Jay MacDonald

Fiction

Joyce Carol Oates

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Nine-year-old Skyler Rampike’s privileged life takes a triple Salchow into disaster when his beloved six-year-old sister Bliss, the darling of the tri-state ice skating world, is found brutally murdered one midwinter morning in the basement of the family’s Fair Hills, New Jersey, home. The ensuing breathless media coverage casts such a toxic cloud of suspicion over the family that even Skyler wonders, could he somehow have killed his own sister?

Corporate CEO Bix Rampike and stage mom Betsy, both prime suspects, quickly exile their surviving child to a series of boarding schools for the famous and notorious, for his own good of course. During the next decade, Skyler’s adolescence becomes both prescribed and proscribed by a host of acronymic disorders: PDD (Premature Depression Disorder), CAS (Chronic Anxiety Syndrome), OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder), even the dreaded HSR (High Suicide Risk). Betsy, meanwhile, becomes a fixture on the talk-show circuit, where she shamelessly promotes the Christian cottage industry she has built around her daughter’s unsolved murder. At 19, drugged, unloved and with little left to lose, Skyler seeks redemption by writing a painstaking autobiography, My Sister, My Love.

Owing to the pervasiveness of that selfsame tabloid hell, readers will immediately recognize My Sister, My Love as the JonBenet Ramsey murder on ice, explored here in all its gothic creepiness with appropriate satiric flourishes by that prolific lioness of Princeton, Joyce Carol Oates. Long fascinated by the corrosiveness of fame, Oates has drawn from true-life events before, most notably in two of her numerous Pulitzer Prize nominees: Blonde (2000), an imagined autobiography of Marilyn Monroe, and Black Water (1992), a novella inspired by the Chappaquiddick incident.

Why riff on the Ramsey case? Chalk it up to the insidiousness of tabloid journalism today. "I was noticing how we’ve developed into a kind of tabloid culture where even the New York Times is reporting on things that, in the past, might have been left to the tabloids," she explains. "The Monica Lewinsky case is the most notorious, where something of an essentially trivial and private nature is elevated to prominent attention."

Oates briefly auditioned the O.J. Simpson case as a jumping-off point, having already written an O.J.-inspired young adult novel, Freaky Green Eyes, before deciding instead to turn the Ramseys into the Rampikes.

"My focus was always on what it would be like to dwell in tabloid hell, to have a name that, when you introduced yourself to anybody anywhere, the name would precede you with this sort of aura of scandal," she says.

Recognizing in the JonBenet case the opportunity to hijack the narrative drive of a whodunit, Oates playfully litters her novel and its talking-to-the-reader footnotes with enough red herrings to feed greater Oslo.

"The more you look, it has the teasing mystery of a locked-room case, where there are only a few suspects, unless you think that an intruder did it," she says of JonBenet’s murder. "This case doesn’t go away. It’s officially unsolved and remains out there, sort of like a vast riddle."

Although police quickly ruled out JonBenet’s nine-year-old brother Burke as a suspect in the 1996 murder, he remains one in cyberspace. "I don’t know anything about him, and I deliberately don’t know anything about him," Oates says.

To get in the mood for mischief, Oates vicariously immersed herself in a steady diet of Fox News.

"I had the whole Fox News syndrome," she says. "I was watching Fox News while I wrote the novel, watching Bill O’Reilly. I do come from a Christian background and the Christianity on Fox News is just used for political purposes, it’s so transparent. Bill O’Reilly always used to say ‘secular progressive’ for left wing. Secular progressive sounds pretty good to me! Fox News? I call it Hawk News. I don’t watch that anymore. I just can’t even look at it now." She detoxed with "The Daily Show." "He’s excellent," she says. "I get a lot of news from Jon Stewart."

Oates engages in considerable sleight-of-hand with Skyler’s narrative, which moves freely between the observations of the 19-year-old author and his nine-year-old self, both admittedly under the influence of prescription mood elevators. Skyler is not so much an unreliable narrator as an unsteady one whose highly intelligent digressions, including a rather desultory 55-page attempt at a novel, account for the narrative’s herky-jerky pace.

"The kind of writing Skyler is doing, this conscience-examining and going inward and remembering every little thing and going back over his past obsessively because he’s obsessive/compulsive isn’t really helping him understand what he needs to know, which he finally will be told at the end of the novel," Oates says.

The author herself received a surprise near the end of writing My Sister, My Love when police arrested John Mark Karr, a 41-year-old former schoolteacher who confessed to the JonBenet murder, though DNA evidence later cleared him.

"I was so shocked because I had already invented someone [neighborhood pedophile Gunther Ruscha], but [Karr] seems even more weird than my character," Oates says. "I said to my editor, I don’t know whether I can keep on with this novel because real life has overtaken it. It was so embarrassing that people would think that I was just following this when actually I had already invented him."

By the time Skyler receives a climactic deathbed letter from Betsy that answers his most fundamental questions, he’s already well on the road out of tabloid hell, thanks to kindly Pastor Bob, a born-again ex-con who practices what he preaches.

"Skyler is kind of going back to this very simple form of religion or Christianity where you do good if you can but you don’t have to do it on TV or have a huge ministry," says Oates. "I really like Pastor Bob. With all his flaws, he has no pretensions. He doesn’t even necessarily believe in God, he just feels, OK, here we are, we have to help one another, let’s make the best of it."

Jay MacDonald attended college in Boulder, Colorado, where JonBenet was murdered.

 

Nine-year-old Skyler Rampike's privileged life takes a triple Salchow into disaster when his beloved six-year-old sister Bliss, the darling of the tri-state ice skating world, is found brutally murdered one midwinter morning in the basement of the family's Fair Hills, New Jersey, home. The…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Clyde Edgerton

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Here’s a classic tale: the well-meaning but gullible innocent, seduced by corruptors into a morally murky enterprise, must question everything he holds true in order to redeem himself. In Clyde Edgerton’s ninth comic novel, The Bible Salesman, 20-year-old Henry Dampier hitches a ride from a smooth Clark Gable look-alike named Preston Clearwater, point man for a car-theft ring working the backwoods of North Carolina following World War II. Clearwater cons Henry into becoming his accomplice by convincing the boy he’s actually an undercover FBI agent moving vehicles in America’s great chess game against communism. When Henry eventually wises up, it’s a safe bet there will be blood.

The provenance of Edgerton’s latest novel is worth exploring, if only to gain a glimpse of how this idiosyncratic humorist, longtime professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington and lead singer of the Rank Strangers routinely produces magic from mayhem. With Walker Percy long gone and T.R. Pearson AWOL, few writers today mine the rich Southern idiom like Edgerton. Who else can so seamlessly weave scripture-quoting housecats into a rural Tar Heel narrative and make it fly? Or explore existential themes of uncertainty and impermanence through the lens of a "Jesus Saves!" bumper-sticker salesman whose handiwork washes away with the Carolina rain?

Trouble, or at least literary mischief, sauntered Edgerton’s way when two Southern dark humorists, William Gay (Twilight) and Tom Franklin (Hell at the Breech), approached him to write a short story in tribute to Flannery O’Connor for a Southern Review anthology. Edgerton responded with "The Great Speckled Bird," a story that throws together two archetypes from O’Connor’s work: the Bible salesman from "Good Country People" and the misfit from "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Intrigued by the resulting interplay between these two borrowed characters, Edgerton decided to expand the short story into a novel. A really long novel. "In my early draft, I took Henry from 1930 to 2000. It was a life story of this character," he recalls. "As I started to work, I realized I was going to be unable to finish a book that big, so I decided to stop at 1950." Even as Edgerton was tailoring back his tale, he imbued in young Henry his own lifelong quest to understand the confounding and sometimes contradictory nature of Scripture.

