I took the Kahala off-ramp from the H-1 Freeway and passed by Kahala Mall, a curious outpost on the border between Hawaii’s haves and the want-to-haves. The strange thing about Kahala Mall is that the want-to-haves consider it a ritzy shopping plaza while rich Kahala residents think of it as a quaint market frequented by the common folk. …

The other way you know you are enterting rarefied terra firma is that a lot of the houses have names, and their names are written on large metal, wood, or ceramic plaques attached to the wall or fence surrounding the house. The names of the houses usually end in “hale,” which is Hawaiian for “house.” I drove past Baldwin Hale, Sunrise Hale, Eagles Nest Hale, and the strangely named Hale Hale. I think this guy was trying to out-Hawaiian his neighbors. Most of the houses should have been named “Haole Hale” since they were owned by white people.

That’s from Aloha, Lady Blue, Charley Memminger’s new novel that will be released nationally on Jan. 22 but is available now for presale on Amazon.com and online book sites.

Memminger, a senior writer at Honolulu PR firm Communications Pacific, is a former Honolulu journalist and humor columnist.

Civil Beat spoke with the Memminger about the book in the first part of a two-part Q&A titled Former Hawaii Journalist Pens Mystery Novel. Memminger drew on his background covering courts and the police beat to inform Aloha, Lady Blue, a mystery featuring former reporter Stryker McBride (that’s him narrating the excerpt above) on a murder trail.

In this final installment, Memminger discusses the challenges he faced finding a publisher and reflects on how Hawaii’s media landscape has changed dramatically since he was a reporter.
 

Civil Beat: I don’t remember the last time I saw a book that has been endorsed by Paul Theroux, Pat Sajak and Neil Abercrombie. How did you pull that off?

Charley Memminger: What you have is an advance reader’s copy, right? Paul Theroux actually wrote the cover blurb for my last book, Hey Waiter, There’s An Umbrella In My Drink! That was a bunch of my columns. But the publisher just put his name on the cover of the advance reading copy. …

(KHON2 news anchor) Joe Moore got me in touch with Pat Sajak — they’re old buddies — and Pat wrote a blurb. Then I thought, “What’s the next thing I can do to promote the book?” I talked to the governor through a friend of mine who is friends with the governor, and I went over and gave the governor a copy of the book.

I also gave a signed copy to him and asked if he would deliver it to President Obama, because they are buddies. And he said, “Sure.” And ever since then the governor has really been supporting me. We are hoping to find out if the president is reading the book, because that would be great national publicity.

Was John Radcliffe the guy who hooked you up with the governor? I see that you thanked him in the book’s acknowledgments.

Uh, I don’t want to go into details on that. (Laughs.)

All right, moving on. How difficult was it to shop your book around and find a publisher?

It was really, really tough. I finished the draft of Kahala Road in 2008. (Kahala Road was Memminger’s original title for Aloha, Lady Blue.) I took the voluntary layoff with the Star-Bulletin in 2009, when they were going to lay off 17 people — remember that? I took one of the slots because I was a senior staffer, and they are still mad at me over that. I don’t know; I won’t go into that.

I thought I could get out and get a job. I couldn’t. I went on unemployment. I started selling one column a week to the Honolulu Advertiser, which meant that everybody in the business thought I was working for the Advertiser and I wasn’t. I was also looking for an agent, and it went all the way up to June 2010 — about a year — before I finally found an agent.

The way I did it was I queried a lot of agents. I had a lot of help, too. People like Carl Hiaasen, the Florida columnist who has some books out and made a movie or two out of them, has been supportive of me. He does tropical thrillers also.

He put my on to his agency, and they looked at the book, but it was right during the recession. Unknown writers getting hired, it just wasn’t going to happen. Plus, you’re in far-flung Hawaii. You know how it is — they sort of think you just party and go to the beach and aren’t serious.

Yes, that’s pretty much what we do here.

