The Moby-Dick Blues
Mystery/Thriller/Suspense
by Michael Strelow
Arvin Kraft loves his complicated family, but they talk about him: how slow he is, how they need to share the burden of caring for him, how tired they all are. He hides in the walls of the family’s old house in Boston and listens to their laments. And he also discovers there a lead box of old papers. Slowly he reads them and finds they are the original manuscript of Melville’s Moby-Dick, long thought to have been lost in an 1850s fire at his publisher. The manuscript is valuable enough to save the family’s failing construction business if marketed properly. But Arvin wants more and Professor Thorne is the Melville expert who can help. Arvin and the professor take turns telling this tale with its lyric resonances of Moby-Dick, the specter of the curse of Ahab and strange deaths, and the scramble of greed as the manuscript becomes more valuable by the hour.
REVIEW
4 out of 5
Just a warning – parts of this story will tug at your heart strings. The way Arvin is treated by his family is nothing short of horrid. The discovery of the manuscript is both a blessing and a curse – it can help Arvin escape, but people are willing to kill for it. Switching between Throne and Arvin we get two unique perspectives on the manuscript and on Arvin’s family life. Greed, financial struggles, a need to escape and the literary find of the century combine for a captivating story.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
My 2005 novel, The Greening of Ben Brown, was a finalist for the Ken Kesey Novel Award of the Oregon Literary Arts. This book is about water, ecology, love, a small town, and the strength of community. Not incidentally, it’s about a man who is turned green in an electrical accident, moves to a small town and affects everyone. Even the strangest characters in town are made more normal for having a green neighbor. His name is Brown, and the guy at the gas station becomes a local hero for being able to greet Mr. Brown without a hitch while looking at green skin and saying, “Good morning Mr. Brown.” The Town of East Leven, Oregon, on the Willamette River, its factory with chemical settling ponds, its citizens, is as much the hero of this story as is the green man. This is my love letter to small towns everywhere, how they operate and arrange themselves.
Two new literary novels: Some Assembly Required (Dec. 2017), sort of sci-fi, cyber punk, humor and literary fiction. The Moby-Dick Blues (March 30, 2018), pursuing the (long lost?) manuscript for Melville’s great American novel, Moby-Dick, mixes together thieves, a university professor, some innocent bystanders, an NBA retired player, and Arvin, the young man who has found the manuscript in the walls of his family’s Boston home.
I have two children’s books (MG, middle grade, ages 8 to 12 or so) coming out this year: The Princess Gardener (April 27th, 2018), and Book II of the series, The Alyssa Chronicle (Oct. 2018).
I am a professor emeritus of English and American Studies at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. I have published poetry, short stories, and non-fiction in a number of literary magazines including: The Bellingham Review, Sou’wester,Willow Spring, Kansas Quarterly, Mid-West Poetry Review, Poetry Midwest, Oregon Quarterly, Northwest Review, Orchids, Hubbub, Cutbank, and others. Other books by Michael Strelow: Kesey (non-fiction about Ken Kesey), and An Anthology of Northwest Writing: 1900-1950. See also article, “All that Hoo-Ha” in Spit in the Ocean # 7: All about Ken Kesey, Penguin Books, 2003, edited by Ed McClanahan. More bio? I’m a downhill skier, tennis player, fly fisher.
