Editing by Elizabeth

January 19, 2012

The City of Strange Angels by Stephen Blackmoore

Today reformed pyromaniac Stephen Blackmoore stops by to share a little about how the dark side of the City of Angels shaped his novel City of the Lost, which I’ll be reviewing tomorrow. And if you’re in the LA area, be sure to check out Stephen and a horde of other authors reading their work at Noir at the Bar on Jan 22nd.

Stephen Blackmoore In January of 1934 G. Warren Shufelt, a mining engineer, believed that a race of lizard people were living in tunnels underneath Downtown L.A. Not only did he think these lizard people were there, but he also believed that they had gold and other treasures in their underground city. He even said he had photographed some of these treasures with “radio X-rays”. Four foot long gold tablets upon which 5000 years of ancient lizard man lore was written.

He dug a shaft on North Hill Street in an effort to find the entrance. He even made a map of it showing the tunnel locations, various rooms and their dimensions and where all the gold was supposed to be.

Could it be true? Could there be a race of Lovecraftian lizardmen living under the streets of L.A.?

Well, no, of course not, but for a while somebody believed it. The L.A. Times even printed a front page story about it. Showed the map and everything.

L.A. can be a weird, funny and truly creepy place. Lizard people, the curse of Griffith Park, haunts a-plenty. Horrors and weirdness of the more mundane variety, too. There’s The Black Dahlia, Charles Manson, The Night Stalker, The Grim Sleeper.

Hell, just the other day a couple hikers found some Armenian guy’s head in a bag in Bronson Canyon. No word yet on where the rest of him is. I don’t think they’ll find him. →

January 18, 2012

Chain Gang Elementary by Jonathan Grant

Come on, it’s just a grade school. This stuff isn’t supposed to destroy people’s lives.

Richard Gray thought he knew what he was getting into when he accepted the position of PTO President at “four-star school of excellence” Malliford Elementary. He would have done well to adopt General Sherman’s attitude about the presidency: “If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve.”

Instead, Richard quickly finds himself at war with Malliford’s ancient and entrenched principal, Estelle Rutherford, and her hardcore supporters among the faculty. For that matter, a vocal group of his fellow parents are also less than pleased with his reformist ways, especially when he challenges them on the basis for their opposition to a redistricting plan which would bring an influx of students from a low-income apartment complex into Malliford.

It’s Rutherford’s implementation of “forced labor” during detention that really escalates things to the next level, however, earning Malliford the scandalous nickname “Chain Gang Elementary,” as well as an exposé in the local paper and Richard’s outspoken criticism. Rutherford is less than amused, and brings in outside reinforcements in the form of two (because one apparently wasn’t enough) school psychologists and the founder of a prominent right-wing “family first” type group to bolster her position, and to help oust Richard…at any cost. →

January 17, 2012

Absolute Zero Cool by Declan Burke

“I’m not the problem, man. The story’s the problem.”
– Billy Karlsson

I seem to have a penchant lately for choosing books that make my head explode. First it was Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat by Andrez Bergen, then came The Office of Lost & Found by Vincent Holland-Keen.

I now add Absolute Zero Cool by Declan Burke to the list, and apart from the rather messy cleanup required of repeated head explosions, I must say I am quite enjoying the stepped up game these authors have been bringing into my reading world.

While at an artists’ retreat, our unnamed narrator, an author (is he or isn’t he Declan himself?), is visited by a man calling himself Billy Karlsson, which just happens to be the name of a character in one of the manuscripts the author has long since set aside. And while it’s all well and good that the author has moved on to a successful career writing comedic crime novels, Billy complains that he’s been stuck in limbo the past five years and would like very much to move the show along toward being published.

Not only that, Billy is no longer satisfied with his original incarnation and has some suggestions on which way his story should go. Bemused by this person who has taken on the persona of one of his characters, the author patiently explains that as a new father and somewhat successful author he’s in a much happier state of mind than he was when he initially drafted Billy’s dark tale of a hospital porter performing euthanasia on elderly patients, and as such isn’t really sure he can recapture that vibe… or that he wants to. →

January 16, 2012

All for the Sake of Entertainment by Declan Burke

Tomorrow I will be reviewing Absolute Zero Cool by Declan Burke. Today I’m pleased to welcome Declan for a guest post, in which he ruminates on violence in crime fiction and the author’s “right” to write about it, and comes to a rather unexpected personal conclusion.