So, I was literally taking a shower one day — I have a lot of my epiphanies in the shower — and I said, “I’ve got to get a hold of the biggest John D. MacDonald fan in the country.” And I found him. His name is Calvin Branche. And he’s head of a sort of John D. MacDonald fan club, if you will. … I asked him to take a look at my manuscript, and he did. …

He introduced me to three Florida writers writing in the tropical mystery genre, and one of them introduced me to InkWell Management and agent Richard Pine. He picked me up. That was the middle of 2010. Then we started rewriting the book into what they wanted it to be. And it wasn’t until October of last year that I signed with St. Martin’s and Minotaur Books.

That was a long way (to publishing) and a great test. I’ve had to make a lot of adjustments. We changed the book a lot. I think the book came out great. When we changed the title from Kahala Road to Aloha, Lady Blue, I went back and retrofitted to build up the character who is really part of the title. And I think it came out real well.

Still, you did most of this yourself, it seems.

I just had to realize that nobody was going to help me as far as coming up with ideas. When you work at a newspaper for 30 years like I did at the Star-Bulletin, you lose that idea that others will help you. But I came up with Calvin Branche, and that’s the only way I would have gotten an agent. Because you can’t get a publisher unless you have an agent.

Speaking of the Star-Bulletin, I was wondering if you might comment on how the media landscape has changed here locally over the years.

Obviously, there’s only one newspaper now — one daily newspaper. Honolulu Civil Beat fulfills a niche in the market, providing some very necessary news coverage, especially in in-depth reporting that the newspapers used to do. Overall, in newspapers, the manpower situation has changed.

When I started off, we had a police reporter, me, we had a state court reporter, we had a federal court reporter, an investigative reporter, several people up at the Legislature, we had several feature writers, we had columnists, we had “three dot” columnists like Dave Donnelly.

I mean, we had an army of people, you know? That’s all gone. I mean, there are hundreds and hundreds of journalists out of work in Hawaii who have moved on after the papers merged, and even myself. When I walked away from the Star-Bulletin, I could see the future, and I thought, “I’m too old to be chasing ambulances.” I wasn’t going to get back into that.

This happened all over the country. You don’t have the boots on the ground, and that’s the biggest change I think that people don’t understand. All those people on the ground generated news. That’s where the Associated Press picks up its stuff, and everybody else picks up their stuff from Associated Press — TV, radio, like that.

TV has very few reporters now. Back in the old days, Channel 9 had a full staff, and they did everything. You had hard-ass investigative reporters like Matt Levi. That’s all gone in the nightly local news now.

And not just in Hawaii. Everywhere. And you are beginning to see the effect of not having those boots on the ground, of the hardcore reporters out there on the beat every single day. And what are you seeing? What’s on TV? It’s sports, it’s weather, it’s disasters, because those are easy to do. You’re not getting any investigative reporting. To stay in business, newspapers really can’t do an expose on the high cost of milk, or ripoffs from car dealerships or something like that, right? They’ll lose those big ads.

But people don’t realize it, especially the young people. When did forest fires become weather? Every fire now is a huge deal on national TV. They have “alerts” on TV news every day about the weather. It’s fucking hot in Nevada in the middle of summer. No shit? In the winter it’s cold.

“Your severe weather station!”

And tornadoes! There’s always been tornadoes. In the 1800s there were tornadoes in what is now Oklahoma. But everyone didn’t have an iPhone with a video app to record it. Now it seems like bad weather is everywhere and it’s news. Because they don’t want to pay some reporter to go dig out real news.

OK. What’s next for you? Maybe a sequel to Aloha, Lady Blue?

Part of my contract with St. Martin’s is that I am working on a sequel right now. We are hoping to have a whole series just like John D. MacDonald did.

But I also want to sell the screen rights to it. I love Hawaii Five-0. I don’t know how long these things stay or whether there will be another show, but this is another possibility for a show that can be shot in Hawaii. The film industry is part of our economy.

I hate to see people come in and shoot in Hawaii and they don’t hire Hawaii writers or actors and then they bug out. They just make the money and leave. I’d like to see a Hawaii-based show in Hawaii written by someone like me from Hawaii.

I’ve also got other books in different genres I want to do and screen plays that I’d like to see made into movies. So I got a lot of things I hope will flow out of this, but the first thing is to just get this book out. I really hope people like it, but if it’s not big on the mainland, there won’t be any series. (Laughs.)

Gov. Neil Abercrombie and Charley Memminger.