Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

Garth Murphy: Plans to set this second novel in Mission San Luis Rey.

THE STORY BEGAN WITH THE HOUSE, A GRAND-SCALE, BOXY VICTORIAN JUST ABOVE THE TRAIN TRACKS THAT SPLIT THE WESTERN EDGE OF ENCINITAS FROM THE REST OF THE CITY. Garth Murphy, the story’s author and my host, tells me it’s the oldest functioning house in town. It was originally built as a railroad hotel in 1887 by an East Coast family named Hammond. They also built the train station, once opposite the hotel but long since trucked down the street and converted into a Pannikin coffee shop and artists’ co-op. “That’s something I’ll always regret,” sighs Murphy. “They sold it for $4 and took it away. I was in Australia, but I wish I’d been here.

“For its day, it was grand,” he says of the house, and looking at the place now, it’s easy to believe him. But in 1976, when Murphy’s wife bought the place (and just around the time she met Murphy), “It was a flop house — 14 rooms, $4 a night. There was one bathroom on each floor. We had rented a little room and stayed in it and found out the house was for sale. As people moved out, we kind of moved in.” As they took over each new section, they worked at restoring it. “It’s been a long term project. It’s got all these levels of how well it’s done, because I was learning how to do it as I went. My father’s hobby was carpentry, and I’m the eldest son. He would buy a house and fix it up — always restoring — and he would augment his professor’s salary by selling it. But I learned a lot on this one, especially about older houses.”

This one is “a good Victorian. They knew how to do it. The outside is all redwood, the beams are big, the ceilings are tall enough” — ten feet — “and there’s enough light. Most houses were dark in those days. These are all original windows. It’s got red wood lathe-and-plaster walls. The electricity is very primitive — they put it in in 1913 — but I left as much of it as was safe.” He turns a knob on a round box screwed into the wall of the front porch, and the lights snap off. When he turns the knob again, I can see the wires running along the ceiling — one leading to the lights, one leading back to the box. “I stripped all the doors and found this beautiful redwood paneling.” He pulled up layers of carpet and linoleum to reveal vertical-grain Douglas-fir flooring in near-pristine condition. “I sanded them, except in the kitchen. I liked the way it was worn around the sink from people standing there.”

Before the floors, he had to tend to the walls, the ones that had been inserted wherever possible to create 14 rooms within a 9-room hotel. Some were plywood, some more permanent. “I just started doing detective work, slowly removing walls and looking at the floor to figure out what the original floor plan was.” Like his father, Murphy aimed at restoration over renovation. He did make a few changes, eliminating a closet that jutted out between living and dining rooms and installing three bathrooms in the front and back-enclosed porches upstairs. “There’s a guy up in Carpinteria who takes bathroom fixtures out of old houses, and I went up there in my old El Camino pickup truck and bought fixtures. They’re not quite 1887, but they’re back there.” The existing upstairs bath received nothing more than new tile.

Some changes were irreversible, forced upon the old hotel from without. The path that once led from the beach to the front porch is no more. The street in front was widened until it pressed up against the house, a high bluff and a wall of vegetation the only buffers. Now, a body enters through a door in the dining room; the front porch is Murphy’s study. White painted wood and windows surround the modest desk that tucks against one side wall. The long, pale, rough-edged space (a porch, after all) is a picturesque writer’s haven, the sort of camera-ready spot you might expect to see photographed in a glossy magazine profile: “The California Writer at Home.” Stacks of such magazines — Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, Surfer’s Journal — cover a low bench in the room’s center; more stacks line the front wall. There are also books, of course, including a row comprising most of the research material Murphy used for his historical novel The Indian Lover.

One of those research books, the first one, arrived because of the house. “When my wife bought it, the place was super cheap, because it was condemned. Now that Encinitas is a city, it’s an historic building, but then, the old timers were all afraid we were going to tear it down. When they found out we were restoring it instead and were going to live in it, they first couldn’t believe it, and then they started bringing me books and articles. My first discovery of William Marshall and his little story came from a book one of them brought me,” sometime in the mid-’80s. That “little story,” the story of a man who journeyed to San Diego just ahead of the American tide, who witnessed the clash of Mexican, Indian, and American cultures from a uniquely involved perspective (he falls in love with a Mexican, lives with the Indians, and serves as a liaison with the Americans), formed the skeleton for Murphy’s novel: the bones upon which he hung his fictional flesh.

