By
JOHN SCHERBER
HIGH HOPES
AND A NEW YEAR
When I was in high
school, the smell of artist’s oil paint always lured me like a siren’s song. I
wasn’t an artist, but I needed to
paint. In the studios of painter friends I’d watch in awe as they shoved paint
around on their canvases. Paint doesn’t smell now the way it did then; its been
cleaned up. Like the crazy studio life of that time, it’s been airbrushed.
When I wasn’t
wishing I could paint, I was aching to be an archaeologist. I borrowed a book
from the library called Lost Worlds. I
re-borrowed it so many times I wore it out. My favorite photo in it was of the
archaeologist Howard Carter peering through the first small opening into the
tomb of Tutankhamun in November, 1922. It was persistence that got him there.
Some would call it stubbornness.
Eighty-seven years
after the photo was taken, I stood in that tomb myself. King Tut is still
there, unwrapped and resting quietly. You can lean your head to within inches
of his and talk to him, as I did.
It had taken me a
long time to get there, but he was unresponsive.
Like those dreams of
mine, high school dreams rarely hold up. Your best girlfriend is not the one
you marry, or if you do, it may not last. If it does last, you sometimes wonder
what you’ve missed. The college you chose doesn’t teach archaeology, or if it
does, it’s a single course about Indian mounds in Illinois, not Egypt. Someone
tells you that all the royal tombs there have been discovered already. Find something else to do. Get a real job.
In college I became
a writer for a while, doing short stories and film reviews. Like painting and
archaeology, it was something I became passionate about. So I did it for a
while, and it almost seemed like a real job at times. Three years after
graduation I ran off the rails with it and was unable to do it again for
decades.
High hopes or pipe
dreams? You stumble and you get up again.
Howard Carter and
his persistence may have something to tell us. He started out as an illustrator
in the early years of the twentieth century.
Eventually I took up
art again, much later, and became a competent painter, although I didn’t quit
my day job, my real job.
Then, on a painting
trip to Taos, New Mexico, a fragment of a mystery story came uninvited into my
head as I drove through the mountains. A young woman is coming to have her
portrait painted, and she thinks it may be an occasion for a little more than
that with the painter. The artist, whom I named Paul Zacher, finds her
attractive as well, but in the studio, discipline prevails, otherwise for him it’s
only chaos. A choice misunderstanding follows.
What I knew by the time I wrote this scene was
that being a painter really does make you see things differently. Wouldn’t that
also help if you were a detective? Because, on that very assumption, Paul
Zacher is drafted into taking a look at a murder.
Yet, he’s more reluctant than flattered. At
thirty-five, Paul is most comfortable staying with what he does best. But like
the lure of the things he never did, that he walked away from, that he might
have done better if he’d only stayed with them longer, he digs into this case.
And then he digs some more.
If you’ve read this far, it’s probably no
surprise that Zacher’s murder case involves some archaeological relics; Mayan
ceramics. He also gets a bit of help from his historian girlfriend, and from a
retired cop they know.
Some of you will be way ahead of me here, because
I was a bit farther down the road before I realized I’d finally put it all
together. All the high hopes and pipe dreams came back in a rush. I was the
writer again, after thirty-seven years of silence, and I was the painter too,
painting, through the steady hand of Paul Zacher, pictures that went far beyond
what my modest skills could ever create. I was the crime-solving sleuth with
the hot girlfriend, and I was young, and nothing was impossible. Writing this
book was more fun than I’d ever had before, and a book that’s fun to write is
fun to read.
I titled it Twenty
Centavos, and it became the first of a series of ten mysteries starring
Paul Zacher and his friends. They’re mostly set in San Miguel de Allende,
Mexico, the classic colonial town in the mountains that plays host to 10,000
expatriates; the town where I live today.
A reader once asked me if Paul Zacher was based
on me. I said, “No. I’m all of these characters, and I am none of them.”
Please visit my website:
www.sanmiguelallendebooks.com
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