THE OLD YELLOWING MANUSCRIPT IN THE CARDBOARD BOX TRICK
One day, while mauling my way through huge piles of old cardboard boxes at the annex of the State Archives, I found a large pack of very old yellowing parchment. This turned out to be the record of a trial--Fry versus Jenkes--that had taken place in Rhode Island in 1774.
We weren't yet a nation then, but the problem of slavery that would haunt the country for the next hundred years (and some say longer) was set out in fine detail in the lawsuit. This was a case of murder that was being tried, though it could not be called murder. Destruction of property was the designation when a sea captain ended the life of a slave under his command.
All the men who had gone on that long voyage to Surinam gave their testimony, and almost all condemned the behavior of their shipmaster. But he was acquitted in a court of law, and again triumphed when he won the appeal.
A lot of things had worked in his favor, including the fact that a sea captain was allowed almost any latitude when dealing with his men. It was not for nothing that the crew in those days was rarely called the crew. They were almost always known as “the ship's people.” And the shipmaster was the “king” of his people.
After reading through the documents of the trial, and memorizing them, I decided that there would have to be another court where this crime would be tried. I took all the facts (and the title) from the depositions given by the men who made that voyage. I freighted them into a fictional package called THE WINTER'S COAST and brought them screaming into a new court of public opinion.
THE WINTER'S COAST is available only as an ebook at Amazon.com (if you click on the name) and BarnesandNoble.com (ditto).
Hope y'all enjoy it.
David
P.S. THE WINTER'S COAST tells the story of a slave as the American Revolution is about to begin. I've also written a three part story--two novels and a nonfiction book--that deals with the same period in a wider ranging narrative. GONE OVER, THE BRIMSTONE PAPERS and BEGGARMAN, SPY are the names to know if you're interested in how this nation was really formed and the lives really led by people at that time. Their lives were harder, but much wilder and more interesting than any history will ever tell you.
The books can be found online at amazon, b&n, apple, etc.
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Saturday, July 2, 2011
There will be a nice ad in tomorrow's New York Times Sunday Book Review for the Israel Potter Series. It would be even nicer if we had the space to run this complete review of Gone Over, the first book in the series.
Gone Over by David Chacko and Alexander Kulcsar Foremost Press,2009
At the close of Gone Over, David Chacko and Alexander Kulcsar’s rambunctious, fantastic historical novel, James DeWolfe, honorable senator from Rhode Island, addresses a fractious crowd: “Washington, Franklin, Greene. Warren, Revere, Hancock, Adams. All gone. Long gone. The man we honor here today is a reminder of a time when gods walked among us. Men who fought not for personal gain but for honor and country. Who fought the War of Revolution that freed us from tyranny forever!”
The honoree here is Israel Potter, that vaguely Falstaffian figure in the history of the American Revolution, the raffish old hero of Bunker Hill. Potter first told the twisting, remarkable story of his life to Henry Trumbull, author and antiquarian son of poor benighted Norwich, Connecticut, and decades later Herman Melville found that same material irresistible and used it to write his Israel Potter, His Fifty Years of Exile. Chacko and Kulcsar have been equally tempted, and the novel they’ve written deserves the widest possible readership. Calling this book one of the best historical novels of the year is only the beginning of the praise it deserves;in its wit, excitement, and sometimes mordant insight into human nature, it’s every bit the equal of Melville’s neglected classic.
The open secret at the heart of both books – and shining from every page of Trumbull’s original account – is that Israel Potter was, in the parlance of a later day, a big fat liar. The life story he spun is full of meetings with royalty, midnight encounters, hairsbreadth escapes … in short, all the things with which a man might fill his autobiography if he were reasonably sure there was nobody left in the world to contradict him. In Gone Over Trumbull finds the aged Potter working in a whorehouse and induces him to tell his story, even though Potter is the first to warn him about that story:
"Let's make a bargain, Mister Trumbull. I’ll tell you the truth, and we’ll decide what the world should know. Too much truth could lose me my pension, and you your reputation.”
“So your life is a scandal.”
“Worse,” he said seriously. “I’m a man without a country, or even a cause. It wasn’t that way in the beginning, though. We were just men who sailed to serve America. We put out from Plymouth in the brigantine Washington, but we were taken prisoner by the British and sent to England. That’s where this story begins. With a question. After a man sails past the gates of hell, what does he find?”
