Forays of a Fat Man

Luff Imbry, confidence man, thief, forger extraordinaire, aficionado of a myriad art forms, began life as a supporting character in my novel Black Brillion. He reappeared again in the same role in a companion novel, The Commons.

And that should have been the end of him. In fact, in the original draft of Black Brillion, I killed him off in a rather messy fashion near the end of the novel. But my editor advised me that it was a mistake to murder the only likeable character in the book. So I rewrote that segment and Luff lived on.

I wrote more stories, and they each found a market. Luff appeared not only in Postscripts but in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and an anthology of stories entitled Forbidden Planets that was commissioned to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the iconic science fiction film.

Pete Crowther, who co-edited the anthology, commissioned four Luff Imbry novellas, each of which was issued by PS Publishing as a limited-edition chapbook. Now all four are collected in this paperback omnibus.

Quartet & Triptych
The Yellow Cabochan
Of Whimsies and Noubles
Epiphanies

The fat man rides again.