Terry Irving's Blog, page 43

SNEAK PEEK - First Chapter of Courier

Chapter 1

Tuesday 12/19/1972

It felt like the motorcycle had become a part of his body—a
part that made him whole. The back wheel of the BMW R50/2 had started to lose traction
on the crusted ice—ice that hung around for months in the shadowed parts of the
alley where the sun never reached. It was spinning now and drifting left, the
back end approaching a ninety-degree angle to the front, but Rick Putnam
realized with a bit of surprise that he wasn't concerned.

He saw the patch of dry concrete coming up and blipped the
throttle just a bit as he crossed it. Dropping his weight back on the bench
seat made the rear wheel grab on the concrete and pop back into alignment. It
was all reflex action—as automatic as walking down the sidewalk.

At the end of the alley, he flicked his eyes to the right,
saw a space in the traffic, downshifted, and slammed across the sidewalk. Entering
19th Street, he locked the rear wheel, threw his weight to break the big bike
to the right, and skidded smoothly into the moving line of cars. He heard the
screech of brakes, and an angry horn went off behind him, but the bike was
already picking up speed, flicking past the two- and three-story brick row
houses.

He liked Washington. It was as if the city had exploded
during World War 2 and then stopped, exhausted from the effort. The town houses
were low and usually a bit crooked, the brick painted every color imaginable,
and the stores, restaurants, and bars on the first floors varied and eccentric.

The relatively few large office buildings stood out like
Stalinist mistakes—square and featureless, built to the exact millimeter of the
height limitations. Alleys cut through the center of most blocks, often just cobblestones
or a bumpy mixture of asphalt and concrete patches.

A century ago, these alleys had held a entire separate city
of poor whites and freed slaves. Rick had learned that from the same rider
who’d showed him that, to a courier, they were the secret to the city, a way to
evade traffic lights and bypass commuters. The alleys may not have held a
separate city these days but they were still more than just urban driveways. Hidden
from sight were bars, restaurants, nightclubs, and little food stores—a Washington
that tourists would never see.

He took the right onto K Street and all thoughts of the city­—and
everything else—were lost in the crystalline concentration of the dance.

***

15 miles ahead of the courier, a specialist in the
restoration of silence began his latest assignment.

In a quiet Virginia suburb, his black Chevy Impala was parked
against the curb on Fairfield Street some fifty feet from where Fairfield met
Fairmount in a T intersection. Taking off his hat to lower his profile, he sat
perfectly still and watched the single-story brick Colonial straight ahead of
him—it’s perfectly white shutters and clipped shrubbery indicating an a precise,
even obsessive, owner . A white AMC Jeep Wagoneer with a strip of fake wood running
down the side sat at the curb, partially blocking his view of the lawn but
still revealing a wooden Santa and wicker reindeer.  

Looking through the Wagoneer's windows, he could see large, heavy-looking
equipment cases that had clearly been pulled from the Jeep's cargo area. One
case was open, revealing shiny metal rods and bits of colored cellophane. He
assumed it was lighting gear for the television crew now inside the house. They
were probably filming their interview and almost certainly did not know they were
being observed.

He scanned the street in front of him, then, without moving
his head, methodically checked behind him in the rearview mirror. Catching a
glimpse of himself—something unusual since he never sought out mirrors—his
startling blue eyes under deep brows stared back. Women might find them
mesmerizing, but he regretted how they made him so easy to remember. Usually he
wore dark sunglasses, but in today's gray afternoon light, sunglasses might
result in one of those curious second looks that occasionally proved so
inconvenient.

He had spent many years making sure he wasn't neither noticed
nor remembered. His name—which a long time ago had been Ed Jarvis—had faded
under a succession of false identities, leaving him defined by his occupation:
an operative, an agent, a useful tool to get things done, a restorer of
silence. Stroking his mustache down, making it just a bit less noticeable, he
resumed his watch.

Fairfield Street was tree-lined, quiet. No one was walking a dog
or scraping the last bits of ice off their driveways. It had begun to warm in
the past few days, and there wasn’t much ice left anyway. That was good; he’d
seen enough ice for a lifetime. When he thought about it, which was far too
often, he could feel the searing cold of a Korean winter still sleeping deep
inside him.

