Thursday, December 24, 2009

Original Ace Atkins short story (part 3 of 3)


Busted Flush Press's new reprint of Ace Atkins's first novel featuring blues historian Nick Travers, Crossroad Blues, also features an original, never-before-published Nick short story, set at Christmas! As an early Christmas gift to fans, BFP is serializing the story in three posts... Here's the third & final part... Enjoy! (Read part one here and part two here.)

"LAST FAIR DEAL GONE DOWN"
An original Nick Travers story.
© Ace Atkins, 2009

(concluded)

SOMETIMES I LIKE to hear Dixieland Jazz after several drinks. Sometimes I like to hear my boots as they clunk across a hardwood floor. Sometimes I even like to cover the tall windows of my warehouse with bed sheets and watch old movies all day. But most of all, I like to sit in JoJo’s and listen to Loretta Jackson sing. Her voice can rattle the exposed brick walls and break a man’s heart.

It was Christmas Eve, a week after Jay picked up Blackie. I was nursing a beer and watching Loretta rehearse a few new numbers. Old blues Christmas songs that she always mixed in with her set during the season. Growling the words to “Merry Christmas, Baby” and making my neck hairs stand on end.

“You keep babyin’ that beer and it’s gonna fall in love with ya,” JoJo said, as he washed out a couple shot glasses in the sink.

“Everybody needs a friend.”

“Mmhmm.” He dried the inside of the glasses with a white towel and then hung it over his shoulder. “Why you down here today, anyway?”

“Sam’s been wanting to go Christmas shopping in the Quarter all week. And I promised.”

“You hear anymore from Medeaux ’bout that pimp?”

“Nah. Blackie’s still in jail far as I know.”

“You let me know if somethin’s different.”

Loretta finished the song with a great sigh into her microphone and a quick turnaround from the band. The guitar player made his instrument give a wolf whistle as Loretta stepped off stage. Running a forearm over her brow, she walked over and sat next to me.

“My boy Nicholas,” she said as she rubbed my back. “My boy.”

“Your boy Nicholas sittin’ on his ass drinking while his new woman trudging round these old French streets looking for gifts.”

“My boy deserves it.”

“Hmphh.”

“Y’all talkin’ ’bout Fats, weren’t cha?”

JoJo nodded and walked back into the kitchen.

“Man had a sad life, Nick. Cain’t believe he sold his sax for that girl.”

“Guess he loved her.”

“Hell, she was just a two-bit whore.”

“Loretta.”

“Naw, I’m serious. She was fuckin’ half the band.”

“What?"

“Sure she was. Saw her almost get her cheap ass beat by Fats’ drummer out back. Havin’ some kind of lover’s quarrel, I guess.”

“When was this?”

“Few days before he died.”

I took a deep breath, and my fist tightened on top of the bar.

***********************

TOM CAT WAS passed out on his sofa when I kicked in the door to his apartment. Little multi-colored Christmas lights had fallen on his body and face, and it gave him a festive, embalmed look. I grabbed him by a dirty Converse high top and yanked him off the sofa. His eyes sprung awake.

“Who killed him?”

“Nick, man. Merry Christmas to you, too. Hey, I—”

“Who killed him?”

“You trippin’, man.”

I yanked him to his knees and punched him hard in the stomach. He doubled over weakly.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were sleeping with her?”

“I wasn’t.”

“The pimp didn’t kill Sarah, did he? He had no reason. You did. You loved her.”

“Fuck you.”

I kicked him hard in the side with my boot. I didn’t enjoy it. It didn’t make me feel like a man. I just did it.

“It was a mistake. Fats shouldn’t been a part of it.”

“Part of what?”

He rolled to his side and wiped his tears with a ragged flannel shirt sleeve. Pushing his long greasy hair, he told me.

I did not interrupt.

***********************

IT WAS BLACKMAIL. Sarah and Tom Cat had worked out a scam on a local trial lawyer. But he wasn’t just any lawyer. He was Spencer Faircloth, lawyer to the New Orleans mob. An all-star backslapper among criminals.

Their plan included a sick little videotape. Maybe it included a burro. I don’t know what was on it, didn’t want to know, but I took it with me.

I let Tom Cat go, drove to a nearby K&B drugstore, and looked through a water-logged phone book. Some of the pages were so stuck together that the book felt like papier-mâché.

There was no listing. I called information and was told he had an unpublished number.

I called a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound bail bondsman I know named Tiny. He asked for the payphone’s number.

He called me back in five minutes with the address.

Faircloth lived in an ivy-covered brick mansion with a spiked iron fence and stained glass windows. When I pulled up near the address on St. Charles, dozens of finely dressed men and women were drinking in Faircloth’s hospitality.

I could see them all, like fish in an aquarium, through the tall windows.

I lit a cigarette, smoked it into a nub, and then decided to go in.

Most of the men I passed were in winter wool suits, accented with the occasional silly holiday tie. Candy canes, reindeer, and elves.

I was dressed in blue jeans, boots, and a jean jacket.

I wasn’t accepted.

“Sir?” a large black man asked me.

Si.”

“Can I have your invitation?”

“I’m here to see Mr. Faircloth.”

“Mr. Faircloth is spending time with his guests. Can I help you?”

The man’s hair was Jheri-curled, and he wore a finely trimmed mustache.

“Aren’t you Billy Dee Williams?”

He made a move toward me.

“Tell him that a friend of Sarah’s is here.”

He looked down at me, and then left.

I walked over to the buffet line and ate three very tiny turkey sandwiches. I didn’t see any tiny quiches.

A few minutes later, a young man in his twenties walked over to me. I didn’t recognize him at first. His hair seemed slicker tonight. His movements were more polished.

“Can I help you?”

“Are you Spencer Faircloth?”

“No.”

“Then you can’t. I’ll just stay here, continue to eat, and thumb my nose at the conventions of the rich.”

“I’ll have you removed.”

“You do and I’ll propose a toast to Sarah. The finest whore that Faircloth ever had killed.”

“You’re insane.”

“Perhaps.”

Then I remembered him, the younger man from the hotel where I first met Sarah. The one who’d backed up the older man. I looked for him.

I saw the gray-headed gent laughing it up with a group of his ilk near the French doors.

I jumped upon the top of the linen buffet table, my dirty buckskin boots soiling the whiteness. I grabbed a glass and spoon and clinked the two together loudly.

“I would like to propose a toast to the host with the most. Spence Faircloth.”

The party hesitatingly clapped. A drunk elderly man hooted his approval.

“Thank you, grandpa,” I announced to the old man. “But right now, I would like to offer Mr. Faircloth a deal.”

They were silent.

The two men were whispering to Faircloth, who had his arms tightly wrapped around himself.

“You might call it the last fair deal gone down, like my old friend Fats used to say. The deal, Mr. Faircloth, is that you join me on this table and announce to the party that you are a gutless turd who had a friend of mine killed.”

The crowd stayed silent. A wrinkled old woman with huge breasts shook her head and blew breath out her nose.

“But where is the deal, you ask?” I said, reaching deep into the inner layer of my denim jacket and pulling out the videotape.

I held it high over my head like a Bourbon Street preacher does a Bible. I mimed my hands to pretend I was weighing the two.

Billy Dee Williams was trying to approach me from behind.

“What’ll it be, Spence?”

Faircloth shook his head, turned on his heel like a spoiled child, and walked away.

I put the videotape back in my jacket and hopped off the table.

Just like any other unwanted guest, no one tried to stop me as I left. I think they were waiting for me to pull a red bandana up over my nose and ask for their jewels.

I got in my Jeep and headed back to the Warehouse District, my hands shaking on the wheel.

***********************

I RETURNED TO my warehouse only long enough to grab a fresh set of clothes, binoculars, a six-pack of Abita beer, a frozen quart of Loretta’s jambalaya, my Browning, and Sam’s Christmas present—a 1930s Art Deco watch that I bought on Royal Street a few weeks ago.

It was so silent in my darkened space that I could hear the watch’s soft ticks as late-day orange light retreated through the industrial windows.

I tucked everything in a tattered army duffle bag and put it outside my door.

I used only the small lock near the doorknob, leaving the deadbolt open.

Walking across Julia Street, I felt a cold December wind coming from the Mississippi. It smelled stagnant and stale. I could almost taste its polluted, muddy water.

In the warehouse opposite mine, Sam slid back the door with a scowl on her face. Her short blonde hair was tousled, and she was wearing an old gray Tulane sweatshirt of mine that hung below her knees.

“You’re scowling.”

“You left me wandering around the Quarter. What the hell is the matter with you?”

“I’m sorry.”

She let me in and I followed her to the second floor of her warehouse that looked down on a dance studio. The lights were dimmed on the floor below, and a stereo softly played Otis Redding.

“I’m still mad.”

“I know.”

She reheated the jambalaya in a black skillet, and we shared the six-pack of Abita. I told her about Tom Cat and about Spencer Faircloth’s dinner party. She shook her head and tried not to laugh. When I told her I had my gun, she didn’t like that at all, and walked out of the kitchen. One of her cats trailed her.

But she warmed up after a few more of Otis’ ballads and a few more Abitas.

Later, we made love in her antique iron bed, Christmas lights strung over her headboard. The beer, food, and music blended into a fine holiday mood.

The next day, we opened our gifts. She gave me an old Earl King record I’d wanted for years, a gunmetal cigarette lighter, a first edition of Franny and Zooey, and a framed picture of Tom Mix.

She loved the watch.

We returned to bed a few more times that day, only leaving the mattress for the kitchen and something to eat. It was one of the best Christmases I can remember.

***********************

THEY CAME AROUND midnight, Sam still cradled in my arms asleep. Two cats were curled in balls at the foot of the bed. I could hear the sound of the engine and two doors closing while I carefully unentwined myself from Sam and peeked through her blinds. The car, a black sedan, was still running. Two men were at my front door with a crowbar.

I walked into the kitchen, pulled on my jeans, boots, and the Tulane sweatshirt. I inserted a clip into the Browning and pulled a black watch cap over my ears.

Before clanking down the steps to the street level, I called 911, reported a burglary and shooting at my address, and hung up.

Outside, it was cold enough to see my breath.

I could see someone seated in the back of the sedan smoking a cigarette. A tiny prick of orange light and then a smoky exhaling that clouded the windows. Without stopping, I bent at the waist and jogged behind the car. I opened the back door and climbed inside.

