Gary Inbinder's Blog, page 2

Happy Holidays! And An Announcement

To all my GR friends and followers,

Best wishes for the holidays and the coming New Year!


Now, for the announcement. Inspector Lefebvre No. 1 &2, The Devil in Montmartre and The Hanged Man are coming soon in audiobooks. The expected release date for "Devil" is 1/14/20 and for "Hanged Man" 2/11/20. They're both currently available for pre-order.

If you like audiobooks, and you're a fan of historical mysteries, you might want to check these out. For more information, see Audible,com, Amazon, and other retailers.

https://www.audible.com/author/Gary-I...

Zotheca: SF/Fantasy

Zotheca, a Science Fiction Fantasy, is one of my earliest published short stories. It's about a lonely widower who has a close encounter of a different kind. I believe it will appeal to Twilight Zone aficionados and fans of writers like Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson. Here's a brief excerpt:

"Almost springing to his feet, Bill immediately noticed the absence of aches and pains, as though his arthritis was a memory left on Earth. Moreover, the soreness in his throat was gone. Reaching up beneath his collar, he rubbed his neck; the rope-burn had completely healed. “Gee, Mel,” he exclaimed, “I feel great, like I was forty years younger.”

Melanie gave him a gentle hug, and whispered, “Of course, Billy; we’re on Zotheca. Nothing hurts here.” Holding his hand, she led him to the portal, saying, “We don’t need space-suits, helmets or anything like that. It’s like Earth outside, only a thousand times better.”

Descending the now visible silvery-metallic stairs Bill viewed a vast expanse of broad, manicured green lawn bordered by familiar looking trees: oaks, elms, maples and weeping willows. At the foot of the staircase, he turned back to view the space ship and almost keeled over from vertigo. The gleaming burnished silver ship was enormous, reminiscent of flying saucers in movies but much bigger, like a gigantic ocean liner seen up close. “God,” he gasped, “It’s breathtaking; like looking up at the QE II from the dock.”

“Yeah,” Melanie replied, “I almost fell over the first time I saw it.”

Turning away from the ship, Bill took a deep breath; the air was pure and oxygen-rich; a mild breeze carried a sweet floral fragrance, like Melanie’s youthful perfume. A radiant, aureate sun glowed through drifting white clouds, lighting an aquamarine sky and casting purplish shadows on the green grassy turf. An eerie stillness made Bill uneasy; all he could hear was a slight rush of wind and the faint rustling of tree branches. “It’s very quiet, Mel,” he remarked.

The complete story is available free online at Bewildering Stories.

http://www.bewilderingstories.com/iss...

Her Reflection:Time and Memory

I've been re-reading my published short stories; not sure why. Perhaps I'm trying to determine whether my writing's improved with age like fine wine, or turned sour. It remains an open question; the jury's still out.

Back in 2011, "Halfway Down the Stairs", a quarterly literary magazine, published my short story "Her Reflection." The magazine's issues follow a theme; "Her Reflection" was categorized under "Time." It's still available free online. Here's a brief excerpt.

Gaze into the mirror too often and you’ll see the Devil. She had smiled at their reflection when she said that. Forty years later, Max Niemand thought he saw her reflected image, poking over his right shoulder. Long, silky, strawberry-blonde hair, sharp hazel eyes, sensual red lips. Her full breasts with erect nipples pressed against his bare back, her tapered fingers teased the short hairs on the nape of his neck. Her warmth enveloped him, like a down-filled comforter on a winter night.

Niemand blinked and the vision vanished — nothing but an illusion, a mirage haunting the desert of his imagination. Neither the Devil nor the woman dwelled in his mirror. He sniffed for her scent, inhaling the astringent bite of mentholated shaving cream; he rubbed his back where he thought he had sensed the press of her flesh and felt nothing but a dull ache in his aging bones.

Red-rimmed eyes glared at him, as if resenting what they had been duped into seeing. Why conjure her now? Time and distance had separated them beyond recall. What’s dead is dead.




https://halfwaydownthestairs.net/2011...

