MORE ABOUT THOSE GUANTANAMO BAY PRISONERS WE SENT TO URUGUAY

This is the stuff of which mystery book plots are made!  My last post talked about former president Jose Mujica of Uruguay and his having facilitated the “immigration” of six former Guantanamo detainees to their “new home” in Uruguay.  Now, let me give you a few of the details.

Last December (2014) six prisoners held for 12 years at Guantanamo Bay were sent to Uruguay, where they were to be resettled as refugees.  This was a deal that had been in the works for a long time once we identified a country willing to take them.  It is part of President Obama’s overall strategy to finally close Guantanamo Bay prison once all of the detainees are resettled, deported, tried for their accused crimes, or otherwise offered alternatives to the limbo of indefinite incarceration without trial.   There was, of course, political opposition to accepting these individuals in Uruguay, but President Mujica’s view eventually prevailed.

URUGUAY UPDATE

Uruguay, as did most of South America, just had a presidential election.  Their campaigns don’t take two years and don’t cost billions of dollars for the candidates.  The process is quick and features much less negative advertising and partisan politics.   The former president Tabare Vasquez defeated the incumbent candidate Jose Mujica.  Tabare Vasquez is a professional politician.  What he lacks in charisma is compensated for by his acknowledged political and bureaucratic skills.  He was well known to the electorate from his previous terms as President.

Jose Mujica may not have been a very good president in the political sense, but he was probably the most colorful character to lead any country in a long time.  During his term in office Uruguay legalized marijuana and abortion.  He spoke against corporate and government abuses of power and spoke for the poor and impoverished members of society.  He offered asylum to several former Guantanamo detainees.  He gave a speech to the United Nations where he said, among other things, “We have sacrificed the old immaterial gods and now we are occupying the temple of the market god,” and “This god organizes our economy, our politics, our habits, our lives. It seems we have been born only to consume.”

And “There’s marketing for everything! There’s marketing for cemeteries, for funeral services, for maternity wards, for fathers, for mothers, grandparents and uncles! ... Everything is business! ... The average man of our time wanders between financial institutions and the tedious routine of offices ... He dreams of vacations and freedom. He dreams of being able to pay his bills, until one day, his heart stops.”

Before becoming president in 2009, Mujica had spent more than 10 years imprisoned in solitary confinement in a well!  He was a revolutionary Tucamaro during the military dictatorship of the 1970s and early 1980s. 

Another quote from Mujica, “You don’t stop being a common man just because you are president.”  He drove a VW beetle and commuted from his home to the office as president; 90% of his salary went to charity.

I met President Mujica a couple of times, once at a reception celebrating the opening of a new pharmaceutical company in Montevideo.  No Secret Service, no bodyguards, no police, no soldiers.  No entourage.  He was just another visitor at the event.  He spoke to me in rapid Spanish about the new jobs being created by the company for working men and women.  He didn’t seem to care whether I was a voter or a tourist.  His enthusiasm and charisma were evident in everything he said and did.  But that’s not enough in today’s complex world.  Uruguay’s economy, like almost all the South American countries in their region, is taking a big economic hit.  Not as big a hit as its neighbor Argentina, but still a hit.  Former President Mujica’s policies have taken the blame, and he’s now a former president.  His style and personality will be missed on the world stage and in his home country.

RECENT REVIEW OF FIVE QUICKIES

            A very nice review of my newest book by a popular blogger just appeared.   Kathryn Svendsen, in her blog “Shelf Full of Books”, reviewed “Five Quickies for Roger and Suzanne”. 
She gave this anthology a rating of 4 stars.

