The Narrows

Preface

Preface

The first version of The Narrows was written in starts and stops during many years prior to 2008. During that time I was practicing law at a law firm, which, trust me, was not a good environment in which to write a novel. I managed to write a few paragraphs now and then during very early mornings, but only when I’d been able to sleep away the prior day’s office rhetoric. Finally, in late 2008 I had finished a draft of the novel and I knew I had to do something with it. My alternatives were to burn it or to publish it in any way I could, which turned out to be only a little better than burning it. No publisher in those days was interested in a novel written by a lawyer unless it involved courtroom drama. And I was a corporate lawyer.

The NarrowsIn 2008 that version of the novel was published as When Mermaids Sing. I hated the title from the start but I was talked into it by marketing people whom, I suspect, thought it sounded like a romance. What I’d wanted to title it was Time To Go, based on a passage where the protagonist is musing about the nature of time and wishing he could package it up and take it away, like take-out food. I spent ten years after that regretting the title I’d used and frequently disliking the book as well, until I retired from practicing law and wrote a second novel, A Lion in the Grass. Then, on the road to being a recovering lawyer, I decided it was necessary to return to the first version of this novel and fix all the parts I regretted, including the title.The novel is being republished now as The Narrows, a reference to the family home on Cape Cod where most of the story takes place.

When Mermaids SingA Lion in the GrassThe NarrowsThe novel has changed in many ways. I’ve tried hard not to disturb Larry Brown’s voice, but I’ve made many revisions to the text to integrate Larry and his cousins, Bradley and Herrick, into the world created in A Lion in the Grass. That novel is the first of The Raymond Hatcher Stories. Raymond was born in 1925. His father was an aide to Robert Lansing, the Secretary of State during World War I, and thereafter a career foreign service officer in Europe. Raymond was exceptionally intelligent. He graduated from college at eighteen and joined the Navy in 1943, where he was seconded to the Office of Strategic Services and served in the Pacific theater. He spent the rest of his life in government intelligence sectors until he died at age ninety. During his lifetime he affected many people in many ways. Some he killed. But others he befriended and a few he mentored. One man who influenced Raymond was a fellow OSS officer, Captain Bradley Wright. Sadly, Captain Wright and his wife, Betsy, were killed while serving as missionaries in 1950’s French Indochina. Their son, Herrick, Raymond rescued.

A Lion in the GrassThe Narrows is the second book in The Raymond Hatcher Stories. Captain Wright’s twin brother, Harold, married Betsy’s twin sister, Adelaide Clements. After his rescue, Herrick was returned to Boston, where Harold and Adelaide raised him as a son, together with their own son, Bradley. The Clements’s twins were from a family that owned a summer house in Chatham on Cape Cod. The Narrows takes place at that house in the 1970’s and involves Herrick’s first cousins, Bradley Wright and Larry Brown. Without giving away the story, I can say that the genetic connection between Captain Wright and his nephew, Bradley, is obvious.

The NarrowsThe NarrowsIn case it isn’t apparent, my love of writing springs from my love of bringing characters to life. The Raymond Hatcher stories are, and will be, all about Raymond and the people he interacted with during his lifetime, as well as their descendants. Herrick will return eventually with his own story, as will his cousins. And Jay Jackson, Raymond’s protégé in A Lion in the Grass, will reappear in 2021 in the third of The Raymond Hatcher stories. He will tell a story about Raymond that hasn’t yet been told. That novel will be titled Belinda, unless the marketing folks talk me out of it.

A Lion in the GrassBelinda