DRIVE-BY BOOK TOUR '09 - ON THE ROAD - Part Three

07-09-09, Nashville, TN: The Mississippi Delta is one of my favorite places on the planet. I didn't do anything all that notable there over the last two nights and one full day. I just drove around and looked at stuff, ate plenty of truly great food that was bad for me, listened to some great music - you might enjoy WABG, the sound of the Delta - and took plenty of pictures:

I arrived in Greenville at suppertime, so, as planned I ate one of the world's greatest steaks at Doe's Eat Place.


Then I drove around town a little, in a stupor, taking pictures of buildings in the evening light.



After that, I needed to keep moving, either that or curl up somewhere and fall into a deep, dark food coma. I took a walk along the Mississippi River levees at Greenville. (The Mississippi River levees are the largest, longest engineering project in history.)


The next day, Wednesday, I took my time driving around on my way to Clarksdale. I went to Leland. (Which I had also driven around the night before.)
I met Pat Thomas there. He's the son of James "Son" Thomas, a blues player as well. He was playing in the Highway 61 Blues Museum, but I think he was just warming up, or maybe it was all the bandages on his fingers.


I lunched at the Crystal Grill in Greenwood and I highly recommend it. The $7.95 lunch special I had was fried catfish, turnip greens, mac & cheese, hush puppies, corn muffins and a piece of pie, oh yeah, and a drink. And it was just about perfect, even if my arteries weren't happy about it. It was fish, wasn't it? That's good for you. And there were greens, so what if they were loaded up with ham hocks.

After lunch I turned north up old Highway 49. I passed Parchman Farm, famous in dozens of blues songs. It's the Mississippi State Penitentiary and was famous as a truly hellish labor camp. These days there don't seem to be long rows of stripe-clad prisoners with hoes or bent over chopping cotton. There were a bunch of road signs telling you what sort of trouble you'd get into if you stopped along that stretch of road for anything other than an emergency, but it didn't look much different than most of the other stretches of road I'd been passing along.

Then I got to Tutwiler, the town where W.C. Handy supposedly first heard the blues on the train platform.
There was an oddly decorated house there. Driving around the Delta you see a lot of art in people's yards and decorating their houses. I couldn't find out any details about this place.There was a nice swampy area right in the middle of town.

Finally I got to Clarksdale, the town that makes the loudest and most persuasive argument for being the home of the blues. I checked into the truly fantastic Big Pink Guest House, and had it to myself for the night. (This is the interior courtyard.)Then I wandered around town for a little while.

There are a number of intersections that claim to be the actual "crossroads" where Robert Johnson, and others, sold their souls to the devil to play the blues. In Clarksdale, the intersection of Highways 49 and 61, the two main highways that run up and down the Delta, would seem to have the greatest claim on it. Sadly, here it is.

I'd never been to Helena, Arkansas, and it is just across the Mississippi from the north Delta. It seemed like as good a place to cruise to as any. It has a beautiful park built along the levees.Which is good, because downtown has fallen on some hard times.




I went back to spend the night in Clarksdale, where at the Ground Zero Blues Club I saw, among other things, a 14 year old white boy (he looked like a little surfer kid) named Jake, shred the hell out of blues guitar licks. That brought to mind the age old question of whether or not white people can play the blues. Far greater minds than mine have mulled this over and come to a wide variety of conclusions. I spent some time mulling it over, too, and I came to some of my own conclusions. I will blog about them, possibly tomorrow. But for the moment, this blog is plenty long enough.

I leave you with a picture of the northern part of the Natchez Trace highway. Just about 200 miles of my drive today, from Clarksdale to Nashville, looked just like this.

DRIVE-BY BOOK TOUR '09 - ON THE ROAD - Part Two

07-06-09, Houston, TX: I have only myself to blame for the Tandoori Chicken Enchilada. It was at the top of the menu in the faux English pub - the Red Lion - here in Houston. The menu claimed it was back by popular demand. It was "Five dollar burger night" and I should have stuck with that. I was hungry, under the influence of whisky, and well...I don't recommend it.

I am on this book tour to do something other than eat, however, sell books for instance. And I have sold some. At Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, Clues Unlimited in Tucson and Murder By the Book in Houston (today.) I've been to all these stores before and visting them is like dropping in on old friends. There's not been big crowds - 12, 5 & 10 people - but I have no doubt the stores will sell plenty more books after I've come and gone, and all three had some preorders for me to sign as well.

I also make a point of dropping in at a lot of other stores, even though most of them don't seem to be carrying my books. I say hi, sometimes give them copies of the books, sometimes just bookmarks, but this trip isn't so much about sales as it is about marketing and building my brand, so to speak. I have a brand? Oh no. What has become of me?

