"He's got the hard drinking, hard smoking,
Buy The Crossing here.
Peter Sellers and Kerry J. Schooley continue their critically acclaimed exploration into the humour and terror of noir fiction.
For this third anthology of Canadian crime stories, the editors have uncovered tales from a mix of recognized masters and exciting new authors: Hugh Garner ("Hunky"), Jean Rae Baxter ("A Wanton Disregard"), James Powell ("A Murder Coming"), William Bankier ("Dead Like Dogs"), Fabrizio Napoleone ("Italics"), Vern Smith ("The Green Ghetto"), Barbara Fradkin ("Great Minds"), Leslie Watts ("Crocodile Tears"), Nancy Kilpatrick ("An Eye for an Eye") and more.
Theirs are stories of long overdue payback, whose time is coming sure as winter. And like them, readers will savour their cold-blooded Revenge like a fine cognac, hand-warmed on a crisp northern night.
"Peter Sellers and Kerry Schooley know their noir, and they get the grit, the sighs, the black-and-white style into every paragraph."
Buy Revenge here.
It was the neighbours who introduced recently widowed ex-cop John Swan to the tantalizingly widowed Meg Maloney, your classic blond bombshell. Turns out, it's a match made in purgatory. Swan suspects Meg may have murdered her last husband. So what does sexy Meg want with a fat, middle-aged burnout like Swan?
Together, Maloney and Swan make the strangest detective duo since, well, ever. Darkly humorous, sap is full of shabby characters, sexy encounters and more twists and turns than your small intestine. God help us all if this spins into a series.
Peter Sellers, author of
Scott Phillips, author ofThe Ice Harvest
"A delightfully ribald and funny romp. If this is Canadian noir, then give us more of it..."
"John Swan is another Canadian who kows how to bring the feel of the country to his readers."
"...you couldn't devour this book any faster if it were smothered in melted chocolate."
"The essentials of noir in a distinctively Canadian style...from (Sap's) opening line, 'Every two-bit dick yarn starts with a beautiful woman,' we are in the world of gams, glamour and guns."
"...more of The Big Lebowski than The Big Sleep...more than enough good scenes and snappy exchanges..."
"There's a pair of gay criminals, a delinquent teen who's the granddaughter of a developer and daughter of a gambler seeking custody of her, there's a nasty, dumb cop and a squeegee kid and a rave and dark streets and a few fist-fights - and there's John and Meg, in town for the weekend...oddly beguiling..."
Read Snare, an excerpt from
sap on tour.
Buy sap, a mystery here.
You Used To Know
From the editors of the acclaimed noir anthology ICED comes a scinitillating new kind of valentine - a book about the many ways love can go wrong.
Editors Kerry J. Schooley and Peter Sellers continue their exploration of contemporary noir by gathering a dozen stories from veteran crime writers and emerging, gritty authors. Stories of love misdirected and misplaced. Stories about the passion of obsession and the calculation of deception. Stories of searing jealousy and grinding indifference. Stories to remind us that in a cold, empty landscape, Hard Boiled Love may be the only warmth there is.
Noir fiction by Vern Smith, William Bankier, Stan Rogal, Peter Sellers, Barbara Fradkin, Gregory Ward, John Swan, Jean Rae Baxter, James Powell, Linda Helson, Mike Barnes, Sinclair Ross.
This is a marvellous anthology of short fiction... a book that is must reading for noir fans, especially those who like their mysteries Canadian.
Perhaps tautness is the soul of noir-newcomer Jean Rae Baxter’s “Loss” is a brief but creepily effective tale of cruel, calculated revenge.
Read an excerpt from Buying The Farm,
Jean Rae Baxter's Loss
Hard Boiled Love on tour.
Buy Hard Boiled Love here.
Praise for ICED
Noir fiction by Mike Barnes, Brad Smith, William Bankier, Eric Wright, Peter Sellers, John Swan, Barbara Fradkin, Stan Rogal, James Powell, Mary Jane Maffini, Vern Smith, Eliza Moorhouse, Matthew Firth, Crad Kilodney, Kevin Burton Smith and Matt Hughes. Edited by Kerry J. Schooley and Peter Sellers.
The Mystery Review says:
Quill and Quire says
$19.95 + 7% G.S.T. = $21.35
Read an excerpt from Head Job,
the Rouge Murders
Fast, funny and hard...
Meet John Swan, a former cop who's always done things the hard way. Thrown off the job and losing touch with family, Swan is adrift in a world where everyone, rich and poor alike, scrathes for an edge. You'll want to read more of this character.
