Since I don’t really know that many of my crime-fiction contemporaries, I was heartened to learn that the irrepressible Deborah Coonts would be in attendance, up from the neon Gomorrah of her native Las Vegas. I first met Deb in Anaheim, at the American Library Association’s 2012 annual conference, where she and I mugged our way through a two-person panel of the use of humor in mystery fiction. This year, at LCC, we were scheduled to share not one but two different panels — on humor, and on writing the legal thriller (Deb is also a recovering lawyer.) And this time, we’d have company.

One thing I didn’t know about Deb is that she’d spent great chunks of her childhood in Colorado Springs where, like Eloise at the Plaza, she’d roamed the halls and hills of the iconic Broadmoor Hotel. So the first order of business on Thursday was a guided driving tour — along with authors David Gates and Chuck Rosenthal — of Colorado Springs, Manitou Springs and environs, including the Garden of the Gods (pictured) and, of course, the stately and historic Broadmoor itself, where we had a lovely reunion dinner on Thursday evening.

Things began in earnest on Friday morning with the New Authors’ Breakfast, where each of us who’d debuted in 2012 was given one minute to pitch his/her novel to the rest of the conference attendees. After that, having no panels on Friday morning, I was able to kick back and listen to some of the best writers currently working in American crime fiction, including David Corbett, Hilary Davidson, Brad Parks, Rhys Bowen, and Margaret Coel, expand on topics ranging from literary inspiration to the balkanization of crime fiction into its various sub-genres. Some enlightenment ensued.

The Friday morning program ended with a bang, and in one of my favorite moments from the conference: Margaret Coel’s one-on-one interview with “Fan Guest of Honor” Tom Schantz, the publisher of Rue Morgue Press and the owner of one of America’s earliest mystery-only bookshops. Tom is a walking encyclopedia of crime fiction, and his insights into the past and future of the genre were both fascinating and, at times, a little unnerving.

I participated in two panels on Friday afternoon. They were “The Lighter Side of Death and Dismemberment” with Deb Coonts, Harley Jane Kozak, Brad Parks, and Rochelle Staab, followed by “You Don’t Have to be a Lawyer to Kill Like One” with Deb, Parnell Hall, Paul Levine, and Chuck Rosenthal. The humor panel in particular was not only great fun but was very well attended –possibly the most popular panel of the weekend — and it came with homework. Asked to bring a funny line from another author’s work, I chose a chestnut from Nelson DeMille’s Wild Fire in which protagonist John Corey says of his ex-wife, “she thought cooking and fucking were two cities in China.” Now that’s a line I wish I’d written.

Each conference panel was followed by a fifteen-minute signing session, in which fans can stop by and chat with the panelists. I met some great folks at these sessions, some of whom had already read Hush Money and some of whom were kind enough to buy it. In fact, all of my books (both Hush Money and Hard Twisted) had sold out of the on-site bookstore by Saturday afternoon.

Mystery writers are fans as well, and in many cases we’re ardent fans of our fellow panelists. I was delighted, for example, to meet Laura Lippman — she and I are finalists for the Audie Award for Best Mystery audiobook of 2012 — and congratulate her (see picture) on What the Dead Know, to which I’d just been listening on the drive up from Cortez. It was also good to see Craig Johnson again, as I owe him a debt of gratitude for his role in helping Hush Money find its publisher, Minotaur Books.

Another highlight of conferences such as these is the opportunity to make new writer friends. So while I did miss the RMMWA reception and “concealed weapons fashion show” held on Friday night, I missed it because I was out to dinner that evening with Naomi (Strawberry Yellow) Hirahara and Diana (Coldwater) Gould, swapping L.A. stories and, in my case, memories of my pre-auctorial past. The next (Saturday) morning, I made a bee-line to the bookstore to purchase a copy of Coldwater, Diana’s debut novel, and I’m so looking forward to digging in.

Saturday’s day-long program included Twist Phelan’s Proustian one-on-one interview with Laura Lippman, entitled The Woman with a Gun, in which we all learned the words to the song “Mommy Time,” and were warned of the hazards of on-line shopping. You had to be there.

In the finest tradition of saving the best for last, the final panel of the day on Saturday was “Writing the West,” on which I sat with my fellow Rocky Award (see photo) finalists Craig Johnson, Margaret Coel, Darrel James, and Beth Groundwater. Craig, as always, stole the show with his patented mix of homespun humor and razor-sharp observations on the craft of writing. It was an honor for this debut author to have been on the same stage with these bright and talented veterans of the business.

The high point of the conference was the Saturday night awards banquet and charity auction, ably hosted by David Corbett. While all of the award nominees deserve recognition, the eventual winners were: Rochelle Staab for Bruja Brouhaha (Watson Award), the hilarious Catriona McPherson for Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for Murder (Bruce Alexander Award), Craig Johnson for As the Crow Flies (Rocky Award), and Brad Parks for The Girl Next Door (Lefty Award). I can only hope that somebody filmed Brad’s acceptance “speech” — which included an impromptu song-and-dance number with Laura Lippman — and if so, that it soon finds its way onto YouTube.

