THE BLACK DAHLIA: A DARK ANNIVERSARY

Elizabeth Short's Mug Shot.

On Jan. 15, 1947, somebody killed Elizabeth Short, a pretty, dark-haired girl with bad teeth from Medford, Massachusetts who lit out for Los Angeles to find fame and fortune or maybe just true love depending on which version of her story you choose to accept.

Most prefer to go the course of that tired old Hollywood dream: Some small-town girl boards a bus to the City of Angels and ends up in Hell.

Certainly, Ms. Short infamously found her name in the headlines in due course. But the happy flavor of fame and fortune “Beth” or “Betty” Short sought tragically eluded her. On January 15, 1947, she became Los Angeles’ “Jane Doe, Number One,” now, of course, better known to us as “The Black Dahlia.”

That moniker is one with a noir pedigree all its own—allegedly lifted from a Raymond Chandler-scripted film by some druggists who hung Beth with the handle.

Or, maybe not.

Contemporary D.A. investigator reports say it was actually a cynical, headline-driving newspaper concoction.

Like so much of the stuff of Beth’s dark legend, securing even the trivial stuff as solid fact is more than a little like trying to nail down mercury.

Regardless, “The Black Dahlia,” is a name that conjures up images of a curvy, black-clad femme fatale. By all accounts, that sexy, sable specter is pretty damned far from the reality of the pale-skinned, asthmatic, dreaming girl from Massachusetts.

When her nude, bisected and savaged corpse was found on display in Leimert Park in sinful L.A., Beth Short deftly and darkly passed into the stuff of noir dreams. Her mug shot from a 1943 arrest for underage drinking was plastered over newspaper covers coast-to-coast. (Beth’s body was first identified through a revolutionary use of fingerprints and an early form of newspaper facsimile technology.)

Once the newsboys (and gals) got a hold of her, Beth was variously portrayed as a man-devouring vixen, an aspiring actress, a ditzy and dipsomaniac farm girl, a lesbian, a stag actress and/or hooker and as a luckless party girl who enticed the wrong pick up.

Over the years, she’s collected some other pieces of eyebrow-raising casting from conspiracy mongers—ranging from Orson Welles’ girlfriend, to victim of mobster Bugsy Siegel.

Beth’s sketchy background—and several missing days before her body was discovered—fire conspiracy theories and the imaginations of novelists.

Actor, director, and magician Orson Welles

Depending on the theorist, she was maybe murdered by Orson Welles, film director, actor, and amateur magician, her severed body dumped on almost the same spot where Welles previously sawed actresses in half to raise money for the war effort.

Maybe she was killed by a twilight character named Jack Anderson Wilson, or maybe somebody’s psychopathic daddy. Maybe it was night club owner Mark Hansen or maybe one of several L.A. doctors (Hodel, O’Reilly and Bayley, please stand up) or, if you buy one long-gone mystery writer’s solution, a dwarf who had to cut the body in half for easier transport.

And the crazy conspiracy beat goes on… (Perhaps the oddest suspect is folksinger Woody Guthrie, who was notorious for drawing nude and sometimes disturbing sketches of women, some of which drew him official attention after Short’s murder.)

TOROS & TORSOS, the second novel in the Hector Lassiter series,
uses Beth Short's murder as a key plot point. 

Hell, maybe a band of killer surrealists did the deed, a notion I explored in my second Hector Lassiter novel, Toros & Torsos, inspired by haunting concepts put forth by authors Steve Hodel, Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss.

MINOTAURE, the notorious surrealist magazine. This Dali piece, and its carvings in the thighs, anticipate similar mutilations to Elizabeth Short's body.

I suppose Beth Short first entered my consciousness through the 1975-TV movie, “Who Is The Black Dahlia?” It was pretty heady stuff for a kid from Ohio. Beth was played by Lucille Ball’s darkly fetching daughter, Lucie Arnaz. Efrem Zimbalist Jr., who I then knew mostly as Inspector Lewis Erskine on the old “F.B.I.” series, played the lead detective.

After that viewing, I’d seek out the occasional true crime account of the murder…maybe stumble across some reprint of Craig Rice’s musings on the killing and so forth. In a Walden’s bookstore, I stole a look at the grainy morgue photos in Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon.

