The City That Taught Me to Listen
I didn’t set out to write a book about a fifteen year old girl.
I set out to write about Jerry Buckley.
If you don’t know that name, you’re not alone. Most people don’t. But in Detroit in 1930, Jerry Buckley was the voice of the city. A radio announcer at WMBC who called his listeners the Common Herd and meant it as a compliment. He campaigned for the unemployed, named corrupt officials on air, and received enough death threats that he stopped being surprised by them. (That was ultimately a mistake.)
On July 23, 1930, three men walked across the lobby of the LaSalle Hotel on Woodward Avenue and shot him eleven times. He was thirty-nine years old. Nobody was ever convicted.
Eight days later, The Shadow debuted on radio.
I kept thinking about those eight days. About what it means to keep speaking when the city is trying to silence you. About who picks up the work when the speaker goes quiet. About the infrastructure of protection that has to exist, quietly, underneath every city that has ever eaten its witnesses.
That thinking became the Whisper Series. And the first story in that series is THE WHISPER AND THE RUNAWAY.
It’s about Marley Stevenson, a fifteen year old foster kid who sees something she wasn’t supposed to see in a Detroit public library. It’s about Jackie Rage, who runs a Night Market stall and knows everything worth knowing in this city. And it’s about an old man in a forgotten basement who has been holding Detroit accountable for fifty years, long before anyone thought to call it a network.
It is not a comfortable book. It is not supposed to be.
If you’d like to read it before it officially launches and leave an honest review, the ARC is available now through BookFunnel. No obligation. No pressure. Just the book.
JM Tangard
Staunton Press | Independent Publishing Imprint 
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