When Your Hen Has a Hankering for Mystery Stories

I think that perhaps now may be the best time to introduce myself with a recent self-portrait. This is who I am. No pretenses, no clever masks, no clever poses to make myself appear to be more than who and what I truly am. I am just an old man who loves chickens and all other animals who call his backyard garden their home.

Years ago, when I started writing here on WordPress, I had six beautiful chickens. Now there is only one chicken left in my backyard garden, the least likely to have made it this far, the one least likely to be loved based on her troublesome start at life — My Dear Pearl.

She got her start in my most successful published book ever, How to Explain Christmas to Chickens, and we are beginning what I hope will be an extremely successful series of mystery books featuring Pearly Drew and The Hardy Hens.

But we need somewhere to place our stories, and Medium seems to be the best place for those stories because of the wide audience and our past successes here. (And quite honestly, it’s not that Medium pays and we need to eat that makes it a great platform. It is the readers on Medium, and the excellence of writers found here that makes this a great place for even an old writer and illustrator like me.

Pearlie Drew is a “take off” on Nancy Drew (first published in 1930). The Hardy Hens is a “take off” on The Hardy Boys (first published in 1927). These classics have withstood the tests of time for countless readers. And who doesn’t love a good mystery?!? We are going to follow the pathway of these classics rather than the more modern Scooby Doo (first aired on television in September of 1969). We don’t have anything against “Scooby Snacks” and are sure that they must be tasty, but we choose classic plot structure over tasty treats.

Yes, there are days that I feel as old as I look in this self-portrait! Like all of my artwork, this was created on my iPad Pro using Affinity Designer and Imaengine software with the black outlining on the top layer and colored vector shapes on the bottom layers and a carefully crafted color palette.

Thank you for reading. You may begin to see the name “Nate Elliot” appear as an author or artist for some of my work. “Nate Elliot” is a pseudonym for some of my work, especially my older stories which are set in a time period prior to my own such as the later part of the 1920’s and earlier part of the 1930’s.