The Horse Latitudes

More than a few years ago my sister-in-law gave me her copy of The Horse Latitudes, Robert Ferrigno’s first novel. Knowing I wrote crime fiction, she thought the book would appeal to me.

The setup is on the surface straightforward. Former anthropology professor and former drug dealer Danny DiMedici returns to his apartment from a night swim, when he’s confronted by two detectives, whom he believes are from Narcotics. It turns out they are homicide detectives, who want to question him about his ex-wife’s blood-spattered beach house. There are no bodies at the scene, which convinces Danny that Lauren Kiel, his ex, is still alive.

The book is full of quirky characters:^*

• Detective Holt—“She was the best dressed cop Danny had ever seen, and wore a tailored gray suit too clingy for Sunday mass and too conservative for a good table at Trumps. Her thick red hair was bound by an ornate antique gold clip. She looked like old money, the kind that got a Yale law degree but felt it was her civic duty to spend a few years with a good PD on the way to a federal judgeship” (p. 15).
• Detective Steiner—“His tie had a yellow ‘I Love Grandpa’ pattern on a black background” (p. 16).
• Dr. Reese—“More gristle than meat, Reese was a tough little bantam with a cropped bullet skull and a look of intense calculation.…Reese was a burnt-black and unforgiving as a Ubangi shaman or a Yaqui medicine man—the very people who had contributed so much to his success” (pp. 45–46).
• Boyd and Lloyd, twin nephews of Dr. Reese—“The twins were his greatest achievement and his most bitter failure. They were raw power, totally obedient, but their performance was erratic. Throw a stick into a boiling volcano, and they’d fetch it. As long as they remembered what it looked like.…What a waste of DNA. They didn’t even dream” (p. 78).
• Michael Kiel, Lauren’s brother: “Michael stood in the front yard wearing baggy madras Bermudas and a white letter sweater, a Pebble Beach Country Club golf cap rakishly tilted back on his head. His ancient jungle boots were spit-shined and laced halfway up. Even with his question-mark posture, he was huge: six feet six, with a wide, flat chest and spindly legs” (p. 88).

And that’s just for starters.

Despite how much I like the book, it took me a long time to understand that what made it stand out in my mind is how it undermines the tropes of the crime fiction hero. Why is Danny swimming to exhaustion every night? Because he’s still in love with his ex. Why did she leave him? Because after he witnessed the murder of friends of his, he lost his edge and got out of the drug business. Lauren’s response? “‘God hates a coward’” (p. 12).

Filled with nonlinear narrative and told from multiple points of view, it’s not a conventional crime novel and it doesn’t have a thriller’s pacing, but despite all that, or maybe because of all that, it’s one of my favorites.

Robert Ferrigno’s path to fiction writing reads like one of his novels:

I was born in Florida, growing up on the last paved street of a small town, spending my youth cutting secret passages through the palmetto thickets with a machete and occasionally burning down those palmettos for the simple pleasure of seeing the fire trucks arrive, sirens blaring.

After earning a college degree in Philosophy and a Masters degree in Creative Writing, I thought that I would be happy being a college professor, writing dense, literary novels which I would assign to my students. I found, however, that being a professor was mostly a matter of going to meetings, and instead went back to my first love, poker.

I spent the next five years gambling full-time and living in a high-crime area populated by starving artists, alcoholics and petty criminals. After a time, I got restless and used some of my winnings to start a punk rock magazine called “The Rocket.” The success of “The Rocket” got me a job as a feature writer for a daily newspaper in Southern California, where I took the adventure-and-new-money beat. Over the next seven years I flew with the Blue Angels, drove Ferraris and went for desert survival training with gun nuts. Great job but I wanted to write novels. I quit my day job and started work.^†

When he was a journalist, Ferrigno got to interview Elmore Leonard, one of his literary heroes. Ferrigno had been writing fiction on the weekends but making little progress on his novel. Leonard gave him some life-changing advice:

You get up at five and you start work, said Mr. L., no messing around making coffee or buttering toast. You sit down and start writing. At 7 you stop, if you’re in the middle of a sentence, you stop, and then you make coffee, take a shower, have breakfast, whatever you normally do. You’re done working on the novel for the day. You do that every day and at the end of a year, you’ll have a novel. Then you send it out to an agent and you start on the next one.^‡

Leonard later offered to blurb Ferrigno’s The Horse Latitudes, if he liked it. Which he did, much to Ferrigno’s and his publisher’s delight. Later, after the book had gone on to some success, Ferrigno let Leonard know that he hadn’t exactly followed his advice:

I told him I had lied to him when I said I would get up every day at five a.m. as he had suggested. Yeah? His voice on the line tense now. Yes sir, I told him, I got up at four a.m. every day for the last year and a half. You’re a better writer than I am, so I figured I needed the extra hour. It made him laugh, a dry cackle that kind of hung up at the back of his throat. A beautiful laugh.^‡

I’ve read The Horse Latitudes many times, and even now, I’ll open it up at random and reread a few pages. How inspiring has Robert Ferrigno been to me? I gave Erin Ferrigno, my female PI, his last name. What books or stories inspire you? Let me know in the comments.

