Manchester Events

Got a couple of things going on in Manchester in July, and as the month's speeding toward us I suppose I'd better a) mention something about them, and b) start getting psyched about what I'm going to do.

Both events take place at "Manchester's perfect pub" the Lass O'Gowrie near Oxford Road, and the first of them's Doctor Who-related; I don't do much Who stuff so it'll give me a chance to trot out my anecdote. Titled Vworp 4, the 'convention in a pub' runs from 9am until 6pm on Sunday, July 3rd, and confirmed guests include Bob Baker, Paul Tams, Dez Skinn, Adrian Salmon, Andrew Cartmel, Ben Aaronovich and "the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre performing an exclusive set of their Doctor Who material".

Tickets for the day are £19.95 and you can get them here.

Then on Saturday July 23rd, as part of the Lass O'Gowrie's ongoing Pub Fiction programme, there's just me for an hour in the Salmon Room from 6.30 to 7.30, most likely with a few video clips to talk around. Tickets for this are £5 (there's a capacity limit on the room so you can advance-book here to avoid disappointment - as if)

Just before me, at 5.30, there's an illustrated talk by old mate Bryan Talbot in which he'll be discussing his graphic novels Grandville and Grandville Mon Amour.

Then at 8pm they're screening a classic horror double bill of Night of the Demon and Vampire Circus. Despite the presence of lightweight B-movie import Dana Andrews and the show it/don't show it rubber monster controversy, this updated 50s retelling of M R James's Casting the Runes is well worth your attention - not least for Niall MacGinness's Dr Julian Karswell, a shaded and thoughtful take on an Aleister Crowley-style villain.

In fact if you cast an eye over the programme of events for the venue's month-long fringe festival, the Lass O'Gowrie is becoming a significant national hub for genre and genre-related activity.

My Start

It's only looking back that I realise how fortuitous my career timing was. With just one spec Saturday Night Theatre script it was like I stepped into radio's National Theatre. My very first producer (on The Humane Solution) was the legendary John Tydeman, who'd pretty much launched the careers of Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard. He was head of BBC radio drama and led a very small team of highly experienced producers.

Martin Jenkins produced my next (An Alternative to Suicide) and I think with one exception he directed everything I wrote for BBC radio thereafter. We got on really well. While I was still working for Granada he came up to Manchester and I took him to see the outdoor set for Coronation Street, of which he was a fan.

He obviously enjoyed the fact that my stuff was anything but social realism, and that it gave him opportunities to push the medium in all kinds of unusual ways. For my part, I got an enormous sense of uplift walking through the doors of Broadcasting House on Portland Place, feeling a connection with everything that had passed through those studios before. On Alternative, a science fiction piece starring Michael Jayston, I can remember the studio managers wiring up every piece of weird and extreme equipment in the building, tying up every channel and turntable. When I had to leave for my train they were still bringing in more.

(Without telling me, Martin sent the Alternative script over to the Doctor Who production office which was then in Threshold House, possibly the dullest, grimmest office building on the planet just a couple of doors away from the Shepherds Bush Empire. But that was the start of another story.)

I wasn't the biggest fan of radio drama in my growing-up years; that would be the 60s and for me the most meaningful radio of the time was the scripted comedy. We must have had terrible reception in the house because I can remember going out to the garage and lying on the scratchy back seat of my dad's Ford Popular to listen. The model didn't come with a radio but he'd installed his own and that's where I'd catch the block of comedy shows on a Sunday afternoon. The material was a mix of traditional and radical – Ken Dodd, The Navy Lark and The Clitheroe Kid alongside I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again and Round the Horne. Actually, in retrospect I'd move Ken Dodd into the radicals' camp. These days he's usually thought of as the last of the traditional variety performers, but on radio I remember him as a demented surrealist.

