The Enigma Club, my novel that is currently under review by my agent, is a hybrid. Not 100% text, not a graphic novel; but a novel enhanced and illuminated by many different types of art and textual sidebars intending to make real a very fictional and unreal world. I’ve been influenced by comic books, graphic novels, illustrated books…a little bit of everything. But the most primal influence has been the four-book “series” of mysteries published in the 1930s and ’40s, written by Denis Wheatley and J. G. Hooks, where narrative was written in epistolary style — letters, notes, various documents, telegrams, whatever — accompanied by actual clues: locks of hair, poison pills, a torn up photograph…

Today’s publishing climate now allows a lot of color on the pages of a book, believe it or not; but real, physical artifacts are far too limiting to conglomerational budgets. So I couldn’t go as far as that — maybe I could for a limited edition that I could somehow finance…

Ahh, dreams…

The Enigma Club is a pulp adventure story…about the pulp adventure stories of the 1910s – 1940s. Accordingly, the art that accompanies the text is all period art, as seen through my 50-year old eyes. This is the header for a story within the story, a pulp adventure published in magazine form in the middle of my semi-contemporary pulp adventure.

I think it’s bad art. It is deliberately bad. Worse than most black and white pulp sketches, and I am the only one to blame. Maria thinks it’s good art. Sorry — I’m just not that good — but man, I love my wife!