A LIGHTER SHADE OF GRAY
In an effort to leave behind her outlaw past and escape the vengeance of the Sinaloa cartel, Lilly DeFranco (The Uneven Surface of the Soul) flees to Mexico City in the hope of rebuilding her life. She soon finds herself in the employ of Jeronimo Hermosa, a local crime boss. Lilly becomes his trusted personal courier dealing with Hermosa’s legitimate business interests.
When Hermosa is approached by his former lover Hattie Ranier who seeks his help in rescuing her granddaughter Kate from her association with a Houston street gang, Hermosa tasks Lilly with traveling to Houston and dealing with the matter. Lilly is accompanied by Jaime Soledad, one of Hermosa’s trouble shooters.
Their efforts go awry when Kate is abducted by her criminal boyfriend after a violent encounter with the police. The two become fugitives and disappear, leaving Lilly and Jaime little choice but to return to Mexico City. Three months later, a cryptic message from Kate results in Lilly and Jaime renewing their efforts. Their quest takes them to rural Colorado, but their mission becomes complicated when they are faced with extracting Kate from a dangerous criminal enterprise. As the plot unfolds, Lilly becomes increasingly determined to rescue Kate from making the same mistakes that led her down a path of criminality. But to do this, Lilly must revert to her old ways.
After completing THE UNEVEN SURFACE OF THE SOUL, I had little doubt that I had to continue the saga of Lilly DeFranco. There was too much potential for the growth of this character. In addition, she seemed to be the classic “gray” character who populates so many of my stories. By that I mean a character whose moral compass is oriented to neither good or evil – neither black nor white.. An outlaw who is neither Snow White or the Wicked Witch, but a persona somewhere in between. These characters may be deeply flawed individuals, their souls tainted by circumstance as much as by choice. At times, they are honorable and beyond reproach, but they are also not hesitant to cross the line, or should I say to walk the line.
In this story, Lilly is forced to contemplate choices that she made earlier in her life, in addition to the unfortunate circumstances that led her down a path of criminality. I daresay that at times some of us have faced similar quandaries and counted our blessings regarding roads not taken.
My own spiritual paradigm is rooted in Balinese Hinduism and the recognition and acceptance of the struggle with moral duality. Some of us walk the line between light and dark in an effort to achieve the balance that provides us with inner peace. Surely this isn’t everyone’s path. But there remains little doubt in my mind that a host of characters I have created over the years comprise an uneven reflection of my own soul. And hopefully, much like Lilly, a lighter shade of gray.
THE UNEVEN SURFACE OF THE SOUL
Former ATF Agent Harlan Quist takes on an off the books, undercover assignment tracking down a violent sociopath who plans to trade a shipment of hijacked weapons to the Sinaloa cartel in exchange for fentanyl. The only catch is Harlan must team up with Lilly DeFranco, an escaped felon with whom he once shared a romantic entanglement during an undercover assignment ten years ago. Their search leads them to El Paso to meet up with a retired mobster and former associate of their intended target. Things quickly go awry, requiring Harlan to undertake dangerous foray into Mexico to complete his mission and rescue Lilly.
It seems I have fallen into the habit of recycling characters. This may be partially out of simple sloth. I’d like to think it is because I enjoy my characters too much to bid them farewell.. Either way, my readers don’t seem to mind, and I assume most of them welcome them back like old friends.
I prefer to look at this as a reflection on life – the fact that we all have an arc to our lives that deserves completion if not a recounting. This sentiment undoubtedly led me resurrect the character of Harlan Quist who first appeared in JACK OF ALL TRADES and alter in SIGNS OF LIFE. The culmination of that particular story seemed to beg for a sensed of completion. I left Harlan and his latest love interest Royale Aucoin embarking on a retreat to the Oaxacan coast after a bloody shootout that resulted in Royale recovering her daughter who had been abducted fifteen years before. The arc of Royale’s life was no less deserving if treatment – a rehabilitated fallen woman, former drug addict and prostitute turned nun and social worker, and Harlan’s accomplice in their foray into Mexico to find her daughter.
