Fifty-five years ago, give or take, I learned to drive under the elevated subway in Far Rockaway. I’m sure a few of my high school friends made use of the same company for their drivers’ ed classes. It could get awfully noisy under the elevated platform, the subway rumbling along overhead.
That’s what it felt like this morning, as though overnight someone had constructed an elevated platform in my attic, and the subway came rumbling along right on schedule. Ah, I thought, that’ll be the 10:23 IND line.
And then, this evening, the subway decided to make a return trip.
“One day I will find the right words and they will be simple.” (Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 1958).
I wonder what words I might write if I had the chance to write them in Jack Kerouac’s house in Orlando, FL, the house where he lived when he wrote the Dharma Bums, the house where he lived when On the Road was published.
When I think about my life, as a reader, and especially as a writer, there are certain names that hold special meaning for me. Jack Kerouac is one of those names. So I was more than a bit intrigued when I learned about The Kerouac Project, and the writer-in-residence opportunity it makes available. But I have come to the realization that this opportunity is not right for me. I will not be applying for the residency. Instead I will be channeling my inner Jack Kerouac here at my writing desk in New Jersey, as I prepare for the release of my new book, The Other, coming in November.
But it might be right for you. The application deadline is rapidly approaching. The secret is that there is no secret.
“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.” (Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957)
It was early in 2010, a few months after Five Star released the hardcover edition of It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Murder. I was speaking at the Jones Creek Branch of the East Baton Rouge Public Library. There was a nice turnout. I spoke for a while, answered some questions and signed some books. There was a hurricane in the forecast. We wanted to get back to our hotel in New Orleans before the rains came (in truth, we were hoping the rains would hold off for a day and we’d be able to fly home the next morning). Anyway, we wanted to get on the road, but the visit had been publicized as lasting two hours, and everyone at the library had been so very hospitable and even though the crowd was now gone, I was determined to stay until the publicized end time.
With ten minutes left before our departure, I heard a man enter the library. “Where’s the man who’s here to talk about the Pine Barrens?” You see, the library had announced that I would be there speaking about my mystery set in the NJ Pine Barrens. He didn’t much care about the mystery. What got his attention was the Pine Barrens. And that’s how I met Dr. Paul Yoder Burns. He was a nattily dressed gentleman in his 80s, an emeritus professor at the Louisiana State University School of Renewable Natural Resources. It had been 60 years, but in 1950, as a PhD candidate in forestry at Yale, Paul Yoder Burns had done his doctoral dissertation on the effect of fire on the forest soils in the Pine Barren region of NJ.
Today, we recognize that fire is beneficial to the health of the forest, but this was not the conventional wisdom in 1950. Dr. Burns was one of the first to study the effect of fire on the life of the forest. I gave him a copy of It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Murder. And that day, in the Jones Creek Library, he gave me a bound copy of his dissertation, published by Yale in 1952. Tomorrow I’ll be at Lines on the Pines. If you ask nicely, I just might let you peruse Dr. Burns doctoral dissertation.
This year marks 50 years since I graduated from Princeton. It’s hard to believe how primitive our writing tools were back then. In my freshman year, we were still chiseling our words into stone tablets. My sophomore year, they introduced papyrus, and by my senior year, we had paper. When we took essay exams, we had to write our answers in little green (or sometimes blue) composition books. Perhaps you’re old enough to remember. The books looked a lot like these.
But these particular green composition books hold something far more precious to me than mere academic Q & A. These books contain my very first (unsuccessful) attempt at writing a novel. Written, for the first time, between 1975 – 1978, drawing heavily on both Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhist texts, and just a little bit from On the Road, and also from Another Roadside Attraction, The Last Bodhisattva was a modern Buddhist parable that explored the distinction between individual and universal enlightenment. (It’s a theme I re-visited in 2021, in Motive for Murder).
The novel was never published. To be honest, it wasn’t publishable. But, many years later, I took out my blue pencil and deleted some 60,000 words. The remaining words became the short story, The Sound Bite, published in 2006 in women’s corner magazine. Here’s a picture of me reading The Sound Bite at the New Orleans Book Fair, in The Apple Barrel, on Frenchmen Street in 2009.
Why did the salamander cross the road? To mate with their beloved in the vernal pool on the other side. There is something sweetly romantic about a township that will close roads in the interest of salamander love. Happy Valentine’s Day.
Twelve years ago, when I was blogging regularly on another platform, I posted the following paragraph, after a short visit to Washington D.C.
I spent a few days in Washington D.C., relaxing. I promised myself there would be no dead bodies. And I almost made it. The National Gallery of Art, the Botanical Gardens, Washington Harbour, Bangkok Joe’s, the C & O Canal, Georgetown Park. Really, I almost made it. Then I noticed the bar on M Street. The red curtain hanging in the doorway, the Middle Eastern music beckoning from within. I pushed through the red curtain into the darkened bar. A row of businessmen were drinking whiskey on expense accounts, paying scant attention to the dead belly dancer on the barroom floor.
You see, I’m a mystery writer, and I practice finding the dead body. It’s an exercise in finding story ideas, kind of like a musician practicing their scales. But sometimes, those dead bodies hang around, nagging at me to tell their story. The dead belly dancer hung around for a decade before I decided to tell her tale. And now, twelve years after I first found the dead belly dancer, you can read her story, Her Hips Were the Face of El Vizir, in issue #21 of Mystery Tribune. It’s a fabulous issue and I’m pleased to find my story there alongside so many authors whose work I admire.
And what is the story about? It’s about social justice. It’s about my fear that America no longer values democratic principles. But mostly, it’s about a dead belly dancer on the bar room floor.