Wade Hemsworth, author of Killing Time and
Matthew Firth in Black Cat 115 says
Read Floater, an excerpt from
$14.95 + 7% G.S.T. = $15.99
Chiffon
Short story in a 16 page, saddle-stitched chapbook.
When he discovers Mayor Bob, dead and with his knickers at his knees, in the backstairs of the city's premier gay club, Swan begins an investigation that links the street with the swank.
It is a money-raiser for Kairos Literary Society. $2.00 Cdn. of the purchase price of each copy will be donated to the registered non-profit corporation for the advancement of literary activities in Hamilton, Ontario.
$5.00 + 7% G.S.T. = $5.35
Whistling Past the Graveyard
Stories of bizarre crime and dark fantasy by Peter Sellers.
Peter Robinson,
Kerry J. Schooley says
$18.95 + 7% G.S.T. = $20.28
Read Murdoch's Wife
Fear Is A Killer
Sixteen Stories of Crime and Punishment
Ellery Queen wrote:
Editor Peter Sellers wrote:
$18.95 + 7% G.S.T. = $20.28
A Murder Coming
by James Powell.
Marvin Lachman says James Powell is:
$14.95 + 7% G.S.T. = $16.00
Glue for Breakfast
by Vern Smith.
Jonzun Riley is stumbling through gritty, disaffected city angst, botched survival scams and trashy obsessions.
His roommate skips town to grow sunflowers in the 24-hour sun, while his new girlfriend tries to fix him. The troll living under his house is hell-bent on shooting down the household ghost. A dying friend is finding God and chemicals. And Uncle is face down in the gutter.
$14.95 + 7% G.S.T. = $16.00
1978
by Daniel Jones.
A new music was coming in from London. Johnny was Rotten a while longer, and the Sex Pistols were imploding on their ill-fated U.S. tour. Meanwhile, all the young punks in Toronto were ripping and bashing about like it was minutes to midnight. Teenage Head, the Viletones, and The Diodes provided the best three chords in town. Everything was falling apart...it was 1978.
$15.95 + 7% G.S.T. = $17.07
Burning Ambitions
Not a normal anthology, these stories comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comforted. Fifty stories that must be told in the hang-time of a mushroom cloud.
Featuring Derek McCormack, Crad Kilodney, Daniel Jones, Todd Klinck, Golda Fried, Ruba Nadda, Matthew Firth, Beth Lisick, Vern Smith and John Swan.
Read A Criminal Investigation,
$12.95 + 7% G.S.T. = $13.86
Fresh Meat
by Matthew Firth.
Mark McCawley of Urban Graffiti says:
$12.95 + 7% G.S.T. = $13.86
old reporter gruff that you need to fill Swan's
ex-cop/ private eye story telling."
-James P. McAuliff.
More at www.hideoutpress.ca.
$10.00 + 7% G.S.T. = $10.70
all prices Canadian Dollars
based upon that oldest of human desires:
GETTING EVEN
Globe & Mail (October 30, 2004)
$21.95 + 7% G.S.T. = $23.49
all prices Canadian Dollars
sap, a mystery
Whistling Past the Graveyard says...
"John Swan is not a nice guy. Not a clean guy. Not a polite guy. But he delivers the goods. Sap is hard-edged, cynical and lean as a timber wolf when the deer are gone. If you're looking for a Canadian PI who's been boiled to leather, Swan's your man."
and The Walkaway says...
"Sap is a very funny, very twisted book by and about the very funny, very twisted John Swan, one of the most original and compelling narrators to hit the pages of a pulp in a very long time."
I Love A Mystery (March, 2004)
Mystery Scene (Spring 2004)
Hamilton Magazine (Winter, 2004)
The Globe & Mail (November 22, 2003)
Quill & Quire (September, 2003)
London Free Press (November, 2003)
John Swan's sap, a mystery.
$21.95 + 7% G.S.T. = $23.49
all prices Canadian Dollars
What Love Was All About.
Now There's
HARD BOILED LOVE
Globe and Mail (May 24, 2003)
Quill & Quire (May, 2003)
John Swan's story in Hard Boiled Love
from Hard Boiled Love
was a Wicked Company
selection of the week
November 10-14, 2003.
$21.95 + 7% G.S.T. = $23.49
all prices Canadian Dollars
"colourful stories of...anti-heroes whose nefarious antics blow away the usual image of Canadians as Mr. Nice Guy and Miss Goody Two-Shoes."
ICED authors "are cool, clever, and completely oblivious to the limits of the genre, while showing respect for its conventions (Nathan Whitlock)."
