Dancing on Broken Glass

My triad of Mallorcan mystery novellas, Dancing on Broken Glass, was selected as a finalist for the 2019 Eludia Award, given by Hidden River Arts. The winner of the award will be published; my collection will look for another path into the world.

Tomás Mateo des Fonoll Vilalta is an unlikely detective who writes ghazals, plays the tabla, and cooks specialties unique to his Mallorcan home.  Three mysteries take Vilalta from one end of the island to the other.  The second two feature as well the detective's archaeologist partner Gritta Becker, who refuses to suffer fools gladly and can't forgive the Romans for having wiped out Carthage.

In Dancing on Broken Glass, the Basque gardener at a fledgling international retreat center on a hillside of restored windmills is found on the pool terrace with his throat cut, and the owner's sister Abigail Laurent is accused of his death, once the Basque Separatists have been ruled out and Abigail's treacherous suitor who leads the famous choir at the Sanctuary of Lluc.

In Whole Cloth, the young Algerian assistant at the weaving mill of Gritta's friend Serena Bâ has disappeared, leaving behind her treasured family heirlooms and a mysterious passport—belonging to someone looking just like Araby, but with a lion tattoo in blue calligraphy on her neck.  When a body turns up on the beach, Vilalta must disentangle the matter of identity to make sense of a young woman's violent death.

In Ungodly Romans, Gritta is reluctantly spending the summer teaching high school students at a field school for Roman archaeology in a medieval walled town across the island.  She becomes the prime suspect when her nemesis, the arrogant daughter of a hot-shot consultant for L.A.'s Getty Museum, is murdered in the ancient theatre where a very modern drama of love and jealousy plays itself out.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Ruins, Mallorca 2013

Writing Spaces

A good autumn chair, for writing autumn things.

image:  The Guardian of the Woods

Belons

A poem I wrote some years ago, "Belons," has been published in the Autumn Issue of Foreign Literary Journal, based in South Korea, and appropriately all about the lure of foreign places, life away from home, where cultures and identities blur, intersect.

The poem is set in Brittany, Locmariaquer, and then the wrong street in Paris (a kind of exile).  It's about oysters, broken megaliths, "memories almost, or almost hope," and refers to my favorite scenes in Erich Maria Remarque's Heaven Has No Favorites, a book I've loved for nearly fifty years.




image:  Paul Gauguin, On the Cliff (Above the Sea), Brittany

Writing Spaces

A week or two here would give me wonderful material, richly flavored as with smoked paprika, figs, not quite free of the voice of troubadours.  Jean Giono would be mentioned at least once, and villages in the mountains.  Honor, and dancing after dark, after the moon slips free of the lingering evening's lees.


image:  Chisako Hamaya, Dome, slatki dome

Green Flash

Another novel excerpt has been published, this "Green Flash"—in Hawai'i rather than Crete.

"All day she thought of the dark skin of the Polynesian dancer, Gabriel, knifing into the turquoise sunshot water with its black heart (son of Pele), the bright-sailed catamaran like a Hawaiian Icarus flying into the sun, saying “it’s better at dusk.”  The green flash that her father yearned for as the sun went, swallowed into night, the yearning color of salvationout in the region where mirages live."

The publisher is Silver Stork, in their "Solais" issue—"of sunlight."

image:  Green Flash, Pekka Parvianen, NASA

Writing Spaces

As summer wanes, I'm finding myself already nostalgic for this view, this chair, this perfect window opening on the garden, the stories that might be written (or spied) while sitting there.


image:  View from a Window, Spencer Frederick Gore

Show Me the Bust of Marcus Agrippa

Lowestoft Chronicle has published the (a)gripping story of one of my foreign quests, on the verge of the new Millennium, in their Fall 2019 issue, #39.

         And so, with fall coming, with trees and late afternoon light yellowing, turning to gold (no matter if it's fools'), let us travel to Rome.

         "But after all, Agrippa is not here.  The Etruscans are here—their finely granulated gold jewelry, their etched bronze mirrors—those things you’ve seen in the art books, and roomfuls more, laid out in all their mystery and splendor.  And in the garden there are heavy-laden lime trees, and a small café where you can sit and rest your blistered feet and imagine that you have turned the clocks back and returned to summer for a little while.  All that is here, at the Museo Nazionale di Villa Giulia, and for only 8000 lire (a single stroke of the delightful triple-zero key which I’ve fallen in love with on Italian ATM machines); but the marble head of Marcus Agrippa, builder of ancient Rome and second-in-command to Augustus Caesar, which we have come so many hellish miles to see, is not here. “We are Etruscans,” the old museum guard with his beetling brows and military bearing says dismissively."

image:  Vatican Museum - Hall of Busts, Saint Mary's Press