Bøger af Garman Lord

Another Commando criminal mystery tale drawn from Garman Lord's own youthful personal experiences. A fiendishly clever murderer with some scores to settle comes close to ending the Commando gang's crimebusting careers... permanently.

Quiet, bucolic Woodruff, in upstate New York, was put on the map by becoming the scene of the "Crime of the Millennium," namely the bizarre and ghastly assassination, during a campaign stump speech, of hometown boy/presidential candidate Szandor Barnisson, as told in Commando Chronicles book 5, DEARTH OF A NATION. Shortly thereafter, glamorous hometown high school junior Caitlyn Corcoran's international best selling exposé of that event, I WAS THERE, made her a sixteen year old multimillionairess. Caitlyn's insider view of that story came as a consequence of being one of precocious private eye Jeff Knight's team of young investigators, who banded together to help Jeff solve a crime that had been baffling the three letter Federal investigative agencies. Following a brief flirtation with a Hollywood career after graduation, Caitlyn decided instead to come back to her home town and start her own indie movie company, "Millennial Films." In that enterprise, Caitlyn is lucky to have the help of several gifted friends, including young art prodigy/budding auteur Marcia Foster, tapped as Film Director. Private eye Jeff Knight steps up as head of security, along with the several other hats he wears. Those security responsibilities suddenly come a cropper when a young stranger, stage magician Doctor Lazarus, in hopes of launching his career by joining the Millennial showbiz cattle call, runs afoul of the ghost of a never-solved triple murder that actually happened years before he was born. Things get ever weirder as Jeff's partner, psychic detective Andy Fassett, passes along a message from Doctor Lazarus, beyond the grave, warning them "not to trust the cops," a warning which bears lethal fruit.All of this with several movies being shot in the midst of the mélee, hoping to wrap in time for the Cedar Lodge First Annual Film Festival. LET'S MAKE A MOVIE is a multi-layered fair play murder mystery that invites the reader to solve the crime along with the sleuths. A-a-a-and... action!

"What Does Heathenry Mean" is the long-awaited sequel to Garman Lord's long out of print "The Way of the Heathen, A Handbook of Greater Theodism." Religion is one of humanity's most ancient sociocultural institutions, and to this day one of our most misunderstood. In detailing the history and explaining the significance of Theodish Belief, the religion he founded in 1976, Lord feels it prudent to review the history and significance of religion in general as a way to better understand Theodism's place in it in particular. Truth to tell, although religious belief spans a wide spectrum of human ideas and aspirations, there are some universal truths that may be found to apply throughout. Theodish Belief is a form of what today's Millennial Age of religious transition calls "retroheathenry," and in this book Garman Lord, born and raised a strict Roman Catholic, details the flaws he discovered in his deep study of Christianity and recounts the path that ultimately led him to a rediscovered form of his ancestral pre-Christian folk religion as the right religion for him.

Annie Oakley is a work of historical fiction built around the 1897 visit of Annie, as a performer in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, to the small rural city of Watertown in Northern New York. The device used by the author, a mystery crime writer and a Watertown native himself, is to have Annie solve a crime during her visit. The visit was real, the crime fictional, although no more than a small diversion from the body of the narrative itself. The book's real point is to give the reader a taste of the flavor of the late nineteenth century, especially in small town America, and of traveling extravaganzas of the day like "Buffalo Bill's Wild West," and also to detail Annie Oakley's highly unusual life, so different from the conventional contemporary mythology of shows like "Annie Get Your Gun," before and after her Watertown visit. It is said that "Annie Get Your Gun" star Ethel Merman was asked why Annie's real life would not have made for a much more interesting stage play, her response was "It would, but then the show would be a melodrama and I'd be a wreck."

