March 2011 Indie Next List: I Couldn't Have Said it Better

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This will go out to booksellers across America, in print and online:

Bringing Adam Home: The Abduction That Changed America


by Les Standiford & Joe Matthews

Ecco, 3/1/11

"As riveting as any thriller, as poignant as any memoir, and as powerful as any investigative journalism, Bringing Adam Home is impossible to put down. The key scenes are beautiful, simple renderings of vulnerability and truth laid bare. This is a gripping work which should become a classic of the genre, not because of the crimes it explores, but for how it casts light into darkness."
- Aaron John Curtis, Books & Books, Coral Gables, FL

Sure, David Mitchell, James Salter, and Joyce Maynard have surged off of Books & Books' shelves in part because of stuff I've posted on the internet, but the Indie Next List is an actual cog in the publishing industry.  I think this means I'm officially a buzz generator.

Of course, my recommendations would mean nothing if not for the work of such great storytellers.  To all the authors who've enriched my life, even those I haven't come around to blogging about, I offer a heartfelt thanks.

My Favorite Cop in the World

After Friday’s classes, at a delicious restaurant recommended by SIBA, a group of book lover’s sat down to dinner.  Judith Rosen from Publisher’s Weekly; Chris Finan, President of the American Booksellers Foundation For Free Expression; Detective Joe Matthews, twenty-nine year veteran of the Miami Dade Police Department; Mitchell Kaplan, former head of SIBA and owner of Books & Books; Becky Quiroga, Children’s Book Buyer for Books & Books and manager of the children’s section at our Coral Gables store; Les Standiford, bestselling author of nonfiction like Last Train to Paradise and The Man Who Invented Christmas, as well as the John Deal mystery series; and Eric Svenson, sales rep and southern charmer extraordinaire for Harper Collins.

Oh, and me.  I read books.

People who love books tend to two camps; shy (or bookish, har-har) and storytellers.  Standiford and Matthews are storytellers.  Mitchell is one who comes across as shy, but that’s just because he’s as good a listener as he is a speaker.  Through the three of them, we hear the story of how Bringing Adam Home became a book.

It started with the timeline of Adam Walsh’s abduction, a document it took Matthews over two years of constant effort to create.  Hoping it would serve as a warning of what could go wrong if investigations were mishandled, he shopped it to a university press.  The editor-in-chief said, “I’m going to do you a big favor – I’m not going to publish this.”  The Uni editor advised Matthews to take it to a big publisher, where it could get the treatment and audience it deserved.  

A few days later, Matthews was having lunch with a friend who mentioned that attorney Joe Kaplan – once a lawyer for the police unions in Miami – had a kid in the book business (if you don’t know books, that’s like saying Basil Fanshawe Jagger has a kid in the rock star business).  Joe M met Joe K, who called Mitchell, who met Joe, who liked Mitchell, who thought of Les Standiford to make a non-fiction document into what Truman Capote called a factual novel.  

To hear Matthews tell it, he and Les hit it off right away.  They met for coffee at a McDonalds and stayed there for four hours.  “They probably thought we were homeless.”

As martinis, cuba libras, mojitos, and Budweisers flow (along with the occasional soda and Odoul’s for souls brave enough to handle sobriety), talk turns to e-books, family, pornography, and movies.  

Matthews tells a great story about a Hollywood actor who wanted to make the Baby Lollipops case into a movie, or a TV series.  This actor nipped around super-stardom from the seventies to the nineties but never quite made the leap to household name status.  He specializes in soft-hearted tough-guy roles, and sympathetic villains.  For the sake of storytelling, we’ll call the actor Guff.  

Guff and Matthews didn’t quite hit it off.  As a man who trains officers on how to administer lie-detector tests, Matthews is uniquely qualified to tell when someone is full of shit.  Still, Matthews agreed to meet Guff at the bar in a South Beach hotel.  

Guff bullied the servers and spent the evening trying to take the female half of a couple he just met to his room upstairs.  Matthews decided to bow out gracefully.  

Guff wouldn't have it.  He followed Matthews into the street, demanding an explanation.

Like a date gone sour, Matthew knew that they wouldn’t work together.  Also like a date, he tried to come up with reasons Guff would understand which wouldn’t hurt his feelings.  Something’s off, we don’t click, now let’s just go our separate ways, the chemistry isn’t there, I’m trying to spare you here, etc. etc.

None of it satisfies Guff.  He wants a reason Joe Matthews won’t work with him.  Matthews is a cop, used to confrontation and plain speaking.  He’s tried to be gentle, but he’s wasted as much time as he’s cared to on this B-list actor. 

“Listen, Guff – I don’t like you.  Is that clear enough?  I don’t like you, and we’re done.”

Guff goes ballistic.  How dare a nothing like Matthews dislike a successful actor like Guff, a man with his own production company, perfect stubble, and chin that could cut class?  He screams himself into a frenzy.  He promises Matthews he’s dead in Hollywood.  He actually uses the phrase, “Do you know who I am?”  

All that would have been fine.  Rude, yes, but Matthews would have walked away.  Except Guff poked Matthews in the chest to emphasize his point.

Matthews grabbed Guff’s finger and bent it back.  To hear Matthews tell it, Guff screamed “in a cowardly fashion.”

