Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Double Wide
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://leowbanks.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no 97070434
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no97070434
HEADING: Banks, Leo W.
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670 __ |a Arizona Highways they left their mark, c1997: |b t.p. (Leo W. Banks)
953 __ |a xx00
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PERSONAL
Born in Boston, MA.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Boston College; University of Arizona, master’s degree, 1977.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Arizona Daily Star and Arizona Highways, journalist; Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe, correspondent, University of Arizona, instructor in writing.
AWARDS:Crime Novel of the Year, True West Magazine, Spur Ward for best debut novel, and Spur Award for best western contemporary novel, all 2017, all for Double Wide.
WRITINGS
Also contributor to anthologies, including They Left Their Mark, edited by Robert J. Farrell, Arizona Department of Transportation (Phoenix, AZ), 1997; Arizona Highways: Manhunts and Massacres, Arizona Department of Transportation (Phoenix, AZ), 1997; Travel Arizona II: Another “Travel Arizona” Guidebook from Arizona Highways, edited by Bob Albano, Arizona Highways (Phoenix, AZ), 1998; Travel Arizona: Regional & Metropolitan Tour Guide, edited by Bob Albano, Arizona Highways (Phoenix, AZ), 2004. Contributor to periodicals, including Miami Herald, Los Angeles Times Magazine, National Geographic Traveler, National Review, Newsday, Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal. Columnist, True West Magazine.
SIDELIGHTS
Leo W. Banks’s debut novel is the noir mystery Double Wide, but he is no stranger to telling stories. “Banks,” explained the author of a biographical blurb accompanying an article by Banks in True West Magazine, “has spent his working life as a journalist in Arizona. Whenever possible, he returned to his first love, the West, the frontier, our unique American story. He has covered these topics for numerous publications, including the Los Angeles Times Magazine, True West, and Arizona Highways.” “At the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, I wrote a consumer complaint column called Troubleshooter,” Banks explained in an autobiographical Q&A found on his website. “I’d get letters from nice old ladies who ordered an Elvis Presley Love Me Tender alarm clock from a P.O. box somewhere and never got it. My job was to right the wrong. I’d call and say, ‘Rest easy, Ma’am. Troubleshooter’s on the case.’ It was great experience. Learned how to talk to ticked-off people. I moved on to features and later magazines and had a blast. Got to meet and talk to interesting people.
The protagonist of Double Wide is former baseball player Prospero Stark. He had his origins, Banks said, in a trip he had made early in his career as a journalist. “I thought back to the hours I’d spent riding Mexican League buses and the conversations with my seat mate, a pitcher in his early 30s who compensated for his weakening arm by throwing junk,” Banks related in the Tucson Weekly. “That got me imagining a novel based around a character, who, instead of just throwing lazy curveballs and ducking, had mastered an illegal pitch like a spitball. In my mind, he was worldly, sarcastic, funny, down but not quite out; a flame still burned.” “Stark was once a pitching legend in the Minor Leagues, known as ‘The Phenom’ and nicknamed Whip Stark,” wrote Alan Cranis in Bookgasm. “But a drug charge landed him in a Mexican jail and brought his promising professional sports career to an abrupt halt. Now he lives in peaceful semi-seclusion in a small trailer encampment in the Arizona desert with a collection of colorful outcasts.” Whip’s life changes abruptly when he receives a package containing a human hand: that of former catcher Rolando Molina. “Whip . . . joins forces with reporter Roxanne Santa Cruz,” said a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “to find his baseball buddy, dead or alive.” “Softhearted Whip is a novelist’s dream protagonist,” stated Betty Webb in a Mystery Scene Magazine review: “a once-famous sports figure who is now perfectly content to spend his time rescuing downtrodden drunks, teenage runaways, and women who are no better than they should be.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, September 4, 2017, review of Double Wide, p. 67.
Tucson Weekly, November 16, 2017, Leo W. Banks, “A Book That Will Make You Believe in Murder Again.”
ONLINE
Bookgasm, http://www.bookgasm.com/ (May 16, 2018), Alan Cranis, review of Double Wide.
Leo W. Banks Website, https://leowbanks.com (May 16, 2018), author profile.
