A free book and a friend who fell in love with a con artist

Hello from San Diego.

 

I’ve got a free book from Linda Moore and some announcements to make. And then something special. This is a personal account from a friend in Chicago who fell in love with a conman who was so skilled he was profiled in The New Yorker magazine. This man shattered many people’s lives.

Book Giveaway with Linda Moore

First the potential free book. Reply to this email, and I will enter you in the lottery to win it. The author, Linda Moore, will mail you a copy as long as you are in the continental U.S.

Five Days In Bogota is a high paced-thriller about a gallery owner trying to save her family by selling paintings at an art fair in Bogotá. It’s Colombia, so you know that guerrillas, art thieves, and sketchy foreign diplomats are involved. Plus Nobel laureate García Márquez. It’s a fun, well-written book that has won awards and that you will really enjoy. I sure did and recommend it.

Some Awards for Me

I’m very pleased that Saving Myles won the Independent Press award for Best Thriller. It is also a finalist in the Clue awards for Thriller and Suspense. The Clue award winner will be announced in April.

Imagine Falling Love with Someone Whose Life Was All Lies

Many years ago when I lived in Chicago, I became friends with Dan Dever. We were in a poetry class together, and Dan was far better at it than I was. Dan had this brilliant boyfriend named Herman who was studying with Saul Bellow and was also an aspiring concert pianist. Herman wrote a very-well-received book called Loosing My Espanish. He later taught writing at George Washington University and organized the judging for the Pen/Faulkner fiction prize. Dan thought Herman would be his partner for life. The picture shows them together.

Dan has courageously written about how devastating Herman’s life of lies was to him and others.

Herman’s Story — By Daniel Dever

When you discover someone you love and trust has been lying about who they are, you begin questioning everything that person ever told you.

Two years ago, I came across an article in The New Yorker about an author who built a career on his experiences as an Afro-Cuban immigrant. H.G. “Hache” Carrillo wrote a prize-winning novel, Loosing My Espanish (2004), based on his childhood escape from the Castro regime in the 1960s and his life growing up in Chicago’s Cuban immigrant community.

But, as The New Yorker piece detailed, it was all invented. Following his death in 2020 from COVID, it was revealed that the author’s life story was a fabrication. He was not born in Cuba, nor did his family escape from Cuba or have any connection to Cuba. He actually grew up in Detroit and his real name was not Carrillo, it was Carroll. Herman Glenn Caroll.

For years Carroll presented this false Afro-Cuban biography in his personal and professional life. This included his appointment as an assistant professor at George Washington University, where he taught writing for several years, and as chair of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, a literary group. When news of the late author’s fraud came to light, his friends and colleagues were shocked. He had kept the facts of his true identity hidden, even from those closest to him – including his husband, whom he married in 2015.

After reading the article, my heart went out to those close to Herman. They had not only lost someone they cared about, they’d also suffered a loss of trust in the person they thought they knew. Thirty-five years earlier I experienced that loss of trust myself – with the same man. Herman Carroll and I were in a relationship… and it was my discovery he had lied about almost everything he’d told me that led to our breakup.

I met Herman in Detroit, where both of us were born and grew up. It was 1980 and we were in our 20s. Handsome, intelligent, and charming, Herman was an aspiring fiction writer. (I read several of his short stories and thought they were very good.) I was a writer, too. I created poetry at home and, for a living, wrote copy about cars at a downtown ad agency. To pay his rent, Herman tended bar at an upscale restaurant called The Money Tree, located in the basement of a bank in Detroit’s financial district.

Soon after our first date, I began spending nearly every night at his apartment in the Palmer Park neighborhood. Within a few weeks, I had fallen in love. I’d been in love once before, but the relationship was short lived. I really wanted this one to work.

Herman was very open about his sexuality, and I admired that. He also seemed very knowledgeable about the world. He spoke French and told me he received his Bachelor’s degree from Sorbonne University in Paris. While living there, he also studied to be a pâtissier, he said. (French food was among his many interests.) Besides Paris, he’d lived in New York City for a time, he said – in a relationship with an older gay man who was an editor at Random House. All of this impressed me, of course. I was a Midwest kid who attended a local university. I’d visited New York only once and had never been to France.

Besides his interest in writing and literature (he read voraciously), Herman was also a classical pianist. There was a piano in his apartment and he practiced almost every day. He told me he’d been a child prodigy on the violin and had attended the National Music Camp at Interlochen. As for his family, he said his mother was a professor at Wayne State University and his father was a physician. Also, he let me know early on that his father was of Armenian descent. He even told me that his family’s Armenian name was Carrollian, before it was shortened. At the time, I had no reason to doubt any of this.

Our relationship progressed through summer and into autumn. As the first leaves began dropping, Herman told me we needed to talk about something important. We were walking through the park near his apartment and stopped at an empty playground. As we sat on the swings and turned to face each other, he told me he had been accepted to graduate school at University of Chicago, to study writing with Nobel laureate Saul Bellow. He said he would be moving to Chicago, probably in the spring. I paused a few seconds to comprehend what he was telling me. Then I asked, “Can I come with you?”

And so, in May of 1981 I quit my job and said goodbye to family and friends. We packed a U-Haul truck and made the 300-mile drive to Chicago. Our new home was the first floor of a greystone on the city’s Northside. I was nervous about the big change, but also very excited. For the first time I would be able to lead my life as an openly gay man, something I did not feel comfortable doing in my hometown.