His careful survey of went on for a full fifteen minutes. Nothing
set off his internal alarms. He got out of the car, took a beige parka from the
backseat, and put it on over his gray suit. Then he began to walk down
Fairfield Street, away from the T intersection. There were no sidewalks, so he
walked in the road— just far enough away from the curb to stay out of the
puddles of snowmelt. Keeping a steady pace gave him the appearance of a man out
for a little exercise to break up an afternoon at home.

He made three left turns, circling the block, and approached
the Colonial from the opposite direction, his deliberate pace giving him time
to check that no one was in any of the backyards.  Without changing his pace, he walked past the
left side of the Wagoneer, reaching down slightly and placing a small box into
the top of both wheel wells. He could hear the faint chunks as their magnets pulled them tight against the metal.

He continued back to his car, feeling confident that—even if
anyone were watching—no one would have noticed such a slight change in his
stride. Back in his car, he sat for a long moment to be certain that no one had
appeared on the street or come to look out any nearby windows. Then he put the
car in Drive.

Moving at a smooth, unhurried speed, he turned to the left on
Fairmount, away from the house, and made three right turns to circle around the
block behind the house. Now, he could be sure that there were no other
surveillance teams watching the Colonial. He didn’t think any other team—even
from the FBI or CIA— would be a problem but it always nice to know that he
could work free of distractions.

He came slowly down Fairmount from the same direction he had
just approached on foot and stopped as soon as he had a good view of the
Wagoneer. He was safely hidden behind a Dodge station wagon and, after looking
up, he reversed a couple of feet into the deep shade of an oak tree—he knew the
shadows would only deepen as the short December day waned.

Then he sat and waited.

Waited to do his work.

To stop the voices.

To restore silence.

To kill.

***

The left lane was clear, and Rick came up through the gears,
hearing the solid ka-chunk each time
the transmission engaged. The BMW might not be slick, but it was steady,
dependable, and fast enough if you gave the engine the time and torque to reach
its full power. It didn't have a tachometer, so he listened to the exhaust
sound and shifted a couple of seconds after the engine's normal throaty putter rose
to a shout.

By the time he hit the elevated freeway that cut past
Georgetown, he was in top gear and running fast. The wide handlebars felt solid
and secure under his thick gloves. Even the winter wind that was numbing his
face and slicing through the zipper of his leather jacket felt good—a sharp,
cold bite after the steam of the overheated news bureau.

That would change in just a few miles, the zipper stream
becoming a shard of ice impaling his heart, his face stiffening, hands cramping
into claws, only his eyes behind the heavy glasses safe from the wind's sharp
whip.

There were cars lined up at M Street, but hell, why ride a
motorcycle if you couldn't dance? He kicked down to second, slid between cars
on the centerline, cut in front of a Dodge waiting patiently for the light to
turn, and swung up onto Key Bridge.

Halfway across the Potomac River, he was back in top gear,
and he cut the turn hard when he reached the Virginia side—almost grinding the
big side-mounted cylinder on the asphalt—and let the bike fly down the entrance
ramp to the GW Parkway.

Traffic clotted the parkway—commuters and, undoubtedly,
police cars up ahead. None of that mattered. He was dancing now, carving
graceful curves right down the centerline in top gear with the throttle nailed.
Cars flashed by on both sides as he wove between them.

He couldn't look at the speedometer, couldn't take his eyes
off the road, couldn't spare a second of concentration from the delicate ballet
of shifting weight, tire grip, and wide-open throttle, rejoicing in each deep
dip into a turn and the swooping acceleration coming out.

He jolted back to reality when the exit to Chain Bridge Road
came up on the right. Unable to bleed off enough speed before the exit, he took
the curve way too fast, jamming the bike down on its side, twisting the
handgrips against the turn—fighting to keep his wheels from drifting into the
treacherous gravel on the outside. He knew that if he touched the brakes, the
tires would lose all adhesion and fly out from under him.

He kept his eyes looking straight ahead—searching for the end
of the turn—and the BMW held like it was locked on rails as it carved a perfect
line through the curve. The back end had just begun to drift slightly when he
spotted the stop sign and straightened up. Now he could use the brakes and he quickly
wrestled the bike under control.

As he stopped, he felt the strange upward lift that the
old-fashioned Earles front suspension always gave when he put on the front
brake. Any other bike would plunge the front down into the telescoping front
forks, the triangular links of the BMW floated the stress up and forwards.

