My Jimmy Carter Moment
Several years ago, on a dark day of deep despair, a silly idea came to me—one that would eventually become a silly book, while finding me crossing paths with a former President of the United States who was anything but silly. I was working back then in the entertainment industry, writing film scripts for the major studios, TV networks, and independent producers. My annual income could best be described as boom or bust. Some years I earned very little. In others, I made vastly more money than I could’ve ever begun to imagine at the Los Angeles Times, where I had toiled as a reporter for more than a decade. On balance, it was a comfortable living, one that allowed me to escape Los Angeles with my family and buy a home with an ocean view two hours up the coast in lovely Santa Barbara. But the more time I spent writing movies, the more disillusioned and frustrated I became. I grew tired of fighting LA traffic and having to attend pitch meetings to propose my movie ideas that more often than not went nowhere; of being jacked around by conniving development executives who professed to love my ideas, then hired other screenwriters to write them; and of seeing my best scripts get rejected outright or rewritten so extensively that by the time they were produced—what few actually made it to the screen–they bore scant resemblance to my original work. Thus it was while sitting at my desk one afternoon, stewing over my latest misadventure in Hollywood, that the idea hit me: I need to find another job. Suddenly, as if guided by some occult hand, I found myself typing up a list of possible employment opportunities, each one more preposterous than the next, but any one of which, I was convinced, would be way more fun than screenwriting. I could become a chair tester for La-Z-Boy, getting paid to sit on my duff all day. Maybe I could shoot hoops for the Harlem Globetrotters, or go be a wine taster for some major vintner (back then) like Ernest and Julio Gallo. I could train whales for Sea World. I could sing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. The list of dream jobs became virtually endless! My one big problem, I realized, was that I was uniquely unqualified to take on any of those jobs. But then I thought, Wait a minute. This is America! Since when did a lack of qualifications stop anybody from doing anything? And so, more for grins than the prospects of actual gainful employment, and just to see what kinds of responses I’d get, I began mailing out dozens of goofy application letters under the nom de plume, “Fred Grimes,” a likeable, somewhat less-than-articulate guy with a can-do, never-say-die attitude who’d unfortunately lost his job “down at the plant”, and was looking to reinvent himself in the Land of Opportunity. The letters spawned replies that ranged from equally goofy to deadly serious. The head of the Tabernacle Choir pointed out rather stuffily that one had to be a member of the Mormon Church with “considerable training and vocal experience” to join his choir—and that each vocalist was a volunteer. The job, he said, didn’t pay a dime. Meanwhile, over at Gallo, the head of consumer relations wrote back to report that, “Unfortunately, if we had a job of wine taster, the applicant’s line would indeed be quite long. Sorry!!” Sea World in San Diego responded with, “Although we were impressed with your resume, we have found other candidates who more closely suit our needs at this time.” Fred had sent no resume; only that he “had a way with animals” after having trained the family cat to do a few tricks. The Globetrotters, to whom Fred had written admitting that he was just “an average unemployed American who is white”, and who couldn’t play basketball to save his life, but who could “whistle the heck out of Sweet Georgia Brown”, the Globetrotter’s theme song, got the joke. They responded with a friendly thanks but no thanks while urging Fred to, “Keep whistling!” Then Fred wrote to Jimmy Carter. “You’re making a big mistake building all those houses for the poor,” he advised the former President. “Sir, why not build houses for the rich? You could call them ‘Jimmy Carter Homes,’ or ‘Homes by Jimmy Carter.’ I bet a lot of rich folks would buy them just to tell their friends, ‘Guess who hung my drywall?’ Fred bragged that he was pretty handy around the house, having recently installed a new kitchen sink, and urged the former President to hire him as his construction foreman. A couple of weeks later, I ventured outside to the mailbox to find an envelope bearing a return address in Plains, Georgia–the same address I was to discover later where Carter in 1961 had built a modest, ranch-style home while helping run his family’s peanut farm and warehouse business, and where he and his wife, Rosalynn, still resided. Folded inside the envelope was the original letter I had sent him as Fred Grimes. Hand-written on the upper-right corner was a note from Carter himself: “Fred—Thanks for your idea. When all the poor have homes, we can start on the rich. –Jimmy C.” That letter, and dozens of others from Fred, along with their responses, would eventually find their way into a modest, nonfiction book–Dear Ernest and Julio, the Ordinary Guy’s Search for the Extraordinary Job, by Fred Grimes, with David Freed. Published by St. Martin’s Press, it’s been out of print for a while, but you can still find used copies for cheap on eBay if you’re at all interested. Not long after Dear Ernest and Julio was published, my wife and I visited Plains, Georgia. It was an easy drive from Albany, Georgia, where I was born, and not far from Fort Benning, where our
Publication Day!
