I wrote The Quark Maneuver in the early 1970s after having spent the first half dozen years of my career writing about music, TV, and the movies for several publications, predominantly The New York Times. Correspondingly, I was accustomed to periodic sleepovers at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, often while trying to get a foot in the door of Hollywood screenwriting. The only thing to come of that was a script I thought perfect for Harry Guardino and Brenda Vaccaro, who were at the heights of their careers at the time. I had always wanted to write mysteries and was in love with the Inspector Maigret stories by Georges Simenon. I felt that New York City needed its own Maigret. At the same time I also was obsessed with The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth (book 1971, movie 1973). Between the two I had the notion of taking a middle-aged, going-to-seed sort of character and sticking him a thriller plot, adding a girlfriend.
That’s sort of what Forsyth did in Jackal, minus the girlfriend, though his Claude Lebel is hardly as studiously middle aged as Jules Maigret. Nonetheless, sticking an anomalous hero in a thriller won Forsyth fame, public acclaim and an Edgar Award. So I wrote a screenplay titled The Jericho Incident, booked myself into the Chateau Marmont, and shopped it around. There was some polite applause, but no sale. I doubt that Harry Guardino and Brenda Vaccaro ever got wind of it. Finally, a well-respected Hollywood agent told me to go back to New York and turn it into a novel.
After 18 rejections it was bought by Ballantine, the publisher that rejected it the first time (a new and clearly more visionary editor had come on board). She considered the title too obscure. We changed it to The Quark Maneuver, referring to ... oh, never mind, that would be a spoiler. Our mistake was that in the early 1970s no one beyond physicists and a few science geeks had heard the word “quark,” nor could spell it. Likewise with the name of the Harry Guardino character, Paul DiGioia, the middle-aged, paunchy and somewhat grumpy detective lieutenant. The Brenda Vaccaro role was Diana Contardo, a lost and lonely 26-year-old who ran an Italian restaurant near the East River and who, fortuitously, got her exercise by doing martial arts. So here we had a pretty 20-something girl with sad eyes hooking up with a 42-year old man who life had beaten up a bit. The should-have-been-predictable result was that she took over the.whole.book as readily as she took over DiGioia.
Whatever, The Quark Maneuver worked. People loved the combination of who'd-have-thunk-it heroes and thriller plot (that had a bit of a stealth mystery in it). Paul and Diana tore themselves away from Contardo's ("fine Italian food") and she rode off in her white 1970 Pinto to save the world. Six years after Forsyth got his Edgar I got mine.
I was so enamored of the team of Paul DiGioia and Diana Contardo that, in the early 1980s, I brought them back, with the names Bill Donovan and Marcia Barnes, in Night Rituals, the first Bill Donovan Mystery. In 2012, exactly 35 years since they first came to life, Paul and Diana live on as Donovan and Marcy in the Donovan books. New York has its own Maigret, and he's hooked up with New York's own Emma Peel. Here, in The Quark Maneuver, is the moment of their creation.
12-10-12
Don't ask.
I'm putting my money where my mouth is.
Ew. No, I mean that I've been bragging about my Kindle books for so long I thought I should give one away. If you click on the link below (or wherever the easily irritated software chooses to put it) anytime Wednesday, May 9, you can download a free copy of "Murder on the Waterfront." It will work on Kindle or anything, such as an Apple device, that runs the free Kindle app.
Extra incentive: My detective, Capt Bill Donovan may be the only working leftist homicide detective in America. And the victim is a Lee Atwater type right-wing dirty tricker who tried to run a conservative fundraiser in Manhattan. This is one of my favorite Donovans, partly because at last the captain lets his political colors fly. The victim, soliciting tips on where the action is, should have listened when Donovan tried to send him to a leather bar.
http://www.linkedin.com/e/-hpv7t-h1x0jibh-57/plh/http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eamazon%2Ecom%2FMichael-Jahns-York-Mysteries-ebook%2Fdp%2FB0076145OI%2Fref%3Dsr_1_1%3Fie%3DUTF8%26qid%3D1336363801%26sr%3D8-1/xdii/?hs=false&tok=3O4ifc0ZDrSBc1
Michael Jahn's Edgar Award-winning Cold War thriller 'The Quark Maneuver' will be available on Kindle
It's 1975. The Vietnam War has been lost and the Cold War is at its height. A madman is about to start World War III. All that stands in his way is a lonely young woman who owns an Italian restaurant.
My Cold War thriller "The Quark Maneuver" will be available in a Kindle edition within the next week. I'm putting the finishing touches on the cover and giving the manuscript one more read. Then I'll upload it to the Amazon Kindle server and it will be available for $2.99 within 24 hours. Apart from a short time nearly a decade ago when I posted an rtf on a Geocities web site, this book hasn't been seen except in hard-to-find used copies for many years.
This came into my Facebook account (http://www.facebook.com/WeegeesBored):
"Mike- your Murder in Coney Island book was just the ticket for reading while we were driving home to Austin from Big Bend. That's a long drive. The only way to make the book better was if it were about 100 miles longer. And I'm not even a big mystery reader. Loved it. Made me really miss Noo Yawk … And I have another one queued up and won't wait for a road trip to read it. I can lock everyone out of the house and read it at home." -Sara Breuer
Wow! Thanks!
http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Jahns-York-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B005GSS314/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2
“Michael Jahn’s New York City Mysteries: Murder at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine” (originally titled “City of God”) went online at Amazon the other day. It's Bill Donovan Mystery #3 and the fifth of the ten-book series to go into Kindle. Here’s what Library Journal said about it the first time out:
"Bustling New York harbors a psychotic killer who, viewing himself as a latter-day St. Augustine protecting the "City of God," bashes people who desecrate the cathedral of St. John the Divine. Series detective Bill Donovan moves into the labyrinthine church to stalk the killer, possibly jeopardizing his relationship with black girlfriend-policewoman Marcie, who wants him to help her find the thugs who killed her best friend on the edge of Central Park. Tandem cases cram the story with detail and personal conflict, while energized prose adds excitement. A great procedural from the author of Night Rituals."