...more
all prices Canadian Dollars
John Swan's story in ICED
The Rouge Murders go down in the bars and streets of the nation's toughest city. These are the stories you're supposed to believe don't happen in Canada.
Both My Legs says:
"John Swan is a distinctly Canadian detective hero. He struggles to pull the truth through familiar obstacles, armed with humble virtues, rendered vulnerable by the soft flanks of charming flaws."
Swan has..."given us a new tragic hero of the same name; a hard-edged detective who prowls Ontario's mean streets, settling scores for a few bucks and restoring his tenuous sanity. The Rouge Murders is, by all accounts, an effective and entertaining work of fiction."
...more
"The Ruby Takedown" in the Rouge Murders
all prices Canadian Dollars
all prices Canadian Dollars
Arthur Ellis Award-winning author, says
Peter Sellers is one of Canada's most entertaining short story writers, and you'll find all the things that make him so good right here in this collection.
Whistling Past the Graveyard has many good stories to choose from. In fact, "Murdoch's Wife" was recently nominated for a Crime Writers' of Canada short fiction award. Those anxious to tread the mean streets of North York needn't wait till then.
...more
all prices Canadian Dollars
from Whistling Past the Graveyard
by William Bankier
No one in the genre writes about music
better than William Bankier.
Welcome to the world of William Bankier. A world where nightmare comes silently, in the dead of night. Where the last act is often deadly.
Where fear is a killer.
all prices Canadian Dollars
The S.J. Perelman of the mystery story...outrageous, hilarious satires, international crime, and surprise endings.
all prices Canadian Dollars
all prices Canadian Dollars
all prices Canadian Dollars
The Anthology of Short Shorts
edited by Debbie James.John Swan's story in Burning Ambitions
all prices Canadian Dollars
A guided tour through an urban menagerie peopled by society's outcasts, truants, and misfits -- adrift in a sea of humanity, putting in time, but cursed from the start. Their only solace is found in booze, casual sex, mysterious rituals, and the mass media. Raw and unpretentious -- Fresh Meat is a must read for anyone who at one time or another found themselves alienated, dispossessed, or marginalized.
all prices Canadian Dollars
More Books
Click on jacket
Readers be warned. The Blue Cheer is a rocket, primed, aimed and ready to fire before you've even cracked the cover. Step aboard page one and Ed Lynskey sparks the jets.
...more from Kerry J. Schooley
Bernie Gunther is back. Philip Kerr's WWII-era cop/detective is on the prowl and run in post-war Germany as Allied authorities hunt, try and hang Nazi war criminals.
...more from Kerry J. Schooley
Noir elbows its way back into the CanLit spotlight with Kenneth J. Harvey's Inside, the tough, rollicking, and romantically doomed story of a man released from prison after being wrongfully convicted of murder. He has served fourteen years.
...more from Kerry J. Schooley
Nobody writing in Canada today catches this disastrous, hilarious fucked up approach to street-level sexuality better than Matthew Firth.
...more from Kerry J. Schooley
Eric Wright wrote that there's more to be learned about human behaviour from Shakespeare as there is in all of modern psychology. Christine Morris, the protagonist in Maureen Jennings' new crime novel Does Your Mother Know? should agree. While Jennings' earlier series were historical mysteries set in Victorian Toronto, Christine is a thoroughly modern forensic psychologist with a degree in English.
...more from Kerry J. Schooley
Michael Blair is back with his second Tom McCall yarn. With any luck (reinforced by publisher Dundurn labeling the series Granville Island Mysteries) mayhem will soon be as familiar to owners of small Vancouver businesses as over-demanding clients and meeting the bi-weekly payroll.
...more from Kerry J. Schooley
George Elliott Clarke develops the story begun in Whyla Falls, of his first cousins, once removed, who slaughtered a friendly cab driver in Fredericton New Brunswick during a robbery that netted approximately $180. The experiences of George and Rufus Hamilton, told in a vivid, rhythmic language, reveal the failure of violence to transcend a world of limited educational and economic opportunity, and the hypocrisy of Canadian multicultural mythology.
Iceberg Slim's life is revealed through a critical literary analysis of his work, what Slim himself deliberately avoided with his legendary street style. The mission is to correct popular misconceptions and take Slim's art seriously. These alone make the book worthwhile.
Domenic Stansberry’s latest is among the finest first-person, noir confessionals since Jim Thompson’s classic The Killer Inside Me.
