My delightful Tell Me Your Story guest for October, Mark de Castrique, is the author of twenty one mystery/thrillers, one science thriller set in the year 2030, and two mysteries written for Middle Graders. Mark is a veteran of the broadcast and film production business. In Washington D.C., he directed numerous news and public affairs programs and received an EMMY Award for his documentary film work. His years in Washington inspired his DC thrillers, THE 13TH TARGET, involving a terrorist plot against The Federal Reserve, THE SINGULARITY RACE, a winner-take-all quest for Artificial Intelligence, and SECRET LIVES, DANGEROUS WOMEN, and his latest, DESPERATE SPIES, featuring feisty and fearless ex-FBI agent Ethel Fiona Crestwater, which will be released November 4. Check out Mark’s website here.
Why I write–
by Mark de Castrique
I write because I love stories and the seeds of stories are everywhere, waiting to be cultivated, harvested, and shared.
Some of these seeds are personal.
I was born in the small mountain town of Hendersonville, North Carolina. I went straight from the hospital to the funeral home where my father was the funeral director. He, my mom, and I lived upstairs. As you can imagine, it was quiet – with one exception: the sirens. Back in the day, the small-town funeral homes also ran the ambulance services, and my father would go speeding off, siren screaming, at any hour of the day or night. But talk about a conflict of interest. Do we speed up or slow down?
My most vivid memory of life in the funeral home was a visitation. At a visitation, the grieving family would be at the funeral home the night before the service, receiving the condolences from friends and neighbors. I would be locked upstairs with my mother. I was three at the time and on this particular evening I escaped and came downstairs to see why all these people were in my house. I remember everyone was very tall and there was a casket set upon a pedestal. About ten minutes later, a staff member got my mother to physically remove me from the visitation because I had crawled behind the casket and was singing “So long, it’s been good to know you” to the deceased. We moved out of the funeral home shortly thereafter and my father changed professions, but I carried the seed of a story that, as an adult, I would feel compelled to explore through the character of a small-town funeral director in the mountains of western North Carolina. The story’s seed grew into my seven-book Buryin’ Barry series.
Sometimes the seed of a story grows from another person’s experience that has such a hold on me that I am driven to create a larger story around it.
About thirty years ago. I visited a friend who had been a funeral director in Brevard, North Carolina, a small town near Asheville. His name was Donald Lee Moore and he was around ninety at the time. Donald Lee told me when he was a ten-year-old boy, his father was the Brevard funeral director. Donald Lee remembered one day when the African American funeral director in Asheville came to see his father. The man was trying to get a deceased loved one to the family plot in north Georgia, but all he had for transportation were a horse and a wagon. None of the white funeral homes in Asheville would help him.
Donald Lee’s father had a truck that had been converted into a hearse and he agreed to help. Donald Lee was allowed to ride along with the two men. This was in 1918 and the Jim Crow laws had come into the South so strong that there was no place where a white man and black man could eat together. So, arrangements were made to stop for lunch with some of the deceased relatives who lived along the way. Donald Lee said around noon they pulled into a pasture and drove up to a sharecropper’s cabin. They were met by a host of relatives from youngsters to grandparents. A man took charge and led Donald Lee and his father into the cabin. They saw the furniture in the front room had been moved aside to accommodate a kitchen table with two place settings. The man said, “Now you and your son will eat first and we’ll wait out in the yard.” Donald Lee’s father said we can all eat outside or share the table. “No,” the man said, “You’re doing a service for our family and this is the way we want to honor you.” So, Donald Lee and his father sat down and ate by themselves while everyone else waited out in the yard.
Well, this story just struck a haunting chord with me. I was looking at the ninety-year-old man who had been that ten-year-old boy. It was a terrible indictment of the South and its racial discrimination. It was ironic: they stopped to eat there because they couldn’t eat together and they wound up not eating together. And lastly, Donald Lee told me that later his father said, “The lesson I want you to learn from this is that sometimes the only thing people have to offer you is their hospitality and you always, always take it.”
I couldn’t shake loose this seed Donald Lee had given me. I had to use it somehow. So, I asked the great question of fiction, “What if?” What if there was something about the coffin they were transporting that the boy and his father didn’t understand? I found an answer to that question and Donald Lee’s seed grew to my nine-book Sam Blackman series.
Story seeds come in unexpected ways.
I was flying from Phoenix to Charlotte and struck up a conversation with a young woman seated beside me. I asked her if she lived in Charlotte and she said she was changing planes for Washington DC. She was going to visit her eighty-five-year-old great aunt who lived there. In fact, she lived in the house she was born in. I found that fascinating. I didn’t know anyone who lived in the house they were born in. “Does another family member stay with her?” I asked. “No, no family members, but we don’t worry about her. She rents rooms to FBI and Secret Service agents. We know there’s always someone in the house with a gun.” What a story seed! It grew into the character of Ethel Fiona Crestwater, my seventy-five-year-old retired FBI agent who has been renting rooms to law enforcement agents for fifty years, knows everyone in power, and is the smartest one in the room no matter the size of that room. Her third adventure, DESPERATE SPIES, will be released November 4th.
Why do I write? Maybe in some way, I’m keeping the story seeds alive: cultivating, harvesting, and sharing. I’m discovering what might have been there all along – a story that was using me to take on a life of its own. I just helped it sprout.
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Mark’s website address is https://markdecastrique.com
Facebook page @markdecastrique
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