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Now Available! The Debut Issue of Down & Out: The Magazine
Down & Out Books is thrilled to announce that the debut issue of DOWN & OUT: THE MAGAZINE is now available to purchase!
 We know a healthy appetite for well-written short stories exists and we want to help make things better. Our goal with Down & Out: The Magazine is to be a little different than other magazines by standing on the shoulders of the giants that have come before us, or at least tiptoe along the arrows in the backs of the pioneers of modern magazine publishing.
Each issue will feature a story based on a series character like this issue’s brand-new Moe Prager story by Reed Farrel Coleman. If you’re a fan of Moe, who is now retired, you’ll want to read this fantastic story.
We also have new tales by established and well-known writers. This debut issue includes series stories by Eric Beetner, Michael A. Black, Jen Conley, Terrence McCauley, Rick Ollerman, and Thomas Pluck. J. Kingston Pierce, fresh off his former beat from Kirkus Reviews, introduces “Placed in Evidence,” his non-fiction column only to be found here.
Finally, we’ll take a bit of the long road as we answer the question of what happened to crime fiction after Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler moved on from the pulps in “A Few Cents a Word.” This issue we re-introduce Frederick Nebel with the first of his Donahue series, “Rough Justice.” This is a fun one.
For fans of good writing, good literature, and good crime…welcome.
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New in the Down & Out Bookstore This Month
August 4: LES CANNIBALES, a crime novella by DeLeon DeMicoli. Published by Shotgun Honey, an imprint of Down & Out Books.
 During a robbery, Blinky sees police activity down the street. His crew assumes cops have the art gallery surrounded, unaware of their true presence, which is responding to a car accident that has left one man dead. The thieves shoot at responding officers and take hostages. When Detective Reynolds arrives on the scene, he identifies the dead man involved in the car accident. This becomes his main lead to hunt down the thieves’ true identities and work out a peaceful resolution before S.W.A.T moves in.
Each thief has a story explaining why he chose to take the job. Inky is a con artist repaying an old debt, Blinky is a stuntman in need of quick cash, Pinky is an enforcer that’s looking to move up in the ranks and Clyde is a sociopath / art aficionado that loves to steal. When S.W.A.T teams get the “go-ahead” to overtake the gallery, it’s dog-eat-dog as the gunmen plan their escape.
August 7: THE BLACK KACHINA by Jack Getze.
 When a top-secret weapon goes missing on Colonel Maggie Black’s watch, her honor and her career are on the line. There were airmen who said the Air Force’s best female combat pilot would never be the same after losing her arm in Iraq, but state-of-the-art prosthetics have made Maggie better than new, and she’s not about to lose what she battled so hard to regain.
But finding her experimental missile won’t be easy—thanks to the revenge-fueled ambitions of Asdrubal Torres, whose hallucinatory encounter with the Great Spirit challenges him to refill Lake Cahuilla, the ancient inland sea that once covered much of southern California. To fulfill his blessed mission, Torres needs wizardry and weaponry, and the Great Spirit provides both: Magic, in the form of a celebrated shaman’s basket returned to the tribal museum by San Diego reporter Jordan Scott; Might, in the form of Maggie Black’s top-secret weapon that falls from the sky.
From that moment, it’s a race against time for Maggie and Jordan, who together must stop Torres from destroying Hoover Dam—and turning the Colorado River into a tsunami that would kill hundreds of thousands and wipe out the Southwest’s water supply. In the final showdown, it’s Maggie who must disarm the stolen missile’s trigger—one-handed or not—and save the day.
August 14: A BETTER KIND OF HATE: STORIES by Beau Johnson.
 The world has never been perfect. The world has never been all bad. But there has always been evil and men who drink of it. This ends now.
Enter Bishop Rider and people like him who have had enough and are willing to embrace what most will not. The world will never be perfectThe world will never be all bad. It’s the middle we must embrace. This, a better kind of hate.
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Our Featured 99¢ Crime Novel for Early August
From August 1st through 16th, MURDER IN THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE, the second Matt Chance Thriller by Tom Crowley, may be purchased for just 99¢ on Kindle, Nook, iTunes, and Kobo. Also available from the Down & Out Bookstore in both .mobi and .epub formats.
