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Available Light And Shadow: Journeys through art, architecture, books, culture, food, photography and more by Steve Paul, a veteran editor and writer at The Kansas City Star.

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I made my annual trek to Boston in April for the PEN/Hemingway Award events, a literary celebration that honors a first book of fiction. The winner this year was Ottessa Moshfegh (above), a noted young writer on the rise. I followed up with her for a brief email interview, and wrote this piece for the Hemingway Society newsletter. Scroll down a bit and you’ll find photos from the Hemingway exhibit, which I shared in an earlier post.  

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More music from Tulsa weekend. Jimmy LaFave does "Purple Rain."

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Great to see Lance Canales this weekend for Woody Guthrie festivities in Tulsa. His version of "Deportee."

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“Ernest Hemingway: Between the Wars,” an exhibit co-curated by the Morgan Library and the Hemingway Collection at the JFK Library and Museum in Boston, opened to the public this week in Boston. It’s a vibrant looking show with many highlights. Much of the material was familiar to me, but it was presented cogently and offers a good, graspable guide to Hemingway’s progression from young journalist and ambulance driver to seasoned war correspondent. I love the two portraits above -- of Hemingway seriously focused on a bullfight and then on a manuscript in progress, probably “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” And then, of course, the acknowledgment at the outset that Hemingway began to really learn his craft at The Kansas City Star, the newspaper from which I just retired.

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West Bottoms, Kansas City.

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The Estes - Mingucci nuptials, Oct. 10, 2015, in the Missouri countryside. People's Liberation Big Band, procession of puppies, horses, flower girls, Rev Seeley in the woods, a marriage of music and life. Sweet.

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Two Missouri photos. In the country: Vineyard. Row boat.

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A chat with James Tate (and a cameo by Charles Simic)

In 1992, I called James Tate after learning he’d won the Pulitzer Prize. He hadn’t heard yet. Reposting that interview here, after learning of his death today, at 71. He had taught for a long time at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

“Poet with Kansas City roots chosen for Pulitzer honor”

By STEVE PAULThe Kansas City Star, 4/8/1992    James Tate was 23 when he got a big boost into the small world of poetry by winning the Yale Younger Poets Prize for his first manuscript.    On Tuesday, 25 years and some 10 books later, the former Kansas Citian won another, more significant stamp of approval, the Pulitzer Prize.    Tate won the poetry prize for his Selected Poems, published last year by Wesleyan University Press of New England.    "You're kidding," Tate said from his home in Amherst, Mass., when a caller informed him of the award. "That would be something if it were true."    Assured that the prize was for real, Tate took a moment to collect his thoughts and to consider how a poet known for his offbeat, surreal vision might win such mainstream recognition.    "I don't know if it means anything for poetry in general," Tate said, "but it may mean that other people may have been experiencing the world as I have in all these years, and it's not so bad. We feel a lot of pain and can laugh about it."       Charles Simic, last year's Pulitzer winner in poetry, was in Kansas City Tuesday to read his work at Rockhurst College and talked about the award.    "There is an element of respect as a result," he said. "This is an award which the world out there takes more seriously than any other. Everybody goes nuts."    Simic, it turns out, is an old friend of Tate’s and like him shares an absurdist vision.    "A lot of people said when I got it," Simic said, "it proved that it was another sign of the great decline of the West. But it's great for adventurist literature, experiential, reckless imagination - all those good things."      Tate's Selected Poems draws from all of his previous work, including that first book, from 1967. It was called The Lost Pilot and concerned his father, who died in World War II.    In reviewing the Selected Poems for The Kansas City Star, Lawrence writer Denise Low noted last fall, "Each poem builds an imagined reality that dazzles like a card trick, and at the end the deck is shuffled as though the illusion never took place."    Tate, now 48, spent much of his early life in Kansas City. He left in 1961 for college in Pittsburg, Kan., before returning in 1963-64, when he attended the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He then went on to graduate school at the University of Iowa.    Later in the '60s, after teaching for a year in Berkeley, Calif., he returned to Kansas City, "thinking how to get by and how to become a poet."    After a spell of wandering, living in Europe and Cambridge, Mass., Tate settled down to teach at the University of Massachusetts, in Amherst, where he has spent more than 20 years. And where he has obviously figured out what it takes to be a poet.    Has he lived a charmed existence?    "The charm is that I've been able to do what I've wanted over the years, and that's luckier than some people," Tate said. "I feel lucky that I love what I do. I loved it at age 17 and lo and behold, 31 years later I'm still doing the same thing, and loving it as much as ever."    Now in the middle of a new book of poems, Tate said he had recently finished a book of short fiction, which would be his first.    Tate said most of his family remains in the Kansas City area, including his mother, Betty Sears.    What don't remain are some of the homes he lived in. A house he rented in the '60s at 48th and Campbell streets has been razed, as has a house he lived in as a boy, near 49th Street and Prospect Avenue. He went there looking for it a few years ago.    "It's not there at all," he said. "It made me kind of sad."

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Taliesin West: We traveled to Arizona earlier this year and made a pilgrimage to Frank Lloyd Wright's desert outpost. Inspiring and meditative.

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Richard Price: 'You've got to leave and go someplace and bring back the news'

It's great to see Richard Price return to the bookshelves with a big new novel, "The Whites." I dug out this old piece from 1992, when I talked to him about "Clockers," another big book, which dove deep into the world of urban street crime. Price here talks cogently about writing, Hollywood and his immersion into a world he knew nothing about. 

A close-up view of urban anguish In `Clockers': Richard Price probes the lives of drug dealer and policeman

By STEVE PAUL

The Kansas City Star

This story first appeared June 28, 1992.

ANAHEIM, Calif. - Amid the national hand-wringing that followed the Los Angeles riots, Robert Maynard, an Oakland, Calif., journalist, had a succinct message.

"The most important thing in understanding the nature of the problem, " Maynard said on one of the Sunday morning television news shows in mid-May, "is to understand the lives of the young people on the streets of our cities."

Richard Price may or may not have had that notion in mind when he set out to write "Clockers" four years ago. But his big new novel serves the purpose just the same.

In fact, "Clockers" (Houghton Mifflin; $22.95) provides a provocative, eye-opening portrait of young big-city black men. Unlike the dry accounts of sociologists or the insubstantial images from television and the press, "Clockers" is likely to give sheltered readers an unprecedented, human view of the oppressive atmosphere of fear and hopelessness that haunts many black youths and breeds the urban nightmare culture of violence and drugs.

"Clockers" tells the story of 19-year-old Ronald "Strike" Dunham, a low-level dealer who's gotten deeper into the pit than he wanted to and now is finding it harder and harder to climb out.

Alternating with Strike's tale is that of Rocco Klein, a 43-year-old white policeman on the verge of early retirement. When another young dealer is killed and Strike's older, clean-living brother makes a hard-to-believe confession, Klein turns his suspicion on Strike, whipping their parallel narratives into a tension-filled convergence.

Price's achievement is in the sound of the street he creates (and sustains for 599 pages) and in his fully formed, complex characters, whom he makes even more believable by worming his way into their consciousness.

It didn't come easily. Price, 42, had been spending time with cops before writing the screenplay for "Sea of Love" when he felt something larger loom that kept him on the street even longer.

"After hanging out with the cops for enough time I started feeling, well, what about the policed?" Price said in a recent interview.

And one thing led to another.

"I got a murder, " Price said in his rat-a-tat Bronx-bred patter. "And when I talk about a kid dealing drugs, how can I really write about the kids dealing drugs unless I understand what happened to them in school and why they're not in school anymore. So I started hanging out with schools and school leads to welfare and welfare leads to prison and prison leads to Legal Aid lawyers. How can you write about this unless you understand this thing?

"It was this chain of things I just had to experience, not knowing the first thing about any of it when I started out."