Okay, maybe that wasn’t the evening’s high point, which may have come after the last bow was taken, when conference Guest of Honor Craig Johnson sat for a one-on-one interview with a flight-delayed Lou Diamond Phillips, whose grit and sportsmanship in battling his way to Denver in a raging snowstorm earned him a well-deserved standing ovation from the banquet guests. Fans were rewarded with an hour of wit, wisdom, and war stories from the set of Longmire. All good things must end, alas, and end they did on Sunday morning.

Although I may not have brought home the Rocky, I did bring home something even better — cherished memories and new friendships. So, big thanks and hugs to all who made me feel so very much at home, and special thanks, for no special reason, to Deb, David, Naomi, Diana, Chuck, Rochelle (congrats!), Brad (ditto), Harley Jane, Paul, Mike, Laura, Margaret, Beth, Darrel, Parnell, Craig (double ditto), and Catriona, plus Linda Joffe Hull, Peg Brantley, Steve Brewer, Bonnie Biafore, Terri Bischoff, Bonnie Ramthun, and Janet Rudolph, but most of all to Christine Goff, Lucinda Surber, Stan Ulrich, Suzanne Proulx and everyone else who played a role in organizing this wonderful, magical weekend.

See you all next year!

As a writer edits his novel-in-progress, he invariably leaves chunks of feeble prose on the cutting-room floor.  More often than not, the discarded material ends up where it belongs, and what remains is improved by its absence.  Sometimes the cuts are painless, and sometimes they hurt a little.  “Murder your darlings,” wrote the Edwardian author Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, and for generations, novelists have reluctantly followed his advice in pursuit of a tighter, leaner manuscript.

When editing Hush Money (Minotaur), my 2012 debut legal mystery, I was compelled to lop a limb or two that still, a full year later, tingle with phantom sensation.  Below is a scene that never made it to the final, published novel, but that was fun to write, and therefore, painful to excise.  While the prose may have died in utero, I did salvage the character name Jordan Mardian, and it will appear – in a very different context – in Green-Eyed Lady, the next installment in the Jack MacTaggart mystery series, which will be in bookstores in June of 2013.

So without further ado, here is an (unedited) outtake from Hush Money:

* * *

The Canyondale Golf Club is in west Pasadena, tucked into the sylvan folds of the San Rafael hills.  Although I knew its general location and its storied reputation as Pasadena’s most exclusive private club, I’d never actually been there.  Nor, for that matter, to any golf club, my only concept of which came from watching Caddyshack re-runs on late-night television.

It was a dazzling afternoon, all blue skies and bright sun, and a gentle breeze carried the faintest whiff of burning chaparral from somewhere out toward Malibu.  I kept to the surface streets, with a watchful eye on my rear-view mirror.

At Arroyo Boulevard I headed south and descended into the bowl of Brookside Park, into the swarm of rollerbladers and cyclists and baby-carriage joggers who congregated there on weekends like so many Lycra-clad honeybees.  Then, as the Rose Bowl loomed into view, I climbed back out onto Linda Vista and continued south, past the stately homes that grew larger and the shaded lawns that grew wider, until the roadway curved westward again at the precipice of the 134 Freeway.

From here you could see down-valley, over the Arroyo Seco and the delicate spider arch of the Colorado Street bridge.  This postcard view, afforded only to the red-roofed mansions that dotted the surrounding hillsides, was the birthright of old-money Pasadena.  It was here that Linda Vista died into San Rafael Boulevard, and a quick jog away from the freeway led me through a corridor of tall pines and sycamores to the entrance gates of the Canyondale Golf and Country Club.

“You cocksucker!” he hissed.

“That was for lying to me.”

“I didn’t lie to you!  You never even asked me about Creole!”

This time he sounded like he might cry.

“Get up, you big baby.”

He rose unsteadily to a crouch and then sprang forward, throwing his weight at my legs.  But his shoes slipped on the pine straw and instead of taking me down, he ended up on his knees again with an awkward bear hug on my thighs.  I took hold of his hair and lifted him upright, then drove a fist into his stomach.  That sent him sprawling onto the ground where he remained, curled and heaving, fighting his lunch to a draw.

“And that’s for Russ.”

“Help!” he called weakly.  “Get him away from me!”

He rolled to a sitting position, his head lolling between his knees.  Then, with an effort, he staggered to his feet and spat, brushing the dirt from his pants.

“You’re in deep shit now,” he said without conviction.

“I can see that.  Where’s Hush Puppy?”

“What?”

“Hush Puppy.  What have you and Huang done with him?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about EVAgen, Jared.”

He looked up at me, hands on his knees, and he spat again.

“You’re crazy, MacTaggart.”

I grabbed him by the collar and backed him into a pine tree, branches snapping, and pinned him against the trunk with both hands.  His eyes were wild with rage and fear.

“We can do this the easy way,” I told him, “or we can keep doing it the hard way.”

“Help me!” he called again, and over my shoulder I heard the muffled sound of running feet.

“Hey, you!  Let go of him!”

Abernathy was the first to arrive, locking a thick forearm under my chin.  He leaned his weight into a series of backward jerks, and on his third attempt I pushed off, driving my head into his chin and pulling Jared with me, launching the three of us onto the ground in a welter of elbows and knees.