For just a second, he kept the clean clarity of the dance in
his mind, and then it was gone. Memories came flooding back. Blood, and stench,
and screaming, the terrible beauty as napalm set the tall grass on fire and the
flowers of light bursting from snipers in the trees. Only the dance could fill
up his head—speed and real danger frightening him enough to keep the phantom
terrors away, if only for a few precious moments.

Rick sighed, then kicked the gearshift down into first and turned
right—heading for the pickup.
 

Terry Irving Author of "Courier"

Red Light

ANOTHER SNEAK PEEK AT 

THE SOON-TO-BE-PUBLISHED NOVEL,  

COURIER.








Suddenly, he came alert, as the
part of his mind that never stopped screening traffic demanded all his
attention. He had long ago realized that the only way to stay alive on a motorcycle
was to make it a rule that any accident would be his fault, or at least he'd
sure as hell pay the penalty. That way he was always ready for drivers who
would squeeze him into a line of parked cars without a glance, or decide to
make a left turn directly in front of him.

A black car coming along L
Street on his left wasn't slowing as it neared the light at 18th. Rick
rechecked—he still had a clear green. His eyes switched back to the car and saw
that the driver's head—outlined in the store lights behind him—turned so that
he stared right at the big motorcycle.

The black car blew the red
light only yards ahead.

Time slowed.

Rick slammed down on both
brakes, and both front and rear wheels began to skid. It felt like the car in
front of him was crawling by, stretching out longer and longer to fill all
possible avenues of escape.

As his wheels screamed on the
pavement, Rick knew that he was losing steering control and forced his right
hand to loosen up on the front brake lever while keeping a full lock on the
foot pedal that controlled the rear brake. He was bringing his speed down fast,
but that damn black car was still blocking the road in front of him.

That son of a bitch must have
slowed in the intersection!

He could feel the back tire
begin to skip and knew he was losing precious traction every microsecond that
it spent in the air. He needed to get the back wheel down and in solid contact
with the road—fast. He slammed his body back and actually came right off the
seat to sit on top of the radio, throwing all his weight directly over the rear
tire.

He felt the tire grab the road
as the tread caught and the stuttering of the rubber treads became a steady
scream. He was still going too fast to steer and that damn car was simply not
moving fast enough to get out of his way, so he tensed for a jump. Getting his
body up in the air and flying over the car's trunk would mean some nasty
scrapes on the other side, but it was either that or turning into a red smear
on the car’s rear fender.

He fingered just a bit of
tension back into the front brake, and that made the difference. He flashed
past the car, and time jerked back to normal. His right leg couldn't have been
more than a half-inch from the wicked-looking steel bar that topped the rear
bumper.

He unlocked the rear wheel and
slowly, carefully, pulled over to the curb and stopped. His hands were so
clenched that he had to force them to relax finger by finger. After he released
his death-grip on the handlebar, he held his gloved hands out in front of him, and
just watched them shake for a long moment.

The right hand—the brake
hand—felt strained, as if it was still grabbing for more stopping power. He
looked down the right side of the BMW. The rear brake pedal was bent, almost
broken. Calmly, he thought, going to have
to stop by the garage and get that fixed.

He looked back, expecting to
see that the Chevy had stopped and the driver was coming over to see if he was
okay. More likely, he'd come over and yell at him for almost getting in his
way.

The black car was gone.

As he sat there, he saw the
light finally turn red.

Rick blew out a deep breath and
drove the half block to the bureau—slowly and carefully.
Terry Irving Author of "Courier"

In Defense of Freddy the Pig.

FREDDY DISCOVERED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES



The following article appeared in the May 22, 1994 New York
Times Book Review and was written by Adam Hochschild.





That Paragon of Porkers: Remembering Freddy the Pig



The moral center of my childhood universe, the place where good
and evil, friendship and treachery, honesty and humbug were defined
most clearly, was not church, not school and not the Boy Scouts.
It was the Bean Farm.



The Bean Farm, as all right-thinking children of my generation
knew, was the upstate New York home of Freddy the Pig and his
fellow animals. They were the subject of 26 books by Walter R.
Brooks, a New York advertising man and a staff writer for the
New Yorker, that appeared between 1927 and Brooks's death in 1958,
One of Brooks's many triumphs of tone was that his human characters
were surprised, but only mildly surprised, that the animals
talked. Mr. Bean, whose farm they lived on, barely said a word,
so he appeared the unusual one.



