Monday, October 6, 2008

Crime roundup, part 1

Funny, with a journal named Thieves Jargon, you'd think we'd run more crime fiction than we do. I get a share of that coming in, and lots of dungeons and dragons themed stuff, but that's not really where my interests lie. The name Thieves Jargon came from a phrase in Dostoyevsky's prison memoir "House of the Dead" where he's talking about his first night in the gulag and all the convicts were tossing and turning, mumbling "thieves' jargon" in their sleep. Phrase always stuck with me, had it in my head for half a dozen years or so before I started up TJ. Had a class in college where the instructor, a guy named Jeff Parker (see: Ovenman), had us write stories with the idea of putting them online, using whatever mixed media we could. Did a story where people were making up drinks, and one of them was called the Thieves Jargon. Well, that put me on the path I ended up on, and here we are.

Recently, due to the randomness of the eenie-meenie-miney-moe theory I apply to which books I'm going to read, I've been on a nice run of crime fiction. I'd like to put up short reviews of those books over the next week or two, but before that, I'd like to give the crime genre its due. Here are some crime classics from the archives of Thieves Jargon:

"Sadness, Lola" by James Maloney

"Punkjack" by Andy Henion

"The Nameless" by Spencer Dew

"Eyes" by Paul Kavanagh

"The Queen of Snake City" by Amanda Walczewski

"Agent Sex" by Sean Kilpatrick

"Dead Men's Shoes" by Lee Reynoldson

"The Elvis Lighter" by John C. Turner

"Halfway to Denver" by Scott Ford

"A Southern Gentleman Out in the Snow" by Anthony Neil Smith

4 comments:

gustavo.rivera said...

today's poem was awesome.

Anonymous said...

maybe his bio was better. heard the poem before.

Mark said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mark said...

theme song