USA TODAY International Edition
Grandfather inspires Cedric’s new crime novel
LOS ANGELES – Even before he became one of the “The Original Kings of Comedy,” comedian and actor Cedric the Entertainer was possessed thinking about his exceptionally original grandfather, Floyd “Babe” Boyce.
The dapper- dressing World War II veteran Boyce – a gambler with a gift of gab and a tough- as- nails boxer - died years before Cedric was born. But Boyce’s grown children, including Cedric’s mother Rosetta, regaled him with stories of his grandfather’s life.
“I started getting these dreams about my grandfather, where he would say to things to me, I even dreamed what he smelled like,” he says. “I would write down this world I could see so vividly.”
Cedric, who stars in the CBS comedy “The Neighborhood,” pays homage to his grandfather in his first novel, “Flipping Boxcars,” out now from Harper Collins. The book is written under his given name Cedric Kyles and cowritten by Alan Eisenstock.
“I have always wanted to tell this story,” says Cedric, 59, speaking during a break recording the “Flipping Boxcar” audiobook in a Los Angeles sound studio.
Cedric makes clear his love letter to 1940s crime novels through his settting in his family’s riverboat hometown of Caruthersville, Missouri ( current population 5,399). The story is entirely fictional, except for the core of the suave expert gambler main character Pops. That is the grandfather he knew from a single photograph and countless stories.
Like Pops, Boyce owned a restaurant with his loving wife and extended his entrepreneurial skills to everything from bootlegging to running an illegal gambling operation out of the back of a Sportsman Hall. Boyce was such a celebrated dice player “his face would be on flyers placed around town,” Cedric says. “Gambling back then was marketed as a spectator event and my grandfather was a draw. He was a serious gambler who loved craps.”
“Flipping Boxcars,” referring to a losing dice roll of 12, is one of the many gambling terms from the era in the novel, so frequent that there is a glossary in the back. Pops loses his life savings and farmland in a stunning defeat at the table, forcing him to partner up with the thuggish Polish arm of a Chicago crime syndicate. Boyce has 72 hours over the Fourth of July weekend to raise $ 54,000 to buy 3,000 cases of untaxed bourbon arriving by railroad. All to claw back the money he lost and save his family.
“We felt we needed bigger gangsters with higher stakes to advance us outside of Caruthersville,” says Cedric, speaking of working with Eisenstock. Both authors loved the idea of setting the story around the boiling summer temperatures and the town’s holiday celebration.
“Fourth of July was a big thing in Caruthersville, for real. To have things
going down in that short span, it’s like now the pressure is on, you got to keep it tight but right.”
His grandfather Boyce lost his family’s savings during a major night of gambling, with catastrophic effects on his marriage, family and life.
“In the real story, he lost my grandmother’s land, and then she left him. He lost his muse and this great life he was living and just couldn’t get it back. My mother said within a year, he got sick and died.”
By writing the novel with a different ending, Cedric gave his grandfather a new life trajectory through Pops.
“In most cases, a character who lives life on the edge always loses. But it’s like, let this man win, because he lives in this beautiful part of the imagination, filled with style and elegance and hustle and grit, all these things we all wish we had in us. I can’t let that hero die the way he actually died.”
Cedric is open to the prospect of the evocative “Flipping Boxcars” being made into a TV series or movie. He’s earned solid reviews with Publisher’s Weekly calling the rookie novel “a promising fiction debut” with “stirring gambling scenes, strong characterizations, and vivid prose.”
More importantly, he’s sure his grandfather is going to love this story landing on bookshelves.
“Yeah, he’s definitely going to be beaming on this. He’ll walk in this light with great spirit and joy,” says Cedric, who is sure Boyce will have some critiques, even about the fictional criminal elements.
“He’ll love those parts. But, oh God, I can imagine. He’ll be like, ‘ It didn’t happen like that. It all went down like this,’” says Cedric, breaking into laughter. “And I’ll have to tell him: ‘ I made that part up, That didn’t happen.’ ”