In Austin I dropped in at Book People, one of the truly great independent bookstores in the country. (They didn't have my books.) I walked around a fun, hip neighborhood - Austin seems to be full of those - and would have bought a new pair of cowboy boots if my feet weren't feeling swollen from the heat and humidity.

We ate Tex-Mex food and though I hate to be ungrateful, I do believe that of all the types of Mex - Mex-Mex, New Mexico-Mex, SoCal-Mex & Tex-Mex - Tex is my least favorite. Don't tell them I said so. Texans are pretty nationalistic, about Texas. (Have you also noticed that approximately 64 percent of the songs written and sung by Texas musicians, include a lyric that mentions Texas? As the song says, "You don't want to mess with Texas." I like that rhyme.)

Then it was July 4th and time for the infamous "Blowshitupathon" at Mary and Michael's house. It was mostly grad students and grad professors from U.T. I'm not sure we all spoke quite the same language, but we managed to communicate reasonably well. Booze, bbq and explosives assisted. Years of working in places where people didn't speak English came in handy. (If Academese is English, it's a dialect I am not all that familiar with.) It was plenty fun, just like it ought to have been.
Yesterday I drove to Houston, stopping at the Southside Market in Elgin (pronounced with a hard 'g') for sausage and brisket. Great stuff, great hot sauce. Cheap, too. Then didn't do much in the afternoon until I met up with an old pal, hung out, had dinner and went back to the hotel on the early side.

This morning I met up with Sheri - there's an acknowledgement to her in SHANGHAIED. She's my Houston cop pal and a splendid writer and a great repository of wonderful tales about both cop and farm life and a woman of tremendous sense and sensibility. We mostly sat around and talked, but as I do whenever I'm in Houston, I did make her take me around to see some parts of town I hadn't seen before. Including, strangely, the downtown skyline:
And the truly beautiful Glenwood Cemetery where there are a lot of lounging angels:

And the tomb of Howard Hughes:
Sheri has convinced me that I need to go back to the cemetery in the rain.

But not tomorrow. Tomorrow I drive to Greenville, Mississippi at the southern end of the Mississippi Delta. I don't really have anything book-ways to do there, but it's on the way to Nashville where I've got an event on Thursday at Mysteries & More, a store I've never been to before.

DRIVE-BY BOOK TOUR '09 - ON THE ROAD - Part One

July 04, 2009, Austin, TX: Tonight, my friends (and hosts) Mary and Michael and about 75 to 100 of their pals will be grilling and eating animals, drinking plenty of booze and blowing stuff up. That's what you're supposed to do on July 4th and despite the 100 degree temperatures and high humidity, Austin seems like a very good place to be doing it.

We had Vietnamese food for lunch.

Therein lies the genius of America and the A Number One reason why I really do love this country above and beyond all others. My family were immigrants - in their case, from Poland, the Ukraine and Romania - and unless you are 100% Native American, your family were immigrants, too. And they know that, and they celebrate that but they're Americans, too and they celebrate that as well.

There are plenty of Vietnamese and Algerian people in France. Their families have been there for as many generations as mine have been here. But they are not considered fully, even quite really, French. Same with Turks and Hungarians in Germany, Pakistanis in Britain, even Uighurs in China. The United States is pretty much the only country in the world where anyone, no matter where they come from, can become a member of the tribe - "American" - just for the asking, and some waiting and some hard work and a test, but still...

That isn't to say that all Americans are treated equally and that there isn't an awful lot of racism and sexism and all the bad isms here. There's all of that. But it's only a very small minority of crazy people who regard anyone other than their fellow White Anglo-Saxon Protestant brethren as somehow unAmerican.

That is what has made this country grow and prosper. That's what's given it hope and energy and excitement and great Bun Bo Hue as well as mighty fine bbq in Austin, Texas.

It's one of the reasons that I never get tired of driving around this country, of poking my nose into as many of its nooks and crannies as I possibly can.

Well, that and selling books. At least some books.

So, Happy Fourth to you all. Drink some beer. BBQ some beast and eat it. Blow some stuff up. Have fun!

I'll write more about my actual trip soon. Probably tomorrow.

In the meantime, some recommendations:

Grimaldi's Pizza - Old Town, Scottsdale - probably the best pizza I've had outside of the greater New York / New Jersey region. Coal-fired, brick-oven cooked and yep, the coal does make a difference, and nope, environmental regulations won't let pizza parlors use it most places. (The old places in NY and NJ have been grandfathered in.) I guess Arizona places pizza ahead in the priorities list of fighting global warming, and, well, I can't blame them.

