Dario Vanni
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“If you don’t see it, create it!” is my motto. Whether I was Richard W. Weiss (birth name) or James P. Alsphert (author of the 22-book series) or Dario Vanni (professional singer, composer, music arranger) or Clarkspur Emden (he, of the deepest thoughts, of spirit, metaphysics and multi-dimensional aspects of the universe!), I must have been “channeling” many personas throughout my lifetime who apparently needed to express themselves through me.
Having a double career can be doubly challenging as well. For the first fifty some-odd years of my life I was a professional singer, performer, entertainer, composer, music arranger and vocal coach. Then I got the writing bug, even though since the age of ten or so I wrote my thoughts down in a journal and even tried some young person’s fantasy stories. Twiw Don, a heroic blockbuster, or TSOC, about the deepest sentiment that Christmas time expresses and that there are always two sides of the coin.
With my opus de monde, the CABLE DENNING 22-book series, what can be said? Is it murder mystery? Is it sci-fi? Is it fantasy? Or is it just a hell of a story? I, as James P. Alsphert, address many layers, not the least of which are social themes, contrary subjects which may disturb the “politically correct” elements of our society. Does this discourage publishers? I donno. CABLE DENNING speaks his truth with raw honesty and profound insight, mines out the layers of human nature and the nature of the universe in which he dwells.
How to find an agent who will dare take this gauntlet up and carry its banner into the unique and unusual? Who will take 76 years of earth experience and bring these incredible stories and insights in to the world? What are the necessary criteria to accomplish this end?
So I’ve written 22 books on one man’s life. So what? I already told you that. But what are the layers in these books. Please…take time to read a page, a chapter—see how the colors change from street-smart crime to lunch on the moon, to erotic midnight embraces, to the Great American Songbook, to some intriguing metaphysical thoughts, to some major “what if” questions that venture into astrophysics and beyond, that ask CABLE DENNING’s one burning question: ARE WE ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE? What if the earth system is really run by extra-terrestrials who look like us? Oh, and by the way, who are you…really?
MY YOUTH
My father called it Shangri-La. I called it The Last Brigadoon. Just nine miles from the world-famous Hearst Castle, Cambria-Pines-by-the-Sea sat nestled in a forest of Monterey Pine trees. Those days, before the reckless axe of man, those lovely trees extended west to the sea shore and east about four of five miles inland. It was a narrow forest, extending north to Leffingwell Creek and South to just the other side of the village of Cambria, perhaps six or seven miles in all. Those days it was sealed off from most of the world, with one major two-lane—State Route One—road going through it. Thirty-five miles south lay San Luis Obispo to the south. Carmel was at least a three or four hour trip along the jagged coastal Santa Lucia coast range, blasted out of the shale rock in the 1920’s and 30’s. There was little else in between.
In some ways, my early youth was idyllic. After morning oatmeal mush, my mother would send me out into the woods, or I could venture to the ocean just three blocks away. As long as I came home for lunch and a nap, it was okay.
The other part of my youth was painful, emotionally a disaster for a young, sensitive lad. My father was a true “raging alcoholic”, my sister hated me for some unknown reason and my poor mother anchored the home as best she could. Eventually, to make ends meet, she distinguished herself as a fine European chef by opening Anita’s Café, where the world’s finest abalone chowder and steaks could be found.
But, the other side of my father’s coin was this: he was a superlative intellectual. Coming in and out of his real estate office were such friends and acquaintances such as Julius Tannenbaum (cellist, string instrument repairman extra-ordinary and player in Las Vegas as Wilbur Clark’s Desert Inn), Felix Frankfurter (Assistant chief counsel of the Supreme Court of the U.S.), Dr. Paul Rogers (eminent surgeon at the Mayo Clinic), Dr. Linus Pauling (physicist and Nobel prize winner for his book No More War!), and among others, author John Steinbeck, who at the time was also an alcoholic. It was this early intellectual environment that influenced my youth. Additionally, my father and a few local “philosophers” introduced me to Kant, Spinoza, Will James, Freud, Karl Marx, Emerson, Thoreau, Shakespeare, Dante, Schopenhauer, Longfellow and many other great minds of earlier centuries.
What made me write the CABLE DENNING series? Since earlier years, my Dad had worked the Cambria Pines Development Company, both out of L.A. and San Francisco. While in Los Angeles, some years before he’d met a tall, handsome private detective named Al Newley. Women were attracted to him like kids to candy. He hung out in “walk-down” dives where in dark corners sat the customers whilst some lovely young woman in a bright sequined dress sang her heart out with a small combo.
On such a day I met Al Newley. He was charming. Affectionate. He threw me up into his arms and bragged to my Dad how handsome his young son was. Of course, Al Newley was an alcoholic, too. Al had been a young L.A. street cop in the mid-1920’s. Early on he’d seen the truth about human nature, the depravity, the ironies, the lighted, the living and the dead. So he drank. And smoked. And was a well-known womanizer. Or was he? My Dad told me that Al complemented the nameless young women who worked in those smoky dens and even tipped them, asking for nothing in return. Perhaps once in a while a spark was born and a love affair might develop. But all in all, Newley was a workaholic, a man who put his life on the line many times. Someone poisoned him to death at the age of 53.
But the story of his stories set my imagination whirling. So at the age of 60, after 40 years as a professional singer, composer and vocal coach, I began researching the life and times of earlier Los Angeles and who this mysterious man might have been. The result is a 22-book series about CABLE DENNING, from 1925 to 1954, when our hero died.
Added into the fabric and layers of the CABLE DENNING series is pure fantasy, science fiction and for all we know, the truth about who runs what in this world. The dollar bill says it: “Novus Ordo Seclorum”!