Ron Base's Blog, page 8

Which Way to the Bathroom–And Other Tales From A Book Tour

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Depending on where I am, a good part of my day is spent telling people where the bathrooms are. Again, depending on the location, I also tell them where they can find the post office (next door to where I am standing).

I help elderly ladies to their cars, direct visitors to local restaurants (not my strong suit), and regularly provide a table where passersby can rest their purchases while they borrow my pen so they can fill out the addresses on the postcards they intend to mail at the post office which I then direct them to.

Oh, yes. And once in a while I sell a book .

The Sanibel Sunset Detective novels I write are set in and around Sanibel and Captiva, two barrier islands off the west coast of Florida hugely popular with visitors, particularly visitors from the American Midwest (I am certain Minnesota empties out in February).

Every year, once I have finished a new novel, I hit the road to promote it. Now in a bygone era, authors were escorted from town to town by attentive publicists to sit in hotel rooms entertaining the local press, appear on local TV and radio, and perhaps visit a bookstore or two to meet readers before moving on.

As a teenager I read accounts of the rigors of book tours described by famous authors like Pierre Berton and Margaret Atwood. As a young reporter I visited many hotel suites containing authors such as Irving Stone, Irving Wallace, Harold Robbins, Leon Uris, and Stephen King to name a few, everyone seated on a sofa sipping morning coffee and perhaps nibbling a sticky bun, at peace with the world, safe in the knowledge that they did not have to direct anyone to the bathroom.

Not to say that sort of traditional book tour doesn’t still happen, but most working authors—and I am certainly one of those—have to get out there, book in hand, plastering on a hopeful grin, ready to give ’em a little razzle dazzle in venues ranging from independent bookstores and farmer’s markets to airports and supermarkets, to—well, you name it and I’ll probably show up.

On the one hand, this is roll-up-your-sleeves, working-in-the-salt-mines bookselling. Conversely, it is also the best way in the world to meet readers, new and old. I have met hundreds if not thousands of people over the past three months at sixty-seven different book events.

Tim Sample the well-known humorist and TV personality (he used to do Postcards From Maine on CBS News Sunday Morning) actually bought a book..

Randy Wayne White, the bestselling literary icon around these parts, so famous that three local restaurants bear the name of his fictional hero, Doc Ford, stopped by to say he’d heard great things about the Sanibel Sunset Detective. He sounded pretty convincing.

Why Mike Pence, the vice president of the United States, even waved at me on his way to get a haircut next door to MacIntosh Books on Sanibel Island where I was doing a book signing. Alas, the veep didn’t buy a book. Maybe just as well.

I’m always amazed at the interesting people I meet. An assistant attorney general from Pennsylvania on Sanibel with her girlfriend who runs a trucking company; a French diplomat, recently posted to Washington; a brave mother on one last vacation with her daughter dying of brain cancer; a psychiatrist excited because she’d just finished writing a dissertation on Norma Bates of TV’s The Bates Motel; Warren who claimed to be the only Bedouin in Fort Myers, Florida, born in Saudi Arabia (his father was in the oil business), who ended up a devout Jehovah’s Witness.

Dorothy Jore reminded me of one of my favorite reader stories when we met again at Annette’s Book Nook on Fort Myers Beach. She and her husband, Jerry Dahlberg, were Chicago police officers on patrol together. She thought he was a good partner but no more than that until one day they confronted a wanted gun runner.

The guy was driving a car filled with guns. When they trapped him in an alley, he opened fire. Jerry leapt in front of Dorothy, taking the bullet intended for her, and then, despite being badly wounded, returning fire, killing the gun runner.

Dorothy stayed by Jerry’s side while he recovered in hospital. Sitting there with him hour after hour, she began to think that anyone who would risk his life for her might make a pretty good husband. Twenty-seven years later, they are still married.

None of these fascinating reader interactions would be possible sitting in a TV studio or a hotel room. Still, I’m always of two minds about the hard business of flogging books. There are moments when I do wonder what I am doing with my life.

