Adam Dumphy

Adam Dumphy is the kind of man who cannot break himself from saying, “Sorry to bother you.” or “Thank you.” to the automated operators on his Bank telephone hot line. (They all seem such nice girls he doesn’t want to take a chance on hurting their feelings.) Still he is stubborn enough to argue bitterly with five of the instructors in the three writing courses he endured. (He didn’t want to learn to write like everybody else. He wanted to write like himself.)He brought this bifid attitude (meek but opinionated) to his approach to writing.Born in South Dakota his school years were unremarkable being spent in California mainly in San Diego. His Navy time was successful in giving him the knowledge that he could survive among his peers though younger than most. Once out of the service he stumbled into Medical School. ‘Stumbled’ as he had not the slightest desire to be a physician like his father and brothers and had never even been preMed.After all that education he was, of course, ‘trapped’ into the practice of medicine that all that misery not be wasted, which he did for thirty odd years in San Diego. On the contrary at age twenty he quite willingly stepped into the ‘Tender Trap’ on the very first meeting with Irene. She was seventeen at the time and they were wed when she was twenty to enjoy (for lack of a stronger word) fifty-four years of a very, very happy marriage. The joyful result of this union were daughters Mary and Therese.Mary (Mair Rathburn) is a talented singer, harpist and composer. She brought in to the family their beloved Joe (Rathburn) also talented (guitar, vocals and composing). So there are all kinds of music available at all times.Therese (Muranaka) has a Ph.D. so she and her husband Jason and son Jay keep him in contact with Academia, Hawaiian customs and cooking, long distance running, and the hidden side of television.During their children’s growing up time Irene discouraged Adam from writing as it took his already limited time away from the family. As always she was right.On her death in his loneliness, and starting at age seventy-seven years, he pulled together notes he had made over the years and self published twenty novels (through the kindliness of Author House) in the next four years.His heroes whether seventeen or seventy vary from tall and skinny, through middle height and round, to barely five feet tall and fragile. All are cerebral.The heroines are best told apart by hair color, as all are patterned after his own private heroine, his wife. This means all are abundantly feminine and abundantly feisty. The settings range from Spanish California in 1801 through the American Civil War, China in Boxer times, the Spanish Civil War, WWII, San Diego in the 40’s and the Southwest generally from the 70’s to the 90’s.Each has a true historical event as the centrum with a gentle romance that must overcome an impediment, a mystery and a chase. The chase may be in anything from an ox cart to a German tank, to a three-winged Cheviot French training plane, to an English made sixteen cylinder Lowland Cabriolet.All novels are cheerful and intended to amuse. He feels there is already enough actual violence, misery and indecency in the present world and there is no need to manufacture bogus horrors or to produce a blueprint for some sick copycat to use.They are all squeaky clean with the events intended to hold the interest of the reader.The author admits his many weaknesses. He likes archaic words and writing styles. He is regrettably addicted to puns. (Some of his grammatical errors are intended as puns but it takes a broad and forgiving sense of humor to appreciate them. Most are dumb mistakes.) Apostrophes, ellipses, the dash, et al, qs, et seq and tildes he simply does not ken. He uses far too many commas. Also he approves of Thomas Jefferson’s dictum, “It is a poor word that can only be spelled in one way.”You will be happier on putting the book down that when first picking it up. Each fits into his motto, ‘Better Wodehouse Than Woe’.FICTION : HUMOR Westinghouse Patent Pend. and Friends Adam Dumphy AuthorHouse 329 pages Softcover, $19.95 ISBN: 1418436399Adam Dumphy’s Westinghouse Patent Pend. and Friends has nothing to do with light bulbs and everything to do with dim bulbs. A rollicking farcical depiction of a bumptious 18-year-old catapulted into the world by his Ma to seek his fortune in and around Depression era San Diego, this book’s a grin-a-minute odyssey of mostly low-brow humor. Full of puns, malapropisms, double entendres and, it lives up to the author’s aim of writing “a cheerful comedy.”In Ma Anstruther’s brood of oddly named kids—Forecastle, Roentgen, Majestic, Capitol, Unearthly and Tillywort—a moniker like Westinghouse Patent Pend. fits