Contributors

After a long career as a professional musician, MIKE DENNIS moved from Key West to Las Vegas to become a professional poker player. His first novel, The Take, a noir tale of human desperation, will be published in 2010. His short story Pickup Across The River was published online at A Twist Of Noir, and another story, Block, is now available in the 2009 Wizards of Words Anthology.

MATTHEW LOUKES is 44, married for more than 10 years and lives in North London and is a graduate of the inaugural creative writing MA at Birkbeck. In 1998 he was shortlisted for the CWA/Sunday Times New Crime Writers award. His first novel Estrella Damn, featuring investigator Slim Gunter, was published by Soul Bay Press in 2008. Matthew’s second Slim Gunter novel, GOOSE FLESH, will be out in September 2009. Beyond crime fiction, his interests include cookery and tattooing.

NICK QUANTRILL was born and raised in Hull, an isolated industrial port in East Yorkshire. Never realising he could be a writer, Nick spent most of his twenties shouting and bawling his way around Sunday League football pitches before studying for a degree in Social Policy. Approaching now or never time, Nick started writing crime stories set in and around his home city. The result is ‘Broken Dreams,’ a novel which focuses on Hull’s past and future through the lens of the city’s lost fishing industry. ‘Broken Dreams’ will be published by Caffeine Nights, late 2009.

MIKE KNOWLES studied writing at McMaster University before pursuing a career in education. He became an elementary teacher and currently teaches in Hamilton where he lives with his wife and dog. Darwin's Nightmare, his debut novel, is out now.

Journalist and short story writer MICHAEL A. GONZALES has written for New York magazine and Vibe, and currently blogs at Uptownlife.net. His short fiction has appeared in The Darker Mask edited by Gary Phillips and Chris Chambers, Bronx Biannual edited by Miles Marshall Lewis and the forthcoming Tell Tales IV edited by Monique Roffey and Courttia Newland.

GERARD BRENNAN, 29, lives in Northern Ireland with his wife, Michelle, and their two children, Mya and Jack. He’s working on his third novel while Piranhas languishes in many slushpiles. His first has been put down, sadly. It was for the best. He is also redrafting a screenplay, titled The Point (thanks to NI Screen), finishing off a collection of poetry for children, illustrated by Rachel Law, and plans to tackle another draft of the play co-wrote with his father, Joe Brennan, titled The Sweety Bottle. And he runs a blog dedicated to crime fiction in Northern Ireland and beyond -- www.crimesceneni.blogspot.com. So pass the coffee.
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BRIAN MURPHY, Chicago street and soul, battles the usual suspects and crime tourists (writers who rely on Google for research and life experience –atmosphere) with his own home spun, authentic punk, crime fiction. He publishes in Thuglit.com, Pulp Pusher - UK’s finest Noir and premier thug venue - Off beat Pulp, and when he’s feeling soft and silly, getting in touch with his feminine side, he’s published poetry at Adelle Stripe’s, “Straight From The Fridge,” a London-based, “Brutalists” Publication. He also has an advice column he believes strongly has helped no one, at “Out Of The Gutter” a Guerilla Convict publication. When all's said and done, he’ll be most remembered for his days in the tropics – Columbia and most recently, Costa Rica, where he had previously owned the bar and night spot in Alajuala, fondly, infamously and forever more known as the “Bar Sin Problemas,” The No Problem Bar.
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CAMERON HUGHES is a reviewer and interviewer for CHUD.COM, January Magazine, and Crimespree Magazine. He lives in San Diego.

ROB MCCLURE SMITH is an expatriate Scot who currently resides just south of Chicago, Illinois. He has published fiction in numerous American literary magazines like Chelsea, Confrontation, Fugue and Other Voices, as well as in European magazines like Versal, Barcelona Review, Chapman and Dublin Quarterly. This makes him, he tells people, cosmopolitan. Another excerpt from No Meaner City was recently published in Night Train and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Smith was a previous winner of the Scotsman Orange Short Story Award.
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RAYMOND EMBRACK. Paperback writer, USA.

