The Big Click

I remember the first time a piece of fiction left me haunted. It was one of the stories in William Hope Hodgson’s collection Carnacki the Ghost-Finder. I won’t say which story, so as not to spoil it for you, and you should read the entire, wonderful book. All the stories have as their protagonist Thomas […]

Rob Hart New Yorked (Polis Books, 2015). Ash McKenna is writer Rob Hart’s crime-wise “fixer”: a freelance troubleshooter for the underclass in modern day NYC. Waking from a bender, he finds a message from his semi-girlfriend, the razor beauty Chell, saying a stranger’s followed her and she needs help. As we and Ash listen, both […]

The subject of this column forces me to brag. This is hard, nay, painful, for me, because I am a man of impressive humility. Indeed, my literary genius is exceeded only by my modesty. But needs must… Though some might pretend otherwise, it’s safe to say that all authors like it when their books are praised, […]

So you say you want to find out something about Scottish crime writing? Are you sure? Well, you know, there’s quite a lot of it about for a small, miserable country with a population of around 5 million sados wandering about in the dark for seven months of the year. With a rich history of […]

“He was undoubtedly a man of original genius, but of coarse manners and low and offensive opinions.”—William Wordsworth, on James Hogg If you grow up working class in Scotland, you have a split personality. You speak in Scots, but you write in English. Almost everything you read in school is in English. The class in which […]

Tom Pitts, Hustle (Snubnose Press, 2014). In the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, Donny and Big Rich, two down-and-out street hustlers and career addicts, are tired of turning tricks for a meal and a fix. The singular focus of life is scoring, as the degradation of being straight sex-trade workers warps their minds, especially Donny. […]

It is written—by me—that the sport of noir is boxing. But noir is a mansion made of many dark rooms, and more rooms are being added as we read and write. One of the most original chambers to be added is the genre of lucha noir, created in a single book—Hoodtown, by Christa Faust. In the […]