What does one do when he wants to raise money? Especially if he's approaching his 76th birthday. Why did I want to raise money? Simple. I wanted to send my grand children to better schools. I'm retired from the FDNY and nobody ever got rich working in a civil service job. So I thought I'd try my hand at writing which was pretty presumptuous considering that I don't know a verb from an adverb, or a noun froma pronoun. But if the spoken word sounds good to me then I can repeat it on paper or in my case a computer. But what to write? Well - I was always fascinated with time travel and a idea kept flitting through my thoughts and after a while a story began to form but I didn't quite know how write it. So I bought books on different approaches to writing including various techniques that the authors used, and I found that they only confused me . . .so I decided that the best way for me to procede was to just write the darn thing and that's what I did. My daughter introduced me to her attorney friend who was retired and was interested in working on my book with me. She agreed to join me as my co-author. But I was so insecure and unsure of myself that I was almost embarassed to have her read it. As it turned out she liked the book. The fact that she liked it gave me the confidence to write a second book. One thing I learned was that when a writer gets an idea and begins to write the story, if the idea is a good one then the book begins to write itself. I found that sometimes a story will take me in a different direction than I originally intended - and I'll let it. I've completed 11 books that way. But I'm getting off of the subject which is my second book.
In the early 60's I grew up in a rough Italian neighborhood where I met a lot of interesting wise guys. Everybody loves a good mob book so I decided to write a book about some of those characters. The Starlight Club was meant to be a stand alone book and I had no intention of writing a series but with four books written you can see how that worked out. Most of the characters and some of the incidents in the book were real. The Starlight Club's story line is similar to the Godfather or Goodfellows.
After the book was published I received a lot of favorable reviews which surprised the hell out of me. They liked my book? I couldn't believe it. But what was even harder to believe was the reviews I received for The Old Man And The King. That book was like an itch that needed to be scratched. I was thinking of Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman when I wrote a story about an old man who could still be a hero. I sent it to my editor and told her to read it and if she didn't care for the story to delete it. but to my surprise she loved it. And so did everyone else who read it. In fact my talented artist Marina Shipova who designed all of the beautiful covers for my books said The Old Man and The King was her favorite book.
Back in the 60's there really was a Starlight Club and since the characters in the book are so colorfull I decided to write a sequel. I introduced a young fighter in the first book. That fighter was a friend of mine who had trained with Rocky Marchiano. Ond day Marchiano called him and asked him to fight for him, but the young fighter owed too much money and could only fight for the boys. It was a shame because he was a talented fighter who could have gone all the way to the top, but he settled, instead of aspiring. I called him Swifty and gave him a brief paragraph in the first book. But In the second book, he becomes an integral part of the story. Since completion of the second book I've completed two other Starlight Club books and I was working on a fifth book when the Lone Jack Kid kept interfering with my thoughts, and I couldn't concentrate on my writing. So I put that book aside to get this pesky Kid off of my back, and instead I wrote his story. i kind of like this book, I think because it's so different from what I have been writing. I'll tell you a little about it and then I'll end this article. I was searching for a name to put before "Kid". Like the Sundance Kid, or the Cisco Kid and, well you get the idea. I stumbled upon the little town of Lone Jack in Missouri. What interested me about this town was the small civil war battle that took place there. At the time the town boasted about 6 buildings and a large hotel which seemed out of place there. What was interesting were the characters who went on to become legends in western folklore, and were involved either directly or indirectly in that civil war battle in the little town of Lone Jack, missouri. Young men such as Jesse and Frank James, Cole and Bob Younger, Colonel Quantril and Bloody Bill Anderson. They piqued my interest so I created the character of Charles Longstreet and made him one of their friends. After that battle Charles Longstreet became The Lone Jack Kid.
Joe Corso