The Collected Poems and The Upper Hand

Having recently made all of the New Orleans Mystery books written by my late husband, John William Corrington, and myself available as e-books and paperbacks on Amazon, I have embarked on a project to make my late husband’s more serious literary work also available.

Corrington began his writing career as a poet in the 1960s, publishing many poems in the “little magazines” so prevalent at the time and in the literary journals published by various universities. In 1962 he submitted a poetry manuscript to a Charioteer Press competition. He won the competition and the reward was the publication of his first book of poetry, Where We Are. The title was drawn from a W. H. Auden quotation: “…Lest we should see where we are,/Lost in a haunted wood,/Children afraid of the night/Who have never been happy or good.”

As Richard Whittington noted of Corrington’s poetry, “…significant qualities…[link] it with the Eliot-Auden lineage. One is its objectivity….an ever-expanding, all-encompassing ‘I’ is alien to Corrington’s temperament, imagination and expression.” While this is characteristic of Corrington’s early poetry, his style changed under the influence of the “Ginsberg-Patchen-Corso-Ferlinghetti-Bukowski group” as Whittington termed it.

In the 1960s, Corrington began a long-running correspondence with Charles Bukowski. On reading Where We Are, Bukowski wrote to Corrington, “A good enough set but not as well as you are doing NOW which is all the more for the good, ya.”

What Corrington was writing NOW was contained in his second book of poetry, The Anatomy of Love and Other Poem, and his third book of poetry, Mr. Clean and Other Poems, both published in 1964. Ralph Adamo wrote that “One thing is certain of The Anatomy of Love: it finds Corrington at the height of his powers as a poet, confident of his themes and his moves, brimming with a molten language, forging ideas that burn and melt as they roll onward.”

Corrington’s last book of poetry, Lines to the South, was published in 1965. Bukowski wrote of the title poem, “The lines of yours. LINES TO THE SOUTH damn near immortal and if this is overpraise, I am sorry.”

Corrington’s poetry earned a few favorable reviews but not as much attention as his novels. Writing in The Massachusetts Review, Beat poet and critic Josephine Miles approvingly noted two of Corrington’s poems from Lines, “Lucifer Means Light” and “Algerien Reveur,” alongside poetry by James Dickey, but her comments were more in passing than in depth. Dickey himself, it should be noted, admired Corrington’s writing, saying, “A more forthright, bold, adventurous writer than John William Corrington would be very hard to find.”

The poems published in these four books total only 61, thus most of Corrington’s poetry which found print in the “little magazine” and journals has not been collected in book form. The Collected Poems of John William Corrington is intended to remedy this.

After this 1960s, Corrington devoted himself largely to prose, publishing four novels and three books of short stories. The Upper Hand, Corrington’s second novel, is now available as an e-book. As time permits, with the help of my son Robert Corrington, I will make all of Corrington’s work available as e-books.

Welcome

Welcome to the site dedicated to the New Orleans Mystery series written by my late husband and myself. These books have not been available to the public (except through used book stores in expensive out of print hard cover versions). With the help (actually he did most of the work) of my son Robert Corrington, all five books in the series are now available as Kindle e-books on Amazon. Naturally I am very excited about this development, and have been announcing it to all my friends. This web site is to announce it to all of you who don’t know me, but appreciate good action/adventure mysteries, with bold, fun characters, who live in that historic but crime-ridden city, New Orleans — “the city that care forgot” or as the beleaguered natives sometimes say, “the city that forgot to care.”

Three characters continue throughout the series, though the point of view changes from book to book:

Wes Colvin is narrator of So Small a Carnival and Fear of Dying. He is my late husband’s alter ego (it’s no accident that John Wesley Colvin has the same initials as John William Corrington, and is a redneck from Shreveport, who hates the corruption of New Orleans). Wes is a reporter for the New Orleans Item (a fictional newspaper, let me hasten to say), but is anxious to move on to bigger and better things. But he finds himself deeply attracted to a local girl from a prominent old New Orleans family, whose roots run so deep it’s unlikely she will ever leave.

Denise Lemoyne, Wes’s girlfriend, is the narrator of A Civil Death. She is not my alter ego (I’m a middle-class Texan, not a New Orleans socialite, but we did raise our family in one of those huge old Uptown houses so I know the scene well). Despite her background, I insisted Denise not be “girly,” and her character was written to be smart, bold, and sexy, while still concerned with the social norms she was raised to follow.

Ralph “Rat” Trapp, a NOPD Captain of Homicide, is the narrator of A Project Named Desire and The White Zone. He is modeled on a friend of ours who was, like Rat, an army veteran, but who returned to his home town to become the director of the Desire project rather than a cop like Rat. Rat and Wes are best friends since they share an equal contempt for “rules.” Rat treats New Orleans (and Hollywood when he visits there) like a combat zone, where anything goes.

If you are interested in how this series began, it was like this: My husband said he would like to write an “entertainment,” a mystery story, and had in mind a first scene: a man walks into a bar and finds everyone there has been murdered. But he did not have a plot. I was the story teller in our writing team, so I said to let me think about it. After a time I came back and said, “It was because of Huey Long’s assassination in the 1930s…” The resulting novel became So Small a Carnival. It sold readily to Viking Press, and it was subsequently translated and reprinted in six foreign editions. Thus, we decided to continue with the series. If you read them all, you will discover that the underlying motive in all five books is something from the past. As Faulkner noted: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”