March to Other Worlds Day 20 Pandora???s Luck by Gilbert M. Stack

March to Other Worlds Day 20 Pandora’s Luck by Gilbert M. Stack

As we end the third week of this year’s March, I’d like to take us back to the Old West. Pandora’s Luck is the first story I sold professionally, bought by Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and published in the July/August 2006 issue. As you can imagine, the sale made me deliriously happy and strongly encouraged me to keep writing. Truth to tell, I hadn’t been thinking of AHMM when I wrote the story—I hadn’t been thinking of any publisher. Instead, I had this pleasant image in my mind that I laid out in the first scene—a well-dressed, proper young woman in the old west, walking into a tavern where no proper young woman had any business being, and a keg of beer simultaneously springing a leak and spurting foamy liquid all over the floor.

 

Miss Parson was the idea of a friend of mine, an enigmatic young woman slightly out of place in the old west because she makes her living playing cards. It’s a very difficult life for a woman on her own and she has a serious problem that has thrown her world out of whack and ultimately endangers her independence.

 

To tell the story, I invented bare knuckle boxer Corey “Rock Quarry” Callaghan—a young man travelling from town-to-town prize fighting for small purses, with his best friend and trainer, Patrick Sullivan. The three characters are brought together by William Steed a professional gambler and fight fixer who believes the only fair game is one he’s rigged so that only he can win. I’m sure you can imagine how that might be a problem for those who play against him.

 

What results is a fun story in which my three heroes attempt to extricate themselves from a very bad situation. But will Pandora’s Luck be enough to save the day?

 

https://www.amazon.com/Pandoras-Luck-...

 

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