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Peter Green: On Designing Crime

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 Interview of Peter H. Green, Writer, with Claire Applewhite, June, 2013

PHGreenClaire Applewhite is the author of several mysteries in her ‘Nam Nor Series. I have read most  of them and find her latest, Tennessee Plates (L & L Dreamspell, 2012),  a suspenseful page turner, full of interesting and quirky characters. She recently interviewed me for the blog of Greater St. Louis Chapter, Sisters in Crime: . Here‘s our conversation:

You have a long list of achievements and a wide variety of interests, Pete, would you tell us a little bit about yourself?

  1. When did you first decide you were going to get involved in a writing career? After a long year career as an architect and marketer of my firm’s architecture and engineering services, at our 40th Reunion my Yale classmates posed the provocative question: What are you going to do with the last third of your life? All of us, about 60 or 61, were considering retirement and new directions, facing 20 to 30 years of relative ease and freedom from more pressing obligations. One re-married classmate looked forward to finishing payment for educating all their offspring, “hers, mine and ours,” and doing some of that travel people talk about. Another contemplated writing about an unusual and interesting diplomatic career. A third planned to take flying lessons. When his friends warned he was damned fool and might get himself killed, he said, “But now I can do what I’ve always dreamed of and no longer have anyone to stay alive for!” Not a bad outlook, I decided: trying something new, taking risks and fulfilling your heart’s desire.
  2.     What is your background, and what part did it play? It’s a long story, starting with my parents, a homemaker and an ex-Marine, both writers and publicists, a grandfather who was a construction contractor and me, an architect that has encountered many fascinating people in a long career, and who just loves to tell stories. My dad did a lot of writing for his radio and ad agency jobs, and Mom had always wanted to be a writer and never went through with it. They had always said I had the ability to be a writer, and I’d always wanted to but needed to earn a living. In a way, I felt I owed it to them and to myself to finish what they started. And in my profession, my favorite activity was always describing the projects and getting people excited about hiring our team. I gravitated toward the marketing side of the business, writing proposals, reports and publicity for my firms. This resulted in millions of words cascading from my pen and then from my computer screen over the years. That’s a lot of writing practice when you think about it.
  3. Please tell us about the first book you got published and the story behind it. On that same college reunion trip my wife Connie and I also visited one of her college classmates, Mary Oates Johnson, a writer and editor, in Andover, Mass. I happened to mention that I spent the summer of 1945, when I turned five, just up the coast with my mother, sister, aunt and her family in a rented seaside house at Annisquam, while Dad was off to war. She insisted on guiding us toward that tiny fishing hamlet, and we happened on a familiar beach turnoff and a house I recognized on the right side of the road. Memories of that summer flooded back, as if I had never left. Later that evening, over much great seafood and wine, Mary pointed out I had the tools to write a great World War II story, and that I simply must do it. I resolved to write a biography and family memoir, based on some 400 letters my mother had saved from that time. The letters revealed, among much other hitherto unpublished war history, that on August 14, 1945 Dad, as de facto manager of Armed Forces Radio Station WXLI on Guam, scooped the stateside networks on news of the Japanese surrender.
  4. Has your work changed since that book? In what ways?  Over a long career I have designed buildings, planned development sites and promoted my firm.  On that journey through the world of design and construction I’ve met real estate developers, bureaucrats, politicians, office rivals–all human, mind you, many of them honorable and even noble–but with a few bad apples that undo the hard work of all the good folks just trying to make life a little better for the rest of us. As a result I saw enough close calls, suspicious acts and outright skullduggery to wonder, what if? In a way, I wished I could have been taller, better looking and more heroic than I was. In second-guessing my life, I wondered what would have happened if, instead of becoming the cautious, conservative person that life taught me to be, I had taken more risks, been braver, more outspoken and more confrontational than I was? So I created someone who was all of these things and, even though he is a perfectionist, far from perfect, with a weakness for beautiful women—architect Patrick MacKenna, an amateur sleuth and hero of my mystery series. 
