Thrilling!

When I first got into crime fiction, there were three webzines where I landed. The first was Blue Murder, which was running on fumes by then. Then came Plots With Guns, which took “A Walk in the Rain” for its second issue. And there’s The Thrilling Detective Web Site. Thrilling Detective was different in that it focused on PI fiction. For most people, that meant Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, Lew Archer, and Spenser. For a few more, it meant Mannix and Magnum and Kinsey Millhonne. This particular corner of the mystery genre can get pretty derivative and repetitious. There are the tired tropes: Snappy patter, the lone wolf, the psycho sidekick, and so on. But Kevin Burton Smith loves it all, even when he hates it. Back when building web sites meant throwing together a tacky html page on Geocities, Smith went a little further and built an online encyclopedia of all things PI. Today, someone would build a wiki, but Thrilling Detective is old school. The site is huge and in-depth. There’s even an entry for Nick Kepler who, believe it or not, is not the most obscure fictional PI on the site. The site went live in the late 90s, when building web sites was a novelty. From the beginning, Smith and partner in crime Victoria Esposito-Shea offered fiction where some of the more obscure PIs on the site made their debuts. Eventually, Esposito-Shea had to bow out. Smith recruited Gerald So, a Hofstra adjunct professor, poet, and admitted television geek to take over. It was on Gerald’s watch that I was able to get “Roofies” (the prequel to Gypsy’s Kiss) over the transom. Kevin Burton Smith did accept an earlier story, but the revisions proved to be so untenable that I stripped it for parts and rolled it into Second Hand Goods. Other writers who started out around the same time also appeared in Thrilling Detective, including Dave White, Simon Wood, Ray Banks, and Victor Gischler. But alas, Gerald had other projects he wanted to focus on, and fiction proved to be the something that had to give for Kevin to keep the site going. So in 2009, the last Thrilling New Fiction ran, including my own “Love Don’t Mean a Thing.” The site still runs new nonfiction, and Kevin continues to update the never-ending lists of fictional PIs. Of all the zines I dealt with early in my crime fic days, Thrilling Detective has proven to be one of the most enduring.

Nick Kepler Returns

Nick Kepler’s latest adventure has him doing his best Humphrey Bogart impression.  “Love Don’t Mean a Thing” is now live at The Thrilling Detective Web Site with a bunch of other cool stuff, including another story by Robert Petyo (who is in the last issue with me.  So where’s Paul Guyot?  And will Robert and I get another Million Writers nomination?).

GO READ IT NOW!