About Les
The writing bug first hit me in 2004 when I was asked to write a weekly article on the Canadian Football League for a magazine then known as the Winner's Edge. It was a weekly that catered to those who wagered on sporting events. The tag line was The Newspaper for Sports Bettors.
Will it be Edmonton and Montreal Again? Pretty original, eh? I throw in that "eh" cuz it's the Canadian Football League. Anyhow, believe it or not, I did get better as time went on. The other problem was timing. It was my job to predict the outcome of the following weeks games and back it up with "expert" analysis in an article of about 800 words...with an 11pm Sunday night deadline. Well, there was one problem with that.
Some Sunday night games did not end until 8 or 9pm. I needed the results of these games before I could entertain any thoughts about making any accurate predictions on the following weeks games. This left a very small window time-wise to put some thoughts together, get them down on the computer and send them to the boss. However it was a fun experience and it was always a kick seeing my name in print beside some very good sportswriters such as Pat Archibald and Ben Burns.
I stuck with the magazine for several years and always had thoughts of writing a book in the back of my mind. While still writing for Winner's Edge I began to think about what kind of book I would like to write. I had always been a bit of a movie nut and a book about Hollywood seemed like it might be a good fit. I had also been a fan of mysteries and where better to start than with the life and mysterious death of Marilyn Monroe. There was no shortage of unhappy endings in Hollywood movies and, unfortunately, these seemed to transfer over to the real lives of the entertainers. The more research I did the more I got into it. The result was my first book Hollywood's Unhappiest Endings: Legends Never Die. There were a few problems though. Click on the Legends Never Die page for more info.
After the disappointment of the Hollywood book I sought to quickly get rid of that bad taste in my mouth. I had always been a fan of rock and roll...mostly classic rock from the 1960's era. I began to think about a book, similar to the Hollywood book, about tragedies in rock music. Again, there is certainly no shortage of them to write about. I decided to cross over to all genres of music and included tragic endings of musicians in rock, country, jazz and even covered Mozart in 1791. The result was The Day the Music Died.
We had a very successful launch of the book at McNally Robinson Booksellers in 2010 and even made the Winnipeg Bestseller Top 5 list in September 2010 but more about that later. You can click on The Day the Music Died page and read several chapters and some teasers from other chapters to give you an idea of what the book is all about. You can also see a complete table of contents to see if any of your old faves are included in the book.
My son Tristan and I started playing with this one back in 2011. It's working title was They Walk Among Us: A History of Serial and Spree Killers 1888-2012. We have shortened the title but not the book. It is a real eye opener and will go far beyond what you read in the newspapers about true crime.
We decided to release They Walk Among Us as a series of kindle ebooks available through amazon. First, we took out the Women Who Kill section and released it as a kindle ebook titled Hell Hath No Fury: Women Who Kill which we released on December 1. The first one in the They Walk Among Us series was released on January 14, 2014. Check out the They Walk Among Us page for updates.
We decided to release They Walk Among Us as a series of kindle ebooks available through amazon. First, we took out the Women Who Kill section and released it as a kindle ebook titled Hell Hath No Fury: Women Who Kill which we released on December 1. The first one in the They Walk Among Us series was released on January 14, 2014. Check out the They Walk Among Us page for updates.