Brooks had many admirers, from my fifth-grade classmates to the
mighty Lionel Trilling, who called the books "delightful."
Other loyalists have claimed Freddy as the ancestor of more famous
literary pigs such as those in George Orwell's "Animal Farm"
(1945). In fact, in "Freddy the Politician" (first
published in 1939 as "Wiggins for President" ), the
animals foil a crafty gang of woodpeckers who try to seize control
of the Bean Farm by making extravagant promises - a revolving
door for the henhouses, cat-proof apartments for the rats and
so on. In his book "Fairy Tales and After," the critic
Roger Sale pointed out that :Freddy the Politician: "not
only preceded Orwell's work but is a good deal more careful with
its materials and, for that matter, shrewder about its politics…The
actions emerge much less mechanically than do Orwell's."



Freddy's readers have called him a porcine prince, a pig of many
parts, a paragon of porkers, a Renaissance pig. As the problems
he faces require, he is by turns a cowboy, a balloonist, a magician,
a campaign manager, a pilot, and a detective. But he is the most
unheroic of heroes: he oversleeps, daydreams, eats too much and,
when not suffering from writer's block, writes flowery poetry
for all occasions. His tail uncurls when he gets scared. Although
lazy, he accomplishes a lot, because "when a lazy person
once really gets started doing things, it's easier to keep on
than it is to stop."



Walter R. Brooks's gentle genius shines even brighter in his
villains. Take, for example, Watson P. Condiment, the comic book
magnate, who has six big houses, 15 big cars and a yacht. A blustery
blackmailer, he is "a tall thin man who always looked as
if he had a stomach ache. That was because he did have a stomach
ache." But the animals can thwart Mr. Condiment's evil plans,
because "people who read comic books will believe almost
anything."



Almost all the other villains foiled by Freddy are representatives
of the Establishment. The bank president, Mr. Weezer, who appears
in many of the books, has glasses that fall off anytime anyone
mentions a sum over $10. General Grimm is "short, stocky
and red-faced and looked as if his uniform was too tight for him
but nobody had better mention it." Mr. Gridley, the high
school principal "never came close to anybody he was talking
to but always stood off several yards and shouted."



The pompous, timid Senator Blunder flees the scene when pursued
by the animals, because "should I be struck down, into what
hands would fall the reins of the ship of state?" The fabulously
wealthy Margarine family tears up farmers' fields with fox hunts
in "Freddy Rides Again." (The fox, of course, is a
friend of Freddy's, and the Margarine's are undone.) And, until
he is exposed by the animals, a conniving real estate man pretends
he is a ghost and haunts houses he wants the occupants to sell.



Poking fun at generals, realtors, bank presidents and the like
was unusual fare for children's books of the 1940's and 50's.
Other volumes make a few digs at the space program and at the
FBI - Freddy's bumbling Animal Bureau of Investigation often misses
the evidence right under his snout. In a subtle way the books
even prefigured the spirit of the 60's.



In "Freddy and the Bean Home News" the animals start
their own paper because Mrs. Underdunk, the rich, haughty newspaper
owner, and her editor, Mr. Garble, distort the news. When the
evil Mr. Condiment hits Freddy, Freddy thinks: "He slapped
me because I am a pig….If I were a boy or a man he wouldn't
have done it." When Freddy becomes mayor, he solves the
traffic problem by banning all parking within city limits.



Small wonder, then, that some of the children who grew up on
these books went on to found alternative newspapers, to march
for civil rights and to become ardent environmentalists. Still,
you don't have to be in the 60's generation to appreciate Freddy.
As with all books that last, their attraction is broader and
deeper. Essentially, they evoke the most subversive politics
of all: a child's instinctive desire for fair play. Brooks speaks
powerfully to his young readers' moral sense without ever overtly
moralizing. The local sheriff, for example tells Freddy's sidekick,
Charles the rooster, that he will get much tougher penalties for
pecking the face of a rich man than that of a poor one. Truer
words were never spoken. But how can a reader feel preached at
when it's someone talking to a rooster.



