Santa Maria Times from Santa Maria, California • 36

C-4-Sunday November 18, 1990 $aritg Mario( Times WW Rollicking fiction and banjo music if I A Six -lA A jf i 1 ux A 4. By David Simpson Associated Press Writer DECATUR, Ga. (AP) With three novels in print and a fourth on the way, Clyde Edger-ton is supposed to be taking a break. So here he is on stage, with banjo and piano, reading his often rollicking, sometimes riveting Southern fiction. It's Southern fiction by an author who thinks the catch-all category of "Southern writer" doesn't do justice to the diversity of the region's literature.

His own diversity was on display during a recent reading at Agnes Scott College, where he is a visiting writer this semester. Edgerton mixed music, a frequent topic in his work, with passages from his novels about the comic elements of family life in the South and the moments in which people reveal or struggle for their souls. It's been a winning combination for Edgerton's books: "Ra-ney," "Walking Across Egypt" and "The Floatplane Notebooks." Algonquin Books declined to release exact figures, but sales of "Raney" in hardcover and paperback went well over 200,000 copies. Publishers Weekly reported Ballantine paid six figures for paperback rights to "The Floatplane Notebooks." All three novels have enjoyed enthusiastic reviews. Movie options have been negotiated, although no productions are under way.

Success has transformed Edgerton from a college English teacher squeezing in some longhand writing at 6 a.m. into a full-time writer with his own word processor and basement office in Durham, N.C. For now, though, Edgerton is popping in and out of Agnes Scott, a liberal arts college for women, attending literary conferences and readings and awaiting the February publication of "Killer Diller." "I'm taking my first break in 13 years from writing fiction," he said. to avoid any hint that he con- dones racism, Edgerton said thoughtless slurs used by other-wise lovable characters may put in perspective by the other "isms," such as ageism or harbored by those who think themselves above racism. "Whpn these characters are attacked for their racism, writer may speculate on how ,4 the attackers think of old peopje and plumbers and painters and how they behave toward thosv'w people which raises the whole- question of the meaning in havior as up against the meanr'n" ing in words and labels." Edgerton said he did not to downplay "the horror of rac- ist labels" and pointed out "They Floatplane Notebooks" includes a an account of a lynching.

Most of Edgerton's scenes, however, are warm; conflicts often are hilarious. The title character from "Raney," for example, is a traditional woman who has married more worldly man. She is somewhat alarmed when he swigs champagne on their wedding night and is moved to terror by some of his other, Ideasjfoj the evening. Edgerton delivered outraged account in an affected accent to his Agnes Scott ence. His variety of voices facial contortions and run-on breathless delivery are reminisnm-cent of Garrison "Prairie Home Companion" jj dio star who also writes sympa thetic stories about rural char-" acters, although his are in Midwest.

Edgerton doesn't resist cora--X parisons to Keillor tall," he joked), but he does1.1 object to the casual labeling ofv" authors as "Southern CI "Too often the analysis stops; there, and all kind of assu'mp-v' tions go with it. Careful know that there are vast-differences among the group-" referred to as Southern ers," he said. 01 with a crime in -ft," 'she '1 think that the setting has become a more important part of the book for that reason." "The gentler mystery canJja set anywhere, and the humorous ones as well. But I do think that the hard-boiled ones need to be the big cities, and certainly in1Si cities that have a reputation. for crime." Mitchell Kaplan, co-owner the Books Books retail sttffefs in the Miami area, ami mystery writers purvey a sense of outrageousness, exaggeration and the 'just plain bizarre.

JWtt I AP laserphoto an interview February particular, tests his ability to paint his characters sympathetically while pointing out their faults. "I have decided not to skirt the issue, simply because it's real. It's hard to love a character who says 'nigger' in a novel," he acknowledged, but he said it's a situation that parallels life. "One of the greatest paradoxes in some Southerners' lives is having people who would die for them that is, their parents who are also people who say Edgerton said. Carefully choosing his words "People in New York realize it's not just a mom-and-pop T-shirt-shop place, that it's a real broad-shouldered American city." Ruth Cavin, who sees nearly 1,000 manuscripts a year at St.

Martin's Press, has become known as an editor of mysteries. In a gradual shift over about 15 years, she has seen Miami and other cities emerge as popular crime novel settings outside the traditional New York-Chicago-Los Angeles axis. "I think the crime novel is no longer as much a set type as it used to be. I think it's a novel Books recount pranksters' merry travels THE FURTHER INQUIRY, by Ken Kesey; photographs by Ron Bevirt. Viking; 218 pages; $24.85.

ON THE BUS, edited by Paul Perry with flashbacks by Ken Babbs. Thunder's Mouth Press; 224 pages; $21.95 (paper). By Tom Blackburn In 1964, 14 people from Palo Alto, painted a school bus with psychedelic forms and colors and drove it to New York and back. The trip may have been the defining event of mid-century American culture, as these two books imply. Then again, maybe it was merely a rude hiccup at the feast of literature, a cross-country fraternity party distinguished from other frat parties by publicity.

Tom Wolfe, in "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," and "gonzo journalist" Hunter S. Thompson became its bards. They weren't on the bus. Ken Kesey, author of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes a Great Notion," was. But only now, 26 years later, has he given his slant on the bus ride, in "The Further Inquiry," more a screenplay than an analysis.

