Busted Flush Press

Daniel Woodrell in today's Shelf Awareness

2010-09-13T08:36:00.000-07:00

Daniel Woodrell (Tomato Red; Winter's Bone) takes part in today's Shelf Awareness Book Brahmin... He answers such questions as what's on his nightstand now, the book that changed his life, and more. Go here to read further.

See Mr. Woodrell at Bouchercon next month in San Francisco and in November at NoirCon!

“There are writers who break all boundaries and break your heart with the sheer level of their art. Daniel Woodrell is not only the most truly humble writer I’ve encountered but one of the very few I refer to again and again to learn how true poetic writing is achieved. His on-the-surface simple style conceals a master craftsman at work. There is no writer I know I would love to devote a whole novel to just quoting from his work. There are crime writers . . . literary writers . . . and then . . . Daniel Woodrell. Nobody comes near his amazing genius and I very doubt anyone ever will.”—Ken Bruen, award-winning author of London Boulevard

Appear in a Reed Farrel Coleman novel!

2010-09-10T05:47:00.000-07:00

Register early for 2011 Bouchercon in St. Louis, and you’ll be in a drawing to have a character named after you in three-time Shamus Award winner Reed Farrel Coleman’s next Moe Prager novel, Hurt Machine (which will be launched at the St. Louis Bouchercon)! The winner, who will be chosen from the first 250 registrants (there are about 100 registrants, so far), will also be invited to lunch with Reed, along with two runners-up. Visit the Bouchercon 2011 website to register now!

Reed has won the Shamus Award for Best Novel of the Year three times, won the Barry and Anthony, and twice been nominated for the Edgar. He is a co-editor of The Lineup and was the editor of the anthology Hard Boiled Brooklyn. The former executive VP of Mystery Writers of America, Reed is an adjunct professor at Hofstra University . He has published eleven novels—two under his pen name Tony Spinosa—in three series, and the stand-alone Tower co-written with award-winning Irish author Ken Bruen. His latest Moe Prager novel, Innocent Monster, will be published in October from Tyrus Books.

Reed Farrel Coleman on INNOCENT MONSTER & the reprints

2010-09-08T12:25:00.001-07:00

by Reed Farrel Coleman

After over twenty years at this and with twelve books under my belt, you’d think the debut of a new novel would become old hat. Although it isn’t quite as exciting as it was when I first began my career, the experience never gets old. I’m really looking forward to Tyrus Books’ October 5th release of the sixth Moe Prager novel, Innocent Monster. I’m excited for all the usual reasons—the launch party, the tour, the fans’ reactions—and just the general buzz of holding something in my hands that began as passing thought over two years ago.

But this time, I have a little bit extra to look forward to because Busted Flush Press has timed the release of the new editions of Soul Patch and Empty Ever After to coincide with the release of Innocent Monster. This will mark the first time since the very early days of the Moe Prager series that entire series will be available at once (& in both physical print editions & e-books). In fact, it will mark the very first time since the very early days of my career that all of my published novels will be in print at the same time.

It is especially exciting because the Busted Flush Press editions of the Moe books come with forewords by some of the leading writers in the genre today: Walking The Perfect Square-Megan Abbott, Redemption Street-Peter Spiegelman, The James Deans-Michael Connelly, Soul Patch-Craig Johnson, Empty Ever After-SJ Rozan. Each of the BFP editions also includes an afterword by me, explaining a little bit about how came to write each book. I am particularly interested in the fans’ reactions to a new feature Busted Flush Press added for Soul Patch and Empty Ever After. At the conclusion of those two novels, BFP has added an original and previously unpublished short story by yours truly.

I look forward to seeing you when I launch Innocent Monster at the Mysterious Bookshop, October 7th. I’m also looking forward to seeing you at Bouchercon, Noir Con, Murder and Mayhem in Muskego, and during my stops on the road.

"Honest, officer, it's only research," by Donna Moore

2010-08-31T07:32:00.001-07:00

Research can get you into a lot of trouble. And it’s fraught with danger if you are a writer of comic crime fiction. If you write a serious police procedural series, you can telephone your local police station with worthy questions such as ‘can you tell me the length of a police baton?’ or ‘what do you use to shine your uniform buttons?’ that make people want to give you expansive, knowledgeable answers. I, unfortunately, don’t get the same reaction. I just don’t understand what’s wrong with calling my local police station and asking ‘can you tell me the best way to break out of one of your cells?’ or -- and apparently this is an even worse question -- ‘how easy would it be for an elderly woman and a teenage boy to storm the police station and take you hostage?’ If I can give you a spot of advice, I would suggest that you don’t bother asking those questions. They won’t tell you.

When researching Old Dogs (new from Busted Flush Press), I nearly got myself arrested in a local museum. I believe I was already being carefully watched by the security guards for spending more time peering behind or under the exhibits to see how they were secured. However, at the time I was oblivious to the fact. The museum in question is a lovely grand old building, and one of the features inside, in some of the interior walls are big, fancy metal grilles. I was peering through one of the grilles into a dark tunnel beyond when there was a cough behind me. ‘Can I help you... madam? There was a distinct gap before the heavily inflected madam. I’m sure he what he actually wanted to say was ‘Can I help you... you maniac?’

‘I was just looking through the grille. Why is it there?’

‘It’s where all the pipes are. There’s enough room for the workmen to walk through.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘That’s fascinating. How would a person get in?’

He looked at me suspiciously. ‘I’m not sure I should tell you.’

‘Oh please tell me. I just want to know if you could hide in there when the museum was shutting, and whether the tunnels are interconnecting so that you could walk through them without getting spotted by the security cameras and... wait... why are you grasping my elbow so tightly and frog-marching me out of the museum...?’

So you see, when you have no skills or talents that would actually fit you for being a crime writer, it’s tough. Many of the writers I know have walked the walk -- police, FBI agents, lawyers, PIs, bodyguards, criminals and, in one case, possibly a spy (even though he doesn’t admit to it). They tell you to write what you know. Well, being a pensions consultant doesn’t quite make the grade (what am I going to do... bore someone to death by reading them a set of actuarial tables?)

That’s not to say I haven’t come into contact with the long arm of the law. But it’s always been on the periphery. Now, I don't know about you, but whenever a policeman turns up at my door and says "Are you Donna Moore?" I always start to panic. Of course, it's to be hoped that a policeman isn't going to turn up at your door and say "Are you Donna Moore?" That's an altogether different problem (and one for which you would have my sympathy). My immediate response is to think a) Oh my God, what's happened to everyone I love?, followed swiftly by b) What the hell have I done? and sometimes c) Has someone sent me a strip-o-gram?

Now, it just so happens that every single time a policeman has turned up at my door I've been on the decidedly underside of dressed.

The last time I had a brush with the law, it was early one Saturday morning. There was a knock on the door and it was a policeman who had come to interview my (now) ex and I. I was in my pajamas so he said he'd give me a few minutes and then come back. I must have looked pretty scary because he didn't turn up until half an hour later. When he finally arrived I said to him ‘Sorry if my appearance scared you so much that you gave me enough time to go out to the dancing.’

What had happened was that a couple of days previously an elderly man was knocked over in the street and he died. Complicating matters was that it was a police car which knocked him over, so, obviously, they have to do a really thorough investigation. The policeman said that it was like doing a murder enquiry, even though it wasn't a murder. He had to fill in forms for both John (my ex) and I.

He said, ‘We'll go to the first person first’ and turned to John.

‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘But who's to say he’s the first person?’

He looked a bit shocked but laughed and said, ‘OK, you can go first then... it's just that he was sitting nearest to me.’

Weak, very weak. He asked name, address, age, telephone number, where I was born (I bit my tongue before saying Newport Pagnell Gas Station -- pump 4, and just answered the county) and height. As he was writing down my height I said ‘Oh God, you're not going to ask my weight are you?’ Luckily he said no. Then he asked whether I was known by any other name. I didn't think that Badsville Broad was relevant, so I kept schtum. I hope I don't get hauled up for withholding evidence.

Then he gave me the form to fill in the next bit - you had to circle your hair colour, eye colour, build (oh God -- the ignominy of having to circle 'fat'; but 'pleasantly plump' or 'the tubby side of voluptuous' just weren't on the form. Skin type 'pale' (I decided not to go for 'spotty' even though a huge zit had appeared on my chin that very morning -- I just hoped that it would disappear in a couple of days and not be a permanent distinguishing feature). Then there was a question that asked for tattoos/piercings/peculiarities/ scars.

‘Do you have any extra sheets -- I can't fit all my peculiarities in on 3 lines.’

Then it was John's turn, or ‘Person number 2’ as the policeman called him from then on. I liked that. I used that from then on.

While person number 2 was filling in the form the policeman said ‘I'll now be able to go back to the Equal Opportunities officer and tell him that I did everything correctly.’

‘How humiliating.’ person number 2 said.‘Yes, you've learned a valuable lesson here today’ person number 1 said.

Meanwhile, person number 2 was agonising over his form: ‘Do I have light brown or dark brown hair? Is it straight, or short? Or straight and short?’

‘Is there a box for old-fashioned?’ I said. ‘If not, straight and short will do.’

And I could see him visibly sucking in his stomach when he got to the 'build' question. 'Slim' was the look he was going for I believe. I caught a glimpse of his form as he handed it back. God help the police if they ever need to search for John. They'll be looking for someone who looks remarkably like Johnny Depp, when Johnny Rotten would be more accurate.

Then the policeman's cell phone rang. Imagine this big butch bloke in a uniform (steady), and his cell phone's trilling away with Britney's 'Oops I did it again'.

‘How disappointing,’ I said. ‘I would have expected you to have the theme tune from The Bill or The Sweeney.’

‘I have. When the station rings it plays The Sweeney.’

So there you have it. If I ever come to write a story about a police investigation I have some background research. I'm not exactly sure that it's any use though. He probably went out of here thinking ‘Two dodgy characters if ever I saw them. Pale and Fat was a bit mad. Tall, Slim and Good-Looking is obviously a pathological liar. And what the hell were all those books with 'murder' in the title?’

But if you can’t walk the walk, then at least you can closely observe the people who do walk the walk, right? Wrong. I must be one of the least observant people on the planet. One morning, I went to catch my bus to work, only to discover that the bus shelter was already full. With about six police, and a bloke and a woman both looking slightly the worse for wear. So, rather than interrupt this cosy little chat, I stood next to the bus stop, waiting for my bus, while wondering what this guy had done. Maybe he'd dropped some litter? Daubed some badly spelled slogans on a wall? Been drunk in charge of a bus shelter?

Just before my bus arrived, one of the policemen came around the side of the bus shelter, looked at me funny, and bent over to pick something up. I looked down. There, 2 inches away from my feet was a saw. Apparently the guy had tried to cut his girlfriend's head off with the saw while she was sleeping. Luckily, she had woken up before he could get very far, realised that he wasn't holding the saw in order to put up a couple of shelves and had run out of the house, with him chasing her, still wielding the saw. Obviously sensing that this was not your normal DIY episode, a passer-by had called the police, who arrived mob-handed in double quick time, complete with riot gear. Enter your humble narrator to trample all over the evidence.

It’s a tough life doing research.

------------------------------

Donna Moore is the author of Go to Helena Handbasket, winner of the 2007 Lefty Award for most humorous crime novel. She has short stories in various anthologies, including BFP's Damn Near Dead and A Hell of a Woman. Donna runs the blog Big Beat from Badsville, which focuses on Scottish crime fiction. Her newest book is Old Dogs, about which Library Journal says, "The author's clever wordplay, irreverent humor, and vivid characters will please Elmore Leonard, Donald Westlake, and Carl Hiassen fans, not to mention the Ocean's Eleven crowd."

New cover for David Handler's fifth Hoagy book!

2010-08-30T18:46:00.001-07:00

Check out the BFP cover for next summer's reprint of David Handler's fifth Stewart Hoag mystery, The Boy Who Never Grew Up (trade paperback; $15). In The Boy, Hoagy, ghostwriter to the stars, heads to Hollywood when he's hired to pen the memoir of a hot young director.

We're going in a different direction from any of David's previous book covers... what do you think??

Find the first four in the series in two omnibus editions:

The Man Who Died Laughing / The Man Who Lived by Night
The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald / The Woman Who Fell from Grace

Busted Flush Press joins forces with Tyrus Books!

2010-08-26T05:40:00.000-07:00

TYRUS BOOKS ACQUIRES BUSTED FLUSH PRESS

Two of Crime Fiction’s Most Respected Independent Presses Merge

MADISON, WI— August 26, 2010 — Tyrus Books, Inc. today announced the acquisition of Busted Flush Press, LLC., in a move that brings together two of crime fiction’s most recognizable independent presses.

“We’re very excited to add the Busted Flush brand to Tyrus Books. David Thompson is a dedicated and tireless advocate of crime fiction and I look forward to seeing the Busted Flush brand continue to grow,” said Benjamin LeRoy, Publisher and President of Tyrus Books.

Thompson, Publisher of Busted Flush Press, will continue in his current role, selecting approximately twenty titles a year for publication. The combined companies will have approximately 45 books in print by the end of 2010 with another 20 titles scheduled for spring 2011.

"I am very excited to join forces with Ben and Tyrus Books. I’ve long been a fan of what Tyrus has been doing,” Thompson said, “and I believe Busted Flush Press will be a good fit."

With this acquisition, Busted Flush becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of Tyrus Books. Both companies are distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

About Busted Flush Press
Busted Flush Press has published previously out of print books from authors such as Ace Atkins, Daniel Woodrell, Reed Farrel Coleman, Don Winslow, Zoë Sharp, and Ken Bruen. Works published by Busted Flush have won or been nominated for nearly all major awards in the crime fiction field including the Shamus, CWA Dagger, Macavity, Anthony, Derringer, and Edgar Awards. For more information about Busted Flush Press please visit http://www.bustedflushpress.com/

About Tyrus Books
Tyrus Books, founded in 2009, publishes crime and dark literary fiction from emerging and established authors including Loren D. Estleman, Victoria Houston, Peter Gadol, Angela S. Choi, Victor Gischler, Seth Harwood, and Mary Logue. Before starting Tyrus Books, Publisher Benjamin LeRoy founded and presided over Bleak House Books. For more information on Tyrus Books please visit http://www.tyrusbooks.com/

Win a signed copy of INNOCENT MONSTER!

2010-08-22T10:12:00.001-07:00

Head on over to Sara J. Henry's blog for a chance to win a signed copy of Reed Farrel Coleman's upcoming Moe Prager novel, Innocent Monster (Tyrus Books; October)! Hurry... contest closes September 2nd.

"Sashi Bluntstone, the 11-year-old Next New Thing on the New York art scene, has been abducted, and Moe Prager—former NYPD cop and former PI—is asked by his estranged daughter, Sarah, to join the search. He expects only tragedy; Sashi has already been missing for three weeks, and he hasn’t been a PI for seven years. Now a well-to-do wine merchant, Moe agrees, primarily to attempt to restore his relationship with Sarah. He quickly learns that nothing increases the value of paintings faster than the death of the painter. Suspects abound: wealthy, self-important collectors; greedy gallery owners; odious rival artists; even the victim's parents. But Moe abides. This sixth Moe Prager novel is pretty much note-perfect. Coleman's take on the art world as a den of iniquity is priceless, as is Moe himself—intelligent, street smart, and tough, especially for a sixtysomething. He’s also sophisticated, despite seeing himself as a 'poor schmuck from Brooklyn.' He’s a mensch, and his bone-deep world weariness and mordant sense of humor should enthrall lovers of old-school, tough-talking, loner private eyes (think Loren D. Estleman's Amos Walker)."—Booklist (starred review)

New cover for Don Winslow's 2nd Neal Carey book!

2010-08-21T08:48:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry, I've been bad about posting on the blog recently... I've been moving my office to my house, and let me tell you, about 300 boxes, down stairs (no elevator), heat index over 100... it wasn't fun. Okay, I know you're saying, "quit your whining, David." Well, at least that's what my wife says. But I'm back to catching up on things, hard at work on getting books to the printers for the fall & mapping out 2011.

Those of you who have been patiently (God bless you!) waiting for Donna Moore's Old Dogs, you'll be happy to know it ships from the printers in about 10 days... then it takes a little longer to filter through Consortium & on to bookstores & libraries... but rest assured, it's a-coming! (There will be an e-book edition, as well.) And I promise you, it'll be worth the wait... honestly, one of the funniest books I've ever read.

In the meantime, check out the cool new cover of the spring BFP reprint of Don Winslow's second Neal Carey novel, The Trail to Buddha's Mirror... I think this will be a series you'll want to collect in paperback (even if you already own them), simply because the covers will look so great together. Then again, I'm a little biased.

More to come... thanks for checking in!

New praise for BFP books!

2010-08-05T03:42:00.000-07:00

Old Dogs (by Donna Moore; paperback original; 978-1-935415-24-4; $15)
"Hilarious... A hypnotic and rollicking experience. Moore has got to be one of the funniest writers in or out of Glasgow." -- ForeWord Reviews (September/October 2010)

UPDATE (08/05/10): "I giggled my way through Donna Moore's Old Dogs... Filled with mayhem, torture, raw sexual banter, creepy chauffeurs, hired killers, and enough kilt-raising Scots profanity to shock a porn star... [A] ribald laugh-a-thon... I recommend Old Dogs highly to fans of Donald Westlake and Carl Hiaasen." -- Betty Webb, Mystery Scene

Killer Instinct (by Zoë Sharp; paperback original; 978-1-935415-13-8; $15)
"A solid, very well-written debut... The urban English setting is nicely realised, and grimy enough to make the reader’s skin crawl on occasion, particularly Charlie’s work at the Adelphi Nightclub. And even so early in the series, the action is so well choreographed that you believe every bone crunching impact on the page. Killer Instinct is a sharp, punchy read; a brutally confident start to a series that would continue to evolve in the best possible ways. Busted Flush Press are going to be reprinting the early Fox novels over the next year or so, and you’d be well advised to check them out and get acquainted with one of the most well-defined and convincing series protagonists I’ve encountered in a long time." -- Russel McLean, Crime Scene Scotland (Read the full review of Killer Instinct and Sharp's Fourth Day here.)

TOWER nominated for a Crimespree Award!

2010-08-02T17:18:00.000-07:00

Tower (by Ken Bruen & Reed Farrel Coleman; paperback original; 978-1-935415-07-7; $15) has just been nominated for the 2010 Crimespree Award for Favorite Book of 2009!

Tower has also been nominated for the Anthony Award, Macavity Award, Spinetingler Award & the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award (Mystery).

Here are all of the nominations:

Favorite book of 2009
BURY ME DEEP, by Megan Abbott
TOWER, by Ken Bruen & Reed Farrel Coleman
TRUST NO ONE, by Gregg Hurwitz
THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH, by Charlie Huston
THE AMATEURS, Marcus Sakey

Favorite first Book 2009
THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE, by Alan Bradley
RUNNING FROM THE DEVIL, by Jamie Freveletti
EVEN, by Andrew Grant
A BAD DAY FOR SORRY, by Sophie Littlefield
THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST, by Stuart Neville

Best in an on-going series for 2009
THE SILENT HOUR, by Michael Koryta
SHATTER, by Michael Robotham
SHANGHAI MOON, by SJ Rozan
WALKING DEAD, by Greg Rucka
TRUTH, by Peter Temple

The winners of each of these awards, along with the recipient of this year's Jack Reacher Award will be announced at Bouchercon in San Francisco.

TOMATO RED excerpt

2010-07-28T04:23:00.000-07:00

Tomato Red
(by Daniel Woodrell; foreword by Megan Abbott; Busted Flush Press; 978-1-935415-06-0; $15)
© Daniel Woodrell, 1998, 2010

1

Theme Park of Fancy

YOU’RE NO ANGEL, you know how this stuff comes to happen: Friday is payday and it’s been a gray day sogged by a slow ugly rain and you seek company in your gloom, and since you’re fresh to West Table, Mo., and a new hand at the dog-food factory, your choices for company are narrow but you find some finally in a trailer court on East Main, and the coed circle of bums gathered there spot you a beer, then a jug of tequila starts to rotate and the rain keeps comin’ down with a miserable bluesy beat and there’s two girls millin’ about that probably can be had but they seem to like certain things and crank is one of those certain things, and a fistful of party straws tumble from a woven handbag somebody brung, the crank gets cut into lines, and the next time you notice the time it’s three or four Sunday mornin’ and you ain’t slept since Thursday night and one of the girl voices, the one you want most and ain’t had yet though her teeth are the size of shoe-peg corn and look like maybe they’d taste sort of sour, suggests something to do, ’cause with crank you want something, anything, to do, and this cajoling voice suggests we all rob this certain house on this certain street in that rich area where folks can afford to wallow in their vices and likely have a bunch of recreational dope stashed around the mansion and goin’ to waste since an article in The Scroll said the rich people whisked off to France or some such on a noteworthy vacation.

That’s how it happens.

Can’t none of this be new to you.

The gal with her mouth full of shoe-peg corn and the bright idea in the first place drives over and lets me off at the curb, and there’s another burglar passed out in the backseat who won’t be of any help. She doses a kiss out to me, a dry peck on the lips, and claims she’ll keep her eyes peeled and I should give the high sign once I’ve burgled my way inside.

The rain has made the ground skittish, it just quakes and slides away from my footsteps, and this fantastic mist has risen up and thickened so that eyesight is temporarily marked way down in value.

I stumbled into a couple of different hedgerows, one about head high and one around the waist, before I fell onto the walkway. The walkway was, I suppose, made of laid brick, but the bricks were that type that’s bigger than house bricks, more the shape of bread loaves, which I think classes them as cobblestones or something. So I wobbled along this big brick walkway, on up the slope and past a lamppost in the yard that made a hepatitis-yellow glow, straight to the backside of the mansion.

Rich folk apparently love their spectacular views, pay dear for them, I’m sure, so there was all this glass. The door was glass and the entire rear wall practically was glass. By sunlight I’d reckon you could see the total spread of the town and long, long pony rides’ worth of countryside from any corner in there. All that window gave me brief goofy thoughts of diamond-point glasscutters and suction cups and the whole rigamarole of jewel-thief piss elegance but, actually, with my head out to lunch as it was I just grabbed a few logs from the firewood stack on the patio there and flung them at that glass door.

