 Having survived the University's curriculum in trigonometry, calculus, kinematics, thermodynamics and beer drinking, I stumbled with my diploma onto the staff of a U.S. National Laboratory. As counterpoise to working with nuclear reactors and electromagnetic pulsers, I painted, spare-time, in watercolor and oil. But after laboring for more than two decades near the blue brightness of Cherenkov radiation, I still failed to glow in the dark. It seemed time to seek a more -- shall I say illuminative? -- mission. My paintings and prints had earned numerous awards and prizes. But immersion in the cognition-shifting microcosms of word-artists from Eliot and Hemingway to Doyle and Chandler convinced me I should write. Stints as a newspaper reporter and a magazine feature writer followed, but fiction -- especially mystery fiction -- beckoned. Embedded as I now am in it, the world of mystery writing seems to me to exist somewhere between a kaleidoscopic opus of creative lushness and a dyspeptic comedy bordering on the absurd. How else could it be, with players ranging from helping friends to pandering advisors, from humility-free bestseller-pushers to cash-challenged one-room publishers, from hello-goodbye agents to ubiquitous Internet masterminds, from writing giants with shelves full of Edgars to -- need I even mention? -- the inevitable tyros who couldn't find a declarative sentence in all the stacks of the New York Public Library? My exact part in this mad drama is uncertain. Given time and faith, it will evolve. |
