An intelligent looking fellow.
I’m pleased to announce that my short story, Valley Of The Meth Head Rustlers, is now available in issue number 52 of Yellow Mama, one of the longest running, premier crime/mystery magazines on the Internet. Valley is the seventh short story to feature Alec Pargrew, Cowhand PI. I’m pleased that this character has proven relatively popular. My sincere thanks to Yellow Mama editor Cindy Rosmus for accepting this story.
I got the idea for Rustlers and the last line of dialogue from a news article about a Texas Special Ranger with a focus solely on running in cattle rustlers, a thriving illegal business in the Southwest, driven in large part by the thieves’ addiction to illegal meth or so law enforcement sources allege. My personal hunch is that since cattle basically represent a fairly large amount of money on legs that can be coaxed into the back of a truck without much effort, financial greed is the primary motivator whether the rustlers plan to blow their ill gotten gains on drugs or not. Research on this story was interesting. I learned about the Texas Southwest Cattle Raisers Association or TSCRA, a quasi-public/private organization whose officers have searched for and arrested rustlers in Texas and Oklahoma since the 1890’s. When I write an Alec Pargrew story, what I’m basically trying to do is write a Western in the guise of crime fiction. There simply is no market as such for Western fiction anymore, a dramatic departure from sixty or fifty years ago when it claimed the lion’s share of the commercial market. Yes, I know that’s ancient history, but I’m an antique myself and my don’t things change. Nonetheless, I continue to be encouraged by Alec Pargrew’s apparent popularity and am seriously thinking about writing a full length novel about him as my next project. Friends of mine will tell you that I’ve been threatening this for years, but maybe this time I mean it.
These guys demand to be taken seriously.
Last Friday, I went to the Black Cat and finally caught Metalachi. What can I say, such inspired silliness I haven’t seen since Flo & Eddie opened for Steven Stills at UVA back in ’74 (gosh, I’m an old goat). The idea of playing mariachi covers of heavy metal chestnuts is absurd enough in itself. The band’s accomplished musicians take the concept to its illogical extreme, togged out in garish make up, lucha libre masks and ridiculous charro outfits, and lay the cholo accents on thick. Lead singer Vegas de la Rockha (his real name) has a perfect pop metal voice. The arrangements were clever and a particular standout musically was violinist Maximilian Dirty Sanchez. Everyone in the band is a huge card and cut-up (what else with a premise like this). Trust me, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard the mariachi version of Hot For Teacher. Other standouts were Sweet Child Of Mine and Enter Sandman. The crowd ate it up. If you want to be entertained and you enjoy amusement of the lowbrow, metal sort, you can simply do no better than Metalachi. Big laughs all round and two thumbs up.