Brother can you spare a half a million?

Okay, I'm old, in poor health, probably uninsurable. So was John Huston when he made The African Queen. Directors are cocooned and pampered by producers, assistant directors, unit managers, drivers, script girl, and a personal assistant. There's always food and coffee on the set, always a place to lay down and rest between set-ups. I know the material inside out. I don't need big stars or special effects. We'll shoot in Vancouver or Colorado or Texas to pinch pennies and put more money on the screen, earn a fat tax incentive by hiring local people. It's not rocket science. Gritty action and boy meets girl is the easiest genre to shoot, also the easiest product to sell internationally. There's money in the budget to debut at a festival and screen 35mm prints in L.A., London, and New York, to hook a distributor. I'm perfectly at ease with actors and crews, editing, rerecording, scoring, color timing, and final mix. Screenplay was copyright protected at the Library of Congress, and I'll throw in four novels with the same characters for a sequel or television series. Nice franchise, a modern Nick and Nora Charles.

Intensely proud

I opened Finding Flopsie tonight, skipped past the soap opera set-up and went straight to Chris on his own, losing his teaching job, his office, his p.i. license, and his pride, all in one afternoon. Absolutely terrific -- and then the story takes off on urgent business, active and grim, Chris Cable at his best, age 64. Whether I got Peachy's story right is debatable, but it simply had to be that way, role reversal with her evil sister, a tortured animal.

Not much to say about Partners, my masterwork.

I cleaned up Mars Shall Thunder for the anthology Eight Ruthless Novels, happy with it and proud of it, my first full-length novel. The Good Walk Alone was a rolicking comedy, free as a lark, fun to write, drove me crazy writing a serial to weekly deadline. DiMarco remains my favorite character of all, a tough female homicide cop, age 38. I don't know quite what to say about First Feature. Personal stories are holy, if anything pertaining to show business is.

The Case Files trilogy (Valor, Tar Pit, and Charity) are what they had to be, a modern Nick and Nora Charles, to honor Dashiell Hammett's final novel The Thin Man, a burlesque that broke the noir genre, gave us penthouse cocktail parties and sexy women as a backdrop to murder. Chris and Peachy are a little different, equals in life, an unbeatable team. A Portrait of Valor tests them to the limit of human daring and spiritual endurance at the peak of their vitality, 30-something, deeply in love for the first time, perfectly matched in marriage. In many ways Valor is my favorite story. Boy meets girl and they go to heaven and hell to earn each other. Being childless opens the door to an important truth, the wider moral horizons of Charity. In our calm, clever 50s, new life happens if we embrace it.

I suppose it's true that all of my stories are aspects of my personal life, things that happened to me, one way or another, amplified a notch or two. I wrote about people and places I knew well enough to speak confidently. I had a life full of adventure. A little sad that it's over, but that's part of life, too. No one likes to talk about the end, and it would be wrong to paint the final chapter of any fictional character's slow demise. Bad enough that I have to do it.

Nice to leave a literary legacy, the splendor of young adulthood and active middle age, great eagerness to thrive, a whole world to gamble and win -- or to lose, in the tragedy of Partners, a story that I did not expect to create. Partners was costly, in time and talent and weight of burden, everything I had to give and endure, the capstone of my career. I know it for a fact, I worked 20 years to prepare myself to write Partners. Completely unexpected and worth it.

Truthfully, I don't recommend that anyone else pursue a creative career. The field is occupied by hostile assholes and pusillanimous slime. Indie self-publishing is a fake solution, gateway to obscurity, sandbagged by Amazon and Google if you stand up for straight white wildcats. I cared about my characters and their circumstances, emptied my wallet to let them breathe and stand fully erect, a proud race of titans. "Old fashioned," Cass declared. So be it. We owe our industrial preeminence and military power to such people, men and women who face a world of tawdry evasion, ritual, and inertia, and kick it into the gutter, where it belongs.

A pity that I wasn't born rich, but if I had been there would be no Chris and Peachy, no Janet DiMarco, no Harry Faraday and Laura Oak, no Kyle and Karen, no Freeman's Constitution to honor and defend them. Pretty good bargain. Those who fight for the future live in it today, Ayn Rand said. True, false, or purple, I'm satisfied that I did everything I could to advance the idea of defacto liberty. Whether sterling hero or hardened criminal, nothing displaces human potential, personal choice, stern perception of values, to live free or to die a coward's quiet, anonymous, meaningless end on earth. The gift of life is not to be thrown away cheaply.

