Billibub Baddings and the Case of the Singing Sword (podcast)

I just finished Tee Morris' podcast novel about a 4 foot, one inch dwarf in 1929 Chicago. With a dwarf named Billibub Baddings you won't be surprised to learn that it is fantasy. It comes with the some of the tropes you would expect in fantasy: Baddings comes from a universe where magic works; there are seven talismans of great power that must be destroyed; Baddings is sucked through a portal while disposing of one of the objects. He arrives in the public library in Chicago in the 1920s where he teaches himself to read and steals food from the library staff. When he is ready to enter the world, he sells some of his gear and sets himself up as a private detective. Billibub, now calling himself Billy, is a hardboiled detective with a beautiful secretary and a .45 automatic he lovingly calls Beatrice. Billy is ostensibly hired by a beautiful socialite to find out why Al Capone had her boy friend eliminated. He soon discovers that the real reason has less to do with the boy friend and everything to do with a mysterious sword found in an Egyptian tomb that is decidedly not Egyptian. Billy followed the talismans into this world and this is the story of the struggle to find and gain possession of the sword.

If you like fantasy and hardboiled detective stories this is a terrific listen. It has gangsters, G-men, Irish cops, speakeasies, roscoes, snappy dialog, beautiful dames, action, attitude, everything you would want in a story. Morris does most of the narrating but has guest voices that podcast fans will recognize, like Scott Sigler and Christiana Ellis.

If we are lucky, we will have another six Billibub adventures. There are still six more talismans out there, after all.

The podcast novel is available at podiobooks.com.
A print version is available at Amazon.