            “This is an anthology of 5 stories of shorter length from novelette length to short story. Each one is about Roger Bowman, a private detective, who once was a patent lawyer and a police detective. The first of the five stories The Empanada Affair takes places in Argentina. Three of the stories take place in Los Angeles and the fifth story “The Haunted Gymnasium” takes place in Fortaleza, Brazil. Most of the stories have some kind of connection to South America

PROGRESS IN THE GALAPAGOS AND OTHER STUFF

            The current Work In Progress reached a milestone.   The first draft of “The Origin of Murder” is complete, I’ve also completed the first round of edits, and a copy is currently being read by my wife with her trusty blue pen.   I like this new book, which started with rediscovering Elaine’s journal describing her impressions of what we saw when we took the cruise through the Galapagos Islands that Roger, Suzanne, and their entourage take in this current novel.   The plot evolved from the original idea (which is still the central theme of “Whydunit”), to a much more complex story as the peripheral characters began clamoring for enhanced identities and backstories.   “Whodunit” evolved with the novel.   Along the way I ended up doing a lot of research (I’d tell you about what, but that would be a spoiler) and learned a lot about [CENSORED] and [CENSORED].

AN EXPERIMENT WITH AMAZON KDP’S NEW BOOK PROMOTION, THE KINDLE COUNTDOWN DEAL

            Amazon KDP recently announced a new book promotion opportunity.  For up to seven days you can reduce the price on your KDP entry to any amount you want on any kind of staggered schedule you might care to try.   The incentives are (1) there’s a special promotional page on Amazon where your book is announced as a participant, and (2) you get the full 70% royalty on sales, even if the price is below the normal threshold for the 70% royalty.   It seemed a fun thing to try---the worst-case scenario was nobody would be interested in a book I put on this promotion.   That would have been OK, as I chose a book with low sales at this time but one that is an excellent entry point into my series because it features pretty much all of the recurring characters in five shorter stories.

            The new promotion started on a curious date, 11/12/13.   I announced the promotional price, $0.99, a substantial reduction from the normal price of $2.99 for this novel-length anthology, on a couple of dozen Facebook sites and on my own Facebook page.   The promotion was set to run for seven days, through the 18^th. 

NOT QUITE A FREEBIE ALERT---BARGAIN ALERT

Starts tomorrow!  Special Promotional Price on Amazon KDP ---Nov. 12-17, 2013.  Thousands of readers have enjoyed a series of mystery novels set in South America and California featuring Los Angeles-based private detective Roger Bowman and his wife biochemist Suzanne Foster.   “Five Quickies For Roger And Suzanne”, a novel-length anthology of five stories---three short stories (including “The Dog With No Name” for dog lovers), a novella, and a novelette---features the regular characters from this popular South American mystery series.  Enjoy the quickies, which introduce several of the recurring series characters from this series and are a great place to begin it!  Normal list price is $2.99; Promotional days only, $0.99.  http://www.amazon.com/Quickies-Roger-Suzanne-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B00F7VRMKS/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1379311152&sr=1-1&keywords=b00F7VRMKS

THE NEWEST ROGER AND SUZANNE NOVEL

The current Work In Progress is almost completed through the first draft stage.   I don’t have a title yet.   Here’s the set-up.   Roger and Suzanne, along with Robert and Bruce, are taking a long overdue vacation tour though the Galapagos Islands.   This is another fascinating piece of South America Elaine and I have visited that I wanted to share with my readers.   On the second day of the tour, as their Zodiac raft motors towards one of the islands Suzanne finds a dead body floating in the ocean just off the beach.   And we’re into another South American mystery novel starring my favorite couple of detectives.   And there to help are Eduardo Gomez, his wife Sophia who we'll meet for the first time, and the mysterious General Vincente Aleman. 

THE SURREAL KILLER WINS AN AWARD

I just received an e-mail telling me that "The Surreal Killer" won the Indie Book of the Day award today.  This novel, the third (and soon to become the second) in the Roger and Suzanne South American mystery series, is the best seller in the series thus far.  I recommend it highly for those of you who haven't read it yet.

The image of the award is embedded below.

