Charles Boeckman

Strictly Poison: and Other Stories Charles Boeckman

Publisher Marketing: Charles Boeckman's biography often reads like the stuff of pulp fiction. He left home in the early 1940s and became a jazz musician, traveling the country, kicking around between New York City and New Orleans. In between gigs, he purchased a used typewriter and began pounding out hardboiled stories. Eventually, the legendary Popular Publications editor Mike Tilden purchased one of his stories for Detective Tales. After that accomplishment, Boeckman began appearing in Dime Detective, Manhunt, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and many others. Mr. Boeckman's stories usually focused on sad people trying to escape their dreary lives -- shifty con-artists, embittered detectives and hen-pecked losers. The author's jazz background in jazz music figures into several stories, reaching a two-fisted crescendo. The twenty-two stories in this anthology were originally published in various pulp magazines -- and now they appear together, wrapped in a breath-taking cover by Robert A. Maguire. Two of Mr. Boeckman's stories (included in this anthology) have been adapted for television. For ProSe Press, he developed the Johnny Nickle jazz-detective series. Today, he cranks out stories from his Texas home, along with his wife Patti, a formidable author in her own right. Contributor Bio:  Boeckman, Charles Charles Boeckman (also writing stories under the by-line Charles Beckman, Jr.) has enjoyed a career as a writer of fiction stories for most of his adult life. His published stories range from short-short stories of 1,000 to 1,500 words to books that have been published all over the world. Contributor Bio:  Parente, Audrey James BraveWolf grew up in a small New England college town 13 miles outside of Boston - a town where social engineers were creating a future that would not be Just or Good. And so he began the journey back to his Homeland. In Berlin, Germany, he fed the birds of Schloss Charlottenburg with the last survivors of the Bunker where Adolf Hitler died. And from Poland to Normandy, France, the European landscape told him that there was another future waiting to be born. He has worked all his life for this new birth. You can find more of his writing at: jamesbravewolf.blogspot.com.