Too Much History?

I began this blog in conjunction with the publication of my “historical” thriller, Safe On Third, as a Smashwords ebook, and at the time I submitted the manuscript to Kirkus Discoveries, which reviews works by self-published and independent authors.  It’s been several weeks since I received my Kirkus review.  It contains a number of positive comments, but I have been stewing over it, and because I want to discuss it, I am now presenting it here, in its entirety:

            Zorensky’s debut is a meticulous historical novel set during the 1940 U.S. presidential campaign.

           As Franklin Roosevelt begins his run for an unprecedented third term and Nazi agents prepare schemes to sway the electorate, British-American sportswriter Percy Brown finds himself caught up in a dangerous spy game. A recent recruit of British intelligence, Percy serves as liaison between the beautiful Elsa—a German-American double agent keeping tabs on dour Nazi spy Karl Mueller—and impatiently irascible SIS operative Nigel Dunderdale. But as Elsa gets closer to discovering the extent of Karl’s ties to a ring of German saboteurs, Percy gets increasingly in over his head. The care with which Zorensky painstakingly recreates the physical, cultural and political world of 1940 is plainly evident; his characters drive on the same roads, walk the same streets and visit the same sites (including a downtown Manhattan gun shop) that flesh-and-blood people of the period would have. Zorensky makes good use of historical cameos, too, peppering the text with visits from the likes of Charles Lindbergh, labor leader John L. Lewis and a few dozen professional baseball figures. Indeed, if Zorensky errs in any direction with regard to historical accuracy, it would be in making the work almost slavishly adherent to it; his plot and characters often feel yoked to the chain of factual events—including the New York World’s fair bombing and an explosion at a New Jersey powder factory—and are given too few chances to breathe on their own. Zorensky’s passion for sharing interesting details—both historical and drawn from his character’s rich back stories—is sometimes too apparent, and often results in unfortunate digressions of exposition that stop the plot cold, as characters spend whole chapters telling each other things they already know rather than cutting to the chase. A fun, melodramatic and authentic spy thriller is contained in the text, but is yet to be carved out by a final, brutal edit.

           A mighty swing, but out at home.

“A mighty swing, but out at home.”  Ouch!  I thought the Kirkus reviewer must have enjoyed that last line, that it was a predictable play on the title, too easy, too clever by half, and certainly unnecessary.  But more troubling to me was the reviewer’s specific, underlying objection to “making the work almost slavishly adherent” to history.  After all, the book is an “historical” novel.  It is not an alternative history; the fictional characters are acting within the framework of actual events in 1940.  I regard this as a positive element of the book, and I make no apology for being passionate about the historical details, which make Safe On Third more than a simple thriller.

     
Still, the review suggests that all this history stops the plot cold, and that while “(a) fun, melodramatic and authentic spy thriller is contained in the text, Safe On Third needs a “final, brutal edit.”  I am not sure how to react to this, because the book already has received such an edit from an independent, “consulting editor,” Alan Rinzler, an extremely intelligent and experienced individual, who for many years was an acquisitions and developmental editor at major publishing houses and has edited many New York Times Best Sellers, including thrillers by Clive Cussler and Robert Ludlum.  With Alan’s capable guidance, I streamlined the manuscript, reducing it in size by half and eliminating many historical elements, including a subplot that followed the American League pennant race of the Detroit Tigers on a parallel track with the presidential campaign. 

      
Perhaps it is just a matter of taste.  Is there too much history in Safe On Third? We know what a Kirkus reviewer thinks, so be forewarned.  But I leave the final decision to each reader.

On The Road Again

Yes, it's been a long time, and my children are upset with me for failing to keep up my posts. Since the beginning of the month, however, I have been on the road.  I have just returned to California from Nantucket after a quick trip down to Washington, D.C., and then a 3200-mile drive across country from Nantucket with only a Labrador Retriever accompanying me. Driving six or seven hundred miles a day with a black Lab sleeping in the backseat, I was not in the proper frame of mind to blog about anything when I finally stopped for the night, and I’m afraid my mind is still mush.  I still feel a bit disoriented and unsettled after so much time behind the wheel, so much inedible road food, and so many uncomfortable beds, although I can't really complain for my trip was certainly much easier than that of the first intrepid drivers to go from coast to coast.

As I learned by chance several weeks ago in D.C., when I visited the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, the first coast-to-coast trip by automobile was made in this country back in 1903 by Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson and Sewall Crocker, who drove from San Francisco to New York City with a bulldog named Bud. They rode in an open two-seater touring car made by the Winton Motor Carriage Company in Cleveland, Ohio, with a two-cylinder, 20-horsepower engine beneath the driver’s seat that had a top speed of 30 miles per hour. Their trip took them 63 days, and at the time there were only 150 miles of paved roads in the entire country. There were no gas stations, either. They purchased fuel used for farm machinery from local general stores. Ken Burns has made a film for PBS about this cross-country journey, called “Horatio’s Drive: America's First Road Trip," and the car that was used is now on exhibit at the Smithsonian, where I saw it along with the goggles that were worn by Bud, the bulldog, who rode up in front and whose eyes were irritated by the dust rising around the open touring car.  

Of course,  Jackson, Crocker, and Bud never got stuck in rush hour traffic or found themselves boxed in by two eighteen wheelers, but I never had to drive on the tracks of a railroad trestle to cross a river, and I never got stuck in any buffalo wallows.  I don't even know what a wallow is.  Nor did I have to provide goggles for my dog, but, as I say, she was in the backseat, and she never complained.