THREE CAN KEEP A SECRET ..., as book 6 in the Commando Chronicles mystery crime/urban thriller series, picks up where book 5, DEARTH OF A NATION, left off. In DEARTH, we watched Consulting Detective Jeff Knight and his dauntless band of talented young friends beat the Federal investigative agencies to the punch by solving the Crime of the Millennium, the bizarre barbaric assassination of presidential candidate Szandor Barnisson, following which high school junior/aspiring writer Caitlyn Corcoran made hundreds of millions with an international best selling tell-all book about her involvement called I WAS THERE. Following that triumph, Caitlyn's young friend, the artist Marcia Foster, reaped many millions more by teaming up with a Cinematography Professor to turn the book into a movie. In book 6, THREE CAN KEEP A SECRET ..., we find Caitlyn and Marcia pooling their money and talents to found a movie company in their home town, and it's off to more high adventure as murder and intrigue rears its head in their midst, complicating things and calling again on the talents of PI Jeff Knight to step in and take charge. As always, it's a complex mystery and a complex, colorful cast of characters, but, again as always, fair play all the way, inviting the reader to pit his own wits against good guys and bad guys alike to solve the crime, or say rather crimes. All that, and make a movie too? Never a dull moment for the Commando crew!

Book number four of the "Commandos" series. Got a mystery that needs solving? Geoffrey Knight is your man! He thinks, for some reason, that he is a reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes, and when you see him in action, you almost think he just might be right! Turning his talents to treasure hunting this time around, Jeff and his friends get to watch themselves on cable TV!

A collection of the author's poetry, together with the author's revisionist poetic criticism.

Number three in the "Commandos" series. Geoffrey Knight, a young PI who fancies himself a reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes, joins the Commandos just in time to help them out of heaps of danger, juggling one mystery after another with deductive skills that would do his mythical hero proud!

The strangest book you have ever read, perhaps even the strangest book ever written, may be the one you now hold in your hands! In it, an ancient heathen goddess of love and wisdom decides to incarnate into an earthly life in the bodies of four baby girls. Her object? Basically, to overthrow Christianity and reclaim her worldly pre-Christian folk congregation. Sound like a work of fantasy? It isn't. This book's modern plot is based on the actual ancient heathen folklore; there is no fantasy in it. Unfortunately, the girls, born with the goddess' brain, but not her mind, will or memories, don't know they are goddesses sent to earth with a purpose. As they grow, the heavens are foiled in one attempt after another to get their mission and message through to them. This book is the story of one of the girls, Frieda Ziegler, the "ugly duckling" of the litter, who happens by a quirky twist of fate to have been born as the only child of a fundamentalist Christian family, who are determined to raise her up in a nun-like Christian existence as an old maid in order to stay home and take care of them in their old age. Near suicidal in her despair, Frieda feels doomed, until the day when fate finally brings all the girls together, and things begin to get really strange, all within the few weeks of one summer vacation. Needless to say, it's a summer vacation like no other!

A modern blacksmith knows the ancient lost art of crafting a magic weapon powerful enough to rule the world, but his knowledge costs him his life when the weapon falls into the wrong hands. Getting it into the right hands turns into a cross country quest destined to throw a college professor, his doctoral candidate girlfriend, a venturesome student, his humble but steadfast girlfriend, and a wizard versed in the ancient and secret arts together in a harrowing common cause. An urban mystery thriller based on actual ancient mystic lore.

The story of the crime of the millennium, told as a tale of the sublime overlaid by the ridiculous. A political parody of a presidential election cycle, played as the fiasco that it really is. Three politicians vying for president until one of them, hometown boy Szandor Barnisson, is eliminated by an assassination of the most diabolical kind that history has ever recorded, and then there were two. In the end there were none, with one of the remaining candidates, Hilarity Hilton, dead and the other one, Darnitol Drumpfke, in prison, so that the presidential election must be called off until the Supreme Court can figure out what to do. So what does President Kerry O'Kenya, America's first Black Irish President, decide to do? Obviously, America is in a fix. If O'Kenya calls off the presidential election, the Oval Office is doomed to default to House Speaker Paleo Rhinoceros, a known fanboy of Objectivalist philosopher Annie Randy. It is of course common knowledge that Objectivalism was repurposed by Church of Satan founder Anton LaVicious into a religious paradigm to be used as the doxology of the Satanic Bible. Accordingly, rather than turn the West Wing over to his Satanic Majesty, President O'Kenya is left with no option but to name himself President pro tem by executive order, until such time as the Supreme Court can manage to untangle the whole mess. Read it and chuckle, if you dare, and hope and pray that this hilarious take on American politics doesn't turn out to be too unfunnily prophetic!

