Phil: Right. And we agreed that neither of us would even think of altering the voice of the other guy’s narrator.
Bill: One of the challenges of collaborating with another writer is finding a consistent voice that belongs to both. Several years ago, I collaborated on a novel with another writer, and while it turned out pretty good, the two of us agonized over every word and phrase. I didn’t want to go through that again, and I don’t think Phil wanted to do it ever. Besides, we thought our fans would prefer us to keep our own characters and their distinctive narrative voices. Taking turns with the chapters allowed us to write a genuine “J.W. Jackson/ Brady Coyne Mystery.” Each character had the chance to report on events, to give a different perspective or interpretation, even to comment on the other guy. Brady and J.W. get along well, as Phil and I do, but they (and we) do tend to tease each other. We did have a lot of discussion and debate on what we wrote. Not just the content and story of it, but everything. I found it enlightening to have Phil scrutinize my prose, and I have no doubt that he found my queries challenging as well as meddlesome. We did a lot of back-and-forth on characters, how they’d appear, how they’d speak, what motivated them, what their backgrounds were. Phil’s knowledge of Vineyard topography and geography and history helped me a lot.
Phil: We agreed that J.W., being a Vineyard resident, would narrate chapter one, giving background to the story. So I did that, writing my chapter from here on the island and emailing it to Bill up in Pepperell. He then had Brady narrate chapter two and emailed that to me. And that’s how we wrote the book, emailing chapters back and forth and figuring out the plot as we went.
Bill: Each of Phil’s chapters led me someplace, and my job was to pick it up from there, figuring out what Brady would be doing next. I think this back-and-forth process sparked ideas for both of us. At times it felt like driving a car at night without headlights. We knew where we were, but what was around the bend was pretty foggy. I often sent my chapter to Phil with no idea where we were headed. But that was okay. Now it was his problem, and I’d just wait to see where he took it. Naturally, we ended up with a story that was quite different from what we started with. It surprised us. I suspect that it will surprise our readers, too.
Phil: We had Brady (a sad case in the view of both J.W. and his wife, Zee, since Brady was currently womanless) meet Molly Wood, an attractive women friend of Zee’s, who makes a date with Brady but then fails to keep it.
Bill: Brady doesn’t see himself as a “sad case,” exactly. He was married once, after all. He likes his independence, but sometimes he does get lonely. He knows it’s a matter of hooking up with the right woman, and he’s always game to meet a new one. Usually the new ones don’t work out. So when Molly Wood failed to meet him for dinner, he just figured he’d been stood up by a woman again. Such is life. J.W.’s wife, Zee, couldn’t believe her friend would do that. It didn’t take J.W. and Brady long to deduce that something had happened to Molly.
Phil: We didn’t know who caused the disappearance of Molly Wood, or why, but it got us—and our guys—working on the problem between their fishing trips on the far shores of the Vineyard. The search for this woman eventually tied in with the missing woman J.W. had been looking for all along, of course, and our heroes began to realize that someone evil was walking on the blessed isle, although they didn’t know who it was.
Bill: That’s the mystery and the source of suspense. Who’s killing unattached female visitors to Martha’s Vineyard, and why, and how is he disposing of their bodies, and can J.W. Jackson and Brady Coyne stop him before he kills again?
Phil: While we told this tale we tried to paint a realistic picture of the Vineyard during the annual October Derby frenzy and of some of the characters who pour down to the island in search of bluefish and striped bass.
Bill: Yes, there is quite a bit of fishing in First Light. But it’s all connected to the central mystery plot, and we think it works. Shirl and Vicki both read the manuscript and gave us the tough criticism that we depend on them for. We’re delighted that Scribner’s is going to publish our book. We’ve even started thinking about doing a sequel.
Phil: We don’t have a story yet...
Bill: No, but we’ve got a title. Second Sight. Get it? First Light, Second Sight?
Phil: I’m thinking of some kind of soothsayer or fortune teller. Someone who claims she can predict the future. The Vineyard is full of these types nowadays.