The drama that probably influenced me most in terms of what the medium could do, and what it ought to sound like, was a series of Sexton Blake stories dramatised by Donald Stuart. This was 1967, so I'd be 12 or 13. William Franklyn was terrific in the lead. In form and pacing they were almost cinematic, way more so than the TV of the time, where you were very limited in sets, staging, and coverage. Stuart had been writing Blake for story papers and pulps since the 20s but there was nothing dusty about his radio technique.

That spec script didn't come out of nowhere. Prior to my first BBC sale I'd written drama for Piccadilly Radio, a commercial station in Manchester, where my total lack of experience coupled with enthusiasm made me appealingly cheap. Piccadilly was a music station, but they'd made a commitment in their franchise application to deliver scripted content.

We made the episodes as a kind of co-operative, in the sense of everyone mucking-in and no money. Tony Hawkins was their commercials producer, and he produced. Pete Baker was the breakfast DJ and he handled the technical side. Our cast was drawn from the actors and voiceover people we worked with every day... Malcolm Brown, John Munday, Peter Wheeler, Chris Kay, Jim Pope, Charles Foster, Diana Mather, Colin Weston, Mike Hurley... a year or so later I roped many of the same people into making a short film which, if I'm lucky, will never see the light of day again.

Pete devised a method by which we'd use our limited time with the actors to get a clean voice recording, and then he'd prepare all the sound effects on the instant-start cartridges used for commercials and jingles. Then he'd re-record the voice track through the DJ's desk in the station's unused backup studio, varying the acoustics with equalisation and playing in all the effects in real time.

The serial was called The Last Rose of Summer, and Piccadilly traded it to other independent stations that were in the same pickle vis-a-vis their franchise commitments.

It was a different situation at the BBC. There it was a rehearse-record system. Different parts of the studio were furnished in different ways to produce different kinds of sound quality, and effects were either created live with props by a studio manager, or played-in from pre-cued vinyl recordings on one of a bank of turntables. Watching it all come together was like some great elaborate ballet resulting in auditory magic. This was my words getting the historic BBC treatment and I was living the dream. But Pete's method was ahead of its time and gave a comparable result, I've always thought.

I still get mail about The Last Rose of Summer. The master tapes are now in the North West Sound Archive and there are bootleg copies knocking around online, if you know how to find that kind of thing.

I mourn the dismantling of BBC radio drama production in its old form, simply because it was the nearest thing we'll ever have to a National Writing School. I was a 23-year-old from the provinces who sent in a spec script and from day one was treated with the same consideration as any experienced pro. The structure and dialogue skills I learned in radio have served me as an equal foundation for both prose and screenplay writing.

But while I mourn, affordable technology and new means of distribution mean that the 'co-op' approach that got me started is now available to anyone. If you want to make a play, you can make a play and put it online, podcast it, whatever. What's harder is that move from there up to the next level.

UPDATE:  I had an approach from BBC4Extra over the possibility of rebroadcasting the episodes. Mixed feelings from me over bringing such early work out of the past for present-day scrutiny... all of which is a bit moot because the initiative seems to have run aground on the question of rights, despite the agreement of all the involved parties. One thing we did establish, though - the North West Sound Archive say they don't have the tapes. Though on the upside, some of the bootlegs have proved to be of near broadcast quality.

'king Crimson

I've been catching up with The Crimson Petal and the White and it's an encouraging reminder of BBC2's much better days, though I'm uneasy at the BBC's current operating assumption that the only acceptable historical drama involves shagging or lesbians. Don't get me wrong, I'll happily watch either, but the feeling's like that of reading the newsletter of some kinky middle-class society of which I'm not a member.

The camerawork's fashionable, which is never good, but the production design is terrific and the performances spot-on. In tone, and in Mark Gatiss' side-plot of sexual self-loathing, I'm reminded of David Turner's 1970 adaptation of Sartre's Roads to Freedom trilogy. The script is cinematically paced and encourages inference in place of exposition; Lucinda Coxon, Crimson Petal's adaptor, is a playwright with no prior TV credits.

