Bad Karma

About the Author

Dave Zeltserman:

I was born in Boston and have lived in the Boston area my whole life except for five years when I was at the University of Colorado in Boulder working on my B.S. in Applied Math and Computer Science.

I spent a lot of hours as a kid watching old movies with Hitchcock, the Marx Brothers, and film noir being my favorite, especially The Roaring Twenties, The Third Man and The Maltese Falcon. I also always read a lot, everything from comic books, Mad Magazine, pulps (Robert E. Howard was my favorite), and science fiction. When I was 15 and spending a few weeks during the summer at my uncle's house in Maine, I picked up a dog-eared copy of I, the Jury by Mickey Spillane, and from that point on was hooked on crime fiction. From Spillane, I moved on to Hammett, Chandler, Rex Stout, Ross Macdonald, and lots of other crime writers before eventually discovering Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford in the early 90s. Thompson, in particular, had a big impact on my writing, not only in the way he got into the heads of broken psychopaths and had you rooting for them, but in the way he took chances in his writing. For years before I read my first Jim Thompson novel, Hell of a Woman, I was trying to write what amounted to bad Ross Macdonald. Once I started reading Thompson, it opened my eyes to how I could break every rule I wanted to as long as I could make it work, and this led me to finding my own voice. My first book, Fast Lane, was probably equally inspired by Macdonald and Thompson-it had the sins of the father theme that Macdonald did so well, but written from the unreliable narrator and mind of the killer that Thompson excelled at. Years after writing Fast Lane, I read about Macdonald's last unfinished Lew Archer novel, and was amazed to find that it had a major plot-point in common with Fast Lane.

After I graduated college I got a job developing data communication software, and over the years have worked at some of the world's leading networking and computer companies, including Motorola, DEC, Nokia, Lucent and Cisco Corporation. Off and on over the years I would be drawn to writing, usually dark crime fiction, but it always seemed more of a lark than anything real. I was a math and computer science guy, and outside of one creative writing course in college, and books I read on the subject, I never had any formal training in it-I was writing mostly at an instinctive and gut level. But a kind of crazy creative fever took over while I was working on Fast Lane, and when I was done I had something that I knew could be published someday, as well as a book that crime noir readers would enjoy. It turned out that day was 12 years after I wrote it, and I first sold the Italian rights to Meridiano Zero before Point Blank Press published it. During those 12 years I had a lot of ups and downs, mostly downs where I'd quit writing to focus on my software engineering career. It's been a long road but things are now looking up. I've had stories published in a lot of places, including Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock, as well as a 3-book 'man just out of prison' noir series that is being published by the prestigious UK publisher, Serpent's Tail (Small Crimes, Pariah, Killer), as well as books Fast Lane, Bad Thoughts and Bad Karma (Five Star Mysteries). And while it took a while, I know from the letters I get from noir fans who discover Fast Lane that I was right about it. These days I'm spending my time writing crime fiction and studying martial arts (I hold a black belt in Tiger-Crane style of Kung Fu), and enjoying every minute of it.

http://www.davezeltserman.com