He won the trust of both the police and the hard-core drug dealers in Jersey City - just across the Hudson River from New York- who allowed him into onto their respective and often overlapping turfs for more than three years.

"There's a whole world out there that nobody knows about, because nobody writes about it, because the people who know about it don't become writers, " Price said. "So sometimes you have to step over the line, especially in the way society is polarized now. You've got to leave and go someplace and bring back the news. I want to be real careful about that - I don't want to sound like a philistine.

"But we know vaguely it's out there. We read about it in the papers, but we don't really know about it."

Success in two camps

Price was sitting on the steps outside the Anaheim Convention Center, where the book industry had gathered en masse for the American Booksellers Association convention and trade show.

"Clockers," Price's first novel in 10 years, was just hitting the stores, and in the few weeks since its release it has received almost universal acclaim. The book has reminded readers and critics of the vast talent Price displayed in his earlier novels, especially "The Wanderers," published in 1974 when Price had barely finished graduate school at Columbia University; "Blood Brothers" (1976); and "Ladies' Man" (1979). He has an unbeatable ear for language and a skill for giving voice to the populace of the blue-collar world in which he grew up.

In the decade between "The Breaks" (1982) and "Clockers," Price found another fortune in Hollywood, writing the scripts for such hit movies as "The Color of Money" (1986), with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise, and "Sea of Love" (1989).

He hates the work but loves the money. For one thing, he said, it fed his own drug habit, since kicked.

"It's just a depressing, despairing kind of writing, given its relation to the finished product, " Price said of working for Hollywood. "But the problem is, it's a lot easier to give up coke than it is to give up screenplays. But it's the same thing, an addiction: `I swear man, it's the last one, tomorrow I go straight.' "

Well, not quite yet. Two more movies Price scripted will be showing up on screens later this year, "Mad Dog and Glory" and "Night and the City, " both starring Robert De Niro. Price already is working on a screen version of "Clockers" - it made news last year when the film rights sold for nearly $2 million - and he said he had one or two more Hollywood commitments. It's much harder to do, he said, now that he's back in the novel-writing mode.

Price has found rare success in both camps. The history of Hollywood is littered with the reputations of literary writers who couldn't adapt. And today there are few writers who can move, or seem to move, so effortlessly from one to the other.

"I was born in 1949, and I grew up on television and movies as much as I did books and it shows in the writing. You know, my writing style is, `Who says what? What happens next. Let's go.' Especially in my earlier work, I didn't have too much world of the interior."

Imagining a life

One of the remarkable things about "Clockers" is how Price, by envisioning that interior world alongside the action on the street, creates empathy for both of his protagonists - Rocco, the homicide cop, and Strike, the dealer.

Strike sits atop a park bench outside a housing project, keeping watch over his crew of young "clockers, " who run the drugs. He is quiet, intelligent and has learned the ropes well. He knows not to draw attention to himself with fancy clothes and cars. Instead he drives a two-year-old Accord, keeps his accumulating income in a string of safe houses and has no interest in doing drugs himself. He has a stutter and he downs vanilla Yoo Hoo soda to calm the burning in his gut.

"All the other characters in the book are pretty much molded on individual people, " Price said, "except for Strike, who's pretty much made up from whole cloth. Which is a funny thing about fiction and just picking up information - the guy I did best was the guy I made up the most after all those years of hanging out."

Price said he had little compunction about writing from Strike's point of view.

"The whole issue for me was, Who am I to write about this world and this 19-year-old kid. Am I being presumptuous? Is this cultural piracy? The whole thing is so polarized. But it's a writer's job to imagine a life that's not your own. I was hoping to cross that bridge that keeps getting wider and wider between the urban underclass and the white middle class.

"What you find is, of course, there are cultural and historical differences, but basically everybody wants the same things in life. Everybody wants revenge and everybody wants peace.

"These people's lives - their hearts are the same size as white middle-class hearts. We're all human beings. No life is worth more than any other life."

Room for optimism

Because of the sweeping portrait of urban life and its finely detailed social realism, "Clockers" has invited comparison to Tom Wolfe's novel of New York, "Bonfire of the Vanities." "Clockers" has a depth of character that "Bonfire's" breezy satire doesn't come close to approaching.

Price is hesitant to accept praise at the expense of Wolfe, but he acknowledges the aptness of the comparison.

"'Bonfire' was one of the books that really got me writing books again, " Price said. "And Tom Wolfe has really been a supporter of me, so I feel very comfortable with that...

"I was feeling awful about writing scripts - getting paid tons of money to do soft sculpture with excrement.

"Then I read 'Bonfire' and it was so panoramic. And it was satirical. You know, it's not 'Studs Lonigan,' it's not Emile Zola, it's not 'Native Son,' it's 'Bonfire' - it's a rogues' gallery, a panoramic view of New York.

"But something about the bigness of it, the lustiness of the ambition of it, the highs and the lows - it made me nuts. I've just got to do something like this - not like that exactly; I'm not a satirical writer. His thing was about the highs and the lows, mine's about the lows and the lows, the middle lows and the low lows."

Part of Price's hanging out involved teaching teen-agers at a drug rehab center in the Bronx. The experience didn't prompt much optimism, he said, but he felt compelled to end "Clockers" with a glimmer of hope.

"It's a book," he said. "You just don't know. You've got 600 pages of such down, grim, nightmarish stuff, and if you gave it a black ending, why bother to have written a book to begin with? You've got to give it some hope, otherwise, `Everybody run, run for the hills.'

"But I never met a kid I didn't like. I never met a cop I didn't like in some way. The more you know about people, it's impossible not to understand them. And if you start understanding them, you can't hate them, or you can't be afraid of them any more or you can't feel that they're that different than you.

"I met so many kids, though, it's like, nice smile, good eye, good presence, what a waste. It's all there, but...I've seen other kids, too, you look in their eyes, and there's something not there that should be there that will never be there and that's terrifying. But there're a lot of kids out there who've got the personality, they've got the wit, they've got the native street smarts..."

But somehow, he suggested, that isn't enough.

"Some people, are lost, lost, lost, and some people are just lost."

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Leonardo's 'La Belle Ferronniere' once scandalized the art world and Kansas City

Le Monde has a story today about the restoration of "La Belle Ferronniere," a portrait by Leonardo da Vinci. Why, you might ask, do I care? But here's why: In the 1920s that very painting prompted a fascinating  and landmark bit of art history -- when another version of it surfaced in Kansas City. I wrote about this case almost 15 years ago as a sidebar to a series of stories about the art market and the debacle involving a set of faked Georgia O'Keeffe watercolors that had been acquired by the founder of the Kemper Museum.

See images of the two paintings below.

And here's that story, first published in The Kansas City Star on Jan. 21, 2001.

Kansas City's da Vinci: A tale of two paintings By STEVE PAUL Paintings in dispute. A Kansas City collection. A dealer on the hot seat. The art world under the microscope of public opinion.

    Where have we heard this before?

    Try the 1920s.

    Almost 80 years before the ejection button jolted the Canyon Suite watercolors out of the Kemper Museum in Kansas City,  the art world trained its collective eye on a painting controversy from the heartland.    It was the case of a purported Leonardo da Vinci called "La Belle Ferronniere, " and the argument over the painting's authenticity isn't over yet.

    The painting had been a wedding gift to Harry Hahn,  then of Junction City,  Kan.,  and the French woman he married after World War I. It had come from her family,  which had long owned it.

    In 1920,  Hahn's wife,  Andree,  was trying to sell it to the Kansas City Art Institute for as much as $250,000. A prominent London art dealer,  Sir Joseph Duveen,  got wind of the picture's availability and was quoted as saying it was a mere copy.

