Sarah Warburton

Sarah D. Warburton lives in the mountains of Southwest Virginia. For ten years she was the lead writer for the monthly magazine UpClose. She has studied writing with Pam Houston at the Taos Writers Workshop and with Justin Cronin in Houston. Her work has appeared in the Southern Arts Journal, Women on Writing, Embark Literary Magazine, and Oyster River Pages.

Warburton's first novel, Once Two Sisters, was a Publishers Weekly pick of the week, a Crimereads recommended debut, and a PopSugar featured title.

[My Book, The Movie: Once Two Sisters; Q&A with Sarah Warburton; The Page 69 Test: Once Two Sisters]

Her new novel is You Can Never Tell.

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

I always have a few books going at once. While I drink my morning coffee, I actually like to read culinary memoirs. Right now I’m rereading Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef's Journey to Discover America's New Melting-Pot Cuisine by Edward Lee. Each chapter takes Lee to a different part of the United States known for a (sometimes unexpected) immigrant cuisine. The writing is beautiful and it’s a luxury to travel vicariously. Lee’s also generous with his own personal story, so that it’s easy to understand why people open up to him. And he includes recipes at the end of each chapter that put his own personal spin on the food he’s experienced.

As a member of five book clubs, I’m always either reading or supposed to be reading a book for one of them. I listened to Being Mortal by Atul Gawande on audio, but have bought that one to read again and pass on. It’s the most uplifting book on a dark subject: how we’ve medicalized the experience of aging and what we do with the elderly. Gawande uses the personal stories of individual people to create the same kind of empathy novelists hope to inspire through their characters.

I’m almost done with One by One by Ruth Ware. This one is sheer fun for anyone who loves a locked room, Agatha Christie-style mystery. From the first page, we know four people won’t make it and as the avalanche comes and the power goes out, the tension builds. I’d actually been saving this one as a treat, and it’s delivering!

And while I’m saving Dream Girl as my next treat, I am reading Laura Lippman’s book of essays, My Life as a Villainess. Love her Tess Monaghan novels, love her stand-alones, love her Twitter feed, and I love these essays. Despite the difference between fiction and narrative nonfiction, I think there’s a recognizable voice throughout. Good reminder that you don't have to be nice and you don't have to be thin to like how you look. Smart, sometimes snarky, and so relatable.

Visit Sarah Warburton's website.

Q&A with Sarah Warburton.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ellen Byron

Ellen Byron is the Agatha Award-winning author of the Cajun Country Mysteries. The USA Today bestselling series has also won multiple Best Humorous Mystery Lefty awards from the Left Coast Crime conference. She also writes The Catering Hall Mysteries (under the pen name Maria DiRico), and will launch the Vintage Cookbook Mysteries (as Ellen) in June 2022.

Byron’s TV credits include Wings, Just Shoot Me, and Fairly OddParents. She’s written over 200 national magazine articles, and her published plays include the award-winning Graceland. She also worked as a cater-waiter for the legendary Martha Stewart, a credit she never tires of sharing.

A native New Yorker who attended Tulane University, Byron lives in Los Angeles with her husband, daughter, and rescue chi mix, Pogo. She still misses her hometown - and still drives like a New York cabbie.

Byron's new Cajun Country Mystery is Cajun Kiss of Death.

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

The other day I found myself short on reading material, which is kind of ridiculous because I have tons of physical books in my house and e-books on my Kindle Fire. But I think I was propelled by the urge to do something denied to me during the pandemic – pay a visit to my local library and browse its shelves. As I scanned the books, I came across the Ian Rutledge series written by the mother-son duo that goes by the pseudonym Charles Todd. I adore historical mysteries. It may be my favorite genre. I read and loved the Todd’s series in the past because it features a British WW1 veteran-turned-Scotland Yard inspector who suffers from shell shock, which we now know as PTSD. I’m fascinated with WW1 because no matter how often someone tries to explain to me what triggered it, I don’t understand. I also have an odd fascination with trench warfare. (For the best description of that, I recommend Robert Graves’ autobiography, Goodbye to All That.)

Back to the Todds. I checked out their 2019 release, The Black Ascot. The title refers to the first Ascot horse races after the death of King Edward VII, when attendees all dressed in black from head to toe, eschewing their usual colorful outfits and chapeau. I’ve just begun the book, which revolves around a man who may or may not have committed a murder shortly after the Black Ascot, and then disappeared. Ten years later, Inspector Rutledge hears a rumor of a sighting and sets out to find the man and possibly absolve him of the charge. I’m in my happy place when I’m reading one of the Todd’s fine historical mysteries.

Visit Ellen Byron's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Ellen Byron & Wiley and Pogo.

Q&A with Ellen Byron.

--Marshal Zeringue

Veronica Bond

Death in Castle Dark is Veronica Bond's first mystery in the Murder and a Mystery series; as Julia Buckley she writes several series for Berkley Prime Crime, including the best-selling Writer's Apprentice Series.

