>>On the day Charlie Hess was put in the ground his new widow, Lucinda, dressed in black with a twist. Underneath the trim black Armani suit Charlie bought her after a big score she wore a hot pink garter belt. Per ounce it probably cost more than cocaine. It looked great on her, a view only Charlie had enjoyed. This was the last time she would wear it.
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>>A couple hundred yards away George Fisk surveyed the burial as inconspicuously as he could. A cemetery is a good place to go unnoticed. Speaking into a microphone near his shoulder, he took note of who arrived and with whom. Periodically he pretended to pay his respects at the nearest headstone. “Gladys Phillips. 1943 – 2005. Beloved Mother.” He idly wondered who she was and what she meant to those who paid for her gravestone.
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>Seems like a good start. From these two paragraphs, I get a sense of something on the hard-boiled side.
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>You should look around in your area and see whether you can find/start a writing group. Marshal's had a small one for years with two women he met in a writing seminar; they edit and critique each other's work. One of them is in the end stages of writing a novel.
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Tamar, you know I have a dirty mind and must realize you just handed me a pin in one hand and a balloon in the other. "Writing group"? Sounds more like a merry threesome to me!

You know I'm just joking around. (Right? Tamar? Tamar?)

Back on track, no, I am not thinking of the hard-boiled genre. I like it a lot, just don't know what I would bring to the table. Trying to do hard-boiled after Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross MacDonald, et al, strikes me as like trying to do iambic pentameter after Shakespeare. What I have in mind is a lot closer to "Greeneland" -- where duplicity is everywhere but people continue to hold faith in dreams they have no reasonable business holding faith in. Plus there is no femme fatale. (Lucinda is a somewhat damaged Great Gal). In noir you gotta have a femme fatale.