A lovely morning in Monterey - blue sky, and the smell of Australian trees. The gulls here seem chill compared to gulls in Sitka, Alaska, standing on the rocks, checking out the world calmly, not flying frantically around looking looking looking for food. A couple of hundred yards offshore there is a mob feeding on something just below the surface. The local park has a gathering of Canada geese and some coots. There are a few glimpses of hummingbirds, match heads flaring out of sight. I drink my Mexican instant coffee sitting in my shirtsleeves in the sunshine, and for a moment I think I’m hallucinating.
I thought some of you might want to know more about the new book. The title for SO FAR AND GOOD comes from the last of the poem Thinking For Berky by William Stafford. Google it up, it is a wonderful poem. There is a kind of longing in it, a sympathy for people a little bit on the edge which I have always liked. I always start my novels by choosing a title, which I think is kind of backwards from the way most writers work. When I got a little stuck while writing the draft I always went back to the feeling of the poem. Love and loyalty really want to have center stage in this crime novel while the violent world presses in from all direction.
Weird… I know, but that’s how it works. Cecil is in prison for the crimes he committed in BABY’S FIRST FELONY. Cecil knows a lot of the people stuck inside with him from having represented them and many are dissatisfied. This is what makes his jail experience a bit different than most. He gets hooked up with a gangster who wants Cecil to teach him to talk to his parole board. He wants to learn how to talk with white women for they are abundant among the decision makers in his life. When the language lessons go wrong it means that Cecil will catch a beating, but the Gangster is well connected. Meanwhile on the outside, Cecil and Jane Marie’s daughter, Blossom, wants to be a private eye like her Pops. She becomes the Nancy Drew on the outside, providing her dad with information. The case involves one of Blossom’s friends who finds out her parents are not her biological parents. Why, what now, and what happened? It gets messy and of course Blossom ends up in danger. What can our hero do to save his daughter? Can his student help him out? Will he? What will he want in return?
Love, loyalty, Justice. Like the hokey pokey: that’s what it’s all it’s about., SO FAR AND GOOD, works as a title, because in jail, “the good” seems so far away… but it’s always present somehow.
Pebble Beach sunshine:
Grackles, swoop down on our table
to steal our Hors d'oeuvres.
