The Stage is set for a Major undercover Operation

Amateur Theatricals is book twelve in the Operation Quickline series. Sid, Lisa and Nick go undercover at a university to catch the person killing a bunch of student KGB agents. The book run about 250 pages, and is available in print for $15.99, and in ebook for $3.99. You can buy it at these and other fine retailers.

Synopsis for Amateur Theatricals

Three students have been murdered on a university campus in Kansas. Sid Hackbirn, Lisa Wycherly, and their son Nick Flaherty are sent in as the Devereaux family to find the killer. The local police can’t know that the three students were also KGB moles finishing their training to assimilate into American society.

Lisa poses as a theatre student to protect the KGB operative overseeing the student moles. Sid takes on teaching history to coordinate with the rest of their team. Between faculty politics, Sid’s chauvinistic colleagues, and Lisa and Nick getting cast in a production of Shakespeare’s Richard III, there are plenty of suspects and little time to check them out. With the help of their teammates, Sid and Lisa take on one of their most challenging cases yet.

How I wrote it

As I note in the dedication to the book, I first wrote Amateur Theatricals while I was finishing the course work for my Master of Arts degree in Theatre. I’d started writing the Quickline series in 1982, right around the time I started that program. It became a respite, a way of relaxing while dealing with all the work and, yes, politics of trying to get an advanced degree.

So when the story started coming together, the obvious setting was a university theatre department. Now, you’ll note that I’m spelling theatre with the British spelling. That’s how we spelled it. I’d already sent Lisa and Sid undercover at a college in These Hallowed Halls. So another college episode fit right in.

The other unusual part of the story is that some of the characters may have borne a resemblance to some of my favorite people at Cal State Fullerton. Some. Not all, and certainly fewer showed up when I did the re-write in the middle of the Pandemic.

The disaster

There’s a good reason for that. Somewhere in the various moves I’ve made, not to mention house cleanings, the original hand-written manuscript of Amateur Theatricals disappeared. I still can’t find it (which annoys the spit out of me). However, it totally shocked me that I had remembered as much of the original as I did. At least, I think I did. Okay, I forgot some of the elements of the original case Sid and Lisa worked. But I had to re-work a lot of those over the course of the series, anyway. In other words, it didn’t make any difference about the plot.

Okay, maybe I kept the original bad guy. But I changed what he was up to and why. Which made it a significantly stronger story.