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

This summer I have immersed myself in audiobooks, and though I love many of the mysteries written by men, I focused on female writers of the British Isles: specifically Elly Griffiths, Tana French, Denise Mina, and J.K. Rowling/Robert Galbraith. (Also Elizabeth George, though only her protagonist is English). I have plowed through the series of each writer, enjoying the threads that tie the various novels together.

Elly Griffiths won me over long ago with The Crossing Places, an atmospheric mystery set in the Salt Marshes on the English Coast. Griffiths makes great use of her setting while writing about the solitary Ruth Galloway, an archeologist called in by police to determine whether a body is the result of a modern murder or the displacement of ancient bones. Griffiths' recurring themes are the mystery of time, the notion of God and how people perceive, or disbelieve, in the existence of a higher power. One of Ruth's best friends is a Druid, while the police inspector she works with is a Catholic, and Ruth herself is an atheist. The mystery is compelling and beautifully written, and I have caught up with the series up to the latest book, The Night Hawks. I highly recommend that people read them in order.

Denise Mina writes the wonderful Alex Morrow police procedurals, which explore the gritty crime world of Scotland. Alex Morrow is tough and brave, yet vulnerable in unexpected ways. She is a hero worth rooting for, and I have done so through five books now, starting with Still Midnight. I also highly recommend Mina's novel Conviction, a standalone that is alternately horrifying and hilarious, thanks to the unforgettable narrator, a woman who begins by telling us that she has a past which has caught up with her.

Tana French was a late find for me, despite her popularity. Her writing is undeniably compelling and intelligent, as I found when I began with The Wych Elm and later with In the Woods. French draws readers in with a strong first-person narrator; in her Dublin Murder Squad series, this narrator changes from book to book. Each narrator has some compelling thing that drives him or her; in In the Woods, the detective who tells the story was himself a victim of a terrible crime that happened in his childhood; it resulted in the disappearance of two of his friends, and he has driven the trauma from his memory. The specter of this old mystery looms over his investigation of a new murder that brings him back to the place where his childhood terror occurred. French is brilliant with twists and cliffhangers and I anxiously await her next title.

I didn't expect to like the Richard Galbraith books, I'm not sure why, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that I loved them. The character of Cormoran Strike, the one-legged private detective (formerly a military policeman) is quirky, loveable, and admirable despite his many bad habits. In the first book he meets a young woman sent by the temp agency. He can't afford her in his one-man operation, but he promises to pay for a week. The woman, Robin Ellicott, soon becomes indispensable to Strike, and the two make a wonderful and often funny duo. The murders are grisly, the motives dark, but Strike and Robin keep the books from unrelenting grimness with their ever-evolving relationship. I plowed through all five books in short order, starting with The Cuckoo's Calling.

I was also delighted by the books of Jane Casey, specifically the Maeve Kerrigan mysteries. Casey's protagonist is tough and ambitious, and though she is only "PC Kerrigan," she has been selected for an investigative team by a man she admires and she hopes to make a good impression in the first novel, The Burning. What I have come to love most about these gritty mysteries is the unexpected moments of humor, which come from the relationship between Maeve and her insufferable superior, DCI Josh Derwent.

Finally, when I ran out of books in those fine series, I decided to return to the Elizabeth George books I had read in the 90s. They hold up nicely thirty years later, still compelling and impeccably written. George delves into the details with a poetic gift for description, and her contrast of the sophisticated, Eton-educated Inspector Thomas Lynley with the working class, highly sensitive but smart as a whip Sergeant Barbara Havers is a brilliant pairing, one that becomes richer with time, and which often provides wonderful moments of humor in the novels. George is not tied to happy endings, but her themes are powerful and remain with the reader after the books are closed.

Visit Julia Buckley's website and follow Veronica Bond on Facebook.

Q&A with Julia Buckley.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joe Clifford

After spending the 1990s as a homeless heroin addict in San Francisco, Joe Clifford got off the streets and turned his life around. He earned his MFA from Florida International University in 2008, before returning to the Bay Area, where he currently lives with his wife and two sons (Holden and Jackson Kerouac). His autobiographical novel, Junkie Love, chronicles his battle with drugs and was published by Battered Suitcase (2010). He is the author of the award-winning Jay Porter series, as well as several standalones including The One That Got Away, The Lakehouse, and the newly released The Shadow People.

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

I’m (almost) always reading more than one book. As I write this, I have just returned from vacation, where I finished three. I am starting a new one tonight. So it’s the rare time I’m technically not reading anything. (Give it an hour.)

