Jim Guigli

Greetings to my UK readers! (Additional for U.S. readers follows.)

A few of you may have heard my voice on the BBC in two interviews during 2006, when I won the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. My winning sentence was later published in the UK by Friday Books in, It Was a Dark and Stormy Night, by Scott Rice.

That sentence opens my little e-novelette, Bad News for a Ghost, and the soon-to-be-published novel, Under the Black Flag - Piracy is not a Victimless crime.

In the novelette, only one character, George Pfeiffer, claims any connection to the UK. But I have met many people from the UK who have traveled to Sacramento, California, where my private detective, Bart Lasiter, lives and works.

My best boss of two decades at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory was an Englishman who still carries a scar he received during the Blitz. He and his wife now live in Lytham St Annes.

In 1998, my wife took me on a ten-day trip to England and Wales, where we visited her cousins. She is an English major with an MA degree from UC Berkeley who strives to keep me on the straight and narrow. She also loves English dogs. She and I count among our children, past and present, Cocker Spaniels, a Collie, a Springer Spaniel, a Border Collie, six Great Danes, a Cairn Terrier, an English Black Lab male, and currently an English Yellow Lab female. We both enjoy English costume dramas. Her favorite is Jane Austen, mine is Anthony Trollope, with Foyle’s War and George Gently thrown in, and now Strike.

I have a new Bart Lasiter story, Blood on the Stairs, in the Crimeucopia Anthology, We'll Be Right Back -- After This, from a great UK publisher, John Connor at Murderous Ink Press. Murderous Ink Press has also published in the Crimeucopia Anthology, Strictly Off The Record, my story, Just a Dream, a John Moss mystery set in bicentennial San Francisco.

Because we are friends divided by a common language, I hope you will enjoy my stories.

(Additional for U.S. readers t0 follow.)