Advertisements for myself: two mysteries

The Deadly Doowop and Dead Body In A Small Room, although written almost 20 years apart, have much in common. Each is a mystery, the only two I've completed (I drafted another and part of a fourth, see below) Each is narrated in the first person, Doowop by a struggling playwright "detective," Room by a successful screenwriter on a leave of absence after cancer. Each depends on its social environment, Doowop in 1954 LA at the birth of rock-n-roll, Room in the 80s at a small Nevada town with legal prostitution. Each is satiric without being heavy-handed about it. Each fits well into the larger body of my work, despite the genre, Doowop utilizing my one-act play The Stiff, Room returning to the Kree ashram featured in Christmas at the Juniper Tavern.

Doowop was written in 1988 and quickly picked up by an agent. He was selling it as the first in a mystery series and told me to write a second as soon as I could. I drafted another Red Trevorak story called The Sputnik Scam, not as good, notable only because it's the first thing I ever wrote based on my experience at Cal Tech. However, the agent gave up when he couldn't quickly sell Doowop, and I abandoned the rewrite of the second. This was a blessing in disguise, I'm sure. I'm not cut out to write a series, or anything too much like something else I've done. I'd get bored, and when the writer is bored, the reader is bored. I put Doowop away and resurrected it when print on demand technology appeared and published it myself to absolutely no interest anywhere in the western world. I've republished it recently at Smashwords, link below. I also reread it after many years, and I like it. In fact, I like it a lot. 

Doowop at Smashwords in a variety of formats, including print.

Room was written in 2006 and it, too, picked up an agent who pitched it as the first in a series and, once again, the lesson forgotten, I started work on a second. However, this agent quit even sooner than the first, and once again I abandoned the sequel, another blessing in disguise. I published Room as print on demand and it went on, miraculously enough, to be a finalist for the 2006 Mystery of the Year at Foreword Magazine.  I've resurrected it, too, for electronic devices at Smashwords.

Room at Smashwords in a variety of formats, including print.

From Doowop:

"Then you think there's a music conspiracy, too?"

"No different from the freeways, man. A black man makes progress, shit, the powers that be got to do something to head him off at the pass. With music, it's the white teenagers making their parents nervous by listening to nigger music. Been happening a couple years now, ofay kids digging rhythm-n-blues, doowop, giving up their parents music, all that mares-eat-oats shit, all that up- a-lazy-river shit. Man, you can't have white kids digging nigger music, don't you see that? They listen to nigger music, next thing you know they'll discover their bodies, man, they'll discover sex. They'll want to get it while the gettin' is good, man. So what's the alternative for white parents? Make a safe white copy of the music, man, dilute it so it's fit for white teenage consumption. And that's exactly what's been happening. If that deejay understands this, man, he's the smartest ofay in L.A."

From Room:

There hadn’t been a dead body in the Black Cat Bar & Brothel in almost a decade, not since the Bicentennial when Frank Ford came in to celebrate his 80th birthday with a lady and suffered a stroke in the excitement. This was a story traditionally told to strangers in town, always in a humorous tone that put the old geezer in heroic light, a man riding in the saddle to the very end. Maybe the story was true and maybe it wasn’t. It didn’t really matter.

*

Then I took a ride to find the ashram and check it out. I was shocked by what I saw. I don’t know how many hundred acres were surrounded by the security fence, but the ashram grounds stretched across the high desert for as far as the eye could see. I drove along the fence for several miles before seeing a sign of life inside, first from the construction equipment, dozens of vehicles scattered hither and yon, suggesting a building project of considerable ambition; and later, as I approached the front security gate, the inhabitable area of the ashram, distinguished mainly by Quonset huts and double-wide trailers, mixed with a few permanent buildings. At the gate I turned and stopped at the guard compound.