You have to have been living under a rock not to have heard about Shawn Cosby, whose Blacktop Wasteland and now Razorblade Tears are taking the crime world by the lapels and shaking the shit out of it. I just finished the former, which was as advertised: amazing. I also just wrapped up Josh Mohr’s latest memoir, Model Citizen, which might be the best memoir I’ve read since Jerry Stahl’s Permanent Midnight. Also: Hilary Davidson’s Her Last Breath (which I was able to score an ARC of!). I just bought Riley Sager’s Survive the Night. Riley is one of those authors I read immediately. So I’m glad I was able to finish the others before his new one dropped. Mary Kubica will have a new one out soon. And like Riley, she is an instant pick up, drop everything, and read. There are myriad other titles that I have downloaded and will occasionally read from, like a Day Keene pulp or Catcher in the Rye, Alice Cooper’s Golf Monster (I’m a huge golf fan, and like Alice, an ex-addict), stuff like that. Despite what the above list may imply, I’d say ninety percent of what I read these days are domestic suspense thrillers, primarily written by women. Shawn and Josh’s books were the first time I’ve read two books by men not in that specific genre in I can’t tell you how long. My go-to list is Mary, Wendy Walker, Hilary, Jennifer Hillier, Paula Hawkins, et al.

Visit Joe Clifford's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Lakehouse.

My Book, The Movie: The Lakehouse.

Q&A with Joe Clifford.

My Book, The Movie: The Shadow People.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa was born in San Francisco and raised in the Bay Area. After graduation from Michigan State University, he studied under Leo Strauss, Joseph Cropsey and Hans J. Morgenthau at the University of Chicago where he earned both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in political science. He received his J.D. degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Buffa was a criminal defense attorney for 10 years and his Joseph Antonelli novels reflect that experience.

The New York Times called The Defense "an accomplished first novel" which "leaves you wanting to go back to the beginning and read it over again." The Judgment was nominated for the Edgar Award for best novel of the year. The latest Joseph Antonelli novel is The Privilege.

D.W. Buffa lives in Northern California.

Here is Buffa's take on Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon:

The unfortunate, if well-meaning, advice too often given to a new author is to write about what you know. It does not tell you how much you need to know or how you need to know it. Some things, important things, we learn by accident: the look of a girl passed on a street late one magical night in Manhattan, a girl we will never see again and, perhaps for that reason, will never forget. Some things we learn, or try to learn, on purpose. We go somewhere because it is the only place to discover what we think we have to find. It was the reason Hemingway went to Spain, to learn about bullfighting, something he thought he would hate but loved so much he wrote what is perhaps the greatest book ever written about it, Death in the Afternoon. The title itself seems to tell a story, four words that convey a sense of solitude and makes death seem an act of heroism and something to be proud of.

Hemingway was in his twenties, trying to write. He had been an American volunteer in the First World War, an ambulance driver in Italy. He was there, on the battlefield, whenever the fighting stopped, picking through dead bodies, looking for survivors. Death was all around him, but he did not yet know what he thought he needed to know.

“The greatest difficulty,” he insisted, “aside from knowing what you really feel, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced.” He was trying to write, “trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all, and the most fundamental, is violent death.” He had seen death, but not life and death together, the moment when, suddenly, death, violent death, takes life away. The only place you could still see it, “now that the war was over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it.”

Death in the Afternoon is not a novel, but neither is it what normally is called a work of non-fiction. It is not even a memoir, an autobiography in which Hemingway tells stories about himself. It is a book about bullfighting, but only because of what bullfighting teaches, or used to teach, about death. Bullfighting, Hemingway is quick to tell us, is not what we tend to think it is: a sport, an equal contest, “or an attempt at an equal contest between a bull and a man.” Bull fighting is a “tragedy,” certain death for the bull and danger, and possibly death, for the man. In an equal contest, all the advantage would be with the bull. This is why the matador has only fifteen minutes to work. Any longer than that and the bull, who learns rapidly, would learn to ignore the bullfighter’s attempts at deception. A bull who survives the bull ring is never allowed to fight again.

Hemingway introduces, from time to time, a woman - he calls her the “old woman” - with whom he carries on a frequently interrupted but never abandoned conversation in which she often asks questions about such things as the love life of the bulls. She is gratified to learn that while one bull is sufficient for fifty cows, a bull sometimes becomes so enamored of one in particular that the two of them try to wander off together, somewhere alone. Hemingway tells her that the best bull fights are held in Madrid and where the best places in the arena are to find a seat with an unobstructed view and at least partial protection from the blazing midday sun. With an expert’s eye he describes what makes a bullfighter great: the bravery, the calm indifference, when a thousand pound bull passes so close that “the horns almost touch, and sometimes do touch, his thighs while the bull’s shoulders touch his chest.”