Another 26th anniversary book, "On the Bus," is an oral history of the trip and what came after. It was Kesey's trip originally. He had to go to New York for a launch party for "Sometimes a Great Notion." He took along sqmefjiends, eventually number-ingl3. Called "The Merry Pranksters," all got nicknames before or during the trip: "Gretchen Fetchin' the Slime Queen," "Zonker," "Mai Function," "The Intrepid Traveller," etc. The purposes of the trip increased and multiplied: West (Coast) would meet East (Coast) at the estate where Timothy Leary and Richard Al-pert (who was to change his name to Baba Ram Dass) were experimenting with the mind-altering drug LSD.

Kesey had encountered LSD as a volunteer experiment subject in a Veterans Administration hospital. The trip would become a movie. Hundreds of hours of film and tape were made. A few minutes of 'm find their way into Kesey's new book. The trip would connect the new flower children with Jack Kerouac, Allet Ginsberg and the Beat generation.

The link was the bus driver, Neal Cassady, a middle-aged ex-con (drug dealing) who seems to have ingested everything but food and was a non-stop talker famed for his insight into people and machines. Cassady was the model for Kerouac's hero in "On the Road." Kesey gives samples of Cassady talking: "Speeders lose licenses. Too-too-too-toot. 'Concerto de la' passing diesel. Wee weee weee weee.

And a hot red galaxy. One moment (tweet). There's another diesel. Oh, he's behind me. 1 wondered why he didn't pass.

Well! I have someone to stay ahead of." Maybe you would have had to have been there. Kesey's "The Further Inquiry" makes Cassady the center of attention. The book is cast as a trial of Cassady on charges of being responsible for everything that happened. Other travelers are called as witnesses. Their tends to exonerate CSfsady died in Mexico in 1968, of hypojhermia, full of tequila and, by some accounts, drugs.

So what happened on the trip? Not much. The group took LSD in Arizona and had the kind of fun you'd have to be high to enjoy. if Edgerton gestures during book, "Killer Diller, is due out in became Mattie Rigsbee, the elderly church lady of "Walking Across Egypt." She and the juvenile delinquent she befriended will return in "Killer Diller," which will be the first of Edgerton's novels not to begin as a short story. "I try not to think of themes and ideas when I write fiction. I try to put interesting characters in interesting situations and just keep writing," Edgerton said.

But Edgerton does grapple with themes as profound as war reflecting his years as a recon-naissanepilot in Vietnam and racfsrrn Racial prejudice, in mansions and pastel colors, and on the inside you have somebody counting the drug money." Jim Hall, a creative writing instructor at Florida International isbf fended that many people seef Miami only as the drug-ridden city of crime made infamous by "Miami Vice." "There's a kind of romanticiza-tion going on about Miami, that it's kind of the Dodge City of America," said Hall, author of three crime novels set in the Florida Keys. "Part of that is justified, and part of that is myth. Wejalways need a Dodge City." However, Hall, the author of "Tropical Freeze," agrees that fictional Miami is a prime setting. "It's in the transition phase from local color to being on the national stage with other American cities that have been there for a long time," he said. BOOSTER MONDAY Miami grabs attention on crime novel scene Author Clyde His new Edgerton, 46, started writing in earnest after seeing Eudora Welty, one of his favorites, reading a story on public television.

Scenes he saw or heard about became starting points. "There will be an incident a woman stuck in a chair that happened to my Edgerton said. "My family thought it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard, so I went home and wrote a short story, and it turns out the short story turned into a novel." The woman" who when she forgot there was no bottom" in her rocking chair This is a wonderful place to be a writer, and more and more writers are moving here because they're fascinated by it." Masters of mystery Dick Francis and Lawrence Sanders live in the Fort Lauderdale area, and sponsors of Miami Book Fair International came up with the names of close to 40 authors or poets writing in or about South Florida. Levine, who has a regional best seller with an extralegal lawyer drama "To Speak for the Dead," goes as far as to theorize Miami has replaced Los Angeles as the boom town of tough-guy mysteries in the tradition of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. "All that glitters is not gold.

Beneath the glitz there is greed. It's a wonderful dramatic device," said Levine, who is writing his third book while practicing law part-time. "You have on the outside these towering royal palm trees and these pristine WARRIOR MIAMI (AP) A growing corps of crime writers looking for a hard-edged, contemporary setting is portraying Miami as a super-charged place of surface beauty and hidden demons. Some people still think of Miami as a mildewed retirement haven and winter vacationland for those who can't push themselves to the Caribbean. But such authors as Edna Buchanan, a Miami Herald crime writer; creative writing professor James W.

Hall; and lawyer Paul Levine are using the city's gritty underside as a vehicle for hard-boiled fiction. "It's a great place to be a writer because there's so much happening here. It's such an exotic, sexy, beautiful place where there's always something happening, whether wild, scary, bizarre or wonderful," said Buchanan, who turned to fiction after the police beat gore of her non-fiction work, "The Corpse Had a Familiar Face." "It's always been this way, but I think it's just being discovered. USED TV'S AND REPAIRS Non-Working Color TV's WANTED ML Santa Maria 928-5707 941 E. Foster Road Santa Maria EVERY Doors Open 4 p.m.

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