A Ray Larkin case · free
Economy of Paint
The novella that opens the Ray Larkin series
In April 2016 my office was the dead end of the bar at the Half Door, and my business hours were the goodwill of a bartender who asked me nothing. Economy of Paint · chapter one
The case
April 2016. A housepainter with twenty-five years on scaffolds is found dead in a storeroom, and by Monday the file says accident. The firm lays one word on the table without saying it: thief.
His daughter walks into a bar in Inwood and buys the truth the only way it's sold: one day at a time, five hundred a day, receipts for everything. Ray Larkin, three months into a private investigator's license and a year out of a badge, starts with what a wall can tell him. A dry ladder on a day of rain. Two kinds of white in one stairwell. And a man whose whole sin was that he counted everything.
A complete case, and the story of how Ray Larkin got his office, his first client, and the name on the door. Read it before the first novel, or after. It spoils nothing.
The tab
The Half Door · InwoodNo. 0001
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The first novel · coming 2026
Voluntary Departure
A security man walks out of his life in Washington Heights, and the police close the file with one official sentence: nothing to indicate the disappearance was involuntary.
Voluntary departure, in other words. Ray Larkin gets paid to read that sentence again. The first full-length Ray Larkin novel arrives in 2026; the mailing list hears about it first, and the novella signup above is the list.
The author
Ellis Crowe writes the Ray Larkin books: private-eye novels set in Inwood and Washington Heights, at the northern tip of Manhattan, in the first-person tradition of Chandler and Ross Macdonald. Ellis Crowe is a pen name, stated openly; the work signs for itself.