Well, truth be told, it wasn’t my very first book.  My first book was in middle school.  I had read every Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew at least twice.  I loved the stories, but more than anything else, I loved the phraseology.  At my current age of sixty-six I can still remember well the sensations, lying on my fully made bed, propped up by pillows, both windows open with a gentle cross breeze carrying the sounds and smells of summer through my bedroom…a distant lawn mower…neighborhood kids playing…and the sweet smell of freshly mowed grass.  I loved being transported from my world to that of Frank and Joe Hardy, Chet Morton and Nancy Drew.

I loved it so much that at age twelve or thirteen I tried to mimic the style and penned my own Hardy Boys novel, a full two-hundred handwritten pages.  To the best of my knowledge, other than my dear mother, no other being ever lay eyes on that manuscript and it has long since disappeared into the mist of my personal history.

The next effort came about thirty-years later in the mid 80’s.  In my eyes it was not worthy of other eyes so to this day it remains in a canvas bag on a shelf in my garage, yellow, brittle and incomplete.  For all intents and purposes my writing career was over.

It would be another thirty-years before my next attempt.  Two years ago, stuck on a tarmac somewhere, I finished the book I was reading.  At a loss for entertainment and facing a three-hour delay in place, I turned to the only means possible of leaving that plane…my imagination.  Purely to escape the moment, I determined to attempt a descriptive scene.  With no concept of plot, my only goal was to author a detailed, realistic sequence for purposes of a mental exercise.  That scene turned out to be the prologue for The MIT Murders.