Apocalypse Now? Maybe not.
HBO’s darkly amazing new series, True Detective, co-stars Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson and south Louisiana. I use that particular billing because the surreal landscape is such a strong character it’s difficult to imagine its denizens being anywhere else. The third episode had the guys driving through an embattled terrain more wet than dry, and talking about how the land there is fast disappearing. Having lived in New Orleans, I knew this was no plot gimmick. Thanks to logging, drilling, oil spills, dredging and other man-made nightmares, the Gulf of Mexico gobbles up a football field of Louisiana wetland every hour. Every hour! No, that’s not a typo. When the French arrived in 1699, appropriately enough on Mardi Gras day, they christened the new colony...
Read MoreDoomed or Damned?
When I began researching the California Missions for my first mystery, Communion of Sinners, I discovered the system was problematic from the earliest days. The often inhumane treatment of the Indians by the Franciscan padres and Spanish soldiers (the subject of two previous blogs), made me wonder how much wretchedness the Missions brought on themselves. The question of karma arose when I learned how much Mother Nature heaped atop the man-made misery. The very first Mission, San Diego del Alcalá, founded on its present site in 1794, was around barely fifteen months when the Indians avenged their people’s abuse. Some six hundred warriors attacked the compound and burned it to the ground in a blaze intense enough to melt the communion chalice. Father Luis Jayme was...
Read MoreYellow Fever
Historical fiction authors spend about as much time researching as writing the actual book, always on the lookout for something to give our stories that special spin. Because the four real-life principals in my upcoming novel, Goat Castle Murder, were all wildly eccentric, I figured there had to be more where they came from, i.e., Natchez, Mississippi. Now the quintessential sleepy Southern town, Natchez once boasted more millionaires per capita than any place but New York, and I quickly discovered my quirky quartet was just the tip of a picturesque iceberg. Consider Jake and Jim Surget, brothers who so despised each other that their house, Cherry Grove, had a chalk line dividing it in two with neither allowed access to the other’s half. Three spinster sisters...
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