Ambition

My friend Ann Rant says, “I have to get to work. I want to finish this book before I die.”

I say, “I have to get to work. I’ve got ten books to finish before I start the next series.”

We’re about the same age. Without disclosing any secrets, I can safely say that neither of us will be shopping for caskets any time soon.

I mean no disrespect to Ann. Some great writers like Harper Lee wrote only one book. To Kill a Mockingbird came out fifty years ago and instantly became part of the canon of great literature.

My ambition is both more humble and greater.

I want to publish a series that spans the last fifty years in the car business. That would be an epic accomplishment, except that the books are crime fiction, a humble genre.

I’m like J.K. Rowling. She’s a retired billionaire. I’m retired, too. She planned out the entire Harry Potter series before she started typing. I planned out my series, too. She kept the plan a secret. I can’t keep a secret. Maybe that’s why she’s a billionaire and I’m not.

All is revealed:

Frank Healy starts as a student and later as an engineer for Univers Industries in Paris, Michigan. If he’d kept his head down and his mouth shut, he’d’ve risen to the executive ranks before retiring. Instead, his uncompromising sense of justice drives him to right the wrongs he sees around him at work. Evil-doers die at his hands. His ambition is to mete justice and keep his job. No mean trick while you’re killing evil executives.

Red Crush (Agora International) Frank returns to school through the aftermath of the 1967 Detroit riots. The smoldering rage awakens him to the plight of black people, a group he’d previously ignored. When he begins a work assignment at a stamping plant, he falls into an imminent race war between black laborers and white skilled trades. People are dying in industrial “accidents.” When Frank realizes there is an invisible hand behind the discord, he sets out to stop the battle by causing his own accidents.

Safety Margin (Agora International) Frank has achieved his life ambition. He’s an engineer at the Univers Styling Center. When he is assigned to the nascent air bag program, he soon realizes that not all the test dummies are dummies. When the trail of his missing Vietnam veteran brother leads into the seamy underbelly of Detroit’s Cass corridor, he finds that the trail of missing veterans leads back to the air bag test program. No man should die for technological progress, and Frank is ready to stop the massacre. Meanwhile, Frank’s wife becomes sexually entangled with a Catholic priest, and the local archbishop is unwilling to stop it. Frank again feels compelled to intervene.

Grand Designs (any takers?) When the Arab Oil embargo shakes the foundations of the auto industry, the Univers CEO asks Frank and some cohorts to re-invent the company. When the time comes to show off their results, the stakes are raised. Frank must mediate between Charles dela Mothe, the styling chief bent on his legacy, and Newt Isakssen, the technical genius who knows how to keep the company afloat in a sea of regulations. Charles has another problem. He believes he has the right to sex with anyone in his employ. When his series of rapes leads to Frank’s door, he must act to save the company and his female coworkers. Charles must die.

Paris Pariahs (draft) After Frank kills Charles dela Mothe; he becomes an outcast at work. His ex-wife, Priscilla, arrives on his doorstep, drug addicted and riddled with AIDS. It is 1984. AIDS is a death sentence. Doctors and hospitals are terrified of the plague. Priscilla is turned away at the emergency room door. Frank nurses her through her final days while plotting revenge on those who infected her. At work, he uncovers a plot to use Methadol, the drug that addicted his wife, in a scheme to addict customers to new cars. The drug leads people to their deaths by heat stroke when they fail to leave overheated cars. Frank vows to stop the plot.

Filled with remorse after brutally murdering one of his victims, Frank attempts suicide, failing not once, but twice. As penance, he must bring justice without resorting to murder. On the way, he learns about mercy and forgiveness, but still rights the wrongs.

Cadillac Dreams (next) General Motors is on the ropes. They are on the verge of missing their payroll. Tony dela Mothe, the Univers CEO wants to regain the Cadillac name his family lost to GM eighty years earlier. When a slick Mergers and Acquisitions trader proposes a scheme to recover the brand through “green-mail” in a stock purchase deal, Tony is taken in. Two hundred million dollars later, the trader disappears with all the money, and Univers has nothing. Frank sets out on the trail of the grafter, intending to turn the tables with the help of Lucy Firenze, his wealthy girlfriend.

