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Angela Hardwicke, Intergalactic Private Eye

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I love private eyes. Always have. Part detective, part crime stopper, part secret agent. And lots of mystery.

And yet Angela Hardwicke, my hard-boiled PI who has now appeared in eight of my books through Crazy 8 Press, seemingly came out of nowhere.

Then again, doesn’t that sound like a private eye?

An amalgam of Doctor Who, Blade Runner, and Philip Marlowe, Angela Hardwicke first appeared in Genius de Milo, the second in my Finders Keepers sci-fi comedy backpacking trilogy, which might seem an odd place for a private eye to show up in the first place.

Loosely based on a series of backpacking trips I took through Europe and New Zealand with a buddy of mine, Finders Keepers is a Bill and Ted-style romp about two loveable knuckleheads running around the globe having zany adventures, while simultaneously mixed up in a quest for a jar containing the Universe’s DNA.

Finders Keepers was supposed to be one and done, but I left it open-ended, and ultimately followed up with the sequels Genius de Milo and Astropalooza, with the scope of the three-book narrative far exceeding my expectations.

When Hardwicke first shows up in Genius de Milo, it’s a blink-and-you-miss-it appearance, but I knew even then I was onto something, so Hardwicke played a much larger and significant role in Astropalooza. After that I was utterly hooked, and knew I’d be writing Hardwicke stories again.

Before I gave her a stand-alone novel, however, much less her own series, I put together an anthology for Crazy 8 Press called Love, Murder & Mayhem—I served as editor—collecting 15 stories from as many authors contributing a range of sci-fi mysteries. It was in this collection I wrote my first Hardwicke short story, “The Case of My Old New Life and the One I Never Knew,” about arson in a rock club in the galactic realm of Eternity.

Since then I’ve written a half dozen Hardwicke short stories, taking her from one end of the Cosmos to the other, with cases about a massive helix of the Universe’s DNA, rerouting Halley’s Comet, a whodunnit in a daycare center, and a case about an AI on death row, “The Case of Jarlo’s Buried Treasure,” which appears as a bonus story at the end of my first Hardwicke novel, Crackle and Fire, on sale today.

On the surface, Crackle and Fire has Hardwicke tracking down an intern from a galactic accounting firm who has disappeared with sensitive corporate files.

Yet the mystery, as these things do, becomes much larger than Hardwicke ever envisioned—she soon finds herself embroiled in a deadly case of lies, intrigue, and murder, clashing with vengeful gangsters, MinderNot rallies, and a madman who’s come a long way to get what he wants.

Dig even deeper, though, and you’ll find that Crackle and Fire is as much about Hardwicke having to make a critical decision—can she be an intergalactic private and all that comes with it and be a mother to her young son who, for reasons I won’t share now, is not in her care?

It’s a critical question for Hardwicke, and the answers don’t come easy.

As you can see, Hardwicke and I have been getting to know each other. It’s been a great relationship so far, but we’re just getting started. Hopefully you’ll come to know her, too.

Crackle and Fire is Hardwicke’s first novel, with many more deadly cases yet to come. I’m working on the sequel now, and it’s a doozy.

The only question for you is: are you ready for the ride?

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Anthologies a place to begin and explore

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When I was young my parents would take all of us to the library once a week. We would trade out the books we had checked out the week before for new books to read. I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

We had librarians who were more than happy to make recommendations for us based on what we liked to read. As they got to know us over the years, they knew our reading level and what we enjoyed reading.

It was a librarian who brought me to the anthology section of the children’s department. She said that anthologies were a good way to try a lot of authors and find new ones that I might like to read more from. She was right.

They had a horror anthology where I first read Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life” and Robert Block and Edger Allen Poe’s “The Tell-tale Heart” and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” and many others. There were science fiction anthologies and mythology anthologies. I first read Harlan Ellison in one of those anthologies.

It is in anthologies that you can read both well-established writers and the up and comers to the writing profession.

Another thing I like about them is if one author is not your cup of tea, you can move onto the next story and see if that is more to your liking.

 It is a smorgasbord of words where you have more options to read various voices and styles.

I still enjoy a good anthology although they are fewer in number than when I was young.

