S.G. Browne

In April 2012, I published my third novel, Lucky Bastard. Or rather, Simon & Schuster / Gallery Books published my noir and luck-themed dark comedy, starring the luck poaching private detective Nick Monday.

Now Lucky Bastard is back, this time in trade paperback with a brand spanking new cover. And to mark the occasion, I’ve included a reading of Chapter 1, narrated by yours truly. Just click on the link below to access the MP3 file:

Lucky Bastard, Chapter 1

The opening line to the novel was something that just popped into my head during a writing exercise at my writer’s group back in July of 2006. I didn’t know where the line was going to lead me, so I just went with it and wrote a short scene about a guy being held at knife point on the roof of some fictional hotel. At the time, I had no idea that scene would end up as part of the opening chapter for a novel about luck.

But one day, after finishing up the final draft of my second novel, Fated, I sat down to figure out what my next book was going to be. I started flipping through my journals and that scene on the rooftop caught my attention. I still wasn’t sure what to do with it, until I combined it with some of the concepts I’d created in a short story about luck poachers called “Softland,” which I’d written in 2004. (You can find “Softland” in my eBook  short story collection Shooting Monkeys in a Barrel).

So that’s how Lucky Bastard was conceived, by a short story getting together with a journal entry. A little over nine months later, I had a newborn novel.