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Casinos,
Motels, Gators by Ben
Boulden
3
Play, 2024
Big news at Maison Boulden. Casinos, Motels, Gators,
which is a collection of four of my crime stories—three Jimmy Ford tales and
a standalone—is available for pre-order now and scheduled for release in a
week and a day: May 28, 2024.
The Author’s Note tells it
better than I could, so…
The four short stories in Casinos,
Motels, Gators were written between 2017 and 2020 in a broom closet-sized
office in my former home in Salt Lake City, Utah. I worked fulltime and wrote
in the early mornings and late at night. I conjured the character Jimmy Ford,
appearing in the first three stories, during a long ago visit to the casinos
of the Utah-Nevada border town of Wendover.
Wendover
is a desert town nestled in a desolate valley about 120 miles west of Salt Lake
City on I-80. It started life as a railroad town in the early-20th
Century and boomed during World War Two when an Army Air Corps training base
was built. The Enola Gay and the rest of the 509th Composite Group,
which were responsible for dropping Fat Man and Little Boy on Japan, trained
there. After the war, the old Air Corps base was largely left to rot and Las
Vegas-style casinos came in, luring both the respectable and seamier residents
of the City of Saints into their gambling pits.
These
three Jimmy Ford stories—“121,” “No Chips, No Bonus,” and “Junkyard”—were all
published in 2019. I think they work well as modern updates on the hardboiled
detective genre, something like the old pulp Manhunt would publish if it
was still around. Jimmy Ford as a character isn’t exactly likable—he is too
violent, a bit smug, too easily manipulated by his unsavory boss, Jenkins—but
he usually ends up doing the right thing even if it’s done the wrong way. These
three stories are all of the Jimmy Ford’s misadventures, but who knows, Jimmy
may rise from the page again. I should also tell you, the Wendover of my
imagination and the real thing are different places. The Desert Diamond casino,
where Jimmy is a security consultant, doesn’t exist, and as far as I know, no
one like Jimmy Ford or his unscrupulous boss, Jenkins, exist, either.
The
fourth and final story in the collection, “Asia Divine,” was written for a
tribute anthology honoring the late-writer and all-around good guy, Bill
Crider. It was published in 2021 with a table of contents filled with writers
outside my weight class. There were stories by Joe R. Lansdale, William Kent
Krueger, Charlaine Harris, Bill Pronzini, and Sara Paretsky. But—and I say this
with all humility—I think “Asia Divine” held its own. “Asia Divine,” like the
Jimmy Ford stories, is set in Utah’s West Desert but none of the action is as
far west as Jimmy Ford’s Wendover.
Now,
let’s get to the stories…
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*
Oh, I should add. The New York Times
bestselling author, James Reasoner, called “121” a “Manhunt story for the
21st Century.” A high accolade indeed!
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