Greetings

Fellow readers and writers, welcome.

I’m probably new to many of you, and this website, Internet, email, dot.com is all new to me. I began writing novels and short stories long before our "electronic age." My first real story, written in college, was publised in 1954; my first novel in 1962; my first detective novel, written by Michael Collins and introducing his still very busy detective Dan Fortune, in 1967. They were all produced on one of those machines we called "typewriters" back then. (I expect there are still some of you still pounding out your work on electric typewriters, but I skipped that stage, went straight from a manual Olympia to a CPM computer in 1983.)

What most writers are most often asked, is how we got started. In my case, I sort of came to it naturally—and backwards. My father and mother were both English actors who loved words, stories, drama. When I came along they happened to be playing in St. Louis, Missouri, for which I have always been grateful—don’t misunderstand, I like England, have all my relatives there, and have been back often, but here in America we pay better, and we’ve got a whole lot more varied and interesting crime. Anyway, I saw a great many plays when I was young, and was awed by them. Since my mother had also been a history teacher back in England—her day job—she raised me on reading history books, historical novels, and, yes, mysteries, which she loved to read herself.

After I was born on the banks of the Mississippi, they immediately returned to London, and for my first six years I grew up in and around that wonderful city and its great theater and literary tradition. When we returned to America, where my parents both eventually became citizens, we stopped first in New York, then headed out to Hollywood, where I went to public school for a year. But Dad hated Hollywood—being a socialist and early member of the Labor Party—he despised most of the British colony of the time, and so work was not easy to get. We moved on to Denver to do winter stock theater, and then to New York. There Dad performed on Broadway with the likes of Helen Hayes, Judith Anderson, Ray Bolger and other star performers of the time, and worked in summer stock with the very young Henry Fonda and James Stewart.

I ended up growing up in Brooklyn, complete with English accent and pronunciation admired by the teachers, but not fitting too well in my largely Italian neighborhood. Fortunately I was a big boy, athletic, and both friendly and gregarious, and I learned the great lesson that few people hate or pick on a minority of one. If you’re pleasant and unthreatening, you become sort of a pet. Yet you remain an outsider. To the kids you’re just a neighborhood boy who plays pretty good first base, but your parents are so different—how many British actors, who worked nights and slept days, were there way out in Brooklyn—that they don’t take you home, and your family and theirs don’t mix.

My whole childhood had tended to isolate me with my "artist" parents, never having real roots beyond them, and Brooklyn added to the isolation. In was an "outsider’s" life in many ways, and developed in me the ability to rely on my own resources. On my imagination where I would create whole worlds of action and adventure—in essence inventing stories, writing dramas. Except for neighborhood athletics on all those vacant lots Brooklyn had then, and which ended the moment we all went home, my world became largely built on theater, books, and imagination. How could I help becoming anything but an actor, director, or writer?

But my parents did not encourage me to repeat their peripatetic, insecure life, so for a time I took a detour into science. (Wow, big detour. Science and art are very much the same thing, after all.) I went to Brooklyn Technical High School—a city-wide school you had to pass a test to get in. I worked in the laboratory for Chas. Pfizer. I got a BA in Chemistry. And that was where I stopped. Who was I kidding? I was good enough at math, but I found no excitement in it, and if you want to be a true scientist you better love math. What I was excited by was still the theater, plays, books. As an adolescent I had tried acting. I found I was wooden, up tight, and scared to death by the audience. While I loved painting, and music, I couldn’t draw and couldn’t carry a tune. So what was left? Writing. That, I could do.

I switched fields and took an MA in Journalism. I had to make a living, and I could and did study English and write fiction on the side. I wrote for, and edited, chemical magazines in New York for about ten years, writing and publishing literary short stories, two novels, and a host of detective/mystery short stories at night and on weekends. In 1964, on the strength of the two novels, and the detective short stories, I quit my last full time job on a magazine, moved to Santa Barbara, and wrote my first Michael Collins Dan Fortune novel.

I’ve been a full time writer ever since, and intend to keep at it. An outfit called PointBlank Press, an imprint of Wildside Press, is planning to reissue a lot of my earlier books, and I’ll keep you posted as they come out. Meanwhile, I’ve just finished a thriller, and expect to be working on my next Dan Fortune novel after a long layoff.

So keep checking in with this website.