I suppose I had a sad need to fit in socially with those trailer-park bums, since I imagined they were the only crowd that would have me, because when that first chunk of wood merely bounced from the glass door and skidded across the patio I became bulldog-determined to get the job done for my new friends, and damn the effort or obvious risk.

The logs hit with a bang. Two, three, four times I chucked firewood at that glass and never heard anything close to the sound of a shatter. I sidled up in the mist and skimmed my fingers over the door and felt, I think, the start of some tiny hairline fractures, but there were no big, hopeful splits.

The glass of that door surely had some special qualities that must’ve been expensive to come by, but worth it, I’d have to say, judging from the wimpy way those logs merely bounced and failed to bust me in there. But I kept pitchin’, and bangs kept bangin’ out across that neighborhood of mist, until my pitches became tired and wild and I whipped a firewood chunk three or four yards off-line and into a small square window to the flank of the door, and that glass thankfully was of a typical lower order and flew all to pieces.

The glass shatter seemed like a sincere burst of applause, a sincere burst of applause that would come across as alarming and requiring a look-see to any ears open out there in the mist. I went motionless, tried to be a shadow. Pretty quick I heard a derisive shout from shoe-peg mouth, something that might’ve hurt my feelings to hear clear, then tires squealed and carried my social circle away, leaving me to do the mansion solo.

I stayed a still shadow for a bit, but my mind, such as it was at the moment, was made up and determined: I needed friends, and friendship is this slow awkward process you’ve got to angle through, and I could yet maybe find what we looked for, return to the trailer park on foot as both a hero and the sudden life of the party.

When no alarm was raised, I came out of my shadow imitation and went to the broken window. The mist felt like a tongue I kept walking into, and my skin and clothes seemed slobbered on. The world aped a harmless watchdog, puttin’ big licks all over my face.

The window was set too high to spring through, and the glass was not perfectly broken out. There were jaggedy places with long points. I got up on tiptoes and reached my arm through, extra careful, but couldn’t reach a latch or doorknob or anything worthwhile.

The batch of flung logs had scattered about and lay underfoot, and the third or fourth time I stumbled on one this thought jumped me. The thought called for a ladder of firewood chunks, and I went to work building this theory that had jumped me from below. That mist made any effort seem sweaty and sweat made me feel employed and that made me start expectin’ a foreman to come along and, because of the part in my hair or the attitude of my slouch, fire my ass on a whim, as per usual. But the ladder got built and came to reach the height it needed to.

I think I thought this ladder invention meant I was thinkin’ straight.

Atop the ladder I wrapped my T-shirt around my fist and punched the jagged parts loose until there was a clean frame that could be wriggled through without gettin’ carved along the flanks.

I slithered inside, uncut, and tumbled among the riches.

My distance perception had gone tilt in my head and that floor reared up and swatted me awful quick. The floor felt like a clean street, a street of that marble stuff, I reckon, maybe Mexican tile, only it was in the kitchen area and mighty stern to land on, especially with that tilt factor in my head, as I barely raised my arms to brace before skidding across it. I’d judged I had further to fall, but huh-uh, and the pain jangle spanned from my elbows and knees to my shoulders and toes. I squealed and rolled and chop-blocked a highback chair in the dark there and sent it tumbling.

You might think I should’ve quit on the burglary right then, but I just love people, I guess, and didn’t.

I became a shadow again, splayed on that imported floor, listening to the mansion. It was supposed to be empty, but newspapers get so many things wrong. Best not to trust them overmuch. The mansion had a slight glow going on inside there, and I got it that they had left a couple of lamps burning in a distant room. The lamps were likely set on a timer and meant to warn away such as I so such as this wouldn’t happen.

These burglar lights helped my eyes to focus.

Standing again, finally I slid my shirt on and rubbed my sore spots, then let my feet aim me toward the glowing room. The crank comedown was settin’ in, I think, from the way my feet got heavy and weaved and stomped. This mansion smelled of big achievements and handbags from Rome and unknown treats, which were better scents than I was used to. The walls even seemed special, kind of, as my fingertips skipped along them feeling how fine and costly they felt. My mind, I’d say, stumbled along two or three steps behind my body. More like a waiter than a chef.

When I wobbled inside that lit-up room the wind jumped from my chest. I gasped, groaned, mewed. My legs folded beneath me and I fell face first to a soft carpet that smelled sweeter than my ex-wife’s hair and brought to mind sheep in a flowery meadow high in the Alps or Japan or Vermont or some similar postcard spot from out there in the world where the dear goods I’ll never own are made.

The sight and smell of all this shook me.

I know I trembled and breathed shallow.

The mansion was the way I’d always feared a mansion would be, only more so. In my fear I’d never managed to conjure the spectacular astounding details. A quick inventory of only this one room made me hate myself. Made me hate myself and all my type that came before me. This mansion was sixteen levels higher than any place I’d ever been among.

As I stared about—gawked, probably—I likely blushed pink to go along with those trembles.

I’d say what such things as I saw in that room were, if I knew the proper names of such things, though I’d bet heavy I’ve never heard those names spoken. I’m sure such things have personal names—those special moody lampshades made of beadwork, and a chair and footstool put together with, like, weaved leather hung on frames of curled iron or polished rare bones, maybe, and end tables that had designs stabbed into them and stuffed with gold leaf or something precious, a small and swank desk over by the far wall, and a bookshelf so old our Revolution must’ve happened off to the sides of it, carved up with fine points and nicely shined, with a display of tiny statues and dolls arranged just so all across it.

Pretty soon I crawled away from the light, back to the dark parts of the mansion. That sinking feeling set in. Truly, I felt scared, embarrassed for the poorly decorated life I was born to.

This mansion is not but about a rifle shot distant from the trailer park, but it seemed like I’d undergone interplanetary travel. I’d never collided with this world before.

I collected myself in the kitchen. Shuffled my parts back together. My breaths deepened to normal. That splendor had stunned me and then sickened me with a mess of recognitions.

You see the insides of a classier world like that and it sets your own to spinning off-balance, and a tireless gnawing discontent gets to snacking on your guts and spirit. This caliber of a place makes you want to discriminate against yourself, basically, as it reveals you as such a loser. A tiny mote of nothin’ much just here to muss up the planet these worthies lived so grandly on and wished they could keep clean of you and yours.

I ain’t shit! I ain’t shit! shouts your brain, and this place proves the point.

Oh, hell yes, this mansion was a regular theme park of fancy fuckin’ stuff I never had, never will, hadn’t ever truly even seen in person.

Naturally there’s some urge to just start smashing amuck in the mansion, whacking all those glamorous baubles and doodads as if these objects had personally tossed you a key ring and told you to fetch their car. That urge is there, to see things shatter, dent, sag with ruin. That urge is always there, usually in shadow though never far away.

But I don’t need to want that anymore, or at least lately, so instead I decided to eat.

That mist had gotten bunchy and milled up against the kitchen windows like a rubbernecking crowd peeking in on a private moment. A few wisps shoved in through the busted window and gave me the sense of long fingers slowly pointing.

There was a button on the wall beside the stove, and I punched it and got light. The light pushed the crowd back, slapped away those pointing fingers. This kitchen came near to the size of a decent trailer home. There were, close as I could figure, two stoves or three, or just one giant with a dozen burners. Cabinets ran to the ceiling, made of some blond wood from Oriental lands, I’d guess, and the ceiling was yea tall, so there was a cute li’l stepladder on a runner that slid from cabinet to cabinet so you could see into the upper shelves. A pretty dapper rendition of woodwork, in my opinion. The fridge resembled a bank vault, a big dull metal thing with heavy doors.

The funny thing about these swell folks is they don’t leave much food to scrounge. I did a run-through of the fridge and found that all the familiar items were frozen. It disappointed me that there were no exotic leftovers. In the freezer part I turned up a booze bottle that belonged on the pricey shelf at the Liquor Barn. The label on the bottle resembled an eye-test chart, Russian or one of those names, but after a few chugs I could testify it was vodka, for certain, and a quality version of it too.

I began to thrash through the cabinets hunting for peanut butter because I’d seen mayonnaise in the fridge, and peanut butter and mayonnaise meant I could sleep. I could let the crank go bye-bye and sleep. I can’t sleep without food nearby. I can’t sleep anywhere until I know I’ll get to eat again if I need to. I don’t have to eat, yet I can’t rest without bein’ positive sure there’s food at hand, but these folks apparently didn’t stoop to peanut butter ’cause there wasn’t any. Peanut butter is the prescribed hunger medicine for poor folks, and there’s always a scraping or so left in the bottom of the jar, somewhere way back in the cupboard. I’ve been to bed hungry plenty and my tummy whimpered and whimpered and those whimpers are forever on tape in my head.

The vodka at least gave my gut growls instead of whimpers.

Some cheese turned up in the fridge. It’s a nice round hunk, but it’s not yellow. It’s some nearly white kind that smells too gourmet for me, but the hunk was silky smooth and plump as a newborn’s rump and I had the sensation of sinkin’ my teeth into a pampered baby’s butt for a taste.

The flavor was odd but okay, and I knew then I could rest.

The vodka and me and the baby butt of cheese wandered down a dim hall. When crank dies out, a big sudden tired hits, and I could feel it windin’ up to smite me. You sleep where you land. I got to a room that echoed as I walked and sounded big, until I bumped my shin on a chair, then fell into it, and threw my head back and raised my feet to the stool out front.

My collapse had been into a calfskin wingback chair, and I just folded into it, tucked myself away secretly there like a French tickler in a gentleman’s leather wallet.

The dreams that made the scene inside my skull weren’t dreamy dreams, but rather more like long news clips from kangaroo court sessions convened on me in a gaudy plush holding cell, and the entire jury was made up of loved ones I’d sorely disappointed since they were buried and whiskery perverts who took a shine to me just the way I was.

I slept for over a full day, as you know, but I won’t say I rested.

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“There are a handful of writers who are known, read and revered by other writers for the brilliant beauty of their words. Some have become better known—James Lee Burke is an obvious example—but some haven’t yet achieved the wide readership that they deserve. Daniel Woodrell is chief amongst them. He’s created his own niche in the mystery world—‘Ozark Noir’—and he’ll dazzle you with each page. Chandler once wrote his ideal of a private eye and I think it applies to writers as well, certainly to Woodrell: ‘He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.’ Woodrell is the best at what he does and he can equal the best writing in any other world.”—JB Dickey, Seattle Mystery Bookshop

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Find Tomato Red at your favorite bookseller or online retailer!

Here are a few links:
Indiebound
Square Books (Oxford, MS)
Big Sleep Books (St. Louis, MO)
Seattle Mystery Bookshop (Seattle, WA)
"M" Is for Mystery (San Francisco, CA)
Murder By The Book (Houston, TX)
Barnes & Noble
Borders
Amazon
Busted Flush Press

Moe & Zoë!

2010-07-26T14:14:00.000-07:00

Reed Farrel Coleman

Reed's sixth Moe Prager novel, Innocent Monster (Tyrus Books; October; $24.95), gets a very nice review in Publishers weekly: "In Shamus-winner Coleman's darkly impressive sixth Moe Prager mystery (after 2008's Empty Ever After), the retired Brooklyn PI takes on a baffling missing person case only because his estranged daughter, Sarah, begs him to help. In the three weeks since art prodigy Sashi Bluntstone, the 11-year-old daughter of Sarah's childhood friend Candy Castleman, disappeared from a walk on the beach near her Long Island home, the police have found no trace of the girl, who 'skyrocketed to prominence at age four when her Abstract Expressionist paintings... began selling for tens of thousands of dollars.' Prager, who encounters a host of ugly characters, including parents Max and Candy, who aren't telling all they know, and resentful painter Nathan Martyr, becomes increasingly sure that Sashi is dead, but keeps slogging along. His past as a cop . . . and his current career as a wine merchant make Prager a complex character well suited to handle a complex mystery."

Zoë Sharp

Zoë's THE CHARLIE FOX MYSTERIES -- centering on ex-army self-defense expert and one time Special Forces candidate, Charlotte "Charlie" Fox and her all-action, high octane adventures in the world of close protection -- has been sold to Twentieth Century Fox TV, by Alan Nevins at Renaissance Literary & Talent on behalf of Jane Gregory at Gregory & Company. Now that would be an awesome show!

Find the first Charlie Fox thriller, Killer Instinct (paperback, $15), from Busted Flush Press.

THE HACKMAN BLUES cover

2010-07-23T15:22:00.000-07:00

We now have a cover for Ken Bruen's The Hackman Blues, which makes its U.S. debut next summer. The BFP edition will include a new foreword by crime writer Ray Banks and a new afterword by Bruen. The cover was designed by Michael Kellner, who worked on many books for Dennis McMillan Publications! Isn't it positively wonderful?? The book's pretty darn good, too...

"I was drowning in a sea of mediocre writing and half-arsed attempts at ersatz amorality when The Hackman Blues sideswiped me like the worst kind of mugger. The sheer strength of the prose knocked me to the ground, battered and bruised... and yet I found myself pleading for more. The Hackman Blues is British noir at its most brutal and honest, populated by characters you could never love but find yourself unable to leave. This is the book that reminded why I love crime fiction... And know The Hackman Blues is the book that will change the way you read crime fiction, that will show up most other writers trading in the darkness of the soul as rank amateurs compared to Ken Bruen. This is noir. This is Bruen. This is The Hackman Blues." -- Russel McLean, author of The Good Son and The Lost Sister

"It’s not a book that wants you to be comfortable. In fact, it wants to hurt you with its relentless nihilism. Which is why this one’s my favourite. To me, it’s what crime fiction should be -- visceral and unrepentant. We should be shown that crime is a filthy, warped and damaging thing. And The Hackman Blues does this in spades. So enjoy, but don’t say you weren’t warned." -- from the foreword by Ray Banks, author of Saturday's Child

INNOCENT MONSTER launch party announced!

2010-07-20T07:15:00.000-07:00

Reed Farrel Coleman will launch the publication of his sixth Moe Prager novel, Innocent Monster (Tyrus; hardback, $24.95; paperback, $14.95), at NYC's Mysterious Bookshop, Thursday, October 7th, 7-9 p.m. BFP will also have the 4th & 5th Moe books back out in time: Soul Patch (w/ a new foreword by Craig Johnson; paperback; $14) and Empty Ever After (w/ a new foreword by S. J. Rozan; paperback; $14). The rest of Reed's tour to be announced soon!

(And let me say this... Innocent Monster is among Reed's best works yet!)

BFP to publish Daniel Judson's "Gin Palace" Trilogy!

2010-07-13T17:37:00.000-07:00

Years ago, Bantam published the first two books in Daniel Judson's "Gin Palace" private eye trilogy, The Poisoned Prose and The Bone Orchard. Sadly, even after being nominated for one Barry Award, two Shamus Awards and winning one Shamus, the Declan "Mac" MacManus series was dropped before Dan could wrap things up. At long last, 2011 will see the long-awaited return of reluctant Hamptons P.I. MacManus as BFP reprints the first two, and publishes the never-before-seen third novel, The Gin Palace.

I've been a friend of Dan's for years, and I still remember reading that "first" (quotes explained in a minute) Mac book while I was laid up after oral sugery back in 2002 (which is neither here nor there, but considering my mindset, I was feeling mighty finicky). I thought The Bone Orchard was one of the best debut P.I. novels I'd read in a really long time.... even though I was slightly confused throughout. You see, the two books were published out of order, and when reading The Bone Orchard, you know pretty much all of the events of The Poisoned Rose, without really understanding what was going on.

Anyway, ever since I started Busted Flush, I've been talking with Dan about publishing them all, and now, at long last, the trilogy will be published as intended, with The Poisoned Rose out in the summer, and The Bone Orchard and The Gin Palace out in the fall, in time for Bouchercon 2011!

These gritty P.I. novels are perfect for fans of Reed Farrel Coleman, George Pelecanos, Sean Chercover, and Dennis Lehane.

"Judson's cinematic prose and realistic dialogue create lush, vivid scenes... [T]his taut thriller is far from predictable, and its dark and mysterious plot suits Judson's understated writing style." -- Publishers Weekly on The Poisoned Rose

"A vivid cast of characters and a frightening plot packed with dead bodies combine to make Judson's atmospheric debut thriller one of the year's more memorable reads." -- Publishers Weekly on The Bone Orchard

Cover for A. E. Maxwell's summer 2011 book!

2010-07-10T08:54:00.000-07:00

Busted Flush Press has been reprinting the Fiddler & Fiora crime novels by A. E. Maxwell, with the fourth, Just Enough Light to Kill, having come out a few months ago. We're now gearing up to do the next two in the series in 2011, starting with #5, The Art of Survival (978-1-935415-16-9; paperback; $14), in which Fiddler heads to Santa Fe & finds himself embroiled in a mystery surrounding the discovery of a new Georgia O'Keefe painting.

Here's a sneak peek at the new cover, designed by the outstanding Lisa Novak, who has worked on the previous four Fiddler reprints...

"The story is unnerving, mesmerizing and, when relief from fierce tensions is required, blessedly funny." -- Publishers Weekly

If you haven't yet discovered this wonderful private eye series, start with Just Another Day in Paradise. Perfect for fans of Robert B. Parker, Robert Crais, and John D. MacDonald!

Dan Chaon on THE DEATH OF SWEET MISTER

2010-07-08T07:25:00.001-07:00

Dan Chaon -- the National Book Award-shortlisted author of Among the Missing and Await Your Reply -- has some kind words about Daniel Woodrell's The Death of Sweet Mister (being reprinted by BFP in March 2011). At Houston's Murder By The Book (my day job), Chaon's Among the Missing was one of our favorite books of 2009!

"Daniel Woodrell is one of my favorite contemporary writers, and The Death of Sweet Mister is one of his best. His books are often described as 'noir,'and it's true that they are often dark and shocking. But to me, the most shocking thing is the unsentimental tenderness that he brings to his portraits of these deeply troubled characters. This is an incredibly moving book, in addition to being an eye-popping, disturbing, blow-the-top-of-your-head-off work of suspense. I would say it's sort of a masterpiece." -- Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply

Look for Woodrell's Tomato Red from Busted Flush Press in August, and The Death of Sweet Mister next spring. And don't miss one of the indie-film hits of the year, Winter's Bone (based on Woodrell's 2006 novel), in theaters now!

DAMN NEAR DEAD 2's table of contents!

2010-07-04T17:13:00.000-07:00

Behold, the table of contents from this November's Damn Near Dead 2: Live Noir or Die Trying! (trade paperback original; 978-1-935415-40-4; $18)...

Take a stroll down the boulevard of broken hips...
DAMN NEAR DEAD 2

Edited by Bill Crider
Introduction by Charlaine Harris

“Sleep, Creep, Leap” (by Patti Abbott)
“El Conejo” (by Ace Atkins)
“Stiffs” (by Neal Barrett, Jr.)
“The End of Jim and Ezra” (by C. J. Box)
“Out Stealing Buddha” (by Declan Burke)
“Love Story” (by Scott Cupp)
“All About Eden” (by Christa Faust)
“Flying Solo” (by Ed Gorman)
“Neighborhood Watch” (by Carolyn Haines)
“Memory Sketch” (by David Handler)
“Some Things You Never Forget” (by Gar Anthony Haywood)
“The War Zone” (by Cameron Pierce Hughes)
“You’re Only Dead Once” (by Dean James)
“The Sleeping Detective” (by Jennifer Jordan)
“Kids Today” (by Toni L.P. Kelner)
“The Old Man in the Motorized Chair” (by Joe R. Lansdale)
“Angel of Mercy” (by Russel McLean)
“Miss Hartly and the Cocksucker” (by Denise Mina)
“Sometimes You Can’t Retire” (by Marcia Muller)
“The Investor” (by Gary Phillips)
“Bill in Idaho” (by Scott Phillips)
“Zypho the Tentacled Brainsucker from Outer Space vs. the Mob” (by Tom Piccirilli)
“Trade Secret” (by Bill Pronzini)
“The Summer Place” (by Cornelia Read)
“Warning Shot” (by James Reasoner)
“Cutlass” (by Kat Richardson)
“Chin Yong-Yun Takes the Case” (by S. J. Rozan)
“Granny Pussy” (by Anthony Neil Smith)
“Old Men and Old Boards” (by Don Winslow)

I am so excited about this anthology... as with the first DND, there isn't a clunker in the bunch! Scheduled to be launched at NoirCon in Philadelphia, Nov. 4-7!

And don't forget the award-winning anthology that started it all!
Damn Near Dead (edited by Duane Swierczynski; trade paperback original; 978-0-9767157-5-7; $18)

KILLER INSTINCT reviewed in the NEW YORK TIMES!

2010-07-02T14:13:00.000-07:00

"Charlie Fox came on strong in Zoë Sharp's early novels but, like a lot of tough girls, softened up with time. Now, thanks to an enterprising small press, we can catch Charlie in the rough. Originally published in 2001, Killer Instinct finds this army-trained martial-arts expert on her first job, working security for a club in an English seaside town. Charlie looks like a made-for-TV model, with her red hair and motorcycle leathers, but Sharp means business. The bloody bar fights are bloody brilliant, and Charlie's skills are both formidable and for real." -- Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review, July 4, 2010

Thanks, Ms. Stasio!!

Free shipping, more praise!

