by Julie Holmes, Rob Jung, Brian Lutterman, Chris Norbury, and John Baird Rogers
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This collaboration knocks the ball out of the park, in my humble opinion. It’s the kind of good, clean fun that will hold your attention on the beach, at a cabin in the woods, or in bed before you turn out the lights.
I first heard of The Kill Code Collective when my friend Chris Norbury announced that he and four colleagues from the Minnesota-based Midwest Mystery Works had begun a joint challenge in which their favored sleuths combine to solve a thrilling medical mystery. The work proceeded apace and was published just a month or two ago.
The plot starts fast with a death among passengers getting off a plane in Minneapolis. Aircraft mechanic Sierra Bauer and her partner, police detective Quinn Moore, try to solve the puzzle of what seems an unlikely heart attack. Half a dozen diverse characters are drawn into the mystery: international traveler Gina Apate, a former operative for the Greek intelligence service; medical device company exec Stephen Hartsburg; jazz musician Matt Lanier; computer whiz Weezy Napolitani; investigative lawyer Pen Wilkinson; and the enigmatic international fixer Henri Harte.
Each character is intriguing in his or her own right. Together, like the proverbial blind men describing an elephant, they stumble and fumble until they begin sharing information. It makes for an exciting and spellbinding ride.
The work of five different authors comes together seamlessly to make a book that’s hard to put down.
What do you do when you’re busy inserting a SEAL team on a rescue mission and your octocopter gunship is suddenly zizzed to bits by an advanced directed energy weapon, leaving you a disassembled person mingled with a pile of twisted metal?
If you’re Navy Lieutenant Jazmin Hassani, you get a batch of bionic body parts and a two-step promotion to emerge as Commander Hassani, an aircraft accident investigator. Your arms, legs, and eyeballs can now do amazing new things, but the price you pay is constantly living on a razor edge of post-traumatic anxiety.
Don’t worry, Dear Reader, I haven’t spoiled a thing. All this comes within the first ten pages; it’s just setup. Electromagnetic Assault offers 339 more pages of nonstop action and military conflict, broken only by quick explanations of next year’s technology, and punctuated by every whiz-bang in the newly-invented arsenal of directed energy weapons.
Yes, there is a human story behind Commander Jazmin Hassani. She has a mother, a father, a raffish love interest, and other close connections. But it’s the astounding hardware, software, and kinetic battle scenes that provide sizzle for this elegant military techno-thriller.
Bruce Landay, the author, is a retired Air Force officer and writes a fascinating “Future Trends and Science Fiction” newsletter on Substack. I’m happy to say Bruce is a friend of mine. He was, in fact, the first writer I met at the 2016 UW Writers’ Institute when we were both neophytes in the novel-writing business—I in historical fiction and he in science fiction.
We walked down State Street to find a place for dinner, and Bruce regaled me with his work-in-progress, a tale in which the hero was busy solving problems in two different time streams, to the best of my recollection. Somewhere in the intervening years, the time travel was lost, and Bruce’s debut novel became one of the best-written techno-thrillers you’re likely to read.
In case you don’t know the genre, a techno-thriller is a form of speculative fiction with a thriller-style plot structure, a near-future setting, and a strong focus on technical details, which often have to do with espionage, geo-politics, and military systems.
If you like techno-thrillers, this will be right up your alley. If you’re new to techno-thrillers, read this one: you may get hooked.
By the end of Bruce’s book, you will have explored a world of the not-so-distant future in which global power relationships are radically altered and frightening new weapons systems decide the fate of nations and individuals.
It’s a bit spooky, Gentle Reader—but it’s worth thinking about.
One evening, ten or fifteen years ago, Peggy Joque Williams told me about les filles du roy—the King’s Daughters. “King” as in Louis XIV of France, the Sun King, who reigned from 1643 to 1715 and built the Palace of Versailles.
I remember our conversation vividly. A few of us ink-stained wretches used to meet for early dinner at the now-defunct Sunroom Café, up a long flight of stairs at 638 State Street in Madison, before the monthly meeting of the Wisconsin Screenwriters Forum in nearby Lowell Hall. The soups, wraps, and pastries were delicious, usually with a nice glass of wine on the side. Maybe those five-dollar glasses of wine were the reason they went out of business.
On this particular night, Peggy and I were the first to arrive, and over appetizers she shared her idea for a historical novel.
