Timothy Jay Smith

From a young age, Timothy Jay Smith developed a ceaseless wanderlust that has taken him around the world many times. En route, he’s found the characters that people his work. Polish cops and Greek fishermen, mercenaries and arms dealers, child prostitutes and wannabe terrorists, Indian Chiefs and Indian tailors: he hung with them all in an unparalleled international career that had him smuggle banned plays from behind the Iron Curtain, maneuver through Occupied Territories, and stowaway aboard a ‘devil’s barge’ for a three-day crossing from Cape Verde that landed him in an African jail.

Smith has won top honors for his novels, screenplays and stage plays in numerous prestigious competitions. Fire on the Island won the Gold Medal in the Faulkner-Wisdom Competition for the Novel, and his screenplay adaptation of it was named Best Indie Script by WriteMovies. Another novel, The Fourth Courier, was a finalist for Best Gay Mystery in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards. Previously, he won the Paris Prize for Fiction (now the de Groot Prize) for his novel, Checkpoint (later published as A Vision of Angels). Kirkus Reviews called Cooper’s Promise “literary dynamite” and selected it as one of the Best Books of 2012.

Smith's latest novel is Istanbul Crossing.

One novel on his recent reading list:

Hall of Mirrors by John Copenhaver.

In Hall of Mirrors, the second novel in his Nightingale Trilogy, John Copenhaver once again seduces his readers with false but believable leads, characters uncertain about their own motives, and a surprise ending that makes perfect sense when the clouds lift enough to reveal it. If ‘tricky mysteries’ were a genre, Copenhaver would be its king.

When the novel opens, two lesbian amateur sleuths, Judy and Philippa, stand on the street with their new friend, Lionel, as they watch his upper floor apartment belch fire and smoke. Where is his lover, Roger, if they dare even use that word? It’s the early 1950s, McCarthyism is at its peak, as is the nation’s tolerance for homophobia and racism.

Roger had recently lost his job at the State Department when a lie detector test revealed him to be a homosexual. The police instantly assume he’s committed suicide. They are even less little interested in pursuing an investigation when they realize that Roger had been shacking up with mixed-race Lionel.

Judy and Philippa are convinced it wasn’t suicide. In the first novel of Copenhaver’s trilogy, The Savage Kind, they teamed up to identify a serial killer of young girls, who was never arrested. Bogdan had been an invaluable spy for the U.S., so deemed untouchable. He’d started his distinctive killings again: young girls, by waterways, with writing on their bodies. Intent on stopping Bogdan, Judy and Philippa had anonymously sent out their investigation’s conclusions to journalists and police; and Roger who, as a part-time crime writer, might hopefully reveal the true story of the serial murders. Had they brought Bogdan to him?

Hall of Mirrors it titled for a passage in the novel where a room of mirrors forces everyone to find themselves in others’ reflections; not unlike the ‘instant of recognition’ inside the Magic Theatre in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf when Harry Haller recognizes the many aspects of himself in the broken chards of a mirror and finally overcomes his self-loathing. In their relationship, Philippa struggles with her relationship with Judy; she’s not as confident about her sexuality. That tension feeds the plot all along. In Philippa’s own Magic Theatre moment, she has her own epiphany. They’ll both be back.

And so will many of Copenhaver’s readers!

Visit Timothy Jay Smith's website.

Writers Read: Timothy Jay Smith.

My Book, The Movie: The Fourth Courier.

The Page 69 Test: The Fourth Courier.

Q&A with Timothy Jay Smith.

The Page 69 Test: Fire on the Island.

The Page 69 Test: Istanbul Crossing.

--Marshal Zeringue