Created by Jack Bludis
KEN SLIGO is a vet recently returned from overseas, trying to scratch out a living as a rookie private eye, while he waits to become a cop (he’s on the waiting list). The P.I. life may not be exactly Sligo’s dream gig, but it’s still better than working for his brother, the butcher.
It’s a suitably rundown, delightfully seedy (and colourfully-drawn) area of Charm City that Sligo calls his own, full of strip joints, dive bars, and fly-specked establishments that offer “bail bonds, tattoos, rubber goods and hot dogs.” And it does this Montreal boy good to see Lili St. Cyr make a brief cameo in Sligo’s first recorded case, “New Guy on the Block,” the kick-off story in the 2001 PWA anthology, Mystery Street.
Ken has since returned, in “Blondes, Blondes, Blondes!,” right on this site and, finally, in 2017, we saw him cut loose in a novel, The Killers are Coming. Rumours are there are more on the way.
Mind you, Jack’s a busy guy. This Hunt Valley, Maryland writer has sold over 400 short stories and forty novels under a slew of pen names and has been nominated for both the Anthony and the Shamus awards. Under his own name he writes about forties Los Angeles private eye Rick Page and he is currently at work on a police procedural set in a small Maryland city west of Baltimore to go along with what he calls his various other “potboilers” — none of which bear his name. He also writes about 1950s Hollywood eye Brian Kane.
UNDER OATH
- “From Baltimore to the mean streets of New York, to the smoke-and-gin-soaked Hollywood of the 1940s, Bludis presents a lineup of some of the finest hardboiled literature around. Page after page is filled with bullets, bucks, and broads. This is the good stuff!”
— Richard Helms - “In a world of over-hyped, pre-packaged, filter-tip crime fiction, Jack Bludis rolls his own. Lots of copycats profess to write pulp, but Bludis shows how it’s done. He’s a true original, always his own man, a defiantly loose cannon in the neatly ordered world of genre expectations.”
— Kevin Burton Smith
SHORT STORIES
- “New Guy on the Block” (2001, Mystery Street)
- “Blondes, Blondes, Blondes!” (Winter 2006, Thrilling Detective Web Site)
- “New Guy on the Block” October 2019, Pulp Adventures #33)
NOVELS
- “The Killers are Coming” (2017) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
COLLECTIONS
- Munchies and Other Tales of Guys, Gals & Guns (2011) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
Includes both “New Guy on the Block” and “Blondes, Blondes, Blondes!”