“Oh, fuck!”

I rolled onto my good shoulder and came up in a crouch, but Jared and his partner stayed down.  Abernathy had a hand over his face and blood was seeping from between his fingers.  We were quickly surrounded by five other men, including one of the caddies who circled, crab-like, wielding a titanium driver.

“What the hell’s going on here?” demanded a late arrival, breathless.

Jared, his shirt torn at the neck, rose to a sitting position and pointed a shaking finger in my direction.

“You’re fired, MacTaggart!  You hear me?  You’re through!  Now get the fuck out of here!”

I heard a whooshing sound then, and a white flash appeared behind me with Jordan Mardian at the wheel.

“You’re through, sport,” I called over my shoulder as Jordan hit the accelerator and we lurched off in a quickening rush of wind and trees, tracking the fairway westward toward the clubhouse.

“What took you so long?” I asked, brushing the pine sap and needles from my forearms.  She reached over and straightened my collar, more amused than alarmed at what she’d witnessed.

“I think you’d be wise to give me a rain check on that drink,” she said.

We hurtled down the fairway and over a low rise, and soon the rear of the clubhouse came into view above the treetops.

“I couldn’t help but notice that you didn’t get your money,” she said after a while.

“Maybe not.  But I got something just as important.”

“Oh?  And what’s that?”

“I got his attention.”

Ruess

On November 12, 1934, a peripatetic young artist named Everett Ruess loaded up his pack burros, said goodbye to the friends he’d made in the remote Mormon settlement of Escalante, Utah, and resumed a journey of exploration – both cartographic and spiritual – that had come to define his young life.  His intention, as expressed in letters he’d posted to his family in California, was to travel south – either across the Colorado River at Lee’s Ferry and back onto the Navajo reservation from which he’d come, or else into the maze of side canyons marking the Escalante River’s confluence with the Colorado, and thence eastward, crossing the latter somewhere above its junction with the San Juan River gorge.

He was never heard from again.

That same day, less than fifty miles to the east, a 36-year-old Texas drifter named James Clinton Palmer was building a crude dugout shelter in which to spend the coming winter in the company of a ragged, visibly-pregnant 14-year-old whom he called Johnny Rae.  The disquieting couple had been hired by Monument Valley trading-post owner Harry Goulding to tend a flock of sheep that had, just a few months earlier, been ordered north of the San Juan River by federal authorities when their home range became part of the Navajo reservation in 1933.  Not surprisingly, this sudden influx of over 1,500 hungry sheep precipitated a series of escalating conflicts with the Mormon cattlemen on whose traditional stock range the Goulding sheep now foraged.

What Goulding did not know was that the man he’d hired was a violent psychopath recently released from the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.  Or that Palmer had, only a few months earlier, kidnapped his child bride – whose real name was Lucile “Lottie” Garrett – from Oklahoma after murdering her father.  Or that Palmer would soon be murdering again, in spectacular fashion.

The red rock country of southern Utah – with its canyons and mesas, its spires and gorges – is among the most beautiful and, paradoxically, among the least populous regions in America, and when Everett Ruess vanished into its rugged dreamscape in November of 1934, he passed into legend.  No fewer than five books and two documentary films have celebrated the young man Wallace Stegner called an “atavistic wanderer of the wastelands,” and about whom John Nichols wrote, “it was his life that was his greatest work of art.”  His disappearance remains – along with those of Amelia Earhart and Joseph Force Crater – one of the enduring mysteries of the Twentieth Century.

Speculation over the fate of Everett Ruess has run rampant ever since his pack burros and a few personal effects were discovered in remote Davis Gulch – northwest of the Colorado River’s confluence with the San Juan River – on March 3, 1935.  Searchers soon discovered his trademark “NEMO 1934” graffito etched into the high-desert sandstone of a nearby Anasazi ruin.  Of the boy, however, there was no further sign.

Theories advanced to explain the Ruess mystery have ranged from the prosaic – he fell to his death, or he drowned – to the fantastic.  Some say he was murdered, or took his own life.  Some say he never died at all, but rather slipped onto the Navajo reservation, took a native bride, and lived to old age in quiet anonymity.  In April of 2009, National Geographic magazine entered the fray, reporting a Navajo grandparent’s supposed deathbed account of Everett Ruess’s murder at the hands of three Ute Indian assailants.  Initial DNA testing of skeletal remains raised hopes that the 75-year mystery had at last been solved.  Those hopes were dashed, however, when further testing confirmed the purported Ruess remains to be of Navajo ancestry.

There is, however, one solid clue to the fate of Everett Ruess, which came to public light in 1983 when Escalante river guide Ken Slight (the real-life inspiration for Seldom Seen Smith, of The Monkey Wrench Gang fame) found another NEMO etching in lower Grand Gulch, also north of the San Juan River, some forty miles due east of the 1934 Davis Gulch discovery.  According to Southwest author and historian Fred Blackburn, who personally took tracings of the two graffiti, they indicate a common hand.

The San Juan Record.

