Tag Archives: crime stories

Do you have BAD INTENTIONS? The crime fiction anthology inspired by the music of Warren Zevon? Cause it’s here!

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Maybe you’ve seen some of us online talking about the BAD INTENTIONS crime story anthology. Hopefully we’ve caught your attention. Fifteen great stories by fifteen crime writers, all taking their cue from the music of the late, great Warren Zevon, edited by Michael Downing and brought to y’all by Literary Garage.

But did you know the anthology is OUT? Huh? Didja?

Okay, forgive me. It’s a project I’m excited about and I hope you are too.

My story SUNSET STAKEOUT is included in the anthology and it was inspired by Zevon’s “Looking for the Next Best Thing.” It wasn’t the Zevon tune that was uppermost in my mind when I was pitching this story to Michael. Until I listened to the song for the first time in years and realized what I was hearing. The “what the hell” lyrics. The soaring electric guitar.

To me, this all sounded like the theme for, each week, a “Rockford Files”-style TV series, featuring the rambling adventures of a private investigator named Jim Rock- wait, scratch that.

It’s not a story about Jim Rockford, played by James Garner as the personification of the best 1970s TV PI. It’s about a bunch of guys who’ve created “Sunset Stakeout,” a Rockford-adjacent TV series that, in January 1979, is facing cancellation by NBC.

How desperate will the producer, co-star and fledgling screenwriter of “Sunset Stakeout” be to save their series? Would they start looking for the next best thing – a movie financed by Los Angeles’ biggest drug dealer, the coke-purveyor to the stars?

Where else are you gonna find this level of Hollywood desperation, played for all the laughs and danger inherent in it PLUS a cameo from the Six Million Dollar Man?

You can find my story SUNSET STAKEOUT in BAD INTENTIONS, and you can find BAD INTENTIONS at the link below. I hope you love all these stories. And feast your eyes on that Frank Vatel cover!

Cellphones replace newspapers for noir surveillance scenes

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For writers and screenwriters of crime and mystery stories, cellphones pose some problems but also some solutions.

Two of the three novels I’ve written have been set pre-cellphones, in 1984 and 1948. I really enjoyed writing scenes for THAT OCTOBER and GHOST SHOW in which the characters have to urgently contact or find each other and can’t communicate via cellphone like my characters in SEVEN ANGELS – set in 2019 – can. It’s a great exercise in how your characters can problem solve.

Cellphones are so handy to modern-day stories that they can pose a problem writers must work around: They’re so handy that you have to find a way to circumvent them, like no cell service or a broken phone or a lost phone. Kind of like how the writers of the Superman comics, radio show, TV show and movies had to find a way around Superman’s godlike powers. The dude is hugely powerful, so you introduce Kryptonite or block him from the rays of the yellow sun, two things James Gunn used in his excellent 2025 film.

But one way that cellphones change everything is surveillance in thrillers, cop stories or spy stories.

No long would a gunsel like Elisha Cook Jr. in “The Maltese Falcon” have to sit in a public place, pretending to read a newspaper, looking so suspicious that Humphrey Bogart clocks him.

These days, a shady type can simply sit or stand and look at their phone, or pretend to. Think about it: How many times a day do you see someone looking at their phone and assume they’re scrolling social media or watching Korean pop music and never think they’re surveilling someone? Surveilling you?