PATRICK QUINLAN was the youngest child in a big, noisy, New York Irish-American family. Ten minutes late to supper and the food was all gone. Other kids in the neighborhood wanted to become cops, or firemen, or crime kingpins. He wanted to become Jimi Hendrix. At an early age, he became an accomplished and incorrigible liar, eventually finding work that made good use of this talent – journalist, copywriter, political operative, and now novelist. He lives on the coast of Maine with his wife, Joy Scott. SMOKED is his first novel.
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RAY BANKS' first novel The Big Blind was published by PointBlank in 2004. The first novel in the Cal Innes series Saturday’s Child will be published by Polygon in May 2006. He also joins an all-star line-up in Akashic Books' Dublin Noir edited by Ken Bruen. But he really doesn’t like to talk about himself. Especially in the third person.
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DUANE SWIERCZYNSKI is the author of six non-fiction books about vice and crime, including THIS HERE’S A STICK-UP: THE BIG BAD BOOK OF AMERICAN BANK ROBBERY (Alpha, 2002) and THE PERFECT DRINK FOR EVERY OCCASION (Quirk, 2003). He’s worked as an editor at Men’s Health, Details and Philadelphia magazines, and is now editor in chief of the Philadelphia City Paper. Swierczynski is such a crime fiction junkie, he named his first-born son “Parker” in honor of the Richard Stark character. Duane's first crime novel SECRET DEAD MEN will be published later this year by PointBlank Press. Next year sees the publication of his second novel, SMELL THE ROSES, from St Martin's Press. He welcomes all comments; his literary agent is David Hale Smith.
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Derringer award winner DAVID WHITE is an 8th Grade English teacher. His stories have been published in Thrilling Detective, Handheld Crime, Hardluck Stories, Shred Of Evidence, Crime Spree and SHOTS UK. He currently resides in New Jersey.

JAMES R. WINTER hails from Cleveland originally and makes his home in Cincinnati. His wife encourages him to write to keep him away from sharp objects and breakables. 2005's NORTHCOAST SHAKEDOWN was his first novel. The follow-up, SECOND HAND GOODS, is due out from Quiet Storm in March.
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HARRY SHANNON has been an actor, a singer, an Emmy-nominated songwriter, a recording artist in Europe, a music publisher, a film studio executive, an acclaimed author of horror fiction, and a freelance Music Supervisor on films such as Basic Instinct and Universal Soldier. He is currently a counselor in private practice. Shannon's short fiction has appeared in a number of genre magazines, including Cemetery Dance, Horror Garage, City Slab, Futures, Crime Spree, Lenox Avenue and Gothic.net. Shannon's script Dead And Gone was recently filmed by director Yossi Sasson, for Dark Haze Productions. His first Mick Callahan novel, Memorial Day, is also available from Five Star Publishing.

CHARLIE WILLIAMS was born and raised in England, and educated in Wales and France. His short stories have appeared in The Third Alternative, Time Out Neonlit, and other publications. His debut novel - Deadfolk - is out now from Serpent's Tail.

CHARLIE STELLA writes most of his novels extremely fast. He is an opera fanatic and a theatre lover at heart. He relies on dialogue to tell his stories and is currently working on screenplays as well as new novels. After enthusiastic reviews for EDDIE’S WORLD, Carroll & Graf bought JIMMY BENCH-PRESS (Carroll & Graf, December 2002) and CHARLIE OPERA (Carroll & Graf, December 2003). CHEAPSKATES was published by Carroll & Graf in March, 2005. Charlie looks forward to a day when writing and teaching are all he might do to earn a living.

JAY A. GERTZMAN, a native Philadelphian, is a fan of noir crime fiction. He is interested in urban social conditions and the mass entertainment or vice zones which reflected them before Information Age corporate power “upscaling.” He has a book on erotic distribution and prosecution in the 1920s-30s and a website on "Times Square Smut" at http://home.earthlink.net/~jgertzma/BkshopsofTimesSq/index.html

BRYON QUERTERMOUS has been an editor, journalist, teacher and playwright. His first play, a shameless rip-off of The Maltese Falcon, was produced by Buckham Alley Theatre in Flint, Michigan when he was 19 and his short stories have been published in DETECTIVE MYSTERY STORIES and THE WHITEWATER REVIEW. His first novel was shortlisted for the Crime Writer's Association Debut Dagger. He is currently in the creative writing program at Eastern Michigan University.

