NEW RELEASE / TOUGH LOVE: / CHAT WITH AUTHOR AND FREE EXCERPT

Dear Reader:

Every writer eventually has to answer a quiet question: What exactly am I writing about? With Tough Love: Modern Noir Romances, my answer is simple enough to say but harder to define. These are romances. But they are not the kind that live comfortably inside the tidy architecture of conventional love stories. Noir romance occupies a different street entirely. The streetlights are dimmer there, the promises less certain, and the characters who wander through the stories know that love is not always a rescue. Sometimes it is the risk itself. 

 That distinction matters. I am not a male version of a Harlequin novelist. Nothing against the genre, but noir romance moves through a different emotional climate. In these stories the attraction between men and women carries gravity. It has consequences. Desire collides with ambition, loyalty, betrayal, power, and the private compromises people make to stay alive in complicated worlds. The characters may fall in love, but they are also capable of wrecking each other. That tension is the heartbeat of noir. 

The men and women who inhabit these pages are not naïve about romance. Many of them have already been bruised by it. Some have survived marriages that collapsed under ambition. Others have made careers in professions where trust is a rare commodity. Private investigators, lawyers, political insiders, wanderers, and opportunists move through the stories. They know better than to expect fairy tales, yet they still feel the pull of connection. In noir romance, love does not arrive as salvation. It arrives as a test. 

 That is why the genre is not for everyone. Noir romance speaks most clearly to readers who have lived long enough to recognize the shadows behind attraction. Those who understand how complicated intimacy can become when pride, fear, and longing sit at the same table. The characters in Tough Love do not pretend to be saints. They make mistakes. They gamble with their hearts. Sometimes they pay dearly for the privilege. 

 Still, there is something strangely exhilarating about visiting that territory. Noir romance allows us to explore the emotional edge without necessarily living there ourselves. It is a dramatic visit, not a permanent address. Readers step into these lives for a few pages, experience the pulse of dangerous affection, and then return to their own mornings perhaps a little more aware of how fragile and powerful love can be. 

 Modern readers also face another interesting question while reading short fiction. Are these stories real or reel? Are they slices of life drawn from experience, or are they scenes that might belong on a cinema screen? The answer, of course, is both. Fiction borrows freely from the emotional truths of life while arranging them with the clarity of storytelling. A look across a café table. A phone call that changes everything. A confession delivered too late. Life provides the raw material, and narrative gives it shape. 

 That cinematic quality is no accident. Noir has always shared DNA with film. The atmosphere, the moral ambiguity, the sudden turn of fate. When a reader enters one of these stories, the hope is that the page feels almost like a camera lens. You see the room. You hear the dialogue. You feel the tension that hangs between two people who know they should probably walk away from each other but do not. 

 Endure me here: If you decide to visit the world of Tough Love, think of the experience less as a purchase and more as a small ticket to ride. A brief journey you might take with your morning coffee. A handful of stories where attraction and consequence travel together, where romance is neither innocent nor entirely doomed, and where a few characters manage to survive the experience of loving someone perhaps by the narrowest of margins. 

AN EXCERPT.

 The following glimpse appears in the short story "Transit Lounge" from Tough Love. The choice of the passage came from a recent reader who mentioned she thought it the soul of the work. Of course, I was flattered.  Bon mots from a reader is why we write.  I'm blushing corny as that reads.

 Now the Moscow concourse swam with men pretending not to look. Cameras in every corner. His flight to Stockholm boarding in minutes. Then—impact. 

A boy tumbled against his leg, laughing as only a three-year-old could. Gresham scooped the giggling toddler, who smelled of baby powder. The mother rushed over, eyes grateful, English too polished. 

“Thank you… are you bound for Stockholm?” 

“Yes,” he said, surprised she knew. 

She smiled thin as glass. “Then stay at the Gander Hotel. My friend Annee Kinder works there.” 

He froze. She was gone before he could take a step. The packet in his pocket was gone. 

*** 

At the Gander’s glass doors, he saw her through the window—slim in black silk, tray balanced on one hand. He knocked once, knuckles on the pane. Her head turned. Eyes widened. The tray crashed to the floor. Moments later she was in his arms, breathless, the kiss fierce enough to steal the years away. 

“This can’t be,” Annee whispered. “You found me.” 

And for the first time in years, Tom Gresham let himself believe he had.  

