D.W. Buffa

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on American statesmen:

Perhaps the best, but certainly the most interesting way, to get a real understanding of the present occupant of the White House is to read a biography written more than sixty years before his birth, a biography of Andrew Jackson written in 1882 as part of a series on “American Statesmen.” The author, William Graham Sumner, who taught politics and economics at Yale, quotes without adverse comment Thomas Jefferson’s remark that Jackson had no business being President, that he was, in fact, “one of the most unfit men I know for the place,” a “dangerous man” who has “very little respect for laws or constitutions.” This was especially the case after Jackson lost the presidency in what he became convinced was a stolen election.

In the election of 1824 Jackson had finished first with 99 electoral votes, but three other candidates, led by John Quincy Adams, had a total of 166. The election went to the House of Representatives. Henry Clay, who had come in fourth, threw his support to Adams, who then won the vote of 13 of the 24 states. Jackson finished second with 7. Adams became President, and Clay became Secretary of State. For those who were most zealous in their support of Jackson this was all the proof needed that Adams had bought Clay, and that had it not been for this “corrupt bargain” Jackson would have been elected. This, Sumner is convinced, would have come to Jackson “like a revelation, and his mind would close on it with a solidity of conviction which nothing could ever shake.” Four years later, when Jackson ran again, he demanded a constitutional amendment prohibiting the appointment of any member of Congress to any federal office during, or for two years following, their term in Congress. Jackson won the election, did not pursue the amendment, and appointed in one year “more members of Congress to offices than any one of his predecessors in his whole term.”

Though the administration of John Quincy Adams was, in Sumner’s judgment, “more worthy of respectable and honorable memory” than any of those that had come before it, Jackson was not interested in an objective, dispassionate analysis of what the Adams administration had done. He believed he was elected to get rid of a “federalist administration which had encroached on the liberties of the people, and had aimed to corrupt elections by the abuse of federal patronage.” His election marked the beginning of a new era in American politics. The “presidency was no longer to be the crown of public service, and the prize of a very limited number of statesmen of national reputation.” Jackson had not been elected because of a long, distinguished career in government or because of the power of his mind and the depth of his understanding; his popularity was based entirely on his “military success.” The highest office in the land would now be “reserved for popular heroes, or, in the absence of such, for ‘available’ men, as the figureheads with and around whom a faction of party leaders could come to power.”

As a popular hero, Jackson viewed his re-election in 1832 as “a triumphant vindication of him on all the points in which he had been engaged with anybody, and a kind of charter to have, as representative, or rather tribune, of the people, to go on and govern on his own judgment over and against everybody, including Congress.” Everyone was either a friend or an enemy. “To offend him was to incur extraordinary penalties.” To make sure everyone understood what he expected from his friends, he issued a message every day through The Globe, a paper under his control, a paper to which every office-holder who wished to signal his allegiance subscribed. Every day, through the paper’s editor, Jackson gave warning of what had to be done to stay in his good graces and to avoid his displeasure. His “personality came more and more into play as a political force.” The laws, the Constitution, were simply set aside. In “the midst of a surging democracy,” only the Supreme Court under the guidance of the Chief Justice, John Marshall, held the country on the course of “constitutional liberty and order.” But Marshall died, and the justices Jackson had appointed to the court brought it all to ruin, a process that reached its climax “when the court went to pieces on the Dred Scott case, trying to reach a decision which should be politically expedient, rather than one which should be legally sound.”

If, as Sumner suggests, the court had saved the country from “surging democracy,” it did so by insisting that the Constitution gave far more power to the federal government than Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic party had originally believed. For Jefferson, and for Jackson, and for everyone who had fought against what Washington and Hamilton and John Adams had tried to do, the federal government had only those limited powers expressly given it in the Constitution; all other powers were left to the States. They believed this, believed it fervently, until they had power and suddenly thought themselves the only proper judge of the powers they should have. Jackson, as President, refused to acknowledge that the States had the power to nullify an act of Congress, but it was Jefferson who changed everything. He bought Louisiana, and with that single act put the original thirteen states, including especially the Southern states, on their way to becoming a distinct minority in the country they had started. How this happened, how Andrew Jackson became possible, is told in a different volume in the American Statesmen series, the biography of one of the strangest men ever to serve in Congress, a man who, even at the time, was thought an impossibility, a man brilliant, erratic and, eventually, almost certainly insane, John Randolph, one of Thomas Jefferson’s own relations.

We hear everywhere the insistence that what someone has done will go down in history, that what has happened will be judged by history, that someone is, or is not, on the right side of history, but someone has to write that history, and the way it is written may not be anything close to what we think it is going to be. The biography, the history, of John Randolph was written by Henry Adams, and unlike most of those who call themselves historians, Henry Adams, the great- grandson of John Adams and the grandson of John Quincy Adams, knew how to write. He knew something else as well, that the only way to understand the American past is to see things the way they were seen at the time, when, without the benefit of hindsight, without the easy comfort of a retrospective judgment, those with the responsibility of governing the nation had to make decisions.

