"The Detective and Dorothy Day" Is Reviewed by Historical Novel Society

Karen Bordonaro, Indie Book Reviews Editor at Historical Novels Review, part of the Historical Novel Society, has written a good and insightful review of The Detective and Dorothy Day. It can be found at their site here, and I reprint it in full below:

This detective story that features appearances by Catholic pacifist, anarchist, and labor activist Dorothy Day offers readers a unique treat. Set in 1975, the action plays out mostly in the upper part of New York State beyond the Hudson River where wealthy families retreat to the lakes, mountains, and small towns north of New York City. Sy Johnson, a private investigator, gets hired by a national labor union to investigate the murder of a local businessman in upstate New York for which the local labor union president has been charged. Sy is sent to find out if perhaps there is more to this murder than meets the eye. The local businessman, Jack Williams, was a wealthy company owner who could have been targeted for reasons other than labor unrest. Sy’s investigative trail crosses paths with Dorothy Day through her Catholic Worker farm, as well as with other business owners, reporters, lawyers, police, and members of the Williams family. As more murders occur, Sy looks for leads concerning potential industrial pollution, financial fraud, drug dealing, and a knot of personal relationships and entanglements that he himself becomes involved in. Amidst the growing violence and turbulence, Dorothy’s words give Sy a moral compass.

Fast-paced action unfolds on every page as all the twists and turns of the case take place within a week and a half. Sy comes across as a very human character as he makes mistakes, overestimates and underestimates his own abilities, and acts both rationally and emotionally throughout all the various phases of his investigation. Sy’s own experiences, his growing relationships with the local people, and Dorothy’s words of wisdom combine well in this entertaining read. Recommended for historical mystery fans who enjoy a wild ride with a touch of morality thrown in.

Reviewing

 

I gave this book a five-star rating and reviewed it on Amazon as follows: 

"The author's great-great-great grandparents were Peter and Clarinda Dumont, of Utica, NY. The book is based on his letters and experiences with the 146th New York Infantry Regiment in the Army of the Potomac, from enlistment at age 25 in 1862 to the battles of Fredericksburg and, in 1863, Chancellorsville, where he was captured. Then he chronicles for Clarinda and us the harsh conditions of Libby prison in Richmond and the frustration of continued long imprisonment without furlough in Union parole camps, until he rejoins his regiment in October, and then through more combat to the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. Peter also drew illustrations which, along with family photographs, are beautifully reproduced by The Troy Book Makers. Clarinda, too, holding the small family together with little money at home, is part of the story, along with descendants who kept the documents for the author, Diana McCarthy. She has off and on spent much of her life preserving, uncovering, editing and writing this informative and moving account. Like Ulysses S. Grant, whose marriage to Julia was as close as that of Peter and Clarinda, and like her ancestor, Diana turned out to be a good writer."

A couple of notes. The illustration on the cover was drawn at Libby Prison, but does not depict the harsh conditions there. It was instead drawn there, and shows the relatively comfortable tent where Peter Dumont had made a home for himself before the Army of the Potomac embarked on its Chancellorsville campaign.

The author, Diana McCarthy, and I are acquainted. We both belong to a Civil War history group called "Da Buffs" in Colonie (near Albany) NY, but had barely spoken to each other before July 2024, when she gave a presentation on the subject matter of this book. Since then, we've become friends, and earlier this year she gave a good review to my novel The Detective and Dorothy Day. A purist might call that a conflict of interest, but I disagree. It is only natural for writers and people interested in Civil War history to congregate together, and to read each other's books. I might have gotten a little hyperbolic toward the end of the above review by bringing in Ulysses S. Grant, but I stand by it.

If you don't want to buy the book at Amazon (although reviewing it there could help boost sales) you can order it from a book store. You can also see Diana give a presentation at 3 pm on Saturday Nov. 14, at The Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza near Albany.

 

O Albany!

 

I will be selling all four of my books (discounted prices!) this Saturday, Sept. 26, at the Albany Book Festival, to be held in the Uptown Campus of the University at Albany (SUNY). I'll be at Table 34 of the Ballroom, on the second floor of the Campus Center. See more about the festival at this link.

