Albert Tucher
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Coutinho on the case!
January 2nd, 2015 14:20 by Albert Tucher
In the rainforest of the Big Island of Hawaii, a young woman's obsession with revenge reopens a closed murder case and threatens to ruin lives, and it's Detective Errol Coutinho's problem. The story is A Pocketful of Sand, and it's in the Winter 2014-2015 issue of Needle, a Magazine of Noir.
I have written before about my fascination with the Hilo side of the Big Island and especially with the Puna region. Sparsely populated and lightly policed, the rainforest is home to marijuana farmers, meth dealers, survivalists, fugitives and Sixties holdovers. I know of no author who has used the setting, which is a natural for dark crime fiction.
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Oh, well
December 11th, 2014 14:44 by Albert Tucher
My story The Forgettable Man, featuring Big Island attorney Agnes Rodrigues, failed to make the cut in the Hofstra contest or at Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. This happens. Bismarck Rules, which Lee Child selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2010, also had a long career of rejection before I finally placed it.
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Desperation
November 3rd, 2014 15:08 by Albert Tucher
"Although suggested by real events, this story is fictional ..."
The boilerplate from Law and Order applies to my new Diana story Desperation, which appears in ThugLit 14. The real event is the case of Ariel Castro, who kept several women imprisoned as sex slaves in Cleveland for years. Can Diana avoid the same fate and rescue another young woman?
The issue includes seven other stories by a great lineup of crime writers. Get some!
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Lo, the Former Egyptian!
September 3rd, 2014 16:44 by Albert Tucher
That's a title by the humorist H. Allen Smith (1907-1976), who now seems nearly forgotten. Forty years ago, however, he made quite an impression on me with his collections of jokes. One that has preyed on my mind all these years goes as follows:
A guy goes into a drugstore to prepare for his big weekend. He has a hot babe on the string and access to a boat. So, he buys condoms for the usual reasons and Dramamine to ward off seasickness.
"Not my business," says the druggist, "but if it affects you that way, why do you bother?"
Yeah, it's kind of on the same level as fart jokes, but I was a teenager back then, and like most men, I still am on some level. But I have finally managed to put the joke to constructive use in my story Karma, which is now online in Spinetingler magazine.
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Deadly Ink!
June 26th, 2014 15:22 by Albert Tucher
I will be attending the Deadly Ink Mystery Conference in New Brunswick, Aug. 1-3. I don't have my panel assignments yet, but I would go just to hang out with some of the best crime writers in the business and meet crime fiction fans.
I have been going to Deadly Ink off and on since 2004. Check it out and consider attending: Deadly Ink 2014
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Diana does NOT approve.
June 12th, 2014 22:04 by Albert Tucher
She runs an honest business. On the other hand, she tells me to get busy on a story using this scam
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Who is Agnes Rodrigues?
April 23rd, 2014 16:56 by Albert Tucher
She is a character from the world of Diana Andrews. In my as yet unpublished novel Tentacles Diana travels to the Big Island of Hawaii with a client who neglects to mention that some nasty people are after him. Among the people she meets on the island is Detective Errol Coutinho of the Hawaii County Police. He has proved able to carry some stories of his own, and his usual adversary is a criminal defense attorney named Agnes Rodrigues.
Agnes gives no quarter to the police or anyone else who gets in her way. As her name suggests, she is of Portuguese descent. Portuguese ancestry makes an underrated contribution to the beauty of the women in Hawaii, and WTH, she's my character. She figures in a story called A Pocketful of Sand, which will appear in a forthcoming issue of Needle magazine, and I just finished a story with her as the main character. I submitted The Forgettable Man to the crime fiction contest sponsored by the Hofstra University law school. We'll see what happens.
So far, Diana and Agnes have not met, but I'm working on it. Any encounter between them is sure to be epic.
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Snowed in.
February 15th, 2014 01:17 by Albert Tucher
Like much of the U.S., New Jersey got clobbered yesterday. The library was closed, my car was covered, and I wasn't going anywhere. So I banged out not one but two flash stories about Diana. They still need to be cleaned up the way a driveway needs to be cleaned up after the snow plow goes by, but twenty-four hours ago they didn't exist, and now they do.
Not a bad day, even with the shoveling.
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More on Brittany Royal
January 13th, 2014 16:32 by Albert Tucher
Brittany Royal's boyfriend Boaz Johnson has been missing since her death, and the Hawaii County Police consider him a prime suspect. On January 2 a hiker in the Kalapana section of the Big Island discovered a decomposing body in a kipuka, which is a wooded area within a lava field. Police have not confirmed a neighbor's report that the body has hanging from a tree.
It's tempting to conclude that the body is that of Boaz Johnson, but a Japanese tourist has also been missing in the area since last February.
This is why I can't resist writing about Hawaii, and the Hilo side of the Big Island in particular.
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Reality wins again.
December 6th, 2013 18:09 by Albert Tucher
Last month I returned to Hawaii for the first time in five years. I had three purposes: to check in on my brother Fred and his family on Oahu, revisit some locations that figure in my stories about Detective Errol Coutinho of the Hawaii County Police and find new settings to use, and to put in some beach time.
On the Big Island (aka Hawaii County) my zero-lava streak continued. Every time I touch down on the island, someone turns the lava off. I tried the two main vantage points for lava viewing, which are the end of Chain of Craters Road in the Volcanoes National Park, and the county viewing area at the end of route 130.
I didn't mind striking out on the lava, because I found a stunning setting for a crime story. Route 130 runs through the Puna section, which is the rainiest and least populated part of the Big Island. I drove through the dusk and then full-fledged darkness without encountering a single vehicle. That was eerie enough, but the end of the highways was even more so. "Proceed at your own risk," reads the sign.
The highway didn't used to end there, but some twenty years ago the lava decreed differently. It severed the road near the community called Kalapana, which was also inundated.
A much rougher informal road continues past the sign. It leads to a parking area, which is overseen by a couple of county employees. From there the lava enthusiast hikes for twenty minutes over a field of flat black volcanic rock and ends up at a makeshift platform just short of the ocean. Another county employee is on duty there.
The strangest part of the hike was seeing houses, all looking relatively new, sitting on top of the lava rock like mushrooms. The county representative told me that they were all recently built by original Kalapana residents who have returned to the property that they still own and still regard as home.
The crime writer in me immediately saw a body floating in the surf in this foreboding setting, but reality has beaten me to it. Last May a fisherman found the body of a young woman in the water. Brittany Jane Royal had been strangled. She was traveling with her boyfriend Boaz Johnson, who is still missing. The police call him a suspect.
Since May someone has been posting flyers and writing anonymous letters to the newspapers claiming that Bo Johnson is also dead, and that native Hawaiian militants opposed to any white presence in Puna killed them both. Police discount the possibility, but it is a twist worthy of fiction.
It's not a question of whether I will use this material, but when and how.
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