Ask the Author: J.B. Manheim
Answered Questions (3)
J.B. Manheim
Thanks very much for your question. I'm delighted that you enjoyed This Never Happened.
The three original books plus one new one are well along in the production process, and will be published within a few weeks, either together or in rapid succession, by Sunbury Press. They will be available from the Press itself, but also from all of the usual sources -- Amazon, B&N, etc.
The book you read was originally written as a one-off project, but when I found myself writing two more with ties to This Never Happened, my then-publisher and I decided to present the three together as The Cooperstown Trilogy. Now that there is a fourth book in press (and a fifth in progress), all of which are contemporary mystery-thrillers with roots in events of early baseball and various characters in common, we will be reframing the series as The Deadball Files.
I will make a note to let you know when the books are available. I hope you enjoy the rest as much as the first.
Best.
jb
The three original books plus one new one are well along in the production process, and will be published within a few weeks, either together or in rapid succession, by Sunbury Press. They will be available from the Press itself, but also from all of the usual sources -- Amazon, B&N, etc.
The book you read was originally written as a one-off project, but when I found myself writing two more with ties to This Never Happened, my then-publisher and I decided to present the three together as The Cooperstown Trilogy. Now that there is a fourth book in press (and a fifth in progress), all of which are contemporary mystery-thrillers with roots in events of early baseball and various characters in common, we will be reframing the series as The Deadball Files.
I will make a note to let you know when the books are available. I hope you enjoy the rest as much as the first.
Best.
jb
J.B. Manheim
My series of baseball novels all trace to the same source, Antiques Roadshow. In 2018 I was watching a rerun of a 2003 program that included some papers from Camp Hancock in Georgia in WWI. The papers showed that several future HOF inductees were together in a unit training on chemical weapons. In the context of known WWI history and propaganda effort, this was clearly put together by the Army and Baseball as a "show" unit -- a propaganda exercise. Yet aside from these truly obscure papers, there is no mention of the unit anywhere -- news media of the day, player bios, baseball history. I took a closer look at the papers themselves, and that got me started on trying to explain how such a disconnect might be explained. The result was This Never Happened, and everything else has spun out from that part of the story. Where is fact, where is fiction? I try to let the reader decide.
J.B. Manheim
This Never Happened was initially written as a stand-alone book, but during the lockdowns I ended up writing two sequels -- The GameKeepers: Whitewash, Blackmail and Doubleday Doubletake -- that will both be published by Summer Game Books in April 2022. Together, the books will be presented as The Cooperstown Trilogy, as all three have important scenes set in the symbolic home of baseball. All three take events from the Deadball Era as the starting point for contemporary-era mysteries and quests. Writer Adam Wallace, who first emerges as a character in This Never Happened, is more fully introduced in The GameKeepers, which also brings on the scene an evil villain who schemes to control The Game.
Nearing completion is a fourth book, also rooted in the Deadball Era, but with a new contemporary protagonist, a young lawyer who.... Oops! Almost gave it away!
Nearing completion is a fourth book, also rooted in the Deadball Era, but with a new contemporary protagonist, a young lawyer who.... Oops! Almost gave it away!
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Oct 07, 2023 08:42AM · flag