I was seated right next to Spencer Faircloth.

I’ll never understand why he came. He was far too smart to put himself anywhere near something as dirty as this. I’m pretty sure it was just ego. The gutless turd remark must have gotten to him.

I poked him in the ribs with my Browning.

“Spencer, you old dog.”

I reached over the driver’s seat and pulled the keys from the ignition while I kept the gun pointed at him. I then motioned him outside, found the key for the trunk, and pushed him in with the flat of my palm.

My face felt cold and wind-bitten when I smiled.

They had made a real mess of my turn-of-the-century door, which had scrolled patterns around the mail slot. Splintered wood and muddy boot tracks led up my side staircase.

This time I did not run. I crept.

But I had the advantage. I knew every weakness in that staircase. Each creak. Every loose board.

I heard crashes and thuds. They were throwing my shit all around. And they must have enjoyed making a mess because they were laughing the whole time.

At the top of the landing, I straightened my right arm and fired a slug into the shoulder of the black man with curly, greasy hair. As he spun, one of my old books flew out of his hands, pages fluttering like a wounded bird before it crashed to the floor.

The young preppy white guy I’d encountered twice wasn’t ready either. It took him a full four seconds before he tried to reach inside his raincoat. His eyes were wide with fear when I fired, hitting him in the thigh.

His gun slid along the floor, several feet away from him.

He was no bodyguard or the trigger man. He was just the guy fetching laundry and coffee for Faircloth.

But ole Billy Dee was the real deal.

I walked over to him, slowly. My boots clanking hard in my warehouse, the place where I slept, ate, and read.

The book he’d been tearing pages from was Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues. The dog-eared pages littered the floor around him, some misted with blood from the bullet’s impact.

He had his gun still in hand. A revolver.

“You’re not a blues fan, are you?”

He looked up at me and laughed.

“You remember that old man who you shot in the head?”

“Should have been you, motherfucker.”

“That old man could play ‘Blue Monday’ and break your heart.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Maybe.”

With my gun pressed flat against his nose, I took his revolver.

“I’ll find you,” he said. “I promise you that.”

The police arrived a short time later, and with the coaxed testimony of Tom Cat, all three were charged with murder.

***********************

ON NEW YEAR’S Eve, I played “Auld Lang Syne” on Fats’ tarnished sax while Loretta sang. Everyone made toasts and kissed while I placed the battered instrument in a dusty glass case where it still remains today.

Sam came over, put an arm around my neck, and kissed me hard. I stood back and looked at Fats’ picture on top of the wooden case.

She kissed me again, and I turned away.

JoJo told me I did a “real nice job” playing harp that night and handed me another Dixie. Drunk, JoJo ambled up on stage and professed his love for his wife. She watched him and smiled, then gave him a kiss, too.

I wish I could’ve kept the moment, everything the way it was right then. But that was the year I met Cracker and went looking for the lost recordings of Robert Johnson in the Mississippi Delta. And my life was never the same.

******************************

We hope everyone has a wonderful New Year! Please take a moment to Ace Atkins's blog & website.

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Pre-holiday BFP news!

This has been a busy week for Busted Flush Press, and we have much to share...

Reed Farrel Coleman

NPR's Maureen Corrigan
discusses her favorite books of 2009 today on Fresh Air, including "a terrific new mystery series... a wise independent bookseller recommended that I read"... that would be Reed Farrel Coleman's Moe Prager series. Read the story & hear the podcast here.

For those who are already fans of Moe, there is imminent good news on the horizon. Busted Flush Press is on the verge of acquiring the reprint rights for the 4th & 5th books in the series: the Edgar, Macavity nominated and Shamus Award-winning Soul Patch and the Shamus Award-winning Empty Ever After. If all things go as planned, both books will be out just in time for the release of Moe #6, Innocent Monster, due out in October 2010. Please stay tuned for more updates.

Margaret Maron

Check out the news on BFP acquiring Edgar/Agatha/Anthony/Macavity Award winner Margaret Maron's 1985 stand-alone Southern crime novel, Bloody Kin, reported on the blog last week.

Don Winslow

Busted Flush Press will be reprinting Don Winslow's incredibly hard-to-find, Edgar Award-nominated crime series featuring private investigator Neal Carey. Winslow has recently attained bestsellerdom & critical acclaim for his later novels, including The Power of the Dog, The Death and Life of Bobby Z, California Fire and Life, The Winter of Frankie Machine, and one of my favorite books of 2008, The Dawn Patrol. But for years fans have been looking for his early, wonderful Carey novels... and now they'll be available again, beginning fall 2010, when the first, A Cool Breeze on the Underground, is published. To follow: The Trail to Buddha's Mirror, Way Down on the High Lonely, A Long Walk up the Water Slide, and While Drowning in the Desert.

I asked Don what he thinks about seeing these books back in print for the first time in over a decade...

"I'm absolutely delighted that the Neal Carey series is coming back into print. I don't think I've made a public appearance in ten years when I wasn't asked about these books. A Cool Breeze on the Underground holds a special place for me -- it was my first book, and I wrote it literally all over the world -- in tents in Africa, Buddhist monasteries in China, college rooms in Oxford. I think it was rejected by the first fourteen publishers who saw it -- including the publisher I'm with now, Simon & Schuster. Then it was nominated for an Edgar. Anyway, it's great to see these books coming back into print, and I'm really excited to be working with good friends at Busted Flush. The last time I saw David, we shared a candlelit (by necessity) dinner -- burgers with bags of chips -- al fresco in just-post-hurricane Houston, and it's my favorite meal ever on a book tour. This is going to be genuine fun."

Daniel Woodrell

Busted Flush Press will reprint Daniel Woodrell's stand-alone novels, Tomato Red and The Death of Sweet Mister, with new forewords for each. Edgar Award-winning crime writer Megan Abbott (Bury Me Deep) will pen the foreword to Tomato Red (to be published in fall 2010), and best-selling novelist Dennis Lehane (The Given Day) will provide the foreword to The Death of Sweet Mister (to be published in spring 2011). I'll be posting another blog entry later this week about Woodrell, "an amazing genius" (Ken Bruen), but it's safe to say he's one of today's finest novelists (of any genre) that most people just don't know about... yet. Check back later this week to see what some of his peers think of his work (including Megan Abbott, Joe R. Lansdale, Allan Guthrie, Reed Farrel Coleman, and more). In the meantime, rush out and buy his novel, Winter's Bone (Back Bay Books), which was my wife's favorite novel of 2006 (and which will be in next month's Sundance Film Festival Dramatic Competition). More to come...

Later this week on the BFP blog: Daniel Woodrell; the conclusion to Ace Atkin's Christmas-set short story, "Last Fair Deal Gone Down"; and more!

Happy holidays from Busted Flush Press!

Monday, December 21, 2009

Catch Reed Farrel Coleman on XM/Sirius!

Reed Farrel Coleman, the 2009 Shamus Award-winning author of Empty Ever After, will be interviewed on XM/Sirius Book Radio's "Cover to Cover Live!", tomorrow, Tuesday, December 22, 3-4 p.m. EST. He will be interviewed about Tower (co-written with Ken Bruen) and his Moe Prager novels. Catch it on XM 163 & Sirius 117.

Reed will also be featured on NPR's Fresh Air this week, as part of Maureen Corrigan's year-end round-up of favorite mysteries. We'd thought it was to be today, but it looks like it'll run later in the week. As soon as we know, it'll be posted here.

To coincide with Reed's NPR appearance, Busted Flush Press has some great news to announce about new acquisitions. Well...... we'll hold off until the NPR piece runs, but we can say it involves Daniel Woodrell (Winter's Bone) and Don Winslow (The Dawn Patrol)... please check back later in the week. (We're such teases!)

In other BFP news...

Donna Moore (Go to Helena Handbasket...) appears to be excited about her galleys of Old Dogs. But it looks as though she's attacking her parents with a copy! Chuffed, indeed. Visit her blog here... you could win an Old Dogs galley!

Thriller writer Zoë Sharp (Third Strike) is interviewed on MrEdit's blog. Her first introduction to crime fiction? Leslie Charteris's The Misfortune of Mr. Teal.

L.A.'s The Mystery Bookstore picks their favorite mysteries of 2009... and Ken Bruen & Reed Farrel Coleman's Tower makes Linda's & Pam's lists! Big thanks to Linda & Pam (& Bobby, too)!

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

BFP to reprint Margaret Maron's BLOODY KIN!

Busted Flush Press is very excited to announce that it will reprint Margaret Maron's acclaimed 1985 Southern crime novel, Bloody Kin, in spring 2011, in time for the Malice Domestic 23 mystery convention!

Margaret earned a rare feat with her first Deborah Knott novel, Bootlegger's Daughter (1992), when the book won nearly every major award for that year: Edgar, Anthony, Macavity & Agatha. Bloody Kin (out of print for about a decade) was originally published by Doubleday in 1985 and is widely considered a prequel to the best-selling Knott series, introducing the region & several characters that would later appear in Bootlegger's Daughter. In Bloody Kin, after Jake Honeycutt dies in a hunting accident, his pregnant wife Kate moves to his family farm in North Carolina and soon discovers that she is a Yankee outsider and that Jake's death was no accident.

"Margaret Maron is one of the best writers in the business. Read her. That's an order." -- Elizabeth Peters

"A hundred years ago, Margaret Maron might well have been classified with that group of writers called 'local colorists.'... From Sarah Orne Jewett's vignettes of life in rural Maine to Kate Chopin's stories of Louisiana's bayous... Maron continues the tradition of quick, perceptive sketches of local life in the framework of a modern murder mystery." -- Houston Chronicle

Go out and pick up Margaret's Bootlegger's Daughter, work your way through the Deborah Knott series (there are fifteen, with the latest, Sand Sharks, published from Grand Central earlier this year), and look forward to BFP's Bloody Kin in 2011!

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Original Ace Atkins short story (part 2 of 3)

Busted Flush Press's new reprint of Ace Atkins's first novel featuring blues historian Nick Travers, Crossroad Blues, also features an original, never-before-published Nick short story, set at Christmas! As an early Christmas gift to fans, BFP is serializing the story in three posts... Here's part two... Enjoy! (Read part one here.)