    Duveen said the genuine picture hung in the Louvre. Of course,  he hadn't seen the Hahns' painting,  but his words were enough to scotch the deal.

    Andree Hahn sued Duveen for slandering her piece of art,  seeking $500,000 in damages.

    Among other things,  the lawsuit had a chilling effect in the art world,  making dealers and experts ever cautious about offering opinions.

    It dragged on for eight years before finally playing out in a New York courtroom in a kind of celebrity soap opera avidly followed by the press.

    Testimony focused on the respective qualities of the two versions of "La Belle Ferronniere." Duveen dismissed the subject in the Hahns' picture as "bovine." The experience helped taint the Louvre's painting as well.

    Which one was the real Leonardo? Didn't Duveen and his expert witnesses,  led by the mighty art consultant Bernard Berenson,  also once disparage the Louvre's portrait?

    Jurors heard about pigment analysis and X-rays. They were given documentary evidence about provenance.

    Their heads swimming with all the details and all the conflicting testimony of experts,  jurors ultimately couldn't decide. Nine of the 12,  however,  favored the Hahns,  and as a second trial neared,  Duveen washed his hands of the matter and settled with the Hahns for some $60,000.

    The Hahns' painting has been in storage almost ever since.

    In 1946,  it came out for a monthlong public viewing at the Nelson Gallery.

    The exhibit and the local publication of a book by Harry Hahn,  The "Rape of LaBelle,"  attracted throngs of viewers to Kirkwood Hall to see the attractive "Lady in Red" as The Kansas City Star's headline called her.

    Reports that the picture was up for sale have surfaced from time to time,  most recently in 1992 when the asking price was said to be as much as $80 million.

    That,  however,  was before a British expert traveled to inspect the work and rejected once again its claim as a Leonardo. This time no lawsuit followed.

    Despite his dismissal,  the critic was moved to call it a "mighty fine picture,  whose history is far from over."

    In fact,  a sale may be on the horizon.

    Jack Chapman,  an Omaha,  Neb.,  lawyer who represents the painting's owner,  a nephew of the Hahns who lives in Wichita,  said he is negotiating with a buyer. He would only say it was an individual in the United States who was well aware of the painting's controversial history.

    Chapman said he was selling it as a Leonardo and at a commensurate price. It may be six months or more before the sale is final because new tests are being conducted on the painting.

    "This, " said Chapman,  "is a piece of art that really,  if not for Joseph Duveen,  would be sitting in the Kansas City Art Institute as a Leonardo da Vinci."

ADDENDUM, Jan. 26, 2015. The top picture below is a reproduction of the Hahns' painting, which does betray that "bovine quality" as compared to the Louvre's "La Belle Ferronniere." The middle picture is the Louvre's version, and at bottom is the restored painting as published today in Le Monde.

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This gorgeous painting by Richard Diebenkorn, from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, takes the cover spot of a lovely new book of the artist's "Still Lifes and Landscapes." The book, a small format paperback, includes 101 images, about half of which have never been published. It's the third of a trio of exquisite Diebenkorn books published by my friend Bart Schneider's little California press, Kelly's Cove Press. The works inside span the 1950s to 1980s, and find Diebenkorn finding art and gesture in the most mundane of daily objects (shoes, scissors) as well as a series of ever more complex and magical landscapes.

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A journey back to Kansas City jazz

I revisited one of the great jazz albums this morning: "King Pleasure Sings/Annie Ross Sings." King Pleasure's version of "Parker's Mood" is a high point of the Kansas City ethos in jazz. This record also includes "Red Top," a tune written by KC sax player Ben Kynard, who was in the Lionel Hampton band in the early 1950s.

That sent me back to a moment in my music-writing life. A dozen years ago I did a group portrait of The Scamps, a jazz vocal outfit with origins in the 1940s and something of a complicated, though much loved history, even into the early years of the 21st century.

So I dug the story out -- it was first published in The Kansas City Star on Feb. 24, 2002 -- and present again:

After half a century, Scamps still can swing

By Steve Paul

If you were a Kansas City hepcat out on the town in the early 1950s, you might have ended up at one of the late-night watering holes that thrived along U.S. 40 east of the city limits: Tootie's Mayfair, the Half-a-Hill, the Plantation Club.

You might have danced with your sweetheart. Or somebody else's sweetheart. If you were lucky, you would've been energized by one of the hippest groups of the day - the Red Hot Scamps.

They sang four-part harmonies. They did skits. And at every show they cranked it up and played their hit recording.

Called "Red Hot" for good reason, it burned fast. In that moment there was nothing hotter and nothing cooler. You were moving to Rudy Massingale's long saxophone solo, a honking performance of major proportions: muscular and urgent, protorock 'n' roll with a jazz-and-blues chaser.

Half a century later, Massingale is still a Scamp, or, more accurately, he's a Scamp again. And although no longer Red Hot, the Scamps are something even bigger than their music.

In a city that pays not much more than lip service to the jazz of its heritage, the Scamps have become a symbol, an institution, a repository of what many people think of as the spectrum of Kansas City jazz.

And this spring a recording that the Scamps made 17 years ago, a disc that captures the heart and history of the Kansas City sound, will be dusted off and released for the first time.

"We're just about the last of that era, " says Lucky Wesley, the Scamps' bassist and nasal-voiced tenor.

They're Kansas City's version of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, without the hallowed headquarters and without that New Orleans group's international reputation.

"In a way it's a very spiritual thing, " local pianist and club owner Tim Whitmer says of the Scamps. "Being in this band for these guys is to carry on a tradition. Not just the band's tradition, but the tradition of the music."

Crowd pleasers

It's late afternoon, a recent Saturday, at the Phoenix Piano Bar & Grill, a brick-walled place in downtown Kansas City.

The Scamps - four members comprise the core of the group today - are squeezed between the grand piano and the club's front windows.

"If you've got a request, we'll play it, " Lucky Wesley informs the crowd between numbers. "And if we don't know it, we'll play it anyway, although you might not recognize it."

Marty and Judy Hughes are sitting at the piano bar, a handshake away from Rudy Massingale, the founding pianist who long ago gave up the saxophone. The Hugheses have driven from St. Louis.

"It's our 40th trip in nine years, " Marty Hughes says.

"We need a new car, " Judy Hughes adds.

All so they can hear the Scamps play a crowd-pleasing "Kansas City" or a swinging "Sweet Lorraine."

"I was born in 1942, " Marty Hughes says. "I'll be 60 in March. I remember the music of the 1940s. ... It's the greatest music the world has ever known. So we keep coming back."

As Kansas City jazz originals such as Jay McShann and Claude "Fiddler" Williams slow down - their careers began before World War II, after all - such relative youngsters as Massingale, 76, and fellow Scamp Art Jackson, 82, have become the music's default torchbearers.

The music of the '40s. The music of the '50s.

The Scamps these days even do "The Girl From Ipanema" and "What a Wonderful World, " Louis Armstrong's invincible pop anthem of the 1960s.

Always adaptable to what audiences want to hear, the Scamps long have been known for radiating good-time entertainment. They don't go way out on improvisational limbs like a Charlie Parker or a Bobby Watson. They're not chamber artists like the Modern Jazz Quartet or performers who require rapt attention.

They play the kind of music that doesn't suffer much from table clatter, flaring saute pans and mingling crowds. Their swing can penetrate all that. They feed off the audience and put on an infectious show that makes jazz safe for people who might otherwise avoid it.

"Music is a pleasing sound to the ear, " Wesley says. "We try to make our music pleasing to their ears."

Duke Ellington and Count Basie are big names in the Scamps' memory-lane playbook: "Satin Doll, " "Shiny Stockings, " "Take the A Train, " "Mood Indigo." Virtually every club gig begins with "Moonglow, " winds through a familiar terrain of sunny peaks and moonlit ballads, and ends with Basie's signature tune, "One O'Clock Jump."

