When Donald Westlake adopted the pseudonym of Richard Stark and wrote the Parker novels, which follow a master thief through a series of bloody heists and betrayals, he pulled off a magic trick. The novels reveal precious little about Parker—not even his full name, much less a detailed family history—and yet he remains a compelling…
Excerpt As hiding places went, you could do worse than the Village on a rainy Tuesday night. The bartenders at McSorley’s Old Ale House, on East 7th Street, liked to point to the dusty wooden chair tied to the ceiling and claim Abraham Lincoln had sat his bony ass in it a hundred years…
Saying goodbye can really suck. Way back in ye olden days of 2017, I wrote a noir novella titled A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps. It featured three central characters: Bill, a sarcastic and luxury-loving conman who wasn’t nearly as smart as he thought he was; Fiona, a hard-driving mob assassin (and Bill’s on-again, off-again…
1. Death sucks. But it’s probably a whole lot better than waking up in an Oklahoma hospital room, plugged into a dozen beeping machines, while a red-cheeked FBI agent screams in your face. Insult to my (serious) injury, it felt like a sadist of a nurse had shoved something very wide and long up my…
The Voice, The Hands, and Rattlesnake Rodeo is the story of Nick Kolakowski. Many of you know Kolakowski from his loveable online persona and his exciting, fast-paced fiction. Unfortunately, that could not be further from the truth. This public face is a mask. The majority of Kolakowski’s crime fiction is autobiographical. Below is the story…
It’s easy to panic when you realize that a five-foot rattlesnake is swimming a few feet away from you. My wife and I had agreed to let a good friend of ours take us on a hike through the wilds of eastern Oregon. The hike itself, we’d been assured as we loaded up the SUV…
Excerpt On the three-hour drive to Boise, we said little, our attention locked on the radio crackling news reports every twenty minutes. No word of famous people disappearing, or shootouts in the woods. During the hunt, we had set part of an abandoned town on fire, and I supposed that smoke from the inferno would…
“COVID-19 promises to alter us all in strange ways. It’s a paradigm-shifting event that divides lives and cultures into a before and after. We will emerge changed, though how those changes will manifest is far from certain. The sensory details of this outbreak—the masks, the faces of doctors and nurses creased with worry and fatigue,…
From a writer’s perspective, the mystery genre is often a rigid one—someone committed a crime that needs solving, and the protagonist will methodically work through the clues to do so. And while that rigidity might seem downright restrictive, it’s also played into the hands of authors who want to introduce outlandish concepts and worlds: the…
In order to transport goods between heavily fortified cities, companies hire convoy escorts. Maxine is the best of these new road warriors: tough, smart, and unbelievably fast. But she also has a secret: She’s the niece of New York’s most notorious outlaw, a man hunted by what’s left of the nation’s law enforcement.
