A Reviewer from The King's English Bookstore in SLC Wants Book Two!

Burning Questions, Barry Willdorf   (9781611602685) Whiskey Creek Press

Willdorf’s previous novel, Flight of the Sorceress, took the reader back into Roman times.  It was a page-turner of an historic novel.  Burning Questions is another historic novel, but one within the memory of many of its readers.  Willdorf knows the world of the ‘60’s and the setting of Gloucester, MA.  It is a time when a young, inexperienced legal intern can spend his time surfing and drinking rather than working on his upward mobility.  When the local big-shot firm asks him to investigate the supposed suicide of a wealthy young man on behalf of the disbelieving mother, Nate Lewis, sees some easy money, but, in reality may be set up for failure.  Nate’s foray into the world of the rich is balanced by meeting the dead man’s girlfriend, Christina who is beautiful, Portuguese and poor.   Christina and the boyfriend discovered a plan to burn down the town’s old hotels to be replaced by new real estate developments.  Now, Kenny, the boyfriend, is dead and Christina and Nate are in the sights of the arsonist and the local police.  Caught between the wealthy and powerful of the town and the arsonist, the two find themselves in a flight for their lives on a cross-country trip in an aging Plymouth Valiant following the sun to California.  Book 2 of the adventures of Nate and Christina, A Shot in the Arm, comes out this year, and I want to know what happens when they reach the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco in the ‘70’s.  

Wendy Foster Leigh

Question 2: Is Burning Questions both a mystery and a memoir?

Q.    The death of Kenny diSimone that you have said was inspired by an actual homicide took place when you were already an attorney. That’s years after the ‘50s and ‘60s when you lived in Cape Ann.  Did you set your story then to introduce elements of memoir?

A.   There’s no question that there are elements of memoir in this mystery, but it's not really that. My definition of a memoir is "What you choose to remember."  While it is true that much of the background in the novel comes from my recollections of growing up on Cape Ann at a time when the economy of the area was changing, there is too much fiction in the story to qualify under my definition. I don't remember a lot of the things in the story because they never happened - although there are some close approximations. 

For instance, there were several hotels that burned down and Gloucester changed from a wealthy escape location to a commuter burb of Boston. Until WWII, rich people got on the Boston& Maine and went up to some big hotels in Gloucester for weekends, holidays and trysts. The biggest hotel was The Oceanside in Magnolia (a section of Gloucester.)  It had 600 rooms and was extremely upscale. It supported a whole economy of pricey shops in Magnolia. But then they built Route 128 and Gloucester became within range of the average Joe from Boston, along with it acquiring a commuter population. And of course, along with the new commuter population came the usual real estate speculation.The big old hotels were no longer attractive. The rich headed for more exotic locales.  And so, one by one, the old wooden hotels burnt down. The Oceanside burned in 1957. It was getting a frayed at the edges by then.  Everyone suspected it was arson and when the same thing started happening to other venues it became a sort of “no brainer.”

Meanwhile, Russian and Japanese factory ships were scooping up all the fish and the old Portuguese and Italian fishing fleet couldn’t hold its own against these behemoths.  So that part of the economy was changing as well. That economy began to feel the pain.  In the novel, Kenny’s stepfather Stephen is in construction and is profiting from these changes. It lends credence to the diSimone claim that Christina (the daughter of a lobsterman) was gold-digging. 

All of this is grist for a “motive-to-kill” mill.  I didn’t want to just do a psycho-drama about teenage suicide (although a lot of the reasons teens kill themselves is addressed in Kenny’s psychological profile.) I wanted to place Kenny’s death in the context of what was really happening. That seemed to me to be also a story worth telling. Greed. Corruption. Sexual ambiguities. Class warfare.  Good stuff for a murder mystery.

Still, it’s fiction and it would be a mistake to read all of my narrative as factual. I make some very big digressions from the actual facts in Burning Questions. We’ll discuss some of those in another Q&A.

The Weekly Question

Every week, I will be posting a question about "Burning Questions." Then I will try to answer it without spoiling the story for readers. If you have one, please don't hesitate to add it to the list.

Here's the first one:

Q: You have a very detailed coroner's report in the book, along with other forensic materials. "Did the autopsy report concluding that the victim of a shooting was a teenage suicide come from one of your actual cases?

A: Over twenty years ago a woman came to me with a stack of materials concerning the death of her son. He was found shot to death in a manner very similar to the description of Kenny's homicide in Burning Questions. She thought her son had been murdered and had been fighting with the police about their having written it off as just another teenage suicide. She told me a lot of facts that raised reasonable doubts about the police conclusion and wanted someone who could convince them to re-open the file. One of the problems she was having was that her son had recently been arrested by the same police officer who also was the investigating officer on the homicide. She claimed that her son knew that this cop was involved in some illegal activities and that he had a motive to kill the teenager. It seemed obvious to her that the police were involved in covering up the truth. I took a look at the documents and concluded that there wasn't very much that I could do, short of launching an independent investigation with PI's, a medical examiner, a court order to get the body exhumed, and who knows what else. I didn't want to take this woman's money on such a long-shot, meanwhile ruffling the feathers of a small-town police department. But I kept a copy of the paperwork in my files all these years. It seemed like a good story. I especially was interested in the way the local authorities besmirched the kid's reputation to discourage any investigation. Of course, I have changed just about every fact other than the forensics of the actual shooting. I read statistics about teenage suicide before writing Burning Questions. Some of the reasons kids kill themselves are incorporated into the story: drugs, alcohol, sexual orientation, parental abuse. It's a really good jumping off place for a discussion of the problem and also for a mystery.