It was James Ellroy, of course, who put her back on the pop culture map in the late 1980s with his corner-turning novel, The Black Dahlia.

Sometime after that I picked up John Gilmore’s Severed, a haunting but controversial “True Crime” account of Beth Short’s murder whose perceived veracity is not helped by a decided lack of sourcing or even basic footnoting.

I went on to interview Gilmore at some length in 2002. When I pressed him for documentation for many of his claims—when I pushed him to explain why he didn’t provide even the most basic of bibliographies—he said, “The books are an experience. The books are portraits of these bleeding sides of beef. That is what as a creative writer I was interested in doing. I’m not a historian in that sense. The reason I didn’t put dates and such in the book is that I want the reader to be thrust into the thing. I don’t want to take the reader by the hand and say, ‘Okay, now we’re going to learn about this crime.’ I want the reader exposed to the crime as it goes down. The reader becomes a part of it. When Dante goes down to Hell, he has a guide, but, remove the guide, and he is just thrust into Hell. I wrote them as literary pieces. I have a novelist’s mind. I chose in Severed not to put in dates because—and I am still convinced I am right—that the minute a reader sees a date, he logs it into his mind and moves on. That date shuts off your experience of what’s being told. It takes the reader out of the experience.”

Okay…

He may not have been saying it so many words, but I think the gist of Gilmore’s point was we prefer the story; we crave the myth, however dark and bloody.

I interviewed Ellroy a few times, too. Several times, we spoke of the Black Dahlia case and various theories pointing to suspects.

James Ellroy

As Beth Short’s most obsessive scribe, it seems appropriate to give The Demon Dog the last word on the subject of Beth Short and her legend on this 66^th anniversary year.

In a 2006 interview I conducted with Ellroy during his tour in support of the film adaptation of The Black Dahlia, we discussed the continuing fascination and fictionalizing of Beth Short’s horrific murder.

Ellroy concluded, “We’re trying to find a language for this horrible act—the murder of Betty Short. Imaginative people want to certify their language as authentic. I don’t. I gave you the most psychologically sound, pathologically valid, lunatic language that I was capable of in describing Betty Short’s death. And I have not the slightest idea who did it.”

Craig McDonald’s current novel is EL GAVILAN, published by Tyrus Books. The fifth novel in his Hector Lassiter series is coming soon.Toros & Torsos, the second Lassiter novel, is centered around Elizabeth Short's murder.

(This article originally appeared in slightly altered form in Crimespree Magazine.)

REMEMBERING DAVIS GRUBB & THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

I guess it was back about 1991 or so that I went through a brief but intense Davis Grubb period.

Grubb, a West Virginia author, made a splash with his debut novel, THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, a wicked tale about a homicidal preacher chasing a couple of kids down the Ohio River after murdering their mother in the early days of the Great Depression.

The novel earned good reviews, got a fair amount of attention, and swiftly inspired a classic film with Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish mounted by one-time-only director Charles Laughton. James Agee wrote the script that hews pretty closely to the original source material.

Back in the day, I made a kind of barnstorming run through Moundsville and some parts of Wheeling that still smacked of Grubb country, but it was a pretty informal and scattered pilgrimage.

In this month’s Crimespree (#49 should have hit store shelves or mailboxes sometime over the last few days, or soon will), I write of NIGHT OF THE HUNTER and, particularly, its murderous inspiration and author.

I wrote the article over the Thanksgiving holiday where we were staying in a mountain resort a short distance from Wheeling and more significantly, from Moundsville, Davis Grubb’s long-ago abandoned hometown.

(Grubb spent most of his adult life in New York. When, closer to the end of his life, a movie based on his book FOOL’S PARADE was filmed in Moundsville and its world premier held there, Grubb took a taxi all the way from NYC to Moundsville and back, racking up one of the world’s great cab fares.)

I decided to use my holiday proximity to spend a bit more time in Grubb country for a second time; to see some key places that shaped the author and to take a few pictures along the way (most of which do not accompany the Crimespree article).

NIGHT OF THE HUNTER was based on the real life lonely hearts murderer and so-called “Bluebeard” Harry Powers, a pretty twisted piece of work who racked up a string of aliases and an unknown number of victims. In the 1930s, Powers was hanged in the fearsome-looking Moundsville Penitentiary, which still looms a few blocks from the childhood home of Davis Grubb.

