OMN Welcomes Mel Gilden and Introduces PI Turner Cronyn

Omnimystery News is delighted to welcome Mel Gilden as our guest blogger. Mel's first mystery in a new series featuring PI Turner Cronyn is Dangerous Hardboiled Magicians (Amazon Digital Services, September 2010 Kindle Edition).

Today, Mel writes about how magicians become hardboiled.

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Photo provided courtesy of
Mel Gilden

One summer while in my twenties I went to the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in Clarion, Pennsylvania. While there I sold my first short story. Which was encouraging, but the sale turned out to be not as important as a piece of advice given to the students by Robin Scott Wilson, the man who ran the workshop. He advised us to read outside our genre. In particular, he advised us to read books by Raymond Chandler, a mystery writer who was a master of description and character-building.

I took Robin's advice and became quite a fan of Mr. Chandler's work. My favorite of his books is Farewell, My Lovely, a story which contains some of the best characters ever: the bear-like and soulful bank robber, Moose Malloy; and Jessie Florian, a obscene drunk of a woman. You wouldn't want to know either of these people in real life, but as characters in a novel they are spectacular.

The peculiar collision of science fiction and mystery always appealed to me (I also once wrote a science fiction western, but that's another story) and so it was that when, many years later, I was asked by a book packager to write a mystery novel based on a piece of artwork he had lying around, I chose Chandler's work as a model and then decided to add a few speculative elements. The packager wanted the novel to be called Surfing Samurai Robots, and so it was. My hero called himself Zoot Marlowe; he was an alien from another planet who came to earth to solve crimes like his hero -- guess who. The book was fairly popular and spawned two sequels. To this day, when I appear someplace to sign my work, Surfing Samurai Robots is one of the books I inevitably sign. And I still get email from fans asking me to write more adventures of Zoot and his robot companion, Bill.

But I can't.

Oh, I'd love to, and there is no shortage of ideas, but because I wrote the Zoot books for a packager I don't own the rights to the books or to any of the characters in them. As you might imagine, this irked me considerably. So I did what any writer might do in similar circumstances: I wrote a novel that was kinda sorta like Surfing Samurai Robots but different.

Originally I called this new novel With Gods Like These, which I thought of as the first part of the question: With Gods like these, who needs enemies? Then it occurred to me that I was missing a bet. It was possible that by changing the name of the book to Dangerous Hardboiled Magicians I could key into the psyches of all those readers who had enjoyed Surfing Samurai Robots. So far, no one has admitted that he or she purchased the book because of the similarity in titles, but I am still hopeful about my strategy. You never know when somebody is going to like a title just because it contains three interesting words.

The hero of Dangerous Hardboiled Magicians is Turner Cronyn, a guy who became a hardboiled PI after he washed out of the wizard academy. In his first adventure he needs to avoid supernatural creatures who want him dead for reasons that are not clear until much later. Meanwhile he is helped by a beautiful woman who may or may not be a goddess.

Dangerous Hardboiled Magicians is available at the Kindle Store of Amazon.com. You can read the first chapter for free. Seems like a deal.

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Mel Gilden is also a writer of books for children and adults. He is a member of Science-Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and Sisters in Crime. To demonstrate that he remains a force for good in our time Gilden lectures to school and library groups, and has been known to teach fiction writing. He lives in Los Angeles, California, and still hopes to be an astronaut when he grows up. Visit his website at MelGilden.com and "friend" him on Facebook.

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About Dangerous Hardboiled Magicians: Cowabunga, schweatheart! A book in the manner of Surfing Samurai Robots!

In a Los Angeles that is something like ours but more magical, PI Turner Cronyn doesn't know why he has been threatened by a supernatural being. Does it have anything to do with the fact that zombies who look like him are turning up all over town?

But there is a bright side to his life, too. A beautiful woman seems determined to help with his investigations. Is she a goddess or does she just look like one?