"The first 18 years of my life, I was a fundamentalist Christian who believed that every word in the Bible was inspired by a knowing, present God. I gradually began to doubt that, and did not have the insight that it was possible to throw out the baby with the bath water; that Christianity was a little more complicated than a belief in the literal interpretation of every word in the Bible," he says.

Edgerton, who admits he tends to follow his interests first and then worry about how to fit them into his fiction, became particularly intrigued by two translations of the 23rd Psalm.

"One of the inspirations for writing this book was stumbling on that last line of the 23rd Psalm, in which the Greek translation, which was from Hebrew, said ‘and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.’ OK, that indicates a life after death. The Hebrew Bible on the other hand, the source of that Scripture, says ‘I shall dwell in the house of the Lord down to old age.’ There’s an astounding difference; the difference between those two passages is infinity!"

Such biblical puzzles have Henry stuck literally on page one of the Old Testament, trying to figure out two conflicting versions of the Book of Genesis. His earnest efforts throughout the novel to talk through and resolve these Bible brainteasers with anyone who will listen, be it Clearwater, his cousin Carson or his girlfriend Marleen, ultimately help him recognize the jam he’s in and make the split-second decision necessary to save himself.

So what’s with the Scripture-spieling housecats? Edgerton issues the chuckle of a lad caught skipping Sunday school.

"Wow. I’ll tell you what’s up with cats. I did a lot of reading of different translations of the Bible and biblical commentary and scholarship, the differences between Jewish traditions and Christian traditions and the melding of the two, so I had a lot of notes and information. I ended up having no way to use that information because I didn’t have any theologians as characters to discuss it. In my case, the only way I could get it in was through these damn cats," he explains.

"Near the end, maybe two or three drafts from the last draft, those cats talked for pages and pages, Old Testament and New Testament, Christianity and Jewish arguments. My editor didn’t understand any of it and advised me to cut it, which I did. I think the book is better as a consequence. I knew I couldn’t solve the centuries of disputes between Jews and Christians in one novel."

Unlike most of his previous novels, from Raney (1985) to Lunch at the Picadilly (2003), The Bible Salesman reveals little about the man behind the mischief, theological felines notwithstanding. Edgerton chalks that up to having started with Ms. O’Connor’s archetypes in developing his characters. "Henry and Clearwater and the situations were more made-up than any novel I’ve ever written," he says.

Edgerton hopes to continue that trend in his next project, an exploration of ’60s music and race relations that centers on "seven white boys who try to do James Brown’s Live at the Apollo album from the first note to the last note verbatim."

"I wouldn’t mind a different direction," Edgerton admits. "I just kind of follow my nose. In my first eight books, I used a lot of stuff from my life and people I’ve known; it’s all been a translation from real life to fiction. My guess is, starting with this book it will be more whole cloth than before. I find myself counting on and wanting to just make up more stuff."

 

Jay MacDonald writes from the Bible belt in Austin, Texas.

Here's a classic tale: the well-meaning but gullible innocent, seduced by corruptors into a morally murky enterprise, must question everything he holds true in order to redeem himself. In Clyde Edgerton's ninth comic novel, The Bible Salesman, 20-year-old Henry Dampier hitches a ride from a…

Memoir

Frank McCourt

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Considering the pain and suffering he experienced at the hands of no-nonsense headmasters during his Catholic school days in Limerick, Ireland, it's a wonder even to Frank McCourt that he went on to spend three decades as a high school English teacher in the New York City school system. Had he not, late in life, written Angela's Ashes, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize and became, in his words, "mick of the moment," he would have slipped, upon retirement, from anonymity to obscurity: just another faceless, voiceless foot soldier on the frontlines of illiteracy. Today, the world seeks the insights and opinions for which, as a mere teacher, he was never asked.

"I think becoming a teacher was the craziest thing I could have done," McCourt says by phone from New York. " I would have been quite happy in an office somewhere, nine to five, although that would have driven me crazy looking at the clock. But I wouldn't have cared about what I was doing. There would have been no challenge. Going into the classroom was a mighty challenge." Submitted as proof: Teacher Man, the final book in his autobiographical trilogy (with Angela's Ashes and 'Tis), a more-bitter-than-sweet look back at age 75 on a teaching career about which McCourt has decidedly mixed feelings. Here, McCourt takes to task bumbling administrators, callous instructors and an educational system that seems perpetually intent on doing everything but educating. Suffice to say, this is no Up the Down Staircase.

What McCourt always wanted to do, he says, was write. But by the time he returned to America at age 19, his impoverished Irish childhood had shattered his confidence and left him with minimal expectations.

"The lowest! The lowest! I never expected to go to college. I was ready to settle for some low-level job, clerk in a bank or insurance company, anything. I would have made a great elevator operator or something like that," he says. "You get out (of poverty) but you don't get out; it's with you for the rest of your life unless you're very conscious and you go on and study what it was and look at the damage that was done and you remedy it. But I wasn't like that." In Teacher Man, McCourt describes how, fresh out of New York University, he was almost fired his first day of teaching at McKee Vo-Tech on Staten Island for intercepting and eating a flying baloney sandwich. His second day, he triggered calls from angry parents for a classroom comment about friendship with sheep. Just showing up for work in those Blackboard Jungle days took every available ounce of will.

"I had absolute dread similar to what I felt as a kid going to school in Ireland," he recalls. "We went to school in a state of terror because you never knew which way the schoolmaster would jump; you never knew what you didn't know and of course he would ask you what you didn't know and then he would pounce on you and drag you out of your seat and knock you around the room. Kids here complain about going to school but we had reason to be terrified. Our knees would knock." McCourt soon learned to use his lilting accent and natural storytelling gift to capture and hold the attention of a classroom full of adolescents. His techniques were admittedly unconventional; he once assigned students to write their mother's favorite recipes, then bring the finished products to a class potluck lunch in the park. By his estimation, it took him 15 years to figure out how to actually teach with authority.

"They knew I was a novice and I think they gave me a break, mainly because of my accent and my stupid inability to do anything right," he says. " Except that I would make an occasional breakthrough, which consisted of me being human and honest, and that's what carried me along for the next 15 years, going from McKee to Fashion Industries to Seward Park and Stuyvesant, which was heaven." The harder he worked, the more he resented the school administrators with their private offices, secretaries and leisure time.

"It's a big racket, they get so many benefits," he says. "The real hardest workers in the system are the people in the classroom. It's the only profession where you're paid more for not doing it! And there are the peripheral jobs: walking the hallways, checking the lavatories, supervising the cafeteria. This is demeaning, and you only do this to teachers. You don't expect a surgeon to mop the floor in the operating room, but that's the equivalent of what teachers have to do." If he had it to do over again, would he go into teaching? Probably not.

"I suppose in the back of my head the thing I always wanted to do was write, but write what? I didn't know. Nobody told me you had to find your own style; I wanted to be Hemingway or Sean O'Casey. In retrospect, I would have thrown caution to the winds and become a busboy and lived cheaply and repaired to my attic and struggled with my writing, but I didn't know enough. And I certainly wasn't going to write about my life; that was the last thing on my mind, to write about this poverty. The shame; it was the shame. But the opposite prevails in American life, which is, this is your material so get into it, buster. Which is what I did."

Does Teacher Man truly mark the end of his memoirs? "Yeah, that's it," McCourt says with finality. "If you call me next year, you won't find me talking about myself. I want to write a novel that has nothing to do with me; maybe the ideal me, a debonair buccaneer lover of the ages, a man who defies the Vatican and the White House, something like that. Maybe I'm entering my epic period!"

Jay MacDonald writes professionally in Oxford, Mississippi.

