Short and Not So Damn Sweet

“There are other Webzines that do what we do, but they all muddy their own waters with book reviews, interviews and the such. We do fiction. That’s it ...,” says Todd Robinson, New York bartender, bouncer, and editor of the online “hardcore crime fiction” mag ThugLit, in an interview with Outsideleft. “And nobody is doing stuff like we are. As a writer, I was sick of the available markets being geared towards elderly housewives. I wanted to make a place where writers who share a creative like-mind with me could find a home for their fiction. Also, a lot of the ’zine’s that I’ve seen springing up lately tend to veer into mutual admiration society and are put together by people who can’t get published elsewhere (I recognize a lot of the names from our rejection pile) and just want to put up their own and their friends’ writing. We’ve pissed off some people, but fuck ’em. If it doesn’t qualify, it doesn’t qualify.”

Is it clear that ThugLit is a Webzine with attitude? If not, check out Robinson’s November/December issue, which includes stories by Hana K. Lee (“The Memory of My Legs”), Hugh Lessig (“Mom’s Money, Dad’s Gun”), Marianne Rogoff (“What Was He Thinking?”), and Cristobal Camaras (“A Goat, a Jaguar, and Some Yams”). And after that, go read Outsideleft’s two-part interview with “Big Daddy Thug” Robinson. The first part is essentially devoted to ThugLit, but in the second part he talks about his much-rewritten novel, The Hard Bounce, his publishing travails, and his debts to authors Richard Allen and Andrew Vachss.

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Short crime fiction seems to be busting out all over the Web. Add to your list of sources The Outpost, a new quarterly ’zine whose editor, Damien Gay, promises to introduce us to “a wide-ranging variety of stories written by Australian and New Zealand authors.” The first issue went up in October (though I just noticed it earlier this week), and features tales by Franklin Neil Karmatz (“Tyler”), Breanda Cross (“Artistic License”), Ken Cotterill (“Wright P.I. and the Circus of Death”), and others. Given the growing diversity of Aussie mysterymakers, it’s nice to see their names and work getting around. That cause is helped not only by The Outpost, but also by sites such as the Australian Crime Fiction Database and AustCrime, and by blogs including Gay’s Crime Down Under, Daniel Hatadi’s Down in the Hole, and to a lesser extent, Matilda.

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And now for the bad news: Anthony Neil Smith, one of the founders of Plots with Guns, a formerly popular and influential pulp mag on the Web (founded in 1999), has announced that the PWG archives will disappear after December 11. “So,” he writes in his blog, “take a trip down memory lane and explore our evolution. Experience the excess of Darren Subarton’s ‘Nil Desperandom,’ or [Victor] Gischler’s Christmas story (Santa and hookers?), or the early work of literary monster Scott Wolven. Check out our Big Shot issue, where we conned some of our favorite novelists into giving us a short story (with a drink for payment), and one of those--Eddie Muller’s ‘Wanda Wilcox is Trapped!’ was nominated for an Anthony Award. Read Frederick Zackel’s four-part novella! Sean Doolittle’s ‘Worth’ is here, which eventually grew into his latest novel, The Cleanup.” Of course, there’s more. Much more, when you really start scrolling down through the PWG archives.

If you’ve heard of Plots with Guns, but never looked in on it during it’s too-brief lifetime, now’s your chance to catch up. Consider this your two-week notice. Click here.

READ MORE: “Literary Badasses,” by Patrick Shawn Bagley (Hillbillies and Hitmen); “Blue Murder Christmas from the Grave,” by David Terrenoire (A Dark Planet).