Crime

August 22, 2025September 1, 2025

Swimming Through the Library

John Cheever came up with an interesting premise for one of his greatest short stories.

In “The Swimmer,” Cheever’s protagonist, Neddy Merrill, lounges, hungover, poolside at a friend’s home on a Sunday afternoon.

It’s a muted gathering, suburbanites recovering from the night before, questioning the wisdom of drinking so much.

As he sits there, Neddy hatches a plan: he will swim home.

**“The Swimmer” appears in Cheever’s Pulitzer-winning collection. Click on the cover to order.**

All of the homes in his neighborhood have pools, so he will follow a chain of them to home.

It’s an odd story that takes a surreal twist and ends in a gut-punch of sorrow and devastation.

If you haven’t read it, you should. It’s a brilliant piece of work.

Last week, I decided to follow Neddy’s lead, but with my own twist.

I never learned to swim and few homes in Massachusetts have pools anyway.

But I found myself in my former town for a doctor’s appointment.

When I was done, it was a brilliant summer day and I thought, “I’m going to do a Neddy.”

Instead of driving straight home, I decided I would go home via the libraries in each of the small towns that freckle the South Shore.

Every library has a Friends of the Library book sale. Maybe I’d find some books for sale — books for which I have no more room in my house (but that’s another story).

Here’s some of what I found.

. . . . . . . .

John O’Hara, The Big Laugh (Random House, $4.95)

Before you get all excited about that bargain price, I should point out that $4.95 was the list price when the book was published — in 1962.

I got this one at the Scituate Library, which has the best second-hand store of all the South Shore libraries.

I’ve read a lot of John O’Hara — a lot. Yet I’d never encountered this novel. How did I miss it on the “Books by John O’Hara” pages?

O’Hara seems to be largely forgotten today, which is a shame. He’s been credited with sort of inventing the New Yorker short story, and was an early and prolific contributor to that magazine.

His writing was tight. I’ve read some stories of his that were all dialogue, yet he managed to describe without describing.

He’s one of those writers I encourage students to read. There’s nothing flaccid in his work. Reading him [and James M Cain, Robert B Parker, Michael Connelly and others], I tell my class, is like giving your mind a suppository. You empty your brain of needless words, in the manner of a colon cleanse.

In addition to his terrific short stories, I’ve read his big novels — Ten North Frederick and From the Terrace — but The Big Laugh was a tremendous surprise. It told a stirring tale over the course of two decades and never did it drag. Turned out to be a quick read, unlike some of his other novels, which went on too long.

It’s the story of a shithead who goes from black sheep of his family to one of the reigning movie stars in the early days of talking films.

Don’t wait for a redemption arc, though the main character does prove himself to be more likable by tale’s end. There are some surprises along the way, and O’Hara keeps the story moving. He was a master at that.

Now to folks of the current generation, whatever your moniker may be: you did not invent sex.

Same goes for my generation. We Baby Boomers like to think that various carnal acts were unknown until our arrival and that we invented many non-Euclidean variations on the basic premise.

So here is a novel written by a man who was there in the 1920s and 1930s when the novel takes place. And the characters fuck like monkeys. There’s a lot of fucking here.

A lot.

I was a little surprised — not that people sportfucked so much back then but that the novel was so frank, being as it was published in 1962.

That’s either a note of caution or encouragement.

For me, I’m always happy to find a book by a favorite author that I have not read. The presence of so much fucking is like finding a bonus track on an album.

. . . . . . . .

Ben Mezerich, The Midnight Ride (Grand Central, $29)

This one caught my eye at the Norwell library.

I knew of Mezerich from his nonfiction books — The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House, two books I have not read.

But he’d always gotten good reviews and I was curious how he was as a novelist.

Turns out he is deeply entertaining.

This novel takes place in Boston, and those sorts of stories are always of interest to those of us who trudge through that insane city’s streets daily.

The book also focuses on a local mystery — the unsolved theft of priceless artwork from the Isabella Gardner museum decades ago. It brings together a plucky card-counter who makes her living at the gaming tables of the Encore casino, and an ex-con trying to start over.

These protagonists — Hailey Gordon the card counter and Nick Patterson the ex-convict — have an unusual meet-cute: it happens over a dead body in a hotel room.

The Gardner theft is only part of the story. The rest is steeped in Boston’s rich history and, as the title suggests, Paul Revere plays a part.

It has echoes of The DaVinci Code and National Treasure, but it’s a lot more fun.

Hailey and Nick returned in The Mistress and the Key, which came out last fall.

Looks like it’ll be back to the library-swim to find that one.

. . . . . . . .

Mario Puzo, The Fortunate Pilgrim (Random House, $25.23)

I read Puzo’s The Godfather not long after it was published and always considered it kind of trashy, because of one particular narrative thread.

