Guest Post: The Idea of Cuba in Heir Apparent by Neil S. Plakcy

Please welcome back author Neil S. Plakcy to the blog today. When he was last here back in late January, he discussed how his story, "Cabbage Key," came to be in the anthology, Cupid Shot Me: Valentine Tales of Love, Mystery & Suspense. Mr. Plakcy is back today to explain the background of his tale in the Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes in the Psychedelic Sixties anthology. Edited by Mr. Michael Bracken and published by Down & Out Books, Mr. Plakcy is the sixth author in the read to appear here regarding this book.

 

The Idea of Cuba in Heir Apparent

 

When I moved to Miami in 1986, Miami Vice was in the middle of its run. I was working on the construction of a new festival marketplace in downtown Miami, and nearly every day I saw something that reminded me of the show—whether it was a taping going on as I drove past, or the iconic Brickell Avenue building with the hole carved out, or an evening out on the decaying deco streets of the beach.

I quickly learned about the Cuban flavor of Miami. Our receptionist had been born on the island and raised in Miami, and she kept us up to date on all the current telenovelas (whether we wanted to know or not.) One of our construction managers was a Juban. His grandparents were Ashkenazi Jews who hadn’t been able to emigrate to the US, so had settled for Cuba instead. He’d been born there, but his family left the island soon after Castro’s rise.

We ate lunch at a Cuban café we nicknamed “Carbon monoxide and flies,” because it was open to the street. Sometimes we got dinner at Versailles, pronounced ver-SIGH-ez, a Cuban icon in Little Havana with crystal chandeliers and a diner menu. When we were off site, we stopped at ventanas, walk-up windows serving tiny cups of strong Cuban coffee.

I learned about the Cubans who had left the island as soon as Batista fell, to preserve their wealth. Much of what we call South Beach, south of Fifth Street, consisted of decaying buildings holding those who fled the island through the port of Mariel in 1980. Then there were regular reports of rafts washing up on the shores of Miami Beach, islanders so desperate to escape that they trusted their lives to flimsy boats and homemade constructions of used automobile tires and a sheet for a sail.

So when Michael Bracken asked if I’d be interested in contributing to an anthology of stories about private eyes in the swinging sixties, I immediately thought of the Cubans I’d met and how varied their stories were.

My friend Elisa’s doctor father was an early anti-Castro activist, and he barely escaped by traveling to a medical conference in Florida in 1960. When his pregnant nineteen-year-old wife returned to their apartment after seeing him off, carrying my one-year-old friend in her arms, she discovered the apartment had been sealed off by the Cuban police. Her mother’s escape was an amazing story involving the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and a stopover in the Bahamas.

My grad school classmate Richard Blanco, the inaugural poet, says that he was conceived in Spain, born in Cuba, and raised in the US. I met people who had lost great wealth to Castro, and those who had sold everything to pay smugglers for a way out of the country.

Lincoln Road Mall (1960)

There were so many stories—which one resonated with me? I had spent time on the streets of South Beach while they were still locked in the sixties, so I felt that I knew the area. But which one could I tell? Who would my private eye be?

I wanted to understand what it was like to be gay in the middle of the 1960s counterculture. 1968 was a year of great sexual freedom and national change, from the Tet Offensive in Vietnam to the landmark Civil Rights act.

I’d heard so many stories about Miami Beach that I had to put George Clay there, in an office with a malfunctioning air conditioner, over a Chinese restaurant. I knew that as a straight-appearing Navy veteran, he’d be disdainful of an over-the-top client who looked and dressed like Liberace. But he was starved for clients, so he overcame that feeling to determine if the older man’s boyfriend was cheating on him.

That led me into the city’s Cuban connections, and a noirish plot involving wealthy emigres and a nascent plot to overthrow Castro. If you’re interested to see how it all works out, I hope you’ll read “Heir Apparent” in Groovy Gumshoes.

(And yes, the title of this essay is a nod to Wallace Stevens and “The Idea of Order at Key West.”)

 

 

Neil S. Plakcy ©2022

Neil S. Plakcy is the author of over fifty mystery and romance novels, including the best-selling golden retriever mysteries and the highly acclaimed Mahu series, a four-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. A Lefty winner, his stories have been featured in the Bouchercon anthology Florida Happens, Malice Domestic’s Murder Most Conventional and the 2022 MWA anthology Crime Hits Home and others.He is a professor of English at Broward College in South Florida, where he lives with his husband and their rambunctious golden retrievers. His website is www.mahubooks.com.

