Where We Find Ourselves

Guest post written by The Smoke in Our Eyes author James Grady with an excerpt at the end!
James Grady’s first novel Six Days of The Condor became the classic Robert Redford movie Three Days of The Condor and the current Max Irons TV series Condor. Grady has received Italy’s Raymond Chandler Medal, France’s Grand Prix Du Roman Noir and Japan’s Baka-Misu literature award, two Regardies Magazine short story awards, and been a Mystery Writers of America Edgar finalist. He’s published more than a dozen novels and three times that many short stories, been a muckraker journalist and a scriptwriter for film and television. In 2008, London’s Daily Telegraph named Grady as one of “50 crime writers to read before you die.” In 2015, The Washington Post compared his prose to George Orwell and Bob Dylan.

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We wake up wondering.

That’s why you love novels. Your kind of music. Art from the heart of someone else who’s been there, too. Someone who creates a world that lets you in. Entertains you like a great a William Carlos Williams prescription, a Don Winslow thriller or a  dive bar juke box dancin’ song. Poetry coming out of the car radio or a playlist giving you moments of transcendent recognition with where you’ve been, where you’re going, what you hope hope hope to find beyond your windshield. A crimson splash of Andy Warhol. The vibrating stillness of an Edward Hopper painting. Your screen capturing that look from Marilyn Monroe. 

What you wonder is the essence of what triggers creators like me, a scarred & gray haired ex-muckraker prose-slinger in a loft office above the home for a family he often feared he’d never get. Because we – I – wonder like you.

Poet Richard Hugo once told our class at my home state of Montana university that certain places have a preternatural spiritual strength that its growing-up souls can never escape even as it shapes what they do and who they become. He glanced around the seminar table and asked us mostly Montana “kids” where we were from. He’d nod. Grunt. Frown or smile. Came to me.

I said: “Shelby.”

Oh the look of those bulldog eyes from a WW II bombardier, Boeing factory line worker, minor league baseball catcher and poet honored by Yale!  

“Yeah,” he said. “You know what I’m talking about.”

Gave me a shrug that said `Sorry!’ and `It’s got you but you got it.’

My growin’ up Shelby sat on rolling golden prairie 60 some miles from the sawtooth Rocky Mountains of our western horizon. Canada slumbered 36 miles to the north. The nearest “city” that could almost fill one Brooklyn neighborhood was 85 miles to the south. The rest of the world was a million miles away in those days when America was coming-of-age as Dr. Strangelove and Oppenheimer’s bomb made us a superpower. Chain-linked Apocalypse missile sites ringed our town and made you feel like both a shooting savior and a target’s bullseye.

My one grandfather rode as one of the last free range cowboys. The other was a homesteader. The town gave our family a parade in 2014 honoring our 100 years there as the first settlers after the Blue Coats cavalry pushed the Blackfeet nation onto a Reservation that became the blooded home to Academy Award nominated Lily Gladstone and author James Welch.

I grew up in the Roxy movie theater my Dad managed. The county library. The subscription to Playboy Magazine my four years older sister gave me for my eighth grade graduation to drive our parents crazy. They decreed I had to keep the coming every month issues only in my bedroom with its cowboy drapes.

Darn.

And poet Hugo was right: Shelby in rock ‘n’ roll’s a-bornin’ years was electric. Other Montanans called it the second toughest town in the state after Butte, the mining city where Dashiell Hammett turned down a corporate murder contract only to see the target lynched from a downtown railroad trestle.  There was a badge-protected two story red stucco whorehouse on the north edge of my hometown. There was an everybody knows abortion mill run by a hero frontier doctor/conservative mayor inside dark second story windows of a flat-faced storefront on Main Street. There were more bars per capita than in Manhattan and the second toughest one was The Bucket Of Blood.

Besides my Chicago health care czar sister, our town produced Dr. Leroy Hood who helped realize DNA and Jack Horner, whose dyslexia almost flunked him out of high school and who after the Marine Corps, became the globally renowned dinosaur-finding savant mimicked in the movie Jurassic Park. 

Even as I created thrillers like Six Days Of The Condor, Mad Dogs and This Train, my hometown thumped my heartbeats.

And yeah, I wrote about it a dozen published short stories and poems.

But a full novel of Shelby….I couldn’t do it.

Hell, can’t do it.

Not just because of politeness or the legalities of protecting people.

Because….Because….I didn’t know the why of because.

Until one of my trips “home” in the before plagues summer of 2019.

I parked my rental car in the gravel paths cemetery where my family and friends are buried — a flat plateau with sprinklers trying to green the grass surrounded by golden prairie underneath a 100 miles wide blue Big Sky. Got out of the car near my family “plots.” Smelled the sod. Gas fumes from a hurrying past pickup. The warm July breeze brushed my bare —

Suddenly the wind swirled arctic cold.

Swept me up and away while shoving me down into that earth.

A realization, an articulated epiphany, a bone-deep knowing grabbed me:

`All the old ghosts are leaving town.’

And I knew I had to honor them. To pay back the fates that gave me my driving talent and great luck.

Especially now when all of us everywhere wonder with awe and horror:

`Where are we going?’

As Ziggy Marley sings: “’Don’t know your past, ’won’t know your future.”

What hit me then and there in that prairie cemetery moment was how.

How to be faithful and true to the old ghosts.

How to pay back the luck that blessed me.

How to be honest and loyal to the realities of everyone’s hometown.

How to portray our past so we can learn of & from it for our future.

How to give readers a ticking-clock meaningful Wow! of a story.

Look in your mirror.

Who you see in there is not you.

It’s your reflection. A flipped view of the who you might be.

Like the street foreman on my old road crew used to say: “I had to laugh.”

Only 1.7 million authors before me in a blink realized & solved the how that had haunted and stymied me for years:

Don’t write a novel set in or about your real hometown.

Write about the totally fictional Montana small town of Vernon.

And be true to the fictional, flipped mirror reflections of your growin’ up like Bruce Springsteen – the great American author of my generation – and others like Emily Dickinson, Barbara Kingslover, Ray Bradbury, Toni Morrison, Bob Dylan, John Steinbeck, S.J. Rozan, Blake Crouch, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, Stephen King, Miles Davis, Jess Walter, William Faulkner, Taylor Swift, Paul Vidich, Thelonius Monk, Richard Thompson, Tom McGuane, Janet Skeslien Charles, S.A. Cosby and thousands of other creators I love have done.

What hit me then was a sensation of our burning-up past.

And the title of that gotta-do-it novel: The Smoke In Our Eyes

And its when: 1959. The year the music didn’t die. The year of our first “noticed” KIAs in a place then spelled Viet Nam. The first scientific warning of global warming. The start of the “modern” battles for Civil Rights and women’s rights. The last year of the great Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who built superhighways to bring the country together and fought for the best possible public schools for every child so we could all know & think & do to save ourselves in this coin-toss world of fanatics plus communist or fascist dictators.

And the novel all starts with a tragic car wreck on a dark night highway.