Fighting Cop Story

The Fight Card series of novels is inspired by the boxing/fight stories in the sports pulps from the '30s and '40s, such as Fight Stories Magazine and Knockout Magazine as well as the Sailor Steve Costigan tales from Robert E. Howard. The series is written by a team of authors. The first one came out a few days ago from the pen of Paul Bishop. All of the books are written under the pen name Jack Tunney (remember Gene Tunney and the famous "long count" fight with Jack Dempsey in 1927).

Here's the setup for Felony Fists, the first Fight Card novel:

Los Angeles 1954

Patrick “Felony” Flynn has been fighting all his life. Learning the “sweet science” from Father Tim the fighting priest at St. Vincent’s, the Chicago orphanage where Pat and his older brother Mickey were raised, Pat has battled his way around the world – first with the Navy and now with the Los Angeles Police Department.

Legendary LAPD chief William Parker is on a rampage to clean up both the department and the city. His elite crew of detectives known as The Hat Squad is his blunt instrument – dedicated, honest, and fearless. Promotion from patrol to detective is Pat’s goal, but he also yearns to be one of the elite.

And his fists are going to give him the chance.

Gangster Mickey Cohen runs LA’s rackets, and murderous heavyweight Solomon King is Cohen’s key to taking over the fight game. Chief Parker wants Patrick “Felony” Flynn to stop him – a tall order for a middleweight ship’s champion with no professional record.

Leading with his chin, and with his partner, LA’s first black detective Tombstone Jones, covering his back, Patrick Flynn and his Felony Fists are about to fight for his future, the future of the department, and the future of Los Angeles.

Read more about Paul, including his hit TV series of the past summer, Take the Money and Run, at his blog Bish's Beat.

Check out all my books at Chester D. Campbell.com

13 Shots of Noir

If you're a lover of noirish short stories, keep an eye out for this book, COMING SOON. It's from British mystery writer Paul D. Brazill, who now lives in Poland. To learn more about Paul, click this link to his blog:

You Would Say That, Wouldn't You?

Reviews: The Good, The Bad

Everybody likes to get good reviews for their books, and I've been fortunate to get lots of them over the years. I just received a great one for The Good, The Bad and The Murderous. In a section headed "He Did It Again!" reviewer Sylvia Cochran at The Deepening wrote:

"Kind readers know that I am a fan of Chester Campbell’s writings. He 'gets' detective fiction on a gut-level. There is no contrived dialog, questionable literary tactic or predictable plot turn. Mystery buffs, who are strong aficionados of the Chekhov’s gun technique, most certainly celebrate the author’s solemn dedication to not litter the plot with confusing and pointless elements. Instead, there is no hole in the plot and all loose ends are tightened neatly before the last page. (Did I mention that this book is superbly edited?)"

I've never received a trashy review like some of the one-star diatribes I've seen on Amazon, but I've had a few that are a mixture of good and not so good. That's an interesting gray area. The conventional wisdom says to just forget it and move on. Be happy they mentioned your book.

Looking at the situation a bit more philosophically, it fulfills the reviewers job of giving an opinion as to the strong points and weak points in the story. What you have to remember is that this isn't rocket science. It's strictly one person's opinion. It's the same state of affairs you run into when querying an agent or an editor. What one person dislikes, another may praise.

In the case of this review, after saying how the crime was solved amounted to "a good study of methodical detective work," the reviewer concluded:

"If I’m going to buy a thriller I want foul language, aggression and sexual tension. But if I’m looking for a well-written murder mystery, this book would do fine."

I mentioned in an earlier post that the book started out like a mystery and ended like a thriller. Before the cover was finished, the publisher decided to call it a "Sid Chance Thriller." Thrillers seem to be the genre of preference these days. As I said, opinions differ. If throwing F bombs around like cigarette butts is a requirement for a thriller, I suppose I'll never write one. I see no need for it. In the few of his thrillers I've read, Harlan Coben didn't use a lot of foul language.

If several reviewers make similar critical remarks about a book, it's time to reevaluate. But debating whether something is or isn't a thriller hardly seems worth the effort. I'll just accept my reviews and be happy with them.

Let's Have a Party

That's right, it's party time. A book launch party, to be exact. It'll take place from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. next Saturday, October 22, at Mysteries & More bookstore in the Lenox Village section of Nashivlle, at 6965 Sunnywood Drive. I'll have a few words to say about The Good, The Bad and The Murderous, the second in my Sid Chance PI series, and then I'll answer any questions the party-goers might have.

We'll have cookies and cake and punch and other goodies that are a hallmark of this remarkable little mystery store run by Mary and Gregg Bruss. One wall is plastered with photos and notes of congratulations from a horde of mystery authors that include New York Times bestsellers as well as not so widely known writers like me. They're as author-friendly as any people I've encountered. With the first three Greg McKenzie mysteries out of print, Mysteries & More is the only bookstore in the country where you can buy all of my books.

If you'd like to check them out (and you should), just click here Mysteries & More.net.

To learn more about The Good, The Bad and The Murderous check my previous blogs below. In addition to the launch party next weekend, I'll be signing the new book at Barnes & Noble Booksellers on Mallory Lane in Brentwood, TN from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, November 5.