“The Daughters of the King,” she said, “were unattached young women of good character who went to New France—Quebec and Montreal—in the late 1600s at King Louis’s behest. The king paid for their passage and gave them dowries and trousseaux, on the condition they would marry one of the many single men in the colony. It was a plan to populate the French colonies in the New World.”
She went on to say that her own French-Canadian ancestors came down from one of more of the King’s Daughters. “Basically, they had their pick among the hardiest and most successful of the trappers, traders, farmers, and merchants who built French Canada.”
To me it sounded like a wonderful book—an adventure set among hunters and trappers, priests and soldiers, Frenchmen and indigenous tribespeople competing and cooperating for success in a rugged northwoods environment.
Fast-forward to 2024, and Peggy released her historical epic Courting the Sun: A Novel of Versailles. What? Versailles? Hall of Mirrors? What happened to the Canadian outback?
Because Peggy is my friend and I was excited for her new book release, I read it. It turns out she had to go through Versailles to get to Quebec. In Courting the Sun, her heroine, resourceful teenager Sylvienne d’Aubert, navigates the glittering, decadent world of Louis XIV’s royal court, rubbing shoulders with such historical characters as the actor/playwright Molière and the Marquise de Montespan, Louis’ official mistress.
“Williams’s sharp dialog, realistic characters, and rich descriptions of Bourbon court life keep you enthralled in ever-changing developments,” I wrote at the time. “The end of the story is more a beginning than an end, and one is left impatient to read the next chapter.”
Now, with Braving the Dawn, published in January 2026, Peggy delivers on that promise. And it was well worth the wait.
Women coming to Quebec in 1667, in order to be married to the French Canadian farmers. Painting by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1872–1945). Public Domain.
Sylvienne, now a bit older and a lot wiser, has been banished by the Sun King and arrives in Quebec among a shipload of filles du roy. Her own status is unclear. She meets, in quick succession, a protective order of nuns, a group of Native American girls, an amused militia captain, the governor-general of New France, the colony’s enigmatic administrator, and a notorious coureur du bois—a woods-runner—who trades in furs without a permit. Despite a plethora of woodsmen vying for her hand, she is resolved to avoid marriage. . . . Oh, did I mention she is concealing a pregnancy, a widowhood, and a secret lover?
There is plenty of plot to thicken in this tale of the French colonial frontier, and my friend Peggy handles it expertly. It’s useful to have read Courting the Sun first, because it adds depth to your understanding of Sylvienne and her motives—but it’s not really necessary. You can start with Braving the Dawn and find yourself caught up in an irresistible story. Either way, do yourself a favor and get into the compelling and accurate historical fiction of Peggy Joque Williams.
“One” is a word for Unity. Wholeness. Perfection. Singularity.
Once you say “Two,” you no longer have that perfection. You have traded in Singularity for Companionship. Fellowship. Relation. One is perfect and alone. But with Two, you can do the tango.
You have sacrificed insular perfection and gained a dyadic relationship.
But note well: Embracing duality opens the door to plurality.
It is inevitable: As soon as you have Two, Three comes marching in behind it, with a whole host of uninvited guests in its train. There is no end to the complexity you will encounter. You need a special symbol, ⚯, just to represent the embarrassing fact that there is no end. A through Ω no longer cover it. You need ⚯ as well.
I did not invent these ideas, Dear Reader. They have been expressed so often, for so long, that we may suspect they are hardwired into the human mind.
Lao Zi, the Daoist sage, may have had such things in mind when he opened his book, Dao De Jing, as follows:
Lao Zi riding an ox. Painting by Zhang Lu (1464-1538). Public Domain.
The way which may be spoken of is not the Unchanging Way.
The name that can be named is not the Eternal Name.
The Nameless is the beginning of Heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of the ten thousand things. . . .
The Nameless is One; as soon as you name something, you have Two. And from these two, the Nameless and the named, come tumbling the myriad of other things.
Numbers are basic to Christianity as well. Long ago, formalizing a theological framework for the newly-acceptable religion, the bishops at the Council of Nicea asserted that God is one, “the Father Almighty, Maker of all things seen and unseen.”
But also, Jesus Christ is included, being “begotten of the Father, the only-begotten; that is . . . consubstantial with the Father; by whom all things were made, both in heaven and on earth.”
So that’s two.
The unique twist of this god-talk, from the first chapter of John’s gospel, is that even though God is two—the Father and the Son—yet the two are still one. Some people might call that mystical.
