Let’s step away for a second from music to reading, books, that is. I have a great friend, my former boss, Michael Ludden, who has a few books under his belt. His latest I have read and it is fantastic.
“Tate Drawdy” is the book’s title and the name of the main character. The book is a slow burn Deep South pulse quickener.
I have Lewy body dementia, as you who are familiar with this blog already know. That means books are more difficult for me now because every advancement is followed by a retreat as I work to gather my memories. It seems to be a little different when I’m writing because, well, I don’t know why. It’s like my fingers have muscle memory.
As I mentioned before, Ludden is my former boss. He was the editor who back in 1987 lured me from the Birmingham News to central Florida and the Orlando Sentinel. I worked with him there about a decade and I consider him a great friend and a fine editor. He was a key editor on a Sentinel Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative project on a sheriff’s department abuse of asset seizure forfeiture.
Ludden was the kind of an editor who wanted to sit down and talk about a story in a big picture sort of way before it was written. Then when he got a copy of the story, he wouldn’t say, ‘Move this comma over here, tighten up this section.’ No, Mike would say: ‘Explain to me what you are doing here?’
I remember getting defensive one time when he did that and he said, ‘No, I really like what you are doing here, I just want to hear you talk about what that is.’
Big picture. A journo lesson that stuck. Think about it macro before getting down to the nitty gritty.
Ludden sets this in Savannah, Ga., and even if you have never been there, you will end up smelling the life and decay of a humid coastal city that keeps its past close.
Ludden has an eye for detail, another practice he used to preach. The descriptions setting up a scene put you there. In the place and moment.
Here’s a passage describing the first meeting of the bad guy, John Robert Griffin and the good guy cop, Tate Drawdy.
In an interrogation room in the police station.
Griffin turned to face him. Standing motionless, a small grin showing his teeth. Nothing else changed. But in that moment Tate saw a piece of himself he’d never seen before, something he had thought might not happen to him, not until he was old and put up.
It made him dizzy, as if the ceiling had lifted back and now he was staring into a burning sky, hoisted up, swaying in the breeze, shadows fading in, fading out, slowly revolving, a vein throbbing behind his eye. His scalp tingling, his face suddenly wet.
He wanted to turn away.
He reached for his coffee, took a sip, set it back down. He kept his hand on the cup, feeling the heat. Told himself Griffin can’t read his mind, couldn’t hear his heartbeat. He counted to 10.
“Where’d you grow up?”
Ludden is also the author of ‘Alfredo’s Luck,’ another Tate Drawdy thriller set in Miami and ‘Tales from the Morgue,’ a tightly written noir-esque rendition of actual newspaper stories culled from Ludden’s journalistic experiences, including his time at the Orlando Sentinel.
His books are on Amazon.
Learn more at www.michaelludden.com