Adams begins at the beginning. John Randolph, he tells us, was born June 2, 1773, “into a world of cousins, a colonial aristocracy all its own, supported by tobacco plantations and negro labor, by colonial patronage and royal favor, or, to do it justice, by audacity, vigor, and mind.” His father died two years later, in 1775; his mother remarried three years after that, in 1778, “and meanwhile the country had plunged into a war which in a single moment cut that connectionr with England on which the old Virginian society depended for its tastes, fashions, theories, and above all for its aristocratic status in politics and law. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that America was no longer to be English, but American, that is to say, democratic and popular in all its parts, - a fact equivalent to a sentence of death upon old Virginian society, foreboding dissolution to the Randolphs with the rest, until they should learn to master the new conditions of American life.”

Randolph’s early education reflected the standard then in place. He read Shakespeare, Homer, Don Quixote, Plutarch’s Lives, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, and Tom Jones before he was eleven; Rousseau, Voltaire, Hume and Gibbon a few years after that. He had, from birth, as it were, “aristocratic prejudices” and “democratic theories.” When he made his first public speech, speaking after Patrick Henry, he was said to have held his audience for not less than three hours on the question whether it was right to resist the federal government. He was, like most Virginians, convinced that every government had a tendency toward despotism, and that only the States could provide protection against the central government.

Elected to Congress when he was only twenty-six, the Speaker of the House, Nathaniel Macon, was so fascinated by “this young Virginian Brutus, with eyes that pierced and voice that rang like the vibrations of glass,” that he made him chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Randolph had the “intense self-confidence of the Virginian…a moral superiority which became disastrous in the end from its very strength.” He could not, he would not, change his mind about anything that had to do with what he thought first principles. He became, not just disenchanted, he became an anachronism, a man without serious political support, a man thought too fanatical to trust or have anything to do with, when Thomas Jefferson decided to buy Louisiana, and with that purchase “completely changed the condition of the constitutional compact; rendering the nation, independent of the States, master of an empire immensely greater than the States themselves.” New states would have more power than the old. The federal government would now be “the measure of its own powers.”

There was one last chance to right the balance, one last chance to bring the nation back to its senses and stop the movement of power from the States to the federal government, one last chance to put an end to what the Supreme Court under John Marshall was trying to do. The impeachment of a Supreme Court Justice would force the court to change direction, to respect the sovereignty of the States and recognize that the Constitution was a compact of the States and not a contract the people had made with themselves. Samuel Chase, who had, among other misdeeds, instructed a grand jury that Jeffersonian democracy was a serious threat to liberty seemed an easy target.

Jefferson was the moving force behind Chase’s impeachment, but it was Randolph who, on January 5, 1804, made the motion for an inquiry into the conduct of Judge Chase, and when the trial finally got under way in the Senate, Randolph led the prosecution. It was his misfortune that the defense was led by “the notorious reprobate Luther Martin.” There was no comparison between them. It was the difference “between show and strength, between intellectual brightness and intellectual power.” Martin destroyed Randolph’s “indictment and humiliated his pride” to such an extent that during closing arguments, Randolph seemed “more like a criminal fearing sentencing than like a tribune of the people dragging a tyrant to his doom.” Randolph lost more than the trial. It was the end of the Jefferson republicans; it was here that they “fought their last aggressive battle, and, wavering under the shock of defeat, broke into factions which slowly abandoned the field and forgot their discipline.”

Impeachment had failed, and so had almost all those who had sworn allegiance to what, for Randolph, remained an article of faith. Two years later, in 1806, Randolph “saw, what so few Virginians were honest enough to see, that the Virginian theory had been silently discarded by its own authors, and that through it pure government could never be expected.” Randolph had wanted to be a Pericles, a Caesar, someone who had done, not just great things, but things that made a country, a nation, what it was supposed to be. He had instead achieved nothing. He had fallen back “among common men with vulgar aims and mean methods.” He had “failed as a public man and had dragged with him in his failure all his friends and all his principles.” He knew it, “and it drove him mad.”

At the end of the War of 1812, “Mr. Jefferson’s party was still in power, but not a thread was left of the principles with which Mr. Jefferson had started on his career in 1801.” The South became the friend of centralized power, and, especially when it was a question of extending or protecting slavery, was not afraid to use it. Randolph’s failure was the failure of the South altogether, the failure of an aristocracy with its inherent belief in inequality to adapt to a set of governing principles completely different than its own. Randolph could never understand that democracy “was a force against which mere individuality strove in vain.” It only needed the presidency of Andrew Jackson to prove it.

