with Ben Solomon
We are delighted to welcome author Ben Solomon to Omnimystery News.
Ben's Hard-Boiled Detective series celebrates the tradition of old-school detective fiction. The first collection in this series, The Hard-Boiled Detective 1 (September 2014; trade paperback and ebook formats), features the perilous cases of his P.I. hero as he seeks truth, justice … and sometimes a living. He tackles dishonest dames, manipulative mugs, cagey crooks, and plenty of victims. There's always plenty of victims.
He titles his guest post for us today, "James Cagney and the Hard-Boiled Detective".
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Photo provided courtesy of
Ben Solomon
Characters can come from anywhere. Stories too. Even entire book series, for that matter. Sometimes the best of the lot comes from the gut, from a connection that's as heartfelt as the richest memories.
I grew up with James Cagney. Spent plenty of late nights together lifting furs, strong-arming saloon keepers, and keeping one step ahead of John Law. At least some of the time.
The Public Enemy and Angels With Dirty Faces were the stuff of my bedtime stories. My knights in shining armor wore double-breasted suits and trench coats. They slew dragons in the forms of backstabbing bootleggers, snitches and two-timing broads. Maybe life was grand over at MGM and RKO. At Warners, things were swell or you got the raspberry.
The whole Warner Brothers gangster cycle taught me plenty about narrative structure, character arcs, comic relief and more. I owe plenty to James Cagney. Bogart, too. And Robinson and Raft and Muni. Add in panache from directors such as Michael Curtiz, Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks. A lot of credit goes to writers including Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman and the Epstein brothers. Of course I didn't realize I was in writer's school at the time. I was just a kid eating it all up.
Warners made out like Black Mask of the silver screen. They celebrated Hammett, Chandler and then some. Those black and white tough guys in a tough world left an impression with me to last a lifetime.
Flash forward several decades to a tiny lightbulb popping in my noodle. I wondered if I could capture the spirit of those flicks, translate their bump and grind into words to produce a throwback valentine to John Huston and Peter Lorre and all the black and white back lots in all the world.
So I created a nameless PI in a nameless burg in a vanished era. I figured any Tom, Dick or Harry was as good another, just like any big city, just like any year from 1929—1959.
I won't claim that I succeeded. I'll leave that up to readers and the boys in the press. But the first short story turned out to be such a gas that I wrote another. And then another. I figured I had a going concern.
So I launched "The Hard-Boiled Detective", a series featuring three short stories every month available by subscription. After running for 19 months with 57 yarns, it seemed only natural to publish the first collection in book form.
The Hard-Boiled Detective 1 features the original 11 adventures in one volume. But it's more than that to me. It's my humble homage to the movies that first showed me the stuff that dreams are made of.
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Ben Solomon, a member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, lives and writes in Chicago, Illinois. His fiction and film criticism have appeared in a number of small, literary publications as well as online. His hard-boiled hero appears in the 2013 anthology, The Shamus Sampler II. Another yarn is scheduled for Drag Noir, an upcoming anthology from Fox Spirit Books. Solomon has also penned regular columns and articles for Hollywood Online, The Motley Fool and Chicago Parent magazine.
For more information about the author, please visit his website at TheHardBoiledDetective.com or find him on Facebook.
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The Hard-Boiled Detective 1
Ben Solomon
A Short Story Collection
For the first time, the original 11 yarns from Solomon's ongoing, throw-back crime series are available in one volume. His nameless detective faces murderers, blackmailers, adulterers and racketeers — and that's only the first story in this collection. Ten more tales cover a never-ending parade of lowlifes, misfits and suckers, all narrated by the hard-luck gumshoe in his statements to the cops.
If you're a fan of "Black Mask", Chandler and Hammett, you'll get a bang out of Solomon's take on old-school detective fiction.
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