Blood Wing: A Cold War Noir Thriller

Finalist, 2026 ProWritingAid Novel Beginnings Contest (selected from 14,570 entries).



A dead janitor. A notebook nobody read. A Cold War operation running through the cracks of a country that cannot see its own citizens.

Long Beach, 1951. The Douglas Aircraft plant on Lakewood Boulevard is half a mile of windowless concrete, building C-124 Globemasters for a Korean War seven months old. A Black night-shift janitor named Ezekiel Wilkins is dead. The company calls it an accident. The police agree. His widow does not.

Ex-LAPD detective Jack Morrison takes the case because the dead man’s brother, Samuel Wilkins, once shared a foxhole with him in Italy, and some debts do not expire. Samuel came home from a segregated Army to a country that still had not decided whether his service counted. Now he needs the one man who can get him the truth.

What starts as a favor pulls Morrison into a sealed world of classified blueprints, federal prosecutors, and a spy operation the government needs to disappear.

Morrison has a .45, a Leica, and no jurisdiction. He is not going to get a trial or a confrontation. What he is going to get is the truth, and a decision about who deserves to hear it, even after the official record buries it for good.

A hardboiled, first-person noir for readers of Lou Berney, Attica Locke, Walter Mosley, and James Ellroy. 1950s Southern California rendered with period precision. Moral stakes without sentiment. A widow who refuses a lie, a war brother who will not be turned away, and a private detective who refuses to leave a lie where somebody placed it.

A complete noir novella you can read in a single sitting. The second entry in Jack Morrison’s Blood & Bourbon Mystery Files, following Blood Tide: A Harbor Noir Thriller. Readable as a standalone.



In 1950s Long Beach, some secrets are built to never see daylight.