"LAST FAIR DEAL GONE DOWN"
An original Nick Travers story.
© Ace Atkins, 2009

(continued)

HER NAME WAS Sarah. Petite hands, delicate face, soft brown skin. She probably was in her late twenties, going on fifty. Her lips quivered when she blew cigarette smoke over her head, and she liked to drink. Crushed ice, Jim Beam, and cherries. The closer I sat to her at the hotel bar, the more I smelled the cherries. The more I smelled her perfume. I see, Fats. I see.

On her third drink, she looked over at me and grinned fully into the left corner of her mouth. Her lips were full and thick. Her small body tight and exposed in black hot pants and black shirt tied above her stomach.

“You sure are big. You a Saint?” she said.

“No, I’m a dancer. Jazz, modern, and some tap. I used to breakdance, but I never could spin on my head.”

She laughed. And even from the six feet that separated us, I could tell she had been crying. Dry streaks through her makeup.

She kept wiping her nose and eyes. She turned her eyes back to a book placed in front of her drink.

“How is it?” I asked.

She cocked her head at me and a thin strap fell from her shoulder.

“The book.”

“Oh,” she said and closed it and showed me the cover. Lady Sings the Blues. “A friend gave it to me.”

As I was about to pursue the thought, two guffawing men walked into the deserted bar. Laughing, smirking. Drunk, with slow moving eyes and aggressive swaggers. One nodded at the bartender. He nodded back.

“Ready?” the bartender asked Sarah.

“Oh. Yes.”

I put my hand over hers, which were cold and shaking. “You don’t have to do this.”

She smiled at me with her eyes. “It’s gonna be just fine. Just gonna be fine.”

I kept my hand over hers.

One of the businessmen approached me. Maybe I was generalizing, but he sure fit the description. Brooks Brothers suit and a wedding ring. His hair was silver, and his expensive cologne clashed with his hundred-buck-meal onion breath. Big fun on the bayou in the Big Easy.

"We already paid,” he said. “You’ll have to do it yourself, son.” He made a yanking motion with one hand.

The younger businessman snorted. The bartender was wise enough to shut up.

I looked for a long time at the older man. He probably had everyone in his company scared of him. Everyone called him “sir” and catered to his every egotistical whim. He’d never sweated, never done a damn thing but hang out at the fraternity house and kiss ass until he made partner. I stared.

He looked down at my tattered and faded jean jacket and sneered. “What do you want?”

I slowly reached down the side of my leg and pulled out my boot knife. I grabbed him by his tie—red with paisley patterns—cut it off at the knot, and shoved it in his mouth. The younger man moved in as the CEO took a swing at me. I caught his fist in my hand and squeezed. If I had anything, it was strong hands from shirking tackles when I played football.

I brought the guy to his knees.

“Sir, when your grandkids are sitting on your lap this Christmas and everything is all warm and fuzzy, I want you to remember this. I want you to think about it as you light the tree, cut the turkey, and pat the kids on the head. Tell the boys when they come to New Orleans to treat the ladies real nice.”

I released my grip. He wouldn’t think about what I said. He was not me, and I was not him. I remembered something a psychologist friend had told me years ago. Don’t expect anything from a pig but a grunt.

********************

SHE AGREED TO walk with me to the Quarter only after I gave her fifty bucks. It was fifty I didn’t have, but it was the only way. Together we crossed Canal, dodging cars, soon smelling that cooked onion and exhaust scent that floats around the old district.

I took her to a small bar off Decatur to talk. Really it was just a place to sit and drink, only four feet from a sliding window. I got two beers in paper cups, and we sat down. No one around us except an elderly black waiter in a tattered brown sweater. Sarah finished half her beer in one gulp.

I asked her if she was afraid.

“No. Not of you.”

“What then?”

She finished her beer, then pulled a cigarette from a pack extracted from a cheap vinyl purse. I lit it.

“Tell me about you and Fats. You know he’s dead?”

“I know.”

She sat there for a moment just looking at me.

“Was he a regular?”

She dropped her head, kneading the palm of her hand into her forehead. The cigarette held high in her fingers.

“Did you work for him at his apartment or did he get a hotel?”

She scratched the inside corner of her mouth and took another drag of the cigarette.

“You were with him the night he died, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

I exhaled a long breath and gambled with what I said next. “That man didn’t have anything. Why’d you set him up? You could’ve rolled anybody, like those two in the hotel. You’d come up with a lot more money than what Fats had. He was a sweet old guy. He had more talent than someone like you could ever comprehend. Just tell me who helped you.”

“Stop it. Just stop it. You don’t know anything.”

“Why?”

“You got it all messed round. You don’t know how it was.”

“How was it, Sarah? You tell me.”

“I loved him.”

I laughed.

“He tole me he’d marry me. Imagine that. Him marrying me. Even sold his saxophone to—”

She was sobbing now. I waited. When she stopped, she told me about how they first met. Thursday nights she would wait for him outside JoJo’s, listening to his sweet music. The day he told her that he loved her, it was raining. “Real black clouds over the Mississippi,” she said.

“So why’d he sell his sax?”

“To buy me.”

***********************

IT WAS TWO in the morning when I got back to the Warehouse District, lonely, cold, and tired. I didn’t want to be alone. A light was on across Julia Street in the warehouse of a neighbor, one of the many artists who lived in the district. A ballet instructor. Beautiful girl. Good person.

I parked my Jeep, grabbed a six-pack of Abita out of the fridge, then found myself buzzing her from the street-level intercom. I could hear Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 filtering out a second-story cracked window and reverberating off the concrete and bricks down the street. Her blurred image floating past the dim windows.

As I stood there, I suddenly felt silly because she could have company. I guess I arrogantly thought she would always just be there when I needed her. Just waiting, no need for a life of her own. But I guess she thought of me like one of the neighborhood cats that she consistently fed whenever they decided to wander by for a meal.

Sam slid back a rusted viewing slot, then opened the door smiling. Short blonde hair and blue eyes. She wore cut-off gray sweat pants and a man’s white ribbed tank top tied at her waist. She’d been dancing a long time—enough to build a sweat.

“I don’t remember ordering a pizza,” she said.

“I do. Should be here in fifteen minutes—chicken, artichoke hearts, and white cheese.”

She shook her head and laughed. She slid two heavy bolts behind us, and I followed her up the stairs. I put my hand on her back. It was very warm.

***********************

THE NEXT DAY I played the waiting game in a little tourist café on Royal. I waited and I watched Sarah’s apartment. I ate two bowls of bland gumbo and a soggy muffuletta, drank draft Abita until I got loopy, and then switched to “Authentic French Market Coffee.” Tasted like Maxwell House.

I saw her walk outside to a balcony in a loose-fitting robe and lean over a scrolled balcony sipping coffee. That was noon.

At three, she came back to the balcony. She sat down in a director’s chair, propped her feet on the iron railing and read. The Billie Holiday book?

At 3:43, she went back inside and did not come back outside for two hours. The bright sunshine barely warming a cold day retreated, and the shadows finally returned, falling over my face.


Around six, she came out of the street entrance walking toward Esplanade. I tucked the copy of Nine Stories back in my jacket pocket, where I always kept it, placed a few bills under the weight of a salt shaker, and began to follow.

I had a ragged Tulane cap pulled low over my eyes and wore sunglasses—some Lew Archer I was. I pulled the collar of my trench coat tighter around my face. Not just for disguise, but also to block the cold. December wind shooting down those old alleys and boulevards can make a man want to keep inside.

She went into the A&P on Royal, and I stayed outside. In a few minutes, she returned, unwrapping a pack of cigarettes and continuing to walk toward the far end of Royal. She walked into one with the doors propped wide open, leaned over the bar, and French-kissed the bartender. He struck an effeminate, embarrassed pose and laughed. She patted him on the face and kept walking.

At the end of the street, she went inside a bed and breakfast. Semi-renovated. New awning, peeling paint on the windows. I got close enough to see through the double-door windows. She was talking to someone at the front desk. Then she turned, going deeper inside the building. I waited.

It was cold. There were no restaurants or coffee houses on this side of district. It hadn’t been civilized yet. I blew hot breath through closed fists.

I waited.

I got solicited twice. Once by a man. Once by a woman. And had a strange conversation with a derelict.

“Crack,” he said.

“Gave it up for the holidays. Thank you, though.”

“Naw, man. Dat’s my name.”

“Your name is Crack?”

“Shore.”

I asked “Crack” where the nearest liquor store was. He said it was on Rampart, so I gave him a few bucks and told him to buy me a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and whatever he wanted. Actually it wasn’t really a gamble to give him money. Most of those guys work on a strange ethical code when it comes to a fellow drinker.

He came back, and we sat on the other side of Esplanade watching the bed and breakfast until nearly ten o’clock. The whiskey tasted like sweet gasoline.

When Sarah came back, her hair was mussed, her jaw worked overtime on gum, and she looked tired. She certainly did not expect what came next as she bent down to re-strap a sequined stiletto.

As she pulled the buckle tight around her ankle, an early seventies black Chrysler whipped around the corner of Chartres, speeding right toward us. I had no time to push her out of way or yell. I could only watch as she just stayed bent over with her butt in the air. Hand still touching those ridiculous shoes. Very still.

I knew the car would hit her.

But it didn’t. Instead, the car skidded to a halt next to her, and a white arm grabbed her by the hair and jerked her in. She screamed as I sprinted across the street. Because of the tinted windows, I couldn’t see the driver, who put the car back in gear and weaved to hit me.
I bolted away and lunged toward the curb, where Crack was standing holding his bottle of apple liquor. The car’s tires smoked as it headed down Royal.

I followed.

My breath came in hard, fast spurts. I knew I was sprinting a losing race, but I followed until I saw the dim glow of the car’s cracked red taillights turning somewhere near Toulouse.

And she was gone.

***********************

WHOEVER TOOK SARAH dumped her body underneath the Greater New Orleans Bridge on the Algiers side of the Mississippi. Naked with a cut throat.

Jay Medeaux stood over me at police headquarters on Broad Street and slurped on a cup of black coffee. I rubbed my temples. It was 9 A.M. and I hadn’t slept. His wide, grinning face looked more amused with my situation than sympathetic.

“No coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“Cruller?”

“Jay, do you mind?”

“Touchy. Touchy.”

