Geoffrey Leavenworth

Author’s Own
Shooting Becomes
Basis for Novel
By Ted Streuli
The Daily News
May 17, 2003

GALVESTON — Somewhere in the pages of “Isle of Misfortune” there is a line that separates fiction from experience.

Precisely where that line lies author and former Galveston resident Geoffrey Leavenworth isn’t saying. But this much is known: Stalked by an unknown man who engaged in escalating acts of petty vandalism, Leavenworth one night answered the door at his Silk Stocking district home and got a bullet in his chest.

“Early in the novel it’s fairly accurate, although not everything is,” Leavenworth said. “That’s the trouble with writing autobiographically — the reader doesn’t know where the line is.”

The man who shot Leavenworth was never captured or identified.

“Fortunately I wasn’t injured too bad, but we decided it was time to leave,” Leavenworth said.

He still lives in Texas with his wife and children, but prefers to keep his city of residence private. The shooter, after all, remains at large. Not even Leavenworth, who confronted the man several times, knows who shot him.

“He was just a tall, skinny guy who seemed kind of disturbed,” Leavenworth said.

The 50-year-old writer lived peacefully on Rosenberg Avenue for a decade, writing articles for Time magazine, the New York Times, Texas Monthly and others. But from 1991-1994, the tall, skinny guy haunted Leavenworth’s world.

“It’s about a family that’s facing a threat and how they deal with it,” he said. “I just felt like I had a story to tell. I didn’t do much with it for a long time — I wasn’t very comfortable talking about it and I didn’t write about it for a number of years.”

“Isle of Misfortune” comes with resolution, unlike Leavenworth’s real-life experience and, though fictionalized, the author said islanders are likely to recognize some of the characters.

“Some people characterize it as a book about a family facing a dire threat; others are treating it as a mystery,” he said. “If people are enjoying the story, I don’t care how they characterize it. I think it’s a book about a family that has, at its heart, a mystery.”

He finished the novel about two years ago, but found selling it to a major publisher wasn’t an easy task while the country was ensconced in a cocoon of fear.

“I was trying to peddle this manuscript in the fall of ’01 when New York publishers were afraid to open a manila envelope because of the anthrax scare,” he said. “It wasn’t a good time to be selling a first novel.”

A small Texas press took the project, and in the 30 days the book’s been available the first printing is nearly sold out.

“I really have a great fondness for Galveston,” Leavenworth said. “Galveston is a gold mine of material for anyone who wants to write about a place and atmosphere with colorful characters. It’s a very interesting place in which to be. Even though the book shows the island with its imperfections, there’s a lot of affection for Galveston in the novel.”

From the Critics
Reviews appearing below:
The San Antonio Express-News
Kirkus Reviews
The Dallas Morning News
Review of Texas Books
TexasMonthly.com
The Austin American-Statesman
The Galveston County Daily News
Texas Books in Review
The Alcalde
The Texas Observer

San Antonio Express-News
June 8, 2003

Author fashions true story into compelling fiction

By Anne Morris

In Galveston one night, as Geoffrey Leavenworth was helping his sons get ready for bed, the doorbell rang. He went to the door, and a man he didn't know pulled out a gun and shot him in the chest.

Leavenworth was relatively lucky. The bullet missed his heart, so he lived to write about it. His gripping novel, Isle of Misfortune, fictionalizes this nightmare. A soft-spoken, scholarly man with a careful beard, Leavenworth seems an unlikely target for a stalker. Who would want to kill him? And why?

"Most people who are stalked know who is doing the stalking," Leavenworth says quietly. "I never did."

His autobiographical novel supplies fictional reasons for the threats his family suffered in the early 1990s. He was a freelance writer in Galveston then, and they lived in a Victorian house in the historical district. He wrote restaurant reviews for Texas Monthly and various articles for other publications, including occasionally Time and The New York Times. Though not born on the island, Leavenworth loved living there. It took a lot to finally drive him out.

Sitting at a table in a West Austin Starbucks on a recent sunny Sunday afternoon, he catalogued the events.