After settling in at our new home, both of us looked for work. I had no luck getting hired at advertising agencies, so I accepted a job with a software company, training steel mill workers on how to use computers. Herman found work as a waiter – first at the Hamburger Hamlet in the Gold Coast, and later at The Pump Room, Chicago’s famed dining spot for celebrities. I worked days and he worked nights, so we didn’t have much time together except on days off. But we were content in our relationship. We even exchanged rings and had a commitment ceremony, officiated by one of my Detroit friends. (Marriage for same-sex couples was not legalized in Illinois until 2014.)

What I did not know at the time – and would not learn until nearly four years later – was that most of what Herman told me about his education and his reason for moving to Chicago were lies. In reality, Herman was not enrolled in a graduate program at University of Chicago, because he had no bachelor’s degree. There was no BA from Sorbonne University in Paris… or from any other college or university.

It didn’t occur to me to check on my partner’s educational background or credentials. Herman was extremely intelligent and more conversant than many college grads I knew. (He eventually did earn a BA several years after we broke up, from DePaul University. He later received a Master’s degree from Cornell.)

In hindsight, I should have recognized clues that something was not right. For example, he would talk about fellow students at U of C, but I never had an opportunity to meet them. Herman carefully choreographed his social life so that I was left out of situations where I could interact with his friends.

This was, no doubt, an attempt to keep people from comparing conflicting biographies he had spun. For instance, I learned late in our relationship that Herman told coworkers he was an heir to the Cartier Jewelry fortune. He said his African American father served in the US military in France, where he met Ms. Cartier. His full name, he told them, was Herman Cartier Carroll. The fact that he spoke French probably helped make the story plausible.

Connections with famous people were a common focus of Herman’s stories. He once told people that he’d waited on singer Paul Simon at the restaurant. Simon struck up a conversation and then invited Herman to join him when his shift was over. They spent an entire evening hanging out together, Herman said, and attended a performance by the Dead Kennedys rock band.

But his lies didn’t just promote his self-importance… some had a more nefarious intent. I discovered Herman routinely presented himself as single, even though we were supposed to be in a committed, monogamous relationship. And he also told people he lived with an “apartment mate” (me). This deceit certainly wasn’t because he was embarrassed about being gay – he was the most “out” person I knew. This was classic behavior of someone cheating on their spouse.

My discovery of Herman’s pattern of lies, manipulation, and cheating happened over an extended period of time. Ultimately, I made the decision to get out of the relationship, for the sake of my own emotional health. But the impact of his dishonesty did not end with our breakup.

About three years later, I heard from a mutual acquaintance that Herman had landed a prestigious position as Creative Director at a downtown marketing firm. A couple of months later, he was abruptly fired. It turned out the professional qualifications and work history Herman presented were stolen verbatim from my resume – including my work at the Detroit advertising agency. The HR department at his new job routinely checked on work histories and credentials. They discovered Herman never worked at the ad agency… and that he did not hold a Master’s degree from University of Chicago, as claimed.

In The New Yorker article, one of his ex-boyfriends made this observation about Herman: “Most people might tell a little lie, but, generally speaking, you walk the planet telling people the truth. Herman walked the planet lying, and he might occasionally tell the truth. It wasn’t malicious—it was a compulsion.”

I disagree with the last sentence of that quotation. Herman’s grandeur of deceit was more than a compulsion. In my opinion, it was pathological. The difference between compulsive and pathological lying is that people who are pathological liars use elaborate stories to manipulate others and show no guilt or remorse. Often, they actually believe their own lies.

The irony here is that Herman didn’t need to create false personas or lie about his heritage or life experiences. He was a very talented writer. And, from what I’ve read, he was an inspiring teacher beloved by his students. But by choosing deception and manipulation, he hurt people who cared about him… and he damaged the reputation of the institutions who believed in him, including George Washington University and the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.

Carl’s note: If you want to read the full New Yorker article, find it is called “The Novelist Whose Inventions Went Too Far.”

For email readers: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/20/h-g-carrillo-the-novelist-whose-inventions-went-too-far

Where I’ve Been and Where I’ll Be

February 1-2.
Birmingham and Wetumpka, Alabama for Murder in the Magic City and Murder on the Menu. I had a fabulous time with other authors and many readers at these two conferences. Above is a photo of all us authors. The second photo is the house in Wetumpka that appeared in the movie Big Fish.

 

February 14-`16.

The Southern California Writers’ Conference in San Diego. I am teaching Putting a Heart Into Thrillers and on a panel about publishing after 50.

 

Thursday, February 27.

I will be featured at the Del Mar Community Connections Page Turners event at St. Peters Episcopal Church Parish Hall. Anyone can come and they are giving out some free copies of Saving Myles. You just have to register here: https://dsnp.co/IWTZhN

 

March 8 at 2:00.

Don’t miss our Partners in Crime virtual event with Dr. Candace Schoppe, Medical Examiner. Register here: https://sistersincrimesd.org/events/

 

Do you have a book club?

If you would like me to talk at your club or some other event about Saving Myles or the writing life, please respond to this email or simply email me at carlvonderauauthor@gmail.com. If you are close by, I can come to your meeting. If not, we can talk virtually. I really love to do these, so don’t hesitate to ask.

Finally, if you know someone who would enjoy my book, please buy it.

Purchase Saving Myles