Powers is buried in a prison cemetery and figures prominently in the museum room of the no-longer in service state pen, which is open to the public for tours and whose walls in the old visitor's area are adorned with Davis Grubb memorabilia.

In the course of preparing my Crimespree article, I toured the prison and located Grubb’s old home. His family lost the place when Grubb was still a child. They say Mr. Grubb was so attached to the old homestead that he carried around a photo of the house for the rest of his life.

Grubb died in July 1980 in New York City.

A new independent film about Powers, and his inspiration of Davis Grubb’s most noted novel, is also now making the rounds on the Indy film circuit.

You can read more about that here, and even listen to a long-ago popular song about the murders that inspired NIGHT OF THE HUNTER here.

If you wish to order or subscribe to Crimespree, you can do so right here.

EL GAVILAN & READER'S CHOICE AWARDS

EL GAVILAN finished fourth in a field of 21 American titles over at the House of Crime and Mystery's 2012 Readers Choice Awards.

(The awards were divided into several geographic divisions; overall winner worldwide was Gillian Flynn and GONE GIRL).

In the U.S. section, EL GAVILAN trailed Flynn, Dennis Lehane (LIVE BY NIGHT), and Michael Connelly (THE DROP). Along with EL GAVILAN, Chris Holm's DEAD HARVEST rounded out the top five on the U.S side of competition.

Thank you to all the readers who took the time to vote (for EL GAVILAN or otherwise) and your continued support of authors everywhere.

EL GAVILAN also made several year's best lists this year, including a very nice appreciation at January Magazine, which can be found here.

THE BLACKEST CARNIVAL OF ALL

The second novel in my eBook exclusive series of Chris Lyon thrillers is now available for Kindle and Nook.

CARNIVAL NOIR follows right off the end of PARTS UNKNOWN, the novel that introduced Chris Lyon (though, to be fair, Chris had cameos in the Hector Lassiter novel PRINT THE LEGEND and last year's standalone thriller, EL GAVILAN).

PARTS UNKNOWN, like the Lassiter novels, is an historically inflected crime novel/thriller based on the Cleveland torso slayings—aka, the crimes of the so-called "Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run."

The second of the Lyon thrillers spins on historical crimes to varying degrees, but it moves in a very different direction from its predecessor in many key respects.

Consistent with one of the aims of the Lassiter novels, the books comprising the Chris Lyon series are calculated to be very different from the novel immediately preceding and the one following each entry. In other words, readers who sample the Lassiter or Lyon series shouldn't expect quite the same novel book-to-book.

In approaching CARNIVAL NOIR, I wanted to try for a blend of the feel of Ian Fleming's early James Bond novels and William Lindsay Gresham's classic circus noir, NIGHTMARE ALLEY.

Central to CARNIVAL NOIR, and to the remaining Lyon thrillers, is the female protagonist introduced in the opening pages of the new novel.

Salome Arnaud is not just the pivotal woman in Chris Lyon's life, but in a real sense, she's the axis around which many other aspects of my work spins.

I first wrote the character of Salome Arnaud in a never-to-see-the-light-of-day first novel finished in the late 1980s. A lot of my subsequent characters, themes and even some plot elements lurk in that early text, but only Chris and Salome survived into my published works.

In the manner of crime novelist/screenwriter Hector Lassiter, "the man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives," — Lassiter, whose life and writing career were shaped by the great love of his life, Brinke Devlin — Salome is the pivotal woman in Chris Lyon's life.

But she is much more: Salome is the hook upon which much of my own writing hinges.

Salome Arnaud, born of Gypsy lineage, raised in seedy traveling carnivals and cultivated to be a fortune teller by her "adoptive mother," hints at erotic and supernatural undertones infusing Lyon and Lassiter novels still to come; she heralds an occult aspect that will broaden and deepen as other of my novels appear.

If future Lyon novels are warranted, in time, Salome will center her own thriller. In the fourth of the Lyon novels, Salome will also bridge my two primary series in an unexpected way, profoundly binding the worlds of Chris Lyon and Hector Lassiter.

The following book trailer sets up the future direction of the Lyon series, and gives a clue or two about the looming nexus between the Lyon and Lassiter sagas.

