The Zine: Five Years of Hardluck Stories
This page was the front door of the zine in its final season — the place where readers learned there would be one last issue, and where the masthead promised what it always had: classic noir, dark, funny, shocking, and absolutely no compromise. It is preserved here as a portrait of Hardluck Stories at the end of its run, with the history filled in around it.
How the Zine Worked
Hardluck Stories published quarterly, and almost every issue was built around two moving parts: a theme and a guest editor. The theme set the table — Psycho Noir, Femme Fatales, Western Noir, Bank Jobs, Borderland Noir, Crime in the City — and the guest editor picked the menu, reading submissions and selecting five to fourteen stories per issue. Nonfiction rounded out most issues: author interviews, book reviews, and essays on the craft and history of noir.
The result was a zine that never settled into a single house style. A Western Noir issue edited by Ed Gorman read nothing like the Weird Noir issue edited by Neddal Ayad, and that was the point. What the issues shared was a standard: stories had to be noir at heart, which meant characters in real trouble of their own making, prose with no fat on it, and endings that didn't flinch.
One Last Call
After five years, the zine announced it would shut down — but go out with a bang. The final issue's theme was 30s Pulp Noir, co-edited by Ed Gorman and Dave Zeltserman, with artwork by the incomparable Jean-Pierre Jacquet, the artist whose illustrations had given Hardluck its distinctive look through its later years. The final call for submissions asked writers to honor the traditions of the magazines that once numbered more than three hundred on American newsstands — everything from costumed-hero gothics to street-level hardboiled crime, as long as it was noir at heart. The resulting issue is indexed in the Archives under its working title, the last issue.
The Company It Kept
Hardluck Stories belonged to a remarkable generation of 2000s crime fiction web zines — an ecosystem that gave short hardboiled fiction a home when print markets were shrinking. Its peers and friendly rivals were zines remembered today by crime fiction historians and sites like CrimeReads: scrappy, editor-driven publications that paid little or nothing and printed some of the most vital short crime fiction of the decade. Within that company, Hardluck carved out a reputation for two things: the rotating guest-editor model, which no other zine ran as consistently, and the long interviews, which treated working crime novelists with a seriousness usually reserved for literary quarterlies.
The Masthead Voice
The zine-era homepage carried blurbs for the editor's own breakout novel alongside zine announcements, and the mixture was characteristic: Hardluck never pretended to be a faceless institution. It was one editor's taste, argued for in public, four times a year. Writers praised the zine in the same breath as the editor's fiction — Ken Bruen called that fiction "pure magic of the blackest kind," and Allan Guthrie judged it "written with a rare maturity and confidence." The same sensibility chose every story the zine ever ran.
Reading the Zine Today
The complete issue index lives in the Archives, organized newest to oldest, with every story and essay credited. The editorial columns are collected under Hardluck Thoughts, and the people who shaped each issue are profiled on the Guest Editor page. For the zine's deepest cuts — the conversations with Ken Bruen and James Crumley — set aside a full evening. They've earned it.