Celtic Chronicles, the ninth novel in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, represents my most recent nod to these disciplines, while Son of Thunder (St. John’s tomb in modern-day Turkey), the second book in the series, is the earliest. But Declan O’Hara’s scholarly tome about the life of St. Brendan, mentioned in several novels in that series and a few times in the “Inspector Steve Morgan” trilogy, were indirect nods as well. The first novel in the “Denisovan Trilogy,” Origins (hello there, A. B. Carolan, get your arse in gear!) came from imagining what had become of the Denisovans, our hominid brethren.

A reader of any of those novels (hopefully all of them!) might wonder where that interest came from. My training wasn’t in either of these academic disciplines, after all. And, while I enjoyed that “Indiana Jones” series of movies (especially the one with Sean Connery), these films weren’t the inspiration. Neither was The DaVinci Code, although Dan Brown’s novel showed me what to avoid in Son of Thunder.

My motivation goes all the way back to my young-adult years when I became interested in these disciplines and even thought of working in them. I checked out a lot of books about them from our public library, including Margaret Meade’s classic work. My conclusion was that human beings are just too damn complex as subjects of scientific study, so I chose to pursue training in an easier science (at least math and physics seemed easier for me). Perhaps that’s just as well. Social scientists aren’t all that rigorous, and Governor Reagan became determined to destroy the anthropology department at UCSB when I was there.

Nevertheless, the interest remains. I read most of the articles in Science News and often follow that biweekly magazine’s suggestions for further reading, but I usually read the articles about human origins and human quirks first! I don’t know if any of these esoteric subjects will be featured in any of my stories (a desalination platform off the California coast played an important role in The Last Humans, for example) but don’t be surprised if they are. Sci-fi, for example, isn’t all about astronomy or physics, and I have a special relationship with both.

Of course, Esther and Bastiann van Coevorden are volunteers who work on an archaeological dig in Celtic Chronicles. I agree with Bastiann in large part: Digging up artifacts and skeletons seems more like back-breaking labor that this old man shouldn’t be doing. We’ll leave that to the truly dedicated and their students!

***

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“Esther Brookstone Art Detective” Series. In this nine-novel series (two novels are free PDF downloads available at this website), the reader follows Esther and Bastiann through many dangerous adventures, all related to art in some way. These two sleuths represent my homage to Agatha Christie: Esther is a more sexy, active, and agile sleuth than Miss Marple (she’s a bit younger too); and Bastiann, first her paramour and then her husband, looks like the actor who portrayed Poirot so many times in BBC features. Agatha might not approve of their more dangerous and romantic adventures—she wrote in a different time—but I mean no disrespect (I also read her mysteries as a young adult) because our detective duos are active in different periods in the UK. The tongue-in-cheek humor and bawdy romance might even appeal more than the mystery and thrills.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

…yet it might not seem like it. I’m also something of a romantic. But only the dearest and nearest people in my life have seen much of those aspects of me. I mostly avoid blatant humor and schmaltzy romance in my reading choices in my informal relationships and that avoidance carries over into my stories.

It’s a matter of degree, of course. For writing, while I suppose it could sell more stories (as if that were a goal), a focus on humor or romance doesn’t appeal to me. The only time I set out to boldly write (and purposely split an infinitive to rub it in to strict editors who haven’t read the new rules!) a pure romantic comedy (isn’t modern courtship always romantic comedy but rarely pure?) was mostly a failure: The first part of The Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse, based on a short story about a mad and atypical female physicist (“mad” in the English sense and “atypical” because girls aren’t supposed to be good at math—of course, I know they can be, because I’ve taught math and science to both females and males!); she hires a brilliant black techie (I wanted to piss off both misogynists and racists); and the story expands to what becomes a “classic road trip” where the two time-travel without creating paradoxes.

I’ll admit that there’s more humor and romance in that novel than most of my other stories (and maybe less quality sci-fi?), but, whether sci-fi, mysteries, or thrillers, or some combination, there’s enough humor and romance in all my tales to make the characters seem human (or believable ETs, as the case might be—sentience requires both humor and romance). One of my favorite authors from my childhood, Isaac Asimov (also an ex-scientist), was a lot more serious than I am, in fact; and another favorite author, Robert Heinlein (you guessed it: also a scientist), in Stranger in a Strange Land, flaunts conventional Christian mythology with irreverent humor and romance that should be a model for sci-fi romantic-comedy writers everywhere (that novel became the hippies handbook!).

After finishing The Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse, though, I realized that writing sci-fi romantic comedy isn’t that easy. Even Heinlein, a master of sci-fi writing, tended to the bawdy and sacrilegious and departed from the humor all around us in our daily lives. (Asimov’s seriousness is also a bit tempered by a few references to android-human sexual relationships in the robot trilogy. From his impish smile, he probably thought that was a great joke!)

