Sometime around 2016 I started talking to Kensington Books about writing a series for them. The problem was what type, or genre, and after some discussion they thought a serial killer series would be the best fit. While I’m a devout reader of crime and mystery fiction, I’m not much of a reader of serial killer fiction and I was going to pass, but my future editor, Michaela Hamilton, gave me several of John Lutz’s Frank Quinn books to read, and that changed my mind. The books were a lot of fun, quick, twisty, with rotating perspectives between Quinn and his team, the victims, and the killer. It gave me ideas for my own series where I’d place the action in Los Angeles and make the quest for fame a running theme throughout the series. I also saw a way to how I could write the books more as crime novels masquerading as serial killer novels, with the killers having motives different than simply being driven to kill. I was sold.
The first step was to create a full history, not only for my hero but his family and all the members of his team. If I was going to write a series, I wanted to make sure my characters were fully fleshed out before I started. The name I picked for my hero was Morris Brick—Morris, so I could name him after an uncle, and Brick because I was going to describe him as being on the shorter side with a compact body, kind of like a brick. Brick’s history would have him as a celebrity member of the LAPD who had solved several big serial killer cases before starting his own private investigation firm, and his team would consist of former homicide detectives. Morris would be married to a wonderful woman and successful therapist, Natalie, and would have a daughter, Rachel, finishing up law school. He’d also have a bull terrier named Parker who’d be involved in the action to varying degrees. Since Kensington wanted me to use a pseudonym to differentiate these books from the crime and horror novels I’d been publishing, I chose Jacob Stone, figuring that Stone would fit seamlessly with Brick.
Five of the aforementioned novels were written before I decided to write my first Morris Brick mystery story, “Lulu & Heartbreaker.” Like the novels, I wanted this story to be fast-paced and with humor, and while written in the third person, I would switch between Morris’s and the other characters’ perspectives. But unlike my novels, I didn’t want anyone to die, and while there’d be plenty of action and some violence, nothing grisly. What I came up with was a Continental-Op like story where Morris and his team are searching for a missing actor while a pair of killers, Lulu & Heartbreaker (who gets his name not for being a heartthrob, but because he’s rumored to once punching a man so hard in the chest as to have torn the man’s heart apart) are also searching for the same actor. The mystery ultimately solved is who hired these killers and why. An advantage I had was having fully defined characters with rich backstories not only from the outlines I wrote but from the five novels.
My original goal was to write only that one story to help promote the novels, but after Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine published it, I came up with an idea that was a slight twist on the first one. The next story was titled Fay & Wray. In this one, a pair of grifters named Fay Hastings and Danny Wray steal Parker. While still a crime/mystery story, I also had fun working different references to King Kong into the story. After Fay & Wray came Mary & Shelley, James & Bond, and the recently completed Alfred & Hitchcock.
Writing my Morris Brick thriller series provided a rich set of characters for my new mystery/crime short story series. I also stumbled upon a formula that’s allowing me to write entertaining crime stories where the possibilities are endless. Bugs & Bunny, anyone?
Trace Evidence 