Going Gangbusters

Considering the volume of labor they require, if they’re to be updated and timely in any fashion, blogs demand a great deal of work. Which is why most of them don’t last more than a year or two--just long enough for their authors to burn out and want to do something else. One way to increase longevity is for clusters of writers to get together and produce a single blog. That’s how The Rap Sheet works, and how a variety of other crime-fiction-related Web logs--Contemporary Nomad, First Offenders, Killer Year, The Little Blog of Murder, Murderati, and The Naked Truth About Literature and Life, to name a few--operate. By everybody pitching in, the burden on any individual contributor is reduced, along with the chance of burnout.

Now welcome another, new group blog to the fold: The Outfit. Described as “a collective of Chicago crime writers,” The Outfit is set to debut, formally, on July 10, with contributions from Sara Paretsky, Libby Hellmann, Barbara D’Amato, Michael Allen Dymmoch, Kevin Guilfoile, Marcus Sakey, and Sean Chercover. Paretsky is obviously the best known of this bunch, but since she’s probably also the busiest of these seven novelists, I’m assuming we will see at least as much commentary from her half-dozen co-bloggers in the weeks and months to come.

Chicago, for all of its modern cosmopolitan sophistication, has a wonderful criminal history, as anybody who’s read Richard Lindberg’s 1999 study, Return to the Scene of the Crime: A Guide to Infamous Places in Chicago, Herbert Asbury’s Gem of the Prairie: An Informal History of the Chicago Underworld (1940), or editor Neal Pollack’s Chicago Noir (2005) could certainly tell you. It was there that doctor-turned-hotelier H.H. Holmes (most familiar from Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City) preyed upon young women visitors to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition; there that Al Capone operated his incredibly profitable criminal enterprises; there that bank robber John Dillinger was shot to death by FBI agents after seeing the film Manhattan Melodrama at the Biograph Theater; and also there that “Killer Clown” John Wayne Gacy Jr. raped and murdered dozens of young boys and buried them in the crawl space beneath his house.

Grisly, yes. But a great backdrop for a consortium of crime novelists. With luck, The Outfit will not just talk about the process of writing and publishing, but also about the city of light and darkness, big shoulders and hard cases, that has inspired their fiction.

READ MORE: In an essay for the UK Penguin site, sometime January Magazine critic and persistent books blogger Sarah Weinman (Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind) offers those who would follow in her Web-logging footsteps advice on how to get started, how often to post and what to write about, and the value (if not necessity) of long-term blogging goals.