Bill: Maybe there’s a charismatic guru who seduces vulnerable young people and uses them for his own Machiavellian purposes...
Phil: If we don’t watch out, we’ll have a series. Third Night?
Bill: Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
MY FRIEND PHIL CRAIG
I met Philip R. Craig the same way thousands—probably millions—have. By reading one of his books. This one came to me from his editor before it was published. She hoped I’d write a blurb for the cover.
I read the book in one sitting. It took place on one of my favorite places—Martha’s Vineyard—and the hero/narrator, J. W. Jackson, was a guy after my own heart. The book was full of fishing and adventure and food and pretty women. It was at once funny and wise and tense. It was called A Beautiful Place to Die. I loved it. I wrote the blurb and thought: This Phil Craig is a man I’d like to meet.
Meet we did, almost exactly twenty years ago, shortly after his book came out. We hit it off instantly, as I was sure we would. I knew I’d like the man who wrote that book.
That book was Phil’s first in what became a very popular series. He wrote a book every year since that first one, all narrated by J. W. Jackson, the Vietnam vet/ex cop/part-time sleuth. As the series unfolded, J. W. married Zee, his sweetheart, and they had children, and J. W. morphed from a loner into a dedicated family man—an identity that Phil found entirely comfortable and familiar. He would deny that life imitates art, or vice versa, but Phil was devoted to Shirley, his wife, and Jamie and Kim, their kids, and their grandchildren.
J.W.’s adventures all took place on the Vineyard. But he and Shirley were globetrotters. Phil had an insatiable thirst to travel, to visit new and offbeat places, to try on new cultures.
So my wife Vicki and I began to spend time on the island with Phil and Shirl—mostly when the bluefish and stripers were around. We surf-cast, we clammed and quahogged, we mixed martinis, and we laughed. There was always a lot of laughter in the Craigs’ house.
As we traveled around New England promoting our books, Phil and I often found ourselves on the same panels. We found that we shared similar views on politics and religion, similar tastes in literature and movies, similar senses of humor. We probably weren’t as witty and clever as we thought we were, but we had a lot of fun playing off each other. Privately, we started calling these events “The Phil ‘n’ Bill Show.”
As these things sometimes go with writers who are friends, each of us began to mention the other one’s character in our novels. My hero, Brady Coyne, began to show up occasionally in Phil’s books, and J. W. Jackson made some cameo appearances in mine.
Neither of us could remember where the idea of the two of us collaborating came from, but we thought writing a novel together would give us a tax-deductible reason to visit back and forth, sit on the Craigs’ balcony with our wives and plenty of martinis and bluefish pate, and also do some fishing. Plus, writing a book together might be fun. Phil was one of the least materialistic people I’ve ever known, but we both thought that a collaborative novel might double our fan base, such as it was.
We started with a title—First Light— and the vaguest of all ideas: Brady would visit the Vineyard to compete in the Derby with J.W., and adventures would surely ensue.
Our approach to collaboration was designed to put our friendship above the demands of art. In order to avoid the inevitable disputes and arguments and ego-trips that would arise from writing together, we decided to alternate chapters. We would not mess with the other guy’s stuff.
First Light (sub
titled by the publisher “The First Ever Brady Coyne/J. W. Jackson Mystery”) got written that way. Phil did the odd-numbered chapters, and I got the even-numbered ones. Then we wrote another called (cleverly, we thought) Second Sight.
Our third collaboration (and, alas, our last ever) is called Third Strike. It will appear next November. Phil Craig was at the top of his game when we were working on this story.
I have lost my dear old friend, and readers everywhere have lost a friend, too. But luckily we can always visit him in his books—the lover of swordplay and Errol Flynn movies and Hemingway short stories, the fisherman and cook and purveyor of recipes, the singer and guitar-picker and jokester, the world traveler, the seafarer, the poet, the jovial host, the cowboy from Durango, the family man, the devoted husband, the loyal and loving friend.