Deep Fury, my seventh Cordell Logan mystery, debuts today. The publication of a new book is always a thrilling if not tremulous occasion for any author, regardless of how many titles they’ve already put out there. Will readers enjoy what I’ve written this time? Will the critics be kind? Will I sell enough copies so that I don’t have to go out and find a real job somewhere, like Home Depot? Fingers crossed. New books come with plenty of responsibilities, not the least of which is remembering to acquire enough copies for your freeloading buddies who are too cheap to buy their own. But perhaps the most important obligation these days is the necessity of promoting your own book. It’s a function that, frankly speaking, I find uncomfortable and usually have to be arm-twisted into doing. Back in the day, your typically introverted novelist (read: pretty much all novelists) could sit back with the doors locked and shades drawn, box up their new manuscript, and send it off to their editors laissez-faire, never having to trifle much with tooting their own horns once the book was released. These days, publishers expect authors to be self-motivated, marketing whizbangs. It’s all about “building your brand” and “extending your reach” on social media with blog posts like the one you’re currently reading. We’re talking search engine optimization, dear friends, not to mention meta descriptions, backlinks, keyword density, and a myriad of other Digital Age terminology, much of which my old-school, analog brain simply fails to comprehend. The good news is that I have some wonderful experts in my corner willing to hold my hand as I navigate this largely bewildering process. These include, most notably, my website guru, Blake O’Ruairi, who is as Irish as his name sounds, and my lead publicist, the ever-charming Tatiana Radujkovic, who works for Blackstone, my publisher. If there’s anything I do understand about the art and science of self-promotion, and one that I do enjoy, it’s the need to get out there and get together with the folks who like reading mysteries. Toward that end, though the details are yet to be worked out, I hope to be appearing in 2025 at a bookstore somewhere in your time zone. Meanwhile. I’m already anticipating questions I’ll get from interested readers, mainly because I’ve been asked many of them before. The one that always seems to come up is the one I can never adequately answer: How do you come up with your ideas? I’m not trying to be glib here, but the process is a mystery in itself. I’ve asked other writers the same question, and their answer is always more or less the same. “The idea usually finds me, not the other way around,” they’ll say, or some iteration thereof. That’s definitely how it works with me. I’ll be taking a shower, or playing catch with the dog, or snoozing at 3:30 in the morning, and, shazam, some random synapse will fire deep inside my skull, and the fundamental notion for a book will come bubbling to the surface. Wow, I’ll think to myself, this could make for a terrific plot! Then I’ll typically chew on the concept for a few days, do some snooping around on the internet, and almost always reject the idea. Often, it’s because it or some iteration of it has been done before, and well, by another writer. Sometimes I’ll conclude that the idea is too simple or too complex, or that I’d have to devote the next two years researching the subject before I could achieve the kind of verisimilitude that would permit readers to maintain their suspension of disbelief, which is key to all good fiction. But every once in a while, an idea will stick. Such was the case with what ultimately became Deep Fury. I was sipping coffee and reading the news online one morning about three years ago when I stumbled across a bizarre story. A British soldier practicing high-altitude parachute drops with his unit had crashed through the Spanish tile roof of a home in central California, not far from where I live, after his main chute failed to open. The soldier was forced to deploy his reserve parachute and fortunately sustained only minor injuries. No one inside the home was hurt. I immediately thought to myself, This has potential! What if a guy falls out of the sky to his death, only naked and without a parachute, and crashes through the roof of a mobile home where an elderly couple lives? What if the guy once served as Cordell Logan’s wingman, back when they were both Air Force fighter pilots flying combat missions during Operation Desert Storm? And what if plenty of people had reason to want the guy dead? Three hundred-plus pages later, I finished Deep Fury. I hope you like it. If you do, please help spread the word by posting a brief review on Amazon or Goodreads. And also, if you have a good idea for Logan’s next adventure, I’m all ears.