Does the current season mark a turning point for BBC drama? As Good Dog points out, this one will be the first to show the outcome of the BBC Trust's stinging 2009 quality review. Or maybe it represents Ben Stephenson's master plan anyway, and the review merely marshalled him the way that he was going. It's good to get an adaptation of a literary work that isn't already crashingly familiar. But with a generation of writers crushed and discouraged by the Holbification of drama, it's going to be a while before we start hearing original voices in authored TV again.

Who Loves Ya

To quote The Fast Show, this week I has mostly been watching Doctor Who.

I hadn't seen the show in at least a couple of years and, frankly, I took one look at Matt Smith in pre-publicity and thought WTF? He's twelve! and so wasn't too encouraged to visit again. The enthusiasm of friends did little to influence me because, frankly again, I have some dear friends who often enthuse about total crap.

For me, relaunched Who had been rather like Jonathan Creek, a steady evolution from the fresh and ingenious to the forced and ludicrous. In Creek's case I think the explanation was simple, over-working its creator instead of putting him in charge of a crew. I have no theory for why I went off Who. It wasn't because of Tennant, who (in disagreement with Good Dog) I thought was pretty good.

It was just that the episodes piled up on my DVR and when they've been doing that for a while, you know the technology is trying to tell you something. I singled out Blink and watched that, but only because it was Moffat and Moffat always seemed to think at right-angles to the routine. Blink was exceptional. But exceptions don't change the landscape, they just stick out of it. And the landscape seemed increasingly to consist of stories that often didn't work coupled with a grating obsession with chav culture.

All of this left me with mixed feelings about the achievement of Russell T Davies. Because let's face it, he did something remarkable. These days you can't move in the BBC without someone telling you how hard they fought to help the show get back on the air. But the truth is that until its popular success, Doctor Who was an object of institutional disdain. Its fans were ridiculed as sad, arrested people in love with ropy makeup and wobbly scenery. But I've said it before. No one ever loved Doctor Who for its bargain-basement production values. They loved it in spite of them. Davies pulled out the core values of the show and delivered something smart, modern, new, and entirely familiar.

But I think it was some time around 2007 that we were walking one weekend in the Yorkshire Dales, and fell in for a mile or so with an American backpacker of around thirty years old who volunteered that he was a Doctor Who fan. I didn't mention that I had any connection with the show. I tend not to in those situations. Partly because my experience must seem like ancient history (I was 25 when I wrote Warriors' Gate) and partly because I don't want to be taken for a liar or, even worse, a smug twat.

But of RTD he said, "The episodes that he produced and didn't write are always better than the ones with his name on them." Which pretty much nailed the thought that I'd been circling around. I was letting stories that I didn't enjoy colour my appreciation of a producing triumph.

So, fast forward. Over the Easter weekend I borrowed the Season 5 boxed set, mainly to try out the new Blu-Ray player that I'm too cheap to buy discs for. I was only going to sample an episode but I've been charging through them at the rate of three a night. Smith's as good as they say. Better, even. I still think he's twelve but it's not the problem I imagined. It's a less sentimental, more honestly-felt show and I think Moffat's nailed it with his Peter Pan/Wendy take on the core characters and their situation.

OK, I'm back in. By Saturday I'll have caught up.

But here's something. While I was on hiatus from Who, I did watch Sherlock. And during my week-long blitz something jumped out at me.

They're the same characters. It's the same show.

Valley of Lights

It's going great, but the 99c introductory Kindle price on Valley of Lights ends on April 20th. After that, it's back to the full price. Valley was my 'breakthrough book' and is still available in print, in a Telos Classics edition incorporating notes, an interview, and a bonus story.

But you can click here to buy the straight-goods Kindle edition, and for the full range of my available eBooks see the Top Suspense Group website.

When Phoenix Police Sergeant Alex Volchak discovers the true nature of a predator that has survived among us unnoticed for generations, he puts himself and those around him in mortal danger. "An excellent thriller... a cracking pace... large helpings of deadpan gallows humour... a genuine ability to create a sense of evil." Evening Times "The best fusion of crime and horror since Hjortsberg's Falling Angel." Time Out

The Killing

The Seattle-set US version of Danish superdrama The Killing begins its run on Sunday. I'm tempted to go overboard and say that the original is one of the best things I've seen on TV, ever. But then I'd start to sound like one of those people who go on and on about The Wire. And I wouldn't want that.

