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Introduction |
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Five Star/Crime in the City Edition The whole thing started with a simple idea. About ten years ago, Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg saw where the mystery publishing industry was headed (unfortunately, as has come to pass, a fairly long, slow, spiraling decline), and decided to do something about it. They teamed up with Thorndike Press, at the time known mostly for their excellent large-print editions, and added a mystery imprint to their Five Star Publishing line, which had previously only published Western novels. More than a decade later, Five Star Mystery has grown to become the largest line in the imprint, publishing forty-eight mystery, crime, suspense, thriller, and any other novels even closely related to the genre every year. Starting with short story collections, and then moving on almost exclusively to novels, the Five Star Mystery line has published some of the best crime fiction from the top writers in the field. Folks like Lawrence Block, Carole Nelson Douglas, Donald E. Westlake, Carolyn G. Hart, Max Allan Collins, Jeremiah Healy, Nancy Pickard, Ed McBain, Doug Allyn, Brendan DuBois, Ralph McInerny, and others. We’ve also had the pleasure of discovering fresh, new talent in the field, authors like James Patrick Hunt, Julie Hyzy, Michael A. Black, Russ Hall, T. Dawn Richard, Mark Bouton, and many more. Since then the Five Star Mystery line has firmly established itself in the field, both in terms of critical praise and sales, and has published some of the best novels around that might otherwise not have found a home in today’s very crowded marketplace. It’s been a great time so far, and we’re looking forward to doing many more novels in the coming years. So, when Dave Zeltserman (in the interest of full disclosure, Dave’s excellent novel Bad Thoughts was also published by Five Star Mystery) approached me with the idea of doing an all Five Star author-issue of Hardluck Stories, it seemed like the perfect way to mark the line’s first decade in the business. We got the word out to as many folks as we could, and they did not disappoint us. This brings us to the second part of this introduction; the theme, which for this issue was “Crime in the City.” I had a very specific reason for choosing this theme (and it wasn’t simply because the Neil Young song was playing at the time either). There is something about the pulse of a major metropolitan area that sets my heart racing—and part of it is the, shall we say, less-than- attractive areas, filled with “interesting” people going about their lives. On a recent trip to a major city (that shall remain nameless) in America’s heartland, my wife and I decided to take a less-traveled route into downtown, a certain 10th Street. We hadn’t gone three blocks when we got the definite impression that we had made a wrong turn. We hadn’t, but for a few miles we were treated to the wrong side of the tracks, as it were. Now, I’m certainly not saying that all crime happens only in economically depressed neighborhoods; there are plenty of transgressions perpetuated in the skyscrapers and wealthy, gated communities in the cities as well. For that is what a city does, unintentionally or not, is bring people of all kinds together, rich, poor, old, young, good, bad, attractive, repulsive. And when that happens, there’s bound to be some differences of opinion, a disagreement over certain rights, like liberty, safety, and the pursuit of happiness, maybe even an argument that escalates into a matter of life or death. The authors in this issue of Hardluck Stories took that simple theme to heart, and what you’re about to enjoy bring both it and the cities that serve as their various backdrops to life in all their beauty, seediness, grit and glitter—just like the people that live there. We hope you enjoy these very hardluck stories of crime in the city. John Helfers, 2007
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