Today’s special guest is Bill Mesce, Jr. to chat about his new police thriller, Median Gray.
During his virtual book tour, Bill will be awarding a $25 Amazon or Barnes and Noble (winner’s choice) gift card to a lucky randomly winner. To be entered for a chance to win, use the form below. To increase your chances of winning, feel free to visit his other tour stops and enter there, too!
During his tour, too, the book will be on sale for $0.99.
Bio:
Bill is an adjunct college instructor at several New Jersey institutions, award-winning author, occasional screenwriter and playwright.
Welcome, Bill. Please tell us about your current release.
Median Gray is police thriller set in New York City at a time when the city may have been at its most frightening and exciting: the early 1980s. One NYPD detective on the verge of retirement – Jack Meara – sets out on a quest to avenge a twenty-year-old failure of justice. Another NYPD cop – Ronnie Valerio – is just a few years on the force, and finds himself unwittingly getting pulled into the wake of Meara’s quest.
What inspired you to write this book?
I first started working on Median Gray not long after I started working in New York in 1980. In many ways, the book was both a response to the big city craziness I was witnessing, and a way of capturing it for myself. A cop story seemed a comfortable framework for me to work with to gather in all those wild and, looking back on them, nearly unbelievable experiences.
Excerpt from Median Gray:
Meara has a foot post, three blocks along 11th Avenue in the 40s. The old hair-bags tell him, You walk your beat, you keep your eyes open, you listen, you own your three blocks, the people who live and work there are yours.
His uniform, bought new for his first beat, still stiff and uncomfortable after two months, sticks to him in the already hammering morning heat, chafes at his neck. His scalp bakes under the peaked cap, his feet are dying in the heavy, rubber-soled shoes.
He complains to the old hair-bags, and they laugh and say, Hey, you wanted to be a cop? Welcome to being a cop.
He’s surprised how quickly he learns the faces on his beat, learns their names, the names of their wives and kids and annoying brothers-in-law and the mother living in Florida. If he closes his eyes, he knows exactly where he is because of the sweet smell of Donatello’s fruit and vegetable stand, the blood and sawdust smell of Ruffo’s Butcher Shop, the smell of Old Spice and Vitalis from old man Donlin’s barber shop, the stale smell of beer and cigarette smoke from Mickey’s corner bar. He knows that for God knows what reason, the sewer at the corner of 11th and 44th stinks like no other sewer in the city and he wishes someone would get around to finding out what died down there.
He gets so fine-tuned to his three blocks he doesn’t have to see or hear something to know when things are off. He can feel it. When he takes his post in the morning, and hands it off at end of his tour, he likes how savvy he feels trading info with the veterans who take the beat on the other shifts, like how when Donatello’s wife wasn’t in the shop he figured maybe Donatello beat her again, so he pulled that fat red-faced prick aside, held his nightstick under the grocer’s double chin and told him if his old lady showed up with a shiner, he and the grocer were going to have a talk. He knows if he sees the MacAfee kid sitting on his stoop eating corn flakes dry out of a ten-pack box, his pop probably tied one on the night before, and now he’s grumbling around the apartment hungover and looking for something to hit. Sometimes the boy sits with the Cazale kid, a fat little girl with bad teeth whose mom makes ends meet by bringing home new boyfriends every night. Every so often, greasy-haired Feeney with the cigarette and magazine place has his pinky in a splint, and that means he’s behind to the shylocks, and the other shifts tell him, Screw it, Feeney’s a scumbag and a hump, he’s got it coming, stay out of it.
Donlin gives him free haircuts. He doesn’t ask for them, but Donlin comes out and says, Hey, Officer Jack, you’re looking a little shaggy. Max with the Greek coffee shop and the daughter waitress who can’t stop talking about how cute Trini Lopez is lets him use the bathroom, brings him in and sits him at the counter with a free coffee to get him out of the rain, a cold drink and a few minutes in the air conditioning when it’s hot. He doesn’t ask for these things, but they do them anyway. Donatello doesn’t even like him and still he tells Meara he’s gotten in a fresh batch of Rome apples from upstate that morning, he should take a few home.
That’s how it’s done, the old hair-bags tell him. That’s what they do because they’re yours, they belong to you and they know it, and what they expect for their tribute is you fuckin’ A better take care of them in return.
Because this is what it is to be a cop.
He’s 26 and he’s two months out of training and still on probation, and these are his, these three blocks. He listens to the hair-bags, he makes himself know every crack in the sidewalk, where the curbside puddles will be when it rains, where the alleys are the truants slip through when they see him coming.
He walks his three blocks the same pace the same route each day so his citizens always know where he’ll be if they need to find him. It takes him a half-hour to make his circuit, then he stops at his call box on the corner of 11th and 44th to make his “30 ring” – his every-30-minute check-in.
It’s 10:30 on an August morning and it is hot, awfully goddamn hot. He was already feeling the scratch of the uniform shirt on his skin before he pulled it on that morning, felt it even while he was lying in bed fumbling to turn off the alarm before it woke up Mae. It’s 10:30, it’s hot as hell, and he’s just locking up his callbox after making his 30 ring. He hears the slap of PF Flyers on the sidewalk, hears the kids panting even before he turns, hears something desperate in the way they’re wheezing. He hears the MacAfee kid saying, “See? Here he is!”
They come up to him, the MacAfee kid and some other boy he doesn’t know.
“Tell him,” the MacAfee kid gasps out. But the other kid freezes up, this isn’t his cop, he’s from someplace else, he’s afraid bringing the bad, scary news, so the MacAfee kid says, “His dad told him to find you. He says somebody shot the other cop.”
What exciting story are you working on next?
I’ve been hired to do a low-budget mystery screenplay for a UK outfit. This early, you never know whether these things will actually happen, but it’s something a little different for me, the UK people are fun to work with. After that, who knows?
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
By the end of this year I will have written or co-written 24 books, and even done some work for film and the stage, and I STILL feel uncomfortable saying, I’m a writer. Don’t ask me why. A couple of rounds of therapy still haven’t provided an answer to that!
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your work day like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
Like most published writers, no, I don’t. My day job is as a college adjunct instructor, gypsying between several schools teaching a variety of subjects. During the school year, yeah, it can be hard to find time. You wind up doing a lot of “pre-writing” in your head while you’re driving from school to school or even walking the dog, so when you actually sit at the keyboard, you can bang stuff out quickly.
Because my schedule varies across the week, I don’t have a set routine. I write when I have time (lunch, or get to a school early and knock out some pages).
The asset I have is that I’ve now been doing this long enough that I can work with those circumstances without going crazy. You do become pretty good a time management.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I wasn’t aware I did this, but years ago a woman I was living with noticed that when I was writing, she could see me mouthing the dialogue and acting it out with my face. After that, I made a practice of never writing with someone else in the room.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Oh, wow, not to date myself but that was SO long ago I’ll be damned if I remember. I’m not sure I had anything in mind. Hell, I went to college because my mother said, “You’re GOING to college!” even though I didn’t have a clue as to what I’d study (I went through three majors; four if you count Undecided).
Links:
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The book will be on sale for only $0.99 during the tour.
Thanks for being here today, Bill.
Thanks for hosting!
My thanks to Lisa Haselton for inviting me on to her site for this chat. She knows that most authors are not headliners and appreciate someone like Lisa providing this kind of platform to get attention for their work. Thank you, Lisa!
I liked the excerpt.
Great post, thanks for sharing!