Announcing a new book is a special occurance for any author. Unless you are Stephen King, or someone like that, it doesn’t happen very often. Over my career, I’ve averaged a new book every three years or so. Every one of them is the culmination of a long process and feels like a statement of principles. For better or worse, I give each book everything I have. For the time it takes to create that literary work and usher it into the public domain, I become that book.

This new one is no different. Published by Hamilcar Publishing, it will be a collection of 20 mostly long-form essays/aricles/journalism from over 40 years in the trade. For me, these pieces represent a lifetime of engagment with the social universe and the written word. To readers, this may be a collection of stories from over the years, but for me it’s more like autoboiography, or a revisitation of what I’ve been doing with my life since rising from the primordial ooze, or at least since I started making a living as a scribe.

There are pieces in BLOOD IN THE DESERT drawn from the world of crime, as might be expected, but also this anthology is a conscious effort to expand beyond that into other areas of literary exploration, namely the cultures of jazz and boxing, urban corruption, and violence in the American Southwest — all subjects that I’ve been writing about for years. The book also includes a fully restored, indepth interview that I did with comedy legend George Carlin two years before he died.

This book is designed to be an eclectic collection of writings that chart the evolution of one writer over nearly a lifetime.

Publication date: September 30, 2026.

Can’t wait for you to have it in your hands. Stay tuned for further dispatches from the battlefront. Over and out.