2010-06-30T04:04:00.000-07:00

From now on, any orders of $25 or more through Busted Flush Press's website get FREE SHIPPING! Please feel free to order often. :-)

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More praise for upcoming BFP releases:

A COOL BREEZE ON THE UNDERGROUND, by Don Winslow

“Don Winslow may be the finest crime writer currently working in America. His recent work—including but not limited to such titles as The Winter of Frankie Machine, The Dawn Patrol, and California Fire and Life—is brilliant on every level, displaying a depth, intelligence, and humanity few writers can hope to equal. Amazingly, his thrillers are also whip-fast, compulsively readable, and rich with language so glittery sharp I am left furious with envy. Instead of hating the man, I am his fan. A Cool Breeze on the Underground is the beginning of Winslow’s journey, and shows all the talent and promise of what is to follow. If you’ve not read the Neal Carey books before, send Busted Flush Press a note of thanks. You’re in for a treat.”—Robert Crais, best-selling author of The Sentry

“It’s one thing to see promise in a young writer, but A Cool Breeze on the Underground is just plain unfair. With his premier Neal Carey novel, Don Winslow announced to the world that neither he nor his characters were going to be run-of-the-mill. He continues to prove it with every book he writes.”—Reed Farrel Coleman, three-time Shamus Award-winning author of Innocent Monster

“A Cool Breeze on the Underground is classic Winslow. All the characteristics are there: the style, the wit, and the building tension. Neal Carey is a wonderful character who drives the story to its stunning conclusion. A great read!”—Dave White, Shamus Award-nominated author of The Evil that Men Do

TOMATO RED, by Daniel Woodrell
(at the printers right now)

“Whenever I’m in need of inspiration, resuscitation—a big, heaping blast of air—I read the opening page of Tomato Red. By the end, I’m always grinning: that disbelieving, appreciative, joyful grin you get when you come upon the extraordinary. That writing! It’s hard to not move when you read Woodrell; his Ozark rhythms will get you toe-tapping, swaying in your seat. It’s impossible, in fact, to read Woodrell discreetly: you’ll find sentences, dialogue so funny or brutal or just plain brilliant, you need to share them with someone else. His characters are underdogs, heartbreakers, steal-your-wallet-and-kick-you-on the-way-out scoundrels, but you still want more time with them. With Woodrell, you always want more.”—Gillian Flynn, Edgar Award-nominated author of Sharp Objects and Dark Places

Zoë Sharp & Lee Child together!

2010-06-28T05:27:00.001-07:00

If you're in the NYC area, don't miss BFP thriller writer Zoë Sharp and #1 best-seller Lee Child at The Mysterious Bookshop (58 Warren St.; 212-587-1011), tomorrow night, Tuesday, June 29, 6:30-8:00 p.m. They will sign Killer Instinct, Zoë's first Charlie Fox thriller, published in the U.S. for the first time! Lee Child wrote the book's new introduction.

Also in New York, Zoë will drop by Partners & Crime (44 Greenwich Ave.; 212-243-0440) sometime on Tuesday to sign store stock of Killer Intsinct.

Please contact either store to order signed/inscribed copies!

UPDATE (06/28):
* Read an excerpt from Lee Child's introduction here.
* Read about and see photos from Zoë's earlier stops on her tour, including Houston, Tucson, Phoenix, and New Orleans!

Zoë's tour, Reed's review of WINTER'S BONE & more!

2010-06-17T06:35:00.000-07:00

Next week, BFP thriller writer Zoë Sharp will be coming over to the States for a mini-tour to celebrate the U.S. publication of the first Charlie Fox novel, Killer Instinct. It's a whistle-stop tour, taking in Houston, Tucson, Phoenix, New York and New Orleans. Highlights include:

* Tuesday, June 22nd, 6.30 p.m.: signing at Murder by the Book, Houston
* Wednesday, June 23rd, 1:30-2:00 p.m.: signing at Clues Unlimited, Tucson
* Thursday, June 24th, 2:00p.m.: Velma Teague Public Library, Glendale
* Thursday, June 24th, evening: Poisoned Pen Conference, The Poisoned Pen, Scottsdale
* Tuesday, June 29th, 6:30-8:00 p.m.: signing with Lee Child at The Mysterious Bookshop, NYC

Please contact these stores to order signed or inscribed copies of Killer Instinct!
Need help tracking down copies of Zoë's books, feel free to e-mail David here.

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Crime writer Reed Farrel Coleman has long been a fan of Daniel Woodrell, an author he considers a "genius." We asked Reed, who saw the new film adaptation of Woodrell's 1996 novel, Winter's Bone, this past weekend, to offer up a review of the movie.

"Life is tough to begin with for Ree Dolly, a teenage girl living in a dirt poor part of the Ozarks where everybody in the area’s got a hand in the meth trade and everyone around is related to one degree or another. But when Ree, already responsible for raising her two younger siblings and caring for her infirmed mother, finds out that her father’s put the family homestead up as bail collateral and that he has fallen off the face of the earth, she goes on a quest to find her dad and save their land. Her odyssey is as harrowing as anything Dante could have dreamed up and as fraught with peril as anything Ulysses ever had to face. Ree faces it, for the most part, alone. Winter’s Bone, written by the Shakespeare of the Ozarks, Daniel Woodrell, is a masterpiece. So too is the movie adapted from the novel.

"The film, directed by Debra Granik [right], is the most faithful adaption in deed, spirit, and tone I have ever encountered. Talk about someone who understood the source material. She understood the dirt beneath its fingernails. But making a film is about making choices and the choices Ms. Granik makes are the right ones. There are things that in the novel—Teardrop’s nub of an ear and burnt face, Ree’s romantic involvement with her closest girlfriend, the brutality of the beatings—that Ms. Granik has wisely played down for fear those details would call too much attention to themselves and detract from the overall impact of the film. And the little additions she makes, particularly a scene involving Ree’s discussion with an Army recruiter, are brilliant.

"Still, the movie, as faithful as it is, isn’t the novel. The movie doesn’t quite have the mythic quality of the book and necessarily has a sharper focus on the crime aspects of the story. However, the film does shine a particularly strong light on the culture of the women in this part of the Ozarks. It’s the women who insulate the men from Ree when she comes calling. It’s the women who do the dirty work, who enforce the codes of behavior, who deliver the beatings. Yet as powerful as these women are made to seem, you just know that they are trapped in this world with no hope of escape. It is that sense of hopelessness and my yearning for Ree to move beyond it that will stay with me forever. Read this book. See this movie. If Jennifer Lawrence, who plays Ree, and John Hawkes [left], who plays Teardrop, and Ms. Granik don’t receive baskets full of nominations for their performances, the world really is flat."

Reed Farrel Coleman is the 3-time Shamus Award-winning author of Walking the Perfect Square, Redemption Street, The James Deans, Soul Patch, Empty Ever After, and the forthcoming Innocent Monster.

Go here to find out when Winter's Bone will be showing in your area!

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Speaking of Daniel Woodrell, he & Winter's Bone director Debra Granik were interviewed yesterday on NPR's Fresh Air. Catch the audio & transcript here.

Busted Flush Press will reprint Woodrell's 1998 masterpiece, Tomato Red, in the next month. Listen to him discussing the book on NPR back in '99.

KILLER INSTINCT excerpt!

2010-06-13T10:20:00.000-07:00

Killer Instinct (by Zoë Sharp; 978-1-935415-13-8; trade paperback original; $15) On sale now!

Chapter One

I SUPPOSE I ought to state for the record that I don’t make a habit of frequenting places like the New Adelphi Club, which is where this whole sorry mess began. Maybe if I’d run true to form and avoided the place, things might have turned out differently.

The New Adelphi was a nightclub that had risen phoenix-like from the ashes of the old Adelphi, a crumbling Victorian seaside hotel on the promenade in Morecambe. It had a slightly faded air of decayed gentility about it, like an ageing bit-part film actress, hiding her propensity for the gin bottle under paste jewellery and heavy make-up.

I should have seen the changes coming, of course. Over the last eight months the Adelphi has had ‘under new management’ written all over it. The first inkling of a revolution had been a line of skips along the front wall of the car park. The next, a sheepish visit from Gary Bignold, the assistant manager, to tell me that I no longer had use of one of the upstairs function rooms for my Tuesday night class.

‘Sorry, Charlie,’ he’d said awkwardly as he’d broken the news. ‘We’ve got a new boss man and he’s sweeping clean. He’s decided that making a few quid every week so you can teach a load of frumpy housewives how to slap down flashers in the park just doesn’t fit in with his game plan.’

I teach women’s self-defence, have done for four years now. I use gymnasiums in local schools, indoor badminton courts in leisure centres, and even the converted ballroom of a country house that’s now a women’s refuge. Finding a replacement venue for this class wasn’t going to be impossible, but it wasn’t going to be a piece of cake either. I thought regretfully of the lost revenue, and shrugged.

‘Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it,’ I said. He’d caught up with me in the car park, near the skips. I was packing my jogging pants and trainers into the tank bag of my RGV 250 Suzuki for the ride home to Lancaster, only five miles or so away.

Gary hovered from one foot to the other until I’d double-zipped the bag and clipped it down. ‘So what’s happening to the old place then?’ I asked, tucking my scarf round the neck of my leather jacket. ‘They going to pull it down and build yet more luxury flats that nobody wants?’

‘Nah, this new bloke, he’s dead switched on,’ Gary said, relieved enough to be chatty. ‘He’s going to turn this old dump into a nightclub. I’ve seen the plans. It’s going to be absolutely excellent. Couple of bars, split-level dance floors, bit of food. The business. You’ll have to come. Opening night. I’ll get you in free, no trouble.’

I raised an eyebrow and he looked hurt at my scepticism. ‘I will,’ he repeated. ‘I’m going to run the bars for him. It’s all been agreed.’

I didn’t say anything as I swung my leg over the bike and kicked it into life. Gary sometimes lets his enthusiasm run away with him. He looks too wide-eyed to ever be put in charge of anything more than asking the next person in line if they want fries with that.

I gave him a cheery wave as I circled out of the car park, ignoring his shouted assurance that he’d give me a call when they were about to re-launch.

It’s a good job I wasn’t holding my breath.

The New Adelphi Club opened about six months afterwards, just after Christmas. In record time if the murmurs in the building trade are to be believed. It seemed Gary had been right about the new boss being a mover and shaker.

At night the neon on the outside of the building lights up low cloud with an eerie violet glow and is visible from halfway across Morecambe Bay. It’s become quite a local landmark.

I learned from the local paper that Gary did, indeed, become the bar manager for the new enterprise, but he never called to offer me those free tickets. I must admit I hadn’t really expected him to.

It came as quite a surprise to myself, then, that I ended up at the place only a month or so after it opened.

That was my friend, Clare’s fault, not mine. She’d dropped it on me over the phone a few days before. ‘There’s this karaoke competition on at that new club in Morecambe this Saturday,’ she’d said, out of the blue. ‘I fancied giving it a whirl, but Jacob won’t go, so will you come along and lend some moral support?’

I hesitated. Clare’s a mate. I’ve known her and her feller, Jacob, ever since I first moved to Lancaster, but I thought such a request was stretching a friendship too far. ‘I didn’t know you were into that sort of thing,’ I said cautiously, playing for time.

She laughed. ‘Well, Jacob says I haven’t much of a voice. He says my strangled mewlings make the nocturnal warbling of our elderly tomcat sound like Pavarotti, but I reckon he’s just too much of an old fogey to want to go to a nightclub.’

I vaguely heard rude mutterings by someone at the same end of the line as Clare, and she laughed again. Jacob must be in his early fifties, his dark wavy hair streaked through with grey, but he’s one of those men who oozes sexual attraction. Always laughing behind eyes the colour of expensive plain chocolate, and just as tempting. If he could reproduce that kind of chemistry in a lab he’d be a millionaire.

Clare is twenty-five years his junior, more my own age. Tall, slender, she has endless legs and a metabolism that means she can binge peanut butter straight out of the jar without putting on an ounce. I recognised years ago that food was not going to be one of my indulgences in life if I wanted to stay in a size twelve.

I envied Clare the ability not to gain weight more than I envied her her looks, which were stunning. She had long straight hair to go with the legs, golden blonde without bottled assistance, and a sense of style I guess you just have to be born with.

She also rode a ten-year-old Ducati 851 Strada motorcycle like a demon and had the distinction of once having outrun a bike copper through the local Scarthwaite bends at well over a hundred. He’d pulled her over out of curiosity and his chin had bounced off his toecaps when she’d taken off her helmet. Where anyone else would have had their licence taken away for three months, she didn’t even get a producer.

‘So, Charlie, what do you say?’ Clare prompted now. ‘I don’t really want to go by myself,’ she admitted.

I heard Jacob in the background again, loudly this time. ‘You’re not going alone until they’ve caught that bloody rapist!’

‘Yeah, that too,’ Clare said. ‘You’ve heard about that, I suppose?’

I agreed that I had. It was a vicious attack that had only happened a few weeks previously. I’m not the morbid type, but I took a professional interest in the crime. Enough to keep tabs on the progress—or lack of it—in the news reports.

When you make your living teaching people, mainly women, how to avoid potentially ending up in the same situation, you tend to notice anything that affects business. When new pupils turn up at my classes with a sudden burning desire to learn how to reduce a large, hairy would-be mugger to a jellied heap on the pavement, you tend to ask what sparked off their interest. You don’t come out of it looking too good if you haven’t heard all about the latest stabbing, rape, or murder. Particularly if it took place on your own doorstep.

In this case, the victim was just turned eighteen, walking home along a gloomy footpath near the River Lune late one Thursday night and not smart enough to take a taxi. When she’d regained consciousness two days later she was only able to give a hazy description of her attacker.

He’d raped her with a knife held at her throat, then beat her savagely around the head. The police announced piously that it was a miracle she wasn’t dead. As it was, the doctors predicted that she was going to need months of physio, speech therapy, and counselling. The surgeons had managed, after a fashion, to save her right eye.

Lancaster may have its share of violence, but it’s still not the kind of town where things like that happen on a regular basis. The local paper was having a field day with tabloid-style headlines it never normally got to air. Public figures expressed their outrage. Worried citizens wrote to their MP.

Prominent policemen promised early results. It was a brutal and senseless attack, their spokesman said. The culprit must have been covered in his victim’s blood. He must have been spotted arriving or leaving along the busy main road which shadows the river. He must have got home in a dishevelled and excited state. He would, they prophesied, soon be under lock and key.

As it was, several weeks had now gone past. Nothing happened. Appeals were made on the television and would-be witnesses obligingly came forward by the dozen. Unfortunately, none of them had anything of real value to tell. It appeared that the only witness of any sort was a derelict wino called Jimmy.

Jimmy thought he might have seen a car, and he even thought it might have been on that evening, but through the fog of his perpetual alcoholic stupor, he couldn’t quite recall the registration number. Or the model. Or the colour.

There was an air of fear in the city that you could almost reach out and touch. I’d noticed it in my students, seen it on the street. Even over the distortion of the telephone system I could hear it now in Clare’s voice—and in Jacob’s, too.

I sighed.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll come with you. Just don’t expect me to sing!’

Which was how, a few days later, I came to be waiting for Clare in the car park of the New Adelphi Club, twiddling my thumbs and rapidly having second thoughts about the whole exercise.

It was partly because the noise level belting out of the place was so high I feared permanent hearing damage if I ventured any closer. The bass could be physically felt across the other side of the tarmac. I could well imagine that at closer proximity the high frequency would qualify as an offensive weapon.

In the ten minutes or so since I’d parked up and sat, watching people arrive and go in, I’d come to the conclusion that I was probably ten years too old to be there, which made most of the clientele too young to buy cigarettes, never mind alcohol. Also, in a clean pair of black jeans, an almost-ironed shirt, and my least tatty leather jacket, I was wearing way too many clothes.

Despite the chill of the evening—it was February, after all—the boys were all wearing tight little vests that showed off how many hours they’d spent down the gym, or untucked luridly coloured shirts that tried to hide the fact they didn’t know where the gym was. The girls looked like they’d come out in their night-dresses. God, I felt old.

A new set of lights swept into the car park, and Jacob’s rusty old cream Range Rover pulled up next to where I’d parked the bike. Clare waved through the window as she killed the motor and hopped down out of the driver’s seat.

‘Hi,’ I said. I nodded to the car. ‘I thought for a moment Jacob had changed his mind about coming.’

‘Oh no,’ she replied with a little grimace. ‘He drew the line at just lending me the car.’

I eyed the skimpy little frock Clare was nearly wearing as I dumped my helmet on the Range Rover’s back seat. ‘The way you’re dressed I won’t ask why you didn’t come on the bike.’

She looked down at herself with a wry smile. ‘It would have been cold, wouldn’t it?’ she agreed, then nudged my arm. ‘Come on, Charlie, lighten up.’

‘Lighten up? You’ll be beating them off with a shitty stick looking like that and I’m the one Jacob’s relying on to get you home in one piece,’ I grouched. In view of her glam appearance I tried to do something with my untidy mop of pale reddish blonde hair, but it spent too much of its time stuffed under an Arai bike helmet to pretend to have a style now.

She grinned at me again. ‘Don’t worry, if we walk in holding hands they’ll all just assume we’re gay.’

‘Yeah,’ I said sourly, ‘and I don’t have to ask which one of us they’ll think is butch.’

Clare locked the Range Rover’s door and linked her arm through mine. ‘Well,’ she said, a smile dimpling her lovely face, ‘we should both be safe then, hm?’

To start with, we nearly didn’t get into the New Adelphi Club at all. Gary’s new boss man had employed some very useful-looking door staff. Two big guys I didn’t recognise, which came as a bit of a surprise really, when I think about it. I thought I knew all the local hardcases.

Clare didn’t have a problem. They waved her through staring at her legs so hard that afterwards I doubt they would have been able to pick her face out of a line-up.

I didn’t merit such appreciation. I just got an arm like a steel girder across my path as one of them grabbed hold of the front of my jacket.

‘Oi, can’t you read?’ he demanded. He jerked his head to the six-inch square sign half-hidden behind him on the wall, which was headed ‘Dress Code’. ‘No leather jackets and no denims!’ he stated, stabbing a finger at the appropriate lines. God knows what he would have done if he’d known about the Swiss Army knife I always kept as an emergency tool kit in my jacket pocket.

I looked down at the meaty fist screwing up the leather. He had gold sovereign rings on three out of four fingers and a blurred blue tattoo disappearing up his wrist into the sleeve of his dinner jacket. It reappeared again over the top of his shirt collar, an indecipherable squiggle just to one side of the knot of his clip-on bow tie.

I couldn’t help getting the feeling that if Clare and I had been dressed the other way round, she probably would have still walked straight in, but now wasn’t the time to lose my rag. I always have the greatest respect for someone whose pain threshold allows a tattooist to stick so many needles into their neck.

‘How about you let go of me and we’ll start this again?’ I said, keeping my voice reasonable.

‘How about you just fuck off and come back when you’re properly dressed?’ he sneered, shoving me backwards half a step.

‘How about you learn to pick up your teeth with broken fingers?’ I shot back. He was pissing me off big time, and this was not professional behaviour. He was muscle and menace, not the right material for working the door. They should have kept him in a cage somewhere until they needed real trouble sorting out. I didn’t think I qualified for the strong-arm tactics straight off.

‘Hey, what’s going on? You causing problems already, Charlie?’

We both turned, which is not easy when you’ve got someone practically lifting your feet off the floor.

It was Gary. He was wearing a white dinner jacket to distinguish himself from the underlings, and trying to look like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. I don’t think he quite pulled it off.

‘It’s all right, Len,’ he said. ‘Charlie Fox is OK. I know her. What’s the problem?’

The doorman slowly, and with great reluctance, uncurled his fingers from my jacket and put me down. ‘She’s not properly dressed,’ he muttered, a bully caught in the act by one of the teachers. He didn’t quite shuffle his feet, but he came pretty close to it.

Gary gave me a studied glance. ‘That’s about as properly dressed as she gets,’ he said, flashing a quick smile. ‘I think we can bend the rules about the jeans just this once, but the boss man’s in tonight so you’ll have to lose the jacket,’ he told me apologetically. ‘I’ll check it for you.’

I shrugged out of my jacket and let him hand it over to the cloakroom staff. Len stood and glared at me like a lion that hasn’t made a kill for weeks and who’s just been whipped back from a freshly slaughtered antelope.

The other doorman was also dressed in a dinner suit, and sporting that comedy blend of joined beard and moustache that just circled his mouth. The rest of his head was shaved smooth of hair. Both of them were wearing walkie-talkies with clip-on mics and earpieces. Curly wires disappeared under their jacket collars.

The bald doorman had been leaning against the wall during the whole exchange. His only energy expenditure was to chew gum. He made no moves to get involved on either side. Now he grinned at me slyly as Clare and I passed through into the bowels of the club. It made my scalp itch.

‘You’ll have to tell me what you think of the place now it’s been re-done,’ Gary yelled down my ear over the thunderous beat of the music.

The narrow entrance way had opened out into the club proper. It had changed so much since I’d last been inside the old Adelphi that if it hadn’t been for the unaltered façade I’d have thought they’d pulled the whole place down and started again.

We’d come out on what was now the first level, overlooking the basement dance floor. I looked up and saw the cellars weren’t the only thing that had become open plan. The ceilings of the next two floors up had been partially dismantled, revealing bars and more dance floors. I didn’t want to be impressed, but I couldn’t help it.

Clare and I fought our way through the crush to one of the bars on the next level up where Gary gave us both a drink on the house. The full extent of his generosity became apparent when I looked at the prices, even though Clare just had a glass of dry white wine and I stuck to mineral water.

‘So, when’s the karaoke start?’ Clare asked him, leaning close so he could hear her over the din.

‘Oh you’re going to have a bash at that are you?’ he said, preening under the attention. Like most fellers he had to look up slightly to make straight eye contact with Clare. Particularly when she was wearing four-inch heels. ‘That’s terrific,’ he told her. ‘To be honest, it’s been a bit slow to take off. The girl who’s won it the last three Saturdays in a row isn’t much cop, but she’s got enthusiasm. The crowd seem to like her.’

He offered to take us up to the smaller dance floor where the contest was taking place and introduce Clare to the DJ who was in charge of it. ‘Dave Clemmens is a scream,’ he said. ‘Just tell him what you want to sing and he’ll look after you. No trouble.’

We followed him deeper into the club, up a winding spiral staircase. Out of habit I checked out the nearest exits as we went. Dave the DJ held court at one side of the raised stage area on the other side of the floor. Gary guided Clare across with his hand resting lightly on the small of her back. I was deemed strong enough to make my own way there unaided.

Dave was another of those blokes who obviously spent more time admiring himself in the mirrors down at the gym than he did slouched in front of the TV at home. He’d worked hard on the vanity muscle groups, emphasising his biceps and pecs.

As Gary introduced us to him, his eyes flickered from Clare’s face down her body to her legs and back again, with a slow smile forming on his lips as he offered her his hand.

