I’m pleased to announce the appearance of my story Conquer Comes Calling in the latest issue of Occult Detective Quarterly.
You can pick it up here –
My late cousin got me into the electric Shaft movies from the 70’s, which was my gateway to top notch blaxploitation fare like Blacula, Truck Turner, Superfly, and The Mack.
It also led to my collecting and enjoying the criminally forgotten series of novels by Ernest Tidyman. They’re notoriously hard to find, so seriously, if anyone has a line on Goodbye Mr. Shaft or The Last Shaft, let me know. They’re the only two I need.
I’ve also got a long abiding, completely fannish love for Len Wein and Gene Colan’s Marvel Comics character Jericho Drumm AKA Brother Voodoo which I share with about two other people I personally know of. I was thrilled when Daniel Drumm showed up briefly in the Dr. Strange movie.
I think my affection for BV began in an issue of Werewolf By Night, and was cemented by his reappearance (while afflicted with zombie-ism) in Marc Spector’s Moon Knight in the late 80’s. I’ve always liked the fighting scholar types, and the more obscure knowledge they commanded the better. For a white suburban kid in Illinois, there was nothing more obscure than Haitian Vodoun.
My character John Conquer is a fusion of the two, a street smart Harlem PI steeped in Hoodoo and West African shamanism.
He’s the cool black cat the Man calls when the cases get too far out.
The NYPD pays a call on a fortune telling numbers banker, and they’re taken aback when they find a miniaturized corpse floating in a lava lamp.
Only one man to call….
Here’s an excerpt. This is isn’t the last you’ll see of John Conquer.
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“Hang up, Carmody. You’ll wake up my secretary,” said Conquer, pulling the metal door shut behind him.
Carmody couldn’t have been more surprised if his own gun had jumped from its holster and shot him.
“John!” Lazzeroni stammered.
Lazzeroni was the quintessential NPYD gumshoe with a donut sack belly and bloodhound eyes from too many stakeouts, his tobacco yellow teeth hid by a bushy mustache, the remainder of his hair regulated to the back of his head and crannies of his drooping body Conquer didn’t care to dwell on.
“Easy boys,” Conquer said. “You’re in Harlem, remember? You’re bound to see more of us.”
“How’d you know….?” Carmody began.
Conquer plucked his business card from the cop’s fingers.
“Don’t need you callin’ me at all hours and hangin’ up,” he said.
“What brings you here, John?” Lazzeroni said, eyeing him sideways. “Just happened to be in the neighborhood?”
That was why Lazzeroni had bars on his collar, whereas Carmody just had dandruff.
“Serendipity, man. That’s my business.”
Carmody snorted, making a show of being unimpressed.
“Go watch the stairs, Mike,” Lou said to Carmody.
Carmody scowled and replaced the receiver. He went to stand on the landing, slamming the heavy metal door behind him. He coughed a few times.
“I get the feeling he doesn’t like you,” Lazzeroni quipped.
“You could fill a phonebook with folks Carmody don’t like. All the area codes would be 706 or 762.”
“We got word this fortune teller was running a numbers bank for King Solomon,” Lazzeroni went on. “We were on our way to talk to him when dispatch calls in a 10-71 at this address. Now you show me yours.”
“Maybe later,” said Conquer. “What’s the story? You wouldn’t call me just to say hi.”
“Aw, don’t be needy. Receptionist said somebody charged in here as they were about to close. She heard ‘em arguing and called it in. Then she heard shooting, so she ran out. Locked the security door out of habit.”
Lazzeroni went to the inner door and opened it.
A single barred window illuminated the space beyond, and the hunched shadow of a cat hissed on the sill, arched its back, and scrambled somewhere into the shadows growling lowly.
Conquer followed Lazzeroni in and shut the door behind him.
This was apartment space converted to office, or vice versa. The living room had been done up in fake gypsy crap the kind of sucker who shelled out his welfare check to a cat like Genie Jones would expect to see; a cheap table draped in a cloth festooned with magically delicious stars and moons, astronomy charts on the walls, astrological signs. A sparkling red and green beaded curtain led to where the all-knowing Genie kicked up his slippers after hours to watch Charlie’s Angels or roll a joint on the toilet, by the skunky scent just beneath the odor of patchouli smoldering in the ceramic Hotei Buddha incense burner, probably lifted from the counter of some Chinese restaurant.
It was a mess. The chairs were overturned, and the requisite crystal ball lay on the floor, cracked. Tarot cards were strewn everywhere, like somebody had busted up the world’s strangest poker game.
“So who caught a bullet?”
“Nobody, so far as I can tell,” said Lazzeroni.
“No stiff?”
Lazzeroni reached over and took a trilby that matched his raincoat off a lava lamp on a table next to the door and set it on his balding head. Why was it there?
“I didn’t say that.”
He snapped the light on, and the dim room was bathed in slow moving red amoebas that slid across the walls and ceiling like oversized blood cells out of Fantastic Voyage. Projected on the walls, suspended among the amorphous red blots, floated the ghostly black silhouette of a man.
Conquer looked from the walls to the lamp itself. Bobbing in the glowing cylinder of the lamp like a buoy among the islands of molten wax was a tiny naked body. Some kind of fetish? He didn’t think so.
“I saw it before Mike did,” said Lazzeroni.
Conquer found the light switch on the wall, but nothing came on. He took a mini TeknaLite from his pocket and shined the thin beam up, saw broken glass and bullet holes.
“Found your shooting victim, Lou,” he said, then turned back to the lamp.
“Be serious, man. Is that real?”
Conquer pulled the plug on the lava lamp. The red blobs and the black ghost vanished.
“Give me something to hold this with. These things get hot.”
Lazzeroni gave him a pocket handkerchief. Conquer grimaced. With all the coughing he and Carmody were doing, he didn’t want to catch anything going around the stationhouse. Still, he carefully lifted the top. The bottlecap opening had been popped off and the miniscule figure had apparently been stuffed down through the opening. One of the elbows was bent the wrong way.
“How do we get it out?”
Conquer turned and dropped the lamp on the floor. It smashed.
“Jesus,” said Lazzeroni, flinching back as the wax splattered the shag throw rug and wood floor.
Conquer hunkered down, directing the light at the swollen little figure lying amid the wreckage.
The boiled flesh bubbled with blisters, the poached eyes bulged from the balloon face. If it was a model, it was a ghastly masterwork.
He took the spindly little arm between his two fingers. It was warm from the lamp. Gently squeezing, he felt the little toothpick bones grinding beneath the loose skin. It was like handling a broken chicken wing.
“It’s real,” he muttered, and took his penknife from his coat.
Delirium Tremens 
Very good blog! Do you have any hints for aspiring writers?
I’m planning to start my own site soon but I’m a little
lost on everything. Would you advise starting with a free
platform like WordPress or go for a paid option? There are so many
options out there that I’m totally confused ..
Any suggestions? Bless you!
I’ve never found a need for going with a paid service and am happy with WordPress, but I know some authors like to have a domain name and all that to make them easier to find. It really just depends on what you want.
Sorry for replying to an old post but I am coming late to the party. Any plans for a book length feature for John Conquer? Love the stories!!
Thanks, RW! There will be a full length novel called Conquer: Fear Of A Black Cat. Coming next year. And a collection of the Conquer stories, including four previously unpublished, should be out by the end of the month. Watch this space.