Kathy Pittman-Gaspard was sold immediately when she first arrived in town from Florida six years ago and friends hauled her to the Phoenix to hear the Scamps.

"'Entrancing' would be the word, " she says today. 'What a great group'

It's the late 1940s. Lucky Wesley is leading a 17-piece Air Force band out of Salina, Kan.

Trumpet in one hand, he's playing the intro to Louis Jordan's wartime hit "Ration Blues." With the other hand he reaches for a microphone to start singing. The mic won't budge out of its stand, so Wesley bends over slowly to meet it. An observant band mate gets there at the same time - and yanks the microphone into Wesley's teeth.

So much for the trumpet, Wesley concludes six months later when his embouchure - a horn player's pucker power - still hasn't returned.

Then again, what he really wants to play is the stand-up bass, just like his idol Walter Page of Basie's band.

Fifty-five years later, Wesley is talking about his music career in the living room of his Grandview home. Around the room are musical bric-a-brac, a plaque honoring Wesley's 40 years of service as choir director at his church and a piano on which his now-grown daughter learned to play.

Wesley remembers the first time he heard the Scamps. He was still in the service in Salina. It must have been early 1948. A song came on the radio, and he was hooked. It was a radiant ballad, a version of Ellington's "Solitude, " sung in a rich baritone by Earl Robinson, who was the Scamps' featured vocalist. "Oh, my gosh, " Wesley says, "what a great group."

Being from Kansas City, Wesley was proud to learn that Robinson and the Scamps came from Kansas City, Kan. He loved "Solitude" so much that he vowed to return to Kansas City and play music just like it.

A recording hit

Creation stories are always subjective. Rudy Massingale has long asserted that he and a guitar player named Wyatt Griffin are responsible for forming the group he calls the "original recording Scamps." It was 1946. Massingale was back home after graduating from college in Virginia.

Griffin brought along Earl Robinson and James Whitcomb, two singers he'd accompanied in the late 1930s and early '40s in a gospel and blues group at the Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Parsons, Kan.

By November 1946 the Scamps were playing regularly at the Sherman Tavern, Ninth and Locust streets. "This was our first union job, " Massingale says, pointing to a photograph of the group on the Sherman's low stage. It paid $32.50 a week.

The Scamps soon landed in a recording studio, and they came out with a short string of 78s for the Modern Music label, beginning with "Don't Cry Baby" and "More Than You Know." "Solitude, " the song that caught Lucky Wesley's ear, appeared in December 1947.

And by March 1949 they had a bona fide hit, their Columbia recording of "Red Hot."

This is where the genealogy of the Scamps gets confusing - and interesting - because soon there were two groups using the name and three playing the same music.

Massingale, Robinson and company went on an extended tour of the region, playing six and seven nights a week. At some point Wyatt Griffin got homesick, Massingale says, and returned to Kansas City.

After the rest of the Scamps returned, they found that Griffin had regrouped and was calling his new band the Five Scamps.

Massingale, Whitcomb and Robinson weren't about to give up the glory of "Red Hot." So they called their group the Red Hot Scamps.

It was around this time that Wesley got out of the service and returned to Kansas City. He got together with some of his musician friends and formed a group called the Five Aces.

The Aces listened to the Scamps intently, and, although they wrote their own tunes, they worked on duplicating the Scamps' sound. "They were our idols, " Wesley says.

The Five Aces played "Red Hot" so often and convincingly that a lot of people thought it was theirs.

All three of the bands dressed in matching, immaculate uniforms, and they played many of the same tunes. They drew their inspiration from the same wells, including songs made famous by the Ink Spots and the Mills Brothers, the big-name, black harmonizing groups who had cultivated large white audiences.

And all played at some of the same spots around town - the Half-a-Hill, the Twin City, the Zombie Club. White clubs, black clubs. Private parties and frat-house dances.

Along with the harmonies, they devised dancing shticks - "antics, " Massingale calls them. "We were multitalented, " Wesley says.

In May 1950, Bob Hope came to town to emcee a benefit show at Municipal Auditorium featuring a lineup of local entertainers. Among those on the bill were the Red Hot Scamps and the Five Aces. More than 8,000 people attended. "I was honking my horn trying to make my name, " Massingale says.

Back in session

Dec. 10, 1984. The five members of the Scamps, even then representing nearly 200 years of collective musical experience, settle into position at the SoundTrek recording studio on Broadway. The idea is to make a record that feels like a club date. Run through a dozen tunes in one take. No overdubs, no redos. Raw and real.

Later, they'll go on to the Sni-Blue Lounge, where they've been holding court four or five nights a week for nearly eight years. The Scamps already were being recognized as ambassadors of Kansas City jazz - and, at the Sni-Blue, they have one of the steadiest jazz gigs in town.

But now they have a record to make. From the first chords of Ellington's "In a Mellow Tone" to a loose and spirited "Kansas City, " the Scamps work through a tour of the defining sounds of the city's musical reputation. Bluesy ballads featuring Earl Robinson's deep, laconic voice. Upbeat, jump tunes. Straightforward swing.

Three and four-part harmonies shimmer with life - even when the melody occasionally seems more a goal than an achievement.

After the session, the recording date's producers, local jazz enthusiasts Steve Irwin and John Jessup, put the tape in the can.

They hope some day to raise the money to release it, but it sits untouched for 17 years.

A musical medley

The Scamps today are a product of a kind of musical cell biology. They've formed and reformed in countless ways through the years. The number of local players who could call themselves Scamps runs into the dozens.

By the mid-1950s the Scamps were down to one group, and the Five Aces disbanded and went their own ways.

Lucky Wesley, for example, joined pianist Jay McShann's band. But it wasn't long before the grind of the road, of one-night gigs and sleeping in the car, took its toll on Wesley, and he came back to Kansas City. He never wanted to play another gig that caused him to cross a state line, he says.

Wesley also focused on the steady paycheck of a day job and ended up working for the U.S. Postal Service more than 30 years. Music became a second job, but when the chance came in 1971 to join the Scamps - the group he had idolized so many years before - he jumped at it.

The three other core Scamps of today - Massingale, Jackson and Rusty Tucker, the gregarious singer, drummer and trumpeter who joined the group in the late '70s - also are retired from other work. They live off pensions and investments more than their music.

Massingale once had the chance to join Lionel Hampton's band, but something, maybe a lack of confidence, held him back. He played awhile with Big Bob Doherty, a local screaming-saxophone showman, but when he left the Scamps in the 1960s, it was mainly for the insurance business.

Tucker, a native of Birmingham, Ala., was a trumpeter just out of high school when he played variety shows that made the rounds of state fairs. He eventually landed in Kansas City and joined the house band at the Orchid Room, a lively jazz spot at 12th and Vine streets. He switched to drums, because he discovered that drummers worked more steadily than trumpeters.

He also got a job in construction and operated cranes for 35 years.

Creating a new take

Dec. 7, 2001. Seventeen years - almost to the day - after recording the Scamps at SoundTrek, John Jessup, Steve Irwin and audio engineer Craig Rettmer are back in the studio. They're remixing the 1984 session, editing it for a planned release in a few months.

Irwin and Jessup had had a remember-that-Scamps-record? conversation after Rettmer warned them if they didn't do something with it soon, the original tape would deteriorate irretrievably. Jessup, Irwin and Irwin's wife, Jo Boehr, had produced the Kansas City International Jazz Festival for its four-year run. Now Irwin was in a position to pitch the Scamps' disc as a benefit for the Marillac Center, a psychiatric treatment facility for children. The recording, titled "Timeless, " is scheduled to be out by May.

Much has changed in the 17 years since the Scamps first laid down the tunes. Among other things, Earl Robinson left the group in the mid-1980s and retired; longtime pianist Coots Dye died; and Rudy Massingale returned to the Scamps' fold.

