Three’s Company

“I read the whole thing and I could not stop. Best work of the trilogy, so tight with the right amount of suspense. Lovely twist at the end. So many characters, so many places…”

Those ego-massaging words came from one of my beta readers for Searching for Cunégonde, and needless to say, they were most encouraging and welcome. But do they beg the question?

Answer: no, they don’t. At least not in the original meaning of the phrase, which entered the English language in the 16th century when an anonymous translator rendered Aristotle’s petitio principii as “beg the question.” The Greek philosopher’s actual meaning was closer to “assume the conclusion.” A true example of begging the question (courtesy of Merriam-Webster) is: “If left to themselves, children will naturally do the right thing because people are intrinsically good.” If you think about it, the logic in that assertion is circular. It is basically saying, “A” is true because “A” is true. This is very different from how most people these days use “beg the question.” What they actually mean is to raise or prompt a question. Sorry to get all pedantic, but this is something that has bugged me for a long time for some reason.

To get back to the original point, yes, “best work of the trilogy” does raise a question. Are the three Dallas Green books (Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead, Lautaro’s Spear and Searching for Cunégonde) really a trilogy? Since I have more time these days to pore over onomasticons, let us consult the Oxford English Dictionary. First up from the OED, based on references from the 19th century: “Ancient Greek History. A series of three tragedies (originally connected in subject), performed at Athens at the festival of Dionysus.” Secondly, from 17th and 19th-century sources: “Any series or group of three related dramatic or other literary works.” So, yes, my trio of novels appears to qualify as a trilogy.

I actually addressed the question on this blog three years ago. At that time I clarified that the yet-to-be-titled Lautaro’s Spear (which I then jokingly referred to as Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead: Part 2) and still-a-glint-in-my-brain Searching for Cunégonde did indeed qualify as sequels but were not a series. In other words, they are meant to be independent and self-contained, even while all dealing with the overall narrative of Dallas’s life. I then pronounced that those three books plus any more that I might write, apart from the fantasy novels, all belong to a grand “novel sequence” à la Honoré de Balzac and his La Comédie humaine.

By accepting that the three tomes are a trilogy, am I signaling that there will be no more Dallas books? Well, if any other books I write are to be part of my novel sequence, won’t they be technically be Dallas books since they take place in a world where he exists—even if he does not actually make an appearance?

There are two things I can tell you for pretty sure, which may clarify things.

Firstly, I don’t expect the three books to be offered together at any point in a box set in the manner of, say, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. For one thing, I don’t even know how to go about organizing that, and frankly, I don’t have much interest. I prefer that each book stand on its own independently, even though reading them all will hopefully be a richer experience. Side note: you can actually make a case that The Lord of the Rings is not a trilogy since it was written as a continuous single work and was only divided into three books because of the printing-press limitations of its era. Additional side note: I have been known to jokingly refer to Searching for Cunégonde as The Return of the King.

Secondly, at this time I have zero intention of writing any other books in which Dallas is the narrator. I was never keen on having a first-person narrator but convinced myself I had to do it with Max & Carly because I was consciously inspired by the first-person-narrated picaresque nature of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. If I had it to do over now, I would probably listen to a certain prescient character in Cunégonde and emulate instead François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, and his novel Candide. But once the first book was written in first person and once I committed to writing one and then two sequels, I was caught. It’s been my own perverse punishment, and only adds to the notion that the books are some kind of roman-à-clef autobiography. So no more.

We may well (or not) learn more of Dallas’s life in other books, but not through his words or point of view. Characters we met through him may turn up in other books but as described by an anonymous narrator. We may get news about him from other characters. He might even turn up in person so that we may see him through someone else’s eyes. We will not, though, be seeing him through his own words.

Unless I change my mind.

Cunégonde Found

Today is the day.

This is the official publication date of Searching for Cunégonde. One thing I have learned about publishing books, though, is that the release does not happen in one big climactic big bang where “the book” is available everywhere at once. The fact is that there are multiple versions of the book and multiple sellers. As much as I try to coordinate things to happen, more or less, all at once, things happen when they happen.

In any event, by the time you read this Searching for Cunégonde should be available in any format you want it from all of the major sellers. As always with my books, the only places to buy it are on your internet-connected device. That is true of digital books (Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Google Play) by definition, but it is also true of the paperback version. Your local bookstore won’t have it, as much as I would love for your local bookstore to stock it. Even large bookstores won’t have it. If you go to Barnes and Noble, they will actually tell you to go home and order it on your computer. That is just the economics of the bookselling business. The good news for you, though, is that by not pricing the book (inevitably in vain) to be more attractive to brick-and-mortar retailers, it is possible to keep the sale price of the book a bit lower.

