The Crime of Doing Good
I've been busy putting my mystery, The Homicidal Saint, into a self-published print edition as well as in two more electronic editions. It is hard and confusing work.
These Lieutenant Joe Sonntag novels, written under my pseudonym Axel Brand, have been a late-life experiment for me. They are set in Milwaukee in the middle of the 20th century, mostly during the Truman presidency. I was growing up there, and the details have flooded back as I write. Milwaukee was a great industrial city, with labor strife, a lot of hard-working people who took streetcars to work, and a lot of first and second-generation people, mostly from eastern Europe.
I became interested in writing about laboring people, their daily toil, their low wages, their hard rides to the factories, but also their happier moments in the neighborhood taverns. I am also interested in one of the questions that occupy theologians and philosophers: why do people do such evil in the name of something good? Why did they take Joan of Arc, tie her to a stake, and burn her to death in the name of religion?
I have no answers, but I make that the occupation of my two principal characters, Joe Sonntag, and Frank Silva. Milwaukee is the place to look for answers to that; a place with a socialist mayor, and bitter labor strife.
The first two of these novels were published by Five Star and got fine reviews. But the world changes, and I've published three more on my own, as print and electronic editions. They'll sell a few copies, but no more than that. But they have become an old-age preoccupation for me, and keep me going, and asking questions, day by day.
These Lieutenant Joe Sonntag novels, written under my pseudonym Axel Brand, have been a late-life experiment for me. They are set in Milwaukee in the middle of the 20th century, mostly during the Truman presidency. I was growing up there, and the details have flooded back as I write. Milwaukee was a great industrial city, with labor strife, a lot of hard-working people who took streetcars to work, and a lot of first and second-generation people, mostly from eastern Europe.
I became interested in writing about laboring people, their daily toil, their low wages, their hard rides to the factories, but also their happier moments in the neighborhood taverns. I am also interested in one of the questions that occupy theologians and philosophers: why do people do such evil in the name of something good? Why did they take Joan of Arc, tie her to a stake, and burn her to death in the name of religion?
I have no answers, but I make that the occupation of my two principal characters, Joe Sonntag, and Frank Silva. Milwaukee is the place to look for answers to that; a place with a socialist mayor, and bitter labor strife.
The first two of these novels were published by Five Star and got fine reviews. But the world changes, and I've published three more on my own, as print and electronic editions. They'll sell a few copies, but no more than that. But they have become an old-age preoccupation for me, and keep me going, and asking questions, day by day.
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