Chemtrails and My Friend Flicka
I came across some startling statistics the other day. According to the National Literacy Institute, 54% of American adults read below a 6th-grade level. One in five is considered functionally illiterate. Perhaps no less sobering, America’s literacy rate ranks 36th in the world–behind Ukraine, Russia, Cuba, Finland, and even North Korea. For somebody like me who earns his keep largely from the printed word, and who aspires to offer more sophisticated prose than those found in, say, My Friend Flicka or Jack and Jill magazine, these numbers are disconcerting, and not merely because it means fewer prospective customers willing to buy my Cordell Logan books. There are no doubt many reasons to explain why more than half of us, if the numbers are to believed, read at the same level we did entering puberty, when our ability to think critically is still largely undeveloped. Digital distractions? The time constraints of modern life? Our ever-decreasing attention spans? Whatever the explanations, the fact remains that reading is vital in learning how to objectively assess evidence, recognize cognitive biases, and question unreliable sources. Learning to read critically empowers people to function more analytically, to resist the emotional and cognitive traps that often accompany wildly unscientific, unfounded beliefs otherwise known as conspiracy theories. Consider, for example, “chemtrails”. Those who believe they’re real contend that chemtrails (short for “chemical trails,” which not to be confused with “contrails,” short for condensation trails) are part of a government plot using commercial jetliners to spray dangerous chemicals on We The People for top-secret purpose. These purposes range from politically motivated weather manipulation and mind control to all manner of covert geoengineering. Believers refuse to accept the proven science of contrails, which form when hot, moist air from aircraft engines meets cold air at high altitude. Exhaust gases produce water vapor that condenses into tiny water droplets or ice crystals, creating visible but otherwise harmless streaks in the sky. The more wind in the atmosphere, the more squiggly the lines. I found myself not long ago unwittingly in the middle of a chemtrails/contrails debate. I waiting in the checkout line at my local hardware store, when I couldn’t help but overhear a conversation taking place in the next line over–although “conversation” in this case would be a misnomer. A bearded, middle-aged, somewhat wild-eyed guy was intently lecturing an older woman standing in line in front of him about the dangers of chemtrails and how the government was out to screw us all. She listened to him mutely if not politely, nodding in places, raising her eyebrows occasionally in surprise, but I could tell by the set of her jaw and the way she wouldn’t meet his eyes that the guy making her a little uncomfortable. I figured it was none of my business. The guy looked harmless enough. So I decided not to intervene. That changed after I paid for my purchase and headed out to the parking lot. Mr. Chemtrails had followed her out of the store and was still telling her all about mysterious sky-spraying and the “Deep State” and how the lamestream media was covering the whole thing up while she loaded the plants she’d bought into her hatchback. She was parked a few stalls away, with her back turned to me. I reminded myself that the world is filled with misinformed individuals and that you can’t educate them all. But as I backed my truck out and started to drive away, I could see by her expression that she just wanted the guy to leave her alone. I stopped and rolled down my window. “Not to interrupt your lecture,” I said to him, “but that’s the biggest bunch of bullshit I’ve ever heard in my life. There’s no such thing as chemtrails.” “That’s what I thought!” the woman blurted out with a look of noticeable relief. I told the guy I was a pilot, and his notion that legions of other pilots would knowingly or otherwise participate in a secret plot to poison the population was preposterous. All he had to do, I said, was look at footage of the condensation trails made by American bomber formations over Germany and Japan during World War II. Was the government back then out to poison the enemy and blow them up, too? How was it possible that after 80-plus years, with all those tens of thousands of airmen supposedly in on the plan, that the “truth” of chemtrails could remain hidden from the public? “You need to get out of your information silo,” I said, “and read some established, respected scientific journals about how contrails are formed. Do your own research. Everybody’s entitled to their opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own set of facts.” The guy stared at me blankly, then responded in a way I didn’t expect. “Thank you,” is all he said. I drove on. Was I rude in butting in the way I did? Maybe. Did I help change his mind? I’ll never know. But I do know one thing: learning to read analytically is key to the attainment of knowledge, and knowledge is power. We’re going to need a lot of power if we are to save ourselves (and innocent weekend gardeners) from the peddlers of mistruths who prey increasingly upon the ill-informed among us.
Chatting with Best-seller Hank Phillippi Ryan
I had a great time talking with Hank, my fellow author and journalist, about DEEP FURY and all things writing-related. She’s a terrific interviewer.
No Throat-Clearing