I regurgitated every trivial detail of what I witnessed and knew. Jay listened without asking any questions. He didn’t even lecture me about conducting my own investigation—which he knew I was prone to do. Jay was a good friend.

I remember him happiest when we beat LSU. His grin wide as he held our coach high on his shoulders in a warped, fading photograph I still kept on my desk.

He pulled Sarah’s file from Vice and made a few phone calls. We found out she was working for a pimp with the awful moniker of Blackie Lowery. A lowlife whose previous convictions included running a strip club staffed with twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, trucking oysters from a polluted water zone, indecent exposure at Antoine’s restaurant, selling illegal Jazzfest T-shirts, and beating the shit out of his pit bull with a Louisville Slugger. Sounded like our man.

Jay let me go with him to pick the guy up.

***********************

WE FOUND BLACKIE outside his Old Style Voodoo Shop spray-painting a dozen little cardboard boxes black—his back turned as he spurted out a final coat. He was a skinny guy with pasty white skin, a shaved head, and a thick black moustache curled at the end like Rollie Fingers used to wear. He stopped painting and looked sideways at us.

“Hey, Blackie, why don’t you spell shop with a two Ps and an E?” Jay said. “The tourists would like it more, I bet. Make it sound real authentic, ya’ know.”

Blackie had his shirt off, and a tiny red tattoo was stamped over his heart. As he watched us, I could see the colored skin beat.

“We found one of your employees this morning,” Jay said. “Blade sliced her throat real even.”

He gave a crooked smile and threw down his paint can. “I don’t have a clue.”

“That’s beside the point,” Jay said. “Come on with us.”

“Eat me,” Blackie said.

I walked through a side door and into a voodoo shop. The smell of incense was strong among the trinkets, stones, and powders. A small, glass-topped casket sat in the middle of the room with a carved wooden dummy inside painted to look like a decomposing corpse.

But beyond the Marie Laveau T-shirts and the hundreds of bags of gris-gris powders, something interested me.

Fats’ sax sat in a corner.

To be concluded...

Monday, December 7, 2009

Original Ace Atkins short story excerpt (part 1 of 3)

Busted Flush Press's new reprint of Ace Atkins's first novel featuring blues historian Nick Travers, Crossroad Blues, also features an original, never-before-published Nick short story, set at Christmas! As an early Christmas gift to fans, BFP is serializing the story in three posts... Here's part one... Enjoy!

"LAST FAIR DEAL GONE DOWN"
An original Nick Travers story. © Ace Atkins, 2009

I’VE ALWAYS BEEN one to keep an eye open during a church prayer—not because of my lack of faith in God but because of my lack of faith in people. What I learned by watching was that others were doing the same. People mistrust people. Each of us pulses with our own agenda. In New Orleans, and particularly, in the French Quarter, those agendas cross frequently.

That night I was in my own house of worship—JoJo’s Blues Bar—with both eyes closed tight as I chased a shot of Jack with a cold Dixie. Fats’ band banged out the last few chords of “Blue Monday,” his lazy sax matching my own black mood. Each drink softened that black mood into brown melancholy.

A cold December drizzle rained outside. Cold droplets fell a muted pink along the window lit by JoJo’s neon sign, only a few regulars in the bar with ragged fedoras pulled low. JoJo’s niece Keesha, the only waitress on duty, tapped her foot slowly to Fats’ music. While she smoked, she read the Bible by dim candlelight.

“Keesha, how ’bout another Dixie?”

“You know where they’re at.”

And I guess I did. JoJo was my best friend and this was my second home. I took off my trench coat and old scarf and walked behind the bar. Pushing up my shirt sleeve, I reached into the slushy ice bin and grabbed a beer. My hand instantly went numb.

“Who’s closing up?” I asked.

“Felix,” she answered, stuck somewhere in the middle of Corinthians. “JoJo and Loretta went to Baton Rouge.”

The set finished and the sparse crowd clapped. Most of them were old men like JoJo who had frequented this place since the early sixties. JoJo’s was the only decent blues bar in a city dominated by jazz. “A little Delta on the Bayou,” is what said the sign outside read.

Fats pulled up a stool next to me. His face grayed under the tiny Christmas lights strung over the bar’s mirror. I looked across at both of our reflections and tilted my head.

He said my name dully back to me.

“How ya been, Fats?”

Hmm.”

“You know why JoJo’s in Baton Rouge?” I asked, for lack of anything better.

“Naw.” Fats shifted in his seat and coughed, politely turning his head away. He looked over at Keesha with her head close to the Bible.

“What? You got religion now or somethin’?”

“Seek and ye shall find,” Keesha said, blowing smoke in his face.

Hmm,” Fats said. “Ain’t that some shit?”

Someone opened the two rickety Creole doors and a cold breeze rushed in off Conti. A horse-drawn tourist carriage clopped by with a guide pointing out famous sites. Fats popped a handful of salted peanuts into his mouth, shell and all.

“You hungry, Fats?”

He looked at my face for the first time, right in the eyes. “Yeah, I could eat.”

Fats was known for gambling or drinking away his weekly profits every Friday. He usually lived on Loretta’s leftover gumbo or handouts from JoJo.

We walked over a few blocks to the Café Du Monde. I asked for a couple orders of beignets and two large café au laits. A Vietnamese waiter set down the square donuts covered in powered sugar and within a minute, Fats ate them all.

“Hungry?”

His coffee sat empty before him. I ordered another round for him.

Fats didn’t say a word. He leaned an arm on the iron railing and looked across the street at St. Louis Cathedral. Or maybe he was looking at the bronze statue of Andrew Jackson. I’ve always liked to think it was the church, with the spotlight beams illuminating the simple high cross.

“Is it the track?”

“Naw.” He laughed.

“You need help?”

“No,” Fats said. “What I got, pod’na, is a fair deal. Just like Robert Johnson said, ‘Last Fair Deal Goin’ Down.’ You know about Johnson?”

“Sure.”

“He sure played a weird guitar. I’ve always tried to make my sax do that. But it just ain’t the same.”

“What’s the deal, Fats?”

He laughed again and shook his head. He looked up. “You ever been in love, Nick?”

“Every Saturday night.”

“No, man. I mean really in love. Where it make you sick jus’ to think you ain’t gonna get no more.”

“I guess.” I looked at him as he brushed a hand over his gray suit to get off the fallen powdered sugar.

“Let’s just say I found somethin’, all right, big chief.”

“That’s where the money went?”

“Thanks for the eats, Nick.”

And with that, Fats reached down, grabbed the handle of his battered sax case, patted it like a child and was gone. I sipped on another café au lait, warming my hands on the steaming mug.

Two days later, JoJo called to tell me that Fats was dead.

***********************

THE SLEET PLAYED against the industrial windows of my loft, a 1920s lumber storage, in the Warehouse District on the blackest early afternoon I could remember. Tulane was on Christmas break and instead of teaching blues history, I found extra time to loaf. I was practicing some of Little Walter’s harp licks on my Hohner Special 20 when JoJo buzzed me from Julia Street.

“I’ve already joined the Moonies,” I said, pressing the button on my intercom. “Fuck off.”

“Goddammit, open the door.”

I went to the kitchen portion of the second floor’s open space, lit the stove with a kitchen match, and began to make coffee. I left the sliding metal door ajar and JoJo walked in, tramping his feet and muttering obscenities under his breath.

“You don’t even know my mother,” I said.

“I need you to go with me to clear out Fats’ shit. That’s if you want him to have a proper funeral. Man died without a cent. And no family that anyone knows about. Loretta said we should do it.”

“She’s right.”

***********************

IT WAS A bullet through a clouded mind that killed him. A self-inflicted wound. Or so read the coroner’s report that my friend, Detective Jay Medeaux, shared with me. He told me a pink-haired runaway found Fats’ body on the Riverwalk, his back broken from a final fall onto the jagged rocks lining the Mississippi River.

All I could imagine was the grayness of those rocks and the grayness of his face among the damp paper bags and broken multi-colored bottles as we climbed the stairs to his apartment. It was on Decatur, not far from the French Market—a sign outside asked for fifty bucks a week.

The apartment manager met us on the stoop, thumbing through the sports section of the Times-Picayune. Wordless, with an impassive face, he led us to a second-floor efficiency. Hazy white light sprouted through rust-flecked metal blinds onto a rat’s nest of dirty clothes, an empty bottle of Captain Morgan’s spiced rum, a rumpled black suit on a bent hanger, a book called The Real Israelites, a juke joint poster, a toothbrush with a box of baking soda, and a pack of sax reeds on an unmade bed.

No sax.

“Mmhmm,” JoJo said.

“It’s not here.”

Mmhmm.”

“Hey, buddy,” I said to the manager. “Where’s his saxophone?”

“What’s here is here. I ain’t responsible.”

“Where’s his goddamned sax?”

I felt JoJo’s strong hand on my shoulder.

“Man doesn’t know.”

The manager bit his lower lip, turned on a heel, and left us. We spent five minutes packing everything in the room into a cardboard box made for Colt 45 malt liquor. I took the rumpled black suit from the hanger, folded it, and handed it to JoJo. He nodded.

I heaved the box up into the crook of my elbows and walked down a urine-scented staircase. My ears rang, full of Fats’ sax, those deep full notes that bled the man’s life and loss. He never cheated, putting all he was into every note. And now someone had taken the one thing he cared about even more than his own life.

***********************

THAT AFTERNOON I started searching all around the Quarter. I looked into any painted window using the words MUSIC, PAWN, or ANTIQUE. I learned his sax was a classic made in the forties, a collector’s item that could pay for a dozen caskets and burial plots.

I found nothing.

The cool day turned into colder night as the setting sun turned burnt orange over the Mississippi. Driving down St. Charles Avenue, mottled shadows played over my face. Leaves turned end over end from the knurled water oaks dripping with Spanish moss.

I parked off Prytania, where Fat’s drummer lived in a rotting carriage house among mansions.

He was stoned when he opened the door. Red-eyed, sunken-shouldered, giggly stoned. Tom Cat usually wore his hair in a greasy ponytail, but tonight it hung wild in his face. Clutching a bag of Cheetos in his skinny white arms, he wiped orange dust from the corner of his mouth and invited me in.

“Hey, dude.”

I pulled a crumpled pair of jeans and a foul-smelling T-shirt off a chair and sat down. The place reeked of marijuana. He’d be lucky if the paint didn’t start to peel.