Electroshock Therapy – A hotshot aerospace entrepreneur comes to Univers with a plan to transform the car business with a revolutionary electric car. Clearly, they know everything about technology and nothing about the car business. Frank is thrust into the middle of the fray when his team is assigned to sort out the conflicting claims and make a business case. Everything comes together smoothly until a crash test reveals the fatal flaw. Sodium sulfur batteries burst into an unstoppable conflagration when torn open in an accident. Newt Isakssen wants to press on convinced that the problems can be masked until they are solved, but when the crash facility burns to the ground killing all the test engineers, a final confrontation is inevitable.

Broken China – When a new CEO takes the helm at Univers Industries, change is overdue. The Japanese have been gnawing away at the American car market and demand is stagnant. The company’s heir, Louis dela Mothe sees China as the company’s salvation, a vast untapped market, ripe for plucking. Frank Healy and Kit Karsten are assigned the lead. Kit gets the job because he has long experience with the Chinese, dating back to his days with the CIA on a secret mission in Cambodia. Frank is there because of his product savvy. Unfortunately, Kit’s history confronts some long memories on the other side of the bargaining table. Their opposite number, the chairman of the People’ Liberation Car Company, is a general who fought against Kit forty years earlier. As the two Americans scout the country looking at market conditions, they quickly realize they are being followed, and a simple business deal morphs into a harrowing struggle to stay alive and out of a Chinese jail. All the while, their negotiations continue as if nothing more was at stake than a few billion dollars.

The List – The stock market meltdown of 2008 is about to claim another casualty. Univers is nearly bankrupt. No one will buy a car from a company that might not be in business tomorrow. Drastic measures have become necessary. Louis dela Mothe gives Frank a list of highly paid executives with simple instructions: get them off the payroll, and ideally off the retirement rolls as well. He has sixty days until the government intervenes. What Louis wants is for Frank to intimidate the executives into quitting, and failing that to murder them. Frank wants nothing to do with the scheme, but Louis threatens to expose all Frank’s past misdeeds if he fails. Frank’s reputation precedes him, and most of the targets leave on their own, but a few holdouts bode ill for a showdown.

The battle over dirty laundry abruptly ends when the government seizes the company, installing a former general at the helm. His personal scheme for revival involves a giant locomotive like vehicle that is supposed to transform long distance transportation. What it does is drive other cars off the road and into the ditches, often on their roofs. When Frank fails to stop the juggernaut program, he becomes the target of a vendetta by the general that can only lead to greater tragedy.

Fuels Gold – Deep in the bowels of Univers Industries, a chemist invents a new ceramic catalyst that will revolutionize fuel cell technology. The zeolite breaks natural gas directly into carbon dioxide and hydrogen which produces electricity with remarkable efficiency. While the patents are being prepared, a strike team of ex-special forces soldiers breaks in and steals the prototypes. They offer the technology on Craig’s List to the highest bidder. Frank and his brother must find the culprits and recover the samples before a competitor decodes the technology and steals a march. The trail leads into the murky, quasi-legal world of mercenaries an corporate espionage.

Power Suit – When Univers funding of an unconventional scientist at Cadillac University leads to the discovery of a new piezo plastic fiber, the implications quickly become obvious. Clothing equipped with the right sensors and a small power supply, can multiple the strength of a person wearing the suit. At first the scientist sees it as a boon to paraplegics, restoring their mobility. But soon Univers military subsidiary seizes on the technology as a path to super-soldiers, men with infinite endurance and the strength of ten. When Frank reluctantly dons the prototype for a confrontation with the mad soldier he opposes, the battle becomes a clash of titans.

There, I’ve done it: two in eBooks, four written, six to go. Now all I need is a publisher.

Is that the phone ringing?