Aaron Smith's Blog

A few days ago, I posted the opening chapter of my first spy novel, NOBODY DIES FOR FREE. This was in anticipation of the upcoming third book in the series, which will be called NEVER THINK TWICE. Today, I'd like to share the first chapter of the second Richard Monroe novel, UNDER THE RADAR.

I hope you enjoy the chapter. If you'd like to read the rest of the book, links are provided after the sample.  





                                                             

                                                          Chapter 1

                                                          I’m a Spy, Not a…

“Where are you?” Mr. Nine asked.
       Richard Monroe had the phone on speaker, his hands on the wheel. It had been a good evening and Monroe, adrenaline pulsing through his veins, was enjoying every curve of the Boston freeway, passing slow drivers, and resisting the temptation to soar over the speed limit.
      “I’m on my way home.”
      “Coming from where, Monroe?”
      “I was out with a lady, sir.”
      “Are you alone now?”
      “Unfortunately, yes.”
      “Head straight home; I’m waiting for you.”
      “You’re at my place?”
      “Yes. Are you armed?”
      “You know I’m always prepared, sir.”
      “Leave it in the car.”
      “Sir, what’s going on?”
      “You’ll find out soon enough, but you’ll be observed on your way in and carrying would be a bad idea tonight. You have to trust me on this. Just get here as soon as you can. It will all make sense soon enough.”
      Click.

                                                                           * * *

Monroe flattened his foot against the accelerator as his excitement level rose. Any word from Mr. Nine meant something interesting was about to happen. Monroe normally received his assignments and other operational information as encrypted files sent to his phone or by courier. Face to face meetings were rarely required. Most of the time, Monroe had no idea where in the world Nine was, and now he was suddenly visiting Monroe at home. Something very unusual was going on.
      He arrived at his apartment block, pulled into the underground garage, and immediately knew he was being watched. He glanced around, saw nobody, for it was late, well past eleven, but he knew. In Monroe’s business, instinct could save your life and you learned to trust it. The eyes were there somewhere, checking his movements carefully. But he trusted Mr. Nine. He had to. His life revolved around his work and Mr. Nine was his link to the world and the events he found himself involved in when the call came.
       He reluctantly took the ten-round Glock 34 from his shoulder holster, put it in the glove compartment as instructed. He felt naked without his trusted weapon at his side. Moving slowly, he got out of the car. Once standing, he took off his jacket and hung it over his arm, walked slowly toward the elevator, and rose to his floor without seeing a single human being. 
      The hallway on Monroe’s floor was empty too, but he knew he was still being watched. The cameras were being controlled by someone other than regular security; he was sure of that now. So he went unarmed to the door of his penthouse, not knowing if he was about to be shot dead upon entry, be beaten in an ambush, or really find his supervisor waiting behind the door. The uncertainty was thrilling and he wouldn’t have traded it for anything.
      The key went into the lock, turned, the door opened. Monroe went in, scanned the room quickly, muscles coiled to spring into action should it be a trap. But he couldn't have been more wrong. It wasn't a trap. Abruptly, he snapped to attention and saluted.
       Monroe found the President of the United States sitting in his living room.
      At first he was honored to host such a prestigious guest, but just as quickly he realized that this was not a social call. The president was there for a reason. A chill went up Monroe's spine.
President Patrick Davis had borrowed Monroe’s favorite chair and sat puffing on a Parliament, a habit his staff must have carefully concealed from the public, for Monroe had never heard a single word in the press on the subject of the president smoking. Mr. Nine stood behind the president, dressed in a trench coat. Monroe looked up at his superior and noted the cold stare from his one good eye. The other eye was made of glass.
      “At ease, Monroe,” Mr. Nine said. Monroe nodded, let his spine relax just a tad, and dropped the salute.
      “Mr. President.”
      “Good evening, Mr. Monroe. Your … friend here speaks highly of you. I’m hoping you can help.” Davis extended his hand, and Monroe shook it.
      Richard Monroe, despite having loyally served his country for over a decade and a half, had never been in the same building as a serving president. Now he had one as a guest.
      Monroe took a seat across from the president. As he tried to relax, feeling a bit star struck, he kept his eyes on the Commander-in-Chief. Monroe had been working for the CIA and stationed in France during the last election. He had not voted for Davis, but he liked him. Davis was fifty-four, an old-school Maine Republican with distinguished gray hair and a charming smile. While Monroe rarely agreed entirely with a politician’s opinions, he respected the office and admired the man who currently held the position.
      “I should have known it was Secret Service watching me on the way in,” Monroe said.
      “I’m sorry to have surprised you,” Davis said, “but no one can know I’m here tonight.”
      “That’s understood. Would you like a drink, sir?”
      Mr. Nine cleared his throat. “This is not a social visit, Monroe. The president needs your help.”
      “I’m at your service,” Monroe assured them.
      “I realize,” the president began, “that you work alone on most assignments, are extremely discreet, and act on matters that threaten national security but could escalate if large agencies involved themselves.”
      Monroe nodded. “That’s been my standard mode of late, yes.”
      “Excellent. This isn’t as big a situation as your recent disposal of Garrett Khan, Monroe, but a different sort of problem, the kind that could create severe embarrassment for the government and for me specifically.”
      “I see.” Monroe was surprised, though he kept it to himself. Patrick Davis didn’t seem like the sort to jump headfirst into potentially scandalous waters. What was it, Monroe wondered: an affair, a slip of the tongue with some foreign official, blackmail over some long-ago indiscretion? As far as Monroe and the public knew, Davis was solidly respectable, had a strong marriage, a daughter with a bright future, and no big black marks on his record. But something was up. Visits like this didn’t happen often, if ever. He waited for the anvil to drop, wondering who he was about to be ordered to kill.
      “My daughter Sophie has disappeared, Mr. Monroe.”
      So that was it, Monroe realized. That’s what all the secrecy and the clandestine visit was about.     
      “You mean someone’s taken her and you don’t want it getting out for fear of what the kidnappers might do?”
      President Davis laughed. “No, Mr. Monroe, that’s not it at all, thank God for that! The little brat has run away and I need you to get her back for me.”
      “That’s not my usual area of expertise, sir.”
      “Monroe!” Mr. Nine broke his long silence. “Your area of expertise is whatever I say it is. Don’t worry, Patrick, he’ll do it.”
      Monroe’s curiosity was piqued when he heard his supervisor address the president so casually, but he knew better than to ask. “Yes, of course I’ll do whatever must be done. What do I need to know, sir?”
      “Do you see this?” the president held up his cigarette, which had just about burned down to the butt by now. “This is a great state secret. It shouldn’t have to be, it shouldn’t be a big deal at all if the man with one of the most stressful jobs in the world finds that a nicotine fix every now and then helps him relax. But it is a big deal because the public has a certain image in their heads of what the president is and isn’t supposed to do in the modern age and right now, Monroe, smoking is on the restricted list.”
      “Your daughter, sir,” Monroe reminded him.
      “I’m getting there. I was making an analogy, perhaps a long-winded one. The cigarettes are a big secret and now I’m going to tell you another one. My daughter is a perfectly normal nineteen-year-old woman! How’s that for scandal? What I mean, Monroe, is that Sophie is human. She’s not the bright, shining, genius, virgin, perfect example of everything anybody could ever want to be that the media has taken to portraying her as. Yes, my daughter is lovely and intelligent and certainly has a wonderful future ahead of her … but she’s normal too and has all the urges and desires that any young woman of her age experiences. I’m sure you read in the papers how Sophie is taking a year off before starting at Yale so she can explore her ‘spiritual side.’”
      “Yes, I recall something about that, sir.”
      “Well, that spiritual side bullshit is a phrase we made up to give them something to report. The phrase, ‘Girls just want to have fun,’ might have been more accurate. Now of course, there’s nothing wrong with young people enjoying themselves and I was perfectly happy to let Sophie have her time off and do whatever she wanted as long as it was safe, was governed by common sense, and, of course, she had Secret Service with her at all times. I didn’t think that was too much to ask. You would know, Monroe, being in the business, how many threats, valid or otherwise, are made against the presidential family each year.”
      Monroe nodded.
      “Then you understand the value of security,” Davis continued, “and you see why I had to keep my daughter on a leash, even if I did loosen it from time to time.”
      “Yes, sir,” Monroe said.
      “Good, I’m glad we’re on the same page. But anyway, Monroe, it’s time to cut the long story short. Five days ago, Sophie asked if she could spend a day or two at our little cabin up in Maine. She’s loved that place since she was a tiny little tot. Of course I said yes. She headed up there with her Secret Service escort and all seemed fine … until she slipped away in the middle of the day, in broad sunshine, from right under her watcher’s nose!”
      “How did she manage that?”
      “We’re not entirely sure yet. The buffoon who was supposed to be guarding her claims he was sick and may have dozed off, but I don’t know how true that is or if he’s hiding something. That cabin is our one refuge from the real world, and it always has been. My wife was adamant about not installing the battery of cameras we have in all our other usual haunts. Now we haven’t seen or heard from my daughter in five days now and I’m afraid to think what she might be doing out there.”
      “I’m sure she’s all right, sir. She sounds like a resourceful girl.”
      “I’m more worried about me, Monroe! Sophie’s certainly got a wild side, despite what the press says, and she’s obviously angry with me if she’s going to run off like that. I’m worried she’ll do something stupid and cause a scandal of some sort while she’s out in the world enjoying her new found freedom. I don’t have any patience for paparazzi and controversy. I’d prefer the focus to be on my work as president and not on family issues.”
      “That’s as it should be, sir.”
      “I’m glad we agree. Now I want you to use any resources you think necessary to locate my daughter and bring her home. Everything I have to offer is at your disposal, but I demand discretion. Keep it quiet and get the job done as fast as you can. Mr. Nine will keep me updated on your progress.”
      The president stood, marched right past Monroe, opened the door himself, and was met in the hall by two large men who escorted him off into the shadows.
      Before the footsteps’ echoes had faded, Monroe was up and pouring scotch, two glasses. He handed one to Mr. Nine, took the first sip of his own.
      “That was bizarre,” Monroe said after swallowing.
      “You enjoyed it and you know it,” Mr. Nine reacted.
      “I did … and I’m honored. I just had a symbol in my living room, the man who stands for the country I’ve devoted everything to. Corny as that may sound, it was an amazing experience. But what he just asked me to do …”
      “What he just asked you to do, Monroe, sounds like a vacation to me. Nobody to shoot, no malicious threat to take down or die trying; just a young lady who’s run away from her mean old daddy. Use your skills, track her down, convince her to come home, and you’ll have the president’s gratitude and probably a nice reward to go with it.”
      “Sure,” Monroe said, “and when I find her, what do I do? Put her over my knee and spank her and throw her over my shoulder and carry her back to the White House kicking and screaming? I don’t have kids; I’ll probably never have kids. What do I know about dealing with them?”
      “Damn it, Monroe, I know you were just thrown out of your element, but didn’t you hear a word Davis said to you? You’re not going after a child. You’re hunting down a nineteen-year-old woman with a wild streak who’s run off to have a good time. That, Monroe, is right up your alley and it’s something you truly are very, very good at. This will be an assignment you can enjoy … and you’ll be doing your country a big favor in the process.”
      “Sir, it’s the president’s daughter. I can’t just …”
      “Monroe, in case you didn’t quite catch his meaning, I think Patrick Davis just said, not in so many words, that he’d rather you went there than some random young man his daughter happens to encounter on her impromptu road trip.”
      “I’m forty years old, sir! I could be her father!”
      “Would that stop you if the target were anyone else? And that’s only one possible way of bringing her in, Monroe. If having her kick and scream suits you better, then so be it. Just get the damn job done.”
      “I will, sir. I'll require a full dossier on Sophie, and any friends and acquaintances that she may seek out. And the president implied the Secret Service operative assigned to watch her may have been involved. I'll need a complete run down on him. And, of course, anything else you deem important, sir.”
      “You’ll have that in the morning. Get some sleep, Monroe.”
      Mr. Nine put down his glass, straightened the collar of his coat, and walked out of the apartment.
      Monroe sighed and went to bed.


                                                                        *****


UNDER THE RADAR is available at Amazon in the following versions:

Print edition

Kindle

Audio book

Back in June of 2013, Pro Se Press released my first spy novel, NOBODY DIES FOR FREE. This book was the result of the interest in spy stories I've had since I saw my first James Bond movie at the age of 7. The novel features my American intelligence agent Richard Monroe, who then went on to appear in the sequel, UNDER THE RADAR, which was published in May of 2015. 

I'm pleased to announce that the third Richard Monroe novel, NEVER THINK TWICE, will be coming soon.
Today, for those who haven't read it and might be curious about Monroe, I'm posting here, free to read, the first chapter of the original Monroe book, NOBODY DIES FOR FREE.I hope you enjoy it. If you'd like to know what happens to Monroe next, links to order the book, which is available in print, Kindle, and audio book editions, are at the end of the chapter. 






NOBODY DIES FOR FREE

                                              Chapter 1: The Cradle or the Grave
Richard Monroe had invested his entire soul in one woman, and then she died. It was as simple as that.             Her blood ran out through his fingers, the last product of her slowing heartbeat, and Monroe knew that it was too much red, far too fast, for his hand to contain and save her. It spilled out and stained the street outside the Paris Opera where, only seconds earlier, they had been joking about the Phantom as they waited their turn to enter.             At that moment, Monroe did not care where the bullet had come from, why it had struck, or what the gathering crowd of policemen and gawkers were shouting. He cared only that he was about to lose her, and five years suddenly seemed shorter than the blink of an eye.             He whispered her name one last time as her soft brown eyes closed.            “Genevieve.”            And she was gone. Richard Monroe held her until the police dragged him away from the body, but already he was alone.

