Book Biographies, #1a

The Samaritan

Over on Substack (subscribe to my newsletter! for all the newses! https://chazbrenchley.substack.com/), I had this notion of writing a biography for each one of my books, to say how it came into being (and to mark thereby how very much the industry has changed, from then until now). Here’s the first part of the first bio, in hopes that posting it here too will prompt me to write the second part, for I have let that slip…

It wasn’t, in fact, my first published novel. (I’ll come to that, but later in the series. Possibly last. The first line of that book is “It ends with a woman, looking into a mirror,” which would be pleasingly recursive. I have a mild hope that I can contrive a way to end my final book with a woman looking into a mirror, for in my end is my beginning, etc.)

It wasn’t even the first novel published with my own name on the cover. (Again, thereby hangs a tale; and again, I’m going to make you wait for that. Sorry not remotely sorry.)

Nevertheless: when I talk about my first book, it’s almost always THE SAMARITAN that I mean. It’s the one you’ll most commonly see listed first in bibliographies and “Also by Chaz Brenchley” lists and so forth; it’s the one people expect to hear about when they ask how I broke into publishing, though I’d actually been making a living as a writer for a decade and…