The Immortal Game (A Signed First Edition)

Meet Edwin Bishop: a multi-millionaire entrepreneur who has founded and taken public several very successful software game companies. Highly intelligent, arrogant, yet unschooled in social graces, Bishop lives an eccentric life in his Silicon Valley mansion with several paid female companions.

Bishop has developed a software program to play chess against human opponents that he claims is the most advanced ever written, but before it is released, he finds that the software has been stolen when he stumbles across a vendor demonstrating the game at a trade show.

Enter August Riordan: a jazz bass-playing private eye who is cynical, irreverent and given to speaking his mind with unreconstructed candor. Although Bishop wants to hire a discreet private detective with a strong sense of professional ethics, as Riordan says, It was his tough luck he happened to pick me.

Riordan careens through the very modern milieu of Silicon Valley in his quest for the chess program, enmeshing himself in more than just high technology. Jazz music, the underground world of S&M and an unlikely partnership with Chris Duckworth, a smart aleck gay man whom he meets at a bar called The Stigmata, are all part of the intriguing adventure.

Full of well-drawn, idiosyncratic characters, fast dialogue and compelling and realistic portrayals of many San Francisco Bay Area locales, The Immortal Game is a very fresh and entertaining mystery in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

This special edition from Poltroon Press is illustrated with 30 photographs and incorporates many of the design elements of the famous Borzoi Books first edition of The Big Sleep published by Knopf in 1939.

Born in New Mexico in 1957, Mark Coggins earned two degrees and a Phi Beta Kappa key from Stanford University. He has worked for a number of Silicon Valley computer and venture capital firms, including Netscape Communications and three (other) software start-ups. He introduced the character of August Riordan in a novella titled There's No Such Thing as Private Eyes published in The New Black Mask, vol. 4, Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Linda and their cat Taki.