Blog — Bruce Russell

In 2018 Robyn and I moved to our unit in Mount Lawley. We had downsized from a big old house in East Fremantle, and there was a lot of adjusting to do. One of the first things I did was to contact Maylands Library, where I met Diane Ling. Diane was active in promoting local writers and their work. Soon, we cooked up the idea of running a regular writing class, where I met a man called Kelvin White. Kelvin had been struggling with some time travel stories. We got on, found ourselves having a beer one night after class. He proposed a collaboration, on the grounds that I was good at writing and already published and that he was good at plotting. We decided to write a crime fiction together and the result, after years of haggling, many coffees, some setbacks and a lot of laughs, was The King of San Francisco, to be launched at Maylands Library on August 1st, 2024, 5pm -7pm..

In The King of San Francisco, drug-dealers, dreamers and femme fatales swim in the sunlit swimming pool of 1970s California - but the garden hides more guns, drugs and low-life than Philip Marlowe ever encountered. Even the sea breeze is reefer-sweet, a soul-soup of poetry, philosophy and danger. You can’t help but inhale.

Graham Kershaw (The Home Crowd, Dovetail Road, Underswimmer).

San Francisco, 1978. Sam Riddell is visiting his brother en route to a long-awaited adventure in Central America and points south. But from his first night at Curtis’s fashionable apartment, the visit turns lethal. He is soon embroiled in a savage world of gun-running and drug-dealing, a world softened only by the presence of Sally, the enigmatic English girlfriend whom Curtis neglects.

Events multiply with alarming speed. Curtis sends Sam and Sally to the highlands of Guatemala to deal with a deranged dictator, who regularly executes rebellious underlings. They escape with their lives, only to return to mayhem back home, where the fruits of Curtis’s machinations have become dangerously overripe.

From the opening pages of The King, anything goes. A cross country flight in a camper van see Sam and Sally pursued by a hired killer. Five years on, they reinvent themselves as New York sophisticates. But the shadow cast by Curtis and his enemies is long and, in the end, threatens everything they have built together.