Some dozen years ago, says Dave Carley, a Toronto playwright,
he "stopped in at a children's library to see if they still
had any Freddy books. The librarian told me that she was photocopying
pages and binding the books with hockey-stick tape because they
were in such demand." Mr. Carley found others who remembered
the books as fondly as he and formed the Friends of Freddy, who
meet every two years for a weekend of book trading, talk, and
pork-free dinners. (For information, write to 5-A Laurel Hill
Road, Greenbelt, MD 20770)



"I grew up in Peterborough, Ontario," Mr. Carley told
me by telephone from his home in Toronto. "A Friends of
Freddy member from there told me recently that when he was a boy
there were two thugs who came to the library on Saturday mornings.
The bigger one blocked the door, and the smaller one ran upstairs
and checked out all available Freddy books. I had to confess
to him that these two were my brother and me."



The nearly 200 Friends of Freddy include Michael Cart, a former
director of the Beverly Hills, CA, public library, who is writing
Walter R. Brooks's biography; Lee Secrest, an Atlanta actor who
says he kept himself sane in the Army by reading Freddy books
concealed inside a copy of Time magazine, and Henry S. F. Cooper
Jr. who for many years covered the space program for The New Yorker.
"They represent the very best of American fantasy writing
for children," says Mr. Cooper of the books. "They
are the American version of the great English classics, such as
the Pooh books or "The Wind in the Willows'."



Mr. Carly says: "A lot of people in the organization are
writers and journalists. It was such a painful thing when you
read the last Freddy book that you felt moved to go out and write
your own book."



Above all, it is Brooks's moral words that sticks with his readers.
"I distinctly remember learning things from the books that
I could apply to my own life," Mr. Carley says. "For
example, that if somebody says, 'To be frank with you" it
means they're lying." Geoffrey Stakes, in a 1992 article
in The Village Voice pointed out that the Bean animals had "a
one-animal, one-vote rule in place long before the human Supreme
Court established our version." Wendy Wolf, a New York book
editor, learned that the Nuremberg defense is no good. Like when
the children of Simon the Rat say, "Our father made us do
it,' they're told: 'Forget it, you're going to jail.'"



Starting in the late 60's, the Freddy books began to go out of
print, one by one. Eventually only the first was left. Then
in 1986 and 1987, with prodding from the Friends of Freddy, Brooks's
publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, reissued eight titles. The new paperback
editions carried introductions by Brooks's biographer, Michael
Cart, and won great praise from reviewers. Sadly, however, all
copies of the eight republished books are now gone. "It's
enough to make your tail come uncurled," Mr. Cart says.



I asked about a dozen editors, writers, librarians, and children's
book experts why these books are apparently less popular today
than 40 or 50 years ago. Some people said maybe the Bean Farm
now seems to quaintly rural. Others wondered if the books were
too long for today's short attention span. A few suggested that
children now want more action and adventure, faster-paced plots,
more violence, more wildness. Everybody mentioned television.



"We were very, very disappointed not to be able to keep
the books in print," says Stephanie Spinner, the associate
publisher of Knopf Juvenile Books, who worked on the Freddy reissue.
"But it's harder and harder to sell a paperback book that
doesn't have mass appeal. We really did give it our best shot.
And we're still trying: it's almost certain we're going to reprint
"Freddy the Detective in 1995."



Then, going over my notes one last time, I suddenly realized
something. Like Freddy floundering through one of his detective
cases, I hadn't noticed a clue right under my nose - evidence
that I was asking the wrong question. Between 1927, when Brooks
wrote the first book in the series, and 1958, when he died, 340,000
Freddy the Pig books were sold. This was considered a grand success:
they all stayed in print for decades. Between 1986, when Knopf
started reissuing the books, and last year, 86,000 Freddy books
were sold. This was considered a failure; all of the books are
gone.



But wait! Look at the numbers again. From 1986 to 1992, Knopf
sold almost exactly the same number of Freddy books per year,
on average, as during Brook's lifetime. Since there were fewer
titles in print during this period than before, that means that
often a particular book sold more copies per year than
it did half a century ago. For example, according to Charles
Schlesinger of Brandt & Brandt, the literary agent for Brooks's
estate, "Freddy the Detective" sold 1,211 copies in
1932, 1,098 copies in 1940, and 1,181 copies in 1950. But when
it was reissued, sales were higher: 1,418 copies in 1988, 1,810
in 1990. Still, in 1991 it was taken out of print.



