I’d just like say goodbye to a guy who made my Saturday afternoons at the movie theater something to look forward to.  So long, Ray.  Give the angels a thrill.

Borders has gone the way of the dodo bird.  If what we hear is true, Barnes and Noble is on the ropes.  And when that chain is gone, know who’s left?  Amazon.  The big faceless corporation for whom books are simply another commodity and each of us is simply a revenue source.

Buying from independents is in our own best interest.  It assures that no one large entity will control what’s available to us as readers.  Freedom—and it does come down to this—is all about choice.

Most of the signings I do are at independents.  I’ll be signing on Friday at a wonderful small bookstore in Hudson, Wisconsin, called Chapter2Books.  Like most independents, they walk a fine line between red ink and black.  If you live in the area, I would consider it a personal favor if you came and experienced this lovely shop and began to do your book buying there.  Here’s a link to a great blog about these folks and their plight.

Thanks for listening.  And remember: Think globally.  Shop locally.

Over time, I also owned a bunch of portable transistor radios, and then there were, of course, the radios in the cars my parents owned.  As a result, I grew up on Rock and Roll and Rock-A-Billy and all the popular music piped ceaselessly across the AM airways in the 50s and 60s.  Better than a time machine, certain songs take me back immediately to a particular moment in the past: “Peggy Sue” and the summer of 1957 when I was in love with a girl named Nelda Griffin; Roy Orbison’s “Cryin” and me trying to hit those high notes just as my voice was beginning to change; Brylcreeming my hair so that I could look like the Everly Brothers, and singing “So Sad” to myself in the bathroom mirror.

When I began writing Ordinary Grace and trying to summon memories of the kind of summer I wanted to create for the story (in the end, the summer of 1961), I went back and listened to a bunch of the old songs that I grew up with.  Amazing how effective they were in helping me capture so much of the sense of being a kid back then—the innocence, the freedom, the unbounded possibility, the feel, for an adolescent in small town America, that there was this great world out there far beyond the corn fields, just waiting to be experienced.

The folks at Atria Books, my publisher, picked up on that sentiment and have put together a collection of some of my favorites from AM radio in the 50s and 60s.  They’ve created the playlist on Spotify.  If you have a free moment, check it out.

For those of us who grew up with AM radio, it’s a cool blast from the past.

How I Hitchhiked to Disneyland and Almost Died

Everything I Need to Know I Learned from The Incredible Shrinking Man

I went to Omaha to spend Memorial Day weekend with my wife’s family.  We left the Twin Cities Friday evening, drove to Des Moines, stayed the night, and arrived in Omaha on Saturday.  We visited cemeteries, placed flowers on family graves—a tradition I really dig—and that evening, my wife and I joined friends for drinks at a local brew pub.

Next thing I know, it’s 3:00 PM Sunday afternoon.  I wake up in the hospital with no recollection of the preceding 48 hours.  I’m kind of fuzzy, to say the least.  Diane, my wife, is the room, along with my brother-in-law.  As I come out of the haze, they’re laughing hysterically at everything I say.

“Where am I?” I ask.

They laugh, and my wife, good-naturedly says, “Lakeside Hospital.”

“How did I get here?”

They laugh.  “I brought you to the emergency room this morning,” she says.

“What’s wrong with me?”

This brings on a near hysterical bout of laughter.  “You have Transient Global Amnesia,” Diane finally manages to say.

I’m not sure if I should be upset, but her demeanor clearly indicates that I’m not in any real danger.  So I ask, “What’s so funny?”

“You’ve been asking the same questions for the last eight hours.”

So this is what, according to Diane, happened.  At 8:45 that Sunday morning, I suddenly began asking the same questions over and over again.  “Where are we?  How did we get here?  What day is it?”

Freaked, she drove me to the emergency room of a hospital two blocks from our hotel, where they did a CAT scan and an MRI, and determined that I hadn’t suffered a stroke or a seizure.  The neurologist came in on his day off because the situation intrigued him.  He finally diagnosed my condition as Transient Global Amnesia.  It’s a condition whose cause is unknown, but whose effect is temporary and with no lasting physiological or mental consequences.  I’ve just simply lost a couple of days out of my life, no memory at all of Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon.

Weird.  Really weird.  An incredible reminder of how fragile everything is in life.

Time is a strange commodity.  In the middle of an experience, the minutes can stretch out in long, silly putty increments.  The ride between Albany and Buffalo, for example, when we were all exhausted and the bus rolled on and on as if we were part of a Twilight Zone episode in which, in the end, we discover that we’re really in hell and doomed to ride the damned bus forever.  But sitting here at the desk in my hotel room, with the talk and the laughter and the intimate connection between us so apparent in our last meal together, the eight days seem to have sped by, a breath or two and done.

I don’t know how Atria Books will judge the success of the Great Mystery Bus Tour.  I hope that whatever gauge they use, the enterprise rises to the hoped-for mark.  In terms of those of us in the trenches—the authors, our “handlers” (the great folks from Atria publicity who facilitated everything), and our phenomenal bus guys—the week was nothing short of stellar.  We loved the whole idea, we enjoyed the events immensely, and we were given the gift of each other.

Today, we go our separate ways.  That’s life.  And I remember the advice my wife often offers me: “Don’t cry because it’s over.  Be happy that it ever was.”

From the road, this is my final dispatch.