If Ruess was, in fact, hiking eastward, exploring the cuts and canyons along the northern rim of the San Juan River gorge, perhaps working his way toward the bridge crossing at Mexican Hat, then he soon would have entered John’s Canyon, less than ten miles due east of Grand Gulch, probably in late November or early December of 1934.

[Full Scan of San Juan Record from March 7, 1935]

And there he would almost certainly have encountered Clint Palmer.

By Thanksgiving of 1934, complications in young Lucile’s pregnancy required that she return to Goulding’s Trading Post in Monument Valley, where she remained until December 11 and then was moved to Monticello, Utah, giving birth on December 31 to a baby boy who would die seven days later.  By mid-January, she and Palmer were back in their John’s Canyon dugout, and the long-simmering range war over the Goulding sheep would soon come to a boil.

On February 28, 1935, as Palmer once again drove the Goulding flock into John’s Canyon for water, he encountered Blanding cattleman William E. Oliver, age 77, the former Sheriff of San Juan County, Utah.  Oliver was one of – and arguably the last of – the legendary frontier lawmen, thanks to his central role in Posey’s War, America’s last Indian uprising.  In that 1923 incident, Sheriff Oliver’s horse was shot out from under him during a daring escape attempt by a pair of Ute Indian prisoners, in response to which Oliver held over 40 Ute men, women and children hostage in a Blanding stockade in a tense, month-long armed standoff.

Bill Oliver was not, even in retirement, a man to be trifled with.

Inside John’s Canyon, words were exchanged between Palmer and Oliver, and shots were fired, and the former Sheriff fell dead beside his horse.  After dragging Oliver’s body to the river gorge, Palmer set off on horseback to find Norris Shumway, Oliver’s 25-year-old grandson, whom Palmer then shot and decapitated, eliminating his only potential witness.

The next day, Palmer and Lottie appeared in Monument Valley, where at gunpoint they relieved Harry Goulding of his car and forty dollars in cash before lighting out for Texas.  Unbeknownst to the fleeing outlaws, however, the decapitated skeleton of Lucile’s father had since been discovered and placed on display at the Hopkins County courthouse in Sulphur Springs, and a Texas warrant was outstanding for Palmer’s arrest.  The pair was finally apprehended on March 5, 1935, and the resulting Greenville, Texas “skeleton murder” trial – featuring Lucile Garrett as its star witness – was a regional sensation.

According to this blood-soaked timeline, Clint Palmer – already psychotic and heavily-armed, and under growing pressure from all sides – was alone in Utah’s John’s Canyon from Thanksgiving of 1934 until mid-January of 1935.  Did Everett Ruess – whom we now believe to have been but ten miles away, and heading in Palmer’s direction – wander into Palmer’s sheep camp?  And if so, did he meet the same fate as would soon befall Oliver and Shumway?

On the same day – March 7, 1935 – that the San Juan Record first reported the John’s Canyon killings in a banner headline proclaiming DOUBLE MURDER SHOCKS COUNTY, it also reported, in the adjoining column on page one, the disappearance of a young, unnamed artist who had last been seen in November of 1934 near the Escalante River, where “[p]lanes were used to try and locate the artist’s camp and succeeded in finding what they thought to be the pack burrow [sic] which he used.  No camp or other sign of the lost man have yet been found.”

Harry Goulding is today best known as the man who brought Hollywood to Monument Valley when, in 1937, he drove his battered truck to Los Angeles with a bedroll and a stack of photographs and managed to convince director John Ford to film Stagecoach – a planned Western epic starring a young stuntman named John Wayne – on a Navajo reservation reeling from a half-decade of drought and Depression.

Pioneer, promoter, and trading post impresario, Goulding was a Western character writ large whose life has been chronicled in books like Samuel Moon’s Tall Sheep (1992), and Richard E. Klinck’s Land of Room Enough and Time Enough (1995), and most recently in the March, 2009 issue of Vanity Fair magazine (Bissinger, “Inventing Ford Country.”)  But there is one subject on which even the loquacious Harry Goulding would remain forever silent, right up until his death in 1981:

“Harry never defended himself to the people of Blanding, and forty years later he would not speak to me on the record about his part in the Jimmy Palmer affair.  True to his western values, he believed that a man should be judged by his actions, not by his words, and that his life would have to speak for him.  Ultimately, it seems that we must leave it where Harry wanted us to leave it.”  Moon, Tall Sheep, at 87.

In contrast to the gauzy glow of legend that has come to envelop Everett Ruess, the John’s Canyon murders of Bill Oliver and Norris Shumway are but forgotten footnotes in the long and occasionally colorful history of San Juan County, Utah.  In November of 1994, however, I stumbled upon a pair of human skulls while hiking in John’s Canyon.  That discovery would lead me to undertake years of painstaking research into the John’s Canyon murders, their etiology and consequences – research that grew to encompass newspaper accounts, court and prison records, genealogical and oral histories, and (in the archives of a Salt Lake City museum) re-discovery of the “lost” 1935 grand jury testimony of Harry Goulding.

