The Clueless Detective (Paperback)

Marty Wiessman left school a no-hoper with no qualifications. He lucks out when an old school chum offers him a job in his successful private detective agency. But his life starts to disintegrate when he discovers his partner in the office, murdered. The police insist that he killed himself, but Marty knows differently. He laboriously unearths clues to his partner’s murderer but struggles to make sense of them. His concentration is not helped when a very attractive woman walks into his office and asks him to find her missing brother. Before long, Marty and his client are conducting a torrid affair. Marty oscillates between believing that these two cases are linked and that they are unrelated. Soon, more dead bodies turn up and Marty fears he and his client have become Mafia targets. The plot twists and turns always one step ahead of Marty, who is always slow on the uptake and who is just as surprised as anyone when the truth is finally revealed.

The author was born in 1947 and successfully studied theoretical physics at Cambridge University. He worked for over thirty years as a software engineer and consultant. Between 1997 and 2001 he had quite a lot of time on his hands due to a chronic illness and he became interested in writing fiction after buying a book at an airport which turned out to be so cliché that he said to himself, surely anyone could write better that that, even me. Even though he only said it to himself he felt he needed to find out. That was when he started writing The Clueless Detective. Much to his surprise he discovered that writing was actually fun. Although he completed several drafts the book was not ready for publication when he recovered his health and went back to work. Now that he is retired, he has had the time to finish off the book. He has also written a second novel, The Money Flight, that he has now published and he is part way through writing a third. He is hoping he will have time to complete it sometime in 2013. As well as writing fiction, he enjoys learning to play jazz on the saxophone and photography. He also has a keen interest in aviation having actively been a private pilot for ten years, though now lapsed, and he has written an ATC simulator for the PC.