Jeremy Davies is made of ink, but don’t dip a feather in him. It tickles. He is also an editor, a religious atheist, a liker of strong coffees, a Shakespeare-lover, a political anarchist and someone who rarely has a pen when he needs one. He has been a PhD candidate, a personal trainer, a life model, a bouncer, an infantry soldier and someone who rarely had a pen when he needed one. He has had words published in a variety of places, in a variety of publications, in a variety of forms, in a variety of moments: Canada,
Wet Ink, SMS and twelve minutes past three in the afternoon being some of these. He lives in a 'leafy' area of Melbourne, Australia, that resembles City Eastside (a little).
He would like to acknowledge some of the fictional and factual influences that helped make Frank and Rhys (and everyone else) happen (in no particular order): Dashiell Hammett, Elmore Leonard, Hercule Poriot, Sam Spade, Aristophanes, Terry Pratchett, Phillp Marlowe, Sam Vimes, Sherlock Holmes, Tintin, Monty Python, Agatha Christie, Tolkein, Humphrey Bogart, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Hardy Boys (yeah, them. Hell, it was a long time ago...), and all those noir writers, you know who you are, dammit!
Missing, Presumed Undead is Elmore Leonard meets Dashiel Hammett meets Terry Pratchett … with China Mieville peering through the window (they got along fine until Terry spilt his tea all over Elmore’s Italian sports jacket). It has an intriguing mystery-driven plot—with occasional madcap humor tempered by biting social satire—and is all set in a classical fantasy-style world with the mood and magic-driven “technology” of a Casablanca-style 30’s detective story.
It isn’t so much hard-boiled as char-grilled, with a side salad.
…the world of Casablantasy, where shining kingdoms are certainly not spread like blue mantles beneath the stars. Instead, the City: where corporate greed meets foul necromancy; the unrelenting advances of Maginology and the subtle menace of the Guilstapo exist beside squalid City breed cut throats and ogres with exaggerated axes.
Here, the legend of Franklin ‘Stubby’ Mynos begins: a be-spectacled minotaur with a mind for Kryptic Krosswords and a stomach for Hurghian coffee. There’s a killer on the loose, which is hardly news in a City crawlin’ with killers; but this killer—The Hightown Hacker—is killing the wrong kinds of people, in the wrong kinds of places. City commerce is suffering. Rich and powerful people are getting scared. The City Watch’s Magicrime Analysis Division (MAD) can’t buy a trick, and the Body Politik Registry wants to pay Frank a stack of Swine to do the deed.
It’s his first big case, the one that would put him on the map, but he’s not interested. He’s more into some dead body swiped from the Embalmers’ Guild and the ever-burgeoning zombie workforce: how they’re recruited and have they got a Union?
Forget what you’ve heard. This is the truth … or, at least, the facts strung together in a meaningful way.
You want the truth? Go see a poet.
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