PARTS UNKNOWN eBook exclusive now available

PARTS UNKNOWN is my new eBook kicking off a series of thrillers featuring a writer named Chris Lyon. The novel is available for Kindle and Nook.

The Lyon series is vintage pulp-noir, to my mind; stuff from my until-now private reserve. There have been tastings, to be sure: Chris crops up at the end of my 2010 novel, PRINT THE LEGEND. He appears a couple of times in my 2011 standalone, EL GAVILAN.

PARTS UKNOWN is the first sampling of the wider Lyon vineyard.

Some literary critics would have you believe authors have only a single book in them. They even have a term for this concept: “urtext.”

Urtext, in a nutshell, means, “the original text.” To put it another way, in a literary sense, it’s the “first text,” or axis around which a novelist’s fictional world rotates. Writers evolve; hopefully they gain skills over time.

But in the end, their core remains the same, urtext proponents would have you believe. The English Lit student in me grudgingly buys into the notion that if you look back at the first complete novel from any given writer’s hand, you’ll uncover the seeds of much, if not all that follows. Look at a mature writer’s juvenilia, and you will, in theory, see from where the seasoned stuff springs.

In 1989, I completed my first crime novel, PARTS UNKNOWN. The book was “inspired,” if that’s the right word, by a real series of mutilation murders committed in Ohio between the 1930 and perhaps extending into the 1970s or beyond.

I’d tried my hand at writing literary novels throughout the 1980s. At age nine, I tried to write a mystery novel about a guy named Chris Lyon.



Sometime around 1990, I read and was riveted by James Ellroy’s THE BIG NOWHERE. It was that Ellroy novel that reminded me genre fiction could rise to the level of literature. The Ellroy novel directly inspired me to go back and try to write a genre novel of my own. A then newish nonfiction book about these old Cleveland crimes inspired the plot of my first crime novel.

The Cleveland Torso Slayer and I go back. Growing up, I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandparents. Here and there, my grandmother used to tell stories about this killer who stalked Cleveland during the Depression. She would tell little six- or seven-year-old me tales about the family car breaking down in Cleveland during the Depression-era murder spree. In the most recurring version, scared and alone, she went off in search of my granddad who had, in turn, gone in search of a mechanic.

At some point, she met a stranger she remained convinced was the killer. My grandmother was unabashedly given to melodrama. She was an aspiring poetess and mystery fiction fan who bought me a subscription to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine when I was a kid. I still have every copy she got for me, though I never read a single issue of the magazine that I regarded, even at age 10, as neutered and tedious. Even then, the thirsty reader in me craved the harder stuff.

Consistent with that juvenile, jaundiced view, I regarded my grandmother’s tales of an Ohio-based decapitation murderer as nonsense.

Flash forward: A downbeat, lonely Christmas Eve in 1989. My widowed grandmother, it was clear to me, was displaying the early intimations of Alzheimer’s. In theory, I was spending time with my family.

But instead of hanging with seldom-seen cousins on that rather depressing Christmas Eve, I bolted. I drove to German Village to a still-standing Indy bookstore open until midnight for last-minute shoppers. I roamed the stacks.

At some point, determined to close the store down, I wandered into the True Crime section. On a whim, I cracked the spine on this newish book called TORSO by Steven Nickel.

In a few seconds, I realized it was an account of the very Cleveland crimes my grandmother had spent so many years talking about.

In various interviews given in 2007 and ’08 regarding my “debut” novel, HEAD GAMES, I went to some lengths to distinguish “first-published novel” from “first novel.”

Few are the writers whose first novel is the first published. Some of us—probably most of us—write many, many books before publication happens through some combination of luck or kismet.

The sad thing is, all those unpublished books that might have been “debut novels” can be pretty strong stuff all on their own.

In all key respects, PARTS UNKNOWN is my first novel. My urtext. When I completed it, I started shopping it around, cockily expecting to find myself a published author sometime in the early- to mid-1990s.

But Chris Lyon faced many of the challenges Hector Lassiter faced years later in getting published. The Lyon books, like the Lassiters, were regarded as something hard to categorize. Hector, in the end, had an advantage Chris didn’t: In the early 1990s, with the exception of books by Daniel Woodrell, Ellroy, James Crumley and James Sallis, nobody was really publishing edgy or envelope-pushing crime novels. The market was saturated with police procedurals, cozies and long-running series short on steam and sparks.

