Noir fiction for the modern reader.

The print version of Setup On Front Street went live today. It’s available on CreateSpace and Amazon now. Price: $12.95 (cheap).

Setup On Front Street is now out. It’s my latest novel, a noir tale from the shadows of Key West. But before you rush to buy a copy…

Here’s the deal with this book. It’s the first in a trio of novels set in Key West. What I want to do is lift the veil off this town and reveal it as a true noir city, on a par with Los Angeles, New Orleans, or Miami. You won’t find any margarita-guzzling goofballs in these pages, no clichéd characters.

People have told me not to do this, that readers actually want all that quirky stuff. They tell me readers want to open a book about Key West and feel like they’ve stepped into a Jimmy Buffett song. Word is, readers won’t accept Key West as having a dark center. Well, maybe they’re right, but I’m hoping they’re wrong. I’ve lived here for the better part of 20 years and I can easily say it’s a noir city. Rest assured you will find no Margaritaville stereotypes between these covers. Just noir, baby!

This is not a trilogy in that there’s no continuing story arc. Each novel is a standalone. But there are recurring secondary characters and locales, and of course, Key West itself is a great character in each book.

Now here’s a brief description:

Key West, 1991. Don Roy Doyle is back in town. Tough and quick-witted, he’s fresh out of prison, where he served three years for a diamond swindle. Now he’s back to collect his share of the proceeds, about $200,000, but the money has vanished.

A local family dynasty which has controlled the island’s politics for generations, a cop with a grudge, the FBI, and the Russian mob all have a stake in the action. They’re convinced Cuba is on the verge of “opening up”, and they all want Doyle gone.

In this tightly-knit town, who can be trusted? And how long can Doyle stay alive?

SETUP ON FRONT STREET takes you inside the world of Key West noir, a world tucked way back in the shadows, where the tourists never go.

The print version is $12.95, the ebook is $2.99. Print will be up in a few days. The ebook is available now at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Also, if you would be so kind, please go to the CreateSpace Preview Gallery, where there is a gripping excerpt from this novel, and leave a rating. It just takes a second.

The folks over at PowderBurnFlash.com have been kind enough to publish one of my very short stories, called Ringtone. It’s there now. Go there and leave a comment. They’ve published some great crime/noir flash fiction and I’m very pleased to be included on their site.

The Caffeinated Diva has weighed in on Bloodstains On The Wall, and she…well, I’ll let her tell you. Go here.

Syria Evans has just posted an interview I did with her on her good-looking website syriasays.com. Check it out. It’s worth the visit because she has a lot of other very interesting stuff on there, too. Her reviews are quite thoughtful, and she features blogs from other authors. It’s a good boost not only to my books, but to noir fiction in general. All very nice. Thanks, Syria.

My latest literary effort is now an ebook, available on Amazon’s Kindle store, as well as Smashwords. It’s a collection of short stories called Bloodstains On The Wall. The collection consists of three stories, all from different corners of the world of noir. Here’s a brief description of each:

1. FULLY LOADED It’s 1984 and Biloxi, Mississippi has seen better days. Sherry Lamar, used car saleswoman extraordinaire, is feeling the pinch. Then one day, a stranger walks onto her small car lot and ushers her into a world of steamy sex and murder.

2. THE DEVIL DRIVES A BIG MERCEDES A seven-year-old boy is playing with his two younger sisters when a minor accident occurs. One of the sisters is to blame, but she blames the boy and their mother believes her, punishing the boy. This starts him on a downward spiral into self-doubt and later, depravity, that will last his entire life.

3. BLOCK A famous crime fiction novelist thinks the current book she’s working on will revive her sagging fortunes. Halfway through it, however, she develops writer’s block and is unable to continue her story, until a mysterious early-morning phone caller claims to have the answers.

In two of the three stories, the central character is a woman. I didn’t plan it that way, but that’s how they spoke to me.

The knockout cover was designed by Ronnell Porter and the formatting was done by Jenna Lundeen.

The entire collection of three stories is available now on Amazon for, get this, only 99¢. How can you not order one?

Booklist, the prestigious review magazine, has reviewed The Take in their latest online edition. In case you don’t understand why I’m doing cartwheels in my living room before popping champagne, it’s because Booklist receives submissions of over 60,000 novels each year, but reviews fewer than 1500. Most of the books they review are in the broad mystery genre, which of course encompasses the noir subgenre of The Take, but nevertheless, I’m ecstatic.

Now, apparently the reviewer does not quite get the world of noir and its population of characters with less than stellar IQs. And he certainly didn’t think he was reading The Maltese Falcon, but hey, I’m not complaining. He liked my novel and that’s good enough for me.

The review is also going to appear in their newsletter, which goes out to some 90,000 librarians. And if they don’t start ordering the book for their libraries, I’m calling Charlie Stella to get Jimmy Bench-Press after them.

You can read the full review here.

SLAYGROUND by Richard Stark/Donald E Westlake

Review by Mike Dennis, 2010

You’ve seen books with maps in the front, haven’t you? You know, like a guide through the locales of the story you’re about to read. Do you ever actually consult them while you’re reading the book? Well, Richard Stark should’ve included one at the beginning of Slayground. A big, two-pager, in fact. Or maybe even a foldout. That’s how confused I was reading this offbeat 1969 entry in the Parker series.

(Now that I think about it, it’s possible one may have been included in the first edition. I don’t know. The one I read, though, a 2010 University of Chicago Press edition, did not contain a map.)

