Review
Readers who enjoy hard-bitten, wisecracking characters will surely fall in love with Jock Stewart, the main character in the new Malcolm Campbell novel, Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire. The story of the book revolves around the disappearance of the race horse, Sea of Fire, but it features a wagon load of human horsing around by the many colorful characters Campbell created, including Coral Snake Smith, Parker House, a preacher named Cotton Mouth and the Krispy Kreme eating police chief Kruller. While reading the story and gathering the clues, that frequently came to light as Stewart dialogued with his own intuition, readers may find themselves having great fun picking up the puns, word plays and hilarious cloaked references to cultural and historical items. Jock Stewart is an old time newspaperman, whose blunt force sarcasm keeps him in hot water with his bosses, co-workers and the police. But if not for his pressing the issue, the mystery would definitely not have been resolved. Stewart, Malcolm Campbell's self-acknowledged alter ego, is also the author's vehicle to decry the effects of the digital age on the craft of writing and the elegance of language. I found the book entertaining, and it might even become profitable, if I can get permission from the author to use the sermon outline he provided in chapter 13! --Ralph Bryant
About the Author
Malcolm R. Campbell, author of the novels The Sun Singer (2004) and the satire Worst of Jock Stewart (2006) has been published Nonprofit World, Nostalgia Magazine, The Smoking Poet, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution , the Great Lakes Bulletin, the Rosicrucian Digest, Future Earth Magazine and training and manufacturing trade magazines The Sun Singer was a finalist in the 2004 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards. A contributing writer for Living Jackson Magazine in northeast Georgia, Campbell also works as a grant writer for nonprofit organizations. Since 2005, Campbell has maintained the Morning Satirical News weblog where his alter ego, Jock Stewart, takes a cynical, sarcastic and randomly humorous look at real and/or imagined news. The early posts from this weblog served as the basis for the satire, Worst of Jock Stewart. Junction City, the Star-Gazer newspaper and the primary characters in Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire were born at the Morning Satirical News. While both Campbell and Stewart learned to handset justified columns of metal type out of a California Job Case and copy fit headlines without using layout software, everything else in Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire is more or less fictional. Campbell was graduated from Florida State University with a B.A. in radio-television writing, with a minor in English, and from Syracuse University with an M. A. in journalism. He also attended the University of Colorado as a journalism student and a weekend climbing participant at the school s Mountain Recreation Department. He served in the U. S. Navy as a journalist between 1968 and 1970, writing news stories and features for the military and the civilian press while on board the aircraft carrier U. S. S. Ranger (CVA-61) and while stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Station. Campbell lives in Jefferson, Georgia with his wife Lesa, of 22 years, a former newspaper reporter, systems analyst, and the consulting director of the Crawford W. Long Museum. In December, Campbell finished serving four years, three as chair, on the Jefferson Historic Preservation Commission. Both Campbells have been active in the town's Main Street Program. An avid reader and book reviewer, Campbell especially enjoys the novels of Sunetra Gupta, Italo Calvino, Diana Gabaldon, Susanna Clarke, Cormac McCarthy and Carlos Ruiz Zafon.
