This is another one I haven't got an explanation for. Where did the idea (which I can't tell you about because it would ruin the surprise) come from?

I know it was early on in my writing career. While I was looking for representation for Macbeth's Niece, I wrote a couple of other books, including Not Dead Yet... I queried agents for this one too, and a woman took it on. For a year she tried to sell it, but she got no takers.

I understand. It's hard to pitch a book that you have to read halfway through before you get what's going on, and today's readers want a murder on page one. Still, those who've read it like the fact that it's a good murder mystery with the best surprise ever to boot.

At the end of our contract year, the agent wrote to me to say she was giving up. I wrote back to ask if she might be interested in some of my other work (I had The Dead Detective Agency and Shakespeare's Blood by then) but she didn't bother to reply. That's how it works, folks. In the end I published it myself, but again, I'm not fond of the current cover. Maybe I should work on that.

Not Dead Yet... concerns a group of squatters who live in the basement of an old museum in downtown Chicago in the late 1960s. They are not alike at all: Libby is domineering and irritable. Leo is kind and inventive but also absent-minded. Roy is reckless and restless, and Memnet is lost and miserable. When they come to the rescue of a girl who's lost everything, they put themselves in the crosshairs of some evil people. The experience will either bring them closer or destroy them all.

This book is available here for $2.99.