Toward the end of his life, in a rare moment of lucidity, Randolph remarked with sad regret: “Time misspent, and faculties misemployed, and senses jaded by labor or impaired by excess, cannot be recalled.”

It is a fair summary, not just of the history of John Randolph, but of the South, and even, perhaps, of more than that.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amy Shearn

Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the critically acclaimed novels Dear Edna Sloane, Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far is the Ocean From Here. She has worked as an editor for Medium, and her work has appeared in the New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, Oprah, Coastal Living, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Catapult, The Millions, The Rumpus, and many other publications.

Shearn has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and currently lives in Brooklyn with her two children.

Her new novel is Animal Instinct.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Shearn's reply:

I tend to read several books at once, which confounds my friends who are more organized readers. Right now it happens to be:

Lifesaving, a memoir by Judith Barrington published in 2000. I teach personal essay and memoir-writing, and I often use Barrington's writing about writing memoir, but it only recently occurred to me to read her actual memoir! This is a gorgeous and thoughtful book about the aftermath of her parents' sudden death when she was 19 -- she expatriated to Spain, had some adventures, and started to come to terms with her sexuality and queerness. It's every bit as good as her craft writing would suggest!

Hot Air, a brand new novel by Marcy Dermansky. I've just started this one -- it has the same pub day as Animal Instinct, and Marcy and I are doing an event together. I've long been a fan of her eccentric and hilarious books (I teach parts of The Red Car in my "Writing for Women on the Verge" class), and am always excited to dive into another one. In this book, a divorced woman's first date is interrupted by billionaires crashing their hot air balloon, which just feels so very now, doesn't it? Marcy and I were just texting about how our novels have weirdly similar lines in them about some of the darker aspects of marriage; I love that we were somehow on a similar wavelength but ended up with such different fictional iterations of midlife rebirth stories.

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë. I felt like a re-read of a classic was in order, and as one of the original Women on the Verge novels, this felt like a good one to revisit. I first read it in college, and related so much to Jane, and was so hot for Mr Rochester -- I imagine I'm going to have a really different reaction on this read. So far it's really fun. What a narrative voice!

Visit Amy Shearn's website.

The Page 99 Test: How Far Is the Ocean from Here.

Writers Read: Amy Shearn (March 2013).

Q&A with Amy Shearn.

My Book, The Movie: Dear Edna Sloane.

The Page 69 Test: Dear Edna Sloane.

The Page 69 Test: Animal Instinct.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Colt

Peter Colt was born in Boston, MA in 1973 and moved to Nantucket Island shortly thereafter. He is a 1996 graduate of the University of Rhode Island and a 24-year veteran of the Army Reserve with deployments to Kosovo and Iraq. He is a police officer in a New England city and the married father of two boys.

Colt's new Andy Roark mystery is The Banker.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Colt's reply:

If reading were a marriage I would be the worst. I suffer from Librid Infedelis. I pick up books, start to read them and find myself distracted and move on only to come back to the original book. I suppose that I am married to Lord of the Rings in the way Spencer Tracy was married but was with Katharine Hepburn.

I am currently reading Amor Towles's Table For Two. An old and dear friend recommended it as it reminded her of me and a good friend whom I lived with in the 1990s. She was spot on. I am about half way through it which is usually when my book infidelity strikes. I can say, with great envy for his craft, that I wish I was half the writer Towles is. He writes beautifully and captivatingly.

I recently read the first four Havana novels, Havana Red, Havana Black, Havana Blue and Havana Gold, by Leonardo Padura. They are police procedurals set in Havana Cuba in the 1980's. About ten years ago Netflix was streaming a series entitled Four Seasons in Havana. It was filmed in Cuba, shot entirely in Spanish with subtitles and I loved it. I loved it so much that I would go back and watch it every now and again until sadly it left Netflix.

It is standard fare that cops have to be jaded and cynical, trust me, I should know, I've been a cop for almost twenty years. But the lead character Conde has all of the reasons to be and more. I picked up the first book expecting to be disappointed. There was no way that the books could match the series. I have found there are rare exceptions to TV/Film not being as good as the movie. I'm talking to you Six Days of the Condor and L.A. Confidential. Both are fine works but not as good as their film versions. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the series was a faithful interpretation of the series. Which is good because I can't stream it anymore so at least I can get my fix from the books!

Visit Peter Colt's website.

My Book, The Movie: Back Bay Blues.

The Page 69 Test: Back Bay Blues.

Q&A with Peter Colt.

The Page 69 Test: Death at Fort Devens.

My Book, The Movie: Death at Fort Devens.

Writers Read: Peter Colt (June 2022).

My Book, The Movie: The Ambassador.

The Page 69 Test: The Ambassador.

The Page 69 Test: The Judge.

My Book, The Movie: The Judge.

Writers Read: Peter Colt (May 2024).