And, as most folks know, two was not enough. They had to make it three by including the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit—a being barely mentioned in the original version of the Nicene Creed but given more detail by the First Council of Constantinople a few decades later. So the One became the Three-in-One—a concept that has survived to this day, though never without challenge from dissenters.
Adoration of the Trinity, painting by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). Father and Son upper center, with the Holy Spirit as a dove flying above them, and myriad beings surrounding them in adoration.
I do not mention all this, Gentle Reader, to start a theology debate. I only mean to point out the power that these simple numbers—one, two, three—have, and have always had, on our thinking.
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Soon, Your New Favorite Writer will be eighty-one years old. Now, there’s a number to conjure with. Eighty-one is nine nines. And nine is magical because it’s three threes. The Trinity trined.
Lao Zi had eighty-one chapters in his little book. One legend says he remained in his mother’s womb for eighty-one years before emerging as a full-grown, wrinkly old philosopher. I do not say this is true. I do say the number “eighty-one” carries a potency in the human mind.
When a person gets to be eighty-one, he will have learned a few things, if he has been paying attention. But all of them—all the myriad things—come out of those first three numbers. They come from unity, duality, and the further possibility of pluralism.
These are depths we cannot plumb. We must be content to deal, in our various ways, with all the ten thousand details. But, doing so, we might be relieved to reflect upon occasion that all these things are just extrapolations of more basic themes.
We feel compelled to point out, in the best interests of the Reading Public, that Your New Favorite Author’s complete works are still available at their original cover prices:
In accordance with their ever-increasing value as actual, non-AI books written by a Living American Author whom you know, we were going to raise the prices by at least five dollars per book. However, we ran into the cruel ironies of the Third Book Business.
If we were McGraw-Hill, or Grosset & Dunlap, or one of the other titans of the old book industry of the last century, raising the price would be a no-brainer. The next time we did a print run of, say, 50,000 more copies, we’d naturally print a higher price on the covers. But in today’s book industry, books are printed one by one. That means we can change the cover any time we want,only we have to pay a special set-up charge any time we alter the image stored in the printer’s computer.
Forget it.
The only reason we mention this is because it means you can still buy these books at the same low price.
If you already own a copy of The Price of Passage and one of Izzy Strikes Gold!, thank you very much for your patronage. But if you have not yet purchased either or both of these books, what are you waiting for?
1853: Scandinavian immigrants ANDERS and MARIA meet DANIEL, a young slave fleeing brutal captivity. Will they do their legal duty by turning him in, or defy the laws of their new homeland and risk everything to help him gain freedom?
It’s an epic tale of America’s heartland, based on the author’s own Norwegian ancestors.
Order from HenschelHAUS Books, here, or use QR Code:
1957: Inquisitive 12-year-old IZZY squirms through a small-town childhood, helped and/or hindered by friends such as bombastic Andy Shore, bullying Lyle Haycock, bewitching Irma Ruger, and bewildering Mutt-mutt Corner.
Rooted in the author’s own 1950s boyhood, it’s a warm-hearted coming-of-age tale, suitable for young readers and their grandparents.
Includes discussion questions and a glossary of 1950s terms.
Order from HenschelHAUS Books, here, or use QR Code:
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Both books are certified by the Authors Guild to be free of artificial intelligence (AI) content.
That means, if you should happen to find any intelligence between the covers, you know who put it there.
My mother’s uncle, Harry Young, was the circulation manager of the Register-Mail, the daily newspaper of Galesburg, Illinois.
In those days, any city of 35,000, such as Galesburg, and many cities even smaller, had a daily paper—despite the cost and difficulty of printing the news every day.
There was no Internet. Computers were huge machines that took up whole rooms, and only rich corporations could afford one.
Glen Beck and Betty Snyder program the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) in 1947 at the Ballistic Research Laboratory in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. U.S. Army photo.
Almost everyone subscribed to the daily paper, giving it the ability to charge good rates for advertising space.
People got spot news from the radio, had done so for decades. Television was a new thing; most of the channels had an announcer behind a desk, reading news, for 15 minutes at six p.m. But to really get the news, you needed a broadsheet paper like the Register-Mail.
Did I mention, Dear Reader? It was made of paper!
Can you believe, kids used to have to deliver these things by hand? A stack of newspapers, photographed by Daniel R. Blume. Licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0.
They printed it fresh, with new contents, every day.
