22 Dead Little Bodies and Other Stories

The Introduction in which the writer drones on about the stories in this collection

Believe it or not, 22 Dead Little Bodies started life as a subplot in The Missing and the Dead. Well, half of it did, anyway. We trimmed seven subplots in total from The Missing and the Dead in order to slim it down to the chunky 160,000-word book that came out in January 2015 — so you can imagine how huge it was before. Loathe to throw this one away, I reworked it into what was meant to be a 10,000-word short story... and it ended up being 42,000 words long instead. Officially that makes it a novel. A short one, but a novel nonetheless. But while it made a nifty, and pretty sexy, little hardback, it was just a bit too small to turn into a full-length paperback. So we decided to bundle it in with two short stories and a novella, all set in Logan’s happy-go-lucky world.

‘Stramash’ was originally published as part of the Isle of Jura Distillery’s Writers’ Retreat project. ‘DI Steel’s Bad Heir Day’ appeared as a Christmas story in the Evening Express for charity, and later got bundled into an ebook with ‘Stramash’ under the title Partners in Crime. The 45 % Hangover was a very rude ebook, then a lovely mini paperback in its own right. And now all of these stories live together, here, in one Steel-infested lump.

If you’re the kind of crazy mixed-up kid who likes to know how the tales in this book fit in with the rest of Logan’s timeline, it goes like this:

‘DI Steel’s Bad Heir Day’

Shatter the Bones

‘Stramash’

Close to the Bone

The 45 % Hangover

22 Dead Little Bodies

The Missing and the Dead

And that’s it, except to say that I hope you enjoy these. Some are a bit dark, some are a bit violent, and one contains scenes of gratuitous nudity that any right-minded reader will find highly offensive. And if you’re not highly offended, there’s probably something wrong with you. Seek help.

All the best,

Stuart MacBride