I had no intention of writing a Gino Ranno series—none whatsoever. I had written and self-published two poetry books, poems that I started writing when I was around 18: Anxiety’s Next and Anxiety’s Cure. I published them on a lark and enjoyed the process of breaking the ice by seeing my name on a book. I recall seeing my first book when it arrived in the mail from the printer. I stared at it for a long while.
A year or so later, I was in Amagansett, New York, in the Hamptons, and was told there was a nice place to have a lobster called The Fish Farm. They also bred these wonderful dogs. Rhodesian Ridgebacks are a large dog breed known also as the African Lion Dog.
The place was a fish farm where they grew fish for retail and wholesale.
The workers at the fish farm reminded me of fishing people who were unique and, in some cases, rather strange. As it neared dusk, a family of South Americans came by, and suddenly, I made up this story in my mind that we could have easily been killed and fed to the fish, with no one the wiser. So, I decided to write my first crime novel which would include a brutal Colombian drug dealer.
Enter Gino Ranno, a legitimate guy with family ties to the fictional Miceli crime family in New York City. I used the Gambino family as a guide. Gino Ranno was me. Gino for Luigino (Little Louie) and Ranno as a fake name I used when I didn’t want to use my real name when I was younger. I made up the characters from friends with nick names like Joey Clams Santoro and Charlie C and other guys I grew up with in the Bronx.
The book took me forever to write. I had lost interest in Fish Farm and abandoned it for 6-8 months. When it was finally finished and published, I got a lot of decent reviews from friends and family, many of whom said it would make a good mystery-crime movie.
A couple of years later, having put the author on my list of paltry accomplishments, I befriended a group of Albanian clients to whom I sold heating oil. When I showed interest in their culture, one of the Albanians gifted me a large, hard-covered red book, The Kanun of Leke Dukagjini. The Kanun is basically the old code of behavior that Albanians have used for hundreds of years and codified by its author.
So, now Gino Ranno returns, and circumstances in the plot get Gino’s mafia family involved in a deadly dispute with the Albanian mob. BESA was the title of the book. BESA is a word of honor, among the Albanians, and I pulled much of the behavior of the bad guys from the Kanun.
It was my first successful fiction book, allowing me to do book signings in New Jersey, New York, Detroit, and other places. Lots of publicity and even more important were reviews from people other than family and friends. The writing was better than Fish Farm as I was learning how to weave a story that held the readers' interest from page one. Fish Farm was criticized for the first 30 pages being not so interesting although I really thought it was. I learned quickly to have a thicker skin. BESA put me on the map I like to say, and the rest of the series was fun and challenging.
Not as commercially successful as the Vic Gonnella series I am pulled to do another book in the Gino Ranno series.
Like anything in life, I like to think my writing has improved as I went along, but who am I to say?