I was recently reflecting on my previous novel THE SIREN’S REFRAIN which I refer to as my dysfunctional romance novel. It got me thinking that most if not all of my stories are romance novels. I say that in in the sense that the romantic literary vehicle is nothing less than a tale of connection. The back drop of my stories often relates the tension between characters – the unrequited connections, tragic connections, some eroticism, and even a handful of unions with happy endings. But that connection between characters, the static electricity is always there, coloring the mayhem, the gunplay, the intrigues, and often times the human misery on a grand scale.
This story is no exception. There is the long ago cast off, ill-fated liaison between Harlan and the outlaw Lilly DeFranco; a connection that Harlan approaches with well-reasoned caution and hesitancy. And there is the tenuous connection between Harlan and Royale, a relationship threatened by their past wounds and a certain degree of the sort of lassitude that besets many a romance. So Harlan’s conundrum -reconciling these two relationships – forms the warp and weft of a story of criminality, violence and suspense. But it is also a story about second chances and the cost of one’s choices. I hope you enjoy it.
Santa Fe, August 2023
SIREN’S REFRAIN
This is my ninth novel. I usually have at least a vague inkling regarding the genesis of my stories – how an idea evolved, or the source of my inspiration. In this case, those roots are not readily apparent. This wasn’t the kind of story that I typically brooded about for long periods of time before finally launching into a tentative narrative. It didn’t evolve from an event or an article I might have once read. Nor did it grow out of an anecdote or story someone might have related to me. The only things that possibly come to mind are the professions of the two main characters.
I have a deep affinity for music, the lyrics of songs specifically. I have always spent a great deal of time listening to songs and admiring the craft and art of songwriting. In my acknowledgments, I referred to songwriters as “the spiritual scribes of the human experience in all its glorious and inglorious complexity and nuance.” The character of Lou Ann Catskill owns the role of such a scribe, both in her songs and the arc of her life. The other main character, Leon Riser, is perhaps my avatar in respect to my being a frustrated travel writer. Stylistically, all of my novels embrace foreign and oftentimes exotic settings and locales. So it felt natural to create a character that allowed my story to wander to and fro in those kinds of settings. Thus, the two characters were born.
As for the story itself, its themes became clearer to me with every rewrite and revision, of which there were many. THE SIREN’S REFRAIN deals with aging and mortality, of love lost and rediscovered, and of regret. I would hazard to say that most people in my age demographic find themselves replaying seminal parts of their lives and the individuals that colored those chapters. All of which leads to a great deal of late-night retrospection regarding those roads taken or not taken, and the friends and lovers that might have fallen at the wayside.
Then there is the ever-present lens of aging and mortality that we all eventually must face – the physical limitations, along with the loss of friends and loved ones. My character Leon faces not only middle age but terminal illness, two bogeymen that draw into sharp focus the past, the present, and the future. The twenty-five year long on and off again love affair between the two main characters forms the backdrop for these themes. The bonds of their relationship endure not only the passage of time but also the obstacles presented by two complex and disparate personalities who struggle with their own demons. I admit it was a challenge to reconcile a relationship between a turbulent woman-child dealing with Bipolar Disorder and fame, and a somewhat unconventional, lone wolf writer of travelogues.
Even though the fictional character of Lou Ann Catskill is a music artist of some note, the story isn’t about music per se. I didn’t delve into any great depth into the art or business of creating music. But I open each chapter with song lyrics that I attribute to Lou Ann. Writing these lyrics was a challenge but also an enjoyable exercise. I leave it to the reader to assess how well I achieved that.
Santa Fe 2022
STATES OF EXILE
Harper Harris, renowned foreign correspondent and photojournalist, is at the apex of her career. At the behest of her agent, therapist, and adopted daughter, she has decided to forgo covering conflict zones. While in Ljubljana presenting a retrospective of her work, she is approached by a woman who claims to be the ex-wife of a man with whom Harper was romantically involved twenty four years ago during the Siege of Sarajevo. Out of a mixture of guilt, obligation, and her inherent hunger for a good story, Harper reluctantly agrees to accompany the woman to Kurdistan to search for her missing daughter and ex-husband.
