Noir

For years now I've been a regular contributor to Spanish satirical magazine El Jueves. In late 2010 I began publishing a series of super short stories under the title Noir. They built upon detective fiction clichés (the dramatic sunlight through closed blinders, the laid-back private eye narrating in the first person) allowing me to skip through the descriptions and jump into the jokes. I guess I'd been reading Raymond Chandler at the time and wanted to try it. They looked like this.

I don't feel like translating it.
Take it from me: it's hilarious.

Noir ran for twenty weeks, whereupon I switched to the horror genre with a new series, Gotik, but I was always proud of some of the material and wanted to expand it into something longer, provided I found some genre-breaking element to throw in. Hopefully that would be an original detective, because my first-person narrators have this annoying tendency to resemble me.

When I came up with the detective, I wrote  a novel. This was late 2012; I had just finished The Supernatural Enhancements in English, but nobody had yet confirmed it was intelligible, so I exerted caution and went with Spanish for this one. I showed it to several publishers in the following years; they all passed. In late 2016 I translated it to English and showed it to my agent and my editor at Doubleday. Both said, "It's the best thing you've ever written." And it's my upcoming book. :)

Meddling Freebies #3: Teen Sleuth Rules

An idea for a series of badges: the rules of teen detective fiction (mild spoilers: all of them are struck out in Meddling Kids). These never went past the Photoshop stage.

By the way, if you don't own your MK copy yet, or want to own an extraordinarily dirty one, Doubleday is throwing a holiday giveaway of signed books! Signed, doodled and pencil-colored by an author with very little real work to do. Follow @doubledaybooks on Instagram for a chance to win now! The girls will be given away today, and the boys are on their way!