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.”
