Interviews
David L. Ulin on Capturing the Special, Despairing Noir of the West
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David L. Ulin has spent the better part of thirty years as the preeminent book critic in the West; first at the late, great, LA Reader and then as book review editor and later Book Critic for the Los Angeles Times and currently as the books editor for Alta Journal. At the same time, he’s…
Black Horror Fiction Has Always Been Here. What’s Changed Is The Attitudes of Gatekeepers.
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2023 has, so far, been a year full of innovative and mind-bending anthologies, and Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror is one of the best. With an incredible list of contributors, and Jordan Peele as editor, this collection is meant to be savored and celebrated. I asked contributors to the anthology to answer a…
The Backlist: Revisiting Steven Hamilton’s ‘The Lock Artist’ with Elle Cosimano
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When I started writing crime fiction, what I worried about most was all the stuff you had to know. I had never been a criminal, a detective, a private investigator, or a lawyer. I didn’t know how to steal a car or bury a body or fake an alibi. Of course there was always Google,…
Jesse Q. Sutanto on Toxic Friendships, Shrinking Attention Spans, and Finding the Muse
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As one of the terminally online, I really enjoyed the recent “how often men think about the Roman Empire” discourse on Twitter. One response that went viral claimed that the female equivalent of thinking about the Roman Empire is thinking about your ex-best friend, and after a recent friendship breakup and also tearing through Jesse…
Shop Talk: Lou Berney Is a Fanatical Believer in Naps
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Lou Berney is one of the reasons I write crime fiction. Coming up, I cut my teeth on Southern writers like Flannery O’Connor, Larry Brown, Harry Crews, and Jesmyn Ward. It wasn’t until I found The Long and Faraway Gone, Lou’s third novel, that I realized the full power of crime fiction. I’m not alone…
The Western Meets Weird Fiction: A Roundtable Discussion
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Once a narrowly defined genre—set in the American frontier of the 19th Century—the definition of Western has expanded with contemporary takes from such authors as Cormac McCarthy, Ivy Pochoda, Alma Katsu, Jim Harrison and Louise Erdrich. And now, along comes HOT IRON AND COLD BLOOD: An Anthology of the Weird West (September 26, 2023; Dead Sky Publishing),…
Sean Howe on High Times Magazine and Its Enigmatic, Larger-than-Life Editor
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For someone who would dress all in black in the guise of a priest or in a dapper all-white suit, there remain shades of gray surrounding Thomas King Forcade (née Gary Goodson). He blazed out of Phoenix in the late ’60s, becoming the head of the Underground Press Syndicate—a national confederation of often-controversial and incendiary…
Michele Campbell Leans into the Truth
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Michele Campbell worked at a prominent Manhattan law firm before spending eight years fighting crime as a federal prosecutor in New York City. She launched her fiction career in 2005, writing as Michele Martinez, with the Melanie Vargas legal thriller series. Then in 2017 she pivoted, boldly shifting into a new subgenre and, perhaps even…
Why James Patterson and Mike Lupica Came Together to Write a Thriller
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For such a hotshot lawyer who’s never lost a court case, you’re a lot younger than anyone would expect. And it’s your win/loss record, not your good looks, that’s wooed Rob Jacobson—publishing and real estate heir—to hire you. He’s accused of killing three and needs you to get him off on a murder charge. This…