Seth Harwood's "Jack Wakes Up"

Seth Harwood teaches writing and literature at the City College of San Francisco and Chabot College. In July 2006, he began the Jack Palms Crime Podcast Series.

His new novel, Jack Wakes Up, debuts today. Harwood applied the "Page 99 Test" to the book and reported the following:

From Page 99:

Jack slides his coffee cup back within easy reach, adds some sugar and milk.

Hopkins drinks, sets his cup down on the table. “Now you’re waiting, Jack. What’s the next question?”

“Someone tipped them off about our meet. Say they popped Ralph, now someone’s looking to sour his deal, hit his supplier and take him out of the picture. Why?”

Hopkins shrugs. “The way these things go? My guess is we follow this long enough, we find someone’s trying to take over the action in this town. That’s the supply line we want, because that’s the one who’s going to be big. Castroneves? He doesn’t give a shit about San Francisco. He’ll be gone in a week. We want the local line.”

“Someone had to tell them about our meet.” Jack makes sure he’s looking Hopkins in the eye when he asks, “You know who dropped that tip?”

Hopkins shakes his head. “I’m with you. Either we got a hole somewhere in our force, or this club owner, guy who owns The Mirage, wants a raid and a shooting in his place in one night.” He shakes his head. “I’m not banking on that one. He wants bad elements out, he calls us. He’s not looking to call in a murder.”
…
An officer from a booth across the aisle gets up, comes over to Jack’s side of the table. “You Jack Palms?” he asks, extending his hand with a pen in it and pushing a beverage napkin across the table toward Jack. “My kids loved your movie.”

I’d say this is a great representative sample of Jack Wakes Up. For one, Jack’s meeting with someone to find out what’s happened, trying to piece together the events that happened in his life the night before. That’s a lot of what Jack spends his time doing: trying to catch up to what’s already happened and putting the pieces together. Seems like he’s always half-a-step behind.

The second reason this is representative is it finds Jack in another one of the awkward situations of his semi-stardom. Having made the one hit action movie a few years back, and very little else but bad tabloid headlines, people recognize Jack and know his name, but not always in the best ways. Here, the cop wants Jack’s autograph for his daughter. What else can he do but sign?

And why not? He’s just found out he’s chasing after one of San Francisco’s biggest and most ambitious drug dealers.

Read an excerpt from Jack Wakes Up at Spinetingler Magazine, and learn more about the book and its author at Seth Harwood's website, his blog, and his MySpace page.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sally McMillen's "Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement"

Sally McMillen is the Mary Reynolds Babcock Professor of History and Department Chair at Davidson College. She specializes in Southern and women's history, with an emphasis on the nineteenth century. Among her publications are Motherhood in the Old South: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Infant Rearing, Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South, and To Raise Up the South: Sunday Schools in Black and White Churches, 1865-1915.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my new book, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement, reveals only a snippet of what the book covers. It identifies the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the first public meeting held to demand women’s equality, as a pivotal moment in American history. Ultimately it changed the lives of half our nation’s population.

The book covers the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement, first revealing how laws, scripture, and tradition kept women in a dependent state. They lacked access to higher education and to equal wages; they were excluded from most professions. They could not vote or hold public office. If married, their husbands claimed their possessions and wages. Gradually, through their involvement in the anti-slavery struggle, a few women awakened to the fact that they were nearly as oppressed as the slaves they were trying to free. That realization galvanized several women, including four heroines of this tale—Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Susan B.Anthony. They and other women and a few men worked tirelessly throughout most of their adult lives to win equal rights and opportunities for women.

Page 99, which falls in the third chapter covering the Seneca Falls Convention, reveals public reactions to that meeting. Admittedly, as the page reveals, a few newspapers gave the Convention positive press, but most Americans were appalled at such daring challenges to women’s secondary status. Former slave Frederick Douglass, who attended the Convention and supported women’s demands, is quoted on that page. He hit the nail on the head when he observed with a touch of cynicism: “A discussion of the rights of animals would be regarded with far more complacency by many of what are called the wise and good of our land, than would be a discussion of the rights of women.” He added that someone would be accused of evil thoughts who dared “think that woman is entitled to rights equal with man.”

