Larry Karp - R.I.P.

I just heard about the passing of Larry Karp.

Janet Rudolph posted this - http://mysteryreadersinc.blogspot.com/2016/10/larry-karp-rip.html


Larry was a contributor to Meanderings and Muses over the years.  I always enjoyed our visits and his pieces always led us into interesting discussions. 

Our conversations would come to an end, as conversations do, but I always knew they would pick right back up again at some point.

I'm sad to know that won't ever happen again.

I know many of you were fans of Larry's, so here are the links to the pieces he wrote for Meanderings and Muses.

Enjoy -

http://www.meanderingsandmuses.com/2010/05/my-flirtation-with-fame-by-larry-karp.html


http://www.meanderingsandmuses.com/2011/11/unorthodox-pair-odocs-by-larry-karp.html


http://www.meanderingsandmuses.com/2012/07/larry-karp-tells-us-story.html


You will be missed, Larry . . . Thanks for all the stories, my friend.

Larry Karp tells us a story

Larry Karp grew up in Paterson, NJ and New York City.  He practiced perinatal medicine (high-risk pregnancy care) and wrote general nonfiction books and articles for 25 years, then, in 1995, he left medical work to begin a second career, writing mystery novels.  The backgrounds and settings of Larry's mysteries reflect many of his interests, including musical antiques, medical-ethical issues, and ragtime music.

      During his first career, Larry served as Medical Director of Swedish Medical Center's Reproductive Genetics Facility and delivered the first baby in the Pacific Northwest conceived through in vitro fertilization. He drew on that experience to write A PERILOUS CONCEPTION, the story of an overly-ambitious young obstetrician in the Pacific Northwest, secretly trying to make medical history by producing the world's first IVF baby. Unfortunately, that sort of secret is hard to keep, and the upshot was blackmail and murder.

     Other mystery novels by Larry Karp include an historical mystery trilogy (The Ragtime Kid, The King of Ragtime, The Ragtime Fool), First Do No Harm, The Midnight Special, Scamming the Birdman, and The Music Box Murders.

     Larry's books have been finalists for the Daphne and Spotted Owl Awards, and have appeared on the Los Angeles Times and Seattle Times Fiction Best-Seller Lists.

Let me tell you a story...

            Some people have trouble giving a straight account of events.  They seem unable to resist the temptation to improve upon what the real world presents, whether or not they declare their own accounts to be fiction.   One such person was Sanford Brunson (Brun) Campbell, who was known as The Ragtime Kid, or as he sometimes liked to call himself, "The Original Ragtime Kid of the 1890s."  By any name or measure, he was quite a character.

            Brun certainly led a ragtime life.  At 15, he ran away from his home in Arkansas City, Kansas to learn to play ragtime piano from Scott Joplin, in Sedalia, Missouri, and for some years after that, he worked as an itinerant pianist throughout the midwest and the south, entertaining customers in every bar, restaurant, hotel, brothel, amusement park, and riverboat where he could snatch a gig.  When jazz replaced ragtime as the national popular music craze, Brun followed his father into the barber trade, married at least three times, brought up three daughters, and moved to Venice, California, where he cut hair (by all reports, very badly) at his City Hall Barber Shop.  But  in the 1940s, his musical genre showed signs of reviving, and the old man hopped aboard the bandwagon, grabbed the steering wheel, and for the remaining decade of his life, led the way in bringing back ragtime, resuscitating the reputation of his old teacher and hero, Scott Joplin, and not incidentally, doing his best to acquaint the country with the work and accomplishments of one Brun Campbell.

            Brun's particular style of ragtime was very different from that of Joplin, whose goal was to make over the syncopated folk music of his early life into a classical form.  But in the places Brun played, the music had to be loud and fast, and in his compositions and performances, he worked in  the rough-and-ready barrelhouse style of ragtime.   Fortunately, Brun was recorded at the piano during the 1940s, and several ragtime musicians have told me that for them, Brun's music was a revelation, representing a missing link of sorts in the genre.

            But Brun drives historians bat-crazy.  Most of what we know about him comes from his own narratives, and he was without doubt a legend in his own mind.  Revision and proofing were not in the man's job description; one and done was his style.  Given that he wrote his accounts some fifty years after his pianistic career, the inconsistencies are understandable, if no less maddening.  In multiple renderings of the same event,, he had a striking habit of being one unit off.  Did it really happen in 1907 or 1908?  On June 5 or June 6?

