George Freedman

Old Guy Writing.
Having been born before television--and even before plug-in radio (our first radio was a crystal set and our second ran on a car-size battery with acid always dripping on the carpet)--I had no recourse as a kid but to turn to books. I took them out of the Revere Public Library at the rate of four a week. So I always wanted to be a writer.

I settled for being an engineer (MIT, ‘43), a professional inventor in fact with several dozen patented products and three technical books. I get the same kick out of inventing as I do from fiction writing.

Now, having reached my eighties, and at last, having the time to write--as long as it lasts--I am one, with two mysteries published and a third in the series on the way.

Seniors--My Audience, My Market.
One is always advised to write what one knows about, so I write about elderly folk. Not only are my seniors alive and functioning, they even run ahead of youngsters in their forties or fifties because, based on their longer years, they have more momentum.

When I was young, old people were not important. Not so now. We have grown tenfold in numbers. We fill restaurants. We party. We go on adventurous international tours. We take courses. We are the mainstay of the medical profession (and they of us). We vote--more than anyone. We give wise advice to our descendents (rarely followed). And we read.

Observe the students at an Elderhostel. Or at any vacation spot frequented by retired folk, and you’ll discover that a majority of them are lugging a book. While their choice of reading material is eclectic, they favor fiction and most of these are mysteries.

My Works.
My two mysteries, soon to be three, are the beginning of a series. They feature a peppy couple who happen to be elderly. In the first volume, Eldernapped, Harry and Naomi Levine are in Padua, Italy, attending a two week course (a “Senior Seminar”) on the culture and history of the Veneto. Mostly through the cleverness and imagination of Naomi, they solve a brutal kidnapping, an “eldernapping,” of one of their classmates who happens to be a billionairess. The Padua PD tries to find the missing old lady, too, but Naomi outclasses and outwits them. By the time Emily Thorndike is reunited with her fellow students, several romances, in several age groups, have blossomed.

In Striking Terror, Harry and Naomi attend the annual reunion, this year in Mobile, Alabama, of Harry and his shipmates who served together (five invasions) on a Navy LST (“Landing “Ship Tank”) in the Pacific in WWII. There were originally a hundred and nine crewmembers but only some forty still living have been located. Thirteen attend along with sundry wives, a daughter and an SO. (“What’s an SO?” one of the wives asks.) They find themselves in the midst of a threat by Osama bin Laden to attack Mobile (of all places) with weapons of mass destruction. When the old sailors try to tip off the CIA, the FBI and the Mobile Police, they are either ignored or laughed off. But Harry and Naomi, mustering the shipmates and their female entourage, single handedly thwart this evil scheme. The public never hears of this heroic act because the CIA squelches its revelation in order not to panic the public.

In Ashes to Ashes, due for 2005 publication, Harry and Naomi innocently arrange for the cremation of one of their recently deceased friends, a neighbor in their retirement community in a Boston suburb. They stumble across a crafty scheme of a famous mobster, Buddy Durgin, who has been on the lam for the last twelve years. He is being sought by the Boston Police and the FBI (#2 on its ”Most Wanted List”) for twenty-one murders, dating back two decades. Buddy plans to utilize the same crematorium as a way to dispose of currently and soon to be created corpses. He reasons, logically, that except for a vase of ashes with all DNA destroyed, there will be no evidence such murders--a big improvement over the previous twenty-one cases in all of which body parts were subsequently discovered in spite of every precaution he had taken to hide them. Buddy discovers that Harry and Naomi are onto his scheme so he decides to dispose of them as his next victims. As tension, as well as body counts, mount, Harry and Naomi, again utilizing Naomi’s investigative gifts, “help” Lieutenant Bill O’Halloran of the Boston Police Department to bring Buddy to his just desserts.