The new issue of Isku out now!

Here's a link to the latest issue of Isku, my crime fiction webzine. Check it out: stories by Harry Shannon, Morris Hershman, Rob Kantner, Tuomas Saloranta, S. J. Hintsala and the Nova winner Tomi Jänkälä! It's a treat, even though I say it myself. And here's also the cover.

Review of the Isku webzine

Paula Arvas reviews the first issue of the electronic Isku here. (In Finnish, of course.) She writes:

Iskuun tutustuminen [kannattaa] aloittaa vaikkapa ottamalla käteen kuppi kahvia ja lukemalla Kevin Wignallin hieno novelli "Kuolema", joka on alunperin ilmestynytEllery Queen's Mystery Magazinessa.

In English:

You get acquainted with Isku best with having a cup of coffee and reading Kevin Wignall's fine short story "A Death" that was originally published in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

The latest issue of my fanzine, Isku

Here's the cover by Timo Ronkainen for the latest issue of my print crime fiction zine, Isku. The cover illo goes for my story, "Joe Novak and the Case of the Science Fiction Writer", and it's purported to be a Vega Books paperback with that title. I'm pretty sure that Vega never published science fiction, but it serves a sort of poetic justice in the story. (If they did, I'd be interested to hear.)

Here are the contents (in Finnish):

Harri Erkki: Kellari (alun perin Vappu-Vippu -lehdessä vuodelta 1980 [!])
Gerald Page: Murhaaja (Planetary Stories -nettilehdestä parin vuoden takaa, veteraanin perinteinen aikamatkustustarina, jossa yllätysloppu)
Eino Liekki: Professori Tähtiniemen hermoklinikka (salaperäisen salanimen tarina Seikkailujen Maailmasta vuodelta 1940)
Kieran Shea: Koko lähtee lomalle (Plots With Guns -nettilehdestä parin vuoden takaa, Shea uusi novellisti; suom. Johanna Vainikainen-Uusitalo)
Juri Nummelin: Joe Novak ja scifi-kirjailijan tapaus (ei varsinaisesti scifi-tarina)

The Best of Isku out

The collection of short stories published originally in Finland's only crime fiction fanzine, Isku, is out. We had a launch party earlier today - okay, it was actually for the sea story book by Veikko Hannuniemi I mentioned earlier, and I got to talk about Isku only briefly.

The book sure feels and looks nice: it's classic paperback size and has only 99 pages. How's that for vintage cheap paperback feel? The cover by Jukka Murtosaari is a delight - you can spot some vintage Finnish pulp and other magazines in the racks, including the real Isku magazine, with the same masthead used in the book and (in black&white) in my fanzine.

The book consists of ten short stories, of which only one, Tarja Sipiläinen's chilling "The Collector", is over 3,000 words. Others are somewhere between 1,000 and 2,500. The best-known writer in the bunch is my friend, Tapani Bagge, with a nice short-short about a loser down on his luck, but aficionados (at least real ones) can recognize names like Petri Hirvonen, Helena Numminen, Petri Salin and Timo Surkka. Others include Teemu Paarlahti, Heikki-Antero Laurila and Sami Myllymäki.

I'm also there, with the first Joe Novak story published in Isku. I read the story earlier today and wasn't entirely satisfied with it (and I found a glaring error in there!), but I guess that's how it always turns out.

Mind you, there's also this, which is the actual first Joe Novak story. I wrote it in the late eighties, while still in school, and published it in a small pamphlet (eight pages, I think, covers included) with the same title (Joe Novak pinteessä in Finnish). It came out retrospectively in 1997. The other stories in the pamphlet had other private eye heroes for which I had developed cool names, like Sam Odessa. In one of the stories Sam Odessa meets the Finnish rocker Mike Monroe who's gone to Amsterdam... [This is a bit of inside joke amongst the Finnish people.]

[Edit: at Todd Mason's proposition I removed the word "pulpish" and replaced it with "cheap paperback". The small number of pages in the book makes one think of a sleazy sex paperback of the sixties. I also added the publishing year of the Joe Novak pamphlet. Now, that's a collector's item. I think the print run was 20 or 25. I seem to remember that I did a reprint two or three years back, but I'm not so sure about that.]

And hey, anyone wants the book, I sell it! Feel free to comment or e-mail me!

Two new books out next Tuesday

Here's the cover by Jukka Murtosaari to a book I've compiled and written the foreword. The book is a collection of Finnish writer Veikko Hannuniemi's sea-faring short stories, starting from 1939 and ending up in the early seventies. Hannuniemi's stories are full of humour and action, but they are not usual adventure stories. As a sea-farer himself, there's also lots of authentic feel to the stories. The book's title translates as "The Great Hunger" which is title of one of the first stories Hannuniemi wrote. The launch party is next Tuesday at the Raisio municipal library - Hannuniemi lived in Raisio from the 1950's on. He died in 1990.

The book is also an entry in my on-going research into the annals of fiction magazine publishing in Finland: all the stories in the book were first published in various magazines, ranging from Kuluttajain Lehti to Seura and Koti-Posti. Suuri jano is also the newest installation in Turbator's series called m.

I've posted my foreword here. It's in Finnish - understandably.

The next Tuesday will also see another book of mine - the collection of my crime fanzine, Isku's best pieces. The book has stories by Tapani Bagge, Helena Numminen, Petri Salin, Petri Hirvonen, Timo Surkka and other writers - including me. (One of my Joe Novak private eye stories.) I don't have the book's cover at hand as yet, but here's the tentative cover I posted a while back.

The best of Isku

To commemorate Isku's tenth issue (which is coming out later this Spring) I compiled a small collection of some of the best original Finnish stories that were published in the magazine, which is the only Finnish crime fanzine there is. The book will come out from Turbator for which I've edited some collections and anthologies and which has focused mainly on short story collections. The book will be of the classic paperback size.

Here's the tentative cover, by who else than Jukka Murtosaari. The picture is supposed to take place in the thirties - there are mock covers of the original Isku magazines, coupled with other Finnish crime pulps and other mags. It's a great cover and I'm really looking forward to seeing this.

(There could be a great, great book with the best of translated stories in Isku, ranging from James Reasoner to Vicki Hendricks and Ed Gorman... we'll see about that.)