...more from Kerry J. Schooley
This collection of 13 short stories by some of the new century’s top mystery writers, explores the thematic connection between noir and blues-based musical forms. The book is not exclusively noir, but its dark stories are the best.
...more from Kerry J. Schooley
I don't know where you'd find a baseball bat in Edinburgh, and apparently neither does the author, unless it's by stiffing Cooper on a loan. Kiss Her Goodbye begins as typical tartan noir. Then there's a young suicide.
...more from Kerry J. Schooley
Smith surpasses Elmore Leonard in his use of scenes and humourous dialogue to define characters that range from the mildly eccentric to the truly oddball.
...more from Kerry J. Schooley
Anyone hoping Blair's humour would become an annual winter respite in Lotus Land will have to look elsewhere to beat those February blues. A Hard Winter Rain still goes down on the wet coast, but it is a decidedly harder fall.
...more from Kerry J. Schooley
For true noir fans it's impossible to read too much about Ross Macdonald and the advances he made writing the genre, but if you want to start at the top, Tom Nolan has the definitive biography. More about Macdonald's origins in Puritan Ontario. More about how it affected his writing. More insight into the achievements and tragedies of one of the three most influential voices in the genre.
...a sporran-full of promise for first-time novelist Allan Guthrie.
For a small, limited-edition chapbook, Spray Job shows a lot of spine.
Cottonwood makes it three hits in a row for Scott Phillips, also making it tough to deny that he is among the most engaging and innovative writers of crime fiction today.
You’ll be hard-pressed to find many better contemporary crime novel, and certainly not a more obscure one.
George Pelecanos is losing his edge.
Now, while others will rush to proclaim as much, I'm not saying Something's Down There is Spillane's best. His 1947 debut, I, the Jury, remains one of the finest crime books ever, and a damn tough act to follow. That said, this new one is just as tough to compare to the rest of the catalogue.
Rancorous academic politics, bizarre happenings, shady deals and a valuable lost manuscript brew into a fine mix of characters manoeuvring for power and glory in the second Eric Wright novel featuring Joe Barley. (See also The Kidnapping of Rosie Dawn)
Part-time English instructor and part-time private detective, Barley has been spending weeknights collecting photographic evidence of adultery. Meanwhile, trouble foments at Hambleton College over the selection of a new chairman for the English department. Then Barley stumbles upon the story of a missing manuscript. Toronto takes great pride in remembering Hemingway’s brief residence as a reporter for the Toronto Star. Now it seems he left not only a memory, but also a manuscript, discovered by chance and too quickly vanished.
Gunther Fahnstiel walked away from Ice Harvest with a bag full of money. Here, the semi-cognizant Fahnstiel walks away from his nursing home to find the buried loot, touching off a frantic search by relatives, and his memories of a post-war case when, as a young patrolman with Wichita police, Fahnstiel tried to protect a young woman from her vengeful husband. Phillips' direct prose renders a complex, tightly intertwined, fact-based story with the dark humour and chilling detail characteristic of an established master of the genre.
Structurally similar to Smith's last book one-eyed Jacks, All Hat is a tough, seamless tale about living on the edge, figuratively and literally, of a sprawling urban complexity. Ray Dokes returns from a prison stretch to the horse-racing community working the gaps between sub-divisions west of Toronto. He has debts to pay, and scores to settle. An up-to-date country noir from a first-rate storyteller.
Turns out crime doesn't pay, at least not much once layers of insulating flunkies and corrupt public officials take their cuts. The real con is law-enforcement PR, scare-monger budget increases and appeals for new laws that further disenfranchise the powerless to make policework easier. Wages of Crime is non-fiction, laying out where the money goes, and doesn't go, in a fear-driven world.
That Sleep Of Death
A Favor for Zodiac
Lost Sanity
The Mind Game
Missing: Presumed Dead
Skin Hound (There Are No Words)
Guilty
Undercut
Hands Like Clouds
Death of a Sunday Writer
Men Lie
lost girls
Get Dutch: A Biography of Elmore Leonard
Blue Moon
Why They Kill
One-Eyed Jacks
1978
the smoking book
Whistling Past the Graveyard
The Hearse You Came In On
Manchineel
Browse for
We Like
to buy from Amazon.
The Blue Cheer
by Ed Lynskey
PointBlank Press
ISBN 0-8095-5667-7
The One From The Other
by Philip Kerr
P.G. Putnam's Sons
ISBN 0-399-15299-7
Inside
by Kenneth J. Harvey
Random House Canada
ISBN 0 679 31427 X
Suburban Pornography
& other stories
by Matthew Firth
Anvil Press
ISBN 1 785636 66 9
Does Your Mother Know?
by Maureen Jennings
Dundurn - Castle Street Mystery
ISBN 155002639 9
Overexposed
by Michael Blair
Dundurn - Castle Street Mystery
ISBN 1550025821
George & Rue
by George Elliott Clarke
Harper Collins Publishing Ltd.
