Mystery and thriller authors sometimes kill off main characters. I did that in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series (the Mossad agent in Angels Need Not Apply), but I couldn’t do it with Castilblanco and Chen (both have appeared in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series as well, most notably in Defanging the Red Dragon).

Main characters can also be villains, of course, and my arch-villain, Vladimir Kalinin, appears in many of my novels, most recently enjoying roles in the latest “Esther Brookstone” novels. I eventually killed him, though—you might have to read some more of my novels to find out how, when, and where!

But protagonists are special, aren’t they? Readers are often fond of minor, one-book characters even. (A reviewer lamented the demise of that Mossad agent, and an editor lamented the loss of the Turkish detective in Son of Thunder, an “Esther Brookstone” novel.) I prefer to “retire” characters, especially principal ones. Chen and Castilblanco’s retirements aren’t explicit; Esther and Bastiann’s is more so. The latter were getting up in years and were old to begin with (cameos in the “Chen and Castilblanco” series and their first solo novel, Rembrandt’s Angel), so they deserved their graceful and peaceful retirement after fighting crime through nine novels. That suggests the question: Who do I hand these marvelous crime-fighting duos’ torches to?

Castilblanco has his adopted kids, Cecilia and Pedro; you’ve possibly met them. Ceci is a CSI and Pedro is an NYPD detective. Esther and Bastiann have no children, though, so I had to consider alternatives. I rather liked the Scottish plods in Celtic Chronicles, Esther and Bastiann’s last adventure chronicled by her old boss, George Langston. The Irish inspector in Intolerance caught my eye too. But Steve Morgan won. He was an important character in The Klimt Connection. He has a military background like Castilblanco and left his hectic life in Scotland Yard to transfer to Bristol PD. Only that became a bit hectic too! In compensation, he finds romance in the Bristol suburbs, a pairing almost as unusual as Esther and Bastiann’s.

So the “art detective” is out—long live Esther Brookstone! And the “plod” is in—welcome Detective Inspector Steve Morgan.

***

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Legacy of Evil. This first “Inspector Steve Morgan” novel, both a British-style mystery and a suspenseful spy thriller, is hot off the press (meaning Draft2Digital). Former Scotland Yard Inspector Steve Morgan receives his first murder case after a transfer to Bristol PD and a stressful secondment to MI5. An old man’s murder is soon followed by three related ones. Their investigations lead the DI and his team to probe the operations of a national crime syndicate as well as uncover a Russian oligarch’s plans to destabilize the UK. Eventually, both MI5 and NCA become involved. (Esther Brookstone doesn’t go away completely. She has a cameo here.) This book is available wherever quality ebooks are sold (just not on Amazon).

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

Did these birds become so popular because of those Harry Potter stories? Are these rapacious carnivores so cute and cuddly that everyone loves them? Or have we always loved them because they say “Who”? And did advertisers just discover them now?

As a writer, I have to be an observer, mostly of human nature and not owls! So, I’ve discovered that suddenly something weird is going on: Owls might be replacing cats and dogs as human beings’ favorite literary animals. Why? What’s changed?

Take commercials. There’s the Xyzal owl, the opticians’ owls, and so forth. (I’m lucky to remember any product now because I’m the ad person’s worst target: I don’t pay attention to the the products, just the human drama, especially when they interact with animals.)

What is it about an owl that’s suddenly made this bird so popular? It can’t be about its wisdom. Like most animals that have succeeded in Darwin’s evolutionary Hunger Games (Mother Nature’s epic stories are far better than that sci-fi schlock of the same name), the owl is perfectly adapted to the ecological niches it populates—not exactly wise these days as human beings destroy habitats—and it operates mostly on instinct. Except for Harry’s owl, I’ve never seen one play an important role in literature. Exceptions might be Poe with his raven and Koontz with his retriever, but Rawling has an owl?

Owls really aren’t nice birds either. It’s a carnivore that feeds on small rodents and birds, ripping them apart and swallowing the raw flesh. For hunting, it’s as deadly as a hawk, falcon, or eagle, with comparable or better eyesight and a better sense of smell. An owl is a killing machine!

