A Sampling of Short Crime Fiction

From time to time, the original site offered a sampling of the editor's short stories available on the web, alongside the publication record of the print work. This page preserves that catalog — a working map of where a 2000s noir writer's short fiction actually appeared, from flagship digests to the roughest corners of the web-zine world.

Stories the Site Featured

• More Than a Scam — honorable mention in the 2003 Best American Mystery Stories anthology; the story of what can happen when a writer tries to pull one over on some email scam artists. The most-shared story the site ever hosted.
• A Rage Issue — a quick and dirty story written for the zine Thuglit, described by its author as only superficially autobiographical, about a man who badly needs anger management courses.
• Nothing But Jerks — first created as a noir comic with artist Jean-Pierre Jacquet for Hardluck's bank-robbery issue, later republished as prose at the web-zine Pulp Pusher.
• Flies and She Stole My Fortune! — two more of the life-in-writer's-hell stories, collected with More Than a Scam in the audio collection Dark Crime, Volume 1 (40 minutes, also distributed as a podcast).
• Adrenaline — originally published in Out of the Gutter #3, offered as a free podcast through the crime-fiction audio site CrimeWav.

The Web-Zine Underground

Half of these stories first appeared not in glossy digests but in the scrappy web-zines that defined the era's underground — Thuglit, Pulp Pusher, Out of the Gutter, CrimeWav. Those sites paid little or nothing and folded fast, but they took risks no print editor would, and they gave hardboiled short fiction a place to be loud. A story could run rough and profane there in a way the newsstand markets never allowed, then get cleaned up or collected later for a wider audience. The catalog on this page is a snapshot of that two-track life: prestige print on one side, the noir underground on the other.

The Print Record

The print credits span the field's most respected markets. Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine ran Money Run (November 2005) and the Julius Katz novella; Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine published Dave Stevens, I Presume? (March 2006) and Closing Time (July/August 2006). The anthologies and digests fill out the list: Thirteen Locks (Hot Blood #13, 2007), View from the Mirador (Futures, 2007), Nine-Ball Lessons (Bullet #7), Forever and Ever (Strange Bedfellows, the Hot Blood series, 2004), Almost Human (Futures, 2003), Next Time (Hardboiled #22, 1996), and the first sale, A Long Time to Die (New Mystery Magazine #2, 1992). A collection titled Seven gathered crime stories that originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock, Ellery Queen, Hot Blood, Bullet, and Futures, plus one story never before published.

Why the Catalog Matters

Short fiction was the connective tissue of the 2000s noir scene. The same writer might appear in a prestige digest, a punk web-zine, and an erotic-horror anthology in a single year — and the range was the point. The catalog preserved here is a case study in how the era's writers built reputations one story at a time, the same path most of the contributors in the Hardluck Archives were walking. For the novels that grew out of this apprenticeship, see the books.