Desert City Diva by Corey Lynn Fayman
ISBN: 9780727885487
Severn House Publishers, January 2016
$28.95
San Diego, CA –
Award-winning musician and multimedia designer Corey Lynn Fayman
announces the release of his mystery novel, Desert City Diva
(ISBN 9780727885487), the third book in the
crime series featuring the guitar-playing San Diego private
investigator, Rolly Waters. Desert City Diva follows the
second novel in the series, Border Field Blues (ISBN
9781477600023), winner of the 2013 Hollywood Book Festival Award for
Genre-Based Fiction and a finalist in the Mystery category of
ForeWord Reviews 2013 Book of the Year Award, along with Fayman’s
critically-acclaimed first Rolly Waters novel, Black’s Beach
Shuffle (ISBN 9780595402670).
Rolly Waters
has many reasons to regret going out for Mexican food at 2:30 in the
morning, not least because then he would never have met golden-eyed
orphan and dance-club DJ, Macy Starr – possibly the most
infuriatingly unpredictable and secretive client he has ever taken
on. Macy wants Rolly to find out what happened to the young woman she
knew as Aunt Betty, who rescued Macy as a child and then disappeared
without a trace. The only clue Macy has to go on is a curious
one-stringed guitar called a Diddley Bow and a black and white
photograph of a young girl with a man in a baseball uniform. Rolly’s
investigation leads to a strange world of alien-obsessed cults, a
mysterious desert hideaway known as Slab City, and a 20-year-old
unsolved murder case. But how can he solve the mystery if he can’t
even trust his own client?
Told with
dark humor about an unlikely and unusual hero, Desert
City Diva
captures the fun, suspense, and unusual characters that
readers have come to expect from a Rollie Waters mystery.
“I hope readers will have as much fun reading Desert City Diva
as I did writing it,” said Fayman. “I can’t believe I found a
way to combine UFOs, apocalypse cults, electronic dance music DJs,
off-the-grid hippies, professional baseball players, and a magical
homemade guitar into one mystery novel, but I’m very happy with the
results. It’s not everyday a character like Macy Starr walks into
your life, but I’m glad I was able to introduce her to my friend
Rolly Waters. As usual, he gets in way over his head, but I think
this case will resonate with him, and readers, for a long time after
its conclusion.”
Corey Lynn Fayman has worked as a keyboard
player, sound technician, and interactive designer. He holds a
B.A. in English, with a specialization in creative writing and poetry
from UCLA, and an M.A. in Educational Technology from San Diego State
University. Fayman spent three years as a sound technician and
designer at the nationally lauded Old Globe Theater, where he
received several nominations and a Drama-Logue Award for his
theatrical sound design. He lives in San Diego,
California, and is the author of two previous Rolly Waters mysteries,
including Blacks Beach Shuffle
and Border Field Blues,
which won the Genre Award at the 2013 Hollywood Book Festival.
Frequently
Asked Questions
1.
Desert
City Diva
is your third Rolly Waters mystery. What can you tell us about Rolly
and how does this book continue the traditions established by the
other novels in the series?
Rolly Waters is a cozy mystery hero
living in a crime noir world. He’s overweight, over forty, and
lives in a small granny flat next door to his mother. He’s a
talented guitar player and musician whose glory days are behind him,
so he makes ends meet by working part-time as a private investigator.
He doesn’t carry a gun and would probably shoot himself in the foot
if he had one. His chief virtues as an investigator are his ability
to make friends with almost anyone and an absolute dedication to
helping his clients, even when their cases lead him into dangerous
situations and criminal activity he never envisioned when he first
took it on.
Music has always been a part of all the
Rolly Waters mystery novels, but in Desert City Diva it’s become
central to solving the case. A special musical instrument and the
‘celestial’ notes it plays are keys to the mystery. It’s the
first time Rolly’s had to call on both his musical and
investigative skills to solve a case.
2.
In
Desert
City Diva, Rolly
takes on a missing person’s case from a golden-eyed
orphan and dance-club DJ named Macy Starr. What’s special about
Macy and why is the search for the woman who raised her so important
to her?
Macy is a willful and independent young
woman who’s worked hard to create her own sense of identity. She’s
never known her biological parents. She grew up as the daughter of
the chief of police on an Indian reservation, but she’s not Native
American. She knows nothing of her parents, or where she came from,
except that she has some sort of ‘golden child’ status with her
adoptive father. That didn’t help much on the reservation she grew
up on though, where she was viewed as a bit of a freak. She’s taken
that outsider view to heart in her professional life and created
different DJ personas she uses to express herself.
