Filed under: News
To make all of this babbling concrete and real and wonderful, I present to you the cover for EXPLETIVE DELETED 
and it’s subsequently thrilling frontlist page on the publishers (Bleak House Books) site.
I may have been quiet, but I have been working diligently to make this book a reality and this is the HTML that proves it.
More interviews (including the charming Anthony Neil Smith and the luscious H.P. Tinker) shall follow soon along with continuing news about the editing process, the launch party and information about the sequel.
Yes, this nasty book shall have a companion.
So keep tuning in, kids. I have more tricks up my sleeve!
Filed under: News
This is an anthology whelped by food poisoning, a late night magazine editing session and exasperation.
The lovely and painfully intelligent Ruth Jordan had written a story. A story I loved.
Little Blue Pill had everything any noir fan would love: sex, violence, murder and sex.
But this was not a story that could find a home just any where. Online, there are some excellent purveyors of all that is dark and ugly and infinitly readable about people. But in print? Not so much.
In print, a writer is generally more limited when it comes to what their nefarious protagonists and antagonists do. And say. And think. And those magazines accepting submissions for print short stories are backed up ’til the next decade when it comes to the actual ‘in print’ part.
What is a girl, namely Ruth, who writes stories with sociopathic women who like to murder men with what they’ve got between their legs to do when she’s got her story all polished up and ready to be read by the world?
As she and I lamented the fate of nasty short stories that night in the CrimeSpree offices, my brain would no doubt barely have registered on the most sensitive of CAT scans. My whole body was involved with exhaustion. My whole brain, what little was still firing from synapse to synapse, was stymied about where to go with LBP.
“I should put together an anthology and put your story in it.”
I’m surprised Ruth heard me say this. The file cabinet that was holding me up absorbed most of the sound. But hear me she did.
“What kind of antholgy do you put a story like that in?”
A good question. Anthologies have themes. Place themes, crime themes, hobby themes, etc.
Another synapse fired.
“How ’bout Fuck Noir?”
She and I bothed laughed our proverbial asses off.
Then we got back to the work of the magazine and forgot all about it.
A few months later, I brought my fake anthology name up to a few people. They loved it.
“Now, that would be fun!”
When enough people expressed interest, my sluggish mind went into action mode.
Anthologies have themes. I knew just saying, “The theme is fuck,” wouldn’t be enough. Did Fuck Noir mean fuck noir as a subject?
Well, I’ve had quite a few laughs at panels in which authors from Loren D. Estelman to Paul Johnston tried to define noir at the almost inevitable “What is Noir?” panel one finds at crime fiction conventions.
Loren Estelman, an incredibley nice man and a brilliant fucking author, summed the whole mess of ‘what is noir’ up best when he said:
“Noir is the French word for black.”
Damn straight!
Despite my amusement about the unending debates about what noir is, I know I love noir.
So, no, it wasn’t going to be fuck noir.
Fuck Noir also suggested a rather dark, erotic theme. Nothing wrong with that.
But I wanted to go farther and deeper than erotica beacuse fuck is more than sex.
Fuck can be an angry, funny, terrified, loving word. It’s all in the intonation. I knew Fuck Noir could be all about tone as well. And what the fuck, let the writer of the story choose the tone.
And damned if they didn’t. I know some of them really cracked themselves and me up with their ‘tone’.
Some of them surprised me. They were dead serious. Sometimes the funniest people write the most serious works you’ll read.
The main gist of the anthology though, is what fuck* stands for today.
It is a naughty word.
A word many people from celebrities to politicians have gotten in a lot of trouble for saying. It is on every street and in every bedroom but it’s still taboo.
Mark Billingham has stated on numerous occasions, and I’ll badly paraphrase him here, that people have written to him after reading his books. They’ve written to admonish him; to waggle a finger. Why? His characters swore. They swore, some had sex, they (gasp!) drank. For shame!
Mark was amused and confused. His characters shouldn’t swear or have sex or (gasp!) drink, but they can brutally murder whomever they want? Slashing people up is OK, but no profanity while you do it. An investigator, after a long day of seeing the very worst humanity has to offer, better not have a drink when he gets home or stop off at the pub. But the evil doers strangling women in alleys is fine.
What is even stranger, really, is that these peole got upset about what fictional people do in a fiction world. It’s a story. It’s made up. Not real. Let it go.
This set my mind on fire. That’s what I wanted in the anthology. All the things those people want Mark to keep out of his books. All the bad things.
Most of the stories for the anthology are in.
Every one has been an utter joy to read. And most of them will really piss off those people that like to keep their fictional characters on the straight and narrow.
Harriet Klausner will give it a rare one star review for being so maleficent.
If you like your fiction dead of night dark with a dash of vicious, this is the anthology for you.
There is sex.
There is drinking.
There is most certainly profanity of the worst kind.
And that’s just the first story.
* it makes it sound like I should have a fuck flag made up. Instead of ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ it says, Don’t Fuck with Me. What to put on it in place of the angry snake. Hmmmmm….
