The Farm Report

(This appeared in Tampa’s Creative Loafing.)

Tom Corcoran’s novels are so good and his characters so real that the next time you’re in Key West — and really, you need to go — you’ll find yourself cruising the streets, looking for Dredger’s Lane.

You won’t find it. It exists only in Corcoran’s mind and in the memories of his league of devoted readers.

Alex Rutledge lives on Dredger’s Lane. He has an outdoor shower in the back yard, a motorcycle in a shed and a lovingly protected Shelby Mustang in the garage. Rutledge is a photographer who becomes an accidental detective every now and then in one of Corcoran’s novels. But when you look up from your pitcher of beer at the Half Shell Raw Bar, you might expect to see Rutledge next to you, chasing an oyster with a Corona. He’s a guy you wish you knew.

Few writers can lay claim to having created such a vivid, admirable character — maybe Randy Wayne White with Doc Ford, or Carl Hiassen with his eco renegade, Skink. And certainly, they all owe some DNA to John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee.

But of these great Florida fictional creations, Rutledge may be the most likeable, because he’s so free of pretension. He’s an organic James Bond — a guy who finds solutions to his problems in things within his reach. He gets into trouble but manages, through his wits, to get out of it as fast as he got in.

Corcoran didn’t create the character and start publishing his novels until he was into his fifties. To make it to his platform as a writer, he racked up a lot of life experience first.

He was a Navy officer, an English lit grad from Miami of Ohio, a taco seller, a songwriter (co-authoring a few songs with Jimmy Buffett) and a magazine editor. He wrote two unproduced screenplays with Hunter S. Thompson and then, in the late 1990s, turned to writing fiction.

As an automotive journalist and editor, he’d done a couple of books about cars, but always knew he would return to fiction. He’d studied literature in college alongside writer P.J. O’Rourke and futureEsquire editor David Granger. He was just waiting for the right moment and the right story.

Corcoran’s first novel, The Mango Opera, introduced Rutledge, an inadvertent gumshoe, a man unable to resist the temptation to find justice in a sinful world. He shares the worldview — if not the spiffy wardrobe — of Michael Connelly’s L.A. detective, Harry Bosch. Of course, there are also glimmers of McGee, the unforgettable creation of the late, great MacDonald. But Rutledge also shares a lot of the talents and interests of his creator — and more than just Corcoran’s intense knowledge of Shelby Mustangs. But despite comparisons to other fictional detectives, Alex Rutledge is his own man.

Rutledge first came to life in The Mango Opera in 1998 and has since appeared in Gumbo Limbo, Bone Island Mambo, Octopus Alibi and Air Dance Iguana, which Connelly called “the reading highlight of my year,” high and valued praise coming from America’s most successful mystery novelist.

Then Alex went into hiding. Corcoran also runs a small publishing company and spent the last couple of years marketing books of his photographs, Jimmy Buffett: The Key West Years and Key West in Black and White, a collection of stunning photos we can now imagine as the work of Alex Rutledge.

For his new Rutledge novel, Hawk Channel Chase, Corcoran bypassed his usual publisher and produced it with his Ketch and Yawl Press, based in the Keys. Corcoran can now reach his readers directly — he knows where they live — and though a small press means some distribution issues, he’s game to deal with the problem.

And he’s very happy with Hawk Channel Chase. It’s a beautiful, lovingly produced book, and Corcoran’s perfectionism is reflected on every page. And, after a longish (four years) layoff, it’s nice to have Rutledge back.

“At first, Alex was a whole lot of things I wish I had been,” Corcoran says. “I had to draw off of something and what I had experienced. But now, Alex has managed to grow his own life and be his own character and not me.”

From the first sentence, when a stranger appears at Alex’s screen door, Hawk Channel Chase is off and running. Alex is hired to find a missing girl and at the same time must deal with the insecurities of his friend Marnie, whose longtime boyfriend (and Alex’s pal) has also been missing.

To me, experiencing the book is like finding a great steak on your plate. It’s so good, you cut small pieces to make the meal last longer. Corcoran’s novels are something to savor. You are caught up in the story and want to know how it all works out, but you also don’t want it to end.

Corcoran writes his detailed Key West tales — so specific with geography, you could follow his characters with a street map — from what he calls his “fortified compound southeast of Lakeland.” He’s owned a home in Central Florida for years but also kept a place in the Keys. He finally sold his Cudjoe Key home in 2005 and came back to Lakeland. It’s a good place to work, he says.

Corcoran’s house is piled high with boxes of Jimmy Buffett calendars (oh yes, he produces those too), books and photographs. It’s where he wrote his first three novels. The last two were products of Cudjoe Key.