Given all that, the 1984 recording captures that era's Scamps at something of a peak. It's a throwback sound that evokes cabaret elegance, unabashed fun and a sense of what Lucky Wesley means when he says, "We've always been gentlemen of music."

Three voices reaching for "How High the Moon." Robinson sounding plush and plaintive on "September in the Rain" and "Solitude." Dye taking a sweet and husky vocal turn on "L.O.V.E." - a fetching ballad lately appropriated for a car commercial.

"This, " says Irwin, "is some of the very best stuff they've recorded."

Dedication prevails

February 2002, at the Phoenix. Art Jackson has a round face and gold-rim glasses. He wears a navy-blue beret on stage and, these days, after a stroke, he plays sitting down.

Jackson holds the distinction of being the longest continuous Scamp, beginning with the breakaway Five Scamps in 1949. Jackson might not blow with the power of his youth - he worries about his upper plate and whether his fingers have the feeling they once did - but he still sounds sweet on a ballad.

His understated ebbs and flows recall his early influences, Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster, two pillars of the Kansas City sound of the 1930s.

And right there in the middle of "Satin Doll, " he might blurt out a ditty like "Pop Goes the Weasel" just to mix it up and spark a few smiles.

It's a nod to the "silly idiosyncrasies" of the earliest Scamps, as Massingale says later.

Jackson went to the old Lincoln High School with Charlie Parker and is the age the trailblazing alto saxophonist would have been today had he not died at 34.

The scrapbook he keeps in his south Kansas City apartment holds a collection of autographed photos, including a young and curvaceous Della Reese, who stopped at the Orchid Room when Jackson played in the house band.

Jackson says he misses the days when the Scamps focused on vocal harmonies. "Nobody has time to rehearse anymore, " he says.

Tucker, almost always sporting a cavernous smile, handles many of the vocal duties whenever the group plays the Phoenix. He's a Louis Armstrong soundalike on "What a Wonderful World, " and he brings along no small amount of impromptu ham.

When the Scamps play elsewhere, the vocals are a mixed bag. Lucky Wesley wraps his airy voice around "Mood Indigo" and other songs. Alternate drummer Wallace Jones also sings. And some jazz classics live on in the Scamps repertoire only as instrumentals.

The Scamps may not be the group they once were, but they "maintain the music of their day, " says Sam Johnson Jr., president of the Elder Statesmen of Kansas City Jazz.

"The Scamps should be called the premier group in the city, " says Johnson, a drummer who, as his father before him, has played Scamps gigs. "They've outlasted everybody."

And some things don't ever change.

Says Wesley: "To say that you were a Scamp meant something."

[alas-sbpaul]

A Rembrandt portrait was reintroduced last spring (2014) at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha. In storage for a decade, the "Portrait of Dirck van Os" was conserved and promoted from "school of Rembrandt" to the real thing by scholar Ernst van De Wetering in Amsterdam. It was a highlight of a quick excursion to Omaha to sit and look at this painting.

[alas-sbpaul]

Remembering Tomas Young

In 2007, as Phil Donahue's documentary about Tomas Young, a wounded Iraq veteran turned public critic of the war, was beginning to make the rounds, I visited with Tomas and produced this profile. RIP

From warrior to anti-warrior; Paralyzed after a firefight, Tomas Young has made peace his new mission

By Steve Paul

The Kansas City Star

Oct. 22, 2007

Some days his muscles start vibrating,  like ropes of Jell-O beneath his skin,  and Tomas Young decides to stay in bed.

Most of the time,  though,  he musters the attitude it takes to slide into his wheelchair and face the day.

Maybe it will be one of those days when a telemarketer calls and he delivers his sucker punch.

You’re 27 and retired? they’ll say when he answers their demographic questions. You must be lucky. How do you get to do that?

You go to Iraq,  he’ll say,  and get shot and become paralyzed from the chest down.Then the dimple deepens in Young’s sharp-featured face.

Amusing. It’s one way to cope.

Young,  a graduate of Winnetonka High School in Kansas City,  North,  is one of more than 28,000 military men and women who have returned home less than whole -- wounded physically,  mentally or both.

And like some of his former brothers and sisters in arms,  Young had spoken out against a war that he did not believe in even before his unit deployed in March 2004.Mike Wallace profiled him early last year in a "60 Minutes" segment about wounded Iraqi war vets,  and Young has recounted his journey from warrior to "anti-warrior" for media outlets from coast to coast.

Now,  Young’s tale of attitude,  war and its painful human cost is on the verge of going wider. He is the subject of a documentary film produced and co-directed by television’s Phil Donahue. The movie,  "Body of War, " needs a distributor and is being shopped this fall at film festivals -- last month in Toronto,  this past weekend in the Hamptons.

And if you’ve caught wind of rocker Eddie Vedder’s anti-war anthem,  "No More," which he wrote for Donahue’s movie,  the inspiration came directly from Young,  ordinary guy and profoundly wounded vet.

"What we have, " Donahue said of Young’s story,  "is a drama that’s playing itself out in thousands of homes across America behind closed doors."

At first Young was gung-ho.As a 17-year-old Winnetonka junior,  he was an early enlistee in the Army. But a shoulder problem got him discharged.Then,  a few years later,  came Sept. 11,  2001.

With Americans stunned by the airborne terrorist attacks,  the 6-foot redhead called a recruiter and asked to re-enlist.

"I figured it was the best thing a young man who is physically able should do, " he said.

Young was working at a Northland Kmart,  making minimum wage and not sure what the future would bring anyway.

By February 2002,  he passed the physical and,  after basic training,  landed at Fort Hood,  Texas,  as part of the 1st Cavalry Division.

Young expected to be sent to Afghanistan. He was all for the mission to "smoke out" and exact revenge on the "evildoers, " as President Bush called them.

Now,  Young refers to the Afghanistan campaign as a "diversionary tactic" on the way to the wrong war in Iraq.

Young had paid enough attention to understand that the U.S. invasion of Iraq had little to do with Sept. 11,  and he came to the conclusion that the nation had been misled.

While training in the woods of central Texas,  he wondered aloud why the U.S. was in Iraq.

"Shut the ... up,  Young, " officers told him.

Iraq. April 4,  2004. For four days,  Spc. Young and Alpha Company had been at Camp War Eagle on the northeast edge of Sadr City. The densely populated Baghdad slum was simmering. Occupation authorities had shut down the local newspaper. Residents of the Shiite enclave were enraged.

Young mostly monitored radio traffic. He wanted a desk job,  and he got it. But late in the afternoon on this day,  he was told to haul butt on a rescue convoy. Another squad had been pinned down in an alley four miles away.

Several Humvees headed out,  and Young and others packed into the back of an open-air truck. Some trucks had tarps that sheltered soldiers from the view of rooftop snipers. This one didn’t.

While pulling up the rear,  Young’s truck was hit by small arms fire. Within minutes,  six soldiers were wounded. Then a bullet pierced Young’s chest,  below the left collar bone,  severed his spinal cord and lodged in the rear of his Kevlar jacket. Young dropped his rifle and instantly realized that he could not feel a thing.

Young said he owes his life to Staff Sgt. Robert Miltenberger,  who,  by one published account,  heroically treated his soldiers’ wounds in between moments of firing back at snipers.

Amid the sloshing blood,  the screams and the gunfire,  Young,  helpless and limp,  wanted to die.Miltenberger and the rest of Young’s unit made it back to Camp War Eagle. Young was airlifted to Kuwait for emergency surgery then to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. A week later,  Young’s mother,  Cathy Smith,  heard her son waken from a medically induced coma as he lay in bed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington."Mommy, " he cried.

Smith spent three weeks at the hospital with her son. One day she offered to arrange a visit from anyone he wanted to name.

