Status Update: “Sodom All Over Again”

For those who don’t know, Hell on $5 A Day was originally planned as three novels… but turned into one… then became the first novel in a planned trilogy… and now it’s morphed into a 10-novel series: three trilogies and a culminating “everyone in the pool” team-up between major characters from all three trilogies. I even have an 11th in very early idea stage.

Greetings from Sodom

The second novel, Sodom All Over Again follows Alain and Marie from the forests of Belgium to Paris and then to post-WWII Los Angeles. We all know and love post-war Los Angeles from the film-noir detective stories set there. Alain and Marie will get caught up in their own detective story as they investigate the murder of a nightclub singer and the disappearance of a rabinnical student, both of which are involved with a brewing war between factions of a cohort of angels known in scripture as the Nephilim. If they cannot stop the war, a large part of Los Angeles could be destroyed as collateral damage.

This morning, I was working on my characters, and spent a good deal of time researching synagogues and yeshivas in Los Angeles in 1946. More importantly, a plot point was that the rabinnical student travels between UCLA for secular studies and a synagogue or yeshiva where he pursues his religious studies. I try to mix realistic elements into the fiction so it’s not inventing history from whole cloth for real places in our world. I take every liberty I want with the scenes in Sodom and Gomorrah as I did with the afterlife, but Los Angeles in the 40s and New York in the 60s (third novel) are too recent and easily researched to just make shit up, although I might bend a few things.

The first West Coast yeshiva to ordain a Rabbi after the war was in Boyle Heights, but that’s a huge trek from UCLA, especially after street car service was shut down on Santa Monica Boulevard in 1941 (according to Wikipedia). So I’m thinking I can fudge that his rabinnical studies took him to the Wilshire Temple (a reform congregation dating back to 1862), so he could catch a bus or ride a bicycle on a straight shot down Wilshire Boulevard from UCLA. I might take time out to drive that route next time I’m visiting family in Los Angeles. It’s been decades since I drove eastbound Wilshire beyond Beverly Hills.

I’m also finding that much of the Los Angeles freeway system I knew from growing up there didn’t exist in 1945/46, meaning I’ll have to research different ways to get to different places than I’d be able to recall from memory. I’m not going to dwell on turn-by-turn directions, but understanding stuff like taking Wilshire from UCLA to the Wilshire Temple is useful to add a touch of realism to a story with vampires, angels, and other humanoid creatures from scripture and literature.

So far, I’m up to just before Alain and Marie find out the war ended and prepare to head back to Paris for Marie to see her mother and resume her university studies. For that, I had to figure out where Marie’s little farm was going to actually be, what cities it was close to, and in which of them she and Alain would catch a train to start their journey to Paris.

Hell on $5 a Day – The Podcast

I’ll be doing a podcast of Hell on $5 a Day as an audiobook or radio play. That’s planned to launch in July and drop a chapter a week. If it gets enough of a following, I’ll do another for this book. I’m hoping to start recording the first chapter by the end of the month, working out the kinks and processes, then get into heavier production in May and June.

That’s all for now.

Greg, April 2nd 2025,
Bothell Washington