Here I am in my late sixties lugging around a folding table, yanking books out of the trunk of my car, on my (increasingly sore) feet for hours (sitting doesn’t work for me) noting the truth of Leonard Cohen’s admonition about aching in the places where one used to play, trying not to look a fool when hour after hour no one pays the least bit of attention.

At these times, any ego boost that enthusiastic readers might have provided evaporates. I am constantly made humble by the passing multitudes who don’t seem the least bit interested in Sanibel Sunset Detective novels or their author.

Demons begin to crawl across the landscape of my memory, reminding me of all my shortcomings, my many failings in life, the finiteness of the time I have left on this earth, and the futility of what I am doing with that time.

Then, someone approaches, and the demons disappear. I slap on a welcoming smile. Another opportunity to win a new reader presents itself.  “Excuse me,” the new arrival says as I gird myself, preparing to tell about the endless delights contained in my novels, the page-turning excitement, the unforgettable characters. “Can you tell me where the restrooms are?”

Straight down to the back and then right through the double doors, answers the author, keeping his smile rigidly in place.

 

Welcome to the Dark Edge

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Dear Reader

An exciting new series of novellas and novels has just been launched that I want to tell you about. The series is titled The Dark Edge. The stories are a little sexier and a trifle edgier than we have previously published

The idea behind the series remains the same, however: to entertain you, the reader, keep you turning pages, and wondering what’s going to happen next.

To launch the series we have just published, as an eBook, The White Island. It’s a thriller, a mystery, a love story set against the backdrop of Ibiza, one of the world’s most exotic islands, located off the coast of Spain.

Here an international cast of shady characters gathers beneath the hot Mediterranean sun: a beautiful young woman being blackmailed; a multi-millionaire and his glamorous wife aboard a luxury yacht, on the run; a pair of quarreling CIA agents; an Iranian government official who may or may not be trying to buy parts for a nuclear device from the Russians; a crafty Mossad agent out to stop the sale.

I hope you’re intrigued enough to check out The White Island at Amazon. You can access the novella by clicking HERE. Or by clicking on the cover below.  If you prefer, The White Island soon will be available on Amazon in a print edition. I’ll be updating you as to its availability.

In the meantime, welcome to The White Island. It’s located in that mysterious place full of shadows and secrets known as The Dark Edge.

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SO YOU WANT TO WRITE A NOVEL…(And Who Doesn’t?)

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So you’re writing or thinking about writing a novel.

To put it mildly, you are not alone. The questions I’m asked most in the course of meeting hundreds of people promoting the Sanibel Sunset Detective mysteries have to do with the novel that appears to be bubbling in just about everyone.

Amazing. I would not have thought there were that many readers, let alone writers.

A great deal of this interest has to do with the revolution in technology and the new attitude it has produced. What used to be a highly restricted and difficult process has been democratized and opened up to everyone. Now you don’t have to interest a publisher in order to have your novel published. You can do it yourself—and hundreds, if not thousands, are doing just that, including large numbers of professional writers tired of banging their heads against the wall of traditional publishing.

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The rise of Amazon has certainly helped.  The scourge of traditional publishers, Amazon is the best thing that ever happened to authors. Now there exists a platform where everyone can sell their books to a worldwide audience. You get the same Amazon page to showcase your work as Stephen King or Nora Roberts. All you have to do is figure out how to sell your masterpiece, and Amazon will even help you do that.

What follows over the course of the next weeks and months is an attempt to address the questions and concerns I’ve heard expressed by fledgling authors. I should emphasize from the outset that these observations and suggestions are merely one writer’s point of view, drawn from sometimes painful personal publishing experiences.

I have been writing professionally since I was fifteen. Almost every day for the past five decades I have sat down to write something. I’ve written for newspapers and magazines. I’ve written scripts for television and movies. I’ve written nonfiction books and I’ve written novels.

