we tried again. Edward was so passionate about it. You have to understand. And I was in love. And curious too. He agreed to get a divorce and marry me if I would agree to have the child. So, you were actually a love child! Don't you see?"

The subject of love seemed totally inappropriate to me just then.

"Actually, I don't. If it wasn't for Aunt Jane, I might never have known what love was."

That got her out of her own planned course. She reacted abruptly then. "Hah! Jane Dunne. That stupid woman! She was hired to care for you. Just a nanny! It's always bothered me that you call her 'Aunt.' She didn't really care about you. It was a paycheck. That and the fact that your father wanted to get her in bed, at least once, I believe."

I don't think he ever accomplished that. I am thankful that Jane held him off as long as she did. He would have fired her for good as soon as he accomplished his goal. That's the way Father is. Jane had been my real mother, from the time I was two until I was fourteen.

"You're wrong about that. But then, it looks like you were wrong about a lot of things."

"No! We were right! Your father was right. The experiment worked! We proved that it could be done! Successfully. You were born a healthy baby. You are a healthy intelligent human being!"

What do you say to such blindness?

"That's not science. It is done every day. The old-fashioned way. A million times a day, all over the world."

"But in your case, it is."

"Why."

"Because . . . Because you are not of the same sub-species as everyone else."

This was not what I expected, even in the few moments after realizing what they had done. I cannot even tell you what thought was in my brain at the instant she said 'sub-species.' Whatever it was, it was blown away.

"What are you talking about?"

"Your DNA."

"What about my DNA?"

"You're Neanderthalensis."

I can hear my voice now. Like it was something overheard in another room. My own mind was that far away.

"Neanderthal?"

"Yes."

What could I have said? I probably didn't breathe for over a minute. It's scary how I can sometimes forget to breathe. She shook her head, shrugged the knobs on those thin shoulders, and shook her head again. She waited for me to say something. And I did finally speak.

"Why didn't you ever tell me before? Didn't you ever think something like this would matter to me? Didn't you tell anyone else? Ever?"

"No! Not unless your father did. Maybe he told one of his young women in the biology department that he was giving hands-on lessons to."

No other question seemed more important.

"But why?"

"Because it was the challenge of the moment. Someone was going to do it first. Why not us?"

"No. I meant why did you keep it a secret?"

"Because it was illegal. Don't you understand? There were laws against such things. There still are. It would have ruined both of our careers if it was ever known."

"Then why do it?"

"It was just the timing. You see, it was not actually illegal when we started. Just discouraged. And your father couldn't believe they would stop him once it was done. He wanted to be the first. He wanted that feather in his bonnet. But come down to it, it was a matter of federal funding for the University. They would have cut off the entire biology department. Hundreds of millions of dollars."

"And now?"

She shrugged again.

"Now it doesn't matter."

"To you. It doesn't matter to you. It's still all about you. And Father. Still! The ethics of what you did doesn't matter to you even today!"

She squinted at me in pained patience, the way she always did to students too slow on the uptake.

"It's not the same now. The labs are so poorly operated at Harvard that they couldn't even attempt it now. It's all pro-forma. The government tells us what they want to hear, and we provide the evidence. There is no excellence anymore. But then—Then! There was still competition! There was a lab in Zurich that was already working with a similar concept. And another at the University of Amsterdam. The Dutch had most of the body of the child found frozen in that glacier in the Caucasus. It was in the papers then. Your father had already purchased viable material from another find—from the Russians, he said. And we never really knew what the Chinese were doing, but I believe it was with something they uncovered in Tibet." She shrugged. "Whatever it was, it didn't come to anything." She shook her head again as if all of that should be obvious. "Then there was the team at the University of Leeds. Rumor had it they finally brought a fetus to term. So, you see, when we started, it was a whole new field . . . And then the politics changed. Overnight! The U.N. got involved. There were stories in the papers with an 'artist's conception of the face of the frozen child.' Congress attached a measure to an appropriation bill. And just like that, it was against the law. All that work was suddenly forbidden . . .Your father couldn't just throw it away. It was years of research. He was working on some way around it, but that never happened. So, we did it in secret. It was our secret." A smile flinched at her wan cheeks. "I remember we were sitting on the stone wall down at the Charles River late one night. We'd been drinking wine. We were both giggling and fooling around. Your father was talking about winning the Nobel Prize. And I said, what about me? What do I get? He said, 'You get to be the mother of the Nobel Prize!' Well, I jumped right up to object to that, but I slipped and fell in. I almost drowned. Your father jumped in to save me—to save his experiment, actually, but he was useless. An MIT security guard pulled me out. I was in the hospital when they told me that I was pregnant. I didn't even know . . . So, we married. And we kept our experiment a secret. Surely, the politics would change again, we thought. Then we heard that the Dutch government had destroyed the fetus at UVA. That would have happened to us, you understand. You would never have been born!"

That was a thought that had some merit.

"It feels like every day brings news of another iconic Boston-area institution closing down. Most recently there was Doyle's, and before that there were Charlie's Sandwich Shop, the iconic Filene’s Basement downtown, and more. But now, as Adam Reilly reports, one such Boston icon has been reborn just a bit north of where it used to be."