            In addition, many of Brun's accounts of ragtime history are clearly embellished, and some are out-and-out falsehoods.  The most egregious example was his story that at Scott Joplin's funeral, there was a procession of carriages, each vehicle bearing a poster with the name of one of Joplin's rags.  But when Joplin died in 1917, he was nearly broke and forgotten, and was buried in an unmarked grave.  I figure Brun told it the way he thought it should have been.

            I was sure I had Brun dead to rights when I read about his having "played for Teddy Roosevelt and his staff in the Parlor of the Lee Hotel at Oklahoma City while he was there with his Rough Riders."  Brun didn't specify a date, and since his peripatetic career ranged from about 1900 to about 1907 or 1908, and Roosevelt became president in the fall of 1901, and thereby was not likely to have been in Oklahoma at a Rough Rider reunion after that, I wondered whether we had another whopper here.  But no, history records such an event on July 2, 1900, at the Lee Hotel in Oklahoma City.  True, there's no proof Brun really was there, but there's no proof he wasn't.

            Brun died in California in 1952.  Though I never met him, I think I got to know him pretty well through written histories, newspaper interviews he gave, and letters he wrote in the 'forties to Jerry Heermans, a young ragtime pianist in Portland, Oregon.  I said earlier that he was quite a character - such an irresistible character in fact that I plugged him in as protagonist in two books of my ragtime historical-mystery trilogy.  At 15, he was The Ragtime Kid.  At 67, a year before he died, he was The Ragtime Fool.  We spent some five years in close company.  When I finished the trilogy, I felt as though I'd lost an old friend.

            But it's a strange old world.  Last spring, I received an email from a man who claimed to have in his possession certain belongings of the late Brun Campbell, and when the man sent me photos,  I darn near swallowed my gum.  There were copies of When Ragtime Was Young, a personal history I knew Brun had been working on, had hoped to get published, but to his bitter disappointment, hadn't succeeded.  There were musical compositions unknown to the ragtime community, tunes Brun had composed during the 1940s.  There was a large collection of correspondence, including letters from Mrs. Scott Joplin and W. C. Handy.  Brun's business records were there, along with books, magazines with articles by and about our boy, and some personal effects.  Within a week, all this stuff was in my sweaty hands.

            How was it the man with the treasure had happened to contact me?  He knew nothing about ragtime, had never heard of Brun Campbell, had googled his name, and up had come The Ragtime Kid and The Ragtime Fool, by Larry Karp.  Whose website includes a contact link.

            I could only laugh.  Of all people, the work of the Great Ragtime Storyteller had found its way to another storyteller, someone who would find it impossible to resist editing Brun's admittedly rambling and unfocused narratives into something publishable.  His story, not history.  The tales of an old man in a barbershop in California, regaling his uneasy customers as they watched him emphasize one or another point by waving a pair of scissors or a razor much too close to an ear or a nose.  One of Brun's customers seventy years ago was a young Ray Bradbury.  Did you know that?  Not many people do.  Bradbury did quite the little hatchet job on Brun in a book titled Death is a Lonely Business. 

            But in the last analysis, Brun was a dedicated ragtime pioneer, and a fascinating and entertaining yarnspinner.  I hope one day, sooner rather than later, you'll be able to enjoy his account  of a singular life in a world long vanished.  Maybe Brun might evenl become the legend he always hoped to be.   He'd sure love that.

            Want to hear Brun Campbell play ragtime as only he could?   This is his Essay in Ragtime originally recorded during the late 1940s.  

    

An Unorthodox Pair O'Docs by Larry Karp

     Larry Karp grew up in Paterson, NJ and New York City. He practiced perinatal medicine (high-risk pregnancy care) and wrote general nonfiction books and articles for 25 years, then, in 1995, he left medical work to begin a second career, writing mystery novels. The backgrounds and settings of Larry's mysteries reflect many of his interests, including musical antiques, medical-ethical issues, and ragtime music. His most recent book, The Ragtime Fool, the third work in a ragtime-based historical mystery trilogy, is set during the ragtime revival of the 1950s.  Larry lives with his wife Myra in Seattle.

 
     Other mystery novels by Larry Karp include The King of Ragtime and The Ragtime Kid (the first and second books in the trilogy), First Do No Harm, The Midnight Special, Scamming the Birdman, and The Music Box Murders. Larry's mysteries have been finalists for the Daphne Du Maurier and Spotted Owl Awards, and have appeared on the Los Angeles Times and Seattle Times Best-Seller Lists.  The Ragtime Kid was San Marino CA's selection for its 2011 One Book/One City Event.