 

Considering the pain and suffering he experienced at the hands of no-nonsense headmasters during his Catholic school days in Limerick, Ireland, it's a wonder even to Frank McCourt that he went on to spend three decades as a high school English teacher in the New…

LiteratureArts & Culture

Jay Parini

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Like a cultural cartographer, poet and novelist Jay Parini charts the major literary islands that expanded to form the landmass of the American psyche in Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America.

His landfalls include Of Plymouth Plantation, The Federalist Papers, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, Walden, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Souls of Black Folk, The Promised Land, How to Win Friends and Influence People, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, On the Road and The Feminine Mystique.

No mere desert island collection of personal favorites, this baker's dozen met a higher standard as what Parini calls "nodal points" that either moved nascent intellectual currents forward or changed the direction of American life and thought. "This is an X – ray of the American spirit," Parini says. "These books either consolidated ideas long in place or shifted things and caused a pivot in the road."

Only a few of Parini's selections were obvious, including Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. "I would say that book invented the American language," Parini says. "Twain had such an ear for how Americans talk that I really think he transformed how people actually spoke to each other. It's also a book about race in America, the westward journey, about lighting off for the territories and independence. It's everything. It is the great American novel."

Others took Parini completely by surprise. "I never thought I'd include Baby and Child Care by Dr. Spock. I kept asking people what they would consider the most important books in their life, I must have asked about 100 people, and over and over again, people said, 'Well, the book that changed my life was Dr. Spock because I kept it by my bedside and raised my children by going back to it and back to it.' It transformed the way children are raised in America."

Some choices, such as The Federalist Papers, helped shape our vision of America almost without our knowledge. "There's a great book that nobody has read. It's endlessly cited and often misquoted and misunderstood," says Parini. "So much of what we think is in the Constitution is not in the Constitution, it's in The Federalist Papers."

By contrast, it was only by sheer accident that the manuscript of Of Plymouth Plantation, a journal of Pilgrim life written by William Bradford between 1620 and 1647, was discovered in an English library after being lost for 200 years. Had it not been reintroduced in 1856 and enthusiastically embraced by a nation on the cusp of the Civil War, it's highly possible that President Abraham Lincoln might not have felt compelled to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday.

Important American fiction, including Moby – Dick, The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath, didn't even make Parini's appendix list of 100 more books that changed America, where instead you'll find The Sears, Roebuck Catalog, The Whole Earth Catalog and Jane Fonda's Workout Book. Don't novels change nations?

"They don't," Parini says. "Nobody reads novels and has their life transformed. They work on the consciousness, but very slowly; they don't have earthshaking effects."

An exception: Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

"Road novels are a big part of American novels," Parini says. "The idea of two buddies getting in their old jalopy and taking off cross – country for California and just experiencing the pleasures and terrors and adventures of the road is a real American story."

That the most recent title in the Promised Land short list is Betty Friedan's 1963 feminist manifesto The Feminine Mystique speaks volumes about the modern ambivalence toward the written word. "It's frightening but true," says Parini. "For example, how many people write real letters anymore? Publishers endlessly complain about the fact that novels no longer sell very well. There really is not much audience for real books anymore."

Which makes guidebooks like Promised Land all the more relevant today.

"We are the United States of Amnesia. It's like when you have an Alzheimer's patient that you're talking to and you have to keep supplying memory as you're talking to them. That's one of the things this book is doing, supplying the memory of a nation, re – igniting the memory of a nation."

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin, Texas.

Like a cultural cartographer, poet and novelist Jay Parini charts the major literary islands that expanded to form the landmass of the American psyche in Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America.

His landfalls include Of Plymouth Plantation, The Federalist Papers, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,…

FictionHistorical Fiction

T.C. Boyle

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Last November, T.C. Boyle stood on the roof of his house in Montecito, California, garden hose in hand, prepared, if ill-equipped, to battle the conflagration known as the "Tea Fire" as it swept down the Santa Ynez Mountains. Only a last-minute westerly spared Boyle's home from joining the 230 homes ultimately destroyed in the blaze. Compared to other concerned neighbors (Oprah Winfrey, Jeff Bridges, Rob Lowe), Boyle's anxiety was tenfold: the house he and his family have been restoring for the past 16 years, a 1909 Frank Lloyd Wright original known as the George C. Stewart house or "Butterfly Woods," was just weeks away from marking its centennial. The celebration would coincide with the publication of Boyle's 12th novel, The Women, an artfully playful rendering of the life, loves and, yes, the two headline-making fires at Wright's Taliesin home that stoked the creativity of America's foremost architect. Mere insurance could never restore such a loss.

"I thought, this is hubris!" Boyle recalls. "I was hysterical. This house is entirely made of redwood, so it would have been terrible."

Fire—destruction as prelude to construction—is as much a leitmotif in Boyle's latest and most ambitious historical novel as it was in Wright's personal life, the details of which were highly flammable indeed. Wright abandoned his first wife, Catherine "Kitty" Tobin, and their six children to run off to Europe with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife of a client and neighbor in Oak Park, Illinois, the cradle of Wright's Prairie School of architecture. Though they were both married, Wright installed Mamah at the newly built Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, where she would ultimately be brutally murdered along with seven others by a deranged servant in 1914. Wright would again outrage the citizenry by living out of wedlock with, before marrying, second wife Maud Miriam Noel, a Southern belle and closet morphine user. He would similarly replace Miriam with his third and final wife, Montenegrin beauty Olgivanna Milanoff.

Although Boyle envisioned tackling the larger-than-life Wright from the moment he set foot in Butterfly Woods, it was the master's scorched-earth love life rather than his architectural genius that ultimately sparked The Women.

"My editor jokes that we should eventually do a boxed set of my books about the great American egomaniacs of the 20th century, with the last book about [sex researcher Dr. Albert] Kinsey (The Inner Circle), the Kellogg book (The Road to Wellville) and Wright," Boyle chuckles. "There is a lot of appeal in these figures for me.

"All three were dynamos of the 20th century who changed the way that we live in radical ways, but each was a narcissist in the clinical sense of the word. That is, they had a scheme and that scheme was all-important; you and I and anyone else weren't really individuals who had lives or needs of our own, we were simply figures in their design. It comes to a head with Wright, who not only designed the furniture but in some cases the clothing that the housewife was to wear. These figures are fascinating to me because, of course, novelists are like that."

A less inventive writer might have been content to render the Wright stuff with a simple chronological narrative; certainly the historical facts in this case need little embellishment. But Boyle, never one to retrace his steps, nimbly reverses the order, introducing us first to Wright's last wife Olgivanna, then Miriam, and concluding with Mamah's tragic death. The effect lends a spirit of parlor comedy with a whiff of ash to the proceedings as each woman in turn falls for Wright and feels the inevitable sting of her predecessor's wrath.

To further pique our curiosity, Boyle leaves the narration to Tadashi Sato, a Japanese apprentice and devotee of Wright, as translated from the Japanese by his great-grandson. Tadashi's own story moves forward in time, a novel within a novel, slipped in primarily in the section introductions and droll footnotes. Credit Boyle's mastery with keeping this circus moving and easy to follow.

"I wanted not simply to do a kind of melodrama but to do something almost in the way that Nabokov would have approached it, something that is amusing and ironic in some ways, but also is complicated structurally and has many layers of narration," Boyle says. "The structure allows you always to question who is writing this book and how deeply they are representing a given point of view and whether or not that view is true. I guess we're having fun in a postmodern way, not that I really thought about it as I was writing it. I'm just always seeking to find something new."

Boyle willingly cops to a few similarities with the mercurial Wright.

"He was like me in the sense that we're control freaks and we have an agenda and this is our world; I write these books as a cautionary tale to myself," he admits. "But he's also very unlike me in that he only seemed to be able to create when all hell was breaking loose, when he was being sued by creditors and pursued by lawyers and divorce lawyers and women and cops. I can't work unless everything is perfect and quiet."

