Launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir, our award-winning city-based Noir Series now has over 60 volumes in print, with many more to come. Each volume is overseen by an editor with intimate knowledge of the title city; each story is brand new from a local author, and each is set within a distinct neighborhood or location.
While we’ve been thrilled to publish the original works of over 800 authors in the series, we still long for more. And while we are constantly seeking homegrown editors with native knowledge of national and international cities not yet visited by the series, we’re eager to dig deeper.
Mondays Are Murder allows us to offer a glimpse of cities not yet seen, neighborhoods or hidden corners not yet explored in previous volumes, and, we hope, writers not yet exposed to our company. Contributions to the Akashic Noir Series are bound by mood: our authors are challenged to capture the sometimes intangible moods of “noir” and of “place”. The stories run the gamut from darkly-toned literary glimpses to straight-up crime fiction, while similarly capturing the unique aura of the story’s location.
Our web model for the series has one further dimension: A 750-word limit. Sound like murder? It is. But so are Mondays.
February is like Tuesday: second best, like me. January at least has the distinction of being first and has that New Year’s resolution hype going for it, and Mondays are loved for being hated. But February is just dirty snow with sky to match, and Tuesday is Monday’s everlasting yawn . . .
Fast Freddy died slow. He’d been on his way out for damn near two decades. In most respects he’d died with Lucky . . .
7:28 a.m. Geneva grabbed Roosevelt’s shoulder as he stood at his locker and turned him around. He rolled his eyes and went back to rummaging through his books. “We need to talk,” she said . . .
The ice pick hung there on a nail. I grabbed it—Ricky was going down. I told that fucking idiot not to leave anything behind. He knew . . .
Dorothy stumbled blindly into the lesbian bar as the last few off-season tourists perambulated the crooked streets, the evening sky a dull antimony pink behind the smoke-blackened canyon of the Cowgate, her hands wet and the bloody knife still in her handbag . . .
My Play Now, Pay Later Rusty Linings Playbook, too scuffed up and soiled to read, hopeless hodgepodge hieroglyphics really. I’ve got to find unity in community amongst my fellow city dwellers . . .
Gustav split her skull instead of the log . . .
I don’t remember how I ended up doing what I was doing. Every fiber of my being shook when the alarm went off as the clock struck seven. I threw a glance at the clock and then looked at the view outside the big glass wall in the lounge, reminiscing about the time I spent planning this vacation out and how excited I was. I thought things would work out between me and Richard if we spent some time together. In a couple of seconds, my mind was drawn back to what I had to do . . .