Sorry

I forgot to mention this: The Johns Hopkins stories are from 1995-1996. The last one may be from 1997. I'm not sure anymore.

So, they are not really early stories, since I've been writing fiction of my own ever since I was seven! I wrote my first crime stories in elementary school while I was ten or eleven. I remember writing something about a Finnish spy who had a jumping car quite like KITT of Michael Knight. A school mate read the story and said: cool stuff. My big brother also wrote all kinds of stuff. You might describe us as pulp writers, since we wrote war, espionage and adventure stories. And science fiction! I remember also something about sportsmen. We tried our hands with everything. (My brother has since semi-self-published a fantasy novel, I have published only one or two stories - one of them in my own mag! How low can you get?)

My first hardboiled experiment was written in 1985 or 1986, when I was almost fourteen. I have some of these still somewhere, but I haven't read them in a while. None of these are in electronic format, so I won't be able to post them here (maybe you're only too lucky...). I remember that I made up a list of the names for all my future private eyes. Ed Aristoteles is a favourite. Joe Novak who debuted in Isku stems from that era, and so does Ted von Mayerling, who is Novak's rich and annoying colleague. I also had a hero called Sam Odessa, which is a cool name still.