What Harris find is not unexpected; a landscape filled with refugee camps, the ruins of war, unbridled violence, and the ever present specter of terrorism. All the while, her traveling companion, Adele Marchand, proves to be more than Harris bargained for as they seek to discover the fate for the missing daughter and her father. STATES OF EXILE is a story of both ill-fated and faded love set against the backdrop of international intrigue, the Syrian refugee crisis, and the unremitting bonds of love and family.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has estimated that by the end of 2018 there to be over 70 million refugees worldwide that were forced from their homes by conflict or persecution. Among the 30 million current refugees, over half of whom are under the age of eighteen. As a result of the Syrian Civil War, 5.6 million Syrians have fled their country since 2011. Another 6.2 million have been displaced within their own country. Again, half of these refugees are children.
Refugees, unlike migrants, have seen their lives violently altered by repression or war. They have lost their homes, livelihoods, and possibly loved ones. And as they are forced to flee, they enter into a cruel contract where they exchange dignity for survival. And too often in the process, they encounter humanity at its worst.
In our nation’s current socio-political climate, many of our fellow citizens view immigrants and refugees as a threat to our values. But what values will there be to uphold of we abandon out duty to protect those less fortunate than ourselves: human beings who have fled their home due to misfortune not wholly of their own making. We must ask ourselves what incentives do we provide these people to assimilate into the fabric of our society if that fabric is so tattered that we are blind to the suffering of others. If our society is unable to welcome them, if we are unable to up to them an image of a better life, then how can we expect them to accept that our world is better than the one they fled?
The refugees in this story remain nameless and are not the main actors in this drama, but instead they provide a backdrop for the personal stories of my characters- an off-screen presence that cannot be ignored. The character of Harper Harris, who has served as the protagonist in three of my previous novels, sees herself as a recorder of how the world works; its tragedies as well as its wonder. She considers it her duty to bear witness to the stories of the people and places that are otherwise forgotten by our society’s tendency to both trivialize and sensationalize the plight of the world and the less fortunate. We live in a culture where the five o’clock news has already faced from our minds by the time the first reality show or sitcom begs for our vapid attention.
For my readers familiar with the Harper Harris trilogy, you may be pleased to see I chose to continue the arc of her story. The inspiration for this tale, like so many of my other stories, came about in an unlikely manner. In this case, a visit to a retrospective photo exhibit featuring the work of renowned Slovenian photojournalist at the National Museum of Contemporary History in Ljubljana. It led me to delve more deeply into the history of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. In the first Harper Harris novel, STILL LIFE IN A RED DRESS, there is a brief intimation of of her coverage in that tragic conflict. Thus, I began this story with a lecture and a retrospective exhibit of her career. From there, the story unfolds on a surprising trajectory that leads her to Kurdistan and northern Iraq, an area rife with refugees. I realized then that crisis would have to become a player in this story.
For Harper, everything is about the story, much to the dismay of her agent, therapist and adopted daughter. Thus, she somewhat unwillingly sets out on an ill-advised but tempting odyssey filled with the usual dangerous mishaps, but also the connections and revelations that compose her story. I hope you enjoy the story.
Santa Fe, 2020
THE ANGEL’S CHAIR
Two men and a woman who were once intimate friends are forced to revisit a tragic secret that has laid buried for forty-five years. One of the men, an Episcopal priest facing the end of his calling; the other, a man with a checkered past who has finally found his way; and the woman they both loved who is running from her past seemingly without direction.. Three people struggling for redemption for the sins of their past.
Their paths become reconnected when a Mexican investigative journalist reopens their wound in an unlikely manner. When the priest and the journalist are abducted at the behest of a prominent Mexican politician seeking the journalist’s damaging expose on his rival, the priest’s two friends, long estranged by their remorse and own tangled history , reunite in an attempt to rescue him.