The obvious places to order the paperback are Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Books-A-Million, but there are other sellers out there as well. Usually, the titles show up sooner or later on the online sites of places like Walmart. Plainly, it’s safer to buy from sellers that are well-known and have a good reputation. Definitely avoid the dodgy websites that claim to have the book for “free” as long as you supply your credit card information for a “membership.”

If you take a look at the right-hand side of this page, you will find a whole bunch links, hopefully organized in coherent way, that will lead you to the seller of your choice and the book format of your choice and maybe even in the country of your choice.

As I mentioned before, Searching for Cunégonde is available from a number of sellers of digital books, including Barnes and Noble’s Nook store, as well as Kobo, Google Play and even Apple’s iBooks. That is in contrast to my last book, The Curse of Septimus Bridge, which was available exclusively in Amazon’s Kindle store. The tradeoff was that subscribers to Kindle Unlimited could read the book for “free,” but people wanting to read it as an ebook could only get it from Amazon. I have now removed Septimus from Kindle Unlimited, and it too is now available from other online digital books sellers.

Once again, my big release announcement seems to be all about how to buy the book when what I really want to do is talk about the book. So, let’s talk about it. As you know, it is called Searching for Cunégonde, and it’s a sequel to both Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead and Lautaro’s Spear. The first questions that may come to your mind may be things like, who is Cunégonde, who is searching for her and why? Well, the first question is easy enough. A quick web search (you know, searching for “Cunégonde”) will reveal that she is a character from 18th-century French literature. Unlike Maximilian, Carlotta and Lautaro, she is fictional. As for the rest of it, you’re probably better off reading the book (mine, I mean).

As you would expect, this novel continues the adventures of young Dallas Green, although he isn’t all that young anymore. By the end, he is beginning his fifth decade. (They grow up so fast.) A good portion of the book, which does some time-jumping, covers further misadventures in his twenties. Even when he hits forty, he may be older, but he is not necessarily wiser.

If you’ve read the other books, then you will have questions. What happens to Dallas and Ángel in Chile? Does Dallas find his missing friend Antonio? Does Dallas ever see Valérie again or, for that matter, any of the other women in his life? What friends will wander back into his life, and which ones will shuffle off never to be seen again? Will our boy find love and settle down? Or will he find worse ways to get in trouble? You have 368 pages in which to find out.

Keep checking back here, as I’m not finished discussing this book by a long shot.

Searching for Dallas

It’s nearly here. The adventures of Dallas Green will continue in my new novel Searching for Cunégonde, which will be released officially on Tuesday. Coincidentally (or not), that happens to be exactly two years after the release of my previous book about Dallas, Lautaro’s Spear.

Less remarkably, that’s six years and 117 days after the release of Dallas’s debut in the Kindle version of Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead. What’s remarkable is that I not only managed to get this book done a mere two years after the last installment but that I actually wrote a whole other book in between. You do remember The Curse of Septimus Bridge, don’t you?

If you want the paperback version, I see that it is already available for pre-order on both Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com. A quick check reveals that it also shows up on the Canadian and UK Amazon sites and even on the French one (under “Livres anglais et étrangers,” bien sûr).

You cannot pre-order the digital versions, but they should appear on the various online bookseller websites on or around Tuesday. That includes Amazon’s Kindle store, although this time around I am planning to make the digital editions also available through as many other sellers as possible rather selling it exclusively through the Kindle store. Check back here for more information as more sellers have it listed.

Okay, enough about how and when to buy the book. So what’s the book about?

If you’ve read the previous two books, then you already have a fair idea. If you haven’t, well, where do I begin? In a nutshell, these are the picaresque adventures of a small-town boy wandering the world, getting into trouble, falling in love, making and losing friends, achieving the occasional victory, and suffering sporadic defeats. The action ranges from California’s San Joaquin Valley and Bay Area to South America and Europe. If you have not met our hero Dallas Green before, I think you’ll get up to speed pretty quick. If you’ve been along for his whole journey, then you’ll be interested to know that this book picks up (eventually) where the last one left off, as Dallas and his friend Ángel head to Chile to see if they can figure out what happened to Dallas’s long-missing friend Antonio.

As with the other two tomes, this one has its share of bad behavior, poor judgment, drinking, male bonding, and potentially catastrophic predicaments. And perhaps more than the other books, this one has a bit more romance. Some of the people we met before are back, and there are new characters to become acquainted with. Not everyone survives, and the ghosts of those didn’t sometimes linger—not least Dallas’s closest friend in the world Lonnie McKay, who was cut down in the prime of life.

Is this the end of Dallas’s journey? I’ve learned to never say never, but it feels as though it is. At least as far as readers are concerned. He will continue to live and have adventures forever if only in my own imagination. Rest assured, even if we do not read about any further adventures, he will still be out there somewhere getting himself into all kinds of trouble.