In my mysteries and thrillers, Detective Castilblanco’s quips and Esther Brookstone’s penchant for collecting husbands often add humor—he’s a Latino, after all; and she’s an atypical Englishwoman, quite unlike Christie’s prim and proper Miss Marple. Perhaps my Esther deserves to be called that American term, cougar. I play Esther against type like I do Dao-Ming Chen, Castilblanco’s longtime partner, especially in Teeter-Totter between Lust and Murder. I love to do that! It makes characters more interesting. And atypical characters often can add humor even though humor isn’t the goal.

Of course, humor comes in many forms. What makes a reader chuckle isn’t easy to predict, so maybe a good humorist should sprinkle different types of humor throughout a novel? What do you look for in humor?

***

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A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. Ever heard of the “Many Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics”? It’s not really a theory but a convenient interpretation of that strange theory describing atomic phenomena; it’s often associated with the Nobel prize-winning Richard Feynman, but it was actually invented by Hugh Everett III in a Princeton thesis subsequent to Feynman’s. For the scientific fans among my readers, the key words are “many worlds,” i.e., parallel universes, if you will; and it should theoretically allow you to time-travel without paradoxes. (Nothing says the parallel universes have to run at the same rate, right?) For those who just want a sci-fi rom-com that’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, though, sit back in your easy-chair and ride along with the heroes of this novel as I poke fun at much of human society’s conventions and culture. Available wherever quality ebooks are found. (You don’t have to be a physicist or engineer to enjoy it, by the way.)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

While I’ve discussed these two topics elsewhere (for example, in my free PDF download “Writing Fiction”—see the list on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page), I’ll mention them again because I consider them and their balance so important when writing fiction. Some fiction writers emphasize one over the other, maybe depending on the type of novel.

There’s no argument about sci-fi: It often requires a lot of world-building, which is narrative, of course. (I’ll never forget the incompetent agent who, early on in my writing career, couldn’t comprehend this. We Irish hold grudges for a long time! Her comment, “There’s too much narrative” soured me on agents in general and established for me a twist on an adage, “Those who can write should do it; those who can’t, should become agents or editors.”) Other genres might require more emphasis on dialogue (especially if you count “internal dialogue”—what goes on in a character’s mind—as a mental conversation with themselves).

Like all the elements used in writing fiction, an author must handle dialogue and narrative with care and skill. The Goldilocks principle is often indicated: Not too much of one or the other but just right. As you read other authors’ works, you’ll see the amount of each employed cannot only depend on genre but also on the location in the story. World-building is usually done early on, but in the novel I submitted to that incompetent agent, Survivors of the Chaos—she asked to read it, by the way—it had to be used all the way through because the venues so often changed. (This novel is the first of a trilogy, and all three books are now contained in The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection, an ebook bundle.)

In my British-style crime stories (novels in the “Inspector Steve Morgan” series are the most recent), I first briefly emphasize narrative (describing the British settings, including police stations, because they’re unfamiliar to many US readers), and then I move early on to dialogue (direct and internal), which often plays a more important role (especially in interrogations). But the parts dedicated to narrative are less in my US crime stories (like the novels in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series—the free PDF Defanging the Red Dragon is a crossover novel in two series featuring the US detective Castilblanco and the UK detective Brookstone, which requires the acrobatics I performed there to tell that that tale).

And then we have another important aspect of dialogue to consider: How much slang and/or local idiom should an author use? For the same reason as above, I include local expressions to provide local color but provide the US reader a glossary at the front of most of my British-style mysteries. (If I’ve missed listing some that are unfamiliar to you—I’ve read a lot of Brit-style crime stories and am now used to the UK’s lexicon that’s as varied as the US’s at times—please let me know, and I’ll add it to the glossary if there’s a second edition.) Words like “nick,” “wanker,” “pillock,” and “eejit” aren’t part of American English (and maybe not Canadian or Australian either), but they add local color that can become an essential part of a character’s description.

The to-and-fro of direct dialogue has to be handled with care. When he is speaking to her, or vice versa, it’s usually not difficult for the reader to keep things straight, but two males or two females talking can create confusion, so names have to be used more within the dialogue or dialogue tags (what’s outside the quotes). They shouldn’t interrupt the flow if done correctly, only inform.

That flow is critical. The basic rule for writing fiction is to avoid forcing readers into situations where they stop and say, “Huh?” or “What’s going on here?” Think of it this way: A speed-reader (moi, par exemple!) should be able to breeze right through those questions if they occur. Tom Clancy suggests a course of action: Just tell the damn story! Anything that inferferes with that should be questioned by the story’s author. A writer doesn’t need either an agent or editor to tell them that. It should be obvious.