Maybe I’ve just seen too many PBS Nature shows to think of this flying carnivore as cute and cuddly? Am I just missing something? Readers, let me know.

I think there’s a lesson to be learned here, though: An owl just looks wise, and that happens because we see it idly hanging around during the day (if at all), not when it’s being a nocturnal killer. During the day, it just stares at us with those big eyes, rotating its head through almost 360 degrees to keep us in view and make sure we, the most dangerous animal on the planet, are not threatening them.

An owl only appears to be a wise observer of human beings. In other words, it isn’t something an author of fiction should emulate! A writer truly should be a wise observer of humans to make his fiction seem more real!

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The “ABC Sci-Fi Mysteries.” These novels for young adults (and adults who are young at heart!) are on sale at Smashwords for 99 cents each! Give your tweens or teens young adult novels to read this summer, providing them with a head start on next fall’s book reports. The Secret Lab (KU26R), The Secret of the Urns (HQ66E), and Mind Games (MG73K) are all on sale at Smashwords. (Or, if you prefer, each novel has a print version, and you can find those wherever quality print books are sold, but they’re so inexpensive that they’re not on sale.) If the ebook’s sale price doesn’t appear when you check out from Smashwords, use the indicated promo code following the title. All these books’ protagonists are young adults (except for Mr. Paws, the mutant cat in the first novel), but adults can enjoy these futuristic tales as well.

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

I’m frustrated when I know there’s the perfect word in a given situation and can’t quite remember it. That’s when I remember that my verbal memory has a lot of junk in it: sports terms, even for sports I never played; trivia facts, ones I could easily look up now with Google; technical terms I once used a lot but don’t use at all in my writing; random words from French, German, Russian, and Spanish—a lot from the latter—that often fight with English; and so forth. The hard disk in my head probably needs a serious cleanup defragging!

While I ignore all writing gurus’ advice to write for a target audience to help end this frustration—fiction has no target audience because any reader can like anything—I tend to avoid pedantic and erudite writing, using vocabulary a reader of average intelligence can relate to (that obviously excludes many politicians, especially those who rarely read anything). I let my plots and themes carry the complexity, not my verbiage, because I practice minimalist writing, a style that avoids excessive description and dialogue and permits the reader to participate in the creative process. I give just enough description so that readers can create their own images about what’s going on. (In old crime and detective literature, especially that from the US, that’s often called “hard-boiled” writing.)

But I am always looking for the right word. Most of them just come without effort as I write the story. When not and I know there is one, I just put an X to hold the place. I’m usually able to replace X with the right word when I content edit, which I do paragraph by paragraph, page by page, and chapter by chapter. Of course, sometimes I have to look for another word…reluctantly…but I can do that too, knowing my intended meaning.

I’ve had success with this writing process from my first published novel (Full Medical, 2006) to my last (Celtic Chronicles, 2022). While it seems there are more X’s lately—this old fellow isn’t getting any younger!—I usually can find le bon mot. When I no longer can, I guess I’ll stop writing.

The reader of this article might ask: How speedy is this writing prcess? The easy answer: It varies. Sometimes finding background material slows me down. Other times, it’s long narrative passages (none of them are very long in my prose), especially world-building in sci-fi. But generally the writing process is a speedy one. It’s the other stuff that takes time and is often a major distraction: Editing and marketing often take more time than the actual writing. Social media takes time too. I’m lucky I don’t have a day-job anymore; when I did, it was hard to maintain the pace.

Getting a book written and published is always an adventure, no matter how you do it. You just have to remember to do what works for you. How I do it might not suit you, but it suits me just fine.

***

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The “ABC Sci-Fi Mysteries.” These novels for young adults (and adults who are young at heart!) are on sale at Smashwords for 99 cents each! Give your tweens or teens young adult novels to read this summer, providing them with a head start on next fall’s book reports. The Secret Lab (KU26R), The Secret of the Urns (HQ66E), and Mind Games (MG73K) are all on sale at Smashwords. (Or, if you prefer, each novel has a print version, and you can find those wherever quality print books are sold, but they’re so inexpensive that they’re not on sale.) If the ebook’s sale price doesn’t appear when you check out from Smashwords, use the indicated promo code following the title. All these books’ protagonists are young adults (except for Mr. Paws, the mutant cat in the first novel), but adults can enjoy these futuristic tales as well.