  5. What is the greatest compliment you have received about your work?What comments, if any bothered you?  I’ve been pleased to receive good reviews: “Peter Green’s Crimes of Design—a “flood-plain noir” mystery—weaves a complex tale of murder, eco-terrorism, love, lust and betrayal. Set in St. Louis at the confluence of the great Mississippi and Missouri rivers, thenovel dredges up fascinating facts about the rivers’ pivotal roles in Midwestern Americana— wetlands law, floods, barge traffic, levees, locks, pumping stations, agricultural commodities trading, corn futures, and how they all interrelate.” —Rick Skwiot, author of Key West StoryAbout Dad’s War with the United States Marines, James A. Cox of Midwest Book Review said:  “Sure to inspire the reader to thoughtful reflection given current demands on the American military arising from the ‘war on terrorism,’ Dad’s War with the United States Marines’ is very highly recommended to all general readers and a welcome addition to the growing library of military memoirs and biographies.” Few negative comments have come to my attention, and some that did came early enough in the process to allow me to improve my work before publication. 
  6. How do you promote your work?I’ve used press releases, radio or TV appearance, author book talks and signings, a bi-monthly newsletter and promotion and sales at regional book conferences, including chairing a  panel at last year’s Killer Nashville mystery conference.
  7. Would you advise another person to become a writer? What caveats/ encouragements would you like to offer?  Writers my parents introduced me when I was in school to jokingly advised against it, offering such comments as, “too many writers already, no money in it, it’s a terrible life.” Kidding aside, from conception to promotion it’s a full time job, and it only produces a living for those who a) have extremely high skills and a bit of good luck, b) treat it is as work and pursue employment as a free-lance journalist or work as employees for magazines, journals, schools and universities, or in other careers and stay dedicated to writing part-time. Those who speak and communicate their message well to the reading public will do best.
  8. Can you tell me about your biggest writing triumph? I’d have to say it was in finding a publisher for my first book. Because it’s so difficult for a new writers to access literary a gents and the big publishers, I went the interdependent route, searched on the Writers Market website for publishers looking for historical and biographical material and hooked up with a small, independent publisher, who took the project to heart and did a creditable book design job. Naturally, however the rest was up to me, a daunting task for an individual who’s also trying to write.
  9. Which of your books is your personal favorite? I always find it’s the next one, because I learn so much each time I publish, I can always find ways to do better. In my second Patrick MacKenna Mystery, Fatal Designs, to be released this summer by L & L Dreamspell, Patrick and his daughter Erin are again locked in struggle during a natural disaster. When an earth tremor causes an avalanche, roils the river and separates seventeen-year old Erin MacKenna from her canoeing party, she and her young companion witness the burial of a murder victim and are abducted by the perpetrators, In addition to man coping with nature, Patrick and his daughter must face off against the worst of humankind—the lowlife predators that would enslave and exploit our children. My next project after that, Radio, a novel of World War II, is a fictionalized account of my family, this time from my mother’s comic and ironic point of view. As the soap operas of the era were described, it is the archetypal story of a shy, but talented Marine Corps wife, coping with child-rearing, learning to run a household in her husband’s absence and facing the daily terror that her husband may be assigned to the next island invasion. The family’s mainstay is radio, the magical voice from beyond that brings fearful news of the war, gainful employment for her in writing radio scripts and daily entertainment, with drama, the bracing music of the big band era and solidarity with her fellow Americans.
  10. Where can we can we buy your books? Crimes of Design, a Patrick MacKenna mystery, has been released in Kindle, Ebook and and Trade Paperback . Use the links below to get a copy:

Buy the Paperback or ebook from Barnes & NobleBuy the Paperback from Amazon
Buy the ebook from AllRomance/OmniLit  (search on Crimes of Design)                     Buy the Kindle ebook from Amazon

Dad’s War with the United States Marines (Trade Paperback) can be purchased from Amazon.com

Many thanks to Claire, for her continued encouragement and support throughout my publishing career.

Till next time, good words to you,

Peter

Peter


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Frozen Music: Tributes to Frank Lloyd Wright and Paolo Soleri

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PHGreenBy Peter H. Green

A Chicagoan by birth, I grew up a mile from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House and made a mission of visiting every Wright building I could, including Taliesin West in the Arizona desert near Phoenix. While there in 1963, I also made a side trip to the Arcosanti community, to see what that visionary architect and artist Paolo Soleri was doing. Although the master was away that day, I had a long conversation with one of his apprentices about his vision for the city of the future and how they lived, selling handmade clay bells for subsistence. I also observed his many volumes of heavy bound blank books,  in which he set forth handwritten and hand-sketched notes on principles of green building, ecologically friendly design, energy-efficient structures and urban agriculture.

I read last week in The Architect’s Newspaper an obituary by  Alan G. Brake reporting Paolo Soleri’s passing at age 93 on April 9th. Since the early 1960s, he enlisted the volunteer aid of some 7,000 apprentices to live and work with him in construction of the new, high density urban settlement.  Today, his ideal community, still emerging from the ground , is visited by over 50,000 people each year. Tomiaki Tamura, an associate, has created an impressive video documenting their progress, with musical accompaniment of the Largo from Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony “From the New World,” which includes an excerpt from the western song, “Going Home.” What a fitting tribute, and not a bad note for this modern genius to go out on.

Intrigued with this site, I landed on another post, this one by Branden Klayko, who discusses the lyrics of Simon and Garfunkel’s, 1969 track, “So Long Frank Lloyd Wright,” on their Bridge Over Troubled Water album.  “While some argue that the song is really a cryptic breakup poem between the two singers on the verge of splitting,” Klayko says, “I’m sticking with architecture going mainstream.” To complete my nostalgic vignette of architecture as frozen music, watch the multimedia presentation  and learn how this song came about, accompanied by vintage photos of Wright’s early work, check out Klayko’s story.

Till next time, good words to you,

Peter

Peter

 

An Interview with Architect Patrick MacKenna-Part II

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By Peter H. Green

Writer Peter: Thanks for taking my call, Pat. I know how busy you are. I had just a few more questions, the ones I wanted to ask last time, before you had to go.

Patrick MacKenna: Sure, Pete. Anything for a fellow architect. Fire away.

WP:       Pat, there’s something that’s been bothering me. I know how much you like women. Everybody told me as a kid that “Faint heart ne’er won fair lady.” But these days, women seem to get so offended and insulted when you “disrespect” them. I’m surprised you never got sued at your office for sexual harassment. Society seems to require guys to be Mr. Nice Guy all the time.

PM.       Touché. I’ve come closer than you think to those lawsuits. It’s not that I disrespect women. As an architect I have an eye for beauty. And there’s no more perfect creation on earth than a beautiful woman. I live for them. I admire them. I worship them. But darn it, if I listened to them and obeyed them as well, I have my whole personality locked up inside a bottle.

WP:       True—but I know plenty of architects who are divorced.

PM:       When I was married for all those years to my lovely wife Kitty, I had no problems—the sun rose and set in her. Ever since I lost her, I’ve been lost myself. I’ve needed the solace that a beautiful woman can give me.

WP:       Yeah, but so many women disapprove of that, especially with children around. They think you ought to be married.

PM:      Oh, you mean the affair with Liza? That’s history—it’s been over for a long time. I’ll marry again, as soon as I can find the right woman and settle down. But I’m still haunted that no woman will want me, after the way I lost Kitty.

WP:       Yeah, I know—the guilt thing. But it’s how you behave in the meantime that offends some people.

PM:       For heaven’s sake, I have a teenage daughter! I have to behave as an honorable gentleman.

WP:       I hate to pick away at this, but some of the women who read about you might still take issue with you about respect.

PM:       But don’t they realize who I’m fighting for? My duty as an architect is to protect the public—to make buildings and sites safer for everybody, including daughters, wives and children. They need to read more about what I’ve done—and less of Mona Springer’s gossip in that Enquirer scandal sheet.

WP:       Right on! I was just about to suggest that to know you better they need to get a copy of Crimes of Design .

PM:       They definitely should.  Whoa, look at the time. I’ve got to go into a meeting. Can we talk later?

WP:       Of course, always.

