AFRAID, written by “Jack Kilborn,” Created a Troubling Concern

Have you ever read a book that would not go away? Two weeks after having absorbed the last sentence in the last chapter, and moved on to other authors, other stories, that one book keeps echoing in your brain?

The Old Cobbler is talking about a book written by J. A. Konrath, an author about whom I have no qualms using wordsmith to describe his writing talent. Beyond that, he represents the two essential qualities that it takes to succeed at writing novels in today’s world.

The man understands persistence. His 500 plus rejections prove that. The man understands promotion. The miles he has driven on book tours, the bookstores he has visited, and the work he has done via the Internet, all speak for themselves.

I found his mixology series, as I have come to call them, featuring Lt. Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels of the Chicago Police Department, to be very enjoyable reads. These books, to use an old line, are the complete package.

It was the enjoyment of these six books that led me to buy AFRAID, which Konrath wrote under the name Jack Kilborn. Nothing was known about the story in AFRAID when the book was bought.

Knowing who wrote the book, a quick peek at the back cover, seeing the comment, “An absolute must read for anyone who loves the adrenaline rush of a shocking story with style, speed, and savage grace,” was enough for me.

I did not get the promised adrenaline rush from reading the book. The concept of soldiers whose skills are enhanced via biochemical engineering and technology to the point they become perfect, cold robotic killers is not new.

What I did get from the book is a though that is for me very disturbing. It’s a personal thing, and needs maybe a bit of explanation. When I left the news reporting business, it was for economic reasons. I had a family to support.

But leaving the business also gave me a sense of relief in that I was walking away from a life that at times put me face-to-face with acts of violence. And as I came to learn during those years, there are two types of violence.

There is the violence of the tragic accident. In the days before seat belts, a young mother parked her car on a hillside and opened the driver’s door. The trim on the cuff of her winter coat sleeve became entangled in the door handle. The weight of the door swinging open pulled her backward from the vehicle seat. The base of her skull hit a concrete curb. She was fatally injured.

There is the violence is that inflicted by one human on another, or on an animal. A high school boy poured gas on a cat and set it on fire. The reason given afterwards for this act was as unjustifiable as the act was savage and brutal. The boy said he simply wanted to know how fast and far a burning cat could run.

Reading AFRAID was the first book in nearly half a century that brought back a memory of that unjustifiable act of violence and brutality. I did not find the book to be an adrenaline rush. I found it to be totally repulsive.

I read the entire book, hoping that by the end, there would be a reason that gave some acceptable level of justification for the violence and brutality. For me, it was not there. It was the burning cat, redux.

I cannot criticize Konrath for writing this book. The man has made the commitment to writing novels that a publisher will buy. I cannot criticize the imprints that published the book. They print what they believe the public will buy.

That leaves the people that bought the book, including The Old Cobbler. I want very much to believe that others bought the book based the same type of criteria, the same level of ignorance that I did. The alternative to this is what leaves me with such a disturbing concern.

That is the idea that there is a sufficient number of folks in this country that buy, read and enjoy the type of baseless, unjustifiable violence depicted in AFRAID to make this type of novel a viable part of the book publishing industry.

If AFRAID proves to be an acceptable seller, as does a second book in this "genre" planned by Konrath, in which he promises more “chilling horror,” the books will make a far more chilling statement about our society than they do about the author or the imprint that publishes them.

A Limb and Eye For Beauty; a Fable

Once upon a time, in a small kingdom by a large river, a baby was born without either a left arm or a left eye. He grew into a strapping young lad, and joined the crew on his father’s boat as they plied the river for fish to sell.

When the young man with no left arm or left eye was age twenty-one, the elderly king who ruled the small kingdom by the river died. The king’s only son, the prince, became the ruler of the kingdom.

The young king, tall and sleekly muscled, and his equally attractive wife were heralded as the beginning of a beautiful new time for the kingdom. The young king liked the idea of ruling a beautiful kingdom. He issued an edit.

All citizens of the kingdom who did not meet the young king’s concept of beauty were to be exiled into the wilderness across the large river. This included the young man with no left arm or left eye.

When the exiles organized themselves according to talent, the young man with no left arm or left eye became a fisherman. Having no boat, he walked the banks of the large river each day, trying to impale fish with a sharpened stick.