WGBH Boston profiles the re-opening of our bookstore, Avenue Victor Hugo Books.

It was possible to sell a blue crab or buy a paperback book for a quarter in 1956. And thus my reading career began.

We lived then in a modern (as in antiseptic and geometric) brick apartment complex in Beechhurst, just where the East River meets the Long Island Sound. Across the street, where a wonderful primal wood had lingered long beyond anything else of its kind in that densely populated suburb of New York City, was a place where I had watched bats twirl in the sky over the remains of a great estate while hidden in the enfolding roots of giant oaks, and held the fortress of a fallen gatehouse against the fury of thousands upon millions of snowballs.

In late summer of that year, a phalanx of earthmovers and a battalion of workers came to that place, at the behest of a Mr. Levitt, whose sign was posted high at a new gate. The invincible Roman Guard, a black fence of iron spears more than twice my height, which was so easily penetrated by our slim bodies, disappeared into the back of yawning trucks.

On a single morning and afternoon the oaks fell. Within mere days the enormous and mysterious cellar hole that had served as a walled pond and bred a zillion tadpoles was dug deeper still, and another beyond it, and another, and another, until the landscape was opened all the way to that small bay where other mysterious powers had already sunk footings for a monstrous bridge which would soon be marching across the waters.

The workers who had leveled the forest were Italian and Greek–not by heritage, but by birth–and they spoke their unfathomable languages back and forth as they altered the earth. And I, with my mouth agape, watched them as closely as I could manage given the new chain link fences.

My recreation then, other than spying and hiding, and talking to anyone who would listen about what I imagined I had seen while hiding and spying, was to chase horseshoe crabs in the tidal shallows and collect the detritus that belched from the river into the Sound and to hang from the cross bracing at the pier and with a homemade net, crafted from a found orange sack and a borrowed coat hanger, to scoop up the blue crabs that nestled against the barnacles below where they themselves waited for the small black fish that darted there.

One day a workman, probably taking a break from the slaughtering of ancient trees, stood above me on the pier and watched. He spoke to me, but I could not understand. He gestured. He pointed, Finally he removed a dime from his pocket and held it between two fingers so that I could see it clearly.

It was a more innocent age than this, but I had been told not to take money from strangers, so I turned away and continued my effort to snag another crab. The crabs, for their part, fiercely attacked my net with widened claws and if I turned my device at just the right moment, they snagged themselves.

“Bene! Bene! Bene!”

I looked up to a shadowed face and a gleeful smile. The worker’s hand went down into his pocket again and returned holding a quarter.

“Take. Please. Take.”

I had no mind for math but I was not completely stupid. One thing quickly led to another. For a couple of weeks, before school began, I had a short line of workers coming to the pier just before lunch with quarters in hand. At the work site they made small fires and boiled the crabs in buckets and ate them with olive oil and pieces of bread torn from long loaves.

I discovered this last part because one worker—the one I had first met—had taken me over the road one day and fed me a shred of crab on a piece of bread dripping with olive oil. I liked lobster better, but I didn’t tell him that. I couldn’t. I just said

“Bene.”

All of this has much to do with learning to read. I’ll tell you why.

It's nearing the end of the day and The knight's tale: a story of the future has done wonderfully.

The book was downloaded by over 1750 Amazon customers and at the time I'm writing this has risen to #4 in Science Fiction and #79 in the overall Kindle Store.

I look forward to seeing readers engage with the book and I hope to see some reviews on Amazon, here on Goodreads, and maybe on BookBub, where I'm just starting to create a bit of a presence.

If you're reading the book and you have any questions, please post them on my profile or send me a message.

"The Dark Heart of Night" Kindle Edition is available for 99¢ through a limited-time promotion with Bargain Booksy. Visit Amazon.com to get your copy now through Sunday, August 11th.

I judge authors by what they intended to accomplish as well as on whether they managed to accomplished it. I judge authors by how much I enjoyed reading them. Originality and style are important, but not the key to greatness lest we leave Shakespeare aside. My favorite mystery authors have surpassed at each of these things to various degrees. Yet Chandler disliked Sayers and Christie, though he backtracked on that later on. Doyle cannot be denied. But my list of the five best mysteries would be idiosyncratic not for the differences between Chandler and Christie, or the fact that not one is at all like the other, or the fact that the Doyle I have read most repeatedly in my life is not a novel but a collection of stories that reveals a single unique character at its center, but for going afield, so to speak, with Buchan. My favorite mysteries would be, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night, and Greenmantle by John Buchan.

"The knight’s tale, a story of the future," is now available in paperback from the mighty Amazon as well as in at least one fine bookshop.

You can read the first three chapters free via the download form on my website: https://vincentmccaffrey.com/the-knig...

This novel has been part of my effort since beginning to write again to touch on several themes I believe to be important while playing with the many genres of fiction that I love and have read since I was a boy.

With "The knight’s tale" my interests were the ongoing predilection of human beings for slavery as much as our amazing sense of regeneration, set in a future time when the worst has already happened but the best might be possible once again.

The question is a simple one, if history repeats itself because we so often ignore it, might not the future come more than once?

The adventure science fiction story was a staple of my youth and I hope I have done it some justice.