"Read you cover to cover.  Whew!  I so appreciate the inner portrait/key thing.  Your writing sparkles with wit, anger, crispness, VOCABULARY, and brilliance.  And, you weave in titles and phrases from songs!  All of it intense and insightful.  'Chaos does resolve into sense.'"

                     Dr. Ellyn Geller, Clinical Psychologist 

                          "It must have been a very difficult book to write, but you have given the world a gift that is important.   Thank you so very much."    

            Linda R. Hengst, Executive Director,Ohioana Library Association 

   "'If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story.'  Skeleton Key isThe Divine Comedy of Revenge. Performing the Spiritual Autopsy on the self-murder of his famous father, Ross Lockridge, Jr., author of Raintree County, Ernest Lockridge grounds his post mortem personally, historically and culturally.  And, even as it honors the universe of "Extension," of intractable concrete fact, Skeleton Key reaches toward Heaven.  The author's scalpel, forged in the purifying fire of Truth, is--as this tragic history requires it to be--keen!"           

                       Pere Nabri SJ, Exorcist 

                                                             WHY

did my brilliant father, Ross Lockridge, Jr., execute himself at 33, March 6, 1948, while his first novel, RAINTREE COUNTY, was the number one New York Times Bestseller?

Additionally, RAINTREE COUNTY had won the Inaugural Metro Goldwyn Mayer Novel Award, which included a Nation-wide publicity blitz, plus the proverbial "pot of gold at the end of the rainbow."  It had been the Book-of-the-Month Club's Main Selection of January, 1948.  A lengthy exerpt had appeared in Life Magazine--America's premier organ of popular culture in the 1940s--which hitherto had not published fiction.  Reader's Digest was publishing a condensed version.  Critics and readers alike considered Dad's first novel, a labor of years, to rank among the top contenders for that mythical numero uno, The Great American Novel. 

This waste of a precious life and incalculable loss to literature bodies forth a murder-mystery that for six decades has extruded a slow crawl of platitudes: Dad was "worn out"; was unable to immediately begin a second novel and therefore believed himself to be "written out"; was destroyed by "the bitch-goddess Success"; was betrayed by a greedy publisher, a book club, by Hollywood; was unloved by his mother; was burdened with patricidal guilt for besting his father in the "Fame Game"--ad nauseam.  Not to mention Epistemology 101 and its soggy taboo: "Oh, my!  We simply can never know even why we ourselves do the things we do, let along another human being!"The ordeals that marred the publication of RAINTREE COUNTY are grossly disproportionate to the prodigious success in which my father should have been reveling.  He had suffered setbacks before--some extreme--only to bounce back, stalwart in spirit and even more robust in resolve. For, even as he was executing himself my father was experiencing success beyond the greatest of great expectations.  Within the space of a few brief months Dame Fortune had transported him from poverty to wealth.  Except for a New Yorker review notable for its gleeful sadism, RAINTREE COUNTY was being praised throughout the land as the novel of the year, decade, Century, by far the most significant novel since WWII.  My father died in full knowledge that his life, viewed from the street, had exceeded all but the most extravagant of human dreams.

Yet he left behind no last will and testament, no personal note of farewell--only four children, nine, five, four and two years old, and a lovely widow who worshiped the ground he walked on and whose 34th birthday was less than two weeks away. The afternoon of March 6, 1948, Dad borrowed the Electrolux hose with which his parents asphyxiated moles, and that night in our back-alley garage he taped the hose to the exhaust of our new Kaiser, locked the garage door, left the engine running, ran the hose through the rear window, crawled into the back seat and--mere feet from the bosom of his loving family--died a squalid, lonely death.

This book holds the Skeleton Key to The Riddle of RAINTREE COUNTY.  I have written it less from choice than out of an obligation to history and to truth.  I have grounded this story in my own personal relationship with my father and other family members, especially his parents (my grandmother and grandfather Lockridge) who had a lethal impact upon my father's life, then attempted a similar impact upon mine.My story is concretely and personally grounded in the culture of the time--e.g., Indiana University's Kinsey Institute, and the Hollywood of Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Eva Marie Saint, and others connected with the making of the motion-picture version of RAINTREE COUNTY.  I experienced the filming of the movie, and attended its Louisville and Indianapolis Premiers. 

Wardell Baxter Pomeroy, Alfred C. Kinsey's colorful right-hand man, was our Bloomington, Indiana neighbor, and as a child playing with the Pomeroy children I was privy to certain "peculiarities" of cultural significance that shed light on my father's place in history. A published novelist, I bring to my memoir a novelist's powers of observation, and a novelist's vision of the intricate, poisonous web of cause-and-effect that trapped my father and ultimately devoured him.

Replete with hitherto unpublished photographs, and documents such as my father's medical records from his self-truncated stint in an Indianapolis psychiatric ward mere weeks before his suicide, SKELETON KEY marries the Memoir with the Graphic Novel. 

Embedded in my narrative is the covert culture of pervasive pedophilia, incest and childhood sexual abuse, cocooned by institutional protection and denial, and permitted to persist, and to wreak unacknowledged havoc in the lives of innocents.

Squeamishness and Mendacity, blood brothers, go hand in hand.  Miss Manners plays no part in this tragedy.  Truth is not subject to etiquette or "taste," and it is precisely because the truth about my father's brief, terrible life and his forlorn death is unspeakable that the truth demands to be told.

                     Ernest Lockridge 

ERNEST LOCKRIDGE (b. Nov. 28, 1938) graduated Phi Beta Kappa with Honors from Indiana University in 1960. A Rhodes Scholarship finalist he was Woodrow Wilson and Lewis-Farmington Fellow at Yale University where he earned "Honors" in all his graduate classes, was awarded an inaugural Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship (1962-3) and completed his M.A. and Ph.D. in English within three years (1960-3). He was hired by Yale's Department of English (1963-71) and taught at Yale during the Golden Age when its English Department was internationally rated Number One. Lockridge was selected Fellow at The Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (1969-70). In May 1971, Yale's seven undergraduate literary prizes were won by his students, with work written under his supervision. Lockridge is author of three novels, one of which, Prince Elmo's Fire, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.  His Twentieth-Century Interpretations of The Great Gatsby (Prentice-Hall) went through 20 printings, remained in print for a quarter-century and continues to sell briskly over the Internet. All but one of his essays in literary criticism have been included in anthologies, and singled out for special praise. From 1971-91, Lockridge taught English at The Ohio State University where in 1976 he was promoted to Full Professor and in 1985 was awarded the University's premier award for teaching excellence, "The O.S.U. Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching." In 1991, he took "early retirement" after 28 years in full academic regalia, and has devoted himself to writing, jazz sax and clarinet, painting, family, and travel.  Travels with Ernest (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers), co-authored with his famous wife, sociologist and poet Laurel Richardson, was published in 2004. He delivered "The O.S.U. Department of English Fifth Annual Emeriti Lecture," April 8, 2010.  Emeritus Professor of English, Ernest is a jazz musician and painter of award-winning paintings that have appeared in solo exhibits, galleries, and on the covers of books. He is father of three, stepfather of two, grandfather of eight.