One thing is certain, though: Whatever you do in your fiction writing, don’t let Microsoft’s Copilot write your dialogue, especially in Aptos or Calibri. AI isn’t permitted in manuscripts submitted to traditional publishers, and self-publishers shouldn’t use it either. Times New Roman is still the font of choice you should use for your writing. (Microsoft’s sneaky changes to Aptos from Calibri and addition of Copilot—hell, we just got rid of Cortana!—shows how low that company has sunk!)

***

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A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. This sci-fi rom-com provides an example of many of the suggestion described above: It’s a lively mix of narrative (i.e. sci-fi world-building, many worlds, in fact—that’s an in-joke)) and dialogue (in romantic spats or with comic prats). This stand-alone novel is a futuristic “road trip” that avoids the paradoxes of time travel but not those associated with human behavioral quirks. Enjoy!

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Having one current and three former presidents all in one place, NYC, at the same time, perhaps made good PR for the two candidates among them—Mr. Biden, Clinton, and Obama raked in $26 million at the Radio City Music Hall for Mr. Biden’s campaign, more than Mr. Trump made in an entire month (he’s busy trying to stay out of jail, of course); but everyone knew the Donald was trying to wreck the three Dems’ show by attending the wake for an NYPD officer effectively slain by the NYC Council’s malfeasance (an overzealous bail reform the root cause), having nothing to do with Mr. Biden, of course, so what did Mr. Trump gain? (He’s been diagnosed as a psychotic sociopath by a slew of qualified mental health professionals, so its natural that he only worries about himself after all and not Officer Diller!) But I’m surprised at the Secret Service’s allowing this strange event of modern politics to occur! (After all, the Secret Service didn’t allow the Donald to march to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, a long-planned coup and a much more violent event.)

Because of the strict security surrounding past and current presidents, the US has rarely suffered from a presidential assassination like other countries have. (To be sure, many of those are more than welcomed by lovers of democracy everywhere when an autocracy’s citizens finally come to their senses, if only briefly, and depose their dictator.) The last assassination in the US was JFK, of course, but Reagan came close. Who knows how world history would have evolved if JFK or Abe Lincoln had survived, or Reagan had been killed?

Due to the rarity of such events in the US, I’ve not often considered assassination plots in my fiction. True, the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series began with a failed plot to assassinate Mr. Obama (never mentioned by name, by the way), one of the four presidents listed above, in The Midas Bomb. And, after one attempt on presidential candidate Sheila Remington’s life (The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan), that fictional US president was assassinated later on my fictional and futuristic timeline, an event that led into the first novel of the “Clones and Mutants” series (Full Medical, my very first mystery/thriller novel published in 2006).

Royalty gets better treatment on that fictional timeline: Major members of Europe’s royal families escape death and play roles of heroes in Aristocrats and Assassins (fourth novel in the “Chen and Castilblanco” series); only minor royal functionaries suffer. A king on a planet outside ITUIP (the “Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets”) is assassinated, but his son leads a rebellion against the Iranian-syle theocracy that took over afterwards; the son gets his revenge (Rogue Planet). And, because I tried to keep my fictional but parallel timeline ahead of our real one, Queen Elizabeth’s passing on my fictional one was announced a bit ahead of time in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series and the “Inspector Steve Morgan” trilogy.. (My apologies to the royal family. They have a lot of problems now, not the least of which is the British media.)

That’s about it, unless you want to count Putin’s ousting of Yeltsin, hardly a fair fight considering Putin and his evil oligarchs’ devilish plot to kill any chance for democracy in Russia, at least for the time being. Benedict Arnold and John Wilkes Booth seem rather tame compared to the current rulers of the Kremlin.

But don’t fret. My fiction has plenty of villains: Some flash-in-the pans; others, like Vladimir Kalinin, who also takes down a few of Putin’s oligarchs out of revenge. What are good mysteries and thrillers without some really evil villains? (You can meet Kalinin early on in The Midas Bomb, but he has a starring role as villain all the way to Soldiers of God,)

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The Midas Bomb. This first novel in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series has some historical significance in my writing career. The first edition (from the old POD, Infinity, no longer in business) shows that initially I saw the NYPD homicide detectives’ cases as standard third-person mystery/thriller tales. Then I wrote a few more novels in the series, decided to rewrite the first novel in first person as Castilblanco that alternates with the standard third-person to match the subsequent novels in the series. (As mostly a self-published author, I’m free to experiment a bit. In The Last Humans, the first title in the “Last Humans” trilogy, everything was first-person; the second two, A New Dawn and Menace from Moscow, alternated between first and third person. In A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse, I even alternated between the two heroes in first person!) Does this experimentation sell any more books? I doubt it; but I have more fun writing them. And hopefully, dear reader, you’ll have at least as much fun reading them. The Midas Bomb is a good place to start.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Democracy Awakening. Heather Cox Richardson, author (2023). This is an interesting but incomplete history about the rise of authoritarian thinking in the US; it’s also a bit simplistic. However, perhaps this simplicity adds power to the author’s arguments?

