08-31-11

Harley L. Sachs

Summer address: 113 West Houghton Ave, Houghton, MI 49931

Winter address: 2545 SW Terwilliger Blvd.#222, Portland, OR 97201

email: hlsachs@peoplepc.com

key words: Judaica, fiction, humor, boating, mysteries, thrillers, short stories, Scandinavia, Police State board game

That's me, Professor Emeritus Harley l. Sachs before my wife saw the beard and asked me to shave it off.

First a disclaimer: This is my personal, non-commercial, do it yourself web page. You cannot purchase anything here, but there are some links to places where you may order books in various formats (If I can get them to work!). I

I an old freelance writer and author of many books, short stories, articles, and newspaper columns. Just to make this web page a bit more accessible, if it works here's a link to my catalog. There's no need to purchase any of my books yourself. Even if you wanted to, few bookstores stock them. You have to order them from me or go on line. Better yet: ask your local librarian to add them to their holdings. Then you can read them for free! Such a deal! Or you might find them on interlibrary loan. If every library in the country stocked them I'd be a best seller!

Big news: Amazon's Kindle library now offers ebook downloads of a number of my books, including the latest: "Betrayal" which draws on my experience working under cover in Moscow. In "Betrayal" Irwin Glass, a low level employee in the American Library in Moscow, is seduced in a KGB honey pot scam, blackmailed into working for the KG B, he does so with full knowledge of the CIA station chief who hopes to make Glass a double agent. Glass gets cold feet, quits, and loses his job and all hopes of a career in the government. The KGB wants to make him a sleeper agent and he is under constant FBI suspicion as a possible KGB agent. Starting his life all over again, nearly twenty years later he lands in Michigan's Upper Peninsula at Michigan Tech where a Russian foreign student shows him the KGB recognition signal and claims to be his daughter. Looks like Glass is going to lose his job again and might end up in prison this time if the FBI and CIA come down on his head. You can get it from www.lulu.com or the Amazon Kindle library or the B&N Nook library.

“Betrayal” is the prequel to “Retribution” in which Irwin Glass discovers the KGB actually did open an account in his name and Katya’s at the Riggs Bank in Washington, DC and he is being dunned by the IRS for taxes on the interest, which is considerable since the sum is so huge. Thinking that if he moves the money out of the account his missing Russian daughter Katya will be forced to contact him, he shifts it to a different account. His fiancée warns him that it is not his money, that he is in fact laundering it, and the people whose money it is will come after him. Sure enough, he is called to Washington to help in the interrogation of Vladimir Putinsky who is asking for political asylum. Things get hotter and hotter but we still do not know if Katya is really his daughter or a KGB plant. Keep reading this Irwin Glass series. Both books are combined in a double volume at Amazon’s Kindle library, also on the B&N Nook library, and at www.lulu.com where downloads and custom printed hard copies can be ordered.

This has been a productive year. In addition to “Retribution” I released more books: “The 1957 Sachs Arctic Expedition” about my hitchhiking adventure from Stockholm, Sweden to North Cape in Norway, a collection of previously published columns titled “Yooper Tales and other funny stuff” and released the previously private memoir of our honeymoon, “From Tent To Castgle: Memoir of a Year Long Honeymoon.” It follows the newly wed Sachses on their one speed junk bicycle across Europe, living in a tent in the rain, and ending up at Borthwick Castle. Ulla says it is not our honeymoon, but Harley’s and Ulla went along. She kept a secret journal, but won’t insert it into the text tpo give her side of the story.

We are leaving the Copper Country, having sold our Houghton home, and probably will not return. Look for my books at Amazon.com. The downloads are price for the impulse buyer, as low as $3.00.

In 2009 two other major works were completed: Essays and Columns: 1992-2009 and a new mystery The Lollipop Murder. The mystery is a cautionary tale for all wannabe authors and publishers, the story of what happens when a group of irate authors confront a nasty publisher. Not for the faint hearted. It and the collection of essays and columns are available at www.lulu.com. Essays and Columns is a massive document over 600 pages and encompasses an amazing variety of subjects. Visit www.lulu.com for excerpts and to place orders.

