Authors Electric

  Metropolis' Maria Futura comes to life, 1927 ... was the word. As I posted earlier, I'm amidst a third rewrite of my latest Frank Ritz noir Hollywood murder mystery. I had run into a wall about halfway through the novel, that draft the product of numerous revisions itself.  No matter. It dawned on me that my roadblock didn't originate ahead of me but back at the beginning of the process. I had gone with the big idea - the case of a famous, missing Hollywood prop that had led to murder - but had neglected Frank Ritz and his complicated personal life. I had made the assumption that readers knew him as well as did I. In the process, I neglected what is turning out to be the novel's most compelling stuff - not the case, nor a high-profile murder, nor the movie-biz clients, but a crisis in Frank's personal life involving his daughter Annie and his on-off lover and dogged reporter, Phyllis. So here goes. I offer this sample for your consideration:  -------------------...

I used a wire recorder on my first attempt to write a detective story. I felt tres avant garde. The wire recorder preceded tape. As the name implies, It recorded and played back your voice magnetically on a long spool of fine wire. I had purchased one when Sears put them on sale cheaply enough for me to afford from my after-school, part-time grocery-wrapping earnings. That was in 1953, the year Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodby e was published and twenty years after Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express .   Dino Moro Sanchez, a Hollywood High School friend and I planned to use the wire recorder to co-author a detective screenplay-- under the illusion that we could somehow talk our way through the process doing our hip imitations of Hollywood tough guys and private eyes. Like any teen, I had no idea who I was. So I made up a noir character out of the flotsam and jetsam of the real-- and make believe-- Hollywood in which I had grown up.   Dino and I were dete...