Often I have been poorly paid, occasionally I have been extraordinarily well paid, and once in a while I haven’t been paid at all. None of it matters. Whatever the circumstances, I’ve just kept writing. It is what I do. It’s about the only thing I can do with any facility.

All along the fight has been to do it better, to keep learning, to keep trying to figure it out, not just by writing but also by talking to other writers, endeavoring (without great success I might add) to unlock their secrets. The writers include Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe, Peter Maas, Theodore H. White, Margaret Lawrence, Pierre Berton, David Halberstam, Irving Stone, Harold Robbins, Mickey Spillane, Irving Wallace, Jerzy Kosinski, Leon Uris, William Goldman. To name a few.

I don’t profess to know more than anyone else, and certainly I have experienced as much failure as success. But I have learned a few lessons along the way that might be helpful to someone starting out. The great thing about the creative process is that there really are no rules; if you can make it work, then it works. The mysteries of creation resist discovery with a handy set of instructions.

So, with all that said, let’s get started.

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Write!

I’m often asked how you write a novel and the answer is dauntingly simple:

You write it.

There is no way of getting around that reality. At some point you must sit down and start writing.

“Writing is work,” says Margaret Atwood. “It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you’re on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.”

The good news is that it has never been easier to get your words, if not on paper, onto a computer screen. When I started, back in the dark ages, I thumped away on my trusty manual typewriter. If you made a mistake or decided you had headed down the wrong path, then you had to start over again, an arduous, often frustrating process not helped much by deciding to write in long hand, the only option of great writers from Tolstoy to Dickens.

There is controversy over whether the personal computer helps or hinders the writing process—John le Carré, for example, still writes his novels in long hand—but for the novice faced with the task of composing thousands of words and afraid those words might not be the right ones, technology is a godsend. You can make mistakes to your heart’s content and then correct them again and again with the click of a mouse.

Make yourself write at least page a day. At the end of a year you will have 365 pages—a novel!

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Once you have completed your word dump, you can see what you have and then edit and rewrite at your leisure, armed with the satisfaction that at least you have produced something.

Whether to outline a novel first is the subject of much discussion. In the days before computers, I would have said yes, by all means; the outline saved a lot of aggravation and hair pulling when working on a typewriter. But nowadays your first draft dumped into the computer can serve as an outline.

However, I do write a few general notes more or less laying out the beginnings of a plot so that there is some indication as to the plot and where I plan to move it.

Having done that, I take the journey as first reader, creating characters and plot twists as I go along. The writing becomes an adventure, an expedition deep into the unknown—cushioned by the failsafe of understanding that whatever you write not only can be changed but probably will be.

When I finish that journey, i.e. completer the novel, and look back, I realize only one thing: that everything I started out with, I ended up changing.

When you understand this, you are on your way to becoming a writer.

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 Ron Base talks about writing a novel at Milton Public Library, Wednesday, Jan. 25,  7 p.m.

Admission is free.

Rogue One: Spinning On Bill Marshall’s Shoulders

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Bill Marshall, employing the look of skepticism he adopted whenever I put my arm around him…

Recovering from the shock of his death, the image that keeps reoccurring was the night—the very late night— Bill Marshall, movie producer, Toronto International Film Festival co-founder, and (much) larger-than-life rogue warrior, lifted me up, hefted me across his shoulders, and spun me around.

This occurred during the wilder and woolier early days of the film festival when such shenanigans were not uncommon after a few of us retreated to the festival’s hospitality suite for an after-hours drink, and you could end up getting tossed around by one of the founders.

[image error]I used to watch Bill, somewhat enviously I must admit, holding court at what was then Club 22—the two-two, as the regulars called it—a darkened, somewhat elegant watering hole nestled inside Toronto’s Windsor Arms Hotel.

It was the place to see and be seen in the midst of the fleeting glitz of what was dubbed Hollywood North, when everyone seemed to be coming to Canada to make a movie. You could find Donald Sutherland at one of the tables, James Coburn huddled at another, Peter Fonda not far away.

