Life is a wild and crazy thing, eh?

Harry Seaburn’s comic crime caper novel series had just been born – with publication of The Feathered Virgin on Amazon – and the author (me) almost got unborn.  Life, as the old Greek said, is a wild and scary thing.

Or maybe just very Dortmunder.  (You Donald E. Westlake fans will know what that means.)

I’d just pushed the “publish” button for Amazon and begun preps to follow up immediately with publishing the rest of the series – The Dimpled Python, The Laughing Camel and all the way through to the seventh book, The Cracker Kingdom, with a blue-haired sniper girl and a dozen circus elephants for the grande finale – when I had this sudden urge to climb a ladder to grab a fresh tube of toothpaste on a high shelf.

Yeah, well, it would’ve happened to John Dortmunder, too.  I sort of fell off the ladder and sort of landed in the shower and sort of banged my head against the tile wall and sort of began to bleed.

Splash blood, I mean.

My wife, expert at solving problems I create, wrapped my head in beach towels (we live by the beach so we have lots of them to spare for occasions like this) and called an ambulance.

The ER jabbed me and wrapped me in wires and made me do bizarre arm exercises.  Shoved me into a CAT scan machine (not as scary as an MRI, which feels to me like being shoved into my own coffin without the benefit of being dead).  And decided I would survive.  Or maybe that I wasn't worth much more of their trouble.

So they stapled six quite pretty metal staples into my head to close up the tear and sent me home.  My wife took a photo of my head to show me the staples – they look like some office loony went berserk on my scalp with a desk stapler.

Have to admit, though, I felt instantly better with the staples in.  Like having that “closure” you hear so much about (I know it's an awful pun but I couldn't resist).  If they were stapling me and not admitting me, then I figured I was going to be all right.

Further, the ambulance man said he would check Amazon to buy a copy of The Feathered Virgin, so my misadventure was not entirely a waste.

After five hours in the ER and early to bed, I expected to be re-energized today and ready to get back to publishing the other six books.  Trouble is, the ER gave me this long list of “Symptoms Indicating Your Concussed Head is About to Explode and You Will Die” and I discovered I have all of them.  Except the one that says you have come to realize you are as handsome as George Clooney.  That requires an extra special concussion.

To fight off those symptoms, I spent the afternoon puttering around in the yard in the fresh air and sunshine.  But the sun heated up the staples in my scalp so powerfully that I had to flee indoors.

Then I recalled from the BBC’s "Doc Martin" series that the Doc revived a man dying from concussion by using a common or garden variety household drill to bore a hole in the skull to relieve the building pressure.  I asked my wife to keep our drill handy in case I want any more holes drilled in my head.

She scoffed and went out back to inflame our oak-fired barbecue to cook up fresh fish for dinner with friends.  I’m sure their good company will cure all my symptoms.  If not, I’m ready with the drill.

Cheers!

© 2015-18 Steven Hardesty

Oh, by the way, Harry is a great guy with one or two little problems...he’s a thief and he wants the love of a good woman, anybody’s good woman, but he tends to shoot people and what good woman could want him?
— Melody Brooks

Life is a War Novel

Saigon Blues - High Resolution.jpg

Some readers ask me how my war novels can describe the wild adventure and heroism of combat yet end without trumpets and flags.  Why so downbeat?  I’ll tell you, but only if you’re a young man or woman eligible to go to war.  You are my audience, not anyone else.

Point.  War is a pisser.  It pisses on you and you can’t piss back in self-defense.  Oh, it may seem a grand heroic adventure.  You may walk away from war dressed in bright ribbons and medals and praise.  But when you are alone in the deepest part of night you will say to yourself, “Goddamn, what have I done?  What did I do to myself?  What did I do to those other people over there?”  You will feel as alone in the night as any human being ever felt because your war is still pissing on you. 

If what you did had to be done, you’ll get through the night okay.  You’ll have in you a bitter regret that it had to be done but you’ll come out all right.  If it didn’t have to be done, you’ll feel the most wretched human being on the planet.