(But it is.)

To steal my own comment from Good Dog's blog I think that The Killing (Forbrydelsen) is near-perfect TV, balancing an adult sensibility with a pulpish must-see narrative drive, nicely under-written and finely nuanced. The personal/professional gavotte of Lund and Meyer is like a masterclass in character work.

So where does that quality come from? What do the Danes know that we seem to have forgotten? The Guardian newspaper sent reporter Stuart Jeffries over to Copenhagen to interview cast and creators for this illuminating piece.

Most illuminating for me was the fact that both Sophie (Sarah Lund) Grabol and Lars (Troels Hartmann) Mikkelson made time for their interviews between rehearsals for, respectively, a staging of Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, and Moliere's The Misanthrope. Danish television's talent gets its drive, class and craft from classical theatre, where ours is now rooted in soaps.

A New York Times interview with showrunner Veena Sud indicated that the US version would add to the backstories of some of the main characters. She also referred to the investigation being 'stretched' over 13 episodes, which I hope was just an unfortunate choice of words. Forbrydelsen's twenty hours were another masterclass, this time in long-distance story management.

(Speaking of unfortunate choices; I just mistyped 'showruinner', which is no reflection on Ms Sud but which I intend to copyright for some future use.)

In answer to the question, "Why remake The Killing at all?" I'd say this; if the remake captures any of the quality of the original, then there's an exceptional treat awaiting viewers for whom a subtitled Danish thriller is an insurmountable climb. Which, on the evidence of numbers, is most of the English-speaking world.

I won't be watching. Not out of protest or a sense of superiority, but because there's no point. I don't want to be the annoying guy who can't shut up about what they've missed or what they've changed. But I don't want to hear about those added backstories, either. So much that was effective for me in the original lay in what went unsaid.

I'll probably sample it out of professional curiosity. But as a viewer I don't want my memories overwritten, much as I don't want to hear lyrics added to Khachaturian's adagio from Spartacus (someone has).

And besides, I'll be busy. Spiral series 3 starts tonight.

Ed Gorman, Dickens, Stale Popcorn, and Frescoes

I see that Ed Gorman's short story collection Noir 13 is up for a 2011 Spinetingler Award. With all due respect to the other nominees I hope it picks up a ton of votes and wins.

My first encounter with Ed was as the editor of Mystery Scene magazine. Later I had a story picked up for an anthology on which he was one of the editors. Most recently I've come to know him as a fellow and founder-member of the Top Suspense Group.

From the beginning I've regarded him as a kind of godfather to all the rest of us working in that loose genre group often called crime and mystery. If you follow the blog you may recall that a while back I contributed an intro to the PS Publishing edition of Ed's novel Cage of Night.

I used the opportunity for a riff or a rant about style and professionalism. Not dying arts, but certainly increasingly neglected ones.

There’s a type of writing which I grew up loving, which made me want to be a writer myself, and which for a while I thought was gone forever. I'm talking about spare, intelligent commercial fiction. Pan paperbacks, crime novels, spy fiction, postwar British thrillers... writers from Gavin Lyall to Graham Greene, from John Le Carré to John D MacDonald. Well-paced novels that were as long as they needed to be and not a page longer, from authors with a grip on the English language as precise as a sculptor's on his chisel. Like a sculptor they wasted no strokes, and like a sculptor they had little margin for error.

Their work is light, racy, and full of substance. By “light”, I don't mean frivolous. I mean with a deceptive lightness of touch, an easy sense of direct connection, a sense that the writer’s first job is always to engage the reader. Rather like the effortless people-person who spots you arriving at a party, makes you feel instantly welcome, and starts introducing you around. You know the type. Born diplomats. Even if you don't know them well, they seem to know you. It's a special thrill when they remember your name.

