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WORKS

WHATEVER IT TAKES, published January 2022.

A short novel set in the near future after a disease has swept the United States, and the rest of the world.  In the US anything like normal society has broken down.  But family relationships haven't.  An old man does whatever he can to protect and sustain the surviving members of his family - his daughter and grandson.

 

The photograph used for the cover was of me with my dog, Pansy Valiant, in the '50s.  Pansy Valiant also appears as a character in the novel.

MEN LIKE US, published in December of 2021.

An American stranger in East London gradually gets to know his way around and finds a kind of home from home in a congenial café.  But who is he, and why has he abandoned a glamorous career in television?  And will he find the sense of redemption that he seeks?

 

This book's jacket was based on a picture of me taken in the '90s.  But is the book autobiographical?  Of course not.  I've never lived in London or worked in television...

CONFESSIONS OF A DISCONTENTED DEITY, published electronically in 2012 and in paperback in 2022.

If man was created in God's image, then to understand what God is really like you should work backwards from what man was like.  Or men...

 

This gentle satire looks at humanity from a Heavenly perspective, and looks at what God is likely to be like since he was the model for men.

 

For comment and a review check out the left column of this page.

Four linked cases for Albert Samson published together in 2018.

 

In these four Albert Samson stories a client returns for Samson's help time after time. The help he needs varies, but it is unusual for clients to repeat the way Private Investigators do in series. All four stories were originally published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The first, "Who I Am" won a Shamus for best PI story of the year from the Private Eye Writers Association. The third, "Extra Fries" was nominated for the same prize a couple of years later. And the last story, "A Question of Fathers", answers a perennial question in the Samson series: why is Samson's father almost never mentioned?

THE RELUCTANT DETECTIVE and Other Stories

Crippen & Landru, 2001

This collection includes two stories that were nominated for Edgars, as well as a Leroy Powder story, all six Lunghi family stories, and the two stories I've published in which Dan Quayle is the crime-buster. There are long stories, short stories... There's even one new story - "Mr Hard Man."

There are also notes on the stories and an introduction that describes how I got into writing, crime writing, and short stories.

Click on the title for more information.

NIGHT COVER, HARD LINE, LATE PAYMENTS

Leroy Powder was the second of my major Indianapolis characters. But in all the books many characters originally introduced in other Indy novels also appear. The second in the series, HARD LINE, won the "Falcon" for "Best Foreign Novel" in 1987 in Japan.

Click on the titles for more information.

FAMILY BUSINESS, FAMILY PLANNING, FAMILY WAY

Three generations of an Italian family work in their family business - a private detective agency in Bath, England. And where does a lot of the work get done? Over big family dinners, of course.

I started writing about the Lunghis in short stories, but they grew on me and into the novel, FAMILY BUSINESS. The first six short stories about them are collected in THE RELUCTANT DETECTIVE.

Click on the titles for more information.

Other Indianapolis novels: UNDERDOG, AND BABY WILL FALL/CHILD PROOF, OUTSIDE IN, OH JOE

Jan Moro, the narrator of UNDERDOG, is what you and I might call homeless, but he doesn’t think of himself that way. In his own mind he's just an entrepreneur who travels light – free of the encumbrances of mortgages and house repairs and taxes and the rest of it. But he's also a man for whom stories are important. He deals with the world through the stories he hears and the stories he tells. Kinda like a writer, I'd say...

In AND BABY WILL FALL, social worker, Adele Buffington, (who is Albert Samson's otherwise unnamed woman friend) has problems at work and problems with her personal life. The book was called CHILD PROOF in the UK. After six books with Samson, I figured she deserved a book of her own.

Willy Werth, in OUTSIDE IN, is a mystery writer on whom a real life murder intrudes. He finds fact a lot harder to handle than fiction and, in turn, he uses fiction to help him handle the fact - the book alternates chapters of Willy's life with chapters of the novel Willy is writing.

 

Joe Prince, the narrator of OH JOE, means well - he really does - but he's always found it hard to spend nights alone.  So, in an effort to become more mature and a better person, he agrees to look after a houseboat while his girlfriend, Kelly has to be away.  All alone on a reservoir...  What could go wrong?

Click on the titles for more information.

CUTTING LOOSE

I wrote this historical novel exactly as I'd write any other book, but the fact that a young woman is the central character encouraged Holt to publish it as a Young Adult book (NB those 5 star reviews on Amazon...)

It is set between the years of 1826 and 1895 and the action occurs in many parts of the US, in London, and on the high seas in between. There's a lot about 19th Century baseball too, in both the US and UK.

Click on the title for more information.

ROVER'S TALES and TELLING TAILS

ROVER'S TALES, with illustrations by Karen Wallis, was published by St Martin's after an editor there saw the PawPaw Press edition of nine of the stories, TELLING TAILS.

There is also an anabridged audio version of ROVER'S TALES - in which I read the stories - that was brought out by Blackstone Audiobooks.

Rover is a stray dog who narrates the very short stories in these books. They describe his adventures wandering in a city (Indianapolis, though he doesn't know it) one summer. He finds a lot of dogs in trouble, and tries his best to help them out.

Click on the titles for more information.

THE NEXT MAN and HOW TO BEAT COLLEGE TESTS

One day I got a film script in the mail. Somebody wanted me, all right, but not for my acting abilies. Instead I was to write a novel based on the story that other people were writing and filming.

HOW TO BEAT COLLEGE TESTS does what it says on the package, but it was also a subversive book, as I explained in the final section.

Click on the titles for more information.