“Want a smoke?”

“No, thanks,” I said, smiling and pulling a pack of Marlboros from my jean-jacket pocket.

“Jesus, Nick, I’m a mess.” He started to giggle. “Why’d he do it, man? Didn’t he realize it wasn’t just him, man, that . . .”

He laughed uncontrollably.

I smoked my cigarette and looked outside. Two kids played touch football in the street.

“I’m sorry,” he said. His laughing died like a cold engine. “I just can’t handle the shit now. Ya know?”

“Yeah.”

“Your band need a drummer?”

“Did Fats have a girlfriend?”

“I really don’t want to talk about this. It makes me feel like I’m gonna throw up.”

“I need to know.”

“You ain’t a cop, man. Don’t be a hard-on.”

“Did he have a girlfriend?”

He dropped his head between his knees, black hair cascading into his face. In a few seconds he raised back up, looked at the ceiling, red-faced from the inversion, and said, “See, Fats didn’t have girlfriend. Fats . . . Fats had a whore.”

To be continued...

Saturday, December 5, 2009

What David Handler has been up to...

Edgar Award-winning mystery writer David Handler has long been a favorite of mine, no matter what he writes. He's just contributed a fine story for next fall's BFP anthology Damn Near Dead 2, and though he's no longer writing the award-winning Stewart "Hoagy" Hoag & Lulu novels (featuring a celebrity ghostwriter & his faithful yet neurotic basset hound), he remains committed to the wonderful Mitch Berger & Desiree Mitry mysteries (starring a shlubby NYC film critic & his Halle-Berry-sexy Connecticut resident state trooper girlfriend) that are being published by St. Martin's Minotaur. If you're a fan of intelligently-written whodunits that are a pleasant mix of hard- & soft-boiled amateur detective fiction, you can't go wrong with David Handler. Start with either the first Hoagy book, The Man Who Died Laughing (available from BFP), or the Mitch & Desiree debut, The Cold Blue Blood.

Here's David himself with a few words on what he's been up to...

"I'm pleased to report that I have a kick-ass new political thriller called Click to Play (Severn House) out now. It's something a bit different for me -- a turbo-charged page turner about a dying child star from TV's golden age who reaches out to a renegade internet journalist with the true story behind the most famous murder spree in Hollywood history. A secret that's so shocking it will most certainly destroy the U.S. senator who is poised to become America's next president. I had an absolute blast with Click to Play. It's chock full of bizarre characters and plot twists. Good, dirty fun. I promise you won't be able to put it down.

"However, if you are a loyal Berger-Mitry fan do not despair. My next Mitch and Des installment, The Shimmering Blond Sister, is all finished and scheduled for publication in fall 2010 from St. Martin's Minotaur. And I'm happy to report that I just agreed to write a new one entitled The Blood Red Indian Summer."

I know I, for one, am very much looking forward to these!

Visit David Handler online at http://www.davidhandlerbooks.com/.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Kenneth Wishnia's students on TOWER!

by Kenneth (k.j.a.) Wishnia

My students hate cozies. Really. I’ll assign one every once in a while for balance and maybe three people out of a class of 35 will say they liked it. Everyone else will hate the freaking hell out of it. I teach a crime literature course every fall term at Suffolk Community College in Brentwood, one of the poorer areas of Long island, and I’ve observed that our students always respond more favorably to hardboiled and noir stories, in part because the sensibilities at the darker end of the genre more closely resemble their own life experiences. In fact, this year’s group became such experts in analyzing the genre they even started complaining that some of the stories in Megan Abbott’s anthology A Hell of a Woman weren’t noir enough for them.

I repeat: some of the stories in A Hell of a Woman weren’t noir enough for them...

So I promised them that the next assignment would supply the electric jolt of noir that they were craving: Tower, by Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman.

They loved it.

And they loved it even more when Reed Coleman dropped by to discuss the novel with us. (We’ve also brought Lee Child, S.J. Rozan, Jason Starr, Megan Abbott, Steve Hamilton and many other authors to our campus over the years.)

One student compared it to the collaboration between Jay-Z and Linkin Park on the album Collision Course, so naturally, we had to christen Reed with a new title: “The Jay-Z of Noir.” (Ken is stuck with being Linkin Park, I guess.)

Other sample comments:

“It was like a hybrid of a Guy Ritchie movie like Snatch and Martin Scorcese’s Goodfellas.”

“It was really disturbing that the only time Griffin ever showed emotion was in the presence of violence, or when someone was speaking about violence. He was a sick bastard.”

“Interestingly, it is finding love that impacts both men more than any of the criminal activity they are involved in... Nick’s experience with love eases his rage; Todd’s experience ignites his rage.”

One woman summed it up in six words: “Love, Hate, F#@^k... then you Die.”

I have my favorite moments as well, but I’ll just pick one, when Todd says the Irish are always pining for the old country, but not the Jews: “You don’t hear too many second generation Jews pining for Poland or Russia, Romania or Ukraine.” You got that right, boychik, and it was true for my family, too. With good reason.

--------------------------------------------

Kenneth (K.j.a.) Wishnia was born on a hot August night to a roving band of traveling academics. His first novel, 23 Shades of Black, was nominated for the Edgar and the Anthony Awards, and made Booklist’s Best First Mystery list. His other novels include Soft Money, which Library Journal listed as one of the Best Mysteries of the Year, and Red House, which was a Washington Post Book World “Rave” Book of the Year. His short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Murder in Vegas, Queens Noir, and elsewhere. Ken’s latest novel, The Fifth Servant, a Jewish-themed historical set in Prague in the late 16th century, is due out from William Morrow/HarperCollins in Feb. 2010. He teaches writing, literature and other deviant forms of thought at Suffolk Community College in Brentwood, Long Island.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

CROSSROAD BLUES excerpt


Crossroad Blues, by Ace Atkins (978-1-935415-03-9; trade paperback reprint; $15) On sale in two weeks!

Chapter 1

last night
New Orleans, Louisiana

JOJO’S BLUES BAR stood on the south edge of the French Quarter in a row of old Creole buildings made of decaying red brick, stucco, and wood. Inside, smoke streamed from small islands of tables, drinks clicked, women giggled, and fans churned. Black-and-white photographs of long-dead greats hung above the mahogany bar—images faded and warped from humidity and time.

Dr. Randy Sexton stared at the row of faces as his thick coffee mug vibrated with the swampy, electric slide guitar. He tapped one hand to the music and held his coffee with the other. The bucktoothed waitress who had brought the coffee shook her head walking away. This wasn’t a coffee place. This was a beer and whiskey joint. Order a mixed drink or coffee and you felt like a leper.

JoJo’s. Last of the old New Orleans blues joints, Randy thought. Used to be a lot of them in the forties and fifties when he was growing up, but now JoJo’s was it. The Vieux Carre was now just endless rows of strip joints, discos, and false jazz—unless you counted that big franchise blues place down the street. Randy didn’t.

This bar was a New Orleans institution you couldn’t replace with high-neon gloss. The blues sound better in a venue of imperfection: a cracked ceiling, scuffed floor, peeling white paint on the bricks. It all somehow adds to the acoustics of blues.

Randy was a jazz man himself. He’d studied jazz all his life, his passion. Now, as the head of the Jazz and Blues Archives at Tulane University, he was the curator of thousands of African-American recordings.

But blues was something he could never really understand. It was the poor cousin to jazz, though the unknowledgeable thought they were the same. Jazz was a fluted glass of champagne. Blues was a cold beer—working class music.

His friend and colleague Nick Travers knew blues. He could pick out the region like Henry Higgins could pick out an accent: Chicago, Austin, Memphis, or Mississippi.

Mississippi. The Delta. He sipped some more hot, black coffee and watched the great Loretta Jackson doing her thing.

A big, beautiful woman who was a cross somewhere between Etta James and KoKo Taylor. Randy had seen the show countless times. He knew every rehearsed movement and all the big, black woman’s jokes by heart. But he still loved seeing her work anyway; her strong voice could fill a Gothic cathedral.

Her husband, Joseph Jose Jackson, pulled a chair up to the table. A legend himself. There wasn’t a blues musician alive who didn’t know about JoJo, a highly polished, dignified black man in his sixties. Silver-white hair and moustache. Starched white dress shirt, tightly-creased black trousers, and shined wingtips.

“Doc-tor!” JoJo extended his rough hand.

“Mr. Jackson. Good to see you, my friend, and—” Randy nodded toward the stage. “—your wife, she still raises the hair on the back of my neck.”

“She can kick a crowd in the nuts,” JoJo said.

Loretta sweated and dotted her brow with a red lace handkerchief to some sexy lyrics and winked down at JoJo.

“Rock me baby.
Rock me all night long.
Rock me baby.
Like my back ain’t got no bone.”

They sat silent through the song. JoJo swayed to the music and smiled a wide, happy grin. A proud man in love. The next song was a slow ballad, and Randy leaned forward on the wooden table, the smoke making his eyes water. JoJo cocked his ear toward him.

“I’m looking for Nick. Isn’t he playing tonight?” Randy asked.

JoJo shook his head and frowned. “Nick? I don’t know. He’s been tryin’ to get back in shape or some shit. Runnin’ like a fool every mornin’. Acts like he’s gonna go back and play for the Saints again. No sir, he ain’t the same.”

“He’s not answering his phone or his door.”

“When he don’t want to be found,” JoJo said, nodding his head for emphasis, “he ain’t gonna be found.”

“Could he be out of town? Maybe traveling with the band?”

“What?” JoJo asked, through the blare of the music.

Traveling with the band? ” Randy shouted.

“Naw. I ain’t seen him. ’Cept the other day when we went and grabbed a snow cone. Started talkin’ to some gap-toothed carriage driver ’bout him beatin’ his horse. Nick said how’d he like to be cloppin’ ’round wearin’ a silly hat and listenin’ to some fool talk all day. Skinny black fella started talkin’ shit, but he back down when he got a good look at Nick. I’m tellin’ you, man, Nick gettin’ back in some kinda shape. Not much different than when he was playin’. You think he’s considerin’ it? Playin’ ball again?”

“I doubt the Saints will take him back,” Randy said, raising his eyebrows.