‘Delighted, Clare,’ he said, holding on to her fingers slightly longer than was necessary. Clare gave him the sunny smile of someone who’s used to eliciting such a response from men.

The stare he treated me to was less driven by lust, more by curiosity. I could see him playing mix and match with the relationship between the two of us. Frankly, I didn’t much care what combination he finally came up with.

He soon switched his attention back and started asking a few questions about Clare’s background. Had she sung before? Had she entered a competition like this before? She answered them all easily enough, leaning forward to talk to him. ‘So where are you from, Clare?’ Dave asked now, scribbling notes on a pad balanced in front of him. His other hand worked the controls of the deck with the sureness of long familiarity.

‘I live near Caton village, just the other side of Lancaster,’ she said.

‘Uh-huh, and what’s your phone number?’ It was tagged so neatly onto the back of the other questions that Clare nearly fell for it, opening her mouth to speak, then closing it again quickly. She shook her head with a smile and wagged her finger at him.

‘Ah well,’ he said, ‘you can’t blame me for trying.’ He checked the list on his pad. ‘You’ll be up last, but there’s only eight tonight, so don’t stray too far. If your friend wants to stay about here she’ll get the best view.’ He put just enough emphasis on the word friend to give it a whole host of meanings.

I smiled sweetly at him and said nothing.

He shrugged, reaching for his microphone. ‘OK, ladies and gents, this is what you’ve been waiting for! Another chance to hear the least-talented people in the area step up to the mic and make arse-holes of themselves!’

I was surprised at the intro and didn’t try to hide it. Dave grinned at my reaction.

‘OK, first up, as always is the reigning champion from last week. Where is she? There she is, can’t carry a tune in a bucket, but what she lacks in being musical, she makes up for in volume and guts. Step up to the mic, Susie Hollins!’

Despite this remarkable lead-in, the girl who scrambled up onto the stage was flushed with excitement rather than anger. She was pretty in a conventional sort of way, medium height, blonde streaks running through naturally dark hair, and a blouse that went see-through enough under the artificial lights to show the generous cut of her bra.

There was something vaguely familiar about her that I couldn’t place. Funny how you can never recognise someone out of context. I frowned while I dredged through my memory files, but came up empty.

Now, Susie stood fiddling with the microphone and primly adjusted her micro-length skirt as Dave gave his spiel about her.

‘You all know Susie. She works behind the meat counter at our local supermarket, and she can weigh out my sausages any time! She’s here tonight as usual with Tony—give us a wave, Tone—there he is! Got your own groupie, haven’t you, Sue? Mind you, with a voice like this, she needs all the help she can get. Give it up now, ladies and gents, for Susie Hollins!’

Susie launched straight into her number with plenty of gusto, but Dave was right. She did need a watertight container to carry the tune. She didn’t have the range to hit the high notes, or the breath control for the phrasing of the song.

Still, you had to hand it to her, she was up there giving it her all, and the crowd were cheering her on. Or maybe they were just trying to drown out the sound of her voice.

One thing was for certain, though. Susie Hollins may have been no great shakes as a karaoke singer, but I didn’t think that was reason enough for anyone to want to kill her.

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Find Killer Instinct, the first Charlie Fox thriller (never before published in the U.S.!), at your favorite bookseller or online retailer! Here are a few links:
Indiebound
Mysterious Galaxy
Poisoned Pen
Powell's
Barnes & Noble
Borders
Amazon

And look for us to post Zoë's U.S. Killer Instinct tour tomorrow!!

Great reviews for Donna Moore's OLD DOGS!

2010-06-11T09:16:00.001-07:00

"Two septugenarian sisters take the classic heist to new levels in this addictive caper... Will keep readers smiling if not laughing out loud. The author's clever wordplay, irreverant humor, and vivid characters will please Elmore Leonard, Donald Westlake, and Carl Hiaasen fans, not to mention the Ocean's Eleven crowd. A leisurely paced setup leads to a quick climax, making this a compulsive, enjoyable read." -- Library Journal, starred review

"Very funny... Hilarious and exhausting; you can't help but love Old Dogs." -- Valerie Ryan, Shelf Awareness

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Old Dogs (by Donna Moore; trade paperback original; 978-1-935415-24-4; $15) Look for it in stores in about a month!

Two Macavity Award nominations!

2010-06-08T18:08:00.000-07:00

This feels like a dream... We've just learned that BFP has earned two Macavity Award nominations!

Tower (by Ken Bruen & Reed Farrel Coleman) -- Best Mystery Novel!
Tower has also been nominated for the Anthony & Spinetingler Awards and the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award (Mystery).

"Last Fair Deal Gone Down" (by Ace Atkins, in Crossroad Blues) -- Best Short Story!
"Last Fair Deal..." has also been nominated for the Anthony & Edgar Awards.

The Macavity Awards are nominated and voted on by the members of Mystery Readers International. The winners will be announced at Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention, in San Francisco this October. This award is named for the "mystery cat" of T. S. Eliot (Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats).

Other nominees include Megan Abbott, Louise Penny, Stuart Neville, S. J. Rozan, Deborah Crombie, and more. Go here for a complete list of nominees. Thank you so much, Mystery Readers International!!!

New from BFP author Elizabeth Lowell (a.k.a. A. E. Maxwell)!

2010-06-08T07:47:00.000-07:00

On sale today, the latest thriller from best-seller Elizabeth Lowell (who, with her husband Evan, wrote crime novels under the name "A. E. Maxwell") -- Death Echo (Morrow; $24.99).

New York Times best-selling author Elizabeth Lowell cuts a new edge in suspense with this thrilling tale of passion, danger, and international intrigue in which a pair of former operatives must stop a deadly plot that threatens a major American city—and ultimately the world.

When she joined St. Kilda's, the elite security consulting firm, Emma Cross thought she'd left behind the blood, the guilt, and the tribal wars that defined her life at the CIA. Yet, trading spying for investigating yacht thefts didn't alleviate the danger—or melt away her professional paranoia. Now, the same good instincts that got her into trouble at the agency might be what will help her survive her latest case.

With some arm-twisting, St. Kilda and Emma are tracking a yacht named Blackbird, a dead ringer for another ship that went missing somewhere between Vladivostok and Portland a year earlier. Emma knows the boat's intended cargo is lethal. What she needs to find out is whether it's biological, chemical, or fissionable. And she's only got seven days to uncover the truth . . . or a major American city will be lost.

Fortunately, she's working with a new partner as menacing and distrustful as the worst enemy she's ever faced—and as deadly. A honed killer, MacKenzie Durand led a special ops team that was deployed to some of the world's nastiest places. But five years ago everything went to hell in Afghanistan, when bad intel hung his team out to dry. The only survivor, Mac walked away and never looked back, preferring to make money sailing high-end boats like Blackbird.

But Emma and Mac aren't the only eyes watching Blackbird. Taras Demidov, an expert in extortion and execution in the pay of the oligarchs running the former Soviet Union, is also waiting in the shadows, determined to intercept a fearsomely powerful arms dealer with the money, weaponry, and connections to alter the geopolitical balance.

Thrown together by an organization of enemies with global ties more dangerous than either of them realize, Mac and Emma must put aside their growing attraction for each other to save more than just their own lives. In a deadly game where the rules change without warning and the line between friend and foe is blurred, the pair must find answers fast—or watch as innocent civilians are sacrificed in a cold-blooded grab for power and supremacy. And even Mac and Emma aren't sure just who will get to the finish line alive. . . .

Elizabeth Lowell is the author of many remarkable New York Times bestselling historical and contemporary novels. She lives in Washington with her husband with whom she wrote mystery novels as A. E. Maxwell.

And available from BFP:
Just Another Day in Paradise (by A. E. Maxwell; $13)
The Frog and the Scorpion (by A. E. Maxwell; $14)
Gatsby's Vineyard (by A. E. Maxwell; $14)
Just Enough Light to Kill (by A. E. Maxwell; $14)

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And out in stores later this week, the Busted Flush Press original novel, Killer Instinct (by Zoë Sharp; paperback original; $15)! Look for an excerpt here on the blog tomorrow.

Busted Flush Press earns two Anthony nominations!

2010-06-04T13:10:00.000-07:00

I (David) have long been a fan of the annual Bouchercon world mystery convention, held each year in a different host city (this year's takes place in San Francisco). My first was Seattle in 1994, followed by Toronto, Chicago, Madison, Indianapolis, etc. Bouchercon is a great place to meet your favorite authors & booksellers; sit in on some fascinating panels; buy lots of books; even explore a new city. But it's also where attendees can vote on the Anthony Awards.... which, as an attendee, is a pretty cool thing to be a part of.

So, of course, I'm extra excited to announce that two Busted Flush Press productions have earned Anthony nominations!

Tower (by Ken Bruen & Reed Farrel Coleman) -- Best Paperback Original!
Tower has also been nominated for the Spinetingler Award & the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award (Mystery).

"Last Fair Deal Gone Down" (by Ace Atkins, in Crossroad Blues) -- Best Short Story!
"Last Fair Deal..." was also nominated for the Edgar Award.

Many many thanks to everyone who voted for the short list! Please check out the Bouchercon blog for a complete list of nominees.

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And here are the BFP authors with a few words...

Reed -- "It's always nice to be recognized by fans and peers. Some peer awards get more repect, but I would say you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a finer, more representative list than the nominations for the Anthony. It's great and humbling all at once."

Ken -- "Without David Thompson, Reed, Craig McDonald & Al Guthrie, there would be no nomination. I'm truly delighted to be nominated and to be a part of Busted Flush. Here's hoping we add the Anthony to Busted Flush's glowing rep." [Thanks, Ken!]

Ace -- "I had hoped to be included in a finer class of people than Ken & Reed. There are plenty of well-heeled, well-groomed professionals out there where I could be grouped. Instead I'm stuck with two scruffy degenerates."

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Congratulations to all of the other nominees! And if you're attending Bouchercon in San Francisco, I'll see you there. :-)

New praise for BFP books!

2010-05-31T10:26:00.000-07:00

"Charlie Fox and Zoë Sharp have been staff favorites since First Drop was released in the U.S. a few years ago. However, her U.S. publisher started with the fourth book in the series, despite the title. Now, thanks to Busted Flush, U.S. readers have a chance to start at the beginning, with Killer Instinct. In her first outing, Charlie has not yet officially transitioned into her career as a bodyguard. Instead, she is a freelance self-defense instructor, and open to other odd jobs as well, especially those where she can employ her skills as a former British Army Special Forces soldier. A casual evening out with a friend leads to a part time job as security at a local nightclub, and enmeshes Charlie in a web of crime and deceit tied to the heinous murders of several local women. Elements of the rape and murders have uncomfortable resonance with Charlie’s past." -- Maryelizabeth Hart, Mysterious Galaxy (San Diego, CA)

Killer Instinct goes on sale this week!

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“What a resounding pleasure to read Don Winslow’s splendid first novel again. Even back in 1991 Don seemed to arrive fully formed—whip-smart, funny, brave and big-hearted, too. From a beginning like A Cool Breeze on the Underground it’s easy to see how Winslow became one of the premiere writers of crime fiction in our language. I look most forward to seeing all of the Neal Carey stories published by Busted Flush.”—T. Jefferson Parker, best-selling author of Iron River

“A Cool Breeze on the Underground is an amazing first novel that set the course for a terrific career. Reading it now is like going back to pick up a diamond you didn’t see the first time.”
—Thomas Perry, best-selling author of The Butcher’s Boy and Strip

A Cool Breeze on the Underground will be published in November.

Pictures from Crimefest!

2010-05-24T10:32:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, British thriller writer Zoë Sharp took part in one of the world's premier crime-fiction conference, Crimefest, in Bristol, England. Here are a few photos from the festivities. Check out that gorgeous piece of work... um, both the new Busted Flush Press edition of Killer Instinct (the first Charlie Fox thriller) and Zoë herself!

And no, Zoë's not attacking a book critic... She occasionally teaches self-defense seminars at mystery conventions.

And here's Zoë (far left) on a Crimefest panel, which is being moderated by the lovely Busted Flush Press author Donna Moore! Look for Donna's Old Dogs next month!

Zoë Sharp's Killer Instinct is leaving the printers (finally) today! We apologize for the delays, but I guarantee you, it's worth the wait!

Look for us at BookExpo this week!

2010-05-23T11:32:00.001-07:00

Busted Flush Press & Tyrus Books will be sharing booth space in the Consortium area at this year's BookExpo. I've been several times as a bookseller participant, but I'm a newbie as a exhibitor. Please drop by & say hi! I'd love to chat with booksellers, librarians, fans... well, anyone. We're at booth #4507.

Reed Farrel Coleman (published by both BFP & Tyrus) will be signing at the booth, Wednesday, 2-3 p.m.

And follow my Twitter feed for photos & news from BookExpo!

Anthony Award nominations, Daniel Woodrell's WINTER'S BONE

2010-05-17T06:12:00.000-07:00

If you attended last year's Bouchercon in Indianapolis, or are already registered to attend this year's in San Francisco (Oct. 14-17), you can nominate the short list for the 2010 Anthony Awards! Categories include: Best Novel, Best First Novel, Best Paperback Original, Best Short Story, and Best Critical Nonfiction Work. Ballots are due by May 28th, just a week away! Download a ballot here.

And may we recommend two Busted Flush Press titles which are eligible for Anthonys: 2010 Spinetingler Award nominee Tower (by Ken Bruen & Reed Farrel Coleman) for Best Paperback Original and 2010 Edgar Award nominee "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" (by Ace Atkins, in Crossroad Blues) for Best Short Story.

Thanks so much, and happy voting!

P.S. My own personal picks for the other two main fiction categories:
Best Novel -- Shatter (by Michael Robotham; Doubleday), though I also have a special fondness for No Such Creature (by Giles Blunt; Henry Holt).
Best First Novel -- Mixed Blood (by Roger Smith; Henry Holt/Picador) just barely edges out The Ghosts of Belfast (by Stuart Neville; Soho), but it's mighty close.

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Back Bay Books has released the new movie tie-in cover of Busted Flush Press author Daniel Woodrell's 2006 novel Winter's Bone. Gorgeous, huh? This edition will be out soon.

And here's the estimated schedule of the film's theatrical release, which begins in L.A. & NYC June 11th. See if it's playing in your neck of the woods! Can't wait for it to hit Houston...

ARIZONA
7/9 – Scottsdale – Camelview 5
7/23 – Tucson – The Loft

ARKANSAS
6/18 – Fayetteville – AMC Fiesta Square 16

CALIFORNIA
6/11 – Los Angeles – The Landmark
6/18 – Berkeley – California 3
6/18 – Irvine – University Town Center
6/18 – Pasadena – Playhouse 7
6/18 – Santa Monica – Monica 4-Plex
6/25 – La Jolla – La Jolla Village Cinemas
6/25 – San Diego – Hillcrest Cinemas

COLORADO
6/25 – Denver – Chez Artiste

CONNECTICUT
6/25 - Hartford - Cinema City 4
6/25 - New Haven - Criterion 7

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
6/18 – Washington – E Street Cinema

FLORIDA
7/9 – Tampa – Tampa Theatre

GEORGIA
7/9 – Atlanta – Midtown Art Cinemas 8

ILLINOIS
6/18 – Chicago – Century Centre Cinema

KANSAS
6/18 - Overland Park - Glenwood Arts

KENTUCKY
6/18 – Lexington – Kentucky Theatre
6/18 – Louisville – The Baxter

MARYLAND
6/25 – Baltimore – The Charles

MASSACHUSETTS
6/18 – Brookline – Coolidge Corner Theatre
6/18 – Cambridge – Kendall Square Cinema
6/25 - Amherst - Amherst Cinema Arts Center 3

MICHIGAN
6/25 – Bloomfield Hills – Maple Art Theatre
7/9 - Ann Arbor - Michigan Theater

MINNESOTA
6/25 – Edina – Edina 4

MISSOURI
6/18 – Frontenac – Plaza Frontenac Cinema
6/18 - Kansas City - Tivoli @ Manor Square
6/18 – Springfield – Campbell 16 Cine
6/25 - Branson - Branson Meadows Cinemas
6/25 – West Plains – Glass Sword Cinema

NEW JERSEY
6/18 - Montclair – Clairidge Cinemas 6

NEW YORK
6/11 – New York – Lincoln Plaza
6/11 – New York – Sunshine Cinema
6/18 - Brooklyn - BAM Rose Cinemas
7/23 – Rochester – Little Theatre
7/30 – Albany – Spectrum

NORTH CAROLINA
7/9 – Charlotte – Manor Theatre 2
7/9 – Raleigh – Colony Twin

OHIO
7/9 – Cincinnati – Esquire
7/16 - Cleveland - Cedar Lee
7/30 - Dayton - Neon Movies

OKLAHOMA
8/6 - Tulsa - Circle Theatre

OREGON
6/25 – Portland – Fox Tower

PENNSYLVANIA
6/18 – Philadelphia – Ritz 5

RHODE ISLAND
7/9 - Providence - Avon Cinema

TENNESSEE
7/9 – Knoxville – Downtown West Cinema 8
7/16 – Memphis – Ridgeway 4
7/16 – Nashville – Belcourt Theatre

TEXAS
6/25 – Austin – The Arbor
6/25 – Dallas – Magnolia Theatre
6/25 – Houston – River Oaks Theatre

UTAH
7/16 – Salt Lake City – Broadway Centre Cinemas

VIRGINIA
6/18 – Arlington – Shirlington 7

WASHINGTON
6/25 – Seattle – Uptown Cinemas 3
6/25 – Seattle – Guild 45th Theatre

And if you haven't seen it yet, view the movie trailer here.

Two Consortium anthologies to launch at NoirCon!

2010-05-16T17:22:00.000-07:00

You probably already know about Busted Flush Press's Damn Near Dead 2: Live Noir or Die Trying (edited by Bill Crider; 978-1-935415-40-4; trade paperback original; $18) launching at this November's NoirCon in Philadelphia (Nov. 4-7)... but did you know that Akashic Books's Philadelphia Noir (edited by Carlin Romano; 978-1-936070-63-3; paperback original; $15.95) will be making its debut there, too? Here are the authors scheduled to attend from each anthology:

Patti Abbott (Damn Near Dead 2)
Scott Cupp (Damn Near Dead 2)
Christa Faust (Damn Near Dead 2)
Scott Phillips (Damn Near Dead 2)
Carlin Romano (Philadelphia Noir)
S. J. Rozan (Damn Near Dead 2)
Duane Swierczynski (Philadelphia Noir)
Dennis Tafoya (Philadelphia Noir)
Johnny Temple (Akashic Books publisher) & David Thompson (Busted Flush Press publisher)
...and likely many more!

Both titles will be released by Consortium Books in November.
For more information on NoirCon or to register, please visit the website, the blog, or contact organizer Lou Boxer directly. We hope you can make it!

BFP wins the 2010 Spinetingler Award!

2010-05-03T16:13:00.000-07:00

Busted Flush Press has been named Best Mystery/Crime Fiction Press, Publisher or Imprint by the 2010 Spinetingler Awards! Thank you SO much to everyone who voted for BFP. It was an honor to have been in the same company as fellow nominees Bitter Lemon Press, New Pulp Press, Serpent's Tail, Soho, and Switchblade. And let me tell you as a bookseller, those publishers are among our favorites at Murder By The Book! Please check 'em out.

Other Spinetingler Award winners include Stuart Neville's The Ghosts of Belfast, Michael Connelly's The Scarecrow, Adrian McKinty's 50 Grand, and more. View a complete list of winners here.

Check back at the BFP blog later this week for an account of the 2010 Edgar Awards. We may not have won, but we still had a great time!

WINTER'S BONE movie trailer!

2010-05-02T15:52:00.000-07:00

Special thanks to Spinetingler Magazine for bringing this to everyone's attention!

The Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning film based on Daniel Woodrell's acclaimed novel will be out June 11th, in selected cities. Don't miss it!

Busted Flush Press will release Woodrell's Tomato Red (paperback; 978-1-935415-06-0; $15) in September. Here's a new blurb, hot off the presses from best-selling crime writer C. J. Box...

"Three pages into Tomato Red I got that inexplicable head rush that comes from wondering how I'd never heard of the book or of Daniel Woodrell, and regretting the years I was ignorant of both. Woodrell writes with a poetic, lyrical, breezy style that reminds me of authentic country artists like George Jones or Hank Williams but he somehow does it on the page. He packs an entire world into a short book and leaves you yearning for more. Thank you, Busted Flush Press, for introducing me to Woodrell. Now others won't make the mistake I made." -- C. J. Box, Edgar-winning author of Nowhere to Run

Give me some work to do, get free stuff!

2010-04-27T18:26:00.000-07:00

I'm heading out of town for the Edgar Awards banquet this Thursday. I get back to town Sunday, and I'd love to have some work for me to do when I get back... okay, it's not like I don't have enough work piled up, but I mean mail orders! If you order just two books (that are currently available) from BFP's website between now and Saturday (May 1st), look at the free grub I'll throw in!

* FREE paperback (St. Martin's edition) of Ace Atkins's 2nd Nick Travers mystery, Leavin' Trunk Blues (this is now out-of-print)! Ace is up for the Edgar this year (for Best Short Story)... if you haven't yet discovered him, this is a good time!
* FREE paperback (Plume edition) of three-time Shamus Award-winner Reed Farrel Coleman's 3rd Moe Prager novel, The James Deans (albeit not as cool as the BFP edition with its Michael Connelly foreword, but it's FREE)!
* FREE (and this one's kinda nifty) signed, original short story chapbook by Randy Wayne White. Entitled "Chatham River," this was a special 22-page coming-of-age fishing tale that RWW wrote for BFP when we first got started a few years back. It was originally produced as a limited edition chapbook (limited to 400 copies), but I recently stumbled across some additional "presentation copies", outside of the initial limitation. Did I mention they're signed?!
* Plus, I'd throw in all sorts of other goodies I have laying around... bookmarks, postcards, etc.

Just mosey on over to http://www.bustedflushpress.com/ and order two or more books. Heck, you order several and who knows what I'll throw in the box! Want any recommendations of what to get? Feel free to e-mail me at bustedflushpress@yahoo.com, and I'll be happy to share my thoughts (even from NYC).

