Ye Leopold Return Tales

So I read S. T. Joshi's cool mystery novel (whut we will be discussing in our vlog next Friday when he comes to drive me to Portland for ye HPLFF), and some thing in his excellent approach to the genre got me hankering to reread those books concerning my all-time favourite detective, Nero Wolfe.  I think I may have read all of the Wolfe novels thirty or thirty-five years ago, and then five years ago I began to read them again but got distracted.  This past week I reread In the Best Families, and this morning I began And Be a Villain.  I also order'd ye DVD set of the A&E series starring the remarkable Maury Chaykin as Nero Wolfe.  I seen a few of these, either on telly or I borrow'd yem from ye library -- but they are so fabulous and authentic that I want to watch them all.

It seems that I cannot have a literary passion these days without trying, in some fashion, to ape it.  It hath long been one of my little literary aches to write a series of psychic detective tales, with my psychic being a child of Sesqua Valley.  This poses some few problems, because the haunted valley is, as I have constructed it, a secretive place, and such a series of stories would involve clients coming to visit my detective at his house in the valley.  But now I see that this can have entertainment value and dramatic effect, so my mind is working overtime on ideas for such a series of tales.  I have vow'd to work on two books only this coming year--and whenever I make such a vow I can never keep it.  I've got this weird feeling that I'll be writing three books in 2011, one of which will be Tales of Leopold Return, who will be my psychic detective.  The stories will be highly inspir'd by the Nero Wolfe novels, and Return's sidekick will be a female version of Archie Goodwin.  Tough talking, probably lesbian; a woman of ravishing beauty who dresses mostly in masculine attire and ain't no wimp.  Of course, the series won't comprise "serious" work of fiction, but fun (yet hopefully not trivial) tales in the tradition of Jules de Grandin and Carnaki.

I like being surprised by my sudden "needs" as an author, & to write a wee collection of amusing psychic detectives tales is suddenly a keen ache indeed.  I'm not clever when it comes to plotting, so they won't be whodunits with intricate plotting and red herrings.  They will be investigations of supernatural queerness.  They will be mass fun to write.