Power Pop-Themed Crime Fiction

"That'll Be The Day," "Good Girls Don't," and introducing...

Jul 12, 2025

Book 3 in my Power Pop Heist novella series is finished.

I actually got the final edits back late last year, shortly before our world got rocked. In a perpetual panicked daze, I completely forgot about this third installment until I came across a months-old email from my amazing copyeditor in March.

Too frazzled to do anything about it, I hastily returned it to the back burner.

I didn’t give it any more thought until I was interviewed by Christopher Grey and Paul Heinz for 1,000 Greatest Misses. I was honestly surprised when our conversation briefly turned to my crime writing, but got undeniably excited talking about it for the first time in many months.

That was the nudge I needed to get the third book, Greatest Misses, ready for publication (the cover art is still in the works!)—but figuring out what “publication” even means to me these days became a brief rabbit hole. For context, the two previous books in this series were self-published through Kindle Direct (aka Amazon).

About That’ll Be The Day: Jackson Sharp is a former power pop guitar player fresh out of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. He's on a mission to settle the score with his dead beat dad, but needs to collect some cash from his younger brother and former bandmate, Jamie. He finds Jamie at his struggling Tulsa record shop, but the cash is long gone. Jamie offers up a heist instead—steal a rare copy of a pre-Beatles 45 from a wealthy collector in Memphis. The road trip that follows is the violent family/band reunion that Jackson never wanted.

I also started serializing That’ll Be The Day in January, 2023 during RTL’s first month on Substack.

The book was already out in the world for a few years by then, but I got a pretty good response sharing weekly chapters and embedded music while introducing myself. That made me wonder if I should serialize the second (and third) book here, maybe even skipping the traditional “book publishing” approach altogether moving forward.

Truth is, the stuff I like to write about is often so niche that it’s a minor miracle to find even a small audience that loves hardboiled crime fiction and power pop the way I do—and is willing to roll the dice on a crime/power pop mash up. (It works, I swear!)

In the end, I decided to split the difference: All three Power Pop Heist novellas will be available in print and ebook editions on Amazon at some point in the near future, and the whole first book in the series will remain available for free on Substack.

I also plan to serialize the second and third books, Good Girls Don’t and Greatest Misses, for paid subscribers.

This isn’t some sneaky way to drive paid subscriptions because, honestly, the print and ebook editions are less than $10 each on Amazon. (Also: See “small audience” above.) But I decided this could be a tiny token of my appreciation for RTL’s paid subscribers who generously support my writing even though 99.9% of it is free.

If you’re new to this series and want to check it out, Chapter 1 is below along with links to the entire book. I’ve also included a That’ll Be The Day playlist featuring many of the songs mentioned in the first book (there are quite a few of them, natch).

I love these characters and this broken little world I created. Hope you do too.

That’ll Be The Day: A Power Pop Heist

by S.W. Lauden

Chapter 1

Jackson Sharp sat alone outside the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. He ran a hand across his close-cropped salt and pepper hair, sunken eyes tilted up at the creeping black clouds. The bleak poetry of the situation brought a mischievous smirk to his lips. He pulled a pack of smokes from his leather jacket and struck a match. That first drag tasted like freedom, the feeling long gone by the time he exhaled. The two hundred dollars in his jeans wouldn’t last more than a day. After that, he was on his own. At least until he went to see his little brother, Jamie.

White smoke escaped from between his cracked lips as the first raindrops fell. Jack tapped a sneaker in time to a peppy rhythm only he could hear. A private one-song radio station that played on a loop every day for three years as he lifted weights, pushed a broom and dodged the occasional shiv. Jack’s life had taken twists and turns during his forty-two trips around the sun, but “Please Please Me” by The Beatles was a constant soundtrack—whether he liked it or not.

The wind howled, bringing with it the smell of dirty, wet pavement. Jack didn’t expect anybody to pick him up, but it still pissed him off. Sitting there alone, hunkered down inside a plastic bus shelter, he considered the lies he’d told to get paroled. All the feigned regret and remorse, the earnest conversations about rehabilitation. What he really wanted was his cut from the job that landed him there in the first place. The ten vintage guitars he and Jamie stole were easily worth a hundred grand, even after the fence’s cut. The promise of Jack’s fifty grand was the only thing that kept him sane inside. That and the plan he hatched to track down the worthless bastard who got “Please Please Me” stuck in his head in the first place.

Jack was twelve when the early Beatles single burrowed into his brain. His dad used to play the Fab Four around the clock, often getting hung up on a particular song for days at a stretch. “Please Please Me” played on repeat that sunny day as the three of them crowded under the hood of the family’s station wagon. That meant somebody had to rewind the cassette tape every three minutes or so. The old man would slap Jack on the shoulder whenever the song ended, causing Jack to slap Jamie. Somehow the song always got cued up again, and slowly but surely, the oil got changed.

“Please Please Me” played for probably the hundredth time when their old man finally slammed the hood shut. He herded his kids inside for the Saturday roast and fresh baked apple pie their mom slaved over all day. After dinner, Jack climbed onto the top bunk in the room he shared with his brother, lulled to sleep by the sound of “Please Please Me” wafting up from the living room stereo. Jack dreamt of joining The Beatles that night, even though the band was long gone by then.

Their dad and the family station wagon had vanished when the boys came downstairs the next morning. They found their mom at the kitchen table, a scrawled note in her shaking hands. She pulled her two sons close and sobbed on Jack’s shoulder while their baby sister, Jenna, wailed in sympathy from the other room. Jack was the man of the family from that moment on. He never forgave his father for it.

Jack hummed the chorus to “Please Please Me” as the bus emerged through sheets of slanted rain. The brakes sighed and the door squealed open. Jack stood, his six-foot frame slowly unfolding. Prison had transformed his beer-bloated body into something almost unrecognizable, and he had the tattoos and scars to prove it. He climbed inside, handed the driver his voucher and took a seat near the back. It was a two-hour ride to the nearest fleabag motel on the outskirts of Tulsa, less than five miles from Jamie’s record shop.

Jack stared out the window, foot tapping again. He couldn’t wait to see the look on Jamie’s face when he came to collect his money. From there, he planned to travel north. He’d done hours of research on the prison library’s computers and found a Jonathan Sharp about his dad’s age living in Milwaukee. Jack decided to pay him a visit as soon as he got out.

But not until he got his money.

And bought himself a gun.