“You tell me.”
“Death or tomorrow,” he said without a smile.
Potter tells his story, and our authors work in a great deal of atmosphere and research in the pages that follow (they previously collaborated on an actual biography of Potter, to the extent such a thing is possible). Since Melville’s book is almost totally unknown to the modern reading public, readers won’t know that Chacko and Kulcsar are doing a bit of homage to Israel Potter by making Gone Over primarily a thrilling adventure story. Their Potter has more than his share of dangerous adventures, and all are narrated with a clean, knowing efficiency.
Israel heard a noise that for a moment overrode the sound of his own footsteps on the cobblestones. It was not other footsteps, but a higher, slicker sound that went on a bit longer than any sound like it.
Israel knew when he turned that he would be facing a sword, and that it would be the brightest thing in the narrow street at three-thirty in the morning.
It was that. He could see by the outline that it was a light dueling blade that made up in speed what it lacked in weight. Israel had nothing with him but the knife he had bought in Portsmouth. The only advantage he had was his familiarity with the weapon and his opponent’s ignorance of it.
“Close enough,” said Israel.
The recent success of HBO’s John Adams mini-series demonstrated that Americans are still fascinated by the actual lives their Founding Fathers lived, fascinated by the gaps, the human lacunae, in those storied biographies. Israel Potter lurks on the far fringes of the American pantheon, half-myth even to the men and women who knew him, and maybe that makes him all the more inviting. Certainly the old rascal himself would have been immensely pleased with the first-rate yarn our authors have spun in Gone Over.
Do yourself a favor: skip the latest doorstop biography of Washington and read this wonderful book instead.
Steve Donoghue in Open Letters Monthly
Gone Over by David Chacko and Alexander Kulcsar Foremost Press,2009
At the close of Gone Over, David Chacko and Alexander Kulcsar’s rambunctious, fantastic historical novel, James DeWolfe, honorable senator from Rhode Island, addresses a fractious crowd: “Washington, Franklin, Greene. Warren, Revere, Hancock, Adams. All gone. Long gone. The man we honor here today is a reminder of a time when gods walked among us. Men who fought not for personal gain but for honor and country. Who fought the War of Revolution that freed us from tyranny forever!”
The honoree here is Israel Potter, that vaguely Falstaffian figure in the history of the American Revolution, the raffish old hero of Bunker Hill. Potter first told the twisting, remarkable story of his life to Henry Trumbull, author and antiquarian son of poor benighted Norwich, Connecticut, and decades later Herman Melville found that same material irresistible and used it to write his Israel Potter, His Fifty Years of Exile. Chacko and Kulcsar have been equally tempted, and the novel they’ve written deserves the widest possible readership. Calling this book one of the best historical novels of the year is only the beginning of the praise it deserves;in its wit, excitement, and sometimes mordant insight into human nature, it’s every bit the equal of Melville’s neglected classic.
The open secret at the heart of both books – and shining from every page of Trumbull’s original account – is that Israel Potter was, in the parlance of a later day, a big fat liar. The life story he spun is full of meetings with royalty, midnight encounters, hairsbreadth escapes … in short, all the things with which a man might fill his autobiography if he were reasonably sure there was nobody left in the world to contradict him. In Gone Over Trumbull finds the aged Potter working in a whorehouse and induces him to tell his story, even though Potter is the first to warn him about that story:
"Let's make a bargain, Mister Trumbull. I’ll tell you the truth, and we’ll decide what the world should know. Too much truth could lose me my pension, and you your reputation.”
“So your life is a scandal.”
“Worse,” he said seriously. “I’m a man without a country, or even a cause. It wasn’t that way in the beginning, though. We were just men who sailed to serve America. We put out from Plymouth in the brigantine Washington, but we were taken prisoner by the British and sent to England. That’s where this story begins. With a question. After a man sails past the gates of hell, what does he find?”
“You tell me.”
“Death or tomorrow,” he said without a smile.
Potter tells his story, and our authors work in a great deal of atmosphere and research in the pages that follow (they previously collaborated on an actual biography of Potter, to the extent such a thing is possible). Since Melville’s book is almost totally unknown to the modern reading public, readers won’t know that Chacko and Kulcsar are doing a bit of homage to Israel Potter by making Gone Over primarily a thrilling adventure story. Their Potter has more than his share of dangerous adventures, and all are narrated with a clean, knowing efficiency.
