Hagar (7 page)

In the Winterlands tales, scholarly
dragonslayer John Aversin and his mageborn partner Jenny Waynest do
their best to protect the people of their remote villages from
whatever threats come along: dragons, bandits, fae spirits, and
occasionally the misguided forces of the distant King.

Antryg Windrose is the archmage of the
Council of Wizards in his own dimension, exiled for misbehavior -
meddling in the affairs of the non-mageborn - to Los Angeles in the
1980s (that’s when the novels were written). He lives with a young
computer programmer, Joanna Sheraton, and keeps a wary eye on the
Void between Universes, to defend this world from whatever might
come through.

Though out of print, all four of these series
are available digitally on-line.

To these have been added short stories about
the characters from the Benjamin January historical mystery series,
set in New Orleans before the Civil War. As a free man of color,
Benjamin has to solve crimes while constantly watching his own back
lest he be kidnapped and sold as a slave. New Orleans in the 1830s
was that kind of town. In the novels he is assisted by his
schoolmistress wife Rose, and his good-for-nothing white buddy
Hannibal; two of the four Further Adventures concerning January are
in fact about what Rose does while Benjamin is out of town.

I have always been an enthusiastic fan of the
Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. Over the years I
have been asked to contribute stories to various Sherlock Holmes
anthologies, and when the character went into Public Domain, I
added these four stories to my collection.

Quest For Glory
is a stand-alone, a
short piece I wrote for the program book at a science fiction
convention at which I was Guest of Honor.

Sunrise on Running Water
is tenuously
connected to the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series, in that Don Simon
makes a brief cameo appearance. After seeing the movie
Titanic
- and reflecting that the doomed ship departed from
Ireland after sunset and sank just as dawn was breaking…and that
vampires lose their powers over running water - I just
had
to write it. It’s the only story that’s more about the idea than
about the characters.

The Further Adventures are follow-ons to the
main novels of their respective series. They can be read on their
own, but the Big Stuff got done in the novels: who these people
are, how they met, what the major underlying problems are in their
various worlds. I suppose they’re a tribute to the fact that for me
- and, it seems, for a lot of fans - these characters are real, and
I at least care about what happens to them, and what they do when
they’re not saving the world. They’re smaller issues, not
world-shakers: puzzle-stories and capers.

Life goes on.

Love goes on.

Everyone continues to have Further Adventures
for the rest of their lives.

*

Novels in the Benjamin January Series (some
are available in print, earlier books are out of print but
commercially available digitally)

A Free Man of Color

Fever Season

Graveyard Dust

Sold Down the River

Die Upon a Kiss

Wet Grave

Days of the Dead

Dead Water

Dead and Buried

The Shirt On His Back

Ran Away

Good Man Friday

Crimson Angel