Murphy had long been a voracious reader — he often managed a book a day in the years before his discovery of surfing and girls — and he had always wanted to write. In Bill Marshall, he found his literary counterpart, a fitting vehicle for many of his own experiences — starting with the peculiarity of white skin. “I grew up in Honolulu. My father was a professor and pretty much a left-winger. No private schools were even considered. It was public school, and if you lived in the rough part of town, you went to school in the rough part of town. I was the only white guy in my school. I kept my bike in the principal’s office, because otherwise, every day it would have the spokes cut or some other tricky thing. And I pedaled home quickly, though I eventually made a group of friends. As far as my dad was concerned, you just had to put up with it.” Further immersion in foreign culture was provided by Japanese school, which Murphy attended after regular school for three years. “In those days, a third of the people in Hawaii were Japanese.” Then in 1959, ten years after their arrival in Hawaii, the Murphys moved to San Diego to stay — transplants, just like Bill Marshall.

The story didn’t start out as a novel; Murphy wandered into book-length territory from the cozier landscape of the screen play. “I was always saying, ‘This is a film script, 120 pages.’ Here’s kind of a true story about California that nobody knows — Americans are ashamed about what happened to the California Indians, so nobody talks about it. It’s always Sioux and Apaches and Comanches. Nobody pays any attention to the California Indians because they were wiped out in the gold rush — though it wasn’t only Americans. It was Australians and Chinese, too — everybody was here all at once. I wanted to make Bill’s life an action-adventure/love story, but when I put his life together, I realized that he had spent a big chunk of it living with the Indians at Cupa,” near present-day Warner Springs. “As the pieces fell into place, I ended up with gaps.” Those gaps seemed to center mostly around women and Indians, and Murphy started trying to fill them in through research and imagination. By the time he was done, he had a coherent story about Marshall’s life, but “I also wanted it to be an easy entry for people into what was valuable and admirable about the Indian way of life.”

That Indian way of life was what seduced him into the kind of detailed description and slower pacing appropriate to a novel. “As I slowed myself down to foot and horse speed and really started examining everything, that’s when I started to appreciate what the Indians had done. I started thinking, ‘These guys are admirable.’ When you think of what we’ve done in 150 years, and they actually lived here 10,000 years and didn’t turn it into a desert like in the Tigres-Euphrates. They actually sustained this culture — some people might call it primitive, but it wasn’t really primitive in its knowledge of plants.”

The California Indians “created California as a landscape. They weren’t hunter-gatherers. They were using permaculture, growing oak trees consciously. The oak trees go to be 300 years old, and one big oak tree can produce 1000 pounds to a ton of protein and carbohydrates, which the Indians could store in acorn form in big granaries. They supplemented that with native asparagus and greens and roots. They burned the underbrush every year, sometimes twice a year, so that not enough brush could build up around the oak trees to damage them in a forest fire. Keeping the underbrush down to grass also made it easier to hunt, because they used a throwing stick to hunt small game and, obviously, you can’t throw a stick in brush.”

As impressively modern as something called permaculture may sound, Murphy says the Indians were even more modern in their treatment of women. “The missionary priests always used to say that the women were ‘brazen.’ I’d see this word all the time, and I’d try to figure out what it meant. I realized that the priest didn’t mean the women were going off and having sex with people; he meant that they were not asking their husbands for permission to convert to Catholicism or to do whatever they wanted. They were just walking up and talking to the priests. They could be chiefs and medicine men and shamans.”

By contrast, a woman who happened to be a Spanish-colonial citizen of Mexico — as the Californios were — “was completely subject, first to her father and then to her husband and then her brothers. Not only couldn’t she vote, she couldn’t own property, couldn’t be a witness in court, couldn’t have a job — not even as a schoolteacher.” Small wonder that when Cortés came to La Paz, “They thought the women were ruling. The women were out there talking to them; they weren’t somewhere in the background. Cortés called California California because there was a novel circulating among his men about a guy who goes to an island that’s ruled by Amazons, and the island was called California.”