It doesn’t take much to see the fascists’ plans to convert the US into a fascist state—presidents like Nixon, Reagan, both Bushes, and other politicians’ shenanigans, aided by fascists in Congress (not gender-specific anymore because even women are also fascists hiding under the cloak of patriotism like Donald J. Trump) and the fascist SCOTUS majority. “Make America Great Again!” has been the fascists’ rallying cry in America for a long time! And, as this history shows, as the numbers of the FPA swell ever so slightly (that’s the Fascist Party of America aka Republican Party, now led by the purely fascist Trump, that “f%$#ing moron” as labeled by Trump’s ex-SecState Tillerson whom Il Duce essentially fired), they lash out with increasingly dirty and evil tricks to satisfy their greed and thirst for power from Reagan’s Iran-Contra ploy to supporting the murderous Pinochet and far beyond, reminding everyone in the world how close America’s fascists have come to a complete takeover.

If the reader thought it all ended with the attempted coup on January 6, 2021, you are terribly mistaken! (By the way, one complaint I have about this type of non-fiction: Ms. Cox refrains from using the word “fascist” and “fascism,” the two words most applicable to America’s GOP now.)

Bottom line: This book can be recommended as a simplistic reminder to those readers who’ve forgotten on purpose or otherwise some or most of the facts about fascist movements in the US. We must be ever-vigilant if we are to protect democracy in America because fascism is a contagious disease that’s always around and ready to strike at America’s body politic.

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“Mary Jo Melendez Trilogy.” AOC and her little fascist friends in the US Congress aren’t smart enough to realize that extremists at either end of the political spectrum can become fascists, although they often prove it in deed. The political spectrum isn’t linear: The far-left and far-right bends around at each end and joins up in that point called fascism, as Cuba and Venezuela have proven on the far-left and Hungary and Turkey on the far-right. Of course, China, Russia, and the US are heading in that direction as well (arguably the first two are already there), which is why Mary Jo’s trilogy, although a work of fiction, might make the hair on your nape stand on end. This trilogy will remind readers of many worldwide events in Muddlin’ Through, Silicon Slummin’ and Just Gettin’ By, and Goin’ the Extra Mile as the books carry Mary Jo around this fascist world. Available wherever fine ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

If you’ve read my novel Son of Thunder from the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, you’ll know that Esther keeps a special ring found in a Turkish cave and used it as a wedding band for Bastiann van Coevorden at their betrothal that takes place at the end of the novel. It later has a few cameos in some novels of the series that follow.

This ring is special, although in that novel there was only one Lord of the ring! Nothing to do with J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy (really one long saga split into three novels), but a bit of religious mystery never quite resolved, making Son of Thunder a lot more mysterious than other novels in the series. (Esther is still waiting for the Vatican museum’s answer to her queries.)

In fact, the question still remains, now that the series has ended: Should Bastiann keep that ancient relic with its inscription in Aramaic? He and Esther have no male children to pass it onto, although Esther has two older brothers she’s estranged from. (They only exchange Christmas cards.) What will happen to that ring when Bastiann leaves this mortal coil?

I hadn’t thought about that question much. (Seven novels in the series–two are free PDFs downloadable from this website’s “Free Stuff & Contests” web page–follow Son of Thunder, as well as other novels.) But I did what everyone else did not that long ago: Ring in the new year! Okay, that’s a terrible pun. No, this question really arose when I finished The Hobbit (I’d read the Lord of the Rings trilogy as a kid but not The Hobbit).

Van Coevorden’s ring represents a bit of mysticism left over from the most mysterious of all Esther’s mystery/thriller novels. Or, does it just represent a bit of history? Perhaps I should write a piece of short fiction about the fate of that ring and what else Esther and Bastiann found in Turkey? We’ll see.

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Son of Thunder. Esther Brookstone first sets out to prove that Sandro Botticelli, the famous Renaissance artist, was never in Turkey despite what his parish priest claims. The story is told in a document found tucked into the the frame of a Botticelli painting the priest owned; it was tucked behind its frame. She finds out she’s wrong and decides to also search for the tomb of St. John the Divine. Available as an ebook and paper version wherever exciting fiction is sold. (If your local bookstore doesn’t have it, ask them to order it!)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

I’ve written more than a few British-style mysteries (see the web page “Books and Short Fiction), and questions keep arising as I write that show my ignorance about life in the UK, of course, but visitors to this blog—they could be American readers or authors themselves—might have also considered some of them. These questions aren’t answered in any detail if at all in my British-style mysteries. Perhaps they shouldn’t be, or they shouldn’t even be asked by an inquisitive Yank who lives across the pond in a country with its own many unanswered questions, but I’m interested in the answers.

