A big welcome to author R. Weir. He tells how he created his Denver series featuring Jarvis Mann, a rough and tough modern-day PI with the proverbial heart of gold.
When it came to cool fictional literary detectives, there were few that matched Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer.
I’ve always been fascinated with the detective genre. Detectives and Dames, I would call it. The classic PI from the black and white days of movies, with shadowy dark scenes and smoke-filled rooms creating a tense atmosphere. Those remarkable stories by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald gave birth to the Noir Hard-Boiled genre that fiction writers have continued to create. Many modern writers have taken those characters and created their own, evolving them, while keeping much of the same spirit. Which is what I set out to do with my own protagonist.
I had written three books many years ago, with a broken character caught up in the spy world, with issues of alcohol and betrayal in his love life. They were dark in nature, full of little hope as he struggled to keep his sanity, in his battle to bring down a terrorist organization. Those stories were never published. From that character I wanted to go in a different direction and thought long and hard, deciding to create my own detective with Denver as the backdrop. It wasn’t long before I came up with a name, and private detective Jarvis Mann was born.
From there I knew he would be tough, struggling to find work, with a biting sense of humor, and issues in his personal relationships. He would not always get things right, with dire consequences coming to bear. Rarely were his cases as it seemed, with twists and turns to keep the reader guessing. I wanted to take all those classic elements of the Noir Private Eye genre and bring them into our world today, with modern storylines and cases. A stolen baseball card, a shadowy stalker after his sexy female client, a football player struggling with concussions leading to bad decisions, a brother who is neck deep in trouble with a mobster, computer hacking and theft, helping homeless veterans on the street, and the latest book, dealing with a gruesome serial killer. And yes, there are gangsters, thugs, femme fatales, and broken-hearted girlfriends who struggle to connect to the man who walls himself off from those who care about him. All of this viewed through Jarvis’ eyes in a first-person descriptive narrative, pulling the reader into each scene, page by page.
I aimed to create a character who was fun to write. I’d find myself smiling as I typed away his latest quip. I wanted him to have rich characteristics on full display, with as many faults as virtues. A smart mouthed, snarky man, using humor to get him through the tough times, masking the true pain underneath that from time to time still bubbles up to the surface, as he faces elements in a seedy world of grisly crime his profession wades knee deep into. With each book—there are now seven of them—he has evolved, though not always in a good way. But he has a good heart, full of confidence and swagger, never backing down from a fight for what he believes is right, even when facing impossible odds against powerful people and organizations. Jarvis is the guy you wished was next door, there when you need him, fighting for you and what is right, until the last bullet in his revolver is fired and last swing of his fists are thrown. Stories hard to put down until you reach—THE END.
About Me
I live in the Mile High city with my wife, daughter and dog, where the Rocky Mountain High isn’t always achieved with an herbal substance. When not glued to the computer for work and writing, I relax by enjoying the outdoors; playing tennis, traveling in our motor home and riding a motorcycle wherever the wind takes me. My writing beckons back to the days of detectives and dames, but with modern plots and twists. PI Jarvis Mann is tough, resourceful and a man with as many faults as virtues. His oddball sense of humor is much like mine, though I’m not nearly as tough and fearless as he is. Though no evil stands a chance against my written word!
Buy Links
My Amazon Author Page
The Case of the Missing Bubble Gum Card
Connect with me
Website https://rweir.net
Facebook page for R. Weir https://www.facebook.com/randy.weir.524
Facebook page for Jarvis Mann https://www.facebook.com/JarvisMannPI
Twitter https://twitter.com/RWeir720
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/rweir720/
During my career as a school library media specialist, I heard several authors of realistic fiction books say they got their ideas for themes and plots from newspaper articles and current events, from personal experiences, or from conversations with friends and acquaintances. It impressed me that they were able to create characters and entire novels from individual events.
Okay, maybe not easy—but as more observations demanded my attention, I decided I needed to write another book. FURtive Investigation, the second book in the series, is based on ideas I imagined about some of our other rental tenants. I had invented a landlady sleuth, and I had experience with rentals. My imaginings took off into story form. Though, until it crept into the story, I never imagined the skeleton Psycho Cat finds in the duplex attic. It would have been creepy to paint and clean the rental unit if I’d had to think about a dead body above me.
Nine LiFelines, the third book, grew from a story I heard at a meeting years ago from the head of library technology in my school district. While giving a report on what she’d learned at a conference, she told a personal story about the elevator in her hotel that would never go to her floor without going to another floor first.
That true story, plus a murder and some fumbling hoodlums, became Tailed, the fourth Psycho Cat mystery. In the story, as you might have guessed, the hoods follow the RV back to Kansas City after a murder is committed. The reader knows it could be the end of the road for the landlady and her cat if they can’t solve the mystery this time.