The remainder of the book details the protracted and difficult struggles as activists held annual conventions, petitioned, lectured, wrote, and pleaded with Congress and state governments to give them the right to vote. Their tale is an inspiring one—and provides an understanding of how a few brave and tireless women fought for their rights. So resistant was this nation to female equality that it took seventy-two years, from 1848 until 1920 and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, to achieve the rights that women enjoy today.

Read more about Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement at the Oxford University Press website, and learn more about Sally McMillen at her faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kim Harrison's "The Outlaw Demon Wails"

Kim Harrison is the dark urban fantasy author of the New York Times bestselling For a Few Demons More and other works.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new novel, The Outlaw Demon Wails, and reported the following:

From Page 99:

The shrill shout was punctuated by a flash of dust I could see even in the strong afternoon light. “It gets better,” I said, stepping into the empty street and heading for the tired, sixty-plus-year-old house Ceri and Keasley shared. “He wants me to go into the ever-after to get a sample so their child will be born without any effects of the curse. Tried to guilt me into it.” And it almost worked.

“Pregnant?” Jenks repeated, his angular face showing his shock. “I gotta smell her.”

The scraping of my boots on the pavement faltered. “You can smell it when someone’s pregnant?” I said, somewhat appalled.

Jenks shrugged. “Sometimes. I don’t know about elves.” He darted to the sidewalk, then back to me. “Can you walk a little faster? I’d like to get there before the sun sets and that thing in the eaves wakes up.”

My gaze went three houses down to fi nd Keasley outside enjoying the fall weather, raking leaves. Great, he’d seen me tear into here like a bunny on fire. “Jenks,” I said suddenly. “I’m going to do the talking. Not you.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said, and I fixed my gaze on him with a threatening sharpness.

“I mean it. Ceri might not have told him yet.”

The hum of his wings dropped in pitch, though he didn’t lose a millimeter of height. “Okay,” he said hesitantly.

My boots hit the sidewalk and the dappled pattern of sun that made it through the colored leaves still clinging to the dark branches. Keasley is Leon Bairn? I thought as I looked him over. Leon was the only other person besides me to quit the I.S. and survive, though he’d apparently had to fake his death to do it. I was guessing that Trent knew it because he had helped. He would have been about fifteen then, but just coming into his parents’ legacy and eager to show his stuff.

I glanced at Jenks, remembering how mad the pixy had been when I hid from him that Trent was an elf. If Keasley was Leon, then he was a runner. And Jenks wouldn’t violate that trust for anything.

“Jenks, can you keep a secret?” I said, slowing when Keasley saw us and stopped his work to lean on his rake. The old man suffered from....

In this passage, Rachel is going to confront her neighbors about something she just discovered about each of them, relating her new gossip to her business partner on the way. Ah, he’s a pixy. It’s complicated, but trust me, it really works, and I have a lot of fun with these characters.

As far as the balance of action, dialog, and plot, it’s a pretty good representation of the book as a whole. But what’s being said in this single page is a remarkable representation of what Rachel is dealing with herself.

Some of the strongest plot threads of The Outlaw Demon Wails revolve around procreation. Not the “bumping uglies” part of it, though there is this one scene ... No, the book touches on the passing on of ourselves, our ideas, our physical traits, talents, and morals. Seeing Rachel going to confront Ceri about her pregnancy relates to this nicely.

The second plot thread here is that of Keasley’s past. Again, Rachel is returning to an ongoing theme in the book of discovering her own past and coming to grips with it as she goes to confront Keasley with the knowledge of his past.

The Outlaw Demon Wails is strongly concerned about the struggle to pass on something of ourselves, and how the past can shape the future. This small passage here is concerned with just that, the same issues that Rachel is dealing with — discovering her past, seeing her future, and finding a way to reconcile that with who she wants to be. So in this case, I’d say that the page 99 test works well as far as content. As far as quality? I’d rather the reader decide that.

