When Rosemary Dronchi has a hair-raising tale in her head, the person with the 9 o’clock appointment at her salon had better beware: the 73-year-old hairdresser turned thriller writer has likely been up since 3 a.m., working on the latest installment of a trilogy based loosely on her Italian immigrant grandfather.
Wielding her scissors or a brush full of bleach at Park Place Salon on Ocean Drive, which she opened five years ago, Dronchi is as likely to be thinking of a Mafioso murder as highlights and split ends.
She may dote on her granddaughter Maria Scheufler, who mans the salon’s front desk and markets her grandmom’s books. And she sensitively and discreetly styles a shelf full of wigs for clients in chemotherapy. But the soft-spoken Dronchi has a fierce imagination.
Behind her mellow façade, she is capable of offing the characters in her books in gory detail as implacably as she touches up a client’s grey roots.
Dronchi’s first novel, “Blood Feud,” published two years ago, is the story of Agostino Rossini, who at 16 leaves Italy for America and becomes a millionaire. In childhood, he was witness to his mother’s murder but can’t remember it apart from haunting nightmares. Finally he figures out the murderer was his own grandfather, and he returns to Italy to avenge her death, but an assassin is hired to bump him off first.
In the just-published “Retribution,” Rossini tries to buy safety with his immense wealth, after a contract is taken out on his family.
Dronchi is currently at work on the third book, to be recalled “Redemption.”
Her books have enjoyed an enthusiastic reception both here in Vero Beach, where she got a standing-room only crowd at her book signing, and in her hometown of Albany, New York, where the mayor held a press conference in her honor.
Dronchi got a head start on “Retribution” using the chapters she had to lop off the first book and mining much of the same research. Not that she rested on her laurels: in January, she published a romantic novel, “Of Body and Soul,” under the pseudonym L. J. Valentine, after hearing from writing professionals that it’s a good idea not to confuse readers with a dramatic change in genre.
After more than a thousand pages of fiction, Dronchi is even beginning to speak in sentences structured for the printed page; when she repeats what someone has told her, she says the quote before identifying the speaker, and she carefully sets up long stories as though they are chapters in a book.
She describes her meeting with the Albany mayor, who presented her with an issue of La Capitale, an Italian newsletter her grandfather published for the immigrant community in Albany. “I know all about La Capitale!” the mayor told her.
“He grabs my hand and turns me around. ‘There’s a guy back here, he’s got to see this. Joe look at this! “La Capitale!” ‘With that, Joe starts crying. I looked up at him. ‘My father wrote for your grandfather’s paper,’ he says to me.”
Since 1993, when she entered a 17-page short story in a Writer’s Digest contest and it caught the eye of a small Maryland publisher, Dronchi has been driven to write. “This person called me and wanted to publish it in a collection of ten short stories. I said, ‘Is this a friend that’s really pulling my leg?’ I hung up on him. He called back and said, “Mrs. Dronchi, I’m serious. I want to publish your story. This means you’re a published author!”
It was all the compensation she needed – fortunately, since no pay was offered. “The honor was being published,” she says.
It was also her honor to market that short-story collection. She was sent a batch, which she took to the Vero Beach Book Store. There she found a captive audience: her salon customers. ”They said short stories don’t sell. Well, they had to re-order them three times. They’d never sold so many books of short stories.”
Her next move was to take writing classes. She took a number of them with Kay Odekirk at the Vero Beach Museum of Art. And she signed on with a writing coach in California, sending typed drafts through the mail and talking on the phone.
“‘Are you published?’ she asked. ‘Just a short story,’ I told her. ‘Send it to me,’ she said. So I did. When she got it, she called me: ‘Don’t write anything else. Make it about these people. Make it a novel.’”
Twenty years later, she did. “Of Body and Soul,” the story of an unwanted pregnancy bringing a couple together, was published in January. She calls it “a pretty story.”
During the writing of “Blood Feud,” she was guided by former Vero resident David Hagberg, who has published more than 70 novels with major publishing houses.
Cynthia Callander, marketing director of the Vero Beach Book Center, says a November signing is tentatively scheduled for Dronchi’s new books.
“We had a top-notch book event with her first offering, ‘Blood Feud,’ and expect to exceed those numbers at her next event in support of ‘Retribution.’ She’s a great example of a successful local author who does her work, not only writing but then promoting, promoting and more promoting. Her books sell quite well on a regular basis.”
Dronchi’s accomplishments really sank in when she went home to Albany in May of last year. Though she and her husband Anthony, who owns a window cleaning service, left New York in 1985, they have close friends, school mates and a number of family members still in Albany.
So when Maria, Rosemary’s granddaughter, contacted a friend in PR there, the wheels were set in motion for a huge reception, beginning with the mayor’s press conference, followed by a packed book signing at an Albany book store, and a party at an Italian country club where 100 people turned up to celebrate her.
The next day was a Champagne and caviar reception at a high-end hair salon Rosemary calls “magnificent – it had a staff of 110!” Then, another signing at a hotel where their high school was having an alumni event. Both the salon signing and the alumni event were attended by the head of the Catholic diocese, who had read about the “local girl made good” in the paper. “I was totally shocked,” says Dronchi.
The coup de grace was just two hours before their noon flight back to Vero: a private breakfast in the home of Pulitzer-prize winner William Kennedy, author of “Ironweed.”
“I bought him a copy of La Capitale. ‘I know La Capitale. I remember your father,’ he said. He started asking me all these questions. Two to one, there’s going to be a book, because of all the questions he asked me,” she says.
As his wife Ana served them “an Italian breakfast: the best cold cuts, fruit and coffee,” Kennedy gave her permission to quote him in her new book: “Good fiction is made of lies.”
“I asked him, ‘Can I use that?’ ‘Who wrote that?’ he asked. ‘You did,’ I told him. ‘That’s pretty good,’ he said. I gave it a whole page at the beginning of the new book.”
