'Looks Can Kill'
Third Fiction Novel Written By Des Plaines Native Cliff McGoon Is Set In Familiar City Locations
By DAN CAMERON
Journal Reporter
Retired business writer and former Des Plaines resident Cliff McGoon released last December his third fiction novel, "Looks Can Kill."
McGoon, 67, now lives in California, but his Des Plaines roots are as strong as they were when he graduated from Maine Township High School in 1958. The characters and plot of his novels are based on his youth riding motorcycles and hanging out at Rand Park in Des Plaines. Maine West High School was built in 1959.
"Looks Can Kill" is the follow-up to two somewhat different novels, "Grannies' Deadly Reunion" and "Grannies Investigate the Tunnel of Death." Each holds Des Plaines within its pages. This, time, however, instead of murder-solving grandmothers, McGoon introduces Chet McGarey, a retired police officer who is struggling to keep his P.I. business, housed on the fourth floor offices of the Des Plaines First National Bank, afloat. McGarey feels old and useless until he is faced with a worthy challenge: unmasking a killer while on a 1950's reunion cruise.
McGoon's first two books were inspired by four women he knew growing up, including Des Plaines resident Pat (nee Sullivan) Kaitcheck, who have since become grandmothers. He got together with three of them in 2005 to visit their old stomping grounds, places like Romano's Restauant, the Des Plaines Bowling Alley, and the Sugar Bowl Restaurant, which McGoon remembers occasionally getting tossed from for smoking in the booths back when the restaurant was operated by the Fifles family. Many Des Plaines memories like that went into his novels in large and small ways, like making the villainous drug lord from "Looks Can Kill" a Thacker Junior High graduate, or giving the gumshoe grannies from his first two books a background as prostitutes working out of the Northwestern Hotel at Five Corners where River and Rands roads meet.
McGoon, having started off as an information and communication officer for the Air Force, and later leading an award-winning career as an industrial journalist for corporations like Armstrong Tires, is relatively new to fiction. There have been times when it's seemed like the only good thing about writing is that it "doesn't involve heavy lifting," he retorted. But there is a light-heartedness to McGoon's self-deprecating sense of humor. Though he admits he finds writing fiction "tougher than digging ditches," through workshops like the Aspen Fiction Writing Conference and the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference, his sense of fiction has changed dramatically from when he finished page one of the first Grannies book shortly after his retirement three years ago.
Despite setbacks, McGoon plans to keep writing, and a chance for a sequel to "Looks Can Kill" is more than a vague possibility given that 40,000 words from his first draft wound up getting clipped.
McGoon had a friendly, somewhat wistful greeting for the community that inspired him and his work.
"[Des Plaines] was a great place to grow up. What little I can do to write about it will preserve it for the people that were there back in the day, and that would make me feel good."
McGoon lives with his wife of 20 years, Nancy, and their Shi Tzu, Harley, in California.
--Reprinted from the Journal & Topics Newspapers, Des Plaines, IL, Wednesday, February 7, 2007
