Eye Am Writer - Umberto Tosi

I've been asked if Frank Ritz - the Hollywood private detective in my recently released novel, The Phantom Eye and its forthcoming sequel, Do or Die - is me. I do identify with him in several ways, and we do share some characteristics and attitudes, but my answer is a qualified no. I didn't intend Frank Ritz Mysteries as a memoir, even though lots of its major characters and events are drawn from real life. Among things we share: We're both devout, and soft-hearted cynics whose views blow leftward. We're both feckless, introspective and drawn to outcasts and eccentrics. Frank and I grew up in the Hollywood District of Los Angeles during the noir film era. Both our moms were stage and screen performers. Frank's mother, however, is also a little person, modelled on a departed actress friend. And we've both suffered from depression.

Circumstances divide us dramatically, however, starting with age: Frank is of my father's generation having served in World War 2. Thankfully, I was too young for Korean and too old for Vietnam. Frank is a former MP, trained in martial arts, who, unlike me, knows how to use his fists and a gun. Most critically, Frank is a wounded veteran who lost an eye overseas. He wears a patch, or rarely, a prosthetic eye. This loss shapes him profoundly. He suffers migraines and "phantom eye" hallucinations from time to time -- hence the title of the first novel. Frank has one daughter, the result of a quickie wartime GI marriage. I have four daughters -- all grown now -- from four marriages, none of them quick. No matter, they made us hostages to fortune. 

The lists of similarities and differences goes on, but I'll get to the existential question about protagonists Who are they? Who is the writer in relation to them?

The comparison has become moot. Frank Ritz now has a life of his own! He's out there in his reality living that life doing God-knows-what while I write this  blog post. He speaks to me rarely. I see what he is doing through a knothole in the literary fence that separates our worlds. I take notes feverishly and add pages to my novel. He acts unpredictably sometimes and compels me to bend my writing accordingly. Frank Ritz evolves constantly into a true detective whose persona I imagined only dimly at start of this process. Keeping up and making sense humbles me and tests my abilities. Sometimes I'm not up to the task. I suspect this is so with all writers.

 Mulling this reminded me of a striking passage in Paul Auster's surreal detective masterpiece, City of Glass. I found my old copy and looked it up:

"The detective is one who looks, who listens, who moves through the morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them," wrote Auster as the narrator in this novel. 

 "In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable,"the passage continues. "The reader sees the world through the detective's eyes, experiencing the proliferation of its details for the first time. He had become awake to the things around him, as if they might speak to him, as if, because of the attentiveness he now brings to them, they might begin to carry a meaning other than the simple fact of their existence," Would Frank Ritz achieves this with our readers. This aim is what makes a detective novel worth writing in my estimation, whether achieved or not.

"Private eye. The term held a triple meaning for Quinn," continues Auster, as Quinn the mystery novel writer, threading through his nested mystery writer's reality . "Not only was it the letter 'i' standing for the investigator, it was 'I' in the upper case, the tiny life-bud buried in the body of the breathing self. At the same time, it was also the physical eye of the writer, the eye of the man who looks out from himself into the world and demands that the world reveal itself to him. For five years now, Quinn had been living in the grip of this pun...." 

That pun grabbed me when I started writing The Phantom Eye -- my first detective novel -- two years ago. 

Auster's City of Glass- part of his New York Trilogy - in which the author-protagonist falls into the existential cracks between author and character, wasn't the first and won't be the last inter-textual romp in which a fictional character turns out to be a novel's author -- a device that goes back to Cervantes' Don Quixote. But it is one of the best examples of it. The Phantom Eye dances with that, with Frank Ritz being its narrator known to tell the story in ways I didn't plan.

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Umberto Tosi's books include, The Phantom Eye, Sometimes Ridiculous, Ophelia Rising, Milagro on 34th Street and Our Own Kind. His short stories have been published widely, most recently in Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review where he is a contributing editor. His nonfiction has been published widely in print and online. He began his career as a journalist for Los Angeles Times and an editor for its prize-winning, Sunday magazine, West, and as editor of San Francisco Magazine. He joined Authors Electric in May 2015 and has contributed to several of its anthologies, including Another Flash in the Pen and One More Flash in the Pen. He has four adult children. He resides in Chicago.

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Enjoy my new Hollywood noir detective thriller: The Phantom Eye (a Frank Ritz Mystery) newly released in paperback and ebook Light Fantastic Publishing.

 "Tosi writes with tremendous style and a pitch perfect ear for everything that makes the classic noir detective story irresistible. Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, make room for Frank Ritz!" - Elizabeth McKenzie, best-selling author of The Portable Veblen.

"... reminds me of Chandler's The Little Sister, and The Big Sleep of course." - Actor playwright Gary Houston.