In the summer of 2009, after a long and sometimes testy wrangle, I recovered the rights to my book of nautical humor, Irma Quarterdeck Reports. I still have copies of the first edition for sale with the charming Peter Wells illustrations. But Mr. Wells died and rather than struggle with the heirs for permission to reprint the original illustrations, I updated the book with illustrations of my own and added a collection of sea shanties in the public domain. The new version is called Ahoy! Quarterdeck! with sea shanty supplement is available as an ebook from Amazon's Kindle library and as both an ebook and a paperback from the on line printer www.lulu.com. I also issued a collection of almost a hundred cartoons I did for the US Navy, also in the Kindle library and at lulu.com as Hunting the Mail Buoy and other hazards to navigation

The lulu edition of Ahoy! Quarterdeck! overprints the title and author on this illustration.

This is the new cover for Conspiracy released this year by Zumaya.com as a paperback and ebook for the B&N Nook library. It's to followed by a new edition of A Troll for Christmas. Zumaya publications let Ben Zakkai's Coffin go out of print, returned the rights to e, so we reissued it at lulu.com printers and it is now also available inthe Amazon Kindle library.

Summer 2008's projects were a memoir, Chilly-Chilly BANG! or How We Freeelanced Through Europe's Coldest Winter in a VW with a Kid. It's an enlightening read for anyone who wants to be a freelance writer and an entertaining adventure for anyone who ever owned a VW. When I bought that used VW Kombi station wagon I had never owned a car before and seldom drove a four speed stick shift. Boy, did I have a lot to learn! But we were stranded in Denmark, caught between jobs and addresses, essentially homeless, and the only way I knew to make enough money to live on until we could return to the United States and look for a teaching job was to freelance for trade journals while living in a car. Ulla and I had a little girl, not yet two years old, so off we went. One VW enthusiast reported, "I downloaded Chilly-Chilly BANG" and loved every word of it." You may, too. You can download it for cheap at www.lulu.com or have them custom print a copy for you for $12.03 plus postage. The second 2008 project was Queer Company (below)

Summer 2008's project was to resurrect my 1958 military novel, Queer Company. It's not about gays in the military, but about the modified basic training unit I was sent to at the end of the Korean War. I wrote it in 1958 while living in Sweden. It was impractical to attempt to market it to a US publisher from Sweden, postage by sea, etc. and months of delays, so the novel languished in my files for years. In 1988 I gave the original manuscript to the US Army Archives for posterity as military history. Then one of my publishers showed an interest in it, but not in reading a weak carbon copy, so I retyped the whole book and have put it up at the on line printer www.lulu.com for cheap downloads as an ebook or for custom printing as a $15 paperback. Queer Company is in the same genre as Neil Simon's "Beloxie Blues" and Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" (without the science fiction), or "From Here to Eternity" or "Catch 22." "Queer Company" is the story of the strange recruits sent to Q Company because they were physically unfit for normal infantry battlefield assignment.

Most of my books were broadcast on Oregon Public Broadcasting's Golden Hours show. I converted my copies of the performances to cassette and CD editions as unabridged audio books. This spring I added an mp3 version of all of the books. We've contracted with a vendor who will sell downloads so curstomers can burn their own CDs or to load into those little mp3 players for private listening. A couple of the booksare now available as downloads from Audible.com.

You can also have some fun at this site and listen to two Sachs short stories as they were broadcast on the BBC World Service Short Wave around the world. One is "Couch Potato" abvout a husbvand whose wife claims took root on the couch while watching nothing but sports on TV. The other is "The Beach" about a disfunctional family that goes to the Oregon beach and has a crisis. In addition to listening to those stories, you can read a funny short story, "The Great Fortune Cookie Caper." which features the funny Jewish detective from Brooklyn who plays a key role in "The Mystery Club and the Dead Witness."

www.zumayapublications.com is publisher of several of my books and brought out Conspiracy! and A Troll for Christmas and other stories in 2009. Booksurge.com no longer prints those, so they must be ordered from Zumaya or Amazon.com. Because of a shift in publisher's location from Canada to the USA, those books have been reissued with new covers and illustrations. Since the troll illustrations were originally done in Tasmania, it was too complicated to pay royalties outside the country. A new artist will be found.

