This week Vine Maple Farm Press published my latest mystery, Blind Man, on Amazon in both Kindle edition and paperback. You can obtain it here. I’m an over-productive and under-disciplined writer, starting projects without finishing them, finishing projects and forgetting about them. But over the past few months, I’ve set my jaw and whipped a segment of a sprawling manuscript into shape as the first book in the Blind Detective series.
It’s a comic crime story set in the 1930s through the 1970s. The main character is a blind detective. As the first book in the series, it includes the main character’s early life. The main story portrays the rescue of an illegal and corrupt—but socially beneficial—gambling scheme run by a notorious crook.
The story is indebted to the classic crime fiction, to Raymond Chandler’s cynical Marlowe and Rex Stout’s wise-cracking Archie. The victim in Blind Man is not a person; instead society is ruthlessly assaulted by forces drifting out of control. Nothing is clear in the dark world of the blind detective. No one, not even the blind man himself, can be trusted.
The story takes place in mythical Chicago, beginning before WWII. Julius “Julie” Parnak is the nephew of the head of the Chicago franchise of Murder Inc., which Julie’s uncle took over from the New York outfit. Julie inherits his uncle’s operation, but he lacks his uncle’s administrative cunning and wit. The blind man, Fenton Herzman, a cellist who lost his sight in Julie’s presence, is an adjunct professor at South Side University. He has established a private detective agency to fund his expensive tastes in antique cellos and baroque music manuscripts.
The skeptical narrator, Reggie Haskell, is from rural Minnesota. He becomes the blind man’s eyes and hands on the streets. Haskell has a rabbit pistol, a flair for baroque musical ornamentation, and a jaundiced eye. Reggie’s dark and looming sidekick, Fellman Biggers, is a former NFL tackle with a PhD. in astrophysics. Reggie and Fellman are heroes; Herzman’s willing pawns in a storm-tossed sea of deception, greed, and spite.