Chris Grabenstein's Backstory

HOW TILT-A-WHIRL STARTED SPINNING IN MY BRAIN

TILT A WHIRL, the first book in my new Jersey Shore murder mystery series, like all “new” ideas, started when two old ideas, two wildly disconnected threads, bumped into and got tangled up with each other.

Thought #1: September 11, 2001.

I, like so many others, marveled at the bravery of the New York City firefighters and cops who ran up the staircases of the World Trade Center when everybody else was running down. What makes some men ignore their survival instincts to help others?

Why, as Bruce Springsteen (The Boss gets quoted quite often by the characters in TILT A WHIRL) puts it, do “love and duty call” them “someplace higher?” Earlier that same year at a wedding, I met a group of soldiers, all former MPs, who had seen the horrors of war in Bosnia but had not lost their inherent sense of goodness or their spirit of camaraderie. "It's all good," seemed to be their motto.

How can such decent, honest people survive in a world that rewards the cunning, clever and devious? How can they hold on so firmly to their sense of goodness and a higher mission when confronted by so much evil? And why do rich, powerful men send these good soldiers off to kill for bad lies?

That's the thinking that propelled me to my protagonist, John Ceepak – a former MP just back from Iraq who joins the police force in a quiet seaside resort town. Ceepak is a good man. A truly honorable hero. A modern day knight guided by a code of chivalry. Ceepak will not lie, cheat or steal nor tolerate those who do. He lives his daily life guided by that strict West Point Honor code. In the modern, super-cynical world, that makes him something of an oddball. A nerd. A naive Goody Two-Shoes. But he remains strong and courageous, steadfast and true. His beliefs may be shaken but he will never forsake them.

Ed McBain once called the classic noir Private Detective "Superman wearing a fedora." John Ceepak is my Superman sporting a crew cut and cargo pants.

Thought #2: Tacky Tourist Towns.

Tilt A Whirl takes place down the Jersey Shore in a tourist town called Sea Haven - the kind of seaside resort best pictured on a map filled with squiggly cartoon drawings of shops and attractions with cutesy-poo names like King Putt Golf, The Pancake Palace, and Cap'n Scrubby's Car Wash.

When I was a kid, we used to drive to Florida every summer. We'd stop at tourist "attractions" like South Of The Border and the Incredible Leaning House. Most of what these places presented, of course, was fake. Mexico is not on the border between North and South Carolina. Things lean in the leaning house because they were built to do just that. These roadside attractions were typically constructed on lies but were always a blast to visit.

When we reached Florida, my family spent two weeks in a small beach town called Treasure Island, big on the pirate motif and putt-putt golf and t-shirt shops and fudge factories. In college, I did summer theatre in the mountains near Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Another tourist trap. More t-shirt shops and taffy-pulling machines. More country music than Weeki-Wachi mermaids, but the same basic idea. I love the kitsch of Roadside America.

I love going down to the Jersey Shore, any place that has a restaurant called "The Rusty Scupper" where they serve cold bottles of beer in an aluminum bucket and mountains of peel-and-eat shrimp in red plastic baskets. Any place with a giant plaster elephant in the center of town or a Muffler Man re-painted to look like a golfer, both done for no reason other than they’re cool to look at and make a good post card.

When I was in advertising, we once shot a Dr Pepper commercial on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. The shoot took three days, primarily because the cast and crew spent so much time licking swirl cones and wolfing down sausage-and-pepper sandwiches and trying to win a stuffed animal by knocking over milk bottles. We had a blast. I also love amusement park rides, especially the rickety ones set up on creaky boardwalks, the ones you think are going to rattle apart while you're on them. I love the games of chance nobody ever wins and the smell of whole-cut French fries. I love all the Sea Havens dotting the shore up and down the east coast. There are worse places to do research.

And I loved putting my hero John Ceepak into this world – a place where absolutely nothing is as it seems, where everything is fake and made of plywood or plastic and packaged into a snow globe so you can take it home when your vacation ends. It’s a world of false fronts hiding seamier underbellies.

A world built on lies that can send a truly good man’s soul spinning.
It makes for a wild ride.

TILT-A-WHIRL is Chris Grabenstein's first novel.