They all had degrees, and degrees were supposed to pave the way to careers. They hadn’t, and it was time for another solution. – Arthur Pender
Of course, for most people that other solution would be something like getting a second job to make ends meet or going back to school to pursue a more viable area of study. Not so for friends and recent college grads Pender, Marie, Sawyer, and Mouse.
Fueled by frustration and righteous indignation they instead turn to kidnapping wealthy businessmen, and what starts out as a lark – “Let’s try it. Just to see if we can.” – turns into a lucrative career.
The secret to their success is careful research to vet the targets, detailed planning, no violence, and not getting greedy; they never ask for more than $100k, an amount their targets can easily afford and are more than willing to pay.
Select a target, kidnap, collect a modest ransom, move to a different city, repeat. For two years things run like clockwork, until the day they unknowingly select a target whose wife has connections to the mob. The wife refuses to pay and calls in the hitters, the group’s attempt to return the target goes spectacularly off the rails, and all their efforts to stay low key are blown to hell as both state and federal authorities enter the fray.
As the title suggests, the stories in Jay Ridler’s short story collection Knockouts: Ten Tales of Fantasy and Noir are thematically linked around fighting. In many of them the fighting is literal – mixed marital arts, bare-knuckle brawling, wrestling – but in others the fighting occurs on a more symbolic level, be it fighting to break free from memories and boundaries, or from the circumstances of life that are trying to drag you down.
I’ve never been much for outlining. Respect to those who can do it, but writing from a treatment has always seemed a little too much like work to me. Anyway, I like being surprised. Usually it’s my characters doing the surprising. Sometimes, though, writing off-the-cuff can lead to some spectacularly unintended consequences for me, the writer, as well. 
Five Shots of the Good Stuff: Why You Should Love Short Story Collections (Including Mine!)
The 2011 Independent Literary Awards Winners have been announced, and I am honored to have served as a voting member of the “Mystery” panel, a category which was included this year for the first time.
“However much you want want to forgive and forget, sometimes you just can’t.” – Steve Priestly
Private Investigator Joe Geraghty is the undoubted star of my two published novels, Broken Dreams and The Late Greats, but it’s also a fact that he was the consequence of failure. A police procedural, Black and White, featuring Detective Sergeant Coleman, a minor character in the Geraghty books, pre-dates them. Looking back, the novel has obvious flaws. I didn’t know the police culture or live it. It was hard to effectively toss a year’s work in the bin, but it was clear to me that I had to step away and start over.
“You know what? If they try too hard to scare us, I might call their bluff.” – Honeymoon Husband
“Ain’t how a man does things that makes the man. It’s how he deals with what he’s done.” – Paddy
