Crushed Trachea Blues

A novel to be published next week

Hello there, foax. I'm glad you're reading this. Why? Well, for two reasons.

One: Your attention here, however brief, indicates an interest, however marginal, in whatever bullshit I have to impart, however non-bullshitty it be.

Two: I'm happy to tell you that a novel of mine will be out next week. It's a fun affair, really—a 250-page jaunt under the dark underbelly of Los Angeles and over the alabaster backside of the Hollywood Hills.

There was a suicide, see.

Suicide by jiu-jitsu. In a cage.

Or was it staged to look like one?

It's put in the hands of Paisley Fuentes to figure it all out. The widow of the suicided dude, MMA fighter Charles “Blitz” Volkenrath, seeks out Paisley’s services with the blessing of the Reseda PD. Reseda's a city out in the San Fernando Valley. Or, The Valley. Lots of weird shit happens out there. It's ten degrees hotter than the rest of the LA Basin and maybe fifty degrees higher on the crazy scale. That's being generous.

You'll like Paisley. He's a snarky private eye whose tendencies toward self-destruction don't keep him from being one of the noble few in a world of vegan crime bosses, nerd assassins, existentialist cage fighters, guys who cut cocaine with borax mined out in Death Valley, and—

and—

AI Charles Manson. Yup, Chuck 2.0, the hippie edge lord himself, has been uploaded into the cloud, wherefrom he directs heinous crimes and equally heinous desert orgies—all to initiate a vegan/bloodmouth war called Smelt Her Dealt Her, which is going down soon out at an illegal festival called Stonernalia.

Come and join Paisley and his weirdo bodyguard Mazagon, his gold prospector friend Tutmoses Ochoa, hacker Tricky, and a slew of other degenerates trying to get by or make it big in the City of Angels.

Crushed Trachea Blues is a funny, profound, and complicated love letter to Raymond Chandler, Southern California, and jiu-jitsu. It's Thomas Pynchon meets MMA. David Lynch elopes with stoner rock. Brooklyn 99 beats up The Big Sleep.

In a few days, I'll throw up a free chapter, maybe hook you in to check out the entire novel. The book will be available in paperback and e-book.

Lastly, I must mention the tremendous help I've received from A.P. Murphy. I call him Murph. He calls himself that, so I do too. You can go ahead and call him Genius. He has a wonderful Substack page about cinema called Back to Back and an equally wonderful Substack page of fiction titled The Strangeness Kit. I hope he publishes a collection or two of his short stories for public consumption because they're phenomenal and versatile. Oh, and he speaks Catalan. Player.

Murph wrote a blurb for the back matter of Crushed Trachea Blues. Goes like this:

“Where Pynchon strode, Bradley VanDeventer strides too...a long list of strictly American gratifications, of uppers and downers, ferocious pleasures, that VanDeventer takes us on in this trip into the underworld of the City of Angels.”

The dude knows me better than I know myself. Figures.

Thanks for letting me slide into your inbox and hang out with you. Check back in a few days for a sample chapter and see if you dig it.

I'll have a cover reveal soon.

Later days, Willie Mays

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