Origin of the Gideon Marshall Mystery Series

The Gideon Marshall Mystery Series – John Janovy, Jr.

This series started during one of our Friday Coffee sessions in the fall of 2012, when Johnica Morrow, a new parasitology grad in Karl Reinhard’s archeoparasitology lab, announced she was going to do National Novel Writing Month and generate a zombie apocalypse novel to pay for grad school. I had never heard of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), an international, web-based program to encourage writing and provide a forum for writers from all over the world. The kicker was that in order to “win” the annual contest with oneself, you had to generate a 50,000 word novel within the month of November; 30 days, averaging 1667 words, which amounts to about 5 or 6 double-spaced pages, every day for the month. So, I said to myself, if a grad student can do that, so can I. The first four came pretty easily, as described below; as of this date (June, 2017), I’m about 1/3 to 1/2 finished with the first draft of the fifth one, so obviously it’s a little more complicated than were the first four.

The first of these NaNoWriMo novels, Be Careful, Dr. Renner, was easy, mainly because I’d been thinking about how workplace stress can be such a powerful negative influence on one’s life, having witnessed it happening first-hand when the University of Nebraska’s School of Biological Sciences was formed, back in 1973, by the merger of three departments. The internal politics were vicious; I’m completely convinced that one of my colleagues died early because of this stress, and I witnessed purges, tenure denials, and degrading behavior on almost a daily basis. So as a stage for this novel, I made up a small, liberal arts, college, gave it massive amounts of endowment, sent the best students from all over the world to this place, and stuck it in rural Iowa. I also populated it with a bunch of people, some of whom would deserve everything that they ended up getting. To do the fourth one, The Weatherford Trial, I spent two months sitting in on court cases in Lancaster County District Court studying how the legal system works at that level.

The next three of these NaNoWriMo projects built on the first, so that they actually form a temporal series. The one item that ties them all together is the theoretical research of a reclusive faculty member who gets murdered at the start of the second book. This research is reputed to provide certain individuals with enormous power; think nuclear weapons level power, although from a geological perspective. Each of these books was finished in first draft during the 30 days in November, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015. They all required about another four to six months to flesh out and clean up. My agent declined to handle them as traditional submissions to major publishing houses (evidently they didn’t scream $$$$ loudly enough), but like many large agencies, this one had started an e-book program and handled them that way, using a New York firm to promote the digital editions. I subsequently did the paperback editions myself through amazon’s createspace.com self-publishing web site. Covers for the first two were designed by a gentleman in London; I did the last two covers myself.

Gideon Marshall himself is modeled loosely after my father, who was a petroleum geologist in Oklahoma. The petroleum industry is involved in all of these books, in a related way. You may think that a small college in Iowa is not a legitimate vehicle for a set of mysteries involving the petroleum industry, but remember that if you have enough money, you can buy an entire college, and intellectual property, unlike big machines, can be hidden away anywhere, ideally in a most unlikely place. You may recognize some of the other characters, but that’s only because their types are so common in academia and in big business. The fifth in this series is taking longer for a variety of reasons, but mainly because it involves serious white-collar crime connected to the murder that happens in The Stitcher File, and the literary challenge is quite a bit greater than it was in the first four books.

Thanks for picking these up. Feel free to recommend them to (or buy them for) your friends!!

Check my web site for the quick links.

JJ

Excerpt from THE EARTHQUAKE LADY

In response to some Facebook discussion of Ottawa, Kansas, here is an excerpt from one of the Gideon Marshall Mysteries, the third one, entitled THE EARTHQUAKE LADY. This scene takes place in a cemetery near Ottawa, KS:

We stand there in silence, both studying the arrangement of headstones and both, I’m sure, imagining what happened to the father and grandfather, why they’re not with the rest of the Stitcher line, and what the maternal side of this family might be able to tell us from the grave. At least those are my thoughts. I know my wife well enough to know that she’s also assembling not only a plausible history, but also a “to do” list for when we get home. That list is likely to have nothing to do with any investigation, especially of a murder, but plenty to do with the satisfaction of her own curiosity. I’m guessing that when she gets into the post-Civil War history of Kansas and Missouri, she’ll find some of the most brutal violence on record, beginning with the Quantrill Raiders and their attack on Lawrence. I hear a voice.

“What in the hell are you people doing?”

I turn and recognize Naomi Stitcher. She evidently is on foot because we’d heard no car and there is none parked within sight.

