The Delivery is a refreshing twist on the “white knight syndrome” so common in the macho-driven world of stoic men meting out frontier justice so prevalent in crime fiction today.
Second in what surely will be an ongoing series, The Delivery follows last year’s The Mailman, wherein a former federal agent for the USPIS, (US Postal Inspection Service) Mercury Carter, offers a unique service: he will make deliveries for certain customers (how they come to hire him is a bit of a mystery in itself) – nothing extra-legal, mind you, but his deliveries take a number of forms. He’s dedicated, even single-minded, about his own moral code, which means no matter what it is, that object, document, person, package, will be transported to its destination.
As with Mercury’s debut, the story starts off with an action scene Welsh-Huggins surely relishes writing. “Merc” is in his car on the way to deliver a coveted baseball card to an elderly man, but, yup, these things never go quite as planned. He comes upon a car accident with the driver trapped, and being the stand-up guy he is, stops to see if he can help. As he’s trying to free an injured woman trapped behind the steering wheel, another car drives up and a pistol-toting thug tells him to move on – (in a less polite way) but Mercury, who has grabbed a crow bar from his car in an effort to pry open the smashed car door, doesn’t roll over.
“Turn the fuck around,” says the stranger. “No thanks, Carter said, and underhanded the crowbar with a single, smooth upthrust, arcing it with the slightest forward lift at maybe thirty, thirty-five miles per hour. Not even close to his record. No matter. It struck the man on the bridge of his nose with a wet smack like a melon hitting pavement. The man grunted and staggered back, dropping the gun as his hands rose to his face. A second later, recovering, he knelt for the weapon, but it was too late. Carter covered the gap in two seconds, made his calculations, and kicked the man square in the face.”
The fight continues, but eventually the interloper backs off and leaves. Later that evening, in his motel room, he discovers that the woman driver, a Linda Stauch, has managed to slip a sealed envelope into his jacket pocket. It contains the name of a banker, a phone number, a small ruby ring and the word, “Help.”
His curiosity piqued, Mercury calls the number. And here the story becomes somewhat convoluted, as he finds himself pulled into the background of Linda’s situation. But first Welsh-Huggins introduces several other nefarious characters, including a scam artist named Monica, who is a nurse at the local prison, and runs a lucrative theft operation based on tips from inmates. Other additions (there are several) include Merc’s uncle, a voice of reason and considerable assistance on the phone. There’s a missing laptop, questions about the ring – it’s a lot to grasp, although as the story proceeds, Welsh-Huggins adroitly ties up numerous dangling loose ends in the second half of the novel.
So, the idea for the Mailman character? In a recent email interview, Welsh-Huggins explained the genesis of his creation.
“If only the kind of inspiration that led to Mercury Carter’s development happened more often. In truth, the character and the specific concept of a freelance mailman came to me nearly fully formed one day a few years ago, when I was out for a walk. I’m a fan of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books and Gregg Hurwitz’s Orphan X novels (and other books featuring lone-wolf protagonists), and something must have been percolating in the back of my brain to give me the out-of-the blue idea for a similar hero, but one more reserved and who comes with an unusual moral code: he’s never missed a delivery, and will do almost anything to keep that streak alive.
Although Carter is a former federal agent and refuses to deliver anything illegal, he doesn’t necessarily see himself as a do-gooder—he simply wants to make his deliveries and get home to his wife, Tomeka, and their quiet life in Rochester, New York. If he has to unleash mayhem on bad actors to achieve that goal, well, that’s just how things go.”
Welsh-Huggins published several short stories about Mercury Carter as he fleshed out his creation.
“The idea that came to me on that lucky walk was a story in which Carter chaperones a young mother and her toddler daughter out of an abusive marriage to a safe house. It pretty much wrote itself and was published in Mickey Finn, 21st Century Noir, Vol. 1, edited by Michael Bracken, in 2020. I published three or four other Carter short stories before embarking on the novel The Mailman.”
Like the debut novel, The Delivery excels in fight and action scenes, often with what feels like the author’s trademark: the use of available, common objects to fend off the bad guys (and gals).
To wit:
An encounter at a gas station convenience store with two toughs who think they can just bully Merc in to leaving. He tells them to move their parked truck and he’ll go. They say no. After locking the door, one of the men (nicknamed Tweedledum and UFC) … “shifted his right hand behind his back with a practiced air, his confidence that of someone who’d been to more than one rodeo…. Carter clapped his left hiking boot on the linoleum floor. Tweedledum and UFC jumped at the sound of the slap. Just a little, but enough to put them the slightest bit off balance. Which gave Carter the fraction of a second he needed to hurl the contents of his to-go mug of tea into Tweedledum’s face – twenty ounces of hot water, minimum temperature of 180 degrees.” The fight goes on for several pages. At one juncture, threatened by a knife, “Carter backed up madly, grabbed a sunglasses display tree and brought it down on UFC’s knife hand, sending the weapon clattering to the floor.”
Or, how about a clipboard? “…jabbing the bottom of the clipboard into the man’s throat, hard and fast, just below the man’s Adam’s apple.”
My favorite in The Delivery, however, is when Merc uses most of a case of motor oil, poured outside a van’s doors… “The man’s left foot skidded on the pooling motor oil, and he windmilled his arms for a long three seconds before yelping as something in his back twisted. He fell backward, grunting when his head bounced off the van’s front bumper, rolled over and went silent.”
