By Christopher D. Abbott
I’ve always been a fan of period drama. Ever since I was a boy, I’ve been enthralled by period crime fiction. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s Poirot, R. D. Wingfield’s Inspector Jake Frost, the list is endless.
When I started writing my own stories, all I could think about was writing a detective story. I created one in Dr. Straay, my Dutch criminal psychologist. Set in the 1930s, he had links to some of the greatest minds in psychology of the early twentieth century. I wrote two books with Straay. Sir Laurence Dies, and Dr. Chandrix Dies. They were Agatha Christie styled mystery books, because the model for Dr. Straay was the amazingly intelligent Hercule Poirot. Sir Laurence Dies later won the Reader’s Favorite Bronze Medal in the Fiction—Mystery—Sleuth genre, in 2014.
Since then, I’d spent a lot of time lost within another passion of mine, mythology. Specifically, Ancient Egyptian. I penned a short story for a publisher in London called Songs of Beast. A dark anthology that had to have the main protagonist as an animal. Later I found I was so enamored with it, I took that story and fashioned it into Songs of the Osirian. It was followed by Rise of the Jackal King, Daughter of Ra, and Citadel of Ra, which completed the series.
Throughout my ten years of publishing, I was blessed to meet and become friends with actress and activist Chase Masterson. She graciously penned a foreword for the first in my series of Osirian books, and through her, I was able to present myself to the public at a few conventions. That’s where I met Michael Jan Friedman. After that, my writing life changed.
Mike is one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. He not only helped me with getting out there, but he also wrote the foreword for my second Osirian book, Rise of the Jackal King. His advice and experience continue to help hone my skill. When I wrote my first pastiche story, Sherlock Holmes: A Scandalous Affair, he read through it and gave me fabulous feedback.
After a long period of writing Fantasy, I wanted to get back into something more period driven. I think the genesis of my idea for Progenitor came from a mixture of sci-fi, mystery, and horror. I love old films like The Thing, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and TV shows such as Tales From The Crypt, or The Invaders. There’s something about the early ’50s and ’60s TV shows that’s missing in today’s broadcasting. Character-driven stories and dialogue are what I’m all about. Without the benefit of special effects, older shows had to rely on actors to suspend our disbelief, and boy did they do it well!
Progenitor is my first book published by Crazy8Press. It’s essentially a 1940s period sci-fi horror. Set during World War II, we see an America under attack from strange monsters, with no one really understanding where they sprang from. A group of survivors, led by General William Marshall and a British Colonel, find solitude in Camp Detrick—a place set up specifically to deal with the type of disaster that has disconnected America with the rest of the world. Once inside, our heroes discover a far bigger threat in the work conducted by scientists led by a German, Dr. Hans Grunner. Without giving too much away, think Alien meets The Thing and you’ll have a pretty good idea of how awful their situation is about to get…
