An email showed up last week which I found impossible to overlook, beginning as it did with the words “Hail, Sparkletack!” Clearly a writer of taste and intelligence!

But wait — could a person of “taste and intelligence” be responsible for words like these?:

Here’s the tale of three typically offbeat San Franciscans who do just that. Bay Time Detective Mikki Bingo moonlights at Lusty Lady and volunteer cooks at Glide. Mikki’s sole employee is Pete Bingo, her inventively incompetent grandfather. Their client, Sharky Bate, is a gazillion year old hip-hop bottom fish who flip-flops from petrified to putrefied. Stumbling through epic timequakes, our titanic trio pits wits with nefarious foes in their unending quest for truth, “justice” and a truly affordable apartment.

Bay Time Detective

That email directed me to the website of the “Bay Time Detective“, a serial drama following an extravagant recipe: Blend equal proportions Dashiell Hammett with Rocky and Bullwinkle, toss with generous dollops of San Francisco history, and dress the melange with snappy dialogue a la the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Season lightly with conspiracy theory, and Bob’s your uncle.

Yes indeed, it’s nuttier than a bag of goobers buried under a king-size fruitcake. Hooray!

What can I say… I’m a sucker for every single one of those elements, and furthermore, there are more historical references per paragraph than you’d see anywhere outside of Gladys Hansen’s personal reference library.

But here’s the bad news:

It’s a serial, and right around episode #9 I developed the sinking feeling that the last cliffhanger was going to leave me with fingernails still embedded in the hillside… and so it did.

But there’s hope! Paul Potocky — whom some of you North Bay folks may know from his series of newspaper columns as the “Bay Time Reporter” — is a Tasmanian Devil of energy, and has a plethora, yes, a plethora of plans to move this story into just about every kind of medium imaginable. Negotiations have Begun, however, to focus on producing a Radio Play, and he has authorized me to ask, you, Dear Reader, to become part of the Story:

Writer? Radio actor? Technical sound wizard? Join the multidimensional time-hopping noir-party by contacting Paul at: ppotocky(@)msn.com.

Just don’t let Ambrose Bierce know what you’re up to — that guy’s in it up to his eyeballs…