These nonhierarchical notions permeated the whole of California Indian culture, says Murphy, a culture that functioned and endured without armies, without slavery, without even a word for work. “They weren’t organized like the Iroquois; they never even grouped into big tribes. They all lived in these individual towns. Father Duran, the head of the missions, asked each priest to write down an account of the customs of the natives and how and where they lived.” Father Peyri, who presided over the Mission San Luis Rey, “made a list of 111 towns. That was in North County; San Diego had its own 120 or so. They were towns of 85 to 200, the densest population outside Mexico City. They were really decentralized,” which makes their accomplishments still more remarkable, in Murphy’s view, and more historically significant.

“My final conclusion, which was strange — and I don’t know if it’s true — is that the difference between Americans and Europeans has to do with the Indians. We’ve absorbed their culture in different ways — especially the treatment of women and the semi-democratic form of government — so that we have them as what I call our ‘landscestors.’ Their greatest gift is that they made California into this unbelievably productive place for humans. Then the Spanish arrived and saw all this grass and all this oak and thought, ‘Cattle, and oaks to make furniture and burn.’ The Americans came and thought, ‘All this oak; we can bring locomotives in here.’ Every oak in Encinitas went onto the trains as firewood. We owe them a sort of debt for improving California as far as its ability to sustain people.”

But beyond their influence on the land, Murphy believes they infused Americans with “this Indian ideal — I even think ‘The land of the free and the home of the brave’ might refer to Indians. I’m not a scholar on it, but I know the Constitution was influenced by Iroquois meeting houses — how they organized on a small level. Democracy wasn’t a thing they brought from Europe and just planted here because it could grow. Democracy was a thing they learned about here.”

Armed with the fruits of his digging and the Hermann Hesse quote, “The third element of history is fiction,” Murphy began providing the story with “connective tissue” from his own imagination. He wrote the novel in the first per son, riding Marshall’s psyche into the world of the Indians and looking out with Marshall from that vantage point at the world of the oncoming Americans, the Mexican citizens, and the Indians who had come under the influence and training of the Mission.

He found a tough critic in his wife, herself a the daughter of a Zapoteca Indian from southern Mexico. “She’d throw the manuscript in the corner.” But just as a house had gotten the story started, a house brought it to fruition. Murphy has made and edited surfing movies, tried his hand at a recording career, and run a successful surf and beach goods business, but he never gave up restoring houses. “My last project before I sort of semi-retired and moved to Mexico was this huge old house in the Hollywood Hills. It had 165 broken windows; it was just trashed. But I went there and realized that it was pretty together; the damage was just cosmetic. It was huge, something like 11,000 square feet, and we couldn’t possibly have bought it. But the woman who owned it turned out to be somebody that my wife knew, and her boyfriend worked for Cal Fed. She had a huge loan, and somehow, he just took her name off and put my wife’s name on, and we just took over the payment.

“We moved in and I started work on it, and that turned into an eight-year project. We were in the middle of a recession and couldn’t sell it, and we ended up having to rent rooms to all these English and Australian people. I met lots of interesting people in the film world. One guy, Earl, who used to be a writer for one of the studios, is the one who made me soap up the novel. He would read it and tell me, ‘You’ve got to have some incest.’” Earl was friends with the literary agent Lynn Nesbit and Knopf editor-in-chief Sonny Mehta, “and he really knew how far to take it.” Earl read draft after draft; after each, Murphy would ask him to take it to Nesbit, and Earl would reply that it was not yet good enough. But the 11th draft passed muster. Earl took it to Nesbit; Nesbit loved it. She took it to another of her clients, Simon and Schuster editor Michael Korda, and Korda bought it.

“From the beginning he said, ‘It’s a really great story,’ and then he asked me to change it from first to third person.” Murphy obliged; Korda went over the new version and sent back notes for a revision. Korda wanted multiple characters collapsed into composites. Also, “He kept wanting less history. He kept saying, ‘What’s Pablo doing? Where’s Falling Star? Where’s Lugarda? They’ve dropped out. Don’t go on these historical sidetracks.’”

Murphy complied and cut where he could, but sometimes, his fascination with the region and the time won out, as in his lush description of life at Mission San Luis Rey. The subject still amazes him. “One priest — Antonio Peyri — went there, built a shack, and started preaching. He was charismatic, and they liked him, and he built the richest mission in the state. Peyri had seven rooms that he kept for his seven Indian chiefs, who ruled the seven different parts of the region. They were supposedly elected, but really, he appointed them. Every Saturday they’d come in and spend the night, then go to the service on Sunday. He would give them their instructions, and back out they’d go. He had a medieval feudal system.”

