Bucker Dudley. It's what you want to read.

Here's a scary thing. I just spent seven years writing a young adult historical novel. None of my publishing contacts thought they could sell it. I know only four or five young persons of fourteen and up, only one of them reads, and I'm not sure she even has a Kindle. Nevertheless I've decided to offer BUCKER DUDLEY as a Kindle serial of maybe five episodes, and see whether anybody buys it.

Ninety-nine cents an episode. If you have a Kindle, the first episode is free! Find it HERE. If you don't have a Kindle, you can pay 99¢ for the first episode and read it on a free Kindle app on your computer, smartphone or tablet. You can download a Kindle app HERE.

I'll sweeten the pot. Enter my contest. If you win I'll buy you a Kindle.

Now, you're asking yourself: Why would I spend my precious time in this short life reading about Polly McCaskie's adventures in the War of 1812, when there are so many reasons not to? First of all, she's Canadian. (I had an editor tell me some years ago, before the rise of Louise Penny, that nobody wanted to read about Canadians.) Secondly, it's the War of 1812, for cat's sake. Nobody but Canadians even likes that war. We in the U.S. are embarrassed by it. The British marched into Washington and burned the White House. President Madison ran like a hare. We don't want to hear about that. It's humiliating.

Furthermore the adventures in this book, while taking place in the Regency time period, are so far from the fashionable clubs and drawing rooms of London that they might as well be happening in another universe. Nobody says, “La, indeed, sir.” Nobody even wears corsets, except maybe in Sackets Harbor, and then they don't talk about them. Captain Leonard of the United States Navy is a rake, I guess, but he isn't an attractive rake, and he gets in serious trouble for it. Are there ladies? No, not a lot of ladies. Half of the major female characters make love for a living. Others are tough Indians scratching out a hard existence in the Canadian woods.

Actually that's why you want to read it. BUCKER DUDLEY will take you out of this worrisome world of the twenty-first century and carry you off to sea, and into the deep woods of Canada, with a girl who retains her light-hearted outlook in spite of war and dreadful vicissitudes. In the end she rediscovers her true love, an American seaman. Between the two of them they strike the blow that puts an end to this miserable war.

I would recommend it to teachers as an aid to teaching the War of 1812, if anyone wanted to teach that, and if the prostitutes didn't play such a prominent role in the plot. As it is I can hear the parents screaming. Oh, well. Leave me a comment if you want to be included in the drawing for the Kindle.

Always to be Calling it, Please, Research

Tom Lehrer fans will recognize this line from his immortal hit, "Plagiarize." When I set out to write BUCKER DUDLEY it was not my intention to rip off other people's work, but to write something fresh and original about a very old idea: the sailor girl who went to sea dressed as a boy.

And I wanted to write about the War of 1812.

I didn't know a whole lot about the War of 1812 before I started reading. Americans don't. It's a big deal in Canada, because they figure they won it, which they did, sort of, and yet not. The idea of a shooting war between Canadians and Americans intrigued and horrified me. My father was American, my mother Canadian. They grew up thirty miles from each other.

What most Americans know about the war is the part where the British burned Washington, and then were repelled from Baltimore, where our flag still flew from Fort McHenry in the dawn's early light, after which they sailed off to New Orleans and got soundly whupped by Andrew Jackson's troops.

There was a lot more to it than that. First off the Americans declared war on Great Britain, the most powerful naval force on earth, without having an effective army or navy. It was not a popular war. President Madison sent raw troops to Canada under incompetent officers in the mistaken belief that their invasion would be welcomed. The troops were terrified of Indians, who wouldn't fight by the rules. The New Englanders were so distressed by the whole mess that they started making plans to secede from the Union.

Showing the craziness through the eyes of an adolescent girl who found herself in the middle of it became the task of writing the novel. Bucko does fine. Good health, a cheerful outlook, and remarkable athletic ability see her through most of her trials. The first draft of BUCKER DUDLEY showcased many fascinating characters that I came upon in my reading, but the multiple point of view necessary to feature them pulled focus from Bucko's struggles.

