Harper Conn 2

Harper Conn is the name of one of the most famous fictional craetions in modern history and was the inspiration for the birth name of the first Martian Ranger.

Conn was originally created as a throwaway character by 21st century author Jim Dietz for use in three of his novels set in the southwestern part of the former United States of North America. After Dietz's death and the expiration of the copyright on his works and characters, holonovel and immersive artist, Sol Miguel Diaz, took the character and expanded on him in a series of thirty-four works including eleven e-novels, leading to comparisons with an even older author than Dietz, 20th century writer Louis L'Amour and his most famous character William Sackett.

In the first Conn novel, A Six Pack and Flies, Conn was shown to be more than a retired politician. Indeed, the novel takes place shortly after his graduation from the Texas Law Enforcement Academy when he accepts an assignment patrolling the Rio Grande for illegal smugglers. That led to an innocuous investigation over shoplifted beer which then blows up into a scandal involving two dead men, a Texas Ranger and the FBI's #23 Most Wanted. Conn solves the crisis in typical old-Texas style involving hard-bargains, blackmail over others, and he understands that the law sometimes needs to be bent in order to keep it from being broken.

Rather than write chronologically, Diaz then wrote about Conn in his fifties, the period just before he appeared in Dietz's novels. At that time, Conn was near retirement after thirty years of service, jaded and tired, but still, at his core, a practical, tough cop--beaten down but not yet defeated. That novel, Tarnished Badges, sold fourteen million electronic copies in the first twenty-four hours of its availability and sold an additional 500,000 copies in printed format, one of the last books to be printed on paper in such quantity.

THE ELEVEN CONN NOVELS
 * A Six Pack and Flies (Conn aged 24)
 * Tarnished Badges (age 56)
 * Stars at Night (age 26)
 * A Big Flat Land (age 55)
 * The Empty List-Serv (age 26)
 * A .45 to the Head (age 55, considered a sequel to A Big Flat Land)
 * Yellow Roses, Red Blood, Orange Sunset (age 35)
 * The Refugee (age 37)
 * Sam Houston's Been Dead a Long, Long Time (age 39)
 * Lost Love on the I-35 (age 40)
 * Ode to Cincinnatus (age 88(

THE CONN SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
 * San Antone
 * The Blue Sky Bleeds Red
 * Big Oil

THE CONN MOVIES/IMMERSIVES
 * Harper Conn
 * Harper Conn II
 * My Name's Harper Conn
 * Six Pack and Flies
 * Immigrants and Guns
 * Tarnished Badges
 * Tarnished Badges (remake)
 * Blood on the Badge
 * Ft. Worth Confidential
 * Dallas Confidential
 * San Antone Memoirs
 * The Smog of Monterey
 * A Corvette in December
 * Corporate Assassin