The Junkyard Dick

 

The Junkyard Dick

by Gillespie Lamb

 

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GENRE:   Contemporary mystery

 

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BLURB:

 

Salvage yard operator and part-time sleuth Tak Sweedner is asked by a buddy, Roque Zamarripa, to investigate a murder. Tak says OK and for his trouble is assaulted with a tire iron. Then he's run off the side of a cliff-the investigation really goes downhill at that point!

Tak calls up gal-pal Emma to help him and soon discovers his feelings for the woman go beyond palling around. When she asks him to give up his investigation and concentrate on her, Tak balks. She might better have asked a bulldog to give up its bone. It would be like quitting, Tak said, and he wasn't a quitter.

Can this blue-collar crime-solver hang in there to get the bad guy... AND win his girl?

 

 

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EXCERPT

 

Sunday stroll with dog…

I scratched behind the dog’s ears when it strolled over for companionship. We were a lazy pair. His eyes pleaded with me for a walk. So, I carried the bowl inside, rinsed it, grabbed a hat, and we headed out to the pasture behind the house. Otis trotted ahead and periodically ran back to jump against me and trot away again. A fun, fun dog.

 

I unhooked the pasture gate for us, and we moseyed north into my thirty-five acres of south Texas soil. We moved past clumps of blackbrush and sumac, through stretches of buffalo grass, and under a live oak whose branches seemed to defy gravity in their undulating horizontal reach. I admired several Beauty Berry shrubs near the western edge of the property that were favorites of wandering white-tailed deer. Certain times of the year, hungry deer virtually stripped the plants of their lavender fruit.

 

Otis padded down the bank of a dry gulch that foamed with runoff after heavy rains, but normally was no more than a pleasing variant in the landscape, cutting southeast across flat terrain. The dog poked its head into a guajillo thicket on the other side. The bush wasn’t good for livestock but was great for honeybees. Preserving it was my contribution to the local honey industry.

 

Otis lifted his leg to fertilize the bush and we began to walk the gulch back toward the house. A black-tailed jackrabbit sprang from hiding and Otis gave chase for half a minute before returning to my side with tongue lolling from the side of his muzzle.

A Word With the Author

1.Did you always want to be an author?

Not that I recall. I always enjoyed reading fiction, a habit undoubtedly picked up from my mother. The Hardy Boys mystery novels were favorites. Yet I don’t recall writing a short story or anything else outside of school class assignments, nor did I take any writing courses in college. On the other hand, I did find journalism interesting. I finally got into that work as a career after some years of pointless moseying around the country. I polished my writing skills there. Only in the last several years did I begin to feel a need to communicate through fiction and to generate short stories and full-length novels. I am loving it.

 

2.Tell us about the publication of your first book.

My first published book was The Beamy Courage of Gerta Scholler. Published in 2017, it is a middle-grades reader set in the 1860s that tells the story of an eight-year-old girl who rides an “orphan train” from New York City to Kansas. That novel came about while I was working on another book, published in August as The Junkyard Dick. I decided to take a break from that project and turn a short story into a novel suitable for school libraries. Beamy Courage was the result. I like Gerta a lot and am learning other people do, too. I hope the book has a long shelf life in school libraries and homes.

 

3.Besides yourself, who is your favorite author in the genre you write in?

Well, that’s the thing. So far, I have not settled into a genre. The Junkyard Dick is a mystery, not another reader for children. I also co-authored a nonfiction history book published in July, The Aviation Pioneers of McCook Field. I don’t read exclusively within genres, either. Some favorite authors—I’m not just dropping names here—are Martin Cruz Smith, Tony Hillerman, Wallace Stegner, Walter M. Miller, Martha Grimes, Zora Neale Hurston, Louis L’Amour, John D. McDonald, Craig Johnson, Cormac McCarthy, a guy named Dickens, and so on. Good company. I try not to think in terms of genres, anyway. We all know of novels that upon publication were categorized as mysteries or romances or thrillers only to become label-less classics. 

 

4.What’s the best part of being an author? The worst?