What follows is a suspenseful thriller , but also a story about the evolution of a love and friendship and the cost of one’s past. With settings as varied as s small farm in Mexico, to present day Austin, a Syrian refugee camp on the Turkish border, a bar in Oaxaca, and finally to an isolated ranch in New Mexico. THE ANGEL‘S CHAIR is at its heart a story of how a single act can color one’s life and the price of redemption.
sit are I guess it would be inevitable that at some point I would choose to write a set of characters who inhabit my own age demographic, ie., the borderline of life’s seventh decade. To those who have not yet reached that pinnacle, you will one day realize that the passage of years lends itself to a great deal of introspection. One ponders the roads taken, mishaps both avoided and embraced, the successes and failures. You find yourself judging these episodes with keen and critical hindsight. Hopefully, you are able to forgive yourself for the worst transgressions while at the same time accepting that these choices and happenstances have formed your persona for better or worse. Readers of my previous work will recognize this as a reoccurring theme. What that says about me is fodder for many hours of therapy.
I doubt many of you are familiar with a gentleman by the name of Don Henry Ford, Jr. If not, I suggest you Goggle his story. Many years ago I read his account “Confessions of a Drug Smuggling Cowboy” and filed it away in my repository of possible story lines. That being said, the tale recounted in “THE ANGEL’S CHAIR bears only a passing resemblance to Ford’s actual escapades other than in its spirit and the germ of an idea from which his story gave birth in my imagination.
I spent a good number of years of my young adulthood in Austin, Texas in the late sixties and early seventies when that town was a major hub for marijuana smuggling from Mexico. At times, it seemed that virtually everyone I knew dealt pot either retail or wholesale. There was a certain innocence in those times, for this was before that trade was tainted by cocaine, cartels and the subsequent violence all that engendered.
My main characters, two men and a woman, once linked by friendship, love and misfortune, came of age during the cusp of that transition – a heady, hedonistic time marked by looming danger. In writing this story, I chose to return to those years as the background or weft of this tale, and then to fast forward forty-five years, placing these characters at a stage of their lives where the memory of a shared tragedy has marked them, coloring their lives. When an unforeseen circumstance inserts itself into their lives, they are forced to confront their past and reflect on the evolution of their relationships.
I realized during a recent and final re-editing that I could have easily expanded this story by a hundred pages and provided a great deal more detail to my characters’ history. For whatever reason – economy, sloth or simple desire – I chose not to entangle the reader too much in the past. It’s a relatively short novel that takes place over the matter of a week between Christmas Eve and New Year’s. It is what it is. I hope you enjoy it.
Santa Fe, December 2019
SIGNS OF LIFE
Two strangers, a man and a woman, become acquainted over drinks in a hotel bar. A tenuous connection is made that ends in a tryst with tragic consequences. So begins SIGNS OF LIFE, a tale of the cost of one’s past and the price one is willing to pay for the future. Harlan Quist, the cashiered ATF agent from JACK OF ALL TRADES, becomes enmeshed in a search for a young woman who was abducted as a child fifteen years ago. What follows is the story of a mother’s willingness to sacrifice everything to recover her bond with a daughter whom she no longer knows. Quist accompanies the mother on a perilous odyssey and a descent into the world of sex trafficking and drug cartel violence, a journey that leads from Fiesta in Santa Fe and the symbolic burning of Old Man Gloom to the underbelly of the tourist mecca of San Miguel de Allende, and finally to Oaxaca during the celebration of the Day of the Dead.
Most of my readers are already aware that my stories evolve from an idea based on true events, real personalities, or some historical incident. I’ve received inspiration from varied sources: an obituary in The Economist, some obscure magazine article, or a trip to a foreign country. From there my imagination takes hold. The idea that germinated into SIGNS OF LIFE presented itself in a casual and serendipitous manner -a conversation with a friend in which she related an incident second hand, the nature of which stuck in my mind. I grappled with the gist of that story for several years, unwilling to toss it aside, but unsure of how to use it in a satisfying manner.