Reporters went out into the community, spoke with people, attended meetings, photographed events. Then they came back to the newspaper building—yes, newspapers had buildings—to a place called the newsroom, and pounded out their stories on manual typewriters, the kind with ink ribbons that were struck by metal bars with letters engraved on the end of them. Reporters and other typists had really strong fingers.
The stories rolled out as sheets of typewriter paper and were handed off to copy boys, who carried them to the copy desk, where an editor corrected errors with a blue pencil. Then it was off to the composition room, where skilled eyes and fingers, working from the edited copy, formed a body of type, one line at a time, out of molten lead.
Sheep on a ranch in Tierra del Fuego, photographed no doubt from the south. Antonio Quintana (book author and copyright holder is Fernando Duran) – Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego, 1893-1943.
Sometimes there was blank space left over at the bottom of a column. You couldn’t just press a button to adjust the spacing, so instead you inserted a filler—something like, “Patagonian sheep bear wool only on the southern side” or “Bituminous coal sales increased last year to 370,000 metric tons.”
Through a series of arcane steps, all of these story-bearing type elements came together on a printing press, which impressed the type lines in black ink on long rolls of paper. The newspaper’s large pages—six to eight columns wide—were cut, folded, assembled into a compact publication, and stacked in bundles of fifty or one hundred.
At this point, Uncle Harry’s people—squads of paperboys and girls plus a few adult drivers for newsstands and rural deliveries—carried the newspapers to the reading public, in time to be read before supper. After supper, they were used to wrap the garbage.
Lots of other people were involved besides those already mentioned—clerks, librarians, stenographers, mechanics, pressmen, and part-time reporters called stringers. A typical small-city daily might give full-time work to dozens of people, and part-time earnings to many more.
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Uncle Harry and Aunt Bertha lived in a small, tidy brick bungalow on West Grove Street. It’s still there, decades later—or at least it was the last time Google drove by.
The Youngs’ house on Grove Street. Google Earth image.
Uncle Harry’s job was a day job, but it didn’t end when he left the Register-Mail building in the afternoon. Sometimes a subscribing household was skipped from the delivery. When they called the newspaper office around suppertime to complain, the call was forwarded to Uncle Harry’s home phone. He always had an extra copy or two in the car. Either before or after supper, he would drive out and make the delivery himself. This was a routine part of his otherwise managerial job.
Uncle Harry wore a suit and tie to work and wing-tip shoes that he kept highly polished. He made good money and supported himself and Aunt Bertha well. They had no children but lavished attention on their nieces and nephews.
They belonged to the Lake Bracken Country Club. Not for golf; they didn’t golf. But they loved to fish and spent many fine summer evenings fishing Lake Bracken, either from a boat or from the shore. They ate what they caught.
Uncle Harry broke his leg one time by stepping in a hole at Lake Bracken while carrying a load of fishing gear. Took him a long time to mend, since he was getting older.
He worked at the Register-Mail until he was too sick to work anymore. He died in his sixties from complications of emphysema, having been a lifelong smoker. Aunt Bertha—a happy, sweet woman who was a favorite of all the nieces and nephews—was devastated. She died soon after, of a broken heart.
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Uncle Harry and Aunt Bertha.
In balmier days, we enjoyed their company. My sister and I were great-niece and great-nephew to them. Uncle Harry had a wry sense of humor and always delivered a laugh line at family gatherings. Aunt Bertha did not work outside the home, and her household chores were not onerous, so she often piled us into her Ford Victoria and took us swimming at Lake Bracken.
There was a large clubhouse that overlooked the swimming beach. The lower story was given over to locker rooms and showers for swimmers. The upper story had a dining room for evening events and a daytime snack bar just off the dining room. It was a swell place, but it burned down years ago and was never replaced. Lake Bracken these days is mostly a golf course and a suburban community. I think there is a small clubhouse there, away from the lakeshore—a nineteeth-hole kind of place.
Times change.
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These days, journals of paper still exist, but they are less relied on. The Register-Mail still delivers a print version six days a week “for a retro feel when consuming the news.” (For example, if you’re a very old person.) But don’t worry—the print subscription includes the eNewspaper as well.
King Harald Bluetooth, right, is baptized by Poppo the monk, around 960 AD, in a relief dated around 1200. Photograph by Anagoria, licensed under CC BY 3.0.
Today we have something called a news cycle, and it is 24/7/365. People pick up information on the fly—through their TV, their laptop, their tablet, their phone. By something called Bluetooth.
Bluetooth used to be an embarrassing dental condition. After that, it was the name of Norway’s king. Now, it’s a window to the world.