How can you tell the difference between those two ifs?  That’s easy…

Point.  There are two kinds of war – good wars and bad wars.  A good war is the war you can’t avoid.  December 7, 1941.  You have to fight back to stay alive and keep your family alive and save your country.  You will do terrible things in this war but you are standing up for what is decent and true.

A bad war is a war of choice.  Your country’s leaders make this war when they think they have run out of alternatives, like diplomacy, politics, threats, bribery or trying to persuade all sides, including your own, to see things with good sense and common decency.  What they really have run out of is honor.  Most of the wars this country fought were wars of choice.  They had no honor.

You know the difference because good wars leave you frightened in the night.  Bad wars poison all your life…

Point.  Vietnam was a bad war.  A very bad war.  Worse because it was a stupid war fought by stupid people on our side – by stupid generals and stupid politicians who lacked the brains and strength of character to break out of old ways of thinking about our wielding power in the world.

What I did in Vietnam poisoned all my life.  I did nothing dishonorable.  I was a good soldier for my country.  But I fought a war that didn’t need to be fought and killed people who should have been allowed to live and tore up someone else’s country for no good reason and left their land sick and ruined when I marched away from it.  I remember all that in the darkest part of every night.

Bet you can guess what I have to say next...

Last Point.  If you are a young man or woman considering going to war or caught up in war or thinking about voting for war, stop.  Stop to think about the difference between a good war and a bad war.  Then decide what you must do.

Your making that decision is what my war novels are all about.  They want to remind you of the good advice offered by Davy Crockett, a man who knew something about war-making, when he said, “Be sure you are right and then go ahead.”

You do the same.  Or you, too, will pay for it in the night.

 

© 2016 Steven Hardesty

What comes next...

I bet you're on the hunt for good reading and want to know if my books are worth your time and eyestrain.  So let's get on with it and talk about my books.

I've been writing all my life, mostly for cruel taskmasters but as often as I could for myself.  I had a war novel published in hardback in the traditional way and published again in paperback a bit later. Magazines bought my mystery and science fiction short stories. But mostly I piled up manuscripts without knowing if I'd ever see them in print.  Until I discovered indie publishing.

Like AirBnb, Uber and Netflix, independent book publishing is a gift of freedom to readers and writers.  I quit my day job and now indie writing and publishing are what I do.  The downside is it's all so much fun that I'm piling up projects faster than I can finish them. So I’ve decided to use both hands on the keyboard.

Here's what I'm working on now…

Click book covers to order from Amazon.com

Click book covers to order from Amazon.com

●  With Harry Seaburn's "noir on wry" crime caper series done (7 books, a nice, round number), I’m filling out the series’ backstory along Florida's snapping-gator Everglades.  First, with short stories about the one-legged thief Bitter Bob and that pair of kidnappers who never get anything right. Then with a spin-off mystery novel featuring the pacifist-sniper-hippie-swampwoman Marjorie (AKA Tang Gramophone Weinstock III) from one of Harry's wildest heist capers.  And, of course, I'll throw in the usual dozen retired circus elephants trampling the swamp and the Miami mafia.

●  I've done a first draft of The Long Run, next in the Dirty Wars Series of gritty international thrillers, opening with a failed helicopter breakout from a Bolivian prison in the high Andes and the hero (well, a very anti-hero) running wild across South America thereafter.

●  And - by popular demand - I'm working up a sequel to Running in Heels telling the even tougher half of the story of a woman who changes from wimp to hero as she steals back a fortune stolen from her which she accidentally stole from a psychopath and her drug-running familiar, an assassin who can never remember who to kill without written notes.

●  I’m also halfway through drafting the sardonic comedy War and the Newby about how young soldiers become old soldiers, if they're very, very careful. With luck, I'll have it ready for Christmas gift-giving, if you really want to give your giftees something that bites and won't let go.

Hope to have all of this done this year, if I can learn to use all ten fingers to hammer the keyboard.

☼ Cheers and thanks for asking!

 

© 2011-2018 Steven Hardesty