Ah, those books! Well-crafted popular fiction. They came out of a tradition going all the way back to Dickens and beyond. It was storytelling, pure if not always simple. The best writers understood that storytelling wasn't some lower form of literature. It was the ticket to ride, allowing any and all of the freight of literature to be checked in to ride along with it.

(Although it has to be said that some of the writers I enjoyed travelled pretty light, and at their worst could rattle off a nifty 50 or 70,000 words and leave you with very little of permanence beyond the aftertaste of the narrative. But in itself that’s no mean feat. When you think about it, what thousand-dollar bottle of wine has ever achieved more?)

I did my best to spot the good stuff wherever it appeared. However lurid the cover, however downmarket the genre, I’d be drawn to those elements that signalled an intelligent writer with a serious mind, ready to step up to the campfire and put all his energies into riveting our attention, filling us with joy and awe, and leaving us feeling exactly the way that he’d planned for us to feel. When an artist writes straight from his or her nerve endings, without engaging in a long process of study and philosophical meditation, that doesn't automatically devalue the act of creation. Fresco painters didn't get a lot of time to mull over what they were doing, either. It's hard to imagine a more ruthless deadline than four square yards of drying plaster; hard to envisage a greater test of one's craft, or a more compelling goad to invention.

For a few years that kind of writing seemed to vanish from the shelves, driven out by so-called bloat books and 'thick fiction' that look like good value and taste like stale popcorn. A 70,000-worder, in the words of one publishers' rep to me, was deemed "too cheap, and too thin". Marketing was no longer being driven by content; content was being driven by marketing.

Cage of Night, dare I suggest it, was probably a victim of that trend.

In its author's words, "Back in the 90s I wrote a novel called Cage of Night. I liked it but many many publishers didn't share my enthusiasm. The complaint was that they couldn't figure out if it was a crime novel or horror fantasy. How do you market it? The publisher that finally took it on decided to experiment with their returns policy. I'm told, though I don't know this for a fact, that when they told the chains no returns, the book was stillborn."

Well, let me just say something about that... the returns business rings depressingly true, and the mindset that drove it probably explains why it's become possible to walk through an entire book barn and still find nothing you particularly want to read. But I reckon that the reason given by the 'many many publishers' for turning the novel down is the very thing that makes the book.

What’s great about Cage of Night is the line that it walks. On the one hand, there are stories that deny the world of the imagination and couch themselves entirely in the terms of the banal – "the low mimetic", as Angela Carter called it.

At the other end of the reality spectrum there are those narratives where fancy drifts without anchor, tales of wish fulfilment in which no effort is spent devising how those wishes might be fulfilled – they simply are. Chosen ones are chosen, destinies are fulfilled, and whatever powers might be needed are available when summoned.

But somewhere, with all these loose pieces lying to left and right of it, there is a middle way where the two come together and forge something else. A form of storytelling in which the feel of a life is wholly believable yet charged with an imminent sense of gods and monsters, all rooted in the weird and wonderful thing that is human psychology. It’s the way we viewed the world every day as children, a power of vision that our growing-up inevitably taught us to suppress. The right kind of story can take us there again – ultimately, it's what stories are for.

The qualities that I thought had gone for good, driven out of the market by ghosted celebrity novels, hasty journalist-written chick-lit, and lazy big-name franchising, have simply resurfaced in unexpected places. These days my fiction reading pile tends to consist of two kinds of novel. There are the trade editions from the literary shelves, where people like Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon aim for high art with a pulpster's vigour. Then there's the stuff in reprint, from a growing number of houses dedicated to ferreting out and celebrating the eminently readable; Charles Ardai's Hard Case Crime takes the strategy one stage further, commissioning new work from classic cover artists so that the books begin to sing even before you've got them open.

Ed Gorman stands right at the core of everything I’ve been talking about. A master craftsman, a professional's professional, and a steady, reliable, original voice. He writes with intelligence and grace, about people we can believe in, facing situations we can imagine, reacting in ways that are truthful. He makes it real, and in his hands that reality can soar.