CS THOMPSON is also the author of A Season of Strange Dreams, featuring occult detective, Jim Rankin, as well as a poetry collection (City at the Edge of Night), a new translation of Baudelaire's classic Flowers of Evil, and Lannaireachd: Gaelic Swordsmanship, a training manual on the use of the Highland broadsword. He is the President of the Cateran Society, an organization devoted to researching and practicing the historic Gaelic martial arts. He is 32 years old, and lives in Portland, Maine.
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WILLIAM STARR MOAKE grew up in Michigan and worked as a newspaper reporter in South Florida for several years. He is the author of three fiction books, two novels and a short story collection all published since 1999. This year Moake won a first-place award from the Society of Professional Journalists for his Honolulu Magazine article about five fishermen lost at sea. When he is not writing, he dabbles in freelance web design and software programming from his home in Hawaii, where he has lived since 1972.

TERRY WHITE is an associate professor at a regional campus of Kent State University in Ashtabula, Ohio, where he was born and raised. He is married to Judy and has three children, his best creative work to date. He has two hardboiled characters: a Chinese-American FBI agent named Annie Cheng and a drunken existentialist P. I. named Thomas Haftmann. Haftmann's most recent appearance is in the March issue of Hardboiled.
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TONY GRIFF was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey and raised in Chicago. He spent several years on the road, coast to coast, on stage crews for rock + roll bands. He continues to get out of town as often as possible.
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PATRICK J. LAMBE lives in the wonderfully corrupt state of New Jersey where he works as a telephone technician and writes crime fiction. He is also an artist whose work has appeared in numerous art shows. He just had an innovative idea: if you can have a casting couch for the movies, why not books? Like most of his innovative ideas he’ll probably forget about this one when he sobers up.
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By day, RICHARD CROSS, disguised as a mild-mannered desk jockey, lives and works in a small market town near Cambridge, England. At night he roams Noir’s jaded streets, looking for a woman like Lauren Braeder – and a damn agent.
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JOHN SWAN’S the Rouge Murders was published to acclaim in 1996 and his stories have been widely anthologized. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where he hosts a web site, www.murderoutthere.com.
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ROBERT D. BENNETT is the author of three novels, Sector-12, Rendezvous 2.2 and Shaft-235. These works were released through Fawcett-Gold Medal, a division of Random House. Rendezvous 2.2 received a stellar review in Publisher’s Weekly. Mr. Bennett is currently putting the final polish on White Slave, the next installment in the Dillon McDonaugh hard-boiled crime series.
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RON MILLER is the illustrator and author of more than thirty books, including six novels. He has won a Hugo Award and the American Institute of Physics Award for Excellence in Science Writing, among many other commendations. He has also created US postage stamps, designed for motion pictures, consulted for Walt Disney Imagineering and provided illustrations (and articles) for publications ranging from National Geographic and Scientific American to Analog and Reader's Digest. His original art hangs in public and private collections worldwide, including the Smithsonian Institution and the Pushkin Gallery.
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MARK T. CONARD is Asst. Professor of Philosophy at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City. In addition to writing fiction, he's the co-editor of The Simpsons and Philosophy and Woody Allen and Philosophy, both published by Open Court Press. After spending most of his adult life in Philadelphia, he now lives in New York with his cat, Mona, and a nasty case of chronic insomnia.
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LANCER KIND grew up on a farm in Montana where he learned to ride a horse at the age of five and shoot varmints by the age of fourteen. In the nineties he lived north of Denver where he studied big city life and ski areas while working for a large high tech firm. Today, Lancer lives in the Pacific Northwest with his lovely wife Shelli and their imaginary rooster Jimmy.
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After graduating from the University of Minnesota, LEE HORSLEY came to England as a Fulbright Scholar to do postgraduate work in English Literature and has lived here ever since (with an English husband and three children, now all in their twenties). She has been at the University of Lancaster since 1974 - currently teaching twentieth-century British and American literature and two specialist crime courses. Over the last fifteen years, she has written two books on literature and politics – Political Fiction and the Historical Imagination (Macmillan, 1990) and Fictions of Power in English Literature 1900-1950 (Longman, 1995) – and more recently The Noir Thriller (Palgrave, 2001). Her current projects include a book on twentieth-century British and American crime fiction for OUP, supported by a Research Leave Award (2003-04) from the AHRB; and another (jointly with her daughter, Katharine) called Fatal Families: Representations of Domesticity in Twentieth-Century Crime Stories (contracted to Greenwood Press). Both of these should be out sometime in 2005-06. Together with Katharine, Lee is editor and webmaster of Crimeculture. Lee is also a co-editor and webmaster of Pulp Originals.
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JASON STARR is the author of Cold Caller, Nothing Personal, Fake I.D., Hard Feelings and Tough Luck. He lives with his wife and daughter in New York City. His new novel Twisted City will be published by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard in May 2004.
Contact Jason via his website.