Guest Post: UNDERCASE G by Stephen D. Rogers

Long time readers of this blog know that I have reviewed and enjoyed some of Mr. Stephen D. Rodgers work. He is another one of those authors that I like, but have a hard time keeping current reading wise, as he has so much going on at a variety of markets. I was thrilled when he recently reached out and asked to do a guest post on writing and his new short story in the Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes in the Psychedelic Sixties anthology. Without further ado, please welcome Stephen D. Rodgers to the blog today.

 

 

 

UNDERCASE G by Stephen D. Rogers

 

It's not uncommon to consider writers the gods of the stories they create, able to shape geographical features, control the weather, and fashion human beings out of nothing more than words.  For me, at least, that's not even close to true. 

When I'm writing a short story, I'm not God with a capital G, not god with a lowercase G, not even god with an undercase G, which I don't know how to represent.  Subscript? 

Instead, I'm a servant to story, character, and art.

 

First, story.  Yes, I can make things happen.  Lightning!  Plague!  Plot twist!  In rough draft, anyway.  Once editing begins, which starts while producing said rough draft, anything that doesn't serve the story goes.

 

(And that was a heck of a lightning bolt.  One of my best.)

 

Second, character.  A character is burning desire complicated by everything that keeps that desire from being appeased.  A writer can force a character do or say anything.  Anything that doesn't relate to desire or its frustration must then be cut.

 

(Novels are more tolerant of looser writing than short stories.  Or so some writers would like to believe.)

 

Finally, art, which is less pretentious than it could be.  In writing, art encompasses the sounds of the words, the flow of the sentences, the rhythm of the punctuation.  Clarity.  Truth.

 

(Maybe pretentious with a lowercase P.)

 

Sometimes, the situation is even less empowering.  Take "Ugly" (Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes in the Psychedelic Sixties), for example, a story which was born not out of muse-infused inspiration but assignment:  write a private eye story that takes place during the 1960s.

 

Honestly, if you need to believe you're the one in charge, stay as far away as you can from writing.  Maybe try children.

 

 

Stephen D. Rodgers ©2022

 

Stephen D. Rogers is a multi-published writer of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Over eight hundred of his stories and poems have been selected to appear in more than three hundred publications, earning among other honors two "Best of Soft SF" winners, two Derringers (with seven additional finalists), a Shamus Award nomination, a Black Orchid Novella finalist, a Rhysling nomination, two "Notable Online Stories" from storySouth's Million Writers Award, honorable mention in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, mention in The Best American Mystery Stories, and numerous Readers's Choice awards. Stephen is a proud member of the Mystery Writers of America, the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Short Mystery Fiction Society. Learn more, including a list of current publications, at https://www.stephendrogers.com/index.html

Guest Post: Groovy Gumshoes: My Story by Andrew Welsh-Huggins

Please welcome author Andrew Welsh-Huggins to the blog today. Like Tom Milani,  Steve Liskow, and Mark Troy, Andre Welsh-Huggins has a short story in the upcoming anthology, Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes In The Psychedelic Sixties. Edited by Michael Bracken, the book is scheduled to come out Monday, April 11^th, from Down & Out Books.

 

Groovy Gumshoes: My Story

By Andrew Welsh-Huggins

 

          Setting out to write a private eye story set in the 1960s, I felt I had all the necessary elements. What I lacked at first was the spark to bring them to life.

          For starters, I possessed actual memories. Born in 1961, I was around for a decent chunk of the decade. I remember images of soldiers on TV; being told by an elementary school teacher in the wake of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination that even making the shape of a gun with my fingers was forbidden (talk about more innocent times); and my parents awakening me to watch the first man on the moon. I also have fond memories of tearing around town on my bike with its banana seat, “cooking” up plastic bugs with a Mattel Thingmaker, and building snowmen after one of that era’s epic snowfalls.

          Next, I had a location. Nowadays, I set most of my crime fiction in and around my adopted home of Columbus, Ohio. But I knew right away I wanted a story that played out in the Finger Lakes, where I largely grew up after my father took a job in Rochester. I went so far as to set a scene in tiny Lima—“The Crossroads of Western New York”—the town along Route 20 where we lived and I went to school. Small, quiet and safe, Lima was the sort of place you could walk half a mile to the library at age six and hardly anyone batted an eye. (My parents didn’t, anyway). As a bonus, the tavern where my fictional private eye is hired—the American Hotel—still exists, practically unchanged.