right in, especially when it’s a.k.a. “Wes.” Nor does it seem unusual for the former circus aerialist whose husband died when he missed the net and landed in the lap of a floozie he was eyeballing, to send her second oldest son to make his fortune “like Horatio Algae,” as Wes would say. While Wes doesn’t have any formal schooling, he does have a head full of stories and sayings gleaned from his Uncle Abernathy’s extensive collection. Wes can mangle words with the best of them, and he’s puppy-like friendly and personable.He’s also loyally committed to his skinny-Minnie two-timing girlfriend, Aramantha—at least until he rescues a more full-bodied, short-skirted Alyce from a flat tire and the unwanted advances of a gang of would-be banditos. Alyce, re-named Philco True Tone, or “Phil” by Wes, soon develops a passion for wanting to feel the muscles in his arm. Wes, as naive as a newborn, is more interested in finding ways to make his fortune.To help Wes with his quest, Alyce/Phil invites him home to meet her own personal Addams Family: Pa, a.k.a. Thomas Jefferson Jefferson Appleby; her story-telling, gun-toting Uncle Billy; the blubbering cousin Bernice who peels potatoes by the bushel basket while lamenting the loss of her husband, Pierre, a French master chef kidnapped to work in a gangster’s roadside gambling house, eventually the site of a pitched battle between the Appleby’s forces of good and the double-dealing on-site demons.Before the brouhaha boils over, however, Wes and Alyce/Phil find a common interest in making money from antiques. They engage in several comical episodes of buying and selling as they shuttle back and forth into Mexico in their aptly named truck, “Clatter,” collecting for their shop, “Clutter’s Last Stand.” Through their travels they meet another assortment of odd-bods—cops and immigration officers on the take, antique dealers as crooked as the legs of their tables, a hodgepodge of homeless animals and birds, and the gangster boss, Louis the Lyme, from the roadside clip joint, angered by Alyce/Phil’s refusal to sell him a piece of movie memorabilia. The “offer he couldn’t refuse” precipitates the battle that draws the novel to its “happy-ever-after” resolution.A well-constructed comedy with consistently funny characters in slapstick situations, Westinghouse Patent Pend. and Friends should deservedly expand Adam Dumphy’s circle of friends.Reviewed by M. Wayne Cunningham ForeWard Clarion reviewsFICTION The Unlikely Adventures of Ranulf the Unready Part Three: The Annunzio Collar Adam Dumphy AuthorHouse 369 pages Softcover, $19.95 ISBN: 978-1418437343First, the good news: Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Hope and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Brigadier Gerard are alive and well and living in the mind of Adam Dumphy. Sweet, silly, light as champagne bubbles, sparkling with mischief or its companion innocence, Dumphy’s “unlikely” story intoxicates reason and delights the senses.Ranulf the Unready, also know as Viscount Linley, also known as Rannie Runagate, also known as Arch Duke R. von Hohenzolleran-Furstenberg, cousin to Kaiser Wilhelm bumps into his childhood sweetheart Audie, or Andra, or Audra, in a fishing hut cum jazz club on the Costa Brava in the tender years between world wars.“His insatiable curiosity about anything and everything and delight at each new discovery and that totally unpredictable mind that could make the simplest thing complex and the most complex commonplace, was unchanged.”Audie latches onto Rannie—not because she likes him, but because she doesn’t…or does she?—and off they go in search of a fictitious poodle, an innocent assassin, a missing heir of Cousin Willie’s and that perfect je ne sais quoi. “It was a lovely summer’s day, the sun warm, the sea cerulean. A faint breeze whispered the palms and lifted the table cloths of the outside tables like girl’s skirts.”Sound unlikely? There’s more fun to come. Rannie also happens to be a spy for Queen and Country (of course, Audie knew this all along) and the real object of his intelligence is the Annunzio Collar (“collar” apparently being a euphemism for “heavy, ugly, unwanted necklace) of which there are three: one authentic and two fakes. Two fake heavy, ugly, unwanted necklaces!Barnstorming, running barefoot across beaches, disguising themselves as Fascist wannabees, cheating at roulette with Countess Maggie of Hoboken and gardening with King Sveaty, the pair makes their insouciant way through mystery toward romance. “Audie” Rannie says, “you are the most unimpressionable, delightful, belittling and seductive person I have ever met.” And then he “caught her hand and tried to lead her astray.”Reviewed by Heather Shaw ForeWard Clarion Reviews