Bop City Swing - Cover Reveal!

How I Fell in Step with a Dancing Partner

Bop City Swing will be released on April 22, from publisher Cowboy Jamboree.

The novel was written in collaboration, and the magnificent cover was designed by wildly talented pulp lover, Frank Vatel. Here it is, full-size, because like the girl it’s worth every inch of it!

I never thought I’d write a book in collaboration. I have my way of doing things with a vague outline that leaves a lot of room for improvisation. What are the odds that I could find a partner who works the same way? Wouldn’t we step on each other’s toes, fight over plot points, criticize our respective styles, and ultimately create a stillborn two-headed monster?

There are famous examples of brilliant joint novels. The Talisman, by Steven King and Peter Straub, is a favorite of mine and a frequent reread. Peter Straub said they sent chapters back and forth, picking up where the other left off. It’s like that old parlor game: one player comes up with a random sentence, the next one adds to it, it goes around the table, and at the end there’s a story. Fun for a rainy evening. Straub and King were friends. Straub even said that they imitated each other’s writing style (here’s a link to a Q&A with him where he talks about the book). They had a mental connection. An exceptional vibe.

When writer friend Russell Thayer suggested we write a story together, I didn’t think it would go anywhere. It was a random chat, words in the air. And for a couple of months, nothing happened.

Then out of the blue, the topic resurfaced because we both had ‘retro’ crime fiction published at the same time in different magazines.

I’d been reading Russell’s stories and he’d been reading mine. We commented on each other’s work. We also shared drafts on occasion. Collaboration, on a small scale.

Many of Russell’s pieces feature a recurrent character: Vivian, nicknamed Gunselle, a former Hollywood starlet who built a career as a gun for hire, an assassin. The stories take place between the late thirties and the early fifties. And I sometimes take a trip to mid-century San Francisco. I love to dig in old newspapers, study photographs, and play with film noir vibes, the cigarette smoke, the snappy dialogue, and the sharp fedoras. A dozen hardboiled stories starring Tom Keegan, a Homicide detective in 1950 San Francisco, have been published so far, in various magazines and anthologies.

A two-step was in our future.

We started without a plan. Just, hey, let’s bring Vivian and Tom together. I enjoyed the brainstorming sessions. They reminded me of my years as a researcher when I played mental ping-pong with a colleague. I doubted I could recapture the same feeling, without sitting in the same room. Surprisingly chatting online was a good substitute. It was exciting to see how we talked over each other in typing, just like we would face-to-face. I suggested a political assassination. We agreed that Russell’s character, Vivian, would not be the killer. Neither of us wanted to write a classic ‘cop chases criminal’ story. We went back and forth on Vivian’s connection with the case. Then we found the twist: she was hired for the hit but somebody iced the target in front of her, and she’s pissed off because she won’t rake in the fat paycheck.

Russell wrote the first scene, from Vivian’s perspective. I wrote the arrival of the detective at the crime scene. Some of that initial work made it to the final manuscript, but these pages were rewritten many times, as we unwrapped the story.

In the beginning, who did what was clear. We each wrote scenes for our respective characters, in chronological order, knowing that we would bring them together in key scenes, even if we didn’t know yet how that would happen. Then as we finetuned and polished the master document, things became less clear-cut. I tweaked Russell’s scenes and he adjusted mine. The story became a blend of our respective styles. It also wasn’t a short anymore. The plot was too complex to stay within 5,000 words. Soon we were in novella territory. The final manuscript clocks at 52,000 words, an acceptable length for a short novel. It took four months of a joint obsession. We became very familiar with each other’s main character. Enough to be able to say: He would never do that / She would never say that.

I can’t explain how the ending came about. It will forever be a mystery. Past the mid-point, we felt the need for a timeline and a script. What character does what where and when. Our long conversations full of ‘what if’ and ‘but, maybe’ clinched the story resolution and we landed in a place neither of us expected. It was indeed a lot of fun, so much so that we are now working on another story with the same two characters. A different setting, a different problem, and yes, it’s going well. We are comfortable, both in Vivian’s heels and Tom’s brogues.

In case you wonder, there’s quite a bit of heat radiating from the two protagonists when they collide. It makes for cool scenes to write, with questions like: do we write it from the point of view of the girl or the guy? And answers like: let’s do both and see what works best. Spoiler alert, it’s better when the girl tells it, and the guy is left pondering!

Bop City Swing, jazz-infused, dark, and a wild ride comes your way on April 22, mark the date! The paperback will be released on that date but you can pre-order the E-Book right now. It will land on your nifty devices without a hitch!

(A different version of this article was published last year in the Mystery Readers newsletter.)