--Marshal Zeringue

Diane Barnes

Diane Barnes is the author of All We Could Still Have, More Than, Waiting for Ethan, and Mixed Signals. She is also a product market manager in the health-care industry. When she’s not writing, Barnes can be found at the gym, running or playing tennis, trying to burn off the ridiculous amounts of chocolate and ice cream she eats. She and her husband, Steven, live in New England with Oakley, their handsome golden retriever

Barnes's latest novel is The Mulligan Curse.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I’m reading an ARC of Unclaimed Baggage by Katie O’Rourke. It’s a beautifully written book about a complicated family. The story is emotional and real. The protagonist is Jenna, a college student who is a twin. When her stepfather falls ill, neither Jenna’s mom nor sister step up to help care for him so Jenna does. She leaves school and moves back home. She discovers family secrets and learns to take care of herself instead of everyone else. Jenna is a relatable character, who is easy to root for her. O’Rourke’s writing style is engaging and drew me in immediately. This is a great book for readers who like character-driven stories about relationships.

Visit Diane Barnes's website.

Q&A with Diane Barnes.

The Page 69 Test: All We Could Still Have.

My Book, The Movie: All We Could Still Have.

The Page 69 Test: The Mulligan Curse.

My Book, The Movie: The Mulligan Curse.

--Marshal Zeringue

Barbara Nickless

Barbara Nickless is the Wall Street Journal and Amazon Charts bestselling author of Play of Shadows, Dark of Night, and At First Light in the Dr. Evan Wilding series, as well as the Sydney Rose Parnell series, which includes Blood on the Tracks, a Suspense Magazine Best of 2016 selection and winner of the Colorado Book Award and the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence; Dead Stop, winner of the Colorado Book Award and nominee for the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence; Ambush; and Gone to Darkness. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Writer’s Digest and on Criminal Element, among other markets. She lives in Colorado, where she loves to cave, snowshoe, hike, and drink single malt Scotch―usually not at the same time.

Nickless's new novel is The Drowning Game.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

The Peacock and the Sparrow by I.S. Berry. This debut novel exploded onto the literary world, quickly scooping up acknowledgements as diverse as Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award and a New Yorker Best Book of the Year. The prose leaps off the page, but it’s in world-weary CIA spy Shane Collins that we find the dark heart of any honest book on spydom: spying takes a terrible toll on its practitioners. Collins has become an alcoholic burnout just as the monarchy of Bahrain (an island country in the Persian Gulf) is under attack by Iran through their proxies (sound familiar?). Berry has real-world experience of Bahrain and the CIA, and this knowledge shines through. Bonus: Learning about a Middle Eastern country you might not have heard of and seeing it vividly portrayed through the eyes of the poverty-doomed locals, the jaded expat community, and in the glittering beaches, skyscrapers, and palaces of royalty and the well-to-do.

Visit Barbara Nickless's website.

The Page 69 Test: At First Light.

Q&A with Barbara Nickless.

The Page 69 Test: Play of Shadows.

--Marshal Zeringue

Allison Epstein

Allison Epstein earned her MFA in fiction from Northwestern University and a BA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. A Michigan native, she now lives in Chicago, where she enjoys good theater, bad puns, and fancy jackets.

Epstein is the author of historical novels including A Tip for the Hangman, Let the Dead Bury the Dead, and Fagin the Thief.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Epstein's reply:

I’ve had Rita Chang-Eppig’s Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea on my nightstand for a while now, but I was saving it for a rainy day because I knew I’d absolutely love it. Reader, I wasn't wrong—this book is stellar. It’s a historical novel about the famous 19th century Chinese pirate Shek Yeung (also known as Zheng Yi Sao or Ching Shih), and it’s immersive and exciting and full of morally complicated characters doing the best they can for themselves in an unfair world. Also, to reiterate: 19th century Chinese lady pirate. Need I say more? Surely I needn’t.

Another recent favorite was Kelsey Rae Dimberg’s Snake Oil, which I inhaled in a single weekend. It’s a scam-centric thriller of sorts set in the contemporary wellness industry, following a “gatekeep gaslight girlboss” type of CEO who tries to hold her supplements company together while an employee on the inside works to expose the whole enterprise as a scam. Murder and drama ensue, because of course they do. If you, like me, are constantly scrolling every streaming service looking for a new docuseries to fill the hole that the Elizabeth Holmes saga left in your heart, pick this up immediately.

Next on my nightstand is Private Rites by Julia Armfield. I’m obsessed with her previous book, Our Wives Under the Sea, and this new one is profoundly up my alley. It’s a queer retelling of King Lear, following three sisters cleaning out the house of their father, a notoriously difficult-to-live-with architect, after his death. With so many of my favorite literary elements packed into the blurb alone—Shakespeare, retellings, queer narratives, a shocking discovery in a will, spooky weather—I have no doubt I'll love this.

Visit Allison Epstein's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Tip for the Hangman.

