FRIDAY NOIR FICTION / "SOMEBODY FAMOUS"

SHORT STORY PREVIEW:       

“Somebody Famous” from Tough Love: Modern Noir Romances By Thomas Shess

 London, rain-slicked and anonymous. A man turns forty alone in a foreign city, carrying the quiet fatigue of an international reporter who has seen too many departure gates and too few reasons to stay anywhere very long. A last-minute concert ticket. 

A raw American voice tearing the ceiling off the Royal Albert Hall. And then, by accident or appetite, a late-night detour into the Playboy Club on Park Lane—velvet booths, cigarette smoke, champagne, and the hum of people pretending they aren’t lonely. 

 At a small table sits a woman who does not explain herself. What begins as flirtation becomes something more intimate and more dangerous: a shared meal at the Ritz, a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, the unsettling thrill of being mistaken for ordinary when you are anything but. She is American. She is bored. She flies Concorde as casually as others take taxis. And she refuses—gently, almost kindly—to give her name. 

 “Somebody Famous” is a story about anonymity and desire, about the strange relief of being unknown, and the quiet ache that comes with recognition. It explores the collision between celebrity and privacy, youth and fatigue, glamour and the hunger for something unremarkable and human. In classic noir fashion, the night is brief, the connection electric, and the truth withheld just long enough to matter. 

 Tough Love continues the Cantina Psalms universe (Shess' first novel) with a collection of modern noir romances—stories where attraction is sharp, dialogue cuts close to the bone, and intimacy arrives without promises. These are not love stories with clean exits. They are encounters that linger, echo, and leave their mark. 

 Arriving early March 2026.  Internet bookstores.
 

E-Book Arrival: If you'd like a personal email notice of "Tough Love" landing in bookstores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble please contact author: Thomas.Shess @gmail.com

RETRO FILES / AMERICAN ROMANCE REMEMBERED

They are not posing here. That is the quiet miracle of these images. John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy are simply walking, talking, negotiating the small choreography that binds two people together in daily life. 

A sidewalk conversation. A half-finished thought. The shared pace that comes from knowing one another well enough to fall into step without trying. New York was their hometown not by birthright, but by choice. It was where anonymity could briefly outrun legacy, where love could be practiced in public without ceremony. 

They moved through the city the way couples do when they believe time is abundant. No urgency. No performance. Just the unspoken intimacy of errands, opinions exchanged, laughter deferred to the next block. 

JFK Jr carried the weight of history with uncommon grace, but here he looks unburdened. Carolyn, so often reduced to iconography, appears thoughtful, grounded, present. Together they project something rarer than glamour: normalcy earned and protected. Their bond reads not as spectacle, but as refuge. 

What makes these images ache is not what we lost, but what they were still building. They were learning each other in real time. Learning how to argue and reconcile. 

How to walk a city without being swallowed by it. How to be married amid expectation. 

Gone since July 16, 1998 but not frozen in tragedy. These photographs preserves them as they lived at their best: mid-sentence, mid-stride, fully alive to one another. 

A reminder on this St. Valentine's Day that love, even briefly held, so often leaves a permanent warmth in the world.