Invasion of the Body Borrowers, the seventh Myke Phoenix story to be published and the third in the new series of 12 stories that will be completed in 2014, should be “live” in the Amazon Kindle Store by this time Monday, Jan. 6. Here are five random tidbits about Myke’s creation that you may or may not have gathered.
1. When I created Myke around 1990, I was a season ticket holder for the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay men’s basketball team, the Fighting Phoenix.
2. Astor City is vaguely patterned after Green Bay, Wis., a medium-sized city where two rivers meet downtown, but none of the buildings or locations in Astor City correspond to the real town.
3. OK, that’s not quite true. “Carlson’s Pretty Neat Antiques,” where Paul Phillips first encounters the Soulkeeper of Kiribati in the Myke Phoenix origin story, might bear some resemblance to Ralph’s Old Tyme Piano Co. aka Ralph’s Antiques & Phonographs.
4. Myke’s habit of exclaiming “Hokey smokes” and the various other expletives that appear in the series are direct descendents of William Harper “Johnny” Littlejohn, archaeologist and aide to Doc Savage, who was known to cry, “I’ll be superamalgamated!” from time to time.
5. It Came From Outer Space was one of my favorite movies as a youth, and Ray Bradbury was my favorite author, but it wasn’t until years later that I realized Bradbury had written that movie.
And what No. 5 might have to do with Myke Phoenix will have to wait until the release of Invasion of the Body Borrowers. The good news is that’s less than 24 hours as of this writing!
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