Chuck Greaves's Blog

The first album to which I can remember binge-listening was my sister’s copy of Carole King’s Tapestry.  That would have been around 1971, when I was sixteen.  Once I’d turned eighteen, my friends and I could hit the local Long Island bars and listen to live music, and the guy we followed most often was […]

Thomas Wolfe’s admonition notwithstanding, I actually went home again, to Levittown, in March of 2025, for the first time in 35 years. The occasion was my induction into the Levittown School District Hall of Fame, a laurel I self-deprecated to friends as saying more about Levittown than it did about me, but which in truth […]

When Lynda and I moved to the Cortez, Colorado area in 2012, I quickly perceived, accurately or not, a dearth of what I would characterize as “literary culture.” By that I mean an independent bookstore that hosts readings, a newspaper that features book reviews, a library that proactively promotes writing and the written word. This […]

It speaks to the rich tradition of Penn State athletics that one of the most extraordinary sportsmen of his day – and to this day, the only NFL veteran ever to fight and defeat a world heavyweight boxing champion – today is all but unknown except to a few diehard fans. It took a chance […]

My father, like nearly all of Levittown’s original homeowners, was a veteran. An Army sergeant, he returned stateside from the European theater with a flat-top crewcut that he wore, graying but somehow never thinning, until his death in 1997. Mom too was a vet; a telephone operator who’d joined the Women’s Army Corps less out […]

The science of fingerprinting was pioneered by Sir Francis Galton, a British anthropologist who, beginning in 1888, published a series of monographs establishing that each individual’s prints are unique and that they remain so, unchanged, over a lifetime. Recognizing the significance of Galton’s research, Scotland Yard began collecting and compiling the fingerprints of arrestees for […]

Mancos, Colorado is about as far from Hollywood as you can get without a passport, and screenwriting gigs for 65-year-old novices are about as common as sled dogs on Sunset Boulevard.  Yet October of 2020 somehow found me on a Mancos film set watching acclaimed television director Felix Alcalá (ER, Breaking Bad, The Good Wife, […]

Six U.S. cities have selected Church of the Graveyard Saints to launch the inaugural “Four Corners/One Book” regional reading program for 2019-2020. The public libraries of Montrose, Cortez, Dolores, Mancos, and Ignacio (CO) and Moab (UT) have joined forces to invite all their residents to read the novel — hailed as “a lyrical, vivid tour […]

Here’s a preview of the cover of my sixth novel, CHURCH OF THE GRAVEYARD SAINTS, coming in September, 2019 from Torrey House Press.  Environmental issues have always been important to me, and moving from Pasadena, CA (via Santa Fe) to the Four Corners and witnessing firsthand both the beauty of the landscape and the threats posed to it by the area’s extractive industries inspired me to write a novel that explores the tensions between economic prosperity and environmental stewardship, as well...

Green-Eyed Lady, a taut political thriller and the second installment in the Jack MacTaggart series of legal mysteries, is now available in mass-market paperback exclusively from Harlequin Worldwide Mystery! To order a copy of the novel that #1 NYT bestselling author Douglas Preston called the “wickedest read if the year,” you can follow this link.