            Six months later, the CIA seemed a world away, a different lifetime for Monroe. The week after the shooting had gone by in a mostly emotionless blur as Monroe had gone through the necessary motions: identification of the body, burial arrangements, and notification of Genevieve’s few scattered relatives. Then he saw to the distribution of their money, most of which had come from her inheritance, into various accounts tied to various banks in various nations. Finally, he put down onto paper his official resignation from the agency that had stationed him in Paris five years earlier. When Genevieve was gone, Richard Monroe severed all ties to his old life, abandoned everything he had planned for the future, and erased himself from the eyes of those who had known him in the years before the shot outside the opera hall.             Genevieve had softened him; he was fully aware of that. With her by his side, he had shifted from a life of movement, change, upheaval, and violence to one of tranquility, happiness, music, fine food and high style.             But she was gone and now the softness of proper civilization had to go away, too. Monroe sharpened himself again, let the cultured, educated façade slip away into the night and hardened into something like what he had been before her, but perhaps worse. He set into motion a metamorphosis that would have made him unrecognizable to his friends, if he had any left who might happen to see him in the dark places he now traveled.             He stopped shaving and let his hair grow until he took on a grizzled appearance and his hair became a semi-hippie mop. He discarded his perfectly tailored suits and took to wearing clothes that put him just one level above a bum. He became the sort of man who nobody looked at twice, who nobody would want to look at twice. Easier to blend in that way. His face went from the younger side of thirty-nine to the ragged wilderness of the far side of fifty. He made the changes in Paris while crashing in a small rented room all the way across the city from the spacious home he had shared with Genevieve. When he was satisfied with his transformation, he put it to the test.            Monroe shuffled into the bank where he had been a frequent customer, his height disguised with a slouch, his face peering out from the jungle of his beard, his movements cautious and without his traditional smooth confidence. He roamed into the bank and stood less than six feet from the bank manager, who knew him very well, and stared the man down, glad to see not a sliver of recognition cross the French moneylender’s face.            Having satisfactorily melted from the face of the Earth, Richard Monroe began the hunt. He had no personal computer now, having abandoned it along with his house, car, and suits. He went into an internet café in one of the rougher corners of Paris and hacked his way into the United States Federal computer system. The US government has over a dozen levels of classified files and Monroe knew how to get into all but the highest of them. He had five minutes in there and began to check statuses and memorize the contents of the secret sites. In minutes though, the intrusion was detected and the visit shut down. No matter. He left the place.             He hit two more pay by the hour computers in Paris and then moved on to Nice, travelling by train and sometimes by bus. Lyon and Toulouse were next, and then back to Paris, followed by a quick side trip to Marseille. He avoided hitting the cities or their internet cafés in any sort of logical pattern; his travels were now as random as his hair. He did not confine his jumps to Paris either, but made it into Belgium once or twice, then Portugal, and finally all the way over to Sofia, Bulgaria. All the while, he memorized names and faces and the details of those to whom the faces belonged. He knew that there were a limited number of men in the world capable of setting up, taking a shot like the one that had stolen Genevieve away from him, and then fading into the night almost before their presence was realized. What Monroe needed to do was figure out which one of those men had been in the right place at the right time to have been the one who destroyed his life.             He had lost count of how many times he had hacked into those files for a minute here and ten minutes there and sometimes as little as thirty seconds before being detected and tossed like a drunk who just pissed off the bouncer. But finally, late one night in Sofia, Richard Monroe struck gold and his blood felt like ice as he saw the face of the man who had indeed been in that place at that time. He would no longer need to go to those classified sites. He would not need to print any documents. That face, that name, that dossier were burned into his memory as if branded with a white-hot iron.            His name was Baltasar al-Hamsi. A former Syrian intelligence man now gone freelance, al-Hamsi was a killer, and a good one. He would shoot anyone for the right price and had never come close to being caught. It was only due to a few small leaks in the chain of darkness that binds together men in al-Hamsi’s profession that the CIA and DHS had any idea who he was. In any case, they had never had sufficient evidence or reason to go after him, to finish him. He was simply on a handful of watch-lists. Those lists had failed to keep Genevieve safe.            Monroe had no idea who might have hired al-Hamsi, for he had spat in the faces of many nations in his CIA career, but he knew who had pulled the trigger and, for now, that was something. And what was more, the CIA, at that moment, according to the information Monroe had just stolen, knew where the son of a bitch was. Richard Monroe would have to go to Istanbul.

            Turkey was hot as Hell and Monroe was sorely tempted to shave off the beard; it made him itch terribly, but he resisted. He had to keep looking like a man who nobody wanted to look at twice, had to blend in. It was no problem locating Baltasar al-Hamsi. Monroe, despite his ragged appearance, still had a nice chunk of money in his possession and buying information was easier and easier the further east one went. The Syrian sniper was apparently taking a break between jobs. He had done one a month earlier, although the provider of the information did not know who the target was and the CIA’s files had not made mention of the job, either. But that was nothing new; it had not made the connection between al-Hamsi’s sights and Genevieve. But al-Hamsi had certainly been in Paris that evening and left on the next flight available after Monroe had desperately tried to keep his wife’s blood in her veins. That was proof enough.            After the information was in Monroe’s mind—al-Hamsi’s address in Istanbul, his favorite café, the brothel he frequented—Monroe spent a bit more of his vengeance fund. He found a dealer of antiquities, medieval in specialty, and he purchased a misericorde. This was the instrument of the final death-thrust for warriors of the Middle Ages, a long, thin blade easily concealed—such as up a sleeve—with a narrow point that could quickly and quietly be slipped right between the ribs to pierce the heart and stop it cold with a minimum of noisy fuss. While Monroe had often entertained the thought of taking al-Hamsi somewhere secluded and giving him a lifetime’s worth of pain before putting him down, it was not his style. Not after Genevieve any more than it would have been before she had softened him. He was willing to stoop to being a beast to end her killer’s life, but he would not become a complete animal. He had to hang on to some part of Richard Monroe. If he did not, he would be as dead as Genevieve, and she would not have wanted that.            It was after midnight on Monroe’s fifth day in Turkey when he caught al-Hamsi’s scent. The Syrian had gone for a woman, spent almost three hours in his preferred whorehouse, and finally wandered back onto the streets looking exhausted but content. Good, Monroe thought, a tired target goes down easier.            Al-Hamsi would take the subway home and Monroe followed him into the tunnel, boarded the same car, and sat five seats away from him. They were the only two men in the car. They were alone, and yet al-Hamsi glanced only once at the bearded, bedraggled stranger.            Monroe got up, shambled over to al-Hamsi, doing his best to feign slight inebriation, and finally swayed back and forth for a moment in front of the assassin.            Al-Hamsi mumbled something in Turkish. When the ragged man showed no clue, he tried Arabic but still got nothing. French came out next and Monroe understood but did not show it. Finally, the irritated Syrian let English fly out.            “Fuck off, you stupid asshole! I have no money for beggars!”            At those words, Monroe unfurled his hand and let something slip from his grasp and fall like a leaf into the lap of Baltasar al-Hamsi. The seated Syrian looked down and saw the photograph settle gently into his lap. It was a picture of a woman, the head and shoulders of a stunning brunette with a joyous twinkle in her eyes.             Recognition came to al-Hamsi like sudden thunder, putting the fear of all gods into him as he understood what was happening and what the ragged man wanted with him. He went for his gun. It was too late.            The arm that tried to get the gun from the belt left an open space, just a few inches, between the elbow and the side of the body. Monroe leaned forward, thrust the misericorde in, felt the slight scrape against the bars of the ribcage, and watched Baltasar al-Hamsi cease to exist.             Monroe did not smile, did not display any emotion whatsoever. He pulled the thin blade out of the dead man’s body and wiped al-Hamsi’s blood onto the subway seat. The misericorde went back into Monroe’s sleeve where it would stay until he let himself think normally again and could decide whether to get rid of it, perhaps in some river somewhere, or keep it as a souvenir of the mission that had meant the most to him of all his assignments over his many years in and out of the business of secret lives and secret death.

            Monroe made it out of the subway at the next stop. He walked out casually and roamed in random circles around many streets before taking a room at a small, cheap inn. He fell into bed at one-thirty in the morning and slept better than he had in months, better than he had since the last time he could feel the warmth of Genevieve’s body beside him in the darkness.             He rolled out of bed when the light of the sun came through the window. He stepped into his shoes, having slept in the rest of his clothes, and sauntered out onto the streets just as the imams were calling out for morning prayers. Coffee was needed, the Turkish kind, strong and bitter and all-powerful. He glanced around for a café and caught the scent of one. At that moment, he thought of Genevieve and it hit him hard that finally justice had been done and she was avenged. He allowed himself to smile and, just for an instant, his automatic guard dropped, his years of training lost to sentimentality and satisfaction. That instant was all it took. He was grabbed, counted four strong hands taking him all at the same time, smelled cheap aftershave, and felt a heavy blow to the back of the head, and that was all.            His head still throbbed when he woke up in the Turkish prison. He cursed in his mind. Had he been on camera in the subway? Where had he slipped up? He was screwed now, and he knew it. Turkish prisons were the worst, and murder counted for, at the very least, life inside the walls. He found himself hoping for execution and wondered—and religion was not a frequent subject in his mind—if he might possibly find Genevieve in the afterlife.            His death hopes were short-lived. A key rattled in the cell door and a small Turkish man in a tan suit waltzed in. The mouth opened and smooth English poured out.            “I am the warden here and I want you to leave my prison immediately.”             He tossed an envelope onto the floor in front of the slab Monroe had slept on.            “In there,” the warden said, “is the money my men found on you, as well as two tickets for an airplane trip and a new passport bearing your real name, Mr. Monroe. You will leave here and go to a hotel where you will make yourself not stink so much. You will purchase new clothing. You will go to the airport and board a flight to Chicago in the United States. When you land there, you will get on a bus, one of those Gray Dog buses that are so famous in your country, and you will ride to the small town of Cradle, located in the state of Wisconsin. If you do not go to Cradle, then you will be sent to your grave.”            Monroe almost laughed at the warden’s unintended abuse of an old expression, but he refrained and let the last words come from the small Turk’s lips.            “Do these things now. Get out of my jail!”
                                                                     ***

NOBODY DIES FOR FREE can be found on Amazon inPrint editionKindle edition Audio book 

In the blink of an eye, we’ve gone from “Ask not what your country can do for you,” to “Fear what your country can do to you.”             That’s what it feels like now, and I’m not the only one who feels this way. I would so much rather be writing about something else right now, something not so real, but this has to come first.   I am a writer of fiction. Mysteries, horror stories, fantasy, science fiction. That’s what I do, how I express myself. Some people think I’m good at it. Some of them pay money to read my stories, and I’m still amazed when I think about that, and I’m grateful.              But, lately, I’ve hit a snag. I can’t write fiction right now, and it’s been that way for the last two weeks. My total output during that time has been to finish a short story I’d started weeks earlier, and I can’t seem to get my head together enough to start something new. There’s too much real world stuff jamming the signals that usually provide me with a seemingly endless supply of characters and situations and concepts. Too much has happened in the past fortnight and it’s been consuming too many of my thoughts, to an extent that the fiction can’t break through. So, I need to bend my creative energies toward real life matters for a change, and maybe it will unblock me, and maybe, in the best case scenario, it will do some good to somebody else. I don’t know, but this is all I have right now, and it might meander and it might seem to drift from subject to subject and change directions a dozen times before I’m done, but I’ll give it  a shot, because I don’t know what else to do with words right now.             Being able to write fiction, being able to let my imagination flow free and create worlds is a privilege I can enjoy because of the freedom of expression I have as an American, and while I’ve never written specifically about what it means to be an American, it is the condition of the nation during my lifetime that has influenced me, perhaps usually unconsciously, but I cannot deny that it has to have had an impact. And now that condition of the country is under threat, and how heavy that threat will be remains to be seen, but it does not look good. So, if I am to continue to write, I must address this.                  I am a writer, as I’ve already said. But what else am I? I don’t like to label myself in too many ways, because I’m always changing, at least in personal ways, if not in ways that can be detected by anyone viewing me from the outside. I’ve never called myself a Democrat or a Republican, or a Conservative or a Liberal, and that’s because I don’t think I’m capable of taking a bundle of ideas and accepting them as whole. I prefer to judge individual issues. I don’t vote for parties, but I do vote for candidates. I’m not a Democrat or Republican. I’m not a Conservative or Liberal. I’m a human being who tries to make the right decision, whether those choices are personal and effect only me or go beyond my own life and impact the lives of others, and I look for that sense of responsibility in the candidates I choose to support and vote for.                 I voted in this year’s election, and this time the choice was an obvious one. We had, on one hand, a candidate with political experience, an imperfect person (because there’s no such thing as a perfect person) who would have probably made an acceptable president for these United States. Maybe a good one, maybe even a great one. At the very least, she had business running. So I voted for her, and so, it seems, did many, many other Americans.             She was the obvious choice. For many of us, she was the only choice, because, on the other side, was a man completely unqualified for the job, a man with a personality that comes across as completely unlikable, a man whose campaign was fueled by reprehensible statements on his part, statements and stances that brought out the worst, not the best, in many of those who expressed hope that he would win. Even his campaign slogan came across as an insult to the very nation he was pursuing a chance to lead.             I didn’t think he had a real chance to win. I thought the vast majority of my fellow Americans would resist the idea of such a man holding one of the most powerful positions in the world. And then the unthinkable happened. He won. He won, at least, via the electoral college, if not the popular vote. And it felt (to many of us; it’s not just me) like a nightmare, and it still does, and it gets worse every day as we see the people he’s appointing to his staff, people with, in some cases, histories and opinions that should be repugnant to human beings who care what happens to other human beings. And he demonstrates more and more each day that he has, apparently, no idea of the scope and nature of the job he’s campaigned himself into.             This is frightening. This is disturbing. This is bizarre and absurd and tragic and dangerous. This is very, very bad. Bad for all of us, potentially worse for some of us.            In past elections, I’ve preferred one candidate over another, but I’ve always felt that, regardless of who won, we would be all right and that America would still be America. Now, for the first time in my life, I am afraid of what the next president will do to this nation, what those he chooses to help him do his job will do to it, and what his followers and supporters will perceive his victory as a license to do to their fellow human beings. We should all be afraid of this.                With that little preamble out of the way, I’m not sure where to go with this next. There are so many things I feel compelled to say, so I’m just going to let it flow.
A Memory I've told this story several times since this whole Trump thing started, first months ago when the whole idea of him winning the election seemed absurd, and again post-election, as the racism of some of his cabinet appointees became apparent and some of their ideas became known. Now, I’ll tell it again. My great-grandmother was born in 1899. She was the youngest of 13 children and the only one born in the United States. The rest were born in Germany and the family, once they moved here, kept close contact (mostly through letters back then) with their relatives back there. When I was a kid and she was in her 80s and 90s, I loved visiting her; I was fascinated by how old she was, by the stories she would tell, and I think she liked having an audience. She died in 1996. One day, when I was maybe 7 or 8, she showed me an album with photos from the 1930s. In one picture, 2 of her older brothers were fooling around on the banks of a local river, just 2 young men having a good time. But I noticed one of their shirts. A T-shirt adorned with a swastika. Even at that age, I knew what it was, I knew what it represented, I knew that it stood for what my grandfather (her son-in-law) had risked his life to fight against. So I was shocked to see it on a relative of mine (one who died before I was born). She saw my confusion and tried to explain. "You have to understand," she said, "that at the time, we thought it was just a political party back home in Germany. We had no idea what would happen. We didn't realize, we didn't understand until it was too late." And as she said that to me, I could hear her voice crack, and I could tell she didn't want to talk about it, maybe couldn't bear to talk about it. I turned to the next page in the album and that part of the conversation ended right there, but I never forgot the way her voice sounded at that moment, and I never heard her sound that way again for any reason. It truly scares me that things are happening now, and here, that have me thinking of that moment so often.
An Education There’s always been racism (and other forms of discrimination) in the world, in the United States, and we’ve  always known it’s there, and sometimes it’s more obvious than at other times. Lately, it’s just spewing forth all over the place, like all the toxic sludge that’s been pooling in the minds of bigots has suddenly been given permission to puke itself out all over the targets it’s always wanted to hit.  I’m watching all this racism drip out of the woodwork and wondering where it comes from. I’ve never thought it through in detail before and there are probably two reasons for that lack of analysis on my part. First, as a white male I’ve rarely been the target of any racially-motivated negativity, and, second, I don’t feel the impulse toward being a racist in myself. But now I sit here thinking about where it comes from and I have to theorize that it must be most common in those whose life experience has been very, very limited in terms of their interactions with those who don’t share their skin color or religion or sexuality. I was born in and grew up in Paterson, New Jersey. I went to school there. It’s a city where the school system is a mess. The elementary school I attended was one of the better ones in the city, but high school was different. I remember going there and, at the same time, knowing kids who went to school in neighboring areas like Wayne and West Paterson and being jealous of the fact that they were being taught things that were far ahead of what the Paterson high schools were offering. There in John F. Kennedy High School, we barely scratched the surface of basic science, hardly got into history at all, and it often seemed like we were all trapped in a factory that’s only goal was to provide enough education to squeeze the kids through the system and spit them out into the world so the public schools wouldn’t have to be responsible for them anymore. I felt bad for the teachers who tried their best but were up against too many obstacles. In terms of learning the subjects after which our classes were named, it was not a good experience. The deficiencies of the school were not the fault of the students, although it is true that many of them had no desire, it seemed, to learn anything, or to even try. And I’ve often blamed the school for giving me a lousy education and for making me feel like I didn’t want to go on to college because I needed to get away from that system for a while, and I never really went back. Now, years later, most people assume I went to college, because I’m a writer and I seem to know things about various topics. But my “education” has been self-endowed. I read, I listen, I watch.So, yes, my formal education was lacking in many ways. But now, in the light of all the racism and other vileness being spewed about the country, I realize that my four years at JFKHS gave me another sort of education, a kind that is very important in a world of discrimination and categorization and Donald Trump’s influence and the atrocious attitudes of his fans. What I said earlier about life experiences that involve interactions with people who aren’t just like you, well, that’s what I had in high school. For four years of my life, for seven or eight hours each day, in that little microcosm of the world, I was in the vast minority. The student body of JFKHS was about 40% Latino, 40% black, and about 10% Muslim, with the rest a mixture of Asian, Indian, and white. In my graduating class, there where, if I recall correctly, four white kids: me and one other having been born right there in Paterson and the other two being immigrants from Eastern Europe. Now, I cannot possibly compare that short period of time to being a minority all the time, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for a lifetime, but it gave me just the tiniest hint of what that’s like, and, even more importantly, it showed me the fundamental fact that all the differences between us are just minor details in the grand scheme of life and we are all human, all much more similar than we are different. It didn’t take long before I stopped seeing those differences on anything more than a very superficial level, because I got to know my fellow students as people and not as categories. Some of them I liked, some of them I disliked. A few of them, I loved, and still do to this day. One of them remains among the most important people in my life. People. Not categories or colors or religions. People. That’s why I wonder if the loud racists, the ones screaming on Twitter and pumping their fists in a zombie-like Trump victory dance and chanting about building walls and threatening people who don’t look just like them and acting like obnoxious assholes, have ever actually spent any time around the people they want to pass judgment on. Because it doesn’t take very long, unless you’re determined to keep the categorization at the forefront of your mind, to stop seeing the details and just see the people.I think back to those days now (twenty-one years after graduation) and the memories are about personalities and words and actions, not about the trivial details of categories. The fact that M celebrated Ramadan and not Christmas was not a concern. I was more concerned about what he could do for the school’s baseball team. I didn’t care what language my friends spoke at home or when they talked to their other friends, as long as they spoke to me in English, because otherwise I would have had no idea what they were saying. When I got sick on the senior class trip, did I care that my roommate in the hotel was black? Of course not, because I was too busy being grateful that he wanted to make sure I was all right and that he helped me clean up after I vomited on the bed. I think of K, and in my memories I don’t consider the detail of her being Filipino-American, but I do recall how she moved to the area that last year of high school and very quickly accepted me for who I was and, since we had the same class schedule, we walked to each class together and were very good, comfortable friends.And I think of S and my gratitude for her friendship knows no limit and I’m filled with joy at the fact that after a very regrettable separation of nearly two decades (that’s a story for another time), we are friends again and that feels so, so right, and I never want her to go away again, and her ethnicity does not factor into that set of emotions in the least.All of us from that time were thrown into that place, that JFKHS because of where and when we happened to exist, and we were all human beings and the little, stupid, specific details of our lives (those things that others might see as big important categories) mattered very, very little in the long run.

