A CRYING SHAME

About the Book

This is the story of two eleven year old boys who consider themselves outsiders.  Stacey Conrad and Shane Boxer.  Stacey’s father has a gun collection and operated a successful Italian restaurant on Long Island  Mrs. Conrad is a devout Christian and pampers her son who finds strength in Shane who bosses him around.  They have a blood pact to kill their enemies.  Shane gets Stacey to steal two high power rifles and they ambush nine of their fellow students and one teacher who ends up in a coma.  The boys are arrested.

Gilda Mueller writes books on child violence and her publisher gives her newspaper clipping on the Long Island massacre.  She contacts Inspector Aaron Vadanoff who is in charge of the Conrad-Boxer  case.  Between the two of them they investigate the children’s parents.  Dolores Boxer is very clearly a beautiful woman who has become a professional prostitute.  She hates and ignores her son---she hated Shane from birth.  As for the father Christopher Boxer, he works for an international banking firm in Manhattan and with an associate Jacqueline Greer  is skimming twenty million dollars out of the company.  Jacqueline goes on vacation in Italy planing to go to Zurich and open a secret account so they can transfer the money.  Her plane crashes over Nantucket Bay and she is drowned.  Her aging mother Martha Greer finds evidence and brings it to Chris who confiscated material covering the fraud.  He must now finish the scheme on his own.  The Boxers refuse to see their son in jail and Gilda and Aaron become a love story.  The independent female and the shy brooding male who remains a challenge. Together they mount a campaign to incriminate the parents in the boys’ crimes. The televangelist Gary Paul Bell gets words of the scandal and enters the scene hoping to whip up some excitement for his “the devil made them do it” program.  He visits the boys in jail after securing permission from parents and ends up writing an article for New York Times on delinquency.  He pushed the envelope one step too far and does a TV show where he accused  Satan for corrupting these two innocent children.  The trial becomes a circus.  The lawyers try to manipulate the judge and jury and fail.  Stacey through his lawyer’s efforts to paint him as a wimp gets off on an acquittal while Shane stoic to the end believing he did nothing wrong---is convicted of the murders and is sentenced to life imprisonment.  The judge shares Gilda’s view that the wrong people were put on trial. In today’s society parents must reassume the blame for their child’s behavior.  Most parents refuse to make this commitment and so child crime will continue to grow until it becomes a world where child murders child again and again and again.

About the Author

Norman Spencer Graham has moved through two other media before he approached the novel. His MFA in Theater helped him write and see mounted five of his plays. The titles of his plays are ARABESQUE, LEGEND OF THE SUN, AN EVENING WITH PRACTICALLY EVERYBODY, AN APPETITE FOR JADE and RETURN ENGAGEMENT. He has also written five original screenplays. NIGHT OF THE SERPENT (cult horror film) THE RAGPICKER, NEVER LOOK BACK, MONDO EROTICA and ONCE UPON A SCOUNDREL Mr. Graham believes the stage gave him an insight into dialogue and the screen---a feeling for structure. Armed with these experiences, approaching the novel was less daunting. A CRYING SHAME is his fifth novel. He has also written DEATH IN GUATEMALA, THE FINAL OBSCENITY THE END .COM, and EYE OF LUCIFER.