The Big Click: May 2012 (Issue 2)

by The Big Click

  The Big Click

  May 2012 (Issue 2)

  The Big Click is an electronic magazine of crime fiction. We publish bimonthly online and for various e-reader formats. Our mission is to find the best of new crime fiction in a variety of modes-we are especially interested in noir, confessional, weird and “literary” fiction that depict and interrogate crime and social trespass.

  The Staff

  Publisher and Editor-in-Chief: Jeremiah Tolbert

  Associate Editor: Seth Cadin

  Editorial Consultant: Nick Mamatas

  © 2012 The Big Click.

  Cover artwork by Timo Eichenhorst .

  Ebook design by Clockpunk Studios.

  www.thebigclickmag.com

  May Editorial

  by The Editors

  It’s difficult to talk about Dan Fante without at least first mentioning his father, John Fante. John Fante is now most famous for his novel Ask The Dust, but he languished in obscurity for decades until championed by Charles Bukowski. Dan Fante followed in his father’s footsteps as a writer, and in Bukowski’s as a chronicler of the alcoholic underworld. Fante’s work always involved crime—it would necessarily have to, given the excesses of his semi-autobiographical characters—but was more correctly understood as confessional fiction. With the publication of his memoir, Fante, Dan has vanquished the demons and embraced the art of crime fiction. Naturally, some of his concerns won’t be changing, as the excerpt we’re pleased to have from his forthcoming novel Point Doom demonstrates…

  We’re also thrilled to offer “The Man Who Loved Birds” from Mar Preston, a new writer who has self-published two mystery novels via CreateSpace. Preston was introduced to us by our friend Anonymous-9 (see “Triangulation” from the March 2012 issue) and is a great find. Often self-publication tells us that the author isn’t quite ready for a real publisher; in this case we think the problem is that real publishers aren’t quite ready for Mar Preston.

  Speaking of publishing, Tom Piccirilli is back with his latest column, and in it he lets us know just what it’s like to be part of a major publisher’s midlist these days. Like our cover photo hints, it ain’t pretty.

  If this is your first time with us, you can now buy the eBook of issue one for only $1. Head on over to the shop and buy a copy.

  We hope you enjoy this issue of The Big Click, and thank you for buying our ebook edition. A note to those who asked about subscriptions: Basically, we have to sell a certain number of copies consistently over the course of a few issues to convince ebook retailers to give us a subscription line, so the best thing to do is to buy issues as they come out, and to encourage your friends to do so as well. Next issue, we have great stories from underground crime legend Jim Nisbet (Lethal Injection, Dark Companion) and dark suspense author Wayne Allen Sallee. Till then, keep clickin’!

  —The Editors

  The Mermaid’s Melody

  by Tom Piccirilli

  A few hours ago I finished off the second draft of my next novel and sent it to my new editor at Bantam/Random House. My previous editor, whom I’d worked together with on eight books, recently left to pursue her dream of becoming a freelance editor scratching out a living. My wise counsel and admonitions fell on ears as deaf as Easter Island stone. She wished to be free of the shackles of 401K plans, health benefits, and weekly paychecks. She sought the boundless freedom of being forced to grind out every penny earned just like a freelance writer does. Via con Dios, little butterfly.

  My new editor is a starmaker, handler of many of the world’s bestselling authors, champion of overlooked titles that start off with rejection and soon become blockbuster hits. Her association can only help where publicity, promotion, and notice is concerned. By all accounts she’s a first-rate editor too, who can only make the work inherently stronger.

  The recently completed novel The Last Whisper in the Dark is a follow-up to The Last Kind Words, due out from Bantam this spring. LKW will be my first hardcover release from a major NY publisher. It’s garnered terrific blurbs and some nice buzz. I’m hearing from certain corners that it is my “breakthrough book.” For those not in the biz, a “breakthrough book” is a mythical creature not unlike the mermaid. It is occasionally seen from afar by dehydrated Italian sailors on the verge of madness. Hunting for it may leave you smashed upon the rocks, yet few of us can resist its haunting siren song.