Passion can lead to intense and often unforeseen results. By its very nature, it is often spontaneous, and leads down paths both pleasurable and perilous. Thus, a brief tryst between strangers seemed a suitable jumping off point for my story. As always, I have only the vaguest notion of where my characters and the opening acts might lead. SIGNS OF LIFE was no exception. Introducing the character of Royale occurred to me in a creative burst of spontaneity that allowed me to adventitiously stumble down a wholly unintended path. The story that followed was partially fueled by a recent excursion to Mexico. I also consciously intended to bring back the character of Harlan Quist from JACK OF ALL TRADES. I believe he served me well in providing the necessary dramatic tension between him and the character of Royale.
Latin America has provided the settings for several of my novels…Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala – for reasons not entirely realized. I won’t admit to possessing even a rudimentary linguistic skill at Spanish, but I have traveled to these countries. And something about each of them seemed to spur my imagination. The last third of SIGNS OF LIFE take place in Oaxaca during the celebration of the Day of the Dead. Needless to say, much about that setting provides a feast ripe with possibilities and thematic references. That celebration of the dead, specifically the honoring and welcoming of our dead loved ones, seemed to tie in perfectly with the thread of my story. The Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro, when describing the character of his countrymen, said “No one loves life more than we do, in a way because we are so conscious of death.” The celebrations depicted here, the burning of Old Man Gloom and the Day of the Dead, serve to remind us that we must honor the darkness to truly appreciate the light. The cycle of life and death deserve no less.
And as is the case with pretty much all my stories, this novel is about a search – whether it is a search for an experience or person in one’s past, the truth underlying some past tragedy, a missing child, an old lover, or in the case of my Harper Harris character, the search for a good story. Arguably, the search, the odyssey, is a timeless dramatic vehicle in fiction. Still, I often wonder if it is simply a nod to some subconscious demon of mine. That being said, I hope you enjoy this story as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Santa Fe, March 2018
THE LANGUAGE OF THE DEAD
Veteran correspondent and photojournalist Harper Harris finds herself back in Sierra Leon during the Ebola epidemic. In the course of twelve hours during her last night in country, she rescues an orphaned child, shares drinks with Nessa Gallagher, an enigmatic Irish woman, and is interrogated by Ron Sumner, a jaded British intelligence officer obsessed with capturing the Gallagher woman. Her journalistic curiosity piqued, Harper accompanies Sumner to Guatemala, where the violent legacy of that country’s civil war and the genocide of hundreds of thousands of its citizens still lingers just below the surface. What follows is a trajectory of retribution, intrigue, and betrayal that entangles all of the actors in a bloody set piece with tragic consequences that will change the course of Harper’s life.
When I began writing THE LANGUAGE OF THE DEAD, I knew I wanted the character of Harper Harris to make a return appearance. After completing my previous novel, JACK OF ALL TRADES, I envisioned a trilogy of novels with Harper as the protagonist. I also realized there needed to be an arc to her story, some sense of completion. I leave it to the reader to decide if I accomplished this in a satisfactory manner.
I typically begin my stories without any appreciable plot in mind. There may be a vague concept of a story line but it requires several embryonic chapters before any solid idea gels. In the case of THE LANGUAGE OF THE DEAD, I returned Harper to Sierra Leone in the opening chapter, and then somewhat randomly introduced the enigmatic Nessa in Chapter Two. I realized I wanted a foil to Harper’s character – another strong, interesting female character but someone polar opposite in history and persona.
