Coming soon, in April, it's issue seven of Occult Detective Magazine! (Formerly Occult Detective Quarterly)

I'm excited to announce that my newest western story "The Home Place" was just released as part of Full Speed Publishing's line of Kindle Original stories!

1889, Indian Territory. Jim Maddern brought his family into a new world, to start a new life, with dreams of owning the best horse ranch west of the Mississippi. But he isn't the only one with such dreams and there are men who will stop at nothing to achieve their goals, regardless of who they have to hurt along the way.

Get it today for only ninety-nine cents or free on Kindle Unlimited!

Check it out and please let me know what you think!

 I have read a lot of Lawrence Block and like most writers, he has some lousy works, some great works, and a lot of forgettable works in between. His most consistently-good works, however, are the Matthew Scudder series of mysteries about an ex-cop, private investigator (initially unlicensed, later licensed).

However, the more I read of the series, the more I realize that it is, by itself, like a microcosm of Block's overall career. There are some truly great Scudder novels, a few less memorable ones, and a few really really bad ones (his most recent, A Time to Cast Stones being the absolute worst).

This one isn't great.

While I've read a lot of Block and a fair amount of Scudder, I haven't read the Scudder novels in order. This is from the early part of what I refer to as "old Scudder era," in which Scudder is becoming an old man (age-wise and in his own mind) the novels are more about Scudder worrying over his place in the universe than anything else, with the mysteries taking a backseat. This one, in fact, the mystery is fairly transparent to the point of being kind of boring.
 
Not that there's nothing to like in this novel, but it's far less interesting and enjoyable than what he was putting out in the mid-70s and early 80s. Most of his stuff from the 90s I've read seems to herald the end of the truly great storytelling Block is capable of in favor of this kind of overly introspective, and frankly, kind of self-indulgent, writing. It's true that Scudder has aged with Block, but some of these later books feel too much like non-fiction for my taste.

If you like truly excellent P.I. stories, however, you can't go wrong with Block's Scudder books from the beginning (Sins of the Fathers, 1976) to the mid-way point (A Walk Among the Tombstones, 1992. Also made into a film), and I highly recommend anything from the first half of the series.

Here's a sneak peek of a video concerning a project I'm part of and of which I'm very, very proud of my contribution!

​More coming soon!

I've been thinking about this comic a lot the last few days.

I've long been a fan of Archie Comics--I own literally thousands of them--and working for them as a dream of mine for a long time. Unfortunately, getting your foot in the door of a company just as it's completely changing its publishing strategy, line up of books, and its future is uncertain is difficult, to say the least.

This comic, a try-out for all of us, is something that I think we can still be proud of, even if it is a shame that its official publication never came to pass. 

That said, there's nothing preventing me from re-posting it for all of you folks to enjoy, so please do.

Click the banner below to read the full comic and please enjoy!