Thanks so much, and wish us luck at the Edgars!
Oh, and don't forget to vote for the Spinetingler Awards (if you haven't already) by Friday.

New praise for Daniel Woodrell's TOMATO RED

2010-04-26T06:15:00.000-07:00

“Tomato Red made me laugh, made me shake my head in amazement, but most of all it made me bloody envious. Modern crime fiction is thick with storytellers, but Daniel Woodrell is that rare beast: a writer.”—Roger Smith, author of Mixed Blood and Wake Up Dead

“The characters in Daniel Woodrell’s Tomato Red speak the poetry of the trailer park in a world where all wisdom is hard-won. Here there are no trust fund babies plagued by ennui. Woodrell’s universe is strictly hard-scrabble, where the only struggle involving identity is the one to keep it concealed. We are better for knowing it.”—Thomas H. Cook, Edgar Award-winning author of The Last Talk with Lola Faye

“There are a handful of writers who are known, read and revered by other writers for the brilliant beauty of their words. Some have become better known—James Lee Burke is an obvious example—but some haven’t yet achieved the wide readership that they deserve. Daniel Woodrell is chief amongst them. He’s created his own niche in the mystery world—‘Ozark Noir’—and he’ll dazzle you with each page. Chandler once wrote his ideal of a private eye and I think it applies to writers as well, certainly to Woodrell: ‘He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.’ Woodrell is the best at what he does and he can equal the best writing in any other world.”—JB Dickey, Seattle Mystery Bookshop (Seattle, WA)

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Tomato Red (originally published in 1998 by Henry Holt) will be reprinted this September by Busted Flush Press (trade paperback; 978-1-935415-06-0; $15), with a new foreword by Edgar Award-winning crime writer Megan Abbott. Read more praise for Tomato Red and The Death of Sweet Mister (trade paperback; 978-1-935415-08-4; $15; March 2011; new foreword by Dennis Lehane) here.

Tweeting at the Edgars!

2010-04-19T06:02:00.001-07:00

The Edgar Awards banquet is now 10 days away (Thursday, April 29)... and yours truly, Busted Flush Press's David Thompson will be there with his/my beautiful bride, McKenna Jordan, owner of Houston independent mystery bookstore, Murder By The Book. As a service to our MBTB customers -- and frankly, just fun for the Twitterin' fun of it -- I'll be Tweeting live Edgar Awards results as they are announced, through MBTB's Twitter feed. Be sure to follow us that evening! (And please keep your fingers crossed for BFP's nomination: Ace Atkins's Best Short Story nom for "Last Fair Deal Gone Down," published for the first time in the recent reprint of Crossroad Blues!)

And if you're attending the Edgars week symposiums, please look for BFP authors Megan Abbott (A Hell of a Woman), Ace Atkins (Crossroad Blues), Reed Farrel Coleman (Walking the Perfect Square), Laura Lippman (Damn Near Dead), and S. J. Rozan (Damn Near Dead 2), all of whom are speaking on various panels. Register for the symposium panels here.

Don Winslow & Oliver Stone

2010-04-18T13:21:00.000-07:00

Crime writer Don Winslow (The Dawn Patrol; The Power of the Dog) is collaborating with director/producer/screenwriter Oliver Stone on a film adaptation of Winslow's upcoming drug thriller, Savages (Simon & Schuster; July). Read more about it here. (And I highly recommend Savages... it's the perfect mix of two of Winslow's best works: The drug-war relevance of The Power of the Dog with the in-your-face, mile-a-minute pacing of The Death and Life of Bobby Z.)

Busted Flush Press will be reprinting Winslow's early crime novels, featuring private eye Neal Carey, beginning with A Cool Breeze on the Underground this fall. Could there be some movie news in the works for the Carey series? We'll see...

Ace Atkins is INFAMOUS!

2010-04-07T17:00:00.000-07:00

2010 Edgar Award nominee Ace Atkins hits the road next week to promote his new historical crime novel, Infamous (Putnam), about Machine Gun Kelly & his wife. He'll be hitting Houston, Phoenix, and several cities in the South. Check out the tour stops & dates here. If you're in the area, be sure not to miss his events... this former Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist gives a fascinating talk, and you can probably tell I'm already a fan: I'm reprinting his early books! The first Nick Travers crime novel, Crossroad Blues, is available now, and Dark End of the Street, will be published this fall.

JUST ENOUGH LIGHT TO KILL excerpt

2010-04-04T07:06:00.000-07:00

Just Enough Light to Kill (by A. E. Maxwell; 978-0-935415-02-2; trade paperback reprint; $14) On sale in about a week.

EVERYTHING STARTED COMING apart on Uncle Jake’s birthday, or what would have been his birthday if somebody hadn’t put two bullets through the back of his head with a .45-caliber Colt semiautomatic pistol. I don’t draw black borders around his birthday on the calendar or anything like that; Jake lived and died pretty much the way he wanted to. But I do remember the day and the dirt road south of Puerto Peñasco because I was there on that dusty road with Jake. Actually, I was only about half-there. The other half was already headed for what my poor Montana mother—Jake’s sister—used to call “a better place.” The guy who shot Jake shot me first. I guess I looked like more of a threat since I was bigger and wasn’t stoned. But if I was such a big threat, why didn’t he waste a second round on me, the way he did on Jake?

Hell of a question to ask yourself when you’re ass-deep in a hole the size of a grave.

I was half-done with the excavation for a new koi pond. The fish had grown too big for the old one. All eight of them had to swim in tight formation or their maneuverings looked like a watery version of Destruction Derby. Even when they managed the close-order drill, Lord Toranaga frayed his fins on the concrete. Every time I looked at him, I felt guilty. I should have been shoveling a lot sooner.

Digging the new pond had been put off all summer. The ground was too dry, too hard, I kept telling Fiora. No sense in using dynamite when the winter rains will do the job for you. When the rain finally came, it was too wet, of course, and I had to wait a week for the soil to dry out a bit. Then it would rain before I could start digging, so it was wait and dry out, and then the rain came again. You’d have thought I had Mother Nature on a retainer. All through December and January, the storms came through on a perfect seven-day cycle that kept my excuse fresh.

But finally, on Jake’s birthday, the game lost its savor. Fiora was too busy trying to take over a local investment bank to notice what I was or wasn’t digging. In fact, she was so busy she barely had time at dawn to remind me that my tux had been cleaned and pressed and would I please appear in it at 7 P.M. on Pacific Coast Highway in front of Savories Cafe. Then she kissed me in a half-assed, distracted way, patted my cheek and hopped out of bed before I could grab her.

When I woke again hours later, I was feeling surly as hell. I told myself it was a combination of Jake’s day and having to wear a tux tonight. A brisk run along the beach didn’t help to shake out my mental kinks. Neither did sitting on my butt. So I sharpened the spade, went up the little rise in back of the cottage and took out my frustrations on something inanimate.

An hour after I sliced out the first chunk of grass and clay, the raw wind off the water picked up, promising the arrival of another storm. The cold wind was what got me thinking about Jake and the border. The wind had been blowing that day, too. I had turned my shoulder against the stinging sand, only to realize an instant later that I’d made a mistake because I caught a glimpse of Refugio turning toward me with the .45 in his hand.

Oddly, I never heard the shot that hit me, although I did feel a hard blow on the back of my head. But I heard the two shots that were for Jake. In my mind I watched him move off slowly, disappearing into the bright light of the overhead sun, the wrong-century cowboy headed for the place he loved best, the shimmering, beckoning border between what has been and what will be. . . .

Jake always had loved crossing boundary lines. His favorite was the U.S.-Mexican border. I sometimes think he was a smuggler because he loved the border. It ran through his life like a black silk thread, stringing together all the bright possibilities from here to tomorrow. On this side of the border, everything is ordinary; on the other side is the Mexico of the soul—uncharted territory, blistering chili peppers and .45 slugs.

Why are they trying to kill us, Jake?

That was just one of the haunting questions that swirled around me like the cold February wind as I turned over spade after spade of dirt. I really should have remembered a few other things about the border when I switched to a round-edged shovel, looked up and saw the clouds scudding inland to pile up against the mountains like great white grave markers. I should have remembered, but I didn’t. I plead guilty to oversight. After all, I thought I was just digging an ordinary hole in the ground.

Actually, Kwame Nkrumah and I were digging the hole together. Kwame is the princely black and tan Rhodesian Ridgeback that lives next door. Technically, Kwame belongs to Dr. J. Samuel Johnson, a black dentist who has one of the most lucrative orthodontics practices in Newport Beach. But Kwame is convinced that Joe Sam doesn’t really understand or appreciate him. Kwame is right. Joe Sam hasn’t a clue about real watchdogs, because he is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. He hasn’t a single enemy, despite the fact that he hurts people for a living.

I hurt people once in a while, too. It’s just as unavoidable in my line of work as it is in Joe Sam’s, only some of my patients try to hurt back. That’s why Kwame hangs around with me. I don’t shush him or tell him to go lie down when he starts making a spine-chilling noise deep in his chest and lifts the loose folds of his lips to reveal gleaming fangs. I also don’t mind when Kwame just pals around with me, getting underfoot, watching everything I do as though it mattered. Let’s face it: digging a grave-sized hole in a cold wind is a lonely way to pass the time.

As I dug, Kwame was in pal rather than guard dog mode. We were getting deeper into the little hill with each stroke of the shovel. About every third time I turned over a shovel load, Kwame would sniff, make a few passes with his toenails and watch intently. When nothing came out to play, he’d flop belly down on the fresh clay and wait for me to turn over something that wiggled. I’d look up from time to time to find him watching me with those clear, dark, calm eyes.

He had just finished his little ritual of scratch and flop when I became vaguely aware of a restless feeling. Kwame felt it, too. He got up, circled the bottom of the hole once and flopped back down. He was up again almost instantly. This time he went to the edge of the waist-deep hole and begged to be excused.

“Fine,” I grunted. “Go home to your warm bed.”

Kwame looked at me earnestly, then stretched up the side of the hole on his hind legs, and looked at me again.

The dirt was piled almost eye-high on that side, but he could have easily scrambled out any of the other sides, so I ignored him.

He whined very softly, deep in his throat.

Kwame’s not the type to complain. I bent over and boosted him out. He could have made the welterweight class, with a pound or two to spare. He didn’t pause to say thanks. He scrambled up the pile of dirt and stood stiff-legged. The hair on the back of his neck raised in a silent flag of warning. In case I had missed the message, he made the low, tectonic sound in his chest.

The hair on the back of my neck rose in reply. I slipped out of the hole in a single motion, but carefully stayed behind the pile of clay and stones that rose between me and whatever had lit Kwame’s fuse.

At first it looked like just another day in paradise. The fifty turn-of-the-century cottages that made up Crystal Cove were as ramshackle and unthreatening as they had ever been. The open pastureland beyond was as calm and bucolic as ever. The whole scene presented a picture of rustic serenity that would have been hard to beat.

Kwame wasn’t buying it. He growled again and held his ground, facing the highway. He was staring toward the turnout below an orange juice stand that had been built in 1931 and looked like it hadn’t been painted since.

Easing around slightly, I got a look at what interested Kwame. One hundred fifty yards away, a blue car sat broadside to me. The car’s nose was pointed down the coast toward Laguna.

There was something innocuous and nondescript about the car, as though it were a rental or part of somebody’s corporate fleet. Beyond the fact that the driver sat alone in the front seat, I was too far away to see anything useful. The guy was probably just a tourist who had pulled over to watch the steel-gray Pacific on a choppy, windy winter day.

Except that this particular tourist seemed to be looking back up the coast toward Crystal Cove rather than out toward the restless ocean.

Even after a soft word from me, the African prince wouldn’t budge. No longer growling, Kwame stood with his feet rooted in the clay, his neck ruff as spiked as a punker’s Mohawk. I’m not one of those guys who asks for expert advice and then ignores it, so I eased back down into the hole and rolled out the other side, right into the cover of a bottlebrush hedge. Keeping the hedge between me and the highway, I duck-walked down the rise toward the cottage.

By sliding under the side porch, I managed to keep out of sight of the turnout until I could round the corner of the cottage and get in through the side door with a minimum of fuss. Fiora keeps a pair of Nikon zoom binoculars near the picture window, the better to count the oil tankers passing on the far side of Catalina Island. I grabbed the glasses and headed for the back bedroom, which faced the highway.

The curtains are always closed back there. I didn’t want to disturb them; if the guy had been watching the house for any time at all, he would be waiting for just such a sign of life inside. That left only one way for me to get a clear view of the turnout. I went into the bathroom, lowered the toilet lid and stood on it to peer out through the narrow louvered window. The zoom lever on the binoculars was down at seven power. When I racked it up the scale, I almost fell backward into the sink. The increased magnification was so great I could damn near read the brand name on the hinge of the guy’s binoculars.

He was looking right at me.

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Named by Time magazine as one of the best suspense novels of the year!

“Plan on reading this one all the way through. You won’t be able to stop.”—United Press International

“A. E. Maxwell writes sophisticated, charming, and literate thrillers. I haven’t had this much fun since reading Nick and Nora Charles.”—Robert Ward, author of Total Immunity

“Fiddler is to California what Spenser is to Boston and Travis McGee is to Florida. Tough, smart guys who know that sometimes, what looks like paradise, is pure hell.”—Paul Levine, best-selling author of Solomon vs. Lord and Illegal

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Just Enough Light to Kill is the fourth novel in A. E. Maxwell's Fiddler & Fiora crime series, following Just Another Day in Paradise, The Frog and the Scorpion, and Gatsby's Vineyard.

2010 Spinetingler Award nominations!

2010-04-01T06:11:00.000-07:00

Busted Flush Press is nominated for Best Mystery/Crime Fiction Press, Publisher or Imprint. Tower (by Ken Bruen & Reed Farrel Coleman) is nominated for Best Novel: Legend (by an author with 9+ novels published). And you can participate in the poll! Please go here to view the nominees & vote for your favorites! Congratulations to the other wonderful publishers also nominated: Bitter Lemon, New Pulp, Serpent's Tail, Soho, and Switchblade. We are honored to be in such great company.

JUST ENOUGH LIGHT TO KILL has arrived!

2010-03-29T10:20:00.001-07:00

We've just received our copies of A. E. Maxwell's 4th Fiddler & Fiora crime novel, Just Enough Light to Kill (978-1-935415-02-2; paperback; $14), and it's pretty darn good-looking! One of the best in the series, this was also named one of Time magazine's best suspense novels of the year when it was first released back in 1988. Copies of Just Enough Light to Kill will start shipping out to stores at the end of this week, but if you can't wait, you can always order it (& the first three in the series) through Busted Flush Press (starting tomorrow or Wednesday)!

"Plan on reading this one all the way through. You won't be able to stop." -- United Press International (UPI)

Tomorrow, I'll post an excerpt from Just Enough Light to Kill, so please check back...

TOWER nominated for FOREWORD Book of the Year Award!

2010-03-20T13:43:00.001-07:00

Tower (by Ken Bruen & Reed Farrel Coleman; trade paperback original; $15) has been nominated for the Foreword Book of The Year Award in the Mystery category!

Foreword Reviews' Book of the Year Awards were established to bring increased attention to librarians and booksellers of the literary and graphic achievements of independent publishers and their authors. Foreword is the only review trade journal devoted exlusively to books from independent houses.

Winners will be announced at BookExpo in New York City in May.

Update (03/20/10): Speaking of Reed Farrel Coleman... Tyrus Books has just released the cover of the 6th Moe Prager novel, Innocent Monster, due out in October. Ain't it gorgeous?? Tyrus & Busted Flush Press will work together not only on the release of Innocent Monster, but the new reprints of Soul Patch (September) and Empty Ever After (October), with promotions, contests, giveaways, and more. Stay tuned to both of our blogs!

The story behind THE EXTERMINATORS

2010-03-11T06:29:00.000-08:00

By Bill Fitzhugh

The long and winding road to the publication of The Exterminators. And oh, what a long, strange trip it’s been…

David asked me for some blog content to commemorate our deal to publish the long awaited sequel to Pest Control. I decided to take a look back at the history of the little bug book that could…

It all started in May of 1991. A screenplay brainstorming session with a former writing partner led to the germ of the idea that would lead to a screenplay called Pest Control.

We finished a draft in September of 1991.

It was optioned for $4,000 November 1991, but the project went nowhere.

Worked on other screenplays for the next two years (including the script that would eventually become my third novel, Cross Dressing) before I decided to try writing Pest Control as a comic novel.

I began research in June 1993. I finished a draft in the fall of 1994. After rejections by 124 agents, I got a call from Jimmy Vines who loved it. However, all the major publishing houses passed on it. Jimmy told me not to worry, told me to start writing another book because he was going to sell Pest Control. So I started on The Organ Grinders.

In July 1995, Jimmy Vines gets the Pest manuscript to the New York offices of Spring Creek Productions. They loved it and send it to their L.A. offices on the lot at Warner Brothers.

On August 3, 1995, Spring Creek Productions bought the film rights to Pest Control for $500,000 against $1 million (i.e., half now, the other half if/when they make it).

October 1995, Japanese and UK publishers buy Pest Control.
November 1995, Avon Books buys North American rights.
February 1996, German publisher buys it.
March 1996, Italian publisher buys it.

May 1996, Pest Control is published in the UK. The Times of London calls it “one of the funniest, most off-beat thrillers to hit the bookstalls in years… Fitzhugh does for New York what Carl Hiaasen did for Miami.” And just like that, five years and 125 agents later, I’m an overnight success.

1997, Pest Control is published in the US, Germany, and Japan.

Italians decide to wait for the film. Bastards.

Many screenplay drafts are written and several directors are considered, but none Warner Brothers likes enough to make the movie.

Jimmy Vines begins urging me to write a sequel to Pest. I say I don’t have a good enough story for it. So I write The Organ Grinders, then Cross Dressing (which Universal Studios bought but still hasn’t made. The bastards.)

Jimmy Vines continues to urge me to write a sequel to Pest. I say I still don’t have a good enough story for it. So I write Fender Benders and Heart Seizure.

Jimmy Vines continues to urge me to write a sequel to Pest. I say I don’t have a good enough story for it. So I write Radio Activity and Highway 61 Resurfaced.

February 2005. The late, great, George Taylor Morris reads Radio Activity. George is the program director for the Deep Tracks channel of XM Satellite Radio. We start talking. I have an idea for a radio show. He says send him a sample. So I do.

Early 2005, I finally figure out a story for the sequel to Pest Control and begin writing The Exterminators.

May 2005, “Fitzhugh’s All Hand Mixed Vinyl” debuts on XM Satellite Radio. Five years later, it's on the air five days a week on Sirius-XM.

June 2007, a German Radio Production company buys the rights to make Pest into a radio show.

June 2007, an attorney from New York sends me an email saying he represents a producer who wants to turn Pest Control into a musical. Seriously? Yes, seriously.

July 2007, Canum Entertainment buys the STAGE MUSICAL RIGHTS for Pest. Seriously.

August 2007, the German Radio version of Pest airs for the first time.

November 2007, a Romanian publisher buys the rights for Pest.

April 2008, “Pest Control: The Musical” hits the stage in Los Angeles to excellent reviews. (It goes on to win awards for Best Costume. Seriously, the best cockroach costumes you’ve ever seen.

June 2008, a Spanish publisher buys rights to Pest.

September 2009, Reed Farrel Coleman is in Los Angeles on tour for Tower. We go out to dinner after his signing at The Mystery Book Store. He says great things about his publisher, Busted Flush Press.

October 2009, I contact David Thompson, who 'craps his pants' [editor's note: Not really.] when asked if he's interested in reading The Exterminators.

February 2010, Busted Flush Press and Fitzhugh have agreed to publishing deal.

April 2011 (twenty years after the original idea for the original screenplay) the sequel to Pest Control is published.

There’s an old saying that “Good things come to those who wait.” It’s true. If you enjoyed Pest Control, you’ll love The Exterminators. But you’ll have to wait…

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Bill Fitzhugh is Toastmaster at this weekend's Left Coast Crime in Los Angeles (March 11-14). Visit him online at www.billfitzhugh.com.

BFP News (March 7)

2010-03-07T07:41:00.000-08:00

Ken Bruen

On World Book Day, award-winning crime writer Ken Bruen (London Boulevard; The Devil) read to Galway children from his upcoming kids' book (to be published in 2011).

Bill Fitzhugh

Look for new BFP author Bill Fitzhugh (The Organ Grinders) at this weekend's Left Coast Crime mystery convention in Los Angeles; he's the Toastmaster. He'll share more information on The Exterminators, the upcoming, long-awaited sequel to his 1996 cult hit, Pest Control, that will launch at next year's Left Coast Crime in Santa Fe. Other BFP authors attending LCC 2010 include Steve Brewer (Damn Near Dead), Christa Faust (A Hell of a Woman), Gar Anthony Haywood (Damn Near Dead 2), Naomi Hirahara (A Hell of a Woman), Gary Phillips (Damn Near Dead 2), and Kat Richardson (Damn Near Dead 2).

A. E. Maxwell

The fourth Fiddler & Fiora thriller, Just Enough Light to Kill, is at the printers, and will start shipping to stores the first week of April. This thriller -- in which Fiddler heads to the California-Mexico border to investigate the murder of a Customs Agent friend -- is one the series' best, and Time magazine named it one of the year's best suspense novels back when it first came out! this is a private eye/thriller series not to be missed.

Zoë Sharp

More early praise for Zoë Sharp's Killer Instinct (on sale in May; also available in large print from Isis):

"Charlotte 'Charlie' Fox could give Cotton Malone a run for his money, but I think he'd enjoy every minute of it. Killer Instinct is spicy, smart, and entertaining. Zoë Sharp has a gift for place and character, making it seem as familiar as your own backyard. She draws out every emotion in the reader with some stylish prose. Well done." -- Steve Berry, best-selling author of The Paris Vendetta

"Charlie Fox is tough, compassionate, and kicks ass to protect others -- how could anyone not love her? Zoë Sharp is a master at writing thoughtful action thrillers, and Killer Instinct is no exception. Read it!" -- Meg Gardiner, Edgar Award-winning author of The Liar's Lullaby

Covers for Daniel Woodrell reprints!