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

Towards the end of Intolerance (a complete “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” novel available as a free PDF download—see my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page), A. B. Carolan meets with his old friend, the Irish copper Michael O’Hara, for drinks at a Donegal pub. There A. B. confesses to having a bit of writer’s block. Michael gives him some advice to cure it.

That advice is basically to remember all the tools a novelist possesses for writing a good story. That list of tools is as old as storytelling: plot; themes; characterization; dialogue; direct or internal; bacground and flashbacks; and so forth. Perhaps more importantly, a meta-tool if you will, is a guiding rule, the Goldilocks Principle: Not too much, not too little, but just enough. How much a writer should use each tool or stortytelling element depends ultimately on the story but also on its intended audience and, I hate to say it, genres. I use the plural “genres” only in the sense of categorizations or descriptors. Writing coaches often try to limit writers to one genre, but good stories can often be described in many ways. For example, A. B.’s Origins had mystery, thriller, romantic, historical, and sci-fi characteristics. So, what Michael’s advice comes down to is to use those tools appropriate for those characteristics, following the Goldilocks Principle.

There’s a bit more to the discussion between A. B. and Michael in the novel. A. B. did a fine job with Origins and his previous novels in the “ABC Sci-Fi Mysteries” series (on sale this month—see below). He’s worried about the rest of the “Denisovan Trilogy” novels he wants to write. (To simplify its description, the trilogy is planned to be something akin to Battlestar Galactica in reverse: hominids were stolen from Earth and taken to the stars, and the protagonists, the remainder of some Denisovans found on Earth, want to return to the stars.) He just needs to get to the writing. Just do it, A. B.!

***

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The “ABC Sci-Fi Mysteries.” These novels for young adults (and adults who are young at heart!) are on sale at Smashwords for 99 cents each! Give your tweens or teens young adult novels to read this summer, providing them with a head start on next fall’s book reports. The Secret Lab (KU26R), The Secret of the Urns (HQ66E), and Mind Games (MG73K) are all on sale at Smashwords. (Or, if you prefer, each novel has a print version, and you can find those wherever quality print books are sold, but they’re so inexpensive that they’re not on sale.) If the ebook’s sale price doesn’t appear when you check out from Smashwords, use the indicated promo code following the title. All these books’ protagonists are young adults (except for Mr. Paws, the mutant cat in the first novel), but adults can enjoy these futuristic tales as well.

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

In a sense, I’ve discovered a way to keep a series going without writing another novel for the series: Write one that connects one series to another. I call it a “bridge novel.” Maybe Grafton wouldn’t have bored me so soon if she’d done that with her “alphabet series”—“B is for Bridge” could have been the title. Baldacci, Child, Patterson, and other formulaic old horses in the Big Five’s stables could have used that trick too.

This isn’t a new concept in my case. The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan is a bridge between the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series and the “Clones and Mutants” trilogy, and Soldiers of God is one between “Clones and Mutants” and the “Chaos Chronicles” trilogy. There’s no bridge between “Chen and Castilblanco” and the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, although the two series are related. You might consider Defanging the Red Dragon a bridge novel (available as a free PDF download—see my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page), but it’s really a crossover novel. (Chen and Castilblanco as well as Esther and Bastiann all have major roles in that story.)

But now the gap between “Chen and Castilblanco” and “Clones and Mutants” will be spanned by three bridges, two novels and a novella: the Virginia Morgan and to-be-published Legacy of Evil novels, and the novella “The Phantom Harvester” (also a free PDF download). All are approximately contemparaneous and nicely fit in that in-between fictional space. And all feature that arch-villain Vladimir Kalinin! (The protagonists are varied: DHS Ashley Scot from the “Chen and Castilblanco” series, DI Steve Morgan from the “Esther Brookstone” series, and Castilblanco’s kids, respectively.)

