Saxton Reads! & Reviews

            I started writing the Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mystery series because of a house. A little yellow house, a cottage, really, in Bay View Oaks in the North Sea area of Southampton, Long Island. It’s right on the Little Peconic Bay, and I imagined a guy sitting on the enclosed sun porch that faces the water, a middle-aged burnout, on his last legs, drinking vodka and brooding about his life. I wondered, what would be in his head?

            Writers will tell you that the most important thing about a work of fiction is the narrative voice. Especially when it’s first person. With this guy, who I named Sam Acquillo, I knew his voice from the start. I just needed to give him a life story to tell, and a world in which he could both rediscover his true self, and have some interesting things happen that people would want to read about. 

It turns out that Sam was once a technical trouble shooter for a big industrial company. So figuring out puzzles was a big part of his life’s work. It seemed to make sense that a guy like that would naturally take to solving the murder of an old lady that no one else thought had been murdered.  

            I was on the second or third in the series, and after being interviewed numerous times, I began to realize where Sam came from. Actually, one of my best old friends pointed it out to me, that Sam sounded a lot like my father.  He was a mechanical engineer, and a born trouble shooting Mr. Fix-it. He was also a very tough guy, charming and brutal at the same time, with an Ivy League education. So there you go.

            But Sam isn’t just my old man. He’s a lot of other things as well. Like all fictional characters, he’s part of several real people, and part entirely made up. People ask me how much of Sam is me, and I have to say, not much. We share carpentry skills and a penchant for reading arcane stuff, but that’s about it. 

            Oh, and I guess I’ve been known to hoist a vodka or two.

            The Sam Acquillo series has a regular entourage of characters, one of whom, Jackie Swaitkowski, is starring in a new series of her own, with Short Squeeze, to be published by St. Martin’s Press in Jan/Feb, 2010. Writing from the perspective of a woman, who lives in the same world as Sam, was an interesting and enjoyable challenge. But as with Sam, I knew her voice. I knew what she sounded like in her own head, I just had to figure out her deeper issues, and make a world for her that made sense.

Not all the regular characters in these books are of the human variety. One stand-out is Eddie Van Halen, a rescue mutt who lives with Sam.  Eddie definitely has a mind of his own, an independent streak like Sam’s, but of a far more joyful nature. He’s the eternally sunny balance to Sam’s eternal noir. And so they fit well together. 

            Eddie is a complete lift from my own life. When my son was a little boy, he had three imaginary friends – Michael Jackson, He Man and Eddie Van Halen. Whenever Van Halen was playing on the radio, James would say, “That’s you, Van Halen.” I passed this gift along to Sam’s daughter. 

            Eddie’s personality comes from my own dog, Samuel Beckett. If you read the books, you’ll know what he’s like. 

            There are two other non-human regulars. Sam’s ’67 Grand Prix and the Hamptons themselves. That’s one of the secrets of fiction – things and places can be characters, if that’s how you think of them.