Although Boyle turned in the finished manuscript in July 2007, he says publication was delayed, first due to the publication of Nancy Horan's novel Loving Frank, which centers on Mamah, then to avoid being lost in the drama of the 2008 presidential election. He's pleased that the book's publication now coincides with the centennial celebration of his own piece of Wright's legacy.

"I thought that living here would give me an extra charge or thrill while writing the book in this house, and it did to a degree, but not as much as you would think because it's my house; I've lived here for a long time and I've written many books here. And yet it gave me great satisfaction to learn more about this particular house and more about his work."

Jay MacDonald writes in the Prairie style from Austin, Texas.

Last November, T.C. Boyle stood on the roof of his house in Montecito, California, garden hose in hand, prepared, if ill-equipped, to battle the conflagration known as the "Tea Fire" as it swept down the Santa Ynez Mountains. Only a last-minute westerly spared Boyle's home…

Alexander McCall Smith

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Where fictional private eyes are concerned, Precious Ramotswe, proprietress of Botswana’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, makes Jessica Fletcher of “Murder, She Wrote” look like Spenser for hire.

In the 10 books of this gentlest of detective series, including the latest, Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, Mma Ramotswe and her eccentric secretary Mma Makutsi spend far more time investigating “the full cupboard of life” (to borrow the title of book five) than actually solving mysteries. They are, in fact, more often the source than the solvers of intrigue as they kibitz and circumvent the kindly but clueless men in their lives—respectively, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, ace mechanic and owner of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, and Mr. Phuti Radiphuti, proprietor of the Double Comfort Furniture Shop. Though a paying client may eventually receive satisfaction, it sometimes takes a detective to find an actual mystery in these utterly charming village tales.

“The plots are entirely incidental,” admits Alexander McCall Smith from his home in Edinburgh, Scotland. “They are character studies, but with a very strong sense of place.”

It’s a place the author knows well. Born in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), Smith attended school near the 
Botswana border. After he earned his law degree in Scotland, he returned to Botswana to help establish a new law school at the university there. He went on to become professor of medical law at the University of Edinburgh, where today he serves as Professor Emeritus. He returns to Botswana every year.

Smith’s fondness for the country and its people shines through in the upbeat, optimistic tone of the series. While some critics praise him for the deceptively simple way he casually reveals human truths, others accuse him of portraying Africa through rose-colored glasses.

“People say that I’m putting forth a saccharine view, which actually isn’t fair,” he says. “What I’m doing is talking about a side of reality that is definitely there but isn’t normally reported. There’s an awful lot of bad news that comes out of Africa, the failure of the political systems and rampant corruption and the resulting suffering of the people. All of that is there, but there is obviously another side.”

To which his legion of readers might add, what’s wrong with gentle escapism? Whether it’s Ballykissangel or the Cheers bar in Boston, don’t we all want to go where everybody knows our name?

“I think that people yearn for a sense of community,” Smith agrees. “The larger the world gets, the larger cities get, I think the more acutely people feel that need.”

It’s the very day-to-day concerns of Mma Ramotswe and associates that help us forget our own. In the delightfully titled Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, Mr. Molofololo, the wealthy owner of the Kalahari Swoopers soccer club, wants the agency to ferret out a slacker on the squad who has been intentionally throwing games. But more pressing matters must take priority: Mma Makutsi’s archrival Violet Sephotho has hired on to sell beds at Double Comfort in hopes of stealing Phuti’s affections, and Mma Ramotswe’s beloved white van, having finally given up the ghost, has been scrapped, then stolen. Clearly, Mr. Molofolo will have to wait.

“We do have a sense of loss with the tiny white van; that mortality is there,” Smith says. “The van is a very important character in these books, and in fact, she will get that van back. There’s going to be a howl of protest from readers, but I think they’ll know that everything is going to work out, that it’s going to be rescued.”

If we are all homesick to some degree for the simpler, slower pace of village life, we likely also miss the common courtesies that accompanied those gentler social interactions. It’s a longing that Smith deftly evokes in the touching formality of Botswana, where even husband and wife refer to each other as Mr. and Mrs.

“Of course, I overstate it, but there is a certain formality in Botswana which is quite striking. People are considerate and formal in many of their dealings with people, which I find very refreshing and nice,” Smith says.

“I think these books have quite a strong sense of loss in them. We’ve lost a certain consideration in our society. Somehow, we all know that we’ve lost some of the courtesies in highly utilitarian societies. We’re in this big rush, and therefore people addressing one another with consideration and courtesy is getting rarer.”
With more than 60 books to his credit, the prolific Mr. Smith won’t be slowing down anytime soon. Still to come this year are new installments of his 44 Scotland Street, Isabel Dalhousie and Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, as well as continuing chapters in his new serial novel, Corduroy Mansions, for the Telegraph.


In March, HBO aired the two-hour film pilot for the new “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” original series, starring Grammy-winning singer Jill Scott as Mma Ramotswe and Anika Noni Rose (Dreamgirls) as Mma Makutsi. The film was directed by the late Anthony Minghella, the Academy Award-winning director of The English Patient. The series continues on Sunday nights on HBO.

Smith caught “Sopranos” fever relatively recently, but hopes the “No. 1 Ladies” series, on which he serves as a consultant, catches the same zeitgeist.

“It will be unlike anything that anybody has ever seen. It’s HBO going out on a limb and doing something really exciting, as they did with ‘The Sopranos.’ They’ve caught the place and they’ve respected the world of these books,” he says.

In his spare time, Smith—called Sandy by his friends—and his physician-wife Elizabeth perform (on bassoon and horn respectively) with “The Really Terrible Orchestra,” an amateur group he founded against his better judgment. They make their American debut, coincidence or no, this April Fool’s Day at New York’s Town Hall.
“We are seriously bad,” Smith says, with a warped sort of pride. “We are cacophonous. We’ve got a fairly broad repertoire, and it really is bad.”

Jay MacDonald writes from the savannahs of central Texas.

Where fictional private eyes are concerned, Precious Ramotswe, proprietress of Botswana’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, makes Jessica Fletcher of “Murder, She Wrote” look like Spenser for hire.

In the 10 books of this gentlest of detective series, including the latest, Tea Time for the…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Elmore Leonard

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Among crime novelists past and present, Elmore Leonard is a prime number, a talent so simple and elemental that it refuses to be divided by comparison to others. Whether he’s hanging with mobsters in Miami Beach, dreamers in Detroit or hustlers in Hollywood, his every dark comedy really takes place in Leonard Land, a closed universe populated by lovable cons, ex-cons and soon-to-be-cons whose dialogue is so spot-on that you hear it rather than read it. The one character you’ll never find in Leonard Land is the author himself. Leonard works hard to stay out of the frame and allow his characters to take over, moving and grooving to their own unpredictable beat.

“When I start a book, I never know how it’s going to end. I never know what’s going to happen,” Leonard admits. “I don’t have a computer. I write in longhand and then I put it on a typewriter, then I rewrite that, and rewrite it and rewrite it. It takes about four pages to get one clean page. I just start writing and keep going.”

The one thing Leonard won’t tolerate is fancy prose. As he states in his 10 Rules of Writing: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

At 83, with 30 novels to his credit in a career that spans more than half a century, Leonard remains up to his splendid tricks. In his latest, Road Dogs, he takes characters from three previous novels and combines them into a whole that is greater—and funnier—than the sum of its parts. Road Dogs also serves as something of a Leonard Land retrospective, with shout-outs to everyone from the hanging judge in Maximum Bob to Miami Beach bookie Harry Arno in Pronto to the otherworldly possibilities of Touch.