There’s no longer any need to touch a smeary piece of paper. You can have your content beamed straight into your head. Nobody needs linotype operators anymore. Nobody needs pressmen.
And, frankly, why bother to pay an editor? Fact-checkers? Reporters? Nah.
Even mere rewrite men are being replaced by Artificial Intelligence.
More and more, our window to the world is filtered by something people trust precisely because they mistrust their own intelligence.
Uncle Harry might not have a job in today’s world. Aunt Bertha might have to go to work, perhaps as a barrista, and would certainly not have time to take anybody swimming. But that’s okay, because the swimming beach is closed anyhow.
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Look at all we’ve gained.
Until next time, Dear Reader, blessings be upon you.
Archibald MacLeish was a poet, a playwright, a great figure in American letters. He served as Librarian of Congress during the Second World War and apparently did a bang-up job of it. He won three Pulitzer Prizes—in 1933 and 1953 for books of poetry and in 1959 for a play, J.B.
In 1962, when I was a freshman at Knox College, Mr. MacLeish came to our school to give a speech. At the given hour—11 o’clock on a Tuesday morning, as I recall—I came to Alumni Hall, our massive, neo-romanesque theater, clutching my softback copy of the published script of J.B., which the college bookstore had stocked by the gross to prepare for the playwright’s visit.
Climbing the front stairs and entering the small second-story lobby, I spied the literary lion in a tweed coat and dark vest, chatting with my English composition professor, Michael Crowell.
“Mister Sommers!” Crowell boomed. “Come and meet Archibald MacLeish.”
I stepped up and shook hands with the great man. He was trim and natty, with close-cropped gray hair, a hawklike nose, and dark, intense eyes.
He looked five times more awake than I.
I burbled a word or two and held out my book to him. He smiled, uncapped a huge silver fountain pen, and signed the title page in black ink. I thanked him and made a quick escape. I found a seat in the theater, and in due course he made his speech. I don’t remember what he said. Probably something about literature.
That I can no longer locate my autographed copy of J.B. may give you a reasonable estimate of the durability of literary fame.
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I actually did read that play, J.B. It was supposed to be a modern American version of the biblical Book of Job. Not to throw shade on an undeniably fine poet and library leader, nor to quibble with the judgment of a bona fide Pulitzer Prize jury, nonetheless I recall feeling underwhelmed. It seemed to me the best parts of the play were long passages quoted directly from the Bible; the parts that had been rendered into a contemporary American setting were rather mundane by comparison with the scripture from which they sprang.
These recollections bring us, in a deplorably roundabout manner, to the Book of Job, one of the great works of world literature. Have you read it? It’s easy to find in any standard Bible, tucked right between Esther and Psalms.
It is a stark fable, a story of undeserved suffering and a seemingly callous God. It holds believers accountable for their faith in a way that no conventional tale could.
Job, the central character, is subjected to immense suffering and loss for no reason he can discern. Instead of giving him an explanation, God re-asserts his Almightiness and draws attention to Job’s creaturehood.
Three Friends Visit Job by Wanda Korzeniowska (Polish, 1874-1939). Public Domain.
In what screenwriting guru Robert McKee would label “an education plot,” Job’s inner landscape is changed—not by anything resembling justice in ordinary human terms but by the simple knowledge that God offers no rational choice except humility.
It’s a thoroughly Jewish answer to the problem of evil. If you feel the resolution of the story unsatisfying, you can hear the unseen narrator’s voice whispering: “Vell, vot did you expect?”
In today’s world, we see evil and injustice seemingly everywhere. The good are punished while the evil prosper. It seems, at times, unbearable.
One almost hates to mention in this regard: It was ever thus.
There is nothing new about evil. It still stinks.
We can fight it, but we won’t always win.
As in the days of the Old Testament, we can either cast aspersions at God or admit that the universe God has made is one altogether beyond our imaginations, where justice may have to be measured by divine standards rather than human.
Archibald MacLeish, wherever you are—I invite you to put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Simplicity itself, I think you’ll agree. But authors still struggle with it. Especially Step 3.
Dear Reader, I ask you: What’s the difference between an author and an extra-large pizza?
Answer: An extra-large pizza can feed a family.
Believe me when I tell you the book business is tough.
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Castleman
Fortunately for us literary lions, historical perspective is close at hand, courtesy of Michael Castleman. The author of many books, both fiction and non-fiction, Castleman has had a ringside seat to the book business for decades. For the last eighteen years, he has been working on a book about it. Now, after three rejected drafts and much revision, he brings us The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing (The Unnamed Press, 2024).