As awesome as Peyri’s accomplishment was, Murphy does not gloss over the complications — and in some cases, the serious ills — it facilitated. “The priests actually got rid of all the Indians’ animals. They refused to eat deer and antelope and elk. They arrived with a plan, like the ark: two cows and two horses and two sheep and two pigs and some ducks and some chickens. They replaced the acorns — ‘We’re all eating wheat.’ They made corn and wheat mixed together in a mush. They grew it all in one place. They tried to centralize it — the mission would make all the food and then feed everybody. They attacked their whole culture. The Indians had rules — you had to marry somebody outside your clan, and the whole area was divided into halves, and you had to marry out side your half.” Peyri did away with these codes and allowed anybody to marry anybody, except close relatives. And, of course, he sought to convert the natives to his religion.

Murphy grants that the priests “always intended to give them back their land when they became Spanish citizens” and that they became the defenders of the Indians when the Mexican government took over the missions. But whatever their intentions, the priests’ experiment was compromised — by the Mexicans and by disease. “The one Indian at the mission who could write wrote a record of his time there, and he reported that in one month, 40 per cent of the Indians died of some influenza epidemic. It was demoralizing; it just sort of ruined their whole social structure. Chiefs would die; whole villages would die. The priests would gather Indians from all over and send them home to their villages for feast days and so forth, so they spread dis eases really quickly. It was simple flu, it was measles, it was mumps, it was chicken pox, scarlet fever, and then worse things: cholera, smallpox, syphilis.”

Under Korda’s watchful eye, Murphy kept these digressions brief and stuck close to what he knew was a good story. “It’s nice to write about something; you’ve got to find a story, and that makes it easier for them to sell it. I can talk for an hour about the Indians and the missions without even talking about the book, and I know that’s what sold it. They thought, ‘Well, here’s something that can grab people on different levels.’ I like a sugar-coated pill. I don’t want to write pure history. I want to make a story that you can read and get involved with emotion ally — you don’t want people to die. It’s entertainment; a novel has to be. You’ll never sell a novel unless it’s entertaining or at least pulls you along. But I think a good novel — the ones I admire — whether they attain the status of literature or not, they’re better if you actually learn something if you didn’t know it, or you relearn it, or they somehow strike a chord in you. There are serious intentions always, but my intention also was just to add to the huge number of pleasurable reads out there.”

Korda also went after Murphy’s use of Indian and Spanish words and the “horrible kind of Zsa Zsa Gabor Hungarian accent” that Murphy gave to Sheriff Agoston Haraszthy. Korda is Hungarian, and Murphy recalls that he would “get these notes, and they would read in big letters, ‘NO BAD HUNGARIAN ACCENTS, PLEASE!’ I’d take most of it out, and he’d do it again. Finally, he gave me a note that said, ‘Just let him speak his bad talk once, and from then on, just say he spoke thickly or with an accent.’” Finally, the 14th draft proved acceptable. Only then did Korda ask Murphy to cut 120 pages.

Murphy says that he is not a natural writer, and the prospect of hacking away so much text proved daunting. He sought out a collection of lectures from a Santa Barbara Writers Conference. “I got all these other authors saying how they cut. The last one was an attack on adverbs from Hemingway and somebody else. They were saying, ‘Get rid of the adverbs; find the right verb.’ That was kind of fun.”

Otherwise, the work, and all that had gone before it, was simply work. “I don’t think I’m a great writer,” admits Murphy. “I really have to work at it. I do read a lot, and I think I know what good writing is, and I think I was at least going in the right direction. But I’m definitely not a natural. I tend to use the same word in bunches — you write something, and then the word is in your mind. The one book I read before I started writing was Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, because everybody says it’s one of the great novels. In the introduction, they said that his rule was that you never use the same word twice on one page.” As the drafts piled up, “I really tried to find another word. I knew I had a good story, but I didn’t want to pay dues with a bad version of a good story and then be searching for a good story, which I then knew better how to write. I figured I had to learn it all with the first book. It’s such a tough climate for writers now. You really don’t think of publishers sticking with you for five novels, and finally your fifth one hits and the other ones start to sell. Now you’ve got to kind of hit with a bang or they’re going to drop you.”