Among the graduate-level courses I teach at Harvard University’s Extension School is one called “Fact to Fiction.” The course emphasizes how the skills required of a journalist can prove invaluable when crafting novels and short stories. I encourage my students to think like news reporters, crafting clean, succinct copy while exercising a keen eye for real-world details that can make their prose more believable. A key lesson is learning how to start a story with a bang. In my opinion, a good opening–what journalists call a “lede” (and, yes, that’s how it’s spelled)—is little different from an avalanche that starts out as a snowslide and quickly builds power as it rolls downhill. Powerful fiction as far as I’m concerned is no different. To be effective, it must be engaging from the get-go. Forget opening with some long bit of exposition, trying to explain what happened before the story begins. No pussyfooting around. No easing into it. I call that “throat-clearing.” Think about when you go to a concert. Do you really want to listen to the band or orchestra tune up while the lead singer or soloist run through their scales before they launch into the music? I’m guessing not. The same is true with fiction. Immediacy and impact are what we want. Give the reader the impression straight away that they’ve stumbled into something exciting. Be brief. Be original. And think cinematically. Kurt Vonnegut believed in starting his stories “with an event that will create a reaction” on the reader’s part. Gabriel Garcia Marquez envisioned his openings as a “kind of invitation to a journey.” Likewise, Margaret Atwood has compared the beginnings of her stories to “the opening of a door” the reader must step through. I couldn’t agree more with any of them. But as a writer of murder mystery novels, I’d go one step further: A good beginning must also implicitly pose a question: Who got killed, why did they get killed, and who killed them? Along with that question comes an implicit promise to the reader that says, in effect, “Read to the end, and you’ll find out.” Consider Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. The novel opens with a question about what happened to Amy. Stick with me, dear reader, Flynn implies, and you’ll find out. Or Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It opens with the unresolved disappearance of Harriet Vanger. This prompts readers to wonder about her fate. Stick with me, dear reader, Larsson implies, and you’ll find out. Or the opening of The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena, which hints at the mysterious circumstances of a missing baby, casting suspicion on her parents. Stick with me, dear reader, Lapena implies, and you’ll find out. Most authors, this one included, will tell you that first few paragraphs are the most important ones. They’re designed to set the hook, to get readers so interested in your story that they won’t be able to put down the rest of it. Getting those lede paragraphs just right isn’t easy. I’ve been known to rewrite mine dozens of times before finally surrendering to exhaustion and submitting them for publication. Here’s what I finally settled on with Flat Spin, my first Cordell Logan mystery: Arlo Echevarria opened his door in flip-flops and a foul mood. “You got the wrong address, dude. I didn’t order any pizza.” The Domino’s guy stood there mutely on the front step, cap pulled low, face obscured in the dim buttery glow of Echevarria’s jelly jar porch light, cradling a pizza hot pouch in both arms like it was baby Jesus. “What are you, deaf? I said you got the wrong address.” Echevarria went to push the door closed, but the Domino’s guy blocked it with his foot, drawing a blue steel semi-auto from the red vinyl pouch. Echevarria yelled, “Wait a—” Boom. The .40-caliber hollow point splintered rib bone and mushroomed through Echevarria’s left lung, blowing a kebab-size chunk of flesh out his back and dropping him like 164 pounds of wet laundry. Boom. Boom. Slugs two and three made pulp of Echevarria’s liver and spleen. The coroner would deem all three wounds potentially fatal. Any cynical street cop, which is to say, any cop, would deem them all sweet, sweet shooting: three rounds, center mass, square in the 10-ring. The Domino’s guy tucked the pistol up under his shirt, then calmly gathered his spent brass, depositing each casing in the hot pouch before disappearing into a pleasantly temperate San Fernando Valley evening. The tang of cordite lingered on the breeze with the perfume of night-blooming jasmine. And here’s what I came up with for Deep Fury, my newest Logan mystery, which debuts December 17th: Long after the naked man plummeted from the night sky and exploded like a bomb through the roof of Walt and Lena Rizzo’s double-wide mobile home in the Sun Country RV and Trailer Park, Walt couldn’t decide if it was the dog or divine providence that had saved his wife’s life. It was after supper. The elderly couple were watching Dancing with the Stars with the sound turned way up when their miniature schnauzer, Rambo, who also answered to “Rambie” and “RamRam,” began pawing at the door so he could go do his business outside. Walt’s knees were acting up again—all those years laying tile for all those rich snobs up in Knob Hill and Pacific Heights— but he willed himself out of his recliner anyway to let the dog out because he didn’t want Lena missing a minute of her favorite show. Sixty-one years together, and she was the most beautiful woman Walt had ever seen. “Sit,” she said loudly. “What?” “I said sit. I’ll take him out.” They were both about as hard of hearing as one might expect of two people in their late eighties. Lena pointed
Close Encounters
The other day, my wife and I were flying near Sedona, Arizona, heading home to California after visiting relatives in Colorado, when we experienced something that felt a bit like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” though I’d be the first to admit I’m not exactly sure what it was we experienced. Please permit me a brief, airplane-geek digression to offer some technical context and to better set the scene: Many pilots these days, myself included, use iPads and an app called ForeFlight to help us navigate. It’s basically a satellite-based, georeferenced moving map that displays your location in the air at any given moment, while also painting an easy-to-follow line pointing in the direction of your next waypoint or final destination. Moreover, if your aircraft has something called an Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast-In receiver (“ADS-B In” for short), which mine does, ForeFlight also allows you to keep track of other aircraft relative to your current position, heading, and altitude. The display provides much of the same information air traffic controllers on the ground see on their radar scopes, and greatly reduces the chances of midair collisions. OK, now back to our close encounter. So there we were, cruising along on our assigned course at an altitude of 11,000 feet, when, suddenly, an unidentified blip popped up on my iPad. Foreflight showed that the aircraft was a couple of miles away, directly behind us, and at our exact altitude. What was particularly disconcerting was that it was coming straight at us at what looked to be an alarmingly high rate of speed. I quickly radioed Air Traffic Control. “Phoenix Approach, Cirrus Seven