WELCOME to my crazy world of hard-boiled crime fiction.
I was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, the youngest of four kids, and started writing bizarre stories and silly poems at an early age. My humor was first published in Boy’s Life magazine when I was eleven. Family and friends can tell you I’ve always been quite the storyteller.
The first books to take hold of me as a kid were Where the Red Fern Grows, by Wilson Rawls, and The Outsiders, by SE Hinton. If you already know me and have heard all my aunts and uncles’ outlandish fibs, then you can understand why Secondhand Lions is one of my favorite movies.
One could say my first job was in the publishing industry working for a local newspaper (a paper route at age 12), but my first real job was working as a trap boy at Elliot’s Shooting Gallery.
Working at Elliot’s was the most fun I had through junior high school. I’d ride my bike the short mile to the skeet park and crawl down into a dirty concrete bunker where I would sit behind a heavy mechanical trap and place clay pigeons onto a steel arm that would sling around at the flip of a switch and launch them into the air for the shooters. The skeet shop’s aroma of gunpowder and machine oil was far more appealing to me than my house stinking of my sisters’ potpourri, perfumes, and hairspray.
When I wasn’t playing sports or swimming at the neighborhood pool, I was spending endless hours at the movies chomping on nachos, and at the arcades dropping every quarter I had into those mesmerizing video games. Other times, I would just hang out in the aisles of bookstores.
Through high school and college I stuffed my pockets with fat tips from working the hotels and restaurants on Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza and Barney Allis Square. As a valet, I’d race in expensive cars through the streets and parking lots, leaving the owners gasping on the curb. As a waiter and bellman, I pounced at every chance to please, flattering guests with my charming smile.
After working 60-hour weeks In the early nineties as a skip tracer, life led me to work as a paralegal for convicted souls, and as a web designer in a small shop full of wicked-smart Java developers. I do a lot of writing at these two jobs: appeal briefs and software documentation. But my passion is writing original stories of hard-boiled, fast-action crime with gritty and cynical characters you won’t forget.
I attended Northwest Missouri State University on a meager athletic scholarship, where I became a happily hazed member of Tau Kappa Epsilon. If I could go back in time to start again, it would be to the summer of 1984, but with the internet. But here I am, constantly debating about what was better: the book or the movie.
After reading several crime novels, I kicked around the idea of writing my own. I already had a vivid imagination, and I love fast action. The Samogon Affair is my first novel. This epic story gives birth to DEA Agent Kelly Reed, who I have devoted an entire series to: Playing for Blood, Whispers That Kill, and Tainted Justice. And with some prodding from a friend and self-published author, I’ve started a spinoff series of novellas featuring DeShawn Mills, a private investigator and ex-con I introduce at the end of Tainted Justice.
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