“Helpless” by Séamus Scanlon
“In Eyre Square the boy Victor waited, watching the front entrance of the Great Southern Hotel. The bells of the Abbey church struck 2:00 am in the rain-solaced silence.”
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 Sparrow” by Kristen Petry
The sparrow literally dropped through the flue into Helen’s cold fire place at just barely daylight. At first, she thought she imagined it.
“Cutting Corners” by Dick Carmel
Blades reached her just as the light at State and Washington turned green . . .
“Keep Portland Weird” by Tom Larsen
“Keep Portland Weird.” I see it on signs all over town, but what does it even mean?
“A Body Appears” by Douglas Cole
Ah, those eyes. You look into them, and you still see the fire, at least for a little while . . .
“Flood Street Fire” by Oscar Holiday
Flood Street. I wound up there after a long period of debauchery, or so I’m told . . .
“Desperado” by Michael Loniewski
Bashir had witnessed his share of riddled bodies since the Americans had invaded, but this was the first from his own hand . . .
“The First Blow” by Tom Andes
I pass Elaine the banana bread. Oh, I’m sure she’s had a trying week, I tell her, clucking in sympathy, listening like the good friend I am . . .