Hard Ticket:
The first finished draft of Storm Waters was actually a novella titled “Hard Ticket.” Due to his family background, it’s a term Marty would have been familiar with. It’s an odd term I had encountered in a few stories from the very early part of the 20th Century, but the only crime author I can remember using it was Cornell Woolrich—and I may be misremembering that.
Hard Ticket: (noun) A person or ghost who is difficult or dangerous to deal with; an unscrupulous person. A rare term in the 1930s, mostly used in spiritist an spirtualist circles starting late 19th century.
After a lot of revisions, Storm Waters moved so far from the original novella, which is now mostly the first third of the book, though some of it was split and put into the last third. But the scenes that scenes that contain my original “hard ticket” remain in the first chapter of the book, though Captain Davies is called a “tough nut” now.
By the way, Storm Waters is officially on-sale today, so if you still don’t have a copy, trot on over to the publisher’s site and get one: Buy Storm Waters at Fairwood Press
And if you want an ebook or a different purchase site, look here: Books2Read
