It’s time for another deep cut from the I Hunt Killers vault!

This is a short bit this time, but I think it’s a good one…

In the very first days of working on I Hunt Killers, I had a dilemma. I envisioned the story as a trilogy, but I knew there was a chance that a publisher would want a single book. So I devoted a tiny bit of time to thinking about what a single book would look like. In fact, in my original proposal, I even wrote this:

The book can end two ways. If itʼs a standalone, then Jazz — with his intimate knowledge of his fatherʼs secrets — catches him before he can get out of town and returns him to jail.

(The second way, obviously, was the trilogy path.)

But hey, guess what? I thought of another option if it was just one book. For a split second, I thought to myself…

Well, first I wrote this bit that would come early in the book. G. William says…

“I still remember your face the day I came and took your daddy away. I swear, there’s days I think he’s safer in prison than at home with you, Jazz. For a while there, I had nightmares you were gonna walk into my office with a satchel and toss it on my desk and your dad’s head would be inside it.”

And then I wrote this bit, which would have been the end of the story if it was just a single, standalone book:

G. William watched as the boy came closer, and quite against his conscious will, he found himself going for his gun.

“You gonna draw on me, G. William?” Jazz asked. “That what youʼre going to do?”

“No.”

But he kept his hand near the holster.

Jazz dropped the duffel bag on G. Williamʼs desk. It made a wet thud, and something in the way it settled made G. William think of the phrase “a sack full of kittens.” But he knew there were no kittens in there. No, siree.

“Iʼve done a bad thing,” Jazz said, and G. William nodded slowly. Sadly. Knowingly.

Now, obviously — obviously! — this runs counter to everything that happens in the trilogy. But for about an hour or so in late 2009/early 2010, I thought to myself, “Hell, if this is one book, maybe I should just go super-dark and break people’s brains.”

Decided not to. The publisher bought the trilogy. The rest is history.

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