I was asked recently whether AI can write books that are as good or better than books written by human authors. If a book is nothing more than a commodity, I told them, then yes, I expect AI can and will produce books that do as well or better in the marketplace. But I hold onto the antiquated belief that art, at its core, is not about economic success. Art is a glimpse into the soul of the artist. And it should be clear to anyone who is paying attention that artifical intelligence has no soul.
I’ve had five novels published, with a sixth, The Other, on the way in November. I tell myself that The Other is my best book yet, and perhaps it is. So I will do whatever I can to put the book in the hands of readers. But it starts by writing the best book I’m capable of writing.
Let me repeat that. The best book that I’m capable of writing.
If my goal is to see my name printed on the cover of a book, artifical intelligence can make that happen without having to bother with the messy challenge of creativity. But my goal is to create the story that you find inside the book cover. I would not use AI for the same reason I would not hire a ghost writer. Because the only part of the writing life that truly matters is the writing.
Folks in other parts of the country are surprised when I tell them about the Pine Barrens. After all, it’s not what people think of when they think of New Jersey. You might be surprised to find more than one million acres of pine forests and cranberry bogs less than one hundred miles from Manhattan, less than fifty miles from Philadelphia.
Towns have grown up in and amongst the forest, and some are now thriving cities, but, even today, there is vast acreage in the Pine Barrens that remains virgin pine forest. Deep in the forest, amongst the pitch pines and the cranberry bogs, the fragrant berries and the abandoned cemeteries, strange things abound.
None stranger than the Jersey Devil.
The Jersey Devil is one of the enduring legends that have come out of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, dating back to the early 1700s. There are several accounts of the birth of the Jersey Devil, but the most common story dates back to 1735, to Mother Leeds, pregnant with her thirteenth child, saddled with a drunken, ne’er-do-well husband, and burdened with far too many responsibilities. Mother Leeds cursed her unborn child to the devil. And then she gave birth to a horrible creature, with a horse-like head and hooves, bat-wings, a forked tail and an ear-piercing shriek.
Sightings of the Jersey Devil have been reported from time to time, terrorizing south Jersey (although, curiously, rarely causing any actual damage). The most extensive sightings date back to 1909, to the week of January 16-23. During that week, in 1909, the Jersey Devil was seen in more than thirty different towns, by hundreds, if not thousands of individuals. The terror was so widespread that schools and factories were closed and posses were formed in an attempt to capture the elusive Jersey Devil.
The sightings began late at night, January 16 in Woodbury, NJ and early on the morning of January 17 in Bristol, PA. The sightings in Bristol included eye-witness accounts by a police officer (later to become the Bristol Chief of Police) as well as the town’s postmaster, who described the creature as follows:
“Its head resembled that of a ram, with curled horns, and its long thick neck was thrust forward in flight. It had long thin wings and short legs, the front legs shorter than the hind. Again, it uttered its mournful and awful call – a combination of a squawk and a whistle, the beginning very high and piercing and ending very low and horse.” (from The Jersey Devil, by McCloy and Miller, published by Middle Atlantic Press).
Over the subsequent twenty-four hours, reports of the Jersey Devil, or Jersey Devil tracks were reported in Burlington City, Gloucester City, Columbus, Hedding, Kinkora and Rancocas. On Tuesday, January 19, the Jersey Devil made a well-documented appearance in Gloucester City, that resulted in the following description by Nelson Evans:
“It was about three feet and a half high, with a head like a collie dog and a face like a horse. It had a long neck, wings about two feet long, and its back legs were like those of a crane, and it had horse’s hooves.” (from The Jersey Devil)
In the ensuing days, the Jersey Devil was spotted in Haddonfield, in Moorestown and in numerous other towns in south Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. Public meetings were held to address citizens’ concerns.
On Thursday, January 21, the Jersey Devil’s rampage intensified, with an attack on a trolley car in Camden. Before the day’s end, there were sightings in Trenton and Ewing, in Roebling, Pitman, Bridgeton and Millville, in West Collingswood, Mt. Holly and Atlantic City, as well as Philadelphia, PA. Trolley cars in Trenton and New Brunswick armed the drivers in an effort to protect the trolleys from attack.
The panic was palpable. By Friday, January 22, people had locked themselves in their homes in towns all across the Delaware Valley. Businesses closed. Schools closed. Sighting continued on Friday in Camden and Woodbury. The final reported sighting of the week occurred Friday night in Salem.
And then the Devil was gone.
There have been occasional reports of the Jersey Devil since that harrowing week, but nothing comes close to the magnitude of the events that transpired 108 years ago, this week, in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens.
The Jersey Devil is a suspect in my first Cassie O’Malley Mystery, Who is Killing Doah’s Deer? originally published in 2004 and still available today in paperback and kindle editions.
Since it’s Elvis’ birthday, today seems like the right day to tell you my Elvis story. Not an Elvis story, exactly, but you’ll get the point. It was 1989 and we were in Japan. Our hosts took us to a karaoke bar and it quickly became clear that the American couple would have to get up and sing. There were only a handful of songs programmed into the karaoke machine that had English lyrics, so we settled on Love Me Tender. We were halfway through the song before we realized they were projecting a pornographic video on a screen behind us in the bar, as we sang. Love me tender, indeed.
My next book, The Other, will be released in November. Is it too soon to start sharing some of what I’ve been hearing from authors who were kind enough to read an early draft?
“Jeff Markowitz’s powerful and poignant novel addresses hate, that scourge of human experience, and how it poisons what should be the joy we all deserve in simply being alive. It’s in his exquisitely drawn characters’ quest for joy that Markowitz finds beauty despite the darkness overtaking two interconnected eras: one past, and one present. It is a quest we all need, and which Markowitz has gifted us.”
Ann Aptaker Award-winning author of the Cantor Gold series
Jeff Markowitz 