November Delta. Just wondering if you’re painting any targets at my altitude and six o’clock position?” “Cirrus Seven November Delta, negative.” Whatever this thing was, it was now less than a mile away and swiftly closing the gap. When you’re on an IFR flight plan, as I was, you’re not supposed to deviate from that plan without first getting permission from ATC. However, there’s a fundamental tenant in aviation drilled into all pilots during their basic training: “Aviate first. Navigate second. Then Communicate.” Basically, what it means is that if you’re in trouble, focus on your first responsibility, to keep flying the plane as safely as possible. You can let ATC know what you’re up to later. With that in mind, I immediately disengaged the autopilot to commence evasive maneuvers when, just like that, the blip disappeared. Bizarre. Was it a UFO—known in more modern parlance as a UAP, or “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”? Or was it some sort of computer anomaly, an echo of my airplane’s own electronics signature? The latter theory was certainly the more scientific and perhaps more likely, but it was the former that remains tantalizing. If you fly planes long enough, you’re bound to encounter any number of strange objects up there. Mylar balloons. Ballistic missile launches. Unmanned Predator drones. Birds soaring at impossibly high altitudes. But I can’t say I’ve ever seen a UAP or flying saucer or whatever you care to call the prospect of an extraterrestrial vehicle operating in our airspace. To be honest, I would seriously love to see one someday because I know it would serve as an existential moment, one that could go a long way in answering that age-old question: Are we alone in the universe? Actual confirmation that we share the cosmos with other sentient creatures surely would upend traditional beliefs about our place in it. It would demand a reassessment of our philosophical and theological notions about creation and existence. And maybe, just maybe, it would foster a greater sense of coexistence, compelling the nations of the world to set aside their cultural and religious differences and work together to make Mother Earth a less contentious place in which to live. With equipment like the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers every day are identifying more and more exoplanets outside of our solar system where conditions might be right to sustain life as we know it. Our closest exoplanet neighbor, Proxima Centauri b, is a mere 4.24 light years away. Could travelers from places like that, inhabitants of civilizations more technologically advanced than ours, transcend such vast distances? Spend five minutes on the internet and you’ll find no shortage of anecdotal evidence suggesting they’re already here and have been for centuries. To date, however, irrefutable proof of their presence remains elusive. In the interim, I intend to continue flying and to remain ever vigilant to the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Statistically, it seems implausible if not impossible to me that we’re the sole inhabitants of the stars. Indeed, as the late planetary scientist Carl Sagan wisely noted, “The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.”
The Ruptured Duck Lives!
If you’ve read any of my Cordell Logan mystery novels, you’ll know that Logan flies an old, cantankerous, four-seat Cessna 172 Skyhawk. Ditto in Logan’s latest adventure, Deep Fury, set for release Dec. 17. The plane, nicknamed the Ruptured Duck, has unreliable radios, hail-dimpled wings, and a faded orange, yellow and white color scheme that practically screams 1970’s, which makes sense, considering that’s when the Duck first took wing from Cessna’s factory in Wichita, Kansas. Readers will occasionally ask me, is the Duck modeled after a real airplane? It is. Loosely. My father-in-law, Don, a lifelong pilot and long-time owner of a pressurized Cessna 210 Centurion, acquired tail number N3566E, a 1978 Cessna 172, in a business deal several years ago. Both my brother-in-law, David, and sister-in-law, Barbara, learned to fly piloting 66-Echo, after which Dave became part-owner of a Cessna 182 Skylane and Barb decided being an active pilot wasn’t her cup of tea. In any case, Don telephoned me one day and said, “I have this 172 and no real use for it. Would you be interested in getting back into flying? All you’d have to do is pay for maintenance and gas.” I’d earned my private pilot’s certificate shortly after graduating from college, but hadn’t flown as pilot in command for several years. My career as a newspaper reporter, along with raising a family, had left little free time, let alone disposable income, for such pursuits. But by the time Don called me with his amazing proposition, I’d transitioned from daily newspapers to earning a healthy living writing movies, my kids were older, and we’d moved from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara. As it happens, this little coastal resort town is one of the most beautiful places in the world to live, let alone fly. So, when he asked if I was interested in having unlimited use of an airplane without needing to rent or buy one, I didn’t think twice before responding. “Absolutely.” I caught a commercial flight to Colorado Springs, where 66-Echo was based, and together Don and I flew the plane back to California. I was rusty. Piloting a plane is not like riding a bike. Some things you remember. Some things you don’t. Much practice is involved. After I got home, I logged about 10 hours in the air with my flight instructor, Terry Harris, before she deemed me safe to fly on my own. The first time I climbed into the right seat and took off alone in that little Cessna felt like I’d been reborn. Much as I loved flying 66-Echo, after two years and 140 hours of logged flight time, I decided it was time to stop taking advantage of my father-in-law’s generosity and buy my own airplane. Months of research and perusing the internet went by before I found the perfect bird for my budget and purposes, based at a small airfield outside Fort Worth, Texas: N8209W, a 1965 Piper Cherokee 180C. The airplane had been well-maintained and was equipped with the basic avionics I was looking for. More significantly, it met what I figured would be my useful load requirements. “Useful load” is an aviation term that conveys how much weight a given aircraft can carry in gas, oil, passengers and luggage. Many four-seat planes simply don’t have enough horsepower to carry full fuel and four reasonably sized human beings. I wanted a plane that could because, I figured, “Hey, who wouldn’t want to come fly with me?” Plenty of people, as it turned out. News flash: many folks are terrified of small airplanes. They hear about crashes on the news and decline, even after you try to explain to them that the only reason they hear about said crashes is because they’re so relatively rare. Regardless, far be it from me to begrudge people their phobias. We all have our apprehensions. Personally speaking, I’m not fond of alligators or most monkeys. They can’t be trusted. But I digress… Asking a person I don’t know especially well if they’d like to go flying can prove awkward. Some people openly admit their anxiety and politely decline. Others will say how fun it sounds—”I’m definitely interested in going!”