Mystery Scene Magazine, https://www.mysteryscenemag.com/ (November, 2017), Betty Webb, review of Double Wide.
True West Magazine, https://truewestmagazine.com/ (October 31, 2017), “Building Your Western Library with Leo W. Banks.”
ABOUT LEO
Leo at Prescott courthouse
OUR APPROACH
In high school, Leo W. Banks worked loading delivery trucks with the Sunday edition of the Boston Globe. In those days the Sunday paper was really heavy, so he switched from lifting to writing. He graduated from Boston College and earned a masters degree from the University of Arizona, where he later taught writing. His articles have appeared in the USA Today, Newsday, Miami Herald, National Review, National Geographic Traveler, Sports Illustrated, Wall Street Journal and many others. He has been a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and, yes, the Boston Globe.
He has written four books of Old West history for Arizona Highways publishing and co-wrote a book about the Grand Canyon. His book about the saguaro cactus won’t stop selling. He has won thirty-eight statewide, regional and national journalism awards and today writes a column for True West magazine. Double Wide is his first novel.
OUR STORY
From the Author:
I wrote about my father's World War II service, beginning with his enlistment in April 1942, followed by training in England, landing at Utah Beach on D Day, the Battle at Cherbourg, and the Battle of the Bulge.
My favorite story about Dad: The day before VE Day, he was riding in a jeep with a German interpreter and a driver. The night was so dark, the driver couldn't see that the bridge over the ravine ahead had been blown up by retreating Germans. The jeep catapulted into it. Dad's glasses and everything else went flying. He suffered broken ribs, a broken tailbone and was temporarily paralyzed.
After a night in the care of a kindly German couple, he was taken to a hospital in Paris. During his recovery, the Army told him he was eligible for a Purple Heart. Dad, who always had bad eyesight, said, "I don't want a Purple Heart. I want my damn glasses back."
Read about him here.
Paul Banks
Lennon Court, South Boston
Lennon Court, South Boston (hotpads.com)
LEO TALKS TO HIMSELF
Where were you born?
In South Boston. In a brick apartment building called Lennon Court.
What memories do you have of Massachusetts?
Snow and nuns, often on the same day. In grade school, our desks had inkwell holes. If a kid was out sick, one of the nuns would put a raw onion in the hole to kill the germs. All it did was make our eyes water.
In the 7th grade, I spent many weekends diagramming sentences for Sister Mary Carlos. She was a fearsome disciplinarian. But it sure helped to learn the language.
My high school was right on Boston Harbor, and in January, after stepping off the subway, the wind coming off the water was absolutely arctic. But the Jesuits had a cure.
My homeroom teacher was a nervous, half-pint Latin scholar who had a speech impediment that caused him to say words twice. He'd make a fist and rap slow learners on the head with his big ring. "Pay attention, attention!" We thawed out fast.
First writing?
When I was 10, I wrote a book about the Civil War. It was 10 pages long, not including the introduction that my father, a math professor, wrote. Riveting stuff.
At Boston College, I wrote sports pieces for The Heights, the student newspaper. Also in college, I wrote and handed out a humor magazine called the Timmy News, which was along the lines of National Lampoon.
Copies might still be found underfoot in assorted public latrines in Boston's seedier precincts. If any are discovered, the politically correct cops will surely haul me away with a raincoat over my head.
What was newspaper work like?
As a high school kid, I loaded trucks with the Sunday edition of the Boston Globe. My high school was right across Morrissey Boulevard from the Globe building. My best friend was Front Page Farrell. We'd leave school, hop the fence running down the center of the boulevard, and, hoping we weren't crushed by rushing traffic, which through some miracle we weren't, go to work.
No, I mean your first writing job at a newspaper.
Oh. At The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, I wrote a consumer complaint column called Troubleshooter. I'd get letters from nice old ladies who ordered an Elvis Presley Love Me Tender alarm clock from a P.O. box somewhere and never got it. My job was to right the wrong. I'd call and say, "Rest easy, Ma'am. Troubleshooter's on the case."
It was great experience. Learned how to talk to ticked-off people.
I moved on to features and later magazines and had a blast. Got to meet and talk to interesting people.