An Incident As I just finished saying, I now consider having gone to school where I did to have been a positive experience in some ways, but I don’t mean to imply that no racism and no negativity existed between the various people in that place. A high school is, after all, a microcosm of society and conflict exists everywhere.Yes, there were ethnic conflicts, and they sometimes erupted into violence, and they often involved gangs made up of this ethnicity or that fighting others. The Dominicans having a problem with the Colombians or other such stuff that the rest of us kept out of. But I don’t recall much open racial bitterness among those who weren’t members of one of those gangs. Sure, there was an occasional racially-based insult thrown around, but not as often as one might expect there to be in such a melting pot of people. I suppose those who weren’t used to being around those of other racial or ethnic or religious backgrounds might have been surprised by the cultural differences at first, but that seemed to fade away as they settled into the routine of the place.However, there was one incident that I’m going to talk about here and now. This is a story almost nobody knows. I haven’t talked about it much over the years. I would rather keep it to myself, but I feel it’s important to the reason I’m writing this whole blog post to try to describe how the incident made me feel then and how it makes me feel now, two decades later. Earlier, I said that I have rarely known what it’s like to be the target of racially-motivated negativity. If you wondered why I said, “rarely” instead of  “never,” this is the part where I explain.  It was either sophomore or junior year of high school. I think it was junior year, but I’m not certain after all this time. I was in the locker room changing back to my regular clothes after gym class. I was alone at a bench between two banks of lockers, minding my own business, putting my sweatpants into my bag and a fastening the belt of my regular pants when I became aware of someone standing nearby. I turned and saw three boys watching me. I didn’t know them, and I’m sure they weren’t in my grade. They were probably seniors, a year or two older than me. They were black.They stepped closer. The way they moved toward me scared me. I zipped my bag shut as quickly as I could. I just wanted to get out of there as all my instincts screamed danger. I didn’t cause any trouble in high school. I was a quiet, shy kid and kept to myself except when talking with teachers or with my few close friends, some of whom I mentioned in the previous section of this essay. I did nothing to instigate this incident. I went to gym class, which I hated, participated the best I could for a clumsy person, and was just getting dressed to go to my next class.But they came closer, and one of them shouted the words, “White motherfucker,” and they were on me.Fists slammed into my ribs, my back, my sides, my stomach. I was shoved up against the lockers and hit a few more times. Three against one, fast, furious, brutal. I had no chance to defend myself, no chance to flee. I managed to step away from the lockers so I was no longer pinned in place. And I stepped into the open space between the lockers and the bench and one of them hit me one last time, hard. I fell. I hit the floor hard and my glasses scraped across my face as they flew off, opening a gash on my forehead and the bridge of my nose.My attackers ran. They laughed as they went. I stayed on the floor for a minute and tried to figure out what had just happened. The shock subsided enough for me to pick myself up. I found my glasses and they were intact. I went into the bathroom, used toilet paper to slow the bleeding. I walked to the nurse’s office, asked for some band-aids, and patched myself up.And I lied to the nurse about what had happened. I made up a story about walking into a barbell in the weight room.The lie was to protect myself, because the school had a policy that anybody involved in a fight would be suspended no matter who started it, and I didn’t want that on my record and I didn’t want any more trouble. I just wanted it to be over.I hate being involved in violence. Even if I’m on the winning end of the fight (which I was in the only other fight I’d ever been in, a silly afterschool bout in the seventh grade), it makes me guilty and sick. I didn’t tell my parents what had happened. I didn’t want them to worry about me.I didn’t tell my friends at school. I didn’t want them to think less of me for having lost a fight, although I later realized I didn’t lose a fight, but was ambushed and beaten, which is an entirely different thing. I’ve told that story once or twice in the years since, but I’ve mostly kept it to myself.For the next few days, I looked for those guys in the hallways, but I was never sure who they were. There were 2,000 students in the school and I couldn’t know all of them. And it all happened so fast, and maybe hitting my head on that locker room floor made it all a bit blurry afterwards. I soon felt normal again. I wasn’t afraid to go to school after the incident. It was the same place, the same mixture of good and bad, and I just happened to be the victim of one of the bad things that day.For a while, I was angry. I’m still a little angry when I think about it now, because I was innocent and I became the target of someone else’s anger because I just happened to be there at that moment.Based on what one of them said before they hit me, my race was the reason they did what they did. A coworker I told the story to responded to it with some racial slurs about black people. He seemed to think I should be angry at everybody who looks like those three unidentified attackers. That’s ludicrous. There were 2,000 students in the place. Forty percent were black. Some of that forty percent were my friends. Most of them, I didn’t know personally. Three of them hurt me. Three out of two-thousand. That’s not enough to influence my opinion of anyone beyond those three, never mind an entire race.So, yes, I knew, for those few painful, frightening moments, what it was like to have a racial remark shouted at me and to be hit and hit and hit again and be left bleeding on a cold, hard floor. And that was among the most terrifying moments of my life and I would never wish that on anyone.I had that small sample, and I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have to live with that fear all the time. And now that fear, the sense that these things can and do happen to people because of their skin color or their religion or their sexuality has been inflated by the results of the recent election. It doesn’t matter if the president-elect meant to inspire some of his supporters to be emboldened to express their hateful views and act according to those views. It doesn’t matter one damn bit if he meant to do that. It happened and it’s horrifying. It had been a long time since I’d thought of that locker room attack. But that memory has been replaying in my mind  a lot since the election and the disturbing events that have followed it. I didn’t want to revisit that piece of my past, but it’s in rotation now and I had to write about it here.It seems the chances of a person being attacked because of race may have increased in recent times, instead of decreasing, which is what should be happening as the world learns from past mistakes, but maybe we’ve taken a step backwards. Nobody should have to fear being the subject of violence because of the color of their skin, whether black, white, or anything else. I don’t want anybody, anywhere, to have to feel what I felt in that locker room.

Those Silly Little Details, Magnified From my reply to a friend’s Facebook post two days after the election:There's something going on these past few days that I find so disturbing that it almost brings me to tears, and that is the fact that I'm suddenly (out of concern) thinking of the people I care about in terms of categories, because I'm worried about them now and scared what those categories will cause other people to say or do to them. And I never think about them that way; it's not the way my mind normally operates. But my best friend is a woman who grew up in Brazil, and I rarely think about her ethnicity or accent, and now I worry she'll be the target of "wall" comments. And my oldest friend--who I wouldn't have made it through high school without and who was, when I was an awkward teenage outcast, one of the few people I really felt understood me--wears a hijab, which I don't even notice or think about normally, but now I'm terrified she'll have to put up with bullshit and abuse because of that piece of clothing. And I worry about the several dozen new relatives-in-law I'll soon have because of my brother's imminent marriage to a black woman, and I worry that there are now people walking around who will feel emboldened to say what they may have only thought before recent developments and give them grief for having an interracial relationship. And I'm worried about my Jewish friends having to hear anti-Semitic stuff being yelled because some of these Trump fans seem to be basking in the Hitler comparisons instead of doing what anybody with any sense of history should have been doing, which of course is running into that voting booth and choosing Hillary Clinton. This is the 21st century and suddenly I'm thinking of my friends in terms of race and religion and nation of origin and sexuality in addition to who they are in personality, because I'm suddenly worried that those details of their lives will make them potential targets for the assholes who think it's acceptable behavior to judge a human being based on skin color or head-wear or what they do in the privacy of their bedrooms. And I'm not supposed to be thinking about them in this way, but now I am, because I'm worried. I should not have to be sitting here feeling like I should call these people and tell them that I'm here if they need me because of any problems that arise because of what's happened this week. This is so, so, so wrong. And I really want this feeling to go away.And now, fourteen days after the election:The president-elect still hasn’t formally or forcefully renounced those committing hateful acts or speaking hateful words in his name, except for a few brief statements during two interviews saying, “They should stop it,” and then, “I disavow them.” Instead, he’s spent more time whining on social media about the way a group of actors at a play his running mate attended addressed the vice-president-elect (in what looked to most of us as a respectful request for the man to not violate their rights when he assumes office). And he’s complaining about the way he’s been portrayed by an actor on Saturday Night Live, as if he’s the only politician ever to be made fun of on a comedy show (it comes with being a public figure!). Meanwhile, white supremacists are making Nazi salutes and chanting “Hail Trump!” and he hasn’t put much effort at all into denouncing that, and he’s appointing cabinet members with vile records of racism and other absolutely disgusting points of view.And I had lunch the other day with my old friend, the one who wears the scarf, and she’s terrified that her children, her Muslim children who were born in the United States and raised in the United States and had for a mother one of the best people I’ve ever known and have been good kids and have been pretty lucky in life so far, may soon have to face real, brutal discrimination and harassment for the first time in their lives, here, in America, where we should be long past things like that happening. Yes, nasty things like that have always happened, and, unfortunately, they probably always will, but now it seems as if we’ve gone backwards a few steps and those in power, or soon to be coming into power, are some of those who would applaud and encourage those backward steps. I’m being forced to think of people I care about in terms of categories, and I don’t like it one bit, but I’m worried, and my mind keeps going back to that photo album of Great-Grandma’s.      

On Religion and Respect I don’t like religion. I have no use for it in my life, at least as far as practicing it goes. My mind is the type that requires evidence in order to believe in something, and I see no evidence presented in any of the world’s religions, so I cannot subscribe to any of them. I do find religion interesting, though. How could I not, as it’s had such an impact on human behavior and history. As an artist, I find its symbolism fascinating. And I’m aware that it plays a part in the lives of many, many people.Religion is as much a target for hate and discrimination as race is, and that’s at the forefront of the news in these post-election weeks, with Anti-Semitic vandalism showing up more prominently, and Anti-Muslim rhetoric increasing. And it’s upsetting and it’s horrifying and human beings should not be subject to this. Religion is a little different than race or ethnicity as far as how it should be judged, because religion, unlike those other things, is not a detail that nature or geography bestows on  a human being. Rather, it is a form of behavior, and that behavior can have positive or negative consequences for the believer’s fellow human beings. Good has been done in the name of religion, and so has evil. That evil is unfortunate and anyone performing such acts should have to pay a price for their misdeeds.But it is extremely wrong to judge all the followers of a religion by the deeds of the percentage who commit acts of terrorism or violence or whatever the case may be. And it is obscenely wrong to assume that a person is your enemy or deserves to be feared or hated or slandered or assaulted or killed because of no data other than their religion.As an American, I respect the right of any human being to follow the religion of their choice, provided, of course, that they do not use it as an excuse to inflict harm on anyone else.  Based on what I’ve seen in life, there are such different degrees of a person’s involvement with religion (any religion), that to judge them based solely on that is ludicrous. Some people follow a religion only out of tradition because they had it handed down to them by their parents and it has little bearing on their day to day life. Others belief deeply and sincerely but keep it to themselves or share it only with those who practice or worship with them. Some talk about it often and openly but either don’t try to convince others of its validity or, at worst, do try to convert others but in a harmless, mostly just annoying way. I have no issue with most of those people, no matter which religion they follow in any of those mostly harmless ways (and I just avoid the annoying ones in that last group).So, what does that leave? It leaves the extremists, the ones who, for whatever reason, decide to use that religion as an excuse to inflict pain on their fellow human beings. That’s reprehensible, but it should never be assumed that a person is one of those monsters simply because he or she subscribes to the same religion as those guilty parties (we’re talking about large religions here, those with thousands or millions of followers, not the little cults and other exceptions like, for example, the followers of Charles Manson, who had their own sort of bizarre religion going on. With little groups like that, I’d say it’s perfectly fine to judge them all as dangerous). This, in theory, is where the problem starts. It seems that sometimes the followers of one religion can’t see past the fact that not all followers of another religion are extremists or fanatics. Let’s take, for example, the largest religion in the United States, which is Christianity (we’ll disregard, at the moment, the many subdivisions of Christianity and just treat it as one large religion). How offended or insulted would a Christian be if someone assumed every Christian acted or thought like those that make up the infamous Westboro Baptist Church (an absolutely monstrous organization based on hate), or the Ku Klux Klan? But, take a Christian who, like many people, can’t see a person of a different religion as anything but a piece of the religion (thus ignoring everything else about that person or not bothering to learn anything else about that person before passing judgment) and he may act as if every Muslim must be of the same mindset as a member of Al-Qaeda or ISIS. Religion, for the vast majority of human beings is, I think, a detail of who they are, not the essential core of who they are. Whether Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, or whatever, we all have more in common than we have differences. It’s just that tendency some of us have of seeing a person of a religion other than ours as the religion and not as a human being who happens to practice it, that keeps us from realizing that. Stop and think about that for a minute. I’m not talking about fanatics and extremists. There are some of those, yes, but to assume all people of a religion (unless it’s your religion) have that fanatic or extremist inside them, makes you the one with the problem, not them. In all probability, that Muslim woman in the supermarket, the one you imagine in your mind looking at you and thinking you’re an “infidel” and wanting to blow you up, is thinking nothing of the sort. She’s shopping. She’s buying food to feed her family, just like you are. But she’s dressed differently than you think she should be and it makes you uncomfortable because you can’t see a person who’s not just like you as anything but a symbol of something that scares you because you don’t understand it (maybe because you’ve never bothered to try, maybe because you just don’t have any experience at being around people who aren’t just like you, and maybe because you’re just too damn stubborn to give people a chance). People are not caricatures. It’s more complex than that. Religion is not the defining characteristic of most people. But it’s also simpler than that, because religion, in most cases, is a detail, not an identity. What is the identity, then? It’s humanity, and we have most of that in common with each other, more in common than different, regardless of which tradition or faith or lack thereof we believe in. The moment you assume an individual is an extremist or fanatic based solely on the fact that they belong to a different religion than you do, it is YOU who have become the extremist.