2010-03-03T06:18:00.000-08:00

Behold, the covers for Busted Flush Press's upcoming reprints of Daniel Woodrell's two most acclaimed novels, Tomato Red and The Death of Sweet Mister!

Tomato Red
Trade paperback, $15 (Canada $18)
September 2010 / 978-1-935415-06-0
New foreword by Megan Abbott!
(And very special thanks to photographer Katherine White for that chilling cover image!)

"Reading Tomato Red -- the first Daniel Woodrell novel I came upon -- was a transformative experience. It expanded my sense of the possibilities not only of crime fiction, but of fiction itself -- of language, of storytelling. Time and again, his work just dazzles and humbles me. God bless Busted Flush for these glorious reissues. It's a service to readers everywhere, and a great gift." -- Megan Abbott, award-winning author of Bury Me Deep

The Death of Sweet Mister
Trade paperback, $15 (Canada $18)
March 2011 / 978-1-935415-08-4
New foreword by Dennis Lehane!

"I can't remember coming across a more precise evocation of innocence lost since Golding's The Lord of the Flies. With The Death of Sweet Mister, Daniel Woodrell has written his masterpiece — spare, dark, and incandescently beautiful. It broke my heart..." -- Dennis Lehane, best-selling author of The Given Day

And have you registered for NoirCon 2010 yet?? Daniel Woodrell is scheduled to be there!

More Maxwells & Handlers!

2010-03-02T14:13:00.000-08:00

David Handler and A. E. Maxwell fans, you'll be happy to know that Busted Flush is reprinting more of their mysteries, beginning spring 2011!

David Handler
After having reprinted the first four Stewart Hoag novels in two omnibus volumes (The Man Who Died Laughing/The Man Who Lived by Night; The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald/The Woman Who Fell from Grace), BFP, at long last, is continuing with more of this witty, erudite series. The Boy Who Never Grew Up (#5) will be published in spring 2011, and The Man Who Canceled Himself (#6) will follow in the fall.

A. E. Maxwell
BFP has released four Fiddler & Fiora private eye novels, with the fourth, Just Enough Light to Kill, due out last month, but running a little behind (it should be back from the printers soon). The Art of Survival (#5) will come out next spring, and Money Burns (#6) in the fall.

Though neither author is currently continuing these series (at the moment), I can't stress enough that if you haven't yet discovered these books, please track down the first ones posthaste. Reprinting Handler's and Maxwell's mysteries are two of the main reasons I created Busted Flush Press, and I'm just sorry it's taken me this long to get back to 'em.

Cover of Ace Atkins's DARK END OF THE STREET!

2010-02-20T06:10:00.000-08:00

Last December, BFP reprinted Ace Atkins's first Nick Travers novel, Crossroad Blues (978-1-935415-03-9; $15), with a new foreword by music journalist Greil Marcus (Mystery Train) & a never-before-published Travers story, "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" (which went on to be nominated for the Edgar!). Now, in October 2010, BFP is proud to release a new edition of the third Travers novel, Dark End of the Street (978-1-935415-17-6; $15), with a new foreword by Robert Gordon (Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters) & possibly another original story! Check out the kick-ass new cover of Dark End of the Street, designed by Mark Francis (who worked on Crossroad Blues and who does the design work on Ace's website) and featuring photography by Neil Krug & Nick Findley. What do you think??

Also, congratulations to Ace for winning this year's Alabama Book of the Year (Fiction) Award for his historical crime novel, Wicked City, which is set in 1954 Phenix City, Alabama, once named by Look magazine as "the wickedest city in America."

And Ace's spring tour for his new novel from Putnam, Infamous, has just been announced, with Ace hitting Phoenix, Atlanta, Houston, Oxford (MS), and more! Booklist raves about Infamous: "It's Atkins' prodigious research that makes this novel a compelling road trip through Depression-era America. He vividly portrays the Dust Bowl, foreclosures, the grinding poverty, gnawing hunger, desperation and the rage at bankers (most of which resonate in today's America); and he captures the imminent end of the gangsters' heyday. Like many fine historical crime novels, Infamous offers a window on society, then and now."

Bill Fitzhugh's PEST CONTROL sequel... coming from Busted Flush Press!

2010-02-19T04:32:00.000-08:00

Back in 1996, screenwriter-turned-novelist Bill Fitzhugh released his debut comic thriller, Pest Control -- a hilarious action novel about a Manhattan exterminator mistaken for an "EXTERMINATOR" (you know, the kind that kills people). The book ended with... well, I'm not going to give it away, but fans remember it was left open to the possibility of a sequel.

Bill followed Pest Control with other funny crime novels, including The Organ Grinders (my favorite) and Heart Seizure (which Bill himself bills as "Midnight Run but with a human heart instead of Charles Grodin"). Yet he's long toyed with the idea of what happened to reluctant, accidental hitman Bob Dillon, and now, 15 years after the publication of Pest Control, the sequel arrives by way of Busted Flush Press! The Exterminators will be launched at Left Coast Crime 2011 in Santa Fe next March. I can promise you, this one is just as funny as the first, if not funnier, as Bill brings our favorite ersatz assassin to Hollywood! It's Carl Hiaasen, Christopher Moore, Jack Bauer, The Professional, and The Player, all put in a Cuisinart and served up Fitzhugh-style.

Bill Fitzhugh will be the toastmaster at this year's Left Coast Crime in Los Angeles, March 11-14. If you're attending, you're in for a treat as he shares more news about the book.

Bill shares some of his thoughts on the history of Pest Control and its sequel on the blog this weekend! Please check back. We'll also have the cover for Ace Atkins's Dark End of the Street, an excerpt from A. E. Maxwell's Just Enough Light to Kill, and more!

All four Zoë Sharp covers revealed!

2010-02-18T06:27:00.000-08:00

Busted Flush Press is proud to publish in the U.S. for the first time Zoë Sharp's early Charlie Fox thrillers! The series debut, Killer Instinct, comes out in May, with a new foreword by Lee Child! The other three will follow later this year & into 2011. The covers for Killer Instinct and Riot Act are slightly different than originally announced because we decided to make Zoë's name uniform across all 4 books. Enjoy!

Killer Instinct (Charlie Fox #1)
Trade paperback original, $15 (Canada $18)
May 2010 / 978-1-935415-13-8

Riot Act (Charlie Fox #2)
Trade paperback original, $15 (Canada $18)
July 2010 / 978-1-935415-15-2

Hard Knocks (Charlie Fox #3)
Trade paperback original, $15 (Canada $18)
September 2010 / 978-1-935415-10-7

(Note: Charlie Fox #4, First Drop, is in print in the U.S. from St. Martin's Minotaur.)

Road Kill (Charlie Fox #5)
Trade paperback original, $15 (Canada $18)
February 2011 / 978-1-935415-41-1

DAMN NEAR DEAD 2 cover!

2010-02-16T15:35:00.000-08:00

Here it is! Drawn by super-talented artist Jeff Wong (who also provided the cover for Tower), the cover of Damn Near Dead 2, BFP's fall 2010 geezer noir anthology. I crack myself up every time I look at it!

Damn Near Dead 2: Live Noir or Die Trying
Edited by Bill Crider. Introduction by Charlaine Harris.
Trade paperback original / $18 (Canada $21.95)
November 2010 / 978-1-935415-21-3

Featuring original "geezer noir" stories by Ace Atkins, C. J. Box, Christa Faust, Ed Gorman, Carolyn Haines, Joe R. Lansdale, Denise Mina, Marcia Muller, Bill Pronzini, Cornelia Read, Kat Richardson, S. J Rozan, Don Winslow, and more!

But have you read the first, award-winning geezer noir anthology, Damn Near Dead (paperback original; $18)?? Find it here!

Cover for reprint of Don Winslow's first novel!

2010-02-13T06:23:00.000-08:00

Beginning this fall, Busted Flush Press will reprint Don Winslow's first novels, the five books that comprise the Neal Carey P.I. series. These acclaimed, off-beat novels have been out-of-print for over 15 years and have been highly sought after by fans of Winslow's more recent work, like The Dawn Patrol (my favorite of his), The Power of the Dog, The Winter of Frankie Machine, The Death and Life of Bobby Z, and California Fire and Life.

A Cool Breeze on the Underground (Neal Carey #1)
Trade paperback, $15 (Canada $18)
November 2010 / 978-1-935415-21-3

Neal Carey is not your usual private eye. A graduate student at Columbia University, he grew up on the streets of New York, usually on the wrong side of the law. Then he met Joe Graham, a one-armed P.I. who introduced him to the Bank, an exclusive New England institution with a sideline in keeping its wealthy clients happy and out of trouble. They pay Neal's college tuition, and Neal gets an education that can't be found in any textbook -- from learning how to trail a suspect to mastering the proper way to search a room.

Now its payback time. The Bank wants Neal to put his skills to work in finding Allie Chase, the rebellious teenage daughter of a prominent senator. The problem: Allie has gone underground in London, and to get her back, Neal has to follow her into the punk scene, a violent netherworld where drugs run rampant and rage is the name of the game. Up against punk junkies, antique book thieves, and murderous betrayal, Neal has his work cut out for him to save Allie -- and get back above ground for good.

"Don Winslow's Neal Carey series is hands down one of my favorite series, and it should be a 'must read' for every mystery fan." -- Jon Jordan, Crimespree Magazine

And look for Winslow's new thriller, Savages, due out from Simon & Schuster this summer! Young, independent Laguna Beach-based marijuana kingpins are blackmailed into working for the Baja Cartel after one of their threesome is kidnapped.

Covers for upcoming Reed Farrel Coleman reprints!

2010-02-11T07:25:00.000-08:00

Check out the covers of Busted Flush Press's upcoming reprints of Reed Farrel Coleman's 4th & 5th Moe Prager novels...

Soul Patch (Moe Prager #4)
Trade paperback, $14 (Canada $17)
September 2010 / 978-1-935415-09-1
New foreword by Craig Johnson.
New afterword by Reed Farrel Coleman.
Includes original short story!
Winner of the Shamus Award! Nominated for the Edgar, Barry, Macavity Awards!

Empty Ever After (Moe Prager #5)
Trade paperback, $14 (Canada $17)
October 2010 / 978-1-935415-19-0
New foreword by S. J. Rozan.
New afterword by Reed Farrel Coleman.
Includes original short story!
Winner of the Shamus Award!

And look for Moe Prager #6 -- Innocent Monster -- in hardback from Tyrus Books this October!

BookPeople's Scott Montgomery names his top ten of 2009!

2010-02-10T06:52:00.001-08:00

Last June we interviewed Scott Montgomery, who runs the mystery section of Texas's largest indie bookstore, BookPeople in Austin. (Read the interview here.) Now, he's come up with his list of favorite books of 2009. We're happy to see Tower make the cut, of course, but it's a damn good line-up regardless. Enjoy!

1. Dope Thief (by Dennis Tafoya; St. Martin's Minotaur)
2. Tower (by Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman; Busted Flush Press)
3. Devil’s Garden (by Ace Atkins; Putnam)
4. The Long Fall (by Walter Mosley; Riverhead)
5. Dark Horse (by Craig Johnson; Viking)
6. Spade and Archer (by Joe Gores; Knopf)
7. Bury Me Deep (by Megan Abbott; Simon & Schuster)
8. Road Dogs (by Elmore Leonard; Morrow)
9. A Quiet Belief in Angels (by R. J. Ellory; Overlook Press)
10. Filthy Rich (by Brian Azzarello & Victor Santos; DC/Vertigo Crime)

2010 Hammett Prize nominations!

2010-02-09T08:24:00.001-08:00

The 2010 Hammett Prize nominations have just been announced, and two BFP authors made the list!

Megan Abbott, Bury Me Deep (Simon & Schuster)
Ace Atkins, Devil's Garden (Putnam)
Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection (Penguin)
Walter Mosley, The Long Fall (Riverhead)
George Pelecanos, The Way Home (Little, Brown)

IACW/NA awards The Hammett Prize annually for literary excellence in the field of crime-writing, as reflected in a book published in the English language in the U.S. and/or Canada. The winner receives a "Thin Man" trophy, designed by sculptor Peter Boiger. Go here for more information on IACW & The Hammett Prize.

Megan Abbott & Ace Atkins have also been nominated for the 2010 Edgar Award (Megan for Best Paperback Original and Ace for Best Short Story).

Film based on Daniel Woodrell book wins big at Sundance!

2010-02-08T09:10:00.000-08:00

Writer-director Debra Granik's indie film adaptation of Daniel Woodrell's 2006 novel Winter's Bone was a hit at the 2010 Sundance Film festival, winning the dramatic competition grand jury prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award (Granik co-wrote the screenplay with Anne Rosellini)! The dark thriller was then picked up by Roadside Attractions (Super Size Me) for North American distribution. According to Roadside's website, they plan on releasing Winter's Bone in theaters this summer... I, for one, can't wait! There's a lot of buzz about not only this movie but the breakout performance by Jennifer Lawrence as the film's 16-year-old heroine, Ree Dolly. It also stars an actor I really like, John Hawkes, whom Deadwood fans will recognize as Sol Star.

Daniel Woodrell previously had a book adapted to the big screen: Ang Lee's 1999 Ride with the Devil (starring Tobey Maguire & Skeet Ulrich), based on Woodrell's 1987 Western novel, Woe to Live On. And according to IMDB, Give Us a Kiss is in development.

Busted Flush Press will reprint Daniel Woodrell's Tomato Red (w/ a new foreword by Megan Abbott) in September and The Death of Sweet Mister (w/ a new foreword by Dennis Lehane) in March 2011. Check back to the blog next week... covers for these reprints are almost ready! (We'll also have cover art for Don Winslow's A Cool Breeze on the Underground, Ace Atkins's Dark End of the Street, and Reed Farrel Coleman's Soul Patch and Empty Ever After.)

BFP's 2010 schedule!

2010-01-23T05:51:00.000-08:00

Here are the books coming out from Busted Flush Press in 2010. Enjoy!

February
Just Enough Light to Kill (by A. E. Maxwell)
Paperback, $14, 978-1-935415-02-2

March
Misleading Ladies (by Cynthia Smith)
Paperback, $13, 978-1-935415-04-6

May
Killer Instinct (by Zoë Sharp)
With a new foreword by Lee Child.
Paperback original (first U.S. publication), $15, 978-1-935415-13-8

June
Old Dogs (by Donna Moore)
Paperback original (first U.S. publication), $15, 978-1-935415-24-4

July
Riot Act (by Zoë Sharp)
Paperback original (first U.S. publication), $15, 978-1-935415-15-2

September
Soul Patch (by Reed Farrel Coleman)
With a new foreword by Craig Johnson.
Paperback, $15, 978-1-935415-09-1

Hard Knocks (by Zoë Sharp)
Paperback original (first U.S. publication), $15, 978-1-935415-10-7

Tomato Red (by Daniel Woodrell)
With a new foreword by Megan Abbott.
Paperback, $15, 978-1-935415-06-0

October
Dark End of the Street (by Ace Atkins)
Paperback, $15, 978-1-935415-17-6

Empty Ever After (by Reed Farrel Coleman)
With a new foreword by S. J. Rozan.
Paperback, $15, 978-1-935415-19-0

November
Damn Near Dead 2: Live Noir or Die Trying (edited by Bill Crider)
With an introduction by Charlaine Harris.
Paperback original, $18, 978-1-935415-40-4

A Cool Breeze on the Underground (by Don Winslow)
Paperback, $15, 978-1-935415-21-3

And coming in early 2011:
Silver and Guilt (by Cynthia Smith)
Road Kill (by Zoë Sharp)
The Death of Sweet Mister (by Daniel Woodrell; with a new foreword by Dennis Lehane)
Bloody Kin (by Margaret Maron)

Ace Atkins short story nominated for the Edgar!

2010-01-20T05:47:00.000-08:00

We are very excited to announce that Ace Atkins's original Nick Travers tale, "Last Fair Deal Gone Down," -- published for the first time in Busted Flush Press's reprint of the first Travers novel, Crossroad Blues -- has been nominated for the 2010 Edgar Award for Best Short Story! He's in good company, with Dana Cameron, Jim Fusilli, Dennis Lehane, and Luis Alberto Urrea. (Find the complete list of Edgar nominations here.)

We wish Ace lots of luck! Be sure to keep an eye on where Ace will be signing his new historical crime novel, Infamous (Putnam; April), about Machine Gun Kelly & his wife... he'll post the tour soon here.

And here's something interesting... there are three Edgar Award streaks of three in effect this year:

John Hart -- Three straight books up for Edgar!
The King of Lies -- Edgar Award nominee for Best First Novel (2007)
Down River -- Edgar Award winner for Best Novel (2008)
The Last Child -- Edgar Award nominee for Best Novel (2010)
(He didn't have a book out in 2008.)

Megan Abbott -- Three straight nominations in years she's been eligible!
Die a Little -- Edgar Award nominee for Best First Novel (2006)
Queenpin -- Edgar Award winner for Best Paperback Original (2008)
Bury Me Deep -- Edgar Award nominee for Best Paperback Original (2010)
(She had no books in 2007 or 2008, but two in 2007.)

Busted Flush Press -- Three straight Short Story nominations!
Bill Crider's "Cranked" from Damn Near Dead -- Edgar Award nominee for Best Short Story(2007)
Daniel Woodrell's "Uncle" from A Hell of a Woman -- Edgar Award nominee for Best Short Story (2008)
Ace Atkins's "Last Fair Deal Gone Down", an original short story published for the first time in Busted Flush Press's reprint of Atkins's first novel, Crossroad Blues -- Edgar Award nominee for Best Short Story (2010)
(BFP didn't have an original story out in 2008.)

UPDATED 01/20/10: Ace Atkins comments on the Edgar nomination...

"One of the best things about being a writer is that an old story is never really old; that story is as new and fresh as when you first wrote it. It’s alive in the hands of your reader in that great collaboration.

"I was more than thrilled to get an early morning phone call from Busted Flush Press yesterday letting me know that 'Last Fair Deal Gone Down' was nominated for an Edgar for Best Short Story. This was a story that had a hell of a time finding an audience. I wrote it fifteen years ago, the first story where Nick Travers, who would find action in four novels, burst into my imagination and started my career as a writer.

"When David and I first spoke about bringing out a new edition of Crossroad Blues, I instantly thought of the short. I hadn’t read it for some time and was really surprised as veteran writer to see how well it held up. Not to say I didn’t make a few small edits, but the story is pretty much as I’d left it back in 1995.

"Chandler wrote about the 'animal gusto' of a new writer really pounding the keys, finding passion and energy in those first stories. And I do believe 'Last Fair Deal Gone Down' had that in spades. I had always thought of the short appearing alongside Crossroad Blues, a book that was initially written as a novella. But as I said, I was a young writer, and when I mentioned the word 'novella' to my editor at St. Martin ’s, he said: 'Can you add about 100 pages in a month?'

"And so Crossroad Blues and 'Last Fair Deal Gone Down' were separated for all these years. The story was relegated to the hard drive of an old computer that never did enter the internet age.

"This story was the first time I felt that I could really do this, work as a storyteller. But I had no idea what I was writing as a fledgling author, only 25, would ever be good enough to be nominated for an Edgar. After all these years, eight novels later, it’s a thrill to see that first tale getting some respect."

Ace Atkins on his college football career & writing!

2010-01-18T07:29:00.000-08:00

TOWER makes best-seller lists!

2010-01-15T07:24:00.000-08:00

Ken Bruen & Reed Farrel Coleman's Tower made the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association's October 2009 & December 2009 best-seller lists. Thank you so much, indies!! Find a mystery bookstore near you.

BFP acquires two Daniel Woodrell books!

2010-01-09T10:15:00.000-08:00

We announced last month that Busted Flush Press will be reprinting two novels by Daniel Woodrell, one the most important American novelists that most people have not yet heard of...

A year before James Lee Burke released the first Dave Robicheaux novel, Woodrell introduced the genre to Cajun cop Rene Shade in Under the Bright Lights (1986; still in print from Simon & Schuster). Woodrell followed with two more Shades: Muscle for the Wing (1988) and The Ones You Do (1992). His other early novels include Woe to Live On (1987; a.k.a. Ride with the Devil), set in the last days of the Civil War; Give Us a Kiss (1996), a "country noir" novel... and then he wrote Tomato Red (1998) and The Death of Sweet Mister (2001), the two noir novels that BFP will reprint in 2009/2010, with new forewords by Megan Abbott and Dennis Lehane, respectively. Both were New York Times Notable Books, and both are considered by critics & fans of the genre to be among the best noir novels of all time. Hyperbole, yes, but please read on...

And once I announced the Woodrell reissues, I discovered that some of Woodrell's biggest fans happen to be Busted Flush Press authors, as they made known very quickly through e-mails that included many exclamation points... then through Twitter and e-mail, I learned that this acclaim was shared by many other crime writers. Below are some early comments from some of Woodrell's peers...

“There are writers who break all boundaries and break your heart with the sheer level of their art. Daniel Woodrell is not only the most truly humble writer I've encountered but one of the very few I refer to again and again to learn how true poetic writing is achieved. His on-the-surface simple style conceals a master craftsman at work. There is no writer I know I would love to devote a whole novel to just quoting from his work. There are crime writers… literary writers… and then… Daniel Woodrell. Nobody comes near his amazing genius and I very doubt anyone ever will.”—Ken Bruen, award-winning author of London Boulevard

"Reading Tomato Red -- the first Daniel Woodrell novel I came upon -- was a transformative experience. It expanded my sense of the possibilities not only of crime fiction, but of fiction itself -- of language, of storytelling. Time and again, his work just dazzles and humbles me. God bless Busted Flush for these glorious reissues. It's a service to readers everywhere, and a great gift." -- Megan Abbott, award-winning author of Bury Me Deep (and she'll write the foreword to the new edition of Tomato Red!)

"Genius is a word that gets thrown around a little too much these days, but when it comes Daniel Woodrell, it’s nearly an understatement." -- Reed Farrel Coleman, award-winning author of Innocent Monster

"I can't remember coming across a more precise evocation of innocence lost since Golding's The Lord of the Flies. With The Death of Sweet Mister, Daniel Woodrell has written his masterpiece — spare, dark, and incandescently beautiful. It broke my heart..." -- Dennis Lehane, best-selling author of The Given Day (and he'll write the foreword to the new edition of The Death of Sweet Mister!)

