Hi, Friends – I’ve had some good news. Amphorae Publishing has agreed to publish my newest novel, tentatively titled “To Live and Die in the Floating World.” It is scheduled for publication in fall of 2021.
The story is about Kip Weston, a young American on the run, who lands a job on a small tourist barge on the canals of France. He soon finds, though, that in trying to run from his actions he has landed himself in a web of intrigue and murder.
People sometimes ask where I get my ideas. This is one where I can only hope the book rises to the level of a good story.
Back long ago, when I was kicking around Europe, I chanced onto a job working on the Wirreanda, the kind of tourist barge I describe in the book. You can see the boat – a beauty, I always thought – at the top of this post.
The other members of the crew and I became very good friends. One evening a couple of them told me of an incident from a couple of years earlier. While the boat usually took on a group of three couples for the three cabins, this time their guests were two men and an attractive young woman. While they knew each other – something, Diane, the owner, always insisted on – there seemed no warmth among them. Well, none of her business, she figured. The young woman took the middle cabin, with the men taking the cabins to either side of hers.
As I say, she was attractive, and one of the crew members started to go up to her cabin at night to do what came naturally. If Diane had known, she would have fired him on the spot and thrown the guests off the boat.
The crew member would have been better off if she had, because the other crew members, who had found out about their little liaison, told him there was a rumor that she was the mistress of a Mafioso capo from Marseille, and the two men were her bodyguards and handlers. If they found out what he was doing, they told him, he’d be in more trouble than he could handle. He laughed it off, saying, correctly, that they didn’t know this for a fact and, perhaps also correctly, that they were just envious.
Then, one evening, someone came by the boat from the nearby village, telling the randy crew member that there was a message for him at the local post office. Given how French communications worked back then, this wasn’t as odd as it might seem now. The crewman took one of the bikes on board and rode off toward the village. He was never seen alive again.
His body was found at the bottom of the canal the next morning, drowned. He’d had a couple of beers and it wasn’t impossible, though unlikely, that he had simply ridden his bike into the canal. But the crew was certain he’d been found out and murdered by the two men on board or by someone called up from Marseille for the job.
The story had always stuck in my head – as you can imagine. And I thought I could use to someday. While nothing in the book matches this story exactly, I use the situation as the basis of what I hope you’ll find to be a good suspense thriller.