It’s been a long road — through all of these other jobs — to get where Corcoran always wanted to be. “I always liked to mess around with words and knew that someday I wanted to write a book,” he says. “I thought about it first in high school. I remember one night thinking it all through — what it would be like to be a writer. I must’ve been 15 or 16.”

It just took a while to realize the dream.

In his early years in Key West, it was sometimes tough to eke out a living in that expensive paradise, but he managed. “Either you worked for Southern Bell or you sold tires at Sears,” he says. Corcoran wound up doing neither, instead becoming part of the brain trust building the legend of the Chart Room Bar. Corcoran mixed drinks for the local crowd and mixed songs on the sound system to embellish the Chart Room’s special, funky atmosphere. “Within two years time, we made the Chart Room the institution in Key West. We had a ball,” he says.

It was at that bar where Corcoran served new arrival Jimmy Buffett his first beer in town, beginning a long friendship and collaboration. “The beer was free. That’s what Jimmy really liked.”

Buffett had been chased out of Nashville by the music-business types who didn’t understand him. He found his performing identity in Key West, and Corcoran was there at the start, offering more than just a free beer. “I fed him,” Corcoran says. “He had no money. He came home with me for spaghetti one night and he picked up my guitar and started strumming a song he was working on. A couple nights later, I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and started strumming the guitar, playing that song. I couldn’t remember Jimmy’s words, so I made up my own.” When he shared his lyrics with Buffett, the singer said, “Damn, Corcoran, you’ve got a song.” The result, “Cuban Crime of Passion,” was featured on Buffett’s White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean, an album that provided the blueprint for the Parrothead lifestyle.

He also collaborated on one of Buffett’s best-known songs, “Fins.” He’d scratched an opening scene on some notepaper, then stuck it in a duffel bag when he went sailing with Buffett. Buffett found the scrap of paper and asked if he could work with it. The result, recorded in 1979, still brings Corcoran a nice royalty check every year.

Not that he needs it. Six books into the saga of Alex Rutledge, Corcoran has joined the top ranks of Florida writers.

(From Bill’s Book Blog in Tampa’s Creative Loafing.)

Spring is here and mysteries are in bloom.

There’s something about this time of year that seems to bring out the pollen and also the best in our great mystery writers.

Michael Connelly, who just delivered The Brass Verdict last fall (and sent it rocketing up the best-seller list) is giving us The Scarecrow (Little Brown, $27.99) in a couple of weeks. Jack McEvoy, the hero of The Poet, one of Connelly’s classics, is back and this time he’s laid off. In a truly ripped-from-the-headlines move, the great reporter is a victim of Los Angeles Times downsizing. We’ll talk more about The Scarecrow as we get closer to publication date, but early returns are in and Connelly has scored another winner. (In a move designed mostly to make the rest of humanity feel like a bunch of slackers, Connelly will have his next Harry Bosch mystery out this fall. Pardon me, Dude, but three books in a year . . . . Are you trying to make the rest of us feel like slugs?)

 

Author TIM GREEN

A couple of other Florida mystery writers are bringing out novels as well: Tom Corcoran’s photographer-sleuth Alex Rutledge returns in Hawk Channel Chase (Ketch and Yawl, $24.95). See myCreative Loafing profile of Corcoran for more details. And Randy Wayne White is in top form — and that’s saying a lot — in Dead Silence (Putnam, $25.95), his latest Doc Ford mystery. WatchCreative Loafing for a career retrospective of White in a couple of weeks.

But let’s stop and praise a couple of other great mystery writers now.

Being a mystery novelist is Tim Green’s third life — at least. After an NFL career (defensive end for the Atlanta Falcons) and service as an attorney, Green became a writer. As an author, he’s written a non-fiction book about adoption and professional football and also published a series of children’s books.

And he’s a heck of a mystery writer. His new book,Above the Law (Grand Central, $24.99), is one of those fast-paced novels written with the urgency of a Twitter post. Like James M. Cain or Robert B. Parker, Green writes as if he’s being charged by the word. He sets a fast pace, then picks up the tempo a bit.

In short, you’ll rip through this book.

Casey Jordan is an idealistic young lawyer, despite her circumstances. Set up in a reconfigured gas station and beset with a toilet that backs up, she and her small team of fellow idealists work in a former garage, trying to help the poor of Dallas. When she learns of an immigrant who might have been murdered by a powerful U.S. Senator, she goes into overdrive.

