Ten best noir novels of the 21st century

Eric Beetner has a pretty good list. I've read five (Starr, Phillips, Zeltserman, Rector, Max Phillips), and also two of the ones bubbling under (Megan Abbott and James Sallis).

Megan Abbott interviewing Patti Abbott

I really loved this small item: Megan Abbott interviewing her mother, Patricia Abbott, on their family reading habits, her (Megan's) tuition into crime fiction and lots of other matters. I still have Patricia's first novel, Concrete Angel, to read, but I will in the near future.

True Detective's opening credits

I know this is starting today in the US and also in different streaming sites around the world, but I'll be lagging behind, I know. Just watched these credits today and all I can say is "vow!" Leonard Cohen's song is also very nice, atmospheric and gripping.


True Detective Season 2 Main Titles from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.

Three flash stories by David Terrenoire

Been working my ass off lately, since I was commissioned to a write a non-fiction book in a month. The Spring of 2015 was otherwise a lazy Spring, I got only three books out, one of these being a self-published pamphlety thing. The other two were a reprint of an old erotic old short story by a Finnish writer called Larin-Kyösti and a collection of Reino Helismaa's adventure stories. There's also a recent collection of my stories written as by Jaakko Ensio, with private eye Mikko Jarmo as the hero, but it's only POD and the stories are light-weight fun at best. I have some two books coming still during the Summer, the other being a collection of jokes I edited and the collected works of Mikael X. Messi, my pornographic alter ego. More on this later.

Didn't mean to brag about my work, instead I was going to say a word about this: I just sent a book by David Terrenoire to the printers. It's a small, 16-page collection of his flash stories, called Hyvä naapurusto, after his story "A Family Neighborhood". Two of the stories, "Sacrifice and the ACC" and "The Fire", were earlier published in my crime fiction mag, Isku, but "A Family Neighborhood" hasn't been available in Finnish prior to this. "The Fire" was also published in Kaikki valehtelevat, the collection of the translated short stories that came out in Isku, and "Sacrifice and the ACC" is still coming out in a small book I put together from the stories I ran in Ässä, my flash fiction magazine. (More on that later.)

David Terrenoire is a very good writer whom I'd like to see getting more praise. His only novel Beneath a Panamanian Moon is a nice thriller, but we'd love to see more. He's very good at short lengths also, as these stories prove. Mind you, these stories were first published in the web in now-defunct on-line fiction mags, and I don't think you can find any of them anywhere. I was very happy to send two of the stories to David himself, as he'd lost his files they were contained in. (One of the stories I had only in Finnish translation, which was too bad.)

The cover is by me. I snatched the photograph from an old Finnish arms and ammunition mag I found in the trash bin.

I've got some other weird stuff cooking also. I've got a collection of Finnish aviation stories coming out, with four stories by one Maunu Jorva, about whom I know nothing, except that he wrote four expertly done aviation pulp stories in 1941.