The Scene Menagerie

The Scene Menagerie contains an assortment of fiction scenes and episodes from the novels and short stories of one author, John R. Downes, plus a few excerpts from his nonfictions thrown into the mix. What a range of subjects! War, the Great Depression, Custer's Last Stand, FBI, orphans, espionage, US history, gunfighters, bank robbers, Adbiz, growing up, mass merchandising, bad guys, dreams, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, code breaking, salesmanship, Hollywood, and more. Many novels contain scenes and episodes that can stand on their own as vignettes, short stories, and worthwhile reads. Regardless of whether the prolific authors are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Elmore Leonard, John Grisham, John Steinbeck, and hundreds of others, a reader can cull through their collection of tales and discover a treasure trove of candidate excerpts. Why not a selection of scenes and episodes from one author's repertoire of published fiction? The Scene Menagerie answers that question.

John R. Downes covered the globe as advertising man, school supplies company president, management consultant, and sales trainer for clients including Manufacturers Hanover Bank, First Pennsylvania Bank, TG&Y, Peugeot, NADA, and dozens of others. His first book, a non-fiction, was published in 1982. Although he coveted being a screenwriter – and had two of his five screenplays optioned multiple times, but not produced – he turned to novels in the 1990's, and strove for diverse genres: mystery, literary fiction, historic fiction, and spy thrillers. In between his novel-writing projects, he wrote four non-fiction books.