I JUST GOT BACK FROM LAST WEEK'S TRIP TO MONTEVIDEO

            Last week I flew to and from Montevideo from my home in Northern California.  The trip takes about 25 hours with layovers for connecting flights, airport to airport; it’s a long way south and east to that part of South America.  According to American Airlines, it’s about 7,000 miles one-way.  My route took me from Sacramento to Dallas-Fort Worth to Miami to Montevideo and vice-versa.  Miami-Montevideo and the return trip are overnight flights where an hour or two of sleep makes all the difference in how you’ll feel when you get there. 

            The overall impression I got from my previous trips to Montevideo, a city of 2.5-3 million people, was that little had changed over the 31 years I’d been going back and forth.  This time it was different.  New construction of apartments and buildings for businesses was evident near the airport in the Carrasco neighborhood, all along The Ramblas bordering the Rio de la Plata as we drove into the heart of the city, and in Pocitos, the neighborhood Elaine and I lived in back in 1999.  Occasional new high-rise apartment buildings are going up in downtown inland from the river.  Several of the older buildings downtown are being remodeled and modernized.

SOUTH AMERICAN MUSEUMS AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

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One of the things we never learned about when I went to school was the history of South America before the Spanish Conquest.  There was (and still is) a rich history, much of which we know about in some detail, culminating with the ascendency of the Incan Empire in the 15^th Century.  One of the benefits of wandering through Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Ecuador is getting exposed to this rich and fascinating history of pre-Colombian South America.

QUIRKY EXPERIENCES IN SOUTH AMERICA, IV: GENDER-SPECIFIC ROOMS IN ARGENTINE HOTELS, AND MORE

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On 2 April 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands.  The United Kingdom sent an expeditionary force to retake the islands. After naval and air battles, the British forces landed on The Falklands May 21st, and had surrounded Stanley by June 11th. The Argentine forces surrendered on Monday, June 14, 1982.  To celebrate the 31^st anniversary of the occasion, I give you Episode IV of this series.

When I first lived in Montevideo in 1982, military dictatorships ruled both Uruguay and Argentina.  They were very different places than they are now.   The small colony of Fulbrighters in Uruguay did a lot of things together, so we got to know one another pretty well despite our many differences.  Several quirky things happened when a couple of us spent June 15-16^th visiting Buenos Aires, almost directly across the Rio de la Plata from Montevideo.   

QUIRKY EXPERIENCES IN SOUTH AMERICA, III: INTERNATIONAL CUISINE IN URUGUAY MEANS WHAT THEY EAT IN ARGENTINA

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            I’ve mentioned before that in general, Uruguayans don’t like spicy foods.  Meat is salted, but not marinated, before roasting or broiling over the fire.  When we lived in Montevideo in 1999, one obvious manifestation of this generalization was that there weren’t any Mexican restaurants in this city of almost 3 million inhabitants.  According to a Google search on the Internet, there are at least two Mexican restaurants in town now.  Roma-Tijuana seems to serve Italian-Mexican fusion cuisine according to a review (2009) I found.  Apparently, the fusion is heavily biased to the Italian-Uruguayan palate.  The salsa was described as “slightly spicy ketchup” and the enchiladas did not include enchilada sauce < http://www.exploringuruguay.com/2009/07/07/mexican-food-in-uruguay/>.  La Lupita in Punta Carretas had real Mexican food with real, if mild, salsa. “Salsa mas picante” can be requested, and it tasted like the real thing for the native San Diegans who wrote this review on the same web site as the previous restaurant review.

            After Elaine and I spent a couple of months on a steady diet of beef with more or less salt, with a tiny portion of chimichurri as a side dish if we were very lucky, the craving for a Tex-Mex dinner was becoming overwhelming.  Fortunately we had by then made friends with several USA expatriates living and working in 1999 Montevideo.   One of them, Luke, burst out laughing when we admitted to craving Mexican food.  When he finally stopped laughing, he invited us for dinner on Saturday at his apartment, which turned out to be the local Mexican food outlet for gringos with palates that craved more than the bland local cuisine.  “Yes,” he told us, “I've smuggled chilis, enchilada sauce, and other goodies into Uruguay”.  He hosted weekly home-cooked Mexican dinners as his contribution to spice-starved gringos living in Montevideo, which earned him pride of place at the top of the list of who you wanted to cultivate as a friend in the large expatriate community.