Here’s my current list:

Do Brits feel like they’re part of Europe or not? I do mention Brexit in my British-style mysteries, more in the aftermath of PM Boris Johnson’s reign than what led to PM Teresa May’s downfall. (In my stories, the latter received more attention for trying to send those descendants of immigrants who helped clean up after World War II back to their home countries. Esther Brookstone’s handyman in her gallery has Jamaican ancestors, and Steve Morgan’s ARO leader has ancestors from Belize.) Brexit caused a whole host of problems, so a related question here might be: Will the UK ever return to the EU?

Did Winnie and his cronies feel like they’d made a pact with the Devil in World War II? This is related to Europeans’ hate-love affair with Putin. The UK is less dependent on Russia’s petroleum exports, but there’s no doubt that part of the world isn’t always comfortable in its support of Ukraine, especially fascist-leaning countries like Austria, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic.

Churchill’s pact with Stalin followed one old Joe made with Hitler. While Winnie didn’t practice appeasement with Hitler like Chamberlain (or Europeans often do today with Putin), I doubted he liked Stalin very much. Or communists, for that matter (except for Cuban cigars?). Current opinions about Putin, who desperately wants to restore that evil Russian empire, the USSR, and is willing to have thousands of Russian soldiers slaughtered to do it, are mostly negative even among Labour Party members, primarily because the UK thinks of Ukraine as part of Europe even if people in the UK don’t think their country is.

How could Brits have allowed the Iron Lady to lead them into that war for the Malvinas? It was clearly a ploy created by Margaret Thatcher to rev up British pride and make her more popular; but outside the UK, it led many people to believe that Britain was struggling for relevance at best and becoming a bad bully at worst. Participation in a few NATO ops was a lot more noble. Do the Brits also think that Malvinas conflict just Thatcher’s folly? (Note that I don’t call those islands the Falklands.)

What are current attitudes in the UK toward colonialism and their participation in the slave trade? In reference to the Malvinas, there’s some truth in the statement that long ago “the sun never set on the British Empire.” There’s patriotism and pride in that statement. But many outside the UK see the colonial period as causing many problems worldwide, even current ones. From Hong Kong to India, many African nations, Northern Ireland, and Israel, British colonialism left bad feelings bitter hatreds among its subjects. Australia was only a place to send convicts remember, and the slave trade made some Brits a lot of money. Do the UK’s citizens regret any of that?

How did the Brits get rid of Cromwell? That Puritan fanatic created havoc inside and outside England. Perhaps he’s also become a model for religious fundamentalists in the US as well as the UK, although the former are probably more Pope-haters than the latter because the Anglicans (Church of England) aren’t Catholic only because Henry VIII wanted to have a few divorces. Old Oliver was a bit more of a bloodthirsty fascist than Henry, though, especially if you allow for their different eras. Just ask the Irish what they think of Cromwell. How to get rid of fanatical religious leaders of oppressive theocracies like the current Ayatollahs in Iran and future ones like the US House Speaker Mike Johnson and his cohorts seems to be a worldwide problem, hence the importance of this question.

I’m sure that other questions I’d like to ask Brits will keep popping up if I continue to write Brit-style mysteries. Stay tuned.

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My British-style mysteries. The published ones started with Rembrandt’s Angel; the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series ended with nine novels (two are free PDF downloads—see the list on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page). Esther’s stories are linked to the three novels in the “Inspector Steve Morgan Trilogy” and sometimes to my short fiction stories (also found in that list of free PDF downloads). My fascination with British-style mysteries began with Covid-19 enforced “sheltering in place” where I perused many novels that go far beyond anything Agatha Christie ever imagined. (The British publisher Joffe Books has many multi-novel sets that are inexpensive “best buys” in this genre. Visitors to this blog should check them out…and some of mine as well!)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

[Note from Steve: I’ve been remiss in offering these short stories and novellas. If anyone cares, I’ve been doing what the title says. (I hope…although, some who also read my political blog might argue that my retirement from running novelistic marathons is far from graceful!) In any case, I thought it was appropriate to end this series by returning to my intrepid Detective Rolando Castilblanco, one of my earliest creations. I hope you enjoy the story!]

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Aging Gracefully

Copyright 2024, Steven M. Moore

Pam put down her section of the Times, removed her reading glasses, and smiled at me. I put down my glass of Jameson—I only did a few sips now, still neat—and smiled back. Drinking that brew never had been an homage to the stereotypical Irish cops in the NYPD. I just preferred it over other whiskeys—bourbon too biting, scotch too smoky—and whiskey over rum and coke or some other drink people often consider more typical of Puerto Ricans. Maybe I had acquired enough blarney to make my choice even more logical?