But Legacy of Evil might lead to a separate series for DI Steve Morgan! In that case, my bridge metaphor breaks down. Maybe I should consider all these series as tree limbs branching out from one huge one, my “future history” series. Asimov extended his Foundation trilogy linearly in both directions. But why limit myself to a linear growth? Stay tuned.

***

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The Klimt Connection. DI Steve Morgan first appears here and plays an important role in this tale about stolen art and domestic terrorism. After a bomb destroys their flat, Esther Brookstone, ex-MI6 spy and ex-Scotland Yard Inspector in the Art and Antiques Division, and Bastiann van Coevorden, her husband, ex-Interpol agent, and current MI5 consultant, are forced to stay in an MI5 safehouse along with others who are threatened by the bomber and his accomplices. The hunt for the domestic terrorists is UK- and EU-wide and leads to the discovery of a nationwide conspiracy, all financed by the far right and designed to purge the UK of perceived invaders, migrants and refugees who are accused of wanting to “replace” the white majority.

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

“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”—Tom Clancy.

Said in another way, a novel should hold up a mirror to the real world, showing its negatives as well as its positives. Fascism is still part of our reality, maybe more so now than ever before. Shouldn’t it be considered in our fiction?

I know many readers, especially those who read mystery and thriller novels, don’t like to see politics or political violence in fiction beyond the good-vs.-bad trivial plots. They just want the simple “Perils of Pauline”-like stories about stereotypical villains being defeated by stereotypical two-dimensional, superhuman-like good gals and good guys. Some people mature beyond Marvel Comics-like characters, but many don’t. Writers pandering to the latter readers include famous names like Baldacci, Child, Connelly, and Patterson here in the US as well as James, Penny, and Rankin in the UK and other Commonwealth countries. The last is a tradition that started with Holmes vs. Moriarty, and it has been embraced by every major book publisher of mystery and thriller fiction since then.

Those famous authors and many less famous ones willingly accept those publishers’ constraints; I don’t. If politics and political violence aren’t in a mystery/thriller novel, it’s really nothing more than a fantasy akin to a Harry Potter book! Such books are divorced from reality and violate Clancy’s dictum as well as my version of it. Politics and political violence are a part of real human experience. To avoid them is to write pablum divorced from reality (in contrast to politicians who utter it).

That’s why I include them in my fiction. And I won’t parse my words by using soft, euphemistic terms like autocracy or totalitarianism in place of fascism. You cannot sugarcoat or make light of the evil fascism has caused in the world and continues to cause. There are few themes as important as this one. It makes dystopian books like Darkness at Noon and 1984 and post-apocalyptic ones like Ape and Essence and Not This August famous classics. (Haven’t read them? Shame on you!)

Thanks to greedy authors like Baldacci et al and their money-grubbing publishers, we seem to have lost that realism in fiction as they pander to the masses by writing and publishing unrealistic pablum. I’ve done my best to break the chains of that constraint. I will not pander to readers’ preferences for unrealistic fiction. Among many reasons for being a self-published author, perhaps that’s the most important one.

Like any background material for a novel, one has to do their homework to handle properly the politics and political violence associated with fascism. I have endeavored to do this. (I read a lot more nonfiction than fiction if the measure is reading time spent, and I’m a voracious reader.) One has to get it right, especially when they include real-world figures. (They also make the fiction more relevant!)

Do I make a big deal of this in my prose? Themes are secondary to plot in my stories as I weave them in and around the plot in a seamless fashion. They hopefully enhance the plot as they make it more realistic and more human. Fascism and its consequences are no exceptions. Yes, it’s evil, but we have to deal with it if the human race is to survive. What better goal for the good gals and guys of my novels to achieve than to do their small part to assure fascism’s defeat in our world?

There are plenty of stories to be found in the politics and political violence of our past, present, and future. The battles of real life shouldn’t be ignored in our fiction. If readers don’t like to read about them, maybe they’re part of the problem?

