This guest post and book giveaway comes to us courtesy of mystery and thriller author Bill A. Brier.
He’s giving away a copy of his mystery The Killer Who Hated Soup.
To enter the giveaway, simply email Bill Brier at billbrierauthor[at]gmail[dot]com. You might put “Crime Cafe giveaway” in the subject line, so Bill will know what it’s about.
The giveaway runs until Aug. 20. So get in on that thing! 🙂
And now … The birth of The Killer Who Hated Soup!
*****
The car, dripping with sludge, hung from a crane. “Honey, get in here—quick,” I called from the TV room to my wife. In 1957, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in honor of its fifty years of statehood, put to rest a brand new Plymouth Belvedere under the courthouse lawn, figuring that fifty years later, they’d bring it back to life.
So they thought.
It was now 2007, the state’s one-hundredth birthday, and the whole town came bopping out, nervous as crickets on a dance floor. In the car were hundreds of postcards, on which citizens had written their guesses of the town’s now current census. The person with the closest guess (or, their descendant) would be given a hardy handshake and the keys to the classic automobile.
Unfortunately, the winner got neither. After decades of hibernating in cold, wet darkness, the car that emerged was no more than, well, a rust bucket. The Belvedere’s concrete vault was not up to fifty years of trucks rumbling past on the street above.
As I watched the car lowered to the ground, and the slimy brown covering being peeled back like diseased skin, I thought to myself, There’s a story inside that car’s trunk. Hence, the birth of The Killer Who Hated Soup.
WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT WRITING FROM GLEN FREY OF THE ROCK BAND, EAGLES.
Glen Frey was just starting out as an artist and living in a cheap apartment above Jackson Browne. Every morning he’d hear Browne’s teapot go off. Then a few notes on his piano. Over and over and over. Each time, just a little different. Then a second verse, and the same thing, again, and again, and again. It would be quiet for a while, then once more, the teapot. Then that first verse on the piano, and it would start all over again. Ah, ha, Frey thought. So that’s how it’s done. Not through inspiration, not by waiting for great ideas to float into your head. Elbow grease . . . time . . . thought . . . persistence.
Heeding that advice, I buckled down and wrote the award winning THE KILLER WHO HATED SOUP. The first in The Killer Who mystery series, taking place in small town, Defiance, Oklahoma, 1957. A town not particularly averse to murders, just the embarrassment of them.
AUTHOR BIO
Bill grew up in California and went to Hollywood High School, then served as an Air Force combat cameraman. After hiring on at Disney Studios as a film loader, he soon advanced and moved on to other film studios. He earned a master’s degree in psychology. A big help when working with Trumpish Hollywood producers.
During his more than twenty-five years in the movie business as a cameraman, film editor, and general manager, Bill worked on everything from the hilarious, The Love Bug, to the creepy, The Exorcist, to the far out, Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica.
Eight years ago, Bill switched from reading scripts to writing mysteries and driving racecars. After completing three award-winning novels, he signed with Black Opal Books. His first novel, The Devil Orders Takeout, is a standalone thriller about a devoted father and husband who makes a deal with a real-life devil to protect his golf-prodigy son after his wife and older son are killed in a mysterious accident — and pays hell for it.
Bill’s second novel, The Killer Who Hated Soup, is Book One in the 1950s The Killer Who mystery series.
For more info and photos check out Bill Brier’s bio links!
BILL’S BIO LINKS: https://billbrier.com/about/about-bill/
Biography – Bill A. Brier
