From Hotel Bars to Hotel California: Guest Post by Don Bruns

Don Bruns: From Hotel Bars to Hotel California

Okay, it wasn’t an original idea, but what is? Just because Hotel California isn’t the first anthology of its kind, doesn’t mean it isn’t a great book…a great collection of stories by celebrated authors. Because it is. But here’s how it started. 

I was asked to participate in The Great Filling Station Hold Up, an anthology using Jimmy Buffet song titles edited by Josh Pachter. I wrote "Cheeseburger in Paradise," about a hitman in Munster, Iowa who is eating a cheeseburger at the Paradise Café. An interesting exercise. 

I called Julie Gwinn, my agent and told her the story. She said she wished we’d thought of that. I countered with “We can do this. Let’s do an anthology based on The Eagle’s songs from Hotel California.” She said, “Who are we going to get to write the stories?” 

One week later I gave her the list of authors. Andrew Child with a Jack Reacher story, (New Kid in Town) Heather Graham with a New Orleans thriller, Reed Coleman, John Gilstrap and three other talented authors. (including myself.) She sold it to Blackstone Publishing one week later. Then she asked, “What’s next?” 

I had the answer. Thriller. With the title song, Billy Jean, Wanna’ be Startin’ Somethin’,The Girl is Mine…I knew I’d get authors to write the stories. Jeff Deaver, William Kent Krueger, Heather Graham and others have contributed fabulous stories in the anthology that will release in July of 2023. 

And next? Back in Black, stories using song titles from ACDC’s triumphant album. I called Andrew Child and asked if he wanted to participate once again. He answered, “If I can do You Shook Me All Night Long.” Of course I said yes. Reed Coleman is back, Charles Todd, Sandra Balzo, Heather Graham and some new talented writers including my brother Dave. Back in Black will release July, 2024. 

We’ve had marvelous reviews on Hotel California and made Oline Cogdil’s best mystery list of 2022 in the Florida Sun Sentinal. Twenty five years of networking at conferences, twenty five years of hanging out at the hotel bars has paid off. Next, I think we’ll do Bat Out of Hell, Meatloaf’s first monster hit album. There’s an endless supply of material out there, and we will continue to mine it. 

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Don Bruns is the USA Today best selling author of nineteen published novels. Currently working on his fourth New Orleans thriller involving a disgraced homicide detective and a voodoo practitioner, the Indianapolis Star says “Simply put, Bruns is a master story teller.”

John D and me: Don Bruns

Award winning author and all-around great guy Don Bruns has 12 published novels and numerous short stories and anthologies. He is a novelist, advertising executive, musician, songwriter, cook, and painter who has no idea what he wants to do when he grows up. He makes his home in Sarasota, Florida. Thanks, Don, for permission to post this article.

John D and me: Don Bruns

When I wrote my first book, Jamaica Blue, I wanted Elmore Leonard's dialogue and John D. MacDonald's characters and settings.

Most fiction writers build heroes and villains out of thin air. In John D's books it was thick Florida air, with the humidity, the heat, the sweat in every pore of their body and every fabric that they wore. These weren't just characters. They were Florida characters, and there is no better study of the Sunshine State crazies than in his timeless novel, Condominium. MacDonald fabricated some of the most memorable Florida characters ever invented. Long before Carl Hiaason, Tim Dorsey or Randy Wayne White, MacDonald exposed crooked developers, loose women, real estate swindlers, and the fixed-income retiree in this epic novel.

His physical descriptions are unparalleled in modern day literature. Consider Harlin Barker, "a smallish man, pyramidal with long narrow head, sloping shoulders, wide hips and thick, muscular, hairless legs." I've never in my life heard a man described as pyramidal, yet it is so vivid. I'd recognize Harlin anywhere.

Characters, as we all do, suffered consequences for their actions. Consider Tom Shawn, a bar tender/bar owner who cheated on the drinks his patrons purchased. Cheap booze in expensive bottles. That sounds like it might just happen in Florida bars. Shawn was "five ten and weighed two sixty-five. Glossy curly black hair, bright blue eyes, boyish red lips, pink cheeks and a flawless complexion." It seems that Mr. Shawn, 41 years old, had been a running back in Georgia, had crossed up the gambling interests on a point spread in a bowl game, and had his knees broken with a ball bat. He'd gone to stock car racing and smuggling hash from Jamaica to Miami to getting shot in the stomach and drowning his partner in a pool in Miami. A normal Florida entrepreneur. But did John D invent the Florida characters, or did he just expose them?

When you read his books, especially Condominium, you know, deep in your soul, he didn't really invent them. They were people he was familiar with. Strange people, but still folks that he knew and thinly disguised. I read the book today and fervently wish that I knew the folks after which he modeled his characters.

And his settings were masterful. In a micro view, let's visit Tom Shawn's bar, The Sand Dollar, beyond the Beach Mall Shopping Plaza. "A former residence, a high-shouldered frame building made of hard pine and cypress." The ceiling was hung with nets, with glass and cork floats. Harpoons were chained to the walls. Chained, probably so none of the patrons would shoot at each other.

MacDonald set scenes in the marshy beaches with a thorough description of floral and fauna, in the big cities, in the suburbs, and he described the locales with more color than we see with the naked eye. As a reader I knew the locals better than people who live there. John was the perfect voyeur.

Read Condominium. Read any John D MacDonald book and revel in the characters and settings that this man imagined, saw, and described.


This article first appeared in the Herald Tribune, January 29, 2016