QUIRKY EXPERIENCES IN SOUTH AMERICA, II: DON’T WHINE ABOUT THE WINE UNLESS YOU’VE TASTED IT

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A few years ago, I visited Mendoza, the wine production capital of Argentina, accompanied by a colleague from my University's Viticulture and Enology Department who is a V.I.P. in wine tasting circles.  We were invited to taste the better wines from several of the local wineries, two or three tours per day, which was where I first fell in love with Malbec wine as a varietal.  There are a few quirky things I remember from this experience.

GIVING A CHARACTER THEIR VOICE

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            When writing dialogue, how can you keep your characters from all sounding the same?  If you’re good at this task you can use regional dialects as a distinguishing characteristic, like my friend Wayne Zurl [http://www.waynezurlbooks.net] does so well in his Sam Jenkins series.  If you do it well enough, and Wayne does, before you know it you have books that will sell well as audiobooks where differences in speech usage and patterns are the essential clue in individuating the characters as you listen to the story.  At least for me, this is hard to do as you need a very nuanced ear and a very good memory for what they said and how they said it to make people sound different based only on word choice.  According to The Guinness Book of Records [http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records-2000/most-character-voices-for-an-audio-book-individual] the greatest number of characters given distinct and distinguishable voices by an actor in an audiobook is 224.   This amazing record was accomplished in 2004.

What can the aspiring author do to make their characters different from one another?  If the educational level of the characters varies (college educated P.I. versus high school dropout thug), you have another way to make their voices quite different.  The thug can use a lot of slang and slur his word endings, maybe even say a few bad words here and there.  You can make a character stutter or misuse certain words, or even have an accent.  One of my characters slips a Spanish word into his English every now and then.  The perfect word for Vincent to be overusing for this particular idiosyncrasy is the classic parsley word used promiscuously in conversational Spanish, “claro”.  Vincent could make a chimichurri with all of the claro parsley he sprinkles into his conversation [check out a previous recent post on this blog on “Salsas” if this doesn’t make sense to you, or go directly to the recipe at http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/chimichurri].

RECENT BOOK REVIEWS---NOVELLA AND NOVELETTE

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I’ve published two shorter books, a novella and a novelette.  They are faster paced and shorter (duh!) than the novels, but as intricately plotted and with the same featured characters.  Try one or both of the books; I think you’ll enjoy them.  Both are well rated by the readers who have submitted reviews to Amazon.

This review was very nice!  From the most recent (5-stars) review of “The Body in the bed” on Amazon. “Although "The Body in the Bed" is the first of Mr. Last's "Roger and Suzanne Bowman" mysteries I've read, now I'll have to go pick up all the earlier stories in the series. Roger and Suzanne, now a married couple living in Beverly Hills, remind me in a gentle way of Nick & Nora Charles, the fictional (and film) married detectives of the 1930's, who in their socially upscale and light-hearted way, solved crimes. Roger is a former homicide detective in L.A., turned private investigator; Suzanne is a remarkably intelligent, highly educated, woman, now mother of a one-year-old son. Much of their focus revolves around the city of Montevideo in Uruguay; that is how they met, and it seems that on every trip to that city of which they are so fond, they encounter yet another corpse. This trip, it's in bed in their hotel room. By the time the story is finished, Roger & Suzanne have of course solved the crime, rooted out corruption in high places, and made their friends involved with the case happy, or at least satisfied with results, and the reader has enjoyed a delightful story line.” 

http://archiestandwoodsreviewsandwritings.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-body-in-bed-roger-suzanne-mysteries.html

SOUTH AMERICAN SALSA

The familiar tomato-cilantro-Serrano or Jalapeno chile mix called salsa we dip our chips into on the Mexican lunch/dinner table is a regional variant of a ubiquitous sauce in Latin America.  In Argentina, Uruguay, or Chile there aren’t chips to dip and there isn’t tomato-based salsa.  So what will you meet on these tables?  I’ll give you a hint---food is pretty bland in most of Argentina and Uruguay, and the prevalent “seasoning” is too much salt on the beef.

URUGUAY HERBICIDE TEST SPURS REGIONAL INTEREST

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Here’s a very nice description of what I did in Uruguay when I wasn't trying to write and sell mystery stories and novels. [Reprinted From Global Health Matters, Fogarty International Center's newsletter, January / February 2013 | Volume 12, Issue 1]

“Focus on water”

By Cathy Kristiansen

What started as an initiative to protect Uruguayan drinking water from an herbicide commonly used by rice farmers has blossomed into an international network of budding researchers focused on solving water problems in Latin America. With Fogarty support, researchers and trainees are teaching others how to develop and use molecular-based tests to measure water purity.  Researchers in Uruguay devised a simple test to measure herbicide levels in water.

The project began in 2001, when Dr. Jerold A. Last of the University of California (UC), Davis, received his first International Training and Research in Environmental and Occupational Health grant.  This Fogarty program aims to nurture trainees from a variety of disciplines to help developing countries and emerging democracies develop capacity in both environmental and occupational health.

TOURISM IN SOUTH AMERICA

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OK, you're ready to visit some of the places I've described in my South American mystery stories.  What should you do next?  Most of South America, especially in the poorer and less developed countries, has a much more complicated system and infrastructure to support tourism than we are accustomed to in the United States and Western Europe.  Banking systems are less reliable, currency values are less stable, and credit cards have not yet replaced cash in many transactions as they have in North America, especially for international visitors.  So, if you want to go from where you are to a different major tourist attraction it takes some planning.   You don’t go on-line and make plane and hotel reservations, nor do you hop on a flight with stand-by tickets and find a hotel when you arrive at your destination.   

LA PAZ AND EL ALTO

We flew from Santa Cruz de Bolivia to La Paz on the usual pre-dawn flight that seemed to be the norm for flying in South America.  With a 5 AM pick-up Elaine and I were in the air early en route to a remarkable landing experience.  We were told that only a few pilots were qualified to make this landing, and that they spent entire careers flying in and out of the airport in El Alto.  As we approached the landing we could look up to see snow capped peaks.  Yes, we entered through a valley and flew under the highest peaks.  We were close enough to the mountains themselves to see the textures and impressions in the snow.  The El Alto airport runway is at 14,000+ feet, and I can personally certify that the air is pretty thin at that altitude.  It takes a long time for the plane to slow down and stop after it lands and the runway is just long enough to make the landing work.  A certain amount of faith in the pilot is required at white-knuckle time; several of the passengers were noticeably crossing themselves and praying as we landed.  El Alto, once part of La Paz, is now a city in its own right.  It spills over the top of the ridgeline that defines the end of the La Paz Valley and sprawls out onto the high plain above the city.  La Paz itself is built vertically into the side of the mountain.

THE NEWEST REVIEW OF THE BODY IN THE BED.

Great review.   5.0 out of 5 stars

Fast paced novella,

By 

Loves All Things Books (Oklahoma)

This review is from the Amazon book page:

The Body in the Bed (South American Mystery Series) (Kindle Edition)

I received The Body in the Bed by the author for an honest review. This is a short read, a print length of about 68 pages. The reader doesn't have to read the past Mystery novels written about Roger and Suzanne to read this one. Though I fully recommend you read those too if this one sparks your interest.

Roger and Suzanne head back to Montevideo to celebrate their friend's promotion in the police force. When they arrive they find a body in the bed. Seems like every time they visit this country there's a new mystery to solve.

I cannot wait to start reading the other novels by Jerold Last. Two thumbs up for The Body in the Bed!