This month, we’re excited to highlight two books by two familiar authors that readers of our other Times Review Media Group publications will know. Shelter Island Reporter Editor Ambrose Clancy has released a book of collected works from his long career, while former Suffolk Times Senior Editor Steve Wick has released his first novel, inspired by a case he covered while at Newsday decades ago.
My Life in Pieces: Writers, Rogues, The Road and The Rock by Ambrose Clancy
(Brick Tower Press)
Longtime readers of Times Review Media Group newspaper, the Shelter Island Reporter, have gotten to know Editor Ambrose Clancy in black and white, through the word images formed by squiggles of ink against the white pages of this newspaper each week. The black-and-white squiggles sometimes morph into the gray shapes of unnerving ghost stories, or transform into the colors of a well-lived life in his memorial tributes to friends mourned by the community.
Since he arrived in 2012, he’s helped illuminate events large and small in a small world sheltered by islands.
Quietly standing to the side of an event like the Veterans Day service, Memorial Day parade or the Turkey Plunge, he draws out Islanders to give voice to the quirks and sentiments of the men, women and children who call home a place they affectionately refer to as “The Rock.”
Now, some of Clancy’s memorable columns and feature writing for several publications — including The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation and GQ, among others — have been captured in a new 480-page book entitled, “My Life in Pieces: Writers, Rogues, The Road and The Rock.”
The author of two other books, “Blind Pilot” and “The Night Line,” he worked with John Colby, owner of Brick Tower Press, who has a home on the Island, to organize the new volume.
The book comprises work that started during Clancy’s days as a night cab driver in Manhattan, which became the subject of “The Night Line.” “My Life in Pieces” includes his work as freelance journalist in Belfast; as a novelist inhaling the beauty of the Irish countryside; and a sharp-eyed and -edged reporter of the Long Island political scene.
Read it from start to finish, or page through and pause to read his feature on visiting Florence, Italy, years before Stanley Tucci taught us how to eat and pronounce stracciatella; dodging Vespas, sipping espresso at a cafe and using words, his own artistic tools, to praise the brilliance of Michelangelo’s David, who he introduces as the “big naked white guy,” and goes on to say: “About 18 feet high, David is the great cliche, the most famous statue in the world. But standing before it in its own skylighted gallery, you’ll be overwhelmed at the scale of the thing, the nakedness, the drama in the stone, that here is David before battling Goliath. Made when Michelangelo was all of 29, David is young, the killer before the killing, but his stance and expression tell you he is far from innocent. Seeing it in the flesh (and the enduring and seductive mystery of classical and Renaissance sculpture is that marble has become naked flesh) allows one of Italy’s gifts, Humanism — the belief that the divine is within us — to shine.”
The Ruins by Steve Wick (Pegasus Crime/Simon & Schuster)
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Wick, known for his work at Newsday and a seven-year stint as executive editor at Times Review Media Group, has released his first novel, inspired by a true crime he wrote about as a reporter.
Set in 1954, “The Ruins” follows Lindenhurst chief of police Paul Beirne as he is called to investigate the grisly murder of a woman found on the railroad tracks. As Beirne, who struggles with his own demons and haunting memories of his time as a POW in Japan, begins to dig into the violent mystery, he discovers a shocking connection to a murder that occurred two decades earlier and realizes that Lindenhurst — on the verge of a mid-century renaissance thanks to a large developer building suburbs in the community — has dark secrets that reach far beyond Long Island.
Wick’s novel is inspired by a case he covered at Newsday. In a Feb. 10, 1981, article, “Twenty-Six Years Later, The Murder Is Solved,” Mr. Wick wrote about a cold case that was solved after a quarter-century.
“I had just gotten to Newsday,” recalls Wick, who was sent to cover Riverhead criminal court. “I’m sitting in the courtroom and the side doors open and two detectives bring in this shackled, very old man. They bring him before the judge and explain that they have made an arrest in a 1954 murder in Lindenhurst.”
As a journalist just starting out at a new job, Wick leapt at the chance to cover the story. The shackled older man was Rudolph John Hoff, who had been charged with the previously unsolved 1954 murder of Kathryn Ann Damm. Hoff’s ex-wife, Gurli, had recently come forward with a secret she’d kept for 26 years: She witnessed Hoff washing blood from his clothes the night of the murder and was forced to help him hide them. Hoff was sentenced to life in prison for the crime.
A newly solved cold case was exciting enough, but Wick found there was more to the story.
“I knew that it was one of those stories where if I could figure out a way to grow it, I could make something of it,” says Wick, who arranged to speak with the convicted killer in prison. Hoff maintained his innocence and said he was being framed, “just like Richard Hauptmann” — the tried-and-convicted killer of Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., the “Lindbergh Baby.” As it turns out, Hoff’s mother knew Anna Schoeffler, Hauptmann’s widow.
The wild coincidence inspired Wick to spin a fictional mystery yarn that included two connected murder cases and also tapped into his own interest and experience writing about Long Island’s history, incorporating the sociopolitical tensions of the time.
“There are photos I used in my research of uniformed, swastika-wearing German Americans marching on Wellwood Avenue in Lindenhurst,” he says, noting that the book’s other main character, funeral home director Doc, is a Holocaust survivor who never talks about his experience as an Austrian Jew.
While the story is a period piece, the themes of violence, generational trauma and fascism are obviously relevant today.
“I’ve been to some readings in the last few weeks where people see some sort of echo with today,” Wick says. “I think the power of the narrative is that there’s so much truth in it that people find it a very believable work of fiction.”
And while Wick is a seasoned investigative journalist who has dug into many complex crime stories over the years — including “Gone,” a 2018 Suffolk Times series about the 1966 disappearance and murder of Louise Pietrewicz, which eventually led to the cold case’s resolution — he says that his lead character of Paul Beirne is not an insert for himself.
“A lot of people have asked me that,” says Wick. “The parts of Paul that are me are the ones that want to know what happened. If you’re a journalist, you want to get at something. I wanted Paul to be that digger.”