Ralph Nader,  he said,  because Nader was the only presidential candidate that year who had opposed the Iraq war from the beginning and talked about bringing the troops home as soon as possible.

Nader showed up and brought along his friend Donahue. Donahue and Smith talked for hours."I can’t just pat this kid on the head, " Donahue recalled thinking after that meeting. "I just felt that people should see this.

"Young returned home in summer 2004,  and in October of that year he moved into a new home that was fully accessible to those with disabilities. Joining him was a onetime high school friend. They got engaged and decided that together they could handle the challenges of his new life.

Smith had discovered a support group for military families and,  knowing of her son’s rising anger over the war,  she pointed him toward a new group,  Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Their family reflects a delicate balancing act. Young and his mother traveled to Fort Campbell,  Ky.,  to see his younger brother,  Nathan,  as he deployed to Iraq.

"I walk a tightrope because I have to support both of them, " Smith said.

"I spend a lot of time saying how proud I am of Nathan for going to Iraq and fighting his war and telling Tomas how proud I am of his staying home and fighting his war."

After Young married,  he and his bride honeymooned at "Camp Casey" in Crawford,  Texas,  where war critic Cindy Sheehan tried to get the attention of the vacationing president. Sheehan’s son,  Spc. Casey Sheehan,  had died from a gunshot to the head on the same Sadr City rescue mission that had left Young a paraplegic.Young attended other protests and became active with the anti-war veterans group,  which today numbers about 650 former and current service members. He appeared in ads for Democratic candidates. He wheeled through the Capitol to argue against this year’s troop buildup in Iraq.

After only eight months,  his marriage fell apart.This summer,  on Aug. 5,  Young rolled onto the stage at the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago,  introduced by Vedder,  Pearl Jam’s singer. Vedder had spent more than an hour on the phone talking with Young,  then sent Donahue two new songs for the movie.

"I speak for a man who gave for this land, " one of the songs begins.Young’s love of music led to a compilation of anti-war and inspirational songs,  things as varied as Public Enemy and Johnny Cash.The compilation is expected to be released by Sire Records when "Body of War" hits screens. The record company last month announced a gift of $100,000 in Young’s name to Iraq Veterans Against the War.

On a crisp,  sunny fall day,  Young sat at a table in his Kansas City,  North,  house. Four remote-control devices sat side by side in front of him. An ashtray was filled with cigarette butts. Beer bottles lined the kitchen and dining-room walls.Young pulled a binder off a shelf. An inch thick,  it was filled with clippings about "Body of War." The documentary premiered Sept. 11 at the Toronto International Film Festival. Festival audiences voted it the third-best film out of nearly 350 shown and gave Young a resounding ovation. Variety’s review was a little chilly,  but other critics were impressed.

Most days,  Young reads,  plays video games,  listens to music and talks on the phone. At 7 p.m. each weeknight,  he tunes into MSNBC to watch Keith Olbermann,  a fierce fellow critic of President Bush. Fuel for the attitude that keeps Young going.

Young’s mother visits every few days. He has an assistant who helps him travel. Last week he taped a show with Montel Williams in New York. Next month he will attend the American Film Institute Festival in Los Angeles for another screening of "Body of War."

The film deals intimately with Young’s daily struggle to live,  and it intertwines his story with the 2002 congressional debate on the Iraq war resolution.

"He’s really a very good soul, " Donahue said of Young. "What’s important is that the emotional impact of this is so huge. The closer you get to it,  the more dumbstruck you become."

Young’s mood swings can be wide and long,  not helped by his divorce. There are many days when he wonders whether he would have been better off not coming home at all.

Now he is butting heads with the Department of Veterans Affairs over anti-spasticity medication.

By speaking up,  though,  Young has found a new mission -- and he’s earned his share of critics.

"Of course, " he said,  "I support the troops and what they do,  but I question the leadership."

Young said he had been told that his anti-war stance was insincere because he was in a wheelchair.

"Meaning,  I guess,  if I had not been shot and paralyzed I’d either be neutral or I’d support the war, " he said. "But if I’d have been shot and paralyzed in Afghanistan,  I’d be quiet as a mouse."

BOOK DETAILS FIREFIGHT

The story of the Sadr City firefight on April 4,  2004,  in which eight U.S. soldiers died and Tomas Young and 59 others were wounded, is told in a recent book,  The Long Road Home,  by Martha Raddatz,  an ABC correspondent.

[alas-sbpaul]

A couple of images of Gillian Flynn to go with the story posted earlier on my Tumblr page. Photos by me, taken in Chicago, October 2012. Top photo reflects the movie shrine in the basement office of her home at the time, including the signed LOTR poster.

[alas-sbpaul]

Discovering Gillian Flynn

A couple of years ago I traveled to Chicago to spend a little time with Gillian  Flynn, whose third novel, "Gone Girl," was already a runaway bestseller. At the time she was writing a screenplay for "Gone Girl" and worried whether it would fly. She's kind of a girl-next-door from Kansas City who has built an incredibly successful career on the basis of some creepily unexpected thrillers. Now, of course, "Gone Girl" is about to break out on screen -- and Flynn is riding another wave having written the screenplay and worked with director David Fincher.

I think the story I wrote in the fall of 2012 still stands as a credible profile of a perfectly deserving creative talent. One update, just recently Gillian gave birth to child No. 2.

This story first appeared Nov. 6, 2012, in The Kansas City Star magazine.

With best-selling ‘Gone Girl,’ Gillian Flynn has arrived

By STEVE PAUL

The Kansas City Star CHICAGO -- We interrupt the dark and deeply disturbed world of Gillian Flynn to bring you this important image.

Soft afternoon sunlight feathers the living room of her 1893 town house, and the author of the hugely successful literary thriller “Gone Girl,” the breakout book of the Kansas City native’s relatively brief writing career, is nestled up to her 2-year-old son.

“ a zebra and a zipper jacket a fox and an ox are making alphabet soup in a box.”

Yes, mother and son are reading aloud from Richard Scarry’s “ABC Word Book,” instant evidence that in Gillian Flynn’s real life there is no toxic drama, no buried, scarring pathological secrets of the kind that have electrified hundreds of thousands of passionate readers and book buyers from coast to coast.

Those who have read her books are usually surprised to discover that Flynn is, ah, nice — nothing like the tortured women who have populated her three novels, all of which reflect her geographical roots and continued avid interest in the lives of Middle-Westerners.

“It’s hard to believe,” said her uncle, Jackson County Circuit Court Judge Robert Schieber, “this wonderful, thoughtful, beautiful niece I’ve got is one twisted gal.”

Flynn’s hairpin fictional plot turns and her characters’ lurid, scheming lives have launched her into the publishing world’s upper reaches of fame and fortune. Since it came out in June, “Gone Girl” has spent every week near the top of best-seller lists, often at No. 1, sometimes in a running battle with “the book that shall not be named,” as she referred to the “50 Shades of Grey” phenomenon on this Friday in late October. The surge has sent a flurry of readers back to her first two murder-in-the-heartland novels, “Sharp Objects” (2006) and “Dark Places” (2009), both of which have reappeared on paperback and digital top-selling lists.

As if her footprint on the pop-culture landscape weren’t already swelling, Flynn has spent the last couple of months transforming “Gone Girl” for the big screen (Reese Witherspoon producing for 20th Century Fox), and she’s keeping close tabs on a forthcoming film production of “Dark Places,” written and directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner (“Sarah’s Key”) and apparently to star Amy Adams. (Although “Sharp Objects” was also sold to Hollywood and she turned out a screenplay, the project has stalled in a not-unheard of bout of development limbo.)