I'm the goofy looking guy seen here at home plugging the historical novel published earlier this year,                                                                             The Detective and Dorothy Day.

My previous novel was The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant, and I also wrote two biographies: James Montgomery: Abolitionist Warrior, and General Gordon Granger: The Savior of Chickamauga and the Man Behind "Juneteenth". 

I'm a former journalist who spent many years working in Albany (mostly at the Capitol) and Schenectady, and will be hanging around at my table most of the day, so feel free to stop by and chew the fat. 

We could talk about the fading glory days of Joe Bruno, the last Republican to hold real power in Albany, whom I remember working a packed room of senators, aides, reporters and lobbyists like a great comedian, purportedly telling a shaggy dog story about the difficulties of operating a steamroller on his Brunswick farm -- a reference to Fred Dicker's then recent story in The New York Post about Gov. Eliot Spitzer threatening to roll over Assembly Minority Leader Jim Tedisco like a "f****** steamroller."

Or the Senate leader coming out in the cold evening to speak to a mass rally of correction officers on the Capitol's east side, as they chanted his name, "Bruno, Bruno," like a dark war cry. They must sorely miss him now, in the ruins of the state's prison system.

Or Bruno holding up a big horse-racing deal, causing one of his allies to desert him. This was a little scoop of mine which prompted the great man to receive me, and provided perhaps the favorite political quote and scene of my not-particularly-distinguished career (and which I'm grateful no editor cut for the sake of good taste): 

“[Spitzer] figures people like you are going to get me to sweat,” Bruno said to a reporter, smiling as he headed back to his office. “I’m not sweating,” said the shirtsleeved Senate leader, raising his arms to demonstrate.

Or we can go farther back, and discuss the intricacies of how the Schenectady Metroplex Authority came into existence. 

Or, "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past," to the days of Mario Cuomo, mocking our police reporter who was telling him they were calling Schenectady "Baby New York" by scornfully repeating the phrase in his Queens accent -- yet not long afterwards the state led a big law enforcement operation which cleaned up Schenectady and drastically reduced crime there. Cuomo, the great liberal, built a lot of prisons and helped turn around a massive state crime wave, but didn't like to take credit for it. Years before that, in the mid-1980s, he was touring the Troy Shirtmakers factory in Glens Falls, peering suspiciously at my union button, and educating me about arugula (which I challenged him to spell). The factory and the newspaper I worked for are long gone from that East Side neighborhood, which happens to be where Joe Bruno grew up in a cold-water flat on Walnut Street. He and Cuomo were both sons of Italian immigrants. 

 

Or let's go back to the Civil War, which was the key part of my first three books, and even breaks briefly into conversations in the fourth, despite Dorothy Day being a pacifist. We could talk all day about that, or my time with Catholic Worker people from the 1970s on.

See you Saturday, I hope.

9/11 and Dorothy Day

 

I'm backing into this one.

My mother, daughter of Irish immigrants, was from Brooklyn. I lived in Manhattan most of the time from 1974 to 1982, then moved upstate to be a daily newspaper reporter. I love the city.

I got married, and we took my first child, a daughter, down to a Long Island church to be baptized; then at my mother's house she was held in the arms of her great-grandmother, Mary Gaffney.

Also at that celebration was a friend of mine from the city and her husband. It was one of the last times I saw her because we were drifting mostly out of touch, as people do -- except on 9/11 when I called her house. I don't think it was when I was writing the editorial for the 9/12 Schenectady Daily Gazette, but later, when I got home. I called because she worked for Dean Witter, had survived the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, and was still employed there.

By 9/11, Dean Witter had become part of Morgan Stanley, and its offices were in the second tower to be hit, between the 43rd and 72nd floors. You may have heard of the company's security chief, Rick Rescorla, one of many true heroes that day. The plane, United Airlines Flight 175, hit between the 77th through 84th floors. It made an enormous noise and swayed the building, my friend told me, as she and her colleagues were walking down underneath.