Nick had been thrown out of the NFL for kicking his coach’s ass during a Monday Night Football game. He knocked the coach to the ground, emptied a Gatorade bucket on the man’s head, and coolly walked into the tunnel as the crowd went crazy around him. Nick once told Randy he’d changed his clothes and taken a cab home before the game ended. He never returned to the Superdome or pro football again, and Randy never prodded him for the whole story.

A few months after the incident, Nick enrolled in the masters’ program at Tulane. Later, he earned a doctorate in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi before sporadically teaching a few classes at Tulane.

“JoJo, tell him to call me if you guys talk.”

“His band ain’t playin’ til . . . shit . . . Friday night,” JoJo said. “Whatchu need Nick for?”

“Got a job for him.”

“Yeah, put his sorry ass to work. Soon enough he’ll be back to the same ole, same ole, drinkin’ and smokin’.”

At the foot of the bar, an old man watched the two talking. A cigar hung from his mouth as he brushed ashes from his corduroy jacket lined with scar-like patches. His gray eyes darted from JoJo to Randy then back down to the drink in front of him.

“If you talk to him, tell him to call me,” Randy said, getting up to leave and offering JoJo his hand. He knew JoJo would find Nick. He was the man’s best friend.

Randy took another sip of coffee and stood watching Loretta. She had a drunk tourist on stage and was getting him to hold her big satin-covered hips as she sang the nasty blues. The old man at the bar watched her too, his face flat and expressionless. His black, parched skin the same texture as the worn photographs on the wall.

Randy and the man’s eyes met; then the old man looked away.

“One of our colleagues left for the Delta a few weeks ago,” Randy said. “He’s disappeared.”

“The Delta? Lots of things can happen to a man there,” JoJo said, looking him hard in the eye. “Nick’ll help; he’s a fine man.”

“Yeah, I think a great deal of him. He’s a good guy.”

Chapter 2

NICK TRAVERS WAS drunk. Not loopy, hanging-on-a-flagpole drunk, but drunk enough to find simple enjoyment in the soapy suds churning in the Laundromat washing machine. It was two A.M. on St. Charles Avenue, and he sat sideways on a row of hard plastic seats—baby blue with flecks of pink. He had three loads now in the machine as heat lightning shattered outside like a broken fluorescent bulb, a tattered Signet paperback of The Catcher in the Rye in his hands.

“Goddamned phonies,” he muttered, thumbing down a dog-eared page, waiting for his clothes in white boxer shorts and battered buckskin boots. His white T-shirt and faded jeans were in the wash, and there was no one around except a homeless man drinking whiskey from a brown-bagged bottle. A classic wino, even missing a few teeth.

“You know what I mean, they screw it up for everybody,” Nick said.

The wino nodded.

Nick liked the hard sixties decor of the place with its stainless-steel rims circling the glass of the washing machines and its occasional elevator music over a busted speaker. But now, he only heard the sound of the dry summer wind blowing Spanish moss on the oaks that canopied St. Charles Avenue like the gnarled fingers of an old man in prayer.

An elderly black woman with her hair tightly wrapped in curlers walked through the open front of the Laundromat and saw Nick in his underwear and boots. She immediately turned and left. The wino watched her butt as she walked by him.

“Get me a piece of dat,” he said, his head bobbing as if he had no neck muscles.

Nick turned to the washing machine. So this is what it had come to: washing clothes for enjoyment and talking to derelicts for a social life. Jesus, life changes in five years. Not that life was crappy now and all that sorry-for-self bullshit. Just different. Apples and oranges. Yin and yang.

Sometimes he could hear the deep resonating cheers echoing from the Superdome and wished he was still in there, grabbing some sissy quarterback by the jersey and slinging him down. But then he thought about lacing up his cleats for a five A.M. practice and would smile. Yeah, life was simple now. Teach a few classes on blues history, play some harp down at JoJo’s, and just enjoy life.

He’d watch the bubbles as the world pulsated in an electric vibe around him. Not quite in, not quite out. Somewhere in the middle. In his mid-thirties and getting soft mentally and physically. No challenges. No immediate goals. He needed to get back on it.

He reached down to the plastic chair beside him and grabbed a handful of quarters from a pile of keys and Dixie beer caps. He tossed the soggy clothes into a double-load dryer and walked next door to an all-night convenience store. He bought two quart bottles of Colt 45, one for him and one for the wino. The Vietnamese woman never blinked at his pantlessness.

“Hey pal, here you go,” Nick said, handing him the water-beaded beer.

“Tanks, Chief,” he said.

Nice of the guy to say thanks. Proved he was all right. It didn’t matter that he was homeless as long as he had some manners. Nick had seen some rich bastards not even thank a waiter for bringing them a meal at Emeril’s. “You from here?” he asked, unscrewing the cap.

The man jerked his head back giving him a double chin. “Naw, man, dis ma’ summer home. Just on a vacation from France.”

“Well, you don’t have to get all surly about it. You could be just passin’ through.”

“Naw. From New Awlins. Stay in New Awlins.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s like I can’t leave, as much as I hate this fuckin’ city sometimes.”

“Yeah, I know, man. Listen, I know. Twenty-nine, ninety.”

“What?”

“That’s the degrees this city sits on, man. Like a big magnet, it draws folks in.” He set his hands a few feet apart, then crashed them together. “Smack. Just like that, your ass is stuck and you can’t leave.”

“I could get out if I wanted to,” Nick said.

“Reason you hangin’ out here is you ain’t got a woman.”

“Had one.”

“Had me a meal yesterday but my stomach still empty.”

“Brown hair and eyes like morning coffee. Voice kinda raspy like a jazz singer and a comma of hair she constantly kept out of her eyes.”

“I ain’t ask you to unload on me. Jus’ sayin’ you need a woman.”

“I need to get back on it.”

“On what?”

“Life.”

“Life is easy,” the man said, gathering his rags and a dirty plastic bag of crushed aluminum cans. “Livin’ is hard.” He winked at Nick and disappeared into the thick night as a streetcar clanged past.

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"JoJo's Blues Bar—a place so deftly described that it should be real even if it isn't. This tale's a pleasure for both mystery and [Robert Johnson] fans."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"An impressive debut by a promising new talent."—The Philadelphia Inquirer

"One of the year's most promising new series . . . Throw in some snappy dialogue, a steamy romance with a red-haired blues singer, and the superbly evoked Delta landscape, and you have a meaty, straight-ahead mystery, entertaining from first to last."—Booklist

"Ace Atkins has woven the Johnson legend into a zesty tale that should appeal to mystery buffs, musicians and readers who like to discover new and promising talent."—The Tampa Tribune

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Crossroad Blues will be published this month, December 2009. Find copies at your favorite independent, chain, or online bookseller. See the list at the right for some of the indies that support & stock BFP titles. Booksellers/librarians: Crossroad Blues (along with all other BFP titles) is available through Consortium, Ingram & Baker & Taylor.

Ace Atkins, a former journalist, has written eight novels. His writing career began at age twenty-eight, when the first of four Nick Travers novels was published in 1998. In 2001, he earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his investigation into a 1950s murder that inspired his 2006 novel White Shadow. He followed with three more true-crime novels: Wicked City, Devil’s Garden, and Infamous (2010). Atkins lives on a historic farm outside Oxford, Mississippi, with his family. Visit his website here.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Ace Atkins's new deal with Putnam!

Congratulations to Busted Flush Press author Ace Atkins (Crossroad Blues), who just sold two Quinn Colson novels -- featuring an Army Ranger who returns to his rural Mississippi county to find it overrun by corruption and his uncle, the sheriff, dead... the beginning of a trail that will lead him not only to the killers but to a new career -- to Neil Nyren at Putnam, for publication in 2011 and 2012.

I asked Ace about this exciting new project....

"The idea for launching a new series was actually posed to me by my editor at Putnam, Neil Nyren. Since Neil is also the editor of John Sandford, Randy Wayne White, and Robert Crais, this wasn’t an opportunity that needed me thinking twice. I’ve written four true-crime novels for Putnam, and I really welcomed creating a new hero to explore my world here in north Mississippi . I think the Deep South -- not counting the other universe of south Louisiana -- hasn’t really been covered. I see so much crime and lawlessness down here that it really called to be written about. And I’ve thought a great deal about the kind of hero it would take. (Many parts of Mississippi feel almost like the old West.) I don’t want to give too much of the story away, but I can promise it will be very gritty, violent and based on very real problems and issues here. The series kicks off a story as old as Odysseus -- a man returns home from war to find his town in shambles. You can bet trouble soon follows. The first book launches in the spring of 2011 and the next story follows in 2012."

But first, look for Busted Flush Press's reprint of Crossroad Blues, due out in mid-December!

Monday, November 23, 2009

CROSSROAD BLUES foreword by Greil Marcus!


Busted Flush Press's reprint of Ace Atkins's first Nick Travers crime novel, Crossroad Blues (978-1-935415-03-9; paperback; $15) -- which will ship from Consortium to booksellers beginning December 11th -- features not only an original, never-before-published Nick Travers short story ("Last Fair Deal Gone Down"), it also offers the following new foreword by renowned music journalist Greil Marcus.

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Copyright © Greil Marcus, 2009. Reprinted with permission.

ROBERT JOHNSON GOT a few minutes in Phoenix, a 1997 cops-as-robbers bloodbath. In the Arizona bar she runs, Anjelica Huston leans over a jukebox, punching up Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues,” named for a ’30s machine and a concatenation of woman-as-automobile metaphors that makes Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” sound chaste. Cop Ray Liotta walks in, catches the tune: “My grandfather used to have one of those,” he says. “Good car.” “It’s not about a car,” Huston says mordantly. So they banter back and forth, tossing lines from the song at each other like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall running their horse-race double entendres in The Big Sleep. It’s as if familiarity with Robert Johnson music on the part of even vaguely cool middle-aged white people can be taken for granted, like alcohol and insomnia.

You can get as good a sense of Johnson’s presence in present-day life from this barely noticed movie as you can from any number of grander manifestations: his first-team 1986 entry into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; the 1990 release of his Complete Recordings, and the subsequent Grammy and gold-record awards; his 1994 stamp. There are novels, from Walter Mosley’s perfect-pitch RL’s Dream, his best, to Sherman Alexie’s pseudo-ghost story Reservation Blues, both from 1995. There are films, from Walter Hill’s puerile 1986 fiction Crossroads to Peter Meyer’s stunningly delicate 1997 documentary Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl?