All of this seems natural if not a little humbling to the auburn-haired Flynn, 41, a soft-spoken, sharp-witted, hardworking talent who spent 10 years writing about movies, books and television for Entertainment Weekly and has seemingly devoted her life as much to pop culture as she does to the warm embrace of family.

In one corner of the dark basement office in her home, an unglamorous few steps from the furnace, Flynn has something of a shrine to Hollywood. An autographed photo she landed directly from Jimmy Stewart. A “Lord of the Rings” poster inscribed to “A genuine nerd!!” by director Peter Jackson, whom she spent several weeks with as he was working on the J.R.R. Tolkien saga in New Zealand. She can’t wait to see “The Hobbit,” which opens next month, although she has a tinge of regret over being out of the movie-journalism loop.

“One of the things I’m looking forward to,” she said, “is when my son gets old enough, sitting down with him and Middle-earth.”

But  Gillian Flynn a nerd?

“Don’t fret,” goes the “Gone Girl” co-narrator, Amy Elliott Dunne, “we’ll sort this out: the true and the not true and the might as well be true.”

• • •

Gillian (pronounced with a hard G) Flynn was in third grade when she wrote a story that seems to have foretold her future career. In “To the Outhouse,” she found a raw kind of middle ground between Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” stories and the brutal reality of unexpurgated Brothers Grimm. (“I grew up loving to be scared,” she said.) Indeed, the girl of the outhouse story met a cruel fate — the wolves prevailed.

“If you’re wondering if I’ve always written dark stories,” she told a Chicago bookstore audience recently, “yes. Starting at age 8.”

Books and movies are much valued in the tree-shaded house in midtown Kansas City’s Coleman Highlands neighborhood where Flynn grew up and where her parents still live. Her parents, Matt and Judith Flynn, were on the faculty, both now retired, at Metropolitan Community College-Penn Valley. He taught speech, theater and film, she taught reading. Their influence is everywhere in their daughter’s life and mindset. No surprise that Gillian turned into a voracious reader. The vast social realism of Charles Dickens? Of course.

“How old was she when she finished ‘Nicholas Nickleby’?” her father wondered aloud one day.

“She was a kid, very young,” his wife said.

Flynn’s mother came from a large family — “I think I had 25 or 26 first cousins,” Judith Flynn said — and Gillian grew up in a pack of cousins of her own; they amount to a sprawling Kansas City clan and support network, and her books are peppered with subtle little shout-outs (the invented Kansas town of Schieberton, for instance, in “Dark Places,” in honor of the Schiebers, her mother’s side of the family).

Gillian went to Kansas City schools (Swinney, Volker, Lincoln Junior High), then Bishop Miege for high school. Painfully shy, she said, she found escape in reading and also found encouraging teachers all along the way. “Writing came naturally to me,” she said, “because I didn’t have to talk.”

She went to the University of Kansas and majored in journalism and English, studying fiction with the late novelist Carolyn Doty.

But early on she also got the family-sponsored education in motion pictures. Her parents took her to theaters for such age-inappropriate experiences as “Alien,” “The Great Santini” and “The Elephant Man.”

“At ‘The Great Santini,’ I had to leave in the middle I was weeping so hard,” she recalled.

At home, she said, her father would typically pop a videotape into the player with an announcement like, “Today we will watch ‘Psycho.’ ”

“He helped me develop my critical eye,” she said of her father. “He’d talk about what worked and what didn’t.”

And Oscar night at the Flynn home was an avid annual event. They still compare ballots each year by long distance.

“Movies,” she said, “have always been taken seriously in my family.”

• • •

After KU, in the early 1990s, Flynn headed to Los Angeles without a job or much of a plan, just the general desire that if something could happen for her in magazine writing, it could happen there. “To me,” her father said, “that was the kind of guts she showed.”

She waited tables. Eventually she landed a job writing for a human-resources trade journal, and two years later she moved to Chicago and Northwestern University, where she got a master’s degree in journalism and met her future husband, Brett Nolan, a lawyer.

She spent a Northwestern quarter in Washington, D.C., and a brief freelance stint at U.S. News & World Report before being lured to the staff roster at Entertainment Weekly in 1998. She worked for the pop- and celebrity-culture magazine in New York and Los Angeles, but after her editors tapped her to replace a departing television critic, she realized she could work anywhere, and she returned to Chicago.

As an entertainment journalist she followed the likes of “the ‘Jackass’ boys” to Costa Rica, lounged on the beach of Cabo San Lucas with Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom during the making of “Troy,” and watched director Terry Gilliam, a “maestro of chaos” (her words), work on the ill-fated “Brothers Grimm” in Prague.

On the side, she started writing a novel. She worked on it nights and weekends at home and whenever and wherever she could as she traveled.

She wasn’t planning to write a mystery novel, but one night she started reading Dennis Lehane’s “Mystic River,” and she read all night till she got to the end. “This is how to do it,” she told herself. Start with a character, go deep and dark and craft a mystery.

The narrator of “Sharp Objects” is a Chicago journalist, but any resemblance to Flynn pretty much stops there. Camille Preaker’s editor sends her to the small town in southeast Missouri where she had grown up and where now two young girls have been murdered. The assignment opens the proverbial Pandora’s box of family secrets, tortured mother-daughter relationships and Camille’s own reckless anxieties, which caused her for a long time to cut words into her skin.

Whatever first-novel creakiness Flynn might have overcome, she accomplished it with an acid-edged style, a rip-roaring pace, what-next story lines and a love of figurative language, to the last of which she credits the influence of California crime novelist Ross Macdonald. She was reading a lot of Macdonald’s books and noticed how he dropped metaphors and similes onto every page. “Everytime I started thinking, am I overdoing this? I’d go, Ross would say it’s OK.”

• • •

Flynn was happy just to have figured out how to write a novel and to have finished it in two years or so of work. Then she realized, in a self-described Pollyannaish moment, “It gets to get published, too?”

Yes it did. And very successfully. “Sharp Objects” won critical raves from her hometown newspaper (this one, that is) and review outlets almost everywhere. It prompted the likes of Stephen King to praise it as an “admirably nasty piece of work.”

As she began casting around for another idea, Flynn decided she didn’t want to write about “another dark, troubled female blah blah blah.”

So she launched into the story of Libby Day, who, as a child in a house outside a small Kansas town, survived the murder of most of her family. (Yes, an echo of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.”) Although her brother had long been in prison for the crime, years later Libby sets out to learn what really happened.

“She was a goodie two-shoes,” Flynn says of the character in that first draft. “She could’ve been an aerobics instructor.”

Brett, her husband and first reader of all of her work, liked the story as it was developing, but, when she asked him what he thought of Libby, he said he couldn’t stand her. She wasn’t believable. Flynn knew it, too. “It just did not work,” she recalled. Brett convinced her to chuck those first 100 pages and start over.

But writing is an evolutionary process, and one grows by making mistakes. “I learned you have to write the book you need to write,” Flynn said, “not the one you think you should write. It was a rough lesson to learn.”

So, of course, Flynn transmogrified Libby Day, and “Dark Places” opens with a chill: “I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly, and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it. It’s the Day blood.”

In December 2008, about the time she finished “Dark Places” and months before it was published, Flynn encountered the recessionary darkness that befell many in her business. Entertainment Weekly laid her off.

It was not unexpected, but it was a blow to her ego and her sense of stability, and that winter unspooled in dread. What was she supposed to do? “I don’t know how to do anything else but write,” was her refrain.

• •

By March of 2009, her path became clearer. “Dark Places” would soon be published, and Random House asked her for another book.

When she launched into “Gone Girl,” Flynn did herself no favors when she envisioned a tale whose freight would be carried by alternating first-person narrators. Developing distinct and believable voices for each was only part of the challenge.

Although her novels are far from autobiographical, her experience sometimes lends them details. In “Gone Girl,” for instance, the central couple’s downward spiral seems to begin when the husband, Nick Dunne, loses his magazine writing job.

