What does a murder at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View and a Mexican cartel that uses pigeons to smuggle drugs have in common? They’re both fictional stories that came from the mind of Livermore resident and author John G. Bluck.
The latter story comes from his most recent book “Pigeons of Death” — which follows undercover sheriff’s deputy Luke Ryder, who Bluck has been writing about for several years and hopes to continue writing about for many years to come.
“You keep it going for as long as you can,” Bluck told the Pleasanton Weekly. “I’m doing it for fun.”
Bluck’s journey with writing first started when he was drafted to the Vietnam War. But instead of traveling across seas, Bluck was sent to Fort Lewis in Washington to serve as a journalist for the Army.
There he would work on putting together a 60-page newspaper every week, which is how he began his career in writing.
After his time in the Army, Bluck ended up working for a television station in Washington, D.C. — WMAL-TV, which is now WJLA-TV — as a daytime crime photographer and videographer, where he covered a ton of crime and major news stories. He said that period of his life is where he actually gets most of his current book ideas from because of all the things he witnessed.
“I saw a lot of historic things, I saw a lot of crime,” Bluck said. “This really helped me to picture, later on, crimes and mysteries that I conjure up in my mind.”
When the station he worked at changed ownership, he was sent to work as an engineer at ABC radio network. When he realized he wasn’t too happy there, he decided to pursue something more challenging, which eventually brought him to work at NASA.
There he produced numerous NASA documentaries for television before becoming the chief of imaging technology at the research center in Moffett Field. He then switched to the public affairs department where he wrote dozens of articles before retiring.
Upon retiring, Bluck said he wanted to try his hand at writing science fiction novels but after writing a couple of short stories, he decided to go back to what he knew best — crime and mystery.
In fact, his first stint with the genre was with his 2017 book, “The Knight Prowler”, which is a murder mystery book that actually takes place in Livermore. After that, he wrote his first Luke Ryder book, “Death in the Holler”, which he ended up showing a first copy to a person who worked at Rough Edges Press — an imprint that works to print books with Wolfpack Publishing, an indie publishing company.
That person asked Bluck if he could write more of those books and before he knew it, Bluck signed a seven-year literary contract with the company in December 2022.
Since his first Luke Ryder book was published in 2023, Bluck has written three other books that follow a renowned detective who specializes in going undercover to solve murders and take down bad guys.
Bluck said he got the inspiration for the protagonist one day when visiting his daughter and son-in-law in Kentucky — which is where the protagonist is from. He said he began spitballing ideas with his son-in-law about crimes that could happen in the state.
After having previously won two Public Safety Writer Association book awards for two of the books in his series, Bluck came back with his new book “Pigeons of Death” — where Luke Ryder returns to Kentucky to solve a murder at a Kentucky farm’s food plot, which ultimately leads to uncovering a larger drug ring where the Mexican cartel uses pigeons to carry drugs into the state.
“This mystery is about drugs, murder and money laundering enabled by the sale of expensive racehorses,” Bluck said in a press statement ahead of the book’s May 28 release date. “Deputy sheriff Luke Ryder goes undercover as a stable hand to investigate the murder of the owner of a Kentucky horse farm.”