Finally, thanks to Stacy Woodson, Robert Lopresti, and Leigh Lundin for bringing me onboard SleuthSayers. I’m thrilled to be here.

Tom Milani’s (www.tommilani.com) short fiction has appeared online and in several anthologies. His stories have been selected for The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2026 and The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2026. Places That Are Gone, his debut novel, was published May 2025 and is being republished this October by Open Road Integrated Media.

Notes:

^* All page numbers for quotations from The Horse Latitudes are taken from the paperback edition, published in 1990 by William Morrow and Company.

^† “About the Author,” Crime Pays, accessed August 12, 2026, https://web.archive.org/web/20060220135533/http://robertferrigno.com/bio.html.

^‡ Robert Ferrigno, ”Thanks, Mr. L.,” National Review, August 24, 2013, https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/08/thanks-mr-l-robert-ferrigno/, accessed August 12, 2026.

The Gingerbread Man

In June, Level Short released Wish Upon a Crime: Crime Fiction Inspired by Fairy Tales, an anthology I edited with Michael Bracken. The stories range from light-hearted to noir. Fellow SleuthSayers, Joe Walker, Barb Goffman, and Michael Bracken, share insights about their amazing stories in previous posts and are worth checking out.

Deb Goldstein, Tom Milani, and Andrew Welsh- Huggins discuss the first two pages of their fabulous contributions at Art Taylor’s First Two Pages, also great reads.

Today, I am delighted to talk about my story, “The Gingerbread Man.”

THE GINGERBREAD MAN

Imagine The Princess Bride meets The Sopranos inside a bowling alley in the 1960’s—that’s my Hollywood-style pitch for this story. It is inspired by the fairy tale and the lost world of action bowling.

The story opens with Jack O’Conner and his grandson. Jack tells him a bedtime story, his version of the fairy tale, “The Gingerbread Man.”

Jack flashes back to the 1960’s in New York City, the center of “action bowling,” games that involve small-time gangsters who make high-stakes bets on players. 

Jack “Crazy-like-a-Fox” O’Connor was one of those bowlers. He’s leveraged by the police to become an informant to keep his wayward brother out of jail. His task, to find action bowler Francesco “The Gingerbread Man” Romano, the getaway driver for the Barnyard Gang that is linked to a series of convenience store robberies. 

Action bowlers had monikers, a clue about how they “ticked.” I used these nicknames as a vehicle to retell this iconic fairy tale.

Jack’s version of “The Gingerbread Man” takes readers into the unique world of action bowling. It’s filled with quirky characters and a twist that I hope readers will enjoy. 

THE TABLE OF CONTENTS

• “Hansel and Gretel” by Joseph S. Walker
• “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” by John M. Floyd
• “Rapunzel” by Adam Meyer
• “The Emperor’s New Clothes” by Laura Oles
•  “Three Billy Goats Gruff” by Michael Bracken
•  “Beauty and the Beast” by James A. Hearn
•  “The Bremen Musicians” by Debra H. Goldstein
•  “Jack and the Beanstalk” by Andrew Welsh-Huggins
•  “Cinderella” by Donna Andrews
•  “The Frog Prince” by Josh Pachter
•  “Little Red Riding Hood” by Barb Goffman
•  “The Briar Patch” by Tom Milani
•  “King o’ the Cats” by David Dean
•  “The Gingerbread Man” by Stacy Woodson

If you want to learn more about action bowling, check out PIN ACTION by Gianmarc Manzione. It’s a fun read and offers insights into the history and unique subculture of action bowling.

***

My latest story, "She Loves You," appears in Black Cat Weekly, Issue 255. "She Loves You" follows a lovesick country music singer who receives an unsolicited reading from a geriatric psychic and gets more than he bargained for in this twisted tale about loyalty, trust, and inevitable consequences.