But almost always you could find Bill Marshall at his corner banquette adjacent to the bar, seeming to dominate the room. He usually was seated with his friend Henk Van der Kolk, the writer Tom Hedley, and, on occasion, the lawyer, Dusty Cohl.

Back then he was known as a movie producer. He’d actually made a film people heard of, Outrageous, and as a result he seemed to be everywhere, momentarily the town’s highest profile producer.

There was something magnetic about him that drew everyone. The movers and the shakers, not to mention the stars, all stopped by Bill’s table for a handshake and a few wryly delivered words.

Bill often played with the establishment—he orchestrated three mayoral campaigns, and worked at city hall—but there was always an outlaw quality about him, a sense that he was outside it all, barely containing his disdain for the games the adults played, particularly when it came to the arcane and mostly impenetrable weirdness involved in the making of movies.

Those outlaw qualities were shared, at least to some extent, by his pals Henk and Dusty. They were all rogues in their way. But Bill was Rogue One.

Maybe these characters could get a movie made; it was a business of crazies after all. But no one in their right mind was ever going to let them loose to do something like start a film festival. Who would ever support a ridiculous idea like that?

Years later, after the festival was a well-established part of the Toronto cultural scene, and was on its way to becoming an international phenomenon, I would look at Bill and Henk and Dusty—all of whom were friends at that point—and shake my head considering the sheer audacity of what the rogues had pulled off.

But pull it off they did, and today the fact that they succeeded so well is part of much-repeated local lore. Bill took it all in stride, never getting too ruffled, viewing the landscape around him with a skeptical eye and a gruff, barely-contained sarcasm.

He never stopped working the room, hustling the next wildly envisioned dream. I would encounter him in the darnedest places. Jogging along Santa Monica Boulevard one morning when I was living in Los Angeles, there was Bill, sauntering toward me. I expressed surprise at seeing him; he acted as if the two of us had run into each other yesterday. Of course he was living in L.A. Where else would he be? Come to lunch. We can talk.

\When I drove to the address he had given me, I thought there was a mistake. Most of the Canadians I knew who had arrived in Los Angeles to reinvent themselves—myself included—occupied apartments, usually over the hill in the San Fernando Valley.

Not Bill Marshall.

Bill was holed up in the newcomer’s fantasy of Hollywood, a mansion in Beverly Hills, complete with a lake-size swimming pool Esther Williams would be at home in, featuring a pair of marble lions resting at either end. One half expected Jay Gatsby or Monroe Stahr from The Last Tycoon to stroll out and ask you if you’d like a drink before lunch.

Instead it was Bill pouring the wine and leading me into a vast dining room where he presided at the head of a long table. What he was doing in La La Land is anyone’s guess. Probably trying to make movies. Certainly that’s what we talked about into the afternoon. But then there was always this enigmatic quality to Bill, the holding of cards close to his chest, never giving too much away.

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Out of the palm of his hand…

Years later, Bill and I more or less reconnected and I got to know his wife Sari Ruda. Bill still had not stopped. There was talk of producing more movies, and, oh yes, a film festival in the Niagara-on-the-Lake region that would combine film with the fine wines and dining to be found at the local wineries.

I couldn’t help thinking to myself, Yeah, sure, but what are the chances of that ever happening? I should have known better. The next thing, I was arriving at a party launching the Niagara Integrated Film Festival. The event was held in a historic old house outside of town, the rooms filled with the local establishment types Bill always seemed to be able to draw in.

He looked frail, but as soon as Sari introduced him, Bill had the crowd in the palm of his hand. Bill never gave a speech as such, he talked to a crowd, reasonable, witty, self-deprecating conversation that you might be able to resist, but could never help but admire.

The guests that night couldn’t resist. The Niagara Integrated Film Festival became a reality. One of the last times I saw Bill was on a sparkling summer evening at the Trius Winery. The festival was honoring the Italian actress Claudia Cardinale, an outdoor event that attracted the usual dignitaries, including the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario.

