Bring In 'Da Folk!

Last week, while I was sick in bed, I read this new murder mystery Such a Killing Crime, which I loved so much I sent an email to the author, Rob Lopresti.

Well, that's the beauty of sending fan mail to people who write for small presses. They write you back.

Rob said to me "Did you know anyone can write a review on amazon.com?"

So I wrote a review for amazon.com, but I felt like I had to edit it way down because I get the impression it's considered bad form to get all long winded on the customer's ass on amazon.com.

I kind of had a feeling my fans would want to read the whole unabridged enchilada, the director's cut, as it were, so here it is, complete with the original heartwarming anecdotes about my mom.

If you could see my "Favorite Books" list for this year, or any year, you'd probably be surprised to learn how much I loved and adored Such A Killing Crime. That's because, for the most part, I'm a pretty hard core non-fiction reader.

You can thank my mom for that, I guess. I was pissing and moaning to her about the "Young Readers" section at our local public library one afternoon when I was about ten.

Sure, I liked Roald Dahl and Jules Verne and Nancy Drew, but I felt like I was ready for something a little more firmly grounded in reality.

So Mom took me over to the grown-up side of the library and handed me a copy of Oscar Levant's memoirs.

"This guy knew the Marx Brothers," she said. "You wouldn't believe some of the $#%@ those guys pulled."

That was a real turning point for me. After that, I continued to read fiction occasionally, but it tended be the kind of fiction that an author grafts onto a very specific time and place with meticulous attention to detail.

For me, that's a big part of the appeal of Such A Killing Crime. The story itself is a perfectly compelling whodunit, but, beyond that, Lopresti immerses you so thoroughly in his setting-- the Greenwich Village folk music scene of 1963-- that you feel like a detective magically transported to a long-vanished era of late night hootenannies and smoky coffeehouses filled with turtlenecked beatniks.

That elaborately fleshed-out setting, that was really half the fun of the book for me. I think I came away with a whole new appreciation for that whole improbable folk music renaissance that flourished so briefly, withered so suddenly and left its subtle but pervasive influence on our culture.

How pervasive? Let me tell you a little story. Must have been about 1971 I came home, and my Mom was sitting on the couch drinking Ripple out of a jelly jar and playing this Frank Sinatra song, "Love's Been Good to Me." She loved that song! Played it over and over.

First time I heard "Love's Been Good to Me," I thought to myself "Sounds like Frank's gone folk music on us, and he's taken the whole Nelson Riddle Orchestra with him!"

Decades later I learned that the lyrics of "Love's Been Good to Me" had been penned by 70's-era celebrity poet and one-time Greenwich Village folkster Rod McKuen!

As it turns out that is only one of many macabre twists and turns in the history of American folk music. Makes you wonder why there haven't been more folk music murder mysteries. We can only hope that Lopresti writes a sequel.

Kurt "big daddy" True
16 october 2005