Sorry to have been gone so long, but my son Mike and I had a week's vacation in Cave Creek, AZ as guests of my best friend, Tom Rough and his family, wife Lisa and daughter Nicola. It was wonderful! Mike and I and Tom got to go to a Giants' game where we beat the A's and I got to meet up with some of my class members at Federal Pizza.
When I got back home, I needed to plunge right into the new session of my online class and that kept me busy until yesterday. I owed a friend a chapter for a new crime book he's asked a bunch of us to contribute to and that leads us up to... today!
Where, when I opened my email this morning, I received the following post from the brilliant writer, Lilly Hellman. Her words warmed the ol' cockles of my heart and I thought I'd share them with you.
March 21, 2014
I was at a Christmas party two years ago at which WGN news anchor
Steve Sanders was also a guest. We started to chat, and when he found out I was
a crime writer he told me he had a story for me. Those words are like catnip
for a kitten — I’m a sucker for a good story. So I followed Steve into a corner
where he proceeded to tell me about a Ku Klux Klansman in Alabama who was in
prison for lynching a black man. A few years into the Klansman’s sentence, a
young black man was wrongly convicted for raping a white woman. No one really
believed the boy was guilty, but the jury was all white (it was the early
Sixties), and the kid didn’t have a chance.
The young man apparently was assigned to the same cell as the Klansman,
and over time, the two became great friends, confounding the expectations of
almost everyone in the penitentiary.
I don’t
how much of that is, or was true, but it stayed with me. A few months later, I
had an opportunity to submit a story to the Fiction River Crime Anthology edited by the
wonderful Kristine Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith, and I decided to tackle that
story. However, aside from a couple of visits to Cook County jail and a woman’s
minimum prison in Racine, Wisconsin, I am woefully unfamiliar with prison
procedures. So I put out a request on Facebook for someone who might point me
in the right direction. One name kept coming back; Les Edgerton, a terrific
crime writer and himself a one-time inmate at Indiana’s Pendleton penitentiary,
which had the honor of being called out by LBJ in the Sixties as one of the
worst prisons in the country.
I got in
touch with Les, read his book JUST LIKE THAT, which recounts his experiences at
Pendleton (and which I highly recommend.) After that, we emailed and
spoke on the phone several times. Les’s patience and generosity was endless,
and I am in his debt. There is no way this story could have been written
without his help.
Of course
I embellished, changed, and added some noir elements to the story—I was in my
dark period. The result is No Good Deed which amazingly, did make it
into the anthology released this week.
I am delighted
to share space with acclaimed authors Doug Allyn, Brendan DuBois, my good
friend Julie Hyzy,
Steve Hockensmith,and more, and I urge you to check out the anthology. Meanwhile, here are the first few grafs of
the No Good Deed.
Gertie
Morton’s baby kicked so much in the womb that she knew the kid was going to be
a troublemaker. Luther didn’t disappoint. Born in 1943, the colicky baby
screamed so much that Gertie thanked the Lord their closest neighbor lived half
a mile away. Once the colic was over, teething began, and Gertie gave Luther
liberal amounts of whiskey that her husband cooked up in their still. She
sometimes wondered if that was the root of Luther’s problems.
Luther
grew into a rowdy boy and even rowdier teen: stealing bikes, then cars, then
whatever he could get his hands on. Which wasn’t much—they lived in a
dirt-poor area of Southern Indiana. Luther wasn’t much of a student either,
until a sheriff’s deputy caught him smoking and drinking whiskey at the pool
hall. Luther seemed to clean up after that, and Gertie was surprised when he
came home with a decent report card in twelfth grade. She proudly proclaimed to
everyone she knew how he was one of the best students in the school.
She
learned the truth a few months later when Luther told her that his high school
English teacher was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and had recruited him into the
group. Gertie remembered the problems the Klan had caused in Indiana over the
years, and while she didn’t exactly disagree with them, she didn’t think it
would end well.
It didn’t.
A few weeks after Luther’s twenty-first birthday, he was convicted of taking
part in a lynching. Sentenced from fifteen to life, Luther was sent to the
state prison at Pendleton near Indianapolis.
Enjoy!
Libby Hellman
Thanks, Libby.
Blue skies,
Les
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