There's a certain romance to the idea of hammering away at a detective story on a manual typewriter, with a glass of whiskey to the side as an overhead fan pushes motes of dust in the shafts of light poring through the slats of wooden window blinds. Sometimes you just want to be Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. Sometimes you just want to create a wisecracking private eye in the grand noir tradition. But, sometimes you are too lazy to actually write a whole book, so here are some random lines from my upcoming someday tale, A Game Of Lies.