Like most novelists, my work is a product of the musings of an idle mind, an active imagination, and in my case, but not exclusively, a marriage of fiction and historical events. All of my previous novels deal with history as the weft and the characters the warp, so to speak. With this novel, I found myself returning to familiar ground, in this case, Central America. Something about that region beckons me. I visited Guatemala a couple of years ago and became enthralled by its landscape, cultural heritage and its people. But underlying those obvious attractions was its history of political turmoil and civil war. In the past decade I have also visited Nicaragua and Chile. What these countries have in common are legacies of civil war that are relatively recent – a mere several decades. In our own country, the aftermath of our own civil war, a hundred plus years in the past, still seems to affect our social fabric. In the three countries I mentioned, the scars of their tragedies lie just below the surface, and there exists a palpable tension that belies the progress of reconciliation and any sense of normalcy.
One morning while in Guatemala, my wife and I visited the small town of Santiago on the shores of Lake Atitlán. Our guide brought us to the local cathedral where in 1981, the parish priest, an American from Oklahoma, along with some of parishioners, were assassinated by a paramilitary death squad. Later that same day, while we had lunch at a lakeside restaurant, our guide pointed out a man dining at a nearby table who had been an officer in the kaibile, the notorious Guatemalan Army unit allegedly responsible for the deaths of untold numbers of their fellow citizens during the civil war, most of them indigenous Mayans. Now, the former officer worked as a tourist guide. Daily reminders of the war and the resulting genocide of hundreds of thousands of their countrymen are evident in forms visible and invisible; the ongoing prosecution of politicians and soldiers for war crimes, the bullet holes in buildings, the absence of family members still in hiding years after the war’s end.
The aftermath of that war proved to be a fertile ground for the backdrop for a story of retribution and salvation. It only required that I create the characters to propel a narrative reflecting that tragedy on a scale both personal and collective. The character of Nessa provided her own arc – from IRA foot soldier, to assassin, and finally, avenging angel, an evolution reflective of the times and struggles for independence in locales as varied as Northern Ireland and Central America
As for Harper, it remains to be seen whether she will be resurrected in any future stories. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy her journey.
Santa Fe, New Mexico – Spring 2016
JACK OF ALL TRADES
Set amid the cauldron of the civil wars of the Middle East and Africa, foreign correspondent Harper Harris finds herself risking everything in her quest to find the elusive arms dealer Jack Xantis. As Harper is attempting to flee Syria, she is captured by the Syrian Army only to be rescued by Xantis who persuades her to repay the favor by delivering a message to a Syrian dissident in Beirut. Something goes terribly wrong, and with glaring clarity Harper realizes almost too late that betrayal and murder are a matter of course in the world of geopolitics and war.
When a month later, Xantis is reported killed in a car bombing, she closes the chapter on a man whose death seems a fitting end for a man whose profession was one of chaos and violence. However, ATF agent Harlan Quist, has reason to believe Xantis is still alive and seeks out the one person who wants to find Xantis more than he does. Pursued by Gustav Jungerman, Xantis’ ex-mentor, who has his own score to settle, Harper and Quist follow the trail of the man whose sins have changed so many lives, even at the risk of losing their own.
After recently completing this latest novel, I realized again how the search for someone from my protagonist’s past is the predominant theme. Arguably, the idea of a search is one of the basic and most often used thematic engines in fiction. Obviously, that theme must ignite and feed some subconscious need in my psyche. Be it my age and the tendency to reflect back on a lifetime of people, places and ideas, or simply just a part of my personality, searching for people seems to be forever integral to my stories.
In JACK OF ALL TRADES, I resurrected the character Harper Harris from my previous novel STILL LIFE IN A RED DRESS for several reasons. One, I enjoyed the character and wasn’t quite ready to let her go. Secondly, her occupation and outlook on life lends itself to the stories I like to write. If you haven’t read STILL LIFE IN A RED DRESS, I recommend it as an introduction to her character. It isn’t a requirement though, as JACK OF ALL TRADES stands well enough on its own. I also found it intriguing as a man to write from a female character’s perspective. Whether I was able to achieve that to a satisfactory degree, I leave up to the reader. In many respects, this story is more about the journey and the searchers themselves than it is about the subject of their search.