BILL CRIDER lives in Alvin, Texas. He won the Anthony award for his first mystery novel, Too Late To Die, featuring Sheriff Dan Rhodes. The most recent book in that series is A Romantic Way to Die. Crider and his wife, Judy, won the Anthony for "best short story" in 2002 for Chocolate Moose, a Dan Rhodes story. Crider also writes several other series, one about Truman Smith, a private eye who lives in Galveston, another about a university English teacher named Carl Burns, and one about Sally Good, a community college teacher. The first Truman Smith book, Dead on the Island, was nominated for a Shamus award. Stand-alone novels include The Texas Capitol Murders, and Blood Marks. Crider has also written four children's books, the most recent of which are Mike Gonzo and the Sewer Monster, Mike Gonzo and the Almost Invisible Man, and Mike Gonzo and the UFO Terror, the last of which won the Golden Duck Award for best juvenile science fiction novel of 1998.
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DAVE ZELTSERMAN lives in the Boston area and has had a number of crime stories published both in print and on the web. A new crime story of his will be showing up later this year in Hot Blood 12. His first crime novel In His Shadow, which is scheduled to be translated later this year to Italian by Meridiano Zero, has been called among other things “a noir keeper”, “an impudent triumph”, “a wild ride on the darkest noir side of the street”, and “hard-boiled fiction at its best”. For information concerning Small Crimes, please contact either Dave or his agent, Bob Mecoy.

