Damned Busters

The Actionary Saves the Day!

When mild-mannered Chesney Arnstruther accidentally summons a demon and causes Hell to go on strike, he doesn’t expect to wind up as what he had always dreamed of being: the Actionary, a costumed crimefighter with a weasel-headed fiend for a sidekick.

But that’s just the beginning of a journey that will see the “high-functioning” autistic actuary enmeshed in the schemes of a greedy televangelist, romancing a pepper-spray-wielding manicurist, and sitting down to a poker game with the Devil where the stakes include his immortal soul.

File Under: Fantasy [ Expletives Deleted | Up Up And Away | Writer Of Life | No Demons ]-
Praise for Matthew Hughes

"If you're an admirer of the science fantasies of Jack Vance, it's hard not to feel affection for the Archonate stories of Matthew Hughes... Hughes has strengths of his own to draw upon: his own considerable wit, and a flair for reified metaphysics surpassing anything conceived by Vance."
- Nick Gevers, Locus

"A bit Arthur Conan Doyle, a bit Jack Vance.... Henghis's escapades [have] the lasting appeal of one of PG Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster books."
- Seattle Times

"Hughes's successful blend of magic, the supernatural and high-tech with Sherlockian deductions (and cryptic observations straight out of Doyle's canon) suggests a long life for Hapthorn."
- Publishers WeeklyMatt Hughes was born sixty years ago in Liverpool, England, but his family moved to Canada when he was five. He' has made my living as a writer all of his adult life, first as a journalist, then as a staff speechwriter to the Canadian Ministers of Justice and Environment, and - from 1979 until a few years back - as a freelance corporate and political speechwriter in British Columbia. He is a former director of the Federation of British Columbia Writers and he used to belong to Mensa Canada, but these days he's conserving his energies to write fiction. The author lives in Ireland.