Throughout the 1990s, I kept on stubbornly writing about my central character, Chris Lyon, a journalist-turned-crime novelist who tended to use himself and those around him as characters in his fiction.

I wrote, in fact, an entire series of interconnected books about the character. I kept on writing about Chris and his world because I believed in them. I still believe in Chris Lyon.

Only in retrospect did I come to see he was also a premonition of the character I’m now best known for writing—that of Hector Lassiter.

Hector, in his world, is a screenwriter and crime novelist popularly known as, “the man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives.” Hector debuted in 2007 in HEAD GAMES, an Edgar- and Anthony-award finalist for best “first” novel.

There is a lot of overlap between the Lyon and Lassiter series. I shamelessly plundered the urtext of the Lyon books to populate the Lassiter novels, lifting whole characters and moving them into Lassiter’s mythology.

EBook technology now allows me to pull a William Blake and essentially package and publish the Chris Lyon series myself. Over the next few months, new titles in the Lyon series will appear with some regularity, about one every two or three months, until the series is complete. I won’t put a number to the series. That would, in its way, constitute its own spoiler.

I’ve resisted the urge to greatly revise the Lyon novels for eBook publication. When I wrote them, they were contemporary crime novels. Now they pretty much read as early 1990 historical novels. Cell phones and the Internet were just coming into their own and actually constitute plot points in the first two or three novels.

The novels stand as the pieces I would have started publishing in 1992, or thereabouts, if the fates allowed. If you choose to take the ride, as a side note, you’ll see where nearly everything of Hector Lassiter’s world and attitude springs from—that pesky urtext thing, again.

So that’s the one significant thing I have chosen to do in prepping these books for publication: Rather than revising out some of the things that link the Lyon/Lassiter series, I’ve ramped them up, played to them. The two series entwine as the saga unfolds. At some point, a torch is passed.

In fact, that blending of Chris and Hector’s worlds carries on through the eBook extras in this first Chris Lyon thriller.

Along with PARTS UNKNOWN, in the new eBook you’ll find previews of the next Lyon novel, CARNIVAL NOIR, which introduces Salome (who briefly appears in EL GAVILAN), the key woman in Chris Lyon’s life.

PARTS UNKNOWN, the eBook, also contains a preview of the next Hector Lassiter novel, ROLL THE CREDITS, which features an appearance by Jimmy Hanrahan, a key player in PARTS UNKNOWN and already established as a longtime crony of Hector Lassiter’s (Jimmy, like Chris, crops up in PRINT THE LEGEND, AKA: Lassiter #3). Like some other characters already in print, Hanrahan was first created for my partly Cleveland-set, first crime novel featuring Chris Lyon.

As a last bonus, there is also an interview with James Jessen Badal, author of the two definitive nonfiction books on the Cleveland Torso slayings. That interview was conducted several years after my novel about the Cleveland crimes was written, and so does not have bearing on my book’s plot or content. The interview does, however, give some deep insight into the actual Ohio crimes, as well as the most likely suspect to have committed the murders.

HEAD GAMES FREE FOR KINDLE ALL WEEKEND

Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, Jack Webb and an ex-President!

Starting today and continuing through the Memorial Day weekend, my 2007 debut novel, HEAD GAMES, is available for free download exclusively for your Kindle right here.

This is the novel that introduced crime novelist Hector Lassiter, “the man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives”—the internationally critically acclaimed character who went on to headline TOROS & TORSOS, PRINT THE LEGEND and last year’s ONE TRUE SENTENCE.

HEAD GAMES WAS:

• 2008 Edgar® Nominee for Best First Novel

• 2008 Anthony Award Finalist

• 2011 Sélection du prix polar Saint-Maur En Poche

• 2008 Gumshoe Award nominee for Best First Novel

• Head Games shortlisted for 2008 CrimeSpree Magazine award for Best First Novel

"One of the great American road novels."

—Heirloom Books

"This slick caper novel touches chords of myth, history, loss and redemption just enough so you can hear echoes faintly under the gunfire."