The Page 69 Test: A Tip for the Hangman.

Q&A with Allison Epstein.

My Book, The Movie: Let the Dead Bury the Dead.

The Page 69 Test: Let the Dead Bury the Dead.

Writers Read: Allison Epstein (October 2023).

--Marshal Zeringue

William Boyle

William Boyle is the author of eight books set in and around the southern Brooklyn neighborhood of Gravesend, where he was born and raised. His most recent novel is Saint of the Narrows Street. His books have been nominated for the Hammett Prize, the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award in the UK, and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France, and they have been included on best-of lists in the Washington Post, CrimeReads, and more. He currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

Boyle's new novel is Saint of the Narrows Street.

Recently I asked the author what he was reading. Boyle's reply:

I've been rereading Leah Carroll's memoir Down City: A Daughter's Story of Love, Memory, and Murder. Carroll tells the story of her mother's murder and her father's descent into alcoholism and depression and, in doing so, she gives her parents back their humanity, making them more than just the tragedies that befell them, and she also tells her own story, how her parents are her, how she's them. I use this book every semester in the true crime class I teach, and I reread it every single time. I guess I've been using it in class for five years now, which means I've read it probably ten times. It's a powerful and haunting book. It amazes me that each time I read it, the impact is the same as the very first time. My students always love it, too. They're blown away--as am I--by Carroll's raw, poetic voice and her honesty.

I recently read Rachel Ingalls's Mrs. Caliban for the first time. It's kind of a Sirkian melodrama mixed with a weirdo folktale. A suburban housewife hides a fugitive sea monster in her house and winds up falling in love with him. It's wild and beautiful, and I flat out loved the prose.

I read Alison's Gaylin's We Are Watching in galley form back in the fall and loved it. It was just released a few weeks ago, and I've been telling everyone I know to grab it. Here's the blurb I wrote: "From the terrifying first chapter on, Alison Gaylin's We Are Watching grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go. It taps into our current paranoid landscape in a way that's both deeply absorbing and deeply unnerving. The upstate New York of the novel is not unlike David Lynch's Lumberton in Blue Velvet; there's intense darkness boiling just under the surface. Gaylin knows that we're surrounded by people who believe insane things, and she puts Meg, Lily, and Nathan through the hell of being at the center of a deranged conspiracy theory so she can show us just how thin the fabric between realities can be. Reminiscent of some of Ira Levin's best work in its intricacies and textures, We Are Watching is a startling tale of suspense and terror so masterfully told that readers will hang on every word."

Finally, I'm just digging into a new novel by Laura Lee Bahr, Who Is the Liar, which will be released later this year. It's the story of a family of sisters in the '80s told from the point of view of the youngest, Topaz, and it's about sisterhood, innocence, and how far we'll go to protect the ones we love. Really excited about this one.

Visit William Boyle's website.

My Book, The Movie: Gravesend and The Lonely Witness.

The Page 69 Test: Gravesend and The Lonely Witness.

The Page 69 Test: City of Margins.

My Book, The Movie: City of Margins.

Q&A with William Boyle.

The Page 69 Test: Shoot the Moonlight Out.

My Book, The Movie: Shoot the Moonlight Out.

Writers Read: William Boyle (December 2021).

The Page 69 Test: Saint of the Narrows Street.

My Book, The Movie: Saint of the Narrows Street.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Cambias

James L. Cambias writes science fiction and designs games. His new far-future science fiction political thriller is The Miranda Conspiracy.

Cambias's first novel, A Darkling Sea, was published by Tor Books in 2014, followed by Corsair in 2015. Baen Books released his third novel Arkad's World in 2019, and the urban fantasy The Initiate in 2020. In 2021 he began the "Billion Worlds" series of far-future adventures with The Godel Operation, followed by The Scarab Mission in 2023. His short stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Shimmer, Nature, and several original anthologies; most recently in the collection Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms from Grim Oak Press. In March 2020 his story "Treatment Option" was adapted for audio by DUST Studios, starring Danny Trejo.

Cambias has written roleplaying game sourcebooks and adventures for Steve Jackson Games, Hero Games, Pinnacle Entertainment Group, and other publishers, and in 2003 he co-founded Zygote Games. Since 2015 he has been a member of the XPrize Foundation's Science Fiction Advisory Board, and in 2024 became a consultant for the Center for the Study of Space Crime, Piracy, and Governance. Originally from New Orleans, he was educated at the University of Chicago and lives in Massachusetts.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Cambias's reply:

Lately I've been working my way through a big, dense, but fascinating book: The History of the Hobbit, by John D. Rateliff and J.R.R. Tolkien. The book includes the text of the original handwritten manuscript version of The Hobbit, with copious notes and commentary by Rateliff.

