Thursday, April 22, 2010

Day Stalker

Soon you will meet Otis Buford, the Pock Face Rapist, in the murder mystery, Day Stalker. Even though this book is fiction, Otis is based on a very real person who was terrorizing Tucson, Arizona, in the late 1960s.

I remember thinking at the time, What a great book this story would make. Little did I know that I would be writing the book forty years later. Better late than never for murder mystery fans.

It felt like Tucson was still a territory in 1969. Crime was being solved without benefit of today’s technologies. There were no cell phones, computers or instant communications. Police dealt with bad hombres who all had Wild West, cowboy mentalities. Every pickup truck had loaded rifles in gun racks and pistols on dashboards. Pure, unadulterated drugs were everywhere and cheap, comparatively speaking.

Police, for the most part, where high school grads, maybe some Nam military experience…academy, and then they became instant crime fighters. Motorcycle cops all rode Harley-Davidsons; detectives drove big-block four-door sedans, and patrolmen cruised in black and whites with a couple large cherry top lights that could be seen a mile away by the bad guys.

There were four major Tucson factions in the day: police, red necks, hippies, and dark characters that operated in the shadows. Otis was one of the latter, and before it was all said and done, he would scare the hell out of the whole community!

Day Stalker will be published by Wheatmark, Inc. this fall.

Mittster

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