A longtime Michigan newspaper editor who began his career as an intern at the Morning Sun after graduating from Central Michigan University has written a book based on his experience as an editor in Marquette.
Former UP newspaper managing editor David Edward Edwards is the author of “Sing for the Lonesome Messenger,” a new novel based in the Upper Peninsula.
Sing for the Lonesome Messenger, is an epic tapestry of U.P. based stories, which lead to a “messenger’s” quest to unlock the voices of lost children.
The book follows the journey of Maggie Maise, a reporter with an elusive past, who works in 2009 Chicago as a freelance columnist covering funerals and weaving stories spun from the lives of recently deceased World War II veterans. A seeminglychance obituary finds Maggie attending the wake of Holocaust survivor “Doc” Sykes, and thus becoming hesitantly bonded to his widow, Mrs. Sykes.
The wake and its implications force Maggie to relive her time in “Ore Town,” in the Upper Peninsula, where two years earlier she worked as a reporter for a small, fading weekly newspaper. There she becomes irreversibly linked to one Tracker McKie, an ancient and ailing former newspaper editor trapped in a nursing home with secrets from his childhood.
Through his own stories and those left behind by his childhood friend from an impoverished 1930s Catholic orphanage, Tracker will groom Maggie for her future “big job.”
Maggie has been sent—by whom, for what and why will not become known to her until the final chapters.
To prepare, Maggie must first absorb the humanity found within the childhood of Tracker and his friend, Mike McCafferty.
Mike’s trials and adventures with his younger brother, Jimmer, include a 1930s shipwreck mystery, the all-but-forgotten disappearance of Tracker’s mother, harrowing Great Depression childhood depravation, and lifelong loyalty. Mike, Jimmer, and Tracker’s childhood experiences all lead toward a single day years later when he briefly crosses paths with a young Doc Sykes in Italy during World War II.
Although Mike will never know it, that brief encounter allows Doc Sykes to survive the war and bring home, locked in his memory, lost children’s voices that one day must be heard bya weary world. But before those voices can be released, they must first sing for the messenger.
Edwards worked for decades in the newspaper business as a reporter and editor, serving for several years as managing editor of Marquette’s The Mining Journal. His work (beginning in the 1970s) garnered awards of excellence from the Associated Press and/or the Michigan Press Association in categories including Investigative Reporting, Editorial Writing, Editorial Page Column, Feature Story, News Photography, and assorted others. He is a 1978 journalism graduate of the Central Michigan University.
Sing for the Lonesome Messenger is available in both e-book and print at Amazon Books and will soon be available at various UP book outlets.