On Rereading

My guest today is Tom Milani. He's been generously filling in for me while I've juggled several deadlines. I always enjoy his thoughtful pieces, much like his today on rereading. He has me reflecting on the books I return to and why. I suspect you will, too. Here's more from Tom.

On Rereading

by Tom Milani

I like to reread books from certain authors. Knowing the plot and characters allows me to focus on things 

I may have missed the first time through, and I get something new each time I reread. There’s also comfort in the familiar. As I told another writer, it’s like watching a favorite movie (e.g., Collateral) a second or third time: it never disappoints.

Here I want to talk about two of the authors I regularly reread, what attracts me to their writing, and what I think they do particularly well.

George Pelecanos

For any crime writers in the DC metropolitan area, George Pelecanos needs no introduction. Author of over twenty novels, screenwriter on numerous shows (most famously The Wire), he’s firmly established in the crime fiction community. Pelecanos writes about the working class, people living in neighborhoods east of Rock Creek Park and often east of the Anacostia River, markers of economic and racial divides. He also peppers his books with local music references and venues, which adds a bit of nostalgia for anyone who grew up in the area. For me, his principal themes are what being a man means and the value of blue-collar work and public service. He does all this while telling fast-paced, compelling stories.

Several of his novels have recurring characters—Derek Strange, Dimitri Karras, Marcus Clay—so reading those books is like being among friends, or at least people you know well. One of my favorites of Pelecanos’s books is probably one of his lesser-known works. A Firing Offence and Nick’s Trip, his first two novels, are first-person PI stories featuring Nick Stefanos. Shoedog, his third novel, is a multiple-POV standalone. Then came Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go, his last first-person PI novel (though not his last PI novel). For me, it’s his best title and also one of his darkest books.

It begins, “Like most of the trouble that’s happened in my life or that I’ve caused to happen, the trouble that happened that night started with a drink.” 

Nick Stefanos wakes up after having driven blackout drunk to the banks of the Anacostia River, only to find a murdered teenager. By the end of the novel, some justice has been served, but it’s the roughest kind, and Nick is back where he began: “Inside, the room was silent, bathed in blue neon. I went behind the bar. I poured myself a bourbon and pulled a bottle of beer from the ice.”

Elizabeth Hand

A multi-genre, multi-award-winning author, Elizabeth Hand has written four mysteries featuring anti-hero Cass Neary. In these four novels, Elizabeth Hand balances deep dives into photography, mythology, and history with Cass Neary’s dissolution and longing, her addiction and trauma, all while telling compelling stories. Cass’s fifteen minutes of fame began with Dead Girls, her book of photography published after she gained notoriety from her art show of the same name. 

Cass describes how she chooses her subjects: “I can smell damage; it radiates from some people like a pheromone. Those are the ones I photograph. I can tell where they’ve been, what’s destroyed them, even after they’re dead.” Cass herself is also damaged, perhaps from the death of her mother, perhaps from the benign neglect of her father, but comes unglued after a sexual assault.

All this backstory, found in Generation Loss, plays a role in the three succeeding books in the series: Available Dark, Hard Light, and The Book of Lamps and Banners, but it’s the last one in the series that I want to focus on. The first few sentences establish the mood for the novel and provide enough detail so that even readers who haven’t read the previous books can form a solid picture of Cass’s character: Much of the tube was still shut down. Another car had plowed through a Go Happy London! tour group the day before, this time near Tower Bridge. I’d taken the night train from Penzance, nodding off between shots of Jack Daniel’s before trying to resurrect my amphetamine jag with one of the Vyvanse I’d stolen a few days earlier.

The novel’s title is a reference to an ancient text of the same name, “rumored to have been written by Aristotle for his student Alexander the Great. Aristotle supposedly illustrated it, and there were handwritten notes to Alexander as well, and references to other people Aristotle knew. Eudemus. Plato.” The physical text has power, people around it die, and people who want to own it will kill.

But there’s more. Tindra Bergstrand, a gifted programmer, is developing Ludus Mentis, an app to heal. As she tells Cass, “But once I get the bugs worked out, the app can be used for all sorts of things. Trauma, insomnia, ADHD. Regulating mood disorders without drugs. Addiction. Libido. Everything.” The bugs are the problem, bringing trauma to the surface, rather than healing it, but the code embedded within the ancient text is the solution: 

Whoever wrote it had figured out how a combination of lights and symbols can change the way we think. Their book drew on knowledge that had already been around for thousands of years, things the ancient Egyptians knew, and the Sumerians, the Minoans. So “lamps and banners” is just shorthand for what we call code.