Those are only the most recent projects. In all I have had 25 books published and you can find most of them at www.lulu.com where you can rfead excerpts and place orders. The Kindle ebook librfary is a new developmentg. Want to listen to my short stories as broadcast on the BBC short wave programme [sic]? "Couch Potato" and "The Beach" A newspaper tabloid version of Couch Potato was published in the SUN grocery store tabloid as "Couch Potato Takes Root" with a picture of me disguised as a plant. The SUN editors totally rewrote the story I submitted, leaving only my photo and byline, but do you know any other authors who are plants? You can take the story "Couch Potato" in two ways, either that the woman is telling the truth or that she's insane. How many people besides the bat baby and the world's fattest human can boast of having their picture in the Sun? "The Beach" is a totally different kind of story. It's about a couple with a handicapped child they take to the dangerous Oregon beach on the Pacific coast. Their marriage is falling apart, but something happens at the beach that changes the relationship of father and son.

Want to learn more about my books? Check out the reviews! (click on the link!)

Back in 1969 I invented the game PoliceState.Though the game originally sold for about $14  it is no longer produced because of high minimum runs and printing costs.  Someone was offering an "extremely rare" copy on the Internet for $19.95!  IDEVCO, The Idea Development Company is offering the POLICE STATE GAME on CD as a kit. For $5 plus postage IDEVCO will send you a CD with the scanned images of the playing board, the three decks of cards, apartment cards, and the instructions. Also included for that price you'll get a pair of dice and, while supplies last, a Tootsie Toy style automobile used in the game.  If you have a color printer, scissors, glue and some cardboard, you can make one copy of the game for your own use. We got a surprise order from a chap in Australia who said Police State is the only game his mother will play. His aunt had brought a copy from England but didn't leave it behind in Australia. We have international fans!

The board game Police State by Harley Sachs is available for license. We sold all the original  copies but you can buy the do it yourself kit CD for $5.00 plus postage (domestic US $2.00) The kit includes the apartment cards, dice, state autmobile, instructions. You'll have to print out the rest on 110 pound stock (e.g. business card stock).

POLICE STATE, a game of strategy and survival, was invented by Harley Sachs in 1969 and sold in England and the USA, even as far as Ireland and South America. It was copyrighted, patented, and published by the IDEA DEVELOPMENT COMPANY (IDEVCO), licensed by Gameophiles and later by L.A. Producers Partnership under the name COMRADES. All early copies of POLICE STATE have been sold, so the original game is not available now for retail sale, but it is offered for license, either as a board game or as an interactive computer game for programmers. For further information about licensing contracts, contact IDEVCO. Or buy the CD kit for $5.00 plus postage.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND GAME INVENTOR: Besides sailing his MacGregor 22 in Lake Superior in the summer, Prof. Sachs winters in Portland, Oregon, trading Upper Peninsula snows for Oregon rain. He is a contributing editor for Northern Express, a weekly newspaper in Traverse City, Michigan, and his columns have also appeared in the U.P. Post, Peninsula News, and Porcupine Press. At the September 1997 meeting of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan Writers' Association, Sachs won the Ed Powers Memorial Humor Award for his newspaper column "Ejaculating with Zane Gray" about characters who shout, roar, and even "ejaculate" but never say anything. His short story "My Brag Book" also won a prize at the 1997 conference. A free lance since the 1950's, Harley Sachs got his start writing trade magazine articles for International Blue Printer, then wrote many articles and project pieces for boating magazines. He earned a number of awards for writing and before he retired from Michigan Technological University was a director of the Society for Technical Communication. He is listed as a poet and writer of fiction by Poets and Writers. His newspaper stories have appeared in The Oregonian, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Louisville Courier-Journal, and even in Danish in Politiken. Besides all that writing, Sachs invented an anti-fascist board game, POLICE STATE, manufactured under license and by IDEVCO, the Sachs family corporation. He also issued a series of snow flea postal cards about the real-- not mythical-- Upper Peninsula snow fleas. POLICE STATE is available for license.

If you read this far, congratulations and thanks for your patience. Send me an email. I'd love to hear from you.