Jacob Cable is a hard-boiled private detective in the style of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet. Believe it or not, he is also inspired by Robert E. Howard’s Conan to a certain extent. His world is post-World War II Los Angeles, shady characters, blasting guns and pummelling fists.
Thus far, four Jacob Cable books exist: Shiny Things, Pretty Things, Dead Things and Sharp Things. Shiny Things and Pretty Things are available in one book. Click the covers below to go to their Amazon pages.
Shiny Things was actually the first book I wrote. It wasn’t the first book I tried to write, but it was the first book I completed.
I actually started Shiny Things as a joke. By that point I was frustrated with the writing process of longer works of fiction because I couldn’t complete them, so I thought I’d try a less serious approach. Lo and behold, something about the process captured me, and I kept going, eventually finishing.
The world didn’t stop moving in celebration, but I had finished a book, and I learned a lot about the process. The first draft of Shiny Things was something like 75,000 words. I eventually cut that down to around 45,000 words because I realized that some of the stuff, while interesting, took away the focus from the main story. I hope to incorporate the stuff I cut into future Jacob Cable books. Hopefully, there are future Jacob Cable books…
After Shiny Things, I went directly into Pretty Things. Lo and behold, I finished that one, too. I remember even less about writing Pretty Things than I do about writing Shiny Things. I think my angle was I wanted to write it as kind of a “love” story as opposed to Shiny Things, which is more of a straight forward hard-boiled detective story.
I can’t remember if I then went directly into Dead Things or if I wrote another novel in between. I kind of think I wrote another novel in between (maybe two). I wanted to get back to third-person narration and see if I could finish a book using that. There is something about first-person that I find a little easier when it comes to writing. You only have to go where the main character goes. You only have to think what the main character thinks.
So after finishing that third-person book (or books), I went back to Jacob Cable and wrote Dead Things. Whereas Pretty Things was a “love” story, I wanted Dead Things to be more of an “action horror” story. In a way, Dead Things served as an “action horror” springboard to DogSS of War because I wrote DogSS of War directly after Dead Things.
Sharp Things was originally started after DogSS of War, I believe. I wrote about 14,000 words and then simply ran out of steam. I had been working too. I had a general idea of where the story would go at that time, yet it was 2021 before I touched it again. I then completed the book. It went in an entirely new direction than its original intention. There are a couple of reasons for this. One, I am a different person now. Two, I thought I might want to save a couple elements of my original intentions for a different book.
I’m not sure what the future holds for Jacob Cable. I am working on a few things, but I have to get some other things out of the way first. In the meantime, Shiny Things, Pretty Things, Dead Things and Sharp Things are good forays into Jacob Cable’s world where knights do exist, but they don’t wear armor. They wear trenchcoats and fedoras, and the dragons they face come in the guise of femme fatales, muscle-bound goons and dangerous criminals.