Nick Stone Comes Clean About His Miami Vice

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John Scalzi’s Whatever blog has a recurring series of guest essays called “The Big Idea,” and earlier this week thriller writer Nick Stone showed up with an article about the storytelling properties of tarot, including his own experiences as a reader, although those experiences aren’t exactly why he ended up writing a novel called King of Swords. Now, when I first came across the book, I was curious as to why a British novelist was setting a suspense novel in 1981 Miami—I figured there must be some sort of connection there. And Stone was happy to fill me (and now you) in on the details behind the strange hold the city has on his imagination…

I’m English. I live in London. And I set my books in Miami.

Why?

Put simply, a place like Miami couldn’t exist in England. F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong about there being no second acts in American lives. America is the country of comebacks. It may let its losers fall through the cracks and break into a million pieces, but it will always cheer and cherish the person who makes back it out of the abyss and reclaims the peak. Unfortunately, in England it’s the other way round. We like losers. We champion the underdog. Sure, this is as fair and as noble as a national trait can be. But there’s a flipside, a foul play to our fair play. What we really can’t stand is when our underdogs become top dogs. It reminds us of our failures, of the fact that those we so steadfastly supported are no longer like us. So we start planning their downfalls, hacking away at the pedestal. And boy do we like it when our heroes take that high dive back to Easy Street. Sure, they can always come back, but they never come back all the way. So Miami really couldn’t live in England, because it’s the city of second acts, the capital of comebacks, the place where people go to start again. Forget Vegas. Miami is for me and you. Miami is the place you start again, the scene of your second act.

I’ve been going there for close to thirty years. My mother and I used to overnight there on our way between England and Haiti. In 1981 we spent a couple of days. It was my first time in Miami Beach, and I’ll never quite forget the ride over the causeway, the way everything had an ethereal glow about it. From a distance was like a mirage. Only this one didn’t fade or disappear on me. It stayed.

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19 December 2008 | guest authors |

Porter Shreve Reclaims the White House (Our House, Too!)

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I’m still in the opening chapters of Porter Shreve‘s new novel, When the White House Was Ours, but I’m totally loving it—even looking forward to subway rides where I know I can get in a solid chunk of reading time! In this essay, he explains how the novel is a mashup of his childhood experiences, with a whole lot of fictional twists added to make things even more interesting.

I was seven years old in 1973 when my parents received a grant to start an alternative school in Philadelphia. We lived in a cozy fieldstone cottage in Mount Airy, with my uncle Jeff and the remaining hippies from a small commune Jeff had formed in Colorado. My father, who had been the star of the University of Pennsylvania football team during its few promising years, was well liked around the city. But he couldn’t believe his good fortune when a near-stranger named Woodward, who owned many properties in North Philadelphia, handed him the keys to a vacant house a few blocks from ours, and said, as long as you’re starting a school, you’re going to need a schoolhouse. Rent-free for a year, renewable thereafter. With help from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, my father named the school “Our House,” as in “Our House is a Very, Very, Very Fine House.” He advertised in the community papers, posted flyers around local schools, and by the end of summer nearly a hundred students had enrolled.

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6 October 2008 | guest authors |

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