Bob has worked very hard to bring a lot of different voices to Thrilling Adventure Yarns. He has assembled a wide range of authors and types of stories which reminds me very much of those anthologies that I started reading as a child and still read to this day.

I am proud to be one of those authors included. I really enjoyed the story I wrote.

I hope that this book does for you the reader what those anthologies did for me back in that local library. That it will entertain and give you at least one new author that you may not have read but now you want to find more of their work.

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My Favorite/Most Influential Anthology: Danger Visions

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By Paul Kupperberg

I don’t read many anthologies these days. Maybe I should. I’ll usually read those containing one of my stories, like the upcoming Thrilling Adventure Yarns, edited by my friend Bob Greenberger and featuring my short barbarian adventure story, “Dreams of Kingdom,” but it’s been decades since they were regulars in my to-read pile.

I used to read them by the stack when I was kid, back in the 1960s. Science fiction, fantasy, sword and sorcery, mysteries, and even literary anthologies (once I discovered literature). Anthologies are like treasure chests full of every conceivable kind of wealth, no two objects alike. If you don’t like one story, chances are the next one (or the one after that) will be more to your liking.

The first anthology I remember reading was Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison’s groundbreaking 1967 collection of state-of-the-art-and-beyond science fiction short stories by the elite of science fiction, past and present, from Isaac Asimov to Robert Zelazny. This 500-plus page tome took the SF community by storm, and it was home to that year’s Hugo Award winners for best novella (“Riders of the Purple Sage” by Philip Jose Farmer) and best novelette, “Gonna Roll the Bones” by Fritz Lieber (which also won the Nebula), and the Nebula Awarded best short story, “Aye, and Gomorrah” by Samuel R. Delany.

I came into possession of Dangerous Visions through the good people at the legendary Science Fiction Book Club, a creation of publisher Doubleday in 1953. It was genre specific “book of the month” club’; members would be sent a mailing offering each month’s book to accept or reject. Send back the postcard to reject it and nothing happen. Accept it—or neglect to mail back the postcard by the deadline, as was most often the case—and the book would be sent, along with a bill. The service’s come-on offer to new customers was something like “eight books for a nickel,” which came with the caveat that they also buy a certain number of books during the year.

I joined the SFBC sometime in 1968 or 1969 and one of my freebies was Dangerous Visions. I don’t have an actual photograph of any of the instances when what I was reading made my head explode, but explode it did. Repeatedly. I had been reading science fiction for a couple of years, lots of Asimov, Heinlein, and Clark, and the stories in DV weren’t anything like I had come to expect. These stories were grown up (I was thirteen or fourteen). I had only recently discovered “New Wave” literature, but this was “New Wave” science fiction. Characters cussed. Had sex. The very first story in the volume, by Lester del Rey, was about man capturing and usurping God; “Evensong” was one of many of the thirty-three stories in that book I’d reread years later and finally, really, understand. These weren’t your talky (but entertaining) Asimov pulp magazine sci-fi tales. This was serious stuff.

But the greatest service DV did me was to introduce me to a slew of new, unfamiliar authors. Brian W. Aldiss, Alfred Bester, Norman Spinrad, Farmer…even editor Harlan Ellison himself, a good chunk of whose oeuvre I went on to devour into my twenties. DV was quite literally my doorway into serious science fiction, the anthology that turned me from a casual reader to a fan.

Fifty years later, I no longer read much science fiction and, except for a few favorite volumes like Clarke’s Childhood’s End, Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, and a handful of titles by Bester, I no longer keep a lot of it on my shelves. But I still own my half a century old edition of Dangerous Visions, and it’s 1972 follow-up, Again, Dangerous Visions (a third, The Last Dangerous Visions, due originally in 1973, has assumed the status of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, often believed to have been spotted, but never captured). Both books have been read, repeatedly. I recently lent DV to my son, so he could read it, and, as father used to say to me, “learn what’s what!”

