Harry Hughes

Author Harry Hughes is a Viet Nam and Woodstock vet, an award winning popular song writer and a professor of psychology. Seven years of his life in New York is the subject of the National Book Critics Circle Award nominated book, Homefires; An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America, by Donald Katz (Harper Collins Press, 1992). Harry's short story, A River Too Distant, was published, along with works by Edward Albee and Joseph Heller, in Hampton Shorts, Vol. 3, 1998. He currently lives in Utah. The Bait Shack is his first novel.

Harry's blog: http://www.hughesauthor.net/

Harry Hughes' podcast on UEN SciFi Friday - get to know more about Harry and his career and interesting life!(20/11/08)

Interview with Harry, author of The Bait Shack, by Ambrose Musiyiwa (12/11/08)

Interview on New Writing International with Harry Hughes (28/11/08)

The Bait Shack by Harry Hughes

Out Now

Unemployed whiz kid Dale Cooles struggles to save his marriage and his sanity when his previously charmed life's turned topsy turvy by a cadre of killers and clowns.

Dale and wife Lacy - daughter of an eccentric but filthy rich Tennessee lumber magnate - unwittingly adopt into their domestic wrangle Twist, the brain-damaged orphan, and Lieutenant Revels, the beat-weary yet determined conservation officer seeking revenge for Lacy's unscrupulous boss's part in the mysterious extinction of rare birds on a prime piece of real estate.

And then there are the other extinctions ... the human ones.

In the parade of offbeat characters in Hughes' ingenious and '90s-set street smart black comedy of crime, we meet cutthroat businessman Henry Meredith, out for what he can get, psycho hitman Connie Jablonski, out for what he can hurt, mobster Johnny Avalino, greedy to enhance the value of his beach-front property by any means, Nancy Littlecrow, the shameless and cagey Native American attorney who gives new meaning to the term 'Indian Affairs', Seymour L. Bram, the retired and retiring Air Force Major suffering from chronic depression and delusions of easy money, Duncan Slochbauer, the slovenly and obsessed amateur producer of grisly news videos ...

And we don't quite meet poor Karen Kern and the faceless others who might have crossed the path of a crazed and kinky serial killer nobody seems to have noticed lurking somewhere in Hughes' uniquely colourful dramatis personae.

Harry Hughes takes noir to a new level. Wry, classy, compelling, and utterly hysterical. Think Iain Pears crossed with Martin Amis. Dale and Lacy make an endearing team of anti-heroes in a world showing its true colours. Magdalena Ball. The Compulsive Reader

A stunning first novel. An up-to-date take on the classic American murder mystery. Harry Hughes tells his suspenseful story in quick-paced and colorful prose and creates dozens of sharply drawn characters, including Dale Cooles, an unforgettable anti-hero in the Philip Marlowe tradition. Michael Lydon. Author. Co-founder of Rolling Stone Magazine

Excerpt