Richard C Katz
AUTHOR

Richard C Katz

Literature & Fiction
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I was born at Mass General Hospital in the first half of the last century and grew up in Roxbury, Dorchester and Milton Massachusetts. As a kid, I spent afternoons, evenings and Saturdays in downtown Boston working in my father's store on Boylston Street where my interest began in people trying to scrape out a living from both sides of the law. Dad's store was a small one-person shop one storefront down from the Washington Street MTA subway station and the infamous Boston Combat Zone. His store was flanked on one side by Joe & Nemo’s where I chomped on paper-thin hamburgers while staring at the words “LOVE” and “HATE” tattooed on the knuckles of the cook’s hands. On the other side of my father’s store was the infamous Gilded Cage which by that time devolved from burlesque and jazz acts into a strip club and center for B-girl activities. Diagonally across on Washington Street was the Pilgrim Theatre where the marque proudly displayed the titles of two new porn films weekly, expanding my youthful interests and vocabulary. Every morning around 10:00, my mother's brother, Larry, who was also my godfather, would come into the store and use the phone to call in numbers and bets he collected on his rounds. Before he left, he'd hand me a finif (five dollars) or, when I got older, a "double-sawsky," a $20 bill. In addition to owning his store, Dad was a jazz musician, playing alto sax most nights in small combos in clubs and bars. Sometimes, to hear the music and keep an eye on my Dad, my Mother would drag me along, even as a little kid, to the bars and clubs where Dad performed. Dad's friends and customers represented various ethnicities and backgrounds. Between the crowds at the bars and the customers from the store, I got to talk to professors, doctors, nurses and lawyers, politicians, cops and police detectives, insurance investigators, laborers, Boston Brahmin WASPs and the maids who traveled from Ireland to work in their homes, members of the clergy, actors from the theater and local TV, standup comics, jazz and classical musicians, grocers, bookies, counterfeiters, thieves, makhers, mamzers, kibitzers, kvetschs, gonifs, gazlins, shikers, schmoozers, shnorers, shimazls, trombeniks, and alter kakers. Everyone had a story to tell with them as the hero or the victim, usually both. Dad treated them all with respect and compassion while still earning a mostly honest living. My first novel, "Every Dog", was inspired by many of these people and others I met while making my way. The drum set displayed on the cover of "Every Dog" (sans the cash and gun) is my 7-piece vintage Ludwig kit in original black oyster pearl, which along with my vintage Zildjian cymbals play a minor but pivotal role in the second half of the book. The kit is now on display at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix Arizona. Currently, I'm finishing a second crime novel that centers on the people surrounding an assassination in Phoenix, Arizona. Everything is contextual. True character won't reveal itself until there is a crisis. These are the stories I try to tell.
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