“Business is Business” was an attempt to tell Rumplestiltskin from a perspective that made the fairy tale a fairer tale. I always felt the miller’s daughter in the original tale was a bit too innocent to be believable. Her father lied, the King was greedy, she makes a deal with the gold-spinner, gets what she … Continue reading
“A Dish Best Served” started simply with a desire to use an multi-course meal as the vehicle for a story. I started writing with the critic vs. chef theme, and the rest of the story came out of the pen on its own (or with the help of my favorite Poe story, “A Cask of … Continue reading
Well, having finished excerpts from all my Detective Jimmy Delaney stories, it’s time to start back at the beginning of my short fiction. When I decided to take up the pen as my creative outlet in the early part of this millennia, I wasn’t yet churning out ideas, and wanted something that meant something to … Continue reading
Writing a pseudo-speculative-fiction detective series, I often find myself looking for creative and unusual ways to kill people. It often reminds me of The Avengers (not the Marvel superhero club – the old British television series about secret agents Mr. Steed and Emma Peele), and how they would discover (and resolve) quirky and unbelievable plots … Continue reading
Our memories are really tied tightly into scents, and I wondered if it might be possible to use the combination of scents from a crime scene to trigger a reaction that would give away the perpetrator – that was the idea that launched “The Scent of the Crime.” And of course, the idea that scent … Continue reading
Detective Jimmy Delaney first sleuthed onto the page in “In a Flash.” He surprised me again a year later by bringing me “Mixed Signals”, but it would be a lie to claim that I thought he was done with me after that. So another year passes, and he comes to me with a story about … Continue reading
So – I wrote “In a Flash”, had some fun with it, but I thought Detective Jimmy Delaney would just be a one-time thing. But something in Jimmy called to me (maybe it’s the midlife thing, who knows?), and when I was thinking about the possibilities of jacking with a variety of devices in our … Continue reading
