Mythical Monday #66

Art work by: @Burntlaughter on Twitter

It seems there are many books influenced by or based on Myths and Mythological Beings.

There are many different Mythology's and Mythological Beings recorded. Some are very popular and well known, others not so much. There are many similar beings, yet different depending on the culture it’s based in.  The definition of Myth covers about anything in the Urban Fantasy/Fantasy realm to me.

I’ve invited authors to share briefly the Mythological being or Myth that influenced their character(s) or story, or what their character(s) are based on influencing their books.  Hosting here, one author and being or myth per week.

Blame it on a misspent youth.

My parents are librarians, and they started reading to me at a very young age—first picture books, then as I got older, we would read stuff aloud together, and eventually I read on my own. Among the first things I read for myself were The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien and the Earthsea trilogy by Ursula K. Le Guin. The lush, beautiful, magickal worlds created by Tolkien and Le Guin captivated me and led me to other fantasy works, and also when I became a teenager to playing Dungeons & Dragons with my friends.

It was also with my parents that I watched television, and two of our favorite series to watch were two seminal police shows, Barney Miller and Hill Street Blues. Still the gold standard for cop shows, these two series captivated me just as much and instilled a fascination with police procedure and the dramatic portrayal of it.

Writing was a passion that was always there—whether it came about due to consuming all those stories when I was too young to know better or if it's just an innate part of me is a question left to geneticists and philosophers. The point is, I have always loved to make stories. (My first book was created on construction paper at the age of six. It's called Reflections in My Mirror, and I still have it.)

Those three passions finally collided in 2004 when Dragon Precinct was published. Set in a high-fantasy setting greatly inspired by Le Guin and Tolkien, the stories were police procedurals, as Lieutenants Torin ban Wyvald and Danthres Tresyllione solve crimes in the city-state of Cliff's End. (Both Torin and Danthres are based on D&D characters I played in my younger days, also.)

I have continued to write stories of Torin, Danthres, and the Cliff's End Castle Guard, both in novel and short story form (the fifth novel in the series, Mermaid Precinct, is on my 2017 writing schedule), and when I was invited to submit something to the new Bad-Ass Faeries anthology back in 2006, there was no question in my mind that the world of fantasy based crime fiction that I'd been slinging words in was ideally suited to giving us a bad-ass fae.

Another cop show I adore is Homicide: Life on the Street, and it was that show—and the book on which it is based, David Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets—that led to my love for that most fascinating part of police procedure, both in fiction and real life: the interrogation. The verbal dance between detective and suspect. Those quickly became my favorite parts of the various "Precinct" tales to write, and when Danielle Ackley-McPhail and her cohorts invited me to submit to Bad-Ass Faeries, my first thought was to do an all-interrogation story, one that was exclusively detective and suspect, doing that very verbal dance.

The result is "House Arrest," which I'm honored to have reprinted in The Best of Bad-Ass Faeries, which will be out from eSpec Books this year. We've got family intrigue, we've got murder, we've got a house fae with a bit of an attitude problem (and a bit of a milk addiction), and it ends with a terrible pun. What more could you want?


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Author Bio:
Keith R.A. DeCandido has been writing fiction professionally for twenty-three years now, which makes him feel very old. Well, that, and his arthritic knees. He has written more than fifty novels, almost a hundred short stories, a mess of comic books, and a bunch of nonfiction, both in various licensed universes ranging from TV shows (Star Trek, Supernatural, Sleepy Hollow, Doctor Who, and tons more) to games (World of Warcraft, Dungeons & Dragons, StarCraft, Command & Conquer) to movies (Cars, Resident Evil, Kung Fu Panda, Aliens, Night of the Living Dead, Serenity) to comic books (prose featuring Spider-Man, Thor, the Hulk, the Silver Surfer, the X-Men, etc.), as well as in his own original universes. The latter includes fantastical police procedurals in the fictional city of Cliff's End, starting with the novel Dragon Precinct, and including several more novels and a mess of short stories, one of which, "House Arrest," will be reprinted in The Best of Bad-Ass Faeries, having appeared in the inaugural anthology in that series ten years ago. Keith also writes the Super City Cops series of cop stories set in a city filled with superheroes, urban fantasy tales set in Key West featuring Cassie Zukav, weirdness magnet, and 2017 will see the debut novel featuring Bram Gold, a nice Jewish boy from the Bronx who hunts monsters, A Furnace Sealed. Find out less at Keith's web site at DeCandido.net.


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