John Norton, the half-Scot, half-Cherokee Mohawk war chief, was too good to cut out of the book in the second draft: handsome, fascinating, bloodthirsty, irresistible to women, ultimately a tragic figure. So he is Bucko's cousin, on the Scottish side, her last remaining relative. She must go into the woods to find him after her ship is destroyed.

In the coming weeks I'll blog about the characters I had to cut. I already told you about Duncan McColl, the soldier minister who was a force for peace on the Maine-New Brunswick border, and Alexander Contee Hanson, the newspaper publisher who detonated the Baltimore riots, and my beloved Captain Thomas Masterman Hardy (Nelson's Hardy), whose aristocratic young wife never appreciated him. There are many others of interest, both noble and debased. Check back here from time to time to find out all about them.

What I'm Up To These Days

Now that the cool weather is upon us I'm happy to say that I'm experiencing that snap of returned consciousness that comes with the end of a steamy summer. I have plans. First of all I plan to brag about the prize I got from the NJSAA (that's the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance) for The Edge of Ruin until everybody gets sick of hearing about it.

But that won't take long. Then I plan to get busy, or busier, on the two books I'm working on right now, the suspense novel that takes place in a town much like Lambertville and the book about the sailor girl in the War of 1812. Which pretty much takes care of my mornings.

Then I'm actually going to drop the twenty pounds I've been promising to shed for the last ten years. I figure I can do that between noon and one. Maybe I'll stop eating and tap dance.

But what I wanted to announce today is my intention of doing more with this blog.

I'm already posting every Friday to the Crime Writer's Chronicle, which I hope you're following; four really interesting writers are on that with me. But for this one, I'm going to try to post every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday, starting next week. Tuesday's posts will explore aspects of the War of 1812, hoping to gin up some interest in that wacky conflict in advance of the bicentennial. Friday and Sunday, random subjects, until I finish the suspense novel, at which time I may begin running excerpts from Bucker Dudley.

I'm going to have to put one of those gizmos on the blog now that make you copy hard-to-read letters into a box before you can comment. Wish I didn't have to, but I'm being snowed under with the attention of Russian spam bots. I hope you'll forgive me.

And that's what I'm up to.

A Prize for the Edge of Ruin

The Edge Of Ruin, the comic thriller I wrote under the name of Irene Fleming about the early film industry in Fort Lee, New Jersey, has won a prize, the annual fiction award of the NJSAA (New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance). I must confess that I'm thrilled.

These folks are historians, not mystery fans necessarily, so the thing they like about it is the history. I think I got it right, not only the events of 1909 but the feelings and attitudes of the people of that time. Research is so much easier now than it used to be. Newspapers have put their old stories online and indexed them. The Library of Congress offers old silent movies reconstructed from the paper copies that were submitted to them for copyright protection.

Apart from the internet there were movies and books. Kino offers silent movies. Netflix offers silent movies. As for books, my two main sources were Fort Lee, The Film Town, by Richard Koszarski, and Big Trouble by J. Anthony Lucas, as well as many biographies and autobiographies. To say nothing of the stories told me long ago by my grandmother, who was living and working in New York City in those days.

I was perfectly comfortable writing about that period. 1812 is more of a stretch. Although Bucker Dudley is set in the Regency period it is in no respect a Regency novel. Most of it takes place at sea, or on military bases, or in the North Woods among the Mohawk Indians. Bucker hardly ever wears a dress, much less a corset. But it's fun. The history is as solid as I can make it. I have something like eighteen linear feet of books on the many aspects of the ever-fascinating war of 1812, and yet I manage to move the action along without boring information dumps.

I'll save the information dumps for the blog. Next week I'll talk about General Wilkinson, that wretched scoundrel.