New publisher in the works

A new Finnish publisher announced its first three books just before the holidays. I had something to do with all of them, so I'm a bit obliged to say something about them, even though the books are in Finnish. The new publisher is called Putki Kustannus (never mind the translation, it doesn't make much sense) and it works only via Lulu. The books are print-on-demand, which is still a novelty in the Finnish book industry, but it's a bit cumbersome to make the books in Lulu, since they don't offer Finnish ISBN codes (or any ISBN codes for that matter), so they are a bit invisible and won't automatically be catalogued in the Finnish National Library system.

But on to the books! Remember my 12-hour novel I wrote some years ago? I thought initially I wouldn't publish the book, but when Jukka-Pekka Kervinen e-mailed me about his idea to publish pulp-styled literature in print-on-demand and asked for help, I thought immediately about my manusript. It fits here perfectly, and the story was actually better than I remembered. The book is called Älä soita sinivuokoille, Joe Novak, which translates roughly as "Don't Call the Coppers, Joe Novak" (Novak being the private eye hero of my one previous novella and various short stories).

I also put together a small anthology of crime and horror stories, some of which were previously published, mostly in my fanzines Isku and others. Some of the stories were previously unpublished, though, for example Harri István Mäki's wonderful story about Edgar Allan Poe's relationship with Annabel Lee. The book is called The Last Shot according to Tuomas Saloranta's sleazy story of a revenge falling over a porn dealer. The first line: "Start jerking off."

The third book is Petri Hirvonen's short story collection Kuolevan jumalan yö ("The Night of the Dying God" in English) that I put together from the stories I've published in various mags through years. There are some western stories, a pirate story with horror overtones, some eighties-style action, some revenge stories, all told with energy and a good eye for violent action. Petri is a little-known pulp writer who's done some Finnish Jerry Cotton stories and the FinnWest western series. Putki Kustannus is also putting out his novella Kalmankylväjä ("Deathsower" or some such) that takes place somewhere in the Central America. The body count is massive in just 100 pages. Both Petri's and my book have forewords or afterwords that explain what's going on.

There are other books coming out from Putki Kustannus: a criminous short story collection by Teemu Paarlahti, a collection of my Mikko Jarmo short stories that mix private eye genre with silly alternative history themes, a collection of flash fiction crime stories I ran in my mag, Ässä, and a collection of my reviews and articles on American hardboiled fiction. I've been also working on a small collection of obscure Finnish pulp short stories from the thirties and fourties, but there are some copyright problems I'll have to resolve. There's possibly also a western short story collection coming from Sami Myllymäki.

Here's more in Finnish on my other blog.