James V. Irving was born and raised in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia, majoring in English. He holds a law degree from the College of William and Mary. After completing his undergraduate studies at UVA, Mr. Irving spent two years employed as a private detective in Northern Virginia, where he pursued wayward spouses, located skips, investigated insurance claims, and handled criminal investigations. In his early years as a lawyer, he practiced criminal law, which, along with his investigative experience and trial work, informs this fictional account of Joth Proctor. Mr. Irving and his wife, Cindy, live in Vienna, Virginia.
My book begins the multi-volume story of Joth Proctor, a successful but underemployed criminal defense lawyer in contemporary Arlington, Virginia. After Holly Saunders’s death, either Sully, her estranged husband and Joth’s best friend, or Paul Saunders, Holly’s brother, and Joth’s college teammate, will become the owner of a valuable piece of developable real estate. Both men are willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get it. When people start turning up dead, we wonder what else they are capable of.
In a world where the line between right and wrong is unclear, Joth must navigate a world of strip clubs, corrupt cops, conmen, and criminals and solve the puzzle before someone else does.
I love this unusual approach to a historical whodunit. A hospitalized police detective combats the boredom of inaction by reviewing a compelling historical mystery: did much-maligned King Richard III commit the crimes that have been attributed to him for centuries? Or was he the victim of character assassination by those who deposed him?
This thought-provoking novel–a quick and compelling read–examines an eternal question: is history the truth or the version of truth presented by the victors? It’s as important a question today as it ever was.
_________________________ Josephine Tey's classic novel about Richard III, the hunchback king whose skeleton was famously discovered in a council car park, investigates his role in the death of his nephews, the princes in the Tower, and his own death at the Battle of Bosworth.
Richard III reigned for only two years, and for centuries he was villified as the hunch-backed wicked uncle, murderer of the princes in the Tower. Josephine Tey's novel The Daughter of Time is an investigation into the real facts behind the last Plantagenet king's reign, and an attempt to right what many believe to be the…
I was looking for a writer to breathe new life into the sometimes-stuffy traditional English novel format, and Wilkie Collins is that man. In what is widely considered the first detective novel, Collins introduces many of the tropes of the classic whodunit, including the English country house setting, the gentleman detective, the skilled professional contrasted with the bungling local investigator, and a generational curse arising from the initial theft.
Underlying this gripping tale is the truth that the moonstone belongs not to one of the principal players who compete for it but to the religious site in India from which it was originally stolen. Justice has an immediate, local, eternal, and global context. The result is a book with memorable characters and enough twists and turns to keep you guessing until the end.
Who, in the name of wonder, had taken the Moonstone out of Miss Rachel's drawer?
A celebrated Indian yellow diamond is first stolen from India, then vanishes from a Yorkshire country house. Who took it? And where is it now? A dramatist as well as a novelist, Wilkie Collins gives to each of his narratorsa household servant, a detective, a lawyer, a cloth-eared Evangelical, a dying medical manvibrant identities as they separately tell the part of the story that concerns themselves.
One of the great triumphs of nineteenth-century sensation fiction, The Moonstone tells of a mystery that for page after…
This novel immediately plunged me into a world of lies and deception, and it retains its air of non-stop tension no matter how many times I re-read it.
I love the cast of colorful characters that populate a grim world of greed and self-interest, where trust is extended at great risk, and the private agent must look out for himself. Sam Spade lives by his wits and his fists.
His simple code is tested by the pull of personal and professional temptation presented by a rare, valuable, and dubious relic. Who doesn’t love that formula?
One of the greatest crime novels of the 20th century.
'His name remains one of the most important and recognisable in the crime fiction genre. Hammett set the standard for much of the work that would follow' Independent
Sam Spade is hired by the fragrant Miss Wonderley to track down her sister, who has eloped with a louse called Floyd Thursby. But Miss Wonderley is in fact the beautiful and treacherous Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and when Spade's partner Miles Archer is shot while on Thursby's trail, Spade finds himself both hunter and hunted: can he track down the jewel-encrusted bird, a…
Billy Budd, the handsome sailor, is the proverbial Everyman, and I was drawn to him in the same way his shipmates were. Melville may have been the first author to apply the classical tragic formula to a simple man without wealth, power, or social standing.
Budd, beloved and respected by all, advances by his virtues and falls due to his single shortcoming. A man whose strengths are balanced by his weaknesses, he is a relatable protagonist who forces me to confront the unsettling truth that our most careful plans and aspirations crumble when fate intervenes.
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
Though best-known for his epic masterpiece Moby-Dick, Herman Melville also left a body of short stories arguably unmatched in American fiction. In the sorrowful tragedy of Billy Budd,Sailor; the controlled rage of Benito Cereno; and the tantalizing enigma of Bartleby, the Scrivener; Melville reveals himself as a singular storyteller of tremendous range and compelling power. In these stories, Melville cuts to the heart of race, class, capitalism, and globalism in America, deftly navigating political and social issues that resonate as clearly in our time as they did in Melville's. Also…
I find it hard to avoid or even recognize the temptations that are inevitably attached to success. The excesses and immorality of the world he aspires to come back to bite Jay Gatsby when he becomes a victim of the vices he seeks to embrace.
All that glitters is not gold; in fact, gold is an irresistible snare that only those schooled in corruption can avoid. The pages of this book are filled with individual characters that jump off the page, but admirable traits are in short supply. Idealistic, romantic Gatsby himself is as close as we get to a real hero in this book.
As the summer unfolds, Nick is drawn into Gatsby's world of luxury cars, speedboats and extravagant parties. But the more he hears about Gatsby - even from what Gatsby himself tells him - the less he seems to believe. Did he really go to Oxford University? Was Gatsby a hero in the war? Did he once kill a man? Nick recalls how he comes to know Gatsby and how he also enters the world of his cousin Daisy and her wealthy husband Tom. Does their money make them any happier? Do the stories all connect? Shall we come to know…
Too often, I find that novelists force the endings of their books in ways that aren’t true to their characters, the stories, or their settings. Often, they do so to provide the Hollywood ending that many readers crave. That always leaves me cold. I love novels whose characters are complex, human, and believable and interact with their setting and the story in ways that do not stretch credulity. This is how I try to approach my own writing and was foremost in my mind as I set out to write my own book.
The Oracle of Spring Garden Road explores the life and singular worldview of “Crazy Eddie,” a brilliant, highly-educated homeless man who panhandles in front of a downtown bank in a coastal town.
Eddie is a local enigma. Who is he? Where did he come from? What brought him to a life on the streets? A dizzying ride between past and present, the novel unravels these mysteries, just as Eddie has decided to return to society after two decades on the streets, with the help of Jane, a woman whose intelligence and integrity rival his own. Will he succeed, or is…
“Crazy Eddie” is a homeless man who inhabits two squares of pavement in front of a bank in downtown Halifax, Nova Scotia. In this makeshift office, he panhandles and dispenses his peerless wisdom. Well-educated, fiercely intelligent with a passionate interest in philosophy and a profound love of nature, Eddie is an enigma for the locals. Who is he? Where did he come from? What brought him to a life on the streets? Though rumors abound, none capture the unique worldview and singular character that led him to withdraw from the perfidy and corruption of human beings. Just as Eddie has…
