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As George Bernard Shaw once said, "if you cannot get rid of your family skeletons, you may as well make them dance." I am a former history teacher who writes character-driven stories with plots that display the consequences of past actions (on non-actions) on the present. The past is, for many of my quirky characters, a haunted landscape from which they hope to escape. There is usually a reckoning that looms just over the horizon that will upend the good and bad intentions of these marginal characters that live outside of polite (and not-so-polite) society in the context of their rough circumstances. My stories are both real and picaresque, comedic and tragic, with plots that confound expectation with twisted or ambiguous results for the heroes, villains, louts, ladies, and furry/feathered critters that inhabit these tales. There is a speakeasy just around the corner where a killer sits in a shadow watching a boy, a witness to a murder across the river in East St. Louis. The man who saved that boy once before, Smoke Dupree, is blowing his trumpet on stage while his woman, Geeshie Wiley sings the blues…the killer watching is Otto Vardaman, a man with little pity and no conscience, a useful man with a set of skills that keeps him busy in 1930s America; a relentless manhunter who tracks and delivers prey for bounty…the boy, S.T. Moberly, is his prey.
R.D. Puller, Scribbler 