Fourteen drafts after he started, he was ready to go through the fresh hell of copyediting. “The galley proof was so bad. I found 3000 mistakes in it. Here’s this multinational corporation making a botch of things. The type setting is done in India by people that don’t speak English. There were so many mistakes, it drove me crazy.” Murphy went through and made corrections, as did a professional copyeditor and proofreader. Finally, a production head took the three corrected versions, combined them, and shipped it back to the typesetter. The published edition contains several disagreements in person — “myself ” where it should read “him self,” that sort of thing. “I definitely don’t have any of those on my electronic file,” says Murphy. He has never read the published edition, but his wife has. “My wife said she found about 50 typos. She said it’s embarrassing and that I should tell people before they read it.”

Murphy’s wife is not here tonight; she is down in Todos Santos, near Cabo San Lucas. “Just about when she turned 50, she decided she wanted to ride horses, and so she got a couple. Now she’s got a few.” The horses are in Baja, and “It’s really hard to leave them, so one of us is there almost all the time. We’re apart more often than we’re together, and that’s good after 25 years. I like to get really close, but at about 20 years, you get to a point where you really don’t have to be together all the time. We talked last night after I did a radio interview and pretty much caught up in half an hour. We’d had enough; we said, ‘Okay, see you later.’ She would have liked to be here though. She would have made a much more attractive dinner.”

Or perhaps merely less streamlined. Following an acute case of hepatitis in 1980, one that dropped Murphy to a mere 132 pounds, he began researching his diet. “I found out that black pepper and salt are really bad for the liver. I got to eating all these liver-healthy things. The first thing I could eat was a potato, and I got so that even a boiled potato all by itself had so much flavor to me. I continued cooking like that. I use zero salt, pep per, and spices. My theory is that if you get good ingredients, it tastes good.”

We start with olive bread and a good salty cheese, then move on to the soup. “It’s just a vegetable soup. It’s got beets and beet greens and kale. The broth is from a cookbook called How to Get Well; it’s called Potassium Broth. The basis is a cup of onions, a cup of carrots, a cup of potatoes, and a cup of celery. I did put one small chile in it, but it’s hard to taste it, and I did add some tofu while it was cooking. My wife likes spicy things — she always alters my soups — but I like the flavor of the vegetables.”

Murphy serves the soup in the kitchen, so that he can stay near the stove, a gorgeous pale green ’20s piece that might be a coupe for all its voluptuous, powder-coated curves. The only mar is a dent on the upper-left edge; explains Murphy, “One of my friends literally threw it out, not realizing it was this priceless collector’s item. My wife is a fanatic collector.”

This last is easily believed. The house itself is remarkably unfussy for a Victorian, a far cry from a filigreed painted lady. But within its straight forward confines, a kaleidoscope of stuff. The kitchen is stuffed with baskets, breadboxes, serving ware, jars, paintings, curios, and cookware. The living and dining rooms possess the modern calm of white and wood, but it takes a while to register under the masses of color and furniture and books and bric a-brac. Some of the decorating is whimsical — colored tissue-paper tubes descending from the bulbs on an old chandelier, a dressmaker’s form sporting a shawl. Some is luxurious — gilt-framed mirrors, a swooping, domineering deep red recamier. Some is giddily primitive — leopard and cattle-print chairs, what seem to be genuine animal skins slung over a retro daybed. And some — like that daybed and the tubular steel-and-Formica kitchen set — are Murphy’s quiet contributions to the menagerie.

The bits and pieces are not the usual run of collectibles; the brown skull on top of a cabinet in the dining room is not real, but the one under glass in the study is — a pre-Columbian specimen. It’s like visiting the house of a colorful aunt, one who adheres to the family tradition of amassing mementos but who has led what the rest of the family calls “an interesting life.”

“It’s mostly junk, but there are a couple of pieces that are interesting. I actually don’t like it; it’s the main cause of marital dissension. She’s been bringing stuff in for years. I beg her to stop. You can’t get around, and it’s a nightmare to clean. Her theory is that when I’m dead — she’s convinced she’ll live longer, like a good Indian — she’ll be able to support herself by opening the house as an antique store. The house has commercial zoning, and she says she’ll open an antique store and serve tea and sell junk and empty the house as she gets older. That’s her excuse for never parting with anything. I say, ‘What about the clothes you wore when you were 16?’ ‘Well, those will be worth something, too.’ Her theory is that it’s all worth more later.”