—William G. Tapply, 2007
PHIL AND HIS BELOVED WIFE, SHIRLEY
BURTON L. SPILLER’S FIRELIGHT, BILL’S BELOVED BRITTANY, IN HIS PRIME.
HE WENT BY MANY NAMES, INCLUDING BURT, MR. B, B, BURTON, AND LOVE BUNDLE.
Bill’s love letter to his wonderful Brittany, Burt, first published in 2005.
~vst
BURT AT TEN
If, like me, you’ve grown leery of dog stories because they always seem to end with the death of the beloved old bird dog, let me assure you that Burt is lying on the floor beside me right now, pretending to snooze but ever alert to the possibility that I might push back my desk chair and say, “Wanna go hunting?”
He’s the best dog I’ve ever owned. He was a puppy prodigy, and if I’d done my job better, there’s no telling how excellent he could’ve been. But he’s still awfully good. He’s got some seasons left in him, and so do I. This isn’t one of those death stories, I promise.
He was the pick of the males in the litter of Brittanies, a gift from my wife, just eight weeks old when we fetched him from the breeder, a little orange-and-white pup with floppy ears and stubby little legs. When we let him out of the car, he pointed a moth.
I named him after my old gunning partner Burton L. Spiller, who is known to literate shotgunners as “the poet laureate of ruffed grouse.” “Burton L. Spiller’s Firelight” is my dog’s kennel name. I called him Burt.
I was working at home that summer, an ideal situation for training and bonding with a puppy. A hundred acres of woodland sloped away from the back of our house, and Burt and I explored every square foot of it. It seemed that he only needed to hear a command once to understand it, and he loved nothing better than to please the man who took him into the woods and fed him and allowed him to sleep on the rug beside the bed.
He was house-broken in a few weeks. He came when I spoke his name. He followed me from room to room. Everywhere I went, I took him with me. When I said “sit” or “whoa” or “come” or “heel,” he did what he was told. “Get-in-the-car” was one of his favorite commands.
I read some books on dog training. Sorting out the contradictions and conflicting philosophies, I concluded that dogs instinctively want to please their masters, that messages should never be mixed, and that without the right genes, no amount of training would produce a good bird dog.
I didn’t know if the corollary would also prove valid. I hoped that my well-meaning but decidedly amateur training program would not negate Burt’s stellar genes. Both of his parents were grouse-trial champions.
The first time I teased him with a pheasant wing on a string, he locked on point. I let the wing lie on the ground. He didn’t budge. I stroked his back and praised him, picked him up and set him down, and he just kept pointing that pheasant wing.
Burt was less than five months old, not even half grown, when October arrived. The books all agreed that he was at least a year shy of being mature enough to actually hunt, but I’d made it my policy to bring him everywhere with me, and even if all he did was run around in the woods while I hunted with my partners and their dogs, I didn’t see how that could do any harm.
Besides, Keith Wegener’s pointer, Freebie, would make a splendid role model for Burt, and so would Skip Rood’s Brittany, Waldo. Both Freebie and Waldo were old dogs -- hunting their last season, as it turned out. Both had developed into superior grouse and woodcock dogs. They’d slowed down and gone deaf in their old age, and neither of them could hunt more than a few covers before they ran out of steam. But they still had sharp noses, and both of them would rather point than eat.
Burt and I drove to Maine on Opening Day. The woods were tinder-dry, temperatures were in the eighties, and the leaves had not begun to drop. Freebie chugged through a couple of our best woodcock and grouse covers. They were empty. Burt had himself a nice morning of trotting around on his little legs and snuffling the air. It might have been my imagination, but he seemed to be watching Freebie out of the corners of his eyes.
We quit at noon, and as Keith said, “Burt did as good as Freebie.”
The following weekend we hunted with Skip and Waldo. Our first cover skirted the edge of a pond. Burt and I followed the hillside, while Skip and Waldo took the string of alders that rimmed the pond.