Bill looked even frailer but once again rallied to chat up his audience, in his element but somehow removed from it at the same time. Listening to him, I marveled all over again at his perseverance, his unwillingness to give up, his quiet belief that the next hand was the winning hand, all he had to do was talk a few people around to his way of thinking.

So much had changed since the days when I used to glance enviously at that corner where Bill Marshall held court. There is no more Club 22, the hospitality suite at the film festival long ago closed down, and the festival itself has become so big and well-oiled that everyone involved pretty much behaves themselves.

But watching Bill do his thing at the Niagara Film Festival, he remained for me a touchstone of sorts, a reminder of earlier wilder days when, late at night, a fellow could get spun around on the shoulders of a delightful rogue, and life would go on forever.

Now the rogue is gone, his brightness vanished. The lights are dimmer.

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HAPPY NEW YEAR!

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(Celebrity) Life Lessons from Carrie Fisher

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Princess Leia, aka the actress Carrie Fisher, was living in an apartment on Upper West Side New York when I came knocking.

This was not long after the Star Wars phenomenon had burst upon the world, catapulting Fisher into overnight stardom.

[image error]George Lucas’s game-changing science fiction adventure featured Carrie in flowing white robes with hair done in funny-looking buns. Cute but weird. For me, she stood out more vividly in Shampoo, her first film appearance as Lee Grant’s precocious, smart-mouthed daughter seduced by Warren Beatty.

The young woman who answered the door was closer to that teenager than she was to Princess Leia—fresh-faced, knee-high-to-a-grasshopper cute, and entirely delightful.

The apartment she shared with actress Teri Garr (who had appeared in Young Frankenstein and Close Encounters of the Third Kind) was spare, the sort of digs, it struck me, inhabited by two singles named Carrie and Teri who had a lot more on their minds than home decorating.

We talked through the afternoon—Teri Garr sticking her head in every so often—a great deal of conversation around the unexpected celebrity fallout from Star Wars. Carrie chuckled about how she now found it difficult to walk down a Manhattan street without being swarmed by little girls wanting to meet Princess Leia.

She seemed to handle her sudden fame with a combination of amazement and wry good humor. After all, as she pointed out, she was no stranger to fame, being the daughter of singer Eddie Fisher and movie icon Debbie Reynolds, performing on stage with her mother at the age of fifteen.

She remained close to her mom, she said, but picked her words much more carefully when it came to the subject of her father who notoriously had left America’s sweetheart in order to marry Elizabeth Taylor. She didn’t see much of Eddie, although she said she got along fine with Elizabeth Taylor.

As the afternoon lengthened into evening, I finally left the apartment on something of a high, having talked to a warm, highly intelligent, attractive young woman with the world at her feet, in control of her destiny.

My encounter with Carrie should have ended there. But it didn’t. I was writing about her for Cosmopolitan magazine, then under the iron hand of a very demanding Helen Gurley Brown. Ms. Brown, for whatever reason, decided she did not like the piece I turned in. Rewrites were ordered.

I sheepishly phoned Carrie and told her I needed more time. That was fine, she said cheerfully. We talked for another hour or so. There are worse ordeals in life, I decided, than spending more time with Carrie Fisher.

I rewrote the piece and submitted it. Still not good enough. Hugely embarrassed, I called her yet again. This time I got Teri Garr. Carrie was out, but she would call me back. Sure enough, that evening, Carrie was on the phone.

“Look, I’m really sorry about this,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “This is great. It’s like therapy.”

We talked some more, and then she spoke with my daughter Erin, one of those little girls who was enthralled with Princess Leia and thrilled to be actually talking to her. As we ended the call, she joked that she felt like she was becoming part of the family. I was beginning to feel the same way.

Finally, Cosmopolitan was happy enough with the piece to publish it, and I never again spoke to Carrie. However, I did see her one more time, from a distance, dancing on a stage with her then-husband Paul Simon at the end of a Simon and Garfunkel reunion concert.

