The Secret Dead Blog

After much begging, pleading, prodding and cajoling, Duane “Leblanc” Swierczynski has become a newly minted Cabana Boy, launching a new blog just as his first novel, SECRET DEAD MEN, is about to be available soon from PointBlank. But ever modest, Duane didn’t have the nerve to write the opening post–so he entrusted this to his friend and editor Allan Guthrie, who takes the floor and doesn’t just run with it, he does a freaking 100m dash in under ten seconds:

Back in October 2003, Leblanc submitted the opening of a heist novel, Smell The Roses, to my authors’ showcase website, Noir Originals. It blew me away. But it wasn’t until March 2004 that I was introduced to the full power of the Swierczynski imagination. By this stage I’d become commissioning editor for a new crime line, PointBlank Press. Leblanc asked if I’d looked at a novel he’d written a little while ago that was now tucked away in a drawer. Like a fool, I said yes (‘fool’, because I’m now a Swierczynski addict). I knew within twenty pages that Secret Dead Men was a winner. The premise is typical of Swierczynski’s comic book-bizarro mind: Del Farmer is a PI who collects the souls of the recently dead and stores them in a hotel in his brain.

See?

Shouldn’t work. But it does. Because alongside his imagination is his other great gift: humour. He knows how to make you laugh until you cry.

Secret Dead Men is one of the most original PI novels you’ll ever read. If it doesn’t at least make the Edgar shortlist for best paperback original, I’ll stop smoking and drinking. I’ll even skin my cat, Bubbles. Okay, I’ll become a vegetarian.

Now, that’s a challenge if I ever heard one. All I want to know is–damn, where’s my copy?