I acted in a TV movie called September Gun. Well, I didn't exactly act. I just stood there wearing a ridiculous hat. Robert Preston, of Music Man fame, threw a shot of whiskey on me. I traveled around Mexico with the Juarez Indios, of Mexico's AAA baseball league, and wrote about it for Sports Illustrated. I interviewed a guy who played poker with Wyatt Earp.
What's with the middle initial on your byline? Sounds chi-chi.
When I was maybe 12 or 13 and got my first savings account, my dad sat me down and said that Leo W. Banks was my official, legal name. That sounded important to me and it stuck.
Any new writing projects?
I've written a country song about a guy on parole and a girl on the dole. They meet on Match.com. It's a love story called My Big Butt Baby, and it's a real toe-tapper. More news to come.
Do you read the comments?
No. Reading the comments is like walking into a biker bar wearing an Armani suit. It doesn't end well.
Favorite novels?
How much time do we have? To name two, The Great Gatsby, The Big Sleep. Wait, I have a third: The Shootist, by Glendon Swarthout. It's about J.B. Books, a dying gunfighter who comes to El Paso in 1901. In the movie version, John Wayne played Books in his final film performance. The Shootist might be the best Western novel ever written.
Favorite nonfiction?
In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote. Love that first sentence: "The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "'out there.'"
The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara's novel about Gettysburg. Won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. His character descriptions are brilliant.
Obsession?
Boston Red Sox.
Favorite movies?
So many. The Graduate, The Godfather, Good Fellas. But most of my favorites have horses in them. Unforgiven, The Outlaw Josie Wales, Open Range. The love story between Kevin Costner and Annette Bening is fantastic. Just like the love story between John Wayne and Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo makes the movie. It was co-written by Leigh Brackett, and I'm sure she wrote those scenes between the two.
Is this your first novel?
Published novel, yes. Like most writers, I've got a bunch of old manuscripts in my drawer, finished and unfinished.
How do you write?
Badly at first. Each draft gets a little better.
Influences?
Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Robert Parker, Robert Crais, Jim Thompson. I could go on. Hemingway's short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro stuns and frightens every time I read it.
Where do you get your ideas?
It's 7 a.m. and I need to produce copy, so I start putting words on the screen. I really don't want to know where I get my ideas. I treat what comes out of my brain in the morning like the smelly guy talking to himself on the bus. Best leave him alone.
leowbanks@gmail.com
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Building Your Western Library With Leo W. Banks
Author Leo W. Banks shares his favorite western books.
OCTOBER 31, 2017 by LEO W. BANKS
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Leo Banks Western Library Western Novels True West
As a youngster, Leo W. Banks watched too many TV and movie Westerns. The summer before entering Boston College High School, the Jesuits sent out a reading list that included Jack Schaefer’s Shane, and that sealed it. He was hooked.
Banks has spent his working life as a journalist in Arizona. Whenever possible, he returned to his first love, the West, the frontier, our unique American story. He has covered these topics for numerous publications, including the Los Angeles Times Magazine, True West and Arizona Highways, which also published four of his books of Old West history.
– Image Courtesy, Teresa Banks –
His latest work is a novel titled Double Wide, a contemporary mystery set in Arizona, which critics are calling “a rollicking page-turner” and “classic crime in its best new clothes.”
Banks recommends five books essential for every Western library.
1 The Shootist (Glendon Swarthout. Doubleday): Every time I read a novel about the West, I think maybe this is the one that tops The Shootist—but nothing ever has. The characters in this story of a dying gunfighter in El Paso in 1901 stand up and sing. The book is confidently written, funny, true and touching, especially the relationship between protagonist J.B. Books and Mrs. Rogers, the boardinghouse proprietor.
2 Son of the Morning Star (Evan Connell, Macmillan): Fine books have been written about Custer and the Little Big Horn, but this stands above. Connell wrote in lyrical prose and had a real gift for storytelling. After back surgery years ago, I picked up Morning Star, as I do periodically, and Connell got me again. I got so caught up in it, and ticked off at Reno, that it hampered my recovery.
3 The Ox-Bow Incident (Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Random House): A mob hangs three men falsely accused of murder and cattle-rustling. Their leader pistol-whips his son when he intervenes to stop the calamity. It happens anyway and the sheriff covers it up. The son hangs himself and the leader falls on his cavalry sword. Not many heroes here, but Ox-Bow offers a hard look at violence, cruelty and justice on the frontier.