 
     Larry's nonfiction books include Genetic Engineering: Threat or Promise?, The View From The Vue, and The Enchanted Ear. 

 

AN UNORTHODOX PAIR O'DOCS

Larry Karp

     Seventeen years ago, when I left medical work to write mystery novels full-time, there was one background I knew I was not going to write against.  After thirty years of total immersion in complicated pregnancies, I was ready for a clean break from medicine.

     During my medical career, by way of dragging my head out of my job for short stretches, I'd gotten into buying, selling, collecting and restoring antique music boxes.  The world of antiques is full of characters who are, to put it mildly, interesting, and my first three books comprised a series, set in New York, among music box aficionados.  The detective was a neurologist as well as a music box collector - well, why not?  What did I know about the lives of butchers, bakers, or chandlers?  I could have spent a lot of time finding out, or I could've gone ahead and written my first mystery with an amateur detective who used his medical knowledge to track down murderers, but never, ever treated a patient on the page.

     As I approached Book Four in the series, I remembered a story I'd wanted to write since I was a teenager, a book about a junkman who got rich selling scrap metal on the black market during World War II.  I'd made several tries at writing it over the years, but the story never went anywhere.

     Just at that time, I happened to read a newspaper story about a doctor in a small town in Georgia, many years ago, who ran a live-in clinic in his house for young women, mostly from well-off southern families, who found themselves in what then was called The Family Way.  Excuses were made for the girls (as they were then called) while they stayed for months at the doctor's facility until he delivered them and sold their babies to well-off couples looking to adopt.  Some of the people in his town thought the doctor was Satan Incarnate; others thought he was a saint.

     Then I remembered my childhood family doctor in Paterson, NJ, a G.P. with near-supernatural diagnostic abilities.  Instantly, he fused in my mind with the doc in the newspaper story to become Samuel Firestone, M.D., a friend of Murray Fleischman, my fictional junkman, and went right to work, pushing my long-stagnant story forward.  At first I refused to go along with this pushy doctor, but it felt like such a good story, I finally gave in.  We all have our price.  Never say never, ever.  Of FIRST, DO NO HARM, the Booklist reviewer wrote, "A triumph of storytelling - the juggling of the two narratives is flawless-that will hold readers as spellbound as a terrifying tale told 'round the campfire."

     With that story finally out of my system, I spent the next five years writing an historical-mystery trilogy that covered the story of ragtime music.  In the process, I did a ton of research, and enjoyed every minute...except for the nagging thought: what next?  I'd gladly have done another ragtime book, but the third volume of the trilogy clearly had closed the chain.  Anything else ragtime seemed anticlimactic.

     Coming up as I was on fifteen years away from thorny, worrisome obstetrical situations, the difficult memories, like those of childbirth pain itself, had eased considerably.  My mind meandered way back to my time as a research fellow, when I was studying the causes of chromosomal errors, such as those that underlie Down Syndrome.  The work involved laboratory fertilization of mouse eggs, basically the same procedure as was then being done in humans by doctors racing to be first to produce a human baby through in vitro fertilization.  The competition was intense, and I remember thinking, someone could end up murdered.  Then, a few years later, I became Medical Director of the Reproductive Genetics Lab at Seattle's Swedish Medical Center.  After a two-year competition with the University of Washington's team, the Swedish laboratory conceived the first IVF baby in the Pacific Northwest, and I delivered that baby.

     All right, I decided, an IVF-based mystery it would be. But the story wouldn't come - not until I remembered a particular doctor I'd worked with years before.  Most docs I've known really don't behave as if they think they're gods, but this guy could've run Zeus, Wotan, Ahura Mazda, and Jehovah into the ground.  If he'd been in the IVF chase, he'd have won or else, no matter what he might have needed to do.  As Dr. Colin Sanford, he couldn't wait to pit himself against a smart, tenacious police detective, to pull off A PERILOUS CONCEPTION.  And I couldn't wait to see whether he really could do it.

     Now I know.

My Flirtation with Fame by Larry Karp

 Here I am, as posed by a Seattle times photographer to "look mysterious."  The longcase clock behind me contains a rare music box that plays from folded cardboard 'books'.

 

Larry Karp grew up in Paterson, NJ and New York City. He practiced perinatal medicine (high-risk pregnancy care) and wrote general nonfiction books and articles for 25 years, then, in 1995, he left medical work to begin a second career, writing mystery novels. The backgrounds and settings of Larry's mysteries reflect many of his interests, including musical antiques, medical-ethical issues, and ragtime music. His most recent book, The Ragtime Fool, is the concluding work of a ragtime-based historical-mystery trilogy that covers the birth, death, and revival of ragtime music in America. Larry lives with his wife Myra in Seattle; they have two grown children, and a grandson.

