Created by Jim Guigli
“Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you’ve had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.”
It isn’t every day a new author brags about winning a prize for bad writing, but that’s exactly what Jim Guigli did.
Since 1982, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has celebrated bad writing… really bad writing. The contest was created by Professor Scott E. Rice of San Jose State University and is named after Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the author of the 1830 novel Paul Clifford, which begins with the famous (thanks to Snoopy) line, “It was a dark and stormy night.”
The prize? A small monetary award, a cheap certificate and, yes, bragging rights.
Guigli won the 2006 Grand Prize with the stinker quoted above, which introduced Sacramento private eye BART Lasiter to the world.
Let’s assume Guigli’s tongue was so firmly in his cheek that it was poking out his ear (Shovel licking? Really?), because since then, Bart has appeared in a handful of short stories (published, unpublished, some in progress), and even a novel, 2024’s Under the Black Flag.
A former patrol officer in Berkeley, California, he chucked it after twelve years to set up his own one-man agency, Lasiter Investigations, an hour or so away in Sacramento. But he’s not exactly setting the world on fire. He works out of (and lives in) a tiny, cramped office on Second Street in Old Sac, a few seedy blocks from the river. The only other member of the agency is his “partner “Agamemnon, a fat orange tabby.
The stories are fun, light-hearted fare, for the most part, with Bart chasing ghosts for a pushy TV reporter, facing off against would-be pirates on Lake Tahoe, tangling with Russian spies, and hunting for a missing cane for his landlord Fred, his cop buddy from his Berkeley days.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jim Guigli is retired and lives near Sacramento with his wife, Fran, and two Labrador Retrievers. He is a member of California Writers Club, Sacramento Suburban Writers Club, and Public Safety Writers Association, and is something of a gun expert, helping other writers when they have firearms-related questions.
SHORT FICTION
- “Bad News for a Ghost” (2013, digital) | Kindle it!
Includes bonus story “Bart’s First Arrest” - “Always Rings Twice” (2018, unpublished)
2018 PSWA First Place unpublished fiction short story - “Looking for Mishka”(Winter 2022, Rock and a Hard Place Magazine #7 )
- “Cane Mutiny: A Flash Fiction Bart Story” (May 2022, Pulp Modern Flash) | Read it!
- “Listen to the Gunsmith” (July 2022, Guilty Crime Magazine)
- “Blood on the Stairs” (2023, Crimeucopia: We’ll Be Right Back—After This!)
NOVELS
- Under the Black Flag (2024) | Buy this book
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- Jim Guigli Says…
The author’s official site.
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
Bart Lassiter is a lot of fun and he’s the reason why I became buddies with Jim Giugli… and auspicious meeting!
The trouble with the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is that it takes real skill to write as badly – and funnily – as the winning entrants. I’d love to read on after those paragraphs. Perhaps it should be like the Bad Sex Award, awarded to books nominated by other people after publication.
I would say it helps writing “Good” if you understand how to write “Bad.”
For reading “on after those paragraphs,” my first Bart Lasiter novel will be available November 12, 1924 or sooner. Thank you, Roger.