“Le Roi de la Porno” by Charles Rammelkamp

POETRY: “No doubt about it, a real moneymaker…. Of course it was going to burn.”

“’It was raining, but it wouldn’t last’: An Interview with James Kestrel on Five Decembers” by Theresa Rodewald

INTERVIEW: “Noir to me is stylistically very interesting because you have this opportunity to explore very intense emotions and situations but to make it in such a stylized fashion, that is still beautiful. That’s what I’m always striving for….”

“Eight O’Clock Sharp” by James McCrone

FICTION: “What had been a general resentment of the halfway house and its rules was now a searing hatred….”

Corporate Gangsters, Rogue Cops, and Big Heists: on Gangster Noir (Preview)

INTERVIEW: “I realized that ’50s noirs were both more numerous and richer than I had originally imagined…and addressed other subgenres that I felt were essential to understanding midcentury American noir….”

“Swamp Witch Blues” by Jason M. Tucker

FICTION: “Heavy, mud-scented air wafted in from the swamp and was warm enough to build up a sweat just sitting. It made everything a bit more miserable.”

“Leaving Rock Bottom” by Robb T. White

FICTION: “If there was a bottom beneath where I stood in that March wind, I didn’t want to know it.”

“Literary Mixtape: Coming Through in Waves – Crime Fiction Inspired by Pink Floyd” by John Talbird

REVIEW ESSAY: “Pink Floyd were so cerebral. Dark, but in a post-apocalyptic-cum-dystopian sci-fi kind of way, not a crime story way. However, the anthology, edited by crime writer and memoirist T. Fox Dunham, makes a certain kind of twisted sense.”

“Charged with Manslaughter in Her Boyfriend’s Suicide” by Charles Rammelkamp

POETRY: “goading him to take his life, / Lola claimed it was free speech….”

“Femme Fatale Assassins and the Time Clock” by Ken Hall

NONFICTION: “A more recent twist on the general narrative arc [of the hitwoman] places the female assassin as a child, perhaps orphaned, but certainly appropriated by a handler, who is trained from an early age, in a morally perverse adoption scenario, to become the ideal robotic killer…..”