On September 1, 2022, a man named Mike Pedley walked into the Belmar Pub in Binghamton, NY for the very first time. Pedley had waited to visit the bar until that day because it was the date when the main characters in his favorite novel, Thirty-three Cecils, died. And the character Dutch from that novel frequented the Belmar.
Pedley walked in, ordered a beer, and started chatting with the bar patrons about the book. “I know it’s a novel,” Pedley said to Jennifer James, the manager of the Belmar. “But it always seemed real to me.”
“The fact that someone would remember that date and make a pilgrimage to one of the settings of the novel is incredible,” said Tara Tomczyk, the editor-in-chief of Blydyn Square Books, the publisher of the novel. “And that needs to be celebrated.” So together, she and De Morier came up with an idea for how to do that and ran it past Jennifer James and Ed Hickey, the owner of the Belmar, who loved it.
So on September 1, 2023, The Belmar Pub held the very first Thirty-three Cecils Day. An event celebrating story, characters and the city of Binghamton. The first celebration was a huge success: the Belmar was beyond packed, people had to park on the street as they celebrated the book with the author, publisher and fans.
When looking at the event for the following year, the group wondered how to top that first one. And then the author had an idea.
“In the novel,” said De Morier, “the character Dutch travels from Binghamton, NY, to Erie, PA, and originally wants to do this by bicycle. So we thought it would be great to do a bike ride from Erie to Binghamton, ending up at The Belmar on Cecils Day,” said De Morier. “264 miles to sort of bring Dutch back home.”
It was a great idea. However, the logistics of getting a bike to Erie, getting support crew along the way, dealing with weather and multiple hotel rooms, plus biking a hundred miles a day for a few days, seemed difficult to pull off.
“So I thought, why not just do the trip itself? The 264 miles, the distance between the two cities in the weeks right before Thirty-three Cecils Day?”
And that’s what De Morier did, biking each day for 45 days, tracking the 264 miles, documenting it all on the YouTube channel Rewiring Everett, and completing the ride exactly one week before the event.
On Sunday, September 1, Binghamton will celebrate the second annual Thirty-three Cecils Day with a book signing and meet-and-greet with the author and publisher at the Barnes and Noble in Vestal from noon until 3:00 pm and a reception and gathering at the Belmar Pub in Binghamton from 7:00 pm until 9:00, where there will be food, door prizes, a visit from the author and publisher, and great conversation.
The novel Thirty-three Cecils won the top fiction prize at the London Book Festival. It has been required high school and university reading and is currently being developed as a major motion picture by Sunset River Productions of Los Angeles, which plans to shoot the film in Binghamton in 2025.
The film based on the novel will be directed by Matthew Modine, who will also be playing the lead role of Walker Roe, alongside Dustin Hoffman, who will play the part of Bugby. Modine has traveled to Binghamton to scout locations with the author and is excited to begin filming there.
When Brian Esquivel, the producer and co-writer of the screenplay, was asked what drew him to this project, he answered, “There is something so simple and flawed about these characters,” he said. “It’s everything you could ask for in a film.”
Everett De Morier is an award-winning author who currently lives in Delaware with his wife and two children. His upcoming book IN THE GHOST SHADOWS: The Untold Story of Chinatown’s Most Powerful Crime Boss, is being released in January by Citadel.