In the 1920s, which were, in the judgment of many contemporaries, a period of decadence in bullfighting, Joselito, one of the greatest bullfighters Spain had ever seen, first arrived on the scene. He was attacked, as is usually the case, by those who admired the best known names of the time, “who fortunately all retired and at once became incomparable.” Watching Joselito, for Hemingway, was like “reading D’Artagnan when you were a boy.” The test, the real test, of a matador came with “his first severe horn wound,” because until then you cannot tell what his “permanent value will be.” Joselito was gored badly three times, and killed 1557 bulls. He was then gored a fourth time and died. Joselito is only one of the bullfighters Hemingway had watched closely. There was El Gallo, “a great bullfighter and the first one to admit fear,” and Manolo, who was refused police protection from the crowd on the reasonable ground that if he fought as well as he should he would not need it. Hemingway describes them all, and then, just when you have been drawn so closely into this misunderstood defiance of death that you begin to think yourself one of the bullfighters he describes, he tells you something about writing that reminds you how little you know.

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have the feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.”

The drama of the bullfight comes in what is called the faena, the “sum of the work done by the matador with the muleta in the final third of the bullfight.” The muleta is a heart-shaped scarlet cloth folded over a tapered wooden stick with a sharp steel point used to perform a series of passes “of more or less aesthetic value with the bull,” the passes that bring the bullfighter and the bull closer and closer. The

first edition

complete, the perfect, faena makes you feel “immortal while it is proceeding,” a feeling “as profound as any religious ecstasy,” a feeling that builds with “the increasing disregard for death that leaves you, when it is over…as empty and as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you.”

The perfect faena is seldom achieved, but it is the standard for what should be looked for. It is, for Hemingway, the one indispensable thing, the one thing you should require of yourself: “to know what is good and what is bad, to appreciate the new but let nothing confuse your standards.”

The last chapter of Death in the Afternoon tells you what has not been written. “If I could have made this enough of a book it would have had everything in it.” It would have included the Prado, and the “bright Madrid summer morning; the bare white mud hills looking across toward Carabanchel; days on the train in August with the blinds pulled down on the side against the sun and the wind blowing them….” And then, at the very end, there is this: “The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.”

Death in the Afternoon is all about bullfighting, and it is not about bullfighting at all. It is about the meaning of courage and what it means to live and to die well. It is about remembering that, “It is easier to be stupid and naturally brave than to be exceedingly intelligent and still completely brave.” It is about the nobility of honorable lives.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on The Great Gatsby. 

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Brave New World.

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Lord Jim.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tracy Clark

Tracy Clark is the author of the highly acclaimed Chicago Mystery Series featuring ex-homicide cop turned PI Cassandra Raines, a hard-driving, African-American protagonist who works the mean streets of the Windy City dodging cops, cons, killers, and thugs. Clark received Anthony Award and Lefty Award nominations for her series debut, Broken Places, which was also shortlisted for the American Library Association’s RUSA Reading List, named a CrimeReads Best New PI Book of 2018, a Midwest Connections Pick, and a Library Journal Best Books of the Year. In addition to her Cass Raines novels, Clark’s short story “For Services Rendered,” appears in the anthology Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African-American Authors. A native of Chicago, she works as an editor in the newspaper industry and roots for the Cubs, Sox, Bulls, Bears, and Blackhawks equally.

Clark's new Cass Raines mystery is Runner.

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

I am lucky to be reading an advance copy of Death at Greenway, by the fabulous Lori Rader-Day. I love her writing. The strength of every sentence, the easy rhythms, her rock-solid plotlines. Awesome always.

Death at Greenway is a historical novel that is set at, get this, Agatha Christie’s estate, Greenway House! Okay, right off the bat, Lori’s got me. I cut my writing teeth on all things Agatha Christie, and how she artfully weaves the Great Lady into the story is absolutely captivating. We get sneaky little glimpses of Christie throughout -- she’s there, then she’s not, like a ghost, but her aura looms large over every page. It’s giddily fascinating.

The book takes place in England during WWII. Nurse Bridey Kelly has signed on to escort and then care for ten evacuated children fleeing from war-torn, bomb-ravaged London. The “vacs” are relocated to Christie’s estate in Devon, spitting distance from the English Channel. At wartime. With enemy planes flying overhead. Loaded with bombs. What? Wouldn’t have been my first choice for a safe refuge, but…

Bridey’s running away from some heavy stuff that happened in London that she’s keeping secret, and she’s hoping to redeem herself through her work at Greenway. But in true Christie fashion everybody at the estate has something to hide. All’s relatively well, the kids are settling in, until, bam, a body is found in the quay. He’s been murdered.

You’re never quite sure who’s on the up and up and who’s leading you down the proverbial garden path in Death at Greenway. I like that. In that, the book’s a great hat tip to Agatha Christie, who was the mistress of misdirection.

Rader-Day’s attention to detail, from the way the characters talk to what they wear and how they live, will transport you back to those frightening, turbulent times when the world was at war and nothing was certain, not even your next breath. You can feel the tension, the uncertainty as you follow Bridey through a maze of intrigue and murky motivations, as you wait for the other shoe to drop.

And then there’s “the death” at Greenway. You can’t forget that. Somebody killed that poor guy. Sounds like the perfect case for Hercule Poirot or Jane Marple, but Lori had other ideas.

Visit Tracy Clark's website.