I believe creativity courses through just about everyone and authoring a book is a wonderful outlet for that creative impulse. A novel also is a means of saying and doing things through characters and story that we otherwise would never be able to say or do. For example. I have never murdered anyone—except in the pages of my novel. An aggravating part of being an author is the uncertain legitimacy of the work. To wit: “I wrote a novel.” “Un huh. Have you done anything else or is that it?” Writing novels is a significant and laudable accomplishment. I believe that. Not everyone does. While that attitude can be annoying, mostly it amuses me.

 

5.What are you working on now?

In terms of my next writing project, I am polishing a book about a middle-aged man’s response to the political and cultural tumult of our day. He believes he has something worthwhile to contribute to the conversation but can’t figure out how to do it without running for public office. He finally does find a way to engage—only to find himself immersed in a tumult. The rest of the book is about he deals with the pushback that threatens his business, his family and his relationship with a woman in the opposite camp. The book is a love story at heart.

 

My other project stems from The Junkyard Dick. The novel is set in the Texas town where I live… Uvalde. The school shooting that rocked the town in May incidentally impacted my plans to market the novel. I subsequently formed a nonprofit organization into which will go any royalties I receive plus contributions from my Texas publisher. That will be seed money for fund-raising efforts to support programs that will foster creative writing among elementary-age children in Uvalde. It will be an ongoing educational effort to help the community and its children recover from the tragedy. You can learn more about the nonprofit, which I named The Story Inventors Club Inc., by visiting the website, storyinventorsclub.com. And thank you. 

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

 

Gillespie Lamb developed writing skills as a newspaper reporter, editor and     columnist before leaving journalism to become a freelancer and pursue less formulaic writing. He published his first novel in 2017, a middle-grades reader about a girl who rode an “orphan train” from New York City to Kansas. It is titled The Beamy Courage of Gerta Scholler. This second novel is his initial foray into the mystery genre. The setting of The Junkyard Dick is the  ruralTexas region where Lamb lives.

 

Gillespie Lamb

Website: https://www.gillespielamb.com/

 

NOTE:  

My latest novel, The Junkyard Dick, is a mystery set in Uvalde, Tex. It contains numerous allusions to Uvalde streets, restaurants, swimming in the Nueces, and so on, and positively characterizes this multicultural, county-seat town where I happen to live.

 

One week before I began marketing the book through my website (gillespielamb.com), Uvalde became a national byword for school shootings. A minor consequence of that tragedy is that suddenly my book became awkwardly positioned in the marketplace. Many people naturally will see promotion of a book about Uvalde at this time as shamelessly cashing in on the tragic event. I want neither the perception nor the reality of that.

 

So, I have created a nonprofit that will benefit elementary fiction-writing programs in Uvalde—or create such programs out of whole cloth. Any royalties I receive from the book will go into the fund along with contributions from the publisher, Black Rose Writing. That will just be seed money. I will be soliciting donations to the fund from the literary industry and associated artistic ventures, from local and regional community organizations and businesses, and from readers anywhere who find comfort, escape or inspiration in fiction.

 

I am calling the nonprofit “The Story Inventors Club,” which is appropriately juvenile so that it might appeal to young people. It will be dedicated to the proposition that young imaginations are capable of producing fictional stories of merit and enduring value. The hoped-for legacy of the Club would be creation of a new generation of prose (and poetry) to delight readers, and the instilling of enhanced cognitive, language and communication skills in some young people.

 

So, as a consequence of all of the above, I now will be promoting two things: (1) a novel that I believe in on its literary merits, and (2) a Club that I believe can build a new and creative legacy upon the ashes of misfortune.

 

For more information on this Club, please go here:  https://www.storyinventorsclub.com/home

 

 

Black Rose Writing

https://www.blackrosewriting.com/mystery/thejunkyarddick?rq=the%20junkyard%20dick

 

Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Junkyard-Dick-Gillespie-Lamb/dp/1685130178/

 

Goodreads

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61257463-the-junkyard-dick

 

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