Tales of murder, drug-dealing, adultery, arson, insurance fraud—a gumbo of delights!

My Mad Russian

Three Tales

My Mad Russian: Three Tales is a tasty gumbo of drug-dealing, murder, arson, adultery, tax evasion, kidnaping, attempted murder, home invasion, insurance fraud and international intrigue.

In the title tale, Piotyr Alexandreyevitch Primov brings his invention—the eerie Primover, the first electronic musical instrument—to 1933 New York. There he finds patrons in a society couple, Mr. and Mrs. Max Berlin. Berlin, a banker, proposes a business partnership to exploit the science behind the Primover, while his wife forms a more intimate partnership with the inventor. The husband hires detectives, but finds himself stymied when Stalin intervenes. Atmospheric and engrossing, My Mad Russian takes its inspiration from the real-life legend of Léon Theremin and his wealthy patrons, Walter and Lucie Rosen—a story the author encountered (and here embellishes) as a teenage underbutler at the Rosens’ Westchester County estate, Caramoor.

Big Luck moves the scene to the early 2000s and Silver Lake, in Los Angeles, where an out-of-work actor, after winning the lottery, enlists his Mexican immigrant friend to help evade taxes on his prize; what happens next prompts the friend to re-examine his application for U.S. citizenship. Sidestep is a story of the heartland, where in 1984 the heir to generations of industrialists, after having to close the old factory, manages to recoup his fortunes through agriculture. The narrator, Cindy, wavers among three loves as she recounts a new challenge from drug dealers.

 A fable of the RV lifestyle in a Kansas Eden, complete with serpents!

The Wedding on Big Bone Hill

After losing his lover and (in the wake of 9/11) his job, Jack hits the road in a classic RV on the quest for Paradise, USA. It seems he’s found it in a summer job at a bucolic Kansas park, but this Eden turns out to be as tricky as the original. The head ranger, soon to marry Donna atop Big Bone Hill, lets Donna’s father, Percy, an ex-con who is a stickler for the rules, run the park.

Percy's conviction is that everybody tries to get away with something, but that anyone once allowed to get away with anything will try to get away with more, and he (if he alone) can see where that leads—he being the poster child for getting away with nothing. His constant search for infractions keeps the whole community on edge, including his widow friend Maureen, Dennis (who runs the entrance booth), and the Beanblossoms, workamper entrepreneurs who introduce into Eden the shirtless Rick.

A little boy goes missing on the late summer weekend when The Wedding on Big Bone Hill is to take place, and Percy undertakes the lonesome task of meting out justice—threatening tragedy in an otherwise ruefully funny celebration of the upside-down underpinnings of an American microcosm.

Queer's Progress

My family is more fucked up than the norm, OK? That’s why I work like a maniac, to keep out of the house. Not that it helps, when everyone I meet is so fucked up.

That’s how Queer’s Progress, a compelling story of young love, opens. The speaker is Edward, Cuban-born CCNY honor student and a page at the New York Public Library (“just a page, not a whole book or anything”). Edward is handsome, charming, reeking of sex.

Ned, who’s seen it all before, adds his voice when Andrew, a young scholar new to town, falls in love with Edward at first sight and seeks the older man’s guidance.

Ned’s the self-styled master of gay Manhattan—founder of "GRO" (“Gays Reaching Out”) and author of a bestselling manual, How to Score Tonight. He offers hands-on instruction as required, but is more interested in using Andrew’s publishing connections to kick-start his own languishing literary career than in aiding his love life.

Andrew makes stumbling progress through gay New York in pursuit of Edward. But Edward, in flight from a pregnant hookup, leaps from his mom’s Harlem apartment to flop on his oldest friend’s floor, his best friend’s couch, Andrew’s bed, the West Side Y, a patch of ivy in Central Park—and a jail cell or two. Ned’s machinations come to naught as Queer’s Progress races relentlessly toward a classic, but surprising, inevitability. It’s a tale by turns savage and urbane, lyrical and full of wit-burnished emotion.

Harvey Joiner (1852-1932)

The Man in the Balloon:
Harvey Joiner's Wondrous 1877

This lively biographical study, impeccably researched and copiously illustrated, is the first ever published on Harvey Joiner, once a well-known American painter.

It brings Joiner to life as a 25-year-old prankster in Jeffersonville, Indiana, a rip-roaring river town where he finds himself at the crossroads of his career. The witty wood-engraved advertising images that have occupied him since he was a teenager have ceased to sell, and he is beginning to paint the pictures he will become known for, especially the landscapes that, evoking the region's beech groves, filter the light falling from their green-leafed canopies through personal responses and meanings. Moreover, he promotes himself nonstop, placing items about his pictures in local newspapers and hobnobbing with the gentry and painting their portraits.

But Joiner will stave off adulthood a little longer with a series of pranks, launching hot air balloons of increasing size, until his biggest--seen to be carrying a man in its basket--soars across the Ohio River and the rooftops of Louisville, Kentucky.

Before his wondrous year is out, Joiner's teetotal pledge attracts patrons who give him the commission of a lifetime, and he paints his masterpiece, Ruth Gleaning in the Fields of Boaz, for the Utica (Indiana) Christian Church. Analyzing the complex Bible story of how Ruth achieves security, he places the young widow in harvest fields at day's end, a moment of respite and possibility he makes personal by recalling his own widowed mother's dilemma and depicting the very fields of his boyhood.

In The Man in the Balloon: Harvey Joiner's Wondrous 1877, an American painter steps out of the shadows of neglect.

 An impatient Depression-era heiress hurries her inheritance along!           

Rex Black builds his comedy club into a global entertainment brand!

                     Good People

Steven Key Meyers lives in darkest Indiana. His new novel Gone Goose, to be published later this year, is set in a small Indiana narcopolis. He is at work on a new novel, Family Romance.