Created by Teel James Glenn
In Not Born of Woman (2024), the first of a promised series, ADAM PARADISE (that’s the name he goes by) is a suitably hard-boiled private eye in 1939 New York City, but he’s never quite fit in.
Maybe it’s because he’s over two hundred years old, and was cobbled together from various parts of dead bodies by some crackpot named Doctor Victor Frankenstein.
Yeah, that Frankenstein. You may haver heard of him. Or maybe the novel Frankenstein (1818), the “fictionalized” account of the doctor’s man-made monster by Mary Shelley?
Anyway, after being abandoned in the Arctic by the good doctor, Adam spent years alone, studying geography, history and language, and eventually journeying south to re-join the human race, setting up as a low-key P.I. with an office over a Fifth Avenue drugstore, keeping his head down.
Just an everyday Joe.
Despite the mismatched skin tones and multiple scars and sutures his tries to hide with gloves and make-up, and the propensity for violence. Oh, and he sees dead people. Sometimes.
But it turns out Adam’s not the only monster in the Big Apple. The city’s infested with Nazis, who whooped it up recently at a big Madison Square Garden rally (Nazis do that, you know), and there’s also some whacko serial killer on the loose, preying on young girls, carving occult symbols on their foreheads.
None of which concerns Adam until a Romani woman hires him to get back a valuable necklace, a family heirloom purported to possess supernatural powers. Seems her deadbeat brother used to cover a bet. But in tracking down the errant jewelry, Adam discovers it’s somehow tied to the serial killer’s victims.
Gothic horror? Hard-boiled detective fiction?
Talk about being cobbled together.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stuntman Teel James Glenn has killed hundreds and been killed more times, both on stage and on screen, appearing on everything from soap operas to Spenser for Hire and in more movies than he wants to admit. He’s also worked as a fight choreographer, swordmaster, jouster, illustrator, storyteller, bodyguard, actor, haunted house barker and, oh yeah, a writer, with his stories appearing in Weird Tales, Mystery Weekly, Pulp Adventures, Spinetingler, SciFan, Mad, Black Belt, Fantasy Tales, Pulp Empire, Cirvosa, Sherlock Holmes Mystery, Crimson Streets, AfterburnSF, and Blazing Adventures. Among his other creations is “Ghostmaker” P.I. Jack Silence.
NOVELS
- Not Born of Woman (2024) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts
Things That Go Bump in the Night, and the Eyes Who Go After Them
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