***

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Celtic Chronicles. Esther’s many adventures in fighting for justice for innocent victims end with this ninth novel in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series. The book starts with Esther and Bastiann at an archaeological dig in Scotland where a young student is murdered. It becomes more complex as ex-Russian and ex-Chinese oligarchs appear on the scene, as well as the arch-villain Vladimir Kalinin, the Russian ex-pat bent on revenge against Putin and his cronies. The 21^st-century versions of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot + Police Scotland detectives + MI5 agents = entertaining adventures for all armchair sleuths and fans of spy fiction. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold (but not on Amazon). Same for previous novels in the series. except for Defanging the Red Dragon and Intolerance, complete novels that are free PDF downloads available at my website (see my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page).

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

There are hard-bounds, often lacking art because they have flyers, which are also often lacking art; trade paperbacks; and those small airport paperbacks—the latter two often with tasteless covers as well. Many older readers prefer them; younger generations (and book pirates?) prefer ebooks or audiobooks (are they pirated?), if younger generations read at all (they’re distracted by social media, computer games, and streaming video). Besides the negatives already hinted at, and being objective, there are more negatives for books in print than for ebooks (I have no experience with audiobooks, either as a reader or writer).

First, print books are expensive to make and therefore expensive for the buyer. An ebook is just a computer file, whether read on a laptop, ereader, or smart phone. A print book, no matter its format, costs more to produce, materials-wise, so the Big Five publishing conglomerates use that as an excuse to stick it to readers (and give writers fewer royalties?). It’s difficult to find a hardbound or trade paperback published by them for less than $20. They publish the paper versions first because that’s where they can scam the reading public more easily, so the ebook versions hit the market later (same for airport paperbacks that are the least expensive of the print versions).

Second, print books in any form are bad for the environment. Is sacrificing Mother Nature’s lungs, Earth’s forests, worth satisfying your preference for print? You might say, “It’s just one book.” Well no, if you’re an avid reader like I am, it’s many. And add up the numbers for a big print run from a Big Five publisher. (Celeb and scandal exposes are the worst!) You might also say, “I just borrow my print books from the library.” Okay, but there are still a lot of libraries! And they tend to feature the more popular books, even buying several copies of them, exacerbating the destruction to our forests.

Third, and something readers often don’t think about, is that print books take up space. You might read each one once or twice, and then they sit on your shelves, weighing them down. Or you give them away in a school’s book sale, say, a good deed to be sure, but what is done with those after they’re sold? Eventually, they all end up in landfills and certainly not replacing the forests that were destroyed to produce them! You don’t want an ebook, you can delete the file. Done. No sagging bookshelves, no more filling landfills, and no killing of forests.

When I started publishing, ebooks didn’t exist. (Amazing, right?) I chose two of those old POD (Print-on-Demand) firms because they didn’t make huge runs and only printed a book when it was sold. My ecological proclivities weren’t all that happy with the situation, but I lived with my crimes because I didn’t expect to sell that many books (and I didn’t!). But when ebooks appeared, I preferred them, as both a reader and writer. All my old POD books eventually had ebook second editions, and I preferred to publish only ebooks from then on.

There are some glaring exceptions, all due to my experimenting with traditional publishing: The first three novels in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series have print versions, for example, the first two because they were published by Penmore Press, a traditional small press, and the third by Carrick Publishing to complete a trilogy. Other novels in that series only have ebook versions, though. The first novel in “The Last Humans” series, published by Black Opal Books, has a print version; the second only has an ebook version because that publisher and I parted our ways. (That also happened with Penmore, but for different reasons.) I’ve published a few other print versions as well with Carrick Publishing, but most of my oeuvre is in ebook format.

I believe print books deserve to die. Their negatives far outweigh their positives. But they will probably continue to live on as long as traditional publishers do. But maybe the latter should also go the way of the dinosaurs?

***

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Last chance! This June’s 99-cent sale on Smashwords ends soon. Purchase the entire “Clones and Mutants” trilogy for $0.99 per book: In Full Medical, Evil Agenda, and No Amber Waves of Grain, arch-villain Vladimir Kalinin is at his scheming best as the clones and good mutant first work against him and then with him. These “evergreen” sci-fi thrillers offer readers many hours of reading entertainment for just $3!