MICHAEL S. CHONG was born a Scorpio in the Year of the Dog. He still plays carnival games, but less for the prizes than for the spiel. Currently he feeds pigeons in The Hague, inbetween writing for nonprofit. The money's no good, but the birds and words make great companions.
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GARY LOVISI is the editor and publisher of Paperback Parade, the world’s leading magazine on collectable paperbacks of all kinds, published since 1986 and HARDBOILED, the toughest little crime magazine in the world. Samples are available at $10 for the first and $20 for the latter; subscriptions: 4 issues for $35, from: Gryphon Books, PO Box 209, Brooklyn, NY 11228, or see his website: www.gryphonbooks.com
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JOCHEM VANDERSTEEN has been writing all his life. With the Internet he found a chance to share his work with the rest of the world. His main influences include the old guys like Hammett and Chandler as well as newer writers like Harlan Coben and Dennis Lehane. He's also a big fan of alternative rock and comic books, which explain a lot of the pop culture references in his work. His work has appeared in Thrilling Detective, Nefarious, Judas and Hardluck Stories. His first novel White Knight Syndrome is available now!
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RUSSELL JAMES is a unique voice in modern crime writing. A writer's writer, he was called 'something of a cult' by The Times and Ian Rankin dubbed him 'the Godfather of British noir'. There are no detectives in his books, and when the police do appear it is on the sidelines. James concentrates on the criminals, their victims and those caught up in the events. When he started writing novels, he deliberately wrote counter to the spirit of the times - which was sex 'n' shopping and international conspiracy - and instead wrote dark, multi-layered thrillers, rich in character and locale: the kind of books more common from American authors, though Russell James' novels remain emphatically British. Russell James was Chairman of the Crime Writers' Association 2001-2002. His novels include Underground, Daylight, Payback, Slaughter Music, Count Me Out, Oh No, Not My Baby, Painting In The Dark, Pick Any Title, The Annex and the forthcoming No One Gets Hurt.
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J. MICHAEL BLUE has published more than 150 short stories, essays and articles in publications as diverse as Byline, The Flying Island, The Concho River Review, Blue Murder Magazine, Papyrus, Hand-Held Crime, The Timber Creek Review, Literally, The Writer's Journal, Vintage Northwest, Arts Indiana, and Plots With Guns. His short fiction has won awards in a dozen contests. Blue Murder Press published a trade paperback edition of J. Michael’s first novel in August of 2000. New editions of Justified Crimes and A Favor For Zodiac have been reissued under the Mystery Writers of America Presents imprint, along with a collection of short fiction entitled 3 Lady Blues + 12. All three books are available as e-books through Coffee-Cup Press.
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JAMES REASONER has been a professional writer for more than twenty-five years, authoring dozens of novels in a variety of genres and over a hundred short stories. He is best known for the mystery novel Texas Wind, which has achieved legendary status as a collectible paperback. For several years early in his career, he wrote the Mike Shayne novellas in MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE under the famous pseudonym Brett Halliday. Under his own name in recent years he has written a ten-book series of historical novels set during the Civil War and several historical novels about World War II. He lives in Texas with his wife, award-winning mystery novelist L.J. Washburn.
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MILES ARCHER is the pen name of a Pacific Northwest mystery writer. He has accumulated a long list of job titles over the years, mostly because he gets fired a lot (something about his 'attitude'.) He has published short stories in several ezines and occasionally in print, about half of which feature his series private eye, Doug McCool. The second novel in The Adventures of Doug McCool series, The Emerald Triangle, is scheduled for publication in June, '03, by NovelBooks, Inc. Readers' comments are appreciated. (Well, the good ones, anyway).
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TIM WOHLFORTH has had twenty-five short stories accepted for publication in the recent period. His stories have appeared in Futures, Detective Mystery Magazine, Orchard Press, Hand Held Crime, Plots With Guns, Mysterical-e, Without A Clue, Hardluck Stories, and StoryOne. His writings also appear in six anthologies, including Fedora (2001) and Hardbroiled (March 2003.) Another short story will be part of a CD-ROM issued by Mysterical-e. He co-authored the non-fiction book, On The Edge: Political Cults Right and Left, published by M. E. Sharpe (2000). Wohlforth participated in a panel on short mysteries, chaired by Ed Hoch, at Bouchercon. He moderated the short story panel at Left Coast Crime (LCC) in Portland and was on the flash fiction panel at LCC in Pasadena. He is the author of three novels. Dark Savior is a thriller that takes the reader into the underground world of environmental terrorism. Dynamite is based on the 1886 Haymarket Tragedy. No Time To Mourn is a contemporary California noir PI story set on Jack London Square at Oakland's waterfront.
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JAMES LINCOLN WARREN’s first published work appeared in 1974, in the pulp fantasy magazine Fantastic Stories. His character Alan Treviscoe, an 18th century insurance investigator for Lloyd’s of London, regularly appears in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. He received his B.A. in the Humanities from the University of Texas San Antonio in 1979. He lives in Los Angeles and is a member of the Board of Directors for the Southern California Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. He is currently working on a Treviscoe novel.

And those without websites...

