Authors Electric

A few months ago I put an eye patch on a postwar, 1940s Los Angeles detective character named Frank Ritz (former Rissoli) in a story that I was working up. I don't know why. Maybe I was desperate for some defining accoutrement to focus my foggy protagonist. Maybe I was thinking of "the Man in the Hathaway Shirt " created by London's legendary "father of advertising" David Oglivy 's that put an obscure, eponymous New England shirt maker on the map. Or, maybe I was thinking of the late, madcap revolutionary San Francisco editor and erstwhile colleague  Warren Hinckle about whom I wrote on these pages in September 2016. Hinckle had lost an eye in a boyhood auto crash. As an adult he made the eye patch a trademark of his provocative, muckraking, buccaneering style of writing and publishing. Then again, maybe I really just wanted to write about a pirate, in which case, I might have also given my character a peg leg. Whatever my reason, the patch did...

At six-foot, I needed to become five-foot-five in a hurry. I had my work cut out for me, as you can probably guess, since I wouldn't hear of a chainsaw. Would I stop there, though? No, not on your life! My new WIP is a spinoff from the Boss MacTavin series.                                                                  The Pitch DB, Boss's partner, is sent to Seattle to helm a new Boss franchise: an adjunct of Gestalt Insurance. Overnight, our short tough-guy hero is neck deep in the corporate world, where his martial skills mean nothing. On three months' probation, forbidden to fight or even raise his voice, he feels smaller than everyone else. For his first case he picks one so easy it can't possibly get him in trouble. But soon enough he has reason to fear not a pink slip...but cement shoes.   ...