Books to date. This modest stack reflects a tremendous amount of work. I meant to put them in chronological order but the “Chainsaws” book is so big the stack would have been top-heavy.
In terms of effort, Stopping Time: Paul Bley and the Transformation of Jazz was started first, in the mid-eighties, but life changed so much that I didn’t get to work on it again until the mid-nineties. Then, while I waited for Paul Bley to read proofs, Harbour Publishing commissioned me to do a four-wheeling guide to Vancouver Island (the south part anyway; it’s a big island). I always thought I could write a book quickly: sure enough Keith Thirkell and I trekked up Island back roads in the summer of 1996, and the guide book came out less than a year later.
My family and I moved to Hamilton so I could do an MA at McMaster University; when I graduated in 2004 I figured I should get serious about writing books, so I turned my thesis into a monograph on Ornette Coleman, and worked with Mike Acres of Burnaby, BC to research and write a book on the history of the chainsaw. Harbour was eager to get the chainsaw book out ASAP, and Bev Daurio at The Mercury Press was enthusiastic, and knew how to get a book out fast, so both Chainsaws: A History and The Battle of the Five Spot came out in fall 2006.
Gradually the books were becoming more personal: from a guidebook where the subject is all, and the writer is well in the background, to the Bley book where I had to do a certain amount of writing in Paul’s voice, to a book on Ornette Coleman that was, at least, distinguished by my own take on how his music was first presented to the public, to a book on chainsaws—I must say beautifully illustrated and designed by the folks at Harbour—in which aside from a quick introduction, the author barely exists at all.
By 2007, when I was able to talk about “Chainsaws” on national CBC, I thought I had launched a career as a book-writer. I added my middle name to my nom de plume, since “David Lee” is, I have to admit, a bit generic and I was afraid that in the age of Google, I would get lost. Finally, my novel Commander Zero came out in 2012; by then I’d met Noelle Allen of Wolsak & Wynn, who offered to reissue “Five Spot,” so I was able to revise and expand that little book. We launched the new edition in May 2014 at the New School for Public Engagement in NYC.
I also offered to write Noelle a horror novel set in Hamilton. I wasn’t really up on current work in the horror field, but had read lots of H.P. Lovecraft, so I wrote a novel with a teenage protagonist who finds the author’s Cthulhu Mythos alive and well in Hamilton. Eventually Lovecraft himself enters the book as a character. That book, The Midnight Games, came out in 2015.
The Midnight Games got a good enough reception that I decided to make it into a trilogy. Easier said than done: I was doing a PhD at the University of Guelph, and once I finished that, I started doing sessional teaching: another big learning curve. Then the pandemic hit. Harbour put out a paperback edition of “Chainsaws” in 2020. Nobody was going into bookstores, so promotion stalled, but it was a good chance to finish the Midnight Games trilogy with The Medusa Deep in 2021 and The Great Outer Dark in 2023. Meanwhile, although the Paul Bley estate prefers the English version of Stopping Time to be unavailable, translator Gabriele Zobele managed to get an Italian edition into print in 2022: Liberare til tempo: Paul Bley e la trasformazione del jazz.
Now I have, at one stage or another, three more books on the go: a monograph on the 1955 Hammer film The Quatermass Xperiment, a book version of my dissertation on Toronto free jazz, and (some people never learn) another novel … but when will they come out? Watch this space. Questions? Email me at lee.davidneil(at)gmail.com.
