Decipher the Blood Code
Mahu #14 releases today
From 1986-88 I worked for the Rouse Company, building festival marketplaces in New York, New Orleans, and Miami. I built up a collection of airline miles flying to those cities and to Columbia, Maryland, where Rouse had its home base.
When my father passed away in January of 1992, my mother inherited his miles, and that spring she suggested we use our miles on a big trip to Hawai’i. I didn’t know it then, but that was the catalyst for my long love affair with the Aloha State.
We flew to Honolulu, and visited all the tourist sites—Diamond Head, Waikiki, Pearl Harbor, the Kodak Hula Show, and Hilo Hattie’s aloha shirt warehouse. We bought island hopper plane tickets which let us fly between islands, so we spent a day in Kauai, then flew to Maui, where we stayed in Kaanapali and then Wailea.
By Ken Sakamoto, Star-Bulletin
Kodak Hula Show cast members, above, pose for visitors
at the end of the show.
I found that Hawaii had so much in common with South Florida. The contrast between light and darkness, the idea of shady characters in sunny places, the sense of being at the edge of the country. Because I had begun reading, and loving, Florida mysteries, I went looking for crime fiction set in Hawaii.
There was very little back then. Only the occasional visiting sleuth in the islands, and the Charlie Chan mysteries.I decided I’d write the book I wanted to read.
I ended up with about 200 pages of random scenes focused on a surfing private eye named Kimo, who had been a police detective and left the force.
I presented the first 50 pages to my MFA thesis advisor, Jim Hall, at a writer’s workshop in Seaside, Florida. He asked why Kimo had left the force, and I didn’t know.
He told me I needed to know that before I could write a convincing character. Disappointed, I put away that book and tried my hand at others. Nothing clicked.
Then I began my own coming-out process, and along the way I had a brainstorm. What if Kimo left the police because he was gay? This was the late 1990s, and though there had been much progress, law enforcement was a last bastion of resistance against LGBT people.
I decided I’d have to write the book in which Kimo leaves the force in order to understand him as a private eye. But in the course of writing that book, he told me that he wasn’t the kind of guy to quit. Instead, he wanted to remain a cop.
Which led me to fourteen novels and two books of short stories, in which Kimo fights his way through a series of cases as well as going through the steps many gay men do—making gay friends, falling in love, getting his heart broken, and so on.
Along the way I had to learn about police procedures, investigation, autopsies, guns and poisons and all kinds of ways to kill people. Good times!
Blood Code releases today at Amazon; it’s already available at other vendors. I wanted to focus on fatherhood and what it means to Kimo and Mike, as well as in the larger sense. Fathers and sons have always been a big theme for me, from the son’s point of view. So it was a challenge to write Kimo as a dad, now that the twins are twelve and starting to question where they came from.
I hope you enjoy the book and look forward to hearing your comments and reviews.
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