Stephen Becker

There are writers you have to love from the very first line.  Stephen Becker did that for me when I opened up The Chinese Bandit:

That summer, they hanged a fat man at the Western Gate as a warning and example to all. In those days, the penalty for most crimes was death. They swung him from a fresh gallows on the city wall, where twelve horsemen in silks could ride abreast, and once had. For sure he deserved it. Every man shall be put to death for his own sin.

I was standing up when I picked up that book, but before I got to the end of the paragraph,  I sat down and read till dinner.  Is there a better testimonial for a novelist?
I do remember that day well, because I'd just been accepted to the Iowa Writers Workshop, and I'd gone to the bookstore and picked up an armload of books that were on the first semester's  reading list.  There were better-known authors on the list.  But there was no better writer.
Steve could put words together and take them apart.  He could explain what he'd done.
What I loved about Stephen Becker as a writing teacher was his sense of being first of all an entertainer, relatively immune to the lure of academe.  Which gave him an honest strength as an educator.  He wrote books and stories that people actually bought, because they were amusing or thrilling or posed fascinating moral problems.

The problems his characters faced were real and earth-shaking:

What if you were a good man brimming with success and talent, but had a third martini and ran over a pedestrian.  People will move heaven and earth to get you off, but do you really want to be free?

What if you were condemned to hang but first contrived to murder the hangman – claiming self-defense?

What if you were a teenage Confederate prisoner about to be executed for lack of papers, even though Lee had surrendered, and the Confederacy no longer existed?   That one, unfortunately, did happen.

Stephen Becker's work was often unsettling, and thought-provoking in ways you don't expect, in tales that traffic in murder and mayhem.  It's good to hear the music of his truly unique voice again.

Open Road Media is releasing nine of Becker's novels on ebook format:

http://www.openroadmedia.com/contributor/stephen-becker/?

-- Joe