Macy is almost completely lacking in
impulse control in both her speech and actions. Whatever comes into
her head, she says it or acts on it. Rolly finds this attractive.
It’s how he used to be. But it frustrates him too, and he knows
from experience it can lead to all sorts of trouble.
3.
The
only clues Macy can provide Rolly are a curious one-stringed guitar
called a Diddley Bow and a black and white photograph of a young girl
with a man in a baseball uniform. What is the significance of these
items, and why did you choose the Diddley Bow as the key to solving
the mystery surrounding Macy’s case?
I can’t remember exactly where I
learned about the Diddley Bow, but I used it in the story because
it’s a simple instrument that non-musicians can pick up pretty
quickly to thump out some basic melodies. It’s important to the
story because I needed an instrument that the members of a UFO cult
could all play together simultaneously. They use the Diddley Bows to
play alternate tunings of ‘celestial’ notes that will reflect
their ancient heritage and serve as a beacon to interplanetary
aliens. I didn’t make that part up. There are people out there who
believe this stuff. Search the Internet for information on the
Solfeggio Harmonies.
The Diddley Bow is a real musical
instrument. It’s a primitive one-stringed guitar that was first
developed by sharecroppers in the American South, who were trying to
recreate instruments they knew from Africa. The instrument interests
Rolly because he’s a Blues aficionado, and Diddley Bows were one of
the first instruments used in the development of Blues music.
The photograph laminated to the back of
Macy’s Diddley Bow is the only connection she may have to her
biological parents. She knows the woman is her Aunt Betty, who
disappeared many years earlier and may or may not be her real aunt.
Macy doesn’t know who the baseball player is, but Rolly recognizes
him at once as a famous major-leaguer and local celebrity.
4.
Desert
City Diva
takes place on an Indian reservation in an area near the Anza Borrego
Desert. How integral is this setting to this particular Rolly Waters
mystery and why did you place the story in this environment?
We have quite a few Indian reservations
in San Diego County. They are much smaller than the Navajo or Hopi
reservations of Arizona, but they are true reservations, and as such
they are independent sovereign entities with their own government and
a police force just like the larger reservations. Many of them are
located in the mountains of east San Diego County, which is still
largely rural, and the kind of area where UFO cults might develop
without attracting much attention. Legal and criminal issues can get
complicated, as county sheriffs do not have authority on reservation
lands and vice-versa. Many of the tribes have built casinos now, and
that provides some tension related to the character’s motivations,
as well.
5.
Can you describe some of the research you did when you were writing
Desert
City Diva?
My last two novels were inspired by
fortuitous driving adventures with my wife. In the case of Desert
City Diva, the drive took place in the southern desert of
California where we happened upon two places with rather interesting
names – Salvation Mountain and Slab City. The first turned out
to be a remarkable monument to one man’s religious passions, and
the second is an off-the-grid gathering of hippies, retirees and
social misfits who have chosen to live together in an ad hoc desert
community where they resist both the comforts and confines of modern
society. Most of the residents live in trailers or RVs, which are
parked on slab foundations left over from a U.S. Army fort used in
WWII. Slab City residents have a library, a café, a modern sculpture
garden, and a stage where they hold musical jam sessions every week.
Once I found out about those jam sessions, I knew I had to get Rolly
Waters out there to play his guitar.
The other thing I did some research on
was the concept of sacred harmonies and the use of alternate musical
scales, much of which is quite interesting and some of which is quite
silly. There was also a bit of San Diego history I had to look into,
such as the mini-gold rush in our mountains in the 1870s, as well as
local Indian reservations and their history. San Diego County was
where the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide took place in 1997, so I did
quite a bit of research on that and other suicide cults, to help me
understand how something like that can happen.
6.
Are you working on another Rolly Waters mystery? If so, what can you
tell us about it?
I’ve sent Rolly to the far edges of
San Diego County in my last two books, so I’ve decided to bring him
back home for his next adventure. Most of the action takes place in
and around San Diego Bay. The jumping off point is the very real U.S.
Navy Marine Mammal Program, which has trained captive dolphins and
sea lions to perform tasks such as mine identification, sea floor
retrieval and enemy diver detection. The story centers on a Navy
diver whose body was never recovered after a training accident twenty
years earlier, but who seems to be taking revenge in the present day
on some of the people who knew him. It also works in some of the
recent controversy surrounding sea mammal captivity at Sea World and
other animal water parks. The working title is Ballast Point
Breakdown.
