The Small Press Pull

Great news for the world - David James Keaton's holy-shit-that's-a-hernia-waiting-to-happen 150k-word novel The Last Projector has been announced as a 2014 release from Broken River Books (as have titles by Adam Cesare and Chris Deal), adding to my general happiness (is this what punch feels like all the time?)

But Broken River ain't the only small crime press that I've been fortunate enough to work with who turning out exciting shit these days. I've got Pale Horses by Nate Southard from Snubnose Press in my sights. Snubnose cranks out more titles than a petty dictator, and chances are if Brian Lindenmuth has invested in it, that there is some worthy shit, but this one in particular caught my eye with some curiously strong word of mouth, and I'm looking forward to digging in.

Those Melbourne boys at Crime Factory sprinkle trouble on eggs for breakfast, but even they may have bitten off more of it than they could hope to chew as the next novella in their Single Shot line has just been announced - Saint Homicide by Jake Hinkson - that's some gimme-gimme-gimme now shit right there. Jake's been making the rounds of exciting small crime presses his own self. His novel The Posthumous Man was released earlier this year through David Cranmer's Beat to a Pulp press.

Cranmer and BTAP are rolling out the hardboiled pulp shit that we all crave, (like Garnett Elliott's The Drifter Detective) but lookee here, he's also publishing stuff like Celebrations in the Ossuary, a poetry collection and posthumous release from the gone-too-young talent Kyle J. Knapp (Pluvial Gardens).

And Hinkson's first novel Hell on Church Street was brought to the world through the wicked midwifery of Jon Bassoff's New Pulp Press whose brannew Last of the Smoking Bartenders by C.J. Howell is raising an alarming rigidity of wood among a lot of trusted crime writing sources, so yup, straight to the top of the pile it goes.

Another NPP title forthcoming that I already dug is Night of the Furies by J.M. Taylor - I believe I called it the dime novel Sophocles wrote over one hell of a lost weekend. It moves fast and is dime-novel sized, but shit is epic in scope. Large-scale, Greek-style tragedy as hardboiled crime pulp. (2014 is going to bring us

And let's not forget Bassoff himself whose novel Corrosion was just released by DarkFuse. Now that's some troubling shit. Right up my alley what with the religious mania and gothic overtones, this one effectively marries (then drives into the ground with a marital murder/suicide - because divorce is for wishy-washy pantywaists) the sensibilities of Old Testament blood and brimstone and the nastiest edge of Jim Thompson-esque pyscho-noir.

And if you need a laugh after the fire and grimstone of Corrosion, Johnny Shaw has just graduated his Blood & Tacos faux-men's-adventure electronic bi-annuals to a real live paper collection with sweet-ass original pulp art by Roxanne Patruznick. (And Thomas & Mercer is hardly small-press, but hot dog! I'm looking forward to Johnny's next Jimmy Veeder Fiasco Plaster City. It's gonna be hard to wait for April.)