Site icon The Thrilling Detective Web Site

Diana Andrews

Created by Albert Tucher

Defiant, unapologetic and streetwise DIANA ANDREWS is a crime-solving hooker in New Jersey who has — so far — appeared in more than seventy hard-boiled short stories in venues including the anthology The Best American Mystery Stories 2010.”

So… she’s not a private eye, not exactly — more of a gifted amateur. At least, originally.

But her long-awaited first “longer case,” the novella “The Same Mistake Twice,” which came out in 2013, seems to suggest she may be leaving her prostitution days behind. The author, ambitious and prolific Albert Tucher, certainly hopes readers don’t mind — he has several books in the can, waiting to be published, including Do Overs, Tentacles, The Homicide Sisters, The Senatrix and The Good Place. He goes on to explain:

“Here’s the lowdown on Diana: I have five still-unpublished novels about her, during which she gets out of hooking and is recruited as a professional bodyguard. The company that hired her is nearly destroyed by an internal betrayal, and as the only one left standing, she becomes president, tasked with rebuilding the company. 
Which she does. Some of my short stories are about early Diana, when she’s still hooking, and others are about her subsequent career. I’m up to about 100 stories now.”

So in The Honorary Jersey Girl (2019), Diana seems to be a sort of semi-legit fixer, having settled down, more or less in suburban Driscoll, New Jersey, and running a security business of sorts, with her crew of seasoned bodyguards on hand, supposedly “the toughest in the business,” whom she can count on, just in case. Also lurking in the vicinity is her cop buddy, Detective Dale Tillotson, “one of the few men in her life… who had never seen her naked.”

“It’s complicated,” says the author.

We shall see… having tracked down a few of the stories from Diana’s call girl days, I have to say, this Tucher guy has gifted us with some hard little gems, everything from flash fiction to novellas and now, novels, and a tough-as-nails hero whose street-level pragmatism and wry, no-nonsense worldview could go a long way. Even more intriguing, he seems to have created a veritable Dianaverse of well-drawn recurring characters who weave in and out of Diana’s life, even appearing in their own stories.

UNDER OATH

SHORT STORIES

NOVELLAS & NOVELS

RELATED LINKS

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

Exit mobile version