John Rateliff covers everything. There are notes on the physical manuscript itself — Tolkien apparently wrote a lot of his first draft on blank pages torn from student examination books (which suggests that an Oxford professor's salary in the 1920s didn't stretch very far). The color of the ink indicates when Tolkien took a break from the project and came back to it.

The book goes into the literary antecedents of the The Hobbit — everything from Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, Hugh Lofting's Dr. Dolittle, and P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster, to Beowulf, Norse Eddas, the legends of Sigurd, medieval romances, and the book of Job.

We also get a detailed discussion of how The Hobbit fits into Tolkien's evolving "legendarium" of Middle-Earth, and how both the book and all the off-stage lore changed over time. The story itself began as a series of bedtime stories for Tolkien's three sons, but he incorporated his own expanding mythology of elves, Valar, dragons, Silmarils, and the dark lord Morgoth; along with his invented languages and writing systems.

It's fascinating to see the changes between the outline, the first draft, the original published version, and the revised version Tolkien produced after the publication of The Lord of the Rings. At first, the wizard who recruits Bilbo to help the dwarves recover their treasure is named Bladorthin, while Gandalf is the chief of the dwarves, who later became Thorin. Bilbo was originally going to be the one who killed the dragon, even getting bathed in dragon's blood and becoming a Sigurd-like superhero.

And of course the Ring itself barely exists in the original. Bilbo's magic ring is just a ring of invisibility, nothing more. Only later, when Tolkien's publisher clamored for a sequel, did the idea arise of the One Ring and the other Rings of Power, and the need to resist temptation and destroy it.

As a writer, I found it utterly fascinating to get an inside look at the creative process of a true master. My respect for Tolkien's craft has gone up considerably — along with my respect for John Rateliff's scholarship. The History of the Hobbit is not exactly light reading (it's more than 900 pages!) but I recommend it heartily.

Visit James L. Cambias's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Darkling Sea.

Writers Read: James L. Cambias (January 2019).

My Book, The Movie: Arkad's World.

The Page 69 Test: Arkad's World.

My Book, The Movie: The Godel Operation.

Q&A with James L. Cambias.

The Page 69 Test: The Godel Operation.

The Page 69 Test: The Miranda Conspiracy.

My Book, The Movie: The Miranda Conspiracy.

--Marshal Zeringue

E. J. Copperman

E.J. Copperman is the nom de plume for Jeff Cohen, writer of intentionally funny murder mysteries. As E.J., he is the author of the Haunted Guest house series, the Agent to the Paws series and the Jersey Girl Legal mysteries, as well as the Fran and Ken Stein mysteries. As Jeff, he is the author of the Double Feature and Aaron Tucker series; and he collaborates with himself on the Samuel Hoenig Asperger's mysteries.

Copperman's latest novel is Good Lieutenant.

Recently I asked Cohen about what he was reading. His reply:

When life starts piling on, I tend to look for a comfort read, something I’ve read before that will take my mind off… everything… and restore my general sense of humor. Most often, it is the book I’m re-re-re-rereading right now.

Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo: A Celebration of the Marx Brothers and a Satire on the Rest of the World, by Joe Adamson. Probably not what you were expecting is it?

First, it helps to be a fan of the bros, and I am a sterling example thereof. Seeing Horse Feathers for the first time when I was in high school (just after the earth cooled) changed my life and my thinking permanently, and I’m grateful for that. But even beyond the exhaustive research that was clearly done in the preparation for this thick non-fiction book, which is extensive, is the writing. For me, it’s written exactly as it should be: admiring without being reverent, funny without being a collection of jokes, informative without being dry.

Consider the first paragraph of the book, after a series of quote about the Marx Brothers, ending with one from Arthur Sheekman, stating that there has never been a book about humor written by a funny writer:

Rational people are sometimes very nice, but they tend to be frightfully dull when they try to explain things like what makes us laugh. Arthur Sheekman is one of the Marx Brothers’ better writers, and he should know. Some day he must write a book on the subject, and then his statement wouldn’t be true anymore, and then he wouldn't know, and we’d be back where we started.

It goes on like that for 484 pages, because yes, I have read the footnotes more than once, and I love almost every word of it.

I’m not sure what I’ll read next, but if things go on as they are (personally and in the world), it will be something I’ll be using to make myself feel better. Maybe another of the Slough House books by Mick Herron. Few things are as satisfying as Jackson Lamb being sarcastic.

Visit E. J. Copperman's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

My Book, The Movie: The Thrill of the Haunt.

Writers Read: E. J. Copperman (November 2013).

The Page 69 Test: The Thrill of the Haunt.

My Book, The Movie: Ukulele of Death.

The Page 69 Test: Ukulele of Death.

Q&A with E. J. Copperman.