"It started with acts of petty vandalism, like broken windshields, that escalated," the author says. "At one point the guy threw a brick through a window and tried to set fire to my garage. A neighbor chased him off the roof of the garage with a match in one hand and newspapers in the other."

This unidentified tormentor disappeared for a while, then reappeared. Each time the violence grew worse. For a time, Leavenworth and his wife and sons moved out to West Beach and lived in hiding.

"The part in the novel where the family finds a get-well card with two bullets in the envelope — that actually happened."

Eight days later the family left, moving to Austin, where they now live.

"When you have something inscrutable like this going on in your life, you try to look at it from every angle," Leavenworth says with a slight smile.

Leavenworth's title, Isle of Misfortune, comes from the diary of the explorer Cabeza de Vaca and helps set an eerie tone for a novel that intermingles a mystery with the story of beleaguered but loving family. The scenes in the book that feature Sam, 6, and Jake, 9, lull the reader into a sense of sweet, ordinary life. They accent the disruption the stalker brings. Does Leavenworth worry that the stalker will read about the book and come after him again? He admits that possibility has crossed his mind, but he prefers to think the man has moved on, too.

There was never any question Geoffrey Leavenworth would write about these events. He's always been a writer.

Growing up in Dickinson, south of Clear Lake, he wrote and published the Bayou Press at age 10. In his adult career he's published more than 500 magazine articles on everything from travel to health care. More recently, he's worked as a speechwriter for presidents at the University of Texas, from Robert Berdahl through Larry Faulkner, and currently is principal staff writer on a two-year strategic planning effort at the university. In Galveston, everybody tries to guess who the characters might be.

"The (book) critic there pointed out a lot of people who were recognizable," the author says. "Of course, it's one thing to have a person who's colorful and inspires a character, but that doesn't mean everything that person did in the book is true."

Gordo O'Connor, the writer/protagonist in the novel, and his wife Ana, a lawyer, experience extra-marital temptations at the same time the stalker makes their home life intolerable. There are even sex scenes that involve a pregnant woman, and even better ones that don't, so forget any notion that university press books are staid. This one isn't.

Leavenworth, who just turned 50, had little success with fiction before. He was best-known for writing the text for Historic Galveston, a nonfiction coffee-table photo book (Herring Press, 1985). He admits to two unpublished novels out in the garage and children's book manuscripts under the bed. That's how he managed to write this accomplished "first novel," packed with suspense and a powerful sense of the seedy charm of Galveston Island.

"Islands are different," Leavenworth says. "Sometimes people end up there because it's the end of the road. Galveston has this charming and notorious past that coexists with all the Victorian architecture, palm trees, the water — people fall in love with the whole thing."

He also mentions the presence on the island of both a psychiatric hospital and a prison hospital — places that the stalker might have passed through.

Whether getting shot transformed Leavenworth into an artist or just gave him a terrific story remains a question. He first sent this manuscript out in 2001, "when nobody wanted to open a manila envelope because of anthrax." The brave editors at TCU Press opened their envelope and fell in love with the book, making it their lead title for spring and assigning Barbara Whitehead the design work. They have been repaid: The first printing has practically sold out.

Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2003
Isle of Misfortune

Fictionalized autobiography about a Texas writer's increasingly desperate attempts to save himself and his family from a psychotic stalker. Leavenworth's first novel begins with a true, bizarre, and terrifying incident that obsessed him for years: One night he answered the door of his Galveston home and met a perfect stranger who shot him in the chest with a .25 caliber pistol. He makes this the starting point of a story about Gordon O'Connor, a freelance journalist and family man, who struggles to unravel the mystery of a similar incident. Naturally shaken by the attack, Gordon flees with his wife and two sons to their beach house, only to be awakened in the middle of the night by a telephone call from his attacker.

The police, at first, are not only unhelpful but downright suspicious, asking why Gordon never reported the earlier acts of vandalism (broken windows, etc.) that he now believes were committed by his stalker, and privately questioning whether Gordon is involved in some sort of hoax. But Gordon's father-in-law, Pat Hayes, an ex-FBI agent with strong political connections, brings in some of his old friends to help sort out the case and they soon come up with-very little. The uncertainty of the situation makes Gordon increasingly paranoid, and he soon finds reasons to suspect everyone around him-from his brother-in-law Allen (a drug addict with a criminal record) to his father-in-law Pat (who concealed Allen's criminal record from Gordon) right up to his wife Ana (whom Gordon begins to think is having an affair).

