The Big Click
March 2012 (Issue 1)
The Big Click is an electronic magazine of crime fiction. We publish bimonthly online and for various e-reader formats. Our mission is to find the best of new crime fiction in a variety of modes—we are especially interested in noir, confessional, weird and “literary” fiction that depict and interrogate crime and social trespass.
The Staff
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief: Jeremiah Tolbert
Associate Editor: Seth Cadin
Editorial Consultant: Nick Mamatas
© 2012 The Big Click.
Cover artwork by Martin Varga.
Ebook design by Clockpunk Studios.
www.thebigclickmag.com
March Editorial
by The Editors
Welcome to the first issue of The Big Click, a new electronic magazine of crime fiction. We hope you find what you’ve been looking for here.
Crime fiction today is dominated by the novel, and the series novel at that. The Internet and the rise of the e-reader has opened up a space for the rebirth of short fiction in all genres, so why not crime? We feel that the short story is still a vibrant and powerful medium for the exploration of plot, characters, and voice, so we’ve asked some of the best writers we know to come up with original crime stories for us.
To kick off The Big Click, we reached out to living legend Ken Bruen and the wonderful new writer Anonymous-9. Tom Piccirilli’s regular column debut with this issue, and we have an interview Pic conducted with Joe R. Lansdale as well. Do check out Lansdale’s Edge of Dark Water, out this month.
We intend to be available on Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, as well as direct through our own store here on the site, with new issues arriving bimonthly. If there are other vendors that you feel we should make The Big Click available through, please let us know. On the website, we will post one new piece of content each week until the entire issue is online for anyone to freely read. We do hope you will consider buying an electronic issue to support our efforts.
—The Editors
Fat Burglar Blues
by Tom Piccirilli
So I’m thinking of robbing my next door neighbor’s house. He’s a cop.
By his own admission he’s a terrible shot. And he’s a jolly cop, with a little paunch and a beaming sweet-guy smile. He’s Officer Norman Rockwell who gets cats out of trees. Not an intimidating fucker with a cop mustache and ashen eyes who you know just loves to beat the shit out of cuffed prisoners with telephone books. Combined yellow and white pages, not just those little DEX directories.
He reads comic books, like me. Still subscribes to them even though I can’t afford to anymore. I’m envious. I burn with jealousy and greed. He smiles and talks about series titles I can no longer follow. The Avengers, X-Men, Daredevil, Batman. It makes me nostalgic. It makes me think of a time when my father used to read to me. It drives me bugshit. A lot of things do these days.
I’m too fat to be a second-story man. I’m not shinnying up drainpipes or easing into tiny shower windows. But his back sliding glass doors, there’s something funky about them. During a barbecue one time his teen daughter accidentally locked everybody outside and the cop just jiggled the pane in its frame until it jumped the track and opened.
There it is. Point of entry.
I know how desperate men think. I’m one of them.
His wife collects silver knick knacks and tea services. Small lightweight stuff a lazy fatass like me can carry easily in a sack over my shoulder. I can pawn them anyplace. Pawnshops require ID, but I’ve learned they’ll let that kind of thing slide if you just play dumb enough. I can play very dumb. It’s not a hard stretch. “My dog ate my wallet.” Nobody gives you too much static. Nobody gives you too much money. The only trick, I suspect, is to wear a hat and keep your face hidden from the cameras in the far corners of the shop.
Since he’s a bad shot, I’m guessing he doesn’t own any guns besides his service pistol. Guns would be where the real money was at. I could sell them on the street to punks of all kinds and really add to the crime rate and downfall of the little town I live in. Everybody else seems to be. Last year a guy dressed as Santa Claus robbed two banks in town. He’s never been caught. If you’re going to wear a Santa Suit and get away with it, then any asshole can get away with anything. Seriously, it’s not even original. Christopher Plummer did it in The Silent Partner. He got shot in the end.
So why have I chosen the cop next door to rob?
Because he’s got benefits and insurance. He’s got job stability. His house is nicer than mine. He’s got central air. I don’t have central air. He’s got an HDTV and streaming Netflix. I don’t think I can climb our fence but I can at least chuck some of his cool shit over into my back yard. Do you think it’s time that I reiterate I’m an envious prick? I think it’s time.
And I don’t really want to invest much energy in my new life as a burglar. I want to put in minimum effort. I don’t even want to think about casing homes for weeks on end, figuring out the homeowners’ schedules, peeking in windows. I don’t want to bother with really rich folks whose homes are wired to independent security forces.
Besides, my neighbor on the other side is a real mountain man-type who owns shotguns and chainsaws. He’s got wild hair and a bushy white beard without a mustache like those crazy Mennonites you’ve read about, whatever the hell they are. I wouldn’t fuck with him.
I could try the guy across the street. He and his family live in a cursed house. Or what had been a cursed house until they actually moved in. Before them, four or five families tried living there, but nobody seemed to be able to make the mortgage, and the bank kept foreclosing. Now this guy’s in there with his wife and son, and they’ve put up new siding and a new fence and they redid the roof. I might give it a whirl except he’s got dogs. Big dogs.