One day, while walking along the riverbank, the young man with no left arm or left eye, looked across the river and saw the young king’s two daughters, playing in the shallow water along the far bank of the river.

He was watching when one of them stepped into a deep hole. She could not swim. Despite desperately flailing her arms, she was being swept downstream by the current while her sister stood helpless, screaming for help.

The young man with no left arm or left eye dived into the river. He used his powerful legs to propel himself across the river’s current. Nearing the end of his endurance, he grasped the princess’ hair and held her up until help arrived.

The young princess was grateful to the young man with no left arm or left eye. She told her father, the king, that she was in love with the young man who had rescued her and wanted to marry him. This troubled the king.

He considered himself a wise man for his age, but he pondered for days, seeking a way to agree with his daughter’s wish while adhering to his idea of a beautiful kingdom. Finally, he arrived at a solution to both problems.

The palace spokesman made two announcements. The king’s daughter would marry the man of her wishes in two weeks. By that time every man in the kingdom would have had his left arm cut off and his left eye removed.

Maron's WINTER’S CHILD (2006) Presents a Major Change in Growth in the Life of Judge Deborah Knott.

Reading Margaret Maron’s twelfth offering in her Judge Deborah Knott series, WINTER’S CHILD⎯a title that was somehow missed when it was published back in 2006⎯ reminded me of discussions about the manner in which readers say they want to see growth on the part of a main character.

Judge Deborah Knott and Dwight Bryant, the chief deputy in Colleton County, N. C., have been married for only a month at the beginning of WINTER’S CHILD. Dwight is involved in the investigation of the shooting death of a local ne’er-do-well when he gets a call from his son who lives with Dwight’s ex-wife in Shaysville, Virginia, a couple hours drive north.

Dwight learns, after arriving in Shaysville, that his ex-wife is missing. Then his son disappears. The ex-wife is found dead, an obviously faked suicide, but the son remains missing. While trying to unravel the mystery in Shaysville, Dwight is still devoting time and guidance to those investigating the shooting death back in Colleton County. When Deborah hears what has happened, she takes a leave of absence from her judicial duties to be with her new husband.

In addition to gaining deeper insight into her husband’s background after arriving in Shaysville, she learns she will be the mother, albeit the stepmother to an eight-year-old boy, when Dwight’s son is found, drugged and scared, but otherwise unharmed. From this point in the story, there are subtle, but major changes in the way Margaret Maron presents her main character.

Among the things that define the difference between being a girl and a woman, is accepting the combined responsibilities of being a wife and a mother. While some might want to boil The Old Cobbler in oil for expressing such a thought, it is, in my opinion, the reason for the change in the manner in which Margaret presents her main character.

However one wishes to explain it, in WINTER’S CHILD, Judge Deborah Knott goes through a major change in her life. Margaret Maron does a masterful job with depicting this change. The writing is, at times, spine tingling scary. In other places, it alternates between tugging at and warming the heart. But most importantly, the writing never becomes bathetic.

This led to a look back over the series to 1992,the time when it all began. In BOOTLEGGER’S DAUGHTER, Margaret Maron introduced readers to Deborah Knott, a small-town, unwed lawyer, taking on the good old boys by running for judge.

Deborah Knot joined two other main characters that were already established on the literary scene in 1992. Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone demonstrated her continuing mastery of the alphabet with the release of I for INNOCENT. That same year, Sara Paretsky’s sixth novel in her V.I. Warshawski series, BURN MARKS, was published.

One book reviewer at the time called Deborah a sassy new heroine. Another said she was North Carolina’s answer to Paretsky’s Warshawski, which is an interesting comparison. Paretsky has said, “V I grew up under the shadow of the old steel mills.” It can be said that Deborah grew up under the shadow of the old copper stills.

When introduced to the reading world, Deborah Knott still had a few loose ends in her personal life that needed to be tidied up. We learned enough early on about her younger years to say that in one sense she was Colleton County’s answer to the TV show, “Sex and the City.”

Even as a Judge, Deborah Knott still had a few personal issues that remained unsolved, but her position in the Cotton Grove community grew as she gave her voice to public issues such as shelter for battered women, and the burning of churches.

After the quantum leap taken in WINTER’S SON, the character appears to be more focused in Margaret Maron’s next two books, HARD ROW (2007) and DEATH’S HALF ACRE (2008). Judge Knott still deals with community issues, while growing in her role as wife and mother.

