Back Pocket Noir
Yes, buy my books, Part Infinity
I’ve got a wall full of old mass-market pulp paperbacks from the days people liked short novels, not bricks, and they are very precious to me. Most of them have cover prices from a quarter up to a few bucks, but I suppose nowadays with ten, fifteen, twenty dollar price tags, publishers think readers want value for their money. Thus, pad pad pad pad pad those stories, y’all.
Every now and then someone comes along and tries to bring it all back. Small paperbacks! Shorter books! Lurid covers! Yes, we’ve seen the Black Lizard guys give it a shot (before they were bought out by Vintage and converted to the larger trade paperback size), then a couple of sweet titles on L.A.’s notorious Uglytown Press (even their eventual trade size was smaller than most trades), then Hard Case Crime (which, again, ended up switching over to trade paperbacks), and now, the Transatlantic Love Cult at Fahrenheit Press is giving it a go with the Pocket Noir line.
They’ve taken some of their titles and converted them to beautiful smaller books with fresh, bold, colorful covers. Then they took on my Billy Lafitte series (and had to apologize because Hogdoggin’ was much too thick for packets), along with fantastic books from Todd Morr, Jo Perry, and my number one noir hero VIcki Hendricks’ Chez Usher.
You ought to check out Chez Usher. It’s if Poe wrote gothic terror about gay culture in Florida. I swear, it’s amazing.
Anyway…
I’m hoping these Pocket Noirs keep on going. I hope people buy them by the dozen. I’m rooting for them to be a bright spot in indie crime genre trash. And I’d love for new readers to discover my Lafitte books - Yellow Medicine was originally published 15 years ago and is still going strong - as I am working on a fifth one, long-promised and probably very frustratingly delayed. I swear, by the end of 2026, I’m turning the draft in to Fahrenheit.
I’m finding myself wanting to write shorter novels because I like things to move. I’m a pulp hack at heart and don’t want or need vast pages of introspection or what John Gardner called “jazzing around.” I’m also a slow reader, so I’d rather read a couple of shorter novels in a month than plod through one with pages equaling two or three trees worth.
I gots to go. Plenty of pulping to do around here. Cheers.
You’ve nailed my thoughts to a T! I struggle with novels these days and go back to Jim thompson and others when I’m not researching history. I’m still a big fan of Vachss’s Burke novels.