Turns out Francis Ford Coppola felt the same way about that part of the book and it was a reason he initially balked on making a film of Puzo’s book.

We both were repulsed by the subplot that led to a character paying for his girlfriend’s surgery. He had this young woman go under the knife so she would be tightened up — in the non-Archie Bell & the Drells meaning — giving, presumably, greater sexual pleasure to both of them.

As I learned more about Puzo’s back story, I’d heard of his first two novels, The Dark Arena and The Fortunate Pilgrim. Both were tagged as “literary fiction” and both were failures.

So he wrote The Godfather strictly to make money. It was a paycheck book, so the trashier the better.

(In the years since, I’ve relaxed more and found The Godfather to be a generally entertaining book and I skip over the surgery scenes.)

I happened across The Fortunate Pilgrim at the library in Hanover and grabbed it immediately.

I’m not sure I’d say this was literary fiction, but it was a compelling story of New York’s Italian population in the 1920s and 1930s. Putting this story next to Puzo’s own, we can see the elements of autobiography.

The primary character is Lucia Santa, an emigre from the farms of Italy, who comes to the New World and is deposited into poverty in Manhattan.

She marries, has children, and is left to raise a family herself on the mean streets. It’s a tough, often tragic, life.

Puzo made no secret of the fact that Lucia is based on his mother and that the protagonist of his most famous novel, Vito Corleone, is also based on his mother.

It’s a good and enthralling novel that shows how much American lives have changed in the last century. The violence and the spectre of death look over the shoulder of us all.

This is an entertaining story and becomes a tribute to the immigrants who built America.

But it also has some irritating touches. Puzo has a group of elderly Italian women who sit on the tenement stoop and form sort of a Greek chorus. Puzo calls them crones. One use of “crone” is probably okay. He uses it six or seven times over the course of a couple pages early in the book.

Consider this your crone warning.

. . . . . . . .

I couldn’t go by the Norwell library without stopping at John Cheever’s grave.

A few years ago, I discovered that his body rests just a few miles from my house, and across the street from The Tinker’s Son, a Irish pub where my youngest son has worked for the last four years.

Odd, to find one of your literary heroes buried just six feet away from a parking lot serving a convenience store.

Fortunately, Cheever was honored by a local denizen of business who built The Cheever Tavern adjacent to his grave.

I have the feeling he would approve of the place named in his honor. The food and the booze are excellent.

If you’re nearby, visit the place and seek out his grave. Then you can say you were truly (an) over a Cheever.

Back to the swim.

I recently picked up a few more books during my swims– State of Wonder by Ann Patchett and a Pete Townshend novel. I have a lot of good reading ahead.

Come on in; the water is fine.

December 1, 2017December 26, 2017

Forget His Name

When Charles Manson was a boy, his mother traded him for a pitcher of beer. He was fetched home by an uncle and returned to his mother, who merely shrugged. She was a prostitute and a small-time thief who passed trade secrets to her son.

Manson was jailed for the first time at 13, for burglary. By the time he was in his early 30s, he’d already spent half his life behind bars.

As he was being released from California’s Terminal Island prison in 1967, he panicked and asked the jailer not to turn him out into the world. The guard laughed, but Manson was serious. Prison was the only real home he’d known.

When the lifelong con man hit the streets, much had changed since 1960, the year he had last tasted freedom. It was the Summer of Love and Manson drifted to San Francisco, epicenter of America’s cultural revolution.

This is an earlier version of what became an essay for The Conversation. To read that piece, click on the logo above.

There he found docile flower children — easy marks, even for an inept crook. He adopted the hirsute look of the tribe, recycled some of the Scientology babble he’d picked up in the joint, and started building a “family” of followers drunk on his flattery. He preyed on lost and damaged young women — wounded birds — and made them think they were beautiful, as long as they followed him.

He sought fame. He deserved fame, he reasoned, and he needed to make the world notice him. “His followers had no idea that Charlie was obsessed with becoming famous,” biographer Jeff Guinn wrote. “He told them that his goal, his mission, really, was to teach the world a better way to live through his songs.”

He figured the fastest route to fame was through music. He knew a few chords and could reasonably mimic the peace, love and flowers ethos in his lyrics. If he looked the part and acted the part, he could bask in the fame he felt he was owed.

He brought his “family” of damaged goods to Los Angeles and sent his women to scout for men who could either help Charlie find fame or money. While hitchhiking one day, a couple of the girls found an easy mark: the big-hearted, generous and sex-obsessed drummer for the Beach Boys, Dennis Wilson. He picked them up, took them home for milk, cookies and sex, then left for a recording session. When Dennis returned home in the middle of the night, the girls were still there, along with Charlie Manson and 15 other young women, all mostly nude. For a sex junkie like Dennis, it was paradise.

