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.
We had switched from beer to a pair of hot rums dubbing around in a reporters’ bar across from the women’s prison downtown. Outside it was storming in late-October style, the first chilly rain that gnaws like winter, and from our polished stools we watched the people tilt their umbrellas at one another like blind knights as they passed . . .
Cow town? Fuck. You could call it that till the crows came home, still didn’t make it true. Maybe once, long before that pissant reporter had even been born. Shit, nowadays, Denver was further from cow town than anyone on the squad was from ever solving this case . . .
“A congressman, a senator, and a lobbyist walk into a bar.” Rich tipped his beer in the direction of the bar’s latest arrivals. “Anyplace else that would be the start of a joke. Here it’s business as usual . . .”
John smashed the Styrofoam cup. No metal spike under there. Did it again. No spike. Two more cups remained. He smashed one of them . . .
The last time we moved was because she said an ex of hers had shown up and zigzagged a razor through her wrists. The time before that she said a pair of meth heads broke in during the day and left her barely living after wrapping a shower curtain around her neck . . .
Joel was fishing in Duck Hollow, on an old mill pier. A nice spot, secluded, including a three-street neighborhood accessible only by a fifty-foot bridge. Duck Hollow was surrounded by brownfield developments, but none of them ever touched the neighborhood. Joel knew folks there, knew that they enjoyed their isolation . . .
What sweet in goat mouth does sour in he bambam . . . her mother’s words seem an echo but come from inside, making the chorus of a song (something she cyah remember doing since reaching double-digits) with verses of mondayjanuarysixthtwentyfourteen and eighteenthbirthdayfirstdayofmylife—sometimes she hearing first-day, sometimes last, but mostly first; annoying, even so . . .
“No, man, this heat ah try kill people!”
Goldine paused in her walk up the bumpy path to Pastor Williams’s house. She removed the straw hat keeping company with her soaking wet head kerchief; fanned with it, for all the good that did. She looked up the road to where the house stood alone, alabaster white against the green hills rolling away from it. The crotons, bougainvillea, pussy tail, and other foliage in the expansive yard looked limp . . .