With the help of Jose, her pro bono investigator (and sometime love interest), she uncovers a scandal that threatens to cost her her life. And, of course, things are not always as they seem. The corrupt senator’s bimboesque wife is also on a social-justice crusade and, once Jose and Casey get to her, she joins them in their battle.

The major obstacle in their way isn’t the senator. It’s the bad-ass sheriff who does the senator’s dirty work and he is a vile, looming hulk — and a terrific villain.

Maybe Green slips into cliché mode a few times. But the story is so fast-paced (most chapters are three pages) that nothing can stop the book’s velocity.

Casey is a recurring character in Green’s fiction (she last appeared in his book The Letter of the Law), and let’s hope he gets back to us with another one of her stories very soon.

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING . . . DO NOT READ AT NIGHT: I’m a pretty fearless guy. My immediate reaction on hearing something go bump in the night is to move toward that sound, unarmed, but ready to kick some ass.

I may have to change my method after reading Afraid(Grand Central, $6.99) by Jack Kilborn. This may be the scariest book I have ever read. It makes the most twistedStephen King novel read like He’s Just Not That Into You.

No fooling. The opening of Afraid sets a tremendously high standard of terror — and Kilborn (pseudonym of J.A. Konrath) generally maintains that fright level.

Set in an isolated Wisconsin lake village, the novel begins with the vicious torture of a woman alone in bed while her husband is night fishing in his boat a few hundred yards a way. The killer’s calm, and his methodical approach to inflicting pain, is what’s most frightening.

I don’t want to give anything away, but let me say this: You will never have microwave popcorn again in your life without thinking of this book and this killer.

And, as sadistic a bastard as this killer is, he’s not alone. There are other killers and their terrifying calm is what makes this book so damn scary. Once the mystery of who these sick cretins are begins to unravel, the tension lets up a little, but the relentless storytelling continues. When the narrative switches from the psycho killers to the aging policeman trying to stop the insanity, you breathe a tremendous sigh of relief.

But you can never let down your guard.

This is a great book for beach reading — because it should be read in bright sunlight, with lots of people around. But don’t be surprised if the story steps into your dreams and ends up standing over your bed, slowly chewing popcorn and deciding how to fillet your soul.

Konrath is known for a series of thrillers about Chicago detective Jacqueline (“Jack”) Daniels, all with booze-themed titles (Fuzzy Navel, Whiskey Sour, etc.). As successful as those books have been, we think this new Jack Kilborn horror series will take off. The next one, Trapped, has already been scheduled for publication next winter.

Be Afraid. Be very afraid.

It might be fun to watch some of these big-time rock critics take each other on in a creamed-corn wrestling match. Some of them have such bile and bitterness that it might be nice to see them exorcise their anger in a tub of gooey vegetable product.

And what makes them so angry? Why, each other, of course.

British rock critic / historian Clinton Heylin has always been amusing because of the jabs he takes at other rock writers in his books. Mention Heylin’s name in the presence of Springsteen’s Boswell, Dave Marsh, for example, and Marsh is likely to go apoplectic. (All unfair, I might add. Marsh remains one of the best and most literate of all rock writers. But Heylin left him out of his huge anthology of rock writing, The Penguin Book of Rock and Roll Writing. That’s like leaving one of the apostles out of the Bible.)

So Heylin takes some of his usual shots at that huge subset of rock writers called Bob DylanExperts in his new book, Revolution in the Air(Chicago Review Press, $29.95). Slamming other rock writers is just part of the territory for Heylin.

Heylin is no stranger to Dylanology. He wrote Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades in 1991, an oral history biography that has been once revised. He also meticulously went through Columbia Records’ archives to produce Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions, an indispensible book covering Dylan’s studio work from 1960 to 1994.

And now, in Revolution in the Air, Heylin sets out to write an essay on every song Bob Dylan has written. This is the first of two proposed volumes and it focuses on Dylan’s writing from his high school days to his re-emergence from a fallow period in 1973.

If you’re a fan, books like these are swallowed whole. And that’s easy to do – a real compliment to Heylin’s writing, which might explain his arrogant-with-portfolio attitude. (And the occasional shots at his fellow rock writers.)

Heylin’s essays on Dylan’s best-known work are some of the best things written about the artist. The pieces on the never-released . . .  hell never-even-recorded . . . songs are tantalizing.

Dylan remains one of the most interesting figures in popular culture and – along with Elvis Presley and Jimi Hendrix – the most important artist of the last 50 years of American music.  He may need to do something about that stinky outhouse on his property, but he doesn’t need to do anything to prop up his reputation or to pave the way for the pages that will be written about him in history books.

But it’s nice, while he is still an active artist (his 52^ndofficial release, Together Through Life, hits stores on April 28), to have Heylin around to help us appreciate the accomplishments of His Grand Exalted Mystic Bobness.