The Page 69 Test: Same Difference.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Tocqueville’s America and Ours:

On April 23, 1794, Chretien Guillaume De Lamoignon De Malesherbes, better known as Lamoignon-Malesherbes, seventy-three years old, counsel to Louis XVI in the trial that condemned the king to death, watched helplessly while his daughter, his son-in-law, and all their children were, one by one, guillotined in front of a howling mob of Parisians. Only then was he allowed to meet his own death by the same method. Not all of his grandchildren were murdered; one of them survived to become the mother of Alexis Henri Charles Maurice Clerel, Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of Democracy In America, the most important book on American democracy ever written. The French Revolution made the equal rights of every one a new religion and made democracy the only legitimate form of government. Everyone was equal, no one was more important than anyone else; everything had to be decided by the majority, whatever the effect on the rights of the minority. The problem was how to prevent a majority, made up almost always of the ignorant and the poor, from following someone who appealed to their sense of grievance and resentment, their demand that those above them should be brought down to their own level? How, in other words, protect against the “democratic despotism” Tocqueville considered the greatest threat to liberty the world had ever seen? He thought he might find the answer in America.

The America Tocqueville discovered in the 1830s bears a striking, and sometimes almost eerie, resemblance to the America of the present day. Change the name of the president we have now and Tocqueville becomes a contemporary writer:

“General Jackson is supposed to wish to establish a dictatorship in the United States.” And he has almost done it. President Jackson “keeps his position and his popularity by daily flattery of those passions,” i.e. the passions for equality. He is “the majority’s slave;” he yields to its “intentions, desires, and half-revealed instincts or rather he anticipates and forestalls them.” Worse yet, “he tramples his personal enemies underfoot wherever he finds them, with an ease impossible to any previous President; on his own responsibility he adopts measures which no one else would have dared attempt; sometimes he even treats the national representatives with a sort of disdain that is almost insulting; he refuses to sanction laws of Congress and often fails to answer that important body.”

What saved America, even at this early point in its existence, was its past. Two things had happened which made the American experiment in democracy possible. The first was the character of the people who first arrived in New England. “All the immigrants…belonged to the well-to-do classes at home,” and were well-educated. They had not come to the New World “to better their position or accumulate wealth; in facing the inevitable sufferings of exile they hoped for the triumph of an idea.” They created a democracy made up of citizens who, because of the “provision for public education,” were able to read the Bible, with the interesting, and perhaps unprecedented result that, in America it is “religion that leads to enlightenment and the observance of divine laws which leads men to liberty.”

The second thing that protected America from the “natural vice” of democracy, laws which make the actions of the people “ever prompter and more irresistible,” was the adoption of the American Constitution and the period of Federalist rule that lasted until the election of Andrew Jackson. This, Tocqueville insists, was “one of the luckiest circumstances attending the birth of the great American Union.” The Framers of the American Constitution, wanted to “restrain liberty against its self-destruction,” which meant limiting, so far as possible, the direct election of members of the government. Those “who consider universal suffrage as a guarantee of the excellence of the resulting choice suffer under a complete delusion.” Members of the House of Representatives, elected directly by the people, are at best mediocre, unable to string together two coherent sentences. Members of the Senate, who were then selected by the state legislatures, are, on the other hand, “eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and noted statesmen.”

The method by which the President is chosen shows how difficult it is to keep in place those restraints necessary to prevent democratic despotism. The electoral college was supposed to act as an ad hoc parliament, a parliament elected for only one purpose: to deliberate among themselves about who was best qualified by temperament and training to serve as the nation’s chief executive. For Tocqueville, and for most of the nation’s Founders, ambition for the office, ambition for any office, was thought a disqualification. Those who sought power should never be given it. It was a grand idea, a way to find someone as high-minded, as highly principled, as ‘great souled’ to use Aristotle’s expression, as George Washington; it was too far beyond the reach of the generation that came after Washington to make it work. Instead of a school of statesmen, the electoral college became, in Tocqueville’s view, a gathering of “dummies” who simply cast their ballots for candidates they had promised in advance to support.

The best protection against the “omnipotence of the majority,” was the law itself, the lawyers who practiced it and the judges who based their decisions upon it. Lawyers, from their study, acquire habits of order and an “instinctive love for a regular concatenation of ideas,” which leads them “naturally” to oppose the “ill-considered passions of democracy.” Conservative by habit, their respect for precedent, the settled opinions of the past, makes them value laws, not because they are good, but because they are old. This is why American lawyers are the “American aristocracy.” This aristocracy is headed by the Supreme Court, the most powerful judicial authority ever constituted. Justices, nominated by the president and confirmed by the senate for life, should be extremely well-qualified, men of “education and integrity,” statesmen able to confront any obstacles to the laws. If they were not, if the Court was composed by “rash or corrupt men,” the country “would be threatened by anarchy or civil war.”