The Myth of Endymion

Several years ago, I wrote a short story inspired by the Greek myth of the goddess Diana’s (aka Selene the moon goddess) love for a handsome young shepherd. The story received the Mariner Award (Bewildering Stories Annual Review) in 2011.
One evening as the goddess was driving along in her chariot, she spotted Endymion asleep on a hilltop, his face glowing softly in the moonlight. The goddess was so taken by the youth’s beauty that she floated down to his side, slowly leaned over and placed a kiss on his lips.
Endymion, partly awakened by the goddess’s kiss, opened his half-sleeping eyes and caught a vision of the hastily departing nocturnal diva. That one fleeting glance of divine beauty was enough to ignite an erotic passion in the shepherd. He awoke with a start and gazed up at the moon. “It was all a dream,” he thought, but such a lovely dream that he went back to sleep hoping the vision would return.
Queen of the wide air; thou most lovely queen
Of all the brightness that mine eyes have seen!
As thou exceedest all things in thy shrine,
So every tale, does this sweet tale of thine.
Keats


As their passion for each other grew, the moon goddess couldn’t bear the thought of the youth’s beauty being marred by the ravages of age, worry, toil and illness. Therefore, she caused an eternal sleep to fall upon him and carried him off to Mount Latmus, where she concealed him in a cave. Thereafter, she visited him each night to gaze at her “sleeping beauty” and place one kiss on his unconscious lips.
My version of the myth is set among the ‘rich and shameless” trendy elite of contemporary Chicago. It’s not romantic, at least not in the commonplace sense. Rather, it’s darkly humorous and macabre. So perhaps it is “romantic” in a postmodern Gothic Byron/Poe sort of way.
My Endymion is available for free on the Bewildering Stories website (see below). The story is accompanied by classical paintings inspired by the myth.

http://www.bewilderingstories.com/iss...

A Holiday Gift For My GR Pals And Followers

Now that I have your attention, my "gift" is a link to "Nemo and the Dead Bird," one of my favorite Mr. Nemo and Kafka the Cat stories. It's a darkly humorous, absurdist satire in the form of a Socratic Dialogue. (Don't let that scare you off. It really is funny in its own warped way).

In keeping with the season, the story is a reflection on the meaning of life, mortality, the vanity of human wishes--and stuff. It's also mercifully brief. Here's a tiny morsel to whet your appetite.

“Now wait a minute,” interjected Kafka the Unemployed. “I have a better metaphor for the futility of life and the vanity of human wishes.”

“Oh really? Perhaps you would care to elucidate,” said Mr. Nemo.

“Gladly,” replied the unemployed. “Life is like that three-mile walk to save planet earth and promote green jobs that I participated in last weekend. Now I’m very skeptical of that event’s ability to save anything, let alone our planet, but I’d sure like one of those green jobs. Anyway, I really went on the walk to score some pot. I had almost achieved my goal — the end of the walk I mean, not the bag of grass, or saving the planet, or getting a green job either — when I slipped on a banana peel, tumbled into a ditch and landed splat on my ass. I had a bruise you wouldn’t believe. A freaking hematoma.”

“So?” queried Nemo.

“So, that’s my metaphor. Life’s like a three-mile walk to save planet earth, promote green jobs, and score some pot. In the end you slip on a banana peel, fall splat on your ass in a ditch and wake up the next morning pot-less, jobless and with a bruise on your butt the size of a jumbo blueberry pancake. And the planet’s still doomed.”

“Your metaphor sucks,” said Kafka the Bureaucrat testily.

“Oh yeah, well have you a better metaphor for the futility of life and the vanity of human wishes? The cosmos is going to blow up in about a million-billion years, and every living thing that ever was or will be is going to disappear into an eternal void. I could just as well have scored my bag of grass and a green job as fallen on my ass, and it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference, viewed sub specie aeternitatis.”

Here's the link, folks.

http://www.bewilderingstories.com/iss...

Happy New Year from me and my strip mall cafe pals!