JAY JEFF JONES is an American who has lived in Britain for many years. In the US and Canada he worked as a journalist, actor and private investigator’s assistant; in the UK as a commercial writer, art director and producer/director of commercials and video programmes. He currently lives in Dartmouth. He has published stories and poetry in a wide range of magazines, winning a Transatlantic Review erotica award, and was the editor of the late 70s literary magazine New Yorkshire Writing. Several of his plays, including The Lizard King, have had productions in London , New York and Los Angeles.
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Born in Mansfield, UK and baptised in Libya, DAMIEN SEAMAN has vomited orange juice on infamous English football coach Brian Clough and smuggled illegal bacon and booze into Kuwait, his most criminal act to date. His fiction and non-fiction writing has also appeared in Pulp Pusher and Spinetingler and Shots. He is currently between jobs and between countries, working on one of those 'novels' that people talk about so much.
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Born in New York City , JON BASSOFF currently lives in Colorado where he teaches high school English. He has had several short stories published in such crime magazines and e-zines as Crime Spree, Thuglit, Hardluck Stories, and Darkest Before Dawn. He recently completed The Disassembled Man and is seeking a publisher or agent.
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STEPHEN HAWLEY. Born and raised in the Notts-Derby coalfield. History degree at Leicester. Post-graduate work at Newcastle and Northumbria. Currently employed at Sunderland University and living on Tyneside.
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DAVID MANDERSON is a teacher at a college in Scotland. In previous lives he’s been a roadie, a warehouseman and an office clerk. He’s published short stories in anthologies and magazines, and runs regular gigs for writers at a tea-house in the south side of Glasgow. He won a prize for an idea for a novel from the Scottish Arts Council in 2003, and four years later was awarded a Ph.D. for the finished product. It’s his first full-length book.
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DAVID LAURENCE WILSON, who lives in the Tahoe National Forest, is a nonfiction writer who has written hundreds of articles for newspapers and magazines. He was a frequent contributor to the West Coast Review of Books and Book Editor of the Los Angeles Free Press. He was also an editor and contributor to the Close-Up on Film series (Scarecrow Press) and the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Western and Frontier Fiction. He wrote the introduction to the new Stark House Press edition of Harry Whittington's Night For Screaming/Any Woman He Wanted and the forthcoming Gil Brewer double The Three-Way Split/A Devil For O'Shaughnessy (the latter being previously unpublished), and is working on additional volumes of Whittington, W.R. Burnett and Wade Miller. He is also completing a collection of interviews with twenty-five classic U.S. crime writers, a thirty-year effort including interviews with Gault, W. R. Burnett, Richard Sale, Jonathan Latimer and Dorothy Hughes.
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ED LYNSKEY's crime short fiction has appeared in such online venues as HandHeldCrime, Plots With Guns, Judas, The 3rd Degree, Hardluck Stories, The Murder Hole and others. His novel, The Blue Cheer, is now available from PointBlank Press.
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URIEL E. GRIBETZ has lived in and about New York City for his entire life. In 1988, after law school, he took a staff attorney position with The Legal Aid Society Criminal Defense Division in Bronx County. Since 1991 he has been in private practice where he continues to represent indigent persons accused of crimes, as a member of a public defender panel. Over the past 18 years he has represented thousands of people accused of crimes -- from the most heinous of murders to the most petty of crooks. He continues to remain enthralled with the fascinating dialectic between cops, perps, prosecutors, witnesses and defense attorneys. Needless to say, criminal law is never boring. He has written a number of crime novels and stories. He published a story title "Sean's Penance" in Orchard Press Mysteries. He lives in White Plains, New York, with his wife, kids, dog and lizard.
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CHARLES KELLY, a veteran reporter for The Arizona Republic, is doing research for a biography of Dan J. Marlowe. Kelly's first novel, Pay Here, will be published soon by PointBlank Press.
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STEPHEN D. HAFF was born on 21 October 1969 in Fairfax, VA, USA. He has lived in Richmond, VA, Hollywood, CA, Raleigh, NC, Aberdeen, MD, and Killeen, TX. Currently lives with his wife, Chong, in Alexandria, VA. He works as an Operations Research Analyst and has for five years. He has a Master’s Degree in Atmospheric Science and a Bachelor’s in Applied Mathematics. His hobbies include running, role-playing games, rugby and reading virtually anything he can get his hands on. He especially likes Noir Fiction. Some personal favorites include Richard Stark and F. Paul Wilson, creator of “Repair-Man Jack.” He’s published Zine Fiction on the Unknown Armies Website. Stories include “Fire, Water, Burn” and “The Exterminator.”
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GARY CARSON is a California refugee working as an IT monkey for the corporate regime in Reno, Nevada. Lizard Flicks is his first novel. His short story 'Dog Breath' appeared in the Fall 2003 issue of Hardluck Stories. He is working on a second novel, Collision Course, and planning a series of hardboiled crime thrillers set in the Roman Empire.