Watching her, I remembered our interviews with great pleasure and thought again about her charmed life, now married to one of the world’s great singer-songwriters.

How wrong I was.

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The marriage to Simon lasted less than a year and the actress I thought I’d gotten to know so well, I did not know at all.

Over the years, Carrie’s battles with cocaine addiction, bipolar disorder, her difficulties with celebrity and being part of a celebrity family were well-chronicled by the lady herself in books, a movie (Postcards from the Edge), and a one-woman stage show (Wishful Drinking).

She grew adept at transforming the mess of her life into art infused with irony and wit, a sad, bittersweet saga so far removed from the young woman I encountered in that West Side apartment another lifetime ago, that I wondered at the depths of my gullibility.

Was the woman who appeared to have such control of her life and celebrity snorting coke and falling apart as soon as I left? During the time I talked to Carrie, she later admitted she was loading up on drugs like Percodan and LSD. Instead of someone in control of her life, I was actually present as she lost that control.

Carrie Fisher taught me a valuable lesson about the pitfalls of celebrity journalism; the person you are interviewing is unlikely to be that person at all. You are invariably getting a performance of sorts, the put-you-best-foot forward view that doesn’t have much to do with reality.

Still, I adored the version of Carrie Fisher I got way back then, the warm-hearted, generous, funny kid who took the time to help a writer in trouble, and who was so kind to my daughter. When I heard of her death the other day, that’s the version I clung to.

To hell with everything else.

MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM AN OLD FRIEND…

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GIVE ‘HEART’ FOR CHRISTMAS…

Heart of the Sanibel Sunset Detective is available by clicking

HERE

Video: The Making of Heart of the Sanibel Sunset Detective

Inspired by a song and its legendary lyricist, driven by images he can’t quite shake, a writer travels from Florida to Savannah to Washington, D.C. in search of his next novel…

 

Undiscovered Spain: If Only the Shoes Fit

There are more shoe stores in Spain than there are anywhere in the known world. There doesn’t seem to be any explanation for this. But someone is selling shoes just about everywhere you travel. Street after street full of shoe stores, sometimes two or three clustered together on a single block.

None of the shoes in these shoe stores fit me. My feet, sadly, are too big for Spain.

However, the shoes in Spain fit my wife, Kathy, all too well. She was in shoe heaven. I endured a lot of attractive shop clerks who looked at my feet, shook their heads, and choked back what I took to be a derisive snicker.

Spain and its many, many shoe stores remain curiously beneath the tourist radar, although, according to the New York Times, that’s beginning to change: by the end of 2016 more than seventy-six million visitors looking for a safe, terrorist-free environment will have visited.

The food here is better than just about anywhere else in Europe, even better—and this is a kind of heresy coming from an unrepentant Paris lover—than in France. The gazpacho is the best a certain gastronomically-challenged patron has ever tasted; one could live on the octopus salad.

At Botin, considered by the Guinness Book of Records to be the world’s oldest restaurant (founded in 1725), tour groups crowding the street in front, you enter into an austere, dark-wood interior where the brusque maître d’ directs you through the kitchen and into a back room for a superb lunch: a mixed fish casserole for the gastronomically-challenged; grilled prawns for our resident foodie.

What’s more, the price of everything–shoes, food, accommodation, clothing–is often less than half of what it is just about anywhere else in Europe. After the soaring costs of London and Paris, a visitor is in a mild state of sticker shock. You keep looking at restaurant bills thinking that a mistake has been made. It hasn’t.

Of course, the view of Spain is the tourist’s narrow view, the romantic Spain of old, old stones, of a twisting labyrinth of cobblestone streets leading inevitably to cathedrals and palaces—Seville’s Cathedral of Saint Mary of the See, the third largest church in the world; the Royal Palace in Madrid, a vaulted complex of such tasteless gilt-edged overindulgence as to leave one breathless; the fabled Alhambra, combination Moorish-Christian palace and grim fortress brooding down on—and dominating—Granada; the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Snows, mounted atop the island of Ibiza.