Browse inside The Outlaw Demon Wails, and learn more about the author and her work at Kim Harrison's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Perlmutter's "Blogwars"

David D. Perlmutter is professor and associate dean for graduate studies and research at the William Allen White School of Journalism & Mass Communications, University of Kansas.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Blogwars: The New Political Battleground, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book Blogwars catches the action in the middle of one of the most interesting — to me anyway — instances of what I call blogthroughs. These are events that showed the true powers and potentials of interactive media like weblogs and allowed bloggers to nimbly outpace (and even embarrass) so-called "big" media. Some background: earlier in the book, I talked about how blogs have often been accused by traditional media and traditional journalists of being a bunch of hotheaded amateurs screaming at each other. (Think beer-sodden fans in the bleachers yelling advice to pro-baseball players on the field). On Election Day 2004 when bloggers outed exit polls early, allegedly showing John Kerry's imminent victory in the presidential race, the big media backlash was fierce. But I spend part of a chapter (the home of p. 99) showing that blogs were hardly the villains of the great exit poll controversy of 2004. In fact, one particular blog, Mark Blumenthal's mysterypollster was instrumental in explaining the nuances, complexities and limitations of reporting exit polls while voting was still going on. Page 99 picks up when I'm talking about the fact that blogs were simply reporting what was already known commonly during elections to reporters in Washington. Except, this time, the leaks were going to the general public. Blogwars is an investigation of many such blogthroughs, from the Howard Dean campaign through Obama's early rise to prominence and preeminence.

Page 99, Blogwars:

Then there is the open-source argument [about outing exit polls]. Kos himself said that his site was essentially just putting the numbers out there, letting the public see the same thing that politicians and journalistic and academic elites were already being leaked, and that open access was “all that matters.”68 Indeed, around every presidential election, those who know anybody in campaigns or parties can call and ask, “Heard anything from the exit polls?” Now, legally, exit polls are owned by the news organizations that pay for them. But too many people are privy to the incoming results for them to be kept secret until after polls close, although reforms instituted in 2006 almost achieved this goal.* The difference on November 2, 2004, was that blogs existed to “out” leaks to lots of folks who had no acquaintances among the media or political elite. Maybe instead of blaming bloggers for being ignorant about what polling numbers mean, we should do a better job of educating everyone, including CNN commentators, about what polling numbers mean. Plenty of influential bloggers, such as Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, were denying the validity of the exit polls, at least the early ones, and Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds simply refused to publish them. Probably most important, the single wisest statement made about exit polls, which within hours propagated throughout the bloglands, was by a blogger himself, who was anything but an amateur. If you consider the circumstances of his posting — what might be ranked now among the ten or so “posts that shook the world” — he qualifies as a blog hero.

Mark Blumenthal’s Mystery Pollster site was only two months old at the time, but he conscientiously explained to the blog nation that early exit polls are not meaningful and should not cause anyone to gloat…

*The exit polling company in fact kept its staff compilers sequestered and claims that no leaks came from its organization. If that was the case, the leaks came, as they traditionally do, from the news groups receiving the data feed. According to one of the exit poll directors I interviewed: “In 2006 we instituted a ‘quarantine room’ in which only two people from each NEP member (twelve people total) were given restricted access to the early exit poll numbers before 5 p.m. EDT. The people in the ‘Q-room’ were required to give up all means of outside communication — cell phones, BlackBerries. As a result, no leaked data reached the Internet in 2006 until 5:30 p.m., just thirty minutes before the first polls started closing in Kentucky and Indiana.”

Read more about Blogwars at the Oxford University Press website.

Learn more about David Perlmutter and his work at his faculty webpage, at PolicyByBlog, and at the blog of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas, which he edits.

--Marshal Zeringue

Walter Hixson's "The Myth of American Diplomacy"

Walter Hixson is professor and chair of the Department of History, University of Akron. He has published numerous books and articles on the history of U.S. foreign policy, including the prize-winning George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy, and reported the following:

Turning to page 99 of my new book, The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy (Yale University Press, 2008), I discovered a Currier and Ives print from 1876 entitled “The Cradle of Liberty.” As I note below the print — and it should be readily obvious to any observer — “This lithograph symbolizes the nation’s power, patriotism, and justice.”

