May-September romances ... they prove any peach can get picked, but spitting the pit out can take all summer.

MARVINS WAKE fini

So ends the original set of Detective Nick DeLeon hardboil. Will more be written? Better the author ask **can more be written?** There's some really snarky Lovecraft-influenced Y2K stuff buried in the text-boxes. Some readers will dig-it-out; injustice would be done to attach 21-Century values to those bad dreams. We as citizens and readers have become both stupidly optimistic and rancidly skeptical of good. Nicky would not understand how a man could NOT seek to do good. But, then he is a person of 15-th Century virtues. You wonder if Eve would stay with him? There's much unpublished about her ... every writer runs into a wall. Certainly for me, logging militia activity and responding gub'mnt atrocity pushes its demands for'ard. Nicky ages. Who indeed would stay with him? Anita, Ben, Jerry-the-Arab ? Of the huge unspoken history I can't say now what gets published ....

Will Scranton ... from somewhere east of Spokane.