KILL THE PIANO PLAYER!

The Mystery-Central Blog is now open for give, take, and everything but confusion. My name is David Chacko, and Mystery-Central is what I called my website when I started it ten years ago. I never did much with the site because I thought of it the same way that book publishers thought of ebooks—they didn't think at all.

E was never E in that alphabet. It was e. And the guys in the cashmere sweaters thought—when they thought at all--in CAPS. Still, I knew I was onto something when I picked the name Mystery-Central out of the air. It came easily. Naturally. Nothing else could be done with something so whole.

I suppose the reason the words came to mind had to do with some of the things that had happened around me. The violence. The killings. We all like to think those things happen to someone else and far away. Or at least far enough. That's why we watch television and that's why we have magic wands to shut down the noise and the blood when we get too much of a grisly thing.

Then within the space of about a year two murders touched my life in ways I never expected. A boy I had grown up with in the very small town where I was born was murdered on the second of one of the three short streets of Smithton, Pennsylvania.

Right there, just down the street where we used to play stick ball. We did almost everything in the street—our whole lives were spent there—and having a murder happen on Second Street was worse than it happening in church. Hell, there was more traffic in a church.

There was not much reason for the killing. Paul Steckman, the victim, was a piano player and he was gay and the massive hulk who beat him to death knew he could get away with a slap on the wrist in a place that was so backward and depressed it was like Appalachia without the drawl.

Smithton Formula One

But that's enough social commentary. Just before the piano player was turned into red meat that not even a rescue helicopter could save, a man I knew was murdered in a quiet suburban community not far from where I was living at that time. Although it seemed impossible for any act of great violence to take place in the heart of upscale Barrington, Rhode Island—a town so dull it was dry—that was the first lesson the class had to learn.

The renegade who killed Ernie Brendel did it in a way that was more primitive and weird than the hyped story the prosecution told at the trial. This was a killing with a dull edge when a razor would have been much kinder. The killer, Christopher Hightower, was a con-man who had married into respectability so well that he became a Sunday School teacher; but he never left behind the bow and arrow or the war cry he had learned as a shoeless boy in Central Florida. After Hightower was done with Ernie, he murdered the wife and daughter. Probably, he buried the eight-year-old girl alive.

You need more than a wand to shut that kind of thing down. The way it comes at you and keeps coming makes you want to hit back. To hurt it. The good thing was that you never again had to ask what “it” was.

I kept hearing a noise like the release of a crossbow--an almost silent twang--until it jumped into my mind when I was looking for a name for my website.

Mystery Central.

It almost has to be said in a whisper.

And I've done some writing about crime. Twenty books and counting. Most of them can be found in the Gallery. http://www.mystery-central.com/gallery.html Just click on the covers to get more information.

They're all mysteries of some kind, and sometimes they're odd kinds, but eventually the puzzles are solved by hard-working men interpreting the facts and stringing them together and putting everything else they can find all in a row. Of course, these men want justice so badly that they sometimes bend the rules. They want it even when it's called revenge and it's said in a whisper.