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Leaving his mark on pulp fiction

Nitish S Rele in Tampa

His first novel, Final Orbit, was a murder mystery set aboard NASA's space shuttle Columbia. His second, Speed Week, was a darkly comic thriller based on his experiences in Daytona Beach.

Journalist-novelist Shirish V Date just hasn't had enough with some "good, twisted fun". He is on to more "cheerfully subversive" topics in his third novel Smokeout, which will hit the bookstores here on November 6. He's going to start marketing the book in the next couple of months, said the Pune-born writer.

"I based Smokeout loosely -- very loosely -- upon Florida's actual law snuck in through the legislature by then governor Lawton Chiles and the subsequent fight he faced to keep it on the books," he replied.

Born in 1964, Date's physician parents emigrated to the United States when he was barely three. He attended public schools in Massachusetts, New York and California before earning a bachelor's degree in political science from Stanford in 1985.

Date was editor-in-chief of The Stanford Daily student paper. "I enjoyed writing for the paper there," he says. That proved the turning point of his career.

He has covered criminal courts for a New York newspaper; then Daytona Beach and NASA for the daily Orlando Sentinel; the Florida state government for the Associated Press and the Palm Beach Post. He is now bureau chief of the Palm Beach Post at Tallahassee, the capital of Florida.

The novelist in him awoke in 1994 when Date and wife Mary Ann took a one-year sailing sabbatical from Daytona Beach across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, and back across to the Caribbean. That led to Final Orbit, which was hardly noticed.

Speed Week, released last year, sold several thousand copies at the bookstores. The protagonist in the book set on Daytona Beach is a stock car racing heir who plans to kill his wife. Along the way, he comes across some interesting characters such as sexy pool hustlers, venal fortune-tellers, a stepmother with alarming ideas about family, a top state legislator with a keen eye for graft, etc.

As for Smokeout, it's jacket was recently released by the publisher Putnam. It speaks of a tobacco bill, political manoeuvring, venal politicians, sexy lobbyists and a few honest citizens.

With Smokeout, Date hopes to make it into pulp fiction's big time. Ahead lies another novel that he's begun work on, and reached about three-quarters across.

"It lampoons Central Florida theme parks and the way they had control over the local media," he said. "It's all a part of the culture in which we all get together."

Of course, that is the future. For the present, Date has enough suspense to deal with considering the future of Smokeout.

EARLIER FEATURE:
Pune-Born Journalist Digs Murder In Daytona Beach

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