Above the stuff, and around it and in some cases below it, is the art. Murphy’s wife is a painter — “One of the better Mexican painters,” in his opinion — and her work is everywhere apparent. Some is vaguely self-referential: slender, dark-skinned women, often topless, in various styles and settings, but always boldly drawn and colored, including one full-body depiction of “a woman giving birth to a monster.” The brown, naked woman is standing, dancing, writhing, her hands covering her face in apparent shame, while the head and shoulders of a robustly pink baby — its skin covered with black marks, like those of a tiger or a cheetah — protrude from between her legs.

That painting dominates the dining room; the adjoining living room boasts an equally striking Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Person. In the manner of the muertos popular in Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations, she has painted herself as a skeleton, albeit one with red lips and an elaborate sheer sleeve floral dress. And as often happens with painters, she has friends who are painters, and their work crowds the walls alongside hers. Other paintings — including some that hold claim to pride of place, the ones hung with a decorator’s eye before the flood — exude a whiff of antiquity. Nudes and semi-nudes abound.

Murphy produces a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. “I don’t drink much, but it’s my birthday, so I’ve got to have at least some thing.” He is 58 today; the rest of his birthday dinner will be steelhead salmon cooked in a cast iron skillet and steamed vegetables: corn, broccoli, cauliflower, beets, and beet greens. “My wife said, ‘You’ve got to make him a meal from the book; you’ve got so many in there.’” Though steelhead doesn’t get a mention, the novel does contain many accounts of eating, often with generous dollops of detail. “I liked writing it. I did it mainly because eating is so basic, and I realized how well they were eating. When you look at the pictures of the Indians, they’re not these skinny little guys. They’ve got nice, thick legs and they’re strong. The descriptions are always saying how well-proportioned they are.”

He shows me a collection of drawings that he used for inspiration. “I used to stare at them and wonder. They really were one of my better clues as to what life was like. Here’s a lancer going after a cow.” There, in the background, are “the grassy hills — not one tree.”

The vegetables go into the pot all together, then get extracted as they finish steaming. “The amount you cook things, especially vegetables, is critical. Cauliflower needs the least of all; it’s good raw.”

Dinner is served in the dining room. Sets of this and that — china, tea sets, silver, glassware, some of them complete, some not — dot the room and fill the built-in hutch. Christmas ornaments hang from the chandelier. The swirling, paisley-ish table cloth is overlaid with a Southwestern sort of runner. Two candlesticks match, two do not. Murphy has found the serving plates his wife would have wanted him to use, white china with apple green trim and pink flowers dotting the faces. “I mangled the vegetables, which I hate doing. It’s slightly lacking in grace, but it’s all here. My father would say, ‘It’s all here and we’re all here.’ ”

The broccoli is more done than Murphy prefers — he likes it crunchy — but his claims of mangling are wildly exaggerated. He douses his vegetables with a sauce made from “balsamic vinegar, good olive oil, chopped up garlic, lemon juice, and Bragg’s amino acids,” an organic product not unlike soy sauce, then invites me to do the same. The sauce is at once sharp and round and very rich.

Over dinner, we talk about the characters in his novel. He grants that No’ka, the chief of the village that Marshall joins, comes across as improbably noble. But he notes that stereotypes have their basis in reality and are not with out their uses. “I read so many stories about chiefs like him; Black Elk Speaks is probably the most famous book. I had a kind of mythologizing intent; I wanted some people to be clearly one thing or another. I thought that I needed someone who was a pleasant person; I wanted him to be a counter to Señor Osuna, who is a stereo typically unpleasant Mexican type. Some of my Mexican friends said, ‘Oh, my God; I know so many people like this guy.’ Other characters are really ambiguous. For instance, Antonio Garra,” the mission-trained Indian who left his native life behind, only to take it up again and lead a suicidal revolt against the occupying Americans. Marshall’s friend Pablo is similarly torn, taking up now this life, now that, now living here, now there, never settling anywhere.

