The following is a book review from the kind souls at Creative Frontiers……. thanks folks.
Buy ‘The Long Weekend’. Soon. OK?
Terry Barca’s introductory novella about Sam and Scarlett Bennet wafts us around the bars and restaurants of Melbourne very much in the old Hammett style.
We’ve got plenty here: a dead body (mysterious circumstances, of course); a flat-footed dick; a glamorous, wise-cracking couple in direct descent from Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man; doses of single malt and lots more.
And all crammed into a novella.
Phew.
Just as the Pelecanos books have you reaching for a map of DC to follow the action, and the Crais books do the same for LA, Barca’s trawl around Melbourne has you itching for Google Maps so you can join in the action.
Sam’s the star, because he’s cool, solves the murder and already has the beautiful girl, but Melbourne puts in a competent challenge. Here also, The Long Weekend, plugs into crime-thriller literary tradition as illustrated, for example, by McBain’s star billing for New York.
The dialogue crackles on the page like bacon in the pan. The descriptives illustrate that unique Barca style as found in other posts on Creative Frontiers. Read’em and weep .. with envy.
But for all this talk of tradition, The Long Weekend’s architecture corresponds to the modern style of crime work, text or movie. We have a beginning and an end, but the middle bathes us in the kaleidoscopic light formed by different aspects of Sam’s life, Scarlett’s and their relationship. In the end, although we get satisfaction by knowing the murderer’s identity, it’s almost the mint at the end of a thoroughly indulgent dinner.
C’mon, Terry. Send this dynamic duo away for another weekend break soon, please.
You can find The Long Weekend for sale on Smashwords and Amazon.
araneus1 
Hurray for you, Terry
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Thanks kid…….. at least it is a start…… something a bit longer for a change.
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Yay!!! I have been out of the loop–have to read the story, too! Working backwards in the Reader still. We’ll start with a “like” for this and I’ll try to catch up soon. But anywayz two levels of congrats–1) for writing & finishing the novella and 2) for publishing…no, make that three levels of congrats, 3) for a nice write-up on the published work as well!
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Thank you, thank you and thank you. I’m so pleased to have you back, and I’m glad that the dust is settling in your world. Getting the book out has been an adventure…….. of sorts……. lots of learning, which is good, and a fair bit of discomfort, which seems to come with anything worthwhile. It’s a bit like WP only with money! Firstly you spend money and you hope to sell enough books to justify the expense….. but mostly it is just waiting to see if people like your work enough to part with a few dollars……. it’s not much more than a cup of coffee but I’m asking a lot of people [not my WP people, they already know whether they like my stuff or not] to pay for a novella from someone they don’t know when they could spend a bit more and buy one from someone they already know. I get it, but it is such a personal thing to ‘put yourself out there’. I take it personally……. every creative person does, you cannot help it. It takes a long time to build an audience.
This all seems like another step……..
Thanks for the congrats.
Terry
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Congratulations!!!!
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Let me get this straight. You’ve published a novel and I didn’t know about it. Whats happening to me. If you have,” I’m a gonna buy it,” as some crazy drug infested coffee addict might express it. Then I’m going to read it, and then I’m going to stick up a review of it.
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Hi Peter,
All of those things would be wonderful, and as a proud owner you will be eligible for our weekly meeting which is held in the telephone box at the end of my street, but you don’t have to worry, there’s plenty of room.
If you need your ‘hard earned’ for other purposes, I could send you a copy….. or at least a link for a download….. it seems the least i could do considering your kindness to me?
Just to get the record straight, it’s a novella……. that means that I ran out of words before it got to ‘novel’ size……… not really, but it is about half a novel…….. bite sized, as they say. I finished it almost a year ago……. almost got it accepted twice, then decided to push on and see how it is done in the modern world. It’s a terrible thing to release a book out into the wild.
Terry
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