Roger Higgins

Billy Gogan, American (eBook, ePUB)

A Novel

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

The Billy Gogan story is a fictional memoir told by an old Army general of his adventures as a young man. Billy Gogan, American, opens with recently orphaned Billy Gogan fleeing Ireland on the eve of the Great Hunger - either because he is the son of a dangerous revolutionary, or because his cousin doesn't trust him around his daughter. Billy befriends a destitute Irish peasant named Máire and her young daughter Fíona, and together they endure a harsh passage to New York, America's greatest city. They get separated as they debark, and Billy searches tirelessly for them in the dangerous Five Points, ground zero in the collision of Americans, ex-slaves, and Irish refugees.

Here, Billy completes his education. Already able to declaim Cicero and construe Aristotle, he learns voting fraud from Bill Tweed, the future head of Tammany Hall, and the numbers game from Charlie Backwell, Tammany's top bookie. Finally, Brannagh O'Marran, the beautiful mulatta daughter of the Irish madam of Gotham's finest brothel, teaches him about love.

Billy eventually finds Máire and Fíona, and the three of them plan their future together. But that future is taken in a cruel stroke, and nothing will ever be the same.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Travelers' Tales
• Seitenzahl: 416
• Erscheinungstermin: 12. April 2016
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781609521165
• Artikelnr.: 44219546

Autorenporträt

Roger Higgins was born in England, in the County Cheshire, where he learned early of the Cheshire cat, whose grin, full of teeth and gums, lingers as the orange-striped cat slowly disappears. Roger emigrated with his parents and younger brother to the United States when he was 6 ¿-there were more than two months until his birthday, you know. When his mother registered him at Sweetbriar Elementary School, he saw fit to wear his English grammar school uniform, which looked a lot like Harry Potter's, except his cap was gray with purple piping and a purple button at the top, and he wore gray short trousers, gray knee socks and a purple clip-on tie with his dark gray blazer. After his mother finished registering him for school, the principal gently asked whether he would like to leave the tie and cap with her for the day and pick them up after school. Roger demurred, and he thereafter engaged in three tussles during that morning's ten-minute recess.

At the advanced age of ten, Roger taught himself the art of swearing, a skill he found useful in his thirty-odd years of playing rugby, where he was noted for his stone hands, his lack of size for certain positions and lack of speed for all the rest. As a young United States naval officer serving on a near-obsolescent guided-missile destroyer many years ago, he also learned, as did Captain Horatio Hornblower two centuries earlier, that sometimes having fifty-five oaths at your command can be entirely inadequate to the occasion.

Roger learned the art of leadership from his second commanding officer and the ship's executive officer, who together took the tired, old ship, which was a bit of a laughing-stock along the waterfront, and won the Arleigh Burke award a year later as the best surface ship in all of the Pacific Fleet. Roger served another fifteen years after that, having had during that time the privilege of being in 1985 the fire control officer for the U.S.S. Missouri's 16-inch guns, and thus the only naval officer in the world under the age of thirty proficient in the ancient art of major caliber naval gunnery.

He later commanded a patrol hydrofoil. One night, his ship lost steering in a vicious winter storm, and he had to turn his ship to run with the seas, which were pushing onto a lee shore just a few miles away, while his chief engineer, his engineering chief petty officer and leading engineering petty officer valiantly braved a loss of electrical power, loss of hydraulics and an electrical fire while they repaired the steering in time for Roger to turn the ship and head to the safety of open water. Roger's most valuable contribution was after the fact, when he convinced his Commodore and the destroyer group's admiral to award medals to all those brave men who deserved them.

Roger became a lawyer after retiring from the Navy with a small pension fit to pay the property taxes. After clerking for a Tax Court judge, who taught him the value of telling your story so as to win your reader to your side, Roger worked for a number of very large law firms, eventually becoming a junior partner at a firm with the grandest bankruptcy practice of them all. Roger greatly admires the practice group leader's philosophy of practicing law, which is to get the best outcome possible for your client, never retrade on a deal, and if you must stab someone, don't stab him (her) in the back; look the person in the eye and then stab her. You'll be treated the same way, when the time comes. Oh, and never sell your reputation. Once sold, you can never buy it back again.

Roger continues to practice law at a much smaller and less grand law firm and to write novels to his own taste. He is having a wonderful time doing so.