Q&A with Tracy Clark.

My Book, The Movie: What You Don’t See.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa was born in San Francisco and raised in the Bay Area. After graduation from Michigan State University, he studied under Leo Strauss, Joseph Cropsey and Hans J. Morgenthau at the University of Chicago where he earned both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in political science. He received his J.D. degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Buffa was a criminal defense attorney for 10 years and his Joseph Antonelli novels reflect that experience.

The New York Times called The Defense "an accomplished first novel" which "leaves you wanting to go back to the beginning and read it over again." The Judgment was nominated for the Edgar Award for best novel of the year. The latest Joseph Antonelli novel is The Privilege.

D.W. Buffa lives in Northern California.

Here is Buffa's take on Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim:

Time moves backward, all our dreams of the future become part of an irredeemable past, what happened long ago the mark of Cain, if we are unfortunate, the burden of our existence, something we do not want to remember and can never forget. It is what Joseph Conrad tells us Marlow tells a few friends, seamen like himself, men who often listen to Marlow tell stories about the sea. Marlow tells them, not just what he observed about a young ill-fated Englishman called Jim, not just what Jim has told him, but what others told him as well, the partial stories that shed their different light on a man who wanted to be a hero and, on the occasion when he could have shown great courage, acted the coward instead. Marlow tells the story of a failed romantic, a hero in all his youthful 19th century dreams, the story of how, because of that failure, he became Lord Jim.

Marlow tells the story, but only after the story is well under way. Jim is a young officer on a rusted out old merchant ship called Patna which is transporting eight hundred Muslim pilgrims across the Indian Ocean. Staring out across a calm and endless sea glimmering in the light of a thousand shining stars, he “seemed to gaze hungrily into the unattainable, and did not see the shadow of the coming event.” His thoughts were “full of valorous deeds: he loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements.” Suddenly, without warning, the ship hits something and the bow starts to rise straight up. Jim hurries below to inspect the single thin bulkhead and discovers that it is about to buckle and break apart. There are only minutes, perhaps only seconds, before the ship sinks and everyone on it goes down to their death. The captain and the other officers make for the lifeboats and with great difficulty manage to get one of them into the water. But Jim will not leave the ship. Out of their heads with fear, they scream that the ship is going down, that there is not anything he or anyone else can do, and he has to jump. As they pull away, the lights of the Patna disappear. The ship and its eight hundred passengers are lost.

But the Patna does not sink; everyone on board is safe and the ship makes it back to port. Facing an official inquiry, the captain and the others run away. All of them except Jim. It is now, when the inquiry has started, that Marlow meets Jim and begins to tell the story. Jim tells him that the captain and the others, “all got out of it, one way or the other, but it wouldn’t do for me.” One of the judges, a captain, someone “second to none - if he said so himself,” asks Marlow to give Jim money so he can get away. Marlow considers Jim’s refusal a “redeeming feature” in his case.

Jim believes that he had done, “as any other man would have done in his place, that the ship would go down at any moment….” He tells Marlow that “he wouldn’t be afraid to face anything,” and that “there was nothing he couldn’t meet.” To show he means it, he insists that when he was in the lifeboat and the chief engineer said that he had seen the ship go down, “It seemed to me that I must jump out of that accursed boat and swim back to see.” Marlow is astonished. It was as if Jim’s “imagination had to be soothed by the assurance that all was over before death could bring relief.”

A long time after the inquiry, Marlow meets a French lieutenant who had been on the ship that found the Patna and brought her safely to port. He had spent thirty hours on the Patna and left no doubt that it was something of a miracle that it had not sunk. Marlowe then tells the French lieutenant what happened at the inquiry and, as best he knows, what happened to Jim during the next three years. Stripped of his seaman’s papers, Jim goes from one job to another, always driven out of each place he goes by the rumor of what he did, until Marlow helps him find a place where he can, finally, be left alone. From the shadow of death Jim had been brought to the shadow of madness, cut off from “the rest of mankind, whose ideal of conduct had never undergone the test of a fiendish and appalling joke.”

For those who have an interest, a serious interest, in how a great writer writes, it is important to notice what Conrad is doing. For the first thirty pages, Conrad narrates the story the way any author would do, as the impartial, anonymous voice that sees everything, including what goes on inside the mind of each of the novel’s characters. Then Marlow, a character of Conrad’s invention, takes over, and instead of a neutral, omniscient narrator, the story is told the way you or I would tell it, through a single, and singular, set of eyes. But while Marlow tells the story, part of the telling is telling what others have told him.

Marlow has spent his life at sea, and knows what it is like for someone like Jim to stand “on the brink of a vast obscurity, like a lonely figure by the shore of a sombre and hopeless ocean.” All that would soon change, as Marlow anticipated. “The time was coming,” Marlow explains, “when I should see him loved, trusted, admired, with a legend of strength and prowess forming around his name as though he had been the stuff of a hero.” The legend would begin from a place where stories of Jim's past would never be heard, “three hundred miles beyond the end of telegraph lines and mail-boat lines,” where “the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilization wither and die, to be replaced by pure exercises of imagination, that have the futility, often the charm, and sometimes the deep hidden truthfulness, of works of art.” A place, that is to say, where the legend of Lord Jim would not be a legend at all.

