According to Amazon.com -- which has a better memory than I do -- our first novel, One for Sorrow, had an official publication date of November 15, 1999. So shockingly enough we are fast approaching its 25th anniversary. Perhaps now is the time to reveal that John's mother was a cave girl.
Let me explain. Back in the mid-eighties there was an explosion of indie comic books. Creators took advantage of easy distribution to sell their comics in the thousands of comic book specialty stores in the United States and Canada. Most indie comics were printed in black and white with two color covers and had nothing to do with superheros. Well, except for a few like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a satire of the superhero genre which became more or less the very thing it had been intended to mock.
A friend of mine was scraping out a living publishing comics and he asked me to script a title he'd come up with -- Kiwanni Daughter of the Dawn. He didn't have a story in mind, just something about a cave girl living in a world with dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts. Notwithstanding that my favorite comic strip as a kid was Alley Oop, we both knew that humans did not coexist with dinosaurs but the artist he had in mind drew animals brilliantly and could pencil one mean T-Rex.
I enjoyed my venture into scripting and subsequently tried to sell some new ones, based on my own ideas, to other small press publishers. One proposal was a superhero historical. Not long after the fall of Rome, when the surviving Eastern Empire has become a bastion of Christianity, a slave comes across a magic ring, once the property of Julian, the last pagan emperor. The ring gives the bearer super powers, of a sort, depending on which god happens to show up when summoned by the ring, and what kind of mood he or she is in, taking into account that the Roman gods were an unreliable and unpredictable lot.
Publishers weren't interested and my career in comics fizzled out. Then one day in the early nineties Mike Ashley contacted my wife Mary and wondered if we could produce an historical mystery for an anthology he was editing, He needed the story quickly.
"Historical" and "quickly" are words that tend not to go together, considering how much research is necessary before writing can even begin. I immediately thought of placing a mystery in the early Byzantine era because I already knew something about sixth century Constantinople. I had done enough research for the comic book script to prop up a 2,000 word story.
And so we hurriedly co-wrote the first tale featuring as detective John, Lord Chamberlain to Emperor Justinian. A Byzantine Mystery appeared in 1993 in The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits. After starring in more short stories in anthologies and Ellery Queen Mystery magazine, John moved on to twelve novels from Poisoned Pen Press. I'm sure Kiwanni would be busting her buttons with pride, if animal skins had buttons.
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