Created by Nicholas Wagner
“When night fell, they burned a campfire and ate a kangaroo.”
A hard-drinking, hard-loving, hard-edged hard man for hire, COLM STEINER works for the London-based Enquiry Service in the years following World War I, doing whatever needs to be done: find a missing person, qualm a gang war, track down a fugitive, break up a strike or a union, settle some dispute, kill somebody.
Whatever.
He’s an ex-soldier, saw plenty of action in France during the war. He’s tall, wiry, dark hair, blue eyes. A tough, cynical SOB, he goes where they send him. Which is all over the British Commonwealth. Which stretches all over the world. Australia, Argentina, Guyana, The Bahamas, South Africa, London, Canada.
There’s a hard-boiled edge to things that fans of Hammett’s Continental Op would recognize, but where there Op is taciturn and terse, Colm is a surprisingly chatty bastard, prone to verbosity.
“They send you places. The men… The men upstairs. And they give directives regarding comportment. Regarding alacrity. Ways to effect their designs. And you find yourself maneuvering through a landscape they’re not even interested in understanding,” he explains to a woman in the Australian wilderness, after a two-day journey on horseback from Sydney. He’s looking for her husband.
When he’s not working or heading for therapy next job, he relaxes with booze, gambling and hookers.
Colm’s only book-length appearance (so far) is Razor Country (2024), which is is comprised of twenty-one untitled, loosely connected short stories, each finding him on a new case, a new locale. Each sharp and hard and frequently nasty, almost percussive in their violence, and they go down real easy.
For those who think they’re not getting enough grit in their diet, this may be the ticket.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A writer and independent filmmaker from Virginia, Nicholas Wagner’s previous works include the novellas Curse of the Jesuit, A Ruin of Mercies, Her Soft Hours and Tout, the indie films Shelter for the Bloodstained Soul and The Holy Sound, as well as the comic book Bring Me the Butcher’s Knife.
NOVELS
- Razor Country (2024) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
