About Dave Zeltserman
Dave Zeltserman was the guy who ran Hardluck — his own description — and at the same time a crime writer whose dark, uncompromising novels earned comparisons to Jim Thompson from some of the most respected names in the field. This page preserves the editor's story as the original site told it, in the years when the zine and the writing career were running side by side.
The Short Fiction Years
His first published short story, A Long Time to Die, appeared in New Mystery Magazine in 1992. Over the following years his short crime fiction ran in many of the field's flagship digests and anthologies — Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (Money Run, 2005; the Julius Katz novella), Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine (Dave Stevens, I Presume?, 2006; Closing Time, 2006), the Hot Blood anthology series (Forever and Ever; Thirteen Locks), Hardboiled (Next Time, 1996), Bullet (Nine-Ball Lessons), Futures (Almost Human; View from the Mirador), and Out of the Gutter (Adrenaline). His story More Than a Scam — about a writer who tries to pull one over on some email scam artists — received an honorable mention in the 2003 Best American Mystery Stories anthology.
The Breakout
His first novel, Fast Lane, was published by Point Blank Press at the end of 2004 after the Italian rights had already sold. Poisoned Pen Bookstore selected it as one of the best hardboiled novels of the year; Kate's Mystery Bookstore called it a stunning, wild, psychotic ride; and Ken Bruen pronounced it the most entertaining debut since Jim Thompson. Bad Thoughts followed from Five Star in 2007 — a genre-bender combining noir's paranoia and existential dread with something stranger, named one of the year's best by reviewers. Then came the breakthrough: Small Crimes, published by the UK's Serpent's Tail in 2008, the first of a three-book noir cycle loosely themed around men just out of prison, continuing with Pariah (2009) and Killer (2010). A starred trade review judged that Small Crimes deserved comparison with the best of James Ellroy. The full publication history, with the reception each book earned, is on the books page.
Editor and Writer at Once
Running a quarterly zine while writing novels meant the two halves of the career fed each other. The zine's contributors and guest editors — Bruen, Gorman, Guthrie, Crider, Shannon, Healy — were also the writing community in which the novels landed, and the standards the zine enforced were the standards the fiction was written to. Zeltserman appeared in his own pages sparingly: a story here (Flies, in the Horror/Crime issue; The Plan, in the Healy tribute), an essay there (Lessons in Noir; an early appreciation of Jim Thompson in the first issue), and the noir comic Nothing But Jerks with artist Jean-Pierre Jacquet.
Interviews and Podcasts
During the site's active years it pointed readers to conversations with the editor around the web: talking Small Crimes with Allan Guthrie, an early interview with Graham Powell (2004), a toe-to-toe exchange at the group blog Murderati (2007), and a Word Nerd interview (2007). The site also offered Dark Crime, Volume 1, an audio collection of his life-in-writer's-hell stories — More Than a Scam, Flies, and She Stole My Fortune! — and noted that Adrenaline was available as a free podcast. The interviews page preserves that catalog.
Why This Page Matters to the Archive
Zines are editors. The taste that picked every story in the Archives — the insistence on noir that is dark, funny, shocking, and absolutely without compromise — was one writer's taste, formed by Spillane and Hammett and sharpened on Thompson and Willeford. Understanding the editor is the closest thing to a key for the whole archive. For the longer, more personal version of the story, in which a math-and-computers kid from Boston becomes a noir novelist over twelve stubborn years, see the author page.