“Get away from my sister’s grave.”

Mykala starts to say something then decides to stay silent, just observing what might happen in the next few minutes.

“I said get away from my sister’s grave.”

Her tone is flat, business-like. She’s shivering a little bit; I can’t tell if it’s from the morning chill or the fact that we’re here.

 “You must be a relative,” says Mykala. I now remember that the only time either of us had encountered Rebecca’s sister Naomi was when I was in the funeral home, so Mykala has never seen this woman.

“How many times do I have to tell you to get away from my sister’s grave?”

Now I’m wondering if Naomi is carrying a concealed weapon. In a fit of good judgment, I don’t ask.

“I’m Mykala Marshall.” My wife introduces herself. “We’re just paying our respects to these individuals.” She gestures toward the headstones. “So if you’re a relative, can you tell us why there are no grandfathers or fathers here?”

Naomi Stitcher responds to Mykala’s question by opening her coat, reaching inside, pulling out a black pistol that looks exactly like one of those still packed in the boxes in the back seat of my truck a hundred yards away, and working the slide to load a round. She holds the weapon down at her side, pointing at the ground.

“Now get away from my sister’s grave.”

We turn and walk back to the truck. As I start the engine, I look back. Naomi Stitcher is kneeling on her sister’s grave, her head in her hands. It’s another fifty miles down I-35, through the Flint Hills, before either of us speaks.

“Do you believe she would have shot us?” asks Mykala.

“Through the left eye, with a large caliber pistol,” I answer.

“Gideon, do you think we should get those guns out of the boxes?”

“And do what with them?”

A contribution for Mothers' Day, 2017

For Mothers’ Day, 2017: excerpts from BERNICE AND JOHN: FINALLY MEETING YOUR PARENTS WHO DIED A LONG TIME AGO.

At the age of about two and a half, I had a question for my mother, a question that went un-answered except in a way that I now recognize as typical behavior of Lillian Bernice Locke Janovy, a woman who could easily see right through anyone and who seemed to carry a deep and cosmopolitan understanding of the world far beyond our immediate surroundings, no matter where those surroundings were located. The question itself was obviously one picked up from a stranger, although at that age, and in that particular neighborhood, I doubt if I would have been allowed to stray very far from home, and especially not so far as to encounter strangers driving by asking for directions.

My mother could have answered this question easily and gone on about whatever young housewife duties she was performing at the time, but she didn’t. Instead, she set into motion a chain of events that would shape the lives of her husband, her son, and her as yet unborn, perhaps even unplanned, daughter. My question was a simple one:

“Dis whar Nat Terrio lib?”

She must have looked at me with her special combination of curiosity and judgment that I saw daily, once I grew old enough to recognize it for what it was, and thought “no, Johnny, this is not where Nat Terrio lives; this is where we live.” I don’t know what she actually said to me at the time, but shortly afterwards she told my father “let’s get the hell out of here.” I was not to grow up in Louisiana speaking Cajun.

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Suddenly, it seems, in this compression of memory and history, Bernice Janovy, crying almost uncontrollably during the radio broadcast of a nuclear weapon dropped on Nagasaki, and voting for Adlai Stephenson regardless of the hole in his shoe, makes sense. And just as suddenly, I now understand that her reaction to my question was simply one example of a cultural clash. Hidden away in Houma and preserved only by the telling, it was a tiny, personal, inconsequential event, but nevertheless a model for other events that would send the entire planet into convulsion by the beginning of the third millennium. Cajuns were “the other” just as surely as Japanese were then, and to many of my fellow Americans Muslims are now, and I was not to be one.

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No matter where the site, my father posed her, or—a more likely explanation—she arranged herself, in a stately, dignified, but interesting, way. So there she sits on a rock, a 19-year old newlywed on the side of a dark slope somewhere in the vicinity of Palo Dura Canyon, with two strange men in the background. These men must be geologists, if not by profession then at heart, for they are bent over in the near distance up the hill, collecting rocks, their rear ends facing the camera. This picture thus shows a young lady maintaining her elegance even in the company of asses. It would be nice to know how she did it because there are plenty of times today when I think that in September of 1935 she’d solved a pervasive, if not a truly monumental, problem for young women of all ages and all times.