What has changed so drastically, then, is not Freddy's appeal
for young American readers of whom there are many more today.
It is how many copies of a children's book a publisher now has
to sell to keep it alive. One title, "Freddy Goes Camping,"
has sold 16,000 copies since 1986. A respectable number, you
would think, but not enough, apparently, to keep the book in print.
According to Betsy Hearne, editor of the Bulletin of the Center
for Children's Books, "There's a shift to something like
the best-seller syndrome in the adult market, where something
flashes across the sky and the goes out of print right away."



Behind this sea change in children's publishing are several forces.
One is that most major publishers are now owned by big conglomerates,
as heartless as Mr. Condiment or Mr. Weezer. The demand the same
rate of profit in children's books as they get from coal mines
or steel mills. Another is a change in the way tax laws are applied,
making it harder to depreciate the value of goods in inventory.
Since 1980 this has made it much more expensive for publishers
to keep unsold copies of backlist titles in their warehouses.
Finally, during the Reagan years, Congress dramatically slashed
Federal money for public and school libraries - at just the same
time as these libraries were already being crippled by state taxpayers'
revolts.



All this hit publishers hard. Fifteen or twenty years ago, some
85 percent of children's books were sold to public and school
libraries. This figure has plummeted - no one is sure by exactly
how much - with the collapse of library budgets. It is more difficult
for publishers to make money selling books to bookstores: the
stores take a commission; they return unsold books, and they generally
carry paperback editions of backlist titles, which have a far
smaller profit margin than hard-cover or library editions.



Freddy's fans have not give up, however. A "Freddy Forum"
has opened on a Berkeley, CA, computer bulletin board. The Friends
of Freddy will have their biennial convention this fall; their
Bean Home Newsletter still comes regularly. But despite their
efforts, the Freddy books, for the first time in more than 65
years, are no longer sold. For books so widely beloved as classics,
this seems outrageous. To preserve works of similar stature for
adults, we have the Library of America, supported by major foundations
and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Isn't it time
we had a Library of America for children?







Back to Freddy's Home Page

Terry Irving Author of "Courier"

Today in Writing

I just wanted to admit that--instead of working on Warrior, the sequel to Courier--I spent the entire day working on a list of Books Everyone Should Read At Least Once on goodreads.com.



This is not a textbook example of efficient use to time. Terry Irving Author of "Courier"

The Strange Universal Synchronicity of Writing

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, yet are experienced as occurring together in a meaningful manner. The concept of synchronicity was first described in this terminology by Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychologist, in the 1920s.[1]



The concept does not question, or compete with, the notion of causality. Instead, it maintains that just as events may be grouped by cause, they may also be grouped by meaning. A grouping of events by meaning need not have an explanation in terms of cause and effect.

When I wrote "Courier," I noticed a repeating pattern: I would write in something (a phrase, a place, an idiosyncrasy)  more or less at random - I just needed things that would differentiate and fill out a character.  Sometimes, they were things that I needed as plot points (where would my protagonist escape to, what kind of woman would he meet and fall in love with, etc.)  They were meant to be small, realistic details but as I researched and continued to write, they kept growing in importance to the plot and the characters.



Several ended up as central pivot points to the plot.



Clearly, I'm trying not to give away too much of the story prior to release but I'll go into one example: the woman that my courier, Rick, falls in love with.  Here's how the character of Eve Buffalo Calf came together.



--I was trying to work out a way to get my guy out of town at the end of the book--figuring that by that time, a certain significant part of the Nixon Administration would be...umm...irritated at him.



--When I researched the time period--the last few days of 1972 when the B-52s were hammering North Vietnam and Kissinger's "peace is at hand' statement had been smashed into little pieces, I read that just a few weeks before, the American Indian Movement had occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs--an incredible story in itself. So I invented an Indian girl. 



--Now, she couldn't actually be a protestor because she'd have been run out of town by then so I made her a law student doing legal defense for AIM. (didn't hurt that I'd known some people who had done exactly that back in the 70s).



