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Move on over Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett there is a new hard-boiled detective novelist on the scene presenting his latest book, Gunny Mac Private Detective Trouble in Chinatown!

I started writing about private eyes, shamus, gumshoes, private dicks, sleuths, bird-dog, and snoopers, because I fell in love with black and white movies of the 1940s and 1950s.Who doesn't love Casablanca with Humprey Bogart as Sam Spade the quintessential movie in this genre. And who could forget the cool suave Peter Gunn, certainly not me!

I read detective fiction today and it leaves me sick at heart. Hearts cut out and eyeballs mailed to people. I read to escape what is happening around me on a daily basis, not to regurgitate the mayhem I witness every day.

Today's novels just do not satiate me. I'm left hungering for a deeper connection to my characters and setting, a deeper connection for justice, a deeper connection to men doing the right thing when no one is looking. I'm looking for a man who must be tough, who will not be intimidated by society threatening him because he doesn't act like the sheeple around him. Yeh, he drinks bourbon and smokes cigars because he likes them. Just like millions of men around the world.

He is a man who is seeking redemption because all humans should be seeking redemption. People are perfectly flawed and far from perfect. But if you're in trouble, you want him and his gun looking out for you.

My private detective in my series is Gunny Mac, you can identify him when he was a Marine because he had three strips up and two down. He was shot to pieces on Guadalcanal in 1942 and won the Navy Cross saving Bloody ridge from being overrun. He is medically discharged due to his wounds and becomes a private detective in Chinatown, Hawaii

Chinatown will never be the same. And either will you.

If you liked "Casablanca," or the "Best years of Our Lives," or any of Frank Capra's movies you will fall in love with Gunny Mac, his best friend Gunny Woitowitz, Lt. Burke, the spoiled blue blood Harvard graduate who learns how to be a man, and last but not least Lt. McCaffery a Jesuit priest, former padre of the Raider Battalion who empties the psyche unit at the naval hospital to help Gunny Mac. We must not forget Mac's lovable black lab, Seadog who is given to Mac at the hospital by the nurse he grows to love.

A little violence, a little suspense, a little romance, a little bit of laughing, and a whole lot of good ole fashioned sentimental tears.

First published on Linkedin