Cass’s skepticism informs her actions at the end of the novel. I hope Elizabeth Hand writes another Cass Neary mystery; the last lines suggest she might: 

Gryffin watched me as I stood, his expression almost wistful. 

He raised his glass to me and nodded. “Stay out of trouble.”

“I wouldn’t count on that,” I said, and headed for the door.

What books do you like to reread, and why? Let me know in the comments.

***

Tom Milani’s (www.tommilani.com) short fiction has appeared in several anthologies and online. His stories have been shortlisted twice for a Derringer, been an honorable mention for The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025 and selected for The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2026 and for The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2026. Places That Are Gone, his debut novel, will be reissued by Open Road Media this fall.

Literary Influences: Nelson Algren

I'm delighted Tom Milani is joining us today to talk about literary influences. Here's more from Tom:

Literary Influences: Nelson Algren

by Tom Milani

Tom Milani

I first read about Nelson Algren in an editorial in the old Washington Star shortly after his death on May 9, 1981. The editorial included a quote by Hemmingway on the power of Algren’s writing: “Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around, and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful.” [1] It ended by noting that Algren had died alone. I wanted to know more.

I was in college at the time, and one of my English professors picked up a used hardback copy of The Man with the Golden Arm for me at Second Story Books in Georgetown (I think it cost $3). Hemmingway’s endorsement suggested lean, muscular prose. But Algren had produced something entirely different.

Frankie Machine, the novel’s protagonist, a card dealer, sometime drummer, and morphine addict, is one of the underclass, barely getting by. Algren doesn’t portray Frankie and his friends as noble because they are poor, but he expounds at length on what their poverty means in a capitalistic society:

The great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one. Guilt that lay crouched behind every billboard which gave each man his commandments; for each man here had failed the billboards all down the line. No Ford in this one’s future nor ever any place all his own. … With his own eyes he had seen the truer Americans mount the broad stone stairways to success surely and swiftly and unaided by others; he was always the one left alone, it seemed at last… [2]

I read those lines over forty years ago and am still struck by how Algren dignified his subjects by writing about them lyrically. For him, the poor weren’t props, stand-ins for the evils of capitalism; instead, they were characters in their own right, for better or worse. And Algren didn’t shy away from the worse—he’d experienced his share of poverty and had been in jail for a petty crime—his descriptions not the product of a fervid imagination but rather lived experience.

The Man with the Golden Arm was Algren’s most famous work, winning him the first National Book Award, but Never Come Morning, published five years earlier, in 1942, put him on the literary map. The cover of my Avon paperback edition is pure pulp: Two sneering young men on a stairwell look down at a teenage girl sitting on a box spring; between them a muscular young man tries unsuccessfully to stare down the boys. The cover screams: TEEN-AGE TRAGEDY! The Great Novel of JUVENILE DELINQUENCY. The story is tragic, but that tragedy is the result of characters who can’t escape their circumstances: 

The world of Never Come Morning is a finely rendered, gray-hued, fatalistic place populated by angry, hungry young people whose lives are governed by rules that are clear, though impossible to abide by. Not one of them is innocent. They prey foremost upon each other, but also upon the wider world, and they acknowledge responsibility for their actions and pay for them. The reader might empathize with or fear them, but they are above pity, victimhood, or stereotype. [3]

Years later, H.E.F. Donohue asked Algren why he’d written the books he’d written. Algren answered that he’d “tried to catch the emotional ebb and flow and something of the fear and terror and the dangers and the kind of life that multitudes of people have been forced into with no recognition that such a world existed.” [4]

Algren wrote other books, both fiction and nonfiction, and for a while was famous. 

But The Devil’s Stocking, his novel about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, was first published in Germany and not with an American publisher until after his death.

I’ve written at CrimeReads about how James M. Cain was my gateway drug into writing crime fiction, but I think Algren’s empathy for his characters and his ability to dignify them with lyrical prose were foundational in my development as a writer.

Who were your literary influences, and what did you take from them? Please let me know in the comments.

Notes:

[1] Bettina Drew, Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1989), p. 210.

[2] Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1949), p. 17.

[3] Colin Asher, “But Never a Lovely So Real,” The Believer 95 (June 1, 2013), https://www.thebeliever.net/but-never-a-lovely-so-real/.

[4] H.E.F. Donohue, Conversations with Nelson Algren (New York: Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1964), p. 86.