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

[Note from Steve: The reader may consider this part two of the article “Brits don’t like me…”.]

While the British royals are far from being main characters in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, the mere fact that the series is partially set in the UK implies that mentioning them from time to time is hard to avoid. And while I’ll repeat here that I wish old Queen Elizabeth well on her Platinum Jubilee (she’s now the longest reigning British monarch), but even the most ardent fan of British royalty must wonder what the future will bring because she’s at a frail age. Prince Charlie won’t be nearly as long on the throne—he’s turning seventy-four, after all!

To put things in perspective, though, that royal family is just as troubled and dysfunctional as any other family. And the Royal Mum hasn’t done too well raising her kids either. (Charlie is an ex-philanderer and Andrew an ex-pervert. One never hears much about Anne or Edward.) No one knows how grandson Willie will turn out either when he ascends the throne.

Europe in general and the UK in particular, together with the Commonwealth countries, just can’t shake off their traditional remnants of royalty. Most have managed to create stable democracies despite their royals, though. In fact, their parliamentary systems are inherently more stable than presidential ones for the simple reason that the PM is chosen by the party in power in the main legislative body. Few parliamentary systems have made the mistakes the US’s founding fathers made in creating the US Senate and Electoral College. The UK’s House of Lords is basically just a powerless debating society, a gentlemen’s club for useless British toffs.

So, why do European countries, nearly all with a parliamentary system, tolerate their foppish royals? Because they’re addicted to the pomp and circumstance (strike up Elgar’s famous pieces, maestro), something a PM and Parliament can’t provide. I suppose the only bad thing about all that P and C is that taxpayers’ money is spent on it and on providing those foppish royals an easy, pampered life!

Let’s face it, Americans: Most European countries have a lot more history than many other nations, including ours, so their traditional P and Q has a long history as well. The Brits are more addicted to it than most, so I suspect they will keep plodding along, feeding their addiction and tolerating the royal parasites.

There’s a group in the UK, though, promoting the idea that Queen Elizabeth should be that country’s last monarch. (Maybe Esther Brookstone—see below—is a member of that group? She votes Labour, you know.) I don’t believe that will occur there or elsewhere in Europe—the addiction is just too strong. Making the tradition of royal characters in our fiction will continue as well, so authors should include them when they indeed be useful characters.

Tom Clancy included Prince Charlie in Patriot Games; I mention him in several “Brookstone” novels as well. I put other European royals in some novels too, most obviously in Aristocrats and Assassins from the “Chen and Castilblanco” series (Esther’s Bastiann has a cameo in that novel, by the way). In general, royals are secondary characters in my prose, but they add some realism to the European novels. And, to paraphrase Clancy, fiction to be successful has to seem real, so we probably should keep them around in our fiction when appropriate.

***

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The “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series. While Esther and hubby Bastiann have taken a well-deserved retirement, readers can still read about their adventures in the nine novels of the series. Many take place in the UK, of course, because it’s Esther’s home patch, but she also travels to Ireland, Scotland, and even to Peru, Norway, and Turkey as the series progresses. You don’t have to work as hard as the old girl, though. You can enjoy all the mystery, thrills, and suspense from your favorite reading chair, maybe while sipping tea and enjoying some scones? Or with a frosty gin and tonic this summer? Good times await you in any case. Jump into the series anywhere—each novel can stand alone—or start with the first novel, Rembrandt’s Angel, where Esther is obsessed with recovering a painting stolen by the Nazis in World War II.

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

I see more and more online retailers correctly sort novels into their respective series. B&N, for example, correctly grouped together all published versions of the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” novels. (Two are free PDFs—see my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page—so no one could blame them for their omission.) Kudos to B&N!

I’ve observed that B&N is on the march. Under new management maybe? Their book barns are aging well, and people still flock to them as well as other mom & pop bookstores, as well as visiting other online retailers, giving Amazon the well-deserved finger. That’s fine with me. I only buy from Amazon when the book isn’t available anywhere else. (Unfortunately many self-published authors and small presses think that Amazon is the place to be. It isn’t.)

