A Condor's Quill

  Revisiting a Classic I’ve read nearly all of Ray Bradbury over the years but only recently returned to The Martian Chronicles in its entirety. I first encountered the book as a teenager in 1973. This time, I was struck by themes I perhaps recognized then but could not fully appreciate until now. Published in 1950, the book remains one of the most hauntingly poetic works of science fiction ever written. Calling it science fiction, however, seems like a misnomer. Bradbury was not primarily interested in technology, engineering, or the physics of space travel. For him, Mars was less a planet than a mirror reflecting humanity’s anxiety, desires and, especially, its arrogance and prejudices. Reading it again in 2026, what strikes me is not just Bradbury’s lyrical prose, but the disturbing relevance of this themes. As “dated” as parts of the book may seem, those themes feel very contemporary indeed. The Comfort and Delusion of Nostalgia One of Bradbury’s most persistent and...

  I’m a writer and avid reader of hardboiled detective fiction, crime drama and noir. I’m also a jazz aficionado … on vinyl, of course. For the record (pun intended) my collection long predates the recent resurgence in the media. To me, those two interests have never felt separate. Noir and jazz simply belong together; artistically, culturally and emotionally. They speak the same language, a language whose grammar is improvisation and tension and whose vocabulary is that of longing, grit, betrayal and loss. The more I read noir and hardboiled fiction, in fact, the more I actually hear jazz in the prose. Take Chandler, for example, the godfather of lyrical, hardboiled writing. At times, his prose swings. It moves with the same balance of precision – Chandler is famous for working and re-working his stories until they were just right – and improvisation. It’s the same kind of balance you hear in any great jazz solo. In The Big Sleep , for example, the iconic P.I., Phil Marlowe decl...

Two more of my stories featuring hardboiled Honolulu P.I., Eddie O'Brien have been published this past week ... A Little White Lie : In July of 1945, the USS Indianapolis made port in Honolulu for six hours to refuel and resupply on its way toTinian with components for the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in August. Against that historic backdrop, Eddie is asked to locate a missing sailor.  Better Press : Eddie is hired by a wealthy art collector to ransom back a famous painting that was stolen from the man's home. The detective discovers that the painting in question has a rather dubious provenance. As usual, he decides to change the rules of the game. Additionally, this week on Freedom Fiction Journal , I was the writer featured in the publication's "Author Spotlight." There's a brief interview with yours truly there as well.

  A number of years ago, a dear friend of mine wrote a story about a Hollywood set designer who could "build anything." The story, and its central conceit, stuck with me.  Recently, I reread Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister . It's a later work and draws on the author's time working as a screenwriter  in Tinseltown.  Those two influences more-or-less coalesced and gave rise to my latest, Pale Perfection which can be found on Topiary Stories/Evergreen Fiction . I'm always fascinated and surprised by how disparate events, experiences etc. can come together and percolate to provide impetus for a story.

  Jorge Luis Borges is considered one of the greatest and most influential writers of the twentieth-century. Yet he never wrote a novel. His reputation is based on a canon of elegant, intellectually adventurous and highly provocative short stories. Borges is famously quoted as stating: “Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness – expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could perfectly be explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend those books already exist …” That idea, along with the strange-but-true saga of fake economic expert Ron Vara , inspired the story that follows. (Recall that a White House economic advisor was discovered to have been citing a fictional  authority whose name turned out to be simply an anagram for his own).   Author of the Revolution by James C. Clar © 2026   Consider, if you will, a small country high in the folds of a forgotten mountain range. It would be a country found on only ...

  My latest Eddie O'Brien, Sauce for the Gander , just came out on Topiary Stories . This time around, Eddie gets hired (independently) by an estranged husband and wife. The results get quickly complicated, indeed! Reading a draft of this story, a friend of mine was surprised to see a newspaper columnist with a Japanese surname in 1948 Honolulu. I reminded him that, unlike their counterparts on the mainland, Japanese-Americans in the islands were not mass interred during WWII. To do so would have been to cripple the local economy since, at that time, they made up nearly one-half of the workforce. Many Japanese-Americans, therefore, maintained their freedom and jobs in Hawaii. Incarceration was highly selective and, no surprise, it often followed socio-economic lines with the less privileged suffering disproportionally.

Given the title of this blog, it should come as no surprise that Moby Dick is one of my favorite novels. A recent re-reading gave rise to the fanciful question … what if Ahab, too, survived the sinking of the Pequod ? These two short stories of mine offer somewhat different answers to that question. … Cold Calculus published in  Sudden Flash Magazine and, … The Last Harpoon which may be found in  After/Thought Literary Journal . From the department of somewhat unrelated: On my recent romp through the novel, I was particularly struck by Melville’s assertion in Chapter 105 (over and against those arguing even then that the mighty leviathan might face extinction) that the whale will persist. He was wrong and right at one and the same time; he could not have predicted the slaughter unleashed by industrial strength commercial whaling in the twentieth-century. No more likely was he to have envisioned the herculean effort required to halt those practices and reverse their...

“The Last Pitch” is a noir tale of mine set during the Great Depression. A mysterious man follows a minor league baseball team around Central New York and Pennsylvania with more than just a love for the game as motivation. The piece can be found on Topiary Stories/Evergreen Short Fiction . Topiary Stories is edited by Bill Tope and is most definitely worth a look; there’s some wonderful material there. Bill is himself a fabulous writer. His work may be found on Freedom Fiction Journal as well as in numerous other places on the web.  

  I just finished The Happy Isles of Oceania  by Paul Theroux. Published in 1992, the book recounts the author’s 18-month journey paddling among the islands of the South Pacific in a kayak. Full disclosure, apart from an essay here or there, this is the first piece of travel writing of Theroux’s that I have read. I am much more familiar with his novels. I enjoyed the book but thought that it was a bit long. Additionally, curmudgeon that he apparently is, Theroux often has unflattering things to say about Polynesian culture. Theroux’s book inspired the short story that follows: Footprints by James C. Clar © 2026 By the three-hundredth day, the man stopped counting. Fever burned through him in waves. Malaria. That, or the wound on his shin; a deep gash he’d earned hacking open a coconut a week earlier. The flesh around it had turned black. Even he knew enough to realize that seawater only made it worse. He lay beneath the shelter he’d fabricated from the wreckage of his ...