In these late pandemic days— I hope these are late days— I have been preparing for another run at a Chicago detective story. My Chicago was a city of riots: the Martin Luther King riots and 1968 Democratic Convention. A corrupt, racist, and vibrant city run by a political machine.
I’ve been writing and rewriting the same book about Chicago for a decade, learning, and trying the patience of the kind people who have read my earlier attempts.
I’m on about the tenth draft, I quit counting years ago, and this version feels better than any of the previous. I’ve lost control. The book has begun to speak in its own voice. I understand that is a good sign, but it is unnerving to sit down at a keyboard and have the text dictate my thoughts.
My Chicago
“My Chicago was a city of riots: the Martin Luther King riots and 1968 Democratic Convention. A corrupt, racist, and vibrant city run by a political machine.”
I took the train to Chicago to go to college on scholarship in the fall of 1967. It was a little cheaper than flying.
When I lived in Chicago, I was unconsciously ambivalent. One part of me was delighted. Every day, something was new. I was shocked by fellow students who were better grounded in or quicker to grasp the mathematics and theory of chemistry and physics and astounded by the insight offered by deeper and more rigorous analysis. And I startled myself with outbursts in history and humanities classes that got me praise and admiration.
But I was also deeply troubled. On the South Side, I talked on the street with black kids who had, only a few years before, lived in the rural south where their lives were like my grandfather’s Waschke Road, lacking electricity and plumbing, and more primitive than the modestly mechanized dairy farm I grew up on. We shared calluses and scars from shovels, hoes, and manure forks. I was shocked, and, I regret to say, ashamed, to realize, that in some ways my life on Waschke Road was closer to the South Side streets than the affluent middle and upper class lives of my classmates at the university. I hid this. From my classmates and myself.
But the world of my black neighbors was also far different from mine. I had come to the city as a privileged participant in the meritocracy that would give me what I thought was a bright future. The neighborhood blacks looked at the university as a source of janitorial and housekeeping jobs, not learning and advancement. They had no voice in why they were on the South Side. They arrived because their parents had heard about work in the steel mills. They had no choice but to quickly learn to navigate the dangerous streets of Woodlawn and Englewood.
“…unlike my black neighbors, I looked ahead to the luxuries of a privileged life.”
I learned to ride the Illinois Central commuter train to the Loop, shop at Marshall Fields and Carson Pirie Scott, venture into Alfred Dunhill’s on upper Michigan for pipe tobacco and a look at pipes I could not possibly afford, but, unlike my black neighbors, I looked ahead to the luxuries of a privileged life.
Why I have written a Chicago detective story
“I set out to grill a fillet seasoned with salt and pepper. I ended up with a complex and high-spirited shrimp and andouille jambalaya infused with mouldering corruption.”
When I started, I sat down to write a story that I would like to read. That goal still holds, but retirement, three books on computing, a national scene filled with tumultuous bombast and unrest, and the inward wrench of pandemic lockdowns have all had their impact. I set out to grill a fillet seasoned with salt and pepper. I ended up with a complex and high-spirited shrimp and andouille jambalaya infused with mouldering corruption.
After 71 years of eating and breathing regularly, I ought to have myself down as tight as ring shank nails, but I have learned that good writing is about who you might become and only partial revelation of who you are and what you see in the people around you. Both revelation and aspiration are helpful. In each draft, the story became both closer to and more distant from life. Both directions, in some perverse way, are improvements. Eventually, the book became itself rather than me.
I always wanted to write stories, although I didn’t think about a Chicago detective story until I was older. The baby boom stretched our rural school that had neither space nor funds for pre-school or kindergarten. Before first grade, I followed along with my mother as she read stories to me and my little sister. A little picture dictionary was all I needed to teach myself reading before I ever saw a school room. When I entered first grade, no one told the teacher that I already read books at home and when I tried to tell her, I was shushed. She had other concerns.
“I got the idea that becoming a writer was a dream, but not a possibility because writers started as ordinary kids with friends, not outsiders wandering the side lines.”
I had far better books to read at home than the bizarre Dick and Jane readers at school. Suburban Dick, Jane, Mother, Father, Spot, Puff, and Baby Sally could have been watercolors beamed from outer space, except Martians or Venusians would have been more interesting.
Consequently, I don’t remember engaging much during my first few years at school. I didn’t need attention and lived in a distant realm; I don’t know what my teachers thought of me. Other kids avoided me, and I didn’t try to join them. I was not unhappy, and I got used to being a lone outsider. I got the idea that becoming a writer was a dream, but not a possibility because writers started as ordinary kids with friends, not outsiders wandering the side lines.
By the time I got to high school, I was thoroughly immersed in the sciences, like most boys in the 1960s.
In Chicago, I switched majors from mathematics to Chinese classical history, for reasons still unclear to me. Before the big switch, I took a class in what was then called Information Science and learned the rudiments of computer programming. Changing majors elevated me from an average student to graduating with honors and a fat fellowship to continue Chinese studies in Chicago.
While in graduate school, I began to read Rex Stout, because my PhD advisor told me I should read and emulate Stout to clarify of my writing style.
Writing this Chicago detective story
Fast forward, fifty years. I have read nearly everything Rex Stout ever wrote, some pieces many times. I deserted from a career as a professor of the Chinese classics and completed an apprenticeship in carpentry. Later, I enrolled in classes that lead to a degree in computer science and a 30 year career in software development, just when the digital revolution stood up and began to kick its legs.
An opportunity for early retirement popped up and I still wanted to write stories, more specifically, I wanted to write mysteries like Rex Stout’s. And I wanted to write a Chicago detective story. I was still an outsider, I had learned to cook so I could stay in the kitchen instead of mingling, learned to seize positions that gave me set roles that did not require much social interaction.
So I asked myself: why not try? I still doubted that an outsider with esoteric tastes and training could write a Chicago detective story that would appeal to much of anyone, but I was game, and when I start something, I fight to the bitter end, and that accounts for the last decade of struggle. Not that I’ve won, but I have accomplished something I am proud of.
Publishing
The Chicago detective story will have a new title, which I have not yet chosen, and will be offered for sale here on Vine Maple Farm. I’ve tried to find a traditional publisher, and I that might be possible, but becoming a publisher will be an interesting and instructive project for me and my twin grandsons, who voted for the first time last November. Christopher, the technical brother, is building the sales page. His more literary twin, Matt, is working on marketing. I plan to publish a free chapter or two here, and I intend to write more about why I think it is worth reading.