4 Shane (Jack Schaefer, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt): “Straight and superb, he was silhouetted against the doors and the patch of night above them.” That’s Shane, as seen by Bob Starrett, the young narrator. Rancher Luke Fletcher threatens to run off homesteaders until the “rider from nowhere” arrives to dispense justice. Good guys and bad guys, simple and beautiful, with a slightly dark undercurrent. “His eyes seemed haunted in the shadow of the hat’s brim.”
5 All The Pretty Horses (Cormac McCarthy, Alfred A. Knopf): The voice is assured and authentic as McCarthy leads us into Mexico with 16-year-old John Grady Cole, who wants to cowboy. At publication in 1992, the book seemed entirely new, a literary lightning bolt that won the National Book Award. Other writers finish Horses with a mournful sigh, wondering, “How could I ever write anything so beautiful?”
About Leo Banks
LEO W. BANKS·SUNDAY, MARCH 18, 2018
Leo is a journalist with more than 40 years of experience. His articles have appeared in the USA Today, Newsday, Miami Herald, National Review, National Geographic Traveler, Sports Illustrated, Wall Street Journal and many others. He has been a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.
He has written four books of Old West history for Arizona Highways publishing and co-wrote a book about the Grand Canyon. His book about the saguaro cactus won’t stop selling. He has won numerous journalism awards and today writes a column for True West magazine. His first novel, Double Wide, has won the 2017 Crime Novel of the Year from True West Magazine, and two Spur Awards -- best debut novel and best western contemporary novel.
Double Wide
Author: Alan Cranis* Comments(0)
Journalist and Old West historian Leo W. Banks brings his knowledge of the Arizona desert, baseball, and even his expertise about cacti, to DOUBLE WIDE, his murder mystery debut novel. It’s a meandering but mostly entertaining first fiction effort that shows enough promise to make Banks a crime fiction author to watch.
Prospero Stark was once a pitching legend in the Minor Leagues, known as “The Phenom” and nicknamed Whip Stark. But a drug charge landed him in a Mexican jail and brought his promising professional sports career to an abrupt halt. Now he lives in peaceful semi-seclusion in a small trailer encampment in the Arizona desert with a collection of colorful outcasts who call him The Mayor.
One eveninng Stark’s routine is disrupted when he finds a dismembered human hand delivered to the door of his refurbished Airstream trailer. Stark immediately recognizes it as belonging to his former catcher and close friend. His friend had a drug problem, and Stark fears his friend got on the wrong side of the violent drug dealers who dominate the deserted towns not far from his encampment. But Stark won’t rest before he finds who killed his friend and the reason behind the murder.
With the help of his trailer camp friends, and joined by the beautiful but hard-living TV journalist, Roxanne Santa Cruse, Stark traces the last days of his friend’s life and the recent activities of a drug gang. Along the way Stark stumbles upon an unexpected conspiracy that could make the drug dealers even richer and possibly alter the course of Stark’s former profession. But his discovery could also get him killed.
Banks amazingly pulls all the diverse and seemingly unrelated plot elements together. This is due mostly to Stark’s laconic and softly sarcastic first-person narration. But uniting all these elements takes time, and Banks’s plot suffers from several occasions where the plot feels lost in the midst of the necessary exposition.
Fortunately Banks balances this defect with his alluring, offbeat cast of characters. Indeed many of the most enjoyable moments are when Stark interacts with the other residents of his trailer camp. They all have backstories that resulted in their winding up in the desert, but Banks relays these effectively in a sentence or two. Their peaceful existence is sharply contrasted with the violent, ever-threatening presence of the drug smugglers who Stark nonetheless accepts with the same ease as his other companions.
Then there is Stark’s father, a former college literature professor whose mid-life crisis resulted in a prison sentence. The chapters where Stark visits his father add little to the plot (except for an explanation of Stark’s unusual first name) but are unforgettable thanks to Banks’s insight into Stark and the emotions Stark experiences in the presence of his father.
Sadly Banks is far less effective with Roxanne Santa Cruz. Her tough-as-nails dialogue and other features come across more cartoonish than convincing. Its only when she calls in her experiences as a television reporter that she proves her worth to both Stark and the novel as well.
