Ron Base - Sanibel Sunset Detective 01 - The Sanibel Sunset Detective
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After dinner that night, he showed me to the guest bedroom which, as I recall, doubled as the office where he continued to pound out manuscripts—rather incongruously he had just written an adventure novel for young people.
On the desk beside the bed stood the battered typewriter he used to write the original Hammer novels—a single draft written in days, never reread. The walls were filled with blowups of the lurid pocketbook covers that beguiled me almost as much as the books. Hung over the back of the chair beside the bed was a shoulder holster containing a .45 automatic, the same gun Mike Hammer used in the books to pump lead into the broads and hoods who offended his sense of justice. The original Signet paperbacks lined the shelves adjacent to the bed.
I grabbed I, The Jury, the first Hammer novel, tucked myself into bed, pulled the covers over my head and began to read, the same way I had as a kid. Here I was in Mickey Spillane’s house, a .45 nearby, cocooned under the covers, once again lost in the rough, tough world of the private detective—childhood fantasy bumping into adult reality to create a certain kind of late night bliss.
I thought about that time with Mickey Spillane a lot as I wrote The Sanibel Sunset Detective. Mickey Spillane would not have thought much of Tree Callister, although when you got to know him, Mickey was such a disconcertingly kind and gentle man I doubt he would have said anything. Still, the vibrant memory of my long-ago infatuation with the pulp novels, not only of Spillane, but also of such practitioners of the craft as Richard S. Prather, who wrote the Shell Scott novels, and Brett Halliday, who wrote the Mike Shayne mysteries, were sources of inspiration.
I did not even try to reproduce the sort of hardbitten hero those authors created (inspired, of course, by the much more literary work of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler). However, I did want to emulate their no-nonsense storytelling. They got to work each day churning out words, keeping the story moving, working overtime to ensure the reader had no distractions beyond turning the next page.
If I was fortunate enough to come even close to what these masters seemed to achieve with such effortlessness, I have editors Ray Bennett and Alexandra Lenhoff to thank. They saved me from myself any number of times. My wife, Kathy Lenhoff, read the manuscript in its earliest incarnations and again just before it went to press. She inspires me in so many, many ways far beyond these meager literary efforts. Also, my son, Joel Ruddy, John D. MacDonald fan extraordinare, blessed the manuscript, thereby encouraging me to keep going.
In Florida, I received help from everyone I encountered on Sanibel and Captiva Islands, two of the most gloriously beautiful and unusual Florida paradises. Particularly helpful, as always, was my brother, Ric, who not only provided insights into life on the islands, but also corrected the manuscript if my characters veered left when they should have turned right. Any lingering mistakes, however, are mine alone.
Friend and neighbor Kim Hunter introduced me to Naples, Florida, and unknowingly provided one of the novel’s locations.
I would also like to thank the very talented Bridgit Stone-Budd who went to extraordinary lengths to create the book’s cover. And of course West-End Books publisher Brian Vallée. Overwhelmed with his own work, he nonetheless selflessly took time to come to the aid of a friend.
Mickey Spillane died in 2006 at the age of 88. Today, he is all but forgotten, part of a fading era, as are Prather and Halliday, not to mention Erle Stanley Gardiner, and even John D. MacDonald, those great paperback writers who helped me navigate adolescence. They live on in sweet memory, though, by flashlight, under covers, late at night.
Coming Soon
A new Tree Callister adventure
THE SANIBEL SUNSET DETECTIVE
RETURNS
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