Les Roberts: Guest Post & Book Giveaway

Today I welcome Les Roberts, author of the  Milan Jacovich Cleveland mysteries, as guest blogger.  

Book Giveaway: Win a copy of The Cleveland Creep. Leave a comment stating why you'd like to read Les Roberts' latest mystery. Winner (s) will be announced 5/30/11 on this post. Be sure and leave your email address.

5/30/11!! WINNERS: JAN LONG & DAVID BLOUNT !!!

Les Roberts is the author of 15 mystery novels featuring Cleveland detective Milan Jacovich, as well as 9 other books of fiction. The past president of both the Private Eye Writers of America and the American Crime Writer’s League, he came to mystery writing after a 24-year career in Hollywood. He has been a professional actor, a singer, a jazz musician, and a teacher. In 2003 he received the Sherwood Anderson Literary Award. A native of Chicago, he now lives in Northeast Ohio and is a film and literary critic. Roberts’s newest book, The Cleveland Creep is published by Gray & Company. Roberts can be reached at www.LesRoberts.com

LES ROBERTS:

In my fifteenth in a series about Milan Jacovich, "The Cleveland Creep," notice the Slovenian Cleveland private eye has grown wiser, more mature, and has the same physical problems most senior citizens have. He's started drinking tea, for one thing, and he watches what he eats. Maybe I've actually begun writing a fictionalized autobiography!

When I created Milan in 1987, I made him not quite 40 and a Vietnam vet, divorced, with two boys aged 12 and 7---never dreaming that here I'd be, twenty five years later, still writing about him. Unlike Raymond Chandler telling tales about Philip Marlowe, I began by writing myself into a corner and now I'm stuck with it. I can't avoid the groundwork I laid down in my first effort---so now, yes indeed, Milan has grown older.

Guess what: so have I.

I never took the chances Milan has; I've never been beaten up, shot, or burned with a cigarette, and no one has ever pointed a loaded gun at me. I don't smoke, I don't guzzle Stroh's, and I can't remember the last time I ate a klobasa sandwich for dinner. But yes, I ache when I crawl out of bed in the morning, and you bet your life I can no longer imbibe alcohol like I used to, nor drink an entire pot and a half of coffee every day nor enjoy red meat and potatoes three times a week as in the old days. I don't own Milan's medical problems, but I have plenty of my own; I'm now on a first-name basis with half the people who work at the Cleveland Clinic.

Yet I love my life; I have plenty of excitement and fun and stress like everyone else and will continue until I can no longer sit up straight at a computer. So Milan, who now has life a bit easier because I've supplied him with a young, tough assistant, is enjoying his own life as it moves exorably from one period to another.

Isn't that what we're all doing?