In the Beginning

Mike with OH-58

I did a lot of flying with Huey Mike. Nape of the earth, aerial assaults, sometimes parking hundreds of feet up on top of buttes slightly larger than a conference table. Rode with the toes of my military boots overlapping the outboard edge of the Huey fuselage while looking straight down, and I can tell you I'm not partial to heights. It's a real rush when the pilot dips the nose of the helicopter to get power and the ground drops suddenly away under your feet. I even rode the co-pilot's seat in an OH-58, learned to read an aerial map and how to plot our course on that map while in the air. Guess you could say that with all our adventures together, I trust Mike with my life.

These days, in retirement, he and I usually get together at least a couple of times a year. He is not a writer, but we do brainstorm some short story ideas during these times. Occasionally, he will do some research on characters or place or an era in history he thinks I might like well enough to write about.

Recently, when the creative well ran dry, I started going through old research he had given me on NYC during the Prohibition Era. I had even already written a couple of stories from that material. One, "A Matter of Values," had been published in AHMM, and the second, "Whiskey Curb," has been purchased by AHMM and is now waiting for publication. These two were the basis for a series, except that the 3rd story, "On the Pad," didn't make the cut for some reason.

Oh, what the heck, I needed something to write and Mike had given me some good research on an area in Harlem known as Murder Alley. Look it up in Wikipedia. At one time, it was horse stables. During Prohibition, it was ramshackle buildings where organizing criminals lived and/or maintained places of business. Here, the "Clutch Hand" branch of the Sicilian mafia tended to leave its victims in molasses barrels out on public corners. Okay, that got my attention.

NOTE: For those of you who are interested, during Prohibition, bootleggers would buy barrels of molasses from the Boston Molasses Company, ferment the contents, and distill the results into clear rum, which they then sold in speakeasies as rum cocktails. I think I can work with that.

To date, the story is at 3,500 words with the same protagonist (a city vice detective) as the first three stories, the victim has been found, our vice detective is on the scene, and complications exist.  All I need now is a complete plot (it's currently at about 90%) and a finish (almost 95% there in my head). After much polishing, it will be submitted to AHMM.

For now, it's a beginning. 

Thanks, Mike.