A hard-boiled private investigator with a talent for twisting dimensions ... a beautiful dame ... a changeling baby made of wood ... the perfect ingredients for my first published short story, a fantasy noir detective romp.

I wrote The Wooden Baby right after devouring a Dashiell Hammett anthology. I'm not the first to mix up the fantasy and detective genres, but it's such a juicy collision I can't resist it.

Later stories in the series explore the strange city where my nameless gumshoe lives, but this one just places him in an anonymous office in the middle of, apparently, nowhere.

The Wooden Baby links

• Realms of Fantasy