Nine of the "troublous tales" in this anthology are reprints of short stories by Garman Lord, reprinted from the anthologies "This'll Kill Ya" and "The Unusual Suspects," both now out of print. The tenth troublous tale, "Gunfight At the Diaper Corral," is new, published here for the first time. In this collection, Garman Lord shows off his yarn-spinning virtuosity, in a mixture of styles ranging from droll humor to fantasy to harrowing intrigue to gritty street action to suspense thriller to hard-boiled whodunnit; action here to please every palate and every taste.

This exposition is a series of six essays on controversial subjects as analyzed and expounded upon by heathen writer Garman Lord, with answers to all the common puzzles guaranteed to win the applause of some and infuriate others. Lord tackles, in quick succession in this very brief book, I: The "old gods" were real, the new gods are not; II: Proof of the nonexistence of God, III: The impossibility of Christianity, Hell and Jesus Christ, IV: The impossibility of computers and Artificial Intelligence taking over the Earth, V: Zeno's paradoxes and other ancient thought experiments, and VI: A demonstration of the reality of psychism and witchcraft, followed by a brief discussion of the intellectual health of contemporary American culture. In many of these essays, the approach is lighthearted, but the ideas expressed are dead serious, often framed in logical syllogism and buttressed as necessary by established scholarly research and historical fact. A very short thinking man's book chock full of ideas worth thinking about long and long!

What is the greatest cause of human unhappiness? It's when men and women don't get along. So why don't men and women get along? It's because they don't understand each other. What is the cure? The cure is better education, starting all the way back to when men and women are boys and girls. So why don't we Americans have that kind of education? Unfortunately, it's because we Americans just aren't very good at that sort of thing. You know, our Puritan historical and cultural heritage, all that. But, is it ever too late, even for grown up men and women? If only there were some sort of instruction manual! Well, guess what? Now, there is!

An alarming percentage of American middle class wage earners live out their working lives in debt, one paycheck away from living out of a dumpster. An alarming percentage of American landlords are more properly slumlords, expert in skirting local ordinances and law enforcement. An alarming percentage of municipal code enforcement offices are too understaffed and under-budgeted to enforce the writs they are daily called upon to serve. An alarming percentage of middle class Americans lead lives of what Thoreau called quiet, and sometimes not so quiet, desperation. For some of them, "quiet desperation" can lead to bloody murder. An alarming percentage of homicide files go cold-case every year without ever being solved and closed by law enforcement. All too often, there are simply insuperable limits on what law enforcement can accomplish. Unless...Unless you're a town like Woodruff New York, where there dwells an upright citizen who knows how to work the shady side of the street when necessary, Private Eye Geoffrey Knight, considered by many to be the greatest Consulting Detective since Sherlock Holmes. Do take an hour or so to tag along with Jeff Knight and his young twenty-first century "street arabs" down "Desolation Alley" into the dark side of domestic real estate, human tragedy and bloody murder, deducing step by step with them in a fair-play murder mystery which has, for the moment, got local law enforcement stumped. Besides being a compelling murder mystery, "Desolation Alley," at 87 pages the first novella of Garman Lord's "Commando Chronicles" series, has its share of chuckles, heartwarming moments and deeper human truths along the way.

WHAT IF THE OLD GODS ARE STILL ALIVE? In the high heavens, where time means nothing, too much time has been whiled away by ancient forgotten gods left with nothing better to do anymore than loaf their days away singing and making merry. Until one of them, a lady, finally thinks to ask why? Why have we sat idle and let our folk be stolen from us? And not just any lady, either, but the Lady Fréo Syr, lover of Wóden Allfather, goddess of love and fertility, wisdom and magic, loveliest creature in all creation. And now, the Lady has decided. She wants her babies back. She wants herself and her friends to be celebrated, fained, boasted and blóted-to, around the merry meadbenches of the world of men as in days of old! The question, then? How to do it! The lady Fréo decides she must wade the worlds, walk abroad in the wer-eld of men. She must suss out the new religion, learn the sources and secrets of its power, and its weaknesses, knowledge and wisdom she will use in due time to work its undoing. She must live an earthly life. For that purpose, then, the Lady arranges to incarnate into four unusually beautiful and talented girl babies, together with a god born into a boy baby to become their earthly consort. Let the adventure begin!