El Indio - on very far south 6th Street in Tucson. South even of Interstate 10. A very good, very cheap Mexican restaurant. The best I've found in Tucson.

Nellie's Cafe - 1226 W. Hadley, Las Cruces, NM. The only real choice to make is between green and red. Chile, that is. I guess you can also get most things "Christmas" if you can't make up your mind. I went with the green, with pork and it's nearly enough to make me want to move to Las Cruces.

I am well and truly sorry to have to write this paragraph. I tend to try and find something of value almost everywhere. But to you, the residents of Fort Stockton, Texas, all I can say is: MOVE! FOR YOUR OWN GOOD - MOVE! PACK UP AND GO RIGHT AWAY!

I recommend that you don't stop to spend the night in Fort Stockton, TX unless you absolutely have to. There is pretty much nothing I could find of interest there. The hotels? There are a lot of them and they are clean enough, I slept well enough, but they are expensive, for the only reason that they can be, as there is nothing else around for quite some distance on Interstate 10.

And, K-Bob's Steakhouse? One of the worst steaks I've ever had. In Texas, yet! Sheesh, I've had better steaks in Laos, in Bamako, Mali. I cannot imagine that steak that bad isn't illegal in Texas. Where are the Rangers when you need them? I got the smallest steak on the menu, an 8 oz ribeye and I couldn't finish the damn thing. And I was hungry. It was gristly. It would have been tough but it had been soaked, for days possibly, in some sort of tenderizer that had a livery flavor that was concocted in hell's chemistry lab. It was cheap, though.

I'd best go now and help get the grills fired up.

New Interview With Me

In the new International Thriller Writers newsletter. I think it's interesting, but I would wouldn't I? Read it by clicking anywhere on this paragraph.

20 YEARS LATER & IT'S THE SAME OLD WORLD - IRAN & CHINA

Twenty years and a few weeks ago, June 4-5 1989, the Chinese government slaughtered a lot of protestors in the streets around Tiananmen Square in Beijing. That pretty much crushed the "democracy movement" in China. I was part of the crowd in the streets of Hong Kong, protesting that. I'd been in the crowds on several other occasions during the month before.On May 20th, there was a typhoon eight signal hoisted in Hong Kong. That means a typhoon (hurricane) is approaching; go home, tape up your windows, batten down the hatches and prepare to wait out the onslaught. Instead, 40,000 or more of us were in Victoria Park, the winds and rains lashing at us, debris flying through the air, from where we marched to the headquarters of Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, in protest against the imposition of martial law in China.

A week later, on the 27th, 300,000 or more of us gathered at Happy Valley Racetrack to listen to musicians play songs of protest and hope. The anthem of the Chinese democracy movement, the song that really got the crowd worked up, was by Cui Jian, China's most famous rock and roller.

The song is called "Nothing to My Name." You can read the lyrics here.

You can see a You Tube video about him here.

He released another song, "A Piece of Red Cloth" in 1989, after the slaughter in Tiananmen Square. The lyrics are sadly appropriate today, in Iran:

A PIECE OF RED CLOTH
That day you took a piece of red cloth
Covered-up my eyes and covered-up the sky
You asked me what I saw
I said, "I see the happiness"
This feeling made me so tranquil
It made me forget I have no place to live
You asked me where I'm headed
I said, "I'm going your way"
Couldn't see you, couldn't see the road
My hand was clasped by yours
You asked what I was thinking
I said, "You decide"
I sense you are not cold like steel
Yet like steel you are strong and hard
I sense there is blood in your body
Because your hand is hot
This feeling made me so tranquil
It made me forget I have no place to live
You asked me where I'm headed
I said, "I'm going your way"
I feel this is not a wasteland
Yet can't see this land is already dry and cracked
I feel I want to drink a little water
But your mouth covered my mouth
I can't go and I can't cry
Because my body is already withered
I will be by your side forever
Because I know your pain so well
________________________________________
music and lyrics: Cui Jian
translation: kemaxiu

The next day, May 27 1989, an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people marched in support of democracy in China through the streets of Hong Kong. That was a quarter to a third of the entire population.

A week after that, anywhere from three or four hundred, to three or four thousand - the real figure will probably never be known - people were dead in Beijing, and the aspirations of the Chinese people for a government responsive to their desires and concerns were quashed, at least for a while. A long while as it has turned out.