A statically count was not done, but it seems there are fewer “dialogues” between the characters that ride along on Deborah’s shoulder, the preacher and his sidekick that represent her inner debates about the issues she faces. The Judge seems to be more certain in her decisions as to what should be done.

To my way of thinking, Margaret Maron’s fourteen books to date in the Deborah Knott series is a text-book example of how an author can show the growth and maturity of a main character while remaining true to the place and people that first led readers to fall in love with the character and the series.

The fifteenth book in the series, SAND SHARKS, is still weeks away from its August release. With it, we will have traveled with Deborah Knott from mountains in the west to the Atlantic Ocean in the east, but always following the highways and back roads of North Carolina. As Phil Harris, Bing Crosby and others once sang, “Nothing could be finer….”

Elizabeth Spencer's Long Literary Career Subject of Upcoming Documentary Film

Generations of Americans who may have forgotten, or may have never heard the name Elizabeth Spencer will have an upcoming opportunity to learn about a lady who casts a long shadow across the field of American literature.

A documentary film, “Elizabeth Spencer: Landscapes of the Heart,” with funding from the Southern Documentary Fund, is being made by Kevin McCarthy, a London native who now teaches screen writing at Dartmouth College. So who is this lady?

Eudora Welty had this to say. “It has never been doubted that Elizabeth Spencer knows the small, Southern, backwoods hill town down to the bone. This she transforms by the accuracy of her eye and ear, talent and a certain prankish gaiety of spirit into a vital and absorbing novel.”

Elizabeth Spencer’s personal life, from her birthplace, Carrollton, Mississippi, in 1921, to her present home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is as compelling as her literary career.

According to Sharon Swanson, the film’s project director, Elizabeth’s mother was a McCain and great aunt to presidential candidate Sen. John McCain. The senator’s brother, Joseph Pinckney "Joe" McCain II, appears in the film.

After graduating as her high school’s valedictorian, Elizabeth attended Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi, before earning her Master’s Degree in Literature at Vanderbilt University in 1943.

Ten years later, with two published novels to her credit, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She left her teaching post at the University of Mississippi in Oxford and moved to Italy to pursue a full time writing career.

In September 1956, she traveled to Cornwall, England, where she married John Rusher, an Englishman. Their honeymoon was a train trip through London, Paris and eventually to Rome where the couple had first met. They would later call Montreal, Canada, their home for nearly thirty years before relocating to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1986.

Her list of awards received is extensive, but the one she did not win may be the most intriguing episode in the six decades of her writing career. In 1956, the year of her marriage, her novel, THE VOICE AT THE BACK DOOR, was published.

The popular opinion among those who deemed themselves to be in the know considered the book a shoo-in for the next Pulitzer Prize for literature. The jury for the 1957 selection recommended that she receive the award. But the Pulitzer board made no award that year.

In a void of explanation, speculation ran the gauntlet … the author was a woman with only two novels to her credit … she was not living in the United States … she was married to a foreigner … the novel dealt with racial issues at a time when some felt they were best left unaddressed.

The novel received the first Rosenthal Award of the American Academy. It was published in England and translated into several foreign languages. Reviews were universally raves. A movie contract was signed, a cast selected and a script written before a Hollywood strike doomed the project.

There were those who speculated that the worldwide acclaim the novel received and the Pulitzer board’s failure to make an award in 1957 were factors in what happened four years later. Harper Lee’s TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD received the Pulitzer Prize for 1961.

There are striking similarities between the two novels. Southern women who had little or no established literary history were the authors. Both books were set in the south, both dealing with small-town strife and racial issues. However, there were differences between the two women.

Harper Lee knew Truman Capote from their childhood days in Monroeville, Alabama. When she moved to New York City in 1950, Capote was already there, somewhat established, and gave his young friend helpful advice that led to the writing of her novel.

During an interview in 2008, Elizabeth Spencer described her situation in 1957. “There were Pulitzer rumors when that book came out, but I was young, and relatively unknown by the committee at the time.”

While TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD was the extent of Harper Lee’s published writing career, Elizabeth Spencer’s has continued for more than a half century since her snub by the Pulitzer board. And her list of awards has continued to grow, a list far to vast to include here.

