Lauderdale Shorts

About the Book

This collection of short stories is just the trick for your next two to four hour flight! From humor to science fiction, to the way you feel about your first wife (or husband). To historical trials and tribulations of people who were nobodies in their own time (1080 AD) but without whom thousands of us would not be here today.

Thought provoking, tender, silly – they’re all here. Enjoy your flight. Or your quiet evening at home. Or your day on the dock by the lake. Wherever you’re taking LAUDERDALE SHORTS with you today or tomorrow, you will enjoy being there more because you brought us along.

THE TIMELING is the story of a time traveler who encounters Harvard student Jack Kennedy while he is visiting in the New Orleans French Quarter apartment of playwright Tennessee Williams one day back when. With the powerful advantages of science fiction, our hero gives young Jack some invaluable insights into what lies in wait for him.

DON AND JUAN is a poignant story about a man who wants to die and a young Mexican migrant farm worker who does not want him to.

VITRIOL is a bitter encounter between a hopeless bitch and the man she divorced many years before.

THE STORY OF PINKNEY is drawn from pages of historical genealogical data relating to two families that intertwined several times in the past thousand years, the Norman family Basford and the Scotch family Melvin, from the Isle of Skye. With the help of fiction, the story fleshes out events in the lives of Pinkney, an illegitimate son of the noble Basford, the Duke of Nottingham, his lover, Mary Melvin, and their son, Daniel. Stories passed down through the real families suggest that approximately these events actually took place in Nottingham around 1080 AD.

CHEEKAY AYUNA is a chapter excerpted from the novel CHILDREN OF THE SAME GOD, by Jim Sauls. It tells of the climb back from involuntary drug-induced debauchery of the Vice-President’s son by criminal drug lords and pornographers.

THE STORY OF GUNTRAM is a short piece that retells another bit of true genealogical data from Jim Sauls’s own family tree. Guntram is the man who became the founder of the Habsburg dynasty in Austria, the ancestral root that counts several million Americans among its descendants. This frame recounts his accession to power as a youth with the help of the Catholic Church.

MEETING IN THE MORGUE is a happy little story of a dead old gay man and a dead young gay man who meet in the morgue. They have but little time to get acquainted and to save the kid’s body from a fate worse than death.

About the Author

Now in full retirement, Jim Sauls lives in a mountain community in Western North Carolina and writes about his intelligence career on six continents. He has four children and four grandchildren. He also maintains contact with the family mining business he started in California in 1993 and vacations at his lodge above Lake Tahoe.