***

Tom Milani’s (www.tommilani.com) short fiction has appeared in several anthologies and online. His stories have been shortlisted twice for a Derringer, and “Barstow,” which originally appeared in Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir vol. 5, was an honorable mention for The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025. “Mill Mountain,” which originally appeared in Black Cat Weekly, was selected for The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2026. “A Sign of the Times,” which initially appeared in Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun, was selected for The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2026. Places That Are Gone, his debut novel, will be reissued by Open Road Media this fall.

Richard Estes and the Art of Seeing

I’m delighted Derringer award-nominee, Tom Milani, is joining us today to talk about how Richard Estes' paintings inspired him to look at his characters in a different way—a technique he applies both to his novels and short fiction. Here’s more from Tom:

Richard Estes and the Art of Seeing

by Tom Milani

In the late 1970s I was a student at George Mason University in Northern Virginia. The main campus had five buildings, one of which was the Fenwick Library. The library had a mezzanine that housed art shows.

My first year there, I wandered into an exhibit featuring silkscreen prints by Richard Estes. The one that struck me first—and stuck with me the longest—was of a bus windshield. Initially, I couldn’t believe it wasn’t a photograph. But later, I marveled at the reflections, which seemed to reveal a once-hidden reality to me. Estes’s work would go on to play a role in my fiction. More on that later.

Before I saw those prints, my conception of a city’s appearance was at a remove: cities had skylines, unique to be sure, but two-dimensional from a distance. After seeing the Estes prints, I began looking for the reflections he painted. Glass-front buildings I once might have dismissed as having no character now were literal mirrors for their surroundings. Imagine looking through a microscope at a few drops of pond water for the first time and viewing the hidden life there. In a way, that’s what I was seeing.

Estes works from multiple photographs as references when he paints. The result is a perspective that can’t be actually seen from one location but is somehow nonetheless “real” in the sense that every building and reflection exists.

In the 1990s, when I was in Ann Arbor for work, I visited the original Borders bookstore, something of a paradise for my English major soul. There, I found Photo-Realism by Louis K. Meisel, a 500-plus-page book featuring thirteen photorealist painters and another fifteen photorealism-related artists. I think the book cost $65, something out of my reach at the time. When I was on the phone with my mom and she asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I mentioned the book, reluctantly mentioning the price. She sent me $100 because that’s what moms do for their lonely sons.

I pored over the text and reproductions of each artist’s works, never less than awed by the technical ability displayed. Even though his art wasn’t the most photorealistic of the group, Estes still stood out to me, for he’d been the one who changed the way I see.

A few years later, newly single and living in a condo furnished with lawn chairs, I went to the frame shop in the local strip mall to buy some art for my bedroom wall. Leafing through catalogs (pre-Internet), I found a poster for the Estes painting Telephone Booths, in the H. H. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. The guys who worked in the shop seemed to think it was cool, which meant something, and hanging it on my wall was a stamp of my personality on the place.

Last year, Places That Are Gone, my debut novel, came out. (It’s currently out of print but in the process of being reissued by a new publisher.) Bennett Wilder, my protagonist, also liked Richard Estes: 

In the bedroom he’d hung a reproduction of a Richard Estes painting of a bus windshield, the surrounding buildings reflected in it like a funhouse mirror. The city scene was devoid of people and impossibly clean. He liked to imagine himself in that streetscape, bathed in its pure light.

Bennett’s feelings represent a kind of Platonic ideal of what he thinks his life could be, despite all evidence to the contrary. Shelley, his wife, views the print very differently: “The painting seemed so cold to her, a world without emotion or any kind of humanity, despite the urban scene.” The collision of their diametric world views will prove catastrophic by the book’s end.

A few years ago, we bought an Estes silkscreen featuring a car hood and windshield in the foreground, reflections of the surrounding buildings spilling across the surfaces like melted wax. It sits above a corner of my desk, and when I stare at it, I’m reminded to look anew at the world and the characters I’m writing about.

#

Tom Milani’s short fiction has appeared online and in several anthologies, including In Too Deep: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Genesis and Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun: Private Eyes in the Materialistic Eighties. Derringer finalist “Barracuda Backfire” was published in 2024 as Book 4 of Michael Bracken’s Chop Shop series of novellas. “Barstow,” originally published in Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir volume 5, was named an honorable mention in The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025. “No Road Back,” which originally appeared in Black Cat Weekly, was selected for The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2026. His first novel, Places That Are Gone, was published in May 2025.

You can find Tom’s Derringer award-nominated story, “A Sign of the Times,” in Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun: Private Eyes in the Materialistic Eighties.