"Murder" Around the Water Cooler

I asked my local Barns and Noble to put my book on the shelf in late December, and all three copies have sold.

A local bookstore called Dominion Books offers a kind of open-mic night for authors to read their work, and I intend to go the evening of February 2nd. 

Some comments and interactions relating to my book:

Catherine arrived late to a meeting saying, "I blame Miles for my tardiness. I got to reading his book and lost track of time." A real page-turner, I guess.

I have gotten both positive and negative feedback about the subtitle, "An Intellectual Thriller." Susan thinks it is a good subtitle because it lets readers know what they are getting into. For every reader turned off by it, others might be attracted by the implicit challenge posed by the subtitle.

Mike, on the other hand, says, "It makes me feel left out." Mike is always self-deprecating.

Gene says that he still thinks that John the Apostle wrote the Gospel According to John and that he is the Beloved Disciple. He came up with a good reason for doubting it is Lazarus and thinking that it is John instead: John was a fisherman, and Lazarus was not. In Chapter 21 of John's gospel, the Beloved Disciple appears in Galilee, fishing with Peter and some other disciples. Why would Lazarus be there?

Well, maybe because he was close to Peter, and maybe because he had to get out of Judea after being outed as a follower of Jesus, or because he wanted to be with Jesus, if he knew that Jesus might be in Galilee. [BTW Mark (14:28) and Matthew (26:32) have Jesus tell his disciples to meet him in Galilee after the crucifixion while Luke (24:33-43) says that Jesus told them to stay in Jerusalem. Matthew 28:16 and all of John chapter 21 portray the disciples meeting Jesus in Galilee.] 

Someone who read my book gave it four out of five stars on Amazon's site. (I am reminded of William F. Buckley's remark to an author, "I am sure that all of your friends will buy a copy of your book," only, I do not know whether it was a friend that rated it.)

An acquaintance rated it five stars and wrote a positive review on Barnes and Noble:

Murder in the Grand Bazaar lists itself on its cover as, An Intellectual Thriller and it succeeds in spades. It interweaves the complexity of the early history of the Christian church and its relationships to the gospels, all wrapped in the maze of a Turkish bazaar, tied up in an ancient manuscript. At the same time, we are shown how in the first centuries conflicts arose as to how the church saw itself, and wanted to be seen.

This picture of winners and losers is the pursuit of the intrepid Professor Felix Markarian, classicist and polyglot, with a nose for ancient codices. He is off to Istanbul to review a newly discovered text that may overturn our understanding of the gospels and is in the hands of a dealer that operates in the shadows of the law. Felix gets wrapped up in a murder case, the intrigues of the Turkish police, and international antiquities smugglers.

Action and subterfuge carry the novel, but the most admirable quality of Murder in the Grand Bazaar is how the convoluted history of what did and did not become the gospels is deftly woven into the story. The details and trivia never interfere with the pacing, and Felix is never abandoned to the facts of the past. He is immersed in them, and his excitement for what the codex and history can reveal spills over to the reader, leaving us with a possible new interpretation of the gospels. Hopefully Felix will grace us with more insights in his next adventure.

        —Les Bares, Richmond, Virginia (retired high school English teacher)

Sorry, Les, I cannot guarantee a sequel, although anything is possible.

My college classmate, Maryann, was also bothered by the ending of Murder in the Grand Bazaar because she wanted to see Felix get home safely, not be sidetracked into another adventure. I think she also prefers her Jesus simpler and less controversial than the one I presented. I see nothing wrong with keeping Jesus simple, even if I believe he was a complicated man, charismatic and historically pivotal, though that last fact would have been unexpected and rightly considered unlikely in the century in which he lived.

"Murder" came out in paperback in October, and the following month four copies were purchased in Germany. I do not know how to tell whether they were all purchased at once or by the same purchaser or whether they were purchased in the same or different cities. [Looking at the paperwork from my distributors, I now believe that the four copies were all purchased by a bookseller in Germany, but I still don't know what city the purchaser was in; they could be a chain buying a copy for each of four outlets.] I am fairly sure that the rest of the paperbacks that have been purchased were bought by me, and all in North America.

In December, my local Barnes and Noble store in Charlottesville, Virginia purchased three copies, and I went into the store and autographed the copies. Since then, I do not know where in the store they have been displayed, if anywhere.

Adding to my own author profile on LibraryThing.com, I noticed their question about relatives of the author, as in what other authors might be relatives of mine? There is the late William Plumer Fowler, and late Katharine Fowler-Billings (aka, Katharine Fowler-Lunn). So, I added them to my profile and myself to their profiles. I am (or should be) humbled to point out this connection; Uncle William was a poet and a literary analyst whose magnum opus Shakespeare Revealed in Oxford's Letters finds echoes of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets in the letters of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, whom my uncle believed to be the true author of the plays and sonnets attributed to Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon. Joseph Sobran wrote that whether or not you agree with William Fowler, the amount of work that obviously went into Shakespeare Revealed is impressive.

Katharine "Kay" Fowler-Billings was a geologist and explorer who wrote many books and papers in her field. One of her books, originally written under her first married name, Fowler-Lunn, is called Gold Missus, and it is about her adventures in Sierra Leone, prospecting for gold and other rare minerals beginning in the late 1920s.

I have, so far, written only a short thriller about murder in an exotic land that I have never visited, and on top of it, with intellectual pretensions right there in my subtitle. (The closest I have ever been to Istanbul was a restaurant in Germany where I had Turkish coffee served by Turkish immigrants.)