Today I am taking a little break away from those crazy bohemians to present an author that I think you might enjoy. After all, who can resist reading about someone brave enough to tango with the grim reaper? I am impressed with Victoria’s dedication and determination to make another person’s dream come true. Interrogation Tango sounds like a great story to get lost in. I hope you read it and let me know how you liked it.
Without further ado please let me present Victoria King-Volreadi!
“The Grim Reaper and
Me”
A fable for the young at heart…
It may seem a morbid title for a guest blog (my apologies
Caddy) but there is a method to my madness.
I’ve reached that golden age where one’s mentors begin
slipping away. Suddenly you realize you
are in the midst of a great void that somehow you are expected to fill! No one tells you that is what you are
supposed to do – you simply feel it, a deep rooted sense of duty to art and
memory.
You immediately feel small and inadequate. The task seems huge and daunting. How can you possibly do justice to the work!?
When Jovi
Starc sent me her manuscript… she was in perfect health. She felt blocked because she was too close to
her material and was looking for a fresh perspective. She was a vivacious 58 year-old who didn’t
smoke and didn’t drink. She ate right
and did an hour of Thai Chi each morning.
How could either of us possibly imagine that one year later to the day
she would be gone?
Just like that, from one moment to the next.
When her mother entreated me to pursue the realization of
her daughter’s creative works I was initially so intimidated. I was also touched and honored. I pondered the rough material my friend had
left behind, her incisive yet tender observations. In the end I acquiesced and am gradually
trying to develop her projects because it is simply a shame for them not to be
shared.
Donald was a different story: Bi-polar with chronic
asthma. We had been pen-pals and
collaborators for quite some time, but patience was not among his virtues. He was losing stamina and his long standing
health issues were getting the better of him.
He had claimed to be “dying” ever since I had first met him, but he kept
coming out of the corner with his gloves up so I never really imagined him as
ill.
The first time I heard about Interrogation
Tango it was an 80 page script called “Firewater”. Don was incredibly frustrated because he
could “see” it in his head, but was getting no interest from producers. I suggested he develop it into a novel, a way
to help others see his vision. He
complained but didn’t argue. He had twelve
pages that with a lot of prodding became 50.
That was when (unbeknownst to me) Don started submitting it to agents.
When Peter Riva at International Transactions
called Don’s bluff, of course he couldn’t admit he only had 50 pages so he
simply yanked all the tag lines and scene directions out of the screen play and
tacked that mess onto the first 50.
Luckily Peter had enough imagination to sense the potential
behind the chaos. I knew how important
it was to Don so I agreed to try and edit it into something that made
sense. Don wrote brilliant dialogue but
it was all his voice, somehow I had to develop and differentiate the characters.
It took a couple of weeks just to clean it up enough where
it was possible to follow who was saying what.
The story had a lot of gaps, some immense. Just to complicate things a bit more Don had
no phone and his only net access was during New York Public Library business
hours so there was a constant 24hour time delay in all our correspondence.
When Don insisted we resubmit the rough draft I knew it
still needed serious work, and I told Peter that in a side e-mail. His response was, “Solid start, you’ve still
got my interest so get to work on the re-write.” Donald was devastated. That was June 2010. What I didn’t know was that this time he
really was dying. He had been diagnosed
with colon cancer but had refused surgery and been given 6-18 months to
live.
Don was 74, and tired, He wrote me, “Puss, you are going to
have to take it from here.” I tried to
encourage him to work on something else while I developed the Elser story with
Peter’s guidance. He dredged up an
ancient manuscript he had started when he was still in advertising and actually
seemed to be enjoying the departure from his obsession.
Don managed to hang on 26 months. The last e-mail I sent him in the wee hours
of August 20th 2012 read, “Baby this is it, I just returned the
final check of the manuscript, and tomorrow we go to into production. We did it!” but he never saw it. Donald
Schwarz passed away alone in his apartment on August 20th 2012,
just a few weeks before the book was released.
So, here I sit surrounded by the cultural legacy
of two very unique individuals. Their
manuscripts rest patiently on my shelf while I try to muster the strength and
the time to change my role of guardian for that of the midwife, to deliver what
they set out to do but were interrupted by death. I can’t help but wonder if I am up to the
challenge, and worthy of the responsibility.
Interrogation Tango is an anti-detective story, based on real events and
people, about an assassin who drove the Gestapo crazy because they
could not explain him away. A non-descript clock maker named Georg Elser
thought it would be a good idea to stop the onset of WWII. He thought
he might be able to do that if he could kill Hitler and all of his
entourage and, because he was sincerely looking for an opportunity, he
found one. He placed a bomb in a beer hall where the Fuhrer was
scheduled to give a speech. It was a good honest try and it went wrong
only by minutes. Elser was caught by a series of accidents and, when his
family was threatened, he immediately confessed. There was only one
problem: his confession was unacceptable. The police had assassin
profiles then as they do now and he fit none of them. In fact, it was
obvious to the police that he was not a criminal. Besides which,
politics demanded that the attempt could not be perpetrated by one of
Hitler's faithful, adoring citizens; it had to be a British conspiracy.
However, there was no conspiracy and the cops were afraid to invent one,
since in the event that there was a real conspiracy, an invented one
would look like a cover-up. Interrogation Tango is the policemen's
story: the detectives Elser destroyed and the Gestapo men he drove
crazy, followed by chaos and a body count. Buy links are below:
Author Bio:
Victoria lives near the city of Heraklion on the island of Crete in Greece with her husband and her two beautiful daughters. A freelance writer and translator in Greece since 1992 she has received two screenwriting grants from the EEU Media Programme for both original and commissioned feature scripts and has worked on local and foreign film and documentary productions. Victoria met her co-author Donald E. Schwarz in 1994 while visiting New York and the two immediately struck up a creative partnership. Social media links for Victoria: :Twitter Facebook Linked In
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