I didn’t know when I ordered it as one of my “eight free books for a nickel” what worlds Dangerous Visions would open up for me. I was already on the road to being a voracious reader, but that one anthology not only fed my hunger, it helped make me a discriminating reader. It inspired me to read other anthologies, science fiction and other genres, and to seek out magazines like New Yorker, Esquire, and Evergreen Review for the cutting edge literary short stories they published. It even gave me the courage to start writing my own “serious” short stories, experimenting with style and subject matter beyond secret agents and superheroes. I didn’t finish ninety percent of them, but at the time, just scribbling even incomplete stories on the lined pages of spiral-bound notebooks was a major victory.

So…I hope you’ll support the Thrilling Adventure Yarns Kickstarter campaign currently underway. Who knows? One day it might just be the anthology that inspires some other young writer to take his pen to paper and create his own thrilling yarns.

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Love, Murder & Mayhem: Read it Now: The Responders

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Michael Jan Friedman’s “The Responders” posits a superhero mystery, based on the Beatles: If the Fab Four had stayed together, who knows what kind of music they could have made. But of course, they didn’t stay together—according to some sources because of John Lennon’s soulmate, Yoko Ono, who pulled him away from the other Beatles and ultimately broke up the group. Well … what if someone like Yoko had been brought into the inner circle of a superhero team? What would have become of them?

For Michael’s answer, here’s an early look:

The Responders

By Michael Jan Friedman

They’re not like us.

I’d heard that said about them before I got assigned to Special Investigations, six years ago now. But back then, I didn’t know what it meant.

After all, I’d only seen them on the news to that point, flashing across the screen in their black jumpsuits with the red ‘R’ stitched over their hearts. I hadn’t observed them up close, hadn’t felt their presence.

Their power.

But they weren’t just stronger than we were, endowed by a trick of fate with abilities the rest of us could only dream about.

They were different, as different as my Uncle Burt and a blind salamander.

Some, like Maser, reminded you of that difference from time to time. No brag, as some guy on TV used to say, just fact. As it turned out later, he was a scientist—to a fault, even considering all the breakthroughs he’d made as DeVonte Larson, professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania—and he didn’t see any point in soft-peddling his superiority.

Smoke was more elusive, as you’d expect. She, it came out last year, was a Senator’s daughter, and she’d seen her old man Kenny Parmenter make a decades-long career for himself in Washington without saying a single coherent thing. So by the time Jessica saved her dad and his staff from those white terrorists, she was an expert at hiding in plain view.

Others, like Antaeus, didn’t avoid questions. But he didn’t give you much information either. Mainly he let you come to your own conclusions—about him, about the team, about why they did what they did.

The poor bastard had to be carrying a lot of hurt around.

Anybody who looked the way he did, hideously scarred from the day he got his powers, had to be carrying something.

He was a teenager when it happened, name of Eddie Fields.

It’s all public now. He woke up one morning and had the ability to tap into Earth’s magnetic fields, bend steel as if it were licorice, crack diamonds in his bare fists.

But at the same time, he’d developed these lesions. Long, livid scars, or at least that’s what they looked like. All over his body, including his face. Made it hard to look at him.

Together, those three were The Responders. In the beginning, people called them The First Responders, but that took too long to say. So it became just The Responders.

They were good, right off the bat. And they tackled everything, from earthquakes to hostage situations to that missile North Korea swore was an accident. Once they even cracked a stolen car ring in the Bronx, though they must have been bored that day.

People loved them. And from what I could tell, The Responders loved each other. At least, as far as anybody could love a guy like Larson.

Then came Koyomi Seiku.

She started out as a fan of Antaeus. Wrote him letters, sent him e-mails, worshipped the hell out of him. Somebody else may have taken it all in stride. But Antaeus? The way he looked, he wasn’t used to female attention.

She begged to meet him, just to get his autograph, she said.

For one of the most powerful human beings on the planet, he could be pretty shy. But eventually, he said yes.

They met at a mall on Long Island. Antaeus was dressed in a trenchcoat with a hat pulled down low. Koyomi was the only one he told he’d be there.

She was nineteen, a first-year civil engineering student at NYU. Cute, long black hair, Goth but not really. And smart, no one ever argued that.

She got Antaeus’s autograph, but that wasn’t all she got. They sat at the mall and talked for a while. Then they went to the beach, which was cold but pretty much deserted that time of year, and talked some more.

To read the rest of “The Responders” click here.