“Do you know who I am?” Matthews asked the actor.  “You don’t come to my city and tell me off.  Don’t ever call me, don’t ever talk to me, I want nothing to do with you, ever again.”

My favorite part of the story was Matthews tone when he described Guff’s scream.  Matthews sounded surprised, like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing for such a little thing.

Clearly there’s a difference between playing tough, and being tough.  

Stranger Danger

“Dylan, what do you do if a stranger comes up and tries to talk to you?”




A sexual predator had moved into Miami Shores and Becky was just being a responsible parent, making sure Dylan was instilled with a healthy fear of strangers. Her question made the bottom drop out of my stomach. I looked at Dylan and couldn’t even imagine him coming to harm.  How could anyone - ?



I’d known him a few scant months at that point. It’s one more thing Becky has carried as a mother, but she’s probably only allowed those thoughts fleeting attention as he's grown up; I got mine all at once, over breakfast.



A few weeks later, Dylan and I were playing in Becky’s kitchen when he suddenly turned serious.



“Aaron, do you know Adam Walsh?” he asked softly.



Dylan had hidden in a clothing rack at Sears to trick Becky a few days before. She’d freaked out, of course. She told him about Adam Walsh, who’d been his age, and taken from a Sears, and murdered.



Matching Dylan’s conspiratorial tone, I told him I didn’t know Adam Walsh, but I knew who he was.



“Is it true someone took him away from the store and killed him?”



“Yes,” I said.



“Is it true they cut off his head?”



Becky gave me two rules in helping raise her child. 1 – never hit him. 2 – answer anything he asks truthfully.



“Yes.” (He was obsessed with this detail for a few days, and Becky had leisure time to repent what she’d told him in the heat of the moment)



Dylan got that faraway look which indicates his little mind is churning; then we played Pirates some more.



He just turned six years old, the same age as Adam, taken about forty minutes north of where I’m typing this. Whether I can fathom it or not, there are people out there who would like to harm him.



As the youngest of three, or six if you include the cousins, I’ve often said that I envy Dylan’s childhood. I grew up with hand-me-downs and a third (or a sixth) of the attention, while he is lavished with the gifts and love of an entire family.



But his is a different world than mine. Fear of strangers is as much a part of Dylan’s life as Nintendo.



Yesterday, we took our first bike ride through the new neighborhood. We used the sidewalk in deference to his age. Another biker passed us in the road, coming in the opposite direction. I said hello, and instructed Dylan to do the same.



“Hello!” Dylan cried enthusiastically. The mustachioed, sunglass-wearing man smiled and nodded in passing.



“Why did you make me say hi to a stranger?” Dylan moaned.



Oops. I’m learning all about Stranger Danger from my six-year-old.

Adam

The made-for-television move Adam played on October 10th, 1983, six days before I turned eleven. In the ads, the parents wandered darkened streets, calling their boy’s name, then the screen went blank. The cries continued in voiceover as the letters of the boy’s name flashed across the screen.



Reading Les Standiford and Joe Matthew’s Bringing Adam Home made me remember the ads for Adam for the first time twenty-seven years, but a line from the movie didn’t need prompting from any book. It was the last line I heard before my parents sent me to bed. The words have echoed through my mind ever since, equipment hanging close at hand, leaping into my consciousness any time I hear a certain word or inflection. The man who played John Walsh, teeth clenched in rage, chokes back tears as he tells his wife, “They found his head.”



My parents probably wanted me to watch so I’d learn about what would come to be called Stranger Danger. I think they realized I might learn a little too much.



I took my time going upstairs, looking over my shoulder every step. The boy was dead? How was that possible? Children didn’t die in movies, and let alone movies that were supposed to be real.



By the time I heard that line, the nation had been obsessed with this tragedy for nearly two years. More than my family’s worry, more than being ten-going-on-eleven, I think the line has stuck with me because I never found out what happened.



Apparently another hour of TV wouldn’t have done me any good; it took twenty-five years to solve this one.



Toward the end of Bringing Adam Home, when members of the killer’s family reveal the knowledge they’ve shared for so long, I was forcibly reminded of Terri Jentz’s Strange Piece of Paradise. All the locals knew who took an axe to Jentz and her best friend on a camping trip some decades before, just as it was “common knowledge” in the killer’s family that he’d murdered Adam Walsh. Bringing Adam Home will enrage you for what ifs, near misses, and unspoken truths. It’s emotionally wrenching and impossible to put down.



Detective Joe Matthews’ struggle to give closure to the Walsh family makes this book more than just an excellent police procedural. The way Eric Larson's Devil in the White City sets up the Chicago World’s fair as the playground of two men - one the architect who dreamt it into existence, the other the killer who stalked it - Bringing Adam Home uses Adam Walsh’s abduction and murder to speak about good versus evil, the best of men’s nature against its absolute worst.  Once you begin reading, you won't be able to put it down.



Since finishing the book, I’ve looked at Dylan - six, the same age as Adam when he was abducted – and can’t help thinking of what happened to Adam Walsh.  I force these images from my mind, realizing what happened is beyond comprehension.



I can’t let the world’s darkness spoil my time with this amazing kid. All I can do is scoop him up and smother him with kisses, to try and show him he’s loved.