As his life veers out of control, Gordon takes increasingly desperate measures to find security, but nothing succeeds-until he finally confronts his attacker face-to-face. By this time, his story has become as much a tale of psychological terror as criminal suspense.

Leavenworth builds up tension gradually and deliberately, giving a sharp edge of eeriness to what could have been a run-of-the-mill thriller.

The Dallas Morning News
June 8, 2003

Getting shot gets writer his first novel

By Rick Koster

It's a well-known fact that every creative writing department at every university in this great nation has a tattoo artist on staff. This is so each student can have "write what you know" indelibly inked on the forehead. This tenet is bedrock basic for obvious reasons, at least in the building-block stages of a writing career, but also limiting because, more often than not, young writers haven't done much interesting enough to sustain a book.

Such is not the case in Geoffrey Leavenworth's first novel, Isle of Misfortune. A compelling literary thriller set on Galveston Island and in the Texas Hill Country, the book leaps into action when protagonist Gordo O'Connor answers a knock at the door one ordinary suburban evening and is shot and wounded by an unknown assailant, who vanishes without a clue. That this actually happened to Mr. Leavenworth certainly adds a shot of Tabasco to the old "write what you know" formula.

What marks Isle of Misfortune as something special, though, is that the author – who still doesn't know who shot him or why – uses the attack as a springboard to creation, rather than merely as the first episode in thinly veiled autobiography. In Isle of Misfortune (Cabeza de Vaca's characterization of mysterious, capricious Galveston Island)–O'Connor, his wife, Ana, and their two small boys are understandably frightened and confused by the mysterious shooting. After a lackadaisical police investigation can't provide any answers, the family abandons their Galveston home, first, for a beach cabin at the other end of the island and, later, for Austin.

Ultimately Gordo, with the help of friend Lars, a retired lawyer-turned-sailor/beachcomber, undertakes his own investigation, not only to solve the crime but to restore stability to a family unraveling under the pressures, accusations and intimations that begin to bubble to the surface. When the net begins to close on a most unlikely suspect, Gordo begins to wonder if a solution will come in time, and if the far-deeper questions that have arisen will be answered.

Mr. Leavenworth, a jack-of-all-trades writer with hundreds of articles to his credit, has a deceptively simple style that probes underlying themes without sacrificing the story's easy-glide momentum. One hopes this first effort will suggest more fiction – and that less dramatic personal catalysts will be required.

Author Rick Koster reviews thrillers for The Dallas Morning News.

Review of Texas Books

Shot by a Stalker: A Victim of Circumstance

By Stephen Curley

Gordo O’Connor is doing just fine. A freelance writer in his mid forties, he lives in a quaint two-story Victorian in Galveston’s historical district with his gorgeous lawyer wife and their two precocious sons. Then one evening, while he is supervising bath time for the kids, the doorbell rings. He jogs downstairs, can’t quite make out who it is, but opens the door anyway. When he recognizes the tall, skinny man on the porch, he slams and locks the door. It’s him—the stranger who’s been stalking Gordo for the past four months. Next moment, a bullet rips through the doorpane and hits Gordo in the chest. The stalker flees.

Luckily Gordo suffers only a surface wound. But nothing will ever be the same for him. His life has changed utterly. The primary interest for the reader of this suspenseful novel is the precise psychological portrait of what it’s like to have been a shooting victim. People treat him—well, differently. As if his bad luck could rub off on them. Neighbors glance at him uneasily; one mother forbids her child to attend his son’s birthday party. A couple of inept cops suspect he’s withholding information and relegate his case to the inactive file. Unfounded rumors—in a socially incestuous city that thrives on rumors—circulate about his connection with the assailant. Gordo, tainted by his innocent encounter with inexplicable powers of darkness, begins to regard himself as damaged goods.
Even his marriage suffers. Both he and his wife—sexually playful and secure with each other before the shooting—now flirt with the possibility of other less complicated relationships. Meanwhile, the apparently motiveless stalker continues to make Gordo’s life a waking nightmare. All this is played out against the compelling backdrop of a gothic Galveston Island—at once delightfully seductive and desolately fearsome.

