After several years of hard work and may pots of coffee in front of a keyboard, I will soon have several books available on Amazon.com. Though the last book I published, The Jazz Age, was an e-book available for only for kindle, the next one will be available for print and kindle. With great pride may I present: Death and Professor Longfellow.
Professor Robert Longfellow plodded through life with one unassailable mission, to ‘to enlighten and ennoble young minds’. That is until his heart was shattered by the disinterested fish eyed stares of his students, and the slightly less painful bullet of a mugger. “Death”, embodied as a beguiling spitfire of a woman, offers him a second chance at life. She places before him Herculean trials to overcome. Can the Professor win his way back to the world of the living? Is there anything worth living for?
With Longfellow I tried to create the most unlikely of heroes. He’s timid, easily embarrassed, and somewhat of a coward. That’s not to say he isn’t a good person. I’ve always loved traditional adventures for as long as I can remember. Those stories had heroic, athletic, protagonists to challenge and overcome the adversity set before them. When a hero wasn’t an ubermensch to begin with, the adventure would see them grow from an unlikely nobody into a super person. What if the protagonist was was genuinely not adventurous, like Professor Longfellow? I think of the line in Peter Pan: “To die would be an awfully big adventure.” How would such a man face the greatest adventure of all?
