Back Story: WORDS KILL
By David Myles Robinson
This is a book that has been percolating in my brain for many years. Having come of age in the late 60s and early 70s, I lived through some truly tumultuous times which have had a lasting impact on America: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, AIDS, drugs, and mental illness. I actually lived on Haight St. in San Francisco in 1968, and I wanted to find
a way to weave a story around many of those impactful events.
Having grown up first in a predominately white area of Los Angeles and then in a highly diverse community in Pasadena, I became acutely aware of racism at an early age. In 1969 I worked as a staff reporter for a minority newspaper in Pasadena, and worked on many stories involving institutional racism. So, as I thought about a plot for this novel, I decided that a story centered on friendship and love involving race would be a good vehicle, especially with the storyline essentially beginning in 1968.
The book itself took over three years to write. I rewrote it from the ground up several times, trying to get it right. Even as I continued to write and publish other books, this book, which I had originally titled The Reporter, continued to rattle around in my brain.
There is a fair amount of quasi-autobiographical content in Words Kill. Like our protagonist, Russell Blaze, I had an alcoholic stepfather who physically abused my mother. I lived through the hippie era in San Francisco and Los Angeles. I narrowly avoided the draft, just as Russell did.
So there is a lot of me mixed in with the blood, sweat, and tears on the pages of Words Kill. I hope people of all age groups like the story and see the unfortunate societal parallels between the past and the present, particularly as they pertain to racism.
David Myles Robinson has always had a passion for writing. During the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, while in college, Robinson worked as a free-lance writer for several magazines and was a staff writer for a weekly minority newspaper in Pasadena, California, called The Pasadena Eagle. However, as he himself admits, upon graduating from San Francisco State University, he decided against the ‘starving writer’ route and went to law school, at the University of San Francisco School of Law. It was there that he met his wife, Marcia Waldorf. After graduating from law school in 1975, the two moved to Honolulu, Hawaii and began practicing law. Robinson became a trial lawyer, specializing in personal injury and workers’ compensation law. Waldorf eventually became a District Court and ultimately a Circuit Court judge.
Upon retiring in 2010, Robinson completed his first novel, Unplayable Lie, which was published by BluewaterPress LLC, in 2010. He has since published five more novels, three of which are legal thrillers set in Honolulu: Tropical Lies, Tropical Judgments, Tropical Doubts, and Tropical Deception. His other three novels are The Pinochet Plot, Son of Saigon, and Words Kill. Robinson has also published a book of short travel stories, Conga Line on the Amazon.
Robinson and Waldorf divided their time between Honolulu and their second home in Taos, NM for seven years before finally deciding to see what it’s like to be full-time mainlanders again. They now live in Taos, where Robinson can pursue his non-writing passions of golf, ski, and travel.
WEBSITE & SOCIAL LINKS:
Website: davidmylesrobinson.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/DMRobinsonWrite
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/DavidMylesRobinson
Instagram – http://www.instagram.com/davidmylesrobinson
Title: WORDS KILL
Author: David Myles Robinson
Publisher: Terra Nova Books
Pages: 250
Genre: Thriller / Suspense
BOOK BLURB:
Famed reporter Russell Blaze is dead. It appears to be an accident, but after Russ’s funeral, his son, Cody, finds a letter in which his father explains that the death may have been murder. It directs Cody to Russ’s unfinished memoir for clues as to what may have happened. The opening words are: On the night of October 16, 1968, I uttered a sentence that would haunt me for the rest of my life. The sentence was, “Someone should kill that motherfucker.”
As Cody delves into the memoir, a window opens into a tragic past and thrusts the still-burning embers of another time’s radical violence into the political reality of the present. History that once seemed far away becomes a deeply personal immersion for Cody into the storied heyday of the Haight: drugs, sex, war protesters, right-wing militias, ground-breaking journalism—and the mysterious Gloria, who wanders into his father’s pad one day to just “crash here for a while until things calm down.”
Cody discovers aspects of his father’s life he never knew, and slowly begins to understand the significance of those words his father spoke in 1968.
Words Kill is a story of loss, violence, and racism; love, hate, and discovery. It is a story of then … and now.
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