January 2009, Boxer is Pleasure of Novel 'This Won't Hurt a Bit'

Boxer is Pleasure of Novel ‘This Won’t Hurt a Bit’January 6, 2009

byMark Connor

© Mark Connor

While reading Timothy Sheard’s novel, “This Won’t Hurt A Bit”, I more than avoided pain; I gained the pleasure of following a working class hero who is encouraged, protected, and supported by a boxer. The story is good enough to hold my interest from the beginning, and the presence of a hero’s faithful lieutenant for whom I have such affinity accentuates the excitement always experienced with a page turner.Tim Sheard and wife, Mary, "and my /69 avanti, made in South Bend, Indiana!" This is a promotional photo for his novel, "A Race Against Death". © Tim SheardThe hero is Lenny Moss, a hospital janitor and union shop steward in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who comes to the aid of a coworker arrested for the murder of a doctor. Lenny’s reluctant investigation is facilitated by Moose Lennox, an accomplished former amateur boxer employed in the laundry room. Passionate and strong, he pushes Moss into the investigation and supports him throughout. The scenario moves the plot along with ever increasing tension as the pair must rely on coworkers and luck to simultaneously avoid the real killers and the hostile eyes of management.

Sheard, who is a nurse at State University Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, found the inspiration for Moose Lennox in a couple of coworkers he knew while previously working in a hospital in Philadelphia.

“He’d worked in the dietary office, in the kitchen,” Sheard explains, “and he’d done some boxing in high school and after high school.

I took a lot of his characteristics, and I wanted to show in my novel working class men and women with all of their wonderful qualities as well as some of their defects and flaws. I wanted to try and present them as grounded and fully fleshed out characters. So Moose, I think, is an honorable man, he’s a gutsy guy, and he’s a good and loyal friend to Lenny and his other coworkers.”

This athletic man upon whom Sheard sketched Moose Lennox was a legendary figure among the employees, he explains, recounting a story about him running in Philadelphia’s Fairmont Park.

“Supposedly he was caught in the middle of a gale—some kind of hurricane strength thunderstorm—” Sheard recalls, “—and he kept on running and didn’t let it stop him. Now maybe it’s not true, but I decided . . . what a wonderful character to have that joy in the exertion and the vitality of the body. You know, that a body in training—that’s in good shape—that you can do these great things with it and find joy and almost rapture in working that body and exercising it and pushing it to its limit.” Capturing that physical spirit in the creative Process, Sheard rounded the fictional character out with the creativity of another coworker known for artistic talent. Moose draws caricatures of people in the hospital, and he, Lenny, and their investigative allies chart them out on the wall while discussing the clues that could pin the murder on one of them. “The idea of this character being a caricaturist was derived from a respiratory therapist,” says Sheard. “Again, a respiratory therapist is not necessarily college educated—not been to a lot of schooling, a good working class guy—and that’s what he did. He made caricatures of people in the therapy office, and he was very good. So I combined the qualities of these two characters I knew in the hospital into one.”That character, Moose Lennox, prods Lenny Moss along, pushing him the way a boxing trainer would while emotionally expressing his own athletic drive and fighter’s spirit. He makes Lenny start taking the stairs around the hospital instead of the elevator, suggests he come running with him when they’re off work, and is there to rescue him from a suspect’s attack. The odyssey opens with two female medical students realizing their assigned dissection subject is a murdered doctor hidden among the cadavers, followed by a young black man employed at the hospital being falsely charged with the crime. Lenny Moss’s desire to free him, along with Moose’s suggestion that solving the crime will greatly frustrate their nemeses in charge of security and personnel, carries us through the different parts of the hospital while revealing the multicultural mosaic of characters—from a highly educated Russian immigrant stuck with Lenny in the low paying janitor’s job to a devout African American Christian woman praying for Lenny’s and Moose’s safety, and a vast array of others—populating this novel the way people of all backgrounds occupy a boxing gym. The glorification of these regular people is the major charm of the novel, but it made for great difficulty, Sheard explains, in getting it published.

“In fact,” Sheard remembers, “most publishers thought it was good and told me they really liked my writing, but they didn’t want to publish it unless I had a doctor or a psychiatrist as the hero.”Apparently most publishers felt the regular, everyday people compiling the central cast of characters were not special enough to hold the interest of the reading audience, but Creative Arts Book Company in Berkeley, California, found the novel worth while, publishing it in 2001.“Creative Arts is now out of business,” Sheard explains, “but they started in the 1960s as a house that published the Beat poets in the days when nobody else would touch them. So they published [Jack] Kerouac and a lot of these guys very early on, and they also published a lot of hard hitting, hard boiled crime novels in a series called ‘The Black Lizard’. But then times went hard . . . and eventually a couple of years after they published my book, they went out of business.”Sheard’s second novel, ‘Some Cuts Never Heal’, was published by Carolyn Graft, “which is a medium sized publisher in New York, and they did a lovely job publishing a hardcover book, but my sales were not up to their expectations; so my third book [‘Race Against Death’], was printed by a small press out of New England called Five Star.” Sheard’s three novels have been used in the City University Schools in New York, exposing his work to students in all five boroughs. “They’re used in intro to literature classes and they’re popular in English as a Second Language classes,” he happily reports, “and I like that because the [immigrant] students are going in or are likely already working in the medical trade.” While Sheard’s novels are now out of print, the few hundred remaining copies are available for purchase through his website, www.timsheard.com. Sheard and I met at the National Writers Union (UAW Local 1981) biennial Delegate’s Assembly at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts in August, 2007. I was there as a Delegate representing the Twin Cities Chapter, and he was representing New York. “The National Writers Union is an organization of freelance writers,” Sheard explains. “We all work for ourselves, and as such we’re always looking for assistance in finding markets for our writing; whether it’s books, textbooks, short stories, journalist articles, bloggers—any form of writing.”Beyond helping us find work and other benefits, the union also makes sure we’re treated fairly. “You know when you sell your first story or article and you’re offered a boiler plate contract,” Sheard emphatically declares, “the chances are that contract is going to rob you of your intellectual property. So if you join the National Writers Union, you can get free contract advice, and most importantly you’ll get to know experienced writers so you can call someone and say, ‘Hey—this journal offered me a hundred bucks and these are their terms, is this a good contract?’”The National Writers Union can be accessed at www.nwu.orgCheck out Tim Sheard, purchase his novels, and view his short films at www.timsheard.com. EXTRA! EXTRA!NOVELIST COMMITS TO ATTEND FIGHT FOR FIRST TIMEMystery Novelist Tim Sheard was so intrigued by the Boxers and Writers Magazine [Boxers and Writers Blog] interview with him about his supporting character, a former boxer named Moose Lennox, that he promised to not only attend a live boxing match for the first time in his life, but to make sure that in his next novel, protagonist Lenny Moss and his friends also do. Read more about this, as well as a mention of how Sheard and I first met at the August, 2007 National Writers Union (UAW Local 1981) Delegate’s Assembly at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, along with pictures and a narrative of my visit to South Boston Boxing Club, in my next post.Until then, keep writing and keep boxing. Sincerely,—-”Malicious” Mark ConnorPosted in Uncategorized Leave a Comment »