The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025!

I’m thrilled to announce that my story “Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting,” which originally appeared in the anthology of 1970s PI stories Private Dicks and Disco Balls, has been selected for The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025.

The 1970s gave us gumshoe classics like Chinatown and authors like Ross Macdonald and Robert B. Parker—but it also gave us a golden age of kung fu cinema, thanks to studios like Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers. I wanted to bring those two gritty, stylish worlds together—and drop them right into urban Texas.

Private Dicks and Disco Balls, created and edited by Michael Bracken and published by Down & Out Books, features a shag-carpeted lineup of writers tapping into the fondue-soaked culture of the 1970s. As always, my favorite part of making it into a collection like this is reading all of the incredible stories by the other writers who also made the cut so I can’t wait to read The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025 when it hits!

I don’t think I ever missed an episode of this. Nothing to see here, just a boy in small town Texas completely rearranging his weekends to watch Gordon Liu become a Shaolin Master Killer.