The “road dogs” in question are Jack Foley, the charming bank robber played to perfection by George Clooney in the film version of Out of Sight, and his prison wingman Cundo Rey, the millionaire Cuban hustler/go-go dancing Cat Prince from LaBrava. Both are facing years behind bars in Florida’s Glades Correctional until Cundo secures the services of a hot young female attorney. She manages to spring Jack first, with Cundo’s release to follow in two weeks.

Since Cundo paid Jack’s $30,000 legal fees, Foley agrees to crash at one of his oceanfront homes in Venice, California, and keep an eye on Dawn Navarro, the professional psychic from Riding the Rap, who has been Cundo’s lady in waiting for seven years. It takes little effort for Dawn to seduce Jack, but he’s cautious when she attempts to enlist him in a scheme to steal Cundo’s off-the-books fortune. The plot starts perking when Cundo arrives home a day early, throwing the dynamics between the three into the spin cycle.

Leonard has occasionally revisited characters in the past, including Raylin Givens (Rum Punch) and Harry Arno (Pronto) in Riding the Rap and Chili Palmer (Get Shorty) in Be Cool.

“I had no reservations bringing back these three characters. I felt that I hadn’t done quite enough with them,” he says. “I was anxious to use them because I know them. They have personalities of their own and I could make them talk, that’s the main thing.”

But he hit a small snag when it came to Cundo Rey. “I wanted to use him, so I had to open LaBrava to see what happened to him and I went, oh God, he’s dead!” Leonard chuckles. “He’s not pronounced dead, but Joe LaBrava shoots him in the chest three times. So I just have the emergency squad pick him up and say, ‘Hey, he’s still breathing!’ That took care of that.”

Then there was the Clooney factor. Since the success of Steven Soderbergh’s film version of Out of Sight, it’s become virtually impossible to separate Foley from Clooney—not that Leonard minds. “I loved the casting. In fact, I wondered, can I do another Foley picturing Clooney? And I had no problem,” he says.

It may prove a bigger obstacle should a film version of Road Dogs come up for discussion, as it almost certainly will. “Universal owns those characters now, so we either have to sell this to them or get an agreement that allows us to go somewhere else. And they don’t want to do that; they don’t like things to slip out of their hands,” the author says.

Leonard got his start, and perhaps his fascination for fringe dwellers, in the 1950s, writing Westerns on the side while holding down a “real” job in advertising. When the market for Westerns dried up, he switched to crime. “I would read John D. MacDonald’s stories in Cosmopolitan and different places and think, that’s what I should be doing,” he recalls. His early attempts fell somewhere between the giants of the genre.

“The book that changed my style somewhat was The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George Higgins. I think that’s the best crime book ever written. It’s about bank robbers and the guy who supplies clean guns for every job,” Leonard says. “What I learned is, I was already using a lot of dialogue, moving the story with dialogue, but I wasn’t getting into scenes as quickly. I was setting up scenes and then getting the characters talking, instead of getting them talking first. [Afterward] editors would complain, ‘I don’t know what’s going on here, these two people are talking,’ and I would say, just stay with it, you’ll find out where they are.”

Leonard’s books have become increasingly verbal ever since. Where other crime writers mourned the coming of the cell phone as the loss of a suspense tool (“Where’s a pay phone?!”), Leonard loved it. His characters in Road Dog may spend more time yakking on their mobiles than actually speaking face-to-face.

Leonard and his wife Christine, longtime residents of the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, have five children and nine grandchildren. Though he’s still in top form, he’s inevitably asked if he plans to retire anytime soon.

“No, there is nothing else I want to do,” he says. “I have no reason to quit. I’d be bored.”

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin, Texas.

Among crime novelists past and present, Elmore Leonard is a prime number, a talent so simple and elemental that it refuses to be divided by comparison to others. Whether he’s hanging with mobsters in Miami Beach, dreamers in Detroit or hustlers in Hollywood, his every…

Barbara Rosenblat

Interview by Jay MacDonald

As the unmistakable voice of Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax, Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody, Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon and the characters in more than 400 other titles, Barbara Rosenblat’s credentials as queen of the audiobook speak for themselves.

The only woman to win six Audie Awards, this multitalented, transatlantic character actress, singer and dancer has been on a wildly successful verbal run since she first heard her own voice on her uncle’s tape recorder as a child.

“It was like a Proustean moment. My life changed at that moment,” she recalls. “It’s like looking at your reflection in a mirror for the first time and seeing what you look like.”

Rosenblat admits that in her role as an audio narrator, she’s a stickler for preparation and reads her scripts “down to the letter.”

“Even if a book is not sterling, a good audio can elevate substandard material,” she says. “It’s movies for the ears.”

Rosenblat has created memorable audio performances of such diverse titles as Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, Amistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series and Larry McMurtry’s Terms of Endearment. Little wonder she’s won 40 Golden Earphone awards from AudioFile magazine and been named its Voice of the Century.

Born in London to Holocaust survivors, the precocious Rosenblat grew up in New York City, the perfect incubator for her often-spontaneous, Annie-like public performances in city parks and street corners. Later, when she enrolled at City College in Harlem, she fell in with the musical comedy society and discovered a new medium for her vocal gifts: radio.

“I had a weekly radio show for three years called ‘Front Row Center.’ I got to see and review Broadway shows, interviewed people and played clips from different cast albums,” she recalls. Bitten by the acting bug, Rosenblat nevertheless took her father’s advice and earned certificates to teach English, theater and speech in New York City schools. She barely had time to use them.

“The first job I got was playing Yenta in a three-city dinner theater tour of  Fiddler on the Roof in Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio,” she says. “I had more fun than a bucket full of bunnies.”

Versatility—and that marvelous, mellifluous voice—have kept Rosenblat in demand ever since, for a wide range of performing roles. On Broadway, she originated the part of Mrs. Medlock in the Tony Award-winning The Secret Garden and appeared in Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio with Liev Schreiber. Her screen credits include Little Shop of Horrors, Reds, “Guiding Light,” “Law and Order SVU” and a number of BBC productions.

She provided the world-weary voice of Sal, the office manager, for those NPR car guys in the animated series “Click and Clack’s As the Wrench Turns,” and even voiced a Teutonic transsexual dope fiend in the classic videogame “Grand Theft Auto.” Last year, friends convinced her to audition for the singing, dancing role of Gertrude Stein in
27 Rue de Fleurus. She nailed it off-Broadway.

Still, audiobooks are where her star shines brightest. She often gets so into a performance that tissues have become a studio staple.

“I just did Anne Frank Remembered and at the end of it, we were all a mess, not a dry eye in the house,” she says. “On the other hand, when I recorded Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I, which is one of the funniest books I’ve ever done, I remember sitting in the studio with tissues all over the place, laughing myself hysterical.”

Rosenblat credits her “phonographic memory” with the ability to create and recreate a sometimes-unwieldy cast of characters. She’s up for another Audie this year for Katie MacAlister’s supernatural comedy Fire Me Up, in which she not only performs as libidinous guardian Aisling Grey, but her drowsy Newfoundland dog, Jim.

Does she ever carry accents home with her?

“No, but when I go back to England, I get straight back into the Brit thing. The same is true when I get in with a mix of Europeans; (with German accent) I will start to pick up little bits of what they’re doing and I can’t stop myself!” she chuckles. “I’ve had people say to me, Stop mocking! and I say, it’s not mocking, it’s research. I’m flexing. This is my gym; New York City is my gym. The New York subway is a microcosm of the world.”

Jay MacDonald writes quietly from Austin, Texas, but occasionally moves his lips.

As the unmistakable voice of Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax, Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody, Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon and the characters in more than 400 other titles, Barbara Rosenblat’s credentials as queen of the audiobook speak for themselves.

The only woman to win…

Memoir

Mitch Albom

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Success hasn’t gone to Mitch Albom’s head. It’s gone to his heart. Fifteen years ago, Albom was already the best-known sportswriter in Detroit, having worked his way into the majors by writing for Sports Illustrated and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He would go on to conquer other media as a radio talk show host, ESPN analyst, screenwriter and playwright.

