Dibs

Kaye Gibbons, author of the bestselling 1987 novel Ellen Foster – an Oprah’s Book Club selection written in the voice of a preteen and set amid scenes of domestic violence — is set to appear today before a North Carolina judge on prescription drug fraud charges, according to the Fayetteville Observer: ”The 48-year-old was charged in November with obtaining property by false pretense and illegal possession of a controlled substance. An officer said authorities were alerted to a pharmacy when Gibbons tried to pick up the prescription painkiller hydrocodone. Gibbons was released from jail in November after posting $5,500 bail.” One of Gibbons’ later books, A Virtuous Woman, was also an Oprah pick. Gibbons is the recipient of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, a Special Citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation, and the Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Prize in Creative Writing. Let’s hope she clears up these legal difficulties pronto.

Those plump little mass-market books about actual murders comprise the bulk of the true-crime genre. For every gorgeously written nonfiction account of homicide — every In Cold Blood, as it were — you’ll find a thousand of the more pedestrian kind whose covers usually shout “Illustrated with shocking photographs,” churned out monthly by St. Martin’s and Pinnacle, among other publishers. I  know from talking with true-crime authors that they have to research and write these books rapidly. Typically, they’re given incredibly short deadlines and must complete entire 300-page manuscripts in under four months — and for small advances. And I’m a true-crime fan. But gosh. Sometimes the writing is so awkward, so haphazard, so downright bad that it makes me crime. Is it THAT hard to master the imperfect past tense? Or to look stuff up now and then? Example: In Wasted, book about the murder of Regina Hartwell by the drug-crazed boyfriend of Hartwell’s sometime lesbian lover, Suzy Spencer describes how an abusive parent repeatedly snuffed out cigarettes on a child’s bare skin. The child’s “back became dotted with scars, dotted like beautiful Swiss fabric.” Argh. You can almost hear what happened. Someone, possibly during an interview, described the scars as looking like “dotted Swiss fabric” or “dotted Swiss.” And the author, rushed as she was, had never heard of dotted Swiss before, didn’t realize that it isn’t really Swiss anymore, nor is it notably beautiful. It’s just thin muslin, textured with tiny evenly spaced dots. But the author, hearing “Swiss,” automatically thought “elegant” or whatever. Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against dotted Swiss.

The author of a popular memoir that was later revealed to be fraudulent has now been murdered, his body found in a Belgian garage, according to the Daily Mail. Using the pseudonym Tom Carew, Philip Sessarego claimed in Jihad! The Secret War in Afghanistan that he was an ex-British Special Forces (SAS) agent highly trained in covert operations who helped train the Afghan Mujahadeen fight Soviet forces during the 1980s. “Carew” claimed to have set up the first Western-sponsored jihad training camp in Pakistan and to have hijacked a plane, among other feats. Somewhat prophetically, the book was published on September 17, 2001. As Carew, Sessarego was a frequent guest on radio and TV talk shows after the current war in Afghanistan began. The book rapidly sold over 50,000 copies before the BBC exposed Sessarego/Carew as a fraud who had never been a mercenary or SAS agent. He had applied for the SAS “in 1973 but failed,” reads the BBC’s November 2001 report. “He was allowed to stay on as a non-member in what was called Demonstration Troop — ordinary soldiers who did jobs for the SAS like play the enemy on exercises. Records show Mr Sessarego later tried to join the Territorial Army Reserve Squadron of the SAS and failed that selection at the end of 1975. On Wednesday he was challenged over the allegations. Mr Carew broke off the interview and on his way out punched a BBC camera.” And now, according to the Daily Mail, ”a decomposed body, thought to be his, has been found in a lock-up garage in Antwerp. Sessarego, who recently went by the name Philip Stevenson, had been living alone in Belgium for several years. Police in Antwerp will compare DNA with his two children in Hereford. A family friend said: ‘He upset a lot of people – his family fear somebody may have taken their revenge.’”

A University of Florida associate professor of anthropology whose books include Time and Memory in Indigenous Amazonia and The Ecology of Power: Culture, Place and Personhood in the Southern Amazon was arrested last Saturday night on cocaine charges in Gainesville, according to FirstCoastNews. “An officer driving toward 46-year-old Michael Heckenberger saw him toss a small bag to the ground,” FCN reports. “The officer got the bag and tested it, finding it had cocaine in it. Heckenberger told the officer the cocaine wasn’t his, that he was just curious about it. He also told the officer that he had planned to trade the cocaine for sexual favors with a man who was nearby.” Great excuse, prof! By the way, the dog ate my midterm essay.