We’d been hunting barely five minutes when I heard the quick explosion of a flushing grouse between us. I never saw the bird, but Skip, a hundred feet off to my right, fired. A moment later he said, “Oh, hell.”
“Miss him?” I called.
“No, dammit. I got him. Dropped him in the middle of the pond, and old Waldo sure as hell won’t fetch him. I guess I’m gonna have to . . . wait a minute.”
“What’s going on?”
“Burt’s swimming out there . . . I’ll be damned. That bird is bigger than he is . . . He’s got it in his mouth . . . He’s swimming back with it. I don’t believe it.”
I hustled down to the edge of the pond, and I got there in time to see half-grown Burt dog-paddling to shore with a full-grown grouse in his mouth. He brought it straight to me. I took it from him and thanked him. He kind of shrugged, shook himself dry, and looked at me, and it was pretty clear what he was saying: “Let’s try that again.”
Burt pointed his first woodcock that day. Actually he pointed his first six woodcock that day, and when I dropped one in some thick grass, he demonstrated his attitude toward retrieving woodcock. He flash-pointed it, crept up on it, then stood guard over it until I picked it up.
That afternoon, he and Waldo pointed at the same time. Waldo crept forward. So did Burt. From different angles they pointed again.
“They’re roading a grouse,” said Skip. “Waldo goes slow on grouse.”
“Maybe that’s what Waldo’s doing,” I said. “Burt doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“I think he does,” said Skip.
The two dogs—the deaf old Brit and the half-grown pup—moved forward on tippy-toes, creeping, pointing, creeping again, coverging from different directions. Finally they both locked onto a clump of juniper at the edge of a dirt road, about 100 yards from where they’d begun.
“Ready?” said Skip.
“I don’t believe this,” I said.
The grouse burst out and flew straight down the road, the easiest kind of straightaway shot.
I mounted my 20-gauge double and looked down the barrels. The grouse was flying directly at a house.
I lowered my gun. Skip had done the same.
“Would’ve been memorable to kill that bird,” I said.
“Oh, I doubt we’ll forget it,” said Skip, “the way those two dogs worked.”
Later that season I took Burt to a hunting preserve. We spent the day with a guide and one of the preserve’s dogs, a lovely shorthair bitch who hunted planted pheasants and chukkar every day. Burt had never sniffed a pheasant or a chukkar.
The sleek shorthair and little half-grown Burt took turns pointing birds and honoring each other’s points. I have no idea where he learned to do that.
That winter Burt grew up, and by spring he was long-legged and thick-chested, a dog, no longer a puppy.
In May, his breeder invited us to go for
a run with one of his litter-mates to celebrate their birthdays. We met at a state wildlife management area and let the dogs out.
Zoom. They both disappeared. Now and then we caught a flash of white in the distance, one or the other of the two Brittanies crashing through the underbrush, running at full tilt, heading for the horizon.
I yelled. I screamed. I cursed.
They just kept running.
“I don’t know what the hell got into him,” I said. “He hunted beautifully last fall.”
“He’s doing great,” said the breeder. “He’s making wide sweeps, covering a lot of ground. He can really run. You should enter him in a field trial.”
“I don’t get it,” I moaned. “He’s acting like a crazy dog. He’s forgotten everything he learned.”
“In grouse trials,” she said, “the dogs are supposed to run big. Burt looks like a winner, assuming he’d point if he found a bird. Would he?”
“Last fall he did. He loved to point. He pointed a damn moth the day I brought him home. Now, I have no idea what he’d do.” I was thinking that my little prodigy had turned into a monster.
The breeder explained how Burt’s superior grouse-trial genes gave him that terrific nose and those uncanny instincts, but they also gave him strong legs and boundless stamina and the burning desire to range as far as he had to—and as fast as he could get there—to find birds.
When he was five months old, she said, he had everything except the legs.
Now—and for the rest of his life—he’d have the legs, too, and I better get used to it.
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