Interviews, Podcasts & Elsewhere
No 2000s web-zine existed in isolation. These interviews, podcasts, and pieces of writing form a snapshot of the crime-fiction ecosystem Hardluck Stories lived in.
Interviews on the Web
- Talking Small Crimes with Allan Guthrie — the Scottish noir novelist (and Fall 2004 guest editor) interviewing the Hardluck founder about the breakthrough book.
- Graham Powell, 2004 — an early conversation from the Fast Lane era, hosted at the crime-fiction aggregator community Powell ran.
- Murderati, 2007 — going toe to toe with Mike MacLean at the group blog that served as the era's writers' common room.
- Word Nerd with Bethany Warner, 2007 — a craft-focused interview from the Bad Thoughts publication season.
Podcasts and Audio
The site embraced crime-fiction audio early. Dark Crime, Volume 1 collected three of the life-in-writer's-hell stories — More Than a Scam, Flies, and She Stole My Fortune! — in a forty-minute audio program also distributed through podcast directories. The story Adrenaline, first published in Out of the Gutter #3, ran as a free podcast at CrimeWav, one of the first sites dedicated to crime fiction in audio. Spoken-word crime fiction has since become an industry; these were the garage-band years, and much of that early audio survives only in web archives such as the Internet Archive.
The Blog
The author's blog offered observations on writing and, in his phrase, other meandering thoughts — including the Lessons Learned in the Trenches series, the informal sequel to the zine's own Lessons in Noir essay. Blogs were where the zine era's conversation moved between issues: Murderati, individual author blogs, and review sites formed a loose network in which Hardluck's stories and interviews were debated, recommended, and occasionally feuded over.
Reading the Network Today
Most of these venues are gone or transformed. Together they show how a small zine plugged into a much larger conversation. For the zine's own contributions to that conversation — the long interviews with Ken Bruen and James Crumley — start in the Archives.