The book I’ve been working on: introducing “The Gangster Crown.”
My upcoming novel is the classic story of the rise and fall of a criminal kingpin, with a few modern twists.
These days I’m known as a historian and YouTuber (and to my middle school students, as their history teacher), but I’ve been writing novels for years and there’s always something or other in the pipeline. Some of you who read this blog may also have read one of my books. I’m generally reluctant to announce works-in-progress until and unless I know they’re actually going to get finished and see the light of day, which means most of the time I don’t announce them at all until a pretty late stage. But I think the time has come to announce my upcoming novel, The Gangster Crown, which is now nearing completion. There’s no target date for its release yet but it’s likely to be before the end of 2024. That is, if all goes well—books, especially novels, tend to have minds of their own, and some stubbornly refuse to be born until the timing is just right.
As you might guess from the title, The Gangster Crown is a crime novel. It’s basically a traditional gangster rise-and-fall tale of a gangland kingpin and how he comes to, and falls from, the pinnacle of power in the underworld. However, there are a couple of little twists on this very old story. Set principally in the 1990s and early 2000s, The Gangster Crown principally concerns Terrence, an otherwise ordinary Gen-X kid who happens to be gifted with a capacity for highly complex strategic thought. In his fantasy world fueled by action movies and board games like Risk and Axis & Allies—which every nerdy Gen-X boy was familiar with—Terry fancies himself a great figure like Napoleon or Julius Caesar. But the modern world has little use for a man like that, and after serving without distinction in the Gulf War Terry winds up working a dead-end retail job at an urban shopping mall. Unlikely as it seems, this proves to be the platform on which Terry builds a criminal empire based on shoplifting. As he rises in the underworld, he comes into increasing conflict with his more traditional criminal rivals, such as the city’s Mafia boss and a ruthless gang chieftain. The ultimate question in the story is what price Terry will pay to stay on top, or whether the sacrifices he’s already made to get there were ever worth it in the first place.