PM:       Great, call any time.

WP:       Well thanks Patrick. I really appreciate your taking the time to speak with me today. I’ll let you get back to your demanding schedule.

And you folks out there, until next time, good words to you,

Peter.

Peter

 

 

Bouchercon 2011: St. Louis fun for 250 mystery authors and a thousand of their closest fans

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Peter as Clouseau

By Peter H. Green

This weekend St. Louis hosted the 42nd Annual Bouchercon World Mystery Conference, the unique literary event that allows fans and authors to meet and greet each other, up close and personal. Highlights included:

Locally-based writers published, or soon to be, by L & L Dreamspell (of whom there are several, including yours truly) participated and met those from both coasts, including Cindy Sample (Dying for a Date) of the Sacramento area and Nancy Means Wright (Walking into the Wild ) of Middlebury, Vermont.

I enjoyed being a lone Brother at the national Sisters in Crime breakfast, and, arriving late, took one of the few empty seats, right next to Sarah Paretsky, whose latest V. I. Warshawski novel Body Work features a Body Artist, who invites nightclub audience members to sketch on her naked flesh. I recalled for her my nightly chore as a set designer in summer stock of inscribing a boat on Luther Billis’s belly and passed along a story  for her husband , a professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute, relating how, during air raid drills in 1944 Miss Dickey, my Chicago kindergarten teacher, would march us like ducks in a row to presumed safety beneath the overhanging walls of Stagg Field, where Fermi himself was producing the first sustained nuclear chain reaction, arguably  the most vulnerable site in the world for enemy attack (see Dad’s War with the United States Marines, Chapters 6 and 14). At Friday’s breakfast Ms. Paretsky was honored for her role in founding this nationwide society in 1986  to advance the recognition of women as mystery writers.

Among the many informative and entertaining panel discussions held here was a session aptly entitled Trouble, including Jeff Abbott (Adrenalin), Ridley Pearson (Walt Fleming mysteries and the Peter and the Starcatcher series with Dave Barry), Steve Hamilton (Misery Bay, an Alex McKnight Mystery),  Harlan Coben (Shelter, his latest Mickey Bolitar novel) and Joseph Finder (Buried Secrets, the new Nick Heller novel, Yale  Class of ’80, Whiffenpoofs member), moderated, to the extent she could manage it, by the popular Boston TV personality and suspense author (The Other Woman) Hank Philippi Ryan.  A typical interchange, punctuated by uproarious audience laughter, went like this (and I quote):

Harlan Coben: I never let research slow down the act of writing the story. Don’t slow the action with cute factoids. Just write the goddamn book!

Joseph Finder: Fix it in post.

Ridley Pearson: All we really mean when we say research is tax deductible travel.

Hank Phillippi Ryan: What did you read as a kid?

Ridley Pearson: Kipling and Poe.

Jeff Abbott: Well, aren’t you special! I read the Hardy Boys.

Harlan Coben: As a young boy, as I was dandled on my daddy’s knee, we read the Collected Works of Ridley Pearson.

Coben, Pearson and Hamilton, when asked about what it meant to have arrived as authors, agreed that the experience was anticlimactic, since the real fun was in the journey, coming up together from obscurity, celebrating each other’s little victories along the way. When the barbs and gags threatened to get completely out of control, Ryan, the only woman on the stage, pulling rank in utter frustration, said: “Do I have to stop this car?”

A nice touch at the opening ceremonies was the official recognition, announced by Ridley, who served as Toastmaster, of the life work of St. Louis’s own “Living Legends”– Robert Randisi, who graciously accepts the title, “The Last of the Great Pulp Writers,” and John Lutz, who wryly commented at the next night’s Shamus Awards dinner, “You don’t know what it’s like to be half of a living legend.” At that event I also had the pleasure of accompanying on our mini brewery tour, fellow architect turned multiple award-winning mystery author, S. J. Rozan, and of comparing notes with her on urban architectural scams in New York and St. Louis, such as midnight brick theft and black market dealings in historic architectural millwork.