"The Death of Sweet Mister is a strong contender for my all-time favourite novel, crime or othewise." -- Allan Guthrie, Edgar Award-nominated author of Slammer and Killing Mum

"Put [The Death of Sweet Mister] on the shelf alongside Faulkner, Jim Thompson, and Cormac McCarthy. With this one, Mr. Woodrell has earned himself a piece of immortality." -- George Pelecanos, best-selling author of The Way Home (and writer for HBO's The Wire and The Pacific)

"Daniel Woodrell is one of those authors that's doing something not enough writers do. Write well about rural people, and about people that aren't all savvy and hundred dollar bills. He knows how to just tell the story. Reminds me of the storytellers I grew up with. They knew the power of a simple tale well told, and so does Woodrell." -- Joe R. Lansdale, award-winning author of Vanilla Ride

"Daniel Woodrell is consistently referred to as 'The Greatest Writer You Haven't Read Yet,' and as much as I hate that kind of labelling, I can't argue its veracity. Fact is, The Death of Sweet Mister is one of the finest novels, regardless of genre, published in the last fifty years, and Tomato Red is snapping at its heels. Nobody else can condense whole lives into less than 200 pages with such emotional truth, and nobody else comes close to the brittle perfection of his prose, stiletto sentences that leave you wondering why Woodrell isn't held in higher regard. Perhaps it's just because people haven't read him. I hope that changes with the new editions, and I envy those coming to him for the first time -- they're about to read real noir, the kind that comes from human beings, not characters." -- Ray Banks, author of Sucker Punch and No More Heroes

"City slickers like me go on and on about the 'mean streets,' but the country noir of Daniel Woodrell can be so rawboned, nasty and violent, it sends me scurrying back to relative safety and comfort of the closest dark, seedy alley. Grab all of the Woodrell you can find -- but don't say I didn't warn you." -- Duane Swierczynski, author of Expiration Date

"Tomato Red. Death of Sweet Mister. The Ones You Do. Under the Bright Lights. Give Us a Kiss. Woe to Live On. These are just a few of Daniel Woodrell's stunning, unforgettable, and beautifully written books. His prose is lean, brutal and poetic, as are his characters. And yet despite the tragedy, violence and emotional pain in his stories, Woodrell always manages to find the humor, and the humanity... and even a little redemption. This man should be a bestselling author, held in the same high, popular regard as Michael Connelly, T. Jefferson Parker, George Pelecanos, and Dennis Lehane. But while he's well-reviewed, he's not well-read, which is a shame. Hardly anybody besides critics and fellow writers are aware of him despite the fact that he's one of the best crime writers alive today... hell, he's one of the best novelists out there in any genre. He's the writer that other writers read to see how a master does the job... and to stay at the top of their game. If you love crime fiction, or just damn good writing, you've got to read this guy." -- Lee Goldberg, author of Mr. Monk in Trouble and The Man with the Iron-On Badge

"The first Daniel Woodrell book I ever read was Tomato Red. You know that feeling you get when you read something by a new to you author and your heart beats just that wee bit faster. You think 'this is it -- this guy is going to be one of my all time favourite authors' -- what a great feeling that is. From the first, awe inspiring sentence which is over 250 words long to the last heartbreaking page I was simply transported. As it happens, the second Daniel Woodrell I read was The Dead of Sweet Mister -- an uncomfortable, painful, brutal tale which is also poetic and beautiful and just... breathtakingly wonderful. It's a book of lost innocence, simmering rage, and ineffable cruelty that makes your heart ache. Daniel Woodrell is the master of making you care about people who live "lives of rancid nothingness". Their stories are so big, yet their lives are so small. I am so glad that Busted Flush Press are reprinting these two great books. Daniel Woodrell deserves a far wider audience. He's a genius." -- Donna Moore, author of Old Dogs and Go to Helena Handbasket...

"Daniel Woodrell's work transcends genre. Don't bother calling it 'crime' or 'noir' or 'southern gothic.' Just call it 'brutally magnificent' and get your dirty hands on as much of it as you possibly can." -- Tom Piccirilli, author of Shadow Season

We'll have covers for Tomato Red and The Death of Sweet Mister in about a month, as well as book synopses, trade reviews, excerpts, and more! In the meantime, we encourage you to seek out Woodrell's latest release, Winter's Bone (2006, Back Bay Books), which is also very highly recommended by Busted Flush Press!

Some of the conventions we'll be attending this year...

2010-01-06T17:55:00.000-08:00

We're looking forward to several book conventions & conferences this year...

Crimefest (Bristol, UK; May 20-23) We probably won't be able to attend, but Zoë Sharp's Killer Instinct should be out in time for the convention!

BookExpo (New York, NY; May 25-27) We'll share a booth with Tyrus Books in the Consortium area. I've attended several times as a bookseller, but this will be my first with a booth... Please be sure to drop by! We'll have authors at the booth... galleys, promo materials, more.

Bouchercon (San Francisco, CA; Oct. 14-17) Come on, is there an American city that personifies crime & noir fiction more than San Francisco? The Maltese Falcon, Vertigo, Bullitt, Dirty Harry... We should have Reed Farrel Coleman's Empty Ever After and Ace Atkins's Dark End of the Street out by then.

NoirCon (Philadelphia, PA; Nov. 4-7) More intimate than Left Coast Crime or Bouchercon, but heavily attended by the best of hard-boiled & noir fiction. Already tentatively scheduled to attend: George Pelecanos (guest of honor), Johnny Temple (Akashic Books), Charles Ardai (Hard Case Crime), Megan Abbot t, Christa Faust, Laura Lippman, Jason Starr, Duane Swierczynski, Reed Farrel Coleman, Vicki Hendricks, Scott Phillips, S. J. Rozan, Lorenzo Carcaterra, Kent Harrington, Allan Guthrie, and so many more. We'll launch Damn Near Dead 2 (edited by Bill Crider) at NoirCon, and Daniel Woodrell's Tomato Red will be out, too.

NEW UPDATE (01/07/10): Daniel Woodrell (Tomato Red, The Death of Sweet Mister) will attend NoirCon! Also let me know they'll be there: Jason Pinter, Anthony Neil Smith.

And of course, it's never too early to register for Bouchercon 2011 in St. Louis! I'll be co-chairing (w/ Crimespree Magazine's Jon & Ruth Jordan, and my wife McKenna).

Sorry, running behind...

2010-01-06T07:24:00.001-08:00

My New Year's resolution was to stay more on top of things and NOT get behind any longer... Crap, less than a week in, and I've already blown it.

Very quickly, I need to thank Janet Rudolph (pictured at left) of Mystery Readers Journal for allowing Reed Farrel Coleman (Walking the Perfect Square) the opportunity to talk about what it was like to write Tower with Ken Bruen (London Boulevard)... "We never disagreed over who had final say. There were no pissing contests." Read more here.

Also, coming later this year... Busted Flush Press will reprint Reed's Shamus Award-winning 4th & 5th Moe Prager novels, with new forewords! Soul Patch (w/ a new foreword by Craig Johnson) is tentatively scheduled for May, and Empty Ever After (w/ a new foreword by S. J. Rozan) will be out in time for Bouchercon 2010 in San Francisco, and in time for Tyrus Books's publication of Moe Prager #6, Innocent Monster! Cover art coming soon.

I hope to get back on track with blogging later this week. As always, thanks so much for dropping by! And if you have any comments, suggestions, complaints (or, ahem, praise!), don't hesitate to drop me a line at bustedflushpress@yahoo.com. I'd love to hear from you.

Original Ace Atkins short story (part 3 of 3)

2009-12-24T12:58:00.000-08:00

Busted Flush Press's new reprint of Ace Atkins's first novel featuring blues historian Nick Travers, Crossroad Blues, also features an original, never-before-published Nick short story, set at Christmas! As an early Christmas gift to fans, BFP is serializing the story in three posts... Here's the third & final part... Enjoy! (Read part one here and part two here.)

"LAST FAIR DEAL GONE DOWN"
An original Nick Travers story.
© Ace Atkins, 2009

(concluded)

SOMETIMES I LIKE to hear Dixieland Jazz after several drinks. Sometimes I like to hear my boots as they clunk across a hardwood floor. Sometimes I even like to cover the tall windows of my warehouse with bed sheets and watch old movies all day. But most of all, I like to sit in JoJo’s and listen to Loretta Jackson sing. Her voice can rattle the exposed brick walls and break a man’s heart.

It was Christmas Eve, a week after Jay picked up Blackie. I was nursing a beer and watching Loretta rehearse a few new numbers. Old blues Christmas songs that she always mixed in with her set during the season. Growling the words to “Merry Christmas, Baby” and making my neck hairs stand on end.

“You keep babyin’ that beer and it’s gonna fall in love with ya,” JoJo said, as he washed out a couple shot glasses in the sink.

“Everybody needs a friend.”

“Mmhmm.” He dried the inside of the glasses with a white towel and then hung it over his shoulder. “Why you down here today, anyway?”

“Sam’s been wanting to go Christmas shopping in the Quarter all week. And I promised.”

“You hear anymore from Medeaux ’bout that pimp?”

“Nah. Blackie’s still in jail far as I know.”

“You let me know if somethin’s different.”

Loretta finished the song with a great sigh into her microphone and a quick turnaround from the band. The guitar player made his instrument give a wolf whistle as Loretta stepped off stage. Running a forearm over her brow, she walked over and sat next to me.

“My boy Nicholas,” she said as she rubbed my back. “My boy.”

“Your boy Nicholas sittin’ on his ass drinking while his new woman trudging round these old French streets looking for gifts.”

“My boy deserves it.”

“Hmphh.”

“Y’all talkin’ ’bout Fats, weren’t cha?”

JoJo nodded and walked back into the kitchen.

“Man had a sad life, Nick. Cain’t believe he sold his sax for that girl.”

“Guess he loved her.”

“Hell, she was just a two-bit whore.”

“Loretta.”

“Naw, I’m serious. She was fuckin’ half the band.”

“What?"

“Sure she was. Saw her almost get her cheap ass beat by Fats’ drummer out back. Havin’ some kind of lover’s quarrel, I guess.”

“When was this?”

“Few days before he died.”

I took a deep breath, and my fist tightened on top of the bar.

***********************

TOM CAT WAS passed out on his sofa when I kicked in the door to his apartment. Little multi-colored Christmas lights had fallen on his body and face, and it gave him a festive, embalmed look. I grabbed him by a dirty Converse high top and yanked him off the sofa. His eyes sprung awake.

“Who killed him?”

“Nick, man. Merry Christmas to you, too. Hey, I—”

“Who killed him?”

“You trippin’, man.”

I yanked him to his knees and punched him hard in the stomach. He doubled over weakly.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were sleeping with her?”

“I wasn’t.”

“The pimp didn’t kill Sarah, did he? He had no reason. You did. You loved her.”

“Fuck you.”

I kicked him hard in the side with my boot. I didn’t enjoy it. It didn’t make me feel like a man. I just did it.

“It was a mistake. Fats shouldn’t been a part of it.”

“Part of what?”

He rolled to his side and wiped his tears with a ragged flannel shirt sleeve. Pushing his long greasy hair, he told me.

I did not interrupt.

***********************

IT WAS BLACKMAIL. Sarah and Tom Cat had worked out a scam on a local trial lawyer. But he wasn’t just any lawyer. He was Spencer Faircloth, lawyer to the New Orleans mob. An all-star backslapper among criminals.

Their plan included a sick little videotape. Maybe it included a burro. I don’t know what was on it, didn’t want to know, but I took it with me.

I let Tom Cat go, drove to a nearby K&B drugstore, and looked through a water-logged phone book. Some of the pages were so stuck together that the book felt like papier-mâché.

There was no listing. I called information and was told he had an unpublished number.

I called a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound bail bondsman I know named Tiny. He asked for the payphone’s number.

He called me back in five minutes with the address.

Faircloth lived in an ivy-covered brick mansion with a spiked iron fence and stained glass windows. When I pulled up near the address on St. Charles, dozens of finely dressed men and women were drinking in Faircloth’s hospitality.

I could see them all, like fish in an aquarium, through the tall windows.

I lit a cigarette, smoked it into a nub, and then decided to go in.

Most of the men I passed were in winter wool suits, accented with the occasional silly holiday tie. Candy canes, reindeer, and elves.

I was dressed in blue jeans, boots, and a jean jacket.

I wasn’t accepted.

“Sir?” a large black man asked me.

“Si.”

“Can I have your invitation?”

“I’m here to see Mr. Faircloth.”

“Mr. Faircloth is spending time with his guests. Can I help you?”

The man’s hair was Jheri-curled, and he wore a finely trimmed mustache.

“Aren’t you Billy Dee Williams?”

He made a move toward me.

“Tell him that a friend of Sarah’s is here.”

He looked down at me, and then left.

I walked over to the buffet line and ate three very tiny turkey sandwiches. I didn’t see any tiny quiches.

A few minutes later, a young man in his twenties walked over to me. I didn’t recognize him at first. His hair seemed slicker tonight. His movements were more polished.

“Can I help you?”

“Are you Spencer Faircloth?”

“No.”

“Then you can’t. I’ll just stay here, continue to eat, and thumb my nose at the conventions of the rich.”

“I’ll have you removed.”

“You do and I’ll propose a toast to Sarah. The finest whore that Faircloth ever had killed.”

“You’re insane.”

“Perhaps.”

Then I remembered him, the younger man from the hotel where I first met Sarah. The one who’d backed up the older man. I looked for him.

I saw the gray-headed gent laughing it up with a group of his ilk near the French doors.

I jumped upon the top of the linen buffet table, my dirty buckskin boots soiling the whiteness. I grabbed a glass and spoon and clinked the two together loudly.

“I would like to propose a toast to the host with the most. Spence Faircloth.”

The party hesitatingly clapped. A drunk elderly man hooted his approval.

“Thank you, grandpa,” I announced to the old man. “But right now, I would like to offer Mr. Faircloth a deal.”

They were silent.

The two men were whispering to Faircloth, who had his arms tightly wrapped around himself.

“You might call it the last fair deal gone down, like my old friend Fats used to say. The deal, Mr. Faircloth, is that you join me on this table and announce to the party that you are a gutless turd who had a friend of mine killed.”

The crowd stayed silent. A wrinkled old woman with huge breasts shook her head and blew breath out her nose.

“But where is the deal, you ask?” I said, reaching deep into the inner layer of my denim jacket and pulling out the videotape.

I held it high over my head like a Bourbon Street preacher does a Bible. I mimed my hands to pretend I was weighing the two.

Billy Dee Williams was trying to approach me from behind.

“What’ll it be, Spence?”

Faircloth shook his head, turned on his heel like a spoiled child, and walked away.

I put the videotape back in my jacket and hopped off the table.

Just like any other unwanted guest, no one tried to stop me as I left. I think they were waiting for me to pull a red bandana up over my nose and ask for their jewels.

I got in my Jeep and headed back to the Warehouse District, my hands shaking on the wheel.

***********************

I RETURNED TO my warehouse only long enough to grab a fresh set of clothes, binoculars, a six-pack of Abita beer, a frozen quart of Loretta’s jambalaya, my Browning, and Sam’s Christmas present—a 1930s Art Deco watch that I bought on Royal Street a few weeks ago.

It was so silent in my darkened space that I could hear the watch’s soft ticks as late-day orange light retreated through the industrial windows.

I tucked everything in a tattered army duffle bag and put it outside my door.

I used only the small lock near the doorknob, leaving the deadbolt open.

Walking across Julia Street, I felt a cold December wind coming from the Mississippi. It smelled stagnant and stale. I could almost taste its polluted, muddy water.

In the warehouse opposite mine, Sam slid back the door with a scowl on her face. Her short blonde hair was tousled, and she was wearing an old gray Tulane sweatshirt of mine that hung below her knees.

“You’re scowling.”

“You left me wandering around the Quarter. What the hell is the matter with you?”

“I’m sorry.”

She let me in and I followed her to the second floor of her warehouse that looked down on a dance studio. The lights were dimmed on the floor below, and a stereo softly played Otis Redding.

“I’m still mad.”

“I know.”

She reheated the jambalaya in a black skillet, and we shared the six-pack of Abita. I told her about Tom Cat and about Spencer Faircloth’s dinner party. She shook her head and tried not to laugh. When I told her I had my gun, she didn’t like that at all, and walked out of the kitchen. One of her cats trailed her.

But she warmed up after a few more of Otis’ ballads and a few more Abitas.

Later, we made love in her antique iron bed, Christmas lights strung over her headboard. The beer, food, and music blended into a fine holiday mood.

The next day, we opened our gifts. She gave me an old Earl King record I’d wanted for years, a gunmetal cigarette lighter, a first edition of Franny and Zooey, and a framed picture of Tom Mix.

She loved the watch.

We returned to bed a few more times that day, only leaving the mattress for the kitchen and something to eat. It was one of the best Christmases I can remember.

***********************

THEY CAME AROUND midnight, Sam still cradled in my arms asleep. Two cats were curled in balls at the foot of the bed. I could hear the sound of the engine and two doors closing while I carefully unentwined myself from Sam and peeked through her blinds. The car, a black sedan, was still running. Two men were at my front door with a crowbar.

I walked into the kitchen, pulled on my jeans, boots, and the Tulane sweatshirt. I inserted a clip into the Browning and pulled a black watch cap over my ears.

Before clanking down the steps to the street level, I called 911, reported a burglary and shooting at my address, and hung up.

Outside, it was cold enough to see my breath.

I could see someone seated in the back of the sedan smoking a cigarette. A tiny prick of orange light and then a smoky exhaling that clouded the windows. Without stopping, I bent at the waist and jogged behind the car. I opened the back door and climbed inside.

I was seated right next to Spencer Faircloth.

I’ll never understand why he came. He was far too smart to put himself anywhere near something as dirty as this. I’m pretty sure it was just ego. The gutless turd remark must have gotten to him.

I poked him in the ribs with my Browning.

“Spencer, you old dog.”

I reached over the driver’s seat and pulled the keys from the ignition while I kept the gun pointed at him. I then motioned him outside, found the key for the trunk, and pushed him in with the flat of my palm.

My face felt cold and wind-bitten when I smiled.

They had made a real mess of my turn-of-the-century door, which had scrolled patterns around the mail slot. Splintered wood and muddy boot tracks led up my side staircase.

This time I did not run. I crept.

But I had the advantage. I knew every weakness in that staircase. Each creak. Every loose board.

I heard crashes and thuds. They were throwing my shit all around. And they must have enjoyed making a mess because they were laughing the whole time.

At the top of the landing, I straightened my right arm and fired a slug into the shoulder of the black man with curly, greasy hair. As he spun, one of my old books flew out of his hands, pages fluttering like a wounded bird before it crashed to the floor.

The young preppy white guy I’d encountered twice wasn’t ready either. It took him a full four seconds before he tried to reach inside his raincoat. His eyes were wide with fear when I fired, hitting him in the thigh.

His gun slid along the floor, several feet away from him.

He was no bodyguard or the trigger man. He was just the guy fetching laundry and coffee for Faircloth.

But ole Billy Dee was the real deal.

I walked over to him, slowly. My boots clanking hard in my warehouse, the place where I slept, ate, and read.

The book he’d been tearing pages from was Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues. The dog-eared pages littered the floor around him, some misted with blood from the bullet’s impact.

He had his gun still in hand. A revolver.

“You’re not a blues fan, are you?”

He looked up at me and laughed.

“You remember that old man who you shot in the head?”

“Should have been you, motherfucker.”

“That old man could play ‘Blue Monday’ and break your heart.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Maybe.”

With my gun pressed flat against his nose, I took his revolver.

“I’ll find you,” he said. “I promise you that.”

The police arrived a short time later, and with the coaxed testimony of Tom Cat, all three were charged with murder.

***********************

ON NEW YEAR’S Eve, I played “Auld Lang Syne” on Fats’ tarnished sax while Loretta sang. Everyone made toasts and kissed while I placed the battered instrument in a dusty glass case where it still remains today.

Sam came over, put an arm around my neck, and kissed me hard. I stood back and looked at Fats’ picture on top of the wooden case.

She kissed me again, and I turned away.

JoJo told me I did a “real nice job” playing harp that night and handed me another Dixie. Drunk, JoJo ambled up on stage and professed his love for his wife. She watched him and smiled, then gave him a kiss, too.

I wish I could’ve kept the moment, everything the way it was right then. But that was the year I met Cracker and went looking for the lost recordings of Robert Johnson in the Mississippi Delta. And my life was never the same.

******************************

We hope everyone has a wonderful New Year! Please take a moment to Ace Atkins's blog & website.

Pre-holiday BFP news!

2009-12-23T15:27:00.000-08:00

This has been a busy week for Busted Flush Press, and we have much to share...

Reed Farrel Coleman

NPR's Maureen Corrigan discusses her favorite books of 2009 today on Fresh Air, including "a terrific new mystery series... a wise independent bookseller recommended that I read"... that would be Reed Farrel Coleman's Moe Prager series. Read the story & hear the podcast here.

For those who are already fans of Moe, there is imminent good news on the horizon. Busted Flush Press is on the verge of acquiring the reprint rights for the 4th & 5th books in the series: the Edgar, Macavity nominated and Shamus Award-winning Soul Patch and the Shamus Award-winning Empty Ever After. If all things go as planned, both books will be out just in time for the release of Moe #6, Innocent Monster, due out in October 2010. Please stay tuned for more updates.

Margaret Maron

Check out the news on BFP acquiring Edgar/Agatha/Anthony/Macavity Award winner Margaret Maron's 1985 stand-alone Southern crime novel, Bloody Kin, reported on the blog last week.

Don Winslow

Busted Flush Press will be reprinting Don Winslow's incredibly hard-to-find, Edgar Award-nominated crime series featuring private investigator Neal Carey. Winslow has recently attained bestsellerdom & critical acclaim for his later novels, including The Power of the Dog, The Death and Life of Bobby Z, California Fire and Life, The Winter of Frankie Machine, and one of my favorite books of 2008, The Dawn Patrol. But for years fans have been looking for his early, wonderful Carey novels... and now they'll be available again, beginning fall 2010, when the first, A Cool Breeze on the Underground, is published. To follow: The Trail to Buddha's Mirror, Way Down on the High Lonely, A Long Walk up the Water Slide, and While Drowning in the Desert.