The aforementioned daughter joined the US Army as a private, married a soldier and started a family, retiring after 16 years with two deployments in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. I am in awe of her achievements and honorable service.

Dorothy Day died in 1980, almost 21 years before 9/11. I was thinking about writing a post here about the latest bureaucratic step toward her possible canonization, but lacked enthusiasm. Not that I oppose the process. While Dorothy was famously dismissive about people calling her a saint, in the non-official sense she obviously was one, as a faithful Catholic and transparently good person.

Opinions are -- steering into safe cliché to avoid a more scatological one which comes to mind -- a dime a dozen. My editorial about 9/11 was conventionally hawkish. I wrote a column I liked better, about the hundreds of firemen and cops who died. In 2003, the Gazette downsized me out of the Opinion Department back to the news side of the operation, where objectivity was my goal.

It can be a sketchy business to declare what a dead person would have thought or done about this or that, but I think a couple of uncontroversial statements can be made about a hypothetically living Dorothy in the 21st century, and specifically how she would have responded to 9/11.

She would, like almost everyone else, have grieved for the dead and their families, especially in the city that was her home, and admired the courageous rescuers. She would have done what she could to help -- which would not have involved changing a lifelong habit of declining to vote for presidential candidates. Nor would she have supported any of the wars.

I am still not all the way won over to her pacifism. But observing the history of this century from the Mideast to Ukraine, the case I think she could have made is overwhelming my defenses. Not entirely. When I hear of African Christians being massacred by jihadis, I think they have the right to defend themselves, their families and neighbors. But my increasing instinct, argument, hope and prayer is to avoid war -- including civil war -- and make peace.   

How Newspaper Journalism Shaped "The Detective and Dorothy Day"

 

The guy in the middle hosts an annual picnic in the park at this time of year, where we three friends often meet up, and did yesterday. We got to know each other 21-plus years ago as reporters for the Daily/Sunday Gazette of Schenectady. I'm the one on the right, a generation older. The other two were single then, but are now married fathers -- as am I, though my children are long grown up. I spent most of my 21 Gazette years at the Opinion department and copy desk, moving on to reporting for the last few years as that and other papers hemorrhaged jobs. Or back to reporting, as I'd done the job for four years in the 1980s at the Glens Falls Post-Star, while also organizing and leading a labor union, part of The Newspaper Guild. None of us works for a newspaper now.

As mentioned here, the first draft of The Detective and Dorothy Day was written almost 40 years ago as a straight detective story in which Dorothy Day did not appear. I rewrote it in recent years to include her (whom I'd met at the Catholic Worker farm in the 1970s), while cutting and reshaping other stuff. The book was/is very much a product of newspaper experience, especially those first four years in Glens Falls, but also my later career as I kept finding out how the world works.

My wife Barbara, who took the photo, dubbed us the three amigos on Facebook. That's the name of a not-bad 1980s comedy, and a good deal less pretentious and stolen-valor-like than the lines which come to my mind about the reporters' trade, "we happy few, we band of brothers."

Albany Times Union Reviews 'The Detective and Dorothy Day'

 

Thanks to Jack Rightymer for a positive review of The Detective and Dorothy Day in the middle of a round-up in the Albany (NY) Times Union's print edition this morning. (It came out earlier online. The bottom half of the short review is at the top of one of the columns in photo.)

I'm part of Book Fair at Brew Pub

The event is this Sunday, July 26, from 11 to 3 at the Common Roots Brewing Co., 62-58 Saratoga Ave., South Glens Falls -- which is by the Hudson River, across which in Glens Falls my wife Barbara and I lived for many years and raised our family.

This is in part a fund-raiser for the Rainbow Division Veterans Foundation, which is connected to the 42nd Infantry Division, an Army National Guard unit headquartered in Troy, NY.

I'm bringing all four of my books to sell, the first three Civil War-related ones at discount prices. And the new hardcover historical novel, The Detective and Dorothy Day, is only $20. Stop by, grab a bite and say hello.

@valenzapublishing

@commonrootsbrewing