–then find any number of excuses not to go. I make a rule to stop asking usually after the second invitation, not because I’m offended, but because I don’t want to make anyone feel forced into doing something they’re apprehensive about. Sadly, they don’t know what they’re missing. I flew that Piper Cherokee for more than 15 years before deciding it was time to find something a bit more modern. In 2022, I got a great deal on a first-generation Cirrus that was for sale in Ohio. Sleek and stylish, it doesn’t carry nearly as much weight as my old Cherokee, but it can get two adults (and their dog) where they want to go in comfort and a whole lot faster. As for N3566E, the Cessna 172 that inspired Cordell Logan’s Ruptured Duck, the last time I checked, it was living its best life with a new owner in rural San Diego County. I wish them both nothing but fair winds and blue skies.
Another Defense Against the Universe
Writing a mystery novel is not unlike piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. Each element must fit seamlessly to reveal the big picture. Introducing humor to this process while navigating tone and plot can be difficult, to say the least. Indeed, I’m often reminded of what actor Edmund Gwenn is purported to have remarked on his deathbed: “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” Drop the mic, Mr. Gwenn. It’s true. Trust me, learning to fly an airplane is not nearly as challenging as writing funny. The protagonist in my mystery novels is Cordell Logan, a sardonically wisecracking flight instructor and former government operator who sees humor in even the most macabre of circumstances. He’s rarely without a snidely amusing quip. Those quips, however, come much more readily to Logan than they do to me in real life. It’s why, I suppose, I’m not the fastest writer around. For me, being amusing on paper takes a ton of time and effort. Maintaining a balance between humor and suspense in a mystery novel can prove particularly tricky. Mysteries are built on dark deeds and the gradual revelation of secrets. Humor, meanwhile, typically relies on lightness, which can easily undermine the gravity of any serious situation. The key to blending these two seemingly disparate elements lies in transitioning smoothly between them, such that the intended humor enhances rather than undermines the mystery. In other words, the comedic elements must complement, not overshadow, the suspense. Character development adds another layer of complexity. Mystery novels typically feature detectives, both professional and amateur, who are focused on solving the case. Introducing humor into such personas without compromising their credibility or the story’s tension is a constant concern. The humor must be balanced in a way that feels natural and doesn’t undermine the character’s depth. Overemphasis on comedic traits risks reducing characters to mere caricatures, while stripping them of the believability that readers expect. The key is to integrate humor in a way that feels authentic to the character’s development and organic to the plot. Reader expectations play a crucial role in this dynamic. Fans rightfully anticipate a certain level of seriousness and tension in a mystery novel. Introducing levity can test those expectations. This presents both an opportunity and a hurdle for me as I consciously strive to bring something different to the page, something that perhaps stretches genre norms. My primary goal, dear reader, is to keep you guessing as you dive into any Logan mystery, including my latest, Deep Fury, but it’s also to keep you smiling. And it’s those smiles that represent the more difficult objective, if only because humor is so highly subjective. What you or I consider funny is based on cultural context and our respective life’s experiences. Given those potentially broad differences, I’m well aware that while some readers might find Logan’s words and actions hilarious, others may deem him off-putting or even offensive. Oh, well. As the old saying goes, “You can’t please all the people all the time,” but you can certainly seek to please the majority. And that’s what I try to do. With each line of dialogue or description I write, I ask myself, “Is this going to make the reader’s day a little better or a little worse?” If the answer is “better,” there’s a good chance the line stays. After publishing Flat Spin, my first Cordell Logan book, I was gratified that a majority of readers and critics appeared to have enjoyed what I wrote. They liked the character and were engaged by the story I’d crafted. Still, there were some who took me to task for trying to be too funny. They complained that the humor felt forced in places, and that not everything is worthy of a joke. In hindsight, I agreed. Thus, you’ll find that in subsequent titles, Logan still cracks wise when appropriate, but perhaps not quite as often as he did originally. Charles Dickens once said that nothing in the world is “so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.” I find that pretty funny considering the undeniably depressing tone of Dickens’ most famous novels, including David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and Hard Times, but his point is well-taken. There’s much these days to lament in our screwed-up world. If my humble scribblings can afford you respite from those ills, however briefly, I will have achieved my objective. The great comedian and filmmaker Mel Brooks put it best. “Humor,” Brooks observed, “is just another defense against the universe.” I couldn’t agree more.