She is retired from her teaching post at UNC-Chapel Hill and has been a widow since her husband of 42 years died in 1998. But she still looks at the world with the heart of a writer. She had this to say in a recently published interview.

“The world of today, so vital and various, sends out a challenge for any writer to get down something valuable, no matter how daunting even to think of such a task may be. I keep running to keep up, not so fast as before, but still trying. This means a short story every so often, a novel when I can.”

The title of the film comes from her book published in 1998, LANDSCAPES OF THE HEART A MEMOIR. In the opening chapter Elizabeth describes the horseback ride she took at age twelve from Carrollton to Teoc, her mother’s family plantation.

Rebekah L. Cowell, in an article in The Chapel Hill News, wrote after viewing preliminaries of the work in progress. “It’s an emotional moment in the film when Spencer returns to the family home place, once a bustling plantation and now a derelict shell.”

Filming on the documentary is scheduled for completion this summer as McCarthy follows the story to Italy. A release date for the film has not been announced.

When the film is released, it will provide an opportunity for the world to see and hear a fascinating lady who can claim personal friendships with a league of authors from William Faulkner to Lee Smith.

[Photo credit: Raleigh Metro Magazine]

State, local laws on Motorists’ Use of Cell Phones Create a Type of Hwy.Rouelette.

The use of cell phones while driving is becoming a target for law enforcement, as radar detectors became back in the days of the double-nickel speed limit. However, knowing when and where you needed to hide the radar detector was easier than it is these days to know when to dump the hand-held cell phone.

Bans on radar detectors were enacted at the state level. That is not the case for hand-held cell phones. As of June 2009, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association, six states have given local jurisdictions the authority to ban cell phone usage with their city limits.

On the flip side, eight states prohibit local jurisdictions from enacting phone usage laws. This strongly suggests that these states are considering state-level legislation, a trend that is growing.

While no state has as yet enacted a ban on all cell phone usage, five states (California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Washington) plus the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands have banned the use of hand-held phones.

With the exception of Washington State, violation of the hand-held ban is a primary enforcement offense. “An officer may ticket a driver for using a handheld cell phone while driving without any other traffic offense taking place.”

State law in Utah considers speaking on a cell phone to be an offense only if a driver is also committing some other moving violation (other than speeding).

New Hampshire has made the issue even more of a legal tangle. It enacted a “comprehensive distracted driving law.” This speaks directly to the issue of contributory negligence. Regardless of circumstances, if a driver is involved in an accident while using a cell phone, he or she may have to share the liability.

Thirteen states and the District of Columbia have banned text messages for all drivers. Beyond these laws, there is a myriad of state and local legislation that speaks to different segments of the driving population⎯novice, underage, and school bus drivers.

The present stage of laws relating to cell phone usage can be compared to the early days of automotive seat belts and helmets for motorcyclists. It was a years-long struggle between state legislatures and the public before the federal government stepped in.

Laws mandating seat belt and helmet usage became a condition for states seeking federal appropriations for highway construction. No one should be surprised to see a total ban on cell phone usage follow a similar path.

In the meantime, cross country driving while talking on the phone has become a type of motorized roulette. The question becomes: How many phone calls are important enough to risk a moving traffic violation? Or worse, a vehicle crash with the potential for injury or death?

Those who wish to do so may go to the Governors Highway Safety Association’s Web site to read a complete listing of all current laws.

Carnegie Mellon University Study Shows Just Listening To Cell Phones Impairs Drivers' Ability to Concentrate

If you have a choice, would you prefer the drivers around you on the road to have chugged two beers within the last hour, or be talking on a cell phone?

Based on the results of a study recently conducted at Carnegie Mellon University, with funding from the Office of Naval Research, the answer is: take your pick and take your chances; there is very little difference.

Various studies on the affects of alcoholic consumption have established an average baseline that two beers consumed within an hour would leave a 160-pound person with a loss of some forty percent of cogitative function. At that level of loss, a driver is “1.4 times more likely to have an accident than someone who is sober.”

The Carnegie Mellon study, using brain-imaging instrumentation, documented that “listening alone reduces by 37 percent the amount of brain activity associated with driving.” A press release from the university detailed the test procedure and the results.

“The 29 study volunteers used a driving simulator while inside an MRI brain scanner. They steered a car along a virtual winding road at a fixed, challenging speed, either while they were undisturbed, or while they were deciding whether a sentence they heard was true or false.

