Some years ago, I became fed up with the same old cliches on TV private detective shows so I thought up one of my own, who I named Jack Mac Clarey. Unlike most TV sleuths, he would drive an ordinary car and have actual paying clients and living relatives. At first, I had the stories solely in my head but as time went on, I committed them to paper, usually in the back pages of old notebooks.

This became a great vehicle for my DiD fantasies, which are basically the Walter Mitty variety (i.e. extracting the damsels from distress rather than putting them there) Jack worked out of Southern California, but often took cases out off town, usually in the summer or in warm climates, as this allowed for the use of swimsuits, shorts, and miniskirts without pantyhose (I'm a leg man) as well as actresses for clients. Models and the parents of wayward daughters were also in the stories, during the course of which he would encounter female cops, P.I.'s, and intelligence officers.

I further broke the cliches by having Jack marry, adopt his orphaned niece, and eventually become a father. After a while, I returned to school and had to concentrate on my class work I had to cut back. That and the fact that the stories on paper were a good deal behind those in my head, I "cancelled" the original series after Jack became a father and retired to take a college teaching job, then brought it back as a series of "telemovies", as many programs are wont to do. It started off modestly at first, a few cases on campus, then favors for friends, then suddenly the game was afoot, only with Jack going into the fray with a coed who had decided to forsake a law career for investigative work, and later his niece. The two female characters, who will be the heroines of this little tale are the Associates in the firm of Mac Clarey and Associates. So if you are quite ready, here a story of (to blatantly steal a line from Lord Ice) pretty P.I's in peril.

Happy reading!

"Historian"