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INTRODUCTION TO BORDERLAND NOIR “…nobody cared if I died or went to El Paso.” Raymond Chandler tossed off that line in The High Window. Tom Russell, the brilliant songwriter who now lives in El Paso, excerpted that nugget for the sleeve of Borderland, his album that inspired the theme of this installment of Hardluck Stories. James Crumley, the godfather of the flavor of crime fiction I most revere, lifted the same line from Chandler as an epigraph for his novel, The Mexican Tree Duck. Every year, I have to confess I lose a little more love for Chandler. Like another writer represented in this selection of stories, I’ve used short fiction to take some tough shots at Old Ray … that metaphor heaving, dipsomaniacal, anglophile romantic. James Ellroy has famously (and often) asserted that, “Chandler wrote about the kind of man he wanted to be; Hammett wrote about the man that he feared he was.” Here we’re spotlighting writers who wrote in what Ellroy characterized as the Hammett mode. In my call for submissions for this edition, I asserted that the Borderline is more than just a geographic boundary — that it is every bit as much a state of mind. The stories I have selected all evoke a notion of an interior borderline. The men and women in these stories all make their own crossing, some for better, but most for worse, to some other side of themselves. But I was also looking for stories that capture the racial and economic pressures that stoke current border tensions. As I’ve fielded submissions, more news has come about those crazy tunnels built by drug dealers I referenced in the original Borderland Noir submission guidelines. We’ve heard tales of alleged uniformed Mexican soldiers taking shots at American border guards. A lot of poor women are still dying mysteriously, dying badly, in and around Juarez … maybe as many as 300. Maybe many more. Talk of sex cults and snuff films echo across the borderlands. In the heartland of America — my stomping ground — many Mexican immigrants recently burned to death in a packed and squalid apartment before they could be rescued because responding fire and police personnel didn’t speak Spanish. Failure to communicate killed. On that note, I wouldn’t wish an editorial gig like this one on my worst enemy. There are many stories I’ve agonized over … the ones that didn’t make the cut. But eight stories was the limit. If this was a print anthology and we could have gone a dozen, or even 15, we might have done so in high style. I lived with the stories submitted for at least several days, more often several weeks, and in the case of the stories submitted early and that made the final cut, many months. Read them all at least several times. But in the end, the stories that appear here are the ones that grabbed me and held me on first reading. And they still captivate me. I’m not going to sum them up or characterize them — just let you confront them as I did … without preparation, like some treacherous, suddenly found river between here and there. The Tecate is cold and a storm is coming across the desert. The jukebox is grinding on in the corner: Freddy Fender singing “Across the Borderline”…. “A thousand footprints in the sand … reveal the secret no one can define.” But watch these writers try.
— Craig McDonald May, 2006
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