  After twenty years in the midlist wasteland I should know better, but I’m beginning to get excited. My long-dead heart is fluttering, and I feel a sluggish ebb of blood. I’m starting to dream again about major sales, significant reviews, cross-country book tours, paying down my heaping credit debt. Such dreams are dangerous for a midlist mook. A kernel of optimism can grow at an alarming rate. It can turn into hopefulness without much nudging at all. You’ve always got to be aware, my friends. You’ve got to keep your exuberance in check. Make your blue cornflower eyes brown.

  There may be a time to do the Snoopy dance of joy, but that time isn’t now. I’ve been down the road too many times before. So, probably, have you, if you’ve been writing for any length of time. You’ve had nibbles from Hollywood. You’ve been told beaucoup bucks were about to fall out of the sky into your waiting arms. You’ve let your imagination run away with you because that’s what you do. That’s how you spend your time. You live inside your head. You can already see yourself sitting poolside in Beverly Hills, drinking top shelf brandy. You don’t like brandy but for the purpose of this visual metaphor you’re drinking brandy. You know exactly what you’ll say when Scorsese phones. You call him Marty. He’s a paisano. He promises to ship you a box of cannoli straight from Sicily.

  In an effort not to let my vivid fantasy life run away with me I usually do the thing I am most comfortable with. I rip out my own guts.

  I turn up the heat of my self-doubt. I prod my painful memories. I remember the times I’ve been lied to. I recall the broken promises, the wasted efforts, the disappointing pitch meetings, the boffo West Coast execs who wined and dined me and then flash-burned my number. I make note of all the lost time. I stare in the mirror and rediscover my scars. This is what grounds me. I jam candle wax in my ears to combat the mermaid’s melody.

  My joy has wavered throughout my life. My confidence has occasionally abandoned me. My many chances have grown leaner year by year. But my need to write has never left me. That need, I long ago realized, comes from pain. That’s not a woe-is-me whining. That’s not a pimp for applause. It’s a simple statement of fact. I picked up a pen to discover how to learn to live with early loss and trauma. I pecked and plucked at my first typewriter to relate anger and pain. I’m a moody fucker and always have been. I am drawn to the dark. I am noir. I smell lilacs on an ill wind. I find safe harbor in sorrow.

  My breakout book may or may not ever come. It might be The Last Kind Words or it might be the next novel following or the stars may never align correctly. The cosmic winds will still blow. You’ll get your chance. You might hit big on the slots with the first pull or you might turn grey looking for three lemons. Hold tight to the process. The work will get you through the fire. The reasons you do the work will always be there even if you don’t remember them anymore. Your path is a lonely one. You are set apart form others. You have to learn to love the loneliness. Your faith will be tested in the publishing business, count on it. That’s the nature of faith. If it’s never challenged then it’s not really faith at all.

  Now please excuse me, I’ve got to take this call.

  Marty on line two.

  © 2012 Tom Piccirilli.

  About Tom Piccirilli

  Tom Piccirilli lives in Colorado, where, besides writing, he spends an inordinate amount of t
ime watching trash cult films and reading Gold Medal classic noir and hardboiled novels. He’s a fan of Asian cinema, especially horror movies, bullet ballet, pinky violence, and samurai flicks. He also likes walking his dogs around the neighborhood. Are you starting to get the hint that he doesn’t have a particularly active social life? Well, to heck with you, buddy, yours isn’t much better. Give him any static and he’ll smack you in the mush, dig? Tom also enjoys making new friends. He is the author of twenty novels including The Coldest Mile, The Cold Spot, The Midnight Road, The Dead Letters, Headstone City, and A Choir of Ill Children, all published by Bantam/Random House. He’s won the Bram Stoker and the International Thriller Writers Awards, and he’s been nominated for the Edgar, the World Fantasy Award, and Le Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire. Learn more at: www.thecoldspot.blogspot.com

  Point Doom

  by Dan Fante

  Sometimes I think that if everyone was dead around me I might be able to hear what my own mind is screaming.