Unlike my previous two novels in which I had very intimate experience with most of the foreign and domestic settings, the locales in JACK OF ALL TRADES are all drawn from imagination and research in the form of reading and visual imagery (thanks to Google). I hope that my descriptions of these places doesn’t suffer from the lack of firsthand knowledge. I hope you enjoy reading this story as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Santa Fe, December 2014
THE MORNING OF THE WORLD
A man and a woman estranged by the death of their first child are forced to revisit their tragedy by the unexpected and strange resurrection of the one person who knows the truth. But does he hold the key to their reconciliation or will an ancient evil force them all to face a horrible salvation? Part love story, part psychological thriller, and part examination of the illusory nature of good and evil, their journey takes them from Hawaii to the horrors of the Rwandan Holocaust and finally to Bali, where a bewildering descent into the madness of our times challenges the boundaries of their love, beliefs, and sanity.
In 1990, I happened to be browsing in the book section of the gift shop of the Honolulu Academy of Arts when I came upon a particularly attractive volume, its subject, the rituals and ceremonies of the Pacific Rim. I randomly opened it to a page midway through and encountered an astonishing image, that of a leyak, or at least a ceremonial depiction of the mythical vampire witch of Bali. I wasn’t entirely ignorant of the entity, or the cultural belief system from which it evolved. Several years before, I had visited Bali and became infatuated with the island’s mystical landscape, its people, and their mythology.
It wasn’t until some years later after I had completed my first novel that I returned to Bali to revisit a world that had earlier gripped my imagination. This time, the Hindu concept of duality and a unique outlook on the role of good and evil struck a personal and spiritual chord. It led me to revisit the concept of the leyak, a being that psychically feeds off of the human spirit. This character invited me to wed a particular paradigm with a story line that satisfied my various interests and needs – my background in anthropology, a nod to a certain philosophical viewpoint, and a desire to create a rich, character driven suspense story that immerses the reader into a world both exotic and real, and regrettably all too likely to be lost due to globalization and the homogenization of the human experience.
The evolution of this tale reflects to some extent the cycles of my life – seasons of despair rooted in personal and political crisis, periods of writer’s block, as well as bursts of creative energy. I am sure a close read of my work is undoubtedly reflective of that struggle. I believe the act of writing is by its very nature an uneven and imperfect attempt to explain one’s life experiences and viewpoints.
For me, writing isn’t a career but a creative outlet, and for both myself and my audience, a window into my subconscious. Any creative process, be it painting, song writing or the fabrication of an imagined set of characters and situations involves impulses and insights whose origins may be unrealized by the author at the time they are conceived. Subliminal messages and those bothersome unresolved “issues” keep emerging, whether desired or not. I won’t elaborate on my own thematic demons other than to acknowledge that there are reasons one writes. On a personal level, the outcomes of these efforts are sometimes therapeutic, and often times decidedly unhealthy. Yet for those of us who write, who a love-hate relationship with this loneliest of endeavors, we seem to go on for reasons that are sometimes beyond our understanding. That said, I hope you enjoy the story.
Santa Fe, 2013
STILL LIFE IN A RED DRESS
Sonny and Ray, their friendship forged during the American involvement in the Nicaraguan civil war of the late 1970’s, struggle to come to terms with the aftermath of that war and their memories of a woman Sonny loved and whose death and Ray’s complicity haunts them both. The discovery of a painting leads the two men on an odyssey to uncover the truth about the woman’s disappearance in the closing days of the war thirty years before. On a journey that begins in a refugee camp in the Sudan, Sonny travels first to New Mexico to reconnect with his friend Ray. Joined by Harper Harris, a photojournalist and correspondent in search of a story, they are lured back to Central America where they confront the legacy of the men’s involvement. The journey draws them deeper into a past filled with choices that cannot be undone and crimes that cannot be forgotten, and ultimately threatens to ruin the futures of those desperate for the peace the war long ago destroyed.
