My Story
Dear Reader,
My life story is a lucky drunkard’s walk through the key turning points of our times, revisited fondly in my recent Merriman Institute Mysteries. My story immersed me in Brazil in the Fifties, then Yale in the Sixties, Cambridge, MA in the early Seventies, London in the late Seventies and Boston in the middle of the Go-Go Eighties. Each era captured historic conflicts that played out on the world’s stage—and each era provides a rich setting for a mystery. I was lucky to be in the right places at the right times.
You can dive into these pivotal, vibrant cultures by reading my mysteries. I use my writer’s license to select the specific characters and plot lines that are relevant to us in our own times. Each mystery has one foot in the past and the other in the present, when Colby Merriman and his team at the Institute solve them using advanced technologies. Write what you know, but say it for now.
My life story shipped me to Brazil in the Fifties, when I was a kid and my Dad ran US Steel’s interests there. Mom and Dad were saints, but there were also the brash Ugly Americans who joined Rio’s Anglo expats and corrupt Brazilian oligarchs during the Cold War at the height of samba, soccer, and the flowering of Carnaval. The Case of the Single-sided Razor Blade (MS complete) takes you into that collision of cultures.
A decade later, I’m at Yale for a BA and an MFA in the Sixties. The heady vibe of the times was richly illustrated by the Living Theater’s tour to New Haven in my last year at the Yale Drama School. They mounted revolutionary theater, performing their Paradise Now! and Frankenstein as incitements to resist the Vietnam war, commanding the audience to flow out from the theater in protest, naked into the streets. It was arresting. The Case of the Shocking Frankenstein (Concept only) immerses you in that rebellious counterculture.
The Case of the Toxic Tear Gas (MS Complete) plunges you into the chaos and passions of the tear gas riots in Harvard Square in 1970, when I was in Boston designing stage sets and teaching scenic design in area colleges. Those were the days of living in a carriage house with a revolving cast of friends and lovers. We thought they’d never end.
Almost a decade later, my story takes me to London planning and producing An Elizabethan Pageant, a theatrical sound-and-light show opened by HRH Princess Anne in 1979. The Case of the Loose Willy (Concept only) flies you into London’s theatre scene in the late seventies, when British theatre is at its peak, but the threat of AIDS looms in the wings. There’s many a tale told in the Dirty Duck Pub by the River Avon in Stratford.
After my company produced a string of such sound-and-light shows, I start hearing about a new medium, IMAX ®. The Museum of Science is building one in Boston, so I become an associate director of the Museum of Science, put in charge of the Museum’s theaters and marketing. Over the next three years, with the help of a suite of hot marketing agencies, we tripled attendance to 2.2 million visitors in 1988 by opening an IMAX® theater and launching the blockbuster exhibition Ramesses the Great. The Case of the Deadly Mummy (MS complete) takes you backstage during the cocaine-fueled, go-go ad agency Eighties.
During the next thirty years, White Oak Associates, Inc., the museum planning firm run by me and my wife, planned over a billion dollars of new and expanded museums internationally. Toward the end of this stage, I authored and edited three non-fiction books, Measuring Museum Impact and Performance, The Museum Managers’ Compendium and The Effective Museum (published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2016, 2017 and 2022, respectively). These pass along to other museum professionals what we learned. While there are plenty of heroes, blackguards and villains from this period to people other mysteries, I’ll let it be for now. Maybe after things cool down…
One last note, there are important differences between my story and the story of Colby Merriman, the leader of the Merriman Institute and the main detective in each of the mysteries. Colby is a very wealthy, old-family Boston Brahmin, living in his family’s nineteenth century brownstone. I, on the other hand, am a first-generation American who had to earn my keep. And I am not a detective. I just love classic detective stories.