The other night, a young woman from Suzhou, China was in the audience at my book event for SHANGHAIED at Mystery & Imagination Bookstore in Glendale, California. She's a student here, and despite the fact that the events of 1989 do not appear in China's history books and are not taught in the country's schools, knew plenty about them. I asked her how she knew. She smiled and said, "I'm just nosey."

Nosey is good. It's essential. Let's hope that things in Iran turn out differently than they did in China. But however they turn out, let's hope that there are always enough nosey people out there that dreams and hope never die, no matter how many people do.

KODACHROME 1935-2009 R.I.P.

I got rid of my film cameras last year, but I always loved Kodachrome and always will.

Djenne, Mali 1985

Douentza, Mali 1985

Central Kalimantan (Borneo), Indonesia 1986

Taos, New Mexico 1977

Guangdong Province, China 1978

FIRST DRIVE-BY EVENT ON TARGET

Yesterday was the book launch party for SHANGHAIED at The Mystery Bookstore in Westwood Village, L.A. As usual it felt just like being at home. Thanks to Bobby, Linda, Kirk, Pam, Ingrid and Emily for everything. If you're reading this and you missed it, sorry you missed it. Hopefully I'll see you at one of the upcoming events.

Here's what yesterday's event looked like, in part:


At some of my events, you might even get a chance to drink this:

BASEBALL IS THE MOST LITERARY SPORT

Last night, 16 of us writers were hosted by the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes at the Epicenter. A ballgame was watched, hot dogs and beer were consumed, and even a few books were signed. There wasn't exactly a mob of readers breaking down the gates to the cafe area in right field, but fun was had. Here's a picture of the writers, and bookseller, in attendance, along with Tremor, the Quakes' mascot:

FACTS OF FICTION - ELSEWHERE

On Friday, June 19, I'm guest blogging at the Murder By 4 blog, which is a blog you might well be interested in whether I'm there or not. My post is titled "Facts of Fiction." You can get to it by clicking anywhere on this paragraph.

LESS THAN A QUARTER OF A BOOK PER MILE - AM I OUT OF MY FRIGGIN' MIND?

Here's what I'm going to do on my summer vacation:

DRIVE. More than 8,500 miles.

THE 2009 ERIC STONE DRIVE-BY BOOK TOUR OF AMERICA is getting underway.

You might be asking yourself, "Is he out of his mind?"

The answer to that is a resounding YES, but I have my reasons.

I like driving. I don't much care for sitting in traffic, but driving on the open highways; music, a book on tape or even foaming-at-the-mouth moronic right-wing talk-radio blasting at me from the speakers, and sometimes just my own thoughts, well, that's something else entirely. I like looking into the cars I pass or the ones that pass me. I like finding local, non-chain places to eat. (I've been known to drive an extra hundred miles when I was already hungry, just to avoid eating at Burger King or its ilk.) I love roadside attractions. Prairie Dog Town in Oakley, Kansas is one of my favorite places. There is little better than veering off Mississippi Highway 1 and onto the dirt roadway on top of the levees, looking out over the cotton fields to the east and the river to the west.

It's my job. Sure, when I'm writing my books I'm sitting at my desk and I'm Dostoevsky, or Mark Twain or Chester Himes or Arthur Miller. But once a book is sold and in stores, I am magically transformed into Willy Loman, the trunk of my car optimistically stocked with extra books and hitting the road.

The point, though, isn't the books I sell on the road. (On this upcoming tour I've got 21 scheduled signings. If I sell 100 books at every single signing - which I won't, not even close, that's still only slightly more than a quarter of a book per mile.)

The point is relationships, friendships really, getting to know people and letting them get to know me and my books so that they'll sell my books long after I'm gone, and they'll help promote my books to other readers, buyers, reviewers, bloggers, media, etc.

Is a big road trip book tour cost effective?

Hell, no.

Are there better, more efficient ways to spend my time and money promoting my books?

Of course there are. (And I do those, too.)

Is it worth it?

YES! For me. It's part of what I love about being a published author. I learn a lot from my book tours. I gain a much better perspective on readers, on booksellers, on my country even, than I ever could by sticking close to home and doing only the more efficient and effective things to promote my books.

And it also clears a lot of the cobwebs out of my head that tend to accumulate when I spend so much of my year by myself, at my desk, staring into a computer screen. And that's something that helps my writing.

Most importantly, I do it because it's fun.

The book launch party for SHANGHAIED is this coming Saturday, here in L.A. I hit the road to San Mateo, CA next Tuesday, come home for a little less than a week, then hit the road for the big drive on Tuesday June 30. You can see the whole schedule here.

I promise to keep this blog up with a great deal more frequency while I'm on the road. Why don't you drop by and see me when I'm in, or near, your town.