On Sexuality I don’t care one bit what anybody does in the bedroom unless I’m in there with them.The fact that Mike Pence has spent so much of his career worrying about that issue is disturbing.

The Big Question If you’re one of those people who judges or hates or discriminates against those who are slightly different than you are in terms of race or religion or sexuality or ethnicity and you treat them as less than human because of those details, rather than look at all the things you have in common with them, which is everything except those details, I want an answer to this question:What are you so afraid of?Do you even know? Or are you acting out of habit, out of tradition, out of selfishness because you fear change and you fear interaction with what you don’t understand, or out of being too lazy to attempt to see the reality that we are all human despite the silly little details that we turn into such a big deal?To those of you who can’t look past the little details, to those of you who think it’s wise to chant about walls being built and try to force your religion or your opinion of what’s right or wrong sexually on people who aren’t bothering you in any way, shape, or form, and to those of you who let those little details and differences override your ability to see human beings instead of caricatures and threats, do you know what you really are? You’re a bunch of cowards!   Look at these people and try to see past all the details. See the human beings. Talk to them. You don’t know what will happen, but you’ll probably learn something, and you might even make connections that will change your life in positive ways. The alternative is misery, if not for you then for someone else who has every bit as much a right to live, to succeed, to enjoy the freedoms that are part of what a properly functioning America is supposed to be. That alternative is an ugly thing, and we’re seeing a bit more of that ugly thing lately.    Is that what you want? To live in a racist world, a segregated world, a divided world? That would mean a world where an infinite number of potential connections, friendships, discoveries, and loves were prevented before they even had a possibility of happening. A world of fear and racism and xenophobia is a world of lost opportunities. America deserves better than that. Every human being deserves better than that.   

Today’s blog entry is something a little different (and it’s my first post in a long time; I really should do this more often).
This is only the second time the focus here is on music. The first was my review of Led Zeppelin’s concert film Celebration Day several years ago.
Today, I’ll be reviewing an album I just heard for the first time a few days ago: The Search for Relevance, the third album from the band MYTHOLOGY. 
Here's the cover! 

First, a bit of background. My interest in music is currently at a level it hasn’t been at in years. There was a time when music was my primary interest. I played guitar for several years in my late teens and early twenties (though at the time I didn’t have the discipline to get much further with it than amusing myself by Jimmy Paging my way around the basement) and spent many of my evenings with a band composed of friends of mine (I miss those days and those guys!).
But that was a long time ago and in the intervening years music became part of the background of my life and not a focus. I’ve always loved music, but I sort of drifted away from taking an active interest in it.That changed recently. I began to listen more. And having more energy due to a change to a job that leaves me a little less stressed out at the end of the workday, I’ve picked up the guitar again and have learned more in a few months than I did in those years of my youth, probably due to the fact that I’m learning the right way now, with patience and work instead of strutting around trying to impress myself with noise! That’s not to say I’m any good at it yet, but I can feel a bit of improvement each day.
So, yes, music is back on my mind a lot of the time. And now I have this album in front of me and I like it enough to sit here and write about it.
Mythology’s drummer, Jordan Morrissey, is a coworker of mine. I make it a habit to seek out the creative people around me, whether they be writers, artists, or musicians. Jordan was kind enough to send me links to some short samples of the songs on the album and I liked them enough to buy the whole disc … and I am very glad I did! 
I popped it into my car’s CD player as I drove home during a powerful rainstorm a few days ago and I was impressed right from the start. 
Mythology is a three-piece band consisting of  the previously mentioned Jordan Morrissey on drums and backing vocals, Brynen A. Sosa on guitar and lead vocals, and Dane Carmichael on bass and backing vocals. The album also features some work on violin, piano, and a French horn.
Here's the band in a picture swiped from Twitter! 

The music of Mythology falls into the category of Progressive Rock, but I see no need for me to give it any further labels, because good music is good music and this album has sections that could fall into several subgenres of rock, and I see various influences at work. Or maybe I should say I can guess at various influences, since I can’t read the band members’ minds.
And, speaking of not reading minds or otherwise guessing at things, there are places in this review where I do guess at certain things I think I hear being done within the songs. If any of these semi-educated guesses of mine happen to be wrong, I would welcome a correction should any of the band members feel one is needed.    
But enough of my long preamble. What’s the album actually like? Okay, here we go …
It opens with a long epic, “Swashbuckling Swashbucklers,” which should (if the listener has any taste whatsoever) have you hooked from the beginning. It immediately proves that Mythology is a tight, skilled trio of musicians. Like the best power trios, (Cream comes to mind) Mythology manages to always have something going on, so there’s no empty air, while still allowing each of the three musicians plenty of time in the spotlight. Sosa’s guitar work is outstanding and bounces all over the place in this opening track, ably aided by Carmichael’s bass lines, which stand out too, which is always good, as it’s far too easy for the bass to get lost in a mix. Morrissey’s drumming changes style several times during the song, each time complementing the other musicians superbly, except of course for that long stretch in the middle when the drums fall silent, but that too fits the song’s style. The best thing about “Swashbucklers” just might be the lyrics. These are good lyrics, evoking images, telling a story, and sounding—this might sound weird—surprisingly English for a band from New Jersey, but I mean that as a compliment! The words take on a well-phrased storytelling style that had me thinking of Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull or the songs of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, with the subject matter being somehow distantly related to Led Zeppelin’s “The Immigrant Song,” though more complex than Zep’s short battle hymn, as well as to Cream’s “Tales of Brave Ulysses.” Overall, “Swashbucklers” is an excellent opening, justifying its 8 minute length by going through a number of stylistic changes, all of which work well as parts of a whole, while giving a good demonstration of what each of the three band members is capable of.
The second track, “Armenian Blues #5,” is an instrumental, and a very good one. In an interesting combination of grace and power, Sosa’s guitar in the first section of this song sings a long string of graceful melodic phrases punctuated by sudden barrages of power chords, while the drums match pace with each of the changes. Behind that, the bass thumps along in a way that fits the song but stands slightly apart, bouncing to its own rhythm, which makes this feel like 2 songs for the price of 1, and that’s a very good deal. But the surprises aren’t over. At the halfway mark, Sosa’s guitar switches to an exotic acoustic sound that shows the influence of Django Reinhardt and again changes the tone of the piece. There is so much going on in this song that it’s possible to listen three times and have a completely different experience each time, simply by focusing on its various components. On one of the album’s later tracks, Sosa says, “You probably wouldn’t listen to this song if it was an instrumental!” Sometimes (and I’ve done this too) there are reasons why listeners skip the instrumentals. Instrumentals can seem boring if there’s not enough going on to justify the lack of lyrics or tell a compelling story without words, or, on the other side of the coin, they can seem like show-off pieces, nothing more than musical masturbation for someone to prove how fast or how complicated their playing can be. “Armenian Blues #5” is not guilty of either of those charges. It is well worth listening to and you won’t even notice it has no vocals. It is not an instrumental for the sake of being an instrumental, but a song that has everything it needs and then some!
The third song, “To Those We’ve Lost,” is the gentlest on the album and perhaps the best lyrically. It starts with Sosa’s acoustic guitar work, slow and sad, with just a sprinkling of Morrissey’s percussion as an accent. Then the vocals come in and, I must admit, those words are so beautifully composed that they had me choked up a bit the first time I listened. I will not repeat any of the lyrics here, because you need to hear them for yourself, but they paint a vivid picture of regret and loneliness. This is a song I can appreciate both as a music lover and as a writer. And it’s not just the story it tells that makes it work, it’s what the texture of the music adds to the tale that makes it (at least this time, upon my fourth listen to the album) my current favorite on the disc. By the way, if whoever is reading this is a fan of Led Zeppelin, listen for the sparingly used upstrokes on certain chords that give it, in a few places, a very “Rain Song” vibe. “To Those We’ve Lost” is wonderful on all counts.
Next, for the fourth track, comes the album’s big risk, “Sosa’s Requiem.” If this had been done slightly differently, it might have sunk the whole experience. It’s one thing to have certain opinions about the current state of music. We’re all entitled to our opinions. It’s another thing entirely to etch those feelings permanently on an album and have the nerve to call the majority of modern bands “diarrhea.” A world famous act can come across as irritating by doing something even remotely like that (see Bob Segar’s “Old Time Rock and Roll,” which is the world’s second most annoying song, after only the Three’s Company theme!), so it’s risky (and courageous) for a band without a huge reputation to stick something like that on their record. To make a somewhat vulgar analogy, if you’re going to write a song bragging about the size of your cock, you’d damn well better be able to back it up with a riff the size of “Whole Lotta Love.” Well, the good news is that the risk paid off and the song works, not only because all the complaints Sosa sings are opinions I agree with (there’s some newer music I like, but it’s been a long time since I heard something that made me NEED to buy it NOW), but because he and his band mates back the string of verbal jabs up with a very good piece of music, showing that Mythology does indeed have the musical skill, if not the fame (yet? One can only hope), to legitimize their stance on the issue. Musically, the song contains a fun main guitar riff complemented by a prominent bass line and a very busy drummer who sounds like he’s grown a few tentacles to help with certain parts of this one. There’s also a good guitar solo with a tone that strongly reminds me of something, though I can’t quite place it as I write this. But, getting back to the song’s subject, halfway through the piece Sosa sings, “Is there anyone who feels the same?”  In many ways, I do, and I’ll say this: I miss Pink Floyd, too, Brynen. I really do.
Now we come to the album’s second instrumental, with it’s odd title of “Shmuley Boteach.” Okay, here’s the story, according to the singer as he introduced the song to a live audience in a YouTube video I watched: Shmuley Boteach is a rabbi, author, and TV host (go look him up on Wikipedia if you want), whose name stuck in Mr. Sosa’s head just because it sounds so strange … and now it’s stuck in my head, damn it all to hell! So, since it’s an instrumental and there are no lyrics to base the title on, the name that will stick in your head like an arrow now belongs not only to a man but to a song! Why not? Having Googled Shmuley Boteach out of curiosity, I’ve decided he looks like actor Bradley Cooper with a beard. 

But enough about the origin of the song’s name. What about the song itself? It begins with a steady drum beat behind a nicely melodic guitar line that sounds somewhat Middle Eastern and is then joined by another prominent bass line (have I mentioned how much I love that the bass doesn’t get lost in the mix on this album?). This continues throughout the song’s three and a half minutes with enough variations to keep it interesting. It’s the album’s shortest song (not counting the 29 second epilogue “The March of May”), just a quick little paragraph of interesting sound.
And after that short one we get to the longest piece, a 13 minute science fiction rock novel of a song called “Return to Planet Zeblos,” which is then subdivided into four sections, but I’m too lazy to try to figure out exactly where each chapter begins and ends. Anyway, I’d much rather just go with the ride it takes us on. Lyrically and vocally, there’s a bit of Bowie sprinkled in, and that’s always a good thing! It doesn’t feel like thirteen minutes, because there’s nothing repetitive or monotonous about it. The tempo keeps changing, the drumming goes through a galaxy of shifts in style, and the guitar and bass keep doing interesting things. The science fiction feel of the piece is added to by some effects, but only to the point where they enhance the song without overwhelming the music. Restraint is always vest when it comes to effects. Perhaps the best thing about “Zeblos” is how it manages to connect to the progressive rock of the 70s (does anybody else remember Starcastle?), while seeming not like a relic or throwback to that era, but like the next grandchild in that same family tree (or maybe solar system?). That’s quite an accomplishment and a very good way to end the album.     
That covers all the songs on The Search for Relevance. It’s an excellent collection from start to finish.
A few closing thoughts:I do not feel as if I just reviewed an album by someone I met at work. This ceased to be me reviewing the music of a “local band” the minute I heard that first track. This is a polished, professional piece of work that I truly wish was getting massive amounts of radio play right now. I hope this review will inspire other people to check out Mythology’s music. Getting to hear this has been one of the best bonuses of starting that new job of mine! I’m as happy to have this CD included in my collection as I am any of the other discs on my shelf.And I’m thrilled to know that there are two previous Mythology albums, and I intend to listen to those as soon as I can get my hands on them.
Here’s a link to Mythology’s website.  http://mythologyband.com/  Please give these guys a listen. They deserve it, and so do you!

“I remember when I saw STAR WARS back in 1977. To this day it’s the closest I’ve ever come to a religious epiphany.” That quote is from a recent Facebook post by my friend, the writer Derrick Ferguson. I think it perfectly expresses how many of us feel about the effect that movie and its sequels had on us. I am a member of the Star Wars generation. I was born in March, 1977, a few months before the release of the first movie. I never got to see Star Wars in the theater during its original run, of course, but, three years later, my very first moviegoing experience was The Empire Strikes Back (thanks, Dad!). Regardless of being born a bit too close to the release of the first film to see it first run, you can bet all your smuggled credits I knew the story backwards and forwards. How could I not when, because of when I happened to come into this world, I was absolutely surrounded by the action figures, comic books, records that told the story, and all the other merchandising that avalanched down upon the world after the success of George Lucas’s magnificent space opera?  
Now, at the age of 38, with the newest Star Wars movie just having been released (no, I haven’t seen it yet, but I will as soon as I can), I’m pondering just what a tremendous impact the original trilogy (I really dislike the prequels) had not only on my childhood, but on my imagination as I grew to be a man and a writer.Before I encountered all the other films, literature, comics, and other forms of art and entertainment that influenced me, there was Star Wars. My exposure to it even predates my other favorite universes, like the fictional future of Star Trek, the Victorian-era mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, the horror-laden concepts of H.P. Lovecraft, and the wonderful stories of J.R.R. Tolkien. Before all that, and all the stories in all their formats that I read or saw in later years, there was Star Wars, and it’s had an effect on my life that I cannot even calculate the depth of.   