The greatest danger to democracy, however, is not the structure of government; it is democracy itself, the effect it has on the manners and morals of a people. What do people look up to, what do they honor, what do they think important; what thought or idea comes to dominate, and define, their lives? In every age there is “some peculiar and predominating element which controls all the rest.” Equality is the “distinctive characteristic” of the Democratic age. People want equality with freedom, but if they can’t have it, they will take equality in slavery; they “will not endure aristocracy.” The danger is real. “If citizens, attaining equality, were to remain ignorant and coarse, it would be difficult to foresee any limit to the stupid excesses into which their selfishness might lead them, and no one could foretell into what shameful troubles they might plunge themselves….”

While equality is the distinctive characteristic of democracy, a “passion for well-being” is “the most striking and unalterable characteristic of democratic ages.” Men have “a taste for easy success and immediate pleasures.” They have “lively yet indolent ambitions; “they are moved by a “breathless cupidity” that “perpetually distracts the mind … from the pleasures of the imagination and the labors of the intellect and urges it on to nothing but the pursuit of wealth.” The darting speed of a quick, superficial mind is at a premium, while slow, deep thought is excessively undervalued.” The only thing Americans are really interested in is themselves, not what they have done in the past, but what they hope to do in the future. It is not a future filled with great deeds and glory. “No men are less dreamers than the citizens of democracies.” They have “the mental habits of the industrial and trading classes;” they are “calculating and realistic.” The love of money is “either the chief or a secondary motive at the bottom of everything the Americans do.”

The more alike everyone becomes, “the weaker each feels in the face of all.” Mistrusting their own judgment, everyone starts to believe that he “must be wrong when the majority hold the opposite view.” Majority opinion becomes the common opinion of the country, and, inevitably, “a sort of religion, with the majority as its prophet.” As public opinion “becomes more and more mistress of the world,” the majority gives the individual a supply of “ready made opinions,” with the result, Tocqueville insists, that there is “no country in which, speaking generally, there is less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America.”

What can be done to prevent the loss of all standards, to prevent everyone from becoming part of the crowd, driven by their passions for equality and well-being, to surrender everything to a popular leader who, as an ancient writer described him, “becomes great through the people’s having authority in all matters, and through having authority themselves over the opinions of the people, since the multitude is persuaded by them?” What is to prevent, in other words, that “democratic despotism” Tocqueville was so concerned about? In chapter seventeen of the second book, the central chapter of Democracy In America, a chapter entitled “Why In Ages of Equality It Is Important To Set Distant Goals For Human Endeavors,” he suggests part of the answer.

When religion was the dominant force in the lives of men, great things were done, things that lasted. It took more than a hundred years to build some of the most famous French cathedrals. “In thinking of the other world, they had found out the great secret of success in this.” Religion, however, has “lost its sway over men’s minds…everything in the moral world seem doubtful and uncertain,” which makes it even more important, and more necessary, to teach that “nothing of lasting value is achieved without trouble.” How is this to be done when the love of comfort “has become the dominant national taste?” The answer is education, “for the age of blind sacrifice and instinctive virtues is already long past, and I see a time approaching in which freedom, public peace, and social stability will not be able to last without education.”

Tocqueville does not leave it with the simple statement that democracy requires an educated citizenry. What kind of education do the citizens of a democracy require? In chapter fifteen, entitled “Why The Study of Greek and Latin Literature Is Peculiarly Useful in Democratic Societies,” he argues that “No other literature puts in bolder relief just those qualities democratic writers tend to lack, and therefore no other literature is better to be studied at such times.” Despite this, instead of the classics, he insists that for most people in a democracy education “should be scientific, commercial and industrial, rather than literary.” Greek and Latin should be taught only to “those who are destined by nature or fate to adopt a literary career or to cultivate such tastes.” These are the people who will understand what greatness means, and knowing that, will be able to help protect democracy against its own worst instincts.

Democracy, as Tocqueville understood, allows everyone to live in whatever way they wish. Those who, instead of following the crowd, want to try to understand the world around them, can do so. In a memoir he never intended to make public, he confessed that the truth is so “precious and rare that once I have found it, I do not want to risk it in the hazard of an argument; I feel it is like a light that might be put out by waving it to and fro. And as to getting on good terms with people, I could not do so in any general or systematic fashion, for there are so few whom I recognize. Whenever there is nothing in a man’s thoughts or feelings that strikes me, I, so to speak, do not see him.” They are “like so many cliches. I respect them, for they make the world, but they bore me profoundly.”

Had he written this same thing in something he meant to publish, he might have written, more cautiously, what certain of the Greek and Latin authors he so much admired had written, that there are three kinds of human beings: a few who can understand things on their own, a few more who can understand things when they are explained, and the rest of us, unable to understand anything in the way we should. Tocqueville, who had the great good fortune to understand things on his own, had the generosity of mind to spend much of his life trying to explain to others what it is worthwhile knowing, not just about democracy and how to save it, but how those of us who live in a democracy should try to live.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky.

--Marshal Zeringue