  It was ten minutes before the start of the meeting. I was sitting in the corner, at a right angle to the speaker’s podium, far enough away so I could be anonymous and not be noticed. The daily Point Dume (pronounced DOOM) Malibu AA meeting has about fifty chairs. It is held in a converted grammar school classroom that once contained local ten-year-olds but now goes by the title Community Center, Room 5.

  The noon meetings almost always have several dozen attendees.

  Most of the people who attend are locals—rich and jobless or rich and shaking one out. Some are addicts. There are also a good number of court-card alkies who, like me, were sentenced by the judge to come here for their DUIs. The swank recovery homes in Malibu bus in another dozen or so of their seventy-grand-a-month clients.

  I’d met the secretary of the meeting several times before. Albert’s a former alkie/dope fiend advertising guy who’d been in a few rehabs himself but now had five years of recovery and apparently considers himself to be some kind of AA guru hotshot. These days Albert is a counselor at The Dume Treatment Center a couple of miles away in Ramirez Canyon. He wears a tie and jacket when he does his meeting secretary act.

  Albert is a pretentious asshole. His fifty-year-old face reveals a recent jowl-tuck and he smiles too much with perfect capped teeth and always seems to pay particular attention to the newcomer girls half his age and never misses an opportunity to introduce himself and pass along a few worn-out snot-filled one-liners about recovery while he ogles their tits and takes down their phone number to later make what in AA people term, “a support call.” Somehow Albert is less gregarious with the one or two transient, shit-in-your-pants locals and guys like me: the ones trying to get through the day without drinking or blowing their brains out.

  * * *

  A pretty girl in her twenties, dressed in dangly earrings and cutoff jeans and a short white top that exposed her tummy, came walking down the aisle toward my row in the corner, holding a Styrofoam cup filled with the meeting’s free coffee. She was about to sit down in a seat in the row in front of me when she paused to get my attention.

  “Hi,” she says, holding out her hand for me to shake, “My name’s Meggie. I’ve seen you here a few times. You’re here a lot, right? Like almost every day. I saw you take a one-year birthday cake a couple of weeks ago at the Saturday night meeting.”

  “JD,” I said back, shaking the hand with the red nail polish. “Yeah, I’m here a lot.”

  “Congratulations on your one-year cake, JD. I mean that’s pretty amazing. It made me think that if you can do it then I can do it too.”

  “One day at a time, right?” says I, parroting a recovery puke one liner.

  “I’ll have forty-five days tomorrow.”

  “Hey, good for you,” my yap says, wanting to sound positive, like I gave a rat’s ass whether Meggie drinks again or smokes more crack, or not.

  “Claude, my boyfriend, has ten days. He’s French. He’s a film composer. He’s pretty squirrely right now and he sort-of refuses to get a sponsor. Hey, would you do me a favor and talk to him, JD? Claude won’t listen to me but he might listen to you.”

  “Sure. After the meeting. Whatever.”

  Then Meggie gives me her twenty-peso grin. “Thanks JD,” she says. “You’re a real sweetie.”

  Then, down the aisle, comes Meggie’s old man Claude, a short, long-haired Frenchy, wearing an expensive sports jacket, jeans, and T-shirt. Malibu casual. He’s carrying his coffee cup in one hand and two big, free, chocolate doughnuts in the other.

  Claude plants his dapper forty-five-year-old Froggy ass in the chair next to Meggie.

  Next to Claude are three girls in their twenties, all wearing hoodies. They’re giggling and acting like morons—pointing at the nearby celebrity people in other seats and whispering. Spoiled Malibu brats.

  After over a year off booze I am still disgusted by most people, especially the has-been actors and ex-rock stars who live nearby in their five-million-dollar châteaus above the cliff overlooking Point Dume.