Writing What You Know
I don’t remember the moment I learned to float in a swimming pool, or to ride a bike without training wheels. The first time I tasted a fresh strawberry has been lost to antiquity. I do, however, remember like it was yesterday the first time I flew as pilot in command of an airplane. We’d practiced landings that clear August morning, my flight instructor, Bert J. Colter, and I. After six touch-and-go’s, Bert directed me to taxi back to what passed for a terminal building at our small, uncontrolled airfield in northern Colorado. “OK,” he said, “give me three more touch-and-go’s.” Then out of the airplane he climbed. No, “Good luck.” No, “Try not to kill yourself.” Bert was “The Right Stuff” kind of instructor. Understated. Unflappable. Out he went, and there I sat, alone for the first time in the cockpit of an airplane, about to depart the earth with no guiding hand to ensure my safe return. Pounding in my brain was a bit of advice Bert had offered early in my training, that a pilot must always “be ahead of the airplane”—meaning that a plane will kill you faster than anything if you’re not anticipating what it’s about to do next. Still, I don’t recall being nervous. More than anything, I was excited. I felt confident. After all, hadn’t I logged almost an entire 11 hours of instruction in the air? What could possibly go wrong? Back out I taxied. I ran up the RPM’s in the run-up area to make sure the engine and instruments were functioning normally, as I’d been trained to do. After that, I radioed my intentions on the Unicom frequency to remain in the landing pattern and rolled my rented, little two-seat Cessna 150 out onto the runway to take off…only to smash down on the toe brakes. About 150 feet down the runway, a coyote was sunning himself (or herself, but let’s forgo the issue pronouns for purposes of expediency). Casually, he looked over in my direction and yawned like he wasn’t planning to go anywhere anytime soon. I was flummoxed. My training hadn’t included how to deal with critters blocking the airstrip, but I knew enough not to force the issue. I could see the headlines the next day: “Student Pilot Wrecks Airplane, Coyote in Stable Condition.” So I waited, with the engine idling and the Hobbs meter turning. Every second was costing me money I didn’t have. A couple of minutes that felt like an eternity ticked by before the furry interloper finally got up, off his haunches and sauntered nonchalantly into an adjacent farm field. This was it. The moment of truth! The moment I would join the fraternity of aviators. Off we go into the Wild Blue Yonder and all that good stuff. I pushed the throttle to the firewall and the plane started rolling. I had just lifted off and was no more than a couple of hundred feet off the ground when I heard a loud, disconcerting, banging noise and the hellacious screaming of wind at high velocity. I glanced to my right and realized I’d forgotten to latch Bert’s door! With one hand on the control yoke and one eye on the attitude indicator, I leaned over and somehow managed to close it. The rest of my solo flight was a piece of cake. More than 1.200 flight hours later, I was recently reminded of that wonderful day as I filled out the last page of my most recent logbook and prepared to start a new one. Some people journal or keep diaries. Pilots make logbook entries, chronicling each of their adventures in the sky. Where they went. How many landings they made. What the weather conditions were like. I can’t recall what I ate for breakfast two days ago. But thumbing through my old logbooks, I can vividly remember the first time I took my wife-to-be flying, way back when Reagan was in the White House, and how she fell asleep soon after takeoff. I remember how the tower controller complimented my landing the first time I flew into Scottsdale, and that crosswind landing I muffed badly coming into Monterey. I remember the engine rapidly losing oil pressure one evening as I departed Santa Maria after enjoying a steak dinner with friends, and how it took me a couple of precious seconds before realizing I needed to execute a 180 and return immediately to the field—as close to declaring an emergency as I’ve ever come. I’m a big believer in writing about what you know. It’s a whole lot easier that having to make it all up. And the thing of it is, every one of those hundreds of flights I’ve logged since that day I soloed have factored directly or otherwise into the adventures of Cordell Logan. The two of us have flown many of the same missions or, at a minimum, been inspired by them, like the flying you’ll find depicted in Deep Fury, the latest Logan mystery, which debuts December 17. I looked up Bert the other day online. He went on to spend more that 25 years as a captain at Delta Air Lines. He no doubt taught hundreds of aspiring pilots like me to fly before that. I have no illusions that he would remember me in the slightest, let alone that special day in August. And that’s OK. It’s my memory after all, one that I will cherish forever.
