BACK TO PAPERBACK

I've been self-publishing my own eBooks -- both on Kindle and from other outlets -- for a good few years. But now that Amazon have made the whole process considerably easier, I've started bringing out a few more novels and short story collections as paperbacks as well.

Some of my novels were already in that form ... the 6 books in my Raine's Landing supernatural series, for instance, two of which are pictured above. The same was true of my Californian detective thriller The Tribe.

And of my non-fiction handbook How To Improve Your Writing: The Art of Creating Professional Fiction.

But it used to take a fair amount of effort  to bring these books out. Now that Amazon have speeded up and simplified the work involved, I've started producing p/b editions of some of my other work, with plenty more to follow. Already out is Under The Ice, my Scandinavian-based chiller.

And there is also my collection Classic Pan and Fontana Horror, which has been so popular as an eBook in the UK.

Soon to come in paperback will be my first detective thriller, The Desert Keeps Its Dead, my near-future mystery novel The Electric Shaman, and my modern-day ghost novel Postcards From Terri.

And that's just for starters. As they say -- whoever they are -- watch this space.

THE TRIBE -- A CALIFORNIAN CRIME THRILLER

It's been a long while coming, but my second full-blown crime novel (no supernatural events, no magic) is now out.

My detective Matt Barrett first appeared in 2014 in the short novel The Desert Keeps Its Dead. And he's one of the favorite characters that I've invented, a former FBI agent who quit the Bureau after a dispute and now works as a private operative ... sometimes operating right outside the law when he can see no other choice.

And now he's back in this much longer thriller, courtesy of CD Publications and my new editor Norman Prentiss. The location this time is the central Californian town of Los Acantilados, an apparently pleasant coastal town (los acantilados means 'the cliffs') with a good number of wealthy residents. But -- as with Desert -- all is not precisely as it seems. There is a lot of ugliness and criminality hovering beneath the surface. Including murder, yes, and some crimes even worse.

Here is the back-cover blurb:

It couldn’t sound like a simpler job. Young Lacey Morganstern has fallen in with a bad crowd of spoiled, unruly rich kids and her mother wants her back.

But as Matt Barrett finds out more about the teenagers who call themselves “the Tribe,” the whole case starts to take on darker layers. Why the secret rendezvous at night? What are privileged kids doing hanging out with violent gangs? And then there is the matter of the Orange Grove Ranch, just outside the wealthy town of Los Acantilados.

A deadly game is being played where human lives don’t count for very much. And it isn’t too much longer before Matt is fighting for his own.

THE TRIBE is available on Amazon Kindle.

Also on B&N Nook.

And if you'd rather read the paperback, then here's the link to use.

NEAR-FUTURE DETECTIVE FICTION

Short stories don't always sell immediately. Far from it.

Many years ago -- for instance -- back when it was still safe to do so, Louise and I visited Zimbabwe. She was in a conference for most of the first week. I spent my first few days wandering the streets of the capital, Harare, and having a good but slightly edgy time ... I narrowly avoided getting robbed by a street gang on one occasion. Then I hired a Land Rover one-ton pickup truck, and drove about a lot, visiting nearby nature reserves and the amazing Chinhoyi Caves, or simply stopping in the middle of plain nowhere for a while to drink in the near limitless views. Once Louise's conference was over we moved on, first to the ancient walled city of Great Zimbabwe, then to the Victoria Falls, and finally to the vast Hwange National Park on the edge of the Kalahari Desert. It was a spectacular trip, one I'll never forget.

Arriving home, I wanted to write something about the place, and wound up finishing a novelette set in the near-future and featuring an African homicide lieutenant. I spent the next couple of years sending it around to all the science fiction magazines and regular anthologies, with absolutely no result. And so I put the MS away in a drawer and forgot about it for a good long while.

Until one day I thought, It's a mystery story too, isn't it? So why not at least try it on a couple of mystery magazines?

I was slightly dubious that this would work, but got the story out again, polished it up, and submitted it to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, which I had sold a couple of much shorter stories to about a decade back. And blow me down ... editor Linda Landrigan snatched that novelette up straight away. And so I wrote three more, each with the same central character and each story interlinked and following on from the next to form a continuous narrative. 'The Very Edge of New Harare' first appeared in AHMM in January 2012, 'The Hunting Party' in October 2013, and 'The Clan' and 'The Danua Boy' in March and April of 2014. And then I wrote a final long tale featuring not only my detective and his new family, but also bringing back a very devious criminal from one of the earlier tales. And now the whole sequence of stories is out as one book on Amazon Kindle.

In the not too distant future, the Dark Continent has changed. It’s become Federal Africa, with all of the old countries now united into one great nation. The separate tribes are gone, technology has boomed … it is a very modern place. 

 But if you think that it’s completely changed, meet Lieutenant Abel Enetame of the Zimbabwe State Police Force, a single father with a great deal on his plate. He doesn’t only have the usual crimes to deal with, murders, assassinations, kidnappings. There are violent Black Supremacists. There are fanatics like the Tribalists, who want to take the whole place back to the old days. And there are egotistic billionaires and power-crazy politicians.  

 And when those kinds of people start getting their hands on brand-new devices that can do startling things, like change the past, for instance … well, that’s when the sparks really start to fly. Because the future of the whole of modern Africa might well rely on one police detective. 

 You can find out more about THE ELECTRIC SHAMAN here.

I'VE FINALLY TURNED TO CRIME!

Down the years, I’ve largely become known as a writer of supernatural fiction, dark fantasy, and horror. I’ve written science fiction too, and even some short mystery stories, but those have almost always had either a supernatural or a futuristic twist. But now my very first full-blown crime novel – THE DESERT KEEPS ITS DEAD – is out from Telos Publishing. No spooks, no sf, nothing but action and intrigue and evil-doing. It’s available in eBook format and in a paperback version too. The back-cover write-up is below:

The desert … it prefers to keep its dead. It wraps them up in its hot, dry arms, leeching the moisture from their skin ….

Ex-FBI agent turned private eye Matt Barrett arrives in Sunset City, Arizona searching for a teenage runaway, only to find her dead and buried in the desert sand. Investigating further, he learns that other young girls have gone missing. It seems there may be a serial killer on the loose. But Sunset City is an unwelcoming place of dark, closely-guarded secrets, and Barrett is resisted at every step of the way, soon finding his own life in danger …

A gripping, noirish debut crime novel from acclaimed horror and dark fantasy author Tony Richards.

‘He’s convincing … convincing enough that the locals will read about their city as described by Tony Richards and shudder. And that’s what we call a writers’ writer’ – John Pelan.

THE DESERT KEEPS ITS DEAD is available in eBook format from Amazon, B&N Nook, Kobo, or as a fine looking trade paperback from Telos Publishing.

I'm really looking forward to seeing how my readers react to this new change in direction. Who knows? I might even pick up some new ones. And a second novel featuring the same detective ought to be in my agent's clutches early next year.

THE BIG AUGUST SALE!

How about this for a special offer?

For the rest of this month, all of my self-published e-books in all formats will be available for 99c plus delivery fee (totaling around 77 pence in the UK). That takes in books normally priced at $2.99, including 3 full length novels in my Raine's Landing dark fantasy adventure series, the huge short story collection pictured above, and The Complete Sherlock Holmes in the 21st Century.

Which means that all of my e-books on Amazon Kindle are now the same low price. And the same applies to Kobo, Smashwords, and B&N Nook.

Happy reading. And in some cases, scary reading too -- though not everything is write is scary by a long chalk. There's something for most tastes here.

IMPORTANT P.S.: EVEN MORE GOOD NEWS ... I'VE DECIDED TO CONTINUE THIS SALE INTO SEPTEMBER. DON'T MISS THIS CHANCE TO PICK UP SOME GOOD-SIZED BOOKS AT THE MINIMUM PRICE.

MEET MATT BARRETT

For most of my thirty-six years as a professionally published author, I have written fantastical stuff. I started off with science fiction, and then moved very quickly on to supernatural and horror. And both those genres have colored the majority of my output over more than three and a half decades. Even my Sherlock Holmes stories have had a good strong touch of fantasy to guide their plots. And my Future Africa mysteries have been partly science fiction.

True, I've written one straight mystery short, 'Hamadryad' for Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, which can be found in my Books of Shadow on Kindle. And one wholly mainstream story, Balancing Act. But those two have been very much the exceptions to the general rule.

Only now, all that is changing. Because Telos Publishing have just bought my very first straightforward detective novel, The Desert Keeps its Dead. NO sci-fi. Not even a HINT of otherworldly spookiness. Just a murder, followed by more, and a tough detective who is tasked to solve them.

The Desert Keeps its Dead is a noirish, hard boiled thriller set in -- as the title suggests -- Arizona. The central character is Matt Barrett, a former FBI agent who quit the agency for personal reasons, now works for himself, and dispenses his own very rough brand of justice. You'll be learning more about him in the coming years, because I have plenty more novels to write in which he plays a very active part. And I'll be letting you know about the whens and wheres of Desert as soon as I hear myself.

But in the meantime, I just thought that you would like to have your very first meeting with Matt Barrett.

IT'S A DARK RAIN THAT'S GONNA FALL

Dark Rain, the first in my Raine's Landing series of dark fantasy/supernatural thrillers, was first published by the Eos imprint of HarperCollins in 2008. It immediately got a following and some pretty good reviews, and I have written four more novels set in that strange Massachusetts town since then, with a sixth - Witchhunter - planned this year. But now that first novel is finally out of print at Eos/HC and no longer available digitally, and the rights in it have reverted to yours truly.

Which means not straight away - I'm working on the final draft of something new at the moment, and don't want to disturb that process - but sometime in April I will be bringing out my own version of Dark Rain on Amazon, where it will join the likes of Deadly Violet and Speak of the Devil as a $2.99 e-book.

It's gonna fall, in other words. In price. Watch this space.

AN XMAS GIFT FOR ALL MY READERS

The 4th Sherlock Holmes in the 21st Century is free on Kindle for today, Xmas Day, and Dec 26th (Boxing Day in the UK). It contains 3 stories. In 'Vermilion Moon,' Holmes finds himself mired among the fleshpots of Amsterdam. In 'A Ghost in Tokyo,' Holmes not only visits Japan but meets his intellectual match in the diminutive female form of Inspector Haruko Minoshi. And in 'Flight of Fantasy,' heading back from the Orient, Holmes is trapped aboard a stricken jetliner with no obvious way off.

You can find out more and get your free ebook here.

SHERLOCK HOLMES BREAKS FREE

The third volume of my modern-day Sherlock Holmes supernatural mysteries is absolutely free on Amazon today. Here's the 'back cover' material:

Sherlock Holmes didn’t die when he plunged down the Reichenbach Falls. He turned out to be unkillable, and is still with us to this very day, travelling the world and delving into all its most confounding cases. But these are not merely ordinary crimes … supernatural forces are at work. In “The Hunters and the Hunted” Holmes is confronted with a deadly insect swarm in Kenya … but what is directing the creatures toward their victims? In “Above the Boulevards” a powerful and mysterious vigilante is protecting women on the streets of Paris. And in “The Crimewave” Holmes is called back urgently to his beloved native London. And he no longer has Watson by his side … so here’s your chance to make the journey with him.

You can get your copy right HERE.

THE REAL THIN MAN

A weird coincidence, this. No sooner had I finished reading -- and loving -- Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse than a discussion sprang up about the guy on a site I regularly visit, The Book Corner on Kindleboards. And it's great to see ebook readers taking such an interest in the fellow, because Dash Hammett is something of a hero of mine. Not only was he a terrific writer, he was a fascinating individual into the bargain.

As has already been pointed out, he served in both wars, and is buried at Arlington as a result. According to his long-term on-off partner, the playwright Lillian Hellman (whose memoir Pentimento is well worth a look as well) army life quite suited his temperament. Unlike the vast majority of crime writers, Hammett actually was a professional private detective before he hit the typewriter, one of the top agents for Pinkerton's, so adept at his job that he once demonstrated to a reporter how to follow someone not from behind but from in front. Sheesh! He finally quit that job and took up writing when Pinkerton's started getting into strike-breaking, which went heavily against his principles.

He served time in jail during the McCarthy era for refusing to cooperate with HUAC. And such was the respect the man commanded that the prison guards didn't call him 'pinko' or suchlike, they called him 'sir.' And he wrote screenplays as well as novels and short stories, earning himself a small fortune in a bare couple of years.

If you want to know more about him, then I heavily recommend Shadow Man: the Life of Dashiell Hammett by Richard Layman. And if you ever find yourself in San Fran, you can go on a genuinely enjoyable Dashiell Hammett Tour. DH wasn't a perfect human being by any means, and would never claim to be so. But he was a far more interesting man than any other half a dozen writers you could put in the same room.

I'M FINALLY ON SMASHWORDS!

 

People have been asking me -- on message boards and forums -- for quite a while now whether any of my self-published ebooks are available through anything else but Kindle. And the answer until this week has been NO. But now I've got two of my short story collections up on Smashwords. Dark Futures is a compendium of my sf/horror fusion tales, from the pages of The 3rd Alternative, Black Static and suchlike, with a cover by the excellent Steve Upham. Whereas The Immortal Sherlock Holmes: Volume I comprises four of my modern day Holmes stories, 'The Desert King' in Arizona, 'The Hidden Shore' in the Carribean, 'The Terror in the Park' in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and the Las Vegas based 'The House of Blood,' originally published in Gaslight Arcanum: Dark Tales of Sherlock Holmes. Both books have gone onto Smashwords' Premium Catalog, btw, and so they ought to be available on Nook, Kobo etc. fairly soon. You can find out more about them HERE.

SHERLOCK HOLMES IS ON THE PHONE

A Sherlock Holmes story available on your cell phone? Even an intellect as vast as the Great Detective's would be hard pressed to come up with such an extraordinary notion. And yet 'The House of Blood' -- the very first Holmes in the 21st Century story I ever wrote, and part of my Immortal Holmes series on Amazon Kindle -- is now available to read via cell phone, iPad, and heaven knows what else from the Movella apps site.

TWO MORE ON KINDLE

I blogged last year (Elementary, My Dear Richards, 17 August 2010) about how I'd been approached for a Sherlock Holmes story by an editor I know, how flummoxed I was at first -- I'd never once in my career considered writing one -- and , when I finally sat down and did it, how much fun I had. I came away from the experience firmly convinced I ought to write some more fiction of that kind. And now, almost a year after the original event, here is the result, My short collection Sherlock Holmes in the 21st Century is now out on Amazon Kindle. It comprises a novelette and two decent-sized stories which see Holmes facing supernatural peril in the Arizona desert, in the Caribbean, and in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. And there will be more to come a little later on.

My second new publication on Kindle is another collection. The full title? Dark Futures: Horror meets SF, which pretty much explains itself. And it turns out that that book is selling better than anything else I've put on Amazon so far, so who says that readers don't like genre boundaries being messed with? All my books on Amazon Kindle are available for 99 cents, and you can find out more about them by means of a simple click here.