The Blues & Billie Armstrong

THE BIG ANNOUNCEMENT

Fifty years ago I was a smalltown golden boy with a scholarship to a private university and the dream of becoming a novelist.

Forty years ago I was an unemployed college dropout, a speedfreak, dive-bar pool shark, drug dealer and philanderer. Thirty years ago I was a newly married, newly clean newspaperman and stepfather. Twenty years ago I was owner, editor and publisher of four regional magazines. Ten years ago I was a recent college graduate enrolled in Stanford University’s online novel writing program.

Ten days ago I finished my novel…

The Blues & Billie Armstrong tells the story of Archer King, as a motherless boy puzzling out what it means to be a man, and as a man in his fifties with perhaps one last chance to live up to his own code.

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Young Archer is thirteen years old in the midst of the historic upheavals of 1970 America. After his mother’s apparent suicide, his father remarries and he gains a stepsister, the barefoot, braless and hand-on-hip seventeen-year-old, Billie Armstrong, whose big personality and radical politics open Archer’s eyes to new ideas (and feelings) but don’t go over too well in the small town of Lupoyoma, especially with Archer’s hero, local baseball legend Hank Timmons, home on leave before shipping out to Vietnam.

When they discover a cache of old blues records and love letters, Archer and Billie team up in a quest to learn the truth about his mother’s secret affair and its connection to her death. But their investigation is sidetracked when the friction between Billie and Hank explodes into flames.

Older Archer is a prize-winning, hard-drinking San Francisco newspaper columnist renowned as a fearless truth-teller. At the height of his success, Billie is captured after decades on the run from a murder charge. Archer can clear her name only by revealing the secrets he’s kept hidden for forty years. Secrets that will risk his career, his financial wellbeing, his personal brand, his very identity...and ultimately his freedom.

The book is generously salted with references to music, pop culture, baseball and American history. Howlin’ Wolf, Dave Brubeck, Country Joe and the Fish. Cronkite, body bags and Tricky Dick Nixon. I Dream of Jeanie, quadraphonic sound and halter-tops. Women’s lib, Kent State, the occupation of Alcatraz. And eighth-grade dances, the Batmobile and Little League rivalries.

It’s a coming-of-age / redemption story with a little mystery and suspense, a dash of unconventional romance, and some unexpected turns. Archer King is naive, witty, self-deprecating and philosophical, but also willful, jaded and self-destructive. He's haunted by the huge impacts of two women in his youth—his mother and her mysterious death and love affair, and the one-and-only Billie Armstrong, who crashes in and out of his young life like a psychedelic wrecking ball, then turns up years later to do it all over again.

First Chapter: INTRO: THE PERSISTENCE >

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• Title Illustration Design by Roy Dufrain Jr

• Background Fractal Art by Blair Gibb at blair-gibb.pixels.com

• Window Frame Rendering: extremal at iStock.com

• © Copyright Roy Dufrain Jr

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