Sunday, July 19, 2020

You will SWOON. Hurray for Anne Oman



HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  You know how Jungle Red goes when we introduce you to a new author. There's an intro, and a tiny bio, and then the author writes something, and then at the end there's the book synopsis and more bio. And then we chat.
And that works fine, it really does.
But today, I'm going to set this up differently. Because two things. 
One, Anne Oman wrote MANGO RAINS, her first novel, when she was  79.
So there's that.
And now, read the description of MANGO RAINS.
 “Before the monsoon came the mango rains, which were short, hard downpours that forced the mango trees to surrender their just-ripe fruits and tantalized the city’s inhabitants with a hint of the release the monsoon rains would soon bring. 
Julia Galbraith, a newly arrived Foreign Service Officer just short of her 23rd birthday, stood on the terrace of her ground-floor apartment on the rue Pasteur and watched the rain fall. She was not beautiful, or even pretty, but she was tall and slender and blonde, which almost made up for the lack. Though a little shy, she exuded the freshness and vulnerability of a woman on the brink of life….”
Mango Rains is a story of love, loss and political intrigue in Southeast Asia during the turbulent 1960s. While war rages next door in Viet Nam, expats in the sleepy, peaceful Cambodian capital fall in and out love and dance to the tune of the famously mercurial Prince Sihanouk. As the gentle mango rains give way to the tumultuous monsoon, world events—the assassinations of JFK and South Viet Nam’s Ngo Dinh Diem—precipitate a crisis that scatters the characters to the far corners of the globe.
HANK: Are you swooning? Or what?  And now, more from the amazing Anne Oman.

CONFESSIONS OF A FAILED MYSTERY WRITER

by Anne Oman

I once tried to write a mystery novel – it was harder than I thought.

I set it in Kauai. There was a female food writer, a Colombo-like cop, a poet who posted his works (which were really clues) on telephone poles, drug smugglers, and a backpacker pushed to his death from the treacherous trail that winds atop the Na Pali coast. I figured I could take a few “research” trips to Kauai and claim the expenses on my tax return.

But when I reread the unfinished story, I came to a sobering realization: there wasn’t any mystery. Even the thickest reader would be able to identify the culprit. I needed a plot twist. I stuck the manuscript in a drawer – and I can’t remember which drawer.

So, I have great respect for people who can write mystery novels, which I read voraciously. My all-time favorites are Ross MacDonald, whose hard–boiled detective Lew Archer solves noir crimes in 1940s LA, and Agatha Christie, queen of the English country-house mystery. Alas, both are dead, and I’ve read all their books. Among the living whose works I wait for impatiently: Sarah Paretsky, Michael Connolly, Peter Robinson, Deborah Crombie and Elizabeth George. And I love finding other exciting mystery authors, and look forward to reading the books of the Jungle Red writers I haven’t discovered yet.

When I finally published my first fiction, a novella entitled Mango Rains, it was not a mystery but so-called literary fiction, a pretentious catchall term for anything that doesn’t fit neatly into any other genre box. But I did include some nefarious activity: opium smoking, espionage – are murder.

Some background: the book begins in Phnom Penh, the sleepy capital of Cambodia, in 1963. Like the book’s principal character, Julia, I was a newly minted 22-year-old Foreign Service Officer assigned there. People at Foreign Service posts tell a lot of stories, especially to newcomers. The idea is to make the newbie understand that “Before you come, things here were more exciting/scarier/more dangerous/more fun/better/worse.” You had to take the tales with a healthy dose of skepticism. One story I heard from several sources was about the killing of a young American boy by a group of cyclo-pousse drivers.

A cyclo-pousse is a carriage propelled from behind – or pushed – by a man on a bicycle. This was the main form of public transportation in the city. The drivers all knew rudimentary French, and you could direct them by saying “a la droite,” “a la gauche,” etc. 


 When you arrived at your destination, the driver would name a price, and you could pay it – or haggle. But the boy in the story, the son of an American aid official, would take long rides, refuse to pay the fare – and run. 

 Eventually, a group of drivers, having received only a shrug from the police, took matters into their own hands: one of the kid’s joy rides ended on a lonely road where a group of drivers ambushed him and stabbed him (sort of like the ritual stabbing in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express). His body, with multiple stab wounds, was found several days later in a rice paddy.