—Publishers Weekly

ABOUT THE BOOK:

“In a dusty cantina on the far side of the Rio Grande, larger-than-life and recently widowed crime writer Hector Lassiter and Bud Fiske, a callow young poet sent by True Magazine to profile Hector, are handed a carpet bag. Inside they find the stolen head of Mexican general Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa—a long missing relic that may point the way to a fortune in lost treasure or a blood-and-thunder death...

“In the dank, hallowed halls of Yale University creep the members of the Skull & Bones, a secret society shrouded in whispers. They are a fraternity whose members include media barons, über executives and politicians, including three generations of men called Bush—and their sanctum sanctorum's trophy cabinet is purportedly packed with the stolen bones of long-dead luminaries...

“In a '57 Bel Air, Hector, Bud, and the beautiful Alicia tear through the desert with a trunk full of human heads. Caught in a crazy crossfire, they lead all manner of headhunters on a breakneck chase across Lost America. U.S. intelligence services, murderous frat boys, the soldier of fortune who stole Pancho's head from its grave, and the specter of a dead Mexican legend all want Villa's head—though they might settle for Hector's...”

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

What some other authors have said about Head Games:

"Head Games is terrific, a real discovery, informed by—but never weighed down by—Craig McDonald's intimate knowledge of pulp fiction, politics, history, literature, film noir and all manner of frontiers. A truly original debut that leaves one eager to see what this writer will do next."

—LAURA LIPPMAN, author of What the Dead Know

"Moves like a bullet, like a trajectory of magnificent artistry and line-on-line of almost casual, throwaway description. The beautiful, understated humor running like a sad song all through the whole novel...I'm beyond impressed."

—KEN BRUEN, author of American Skin

"Reading Craig McDonald's Head Games was like reliving those wonderful and exciting, tequila-fired weekend border-town tours of my youth in the '50's. A different character, vivid and lively, waiting around every new corner of the artfully twisted plot. The time and place are captured perfectly, and story never falters as it dashes to the surprising ending. It made me homesick for El Paso the way it was."

—JAMES CRUMLEY, author of The Last Good Kiss

"Few writers can blend a contemporary feel with what drew us to old-style pulp and original paperbacks: that momentum, that craziness, the thrill of the downhill slide and crash. Head Games is smart, it's funny, and it moves like a roach when the lights go on—what's not to love?"

—JAMES SALLIS, author of Drive

"Head Games is fast, funny, furious, heart wrenching, real smart and totally unapologetic...a five-star page turning sizzler in a four-star world. Talk about nailing your debut...Head Games seals the deal and establishes McDonald as the new badass on the writing block. Kick back with a shot of Cuervo and a cold Tecate chaser. Enjoy the search for Pancho's missing head in this fast-paced thriller of lost and sorely missed Americana."

—CHARLIE STELLA, author of Shakedown

"Head Games is contemporary noir at its finest. Prose that bites like a guillotine blade. A voice that sings in your skull. And in aging pulpster/adventurer Hector Lassiter, a hero who's the real deal—morally complex and damned funny."

—ALLAN GUTHRIE, author of Hard Man

Selected as one of The San Francisco Chronicle's Top 10 crime books of the year: "Craig McDonald, a genuine expert on the history of crime fiction, gives free rein to all his obsessions in a debut novel that's a berserk 1957-based caper running roughshod through the politics and pop culture of the latter half of the 20th century. Strap in, hold on, enjoy the ride."

—EDDIE MULLER, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

"Head Games is a gravel and mescal cocktail, a one-day burn, a novel of genuine piss and vinegar, the kind of book you thrust on people with the wild eyes and intent of a PCP freak. It's Tom Russell singing ‘Tonight We Ride’ with a gut full of tequila and a loaded Colt. Craig McDonald knows the tough guy, has created one of the very finest, a pulp writer called Lassiter who knew Hemingway, Welles and Dietrich, and who I wish wasn't fucking fictional so I could hunt for his books. He spits in the eye of the pansy-ass authority hero that has glutted the crime market, reminiscent of Crumley at his best and with Ellroy's sick historical verve. Bottom line, McDonald's a talented bastard."

—RAY BANKS, author of Saturday's Child

"A booze-soaked tribute to those great gonzo noir writers of days gone by."

