Minnesota Calling

The group Minnesota Crime Wave is calling all Minnesota-based writers to submit short stories for possible inclusion in Resort to Murder, a crime-fiction anthology being planned for 2007.

This anthology will be published by Nodin Press of Minneapolis, which also published the Crime Wave’s first anthology, 2005’s Silence of the Loons. “We’ll be looking for strong motivation, suspense, and interesting characters,” explains William Kent Krueger, one of the Crime Wave authors.

The stories accepted for publication in Resort to Murder will have been written by a “professionally published” author in any genre who is currently living in Minnesota. Tales should fall between 1,000 and 7,500 words in length, and each story must contain at least one murder and be “set at a real Minnesota resort, although the actual name of the resort may not be used. Authors must tell the Crime Wave which Minnesota resort they intend to use as their setting to avoid duplications.”

The Minnesota Crime Wave consists of Carl Brookins (Old Silver, The Case of the Greedy Lawyers) and Ellen Hart (The Iron Girl, No Reservations Required), as well as Krueger (Mercy Falls, Blood Hollow). Though other authors have banded together to pool their marketing resources, members of the Crime Wave have done a spectacular job of drawing attention to their work, even doing cross-country events in costume to promote their own books, in particular, and crime fiction in general.

You can read more about this new anthology at the Minnesota Crime Wave Web site.