The Myth of American Diplomacy features eight illustrations along with some 320 pages of text, all of which complement my central argument. Below “The Cradle of Liberty” on page 99, I also wrote, “The Union victory in the Civil War ultimately affirmed the imagined community and the Myth of America.” My book focuses on national identity, the imagined community of the United States and how it drives and affirms the nation’s foreign policy.

I argue that a “myth of America” — the notion that the United States is a chosen nation destined to lead the world — lies at the heart of national identity and of a militant U.S. foreign policy. Discourses and representations of racial superiority, masculine power, and providential destiny permeate American history and foreign policy. Finally, I have found remarkable continuity throughout the modern era, from early “settlement” (ethnic cleansing of Indians) to the Iraq War of today. While not everyone agrees with national foreign policy, and prolonged engagements like the war of today do become relatively unpopular, the foreign policy is hegemonic and thus enduring because it is a reflection of the nation’s very identity.

Learn more about The Myth of American Diplomacy at the Yale University Press website, and visit Walter Hixson's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Maine's "Monster, 1959"

David Maine is the author of The Preservationist, Fallen, and The Book of Samson.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new novel, Monster, 1959, and reported the following, beginning with a passage from Page 99:

Ash: —They said they didn’t want to move prematurely, sir. If the monster falls off the platform, they don’t want it to be too far offshore.

Betty: —What are you talking about? What are you planning here?

Captain: —Let’s hope they get the voltage right.

Betty: —You mustn’t hurt him!

Johnny: —Easy darling. No one’s going to hurt Romeo here. Billy’s got a nice place for him in the warehouse district.

Billy: —A regular Waldorf-Astoria, doll. And it cost about as much!

Johnny, placing a hand on Betty’s shoulder: —But we’ve got to knock him out to get him under control. Surely you can see that.

Billy: —It’s not like we can carry him up another cliff and throw him over again, can we?

Impatient, Betty shakes off Johnny’s reassurance. Sometimes—only sometimes, but more and more often lately—her husband feels like a complete stranger to her.

The exchange doesn’t go unnoticed. Billy studies his friends from the corner of his eye. He notices the tension locking Betty’s shoulders, the stubborn set of Johnny’s jaw, the professional calm of the captain. Billy figures he knows a thing or two about human nature, about how people react under stress. Johnny’s bull-headedness, an asset in some circumstances (on the island, pursuing Betty and the monster) can be a drawback at other times (sinking every penny he owned into a single safari, a one-shot that gambled everything. And lost). Johnny just doesn’t know when to quit, how to say enough is enough. But then anybody who has ever watched him drink, or play poker, or mix with the girls, knows that already.

Billy also knows a thing or two about Betty’s overgenerous heart. How she’ll give the benefit of the doubt to anyone. Or in this case anything, especially anything male.

There was a professor at my college who liked to say that you could measure the greatness of a culture by counting the number of cheeses it produces. (US = 1; Britain = 2; France = 273). It was a funny line but I never quite believed it, and I feel the same way about Ford’s idea. Great quote, it’s pithy and memorable. But accurate?

My book Monster, 1959 is something of a kaleidoscope. Or, as one reviewer put it, it’s “all over the map.” She meant that as a criticism, but I don’t take it that way. The book is all over the map, both in terms of theme and content, and incorporates lots of things — a pastiche of monster movie clichés, a contextual smattering of contemporary events, faux documentary elements, pop culture references, a wildly intrusive third person narrator. The viewpoint character can’t think or talk. The narration veers wildly in both tone and content. Is it possible to encapsulate all that in any single page? Probably not.

Here on page 99, we find ourselves with the human characters as they watch the 40-foot-tall radiation monster, K., that they have abducted from his island home and towed by steamship back to the USA. There is a terse exchange between these characters, then the POV shifts to one of them as he reflects on he conversation.

Is this representative? In some ways, sure. The situation and dialogue mimic a cheesy 1950s B-movie — this conversation is even written as a script — but then I try to twist those conventions, as Billy’s reflections suggest. But there is much you don’t see on this page, most obviously the monster, the glue that holds the story together. Or the peripheral 1950s context of the story: the nuke tests, the desegregation of public schools, the Suez War, and much else. The stories used to re-tell and distort the original story — comic books, newspaper reports, a stage play — are all missing. Which is, maybe, just a way of saying the obvious: that one page cannot hope, really, to represent 242. This doesn’t apply only to my book, either; I can think of many that simply contain too much to be distilled down to a single page.