Here are ten things I now realize I initially learned from those three amazing movies, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.  I suspect that if I look back on this list in ten or twenty or thirty years, these points will still be informing the way I think, the way I dream, the way I write, and the way I view the world around me.
1. It can be more fun to root for the underdog.That where the drama comes from! Seeing a small group of rebels face the mighty Empire is what makes Star Wars work. And the same could be said of Gandalf and his band of hobbits, elves, and dwarves in The Lord of the Rings, or of so many other great adventure stories. The joy of adventure fiction comes from betting on the side that the odds are against. And this bleeds over into other aspects of life too. Even when it comes to sports, I find victory means more when your team isn’t expected to win. I got more satisfaction out of the Yankees just managing to make the playoffs this past season (and, unfortunately, losing in the first round) than I did in some of the years when they were sure to win the World Series and did.     
2. The mentor is just as important as the hero.As a kid, Star Wars was, to me, all about Luke. That’s who I wanted to be. But, looking back, I realize the importance of Obi-Wan (and Yoda, too) and how indispensable those guiding teachers are to our hero’s success. Gandalf, Professor Charles Xavier, Burgess Meredith in Clash of the Titans, and Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix: those characters are essential to the stories and their presence should not be too overshadowed by the younger heroes we are more likely to identify with.    

3. The monster in the backyard can be just as scary as the big villain.One of the things that add such wonderful texture to the Star Wars universe is how danger lurks around every corner and on every planet and how those threats don’t always come from the Empire. Sand people on Tattooine, the creature that hangs Luke upside down (presumably to eat later) on Hoth, and the asteroid that turns out to be a living creature are all examples of how a world with many small dangers scattered about is more interesting than one with only a single main villain or set of villains.

4. Women can be kickass heroes.As a little boy, I, of course, wanted to be Luke Skywalker. And I thought of heroes as usually being men because that’s how it was in most of the fiction I was exposed to. Even today, I see fans of Luke debating fans of Han about who was better. But we can’t forget Leia! Princess Leia was the glue that held that story together and was just as important as the boys. She sets the whole story in motion by drawing Obi-Wan back into action. She gets captured by two of the most feared members of the Empire, Darth Vader and his boss, Grand Moff Tarkin, and then (while Luke is still a naïve farm boy on Tattooine) proceeds not to cower in fear but instead threatens Vader with political ramifications and tells Tarkin he smells bad! And, something I realized only recently: the only time in the original trilogy that a major hero kills a major villain up close and personally is when Leia strangles Jabba with a chain! Tarkin died in the Death Star explosion, Vader and the Emperor killed each other, and I don’t think Greedo or Boba Fett (despite the latter's popularity, which comes from the fact that he looks cool) qualify as major villains on the level of the others I’ve just mentioned. Leia was, I think, the first female character I encountered who was just as tough (and maybe more so) as her male co-adventurers.      
5. Comedy has a place in even the most serious stories.Star Wars is a dark story at times, certainly an exciting one, and full of suspense (especially when you’re a kid), and those wonderful little exchanges between R2-D2 and C3P0 nicely break up the tension and give the films a rhythm that’s just right for the rousing adventure series it is. I find that now, as a writer, I often find a way to sneak something I hope will induce a laugh or smile in the reader into even the darkest of my stories.   

6. You don’t have to know everything about every character.Han Solo was a smuggler, a rascal, a greedy son-of-a-bitch with an “interesting” past, and that’s all we needed to know when we met him. Some characters work best that way. Marvel Comics’ Wolverine used to be one of my favorite superheroes, until Marvel decided to reveal way too much about his previously mysterious past, and that ruined the character. With James Bond, we were told everything we needed to know about him in the first 10 minutes of DR. NO: he works for the British government, he’s been on dangerous assignments before, he’s armed, he gambles, he seduces women, he drinks, and he smokes. The essence of Bond was boiled down and we, the viewers, were expected to take it from there, and we did, for 19 more movies! Contrast that with the recent, rebooted Bond movie series featuring Daniel Craig as 007. Those movies range from great to very mediocre, but if they commit one major sin it’s going too deeply into over explaining who Bond is and how he got that way. We don’t need fully detailed origins and histories for every single character!  

7. Sword fights are awesome!There’s something about sword fighting that’s just so much fun! It’s better than watching people shoot at each other. It’s up close and personal, fast-paced, can go on for a long time or end with a single, deadly thrust. As much as I love the sword fights in Errol Flynn movies and Zorro and other such classics, my love of that sort of action began with the lightsaber duels in Star Wars.   

8. Injury can be scarier than death.Seeing the Death Star blow up or even watching Obi-Wan struck down by Vader didn’t get to me nearly as much as that moment in The Empire Strike Back when Vader cuts off Luke’s hand. That scene horrified me when I was a kid, probably because it was something I hadn’t considered before, the idea that a heroic character could suffer a permanent injury like that.

9. Good stories mean different things to us at different times.I must have seen each of the three films in the original Star Wars trilogy several dozen times, and I still haven’t gotten tired of them. This is because they mean different things to me at different times. I’ve identified with Luke on some viewings, Han on others. I’ve had times when my attention was focused on the brilliant performances of the first film’s two legendary supporting actors, Sir Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing. In fact, Star Wars took on a whole new dimension a few years back when I watched it for the first time after seeing many more of Cushing’s films in the interim and having him become one of my favorite actors. Suddenly, Tarkin wasn’t just that old man who bossed Darth Vader around. Instead, he was the main villain of the first movie, and a frightening one at that. I’ve seen Star Wars as the great entertainment experience of my childhood, as a sentimental favorite of my adult life, and as a fascinating example of how certain threads of myth and archetype runs through modern films just as much as they ran through the various religions and epics of our ancestors from nations and cultures all across the world. Every time I watch the Star Wars movies, I find a new angle from which to consider them, a new way to enjoy them.   
10. Tell that story! Write that book! You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
As a writer, it’s easy to discard an idea or a story, because it often seems overwhelmingly unlikely that it could ever mean much to anybody else. “Who would want to read that?” we say to ourselves in moments of doubt. It certainly wasn’t easy for George Lucas to have Star Wars made. To studio executives, seeing the idea on paper, it must have looked to some of them like a silly little space opera more fit for a B-movie than a “real film.” And here we are, 38 years after its release, and it’s not only a story beloved by millions of people who had their entire childhoods shaped by it; it’s also a piece of storytelling and cultural mythology that’s been permanently etched into the consciousness of the human race. That’s not an exaggeration. We quote it constantly in all sorts of situations. People are flocking to theaters as I type this because they can’t wait to see the next part of the ongoing epic of Star Wars. That little story by George Lucas caught hold of the imagination of a generation and has yet to let go, almost four decades later. That story was an underdog. And it won. Now it’s immortal. Don’t let your imagination be discouraged. 

I’ve written here before about my lifelong interest in detective fiction, which was jumpstarted by my exposure as a child to such TV sleuths as Sherlock Holmes (as played by Jeremy Brett), Hercule Poirot (David Suchet), and Columbo (Peter Falk). I could write a long list of TV detectives who have inspired me, and my writing, in one way or another. However, there is one such character whose show’s entire premise has bothered me since the series’ height of popularity in the 80s. You see, most TV detective had a very good reason for being involved in the investigation of crimes. Columbo was a homicide detective, Steve McGarrett led Hawaii’s state police, Quincy was a medical examiner, Holmes was a consulting detective, and Monk was a former cop who was often called in to consult on cases. But, this other character I’ve just hinted at had absolutely no good reason to be present EVERY SINGLE TIME  a murder took place in the tiny town she inhabited (it’s amazing there was any population left), yet for 12 seasons people dropped dead everywhere she went and she (not the police) managed to figure out who the killer was. A few years ago, my annoyance with this show made me write a little piece of fiction in which this character of whom I speak, in a thinly disguised version, finally meets her match in one of my favorite TV investigators (in another thinly disguised version) and the truth is brought to light! When the topic came up in discussion recently, I dug out that old story to post here today. Most of you who read this will probably recognize who the characters “really” are.
Enjoy! 


