$0.99

Such a Deal!

I am proud to announce the third novel in the Detective Tony Alfano thriller set, 

CHICAGO FIX. 

It’s 1933 Chicago, the Century of Progress Fair draws over a million people a week to the city. And not all of these people are looking for fun. It’s the politics, the night life, the rackets, and the mob that draw them. Does the city turn away from this evil and dissipation – hardly. Often, they are willing participants. Detective Tony Alfano, a righteous cop in an unholy land, is the corrupt mayor’s sword of truth and justice.

Pre-orders until December 31, 2018. It’s on Amazon for only $0.99.

Click on Tony and he'll take you there.

Click me baby!

Alt Link:

https://www.amazon.com/Chicago-Fix-Alfano-Thriller-Thrillers-ebook/dp/B07L8MT7PM/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1544971583&sr=1-1&keywords=chicago+fix&fbclid=IwAR1O2lU-IPlj6_K-vo7IWGqagIrjbyR56t4GAW7T4xMo9e_ldUuEEa5sN2U

Venice, Missing - A New Gregory C. Randall Book

Publisher’s Marketplace Announcement

It’s been a while since my last post, I apologize to all my readers who thought that I either quit blogging or ran off to Tahiti (great thought, BTW). What I have been up to is writing, seriously writing. Finished two books since August, one that was taking in by a publisher, and another that is being shopped by my agent. Every book or manuscript goes through a series of steps or stages, from initial concept through drafts, rewrites, edits, line edits, actually until the thing looks like road kill (and often feels like it too). That’s when you present it to a publisher hoping they too see what you started with, so many months before.

Big Announcement:

What a great way to start the year! I’ve been writing fiction and non-fiction for twenty years. I have two active thriller series (see columns left and right) and three others underdevelopment. I’ve self/indie published nine books. Writers want to share our stories with others, and Kimberley Cameron has helped this writer achieve this dream, a real contract with a real big-time publisher. So here you are as posted in the upcoming Publishers Marketplace:

Fiction: Thriller

Greg Randall's VENICE, MISSING, book one of the Alexandra Polonia Series, involving two women protagonists—each carrying heartbreaking burdens from their pasts and seeking retribution for bloody wars and shattered families— as they confront their enemies, personal ghosts, and eventually each other in the ancient city of canals, to Jessica Tribble at Thomas & Mercer, in a two-book deal, for publication in 2018, by Kimberley Cameron at Kimberley Cameron & Associates (world).

I’m going to frame that and put it on the wall. 

Not to worry Sharon O’Mara fans, a new book is on the way, hopefully this summer. Sharon and Kevin are in Ireland, nasty stuff happens, but of course our friends manage to win the day.

And not to forget Tony Alfano—our Chicago detective is hard on another case. Fists fly and bodies fall as Alfano chases down another villain during the Century of Progress Fair. Its 1933, those bygone days of yesteryear, when men were men, women soft and lanky, and Chicago politicians acted just the same.

Some new characters are in the works. New Guy: he’s spy in Rome during World War II and a follow-up book in Cairo. Good historical stuff here, OSS and CIA, sexy brunette, and very bad Nazis.

The new year looks very promising, can’t wait to get started.

More later . . . . . .

Star Crossed Museum Wars

The “Star” war that has been bouncing around the country the last year or so has finally been ended, and the winner is Chicago. The vanquished is San Francisco. As someone who was raised in Chicago and lived for twenty years in San Francisco I followed this battle with interest. And I’m actually happy that Chicago won – simply because it serves San Francisco right, the town hasn’t been able to make a meaningful decision on its waterfront for years (and when they did they ended up with the debacle of the Americas Cup facility).

The future George Lucas Museum will be a collection of Star Wars memorabilia, artifacts, artworks, and other pieces from Mr. Lucas’s collection. One might call it the largest collection of Galactic Kitsch in the whole universe. Don’t get me wrong the original series of Star Wars shook the foundations of the movie world (all except for those cloyingly annoying teddy-bears in the last episode – or sixth depending how you count). I have friends – adult friends – who have life size statues of Yoda in their offices, R2D2 cigar trays, and even get teary eyed over Hans Solo and Princess Lea. And I have a Star Wars watch still in its original tin.

But, and I mean this most sincerely, does this museum rank a location in a national park? So while there is great concern over the loss of the museum overlooking San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge (i.e. Senator Feinstein and Congressperson Pelosi) I would offer than it is a site better suited to celebrate those men and women who passed under that bridge to fight in real wars during the last seventy years than in a galaxy far, far, away.