Successful? Sure. But fulfilled? Not so much.

“I was sort of living neutrally; you’re not in reverse and you’re not in drive,” he says, choosing an apt Motor City metaphor. “If you would have asked my position on faith, I wouldn’t have said I was an atheist or agnostic; of course I believe in God and I was raised with the faith and that’s it. But if you drilled down a little further and asked how often do you go to service? Uh, once a year. How often do you get involved in anything having to do with your faith? Never. How often do you pick up a Bible and read through it? Never.”

In 1995, in quick succession, he married Janine Sabino and reconnected with Morrie Schwartz, his former college professor who was dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease. The life lessons learned from his dying mentor would form the basis for Tuesdays with Morrie, which spent an astounding four years on the New York Times bestseller list.

Morrie did more than catapult Mitch to fame and fortune (part of which he used to pay off Morrie’s medical bills). It also threw open deserted locker rooms in his heart.

“Tuesdays with Morrie kind of pushed me in the direction to begin examining a bigger picture of life than just making money and accomplishing things,” Albom admits in a telephone interview.

Following a couple of inspirational novels (The Five People You Meet in Heaven; For One More Day), Albom hits one out of the park once again with Have a Little Faith: A True Story, which grew from the author’s close encounters with two remarkable men of very different faiths.

Have a Little Faith opens with an unusual request. An aging Albert Lewis, who had been Albom’s rabbi growing up in suburban New Jersey, asks his successful congregant to write his eulogy. To do so properly, Albom must get to know the man behind the vestments, little knowing it would take eight years to prepare for the inevitable.

As Albom makes pilgrimages to “the Reb’s” suburban home for Morrie-like visits, he slowly grows to love and understand the man he had feared as a kid—a loving husband and father who suffered the loss of a daughter yet remained unshakable in his faith.

“When I knocked on his door the first time, he opened it and he was wearing Bermuda shorts and sandals. He just looked like a goofball! I didn’t think that was allowed! I thought he slept in a robe. Here he was, saying, come into my world, it’s not that strange.”

The rabbi helps reconnect the author with his faith through exchanges like this:

“But so many people wage wars in God’s name.
‘God,’ the Reb scolded, ‘does not want such killings to go on.’
Then why hasn’t it stopped?
He lifted his eyebrows.
‘Because man does.’ ”

Between Saturdays with Albert, Albom skillfully weaves in a second narrative about Henry Covington, whose journey through a hellish youth of poverty and drug addiction ultimate led him to establish the I Am My Brother’s Keeper ministry and homeless shelter in Detroit’s inner city.

When Albom drops by the church to write a feature story, he finds a ministry held together by faith and charity but little else. A gaping hole in the church roof ultimately forced the congregation to construct a makeshift tent of plastic sheeting in one corner to enable services to be held.

Covington’s courage and his congregation’s dedication nudged Albom to an ecumenical awakening.

“Before I started going through all this, I did not like it when other people started talking about their religion, especially if it wasn’t mine. I felt almost offended; don’t push what you believe on me, you know? And when people of my own faith talked about it, I was kind of embarrassed, too: don’t overdo this, don’t call attention to yourself. I felt uncomfortable in both directions,” he says.

“But I don’t anymore. I realized that you can be around people of faith and you don’t have to turn into a zombie. You don’t have to eat communion wafers or put on a yarmulke. It’s just one element of people’s lives and you can talk to them about it and celebrate it.”

Though Have a Little Faith was eight years in the making, Albom admits its message could not be more timely.

“I do think it’s fortuitous. When times get tough and money disappears and people get fired and the things you assumed were going to be there forever are not there, you start to drift back to something you once had and you wonder why you let it go in the first place,” he says.

Albom uses his success to power three charities: A Time to Heal, which focuses on community projects; The Dream Fund, which provides scholarships for underserved children; and S.A.Y. (Super All Year) Detroit, which serves the needs of the homeless.

But Albom refuses to take the credit, or to use his success to promote himself.

“My attitude, for better or worse since these books started to become what they’ve become, is I’m happy for them, I embrace them, but I don’t need to change who I am. I like who I am here. I don’t need to leave Detroit and go and try to elevate myself. I live in the same house, we have the same phone number and I have the same job as I did before Tuesdays with Morrie.”

Would he wish a little faith upon his hapless Detroit Lions?

“Yeah,” he chuckles, “along with a little defense.”

Jay MacDonald writes faithfully from Austin, Texas.

 

Success hasn’t gone to Mitch Albom’s head. It’s gone to his heart. Fifteen years ago, Albom was already the best-known sportswriter in Detroit, having worked his way into the majors by writing for Sports Illustrated and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He would go on to conquer…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Henning Mankell

Interview by Jay MacDonald

At the age of 62, Henning Mankell recently bought a pair of ice skates for the first time since he was a young boy growing up in northern Sweden. The occasion: a winter blizzard that virtually isolated his northern residence. The temporary loss of telephone service might concern others, but for Mankell, it was bliss to be suddenly transported back to the natural quietude of his youth.

In his latest mystery, The Man from Beijing, the best-selling author of Swedish crime fiction revisits his past in a different way. His heroine, Birgitta Roslin, is a college radical turned principled judge who finds herself swept up in worldwide intrigue. Mankell’s father had been a judge as well, in the tiny hamlet of Sveg. “It is the first time I have used a judge as a character in a book,” Mankell says by phone from Sweden.

The Man from Beijing represents another first—it’s also Mankell’s first hardcover release from Random House’s Knopf imprint, after a string of successful paperbacks featuring Swedish detective Kurt Wallander.

“Mankell has become an iconic brand for Vintage Crime/Black Lizard with paperback sales in excess of half a million copies,” says Paul Bogaards, Knopf’s executive director of publicity. “The Man from Beijing was actually the first hardcover on offer to us at Knopf. Of course, we immediately leapt at the chance to publish Mankell here.”

Mankell’s new suspense novel must have been especially appealing to Knopf after the blockbuster success of Stieg Larsson, the late Swedish crime writer whose Millennium Trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.) has struck publishing gold in the U.S. But, as Bogaards notes, deconstructing the mania for Nordic crime fiction leads to a chicken-or-the-egg question about who launched the trend.

“I think it’s important to note that Mankell is very much a pioneer in the genre and that much of our fascination with Swedish crime fiction turns on his work,” Bogaards says. “Mankell preceded Larsson—indeed, he seeded interest for American readers—and Larsson’s success in the States and around the world is a tribute to Mankell’s iconic detective, Wallander.”

No matter who came first, it’s indisputable, as Bogaards notes, that Mankell “really is one of the best crime novelists at work today,” and this talent is on display in his new standalone suspense novel.

The Man from Beijing opens in January 2006 with a gruesome discovery: 19 residents of the remote Swedish village of Hesjovallen, most of them members of the Andren family, have been brutally and inexplicably massacred. Judge Roslin, whose mother grew up in the village, finds a diary kept by Jan Andren, an ancestor who describes his immigration to America and his role as a foreman during the construction of the transcontinental railway.

Cut to 1863. Three Chinese brothers, San, Wu and Guo Si, flee their village for America, only to be forced into virtual slavery to build that selfsame railway. Ultimately, San repatriates to China, where he marries and bears children, including a son who would become a leader of the Communist Party.

Back in Hesjovallen, Roslin finds a single red ribbon at the crime scene that leads her to suspect that the killer was a lone Chinese man who passed through town on that deadly night. When she follows her suspicions to Beijing, the tables turn as Roslin is tracked and detained as a person of interest by the Chinese. Her amateur investigation leads her to Hong, a committed Maoist who acts as her escort in Beijing, and ultimately to Hong’s brother Ya Ru, an ultra-wealthy developer with big plans for Africa.