--A friend, and fellow author, told me that Indians never refer to themselves as 'Indians' but as 'Cherokee' or 'Crow' or whatever.  So on a whim, I made my generic Indian into a Cheyenne and that morphed into a Northern Cheyenne of the Montana Reservation. A bit more research (not a lot because I don't read modern books on my subjects to avoid unintentional plagiarism) and she gained the name Eve Buffalo Calf after a famous Cheyenne woman named White Buffalo Calf.



--Now, there are historians who say that Custer's Last Stand was not really part of a war against the Sioux (as I always thought) but against the much-more dangerous Cheyenne and - as it turned out - the unit Custer was leading was the US Seventh Cavalry. That worked well because I'd already decided that my protagonist would have served in a particular battle in Vietnam which - when I looked it up - turned out to be the Seventh Cavalry.  For a number of reasons, the guy who is trying to kill him served with the Seventh Cavalry in Korea.



I swear, none of this was a product of my genius for planning and plotting my manuscript--it just kept happening. 



OK, there are other great links in Courier that worked out in just the same way but you have to read the damn book to get those.



When it came time to begin "Warrior", the sequel to Courier, I knew where Rick and Eve were (Out West--read the book) and approximately when. So I looked in the papers from early 1973 and there was the Occupation of Wounded Knee by AIM. 



So that's where "Warrior" begins.



In the process of researching Wounded Knee and the Cheyenne people, I kept finding new information--including a local newspaper article about big meeting in the mid-1990s where the Cheyenne broke a self-imposed 100 year oath of silence and revealed exactly how General George Custer had died.



Yeah, it involves the woman White Buffalo Calf.



In addition, reading newspapers and magazines from 1973, I stumbled across a story about how the largest coal seam in the United States--well, basically it IS the entire Montana Cheyenne reservation and thousands of miles more--drag lines continue to rip apart Montana, North and South Dakota today as millions and millions of tons of coal goes out every day.



EXCEPT from the land of the Northern Cheyenne because, in 1973, they unilaterally abrogated all the coal leases negotiated for them by the BIA (at unbelievably bad rates). 



"in 1973." You get the pattern here?



Just last week, I read that the Cheyenne --when they left their pestilent and hunted-out lands in Oklahoma - fought their way through FOUR major US Army battle groups in what some call the biggest, bloodiest, and most insanely courageous of the "Indian Wars". (Those of you old enough might remember John Ford's "Cheyenne Autumn" where, apparently, Ford said he killed enough Indians--it was time to tell their side of the story. ) Although Dull Knife and most of the warriors did not make it home, they crossed a thousands miles under winter conditions and constant battle.

Eventually, it was public opinion in the rest of the US that forced the government to declare  the Montana Reservation of the Northern Cheyenne. 



So all these apparently random choices are becoming 'synchronistic'- which, if you didn't read the quotes at the beginning--are events that occur close together and seem connected but aren't necessarily.



I would just call them sorta spooky.



Finally, today I had lunch with another out-of-work tv producer and--as we were leaving, I was telling him of all these puzzle pieces (and a lot more - read the book!). I ended up with how Eve Buffalo Calf got her name.  



We said, "Goodbye" and got into our cars. I started the engine and the local NPR station came on and the FIRST WORDS I HEARD were "White Buffalo Calf Woman". and the discussion was over the Transcanada oil pipeline, energy reserves and the increasing resistance of Native Americans (US) and First Nations (Canadian) to having their lands despoiled



At the end of the day, I don't see this as a sign that Someone wants me to write my thriller novels for some mysterious Reason.  I just see it as evidence of a benevolent universe that has clearly spent hundreds of years arranging history to provide me with cool plot lines and details.



Ok, part of it could be my writing method.  I smash out something really fast--inventing stuff as I go and only doing enough research to keep from falling off a cliff. Then I go back and re-write to about triple the length and changing just about everything.  But then, I can weave in the cool material that's fallen into my hands.



Synchronicity, hell.



Serendipity is more like it.








Terry Irving Author of "Courier"

Review from Marshall Arbitman

If you can remember the sixties, you never lived through them. If you lived through the seventies, you'll never forget. Irving masterfully brings back the cold-eyed conspiracy lurking behind the smiley face.



-- Marshall Arbitman (Senior Writer, Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN) Terry Irving Author of "Courier"

Fear of Proofing

Martin Heller Reviews Courier

Signed First Edition Contest

Sneek Peak at Chapter One of Warrior - the sequel to Courier