This volume is indispensable reading for any author, publisher, agent, or bookseller. It covers the waterfront. The author’s nuanced and occasionally sardonic view of the industry may be inferred from a few of his chapter heads:
“Gutenberg Went Bankrupt”
“How to Reduce the Price of Books: Piracy”
“Goodbye Forever, Mrs. Weathersby, I’ve Joined Book-of-the-Month”
“Everyone Struggles With Amazon”
But though Castleman presents an unvarnished chronicle, one feels somehow encouraged: After hundreds of years of commercial publishing, replete with blighted dreams and corporate connivery, we still want to make books and people still want to read them. There must be something all right with a business like that, even if most of its denizens are going broke.
Castleman touches lightly on the period from troglodyte narratives offered around the fire through the production of medieval texts by hand copying. But his real focus is on the business of printed books, from Gutenberg till now.
He says there has not been one book business. There have been three.
The First Book Business
Johannes Gutenberg. Public Domain.
“The first book business,” Castleman writes, “began with Johananes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type and lasted 450 years through the end of the nineteenth century.” It was an author-centric cottage industry. You wrote a book, hired someone with a press to print it, and hawked copies to the public on the streets if need be. All authors were what today we call self-published. A few got rich, but most had to settle for the satisfaction of seeing their words in print.
The Second Book Business
“By World War I,” the author says, “industrial publishing produced the second book business, now called ‘traditional publishing,’ though it lasted only eighty of the book business’s six hundred years.”
This second book business was publisher-centric. Now, instead of paying a printer to print his manuscript, the author, likely represented by an agent, could sell publication rights to a publisher. This professional publisher then would pay the printer, market the books through bookstores, and feed back to the author a fraction of the revenue as a royalty—keeping the rest as profit.
This “traditional publishing” model is the one we think of as normal. You know, where the author pockets a huge advance and goes on a nationwide promotional tour arranged and paid for by the publisher. But in reality, only a few authors receive large sums of money in the form of advances or earned royalties. Even authors whose books sell well usually have to take their publishers’ word on how much money they are owed. And successful books have always been subject to piracy by foreign publishers.
In the second book business, a few got rich, but most had to settle for the satisfaction of seeing their words in print.
The Third Book Business
“Around the millennium,” Castleman notes, “the digital revolution launched the third book business.” This business—the one we work in now—is still in its birth pangs. Huge conflicts and controversies abound. No dust has settled, and great clouds of it are being kicked up by everything from Kindle and audiobooks to print-on-demand and artificial intelligence.
It’s enough to make a literary luminary swoon, Gentle Reader. We are all—from Stephen King down to Your New Favorite Author—all of us are treading warily through terra incognita.
Only a few make any serious money; but that’s how it always was.
Steinbeck with Charley. Photo by Hans Namuth/Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery.
The late John Steinbeck, who wrote The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, The Pearl,Travels with Charley, and a long shelf of other highly acclaimed books during the middle part of the previous century, once said:
“The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.”
And these days, in the time of the third book business, still it can honestly be said: A few get rich, but most have to settle for the satisfaction of seeing their words in print.
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Don’t underestimate that motive, Dear Reader. There is something wonderful about seeing your words in print. It’s a thrill, no matter how much it costs.
So now, having vented my thoughts about the book business, thanks to the spur of Michael Castleman’s wonderful book, I shall retire to my library full of leather-bound volumes, don my herringbone tweed coat with leather patches on the sleeves, pack and light my Kaywoodie briar pipe, and bang away at my trusty old Underwood typewriter till dawn.
In August 1938, the musical von Trapp Family of Salzburg packed suitcases, walked out their back gate, crossed the lane to the railroad station, and caught the first train to Italy.
Movie poster for The Sound of Music. Fair use.
“NO, WAIT! You’ve got that all wrong, O New Favorite Writer. Everybody knows they slipped out of a performance, donned knapsacks, and hiked across the Alps to Switzerland.”
Au contraire, Gentle Reader. What Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, and their adorable kids did in The Sound of Music would have required a mountain trek of 200 miles or more. Absurd, when there were trains every day from Salzburg to Italy—a place where, incidentally, they were already citizens.
