A little bit about me

Richard Gid Powers is a well-known author of historical and biographical studies:  a New York Times front-page reviewed biography of J. Edgar Hoover, a history of the FBI, a  study of the FBI in American Popular Culture, and a history of American Anticommunism.  They were the sort of meticulously researched and carefully argued books that readers and critics expect from serious works of non-fiction.

BUT . . .

Sometime after writing my last non-fiction work, his History of the FBI, Broken, I wondered if my non-fiction career wasn’t actually a detour from my first love, creative, very creative writing.

I had along the way been writing and occasionally publishing short humorous pieces of fiction like “Two Immortals,” a study of the Williams Brothers, Ted and Tennessee. Actually I had been fired as Features Editor of my College paper  for breaking the rule that what we published should say something about something in a manner that made sense to someone besides the writer. Getting thrown out of the paper’s newsroom was not only an offense against free speech and freedom of the press, but it meant no more free cigarettes and milk shakes. And as for writers having to make sense, there goes the Bible, Old AND New Testaments, to say nothing of the instruction manuals for “assembly required” mail order furniture.

Moving right along, I decided to try my hand at turning a book I was writing on the Holy Trinity into a novel. My reasoning was that, interesting as I found the mystery of the Trinity, I had never met anyone else with the slightest interest in it, and I was finding it less than compelling myself as I approached the thousand page mark.

So I was happily turning page after page of my characters’ arguments about theology into fiction, when it struck me that not only had I never written a novel before, but that I had no idea how to write one. (I had studied novels in college and graduate school, and taught college students about them, but I now knew that teaching about something does not guarantee knowing anything about something.

So I got one of those yellow and black Idiot’s Guidebooks, this one something like The Idiot’s Guide to Fiction Writing.

The first thing I learned was that a novel should have a plot. What a concept! Hadn’t occurred to me. And so instead of beginning with a hundred pages of rambling on about St. Augustine and other fascinating saints with great ideas about the Trinity, I shot someone in the first paragraph, and that changed everything.

And so The Mystery of the Trinity (I still liked the title although it had nothing to do with the story anymore) developed with sex and /or violence in just about every chapter, my characters romping through Greece, Paris, El Salvador, New Orleans, and New York. Couple other places, too. Largely concerned with corruption and conspiracies in the Catholic Church, and there is nothing so outrageous or weird you can say about that wacko bunch of Popes, Cardinals, Bishops and Priests that will make anyone will blink an eye. I liked how Trinity turned out, and so have the very few very discerning readers who’ve read it, but it so happens it has been translated into Turkish and has sold more copies there than here! Go figure. If you read Turkish, a language I now recommend to everyone as the tongue of saints and scholars, you can get that version on Amazon.

The next novel came out in the Spring of 2023, Secret Agent Gals, about how two celebrity founders of the Guggenheim Museum were recruited by J. Edgar Hoover to win WWII, pretty much by themselves, with an amazing “big reveal” about Hoover and his bunky Clyde Tolson at the end. No, not what you think, get your minds out of the gutter. Something else. I had a lot of fun writing it, stuffed it full of good jokes and wisecracks, and you’ll have fun reading it. Or listening, since there’s an audio book.

A really adventuresome press, Nat1, published my spoof review of Dune 2 this summer and a collection of my science fiction humor, To Boldly Go Where No Fool Has Gone Before. You can get them in print and digital form from Amazon.

On top of that, at the end of this year Nat 1 will publish my circumcision epic, The Most Unkindest Cut, the story of someone, kinda like me but much funnier, and his search for his own foreskin and the Foreskin of Our Lord and Savior. Before he gets through, the hero, the Chosen One, Chosie for short, has become Pope, President (of the USA), head of the National Soap Box Derby Races, and has established the Red Ryder BB Gun Battle Royal as an official Olympic Sport, in fact THE headline Olympic Sport.  but The Most Unkindest Cut could be everyman’s search for the lost foreskin that was lopped off before anyone asked him if he wanted to be mutilated in such an intimate part of his anatomy..

Still looking for a publisher is My Story: The Cock-Caboose-Itis Wars, which is Jennifer Anniston’s account of how she defeated a pandemic that was turning American men into, as David Crosby put it, cabooses attached to their dicks. You say it couldn’t happen? I say it could.

I’ve completed another novel, Mystery at the Guggenheim  about  . . . well, better not say, since anything would be a spoiler. But it is a mystery and it does take place at the Guggenheim Museum.

A disclaimer:

If you are reading about me here, it is more than likely that you were looking for the award winning library novelist Richard Powers, or my father, the science fiction illustrator Richard M. Powers.

Of the former, when the two of us explored the possibility that we were related, we decided probably not, although both of our families came from Illinois, and we were both born there.

As for my Dad, there are web sites galore devoted to his science fiction paperback covers. There were all told about 1300 jackets he did, most of them science fiction, and he is in the Science  Fiction Hall of Fame and the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. His originals are much sought after, and his paperbacks are highly collectable.

When he started his career in New York when he was in the Army, he figured he would be a writer or an illustrator, depending on which broke first. His big break was a wonderful full-color illustrated edition of Gulliver’s Travels but he wrote many much-rejected short stories, and I have completed one of them called To Ocean Island, which I am posting under Richard M. Powers on this website. It’s about how a little boy, me, saves Monhegan Island from being incinerated. I plan, as time allows, to put together an edition of his stories and see if I can piece together an interminable Irish novel he left behind that seems to The Portrait of the Artis as a Young, Middle-Aged, and Old Man.

I just published an illustrated book by him for very smart kids or very childish adults called XBLND, which is an alphabet book for robots. Available on Amazon.