Tag Archives: crime fiction

Cover reveal: The BAD INTENTIONS anthology

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The folks behind the BAD INTENTIONS anthology, publisher Literary Garage and anthology editor Michael Downing, have revealed the cover for the collection, which comes out July 7.

And that cover is a gem, as you can plainly see.

If you’re a compulsive watcher and reader of credits, like me, you know that Frank Vatel, a writer and artist, has turned out some beautiful work and this is another example of that. (Frank is @vatel1675 on the former Twitter.) He really captured the mood of the 15 stories in BAD INTENTIONS.

I’ve got a story in the anthology: “Sunset Stakeout” is set in 1979 and is about three increasingly desperate men – a producer, a faded star and a film school screenwriter – as they face the extinction of their show, “Sunset Stakeout,” a “Rockford”-esque action/drama in a time when TV viewers loved sitcoms.

How desperate do my characters get? You can find out July 7.

I wrote the story as a love letter to Los Angeles as the 1970s were about to become the 1980s. I sent a lot of time in L.A. in the 1980s, visiting a friend who worked in the movie business, and I based the characters on people I met through him. Zevon’s song “Looking for the Next Best Thing” inspired my story.

I hope you like it – and there are 14 other stories by great writers in BAD INTENTIONS.

Best of all, proceeds from the anthology go to Philabundance, a non-profit food bank working to help people facing hunger.

You’ll find BAD INTENTIONS in paperback on Amazon and the usual booksellers as we get closer to July 7.

Two years since my first story published in an anthology, MOTEL

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It’s been two years since the first time one of my short stories was published in an anthology. The Cowboy Jamboree Press MOTEL anthology, edited by Barbara Byar, came out in March 2024. I’d had short stories published before, starting in 2023, and of course my non-fiction had been published since 1977 and in true crime books since 2016. But having a short story in an anthology was a very cool development.

I still really like the story, “Independence,” about an unnamed cowboy passing through a small Tennessee town who gets caught up in a conflict between some small business owners and the corrupt sheriff. If you read my upcoming second novel, SEVEN ANGELS, you might realize that town is Seven Angels. I never cite the town by name in “Independence” but the sheriff in the short story is named and he’s the same corrupt sheriff as in SEVEN ANGELS.

It was a kick to have the story published in an anthology and a few followed. It’s always a kick, although I suspect the anthologies you have to purchase have smaller readership than the stories published online. Still a kick, though.

This year, in 2026, I’ll have short stories in three anthologies I know of, including my story “A Fighting Life,” about foul-mouthed kids in 1948 who figure out they can make money by scrapping with neighborhood kids, which is in the just-published-in-paperback FIGHTING WORDS. My story “This Just Doesn’t Seem To Be My Day,” about a kid spending the day with his older brothers in 1970, will appear this fall in DAYDREAM BELIEVER, an anthology of crime stories based on Monkees songs.

And a while back, I had a crime story accepted for an anthology that hasn’t been announced yet.

For me, three stories in anthologies in one year is a lot, so I doubt there will be others. But I’ll submit some stories and we’ll see.

Here’s a link to the paperback of FIGHTING WORDS is you want to read my short story and the work of some really amazing authors: