“The Great Fire of Galway” by Seamus Scanlon
My brother Sid was a fire starter who started early. He was twelve. He was precocious. He was an igniter atrocious. He was a pyromaniac poet laureate . . .
Category: Mondays Are Murder
Mondays Are Murder: Original Noir Fiction to Get Your Week off to a Dark Start
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.
“The New Competitor” by Jim Herod
Jay was sure that he didn’t know a single person in the bar . . .
“Luci” by Brandon Dutton
A white Prius squealed up the driveway of the Chevron station and pulled around back. Dark, syrupy blood dried to the grill . . .
“The Food Truck Owner” by Cedrick Mendoza-Tolentino
You sit with your back against the bronze statue of Ken Kesey in the square bearing his name, a box of Voodoo Doughnuts between your feet and an aluminum baseball bat leaning against the inside of your right leg . . .
“A Monday in Rishikesh” by William J. Jackson
I never relaxed during the week I spent in Rishikesh . . .
“Royals Flushed” by Howard Gimple
Kelleher piloted the small motorboat out of Mullaghmore’s famous stone harbor to establish an alibi. McMahon and McGirl, the IRA men, sat stiffly in the back . . .
“Trenton Makes, The World Takes” by Bruce Harris
Here I am, ten minutes after five in the a.m., standing on Fowler Street, one of Trenton’s meanest, a shit-eating grin on my face. How did I get here? It’s like this . . .
“The Stranger Outside the Shop” by Aaron Fox-Lerner
Right when I thought things were getting better, the stranger showed up . . .