                                             THE QUEEN OF ALL KILLERS
“She said yes! She said yes! She’s coming to the wedding!”             Elizabeth Appleton had just opened the mail and was thrilled. Her mother, Regina, came rushing into the foyer to see what the fuss was about.            “Who’s coming to the wedding?”            “Julia Fisher! I sent her an invitation. It was just a silly, crazy idea and I didn’t think she’d even bother to respond. I didn’t think she’d really come! This is amazing!”            Regina tilted her head and looked at her daughter as if she were talking to a lunatic. “You mean you actually sent an invitation to that mystery writer you’re always talking about? We don’t even know the woman! What a waste of a perfectly good place setting. We could have used the space to seat one of your cousins.”            “Mother, there are already more cousins coming that you can count, and I haven’t even seen most of them more than two or three times in my life; I hardly know them. Miss Fisher’s been with me my whole life, maybe not in person, but certainly through her books. And I’ll have you know she’s not just a mystery writer. She’s a real amateur detective. She started out writing fiction, but she’s stumbled across many real cases too, and she’s put the police to shame more than once by figuring it out before they did. I don’t care whether you like it or not. It’s my wedding and I’ll invite whomever I please!”             Almost out of breath from putting her mother in her place, Elizabeth took the letter and its envelope and marched up the high, spiraling staircase and into her bedroom.             She took the letter and tucked it away between the pages of Julia Fisher’s latest book and put the book back on the shelf. Fisher was the author with the most space devoted to her work on Elizabeth’s shelves and Elizabeth was almost as excited about Fisher’s coming to the wedding as she was about the wedding itself. She sat down on the edge of the bed and smiled, feeling silly and giddy and completely happy. The wedding was only two weeks away. Soon she would be Mrs. Thomas Grant. She would be married, out of her parents’ house, looking forward to planning a family, and would finally have the chance to meet her favorite author. Things, she decided as she sat there, couldn’t possibly be any better.            Downstairs, Regina Appleton threw herself back into the task of making sure everything would be perfect for Elizabeth’s big day. The first of her children would be married soon and she wanted the day to be one none of the guests would ever forget. The arrangements had been made with the country club, the menu had been finalized, musicians had been hired, dresses were selected, and most of the invitations had been responded to. Everything was almost set.
            Dr. Andrew Appleton arrived home the following afternoon. He had been gone nearly a week on business, a seminar for corporate chemists. He kissed his wife on the cheek and settled into his favorite chair. He had not seen his wife since leaving for the seminar, but they had spoken on the phone several times over the course of his trip. “Frank called me last night,” he told her.            “Frank who?” Regina put her magazine down and shot a cold glance in Andrew’s direction.            “Frank Dante. Who did you think I meant?”            “That’s who I was afraid you meant. What did he want?”            “To tell us he’ll be coming to the wedding. It’ll just be Frank though; his wife can’t make it. She’s going to visit her sister in Maine or some such place.”            “Andrew, why on earth did you invite that slob?”            “Because he’s an old friend of the family, that’s why. I don’t see what you have against him, Regina.”            “No, Andrew, he is not an old friend of the family. He’s an old friend of you! I never liked the man. He’s a little weasel, always wearing that wretched old trench coat like he thinks he’s Sam Spade or something and constantly chomping on those horrendous cigars of his. That wife of his must be either an angel or a lunatic to put up with someone like him. I just hope he doesn’t offend our more civilized guests.”            “Well, he almost declined, but he changed his mind at the last minute.”            “Why? What did you say to convince him?”            “Well, his interest seemed to peak when I told him Lizzie had invited that mystery writer, Fisher.”            Regina stood up. She was angry. “That is just wonderful, Andrew, just wonderful! We have a celebrity coming to the wedding and now the poor woman will have to put up with Frank Dante! You’re determined to embarrass us royally this time, aren’t you? I can’t see why that rude little man would want to meet Julia Fisher anyway. I’m surprised he’s even heard of her. I didn’t think he could read.”            “That’s enough, Regina,” Andrew brought her raving to a stop. “Frank and I grew up together. I know his station in life doesn’t meet your ridiculous standards, but he’s a good friend and, if you really think about it, his profession means more in the grand scheme of things that mine does, regardless of how much less money he might make. He’s coming to the wedding and you’ll treat him just as you would any of our guests. And that’s the end of it.”
            The day finally arrived. The wedding went perfectly and Elizabeth and Thomas became The Grants. The entourage left the church and made its way to the reception. As the Appletons arrived at the country club, Regina nodded her approval. The grounds were lovely, the main banquet hall exquisite, and the decor perfect. She and Andrew made their way inside and greeted guests as they arrived.            “Mrs. Appleton?”            Regina turned to find a well-dressed, petite little late-middle aged woman standing there in a lavender suit with a charming smile painted across her face.            “Yes, I’m Regina Appleton.”            “My name is Julia Fisher. I wanted to thank you for inviting me. I’ve received many letters from my readers over the years, but the one your daughter wrote was so sweet, I just couldn’t bring myself to refuse. She made a lovely bride today. You must be very proud. And the groom is quite a handsome young man as well.”            “Thank you.” Regina liked her new friend immediately. “Elizabeth will be so glad to finally meet you once she and Thomas arrive. She’s been reading your books since she was a little girl. To be honest, Miss Fisher, I didn’t quite approve of so young a girl reading about murder, of all things! But she’s turned out all right in the end.”  
            The bride and groom arrived and mingled with the guests. Elizabeth got to meet her literary hero and found Julia Fisher to be as charming as she had hoped.            “Did you ever expect to really solve murders, Miss Fisher? I mean, you started out as just a writer, but then you wound up catching real killers! What an amazing change!”            “I suppose I’ve just been lucky,” Fisher admitted. “Many writers have to struggle to come up with interesting mysteries. Mine just seem to pop up at the right times and provide plenty of fuel for my imagination’s fires.”
            The reception proceeded as planned. Regina had not missed a single detail and was quite proud of the fruits of her efforts. Dinner was perfect, the musicians she had hired performed admirably, and everyone, bride and groom included, seemed to be having an excellent time. Julia Fisher sat, like a guest of honor, at the table of the bride’s family, and regaled Regina and the others with tales of crimes she had helped the police solve.            Across the room, Frank Dante was getting a headache. The violins were too shrill for his tastes and he found the overall atmosphere of the place to be stuffy. Coming from a large Italian-American family, Dante preferred his weddings more jubilant and less officious. The Chicken Dance was more to his liking than Brahms. Still, he had his reasons for having accepted the invitation and he kept those reasons firmly in mind as he munched his chicken, sipped his Coke, and kept an eye on the table around which were seated the bride’s parents and their companions. He watched as a small, white-haired woman excused herself from the table and walked in the direction of the restrooms. Dante was a people-watcher. He always had been. It was a major part of his personality and had served him well over the years.            Five minutes later, he watched the same woman return to her seat. He noticed the gloves on her hands. They matched her lavender suit precisely, but had not been there when she had left the table. She slipped them off, put them back in her bag, and returned her attention to her meal. 
            Five minutes later, the violins suddenly stopped. The attendees all looked up from their food. The chief waiter stood there with a pale face, shocked expression, and trembling hands. “Please!” he shouted out in a French accent, “Is any of you a doctor? I need a doctor at once!”            Andrew Appleton stood up and rushed over to the shaking man. Although working mostly as a chemist for a large pharmaceutical company, Andrew had indeed graduated from medical school. “What is it? Are you ill?”            “Not me,” said the chief waiter, “my assistant, Antonio!”            Andrew followed him into the men’s room and emerged a minute later, just as shaken as the man who had brought him there. He addressed the guests. “I’m sorry to say that something terrible has happened. A man is dead. The police are on their way.”            Elizabeth Grant began to cry. Thomas put his arm around her in consolation. Regina huffed and puffed, lamenting the ruination of her perfect day. Julia Fisher produced a notebook and pen from her handbag, her eyes narrowing in an expression of supreme interest. Frank Dante did not say a word. He just watched.             Most of the guests left once the local police had taken contact information. Elizabeth and Thomas departed, hoping to spend some time alone and make the most of what was left of their wedding day. Andrew and Regina stayed behind, as they had been the ones to book the affair. Julia Fisher refused to leave and took the homicide detective into another room, telling him she might have some important information. Frank Dante stepped out into the parking lot and lit one of his cheap cigars. He watched as the coroner’s men carried the body out. The sheet draped over the stretcher to conceal the corpse could not hide the tent made by the large kitchen knife that was still stuck in the dead man’s chest.
            The bride and groom were permitted to leave on their honeymoon as there was no reason to suspect that either of them was in any way involved. The next morning’s papers had a generous amount of coverage of the Country Club Killing, as it was now being called. Andrew Appleton read the article and related the main details to Regina, who was still wearing a sour expression and moaning about her plans being blown to smithereens.            “Well, at least they had a memorable wedding day,” Andrew quipped. “It seems, Regina, that the murdered man’s name was Antonio Estefan. He was one of the waiters at the club for the last six months. The medical examiner seems to agree with what I thought as soon as I saw the poor fellow, that he died instantly when that knife went in. It says the man’s wife is trying to keep them from doing an autopsy, for religious reasons. I don’t suppose it matters much, as the cause of death would be obvious to almost anybody. Now if they can just figure out who did it, they’ll have everything squared away.”              The doorbell rang. Regina stood up to answer it, having had enough of Andrew’s talk of murder, hoping she wouldn’t find another reporter or policeman coming to ask questions for which she could provide no answers. When she opened the door, she wished it had been a reporter.            “Oh … it’s you.”            Andrew recognized the ice in Regina’s voice. “Come on in, Frank,” he called out, and he heard his old friend shuffle in.             “Listen, folks,” Dante said in his rough voice, “I just wanted to thank you both for inviting me out here. It was a lovely ceremony and a great dinner too … at least until what happened at the end. What a tragic thing. That poor kid was so young, had a wife home waiting for him. You never quite get used to things like that.”              “Well thank you for coming, Frank,” Regina said. She was trying her best not to be rude, trying to respect her husband’s wishes. “You’re always welcome here and I’m glad you enjoyed the wedding or most of it at least.”            “You know,” Dante went on, “I wish I’d had a chance to meet that lady, Julia Fisher. When I heard she was coming, I said to myself, ‘Frank, you’ve got to go and meet that writer.’ You see, my wife, well she loves Miss Fisher’s books, so I thought maybe I could get her to sign one for me, thought it’d make a nice surprise when the wife got home from visiting her sister. Oh well, I guess I missed my chance.”            “Nonsense, Frank,” Andrew piped up, despite Regina’s sudden burst of throat clearing, “Miss Fisher’s staying in town for another day and Regina and I have invited her over for dinner tonight. Why don’t you come too? Then you’ll get your chance to have her autograph your book and you’ll have a decent meal before you head back home.”            “Well,” said Dante as he took a cigar from his coat pocket, though he knew Regina would have a fit if he dared light it in her living room, “I just might take you up on that offer. What time?”
            Andrew answered the door at five minutes before seven. Julia Fisher stood there smiling, with a bottle of wine in hand. “Good evening, Dr. Appleton, have you seen the six o’clock news?”            “No, Miss Fisher, I haven’t. Why?”            “I left the police department two hours ago before returning to my hotel to freshen up. They’ve made an arrest in the Estefan case.”            “You mean they’ve caught the murderer already? Who was it?”            “Would you believe it was the head waiter, the one who called out for a doctor and pretended to be so shocked at finding his friend’s body in the bathroom? His name is Raoul.”            “Miss Fisher, I know your reputation from all the talking my daughter’s done about your books over the years, although I confess I haven’t read them myself. Did you have anything to do with this case being solved so quickly?”             “I suppose you could say I did, Mr. Appleton. I accidentally witnessed something that turned out to be quite important. Why don’t we open this wine and I’ll tell you and Mrs. Appleton about it?”            Andrew, Regina, and Julia took to the living room chairs and sofa. Regina tried to corral them to the dinner table but Andrew insisted they wait for Frank Dante, who seemed to be running late. Regina snorted and agreed.            “When I first arrived at the reception,” Julia Fisher began to explain after her first sip of wine, “I accidentally, being a confused old lady, wandered into the kitchen, of all places! As timing would have it, I overheard a portion of an argument between Raoul and poor Mr. Estefan. The young waiter had come to this country under, shall we say, circumstances that were a tad short of being fully legal. It seems Raoul had somehow found out about this and was going to report Estefan’s status to the man in charge of the club’s staff. Estefan countered and told Raoul he had learned that Raoul had been, to put it politely, seeing the club president’s wife at inappropriate times. The argument grew a bit more heated as I left the kitchen and got back to finding the place I was supposed to be. Sometime after that, it seems, Raoul cornered the poor boy in the restroom and stabbed him to death with one of the kitchen knives. When poor Estefan was killed, I thought it my duty as a citizen to report what I had overheard to the detective who arrived on the scene after the body was found.”            “Very interesting, Miss Fisher,” Andrew said. “I suppose this will end up in one of your books now.”            “It would be wrong of me to not use any material that comes my way,” Julia laughed. “It was a bit dull though, in comparison to some of the other things I’ve seen in my time. I shall have to embellish it to some degree if I’m to get a decent tale out of it.”            “Well, congratulations all the same, Miss Fisher,” Regina added. “I’m sure Elizabeth will find it thrilling to be a part of one of your stories. What a wedding present!”            “Regina please,” Andrew blurted out, “a young man was killed yesterday! That’s hardly something to celebrate!”
            The doorbell chimed, stopping Regina from verbally shooting back at her husband. As Andrew got up to answer it, Julia laughed softly, amused by the bickering between the Appletons.            “I’m really sorry I was late, ladies,” Dante said as he hung his coat on the back of his chair and sat down. “Hello, Miss Fisher, I’m Frank Dante. I’ve got to tell you, it’s a real pleasure meeting you. My wife, well, she couldn’t be here tonight but she’s a big fan of your work and I think she’s read every book you’ve ever written. I was hoping that, maybe, after we eat, well, if it’s not too much trouble, do you think you could sign a book for her? She’d get a real kick out of that.”            “I’d be delighted,” Julia said with a smile.            “You know, Frank,” Andrew said, trying to get Dante to calm down before Regina lost her temper, “Miss Fisher’s going to have to write another book now. She helped them solve the Estefan case this afternoon. The murderer is in police custody as we speak.”            “Is that so?” Dante smiled at Andrew’s news. “They didn’t waste any time on the case, did they? In the movies it usually takes them a week to figure out a whodunit.”              “Well, Mr. Dante,” Julia piped up, “things work a bit differently in the real world. Some murders are never solved and some are wrapped up in a matter of hours or days. Perhaps you ought to read some of my books, the ones your wife seems to find so interesting. You might enjoy a more realistic take on crime solving than you’ll find at the movies.”            Andrew chuckled at that, but Dante shot him a ‘keep your mouth shut’ look and spoke before his host could get a word out.             “Actually, Miss Fisher, my wife’s the big fan but I’ve flipped through a few of your books when she’s left them out on the coffee table or beside the bed.”            “I see,” Julia said, still flashing her sweet old lady smile. “And what did you think of them, Mr. Dante?”            “Actually, ma’am,” Dante said, reaching behind himself and poking around in his coat pockets, “that would be Lieutenant Dante.” He held up a badge. Los Angeles, Homicide.             “Bravo, Lieutenant!” Julia exclaimed, quite delighted. “I’d never have guessed you to be a policeman.”            “Yeah, I get a lot of that,” Dante admitted, putting his badge away. Now about those books of yours…”            “Yes,” Julia said, “now I’m even more interested to hear your opinion.”            “Well my wife’s been reading your work ever since your first novel,” Dante said. “That one really was a novel with a clever killer, a determined cop, and a twist ending; classic detective stuff. The problem with that kind of book is that most writers can come up with one plot like that but it’s always a hard act to follow. Unless you happen to be Agatha Christie, you tend to run out of ideas pretty soon. Then you came out with a second book, Destination: Death. It seems you’d stumbled across a real murder case while on vacation in Hawaii. I thought that was a pretty interesting coincidence. My wife kept buying your books and I kept flipping through them. And I started to see a pattern. You went to a family reunion and your old uncle dropped dead. It turned out your cousin was after his inheritance before he altered his will. You went to the circus and somebody cut the trapeze wire. Somebody bumped off a literary agent at a crime writers’ convention. On and on it went, Miss Fisher, for twenty-odd years, for book after bestselling book. Nobody’s that lucky, if stepping into puddles of blood everywhere you go can be called lucky.”            Regina Ackerman made a sudden, loud snorting sound, almost spitting her wine out as she saw where Dante was going with his speech.            “Frank! Whatever are you suggesting?”            “Regina,” Dante said, turning his head to face his hostess, “how many times have you and Andrew gone to dinner at that club of yours?”            “Dozens of times, perhaps three times a month. Why?”            “Had you ever seen Raoul before the wedding? What about Antonio Estefan?”            “Well no, but I just assumed they were newly hired. What does any of that matter? One is dead and one is in jail where he belongs.”            “No, Regina, he’s not in jail any longer. And he never did belong there. Excuse me a moment.” Dante took a cell phone out, pressed a few buttons, and spoke into it. “Detective Randall, will you please bring our other guests in?”            The dinner companions heard the front door. Ten seconds later, a man walked in, the police detective from the country club, followed by Raoul and Estefan.             Julia Fisher turned a ghostly white. She let out a little squeak of disbelief, and she tried to stand up. Detective Randall put his hands on her shoulders and gently but firmly suggested she remain seated.             “These two gentlemen,” Dante said to the shocked Julia and Regina, “deserve Oscars, don’t they? And so do you, Andrew!”            “Andrew!” Regina cried out, “You knew about this, this … charade? And why wasn’t I told about this? I still don’t understand what this is all about!”            “You weren’t told, dear,” Andrew spoke his mind loud and clear, “because you have too big a mouth! Now let Frank finish what he’s trying to say.”            Dante went on. “To be honest, I wasn’t planning on coming to Elizabeth and Thomas’s wedding. It’s not my kind of thing, especially if my wife’s not around, but when Andrew told me you were coming, Miss Fisher, I wouldn’t have stayed away for all the tea in China. After all those coincidences in your books, I had to find out if my little hunch was on the money. If I was right, I couldn’t take the chance of you being here among these dear old friends of mine if you really were what I thought you were. So I flew out here and made sure to get here a week early. Once I arrived, I called Andrew and we met for coffee without Regina around and I told him what I had in mind and he agreed to help me, even if it did put a little bump in the road to a perfect wedding day for his daughter, and I really appreciate the sacrifice.            “Why, I asked myself, would you, Miss Fisher, accept an invitation to a wedding between two people you’ve never seen before in your life? Being a successful writer, you must receive dozens of strange invitations. You couldn’t possibly accept them all, so why this one? Maybe, I decided, you needed some new material. That, if my original idea about what you are was right, could be a very bad thing. But it would work to your advantage, wouldn’t it? Doesn’t it always? If you go into a situation like this one, where you don’t really know anybody, you’d have no obvious motive if somebody turned up dead, would you? A murder could happen and you’d insert yourself into the investigation, using your reputation and celebrity as your ticket in, and pretty soon you’d have some more material for your books. But there would have to be a killing for that to happen.            “So, Miss Fisher, as soon as you got here, you set yourself to looking for somebody to kill and somebody else to take the blame for it. I had my suspicions, you see, from reading your books. It was too much to be coincidental. Nobody, unless they happen to really be in the business like I am, could possibly be present at the scenes of so many crimes. Knowing what you might be up to, I decided to bait the hook. It wasn’t really that hard. Raoul and Antonio here are not really waiters. They’re police officers who act in community theatre as a hobby. I knew you’d snoop around the country club looking for a victim and a potential frame, so I had them improvise their little argument when you wandered into the kitchen. Antonio knew you’d slip a drug into his coffee and so he knew not to drink it. It was Raoul who saw you take the kitchen knife he’d just put down, held with a napkin so it would have his prints and not yours, and hide it in your purse. It was also Raoul who slipped the note to me telling me what they’d seen. Once that was set, I just had to wait.             “I saw you notice Antonio going into the bathroom and I knew you’d take that as a sign that the drug had started to take effect and the poor fellow was beginning to feel sick. That was when you got up from the table and slipped those gloves out of your handbag. You excused yourself to use the ladies’ room and went into the men’s’ room instead. You took the knife, found Antonio passed out, or so you thought, and used the knife on him. But you missed out on knowing three important facts. First of all, Antonio was only pretending to be passed out. Second, he knew how to position his body so his chest would be the most convenient place for you to stick that knife. Third, his chest was well protected with a sheet of prosthetic skin, the kind used in horror movies, complete with pouches of fake blood.            “So you went in and did the deed and came out thinking you’d killed the poor guy. You calmly went back to your dinner, your conscience hardened by doing things like that dozens of times over the years, and you waited for somebody to find the body. Raoul went into the bathroom after I’d given him a signal, and came out with his brilliant act of shock. That was when Andrew here, who was in on the whole thing, followed Raoul in and pronounced Antonio dead on the spot. The police arrived, and they were in on it too, and had the body hauled away before poor Antonio got cramps from keeping up the carcass act for so long. Then Detective Randall waited for you to go to him, as we knew you would, with your eyewitness account of the little argument in the kitchen.  We tested the coffee Antonio didn’t drink and found the tranquilizer you spiked it with, which, of course, matches the pills we found in your hotel room while you were out for breakfast this morning. I’m sorry, Miss Fisher, but the game is over. Next time you need material for one of your books, you’ll have to use your imagination. If that doesn’t work, maybe your cellmate will have a good story to share.”            Julia let the tears flow. “This isn’t fair. It’s entrapment! I know my rights!”            “Entrapment,” Dante said, “it might be, but all we really did was go through with a wedding and create an argument. Of all the people there, you’re the one that decided to go ahead and try to kill a man. You may have failed this time, but you still made the attempt. The drug you dropped into that coffee was real, even if Antonio didn’t drink it, and I don’t even have to mention the stabbing. Trying to kill someone is still a crime, even if you didn’t succeed. And, Miss Fisher, I think a judge will agree, in light of what we’ve found out here tonight, that it might be time to reopen some of those old cases you claim to have helped solve. I think there might be some innocent people in prison who’d like to go home and see their families, don’t you? Detective Randall, take her away.”
            Julia Fisher was led out by Randall. Regina Appleton, still pale and shocked, was kind enough to invite Raoul and Antonio to sit down and help finish the dinner that had hardly been touched. Andrew Appleton looked over at his old friend.             “That was fun, Frank! If you ever need my help again, just give me a call!”            Dante got back to his plate. “Regina, I know you might never forgive me for all this, but it had to be done.”            “But you ruined my daughter’s wedding day!” Regina’s voice was getting shrill again. “It was supposed to be the best day of her life!”            “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Dante mumbled with a mouthful of mashed potatoes. “Once she got over the idea of her favorite writer being a serial killer, she was more than happy to help.”            “You mean she knew about this too?” Regina had gone from pale shock to crimson anger in an instant. “Was I the only one left in the dark?”            “Not at all,” Dante quipped after swallowing. “Miss Fisher didn’t have a clue until ten minutes ago either.”
                                                            END

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing author Ralph L. Angelo Jr.
Ralph is an excellent writer of science fiction, fantasy, and other action-packed genres, a hell of a nice guy, and (we can't underestimate the importance of this) a fan of the New York Yankees. Here are Ralph's answers to some questions about his work, as well as some information about his books, past, present, and future.