ON THE ROAD . . . AGAIN: Dylan listed Jack Kerouac as a major influence on his life and art. Who of Dylan’s generation was not affected by Kerouac’s monumental-and-immediate On the Road? But the young readers whose impressionable adolescence paralleled  the Beat Generation are well into their AARP years now.

For young wannabe hipsters, there needs to be a cram course in Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso,William S. Burroughs and all of those other writers who  shook up the world a half century ago.

Now there is. The Beats (Hill and Wang, $22) is a great primer on the major writers, works and events of that generation. It’s written and illustrated by a committee of 17 authors and artists. It’s a graphic history – done in comic form – and it is both hugely informative and massively entertaining.

The bulk of the book is by Harvey Pekar, the former staple of David Letterman’s show and the man behind American Splendor. Pekar writes the narrative of the Kerouac / Ginsberg / Burroughs storyline and that narrative is illustrated by Ed Piskor. The text is lively and often quite funny. The art matches Pekar’s style and if Piskor’s Kerouac doesn’t much look like the man we see sad-eyed in those well-known photographs, after a while, you just don’t care because the book is so good.

Half the book is devoted to Pekar / Piskor’s work. The remainder pulls together a variety of styles and approaches and tries to touch on every Beat writer of significance.

Let’s not forget Kerouac’s strong ties to the Bay Area (he died in St. Petersburg at age 47) or the Kerouac House over in Orlando. This part of the state played a significant part in the writer’s life.

This subject could have easily spawned some boring academic treatise that wrung the life out of the energy in the writers’ work. Instead, The Beats matches the work of its namesake generation with wonderful writing and an innovative graphic look.

Like the Dylan book, The Beats can be swallowed whole.

TALKIN’ BOUT MY HELLA NATION: You might find yourself lingering more over  Evan Wright’sHella Nation (Putnam, $25.95). It’s a collection of magazine pieces by the author of Generation Kill.

Wright’s approach makes me wonder what Kerouac might have been like as a journalist. (And maybe he was. But that’s a discussion for another day, preferably with an icy Shock Top involved.)

Wright did time gaining life experience before turning to journalism, when he started as articles editor at Hustler. Kids, this might not be the best career path for someone interested in a Serious Literary Career, but it worked for Wright.

These pieces appeared originally in Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, Vanity Fair and, of course, Hustler. They include his twisted look at white supremacist groups, skateboarding and the world of porn. Hence the title.

It’s not the prettiest picture of the land of the free and the home of the brave, but it’s certainly honest. Comparisons to Kerouac or Hunter S. Thompson (the name most often evoked in describing Wright’s work) don’t do the guy justice. He’s original and this Hella Nation he’s dealing with would make Kerouac run for cover and perhaps even scare the bejeebus out of Dr. Thompson.

Curl up in bed with Wright’s brilliant book and thank your Spiritual Being du Jour that you are not . . .out there.

(This post is borrowed from Bill McKeen’s Book Blog at Creative Loafing in Tampa.)

When I was growing up, the motto on the editorial page of my hometown paper was that famous quote of Voltaire’s: “I disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Anyone out there today willing to go balls-to-the-wall for a dissenting point of view? Didn’t think so.

We’ve turned into a nation of shouters, whiners and complainers. When someone starts spouting a point of view that we don’t like, we start the no-nodding and the condescending smirking, and we don’t even let the spouter finish a sentence before we inform him he is a repulsive dumb ass.

So much for civil discourse or “free, robust and wide-open” debate. John Milton and John Locke would shit their philosophical pants if they cruised deep cable and saw Keith Olbermann off on one of his operatic rants, or if they happened on Bill Maher jumping down the throat of someone who dared to disagree with him. If they saw the jabbering heads exploding with rage and cross talk that turned hours of digitized signals into gibberish, they would run for the next available time machine.

So here comes Bernard Goldberg with A Slobbering Love Affair (Regnery, $25.95), which will never reach the audience that could most benefit from it. As with Bias, his earlier best-seller, Goldberg makes some strong points – and does so very entertainingly. But many will condemn the book without cracking the cover or even glancing at Goldberg’s arguments.

Too bad. Many in the media machine did court the sort of relationship with Barack Obama that Goldberg’s title implies. A lot of reporters popped figurative chubbies for the candidate back in 2004 and they’ve maintained that status all along. Aren’t you supposed to call a doctor after four hours?

Goldberg’s metaphor isn’t bad, especially when you consider some of the ammunition he got from the talking heads. Chris Matthews of  “Hardball” even said that just seeing Obama game him chills up and down his leg. Come on, Chris. For God’s sake.

