Looks very inviting and comfortable, doesn’t it?
Yellow Mama, one of the premier venues for hardboiled crime fiction on the Internet, has accepted Valley Of The Meth Head Rustlers, the seventh published story to feature Alec Pargrew, Cowhand PI. It will appear in issue no. 52 on October 15, 2015.
Valley was inspired by a news article I read last year about an investigator in Texas for TSCRA, the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, a rather strange, public-private hybrid, law enforcement organization that has chased down and run in stock rustlers in Texas and Oklahoma since the 1870’s. Most of my ideas for Alec Pargrew yarns come from reading travel books and news about the Southwest and Northern Mexico. One book, God’s Middle Finger, by Richard Grant inspired the first three stories all on it’s lonesome.
I hope to write a full length novel with Alec as the protagonist entitled Nothing Sure But Death In Texas. At present, the novel only exists vestigially in my mind, but I’m debating whether to have the plot revolve around a Ponzi scheme with a character very loosely based on Robert Allen Stanford, better known as “Sir Allen,” the international banker/financier and beefy Texas good old boy whose shenaningans got him a phony title from the island nation of Antigua and Barbuda and a lengthy prison sentence courtesy of Uncle Sam. People who pull Ponzi schemes fascinate me even though I find their behavior utterly despicable. The way they follow the exact same path to their virtually inevitable downfall, right down to the classic car fetish they seem to all share, plus the fact that they always find plentiful suckers, really intrigues me. Can you tell that American Greed is one of my favorite shows on cable TV?
My most sincere thanks to editor Cindy Rosmus for accepting the story. I’ll be sure to plug the yarn again when it appears in Yellow Mama in October so folks who want to read it will have ample notice. Until that day, good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, I wish everyone well and remain your most obd’t servant.
Historical note: Yellow Mama was the affectionate nickname given to the electric chair used by the Alabama state prison system. Many a convicted man was fried to a char in the ample confines of its hard wooden seat. This is a photo of the monstrosity. Like I said, the magazine prints HARDBOILED fiction, the beat I intend to walk for the rest of my writing career.
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