My New Play: Sausalypso Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery

by | Sep 17, 2020 | Murder Mystery

For the past six years, I’ve performed in a murder mystery dinner theater at the local Tam Valley Community Center. In 2017, I wrote and directed the show — “Publish or Perish: Tam Valley Mystery Writers Retreat Murder Mystery” — and now I’ve written the script for next year’s show.

(Our murder mystery dinner theater works like this: About a hundred people gather for dinner at the community center, ten guests seated at each round table. After dinner, we start the show, then, at a break, we ask each table to discuss among themselves whodunit. Then during the second act, the captains from each table stand up and make their accusations. It’s a fun evening for the actors as well as the audience.)

Here’s a preview — this is Scene 1.

Sausalypso Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery

Scene 1. A History of the Sausalypso Waterfront

(As Dawn introduces the play, historical photos are displayed on the screen.)

     DAWN: In 1942, as the U.S. joined World War II, Bechtel Corporation opened a shipyard in Sausalypso. Called Marinship, at its peak, it employed 20,000 workers, who built 93 ships in three years.

Workers came from all over, but housing was scarce. Marin County’s Housing Authority and the federal government teamed up to create Marin City and build housing for 6,000 workers. Still not enough. Many workers lived on old boats or jerry-rigged them from whatever they could scrounge.

After the war, Bechtel abandoned the shipyard, and boatbuilder Donlon Arquez bought a large waterfront parcel, considered worthless, full of shipbuilding debris.

He dragged old boats, like decommissioned ferries, onto the mudflats and rented them to G.I.s returning from the war. Rent was cheap and his landlord style was pretty much “benign neglect.” Artists and craftsmen built homes on barges and rafts. Out of packing crates, railroad cars, motor homes. These floating homes connected to land on ramshackle walkways or floating docks made from styrofoam and plywood.

Then, in the late sixties, when Haight-Ashbury’s Summer of Love turned dark, hippies and squatters arrived, seeking free love and free living.

Arques’ property, known as the “Gates,” became the epicenter of Sausalypso’s development battles of the 1970s. City leaders tried to clean up and clear out the houseboats, focusing on the lack of sewage hookups. Arques was forced to sell.

You might remember the houseboat wars from the newspapers and TV. Or heard stories from people who were there.

But do you want to hear the true story?

Do you? (Wait for response.)

I was hoping you’d say that, otherwise we’re heading home.

This is what really happened.

—

One more thing. Where I grew up, in the hills of Sausalypso, we looked down on the houseboat harbor — my father called it a shanty town full of  “low-life wharf rats.”

Little did I know that one of those rats would be the handsome and charming Honest Abernathy, who dresses like a pirate and has enough low-life in him to infuriate my father.

 

Politics is Tough. Family is Tougher.

by | Sep 17, 2020 | Bones in the Wash

Bones in the Wash Ebook Free Till Election Day

My first novel, Bones in the Wash: Politics is Tough. Family is Tougher, is set during the 2008 presidential campaign in New Mexico. It’s one part political thriller, one part family soap, and one part murder mystery.

Ambitious Albuquerque Mayor Tomas Zamara, charged with delivering the state’s five electoral votes for John McCain, is directed to shut down voter registration drives and accuse the Democrats of stealing the election. He’s also grappling with a volatile new woman and a demanding family. Then, when a flash flood unearths the skeleton of his long-missing wife, investigators zero in on Zamara as a suspect.

Challenging him every step of the way is fierce, young Sierra León of the Democracy Project, who calls on him to listen to his better self and reject his party’s dirty tricks.

Bones in the Wash, awarded Best Book 2015 by the Bay Area Independent Book Publishers Association (BAIPA), is free as an ebook until Election Day.

    

One of the recurring storylines in Bones is voter suppression and dirty tricks. I remember one reader, from Canada, who told me how much he enjoyed the book, but he thought that the many tactics in the book that made it harder for people to vote seemed unrealistic. I told him that all were based on documented incidents, though not necessarily in New Mexico.

But from the vantage point of now, those voter suppression actions in 2008 seem so innocent, almost quaint.

Early on in the story, my protagonist, Tomas Zamara, a Republican, expresses his discomfort focusing on making it harder to vote. Well, that’s obviously fiction.

(For an overview of how Republicans are engaging in voter suppression and disenfranchisement in the 2020 election, see “Conservative Judicial Decisions Keep Boosting GOP Voter Suppression,” by Ari Berman in Mother Jones and “A Judicial ‘Shitshow’ Blocks Absentee Ballots in Wisconsin,” by John Nichols in The Nation. The most galling example Berman references is in Florida, where 64 percent of voters approved a ballot measure two years ago to restore voting rights to former felons, but the legislature subsequently passed a law requiring them to pay all fines before they can vote. This could result in the disenfranchising of 775,000 Florida citizens.)

Here are a couple of my favorite reviews of Bones in the Wash:

✭✭✭✭✭ A political page turner
Bones in the Wash is a fast-moving whodunnit built around the 2008 presidential campaign as it played out in New Mexico. The story alternates between two attractive and sympathetic characters who are on opposite sides of the campaign. It includes political dirty tricks, international drug gangs, a disappeared spouse who may have been murdered, cranky dysfunctional families, and lots of beautiful New Mexico countryside. I was up till 4 am finishing this one. The surprises continue right to the last page. I highly recommend it.

✭✭✭✭✭ Highly recommended
It is remarkable how the author so completely understands the characters he develops for this story: the dynamics of Zamara family; the competitive relationship between two young women friends; the distinctly different romances between young Sierra and her boyfriend, between Mayor Zamara and the mysterious Tory, or the strained marriage of Sierra’s parents. You feel as if you’re peering into the private lives of real people, all skillfully set against the backdrop of the highly competitive world of Presidential politics, with the sinister world of organized crime casting a faint but menacing shadow. It takes a fertile imagination to dream up a flash flood that threatens the lives of the mayor and his lover on an outing in one part of the state, while uncovering the bones of his murdered wife in another. I found myself eagerly turning the page to discover how the various plot lines in this book were going to turn out. Highly recommended.

(More reviews here.)

I hope you take advantage of the free Bones in the Wash ebook and enjoy reading it. I’d love to hear what you think.

Oh, and please vote November 3. (Or earlier, if you can.)