Photo via Dangerous Minds (click to see original article)
While the order of stories may be subject to change, here’s the stories you’ll be reading when Drag Noir pops out in a couple months from now with a faboo cover from S. L. Johnson:
The Meaning of Skin – Richard Godwin
Wheel Man – Tess Makovesky
No. 21: Gabriella Merlo – Ben Solomon
Geezer Dyke – Becky Thacker
Lucky in Cards – Jack Bates
Trespassing – Michael S. Chong
Chianti – Selene MacLeod
The Changeling – Tracy Fahey
Straight Baby – Redfern Jon Barrett
Kiki Le Shade – Chloe Yates
Protect Her – Walter Conley
King Bitch – James Bennett
A Bit of a Pickle – Paul D. Brazill
Stainless Steel – Amelia Mangan
The Itch of the Iron, The Pull of the Moon – Carol Borden
We’ve got a whole lot of interesting takes on the theme from folks around the world. I hope you will enjoy — I know I did as I sweated the choices. I was afraid I might not have enough submissions; instead, I had to make tough choices among some fine stories but the ones that made the final selection brought surprises and delights as well as that elusive noir spirit.
Although Fox Spirit is probably more associated with Fantasy, SF and Horror, we do love a bit of crime. No cozy mysteries here though, the emphasis is on dark.
Requiem in E Sharp by Joan De La Haye
A troubled detective
A tormented serial murderer
Sundays in Pretoria are dangerous for selected women.
A murderer plagued by his childhood, has found a distinctive modus operandi to salve his pathological need to escape the domination of the person who was supposed to cherish him.
For fans of serial killer crime and procedural. We know fairly early who dunnit, the real question is who will make it to the end of the book and how will the killer be caught. Set in South Africa Joan uses the corruption in the system and the setting to spin a grim tale of a ruthless murderer.
Extricate & Other Stories by Graham Wynd
EXTRICATE is a violent tale of sexual obsession, unfolding on the dark streets of a nowhere town. Peter falls for Judy the instant he lights her cigarette, but she’s his best mate’s girl — and he’s already married. He decides to begin removing obstacles — starting with his wife. How far will he be willing to go? How far does lifelong friendship go when he finally meets the woman of his peculiar dreams?
Extricate is available on its own as an ebook and coming soon with a second novella and some additional short stories.
This is a collection of noir crime kicking off with a sexy tale of lust, murder and betrayal.
White Rabbit by K.A.Laity
White Rabbit is a noir crime novel with a supernatural twist for fans of crime with a little extra twist.
Sometimes the shadows that haunt us
are what lead us back to the light
Disgraced former police detective James Draygo has sunk as low as his habit allows, working as a fake psychic despite his very real talents. When a media mogul’s trashy trophy wife gets gunned down at his tapping table he has to decide whether he can straighten up long enough to save his own skin. He may not have a choice with Essex’s loudest ghost bawling in his ear about cults, conspiracies and cut-rate drugs. Oblivion sounds better all the time…
White Rabbit will be hopping onto Amazon as a paperback any hour now so get your copy and burrow in with this noir tale of murder and the supernatural.
What is noir? You can Google the term and come up with a bunch of answers, but as librarians will ask you, are you sure you have the right one? I always say I’m a ‘duck test’ sort of person — an out-dated Americanism for recognising ‘communists’ viz. if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck (though Senator McCarthy might have been wise to have looked into more stringent methods).
Most people who like the genre of noir will point to the films with their bleak cityscapes, inky shadows and sudden gun shots. Ida Lupino and Humphrey Bogart frown with worry, Lauren Bacall and Gloria Grahame show their gams, while Farley Granger looks lost. In novels, Patricia Highsmith’s slippery Tom Rippley worms his way into people’s lives while keeping his intentions hidden, or Dashiell Hammet sends the Continental Op to a seedy location and the blood spills red down the walls.
When I think of ‘noir’ I tend to think of women who don’t see the options and men who make bad choices. The very gendered split of that thought is what led me to thinking about Drag Noir and how people might play with that divide. In the noir world, people invest in the gender divisions because it brings them some certainty in an uncertain and dangerous world.
Buddhists say desire is the beginning of suffering: noir is all about the suffering. And the desire — whether it’s for money or sex or something less certain. Fred MacMurray lusting for Barbara Stanwyck: we know the Double Indemnity story so well. But what about Lily Dillon in Jim Thompson’s The Grifters? Especially as embodied by Anjelica Huston in Frears’ film, she’s hungry and restless as a shark, but nothing really fills it for long. Sometimes there’s a hunger that can’t be fed.
Some folks spend their whole lives trying to keep it They carry it with them every step that they take
Till one day they just cut it loose Cut it loose or let it drag ’em down…
A writer of bleakly noirish tales with a bit of grim humour, Graham Wynd can be found in Dundee but would prefer you didn’t come looking. An English professor by day, Wynd grinds out darkly noir prose between trips to the local pub.
