Match Play

This might be a good time to describe my books. This first one, Match Play, I wrote thirty years ago, a golf/suspense novel I thought would be successful with the growing number of golfers all over the world. But I couldn't find a publisher willing to take a chance on it. I guess they all thought golfers were too stupid to want to read a suspense novel set on a crazy golf course. And it does have a lot of golf in it, something non-golfers might find boring. I still believe the conflict between the narrator and the bad guy, both on and off the course, is entertaining enough even for non-golfers. If anyone wants to try it, the book is available on Lulu.com as an e-book for practically nothing . . . in fact, nothing. It's free. For those without an e-reader, it's available on Amazon or Barnes and Noble, but not free. I think the cost is around $15.

Prologue
One Wednesday in May as Pat and Stan and I were coming up the sixteenth fairway, we saw it—a pure white martin. Martins, barn swallows, you’ve seen them if you’ve ever been on a golf course in late afternoon when the shadows are long and the air is still and the bugs are sunlit low along the ground. They’re dark blue on top and yellow-brown or gray on the belly, and they have double-pronged tails. Sort of daytime bats, and like their nighttime counterparts, they’re magical fliers. They glide, then flap and swerve just inches from the grass, then sweep up and around again for another pass, skimming bugs in unpredictable patterns. You watch, fascinated with their skill. The eye grows so accustomed to the flight and color that when you see something white flash past, in martin flight—same swoops and glides, but jarringly out of synch with the blue of the others—the thrill is doubled.

“Oh, wow,” Pat breathed when she first noticed it. I’d seen it about the same time, and we both watched it rise and swing past the trees along the right side of the fairway, then back again, white against the dark green of the pines and the lighter green of the fairway.

“I’ll be damned!” Stan murmured. “You ever see anything like that before?”

We watched it in silence for a few minutes until it decided to find fatter bugs on some other fairway, to show off for and delight some other golfers. It was beautiful.

And in July, Roger Burdis caught it, killed it, and had it stuffed.