It’s the depth of the Great Recession and (cue the fictional invention) Nick convinces his wife to move from the swirl of New York City to his tiny Missouri hometown. His parents are ailing there, and he and his twin sister plan to open a bar. On their fifth anniversary, Amy Dunne disappears, and Nick is suspected of killing her. The narrative shifts back and forth in time, interweaving developments as they unfold in the present and as Amy’s diary entries fill in the couple’s past.

When she needs to pin down specialized details, Flynn taps her family’s expertise and professionals in various fields.

Her older brother, Travis Flynn, a railroad machinist, is her trusty adviser on all things mechanical. One cold winter day, when his sister was writing “Dark Places,” he took her to a Platte County shooting range where she spent the afternoon getting a feel for guns. “She gravitated toward the 12-gauge shotgun,” he said. “She had an idea of what she wanted to work into the story.”

Getting guns right is one of the first rules of crime fiction, Flynn noted. And accompanying that knowledge, after four or five hours of shooting, was a whole lot of recoil pain in her bruised shoulder.

She consults frequently with her uncle, the judge, tossing him questions about court procedures, rules of evidence and the like. “The last explanation not only made perfect sense,” she wrote to him by email during the writing of “Dark Places,” “it really helped me refine this book, and steered me in the right direction.”

And, last year, while working on “Gone Girl” (spoiler alert here): “It’s a high-profile murder case; they’ve finally arrested the guy for killing his wife — is there any chance a judge would grant him bail?”

When Overland Park Police Detective Craig Enloe messaged a high-five to Flynn via Facebook, she turned around and picked his brain, too. “God bless him,” she said. “He answered a billion questions.”

But Flynn is hardly a slave to research. Mostly she draws from a deep well of insight about the modern lives of men and women. She loves Westerns, she said, and in “Sharp Objects” she transferred the genre’s foundation on male “cycles of violence” to explore how they worked among women. “It’s usually not the same; it’s not outright, it’s more psychological. But I think it’s much more damaging ultimately.”

In “Gone Girl” she gets below the skin in ways that are both discomfiting and achingly real. One “Gone Girl” passage that caught social-network traction involved the notion of the Cool Girl:

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want

Flynn also accents her stories with understated but devastating social comment, such as a freakish “Gone Girl” scene that takes place in a homeless squatter camp inside a vacant mall.

Like Nick and Amy Dunne, Flynn and Nolan reached their fifth anniversary just last weekend. (Judge Schieber married them at a big family event at the historic Longview Farm in southeast Kansas City.) As that milestone loomed, it was her husband who tossed out the idea that maybe, just maybe, if one of them would disappear on that day, “we could really move some books.”

As Flynn put it: “It would be the greatest book tie-in ever.”

• •

Success has perks. Someone at General Motors read “Gone Girl” and liked it so much Flynn got a call one day asking if she’d like to drive a new Cadillac for a week. No strings.

“They dropped it off Wednesday,” Flynn said as she walked toward the shiny black XTS sedan on her way to a book-signing event. Its gold interior prompted a comment about Missouri Tigers colors and the irony that she was one of the few members of her sprawling family to go to KU. (Try to reach her uncle, Judge Schieber, on his cellphone and you’ll be greeted by a jubilant rendition of the Tiger march.)

It was a pleasant, slightly chilly blue afternoon in the close-in suburb of Forest Park, where a small crowd of book people filled the storefront shop called Centuries and Sleuths to hear Flynn talk about her book and her life.

They asked the questions she usually gets, including the one that almost always comes up, a version of “That ending — what were you thinking?” Almost everyone who reads the book is startled and unsettled by its gauzy uncertainty. Flynn said she’s a bit baffled by how divisive the subject has been.

“I think I stayed true to something the characters set up for themselves,” she told her audience. “And I hear from book clubs a lot how the ending always prompts another 20 minutes of discussion.”

Someone tossed out a comparison to the darkly drawn serial killer novels of Patricia Highsmith, the British author of “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” Given Flynn’s books’ literary ambitions, a reader of “Gone Girls” and the others also put them alongside 1992’s “The Secret History,” the much-admired first novel by Donna Tartt, rather than a standard-issue mystery series or detective novel.

Maribeth McIntyre, one of the Chicagoans who’d asked her questions and lined up for autographs, chose “Gone Girl” for her seasonal book club in January.

“This is one of those things that’s definitely not a formula book,” McIntyre said. “It’s great.”

• •

Before leaving the store and driving her temporary Cadillac into an inexplicable suburban traffic jam, Flynn chatted a few minutes with her husband’s uncle, Tom Nolan, and his wife. The talk, of course, turned to Flynn’s son — his name is Flynn Nolan — who just recently turned 2. Flynn proudly tells them of a defining moment in his young life — and hers.

The first sentence he spoke aloud, she said, was “read books.”

“There’s nothing in the world he’d rather be doing.”

Music to her ears. Like mother, like son.

Flynn is facing an end-of-the-year deadline to finish a first draft of the “Gone Girl” screenplay. “It’s too long, and I’m trying to figure out what to cut.”

What happens after that, she’s not sure. Will the studio suits like it? Will it ever get made? Will the decks be cleared to start writing her next novel? Right now she owes her publisher two more books. And she has also agreed to write a book for young adults, a booming publishing niche, sometime down the road.

When one of her readers at the bookstore appearance asked what her next book would be, she replied the only way she could: “I’m sure it will be dark psychology. I’m not going to write about shopping and boys.”

Beyond that project, she has high hopes that “Gone Girl” will see the silver screen sooner rather than later. And when it does, she already has a plan. She will take her father, the movie historian, to Hollywood for the premiere. Another precious family moment.

Said the nice girl who’s not anything like a gone girl: “It’ll be the best father-daughter date ever.”

Here are a couple of exerpts......

EXCERPT: ‘Dark Places’

I pushed a foot out from under my sheets, but couldn’t bring myself to connect it to the floor. I am, I guess, depressed. I guess I’ve been depressed for about twenty-four years. I can feel a better version of me somewhere in there — hidden behind a liver or attached to a bit of spleen within my stunted, childish body — a Libby that’s telling me to get up, do something, grow up, move on. But the meanness usually wins out. My brother slaughtered my family when I was seven. My mom, two sisters, gone: bang bang, chop chop, choke choke. I didn’t really have to do anything after that, nothing was expected.

I inherited $321,374 when I turned eighteen, the result of all those well-wishers who’d read about my sad story, do-gooders whose hearts had gone out to me. Whenever I hear that phrase and I hear it a lot, I picture juicy doodle-hearts, complete with bird-wings, flapping toward one of my many crap-ass childhood homes, my little-girl self at the window, waving and grabbing each bright heart, green cash sprinkling down on me, thanks, thanks a ton! When I was still a kid, the donations were placed in a conservatively managed bank account, which, back in the day, saw a jump about every three-four years, when some magazine or news station ran an update on me. Little Libby’s Brand New Day: The Lone Survivor of the Prairie Massacre Turns a Bittersweet 10. (Me in scruffy pigtails on the possum-pissed lawn outside my Aunt Diane’s trailer. Diane’s thick tree-calves, exposed by a rare skirt, planted in the yellow grass behind me.) Brave Baby Day’s Sweet 16! (Me, still miniature, my face aglow with birthday candles, my shirt too tight over breasts that had gone D-cup that year, comic book sized on my tiny frame, ridiculous, porny.)

I’d lived off that cash for more than thirteen years, but it was almost gone.

EXCERPT: ‘Gone Girl’

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men — friends, coworkers, strangers — giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much — no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version — maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)”

To reach Steve Paul, senior writer and arts editor, call 816-234-4762 or send email to [email protected] . Follow him at Twitter.com/sbpaul .