Just Don’t Sell It Short

The summer edition of Spinetingler Magazine has been posted, with “more shorts than even the average woman needs to survive the heat,” according to editor Sandra Ruttan. Included in the contents are book reviews; an interview with Tony Black, author of the forthcoming novel Paying for It; and a profile of the fiction-writing resource The Graveyard Shift. But the body of this latest Spinetingler, Ruttan explains in her Editor’s Note, is given over to very short stories:

Most of these stories have been out there before, courtesy of Tribe’s Flash in the Gutters. Readers will probably remember the Hump the Stump stories that inspired the cover for this issue, as well as the offerings from Patti Abbott, Amra Pajalic and Stephen D. Rogers. There are also new, original stories from Allan Guthrie, Steve Mosby, Tony Black, Brian Lindenmuth, Grant McKenzie, John McFetridge and more. Jam-packed with goodies, this issue serves as a tribute to Tribe, whose contribution to the mystery community couldn’t be measured. No one, single site has been able to match what he did for short fiction, and we raise a glass of (appropriately) shrimp cocktail to him and thank him for all he did.

Again, the full contents can be found here.

Back to the Gutter

We don’t usually run press releases here (far too many of which I’ve seen during my journalism career), but the following message from Sandra Ruttan, editor of Spinetingler Magazine, seems to warrant the widest possible Web distribution. So here goes:

The new issue of Spinetingler Magazine should be available in a few days, and the continuation of Spinetingler is due to the persistence of Brian Lindenmuth and his efforts to persuade me to at least save the Spinetingler archives by moving them to Mystery Bookspot. Ultimately, MBS adopted Spinetingler and provided me with the financial resources needed to increase payments to writers, and technical support to create and upload the issues.

The new issue is, in part, a tribute to Tribe’s Flashing in the Gutters. All the stories are flash pieces or short-short stories, and some of the flash pieces originally appeared in FITG. However, we didn’t note which ones originally appeared on Tribe’s site, because we wanted to show how well the stories have stood up over time, and the caliber of the writing showcased on Tribe’s amazing site.

With Tribe’s blessing and Brian’s continued interest in making sure that important contributions to the genre are not lost to us forever, we’re now seeking permission to post an archive of Flashing in the Gutters from all writers who had work on the site. We do not wish to re-post the stories without consent, and we do expect this to be a time-consuming project, but hopefully by fall an archive of most of the stories will be available at mysterybookspot.com.

All writers can e-mail Brian Lindenmuth (blindenmuth@gmail.com) or Sandra Ruttan (sandraruttan.spinetinglermag@gmail.com) to confirm whether or not their story can be included in the archive.

No sense in letting all that fine writing go to waste, right?