Historical Mystery Lovers: December 2018 Featured Author

In keeping with the season, I just got a nice surprise. The Historical Mystery Lovers Forum has chosen me as their Featured Author for December. This is an outstanding group for readers who love the genre and I'm thrilled that they chose me as one of their featured authors!


https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Happy 200th Anniversary, Frankenstein!

Happy 200th Anniversary, Frankenstein!

The current Historical Novels Review (HNR Issue 85) features Bethany Latham’s cover story, Happy 200th Anniversary, Frankenstein. In her tribute to Mary Shelley’s classic horror novel, first published in 1818, Ms. Latham references several novels based on Shelley’s original, including my Confessions of the Creature. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
“The struggle to achieve or keep humanity, even the very definition of what it means to be human, fascinates authors who tackle Shelley’s work. In Confessions of the Creature(Fireship, 2012) by Gary Inbinder, the creature is given the opportunity for normalcy, starting with his outward appearance. Inbinder notes that it is first “Frankenstein [who] denies the creature’s humanity. As their hatred for each other grows, both creator and creature become less human, more monstrous.” Rejected by his creator from the outset, Shelley’s poor creature was never offered the empathy he perhaps deserved; Inbinder chose to be kinder: “In my sequel, the creature is given the chance of becoming truly human, the person he was meant to be. No longer hideous, the transformed creature sets out on a quest for redemption through love, the love that was denied him in Shelley’s novel.”’

I was honored to have my novel chosen for reference in this fine tribute to a classic. My thanks to Ms. Latham and the HNR!

Confessions of the Creature is currently available in both paperback and e-book from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other retailers.

Good-bye, Achille!

I first viewed John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (1952) in a second-run “art house” on Chicago’s West Side. That was more than sixty years ago and I was very young, no more than four or five. The film made a lasting impression on me for which I wasn’t entirely unprepared, even at that early age. My late brother was a fine artist and teacher and my late sister studied art history and French language and literature; in 1959 she travelled to Paris on a Fulbright scholarship to the Sorbonne, where she spent a year studying stained glass windows in the great medieval cathedrals.

I learned to read before I went to kindergarten, and much of what I learned was gleaned from my older siblings’ small collection of art books. A group of illustrated short biographies of painters got me hooked on the subject, and the pictures grabbed hold of my imagination. While I was acquiring a very basic education in art history I was also exposed to my mother’s love of popular historical fiction, e.g. Taylor Caldwell and Sigrid Undset, and my father’s similar interest in historical adventures, e.g. Sabatini and C. S. Forester, and detective novels e.g. Hammett, Chandler and Spillane. Given these influences, and the old gangster films on our early fifties T.V., I started drawing story-boards that combined car chases and gun fights in a primitive, childish art form. When, at the age of four, I proudly showed my mother one of these “books” with the Spillane-like title, “Men Are Violent,” she was appalled. Her maternal instincts warned her that she might be raising a gangster or, worse yet, harboring a nascent homicidal sociopath. This incident ended my budding career as a writer of pulp fiction.

My father became seriously ill in his early forties; he passed away at fifty when I was eight. His passing left us strapped for cash. To quote the New Testament: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
Circumstances soon forced me to put away childish things. My mother had to work full time; my brother helped a little, as best he could, my sister married and had to deal with her own family’s needs. By the age of ten I was a latchkey kid in a rapidly deteriorating Chicago West Side neighborhood. I tried to stay out of trouble and contributed to our household income what little I could. At fifteen, I got a summer job in a South Side warehouse, at seventeen I worked as a janitor's assistant after school. I continued working part-time my first two years in college. I managed to pay for my tuition and books, and graduated with a B.A. in English Literature.

My early dream of becoming a writer seemed distant and unrealistic. At twenty-two I needed a job, anything to support myself, and such was my life for about the next forty years. During that time, I managed to add a J.D. to my B.A., working full-time as a paralegal while attending law school in the evenings. In late middle-age I was a reasonably successful lawyer, but I still felt the urge to write. I started writing articles and essays in my spare time and, to my surprise, was actually paid for some of my work. Then, when life seemed to be getting along comfortably, my job was eliminated. I had a choice: keep working at a lesser job for less pay and benefits or take an early retirement package. I chose the latter and, shortly thereafter started work on my first published novel, Confessions of the Creature.
Other writings followed: essays, short stories, novels. A few years ago, I was fortunate to obtain representation from Philip Spitzer and thanks to him and his associates, the Inspector Lefebvre series ran its course of three novels: The Devil in Montmartre, The Hanged Man and The Man Upon the Stair. Now, I must say good-bye to Achille and his world, a place I first visited a life-time ago in that long- departed theater on Chicago’s old West Side.