“Murder at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine” is crucial to understanding the intertwining back stories of the Bill Donovan Mysteries. No spoilers here, but Donovan’s relationship with Marcie comes into focus, Brian Moskowitz makes his debut, and Marcie has a secret so deep and dark that not even she is aware of it. And Donovan begins to confront his deep-seated hatred of the rich and consequent fear of marriage to a wealthy woman.
For all the whooping and hollering and “just plain folks” blather about being “Jenny from the block” or otherwise like you and me, show biz operates pretty much within the yurt. You’re either inside with the rest of the tribal chiefs and the music and the wholly uncontrolled substances, or you’re alone on the steppes staring at mastodon bones.
I remember Cissy Houston at one or another rock scene powwow in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those were the years during which I covered rock and roll and related riots for the New York Times, which got me into a lot of yurts. Those days Cissy was a session singer for Hendrix and a lot of others and just beginning a solo career. I saw her around. Everyone knew everyone else because they were around.
I did not know her daughter, who I understand just died. My son saw her around, in the early 1990s when he was working at Arista Records, founded by Clive Davis, who has been in the news a lot lately for having discovered Whitney Houston. Clive was around at some of the same powwows I was, and presumably Cissy was, the big difference between me and him being that he got there in a limo. (He let me use it once.)
I don’t know if Cissy ever brought her daughter to a powwow. I routinely brought my son to them, him riding on my shoulders.
Steve was another guy who was around. He was a good friend of mine who had a quartet that opened for the Who during one of their 1970s arena tours. How did a folk/rock/jazz fusion quartet get to open for the Who (and get booed for their effort)? Steve was good friends with Pete Townshend, who I also knew from around ... ran into him at a guitar store on 47th Street twice and on the street in San Francisco once, following which we went to his hotel room and split a six. I don’t recall what we talked about. Probably all the people we knew from around.
One weekend night circa 1970 I got a worried call from Steve, who said something like “Pete’s here. The cops are looking for him.” The exact words don’t matter when you’re in a situation involving guns and jails. It seems that Pete threw a fire marshall off the stage at the Fillmore East -- there was a fire next door and the man interrupted a Who set to ask that the theater be evacuated. Pete gave him the old heave-ho and later, when told that the NYPD frowns on such things, ran off to Steve’s apartment to hide. I told him that Pete should lay low until Monday when the lawyers were around.
One thing you always talked about when you were around was what everyone was doing. In the 1960s/1970s when I was around, everyone else was either “smoking dope” or “doing smack.” You hadn’t seen someone in a while and you ran into him, the first words might be “Tim kicked!” That was good news at the time, but in this particular case Tim didn’t kick permanently. Tim died.
So did Steve, but it was in the 1990s and not of a heroin overdose. He died of hepatitis C, but not the AIDS-related kind. He got it in a Nashville hospital, where he was working as a nurse, having failed to make it in show biz -- musical support from Pete and editorial support from me notwithstanding. He burned all his master recordings and turned his back on the show biz scene where people lived unhealthy lifestyles and, in consequence thereof, died. He got a nursing degree and went into health care, which killed him.
I hear that he was a very good nurse, though. Found it very fulfilling and everyone at the hospital loved him.
Before Steve was entirely done with show biz, he wrote an especially good pop song and got Nashville session singers to record a demo. It was a wonderful song. So wonderful that I gave the tape to my son to give to Cissy’s daughter the next time he saw her around. He didn’t know her other than as someone he saw around, and thus gave the song to her A&R people, those record company souls who decide what songs pop artists record. The artists themselves are often too busy being around to make the decisions themselves. The tape came back with the word that it was a good, “well constructed” song ... thanks for letting us hear it ... but it’s not right for Whitney.
At Steve’s memorial service in Nashville everyone sang a different song of his, one about saying goodbye. At Whitney’s memorial service on Saturday in Newark, the church full of celebrities -- invitation only, mind you, this is a show biz powwow, ain’t no Jenny from no block gettin’ into this yurt -- will sing “I Will Always Love You,” the song she recorded about never saying goodbye. Naturally the service will be broadcast on CNN and livestreamed.
And we can hear those notes forever.
Somebody bought a Kindle copy of "Murder on the Waterfront!" The first one that sold! Maybe it’s so popular 'cause in it a vicious GOP strategist gets his just desserts. Or is it reverts? I was WAY ahead of my time with this book. http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Jahns-York-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B0076145OI/ref=pd_rhf_ee_p_img_3
I often get asked for the exact list of Bill Donovan Mysteries. Actually, I more often get asked if I forgot to take my meds that morning. The latter is written down someplace, but I can't remember where. Here’s the list:
1. Night Rituals 1982
2. Death Games 1987
3. Murder at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (original title City of God, 1992) (Kindle Edition 2012)
4. Murder at the Museum of Natural History 1994
5. Murder on Theatre Row 1996 (Kindle Edition 2012)
6. Murder on Fifth Avenue 1998
7. Murder in Central Park 2000 (Kindle Edition 2011)
8. Murder on the Waterfront 2001(Kindle Edition 2012)
9. Murder in Coney Island 2003 (Kindle Edition 2011)
10. Donovan & Son 2008