Okay…here it is, the cover reveal for The Strange Case of the Pharaoh’s Heart.
Sherlock Holmes travels to Egypt to take on the curse of Tutankhamun, along with the indefatigable Dr. Watson and the mysterious medium Estelle Roberts.
Releasing March 19th from Seventh Street Books. Available for pre-order Amazon and a host of other places now.
Cover by the inimitable Jennifer Do.
Oh, and that’s an Egyptian scarab on the cover, not a flying cockroach.
That’s my story anyway.
“Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.”
–Eudora Welty
The Devil’s Advice to Storytellers
Lest men suspect your tale to be untrue,Keep probability – some say – in view.But my advice to story-tellers is:Weigh out no gross of probabilities,Nor yet make diligent transcriptions ofKnown instances of virtue, crime or love.To forge a picture that will pass for true,Do conscientiously what liars do –Born liars, not the lesser sort that raidThe mouths of others for their stock-in-trade:Assemble, first, all casual bits and scrapsThat may shake down into a world perhaps;People this world, by chance created so,With random persons whom you do not know –The teashop sort, or travellers in a trainSeen once, guessed idly at, not seen again;Let the erratic course they steer surpriseTheir own and your own and your readers’ eyes;Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair)Motive and end and moral in the air;Nice contradiction between fact and factWill make the whole read human and exact.—Robert Graves
But: the author pulls it off, largely through the agency of his main character, a thoroughly grounded, down-to-earth, self-deprecating, modest graduate student in physics who is the only person who could ever solve the many mysteries presented to him, in part because he and his antagonist go together like yin and yang.
It’s a spy novel which may also qualify as a cozy mystery. It includes an alluring local cop and an asshole FBI agent who may be allies or enemies. Through it all, it’s strangely believable. This is an overlooked gem. Pick it up now.
The Law of Falling Bodies can be found here on Amazon.
Modern society is a minefield, and was even before Covid-19. But there was a lot of discussion at the height of the pandemic as to how writers should handle such an event. Ignore it?—or plunge into it? Steve Goble elects to skip it, but in doing so he (intentionally) shines a light on the aftermath, and what it means to us going forward. The waning of trust—in institutions, in each other seems to have accelerated to dangerous new levels. A lot of readers were waiting to see how writers would handle Covid and the post-Covid arena. If Go Find Daddy, Steve Goble’s third in his Ed Runyon series is any example, I would say—honestly, straightforwardly, levelly. Which happens to describe his hero, Ed.
A New York girl buys an old painting in a second-hand store upstate. Her boyfriend, an up-and-coming young painter, discovers there’s more to this painting than meets the eye. They make a big mistake: they tell somebody. Just a handful of people, really. But every single person they tell, they shouldn’t have.
This story is marinated in the New York art world, seasoned with Amsterdam, and served up fittingly enough, in the little French village of Auvers-sur-Oise, where van Gogh drew his last breath—and he’s not the only one to die there for his art.
Jonathan Santlofer is a rare bird, an author who’s also a painter in his own right, which makes him eminently qualified to pen this tale. (As the author of a mystery title involving van Gogh myself), I was impressed. You will be, too.
The Lost Van Gogh can be found here on Amazon.
“Hesitancy is the surest destroyer of talent. One cannot be timorous and reticent, one must be original and loud. New metaphors, new rhythms, new expressions of emotion can only spring from unhindered gall. Nothing should interfere with that intuition--not the fear of appearing stupid, nor of offending somebody, nor jeopardizing publication, nor being trivial. The intuition must be as unhindered as a karate chop.”
―
I was talking to a friend one day (actually, my best friend, herein referred to as the Rainbow Trout) and he asked me what was the deal in San Juan Hell with all the fershlugginer verbiage underneath my profile picture on my blog. Well, no one's ever asked me that before--I suspect no one's ever noticed it before-- but I suppose I should explain for his benefit, by way of an introduction to this site, for the idly curious, and for anyone else too shy to point out out that my new clothes look a lot like my birthday suit. I actually put a lot of time and thought into this seeming scattershot collection of nounage.
Well, that's an easy one. Novel-writing is what you do when you hang up your apron after twenty-five years tending bar. I’ve had three novels published, two in the bullpen, and another in the works.
You may be familiar with this one. Let's say you're playing a fame of chess, or poker, or Monopoly, or really any game that's more complicated than Candy Land. There is inevitably a guy standing behind you who is not in the game, looking over your shoulder munching noisily on his Cheetos, and giving you horrendously bad advice on your next move. That, my friend, is a kibbitzer. I’d like to pretend I’m a sage counselor, but the orange accumulation on my fingertips always gives me away.
French for a story-teller, especially one particularly witty or amusing. From this you may gather that French is the last refuge of the pretentious egotist. I’d say that’s the mot juste, n’est ce pas? Je suis le chapeau. The real storytellers were my mother and oldest brother and sister. I learned to dart in comments during their infrequent pauses in conversation. It’s still my style of talking.
I just threw this one in because I love to use big words. It means a person who loves to use big words. My high school English teacher, Miz Ely, used to say to me “You’re so erudite” with that special blend of fondness and contempt that only she, with her fine-tuned East Texas twang, could muster.
A term coined by Dutch theorist Johan Huizenga, in his book of the same name, used to delve deep into the play element in culture. The literal meaning is Man Playing. This is my species. I hope it’s yours too. Huizenga says “You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.” This is my cultural stance.
Also French, and I wanted to include the words flaneur and croque-monsieur as well, but I ran out of space. Sans-culotte literally means pantless, but before you get the idea that I'm hanging out in the altogether (I might be and I might not), a bit of further explanation. The sans-culottes were the lumpenproletariat* at the heart of the French Revolution, the ones Marie Antoinette wanted to see eat cake and die. They were radical democrats, sort of like Bernie Sanders with the mittens off. They did wear trousers--they just didn't sport the fashionable silk knee-pants of the aristos. This is my political stance.
If you know you Vonnegut, you know the Tralfamadorians, little aliens who look like plumber's friends, with hands where their heads should be, in which is set a single eye. They also live in four dimensions, which means that they can see all of time laid out before them--and choose, quite sensibly, to live in the good times and avoid the bad. This is my philosophical stance.
I came across this one for the first time when reading Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Did you know there was a class lower than the lower class? Lumpen literally means “ragged.”Marx calls them the dangerous ones, the “the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society.” I immediately identified with them. He really meant the bohemians, vagrants, the artists, the theatre people, the barkeeps and cocktail waitrons, the ones told to “move along”, the ones who never bow to a clock, the free people. We made even Marx nervous. This is my social class.
This is my own coinage, taken from the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, especially in homage to his great poem The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower (written when he was only nineteen) that expresses an intense identification with all of creation, the wood wide web. The universe is numinous. This is my religious stance.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
There it is. If you’ve read this far and swallowed the hook with the bait, you’ll likely say I’m a self-contradictory sonuvabitch. Like you, I suspect, like you. I hope that clears things up for the Rainbow Trout. And for you.