—ANTHONY NEIL SMITH, author of The Drummer

"Yeah, I'm late catching up to this guy, but damned if this 1950's set tale of a crime writer carrying the head of a Mexican rebel in a bag across some kind of crazy road trip didn't set my pulse racing. There's a strange switch at a late stage in the novel which might divide some readers in the way the ending of No Country For Old Men did its audience, but for my money it's a bold move that more or less works exactly as intended. This McDonald guy is definitely one to keep your eye on."

—RUSSEL D.

BORDERLAND NOIR: SIX YEARS LATER

“Swing for the fences…Gut-shoot me and/or break my heart, because, tonight, I just want to feel something.”

Many years back, pre-HEAD GAMES time, I was invited by Dave Zeltserman to guest-edit an edition of the now long-gone Hardluck Stories e-zine.

The year was 2006. I immediately pitched this theme concept tied to Cinco de Mayo I dubbed BORDERLAND NOIR. Dave Z. was dubious, but ever the gentleman, gave me a shot. I wrote this pitch for the sucker that drew some pretty potent submissions:

"La frontera … what El Paso-based songwriter Tom Russell describes as 'that delicious, dark-eyed myth of the border.'

"We’re headed way out west, out past where you’ve dared to go before. Out to Touch of Evil country (that’s the film, not the book, hombres).

"Our troubadours are Russell, Dave Alvin … Marty Robbins and Ry Cooder. Mariachi bands dominate the shortwave radios down this way, where tortured widower Orson Welles hands out justice with his ham-sized fists, all the while muttering under his boxy Stetson.

"We’re not looking to be slavish about the coordinates: The Border is a state of mind every bit as much as it is a geographic boundary. But fiction or nonfiction, I will be seeking that Malcolm Lowry/Day of the Dead/Cinco de Mayo vibe.

"Focus on that uneasy friction between Old Meh-hi-co and El Norte … because, way down deep, we all know that you can leave Brownsville, but you can never get Matamoros out of your soul.

"Give me stories about young lives snuffed out chasing the dream of more money and better futures up north.

"Show me guilt-stricken 'coyotes' who can no longer stand to roast peasants in locked freight cars, or to abandon babies and their too-young mothers in the scrub-oak purgatory of the Sonoran desert.

"Tell me tales of Narcotrafficante madmen with too much cash and bent imaginations who build crazy tunnels under miles of wasteland to smuggle drugs. I’m craving stories about bad bastards who kidnap tourists and mail them back one-finger-at-a-time, seeking impossible-to-pay ransoms from gringo wage-slaves whose one foreign vacation has gone so terribly south on them.

"To this day, cherry boys with butterflies in their bellies steal across the border to get laid … to drink rum at TJ’s infamous 'longest bar in the world' and to find out exactly what the hell a 'Donkey Show' is. But sometimes things take a turn. Rum and tequila and first sex are a treacherous mix. Show me how treacherous.

"Emiliano Zapata said, 'It’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.' So, in that spirit, swing for the fences, amigos. Give me strong and original voices. Gut-shoot me and/or break my heart, because, tonight, I just want to feel something."

Well, we put that issue out on May 5, 2006. Ken Bruen kicked in a Johnny Cash-inflected story. Manuel Ramos had a wonderful story, too. Then we had these great pieces by Mike MacLean, Garnett Elliott (whom I had the pleasure of meeting in person in Arizona this past February), Theresa Kennedy, Bradley Mason Hamilton and Rick Deckard.

Dave Z. kicked in a terrific essay on Touch of Evil. We fronted the whole package with a painting (the original hangs on my living room wall) by singer-songwriter Tom Russell whose album, Borderland, inspired the theme for that special edition of Hardluck Stories.

Sucker took on a life of its own. The next year, Head Games came out with its own Borderland Noir vibe and Touch of Evil aspects. Ken and Manuel's stories were promptly anthologized. Rick Deckard has a book contract and will be putting out a borderland noir-length novel from Serpent's Tail.

Hardluck Stores, however, folded, and I thought all that material was lost.

Turns out, it's archived...

So here, for your Cinco de Mayo inspection, is BORDERLAND NOIR, now aged to a sublime and palate-teasing six years. As I said in the introduction back then:

"The Tecate is cold and a storm is coming across the desert.

"The jukebox is grinding on in the corner: Freddy Fender singing “Across the Borderline”….

“A thousand footprints in the sand … reveal the secret no one can define.”

But watch these writers try."
Check it out HERE.