Geoffrey Leavenworth, writer of hundreds of non-fiction magazine articles and an authoritative book about Galveston architecture, has turned out a good first novel. (A pertinent biographical note: a decade ago, an unknown assailant shot Leavenworth in Galveston.) Isle of Misfortune is light enough to read on vacation and deep enough to leave a lasting impression. And its rich, honest rendering of Galveston provides local color. Recommended for fans of mysteries and crime stories set in interesting places.

Review of Texas Books is a publication of Lamar University, Department of English and Modern Languages, Beaumont, Texas.

TexasMonthly.com, April 2003

Personal tragedy can be fascinating, but personal tragedy distilled into art can be absolutely compelling. And so it is with Geoffrey Leavenworth's first novel, Isle of Misfortune, which is based on his first-hand experience...

Austin American-Statesman, May 29, 2003
Author turns real fear into gripping fiction
Geoffrey Leavenworth lived the 'Misfortune' of his debut novel

By Sharyn Wizda Vane

One of the oldest authorial maxims is "Write what you know."

Geoffrey Leavenworth had more to work with than most. His debut novel, "Isle of Misfortune" (TCU Press, $26.50), opens with a scene of shattered domesticity: Writer Gordo O'Connor is navigating bathtime with his two young sons, focused on bath blocks and toy dinosaurs, when the doorbell of his Galveston home rings. Jogging down the steps, Gordo sees a familiar figure -- and then hears glass breaking and feels a bullet sail into his chest.

It's a gripping few pages. And it really happened.
Leavenworth and his family spent a few years in the early '90s struggling with Galveston authorities and their own fears after they became the target of a stalker. The man was never caught, and Leavenworth doesn't know why his family was singled out. But the crime eventually forced the Leavenworths from their comfortable life in the coastal community...

In addition to his books and speeches, Leavenworth has also penned articles for The New York Times, Time and Texas Monthly. He's written two novels, neither of which made it to publication. But it took several years to even consider making that tumultuous time in Galveston the focus of a book.

"I didn't write about it or even talk about it much for several years," he says. "For a long time it felt too risky. I didn't want to do a magazine piece about it because he was still out there. Then some years passed, and I thought that maybe this would make a good work of fiction."

Fictionalizing the story was key to its success, Leavenworth says. Even though "Misfortune" was inspired by true events, writing a novel instead of a memoir freed him from the constraints of hewing to reality. It also allowed him to develop a more traditional storyline.

"A novel has a beginning, a middle and an end," he notes. "But as an experience, I really only had the beginning and part of the middle, without a tidy resolution."

Bookending his regular work day with a few hours of morning or late-night time at his home computer, Leavenworth spent 2 1/2 years crafting a story that on one level is a straightforward crime tale, the story of a family trying to make sense of the senseless. Yet he has also woven in a psychological element that elevates "Misfortune" -- the tracing of Gordo's increasing paranoia as he begins to suspect everyone around him. Indeed, his multilayered story caught the attention of Kirkus Reviews, one of the two top prepublication review services; Kirkus noted that Leavenworth "builds up tension gradually and deliberately, giving a sharp edge of eeriness to what could have been a run-of-the-mill thriller."

There's plenty that's made-up in "Misfortune." But there's enough truth in it that when Leavenworth was reading his page proofs, he had a moment's hesitation.

"Someone who writes autobiographical fiction decides to drag a lot of people into it along with them," he notes. "There are enough recognizable things to make people in my family feel a little exposed." For example, Gordo's father-in-law is a former FBI agent who shut down the island's famed Balinese Room in the mid-'50s, spurring no small measure of disgust from some longtime residents nostalgic for the old gambling club. Leavenworth's father-in-law also was an FBI agent who helped shut down gambling in Galveston...