Century of Progress Fair - Lucas site at base of right tower

Chicago’s site for the museum is very interesting; I was there in fact, on the exact spot a month ago. I visited the site for two reasons: 1) Located there is a monument given by Mussolini and his fascists. It is an ancient marble column from Ostia, Italy given to the city of Chicago by Il Duce to celebrate the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair and the transatlantic flight of Italo Balbo and his seaplanes. 2) In almost the exact spot of the future Lucas museum once stood one of tallest structures in the United States, the 625 foot high Sky Ride tower also built for the Century of Progress World’s Fair. I was conducting follow up research for two of my novels that will be published soon.

Unfortunately the recent internal squabbling of City of San Francisco has lead to the loss of the 49’s stadium to Santa Clara/San Jose, the chaos of the Warriors basketball team’s area location, the loss of waterfront housing, the inability to form a housing program that meets the incessant demands of the high-tech industry, and now the loss of the museum. But the tourists still come and spend their dollars; I would suggest that the City is a bit spoiled.

Chicago on the other hand knows how to get things done – big things. When I was there last month cranes were rising everywhere, the city was in bloom, and there were new parks under construction (a delightful children’s park expansion next door to the spectacular Millennium Park). And outside of the streets in disastrous condition due to the very hard winter the city looked good. So it is no surprise that the George Lucas looked here – we all want to be wanted and loved. So at some time in the far away future I will walk through the grand entry of Chicago’s Lucas Museum with great expectations and memories of my youth – but then again isn’t that what museums are for – to remember the past.

May the force be with you.

Stay Tuned. . . . . . . . . . . .

Road Trip 2014

The Friendly Confines

Today’s piece is about impressions. Last week I logged almost 1500 miles on a road trip that combined family matters and curiosity. We flew into Chicago, spent a few days then onto Ohio and the areas north of Columbus, then west to Indianapolis for a surprising dinner with friends, then further west to St. Louis and a town called Cuba and a wedding, then back to Chicago.

Chicago

Unlike past trips to this hometown of mine (forty odd years ago) that have been during the winter, the weather this spring stay was delightful. I had a list of places to see (research for a forthcoming thriller that takes place in 1933 Chicago) and things to do. I grew up on the south side so naturally I was a White Sox fan and never attended a Cubs game. Wrigley Field is everything that nostalgic baseball fans love and for my first game they played the Yankees. The park has that ancient tangible feel and tangy taste of old timey baseball. The crowd was half Chicagoans and half zealots from around the world. I heard the twang of Indiana Hoosiers, clipped Wisconsonite and visiting Bronxese in the surrounding seats. The park is a magnate that draws true baseball fans.

I also saw more cardboards signs on the streets than past years, more people with their hands out. Maybe it was the weather, maybe it wasn’t, more than three days is needed to make a better observation. But the streets and restaurants were crowded, the neighborhoods (even after this horrendous winter) looked fresh and even though the potholes in the streets had potholes, the city looked prosperous. There was even construction going on.

Ohio

Without a doubt Ohio is a beautiful state. The countryside north of Columbus that extends to Ashland is rolling farmland that has for almost two hundred years supplied corn and wheat to America. Most urbanites have never walked a newly planted cornfield where the sprouts are three inches tall in neat orderly rows that extend to the surrounding woods a half-mile away. It’s worth it. My wife’s cousin owns a farm. The corn is in the ground; the winter wheat is now a foot tall, four head of cattle he raised are being prepared for what normally happens to cattle when they reach a certain age. It is farming in all its richness and glory. It’s also wondering if the rains will let up enough so that the lower fields can be planted without losing the tractor to the axles.

The roads in Ohio were good after this past hard winter and the roads in Indiana weren’t so good. Maybe it’s the reconstruction of almost every bridge on I-70 that gave the impression or maybe it was the failing pavement. Needless to say Indiana, like Chicago, has a lot of roadwork ahead of it.

Race weekend in Indianapolis is fun. Our schedule was independent from the Indy 500, but we were lucky and found a room downtown. If there is one impression of Indianapolis I take from my almost drive-by visit is that the town gives up more of its downtown real estate to roads than any major city I have been in. Four and six lane streets grid the city’s core and with parking along the sides make crossing these boulevards difficult. There is a mix of old brick buildings and new steel and glass but more like set pieces on isolated islands surrounded by traffic. But it does stand tall on the Indiana prairie. BTW the Osteria Pronto is as fine an Italian eatery as anything in San Francisco.

