Tag Archives: artist

Cultured Moroccan-born Author Pokes Harmless Fun at St. Louis Elite in Fast-Paced Caper Novel

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By Peter H. Green

Terms of Interment, Fiction, by Marcel Toussaint, in collaboration with Cyrus Pars, NACG Press, 2011, Trade paperback, 273 pages.

Albert Wilson, a semiretired lawyer from a proud family, finds his existence in the family manse in St. Louis’s stately Portland Place threatened by the collapse of his poor investments and his overspending on a debauched playboy lifestyle. In desperate straits he calls in his younger brother Edward, an intern doctor, from Jefferson City, to explain his plight. Shocked that he has depleted all his assets and learning that Albert has a half million dollar life insurance policy, Edward tells his brother he must fake his own death and promises to show him how. In a hilarious series of misadventures, Albert makes his way from hospital to funeral home to cemetery, with surprising results.

This classic caper, reminiscent of Jimmy Breslin’s 1970 classic The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, and many others of its comic ilk, could only have been conceived and carried off–with some technical counseling from his collaborator Cyrus Pars–by Moroccan-born, award-winning poet, playwright and novelist Marcel Toussaint, whose Gallic irony and humor, along with an easy familiarity with St. Louis society, seems perfect for spinning the tale. A French-cultured dancing master who spent many years schooling the scions of St. Louis’s Central West End upper crust in the finer points of deportment and the social graces, he recounts the fast moving drama with just the right respect for and alarm at the foibles of the rich and famous. The plot, with its improbable yet comically plausible premise, races from from one adventure to the next through many unexpected twists as the brothers outwit a greedy, pompous funeral director, a necrophiliac grave robber with a bizarre fetish and two real mobsters who set out to unburden them of their supposed treasures. In its surprising dénouement, Toussaint’s characters must learn the classic lesson that crime doesn’t pay—or does it?—to  the great relish of those familiar with St. Louis in a much happier golden era, and those previously unfamiliar with our town, but craving an enjoyable laugh-out-loud adventure. More about this clever caper at www.NACGpress.com.

Marcel Toussaint, recently named National Gold Medalist by the Veteran’s Creative Arts Festival, was born Emil Saint Pellicer, in Rabat, Morocco, where his father worked for the French government, the youngest of three surviving children born to the late Raymond and Maia Gracia Saint Pellicer. His father was French and his mother was Spanish. He was a radio personality, professional dancer, fencing master and “duke of deportment” for St. Louis society matrons and their children in the 1960s and ’70s. He is a poet, author and lyricist of plays, novels and several volumes of poetry, including his autobiographical Poetry of A Lifetime.  Toussaint has two children from a previous marriage and lives in Wildwood with a golden Lab puppy named Madison. A member of St. Louis Writers Guild, he recently read his article in St. Louis Reflections, an anthology celebrating the 90-year history of Guild, at their holiday Book Fair at Kirkwood Train Station. Read more.

Till next time, good words to you,

Peter

Peter

 

 

 

Fresh Views of Hemingway from Rick Skwiot, Paul Hendrickson, Woody Allen and Me

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By Peter H. Green

Recent Works on Hemingway—Rick Skwiot’s new novel, Key West Story, Paul Hendrickson’s Hemingway’s Boat and Woody Allen’s comeback film, “Midnight in Paris,” which recently garnered a Golden Globe for Best Screenplay—prompted me to read The Sun Also Rises, the prizewinning author’s first novel, considered by many to be the best first novel by an American of all time.

In a review on Amazon.com I said St. Louis Writers Guild member Rick’s Skwiot’s latest novel is “a rich and timely contribution to this hearty literary stew. This work stands alone as an intimate portrait of a struggling writer’s close buddy and mentor relationship with a great author in his youthful prime, perhaps coincidentally similar, perhaps the man himself, reincarnate in his main character Nick Adams. Con (for Constantine) Martens, the protagonist in this self-actualization adventure, tolerates his new patrons’ and coach’s moniker Conman, as he joins a sunken treasure quest in Gulfstream waters to satisfy his more immediate need for cash to settle his bills and turn the lights back on.  A work in progress for at least six years, this novel gives us a new personal insight into what it might have been like to know the man and profit from solid advice generously offered from the master’s creative core where, for a writer, the rubber meets the road.” Read more.

In Hemingway’s Boat Paul Hendrickson searches for the human side of this much-maligned author. This well researched biography seeks out the causes of his brain numbing alcoholism, irascibility and downright cruelty in later years to his friends and to those he loved best. Chasing down original sources, some previously ignored – such as his protégé Arnold Samuelsson and his secretary’s new husband diplomat Walter Houk – as well as his youngest son Gregory (Gigi, pronounced Giggy) he uncovers the moving story of the master’s rise to the top of the literary and sportsman’s world and his ultimate decline through his later obsession with fame and struggle to defend his self-image, despite his declining sensitivity, output and health.

And if you haven’t seen “Midnight in Paris,” you should. We time travel back to earlier eras in Paris history: that of the lost generation of the 1920s and earlier literary times. This is Woody Allen at his creative best, finally stepping aside and allowing someone else to take the lead acting role and focusing his genius where it really belongs, on creating and crafting the story.

