Category: The Esmeralda Goodbye

Covenants & Lost Neighborhoods

I recently visited the San Diego History Center to view the San Diego’s Lost Neighborhoods exhibition, which examines the local history of African-American communities displaced by redlining, freeway construction, and other discriminatory policies. One of those lost neighborhoods …

Raymond Chandler’s Taco Place

Below is a photo of the La Jolla Methodist Church on La Jolla Boulevard, located in the Lower Hermosa neighborhood. The chapel on the right was originally built in 1924 as a passenger and traction power substation for …

Drinking with Dr. Seuss

“And across from me is Ted Geisel,” Miller continued. “Who writes a few small words, mostly for children, and gets paid extravagantly for them. That’s the only reason we let him in the group. He also draws very …

Tijuana Bibles & The Perverted Savants Club

My recent novel, The Esmeralda Goodbye, is set in Southern California in the mid-1950s. Some of the characters I developed early on were a trio of disaffected young teenagers—Danny Stirling, Willie Denton, and Rachel Shapiro—who chafe against the …

Sunny Jim’s Sea Cave

The cover for The Esmeralda Goodbye is taken from an old postcard I found, which features an illustration of a female swimmer standing on the rocks at the entrance to a cave, preparing to dive into the ocean …