Sunday, December 14, 2014

The Drowned Phenician--Pulp Fiction


My Novelette--The Drowned Phenician            

I like long-ish short stories and I often struggle to keep my work short enough to meet the word limits of modern journals and magazines. Give me the longer range into which many Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler Black Mask stories used to fall. Hammett's novels, Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, and The Dain Curse were originally serialized in four-parts in Black Mask, and some of my favorite Chandler short stories such as "Red Wind," and "Goldfish," fell in that 15,000 to 18,000 word-range too.   
About a year ago I decided to let myself go and write a pulp fiction story of no pre-determined length--however long it came out would be right.  I didn't know what I'd do with it after I wrote it, but I got lucky. J Thompson, the gentleman who runs Dead Guns Press, liked it and offered to publish.
When I say "pulp fiction," I'm thinking of something along the lines of this quote from Raymond Chandler:  “The emotional basis of the standard detective story was and had always been that murder will out and justice will be done. Its technical basis was the relative insignificance of everything except the final denouement. What led up to that was more or less passage work. The denouement would justify everything. The technical basis of the Black Mask type of story on the other hand was that the scene outranked the plot, in the sense that a good plot was one which made good scenes. The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing.”
That fits The Drowned Phenician--to a P. And Dead Guns likes pulp fiction.
Buy it at Create Space: https://www.createspace.com/5098942   

 

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