I’ve also boycotted Amazon for my newer publications as a writer. While the “Esther Brookstone” series’ first two novels were traditionally published (by Penmore Press), implying I had no control over where they’re sold, and the first novel in “The Last Humans” series was too (by Black Opal Books, now in its death throes) was too, the remaining novels in those series were self-published but not on Amazon (um, maybe Death on the Danube appeared there—I can’t remember). In any case, the published versions of the “Esther Brookstone” originating from various publishers must have made it difficult for B&N to group them…and they came through with flying colors without any intervention from yours truly! They also grouped together the two “Last Humans” novels, a test that Amazon’s bots (or big-bot Bezos?) completely flunked!

I’m happy to see online dealers grouping series’ novels together. That’s convenient for readers, and it’s logical in book marketing as well because readers like to read series in order, or at least know a book is part of a series. I doubt that brick and mortar bookstores, even B&N’s, manage that well. That might be mostly due to shelf-space limitations, and they’d certainly do better than Amazon, but I rarely see an entire series displayed. The last time I saw that was with the Harry Potter fantasy novels.

But everyone in the retail book business is far ahead of PR and marketing services! They either don’t know how to do it, or they just greedily want to maximize their profits, but they offer no marketing plans for series! Nada. Nil. Zilch. (I can name a few examples of famous offenders, if you’re an author and want to avoid them for that reason.) My series are either marketed online by retailers like B&N or via my own efforts at the end of my blog posts. That’s why I’m boycotting all PR and marketing services as well until they wise up. Until they offer such services, I’ll just have to consider them behind the times and useless for any author with one or more series!

***

Comments are always welcome. (But please follow the rules on my “Join the  Conversation” web page. If you don’t, your comment goes to the spam folder!)

The “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series. While Esther and hubby Bastiann have taken a well-deserved retirement, readers can still read about their adventures in the nine novels of the series. Many take place in the UK, of course, because it’s Esther’s home patch, but she also travels to Ireland, Scotland, and even to Peru, Norway, and Turkey as the series progresses. You don’t have to work as hard as the old girl, though. You can enjoy all the mystery, thrills, and suspense from your favorite reading chair, maybe while sipping tea and enjoying some scones? Or with a frosty gin and tonic this summer? Good times await you in any case. Jump into the series anywhere—each novel can stand alone—or start with the first novel, Rembrandt’s Angel, where Esther is obsessed with recovering a painting stolen by the Nazis in World War II.

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

It all started with a British review of Rembrandt’s Angel that torched that novel: I thought the British reviewer’s critique could be summed up by the following: How dare I, a Yankee author, write a crime story set in the UK? I took that as sour grapes—the novel had good reviews here in the States, so that critique certainly wasn’t about quality. The reviewer just hated the idea that someone could write about a British character mucking around in a British setting (Esther Brookstone travels a lot outside Britain too). Okay, maybe it wasn’t fanatically anti-American or rabid British patriotism either, just another sniveling troll (one finds a few among reviewers, especially on Amazon and Goodreads, which, for practical purposes, are the same thing) who can’t write a damn thing but loves to criticize those who can.

But I imagine that the snarky critiques will continue with later novels in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series (there are nine now) because I’ve dared to “kill” Queen Elizabeth! I’ll try here to head some of that criticism off by pointing out that Esther’s adventures are in the near future, not sci-fi by any means, but futuristic enough that the Queen, now 96, is unlikely to still be among the living. I salute her and wish her well during her platinum jubilee year, but I suspect that someone else will soon be on the throne.

The question is: Will she be replaced by Charlie or Willy? Will Charlie abdicate in favor of his son? I assumed he wouldn’t when I wrote the novels. He seemed like an upstanding fellow in Clancy’s Patriot Games, albeit a bit helpless if not spoiled, but that was before Diana’s demise and Camilla’s taking her place. That alone might mean he’s just another self-centered royal who’d want at least a few years of kingly fame before soon also handing the crown over to Willy (he’ll be turning seventy-four, after all!). (In Celtic Chronicles, Charlie has his eyes on a Russian oligarch’s yacht! Nothing wrong with that, I suppose—they’re nice little boats!)