Bumming with St. Louis Writers Guild members Angie Fox, Elaine Viets, David Lucas and Leigh Savage, at the Saturday evening party, we almost broke the photo booth and concluded that a good time was had by all.

Elaine Viets as Freddie Krueger

Till next time, as John Ciardi would say, good words to you

Peter

Peter

Macmillan, Look Out: Here Comes the Peppy Small Press

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By Peter H. Green

You might want to look online to find innovative authors these days—the best and the brightest new writers may not be represented in traditional bookstores.

In a 2008 ranking by Publishers Weekly’s Jim Milliot, major U. S. publishing companies occupied only three slots among the world’s top ten: McGraw-Hill Education (U.S.): $2.7 billion, Reader’s Digest (U.S.): $2.6 billion and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (U.S./Cayman Islands): $2.5 billion. Two top European companies, Bertelsmann and Hachette, own many familiar American imprints. Despite these trends, it’s premature to sound the death knell of the American book entrepreneur. Industry observers note that from 6,200 to 11,890 publishing companies exist today, depending upon which ones you include and how they’re selected. These numbers include everyone from the legendary presses like Alfred A. Knopf, Scribners and Simon & Schuster, to respected smaller publishers St. Martin’s Press and Midnight Ink, and at the lower end may include the vanity publishers, and printing services that adopt the “publisher” label. Traditional bookstores loom like dinosaurs in the hulking twentieth century shopping malls—which increasingly serve as showrooms for more competitive online sales. According to statistic compiled by UNESCO, new American book titles nevertheless hover at 17 percent (172,000) of the one million books annually published worldwide. Adding some of the less recognized presses, I suspect this number would be dramatically  increased.

Contributing to this the sea change, of course, is the advent of the e-book. The Kindle, Amazon’s pioneering e-reader, is this on line merchant’s best selling item. Borders hustled its comparable version, the Nook, into the market, apparently too late to right its listing ship. And Sony, Apple and others regularly debut new entries into the race.

In recent years, for example, two dynamic women, committed with a passion to the e-revolution and the value of  individual initiative, Linda Houle and Lisa Smith, founded a forward-looking publishing company, L & L Dreamspell. Although they produce skillfully edited and handsome trade paperbacks, which are offered by many independent bookstores and available though Ingram, on Amazon.com and other book services, their total output is also available on line, on their website. In her definitive description of the changing industry, The Naked Truth about Book Publishing, Linda Houle writes, “E-books are now widely accepted, displacing print book sales and transforming a multi-billion dollar industry. Bookstores are fighting for survival…Old wasteful printing methods are fading away, and nearly all paper books of the future will be made to order.”

With  their own initiative as an example, L & L Dreamspell’s principals enlist the participation in promotion and sales of their authors, thus leading them in the very things they would have to do anyway, even if accepted by a big publishing house. This is a powerful formula for success. If we take off our blinders and try to imagine things not as they are, but as they will be, I venture to say we’ll see more publishers following the model of this well oiled and dynamic publishing system. Rumor has it that literary agents are now beginning to knock on Linda’s and Lisa’s door, seeking a market for sales they will claim a commission on—a market that the individual author can, at present anyway, approach without such representation.

In St. Louis alone—a hotbed of literary talent that Catherine Rankovic has compared to Paris in the 1920s in her fascinating collection of interviews with famous writers, Meet Me:Writers in St. Louis—LLD has snapped up the latest works of several talented authors. They include Claire Applewhite, Judy Moresi and Jo Hiestand. I’m happy to report that with the coming publication of my own debut novel, Crimes of Design, I’ve also joined L & L’s “Dream Team,”, along with a host of accomplished authors. My mystery, set in St. Louis during a major flood, involves architect Patrick MacKenna in  a series of crimes that he must solve to clear his name, save his career and rescue his family. It will join a long list of list of 150 LLD titles by over 100 authors, including:  Historical & Fiction, Mystery & Suspense , Non-Fiction, Paranormal & Vampire, Romance & Erotica, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Thriller & Horror and  Young Adult . To see my own personal webpage and bio on their site, please visit http://lldreamspell.com/PeterGreen.htm. After all the complex steps of editing  and book and e-book production, Crimes of Design will be available in the first quarter of 2012.