A Slobbering Love Affair is Goldberg’s scorecard on the last campaign, and it ain’t pretty. He doesn’t make it an us-versus-them game. In fact, he admits John McCain’s faults as a candidate and this book is anything but an apologia. But he does cite the sort of relentless fawning over candidate Obama that gives any veteran of without-fear-or-favor journalism the willies. This isn’t the way journalism used to be practiced. When did it all change?

Goldberg doesn’t dwell on that subject. His mission was to hold up his bias meter to the campaign and hold the press accountable. The book was written (mostly, it seems) after the election and the fact that it’s in our paws in hardcover already is amazing. What’s more amazing is that it shows no sign of being rushed. Though slight (173 pages, minus acknowledgements and index), it’s funny, sharp and enjoyable.

Enjoyable, but depressing at the same time. As we see the changing and shrinking landscape of journalism, here’s further evidence of the decline of that craft. Used to be that reporters saw themselves as members of the Fourth Estate, something separate from government. Now we have talkers like Matthews, telling us that his job is to make sure Obama’s administration works.

Too bad Chris Matthews or Keith Olbermann or millions of other Americans will never read this book. Goldberg has a lot to tell them.

(This was written for The Thresher, a site for planting, watering and manuring ideas.)

It’s like an illustrated rolodex. I have nearly a thousand friends a couple keystrokes away through Facebook, including my high-school prom date, a few women I used to live with, four of my seven children, and hundreds of former students spread across the country.

When my student assistant told me about Facebook a few years ago, it seemed like a great idea. Most of my classes have 250 students or more. It would be a great way to put faces with names.

But after I started looking through Facebook, with its constant status updates (“Shannon is brushing her teeth . . . “ “Arnold had a hard day’s night ….”) I saw that there was great potential for abuse.

In fact, for my first couple of years on Facebook, I held my breath, waiting for the first Facebook stalking or even the first Facebook murder. Since it started on college campuses, Facebook has a large and young clientele. These are the same invincible young folk who cross streets without looking and figure that nothing could possibly hurt them.

So they post their whereabouts on Facebook and make themselves targets. Luckily, nothing so grim has happened. But as the father of four Facebook members, it’s a little scary.

Though Facebook threatens to become a job, it’s still fun. I get a couple dozen invitations to join causes or receive non-existent gifts or have cyber sheep thrown at me and I learned just to ignore them. Responding to all of that stuff makes Facebook much less fun. I also routinely delete any work-related e-mail on Facebook. This is a cyber playpen, after all, and – like millions – I have wasted a lot of time just leafing through the rolodex.

For me, it’s a great way to share family photos, deliver happy-birthday wishes and keep up with my college-age kids. Sometimes, while leafing through my older kids’ online photo albums, I learn more than I want to know.

And for my students, it’s become kind of a great reference point and teaching tool. Students whose classroom writing is stiff and wooden write great status updates.

Here’s just a few from today:

• Matthew is only a rebel below the waist.
• Jim never finishes what he star
• Andrea likes the Celebrity Apprentice but wowza, the cost of their collective plastic work must be phenomenal

So all I have to do is tell my uptight young writers to loosen up and pretend they’re writing status updates. It seems to help.

My wife and I are so busy between our jobs, children and farm that we do a lot of our communicating through Facebook and status updates.

But the more tech savvy have moved on to Twitter and other services to keep us posted on their up-to-the-second activities.

I have a Twitter account and get several messages a day that someone is following my “updates” on Twitter. It’s a glimpse into an Orwellian nightmare to get a message that “Stanley is following you on Twitter.” Stanley and others must be sorely disappointed, because I rarely do anything on Twitter. When I found out that when I post on Twitter I am said to have “tweeted,” I decided that for a man my age to “tweet” was absurd.

So last week when one of my former students posted on Facebook that she was basically shutting down her Facebook shop and would henceforth be more reachable on Twitter, I wrote her, “We miss you here on Facebook. Must I tweet if I want to twalk two ywou?”

I must’ve shamed her, because she responded, “Why do people insist on actually using Twitter vocab? It’s so ridiculous. I do spend a lot more time on Twitter than Facebook, but I used to feed my Twitter status to Facebook. I’ve been thinking about turning that back on. Sometimes I get better responses here than on Twitter.”

So Facebook is sort of the McDonald’s of social media: you love it when you start out but as you get older, you get over it. But it doesn’t go away and has the virtue of reliability working in its favor. And, like a Big Mac, it’s probably not very good for you, but it does have its pleasures.