I have no idea why Brits think they have a monopoly on mystery stories. America’s tradition is at least as long as Britain’s! (Edgar Allan Poe was writing them long before Agatha Christie! That’s acknowledged by the Edgar Awards.) Plenty of other American authors have written good ones (see the list in the Sleuthing, British-style series of short fiction), even ones set in merry olde England like mine. (And the whole hard-boiled movement started here before P.D James!) Actually, as I stated, Esther’s adventures take her all over the world, from Peru in Rembrandt’s Angel to Turkey in Son of Thunder, with even a sojourn in NYC at the end of Intolerance and the beginning of The Klimt Connection. I didn’t see any American reviewers complaining about her trips to America! She’s lot more the globetrotter than Miss Marple and a sprier woman to boot, a true twenty-first century sleuth grounded in the twentieth (she was an MI6 spy in East Berlin during the Cold War).

PMs (Prime Ministers) and MPs (Members of Parliament) don’t fare well in Esther’s series—what would that disgruntled reviewer say about that?—a lot worse than Queen Lizzy, that’s for sure. An MP is the major villain in Palettes, Patriots, and Prats, and an MP who becomes PM has questionable ethics in the last few novels. Of course, a real-life PM indirectly accepted campaign contributions from a Russian oligarch—the oligarch’s son-in-law was that PM’s campaign chairman (I shall not name names, but that PM with the haystack haircut is known to have had lavish parties even when such events were banned during Covid). The old Queen was never embroiled in such scandals (one son, that friend of Epstein’s, did that in spades), but her and Phillip’s treatment of Diana was highly questionable if one is to believe a (made-for-TV?) movie about the events surrounding Diana’s death (old Phillip didn’t come off well in that one either).

Besides being American, I have enough Irish in me to wonder why any sensible, modern nation would tolerate any royalty, but I suppose reducing royalty to a powerless pomp-and-circumstance role in a democracy is more acceptable than the alternative (why we had our revolution). I certainly enjoyed old Lizzy’s disdain for a certain US ex-president who probably still has royal aspirations, to say the least. One has to wonder if she ever approved of any fascist monsters this world has produced. Britain certainly showed its democratic credentials during World War II by standing up to Hitler while the US delayed its entry into the war. That existential war against fascism might have otherwise ended a lot earlier, one way or the other.

It’s sad to think the Brits don’t like me. Perhaps it’s my Irish surname (O’Moore, to be complete)? Or maybe just because I’m a Yank? I like them, and they all fascinate me. They share traditions passed down from Angles, Britons, Celts, Normans, Saxons, and Vikings and have given us some of the best writers and poets in the world. I’d be stupid to overlook that or deny it.

In any case, I hope the Brits won’t hold any grudges with respect to Esther’s series. The rational ones among them will hopefully recognize that old Liz inevitably will leave this mortal coil and that democracy, not royalty, is far more important to the world right now. What lies ahead for the future of the royal family is unknown and might bring surprises that are stranger than fiction.

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Celtic Chronicles. Novel #9 in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series is special: It’s the last novel in the series, and what a series it’s been with Esther and Bastiann taking us all over the UK and Europe and even to the Third World, from Peru to Turkey. (Yes, like Russia, the latter is Third World—nothing wrong with that; it’s just a fact.) In this novel, Esther and Bastiann volunteer to work at an archaeological dig near their modest castle outside Edinburgh. A student also working there is murdered. Police Scotland finds a Russian oligarch’s number on the lad’s call-list. That Russian is on his yacht anchored off the Scottish coast. As the investigation continues, everything becomes more complex, other characters come into play, and the intrigue and suspense increase. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold (but not on the grand Bezos bot’s Amazon). Enjoy!

Note: The above novel and others are distributed by Draft2Digital that supposedly merged with Smashwords March 1 (even before, they more or less distributed to the same online retailers). Supposedly these D2D novels will appear listed on Smashwords. I see no evidence of this. Progress is often akin to a snail trying to climb up a greased window pane.

On pubprogressive.com yesterday: “Common-Sense Gun Control.”

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