There’s a scene at the end of Huston’s Moulin Rouge that can be moving or cringe-worthy depending on one’s perspective. The dying artist has a vision of characters from the famous dance hall, the subjects of his paintings, sketches and lithographs. At the very end, one of the can-can dancers whispers, “Good-bye, Henri”. Maybe I’m sentimental, but I can’t get over that scene and a sense of loss in saying good-bye to some of my favorite characters and their world. There's a line in Moulin Rouge that paraphrases Oscar Wilde: "They say men kill the thing they love most." In the film, Lautrec mourns the passing of the Moulin Rouge as it was before it achieved the fame generated by his poster. I mourn the passing of an imagined world that came to life in three books. At least I have the consolation of knowing that my characters will have gained a reprieve for as long as the novels remain in print.

On the positive side, I’m not finished writing, at least not yet. I have a new novel, with fresh characters, in the works. Depending on how things pan out, I’ll be posting on that subject when the time is right. In the meantime, my thanks to those of you who’ve shared my vision and supported my work. À bientôt!

The Man Upon the Stair Available in Hardcover Today!

My third Inspector Lefebvre Mystery, The Man Upon the Stair, is now available in hardcover edition.

"This is the third novel in the Achille Lefebvre
series and is a densely written mystery
with a surprise ending that, in addition to
an intricate criminal investigation, provides
the reader with a real feel for what it was like
socially and politically to live in that time
and place." — Mystery Scene

“A dizzying number of details recreate the nineteenth-century Paris of artists, prostitutes, aristocrats, gamblers, and spies. Achille continues to endear, with his mashed flowers and good heart, much like Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache.” Booklist

“A wonderfully atmospheric novel with "purplish cloud cover," figures hiding in the shadows of doorways, gaslights, and the sound of cartwheels and horses’ hooves on the cobblestone streets. Inbinder has created a convincing and intriguing mystery reminiscent of Parisian literature at the turn of the 20th century, when detective work was vastly different than it is today with the benefits of advanced technology.” Historical Novels Review

“The third of Inbinder’s lush, leisurely period procedurals favors the journey over the destination, with back stories and period touches in nearly every chapter.” Kirkus Reviews

“Inbinder’s solid third mystery set in fin-de-siècle Paris finds the capable Achille Lefebvre dealing with blowback from the arrest and execution of terrorist bomber Laurent Moreau. An intriguing plot. ” Publishers Weekly

“A wonderfully atmospheric period policiere.” The Wall Street Journal (Praise for the Achille Lefebvre series)

“Inbinder's tale is an enjoyable romp through a vibrant time in history with great artists, Can Can dancers, and underworld mobsters set against a pleasingly tawdry Parisian backdrop.” The Cleveland Plain Dealer (Praise for the Achille Lefebvre series)

“Inbinder weaves a wonderful tale and his plotting and pacing are right on the money. ” Crimespree Magazine (Praise for the Achille Lefebvre series)

The Man Upon the Stair is now available in hardcover and e-book edition from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other retailers.

Mystery Scene Reviews The Man Upon The Stair

There's a very nice review of The Man Upon the Stair in the February issue of Mystery Scene magazine.

"This is the third novel in the Achille Lefebvre
series and is a densely written mystery
with a surprise ending that, in addition to
an intricate criminal investigation, provides
the reader with a real feel for what it was like
socially and politically to live in that time
and place." —Joseph Scarpato, Jr. in Mystery Scene

The Man Upon the Stair is now available in e-book edition from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other retailers.
The hardcover edition is coming soon and is currently available for pre-order (Expected publication February 20).