My novel Hard Twisted – the true story of Lottie Garrett’s harrowing year in captivity – was published by Bloomsbury on November 13, 2012.  It opens the door on a long-forgotten chapter in Western history.  Does it also hold a clue to the seemingly insoluble mystery of Everett Ruess?

A starred review from Library Journal!

Compelling novel…Readers can’t help but open their hearts to Lottie. …Her story with all its gritty details and twists deserves wide readership.

Another rave from High Country News!

 Greaves’ understated writing captures the dry, raw-boned beauty of the land and reproduces the distinctive dialect of that time and place with a pitch-perfect ear . . . Comparisons to Cormac McCarthy, another writer of unflinching Western stories, feel apt.  In its historical weight and narrative power, HARD TWISTED is as epic as the rugged mesas and range its characters inhabit.

Have you been convinced yet to read Hard Twisted? No? OK, here’s some more!

The Historical Novel Society recommends it:

The fact that this is based on a true story adds to its chilling suspense. Greaves impressively brings alive Lottie’s year with Palmer; it felt as real to me as my own childhood. This is Lottie’s story, from start to finish. Greaves effectively intersperses court transcripts (fictitious—no real transcript survived) to show how the world in 1934 might see a girl like Lottie, “with [her] schoolgirl charms and [her] feminine wiles.” I was so worried about what happened to Lottie that I’d read less than 50 pages when I had to turn to the author’s note to find out what her fate would be. Even after I knew how it would end, Hard Twisted grabbed me and didn’t let go. It feels like a classic because of Greaves’s stylish writing, because of the story’s drama, and because of the powerful theme—how Lottie’s believable, determined innocence and faith kept her whole. Although Hard Twisted will never be shelved with inspirational books, it inspired me. It’s a real-life morality tale, no preaching needed. Recommended.

The Big Thrill interview is here, as is this very kind, albeit brief critical response:

Researching an incident of social impact and resurrecting its mythology  as thrilling literature in the TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG(2000) contributed to Peter Carey’s Booker prizes. In a different time-space, C. Joseph Greaves’ HARD TWISTED is in the same class.

From Booklist’s forthcoming November 15th issue

Drawing on a famous Depression-era murder case—the 1935 “Skeleton Murder” in Greenville, Texas—Greaves extrapolates from the historical record to look inside the principals’ hearts and minds. In May 1934, 13-year-old Lottie Garrett and her father, Dillard, are homeless, standing by a dusty road in Oklahoma, when Clint Palmer, recently released from Leavenworth, picks them up with promises of work and food. So begins a one-year odyssey in which Palmer, apparently after murdering Dillard, rapes Lottie and claims her as his wife before embarking on an interstate crime spree with Lottie in tow. It culminates with the double murder that made the pair famous (trial transcripts are interspersed within the story). Lottie’s narration, a mix of naïvete and hard-won toughness, is heartbreaking in its plainspoken recounting of the facts behind a nightmare, but all the characters, even Palmer—a sociopath to his core—reveal flickerings of inner lives that confound our attempts to pigeonhole this seemingly archetypal Depression tragedy. There are echoes of Robert Altman’s great 1974 film Thieves like Us here, but most of all Lottie evokes the steely but tender heart of Ree Dolly in Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone (2006). — Bill Ott

And, lastly, check out the current issue of Mystery Readers Journal–I’ve got an article in there.

In November of 1994, my wife and I drove from Los Angeles to a remote bed & breakfast in southeastern Utah, where we planned to spend the Thanksgiving holiday weekend with friends from Colorado.  This is America’s red-rock country – a hallucinogenic landscape of buttes and spires, mesas and gorges – and is among our nation’s most beautiful, and, paradoxically, least populous regions.  It lies at the northern edge of the Navajo reservation, where the San Juan River divides Monument Valley to the south from the towns of Mexican Hat, Bluff, and Blanding to the north.

On our second day, while hiking in an area known as John’s Canyon, it began to snow.  As we headed back to our car, muffled in the cottony silence, we stumbled upon two human skulls.  And just as we bent to examine them, a thunderclap rolled down the canyon, shaking the ground beneath our feet.

We could see that they were Indian skulls – Navajo or Ute or Paiute, given the location.  Not old enough to constitute artifacts, but not fresh enough to represent an investigable crime-scene.  There was, however, definite evidence of foul play, in the form of holes or jagged fractures at the back of each skull.

Intrigued, we reported the discovery to our hosts, who in turn introduced us to a local woman named Doris Valle, who had self-published a short history of the area in and around Mexican Hat.  We were not, apparently, the first hikers to find the skulls, which Doris believed were connected to a notorious double-murder mentioned in her book.

The incident occurred in 1935, when a 36-year-old sheepherder named Jimmy Palmer and his 14-year-old “child bride” whom he called Johnny Rae, newly employed by Monument Valley trading post owner Harry Goulding, clashed with some local cattlemen on whose range the Goulding sheep had trespassed.  Palmer shot 77-year-old William Oliver (the former Sheriff of San Juan County) and his 25-year-old grandson Norris “Jake” Shumway, tossed both bodies into the river gorge, and then fled with Johnny Rae to Texas in a car he stole at gunpoint from Goulding.  (The John’s Canyon skulls were alleged to be those of two Navajo sheepherders who were working for Goulding at the time of Palmer’s arrival.)

The story – and my rather dramatic introduction to it – haunted me long after I’d returned to my law practice in Los Angeles, and so I set out to investigate the many questions it raised.  Who, exactly, was this Jimmy Palmer?  Who was the girl?  Where had they come from, and what had become of them?

My quest began with archived newspaper accounts of the John’s Canyon murders, from which I worked backward, following the outlaws’ trail to Texas and thence Oklahoma.  The story I uncovered – via newspaper accounts, court and prison records, museum archives, site visits, and oral histories – proved more dramatic than any I could have hoped for or imagined.

The story begins in May of 1934, outside of Hugo, Oklahoma, where a homeless man and his 13-year-old daughter are befriended by a Texas drifter newly released from the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.  The drifter, James Clinton Palmer, lures father and daughter to Texas where the father, Dillard Garrett, mysteriously disappears, and where his daughter Lucile begins a one-year ordeal as Palmer’s unwilling accomplice on a crime and killing spree that traverses the Depression-era Southwest, eventually leading to the four Utah murders and culminating in Palmer’s Texas trial for the murder of Lucile’s father.

Not only was the story compelling in its own right, it contained a number of unexpectedly-intriguing elements, including (a) its Dust Bowl origins, (b) Lucile’s (aka Lottie’s, aka Johnny Rae’s) Stockholm Syndrome captivity, (c) her pregnancy and childbirth while on the run, (d) Goulding’s later fame for having introduced film director John Ford to Monument Valley in 1937, (e) Sheriff Bill Oliver’s earlier role in Posey’s War, America’s last Indian uprising, and (f) the notoriety attendant to Palmer’s 1935 Greenville, Texas “skeleton murder” trial – so called because Dillard Garrett’s remains had been placed on display at the county courthouse in Sulphur Springs – in which 14-year-old Lucile would be the State’s star witness against her captor.

Having finally unearthed the story, I turned next to crafting it into a novel, a process that took around two years, and that I finally completed in 2009.  Happily, while still in manuscript, Hard Twisted was named Best Historical Novel in the 2010 SouthWest Writers International Writing Contest, and was soon sold to Bloomsbury, which then selected it as one of nine international novels with which to launch their new, all-literary Bloomsbury Circus imprint in the UK.

On November 13, 2012, the saga of Clint Palmer and Lottie Garrett will be available in bookstores worldwide, and the circle that began for me in 1994 on a snowy, windswept day in John’s Canyon, Utah will finally be complete.

I hope you’ll like the book.

Jack Kirby (1917-1994)

For most Americans of a certain age, the summer of 1968 is viewed as a kind of dark chasm that yawned between the Summer of Love and the Summer of Woodstock.  It was, after all, the summer of Martin, the summer of Bobby.  Of My Lai and Biafra.  It marked the rise of Nixon and the fall of Prague Spring.  It hosted the Chicago Convention.

For me, the dog days of 1968 evoke different memories, fonder memories, and none more enduring than the memory of my improbable audience with the King.

Iron Man, X-Men, the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four.  It was these Ektachrome heroes of today’s CG cinema who formed the warp and weft of my boyhood narrative, their parallel universe of lantern-jawed heroes, buxom damsels and, of course, evil villains bent on world conquest the golden latchkey for a yearning pre-teen fettered to the terrestrial orthodoxy of 1960’s Levittown.

CaptainAmerica, the Avengers, the Mighty Thor, the Silver Surfer.  Conflicted but righteous, misunderstood yet unerring, they and countless other pulp paladins all sprung fully-formed from the sharpened No. 2 pencil of one man, who today is acknowledged, posthumously, as the greatest pencil artist in comic book history.  I’m speaking now of the King of Comics, Jack Kirby.

And all I wanted was his autograph.

It was in 1968, that tumultuous summer of my twelfth year, that my pal Jimmy and I hauled out theNassauCountyphone book and started paging through the K’s.  We’d reasoned that if Marvel Comics was headquartered on Madison Avenue, then some of the artists must surely ride the Long Island Railroad to work just like our fathers.  Just like ordinary mortals.

We found several possibilities — Johns, Jacks and J’s — and I wrote to all of them, effusive in my adulation, and humble, or so I’d hoped, in my request for a signed photograph.  I posted the letters and waited.

A week passed, two weeks.  My attention, meanwhile, had wandered to the more prosaic diversions of a Levittown summer.  The Village Green swimming pool.  Curb-ball.  Ringalevio.  The not-yet-amazin’ Mets.

And then, all but forgotten, it suddenly arrived — a stiff manila envelope with artful block lettering.  Inside was no photograph, however, but an original pencil drawing.  The Thing, his arms bulging beneath a tight t-shirt, hunched over a drafting table, a word balloon suspended over his rocky brow.  “Is this shot okay, Chuck?” he asked, the smoke from his stogie curled upward to form the magical number 4.

Jimmy was jealous.  Jimmy was, in fact, beside himself.  And Jimmy had a plan.

Over the phone, Mr. Kirby was gracious.  Yes, he worked from his home.  No, he enjoyed having visitors.  Tomorrow?  Sure, not a problem.

