BIOGRAPHY

Thirty years of playing music isn’t exactly the best training for an author. Thirty years of writing would be more like it. But playing music is what I did, so that’s what I had to work with.

To set the record straight, I was a piano player, also venturing off into electronic keyboards from time to time. My career, which started in Houston, took me to nearly every state in the Union, as well as to several unusual foreign countries, all the while roving through disparate musical genres: rock & roll, rhythm & blues, and country. I played in clubs, concerts, TV, radio, and recording studios. I played large venues in front of tens of thousands of people and in smoky bars for no one at all. My journey found me living in Memphis, Nashville, Fort Lauderdale, New Orleans, and finally, my beloved Key West, where I lived for sixteen years, and where I retired from music around 2003.

I had begun writing almost by accident somewhere in the late 1980s, while living and playing in New Orleans. I was encouraged to do so by a friend of mine, Marda Burton, who was herself a writer. She had read a little account I wrote of an overseas trip I’d taken, and she seemed to think I could make up stories and string words together in a coherent fashion, filling up hundreds of pages in the process. Of course, I disagreed, claiming fiction was for “real” writers.

She stayed on my case, though, and pretty soon, I got started. On and off for the next twenty years, I eventually completed six novels and some dozen short stories. Oh, and did I mention hundreds (or was it thousands?) of rejection slips.

I left Key West in late 2006 for Las Vegas. I played a lot of poker at the professional level for several years, but I’m now devoting most of my time to writing.  I scored with a couple of short stories, one in the 2009 Wizards Of Words Anthology and another in the online zine A Twist Of Noir. Most recently, I placed other stories with the webzines, Powder Burn Flash, Mysterical e, and Slow Trains.

And then it happened. L&L Dreamspell, a small traditional press in Texas, released one of my novels. It’s called The Take, a compact noir tale of ordinary people, minor players in society, caught up in extraordinary circumstances and emotions: greed, lust, and the survival instinct. It’s now available in print and ebook versions onAmazon, Barnes & Noble online, Fictionwise, and All Romance.

In December, 2010, I moved back home to Key West. I just love it here.

My short story collection, Bloodstains On The Wall, went live digitally on Kindle, Smashwords, and Pubit in March, 2011. The print version is now available onAmazon and CreateSpace.

I’ve recently released the first of a series of Key West noir novels. It’s called Setup On Front Street, and it’s now available as an ebook on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The paperback can be found on Amazon and CreateSpace.

This series of Key West Nocturnes will lift the veil on Key West, revealing it as a true noir city, on a par with Los Angeles, New Orleans, or Miami. The novels, all standalones, with recurring secondary characters, will pull the reader deep into the shadows of Key West, where the tourists never go.

The second book in this set, The Ghosts Of Havana, is now available as an ebook on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The paperback is out on CreateSpace and Amazon.

In addition to the Key West Nocturnes novels, I’ve begun a new series. This one is the Jack Barnett / Las Vegas series about a reluctant ex-private investigator who tries to maintain a low profile but keeps getting dragged back into the business. The first installment is now out. It’s a novelette called Temptation Town and it’s currently available as an ebook on Amazon. The print version will be out soon.