Detectives and Spies
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Archie’s Been Stolen! felt like the natural end to my Julius Katz series, but a year after writing it I found myself missing Julius and the little guy. I also thought since the last two stories in the series featured Julius’s spy sister, Julia, I owed it to the readers to give them one last Julius Katz mystery story, and so I wrote the longer novella, Julius Katz and the Ruined Roast. The setup: a comedian is poisoned during a comedy roast, and the other comedians who were on the roast are afraid their careers will be ruined unless the murderer is exposed, and so they hire Julius. This one has all the ingredients that I felt made the Julius Katz series fun to read as well as wrapping up a few loose ends, and I was able to naturally fit it the timeline right before Julius Katz and the Two Cousins. Since the novella was too long to submit to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, I had the idea of grouping it with Morris Brick stories and Mike Stone in PI stories, and since I needed another story to complete the collection, I wrote the Morris Brick story James & Bond for this new collection. I also decided to title it Detectives and Spies since there would be three spy-related stories, all while still having detectives in them. A funny thing happened when writing the Julius Katz novella—I wanted to write more Julius Katz stories, which is why I’m now writing the “early” stories.
My introduction to the collection:
Three sections. Four different types of mystery and crime stories.
Whether it’s the brilliant Boston detection Julius Katz or his sister Julia the first three stories in the KATZ section are traditional mysteries. A crime has been committed, the potential suspects are questioned, and the guilty party is exposed. While the fourth story in the section, Archie’s Been Stolen!, has the same style, tone and humor as all the other Julius Katz and Archie stories, it’s a caper. There’s no mystery to solve, only a heist of sorts to commit.
The three stories in the BRICK section are crime thrillers featuring investigator Morris Brick, his bull terrier Parker, and the rest of the MBI team. These stories and the five Morris Brick novels that I wrote under the Jacob Stone pseudonym for Kensington have similar humor and style, are fast-paced, and are populated by hardened criminals and mobsters. Where they differ is the novels have very bad people committing horrific acts while the stories are lighter. While there’s plenty of danger in these stories, ultimately no one gets badly hurt.
The two stories in the STONE section features Hell’s only operating private eye, Mike Stone, from my novel Everybody Lies in Hell. Even with the unique setting and the fantastic elements, such as souls being tormented by demons and demonic racing horses that bite the heads off of jockeys, these are hardboiled PI stories. These stories are about stripping away the self-deceptions and lies we tell ourselves to expose the ugly truths underneath, and there’s not much more hardboiled than that!
So given that these are all mystery and crime stories, why the title Detectives and Spies? While all the stories have either detectives or spies acting as detectives, three of the stories are a merging of mystery and the spy genres.