The Connection

The unassuming house right off Chain Bridge Road in McLean has a small sign bearing Dr. Robert Comunale’s name in the front yard. For passersby or the mailman, it is just a sign to indicate who lives in the house. But for his patients, it is where they turn to see the doctor, who maintains a practice in the back of his home. Dr. Comunale is semi-retired, which according to him, means he takes four hours off on Sundays. His long-time secretary, Virginia, said that it is very rare to have a break in the influx of patients he receives daily. Dr. Comunale is an aviation medical examiner. These are doctors who medically clear pilots for flight.

But what belies the house more than the medical practice in the back is the doctor who masquerades as a writer. Or is it the other way around? An author of six books, Dr. Comunale writes “about what he knows and embellishes it.”

“Characters write the book…[they] write the story for you,” he said. Taken from his life, starting from his childhood in the New York/New Jersey area, Dr. Comunale interweaves fact and fiction, blurring the lines between what is real and what is plot.

His publisher Phil Berardelli said that Dr. Comunale has “effectively melded his personal history and his imaginations.”

He started writing about 10 years ago, when he reconnected with his high school friend, who in his books is the character “Edison,” and just after his roommate at the Medical College of Virginia died from an auto accident. Dr. Comunale was going to meet his old roommate, who had just retired from practice, to celebrate. Instead, “I drove to his funeral,” he said.

His friend’s death got him thinking about his high school friend and looked him up. “It was like not a day had passed by,” he said of the reunion. “Edison” challenged him to write a story about a vacation they never took. What came out was the incipient story that would grow into his first book, Requiem for the Bone Man. It would also become the first of what he calls the Safehaven trilogy.

Dr. Comunale, now in his 70s, cryptically references the inspiration behind the characters in his novels but never breaks the confidentiality that is the bastion of his profession. However, they are recognizable characters in the D.C. and Northern Virginia landscape--the Capitol Hill worker, the overzealous bureaucrat, the federal employee whose agency cannot be named. His more unusual patients and cases are often woven in the narrative, he said.

“He’s had such experience in dealing with people that he’s developed some really keen insight in human nature that he brings to his books,” said Berardelli.

To find out who they are, he said, “Read the books,” which are available from Mountain Lake Press, http://mountainlakepress.com/buyourbooks.html, and on Amazon.