Jack Kirby's "The Thing" in a special drawing, 1968

We lied to our parents, naturally, and set out after breakfast on our Sting-Rays for what would prove to be a half-day’s ride into uncharted territory.  A suburban neighborhood, a modest home.  We knocked.  We waited.  And Jack Kirby answered the door.

He was friendly, avuncular.  He offered us Orange Crush and led us downstairs to the basement studio where he’d been working on a forthcoming issue of the Fantastic Four.  The room was littered with monochrome panels of mutants and monsters, machinery and mayhem.

We watched him work.  He patiently answered all of our inane questions.  We hung.  And in the end, after we’d wrung the last drops from our soda bottles, he offered to draw a picture for each of us.

My favorite that week was T’Challa, the Black Panther, Marvel’s first-ever African-American superhero, yet another of Kirby’s pioneering creations.  He seemed surprised by my choice, and somehow pleased.

He took a clean sheet of paper.  He sketched, he shaded, and in less than thirty seconds he’d confected an astonishing image.  The Black Panther, tightly-muscled and perfectly proportioned, sprang forth from the page.  Above his head, a word balloon declared, “Chuck, it’s great meeting you.”

Today, almost 45 years later, I still look at both drawings every day, since they hang on the wall of my home office.  They’re totems, I suppose; paeans to innocence in turbulent times.  And they’re tributes to a man whose genius continues, even in these trying times, to offer the same promise of magic and adventure to a new generation.

Jack Kirby, born Jacob Kurtzberg, died inThousand Oaks,Californiain 1994.  He was 76 years young.

Jack, it was great meeting you.

I am a neutral in this debate.  Although traditionally-published myself, I have great sympathy with the argument that much worthy literature goes unrecognized by the jaundiced eye of Big Publishing.  Indeed, the anecdotal evidence – Harper Lee, for example, being rejected by ten publishers before finding a home for To Kill a Mockingbird – compels no other conclusion.  Nor do I take issue with those who begrudge Big Publishing its outsized, pride-of-lions’ share.

In debating the Traditional-versus-Independent question, one must inevitably address the subject of literary criticism.  Traditionalists argue that the brave new landscape envisioned by the Independents – a landscape mounded with 300,000 new self-published titles in 2011 – more closely resembles a swamp, in which the reader is left to slog the digital morass without compass or sextant, as likely to download a cottonmouth as, say, a roseate spoonbill.  To this the Independents have heretofore rejoined that the democratization of publishing extends even to literary criticism, such that a constellation of Amazon five-stars is the astral equivalent of one meteoric review in the Times Review of Books.

I say “heretofore” because, as even the most ardent Independent must acknowledge, the face of populist literary criticism has recently changed, and not for the better.  On August 26, the New York Times’ David Streitfeld introduced readers to Todd Rutherford, a man whose web-based sham-porium GettingBookReviews.com admits to having commissioned over 4,500 on-line book reviews during 2010-11, all from a boiler room cadre of freelance “critics” recruited on Craigslist and paid $15 for each five-star review they belched forth on behalf of GBR’s author-customers, at rates ranging from $99 for one to $999 for fifty.  Moreover, this bombshell landed in the midst of shocking admissions by several bestselling authors, including John Locke, Stephen Leather, and R.J. Ellory, to having either paid for reviews (Locke) or having written reviews of their own (Leather and Ellory) using on-line pseudonyms – a practice known as “sock-puppetry.”

Ellory’s admission – the latest in the series, but probably not the last – is particularly disturbing.  For those unfamiliar with his oeuvre, Ellory is a popular British author of U.S.-based thrillers whose nine novels have, according to his official website, been translated into 25 languages and short-listed for numerous literary awards, including the CWA Steel Dagger and the Barry.  His are certainly not the sort of books one imagines requiring false praise to find an audience.  What is more troubling are the allegations that Ellory not only lauded his own writing, but publicly denigrated that of his perceived rivals, posting scathing, one-star reviews under a rogues’ gallery of false names.

The charges against Ellory hit a little too close to this writer’s home because, although I’ve never met the gentleman, we have corresponded.  My second novel Hard Twisted will be published in November, both in the U.S. (by Bloomsbury USA) and in the UK (by Bloomsbury Circus.)  Through the efforts of my UK publicist, we received a sensational blurb from Ellory that Bloomsbury was considering for the jacket of the UK edition.  While I have no doubt as to the blurb’s sincerity, both from its content and from my subsequent correspondence with Ellory, and while I remain grateful for having received it, its promotional value has been irreparably compromised by the sock-puppetry scandal.  And there, in microcosm, is the heart of the issue.

I’m an author, not a psychiatrist or a public scold.  I don’t know what might have motivated Ellory, or Leather, or any of their fellow travelers, and I’m not going to presume to judge them until all the facts are known.  What I do know is that public confidence in the kind of populist literary criticism touted by the Independents – fostered by sites like Amazon.com, and relied upon by those who use them – has been shaken, perhaps to its very foundation.  And it’s on this damaged foundation that the towering “independent publishing” edifice now uneasily rests.