I’ll start with Liza Marklund. Before we launched, Liza (it’s pronounced Leesa) was the author I was most uncertain about.  Statuesque, lovely, colossally successful in Sweden and Europe, several of her books already in film, she seemed to me the author most likely to be a prima donna.  Thank God nothing could be farther from the truth.  What a great and gracious woman.  Not only is she a talented writer, she’s down to earth and very funny.  She’s not well known in this country yet (but that will change) and so at our events, she doesn’t have the hundreds of adoring readers crowding into the bookstore that she would draw were our signings in Europe.  I asked her how she felt about that, and her reply was that it troubled her not at all, that she’s building a following here, and that all good things take time.  Lovely and wise, what a killer combination.

I expected to be intimidated by M.J. Rose.  For those of you not in the book business, the skinny on M.J. is that she’s a whiz at marketing books.  She owns her own company, AuthorBuzz, which does just that.  Before embarking on the tour, I read her most recent novel, The Book of Lost Fragrances, and loved it.  The research is awesome.  The storyline is compelling.  The writing is silk smooth.  I thought to myself, Here’s one very smart woman who’s going to make me feel like a dumb donkey.  M.J. is smart.  M.J. is savvy.  And M.J. is delightful.  She has a marvelous sense of humor, and if you’re not following her blog or her tweets, you’re missing out on some fall-on-the-floor-laughing commentary.

Okay, John Connolly.  John’s the only one of the authors I knew in advance, but I didn’t know him well.  I know him better now, and fully fleshed out, this guy is the kind of author we all aspire to be.  Please don’t tell him I said that!  In my estimation, he stands beside James Lee Burke as one of the finest prose writers in our genre.  He also a keen sense of both the art and the business of books, and when he defends the brick and mortar bookstore, he’s articulate and even a little scary in his passion.  (The other night while he was ranting eloquently, I saw a blood vessel throbbing in his temple like one of those creatures from Aliens ready to burst through his skin!)  And did I say funny?  The man’s a walking comedy club.

So, humor is clearly a big part of what makes this tour so delightful.  We don’t any of us take ourselves too seriously, and all of us are more than willing to be nakedly human.  Okay, maybe “nakedly” was the wrong word.  I really don’t want you—or my wife—to get the wrong idea about what happens on the Mystery Bus.

That’s all for now.  More down the road.

If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that the Great Mystery Bus Tour’s first crisis was a dearth of toilet paper.  Yesterday the crisis escalated to rebellion.  We learned that we were using the bus toilet incorrectly.  (Probably the reason we ran out of toilet paper.)  Apparently, of the options available to human beings for the body’s elimination of waste, only one is allowed on the bus.  I mean number one.  And no toilet paper is allowed to be flushed down with any elimination.  Who knew?

The result is a situation with the waste pipe in our mammoth vehicle that, in human beings, would require a good deal of Ex-Lax.  And as I understand it, in order to remedy the situation, our driver has to do to our drain pipe what James Herriot, the young vet in All Creatures Great and Small (if you remember the book or the fine BBC production made from it), was forced to do to clear the bowels of a plugged cow.  Believe me, whatever they’re paying our driver, it ain’t enough.

At any rate, we’ve learned our lesson, and now when one of us hears nature’s delicate call, we simply indicate that we “need to make an important phone call,” and the driver will find the nearest clean “phone” along the highway.

Two events yesterday: the first at Centuries and Sleuths, a lovely mystery bookstore in Forest Park, IL; the second in Milwaukee, WI, at the very intimate Mystery One.  Milwaukee has lovely real estate, especially on the shoreline of Lake Michigan.  Here’s a photo of me in front of an impressive water tower near the shore.

Events today in two of my favorite stores—Booked For Murder in Madison, WI, and Once Upon A Crime (my hometown store) in Minneapolis.

That’s all for now and here’s hoping I don’t have to make any “important phone calls” along the way.

Second crisis: We are currently headed toward a long line of severe weather.  Books and Co. in Dayton, OH, is our next event stop.  South and west of Dayton is a turbulent storm front that is producing tornadoes at an alarming rate.  Five people have been killed already.  North and west of Dayton is another front with violent storms along the leading edge.  We have a very small chance that we might be able to slip through the narrow clear area between these two storm systems, but it will be akin to threading the eye of a needle.

So, stay tuned.  Who knows?  This could be my last dispatch from the road.

We stayed last night in a hotel just outside Brattleboro, VT.  Determined to get a better sense of the landscape here, I got up at first light this morning and walked the two miles into town as the sun rose over the mountains of southwestern New Hampshire, just across the Connecticut River.  Lovely sunrise, gorgeous walk, quaint mountain town.  I’m partial to Minnesota, what can I say, but that love doesn’t blind me to the beauty of other places, or their unique nature.  Here are some facts about Brattleboro you may not be aware of:

Brattleboro is the oldest town in the state and also is the site of the first U.S. printing of the first Harry Potter book.

Brattleboro is mention repeatedly in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

Rudyard Kipling built a home, which he called Naulakha, just outside Brattleboro where he lived with his wife, a native of Brattleboro, for several years.  Here’s a photo of the plaque commemorating Kipling and his home.

The next photo is of another plaque in one the town parks, affixed to an impressive monument erected in memory of the Vermont soldiers who fought in the Civil War.  The  monument was erected in 1887.  Check out the name that, in Vermont in 1887, they gave to the Civil War.  When I lived in Texas, it was referred to as the “War of Northern Aggression.”  All a matter of perspective.

On tap today, an event at Mystery on Main Street here in Brattleboro, then we shoot to Albany, New York, for an evening event.

See you on down the road!