And oh, by the way: Captain Georg Ritter von Trapp’s second wife, Maria (think Julie Andrews), did not teach his children the elements of song (“Do—a deer, a female deer; Re—a drop of golden sun; Mi—a name I call myself . . .”). The whole family were already accomplished singers and instrumentalists when she came into the household as teacher to von Trapp’s third child, who had been sick.
And oh, by the way: The eldest Trapp child was not Liesl, but Rupert. And the next eldest Trapp child, the eldest daughter, was still not Liesl, but rather, Agathe. (None of them were Liesl, but it’s a nice, German-sounding name.)
1940 photo of Baroness Marie von Trapp (front) and five of her ten singing children (back row, left to right) Agatha, Hedwig and Johanna; (center, left to right) Marie and Martina. Photo by C.M. Stieglitz, World Telegram staff photographer. Public Domain.
Agathe von Trapp is the one who, still clear-minded and articulate at the age of ninety, published a 2003 memoir titled Memories Before and After The Sound of Music—a book Your New Favorite Writer has just finished reading.
The real story of the von Trapps lacks the surefire dramatic contours of The Sound of Music, but it’s compelling, charming, and inspiring in a different way. I found it a fascinating read, mainly because it’s a clear glimpse of a bygone world.
Agathe von Trapp was born into the Austro-Hungarian Empire—an entity that ceased to exist five years after her birth, when World War I ended. Her father had been an officer in the Austrian navy, which was no longer needed when Austria gave up its Dalmatian seacoast in the Treaty of Versailles.
Georg von Trapp lost his naval commission (demise of empire), most of his money (postwar financial crisis), and his wife, Agatha Whitehead (scarlet fever). When the new teacher, Maria Augusta Kutschera, came on the scene, the family needed a way to survive—and music became the answer.
The Trapp Family Singers sang themselves into Europe-wide demand in the few years before Hitler took over Austria. At that fateful moment, they had just received an invitation to undertake a coast-to-coast concert tour in the United States. Austria’s borders were about to be closed by the Nazis. Georg von Trapp was from Istria on the Balkan peninsula, a part of Austria which went to Italy in the postwar realignment, so the family had automatically become Italian citizens and received Italian passports. They just caught a train and got out of town.
Next season, they toured the United States and were warmly received everywhere. Coming to rest in Vermont, they built a resort hotel where music lovers could visit them in the summer, between touring seasons. After a few years, the children recognized they had to go their own separate ways, following individual dreams. But their family’s success during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s had come from pulling together, intelligently and with love, acting together as a unit.
It was a delightful read, informed by Agathe’s accurate memory and illustrated by her own line drawings of important places and scenes. Like all the von Trapps, Agathe was a person of many talents. Her story, really the story of her family’s navigation from the Hapsburg Empire to modern times, is inherently worth a read.
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A whole different thing is what we get from And There I Stood With My Piccolo—one of three memoirs penned by the late Meredith Willson, floutist, bandleader, composer, and storyteller extraordinaire.
Publicity for the movie version of The Music Man. Fair use.
If you don’t know Meredith Willson, he is the fellow who created every bit of The Music Man, one of the great musical shows in Broadway history. He followed up The Music Man with another pretty good musical called The Unsinkable Molly Brown. But everybody would say The Music Man is his chef-d’oeuvre.
Some time ago, I read his memoir But He Doesn’t Know the Territory, in which he told the story of how The Music Man came to be created and produced. It was truly entertaining, but it left me with the feeling that somehow this corn-fed Iowa musician magically appeared on Broadway one day with the perfect musical show about musicians in Iowa.
This book tells the rest of the story. It was originally published in 1948, nine years beforeThe Music Man opened on Broadway. When Willson wrote this memoir he had not yet accomplished, nor even fairly begun, his life’s major work. But it shows that he did not come out of nowhere.
Meredith Willson in 1961. Public Domain.
“New York talk was a heck of a shock to me,” he says. Maybe that’s because, having lived his whole adult life in New York and California, he still talked like an Iowa boy. Or at least, he wrote like one.
This memoir builds on a big contradiction: A man who couldn’t wait to get out of Mason City and conquer the musical world of New York writes most eloquently and passionately about the sounds, sights, and memories of his boyhood in Iowa. Despite having spent decades hobnobbing with the glitterati of the show-biz world, and despite his obvious pride at having become one of them, he achieved his life’s masterwork by bringing Mason City to a New York stage.