As for Bill Marshall himself, “He’s always been depicted as kind of amoral. In one of the few articles written about him, one guy calls him the Wickedest Man in the West. He’s accused of all these things,” including aiding the Indians against the Americans and authorizing the murder of his paramour’s husband. “I wanted to make him more of a modern person who is not always thinking about what he’s doing. He wasn’t an outlaw; maybe an opportunist. Basically, he was just a guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time” — over and over again. Marshall’s immense dog Shadow is modeled after Murphy’s own dog, Dante. And the women? “Everything to do with the women is based on personal experience. I don’t think I could write about it otherwise.”

Murphy drew upon much of his own experience for his first novel; for his second, he will be venturing further out and further from the tether of recorded history. “I’ve come to realize that I have to write another book preceding this one. By fol lowing Marshall, I was forced to learn more and more about the Indians, and I now think I know enough to write about San Diego before the Spanish came in 1769.”

He plans to set this second novel in the years just before the Spanish arrival and to center the action in Father Peyri’s Mission San Luis Rey. “He kept up to 1000 virgins locked in there every night. Every baptized, unmarried girl, from puberty on, had to stay in the Mission at night. So did married women whose husbands were away. I’m going to use Ladislaya” — a character in The Indian Lover — “who is based on a real person. She was the mother of one of the boys who went to Italy with Peyri, after the Mexicans took over the missions. I’m going to use her as a woman raised from infancy by a priest; growing up in the Mission, calling him ‘Father.’ She’s going to be the foil, the midperson between the cultures. I’m thinking of writing it in the first person — Antonio Peyri and then also this girl. It will be more of a stretch, because I won’t have all these hanging points,” historical events such as the Battle of San Pasqual that act as anchors for his current narrative.

The all-important story is taking shape; soon he will enter again into his writing regimen. “It’s waking up in the middle of the night with dream ideas — I don’t know where they come from — lying awake wondering if I’m going to remember them in the morning, and finally get ting up the energy to turn the light on and scribble them on the pad, then going back to sleep. Then up early and straight to writing. When I first get up, I quickly write down all the things I thought of during the night. For some reason, I get ideas immediately when I wake up. I’ll lay there, and I’ll have things already rolling. They sort of take over. That’s the really inspirational, creative part. I write from 5:00 or 6:00 or 7:00 or when ever I get up until I get hungry or my back’s sore, and I need to stand up. Then I have breakfast and go back to writing and keep going, at the most until noon. As the hours go by, I’m doing less creative work and more rewriting, fixing, patching.” Afternoons are slow, some times producing little more than a few notes to serve as fodder for the next morning’s burst. He wrote his first draft of The Indian Lover by hand; since then, he’s been working on a second-hand laptop. “I had to use glasses within six months.”

“We should have dessert.” Murphy disappears into the kitchen with the dinner dishes and returns carrying two plates, each bearing wedges of American and Japanese persimmons, along with some cherry-vanilla ice cream. “Persimmons are by far my favorite fruit. We don’t really need ice cream, but we’re indulging because it’s my birthday. These are really ripe, which are hard to find. They have amazing differences of taste. There’s a little more pucker in the American one. I prefer the American; it’s got more cinnamon flavor.”

He does not have a contract for his second novel, but he is unworried.“I think if this book does all right, then I won’t have any trouble. I’ve heard — but I don’t know — that 10,000 copies make a success, as far as the publisher’s concerned. I’ve heard that 1 in 20 books pays for all the rest of them and that 10 or 15 thousand makes you a writer. In other words, if you get their money back for them, you’re not the 1 in 20, but you’re not a loser either. You can be one of the 19 for the next one, because you might hit.”

So far, his hope is aloft. “The signings have been going well. The first one was on December 6 at D.G. Wills’ in La Jolla. He sold all the books he’d ordered, which was about 25, and I gave him another 18. All but 3 went, I think. Then, on December 8, I did a cold signing — no advertising, no nothing — down in Old Town. I just went and sat in a re-creation of Fitch’s store” — an occasional setting in the book — “in the middle of a pile of Mexican blankets. We sold close to 20. I got a really great cross section of people and had a great time. People would walk up and look through my little book of pictures and then get to talking. Their interest would be sparked; it really encouraged me. After that, I went home and thought the book might actually — something might happen.”