Travels and Travails of a Certified Grouch

About the Book

When is a kidnap not a kidnap or a train robbery not a train robbery? How does one prove paternity when conception occurred sixty years earlier on an Indian reservation with limited written records? How nearly can the human mind produce total recall if carefully questioned? How does one dispose of unwanted ill-gotten gains and remain under the radar of the IRS?

Dr. Thomas McDuff has to untangle each of these puzzles.

A retired physician and widowed he is the Certified Grouch of this series. Since his wife passed away he doesn’t really care about anything very much. He actively dislikes other doctors, hospitals and Medical Schools. Add to the list: big cities, noisy crowds, short skirts, Linnaean taxonomy, anything cooked in olive oil or flavored with paprika. Almost anything can arouse his ire.

            Unfortunately for the good doctor a little gray man in a little gray office in the large gray building in the gray atmosphere of San Francisco knows his weakness, contention. If told firmly that the doctor cannot solve some puzzle his answer is “Any scheme devised by one man’s mind can be penetrated by another’s.” And the old man will attack the problem forthwith.

            McDuff also does not know that the grey man’s sign on the gray door of his gray office says, “Intercontinental Floral Transport Company”. And that it has little to do with flowers except an occasional funeral wreath. In addition he does not know that the old doctor’s efforts, at no expense to the Company, reduces its dependence on ‘endowments’ from a very luxurious office in the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington D.C.

About the Author

Adam Dumphy is from a medical family. His Father, two brothers and a brother-in-law are all physicians.

            Being the youngest there was much pressure on him to follow in the family footsteps. This was the one thing he definitely did not want to do. He had something far less arduous in mind.

            To please his father he applied to one Medical School, (Some applied to twenty.) and then did everything he could to be rejected. (Never took preMed, skipping required courses and suffered through lack luster interviews.)     

            To his chagrin he was selected as a third alternate and then four candidates went elsewhere.

            Once in Medical School he was altogether too stubborn to allow himself to be kicked out of anywhere so he worked hard at his studies, for the first time.

 On completion of Med School he was swept into the maelstrom of medicine with a Residency and then practice.

            After thirty-odd years of practice he was forced to retire for his health. Then at last he felt his conscience would allow him to read whatever he wanted rather than always medical articles. He still has his last issue of the New England Journal of Medicine with a black ribbon tied about it.

            He promptly found that there was nothing that was to his taste in fiction. He had jotted down notes on plots and stories over the years and at age seventy-seven he began pulling these together into stories that he liked.

            In four years he has self published twenty novels.

Each is strictly to his liking and based on an historical event. Brief, light hearted, with a chase and a romance they are also clean, amusing and nonviolent. They are written to cheer the reader along in a world that even the most sanguine must admit is becoming more and more non-light-hearted.