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Aside from birth and death certificates, and public school report cards, the only other written record of my mother’s time on Earth is her college transcript. Years after my sister Teresa and I left home, Lillian Bernice decided to go to college, commuting to what is now University of Central Oklahoma to major in English, knowing full well she’d never live long enough to graduate. She took courses in history and literature until her cancer advanced to such a stage that she was mostly bedridden. After that, she read, again mostly history and literature, until—at the age of 46, a month before her 47^th birthday—she could no longer lift a book. Nobody ever asked my mother about her childhood, her public school experiences, how she met her husband, what she did with her time before her children were born, or what she thought of her own parents. My maternal grandfather was gone by the time I was born, supposedly dead of pneumonia, but there was never any particular sadness in any discussion of Edgar Locke and my maternal grandmother never talked about him. He may have been a rather ornery person; we all seem to have such grown-up brats in our family, and one of my mother’s sisters certainly married one.

BERNICE AND JOHN is available on all e-readers.

Comments on the keynote speech to Alpha Chi Honor Society.

Speech at Louisville – John Janovy, Jr.

Last fall I was invited to give the keynote address at the national Alpha Chi convention in Louisville, Kentucky. Alpha Chi is a national honors organization; most of the chapters are at smaller colleges and universities; students in the top 10% of their class are eligible for membership. The invitation was issued by Bill Clemente, an English professor at Peru State College, who is vice-president of the national council. The convention was held last week, April 6-9; attendance was maybe five or six hundred, including students and faculty members. The invitation to be their keynote speaker was a major honor. The title of that talk was, of course, “Life Lessons from a Parasite.”

The title was chosen mainly because the Alpha Chi theme is Transcending Boundaries, and of the things that parasites do well, at least as species, it’s to transcend boundaries, particularly ecological ones. Thus the life cycle of a typical trematode is wonderful material to use metaphorically, and of course I chose Posthodiplostomum minimum as my subject. This trematode lives as an adult in fish-eating birds; eggs are shed and first stage larvae develop in snails; cercariae emerge from snails, penetrate small fish, and develop into infective stages. These larvae end up in various tissues, including the eyes. Prevalence varies over the years, depending on how the South Platte River flows, which in turn is based on Rocky Mountain snowpack.

You can see immediately where this narrative is going. A parasite that infects the eyes influences how the host sees the world. A parasite whose prevalence in fish depends on Rocky Mountain snowpack is a parasite whose life is controlled, in part, by events that are distant in time and space. These kinds of relationships are easy to turn into metaphors. For example, we might ask the question: what do the following items have in common?

Zika virus, Ebola virus, influenza, HIV, Cryptosporidium parvum, MRSA, mumps, measles, tuberculosis, Dengue, Giardia intestinalis, West Nile virus, cholera, Cyclospora cyatenensis, SARS, MERS, Lyme borreliosis, poliovirus.

The answer is pretty obvious, namely, that they move through populations by way of various mechanisms; some folks get infected; others are shielded or immune; and everyone, especially people in positions of power and responsibility, needs to understand both the mechanisms by which these agents move through populations and the consequences of such movement. We could easily, of course, ask the same question about the following items:

Snapchat, rumors, fake news, smart phones, money, handguns, rap music, selfies, Pokémon Go, torn jeans, Middle Eastern names, “immigrant,” plastic water bottles, “LGBTQ,” “abortion,” recipes, bad ideas, lettuce and broccoli, car parts.

Again, the answer is pretty obvious, namely, that they move through populations by way of various mechanisms; some folks acquire or accept them; others are shielded from them, or reject them; and everyone, especially people in positions of power and responsibility, needs to understand both the mechanisms by which these agents move through populations and the consequences of such movement. Furthermore, some are only words (LGBTQ, immigration, abortion) that elicit strong responses in people, others provide power (money, guns), and still others enter our personal realms by way of the media and because of distant events over which we have little or no control (Middle Eastern names).

At some point toward the end of this talk I used the term “divisiveness” as an example of a meme that had taken on significant power in recent decades. In other words, it is an entity that is moving through our population, producing reactions, depending on the prior exposure of the recipient. During the question and comment session that followed, two students made comments that I thought were truly profound.

One student indicated that I had characterized the meme “divisiveness” as negative, whereas in the past, it had been a driving force for people to participate in the political process, and indeed to effect change. I agreed with her completely. The other student asked whether I thought that divisiveness could function as a vector, carrying along other memes, or enhancing the extent to which those carried-along memes were accepted or rejected. I had to not only agree completely with this student, but it seemed to me that his idea might be a great one for a senior thesis in communications or journalism.