I knew this woman so well now that which smile she was flashing me was obvious: She was going to propose something that I might not be keen on doing but would willingly do if I could because she’s the love of my life. There might even be an argument that I knew I’d probably lose, again willingly. After all, the man is the king of his castle until the queen arrives, as they say. That’s a rule for any man to live by when it came to his woman! And in my case, I figured I was lucky to have her.

Let’s face it: I’ve always looked like many of the thugs I’ve often pursued and arrested, and that never changed for the better as I aged. I’m a bear of a man, always have been, from the time when I was still a young and nimble Navy SEAL traipsing around in the Middle East to when I walked out the precinct’s doors to become ex-Sergeant Rolando Castilblanco, celebratory emphasis on “ex.”

None of my detective skills involved mind-reading, though, so I waited to hear what mi mariposa’s sly smile meant, secure in the knowledge that whatever it meant might get me into trouble. That had happened, sometimes getting Pam into trouble as well.

“You know, Rollie, our European trip wasn’t exactly the romantic vacation I’d imagined.”

Talk about stating the obvious! Assuming her comment was about how the terrorist Kadar had resurrected from the dead to begin his evil campaign by nearly killing me, a very good assumption albeit a bit dated, Pam’s observation was an understatement. Or was she referring to our more recent little getaway when we visited Esther and Bastiann in London? That had begun back in New York with an attack on our daughter, Ceci. I ended up working in London to thwart some Chinese agents, so that trip wasn’t exactly pleasureful either.

It was unusual and interesting how my “Big Apple beat” prowling for criminal lowlifes on the city’s mean streets so often took me elsewhere in the US and abroad. Pursuing the murderer of an FBI agent’s son—the agent had been a good friend and became a love interest for my partner Chen—that pursuit had taken me to the Fascist Republic of Texas and had ended in a trip to the Caribbean. (The state had become much worse over the years, a place smart Latinos and women needing abortions had to avoid now because their lives depended on it!) Unlike AOC and all her little commies, I’d seen Cuba wasn’t the worker’s paradise, but maybe I was just biased after being shot at in Gitmo.

“Don’t keep me in suspense, mi amor,” I said to my wife. “What are you proposing?”

***

Pam thought a moment. She’d been a TV personality but was without a script writer, so maybe she was looking for the right words to convince me? I knew she would eventually, but I hoped it wasn’t a long, drawn-out discussion.

“I was referring to our trip when that awful terrorist was kidnapping those aristocrats,” she finally said.

I nodded: That had been my first guess. Kadar had made both our lives and Chen’s miserable. Where was this going?

“We could avoid any possibility for a repetition of something like that by taking a river cruise like Esther and Bastiann did for their honeymoon.”

“Please remember that Bastiann had to solve a murder case on that riverboat,” I said. “That wasn’t exactly a joyful and romantic honeymoon for those two old lovebirds.”

“Oh, that could never occur again. You’re not a cop any longer; I’m not a reporter. Very few people even know we exist anymore. Our kids now live more dangerous lives that we do.”

I wasn’t going to argue with her about that—Ceci was a CSI and Pedro was a cop, and both had already proven their livelihoods could lead them into danger—but as an ex-cop, I still had many enemies, including some lowlifes still in jail who might have it in for me and would soon get out for “good behavior.” Even dumb apes with one-track minds can hold a grudge for years!

“I suppose you have a tour already picked out?”

“I do. The same tour in fact with the same riverboat company Esther and Bastiann used.” She smiled. This was now one of her gotcha-smiles. “Less chance of a repeat if I understand Bayesian statistics at all.”

Bayesian statistics? Is that a thing? What the hell has she been reading? Pam had always been more curious and self-taught than I am. Her work had covered lots of topics with interviews of many so-called experts on many things. The perps I’d caught were generally the dumb ones. The smart perps, often psychotic sociopaths, used their better brains to commit evil deeds, an exception being a certain ex-president who wasn’t smart at all and just barely escaped serious jail time…and maybe a firing squad for being a traitor?

“Are we doing Munich or Prague before the riverboat cruise?” I knew something about Esther and Bastiann’s trip, more his version than hers.

“No. This will be a trial run for you. It should be easy. They have one-, two-, or three-level difficulty ratings for their land tours, or we can just stay onboard and watch the Danube flow by.”

Oh joy, I thought, recalling that all those new fascist European countries we’d also be passing by.

***

Our European super-vacation was delayed!

I knew something was wrong as we sat at our gate at JFK and I heard shots fired. Later I learned that the small group of terrorists had broken through TSA security, killing three poor agents on their way to our gate.

When they arrived, I saw they were dressed in business suits. (I suppose full military regalia might have been suspicious.) They were waving pistols with huge magazines hanging from their undersides; I guessed they had more mags in their pockets. TSAs’ scanners would have spotted those weapons obviously, so that must be why they’d broken through the security station. An obvious point of failure! Maybe TSA needed to screen people as they entered the terminal instead?