All this brings me back to Paris at the time of the lost generation and Hemingway’s remarkable first novel. The title The Sun Also Rises comes from Ecclesiastes, and Jake Barnes, a Paris-based American journalist, can be seen as the suffering protagonist in the biblical story as he joins his Parisian expatriate friends in a trip to Pamplona for the July fiesta and the bullfights. Impotent due to a war injury, he is in love with Brett, who in her current marriage is Lady Brett Ashley, wife of a British nobleman. She toys idly with the men in her group, having had brief fling with Robert Cohn and gained him as a doting worshipper. She is seeking a divorce so she can wed another Brit “writer”, Mike—a drunkard, moocher, loudmouthed bully, womanizer, Jew-baiter and braggart, with few redeeming qualities. He rides and baits Cohn mercilessly, as he lives off Lady Ashley’s stipend.  When Brett, bored and disgusted with them all, becomes infatuated with a promising and comely nineteen-year-old bullfighter,  Barnes and the other suitors receive  knockout punches from Cohn, in a fit of justified rage at the ragging from his comrades. Jake Barnes forgives and tolerates them all. Originally a Catholic, he is the only one in the group that will admit to being religious. While they seek pleasure, he seems to live less for self indulgence and more for vicarious experience, absorbing the  local people’s appreciation of the beauty of the landscape, the color of the fiesta,  the nobility of the bullfighter’s art and the dignity of the faithful Catholic population.

For a writer, it’s all about the way words are used to create the emotion. The word play among the expats, the author’s literal rendering in English of the idiosyncrasies of the locals’ Spanish and French expressions and the dialogue’s bite into the characters’ flesh as they love, tolerate, and abuse each other, in the most concise and simple phrasing imaginable, show us the master at his first shining moment.

Until next time, as John Ciardi would say, 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

A Tale of Two Artists in a Japanese Prison Camp

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In September1939 Edwin Smyth left his signwriting business in Clacton-on-Sea, a picturesque Essex village on the English Channel, for duty to his country in the Royal Artillery. After serving in England and Sumatra, he was captured by the Japanese in Java on March 4, 1942 and sent back to Japan to Hiroshima #6 Omine-Machi (Sanyo prison camp) to work in a coal mine. When he came down with dysentery, his sign painting talents earned him a special duty job at the prison camp. But after six weeks, presumably because he showed signs of recovery, he was sent back to the mine.

Edwin G. C. Smyth

Edwin G. C. Smyth by L. L. Rogers

At the hospital he encountered another artist, Leonard L.Rogers, a Marine sergeant. After the liberation, when it was time to sail for home, Rogers sketched an elaborate plaque for him as a farewell souvenir, part of which is shown here.

I learned about all of this from Edwin Smyth’s son, Terry, who read my October, 2009, post (below) and recognized the drawing style and the signature as the same as that of his father’s fellow prisoner, L. L. Rogers. In a letter from Guam on September 15, 1945, Dad wrote:

Our party last night was quiet. I felt a strong impulse to drink up everything in sight and couldn’t get enough into me…

Nobody bothered us, we weren’t very noisy and two liberated prisoners of war spent the evening with us…we settled down to some serious drinking and I haven’t any idea what time we actually broke up. Nobody bothered us, we weren’t very noisy and two liberated prisoners of war spent the evening with us…one was a very fascinating guy named Gabby Kohl, who talked and talked and told us all about what had happened, where they’d been, how they had reacted and filled us full of details that were tremendously absorbing. Gabby was back tonight and is coming again tomorrow night.  He was in radio in a mild sort of way before he joined the Marine Corps…and now thinks he may return to Shanghai where he knows lots of people and which he likes very much. They were prisoners of war for four years. Pictures showing him before and after liberation are very sobering evidence.

Because of the September 22nd date on the WXLI sketch, about a week after first series of parties at Armed Forces Radio Station WXLI that my father describes, it’s evident that the other prisoner in the room with Gabby Kohl and Dad was L. L. Rogers. Too bad he didn’t write down those details, but I understand why: that was the type of information he kept out of his upbeat reports to us at home. They would have been too sad. As Terry Smyth told me in his e-mail message:

I have one letter from Leonard to my father dated 7 December 1945. At that time he was living at 3808 Mason Avenue, Tacoma, Washington. Over the years, I have tried to discover whether I could contact any relatives but to no avail. I still hanker after making that connection. In the letter he says that he has a job awaiting him in ‘advertising layout’. While the letter is generally upbeat in tone for me the most poignant passage is this:

‘We shall always have many memories of the past to reflect upon and no one will be able to share them because they will never know how we prisoners spent months rotting in hell’.

In all seriousness, I cannot really follow that.

With best wishes.  Terry Smyth, Leavenheath, Suffolk, England

And I can’t really follow that, either. If you know anything about Leonard L. Rogers, USMC,  or Edwin Smyth, patriots and artists extraordinaire, please let me know.

Regards till next time,

Peter