Pioneers, books, computing, and our future
Today, I’m enrolling Blind Man in Kindle Unlimited. If you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, you will be able to read Blind Man on your Kindle without additional charge.
I invite you all to join Fenton Herzman, Reggie Haskell, and Fellman Biggers in their fight for the residents of a mythical South Side of Chicago in their struggle to thrive in a society that respects wealth and corrupt power and disdains kindness and justice.
This week Vine Maple Farm Press published my latest mystery, Blind Man, on Amazon in both Kindle edition and paperback. You can obtain it here. I’m an over-productive and under-disciplined writer, starting projects without finishing them, finishing projects and forgetting about them. But over the past few months, I’ve set my jaw and whipped a segment of a sprawling manuscript into shape as the first book in the Blind Detective series.
It’s a comic crime story set in the 1930s through the 1970s. The main character is a blind detective. As the first book in the series, it includes the main character’s early life. The main story portrays the rescue of an illegal and corrupt—but socially beneficial—gambling scheme run by a notorious crook.
The story is indebted to the classic crime fiction, to Raymond Chandler’s cynical Marlowe and Rex Stout’s wise-cracking Archie. The victim in Blind Man is not a person; instead society is ruthlessly assaulted by forces drifting out of control. Nothing is clear in the dark world of the blind detective. No one, not even the blind man himself, can be trusted.
The story takes place in mythical Chicago, beginning before WWII. Julius “Julie” Parnak is the nephew of the head of the Chicago franchise of Murder Inc., which Julie’s uncle took over from the New York outfit. Julie inherits his uncle’s operation, but he lacks his uncle’s administrative cunning and wit. The blind man, Fenton Herzman, a cellist who lost his sight in Julie’s presence, is an adjunct professor at South Side University. He has established a private detective agency to fund his expensive tastes in antique cellos and baroque music manuscripts.
The skeptical narrator, Reggie Haskell, is from rural Minnesota. He becomes the blind man’s eyes and hands on the streets. Haskell has a rabbit pistol, a flair for baroque musical ornamentation, and a jaundiced eye. Reggie’s dark and looming sidekick, Fellman Biggers, is a former NFL tackle with a PhD. in astrophysics. Reggie and Fellman are heroes; Herzman’s willing pawns in a storm-tossed sea of deception, greed, and spite.
I published this piece on my Substack, Second Thoughts, but I like it so much I decided to post it on Vine Maple Farm also. I am enthralled that U.S. attitude toward the cold war of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s was very likely a reflection of the state of the candy industry in the 20th century. I discovered this when I researched a presentation I remembered from the fifth grade. We live in a fascinating world.
Socialism, democratic socialism, and social democracy have been tossed around the last few days on the platforms I read regularly. On the 250th anniversary of the U.S.’s democratic government, we are re-examining our freedom of democratic choice over the relationship between government and the distribution and acquisition of wealth and power. Socialism has been a loaded term for a long time. It may seem fantastic, but this discussion has been heavily influenced by candy wars in the early 20th century.
In North Bellingham Elementary School in 1960, Mr. MacDonald, my fifth grade teacher, stood in front of our class next to an easel loaded with slick graphics that looked like PowerPoint slides 25 years before PowerPoint was invented. The packaged presentation, which circulated among classrooms in the Ferndale School District, gave us fifth-graders the low-down on the evils of Communism and the virtues of Capitalism with a side order promoting the domino theory that threw the U.S. into sad exploits in Southeast Asia when we fifth-graders registered for the draft. Separating socialist economics and authoritarian Soviet-style communism was far beyond Mr. MacDonald’s presentation.
Mr. MacDonald and the Ferndale School District board, which must have sanctioned the presentation, were well-intentioned, probably not well-informed, and likely the victims of a movement upholding the grotesque anti-communist McCarthy hearings a few years earlier. I won’t say explicitly that the John Birch Society’s hand was in the presentation, but I believe it.
The John Birch Society’s founder was a candy magnate, Robert Welch, the mastermind behind Junior Mints and Sugar Daddies, and veteran of cut-throat and conspiratorial candy wars.
Candy brands and packaging art can be legally protected, but ingredients, recipes, and processes, which are the real treasures of the industry, are free to steal without legal penalties. Candy factories, like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, are secretive fortresses against industrial espionage. The struggles of these intrigue-wrapped bastions mirrored Welch’s vision of the cold war against world communism and inspired the thought behind Mr. MacDonald’s presentation.
North Bellingham Elementary School is in a remote corner of the nation and national communications did not penetrate as deeply sixty years ago as they do today. In my fifth-grade days, only the loudest ALL CAPs, candy war-inspired voices made it all the way to the Nooksack River plain.
Amazing that we’ve made it this far.