Domestic terrorism had plagued the US even before that ex-president had tried to overthrow the US government claiming fraud in that election where he’d been the big loser. Militia members from California had participated in a crazy cartel leader’s plan to take over most of the American drug trade that oxycontin manufacturers had shown to be so profitable. Al Qaeda terrorists had participated as well. It had been a huge cluster-fuck that had almost killed Hal, an American Interpol colleague of the Dutch Bastiann; they’d become consultants for MI5. I knew all this for multiple reasons, the last because of submarines. Long story!

Our terrorists didn’t wear red hats, big sombreros, or military helmets, some apparel that might have made security agents wonder. They looked more like young businessmen off to have a good time at a boondoggling meeting somewhere in Europe. I bided my time, thinking about one, what they intended to accomplish, and two, what I could do to help prevent it. It was clear that the terminal would soon be invaded by US agents of all types. In a firefight, innocent people could die. Shit, Pam and I could die! Not exactly the vacation she’d wanted!

Sometimes on a case, Chen or I discussed a perp’s possible motives. Knowing them could help us solve the case. The weird cases were those we solved without ever learning the motives. In Europe, the case of that terrorist Kadar had almost been like that. He’d had a whole lot of so-called “counterterrorism experts” baffled. There’d been a clear motive, a terrible one, to be honest, so we’d been lucky to stop him.

Consequently, I couldn’t help wondering what these domestic terrorists’ motives were. With all the airport’s security around and more on call who’d be there in minutes, why take the risk of mounting what could very well be a suicide op for them?

Suicide? My memories time-traveled back to 9/11/2001! Our plane wasn’t a good one to hijack to Cuba or anywhere else. It was a huge jumbo with a lot of twelve-seat rows in a 3-6-3 combo separated by two aisles. I used my smart phone to find out where it was headed after Frankfort, Germany, hoping that would provide a clue. The answer I got was Tel Aviv, Israel.

Despite that crazy ex-president’s efforts—he’d encouraged the Israelis to make Jerusalem their new capital, pissing off a lot of Muslims and even Christians who shared that holy city as a shrine—Tel Aviv was still the most important city in Israel for multiple reasons, mostly economic. It was a safe assumption that the SOBs at JFK wanted to go there, although the plane would have enough fuel to go to other places. And big cities don’t only exist in America! London or Paris could also be a target. (The jumbo would need a large airport to land, if a landing was in the terrorists’ plan.)

As the terrorists tried to maintain control of a lot of frightened passengers, I studied them. They were black-haired, brown-eyed, and swarthy-skinned, but hell, that describes me as well! They could be from anywhere and fanatics about anything.

I moved closer to a subgroup of them to try to determine their language. A gun swung in my direction to cover me.

***

Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

Want to read the rest of this story? Easy…but TANSTAFL, because you’ll have to make a few clicks. Rather than serialize it, you will find it next week in the free PDF download “Castilblanco Redux Plus Two,” a short fiction collection that contains two more crime stories set in the Sheffield area of England. Consider all these and many other free PDF downloads of crime mysteries to be an introduction to the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco,” “Esther Brookstone Art Detective,” and “Inspector Steve Morgan” series, Have fun!

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Far too often!

The Star Wars series turned me off with its very first film (whatever number that was in their all-too-cute numbering scheme). I knew immediately that it was basically a fantasy filled with references to Japanese ninjas, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s characters (even the names!), and Isaac Asimov’s plot devices (the Foundation). Where were the lawyers at that time who went after plagiarists? (Or the ones even now?) Jedi warriors and fairy-tale princesses with light sabers? C’mon! (Okay, I’ll admit the music was interesting, but I liked that composer a lot more when he was leading the Boston Pops.)

Frank Herbert’s Dune series is even worse as sci-fi but at least it was in book form long before Hollywood screenwriters took a break from writing terrible scripts (e.g. Star Wars!) and tried to adapt those novels to the silver screen (a new Marvel Comics-like version is about to come out). Herbert’s books were already pure fantasy (forget that damn Hugo because it’s also given for fantasy!) filled with magic, mysticism, sandworms, and that miraculous spice existing only on one arid world, a coveted and moneymaking substance that Ponce de Leon might have searched for in Florida if he could get past DeSantis’s anti-immigrant Gestapo. (I’m sure Ron would have arrested him and sent him to New York if that fascist Florida governor and huge presidential primary loser had been around back then.) The Dune series is just more fantasy, whether in book or movie format. (The movies have been worse than the books, but that’s almost always the case!)

Too many people (a majority who have never read a book, by the way…if they can read—Trump can’t) conflate fantasy with sci-fi, and authors and screenwriters exploit them by adding a few starships and blasters to Harry Potter and call it sci-fi. (A silly author like Margaret Atwood might pardon their sins by calling it all “speculative fiction,” of course; she’s become rich peddling her fantasies.) That’s the formula for creating a sci-fi classic, right? Wrong!