  I am forty-four years old, what in AA they call a re-tread because I have been in and out of sobriety twice over the last few years. When I am at an AA meeting I try to act like a concerned participant when I meet people, but I’m not. It’s just that—an act. I don’t belong in Malibu and I don’t like Malibu AA. My dead father, James (Jimmy) Fiorella, wrote movies for forty years in Los Angeles as a contract screenwriter. He was a transplant from the Little Italy section of New York City and moved West to Los Angeles trying to become a newspaper columnist. A few years later, by mistake and by accident, he got into writing screenplays. Pop’s street name as a kid in lower Manhattan was Jimmy Flowers. In Hollywood he became a script doctor, re-writing movies that had already been re-written and further ruined. Pops almost always never got a screen credit and didn’t want it. He hated every minute of it. He moved us here to Point Dume thirty-five years ago when the place was a desolate, wind-blown plateau above the Pacific Ocean. Malibu was not pronounced Malibooooo in those days; it wasn’t dripping with glitz and two hundred thousand dollar sports cars and big names. As a kid I could stand on our roof and not see another house for miles. Pop wanted to live as far away from the movie business as possible, so he picked Point Dume because no one lived there. Jimmy Fiorella had contempt for the film industry but he always cashed the large biweekly pay checks.

  As it turned out, the joke was eventually on my dad because, somehow, with the passing of time, people like Barbara Streisand and Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn and Bob Dylan and Cher and Nick Nolte and Anthony Hopkins and Lewis Gossett and Robert Downey Jr. and Julia Roberts and a hundred other glitzy Hollywood transplants began to build their palazzos nearby. Jimmy had never wanted to be a trendsetter. In the years before his death, as he witnessed Malibu becoming Maliboooo and Point Dume becoming Point Glitz, his new dream was to cash out, sell everything, and evacuate his family to the Abruzzo mountains in central Italy. On his deathbed he held my hand and mumbled to me in Italian: “You’re a good kid, JD. I love you. You’ll figure things out someday.”

  * * *

  Nothing important in my life has changed since I returned here to my mom’s house three months ago, eight years after my old man’s death. I arrived with all that I owned in three green plastic garbage bags, my mind still carving more of me up and killing more of me off every day.

  The last, and hopefully final, shitstorm started eighteen months ago. Battling a perpetual headache, I’d gone on a three-week drunk, had a fight or two, and supposedly, underline supposedly, tried to off myself. During this time I had failed to show up at my Marina del Rey business, a high-end car rental agency that supplies the over-rich population of Los Angeles with Hummers and Ferraris and Dodge Vipers by the hour and by the day. A good business too—until I blew it.

  My serious drinking and the headaches began five years ago, after an incident in an apartment in the East Bronx when I was a detective. From that day to this I still have the headaches. The booze was the only thing that eve
r helped control them. But now I don’t have the booze—just the headaches. They’re less severe but they’re not gone.

  I don’t remember much about the binge that caused me to lose my rental car business but it resulted in me, thanks to a clause in my partnership contract, having to pay the tab by signing over ownership of my company to my two acting, shit-for-brains minor partners. After I got arrested these guys called our mutual attorney and, in a conference call, decided it was time to clean my clock, financially.

  Knowing they had me by the short hairs I played dead and rolled over. In the end, I sold my 51 percent in LA Dream Machine, the company I had started, for pennies on the dollar and came away with $30,000 for a business that should have netted me at least three hundred grand.

  I hadn’t had thirty K in cash in my pocket, free and clear, in quite some time so I decided on a road trip and ended up back in New York City, where I’d lived before coming to LA, to see my son, Jimmy.

  Once there I made a few strategic and spontaneous investments: mainly hookers and cocaine and limo rides, and then a suite at The Pierre Hotel. But I did show up for my eight-year-old kid and we had a good time.

  A few days after me and my kid Jimmy began renewing our relationship, I discovered that my ex-wife, a splashy, spiked-heeled Hamptons brat, who used to be Kathy but is now Kassandra, was having trouble with her newest live-in boyfriend, and my kid Jimmy was acting depressed.

  When I began to dig for answers he finally let me know that his mom’s new bed pal Cedric enjoyed slapping him around after a few drinks in the evening. So, one morning before breakfast, after an all-nighter at some downtown clubs, I dropped by in the limo to deal with Cedric the asshole one-on-one.

  That pre-oatmeal visit and the Assault and B&E charge that came with it resulted in a Permanent Restraining Order and landed me in a Croodmoor nuthouse lock-down and eventually a six-month recovery bit.