TY SCARLET is The Big Sleep filtered through The Twilight Zone, the epic promise of The Avengers entangled with the unpredictability of Knives Out.
A cinematic hard-boiled mystery tinged with noir and infused with puckish narration, quick dialogue, and unpredictable action harkening back to the best of Chandler and Hammett, TY SCARLET's first steps of enigmatic adventure begin with the classic “missing girl” setup but quickly take a hard, uncanny left into the cosmic implications of the monomythic hero.
It is The Thin Man becoming dangerously out-of-breath chasing after Joseph Campbell and Dave Barry.
TY SCARLET is a bracing, wildly satisfying read for fans of vintage pulp and classic P.I.-style noir, while also offering something to fans of everything and everyone from Moonlighting to The Night Gallery, Gilgamesh to C. Auguste Dupin, and Patricia Cornwell to Jeff Strand.
He was once a high-flying lawyer, but ever since his wife and his mentor chose lust over loyalty, Ty Scarlet's been a recovering lawyer, adrift. For the last 20 years.
It is baffling, then, that while on an airport layover, his two least favorite people, the now-Congressman and Mrs. Harwood, beg him to investigate their daughter’s unsolved disappearance. Scarlet’s no detective, but he’ll take the job, mainly to uncover why they came to him since he doesn’t know the first thing about conducting a criminal investigation. Or so he thought.
Because as he will discover, Scarlet has inexplicably mastered an incredible new suite of skills that puts solving the two-year-old Emma Harwood case squarely within his uncanny wheelhouse. With every question he asks being on-point and every tic he observes a readable tell, Scarlet has become something of a Batman-meets-Sherlock Holmes (or even Encyclopedia Brown) Mary Sue. And he will find out why.
In pursuing answers to this myriad of mysteries, Scarlet would do well to keep an open mind. Since his quest will involve repeated zillion-to-one coincidences; bank robbers and shopping mall terrorists; secret organizations cosplaying superheroes; transdimensional, exploding warlocks; and creepy urban legends involving things straight out of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu-era nightmares, there must be something truly cosmic happening.
Or maybe it’s all just a matter of his luck finally turning? If so, perhaps he should play the lottery. No, he will play the lottery. And when he does, the results will call into question everything Scarlet thought he knew about his place and purpose in the universe–and beyond.
© 2023 Joe Camborne / All Rights Reserved