Since I wrote the piece, Hard Case Crime faced some uncertain times with the collapse of Dorchester Publishing, which handled production and distribution of its titles. A new partnership with Titan Books looks set to allow the line to continue.

Voting in the Spinetingler Awards is open until April 30th. I'm happy also to see follow Top Suspenser Dave Zeltserman nominated in the Rising Star category for his novel Killer.

All Fools' Day

April 1st is the day we all wait patiently while media dullards jest.

Daily Cheap Reads

If you own any kind of an eBook reading device, this is a site that you probably need to know about. Daily Cheap Reads has been running for a while in the US and has now opened a dedicated British outlet.

The point here is that there's nothing bargain-basement about the cheap reads. Bargains yes; bargain basement no.

I just took a look and Daily Cheap Reads is very impressive - classy design, professional-looking presentation, and a strong sense that you're getting a set of intelligent editorial picks and not just an open crap spigot of self-publication. They're not neglecting the indie market, but they are discriminating in their choices.

Recent listings include Kate Atkinson, Maeve Binchy, and Sebastian Faulks. They've found Ian Rankin at £1.49, Kazuo Ishiguro for £2.44... you could spend your days scouring the net for this stuff, but now you don't have to.

The Top Suspense Group

Exciting stuff - I've been invited to join the bunch of fellow-writers who have founded the groundbreaking Top Suspense Group. It's an online resource for readers in the fast-expanding eBook market.

To mark my debut with the gang I'm launching the Kindle version of my novel Valley of Lights at the rock-bottom Amazon price of 99c, for one month only.

When Phoenix Police Sergeant Alex Volchak discovers the true nature of a predator that has survived among us unnoticed for generations, he puts himself and those around him in mortal danger. "An excellent thriller... a cracking pace... large helpings of deadpan gallows humour... a genuine ability to create a sense of evil." Evening Times "The best fusion of crime and horror since Hjortsberg's Falling Angel." Time Out

This is a significant development, I think. As readers we look for some kind of filtering and guidance to help us seek out the kind of books we might like, and in this brave new world there's not a lot of it around.

From the group's initial press release:

The e-book market is exploding. With over 700,000 e-books currently available and hundreds more added every week, it’s growing increasingly difficult to distinguish quality books from those that are unedited and written by inexperienced authors.

That’s why nine established, professional authors have formed Top Suspense Group, a site where readers are guaranteed to find top-notch, award-winning authors in multiple genres who deliver a great e-reading experience in their dozens of highly-acclaimed books.

"Readers can count on us," acclaimed author Max Allan Collins explains. "Every member of our group has already made his or her mark on genre fiction, whether it's noir, crime, mystery, thriller, horror or Westerns, and in some cases, several of these genres."

Top Suspense authors have each:

* Published multiple novels with traditional publishers
* Won or have been nominated for major literary awards
* Been internationally published
* Received critical acclaim from national publications

The original lineup includes Max Allan Collins, Bill Crider, Lee Goldberg, Joel Goldman, Ed Gorman, Vicki Hendricks, Paul Levine, Harry Shannon, and Dave Zeltserman. They're joined by Naomi Hirahara, Libby Fischer Hellmann, and me.

All of us appear in the group's first anthology of short fiction - call it a taster, if you like - about which, more below.

The Top Suspense Anthology

I've been allocated twenty-five Advance Reading Copies of the Top Suspense anthology to give away, in the e-format of your choice. All you need to do is agree to post a no-spoilers review, positive or negative, on your blog, website, Goodreads page, Facebook page, or the Amazon listing for TOP SUSPENSE in the next 60 days.

Click here or on the Contact tab, and drop me a line with FREE TOP SUSPENSE BOOK in the subject line. Don't forget to include your preferred eBook format and the name of your blog or website, if you have one.

