Writers Read: David Handler

Thursday, September 14, 2017

David Handler

David Handler’s first book in the Berger and Mitry series, The Cold Blue Blood, was a Dilys Award finalist and BookSense Top Ten pick. Handler is also the author of

eight novels about the witty and dapper celebrity ghostwriter Stewart Hoag and his faithful, neurotic basset hound, Lulu, including Edgar and American Mystery Award winner The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald.

His new book, the latest Stewart Hoag mystery, is The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes.

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

As the warm, lazy afternoons of summer have begun to wind down I’ve been finding myself hungering for a big, juicy, old-fashioned novel to lose myself in on my garden bench. Something other than my usual rat-a-tat hard-boiled crime fare.

And so right now I’m totally immersed in re-reading Frank Conroy’s enthralling 530-page saga Body and Soul, which was published in 1993. Body and Soul, a sweeping period novel that starts out in New York City in the 1940s, is the story of an earnest, lonely six-year-old urchin named Claude Rawlings who happens to be a child prodigy on the piano. In fact, Claude, who lives in a dingy basement apartment with his single mother, a cab driver, is about to grow up to become one of the classical music world’s greatest pianists and composers.

Body and Soul is more than a fascinating page-turner. Conroy manages to take us inside Claude’s mind with such incredible insight that we are actually able to get an inkling of how composers do what they do. People often ask me how a writer writes. Me, I’ve always wondered how a composer composes. Where does the music come from? What is Claude hearing? What is going on inside of his head? Conroy is able to take us there. It’s truly fascinating.

And Conroy was a truly fascinating man. Before he wrote Body and Soul, which is his one and only novel, he was best known for his brilliant 1967 childhood memoir Stop-Time, which I keep it on my bookshelf right next to The Catcher in the Rye. The man knew music. He was an accomplished jazz pianist who sat in with the likes of Charlie Mingus. And he knew writing – he was the director of the famed Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa for 18 years until his death in 2005 at the age of 69.

If you’ve never read Stop-Time you simply must. It’s a genuine classic. If you’ve never read Body and Soul you’re missing out on a truly major reading experience. And if the name Frank Conroy is new to you, well, all I can say is that you need Frank Conroy in your life. Please, just trust me on this one.