Please Welcome Mystery Author Marc Krulewitch

with Marc Krulewitch

We are delighted to welcome mystery author Marc Krulewitch to Omnimystery News, courtesy of TLC 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.

Marc's debut mystery, Maxwell Street Blues (Albi; August 2014 ebook formats), introduces Jules Landau, a college man turned private eye on the Windy City's mean streets — a virtual school of hard knocks where graduation means just staying alive.

Today Marc tells us more about the book and the series he's planning.

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Photo provided courtesy of
Marc Krulewitch

Maxwell Street Blues is the first book of my detective series that takes place in modern day Chicago, where I was born and where my great-grandfather had been a powerful political boss of the "bloody" 20th ward during Prohibition. Maxwell Street was located in the 20th ward and became famous for its open air market where poor immigrants could buy and sell their wares. In the 1930s and 40s, many African-American blues musicians from the segregated south moved to Chicago and began playing at the Maxwell Street market. The musical genre of electrified urban blues — known as Chicago blues — was created at the Maxwell Street market.

My detective is Jules Landau, the youngest in a family of petty criminals whose great-grandfather was fashioned after the man described above. But unlike his forebears, Jules has decided to become a private investigator. His first murder case comes via his estranged father, Bernie, who had just gotten out of prison and hires Jules to find the killer of Snooky, who also happened to be a close friend of the family.

The second book is in the latter stages of editing, and the third book is a nearly completed first draft. It is my intention that Jules remains relatively unchanged throughout the series in that he's a complicated person full of conflicting emotions, contradictions, and more than a little bit of unacknowledged anger.

Maxwell Street Blues has been consistently referred to as hardboiled or noir fiction which at first surprised me because that was not my intention. I did not decide beforehand what category he would fit in, wanting instead for Jules to develop organically as someone who ultimately will tell me where he fits in. Admittedly, Jules is my alter-ego, and how we view ourselves and how others view us is rarely the same.

Thus far, my writing process has been very unstructured in that I begin a book with only a vague outline in my head. At most, I'll know who's dead or missing and who hires Jules to find out what happened. As I write the opening scene, ideas come to me and I jot down notes lower on the page. Sometimes one idea leads to many others and I end up writing several pages of possible scenarios for the next scene or for events that won't take place until much farther down the road. When I'm ready to start the fourth book, I plan on first writing an extensive outline just to see if it makes a difference in how productive I am in the actual writing of the book.

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Marc Krulewitch’s Jules Landau mysteries take place in Chicago, where he was born and where his family has lived for generations. He now resides in Colorado.

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Maxwell Street Blues
Marc Krulewitch
A Jules Landau Mystery

Chicago runs in Jules Landau's veins. So does the blood of crooks. Now Jules is going legit as a private eye, stalking bail jumpers and cheating spouses — until he gets his first big case. Unfortunately, the client is his ex-con father, and the job is finding the killer of a man whom Jules loved like family. Why did someone put two bullets in the head of gentle bookkeeper Charles Snook? Jules is determined to find out, even if the search takes him to perilous places he never wanted to go.

Snooky, as he was affectionately known, had a knack for turning dirty dollars clean, with clients ranging from humble shop owners to sharp-dressed mobsters. As Jules retraces Snooky's last days, he crosses paths with a way-too-eager detective, a gorgeous and perplexing tattoo artist, a silver-haired university administrator with a kinky side, and a crusading journalist. Exposing one dirty secret after another, the PI is on a dangerous learning curve. And, at the top of that curve, a killer readies to strike again.