Until next time, as John Ciardi used to say, good words to you,

Peter

Green Design, Environment and…Murder?

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How could these well-intentioned goals lead to murder? If you’ve tried to get a zoning change lately, you may know what I mean.

Early in my design career, zoning hearings used to be routine procedures, in which a board offered minor regulatory adjustments and then rubber-stamped plans that would help a city or town create new jobs, increase the assessed valuation of the property within its boundaries and enable it to collect more taxes.

But beginning in the early seventies, someone turned up the heat in the hearing chamber. These formerly friendly, local meetings broke out in holy war. Zoning became an issue, and obtaining a change of land use from a local government gained all the furor, cost and intrigue of a hotly contested election campaign. Neighbors protested, saying the new project would use too much fossil fuel, eat up too much virgin forest and farmland and create too much dangerous traffic, noise and air pollution. The objectors were suddenly well organized and well funded: they brought legions of experts to zoning meetings—traffic experts, botanists, ecologists, zoologists and air pollution scientists. Developer’s forces countered with geotechnical engineers, fluvial geomorphologists, potamologists, entomologists,and hydrologists. It was after the third such confrontation that I began to think that maybe there’s something to it—other than futile blustering by stubborn residents who opposed any kind of change to their customary surroundings, people who did not share our team’s grand vision for improving it. For one thing, the more time went on, the truer seemed the environmentalists’ concerns. And for another, a few defeats handed to me at the bar of local approval soon brought home the fact that their efforts were futile: we were stopped dead in our tracks.

Then as I sifted through the wreckage of one particularly big setback I detected skullduggery. Someone had connived the young, wild-eyed environmental advocates into opposing the developers, but not for the reasons of environmental purity that the land developers claimed. We had planned our new town project to be a demonstration of good land use: with high densities to shorten walking distances, make residential property accessible to stores and shops, keep homes near jobs, make future mass transit stops accessible and preserve green space within the development. We soon learned that these kids had become the unwitting tools of larger forces—those that didn’t want apartments (and the lower income, racially mixed tenants they attracted) in the suburbs. Others joined in the fray: those that opposed competing businesses and those that just wanted everything to remain green, despite the fact that the land was not in a natural state—it had been farmed for generations—and to have their way, no matter what opportunities for economic growth and improved land use the community might lose out on in the process.

A third issue—and this was our Achilles heel—was that, despite our good intentions for better land use, our developer had selected a flood plain location, and this choice was due to the fact that the land was cheaper—for good reason: it was the least desirable and suitable for urban development. And over the years the true cost of making and keeping it suitable became apparent: it needed levees, pumping stations, drainage channels storage ponds, and a host of special engineering measures to create and maintain the basic conditions that exist at the outset on high ground. While the ability to protect from floods for long periods has been shown to be possible in entire countries, like the Netherlands, it has been less successful in New Orleans. Often the die is cast for urban development long before rational planning can be achieved, and then it is too late. While the premise of building on low land can be shown to be a fallacy, it is a romantic and seductive idea, one which many will defend. Hence the battle is joined.

It is this conflict between an immovable object (the city and its inexorable demands for growth) and the irresistible force (the river, Nature and the environment) that has fueled many costly urban battles, with casualties on all sides. It’s the stuff of conflict, and it has inspired many life histories and stories worth the telling. That’s what got me going in writing my new novel, Crimes of Design and how it came to be that an architect who loves to tell these stories and to write the histories of real people was inspired to create a murder mystery, set in St. Louis, during a flood of record rivaling the Great Flood of ’93.

More next time.

Till then, regards,


Peter

  • An architect who writes: what’s up with that?

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    Peter
    Welcome to “the green grapevine.” web log that is part of our new look for 2009. I figure with half a million people blogging around the world, perhaps one more can sneak in without doing too much additional harm. I haven’t read enough of those efforts, so I am more than likely to repeat all of their mistakes. Bear with me here while I report our little victories and defeats, funny encounters, random thoughts and a journal of my progress toward that elusive goal we all chase, self actualization.

