Pluck This!

My buddy Thomas Pluck is featured as part of the Montclair Times Bookshelf. Check out Pluck pens pulp fiction warriors.

BLADE OF DISHONOR

So back in July 2011, I had a germ of an idea for a new character (probably after watching too many Toshiro Mifune films) named Reeves who's in possession of a priceless sword that is stolen. Cliché, right? Well, Tom Pluck also grew up on the same ninja and samurai films that I did (let’s hear it for The Challenge!), and, having a much sharper idea, came up with BLADE OF DISHONOR.

Taught to fight by his war hero grandfather, Reeves comes home to find Grandpa Butch embroiled in a centuries-old battle over a treasured Japanese sword. Together they team up with Tara the hot-rodding ambulance driver and a secretive member of a samurai warrior brotherhood to take on a powerful clan of ninja and yakuza bent on sparking a third world war.

From the heroics of the Devil’s Brigade in World War II and the brutal underground fight scene of Tokyo to the American heartland, BLADE OF DISHONOR pits battle-hardened cage fighters against cunning shadow warriors in a thrilling adventure story that’s part Kurosawa and part Tarantino … with a ton of Pluck!

Tom will be at Bouchercon in Albany and will have copies of BLADE OF DISHONOR available at a store in the dealer’s room. Since I’ll be in the area, I’m planning on crashing the party and hope to see you there. But if you can’t make it, you can get the BLADE OF DISHONOR omnibus now from Amazon.

“Thomas Pluck!”

When I mention the name Thomas Pluck out loud, my two-year-old daughter recites it in a cute high-pitch voice. His name must have some sorta boom-chicka-boom rhythm the way she spins around on her toes as she sings out, “Thomas Pluck!”

Today, I was sent quite a present from “Thomas Pluck!” The gift was his final edit of Blade of Dishonor that we’ve been working on together—or rather he’s been working on based on an idea I hatched about a character named Reeves. My proposal was cliché and to “Thomas Pluck!”’s credit, he let me know it was cliché. But he liked the germ of the idea and ran with it. It’s too early to get into specifics as this nearly 50k word novel needs to be edited by yours truly and we have to work on the cover art, though I think “Thomas Pluck!” has that, um, covered.

Wait a sec, I just remembered he had talked about Blade once before and said this about it:

David Cranmer asked if I’d be interested in writing about an MMA fighter tussling with ninjas over a stolen sword. How could I say no to that? David published my mixed martial arts fighter tale “A Glutton for Punishment,” and I grew up on ’80s ninja movies and the Shogun Assassin “baby cart” samurai films. It is set in the present day, but the action begins in World War 2. I enjoy writing this so much that there may be a prequel written in the era of feudal Japan.

Well, he exceeded far beyond what I imagined. Today, at the soul-sucking day job, I read as much as I could at lunch and then said out loud, “Thomas Pluck!” My co-worker asked, “What’s a Thomas Pluck?”, and I replied, “You will know soon enough.”