          Finally, I had a character. I named my gumshoe Jerry Hollister, a nod to a formative book series, The Happy Hollisters, that I devoured as a child. The books were published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which also put out Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, but were marketed to a slightly younger set of readers. They featured a family of five kids living in fictional “Shoreham,” who used wit and pluck to solve mysteries with hardly any of the constraints on exploration that we’re used to in these days of helicopter parenting. Unlike many Stratemeyer books, The Happy Hollisters were all written by one person, Andrew Svenson, who wrote under the pseudonym Jerry West—hence Jerry Hollister. (Happily, these books are back in print thanks to the efforts of Svenson’s grandson.) The name in place, I made my character a Vietnam vet and ex-Rochester cop who takes the private route after becoming disillusioned with the police force.

          So: I had memories of the 1960s; a location; and a character. What I lacked was a plot.

          Eventually, a dislocated memory started me off. It involved a family visit to the house of someone my parents knew. A young couple—possibly teachers—who lived in the country and cultivated a large garden. I’m pretty sure they kept chickens, and possibly rabbits. Crucially, I recalled the husband—boyfriend?—sporting a decade-appropriate long beard. And that’s about it. Both my parents have passed and so the specifics are forever lost. But perhaps just as well. That one memory was enough to trigger an idea for a story that finds my private eye searching for a young wife and mother who absconds with a ganga-smoking guru into the hills overlooking one of the Finger Lakes.

          And so Jerry Hollister was born, thanks to the quirk of fate that transplanted my midwestern parents to western New York State. Better yet, he appears for the first time in my short story, "Building Something Better," in the upcoming Groovy Gumshoes anthology. One story into Hollister's career, I kind of like the guy. Hanging around with him in my head, it makes me miss those days. It was nice to go back for a while.

 

Andrew Welsh-Huggins ©2022

Andrew Welsh-Huggins is the author of the Andy Hayes private eye series, featuring a former Ohio State and Cleveland Browns quarterback turned investigator, and the editor of the anthology Columbus Noir. Andrew's nonfiction book, No Winners Here Tonight, is the definitive history of the death penalty in Ohio. Andrew's short mystery fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mystery Magazine, Mystery Tribune, the 2021 Bouchercon anthology This Time For Sure, and other magazines and anthologies. His standalone suspense thriller, The End Of The Road, is due out in 2023 from Mysterious Press. Learn more at https://www.andrewwelshhuggins.com/

Guest Post: Writing “Sundown Town” by Mark Troy

Please welcome author and my friend, Mark Troy, back to the blog today. Like Tom Milani and Steve Liskow who previously appeared here, Mark Troy also has a tale in the upcoming Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes in the Psychedelic Sixties anthology. Edited by Michael Bracken, the anthology is currently scheduled to come out in April 2022.  

 

When Michael Bracken put out his call for submissions to Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes in the Psychedelic Sixties, I had to jump on it. The sixties are my era. I entered high school in 1961 and graduated from college in 1969. The best music, the best literature, and the best cinema were produced in the sixties. As I look back, I think that the issue that defined the decade was segregation and the struggle for civil rights. For a time, the Vietnam war nearly overshadowed the civil rights cause, but eventually it became clear that the two issues were tightly bound up by racism. Our leaders were sending black men halfway around the world to kill brown men. Leaders who tried to prevent that were assassinated.

I was born near St. Louis, Missouri and that’s where I’d spent the sixties. I’d never written a story set in St. Louis, so this presented an opportunity. It also presented a challenge. Michael had suggested that the stories involve the events of the decade, not as background, but as an integral part of the story. However, the big headline events of that era, the ones that captured everyone’s attention and which determined the course of our lives for decades to come, all seemed to occur elsewhere. If I was going to write about St. Louis, I would have to dig deeper into its history. I hoped to find something that, while it might not have been a major event at the time, was nevertheless indicative of that era and became more important in the future.

In 1968, a black family sought to buy a home in Ferguson, Missouri. If successful, they would be the first.

Ferguson is a suburban St. Louis city which bordered my home town. Growing up, I knew nothing of Ferguson’s history. It was a pleasant community where Mom took us shopping for back-to-school clothes and where we went on Saturdays to see the movies. The fact that all of the residents were white did not register with me at the time. Even if it had, I would not have known that structural racism was the cause.

