If all you know of Rupert Holmes is a little ditty titled “Escape (The Pina Colada Song),” then you don’t know Rupert Holmes. Novelist, playwright, lyricist, composer, performer, musician, Holmes does it all — and he does it well: His mantle is groaning with Edgars and Tonys and a diverse array of other prizes and citations for excellence.
He also happens to be one the nicest people in the world, as anyone who’s had a chance to speak with him will testify. MWA-NY members had the opportunity to do just that a couple of years ago when Holmes (an MWA-NY member himself) was one of the guest speakers at one of the chapter’s dinner meetings.
I’m particularly fond of his novel Swing. The reader follows Big Band saxophone player Ray Sherwood through 1940 San Francisco, including an extended visit to the long-vanished Golden Gate International Exposition, a counterpart to NYC’s World’s Fair. Holmes provides us with a meticulously detailed Bay Area, and his knowledge of music and musicians brings Ray Sherwood’s profession to vivid life. Did I also mention it’s got a great big juicy mystery plot? Or that the book comes with a CD featuring songs Holmes wrote to accompany the story? Well, I have now.
Holmes has a decided appreciation of and ability to evoke the past. Swing is proof of that, as in Remember WENN, the series he created and scripted for AMC in the ’90s. It’s a loving tribute to the golden age of radio. Holmes has described the show as cross between Father Knows Best and Fawlty Towers, a mixture of old-time warmth and frenetic farce.
I could name a dozen other of Holmes’ plays or novels or songs, but in 2007 he spoke with at length with Gregory Bossler for The Dramatist, the journal of the Dramatists Guild. It’s a fascinating conversation that covers Holmes’ career up to that point. You can find that interview by clicking here.
(The title of this post, by the way, comes from Holmes’ song “Partners in Crime.”)
— Joseph Goodrich
Joseph Goodrich is the author of South of Sunset: Nine Plays and “Incident on Clinton Street,” which appears in the January/February 2016 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.