Professor Poison

Chapter 1

Professor Poison

By R.W. Clinger

I read all of E.L. Poison’s books. Of course, I did. All six of them. All mysteries. All containing the sexy and inquisitive main character Catch Dunham, full-time professional football player, and part-time private eye in a small lakeside town like Templeton, Pennsylvania. My favorite of the six was Penned to Death. Two hundred twenty-five pages of E.L. Poison fun. The best read ever. Synopsis: a famous English mystery writer is stabbed in the heart with a very chic and expensive marble pen. Catch goes through nine suspects before he’s stabbed in the thigh by the writer’s illegitimate son, the killer. Honestly, I couldn’t put the book down, thumbing through its pages, hooked. And nor could I figure the mystery out, which always made for an appealing read. No complaints here.

Yes, I read E.L. Poison’s other best-sellers, but they weren’t as spine-tingling as Penned. Inferno of Death, Poison’s fourth mystery, was good but not perfect. I felt that there were far too many windy paragraphs and not enough dialogue, which caused boredom to settle into my bones. Death’s Demise, Hammered to Death, and Jagged Death were all quite good, but certainly not as brilliant as Penned, in my opinion.

Critics are the death of writers, I’ve always said. The Black Plague. Colon cancer. Terrorists. Anthrax. Meningitis. Critics are horrible creatures, similar to diseases. I wasn’t either, though. Fortunately. And nor did I write mysteries, but I wanted to. I passed hours upon hours reading Agatha Christie, Mary Higgins Clark, P. D. James, Sue Grafton, Dorothy L. Sayers, Patricia Highsmith, Robert B. Parker, Tony Hillerman, and many others. I didn’t go for the fluffy romances or literal masterpieces on the New York Times’ list. I didn’t like book club picks or horror tales. Instead, I craved a compact Who-dun-it? the best. The shorter, the better, I’ve always said. The stronger the characters, the tastier. Could I pull off writing one? Maybe. Did I want to give it a try? Certainly.

Listen…