Declan Burke I don’t think I’ve ever been so busy. Really, Elizabeth’s gracious offer to host a guest post by yours truly couldn’t have come at a better time.

Seriously.

Right now I’m supposed to be doing a final redraft on my latest book, Slaughter’s Hound (it’s a sequel to my first book, Eightball Boogie). And I am. Except I’m so busy fiddling with a word here or a comma there, an entire paragraph over there and three pages of exposition virtually everywhere, that I don’t have time to think about the bigger picture, and about what the book is really saying. So I’m very grateful for this opportunity to type out loud, as it were, and discover a thing or two about where the story is going.

I hope.

Anyway, as you can probably appreciate from the title, Slaughter’s Hound is not a cosy in which the mystery of the missing mittens is solved by a cat detective (note to self: sketch out synopsis for story about a serial-killer rabid dog who hunts down cat detectives). No, Slaughter’s Hound is old school. In fact, it kind of harks back to the Old West, and a time and place where the law was what the man with fastest draw said it was. In essence, it’s an eye-for-an-eye retribution tale featuring a protagonist who is, politically speaking, perhaps just a little to the left of LA Confidential’s Bud White.

This didn’t happen by accident, of course. I deliberately set out to write a right-wing treatise, mainly because Irish crime fiction, while offering virtually every other kind of variation on the crime / mystery novel, has yet to unearth its very own Mickey Spillane or early James Ellroy. Consciously or otherwise, most Irish writers cleave to the liberal model of the crime novel, which is to say that evil is not just always defeated, but is seen to be defeated, and generally as a result of the hero’s innate goodness, which usually manifests itself as a superior intellect and emotional intelligence, both of which the dastardly criminal lacks, being working class and stupid and starved of affection because his parents were working class and stupid and emotionally stunted. And on it goes. →

January 10, 2012

The Chosen by Arlene Hunt

Everything had been blown apart the day two boys decided it might be something to show the world the power of their savagery.

Located in the mountains of North Carolina near the Tennessee border, the sedate town of Rockville is rocked to its core when two students pull a Columbine-style shooting at the local high school early one morning.

Though three are killed and five wounded, the final toll would have been much worse but for the efforts of teacher Jessie Conway, who rushes into the cafeteria and confronts the shooters. When the dust settles both shooters lie dead, one at the hands of Jessie, who is also injured in the confrontation.

And while the shooting may be over, the fallout and healing are just beginning. Even after her physical wounds heal, Jessie continues to struggle to come to terms with the lingering psychological trauma from seeing people shot around her… and having taken a teenager’s life herself.

That kind of stress would be difficult enough even if Jessie and her husband, Mike, had the luxury of regrouping at their own pace, but the local media, desperate to exploit the “big city” tragedy for paper sales and TV ratings, relentlessly hounds Jessie for her firsthand account of events. Frustrated at her lack of cooperation, one local reporter digs into Jessie’s history and publishes a story with inflammatory information about Jessie’s past. And just when Jessie thinks things can’t possibly get any worse, she finds out how disturbingly wrong she is. →

January 09, 2012

Go West by Arlene Hunt

After six successful novels set in her native Ireland, including five in her QuicK Investigations series, author Arlene Hunt has decided to kick down the door here on the shores of the U.S. with her latest release, The Chosen, by setting the action in the woods and mountains of upstate North Carolina. Tomorrow I’ll be reviewing The Chosen, but today I’m pleased to welcome Arlene to explain why she felt she had to “Go West.”

Arlene Hunt For as long as I can remember my fascination with all things crime came with a distinctly American flavour. I grew up in a foster home. Kitty (my elderly foster mother) watched Kojak, Hawaii 5 0, Hill Street Blues, CHiPs and just about every cop show that could be caught on a two-station black and white television set the size and shape of a packet of cornflakes. I was her willing companion (plus it meant I got to stay up late and hot chocolate).

The seed was sown. As soon as I could I left behind Enid Blyton and Judy Blume novels and discovered Joseph Wambaugh and Stephen King. I loved the horror novels, but it was crime that drew me in and kept me hooked. I was amazed at how people spoke in crime novels, stunned by the wit and black humour, and in awe of the tension and violence. It became something of an obsession with me to get my paws on as many crime novels as possible, books that had Kitty ever cracked their spines would immediately have been confiscated (I’m trying to picture Kitty’s expression had she read some of the exchanges between ‘Spermwhale’ Whalen and ‘Roscoe’ Rules in The Choirboys). I had an ally in Kitty’s husband, a garrulous ex-army man, who plied my interest with both tales of war and dog-eared paperbacks, where men shot first, asked pertinent questions later, and always with a mysterious broad skulking in the shadows. →

January 08, 2012

Indie Lit Awards 2011 Short Lists

The Short Lists for the 2011 Independent Literary Awards have been announced. The awards are given in a number of genres, and I am honored to have been asked to serve as a voting member of the “Mystery” panel.

The following have made the 2011 Indie Lit Awards Mystery Short List:

Missing Daughter, Shattered Family by Liz Strange (MLR Press)
The Cut by George Pelecanos (Reagan Arthur/LIttle, Brown)
A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny (St. Martin’s Press)
The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes by Marcus Sakey (Dutton)
Fun & Games by Duane Swierczynski (Mulholland Books/Little, Brown)

The Short Lists have also been announced for the Biography/ Memoir, Fiction, Non-Fiction, GLBTQ, Poetry, and Speculative Fiction genres as well. You can read more about the Independent Literary Awards and see all the Short List nominees on the Indie Lit Awards website.

December 30, 2011

Dig Two Graves by Eric Beetner

God dammit. I’d hoped to get this over with in one bullet. At this rate, I’d empty the clip before morning. – Val

OK, first things first. Though the title of Eric Beetner’s novella comes from that old proverb about digging two graves before starting on a journey of revenge, it is a bit misleading… a hell of a lot more than two graves are gonna be needed by the time all’s said and done in this story of a man determined to extract his pound of flesh from the one who betrayed him.

After serving three years for a gas station hold-up gone wrong, Val gets out of prison with two revelations. First, the key to successful crime is massive planning and not biting off more than you can chew. Second, well, he kinda fell in love while he was inside. With a guy. So much so that when his new jailhouse friend, Ernesto, is released shortly after Val they pick up with their relationship. Val’s not sure whether that makes him queer, but he’s damn sure he doesn’t want his wife to find out about it.

Turns out his wife finding out he’s cheating on her with another man is the least of Val’s worries. No, more pressing are the cops at his door, the ones who couldn’t possibly be there unless someone ratted out Val’s new bank robbing scheme – one that had been working out quite successfully, thank you very much – to the cops. Problem is, the only other person who knows about the operation is Ernesto. And so, fueled both by the heaviness of a broken heart and the fury of betrayal, Val heads out to find Ernesto and settle the score in what unfolds as a frenetic night of escalating violence and dwindling options. →

December 30, 2011

Off the Record by Luca Veste, Editor

The past year seems to have been a bonanza for short story collections, and editor Luca Veste proves that last is certainly not least with his collection Off the Record, which was released at the end of November.

Featuring a mind-boggling thirty-eight stories from a who’s who of the crime fiction community, Off the Record is structured around the clever premise of taking a classic song title and writing a story inspired by it. To avoid making this review ridiculously long, and to leave you plenty to discover fresh for yourselves, I will just mention a handful that stood out to me for one reason or another.

“Light My Fire” by AJ Hayes is an incredibly dark tale of a love triangle gone awry. What could have been a run of the mill story of revenge instead turns into a truly disturbing look at how one man’s journey out of the mouth of madness ends up being another’s entrance into it as they both seek answers to the murderous events of the past.

Ian Ayris’ “Down In The Tube Station At Midnight” features a working stiff bloke in the London Underground on his way to the daily grind. In what turns out to be an interesting twist, however, the grind in question isn’t quite what you may be expecting.

Iain Rowan tackled a biggie when he chose the legendary “Purple Haze” as his track, and he more than lives up to the challenge in this story of three well-to-do college boys who head into the projects looking to score drugs only to discover a high they never anticipated. →

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