The Page Turners discussion

Hi everyone! Our newest Q&A is with Michael H. Rubin. He is the author of The Cottoncrest Curse.




Synopsis:

In this heart-racing thriller, a series of gruesome deaths ignite feuds that burn a path from the cotton fields to the courthouse steps, from the moss-draped bayous of Cajun country to the bordellos of 19th century New Orleans, from the Civil War to the Civil Rights era and across the Jim Crow decades to the Freedom Marches of the 1960s.

At the heart of the story is the apparent suicide of elderly Civil War Col. Augustine Chastaine who, two decades after the end of the Civil War, viciously slit the throat of his wife and then shot himself. Sheriff Raifer Jackson, however, believes that this may be a double homicide, and suspicion falls upon Jake Gold, an itinerant peddler with many secrets to conceal, not the least of which is that he is a Jewish immigrant in the post-Reconstruction South, where racial, religious and ethnic prejudice abounds.

Jake must stay one step ahead of the law, as well as the racist Knights of the White Camellia, as he interacts with blacks and whites, former slaves, Cajuns, crusty white field hands, and free men of color as he tries to keep one final promise before more lives are lost and he loses the opportunity to clear his name.

Please post questions by the 7 of September!

What inspired you to write The Cottoncrest Curse?

Which writers do you admire the most?

When did you know you wanted to become a writer?

How did it feel when you published your first book?

Here are the answers:
What inspired you to write The Cottoncrest Curse?

As a lover of thrillers, as a history buff, as a native of the deep south, and as someone who has taught law school courses in ethics over the years, I wanted to write a page-turning thriller that spanned multiple generations, ranging from the Civil War era to the Civil Rights era and on into the present, focused on three universal questions.

First, can we really know every significant aspect of our family’s history, and if we did know it, would it alter our perception of who we are?

Second, how are our relationships affected by our preconceived stereotypes and our own sense of identity?

And third, do we have an obligation to tell the complete truth if it will help one person but hurt another?

I wanted to deal with these issues in a down-to-earth way, as these questions are universal and echo from generation to generation.

Which writers do you admire the most?

Four writers of very different genres have influenced me: Arthur Conan Doyle, Ray Bradbury, Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens.

My parents gave me the “Complete Sherlock Holmes” when I was twelve, and I devoured it, reading it again and again. I found it hard to believe that Sherlock Holmes was not a real person, because he was so real to me. Conan Doyle’s stories, although now more than a century old, had an immediacy and intimacy that captivated me. That movies and television shows are still being made about Sherlock Holmes is a tribute to Conan Doyle’s creative imagination.

Ray Bradbury was a master of many genres. I have always admired his effortless prose and am in awe of his accomplishments. He wrote “Fahrenheit 451,” “The Martian Chronicles,” “The Illustrated Man,” and the screen play for the movie “Moby Dick,” directed by John Huston and starring Gregory Peck. It is a remarkable range of work. My wife and I were privileged to get to spend an entire afternoon with Bradbury at his home in Southern California a few years before he died. We discussed everything from how he began his writing career to how he approached his craft. It was an afternoon neither one of us will ever forget.

Charles Dickens and Mark Twain are also writers I greatly admire. Dickens’ characters leapt off the page and into my imagination, as real as if they had knocked on my door and paid me a long visit. I’ve always been amazed by Twain’s ability to combine humor with empathy, to illustrate the human condition, and to make his readers both think and feel.

Reading the works of each of these four has helped me better understand how to keep a reader’s interest, how to plot a story, and how to make the fictional world ring true.

When did you know you wanted to become a writer?

My mother was a poet and a published short-story writer. My father was a judge whose opinions are still quoted and cited today, more than two decades after his death, because of the clarity of his writing style and the complex legal principles he was able to make so clear. My uncle was a journalist. I grew up with writers of one kind or another all around me. Though I became a lawyer (another profession that operates in the realm of words), I knew I wanted to write as soon as I became a skilled enough reader to be able to escape to another place or time through books.

How did it feel when you published your first book?

I am a practicing attorney and an adjunct law professor. The first book I wrote, more than a decade ago, was non-fiction, and it dealt with arcane legal issues that were pertinent only to other practicing attorneys. My audience for that book was ready-made, and I have published a number of legal volumes since then. Holding that first hard cover volume in my hands gave me an incredible sense of accomplishment. The thrill I felt way back then is similar to the thrill I felt on September 10, 2014, when my first novel, “The Cottoncrest Curse,” was published by the award-winning LSU Press.

As a lawyer and law professor I knew I had something of value to share with others in my profession, and I knew that my audience would gravitate to my book. As an avid reader and book lover with a story to tell, however, I experienced great trepidation leaving the world of non-fiction to try my hand at writing fiction, for it is never easy to leave one’s comfort zone.

The positive response my debut novel has garnered from both professional reviewers and lovers of historical fiction, thrillers and mysteries, buoys me in a way that is almost indescribable. It gives me such pleasure to know that my novel is reaching its broad target audience and is being embraced by it.