JOSEPH M. FARIA was born on the island of Sao Miguel, in the Azores. He studied Creative Writing at Roger Williams University. His first book of short stories, From A Distance, was published in the Azores in June 1998 by Nova Grafica, Lda., and a book of poetry, The Way Home, was published in October 2003 by Lit Pot Press, CA. His work has been published in numerous venues, print and on-line. He is also the Contributing Editor of NEO, a literary print journal published in Europe. He lives in Warren, RI.
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PEARCE HANSEN Born in SF in the 50s into a train wreck of a family, the subject under discussion came up in Oakland in the 70s and then traveled widely, misspending his youth careening from one terror-in-retrospect abortive learning experience to the next. Cab driver, bouncer, kick boxer, Marine: all the stereotypical noir writer's breeding grounds apply here. Has seen most of the continents, and is not nearly as dysfunctional as his writing might seem to imply. His debut novel, Street Raised, will be published by PointBlank Press in 2006.
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MEL CARTAGENA was born in New York, raised in Puerto Rico, and currently lives in Massachusetts. His short fiction and nonfiction has been published in a variety of magazines in the United States, Europe and Canada. He has written a couple of screenplays, and wishes to produce one as an independent film this summer (if he gets the money and equipment.) He likes to exercise, listen to music, movies, long, lazy dinners, and writing (of course.)
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JONATHAN L. WOODS is a lawyer by training and trade, with degrees from McGill University, New England School of Law and New York University School of Law. Most recently he held the position of Assistant General Counsel for Nortel Networks. Mr. Woods has traveled widely in Europe, Japan, Mexico and the Caribbean. Presently, he lives in Dallas, Texas with his spouse, the artist Dahlia Woods, and a bichon frise named Hazel. He is at work on a new noir tale set in Mexico.
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JAMES M MCGOWAN's influences are Ed McBain, Ross Macdonald, James Lee Burke, George Pelecanos, Ed Bunker, Ice-T and Michael Collins. He was exposed early to street fighting, hand guns, death from shotguns, suicide and the incipient violence in a working class estate. It affected him greatly. He writes about social, adolescent, family and paramilitary violence (with an Irish setting but transplanted also to Irish cities in the US) and how it influences a child's development. He uses black humour in the writing to ameliorate the intensity of some of the violence and darkness.

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DAVID GOW works as a shop assistant in Edinburgh.
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BRIAN CAIN, 28, lives in California where he pounds a news beat for TV and radio and uses the experience for story ideas (which makes up for the lousy pay). Several of his short stories have appeared in the Printed Poison web zine.
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BRUCE DETTMAN is a San Francisco-based writer whose work has appeared in Military History, True West, Filmfax, Scarlet Street and Emmy. He is also the co-author of "Hoagy" a play on the life of composer Hoagy Carmichael.
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JOHN KNOERLE was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1949. His family migrated to California in the early ‘60’s. John has an eclectic writing history. He started out as a stand up comic in LA, opening for the likes of Jay Leno and Robin Williams. He went on to write several screenplays, including Quiet Fire, which starred Karen Black and Lawrence Hilton Jacobs. He also wrote the stage play The He-Man Woman Hater’s Club, an LA Time’s Critic’s Choice. John also worked as a staff writer for Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion and as fiction editor of Mystery magazine. He moved to Chicago in 1996 with his wife Judie and began his quest to write the great American novel. His first book, “Crystal Meth Cowboys”, was published in 2003 by Blue Steel Press. His novel “The Violin Player” won the 2003 Mayhaven Publishing Fiction Contest and will be published in early 2004. He is currently at work on “Two Jacks”, a crime novel set in Cleveland in 1945.
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FRED DEVECCA is a writer and filmmaker who lives in western Massachussets. He's written extensively on music, movies and baseball and has turned two of his screenplays into movies - the film noir homage Hellhouse Moon and a short film inspired by James Joyce's Ulysses - A Shout From The Streets. He works part-time in a bookstore and runs a funky, classic movie theater. He has a dog named Travis and a cat named Marlowe. Act Of Contrition is his first published fiction.
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JAMES MCKIMMEY was born in Holdrege, Nebraska, in 1923. He grew up in Red Cloud and Omaha. After graduation from Omaha Central High School, he started the study of architecture at the University of Nebraska. World War II interrupted that effort. Following 37 months in the U.S. Army, including 18 month's European overseas duty with the 102nd Infantry Division, he exchanged architecture for writing, married Marty from Indiana, and graduated from the University of San Francisco with a BS in English. It was at USF where he sold his first short story to a “little magazine” called the American Pen. Holding a variety of jobs, he sold stories to magazines ranging from the pulps to the slicks, started to write full time in 1955 and eventually wrote 17 books. He moved to Lake Tahoe in 1961, became a widower in 1994 and married Starr, also a writer, which happily transformed him into an instant father and grandfather to Starr’s family.

