Retired Somerset police lieutenant Thomas J. Mello pens action-drama novel 'The Last Cigar'
SOMERSET – While watching “The Sopranos,” now retired Somerset police lieutenant Thomas J. Mello would often find himself writing his own plots for the popular crime drama TV series.
“I’ve always been interested in law enforcement, solving crime and new technologies like those for fingerprinting and iris recognition. I would say, ‘Gee, this would be a good plot’ and I would write a different story,” said Mello, who also happens to be an attorney and is still active as a reserve officer.
With a knack for writing since an early age, Mello recently debuted his first novel “The Last Cigar.”
Combining fiction and real-life events, the book published by Xlibris revolves around several generations of the Azevedo family and their struggles and quest to enjoy prosperous and rewarding lives.
“Beginning in the 1800’s from São Miguel, Azores, it portrays the Portuguese family by generations of struggles in the ‘Old Country’ to their travels in the United States,” Mello said. “The book encompasses much from the Fall River, New Bedford and Rhode Island area.”
The Fall River native and lifelong Somerset resident said he felt inspired to pen down these stories of experiences from an ancestral perspective, after listening to interesting accounts about Portuguese family history.
“I’ve always heard different stories from my father, my grandfather, and just different families. That’s why I decided to write it,” said Mello, a third generation Portuguese-American, who traces his roots to Povoação, São Miguel, Azores. “Some stories are fiction, and some are nonfiction; I kind of mixed them up.”
He said the book was written in the spirit of family, values, traditions, and respect, which is carried over to different nationalities.
“Today’s society has people from many nationalities, which encompass various and different cultures, norms, beliefs, history and traditions. A main purpose of the book is to attempt to communicate and to gain a person’s points of view and arrive at decisive solutions,” he said.
Over the book’s 166 pages, he shares several family traditions, including one involving a cigar, which is smoked when family members speak from the heart or during conversation of importance.
“Two generations will meet and have a cigar,” he said. “They actually talk about, you know, how they made out, what was good, what could have been better. It’s more symbolic, like passing the torch.”
Thus, the book’s title.
“That’s basically where it came from,” Mello said. “Each generation tries to get better and support each other so they can have more prosperous and happy lives in the future.”
Another tradition told involves when a son in the family turns 21, the father offers him a chance to attempt to prove whether or not he can beat his father in a fight.
“It shows the father still has the power, but he’s getting older and he’s giving the son a chance to take over… you know, now is your chance. Now you’re turning 21 and you’re a man,” Mello said. “Every son in the book will turn that down because out of respect for the father.”
The book’s chapters are filled with ancestral traditions mixed with much action and drama.
Some passages talk about the struggles of making a livelihood, others deal with fighting for the United States.
“My father was in the Korean War so there are some things in the book about situations that happened to him,” Mello said. “He was one of only two men out of 140 in his platoon who actually made it back home. The other man was from Dighton.”
Other passages retell the experiences of a famous Portuguese naval captain in the family and a cousin who acted as a Robin Hood to get justice for persons where the court has failed. There are also some that include revelations from police officers in the family.
Mello said ‘The Last Cigar’ has received some good reviews and there’s been some talk about the possibility of turning it into a movie.
The book has been selected as a winner of the 2023 PenCraft Seasonal Book Award Spring Competition in the Fiction - General genre.
The 7th Annual PenCraft Book Award Ceremony will likely take place in Las Vegas in February or March 2024, although the actual date and place will only be revealed after the announcement of the annual winners in October.
“I would like readers to take away from the writing that there is hope in the future for our families as well as society, to respect the past and learn from it,” Mello said. “Stick together as a unit, not give up, fight for what you believe is right and listen to all points of view and opinions of others.”
This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Somerset resident Thomas J. Mello pens action-drama novel
