Sunday Review: Boystown: Ride the Cocaine Highway North (novel)

Now available as a Kindle book

By Morris Dean

You may not recognize the title as that of the novel from which three chapters have been published here and identified simply as from Boystown, but it's the same book, by the same writer – our contributing editor Ed Rogers. Another difference, besides the subtitle specially added for Kindle, is that Ed's first name isn't capitalized on the cover. Ed explains:

I started that a long time ago. When I sign it, I use the back of the "d" to make my "R."

    Makes me wish the book had been published on paper as well as electronically, so Ed could autograph a copy for me.
    From the chapters we've shown on Moristotle & Co., you've picked up that the narrator is James Hamilton, a Vietnam draft dodger and entrepreneur who flies airplanes to move "product" and cash. You've learned that he has a friend named Jay, who sometimes flies for the C.I.A. and that his activities lead to his having to flee Mexico to avoid being killed by a Colombian drug cartel. And you may remember that he's intimately familiar with "the hippie experience"....
    If you haven't been biting your nails already to get a copy of the whole book, nothing I could say here would make any difference. So, what does Ed have to say about his book?

I grew up in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. The town I lived in was Harlingen, Texas. Most of the people were in the Air force or worked on the base. About the only people with money were the farmers. My friends ranged from the richest to the poorest and they all play a part in my novel Boystown.
    There really was a place called Boystown, by the way, and at the age of 14, I entered manhood there, in a bar called the Golden Place. The price was $2.00.
    The people in the book are made up, but most of the events did happen to real people who I have crossed paths with over the years. The part about where and how the drugs were flown into the States is true, and the character who flies for the CIA is based on a friend I had.
    If you choose to read my book, please remember that something that happens to one person in the book may in actuality have happened to several people. In order to tell the story, I had to embody many people in one person.

You can purchase a copy of Boystown: Ride the Cocaine Highway North on Amazon.
    You can't buy the first copy, however – I already did...which led Ed to quip, "Well, I guess, as I have sold at least one book, I can call myself a writer." I've called Ed a writer for a very long time. And what a writer!

Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean