When the New Left rose in the 1960s, they began throwing around the word "fascist" to mean "anything we don't like at the moment." The police were fascists when 'oppressing' somebody, but not fascists when they were trying to recover your stolen Volkswagen. Almost any conservative politician was a fascist, as was anybody, left or right, who supported the war in Vietnam or the military draft.

But that New Left epithet, 'fascist,' is a distortion. The word "fascist" at one time had a fairly specific meaning. It was a wildly romantic and quite successful political theory, which once controlled Italy, Germany, Spain and parts of eastern Europe. Successful fascist regimes still exist (Singapore) and others have only recently fallen or declined: Spain, Lebanon, Syria.

In my view, the history of U.S. politics since the Civil War essentially is the struggle of liberals and conservatives over the populist vote. When populists are most concerned with fiscal issues, they tend to swing to the liberal side. When cultural issues become more important, they tend to vote with conservatives. The nightmare for both liberals and conservatives is that the populists will find their own leader, and become an independent political force.

The original Dead Watch involved a governor who favored a strong military, a weak dollar, was conservative on cultural issues (especially immigration), but favored liberal positions on income tax rates, Medicare and Social Security. He was also authoritarian and had organized a group of "Watchmen" to look out for various internal and external terrorist threats – the Watchmen being the equivalent of the fascist Brown Shirts. He was not opposed to the use of violence to further his ends.

So the guy was a budding fascist of the Mussolini stripe, but quite successful in what had become an increasingly chaotic political structure. He seemed to offer strength, authority, order, and even some wisdom. But he was also a very bad guy, with very extreme ideas hidden behind a friendly face.

Translated into English, that means, "Your book sucks, pal."

Part of the problem can be seen above, in the 'detour'. I was trying to write a political thriller, but I kept having to stop to explain some fairly complex political thoughts. In other words, I was killing the thriller aspect of the book, and in the opinion of my editor, who shall go unnamed, but whose name is Neil Nyren, neither did it work as a more literary adventure. I was sort of stuck in a bog in the middle.

One thing, though, that I was sure of is that Neil has an exquisite taste for how a thriller novel should work. Even if he doesn't write them himself (and here I should be careful not to identify Neil as the real person behind the name 'James Patterson')* he knows exactly what should be where.

After a fairly agonizing week of review, I decided that I had two choices: pass on a book for this year (the original really didn't work that well) or rework what I had into a thriller. I decided to go for the thriller and started ripping things up.

I ripped for a full month and then started putting it back together. One result, I think, is that the book is more episodic than earlier books: it doesn't have the smooth transition between scenes, the 'bullshit', the 'grease', that makes a novel smoother. One reason for that is that Fate showed up again...

I finished the book: but, as I said, without some of the smoothness that would have been there under other circumstances. And reading it now, I don't miss it much.

So now, in 2006, Susan is still in chemo and the new book is out. I am doing only a very limited book tour this year because of Susan's illness, and won't tour much until this is worked through. I'm still writing, though: a new Davenport Prey book is underway. I'll post about sometime in the next few weeks.