Serious Wednesday: Murder in Disguise by Donn Taylor

I am so delighted to introduce and share this interview with my friend, Donn Taylor, with all of you. Please be sure to check out the links below to discover where his books may be purchased. Now here's Donn...

Murder in Disguise Blurb: 

Official verdict: Suicide.

But why would that vigorous department chairman kill himself? To avoid disgrace? Those rumored ventures on the dark side? Some other secret life? Visiting professor Preston (Press) Barclay wonders.

But his questions bring no answers, only anonymous threats. He has enough problems already, proving himself on a strange campus while radical faculty do all they can to undermine him. Worse yet, that sexy siren assigned as his assistant complicates his courtship of the beautiful Mara Thorn.

While Press keeps asking questions, Mara’s research reveals a cancer of criminal activity that permeates the community and even the campus itself.

The more Press questions, the more dangerous the threats against him become, and the more determined he grows to clear his friend’s name.

But can Press and Mara’s stumbling efforts prevail against the entrenched forces of police, the campus radicals, and an unseen but powerful criminal organization that increasingly puts their lives in danger?

Link to buy:

Murder in Disguise is available among my other books at: https://amzn.to/2TddBsm

What started you on your writing journey?

I'm not really sure what started it. I don't remember a time when I wasn't trying to create something. I began writing music at age 14. But at age 18 I got interested in poetry—the Romantics, of course—and began writing poetry and some very bad short stories.

The Cold War draft and the Korean War interrupted, and the next two decades of Army brought only bare-facts tech writing. After that came graduate school and the painful switch to bloviated academic writing—and in both situations no time for creative writing.

Two decades after graduate school I retired from college teaching (English Lit) and decided to see if I could write the kind of poetry I enjoyed teaching. That point proved, I turned to see if I could publish a novel. It took longer than I expected to convert from literary thinking to commercial-fiction thinking.

That first novel—The Lazarus File—took a couple of years to finish. It was published in 2002, and it's still selling as an e-book.

What kind of books do you enjoy reading?

1. Aside from the Bible, my reading goes in three wildly different directions. In commercial fiction,

it’s suspense. Almost any book by:

• Jack Higgins (Henry Patterson), but especially his Paul Chavasse series and the first half of the Sean Dillon series.

• Also any of Harry Wegley’s thrillers

• and most Westerns by Terry Burns or Ernest Haycox.

• But my all-time favorite is Gavin Lyall’s The Wrong Side of the Sky.

2. The second direction is the classics. I don’t do a lot here, but they keep me reminded of the deep meanings genuine art can reveal. Favorites include:

• poetry by George Herbert, Tennyson, and W.H. Auden.

• For novels, it’s hard to beat Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

• And just for fun the other day I revisited (in English translation, of course) part of Ariosto’s light-hearted epic romance, Orlando Furioso (Orlando Insane). It has wonderful comic situations.

3. The third direction is nonfiction—most recently:

• the late M. Stanton Evans’s Stalin’s Secret Agents

• and Paul Kengor’s Dupes (American non-communists who unthinkingly promoted Soviet Russia’s interests).

• But my favorite is Mark Moyar’s Triumph Forsaken, a historical study of early Vietnam War using Communist as well as US sources.

Which character in your newest release most interested you while you wrote? Why?

I’ve been blessed that in each of my novels there is one character who simply took off and wrote himself. In Murder in Disguise, that character is the graduate student, Helen Chevius, unmarried and who delights in introducing herself, “I’m Miss Chevius.” That prompts the person meeting her to respond with something like, “I don’t doubt that, but the word is pronounced MIS-ch-vus. Now, what’s your name?” So Helen can explain, putting the other person on the defensive. But that’s not all: She responds to difficult situations by taking some outlandish action or other that puts her, at least partially, in charge of the situation. It was a challenge to find the wild actions for each of her situations.

Why do you write in the genres that you do?

In real life I have two backgrounds, military (to include aviation) and academic. The military experience led directly into suspense writing for two novels, with a heavy emphasis on espionage. The academic experience led itself to the Preston Barclay mysteries set on college campuses—mysteries, yes, but with continuous satire of academic institutions and their pretensions. I also wrote one historical novel, Lightning on a Quiet Night, set in the place and time when Mildred and I were growing up. I wrote it before I knew the limits of genres in commercial fiction. Consequently, it splits the requirements for several genres: romance, mystery, suspense, and comedy—all in a historical setting. That made it a misfit in all of them, but it still was a finalist for the Selah Awards.

What is a favorite memory from your childhood?

This is a weird one. I don’t have coherent memories until I was about age five. But there is one vivid one before that. I remember waking up in a Pullman coach on a train at night. We were stopped in a station. I could see and hear a steam engine on an adjacent track, and I could see and hear the steam released from the engine. I remember vaguely that my mother comforted me, and know that I went back to sleep. Why is it weird? Because our only trip that matches it was our return from NewOrleans, where I’d had bilateral mastoid surgery. That would mean I was two years old. I will never understand why that one early scene still remains so vivid in my mind.

Share a verse or Scripture passage with us that is special to you. (and why it's special)

I would share three. Two statements by Jesus form the bedrock core of my belief. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father but by me." (John 14:6)

And He said, "I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.…" (John 11:25)

And the third scripture: I am fascinated by the perfect structure of Psalm 19 ("The heavens declare the glory of God…). In the first six verses, the psalmist contemplates God's physical ordering of the creation. In the next six verses (beginning "The law of the Lord is perfect…), the psalmist contemplates God's moral ordering of the creation. In the final three verses (beginning "Who can understand his errors?"), the psalmist invokes God's ordering power to order his own life, concluding with the familiar prayer, "Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in they sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer."

About Donn:

Donn Taylor led an Infantry rifle platoon in the Korean War, served with Army aviation in Vietnam, and worked with air reconnaissance in Europe and Asia. Afterward, he earned a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature and taught literature at two liberal arts colleges. His publications include several suspense novels, one historical novel, and one book of poetry. Two of his novels have been finalists in the Selah Awards. He lives in the woods near Houston, TX, where he writes fiction, poetry, and essays on current topics. A blog describing the action of God in his life (“A Quiet Assurance”) is at https://bit.ly/2R4jSRd

He is on Facebook at www.facebook.com/donntaylor and www.facebook.com/authordonntaylor, and on Twitter at www.twitter.com/donntaylor3. His website is www.donntaylor.com

Thank you, Donn, for sharing about you, your writing, and books with us!

Friends, don't forget to check out his links! I'm sure you're going to enjoy them!