Mankell has lived “one foot in snow, one foot in sand” since 1986, when he became director of Teatro Avenida in the Mozambican capital of Maputo. He traces the novel’s origin to a news story 10 years ago about Chinese construction foremen mistreating African workers while building a new Chinese-funded government building in Maputo.

“When I heard about that, I started to really reflect on the idea of China in Africa,” Mankell says. The Man from Beijing explores the irony that China, once the victim of colonialism, now seems intent on colonial expansion.

“China has one enormous domestic problem, and that is what to do with all of the hundreds of millions of peasants that they really do not use. I read just the other day that China has rented land in Kenya to move some one million peasants to Africa. What I try to say in this book is, we have to be very careful about what is happening in Africa. There is a risk that something bad is happening now.”

Mankell, who has written many of his Swedish-set novels, including most of the Wallander series, while residing in Mozambique, likes the perspective that Africa affords his fiction.

“I believe in distance,” he says. “As a painter stands very close as he’s painting, occasionally he steps backward to have a look and then he goes closer and continues to paint. I believe this distance I have to Europe has made me a better European in a way. When you stand at a distance, you can see things more clearly than if you do not have that distance.”

He has watched with equal clarity the boom in Nordic mysteries, which extends beyond his work and the Larsson books to Karin Fossum’s award-winning The Indian Bride, Hakan Nesser’s Inspector Van Veeteren series and a host of others.

“You remember 30 years ago there was a Swedish tennis player named Bjorn Borg? We never had had a really good tennis player before that, but after him, there came a hell of a lot of really good tennis players: Mats Wilander, Stefan Edberg, etc.,” Mankell says. “I believe that nothing succeeds like success.”

Mankell’s publisher is betting he’s right on target with that assessment and plans to ride the wave as long as it lasts. A second Knopf hardcover, The Troubled Man, is already in the works, says Bogaards, who predicts significant readership gains for Mankell as the fascination with Nordic noir continues.

Jay MacDonald writes from snow-free Florida.

RELATED CONTENT
Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy
Karin Fossum’s Black Seconds
Henning Mankell’s The Man Who Smiled

At the age of 62, Henning Mankell recently bought a pair of ice skates for the first time since he was a young boy growing up in northern Sweden. The occasion: a winter blizzard that virtually isolated his northern residence. The temporary loss of telephone…

HistoryAmerican History

Hampton Sides

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Memphis historian and subculture explorer Hampton Sides was six years old on April 4, 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel by a prison escapee named James Earl Ray.

Sides remembers that his father, who worked at the Memphis law firm that represented King during his marches on behalf of the city’s striking garbage workers, came home that evening, poured himself a stiff drink and braced his family for the worst.

“He was extremely worried that the city was going to rip apart and there was going to be a race riot,” Sides recalls. “Black and white, no one knew what was going to happen next. It was fairly terrifying.” Memphis would be one of the few major American cities spared widespread rioting in the wake of the assassination, but its scars of rage and guilt have been slow to heal.

Sides brings it all back home in Hellhound on His Trail, a narrative history with the pace of a thriller and the bite of a Howlin’ Wolf blues song.

Drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished material, Sides employs an alternating narrative to build profiles of King and Ray in the months leading up to their fatal collision. King, who fears that his nonviolent movement is losing relevance, convinces his inner circle to decamp to Memphis and march in support of the largely black garbage workers. In the meantime, Ray, a small-time thief and Missouri prison fugitive with delusions of grandeur fueled by George Wallace’s racist presidential campaign, drifts back to the U.S. after hiding in Mexico, assumes the alias of Eric Galt, rents an apartment in King’s hometown of Atlanta, buys a high-caliber rifle and follows King to Memphis with intent to kill.

Employing the same storytelling prowess he displayed in Blood and Thunder and Ghost Soldiers, Sides ratchets up the tension by tracking Ray under his assumed name, a technique that enables us to suspend our feelings toward the historical figure and gain fresh insight into the mind of Eric Galt, assassin.

“I decided it was important to let Ray be whoever he is saying he is at any given point in the story,” Sides explains. “The ease with which he moved about the country and assumed these various identities is a big part of who he is, and the mystery is enhanced by that. Who is this guy with all these names? So I decided that the reader should find out it’s James Earl Ray at the point in the story where the FBI found out it was James Earl Ray. That ends up being like on page 300.”

Sides’ brick-by-brick portrait of Ray shows what madness can result from a birthright of racism, poverty and ignorance. A loner by temperament, Ray was a desultory dabbler, unwilling or unable to commit to anything—except murder.

“He was kind of an empty vessel of the culture, all these fads and trends, from bartending school to hypnosis to weird self-help books like Psycho-Cybernetics to locksmith school to dance lessons,” Sides says.

As if two larger-than-life figures were not enough, Sides also juggles a third: J. Edgar Hoover, the iconic G-man who supervised the largest manhunt in American history—a two-month, four-country search that ultimately involved 3,500 FBI agents and cost $2 million. Hoover not only loathed King, he also disdained Attorney General Ramsay Clark, his boss under President Lyndon Johnson.

“What Ramsay Clark said to me was, nothing was more important to Hoover than the reputation of the FBI, and he felt that it was at stake here because people were going to find out how much he’d been bugging and eavesdropping and smearing King,” Sides relates. “So in a paradoxical way, Hoover’s hatred of King intensified the manhunt and made it more desperate.”

The manhunt, which consumes the second half of the book, reads like a crime novel worthy of Joseph Wambaugh or Michael Connelly.

Sides studied under John Hershey (Hiroshima) at Yale and developed his love for narrative history out of the New Journalism movement of the ’60s. Would he ever consider flipping the coin and trying his hand at historical fiction?

“Honestly, whenever I read historical fiction, I have a problem,” he admits. “It’s sort of like, will the real fact please stand up? Even really good literary historical fiction like E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, I’m thinking, what about the real Houdini? How much of this is real and how much of this is in [the author’s] own mind? I just think that the real story is always more interesting.”

RELATED CONTENT
Watch a video about Hellhound on His Trail

 

Memphis historian and subculture explorer Hampton Sides was six years old on April 4, 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel by a prison escapee named James Earl Ray.

Sides remembers that his father, who worked…

ParentingFamily & Relationships

Scott Simon

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Since Scott Simon has chronicled the American experience for years as the host of NPR’s “Weekend Edition,” it seems only fitting that he should apply his prizewinning reportorial skills to a personal experience that has enriched his life beyond his wildest dreams: adopting a child.

In his new memoir Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other, the congenial moderator invites us into the family he and his wife Caroline created when they adopted two Chinese daughters based on little more than thumb-size snapshots. Being a gracious host, he also shares other adoption stories within his circle of friends that includes sportswriter Frank Deford, Freakonomics author Steve Levitt and celebrated fashion designer Alexander Julian.

Elise, now 7, and Paulina, a precocious 3½, have become the center of Simon’s world. “I am the spoiler-in-chief,” admits the proud papa without hesitation or remorse. Despite the fact that he and his wife saved their daughters from what he calls “a life too terrible to contemplate,” it is Simon who feels lucky.

“Why are we pouring money into a scientific procedure to create children when there are millions of children in this world already who need love?”

Having failed to start a family “in the traditional Abraham-and-Sarah-begat manner,” the Simons submitted to the prodding protocols of a fertility clinic, without success.

“At some point, we just looked at each other and thought, why are we pouring money into a scientific procedure to create children when we know there are millions of children in this world already who need love?” he recalls. “I wish that people would take a look at adoption early on in the process of trying to have a family rather than as a last resort.”

