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Bag Men: Mosaics

by Richard W. McBurney, M.D.

345 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #02-0533; ISBN 1-55369-720-0; US$29.50, C$34.24, EUR24.00, £17.00

Murder, humor, and homespun charm come together in this intriguing medical mystery set in mid-western America during the year 1950. Written by a retired physician, surgeon and county coroner.

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About the Book As the two young doctors start their practice on a shoestring in Putney Ridge, one becomes the Ast. Coroner. Amid the practice a series of seemingly-unrelated murders takes place. Solving the perpetrators of the murders almost costs both physicians their lives.

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About the Author Dr. Dick Mc Burney grew up in Cambridge, Ohio. He was graduated from Denison University in Granville, Ohio and then attended Western Reserve University Medical School. He spent five and a half years of graduate training in abdominal and thoracic at Cleveland City Hospital. He practiced medicine and surgery in Painesville and Willoughby, Ohio and for 26 years he served as the elected Lake County Coroner. He joined Diamond Shamrock Corporation full time in 1975 serving as Corporate Medical Director and later as Vice President of the Departments of Health, Industrial Hygiene Safety, and Environmental Affairs. In 1980 the corporate headquarters of Diamond were moved to Dallas, Texas, and the McBurneys built a new house at Las Calinas in Irving, Texas. He retired from Diamond in 1985. During his corporate days he and his wife, Paula, were able to travel extensively in the United State as well as Internationally. Paula and he raised running quarter horses during his practice years in the north living on fifteen acres of farmland in Mentor, Ohio. They owned a townhouse in California at Huntington, Harbor, near the quarter horse track, Los Alamitas, where they raced the horses. He and his wife, Paula, now reside in the tropical paradise of Naples, Florida, with their four cats and their Australian Shepards, Rascal and Randi.

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Prologue

BAG MEN: MOSAICS PROLOGUE         The death of Dr. Calvin Strickland, who was first a formidable obstruction (not to mention a pain in the ass), then eventually a cherished friend and colleague, prompted Robin Younger's return to Putney Ridge. All these years later, on a Saturday morning, he sat nostalgically on a bench in the little park in front of the Courthouse. Before him stretched Main Street, looking as dowdy as it did in 1949. The weather in mid-August was as he remembered it -- sticky and sweltering . . .'dog days' as Nero, his partner, used to say. Today he sat alone, except for the people who began to enter his memory.         This had been a Saturday afternoon town, the downtown crowded and friendly, families and friends greeting families and friends, men lounging on corners, children running wherever there was an open space. Not so now. Everyone obviously preferred the giant mall on the outskirts of town. He had been to the mall yesterday. There, instead of the neighbor/merchants who had once inhabited many of the boarded-up buildings downtown he found vacant faces, child-clerks, who were superficial and uncaring as they went about their auto-vending.         From his mind he pulled his favorite memory, recalling vividly their first sign and the pride the four of them had felt watching it hang in front of the office on Main Street. Neat black letters on a white background read: Nero Hawk, M.D. Robin Younger, M.D.         Robin shook his head remembering the bill he paid to Lester Gage for erecting that sign: thirty-five dollars! He recalled being outraged by the price. shrouded, towering ridge from which the town took its name, looking like it had the first time he had seen it, except it was green now, in August. In November of 1949 the Ridge had been dressing for winter.         How brash and arrogant they must have seemed when they first arrived! Robin knew that he and Nero had made a difference in the town during the twenty-six years they practiced there. They had almost single-handedly brought medicine in Putney Ridge into the Twentieth Century. He recalled vividly the exhilaration they found in their practice! Such pleasures appear to be so little shared by present day physicians. His memories of medicine here precluded the impersonality of defensive medicine, of third-party intrusion into the doctor/patient relationship, and entirely lacked litigation, the new American medical past time.         Geographically, he knew, Putney Ridge lay on both sides of the Picasse River, at the confluence of Wolfe's Creek. State Highway 11 ran along the Ridge, dipping as it entered the town of Glymph. To the south, going out of town, the road was a corkscrew, running through farmland bordered by the Picasse, and ending in Americus, the state Capital. East lay the so-called "hill country,' with poor soil and eccentric people. West was rich farmland -- nursery country. Just south of the downtown area he could see the spot where the Baltimore and Ohio and the little-used Pennsylvania railroads crossed. The lawn around the abandoned station was weed-infested, the buildings surrendering to decay.         Robin felt no attraction to the dowdy relic of Putney Ridge he saw in front of him as he sat, looking, that Saturday of his return. He also didn't anticipate the power the past had as it attracted him into the town he had known. He quietly left his park bench that Saturday and found himself, again, in the first year of their medical practice. That town was still peopled by the same fine citizens (and some not so fine), the same people whom he was fortunate (and some not so fortunate) to know. He willingly regressed, remembering with pride and relish the revolution he and Nero had stubbornly accomplished, much of it over the spiteful objections of Dr. Calvin Strickland. He was again touched by the faces and lives of people (and horses) they had treated years before, and who, of course, were the heart of the practice. And, then, there were the five murders, which almost ended both their lives.

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Catalogue Information

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