BIO -

The very first piece of creative writing that I can recall producing came in the fifth grade. Saint Paul’s School in Baltimore. It was a poem, a direct rip-off of the two doctors, Dr. Seuss and Dr. Dolittle. As I recall, it featured a bird with a head at both ends - the paean to Dr. Dolittle’s Push-Me-Pull-Me - and was in a cadence that was pure sing-song Seuss. A ditty about the difficulty of trying to fly in several directions at once. Your basic fifth grade angst. If I can locate the masterwork one day amid the debris of my desk and files, I'll be sure to post it here. Please hold your breath.

So there’s my start. Fifth grade. Mrs. Clark’s English class. My literary talents then lay dormant for the next four or five years. Grades 6 through 9 are more notable for minibikes, cigarettes, painstaking designs magic-markered onto loose-leaf notebooks, finding out where to buy beer when you’re underage in Baltimore (the answer is ############), skipping school on occasion, chasing the wrong girls and being chased by the wrong girls, horrifying my parents during my delinquent year down in central Florida, where our family was banished in the mid-sixties...and just generally enjoying the fruits of democracy.

It wasn’t until 10th Grade, when I found myself the so-called ‘manager’ of the school’s junior varsity football team, that the writing bug returned and took its next big bite. Manager = water boy/laundry schmuck and general team flunky. Irked by the ignominy of this role, I took advantage of an open-topic essay assignment my English teacher, Mr. Longstreth, to unload about the rotten cards I had been dealt. Mr. Longstreth was also the football coach, so the forum was perfect. I lamblasted till the cows came home. And Coach gave me an A+, commending me on the quality of the dressing down I had given him and everyone else in my essay.  And there it was. I had discovered the pen-as-sword motif.

The rest is so detailed and fascinating that I dare not risk keeping you on-line for the hours and hours it would take to read. Let's skim. Highlights include my make-it-or-break-it novel, Zen Bastard (I don't really know if it made it or broke it...but it went unpublished) which I turned into a screenplay that caught the eye of some of the big-wigs at The Sundance Institute. Unfortunately, it didn't keep hold of their eye long enough, but that's another story. Zen Bastard has been liberally plundered and plagarized in THE HEARSE YOU CAME IN ON. And so I suppose it qualifies as a 'seminal work.' After Z.B., first place in a P.E.N.-sponsored short fiction competition kept my hopes alive... followed by my first year in New York City, which dashed them pretty thoroughly. I lost the knack of paragraphs for a number of years, and turned out a few plays and about a dozen screenplays and teleplays, several of which were optioned. One landed me in a hot tub in Malibu for a time, and another even began to snake its way through development at American Playhouse (which then had the nerve to go off the air before my script had snaked its way onto the screen).

For the sake of utter confusion, I decided to toss out the ‘Hearse’ titles on the fifth book.  I seem to have done just fine in that regard…everyone’s confused.  The title is BACKSTABBER. In it we find our hero as beleaguered as ever as he attempts to extract himself from trouble on one front whole plunging headlong into it on the other. Why he behaves this way is still beyond me.

I’m still busy inventing new words sufficient to express my gratitude to all the booksellers out there who have ballyhooed my books so wonderfully. Not to mention of course YOU…(yes you) who have showed such uncommon enthusiasm for these books of mine. And if you would now be so kind as to tell a few thousand of your closest friends…

All of which brings us up to the present in which we find Hitchcock Sewell on a long (if not necessarily deserved) break.  To while away our time while Hitch cools his heels, I direct you to my parallel endeavor…my new series… under my new name. I won’t go on and on about it here, for I’ve already gone on and on about it on my other Web site. So…if you’d like to take a look at what’s happening there, as well as read first chapters of the new stuff…you can head over to www.RHawke.com.

I believe this pretty much brings us up to date.

You may now return to your normal programming.