Read more about Monster, 1959 -- and learn more about the author and his work -- at David Maine's blog, The Party Never Stops.

--Marshal Zeringue

Allen C. Guelzo's "Lincoln and Douglas"

Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College, where he also directs the Civil War Era Studies Program and The Gettysburg Semester. He is the author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (1999) and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (2004), both of which won the Lincoln Prize. He has written essays and reviews for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Time, the Journal of American History, and many other publications.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America, and reported the following:

This may be one case in which Ford Madox Ford’s "page ninety-nine" rule fails us, because page 99 of Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America deals only with what Lincoln and Douglas looked like on the debate platform, and there is more, and of greater moment, to the Lincoln-Douglas debates than what they looked like, standing beside each other. The debates are one of the most mythical moments in American political history, since they are often cast as a sort of premonitory tremor of the Civil War, or as a the American equivalent of a platonic symposium. That forgets that these seven debates in the summer and fall of 1858 were part of two politicians’ campaigns for a U.S. Senate seat, and political campaigning in 1858 had no more to do with Plato than it does now. There was hoopla, heckling, noise, race cards, voter fraud, brass bands, banners, sexual innuendo, even an October surprise – not to mention interparty turmoil behind both candidates’ backs. But the Lincoln-Douglas debates really did have at least some element of a symposium. Each lasted for three hours (no soundbites, no journalist moderators), before crowds that varied in size from 1500 to 25,000, and each was devoted to only one subject – what was to be done about slavery in America. And even beyond this, both Lincoln and Douglas moved their debates to the very core of what it means to be a democracy – is democracy, as Douglas maintained, purely a matter of determining whatever it is a majority of the people want, and giving it to them? Or is it, as Lincoln argued, a means for realizing the inherent natural rights of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Douglas, of course, won the election to the Senate. But Lincoln won the attention of the nation, and was elected president in 1860. And the debate over the nature of democracy continues to-day.

Learn more about Lincoln and Douglas at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

C.J. Lyons' "Lifelines"

C.J. Lyons is a physician trained in Pediatric Emergency Medicine and a debut medical suspense novelist.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her newly released first book, Lifelines, and reported the following:

Oh boy, I was worried about this one! Typical doctor, right? Got to sweat out every test, aim for the top!

Then I opened Lifelines to page 99 and voila! It's a major turning point in the book where the emotional arc, the romantic elements, the plot and theme all intersect.

Up to this point, we've followed Pittsburgh ER doctor, Lydia Fiore, as she struggles to clear her name after losing a patient. She's fiercely independent and, as a newcomer, she has no idea who to trust. Nor does trust come easily to her.

On page 99 she makes the decision to reveal some of her past to Trey Garrison, a paramedic who also cared for the dead patient. We learn more about Lydia on this single page than we have so far in the book.

"Yeah, I heard that you put yourself through school." He paused but didn't look away, kept staring straight into her eyes. "And that you came out of the foster care system, lived on the streets before that."

"Stop looking at me like I was raised by wolves. It's not like it sounds. I just had an—" How to describe Maria to this stranger? "I had an unconventional mother. That's all." She felt his gaze on her, raised her chin. "Some days I wish I stayed out on the streets. More fun, less lawyers."

"No, you don't. I saw you last night. You live for this sh**."

"Yeah." She managed a half-smile. "Too bad I might be out of a job. Permanently."

The theme of Lifelines is family — building connections, learning that you can't go it alone, that we all need lifelines.

Page 99 is the first time we see Lydia lowering her guard, allowing someone else to get close. Further on down the page she and Trey share their first kiss, cementing the importance of this moment for Lydia. And this page is when she makes a full commitment to risk everything in order to solve the mystery behind her patient's death.

As soon as she makes this decision, the door opens (literally) and everything changes as the plot speeds forward.

Character, theme, plot all colliding to take the book in a different direction from here on out. Wow! Who knew one little page could work so hard?

Thanks, Page 99!