    What is an architect and planner doing writing anyway? And he writes books also, you say. It’s a long story, starting with parents, a housewife and an ex-Marine, who were both writers and publicists, a grandfather who was a construction contractor and me, a person that just loves to tell stories. My choice of architecture was a matter of interest and aptitude, but it also had something to do with finding a “practical” way to earn a living. And for a long career I have designed buildings, planned development sites and promoted my firm, all activities that I still enjoy. My favorite among these, however, was always describing the projects and getting people excited about hiring our team. This resulted in millions of words cascading from my computer screen over the years. That’s a lot of writing practice when you think about it. Then, after a nostalgic trip to Annisquam, the scene of my sixth summer in 1945, I was aware that there was a story worth telling (see my Foreword ). When I stepped down a few years ago from my day job (temporarily, as it now seems), I had time to peruse some 400 letters that my dad had written home during World War II, some funny stories he wrote about his personal war with the Marine Corps and a script Mom wrote for Dad’s surprise “This Is Your Life” 48th birthday party. Then over the next year, the story, which I had only begun in fits and starts, poured out and became my nonfiction family memoir, Dad’s War with the United States Marines.

    The rest is the history that I’m here to tell you, if only in little bits and pieces. Once the writing was done, it was merely necessary to find an agent and a publisher. In case you haven’t checked lately, unless you’re the next Tom Clancy, literary agents rarely look at your work. That’s often because–despite your book’s readability and potentially wide appeal–you’re not hot enough to spark a bidding war over your next great novel with the five or six big publishers that remain in the English-speaking world. Most of those charming little presses like Borzoi Books and Doubleday, Doran & Co. have been snapped up by the great leviathans that today rule the commercial book world.

    But just as I was about to give up all hope, Roger Hayes, the published writer of a Vietnam war story (On Point, St. Martin’s Paperbacks, 2001), whom I met through my military clients in St. Louis, said, “Forget everything you’ve been told: just approach the publishers directly.” My search then began in earnest, and I discovered that, as small to medium-sized publishers were acquired on the demand side, even smaller firms were being created or still existed on the supply side. After a renewed Internet search and a new flurry of inquiries and submissions, on a day in May 2006 one of my e-mails brought an answer. I met Jim and Lynne Rock of the Seaboard Press, an imprint of an established publishing house, one of those boutiques that still do exist. The tender loving care that they invested in the publication of my work, especially their fascination with my father’s hand drawn sketches sent home in his letters for me, his six-year-old son, was far in excess of what I might possibly have coaxed out of Simon & Shuster, even if they had beat down the door to publish it. I was on my way.

    As the fall publication date neared, I put on my publicity hat and let the local press know that my dad had played a special role in the war’s history. On August 14, 2005 Harry Levins of the Post-Dispatch broke the story, on the anniversary of V-J Day, that it was my father who scooped the news of the Japanese surrender to the world sixty years earlier (See News and Reviews page) from his outpost at Armed Forces Radio Station WXLI on Guam. Other media attention was soon to follow: John Pertzborn interviewed me on KTVI Channel 2. From there, I dashed over to a downtown hotel, where Charlie Brennan was broadcasting a Veterans’ Day program on KMOX radio, raising money to provide phone cards for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. He devoted the entire morning to interviews appropriate to the day’s celebration, including one with me about my book. In our lively exchange, Charlie couldn’t get over the fact that during the war we used to save bacon grease and other meat drippings in Mason jars and take them to the butcher. We were told that the government could turn them into explosives for our troops, although I still have no idea how they did that. (If you know, please post a comment.) That same day I held two other presentations and book signings in St. Louis and the book’s sales campaign was underway.

    This, then, is a brief explanation of of why an architect attempts to write books. You can be the judge of how well I’m doing. It has been a fulfilling and a wonderful experience, although I miss my friends back in the office.

    And my next book? It’s called “Crimes of Design,” a mystery about an architect who must turn sleuth to save his life, rescue his family and spare his beleaguered city. But this you can check for yourself back on my website.

    Good reading until next time,

    Peter