Join the Hardluck Community

In the zine's active years, this page invited readers to join the Hardluck Stories mailing list — a group hosted on the mailing-list services of the era, where subscribers received news about new issues and talked hardboiled and noir fiction between quarters. The list is long retired along with the platforms that hosted it, but the community it served is worth remembering, because it was half of what made the zine work.

What the List Was For

The mailing list carried three kinds of traffic. First, issue announcements: when a new themed issue went live, subscribers heard about it before anyone else. Second, submission calls: guest editors' themes and deadlines went out to the list, which is how many of the zine's contributors first found their way in. Third, and most valuably, conversation — readers and writers arguing about noir, recommending out-of-print paperbacks, and dissecting the latest issue's stories with the authors sometimes in the thread.

A Community of Writers and Readers

The line between Hardluck's audience and its contributors was always thin. Many subscribers were working or aspiring crime writers; several names that first appeared in list discussions later appeared in the zine's tables of contents. That porousness was typical of the 2000s web-zine scene at its best — a small, serious readership that doubled as a talent pool, holding the zine to its own standards issue after issue.

Where the Conversation Lives Now

The noir conversation never stopped; it just moved. Readers looking for the contemporary equivalent of the Hardluck list will find crime-fiction discussion thriving in genre publications, author newsletters, and the awards communities of organizations like the Crime Writers' Association. And the best starting point remains the archive itself: browse the complete issue index, read an issue introduction or two, and you'll understand exactly what kept that mailing list arguing happily for five years.