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Never the Same Again: A Rock 'N' Roll Gothic

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Read an excerpt of Never the Same Again by clicking here.

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The Martin Fender Novels

My first three novels were published by Viking: Rock Critic Murders,Tough Baby, and Boiled in Concrete. The protagonist is a bass player named Martin Fender who lives in Austin, Texas and plays in blues bands and moonlights as a skip tracer for a collection agency. Out there is a smoky and neon lit world of nightclubs, bars, American Legion Halls, backstage corridors, road houses and joints where the acoustics are so bad the sound bounces around like a jittery cat but the light is just right, and someone you’d never look at twice becomes a confidante, a friend in need, a lover for the night. Sometimes in that kind of light, a dangerous person can take on a sainted glow, a fragile soul on the edge might slip a knife in your back. There are weird people, dishonest people, desperate lovers, thieves, losers, flakes, no hope heroes who know their way around the neck of a Fender Stratocaster. There are promoters who can’t do anything right but steal from musicians with fine intentions. There are managers desperate for one last chance to grab some glory with a bunch of innocent, slack eyed tone magicians. Some are criminals, some just don't see the point in making things too black and white. There are guys who dwell a grey area, where no one bothers telling the truth when a lie will do almost as well every time. There are guys who like the fact that a 45 automatic with a full clip on the table always makes negotiating a deal go a little smoother.

My fans should know that as of 1996, the first three Martin Fender novels are, out of print. So you'll have to scour the finer used bookstores and libraries for those. I’ll have some new novels and I’ll get the old ones back in print someday. I just can’t say exactly when.

Some of you may have run across titles I’ve written which were published by the tiny but dedicated Gryphon Publishing. These are digest-sized novelettes, often with a title by me and another by another writer on the reverse half of the book. These include "The Teflon Babe" and "Deader Than Hell", and there are some short stories in digest magazines from Gryphon as well. My favorite is “Gore Galore.” These stories feature a hardboiled detective named Clapton who lives a bleak existence in North Hollywood, and were written when I was in my Black Mask period. I dashed them off quickly, in between other projects, with very little rewriting. A little like early punk rock.

OTHER BOOK NEWS - MEET JOHNNY HEARTBREAK
October 2002 saw the publication of Measures of Poison, an anthology that collects short crime fiction stories by 24 authors, including such hardboiled luminaries as James Crumley, Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Jon Jackson, and even Jesse Sublett. I contributed a brand new long short story titled "Johnny Heartbreak". Set during Prohibition, the title character is a private eye who is also a smuggler who manages lounge singers on the side. The collection is published by Dennis McMillan Publications. Dennis is a good friend who happens to publish deluxe edition books by some of my very favorite authors.

Read an excerpt by clicking here.

NEW HOPE FOR THE DEAD
I’m a book collector. Around the time we moved to LA in ’87, I was going crazy for old Fawcett Gold Medal paperback originals. This is the house that published John D. MacDonald, Donald Westlake’s Richard Stark novels ( Point Blank, The Score, The Sour Lemon Score , etc.), David Goodis, and other hardboiled classics. This addiction led more or less directly to my discovery of a “lost” novel by the late, great Charles Willeford , author of great novels such as Miami Blues, The Cockfighter, New Hope for the Dead, Off the Wall , and others. The novel Deliver Me From Dallas, which was written by Willeford and an Air Force buddy, W. Franklin Sanders, around 1952, was finally published in 1960 as The Whip Hand . The only author credited was Sanders, and no one, not Willeford or his wife Betsy, knew until I compared the book with Willeford and Sanders original manuscript in 1992. I tell the whole story in the introduction I wrote to the new edition, published by Dennis McMillan Publications in 2000. I wrote another version of this story for the Chronicle in 1998, " One of the Great Ones ". The book can be ordered directly from Dennis McMillan’s website

Rock Critic Murders

Tough Baby