I could make a go of the guy who lives behind me. He rented out the house for a few years before moving back in. He had a job somewhere that fell through. His wife screwed around with real estate. They once laid out this plan to build their own little empire, buying up houses all over the county and selling for big profit. Turned out they couldn’t even sell their own place and had to eventually move back in. His kid once fired a real arrow into my yard, the little bastard. He fires BB guns all weekend long. The BBs zing all around and scare my pets. If I ever invaded his home he might put out my eye.
So no, it’s got to be the jolly cop.
And anyway, more than anything, I want the comics. I really want to find out what’s going on with Captain America since the movie came out. I mean, the guy was dead for a while, and Bucky was pulled out of deep freeze, and then he became Captain America, and now I think Cap is back again, somehow. Maybe he’s a clone. Maybe they went back in time and saved him. I could ask Ed Brubaker, who writes the series. We’re friends. But I get the feeling he’d just say, “Why don’t you just pick an issue up?” And I’m ashamed to say I can’t afford the couple bucks. Because it wouldn’t just be a couple bucks. I couldn’t just stop there. Not when I can lose myself in the stories and the characters that have comforted me since I was four years old. That remind me of my father. That remind me of myself.
Why am I even thinking of going down the road of this new occupation?
It’s likely to have more of a future to it than my current career. I’m a writer. Writers have no health insurance. Well, loser bottom-list writers like me. Last year my wife had a heart attack and the hospital bills left us in tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Bookstores are dying. The printed word is dying. My credit is dying. The publishing field is in turmoil. Publishers pay on time less and less frequently. They pay
weaker rates more and more. Maybe it’s their fault. Maybe it’s yours, maybe it’s mine.
I just read some punk’s Facebook page where he claimed we writers should all be having fun. He writes about bigfeet battling zombies. He has scads of fun. He laughs at his desk like a twelve year old who’s just discovered his dick. If you’re not having fun writing, he claims, you shouldn’t be a writer in the first place.
Words to die by.
I don’t have fun writing. In the moment it’s a painful, gut-wrenching process, satisfying only afterwards, when the thing is finished. And sometimes not so much then.
Officer Baby Face takes a lot of family trips in this big camper parked on the side of his house. He’s taking off again for the holidays. Today he asked me to put out his garbage cans while he and his family are traveling. Of course I said yes. I’m a good neighbor. I’m a friend. I stew, but I don’t hate. I rage, but that’s only against myself. I’m embarrassed, but that’s my own pervasive sense of guilt.
He asked me how the writing is going. I responded, Fine. I always respond “fine,” to everyone, all the time. Other failing writers will understand the lie.
We talked about his kids. We talked about my dogs. We talked about a recent blizzard and how oil and gas prices are going up. We talked about family. He’s going home to California to see some of his. Most of mine are gone, I told him. Another wave of sentimentality hit me and a shiver ran across my shoulders.
Man, do I want to get my hands on his comic books.
I could just reread all of my own. I have over five thousand of them neatly backboarded, bagged, and stored away in lengthy cardboard boxes in my office closet. But I’m going to have to sell them on eBay soon for a song. Their value has fluctuated wildly over the years. Right now it’s complete crap. That’s a real crime. I should reread them at least one more time before I lose them.
I could stack them up around me while I sit at my desk and work on the new book. I need my solace, my protection from the vicious world out there and in here, and the anxiety that constantly eats at me. I turn my envy into bullets and let my protagonists fire away at the cruel, the malicious, the evil. He is righteous.
It’s garbage night.
I pull my trash cans to the curb. I pull Officer Friendly’s cans down his driveway and leave them at the curb. I stand looking at his house, and my other neighbors’ houses, and let the cold wind numb my face. There are lights on in most of these homes. There are faces passing the windows. I wonder, with snow starting to fall, and my ears burning, and my head aching, and my will weak, how many of them want to rob me.
© 2012 Tom Piccirilli.
About Tom Piccirilli
Tom Piccirilli lives in Colorado, where, besides writing, he spends an inordinate amount of time watching trash cult films and reading Gold Medal classic noir and hardboiled novels. He’s a fan of Asian cinema, especially horror movies, bullet ballet, pinky violence, and samurai flicks. He also likes walking his dogs around the neighborhood. Are you starting to get the hint that he doesn’t have a particularly active social life? Well, to heck with you, buddy, yours isn’t much better. Give him any static and he’ll smack you in the mush, dig? Tom also enjoys making new friends. He is the author of twenty novels including The Coldest Mile, The Cold Spot, The Midnight Road, The Dead Letters, Headstone City, and A Choir of Ill Children, all published by Bantam/Random House. He’s won the Bram Stoker and the International Thriller Writers Awards, and he’s been nominated for the Edgar, the World Fantasy Award, and Le Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire. Learn more at: www.thecoldspot.blogspot.com
Talking with Joe Lansdale: Out on the Edge
by Tom Piccirilli
Joe R. Lansdale has been writing riveting novels and stories spanning the suspense, Western, and horror genres for four decades. Frequent themes and elements to his writing include memorably quirky characters, bizarre criminal set-ups, issues of race, and matters of rural deprivation, often all couched in the most brazen humor. He’s noted as a “cult author” but with each new work he garners more and more mainstream and commercial success. Best know as the author of the popular Hap and Leonard series of action-suspense novels, he’s also the winner of the British Fantasy Award, the American Horror Award, the Edgar Award, and eight Bram Stoker Awards. In 2007 the World Horror Convention made him the recipient of the Grand Master Award for his contribution to the field of Horror fiction.