Science fiction, sci-fi for short, even if you accept A. C. Clarke’s claim that any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic (consider Ugh the Caveman finding some time-traveler’s smart phone, basically a little computer!), must be some sort of reasonable extrapolation of current science. Comsats were created by Clarke in his fiction long before Elon Musk littered near-earth orbits with his space junk! Sure, the farther into the future an author goes with his story, the more bold the extrapolation has to be, and it all often approaches Clarke’s limit. But science fiction stories nowadays have generally ceased to be a logical extensions of current science, stories that often contain clear violations of known physical laws, which is what fantasy does (and all the examples above, I might add).

I read very little fantasy now—I graduated from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter on Mars stories with their Jedi warriors and beautiful egg-laying princesses decades ago. (For all their sophistication, I guess those Martians didn’t have IVF; and John Carter probably never realized an egg back on Earth was already a chicken, so he couldn’t apply that lesson learned to Martian females’ eggs!) I especially avoid fantasy stories if their authors claim they’re sci-fi. (You can comment on this post and tell me if you agree or disagree.)

Or, you might want to read some sci-fi classics written by Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and others (even some of mine?) to see how good sci-fi can be when it’s not conflated with fantasy! (By the way, the best sci-fi authors, like me, are ex-scientists. When they’re not, they can easily confuse fantasy with sci-fi!)

***

Comments are always welcome. (Just follow the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page. If you don’t, I might send you an ESP-transmitted whack with my light saber!)

“Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection.” There are three complete sci-fi novels in this one inexpensive bundle. The first, Survivors of the Chaos, will seem a bit too close for comfort to what’s going on in the US and the world today. The last leads into the novel Rogue Planet and the Dr, Carlos short stories. (The first book represents well deserved mockery of the current Iranian regime; for the second collection, see the list of free downloadable PDFs on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page.) These are “evergreen books” (as entertaining, fresh, and hopefully still profound now as on the day I finished their manuscripts), but sci-fi in general can never get old, can it?

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

From 1984 to Atlas Shrugged and Ender’s Game, authors have stated their political positions. When their works take extreme positions and/or are morally extreme, one way or the other, readers and critics can react. All three novels just mentioned are political, debatable, but shouldn’t be banned.

This article applies not only to the past, however. In fact, it’s more about authors failing to state their positions now. As Tom Clancy, certainly a successful author if not a philosophical or political sage, said, fiction has to seem real, and I would add that real human beings are philosophical and political animals. I’m not asking authors to take positions I favor; I’m telling them to take positions! Period. I’m not asking them to present both sides of an issue nor take what I’d call the moral high (or low) road either. But authors who write silly fantasies (J. K. Rowling’s a well-known example) and schmaltzy or smutty romances (I don’t read them, so that Fifty Shades crap is the only example that comes to mind) are shirking their duty of being honest observers of the human condition when writing their stories, usually motivated by their desire to make tons of money by appealing to readers’ escapist and/or prurient interests. Of course, they share the blame with the acquisition editors of every publisher under the Big Five conglomerates huge umbrellas.

Some of my readers have told me that I’m too political in my fiction, even friends who know better to believe that I measure my success as a writer by my sales figures. I celebrate those comments! They mean that I’ve done my job!

Too many authors nowadays write pablum for the masses and try to please all readers all the time in order to maximize their royalties, often pleasing no one in the process. They become accomplices in crimes against humanity by becoming completely irrelevant. All three authors of the books mentioned in my first paragraph are relevant in the sense that their fiction teaches a reader something I might agree or not agree with—the dangers of fascism, quirky economic theories, and homophobia, respectively—but what they say is important in current political debates as they were when the books were published. Relevance is the key feature we should demand of fiction in today’s troubling times; and if that has lasting value, all the better!

***

Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

Defanging the Red Dragon. I originally wrote this novel as a 2022 holiday gift to my readers. It features my quartet of detectives—Brookstone, Castilblanco, Chen, and van Coevorden—from two series—“Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” and “Esther Brookstone Art Detective”—and counts as the eighth novel in the first series and the sixth in the second. It’s also completely free (as is Esther’s seventh). (See the list of free downloadable PDFs on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page.)

While the dictator Vladimir Putin and his fascist Russian accomplices and enablers are featured more as villains in those two series, this free novel has the fascist Xi and his Chinese spies as the major villains. But there are good Chinese too: Esther’s new artist friends, for example, who play important roles. They had to flee when the Chinese fascists took over Hong Kong.

Considering the title and the importance of those creative and gentle Chinese artists, let me present this novel to you as a celebration of the “Year of the Dragon,” 2024. You won’t find this book in any bookstore, but it’s a complete novel you might not want to miss. Like all good “political fiction,” it will be forever evergreen. Download it now.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!