Around twenty-five years ago, I hung around outside RFK Stadium while the Grateful Dead played their last gig with Jerry Garcia, due to the fact that he croaked almost immediately thereafter. Although I drew many impressions from the sizable crowd drifting around outside the stadium, my chief conclusion was what silly, gullible people hippies were due to the fact that a large number of them were convinced upon sight of me that I must be some sort of undercover law enforcement. Me, a cop, ha ha. The only thing I could figure was my military bearing (a holdover from years of indentured servitude with the US Army) and disgruntled demeanor somehow added up to the Man in their pot foozled brains.
This gave me the germ of an idea for a short story, The Hippy Hunter, about a punk kid who goes to outdoor music festivals in upstate New York where he poses as a park policeman so he can roust hippy kids by pretending to arrest them and then shaking them down for their drugs. The Hippy Hunter was published in Over My Dead Body in December 2014:
http://www.overmydeadbody.com/hiphunt.html
From this, I got the idea for another story, only much longer and this time involving an actual murder mystery, the first time I’ve ever tried something in that vein. The result is Death Finds The Hippy Hunter, a 17,000 word novella, now out in the new, Winter/Spring 2019 issue of Mysterical-E, one of the longest running, best reputed crime/mystery magazines on the Internet:
https://mystericale.com/article/death-finds-the-hippy-hunter/
Without giving too much of the plot, Kurt Malaparte, the Hippy Hunter, finds himself a fish out of water when his hippy girlfriend Flora Windsor drags him to the Sun Solstice Fest in upstate New York. Forced to get along with people he usually victimizes, the culture clash is high. Tensions reach a breaking point, however, when a featured performer at the festival is murdered with Kurt as the chief suspect. To find out the solution to the mystery and how Kurt manages to endure a lot of New Age hogwash without going stark staring mad, check out the latest issue of Mysterical-E.