Here, Joe and I discuss his latest novel Edge Of Dark Water, out from Mulholland Books in late March, 2012. The story focuses on the murder of pretty May Lynn, a teen from rural east Texas who dreamt of going to Hollywood and becoming a sensation. Her friends Sue Ellen, Terry, and Jinx decide to honor her by robbing her grave, burning her body, and traveling down the Sabine river on a raft before heading out west to scatter her ashes in the city of movie stars. However, when the kids find a map leading to stolen loot, they’re suddenly on the run from several violent adversaries, including the mythical “Skunk,” a man raised as a beast in the deep woods who will stop at nothing to track and kill his prey.
PIC: Much of your crime and horror work is noted for its occasional excesses into violence, disturbing, and unsettling matters. With a coming-of-age tale like Edge Of Dark Water some folks might think you would curb your impulses towards more over-the-top material but it’s just as dark a narrative with scenes of real chills and bloodletting. Do you ever feel the need to tone down the work?
LANSDALE: I never really think about it in a conscious way. I think each story dictates its own nature. I let the story be the guide. I’ve purposely toned down things when I think I went too far with that particular scene. Not because it was violent, or scary, or even quiet. I changed it or toned it down when I thought I made the wrong choice for the scene, for the kind of story I was trying to tell. I am not married to being violent or being non-violent. It depends on the story, the kind of impact I want to make with the scene, or the overall impact. I have said for years less is often more, but sometimes more is more.
The Edge Of Dark Water is a coming of age tale, but it’s for adults. I think young adults can read it, but it’s not designed for children. If I had written it strictly for Young Adults, I might have geared it in a slightly different way to accommodate the age group more, but that’s about it when it comes to changes of that nature.
PIC: You’ve written other young adult/coming-of-age tales featuring bizarre adventures, going back to the likes of The Magic Wagon and The Boar. But lately with the young Hap Collins story “The Boy Who Became Invisible,” the YA novel All The Earth, Thrown To The Sky, and now Edge you seem to be honing in on this kind of fare. What stirred your need to focus on these themes again recently?
LANSDALE: I think those themes have always been in my work, but I go through waves. I also find that I feel the most comfortable with pure storytelling. The kind of tale told by someone who is relatively innocent, or at least should be, who is just saying this is what happened. First person narration is to me the purest form of storytelling. I’m not saying you can’t tell a good story in third person, or if you’re really clever, second person, or some variation there of. I’ve written in first and third, and I’m written with a bit of experimentation. But what I like best is first person and the feeling that I’m getting the story straight from the horse’s mouth, or someone who got it first hand from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. That makes it seem more real to me. It’s one of the reasons that though I wanted to write early on, when I read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess Of Mars, which was told in first person, I from that point on HAD to write. On some level I almost thought the story might be real. That it might have happened. Such was the power of the first person voice. It led to my reading more and more first person narratives. I read a lot of Burroughs, and the first person tales, of which he wrote many, were always my favorite. I loved Twain’s Huckleberry Finn for just that reason. It seemed real and immediate. Third person is one step removed, but first person, it’s the story teller’s voice. I
always loved it when we sat under a tree in my grandmother’s front yard, and the adults would start telling stories, some of them things they had heard, but often their own adventures, or stories that were told as their own adventures. That came even before Burroughs. But when I read that book, A Princess Of Mars, I was sunk. From that point on all I wanted to do was write, and because of that book, I preferred first person narration. It’s another reason I latched onto private eye fiction, because so much of it was told in first person.
There were some great third person books in that field, of course. The Maltese Falcon comes to mind, but I always preferred Chandler, not only because he was a wonderful writer, but because he told his Marlowe stories in first person. To Kill A Mockingbird sealed the deal for me. I was introduced to the book by the film. The little bit of first person narration in the film hooked me as well, and when I read the book I realized what could really be done with first person. And the fact that it was a young person telling the story, and many of the things the character talked about were things I could relate to in my life, directly, or indirectly, I was even more locked-in to preferring that kind of storytelling. Now, after all this, my next novel may be in third person. But the point I’m making here is first person narration is a favorite of mine, and when it involves someone coming of age, I’m more likely to be sucked in.
PIC: Will we see more tales of young Hap and Leonard?
LANSDALE: Yes. There is a new one, a novella, titled Dead Aim that I’m finishing up. It will be turned in to Subterranean Press this coming year. Beyond that, I can’t say. As for novels, I think there will be more. I also have some film business involving them. We’ll see how that turns out.
PIC: How about your own childhood? Were you an adventurous kid searching for lost treasure? Did you ever run into any Injun Joe, Goat-man, or Skunk-like characters?
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