Talk about harmonic converge. Not only did the publication date of BAJA FLORIDA coincide with the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe, father of the crime novel, it also fell on the same day as my Crime Fiction class at Rollins College. Here we see my brilliant students toasting their most awesome professor. What you don't see are the three bottles of Spanish Cava we will soon polish off. Uh, officer, everyone told me they were of age...Today also marks the day we learned that Robert Parker died. We toasted him, too. And read the first three pages from "Bad Business," which are vintage and sublimely sardonic and highly toastable. Jeez, I'll miss him.
The goal of this class, in addition to reading Poe and Chandler and Cain and MacDonald and Grafton and Connelly and Child and more, is to write the first 25 pages of a crime novel. You can't turn around these days without reading that "The Book" is dead. But here is visual proof that good people still exist who not only only want to read 'em but write 'em.
And, yeah, well, get college credit for it, too.