Other mystery novels by Larry Karp include The Ragtime Kid and The King of Ragtime (the first and second books in the trilogy), First Do No Harm, The Midnight Special, Scamming the Birdman, and The Music Box Murders. Larry's mysteries have been finalists for the Daphne Du Maurier and Spotted Owl Awards, and have appeared on the Los Angeles Times and Seattle Times Best-Seller Lists.

Larry's nonfiction books include Genetic Engineering: Threat or Promise?, The View From The Vue, and The Enchanted Ear.

 This is where I write my books, the white outbuilding, down the hill from our house, separated from the neighbor's house by a wall.  No phone, no other people in the room, no Internet, nothing else going on, no distractions outside.  Nothing to keep me from writing. 

 And here I look less mysterious, in my office (with Internet access) in the house, where I go after I finish my day's writing, to take care of the business side of the job. 

A couple new pictures added - Wonderful Pictures!  - - - 
see Larry's comments in the comments section below

MY FLIRTATION WITH FAME

by Larry Karp

I'm Mr. Midlist. My seven mystery novels have gotten good reviews, and sold enough copies to keep me in the game. But no one would mistake Larry Karp for Michael Crichton.

Once upon a time, though, I had my feet on the road to the Big Time. Back in 1977, I wrote THE

VIEW FROM THE VUE, an account of my years as a med student, intern, and resident at New York's Bellevue Hospital. The book came out in hardcover from Jonathan David, a small New York house.

Then, one early-spring day in 1978, I got a long-distance call in my office at the University of Washington Med School. The caller identified himself as an editor at a big publisher of mass-market paperbacks. “I guess you've heard we acquired the soft-cover rights to your book from Jonathan David,” he said.

I told him no, I hadn't heard any such thing.

“Well,” he assured me, “we have.” And then he spent 45 minutes by the clock telling me that everyone at the publisher's was crazy about THE VIEW, and that it was going to be a lead issue several months hence. “Dr. Karp, I'm going to put everything behind your book,” he crowed “I'm going to make you the next Michael Crichton. I want to send out two publicity people to get the ball rolling. Next Saturday OK?”

The publicity people, a cheerful and peppy young woman and a young man to match, came as scheduled, took me to a posh waterfront restaurant, and assured me that a year from that day, my star would be eclipsing Michael Crichton's. It did not escape me that the date was April 1, 1978, but I dismissed the implication with a smile.

The campaign was supposed to go into high gear in a few months, but summer came and went with no further word from the editor, the publicity people, or anyone else. The publication date arrived, as did ten complimentary copies of my book, but that was it.

My calls to the editor went unreturned. My letters disappeared into a bottomless hole. Finally, one morning, I called the editor's office, told his secretary I was Jack Marshall, an editor at Random House, that I needed to speak with her boss, and that it was urgent. And by George, she put me through. Talking as fast as my pipes permitted, I asked the editor to please not hang up, that I was not planning to shoot him or sue him...yet. I just wanted an explanation.

I heard a huge, deep sigh. Then, he apologized for having evaded me all those months. “I was embarrassed,” he said. “Just when we were about to launch your campaign, the company decided they were only going to publish westerns, and they pulled the plug on everything else. They were legally obligated to bring out the book, so they did, but they weren't going to put any money into promoting it. Which makes no sense to me. For what it's worth, I'm going to be leaving here as soon as I can find another job.”

But that wasn't quite the end of the story. Fast-forward some twenty-five years to a Bouchercon, where I noticed that this same editor, now working at another publishing house, was going to be on a panel. Of course I attended the session, then afterward, walked up, introduced myself, and asked whether he remembered me.

If I had had a camera there, I could show you the definition of sheepish. “I was sure that book was going to make your career and mine,” the editor said. “I really did think you were going to be the next Michael Crichton, and I've never been so pissed off or embarrassed in my life. I just couldn't bring myself to call you.”

I told him not to worry, that I'd paved a few roads to Hell myself. We shook hands and wished each other good fortune.

I suppose it might've been nice to be rich and famous, but as Mr. Fats Waller used to say, “One never knows...do one?” No point complaining. I'm having a ball writing mystery novels that get good reviews, and sell enough copies to keep me in the game. And Michael Crichton's dead.