Virginia Woolf, who wrote a review of Lord Jim in the l920’s, observed that although Conrad’s “characters remain almost stationary, they are enveloped in the subtle, fine, perpetually shifting atmosphere of Marlow’s mind; they are commented upon by that voice which is so full of compassion….” Ford Madox Ford wrote that he got to know Conrad as “little by little, he revealed himself to a human being during many years of close intimacy. It is so that, by degrees, Lord Jim appeared to Marlow, or that every human soul by degrees appears to every other human soul.” And then he added, “Conrad was Conrad because he was his books. It was not that he made literature: he was literature….”

Read this Joseph Conrad story, read the story Marlow tells you, the story, the tragedy, of this failed romantic, a hero in all his youthful l9th century dreams who became notorious as a coward and who then became known as the heroic Lord Jim. The story, when you read it, is not fiction, a made-up story of the past; it is more real, because more lasting, than anything you read in the papers or see on television. The story Lord Jim is what being timeless means.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on The Great Gatsby. 

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Brave New World.

--Marshal Zeringue

Debra Bokur

Debra Bokur is the author of The Fire Thief and The Bone Field (Dark Paradise Mysteries, Kensington). She’s traveled the world as a writer, journalist and staff editor for various national media outlets, with more than 2,000 print pieces carrying her byline to date. Her work has garnered multiple awards, including a 2015 Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Journalism. For more than a decade, she served as the poetry editor at a national literary journal, and her poetry and short fiction have been widely published. Among her favorite writing credits are a series of original literary essays commissioned by the Celestial Seasonings tea company that appeared on the artfully illustrated boxes of ten separate tea flavors. She continues to travel in her capacity as the Global Researcher and Writer for the Association for Safe International Road Travel, and as a monthly columnist for Global Traveler Magazine.

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

Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman

My husband gave me a copy of this book as a gift years ago, following a long discussion about how the perception of time can be highly subjective: Not to discount the veracity of clocks, of course, but how an actual segment of time—like a minute or an hour—can seem to pass at a different speed for different people. This can be heightened by the season, with winter seeming to last forever for everyone except me; or how summer may appear to be fleeting. The speed of time might even depend upon what you’re doing. For me, no matter how long I try to linger over a slice of apple cake, it seems like time flies by and the cake is gone before I know it. Lightman, who is both an author and a physicist, takes this thought and presents it in a series of chapter-stories; each of which presents the passage of time in a different way using Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity as context. This theory suggests that the passage of time, or the discernment of it, is relative to the lens through which it is perceived. Context becomes everything, and in this small book, Lightman treats the topic with brilliance and imagination. The writing is consistently lyrical and mesmerizing, and I pick it up every so often to enjoy again, always discovering something new and beautiful in each reading. It’s become one of my favorite books to gift to others.

Call this Room a Station by John Willson

I’ve long been a fan of the compelling poetry created by poet John Willson, and was pleased to discover that he’d published a collection. In Call This Room a Station, Willson has assembled his poems in a way that reflects a journey through joy, loss, and a return from despair while employing imagery from an actual expedition across the world as framework and setting. Nature is one of the recurring themes in Willson’s moving poems, and I find myself repeatedly returning to specific pieces, including “Eagle, Border Waters,” and “Morning,” which ranks as one of the most beautiful poems I’ve ever read.

How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan

As a rule, I don’t read a lot of nonfiction, but anything by author Michael Pollan is an absolute exception. Pollan teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, and readers of The New York Times Magazine will be familiar with his byline. I’ve found his previous works on plant life, the human relationship with food, and how we experience the natural world to have been exceptionally enthralling. Right now, I’m in the middle of one his latest works, How to Change Your Mind, which explores the human fascination with psychoactive plants and delves deeply into ongoing clinical and scientific research into psychedelic drugs including LSD, psilocybin, Ayahuasca, and 5-MeO-DMT. Pollan details research being conducted at Harbor UCLA Medical Center, Johns Hopkins, Imperial College in London, the University of Zurich, and NYU, all of which is seriously examining how even a single psychedelic experience may offer curative benefits for numerous conditions including depression and addiction—while also providing perspective and comfort to patients with terminal illnesses regarding suffering, death, and the very nature of existence. It’s a truly compelling read.

Visit Debra Bokur's website.

Q&A with Debra Bokur.

The Page 69 Test: The Fire Thief.

My Book, The Movie: The Fire Thief.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa was born in San Francisco and raised in the Bay Area. After graduation from Michigan State University, he studied under Leo Strauss, Joseph Cropsey and Hans J. Morgenthau at the University of Chicago where he earned both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in political science. He received his J.D. degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Buffa was a criminal defense attorney for 10 years and his Joseph Antonelli novels reflect that experience.