On and on it goes—just when you are certain the Spanish can’t outdo themselves architecturally any further, you stumble upon Seville’s Plaza de España , built to celebrate the 1929 World’s Fair, an ostentatiously elegant clash of art deco and Moorish styles one local called “The most beautiful place in the world.”

Tourists overwhelm these monuments to the power and religion that have dominated Spanish history—better order your tickets in advance for the Alhambra, otherwise you’re not going to get in.

No sign of the peasants among the grand stones. They don’t write the history and their hovels don’t survive, so it is the kings and cardinals who endure and are remembered. In this modern, democratic time we line up in droves to marvel at testaments to a royal and religious world that effectively shut out any notion of the common man.

History comes via a series of guides escorting the hordes through ancient city centers, attempting, usually with some success, to illuminate a blur of competing cultures and religions, all taking turns invading across the Iberian Peninsula.

The Phoenicians arrived more or less first, people of the Fertile Crescent in what is now Israel, Jordan and Syria, then the Romans, who were replaced for five hundred years by the Moors of North Africa. They, in turn, were finally defeated by the Christians—the last sultan gave up Granada to King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella in 1492, the same year Columbus, or Cristóbal Colón as he is known here, set sail for India and instead bumped into the New World. Loathe to admit his mistake, Columbus called the inhabitants Indios or Indians.

The Christians, depending on their mood, either obliterated any sign of the Muslim presence—in Valencia they destroyed the great mosque and replaced it with their own cathedral—or learned to adapt to it, most prominently at the Alhambra in Granada and the Alcazar in Seville.

For a time, the Christians understood that they could learn much from the Muslims, and that Islam and Christianity weren’t all that far apart when all was said and prayed for, so they simply pinned a few Christian symbols onto the existing Muslim architecture and no one seemed to mind.

The one part of Spanish history that the guides and the guidebooks do not much discuss is the Spanish Civil War between 1937 and 1939. Romanticized in North America thanks to the likes of Hemingway, the war is barely mentioned in the country that was ripped apart by it and resulted in nearly four decades of dictatorship under Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

“That is still an open wound,” said Aitor, a passionate student of history who introduced us to his native Seville. “It’s something the Spanish people don’t like to talk about.”

The lingering effects of the civil war are subtle but still present. For example, all those statutes you see around Madrid? Replicas, for the most part. The original bronzes, amazingly, were all melted down for ammunition during the war.

And one has only to wander into the city’s Reina Sofia museum for a view of Guernica, Picasso’s black and gray masterpiece depicting the bombing of the Spanish town by German planes aligned with the Nationalist forces of General Franco, to be reminded of the war’s atrocities.

Franco died in 1975 and Spain has been a democracy ever since, although lately there had not been a national government. As we departed, the warring opposition parties finally reached a compromise and formed a government amid howls of outrage and protests outside Madrid’s Palacio des las Cortes, the house of parliament known locally as the Pickpocket’s Temple.

Otherwise, no one seemed particularly concerned by the lack of a governing body. Most Spaniards thought the country worked better without a government. Services kept functioning, everyone somehow got paid, the streets of the major cities were clean, unemployment fell, and the previously floundering economy grew at a healthy three per cent.

On a perfect evening in Madrid, one sits in the city’s central square, the Plaza Mayor, teeming with the young and the exuberant, concluding that for all Spain’s dark history, its recent economic woes, this is a vibrant, energetic country where everyone is out on the street, where no one seems to go too far before settling into an outdoor café or restaurant for tapas or paella or pulpo (octopus to you foreigners), accompanied by a glass of Agua de Valencia—a popular cocktail combining cava (champagne) orange juice, vodka, and gin. “It doesn’t taste like liquor,” someone pointed out. “Until you try to stand up.”

You marvel again at the ease of Spain, its rich culture, the intoxicating rhythms that draw you in effortlessly, so much to enjoy here.

If only the shoes fit.