Manson saw Dennis — and his Beach Boy brothers Brian and Carl — as his entrée to the music business and international fame. Although the group’s star was dimming by the late ’60s — they were no longer the hip boy band they had once been — it was at least a moccasin in the music industry’s door. Through his time as Dennis Wilson’s roommate, Charlie had gotten to know record producer Terry Melcher, Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas, Neil Young and Frank Zappa.

Click on Manson’s guitar to go to the iTunes playlist for my book ‘Everybody Had an Ocean,’ which features Manson singing ‘Look at Your Game, Girl.’

Convinced he would make Charlie — whom he called the Wizard — into a star, Dennis urged his brothers to record the fledgling singer at the Beach Boys studio in Brian Wilson’s home. Wherever Charlie went, of course, his “family” followed. Marilyn Wilson, married to Brian at the time, had the bathrooms fumigated after every session, fearing the filthy girls were spreading disease. (And they were, though not the kind that showed up on toilet seats. Dennis ended up footing, for the Manson women, what was jokingly referred to as the largest gonorrhea bill in history.

When Dennis’s efforts bore no fruit, Manson glommed onto Melcher, who had produced the Byrds and Paul Revere and the Raiders. Melcher and Wilson introduced Manson to L.A.’s music society, largely through lavish parties at the estate on Cielo Drive that Melcher shared with actress Candace Bergen. At Cass Elliot’s parties, Manson played whirling dervish on the dance floor, entertaining all with his spastic monkey moves.

The Beach Boys’ 1969 album, ’20/20′ featured a song called ‘Never Learn Not to Love,’ which Dennis Wilson adapted from Manson’s song ‘Cease to Exist.’

When Neil Young heard Charlie sing his compositions during a drop-in at Dennis Wilson’s house, he called Mo Ostin, president of Warner-Reprise Records, to urge the boss to give the guy a listen. Young warned him that Charlie was a little out there and spewed songs more than sang him. But still, Young insisted there was something there.

And there was. Manson’s voice was good enough that he had a reasonable expectation of getting a recording contract. His original compositions were good enough to be recorded: The Beach Boys adapted one of his songs into something called “Never Learn Not to Love,” which they performed on the supremely wholesome “Mike Douglas Show.”

Manson’s lyrics, unfortunately, were mostly honky gibberish, bad enough to justify Ostin’s rejection and for Melcher to tell Charlie he couldn’t get him the record contract he so desperately wanted.

But it was too late to stop now. Charlie had drunk from the trough of fame. He mingled with rock stars and thought he was entitled to be a rock star.

The American Dream used to be described thus: Come to America with nothing and, with the great freedoms and opportunity offered by the country, exit life with prosperity. It has also been described as simply the ideal of freedom — of living in a free and robust society, with nothing to impede people but an open road.

At some point, this changed. In the post-war world of abundant leisure and instant gratification, an ethos of opportunity, hard work and the gradual accumulation of wealth fell away, replaced by a longing for instant fame and fortune. Perhaps it was a result of the conspicuous wealth so visible on the new medium of television. Maybe these new celebrities burned so much brighter because their images slipped through the cathode ray into millions of American homes, turning the house into the new movie theater.

Either way, for millions today, the American Dream is simply the delirious pursuit of fame. Ask a school child what he wants and it’s simply to be famous — by any means necessary.

Charlie Manson was an early avatar for this new concept of the American Dream. He sought fame at any cost. He tried to achieve celebrity through music and, when he didn’t reach that goal, he turned to crime. Sure, he would spend 61 of his 83 years in prison. But the cameras rolled, the papers were printed, the books were sold. No one would ever forget his name.

Terry Melcher and Candace Bergen lived at 10050 Cielo Drive before Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski moved in.

Manson achieved his goal, becoming so famous that his name replaced those of his victims. The crimes became known as the Manson Murders.

Look to the media today to see Manson’s ideological descendants, thirsting for fame at any cost. Some don’t just risk humiliation, they court it. Remember the early rounds of “American Idol” with jarringly dreadful performances giving the reprehensible “singers” their 15 seconds of fame?

Other, more deadly offspring, could be the boys who shoot up schools and coffee shops and prayer-group meetings. They might be dead, they might have left a trail of destruction in their wake and they aren’t mourned. But like Manson, they are remembered. That’s certainly more than most failed con men can claim.

Unfortunately, Manson achieved his goal: fame. Perhaps the best way to honor his victims is to forget his name.

Recommended reading: I don’t reference it in this piece, but I’d like to mention a great book by Ed Sanders called The Family (Dutton, 1971). This was one of the most important books in my life — not because of Manson, but because it made me want to be a writer. I know the book has had the same effect on a lot of other people. Of course, any dive into literature about Manson includes Helter Skelter (WW Norton, 1974) by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry. Jeff Guinn’s biography, Manson (Simon and Schuster, 2013) is superb.