###

The eBook edition of Tough Love: Modern Noir Romances is available for $2.99 through the BookBaby bookstore.   

If you wish to find the book: https://store.bookbaby.com/book/tough-love 

TRAIN TRAX / LAST BRIT STEAMER ACROSS RANNOCK MOOR

For many visitors, the most famous view of Rannoch Moor comes from the train window. The West Highland Line crosses directly through it, running between Glasgow and Fort William.

There are trains, and then there are trains that seem to breathe. The LMS Stanier Class 5 4-6-0 No. 44871 (above), is one of the latter—a machine of iron and steam that carries not only passengers but memory itself. In the hush before departure, when vapor curls along the platform and the great driving wheels stand poised, she feels less like machinery and more like a living relic of Britain’s romantic age of rail. 

Affectionately known as a Black Five, No. 44871 belongs to a class that once stitched together cities, villages, moors, and mills across the length of the island. Designed in the 1930s by Sir William Stanier for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, these engines were built not for ornament but for purpose—versatile mixed-traffic locomotives capable of hauling crack passenger expresses one day and heavy freight the next. Yet in their purposeful lines and steady cadence, they acquired something more enduring than utility: they acquired devotion. 

More than 842 Black Fives were constructed between 1934 and 1951, making them one of the most numerous and successful classes of steam locomotive ever built in Britain. But numbers alone do not explain their hold on the imagination. It is the sight of No. 44871 advancing beneath a sky the color of burnished pewter, the rhythm of pistons echoing against stone viaducts, the faint scent of coal smoke drifting over hedgerows—that is where history becomes intimate. 

No. 44871 itself was built in 1945 at Crewe Works and entered service just as World War II was ending. After nationalization of the railways in 1948, it was renumbered 44871 under British Railways, and it continued in regular service right up to the end of steam on Britain’s national network in August 1968. It was one of the last steam locomotives withdrawn from duty. After withdrawal from service, 44871 avoided the scrapyard. It was preserved directly from British Rail stock and spent years at Carnforth, later becoming part of the mainline steam movement when the ban on steam operation was lifted in the early 1970s. 

Over its preservation life it has worn the name Sovereign and has been based at various heritage railways, most recently under the ownership of Ian Riley & Son Ltd. It has operated enthusiast excursions and charter trains over the national network and on scenic routes. 

Ronnoch Moor Station, West Scotland

One of those scenic routes is the West Highland Line in the Scottish Highlands, where 44871 has been photographed and filmed crossing Rannoch Moor and climbing the gradients between remote stations such as Corrour and Rannoch. These steam excursions often form part of heritage rail tours such as the Jacobite service between Fort William and Mallaig and special photography charters. The Moor. Rannoch Moor is one of the last great wildernesses in the United Kingdom — a vast sweep of bog, heather, rock, and lonely lochans spread across roughly fifty square miles of western Scotland. It lies west of Loch Rannoch and stretches into both Highland and Perth and Kinross council areas. There are no towns on the moor. No farms. Hardly a tree. Just open sky, peat underfoot, and water pooled in dark, reflective hollows that seem to hold the weather itself. Geologically, Rannoch Moor is a glacial landscape. 

Geologically, Rannoch Moor is a glacial landscape. 

During the last Ice Age, massive ice sheets scoured and flattened the terrain, leaving behind granite outcrops, thin soils, and poor drainage. Over millennia, peat built up across the surface, creating the boggy ground that defines the moor today. Despite its stark appearance, it is ecologically important. Rannoch Moor is designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a Special Area of Conservation. Rare plants such as the Rannoch-rush grow there, along with red deer, golden plover, and birds of prey that favor its open isolation. 

For many visitors, the most famous view of Rannoch Moor comes from the train window. The West Highland Line crosses directly through it, running between Glasgow and Fort William. Engineers in the 1890s faced extraordinary difficulty building the railway across what was essentially floating peat. They laid down a mattress of tree trunks and brushwood to stabilize the track — a feat of Victorian persistence in one of Britain’s most inhospitable landscapes. Geologically, Rannoch Moor is a glacial landscape. During the last Ice Age, massive ice sheets scoured and flattened the terrain, leaving behind granite outcrops, thin soils, and poor drainage. Over millennia, peat built up across the surface, creating the boggy ground that defines the moor today.