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Novelist Peter Kelton, a retired U.S. Newsman, has published six novels in the cross-genre category of literary fiction. His novels conform to the belief that well-written literary fiction doesn’t have to be “Highbrow”; it has to embrace ideas about destiny in a storyline that holds the readers’ attention. He wrote for Texas newspapers in Temple, Greenville and San Antonio and for trade magazines in New York. In 1962 he left the New York editing scene to try to write novels, living in a village in Spain. He returned in 1965 with two manuscripts that Perry Knowlton, an agent at Curtis Brown, promptly accepted. The agent’s only question when they met: “What are you going to write next?” Kelton continued to write novels at night and on weekends for more than 50 years, while writing news daily. Along with more than 100 free-lance assignments, he wrote 450 reviews of novels for six years as National Contemporary Literature critic for Examiner (dot) com. He later placed some of those reviews on Goodreads. He turned 86 in 2018, experiencing a belated wake-up call, for he owned four unsold, unrepresented novels lying fallow, the product of more than 50 years. Kelton has said his story is pretty much the journey that many writers take through the fog of creation to find clarity. “It takes some of us a lot longer to learn than most. But now I’ve got six novels published and well worth reading . . . finally.”
Reviewed by Patricia Reding for Readers' Favorite
From time to time I read something that doesn’t seem to fit (for me, at any rate) into any traditional genre classification. Such was the case with The Junk Yard Solution: Adventures Among the Boxcars and Other Lost Causes by Peter Kelton. The story opens with the discovery of Loretta’s body hanging from a cell phone tower in the middle of a village made up of abandoned railroad boxcars, populated by a cast of characters one might classify as “misfits.” The boxcars are as uniquely finished and decorated as the personalities that inhabit them. Each of those personalities exhibits its own unusual idiosyncrasies, as does the Federal Marshal, Rick Senate, who investigates Loretta’s death. Throughout the journey to discover Loretta’s killer, the reader is taken along on a series of adventures as parts of the villagers’ past stories are presented.
For me, the most notable part of The Junk Yard Solution was the cast of characters. There is Loretta herself, who is described as having been “a health nut, a cleanliness freak, [and] a Yogini of the first order.” Loretta had a passion for learning. Then come the actors, Arthur, and his “friend” Oswald (who makes a fine plumber); Cicero who is also known as Don Quixote (and as CVR), who sometimes wears a monk’s robe and is the one to whom the others go with their problems; and Helena, the Chocolate Lady, whose life goal (at age 70) is to travel to India to spread her late husband’s ashes there, to name a few. My personal favorite is the widow, Ellen McDougal, who “converses mostly with her deceased husband, the historian.” I especially enjoyed Miss Ellen because she “wanders among the boxcars at night, kind of like an itinerant fundamentalist of a proselytizing faith, quoting The Elements of Style.” Meanwhile, a couple of her neighbors, Jefferson Davis McClandish and Justine, don’t unsettle her in the least when they take up nudism, but they annoy her no end with their incessant use of the word “like.” (Seriously, that is a person I’d like to meet!)
The various characters’ lives generally include some details as to how each has been in touch with—or has come within only a couple degrees of separation from—some famous person or event. Those in this odd and entertaining group share two things in common: their dislike of digital life, and their desire to discover who is responsible for Loretta’s murder. Together, these factors make for an interesting afternoon of reading.
