All the PIs I've written

I’ve written a lot of PIs, starting with my Johnny Lane, the PI protagonist in my first novel, Fast Lane. While the novel masquerades as a cliched hardboiled PI novel before shifting gears and becoming full-blown psychotic noir, Lane does act, at least for a while, as a PI. After the (well-deserved) hell I put Lane through, I decided to give him a chance to act as the Lew Archer-type PI that he imagined himself as, and so I later wrote a short story prequel to the novel titled The Dover Affair.

The main character in Bad Thoughts (Bill Shannon) isn’t a PI, but this horror/crime/metaphysical novel features a PI (Phil Dornich) as one of the significant characters. I modeled Dornich after a licensed PI who taught an adult education class that I took on “How to be a PI”.

Bill Shannon miraculously survives Bad Thoughts, and in the sequel, Bad Karma, he’s now in Boulder, CO, working as a PI, and this is a pure hard-boiled PI novel, albeit one with some metaphysical aspects.

One of the main characters in my horror/crime/vampire novel, Blood Crimes, is a PI named Donald Hayes. Hayes is smart, industrious, and honest, whose only mistake is taking on the wrong client.

There have been 22 Julius Katz detective mystery short stories published so far (winning an Edgar, Shamus, Derringer, and two Ellery Queen Readers Awards), one novel, and more stories that have been acquired for publication. My PI Julius Katz is very different than my other PIs, and his sidekick, Archie, is very different than any other detective sidekick in literature. While there’s certainly a hard-boiled edge to these stories, they’re more along the lines of the British drawing-room mysteries.

There have been 5 crime novels featuring Morris Brick and his team at Morris Brick Investigations that were originally published by Kensington under a pseudonym. I have since published these novels under my own name and with the titles I wanted. There have also been five Morris Brick short stories published so far, with a new one titled Alfred & Hitchcock scheduled for the July/August issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. While the five novels are hard-hitting crime novels disguised as serial killer novels (which was what Kensington wanted), the short stories are lighter and have the investigators dealing with heists and other such crimes.

There have so far been five Steve Heller and Joe “Red” Sullivan stories published, two in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and two in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. While Steve and Joe are Cambridge MA cops, and technically not PIs, these are moody detective stories that operate in a gray area where nothing is black and white.

And finally, there’s Mike Stone, the only operating PI in Hell, and the star of my novel Everybody Lies in Hell and four subsequent PI in Hell short stories, and now a pure PI story, Sleeping Dogs, which has Mike when he was alive and working as a PI in Brooklyn in the 90s.