Was the story true?
I took cyclos all the time, and found the drivers reliable and courteous. But then again, I always paid the fare. And who knows what impoverished, disenfranchised people will do if they have no other recourse? Anyway, I was writing fiction, so I decided to use the story.

I introduced it in the second chapter, at a dinner party in the home of an American economic attaché, when a Cambodian journalist asks: “What will your Embassy do about the murder of the American boy by the cyclo drivers?”

The host, a seasoned, cynical and hard-drinking diplomat named Bill Harper, tells the reporter that the Ambassador has taken the matter up with Cambodia’s head of state, the famously mercurial Prince Sihanouk, who has piously promised to investigate. But, his tongue loosened by drink, he explains that the Prince is simply telling the Ambassador what he wants to hear but that “he doesn’t really expect the Ambassador to believe it.”

The problem, he adds, is that “the Ambassador doesn’t know the rules of the game here --he takes it all literally… He has no grasp of Asia.”

It’s dangerous to make sweeping pronouncements about a whole people, but it’s generally true that in Asia, face is all-important. You may know the façade isn’t quite real, but you at least have to pretend to believe it -- as long as you don’t fool yourself.

The never-to-be-solved murder comes up again at a vernissage –the opening of an exhibit of paintings at the American Library. The same Bill Harper, cocktail-fueled, tells his young protegėe: “…All the art exhibits, all the perfumes of Arabia, none of it matters a damn…. “I’m not sure any of these people matter either… Look outside, at the man sweeping the street, or the guy pedaling the cyclo. Do we have any inkling of what they’re thinking? Maybe someday they’ll tell us, and I’ll bet it won’t be pretty. Maybe we got just a hint of that in the murder of the American boy.”

This is a 20/20 hindsight allusion to the Pol Pot holocaust, the time of the brutal killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. In fact, I had absolutely no premonition of these horrors to come, and had trouble taking them in when they occurred. (The best book on that subject is Elizabeth Becker’s When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution.)

In the last chapter of Part I of Mango Rains, many of the Americans, including Julia, are leaving Cambodia in the wake of the diplomatic breakup. At the airport, Julia sees the family of the murdered boy: “The Air Lao plane to Vientiane was called, and the family of the child killed by the cyclo drivers started to board. The father had been transferred to Laos, and the wife carried a brass box that held the boy’s ashes.”

If this were a Christie novel
, Hercule Poirot would have called all the cyclo-pousse drivers in Phnom Penh into the library and given us all the benefit of his little gray cells and revealed exactly which ones stuck their knives into the boy. The obliging Inspector Japp would have carried the culprits off to justice, and the rest of us would have raised a toast with our glasses of sherry.

But, alas, this is the mysterious East, where mysteries don’t get solved that easily. Or at all.

Namaste.

HANK: Okay, Reds and Readers. Do we want to be Anne Oman, or what?  Tell us what you think when you read this...and congratulate a wonderful new author. 

(And Anne, my Dad was a cultural affairs officer for USIA from 1960 or so until he retired. And his wife was also in USIA. I wonder if you'd crossed paths. Seoul, Cebu, Bangkok, Hamburg, London?)



Anne H. Oman began her career as a Foreign Service Officer for the now defunct US Information Agency, which was charged with “winning the hearts and minds of the people.” She served in Cambodia and Indonesia and was expelled from both countries, for political, not personal, reasons.

Since that time, she has worked principally as a journalist. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post, The Washington Star, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Times, Washington Woman, Family Circle, Sailing, National Geographic World, Senior Scholastic and many other publications. Currently, she is Reporter At Large for the Fernandina Observer in Fernandina Beach, Florida. She has also published four non-fiction books. Mango Rains is her first work of fiction.



















49 comments:

  1. What an amazing story, Anne . . . it gives me chills.

    Congratulations on your book . . . I’m looking forward to meeting Julia.

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    1. Did sound amazing? When even the synopsis can make you yearn for the book…

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    2. REPLY FROM ANNE OMAN: Thank you, Joan. I am thrilled to be on Jungle Red Writers today. Hank is very generous and I appreciate this community inviting me to be a guest today. I hope you love Julia.

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  2. Wow. Just wow. I can’t wait to read this.

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    1. Agree! And so much of it sounds like it came from personal experience… So fascinating!

