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The Operation Quickline Series

Get all the information on the Operation Quickline series here, including the books currently available, the reading order, and upcoming stories in the series. Check out the adventures of Lisa Wycherly and Sid Hackbirn, undercover counter-espionage agents with a serious thing for each other.

How I wrote the Operation Quickline series

Back in the fall of 1982, I had this really weird dream. I tried to kick out this old man. I put his suitcase out on the porch, but then he brought it right back in. How that small vision erupted into a 13-book series, I’ll never know. But it did.

Truth be told, it gets pretty noisy in my head sometimes. Characters start “talking” to me and the next thing I know, I’ve got a novel. At least, that’s what happened with this series. I wrote the first drafts over the course of two years and have since re-written them a few more times. That’s why I kept the series set in its original 1980s setting, mostly because Sid couldn’t really have happened in a world filled with AIDS. Not to mention, we still had a Cold War going on and that made for some great conflict.

The series updated

I’ve done a bit more research since then, and have been able to play more with the technology. But it has been fun not having to check up too much on historical details. Those are already in the original text. One major change is I made the stories Lisa’s journals that were originally written in a cipher, but now can be read because they declassified the cases. That’s why you don’t see Chapter One or Chapter Two in the books. It’s the date that Lisa “wrote” it.

The series has grown and evolved over the years and during the re-writes, as well. Sid’s voice became a significant part of the series early on. But then, starting with book eight, A Little Family Business, another voice joins the narrative, you can click here for the story on how that happened.

Book nine, Just Because You’re Paranoid, is currently running on the fiction blog. That one has a lot of surprises, including one that I actually set up in That Old Cloak and Dagger Routine when I originally wrote it.

I’ve got fifteen Operation Quickline stories total (yes, I added a few), which will continue to appear as blog serials before they’re released as books. As alluded to in the first book, the organization ends up mothballed. But don’t worry, Sid and Lisa have more adventures to share, just under a new organization and series.