Leavenworth admits to fleeting misgivings before returning to Galveston for a reading (as it turned out, the event was standing-room-only, and among his fans was the paramedic sent to his home the night of the shooting)...

Leavenworth says, simply, that you can't live in fear.

Galveston County Daily News, April 20, 2003
Isle of Misfortune

By Melvyn Schreiber

Geoffrey Leavenworth is a former Galvestonian, and this is his first novel. Its setting is Galveston, and the reader will recognize many of the references to places (Menard Park, the San Luis, the beach front, The Strand, 25th Street, Victorian buildings) and people (a certain judge, a certain sheriff, Galveston police, Sam and Rosario Maceo, for example).

But the story itself is about Gordo and his wife, Ana, and their two boys. The live in a Victorian house on Batavia Boulevard (25th Street). He is a freelance writer; she a lawyer. The tale revolves around the fact that Gordo is being stalked by a tall, skinny man whom he does not know but who has confronted him on several previous occasions. On one of those occasions, he shoots Gordo in the chest as he opens his front door to answer the doorbell. The bullet...produces only a superficial but painful wound, but it scares Gordo and his family into the realization that this stalker means business and is out to kill Gordo.

Gordo reports the incident to the police but finds them incredulous, believing that he probably knows the reason for the assault...and Gordo and Ana grow increasingly frustrated with their inactivity.

Fearful for their lives, they move...to a beach house on the West End of the island, and they advertise their home for sale. Their attachment to Galveston is great, but it is increasingly becoming the Isle of Misfortune for them. (Isle of Misfortune is a quotation from Cabeza de Vaca's journal. He called the island Malhado after being stranded on it for years.)

We meet Gordo's friends and Ana's colleagues, and subplots develop, particularly romantic temptations...

Eventually, a serious, helpful and experienced policeman is assigned to the case, and progress is made. The house on 25th Street is sold, a new home is found in another town, and the family moves out of harm's way while the investigation continues. The new setting is idyllic, with surrounding woods and a stream, animals and birds, space and freedom, particularly freedom from fear.

But you know that won't last for long, and it doesn't...

The book is filled with suspense, and every family will be shocked and shaken by the misfortune that befalls this one. Galveston, the place where it happens, inevitably becomes seen as part of the problem, part of the misfortune. Galvestonians will love the references to familiar places and people, and everyone will thrill to a chilling tale in which the reader quickly becomes personally involved. Those of us who love Galveston despite its shortcomings will sympathize with the author and his characters who, despite everything, are hypnotically drawn to the island.
Dr. Melvyn H. Schreiber is a physician who lives and works in Galveston.

Texas Books in Review
Spring 2003
By Mark Busby

Geoffrey Leavenworth's Isle of Misfortune is a crisply told story about the intrusion of chaos and fear into a stable family in Galveston...

Leavenworth's skillful narrative...will appeal to a cross section of readers interested in a sophisticated human tale about how an ordinary man responds to a strange but believable threat to his life and his family...

Gordo's life is transformed by his experiences, a theme introduced in the novel's title, which is a translation of the Spanish word, malhado. In 1528 the Spanish conquistador Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca...washed up on the shores of Galveston Island...Cabeza de Vaca called Galveston the Isle of Misfortune because of the bad luck it represented...

With Isle of Misfortune Geoffrey Leavenworth leads us out beyond the third sandbar into a world of dangerous riptides, fear, jealousy, desire, and family. He creates an effective tale with not only the appeal of the mystery story but with important human concerns as well.

The Alcalde, May/June 2003
Isle of Misfortune

Taking the title from Cabeza de Vaca's name for Galveston Island, Geoffrey Leavenworth's autobiographical first novel takes the O'Connor family away from that city. They're on the run from an unknown stalker who shot Gordo O'Connor in the chest at his front doorstep. Terrorized, Gordo and his wife, Ana, take their two kids out of school and move to the Hill Country, where the psychic toll of the shooting weighs heavily on Gordo's mind--and where he will have to face the shooter one more time.

For The Texas Observer review, visit:
Texas Observer