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Ronald James  (Author) 

 

Book Description

Publication Date: October 13, 2010
This short story introduces Detective Sammy Shovel. He is short and built like a rain barrel, similar to the English actor, Bob Hoskins. Street people dress better than he does. Five years ago, bullets which were meant for Sammy snuffed out his senior partner, Harry Hart. Since that fateful night, Sammy's had a constant chip on his shoulder. He will do anything to make a buck-even resort to dreaded repos. 

Sammy is drinking up a storm at one of Harry's old spots when he sees an opportunity to make a quick buck. The time is December, when Christmas music blares and ornate decorations keep reminding Shovel he's alone in a city that doesn't care. This sacred season brings back memories of a happier childhood, and that irks Sammy even more. He has no one. Both his gentle mother and his forgiving father passed away about the same time Harry ate lead. Sammy has no siblings and has never married, because of shyness around the opposite sex. He knows why suicides increase from Thanksgiving to the New Year; the temptation lingers constantly within his own shallow life. 

The adventure starts with two hit men, Guido and Bennie, waiting outside of a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco for old man Crowder, their target for tonight's shoot-to-kill fun. 

Oakland-born during the Great Depression, I didn't have lots of toys, but I didn't know better. My father and mother loved the movies. The local theaters were cheap, about 15¢ for adults and 10¢ for me. I liked the musicals and cops and robbers best. These films were my training ground for future stories. I was treated to Humphrey Bogart's breakout role of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon as a child. 

While watching films in the dark palaces of the Golden Age of movies was entertaining, maturity demanded: get a job. I went to Cal in Berkeley and became an architect. When the world of architecture changed from fun to drudgery, I still practiced architecture, but I looked around for something that would be exciting again. I don't know if I found creative writing or if it found me, but my first three-page story had a detective running about in an adventurous night. This novelette grew out of that story first written in 1989
 
Format:   Paperback 



 
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From the Author


Born in the depression and having no toys to speak of, I used my imagination to conjure up stories. I would tell them to my playmates, while we constructed space ships and buildings out of cardboard boxes. Yes, we had Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers back then. In high school I wrote stories, and so impressed the teachers they read them to other classes. In my teens I went to a movie about George Sands, the pen name of a women writer. I became enamored with having a pen name and selected "Ronald James." Unfortunately, my chosen profession, architecture, prevented me from writing. Now retired, I have completed stories that have been buzzing in my brain for years. The Two Jacks takes us back to the mid-seventies, when porn crashed into mainstream society. At the time, I always wondered why the fledgling porn industry never tried to do musicals since they poked fun at everything else. My mind started to put together what if scenarios. The result, "The Two Jacks."

As an architect, I organize space into aesthetically pleasing environments for working and living. This burning desire rolls over to the written word, where I strive to create stories that are fun to read and jolt the reader.

What to expect next from this writer? Like most boys growing up, I loved cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians. I remember listening to I love A Mystery, a fifteen-minute radio show broadcast of sleuths, Jack, Doc, and Reggie during radio's Golden Era of the late 30's and early 40's. I have a series of detective novels that start with "An Adventurous Night"--a novelette that introduces my shamus, Sammy Shovel. My detective novels are not the usual "Who Done It" mystery type genre. In my stories, you know who did it, but I explore why upstanding and/or misfit people are murdered. Sometimes it's simply being in the way to basic greed. Other times, as murder usually is, it becomes ugly and convoluted when normal everyday living is compromised. At the end you will learn who and what turned innocents into enemy number one.