Please Welcome Mystery Author Jack Getze

with Jack Getze

We are delighted to welcome mystery author Jack Getze to Omnimystery News today, courtesy of Great Escapes Book Tours, which is coordinating his current book tour. We encourage you to visit all of the participating host sites; you can find his schedule here, where you can also enter to win a $100 Amazon gift card!

Jack's second Austin Car mystery is Big Money, first published in 2008 and now being reissued in new trade paperback and ebook formats by Down & Out Books.

His guest post for us today is titled "The Other Stuff Writers Do", or as he tells us, "Nobody said being a new author was easier than getting to be one."

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Photo provided courtesy of
Jack Getze

Delayed by construction not long ago, my train from New Jersey arrives at Washington, D.C.'s Union Station ten minutes late. Yes, I'm due soon at a well-known writers conference, but I've left myself plenty of time. I'll be fine. Relax.

But then the robotic, incredibly complicated Metro ticket machine steals my last twenty dollar bill, and I get a little upset — Oh, heck, let's be honest, I have a hissy fit — and after two subway switches and one kind stranger later, I am now jogging through the underbelly of the Marriott Crystal Gateway. Late, late, late.

In tow are my computer and it's heavy briefcase, my luggage packed with five-days worth of clothes because this is the first of two conferences I'll be attending before going home, and — whew, let me catch my breath — forty-five pounds of promotional material. Cards, book marks, post cards, T-shirts, and a dozen wind-up replicas of a giant bluefin tuna. (Trust me, people are going to love these tuna). Me and my stuff weave like a halfback chased by his would-be tacklers through the busy underground shopping mall.

Checking my cellphone, I'm due at the special meeting for new authors in nine minutes. My pulse and temperature climb. Plus — wouldn't you know it — I need to find a restroom.

Nobody said being a new author was easier than getting to be one. I was just kind of hoping …

I trot into the meeting with two minutes to spare, red-faced, dripping with perspiration and panting like an old Labrador. I hope my tail's not wagging. Suave, poised, dabbing at my brow and upper lip like President Nixon during Watergate.

"Ready to pitch your story to a hundred mystery fans?" the event coordinator says. "You'll have ninety seconds at each table of six-to-eight fans."

My eyes scan the Marriott's huge ballroom. I'm too sweaty, nervous, and distracted to make a truly accurate count, but there seem to be three or four rows of five or six tables. There are at least one hundred people in the room. At least. And I sure hope I'm wrong, but it looks like half of these mystery convention attendees are staring at me.

Buck up, I tell myself. Don't be so self-conscious.

The coordinator leans in close. "You'd better zip yourself," she says.

Later, in the bar, a veteran author of twenty published mysteries says, "This is our hazing process for you newbies. Fast-pitch practice, face-to-face. It's tough, but you learned how to tell your story, didn't you?"

Sort of. I mean, yes, it was indeed a serious learning experience. At one point, I asked another author traveling table-to-table with me. "Did I have three or four blank faces this time when I showed them the wind-up tuna?"

Mystery conferences are great places to meet other authors, editors, agents, and once in a while a fan or two. But unless you're Charlene Harris, don't expect to sell a ton of books in the dealer room, or sign dozens and dozens of your book in the autograph sessions.

Or maybe it was just me. Me and those stupid tuna dolls.

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Former Los Angeles Times reporter Jack Getze is Fiction Editor for Spinetingler Magazine, one of the internet's oldest websites for noir, crime, and horror short stories. Through the Los Angeles Times/Washington Post News Syndicate, his news and feature stories were published in over five-hundred newspapers and periodicals worldwide. His short stories have appeared in A Twist of Noir and Beat to a Pulp. Getze is an Active Member of Mystery Writers of America's New York Chapter.

For more information about the author and his work, visit his blog The Crime of Austin Carr or find him on Facebook.

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Big Money
Jack Getze
An Austin Carr Mystery

Three women are mad enough to kill him …

Left in charge of a third-rate Jersey Shore investment firm, suspended stockbroker Austin Carr becomes the prize in a war between two crime crews, a powerful state investigator and Mama Bones Bonacelli, his boss's wacky mother.

Barely staying alive with mobsters, beautiful cops, and a hitman he calls The Creeper chasing him, Carr stumbles into the secret world of a beautiful but desperate woman — a murderer who chooses Austin as her next victim.