Month: February 2019

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Let’s Talk about My New Book, Part Two

Camarillo State Hospital

One of the women’s dorms in the Camarillo State Hospital. From the CSUCI archives.

The university where I work used to be a psychiatric hospital. In my new novel, Dead Extra, I delved into the history of the hospital a bit. I spent a lot of time digging through the hospital archives at CSUCI, listening to oral histories, studying pictures, and reading memoirs from patients and employees. My favorite of these is They Call Them Camisoles. The memoir was published in 1940 and details the involuntary hold that the author, Wilma Wilson, endured in 1939. Wilson was committed for alcoholism. These alcoholism commitments in the ’30s and ’40s were often questionable. Wilson did drink too much. She admitted as much herself. Sometimes, her antics embarrassed her mother. This is what really landed her at Camarillo State Hospital: embarrassing her mother.

I know there were times in my life when my mom wished she could send me away for getting drunk and embarrassing her. I’m glad she never did.

For Wilson, the hospitalization was not about therapy. It was really about free labor. She went to the hospital, worked as an unpaid maid for the duration of her stay, had her stay extended at one point for dubious reasons, and wrote a book about it when she got out.

Both before and after her release, Wilson worked in movies. Actually, she mostly worked as a waitress, but she occasionally found herself in the background of B movies.

In 1943, an army private visited Wilson’s home wanting something that Wilson wasn’t willing to give him. He turned violent. She fled her house and screamed for help. The neighbors heard her, but didn’t come to her aid. According to the neighbor who was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, this was because Wilson was drunk. The army private murdered her.

While doing some research on Chester Himes years ago, I came across his account of meeting with his editor, Marcel Duhamel. Duhamel asked Himes to write a crime novel. Himes said he didn’t know how. Duhamel told him, essentially, to start with a body and try to figure out what happened to it (I fictionalize this exchange in my short story “The Five-Cornered Square” in The Metaphysical Ukulele). When I read this, I knew I had to take Duhamel’s advice.

I started with the basics of Wilma Wilson’s murder. In honor of Wilson, I named the murder victim in my novel Wilma (her last name in the book is Greene). She’s also a Hollywood extra who mostly waits tables. She also does a stint at the Camarillo State Hospital and writes a book about it. The similarities pretty much end there.

I’m not giving away anything when I tell you that, in Dead Extra, the army private does not kill Wilma. There are no army private’s in the book. And I want to be clear that the character of Wilma Greene is not supposed to be Wilma Wilson. Wilma Greene is entirely fictional with the exception of the few things I point out in the previous paragraph. Still, she wouldn’t exist if Wilson hadn’t inspired her.

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Let’s Talk about My New Book, Part One

Dead ExtraWe’re still about three months away from the release date, but I’m already so excited about my new novel that I’m having trouble thinking about anything else. When someone asks me how I’m doing, my first thought is, Great! I have a new novel coming out! I think it’s the best thing I’ve written! I almost always contain myself and say, “Good. How are you?” Almost always.

I want to talk a little about the new one here, though. It’s a crime novel titled Dead Extra. It’s set in Los Angeles in the 1940s. One of the protagonists is Jack Chesley, a veteran who returns from a German POW camp to find his wife dead and his wife’s twin convinced the death was murder. It sounds like a common trope, I know. Hopefully, I changed things up enough to that Jack isn’t common. He’s not your typical Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe tough guy detective, for one thing. For the other thing, he’s inspired by a real man.

My father is the youngest of seven kids. The oldest, born 21 years before my dad, was my Uncle Jack. Jack’s middle name was Chesley. I was close with my Uncle Jack for the final fifteen or so years of his life. This started when I was about 13. He’d come down to Florida. I’d take him fishing. He’d take me on drives around town. We’d talk a lot.

As I got older, Uncle Jack opened up to me more and more. He told me stories about his father, my grandfather, who’d died when my dad was a little kid. The old man, as Jack called him, was brutal. A hired thug. A gunman. A killer. And, though Jack didn’t put it in these terms, the old man was horribly abusive to Jack. Jack got away from the old man first by joining the NYPD, then by going off to fight in World War II. His plane was shot down in western Germany. He parachuted out, survived behind enemy lines for a bit, and ended up in a German POW camp. While he was there, his father and his wife both died. When he returned, he got mixed up with his wife’s twin sister.

I took a bunch of these things from my uncle’s life and used them for my novel: his name, some of his war stories, the broad strokes of his relationships with his father, his wife, and his wife’s twin sister. Mostly what I tried to borrow from him was his complexity.

When I got to know him, Jack was in his sixties. He was a recovering alcoholic, a retired cop, a father and grandfather, and just about the sweetest guy I’ve ever known. What also came out in our conversations was that he’d killed people. A few during the war. Maybe a few while he was on the force. I could never reconcile this in my mind. How could you be all these things? How can you be a killer and a kind, generous, thoughtful uncle? How can a young man go through all that Jack went through and emerge whole on the other side?

I don’t know that anyone buy Uncle Jack can answer those questions. I developed the character of Jack Chesley to explore some of these questions and find ways to reconcile some of these things in my mind.