My Ten Least Favorite Aviation-Themed Movies, Ranked from “You Must Be Kidding Me,” to “Well, Those are Two Hours of My Life I’ll Never Get Back”
Flight (2012) With a thunderstorm directly along his route of fight, alcoholic, coke-snorting airline Capt. William “Whip” Whitaker (Denzel Washington), doesn’t ask ATC for a different heading or new altitude, like any actual commercial pilot would. Instead, he accelerates straight into the storm “to get through it faster”. The jet subsequently suffers a major mechanical malfunction requiring Whitaker to fly upside down before making a crash landing and somehow, miraculously saving most everyone on board. He’s initially hailed as a hero, but an investigation soon proves otherwise. Denzel is a fine actor. As the old saying in Hollywood goes, I’d pay to watch him read the phone book (assuming we still had phone books), but Flight is so fraught with technical inaccuracies, improbabilities, and flat-out insults to the professionalism of air transport pilots, that it’s impossible to suspension disbelief. In real life, Whip Whitaker wouldn’t last five minutes at any major airline before being found out and fired because of his addictions. Top Gun Maverick (2022) The no-CGI flying scenes are absolutely fantastic. The rest of Top Gun Maverick, not so much. The magic of the original Top Gun, which I’ve watched repeatedly over the years, is in short supply in this sequel. After about 20 minutes, I found myself looking impatiently at my watch and shaking my head at its many contrivances, the preposterousness of the all-too-predictable story, and the flagrant theft of plot devices from other blockbuster movies, including the original Top Gun. I won’t catalogue my many grievances other than to point out what may be the most preposterous scene of all, in which the Navy’s top young F-18 aviators are drinking and playing pool at a popular pilot watering hole in San Diego. When Tom Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell violates some silly bit of drinking establishment protocol, the cocky young pilots toss him out on his butt. In the first Top Gun, Maverick shot down three enemy MiGs—the first US pilot to do so since Vietnam. In real life, in any real Navy pilot hangout, even years later, he would be instantly recognized and feted as a hero. In Top Gun Maverick, he’s wearing his leather Navy flight jacket with a name patch that identifies who he is, and he’s still treated like some over-the-hill loser. Sorry, Tom Cruise, you had me at the need for speed in the original Top Gun, but I’ve lost that lovin’ feeling for this one. Executive Decision (1996) The best part of this movie, in which terrorists hijack a Boeing 747 in route from Athens to Washington, D.C., is that the US Special Forces commander tasked with stopping them, played by Steven Seagal, gets killed early on, mercifully sparing us from having to watch Seagal “act” for a full two hours. Every work of fiction is a house of cards constructed on a foundation of believability. Too many cards stacked haphazardly, and the whole thing starts to fall apart. Such is the case with Executive Decision. Things begin veering wildly toward the preposterous when the commandos sneak onto the commercial jetliner in mid-flight using the “Ramora,” a fictional variant of the top-secret F-117 stealth fighter designed to latch onto other airplanes, including a 747. We’re talking, silly special effects, over-the-top bad guys, and coincidences galore. Executive Decision is, at its core, a bad imitation of Air Force One. About the only thing it’s got going for it is the hero, Dr. David Grant (Kurt Russell). Grant’s an Army intelligence analyst. When we first meet him, he’s learning to fly and clearly not very good at it. By the end of the movie, he lands that 747—a fantasy among many single-engine, general aviation pilots, including me. On a Wing and a Prayer (2023) Based on a true story, this movie may well be the worst film Dennis Quaid movie has ever been in—which is saying a lot considering Quaid also appeared in Jaws 3D. The set-up: On a flight from Florida to Connecticut in a chartered, twin-engine Beech King Air with his wife and daughters, businessman Doug White (Quaid) must learn to fly and land the plane (with help from an air traffic controller) after the lone pilot on board suffers a fatal heart attack. There’s a whole lotta praying throughout On a Wing and a Prayer (hence the title) before White ultimately saves himself and his family. Much of the acting, dialogue, and special effects are so lame that I found myself laughing out loud during scenes that were intended to be nail-biters. Quaid is an avid pilot in real life. One can only wonder how much he got paid to appear in this low-budget clunker. Soul Plane (2004) It’s Soul Train meets Airplane! Marketed as an outrageous, laugh-out-loud spoof, there isn’t a single funny line in this entire movie. The airplane in question is an airborne disco flying from LA to New York that caters to an all-Black clientele. Sexual tropes and racial stereotypes abound. You know you’re in for a rough flight when Calvin Broadus, the rap artist and marijuana enthusiast otherwise known as Snoop Dog, is your pilot in command. The running joke in Soul Plane is that smoking onboard is always allowed. Trust me, you may well require something medicinal to sit through this cinematic calamity. Snakes on a Plane (2006) The title tells you all you need to know. The great Samuel L. Jackson plays an FBI agent escorting a government witness on a flight from Hawaii to Los Angeles. Everything’s going great until somebody on the plane unleashes a crateful of venomous snakes in an attempt to permanently silence said witness before he can testify at trial. Snakes on a Plane is so completely schlocky, it’s been elevated in some circles to a cult classic. Horror movie contrivances abound. It’s violent, it’s grotesque, and the plot is inarguably ridiculous. But, hey, it is what it is–the embodiment of truth in advertising. The only thing that makes this film