Showing results by author "Jerry Bader" in All Categories

Virginia Collins is not what she appears to be. By all outward appearances the successful uptown psychiatrist is just another beautiful dame who hires a private investigator to find her missing husband: a weird little man who makes fancy umbrella drinks and dresses like something out of an old gangster movie. Collins hides her real motives, along with her tragic past, in order to win the affections of Raffy Rheinhardt, a cynical PI with an equally tragic history; a long forgotten shared incident resulting in damaged psyches and dead bodies.

In the 1950s, westerns were the most popular form of television drama. Saturday mornings were filled with black and white images of Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, The Lone Ranger, and The Cisco Kid. In the evening you had the more adult westerns like Have Gun - Will Travel, Rawhide, and Wanted Dead or Alive. Sprinkled amongst these shows were programs purporting to be about real historic characters, people like Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, Annie Oakley, and Wild Bill Hickok.

As a Jew whose parents survived the Nazi concentration camps, I learned life is fragile, and survival arbitrary. As a jockey, I developed an approach to life of living in the moment, of pushing the envelope, of reacting first, because not reacting can cost you the race, or maybe your life. Jockeys are modern day serfs that travel the country picking up rides where possible, for the most part earning scraps, guaranteed to be seriously injured. Did I bend the rules? Yes. Did I break many of them? Most certainly, because that's the way the game is played.

We are all familiar with the classic tale of Casey at the Bat but that story was written a long time ago. I felt it was time for a new story about about the best sport there is, baseball. Baseball is unlike any other game, it requires great individual skill, as well as practiced team co-ordination. In terms of life lessons, baseball has a lot to offer children. The Ninth Inning is a humorous take on the game with a nifty rhyme. I hope you like it.

From the bizarre world of female Japanese motorcycle gangs to the historic rise and fall of London's 40 Elephants, the history of female organized crime is both fascinating and strange. These are the stories, both true and legendary, of the female crime bosses that broke the mold of feminine gentility. This is the secret world of female gangsters. Most of society thinks of women as the gentler sex, the sex with more compassion and empathy, not prone to violence. The truth is history, and current events, are littered with stories of violent women who do whatever it takes to get what they want; women who either revel in, or accept as needed, whatever acts of torture, murder, and depravity that are required to achieve their goals.

The Jockey is the true story of a young boy from the wrong side of the tracks who, because of his size and toughness, is offered a position to train as a jockey. It soon becomes clear that the business is less about winning horse races than it is about making money. He resists the temptation to join the extralegal side of the business until he is confronted by the facts of racing life: Horse racing is a blood sport, and jockeys rarely survive without life-altering injuries.

Why do we call mixed alcohol drinks "cocktails"? How do they get their exotic names — names like the Singapore Sling, Screw Driver, the Alamagoozlum, the Angel’s Kiss, the Hanky Panky, the Harvey Wallbanger, Sex on the Beach, the Monkey Gland, the Brass Monkey, the Margarita, the Japalac, the Lion’s Tail, and many, many more?

A down-and-out LA actor with a knack for impersonations finds his circumstances completely reversed by a chance meeting with a look-alike stranger. After a night of drinking with his new friend discussing the possibilities made possible by their similar appearance, the stranger offers the actor a ride home. On the way there is an accident and one of them is killed. The survivor finds himself in the hospital with amnesia and everyone assuming he's the stranger, the right-hand man for a mob boss.

Crime...it's a dirty business, and eventually someone always dies. The thing is...you got to make sure it isn't you, or someone you love. That's the problem: the someone you love may just be the reason you end up on an aluminum table with some white-coated ghoul slicing you open like a prized Thanksgiving turkey. There comes a time when everybody has to make a decision...you're either all-in, or you cash out, if they let you. But you know in the end that's not going to happen. It always gets messy.

In my business, you meet all kinds of people; some, let’s call them civilians, are ordinary, what the politicians call “folks;” then there are the characters, the peculiar sorts, people with strange peccadilloes: what an old friend of mine might call, “people who scare the horses.” Some, let's call them “the desperate:” come to me because they find themselves in a situation, sometimes of their own making and other times… well… let’s just say, imposed upon them. In each case, they have secrets.

What would you do to be rich? Not just rich, but fabulously rich. Perhaps you are that unique soul that has no dreams, no aspirations, no agenda…. Well, if you are, good luck. It must be a very dreary existence. But if you’re like the rest of us, you have a fantasy, a vision of what could be, of what you could be. Maybe that dream is selfish, or maybe it’s altruistic, or maybe...it’s extremist. What if there was a family jewel, an exquisite 133-carat pink piece of perfection, a diamond that historically belonged to you, and what if that gem was stolen?

Little Frankie Darling wants revenge, Asami Sato wants her inheritance, and Oyabun Kitsune wants the magic artifact hidden in the 150-year-old cherrywood box. They each pay investigator, Axel Webb, to find the box, but things are not always what they seem, and people always lie to conceal their secret agendas.

English artist Alice Bulbeck and her twin brother, Edward, approach Axel Webb to find a lost Shakespeare play entitled The History of Cardenio. The play, performed only once for James I, has been lost for 400 years. It wasn’t included in the 1623 First Folio published by Shakespeare’s friends after his death. It is the only known play credited to William Shakespeare that has never been published. The question is, why?

On Christmas Eve, 1984, two Mexican veterinarian dropouts broke into the Museo Nacional del Antropologia. They stole over one hundred ancient Mayan treasures found in the tomb of K’inich Janaab’ Pakal, a discovery that rivals Tutankhamun in beauty, wealth, and cultural significance. The burglary became known as the El Robo del Siglo: The Theft of the Century.

Investigator Axel Webb is hired by a Japanese Naichō Agent on the recommendation of his Yakuza friend, Hibiki Sato, to find the Honjō Masamune katana that was last seen in 1945 when it was taken from a Mejiro Police Station by a US Army sergeant. The sergeant’s name was recorded by the police in Japanese.