 When Matt Chance is asked to look into what first appears to be a simple but brutal crime, he has no idea of the combination of forces which will send him on the run and threaten his life as well as the lives of those closest to him.
A teenaged street boy is found viciously murdered in the most unlikely of places, his nude body laid out on the bare concrete floor of the slaughterhouse where they kill the pigs. The boy was a student at the muay thai school run by Coach Somchai, who is also Matt’s mentor. Afraid the cops may find the killing easy to dismiss as just another meth crazed killing, Coach Somchai calls on Matt to look into the boy’s death.
Matt finds the boy was drawn into a sex service ring whose clients include international terrorists and those who control them. Most troubling of all, the trail leads Matt to a covert CIA operation and one of the most notorious of CIA operatives, a man Matt has clashed with before in Iraq. The operative’s power in Thailand means Matt’s safety is in question. He must run for his life searching outside of Thailand for allies to help counterbalance the threat and solve the murder.
Winner of the 2015 Bronze Medal from the Military Writers Society of America for Mystery/Thriller.
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This Month's Featured Author: Daniel M. Mendoza
In a continuing series of features from our authors, Daniel M. Mendoza takes a look at what aspiring writers can learn from working-class fiction and noir.
 Fiction should do more than entertain or provide an escape from the reality of the world. Rereading Poe’s review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, Henry James’s “Art of Fiction,” the Gass and Gardner debates of the late seventies, Eric Williamson’s Say It Hot are all enough to convince readers of the intellectual role fiction plays in our lives. What should be of real value in writing contemporary fiction is the author’s willingness to aggressively encounter reality. Authors should try to work from the violence, the despair, the poverty of this country and it is there that they will find the stories of our true America.
Writers should meditate on a very old, and dare I say dangerous tenet of realism: showing things as they actually are—they can learn a lot about this from classic noir and working-class fiction. Noir writers and working-class fiction writers have made the seedy underbelly of our country the centerpiece of their work from the very beginning. Poe—our first detective fiction writer—Melville, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Sherwood Anderson, Hammett, Chandler, and others all made everlasting careers illuminating the dark and often dangerous experiences of the common American.
Continue reading…
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Read Greg Herren's Macavity Award-Nominated Short Story, “Survivor's Guilt”
 Greg Herren, a contributor to and the editor for the Anthony Award-nominated BLOOD ON THE BAYOU: BOUCHERCON ANTHOLOGY 2016, was recently honored with a Macavity Award nomination for his short story “Survivor’s Guilt”, which appeared in the anthology. (The winners of the 2017 Macavity Awards will be announced at the opening ceremonies of Bouchercon in Toronto on Thursday, October 12, 2017.)
We are pleased to reprint “Survivor’s Guilt” here, with his permission.
I’m going to die on this stupid roof.
It wasn’t the first time the thought had run through his mind in the—how long had it been, anyway? Days? Weeks?—however long it had been since he’d climbed up there. It didn’t matter how long it really had been, all that mattered was it felt like it had been an eternity. He’d run out of bottled water—when? Yesterday? Two days ago? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was he was thirsty and hot and he now knew how a lobster felt when dropped in boiling water, how it felt to be boiled or scalded or burned to death.
He was out of water.
Not that the last bottles of water had been much help anyway.
In the hot oven that used to be the attic of the single shotgun house he’d called home for almost twenty years, the water inside the bottles had gotten so damned hot he could have made coffee with it and it tasted like melted plastic, was probably toxic, poisonous in some way. Wasn’t plastic bad for you? He seemed to remember reading that somewhere or hearing it on the television a million years ago when his house wasn’t underwater and there was still air conditioning and cold beer in the fridge instead of this…this purgatory of hot sun and stagnant water and sweat-soaked clothes.
But drinking hot water that tasted like plastic and was probably, maybe, poisonous—that was better than dying of thirst on the hot tiles of this stupid stinking roof. He’d tried to conserve it, space it out, save it, trying to make it last as long as possible because he had no idea when rescue was coming.
If it ever came at all.
He’d been on the roof so long already—how long had it been?
Days? Weeks? Months?
Continue reading…
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