I had to ask, are you a Hong Kong action movie fan? Would coming up with these wacky, effective “weapons” be one of your favorite parts in writing the books?
“One rule I decided to stick with early on was that this series was not going to involve a lot of high-tech weaponry and specialized military skills. (For example, you will never see Carter piloting a helicopter through enemy fire in a hostile nation-state, nor will he expertly hack the security system of an enemy’s lair. I mean, he’s not even on social media.) Carter carries a Beretta, the same weapon that was standard issue when he was a U.S. Postal Inspection Service agent, but that’s his only firearm.
“From there, as you’ve noted, he relies on improvisation, tapping what’s on hand or that he can order from Amazon. It’s MacGyver-lite, I suppose, with a goal of being realistic within the context of Carter having a good imagination along with defensive skills learned as a Fed. I watch a fair amount of action movies of all types and closely study the fights, but I also spend a lot of time at my desk thinking about how Carter could respond to a threat without it seeming too ridiculous. Also, I try to make the fight scenes authentic in the sense that, if Carter gets punched or kicked, he’s still feeling it days later. He’s not Superman.”
A delicious sense of humor permeates these novels. After subduing a baddie, “Carter didn’t have time to bind him. Instead, he pulled off the man’s left shoe and tossed it toward [a] dumpster. Nothing throws someone off more than trying to run with one shoe on, one shoe off.”
And: two of the scamming criminals are discussing retrieving the missing laptop. One tells the other how he’s bungling getting that computer back. “Which means our chances of getting the laptop back are shrinking faster than a pecker in a blizzard.”
I mentioned how much I enjoyed the humor in the stories. “Like you,” says Welsh-Huggins, “several people have noted various lines in the books that made them laugh. (My favorite in The Mailman is when Carter describes a tall, blue-eyed brute as, “Like if Home Depot sold Vikings.”) I don’t set out to make him funny, and he’s consciously not a wise-cracking combatant or prone to deadpan. (As hilarious as the line is, you’ll also never hear Carter say something like, “Nailed ‘em both,” as Danny Glover’s character does in Lethal Weapon 2 after dispatching two bad guys with a nail gun).
“Instead, Carter truly thinks that, yeah, removing one of this guy’s shoes is the best option in that moment… a lot of this stuff does come to me in the moment. I’m a 75% plotter, meaning I try to leave at least 25% of the plot blank to allow for those kinds of moments. As far as the second question, I think the books have allowed me to be inadvertently funny in a way that hopefully doesn’t detract from the seriousness of the situations.”
Welsh-Huggins, based in Columbus, OH, worked for the Associated Press (AP) for many years. I wondered to what extent that kind of writing has informed his crime fiction.
“Very much so. I cut my teeth as a young reporter on the police beat for The Herald-Times in Bloomington, Indiana, in the 1990s, halcyon days of journalism when crazy things would happen, such as police officers who trusted me letting me into crime scenes to see what happened. During my 24-year stint at the Associated Press, I covered many big crimes—such as the Ariel Castro Cleveland kidnapping case or the Piketon massacre—as well as all aspects of the death penalty. Covering those events as a reporter gave me plenty of story ideas, but it also taught me the importance of getting criminal justice stuff right in fiction (hint: there’s a big difference between jail and prison, and, no, a trial doesn’t start two weeks after an arrest).”
He also writes the Shamus Award-nominated Andy Hayes private eye series, featuring a former Ohio State and Cleveland Browns quarterback turned investigator. (The latest book in that series, Rescue Me, formally launches June 2).
I always like to ask the authors I interview about their “day at work.” Welsh-Huggins leads a busy life …
“I’ve always been an early bird, and that was especially true when I was still working as a full-time reporter, days that saw me arising at 4:45 a.m. to write fiction for an hour or two before heading to my day job. These days, I’m still up early, but I tend to get my non-fiction responsibilities out of the way first: assignments in my small freelance writing portfolio, marketing duties, etc. Then, depending on the day, I shut down email and social media and focus exclusively on fiction for two or three hours. Lately, that’s been from about 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., but the time can vary depending on that day’s obligations outside of fiction. I treat my writing as a job, meaning overall, I’m at my desk most days 8-5 and rarely work on weekends.”
Finally, at the heart of Mercury Carter’s story is the murder of his father, Danny, when Merc was a teenager. Danny was also with the Post Office, and his death was suspicious. It haunts Merc every day. The very end of The Delivery hints at Danny’s unresolved cause of death. The true suspect, Earl Madden, was Danny’s supervisor and has been missing since shortly after the murder.
Asked if he were concluding the series as a trilogy, say, with justice for his dad’s killer, Welsh-Huggins replied, “My goal is to continue writing Mercury Carter novels for as long as readers demand them. That said, I don’t think continuing Carter’s search for his father’s killer, book by book, is realistic or all that interesting. So, while envisioning—hoping for—more than a trilogy, the third book, Address Unknown (coming in March 2027), will likely wrap up the “father’s killer” arc.”
This reader looks forward to more creative weaponry, solid jokes and a uniquely likeable protagonist.
Peter Handel has been writing about crime fiction since the early 1990s. His reviews, interviews, and profiles have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Portland Oregonian, Pages Magazine, Mystery Reader’s Journal, The Rap Sheet and CrimeReads. Join his Substack here.