All of this is based in the way one man hung sound in the air. That’s an event in Johnson’s “Come On In My Kitchen.” Each high guitar note stands out, flying away like a bird from the slow, nearly abstract rhythm, the apparent ground of the composition, then circling over the singer as if trying to decide whether to light. “You can see it,” the 1990s blues player Robert Cray says on the screen in Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? “It’s so visual, the music is visual.”

More than seventy years after his murder in 1938, Johnson persists as the most famous and influential blues musician who ever lived. He is a man whose personal culture, his version of a local Mississippi culture—certain moves on six guitar strings, certain recastings of long-polished song fragments, certain inflections of common vocal patterns—has become world culture. Since his twenty-nine 1936 and 1937 recordings began to travel by way of reissue albums and rock ’n’ roll cover versions in the ’60s—the Rolling Stones’ “Love in Vain” and “Stop Breaking Down,” Cream’s “Crossroads” and “Four Until Late,” scores more—Johnson has pressed his case, and his case is an argument against life. Life insures that we will desire what we can’t have; life allows some of us to translate our frustration over our inability to live as we wish into art, and art is only a further trap. Its beauty finally does no more than mock the meaningless existence of those who make it, producing only a greater despair—and that, Johnson said in “Cross Road Blues,” “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day,” and “Stones in My Passway,” is a cheat. But that’s not all: in Johnson’s hands this argument is an invitation to a dance, a joke, and a mystery.

This is the premise of Ace Atkins’s 1998 Crossroad Blues, a detective story featuring one Nick Travers, whom the reader meets as a professor of musicology at Tulane. Travers gets onto a story going around about a 1938 Robert Johnson recording session and nine sides no one has ever heard; no one can quite disbelieve it. Soon enough there’s an itinerant red-headed blueswoman, an albino black man who was present when Johnson was killed, a craven white promoter, more than one box of discs that all but glow with the sulfur of the forbidden, and a body walled up in a house for more than half a century.

Atkins has endless fun with material that has tortured so many writers before him. Crossroad Blues is a riot of Johnson lore, driven by the sort of stories generations of blues researchers would have sacrificed their children and parents to nail down: in these pages, Johnson is murdered by a white record producer for stealing his own records. Old crimes remain alive as shaggy-dog stories. “Shut his ass up, Willie,” a man who holds court in Three Forks, Mississippi, where Johnson was killed, says of the facts the blues professor has at his command. “Just made me fifty bucks yesterday from some Japanese. They thought I was Robert Johnson’s son.” But there is also something more, something none of the previous treatments of Johnson’s life, his legend, his myth, his recordings, even the two or three known photographs of the man himself have led anyone to put into words.

There comes a moment when Atkins seems to see through his own tale. He seems to realize that the story, like the little bird that might fly out of “Come On In My Kitchen,” will resist even those who can make a detective novel out of it. It’s a white man’s doubt in the face of a black man’s legacy, if not anyone’s doubt in the face of the rebuke art offers life. At the very least there is a deep feel for black secretiveness in the face of white greed, be it greed for the fortune the lost records represent or for the knowledge Atkins’s hipster academic momentarily suspects is not his to find. All books or movies about Robert Johnson ought to have a dream in them, but of the many that will follow Atkins’s, few will contain a dream as fine as this: “Black-and-white images of searching for Robert Johnson—his music grinding beneath a huge needle. Johnson gagging on his own blood as he vomited. Johnson smiling up at him and telling him, You’re not welcome. . . . You’re not part of this, he said. You’re not welcome.”

That dream, those words, didn’t stop Atkins, and they won’t stop anyone else. King of the Delta Blues was in preproduction at Rhino Films some years ago, with a script not only about but by Robert Johnson. One of those things: It’s a common name. There are seventeen in my telephone book, probably as many or more in yours, and one in none.

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Greil Marcus is the author of The Shape of Things to Come, Mystery Train, Dead Elvis, and other books. He lives in Berkeley.

Look for Ace Atkins's Crossroad Blues, out in time for the holidays. The original Nick Travers story, "Last Fair Deal Gone Down," is set at Christmas! Visit Ace Atkins's blog here.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Busted Flush hits the HUFFINGTON POST and DALLAS MORNING NEWS!

Best-selling thriller writer Jason Pinter interviewed six renowned crime-fiction reviewers on The Huffington Post, and BFP was mentioned a few times, especially in response to the question "Which small presses do you feel are doing the best job publishing crime novels?" Mystery Scene's Kate Stine said, "[O]ne of my favorites is... Busted Flush in Texas. Not only do they select high quality books, they do what so many small presses don't: lavish care on the covers and general marketing materials." Read the entire interview here. BFP praise aside, it's a wonderful, informative exploration of the state of the crime novel & where it's heading.

Ken Bruen & Reed Farrel Coleman's Tower was #1 on Dallas Morning News's Paperback Fiction best-seller list (running November 1st)! Special thanks to Legacy Books, one of Texas's largest indie booksellers, for this!

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

GATSBY'S VINEYARD excerpt


Gatsby's Vineyard, by A. E. Maxwell (978-1-935415-01-5; trade paperback reprint; $14) On sale in two weeks!

Chapter One

JAY GATSBY WOULD have loved the Napa Valley—until someone found him face down between the vines. And they would have found him that way, make no mistake about it. There’s more than wine, prestige and carefully nurtured romance in Napa. There’s money. Real money. The kind people kill and die for.

Socially, Gatsby might have had an easier time in Napa than in East Egg. The vintage of the money in Napa is a lot less important than the vintage of the wines that are stored and poured there.

Some of the money in Napa is old, even older and more deeply rooted than the arm-thick vines in the vineyards that survived Prohibition. But much of Napa has been built in the last decade with money from semiconductors or sinsemilla or silver scams. As a result, there’s a kind of rough-and-tumble economic democracy on Napa’s flat and fertile floor. Growing grapes isn’t a club tournament limited to members only. All you need to become part of Napa’s economy is the admission fee. Joining the crowd of vintners is like signing on for a pro-am golf tournament in Pebble Beach or Palm Desert. Just ante up and play with the stars.

There is one condition, however: the money has to be real. None of this dollar-down-and-bet-on-the-come bullshit that works in the rest of California. Inherit your fortune, earn it, politely steal it or find yourself a wealthy silent partner. Whichever. Just make sure that your assets are as liquid as your Cabernet Sauvignon.

There’s a very good reason for that kind of fiscal snobbery. You have to have money in order to lose it—and that’s just what will happen. You’ll lose money. A whole lot of it. When you strip grape growing and wine making of its romance, the process is called farming, and there are a thousand ways to go broke farming. Ask anybody who has ever tried to turn a profit with a pitchfork and a hoe.

Oh, sure, there’s money to be made in the rich creases and on the flats between Spring Mountain and the Cedar Roughs, between the salt marshes of San Pablo Bay and the black rocks at the top of Mount St. Helena. Napa Valley grows wondrous grapes which become magnificent wines which fetch premium prices all over the world. A smart, trendy, innovative vintner can make a fortune in good years, break even in middling ones and hold losses below the threshold of bankruptcy in those years when the frosts come late in the spring and the rains come early in the fall, and when the mites and the leaf roll and the systemic viruses cripple the vines.

But all told, your odds of making a killing are probably a lot better in Las Vegas. Ask Coca-Cola or Nestlé or Seagram’s or any of the other capital-rich conglomerates that fueled the vineyard boom of the middle 1970s. They poured cash into Napa as though it were a slot machine, and they kept on pulling the green handle. But they couldn’t even turn up a double cherry. The guy who runs the casino had reset the drops while no one was looking. The payoffs were irregular, the return on investment minimal, the bottom line dismal.

One by one the conglomerates backed out of Napa Valley, leaving behind the only folks who could still afford to play the game: the old-time farmers who owned their land in fee simple, and the very wealthy boutique winery folks for whom the romance of the wine country was as bewitching as the sound of Daisy’s voice was for Gatsby.

I can sympathize with Gatsby. I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich, and rich is indeed better. But as a group the recently arrived always have been and always will be the butt of well-bred disdain . . . and more dangerous forms of aggression as well. I know something about what the nouveaux riches are up against. My late and lamentable Uncle Jake, the last of the hippie outlaws, left me a steamer trunk full of untraceable currency that my ex-wife, Fiora, turned into a fortune. Granted, my asset sheet wouldn’t intimidate J. P. Morgan or J. D. Rockefeller, but it gives me a freedom that is sometimes hard to describe.

You have heard, perhaps, of “fuck-you money”?

However much I enjoy the aspirations and excesses of the newly rich, my favorite folks in the Napa Valley are the old-timers, the farmers who are not necessarily rich but who have been there since before the boom, the people who rooted themselves and their vines in the land thirty or forty years ago, when the valley started to crawl out from under Prohibition.

Actually, some of these families go back more than a century. Barley farmers and dairymen and European grape growers gravitated to the valley not long after the gold rush. They were drawn not only by the soil but by the light and the clean air.

Unlike Iowa or Kansas, where farmland has the utilitarian aesthetics of a John Deere tractor, Napa has an enormous, fecund beauty. The hills are sexy, like black eyelet lace smoothed over tanned skin. There is a sensual fullness to the country that is palpable. The feeling comes from the contrasts of cool and heat, damp and dry, and from the visual impact of heavy, bushy vine heads along straight trellises in row on row of field on field of grapes. Even in the spring, when the vines are just past bud-break and the grapes are more potential than actual, there is a feeling of immense growth and fertility.

The nights are still crisp in the early summertime, when the gray evening fog spills over the crest of Spring and Diamond mountains along the west edge of the valley. Yet those same June days are warm and getting warmer; the sun is back and, like a young stud horse, just beginning to focus blinding, instinctive heat on the requirements of procreation. By July the days will bake. The south- and west-facing hills and canyons will become chimneys drawing up valley heat and pouring it over the small vineyards in the side canyons. All day long the vines will soak up sunlight, changing it into the complex sugars and tannins and acids that eventually will become fine wine.

The contrasts between the mountain and the valley vineyards are part of what has always fascinated me about Napa. The valley vines have an easy time of it, comparatively. Granted, the soil is rocky rather than Iowa-loamy. Each vineyard has its walls of red and brown and gray boulders, from hand-sized to head-sized, some grubbed from the ground by Chinese coolies a hundred years ago and some stacked last winter by Mexican field hands.