I asked Don what he thinks about seeing these books back in print for the first time in over a decade...

"I'm absolutely delighted that the Neal Carey series is coming back into print. I don't think I've made a public appearance in ten years when I wasn't asked about these books. A Cool Breeze on the Underground holds a special place for me -- it was my first book, and I wrote it literally all over the world -- in tents in Africa, Buddhist monasteries in China, college rooms in Oxford. I think it was rejected by the first fourteen publishers who saw it -- including the publisher I'm with now, Simon & Schuster. Then it was nominated for an Edgar. Anyway, it's great to see these books coming back into print, and I'm really excited to be working with good friends at Busted Flush. The last time I saw David, we shared a candlelit (by necessity) dinner -- burgers with bags of chips -- al fresco in just-post-hurricane Houston, and it's my favorite meal ever on a book tour. This is going to be genuine fun."

Daniel Woodrell

Busted Flush Press will reprint Daniel Woodrell's stand-alone novels, Tomato Red and The Death of Sweet Mister, with new forewords for each. Edgar Award-winning crime writer Megan Abbott (Bury Me Deep) will pen the foreword to Tomato Red (to be published in fall 2010), and best-selling novelist Dennis Lehane (The Given Day) will provide the foreword to The Death of Sweet Mister (to be published in spring 2011). I'll be posting another blog entry later this week about Woodrell, "an amazing genius" (Ken Bruen), but it's safe to say he's one of today's finest novelists (of any genre) that most people just don't know about... yet. Check back later this week to see what some of his peers think of his work (including Megan Abbott, Joe R. Lansdale, Allan Guthrie, Reed Farrel Coleman, and more). In the meantime, rush out and buy his novel, Winter's Bone (Back Bay Books), which was my wife's favorite novel of 2006 (and which will be in next month's Sundance Film Festival Dramatic Competition). More to come...

Later this week on the BFP blog: Daniel Woodrell; the conclusion to Ace Atkin's Christmas-set short story, "Last Fair Deal Gone Down"; and more!

Happy holidays from Busted Flush Press!

Catch Reed Farrel Coleman on XM/Sirius!

2009-12-21T12:56:00.000-08:00

Reed Farrel Coleman, the 2009 Shamus Award-winning author of Empty Ever After, will be interviewed on XM/Sirius Book Radio's "Cover to Cover Live!", tomorrow, Tuesday, December 22, 3-4 p.m. EST. He will be interviewed about Tower (co-written with Ken Bruen) and his Moe Prager novels. Catch it on XM 163 & Sirius 117.

Reed will also be featured on NPR's Fresh Air this week, as part of Maureen Corrigan's year-end round-up of favorite mysteries. We'd thought it was to be today, but it looks like it'll run later in the week. As soon as we know, it'll be posted here.

To coincide with Reed's NPR appearance, Busted Flush Press has some great news to announce about new acquisitions. Well...... we'll hold off until the NPR piece runs, but we can say it involves Daniel Woodrell (Winter's Bone) and Don Winslow (The Dawn Patrol)... please check back later in the week. (We're such teases!)

In other BFP news...

Donna Moore (Go to Helena Handbasket...) appears to be excited about her galleys of Old Dogs. But it looks as though she's attacking her parents with a copy! Chuffed, indeed. Visit her blog here... you could win an Old Dogs galley!

Thriller writer Zoë Sharp (Third Strike) is interviewed on MrEdit's blog. Her first introduction to crime fiction? Leslie Charteris's The Misfortune of Mr. Teal.

L.A.'s The Mystery Bookstore picks their favorite mysteries of 2009... and Ken Bruen & Reed Farrel Coleman's Tower makes Linda's & Pam's lists! Big thanks to Linda & Pam (& Bobby, too)!

BFP to reprint Margaret Maron's BLOODY KIN!

2009-12-15T06:07:00.000-08:00

Busted Flush Press is very excited to announce that it will reprint Margaret Maron's acclaimed 1985 Southern crime novel, Bloody Kin, in spring 2011, in time for the Malice Domestic 23 mystery convention!

Margaret earned a rare feat with her first Deborah Knott novel, Bootlegger's Daughter (1992), when the book won nearly every major award for that year: Edgar, Anthony, Macavity & Agatha. Bloody Kin (out of print for about a decade) was originally published by Doubleday in 1985 and is widely considered a prequel to the best-selling Knott series, introducing the region & several characters that would later appear in Bootlegger's Daughter. In Bloody Kin, after Jake Honeycutt dies in a hunting accident, his pregnant wife Kate moves to his family farm in North Carolina and soon discovers that she is a Yankee outsider and that Jake's death was no accident.

"Margaret Maron is one of the best writers in the business. Read her. That's an order." -- Elizabeth Peters

"A hundred years ago, Margaret Maron might well have been classified with that group of writers called 'local colorists.'... From Sarah Orne Jewett's vignettes of life in rural Maine to Kate Chopin's stories of Louisiana's bayous... Maron continues the tradition of quick, perceptive sketches of local life in the framework of a modern murder mystery." -- Houston Chronicle

Go out and pick up Margaret's Bootlegger's Daughter, work your way through the Deborah Knott series (there are fifteen, with the latest, Sand Sharks, published from Grand Central earlier this year), and look forward to BFP's Bloody Kin in 2011!

Original Ace Atkins short story (part 2 of 3)

2009-12-10T06:39:00.001-08:00

(continued)

HER NAME WAS Sarah. Petite hands, delicate face, soft brown skin. She probably was in her late twenties, going on fifty. Her lips quivered when she blew cigarette smoke over her head, and she liked to drink. Crushed ice, Jim Beam, and cherries. The closer I sat to her at the hotel bar, the more I smelled the cherries. The more I smelled her perfume. I see, Fats. I see.

On her third drink, she looked over at me and grinned fully into the left corner of her mouth. Her lips were full and thick. Her small body tight and exposed in black hot pants and black shirt tied above her stomach.

“You sure are big. You a Saint?” she said.

“No, I’m a dancer. Jazz, modern, and some tap. I used to breakdance, but I never could spin on my head.”

She laughed. And even from the six feet that separated us, I could tell she had been crying. Dry streaks through her makeup.

She kept wiping her nose and eyes. She turned her eyes back to a book placed in front of her drink.

“How is it?” I asked.

She cocked her head at me and a thin strap fell from her shoulder.

“The book.”

“Oh,” she said and closed it and showed me the cover. Lady Sings the Blues. “A friend gave it to me.”

As I was about to pursue the thought, two guffawing men walked into the deserted bar. Laughing, smirking. Drunk, with slow moving eyes and aggressive swaggers. One nodded at the bartender. He nodded back.

“Ready?” the bartender asked Sarah.

“Oh. Yes.”

I put my hand over hers, which were cold and shaking. “You don’t have to do this.”

She smiled at me with her eyes. “It’s gonna be just fine. Just gonna be fine.”

I kept my hand over hers.

One of the businessmen approached me. Maybe I was generalizing, but he sure fit the description. Brooks Brothers suit and a wedding ring. His hair was silver, and his expensive cologne clashed with his hundred-buck-meal onion breath. Big fun on the bayou in the Big Easy.

"We already paid,” he said. “You’ll have to do it yourself, son.” He made a yanking motion with one hand.

The younger businessman snorted. The bartender was wise enough to shut up.

I looked for a long time at the older man. He probably had everyone in his company scared of him. Everyone called him “sir” and catered to his every egotistical whim. He’d never sweated, never done a damn thing but hang out at the fraternity house and kiss ass until he made partner. I stared.

He looked down at my tattered and faded jean jacket and sneered. “What do you want?”

I slowly reached down the side of my leg and pulled out my boot knife. I grabbed him by his tie—red with paisley patterns—cut it off at the knot, and shoved it in his mouth. The younger man moved in as the CEO took a swing at me. I caught his fist in my hand and squeezed. If I had anything, it was strong hands from shirking tackles when I played football.

I brought the guy to his knees.

“Sir, when your grandkids are sitting on your lap this Christmas and everything is all warm and fuzzy, I want you to remember this. I want you to think about it as you light the tree, cut the turkey, and pat the kids on the head. Tell the boys when they come to New Orleans to treat the ladies real nice.”

I released my grip. He wouldn’t think about what I said. He was not me, and I was not him. I remembered something a psychologist friend had told me years ago. Don’t expect anything from a pig but a grunt.

********************

SHE AGREED TO walk with me to the Quarter only after I gave her fifty bucks. It was fifty I didn’t have, but it was the only way. Together we crossed Canal, dodging cars, soon smelling that cooked onion and exhaust scent that floats around the old district.

I took her to a small bar off Decatur to talk. Really it was just a place to sit and drink, only four feet from a sliding window. I got two beers in paper cups, and we sat down. No one around us except an elderly black waiter in a tattered brown sweater. Sarah finished half her beer in one gulp.

I asked her if she was afraid.

“No. Not of you.”

“What then?”

She finished her beer, then pulled a cigarette from a pack extracted from a cheap vinyl purse. I lit it.

“Tell me about you and Fats. You know he’s dead?”

“I know.”

She sat there for a moment just looking at me.

“Was he a regular?”

She dropped her head, kneading the palm of her hand into her forehead. The cigarette held high in her fingers.

“Did you work for him at his apartment or did he get a hotel?”

She scratched the inside corner of her mouth and took another drag of the cigarette.

“You were with him the night he died, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

I exhaled a long breath and gambled with what I said next. “That man didn’t have anything. Why’d you set him up? You could’ve rolled anybody, like those two in the hotel. You’d come up with a lot more money than what Fats had. He was a sweet old guy. He had more talent than someone like you could ever comprehend. Just tell me who helped you.”

“Stop it. Just stop it. You don’t know anything.”

“Why?”

“You got it all messed round. You don’t know how it was.”

“How was it, Sarah? You tell me.”

“I loved him.”

I laughed.

“He tole me he’d marry me. Imagine that. Him marrying me. Even sold his saxophone to—”

She was sobbing now. I waited. When she stopped, she told me about how they first met. Thursday nights she would wait for him outside JoJo’s, listening to his sweet music. The day he told her that he loved her, it was raining. “Real black clouds over the Mississippi,” she said.

“So why’d he sell his sax?”

“To buy me.”

***********************

IT WAS TWO in the morning when I got back to the Warehouse District, lonely, cold, and tired. I didn’t want to be alone. A light was on across Julia Street in the warehouse of a neighbor, one of the many artists who lived in the district. A ballet instructor. Beautiful girl. Good person.

I parked my Jeep, grabbed a six-pack of Abita out of the fridge, then found myself buzzing her from the street-level intercom. I could hear Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 filtering out a second-story cracked window and reverberating off the concrete and bricks down the street. Her blurred image floating past the dim windows.

As I stood there, I suddenly felt silly because she could have company. I guess I arrogantly thought she would always just be there when I needed her. Just waiting, no need for a life of her own. But I guess she thought of me like one of the neighborhood cats that she consistently fed whenever they decided to wander by for a meal.

Sam slid back a rusted viewing slot, then opened the door smiling. Short blonde hair and blue eyes. She wore cut-off gray sweat pants and a man’s white ribbed tank top tied at her waist. She’d been dancing a long time—enough to build a sweat.

“I don’t remember ordering a pizza,” she said.

“I do. Should be here in fifteen minutes—chicken, artichoke hearts, and white cheese.”

She shook her head and laughed. She slid two heavy bolts behind us, and I followed her up the stairs. I put my hand on her back. It was very warm.

***********************

THE NEXT DAY I played the waiting game in a little tourist café on Royal. I waited and I watched Sarah’s apartment. I ate two bowls of bland gumbo and a soggy muffuletta, drank draft Abita until I got loopy, and then switched to “Authentic French Market Coffee.” Tasted like Maxwell House.

I saw her walk outside to a balcony in a loose-fitting robe and lean over a scrolled balcony sipping coffee. That was noon.

At three, she came back to the balcony. She sat down in a director’s chair, propped her feet on the iron railing and read. The Billie Holiday book?

At 3:43, she went back inside and did not come back outside for two hours. The bright sunshine barely warming a cold day retreated, and the shadows finally returned, falling over my face.

Around six, she came out of the street entrance walking toward Esplanade. I tucked the copy of Nine Stories back in my jacket pocket, where I always kept it, placed a few bills under the weight of a salt shaker, and began to follow.

I had a ragged Tulane cap pulled low over my eyes and wore sunglasses—some Lew Archer I was. I pulled the collar of my trench coat tighter around my face. Not just for disguise, but also to block the cold. December wind shooting down those old alleys and boulevards can make a man want to keep inside.

She went into the A&P on Royal, and I stayed outside. In a few minutes, she returned, unwrapping a pack of cigarettes and continuing to walk toward the far end of Royal. She walked into one with the doors propped wide open, leaned over the bar, and French-kissed the bartender. He struck an effeminate, embarrassed pose and laughed. She patted him on the face and kept walking.

At the end of the street, she went inside a bed and breakfast. Semi-renovated. New awning, peeling paint on the windows. I got close enough to see through the double-door windows. She was talking to someone at the front desk. Then she turned, going deeper inside the building. I waited.

It was cold. There were no restaurants or coffee houses on this side of district. It hadn’t been civilized yet. I blew hot breath through closed fists.

I waited.

I got solicited twice. Once by a man. Once by a woman. And had a strange conversation with a derelict.

“Crack,” he said.

“Gave it up for the holidays. Thank you, though.”

“Naw, man. Dat’s my name.”

“Your name is Crack?”

“Shore.”

I asked “Crack” where the nearest liquor store was. He said it was on Rampart, so I gave him a few bucks and told him to buy me a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and whatever he wanted. Actually it wasn’t really a gamble to give him money. Most of those guys work on a strange ethical code when it comes to a fellow drinker.

He came back, and we sat on the other side of Esplanade watching the bed and breakfast until nearly ten o’clock. The whiskey tasted like sweet gasoline.

When Sarah came back, her hair was mussed, her jaw worked overtime on gum, and she looked tired. She certainly did not expect what came next as she bent down to re-strap a sequined stiletto.

As she pulled the buckle tight around her ankle, an early seventies black Chrysler whipped around the corner of Chartres, speeding right toward us. I had no time to push her out of way or yell. I could only watch as she just stayed bent over with her butt in the air. Hand still touching those ridiculous shoes. Very still.

I knew the car would hit her.

But it didn’t. Instead, the car skidded to a halt next to her, and a white arm grabbed her by the hair and jerked her in. She screamed as I sprinted across the street. Because of the tinted windows, I couldn’t see the driver, who put the car back in gear and weaved to hit me.
I bolted away and lunged toward the curb, where Crack was standing holding his bottle of apple liquor. The car’s tires smoked as it headed down Royal.

I followed.

My breath came in hard, fast spurts. I knew I was sprinting a losing race, but I followed until I saw the dim glow of the car’s cracked red taillights turning somewhere near Toulouse.

And she was gone.

***********************

WHOEVER TOOK SARAH dumped her body underneath the Greater New Orleans Bridge on the Algiers side of the Mississippi. Naked with a cut throat.

Jay Medeaux stood over me at police headquarters on Broad Street and slurped on a cup of black coffee. I rubbed my temples. It was 9 A.M. and I hadn’t slept. His wide, grinning face looked more amused with my situation than sympathetic.

“No coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“Cruller?”

“Jay, do you mind?”

“Touchy. Touchy.”

I regurgitated every trivial detail of what I witnessed and knew. Jay listened without asking any questions. He didn’t even lecture me about conducting my own investigation—which he knew I was prone to do. Jay was a good friend.

I remember him happiest when we beat LSU. His grin wide as he held our coach high on his shoulders in a warped, fading photograph I still kept on my desk.

He pulled Sarah’s file from Vice and made a few phone calls. We found out she was working for a pimp with the awful moniker of Blackie Lowery. A lowlife whose previous convictions included running a strip club staffed with twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, trucking oysters from a polluted water zone, indecent exposure at Antoine’s restaurant, selling illegal Jazzfest T-shirts, and beating the shit out of his pit bull with a Louisville Slugger. Sounded like our man.

Jay let me go with him to pick the guy up.

***********************

WE FOUND BLACKIE outside his Old Style Voodoo Shop spray-painting a dozen little cardboard boxes black—his back turned as he spurted out a final coat. He was a skinny guy with pasty white skin, a shaved head, and a thick black moustache curled at the end like Rollie Fingers used to wear. He stopped painting and looked sideways at us.

“Hey, Blackie, why don’t you spell shop with a two Ps and an E?” Jay said. “The tourists would like it more, I bet. Make it sound real authentic, ya’ know.”

Blackie had his shirt off, and a tiny red tattoo was stamped over his heart. As he watched us, I could see the colored skin beat.

“We found one of your employees this morning,” Jay said. “Blade sliced her throat real even.”

He gave a crooked smile and threw down his paint can. “I don’t have a clue.”

“That’s beside the point,” Jay said. “Come on with us.”

“Eat me,” Blackie said.

I walked through a side door and into a voodoo shop. The smell of incense was strong among the trinkets, stones, and powders. A small, glass-topped casket sat in the middle of the room with a carved wooden dummy inside painted to look like a decomposing corpse.

But beyond the Marie Laveau T-shirts and the hundreds of bags of gris-gris powders, something interested me.

Fats’ sax sat in a corner.

To be concluded...

Original Ace Atkins short story excerpt (part 1 of 3)

2009-12-07T07:26:00.000-08:00

What David Handler has been up to...

2009-12-05T06:23:00.000-08:00

Edgar Award-winning mystery writer David Handler has long been a favorite of mine, no matter what he writes. He's just contributed a fine story for next fall's BFP anthology Damn Near Dead 2, and though he's no longer writing the award-winning Stewart "Hoagy" Hoag & Lulu novels (featuring a celebrity ghostwriter & his faithful yet neurotic basset hound), he remains committed to the wonderful Mitch Berger & Desiree Mitry mysteries (starring a shlubby NYC film critic & his Halle-Berry-sexy Connecticut resident state trooper girlfriend) that are being published by St. Martin's Minotaur. If you're a fan of intelligently-written whodunits that are a pleasant mix of hard- & soft-boiled amateur detective fiction, you can't go wrong with David Handler. Start with either the first Hoagy book, The Man Who Died Laughing (available from BFP), or the Mitch & Desiree debut, The Cold Blue Blood.

Here's David himself with a few words on what he's been up to...

"I'm pleased to report that I have a kick-ass new political thriller called Click to Play (Severn House) out now. It's something a bit different for me -- a turbo-charged page turner about a dying child star from TV's golden age who reaches out to a renegade internet journalist with the true story behind the most famous murder spree in Hollywood history. A secret that's so shocking it will most certainly destroy the U.S. senator who is poised to become America's next president. I had an absolute blast with Click to Play. It's chock full of bizarre characters and plot twists. Good, dirty fun. I promise you won't be able to put it down.

"However, if you are a loyal Berger-Mitry fan do not despair. My next Mitch and Des installment, The Shimmering Blond Sister, is all finished and scheduled for publication in fall 2010 from St. Martin's Minotaur. And I'm happy to report that I just agreed to write a new one entitled The Blood Red Indian Summer."

I know I, for one, am very much looking forward to these!

Visit David Handler online at http://www.davidhandlerbooks.com/.

Kenneth Wishnia's students on TOWER!

2009-12-03T05:17:00.000-08:00

by Kenneth (k.j.a.) Wishnia

My students hate cozies. Really. I’ll assign one every once in a while for balance and maybe three people out of a class of 35 will say they liked it. Everyone else will hate the freaking hell out of it. I teach a crime literature course every fall term at Suffolk Community College in Brentwood, one of the poorer areas of Long island, and I’ve observed that our students always respond more favorably to hardboiled and noir stories, in part because the sensibilities at the darker end of the genre more closely resemble their own life experiences. In fact, this year’s group became such experts in analyzing the genre they even started complaining that some of the stories in Megan Abbott’s anthology A Hell of a Woman weren’t noir enough for them.

I repeat: some of the stories in A Hell of a Woman weren’t noir enough for them...

So I promised them that the next assignment would supply the electric jolt of noir that they were craving: Tower, by Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman.

They loved it.

And they loved it even more when Reed Coleman dropped by to discuss the novel with us. (We’ve also brought Lee Child, S.J. Rozan, Jason Starr, Megan Abbott, Steve Hamilton and many other authors to our campus over the years.)

One student compared it to the collaboration between Jay-Z and Linkin Park on the album Collision Course, so naturally, we had to christen Reed with a new title: “The Jay-Z of Noir.” (Ken is stuck with being Linkin Park, I guess.)

Other sample comments:

“It was like a hybrid of a Guy Ritchie movie like Snatch and Martin Scorcese’s Goodfellas.”

“It was really disturbing that the only time Griffin ever showed emotion was in the presence of violence, or when someone was speaking about violence. He was a sick bastard.”

“Interestingly, it is finding love that impacts both men more than any of the criminal activity they are involved in... Nick’s experience with love eases his rage; Todd’s experience ignites his rage.”

One woman summed it up in six words: “Love, Hate, F#@^k... then you Die.”

I have my favorite moments as well, but I’ll just pick one, when Todd says the Irish are always pining for the old country, but not the Jews: “You don’t hear too many second generation Jews pining for Poland or Russia, Romania or Ukraine.” You got that right, boychik, and it was true for my family, too. With good reason.

--------------------------------------------

Kenneth (K.j.a.) Wishnia was born on a hot August night to a roving band of traveling academics. His first novel, 23 Shades of Black, was nominated for the Edgar and the Anthony Awards, and made Booklist’s Best First Mystery list. His other novels include Soft Money, which Library Journal listed as one of the Best Mysteries of the Year, and Red House, which was a Washington Post Book World “Rave” Book of the Year. His short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Murder in Vegas, Queens Noir, and elsewhere. Ken’s latest novel, The Fifth Servant, a Jewish-themed historical set in Prague in the late 16th century, is due out from William Morrow/HarperCollins in Feb. 2010. He teaches writing, literature and other deviant forms of thought at Suffolk Community College in Brentwood, Long Island.