Who is Ralph L. Angelo Jr.? Tell us a little about yourself and your life beyond what a reader might learn just by reading your books.

Well, I’m a 56 year old guy whose idea of fun is riding sport and sport touring motorcycles in the warmer weather, and up until this past year skiing all winter. But due to these constant injuries I keep getting skiing every year I may be done with that for good. I have a bad lower back to begin with and last season I crashed badly on my upper back along my shoulder blades. That laid me up for two months before I was back to normal. I play guitar and sing, though the last few years that has been down to karaoke nights and not in any bands. I’m single, never been married and no kids. I owned a business for 15 years prior to all of this.


What inspired you to begin writing, and what's the earliest thing you remember writing? 

I always had an interest in writing dating back to elementary school. I loved to read, and it naturally carried over. The earliest thing I can remember actually putting down on paper was what became the prologue to my ‘Torahg the Warrior’ novel. I actually wrote that scene in mid ‘80’s. It was my attempt at the beginning of a Conan novel, and I just kept it for myself.


When and why did you decide to take writing seriously and pursue it as a profession? 

In the late 90’s to the early 00’s I had been writing and selling articles to a few motorcycle magazines and decided to write a book on Motorcycle safety. That was published a decade ago and is called ‘Help! They’re All Out to Get Me! The Motorcyclists Guide to Surviving the Everyday World’ It was my first book, and while it didn’t sell a ton of copies at first, it left me with the idea that I could do this thing. So I immediately began writing my first novel, ‘Redemption of the Sorcerer-The Crystalon Saga, Book One’ But I lagged on that one. I took my time. I dragged my heels. Flash forward 6 years and I got hurt at work. My back got so bad that I could not continue in the field I was in (I was an appliance repair technician.) and was out on permanent disability. But now I had time to finish my book, which I did. There were a bunch of growing pains associated with that book, but it was nothing that couldn’t be overcome. I think that’s probably the best book I ever wrote, to this day. I wrote 3 more within the next year, including Torahg, the still unpublished sequel to Torahg, and ‘The Cagliostro Chronicles.’


When I think of your work, Ralph, the first thing that comes to my mind is "The Cagliostro Chronicles." Can you tell us a little about how those books came about, what they're about, and what plans you might have for the future of the series?  


The Cagliostro Chronicles is my ode to space opera/sci-fi. Not the technical boring stuff that makes you want to peel your eyes out of your skull but stuff more like Star Wars and Star Trek. It’s action packed, adventurous and generally a lot of fun. It’s my most popular series. It starts in 2089 and goes from there. It begins with a scientist/engineer named Mark Johnson (BTW, the concept of this series was also something I came up with in the mid to late 80’s, especially the opening chapter) who discovers the secret to faster than light travel. Along the way he also discovers that mankind’s progress in space has been stunted by an outside force; an alien civilization that does not want man to leave Earth because they fear us and our potential. So since the early days of the Apollo missions and right through to 2089 they have made sure that there have been disasters that have set man’s quest for the stars back. The first book deals with their first mission out amongst the stars, and how they begin to unravel the conspiracy. It culminates in an intergalactic battle for Earth’s survival.
The second book is two and a half years later on and The Cagliostro and its crew have just discovered an Earth-like world about 4 days distance from Earth at hyper-warp speed. Along the way the ship gets badly damaged in a battle and they end up crash landing on that planet. There they face all sorts of threats including natives and monsters. This culminates in a three way war for that planet. This book also introduces a huge threat to both mankind and their enemies from another dimension.
The third book is set six months after the second and The Cagliostro has been in for refits and upgrades. Its shiny and new again as well as being better than ever. Now they discover that the President wants them to go undercover once again and infiltrate an ancient, long abandoned world with a hidden secret that they must retrieve before their enemies the Agalum do. But the new threat that emerged at the end of the second book is cutting a bloody swath through the galaxies, complicating things on a grand scale.
The fourth book will close the current arc. The fifth book will begin a new series of adventures that will be slightly lighter in tone, at least for a while.

You mentioned before that "Torahg the Warrior" began its existence a long time ago, long before you started your career as a writer. What was it about that concept that stuck with you for so long that it eventually found a place in your professional work?

The opening sequence really hooked me. It was frightening and monstrous and filled with dark magic and evil men looking to overthrow an empire. But most intriguing to me when I wrote it was that one of those evil men is Torahg’s older brother, the King’s other son. This novel is brother Vs. Brother but not just in their present. There’s a twenty year gap that takes place when we first see Torahg, he’s a young, wide eyed young man of eighteen or nineteen. After he escapes his home with the palace guard on his heels the next time we see him he’s thirty eight and no longer so pleasant to be around. He’s been in a forced exile for twenty years with his teacher living under an assumed name. He’s been framed by his brother for their father’s death, even though his brother, Welcomb, is the one who actually killed their father. But events have a way of coming back around, and he ends up in a position to take back his home land of Fairandia, now renamed Blackhorne by his brother to remove all semblance of the land his father ruled so peacefully. Taxes have been increased dreadfully upon the populace and everyone is miserable. King Welcomb has a private army of thugs making sure everyone stays in check as he turned a once wonderful country into a hell for its citizens. And of course the fact that he’s willingly possessed by a demon has something to do with all of this as well. It’s an epic, sprawling tale that may indeed be my favorite creation to this day.


Tell us something about The Crystalon Saga and what plans you have for its future.



Oboy… Crystalon’s story begins in another dimension. A dimension he has ruled for a million years, yes I said a million. He is an immortal sorcerer on a parallel Earth in a parallel dimension. Where the first novel begins he has just been overthrown by an invading force. He’s poisoned and shackled by mystic chains that it takes thirteen sorcerers to maintain, even in his weakened state. He’s incalculably powerful, more like a force of cosmic nature than a man. But his punishment (For ruling with somewhat of an iron fist, though not as harshly as some would make it out to be) is to be banished to a world without magic. A world that looks exactly like the one outside our door. A world where he is completely powerless and destitute. He soon discovers a mystical plot involving soul stealing demons is in place and that consequently this world is not so free of magic as he once believed. But he is the only man on Earth who has a chance of defeating the evil sorcerous forces allied against him. If he does not, two worlds will ultimately fall. His new home and the world of his birth as well. Will he regain his powers in time to save both Earth’s or is it already too late?
The second novel in the Crystalon Saga, ‘My Enemy, Myself’ takes place a few years later and he is firmly entrenched on his new home when he receives a visitor he never expected to see again, one who begs him to return to his old world and help them against a foe that cannot be defeated, one who is mad in every sense of the word. He’s making deals with the devil, literally and is seeking revenge against everyone from his old home. The universe he was originally from; the universe Crystalon now occupies. Once again the master sorcerer must put aside all his concerns and work to save two universes from a foe who is at the very least his equal in power. But how can he defeat an enemy who is alike as the face in the mirror? How can Crystalon defeat ‘My Enemy, Myself’?

Tell us what Hyperforce is about.


Superheroes and their first appearance on an Earth that never had them before. A world that is suddenly changed by the appearance of a young alien prince of extraordinary power who is being hunted by an evil warlord looking to usurp the throne of the world they are both from. They have many adventures within the book, in fact each chapter is written as if it were a monthly superhero comic. There’s even a supersized chapter inside to replicate an annual or king sized issue. Hyperforce is my ode to the great comics of the 70’s to late 90’s. It’s a fun, gigantic adventure.

Who or what is The Grim Spectre?  


The Grim Spectre is my first true pulp novel. It’s set in the 1930’s in a city where everything and everyone is corrupt except for the citizens. Robberies and muggings are commonplace and happen every day. Gangsters and crooked politicians rule the streets with impunity. When a man is beaten nearly to death in an abandoned alleyway his life is saved by a mysterious being, who could be an angel or something far worse, but he doesn’t know. What he does know is that now he has a mission and the ability to complete it. The city of Riverburgh has its champion now, but will the avenger of Riverburgh, The Grim Spectre, be up to the task? It’s a rough and tumble novel filled with fights and gunfire between good and evil for the fate of a small city forty miles north of Manhattan up the Hudson, with a horrific demon-like being as its star.


Having talked about your novels already, can you tell us about the short stories you've had published?

Sure, the funny thing is I have to sit back and actually remember what I had published as shorts. I have one novella out there that is appropriate for this time of year called ‘The Halloween Terror of Weatsboro’ which is a Halloween tale of a community that discovers they have had monsters living in their midst for over a century. At only .99 cents it’s a bargain and a steal! Many are still awaiting publishing, but the ones that worked best for me were the Sinbad tale I did for Airship 27 last year in volume 4 of that series, a story in an anthology I did for Pro Se called ‘Rat-A-Tat-Short Blasts of Pulp.’ And most especially my story in the Destroyer Anthology that came out last Christmas entitled ‘More Blood’ that one was actually nominated for an award last year. Though I didn’t win it, it was still nominated and that worked for me. I also have shorts coming out in a book by Flinch Books, another in a new Pro Se anthology featuring a hidden segment of the musketeers in old France that battled against enemies of a mystic or horrific nature. This one may actually be Lovecraft-ian. I have two stories coming out in anthologies that are being produced for those of us in the community who have been suffering with illnesses. One being handled by Ron Fortier and Airship 27 and another by Van Plexico and White Rocket. Both are benefit books. I believe that is all I have out there right now as far as new or unpublished anthology tales.

What writers do you feel have influenced your work the most?

Easy question, Robert E. Howard, Warren Murphy, Robert Jordan, Lots of comic book guys like Chuck Dixon (Who has crossed over to writing novels and is kicking ass doing it), Roger Stern, Gerry Conway, Roy Thomas, Steve Englehart, Jim Starlin, Walt Simonson and lots of others I can’t bring to mind right now.

Looking at your various published works, I see some science fiction, some fantasy, and even a little horror. What other genres, if any, would you like to try?

Believe it or not, I’m considering trying my hand at an old style mystery book, something like what more acknowledged authors write. I doubt I’ll ever try romance, that’s not in me, as a writer. At this point I’m looking to write something that will be a breakout title for me, that will definitely take me out of my action packed comfort zone.

What is your process for writing like? Do you write detailed plans for your novels, fly by the seat of your pants, or somewhere in between?

No detailed plans at all. I have a few ideas of where to start and go from there. There are times I don’t really know the ending of the book in progress until it appears on the page. The opposite of this is the just finished ‘The Grim Spectre’. I knew the ending well in advance. I didn’t even have to put it down on the computer screen (Notice I did not say ‘paper’?) It was floating around my brain for a long time. It’s been said by many a writer that a book is a definite beginning and an ending and the hardest part is everything in between. Sometimes this is true for me. I put these artificial word counts in place for myself. Usually a minimum of 65K words until I’m satisfied that I’m giving the reader enough for their money. Some of my books are closer to 100K words (The two Crystalon books) others are nearer to the 65K mark, and quite a few are in-between. The original cut of Torahg was 106,000 words. Usually I let the story tell itself and if I have to add some meat and potatoes to it to fill it out I do. There was a late chapter in The Cagliostro Chronicles III where I added this entire side adventure to fill it out. It was several chapters’ worth of material and this one big adventure that had nothing to do with the main storyline, but it’s also one of my favorite parts of the book, if not the favorite.

What is your favorite things about writing? Your least favorite?

Well my favorite is coming up with new ideas for stories and putting them down on the screen, then of course seeing them actually printed. My least favorite is actually getting lost in the story and starting to realize just how little I have written. Then I have to force myself to write more and to a steady schedule, which always gets far easier as I come to the end of a storyline.



Ralph, thanks so much for taking the time to tell readers of this blog about yourself and your books. I look forward to everything you write in the future!


Ralph's Amazon page: http://tinyurl.com/ralphsamazon

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Detective and mystery fiction has been part of my life for almost as long as I can remember. I recently tallied my 45 published stories according to genre and found that I’ve had more mysteries published than any other type of story. While detective movies and literature have been very important to me, I’m pretty sure it all started with television. After all, movies, until quite recently, were either encountered incidentally when they happened to be shown on TV, or had to be seen in theaters or rented. And books had to be sought out at stores or libraries. But television has a constant presence in the household and my first exposure to detective fiction probably came from me joining my father in watching various reruns from his youth or whatever was running on Mystery! when I was in the age range when being exposed to new ideas had the greatest impact on my developing imagination. So today I’m endeavoring to choose my ten favorite television depictions of detectives and put them in order from least to favorite. I love all ten of these shows and many more, but I can only choose ten (with one instance of cheating a bit, which you’ll see as you go up the list), so let it be noted that exclusion is not to be seen as disrespect toward any small-screen sleuth who does not appear in the countdown.   One more thing to note: the fine actors in spots 10 and 9 are at the bottom of the list because their shows are still running and so can’t properly be compared to the other eight, which are completed bodies of work. Perhaps, if I update this list several years from now, the order will be altered in some ways. So here we go. My ten favorite TV detectives, from 10 to 1.
10. Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes
 I was prepared to hate Sherlock. When I heard the BBC was doing an updated version of Sherlock Holmes, I was against it. My favorite fictional character belongs in the Victorian and immediately post-Victorian eras. The entire mystique of the canon fits that period so well. The world has changed so much since then and we have so many new methods of crime-solving at our disposal here in the 21stcentury. I was convinced they wouldn’t get it right. And I was wrong. The essence is there! Holmes, Watson, and the usual cast of characters are all represented in modernized versions and the spirit of Doyle’s work lives on. I’ve enjoyed every episode so far, though some are better than others, and I look forward to the next series.

9. Idris Elba as Luther  Since 2010, Idris Elba has portrayed Detective Chief Inspector John Luther in 3 series of episodes. Elba’s intense performance has made him one of my favorite current actors and made Luther a TV cop I look forward to seeing in what I hope are many future episodes.