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Playboy Channel

I've created a lot of fictional characters over the years, many of whom I liked and respected. A few were modeled on people I knew, supporting characters whose personalities were frozen -- well, that's a bit harsh, let's say inflexible, unable to transform. It happens in life to most people. Their formative battles were fought long ago, and it shaped how they think and live. All of them deserve honorable mention to acknowledge their strengths and sorrows.

It's important always to treat a character with respect, even the tawdry ones, the bit players and stock figures -- tailors, waiters, uniformed cops, cab drivers. Little glimpses need to be three-dimensional and real. It's never wrong to be honest about where they are in life, how they move, talk, think, hide themselves from others.

Characters who transform, undertake challenges, and put their future at risk, are "principal players." There is no story without such people. Some of them are heroic men and women, some are dangerous villains. It's possible to see virtue in a villain, no different than a hero with inner conflicts and limitations. I'm speaking mostly of male characters. Women seldom deliberately do wrong, although it's good to see the extreme and exceptional. One of my favorites was a film star -- Ophilia Opfir -- always outrageous, mercurial, a comic figure. Now that I think of it, all of my women were wonderfully complicated. The Good Walk Alone had several female characters, no two alike, vital to the story line. In Mars Shall Thunder, Wendy and Emma played pivotal supporting roles, far more important than the men.

Leading ladies are important to me. Sorry, that's an understatement. The Good Walk Alone is Janet DiMarco's story. Mars Shall Thunder is Laura Oak's story. Chris is nothing until he meets Peachy in A Portrait of Valor.

Chris and Peachy are the subject of this essay. They deserved a series of novels. I risked everything to do it -- personally, financially, and artistically. I don't regret it, although I doubt that Chris and Peachy will be well received by readers. Their exploits are sexually explicit, adults only. My best bet is the Playboy Channel. It was important to give Chris and Peachy a voice of their own, in honor of their exceptional lives and exceptional challenges.

Christopher Cable, P.I., is a better man than I am, far more complex, far more courageous. He was an only child born into a military family. His birth took his mother's life. His father was a stern naval officer who became a powerful member of the Deep State, if you know what that is. Chris was raised by colored servants, if you know what that is. He went to Ivy League prep school, a sprig of privilege. He spent summers in New York with show people, his mother's clan of Broadway actors, dancers, musicians. When he was 18 years old, he was accepted in Marine Corps Officer Candidate School to honor his father and follow in his footsteps.

Combat changes people, always, and Chris fought with courage that could not erase sorrow and guilt and revulsion. He hated killing. As an officer, his duty was ever-present and clear, ordering men to their death and dismemberment. Rising to the rank of Captain, partly on merit, partly because his father pulled strings, Chris couldn't continue. He resigned, changed his name, and fled to Los Angeles -- a disgraced black sheep who abandoned his duty and his father's iron sphere of influence and expectations.

Ex-military is where most of our cops come from, and Chris had friends in L.A., ex-Marines who went into law enforcement, well-paid private surveillance, and medicine. None of those jobs were right for him. Chris couldn't deal with fussy paperwork or take orders, especially an order to do nothing, to drop a case, let the guilty skate because they had political pull.

When the saga opens in A Portrait of Valor, he's alone, lonely, miserable, age 38, jailed for killing a man, which he regrets but was compelled to do, to save a crowd of laughing drunks and doped-up chicks at a Hollywood nightclub. Terrible karma. The man who hates killing, forced to kill as a licensed private eye, working alone, financially strapped, hardened to life, expecting nothing but trouble. Not handsome, covered in battle scars, Chris cleans up every night and tries to be cheerful, drinks in nice nightclubs and dinner joints, hoping to meet a single woman his own age or thereabouts. He's ignored, night after night, year after year.

Enter Peachy.

I don't think I want to talk about her, a truly exceptional woman among women, beautiful, brilliant, elder daughter of a billionaire nuclear physicist (a horrible father), turned her back on wealth and made her own way in the world, a Stanford Ph.D.

Wonderful couple who saved themselves for each other, wouldn't settle for less than ideal romance, astounding sexual chemistry, risking their lives for each other repeatedly. This is the glory of heroic fiction, to paint the beautiful.

They meet and marry in A Portrait of Valor, and it nearly costs Peachy her life. They cheat death again in The Tar Pit showbiz mystery, throw global banking and CIA officials for a loop in Charity, and separated, incommunicado and older in Finding Flopsie, they struggle to understand what's happening in an alarming, globetrotting case of murder and extortion.

Think series franchise, a modern Nick and Nora Charles.

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