A bookseller in India has been arrested for the heinous crime of stocking a book that allegedly contained “objectional references to Islam,” and its publisher has been interrogated by police, according to today’s Hindustan Times. How is this even possible in an allegedly free country? It happened after the chief cleric of a mosque complained to local officials about the book in Patna, the capital city of India’s Bihar state, home to a population of  82,998,509, of which over 80 percent are Hindu and 16 percent are Muslim.  The outraged cleric, Maulana Kari Abdullah Bukhari, “demanded immediate action.” So Chief Minister Nitish Kumar “directed Home Secretary Afzal Amanullah, the state minority commission chairman Naushad Ahmad and Patna Senior Superintendent of Police Amit Kumar to look into the matter.” Based on the imam’s complaint, “the police arrested the bookseller and detained and interrogated the publisher of the book, Nilofer Yasin, who is the wife of the author of the book, Mohammed Yasin Ahmad.” The bookseller was jailed, the publisher interrogated. “Police are likely to arrest Ahmad” — the book’s author — “soon,” according to Patna Superintendent of Police Anwar Hussain, who said that “all of them have been charged with hurting the sentiments of the Muslim community.” The Urdu-language book in question, Islami Surah Ya Beimani Ka Panchnama, “raised eyebrows among a section of the Muslim community, particularly clerics,” because it “questioned ten tenets of Islam.” Ah, the ultimate no-no: questioning. Chillingly, the article concludes: “The police are on the lookout for Ahmad.”

You know that current trend in which historical novels have, as their protagonists, actual celebrities who actually lived? A certain sector of novelists “re-animates” such flesh-and-blood people as Sappho, Thomas Jefferson and Arthur Conan Doyle. Last week we got a new one in which Jack London gallivants around Hawaii. Well, now there’s a new twist — a novel whose protagonists were biblical celebrities who may or may not have actually lived, depending on whom you ask. In Eve: A Novel of the First Woman, Elissa Elliott alternates chapters between the voices of Adam (from the Bible), Eve (ditto), and their five kids: Cain, Abel, Dara, Aya, and Naava. Elliott’s descriptions are sensually lush, exactly as you’d hope and expect from the first inhabitants of a brand-new world. In the Garden of Eden, Eve remembers, “the wind raked through the clacking bamboo thicket…. There were so many kinds of green — light, dark, fuzzy, pointed — and enough color in the flowers and shrubbery to outdo any sunrise  or sunset thereafter. Adam shone…. His skin and his face glowed as though the light of the sun itself were a garment.” And yes, we get seriously arousing Old Testament sex: “I tightened and flexed against him and wrapped my legs about him…. His kisses were as flower petals, his touch was as shade and water…. I felt as if I were plunged under a waterfall, breathless…. Oh, if this is Elohim’s doing, I want more of it.” In her afterword, former high-school-teacher Elliott tells readers: “I think the most difficult thing about the writing of the story was how to portray Elohim — how He spoke, what He looked like. I ran the risk of making him appear like Bob Newhart.” As for the three girls: “Eve’s daughters have emerged from my imagination.”

Thailand’s last prison executioner, Chavoret Jaruboon, fired eight bullets into a rapist and murderer in 2002. It was his fifty-fifth execution, and the last of its kind. (Executions in Thailand are now done by lethal injection.) He tells all in The Last Executioner, a memoir written in English with coauthor Nicola Price. “Those who had nothing to lose – those whose their parents were dead, or their wife or lover had ditched them, or those that had lost all their money – were calm when walking to their death,” Chavoret told the Malaysian Star.com. “So were hitmen.” In the book, he writes: “All I had to do was pull the trigger. It is very easy to empty your mind and just shoot,” he confessed in his memoirs. To the reporter, he explained: “Not all of them die instantly. I needed to keep shooting for three to five minutes for some of them to die.” If not tied up properly, “the convict could wriggle. And when the bullets missed his heart there would be lots of agonising screams.”

I’ve always admired authors who have specialties: they’re experts; they’re the go-to guys and gals on their given subjects, and they devote their lives to studying, experiencing, and writing about this one little facet of the world. New Zealand veterinarian Graham Meadows is one of those. He has co-authored more than sixty books for children and several for adults. His topic? All things bovine. His latest work, the Pocket Guide to Cattle Breeds of New Zealand, includes thousands of details about those familiar four-legged creatures, including the following: Cows are not color-blind. “They can recognise different people by their clothing or shape, they can count, and can associate more than one person or a person appearing in, say, green overalls with the stress of forced handling or injection,” we learn in the Taranaki Daily News. “Tame cattle really do enjoy being stroked and patted by the people they know well, and that’s because cattle have sensitive skin.” Who knew?!

Yet another leading light of the music scene is penning a memoir. Bob Mould, now 48, was the frontman for that well-loved ’80s speedcore/punk band, Hüsker Dü. He’s working on a book with the help of rock writer Michael Azerrad, according to Prefix magazine. Due in fall 2010 from Little, Brown, the book “will cover his work with Husker Du and Sugar, as well as his solo career and his experiences dealing with his sexuality,” Prefix tells us. Mould also played lead guitar in the house band featured in the cult-favorite film Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

As a new American Idol season gets ready to start, one of the most talked-about contestants from an earlier season — lustrous-haired Sanjaya Malakar — has a new book due for a January 20 release. Coauthored by Alan Goldsher, Malakar’s Dancing to the Music in My Head: Memoirs of the People’s Idol includes a blow-by-blow recounting of his audition process and week-by-week discussions of his appearances on the show. It also includes details on his hair. (A professional bassist, Goldsher has recorded with Janet Jackson, we learn at AlanGoldsher.com.) The book’s release accompanies that of Malakar’s new CD, which bears the same title and includes such tunes as “A Quintessential Lullaby,” “Tell Me Who I Am,” and “A Guy Like Me.”