Ferguson was a sundown town. Non-whites who were found within the city limits after sundown were subject to harassment and arrest. At one time, the city might have posted signs saying that colored were not allowed there after sundown. By the time the sixties rolled around, such signs were no longer permissible, but the city remained a de facto sundown town. Redlining was the method of enforcement. Realtors would not show homes in redlined areas to non-whites. Banks would not lend to non-whites for homes in those areas. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 was designed to put an end to redlining. In reality, the act pushed it below the surface.

Had the Fair Housing Act done as intended, had it been enforced, the pioneer black family might have had an easier time purchasing their home in Ferguson. Despite the resistance of realtors who didn’t even return phone calls, they persisted with the help of a white clergyman. Threats and intimidation followed. Eventually they prevailed, but it would be forty years before the story of their struggle and eventual success was told. By that time, many more families of color had moved into Ferguson. The city, from the outside, seemed an example of what the Fair Housing Act was designed to accomplish. But the shadow of racism is long. Institutional racism didn’t go away; it just mutated into a more toxic form. And so, in the summer of 2014, Ferguson exploded.

In 1968, the nation was torn apart by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. The fires were stoked by the rhetoric of George Wallace. Nevertheless we had made progress on civil rights and we repudiated George Wallace at the ballot box. Jim Crow appeared, if not dead, then soon to be. We dared to hope. It was the dawning of the age of aquarius. In hindsight, we were naive.

My take on the story of Ferguson is that we underestimated the staying power of the beast. The busting of redlining was a victory in the fight against racism, but then we let our guard down.

I began the story with a white private eye. He was something of a hippie, a member of the counter-culture, but I soon realized he wouldn’t do. His hope blinded him to the reality of what was happening. I needed someone who had faced the beast, who was more grounded in reality, whose hope was tempered with cynicism.

Meet Horatio Cutter, a black man recently returned from Vietnam. His weapon is a camera. He does freelance assignments for a white private eye firm. His ambition is to one day get his own PI license. Horatio has struggled for equality all his life, but it’s only when assigned to gather photographic evidence of the radical activities of a white clergyman that he confronts institutionalized racism head on. Though he enjoys a small measure of victory over the beast, the victory, as we all know, wasn’t final.

I’m honored and proud that “Sundown Town” will appear in Groovy Gumshoes with fourteen other far out stories by great writers. Look for it in April from Down & Out Books.

 

Mark Troy © 2022

Mark Troy is the author of Pilikia Is My Business, a private eye novel published in 2001 and republished in 2010. Pilikia was nominated for a Shamus Award by the Private Eye Writers of America for Best 1st P.I. Novel. Game Face, a collection of short stories featuring P.I. Val Lyon, was published in 2011. The Rules, the first story in the Ava Rome series, was published as an ebook and audiobook in 2013 followed by The Splintered Paddle, a novel in 2014. You can learn more about me and my books at my website: https://marktroyauthor.com/

Guest Post: On Writing “Kick Out the Jams” by Steve Liskow

Please welcome back Steve Liskow to the blog today. Like Tom Milani who recently shared his experience of writing his short story, A Hard Night In Hamburg, for the Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes in the Psychedelic Sixties anthology, Steve Liskow has a story in the anthology. Today he shares the background for his tale, Kick Out The Jams. Edited by Michael Bracken, the book is currently scheduled to come out in April. One gets the feeling that April is destined to be a busy month for anthology readers.

 

Some time ago, Michael Bracken posted a submission call for Groovy Gumshoes, Psychedelic PIs in the Sixties. He encouraged writers to use a real historical event in the story, and I graduated from high school in 1965, so I knew the turf.

But what major event? We saw several assassinations, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, Vietnam, Woodstock…so many choices. I wanted one nobody else would select so I’d stand apart.

Then I remembered the riots.

I attended Oakland University’s summer session in 1967. Oakland County lies just north of Detroit. About 85% of the Oakland students were residents of the Detroit Metropolitan area, and many lived on campus to avoid the commute.

One Monday morning in July, CKLW radio reported that police had raided a “blind pig” Sunday night. By Monday afternoon, organized resistance swept the city. My dorm mates and I watched the television coverage as the fires grew and demonstrators kept fire fighters at bay with bottles and rocks. The Detroit police actually had radio stations stop playing the Doors’ “Light My Fire,” number three on the charts.

Over the next four days, 100 blocks burned, including the homes of two of my dorm mates. One watched his house collapse on ABC evening news. I don’t remember his name, but I still see his face.