He was born in 1902—eleven years before Agathe von Trapp was born in Austria! He wound up chronicling that innocent period before the Great War which was known, even in America, by French names like fin-de-siècle or Belle Epoque. In Iowa the Belle Epoque looked like farm boys smoking corn silk behind the barn. In this work we get a fair amount of very particular boyhood reminiscence.
But we get something else: We get a flying tour of the period between about 1920 and 1950—roughly the same between-the-wars era that Agathe von Trapp describes in the European context.
Willson’s life in these decades reads like it’s lifted from the pages of Variety. He clearly delights in dropping names. His recollections, interspersed with homespun Iowa philosophy, are mostly anecdotes involving famous musicians and other entertainers with whom Willson had business and personal relationships.
Meredith Willson in 1937. Public Domain.
To someone like Your New Favorite Writer, this book was a treasurehouse of innocent merriment. To you, Dear Reader, I would say it depends on your era and your historical interests.
Here is a sample of the people mentioned in this slim book, most of whom Willson knew personally: Eugene Ormandy, Paul Whiteman, Bing Crosby, John Philip Sousa, Victor Herbert, George Jessel, Chauncey DePew, Lee DeForest, Walter Damrosch, Arturo Toscanini, Nelson Eddy, Phil Harris, Ted Fio Rito, Horace Heidt, Anson Weeks, Kay Kyser, Carlton Morse, Bill Goodwin, Xavier Cugat, Ralph Edwards, Mel Blanc, Amos ’n’ Andy, Lum and Abner, Mortimer Snerd, Stoopnagle and Budd, Gene Autry, Ferde Grofé, Pinky Lee, Jerry Lester, Pierre Monteux, Herb Caen, Lanny Ross, Hattie McDaniel, Jack Haley, Warren Hull, Eleanor Powell, George Murphy, Buddy Ebsen, Robert Montgomery, Norma Shearer, Ed Gardner, Darryl Zanuck, George Kaufman, Robert Taylor, Spencer Tracy, Charlie Chaplin, Sam Goldwyn, William Wyler, Frank Morgan, Fannie Brice, Robert Young, Fred Waring, Adolph Zukor, Frank Sinatra, Ken Carpenter, Harold Lloyd, Ray Noble, George Burns, and Gracie Allen.
My point is: If half or more of these names ring a bell for you, then you’ll probably enjoy this chatty little book as much as I did. If not, you may still enjoy it—but you’ve got a lot of Googling ahead of you.
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Why do I combine these two books, one by Agathe von Trapp and one by Meredith Willson, in the same post? For one thing, I read them back-to-back. For another thing: They are scintillating memoirs by two people living through the same period of history—one in Old School Europe, the other in brash young America.
Both of them shed light not only on their own lives and doings, but on the whole milieu in which they lived—the fleeting years between the First World War and the advent of television. They were interesting years, “lost” years in some ways. They were mostly before my time, but I happen to like reading about them.
“I DON’T KNOW ABOUT THE REST OF YOU. I AM STRUGGLING WITH WHAT IS HAPPENING IN OUR WORLD. ANY WORDS OF ENCOURAGEMENT?”
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Yes, Kimberly, try these:
God is not finished with us yet.
It’s easy to get discouraged when we are fed a constant stream of the most outlandish and outrageous things happening somewhere, anywhere, in our tired old world.
But everything that’s happening now has happened before, over and over again.
There was a gag in the Fifties that went like this:
They told me, “Cheer up, things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure enough . . . things got worse!
In times like these, I feather my own nest; I tend to my knitting; I weed my garden. These are all metaphors, Kimberly. I don’t actually do those particular activities.
The point is, I show up every day. I take people one by one. I try to respond to their needs as I can discern them—especially each person’s need to be treated with dignity and respect.
I hear folks’ concerns, but when those concerns are political—usually informed by media reports of matters far from our daily lives—I safeguard them in File 13 and redirect the conversation.
An old Chinese poem, perhaps the oldest extant Chinese poem, says:
I focus on the here-and-now and on my own responses, which ultimately are the only things within my control. Yes, I can control my own thoughts, words, and deeds.
Some may think me cold-blooded, but I simply do not get urges of the heart that compel me to act out of character. My heart, if I have one, is not that kind of heart.
Calm, philosophical detachment may be impossible if you have another kind of heart. If so, all I can say is you are in for a lot of woe that I have managed to avoid over the past eighty years.
Despite my distance from the flames of passion—or because of it—I am active, upbeat, and productive in my actual life. I meet each day with a certain zest, untroubled by a whole world of troubles, confident the sun will rise again tomorrow.