And thanks to everyone for reading!

Read an excerpt from Lifelines, and learn more about the author and her work at C.J. Lyons' website and her blog, Vital Signs.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ha-Joon Chang's "Bad Samaritans"

Ha-Joon Chang is Reader in the Political Economy of Development at the University of Cambridge.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, and reported the following:

P. 99 of Bad Samaritans is representative of the book in one important sense but not in another.

While Bad Samaritans deals with big themes -- the history of capitalism, globalisation, the future of world development -- its conclusions are drawn on the basis of careful and detailed examination of empirical evidence, both historical and contemporary. P. 99 happens to provide such an examination in relation to the dominant neo-liberal dogma that trying to regulate foreign direct investment in a globalising world is futile. In this sense, the page is representative of the book's careful empiricism.

However, there is one important sense in which p. 99 is not very representative of Bad Samaritans. Given what it does, p. 99 happens to be rather dry (I wouldn't say boring), which much of the book is not. The book has been written with the general reading public in mind. It deploys quite a lot of popular cultural references in order to sustain the non-specialist reader's interest through many necessary but tedious economic arguments: I don't think you will find many economics books that feature Alexander Hamilton, Orson Welles, Tom Cruise, Monty Python, and Muhammad Ali, to name just a few. Despite this, sometimes the discussion inevitably become a little too dry, and p. 99 happens to contain one of those exceptions. The good news for the reader is that there are not many pages like p. 99 relative to the many more lively pages in Bad Samaritans.

Read an excerpt from Bad Samaritans, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

Watch a video of Ha-Joon Chang discussing his book.

Learn more about Ha-Joon Chang's research and publications at his Cambridge webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steve Hockensmith's "The Black Dove"

Steve Hockensmith is the author of the novels Holmes on the Range, On the Wrong Track, the newly released The Black Dove, as well as numerous short stories. Holmes on the Range, the first novel featuring Big Red and Old Red, was a finalist for the Edgar, the Anthony, the Shamus and the Dilys Award.

Hockensmith applied the "Page 99 Test" to The Black Dove, and reported the following:

Well, I don’t know what Ford Madox Ford would’ve thought -- somehow I doubt he was a fan of mysteries, and mysteries starring squabbling cowboys would’ve been a real stretch for a guy like him. But hey, maybe he would’ve found something to like on page 99 anyway. I know I kind of dig it.

Here’s the first paragraph:

The street emptied out onto a bigger, busier thoroughfare running at a slant -- Columbus, most likely. Which put us a stone’s throw from the corner of the Coast called “The Devil’s Acre.” You’d have plenty of reason to throw stones there, too, for you could hardly take two steps without someone trying to rob you, kidnap you, or just kill you for a giggle. It was the kind of place even the police wouldn’t go without a rifle squad and a priest at the ready.

Right there you (hopefully) get a feel for the gritty setting (1893 San Francisco, actually) and the narrator’s way with words. Over the next few paragraphs, the situation becomes more clear, too: The heroes are trying to follow a mysterious old man through the streets of Chinatown only to have him duck into a building with a pair of menacing “lugs” loitering out front.

It was obvious who they were because they wanted it obvious.

The newspapers would’ve labeled them “highbinders” or “hatchet men.” In less colorful language, they were hired guns for the tongs. Or, to be even plainer still, killers.

The old man breezed right between them without so much as a nod in their direction, scuttling up the steps they were guarding and disappearing through the door beyond.

End of chapter! I know it’s not exactly Raiders of the Lost Ark, as far as cliffhangers go, but I do think it establishes a nice aura of exotic menace.

Is “the quality of the whole” revealed? Not really. There are other pages that are more funny and more exciting and more poignant, too. But the appeal of the whole comes through, I think. If you like what you see on page 99, odds are you’ll like the book.

And if you don’t like it ... well, maybe you’re Ford Madox Ford. In which case, I suspect it’s not for you anyway.

Read an excerpt from The Black Dove, and visit Big Red's blog to learn more about Steve Hockensmith and his writing.

The Page 69 Test: On the Wrong Track.

My Book, The Movie: Holmes on the Range.

--Marshal Zeringue