Buy Fred’s Books!

Traipsing through Wonderland

Chronicles of a wild life in biker bars and the fleshpots of Bangkok, of years of solo hitchhiking across America, of a Southern boyhood of drag racing in old wrecks and guns and beer, of Marine Corps boot camp and Moon’s strange church, of scuba diving the deep walls of the Caribbean and cave diving in Mexico, of life on staff at Soldier of Fortune magazine and nine years as police reporter for the Washington Times in the weird, sad, and often unbelievable urban Petri dishes of the big cities. Politically incorrect and evilly funny, Fred takes no prisoners. He skews with murderous wit things he doesn’t like, which are many: pols, talking heads, officious do-gooders. He has a soft spot for things he does like, such as dogs, drunks, bar girls, and ambulance crews, all of which he has known many. His work has appeared in Playboy, Harper’s, the Washington Post magazine and op-ed pages, and suchlike stations of the literary cross.

Au Phuc Dup and Nowhere to Go, the Only Really True Book about Viet Nam

A wacky novelette by a Marine veteran of Viet Nam who says he finds it easier to laugh about the war than to assault the Pentagon with a back hoe, which would be his preference except that he doesn't have a back hoe. Follow the adventures of Major Egglesby, the worst fighter pilot in the Air Force, and Sergeant Anesthesia Remingham, a black Marine from Alabama who invents the Torpedo Rat and nearly brings the war to a halt, and the concert with the rock band Klok Mortuary and the Gadarene Swine and...and....

A Grand Adventure: Wisdom's Price

More outrage and sedition from the internet's leading curmudgeon. Sardonic, funny, savagely irreverent, Fred trounces everything and everybody except children, drunks, and bar girls, for whom he has a soft spot. He also likes dogs. This is the man who described Oprah Winfrey as looking like "five hundred pounds of bear liver in a plastic bag." A former Marine and war correspondent, he loathes war, the Pentagon, and the military budget, and thinks the Marines can do the world a favor by staying home. Dentists like this book as it makes people grind their teeth, but they also applaud. He asserts that after he writes about feminists, Republicans, Democrats, evangelical Christians, or atheists, a lynch mob forms outside his house in Mexico, but he may be stretching the truth a bit. In case he isn't, you may want to buy a rope before ordering A Grand Adventure.

Killer Kink

Robert Dawson, police reporter for the Washington Herald, hard-drinking ex-Marine with a sardonic view of practically everything, finds himself first covering and then involved in a string of truly bizarre murders involving grotesque mutilation and apparent Satanic rituals. Then his girlfriend, Attila the Liberal, who works for one of those super-secret three-letter spook agencies, begins receiving body parts from the murderess. Somebody, it seems, doesn't like Dawson. Riveting fiction by an author with eight years’ experience of covering Washington's police department.

Triple Tap (Kindle edition)

Robert Dawson, a free-lance police reporter in Washington, DC, ex-Marine, ashen-souled cynic after seeing how the world actually works, finds himself and his girfriend, Attila the Liberal, who works for one of the three-letter spook agencies, involved in a weird web of genius dweeb Carol Oslieber, plus a couple of ex-Special Forces nut-jobs, and various drug dealers, who want to...well, that's the story. Written by a veteran police reporter who has actually been there, this is hard-boiled police fiction, not the wine-and-cheese unisex variety common now. If you liked Raymond Chandler, you will like Triple Tap. If you want niceness and political correctness, find another book.

A Brass Pole in Bangkok, a Thing I Aspire to Be

Another collection of Fred's Fred on Everything columns, seditious, outrageous, inflammatory, evilly funny. Fred dislikes everything he is supposed to like, and likes everything he is supposed to dislike. He likes downscale bars, thinks bar girls are decent human beings, approves of dogs, motorcycles, and really loud blues. He detests wars, which he has seen several of, loathes ugly feminists with politically significant hairy armpits, believes that congressmen would serve well as skeet, and proposes to tie everyone on Wall Street to an anvil and drop it in a river. Obviously he is a benefactor of humanity, like Gandhi.

Nekkid in Austin

Essays on America, life, politics, and just about everything, The author chronicles, among other adventures, an aging stripper in Austin, dressed in a paper-Mache horse, who had with her a cobra and a tarantula like a yak-hair pillow with legs and alternately charmed and terrified a room full of cowboys sucking down Bud and.... Fred was an apostle of the long-haul thumb during the Sixties and saw...many things. He tells of standing by the big roads across the desert, rocking in the wind blast of the heavy rigs roaring by and the whine of tires and dropping into an arroyo at night with a bottle of cheap red and watching the stars and perhaps smoking things not approved by the government. He tells on. Well, that's what the book is for. Join him.

The Great Possum-Squashing and Beer Storm of 1962: Reflections on the Remains of My Country

Fred's reflections on America as it was and isn't. In the title essay he tells of his rural Southern boyhood, driving a 1953 Chevy the color of two-tone dirt, an aging wreck serving as heraldic emblem, codpiece, bar and, far less frequently than he would have liked or admitted, love nest. It usually started but remembered compression as an aging gigolo recalls the ardors of youth and on the night of the possum-squashing, with Bobby on the roof and Itchy in the trunk and a great many empty beer cans.... Well, you get the idea. It was another country, says Fred, and he would like it back. Never happen.