Hush Money (Minotaur 2012) introduces Jack MacTaggart, a junior lawyer with Henley & Hargrove, the oldest and snobbiest law firm in Pasadena, California. When socialite Sydney Everett’s champion show-jumper Hush Puppy dies unexpectedly, Jack is assigned the insurance claim. The vet doesn’t find any sign of trauma and gives a verdict of cardiac failure, but the insurance company suspects foul play. Jack finds the brittle and calculating Sydney Everett distasteful, but is instantly attracted to her stable manager, Tara Flynn, who sincerely mourns Hush Puppy’s death. Tara, a grand prix equestrian competitor, helps Jack understand the complex world of professional show-jumping and provides a disconcerting riding lesson to demonstrate the physical strength needed by the riders. Jack’s investigation into Sydney’s stables uncovers high monthly payments that look like blackmail, and then the necropsy on Hush Puppy turns up a parasitic infection that appears to have been intentional. A sudden death that just could be murder adds to the tension, and Jack fears that he might be the next victim. Jack is an engaging narrator, his quips balanced by true empathy for those he feels are deserving of help. His other client is Victor Tazerian, a trash collector whose insurance company refuses to pay for a medical procedure that might cure his leukemia. The procedure requires harvesting Victor’s bone marrow while his leukemia is in remission, which the insurance company claims is an unnecessary procedure since Victor is not sick while in remission. The quirks and tricks of legal negotiations are presented with humor in this fast-paced legal thriller, hopefully the first in a series.

You can read about more books on their August list here

But wait, you say, I’m not a serious runner.  In fact, I get tired driving 26 miles.  And even if I were tempted to do something as loony as train for a marathon, God help me, what about my (fill in the blank: job, family, novel-in-progress)?

I first discovered running – or was it the other way around? – while in law school, in Boston, in the late 1970s.  This was ground-zero for U.S. distance-running, a time and place when it was not uncommon for me to see guys like Bill Rodgers and Alberto Salazar circling the Chestnut Hill reservoir on my nightly stress-busting forays from my Commonwealth Avenue apartment.

Endurance athletics, alas, proved not to be my strong suit, and I’ve never threatened the podium in any of the dozens of road and trail races I’ve entered over the years.  But I’ve always enjoyed the personal challenge, not to mention the mental and physical benefits of regular training, such that the habits I developed in my student days have stayed with me well into middle age, where I still run at least three times per week – and have for nearly 35 years.  By my calculation, that pencils out to around 25,000 miles, and 70 or so pairs of running shoes.

Wasted time?  Hardly.  In my second career as an author, and now having run three marathons and written three novels, I can draw some parallels between the two – parallels that should apply with equal force to lawyering, or to parenting, or to any of life’s endeavors that requires time and effort and single-minded dedication.

But first a story.

My first-ever marathon was the 1984 New York City, for which I naively trained by running as far as I could as fast as I could, night after night, for two solid months.  I worked my way up to 14-milers at an eight-minute pace, figuring that the crowds and adrenaline would carry me to the finish.  I figured wrong.  Race day found me slowing at mile 18, and mostly walking to mile 20, where I bonked so badly I could no longer put one foot in front of the other.  I sat – first in the street, then on the bumper of an ambulance.  But I eventually managed to get up, and stagger, and walk some more.  Then I found myself jogging again, through the sun-dappled hills of Central Park and onto 59^th Street, where I finished in a humiliating, exhilarating 5:59.

To this day, I regard that race as the greatest achievement of my life.

Why?  Because I didn’t quit.  In fact, I vowed then and there to run again in New York, which I’ve done every ten years.  And though my performance has improved markedly with each return visit, the lessons I learned in that first, torturous race – lessons I’ll here call the “Three Ps” – have remained immutable and indelible, sustaining me still in my middle-aged writing life.  They are:

• ͦPreparation.  It takes more than ideas and enthusiasm to begin a novel, given that THE END lies more than a year and a hundred-thousand words down the road.  Each new book is its own epic journey, requiring the kind of research, organization, outlining, and mental preparedness for which marathon training is uniquely suited.  Approach the process lightly, and you’re likely to hit the Wall – or to never reach the start line.  Know and respect the course, and you just might wear the laurels.

• ͦ   Perspiration.  There are days when the words won’t come, and when the finish line looks to be a hundred miles away.  That’s when you need to put one foot in front of the other, pushing through the pain and refusing to quit.  You might not love what you’re writing on those days, but at least you’re moving forward.  As Nora Roberts once said, you can’t edit a blank page.

• ͦ   Perseverance.  It was E. L. Doctorow who likened writing the novel to driving on a foggy night, in that you can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.  So too the marathon, in which you can only see a few blocks up the road, but with faith and persistence, you’ll eventually get to the finish.

So yes, I’ll keep on running, for as long as my aging joints allow.  Because the road offers valuable lessons.  And the foremost of these is:  never, ever give up.

Greaves’s deft prose twinkles like Okie campfires (in the night). Storytelling at its most compelling: raw, yet tender and as dangerous as warm moonshine breath on a young girl’s neck.

My deep thanks to Sir Parker.