Tony Piazza has been a lot of things in his career, but right now one of his favorite titles is “author.” He just released The Curse of the Crimson Dragon, an action-adventure book that follows on the heels of his first book, the Hollywood-based Anything Short of Murder.
Piazza grew up in the ’60s and was fascinated with the action and adventure of the James Bond series.
“I’m an avid reader, but the two genres I like the most are mysteries, because I love puzzles, and adventure,” Piazza said.
Though he never expected he’d become a novel writer, he did get an early start of it. When he was just 10, his parents bought him a typewriter. In those days, typing was done on carbon paper, and one mistake meant starting over. Still, he set to work on his first novel. He no longer remembers what it was, but he suspects it was a Jules Verne-type story, or maybe a spy novel.
Piazza wanted to revisit his youthful desire to write, but was never able to do so until recent years. He discovered that writing with the Internet and word processing tools allowed him to put words down quickly—much faster than on a typewriter—and his first novel was born.
“I never knew I’d write a novel, I just always wanted to do it,” he said. “I think when you read a lot, you can’t help to eventually want to try writing a novel yourself.”
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Like Piazza’s first book, The Curse of the Crimson Dragon is also set in the 1940s, but it’s an ocean away from the glamour of Hollywood. Set in a Hawaiian paradise, the story follows the adventures of Ryan, a
pilot with his own charter service who chases kidnappers involved in a Nazi plot to change the world.
Ryan’s adventures take him across three islands and into the face of danger after government agents ask him to help look for a Nobel Prize-winning fission scientist who’s gone missing. The agents think members of the Third Reich are behind the scientist’s disappearance and want Ryan to use his extensive knowledge of the islands to discover what happened.
Piazza found success with his previous book, Anything Short of Murder, which is set during the Golden Age of Hollywood and follows a former LAPD cop as he investigates a killing. That detective novel, which combined elements of mystery with the nostalgia of Hollywood’s yesteryear, started out as a short series of posts. Piazza serialized the story in a blog on Turner Classic Movies, and the blog became a popular read, prompting him to create the book.
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The writer wasn’t content to sit idly by, waiting for that one to publish, because there were more stories to tell.
“In my case, I had an idea that I wanted to write an adventure that, as a reader, I would enjoy reading, with a hero that I was familiar with from all the action adventures I read and loved as a kid,” he explained. “I then looked around my office and saw the various elements that set my scenario in place: a screen saver of Hawaii that brought back memories of my visit there some 20 years earlier; then I saw a photo my supervisor had on his wall of a submarine and another of a missile being launched, and that sparked another idea. I could go on with many other situations from my past … but the point is that once I put my brush to canvas, it all started flowing from my experiences and memories—mixed, of course, with a fair portion of imagination.”
Piazza already has his third book under way, a sequel to Anything Short of Murder, and based on a famous 1930s murder case. He’s also considering the possibility of writing a book on his own experiences in Hollywood, where he spent years working on and off sets since he was about 4 years old as an actor, extra, and stand-in. He met legends like Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood, and Steve McQueen.
But he hasn’t committed to the idea yet. There are still many books to write.
Arts Editor Shelly Cone prefers Harrison Ford to Sean Connery—though it’s close. Contact her at scone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 1-8, 2012.
