Black Gray Eaves & Step

Biography


Gayle Bartos-Pool


(When I was 25, it was a very good year...)

Write what you know. If you don't know it all, do research.

A graduate of Rhodes College in Memphis, Gayle took a year off between her Sophomore and Junior years and worked first as a newspaper reporter for a small Mid-South weekly where she wrote the local articles, laid out the front page, and took the pictures with an old Polaroid camera. About the only thing she didn't do was deliver the stupid thing every Thursday. This was in the pre-computer, pre-digital camera, pre-Internet era.

Gayle followed that job with a stint as a private detective working for Mark Lipman Service Incorporated out of Memphis. She had assignments in Atlanta, Chicago, and Little Rock. She worked undercover on an assembly line, in a clothing factory, and in a printing company. As her female protagonist in her Ginger Caulfield P.I. series says in the book, "It's amazing how much people will tell you when they don't know they're being questioned."


Gayle has worked as a draftsman, in a bookstore, made miniatures for a doll house shop, and then spent a decade in a bank learning about stocks and bonds before she "retired" to continue her writing full time. It was that bank experience that led to her writing Hedge Bet, the second book in the "Gin Caulfield P.I. series." The first book in the series is Media Justice. That story came about after she served on a jury. The third book in the series, Damning Evidence, was inspired by a photograph of a local dam. Gayle writes under the pen name, G.B. Pool.

Another other mystery series she pens is The Johnny Casino Casebook featuring Johnny Casino a retired P.I. with a past. He just hopes it doesn't catch up with him. There are three books in the series so far: The Johnny Casino Casebook 1 - Past Imperfect, The Johnny Casino Casebook 2 - Looking for Johnny Nobody, and The Johnny Casino Casebook 3 - Just Shoot Me.

The third mystery series features Chance McCoy. This guy was given the chance of a lifetime and is trying very hard to make good. He gets a partner at the end of the first book, Second Chance...a German Shepherd named Monte who has abilities that astound Chance. The second book, Another Chance, gets Chance up to speed and the third book, By Chance Alone, has him really starting to find himself.

Gayle has been published in various anthologies over the years. She has several of her own short story collections. One is called From Light TO DARK. It is a collection of tales ranging from lighthearted to soul searching. She dedicated it to Ray Bradbury. She met the famous man when she reviewed plays for American Chronicle. Bradbury told the story once about a variety of short science fiction stories he had written. A publisher told him to connect the stories and put them in one book. He did and The Martian Chronicles was born. Gayle did this with her Johnny Casino stories.

Another collection is called Only in Hollywood with stories about Tinsel Town.

She also paints, builds miniature doll houses, and makes hand-made Santas and other crafts. Her Christmas stories are filled with photographs of things she made just to illustrate the books.

Gayle's late husband, Richard J. Pool, was the basis for Gin's husband, Fred, in The Ginger Caulfield P.I. series. They shared their home with various dogs and cats and a foundling bird, all strays, and each one special. Four of them make guest appearances in her first holiday story, Bearnard's Christmas.

She collects Santas (nearing 3000), Christmas ornaments, Halloween decorations, Easter items, Fourth of July decorations, roosters, and a few other things, space permitting and a great husband who didn't mind the crowd.

Her second Christmas book is called
The Santa Claus Machine. The third in the series is called Every Castle Needs a Dragon.

She is a member of both Sisters-in-Crime/Los Angeles and Mystery Writers of America. She was on the board of Sisters-in-Crime/LA as their Speakers Bureau Director doing over 80 events. She initiated their workshop program and worked on the last No Crime Unpublished conference sponsored by SinC/LA. She was one of the founding members who brought together Mystery Writers of America and Sisters-in-Crime/LA for their inaugural joint conference called the California Crime Writers Conference in June of 2009. She went back on the board as Treasurer during the 2012-2013 term.

She released the SPYGAME Trilogy in 2015. THE ODD MAN takes place during World War II, The Cuban Missile Crisis, and the beginning of the Cold War. DRY BONES deals with Vietnam, drugs, and part of the present time. STAR POWER goes back to the McCarthy era, the Prague Spring, and takes us up to the near future. Also released in 2015 was CAVERNS. This book deals with a nightmare that happens in Chicago. She lived there while working as a private detective, so some of the locals are based on real placres.

She has one charming romance novel, Enchanted - The Ring, The Rose and The Rapier.

There is also The Santa Claus Singer.

A stand-alone mystery,
Closer, was released in 2019.

Released in 2016 is a book for writers called The Anatomy of a Short Story Workbook. This was followed by So You Want to be a Writer which is a collection of some of the articles she wrote for The Writers-in-Residence blog of which she is a mewmber. The latest book in the series is Words, Words, Words The Art of Writing.

In 2022, she published her autobiography, A Scrapbook Life, a book filled with memories and photos of the things she has collected and done in her 75 years. There is a lot of life to see with this gal.




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