Another highlight is the Arizona desert setting, with its endless sunsets, abrupt rainstorms, majestic mountain terrains, and boundless stretches of sand and silence. Banks’s descriptions are wonderfully evocative, and frequently contrasted with the ugliness of the Arizona cities just outside of the desert.
The setting and characters, along with the inventive plot, make DOUBLE WIDE well worth your time.
Will we see more of Whip Stark? The open-ended conclusion would suggest so. But let’s at least hope we see more fiction from Leo W. Banks as he joins the ranks of other new crime fiction authors. —Alan Cranis
About the Author
Leo W. Banks graduated from Boston College and earned a masters degree from the University of Arizona, where he later taught writing. He has written four books of Old West history for Arizona Highways publishing and co-wrote a book about the Grand Canyon. Today, Banks writes a column for True West magazine. Double Wide is his first novel.
4/25/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Double Wide
Publishers Weekly.
264.36 (Sept. 4, 2017): p67.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
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Full Text:
Double Wide
Leo W. Banks. Brash, $12.99 trade paper
(352p) ISBN 978-0-997832-34-1
Banks's strong noir debut will remind many of early Joe Lansdale. Prospero "Whip" Stark, a former
professional baseball pitcher, has retreated to a trailer park, population eight, in the Arizona desert, after a
drug bust led to his doing time in a Mexican jail. One hot, stormy summer day, he opens a box that
mysteriously appeared outside his trailer. Inside is a severed hand that he recognizes as that of former
catcher Rolando Molina, a close friend, whom he last saw two years earlier outside a rehab center in
Malibu, where Rolando was being treated for cocaine addiction. Whip and neighbor Opal Sanchez follow
car tracks to a bluff, where he discovers a body that at first appears to be Rolando's--but it's not missing a
hand. Whip later joins forces with reporter Roxanne Santa Cruz to find his baseball buddy, dead or alive.
Opal's disappearance raises the stakes. Since he's new to this kind of work, Whip turns to his vast library of
pulp detective fiction for guidance. Smart dialogue helps propel the tight plot. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Double Wide." Publishers Weekly, 4 Sept. 2017, p. 67. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505468062/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0ce1c0e3.
Accessed 25 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A505468062
Books
Double Wide
by Leo W. Banks
Brash Books, November 2017, $12.99
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There are no eclipses in Leo W. Banks’ Double Wide, other than in the dark side of the human heart, yet this tale of a washed-up pro baseball pitcher living in a 1977 Airstream trailer in the Arizona desert is filled with wit. His career long tanked, Prospero “Whip” Stark stays financially afloat by renting out space in Double Wide, his small, self-owned trailer court. One morning someone leaves an amputated human hand in a box on the Airstream’s doorstep. By studying the tattoos on the hand, Whip realizes it belongs to pitcher Rolando Molina, his onetime catcher and longtime friend. The day gets even worse when Whip comes across a dead man near Paradise Mountain, one of the major routes for the area’s drug traffickers as they make their way from Mexico into the US. But the dead man is a stranger, and he has both his hands. Probably a drug mule, Whip figures. Deciding to let the authorities deal with the problem, he commits himself to finding the rest of his friend Rolando. The plot of Double Wide delivers a lot of drug cartel, baseball, and agave cacti information, all of which is interesting enough. But where Double Wide really shines is in its characters. Softhearted Whip is a novelist’s dream protagonist: a once-famous sports figure who is now perfectly content to spend his time rescuing downtrodden drunks, teenage runaways, and women who are no better than they should be. While some of the book’s other characters may be a bit over-the-top, such as the hard-drinking TV anchorwoman, few readers will mind because they are all so much fun. My personal favorite is Whip’s father, a once-renowned college professor who may or may not have murdered a prostitute while in the throes of his heroin addiction. The loyal Whip makes a weekly 200-mile round trip to visit his jailed father while he awaits his trial. By the end of the book (I’m not giving anything away here) Dear Old Dad is still in lockup. But that’s good news, because maybe Whip can spring him in a sequel. I certainly hope so, because the half-hilarious, half-somber Double Wide is so good it could bear at least one sequel. Maybe even a dozen.