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    2. REPLY BY ANNE OMAN: Hello Pat D. Thank you very much. I truly hope you enjoy MANGO RAINS.

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  3. Congratulations, Anne! I used to hang out a bit with the expat community in Mali and Burkina Faso - I can only imagine the intrigues in southeast Asia.

    Good for you for writing that novel. I hope there are more to follow.

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    1. And she had written nonfiction in the past, so it will be interesting to hear how her thought processes changed...

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    2. REPLY BY ANNE OMAN: Edith, thank you. I have been lucky to have many adventures -- including publishing MANGO RAINS at 79 after years of dreaming about this moment.

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    3. ANNE OMAN REPLY #2 TO EDITH: Dear Edith, Thanks so much for your interest. As you have experience in tropical underdeveloped countries and expat communities I am particularly interested in your reaction to the book. Full disclosure, have never been to sub Saharan Africa. I set one chapter of Mango Rains in Chad because it seemed the kind of place the State Department would send a French speaking officer who had performed well but wasn't a superstar. And I loved that it was called The Dead Heart of Africa.
      Btw, a colleague whose first post was Brazaville said Mango Rains rang true. His Ambassador communicated with the State department in limericks and the German Ambassador was killed by crocodiles while waterskiing on the Congo River.

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  4. Congratulations, Anne! Your early career sounds like an eye-opening adventure for a young adult. I am curious how much/what type of training you had before your post as a newly minted FSO in a strange land?

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    1. Yes, I am trying to remember what my dad told me about his training. I do remember him talking about total immersion language. But that must’ve been just been a tiny part of it.

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    2. ANNE OMAN REPLY: Dear Grace, Thanks so much for your interest. The first part of the training was the basic Foreign Service Officer Course for both State Department and USIA junior officers. This lasted about three months and consisted of general protocol and organization. We took a field trip to UN headquarters in Ny and met with business leaders in Philadelphia. We also went to Capitol hill and .met with staffers of the committees that dealt with foreign affairs. Then the State department people went off to a consular course and the USIA contingent took courses in such topics as Communist strategy and counter insurgency--this was the cold war. The most useful course for me was Southeast Asia area studies, where we had excellent lecturers including the scholar Bernard Fall, who wrote The Street Without Joy about the Viet Nam war (and was later killed on it). Bear in mind that this was 1962, and training has undoubtedly changed.

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  5. Congratulations, Anne! What an exciting and interesting life you are leading!

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    1. That true? Talk about the fodder for fiction... But Anne’s reality is so fascinating!

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    2. ANNE OMAN REPLYING: Dear Judi, thank you for reading Hank's feature about me and MANGO RAINS. I think we all have interesting stories to tell especially when we get older don't you agree?

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  6. Congratulations on your new release! I'll enjoy reading it.

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    1. Yes, I agree! I am so thrilled about it.

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    2. ANNE OMAN REPLY: Thank you so much. I hope you like the book and that you will get back to me with a frank assessment.

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  7. This sounds so intriguing, Anne.

    I'm in with your definition of literary fiction. :^)

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    1. So funny! Someone once asked me if I could write a romance without a mystery, and I was baffled! What would people do? I asked. See why I am not the person to write anything but thrillers.

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    2. REPLY FROM ANNE OMAN TO SUSAN D: Thank you.

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  8. Congratulations on your debut novel! I had difficulties writing a mystery novel. When I reread it, it looked more like a romance novel than a mystery novel. No mystery either. LOL.

    Galbraith was the name of a member of the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s. Was the name coincidential?

    Diana

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    1. Diana, Galbraith is also the pseudonym used by J.K. Rowling in her Cormoran Strike crime novels.

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    2. Deborah, yes, Galbraith is also the pseudonym used by JK Rowling. It is also similar to my 3x great grandfather's name - Gabreath. He was born on the Island of Gigha off the coast of Scotland.

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    3. REPLY FROM ANNE OMAN: Diana: Yes, it was totally coincidental. I wanted a waspy name. I first picked Shields, but when I gave a reading to a writers group, people thought I was talking about Julia Child. I admired John Kenneth Galbraith, but mycharacter
      Wasn't based on anyone in his family.

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    4. Anne, I thought that was interesting about names. Julia, as in Julia Child. I wonder if Shields sounds like Child?