If you're around the area, I'd love to see you at one of these events. You can read opening chapters and find out where to buy the book at my website, ChesterCampbell.com.

The Ultimate Bookstore

It's a bookstore where you can buy a book in any form you like, whether in hardback, trade paper, ebook (pick your format), even an autographed copy. Sound enticing? I hope so. It's a new feature on my website called simply The Bookstore.

You can check it out right now by clicking on The Bookstore.  There you'll find links to where you can buy each of my books in all available forms. A few can be found in hardcover, but all seven are ready to be purchased in trade paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Books-a-Million.

The five Greg McKenzie mysteries and two Sid Chance novels are also available in almost every ebook format, from the Kinde (.mobi), Epub (for the Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo and most e-reading apps), Palm reading devices, PDF, RTF, LRF, HTML and JavaScript. Following these links will get you an ebook for only $2.99.

You'll also find a link to order a signed book. It gives you the option of paying by PayPal or ordering by mail.

Try the ultimate bookstore today and order copies of some great mysteries.

Beware the Jabberwock

That's the title of the first book I finished after taking up mystery writing on retirement in mid-1989. It was an end-of-the-cold war thriller. After completing the manuscript, I sent out a few queries to New York agents and got a positive response from one. The agency began sending it to editors and sent me copies of their responses. One referred to it as "creepily plausible and nicely audacious." Another commented on the timeliness of the book but said their fledgling thriller line was taking a style and characterization different from the genre as a whole. An editor at the Berkley Publishing Group wrote, "It is a very well written thriller, but this genre is just too hard to sell in mass market at the moment. Maybe this would work well in hardcover." Another said, "It's a competent and entertaining piece of work." But it wasn't the type of novel published at his house.

After about six months, the assistant handling my manuscript left the agency. The principal agent wrote that she was concentrating on non-fiction and wouldn't be able to represent me. So the manuscript went onto the pile on my office floor. It had been created in one of the early word processing programs before I knew much about Windows. I later converted it to Word and it has been on a succession of hard drives since.

I followed Jabberwock with two more thrillers in a trilogy featuring disgraced FBI agent Burke Hill, who was hired to run a CIA spin-off disguised as an international public relations firm. The second book went to an agent who sounded like an old guy when I talked to him on the phone. He kept telling me post cold war spy stories were difficult to sell in those days (early nineties). After nearly a year, I tried to call him and found he had died. By then I had the third book finished and this one landed with a major New York agency (the one that handled John Grisham). I finally learned the manuscript had been sitting on the shelf until when it finally went to an editor, he wrote that it was too dated.

In the hindsight of two decades, the Cold War spy story has made something of a comeback. I'm too jaded now to venture back into the agent search business, however. So I decided to revise the manuscripts and make them available as ebooks. I have about completed work on Jabberwock and hope to get it up soon for the Kindle and on Smashwords for other ebook formats.

The character of Burke Hill was based on a former FBI agent I met back in the sixties when I was editing Nashville Magazine. His name was Jim Scott and he had quite a tale to tell. We talked about my writing his story for a book, and I taped a few hours of reminiscences. He wrote the FBI to get a copy of his files under the Freedom of Information Act. I still have a copy of the reply he received, asking for money to pay for making copies. But before anything came out of it, he moved on and I eventually lost touch with him. The last i heard he had died in his home state of South Carolina. My character followed Scott's story about being chosen by J. Edgar Hoover to attempt to infiltrate the Mafia. In preparation, he resigned from the Bureau and committed a few bank robberies to establish his bona fides. When he failed to get close to the mob, he went back to Washington and was rebuffed by Hoover. Then the FBI blocked his attempts to find another job.

Jabberwock opens in Vienna shortly before dissolution of the Soviet Union with a clandestine meeting of a high CIA official and a KGB general, where a plot is hatched that would change the course of the two countries.

It's a good thing I'm with a small press, or my new book probably wouldn't have gotten published. The Good, The Bad and The Murderous starts out like a mystery and winds  up like a thriller. Such cross-genre books often get turned down by New York publishers because they don't fall into a convenient niche for the marketing department.

Since Night Shadows Press has no marketing department, that's no problem. Like most authors these days, I'm the nearest thing to a marketer my books will ever see. I put them on Amazon for the Kindle and on Smashwords.com for the rest of the e-readers. And through blogs like this, my page on Facebook, various online lists, and appearances at a variety of bookselling venues, I try to get my name out and information on my books.

Getting back to The Good, The Bad, the mystery is pretty well solved within the first 100 pages. Then things start getting nasty for my protagonists, Sid Chance and his sometimes sidekick, Jaz LeMieux. At that point it becomes a matter of how can they keep their client off death row and save their own skins before the bad guys win out?

The book will be out in paperback this fall, but it will be available in ebook format within the next few weeks. Like a lot of writers currently, I'm selling more ebooks than paper books. The cover of the new book has been revised slightly from what appears here. Instead of billing it as Sid Chance Mystery No. 2, it is now called A Sid Chance Thriller. Inside it'll be identified as Sid Chance Novel Number 2.