Their search for a family led them to China, land of the controversial one-child-per-family policy that has placed a premium on male offspring at the heartbreaking expense of tens of thousands of abandoned little girls each year. That it took 18 months to adopt Elise and two years to adopt Paulina frustrated Simon beyond words.

“The Chinese permit an astonishingly small percentage of orphaned and abandoned children to be adopted,” he says. “To me, that is absolutely flabbergasting. The government policy on adoption is addressing political, economic and social goals that have almost nothing to do with the best interests of children. Now that we have two little girls from China who are part of our family, we need to speak out about it.”

“I’m amazed that today people can get scolded for using a paper cup and throwing it away and yet somehow we haven’t fathomed all the youngsters in the world who need homes.”

Simon describes the anxious hours of waiting in a Chinese hotel room before they could take their daughter Elise in their arms. Impending fatherhood brought its share of doubts.

“I love children, but I understood even then that there is a real difference between playing peek-a-boo in a public place and then being able to get up and go about your business,” he recalls. “I knew I could be a pretty successful play partner, but I think I was concerned whether I would be a good and devoted parent. But the transformation was pretty quick.”

The Simon sisters are in most ways typical American kids; they attend public school, prefer ice cream with extra sprinkles and believe in the Tooth Fairy. “They’re very, very bright,” Simon crows, then quickly adds: “One of the other advantages of adoption is that you can brag on your children without any concern that you’re congratulating your own genetic contribution.”

Still, he’s aware that childhood can slip by faster than a half-hour newscast. “The older they get, the sharper their questions get about not just what happened to them but what happens to other people there,” he says.

Those are questions the Simon family will tackle together.
“I’m sometimes amazed today that people can get scolded for using a paper cup and throwing it away and yet somehow we haven’t fathomed all the youngsters in the world who need homes,” he says. “There are at least 15 million children who have been orphaned and abandoned. We’ve really come to think of it as one of the great unfinished endeavors of the world.”
It is Simon’s fervid hope that the joy he has found in adopting two daughters from a faraway land will in some small way inspire others to do the same.

Since Scott Simon has chronicled the American experience for years as the host of NPR’s “Weekend Edition,” it seems only fitting that he should apply his prizewinning reportorial skills to a personal experience that has enriched his life beyond his wildest dreams: adopting a child.

In…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Patricia Cornwell

Interview by Jay MacDonald

The prolific, perennially best-selling Patricia Cornwell first kicked her way into publishing 20 years ago with Postmortem, a risky little mystery that introduced the world to Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner whose grim science had heretofore been relegated to footnote status.

Seven publishers turned it down before Scribner finally agreed to let the presses roll. Did it succeed? And how! Not only did it become the first novel ever to win the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony and Macavity awards in a single year, but without Cornwell’s infectious introduction to the arcane world of forensics, the letters CSI might be just another meaningless acronym today.

“Part of the reason the publishers hesitated was, it was a world they hadn’t seen before and it was occupied by a woman, and the whole thing was a little bit scary and they weren’t sure it was a smart investment—all $6,000 they paid for it!” Cornwell chuckles. “No one was really sure anybody had an appetite for this sort of thing. Who cares about toxicology labs? Yuck!”

Who cares indeed. Fast-forward a decade to “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced television series set in Las Vegas that premiered on CBS in the fall of 2000. It would become television’s most successful mystery franchise of the new millennium, spawning two equally successful spin-offs and, not incidentally, a mini-boom in forensic-centric crime fiction as well.

The “CSI” craze has been both flattering and somewhat problematic for Cornwell.

“The biggest chalenge for me was creating a genre that then took over like kudzu, and then realizing that there is so much of this because you sort of made it accessible to people and now everybody’s doing it and what are you going to do?” Cornwell says. “Because you can’t take the approach that I did the first 10 years of my career, which was, I’m going to write a book about forensic fire investigation, or about trace evidence, or one that has Interpol and a decomposing body in it. I would pick a certain area of expertise that you’ve never seen before and then show you something that’s really fun. Well, that same approach doesn’t exactly work anymore because there’s no point in spending 10 pages explaining a scanning electron microscope when people can watch one on TV.”

With Port Mortuary, her new Scarpetta mystery and number 18 in the series, Cornwell takes her seasoned chief medical examiner out of her comfort zone in a plot that could be torn from tomorrow’s headlines. As chief of the new Cambridge Forensic Center in Massachusetts, a joint venture between the state and federal governments, MIT and Harvard, Scarpetta has spent months away on a fellowship at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, learning the military’s cutting-edge art of CT-assisted “virtual autopsy” at the request of the White House. During her absence from her day job, a mysterious death near her Cambridge home threatens to shut down the new venture and destroy Scarpetta’s career.

Longtime readers will welcome Cornwell’s return to first-person narration as she tells this grim tale in Scarpetta’s voice. But they may be surprised at the new elements of political intrigue, including a long-hidden secret from Scarpetta’s own military past that reverberates through her new life at the coordinates where military and domestic forensics meet.

Cornwell, who takes pride in immersing herself in field work for inspiration, felt the chill of military secrecy and anti-terrorism forensic investigation, if only from a distance, and likes it as a new flavor for Scarpetta. In truth, she says, medical examiners are often caught up in powerful outside forces.

“Medical examiners put up with a huge amount of political stuff,” she says. “I haven’t really gotten into that a whole lot, but now that Scarpetta has this affiliation with government, it gives me more of a platform to talk about some of it. Having her more involved in government gives me the license to have the flavor of not only a thriller but a spy novel. You don’t always know who the good guys are. You think you know, but maybe you’re wrong.”

Curiosity has driven Cornwell since her days as a police reporter for the Charlotte Observer back in the early 1980s, a cool job that allowed her to stick her nose where it didn’t belong. She still remembers the moment her curiosity put her on the path to becoming a best-selling novelist.

“I decided I wanted to write books about crime and I managed to get an interview with a medical examiner in Richmond, and that was the day that changed my life,” she recalls. “It was the spring of 1984, and I still remember walking into this conference room and sitting down with Dr. Marcella Fierro, who was the first medical examiner I’d ever met, and we spent three hours just discussing forensic medicine. She gave me a tour of the morgue—it was empty at that hour—and she happened to mention that there was some new technology coming down the pike, something called DNA and something called lasers. And I thought, wow, this is cool stuff! I knew at that moment that this was where I want to be; I want to be in this building and learn everything I can about the world these people work in.”

For six years leading up to the publication of Postmortem, Cornwell did just that, working as a technical writer and computer analyst at Dr. Fierro’s ME unit, soaking up the scientific know-how and love of cutting-edge forensics that still power her fiction.

“The truth is, if you walk into a lab, you don’t go, oh my God, this is cool; your first thought is, I have no idea what I’m looking at and I want to run in horror. There’s nothing sexy about any of it,” she says. “You’ve got to let your imagination take hold of it and be able to explain extremely esoteric techniques and put them in terms that they understand and humanize them. And add a dash of poetry while you’re at it.”

Cornwell refers to the plots of “CSI”-type television programs as “forensic fantasy.” As she sees it, “There’s no limit to the kind of stories you can come up with because you’re not limited by the procedures of technology. It’s like ‘Star Trek’—anything that you can imagine, you can do on television.”

That said, Cornwell has seen firsthand how quickly science fiction becomes science fact in the forensics world.

“If I had been writing Port Mortuary back in the days of Postmortem, it would have seemed like ‘Star Trek.’ What’s true about shows like ‘CSI’ is that probably some of the things that seem outrageous now may very well be used in 10 years, or even five years.” 

The prolific, perennially best-selling Patricia Cornwell first kicked her way into publishing 20 years ago with Postmortem, a risky little mystery that introduced the world to Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner whose grim science had heretofore been relegated to footnote status.

Seven publishers turned it down before…

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