Israel heard a noise that for a moment overrode the sound of his own footsteps on the cobblestones. It was not other footsteps, but a higher, slicker sound that went on a bit longer than any sound like it.
Israel knew when he turned that he would be facing a sword, and that it would be the brightest thing in the narrow street at three-thirty in the morning.
It was that. He could see by the outline that it was a light dueling blade that made up in speed what it lacked in weight. Israel had nothing with him but the knife he had bought in Portsmouth. The only advantage he had was his familiarity with the weapon and his opponent’s ignorance of it.
“Close enough,” said Israel.
The recent success of HBO’s John Adams mini-series demonstrated that Americans are still fascinated by the actual lives their Founding Fathers lived, fascinated by the gaps, the human lacunae, in those storied biographies. Israel Potter lurks on the far fringes of the American pantheon, half-myth even to the men and women who knew him, and maybe that makes him all the more inviting. Certainly the old rascal himself would have been immensely pleased with the first-rate yarn our authors have spun in Gone Over.
Do yourself a favor: skip the latest doorstop biography of Washington and read this wonderful book instead.
Steve Donoghue in Open Letters Monthly
Monday, June 27, 2011
KILL THE PIANO PLAYER!
The Mystery-Central Blog is now open for give, take, and everything but confusion. My name is David Chacko, and Mystery-Central is what I called my website when I started it ten years ago. I never did much with the site because I thought of it the same way that book publishers thought of ebooks—they didn't think at all.
E was never E in that alphabet. It was e. And the guys in the cashmere sweaters thought—when they thought at all--in CAPS. Still, I knew I was onto something when I picked the name Mystery-Central out of the air. It came easily. Naturally. Nothing else could be done with something so whole.
I suppose the reason the words came to mind had to do with some of the things that had happened around me. The violence. The killings. We all like to think those things happen to someone else and far away. Or at least far enough. That's why we watch television and that's why we have magic wands to shut down the noise and the blood when we get too much of a grisly thing.
Then within the space of about a year two murders touched my life in ways I never expected. A boy I had grown up with in the very small town where I was born was murdered on the second of one of the three short streets of Smithton, Pennsylvania.
Right there, just down the street where we used to play stick ball. We did almost everything in the street—our whole lives were spent there—and having a murder happen on Second Street was worse than it happening in church. Hell, there was more traffic in a church.
There was not much reason for the killing. Paul Steckman, the victim, was a piano player and he was gay and the massive hulk who beat him to death knew he could get away with a slap on the wrist in a place that was so backward and depressed it was like Appalachia without the drawl.
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| Smithton Formula One |
But that's enough social commentary. Just before the piano player was turned into red meat that not even a rescue helicopter could save, a man I knew was murdered in a quiet suburban community not far from where I was living at that time. Although it seemed impossible for any act of great violence to take place in the heart of upscale Barrington, Rhode Island—a town so dull it was dry—that was the first lesson the class had to learn.
The renegade who killed Ernie Brendel did it in a way that was more primitive and weird than the hyped story the prosecution told at the trial. This was a killing with a dull edge when a razor would have been much kinder. The killer, Christopher Hightower, was a con-man who had married into respectability so well that he became a Sunday School teacher; but he never left behind the bow and arrow or the war cry he had learned as a shoeless boy in Central Florida. After Hightower was done with Ernie, he murdered the wife and daughter. Probably, he buried the eight-year-old girl alive.
You need more than a wand to shut that kind of thing down. The way it comes at you and keeps coming makes you want to hit back. To hurt it. The good thing was that you never again had to ask what “it” was.
I kept hearing a noise like the release of a crossbow--an almost silent twang--until it jumped into my mind when I was looking for a name for my website.
Mystery Central.
It almost has to be said in a whisper.
And I've done some writing about crime. Twenty books and counting. Most of them can be found in the Gallery. http://www.mystery-central.com/gallery.html Just click on the covers to get more information.
They're all mysteries of some kind, and sometimes they're odd kinds, but eventually the puzzles are solved by hard-working men interpreting the facts and stringing them together and putting everything else they can find all in a row. Of course, these men want justice so badly that they sometimes bend the rules. They want it even when it's called revenge and it's said in a whisper.
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