C. M. Albrecht

I'm me.  I work alone. I'm a private eye. When my casebook's empty— and it's empty a lot—I write books. Murder books. I wear a dark fedora and a trench coat even when it's a hundred and five in Sacramento.  I pack an 11mm Marley I bought at the Archie Goodwin estate sale.  I know which end the slugs come out of.  But 11mm slugs?  Hard to come by these days.

People say I've got attitude.  Attitude they don't like.  I get that a lot.  The cops and me? We work toward the same end, but we're like water and electricity. They think I cramp their style. They hate that  I don't have to play by their rules.

I usually end up  needing a lawyer.  I  had one.  He fell off the back of an ambulanceful of mesothelioma patients and got run over by a speeding Cooper.  I'm alone and  on my own.  It's a mean life.  I'm used to it.

Okay, really, I'm not at all like that.  I'm just a mild-mannered fellow who loves mysteries and detectives (public and private alike). I sit at my desk and drink coffee and daydream. I've never gone strapped (except for cash), and I've never shot anybody and nobody's ever shot me. I've been happily married to the beautiful Irma since 1967.  While my head's in the clouds, she helps keep my feet on the ground. 

I'm sure people in law enforcement laugh and/or snort at boo-boos they run across in crime fiction.  They may think the writers are stupid or simply ignorant.  FYI we may or may not know what we're writing about, but in writing there's a technical loophole that covers this.  It's called poetic license. It's legal. 

I like murder mysteries and « romans noirs ». A couple of my books are not only murder novels, but fall under that classification as well.