Four years ago Tony Lindsay had two novels under his belt. The first one, “Prayer of Prey,” was a thriller about a drug addict who dies and is possessed by an evil African king. The other, “Chasin’ It,” was the story of a black drag queen. But try as he might, Lindsay couldn’t get anyone to publish either of them. “People loved ‘Chasin’ It,’” Lindsay says, but “they were not ready for a drag queen protagonist who was happy and comfortable with his gayness. Everybody loved the book, but nobody wanted to market it.”
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BlackWords published One Dead Preacher five months ago. The narrator, security escort David Price, gets more than he expects when a client’s husband, a dynamic preacher, is murdered: Price is implicated and has to find the real killer. Characters mention such local haunts as Jackie’s Place, a soul food diner on 71st Street; the Other Place, a bar on 75th Street; and the South Shore Cultural Center, still called the South Shore Country Club by some longtime south-siders.
A sales manager at Imagination Publishing, a downtown producer of custom magazines and newsletters for businesses, Lindsay grew up in Englewood and Brainerd and says his writing career started after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Lindsay, then in the third grade at Copernicus elementary school, watched his parents cry and saw the devastation after the riots on 63rd Street. Afterward he wrote an essay describing his feelings and read it to the student body. “The seed was definitely planted in grammar school,” he says. He wrote horror and action short stories and read everything from Nancy Drew mysteries to gritty urban novels by Donald Goines. At Chicago Vocational High School, he wrote love poems to female classmates and penned a Shakespearean-style poem called “Ode to Pancakes” after studying The Taming of the Shrew.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Newberry.