I suspect for many Americans the Nicaraguan Civil War that took place in the late 1970’s is a distant, vague memory. For a generation of younger Americans, that war, along with the subsequent Contra War and the Iran-Contra scandal, most likely fail to even register on the radar. As for me, that particular Central American conflict still manages to resonate in my consciousness. Perhaps it is only my leftist leanings or the fact that I am a junkie for current events that explains my fascination for that time and locale. And it probably explains why an obscure article in a long since misplaced newspaper or magazine caught my attention.
The article in question related a little known incident that took place during that conflict, the subject of which was a woman by the name of Nora Astorga. I suspect the article may have appeared on the anniversary of her death in 1988, but I can’t really be sure of the timing or the circumstance that led me to delve further into her story. I invite the reader to Google her biography for more details of her life.
Her story, a fascinating tale of intrigue and bravery, is worthy of a Hollywood treatment. Subsequently, reading about her stirred my creative juices. But the idea sat on the back burner of my imagination for years waiting to evolve into a story line I might use in a fictional work. When I undertook writing STILL LIFE IN A RED DRESS, I had only the vaguest idea of weaving her story into my novel. The story line finally evolved with its usual false starts and dead ends.
This story is a work of fiction. The characters and circumstances arise from my imagination. Only the basic germ of Ms. Astorga’s experience serves as the central plot device. Instead of an attorney, the Nicaraguan woman in my story is an artist- a painter. Her lover, a young American working for the US Agency for International Development, is also imagined, as is his friend in the CIA. Only the details of the pivotal episode that vaulted Ms. Astorga into the annals of history are borrowed for the dramatic underpinnings of this story.
The heroine of my story, and by extension Nora Astorga, may seem iconic on some level. By that I mean her story serves as a reminder that it is only through great courage and struggle that circumstances change, that worlds move and a different future can be realized. On the other hand, her saga should not be taken as some leftist anthem to an idealistic revolution, for the political and social progress that has been made in Nicaragua is uneven and is a work in progress at the very least. Patriotism has many faces, some that present a countenance we might find unsettling. Still, her story is a universal one of heroism and sacrifice. I hope you enjoy it.
Santa Fe, New Mexico, January 2012
THE EYE OF GOD
Recently after finishing my third novel, it dawned on me that my novels seem to have a common theme – an obsession with searching – for something, for someone. I might well title them THE SEARCHERS – A Trilogy. This is undoubtedly a common and timeless premise in storytelling. That being said, I can surely connect the dots between events in my life and the underlying thematic issues in my fiction.
THE EYE OF GOD is a story about friendship, obsession, and what I surmise is a common source of refuge, mystery, and regret for people who reach an age that lends itself to contemplation of the past. One finds themselves wondering about the fate of someone from their youth. Whatever became of him or her? The ‘what ifs’; the roads not taken. There is also undoubtedly quite a bit of “What the hell was I thinking?” If one is fortunate, these musings will make one appreciate the wonder and reward of the road one did follow. But I suspect for most of us, these musings are a mixed bag.
As a baby boomer, I wrote this novel as an ode to those who came of age in the turbulent late 60’s and early 70’s, a time of recklessness and liberation, optimism and despair, and a fair degree of decadence. THE EYE OF GOD is about looking back and searching for that someone who might hold the key to understanding what happened and why you became who you are.
An integral part of the plot also deals with shamanic plants, both real and imagined, and the unharnessed power and promise of a natural world that is in danger of being lost to our modern world. It was written also in the time that the AIDS epidemic had taken close friends, and therefore touches on that loss.
It also brings to life the character of Jess who is unabashedly based if not entirely on the biography, than at least on the persona, of a dear friend, my first cousin Chuck, born two days before me, and for a good part of my life my tortured soul mate, whose passage through this life intersected my own, marking me indelibly. ‘We were born under the same star twice’, we were fond of saying. And Gemini’s at that.
Needless to say, this story was a very personal one for me. That said, it’s fiction – a story populated by what I feel are some really good characters, with a few surprises for the reader, and reintroduces the thematic demons that lead me to write. I hope you like it.
Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2010