My Background Story of "The Detective and Dorothy Day" (with Juneteenth update)

I arrived uninvited at the Catholic Worker farm in Tivoli, NY, on March 19, 1974, one week after I turned 20 years old. At dinner there was plentiful meat -- which they good-naturedly told me not to get used to, because it was to mark the feast of St. Joseph. I stayed until late summer, then lived and worked in Manhattan through the winter, returning to Tivoli the following spring. I moved to Missouri the next winter (1975-6), and worked in a lumber yard. Then with three other people whom I'd met at Tivoli, we bought 40 acres of cheap woodland in the Ozarks. I was still clinging to the fantasy we were hippie peaceful revolutionaries. None of us or our descendants still lives on the property (but I think it's in good hands).

I also thought that way in Tivoli. It would have made more sense, given my actual skills and how my career would work out (mostly at newspapers), to have gotten involved with The Catholic Worker paper. But I did farm work instead, and was distracted with new friends and experiences, e.g. falling in love for the first time. Nor did I go to Mass, despite my Catholic upbringing, only returning to the church after I got married at age 30 (to someone I'd met the year before). 

The dedication of my 2026 novel The Detective and Dorothy Day, says: "For old friends from the Catholic Worker, living and dead. Most of whom knew Dorothy Day much better than I did." Dorothy was not at Tivoli a lot when I was there. Her daughter and grandchildren were in Vermont, and she herself lived mostly in New York City. When she was at the farm, I made no effort to hang out with her, thinking it would be a phony thing for me to do. I only recall one brief conversation, about selling out, a fictionalized version of which is in the novel.

It was not included in the book's first draft, written almost 40 years ago, and nor was Dorothy. That was a straight detective novel told in the first person and influenced by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, especially the latter. It was based on my four years as a reporter, labor organizer and leader at The Post-Star in Glens Falls, NY.

Much later, I wrote my first three published books, all focused on the American Civil War. Only one of these was a novel, The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant, which is written from the perspective of multiple historical characters, and is technically more sophisticated than the first-person narrative of The Detective and Dorothy Day.

I rewrote the detective story's 1987 draft, moving it back 12 years to add Dorothy, who gives it needed moral ballast. Among the things I cut were some but not all of the conversations about Grant and the Civil War. What stayed got amended and included in Dorothy's pacifist vision, which partly becomes the detective's. Grant, too, in his way, became a man of peace.

Update: The above was written June 17, and today, June 19, I get more reminders of America's lack of historical knowledge, as commemorators of the holiday keep insisting Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston on today's date, when in fact he got there two days earlier but issued his crucial order June 19th. My first book was a 2013 biography of Granger, and the publisher reasonably put quotes around Juneteenth in the subtitle because most people were unfamiliar with the word. In 2022, when my third Civil War-related book was published, I wrote an essay here about the holiday, to which I link below.

BOOKS BY BOB : Juneteenth as a Hopeful Symbol of National Unity

Grant the Writer

 

The image of Grant from the cover of my 2018 novel is derived from a famous photo of him on the porch of the cottage at Mount McGregor, a few weeks before his death. It was taken by an otherwise unidentified person named Howe, who apparently sold the rights to Mark Twain, publisher of Grant's Memoirs. Here it is below (aged into a brownish color): Grant, as you can see, is intently working on the manuscript of the book which Twain would publish. I think it was taken early in the morning, before Julia was up, as she would probably have preferred to see her beloved husband more properly dressed, in suit and top hat, as he appeared in most of his postwar photos including others taken at Mount McGregor. The earliness of the hour, along with the considerable weight loss Grant experienced as his health deteriorated, might also account for why he was so warmly dressed in summer. But the flap on the right side of his face was not so much as to protect against a gust of wind as to conceal the tumor which was rapidly killing him from throat cancer. Grant's book, his first, turned out to be a masterpiece. Not as long as originally planned, it left out his political career. But he got up to the end of the war, and wrote a conclusion.

This Saturday June 13 is Community Day up at the cottage, with various free family events "to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our great nation." I made arrangements to be a vendor selling my four books, but now that they've put me in the Visitor Center next to the gift store, I realize I can't be competing against that store and selling the two books of mine they have. So I'll just put one copy each of the Grant novel and Gordon Granger biography out, directing potential customers to buy them in the room next door. And I'll sell copies of my two other books, the James Montgomery biography and the new historical novel, The Detective and Dorothy Day. You might think the latter has nothing to do with Grant, but that is not the case. There are a couple of conversations about him in it, and also mention of the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. There was even more about Grant in the first draft, written almost 40 years ago in the 1980s. But I cut some of it, since the other three books are focused on the Civil War and this one is set a century later, and added the nonviolent radical Catholic activist Dorothy Day. 

Come on up and I'll tell you some stories, maybe of Suye Narita Gambino, who spent most of her long and remarkable life -- as inspiring, in its way, as Grant's -- at the cottage. Her husband Tony gave me and my girlfriend (now wife) Barbara our first tour of the place in 1983, while Suye (as with Barbara's help I figured out years later) was working in the garden. The Gambinos are buried nearby, in Gurn Springs Cemetery on Ballard Road in Wilton.