8. Ronald Howard as Sherlock Holmes In 1954, 39 half-hour episodes of a Sherlock Holmes TV series aired. I call this “Holmes Lite,” as they were short, sweet little mysteries, perfect for quick distractions when one is in the mood for a Holmes fix that’s not too heavy or intense. Simply put, these stories are fun. Howard plays Holmes well, and his co-star, Howard Marion Crawford, plays a Watson who is somewhat of a cross between the brave, able doctor of Doyle’s canon and the comedic sidekick of the Basil Rathbone films.   

7. Robbie Coltrane in Cracker A detective doesn’t have to be a police officer or private investigator as long as he or she works to get to the bottom of mysteries. Robbie Coltrane gave a great performance as Dr. Edward “Fitz” Fitzgerald, a psychologist who assists the Greater Manchester Police in this 1993-1996 series. An obese, chain-smoking, drinking, gambling, sarcastic, yet brilliant man, Coltrane’s character was a pleasure to watch.    

6. Derek Jacobi as Cadfael A medieval monk solving mysteries is a wonderful contradiction, as the clergy usually has the job of encouraging faith and belief in things we can’t see or hear, while a good detective must always rely on evidence and facts. This mixture of two opposing ideas is what made Brother Cadfael so interesting. The character originally appeared in stories by Ellis Peters (the nom de plume of Edith Pargeter) and was adapted for TV between 1994 and 1998. 

5. Inspector Morse and his spinoffs Okay, this is the part where I cheat. The Inspector Morse TV series ran from 1987 to 2000 and starred John Thaw as author Colin Dexter’s opera-loving, crossword-solving police detective. His partner was Detective Sergeant Robbie Lewis, played by Kevin Whately. From 2009 to the present, Lewis, now an inspector, has had his own series, simply called Lewis, in which he is assisted by the young Detective Sergeant James Hathaway (Laurence Fox). In addition to that, there is also another currently running spinoff series, Endeavour (Morse’s rarely mentioned first name), which features Morse as a young detective (played by Shaun Evans) in 1960s Oxford. I enjoy all three series and consider them parts of a whole, so I see no reason not to include them all on this list. 

4. Jack Lord as Steve McGarrett  Hawaii Five-O had an incredible run from 1968 to 1980, making it (I think, but I’m too lazy to look it up right now, the longest running weekly police drama before Law & Order). It’s been the butt of jokes for years, due to the blindingly garish fashions of the 70s, the catch phrase “Book ‘em, Danno,” which is actually not spoken very often at all in the series, and Jack Lord’s thick, seemingly immovable hair. People can make whatever comments they want, but it’s hard to deny that the show was a huge success, and it’s easy to see why. The stories were always compelling crime dramas with great guest stars, clever mysteries, and good action scenes. Like some of the 60s and 70s’ best shows (like Star Trek and Bonanza) Hawaii Five-O features story styles that could switch episode to episode from drama to semi-comedy to espionage-based noir worthy of the early Bond movies. Jack Lord’s no-nonsense McGarrett was the series’ star and the glue that held the show together. 

3. Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes Holmes is my favorite fictional character in the entire world. He’s been played by many fine actors on film, many of them quite good. But Jeremy Brett, in his 41 Holmes adaptations, from 1984 to 1994, was the most faithful to the character as created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. These are nearly perfect versions taken directly from the source material. Brett’s performance is magnificent, as are those of his two Watsons, David Burke and Edward Hardwicke. It was when I happened to walk into the living room of the house I grew up in to find my father watching the Holmes episode “The Devil’s Foot” when I was 11 years old, that I became hooked on Holmes and soon sought out the original stories. 27 years later, I’ve had six of my own Holmes stories published, with 2 more on the way, and, I hope, many more yet to be written. I have Jeremy Brett to thank for all that! Many people who know me well might expect Brett’s Holmes to be first on this list, but it’s third, because, as I said a moment ago, Jeremy Brett was, perhaps, the best, but he was not the only great Holmes. The top 2 spots had to go to actors who are now the only men I can accept as the detectives they so brilliantly portrayed.

2. Peter Falk as Lieutenant Columbo Columbo was a unique character among TV detectives, with his stories being not whodunits, but, as someone once pointed out, how-catch-ems, meaning that we, the viewers, knew from the opening scenes who had committed the murder, and, probably, so did our title character, a disheveled little man who latched onto his suspects like an annoying tick, not letting go until he’d just-one-more-thinged them to the point of gathering enough evidence to put them away. These were brilliant stories starring one of the greatest actors ever to grace the silver or small screens. I probably saw Columbo even earlier than my first exposure to Sherlock Holmes, and I still admire the series and Falk’s work to this day. One of my favorite conversations I’ve ever had involved discussing the brilliance of Pete Falk with Robert Culp, an actor who played a murderer on Columbo no less than 4 times. As far as I’m concerned, Peter Falk was Columbo, and if the occasional rumors of a rebooted, recast version ever turn out to be true, my head may literally explode, so somebody needs to keep a mop close by.

1. David Suchet as Hercule Poirot How could the first spot on this list go to anyone else? Hercule Poirot is easily my second favorite literary detective, after Holmes, and most adaptations previous to 1989 had been less than faithful to the character Agatha Christie put on paper. David Suchet, over a span of nearly 25 years, starred in TV adaptations of almost every one of Christie’s Poirot novels or short stories, for a total of 70 episodes or TV movies. Suchet meticulously researched the role and perfected it in a way no previous actor had (and, I think, no one else ever will, for perfection cannot be improved). His Poirot is an extraordinary accomplishment, and watching an episode transports the viewer to a different time and place. The glorious opening theme music pulls us in and we’re spellbound until the conclusion of the mystery. I would go so far as to call Suchet’s little Belgian detective the finest adaptation of a literary character I have ever seen. Of course, I also have to mention the superb supporting cast of Hugh Fraser as Captain Arthur Hastings, Philip Jackson as Chief Inspector Japp, and Pauline Moran as Miss Lemon, whose contributions to the stories and interactions with Poirot added to the show's many layers of charm. 

And that's the list. I'd like to extend my thanks to all the actors, writers, directors, and producers of these fine detective shows, as well as the original creators of the characters and the mysteries in which they found themselves entangled.    
 

As a writer of new Sherlock Holmes stories, the best kind of compliment I can receive from a reader is to be told that my stories capture the feeling of the originals by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or that they would, as one reviewer said, “fit right into the canon.” That is precisely my intent every time I sit down to write a new one. I want to bring readers to that same comfortable place they go when reading Doyle’s work. What I do not want to do is reinvent the carriage wheel that rolls down Baker Street by revising, adjusting, or otherwise trying too to make the legend of the world’s greatest fictional detective too much MINE rather than Doyle’s. Holmes belongs to his original author and to the generations of readers who have thrilled to his exploits. I’m just borrowing him (with the gracious permission of my editor and publisher, the public domain state of the character, and the readers who actually—and I still have a hard time wrapping my head around this fact—pay a bit of their hard-earned money to read my Holmes stories). The last thing I want to do is go too far and fundamentally alter Holmes and his cast of fellow characters in any way that drastically strays from canon. As I consider this state of mind today, I’ve thought of a list of some (but probably not all) the things I will never do within my Holmes stories.   I will never resurrect Moriarty. Doyle killed him off, so he stays dead. Yes, I might make postmortem references to him or even have Holmes involved in a plot of the evil professor’s devising if the story takes place before “The Final Problem,” but I will not have the Napoleon of Crime crawl out of his grave (I know he wasn’t given a proper burial; it’s a figure of speech).
I will never reveal what “really” happened in any of Doyle’s stories. I am not a Holmes revisionist and I have enough of my own stories to tell without having to mutilate the work of the original writer. 
I will never insert explicit sexual details into my Holmes stories. Yes, I might hint at things or include light innuendo, but full-blown (accidental pun, there) erotica has no place in that world. If sex plays a role in a story, I will write of it as Watson would have written of it: discreetly.   
I will never kill off one of Doyle’s major characters within one of my stories. This includes Holmes, Watson, Mrs. Hudson, Mycroft, the main inspectors like Lestrade, Gregson, and Bradstreet, and probably a few others that don’t come to mind at the moment. That would smack of me going for shock value and I just won’t go there. Of course, any character I create for a story is fair game and is never safe! I did write a story (featuring my 1930s British intelligence agent Hound-Dog Harker) in which an elderly Holmes appears and mention is made of Watson having passed away at some point in the past, but the death of the dear doctor is not a major plot point and does not happen during the events of the story itself. That story is also not part of my intentionally canon-like Holmes series.
I will never have Holmes face a supernatural threat in a story that is specifically about him. To do so would defeat the entire purpose of Holmes’ character and methods. He will not meet Dracula, werewolves, or zombies, or fight black magic or ancient gods! Yes, my novel Season of Madness hinted at the supernatural, but that book was about Watson without Holmes. Within my Holmes tales, events may seem to be supernatural, but will always have a logical, realistic explanation by the end of the mystery. Other characters may believe in the supernatural, but Holmes can distinguish between the improbable and the impossible. It is, after all, what he does best.     I will never reunite Holmes with Irene Adler. Their story begins and ends with “A Scandal in Bohemia.” If Doyle had wanted Miss Adler to be a recurring character, he would have brought her back. The whole point of her character is that she makes such an impression on Holmes that he henceforth refers to her as the woman. She is the one example to which he (either consciously or otherwise) compares all others. Irene Adler, post-Scandal, is an idea that lives on in the minds and memories of Holmes, Watson, and the readers. She must remain a ghost of the past to retain the potency of what she means to the lore of the canon.    
I will never reveal how Watson’s wife Mary died. Doyle tells us that Watson met her during “The Sign of Four,” that they married, and that she died sometime later. That’s all we need to know.

 Those seven items are the rules I’ve thought of today while pondering my personal philosophy for writing Sherlock Holmes. But I’m far from the only modern Holmes writer. Some others choose to do the things I’ve decided not to do, and that’s fine. If it works for them and their readers, it’s not my place to judge.
Now, back to my regularly scheduled Baker Street scribblings. I’ve recently finished my eight Holmes story, and I’m now working on a play featuring the Great Detective.  

My Sherlock Holmes stories appear in volumes 1, 3, 4, 5, and 7 of Airship 27 Productions' anthology series Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, all of which can be found on my Amazon page.      

Recently, a coworker of mine (at my day job) learned that I’m a published writer. Several times since then, he’s asked me if I could give him some of my books for free. I refused. I made a simple suggestion that should have solved the issue right then and there if he was truly interested in reading my work. For every one of my books that’s available online, whether in print or e-book format or both, Amazon offers some sample pages. It would be the easiest thing in the world for a curious person to go to my Amazon page, choose a book, click on the “Look inside” feature, and read those sample pages to see if it grabs his attention tightly enough to make him want to buy it.               There; problem solved. But apparently it isn’t. He seems almost insulted and unable to understand why I won’t give him books for free.                         Truthfully, I do occasionally give books away. But those occasions are rare and have good reasons behind them. I sometimes give copies to my very few, very closest friends. The reason for that should be self-explanatory. I’ve also been known to give copies to those who are somehow connected to the story coming into existence in the first place. For example, my grandfather introduced me to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories when I was a kid, so I sometimes give him free (free to him, but I have to pay for them!) copies of the anthologies in which my Holmes stories appear. Other than those exceptions, I really don’t give my books away for nothing, and most of my friends and acquaintances, and even my relatives, are fine with that fact.             So yes, I’m beginning to get seriously annoyed at this coworker’s begging for freebies. But, to be fair, it occurs to me that there are certain factors involved here that he may not be aware of. After all, unless you’re part of a particular profession, you can never really understand what a certain kind of work involves.             So here are a handful of good reasons writers should be paid for their work and should never feel obligated to give it away for free.
Writing is Work!            Yes, we sit down while we’re doing it, so maybe it looks easy. Sometimes it feels easy too, but it’s never as easy as it might appear to be. Writing a novel or short story can take days, weeks, or months, and that’s even if we only count the actual time spent typing. Ideas take time to form, manuscripts have to be revised, edited, and proofread many times before going to an editor who isn’t the writer, and then, once that outside editor has had his or her way with it, the writer has to go back and make the suggested changes (or produce some damn good reasons why he won’t change things). Writing a story takes a lot longer than reading it. The handful of hours of enjoyment you get from reading a novel is just a fraction of the time it took the writer, editor, publisher, proofreaders, and various others to prepare it for your consumption.             Also—and this is something non-writers might not realize—we’re not just writing when we’re physically sitting down to work on our stories. Writers’ minds are going every waking moment, churning ideas around, trying to memorize sections of prose at times when we can’t stop whatever else we’re doing to jot notes down, and even groping for a pen and paper in the middle of the night when an idea pops up in a dream or in that strange, wonderful zone of consciousness between fully awake and fully asleep. We’re never truly “off the clock.” Divide the money we make from our books by 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and figure out what we’re really paid!              And, on top of all that, there really is a substantial amount of work we don’t make any money from. Not every story we write gets published. Things get rejected no matter how good a writer is, and some projects that do get published just don’t, for whatever reason, successfully make a profit. So it’s even more vital that we do make some money from those stories people really want to read.    
Even the Writer Doesn’t Always Get His Own Books for Free            Sure, I often get comp or contributor’s copies of the books I write or have work included in, but I certainly don’t receive box after box of unlimited supplies of them. I get a few, keep one or two for my personal bookshelf, maybe give one or two away as gifts, and then, if I need more for any reason, I usually have to buy them.! In this day and age of technology allowing books to be produced by many publishers, some of them quite small, which gives readers a much greater variety of stories to choose from than back in the days of just a few major publishers, smaller presses just can’t afford to give authors dozens or hundreds of comp copies, and that’s just fine. But readers, especially those who personally know the authors, have to understand this fact.
Sales Numbers CountIf you want to support an author whose work you enjoy, or an author who you consider a friend (even if you haven’t yet tried his work), the best ways to do that are to buy the books and leave a review on Amazon or another venue. By purchasing his books on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or wherever, you not only make sure the writer is paid for the work, you also, without any further effort on your part, give the book a boost in sales rank. Potential buyers, some of them at least, do look at such statistics. The more successful a book is, the more successful it might continue to be.
The Writer is Not the Only Person Who Needs Sales from that BookSo let’s say you want to read, for example, one of my Sherlock Holmes anthologies. And instead of buying it off Amazon or from the publisher, you want me to give you one of my copies. Even if I’m willing to forego my royalties from that copy so you can read it, let’s think about what else is happening here. Guess who’s not being paid for their work on that copy of the book. How about the editor’s royalties? Or the illustrator? What about the other three or four authors whose work appears in that volume?             And even if it’s one of my novels we’re talking about, I still didn’t do it alone. The publisher wants his share, as does the editor, and whoever drew the cover illustration. Don’t these fine creative folks deserve to be paid for their hard work in making my story available to you, the reader?
It’s Just Wrong to Expect Something for NothingWould you walk into your dentist’s office and expect a free filling? Would you demand a free oil change from your mechanic? Do you go into the local Dunkin’ Donuts and think it’s likely they’ll just hand you a coffee and say there’s no charge? Of course not, because that mechanic and dentist and barista (yes, I know, that’s more of a Starbucks-style term) are people doing jobs to earn a living. Well so are writers! Try to keep that in mind.