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  9. This checks so many boxes for me! Yay! Congratulations on the release, Anne. I am so looking forward to reading Mango Rains!

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  10. Anne, welcome to Jungle Red, and congratulations on your fiction debut! Your prose in that little excerpt is gorgeous, and I'm fascinated by that time period in Asia, with the attendant political intrigue. I can't wait to read Mango Rains!

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    1. ANNE OMAN REPLY: Dear Deborah, Your kind words are especially meaningful to me as I am a great fan of your books and look forward to the next. I especially like the way you weave just enough domestic detail into your novels to ring true with those of us who have juggled children and careers but not too much to get in the way of the plot. And I love the GB settings. My husband and I went walking on the coast trail in Cornwall last summer, staying at the Housel Bay hotel. I think Cornwall would make a great setting for a Deborah Crombie novel. Actually, I think Dorothy Sayers set on of her Wimsey books on the coast path.

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  11. ANNE OMAN COMMENT: Dear Hank, Thanks so much for your kind words and for giving me this wonderful opportunity.

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  12. TO HANK FROM ANNE OMAN (trying again to post!) --- Dear Hank, Thanks so much for your kind words and for giving me this wonderful opportunity. I don't remember running across a Ryan in my travels but I'm sure we have mutual friends from those days. My only posts were Phnom Penh and Djakarta. My surname was Henehan. I'd love to hear about your father's experience. Were you with him overseas?

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    1. Oh, his last name was Sablosky. Irving Sablosky. And his wife is Juliet Antunes. No, I wasn't with him--I was with my mom and stepfather. But we were always close! I bet you had some colleagues in common!

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    2. ANNE OMAN REPLY TO HANK: Thanks, Hank. I'm sure we did. I Don't recognize the names, but it's been a long, long time.

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  13. Kudos and congrats on fulfilling your dream! You give me hope, as I prepare to shop my speculative fiction novel at *ahem* a few years younger. I look forward to reading your debut novel.

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    1. ANNE OMAN REPLY: Dear Diane Hale, Good luck with your novel. Don't get discouraged and never give up. --Anne

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  14. Such an inspiration to other aspiring novelists! I always tell my students you can write at any age, because each time of life gives you your own particular insight and personal experiences.

    Also, the summary for MANGO RAIN sounds fascinating, and it's it's interesting to me that we seem to have hit a moment where we're seeing more and more historical novels set in Vietnam and other parts of southeast Asia during the end of their colonial era. So many Americans think those countries histories began in 1966 - I love how we're seeing a deeper dive into slightly earlier times.

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    1. Seems like such a long time ago...and so important.

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    2. ANNE OMAN REPLY: Thank you. By all. Means, your students shouldn't be discouraged. Writing dislike everything else--it improves with practice. My book is fiction a d shouldn't substitute for the historical non fiction written about the period.

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  15. COMMENT FROM ANNE OMAN: Thank you everyone for commenting and writing today. I plan to answer all your questions so please keep posting.

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    1. We love having you! You are an incredible inspiration.

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  16. I am going to get this book. I was an expat for more than half a decade in the Middle East, though not with the government. Knew lots of diplomats etc. This kind of story appeals to me greatly. I can’t wait to read it!

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    1. ANNE OMAN: Dear David, Hope the book lives up to expectations. I had several friends who lived in the Mid East, and my husband was a vice consul in Dharran. Have you read Crossing Mandlebaum Gate by Kai Bird? It's a non fiction account of growing up as a Foreign Service child in the Middle East. Thank you.

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  17. Wow. What a fabulous story. Gives me those must-read kind of chills. That kid didn't deserve to die -- but what he did was stupid, and sometimes stupidity has terrible consequences. I wonder whether he was just young and mischievous, or more likely arrogant and totally inconsiderate, with no respect for people of another culture, or...

    Re writing mysteries, I kept adding mystery (or at least adventure) to my romances because I felt that something needed to HAPPEN, and the publisher in question wanted just romance. Ah well.

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    1. ANNE OMAN REPLY: Dear Barbara, Thanks so much for your interest. I hope you enjoy the book. I should tell you that the boy who was killed is not a fully developed character. I put him in as an illustration that in the East, some mysteries never get solved. I would love to know more about your books. I also tried, unsuccessfully, to write a romance novel. Take care.

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  18. This sounds like a fascinating read! I am very much looking forward to it.

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