State-of-the-art functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) methods were used to measure activity in 20,000 brain locations, each about the size of a peppercorn. Measurements were made every second.

The driving-while-listening condition produced a 37 percent decrease in activity of the brain's parietal lobe, which is associated with driving. This portion of the brain integrates sensory information and is critical for spatial sense and navigation. Activity was also reduced in the occipital lobe, which processes visual information.

The other impact of driving-while-listening was a significant deterioration in the quality of driving. Subjects who were listening committed more lane maintenance errors, such as hitting a simulated guardrail, and deviating from the middle of the lane.”

Neuroscientist Marcel Just, director of the University’s Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging, said, "The clear implication is that engaging in a demanding conversation could jeopardize judgment and reaction time if an atypical or unusual driving situation arose. Heavy traffic is no place for an involved personal or business discussion.”

Those who are against any laws against restrict cell phone argue that there is no difference between cell phone use and listening to a radio /music player or talking with a passenger. While admitting it is not known how these activities compare to cell phone usage, Dr. Just addressed this issue.

"Talking on a cell phone has a special social demand, such that not attending to the cell conversation can be interpreted as rude, insulting behavior." A passenger, by contrast, he noted, is likely to recognize increased demands on the driver's attention and stop talking.

Americans have a history of not accepting studies that do not support personal choices, and while one study does not establish an irrefutable fact, it is only a matter of time until the use of cell phones will added to alcohol and drugs as a reason for a driver to be cited for DUI (driving under the influence.) Five states have already taken steps toward that end.

Those interested in reading the complete Carnegie Mellon study may download a copy by going to the university’s Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging Web site.

Human Instinct, Deportment Training Combine to Make Use of Cell Phone While Driving a Deadly Combination

Back in the days when telephones came only in basic black and had a cord that tied them to a wall outlet, The Old Cobbler’s employer at the time sent his employees off to a charm school to learn the proper way to deal with a customer in our office should we have to answer the phone in the customer’s presence.

The secret to success we were told was maintaining maximum eye contact with the customer while on the phone. That we were also told was not as easy as it sounded. Doing such was contrary to basic human instinct and training.

Three separate incidents over the past weeks reminded me of what was learned in that class from yesteryear, that it is still applicable, and carries importance of a greater nature in today’s world of cell phone usage while driving.

Here’s what was learned in that class. From infancy, it is human instinct to look in the direction of any sound heard. Then, from the age when the teaching of polite manners arrives, kids are taught to look at someone when they are being spoken to.

It is this mixture of basic instinct and training that we carry with us when we use a cell phone while driving. So what happens? On three occasions, this was observed at intersections with two through lanes and a dedicated left-turn lane and left-turn traffic signal.

Traffic was stopped for the traffic signal. The driver in the inside through lane was talking on the cell phone, which was being held in the left hand. The left-turn signal turned green, the traffic in the left-turn lane started moving, and the driver in the inside through lane began moving through the intersection and through what was still a red light.

These three incidents were observed from a point head on, across the intersection. None of the three drivers were looking ahead at the traffic signal. They were looking down and to their left while talking on their cell phone. One can only assume that they saw movement to their left, which triggered their reaction to start moving through what was for them, still a red light.

In two of the incidents, the drivers continued without incident through the red light because there was no opposing traffic: left-turning vehicles from the opposite direction. In the third incident, the left-turning driver ahead of me saw what was happening, hit his horn, stopped, and only then did the driver running the red light while talking on his phone look up and slam on his brakes. A collision was avoided by mere inches.

If anyone questions the idea that people look down and to the side while talking on a telephone should plant themselves somewhere and watch their fellow citizens who walk or drive by while talking on a cell phone.

State-by-state, authorities are dealing with the issue in various ways. Some have banned cell phone use by drivers below a certain age. That begs the question as to what the legislators are doing to protect the young people from the other drivers.

Some states allow only hands-free usage. Those legislators much think people think with their hands or fingers, and not their ears.

I asked a gentleman I know, a personal injury lawyer, what he thought about the use of cell phones while driving. He smiled and said, “They’re good for business.”

So, bottom line. If you are going to drive and talk on your cell phone, please keep your eyes on the traffic around you and obey the traffic signals.

There are may be some folks around who do not remember the item below. If you do, you are showing your age.