The Gods of Publishing have been kind. We have an early release this year. Now available from Airship 27 is a new anthology: Marty Quade Private Detective. This contains my story “Over their Head,” one of four stories chronicling the adventures of Marty Quade, a classic hard boiled Detective.
Set in 1930s New York, Marty was a classic detective who appeared in the back pages of Ten Detective Aces magazine in the mid 1930s. Although never having his own magazine or a huge fan following he is cut from the classic Chandler/ Hammett detective mold. He is a tough, self confident and quick with both fist and gun.
I had never heard of Marty when Ron Fortier put out a call for stories of his adventures. It seemed that the airship was looking for more detective stories to publish and had cast around looking for a classic detective in the public domain. I’ve always wanted to write mysteries and the temptation was too much so I put in a bid.
It wasn’t hard to find reprints of a few of the old Marty Quade stories and after reading them for flavor I started in. I’ve said before that mysteries are much trickier to write than adventures. All the clues have to balance out and everything has to mesh exactly to write a good story. It was a lot of work, especially as this was the complete story that I lost in the big data crash three years back. So technically, the story you will see in the new anthology is the second version of the story I wrote.
I’ve thought about it and still can’t decide which version is better. I remember the first version moving very quickly. But I think the re-done version has a good noir feel. I wish I could see them side by side; the same but very different, I think. At any rate “Over their Head” had it’s challenges but it was definitely fun writing a classic tough guy detective story.
For what its’ worth, I think the cover art is classic detective noir and the inside illustrations are very good as well. If you like hard core detective fiction you should like this book.
It is now available on Amazon. I will have some for sale on E-bay soon.
What am I working on now? Just finishing up a Moon Man adventure and hoping to start another classic pulp hero after that. I should be able to knock that out quickly and later this spring I am returning to my original fiction roots and will be finishing my long lost colonial adventure novel. It’s a fun one set in early Philadelphia, and yes, Benjamin Franklin does put in a cameo appearance.
That’s all from the Pacific Northwest today. Oh, despite the news about winter storms, Portland avoided heavy snow; just dry and cold here. Although, I guess Seattle to the north got quite a bit.
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