My room mate at the time became an attorney in Detroit, and I asked him to email me pictures. I had a Detroit map because my Woody Guthrie series is set in Detroit already. I had albums by the Motown groups, Bob Seger, The Amboy Dukes, The Stooges, and the MC5. The following winter, the MC5 recorded their first LP live at the Grande (pronounced GRAN-DEE) Ballroom in Detroit, including the song “The Motor City’s Burning.” They performed at the Grande the weekend after the National Guard arrested thousands of people. Their famous (censored) album cut was “Kick Out The Jams,” introduced by the singer as “Kick Out the Jams, Mother F#*@&s,” the last part being sloppily dubbed to “brothers and sisters,” but not until the record’s second pressing.

There was my title. I gave my PI a case following a radical young woman who had a lot to do with starting the fireworks. I wrote the first draft in two days and kept polishing the dialogue and details.

It will appear in Groovy Gumshoes sometime in April. I hope you’ll pick up a copy and take a walk down memory lane, even though there are some dark spots along the way. That’s what noir’s all about, innit?

 

Steve Liskow © 2022 

Steve Liskow (www.steveliskow.com) has published 16 novels and 40 short stories in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Tough, Mystery Magazine, and various anthologies. Before Covid-19 appeared, he conducted fiction writing workshops at libraries throughout central Connecticut. He has appeared on panels for both MWA and SinC, and blogs on Sleuthsayers.org. He has been a finalist for both the Edgar Award and the Shamus Award, has won Honorable Mention for the Al Blanchard Story Award four times, and was the first two-time winner of the Black Orchid Novella Award. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, Barbara, a costumed tour guide at the Mark Twain House.

 

Guest Post: Writing “A Hard Night in Hamburg” by Tom Milani

Please welcome Tom Milani to the blog today with a guest post on writing a short story for the Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes in the Psychedelic Sixties anthology. Edited by Michael Bracken, the anthology is currently scheduled to come out in April 2022.  

 

Writing “A Hard Night in Hamburg” by Tom Milani

 

Somewhere on social media I saw a question: If you could go back in time to see any band perform, which band would it be? I thought about it and decided I’d want to see the Beatles in Hamburg. Before Beatlemania and the screaming crowds, before the band was in its final form. The time when the Beatles were becoming The Beatles.

Sometime later, Michael Bracken issued a call for Groovy Gumshoes, an anthology of stories that take place during the 1960s and feature a PI. He noted that prominent events of the 1960s could be featured (such as Woodstock), but added that they needed to be integral to the plot. I immediately knew the setting of my story: Hamburg, Germany, 1960.

For period details I consulted Mark Lewisohn’s invaluable Tune In, The Beatles: All These Years, Volume 1, and Tim Riley’s Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music—The Definitive Life. Lewisohn’s descriptions of Hamburg and its nightclub scene and period photos in both books informed the atmosphere of the story. Google Earth and Google Maps helped me understand the layout of the city.

The setup was simple. Richter, my protagonist, is hired by Major Waters to find the killer of Philip, his son. A sailor in the Navy, Philip was killed while on liberty in Hamburg. At that point, I didn’t know much about Richter. He was a loner and a combat veteran who was willing to work outside the law. But as I wrote, his character came into focus, and I began to see how the case could become personal for him. A writer friend of mine read a draft and felt that the ending wasn’t supported by events earlier in the story. That comment caused me to revise Richter’s view of Hamburg and his place in it. Doing so raised the stakes for him, which ultimately reshaped the ending.

Richter recognizes the Beatles’ future before they do. That recognition spurs him to finally examine his own life, to consider his future beyond the next job. I didn’t know any of this when I started writing, but with a little help from a friend, and by immersing myself in Richter’s world, the ending became clear.

I’m honored to be part of this collection, which will be published early next year, and am looking forward to reading each contributor’s take on the decade.

Tom Milani ©2021

Tom Milani's novel Blues for the Road was shortlisted in the St. Martin/Private Eye Writers of America contest. Tom is a member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime. For 10 years, he edited The Masik, the online journal of Qajaq USA, and for the last 25 years, he has been a technical editor for a federally funded research and development center. Tom has a BA and an MA from George Mason University, where he studied writing under Richard Bausch and Steve Goodwin. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia, with his wife, glass artist Alison Sigethy. His website is https://www.tommilani.com/