ISBN 0 00 225539 1
Iceberg Slim, The Life as Art
by Peter A. Muckley
Dorance Publishing Co., Inc.
ISBN 0805954236
The Confession
by Domenic Stansberry
Hard Case Crime
ISBN 0843953543
Murder and
All That Jazz
edited by Robert J. Randisi
Signet Mystery
ISBN 0451213335
Kiss Her Goodbye
by Allan Guthrie
Hard Case Crime
ISBN 0843953551
Busted Flush
by Brad Smith
Viking Canada
ISBN 0 670 04517 9
A Hard Winter Rain
by Michael Blair
A Castle Street Mystery
The Dundurn Press
ISBN 1 55002 533 3
Ross Macdonald
A Biography
by Tom Nolan
Poisoned Pen Press
ISBN 1 890208 54 X
Two-way Split
by Allan Guthrie
POINTBLANK
ISBN 1 930997 49 3
...more from Kerry J. Schooley
Spray Job
by Harold Hoefle
Black Bile Press
ISBN 0 9680097 7 8
...more from Kerry J. Schooley
Cottonwood
by Scott Phillips
Ballantine Books
ISBN 0 345 46100 2
...more from Kerry J. Schooley
Damaged Goods
by Roland S. Jefferson
Milligan Books
ISBN 1881524930
...more from Vern Smith
Hard Revolution
by George Pelecanos
Little, Brown and Company
from uncorrected proofs
ISBN 0-316-60897-1
...more from Vern Smith
Something's Down There
by Mickey Spillane
Simon & Schuster
from uncorrected proofs
ISBN 0-7432-5146-6
...more from Vern Smith
The Hemingway Caper:
A Joe Barley Mystery
by Eric Wright
A Castle Street Mystery
Dundurn Press 2003
242 pp, ISBN 1-55002-451-5
The Walkaway
by Scott Phillips
Ballantine Books
294 pp, ISBN 0-345-44020-X
All Hat
by Brad Smith
Penguin Canada
Henry Holt & Co. (U.S.)
320 pp, ISBN 0-8050-7217-9
Wages of Crime
by R.T. Naylor
McGill-Queen's University Press
Cornell University Press (U.S.)
336 pp, ISBN 0-7735-2417-7
just for comfort
by Ralph Osborne
Insomniac Press
255 pp, ISBN 1-895837-63-4
review
Doom Fox
by Iceberg Slim
Grove Press
240 pp, ISBN 0-8021-3588-9
review...
The Ice Harvest
by Scott Phillips
Ballantine Books
217 pp, ISBN 0-345-44018-8
review...
A Firing Offense
by George P. Pelecanos
Serpent's Tail
216 pp, ISBN 0-85242-715-9
review...
If Looks Could Kill
by Michael Blair
McClelland and Stewart Ltd.
274 pp, ISBN 0 7710 1127
review...
The Fish Kisser
by James Hawkins
A Castle Street Mystery
440 pp, ISBN 0-88882-249-5
review...
Hard Feelings
by Jason Starr
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
245 pp, ISBN 0-375-72709-4
review...
Iguana Love
by Vicki Hendricks
St. Martin's Minotaur
184 pp, ISBN 0-312-26752-5
review...
The Last Hand
by Eric Wright
Castle Street Mystery
232 pp, ISBN 0-88882-239-1
review...
Mister Jinnah: Securities
by Donald J. Hauka
Castle Street Mystery
455 pp, ISBN 0-88882-231-6
review...
On Cabrini Green
by Charles Shafer
CT Publishing
255 pp, ISBN 1-902002-14-8
review...
The Cooperman Variations
by Howard Engel
Penguin Canada
279 pp, ISBN 0-14-029744-8
review...
The Long Drive Home
by Stan Rogal
Insomniac Press
177 pp, ISBN 1-895837-56-1
review...
Paul's Case
by Lynne Crosbie
Insomniac Press
184 pp, ISBN 1-895837-09-X
review...
the enforcer
by Adrian Humphreys
HarperCollins Canada
280 pp, ISBN 0-00-200016-4
review...
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by Sky Gilbert
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by Mark Zuehlke
by Eric Wright
by David Maxwell
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Four criminal dolls in a half-way house with a pliable social worker.
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