Ebooks were a new thing when the rights for the first nine Jeri Howard books reverted to me. I wanted to republish the novels as ebooks myself. That was a time-consuming project, as I had to have them converted into electronic files, which involved having the actual books scanned. I found a service that would do this, but spent the next six months proofreading. All sorts of things affected scans, from the quality of the paper to specks of dust on the page.

I still find mistakes, though not as often now. The quality control gremlins at Amazon do point out those errors. At least now I’ve become quite skilled at correcting those files myself, thanks to Calibre software.

Cover art was an important aspect of republishing the books. Kindred Crimes, first in the series, was published by St. Martin’s Press, while the next eight were published by Fawcett Books. The US covers were all over the map. Some good, some that left me scratching my head.

The British covers? Awful. Really awful. Dreadful, even. The Japanese covers were terrific.

For Don’t Turn Your Back on the Ocean, which mostly takes place in Monterey, I told my Fawcett editor that it would be nice if the cover had something to do with the contents of the book. I remember being quite pleased at the pelican that appeared on the cover. The new cover has a more brooding look, but still has that all-important ocean.

As for that business about the cover having something to do with what’s in the book, that’s apparently an author thing. People in marketing tell me that it doesn’t matter to the potential reader. After all, said reader is looking to buy a book and often that’s based on what they see in a small thumbnail on a computer screen.

Back to those ebook covers. I really wanted to have a unifying look, something that said: this is a series. I’m now on my third set of covers for those first nine books and I’m please with them. The artwork for each cover is different but you can certainly tell they are all books in the Jeri Howard series.

I also have nine books published by Perseverance Press. The covers for the Jeri Howard books are quite different. Those for the Jill McLeod/California Zephyr series have a unifying look: trains, since they are historical mysteries about a Zephyrette on a long-distance train. Now that Perseverance Press is closing, the rights for those books are reverting back to me. For the Jeri Howard books, I’m working with a cover artist to put new covers on the ebooks, covers that jibe with those on the first nine ebooks.

As for the train books, as I call them, those will get a cover reboot. Back when they first came out, I was hoping to use the old California Zephyr advertisements, which have a distinctive 1950s look. But I couldn’t figure out who had the rights to those images. The train images that we used are great, but this is a cozy series and I’d like to rebrand them as such. The new covers may have illustrations that resemble the old ads.

Earlier this year I published The Sacrificial Daughter, the first in the Kay Dexter series, which features a geriatric care manager in a fictional Northern California town. The series is more cozy than hard-boiled. I wanted a great cover, but I resisted the impulse to add a cat. I tried designing a cover myself and quickly discovered that’s not really my skill set.

I turned to a cover designer who read the book and came up with several designs based on suggestions I gave her. None of them worked. Some came close, but… Then the cover designer came up with something on her own, an image we hadn’t even discussed.

Yep, that was the one. It clicked. It was just right.

And that is what’s on the cover of the book.

As I read about the surrender of the Afghani troops, the rush to Kabul, and the evacuation, I can’t help but compare it to the Fall of Saigon in 1975, the subject of Pay Back, the third book in The Cooper Quartet. The parallels between the two events are too keen. The U.S. pulling out of a lost war, one fought for 18 years the other 20, money spent on arming our allies, training their pilots, and building an air force, only to see both crumble in days. In Pay Back, the Cooper family is entangled in the Fall of Saigon, each driven by the need to make recompense for their pasts. Their story begins in 1967 in Dead Legend, as the Vietnam War tears the U.S. apart; the second book, Head First, unfolds in 1972 during the Christmas bombings as the U.S. prepares to pull out our troops. The eBook of Head First will be available for $.99 on Amazon, September 9 – 12.

After the pullout in 1972, the U.S. Embassy remained open and protected by Marines. The U.S. continued to support the South Vietnamese Army and Air Force, with both advisors and weapons. In addition to the Embassy Staff and Marine units, the usual alphabet soup remained in-country (the CIA, et cetera, et cetera), plus U.S. contractors, their families, and reporters. As did the Vietnamese scouts who spent the war embedded in various units of the U.S. military, the Vietnamese who worked for the U.S. forces, and the Amerasian children of U.S. soldiers. All but the children were promised a quick exit should the North Vietnamese take the South.

When the South Vietnamese Army folded at Pleiku in late April 1975, the rush to get out was on, refugees poured into Saigon, clotting the airport at Tan San Nhut and the city. They weren’t alone. The armed troops from the South Vietnamese army rushed in with them. Masses waited outside the U.S. Embassy, at the airbase in Tan San Nhut, or floated the Saigon River on a rumor that merchant ships were waiting in the coastal city of Vung Tau. The Cooper family is caught in this mêlée, whether in the U.S. watching it on television, in Saigon, or with the Seventh Fleet. I hope I did the tumult justice.

On April 29, with 15 North Vietnamese divisions ringing Saigon, the U.S. Ambassador ordered the evacuation. The U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet pumped chopper after chopper into Saigon from the South China Sea. By the last flight out April 30, over 6,000 people had been evacuated, overpopulating the waiting aircraft carriers and destroyers. A few flights got off from Tan San Nhut before it was shelled. And though, Vung Tau was attacked, and fuel depots burned, some people made it down river and out by ship or fishing boat. By any standards, the exit was messy, and many were left behind.

In my research for Pay Back, international reporters in Saigon wrote of an abiding insouciance among the population which had survived the French, the Japanese, the French, and the U.S. – an enduring patience that someday the country would be theirs. It’s been nearly fifty years since the Fall. The Domino Theory’s dire predictions proved false. Perhaps because of Vietnam’s long history of colonialism, invasion, reunification, a country emerged, not easily, not without bloodshed, but not our way, or the French’s, or anyone else’s. And perhaps Afghanistan will as well, given the similar history of the two countries. One thing is certain, there will be repercussions and blame enough to go around.

Don’t Tell, the final book of The Cooper Quartet, deals with the aftermath and repercussions of the Fall of Saigon for the Cooper family. It will be published on November 11^th; the date seems apropos.  

*I stole the title for this blog from a line in the movie High Road to China.