St. Louis and Cuba

For some reason I thought the Mississippi River was wider. We were over it in less than a minute. Maybe it’s the bridges in the Bay Area I’ve been crossing for years where you had the time to consider the water under you. The Mississippi is most important river in America and with is contributing tributaries drains most of the United States from Pennsylvania to Colorado and north to Minnesota. We crossed it on one of its more docile days.

The Gateway Arch (designed by Eero Saarinen in 1963) will celebrate its fiftieth birthday next year. It is the tallest and most dramatic structure in the Midwest. Worth a visit when in town.

Cuba, Missouri sits on the historic U.S. Route 66, has a population of 3,356 souls and one great barbeque joint called Missouri Hick Bar-B-Q. Harry Truman once stopped in Cuba and four miles west is the world’s largest rocking chair, sadly we missed it.

But we didn’t miss my niece’s wedding that was held at a small winery near the town of Owensville. Her husband is an infantry sergeant with multiple tours to Iraq and Afghanistan, prior to the start of wedding dinner they was a touching ceremony that honored their fallen comrades on this Memorial Day weekend. Thank you Ray and your men for your service. And congratulations to Rebecca and Ray.

But I’m still not sold on Missouri wines.

Stay Tuned . . . . . . . . . . . .

Fascists, Rome, and Chicago

Monument to Italo Balbo in Chicago (wikipedia)

While doing research for my new book Wars Amongst Lovers (which I write in a parallel life and will be out this summer), I came across an interesting and strange bit of factual history about Chicago, Fascists, and World War Two. It has to do with the naming of Balbo Avenue on Chicago’s near south side. The street runs east to west and begins near the Buckingham Fountain and South Lake Shore Drive. The street is named for one of Benito Mussolini’s most important political allies and Fascists, Italo Balbo (1896-1940). A devoted Fascist since World War I, Balbo was one of the most powerful men in Italy and helped bring Mussolini to power in 1922.

Even though new to flying, Balbo was tasked with building the Italian Royal Air Force and he led Italy into the twentieth century skies. Aviation was the “New” thing in 1925, not unlike some of the strange things we recently see like electric cars, high speed rail, and even smartphones. All started slow and built momentum until they became the rage. In air travel that meant a lot of amateurs lost their status by burrowing their airplanes into cornfields. For nations, air was prestige and glamor. And Italy was one of the leaders of the times; Italian aviators accomplished amazing feats in aircraft built by Italians. Italo Balbo led two transatlantic flights in seaplanes, twelve Savoia-Marchetti S.55s to Rio de Janeiro in December 1930 and twenty-four seaplanes to Chicago in July, 1933, that landed on Lake Michigan.

Chicago was in the midst of its glorious Worlds’ Fair, The Century of Progress. All manner of new and exciting post WWI exhibitions and events continued to add to Chicago’s reputation as a new and upcoming leader in American and world commerce. This squadron of Italian seaplanes added to this image. Chicago, by the mid-1930s, had a large and expanding Italian population. On the south side, Little Italy spread along Taylor Street and Italians were making their way, like the Irish, into important political jobs. Balbo only added to their pride and prestige.

In Chicago. he was treated to a huge parade, dinners, and other public presentations. His pilots and crews were welcomed as conquering heroes and with great pride shown off across the city. And, in an even greater example of international friendship, Mussolini “borrowed” a marble column from the historic city, on Italy’s coast, Ostia, and presented it to the city of Chicago to be displayed at Italy’s exhibit at the fair. It now sits a few hundred yards southeast of Soldier Field. And the city renamed Seventh Street to Balbo Drive (now Avenue). Later, during the war, there was much controversy over the name – but it still remains today.

Balbo was treated to lunch with President Roosevelt (who gave him the Distinguished Flying Cross), the Sioux adopted him as a brother with the title “Chief Flying Eagle”. He stopped in New York on his way back to Italy and in Madison Square Garden told the huge crowd, “Be proud you are Italians. Mussolini has ended the era of humiliations.”

Balbo was one of the few who was against the rise of Italian anti-Semitism and laws the specifically targeted Jews in Italy, sadly he was a minority voice in Mussolini’s need to curry favor with Hitler. He was later Governor-General of conquered Libya and was involved with Mussolini’s grand designs on much of North Africa. In the late 1930s collaborations between Hitler’s air force and the Italian military began to expand, much of it do to their assistance to Franco in Spain’s civil war. But Balbo leaned toward Britain. Few followed his lead, and when he was informed of Italy’s formal alliance with the Nazi’s, he exclaimed, “You will all wind up shinning the shoes of the Germans.” Sadly Italy did far more than that before their surrender in September of 1943.

On June 28, 1940, while trying to land at an Italian airfield in Tobruk, his plane was shot down by his own Italian gunners and he was killed. Some have claimed it as an assassination by his own government, but it was really one of those tragic accidents of war. How his voice might have changed the outcome, we will never know. Later when Muammar Gaddafi threatened to disinter the Italian cemetery in Tripoli, Balbo’s remains were brought back to Italy.

Balbo Avenue still remains, the Balbo monument, with its 2nd century marble column, still remains, and Chicago’s connections to Italy remain as strong as ever.

More Later . . . . . . .

Let Me Gang Up on You For A Minute

Northerly Park Expansion - Chicago

I am very curious about Jeanne Gang and her Studio Gang Architects. She has created some very exciting buildings and concepts; one of the most notable is the design for a new and dramatic lakefront park (with SmithgroupJJR) where an airport used to be in Chicago (I really admire the park concept). She has challenged conventional architecture and made significant impacts on architectural-ecological mixtures of how we should live and where we should live. But, like the slave who rode in the chariot behind the conquering hero, continually reminding him to be wary of hubris and his conquests going to his head. All success must be tempered. Even Howard Roark wasn’t infallible.

What I am referring to is in an article in Bloomberg.com    about Ms. Gang, her firm, and its designs and brilliant work. As both a Chicagoan and Californian, I understand the broad sweep of architecture and time. The high rise was born in Chicago, the great linear parks were born there under the pen of F.L. Olmsted, and greats like F.L. Wright, Sullivan, Skidmore, Owens, Perkins, Will and others called it home. Architecture can be organic or concrete, lush and brutal, fad or fashion. But in all cases it must be humane. And I also have to add, meet the demands of the consumer and the marketplace. If not, architecture is only expensive sculpture and art, and at its worse, a dalliance and a visual blight for decades.

But when Jeanne Gang makes the statement:

 “I want to turn Wright’s legacy upside down,” Gang says with no hint of doubt. “The way to be ecological is not by spreading out. It’s by clustering together. It’s by having a better relationship with nature in the city than you can have in a far-out suburb.”

Aqua Tower - Studio Gang Architects

That is hubris. It is joining the unending war against the suburbs that is now into its second century. Give it up, the maligned suburb is not worse or better than an 80 story high rise powered by compost in the basement and a windmill on the roof, but the suburb is a more practical and economic model than anything I’ve seen with multiple floors and “views to die for.”

And when she also says:

“Urbanization is the huge issue of our time,” she (Gang) says. “We can’t survive if we can’t solve the problems of population growth, loss of clean air and water and loss of biodiversity.”

That is folding the perceived ills of the world into a nice self-serving quote for the front of your brochure. Hyperbole and hubris, shame on you Ms. Gang.

In William H. Whyte’s book the Organization Man, published in 1956, he succinctly put it thus when he challenged architects and planners interested in sociology:

“…but a little sociology (applied to planning) can be a dangerous weapon, for it seems so objective that it is easy to forget the questions of value involved.”

And more to the point, Mr. Whyte, one of America’s greatest writers and critics on American architecture and planning, said (in his seminal book The Last Landscape, on ecological planning, open space, and human habitats), be careful:

“Listening to some new town discussions, one gets the feeling that the end object is not a workable community so much as the untrammeled exercise of expertise in planning it.”

I have seen this before with the New Urbanist Movement with it acolytes and finger wagging, the Transit Oriented Development (TOD) movement (your tax money at work), Paolo Soleri and his mega cities (which were really very cool, in a Blade Runner sort of way), Frank Lloyd Wright and ‘American’ utopian architecture, and we give Le Corbusier a pass for creating architecture that foretold the American prison system. As I said, fads and fantasies. We have had brutalism, pre and post modern, and now rampant ecological design (actually the list is endless, as if a parking garage covered with ivy is an award winner). And each is as different as Robert Stern is to Philip Johnson.

So, be careful Ms. Gang, listen to the voice over your shoulder, there are traps being laid, both professional and journalistically. And please remember the market, while the client is important, the buyer is even more powerful. They will determine your success. They will determine whether you are an architect or a dilettante.

Stay Tuned . . . . . . . .