Scandi Book Bonanza

The wait is nearly over. As of this writing, the official release of the third Dallas Green novel—the sequel to Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead and Lautaro’s Spear—is slightly less than a week away. I will have much more to say about that in the coming days, but in the meantime I want to tell you about someone else’s books, which are also coming out in the very near future.

Danish author Claes Johansen is a tireless writer. I get exhausted just watching the volume of his output. If you a regular reader of this blog, you may remember when I wrote four years ago about his non-fiction historical tome Hitler’s Nordic Ally?: Finland and the Total War 1939-45. In that book he coherently explained the complicated situation in which Finland found itself before, during and after World War II and how it all played out. Originally written in Danish (Finland og den totale krig, published in 2013), the book was translated into English by the author himself. There are not many authors who would attempt that, but Johansen has lived many years in England and Ireland, and his mastery of English is impeccable, so he is in a unique position to do his own translating.

He now has three more English-language editions of his books—which he also translated himself—coming out in the next week or so, following one that was released in June. It is not an exaggeration to say there is something for everybody among their number. All four are or will be available in digital format from Amazon’s various international Kindle stores, from Rakuten Kobo, from Google and no doubt from other fine online sellers.

I have read all of them, and this is what I can tell you about them.

The Doubter (available September 30): Needless to say, I took to this story immediately since it happens to fall squarely into my own wheelhouse of narratives about aimless 20th-century youth. The novel opens in December 1979 as our hero Thomas, the aptly named twentysomething doubter of the title, returns home to Copenhagen from an irresponsibly unplanned and surprisingly eventful sojourn in London. The story switches between Thomas’s time in England and his subsequent reacquaintance with his own country, family and friends. Through his eyes we experience the Denmark’s educational system, as the protagonist takes a teaching job, and life in its army due to compulsory military service. As we learn about his family and childhood, we get a critique of Danish society at the time with many people stuck in a lingering Hippie mindset. The real treat is getting the author’s insights and observations of the era’s music scene. The backdrop for the London episodes is the Mod Revival, harkening back to the 1960s swinging subculture. The film version of the Who’s Quadrophenia is invoked, as it was being filmed at the time. Johansen has an uncanny knack for capturing the speech of young Englishmen that makes the story feel very real. As Thomas joins a band in England and then in Denmark, we get plenty of young male bonding, and inevitably, there is also a girl. Personally, I enjoyed the author’s observations of how Danes view Swedes during a bicycle excursion across the strait between the two countries. Depending on one’s age and personal experiences, this book can make one feel very nostalgic.

The Boatman and the Boy (available October 2): This historical epic about war, inhumanity and retribution begs to be made into a movie. The story begins in the war zone of 1950s French Indochina. A wounded private in the French Foreign Legion reflects on the prospect that he may have finally found the man he has been hunting for years. Flashbacks fill in the story, as the narrative takes us back to the Jewish district of a village in Eastern Romania during the 1930s. The author’s thorough historical research makes us feel as though we are there, experiencing the shifting political and military situation that makes victims of the villagers in the ruthless struggle between Nazism and Communism. By the time we get to the tense resolution, we feel as if we have personally witnessed the Holocaust, the Second World War and the birth of Israel. Because of the subject matter, some sections can be difficult to read. Others, however, lift the soul with hope. In the end we inevitably see that violence tends to go round in cycles. The seriousness of the themes nearly make you feel guilty for enjoying the adventure/thriller aspects.

Anita’s Homecoming (available October 2): A different sort of espionage thriller, this novel draws on Johansen’s own knowledge of his country’s recent history. Anita is a former member of the Resistance during Denmark’s occupation by the Germans. Now that the war is over, she is based in London and has become an agent for British intelligence. She returns to Copenhagen for what seems like a straightforward assignment, but she is not fully prepared for the duplicity in Danish post-war politics or the ghosts, living or otherwise, of her former comrades. The story is an entertaining page-turner, but it also provides a pretext for the author to make his own cynical comments about the state of Denmark during and after the war. As Anita’s situation becomes unexpectedly more dire, we find ourselves invested in her fate and her survival. In a particularly nice touch, her survival may hang on something as simple as a linguistic misunderstanding.

Nicola and the Child Correction Centre (available now): Johansen also writes for younger readers, and this magical adventure story exhibits plenty of the darkness we associate with Scandinavian literature. Young Nicola might have been oblivious to the fact that she lives in a dystopian society but for the fact that she inadvertently learns about the Child Correction Centre. Once she does, though, she cannot let go of the mystery, and her pursuit of it could well be the end of her. Even if it is, though, perhaps the end may only be the beginning. I defy any reader to figure out exactly where plucky Nicola’s nose for enigma-solving and putting wrong to right will lead her. Rest assured things will definitely not be all sweetness and light along the way.