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A Book That Will Make You Believe in Murder Again
By Leo W. Banks
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Leo W. Banks
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Leo W. Banks: Book Signings
Saturday, Nov. 18, 2 p.m.
Clues Unlimited
3154 E. Fort Lowell Road
Sunday, Nov. 19, 1 p.m.
Singing Wind Bookshop
700 W. Singing Wind Road, Benson
Brash Books just published my first novel, Double Wide. I wrote the first version of it in the 1980s. What are we looking at here—more than three decades? Sounds about right.
The idea originated on a bus in Mexico. I was a young newspaper reporter looking for a good story. I was single, had vacation time coming and didn't fancy sitting on a beach somewhere. A friend who used to pitch in the AAA Mexican League described what it was like to play baseball south of the border, the wild times, the characters he'd shared the field with.
It sounded good. He gave me the name of a guy with the Juarez Indios, and before long, I joined the players as they gathered outside the stadium, past midnight, for the start of a 20-hour bus trip. I spent three weeks with the team, in the hotels, the dugout, the locker room and on the field.
The access was total. I had a blast. The players were loose and fun, even though most were on the downside of their careers, fighting to stay in the game and hold off that awful moment when they toss their glove in the trunk and think, "What now? Am I supposed to sit in an office wearing a tie? Please, please, give me one more season."
I wrote my story—the Indios were Mexican League champs that year—and Sports Illustrated published it, an eight-page feature shot by the great Life magazine photographer Bill Eppridge. (Hit the journalism link on my website, leowbanks.com, and it's the first story under Sports Illustrated.)
My mission accomplished, I thought back to the hours I'd spent riding Mexican League buses and the conversations with my seat mate, a pitcher in his early 30s who compensated for his weakening arm by throwing junk.
That got me imagining a novel based around a character, who, instead of just throwing lazy curveballs and ducking, had mastered an illegal pitch like a spitball. In my mind, he was worldly, sarcastic, funny, down but not quite out; a flame still burned, a spark of goodness.
I wrote a couple hundred pages and an agent sent it out. A partial is hard to sell, and we got rejected. Time passed. I had a family, buried a couple of great dogs, wrote a few more novels, got rejected again, traveled around the Southwest writing for the L.A. Times, the Boston Globe, and others, including Sports Illustrated, which ran numerous additional pieces of mine.
And I did a ton of work for the Tucson Weekly and Arizona Highways, becoming intimately familiar with the backcountry of this great state and its people.
In my travels, whether here or in Mexico, I always packed a crime novel. I could forget everything else, but my go-bag held three essentials: Apples, clean underwear and a Raymond Chandler paperback.
Well, maybe a Jim Thompson, too. James M. Cain made good company. Oh, and I can't forget Cornell Woolrich and Robert Parker. David Goodis is so underrated. It was hard to choose.
A couple of years ago, I went out to the garage and dug up a dusty hard copy of my partial, then called Tequila Sunday. I liked it but thought I could make it better. I rewrote it, creating a new hero, the one-time phenom Prospero Stark, nicknamed Whip. He's out of baseball following a misunderstanding with Mexican authorities involving a gear bag full of cocaine.
I gave him a beautiful, hard-drinking TV reporter partner, Roxanne Santa Cruz, and created a few down-and-outers to populate his trailer park in the desert outside Tucson, which happens to be on a drug smuggling route. To kick off Stark's investigation and the plot, someone leaves the severed hand of his former catcher on the front step of his Airstream.
How did the book change from Tequila Sunday to Double Wide? The writing not much, but the plot is altogether different. In both, I tried to write the kind of book I like to read. Plenty of humor, nothing too deep, nobody rattling on about the human condition—a book that can make you believe in murder again.
As Whip Stark says to a homicide detective about his love for crime novels: "They move and they have endings. Nobody comes to terms with anything."
Most importantly, I followed the one unbreakable rule, the four-word secret ingredient—stuff has to happen. I don't like cement-mixer books in which there's too much description and not much movement.
So there you have it. And here I am, decades later, holding Double Wide in my hands, just like I planned it.
RELATED A Box Full of Trouble: An excerpt from Leo W. Banks’ new novel, Double Wide