In his former life, Steve Corbett wrote a hard-hitting, award-winning news column for the Santa Maria Times and covered the Michael Jackson trial for SKY News, a British TV news channel.
Corbett penned his column until 2006, when the publisher of Lee Central Coast Newspapers, owners of the Times, Lompoc Record, Santa Ynez Valley News and assorted other weekly newspapers, laid him off.
Corbett and his wife, Stephanie, left California and moved back to Pennsylvania, where the fifth-generation Scranton resident promptly switched gears from print to radio. He successfully hosted his own talk show there until 2017.
If you didn’t know Corbett, you might assume the writer, now in his mid-60s, might retire to his garden, or devote more time to yoga or Aikido, two passions he and Stephanie practice daily.
You’d be wrong.
With the encouragement of his wife (now his manager), Corbett fleshed out a character he’d had rattling around in his head for the past 35 years, Wally Wilson, the lead in his new book. He sent Wilson on a “psychedelic pilgrimage” through California’s Central Coast wine country, which Corbett recalls fondly from his Santa Maria years.
Blood Red Syrah: A Gruesome California Wine Country Thriller, took Corbett a mere six months to write — perhaps because the characters were remarkably easy to put to paper.
“I had the backbone of the book’s skeleton already in place, and all I needed were the arms and the head,” Corbett told me over lunch in Santa Maria recently.
He and Stephanie were on the Central Coast to promote the book at libraries, bookstores and events, and reconnecting with friends and colleagues.
Avventura Press, which Corbett said handles just a few titles each year, published the novel. The couple, he said, “is enjoying time on the road” promoting the book, which is available on Amazon.com.
Blood Red Syrah is packed with characters who are good, bad and very bad. Corbett introduces them chapter by chapter, seamlessly layering each into place.
Readers develop empathy for the players who are trying to survive life’s potholes with their best set of skills — be they Aikido or meditation, knives or guns.
Naturally, I inquired of Corbett if his book’s characters might be fashioned after any real-life characters he encountered while writing his Santa Maria column. Corbett smiled, and alluded to people needing to take a good, hard look at their own actions, should they see a reflection of themselves in his book.
While he admits that his characters “do horrible things,” Corbett weaves spirituality and fatalism into his book, and Jesús Malverde, the legendary Sinaloan patron saint of the poor, has a starring role.
As detailed on the book’s back cover: “Seeking only peace of mind, Wally finds faith in a rogue priest, seeks guidance from a killer ex-convict newspaper columnist, and defies corrupt politicians, brutal cops and raging wildfire. Heading deeper into his journey, Wally explores the comfort of cannabis and meets crazed militia members pitted against an all-female eco-terrorist tribe.”
Blood Red Syrah is laden with realistic wine industry references, with most of Wilson’s wicked ways taking place in tasting rooms or with equipment used to make — or open — a bottle of wine.
“The gang, the ‘Crushers,’ is a play on the wine industry,” Corbett told me, referring to the fictional motorcycle gang whose members leave a trail of both good and evil in their wake.
Corbett’s already crafting a sequel, and noted that “it has a lot of strong, young, female characters in it” — a suggestion from Stephanie, he said. And that sequel will definitely also be set in California, and likely again on the Central Coast, he said.
“It’s clear that any book needs to be set here.”
— Laurie Jervis blogs about wine at www.centralcoastwinepress.com, tweets at @lauriejervis and can be reached via winecountrywriter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are her own.