I'm pleased to welcome J. David Core, author of Fair Play: A Lupa Schwartz Trilogy!

1. Hello, and welcome to my blog! To start off, what made you decide to take the plunge into the world of publishing?

 Thank you for having me. Well, as I was growing up, there were always books and magazines in the house. My dad was an avid reader who used to take me with him to the library, and my mother spent any spare time she had reading magazines. Then as soon as I was old enough to read, I started noticing that all of my favorite entertainment was written by somebody. My favorite songs had clever lyrics, and I wanted to know the stories behind them. My favorite shows were actors reading somebody else’s words. It was writers who made all worthwhile entertainment possible. I wanted to be the guy shaping the stories and building the worlds.

2. Tell me about your book.

Fair Play is the third installment in the Lupa Schwartz mystery series. The first two were full length novels. This one consists of three novella length stories. My detective is a Balkan born Jew who came to America after the fall of Tito. He has established himself as a genius PI in the Sherlock Holmes/Nero Wolfe mold. He has built a home for himself and his house keeper/best friend who may or may not be secretly in love with him. He collects cars, and a third member of his household is his female mechanic. Then one day a reporter, a woman with a connection to his family, shows up wanting to do a single story on his method and the next thing you know she’s permanently assigned to cover his cases for her magazine. She’s the Watson to his Holmes.

Each story in the series is a fair play mystery, and that’s why this first collection is called Fair Play.

3. What, if anything, inspired you to write this book?

The first story is a locked door mystery about a reality game show. I got the idea when I wondered if it would be possible for a contestant on a game show like Big Brother to be murdered and nobody see how it happened despite the constant cameras. The second story came about when I was working in a convenience store and in the slow time I came up with a way to use the nicotine gel we sold as a murder weapon. The third story came about due to a break up I went through. The less I specify about that one the better, I think.

4. I see you write in different genres. Do have a particular genre that is your favorite to write in?

Mysteries are my favorite now, but I used to prefer sci-fi. In both cases, what I like is the twist endings. I’ve always been an O. Henry fan, a Twilight Zone fan, a fan of Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen. I’ve also always been a fan of humor; Douglas Adams, Mark Twain, P.G. Wodehouse, James Thurber. So if I can inject humor in it and give it a clever twist at the end, I’ll write it.

5. Do you have a favorite author?

I really don’t have an all-time favorite author. Many of the ones I’ve just named are certainly on the short list, but I do have a few favorite contemporary authors. For twists and plotting, I like Dan Brown. For interesting humor, I like David Sedaris. Joss Whedon doesn’t write books, but he’s a genius at both humor and plotting.

6. What do you do when you're not writing?

I’m involved in a few local community groups, a charity haunted house and an organization that plans community events and raises money to donate emergency funds to the local needy. I also like to cook and garden a little. My beautiful girlfriend and I also enjoy flea markets and hiking.

7. Any advice for beginning writers out there?

Yes, don’t be deterred if your first book doesn’t fly off the shelves. Also, learn as much as you can about marketing your books and forming community around your platform. Everything in modern publishing is changing all the time. But most important of all, enjoy it or give it up. When it stops being something you do because you love it, that’s when it’s no longer worth it.

Off beat questions

1. I see you've written a book involving time travel. Would you travel back in time if you could? If so, what period of history would you visit?

I probably wouldn’t, because all the best time travel stories involve paradoxes and if we learn anything from fictional time travel it’s that it never turns out well. But if I was to travel back in time, I think I’d go back to the time of the European Enlightenment. Witnessing firsthand the end of 1500 years of religious oppression and watching the dawn of modern science, that would be something.

2. You have also written mysteries. If you could discover the answer to one mystery in this world (examples being aliens, sasquatch, whatever), what would it be?

I wish I had the skillset to crack the Beal Codes or the Kryptos or something like that, but really if there’s one puzzle I’d like to know the answer to before I die it would be is there a unified field theory that actually merges micro and macro physics. Knowing the answer to that question matters. Not knowing whether there are aliens or Big Foot, that’s part of the fun.

Blurb

   Fair Play features three full length novellas, Overlord, Counterfeit, and Confessions of the Cuckold, each a stand-alone story in the Lupa Schwartz universe.

   Cattleya Hoskin has settled into the Schwartz residence and into her new gig chronicling Schwartz’s exploits for Gamut Magazine. With cases running dry, she takes matters into her own hands and pushes Schwartz to investigate a case that has the entire country buzzing, the on-air poisoning of a reality game show contestant on Cattleya’s favorite TV program, Overlord.

    Schwartz next takes Cattleya undercover to investigate the death of a small-time store manager in their old stomping grounds of Paine County, Ohio. With a renewed passion for logic puzzles as fuel, can Cattleya solve the homicide before Schwartz, or are all of her attempts going to prove to be Counterfeit?

   Finally, is a bounty hunter ever supposed to share as much information on a former client as the unnamed protagonist in this peripherally related yarn? Was there ever even a murder plot to begin with, or was it all just the fanciful Confessions of the Cuckold?

Author Bio

With a profound interest in religion, liberal politics and humor, Dave began writing in High School and has not given up on it since. His first professional writing jobs came while attending the Art Institute of Pittsburgh when he was hired to create political cartoons for the Pitt News & to write humor pieces for Smile Magazine. Dave has worked in the newspaper industry as a photographer, in the online publishing industry as a weekly contributor to Streetmail.com, and was a contributing writer to the Buzz On series of informational books and to the Western online anthology, Elbow Creek. Dave’s science fiction novel, Synthetic Blood and Mixed Emotions, is available from writewordsinc.com. Dave currently resides in his childhood home in Toronto, OH with his beautiful girlfriend and his teenage daughter. He enjoys participating in local community events & visiting with his two adult children and his grandkids.