NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

HARD-HEARTED HANNAHS

We are delighted in this new issue of The Back Alley Webzine to offer six new stories, this time from a collection of some of the finest female hardboiled and noir authors in the country.

For most of its earliest formative years, hardboiled and noir literature was considered to be the domain of male authors. Many of them had led lives of action--such as Dashiell Hammett--and used their life experiences as a literary pool from which they dipped to create their fiction. Even woman protagonists were rare, with sparse exceptions such as Erle Stanley Gardner's Bertha Cool stories, or Dwight Babcock's sex-and-violence-laced Hannah Van Doren tales.

Gloria Fickling and her husband, Forrest, did produce Honey West beginning in the 1950s. This series was almost certainly more serious than the tongue-in-cheek depiction by Anne Francis in the 1960s television series, and may count as early distaff-authored hardboiled.

We might consider that the true turning of the corner came in the 1970s, when Marcia Muller started writing the Sharon McCone series. Marcia Muller probably blazed the trail later trod by such wonderful authors as Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Janet Evanovich (arguably soft-boiled, but still part of the tradition), and Liza Cody. Today, we are lucky to enjoy the works of dozens of marvelously hardboiled and noir female authors such as Vicki Hendricks, S.J. Rozan, Laura Lippman, Megan Abbott, Twist Phelan, Cathi Unsworth, and Christa Faust.

So, here in The Back Alley, we decided for this issue to feature the works of both established female hardboiled and noir authors, such as Derringer Award recipient Patricia Abbott and Edgar Award recipient G. Miki Hayden; and from some exciting new voices you may not have read before, but whom we expect to emerge over the next several years as forces in the genre.

We hope that, after reading this issue, you'll never again even think of using words like "...writes like a girl...". These women can stand up to any author in the market.

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Here at The Back Alley, we're very excited about milestones and the successes of our authors. It's always fun to receive award nominations and wins, and this year is no different. We're extremely pleased to announce two award nominations for stories from the past year.

Claude Lalumière, a Montreal-based author and editor, was nominated for a Spinetingler Award, sponsored by Spinetingler Magazine, for his story She Watches Him Swim, which appeared in The Back Alley's All-Canada issue last December.

Chris F. Holm's story The Big Score, which was published in The Back Alley in the summer of 2008, was nominated for a Short Mystery Fiction Society Derringer Award this spring.

Neither story won the award in its category, but as both a three-time Shamus Award nominee and a two-time Derringer Award winner, I can tell you from personal experience that just being nominated is a thrill and a half. We are very happy to offer our congratulations to these two exceptional authors, and look forward to more award nominations--and wins!--in the future.

 

Rick Helms - Editor

 

Short story Edgar winner G. Miki Hayden (The Maids) is up for a Barry Award at the coming Bouchercon for her story A Killing in Midtown, which was published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Her last book out, The Naked Writer, is a style and composition guide for writers at all levels. Based in New York City, Ms. Hayden teaches at the Writer’s Digest online school and freelances as an editor for other writers. This is her second appearance in The Back Alley, and she's always welcome.

SUSAN FRY has sold short fiction to publications such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Crimewave, and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.  Her stories have also appeared in anthologies, including The Museum of Horrors (winner of the 2002 World Fantasy Award for best anthology).  She’s won the 2004 Phobos Fiction Contest and a first-place prize in the 2001 Writers of the Future Contest.  She was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award in 2005.  She has a B.A. and an M.A. from Stanford University.
 

KATRINA BARNETT is a college student at Loyola Marymount University where she is one year away from obtaining her degree in Screenwriting. She hails from California and Texas sometimes, and once drove from one state to the other with a stuffed beaver strapped to the roof of her car. She's written numerous screenplays, plays, and a host of short stories, but only recently made the decision to seek publication. Back Alley is her first paid fiction publication credit. We expect her to remember that when she collects that Pulitzer in a decade or two.

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When j.a. kazimer isn't reading, she spend her time writing urban fantasies and crime fiction with a dark comic twist. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, she escaped at a young age, and now lives in Denver, Colorado, where she received a master's degree in forensic psychology, and has worked as a PI, bartender, and most recently at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where she apparently specializes in the avoidance of capital letters.

FRANK NORRIS holds a very special place in the history of noir fiction. Despite his relative lack of renown today, around the turn of the twentieth century he was setting the world on fire with  his naturalistic, dark stories of doomed people. 

His greatest contribution, however, came with the first volume of his projected three-volume epic tracing the role of wheat in society, The Octopus. Sadly, his trilogy was left unfinished when he died of complications from appendix surgery in 1901.

Continuing in this issue, we present Part Five of  McTeague.

 

PATRICIA ABBOTT has published more than 60 stories in literary and crime zines. Her story, My Hero, won a Derringer Award last year. She has forthcoming print stories in Between The Dark And The Daylight and Damn Near Dead II and another in Sex, Thugs, And Rock And Roll. She lives and works in Detroit. This is her second story in The Back Alley. We look forward to hosting her a lot in the future, because this woman can write!