The dark sexy noir thriller Extricate by Graham Wynd is out now on Amazon and coming soon on Wizards Tower and Spacewitch
A story of sex, murder and betrayal, Extricate is being released as ebook only as will form part of a collection of Wynd’s stories coming soon from Fox Spirit.
Drag is a broad concept; noir is a fairly narrow one. Drag can be a way of playing with gender or it can be a matter of survival. In the noir world, it can be almost anything: camouflage, deceit, truth — or a skin to be shed at will.
Otto Penzler has always been really strict in his idea of noir:
Look, noir is about losers. The characters in these existential, nihilistic tales are doomed. They may not die, but they probably should, as the life that awaits them is certain to be so ugly, so lost and lonely, that they’d be better off just curling up and getting it over with. And, let’s face it, they deserve it.
Pretty much everyone in a noir story (or film) is driven by greed, lust, jealousy or alienation, a path that inevitably sucks them into a downward spiral from which they cannot escape. They couldn’t find the exit from their personal highway to hell if flashing neon lights pointed to a town named Hope. It is their own lack of morality that blindly drives them to ruin.
I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says, but I think noir ends up being a fairly bleak place — one where any bit of glamour or adopted power can be worth the gamble of discovery. It may even be worth flaunting it.
Can you tell who’s Dressed to Kill?
As RuPaul advises,”When the going gets tough, the tough reinvent.”
That’s what we want for DRAG NOIR: this is a call for stories where glamour meets grit, where everyone’s wearing a disguise (whether they know it or not) and knowing the players takes a lot more than simply reading the score cards. Maybe everyone’s got something to hide, but they’ve got something to reveal, too. Scratch the surface and explore what secrets lie beneath — it’s bound to cost someone…a lot.
Mercedes McCambridge in ‘A Touch of Evil’
An anthology is not a democracy; it’s a benevolent dictatorship. All editors have their tastes or quirks: if you want a clue to my sensibilities, check out my extensive bibliography and of course, read Weird Noir and Noir Carnival.
Stories should be:
Previously unpublished anywhere
Not submitted anywhere else
Length 3-8K
Formatted: Times New Roman, regular, 12 point; 1″ margins; 1 space after full stop; lines spaced 1.5; use paragraph formatting to indent first line not tabs; no header/footer
Identified with a title, your name (and pen name identified as such), working email address on the first page: file name should include your surname & the title
Submitted in RTF format via email to katelaity at gmail with your name, the story title and total word count included in the body of the email; make sure the Subject line includes “Submission: Drag Noir” + your name
Due by March 20, 2014.
We will ask for world-wide print & ebook rights for a year and pay £10 via Paypal plus a copy of the paperback. The fabulous Stephanie Johnson has been persuaded to create another fabulous cover image! We plan to launch the book in July 2014.
Fox Spirit is pleased to announce the release of its first title, a serial killer thriller ‘Requiem in E Sharp’ by South African author Joan De La Haye. ‘Sundays in Pretoria are dangerous for selected women.
A murderer plagued by his childhood, has found a distinctive modus operandi to salve his pathological need to escape the domination of the person who was supposed to cherish him.
As The Bathroom Strangler’s frenzy escalates and the body count mounts, Nico van Staaden, the lead detective on the case, finds himself confronting his own demons as he struggles to solve the murders of the seemingly unconnected victims. The lack of evidence in the sequence of deaths and pressure from his superiors are challenges he must overcome.’
The ebook will be available from 9th July at Amazon and shortly after at Wizards Tower and other outlets.
The book will be made available as a paperback for print on demand later this year.
The release of ‘Requiem in E Sharp’ will be followed later in July by Joan’s post-apocalyptic zombie novella ‘Oasis’. The re-release of her horror novel ‘Shadows’ will be in August.
Also in August Fox Spirit will be releasing its first cross genre ‘Bushy Tales’ anthology ‘Tales of the Nun & Dragon’. This collection features the writing talents of Adrian Tchaikovsky, K.A.Laity, Wayne Simmons, Sarah Cawkwell and many others, with cover art by Vincent Holland-Keen and internal illustrations by Kieran Walsh.
Fox Spirit author Joan De LA Haye will be interviewed on 1485am Radio Today in SA by Michael De Pinna and Carolyn Steyn on Monday 25th June 2012, talking about her books.
You can ‘Tune in’ here and it’s at 2pm in local time which is 1pm GMT.
Joan’s Novel ‘Requiem in E Sharp’ will be Fox Spirit’s first publication in July, with the Oasis release and Shadows re release following shortly.
Yesterday Fox Spirit sealed the deal on publishing an anthology of Weird Noir edited by K.A. Laity, to come out later this year.
Here is K.A. Laity on the concept “The ambience is pure noir but the characters aren’t just your average molls and mugs—the vamps might just be vamps. It’s Patricia Highsmith meets Shirley Jackson or Dashiell Hammett filtered through H. P. Lovecraft. Mad, bad and truly dangerous to know, but irresistible all the same.”
This will be an exciting addition to the 2012 publishing schedule and a wonderfully entertaing read. More to come on this soon.
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