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Reverse-Gentrification of the Literary World

Akashic Books

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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.

“A Face in the Crowd” by B.L. Conradis

Max Renzi was running out of time. Scurrying through the crowd, his beady eyes scanning over the policemen, the TV reporters, the children clogging the sidewalk, he figured he had an hour, maybe two, before D.C. got too hot for him.

“Moby Mick” by BV Lawson

Paul steered the deadrise boat around the shoals, keeping his distance from the shallow Chesapeake waters around the barrier island. Wouldn’t do to get stuck in the muck. Not today.

“Stateline” by Tom Gartner

I’d been in Stateline for four days, trying to find a coke dealer named Daniel Fowler. He was the reason my friend Powell was headed to San Quentin, or so I’d been told.