Anyone who’s been around the crime fiction community for any length of time knows the name Jack Getze. In addition to serving as the Fiction Editor for Spinetingler Magazine, Jack is an accomplished author himself, his work having appeared in A Twist of Noir, Beat to a Pulp and The Big Adios, among others. Today I’m pleased to welcome Jack for a guest post in conjunction with his Austin Carr Mystery series (Big Numbers and Big Money having been reissued by Down and Out Books), wherein Jack proves that, once again, sometimes truth can be stranger than fiction, and that some authors have very deep wells from which to pull for inspiration.
He was short, dark and handsome, with thick black hair and tunneling eyes that could warm you with a twinkle or drive you away with quick, venomous anger. The ex-boxer’s temper and willingness to fight were legendary, but so was his generosity, and so was his love for Sam, the German Sheppard who went with him everywhere. In the car or on his leash, the tri-colored, one hundred pound dog named Sam was Domenic’s closest friend.
“We’d be loafing on the job, smoking,” one of his former workmen recalled. “We’d see and hear that huge dog of his in plenty of time to get back to work before Dom arrived. We fooled him every time, convinced him we were one of his hardest-working crews. Man, we loved Sam.”
That workman’s employer, Sam’s owner, the man with the legendary temper, was also my father-in-law. He owned a successful electrical contracting business, served in World War II and worked like a dog all his life. Everyone called him Dom except his mother-in-law, Angelina, who called him Don as a passive-aggressive insult. (You had to love Angelina). And were it not for Dom and his daughter, who single-handedly dragged me to Jersey, the crazy story that is Big Numbers would not have turned into a series.
Let’s face facts, stockbrokers are boring by themselves. Austin Carr needed trouble with the mob. And luckily for me, my father-in-law provided introductions. Not personally (Well, there was that time Dom and I met the handsome “Big Frank” Condi in a restaurant), but mostly through stories about Dom in the newspaper. Trust me, Dom was not the kind of man you slap on the shoulder and say, “So Dom, tell me about this limo ride. Were you scared?” →