I'm Dying Here: A Comedy of Bad Manners

By Damien Broderick and Rory Barnes

R. Doubting Thomas Perdue, tough Aussie former P.I. and jailbird, is in trouble, and it can only get worse. Tom's *Feng shui* consultancy implodes when some bastard drives a Mack truck through his heritage office. Fatal things keep happening to his phones. And who's been blabbing about his racehorse-doping past? The love of his life has made a ten-year vow of celibacy to the Virgin Mary. Tom's Goth daughter's girlfriend's obese sister has vanished, extremely foul play suspected. Meanwhile, an unusual racing camel named Nile Fever has become an animal of interest to the Australian Federal Police, and Tom is up to his neck in the middle of the mess. I'm Dying Here is a darkly comic crime caper that leaves no taboo, or cell phone, unviolated. "This is a comic, crazy, original crime novel. You won't find another one like it this year, or, more likely, ever." Bill Crider. "What it reminds me of, powerfully, is a Donald Westlake comic novel about Dormunder. If you did smart, funny caper novels, I suspect you'll like this one as much as I do." Todd Mason. "Think anything Joseph Wambaugh, and then make it much more funny, and you start to get an idea of how much fun this is to read." Amazon five-star review.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Release date: Apr 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781434449016

Damien Broderick

Damien Broderick is Australia’s dean of science fiction, with a body of extraordinary work reaching back to the early 1960s. The White Abacus won two Year’s Best awards. His stories and novels, like those of his younger peer Greg Egan, are drenched with bleeding-edge ideas. Distinctively, he blends ideas and poetry like nobody since Roger Zelazny, and a wild, silly humor is always ready to bubble out, as in the cosmic comedy Striped Holes. His award-winning novel The Dreaming Dragons is featured in David Pringle’s SF: The 100 Best Novels, and was chosen as year’s best by Kingsley Amis. It was revised and updated as The Dreaming. In 1982 Broderick’s early cyberpunk novel The Judas Mandala coined the term virtual reality. His recent novels include the diptych Godplayers and K-Machines, Post Mortal Syndrome (with his wife, Barbara Lamar), and several collaborations with Rory Barnes: I’m Dying Here, Human’s Burden, and The Valley of the God of Our Choice, Inc. Like one of his heroes, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Broderick is a master of writing about radical new technologies, and The Spike and The Last Mortal Generation have been Australian popular-science bestsellers. His long novella, “Quicken,” is the second half of the novel Beyond the Doors of Death, cowritten with Grand Master Robert Silverberg (an expansion of Silverberg’s “Born with the Dead”), and is the closing story in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection. In 2005 Broderick received the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

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