It’s been a busy week — the kind of busy that sees words on the page. Some new, some recycled, and others reorganised.

So hey — and hello — to new subscribers.

I’ve been making decisions about stuff I’ve made up.

The Spectral Detective is an idea for a series of novels. The artwork here, and in previous newsletters, is from that concept.

While I can point to plenty of detective fiction and cinema as inspiration, this one began with a dream. A very particular dream. A distinctive hero, with a twist, working as a private investigator from his New York office, with a strong female partner. Sometime shortly after WWII.

Many stories start somewhere in the middle.

Take Hornblower by C.S. Forester. The first book published — The Happy Return (1937) — shows Hornblower already a captain on a serious mission. But the “first” book in his life’s timeline doesn’t appear until 1952. Then in 1963 we get another, set before 1953’s Hornblower and the Hotspur, though it’s written ten years later — Lieutenant Hornblower.

And there are good reasons for starting with the finished article. We meet Sam Spade already a hard-boiled detective in the first paragraph of The Maltese Falcon. In 1997, Lee Child’s The Killing Floor gives us Jack Reacher — a former US Army Major, Military Police — already wandering the USA with no fixed abode. Then, in 2004, Child stepped back with the first of four prequels, within a 29-book series.

Last year, when I began plotting the adventures of Arthur Raphael King, I set The Spectral Detective in 1947. I didn’t plan on doing a giveaway, introductory story. That came this year.

For a novella, I thought: start with King’s final wartime mission, then show why he became a private investigator — the story before 1947, more or less the time and place of my formative dream.

But it grew.

For all the right reasons, it’s becoming a novel.

Rather than short-change you — and myself — I’m going to finish King in the Dark as a full-length book. But not just yet.

The novella prequel is still happening. Arthur King will walk in as a fully formed adult — but not yet the man who becomes the Spectral Detective. And with hindsight, I’m fixing a weakness in King in the Dark by fleshing out that crucial mission in the closing months of the war in Europe.

An event that changes Arthur King’s life forever.

The novella will be the first step into this story.