Hold on tight for a literary thrill-ride into the wickedly clever, frightening, and exhilarating world of Top Suspense, a sizzling collaboration of twelve master storytellers at the peak of their powers in thirteen unforgettable tales... Max Allan Collins, Bill Crider, Stephen Gallagher, Lee Goldberg, Joel Goldman, Libby Fischer Hellmann, Naomi Hirahara, Vicki Hendricks, Paul Levine, Harry Shannon, and Dave Zeltserman.

This unforgettable anthology – packed full of cold-blooded killers, erotic tension, shady private eyes, craven drug dealers, vicious betrayals, crafty thieves, and shocking twists – is coming out on APRIL 1 and is only a taste of the thrills you will find in the breathtakingly original ebooks by these authors at www.topsuspensegroup.com.

US Kindle price will be $2.99.

The Good Old Stuff

The header comes from the great John D McDonald's title for a collection of his pulp writing, energetic, reader-centred fiction of which he was particularly proud, and it seemed like an appropriate way to introduce this guest post from Lee Goldberg.

I've met Lee in person, so I can testify that there's only one of him. Though you'd never guess it from the sheer variety and energy of his output; novelist, TV writer, tie-in champion, film-maker, blogger, leading commentator on the developing (exploding?) eBook market... Lee is also closely involved with the Top Suspense group, a cadre of experienced writers who have banded together in a branding operation that I suspect is going to become more common as readers seek some kind of guidance and filtering for eBook titles.

More on that subject soon. The venture he describes here is in the McDonald spirit, and sounds like a lot of fun.

The Dead Man: Face of Evil is the first in a new series of ebooks and paperbacks that we like to think of as cross between Stephen King’s The Gunslinger, George Gilman’s Edge, and Don Pendleton’s The Executioner... and a blatant attempt to recapture the flavor of those “men’s action adventure paperbacks” of the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

Those paperbacks were short and tightly-written, with hard-boiled heroes, outrageously sexy women, and gleefully over-the-top plots. Nobody would ever mistake them for great literature, but they were enormous fun to read...and to write. I know, because I broke into publishing in the mid-1980s writing one of those series - 357 Vigilante by "Ian Ludlow" - while I was still in college.

Sadly, the "men's action adventure" genre is virtually extinct now, an early victim of the narrowing of the paperback marketplace. But I’ve never lost my affection for the genre... and the Kindle is the perfect medium for it. So, I figured, why not try it again?

Which is where The Dead Man comes in.

The idea actually began as a TV series that Bill Rabkin & I started pitching around Hollywood over 20 years ago. The pitch went something like this:

There is good, and there is evil.
On November 12th, Matthew Cahill died, buried in an avalanche of snow.
On February 20th, Matthew Cahill came back to life.
Nothing has changed.
There is still good, and there is still evil.
Only now... he can see it.

Each day has becomes a journey into a dark world he knows nothing about...a quest for the answers to who he is and what he has become...and a fight to save us, and his soul, from the clutches of pure evil.

Execs always seemed to love the pitch, but we were never able to clinch the sale, and gave up on it a few years back. But lately I’ve had some success reviving my out-of-print books on the Kindle – particularly The Walk – and it occurred to me that The Dead Man would make a kick-ass series of “men’s action adventure novels.”

It took me 30 seconds to convince Bill to go along with idea...and I even managed to cajole a bunch of other writers to pen future novels in the series. Not just any writers... but some of the very best western, horror, mystery, and science fiction scribes out there, including Marcus Pelegrimas, Joel Goldman, Bill Crider, James Reasoner, David McAfee, Matt Witten, Burl Barer, James Daniels, Matthew P. Mayo, Jude Hardin, and Harry Shannon.

The first book, Face of Evil, is out now in the U.K. and will soon be followed by Hell in Heaven by Bill Rabkin and me, Ring of Knives by James Daniels, The Dead Woman by David McAfee, Crucible of Fire by Mel Odom, Lust for Blood by Harry Shannon, and many more, a new book in the series coming out every month or so.

We are all having a great time writing these books and indulging our great affection for the genre. Hopefully, The Dead Man can be the gateway drug that gets you hooked on it, too.