Up toward Calistoga, just off the Silverado Trail, I once ran across a rock pile that was ten feet high, a hundred feet wide and three quarters of a mile long. Every stone on it had been dragged from the soil by a pair of hands, tossed on a stoneboat and skidded to the pile. The huge rock pile was the proceeds of a few large vineyards, maybe a hundred and fifty acres. There are more than thirty thousand acres of vineyards on Napa’s flat valley floor. Each of them had to be developed the same way. One stone at a time. That tells you a little bit about what farmers are up against on the flats.

But the mountains are even rougher. The mountains test a vintner’s dreams, his wallet and his nerve.

Diamond Mountain was the first sizable mountain vineyard to be opened up in the recent boom. That was maybe ten years ago. A grape entrepreneur named William Hill took a real flier, brought in a couple of D-8 Caterpillar tractors and put them to work scraping the brush off one hundred and fifty acres of natural amphitheater on the shoulder of Diamond Mountain. The slopes were chillingly steep. The D-8s turned turtle a half dozen times, rolling over on their backs and waiting helplessly to be rescued. Nobody was killed, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Then Hill brought in smaller, more agile Cats and cut stair-step terraces, gambling that the remaining soil was deep enough and special enough to justify development costs of ten thousand dollars an acre. St. George’s rootstock went in first. That took two years to establish itself. Then the scion vines were grafted on—Cabernet Sauvignon, mostly.

The yield was low, maybe half of what the normally stingy Cabernet vines would produce on the flats. But what grapes those mountain vines grew. Good flatland Cabernets might return four to six hundred dollars a ton. The stressed vines of the Diamond Mountain Vineyard produced half as many grapes but the fruit was extraordinary, world class. Sterling Vineyards, the big Seagram’s subsidiary down the road, was paying upward of two thousand dollars a ton when they finally got smart and bought Hill out.

There’s a little one-lane dirt road that runs straight up Kortum Canyon from the edge of downtown Calistoga, such as downtown Calistoga is. The road, once the stage route over the mountain to Santa Rosa, cuts along one edge of the Diamond Mountain Vineyard. Just before the road drops over the ridge into the next valley, there’s a spot where you can park and look down across the pepperwood and madrona and manzanita. In the foreground the vineyard is simmering in its natural punch-bowl microclimate, soaking up the hard summer sunlight. Beyond is the rest of the Napa Valley, all the way down toward Stag’s Leap and a dozen other of the most special wineries in the United States. The view is so grand that you hate to tell the rest of the world about it.

That’s the spot where Sandra Autry and I would go, back when we were seeing one another. Sometimes in the early evening, when the worst of the heat was over, we used to drive up there and park and admire the view and neck and get as hot and sweaty and passionate as a couple of teenagers.

After about an hour of that we’d both be lucky to get down the hill. Sometimes we didn’t. Get down the hill, I mean. But other times we’d check into the little hotel on Lake Street. The place wasn’t very genteel but it had its own rural California charm. With the windows wide open to catch the first evening breeze up from the bay, we’d sweat and love and drink cold white wine and have a hell of a good time.

Then we’d shower and go eat in the Mexican restaurant down the street, the one that was using mesquite charcoal a dozen years before the gringo importers discovered it. Broiled pollo and carne asada, carnitas and fresh corn tortillas. Mexican field hands tend to be beer drinkers, but as a nod to the lifeblood of the valley, the restaurant had a wine list of sorts. It extended from blanco through rosé to tinto. All of the wines, even the tinto, were kept in the cooler.

Sometimes Sandra would cook, which is what she had done every day since she was eleven and first discovered that canned tomatoes tasted better if you added something—almost anything—from the cupboard. Sandra was a natural cook. It came to her as easily as the violin had once come to me; but, unlike me, she learned early to value her gift from the gods. She didn’t throw her talent away because it never came up to her expectations, the way I had. She just worked like hell to develop her gift.

And gift it was. She understood instinctively, almost intuitively, how foods and wines and herbs and spices work together, in the same way that I had once understood the immense possibilities of music. She dreamed of tastes in the same way that I dreamed of sounds.

There wasn’t a pretentious bone in Sandra’s lovely body. She seldom talked about what she was doing, what spices she used, what elements of Pinot Noir made it particularly suited to her veal dishes or her cheeses. But her sensory acuity was remarkable and her sensory memory was perfect. On a summer night in Calistoga, one of her three-egg omelets with herbs and a tomato vinaigrette was better than most four-star meals. She could look at a raw egg and know whether to use more or less basil, one or two grinds of pepper, a three-dollar Chablis or a twelve-dollar Grey Riesling.

I have eaten grand meals and known some world-class chefs, but Sandra was both the best at what she did and the least willing to dress it all with fancy words. So far as I’m concerned, that’s the only reason she is less famous now than, say, Alice Waters, the trendy queen of Bay Area eating. Sandra could cook as well as anyone, but she didn’t talk as well and her politics and aesthetics weren’t as avant. So Sandra remained a quiet treasure.

Maybe it’s simply that Sandra was too busy living and eating and loving and tasting to be bothered with the talking of it.

Sandra kind of put me together, I guess, after Fiora and I broke up the first time. Sandra was a wine-country girl. Her parents owned one of the most famous vineyards in the Napa Valley, a hundred and forty acres of fertile ground called Deep Purple. The Autrys were down-to-earth folks, in the original sense of the word, and that may have been where Sandra learned her natural reserve. She lacked the outgoing charm, the sense of showmanship, that professional cooks and hostesses often have. But her extraordinary talent had already taken her a long way when I met her at a fancy wine-tasting party in San Francisco three months after Fiora first moved out on me and went back to Harvard.

Sandra was tall and almost willowy. Almost, I said. She had a figure that most women would have killed for, but lots of men never noticed because she tended to dress in an understated way. She was not given to showing herself off, but she made quite an impression on me the first time I ever saw her.

The party was crowded, with people sliding this way and that to get through, and I was standing in the middle, watching it all with the detachment of the unattached. When I first saw Sandra making her way through the crowd, she was trying hard not to spill the tall glasses of champagne she was carrying in each hand. Most everybody else was having a good time impressing whoever they were talking to. I guess I had been a long time without a stirring, because I found myself watching Sandra—Venuslike with arms raised, seeming by her attitude to invite inspection—as though I had never seen a woman’s body.

She had come about halfway across the room before I realized that I was staring. Then I realized that she realized I was staring. Then I realized that she didn’t mind me staring, even if I wasn’t looking at her eyes. I think I got a little flustered, turned a little red. But Sandra just kept coming toward me, smiling, calm and sexy as all hell.

It felt so good to want a woman again that I got over my embarrassment and just kept watching, albeit a bit less like a chained wolf watching a lamb gambol closer. Sandra drew abreast of me, quite literally, and then slid past without saying a word, a faint smile of pleasure or pride parting her lips. Three steps beyond me, she turned and looked back over her shoulder.

“You like them?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said simply, because it was way too late to think up a polite lie.

Still smiling, she turned away and glided into the crowd.

Two hours later she was introduced to me as Sandra Autry. That’s where I got lucky again, since it took me less than two minutes to remember that S. Autry was listed on the menu as the master chef for the evening. This was back in the relative Dark Ages, when a woman who wanted her cooking to be taken seriously might hide her gender behind a single initial. Sandra seemed genuinely pleased when I put that little puzzle together, and she allowed me—maybe even encouraged me—to hang around while she oversaw the cleanup. Then she took me home, all the way out to a Victorian at the north edge of Golden Gate Park.

Neither of us mentioned my previous lechery until sometime just before dawn, after she had given me a hickey on my neck. It was a reward, she said, for not being afraid to leer in public.

“If I ever get to feeling drab and little brown henlike,” she said, laughing deep in her throat, “all I’ll have to do is bring back the memory of the look on your face. Every woman needs that once in a while. When I got close and saw those gray eyes and that slow, sexy smile, I knew that if I never had another man I had to have you tonight.”

That was Sandra’s gentle way of defining our relationship from the very start. We never lived together, and often were not lovers when we did get together. She was independent in a deep and abiding way. There was too much of life she wanted to experience; she had too many things to do to allow herself to be tied to one man.

And I had too many ties and too many directions to go to be bound inextricably to her.

Yet we were very close when we were together. I told Sandra about my failed marriage, and she explained Fiora to me, without ever having met her, because they were quite alike. There is an independence in some modern women that ought not to be trifled with. This wine-country woman helped me to get over Fiora by eventually sending me back to her. Maybe Sandra and I never stuck permanently together because Fiora and I had already done so. But Sandra and I got pretty sticky, some of those hot nights in the little hotel in Calistoga.

Now I was headed north out through the Tejon Pass, leaving the smog of Los Angeles behind, with Fiora sitting beside me in the car, headed toward Napa’s generous, fertile harvest because I had heard that Sandra was in danger of losing everything she had ever owned.

What I didn’t know then, what I didn’t discover until much later, too late, was that the trouble was bigger than Sandra, bigger than the hundred and forty acres of magnificent grape land called Deep Purple. The trouble was as complex as a good Chardonnay, as hidden as the roots of the silent vines, and as deadly as steel sliding between living ribs.

Yes, Gatsby would have loved the Napa Valley, but he wouldn’t have survived it.

I nearly didn’t.

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“Maxwell manages a slam-bang climax . . . and the California wine business background is unusual and entertaining.”—Publishers Weekly

“Evokes with grace, elegance and love the colors, smells and sounds of Napa Valley wine-making.”—Vanity Fair

“By far [Maxwell’s] best, a California thriller with very real characters and dialogue and a violent, unexpected ending you won’t soon forget.”—Palo Alto Times Tribune

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Gatsby's Vineyard will be published this month, November 2009. Find copies at your favorite independent, chain, or online bookseller. See the list at the right for some of the indies that support & stock BFP titles. Booksellers/librarians: Gatsby's Vineyard is available through Consortium, Ingram & Baker & Taylor.

A. E. Maxwell is the pseudonym of husband-and-wife writing team Ann & Evan Maxwell. Ann is now best known as New York Times best-seller "Elizabeth Lowell." Visit their website here.