Thursday, August 24, 2023

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls, in Order. The Noticeably Tough Private Eye Stories of Detective Mack Brain

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls 

by Jamie Bollenbach @2005-2023

A Tableau of Contents


This whole pulp story whizbang I wrote for fun in the mid 2000s is a wickerbasket full of schticks,  and one of these is that you didn't find this on the internet. Nope! You found these stories digging through musty boxes of 80 year old magazines in the basement of a vast and decrepit bookstore in Portland, Oregon.  Everything more or less takes places in wartime San Francisco, roughly in 1942, as Dectective Mack Brain chases Nazi spies around Pacific Heights and relaxes in affordable housing, but chapters are missing, stories end abruptly, and whole months are lost and gone.

This freed me to play and write them inside out, from one ridiculously overwrought sentence that popped up to figuring out how things got there or where they must go, rather than get tied up in knots with plots.

It was never edited properly, and the first few stories, freed by any need to be good writing, demonstrate that all too well. But they settles down into a better groove around #7, and it might be worth starting there.  It was written for fun and I hope you get a little kick out of it too.
- Jamie Bollenbach, Seattle, WA, August 2023


1 Chapter .22 Rimfire
2 Chapter 9mm Hollowpoint
3 Chapter .38 Special 

4 Chapter .41 Under Spurious Owls
5 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Chapter .44 Magnum - Where Kittens Dare
6 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Chapter .45 Auto: The Stink of Dissimilitude

7 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Chapter Twin .50s - The Sodden Wavering
8 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: The Tinkly Shell Game of Atomic Empires
9 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: The Obscure Greek Word Conspiracy
10 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: The Bronx Cheer Bombardier

11 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Where Blood Stains The Linoleum
12 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: The Milk of Human Violence
13 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Deadly Being and Violent Nothingness
14 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: In the Deepest Darkness of the Dark Despair of Deadly Desparation

 
15 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Snitch Pudding
16 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Red Nose Honking
17 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: A Snack Box of Buttered Lap Dogs
18 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Total Decor

 
19 Rebar For Tootsie Rolls: Kill Three, And It's One, Two, Four
20 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Shoot Me With a Kiss, Sugar Baby
21 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Party of Two For Murder and Drinks Available In the Bar if You Care to Wait
22 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Stop- You're Killing Me.

 
23 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: I Wandered Lonely As a Corpse
24 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Get Stingy Wheels
25 Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Backscrub at the Bloodbath
26 Rebar For Tootsie Rolls: Double Cross in Triplicate!