The New York Times called The Defense "an accomplished first novel" which "leaves you wanting to go back to the beginning and read it over again." The Judgment was nominated for the Edgar Award for best novel of the year. The latest Joseph Antonelli novel is The Privilege.

D.W. Buffa lives in Northern California.

Here he shares some reflections on the enduring relevance of Brave New World (1932):

Some authors are unfortunate in when they were born, writing books that might have had an audience a generation or so earlier, but not much of one now. But some authors are unfortunate in when they died, none more so than Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, who died on November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Given a few short paragraphs near the back of the newspaper, his passing was scarcely noticed or, if noticed, paid any great attention. The country had other things on its mind. In l931, however, when he wrote Brave New World, everyone paid attention. The critics, who seldom agreed on anything, dismissed it as “a thin little joke,” a literary work so bad that “nothing can bring it alive.” The public, on the other hand, could not get enough of it, which might have been a warning that the world Huxley foresaw had more of an appeal than he might have imagined.

The story is set in the distant future; a future, however, anchored in the immediate present, the present in which Aldous Huxley was living in l931. Christianity has been abolished, and with it the system of recording historical time. Instead of A.D., from the death of Christ, the years are counted A.F., from the time of Ford. Yes, that’s right: Henry Ford has taken the place of Jesus Christ. The top of all Christian crosses have been removed so that the sign of the cross has become the sign of the ’T,’ as in the model T, the first of Ford’s creations. No one swears “Christ!” anymore; they say “Ford!” when they give way to their anger or frustrations. The choice of Ford is not accidental, the random selection of a famous name. Mustapha Mond, the Resident Controller for Western Europe in the year 700 A.F., explains:

“Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production deepened the shift.”

The shift has been completed. Eugenics and chemistry have abolished natural reproduction; human beings are produced in laboratories, the mass production of endless sets of twins made to fit the categories of a hierarchy, from the lowest, the epsilons, who do not need human intelligence, to the highest, the alphas, who will know more than anyone else. Created without the need for parents, they have no relatives and no attachments. Conditioned through infancy and childhood, they believe that the collective is the only thing important, and they believe, all of them, that they are happy.

And they are. They have everything they need; especially the eight-ninths of the population that never have to think. They spend seven and a half hours every day at work, the work they have literally been born for; work, as it is described, without strain on the mind or muscles. It is when work is over, that real happiness begins. They have games they play and movies they watch, movies called ‘feelies,’ in which electric impulses stimulate the emotions to match, and to intensify, what they see on the screen. To take care of their own emotions, any sadness or uncertainty, they have drugs; or rather they have one drug, Soma, which is taken every day and always makes them feel good. The greatest source of permanent happiness, however, is sex; not just occasional sex, but unrestricted copulation. There is no such thing as chastity or even restraint; the only decision is whom to have sex with next. As I said, the critics hated it, and the public loved it.

Despite all the precautions, all the conditioning, there are still, occasionally, a few human beings who sometimes doubt that everything is as it should be. One of them, Bernard, who is rumored to have had the wrong chemicals mixed in when he was born, goes out on a date with a young woman, Lenina, who is proud of nothing so much as that she has slept with perhaps as many as six hundred different men. She wants to play “electro-magnetic golf;” he objects that it is a waste of time. “Then what’s time for?” she asks, with some astonishment. He suggests they might go walking and talk. She thinks it “a very odd way of spending an afternoon.” The next day, he regrets that they went to bed together on their first date. She reminds him, and does so quite “gravely,” what they have all been taught: “Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.” When he tells her that he feels “enslaved by my condition,” she is truly horrified: “You say the most awful things.”

Unlike George Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World does not describe a nation, or even an empire; it describes the planet. Universal peace has been achieved. There are no wars, and there is no conflict. Everyone is happy. Almost everyone. There are still a few places where “savages” still exist, human beings who still practice the customs of primitive people, including even the disgusting and morally reprehensible act of producing a child through sexual intercourse. One of these unfortunate children, John, was born to a woman who had gone to the New Mexico reservation as a weekend tourist with an alpha who left her there.

John, all grown up, is discovered and brought to London, hopelessly ignorant, a savage in every respect. Taken to Eton, where the alphas are educated, he is so simple-minded as to ask about the students: “Do they read Shakespeare?” It is explained to him, with all the patience needed when dealing with abysmal stupidity, that, “Our library contains only books of reference. If our young people need distraction, they can get it at the feelies. We don’t encourage them to indulge in any solitary amusements.” A statement that sounds a lot like what an American college president might say today in defense of a curriculum weighted heavily on the side of computer science and televised sports.

It takes an effort to keep everyone happy. It requires first of all keeping everyone together. Any suggestion that the purpose of life is anything beyond the maintenance of well-being of everyone is subversive of good order. Solitude is to be avoided, of course; but then, in Brave New World, no one wants to be alone anyway. Except, of course, John.