STARR E. MCKIMMEY was born in 1933 in Sweetgrass, Montana. Hoping for greener pastures, her father piled his wife Gladys, Starr, and her two brothers and two sisters into a rickety 1940 car to head for Modesto, California. Twenty minutes after she graduated from high school, Starr signed up as a recruit in the U.S. Navy. Stationed at Pearl Harbor, she was crowned Miss Pearl Harbor and met her first husband, George Lewis Epps, trumpeter extraordinary. Following military duty, Starr and Lew settled in Georgia where two sons, Gary and Jerry, were born. In time, Lew got a call to play lead trumpet in the South Shore Room of Harrah’s Lake Tahoe. At Tahoe, Starr’s third son Michael was born. Lew died in 1991. Starr now has five granddaughters. She was a writer for the Tahoe Daily Tribune for five years and recently wrote a facial exercise book, Cheshire Cat Face-Ups: Push-Ups For Your Face. She married James McKimmey in 1994.

ANDREW JAMIESON was born in Derby in December 1977, just in time for breakfast. He discovered a love for storytelling and writing from a young age and read and read and still reads. He is educated to degree level. His favourite colour is midnight-blue. His favourite fruit is the Fuji apple. His favourite author is Barry Gifford. He has written two feature-length screenplays. The first, terrible. The second, slightly less terrible. He is now concentrating on his first novel. It might be terrible.
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MICHAEL ROBISON is an electronics engineer for the U.S. Navy. He lives in southern Indiana with his wife and teenage daughter. They spend summers boating on Lake Monroe.
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BRIAN THORNTON is a veteran of the U.S. Navy, and received his B.A. from Gonzaga University in 1992. Brian earned his M.A. in 19th century American and Tudor-Stuart English History from Eastern Washington University in 1995, and has had articles published in The Pacific Northwest Forum and Columbia: the Magazine of Pacific Northwest History. He lives in Seattle.
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KATRINA MUNRO works as a lowly paid shop assistant in Edinburgh.
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REUBEN WELSH is 22 and is currently studying for an M.A. in Contemporary Literary Studies at Lancaster University.
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CORNELIUS LEHANE has been a college professor, a union organizer, and, for more than a decade, a bartender. After spending most of his life in and around New York City, he now works in Washington, DC, as a labor journalist and lives in a DC suburb with his wife, two sons, and an assortment of pets. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction writing from Columbia University School of the Arts.
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STUART MARK lives beside the Forth bridges at South Queensferry with his wife and two very vocal sons. He has written a number of short stories and will soon complete his first (decent) novel, ‘Paying for It’. Stuart has had articles published in IT Week magazine but has yet to see any of his fiction in print. A fully paid up member of the oppressed IT workers’ community, Stuart’s writing ambitions are simple; to be prolific, preferably outside the confines of his own house.
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DONNA BUCHAN was born in Glasgow, studied in Stirling and taught in London before moving to Edinburgh where she met her husband (the erratic genius that is Allan Guthrie) over the bookshelves of the shop where they both worked. Now working as a legal editor, she teaches literacy to adults and guitar to children in her free time. Her support of her husband’s work derives entirely from the belief that helping him to get published will enable him to buy her diamonds.
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RICHARD A. MOORE is the author of three novels and several short stories published by Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock and Mike Shayne mystery magazines and various anthologies. He debuted in the July 1978 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine as EQ's "First Story" Number 499. His novel Death in the Past was named one of "One Hundred Notable Novels of Detection" by Marv Lachman in his The American Novel of Detection. One of his short stories was selected for Best Horror Stories of the Year Series VIII, edited by Karl Edward Wagner. Growing up in rural Georgia, Moore was hooked on mysteries by paperbacks featuring Mike Shayne, Mike Hammer and anything by John D. MacDonald and Frederic Brown. Paperbacks were 25 cents and on monthly forays to Atlanta used copies were two for a quarter. It was a good time to begin a collection. A former reporter and press secretary, Moore now lives in Alexandria, Virginia and works in Washington, DC for a public relations firm.
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