Seale Doss publishes two new novels with familiar character

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy Seale Doss has two recent novels that are available on amazon.com. The character of Phillip Dee from Doss’ 2018 novel Blood on the Risers returns in both.

The novel Hattie’s Pink House is described: “At one time, Hattie’s was a famous Texas whorehouse, located just outside the Austin city limits, featuring a downstairs bar where politicians, newspapermen, Longhorn football coaches, university students, and other late-nighters could congregate for drinks and what not.

“In this novel, Hattie’s has disappeared, but by way of flashback, it is remembered warmly by Phillip Dee, a paratrooper on his way to Germany on the eve of the Vietnam War, recalling how he had once been a reporter working his way through college, going without sleep, trying to keep his managing editor at bay. Back in Austin to retrieve a car he had won and left there five years earlier, Dee recalls, among other things, how Hattie had helped him expose a crooked Texas congressman named Lomax, only to be fired then by his publisher, who was in league with Lomax, bribing him to obtain a TV station.”

In Blood on the Risers, Dee had been told “Life is like baseball. Sometimes you get a hit, sometimes the ball rolls foul. It’s a game of inches.” Dee was led to realize that life is, indeed, like baseball, a matter of chance.

Doss’ most recent novel, A Game of Inches, is set years later, and Dee is shown how he, himself, becomes who he is by chance. “In a three-part story he is seen as three entirely different men, depending on who he marries, three different women, each of them met more or less by accident,” the book’s description reads: “Here he is seen as a newspaper reporter, then as a Vietnam combat veteran, and finally as a college professor, in a story meant to illustrate how random events, such as who one meets and marries, determine who one becomes — as well as to amuse us about the way life is truly a matter of chance.”