Into a Crack…another mystery is underway

I’ve let five years lapse between Gaslight Mysteries, running to and from the auld sod of Scotland even to pre-revolutionary America in my pursuit of desirable men and entertaining stories.

When Masters of Cane debuted early in 2016, it happened almost over my prone body. I was in a hospital bed, in stage 4 of a damn kidney disease. Being away, I lost contact with many readers and groups. At the same time, the gay press I published with (Amber Quill) went kaput.

In the intervening years, I tucked Michael and Simon into a large double bed in their Victorian bedroom while I followed my muse hither and yon. I wrote several novels and novellas. I started my own pub house. I began to design all my own covers.

Recently another kick in the arse from Fate has moved me to write another retro mystery starring the private dicks Michael McCree and Simon Hart.

The Adobe app I used for several years to create my covers and promotions simply went away. Poof. In experimenting with other apps, I decided to re-design the covers of the five Gaslight Mysteries. And then it hit me—five novels are impossible to promote. They should be grouped in two sets of three, or at least become an even half dozen.

Poof. The new novel, half a dozen chapters along, is titled Into a Crack. Pun absolutely intended.

Here’s the intro and the possible cover, both of which I regularly create before I write anything else… My form of self-motivation.

[Love] is a prick, it is a sting,
It is a pretty, pretty thing
It is a fire, it is a coal,
Whose flame creeps in at every hole.

Edward Peele, English dramatist, 1556-1596

Foreword

The first three books of the Gaslight Mysteries take place in just a few months’ time, in the summer of 1923. The next two novels—and now the present volume—are set one year later. It was a heady time of groin-tightening jazz, of new inventions like the telephone, gramophone, and electric lights. In the Roaring Twenties, the word “gay” meant “happy.” If a man loved another fellow, he kept it under his wide trousers, hidden in his special body language and in the street cant called Polari.

Into a Crack explores the underside of polite society in a fictional setting—from the homosexual taverns called “Molly houses” to the “lavender language” Polari…from the disreputable law enforcement system to the harsh prison conditions…from the secrets hidden in the homes of the wealthy to life inside clapboard hovels on the docks.

Please keep in mind that much of what I describe is fictional. There is no city called Dun Linden, no prison called Old Chokey, no hidden office of Pinkerton’s. But much is real: the motorcars, the pubs and shops, the attitudes and platitudes. So the actual and the fictional have been brewed in my special soup to present the world of Michael McCree and Simon Hart.

I present a world of romantic comedy with no attempt to interpret history or to parcel out blame. It’s sometimes funny, often edgy, but always (I hope) unique and entertaining.

~Erin O’Quinn (Bonita Franks)

Intro

For PIs Michael McCree and Simon Hart, life has become…if not humdrum, then unusually calm. Routine cases, daily training with their band of back-street urchins, the incessant games of sex and innuendo—all of it ends in a heartbeat when they learn that an arch enemy has somehow slipped through a crack in Ireland’s stalwart law enforcement system. Instead of quietly leaving the country, their implacable opponent is out for blood…namely, the blood of two sleuths named Michael and Simon.
Nothing stirs their keen intellect and, um, base instincts like raw danger. Both men find themselves sliding into more than one crack in the Roaring Twenties city of Dun Linden as they alternately evade and pursue, duck snd dodge, parry and thrust—and not just in the bedroom of their private Victorian flat.

Here’s a simple ad for the series as it now stands, minus the sixth mystery and including the new covers. Note that the app I’m using is not up to my normnal standards so I’m looking for something that reproduces the covers with better pixilatiion. Ah, those pesky pixilations!