I started this site to promote my unpublished if not unpublishable fiction, but that old mutatis mutandis thing took over—I had a dedicated band of about seven readers, plus the ebook thing was coming along, plus President Obama was turning himself into Cheney Light, so now I’ve rearranged things, going the self-publishing route for my fiction and fixing up this site for both continuing commentary and self-promotion. So this is what you’ll find.
If you go to the left-hand column and click on “About,” you’ll see a dismayingly large picture of me looking fairly goofy, as is my wont, along with a touch of self-description.
If you click on “Books,” you’ll get links to my two “dead tree” books, Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of Sumatra and Sherlock Holmes and the Hapsburg Tiara, as well as my free ebook, Three Bullets A New Nero Wolfe Threesome. You can also access samples of the three books.
I have also just published my first non-pastiche book via CreateSpace on Amazon, Author! Author!, which you can find here. It is also up as an ebook here. Author! Author! consists of two short stories and a novella. Each takes a famous author as its central character—W. H. Auden, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Updike, to be precise. In “The Transfiguration of W. H. Auden,” the great poet dies and goes, not to heaven, but someplace better. Victorian England! In “The Man Who Met Joyce Carol Oates,” an admirer discovers that encountering genius is not without peril. In the novella “The Apotheosis of John Updike,” the poet of suburbia encounters catharses without number west of the Hudson. I’ll have Author! Author! up in the Books section soon.
If you click on “Reviews,” you can access movie reviews I’ve written for the Bright Lights film Journal reviewing all the films of Charlie Chaplin and all the musical films of Fred Astaire. The “Links” page, which needs some expanding, lets you access all the other reviews I’ve done for Bright Lights, as well as the site itself.
“Topics” is the not terribly snappy title I’ve come up with for longer pieces that I’ve run in the past—ranging from takedowns of Flannery O’Connor (not as great as some people say) to a partial guide to jazz albums dedicated to the compositions of Thelonious Monk.
You’re probably not into jazz—few people are—but you ought to be, and to help educate the ignorant masses I run a jazz video every week, usually focusing on the compositions of, yes, Thelonious Monk. If you want to find all the jazz videos I’ve run, well, click on “Jazz.”