At first, the novel appears to be standard-issue Parker. In the opening, he and his crew are knocking over an armored car, they escape with the loot, and you’re positive he’s going home to relax with Claire, only to be offered another job, which will then take up the rest of the book in its planning and execution.

But no. It turns out the getaway driver in the armored car heist is second-rate, and he spins the car out of control on an icy street, rolling it over several times. Parker is shaken up, but crawls out of the car with the money satchel. Sirens are audible in the distance, and his options are limited. He winds up climbing over the fence of a shuttered amusement park, where he plans to stay until things around the armored car scene quiet down.

Problem is, someone sees him enter the park from across the street. Four men, to be exact, two of them cops. Turns out the other two are gangsters, who quickly put it all together. They summon more hoods to the scene and so begins a book-long claustrophobic siege of the amusement park.

Now, this is where I need the map. Parker, knowing they will be coming for him and the money, goes over every inch of ground in this huge park, which is crammed with rides, buildings, snack bars, and so on. Stark does what he can to orient the reader with narrative explaining where everything is, but there are simply way too many places in this park to keep it all straight. I don’t know about you, but when I can’t place myself in the exact locale of a story, it tends to lose me.

Slayground didn’t lose me to the point of putting it down, however. I mean, who can put down a Parker novel, right? Stark’s writing is so powerful, and he does manage to keep the story moving, so I stuck with it. But I have to say that every time Parker went from one place to another, I had no real idea where he was in relation to anything else. I just knew he was wandering around somewhere in this giant amusement park.

And I didn’t find that amusing.

There’s a blog today on The Outfit–A Collective of Chicago Crime Writers, written by David Heinzmann, which grabbed my interest. David mentioned that he was born and raised around Peoria, a solid middle-American town if ever there was one. On a recent visit, he noticed that what once was a lonely country road outside of town, rolling through miles of boundless cropland, is now a busy thoroughfare linking suburban subdivisions to the city proper. Of course, he lamented this change.

Naturally, this isn’t a new story. Many people have seen drastic changes to their hometowns over the years. But David went on to ponder this a little more, concluding that he can’t set any of his writing in Peoria, that it’s all set in Chicago and other locales of his adulthood. Peoria isn’t the same as when he was a kid, he says, and neither is he.

I had never really thought about my hometown as a locale for my writing, and now I know why. It’s a little place called Seneca Falls, nestled in the heart of the Finger Lakes District of central New York State. Back then, its population was 7000, and it bustled with manufacturing activity. Several large factories were there, employing most of the locals and pumping money into the economy. Unlike David’s experience, the town looks almost exactly the same as when I grew up there so very long ago.

Except that today, most of the factories have closed or moved away. The population is still 7000, but they’re on the ropes. Very little money is circulating and the people wear the hard times on their faces. Like so many fading mill towns, Seneca Falls lives in the shadows, on a slippery slope to oblivion.

When I was growing up there, I had no awareness of anything, especially anything regarding the rhythms of life that we all eventually learn. But through reading, television, and looking at maps, I slowly became cognizant of a wider world, a world that called to me all through my adolescence. I figured out that I had to answer the call, so by the time I went away to college at age 17, my mind was made up. I never returned there to live.

Many of the places I lived since then (and there have been somewhere around a dozen) have provided me with great settings for my novels. But I absolutely cannot write anything about Seneca Falls. Because like David, I’m not the person I was during those formative years. Back then, I saw things through the clear prism of childhood, of innocence, before I knew anything about mean streets or good whiskey or dangerous women.

But once I eased into adulthood, and I felt the toxic kiss of corruption, I learned a lot of what I needed to know in order to write crime fiction. I learned it in cities like New Orleans and Las Vegas and even Key West. My novels are set in those cities, and others, because my life in those places, and the choices I made while traveling this long road, transformed me into the man who is writing this today.

As David Heinzmann so aptly put it, I’m writing about places, not where I came from, but where I came to. And most of them exist in a sort of moral twilight.

How about you? Did you leave your hometown? Do you write about it now? Or do you write about the places you came to?

Russel D McLean put up a thoughtful post on today’s Do Some Damage blogspot. It concerned the length of novels, with a side conversation about pricing relative to length. The length part was what caught my eye, though. I’ve had all kinds of problems with this.

My first published novel, The Take, will be coming out in 2010, but that was not the first novel I had written. There were several others, the first two of which exceeded 100,000 words. One of those weighed in at 180,000 words before I called it a day, although subsequent drafts eventually “slimmed” it down to about 130,000.

After those two efforts, I never again came close to those numbers. Probably because they weren’t crime novels, and everything I’ve written after that has been in the crime genre. The Take, mentioned above, topped out at 51,000 words. My others are in the same ballpark, only one of them exceeding 60,000 words, and that just barely. My latest one, which I’ve just finished, limped across the finish line at 39,000! A second going-over added about another 2000 words, but it still sits at a paltry 41,000.

I don’t know what my problem is. These stories play themselves out in a natural fashion, and in my opinion, they don’t feel at all rushed. The 41,000-word novel is even a slightly bigger story than the others and fairly begs for more words (like twice as many), but I just can’t find them to put in there. I don’t plan it this way. It’s just that when the story is about to wind up, the word count is pathetically low.

Adding clunky subplots just for the sake of piling on the words is not an option for me. I hate books that do that. These novels of mine are not overblown short stories, either. They’re fully-developed novels in every sense of the word. Every sense, that is, except length.

Anybody got any ideas? Anything I can grab onto?