Jimmy stands in the doorway with a flask in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He surveys the room until he commands the attention of every customer in the joint. He’s wearing a suit and tie and his black hair glistens beneath the pale lights. Slowly he strolls into the club. The volume of the room diminishes. He sits at the piano bench. He clears his throat. He rests his cigarette on top of the piano and the smoke twists upward in tight loops before the stream widens and fades off like a paintbrush being dragged across the canvas as it runs out of paint. His fingers begin tinkling the keys. His eyes are shut. His head sways to the tempo of the tune he’s playing. No one in the room clinks a fork or whispers a word.
The Devil’s Whipping His Wife is a mainstream novel set almost entirely in early World War II Los Angeles. It is a nostalgic, character-driven story written in past tense but, as you can see by the paragraph above in italics, switches to present tense to grab the reader to spotlight critical scenes. The story centers around four young adults, but particularly that of Jimmy Portside and his unorthodox rise to fame as a brilliant entertainer, his exploits, and his inevitable fall.
The Devil’s Whipping His Wife is my first completed novel. I have a BFA degree in theater and a minor in creative writing at UC Santa Barbara. I was a staff writer for the Ventura College Newspaper, and had my own column. I’ve studied privately with several authors associated with local universities and I’m currently working on a collection of short stories by incorporating descriptive narrative and dialogue for portraits taken by international photographer, Jim Englund.
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