A Condor's Quill

  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 ...

Eddie O’Brien is a character I created for a series of hardboiled PI stories set in post-WWII Honolulu. To date, six of those tales have been published in a variety of venues. Below are brief descriptions of those pieces with links to the sites where they first appeared. The seventh in the series, “Better Press,” is on the way. Do the Right Thing … Eddie’s investigation into a missing person enmeshes him in the world of espionage on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor. ( Hackwriter’s ) Ghosts … Our intrepid PI, as always, finds the killer. What he discovers, however, precipitates a rather thorny moral dilemma. This story was an Editor’s Choice selection on Freedom Fiction Journal . Sleeping Dogs … Another tale featured on Freedom Fiction Journal . Here, O’Brien finds a woman’s missing brother. Along the way, he discovers that his client hasn’t exactly been telling him the whole truth. Taking Care of Business … This one can be found on The Yard: Crime Blog . The detective ...

I have always been fascinated by the JFK assassination. The truth about that event is, to me, the Holy Grail of conspiracy theories rivalling even the Roswell crash. Indeed, one of my earliest, coherent childhood memories is of watching a black and white TV (with rabbit ear antenna) and being transfixed by the grainy images of large horses pulling some type of cart. My mother was sitting next to me and she was crying. In time, I came to understand that we had been watching JFK's funeral. The following story ("Two Men in A Window") is, in part, inspired by that memory as well as by an old newspaper article I happened to see while aimlessly surfing the web as I was waiting for an appointment. Although centered around a "real" historical event, this is wholeheartedly a work of fiction. The story intentionally blurs the lines between fact, speculation, documentary and the sheerest fancy. Additionally, and from a more philosophical standpoint, it suggests that imagin...

Kahala, otherwise known as “the Beverly Hills” of the Pacific, is an area along the south shore of Oahu which features some of the costliest property on the island. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, much of that property was purchased by foreign investors. When the economy flagged in the early 2000's, some of the mansions along Kahala Avenue were virtually abandoned. As I walked through the neighborhood at the time I thought, “what a great setting for a series of dystopian stories.” From a recent re-reading of J.G. Ballard and Stephen Jay Gould , this story evolved … pun intended! “What We’ve Become” by James C. Clar © copyright 2026 The Kahala Resort sat stranded on the shore, a carcass of chrome, steel and glass. The rising sea had swallowed the first-floor decades ago. The smell of rust and iodine clung to everything. A handful of survivors remained on the coast. Others had either left Oahu or had fled to the inland valleys. Dr. Frain arranged the chessboard on his lanai. He placed...

A new 600-word story of mine published today on Sudden Flash Magazine  entitled, "Rope a Man Can Trust."  Just having a little fun with an archetypal tale of betrayal and, perhaps, remorse.