Albert Tucher
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Diana solves a business problem.
January 25th, 2012 01:15 by Albert Tucher
And as so often happens, her sidekick Mary Alice aka Crystal is the cause of it.
The Worst Thing in the World is now linked in my writing samples. It's another story based on the experiences of my technical consultant, whose material will never run out. Several times she rescheduled our meetings because she was sick, and I realized that her line of work exposed her to almost as many bugs as a room full of schoolchildren. Here's one way it could play out.
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Diana at Untreed Reads!
December 20th, 2011 17:39 by Albert Tucher
The up-and-coming publisher of e-books, Untreed Reads, has just brought out a Diana story called Value for the Money
To get herself out of a jam with the police, Diana investigates old money and murder and risks becoming the next victim.
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Another old favorite added to my writing samples.
December 6th, 2011 14:56 by Albert Tucher
My technical consultant gave me the title, Enlarge Your Penis, and challenged me to write a story under it. What else need I say?
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Guest blogging today.
November 4th, 2011 13:27 by Albert Tucher
I'm over at Patti Abbott's place blogging about a book I stumbled over in the unplumbed depths of the Newark Public Library's biography collection. It's a prison memoir called Lonesome Road, by George Harsh, and it has the kind of improbable twists that would earn only derision in fiction.
The Library was founded in 1883, and many of the older collections were cataloged according to pre-automation rules, which gave little access beyond authors and title--no subject analysis, no Dewey classification. They are simply filed alphabetically by the biographee. To make things worse, despite our unceasing efforts since the early 1980s, many of the 1.5 million items in the Library's collections have been missed in the conversion to our current online catalog. In other words, nobody knew we had this book until I pulled it off the shelf.
Here it is now:
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Time for another story.
October 21st, 2011 23:55 by Albert Tucher
Frisson, one of my favorite flash stories, which originally appeared in the lamented zine Thug Lit, is now linked to my writing samples section.
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Location, location, location!
August 24th, 2011 17:06 by Albert Tucher
Another online friend, Wayne Dundee, is engaged in putting his novels and stories about PI Joe Hannibal out on e-books. Joe is a great hardboiled character, but to me the best part of Wayne's work is his use of underserved locations like Illinois and Nebraska. If Truman Capote hadn't already alerted us to the noir potential of the Midwest, Wayne's stories would do it.
Check out a representative novel:
and Wayne's website:
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Keep 'em coming!
August 20th, 2011 23:04 by Albert Tucher
Another of my online writing friends has a new e-book out. Timothy Hallinan has just published the second novel in his Junior Bender series:
The author describes the book as follows:
Junior Bender is a San Fernando valley burglar, an unhappily divorced man who still cares for his former wife and adores his 12-year-old daughter, Rina. Junior's a very, very good burglar. Despite plying his trade for most of his late-teen and adult life, he's never been arrested. He also runs a profitable, if dangerous, sideline: he works as a private eye for crooks. When someone does something crooked to a crook, the police are often not an option. The option is Junior.
This moonlighting has not made him popular with some members of the LA underworld, and with the cops also interested in him, Junior lives in a series of motels, in a region that's especially rich in awful motels. The motel of the month is part of each book, in one way or another. (In LITTLE ELVISES, it's Marge 'n Ed's North Pole.)
In LITTLE ELVISES, Junior is forced by a corrupt cop to go to the rescue of an old record producer, a guy who, in the sixties, grabbed handsome boys off of Philadelphia stoops and turned them into little Elvises for six months or a year, until the fans got tired of them. A supermarket-tabloid journalist has been murdered on Hollywood Boulevard and the cops think the music producer did it because -- well, because he was planning to do it. He was even scouting for a hit man, which someone told the cops, but somebody else got to the journalist first. So the story takes Junior into the arena of old-time rock-and-roll, missing persons, the world's oldest still-dangerous gangster, a murderer of young women, and a terrifying if somewhat hapless hit man named Fronts.
Look like a rip to me, and it's on my list.
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Beat me to it!
August 15th, 2011 22:25 by Albert Tucher
The Pentagon refuses to confirm or deny anything about the Delta Force, but rumors persist about an all-female unit colloquially known as the Funny Platoon. I have been thinking for some time that there is a series of thrillers in that idea. Little did I know until just recently that Zoe Sharp has a terrific series about Charlie Fox, a female Special Forces veteran turned bodyguard. The latest book is available for the Kindle:
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The Return of Miss Winser
July 30th, 2011 16:21 by Albert Tucher
I have just added Miss Winser Will Pour to my writing samples.
On July 21, 2011, the temperature in Newark reached 108 degrees. That is a record for the city, but Newark has always suffered from extreme summer heat. In this story Miss Winser soldiers on without air conditioning or the casual dress we have become used to in recent years to find the desperado among her assistants who has thrown away charge slips and recklessly consumed food in the Lending Department.
Those were firing offenses in her day, and in the Depression year of 1931, firing was serious indeed. Can Miss Winser mix mercy with severity?
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Another Challenge
June 13th, 2011 15:35 by Albert Tucher
Over at the Do Some Damage blog Steve Weddle has challenged the crime writing community to write beach noir. It seemed to make a good fit with my Technical Consultant's dread of encountering clients while on her own time. What if Diana went to the beach and ran into the last man she wanted to see?
I just posted Sharks in my writing samples section.
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