He goes to live in an abandoned lighthouse. He grows a garden and makes, as he had been taught by the Indians in New Mexico, a bow and arrow to shoot small game. No one has ever heard of anything so strange. A reporter comes with a camera and, when a movie is made, John becomes an international sensation. Everyone wants to see him now; John and the lighthouse become a tourist destination. The only truly human being left on the planet, he becomes the ape in the zoo, laughed at by automatons who think they are human. The year 700 A.F. begins to resemble the year 2021 A.D.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa was born in San Francisco and raised in the Bay Area. After graduation from Michigan State University, he studied under Leo Strauss, Joseph Cropsey and Hans J. Morgenthau at the University of Chicago where he earned both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in political science. He received his J.D. degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Buffa was a criminal defense attorney for 10 years and his Joseph Antonelli novels reflect that experience.

The New York Times called The Defense "an accomplished first novel" which "leaves you wanting to go back to the beginning and read it over again." The Judgment was nominated for the Edgar Award for best novel of the year. The latest Joseph Antonelli novel is The Privilege.

D.W. Buffa lives in Northern California.

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

I first read The Great Gatsby by accident, when I was twenty-four, late one night at the end of my second year in graduate school, the night before I left to spend the summer in New York. I had finished packing my tattered second-hand suitcase and the small string tied cardboard box of books I was taking with me. With nothing left to do, I picked up a slim paperback edition, a copy of Gatsby, and started to read. It was, if I remember, a little after midnight when I started and a little after four in the morning when I finally finished it and knew immediately that I would one day read it again. And I have, at least half a dozen times, the last time just a few days ago. The astonishing thing is that each time is like reading something you have never read before. You remember that you have read it, you remember the story, you remember whole lines, but it still, somehow, comes as a surprise, the way Fitzgerald makes you feel that you know these people as well, or better, than anyone you have ever actually met.

It is like listening to a story told by one of your uncles about relatives you never knew, the story he tells you each time you see him and always manages to change, until finally you decide that he is only telling you things that someone had once told him, but because it is mostly a story made up of the fragments of other people’s now forgotten lives, because it does not concern itself with a too careful attention to the literal biographical facts, tells you something more important about who these people really were, what they thought and what they felt, and what, sometimes without quite realizing what they were doing or the effect it would have, what they did. It is that way with Gatsby, the novel that will tell you more about what America was like in the bright, dizzy days between the Great War and the Great Depression when money became the only thing anyone wanted and the only thing needed to make you what you had always wanted to be, when everyone danced through the Jazz Age, the phrase Fitzgerald invented, when life for those rich enough to afford it was a party that lasted all summer and summer, banishing the seasons, lasted all year.

Driven by the dream of the girl with whom he fell in love, Gatsby, Jay Gatsby, did everything he could to become what he thinks he has to be to have any chance with her. He buys a huge estate across the Long Island Sound from where Daisy, the girl with whom he had been engaged before he went away to the war, lives with her husband, Tom Buchanan who, like his wife, has always been used to a life of wealth and privilege. Every night, Gatsby looks across the water at the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, the green light that represents everything he hopes for, the justification for everything he has done. Hundreds of guests, invited and uninvited, come to the colossal parties given by Gatsby every weekend, and one of the rumors that circulate about their host, a rumor that tends to make him even more mysterious in the eyes of all those anonymous intruders, is that he once killed someone. It is a rumor that seems to discredit itself when they suddenly find themselves in the presence of his inimitable smile. “It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

Gatsby, who had nothing when he met Daisy, when he was a young soldier about to go to war, lied about where he had come from; he lied about everything, including his name. After the war, he became rich selling liquor when selling liquor was a crime, and became richer still by his involvement with the man who had fixed the l9l9 World Series, the thing that more than anything else taught Americans that nothing was sacred, that everything could be had – even the loyalty of baseball players, even the integrity of the game that America loved – for a price. Whether or not he had ever killed anyone, Gatsby was a liar and a thief, and yet, more than any of those who had been born into the wealthy, established families whose palatial estates lined the waters of the sound, Gatsby had a purpose in his life and a sense of honor. All the others, Tom and Daisy and their spoiled friends, lived their careless lives and let others try to put back together all the things they had broken. Daisy, driving Gatsby’s car, kills a woman who dashed into the street, the same woman who had been having an affair with Tom Buchanan. Gatsby, a passenger, lets everyone think he was driving. Daisy does not mind. The woman’s husband, deranged by grief, murders Gatsby in his pool. Tom Buchanan thinks he deserved it.

At the end, Daisy’s second cousin, Nick Carraway, who is telling the story, goes back to Gatsby’s enormous and abandoned house and wanders down to the shore.

I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther….And one fine morning –

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

But Gatsby stays with us forever.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

--Marshal Zeringue